The Hangman's Whip (8 page)

The door to the pantry opened and Diana came out with a tray on which were brandy and glasses. She went to the table, her long mauve dress trailing along the floor. There was a flash of lightning so vivid it blazed against the windows at the front, and thunder rolled and shook the old house.

“The storm is coming back,” she said. “Here, Richard.” She poured brandy with a steady hand and gave him the glass. “We’d all better have some. Whatever possessed Eve—I thought she was in her room, writing letters. That’s where she said she was going. She must have gone down the back stairs. And so to the cottage.”

“Drink it, Dick,” said Calvin. “It’ll do you good. There’s nothing we can do but wait. Was there a—a note or anything like that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t look.”

“A note,” said Calvin rather thoughtfully, “would make things simple.”

Diana glanced at him quickly. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” said Calvin. “Go on now, Richard, and change. I’ll get some flashlights—they’ll be here in twenty minutes or so.”

“You’d better put some clothes on yourself,” said Diana. “I’ll get flashlights together. I think I saw a couple in the chest at the side door.”

Calvin turned quickly toward the narrow passage that ran, at right angles to the main hall, toward the side door, and Richard put down his empty glass. “Calvin, wait a minute. Don’t you think—well, how about getting Howland over? He—he’s a lawyer. He’ll know what to do.”

Calvin whirled abruptly. “Howland!” And Diana said in surprise:

“Howland? Is he here?”

“He came tonight,” said Richard, still looking at Calvin. “What do you think, Calvin?”

“I don’t know,” said Calvin slowly. “It might look—but I’ll telephone to him. You go and change.”

“I’ll telephone to him,” said Diana. She turned swiftly toward the telephone. Calvin went down the hall toward the side door, his bedroom slippers flapping on the matting, and Richard looked at Search.

“Remember,” he said and put his hand for an instant on her wrist. Then he turned swiftly toward the stairs, running up the steps with an easy grace, tearing off his coat as he ran. Some of Search’s heart went with him.

He whirled around the landing and was gone. Calvin returned with two flashlights, which he put down on the table beside the tray, and followed Richard. Diana had got Howland at once and was explaining, swiftly but coherently too. She hung up and turned to Search.

“He’s coming. He said to tell everybody not to talk at all. He’s got to dress; then he’ll be here.” Her eyes darted around the room and she went to the library door. “Aunt Ludmilla, you’d better go to bed. It’s going to be rather awful, I imagine.”

Ludmilla. Search followed Diana into the library. Candles stood on the table and lighted the big room dimly, and Ludmilla sat in the middle of the chintz-covered sofa, her face looking ghastly pale, her china-blue eyes wide and tragic. She saw Search and cried: “Oh, there you are, dear. I wondered—you’ve heard, of course. No, Diana, I’m not going to bed.”

“As you please,” said Diana, shrugging. “I’m going after flashlights.” She went into the hall again. Ludmilla leaned toward Search.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Perhaps they’d better not know—the coroner and the sheriff, I mean—about—about the arsenic.”

Search said with a kind of gasp: “But that has nothing to do—”

“I know. Eve committed suicide. But still—Pete Donny is a nosy old fellow; it’s just as well not to tell him too much. We’d better help Diana look up raincoats and flashlights.”

All three of them were in the hall ten minutes later when Howland arrived. He opened the front door unexpectedly. “Can I come in? Your bell doesn’t work. I rang but—”

“Howland!” cried Diana. “I’m so glad—come in.”

A wet raincoat was slung around his bulky shoulders; his short blunt face looked sallow in the dim light. He shook rain from his hat and glanced quickly around, and his soft brown eyes met Search’s. There was significance in his look, so it reminded her of their last meeting—yet there was something a little different about it too. She felt that difference only vaguely and gave it then no thought. “Hello, Search,” he said. “I meant to telephone you in the morning. I just got here—came out with Richard from town. How do you do, Aunt Ludmilla. Well, Diana, what about Eve? Who found her? Why did she do it?”

Richard came running down the stairs; he’d changed to gray slacks and a sweater and was knotting a scarf at his neck as he ran.

“Have they come? Oh, it’s you, Howie. Did Diana tell you—”

“About Eve, yes. That is, she said Eve had killed herself. Where is she?”

“At the cottage. I found her there. Look here, Howland, I want the women kept out of this. There’s no need to question anybody but me.”

“I see,” said Howland slowly, his blank gaze fixed on Richard. Calvin came running down the stairs. And Howland said: “That’s rather an odd request to make, Dick. You don’t have any doubt that it was suicide, do you?”

He had left the door behind him open. So they all heard the sudden tramping of feet, crossing the veranda. And they all turned to look as men—two men, three—appeared in the doorway, their raincoats glistening, their faces looking white and stern and somehow threatening in the light from the candles and against the wild night.

There was an instant’s sharp silence. Then Richard and Howland and Calvin moved together toward the door, explaining, telling them Eve Bohan had killed herself, telling them where and how long ago and who had found her.

Pete Donny was the sheriff; a big man, clumsy and awkward, with a big voice. It boomed out rather cheerfully and friendly over the other voices. “Well, it’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear this. We’d better go along and see her. You lead the way to the cottage, will you Bohan?”

Raincoats, flashlights, voices, feet tramping away again and down the steps to the lake path. And silence then in the big house—except for the storm.

They waited, Search and Ludmilla and Diana, in the library, with the rain sloshing the black and winking windowpanes. Diana was nervous, prowling like a cat from one window to another. Ludmilla stared at the Brussels carpet and said nothing.

Search sat beside her, thinking and trying not to.

If it wasn’t suicide it was murder. And there was nobody who would murder Eve. But, where there was murder there was a motive, and Search, herself, and Richard had a motive, for Eve had stood between them.

Once Diana turned from the window, said in an impatient voice: “It’s still pouring,” and glanced at Search, stopped, frowned, said in a puzzled but absent way: “That’s not the dress you wore at dinner,” and swerved: “Search, why do you suppose Eve killed herself? She was so—so happy all day. Almost triumphant, it seemed to me. Why did she do it?”

“I don’t know.”

It would be safest, thought Search suddenly, to say that later, when they asked questions. “I don’t know—I don’t know.” Swiftly, dreadfully, her imagination hurtled off into what might happen. Accusations, arrests, trial. Trial for murder.

Time must have passed, for all at once the men returned. There was again the tramping of feet, the muffled voices, the swish of raincoats. Sheriff Donny’s voice boomed out; he was apparently at the telephone, and his voice was no longer friendly.

“John? John, this is Sheriff Donny. I want you to swear in a couple of deputies and come up here to the old Abbott place as fast as you can. …No, it’s a murder; young Mrs. Bohan. Listen, John, you stop at the jail, and in my office, the right-hand drawer of the desk, is a bag with some stuff in it that I need. Bring it along. …No, she wasn’t shot. Doc says she was chloroformed and then strangled.”

Ludmilla’s plump little hand went slowly up to her throat. Diana went into the hall, and Ludmilla followed. As her fat little figure vanished Howland Stacy came to the door, saw Search and came to her quickly. The candles on the table beside him shone upward so the lower part of his face was in sharp relief and his eyes pocketed with shadows. He took her hands and said in a low voice:

“I was looking for you. Search, what really happened?”

She scarcely heard his question. “Howland, what are they going to do?”

“I’m afraid they are going to arrest Richard.”

“
Richard!
”

“Yes. He was a fool to let them know he found her; he ought to have gone away and let someone else find her. Unless he thought it would seem less suspicious.”

Her fingers dug into Howland’s hands. “Howland, he didn’t kill her. You’re his lawyer. He didn’t do it—”

A kind of stillness in his short dark face stopped her. There was a little pause. Then he said: “Oh, I see. So I was right. You are still in love with him.”

She didn’t answer; he must have seen the truth in her face. But unexpectedly his manner changed; his voice when he spoke was entirely different, almost coaxing. He said in the friendliest possible way: “Well, that’s all right. I won’t bother you about it now. And I’ll do my best for Richard. But you’d better tell me all about it. The whole story; you can confide in me. There’s a difference, you know, between premeditated murder and manslaughter.”

T
HE VOICES IN THE
hall made a kind of tapestry of sound. Rain dashed against the windows, and the shining black windowpanes reflected a slender girl in white, her arms and throat bare, her head lifted. The candle flames lifted and lowered again. Search said stiffly: “He didn’t do it. I was—” and stopped as if a hand had placed itself upon her lips. If they knew she and Richard had arranged to meet at the cottage, if they knew why they had planned to meet, it would go that much harder with Richard. They would say that Eve refused to give Richard a divorce and that that was a motive. Something seemed to move and change back in Howland’s soft brown eyes. He said:

“You’d better tell me everything, Search. That’s the only way I can help you.”

And just then Ludmilla returned and was followed by the sheriff.

She came directly to them; it seemed to Search that the sheriff looked at her and at Howland sharply, but his eyes were so shielded by wrinkled and heavy eyelids and shadow from the glancing candlelight that she could not be sure of any expression in them or in his thick, heavy-featured face. Ludmilla said a little breathlessly: “Search, they are going to question us. They say she was murdered. They—they’ve got Richard in another room.”

The sheriff interrupted, turning back toward the door. “Will you come in here, Mr Peale? There’s plenty of chairs here. Al, bring those candles from the hall, will you? Put them on the table; that’s better.”

One of the men who had accompanied him, a slim, bald little man with anxious eyes, slid into the room with candles and immediately out again. To guard Richard? Search wondered. Calvin and Diana came in too, Calvin frowning worriedly; Diana’s thin face was ghastly white in the candlelight and her mouth set.

“Sit down, folks, sit down,” said the sheriff. “Now then, Miss Abbott, I’ve known you a long time and you’ve known me. I think you want the truth, and I’m going to give it to you. The girl was murdered; it wasn’t suicide.”

Ludmilla sat down slowly on the sofa; she seemed, in the face of emergency, less childish and helpless.

“Yes, Mr. Donny, I understand that. But it isn’t easy for us to believe it was murder.”

“It was murder all right. We don’t have many murders up here in Kentigern; fact is, I can’t remember any—certainly there’s not been any since I came into office. I may not go at this just the way they’d do in a city, but I’ll have to do my best. Anybody been around here lately besides the family?”

There was a little pause; probably all of them sought rather desperately to recall some stranger, some intruder, someone who could have murdered her. The sheriff sensed the reluctant denial and said: “Well, soon as it’s light we can make a better examination about the cottage; that’s one good thing about the rain—there’ll be footprints.”

Her own, thought Search; her sharp high heels.

The sheriff went on quickly. “I told you I was going to tell you the truth. So you’d better know about the things I know. Never mind how I know; there’s nothing I’m going to say I can’t back up with proof. I know—” He stopped and looked at Ludmilla and said: “Mind if I smoke, Miss Abbott?”

She shook her head; he took out cigarettes and lighted one for himself and offered the package to Calvin who accepted it and went to lean against the edge of the table, his feet in muddy sneakers stretched out before him, his sharp-featured face taut and concentrated.

“I know this,” said the sheriff. “Eve Bohan and Richard came here about the first of June; he stayed in the cottage and she stayed here at the house. That right?”

“That’s—right,” said Ludmilla. “Until she went away. Then he came to the house.”

“She left to get a divorce, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Ludmilla after a moment.

“Then she came back last night. Taxied out here, so I guess you didn’t expect her.”

Calvin said: “How did you—”

“It’s a little town,” said the sheriff. “I aim to know something of what goes on. Anyway, she came here; she stayed again in the house last night. Dick Bohan went to the cottage again.”

Diana said, “No, that’s wrong; he went to the hotel in Kentigern.”

Calvin said briefly: “No, Diana. He’s admitted staying at the cottage; he said he thought of going to the hotel last night, told Eve he was going there. Then he walked down to the cottage instead and slept there and drove into town early this morning.

“He stayed at the cottage last night; he went in to Chicago today, spent the day there, came back about dinnertime with”—he glanced at Howland Stacy—“with Howie Stacy.” Howland nodded briefly; evidently there had been some inquiry already—in the cottage or on the way back. “Ate dinner with Howie, then left the house at about eight-thirty—said he was going to take a walk. That right, Howie?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Did you see him again?”

Howland answered rather slowly: “No. Not till I came here after Diana telephoned to me and told me what had happened.”

The sheriff’s glance shifted to Diana.