House of Storm, page 18
“Perhaps there’ll be something left,” Roy said, comfortingly.
She shook her head. “I know the firm. Nothing could slip past them; they’ll have accounted for every penny.”
Jim said, watching her, “Rich girl, poor girl. Do you care?”
Care! She met Jim’s eyes and her answer must have been in her own gaze, for suddenly he smiled and said in the most casual way in the world, “That’s all right, then.”
Roy said: “It came yesterday and I thought I’d wait till after we were married. I was afraid you’d mind. I wanted that to be a happy day. Well—well, we’ll talk of all that later. The wind is going down a bit. We may have a lull. Riordan wants to see some of his sick patients. He’s a fool to go out in this but …”
Roy went into the hall and closed the door and Jim’s arms went tightly around her and drew her close against him so her head rested on his shoulder. “I’ll make you a decent living. I’ll have enough for us—not yachts and sables but enough …”
“All I want is you.” She said it so earnestly that her voice sounded childish and broken and Jim chuckled suddenly and lifted her face and kissed her. “I’ll love you all my life—all my life, Nonie …”
But then the house began to watch and listen outside the magic circle around them. Intangibly, with a kind of deadly patience, it reminded them of the barriers it knew, the shocking secret it had witnessed—and the threat that secret held for them.
Jim felt it, too. He moved, putting his cheek down against her head for a moment, warmly, like a comforting promise. Then he said: “I’ve got to see Riordan. I’ll be back.”
He disappeared into the hall, his black head shining under the light. A vine beat against the shutters like impatient fingers demanding entrance. She had stood for a time, thinking, not thinking—mainly feeling his arms around her again, his mouth against her own, before it occurred to her that there had been something rather different about his voice when he said he had to see Riordan. Something different about the abrupt way he left. Different—well, then how?
What was he going to do?
But she knew that; he meant to find the evidence that Seabury had found. What had Riordan to do with that?
It wasn’t likely, though, to be a clue, a material thing—a piece of evidence that could be put under a microscope, photographed, analyzed so it became an arrow pointing to identity, pointing to a murderer.
The tempo of the storm was changing. The wind was steady and strong, less wild and gusty; the beat of the rain had a heavy rhythm. The candle flame burned more evenly; its light and the steadiness of the rain were hypnotic. After awhile she pulled the eiderdown around her and, without knowing it, listening to the beat of the rain upon the balcony, she fell into an uneasy sleep.
But the storm marched through her sleep. She knew when it began to accelerate its pace. She even thought about it, clearly, when she awoke. The lull had passed; the wild whirling outer circle of the storm fell ravaging upon the island, as if it had drawn back like a tiger to spring with renewed force.
She had no sense of time. An eerie twilight filtered dimly through the closed shutters, the candle flickered and wavered and sent flying shadows into the corners of the room. Her letter to Aunt Honoria—written in another age it seemed to her—glimmered faintly out of the dusk and fell into obscurity again as the small golden flame flickered and smoked and almost died and then sprang back into life.
She would not send the letter. She thought of Roy and Lydia, clearly now and with an inward conviction. Almost certainly at some time Roy had been in love with Lydia. Time had passed and Aurelia had, perhaps, blocked their marriage. But Lydia obviously still loved Roy. Nonie had been sure, for a moment, that Roy in his heart still loved Lydia. He had been sincere in his affection for her, Nonie. He would have been loyal to her; she was equally sure of that. But perhaps the love a man gives to only one woman in his life had been given long ago to Lydia.
Suddenly, again, she was sure it still existed—without Roy’s knowledge perhaps, choked and smothered by Aurelia, but still alive. She remembered the night Lydia had come, uninvited, to dinner. She remembered the laughter and shared memories between them—Roy, manlike, unaware of the thing his eyes admitted. How could she have failed to see it then?
A load lifted from her heart. The sense of disloyalty to Roy no longer oppressed her.
Where was Jim, she wondered. What was he doing? She could have heard no sounds in the house, the storm was too loud. Yet there was a sense of emptiness and quiet. She roused and took the candle to the dressing table. She showered and dressed and brushed up her hair and looked at the gold-backed brush. The little brilliant-set monogram twinkled and glittered in the candlelight. How like her father that was! And glad she was now because he’d been like that. He had lived in his own romantic and glamorous generation. But in her own no less romantic, certainly no less idealistic age, money, as money, had lost some of its halo.
She had no need for a fortune; no need for jewels, no need—her thought broke off abruptly. Jim might need lawyers; she hadn’t thought of that.
Would they let him use money from Hermione’s estate, from his own inheritance, to defend himself if he were tried for murder? Almost certainly not. The twelve hundred dollars taken from her brown alligator bag might have helped. Could she, by any chance, recover it? She could at least try.
She took the candle and went into the hall. Another candle in a tall silver candlestick stood on a table near the stairway; beyond it the long hall stretched away into deep shadow. Again she had an impression of emptiness within the house.
But a pool of light came upward from the lower hall, lighting the stairway and casting deep shadows of banister and newel post. Roy was there, sitting in an armchair, his head resting on his hands, and a great old candelabrum, its candles flaring and dripping wax, on the table beside him. He saw her and got to his feet.
“Nonie! I hoped you were asleep.”
She sat down, putting the small candle she carried on the table. “The house seems empty,” she said. “Where is everybody?”
He sighed. “Riordan said he had to see some patients and left during the lull. He’ll be back; the roads must be blocked everywhere. Aurelia is asleep, I suppose. Lydia, too. At least I haven’t seen them. Jim …” He rubbed his forehead wearily and said: “Jim started off for Middle Road. Dick discovered it, flew into a rage at me for letting him go and started to bring him back. Jim couldn’t escape. Nobody could escape in a storm like this. But Dick had a brainstorm; said it was the same as breaking a parole, said he’d bring him back in handcuffs …” He sighed again. “I don’t know what’s happened to Dick. He hated Hermione. Yet anybody would think he’d appointed himself her avenger.”
The flames wavered so the shadows everywhere moved. Arrest, lawyers, money!
Roy put his hand over her own with a gesture like an apology. “I’ve been thinking, Nonie. Lydia …”
“You are in love with her, Roy. It was Aurelia who wanted our marriage.”
“Aurelia …” He stopped for a moment and then said, slowly: “She’s been more like a mother to me than a sister. I’ve let her influence me too much. I see that now, too.”
Nonie leaned forward abruptly: “Roy, I’ve lost some money.”
“Money! What do you mean?”
He listened as she told him quickly of the missing money—listened with a growing seriousness. “None of the servants has ever taken anything,” he said. “I wonder …” He checked himself so abruptly that she felt a quickening of alarm. “What, Roy? What were you going to say?”
“I don’t know exactly. I wondered—well, if it could have anything to do with Hermione’s murder. Or Seabury!” He considered it, and shook his head. “I don’t see how. Yet—would you know the bills, Nonie, if you saw them again?”
“Yes, I think so. I have to fold them like this”—she sketched the gesture with her hands—“for my billfold. How could it have any sort of connection with—with murder!”
“I don’t know. Only it’s queer. It’s not right.” He waited for a moment, thinking, and suddenly rose. “I’m going to question Jebe. Don’t worry, I’ll not accuse him …” He touched her cheek lightly, smiling down into her eyes, and went away, through the dining room toward the kitchen. A wild wind shook the house, sifting along the floors. The candle flame smoked and lowered and flared up again. Jim and Dick must return soon. Perhaps they could not reach the house through the gale.
But Dr. Riordan had returned.
His bag stood on the bench near the door and as the candles flared wildly, the light caught in its lock and gleamed for a second.
Where was he then? It struck her as curious that Roy had not seen his return. On an impulse she rose and went to the library. No one was there. A lighted candle stood on the desk. The plaster bust surveyed her blankly from the shadows above it. The sea was so loud that it seemed to threaten the very foundations of the house. As she turned into the hall she had a quick and formless impression that someone preceded her.
It was, however, only an impression—swift, intangible and mistaken. The maroon walls had a damp, smudged look. The smell of the sea and the rain seeped through the hall as if a door had opened somewhere.
Usually the veranda was the center and living room for the entire house. Now, little-used and unfamiliar rooms stretched unexpectedly into the gray twilight. The house seemed larger, and cavernous and singularly empty. Dr. Riordan must be somewhere.
She went toward the door of the old-fashioned, formal drawing room; it was a dark and empty space. A queer sense of impatience caught her, a fumbling sense of urgency. A small morning room, Aurelia’s sewing room, with its wicker furniture and windows upon the garden, lay at the end of the hall and she went to it quickly, her heels tapping along the tiled floor.
As she reached it she was aware of a dimming of light; in the same breath the sense of movement, of someone walking ahead of her, behind her, somewhere near, was so strong that she turned to look. But in the very act of turning, all light softly vanished. There was only the smell of smoking candles, the wild rattle of the windows. She did not know how she knew that someone stood between her and the rest of the house, blocking her return.
19
THE STORM DARKENED THE outside world. The closed and bolted shutters intensified the gloom inside the house but actually it was not yet night. Gradually, thick and obscured shadows loomed dimly out of surrounding shadows as Nonie’s eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness. The acrid scent of smoking candlewicks hung in the air like a pervading presence. Nothing moved in the gray obscurity of shapes and shadows. But candles do not blow themselves out. Nonie listened and pressed herself backward against the door.
A moment perhaps passed, and another. She could not move, the slightest rustle might guide a nebulous and undetermined shape out of the other gray shapes, toward her. Time passed and nothing happened.
So long a time passed indeed that she began to reason with herself. Nothing was there; they had locked and bolted the house. The candles had gone out; that was because of some strong draft, fluttering the candle flames until they died. The house had seemed cavernous and deserted; but in fact there were people. Aurelia, Lydia, Roy, Dr. Riordan. She had only to scream for help. Even if one of those dim shapes had living substance, still she had only to scream.
But there was nothing there. A faint dusk filtered through the tightly closed shutters, making deep and shifting twilight. The vague shapes of chairs, the dim outline of a doorway, the mass of black that was a sofa began to emerge more solidly from the darkness.
And they were only dim and half-seen shapes, inanimate and still; no one was there. It was absurd to stand frozen by a knowledge which was not a knowledge.
She moved—and went on tiptoes, a step at a time, reaching outward with her hands along the chill, dank plaster, hearing the soft brush of her skirt against her legs. Her hands encountered open space.
That was the doorway into the drawing room, away from the hall, away from the vague and shifting gloom between her and the stairway. Suddenly it seemed a refuge and she felt her way, very quietly, very carefully around the door casing and into the room. There was a smell of potpourri and dank plaster. The wall felt rough to her groping hands. She waited, listening, trying to remember the arrangement of the long, wide drawing room with its gilt-framed portraits and fringed chairs and sofas.
A bulky, lumpy object came from the gloom and was a chair. There was no sound at all from the hall behind her. Nevertheless, she resolved to wait—quietly, in a safe corner until, well, until what? Until someone came; until the candles were relighted; until a voice she knew spoke in the hall. She sidled cautiously along the wall, farther from the door. The chair became more distinct; she put her hand upon it and the touch of the silken fabric was reassuring. She edged around it, however, still farther from the door. She groped her way past a table with a lamp on it as high as she was; past sofa and more chairs. She waited a moment, listening. There was still no sound. The fireplace should be at her right and a small sofa stood at an angle near it. She started cautiously in that direction and something that sounded like a footstool slid softly along the floor somewhere and stopped.
There was again no sound at all.
But candles don’t blow themselves out; footstools don’t slide of their own will across the floor.
There began a grisly little game of hide and seek. Where exactly in that confusing darkness had someone stumbled against a footstool?
She turned, and listened, and turned again and suddenly lost all sense of direction. If she moved, she might be going directly into hands that now hunted through the blackness for her.
But there was something she had meant to do. During those moments of a false feeling of safety she had thought of something to do, something—oh, yes. She had intended to scream.
If she screamed she would only betray herself. Besides, her scream could not have been heard through the tumult of the storm. She had not thought of that. Even if someone heard and came it would be too late. Seabury Jenkins, there at the telephone, had not had time or warning to call for help. Hermione had stood on her own doorstep unwarned.
She, Nonie, was warned. But panic caught her and she made a quick uncautious step and struck against a table, and something on it, an ash tray, a cigarette box, some trinket of Aurelia’s jingled. Jingled sharply and clearly; a bell-like little sound of doom.
There was a split-second’s pause; then a soft rush of footsteps charged from the darkness toward her. The table that betrayed her saved her too. She flung out both hands to catch at it and they encountered the hard, stuffed back of the sofa. She sank down on her knees behind it.
She crouched there, close against it, her cheek pressing into the rough fabric. The rush of footsteps stopped. The very air seemed to listen; then the footsteps blundered softly past.
She waited, her head pressed against the bulwark of the sofa. There was a long silence within the room. The roar of the sea was more distant there, the rattle of the French windows at the end of the room more subdued. Her mind, released from its lethargy of terror, began to race. Who was there in the room, waiting as she was waiting, listening as intently as she for a betraying breath or motion? Had some outsider, an invisible, convenient outsider whom Aurelia—all of them—had clung to so resolutely as an answer to their ugly problem—had that outsider somehow, some way got into the house? There were always ways in and out of a house as long and sprawling, with as many doors and windows and passageways as that one. Or was it someone already in the house?
But there were so few, so terribly few people in the house—Roy, Aurelia, Lydia. Dr. Riordan. Jebe.
Listening, holding her breath, trying to still the heavy thud of her heart, questions raced on. Was that Aurelia, padding heavily—and relentlessly—through the gloom, seeking prey like a massive, angered animal? Aurelia with her latent violence, her suddenly released vehemence, her anger. But why? Her friendship with Nonie was unshaken. She still wanted Nonie’s marriage with Roy to be an accomplished fact. Nonie had had only kindness, only affection from Aurelia.
Lydia had said that Aurelia would be jealous of Lydia, as Roy’s wife. Could she have meant that Aurelia would be jealous of anyone, as Roy’s wife? Could Aurelia’s protestations of affection, her stated desire for Nonie’s marriage to Roy, have been merely statements, designed to cover her real feelings?
Nonie denied that quickly. She would not accept so resolute an insincerity on Aurelia’s part as a basis for such a theory. She listened and thought she heard a stealthy, seeking movement somewhere off in the dusk and crouched lower.
Besides, Aurelia would have had no motive to murder Hermione. Aurelia had not even seen Hermione the night she was murdered.
Or had she? Did anyone know where Aurelia had been or what she had done other than her own statement? And during all the years that she and Hermione had lived on the island as neighbors, seeing each other constantly, might not a hidden enmity have come into being between them, smoldering in a long train ready to explode like powder? Yet there was no vestige of evidence against Aurelia.
Aurelia, Roy, Lydia. Roy, who also had known Hermione all those years, who too might easily have hated her, who certainly could have killed Seabury with one murderous sweep of a machete. Could Aurelia have done that? She thought of Aurelia’s powerful body; she thought of Lydia’s look of wiry strength below the graceful lines of her figure. But Roy was a man; it was easier to accept the fact that a murder by violence had been done by a man. Didn’t they say that a woman murderer was more likely to seek poison?
Questions, speculations, possibilities came at her like knife thrusts in the darkness. Suppose Roy, loving Lydia in his heart (even though he had let himself be persuaded by Aurelia against Lydia), had heard Hermione’s scarcely veiled taunt, suppose it had angered him, suppose in an instinctive defense of the woman he really loved, whether he knew it or not, he had quarreled with Hermione; suppose he had shot her! Roy—who had defended Jim, who had prevented his arrest, who had done everything possible to keep Jim from being charged with murder. If Roy had murdered Hermione, wouldn’t he have let Jim—or anyone—take his place for that dread penalty? Would Roy—would anyone—have scruples when it came to saving his own neck? But perhaps Roy had; perhaps that was why he had so earnestly tried to protect Jim. Conscience!
