The next day, too, was quiet, with the newspapers guarded, callers and telephone inquiries from friends adroitly weeded out by Ancill, and nothing to be seen of either Verity or Rob.
It was a warm, misty day, with shrubbery and paths wet and the leather chair in Ivan’s library damp and sweaty to touch. Unseasonably warm as it had been unseasonably cold, but still wet.
Once toward noon Jacob Wait came again and talked to Marcia alone in the front drawing room, where the old mirror over the mantel was faintly misted and the mahogany arms of the chair sticky if you let your hand lie on them. All his questions were repetitions; things he had asked many times before. She replied steadily, exactly as she had previously replied. But when at length he went away she felt troubled and uncertain. As if waves continually battering at foundations might in the end carry them away.
She asked him no questions. She knew that he would tell her only what he wished to tell her. Besides, her own inquiries might, somehow, reveal something to him. Better say nothing.
She felt shaken and uncertain but still sure that she had given him no new evidence and that she had revealed no more than he already knew. But an hour after he’d gone, more men came to search the house. Again and far more thoroughly—going steadily from room to room, requesting keys with quiet authority, doggedly searching shelves and bureau drawers and store closets.
It was queerly disturbing. As if they had lost their right to private citizenship. Their house was not their castle. They had no reticences.
It was also as unsettling and bewildering and depressing as a terribly thorough house cleaning. Gally took early refuge in the game room in the basement—his billiard game, Marcia thought once, was almost certain to improve and was already rather better than a young man’s with his way yet to make ought to be.
Beatrice let them go through her study and then barricaded herself therein with the door locked. They must have been looking for something very small and something very easily hidden, for they went even to the kitchen and, later, were exploring the third-floor attic.
That day was, however, in many ways more difficult than the preceding day. Then a kind of nervous tension had helped, had kept them keyed up, scarcely believing the situation that was there. But on the second day there was no incredulity. It had happened. Ivan Godden had been murdered, and they were all of them suspect.
It was not a pleasant thought.
The servants had a tendency to congregate in the kitchen and talk in low voices, becoming immediately silent if Marcia or Beatrice came within hearing or seeing distance. Delia was nervous and did not dust the stairs and had already begun to sidle away if you approached her unexpectedly in the shadows of the hall. Emma Beek, however, flourished like a fat white mushroom and watched everything and everyone from the kitchen hall. It was not nice, that sly espionage. Marcia, entering the hall or descending the stairway, would see the door to the kitchen passage closing silently, furtively.
The day wore on, and still there was no sign of Rob or Verity.
Once Marcia, peering across the garden toward the Copley house, saw a man at the garden wall. It was not Rob, but there was something familiar about the angle of the hat and the narrow shoulders, and suddenly he straightened and became the detective, Jacob Wait. She watched as he went on to another stretch of the wall and bent absorbedly over it. What was he looking for? She watched his slow progress to the foot of the garden and out of sight, but if he made any discoveries or conclusions it was not apparent. Later, she saw someone at the lily pool, but owing to the obscuring vines of the summerhouse could not tell whether it was Wait or someone else.
It was later, too, that Marcia, happening near the telephone extension in the upper hall, answered when it rang and was told it was the hardware store wanting to speak to Mr. Wait.
“We have the information about that package for him now,” said the voice.
Ancill’s voice came in just then from another extension, saying Mr. Wait was not there, and after a moment Marcia hung up and stood there staring at the telephone without seeing it.
Package. The whole package of garden tools and supplies?
She tried again to recall, as she had already tried over and over again, the package from the hardware store as Ancill had placed it on the desk that morning of March eighteenth. There’d been brown paper wrapping, gleaming hedge scissors; paintbrushes. Two dandelion knives—one of which was short and sharp like a dagger. She could still see Ivan’s white fingers holding it, hear him commenting on its sharpness and probable efficiency. She shuddered away from that. She could not remember the arsenic, though she did remember Ancill naming it in his list of purchases. Yet certainly there was a faint, hovering recollection concerning it. As if somewhere she had seen a package that might have been the arsenic. But it was a vague recollection and remained only that. Later, too, Dr. Blakie telephoned, but it was only to ask Beatrice, who went to the telephone, if they knew anything of the inquest.
“Nothing,” said Beatrice. “I don’t know what they are waiting for, I’m sure.”
For an indictment, thought Marcia with a quick, ugly clutch of terror.
He did not ask for Marcia, or if he did Beatrice did not tell her.
Beatrice said nothing at all to Marcia. But knowledge and the security that knowledge gave her were in her eyes every time she looked at Marcia. And her strange boast of the previous night kept repeating itself in Marcia’s mind during that long, queer day.
A day during which there was at last time—too much time—to think. To go over and over again helplessly every smallest detail of that incredible period of time since Dr. Blakie, standing there spinning the globe in the library, had told her that Ivan was about to return.
But at the end of it she was no wiser than she had been.
Although she knew that there were at least one or two things she could do, one or two questions to which she might supply answers. Unless the answers only propounded other questions.
One of the obvious courses was to discover the hiding place of the letter. But she had no liberty to search for it with the men from police headquarters still in the house. Through with their prolonged search now, and again questioning Delia in the dining room. She wondered again what the servants had told them. What small things, forgotten and unimportant, would be remembered now and told so that, in the light of what had happened, they would seem significant, full of ugly meaning.
Perhaps nothing. Though Ancill had no liking for her. And there was no way of knowing what went on under that cloak of respectability and smoothness.
At five-thirty exactly they left. At six, the policeman in the hall—Mawson again, she noted—got up and strolled kitchenward as a faint odor of coffee floated through the air.
Dinner would be at seven. Beatrice had vanished. Gally was nowhere to be seen. It was cloudy and already growing dark, and—it seemed for the first time since Ivan had returned—the house was empty and quiet and unobservant.
It was a good time to accomplish one small bit of investigation on Marcia’s own part, and that concerned the queer matter of the silver wrap.
True, there was no particular object, so far as Marcia could see, in Beatrice’s borrowing the wrap for any reason other than the one she had stated. If she had wished to establish an alibi for the time of Ivan’s murder, then she would have wished to establish it for herself, not for Marcia, and would have seen to it that a wrap of her own lay there prominently displayed in that upstairs room at the Copley house.
No, if it was in any way a clue, or there was any purpose in it beyond Beatrice’s stated purpose, then it was curiously twisted and backward. But it was something the truth or falsity of which was very easily proved. If Beatrice’s summer things were in the wardrobe in her room, if her winter broadtail coat and sable choker and white ermine evening wrap were not in the wardrobe, then the seasonal exchange had been effected—furs were stored, summer taffeta and silks brought out, and Beatrice had been lying when she asked for Marcia�
��s own wrap.
And while, if she had been lying, Marcia still would have no notion as to the reason for it, still it would indicate that there was a reason.
But Beatrice was in her room. Marcia knocked lightly on the door before entering, and there was a rustle inside and Beatrice said, “Who is it?”
Marcia said something vague about the police having gone, was assured rather tartly by Beatrice that she already knew it, and retreated to her own room.
With Beatrice in her room there was no use in trying to look in the wardrobe. Marcia went wearily to the windows overlooking the garden, as she had done so many times that day, and put her face against the chill windowpane. It was going to rain again. It was cooler, and there were heavy clouds all over the sky and very close above them, pressing upon the peaked roofs of the houses. It was dark, too, so dark that the shrubs were already black blotches and the figure of a man going along the street was merely a moving figure altogether unrecognizable. Owing to the clouds, twilight was early, and the street lights had not been turned on, and a blur of light making a rectangle on the lawn at the back of the Copley house—coming probably from the kitchen—was the only light visible, until, quite suddenly, someone turned on the light in the library immediately below, another brighter rectangle fell upon the lawn directly below her, making it dull green and full of sharp shadows, and then immediately vanished as the light was turned out again.
Gally, probably; coming up from the game room and wondering where everybody had gone to.
It was just then that she remembered the storeroom. If Beatrice’s wardrobe was inaccessible, the cedar-lined closet was not and would furnish as definite proof, for it was there that clothes, put in brown paper envelopes and tightly tied with twine, were hung away every spring and every fall. Sometime there had been an unwary and starveling moth in the house, and Beatrice had fought the menace of its unhappy presence ever since. The closet was there on the second floor, just around the turn beyond Beatrice’s room, and it would take only a few moments to explore it.
In the hall she remembered the stout twine knots and the heaviness of the paper. She would need scissors. As usual the sconce light was on at the landing of the stairway, and the hall below was a pool of shadow into which she descended—wondering as she did so if she would ever again be able to descend those stairs without remembering the faint little rustle of her chiffon dinner gown when she’d gone down that stairway so short a time ago and found what she had found there in the library.
The library was in shadow, too, though when she opened the door she thought she heard a movement and called out, “Gally.” But no one answered, and as she found the desk lamp and pulled on the light she saw no one was there. Nerves, she told herself, took the scissors from the top desk drawer, and went quietly upstairs again. There was no one about; a faint odor of dinner being cooked was in the hall.
Beatrice’s door was still closed. And the store closet, luckily, had the key in the lock. It was a generous room, originally a sewing room, well lighted, with a half-collapsed wire figure, much padded, in one corner and a long sewing table in the middle under the light. Sliding doors along the walls revealed ranks of brown envelopes, fat with clothing hanging along rods.
She looked at them, fumbling among them. It would be more of a task than she had expected. Still she might be able to select the new-looking envelopes. She put down the scissors, slipped up the shade of the light and went to work. The envelopes rattled and the paper looked inconceivably tough and only Beatrice’s strong hands could have possibly tied those knots. There was no glancing shadow between her and the light; no sound except the stiff rattle of paper. But these envelopes were obviously old; not of this year’s vintage. Surely they were marked somewhere.
They were. Down at the bottom, in Beatrice’s strong handwriting:
“Aunt Beatrice: Seal trimmed black suit; green wool dress”—Aunt Beatrice had died before Marcia’s marriage. She turned to other envelopes and at last found what she wanted: “B.G. Summer things,” 1934. Green taffeta wrap; white quilted wrap; 3 knit suits; white linen suit—”
Marcia did not need to read further. Beatrice had been telling the truth, then. But better look inside the envelope to be sure. She turned to the table, and the scissors were not there.
The scissors were not there. They were not on the table, they were not on the floor, they were not anywhere in that room.
And there was no one in the room. The light from the unshaded bulb beat brightly upon its emptiness. There was no breath of motion, no sound, no flickering shadow.
But the scissors—heavy and sharp—were gone. Gone … and Marcia was suddenly possessed by one ugly, terribly compelling thought:
She must tell them—tell everyone. Tell them now before it was too late.
The door had closed. Funny. She didn’t remember closing it. But the house was old; the doors loosely hung; they closed themselves—or often drifted open.
But they did not lock themselves.
Her hands bruised on the lock.
“Yell like hell,” Rob had said. How could she yell when no sound would come from her throat? When in that great house, in a closet lined with cedar, no one could hear her. Unless Beatrice ...
Suppose whoever had locked that door returned.
… But she must warn them—she must tell them before it was too late.
She couldn’t warn them, and it was already too late. It was perhaps ten minutes after that that Beatrice Godden was found—murdered.
CHAPTER XIII
SHE WAS FOUND HALF on and half off the lower steps of the stairway, just outside the library door.
Delia found her. Ran upon that sight unexpectedly, horribly, when she turned on the light in the hall. She screamed, and Marcia heard the scream. She heard more. The sound of running footsteps and the terribly shrill bleating of a police whistle. Confused sounds and shouts. Doors being opened and closed. Footsteps at last on the stairs. Much later, it seemed, someone calling her name.
She tried to reply. Pounded on the locked door with her fists. Off somewhere in the distance a siren was coming, again, nearer that house.
Gally found her, and Rob came running at his shout.
“Marcia!”
“What is it? What’s happened?”
“Marcia! We couldn’t find you. We didn’t know. Are you all right?”
“Take her into her room, Rob.” Gally was brandishing a golf club, his eyes bright with excitement and his freckles standing out. “I’ll search the back of the house.”
“Rob!” Marcia clung to him. “What—who—You must tell me.”
But he had to be certain she was uninjured. Had to be certain there was nothing in the room but Marcia and the paper bags and the limp, grotesque dummy. Had to take her to her own room. The hall below was filled with noise and confusion and voices; at the stair well she had a lightning glimpse of a sort of nucleus of it all there at the foot of the stairs.
“Don’t look,” Rob said, pulling her away.
Somewhere down there Delia was sobbing and crying out shrilly, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it—there she was— and I saw it shine when I turned on the light—I didn’t touch it—I didn’t—”
They reached her room, and Rob went ahead and looked all around it.
“Come inside,” he said, returning quickly from that swift survey. “Sit down there. Do you want—Are you all right?” His eyes were blazing, and he knelt down beside her and put his arms around her. “Oh, my dear, I was so scared,” he said in a shaky voice.
His arms were warm and safe. And he was safe. There in that small sewing room, with the door locked, she hadn’t known. She wouldn’t think of those moments again; not for years and years. Not ever.
It was the smallest, briefest interlude of reassurance and warmth and comfort. They had each other, safe and tight in that small circumference, and they told each other that that was the real thing and it was removed and not a part of this ugly unreality. This thing tha
t, in spite of its unreality, had happened.
Rob stirred suddenly and said in a muffled voice, “These things—It’s like—what is it? The terror that walks by night—”
“It was Beatrice?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Nobody knows.”
“How?”
He rose and turned away with his hands jammed into his pockets and his face white and sick-looking.
“Stabbed. She—Look here, Marcia, do you have to know? I’d rather—”
A voice that wasn’t Marcia’s said, “Were there—scissors—anywhere?”
He whirled around at that and stared at her before he said huskily, “How did you know?”
She told him, looking away from him as she did so, and her voice was thin and small against the tapestry of sounds in the house.
“God!” said Rob and took her into his arms again as if he meant never to let her go. But he was savage and angry, too. “How dared you do it, Marcia? How could you—
You’ve got to be taken out of this. It’s criminal negligence on the part of the police. It’s a homicidal maniac. That’s what it is. Roaming around—striking from any shadow. And here you are unprotected—that fool police man letting such things—” He pulled himself up shortly, released her suddenly as someone in the hall called “Marcia” and opened the door. “Oh, Dr. Blakie. Thank God you’ve come. Take a look at Marcia, will you? She’s just had a pretty bad shock.”
“I think we’ve all had a shock,” said Dr. Blakie. “Do you know anything about it? How did it happen? I’ve just seen her—Beatrice, I mean. The police doctor’s here; he let me take a look.” He took Marcia’s wrist. “What’s the matter here?”
Rob told him, tersely.
“Locked in!”
“Yes. And the scissors gone.”
“And you don’t know who—”
Marcia shook her head.
“I was looking through the bags of clothing. They rattled a lot. Made so much noise I didn’t even hear the door close.”
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