by Helen Reilly
Bill wasn't in the hall. He had probably gone outside to wait. Damien went to the front door, opened it, and looked around the graveled sweep. There was no sign of Bill. He must be inside, in one of the rooms. She went back into the house. The library was empty. She went to the living-room door, looked through it. Bill wasn’t in the living-room—but Miss Stewart was.
The nurse was at one of the windows at the far end of the room. She wasn’t standing at the window looking out in an ordinary fashion. She was standing to one side of the window, stooping forward with the same crouched intensity she had worn upstairs, and staring absorbedly through an opening in the slats of the drawn Venetian blind at something beyond and below her, in the direction of the tennis court. Damien withdrew without speaking at the sound of the front door. Bill had been outside. Before she could go to him, the maid, Agnes, entered the hall from the service corridor. The maid said with that queer inimical blankness she had had from the first, “A call came for you while you were out, miss. It was from a Miss Towle. She said she’d call you back at six o'clock.”
Jane— Damien was carried bodily into another more normal world. It, too, had its shadows. Had something happened? Was Jane worse, had a new complication cropped up? Bill said, “Ready?” as she went toward him, and she said no and told him about Jane's call.
“I can't go until I’ve talked to her, Bill." They went into the library, and Damien rang long-distance, but the apartment didn’t answer. Jane wasn’t there. It was all right, Damien assured herself. There wasn’t anything really to be worried about. Jane liked a little walk in the afternoon whenever she felt up to it and it wasn’t too cold. She said, “I’ll have to wait here until six, Bill.”
Bill smiled at her. “If you can stand it, Damien, I can.” He added between his teeth, his expression darkening, “But I wish to God you could be out of here for good. It seems as though there’s always something to prevent your leaving this house. If Mike had never come into it, he’d be alive now.”
The phone rang again, and Damien jumped. The call was for Bill. She gave him the instrument and went over to the window, started to light a cigarette, and didn’t. The window opened on the side lawn. It showed much the same view as the living-room window at which Miss Stewart had been stationed. What had the nurse been spying on—that was the only word for it—so intently? There was nothing in sight but an expanse of rolling lawn, still green and dotted with almost leafless trees. She moved a little, and saw Eleanor Mont. Oliver’s mother was down on her knees, working in one of the flower borders between the house and the tennis court. As Damien watched, she lifted an earth-encrusted bulb, put it in a basket beside her on the turf, lifted another, brushed the earth flat with a gloved hand, and got to her feet.
Whatever the nurse had been watching, it wasn’t Eleanor Mont taking in bulbs for the winter; Damien turned back into the room. Bill was dropping the phone into its cradle. He had to go home at once. It was his aunt who had called him. A state policeman was at Frances’s. The policeman wanted the name and address of Mike Jones’s only living relative, a brother in southern California. Bill said, “I don’t know just where Bob Jones lives, except that it’s fairly near San Diego. I’ve got his address somewhere in my desk. I’ll have to go down. Tell you what, I’ll go along now and drive the Chevy back for you at six. Jane will have called you by then. I’ll wait for you at the gate.
It’s just as well anyhow, you’ve had walking enough for lone day.” He started for the door.
Damien said, “Wait a minute, Bill. Miss Stewart is up to something.” She told him what she had seen the nurse go upstairs and then in the living-room. “She was like a cat getting ready to pounce, making sure of her position.”
Bill said doubtfully, “Are you positive, Damien?”
“I am,” Damien said. “Come and look for yourself, maybe she’s still at the living-room window.” But when they readied it, the living-room was empty. Miss Stewart had gone.
Bill and Damien were at the front door when Eleanor Mont entered the hall from the side corridor, walking hurriedly. She didn’t see them. She went into the library to the telephone and called Hiram St. George. The door was open. They both heard the stress in her edged tone as she said quickly, “Hi, something pretty bad has happened. You'd better—”
She stopped talking suddenly. The sound of the receiver being put down; the library door closed. Damien stared at its blank surface. Something pretty bad had happened—Was Eleanor Mont talking about Mike Jones’s death? Scarcely. Hiram St. George must have heard of that quite a while ago. She gave it up tiredly.
Bill went then. The library door was still closed. Damien looked at the clock beside it. The clock was going again. Someone had started it. Why had it stopped yesterday afternoon? Because someone had forgotten to wind it, of course. It was almost twenty minutes past five. Jane was always punctual. She had only a little over half an hour to wait. Where was Oliver? Over at the St. Georges’ with Linda, probably. She went upstairs to her own room.
But even shut up in it, she felt vulnerable. The sensation of something covert, strange, going on in the house, had deepened sharply since she had re-entered it with Bill. It was as though wheels were spinning faster, things rushing toward a focus— An overwhelming desire to be free of Arroways and the people in it took hold of her. At five minutes of six she went dowrnstairs. The library was untenanted. As the clock in the hall struck the hour, the phone rang. It was Jane, and Jane was worried. She had read about Anne Giles’s death in the paper, noticed the story on an inside page because Damien had asked her about the woman. “I recognized the name.” She wanted Damien to come home. Damien reassured her, said she’d probably be back some time the following day, hung up, and lifted the instrument again.
No matter what happened up here, it didn’t alter her own problems any. She still had to have money, and she had to have it at once. Soon it would be cold, and Jane would begin really to suffer. She called the bank and asked for Mr. Silver. A voice at the other end of . the wire said that Mr. Silver was in a directors’ meeting. She left the number of the Kendleton house saying she would call again as soon as she got there. Damien put on her coat and left Arroways.
It was growing dark out. The sky was overcast. A light mist trailed ragged veils of gray chiffon through the hollows. Tree branches creaked in the low wind and gravel pinged under Damien’s feet as she walked quickly down the driveway. Suppose she met Oliver now, on his way home? She quenched the wild hope that sprang up in her with hard bitterness; that sort of thing was out, definitely out. She must put Oliver Mont from her mind, not let her thoughts touch him. She increased her pace. She had rounded the turn and was on the stretch between it and the gates, a stretch banked by rhododendron on either side and hemmed in by the leafless elms, when she tripped and almost fell over the shoe.
Righting herself, Damien looked down. It was a brown pump with a cuban heel over which she had stumbled. Staring at it, little fingers of ice ran along Damien’s spine. The brown pump belonged to Miss Stewart. She had never seen the nurse wear anything else. What was her shoe, one shoe, doing here on the driveway in the autumnal dusk, lying on its side, commonplace and forlorn—and demanding? Damien stood still, scarcely breathing, turned her eyes this way and that, and saw the stockinged foot. It was just visible off on the right, protruding through glossy green leaves, heel in the air, toes digging into the earth. Damien walked stiffly across the grass, pushed more leaves aside. Miss Stewart was there, behind a thin screen of laurel bushes. She was lying face down on the turf, her arms thrown out. Her hat had fallen off. There was blood on the back of her neck, in her hair and on her skin. Miss Stewart didn’t move. The blood did. It welled, bubbling.
Something else besides the blood moved. Close by, something stirred in among the densely massed leaves that were sloping green walls draped with mist. It was almost dark, and cold, and wet. The wind muttered. A leaf floated down. She and the nurse were in a bay surrounded by those concealing masses, walls.
The house was far away. The sound again? Nearer this time?
Damien’s frozen throat opened. Nothing but a harsh croak emerged. She turned and plunged back toward the driveway, crying out as she ran. She had to get help, get away. The two insistent demands were intermingled. Somewhere on that flight into blackness, fifty, a hundred feet from the spot where Miss Stewart lay, arms pinioned her, and she was caught and held.
It was Oliver, Damien had run into. “Miss Stewart,” she cried. “Back there, in among the bushes. She’s hurt—dead, I don’t know. There’s blood—"
“All right, Damien. Just take it easy. Show me.”
But the others were before them, Bill, on foot, and just behind Bill the Inspector and Luttrell leaving a stopped car around the bend of the driveway. The lights from the car, brilliant in the dimness picked up the nurse’s shoe.
Miss Stewart wasn't dead. Luttrell held a torch while the Inspector knelt, surrounded by die motionless little group standing back a few feet. The nurse was breathing. Luttrell went to telephone for a doctor. Without looking at any one of them, McKee said, “You people go up to the house and wait there,” and alone with the injured woman, he knelt again. A handkerchief pressed gently to the wound behind the ear; he studied her position, then reached out and opened the clenched fingers of her right hand. On her lax palm lay the missing squares of silver from the necklace with which Anne Giles had been strangled.
Chapter Sixteen
Window-Sill Clue
Just for a handful of silver she left us—not for a riband to stick in her coat—Miss Stewart had been savagely attacked and struck down for those two heavy silver squares missing from the necklace with which Anne Giles had been strangled and that she had carried in her hand. That much was clear to McKee, propped against a window sill at the far end of the living-room at Arroways listening to Luttrell question the occupants of the house. Also and in addition, if it hadn’t been for Damien Carey’s arrival on the scene, the nurse would have been polished off then and there and the missing bit of necklace removed. The injured woman had been rushed over to the hospital in Danbury, where she had been put on the critical list. She might or might not live. There was a fifty-fifty chance. They wouldn’t know for at least twenty-four hours.
The situation was dangerous. The killer was on the run. Prudence, caution, had been thrown to the winds, of necessity. Events were ganging up on the perpetrator, there was no time to pick and choose. If they could only get at the real meaning of the broken necklace— Miss Stewart was the single lead. She knew. That was why the attempt to kill her had been made. Failing the nurse’s return to consciousness, they would have to dig themselves, and digging took time. He returned his attention to the room.
The ceiling lights were full on. Shocked faces that told nothing, answers that were equally inconclusive. He threw the answers away. As in Mike Jones’s death, everyone in the room, including the St. Georges, at the house when he reached it, and Bill Heyward, ostensibly there to pick up Damien Carey, every one of them, any one of them, could, as far as opportunity was concerned, have attacked the nurse. Slip after Miss Stewart in the dusk, through the concealing bushes lining the driveway, strike, and flee perforce, without the bit of necklace, when the Carey girl showed up.
Jancy Hammond had reportedly been in her bedroom, Eleanor Mont in hers, the maid in the kitchen. Hammond had been practicing billiard shots in the game room in the basement. The St. Georges had been together in their own house and then on the way over to Arroways. Linda St. George said that with an effect of shouting it aloud, although she spoke in a low voice. Her hand was tucked under her father’s arm where she sat beside Hiram St. George on the love seat, her blue eyes big and dark, like those of a clairvoyant’s, her body shaking with small repeated tremors, the little dust of freckles on her nose gold against intense pallor. Oliver Mont had been at the St. George house earlier, had started home in advance of Linda and St. George, had heard Miss Carey calling for help, and had gone to meet her. Bill Heyward had been in his car outside the gates waiting for Miss Carey. He, too, had heard her cry out.
Hiram St. George said thoughtfully to Luttrell, “How did you people get here? What brought you at just that time?” Luttrell glanced at McKee. McKee said, “Miss Stewart called Mr. Luttrell’s office. I answered the phone. She started to talk, changed her mind, and put the receiver back on the hook. I recognized her voice, thought she might hav£ something important to say, so—” He shrugged.
Damien Carey after that. The same questions to her as to the others; her own movements first. She described them. Had she seen Miss Stewart about the house earlier, before Miss Stewart started down the driveway, did she know anything about the two silver squares? What had Miss Stewart been doing? Had there been any conversation between them?
Damien and Bill were sitting in chairs side by side against the east wall. Opposite and facing them, across the width of the room, were the Monts, Hammond, Linda, and Hiram St. George. Luttrell was at one end of the impromptu horseshoe, writing, the Inspector, farther away, was at the other. Damien listened to the clock tick and looked at mental images, of Mike Jones sprawled beside the brook, of the nurse face down on the ground, blood bubbling from the wound behind her ear. There were certain things you could do and certain things you couldn’t—no matter what the cost.
She straightened in her chair, abandoned retreat with finality, looked at Luttrell, and told him. She said that Miss Stewart had surreptitiously slipped into Mrs. Mont’s bedroom about half an hour before she left the house. The nurse had only been in Mrs. Mont’s bedroom a short time when she came out, with the same caution, stealthiness. Later, perhaps two or three minutes later, Miss Stewart had been watching something intently through the west window of the living-room. The only person outside, the only person in sight, was Mrs. Mont, gardening.
The clock ticked again. McKee spoke. He said, “Miss Stewart didn’t have those two silver squares earlier this afternoon when we met her at the Giles cottage. She didn’t know until we told her that the bit of necklace was missing. She didn’t find it at the cottage. From the time in, volved, she must have come straight to this house from there. Mrs. Mont, Miss Stewart was in your room after she got back. Her demeanor appears to have been that of a woman searching for something. Can you tell us anything about the broken bit of the necklace with which Anne Giles was strangled?”
Eleanor Mont had sat looking at her hands while he spoke. She raised her eyes. She had never been calmer. Her control of all nervous movement was so complete it was a surprise when her lips parted. A flat negative.
“No, Inspector. No, I cannot.”
The attack on the woman who had been a guest in her house seemed to have affected her far less than the revelation concerning Maria Mont’s rings missing from her husband's body. Perhaps she was becoming inured to murder and attempted murder in her immediate vicinity. Then, of course, tnere was always the courage of desperation. But if Eleanor Mont was cool, collected, apparently untouched by Damien Carey’s statement, the others were not.
Jancy Hammond had come out of her lackluster lethargy. There was black anger in the look she bent on the younger girl. Oliver Mont’s scrutiny of Miss Carey was sharp and cold. Linda St. George looked puzzled and uncertain and distressed. Hiram St. George was openly angry. Roger Hammond was outraged. His innocuous and handsome fagade had an ugly crack in it. He said sneeringly, “Miss Carey thinks Miss Stewart went stealthily into Mrs. Mont’s room, that she was watching something intently, through a window—” He smiled broadly, his chiseled face flushed. “Of course, if one doesn’t care how one uses words—”
Damien felt the scorn, contempt, in all of them. It was in Oliver, too. Well, she thought grimly, you wanted to put distance between yourself and Oliver Mont. It’s done now. She had something else to say. “Mr. Luttrell, yesterday afternoon my room here in this house was entered and my things searched—by Mr. Hammond.” She produced her crushed lipstick from her bag, gave the details in a clear voice. “
If you’ll look carefully under that chair over there,” she waved a hand, “you’ll find traces of lipstick on the carpet.”
She had thrown down the gage with a vengeance. Hammond’s verbose and lengthy explanation, produced after an initial explosion, explained nothing—was exactly the sort of tale she had expected him to come up with. After he got home from the funeral service for Miss Giles he said he had fancied he heard someone in Miss Carey’s room, knew she wasn’t there, had gone in to see— The others rallied to his support, closed ranks, faced her with freezing glances.
No doubt now of what these people felt about her, including Oliver, Damien thought. They had admitted her to their midst, had treated her as one of themselves, while all along she had been spying on them and at the first possible moment, in spite of their kindness, she had run to the police with irresponsible malice.
Eleanor Mont put an end to the scene. She said with icy courtesy, “I fear we've been trespassing on your indulgence, Miss Carey. Arroways is no longer ours. It belongs to you. We have no business here. I’m afraid it will be impossible for us to leave tonight, but early tomorrow morning we will be out of it. I can promise you that.”
Damien was already on her feet. So was Bill. His silent companionship was warming, a comfort. Damien looked Eleanor Mont full in the face. “Thank you, Mrs. Mont. That will suit me nicely." Beside his mother, Oliver neither moved nor spoke. He continued to regard her through narrowed eyes above a lean hand negligently holding a cigarette, as though she was some new arid not particularly interesting species of animal in a cage at the zoo. Damien turned to Luttrell. “If you're through with us, Mr. Luttrell?” and when the town prosecutor said yes, she walked out of the room with Bill beside her, picked up her coat from a bench in the hall where she had thrown it, and without the slightest idea of where she was going, except that it was away from under the roof .that covered the Monts, she started for the front door.