The Strawstack Murders

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “Quick!” I gasped. “Go quickly. I’m all right, but someone’s in my bedroom.”

  Simon raced into my room, and Ames went after him. But the intruder wasn’t in the room, and they found no sign of him. Mystified, they rejoined us. “Who was it, Margaret? What happened? What were you doing here?”

  I tried to give a clear, ungarbled account. My family looked increasingly bewildered. It did not occur to me that no matter how calmly I related the bare, unvarnished facts, my adventure might sound too fantastic for belief. But after Simon had packed the others off to bed, and carried me bodily to my own bed, and stationed Verity there to guard me, I had my first inkling of the general reaction to my story. Simon prescribed a sedative so that I might enjoy a “dreamless sleep.” I was calmer, my terror was ebbing, and I felt baffled as I looked at him.

  “Do you think that I was dreaming, Simon?”

  “You’re exhausted, dear.” He leaned to pat my cheek. “Lie back, and close your eyes and let the sedative work.”

  “There was someone in Dorothy’s room,” I insisted. “Someone who grabbed my hand and held me, and pushed me against the wall. Someone who slipped through the door in here.”

  “We’ll talk about it,” said Simon, “in the morning. You’re in no condition to talk now. I’m counting on you, Verity, to keep her quiet.”

  He tiptoed from the room. Verity obeyed Simon’s orders to the letter. She wouldn’t listen, nor would she speak. She sat silently, immovably beside the bed as she had sat when I was six years old, and presently I dropped those futile efforts of mine to fit that terrifying incident in the other bedroom into the picture of Dorothy Fithian’s death. Presently I drifted off into a sleep as dreamless as Simon had prescribed for me.

  When I woke up in the morning Verity was gone. The day was gray and sunless and my bedside lamp—Verity must have left it burning—shed a yellow glow around the bed. I had an impression that my cousin had only recently quit the room, indeed that she had departed as I stirred and opened my eyes.

  The clock pointed to half past nine. I half expected that Verity had gone to get my coffee but when at ten o’clock she had not returned, I rose and dressed. The sedative had left me heavy-eyed and restless, clumsy with my buttons. It had left me also in a condition that made me extraordinarily acute to outside sensations. The quiet of the upper floor, the sultry heaviness of the air, the whispering of the English ivy at my window. I felt lonely and depressed.

  Shortly afterwards I went into the hall and rapped at Marian’s door. There was no reply but I heard a subdued rustle inside and with an ugly little shock I realized that my sister was there. She was there and she refused to answer because she did not wish to talk with me. Just as Verity had not wished to talk, and had silently and swiftly quit my side.

  No one, I realized then, wanted to consider or to face the incident in Dorothy’s bedroom. No one was willing to be convinced that I had not been dreaming. No member of my family—so I thought—was willing to put a determined skepticism to the test of what I had to say. It seemed to me as I stood there in the hall before my sister’s door that something had entered Broad Acres which was not to leave it until the mystery surrounding Dorothy Fithian’s death had been cleared away.

  Suspicion and fear had crept into the house. We no longer trusted one another, or trusted ourselves to speech or shared our thoughts. We shrank from confidences, just as we refused to give them. The sense of withdrawal, of fear and dread, had been present from the moment we discovered Dorothy’s body in the blazing strawstack, but until that morning I had not admitted it. Nor had I admitted that, helpless and wretched, I was watching the disintegration of a loving and once singularly united family.

  I could no longer avoid the knowledge that we had broken up into little cliques, that Jane was willing to confide in Ames what she would confide to no one else, that Marian would spend long hours with Harold and come to me only when pressed to desperation, that Fred apparently would talk to no one. I was too fond of Simon not to have sensed and been hurt by a reticence in him, but it wasn’t until later on that morning that I learned that he, too, had chosen an ally. And that ally was not myself, but was my cousin Verity.

  Heavy-hearted I descended to the breakfast room. No one was about. The house seemed to have borrowed the grayness of the skies outside, and was full of shadows. We had not turned on the furnace, and the servants had neglected to replenish the various open fires or to do any of the necessary work, in favor of congregating in the kitchen and drinking endless cups of coffee and plotting ways of going on to new employers. The news of my adventure in Dorothy’s bedroom had been carefully suppressed but some rumor must have reached the kitchen, for when Thomas brought in my solitary coffee he reported that Cook was alarming the upstairs maid with the tale of a walking ghost.

  “She’s saying that Miss Fithian’s ghost won’t leave the house until the police lock up her murderer,” Thomas snorted. “I told that woman the best way to lay any ghost Was to put her mind on the living. I ordered her to bake some pies for dinner.”

  Then, instead of leaving promptly, Thomas stood and watched me start my breakfast. The silent scrutiny got on my nerves. The house was filled with fear, and, for all his brave words, Thomas had not escaped the general infection. Nor, I felt, had he escaped that awful sense of waiting, that sense that the worst was yet to come. A little shortly I asked him to bring in the morning paper. When Thomas returned he brought not only the egg-stained newspaper—the publication had obviously gone through many hands—but a collect parcel of books for Simon.

  “The petty cash account,” Thomas informed me sadly, “won’t cover the books, and Dr. Hargreaves isn’t in his room. The express man is waiting.”

  I found my purse, and produced twenty-four dollars with the mental reflection that medical reading matter is likely to be expensive. When I unwrapped the three heavy volumes and requested Thomas to place them in the library I discovered that the books which Simon had bought and I had paid for dealt exclusively with bacteriology. Simon was always conducting studious investigations into abstruse and technical subjects, and I was more irritated than interested. It seemed to me a poor time indeed for my old friend to contemplate a course of professional reading.

  I turned indignantly to the morning paper. Dorothy Fithian’s murder held a commanding place, but the story contained nothing new except details of the fruitless search for Kirkland Anderson. The public, the newspaper reading public, had readily accepted the missing interne as the murderer and as readily assumed that his capture would close the case. My. own household alone could not accept the premise. Each of us, I firmly believed, was working independently to hide something from the others.

  I had proof of it when I walked in on Jane. I heard voices in the music room, I knocked and, uninvited, entered. Jane and Ames were deep in a conversation which broke off abruptly but I had caught Ted Breen’s name. I had heard Jane say:

  “Ted’s our only chance.”

  “Ted’s your only chance for what?” I asked.

  Jane seemed embarrassed. “I want to do something, Aunt Margaret. I want to meet Nancy Anderson.”

  “I prefer,” I said tartly, “that you make up your mind to let the police force earn their salaries. In any event I can’t see what you hope to learn from Nancy Anderson.”

  “I don’t quite know,” Jane said reluctantly. “But there’s no harm trying. Whatever Nancy Anderson knows it seems quite clear she isn’t disposed to tell to the police.”

  “I should think she’d made it equally clear she had no enthusiasm for this particular family. You should have seen her, as I did, at the hospital.”

  Jane was aggrieved and somewhat argumentative. “Oh, well, I suppose that I can drop the matter. But Ted seems to think…”

  “Ted thinks what?”

  Jane and Ames exchanged a glance.

  “Something quite queer,” said Jane slowly. “I’ve just been talking with him on the phone. Ted admits that Nancy And
erson is still unwilling to talk, but he thinks we should bring all the pressure to bear that we can manage. Now—before it’s too late. I—I agree with him.”

  “Before it’s too late,” I repeated sharply. “What do you mean by that?”

  Jane looked at me, and I was profoundly shocked by the expression on her face.

  “Ted believes that the information Nancy Anderson is holding back involves one of us, Aunt Margaret.”

  Any doubt I might have had that Jane herself was concealing something perished on the spot. Nothing else could be responsible for the terror in her eyes, or for her wish to seek out Nancy Anderson. Jane had some secret theory, some secret dread. I was certain that her theory was borne of the story she had not told—the story of what had happened when she ran upstairs to get the fire extinguishers. But I asked no questions. She and Ames had made plain that they did not desire a confidante, that my presence was unwanted, and I left them to resume their private conference

  14

  I needed no further evidence of the disunion and demoralization of the family, but shortly afterwards it was again impressed on me. When I returned to the third floor I encountered Cook. Or rather Cook, in full flight, crashed into me. She had come upstairs to consult with Verity on the question of the pies, and had abruptly lost all interest in the matter. Miss Fithian’s ghost was walking, Cook declared, and the spectral footsteps could be distinctly heard in the nurse’s bedroom.

  “I’d rather go to jail than stay in this house another minute, Miss Tilbury. You tell Old Miss I’m leaving.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” I said. “One thing’s certain, Rosa. You can’t hear ghosts walk.”

  As I approached Dorothy’s door, however, the cook gave a muffled cry and shot downstairs and for an instant I discerned a certain weakness in my knees. Then from behind the door I heard a very substantial, unghostly noise—the sound of someone dragging a piece of furniture across the floor.

  I opened the door. Simon and Verity were in Dorothy’s bedroom. Simon was standing on a bench beneath the overhead light, and Verity was examining the chair which I had overturned the night before. As I crossed the threshold she was saying:

  “We’ll never convince Margaret, Simon.”

  “You’ll never convince me of what?” I asked.

  They turned around. Simon got slowly off the bench and sat on it. “We owe you an apology, Margaret. I admit I thought last night you were dreaming. But we’ve just established that some—some intruder was in the room.”

  “I don’t see how standing on that bench helped you to establish it.”

  He smiled. “The bulb wasn’t burned out, Margaret. Someone stood on that chair”—he pointed—“and unscrewed the bulb at the ceiling. That’s why the chair was out of place. I’ve just fixed the bulb.”

  I stepped to the switch and pressed the button, and at once the light flashed on. I turned to examine the chair, but to my astonishment Verity stepped into my path and stood there stubbornly until Simon said:

  “Let Margaret look.”

  I looked. The seat of the chair was highly polished and so far as I could see bore no evidence whatever that anyone had stood upon it.

  “Tip the seat,” said Simon, “to the light.”

  I obeyed him. I saw then, as the light caught the polished surface, what I had not seen before. The distinct impression of two bare feet. Even as I dropped the chair, slowly, coldly, clearly, an almost forgotten memory crept into my mind. The memory of a tassel attached to a length of cord, flipping through a swiftly closing door. I realized what I had seen—I had seen the tasseled cord which belts a dressing gown. I knew then that the other person in Dorothy’s room had risen from one of the beds beneath my own roof, slipped into a dressing gown and crept barefoot down the darkened hall toward his objective. That person had heard me floundering, stumbling in the darkness and had not spoken. That person had struggled with me over possession of the lamp, had pushed me, half fainting, against the wall and had escaped, and had not revealed himself.

  These things passed coldly, clearly through my mind yet I did not speak of them. Nor did Simon or Verity speak. My cousin—quite as though she were engaged in an ordinary morning’s dusting—silently produced one of her enormous handkerchiefs and began to rub the seat of the chair. She rubbed until every trace of the twin bare footprints was gone.

  “Now,” she said grimly, “Inspector Chant can come and look. Did you dust off the light bulb, Simon?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I can’t stand this much longer,” I said. “It—it’s got to stop.”

  “We can trust and hope,” my cousin said, “it doesn’t stop with the gallows tree. No painted Jezebel is worth…”

  “Be quiet, Verity.” Simon turned to me. “I’m sorry you came in,” he said gently.

  “You’re sorry, I suppose, because you didn’t mean to let me know what you’d found! Well, I'm sick of that. I’ve got to know the truth—all of it. If you’re keeping things from me to spare my feelings I insist you stop…”

  Again neither of them spoke. Simon put an arm about my shoulders and I irritably pulled free. Verity had pushed the chair into its place beside the dressing table, and now had stooped and was peering underneath the bed. Her head was almost completely out of sight.

  “What are you doing now?” I asked, exasperated. “More dusting?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” she replied in muffled tones.

  I got down on the floor beside my cousin. My servants weren’t the sort who went out of their way to hunt for work, and dust lay thick beneath the bed. So thick that I was able to see quite clearly the bare patch where a squarish object had rested. I saw also the wide swath that had been cut in the dust as the squarish object had been hurriedly removed. Something had been concealed underneath the bed, and was no longer there. So much was plain.

  I said sharply, “So that explains the visit to the room last night. But what in heaven’s name could have been hidden under Dorothy’s bed?”

  Verity chuckled—a ghostly, muffled sound. “Use your eyes, Margaret. And use your head. Don’t you know what was underneath the bed? And can’t you see it wasn’t moved last night?”

  I peered more closely. A thin film of dust faintly blurred the disturbed area, and testified that the square object had been dragged across the floor less recently than I had thought. But I received no further enlightenment.

  My cousin got to her feet. She looked at Simon, and once again I was irritably .conscious of a kind of wordless understanding between the two of them. It was Simon who said:

  “You remember, Margaret, that Dorothy used your typewriter before she went downstairs on Monday night?”

  “Quite well,” I said drily.

  “When Dorothy left this room,” said Simon, “your typewriter was underneath her bed. She had placed it there.”

  I daresay I looked incredulous.

  “There’s no doubt,” Simon repeated slowly, “that after Dorothy typed out her message she put your typewriter underneath her bed. Talk to Philomena, my dear. She turned down the bed at ten o’clock on Monday night, long after Dorothy had gone. The maid glimpsed the typewriter as she stooped to adjust the counterpane.”

  “The typewriter,” I said stubbornly, “was in my room when we found Jane. She saw it on the highboy when she first went in.”

  “Someone,” said Simon, almost wearily, “moved the typewriter during the interval when we discovered the strawstacks were burning. Someone in a tremendous hurry. Even the smudge in the dust suggests speed and haste. The intention,” Simon went on somberly, “must have been to destroy the message that Dorothy had typed, and then to replace the machine where it belonged on your desk. When Jane blundered into your room the plan went temporarily haywire. But whoever knocked out that kid retained sufficient presence of mind to get away with the message.”

  I felt stunned, bewildered. “But I thought Dorothy had typed out the note for me. She couldn’t have expected me t
o go hunting for my typewriter underneath her bed.”

  “She didn’t.” Verity cackled shrilly. “Wake up, Margaret. You knew that girl. Isn’t it rubbish to suppose she would bother her head to make explanations to you? I can’t imagine what was in the note, but one thing’s certain. It wasn’t intended to reach your hands.”

  I knew then that I had always doubted that Dorothy would have left a note for me, but I had been able to think of no other way to explain the presence of my typewriter on the highboy except that Dorothy had placed it there to catch my eye. But Dorothy had not placed the typewriter on the highboy; someone else had transferred it there, the same person who had torn the message from the roller.

  Dorothy had never intended that I should read those brief and fatal lines of typing. That was clear. But she must have expected someone to find the typewriter hidden underneath her bed. Who was that person? Her murderer?

  Simon and Verity offered no theory to supplant the one which they had destroyed. But I felt they had a theory. I looked at them and had the baffled feeling that they were leagued against me, that they didn’t trust my discretion, that they regretted the little that had been said.

  I attempted to draw them out on the marauder of the night before. Since he couldn’t have come to Dorothy’s bedroom in search of the typewriter, why had he come? Simon and Verity disclaimed any knowledge of the mysterious individual who had stood on the chair and doused the overhead light. They refused to guess at his identity, or to speculate upon his purpose.

  “But you suspect someone—you suspect something. I know you do. I can feel it.”

  “No,” said Simon.

  “No,” said Verity.

  Suddenly their bland denials were more than I could bear. I turned a little blindly and left them standing beside the neatly polished chair.