XIII
I did not entirely lose consciousness, but the world swam before me dizzily, then went black for a while. I was aware of several persons moving about me; of the body of my enemy having been lifted off my own; of someone bending over me and examining me as if for wounds. Then I heard Hobbs’s voice.
“I don’t think he’s much hurt. He’ll be all right.”
I struggled and opened my eyes.
“I’m all right now,” I gurgled, for my throat had been pretty severely constricted in Ormes’s grasp and the cords and muscles would not function properly at once.
“Lie still and rest. Get back your strength,” said Hobbs, soothingly.
Whereupon, I sank back onto the floor and lay quietly there, hearing Hobbs, with Gray and Muriel, moving around me. I knew that Ormes lay beside me, a little to my right. He lay still, and I wondered about it. None of them addressed any word to him, nor did they approach him to give him aid. Looking back on it, I suppose that the entire scene occupied only a few minutes of time, though to me it seemed that long hours must be passing. At last I heaved up onto my elbow, opened my smarting eyes, blinked a while, and coughed. But I knew that I was not greatly hurt, and I would no longer allow the hand on my chest to press me back.
“I’m all right,” I said, gruffly. “Where’s Ormes? What’s happened to him?”
Hobbs bent over me until his mouth came close to one of my ears.
“He’s dead,” he whispered.
I said nothing. It seemed perfectly natural that Ormes should be dead. He had been crazy and he had been bent on killing me; but as my head cleared I began to suspect that Hobbs had killed him. I wanted to know about it. The servant, seeing that I was bound to rise, helped me to a chair. Swiftly now my eyes cleared; my power of speech came back; and as the blood receded from my brain, I began once more to be sharply aware of everything and everybody in the room.
Hobbs, somewhat dishevelled, stood before me, a little at one side. He was very pale and his hands opened and closed nervously, while there was a spasmodic twitching about his mouth and eyes, and one shoulder hunched upwards in a peculiar way. Gray stood before a window, her back to the room. She seemed to be crying, for her hands covered her face, though I could not hear sobbing and her body did not move. Muriel was beside her, one arm around her waist. The latter turned her head, now, and stared at me with wide and frightened eyes. Ormes lay on his back in the middle of the floor. Someone had spread a towel over his head. It was a large towel and heavy, and it was stained with blood. Several other bath towels, wadded into a red heap, lay near to Ormes. They had been used, apparently, for soaking up a pool, for the boards of the floor about the mass were streaked and smeared with blood. The small rugs which had covered the floor were twisted into rolls or torn into rags and a great many pieces of furniture were either lying over on their sides or were jammed against larger pieces. The room looked as if many more than two men had done battle within it. My own clothing had been ripped into ribbons, with scarcely enough of it left to cover me decently.
“What did you hit him with?” I muttered.
Hobbs did not answer in words, but contented himself with pointing toward a table nearby. On it stood a bronze elephant. It was about nine inches high. I did not go and examine it, but I knew that it would be very heavy and that it could have crushed a man’s skull like an eggshell. I had no difficulty in guessing at what had happened. Rushing into the room, seeing that his master had me down and was choking me, that my face was even then purple with congestion and that Ormes was about to sink his teeth into my throat, Hobbs had no time in which to deal gently with the maniac. He had snatched up the bronze ornament and had struck out with it. He had not meant to kill. But the sharp points of the trunk and tusks had penetrated my antagonist’s skull and the weight of the metal behind them had crushed in the surrounding bony area. Ormes must have died instantly. When I later examined the elephant, I saw that shreds of brain tissue were still clinging to the curving trunk. I did not then question Hobbs as to details, of course, but he told me afterward that my reconstruction of the killing had been a good one, only adding that he had first tried to separate us by pulling Ormes away from me. When this had proved to be impossible, he had seized the elephant and struck the man’s head with it, never thinking to do more than stun him.
And now there were two dead bodies at Ormesby, and the problem of what to do with them had more than doubled in complexity. I got to my feet, my head whirling with the effort and needing several seconds for it to clear. Then I drew Muriel toward me by a crook of the finger.
“Take Gray to her own room and make her lie down for a while,” I said. “I’ll get some other clothes, somewhere, and think what’s got to be done. Then I’ll call you.”
She nodded and led Gray out of the room. Hobbs had already guessed my predicament.
“I can lend you some clothes, sir,” he said.
“Can you? Thanks! I’ll go with you at once and change. I don’t dare be seen in this condition, in case anyone comes here. Leave all this as it is. We’ll lock the door.”
We did so, Hobbs giving me the key, which I returned to him, bidding him put it into his pocket. He was about of my own size and he gave me a suit of gray serge that fitted me well enough for all present purposes. I had stopped in at my own room and picked up clean linen. Soon, bathed and presentable, in the event of any stranger, or of Doctor Barnes, coming to the house, I joined Hobbs in the dining room, where we once more had recourse to Ormes’s whiskey to quiet our frayed nerves.
“Have you notified anyone of the . . . the accident?” I asked.
“No, sir. I was waiting, sir, for your advice.”
“I suppose the police must be told, and at once. I don’t think, Hobbs, that you need worry much about clearing yourself. It was a clear case of assault to overpower a maniac and . . . and to save another person’s life.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know, Hobbs,” I asked, watching him narrowly, “what has become of Mrs. Ormes?”
“No, sir. I haven’t seen her since she came into my wife’s room this morning. I have been wondering what has become of her.”
If he had been to the garage and had seen Agnes’s body there, he gave me no sign of it. I resolved to take Hobbs fully into my confidence. For already I was forming a plan for disposition of the dead bodies, and I thought that Hobbs, committed as he now was to my side by having killed his master, innocently or otherwise, was an accomplice on whom I could rely. If it be said that I ought to have called the authorities immediately, I can only reply that the investigation they must have made could have done no one any good. Two persons had been killed at Ormesby, within a few hours of each other, and yet neither had been slain by sane premeditation. Nothing could come of such an investigation as the police and the newspapers would have made, save trouble for everyone at Ormesby, trouble of worry, trouble of expense, trouble of disgrace. It might be that the difficulties before me would prove to be too great to be surmounted. But I was not yet ready to call in the police.
“I know what has become of her, Hobbs,” I said, and went on to tell him of how I had come upon the corpse.
He was much shocked, I could see that. Yet he maintained an outward calm, so that I began to augur much from his ability to hide his feelings.
“It was the news of his wife’s death,” I said, “that drove Ormes mad. I went to his room to tell him of what I had found. He at once accused me of killing her. I didn’t kill her, Hobbs. I had nothing to do with it. You must come to the place with me, in a minute or two, and you’ll see the marks of the murderer as plainly as I saw them. But Ormes insisted that I surrender to him. I argued, thinking he was willfully trying to fasten a crime on me in order to save his own sister.”
“Ah!” breathed Hobbs, though I suppose that he had already suspected Grayce.
> “So he attacked me. But I must tell you, first, that the news reached him at a bad time. The poor fellow was driven half frantic by other troubles. He had come here this morning— By the way, do you know that the woman who came with him is Mrs. Seaverns?”
“No, sir, I haven’t heard her name, sir.”
“Yes. She was coming up from town, in any case, and since he had to come suddenly, he offered to bring her, which she accepted. But the reason for his visit is this . . .”
Whereupon I spun Hobbs a story of how Ormes, faced with bankruptcy, had come here to demand of his wife the surrender of securities and jewels sufficient to save his financial structure. He had not seen his wife, for the reason that she had left the house before the arrival from New York, and had been killed by Grayce in the garage. I told Hobbs frankly that I had had all this from Barbara and from Gray, both of whom had expressed to me their concern for Ormond’s sanity in his trouble. Then I went on to explain to the man how Ormes, driven to desperation by the news I brought, had attacked me murderously, first shouting that I had killed his wife. The tale was largely true. I did not think it necessary to give him the exact truth as to Muriel, nor as to Ormes’s connection with her. I could not see that it would help anything to put Hobbs in possession of the secret of Ormes’s plot against Agnes, while I could not reveal that against my own life without telling him more of Muriel’s association with the dead man than I cared to. Upon the whole, however, I made out a credible enough story, the more easily as Hobbs had himself been witness to Ormes’s insane frenzy just at the last. (Indeed it is not likely that he would have attacked the lunatic with the bronze elephant had it not been necessary to save me from those ravening teeth of his.) Hobbs had seen Ormond’s father’s madness, and he had seen something of Grayce’s. He was soon to see more of it. He had no difficulty in believing that the insane taint in the Ormes blood had come uppermost in Ormond, as indeed it had at the last.
“So there it is,” I said. “We can call the police and have a full investigation, with mobs of curious people tramping through the place and over the grounds, worrying all of us half to death, asking questions, prying into everything, stealing pictures and photographs and anything else that’s loose, with great scare heads in all the papers, disgrace, ruin, humiliation, all that, with you and I, in the meantime, sitting in jail, gnawing our nails and being beaten perhaps by big policemen administering the third degree to us. . . . Or we can hit on some other plan.”
“What do you suggest?” asked Hobbs, who had gone a shade paler as I pictured for him the scenes to follow, and who now, in this extremity, dropped his air of the servant to speak with me as man to man.
“You helped Ormond put his father’s and mother’s bodies down the old cistern, didn’t you?”
“My God, how did you know that?”
“Oh, I’ve been around, Hobbs. I saw, the moment I entered this place, that something was wrong. So I made a few quiet investigations. Besides, I had reason, even then, to think that Ormond was slightly wrong in the upper story. Do you know why I’m here? I’m here to write a sort of history, for Ormes, to comply with a provision in his Aunt Matty’s will. If the will had been complied with, Ormes might have inherited a hundred thousand dollars that went to some historical society, I understand. But when he hired me to write the book for him, using the books in the Ormesby library for material, the time set by the will had already expired. His Aunt Barbara will tell you that he insisted on having the book written anyway, claiming that he could have the will set aside. Is that exactly the reasoning of a perfectly sane man?”
Hobbs agreed that, under the circumstances, it did not seem to be so. Then, again, he asked what I proposed.
“I’m thinking,” said I, “that you and I together might hide Ormes and his wife Agnes in the same way. You put the . . . the others . . . down the iron pipe, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“We could do the same. We could say that Mrs. Ormes got into her car and left the house and never returned. We could say that Ormes, threatened with financial ruin, must have secretly done away with himself in New York, or elsewhere. What of it? Unidentified men are found every day in New York, picked out of the river, or out of the subway, or just found in alleys.”
“What shall we do with his car, standing now just outside the door?” asked Hobbs.
“Oh, Lord! There’s a difficulty, sure enough!”
And indeed, as I considered it, the problem of disposition of that automobile seemed nearly insurmountable. Human bodies can be destroyed, by quicklime or fire, and there are other means of getting rid of them. But how to efface all traces of an automobile? There are records kept of engine, body and factory numbers, of designs, models and the like, records especially kept for tracing cars when they have disappeared. Cars do, of course, disappear, and some of them are never heard of again. But even the hub cap of a known make may supply such a clew to police officers as will lead to discovery of something which has been thought well hidden. What we had to do was so to dispose of that car that no one, finding it, or any part of it, should connect it with the one which had been registered in the name of Ormond Ormes.
“There’s one thing in our favor, Hobbs,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked. “If there is, I’ll certainly be glad to hear of it.”
“It’s time,” I replied. “I can’t see that we’ve got to do everything in a minute. Ormes won’t be missed in New York for a day or so. That is, perhaps he won’t be. It depends on the story we concoct and tell here whether Agnes’s disappearance ought to be reported today, tomorrow, or . . . never.”
“There’s a bank up in the woods,” he said, slowly, “where the mountain comes down and makes a low cliff above the level ground. He might drive his car there, set it close under the cliff, then have a landslide to cover it up.”
“And the tracks of the wheels on grass and soft ground?”
“I don’t know, sir. Maybe we could cover ’em with rakes or shovels.”
“Well, we’ll have a look at the place. But now, where are those dogs? For you and I must go to the garage.”
“They’re loose,” he said.
“Can you pen them?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve tried it, several times. They won’t obey me. They let me alone . . . usually . . . but . . .”
“Then Gray must do it. Besides, we can’t do anything here without her knowledge and consent. Come, let’s go to her room. By the way, Hobbs, where’s your wife?”
“Lying down in bed, sir. She’s going to be ill, I’m afraid. She gets so upset whenever there’s trouble around. If it wasn’t for that, her throat wouldn’t bother her so much.”
“She does, eh? Then whatever we do, we musn’t let her know everything.”
“No, sir. No need to, sir.”
I grew immediately afraid that the sickly Mrs. Hobbs might thereafter do or say something to ruin any plan we might make and carry through. Nevertheless there was small time to give to the problem her conduct might set for us. From his suggestion of a place of concealment of the Ormes car, Hobbs himself seemed to be entering wholeheartedly enough into my partly formed scheme.
Together we climbed to the third floor, where I knocked on Gray’s door. Muriel opened for me. Gray sat in a chair. She had been weeping; her yellow eyes were red and swollen. Hobbs and I stood before her, and I struggled for words in which to begin.
I do not see that it will serve any good purpose for me to set down every word and argument the four of us used and proposed. I should have been surprised had Gray not fallen in with my half-formed design. I had seen enough of her to suppose that she dreaded an investigation and the consequent disgrace as much as her brother had dreaded them. We agreed, then, soon enough on the main details. Hobbs and I would take the bodies to the mouth of the pipe, push them into the hole, th
en throw down a sufficient quantity of lime to cover them. After that we must carefully cover every trace of violent death. All clothing, towels, rugs—everything, in short, that bore the slightest stain of blood, must be gathered up and burned in the incinerator which adjoined the kitchen. This was the device built into the house and designed to consume the household’s garbage and other refuse. Muriel it was who thought to remind us to remove all keys and other metal objects from pockets, since such articles could not burn; and that all garments ought to have the buttons cut off them before consigning them to the flames. Ormes’s room was to be rigorously set to rights, and the work of doing it must be performed by Gray herself, with Muriel helping her, since it ought not to be entrusted to Mrs. Hobbs, even though she could be driven to leave her bed and do it. It appeared that Gray, more than I was coming to do, suspected Hobbs’s wife of a moral weakness that might very well break under even slight questioning. Lastly, Hobbs and I must go to the garage, after Agnes’s corpse should have been taken out of it, and carefully wash away every stain of blood, from the garage itself, and from the floor, body, brake rods, transmission housing, and upholstery of the car. It was most fortunate that the little coupé was upholstered in leather, and not in mohair or some equally permeable material.
With the two bodies thus disposed of, Hobbs and I were to drive the car to the place mentioned by him and there in some way bury it, either by throwing down enough earth with shovels, or by undermining the bank so as to induce a landslide. We had no explosives with which to overthrow it, and we dared not purchase any. In the event of suspicion falling upon us, the fact that we had bought explosives must convince any investigator that we were lying, even if he had no other clew. Then tomorrow morning, and not before, Gray would drive into Tiltown and report to the authorities there the disappearance of her brother and his wife. She would say that he had come to Ormesby about daylight, bringing my wife from New York on a visit to her husband. That he had briefly stated his unexpected visit to have been necessitated by a desire to consult with his own wife on some matter of finance. That he and Agnes had driven away in Ormond’s car, ostensibly for the purpose of talking while driving about the countryside. And they had not returned. No great uneasiness had been felt until after nightfall. Gray herself, though slightly anxious, had retired earlier than usual, having a nervous headache; she had fallen asleep and had not awakened until nearly dawn. Thereupon, finding that her relatives had not returned, she had telephoned his residence and his offices in New York (which Gray, of course, was to do), learning that no one there had seen him since Friday evening, it being now Saturday. This would make Gray’s report to the police fall upon Sunday morning.
Fingers of Fear Page 17