Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22

by John Dickson Carr

  "Shut up."

  "You're not very romantic, are you?"

  So he shut her up in the only appropriate way, elaborating the same treatment.

  What they subsequently said or did—the discoveries they made, the vows they took, the pledges old though forever new—are matters of no strict relevance here. But it was very important to these two, and must be dealt with kindly. Their moods ranged from the erotic to the hilarious: from blind intensity of emotion through tenderness to the sudden notion that everything on earth, including themselves, was uproariously funny after all. They had misunderstood each other, they decided, but there should be no misunderstanding in the future. Though they might have bickered incessantly, they were now too wise ever to bicker again.

  Presently, after an accumulation of minutes that seemed all too short, they found themselves seated side by side, once more entwined, on an upended horse-trough in the nearest slave-cabin. Both, so to speak, reached the surface at the same time.

  "I'm awfully rumpled, sort of," said Camilla. "But I want to be still more rumpled, if you see what I mean, when there's the whole night at our disposal and nobody can possibly interrupt us?"

  "I see what you mean. I will devote all efforts to that purpose."

  "Alan, what time is it?"

  When the hurried striking of a match and a quick inspection of watch-dials showed the time as twenty minutes to midnight, Camilla disentangled herself and sprang to her feet

  "We promised Dr. Fell ... or do you think it's too late?"

  "It's not too late. We're back in the real world, that's all."

  "Why does he want us at that school, of all places on earth for a midnight meeting?"

  "We can both guess, my dear. There are certain facts and realities to be looked at without gloss. They won't be pretty, I'm afraid—steady, now!—but we can't retreat to paradise until we've faced 'em."

  With this sobering thought they left the hut. They had no need of retracing their steps to the gate by which they had left these grounds the night before. Camilla thought she remembered, and succeeded in finding, another gate in the boundary wall to the south.

  Though it brought them out on the road at a point much closer to the Joel Poinsett High School, the landscape through which they moved now seemed less an unreal place than a dead one. Mist breathed higher from the earth: unvexed by any wind, torn to wisps and tatters only at their passing, but with a clammy touch which made Camilla flinch.

  Stark black and skim-milk white, windows faintly glimmering, the west side of the school-building rose up like a repository of secrets. R. Gaiddon's junk-yard lay lightless and apparently deserted.

  No dog barked; no guardian barred the way with a shotgun; no footsteps sounded but their own. They had almost reached the side door when Camilla seized Alan's arm and pointed.

  "It's dark!" she said in a whisper. "The windows of room 26 are as black as pitch. Dr. Fell spoke as though they'd gotten the place ready for what you called a party, but there doesn't seem to be a light there or anywhere else."

  "Since when, my anti-Puritan, need a dark room bother us? We're to go in, sit down, and await results. He also said, if I remember, the side door would be easy to pry open."

  It was unnecessary to pry open the door, which someone's hand pushed wide from within. Yancey Beale, faint light filtering behind him, leaned his left shoulder against the inside of the door and regarded them with a kind of jumpy nonchalance.

  "Howdy there!" said Yancey. "If y'all are thinking what I expect you're thinking, forget it! The room's not dark; it's just blacked out."

  "Blacked out?"

  "Tar paper," Yancey made illustrative gestures, "on a wooden frame fitted to the inside of each window. It's some game craftily arranged by Grand Goblin Dr. Fell or High Priest Caiaphas Ashcroft, but don't ask me what game or what's up. They phoned me at home, they insisted on my presence, so I drove over."

  "Who else is here?"

  "So far, nobody 'cept me. Come on in; join the Lost Souls' Club!"

  The corridor was dark; room 25 across the way also was dark. But the same bleak ceiling light glowed behind-the ground-glass panel in the door of room 26. Pushing open the door, Yancey propped the wedge under it and with something of a flourish ushered them in.

  "Been cleaned up some since last night," he explained, indicating the blackout on the windows. "Smell of soap and water, eh? No more blood where poor Valerie stopped a bullet. Victrola back in place, lid closed. And there's that damn saxophone still on top of the piano! In my opinion—" He stopped abruptly.

  "What is your opinion?" asked Alan. "And what's this about a Lost Souls' Club?"

  "I think I belong to it; maybe we all do." Yancey began to pace back and forth in front of the teacher's desk. "When I got here, 'bout fifteen minutes ago, I parked my car on the west side of the junkyard and walked towards the school. I was just abreast of the junkyard when I saw a woman wanderin' along the road from the direction of Maynard Hall, as uncertainly as though she couldn't make up her mind where to go.

  "Then I realized it was Madge, it was my little Madge! Without seein' me—I was in shadow—she turned around like a blind girl and started back in the direction she'd come from. If she needs aid and comfort, thinks I, ol’ Yance is the man to give 'em! I'd just opened my mouth to hail her, when who should walk out of the junk-yard but Grand Goblin Dr. Fell, with a very peculiar look about him?

  " 'Don't do it,' says he; 'don't interfere; don't add to her distress.' 'It's Madge!' says I. 'Will she be at the midnight conference too?' 'She will not,' says Dr. Fell; 'need we add to her distress either?' He told me to get along to the school, and back he went to the junk-yard without another word. What he was doing there I can't tell you, or what he meant either."

  Yancey paused.

  Already there had been a faint noise as the side door opened and closed on its air-cushion. Into room 26 lumbered Dr. Fell, hatless, carrying his stick in one hand and a leather brief-case in the other. He closed the door to the corridor. Depositing stick and brief case on the teacher's desk, he moved behind the desk and faced his companions with a long, rumbling sniff.

  "Forgive this cloak-and-dagger secrecy," he began. "We are here, madam and gentlemen, at the request of Captain Ashcroft."

  "Old Nimrod himself?" said Yancey. "Where is the mighty hunter before the Lord?"

  "He has been detained elsewhere on urgent business relating to this case. Since Captain Ashcroft says he has no wish to dc the talking, a reluctance not hitherto observable in him, he has deputized me to put before you certain facts which must be understood before we can understand anything else. I myself have little relish for the prospect It will make bitter hearing, and may explode some fireworks before we have finished. But it is necessary; we have no choice. If you will make yourselves as comfortable as possible under the circumstances . . ."

  Camilla, Yancey, and Alan sat down at three students' desks in the front row having some difficulty adjusting their legs underneath. Dr. Fell remained standing, a prey to disquiet. From his pocket he took a meerschaum pipe already filled. But he did not fight the pipe; he pointed its stem at Alan.

  "If for a moment I may (harrumph!) pursue the Socratic method, what are the most suggestive features in this affair?"

  "Who killed Henry Maynard, and tried to kill Valerie Huret? What's the explanation of the impossible murder?"

  "Tut!" Dr. Fell said with a touch of impatience. "I did not ask for the most puzzling features; I asked for the most suggestive. How and with whom did it all begin? Whose emotions touched off a chain reaction which ended in violent explosion? Whose character must we examine first of all?"

  "You mean the murderer's?"

  "I mean the victim's."

  "Are you saying," cried Camilla, "everything began with Mr. Maynard?"

  "Of course it did. However far we look back, we see Henry Maynard at the end of the vista. Let him walk across the screen of your minds as vividly as he walked in life. But the outward physic
al characteristics—spare, straight-backed figure always carefully dressed, silver hair, rather frosty blue eyes—are less revealing than the mental or emotional. He was a man of imagination and intelligence. He was a man of strong feelings usually repressed, though they could and did break out. Despite the compelling charm he could use when he needed it, he was moody and unpredictable. For at least a month, probably much longer, something had been haunting and hag-riding him. What was it?

  "Outwardly, at least, he would seem to have had few troubles. Already well-to-do in his own right, he had inherited the fortune and estate of his elder brother. He had made a success even of his hobby; academic circles held him in high esteem. Wealth, health, and admiration he had in plenty. Shall a man ask for more than these?

  "Yet he remained the reverse of happy; the haunting grew worse. Since his arrival at Maynard Hall, in fact, he had done little but work on paper at endless 'calculations' he never discussed or referred to. Is there any indication of what these calculations may have been? Well! Presumably because his daughter objected to too cloistered a life, he invited certain guests to a house-party which was to begin on Monday, May 3rd, and these guests included the two known suitors for Madge Maynard's hand. Let us note, in passing, that he once asked Madge the height and weight of both Ripton Hillboro and Yancey Beale."

  Dr. Fell paused. It was Camilla who answered, in an excitement that almost brought her to her feet.

  "Yes!" Camilla said. "I wasn't here when he asked it; it was before any of us arrived. Madge first told me in confidence, and then blurted it out in the library on Friday afternoon; I'm sure it's true. But how does that help? Whatever tormented Mr. Maynard, wasn't it something to do with Madge herself?"

  "Bull's-eye!" said Dr. Fell, whacking his knuckles on the desk. "His torment—you have used the right word— originated there. So much we have agreed all along; so much has never been denied. You, Mr. Beale, have described in some detail the famous incident under the magnolias on the night of Sunday, May 2nd. You remember?"

  "I remember," agreed Yancey.

  "Madge had been speaking to some unknown man, who broke away just before you walked in. Down from the attic came Henry Maynard, again in torment, and added confusion to a scene already confused. He was provoked to rather a curious outburst when Madge, in an outburst of her own, ended with, 'Sometimes I think it's not worth ... What did she mean by that? How did it relate to the torment of Henry Maynard?"

  "My dear Grand Goblin," Yancey raved, "I've already said I don't know, and asked you the same question. God's britches, what is all this? We're tryin' to find out what ailed the old man, but there's no evidence at all!"

  "Oh, yes, there is," said Dr. Fell.

  Putting down the pipe, he unfastened the metal catch of the brief case on the desk, opened it, and reached inside. But he did not take out any of the papers it evidently contained. Instead, picking up the meerschaum pipe, he again pointed the stem at Alan Grantham.

  "Come!" he said. "On our way to Davy's Restaurant on Friday evening, if you remember, I asked if you had any suggestion to explain Maynard's sometimes astonishing behavior. You hazarded the solution, not uncommon in Victorian novels, that Henry Maynard might not be the real Henry Maynard, but only an impostor. Though compelled to deny this as erroneous, I replied that it led directly to another thought. And this thought, surely, does much to explain his attitude towards his daughter."

  "Another thought, did you say?" cried Camilla. This time she did jump up, like an excited pupil in class. "What thought, Dr. Fell? And how in heaven's name could it affect his attitude towards his daughter?"

  Dr. Fell pointed the pipestem.

  "Because Madge is not his daughter," he said. "Henry Maynard never had a daughter. Miss Bruce; she is no more kin to him than you are. She has every right to the name of Madge Maynard, though it is not the name she was born with.

  "For now I must tell you (fiat justitia, ruat coelum) that eleven years ago that pretended father, then living in New York, fell violently in love with a sixteen-year-old girl he met at St. Dorothy's Orphanage in Queens. Madge McCall, herself an imaginative orphan, was of invaluable help at teaching younger children their lessons. But she yearned for wider horizons, as she always has. He adopted her formally; for a year he sent her to the best school in Switzerland, after which seventeen-year-old Madge accepted love on his own terms. She has been his mistress ever since, a relationship so discreetly maintained that nobody ever suspected. His passion, far from diminishing, only increased with the years. The girl herself (genuinely good-hearted, genuinely well-meaning, merely amoral) was quite reasonably happy. She might have remained happy if tragedy had not overtaken them, wrecking his life as it may well wreck hers, when nature had its way and her eye strayed towards someone else."

  19

  Startled silence held the room and lay like a spell on wits. The dim light in the ceiling shone down on a stilled metronome, on a walking-stick, and on an open brief case in front of Dr. Fell. Bumblingly Dr. Fell dropped the pipe into his pocket. Once more he reached for the brief case, but took nothing from it.

  "If you would have documentary evidence—" he began again. "However, since Madge herself has owned the truth of all this ..."

  Grotesquely bent forward, Dr. Fell blinked at Alan. He blinked at Camilla, again seated with her hands tightly clasped together. Then, after a look at Yancey Beale, he straightened up and was galvanized.

  "Mr. Beale! I regret subjecting you to this bluntness. But it was necessary; you of all people had to know! Better hear it from me, perhaps, than to hear it under circumstances still more brutal."

  "It's all right, Grand Goblin," said Yancey. "It's all right."

  He spoke in so easy and level a voice that momentarily Alan wondered. Yancey's head was turned away. Suddenly unfolding his long legs, he rose with a jack-knife kind of motion and stalked to the left of the teacher's desk, past the portable blackboard on its easel, towards the battered little piano in the corner. There he seemed to be examining the saxophone on top of the piano. Then, face completely smoothed out except for a vertical wrinkle between the eyebrows, he turned back towards Dr. Fell.

  "It's all right, Grand Goblin!" he repeated. "I hear what you say; I understand what you say. Doesn't seem to mean too much, that's all. I'm still in shock, I guess. Anyway," he burst out, "what difference does it make what I think?" He looked over at Alan. "You, old son. This business about Madge: did you suspect it?"

  "No, not for a minute! But I can see now why Captain Ashcroft called it big trouble."

  "What about you, Camilla? You guess, honey?"

  Camilla stared at her interlaced fingers.

  "No, I did not, though I should have. We all noticed something peculiar, and we were so wrong! What we kept regarding as his 'over-protectiveness' towards Madge was only . . . oh. never mind!"

  "That's what I say too, honey: never mind. I'm tryin' to get this straight. There's no pain at all—not yet, anyway—so I just want to know. Can't you loosen up and tell us, Grand Goblin? What made you think of this, for God's sake? What put you on to it?"

  Dr. Fell pondered in ruminating and cross-eyed fashion.

  "At the beginning," he replied, "it can be called little more than atmospheres, suggestions, innuendoes: what Miss Bruce has described as something peculiar. A hint of this peculiarity cloudily presented itself when 1 first met the two of them at Goliath during my winter lecture-tour. When he summoned me from New York, and talked to me in his study on Friday afternoon, the accents of peculiarity could be heard like a trumpet-blast. Whether he spoke of her or she spoke of him—either to me or to others in conversations reported to me—it was a father-and-daughter relationship more strange than any I had ever encountered.

  "No subject could be mentioned without each instantly springing to the forefront of the other's mind. It was too much; it was obsessive. They did not sound like father and daughter; they sounded like clandestine lovers with constant cause for bickering. Betraying speeches, it
is true, did not occur so frequently as to attract general notice. Their intimacy was of a full decade's duration; both could play their parts fairly well."

  "Yes," cried Camilla, "but that's what I can't get over!"

  "If it shocks you, Miss Bruce . . ."

  "It doesn't shock me, exactly, though I can't say I like it. All that difference between their ages! Such things happen, we know; for a long time, I suppose, Madge must have been so grateful to him she really thought she loved

  him. But—ten years together! How could they have hoped to get away with it?"

  "The answer," replied Dr. Fell, "is that they did get away with it. Be discreet, madam and gentlemen; be discreet, I counsel you, and the most censorious neighbor will accept you for what you seem. With your permission, however," and Dr. Fell reared up, "we will return to facts that can be established or proved.

  "In the study on Friday Henry Maynard unhesitatingly reeled off facts and figures. Madge, he said, had been bora in Paris in 1938 and baptized at the American Church in the Avenue George V. He had grown used to reeling off those 'facts,' I suspect; he never feared a challenge. When a certain girl is generally known as somebody's daughter, and in public at least behaves like one, who will have cause to question it or carry the matter further with investigation?

  "Despite the doubts in my mind, I myself might not have investigated but for the single circumstance that betrayed him. As I was leaving to go downstairs he handed me the diary kept by a young lady in 1867, dealing with the death of Commodore Maynard on the beach. Forget that diary, for the moment; it merely sent me haring In the wrong direction about murder-methods. But our good host had told me something else.

  "On my way out of the house, to watch some spirited baseball antics in the drive, I looked into the library. Over the fireplace, as I had been told, hangs a portrait of the late Mrs. Henry Maynard, born Catherine Wilkinson of Atlanta. One glance at the portrait inspired thoughts which were still boiling in these dim wits when a group of us returned to the house, discovered that a tomahawk was missing from the weapons-room, and then adjourned to the library for meditation.