by Helen Reilly
Night was coming fast over the hills. A little wind had risen. It ruffled the hair on his damp forehead. His eyes were unfocused, fixed, like the eves of a blind man. Shafted light from under a cloud touched him for an instant as he stood there holding the telegram. He looked like an animal caught in a deadfall, trying to gauge the depth of the pit into which it had fallen and exploring, with every ounce of resource, for a possible avenue of escape.
The group under the nut trees strolled toward him. “What is it, Steve, anything important?” Pat called.
Without turning, Steven Hazard said, “No, just something from the office.” His tone was gray, indifferent. He crumpled the message up and thrust it into the pocket of his plaid sport jacket.
They all went into the house. The front door closed. Lights sprang up inside. Outside, the cold purple of the twilight faded quickly into darkness. There was a chill in the air.
Todhunter huddled lower into his coat and moved nearer to the house walls.
XVI
The moon, nearly at the full, cast a soft silver-blue flood down over the dark night hills that cupped the two-mile stretch of gleaming water. It threw one roof of the rambling Kokino Inn into high relief, made black velvet of the other. Under the black velvet, lighted windows burned brightly. It was the night of the Kokino’s Halloween dance, an annual affair attended by sportsmen, their wives and daughters, and local landowners within a radius of twenty miles. The Kokino Inn was famous for its fish and for the spontaneous gaiety of its impromptu gatherings. Quite a number of fashionable New Yorkers went there during the autumn.
The chairs and tables in the long, low, spacious dining room had been removed. Festoons of orange paper with black witches riding paper brooms draped the walls. Illuminated pumpkin heads strung across the beamed ceiling cast a mellow radiance on the men and women in evening dress dancing to the music of an excellent orchestra or sitting about at small tables against the windows.
Cristie Lansing paused on the landing of the wide staircase running down across an inner wall. The dusty rose of a dinner gown fell in long straight folds to her feet. Her smooth chestnut head was up, her eyes were more gray now than violet. There was no expression in them. They were still beautiful, tilting at an angle under the slim dark brows, but the life in them was gone.
They followed the twining figures moving in and out and up and down across the waxed floor. Margot was dancing with a tall thin man with a red moustache. Cristie’s gaze lingered on her thoughtfully.
When Margot had first proposed coming up here to the Inn in her breezy offhand fashion, Cristie’s initial reaction had been a violent negative. She knew Steven had a place somewhere on the lake, a place that had been in his family for years. He had spoken of it often in those far-off days when she had first come to New York before they had quarreled and separated, before his marriage to Sara. The thought of Steven or of nearness to Steven was an intolerable pain. She had to outface this pain, had to override it, push it into the background and return to at least a semblance of normal living. You did go on living, somehow or other.
It was the story in the afternoon papers that had made it more than ever necessary to preserve a facade of indifferent serenity, as though she knew nothing. Those terrible black headlines had rekindled the dark fire behind the closed door at the back of her mind. It was Margot who had called her attention to the newspaper after a late luncheon and before she had decided on this trip.
They were going to bring Sara Hazard back into existence. Cristie’s nails bit into the palms of the hands hanging at her sides. They mustn’t. Sure of nothing else, Cristie was sure of that, dreadfully, vehemently sure. It mustn’t be permitted to happen. The police were so expert, so skillful, they had ways of finding things out. Perhaps they could connect up—she made herself stop thinking as Johnny came forward eagerly from the crowd to meet her.
Johnny slipped his arm through hers. He looked very handsome in his dinner jacket with his fine head and trim shoulders. He was smiling but he seemed tired. He had skipped a benefit at which he was to have been master of ceremonies to bring Margot and herself up there to Kokino for a Halloween holiday. He not only seemed tired but there was a queer sharpness to his face.
A little pang of compunction went through Cris-tie. Johnny was so kind, so considerate, always looking out for her, always trying to make her comfortable. She gave him so little in return. With the pang of compunction a vagrant question presented itself unbidden. Could this trip to Kokino have been actuated by more than a desire to please Margot and herself and to get away from the city and enjoy a night’s fun?
She dismissed it as Johnny circled her waist and swept her out on the floor to the tune of All Night Long the Glasses Tinkle. Cristie waved to Margot as Margot went by with the red moustache. Just for a moment, in the light firmness of Johnny’s expert embrace, apprehension went through Cristie. Margot didn’t reply to the wave, looked at her vacantly as though she had never seen her before. Cristie’s tension relaxed, light flashed into Margot’s eyes and she called, “Try the punch, darling. It’s real witches’ brew.”
That was at about half past ten. It was on toward eleven when Cristie first noticed that neither Johnny nor Margot was anywhere in evidence. Then, a few minutes later, after a rumba with a man named Carlson, Cristie saw Euen Firth.
He was standing in the middle of the long side hall beyond the dining room. His attenuated knobby length was clad in a dark brown sack suit, he had a soft brown hat in his hand and he was staring in the direction of the side door. The door was closed.
Cristie gaped at the sight of Euen. Where had he sprung from? According to Margot he was supposed to be killing birds hundreds of miles away. Euen kept on staring at the closed side door. Thrust forward on a long thin neck his ferrety profile had a peculiar intensity to it. He didn’t look at all stupid. He looked shrewd and, somehow, under that sandily inoffensive exterior, queerly excited and upset.
As she watched, he walked to the door, jerked it open and closed it behind him. Little taps of conjecture began to sound inside Cristie’s brain. She excused herself quietly to her partner, took a quick look around the first floor. No Margot, no Johnny; she ran upstairs. Margot and Johnny weren’t there either.
Cristie picked up a black cloak with a hood. She pulled the hood down over her hair, gathered the black folds around her. Slipping unobtrusively through the small lobby behind the game room she stepped out into the black and silver night.
It was getting on toward midnight. The half hour struck before Todhunter took his place outside the west windows of the wide-flung, many-leveled farmhouse opposite the hotel on the eastern shore of the lake. The sky was thick with piled clouds, the moon a giant jack-o’-lantern, was now hidden, now visible, behind their tumbling thunderous masses.
When it went it took every vestige of light with it. All Hallow’s Eve. It was a restless night, a night suited to the day and the hour, a night on which anything could happen.
The little detective was not superstitious but the wooded hills, the lonely stretches of lake, the absence of all sound and motion except for the wind whistling drearily through the trees, were beginning to have an effect upon him. That and some sixth sense which had recorded without defining a vague threat in the behavior of all five people he had been watching carefully during the earlier part of the evening.
Clifford Somers had arrived at half past ten. Firelight seeping through the drawn shades, a laugh or two, an occasional glimpse of Steven Hazard, hadn’t reassured him any. The man was on edge and clashed as sharply against the half-hearted merriment and the attempt to draw him into it, as a stone in a piece of fruitcake.
From where he stood Todhunter commanded a view of the entire front of the house. There was a man at the gates leading to the road, another man in the meadow to the north. Todhunter stood away from the porch wall as a door midway along its length opened and closed and a man’s figure descended the steps and moved out onto the dry grass strewn with fallen leave
s. Gnarled apple trees threw tangled and distorted shadows on the faintly silvered turf. The man was Steven Hazard.
Hazard was hatless. The collar of a dark topcoat was turned up around his ears and he carried a stick under his arm. Fifty feet from the house, he paused near a clump of bayberry bushes, tucked the stick under his arm tighter and reached into the pocket of his suit.
Todhunter couldn’t be certain but he was almost sure that what Steven Hazard had taken from his pocket was a thick roll of bills. He appeared to be counting them. He returned them to his pocket and resumed his interrupted stroll.
Walking more rapidly he entered a small path that wound down the slope, rimmed the edge of the cove and struck upward into the rough hummocky ground that bordered the fringes of the long pine-clad point jutting out into the lake. Todhunter followed him as closely as possible.
There was practically no danger of his being seen. The night, the blackness in the coverts, the wind, the incessant lapping of water on shingle would have given shelter to an army of trailing detectives. The vastness of the empty hills, the stretches of marsh, the singing of the reeds, the soughing of the pines up and down, oppressed the little detective’s spirits.
A crooked pear tree, misshapen against a tuft of cloud, was a crouching dwarf, knife in hand. A blasted chestnut, two-thirds of the way out on the point, toward the top of which Hazard was moving steadily, was a gallows tree rearing itself to a sudden fling of stars. The stars vanished. The moon went too. So did Steven Hazard, momentarily.
Todhunter picked him up again. Hazard was almost at the end of the tree-clad finger of land running out into the water. The path he had been traveling was only a few feet above the water line, hugged the rocky shore. On the right, the surface of the cove, cold and dark and deep, on the left the precipitous flank of the hummock overgrown with low shrubs and weeds and tangled vines. Hazard continued to go forward. The little detective stood still and rubbed his chin. Was the fellow going to walk upon the waters? An even more sinister possibility presented itself to him. There was a savage crouch to Hazard’s shoulders, to his stride. It was quick and yet furtive. He very obviously didn’t want to be seen, just as he obviously knew every foot of the ground.
The path, a mere thread now, wound steeply among strewn boulders perched perilously on the tip of the point. Hazard turned, put his back to the water and scrambled up the side of the promontory above. It was crowned with a huge stand of tall pines, their trunks hidden by the sweep of tangled feathery branches. Hazard disappeared over the edge of the nearest summit.
The little detective crept upward in his wake. He reached a gully and paused. Confronting him, level with his eyes, was a gentle incline of slippery moss and brown, needled earth. It stretched backward roughly for some thirty feet before the trees began. Slanting moonlight fell on the great solid bank of green made by the pines and hemlocks and cedars that ran from the tip of the point toward the hidden road hundreds of yards away.
Steven Hazard had vanished again. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, Todhunter saw him. Hazard was leaning against the massive trunk of the nearest pine. Only his legs and one hand were visible. The hand fascinated the little detective. He kept his eyes fixed on it. It held the heavy blackthorn stick which Hazard had brought out of the house with him. The stick moved slowly to and fro under those sinewy clenching fingers. The wicked knobs and stubbles on its sturdy haft gleamed a little as reflected moonlight struck them.
Todhunter peered anxiously into the depths of the wood beyond Hazard’s waiting figure. Lapping of the water, soughing of the wind, louder here. Reeds rustled dryly. Was someone moving within the obscurity of that tree-clothed summit, someone who was advancing to meet the man whose grasp on the stick had tightened?
Edging forward a few inches, Todhunter tried to cleave the almost illimitable blackness under the branches with his eyes. What was hidden there? Steven Hazard had straightened. He took a step or two, stood motionless again. A twig crackled somewhere. There was a stir within those boundaries. Hazard had heard it. He dove forward. Todhunter reared himself in a flood of silvery light and suddenly the light was gone.
Todhunter was so intent on the scene going on in front of him that he didn’t hear the creak of an oarlock, the soft beaching of the boat in the catkins below. When a hand fell on his shoulder he ducked, whirling. A voice said very quietly in his ear, “McKee, Todhunter,” and the little detective relaxed—to snap back to steel wire the next moment.
Before either man could move, it happened. First the sharp snapping of dry branches some distance under the pines and then, almost simultaneously, a scream—high-pitched, thin, terrible. Overlapping it as it broke off, stopped, was the thud of a falling weight, a thud that terminated in a loud splash.
McKee was on the top of the bank and running. Todhunter followed.
XVII
Steven Hazard drew back and threw up a hand to shield his eyes from the flood of bright light that streamed out of McKee’s torch. He was standing in a small clear space some fifty yards inside the grove. Behind and above and beyond Hazard the towering pines climbed up into blackness. Hazard stared at them whitely. He didn’t speak. His stick was gone. McKee wasted no more than a glance on him. He said, “Stay where you are, Mr. Hazard. Don’t move.”
Underbrush advanced and retreated in every direction. There were paths through it. It cloaked the edge of the steep bank running down to the water of the lake thirty feet below. The Scotsman sent his torch swinging, held it steady on one spot where a clump of laurel, its leaves twisted and bent, topped the miniature cliff.
The incline bore deadly and accurate evidence of the cause of that scream. There had been a struggle there. Someone had fallen over the brink. Twigs were broken, a small evergreen was smashed flat, moss and pine needles were gouged out and sand slid in a trickle into the black water. The trickle ceased as the Inspector watched. The water was very still.
The two men scrambled down over boulders, found a foothold. Light on the water. McKee had his coat off, ready to dive at the slightest indication of a body below that inky spread. They sent their torches in wide circles, again and again and again, watched and listened, straining for the slightest stir, the slightest movement. There was neither. The surface of the lake retained its flat inertia. Whatever it held in its icy black depth remained there.
The Scotsman moved at last. If a man or a woman had gone into the lake at that point it was already too late. The struggle for life was over. The water was cold and deep and at least five minutes had elapsed since that scream. Get men, he thought. This would be a dragging job. He motioned to Todhunter and remounted the bank, taking care to keep clear of the ominous downward track.
“Well, Mr. Hazard,” the Scotsman’s voice was deceptively quiet, didn’t match his burning eyes.
Hazard stopped opening and closing his hands and thrust them into his Dockets. The night was cold. He was shivering. He said thickly, “I don’t know any more about it than you do, Inspector. I was here. Yes, I was out there near the tip of the point. I heard the scream. I ran. That’s all.”
There was something the matter with the man’s mouth. He was having trouble with it. It didn’t quite close. McKee said: “You were here. What were you doing here at this hour of the night?”
“I—“ Hazard was fighting with himself. He spaced his words, bringing them forth with immense effort. “I wanted some air, came out for a stroll.”
The Scotsman shook his head. “The truth, please, Mr. Hazard.” Todhunter whispered to McKee and the Scotsman continued: “Of course we can search you, but it will be simpler if you’ll give us an assist. What have you got in the right-hand pocket of your suit?”
There was nothing else for Hazard to do. He produced the roll of bills. Todhunter held a torch while McKee counted. He finished, replaced the rubber band. “Always carry a thousand dollars around with you on your person?”
Hazard remained silent. McKee knew what the silence covered. A man with a tho
usand dollars in his pocket at a lonely spot at midnight; Hazard had received a telegram, a telegram that had shaken him, late that afternoon. There was only one conclusion possible. Hazard had had a rendezvous here, a rendezvous that had apparently ended with a scream and a heavy splash.
Whatever they were going to find in the depths of the lake below, there was no possible doubt that blackmail had cropped up again, the blackmail that had smeared itself over the case from the very beginning. First Cliff Somers, now Steven Hazard. And the maid Eva Prentice was missing and so was her boy friend, Mr. Loomis. And so too was the ambiguous Mrs. Thompson to whom Margot St. Vrain had paid a hurried and urgent visit just before Mrs. Thompson lit out.
Get on with it, McKee said to himself. A distant echo of voices came drifting through the menacing blackness of the crowding tree trunks and the crouching underbrush. He said curtly, “Come along, Mr. Hazard,” and turned in the direction of the voices.
A twisting path carpeted with the slippery brown needles of uncounted seasons wound in and out through the tangled grove. It terminated in another cleared space some four or five hundred yards to the east. Ahead was the narrow dirt road that circled the lake, and to the left beyond the tree-strewn slopes, the lights of the Hazard farmhouse. Two men were standing still in the road, near the gates to the house, arms gesticulating, voices raised.
As McKee and Todhunter, with Hazard in tow, approached, the moon slid out from behind a spindrift of tumbled cloud. One of the men was Nielson, of McKee’s squad. The other man was Pat Somers.
From his post by the white gates, Nielson had heard the distant scream. He had started around the curve to find Pat Somers striding hastily back along the road toward the house from the direction of the point. Nielson said as the Inspector paused beside him: