by Helen Reilly
“Mr. Somers wouldn’t tell me where he was coming from. He just told me to get out of the way.” McKee turned to Pat Somers. Pat was lighting a cigarette. His big face was calm in the shadow of his soft black hat. He tossed the match to the dirt of the road.
“Since when, McKee, is it a crime to take a breather and stretch your legs before going to bed?”
The Scotsman’s smile was a sketched grimace. He murmured, “Odd, how many of you suddenly conceived an affection for the great outdoors.” His manner was brusque. He wanted the cove beaten. He wanted whatever had fallen into the lake recovered.
Pat Somers and Steven Hazard were looking at each other. Each was asking himself an unspoken question. Steven Hazard had been on the spot or near it. Was there someone there before, someone who faded at their own approach?
McKee said, “Exactly where were you when you heard the scream, Mr. Somers?”
Pat Somers said, “I was up the road around that turn.” His tone was clipped, final. His gaze supported the Scotsman’s without the slightest wavering. He had no intention of going any further. Right around that curve commanded the exit from the point. Pat Somers was a quick man on his feet. He could have been there. The Scotsman swung curtly, led the way toward the house.
“I want to talk to you some more inside,” he said.
As they neared the gray clapboarded walls glimmering in transfused moonlight, the number of fresh-air fiends was augmented. This time it was by a woman. Detective Johnson, who had been patrolling the lake side of the farmhouse, had her in tow under trees over a small side porch. The woman was Mary Dodd.
Johnson said, “I heard that holler, Inspector. I took it on the run. When I got into the bushes along the shore that leads out to that point, I find this lady streaking like lightning for that pine wood. She didn’t want to come back with me.”
McKee’s brows rose. Mary Dodd was tall and straight and very pale in a long, dark, hooded cape. The hood was down. Her head was bare. Her stockingless feet were in slippers and the folds of a night-dress showed under the cloak. She said with a concealed thread of terror in her controlled voice: “Steven, Inspector, what was it? Who screamed? What happened?”
Steven Hazard simply shook his head. Mary Dodd looked at the Scotsman. McKee said in a somber tone, “We don’t know yet, Miss Dodd. Mind telling me how you chanced to get out here?”
Mary Dodd met his glance straightly. Her eyes were dark pools, her lips were shaking, “I—that scream—it was terrible. I had just gotten out of bed to get a drink of water when I heard it. I was half asleep. It came from the direction of the point. I threw on a wrap and ran out. And then this man caught up with me. Was anybody, did anything—?” There was a queer dread in her repeated and unfinished inquiry.
It was Pat who answered. He said reassuringly, “Don’t worry, Mary, probably a pair of lovers were seeking a little seclusion. Steven must have blundered in on them and the girl got hysterical.”
It didn’t go down. Not with any of them. That shriek, high-pitched, terrified, chopped off in the middle, was no plaint from the lovelorn. It was the cry of a person in mortal danger. The Scotsman’s long lined face was tired as he entered the house with the others.
They went in by way of a side porch. A short corridor leafed with doors bisected the left wing. One of the doors opened. Kit Blaketon looked out at them, her red hair a tousled halo against the light of the oil lamp on a bureau behind her. She was fully clothed, wore a green sweater and a green wool skirt and saddle oxfords. Her eyes were narrow and intense in a pointed bleak face as she said coolly:
“What’s all the shooting for? Oh! It’s you again, Inspector.”
The match she held to her cigarette was steady.
McKee bowed. He asked her dryly to tell him where she had been for the last twenty or twenty-five minutes. In front of him Mary Dodd pressed a shoulder tightly against flowered wallpaper. Pat Somers cleared his throat. Kit Blaketon said, drawing smoke deep into her lungs and exhaling it in long streams through her nostrils: “I was in the living room, up until a few moments ago. Then I came in here,” she gestured toward the bedroom, “to get a fresh pack of cigarettes.” She showed it.
“Anyone with you in the living room, Miss Blaketon?”
“No,” said the girl. “Mary had gone to bed and the others were somewhere else. I was alone, toasting some marshmallows at the fire. I felt hungry.”
She said she hadn’t heard any scream, expressed neither curiosity nor surprise at the information that there had been one.
Statements for the record, the Scotsman reflected. Well, he had them for what they were worth. Steven Hazard, Pat Somers, Mary Dodd and Kit Blaketon were innocent of any hand in that struggle on the point, according to them. He had already taken in the endless doors that opened out into the grounds from practically every room of the rambling old farmhouse. A good many of the windows were open too. Mary Dodd had heard that scream. Why not her niece?
Cliff Somers was the only one not yet interviewed. They found the Assemblyman sprawled in a deep chair in front of a huge fire of flaming logs in the low-ceilinged living room, at the end of several turns in the narrow corridor. At their entrance he sat up with a start that had a flavor of the theatrical about it. He looked first at his brother, then at Kit Blaketon, and then at McKee. The Scotsman put the same question to Cliff Somers that he had put to the red-haired girl. The answer was astonishing.
Cliff Somers said, “I did hear something, Inspector, I figured it might be a hoot owl. I didn’t give it much thought. As to where I was, I was right here in this living room where I’ve been practically all evening since I got here at around ten-thirty.”
“Alone?” McKee asked genially.
“Yes. Alone,” Cliff Somers answered firmly and pulled up short.
He got it, but he got it too late, the small almost inaudible gasp than ran through the huddle of people behind McKee like a flame through corn stalks. Either Cliff Somers or Kit Blaketon was lying. They couldn’t both have been alone in the living room.
McKee went over the ground in detail. He took them separately and together. He measured distances and time. He consulted with the detective who had been watching the house. He studied the layout of the various rooms. At the end of two hours of intensive labor, he arrived at the conclusion that not only Cliff Somers or Kit Blaketon or both were lying, but that this might be true of the others, Mary Dodd, Steven and Pat Somers. Any one of those five people could have been out near the end of that point and could have been the agent back of that scream and that splash. They were not the only possibilities. Other angles being checked; no proof of any sort, about anything, yet.
Arrangements were being made for the dragging of the waters in the vicinity of the point, the proper implements were being assembled. The farmhouse was presumably asleep and McKee was back of the point of land when the corps of detectives searching the ground found it. Not the sinister secret that the lake might hold, but something almost equally as sinister.
Close to the spot where the broken twigs and smashed branches ran down into the water, one of his men fished the compact out from under a trampled bush. It was of gold, delicate, fragile and valuable. There were intertwined initials on the lid. The initials were “S. H “
“S” for Sara and “H” for Hazard. Light was coming up in the east. McKee stood motionless under the dark trees and stared at the golden toy for a long time.
XVIII
It was half past ten on the morning following the Halloween dance. Cristie’s heart took a sickening thump when the door opened in response to Margot’s “Come in” and the towering lean Inspector entered the sitting room on the second floor of the Kokino Inn.
Cristie was seated in an armchair beside the breakfast table that had just been wheeled in. Margot sat opposite. The Inspector directed himself to Margot. He said that there had been an accident on the other side of the lake the previous evening and he wanted to ask a few questions concerning their own whereabouts
at the time. Cristie held her breath.
Margot dropped her allotted lump of sugar into her coffee and looked at the tall man leaning lightly against a window frame. “Go ahead, Inspector.” Her hazel eyes, above square hands occupied with the breakfast tray, were direct.
McKee said, “It will save time if I tell you what we already know, Miss St. Vrain. When I arrived at Kokino last night I was informed that you and Mr. St. Vrain had slipped away from the dance downstairs and couldn’t be located. In a tour of the grounds I noticed that there were a couple of rowboats missing from the collection at the dock. I took a canoe and went out on the lake. I didn’t happen to run into you but you were out rowing, weren’t you? You returned, I believe, shortly after midnight.”
So that was where Margot and Johnny had gone. Cristie crumbled a piece of toast between her fingers and then remembered to eat a fragment of it. The crunch of the crust between her white teeth was broken by Margot’s forthright, “You’re quite right, Inspector. My cousin and I did go out on the lake.” “Why?” The tall man in the loose gray flannels was as incisive as Margot, consuming her coddled eggs and bacon with methodical industry.
Margot said coolly, her brows raised, “I can’t see precisely how or why my movements should be of interest to a member of the New York police force...However, I went out to meet Pat Somers. I’ll tell you something else, Inspector, while we’re on the subject. That was the purpose for which I came up here to Kokino. Yesterday in the city I called Pat and told him I wanted to see him. I respect Pat Somers’ judgment and he knows the ropes. To be quite frank with you, Inspector, I’m becoming a little annoyed at being trailed by detectives wherever I go and by the implication that I had anything to do with the death of Sara Hazard. I’d been up here before; I didn’t want to go to the Hazard place so when Pat suggested that we meet for a chat on the road below the farmhouse, I agreed.”
Cristie sipped her coffee. She was afraid of the man lounging easily in the stiff chair, an unlighted cigarette between his fingers, his eyes a blank, his sardonic face expressionless. He would question everyone. Was Margot telling the truth? Would Pat Somers corroborate her story? Was that what she really had gone out for? Turning away so that her face was averted from the Scotsman’s wandering gaze, Cristie listened to Margot saying categorically that the interview with Pat had not taken place, that she and her cousin, Johnny, had never reached the opposite shore, that they had heard a cry and seen lights and people, had guessed that something was wrong and had returned forthwith to the hotel where they had gone to bed.
“What did happen, Inspector?” Margot asked.
Cristie was conscious of her own inner stiffening.
She kept her eyes fastened determinedly on the chintz of the window drapes where forget-me-nots intertwined themselves with what looked like incipient cauliflowers.
McKee waved Margot’s brisk inquiry aside, struck off at a tangent that brought the huddled girl in the blue sweater and blue pleated skirt back sharply into that room above the lake.
He said, “You seem to have rather a leaning for private meetings with people at night, Miss St. Vrain. I believe you paid a visit to a Mrs. Thompson on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx last Sunday evening.”
Margot laughed but her color changed. The freckles stood out on her skin. “Oh, that,” she said pouring herself fresh coffee. “That’s quite simple. Mrs. Thompson’s the wife of an old tuba player I used to know. She rang me up. She was in low water financially and wanted to join her husband somewhere in the West, wanted a small loan.”
“I see,” the Inspector answered.
Watching him covertly, Cristie was quite sure that he saw more, much more than his words implied. Coldness seeped through her and with it a sharp jab of fear. Was Margot, along with herself and Steven and the others, caught up in the tangle of Sara, the woman who wouldn’t stay dead?
Johnny came in while Margot was repeating that they hadn’t touched land, didn’t get out of the boat after they left the hotel. Johnny was fresh and alert in a dressing gown and slippers, his hair damp from a shower. He threw Cristie a warm smile, took a coffee cup from Margot and raised his brows at the Inspector.
“That’s right,” he said, reaching for a roll, “I ferried Margot out on the lake and part way across but we didn’t touch land. That rumpus broke out over there and we pulled stakes.”
Cristie felt the menace in the Scotsman’s casual, “You’re sure, both of you, that you didn’t beach the boat anywhere on the opposite shore?” He placed the faintest possible emphasis on the “anywhere.”
When Margot and Johnny both said no with firmness he added ruminatively, “Queer, we’ll have to look for another man and woman then, because a man and a woman in a rowboat did land on that point over there some time last night. The marks of their arrival are quite plain.”
Cristie repressed a troubled frown. In spite of Margot’s and Johnny’s reiterated assertions that they hadn’t touched shore, Cristie was convinced that they had. Why were they lying? November sunlight streamed gaudily through the wide windows. It couldn’t dissipate the fog banks of mounting bewilderment and the ever-increasing dread folding themselves around her, drawing closer in.
The door opened and Euen Firth’s stork neck protruded around it, followed by his long gangling body clad in a rakish sports costume. He goggled at the Inspector, his large prominent eyes startled and inquiring. Margot introduced McKee and Euen said, “Oh. You’re the Inspector fellow, are you, the one who’s investigating Mrs. Hazard’s death?”
McKee pleaded guilty and began putting Euen through his paces. Cristie listened intently. She had thought about Euen a good deal since she had had that glimpse of him in the hall of the Inn last night. Euen agreed effusively with everything the Scotsman produced. Yes, he had taken Mrs. Hazard home on the night she was killed in her car. Sure he had. He was a bit tight but he remembered that clearly, and how shocked he was to read of her death, the next day. He remembered seeing another woman who looked kind of like her come out of the apartment on Franklin Place. That was right. Come to think of it he had called to the woman. She walked on and he realized his mistake. No, he didn’t know the woman was Mrs. Hazard’s maid.
Certainly he had been away on a hunting trip.
What was he doing up here? Margot was here, wasn’t she, and that was a good enough reason for him to be any place. The people in the penthouse had told him that she was at Kokino. He reached the hotel at around eleven the night before, in time to see Margot and Johnny strolling down toward the water. He tried to catch them. When he didn’t, he took a boat and headed in the direction he thought they had taken. But he got lost on the briny deep, you know. Bit of a muddle in the dark. Got back safe though, so it didn’t matter. He had emphatically not landed on the opposite shore, didn’t know anything about anything happening there and was damnably hungry. If the Inspector didn’t mind—he lifted the lid of a covered dish, peered under it and rang the bell.
Cristie watched Euen straighten a dazzling tie. His rambling tale didn’t jibe with the concentration in his attitude the previous evening when he had taken a sudden and hasty departure from the Inn. He hadn’t been stupid or wandering or vacuous then. He had been alert and clear-headed, a shrewd calculating man. Was that silly ass exterior a pose, a cover for something else?
At the end of another five minutes, to her unspeakable relief, the Inspector rose and reached for his soft gray hat. She had escaped; he wasn’t going after her.
The door closed behind him. She drew a long sigh and agreed to play a round of golf with Johnny after lunch.
Twenty minutes later the blow fell. She was alone in her own room, changing to crepe-soled shoes and a plaid sports jacket when the Scotsman followed a soft knock into the bedroom and stood looking at her. Her recoil was involuntary. He said, smiling down at her, and his tone had a blandness which increased her inward shaking,
“Don’t be frightened, Miss Lansing. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Or is there?”
She couldn’t get away from his eyes. They were like rivets clamping her mind to his, so that he could roam around freely and examine and handle everything she kept hidden in secret corners, away from the light. She made herself tight and hard and unyielding. She admitted having left the hotel in the wake of Margot and Johnny and Euen the previous night, admitted having taken Euen’s car and having driven around the lake toward the Hazard farmhouse. She denied having heard the scream. She denied having met anyone. She said that when she was almost at the Hazard house she had changed her mind and had turned around and driven back to the hotel, to find that Euen and Johnny and Margot had returned.
“Why,” McKee asked, “did you go over to the Hazard house in the first place, Miss Lansing?”
Cristie pressed slim shoulders against the wall behind her. It came out before she could stop it. “Because I was afraid...”
The Inspector was scrutinizing her with interest. “Afraid, Miss Lansing?” he said gently. “Afraid of what?”
Cristie strove frantically to retrieve her blunder. She couldn’t tell him the real reason, the deepest reason of all. But there were others. She turned to the dressing table, ran a comb through her hair. Facing him again, powder puff in hand, she told him about the intruder with a key who had entered Margot’s apartment when she was alone there two weeks before.
The Scotsman was more than interested in this piece of information. It appeared to be new to him and he questioned her exhaustively. Relief flooded through Cristie. If she could only keep him away from that other, that first night, the night of Margot’s party. She answered him as fully as she could but there was little to describe. The hall was dark. Whoever was in the living room of the penthouse that night hadn’t answered her call. The living room lights had been switched off and the front door had opened and closed. That was all. She had heard a vague sound she couldn’t define. The galloping of little horses was the nearest she could get to it. She gave that to McKee with a faint smile.