House of Storm, page 14
It was late. The twilight already in the house had deepened. Yet there was still a sense of being adrift from time as measured by clocks, as measured by man. Roy said: “Jim, we’ll not talk of this for awhile. First things first.”
Jim felt as Nonie had felt. He came to Roy and Roy unexpectedly put out his own hand first. They shook hands—briefly and without speaking. Roy said to Aurelia, “Tell Dick I’ll be there.”
But Aurelia stood in the doorway so strongly entrenched in resolve that for a moment she seemed undefeatable.
“You are putting me in a terrible position,” she said. “You know what it will mean to Jim when I tell the police the truth. Why do you make me do this?”
“You didn’t hear Jim threaten Hermione,” Roy said. “You only heard us talk of it! They can’t accept hearsay evidence.…”
“That is sophistry,” Aurelia said swiftly, brushing Roy’s argument aside. “You heard him say he’d kill Hermione. Nonie heard him. If you are put on the stand you cannot deny it.”
Jim went to her. He said, again in a quiet, almost gentle voice: “That will not happen, Aurelia. I can see that to clear myself, the person who shot Hermione has got to be found. It’s got to be a clear case. No doubts or suspicion; all strings tied. But I didn’t kill her.…”
“You can’t marry Nonie. I’ll see to that.”
Dick Fenby, from the hall, spoke over Aurelia’s shoulder: “Seabury is here, Roy.”
First things first. Murder took a dreadful precedence, an ugly priority over everything else. Nonie’s eyes met Jim’s for a swift look—which could yet say nothing, which could only question.
Aurelia went out ahead of them, tall, imposing, implacable anger and determination in every movement and in every look.
Seabury Jenkins was waiting in the old-fashioned, formal, musty and uncomfortable drawing room off one end of the hall, which had been furnished probably when the house was built and never changed. There were rosewood armchairs with worn, pink moire cushions; there were tiny gilt cabinets full of shells and paperweights and China figures and miniatures. There were fringed ottomans and stiff rosewood settees and round marble-topped tables. Lydia sat in one of the armchairs, her red hair and her eyes gleaming.
And Dick had a sheaf of papers in his fine, rather unsteady hands, and a look of apology on his small, weary face.
“The commissioner told me to do this,” he said. “It seems silly. But that’s what he said to do.”
“What’s what he said to do?” Aurelia snapped. And when he replied she gave him a look of cold and outraged anger. For the sheaf of papers in his hand were notes made by the commissioner concerning the activities of the previous night, so far as they could be discovered, of the small group of people closest to Hermione, the people who so far as it was known had seen her last, who might have some quarrel with her, or might have some information leading to the discovery of her murderer.
Dick said, not without dignity: “I’m Chief of Police. I may not know much about it but I’ll do the best I can.”
Roy sat down at one of the round marble-topped tables; the scene took on an odd little air of formality. “Go on,” he said.
It seemed long-drawn out; really it was short and there was little that all of them did not already know. But Dick’s brief phrases, stripped of everything but the bare facts sounded new and unfamiliar, inviting scrutiny. Obviously they had pieced together a sort of résumé of the previous day, including Hermione’s visit at Beadon Gates during the afternoon and its purpose, and her later visit that night to induce Dick himself to return to Middle Road.
“Who told Major Wells that?” Aurelia asked.
“I did,” Dick said. “I told the exact truth about everything.”
“Did you tell him that she fired you?”
“Certainly.” He shook his head a little, eyeing Aurelia. “I didn’t kill Hermione. And as Jim says the only thing for all of us to do is to tell the truth—all the truth.”
“Well,” Aurelia said, still angry, “I don’t have anything to add. I didn’t come down to dinner. I was in my room all the time; I didn’t even see her. I’m out of it.”
“That’s all here, too,” Dick said. “Shall I go on?”
They listened again with the wind swirling and hurling around the shutters. The bare account of Hermione’s murder seemed suddenly, to Nonie, to deal with events in which she had had no part. Jim had left the island and returned; he had found Hermione, dead. He had heard the shot; he had telephoned for help. Roy was at Lydia’s …
Lydia interrupted there: “I kept him,” she said. “I wanted to ask about changing some investments.”
“Right,” Dick agreed, and continued. Lydia’s slippered foot swung nervously, her green eyes glittered. Seabury rubbed his bald head thoughtfully. Roy had been told about the murder when he reached home and had come at once. The body had been moved.…
It was Jim who interrupted then. “We had to move her.”
“I explained that to Major Wells,” Roy said. “I told him you couldn’t leave her like that—dinner dress, sandals, nothing to cover her with, rain pouring down. Go on, Dick.”
There was no difference in his voice or his looks. Everyone was listening, everyone intent on Dick’s rather weary, husky voice. First things first, Roy had said; everything else put aside, everything else shelved because murder came first, because murder ruled a terrible empire of its own.
Suddenly Seabury Jenkins was speaking and Nonie had been scarcely aware of the fact that Dick had finished. Seabury, she realized then, looked sick and shaken; so ashy below his leathery tan, so curiously shrunken and pinched that Nonie thought for an instant that he was really ill. Probably, however, his stricken, half-frightened look was due to a kind of delayed shock. And to fatigue: he had been up most of the night, he had spent all that day either at Middle Road, or rummaging through Hermione’s papers.
Even his voice was abrupt and jerky. He seemed indeed so like a man reeling under the impact of an unexpected blow that a question as to his friendship with Hermione nudged Nonie briefly. Had he, like Dick, ever been in love with a young and beautiful Hermione? But if that were true, everybody would have known it, someone would have referred to it.
He sat, staring at the carpet, avoiding everyone’s eyes, telling them in that jerky, preoccupied way of Hermione’s will, which they all knew. The Shaw trust fund, Middle Road, and all her personal property went to Jim.
“Personal property!” Jim said in a surprised way. “I didn’t know Hermione had anything special in the way of personal property.”
“Jewelry?” Lydia asked with interest.
Seabury, staring at the rug, shook his head. “Cash,” he said. “And bank balance.” He hesitated as if questioning his next statement but then went on: “Her bank balance is by no means what I’d expect it to be; but Hermy put most of her income back into Middle Road—not always advisedly, she was pennywise and pound foolish in a queer way. We’ll have to check on that—if we can. She was very secretive and, so far as I know, never kept books. She prided herself on her memory. It is more difficult to check on things because she dealt in cash. She—well, to tell you the truth, she liked cash. She paid bills in cash; used cash wherever she could. It was one of her peculiarities.”
All of them stared at him and Seabury stared at the carpet.
Roy said finally: “How short is the bank balance?”
Seabury shrugged in a helpless way. “It may not be short. How can anyone tell? I only meant that I’d have expected her to have a fairly substantial sum on deposit. There isn’t; yet she may have been barely breaking even. Her tax accounts may show something, or nothing. She could have done anything with money—or had none to do much with! The way Hermione used cash we may never get at the real facts. We’ll try. But that’s the sum of the will.”
And Nonie thought suddenly: cash. Cash in her alligator bag, bills amounting to twelve hundred dollars. Disappeared. Vanished. Cash.
She hadn’t told Roy or Aurelia. The fact of murder had seemed to block everything else, like a barrier to the normal, commonplace highway of everyday living. A strange and perilous detour into nightmares.
But twelve hundred dollars in a roll of bills in her brown alligator bag, in her own room upstairs, could have nothing to do with the murder of Hermione Shaw. Aurelia called the curiously formal little meeting to a close.
“We’ll have supper,” she said. “It’s on the table. Put those papers away, Dick. There’s nothing we can do tonight.” She listened to the wind. They all listened and Aurelia said: “You’ll have to stay here tonight, Seabury. You can’t possibly make it to the village in this.”
All of them agreed; there was nothing they could do then. Supper was a repetition of the afternoon’s meal, except the storm was wilder; so wild, so strong, so ominous that it took precedence, again, over murder. Dr. Riordan came in, breathless, wet, haggard, in the middle of it.
“Trees down everywhere,” he said. “It’s the worst storm I remember. I’ll take up your invitation, Roy, if you don’t mind. The road to Beadon Rock is blocked.”
Aurelia made a place for him at the table. The house shuddered and sighed and the sea pounded wildly, almost, it seemed, at the foundations of the house. Aurelia, with her fine dark eyes still angry and determined, took the helm again and sent everyone to bed. “We can’t do anything tonight,” she repeated and added rather grimly: “And from the sound of the storm we may be blown off to sea by morning.”
Already small pools of water were seeping irresistibly from under the shutters; the world outside was a black and lashing wilderness of rain and wind and torn and frantic shrubbery. Actually the storm had not yet reached its height, but it laid a kind of spell, a waiting, leaden paralysis upon them all.
Nonie had no chance to talk to Jim alone. Roy said good night to her with his usual gentleness and did not refer to Jim or their talk. Aurelia, coming to Nonie’s room to see that the balcony shutters were securely bolted, was exactly as usual. There was no flicker of recognition of the change in Nonie’s relationship to her. “Good night, my dear,” she said calmly. “Don’t be afraid of the storm.…”
Yet the house was like a ship at sea, rocked and battered upon all sides. The people within it were hypnotized by its sound and power and by sheer physical weariness. Probably nobody in the house expected to sleep and probably nobody in the house could have resisted that dark and welcome tide of weariness.
There was, however, one presence on the island which escaped that paralysis, which did not sleep, which traveled through the night and storm, from Middle Road plantation to Beadon Gates.
Sometime in the night the telephone in the pantry began to ring.
Nonie, in her room at the head of the stairs, heard and went to answer it.
Probably, half-asleep, she obeyed a dreamlike quality of compulsion in that continued, imperious summons. Certainly she was fully aware only of its insistent demand—not of the dimly lighted hall, the descending stairs, the empty, wide hall below. The storm surged around the house. The ringing of the telephone stabbed sharply through its wild monotony. Halfway across the dining room Nonie stopped abruptly; the pantry was lighted too.
So someone else had heard the telephone! Why hadn’t he answered that repeated summons? She moved on, slowly, to the open pantry door. She stopped there, again, this time like a sleepwalker, terribly aroused on the edge of a precipice.
The brass plate on the door was sweaty and cold under her hand. Her light silk robe swirled around her feet; her slippers were brightly scarlet below it. The windows rattled and creaked and the sea raged out in the blackness like a devouring beast. But the beast had got into the house; the beast had traveled from Middle Road to Beadon Gates. Seabury Jenkins was in the pantry and he had not answered the telephone because he lay huddled below it. His face, mercifully, had fallen against his arm. He had been murdered and a machete lay on the floor, almost touching him.
The telephone rang and rang and finally stopped.
15
NONIE WAS LIKE A sleepwalker only now she was running.
A mirror in the hall gave her a flickering reflection of a woman with a white face and frightened eyes and flying white skirts. The storm battered at the door as if it had desperate, determined being. It sifted through the hall, tinkled the lusters on the chandelier, followed her up the stairs. Her hands beat against a closed door, desperately, like the storm. She looked over her shoulder but nothing, really, had followed her up the stairs, catching at her flying skirts.
Then, all at once, Roy was in the hall, Jim was there, everyone was there.
Roy was tugging at a red bathrobe; Jim came, running, in slacks, his shoulders bare and brown. Dick Fenby came and Dr. Riordan and Lydia with her red hair tousled and a black-silk robe pulled tightly around her lovely figure, her green eyes glittering. Nonie still felt as if she stood, clinging, to the perilous edge of a precipice and did not know how she had got there.
There was no comfort in the company, no safety anywhere, only questions, exclamations, half-words; suddenly the men plunged downstairs and she and Lydia were left at the top of the stairs, with lights glittering everywhere now, with sounds and footsteps, and voices suddenly dying away below, submerged by the storm, muffled by distance. “I’m afraid to go down,” Lydia whispered. “I’m afraid—are you sure he was dead, Nonie?”
She must have replied for Lydia sucked in her breath so sharply that it was like a stifled scream. Aurelia came then, from the end of the hall, hurrying from the shadows, her full dark eyes flashing, her face flushed, her great gray braid swinging over her shoulder.
“Aurelia, Seabury was killed,” Lydia cried.
“I know, I heard what you said.”
“Nonie found him. She says the telephone was ringing.…”
“I’m going down.”
Lydia caught at her arm. “Oh, no, Aurelia …”
Aurelia’s dark eyes flashed scornfully at Lydia. “Do you think I’m afraid?” She shook off Lydia’s clasp and started quickly down the stairs, her strong, brown hand holding the banister.
They watched her go. When her gray braid and her wide shoulders disappeared around the newel post Lydia gave a kind of cry and sat down on the top step, swathing her black robe around her knees. She listened, Nonie listened; there was no sound at all except the battering of the storm. Lydia’s head was bent forward, the light shining on her thick red hair. Her face from that angle looked sharp and rather predatory; her green eyes were fastened on the visible section of the hall, watching and waiting with the poised yet tense patience of a cat at a mousehole.
Nonsense, thought Nonie sharply, deriding her own fancy. Nonsense! She sat down beside Lydia.
Moments passed and there was still no discernible sound from the back of the house. At last Lydia shifted her knees slightly.
“This rather brings it home,” she said, her voice husky. She shot a look at Nonie. “Who killed him?”
Nonie shook her head. She was watching that small visible part of the hall as fixedly as Lydia, listening, too; waiting, too. Lydia said, “Didn’t you see anybody?”
“No …”
“How long do you suppose he’d been dead?”
Nonie was cold. The house felt chill and dank. The house she’d thought, only yesterday, was listening and waiting much as she and Lydia were waiting now.
The memory touched her and went away; it too had been fancy. The house could not have known in advance the dark and terrible thing that was to happen within its thick and storm-beleaguered walls.
Lydia was insistent. Her suddenly sharpened face was turned, ferreting. “How long do you think he’d been dead? Wasn’t there anybody around? Any sound—anything? Have you no idea who did it?”
Even Nonie’s lips seemed cold and numb. She tried to reply: “I heard the telephone and went to answer it. I wasn’t really awake. The lights were on in the pantry. I saw him as soon as I reached the door. I didn’t see anybody else anywhere.”
It was a story she was to tell many times before that long night was over. It was a story she was to seek through in her mind many more times, trying to find a facet, a small forgotten chink through which some fact might be perceived, some vista into truth discovered.
Lydia said nothing. The silence lengthened indeed until it took on something that was not quite silence, that was not quite passive, that had a probing, urgent question of its own. Nonie turned suddenly to look at Lydia and Lydia was looking at her with bright, speculative eyes. For another moment that long look held them, so near they could have touched each other, neither of them moving. What is Lydia trying to say? thought Nonie. What does she mean? What is the thing in her eyes?
Then Lydia touched her lips with her tongue. “I was awake. How could anybody have slept tonight? But I didn’t hear the telephone. You say you heard it?”
“Yes.”
“And went down to answer it?”
“Yes …”
“Don’t you think that was—well, rather an odd thing for you to do? In the dark. After Hermione’s murder. After the thing you said happened to you this morning. Weren’t you afraid?”
Something was flickering in Lydia’s eyes—peering out and sliding back again, like a small animal crouched behind a wall. Nonie, watching it, said slowly: “I don’t know. I was half-asleep. Yes, I suppose I’d have been afraid as soon as I really waked.”
“But you must have been awake—you put on a robe, you put on slippers …” Her bright glance touched them and came back to Nonie’s face. “You went downstairs. You weren’t walking in your sleep, I suppose!” said Lydia and gave a small laugh.
As a matter of fact, it was exactly how Nonie had felt. She had been only half-aware of her own actions. The telephone had demanded imperatively, so she obeyed as if the house and everything in it was quite as usual, in its normal, accustomed order. Not in terrible disorder; not in fear; not drifting into a nebulous and shadowy other world where there were no rules, no sure and certain paths.
