The Dark of Summer
Page 21
“You're not involved,” Barnaby said. Then he took Elaine her coat, waited to walk to the parking lot with the Aimeses. Both couples had brought their cars, and they separated, at last, to board them.
“What is it?” Elaine said, when they got into her sportscar.
“Whatever it is, it's bad,” he told her. “Let's not waste any time getting home.”
TWENTY-NINE
Gwyn rolled up the first garage door, where the Rolls Royce was kept, stepped inside, walked to the tool cabinet bolted against the lefthand wall, and felt along the top of it for the keys, where she had learned that everyone in the house kept them.
There were no keys there.
Confused, she ran her hand back again, but still found nothing.
“We're one step ahead of you, dear,” Ben Groves said, from the open garage door.
She whirled in time to see him step over the threshold toward her, his big body blocking all escape along that side of the car.
She turned, ran, rounded the nose of the Rolls and stopped to see what he was doing.
“A game of tag, is it?” he asked.
He had not rounded the front of the car after her, but stood across from her, the hood between them. He was smiling, as the safety light in the wire fixture overhead showed her.
“I won't prosecute you,” she said.
“You say that now.”
“I never intended to. I was just going to tell you that I knew what had been done, then I was going to pack and go away.”
“What a story,” he said, shaking his head and grinning. “Didn't anyone ever tell you not to lie?”
“I'm not lying.”
“Of course.” But he clearly did not believe her.
She turned and ran toward the open garage door, aware that he was running too, on the other side of the car.
She came out into open air, felt him take hold of her, screamed, wrenched herself loose and ran.
“Bitch!” he cried.
She ran toward the fountain, darted around it, put the four marble cherubs between her and Groves.
He came up on the other side, no longer smiling, his face set in a hard mask, his eyes hooded, his big hands flexing and unflexing and flexing again. He seemed to have decided that there had been too much chasing and that the time for the final catch was now.
“You getting tired, are you?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“You will, shortly.”
She said nothing.
“I think it'll be over the cliff with you.”
She shuddered.
“That ought to be quick and neat. Well, quick anyway. And it'll look like an accident, which is the most important thing.”
“You'll never get away with it.”
“Don't start that old song again,” he said.
“It's the truth.”
“There is no truth.”
“I think you're the one who's mad, now,” Gwyn said, watching him carefully, ready to circle the fountain if he should start around it in her direction.
“Not mad, just canny,” he said. “There's a vast difference between wisdom and insanity, though the two often look alike.”
Without warning, he leaped into the reflecting pool of the fountain and took three splashing steps straight for her before she realized what he was doing.
Again, she ran, harder this time, aware that he was right behind her and that, if she stumbled or hesitated for even a moment, he would be onto her and he would finish her.
She could hear his heaving breath and the pounding of his feet as he came up closer behind her. She ran back toward the garage, turned the corner and saw Penny coming out of the front door. She veered away from the woman and put her head down, trying to run even faster. Without thinking, in the darkness, she almost ran over the edge of the cliff; it loomed up, marked only by a few rocks which had been daubed with white paint, and she stopped just in time.
Whirling, she found that Groves had stopped a dozen steps away, and that he had her trapped. No matter whether she ran north or south, she would be paralleling the cliff and could easily be pushed off. She did not kid herself that she could run at him and squeeze by. He was too alert for that, now.
“Dead end, isn't it?” he said.
Abruptly, the sound of a racing automobile engine cut through the still night air, and the twin headlamps of a small car appeared on the drive, heading toward the house.
“You can't kill me now,” Gwyn said.
“Oh?”
“Someone's coming. They'll see!”
He smiled again, and he said, “It's only your favorite uncle, my dear. And surely you know that if I don't heave you over, he'll do the job himself.”
She turned to the right and then the left, looking desperately for some escape, when there was no escape, when all her options had been used up. It was then she felt him rushing toward her…
She fell flat and cried out to be saved.
As if in answer to her cry, the big man lost his balance, lunging for her where she no longer was. Then the air was rent with his own longdrawn, hideous scream, and he pitched out into emptiness, past the edge of the cliff, tumbling all the long way down to the rocks and the sand below.
Dazed by how quickly all of this was happening, Gwyn pushed up to her knees, then to her feet, and walked clumsily away from the brink. She saw Penny standing by the garage, her hands raised to her face to stifle her own screams, which she was not managing to do. She also saw Elaine and Will getting out of the sportscar, and by the expression on her uncle's face, she knew that she could not return to the house.
She turned and ran for the steps that led to the beach, ignoring whatever Elaine called out to her.
At the top of the steps, she risked a glance backward, then wished that she had not, for she saw that Will Barnaby was dangerously close and that he would most likely catch her before she had gotten a third of the way down the steps. If he did, then with one hard shove…
She turned and started down, just in time to collide with Jack Younger, the elder, and the couple of dozen fishermen who were on the steps behind him.
The big man grabbed her and steadied her. “What in the name of God is happening up here?” he asked, having just witnessed, from the beach, Ben Groves deadly fall.
She tried to speak.
She couldn't.
Instead, she fell against him, hugging him as if he'd been close to her all her life, and she sobbed so hard that her stomach began to ache and her tears soaked his shirt.
She woke from a nightmare and sat straight up in bed, gasping for breath and calling for help in a tiny voice. Her fear was not abated when she realized that it had all been a dream, for she was in a strange place and could not remember how she'd gotten there.
Then, Louis Plunkett's pretty young wife opened the door and came in, looking worried, and Gwyn recalled the entire thing: the horror of the previous night, Ben Groves' death, being rescued by the fishermen, the police, the sheriff, the kind offer to stay here through the following few days… She had refused Plunkett at first, but had given in when she realized she could not bear to stay in Barnaby Manor, and that she would have to stick around at least until formal charges had been placed against Elaine, Will, and Penny Nashe-Groves. They had gotten here quite late, after four in the morning, and she'd not been asleep until about five, near dawn.
“What time is it?” she asked Ellen Plunkett.
“You slept through lunch, and it's nearly suppertime, a quarter past five,” the slight, freckled woman told her. “But you needed every minute of it.”
“I guess I did.”
Ellen sat down on the edge of her bed and said, “I heard you cry out. Are you okay?”
“I was having a nightmare.”
“Those will fade away,” the slim woman said. “Also, I thought you might want to know what your uncle's admitted to.”
She nodded.
“It seems he met Ben and Penny Groves in London, when he and Elaine were the
re on vacation, saw her in a new stage show. The show, he says, was rotten, but the girl looked so like you that he got the idea for this hoax. Anyway, he'd known about your parents' deaths from the start, and he'd also known about your bout with emotional illness, about your Dr. Recard and everything.”
“How?” Gwyn asked, amazed.
“He read about your parents deaths in the newspapers, despite what he told you,” Mrs. Plunkett said. “And from that time on, he had you followed by a private detective agency. At least, Louis says it was that way.”
“That's absurd!”
“Not particularly,” the slim woman said. “Remember, you had a fortune coming to you, and he was your last living relative. Naturally, the situation gave him ideas, though he couldn't pinpoint a plan of action — not until he saw Penny Nashe. He talked to the Groves, found they were down on their luck, and talked them into taking on the job. Mrs. Groves underwent limited plastic surgery on her face, to make her look even more like you, and then your uncle wrote you that letter.”
“Weren't Fritz and Grace in on it?” Gwyn asked.
“Yes. They're friends of the Groves. I believe Grace is Penny's aunt, or something like that.”
“One other thing,” Gwyn said. “Penny knew things about my childhood that even I'd forgotten.” She explained about the Teckert boy.
“That's easily explained,” Ellen said. “When Mr. Barnaby knew you were having emotional problems, he paid his detectives to raid Dr. Recard's files. They found a copy of your diary there, which you'd given the doctor for study, and they copied it. Penny could have used a wealth of information that you'd written years ago, but which you'd forgotten yourself.”
“But why go to all this trouble?” Gwyn asked.
“Your fortune, as I understand it, would be enough to make a lot of people go to even more trouble. And your uncle was in very bad financial straights, both from high living and bad investments.”
“So it's over now,” Gwyn said, sighing.
“Yes, it is,” Ellen Plunkett said. “But there's a third reason I've come upstairs to see you.” She smiled mischievously. “There's a boy downstairs who wants to talk to you. He says he's treated you rather poorly and that he wants to apologize. But I think he's here for more than that, because he mentioned something about you and him going into Calder to take in a movie.”
“Jack Younger?” she asked.
“That's right.”
“I've got to shower and dress,” Gwyn said. “He probably won't want to wait. I'll need an hour or—” She kicked back the covers and got up so suddenly she startled Ellen Plunkett. “Tell him I'll shower and dress fast and be down in fifteen minutes. If there's one thing I could use now, it's a good movie. I sure hope it's a funny one.”
The End
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