She said, “Count ten—I understand. Do we start now?”
“Yes. That means you to the chapel, Ross; Chatty to the north corridor; Hanna just outside the Priest’s Room, Kit in the room off the library, and Sherry in the attic. You’re in Chatty’s room, Trudi, and Joel’s in that warren of baggage rooms…. Dash a little water on those embers, Kit; we don’t want it flaring up…. Come on, Ray. We’re off to patrol them and turn out the lights. Sure that you don’t mind being left here alone, Lindy?”
“Sure.” Her eyes followed him, unswerving, across the room … across the hall… up the little turn that the stairs took.… She turned back to the shelter of the green chair by the fire, spreading her tulle skirts, folding her slim hands … waiting, silent and alert.…
Upstairs Trudi called, and Joel’s voice answered, young and buoyant and excited. She did not move.
After a moment there were quick feet on the stairs, and Gavin’s voice called down:
“Sorry to keep you waiting.… Sherry couldn’t get into the attic; the trapdoor was locked. Has it a spring lock?”
“A spring lock? I didn’t know that it had.”
“He says that it must have sprung to after him—at any rate, we left him at the top of the ladder. Here go the lights … are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“Count ten, slowly, remember. We’re off.”
“One … two … three … four … five … six … seven … eight … nine … ten—”
It rang out frantically, appallingly, as though all the pent-up terror of those last terrible hours were unleashed in one frenzied breath—and in the second’s balance of utter silence that followed it something else rang out, too.
Something else—something gay and young and enchanted—something more terrifying than any scream or any silence:
Sunny’s tune, singing quietly to itself in the darkness, on the cracked old phonograph—Sunny’s tune, that everyone had forgotten—singing of stars … and youth … and love.… And over it and beyond it rose the terrified pandemonium of voices.
Chapter VII
Above those startled voices it sang peacefully and clearly on, completing that old, lost tale that none of them had wanted to hear—that forgotten tale of magic and starlight and youth, touched with the charmed nostalgia of all lost and lovely things.… It was Gavin Dart’s cool, clipped voice that cut sharply across its singing and the rising surge of voices that almost drowned it out.
“Will everyone be good enough to stand exactly where they are? I mean that literally; don’t move a step. And it will help if you don’t make a sound, either. Don’t let go of my hand, Ray; just stand where you are and stretch out your other hand till it touches the door frame. I want to make a barrier across this hall door. Never mind the lights; I’ll get them in a second.… All right—here goes!”
They flared up magnificently just as the little black disk spun peacefully off into silence and quiet under the frantically incredulous eyes turned to it.
Gavin Dart was the only one who did not so much as glance in its direction. His eyes were on another disk—a small white one on his wrist, and they were narrowed in a very passion of concentration.
“Exactly two minutes and ten seconds…. Are we all here?”
Sherry’s voice called from the head of the stairs, breathless and incoherent:
“Wait a bit, will you? I took the wrong turn on the third floor—there’s a damned jog in the hall that brings you out beyond the stairs, and I—”
“It was you that we were waiting for, Sheridan,” said Gavin Dart. “It was for your especial benefit that I waited almost a minute to turn the lights on. Come down and join us, won’t you? You had a rendezvous with us here almost forty-five seconds ago.”
Sherry, thrusting his way through the crowd in the hall, said sullenly:
“I took the wrong turn, I’m telling you.… What’s the matter with all of you, anyway? What are you gawking at that darned phonograph for?”
Chatty answered in a small, hushed voice, too charged with awe even to tremble: “Sherry, it was playing … Sherry, it was playing Sunny’s tune.”
“Never mind the phonograph for a moment, please, Chatty. Let’s find out first, Sheridan, why you took that wrong turn now and didn’t take it at midnight? At midnight, if you remember, you were a long sight farther from the room than you were this time—you’d managed to waft yourself through a locked trapdoor into some remote corner of the attic itself—and yet in the pitch dark you got yourself out of the attic, down the ladder, through all those corridors, down two other long flights of stairs, and into this room, straight as a homing pigeon, in a little over a minute flat, according to the estimate of some of us here—in under two minutes, according to the most generous of us.… Why couldn’t you repeat that distinguished performance of yours, Sheridan?”
Sherry said in a voice too weary for bravado:
“I told you why, twice. I got balled up on the turn.”
“You’re balled up on more than the turn, I’m afraid. You won’t blame me later for not reminding you that candour is your surest refuge in time of trouble, will you? Because I’m reminding you of it now.” He paused, waiting expectantly, his chilled eyes on Sherry’s sullen and disordered countenance. After a moment he said smoothly: “Very well, then. I think that as we aren’t to be vouchsafed any assistance on your part, we’ll manage to get on excellently without it. Tom, I want you to go on an errand for me.… Or no—wait a moment. Are you all standing just where you were at ten minutes past midnight?”
Trudi said wearily:
“Of course we’re not. In the first place, that phonograph thing brought us all in here on the run, and in the second place, you told us to stand still exactly where we were when you spoke. Why didn’t you turn on the lights, without all that chatter about not moving a hand or a foot?”
“Because I was performing this experiment for a perfectly definite purpose, Trudi. It was, I regret to say, a trap to catch Sherry, and phonograph or no phonograph, I couldn’t spring that trap for at least two minutes. My watch has a luminous dial, you know, so I simply held off the lights until the time was up.”
Joel demanded excitedly:
“Yes, but after all, you can’t laugh that phonograph off, can you? How does that fit in, for Pete’s sake? What’s it all about, anyway?”
“It strikes me as fairly simple. It means that someone was moving about in this room who had no earthly business to be here—and that for some reason of their own they were very near the phonograph. Suppose we check up on who is in the room now. You, Lindy, naturally. And Tom—you came in from the chapel, didn’t you? That leaves Jill to be accounted for. How did you happen to be here, Jill?”
She said, clinging to the back of the chair by the door, her face turned so that she could not see Larry’s astounded eyes: “I thought I was meant to be here.”
“And what made you think that?”
“Because—because this was where I was when it—happened.”
“But, Jill, I told you perfectly distinctly that you were to be up with Larry in the linen presses. And you were certainly there when Ray and I were checking up on positions.”
“Was I? I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything very well.”
She swayed slightly, and something in the blinded pathos of the small sad face tempered the steel in his voice.
“Just try to tell us what happened, will you? We all want to help you.”
“I can’t tell you.”
Larry asked from the hall, his face drained of every vestige of colour:
“Let me get in there to her, will you, Dart? You can see for yourself that she isn’t fit to answer questions. I’ll tell you anything you want to know, I swear.”
Gavin Dart dropped the arm that still formed a barrier across the door, and Larry went straight to the girl in the green smock, gathering her up and putting her into the nearest chair as though she were the exhausted child that she looked.
>
“It’s all my fault, Blessed. I shouldn’t have let you go. Don’t shiver like that—nothing’s going to hurt you.”
She whispered:
“Larry—Larry, it was Sunny.… She came back to finish the tune—she came back to tell us—”
Gavin Dart said gravely:
“I’m afraid that it wasn’t Sunny, Jill. Now, Redmond, perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell us what all this means?”
“The whole thing’s my fault. Jill went completely to pieces after you left us out in the presses; she was out of her head with terror at the idea of being in the dark up there, and she’d got the idea that there was still blood on her hands and on her dress—she told me that unless she could get to her room and get rid of that blood, she’d go stark, staring mad. I knew that the knife had been found, and there didn’t seem any point in keeping everyone under surveillance, since that was so—so I let her go.”
“Did you go with her?”
“No—she wouldn’t let me come with her; she said that I’d be expected to go through this test and that if I didn’t it might get me into trouble.”
“I see. Now, Jill, will you tell us why you didn’t go to your room?”
“I can’t tell you. It was Sunny—it was Sunny’s tune—”
“But you must have started down the stairs the moment I put the light out—even before Lindy screamed—certainly before you could have heard the tune. You were in the room when I told everyone to stand still, weren’t you?”
“Was I?” The blue eyes stared at him piteously out of the frozen terror of her face.
“Dart, go easy with her just for a bit, can’t you?” Larry kept his own voice level with an effort that tightened every muscle in his body. “Just give her a chance to get hold of herself—she won’t be any good even to you if she goes out of her head, will she? She’s in a state now where you could get her to say absolutely anything. You could probably get her to say that she did it herself. Is that what you want?”
Gavin Dart said slowly: “No; no, that’s not what I want.”
And the frozen voice from the chair said: “You couldn’t make me say that, Gavin. Not that—not ever.”
“No; I don’t believe that I could. Very well, Jill—only just remember when you’re ready that we’ll all be grateful for any help that you can give us. Now for the errand: Tom, will you run up to the third floor and see what kind of a lock that trapdoor at the head of the ladder to the attic has on it? You know your way about, don’t you? Thanks.” He paused on his way across the room to call after the disappearing figure: “Turn on any lights that you need up there, naturally.” Just short of the phonograph, resting small and dark and inscrutable on its little stand to the left of the fireplace, he halted, surveying it for a moment with compressed lips. The irrepressible Joel bounded after him, the puppy-off-the-leash motif so apparent in his approach that even the sternness of Dart’s tired face relaxed slightly.
“Now how do you size that thing up?” he demanded eagerly. “Look, I’ll tell you how I’ve doped it out.” He moved forward, swinging the arm of the machine back into position and drawing a triumphant finger down the long gash across the record. “That’s where Kit dragged it across when he stopped it to-night while Lindy was dancing with Doug, see? Only the gash stops about an inch or so before the record ends, see, and it was that inch and a half that someone started playing. That’s why it ran on smoothly, without jarring over the scratch! So the only question is, why did they start it?”
Dart commented with a somewhat grim smile:
“Well, hardly the only one, I’m afraid; still, it’s undoubtedly one of them. There are two possible explanations for the thing starting off; there may be more, for all I know. It might have been started deliberately in order to create a distraction that would permit someone to accomplish a purpose that we can only guess at. On the other hand, someone may have set off the release catch accidentally while they were trying to accomplish something quite different—and again it’s a pure matter of speculation as to what the objective was. Which strikes you as the more plausible, Baird?”
“Either,” said Kit Baird. He came toward them from the doorway with that long, light stride, measuring the distance between the door to the service quarters and the stand by the fireplace with an appraising eye. “The stand’s rather low; still, someone crossing over from the service quarters to the hall might have brushed against it—or someone crossing from the hall to the service quarters. What should you say could have been the object in deliberately starting it, Dart?”
“Oh, your guess is as good as mine! To bring us all back earlier, perhaps? To cover up some noise that it was essential to keep unheard? To spoil what someone guessed to be the object of my plan? … It’s all pure speculation. Well, one of the first things that we can do is to narrow it down to the people who actually had access to this room. Lindy was here already, of course—and Jill—and Tom could have reached it from the chapel. Does that cover it?”
“Well, hardly!” murmured Kit, and for a moment his eyes danced. “You aren’t forgetting your honourable self out in the hall?”
“Thanks for reminding me.” A somewhat wintry smile replied from the gray eyes. “Fortunately for me, Ray had my wrist in an iron grip during our entire sojourn in the hall. You’ll back that, Ray?”
“I never let go once—not once.”
“There remains, of course, the possibility of practically anyone in the house coming down these stairs as Jill did, while Lindy was counting. Or someone might have found it more convenient to slip down the back-stairs and through that way. I hadn’t counted on anything of the kind for a minute, which shows the lucidity of my state of mind at present. Though I swear I’m still in the dark as to why anyone should have wished to return to this room.”
“Maybe to get something that they’d left behind,” suggested the indefatigable Joel. “Or else to leave something that they wanted to get rid of. Or—”
“I hardly think that they’d choose this general rendezvous of ours as a particularly attractive dumping ground for incriminating débris,” commented Gavin Dart drily. “But there certainly may be something in your first suggestion. Of course it was running a desperate risk of discovery.… Lindy, did you hear anything out of the way in the room between the time that the light went out and the phonograph started?”
Lindy, still at her post near the spot where the sofa had stood, knitted soft brows in concentration.
“I’m not sure, Gavin. I did hear sounds of some kind, but I thought that probably it was you and Ray in the hall—I wasn’t paying much attention, you see, because I was counting … Gavin, why don’t you make Hanna come over here and sit down? She looks absolutely worn out. You come, too, Ray, and Larry will push Jill’s chair closer. We might as well all sit down, surely …”
Kit, eyes still on the phonograph, inquired pensively, “Did you hear anyone out in the hall, Gavin? Before Lindy screamed, I mean?”
“Yes. I heard someone running down the stairs; as it turns out, it was probably Jill.”
“But you didn’t try to stop her?”
“I was particularly anxious not to stop anyone. One of my objects in this performance—outside of the necessity of proving the fact that Sherry was lying—was to give everyone just a little more rope than they needed, and see what they would do with it. I thought that the results might prove illuminating.”
“A little more than we needed,” repeated Kit Baird slowly. “Enough to hang us with, perhaps? We should be grateful to you, Dart.” He picked up a log, coaxing the dead embers skilfully back to life, the enigmatic smile still flickering. “And you didn’t hear anyone pass you in the hall?”
“No,” said Gavin Dart curtly. “I heard no one.” He crossed to the decanter on the tabouret and emptied a generous portion of it into a glass, adding more curtly still, “Nevertheless, someone passed me.”
“Pour out one for me, there’s a good Samaritan, before you enlighten us as to your late
st discovery.”
“Soda, too? Is that about right? … Oh, the explanation doesn’t do any particular credit to my acumen! When I told you all to stand perfectly still and asked Ray to help me make a barrier across that door, I spoke just a fraction of a second too late—someone had already brushed by me coming out of this room.”
Kit, something just short of mockery edging his voice, abandoned the fire, and swung himself lightly onto the table edge.
“Very, very indiscreet of the brusher, if you ask me. The poor devil probably didn’t know about that rope. You haven’t figured out yet who it was?”
“No. I’ve figured out exactly nothing—except that you were in the writing room off the library, a few yards away.”
Kit’s eyebrows went up in mild astonishment.
“I? Dart, you aren’t telling me that it’s I that you’ve caught in this trap that you set for Sherry?”
Gavin said wearily: “I’m telling you that it’s beginning to look as though every last one of us is so deep in this that it would take more than a lifetime to get us out of it.”
Joel, still hovering over the phonograph as though it were a toy that he was loath to relinquish, lifted an imperious voice.
“Hey, Dart, how about this? Why mightn’t someone have hid something near this darn thing, and come back when the lights were out to get it?”
Gavin inquired drily: “What kind of a thing, for instance?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet. Something darned incriminating, anyway, that it was up to them to get hold of good and quick. This stand is too low for anyone to brush against so that you’d start it up accidentally, shouldn’t you think? But you certainly might catch a cuff or a sleeve in it if you were poking around trying to get something out of this cabinet part down here. Or even if you were trying to stuff something in it. Hey, how about that for an idea? Suppose there’s something in it right now—”
He tugged ruthlessly at the doors to the little cabinet, swollen and warped by years of neglect, and abruptly they swung open, revealing to eager eyes only a small cavern of darknes
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