At that moment a shot was fired down the stair well. An invisible mirror broke with a tinkle of glass. A second bullet whizzed by and plaster showered upon us. The kidnapper stood at the head of the stairs, and considering the total darkness his aim was excellent. I screamed. Jack knocked me to the floor, and I slid five steps to the second landing. A third shot was fired, this time from Jack’s gun. He vaulted up the stairs.
Abruptly the shooting stopped. Overhead, on the third floor, I heard the impact of two bodies, a savage yell, then the confused, muffled sounds of close-in fighting. A gun angled through the air and hit in the foyer. Whether Jack’s gun or the killer’s gun, I had no way of knowing.
The smoke was thicker; it was pouring down the stair well and far off and above me, someone—a woman—was shrieking. Muffled, hideous, horror-stricken shrieks. I crawled to my feet and staggered toward the third floor, only to be knocked down again as Jack and his murderous adversary crashed past me to the second landing.
Coughing, weaving, I clung to the third-floor balustrade. I was conscious of brilliant, dancing light some time before I identified the source of it. A bonfire—wastepaper, rags and the like—blazed in the open hall at the foot of the ladder which led to the attic. The fire was small, but the ladder had started to char. Clouds of stifling smoke beat against the locked trap door from behind which came those hideous screams.
Tears streaming from my eyes, I tore up the hallway carpet and choked out the fire. The gesture was purely automatic. I neither saw nor felt my blistered hands.
My next move was similarly automatic. A flashlight which had fallen during the previous melee lay upon the scorched floor, throwing a beam of light across my feet. I snatched it, and ran to the second-floor landing. The fight still raged there—two men, struggling fiercely, locked in desperate embrace. I made out Jack’s blond head, and brought the flashlight—my only weapon—down upon the other darker head. The dark head sagged. But Jack hadn’t seen me. The unexpected flank attack caused him to release his hold. His victim slipped his grasp and rolled down the stairs. Jack shouted:
“Duck, Lola. He’s got the gun.”
He had the gun, indeed.
A second later he used it—upon himself. A single shot, followed by a hiccoughing sigh, followed then by silence. Our triple murderer was dead before we reached him.
“Hand me the flashlight, Lola,” Jack said.
With a faint surprise I realized that I still held the flashlight. I gave it over. Jack turned the narrow finger of light upon the dead man, and I looked into Lester Harkway’s face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Homeward Bound
The rest, to coin a phrase, is history.
Standish gives us credit for the solution of the mystery, and personally I feel that we deserve it even though I must confess that I didn’t anticipate the astounding denouement. Until the moment when I looked into Lester Harkway’s still and strangely peaceful face, it had never once occurred to me that he might be our killer. The signs were there to read—his presence on the Post Road the night we delivered Hiram Darnley from New Haven, his interest in the “burglary” of the cellar, his professed anxiety and subtle, insistent suggestion that we abandon the cottage, even the strange way he had eyed that coal which had been dumped squarely upon the spot where, as he knew, Franklyn Elliott had buried the second ransom money.
The gun which he lent to Jack as a “protective” measure was a final bit of insolence. That gun was loaded with blanks, as Jack would have discovered, had he examined it carefully. At every turn Harkway took advantage of our trusting credulity.
In a sense, even now, I feel we were hardly to blame for the many things we didn’t see. As Standish said later on. “A conspiracy is the hardest crime in the world to uncover.” He smiled soberly and added, “Also it is the most difficult crime to maintain.”
To this our own experience testifies.
The conspiracy to kidnap Luella Coatesnash had hardly been set into motion by our three plotters—Silas, Laura, and Harkway—before it fell to pieces. It fell to pieces when Lester Harkway—at the cost of one murder—attempted to cut out his confederates and seize for himself the $108,000 which Hiram Darnley carried in our car. Unfortunately for him, the double-crosser got possession of the wrong bag.
I sometimes try to visualize that moment when Harkway opened the bag, bought so dearly, and saw its worthless contents. He had risked everything and come off with another man’s laundry. I cannot visualize and will never understand his cool and ruthless nerve. By prearranged plan—or so we believe—the policeman followed our car from New Haven, watching the passenger who rode upright and defenseless in the rumble seat. Hiram Darnley was bound for our cottage, where Silas awaited him, prepared to take over the ransom money. But that meant a three-way split--and a three-way split was something which Lester Harkway had decided to prevent.
He saw his chance when Jack began to speed the car. He stopped us, engaged in the three-cornered dispute, and then, immediately we got under way again, he shot Darnley and seized the bag in the seat beside him. It was a terrible gamble, but it worked. Our windows were closed, and the sound of our motor combined with the pop-pop of the policeman’s motorcycle prevented our hearing the shot. We drove into Crockford with a dead man as our passenger.
Even then we might have guessed. But, on Main Street, Blair picked up the exploded automatic shell which fixed the murder in Crockford and removed from our minds any suspicion of the true facts. The presence of that shell when examined closely, and Standish did examine it closely, proved relatively simple. After the discovery of his hideous blunder, after he had discarded the worthless bag, Harkway returned to the spot where the murder had occurred and recovered the shell. When Standish telephoned for him, he carried the tell-tale bit of metal into the village, and casually dropped it for Blair to find.
Lest this recapitulation sound too sure, I hasten to add that we have positive evidence on the point. In the first place, markings on the shell matched precisely markings on other shells fired from Harkway’s service gun. This use of the service gun is curious in itself and another instance of Harkway’s almost fanatic indifference to his own safety, for Standish informs me that police officials must report the disposition of every bullet fired. Just what sort of report Harkway would have made of the bullet fired into Franklyn Elliott’s back I’m not prepared to say, but his official record for March 20th shows that he killed “a brown rat” in his own back yard.
Standish, characteristically thorough, wasn’t satisfied with the knowledge that the bullet which killed Hiram Darnley was fired from Harkway’s gun. He inserted in local papers appeals for interviews with people who had driven to New Haven on the night of March 20th. Here he had a piece of luck.
A Mr. and Mrs. Abramson came forward. March 20th was Mrs. Abramson’s birthday, and the couple had driven to New Haven to celebrate the anniversary. On the trip there both of them had observed a policeman with a flashlight—they identified Harkway from photographs—searching the road at the point where the tragedy occurred. Mrs. Abramson had actually seen Harkway pick up and pocket something which she was ready to swear was an exploded automatic shell. Since the Abramson car didn’t stop, her testimony would seem to be on the positive side, although Standish, who immediately tested her eyesight, found it very good.
At any rate, Mrs. Abramson satisfied us all as to Harkway’s means of shifting the scene of the crime from the place where it occurred to a public street in Crockford.
The first crime, then—the murder of Hiram Darnley—in every detail is clear to us. Method, motive, opportunity—we can reconstruct them all. A blank period follows, a period we can never hope to fathom, since every actor in it is dead. We can only guess at Laura’s frantic thoughts when she learned that Darnley had been murdered, that the plot had gone awry, that instead of the security she longed for she was faced with the electric chair. Our only testimony is the affidavit of a French chambermaid to the effect that “the la
dy seemed low in her mind.”
Silas and his thoughts during that same interval are similarly obscure. He had grabbed a tiger by the tail—on the one hand was Lester Harkway, of whom he was in mortal terror; on the other was Mrs. Coatesnash, held prisoner in the attic of her own home and in his custody. If he freed the old lady she would instantly expose him, for it was Silas who had forcibly brought her back from New York City to Hilltop House. During those days when he lost weight visibly and jumped at shadows, Silas guarded Luella Coatesnash, fed her, kept her heavily drugged, and slowly approached his own breaking point. I am sure on the afternoon Standish and I made our futile tour of Hilltop House, he was close to a complete confession. He was close to it when Standish picked up the broken hypodermic needle and drew the wrong conclusions; and, when the policeman decided against a search of the attic, I believe the hired man was more disappointed than relieved. He wanted, I am convinced, to have the decision removed from his own hands.
It seems certain that neither he nor Laura ever contemplated murder. Darnley’s death struck terror in them, and brought with it the bitter knowledge that they were merely pawns in Harkway’s larger game. They must have comprehended perfectly the motive which caused Harkway to upset the original scheme, for thereafter, all the evidence goes to show, they acted in unison with him only to save their own necks. Thus, before panic and desperation drove her to suicide, Laura continued to send the cables signed with Mrs. Coatesnash’s name; and Silas worked both with and against the man he hated. He was playing Harkway’s game—and God knows with what aversion and reluctance—when he obliterated the traces left after Jack’s and my midnight foray into the Coatesnash grounds.
It was Lester Harkway, of course, with whom I struggled in the storeroom. I often wonder, with a shudder of reminiscent fear, that he didn’t kill me on the spot. I daresay he felt too secure to think it necessary, and the chilling memory of his low soft chuckle in the darkness would seem to confirm the belief.
He outwitted us at every turn that night. He spirited Laura’s baggage from the storeroom, confident that we would guess—not impersonation—but that Laura herself had been murdered. More important, he prevented any examination of that sunken plot in the rock garden. Ivan, the mastiff, was buried there, Ivan who had been returned from New York with his mistress and promptly killed. Had either Jack or I glimpsed the dog’s body, I am sure we would have guessed the truth. For Ivan supposedly was in Paris with Mrs. Coatesnash!
But we didn’t see the mastiff’s body; it was cremated in the furnace, and the fragment of bone we found there merely bewildered us. A bit of canine bone didn’t suggest Ivan to us, and I remember that I even wondered whether Dr. Rand might not have distorted the analysis for some reason of his own. After all, he had withheld other vital information from the police.
I admitted this to the physician on our last day in Crockford, and he responded with a roar of laughter which subsided as he said:
“That makes us even, young lady, for I certainly thought your husband was a suspicious character. He looked it; he acted it; he had a dead man in his car; the dead man carried a pile of money, and your husband—” he paused and added with a straight face, “—your husband was a needy artist. All in all, that’s a pretty telling case.”
“I can see it is,” I said stiffly.
Everyone laughed at me. It was a soft and tender April day; the doors and windows of the cottage stood open to receive the spring; and, as I remember it, our packed, strapped luggage was awaiting removal to the car. It was the last time our little group was to gather there. Standish had come to escort us to the hospital where Luella Coatesnash was recovering from her terrible experiences, and he had brought with him Annabelle Bayne. Annabelle’s shoulder was bandaged, and her eyes were shadowed, but she looked better than I had seen her look in many weeks. The worst had happened to her; the terrible suspense was over; if she had nothing more to hope, she also had nothing more to fear.
I said uncomfortably, “I know, Annabelle, that you thought Jack and I were guilty.”
“I thought,” said Annabelle, “you were guilty of kidnapping, after I learned there had been a kidnapping.”
I was surprised. “You didn’t know all along that Mrs. Coatesnash had been kidnapped?”
“Not at first. I played stupid like everyone else. It seems absurd now but I imagined that the old story—Jane’s story—had reached Luella and that she had got together with Silas to kill Hiram Darnley. I saw Luella yesterday. As it happens, she doesn’t know that miserable story yet—and I hope she never learns it—but that was my bird-brain reasoning at the time. Frank himself, in the beginning, thought that Luella had engineered Darnley’s murder, after hieing herself to Paris.”
“Those letters that came from Paris…” I ventured.
“The letters deceived me too,” said Annabelle, “although they shouldn’t have. Luella wrote the letters, all right, but she wrote them from the attic of Hilltop House. Then they were posted to Paris and Laura mailed them back here. It was a smart enough trick, but I should have seen through it. Luella was always a wretched correspondent, and I remember my amazement at receiving a half dozen letters. And their tone somehow struck me wrong. I suppose because they were dictated to her, and she simply put down what she was told.”
“Then Darnley,” said Jack curiously, “didn’t tell Elliott what was going on?”
“No. Not a word. Frank was out of the city at the time Darnley came here, but I doubt he’d have spoken anyway. Judging from the various precautions he took, his alias and all the rest of it, he’d been thoroughly impressed with the fact that his trip must be kept absolutely secret.” Annabelle paused, and a cloud crossed her face. “I know Frank was threatened with what would happen to Luella if he let out any hint of his efforts to ransom her. It was on the day of the inquest,” she said slowly, “that Frank was contacted by the kidnappers.”
“Contacted by Harkway!” said Standish in harsh interruption. “I talked to Mrs. Coatesnash yesterday, and although she was drugged and hazy a good deal of the time she remembers Silas arguing that point with Harkway, pleading with him.
“It hardly matters now,” said Annabelle, with a flash of bitterness, “who was responsible.” Very quietly she resumed her narrative. “Anyhow, Frank got this note signed by Luella—she even fingerprinted it—advising him that she was a prisoner and in deadly danger. The note ordered him to bring a hundred and eight thousand dollars to the Tally-ho Inn, and to wait there for a telephone call which would tell him what to do with it.” The speaker smiled wanly. “Frank came; we talked the situation over—not too sanely you may imagine—and eventually we decided that Frank should stay here, await his second instructions, and try to catch the kidnappers if he could.”
“At which point” said Jack dryly, “you started in on me and Lola.”
She colored faintly. “In a way, I suppose that’s true. We suspected you and Lola. But it was only suspicion. Two other people we had cold to rights. One of them was Laura Twining. She had to be the woman in Paris. The second was Silas.”
“Why Silas?”
“For a curious reason. Frank did go down to see the Burgoyne off, and reached the dock after the gangplank was up. He glimpsed the Coatesnash car, saw Silas at the wheel, and was astonished to see a woman huddled in the rear seat. He hopped out of his taxi, shouted, but the woman pulled down her veil and the car shot off.”
I gasped. “Do you mean that Mrs. Coatesnash permitted the impersonation? It sounds like that.”
Standish cleared his throat, “I can explain that. The poor old soul did authorize Laura’s sailing in her place, and unwittingly made her abduction as easy as rolling off a log. She was hoodwinked by forged letters into believing that she was being taken to her daughter Jane. I’ve seen those letters—and I believe Laura forged them, copying from notes she probably found in Hilltop House. They were mailed from a small New Hampshire town, signed with Jane’s name, and each one—there were only three—begged
Mrs. Coatesnash to come secretly to this town to be reunited with her loving daughter.” The policeman sighed. “No explanation was given for the need of secrecy, although some kind of disgrace was hinted at. But Mrs. Coatesnash wasn’t the type of woman who would require an explanation. She thoroughly believed—and the three plotters knew that she believed—her daughter was alive.”
The last fragment of our puzzle slipped into its proper place. I saw at last the explanation for Laura Twining’s interest in the newspapers and in everything that had pertained to Jane Coatesnash. If she were to forge letters which would deceive even a credulous mother, she would need to possess an intimate knowledge of the girl.
Annabelle caught my eye and evidently read my thoughts, for she gave me a wanly reminiscent smile. “It all fits, doesn’t it? You have an orderly mind, Lola, and should go far with it.” But her tone removed any possible sting from her words, and told me that she had forgiven Jack and me our interference in what she had so valiantly considered her own affairs. Her own and Franklyn Elliott’s.
When I reached for her hand, she mutely returned the pressure. Standish beamed at us in a benign and fatherly fashion, then stretched and rose. “It we’re going to the hospital,” he said regretfully, “we’d best be getting started. Mrs. Coatesnash isn’t too spry yet and she turns in early. She’ll want to see you folks before you leave.”
I would willingly have avoided contact with Mrs. Coatesnash, since any expression of gratitude usually embarrasses me, and in my innocence I feared that the grim old woman might prove effusive. I might have spared myself anxiety.
Mrs. Coatesnash was still suffering from shock and undernourishment, but she had the type of personality which triumphs over bodily ills. She occupied her narrow hospital bed as though it were a throne, and the familiar dirty diamonds sparkled on her emaciated wrists and fingers. She greeted us with a regal wave of the hand, and a rather detailed complaint of the hospital service. Her room, she said and glared, was far too noisy. I felt at once relieved, amused and—so accusing was her glance—guilty.
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