After that there would be nothing to do but wait. Ormes’s business associates would probably send a representative to Ormesby to consult with Gray and with Barbara. No doubt the police would also visit the house, now and again, questioning and prying. My own business there was to be stated as that of a friend who had consented, at Ormond’s request, to look over his library for the purpose of estimating its value in the event of his deciding to dispose of it. Thus we planned, desperately, sticking to truth where we could do so without becoming involved in admissions we dared not make, and only inventing where necessary. We knew, all of us, that we were taking terrible risks. The slightest slip would precipitate an investigation which would bring down our entire house of straw about our ears. Everything depended upon the authorities, and Ormes’s creditors and partners, obtaining not the least hint that he and his wife had not disappeared in the manner we were to relate.
How wild a thing it is to undertake the concealment of a violent death! Not one of the four who had been slain at Ormesby had been killed maliciously by anyone sane enough to suffer for the deed. Except, of course, that the elder Ormes had been done to death by his son in protection of a woman. Yet here we all were, two of us outsiders with no apparently vital interest in fostering the pride of this family, bound by such secrets as filled that silent house with ghosts, and intent upon the burial in hugger-mugger of yet more corpses! All for the sake of this family’s crumbling pride! When I look back upon it, I think that we must, all of us, have been more than a little mad. I could have refused, and Muriel could have refused, to join Gray in her fixed resolve to hide the madness which had wrecked her tribe. Yes, and Hobbs could have refused. There was really no good reason why we should have taken the risks we all agreed to take merely for the sake of pandering to this girl’s fear of scandal. If the three of us had stood together and had told the truth, no more harm than inconvenience could have come to us, perhaps, though we should have crushed Gray and Barbara and have made it impossible for either or both of them longer to reside at Ormesby. Yet we did take those risks. We did join hands in trying to hoodwink the police. We did agree to conceal the fact of the deaths and to aid Gray in destroying the bodies. We did, in short, become criminals by conspiring to thwart justice and by refusing to report those deeds of violence.
Well, let me be honest! We did all that for Gray’s sake, it is true, but we did it even more for our own. I know that I was mortally afraid of scandal, as much afraid of it as Gray herself was. I dreaded questioning by the officers of police as much as or more than Hobbs did. I feared, more, perhaps, than any of the others, that we might not be able to establish our innocence, were we to be charged with crime, or with being accessories to crime. As for Muriel—well, I cannot answer so well for her as for myself, naturally, but I thought then, as I still do, that she became one of us because she found me to be one of the conspirators. It was what I had called, up there in Gray’s room, habit of thought and action. She had left me and she had divorced me. But she had been my wife. Now, facing danger with me, she stood beside me as she had not stood when the danger threatened only her comfort and love of luxury. There was, I thought, some extenuation in that.
“Where is Grayce?” I asked.
“She was fast asleep when I looked in there an hour ago,” Gray replied. “I’ll look in again before I leave the floor. She—well, she’ll probably sleep like that until tomorrow.”
“And Barbara?”
“I had to tell her there’d been a fight. I must go and tell her now that Ormond is dead.”
Hobbs and I went straight to Ormond’s room for the purpose of taking up his body and carrying it to the “crypt” at the foot of the winding stairs. We dared not leave it in any of the other rooms. In all probability it would have been quite safe to do so; but our imagination saw dangers where they probably did not lurk, even as they in all likelihood failed to seem then where they were. I was thinking that, much as I loathed such work, I would far rather do it than do what Gray must. Muriel accompanied us, and after we had wrapped the corpse in a sheet, so that blood might not drip onto the carpets and floors, and had borne it out of the door., she set to work to remedy the appearance of the room. Half an hour later we all came together, quite by chance, in one of the small drawing-rooms on the ground floor.
“I’ve told her,” Gray said.
“She wasn’t . . . shocked?” I put in, for Barbara’s attitude interested me deeply.
“She . . . she bore it bravely enough. In fact, she seemed relieved. Maybe you know why? She said she had feared for some time that Ormond’s brain was failing, and that Agnes meant no good to any of us. She’s always claimed that Agnes doesn’t belong here, you know. And then she asked what we intended doing with . . . with the bodies. She wants all of us to come to her room.”
We went. There were questions asked and answers given, but I shall not detail such matters. The only thing of any consequence spoken in that gathering was a speech made by Barbara. Here are her words:
“You’re all fools to think you can get away with such crude work as that. Don’t you realize that Ormond’s disappearance will cause his business associates to hire clever detectives to learn where he went, or what became of him? Or, if they don’t, his creditors will. We shall have ’em here, questioning us separately, and they’ll be bound to find flaws in any story we can hatch. It won’t do. Besides those bodies must be disposed of in a manner more becoming to—that is, I mean, both the bodies must be disposed of in some entirely different way. Now listen: Someone’s said that Doctor Barnes is to return here about seven this evening, to give Alice her first injection of vaccine. Where is Ormond’s car? Still on the driveway? Put it into the garage at once, and lock the garage door. When the doctor comes, you three must be sitting downstairs, on the lawn, chatting. You must appear entirely at ease. I’ll be here in my room. I’ll show no excitement, if he stops here, as he usually does. Hobbs will admit him and take him up to Alice. Barnes will be able to testify, afterwards, if need be, that nothing was wrong at the time of his visit. If he asks after either of the Ormeses, you’re all to say that they went for a drive through the hills. That is, one of you is to say that, the others are to remember it and back it up, if need be. Don’t say it, don’t mention either of their names, unless his question obliges you to. After he’s gone, Mr. Seaverns and Hobbs will take both the bodies out and lay them near the kennels. Then let the dogs loose upon them!”
“Good God!” muttered Hobbs, while the same expression, or similar ones, showed in the shocked faces of the rest of us.
Barbara glanced round the circle, asking us haughtily with her eyes whether we had any better suggestion to offer. Since none of us said anything, she resumed her orders. But I could not help noticing that her eyes had in them something of the same red gleam which I had seen, and more than once, in Grayce’s eyes, and had seen in Ormond’s eyes at the last, and had seen in the eyes of the portrait of the dead man whose unclean ghost yet walked in the house of the Ormeses.
“After the dogs have torn the bodies for fifteen or twenty minutes, one of you—no, two of you—Seaverns and Gray—who will be out in the grounds, will scream several times. Hobbs will rush out of the house. You will all shout, then, and make as much noise as you can, and Gray will lead or drive the dogs back into their pens. Then Mr. Seaverns will rush to the telephone and call the doctor again, and also call the police. You will say that a horrible thing has happened. That the dogs have just dragged down and killed Ormes and his wife. By the time people get here, if the brutes have done their work as thoroughly as I think they will have, there will be no one to ask how Agnes’s throat came to be cut.”
“Well enough,” I objected, “but the dogs won’t have been able to put that hole in the man’s head. What’s to account for that?”
“It’s well you thought of that,” she said, favoring me with her little, brittle, hard smile. “L
et me think a moment.”
Horrible or not, there was not one of us who could not see that Barbara’s idea was worth a score of such plans as that on which we had thought to proceed. Already we had a witness, in the person of Doctor Barnes, that the dogs at Ormesby were vicious creatures which would, on occasion, with or without provocation, attack even the persons living there and with whom they could be supposed to be perfectly familiar. The doctor had said that the brutes ought to be got rid of. I could truthfully testify that Ormes had been afraid to alight from his car, on the night of my arrival with him, until his sister had called the beasts to heel. All of us could swear that Agnes had been afraid of them. The entire plan, if carried through with resolution and with naturalness, ought to succeed, provided that Barbara, or any of us, could think of something to account for that great hole in Ormond’s skull.
“This,” said Barbara at last, “is the best I’ve been able to think of, so far. If I get a better idea later, we can change the plan. But one of you—Hobbs, you—will rush out into the grounds with an axe or a hatchet in hand. You will kill one of the dogs—brain him—with it. And you will kill several of them, if you can. You will say that the wound in Ormond’s head was caused by aiming a blow at one of the dogs and striking his dead body. This whole thing will depend on how well all of you can act. You can’t rehearse it. But you can do this: live the parts you’re to play after the doctor’s arrival. Then, perhaps, you’ll be able to tell your story with some appearance of truth. The thing isn’t perfect. It shouldn’t be . . . quite. It must look, then, too much like a plot. But for God’s sake, or your own, or for Hell’s, do the best you can. It’s your only chance. And may Satan have mercy on all of you.”
Again I started, as I think the others must also have done, except, perhaps, Gray. I saw her smile grimly at the woman who had used such expressions. This gentle Barbara must have looked deeper into the Pit, and into human hearts, than any stranger could well suppose. But Gray seemed not astonished.
It was after four o’clock, and there was no time to be lost. Hobbs and I went at once to the garage, carrying pails, water and sponges. We took care that no one should be passing on the road below us while we traveled between house and garage. There we laid the stiffened form of Agnes Ormes on the floor, while we attacked the interior of the coupé with our sponges and water. In an hour we had removed the last least trace of gore from inside and outside of the car, and from the garage floor. I knew that a scientific investigation, with proper instruments and appliances, must reveal traces which we had not removed, could not remove. But all our efforts were to be bent upon preventing the necessity for such an investigation. The stockings I had found, my own torn and bloodstained clothing, one or two of the small rugs from Ormond’s room, and the filthy blankets from the little room at the rear of the second floor, all these were carefully burned in the incinerator. The towels and the sheet used to wrap Ormond’s body in could not be burned until we had removed that body from the house to the lawn. Hobbs was detailed to make it a special duty to see to it that all such articles should be consigned to the flames as soon as they should have served their purpose and before the dogs should have been let loose.
Both Gray and Muriel spent some little time in the dead man’s room, putting things to rights there, removing broken chairs and tables to the lumber room in the attic and replacing them with others. Gray had gone at once to the kennels, after leaving Barbara. She reported that the pack, which had not been fed all day, came eagerly to her whistle and that, finding no meat awaiting them, one or two of the more surly brutes had behaved badly. They would all be ferocious with hunger by the time we offered food to them. And all this helped to assure us that they would not hesitate to tear the corpses literally in pieces, as soon as they should have been released upon them. Grayce, said Gray, slept soundly in her bed.
There seemed, indeed, to be but two bad flaws in the plan. It might very well be that the hole in Ormond’s head would excite more suspicion in the police than could be allayed by Hobbs’s story of the chance blow; and since rigor mortis had already set in, it might be that the coroner or some other medical sharp would give it as his opinion that the torn bodies had been dead longer than they should have been. But we had to take these chances, great as they were. The scheme was certainly not perfect.
But we did not overlook placing a small axe in the kitchen, where Hobbs could most easily snatch it up on his way to the rescue—I do not write that word ironically!
Much later in the afternoon (indeed, I was on my way to my room to remove some of the grime I had accumulated in doing my part of the work) I paused for a moment before mounting the stairs. Why I paused, I do not remember. But as I stood there in the hallway, something touched my throat!
I was not mistaken. The sensation was unmistakable. A swift cold touch, as of metal or thin claws. It was a repetition of what I had felt upon first entering this house. Then it had come to me in darkness. Now I felt it in the full light of day.
Do you say that I was mistaken? That I imagined the thing? That my nervous state induced the fancy? If you account for the sensation in any such rational way, you do what I myself endeavored to do, after my first astonished and affrighted gasp, and as I gathered courage together and mounted the broad stairs.
Oh, yes! But what of the tall thin man, dressed entirely in black, who strode swiftly and silently down the hall in my direction, seeming to have come from Alice Hobbs’s room, and vanished into the little room where hung the evil portrait?
I did not follow him. I should have done so, undoubtedly. If a stranger were walking about in the house, I ought to know his business there. But I did not follow. Instead, after what seemed a long while, I went to the door of Mrs. Hobbs’s room and knocked. There was no sound from within. I turned the knob and looked in.
The woman lay in her bed, her face as white as the sheet beneath her chin, her eyes fixed and staring. She was unconscious. I saw that when I had entered and gone close beside her. And the bandages around her throat had been partly ripped away!
XIV
It was a silent dinner to which three of us gathered, a dinner which Muriel had prepared and which Hobbs, once more the perfect servant in word and manner, served to us at table. I do not know what may have passed through the minds of those others; for myself, I had already begun to lose heart. With lessened action came time for thought. The difficulties thought conjured up loomed very large. It was in vain that I quoted for my own benefit all the copybook maxims pertaining to courage and the proper use of it. My spirits continued steadily to sink until, with dinner over, I must have been pulling as long a face as the Knight of La Mancha himself.
How much of this depression was due to my recent experiences in the hallway upstairs and in Alice Hobbs’s room, I cannot say. No doubt they contributed mightily to it. Nevertheless I believe, today, that my pessimistic attitude had been induced more by the suspicions that were slowly forming in my brain with regard to Barbara Ormes than by any other happening or thought. Something was wrong with the woman! Lovely as her face was, I had seen in her eyes and in her smile the hint, the merest ghost, it is true, yet not to be mistaken, of something more terrible that Grayce’s lunatic frenzies, more shocking than Ormond’s murderous schemes and efforts, more diabolical than even the ghosts which walked at Ormesby.
Mrs. Hobbs had regained consciousness while I stood undecided beside her bed. She looked up and saw me. Gradually the blankness went out of her eyes. Then a flash of terror came into them. That also faded. After all, she had not been physically injured. And she herself might have disarranged the bandages about her throat. But there was in the whole aspect of the poor woman a hunted look. It was not a look so much of fear as of despair, as I have seen it in the face and bearing of a man about to be hanged. She was doomed, and she knew it, and she had abandoned hope. And when hope has left the breast of any human being, that being is already, thou
gh he or she may still move and breathe and think, that being is already as one dead.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “You have been having a bad dream.” And I smiled at her.
“Don’t let . . . her . . . come here . . . again,” the woman gurgled, and she spoke out of the corner of her thin and twisted mouth.
“Her?” I gasped. Was Grayce abroad again?
“Yes! She . . . she . . .” Her words died away.
“Yes?”
“She’ll kill me! I know it! Oh, I’m so afraid of her! But it’s no use . . . no use . . . no use!” she sobbed, though her eyes were dry enough.
“Have you seen nothing of a man, then?”
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