The short conversation left her more shaken and troubled than its content seemed to warrant. But that was one of the things to reckon with if there was murder, or even a suspicion of murder. Newspapers, headlines, photographs, a certain amount of surveillance and extraordinarily disagreeable publicity.
Jem didn’t come and didn’t telephone.
And she wouldn’t think of him; she wouldn’t sit near the telephone, pretending to read, pretending not to listen and hope every time it rang that it would be Jem. She wouldn’t catch herself again, holding the magazine in her lap and staring out into the gray clouds over the mountains, thinking the same thoughts over and over again because there was nothing she hadn’t thought of, nothing she could add, no different or new view she could take.
Amanda and Sutton did not return. Dave Seabrooke called a little after three and asked if they’d had any news.
“None. That is, so far as I know. They say the body may never be found.”
“That’s right,” said Dave. “How’s everybody?”
“All right, thanks. Amanda and Sutton are in town.” She longed so for him to mention Jem that it was as if she had asked him to do so, aloud, for he said: “I’ve been trying to salvage something of my laboratory. I think I can have some of the equipment fixed up eventually, if I want to. I’m not sure I want to. Jem’s been out on the rocks most of the day with one of the police. Well—I just thought I’d call.”
“Thank you, Dave.”
Again, she wondered, putting down the telephone, if there could be any possible connection between the destruction of Dave’s laboratory and Luisa’s death. Yet, if she even considered the possibility of such a connection she must first accept the theory of murder. Besides, it was only the fact that the two events had happened at so nearly the same time that inclined one to seek a connection. Amanda had added Bill Lanier’s return to the equation. But that, again, was mere speculation.
Almost immediately after that, however, there were two more telephone calls. One was even more disturbing and disagreeable in its feeling of menace than the call from the newspaper had been, for it was Bill Lanier, and he thought at first that she was Amanda.
“I’m back,” he said. “I came back day before, yesterday. Did you know I was back?”
She didn’t recognize the voice for a moment. She stood holding the receiver tightly, taken aback by the abrupt words that came out of it. It was a heavy voice, flat and without inflection, a deep, sullen kind of voice. The man at the other end seemed to wait, too, for a moment and then said: “I said I’m back. I told you I’d come back. I told you some other things, too.”
It was Bill Lanier, of course. It could be no one else. She said quickly: “This is Serena March. Is that you, Bill?”
There was a short and startled silence. Then he said: “Sissy!”
“Yes. Do you want to talk to Amanda or Sutton? They’re both in town.”
He gave a short laugh. “Tell Amanda I phoned, will you? Just tell her I phoned.” He hung up abruptly so it crashed in her ear.
She put down the telephone slowly. She wished, rather unreasonably, that she hadn’t let him know that she had recognized his voice. And the telephone below her hand rang again. This time it was Leda.
Her voice was excited, breathless, words falling over each other. “Sissy, is that you? I’ve been trying to get you; the line was busy. Sissy, has Luisa’s body been found?”
“No. That is, I don’t think so. If so, I’ve not heard …”
“That’s what I thought! Sissy, it won’t be either!”
“What …!”
“I said it won’t be found. Ever. I know.… Sissy, can anyone hear me?”
There was no kitchen extension, and there was only Modeste and Ramon and herself in the house. “No. Leda, what do you mean?”
“Are you sure? Because … Listen, Sissy, I’ve got to talk low. I’m in a drugstore booth in Monterey. I don’t know whether I was followed or not!”
“Followed!”
“Yes, from Gregory’s. Sissy, I know how Luisa was murdered. She was murdered. And I know how, and it’s the only way it could have been done.”
“Leda!”
“It changes everything! You see, I thought … Well, I know that Luisa and Amanda had had a terrible quarrel. Over Jem, you know. Luisa thought Amanda ought to send him away, not keep him hanging around like this. So Luisa threatened to tell Sutton—not that Sutton couldn’t see, even if he were blind as an owl and Sutton isn’t blind. But Luisa would force him to take some notice, you see. And Jem …” She ran out of breath and cried: “Oh, but that’s not what I’ve got to tell you. I thought Amanda might have … Oh, I didn’t really think Amanda would push her over the rocks, and anyway you said nobody was there, but still I thought Amanda wouldn’t have stopped it. You see? If she saw it or knew of it. And of course I know how you feel about Amanda. You’d stick up for her and never tell the police, no matter what you knew.”
“Leda, what are you saying?”
“Don’t shout,” cried Leda in a rush. “You know perfectly well what I’m saying. I thought Amanda might have been what the police call involved. But now I know something else and I …”
“What? If you’ll not talk so fast …”
“I want to tell you. I want you to meet me.”
“Nonsense. Leda, you can’t be serious.”
“Not nonsense at all. Sissy, you’ve got to listen …” Leda’s voice was almost a whisper. Serena had a quick impression that she was looking over her shoulder, shielding her mouth with her hand. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Leda, I think you’re out of your mind.”
“Will you meet me?”
“If you really think you know anything, you ought to tell the police!”
“No, I can’t.”
“But …”
“And I won’t. I simply won’t, Sissy. I’ve got to talk to you. You were there when it happened. And I’m not sure. I don’t want to tell the police. Not when it’s … I want to know what you think. You’ve been away and you’ve got a …” Leda hesitated and said rather simply and childishly: “A better slant on us. Clearer. I’m all mixed up, Sissy. Johnny … Oh, I’m all mixed up. I don’t know what to do. I can’t tell the police. I won’t.”
The childish hesitancy and simplicity were more convincing and more persuasive, too, than anything else had been.
Go slowly, Serena. Go carefully. It was as if somebody else said it warningly. Serena said: “Where do you want me to meet you?”
“I’ve thought it all out. At your house. At the March house. At Casa Madrone. It’s about halfway between where you are and Monterey. You have the key. But anyway, it’s unlocked, if I get there sooner than you. You can take Sutton’s station wagon. It’s in the garage or somewhere. Come right along, Sissy. I’ll meet you at Casa Madrone. In, say twenty minutes.” With a breathless kind of dash she clicked the receiver, quickly so as not to give Serena a chance to refuse.
It was no use telling one’s self that Leda was a fluttering, excitable idiot. She was fluttering, she was excitable—but she had a certain shrewdness. She had a certain tenacity, too, when she knew what she wanted.
She had called it murder. She had really thought that Amanda had been “involved” in Luisa’s death, yet somehow in that fluttering, dangerous mind of hers she had evaded her own consequent responsibility in the matter.
Yes, Serena seemed to see quite suddenly that Leda was dangerous. And uncertain.
There was no question in Serena’s mind about meeting Leda. Somebody had to meet her, listen to her, talk her out of any false and dangerous notions. Leda hated Amanda.
And if by any chance there was a grain of truth below Leda’s excited talk then that, too, ought to be weighed and reckoned with. Even Leda, in a confused way, seemed to feel that.
It was, however, more than twenty minutes before Serena had pulled on a scarlet raincoat of Amanda’s that hung in the hall c
loset, and, in case the house actually was locked, found the key to Casa Madrone in a forgotten pocket of her own dressing case. More than that, by the time she had told Modeste merely that she was going out and had found the long, shed-like garage and backed out the station wagon. There was gasoline in it, and the key was in the ignition lock. But it was difficult driving down into the valley; the road was slippery and the edges of it had a tendency to disappear into foggy grayness. She turned on the parking lights which merely reflected themselves confusingly against the moving curtains of fog.
Once down into the valley however she knew and remembered the road, which on the other side climbed again. She had to drive slowly however, for fog so masked the road that it became increasingly difficult to follow it. Once, in trying to hurry, she saw the edge of a deep and dangerous drop barely in time to wrench the wheel so sharply that a button of her blue jacket caught in the wheel and was jerked off. It was a narrow escape, and she slowed down again so it was probably well after four o’clock when she came to the familiar curve leading into a short-cut above Carmel. This road again branched bewilderingly but climbed steadily upward and eventually came upon Madrone Road.
Casa Madrone. How long it had been since the day when she’d locked the front door and put the big brass key in her pocketbook and gone away! That made her think of Jem again. And suddenly, inexplicably but irresistibly, all her utter faith and confidence in him came back, like a warm tide. Suppose Luisa had threatened Amanda; suppose Jem had been in love with Amanda; that was in the past and this was now, and last night Jem had said, “I love you, Serena.”
It was indescribably welcome. There was no accounting for it, but there it was, sustaining her like a rock. As if Jem’s arms were strongly around her again, shutting out everything else.
Inexplicably, too, she went on with more confidence in herself.
It was growing dark early, as it did on foggy days. She was leaning forward, peering through the spaces the wiper made clear on the windshield when she reached the gates of Casa Madrone.
Her own house.
Her own gates, grilled iron between tall, ivy-laden, brick posts. The gates were open so Leda must be there already. The shrubbery had grown, and it pressed in upon the driveway which was narrow and weed-grown. Small, wet wisps of broom and heather brushed the sides of the car with swishing fingers. The drive turned twice and then suddenly reached a small space lined with dripping madrone trees and laurels before the old, Spanish house, with its great front door and double veranda. She stopped the car, looking rather uncertainly around her. Leda’s car was not in the courtyard.
She rather wished she hadn’t come.
The house would be cold that day, and dank, as it had been closed so long. Obviously the sensible thing to do was to enter, make sure the draft on the fireplaces was turned right and light a fire. If wood were laid for one. She turned off the engine of the station wagon, and it seemed disconcertingly quiet and lonely with only the dripping, gray-green of trees and shrubbery around her and the long, silent and empty house. On clear days there was a view of the blue sea far below, but there was none now and, besides, the foliage had grown too thick and dense around the house; probably it had closed the view that there had once been. She got out and walked along the mossy, brick walk, toward the entrance.
She wondered if Amanda ever came to the house. She was poignantly aware of its familiar, gracious lines, of the tall eucalyptus trees at each end, leaning protectively over the house, ghostly now in the fog. Damp tendrils of shrubbery and vines that had overgrown the walk touched her ankles softly. She crossed the lower veranda and put the key in the lock of the wide door, old and dark and made of a single beautiful slab of wood.
It was locked. Whoever had said the house was not locked was wrong. She turned the key and the door opened readily. The interior of the house was a deep twilight, cold and dampish. It smelled of old wood and old leather, of dust and camphor and, surprisingly, of tobacco; almost as if someone had smoked a cigarette in the house quite recently. But Leda hadn’t a key to the house. Even if she had come, waited for Serena and gone again, she could not have waited inside the house.
She sniffed again and decided she was mistaken. A narrow stairway led upward, dimly, straight ahead. She remembered it clearly and the soft patina of the old railing under one’s fingers and the way the fifth step from the top creaked. She and Amanda used to make a long step over that one when they were late coming in at night and didn’t want to wake Aunt Jane. A tall, massive chest which had come around the Horn stood beside the door and she remembered it and the array of riding gloves and used golf balls and railway timetables that had littered it during her father’s lifetime. A lamp, covered with newspapers, stood upon it and she pulled off the papers which slipped off lifelessly and damply. The lamp’s light shade loomed up eerily like another face at the same height as her own.
Caught by memories, she closed the outside door, cutting off much of what light there was. There was a long, narrow drawing room at her left with a fireplace at each end of it. She turned in that direction and entered the room, stopping when she had crossed the threshold, for the room was in deep twilight. The shutters of the French windows upon the veranda were closed and light filtered only dimly through them. There was a roll of rugs just inside the room on the floor.
Only it couldn’t be a roll of rugs. All the rugs had been stored in the attic; the old polished floors were bare. And a roll of rugs wouldn’t have looked just like that, soggily huddled beside the sheeted outline of a sofa.
Wouldn’t have been wrapped in a light thing that looked like a coat.
She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even kneel beside that inert shadowy figure. Her eyes, though, were more accustomed to the twilight, and she could even see that the thing on the floor had a face, and its hair was flung outward below it.
This time there wasn’t any doubt about its being murder.
She didn’t actually think that or anything, for it was just then that someone started down the stairs, out in the hall, above, and it was someone who was making every effort not to be heard.
But memory, fantastically and sharply, woke again, so she listened for the creak of the fifth step.
Whoever it was knew about the fifth step, too, and dextrously avoided it and came on so lightly and so adroitly that she could scarcely hear the whisper of that motion, but she did hear it, for she knew it when it stopped. There was a straining hush. It was like an evil spell put upon her and upon Leda Blagden, dead at her feet with her blonde curls and her dreadful face.
A voice spoke abruptly into the hush, breaking it and breaking that spell. “Amanda!” it cried. “What are you doing here?”
It was Jem’s voice. She whirled around and, as she did so, there was a loud swish and clatter and crack like a whip against the wall, against the door, against something in the hall that fell and shattered upon the bare floor.
CHAPTER TEN
LONG-DEAD ECHOES ROSE and throbbed and rocked tumultuously through the silent rooms, against the low ceilings, all over the house. The shadows, the clattering echoes, the horrible awareness of Leda Blagden’s body, just there where the dim light streaking through the shutters fell upon it, all of it was a nightmarish welter of confusion. A dark abyss of horror from which she grasped at one real and solid fact. She had heard Jem’s voice—hadn’t she? Then he must be there, somewhere.
She thought she cried: “Jem …” Then she knew that he was running forward actually from the other end of the long drawing room, toward her. And toward Leda. His face and the light raincoat slung over his shoulders loomed out of the shadows. He came closer. “Serena!” he cried. “I thought you were Amanda. That coat …” He saw Leda. He jerked to a stop, catching at the back of the sofa. “For God’s sake, what …!” He knelt down over Leda’s body.
The echoes were dying in the house. Where had Jem come from? Not the hall, because someone had stood there on the stairway, and something had lashed and clattered and
thudded upon the bare floor. So then Jem must have been in the back of the room, since he couldn’t have been the person on the stairway. But had he been there all along? Had he watched her own entrance and dreadful discovery? No, that wasn’t possible either. He’d have stopped her, he’d have tried to do something for Leda. Then she remembered, still groping out of that dark abyss into which she’d descended, for real things, solid things, that there was a second door from the narrow drawing room, leading also to the hall which ran back past the stairway, past the door at the other end of the room, past the dining room and a small study, and on to the kitchen regions. So Jem must have come from that way. She was holding to the back of a chair, a tall, narrow Spanish chair, and the carved wood felt cold and damp under her hands. She said in a half-whisper: “Jem, is she dead?”
He was bending over that huddled body in the light polo coat. He looked up slowly: “Yes. I can’t … What happened, Sissy?”
She forced a voice out of her own numb and frozen throat. “I don’t know. Isn’t there something …?”
“I can’t hear you. What did you say?”
“Isn’t there something?” she began again and stopped.
“You mean something we can do? No. It’s too late.” He looked down at Leda. The shadows all around seemed to give his face a white rigidity. “She’s dead. She’s been dead, I think, for awhile. I don’t know how long. I think she was strangled. It looks like it, but there’s nothing around her throat now.”
Serena’s hands left the cold, carved wood and went upward stiffly to her own throat. Leda, and her blonde curls. Leda, dead.
“I came to meet her …” she whispered. Jem did not appear to hear her. He said again: “What happened, Sissy? What did you knock over just now?”
“What did I …?”
“That noise, I mean. I was in the back of the room. I couldn’t see what happened. It’s so dark …”
“Jem, Jem, I didn’t! It was somebody else! Somebody in the hall! Somebody on the stairway …”
He was up before she’d finished. At the hall door she would have followed him, but he put his hand hard on her shoulder and pushed her backward into the room again and was gone. But she couldn’t stay in that room with Leda. She had to see the hall, too, and see what had thudded and echoed against the floor and whether anyone still stood there, watching from the shadowy reaches of the narrow stairway.
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