Escape the Night

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  Leda gave a kind of gasp. She was the only one of them who had changed for dinner. They had arrived, she and Johnny, just as Amanda and Sutton were starting down to the cottage. She was wearing a long black dress, with a deep slit in the skirt. Her fair hair was in curls, very carefully arranged. Her dress was just too tight, so she seemed stuffed into it and slightly lumpy, but her pretty face was carefully made up. Bracelets jingled on her plump wrists and jewels flashed on her white hands. She crossed her knees, displaying rather thick legs. “Suicide!” she cried. “That would be terrible! Of course we all know you and Sutton wouldn’t murder her! Why do you suppose she would commit suicide?”

  Amanda seemed irritated. “I didn’t suggest suicide,” she said tersely. “I didn’t even think of it. I just think it’s ridiculous for the police to talk about murder.”

  “Unless,” said Dave Seabrooke, “she really was of unsound mind.”

  “Wacky, you mean,” said Johnny Blagden, as if it needed translating. “Well, she could have been. Frankly, she always scared me a little. Seemed a bit odd, you know. Way she looked at a feller. Hope you don’t mind, Sutton. I mean, well, of course, she was your aunt, but still could have been wacky, you know. Seems to fit the case, if you ask me,” he went on cheerfully. “Candidly, I don’t think she could have fallen just like that. Said so to myself soon as I heard the news. Said so to Leda, soon as we got into the car again and started to follow you, Sutton, down to Dave’s. Said, ‘I don’t understand how she could have fallen.’ Didn’t I, Leda? Old lady was as sure-footed as a mountain goat.” He stopped in rather awed silence, brooded and seemed to feel his reference was unchivalrous. “Sure-footed as a cat,” he said, tilting his glass, and got up to refill it.

  “Well, that’s true,” said Sutton rather vaguely. “Still—there it is. We know this coast-line. Accidents like that have happened. Too many times. I wish the police would come.”

  “Why?” asked Leda.

  Sutton opened his blue eyes, and stroked his small, light mustache. “Why, to get it over with, of course,” he said. “Stop all this nonsensical talk of murder. It’s silly.”

  Amanda stirred and murmured: “I look frightful. I’m going to wash. I told Modeste just to put some food on the dining room table and we can help ourselves. She’s upset.” She got up, tall and lovely in spite of her disheveled hair and wrinkled white shirt, and left the room.

  Leda put down her glass, struggled ungracefully out of the depths of the upholstered chair in which she’d been sitting, and followed Amanda. Serena, suddenly aware of her own tousled hair, moved too. She felt Jem’s eyes upon her as she got up. He went quietly to open the door for her and followed her into the hall.

  “All right, Sissy?” he said in a low voice. She looked up at him despairingly.

  “It’s so horrible, Jem. If they’d only stop talking. I keep thinking of her scarf. And …”

  He put his hand on her shoulder and looked down into her eyes. His own were very dark and somehow comforting. “Don’t, my dear. I’ll talk to the police again, when they come. Don’t worry about their idea of murder. They have your story. Nobody’s going to blame you for anything. And there was nothing—absolutely nothing, Sissy, that you could have done to save her. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Oh, Jem, if I could only have done something.”

  “Sissy, dear …” he put his arm around her quickly and drew her closer so her head leaned against his shoulder. It was a small, brief caress, yet immeasurably comforting; as if he had said, I’ll see to everything; leave things to me; I’m strong and will take care of you.

  Not that he said anything at all like that. He merely held her for a moment and patted her shoulder, and then said: “Run along. Wash your face. You’ll feel better.”

  She smiled a little weakly. She didn’t want to leave the shelter of his presence. It was queer, though, that she seemed to need shelter. She said, “Thanks, Jem,” and went out into the patio.

  It was very dark out there. He’d closed the door immediately so the light wouldn’t stream out upon the night and the darkness was momentarily bewildering. The stairs up to her own room were on the left. She started toward them. But she didn’t know that Leda and Amanda were somewhere in the patio—behind one of the heavily vined pillars, perhaps, certainly where they had not seen the door open and Serena’s figure against the brief gleam of light, for certainly they thought there was no one to hear them. Leda said, passionately, her voice low and shaken: “I don’t say you did it, Amanda. I don’t really see how anybody could have done it. But it was very convenient for you. Luisa would have told Sutton everything. She said she would.”

  There was a pause and then Amanda said in a voice that was as cold as the sea: “Exactly what do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

  Leda’s voice, replying, had risen, so she sounded excited and shrill with triumph too. “You needn’t try to scare me, Amanda Condit. I know too much. But from now on you’re going to let Johnny alone. You’ve had the upper hand for a long time. I’ve got it now.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THERE WAS ANOTHER BRIEF but very pungent silence, and Amanda’s deep cold voice spoke again. She said: “What a cool little blackmailer you are, Leda. You mean you won’t tell the police what you think you know? Come inside …” No light came upon the patio, but a door opened, there was the sound of motion and its abrupt closing. And then complete silence.

  Serena did not move for what seemed to her a very long time. Actually, in time, it couldn’t have been long; but in that time she crossed a very terrible boundary. She couldn’t have identified and described that boundary but, whatever it was, certainly, once it was crossed one entered a dark and ugly labyrinth of suspicion.

  These were people she hadn’t seen for some time, but people she knew. They were very like each other, confusingly like each other in a sense and to the outward eye, as men from the same school have an outward resemblance. They were closer, too, in a way, than members of a family because they were contemporaries, all of them, and they had shared so much of each other’s interests and lives. They were so much alike that, except for physical unlikenesses, they seemed poured into a common mold. If, below the surface they were made of very individual and contrasting clays, their outer glaze protected and masked the difference. Yet those latent, concealed differences existed and were basic, shaping motive and action.

  “Something,” Leda had said, “is going to happen.”

  Automatically Serena found her way to the left-hand flight of stairs. Her footsteps sounded soft and furtive. She wouldn’t go down again. She couldn’t join them and listen to that talk, and see their faces—Amanda’s and Leda’s. She had to stay in her room, away from them for awhile. It was a foolish refuge, of course; it wasn’t any refuge at all against thoughts.

  And questions. Why had Luisa talked of murder only the day before? Why had she thought herself threatened? People had persecution complexes, but not Luisa. One glance into her coldly observant and clear blue eyes would have convinced anybody of that.

  Why was Luisa’s death “convenient” to Amanda? Why had Amanda accepted Leda’s offer, or seemed to? Certainly she’d known what Leda meant. Did Luisa’s life threaten anybody—Amanda, for instance, as Leda implied? What had Luisa intended to tell Sutton? And how did Leda know it?

  It was as if a new vista had been opened to her reluctant eyes, a peephole into emotions and strife that up to then had been masked. Probably they were all still sitting around the fire downstairs, talking of the accident with every evidence of frankness and honesty. Only suppose it was no accident.

  “Something is going to happen,” Leda had said.

  Well, then think, Serena told herself almost frantically. Either admit that there is something very wrong here, or deny it. She found the light satin cover on the foot of the chaise longue and wrapped it around her. Luisa couldn’t have been murdered because nobody was there to murder her! She must force herself to be logical; well, then if
someone had been, say, on the rock ledge above, how could he have crept upon Luisa without Luisa’s knowing it, pushed her over the edge of the path so quickly, so silently, so forcefully that there was no struggle? Luisa did not scream, or, if she did, why had Serena herself not many feet away, heard nothing?

  It wasn’t possible. And if it had been possible how could he have scrambled up that steep, jagged rock again and out of sight before Serena came around the curve?

  She tried to think back to a clear, mental picture of the height and steepness of the rocks that rose so sharply behind her on the path and could not, except they had seemed steep and she had never thought of climbing up them in search of help. Luisa couldn’t have been murdered.

  But suspicion was like a colored spotlight. Small things she had ignored, or pretended not to see merely because they were unpleasant, began to show up under the ugly color of that spotlight and assume larger proportions. Certainly at dinner the night before there had been an undercurrent of bickering—aimed at Amanda, it seemed to her then, and that was unfair. Amanda had always been, in a sense, the target for petty jealousy; but merely petty jealousy, nothing serious. Nothing that could have any possible connection with murder.

  But Amanda had understood Leda. There had been also an unsaid implication of yielding, as if she intended to bargain with Leda.

  Serena argued with herself about that. It was more likely, wasn’t it, that Amanda was merely prudent. She—all of them—would want as little talk about Luisa’s death as possible. Amanda and all of them would do anything within reason to stop idle talk of murder.

  Anyway, Luisa couldn’t have been murdered.

  Could she?

  She always came back to that and presently she realized that she was only going over and over certain paths of reasoning that, actually, were not very reasonable.

  It was queer about the patio, she thought once. In the middle of the house like that, one could so easily be overheard by unobserved listeners who might be anywhere in the shadow of the encircling double veranda. As she had overheard whispering the night before. Whispering! It was another small, subtly troublesome event which now assumed an ugly color. Who had been in the patio? Angry whispering like that, jerkily and vehemently in the middle of the night?

  She must do something. She must take some action if only to settle her own ugly doubts. She’d ask Leda what she meant, exactly, by saying “something” was going to happen. She’d pin her down; she’d persist until Leda explained it. She’d tell Amanda of Leda’s hysterical accusation, too. Amanda must know in order to protect herself against Leda. Johnny meant nothing to Amanda. Amanda would see the wisdom of stopping any nonsense on Johnny’s part.

  Serena realized suddenly that time had passed. She didn’t know how much and she heard the arrival of a car outside in the driveway, and its departure much later, it seemed to her, without paying attention to it. But when a knock came on the door it startled her so her heart fluttered almost in her throat. The knock came again.

  “Sissy.” It was Jem’s voice. She sat up. “Sissy, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. You didn’t come back. May I come in?” He was already in. The door closed. “Where’s a light? Turn it on, will you? My hands are full.”

  His matter-of-fact voice was like a wind dispelling cobwebs of dreadful fancy. She fumbled for the light on the little table beside the chaise longue. It spread a rosy glow over the room. Blinking, she saw that Jem was standing inside the room with a tray in his hand. His face with its straight nose and straight chin and the straight line of his eyebrows, looked grave; but there was about him, as always, a feeling of substantiality and solidity. He glanced at her and something like anger crossed his face so his features seemed to fix themselves in a restrained but rather implacable mold. He crossed to the table and put down the tray. There was a glass of milk on it, sandwiches and a large piece of cake.

  He glanced down at her, unsmiling, then quickly around the room. He selected the door to the bathroom, and went into it. There was the sound of a light being turned on and running water. He came back, a towel in his hand. One end of it had been dipped in water. He sat down on the end of the chaise longue. “Put up your face.”

  She did so. The cold wet towel felt indescribably refreshing. He pushed her hair back from her temples. “Give me your hands.” He washed her hands too with the wet towel, and dried them. He tossed the towel into the bathroom, looked at the thin, pink satin coverlet around her with distaste, saw a blanket rolled up on the bench at the foot of the bed and got it. He took away the thin delicate cover and wrapped her snugly in the long blanket, tucking her feet into it carefully. There was an electric heater, a small ivory-painted affair, near the wall; he turned that on. “Now eat,” he said.

  He had wrapped her so thoroughly in the blanket that she couldn’t get her hands out; she was like a cocoon. He leaned over again and loosened her, but without smiling; still looking very grave and a little angry.

  And then he made her eat. He sat on the foot of the chaise longue, smoking, watching every bite. She tried to say something once or twice, to ask some question, and he wouldn’t let her talk. “Finish that sandwich. What do you suppose I brought it up for? Now, then, the cake.”

  “But I’m not hungry.”

  “Yes, you are. Go ahead. Drink the milk too. That’s better.” He took the glass from her hand and put it down on the tray. “Are you warm?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d have come before, but I couldn’t. I thought Amanda had come to you. I thought something was wrong. Then she said she hadn’t. She said she supposed you just wanted to rest.”

  “I—I suppose I did.” Her voice sounded in her own ears very small and faint, not at all like Amanda’s always clear, always decisive way of speaking. Obscurely she wished she were more like Amanda.

  Jem put out his cigarette. The look of anger left his face as if it had been wiped out. He leaned toward her and took both her hands. “They’re still cold,” he said, and held her hands against him. He was wearing a pullover sweater under his brown tweed jacket. She felt the wool against her fingers and the warm pressure of his hands. Something came suddenly and strongly into his eyes that had a life and fire and being of its own. “Serena,” he said, “I think I …” He moved, so her arms went upward around him, and he took her close to him and put his warm, hard cheek down against her own and held her like that, tight and warm against him.

  It was like the moment on the stairs of the previous night; like it, only again different. There was something deeper in it, something very simple and gentle and safe. Tenderness, she thought; that was it. She hadn’t known there could be such tenderness, and such a feeling of sharing in all the world.

  She never wanted to move; she never wanted to speak. Perhaps he didn’t either, except to hold her closer. And he did speak, in a low voice, incoherently, his mouth against her face. “It’s been you. For a long time. I didn’t know it. You are so—so dear. So …” he stopped, sighed a little, and said again: “Serena …”

  She turned her face a little so it pressed more gently and closely against his face. She wished passionately that he could hold her like that always. Then he lifted his head and looked at her for a long moment before he kissed her on the mouth as he had done before. “I believe I’ve loved you for a long time,” he said, and kissed her again.

  Someone knocked quickly on the door and called: “Sissy! Are you in there?” It was Amanda.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  JEM GOT UP SLOWLY, looked at the door, said, “Damn it to hell,” in an explosive undertone, and replied more loudly to Amanda: “Of course she’s here. Where else would she be? Come on in.”

  Serena tried to mask the look that must be on her face. Amanda opened the door, came quickly inside and closed the door behind her. She glanced at them and at the curtains which were still open, but she looked worried and preoccupied. Which was just as well, thought Serena swiftly. Whatever it was
that had happened or was about to happen, or might ever happen between her and Jem, she didn’t want Amanda to know of it. Not then. Not yet. Amanda was too prone to meddle with other people’s possessions. The more one valued it, the more likely she was to want it. It had been that way always, a doll, a pair of roller skates, a book, a piece of jewelry, despite the difference in the ages of the two sisters. She couldn’t help it. It was something in her nature that was strong and possessive; but Serena didn’t want her to sense anything of the thing that still lay, warm and lovely and exciting, in the very air between her and Jem.

  Amanda frowned and went swiftly to the curtains and pulled them together with a strong sweep of her arm. “For Heaven’s sake, Sissy, I told you about the dimout. Do you want the air warden after us? The police are about all I can cope with at the moment.” She turned around, reached for a cigarette from the little porcelain box beside the empty supper tray, lighted it with an angry jerk of a match, and sat down. Her rather thick black eyebrows were drawn together. She glanced at Jem and said: “I suppose you told her.”

  “No,” said Jem. “I didn’t. There wasn’t time.”

  Amanda looked annoyed. “It’s been ages since the police left. Oh, well. The point is, Sissy, they have decided to investigate Luisa’s death. They say …” Amanda drew a long breath of smoke. “They say they’ve got to go on the theory that it was murder until they prove it wasn’t.”

  Serena had a very curious sensation; exactly the sensation one feels when an elevator drops too suddenly. She must have shown it in her face, for Jem leaned toward her again, quickly, and put his hand over her own. “You don’t have to be brutal about it, Amanda,” he said sharply. “Don’t worry, Serena. All you have to do is answer their questions and just not let it bother you.”

  “Well, good Heavens, Jem,” said Amanda, “you don’t have to get so upset about it. Sissy’s all right. It’s no worse for her than the rest of us. Not as bad, in fact. She …” Amanda let smoke slip slowly out of her fine, sharply cut nostrils. “She’s only a witness,” said Amanda. “The rest of us—at least Sutton and me—are in the position of suspects, which is not very pleasant. If you’ve got any sympathy to give away, Jem, save it for me.”