The Dark of Summer

by Dean R. Koontz

  Quickly, backing against the door frame and keeping the beam of the flashlight centered on Groves' face, she said, “I know enough to have both of you tossed into jail, if I want to see that. I know that you're actors, that you were hired by my uncle to make me think that I'm losing my mind.”

  “Ben, let's get out of here,” Penny said.

  “Shut up,” he told her.

  “Ben—”

  “Shut up!”

  Gwyn said, “I know that the whole thing was a set-up in order to put me over the edge and get me declared incompetent by a court. Uncle Will needs money, and my inheritance runs past ten million dollars. When I turn twenty-one, in a few months, I should take over its management; but if I'm committed to a mental hospital, someone will have to be appointed guardian and manager of the estate. Who else but Uncle Will?”

  “Ben?” Penny called.

  He ignored her altogether now, and he took another couple of steps toward Gwyn. His expression was not at all that of a chastened man, but full of bitterness and a dark determination.

  “It's over with, don't you understand?” she asked.

  “You can't hurt us if you're dead,” Ben Groves said. He was very nearly on top of her now.

  “You wouldn't hurt me.”

  “Wouldn't I?”

  “Ben, don't do it, please don't,” Penny said, following after him, pleading.

  Gwyn said, “Don't you see that if you kill me, you'd just be making things worse for yourself? You'd be liable for murder, then, not merely for conspiracy to drive me mad, or to defraud me or whatever. Besides, my death wouldn't help you at all.” She was amazed at her own intense calm, the way the words spilled out of her as if she were just talking about the weather and not about her life, which hung in the balance. She said, “My estate would be tied up in court for years. If the state didn't take every last penny of it, and if by some far-out chance Uncle Will ended up with the leftovers, inheritance taxes would have reduced it by more than half, by as much as sixty percent.”

  “So what?” Groves asked. “As far as I'm concerned, five million is as good as ten.”

  Beginning to see that he might not be bluffing, that he might mean the threat, she said, “You stay away from me, do you hear? I'm warning you!”

  He laughed, his face an ugly mask in the beam of the flashlight. He might be acting, trying to frighten her again, but she did not think that he was.

  “Ben, what are you going to do?” Penny asked, sounding all alone and desperate.

  “He's going to kill me,” Gwyn said. She realized that the wife was a potential ally now. “He's going to get you both sent to prison.”

  “Ben—”

  As much to himself as to his wife, Ben Groves said, “If she was to fall down the stairs and break her neck, no one would have to know that it was murder.” As he spoke, he did not remove his eyes from Gwyn, and he took another step in her direction; in a few moments, he would be close enough to grab hold of her… He said, “It would be a nice, clean accident, a very sad thing to have happened, but something that could be in no way construed as an accident. I could even say that she'd been screaming about seeing a ghost and being visited by her dead sister just before she fell, and then all of this charade we've been through wouldn't go unrewarded. Dr. Cotter could testify that she'd had some hallucinations; since he's not in on this, he'd make a very good, very reliable, very convincing witness. There'd be no risk to us…”

  “Don't touch me,” Gwyn said.

  “You can't hurt her,” Penny said. She had been willing to drive the girl mad. However, the idea of spilling blood repulsed her. Madness was a quiet illness, an invisible one that could be forgotten in short order by those who had caused it; a broken neck, on the other hand, was the kind of thing nightmares were made of.

  “Stop him, Penny,” Gwyn said.

  “Stay out of this, Penny!” Groves said.

  “You'll go to prison, both of you, no matter who throws me down the steps,” Gwyn warned.

  In that instant, Groves leaped forward, grabbed her, and pulled her out into the hall.

  The flashlight slipped out of her hand as, too late, she realized it might have made a good weapon to use against him. It dropped to the floor and rolled lazily against the far wall, making no noise at all on the carpet, but casting huge and eerie shadows all around them, making this the haunted house they'd tried to convince her that it was.

  Gwyn felt his hands go for her throat.

  She tucked her chin down.

  He forced her head up and got a grip on her neck, just the same.

  She wrestled furiously, trying to break free, but she found that he was even stronger than he looked, all muscles that were more than a match for her, even with her special strength that fear gave her.

  She kicked his shins, hard.

  He growled, and his face was contorted with pain; but he did not let go of her, nor did his grasp slacken.

  “Ben, don't hurt her!”

  Listen to her, Gwyn pleaded.

  His hands clutched her with a more brutal determination than Penny's hands had shown when the actress had been playing Ginny's ghost earlier in the evening. Gwyn felt dizzy and nauseous, and she didn't know how soon she would black out and be at his mercy.

  She kicked at his shins again.

  “Damn you!” he snarled.

  She twisted, bucked, tried to wriggle away from him.

  Frustrated with her, he pulled her around, rushed her backward and slammed her up against the corridor wall, effectively cutting down her freedom of movement.

  Then, miraculously, Penny was there beside them, pulling at his right arm, trying to make him give up a useless battle, trying to give Gwyn an opportunity to break away.

  Groves was beside himself now, and he was in no mood to be dissuaded, not even by Penny. He said, “Get away from me, damn you.”

  “I won't let you hurt her!”

  “Get away, damn you, you bitch!”

  Though she was clearly stunned by the expletive, she did not let go of him, but continued scratching his arm with her long nails, cutting bright red streaks in his thick biceps.

  Suddenly, he let go of Gwyn with one hand, swung that hand and struck his wife across the face.

  She fell down.

  Now that he was holding her against the wall with only his left hand, Gwyn realized that this was her last best chance of escape, and she put out a burst of effort, kicking and clawing and even biting him, until she suddenly broke from his grasp and ran.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  She made for the back steps.

  “Ben, let her go!” Penny shouted.

  But he came after her.

  She felt his hands grasping at her pajama blouse.

  She leaped sideways, ran on, reached the steps and went down them, fast, so fast that she thought she'd surely fall and kill herself, just as he had pretended to do on the main steps.

  At the bottom of the dark steps, as Groves started down from the top, Gwyn made use of the pantry again, as she had before when she'd made them think she'd gone out of the house, when she heard them talking together by the back door. She hoped that this similar ruse would work; if it did not, she was finished.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Just as Gwyn pulled the pantry door shut, leaving only a tiny crack to see out of, Ben Groves came off the stairs and into the kitchen, standing directly in front of her, breathing hard. His back was to her, and he was studying the shadows in the main room, to see if she were cowering in any of them. He seemed to have forgotten about the food cupboard in the wall behind him.

  She hoped his bad memory didn't get any better.

  “Ben, where are you?” Penny said, as she came out of the stairwell after him. She saw him, went to him and took hold of his arm. She said, “Won't you please let her go?”

  He said, “I can't.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “I've got to find her.”

  “Ben, listen to reason.�
�

  He said, “You're the one who's unreasonable. If that kid gets away, we not only lose any chance at the money, but she can identify us, and we'll both end up in jail.”

  “Maybe she won't press charges.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Even if she does press charges,” Penny argued, “they won't give us more than a year or so. That's not long.”

  “That's forever,” he disagreed,

  “With good behavior—”

  “I'd go insane in a prison,” he said.

  Gwyn thought, from her hidden perch inside the pantry, that prison, then, would be ironically just punishment for him, after he had spent so much time to make her think she was losing her mind.

  “You're just overwrought now—” Penny began.

  He said, “You've also forgotten what it's going to be like to face Barnaby if that girl escapes.”

  “He'll have to suffer with the rest of us.”

  “That's hardly likely,” Groves informed her. “He's too powerful a man, for one thing. And, for another, don't you remember the story of him hiring that guy to burn down that house, so he could force a man to sell the land?”

  “So?”

  “You seriously believe that a man like Barnaby, a man who has resorted to that kind of force in the past, would take what was coming to him? Of course he wouldn't. He'd cover his tracks so fast that we wouldn't have a chance.”

  “You mean he'd hurt us?”

  He laughed bitterly. “Hell, love, I wouldn't be surprised if he took it in his mind to kill us.”

  “Oh, God, what a mess,” Penny said.

  “And my way is the only way out of it,” he said.

  “Killing her.”

  Groves said, “Yes.”

  “I didn't think it would come to this.”

  “But it has.” He patted her shoulder and said, “Don't worry, love. I can handle it so that it'll look like an accident. We're going to come out of this smelling like roses.”

  Reluctantly, but finally convinced, Penny said, “Okay, kill her. But I don't want to have anything to do with this; I don't want to have nightmares about it for the rest of my life. I don't want any of the responsibility, and I don't want to have to watch you when you — when you kill her.”

  Gwyn would have laughed at this hypocrisy if her laughter wouldn't have given her away.

  Groves said, “I've got to call Barnaby—”

  “Why?” New fear replaced the note of resignation in Penny's voice.

  He said, “He should be home to handle the aftermath of all of this. He'll be better prepared to take care of the cleaning up than I will, because he has more contacts. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell him what's gone wrong. With a little bit of luck, I'll catch the kid and have this over with before he gets here.”

  “What can I do, anything?” Penny asked.

  Gwyn knew, now, that there was no chance of using Penny as an ally in the future.

  “Come along with me, to the study,” Groves said. “You can stay there when I'm done with Barnaby, and you can make sure she doesn't use the study phone. She's probably already been on the house phone, somewhere, and found that doesn't work. She'll think of the study line soon.”

  Groves and his wife left the kitchen and entered the corridor, the swinging door squeaking shut behind them.

  Gwyn waited where she was, wondering if he might be playing a trick, if he suspected she was nearby and intended to come back through that door without warning.

  A minute passed.

  Then another.

  At last, feeling somewhat safer, she came out of the pantry and went to the back door, opened that and stepped outside, closed the door behind her, all without making a sound.

  When she had heard Groves say that the main house telephones were out of order, her spirits had sunk to a new low, for she had intended to get to an extension and dial the police the moment she was free to leave the pantry. Now, that course of action was lost to her, and she had a bad moment as she thought that they were too clever for her, that they had thought of absolutely everything.

  But that wasn't true.

  They hadn't thought of the pantry.

  Her spirits boosted again. And, she hoped, they hadn't thought of the three cars in the garage, either. They had expected her to lose her senses tonight, to totter over the brink, beyond help, beyond reason. Perhaps it had not occurred to them to bother disabling the cars; who, after all, would expect a madwoman to proceed rationally to the garage, pull up the door, look for the keys on the ledge where they were kept, and be off…?

  No one would.

  She hoped.

  She stepped off the rear patio, then thought better of exposing herself on the open lawn; she recalled how clearly Ben and Penny had stood out against the dark grass when she had been inside watching them. She went back to the wall, and began to circle the house, staying flat against it, crouching to crawl beneath any window that rose up in her path. In a few minutes, she reached the first study window, where warm yellow light spilled out onto the grass, and she felt a curious temptation to peer inside, to spy on her enemies once more.

  That would be foolish, she told herself. She might rise up to look inside — and come face-to-face with Penny or Groves, who would be looking out for her…

  But the temptation to be one up on them was too great to resist. She edged up to the window and cautiously lifted her head to peek in over the sill.

  No one was looking her way.

  Ben was standing beside the desk, holding the phone to his ear and talking animatedly. Apparently, he had her dear Uncle William on the line right now.

  Penny sat in the swivel chair behind the desk, staring straight ahead at the bookshelves, as if she were mesmerized.

  Gwyn realized, watching Penny, that though these people had come frightfully close to driving her out of her mind, and though Ben had nearly killed her, they were not professionals at this sort of thing, as they were on the stage.

  The odds were not, she saw, so heavily weighted in favor of the Groves. Indeed, because her life depended on her success in getting away, and because they were not fighting for their lives, the odds actually might favor her.

  Smiling for the first time in a long time, she ducked down again, crept under the window, and went on toward the garage.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  At ten minutes past midnight, William Barnaby tipped the waiter another dollar for leading him to the proper phone again, then slid into the booth, closed the door, glanced around to make sure no one was lingering close at hand, and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “You've got to come home.”

  “Groves?”

  “It's me.”

  “What are you saying?'

  “Come home straightaway.”

  Barnaby bristled at the implication of disaster, and he said, “What has gone wrong out there?”

  “It's not so bad as you think.”

  “How do you know what I think?” Barnaby roared.

  “Look, I think you should be here.”

  “What about Gwyn?”

  “That's why I called.”

  “Did everything go all right?”

  “Almost.”

  “Almost?” Barnaby asked, incredulous. “This wasn't the sort of situation where it could be 'almost' right. It was work or fail!”

  “Just come on home,” Groves said.

  “I won't—”

  “And be fast!”

  He hung up on Barnaby.

  “Hello?”

  The empty line hissed at him.

  “Groves?”

  But Groves, of course, was not there to answer.

  Barnaby slammed the receiver down in its cradle and sat there in the booth for a moment longer, trembling, thinking furiously. The trick was to get home as soon as he could, but to do it without making either Edgar or Lydia Aimes curious. Edgar was not a strictly honest businessman. He would tolerate the use of a man like Paul Morby,
in special cases, if there were enough money to be made to justify violence — but he would never tolerate something like what they'd intended to do to Gwyn… He must never know about it. And, of course, Lydia would tolerate neither Morby nor what had been done to Gwyn, making this a touchy situation.

  Two minutes passed before he got up out of the booth and went back into the crowded cocktail lounge. All night, Lydia had wanted to leave, and only his and Elaine's insistence kept them there. She was going to think it strange indeed that he presented such an about-face, without warning and on the heels of another phone call.

  By the time he reached their table, however, he thought he knew how to bring it off. He sat down and picked up his drink, took a sip of it and said to Elaine, “It was just Ben. Seems Gwyn wasn't able to eat, and now she can't sleep.”

  She picked it up beautifully. “Is she having any more of her — hallucinations?”

  “Not really,” he said. “But Ben's worried about her not being able to sleep. She just tosses and turns, he says.”

  “I think we ought to go home,” Elaine said.

  “She'll be all right,” Barnaby said.

  “She's been a fairly sick young girl.”

  “There's no need to break up the evening,” he said.

  Lydia, seeing an end to the night and anxious for it, said, “I think Elaine's right. From what she's told me about Gwyn, the girl might be on the verge of a relapse.”

  “She was fine all day.”

  “But you can't tell about these things,” Aimes said. His concern was not part of his wife's, for he had also seen through Barnaby's deception, and he realized there was some crisis brewing. He probably thought it had something to do with Morby. But whatever the cause of it, he was anxious to give Barnaby a chance to leave.

  “Well, it looks like you're all against me.” He tossed off the rest of his drink and said, “Let's call it a night.”

  They paid the check and went to the lounge where the men separated to get the women's coats,

  At the coat rack, Edgar said, “Morby?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Don't lock me out. This could mean my neck as much as yours.”