House Of Storm (23 page)

“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.

T
HE 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!

Thinking of Seabury, though, she rejected that. The person capable of that murder had no conscience, could not have recognized its urging.

Aurelia, Roy, Lydia! A wave of dizzying incredulity, and something like compunction struck her. Was she in fact thinking of one of them as a murderer? There was Dr. Riordan in the house; returned secretly, his bag in the hall betraying his presence.

Then there was Dick Fenby, who might or might not have followed Jim to Middle Road; and who might have returned secretly. Did he have the strongest motive for murdering Hermione aside from the motive ascribable to Jim—Fenby, who might have stolen the slug, who might have had a gun? He had suggested, himself, the way he might have murdered Hermione and then had protested his innocence in a way that sounded convincing. Yet he might have been only frightened and wily acting. Who might have killed Seabury? It seemed that it must have been a man. Who had changed since Hermione’s death; and finally, who was quite suddenly ruthless in his determination to fasten the guilt for Hermione’s murder upon Jim.

She rejected that swift hypothesis, too. If Dick had acted, he had acted too well. And more than anything he had once loved Hermione so much that even if he had grown to hate her, he still could not cast off the shackles she had put upon him. If his resolution to bring her murderer to trial was actually due to an inner desire to avenge the woman he had once loved, then he could not have killed her.

Nonie thought Lydia’s terror had been real. Her green eyes had flashed fury at Hermione’s smoothly directed thrust, but they had been lighted with a real terror after Seabury’s murder. More important, Lydia had still loved Roy, had still wanted to many him, had come to the house that night to dinner in an admitted last hope of swerving him from his marriage to Nonie. She could have had no other thought that night. Even an angry feud with Hermione would have lost its urgency then.

Again the litany of names was too short. Dr Riordan and Jebe remained. Dr. Riordan had seen Hermione on that last afternoon of her life and admitted it; but all of them had seen her and Jim had openly quarreled with her. There was possibly some small mystery about the boy who had fallen down the steps, the boy Dr. Riordan had come to attend, bringing Lydia with him to Beadon Gates. It was possible, too, that in some way Dr. Riordan was vulnerable to Hermione’s instinct for cruelty and for power; some way in which her continued life threatened him, some thing she knew which gave her small, strong white hands a hold over him. But it was only a possibility. There had been no hint of such a theory as fact in any of the mass of facts that had emerged. And the only evidence, if it was evidence, that could be summoned up against Dr. Riordan was his presence, his statement that the slug had disappeared and, of course, his bag, proclaiming his secret return to the house. Was it Dr. Riordan waiting there in the deep shadows, walking so lightly, so softly, listening for her slightest breath?