Death in the Back Seat

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “You made a lot of noise,” I said nervously. “Someone might be inside and have a perfect right there. We don’t know Mrs. Coatesnash didn’t lend her keys.”

  “Silas would have known about it if she had. I wish I had a ladder. I would like a closer look at the upper windows.”

  Fortunately—or so I felt—our equipment did not include a ladder. Unsatisfied, Jack inched along the lawn searching vainly for possible marks of a ladder used by someone else. Then, when I was reaching a pitch of nerves and impatience, he proposed to give the front grounds and entrances a similar examination.

  By this time the whole expedition had begun to seem both impertinent and pointless. I protested. I wanted to go home. I said so. We went around to the front of the house. Thick boards covered the two front doors; shutters cloaked the first floor windows. Nothing suggested illegal tampering. Leaves choked the walks and porches, maple seed wings littered the steps. Relieved by non-success, I concluded that the mysterious light had a natural, innocent—if elusive—answer.

  Past an elaborate rock garden an untidy graveled path twisted to the main road which bent around the hill to join our own road. In our vocabulary this route was termed “the long way home.” I started toward the gates. Disappointed, Jack turned to follow. His flashlight made a great arc as it traversed the steep slope of the garden.

  I gasped and stopped on the path. Beside me Jack stood rigid. In the daytime we would have missed what we now saw clearly—an oblong patch of earth in the garden, black and freshly dug. A patch vivid in the flashlight’s glare, standing forth from the intense surrounding darkness, a patch of queer shape and size—about four feet in width and six feet in length. Although the earth had been skillfully roughened, it resembled unmistakably a level grave.

  An owl shrieked near by. Reuben bristled and I felt my hair rise on end. Jack dropped his flashlight. He sheepishly picked it up, scrambled over the rocks, knelt and thrust out his hand. His whisper was piercing.

  “The ground is soft. Something is buried here.” He swiftly returned to me. “You stay here with Reuben. I’ll need a spade.”

  I clutched at him hysterically. “What are you going to do?”

  “I mean to find out what’s buried there.”

  An argument ensued, incoherent, bitter, touched with the horror of the place and situation. Convinced that the light, the cunningly hidden grave, the Coatesnash house impinged upon the murder of Hiram Darnley, Jack was fanatically determined to complete his evening’s work. He should, of course, have delegated further investigation to the police; he flatly declined. He believed they would disregard any evidence which tended to incriminate Mrs. Coatesnash, unless the evidence were final and conclusive. In the end, his vehemence conquered me—though there was one thing I refused to do. I would not remain alone in the rock garden.

  For a curious reason, Reuben stayed. As we turned to go, his head went up, he sniffed the air, barked and bolted into the leafless laurel bushes. I felt a thrill of icy fear.

  “What’s there?”

  Jack was impatient. “A woodchuck probably. Come on.”

  “Reuben,” I called. “Reuben.”

  “Let him catch his woodchuck. Come, Lola, let’s get this done.”

  With an odd reluctance, which I laid to the happenings of the evening, I obeyed.

  I do not like to think about the return trip to the cottage—the stumbling along the road, the protracted hunt for a spade after our arrival, the darkness and the quiet. Once or twice I fancied I heard the distant barking of a dog. Five minutes later when we hurriedly retraced our steps through the pasture, I was sure of it.

  “It’s Reuben, Jack.”

  “He’s got the woodchuck.”

  “It doesn’t sound like that.”

  As I spoke the barking rose to frenzy, became a yelp of anguish, subsided to a moan—to nothingness. Jack broke into a run. Half a minute carried him past the Lodge. He shot through the grape arbor, circled Hilltop House to the right, disappeared.

  Reuben lay in the rock garden. Kicked into unconsciousness, bloody and pathetic, the dog sprawled beside a wide, shallow, gaping hole. The excavation revealed every sign of haste. Clods and mounds of dirt were scattered in four directions; swift, deep shovel bites were visible. Also visible were smeared footprints.

  Kneeling beside the dog, Jack looked up dully. “Rotten luck beat us, Lola. I ran around the house the wrong way.”

  In explanation he turned his flashlight upon the gaping hole in the garden. From the excavation, leading across the grass, blurred marks showed where something long and heavy had been dragged away. These marks led directly to the left and toward the house, vanishing in the gloom of the trees. If, when Jack dashed around the house, he had happened to run to the left, he would have solved our mystery then and there. But he made the wrong choice. He ran to the right, and thus missed a dark figure scurrying along the opposite side of the mansion, hauling a heavy burden.

  With Reuben wrapped in my coat, we started again for home. The marks on the brittle grass stopped abruptly at the cellar door. The door was closed. Jack tried the knob. His fingers touched a key in the lock.

  Immediately, unhesitatingly he turned the key and entered the cellar of the Coatesnash house. He collided with an ashcan, pushed past, strode to the furnace, pried it open, peered inside. A film of ancient ashes rose chokingly. His instant hunch had failed. There was nothing there.

  Leaving the injured dog near the door, I joined him. He put his mouth to my ear.

  “Let’s go upstairs.”

  A desperate situation requires desperate remedies, and the situation, I felt, was desperate. It appeared certain that whatever had been buried in the garden was hidden within the house, if we were to search, it must be tonight. Tomorrow would be too late.

  Such logic sustained me very little as we began our surreptitious tour. My tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, and if ever a person felt criminal, I did. We gained the first floor, paused at the entrance of the cavernous drawing-room, where long ago we had sat at tea. Luella Coatesnash’s personality lingered like a vapor there. I seemed to hear the tapping of her cane, to smell again her cloying lavender scent, to see the diamonds on her hands and the splitting taffeta of her gown.

  A drapery rustled; something pattered across the floor. A mouse or a rat probably, but I gasped and grabbed at Jack. The darkness filled itself with shapes and forms. Behind every shrouded piece of furniture, beyond every unseen corner, lurked a crouching, waiting figure. I felt certain we were not alone in the house. The key in the basement lock—might it have been left to lure us in? Had we walked into a trap?

  Jack pulled me on. He paused at the flight of stairs which climbed to the upper floors. His quick, excited breath stirred my hair.

  “We may find what we’re hunting in the third-floor room.”

  Setting my teeth, I started up the stairs. The journey was less difficult than I anticipated. The curving banister was reassuringly solid, the carpets were thick. In absolute silence we moved upward. We easily located the room with the unshuttered window. At the corridor end, a door stood ajar.

  We crossed the threshold. Jack snapped on his flash and I looked around a cheerless storeroom. Dusty trunks, bags, boxes, broken furniture jammed the place. Blinking, I surveyed the decidedly unmysterious surroundings and turned to speak. With a report that resounded throughout the house, the door behind banged shut and something bounced on the floor. Severely shocked, I didn’t realize what had happened.

  “Lola!”

  “It’s all right. I bumped the door.”

  “The knob’s come off.”

  “It’s here on the floor.”

  I picked up the china knob and handed it to Jack. He stepped to the door. A moment passed. I said nervously, “Well, why don’t you put it back?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t.” Jack’s voice was queer. “The outside knob and the shank fell through on the other side. You’ve locked us in.

  Under other ci
rcumstances the immediate shift in attitudes might have had a humorous side. Thoroughly alarmed by the mishap, Jack lost his burning interest in the Coatesnash house and wanted only to get us out of it. As for me—temporarily, anyhow—I was too apologetic to be frightened.

  Jack hammered at the door. It was two inches thick and fabricated of solid oak. It didn’t budge beneath his stoutest efforts. Nothing he tried would serve in place of the missing knob and shank. He tried to fit into the hole in the door his finger, his fountain pen, his palette knife. The door remained firmly closed. The single window offered the only other egress from the room. After minutes of frantic, futile labor, Jack pushed up the window and poked his head into the raw spring night. He doubtfully examined the overhanging gutter.

  “Do you think you can make it to the roof, Lola?”

  I looked out and up, and firmly declined to try.

  “If I went first and pulled you up…”

  “I prefer staying here.”

  Jack then proposed that he ascend to the roof, climb down by the grape arbor in the rear and return through the house for me. Once he got hold of the shank and knob which maddeningly lay in the hall he could easily open the door for me. It was a solution I didn’t like, but I hardly dared object.

  With a sinking heart I saw Jack go out the window. Half standing, half sitting, he attempted to draw himself to the roof. He is a strong and acrobatic man, but the gutter was old and rusty. A piece tore away, ne grasped air, and for one dreadful moment I thought he would plunge to the ground below. I insisted that he abandon the effort. He refused. He tried again with me clinging desperately to his knees, wondering how long I could support his weight if he should slip. This time the gutter held, and in some miraculous fashion he got to the roof. Leaning over the edge, he whispered a few final encouraging words and vanished.

  For a while I remained beside the window, too terrified to move. Jack had left me the flashlight and the wrench. A monkey wrench is a singularly inadequate weapon. I laid it down. Minutes slowly passed, and gradually I felt a little better. If anyone were in the house, surely the loud report of the door would have brought that person to the scene. No one came.

  I changed my cramped position, began to study the confusion of objects in the storeroom, shifting the flash from a box piled high with shoes to a box filled with hardware—old electric fixtures, locks, bits of plumbing, and the like—from a battered wardrobe trunk to a sagging, springless couch.

  The room was bitterly cold. I tiptoed to the couch, pulled its faded coverlet across my knees. Fumbling in my coat I pulled out a squashed pack and lighted a cigarette. I flipped the match to the floor. As I bent to extinguish it, my hand touched leather. Tucked underneath the couch were two traveling bags, brand new and thick with dust. Both were initialed L.T.

  How long I sat staring at the bags I cannot say. L.T must stand for Laura Twining. But what were her bags doing here? Why hadn’t she taken them to Europe? The very questions were disquieting.

  I pulled out the bags, snapped the locks. My perplexity and uneasiness intensified. Both bags were packed, just as Laura Twining would have packed them. Stout shoes wrapped in tissue paper, cotton stockings wound in careful balls, a crepe kimono folded across a hanger. The bags contained every garment I had seen the spinster wear; the bottle-green foulard so peculiarly unbecoming, the black poplin used for every day, the darned housedresses, the shapeless raccoon coat, the purple velvet hat. Laura Twining had planned to take the bags. A waterproof toilet case provided with fresh toothpaste, a tin of talcum, a bar of jacketed soap, insisted that she had. Why not, then? I recalled the orderly workings of her mind. That she could have forgotten her luggage seemed beyond belief.

  Why should the bags be in the storeroom here hidden beneath a couch? I continued the exploration, caught my breath. In the second bag I came upon three things. I found the dress Laura had intended to travel in—the gray poplin trimmed in lace, pressed and ready to wear, and yet not worn. In the pocket I found a letter of credit, pathetically small, and an unused passport. Laura’s passport. The photograph smiled timidly, apologetically as Laura herself had smiled when she asked me if I thought the poplin dress was suitable for shipboard.

  I felt a sickening dismay. A conviction long avoided rushed inescapably upon me. Laura Twining had never sailed to France. If not to France, where had she gone? In awful fascination my mind returned to the rock garden and to the excavation there. Sitting in the storeroom, her pitiful possessions spread before me, I felt quite certain that never again would Jack and I be annoyed by friendly little calls from Luella Coatesnash’s dull companion.

  I began automatically to repack the bags. I stopped suddenly. Someone was moving in the hall outside. I tried to pull myself together. It must be Jack, come back into the house for me. But I hadn’t thought he would be so soon. I went to the door.

  “Jack,” I whispered. “Jack.”

  There was no answer. The footsteps ceased, and all was quiet. Someone lurked beyond the door, motionless, listening, waiting for me further to betray myself.

  I crouched against the panel. I heard from the other side the flare of a match, a rattle along the floor, and then, most terrible of all, I heard the sound of the steel shank as it was forced through the hole in the door. Slowly the door began to open. I resisted frantically. Inch by inch the steady, insistent pressure forced me back. The noiseless, terrible contest continued. My strength and will gave way. The door opened wide. I was trapped in the corner, pressed against the wall.

  Footsteps, regular, unhurried, came into the storeroom, crossed to the couch. The thick darkness kept its secret well. I could see nothing. The couch coverlet rustled; leather scraped on wood. A pause, long and ominous. Then the unhurried footsteps returned to the door, again paused. I prepared for the end. Whoever had entered the room knew that I, or that some person, was also there. I opened my mouth to scream, made no sound.

  The door began to close, slowly and deliberately as it had opened. Fantastically, in the darkness, I heard a low soft chuckle. The door shut smartly; the shank was swiftly withdrawn, and was dropped to the floor on the other side. I heard it fall.

  Three minutes that were like hours dragged by. Certain my visitor would not return, I tottered to the couch, found the flashlight. Laura Twining’s bags were gone. I was alone and imprisoned once more.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Splinter of Bone

  Gravel pattered at the window-pane behind me. A sharp, small noise like the rattle of broken beads. I tottered to the window. Jack stood on the ground below. His coat was torn, his cheek was bleeding, but to me he looked very nearly perfect. Then to my consternation he called in loud and cheerful tones:

  “I’m alive and whole. I had a devil of a time getting down that arbor, and…”

  I leaned out into the night. “For heaven’s sake be quiet. Something dreadful’s happened.”

  I heard him gasp, but he asked no questions. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  A little later his footfall sounded in the corridor beyond the storeroom. Once more the steel shank slipped through the door, once more the knob was turned, and the door was opened. This time, though, I felt the blessed clasp of Jack’s arms, the warmth of his kiss on my lips. I tried incoherently to talk and I know that I wept from sheer relief. Clinging together, we started through the pitch-black silent house toward the lower floor. I recall little of that swift and noiseless journey, but as we started down the cellar stairs I did become vaguely aware of the change in temperature. The previous bitter chill had vanished; the basement dampness stirred with a feeble, humid warmth. A strange odor assailed the nostrils, an odor misty and unsubstantial, yet faintly acrid, like rubber drying in the sun. Then, suddenly, from the darkness came a whimpering moan.

  “What was that?”

  Jack’s arm tightened at my waist. “It must be Reuben. Poor little devil, I’d forgotten we left him here. Come, Lola.”

  I sensed the strain and urgency in his voice, th
e speed with which he hurried me outside. But I was glad enough to go. Jack returned for Reuben, and shortly afterward was at my side.

  We ran most of the way to the cottage, stumbling along in the dark, Jack with Reuben nestled under his coat. Under the cheerful light of the living-room lamps it became evident that Reuben was less seriously injured than we had thought. But the little dog was bruised and bloody, and my rage at his condition was a tonic to my nerves. While Jack busied himself with iodine and bandages, and I grew angrier every minute and less afraid, I got my story fully told.

  I can remember now Jack’s whitening face, the look in his eyes, how he rested his cheek against mine, how he said: “Maybe you’re a bum housekeeper, love of my life, maybe you don’t sew the buttons on my shirts, but you do have your points. Go on, weep on my shoulder. Collapse! You’re entitled, to a week of prostration. You’ve earned it.”

  That made me laugh. But Jack’s kiss wasn’t a joke. We had a moment of our own, before I said honestly, “The truth is, I was scared stiff. So scared that I haven’t the remotest notion who the man in the storeroom was, what he looked like or anything else.”

  “I think,” said Jack, “I know what he looks like. And both of us know why he ran such a desperate risk to get those bags.” Jack was silent for a long time. “You must have noticed how warm it was on our second trip through the cellar. And that curious odor. While we were trapped in the storeroom, Lola, something was being burned downstairs. Burned in a hot quick fire. I examined the furnace when I went back for Reuben. It was still warm. I found this in the ashes.”

  From his pocket Jack removed a tiny, charred object. It was a splinter of bone, very narrow, about three inches long—a fragment broken from a larger section. We stared at each other. Our eyes asked questions with implications almost too terrible to put into words.

  Jack said, “You’re certain you saw Laura’s passport?”

  “Positive.” Suddenly I found myself near tears.