Blood upon the Snow

by Hilda Lawrence

  Perrin came in with Amos and the Taits. They were panting. “All over,” Perrin said. “Wilcox can manage without us now.”

  Violet crept out of her chair.

  “Come here,” Mark said. “Are you all in one piece?”

  She got as far as the sofa before her knees gave way and she collapsed on Bessy’s lap. It wasn’t hard to see what she was thinking. Perrin, Perrin, Perrin. Possibly, even Lord Perrin.

  Mark looked at the man and forced himself to think of him as Oliver. “I’d like to ask you a question, but you needn’t answer unless you want to. How much did he get from you?”

  “He’s had fifty thousand. He was to get two hundred more when we reached New York.”

  Beulah pawed the air. “Blackmail! Bigamy! Murder! That good-looking man! I’m having one of my nightmares. Either wake me up or explain.”

  “And who is who?” complained Bessy, shifting under Violet’s weight. “You’re heavy, dear. Do sit on the floor like a good girl. . . . I can’t place little Ivy.”

  “Ivy,” Laura said thickly, “is Ivy Oliver. I’d have fought this thing if it hadn’t been for Ivy. You see, according to law, she is illegitimate.” She began to cry. “But that’s not all. He talked about kidnapping too. First he’d say how sorry he was for Ivy, how she’d be better off dead. Then he’d talk about kidnapping. He’d ask me if I’d read certain cases, and he’d tell me about them, and I’d have to cover my ears.” She raised hopeless eyes to Mark. “I was afraid I’d never see her again. I thought of all the other pitiful babies who have died that way. But you must believe me—if I’d known how Mrs. Lacey and Florrie would pay for my silence I’d have defied him. But I didn’t know until it was too late.”

  Oliver bent over her. “Tell it all,” he said. “We’ve been running away too long. Tell it all and then it can’t hurt you again.”

  Beulah’s thin claw fumbled for a handkerchief. “I’m beginning to get the point,” she said. “I’m—sorry.”

  “Go on,” Oliver urged Laura gently. “Get it out of your mind. All of these people have helped you and they have the right to know.”

  “The—children? Mr. East said—”

  “They’re with Mrs. Wilcox, snug as a bug in a rug.” Mark smiled reassuringly.

  She straightened her shoulders and a faint colour crept into her face. “My husband wasn’t fit to live,” she said. “I left him when Anne was two years old and went to live in England. I had no near relatives and I had money of my own. You know what happened there. Just as I was ready to start divorce proceedings I had a letter from Mr. Stoneman. It came from Florida. He was an old friend of my husband’s. I’d never known anything against him and had no reason to doubt him. He told me Jim was dead and enclosed a clipping, a clipping that proved I was a widow. Of course I believed it. I dropped the divorce action at once. I married. Then six months later, that day in Paris, I did two things. First I went to a gynæcologist. He told me I was going to have a child. Then I went to the bank. I saw Jim’s writing on a letter. He had sent it to my London house, addressed to Mrs. James Morey, and it had been forwarded. . . . Shall I tell what was in the letter?”

  “Go on,” Oliver said.

  “He told me Mr. Stoneman had made one of his classical errors. The man he had identified as Jim was a tramp wearing clothes Jim had given him. He told me how it had happened. He said he had left Mr. Stoneman in Citrus City and gone on a fishing trip. He stayed away longer than he had planned. While Mr. Stoneman was waiting for him he read about the unidentified man. He said Mr. Stoneman was worried and went to see the body. He said he didn’t know anything about it until he returned several days later and Mr. Stoneman told him he had written me. They were both horrified, he said. They decided to say nothing. Then later he changed his mind. He was afraid I might remarry, illegally. He hoped I understood. . . . I understood perfectly! He waited until I had been married six months before he wrote that letter! And—he asked me to take him back.”

  “Where is the letter now?” Mark asked.

  “In my safe-deposit box in New York.”

  “That’s where you should have kept the clipping.”

  “I know that now. But I kept it with me because it was the only vindication I had. I used to—read it over and over. I was looking at it the day before—Florrie died. He’d just asked me for two hundred thousand dollars. I told him I’d have to think it over. But I knew I’d give it to him. He promised to go away and never see me again. When he left my room I put the clipping on my dressing table. It must have fallen in the basket. I don’t know. When I went to look for it, it was gone. And the basket was empty. He was wild when I told him. I know now that he was afraid someone would find it and start talking. But he told me he was worried for my sake.”

  Mark looked at Oliver. “Did you ever suspect that accident was part of a brutal hoax?”

  “Certainly. And so did Laura. But we couldn’t prove it then and I doubt if you can even now. Morey did things too well. I believe there actually was a tramp and that Morey got the poor devil drunk and happy before he deliberately ran him down. Or persuaded Stoneman to run him down, with half the blackmail money as a reward. Manslaughter, and he never let Stoneman forget it. I think Stoneman wrote the letter to Laura with manslaughter hanging over his head and a hundred thousand dollars in his dreams. Morey made a point of ragging Stoneman about his driving. He’d do it while I was in the room. Then when I left I’d hear Stoneman whimper and Morey laugh. But Stoneman always remembered the money and recovered. Morey was insane, but Stoneman was a devil.”

  Amos coughed unhappily. “I don’t like to butt in and I’m not criticizing anybody who’s had trouble, but why didn’t you call his bluff in the beginning?”

  “Ivy is the reason. At first we could think of nothing but the rotten publicity. But soon we faced a graver danger. Kidnapping. He was too smart to threaten openly. You see he was still protesting his innocence. But he planted the possibility in Laura’s mind. He constantly referred to a famous case in which wealth and position were powerless. I told her it was a bluff, but later we both knew he was equal to it. Once he locked Ivy in a closet and we couldn’t find her for hours. Twice he overturned her pram. You”—he turned to Mark—“you’ve seen him knock her about in the snow. When she was a year old her wrist was broken. We never knew how it happened, but we could guess. Laura told Anne she must never leave Ivy alone. We couldn’t give her a reason. That was a dreadful burden for a child to carry, but I’ll make it up to her someday. . . . Can you understand our terror and silence now?”

  Mark remembered two little girls with their hands in his and grimly smiled his answer. “What did you do after you got that letter?”

  “Laura took Anne from her school and went to Switzerland.”

  “Wait a minute. Was that school in the Basque country?”

  “Yes.” Oliver looked puzzled. “Why?”

  “She was playing a version of the national game with snowballs. I pumped her and she was frightened. . . . Sorry. Go on.”

  “I went on the same train but in another compartment. We didn’t want Anne to see me. We’d already decided that after the baby was born we’d go to the States and try to find a solution there. I couldn’t go as—myself, but I had to be with them. So I joined them in New York as a servant.”

  Violet forgot herself and patted his knee. He thanked her gravely.

  “At the Swiss border I left Laura and Anne and went back to London. I told my patients and hospital that I was called away on His Majesty’s business. Then I confided in the one person I could trust, Colonel Davenport. My mother was an American and he was an old friend of hers. He fixed me up with a passport in the name of George Perrin. I don’t know how he did it and I’ll never ask. He also provided unimpeachable references. He got those from his friends by hinting at counter-espionage and swearing them to secrecy. It’s an amazing list. One of my most enthusiastic sponsors is an elderly duke who hasn’t spoken to me for years . . . In the meantime Lau
ra told Anne she was going to adopt a baby. We had to prepare the way somehow. And she told her they were going to see her father. Anne didn’t remember her father. She’d been told he was ill. It’s an odd thing, but when she met him she hated him on sight. Then about three months before Ivy was born Laura put Anne in a convent and went away to meet her trouble alone.”

  Wilcox came in silently and took a chair. Nobody noticed him.

  “Once in the States,” Oliver went on, “we moved from place to place, always trailed by Morey and Stoneman. They kept up the fiction. Their lives were ruined, they said. Their lives! We made the mistake of paying at first. Then we stopped. Laura told him she was ready to take the case to court. He retaliated with the kidnapping suggestion and proceeded to show us how easily it could be done. I knew then that nothing would stop him. Laura was losing her mind. We dropped the plans for legal prosecution and paid again. At the same time I wrote Davenport and asked him to recommend a secluded place. I think I was subconsciously planning to kill Morey. Davenport offered us this place and a house in Maryland. I chose this, for greater privacy. We still thought we could handle things. We thought we’d find a way out. That others would suffer never occurred to us.”

  Amos leaned over Oliver’s shoulder and whispered.

  “Train?” Oliver said. “No, we’ll put up at the hotel to-night. I want to see some people to-morrow. Obligations.”

  “I’m sorry he’s dead,” Beulah said. “I want to kill him myself. He threatened me with a hatchet once, remember? The day you came here.”

  “I remember.” Oliver smiled. “So—we came here. Morey and Stoneman began to quarrel. I think Stoneman wasn’t getting his share and threatened to talk. That’s one reason why he was killed. The others were Morey’s greed and Stoneman’s very open reaction to Mr. East’s chatter about Citrus City. Morey saw that and Stoneman knew it. He figured it was time to play on our side. He knew he was the only person in the world who could prove we had been victimized. And he’d get more out of Laura than he would out of Morey. At the worst, a reduced sentence for turning state’s evidence; at the best, a small fortune.”

  Wilcox coughed unhappily. His face was serious and troubled.

  “Plenty of people are going to think you and your wife are directly responsible for these deaths, Dr. Oliver. I can understand why you didn’t go to the police in the first place, anybody with kids can understand that. But why didn’t you come to me after Mrs. Lacey’s death?”

  “The night Mrs. Lacey died I thought of Morey and Stoneman at once. But it seemed too fantastic. I had no proof, no motive. Then when you and the coroner both called it an accident I wrote my suspicions off as nerves. When Florrie was murdered I knew she must have found the clipping, in spite of her denials; and I knew Morey or Stoneman had done it. I told Laura so. It was too late to help Florrie, but Laura faced Morey with it. She told him she was going to the police. He told her it was Stoneman. He asked her to give him a few more days, only time enough to get Stoneman away and out of the country. She refused. Then he picked up a miniature of Ivy and looked at it. He didn’t say anything; he smiled. But she thought what he intended her to think. So she agreed.”

  He reached over and took both of Laura’s hands in his. “When he told my wife about Florrie,” he said quietly, “she tried to jump from her window. He pulled her back. She was too valuable to lose. She is ashamed because some of you heard her screaming. . . . She tore her fingers on the window latch and broke one of the panes. You can see the marks.”

  He held up her hands. Mark remembered that day.

  The Taits blew their noses and huddled in their capes.

  “We believed Morey when he said it was Stoneman. And when Stoneman disappeared it looked like a confession. Perhaps we shouldn’t have given them those days of grace, but we were bargaining for Ivy’s life then. . . . I know that if we had never come here, if we had turned them over to the police in the beginning, Mrs. Lacey and Florrie would be living too. But we couldn’t read the future. And if Mr. East had come to my wife with his suspicions about Mrs. Lacey’s death we could have stopped the slaughter there. But neither could he read the future and his reticence is understandable.”

  Wilcox nodded in agreement. He saw too clearly his own signature on Mrs. Lacey’s death certificate. It was nobody’s fault, he told himself. It was a devil’s web. He liked the sound of that and said it over and over in his mind. A devil’s web.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Did you see Mr. Morey heave that rock through the nursery window?”

  “No. But he did it. It was a warning to Laura that he meant business and as usual it was successful. She promised him the two hundred thousand that night.”

  “Didn’t he ever suspect—you?”

  “No. Laura told him I’d deserted her. He was happy about that.”

  The Taits came forward to say good-bye. Their courtly bows and clicking heels brought a thoughtful look to Bessy’s face. That sister of their’s wasn’t the only woman in the world who could air flannels. She tore down and rebuilt her house while they cast regretful and admiring looks at their own shattered masterpiece.

  “Don’t touch!” warned Wilcox. “We’ve got to photograph it. It’s evidence.”

  Oliver walked with the Taits to the front door. When he returned he beckoned to Mark and Wilcox. Amos trailed them across the room to the window. Oliver drew back the curtains.

  Two processions were moving into the drive from opposite directions; two groups of men, each with a covered stretcher and lantern-bearers. They converged and walked slowly toward their destination. Further down, the lights of a parked ambulance pierced the trees. As they drew abreast of the Taits, the old men stood aside and uncovered their heads.

  Nobody spoke.

  Oliver dropped the curtain.

  They had all drawn their chairs close together. Oliver brought a small table and drinks. Nobody wanted to leave.

  Wilcox and Amos were waiting for the photographer. Mark was waiting for them. Bessy and Beulah were waiting for Mark and hoping to hear more. Violet was in a trance and waiting for anything. Wilcox promised to drive her home. The Olivers refused to leave until the house was finally closed.

  A surly youth put his head in the door and waved a grimy paper.

  “Scott’s,” he said hoarsely. “You gotta get out and I gotta lock up.”

  “Listen,” advised Wilcox. “We’ve had a little trouble here and we’re late. You begin at the bottom and work up, then begin at the top and work down. When you get to the middle, we’ll be done.”

  The youth vanished.

  Bessy plunged. “Beulah says Mr. Morey left me a present. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. . . . What is it?”

  “It’s too young for you,” Mark said.” It’s already been donated to the Orphanage, for medicinal purposes. You can look for an epidemic any day now.”

  “You have a nasty mind,” Beulah said affectionately. “I suppose you’re the one who turned off the furnace this afternoon and hid the light bulbs.”

  “I did it,” Mark said regretfully, “but I was only a tool. Wilcox dreamed that one up. He said a dim and chilly atmosphere would provide the graveyard touch. It was nice, wasn’t it? Amos yearned to play the harp offstage, but we sat on that.”

  Beulah sent Amos a look full of pity and insult and turned to Mark. “I suppose you had to leave that body in the snowman until you could take it out with witnesses.”

  “You’re catching on. We’ll make it Pond and East.”

  Scott’s man reappeared, scowling at his grimy paper. “It says horse here,” he accused.

  “Not here, pal,” Mark said. “In the stables.”

  “Oh.” He lowered his voice. “Hey. Is it true what they say out there? They say some feller went crazy and killed twelve people.”

  “No,” Mark said. “Only three. And it wasn’t a feller. It was a woman.” He pointed to Beulah. She bared her teeth. Scott’s man disappeared again, with a look that suggested permanence.


  “I don’t know yet how you located Stoneman’s body,” Oliver said.

  “The answer to that one came out of the mouths of babes.” He told them about the eyelashes. “Anne wasn’t watching me, so I dug farther. He was bludgeoned to death. The poker, I think. Morey played constantly with the poker that night, stabbing the coals. Removing the traces. Then the other babe, young Floyd Wilcox, rounded out the story. We couldn’t have tied it to Morey without young Floyd. You remember his antics at Florrie’s funeral? Crawling on his stomach and swinging from tree to tree? He was following you and Morey when he did it. I collared him later and asked him why. Then he confessed that he and his pal paid us a second visit the night Stoneman disappeared. There was nobody home to keep tabs on them. They prowled around here from one o’clock on. They had a wonderful time frightening themselves until three o’clock and then they started back to Bear River. Over in that grove where the children play they saw Morey. He was replacing the snowman’s hat and patting its face. They were enchanted. They thought he was drunk. Then, to complete their evening’s entertainment, he made his way back to the house by crawling on his stomach and swinging from trees. He was trying to make as few tracks as possible, of course, but they just thought it was high spirits. The next time they saw him, at the funeral, they let themselves go. They couldn’t help it. I think Morey caught on. We worried about that. The boys have been locked in the house ever since. By the way, the Taits built their remarkable replica on Floyd’s sled. That’s how it moved so smoothly. Two men with clothes-line poles were behind the hedge, pushing. The lovely blue light, which scared even me to death, came out of Floyd’s chemical set. . . . I like to think he was trapped by children’s toys.”

  “How did Morey get Stoneman? I can’t figure it. We were all there.” Beulah looked affronted.

  “He was a quick thinker. After the boys fired that shot he told Stoneman to call Wilcox. He also told him to turn out the lights. Oliver and I heard him. Then he took one direction and sent us in others. He doubled back. He crept in just as Stoneman completed the call and killed him, and—I’m sorry about this—hid his body under this sofa.”