Lady Afraid (16 page)

“You know that I am not lying,” Sarah said quietly.

“Hah! Of course you are.”

The old man’s thick shoulders, his palms, arose together, and he said, “It is ridiculous to imagine anything else. The story of mystery men taking the child from you is preposterous. Your devious mind should have done better, Sarah. I do not know why you told such a weak story.” Now he came toward her with heavy force and planted himself; he thrust his head forward and rolled out words, soft words but infinitely wicked. “How much money for the boy? My wife’s mental health depends on getting him back. How much? I may pay it.”

Head down and mouth thin, without another word, Sarah walked past the old man to the door and opened it. She had the feeling that he had used those words on her to drive her away. Therefore she should not go; she should stand against him. But what good would standing be? She knew now that it had been news to him that the boy had been taken from her. He hadn’t known. He had been floored by the news. What, then, could this evil and arrogant old man accomplish if he had not contrived the vanishing of the little boy? Drawing the door open, Sarah went into the hall and on out into the darkness.

Sarah, moving a short distance down the walk, pausing and waiting for Captain Most to join her, was lost in preoccupation. It seemed to her now that she knew Alice Mildred in a different way. That she had seen Alice Mildred clearly for the first time, not as a frigidly withdrawn woman, but as the helpless prisoner of a cold-fisted husband.

It stood clear in Sarah’s mind that the cruelties done her had been solely Ivan’s work. Ivan had not liked her; Ivan had done with her what he wished to do. That was his way. Sarah could imagine Alice Mildred protesting and Ivan’s stony indifference. A woman like Alice Mildred must have been cast emotionally adrift by Paul’s death, and such a man as Ivan would be small comfort to her in moods of inward depression, sustained and hungering for the dead Paul. Sarah did not wonder that Alice Mildred’s poor mind might have set up the abnormality of substituting Jonnie for Paul.

Sarah’s head came up. How long had she been standing here waiting? “Captain,” she called. And when the darkness did not respond, she said, “Captain Most!” more uneasily.

She approached a spot near the window. “Captain!” But Captain Most was not there. He was not where he had assured her he would wait.

Disappointment took a bite out of her good opinions of Most. He had said he would wait. She resented his breach of word. And she was needled a good deal by merely cast unexpectedly alone in the darkness.

Sarah hurried to the station wagon. Most was not there.

A thin high string of fear began singing. She could feel the cool, dank night air inside her clothing, fingering her body…. Most surely would not leave without some word. A note, at least. Perhaps there was one in the station wagon. Sarah jerked open the station-wagon door and leaned inside, but found it too dark to see clearly. She explored the spot between the doors for the dome-light switch, pressed it, and flooded the interior of the station wagon with light.

Sarah, eyes narrowed against the brightness, quickly saw there was no note. No note on the wheel, under the windshield wipers, nor anywhere in the front seat. Now really apprehensive, she looked into the back seat, searching for a possible written message. On the floor in the back, between the seats, there was a considerable object covered by sailcloth, and without quite thinking—anxiety had its claws hard in her—she jerked the sailcloth partially away from the object.

Sarah looked down at what she had uncovered while her mouth slowly formed into such a distorted shape that it hurt her, and in all of her, in each muscle and nerve, there was shock… until finally her lips began changing their position, slowly, then faster, changing a number of times before the first scream came. The second scream ached the roots of her teeth; it must have been more effective in the street, the neighborhood.

And now Sarah threw herself backward and wheeled and ran wildly and near blindly away from the station wagon and the body of Attorney Brill that she had just found. The act of running and the way of it were not wholly rational, but probably as rational as finding Brill dead there.

C
HANCE AND TERROR CHOSE
the direction Sarah took. The route carried her north in the side street where the station wagon was parked. But she was not aware of a small thing like directions. Coming on top of a night of tension, to pick up a piece of canvas and confront a corpse was a bit overmuch. One of the basic primitive instincts—safety by flight—had been aroused. Oh, Attorney Calvin Brandeis Brill of the disappearing office was a corpse. A pocketknife—the handle only—Sarah had seen far too clearly as protruding from Brill’s left ear. Logic readily indicated that the pocketknife blade, which happened to be not a short one, was buried in the brain back of the ear. Oh, Brill was dead, all right. Sarah knew whose pocketknife it was. Brill’s. She had seen the foxy attorney paring over-kept fingernails with it a couple of times. It had mother-of-pearl handle inlays and was a distinctive knife, and it had never seemed more distinctive than a moment ago sticking out of Brill’s left ear. One could logically imagine that it never would again.

So Sarah ran. She was not screaming now, because she needed the air for her lungs. There was no abatement of terror; there was no diminishing of shock. Her heels beat a hard wild rattle on the sidewalk.

Soon she heard, in the night to her left, a human grunt. Then a brief
whuff
! of disturbed leaves…. Someone running hard had hit a tree or a stout bush in the darkness.

The sound gave Sarah fresh alarm, and she stopped, faced in that direction, and listened.

In the south far away a car horn was briefly noisy, and then from an easterly direction, toward the bay, she heard a ship clock striking on some yacht. The clock dinged out three bells, or half-past five o’clock; then the car horn began again, and she heard a foot knock against a rock quite near by.

Now certain that she was being stalked, Sarah stepped off the sidewalk, in order to move with more silence, and began walking swiftly. Her ears were attentive and her eyes searched warily. It was horrifying in her mind that this could be Brill’s assassin, for who else would pursue her furtively?

When, close at hand, feet hissed on wet grass, she knew she had not evaded the prowler. She was being rushed in the darkness. She plunged ahead then in driving flight. But to the left and rear the stalker materialized and grew to terrible size, a man who was faster than she by far. Closely beset, she threw herself to the right in a twisting plunge designed to put her clear and, if she was fortunate, let the other hurtle onward far enough for her to have a respite. She was not fortunate, because he laid hold of her—quite hard, then more gently—then he exploded, “Oh lord!” And then: “Sarah!”

Sarah gripped his arm until fingers probably bit into his flesh. “Oh, damn you! You scared me half to death,” she said.

She heard the vast relieved breath that he yanked in. “I had no idea it was you. Too infernally dark, in the shrubbery.”

And then he demanded, “Who screamed? You?”

“Yes.” Sarah shuddered.

“I thought it was you. I was standing in a kind of park over yonder when I—” He broke off. “What happened to you?”

Sarah managed to say, “Brill is dead in your station wagon. I found the body.”

This news settled a silence on Most, a deep stillness-wary, imaginative, stark—and he did not move a muscle.

Finally Most asked, “When you screamed—that was when you found Brill?” His voice was heavier, thicker.

“Yes.”

“Brill is dead? You are sure of that?”

Sarah, certain she would see the pocketknife handle protruding from Brill’s ear if she but closed her eyes, got out the one word “Yes.”

“In my car, too,” Most muttered. This was not a question but a statement, a posing of a bad fact for consideration. “But who did it?”

“I don’t know. I just found him.”

“Where?”

“The back seat, covered by a piece of sail.”

Most grunted briefly. “That sail has been in there two or three days. But I wonder how long Brill has been there?”

Now from the spot where the station wagon stood parked came a man’s shouted surprise. Plainly a householder from the neighborhood had found the body, and he began bellowing at someone called Danny to call the officers. “There’s a dead man here!” he yelled. “Danny! Danny, call the cops!” He sounded so vastly excited that Sarah visualized him as a peace-loving man who had gotten up to investigate a female screech and found, in a station wagon with the dome-light turned on, a cadaver.

Most took in his breath softly and murmured, “Well, the body’s been well found.” Then he told Sarah, “A woman left the Lineyack house, and I followed her. That’s why I was not waiting where I said I would be.”

“A woman?” Sarah echoed wonderingly.

“The old lady who came into the room when you were talking to Lineyack.”

“Alice Mildred!”

“Yes. If that’s who she is…. Well, she slipped out of the house. It was soon, within a minute or two after Lineyack took her out of the room where you were that I saw her leaving. She passed along a path in the moonlight, that I could see from where I stood.”

Sarah said blankly, “She… left the house! But Lineyack took Alice Mildred to her room. She was supposed to go back to bed.”

“Maybe they lied. Maybe she went for the police.”

“I don’t think so,” Sarah said, shaking her head quickly. “Alice Mildred would not—I cannot believe she would do that.”

The householder was yelling again at Danny, wanting to know if Danny was calling the police. Most cleared his throat thoughtfully. He asked, “Think we’d better go away from here?”

Sarah looked up at him. His face was indistinct in the darkness. But he must quite understand that a body had been found in his car, and that such a thing was very serious.

“Shouldn’t that be for you to decide?” she asked.

He took her arm then. “I don’t like to make up my mind that quick,” he said dryly. He chose a route deeper into the shrubbery. As they walked he told her, “This is the edge of a narrow park. I don’t know the neighborhood too well, but I seem to remember that the park runs along the bay several blocks.” A few yards farther on smaller shrubs disappeared and the park spread more openly before them. There was flat dew-jeweled grass and a scattering of palm trees.

“You had it rough back there,” Most said. Sarah was silent. Presently he added, “I didn’t help it by stalking you that way.” And Sarah shivered violently. “Please!” she gasped. “Don’t get me thinking about it!” And when he slowed, clearly concerned for her, she gathered control and added, “And don’t worry about me. I’m getting hardened to these things.”

He probably understood this was untrue, but he pretended to believe her anyway. He glanced about for bearings, then altered course several points to the southward. “She was headed this way when I heard you let go. There’s a chance we might pick her up,” he said.

“Alice Mildred? You want to follow her?”

“Why not? I was following her. I thought she was going after the police. If she was not—well, it might be interesting to know where she was going.” He was swinging out on his long legs swiftly. The moon, less hindered by shrubbery and foliage here where the park was open, laid enough silver on Most’s angular face so that Sarah could see how sober his expression was.

Suddenly he said: “What do you think of this: She came outdoors wearing what she wore in the room—nightgown and housecoat.”

Sarah’s breath caught. “Poor Alice Mildred!”

Most looked at her sharply. “Do you mean something special by that tone?”

“Alice Mildred,” Sarah said gently, “is unstable mentally.”

Most swung his face toward her, brows arched skeptically. “Are you sure they—”

“Didn’t deceive me?” Sarah said. “No. I don’t believe it was a play for my sympathy.”

Most looked ahead again. “What else happened?”

“Ivan didn’t know. When I told Ivan that Jonnie had been taken from me, I’m sure it was the first he’d heard of it.” Sarah laid out in a few words the gist of what she had said to Lineyack and what he had said to her. “The man Ides—I’ll call him Dewey Cokerham now—works for Lineyack. Ivan admitted that, referring to him as Dewey Cokerham, not Ides.”

“Then you don’t feel that Ivan hired this Dewey and some others to take the boy from you?” Most inquired.

“No, no longer. I did have some such notion, without understanding at all why Ivan should do such a thing. But not now. Ivan was too genuinely upset when I told him.” Sarah hesitated and then added impulsively, “I think he was intensely surprised rather than hurt.”

“Would there be a difference?” Most asked.

“I think so—with Lineyack.” Sarah frowned, not sure how to express just what she did mean. “I thought he seemed like a man who’d had footing jerked from under him, more than a man who’d been stabbed. That is—oh, I can’t be sure. It may be imagination. At a time like that it would be hard to know, because it’s difficult enough at any time to read people rightly.”

“Acted as if something had gone wrong with a scheme, did he?”

“I—I don’t know. It could be,” Sarah said. She added quickly, “Oh, and this you should know: At the very last he said flatly that he did not believe my story about my son being taken from me. But Ivan lied. I’m sure he lied. He did believe it. He only said he didn’t.”

Most summed it up by dryly saying, “Old Ivan seems to live up to advance notice…. Incidentally, suppose he killed Brill?”

This was spoken far too casually for its importance and got to Sarah as a form of delayed explosion. “Oh no! No—” Then she went silent, shocked, but now wondering. Presently she added dubiously, “He had no opportunity.”

“No?” Most said skeptically. “What about when he took his wife upstairs?”

“He didn’t have time.”

“Time?” Most glanced sharply at Sarah. “He was gone upstairs at least five minutes.”

Sarah tried to remember. It could be that Lineyack had been upstairs longer than she had supposed. Probably her mind had not been in a state where time meant much to it. Perhaps she had stood there at the foot of the stairs, listening for quite an interval. And there was another stairway…. “He could have been gone longer than I thought,” she admitted. “And he could have left the house, I suppose.”