Five Fatal Words (32 page)

Melicent could hear him plainly through the open window, but she could not return to the window to look up at him; she must go out and pursue him. And she must tell Donald and the servants that Miss Cornwall was dead.

She ran again from the door, leaving it open behind her.

A maid met her.

"Miss Cornwall has fallen! She has fallen from her window!" Melicent cried.

"She's on river's edge; down there. Get men and go down and get her. Where's Mr. Cornwall?"

"Fallen?" gasped the maid. "Out the window? Miss Waring!"

"Listen to me!" commanded Melicent, seizing and shaking her. "Where's Mr. Cornwall; do you know?"

"Mr. Cornwall's gone. He drove away just a minute ago. I saw him."

"Get help and go down to the river's edge. Miss Cornwall's there!" Melicent repeated to her; and she released the girl and, herself, Melicent ran down to the courtyard.

A little car was standing there; whose, Melicent neither knew nor cared. Perhaps it belonged to Alcazar; perhaps it was some tradesman's. It was a coupe, empty and with the key in the lock. Melicent jumped in and pressed the starter and the engine immediately caught.

Melicent looked out and up. The aeroplane, without its trail of smoke, was setting off to the west. Behind it, over the river, its words floated in the still sky. Melicent did not look back at them. She had set the car in motion and was spinning down the drive which led from Alcazar to the main highway. Its direction followed, fairly enough, the path taken by the aeroplane. She was in "high" and the foot throttle was pressed to the floor; but the aeroplane gained on her.

Her direction turned. There was nothing she could do about it; she had to follow the only road, though it veered her away from the course of the aeroplane, which was going farther and farther ahead anyway.

Now she came out upon the main road; and she had to choose between a vain pursuit of the aeroplane and a chance to overtake Donald; for he, she knew, must have made the turn here toward the city.

Melicent scarcely hesitated; she swerved to the left and, with horn clattering her cry for room to pass--to pass--she raced toward the city. There was an intersection and fate favored her for the light burned green just in time.

She headed the pack past the light and the cement was clear for a mile. On her right, far away, the silver aeroplane which had spelled the death message in the sky was nearly lost to sight. She came upon another pack of cars held up at a crossing and she ran out upon the soft shoulder of the road to the right.

"Melicent!" a voice hailed her; Donald's voice; and there he was in a roadster. The light before them changed but he did not move his car; he leaped from it and came to hers, letting them all honk behind him.

She sank back in her seat, staring at him. How to tell him? What to tell him?

"They've killed your aunt!" she said to him, as the honking ceased and the cars, which had been blocked, began to circle his and speed on. "They wrote the message in the sky; and she saw it and fell from her window!"

"What's this?" he said, opening the door of her car.

She slipped over on the seat and he came in beside her. They were alone now beside the road except for his empty car and the machines spinning by.

"They've killed your aunt!"

"Aunt Hannah, you mean?"

"Yes; Miss Cornwall. . . . It was Granger, Donald. He wrote the message in the sky with an aeroplane. Granger--you remember him."

"Of course I remember him. But how do you know; what message did he write? . . . What's all this?"

He caught her and held her between his hands to steady her; and she dung to him while she stammered out what had happened.

They were no longer alone. The light had turned red to them; cross traffic rushed both ways before them; and halted cars were at their side. A driver saw that Donald's car was empty and he shouted to them.

"How do you know it was Granger in the sky?" Donald demanded of Melicent, ignoring everyone else.

"He misspelled 'decency.' He did it in a letter to me; and he did it in the sky. 'Sy,' he spelled it both times. He liked to use the word. It was the D word of this message."

Other drivers yelled at them.

Donald dropped his hands. Melicent shivered.

"I've got to go back," she said "I don't know what's been done; or if anything's been done. I've got to go back--if you'll follow the plane."

"I'll follow the plane," promised Donald. "You don't remember any markings?"

Melicent shut her eyes to see it more clearly. "It was silver; a monoplane, with open cockpit. No markings--nothing that I remember. But I saw that word--I saw it in the sky--sy, just as he spelled it to me."

The shouting beside them again had ceased; the cars were spinning by. For a brief moment, Donald held her once more. "All right," he said very gently. "Go back. I'll try to trace that plane."

"But don't fly again yourself doing it!"

He kissed her and stepped from her car. "Road's clear now. Turn 'round."

"Donald, don't take chances!"

For answer he started his car, swerving it out upon the crossroad to the west and she had a wild impulse to follow him; but she completed her turn and headed back toward Alcazar.

Slowly she drove. The need for heedless haste was over. Almost deliberately she delayed; what was being done at Alcazar, she hoped, would be done before she returned. It was better, far better, that servants who had not been constantly with Miss Cornwall--who had not learned to have feelings for her--should do the grim duty demanded now. So she returned but slowly, and leaving the highway, retraced the winding road to the top of the palisades.

Granger was the murderer of the Cornwalls! Or one of the murderers! Could he--could anyone, alone, have accomplished all? The poisoning of Donald's father. One, alone, might have managed that. The electrocution of Everett. Yes; Granger, alone, might have done that. It required chiefly unchallenged access to the house; and Granger had been there as a guard! It required, in addition, no more equipment than a pick to pierce the plaster from the unused room beside the bath, a length of light cord to reach to an electric socket and the little copper spider to attract Everett Cornwall's curiosity. Yes; Granger, alone, might have accomplished all that.

There was, besides, the message which had come to Everett from New York. It had been filed, Mr. Reese had learned, in New York that morning after Mr. Reese and Granger and she had arrived at Blackcroft. That fact pointed to an accomplice. It was no surprise to Melicent to consider an accomplice in that crime. Her mind went to the Belgian fog. Could Granger and an accomplice--only one--have contrived that frightful poisoning of the mist?

Granger, of course, had been present before the fall of the fatal fog. He had escaped it, personally, because he had driven Miss Cornwall and Donald to Brussels and so was not in the Domrey valley when the death took its toll.

And then Granger had gone away; or been sent away, for Miss Cornwall had discharged him and packed him off for making love to her, Melicent, just before Lydia Cornwall and Ahdi Vado arrived.

Melicent had no more quiet for retrospect; she had reached, again, Alcazar.

A man was at the gate to meet her. A manservant, he was, Sibley, by name, whom Melicent knew as the butler employed by Mr. Reese but who had seemed more of a factotum.

Sibley had assumed, from some source, authority in the brief time since Melicent had driven away. He thrust in his hand and grasped her by the arm as she stopped the car in the courtyard.

"So," he said, "you decided to come back."

"Of course I came back," returned Melicent, not making out the reason for his change of manner and tone. "Miss Cornwall--she's been--brought to the house?"

"The Baroness Strang wants you," announced Sibley. "If you had not returned, you would have been pursued. You were to be brought to her as soon as anyone found you."

"Found me?" gasped Melicent and, staring into the man's eyes, she realized for the first time the inference from the fact that she had been locked in alone with Hannah Cornwall when Miss Cornwall had fallen--or been thrust ?--from the window.

"The Baroness Strang is in charge?" demanded Melicent who, herself, had been in charge less than an hour ago; but her power, of course, had been hers vice Hannah Cornwall.

"Naturally the Baroness Strang is in charge," replied the man. Naturally Lydia would be in charge. Lydia, the last of her generation of the Cornwalls. But in charge of her, unless all things had altered during the last hour, would be Ahdi Vado.

"Where is she?" asked Melicent.

"I will take you to her."

"I'll go. I want to see her," said Melicent, trying to free herself from the man's grasp; but he maintained his hold while he escorted her up the massive stairs and to Lydia's apartment.

Ahdi Vado admitted them; or, more exactly, he admitted Melicent, for Sibley did no more than escort her into the great room before he was dismissed.

Lydia was seated, bolt upright, in a stiff, thronelike chair; and as Melicent faced her who closely resembled no one of her sisters and brothers but who yet suggested in some way each one of them all, there seemed to pass in review before Melicent Miss Cornwall as she had been when she first admitted her new secretary to Blackcroft; Everett as he had talked with her and laughed at the threat of fate; Alice across the table from her at the little Belgian inn; and Theodore. Lacking an image of Donald's father, for he was dead before Melicent became involved in the family fates, she saw Donald as he had entered so gayly on that first day and inquired if she had a name.

Donald! Where was he now? Pursuing the plane?

How? With whom? And suppose he overtook the murderers! She had not sufficiently reckoned with eventualities; in her panic of horror, she had thought only of the need of pursuit, of preventing the murderers from getting away. But if they were caught and cornered, what would follow?

"I was informed," said Lydia, in a small, constrained voice, which seemed strange and lost in the great chamber, "that you had fled."

"I went after Donald," said Melicent.

"Did you overtake him?" inquired Ahdi Vado.

"I did."

The Hindu continued the interrogation. "Then where is he?"

"I did not ask him to return. I told him I would. I sent him after the plane."

"After the plane?" asked Lydia. "What plane?"

Melicent confronted her. "Don't you know about the plane? What do you know?"

"I know," returned Lydia, "that my sister was thrown from her window."

"Thrown!" cried out Melicent.

"And you, alone, were in the room with her," added Ahdi Vado. "And you alone," parroted Lydia, "were in the room with her."

"She fell. Oh, she fell!" cried Melicent.

"Fell?" said Lydia. "How could she fall?"

"She was looking up at the plane--she leaned out the window looking up at the plane that wrote the message!"

"Message?" said Lydia. "What message?"

"Don't you know of the message?"

"Some one was writing--writing in the sky, one of the servants said," admitted Lydia.

"Don't you know what the writing was?"

"Do you?" demanded Lydia. "Do you?"

"It was death again; words beginning with D E A T H written, this time, in the sky."

"In the guilty mind," pronounced Ahdi Vado. "Words written in the guilty mind. They might have seemed to have projected themselves in the sky; but they were written in the guilty mind."

Melicent turned on him. "But she said a servant saw them!"

"One mind," returned Vado calmly, "can project into another. It often happens. One has an hallucination; another shares it."

"What words did the servant see?" demanded Melicent of Lydia; and Ahdi Vado tried to stop her, but she replied.

"'Decency,' it began," Lydia said. "She wasn't sure of the rest. What she read was meaningless; utterly meaningless. "

"All the messages have been meaningless," Melicent cried, "but they have all brought death. Did the servant speak of the spelling of the first word?"

"Speak of the spelling?" iterated Lydia. "No; why should she?"

Melicent did not tell her; she was not ready yet for the accusation of Granger to anyone else but Donald. Where was he? Oh, where was he?

"She is evading," said Ahdi Vado; and Lydia, tapping her chair like a throne, charged her: "You are evading. What happened to my sister? Tell me exactly what happened."

Melicent told her; and, telling, knew she was not believed. She had been prejudged, she knew, before she faced them. Prejudged not so much by Lydia as by Ahdi Vado! For if Lydia believed--actually believed--that Melicent had pushed her sister from the window, could she sit there in this strange inquisition?

Something different and very puzzling underlay all this; and Melicent was glad she had made no accusation of Granger or of anyone.

"Now we may call in the police," observed Ahdi Vado calmly.

"Not yet!" said Lydia.

"Why not yet?"

"Not yet! Not yet!"

It was the resurgence, in her, of the Cornwall obsession to deal, of themselves, with their own fates; of the Cornwall detestation of outside interference, of notoriety and official investigation. It seemed to Melicent also a bit of a resurgence of impatience with Ahdi Vado which Lydia once had expressed. The Hindu felt it and spoke to her calmingly.

"The police must soon appear; all this must come to their attention. It is deplorable but yet better for you that they enter by your invitation."

"You are right, Ahdi," said Lydia wearily. "You are always right. Meanwhile, what do we do with her?"

"Should I say?"

"Will you, Ahdi? Take charge of her, please; and then do about the police as must be done."

"To you," said Ahdi, "I shall promptly return. You, please," he gestured toward Melicent and opened the door.

She went out with him, her wits spinning.

"I shall not enclose you in
the
room," said Ahdi considerately, avoiding the door which had been Hannah's. "There are plenty of rooms."

"Who gave you the keys?" asked Melicent.