After a moment she said slowly:
“Sherry, if I’ve made you or anyone else think that I despise you, I deserve everything you’ve said—I deserve more. Don’t go back on me now, old boy.… Friends again?”
He caught convulsively at the outstretched hand, his face twisting and straining for the control that Trudi wanted.
“Trudi—my God, my God, Trudi, what made me do that? Trudi—”
“Friends it is, then. Don’t take it too hard, Sherry; we’re all in the same boat.… I’ve been acting like a beast myself for hours! I don’t think any of us seem temperamentally adapted for a murder…. Well, Gavin—still think it was Sherry?”
“I’ve about given up thinking.” He looked as weary as the weary voice. “The only valid reason that I can see for eliminating Sherry is that we’ve temporarily substituted someone else.”
“Someone else?”
“We’ve substituted Tom Ross, haven’t we? You were in the chapel at the time the murder was committed, weren’t you, Ross?”
“I don’t know. As it happens, I don’t know when the murder was committed.”
“At approximately that time, then. And you were in this room again when the phonograph started playing, weren’t you?”
“No. You’re quite wrong there. I wasn’t more than halfway across the chapel when the phonograph started up.”
Dart smiled, but not as though he were amused.
“I wasn’t trying to trip you up, my dear fellow. What I meant was that theoretically you had access to this room on both occasions.”
“I’m afraid that I haven’t attained your Olympian detachment,” replied Tom Ross pleasantly. “I thought that what you were after were facts, not theories.… The fact is that I wasn’t in the room.”
“And if you’re linking the phonograph and the murder together, you’re letting Sherry out, aren’t you?” inquired Trudi dispassionately. “It would be a little difficult even for you, Gavin, to evolve a theory that would bring Sherry from the ladder to this room in three or four seconds.”
“Sherry might have had an accomplice.”
“You mean me?” She considered this for a moment in silence. “Yes, I see what you mean. If Jill could have slipped into the room in the dark, so could I—and out of it, too, if it comes to that. Well, that seems to let all of us in—Larry, Jill, you, Hanna, Tom, Kit—oh, the whole shooting match…. And that leaves us just about where we started, doesn’t it?”
“A little worse off, I should say.”
“All right, then; let’s start again. Let’s start with those three or four questions that you wanted cleared up. You found out about Kit and Panama, but you haven’t found out what Doug wanted Lindy for, or what upset Ray when she went upstairs, have you? Why not have another go at that?”
“An excellent suggestion, Trudi—and a fairly well-merited rebuke, I’m afraid. Very well; here is where the clouded Master Mind abandons the blind alleys of speculation and returns to the straight and narrow path of facts. Lindy, will you tell us now why Doug King called you upstairs just before the game started?”
Lindy lifted her eyes from the twisted pearls, looked at him pensively for a moment, as though she were trying to weigh imponderable facts, and then said, with a curious and inflexible finality: “No.”
“No?” He echoed it blankly. “And why not, may I ask?”
“Because, Gavin, the thing that Doug wanted to discuss with me didn’t involve simply myself. Other people were seriously involved in it, and as it was an extremely personal matter, I’m sure that you’ll forgive me for not being willing to drag them into all of—this.” She smiled faintly, a piteous and gallant smile for all the tremorless serenity of her voice, and added, “You’ve warned us of the terrors of cross-examination, Gavin. You aren’t going to subject us to it now?”
He said quietly:
“No. But I wish that you could see your way clearer to helping us. Well, Ray, how about you?”
The small creature curled dejectedly in the corner of the love-seat turned on him a pair of round hazel eyes, tragically forlorn in the wan face.
“Gavin, I don’t want to talk about—about those things—not now, please. Oh, Gavin, if you knew how absolutely dead I am I do think you’d let me alone, just for to-night. I’m absolutely hollow I’m so tired, and everything’s all mixed up in my head.… I’ll only get it more mixed up if I try to tell it now—truly, truly I will. Joel, don’t let him make me tell!’”
Joel, a brown hand linked securely about the small limp paw, murmured cajolingly:
“Honey, if you tell him what happened then, Gavin’ll let me take you upstairs, and tuck you into bed, and I’ll sit right there beside you until you go sound asleep and forget the whole dreadful mess. That’s straight, isn’t it, Gavin?”
“Perfectly straight.”
“Can I keep the light on all night?”
“You can keep the light on for the rest of your natural life, darling. Now tell us about those ghosts of yours—come on.”
“They weren’t—ghosts.” She shuddered, her fingers clutching desperately at the reassurance of Joel’s. “Gavin, it all makes me seem like such an idiot; I don’t know what happened to me.… I’ve been like an imbecile all night, and this just finished me. I was pretty nearly demented with that wind and my head before I started upstairs, and then when I got there it was all dark except for one light’way at the end of one of the corridors, and I got frightened again—only worse. I remembered that there was a little jog near my bedroom, and I could see one there, too—and then something banged somewhere—oh, frightfully loud, and just behind me I thought I heard someone laugh a dreadful little laugh, like—like Damaris … and I put my hands over my ears and started running. I couldn’t have heard anything anyway, because of that hideous wind. I wanted to shut it out, and when I got to the door I was afraid to take my hands down even for a second—even for the second that it would take to turn the handle.… And then I took them down, and turned—and the door wouldn’t open. It wouldn’t open at all; it was locked. I stood there hanging onto the handle, wondering how I could ever get down those corridors again—wondering why Joel hadn’t told me that he’d locked the door, when I heard something move … inside. And I heard—a voice.” Her own voice, edged with horror, trailed off into space, her eyes following it, dilated with some incommunicable memory.
Gavin Dart asked gently: “Whose voice, Ray?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t sound like a real voice at all; it sounded like—like an animal’s … strangled, and choked, and—gagged.”
“Could you hear what it said?”
“I don’t want to tell you what it said.”
“Ray, I’m afraid you’ll have to.”
She cast a despairing glance at Joel, who stared back at her blankly, his gay face suddenly shadowed with disastrous unease. After a moment he said slowly:
“Go ahead, honey—Gavin’s right. Just tell us what it said, and then you won’t have to bother about anything more as long as you live. What did it say?”
“Hold my hand tighter; hold it tighter still.… It said, ‘By God—I’ll get you for this to-night—if I burn for it.’ And then I knew—then I knew that it wasn’t my room that I was outside of—then I knew that this door belonged to someone else, and that something dreadful was happening behind it.… And I let go the handle, and I ran, I ran like mad, down those halls and down those stairs—I thought that I’d die before I got to the foot of them. And Joel was waiting there … and I nearly went mad begging him to take me away, and he didn’t take me away … he only laughed at me. He never took me away at all. And that’s all, Gavin—that’s all, truly. Now can I go?”
“In just one minute, Ray. Does anyone remember who was out of the room at the time that Ray went for the aspirin?”
“I was,” said Kit Baird, with commendable promptness. “And so was Doug King. I’d gone up to give him some iodine for that cut of his.”
“And it was your
voice that Ray heard?”
Kit slanted his eyebrows at him inquiringly.
“My voice? Oh, Your Honour! Isn’t it fairly steep to ask a fellow to split the faggots for his own funeral pyre?”
“Not so steep as to deny my question, I’m afraid, Kit.”
Kit, swinging his long legs pensively, bestowed a brief smile on the rigid gravity of his inquisitor.
“Still, you know, that’s just exactly what I’m going to do. The voice of prudence is earnestly counselling me to enter a blanket denial of the entire episode, but prudence and I don’t get on very well together. And as we’re all mighty seekers after the truth, I am now going to confide in you that it wasn’t my voice—it was Doug’s.”
“And are you going to confide in us why Ray told us that it sounded so strangled as to be unrecognizable?”
“Even that, Your Honour. It sounded strangled for the main and simple reason that at the time I was engaged in choking Mr. King a little—oh, not enough to really hurt him, but quite enough to upset him rather badly.”
“Why?”
“Are there supposed to be no limits to my philanthropy? Very well—in one last burst of confidence I’ll confess that Doug had been getting fairly well on my nerves all evening, and that I found our last little chat over the iodine just a little bit more than I could stick. He was touching up the Panama episode a bit, and I was fairly fed up on Panama … so I stopped him. I don’t think he was quite through—that was what Ray heard him complaining about.”
Gavin Dart said gravely: “I wish that I felt that you could laugh yourself out of this nightmare, Kit.”
The red-headed young man stopped swinging his legs. After a moment he said, with no particular emphasis: “Thanks, old boy. I wish so, too.”
Joel Hardy said desperately to the man at his elbow:
“But look here, Dart, you don’t believe that if Kit had anything in God’s world to do with it he’d be telling you all the rigmarole about choking Doug? He’s not exactly a moron, you know. Someone else is mixed up in this as sure as shooting. Look here, I’ll bet if we could find out who was monkeying with this phonograph, we’d find out who did Doug in! Listen, how about this? Suppose whoever did it had an accomplice of some kind—you know; you thought of that yourself! Suppose he had to communicate with this accomplice, and didn’t know how in heaven’s name he could get at him—or her—as long as we were all penned up in this room. Well, he’d try a note, wouldn’t he? And he’d think this phonograph would be a slick place to plant it. You could wedge it in almost anywhere in at the back here, or along the sides—or… by golly, I’ve got it at last! Lord, what dumb-bells we’ve been. All anyone who wanted the prize hiding place of the world would have to do would be to take this record and slip the note under, and there he’d be. Now watch old Dr. Hardy—one—two—three—and there you are, by crackie!”
He lifted the black disk with a mighty flourish, and stood transfixed, staring down at the green felt circle with eyes suddenly and appallingly enlightened. There on the circle, staring up at him malevolently, lay four aces, neatly spread out like a little fan—and across the face of the ace of spades ran a little trail of red drops.
Gavin Dart said quietly:
“Just a minute, please, Hardy. I’d like a look at those, if you don’t mind.”
He lifted them carefully, turned them over with fingers almost surgical in their deft precision, ran one swiftly over the patterned back and said curtly:
“They’re marked. Here, in the middle of this arabesque. The design is pricked—you can see for yourself; or rather you can feel it.”
He paused for a long moment, staring down at them, and then turned slowly to Kit. He said:
“These are the cards that we were playing with this evening, aren’t they, Baird?”
Kit took them from the outstretched hand, and stood staring down at them thoughtfully. After a moment he drew his finger slowly across the invisible pricks, smiled slightly, and handed them back to their erstwhile guardian.
“These are indubitably the cards,” he said.
Gavin Dart asked, his voice gravely troubled: “The aces that you held in the last hand that we played?”
“The very aces.”
“What should you call these stains on the ace of spades, Baird?”
“I should call them blood,” replied Kit coolly. “What should you call them?”
Gavin Dart, his low-pitched voice a trifle lower, said, “I, too, should call them blood.” He dropped the cards on the table beside him and sat down rather abruptly in the capacious chair at his elbow, leaning his head against his hand as though the end of the chase found him unexpectedly weary.
Joel, who had been staring at the grim little objects with stunned fascination, emerged from his stupefied contemplation into galvanized activity.
“Well, but, Kit, why for the love of God don’t you tell him where the stains came from?”
“You’re a nice loyal young fool!” said the red-headed young man, still smiling. “The blood came from Doug King, as a matter of fact, Dart—but before he was killed, not after. He cut himself at the card table, if you remember.”
“Yes, I remember perfectly. I had forgotten, though, that the blood actually got on the cards.”
“I believe Joel spoke of it at the time—and I had excellent reason for remembering it later. That isn’t what’s bothering you though, is it?”
“No; you’re quite right. That isn’t what’s bothering me at all. I think that you can help me with my major difficulty, if you care to, Kit.”
“I’m at your service entirely.” Kit poured three inches out of the decanter into his glass, added a handful of ice and a modest hint of water, and added, pensive and ironic, “It’s a little difficult to see where else I could be.”
Dart agreed without raising his head.
“I can quite see that. Then would you be good enough to tell me just how the marked aces from your last hand came to be concealed under this phonograph record?”
Lindy, lifting dark eyes, asked quietly in her voice of silver dreams:
“Why not ask me?”
“You?” Gavin Dart turned incredulous eyes from the smouldering copper of Kit’s arrogant head to the velvet smoothness of the little dark one against the dim brocade. “Why should I ask you?”
She let the pearls that she had been twisting into a rope all evening slip through her fingers as though she no longer needed them, and leaned forward out of the shadows into the light.
“Because it was I who put them there.” In the dancing firelight the clear serenity of the small, pale face was as unflawed as the voice. “Because it was I who murdered Doug King.”
Chapter VIII
The snap of Kit Baird’s pencil between his fingers cracked sharp as a pistol, and Gavin Dart’s voice sounded curiously flat after it.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t you, Gavin? Is that because truth is so hard to believe? … I’d begun to think that you could believe almost anything—you’re really almost as bad as the White Queen! You remember, she practised until she could manage as many as six impossible things before breakfast; I think that you could manage seven.” A light, too delicate, too remote and elusive for mirth, hovered behind the shadowing lashes, and Gavin Dart turned his eyes from it, as though he found it intolerable.
“You could believe that Sherry, who adored him, killed Doug for fifty thousand dollars, couldn’t you? You could believe that Tom did it for a shattered business career—that Kit did it for four cards with little pricks on their backs. You’ve believed quantities and quantities of other things almost as foolish and almost as dangerous, and yet you can’t believe the simplest of truths. Why can’t you, Gavin?”
He said, out of the deathly silence through which the limpid voice ran like a brook:
“Because it’s sheer insanity. All this has been too much for you, Lindy; it’s been pretty well too much for the lot of us. Hysteria has more than one way
of hitting us, my dear, and this happens to be the way it’s hit you. You are no more capable of committing murder than that baby of mine at home.”
She said:
“I hope for his sake—and for yours—that you’re as wrong about that as you are about everything else. Why don’t you think that I killed Doug, Gavin? No, don’t bother to tell me—I’ll tell you. You don’t think that I killed him because I have long lashes, and small hands, and pretty manners. They’re none of them real deterrents to murder, I think—Damaris had them, too, but Sidney died at his desk for all of them.”
“It’s that story that’s turned your head.” Gavin’s voice was harsh with pain. “You’d never have so much as thought of trying to make us believe a monstrous thing like this if it hadn’t been for that worn-out tale of blood and revenge… Lindy, do you realize that you are practically the only person here who hadn’t the shadow of a motive for killing Doug?”
“You are wrong again. I am the only person here who had a motive urgent enough to make murder the only solution.”
“What motive?”
“Doug King was trying to ruin someone that I loved.… He gave me only one alternative to prevent that ruin—he forgot that there were two.… I chose the second.”
“The second?”
“I chose murder,” said the lovely tranquil voice.
Chatty, who had been staring at her with eyes that terror had burned dry of tears, made a strange little sound, and covered her face with her hands.
For a moment no one spoke at all, and then Jill Leighton, holding the smock that covered the blood-stains together with hands that shook uncontrollably, asked in a voice that did not shake at all: “Was it because of Sunny, Lindy?”
“No … not Sunny. I loved her, too—I loved her dreadfully—and Doug would have been kinder to have used a knife to kill her. But Sunny’s lucky—Sunny’s dead. He couldn’t hurt her any more.… It wasn’t Sunny.”
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