The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  Seething inside as I imagined she was, she still had her fortress of honey and caramel intact.

  “He has such a quaint sense of humor. Someday it’s going to get him into serious trouble.”

  Molly McShane shook her head.

  “No, Mrs. Kersey. Eustace has been in all the trouble he’s ever going to be in.”

  “You children!” If she had listened to the quality of Molly’s voice she would not have laughed so airily. “You think you can make Eustace see the error of his ways and turn to righteousness. You underestimate dear Eustace’s capacity for malice. You’re all exceedingly naive—”

  “Mrs. Kersey—Eustace is dead,” Molly said deliberately. “Eustace was murdered—this evening—”

  “You’re lying!”

  Then Mrs. Kersey clamped her lips shut, her blue eyes distended, the pulse beating a violent tattoo in her white throat. She flicked her tongue across her lips.

  “You’re lying!” she cried again. “Mrs. Latham!” She steadied herself against the door. “Tell me she’s lying!”

  I shook my head. I’d never before been around so many people who called each other liars with such unadulterated unambiguity.

  “It’s true, Mrs. Kersey.”

  She kept her eyes on me a long time, but they weren’t seeing me. They were seeing something visible only to them. Or seeing nothing. I don’t know. The blue-white eyeballs were strained and they had tiny threads of red in them that had not been there before.

  Then very slowly Mrs. Kersey moved them, without moving her head, until they were fixed on Molly—fixed, and as damnably accusing as if she were pointing her finger and saying it in so many words. It was as plain to Molly as to me what she was thinking—what it was she was saying.

  “It’s you that’s lying, Mrs. Kersey.”

  Molly’s voice was low and passionately intense.

  “My parents didn’t kill him. That’s what you want to think. That’s what you want everybody to think. It’s a wicked, horrible lie. Mother doesn’t even know it was Eustace that told you. Dad knew it, but he kept it to himself because he didn’t want her to know. You tried to make her believe Dad had put the string across the steps—but Dad wouldn’t do that. He’s too kind and too sweet. You don’t understand kindness, but he does. He doesn’t even hate you, like Mother and I do. He doesn’t know how to hate anybody.”

  She flashed away from the woman at the door.

  “Mrs. Latham—Sheep brought me down here. He said I was to stay here so nobody could find me. He was afraid for me to stay up in my room alone, with Mother and Dad and Bill all gone, and he had to go back to the house. He took Mother with him so Dad would have somebody who could talk for him when they got him all mixed up. I told him I’d stay, if you’d let me when you came back. But I won’t stay if she’s going to stay here. I won’t—”

  “Mrs. Kersey is going, Molly,” I said. “Right away. I’m sure she doesn’t want to stay.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Terrifying night

  THAT WASN’T TRUE. Mrs. Kersey wanted very much to stay. She didn’t want to go down those stone steps to the empty magnificence of her apartment. I can’t say I very much blamed her, but I didn’t want her in mine.

  As she moved uneasily, sort of fumbling for the doorknob behind her, I felt sorry for her all of a sudden.

  “Wouldn’t you like me to go ask Mr. Gannon to go down to your apartment with you?” I said.

  She licked her lips again, a kind of new terror on her. Mrs. Kersey was beginning to shake violently. If I didn’t get Mr. Gannon, and quick, I thought, I’d have to go myself, and that I didn’t care to do. I may say I quite definitely did not.

  I looked at Molly. If she had either pity or compassion in her hot little heart there wasn’t enough to waste on Viola Kersey. Her head was raised, her chin thrust out a little, no emotion visible in any line of her slim body except contempt of a very high order. Molly didn’t like Mrs. Viola Kersey reduced to quivering pulp any better than she liked her opulent sugar and spice.

  “Would you like me to get Mr. Gannon?” I repeated.

  It was only then that it struck me that if Lucille should happen to be right, I was little better than an accessory before the fact. But he was all there was. She seemed to realize that too. She moistened her lips again and nodded her head. I opened the door, when she’d moved unsteadily aside, left it open, and crossed the hall. I knocked at George G. Gannon’s door. I waited, and knocked again. I could feel my silent audience behind me—Viola Kersey and Molly McShane. Otherwise I don’t suppose I would have had the temerity to turn Mr. George G. Gannon’s doorknob. But I did. I turned it, and oddly enough the door opened, almost as if it hadn’t been completely closed when I touched it.

  “Mr. Gannon,” I called.

  There was no answer. I looked into the lighted room. He wasn’t there. The bathroom and closet door, like mine, were open, the windows open onto his patio. Mr. Gannon was not at home. He’d been in dishabille, or at least I assumed so, seeing his heliotrope pajamas and holly-green dressing-gown and holly-green sandals in a heap in the middle of the floor. Either he’d not been there when Mrs. Kersey left his room or he’d left it since. With the emotional crisis going on in my room, it wouldn’t have been strange if we’d failed to hear him go.

  I closed the door at once.

  “He was there,” Mrs. Kersey said.

  “He’s not there now.”

  She put her hand to her throat. “I can’t go down there alone. I can’t.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Molly said. “I’m not afraid.”

  “No, you won’t,” I said. “I’ll call the desk, and one of the boys can go with her. You’re staying here with me.”

  I went over to the phone and told the operator to send one of the boys down. While I did it I read the three yellow slips that were there beside it and that I hadn’t noticed when I came in. They were the carbons of the originals I would have found in my box if I’d gone by the desk. The time stamped on them was ten minutes past eight for the first and eight-thirty for the last. They were all from Lucille Gannon and each marked Urgent— Please Call.

  It was almost eleven then, but I called anyway. After I told the operator we’d like a bellboy, I asked her to ring Mrs. Gannon for me in Room 203.

  “Oh, she’s gone, Mrs. Latham,” the girl said cheerfully. “Haven’t you heard? They’ve taken her to the hospital. She turned on the gas heater in her bathroom and forgot to light it. She must have thought it had a pilot light. It’s lucky the woman upstairs could smell. They got her out and they hope she’ll be all right, but it was a narrow squeak. We’ve sure had a lot of excitement around here lately. Mr. Gannon’s gone with her. He’s terribly upset. I guess anybody would be. I’ll send a boy, Mrs. Latham. Right away.”

  I put the phone down. It was cold and heavy as lead in my hand.

  “It’s Lucille,” I said. “She turned on the gas and forgot to light it. She’s—”

  I didn’t get any further. Mrs. Kersey gave a guttural gasp as if somebody had her white throat already in his hand, slowly pressing steely claws into it. She was gray and green and mottled. She staggered to the door.

  “Let me out of here! Let me out of here!”

  It was a hoarse, awful cry, and she pulled, the door open, and staggered back for an instant, and then she ran. She didn’t wait to swing into her rhythmic walk and she didn’t wait for the boy to come.

  “Lucille!” Her name was a sort of awed whisper on Molly’s lips as she looked at me. “Not Lucille. She wouldn’t forget to light the gas. It must have been— somebody else, Mrs. Latham.”

  I nodded slowly. I thought so too. It seemed cold in the room, suddenly, but somehow I was reluctant to turn on our gas.

  Molly went over and looked down toward Mrs. Kersey’s apartment. “She’s scared now, isn’t she?” she said quietly. “She’s really scared. Maybe—now she’ll go home. Go home and stay there.”

  With two people dead and one near dea
th, and Sheep’s sending Molly to my room because he didn’t think she was safe in her own, Mrs. Viola Kersey’s being so scared that she’d go home and stay there seemed to me a shockingly small net result—even if she lived to get home. It frightened me. Murder I’m used to. My life with Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck had at least done that for me if nothing else. But before, it had always been a reasonable sort of murder. It had never been creeping and sly, so mad, so without discernible pattern. If it was all to frighten Viola Kersey away from Hollywood it was time something was done about it.

  And it was certainly time for me to start taking to heart Colonel Primrose’s constantly reiterated lecture on Dangerous Knowledge. There was no doubt, I supposed, that I had it. There was no doubt in that case that I’d better begin to get rid of it. What had happened to Lucille could be part of it.

  I went to the telephone. “What’s Eustace Sype’s number, Molly?”

  Her little body stiffened. “What do you want it for?”

  “I want to tell Colonel Primrose about Lucille Gannon,” I said patiently. If I’d thrown the telephone book at her it wouldn’t have surprised me. “I don’t think Lucille turned the gas off either. They ought to know it up there.”

  She considered that a moment.

  “If you truly believe your parents had nothing to do with any of this, Molly, you won’t be afraid for the police to know.”

  I’d hit her much closer to home than I’d had any idea I would or could. It was the first inkling I’d had that her passionate defense of them came from anything deeper than a belief that they were innocent. It was a startling revelation, and profoundly disturbing. I could see her crumpling up inside, fighting down the miserable agony of doubt that she was living within her heart.

  “They couldn’t have, Mrs. Latham,” she whispered. “They couldn’t have. Not Lucille. They haven’t got anything against Lucille Gannon.”

  I started to say something in general, and stopped. There didn’t seem much use, at this point.

  “Then what’s the telephone number?”

  She gave it to me. She didn’t want to, but she did. She stood there then with her little fists knotted tightly together, her lips trembling, watching me, trying desperately to keep from breaking down altogether.

  It took me a long time to get the house, and when I did I could hear the blur of heavy voices all around the telephone even when I was speaking to Colonel Primrose, telling him about Lucille.

  He listened in absolute silence, and he was silent for a long time when I’d finished.

  “What hospital is she at?” he asked then.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You can find out. But I told you she was afraid. George Gannon’s with her. She was terrified, this afternoon. I think somebody ought to go and be with her.”

  “You’re right,” he said.

  That was in itself an all-time high. But everybody’s got to be right once—even me.

  “And if you’ll come in the morning, there’s some other stuff I think I’d better tell you,” I said.

  I should have known better than to say it. I knew it the instant the words were out of my mouth.

  Molly was watching me, every inch the little jungle cat again, poised, intense, and taut, ready to spring. I mean figuratively. What she did in fact was to draw in a quick audible breath, and flash around, and the next instant she was out the door and gone. I could hear her feet on the flagstones. She was running, and I hadn’t the faintest doubt where she was running to. She was heading for a telephone—just as she’d done when she recognized the name of Viola Van Zant Kersey, and in her frantic haste had left her bag behind her in the telephone booth, to be picked up there by the girl from Seattle.

  As I turned away from my own phone I felt suddenly and terrifyingly alone. The silence all around me was thick and soft as sable down. The long night stretched endlessly ahead of me, already filled with formless, nameless moving things.

  That’s when I remembered the yellow match-book cover on the seat of the taxicab in Washington, D.C.

  “Death is the Devil’s Stronghold,” someone had written on it. The fear of death was really worse, I was thinking. It’s the outer battlements of the fiery keep. It’s the paralyzing chain that drags to the gates. I could feel it now. I could feel the creeping, whispering Presence moving up the dark patio stairs, slithering across the tiled floor of the hall outside my door. I’ve never been so frightened in my life.

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Tragic accident?

  IT WAS HALF-PAST TWO when I heard George Gannon come home.

  I’d been asleep and awake a hundred times, it seemed like, and heard a hundred creeping footsteps before I heard him. When I first went to bed I’d left the light on in the bathroom and the windows closed, but I was ashamed about the light and turned it off when the stuffiness of the room woke me the first time. I even closed the door to keep out the glow from Viola Kersey’s lights, full on, before I decided to open the windows and get a little fresh air come what might. The white iron furniture on the patio had the reassuring quality of familiar objects. I don’t say my liver wasn’t still the pallid shade of a piece of old halibut, but at least some of the oppressive closed-in feeling of locked windows and tightly drawn curtains was removed.

  It was the smell of cigar smoke coming in through the screen that first told me George Gannon was outside. That in itself was a little surprising. The impression I’d got was that he ate his cigars cold. Smoking one hot would seem to indicate a calm and peaceful spirit. It couldn’t, I thought, be that he was content with his wife’s condition—or could it? If Lucille Gannon was right, and George Gannon was himself the heavy in this grim tale he was acting in for once—and directing and producing as well, I supposed, if she was right—then the only reason he’d have for enjoying his cigar at this time of night must be that she was worse off than the girl at the switchboard had thought.

  It was a sobering idea. I’d half forgotten what it was Lucille had been practically shouting at the top of her lungs when it had struck her that he might be listening. It came back to me very clearly now. I remembered chiefly her dreadful questions about evidence: Would Eustace Sype’s saying he’d seen George be enough, or would they have to prove he’d done it? And I remembered the way Lucille, thinking suddenly that he could have heard her, had clutched her throat. That was fear, as genuine and stark as it was in the hoarse croak that Viola Kersey had let out when she heard about Lucille.

  It occurred to me at just that point, I think, that the smoke from George Gannon’s cigar was very close.

  That was also the time I got up. I got up, put on my dressing-gown, and stayed up. I stayed up until George Gannon went back into his room to stay. That was at twenty minutes past four. From a quarter to three until that time, except for a short space when he answered the telephone, George Gannon paced. He didn’t stay on the patio; I heard the muted click of his gate, and his awkward steps going down to the terrace. And I gathered eventually that his spirit was anything but calm and peaceful. He was a harassed and sleepless soul. It was a story told in sound as he paced back and forth, up and down. What his thoughts were I’d have liked to know. I’d have liked to go out on my own patio and call to him to ask how Lucille was, but I didn’t dare do that. It was a strange trio that he and Viola Kersey and I made there in our adjacent holes—George Gannon pacing, me wide awake, awaiting my passport into the Devil’s Stronghold, Viola Kersey enshrined in her glowing pool of light below us, waiting for hers with even more acute and agonizing fear, in the sunlit morning it was absurd. It wasn’t absurd at half-past three, the silence broken only by George Gannon’s slippered feet pacing, pacing, pacing.

  At ten minutes past four the telephone ringing in his room took him inside. I could hear it through the open windows on the patios. He was down on the terrace walk, by the chrysanthemum bed, when it rang. He ran up the steps, clicking the gate sharply, letting the screen door bang shut behind him. I thought he’d gone to stay then, but he hadn’t.
He came out onto the patio again, and I heard the creak of the chaise longue as he threw himself on it.

  Then I heard him sobbing. It was a soul-racking, terrible sound coming in strangled torment across the white-painted brick wall that divided his patio from mine, the wall with the fuchsia on it, the blossoms crimson and purple like great drops of blood dripping down its dead white face. George Gannon was crying. Lucille was dead, then. He’d been pacing, then, waiting for the news to come, with what anxiety, and even horror, perhaps, his despair now was the vivid proof. And it was a strange thing, but I was no longer afraid. I was aware suddenly that I was no longer afraid of the creeping night things. I looked at the clock at the head of my bed. It was twenty minutes past four. I’d started to take off my dressing-gown and go back to bed when I heard the creak of his chaise longue again, and I heard the screen door open then, and shut. He’d gone back to his room, the racking torment of his weeping eased finally to give him rest. It’s a horrible thing, to hear a man cry. And after I went to bed again it seemed to me I could still hear him, and I still felt pity for him.

  Which, I suppose, is what made it such an appalling shock the next morning when Colonel Primrose called me and said Lucille was all right and she’d probably be out of the hospital around ten o’clock. I was utterly staggered. I wouldn’t have been nearly so staggered if somebody had told me Viola Kersey had been found with a rope around her neck. And nobody told me that. My son, who brought me my breakfast in his capacity of morning waiter, told me what amounted to the contrary, in fact. Mrs. Kersey was very much alive and well. Even more, she was in high good spirits. She’d started packing, the night before; this morning she’d changed her mind. She loved Hollywood, she was going to stay.

  I was still so confounded about the business of Lucille that Mrs. Kersey’s new intentions, while interesting, were a relatively minor surprise.

  “Here’s your paper, Mother,” Bill said. “I’m rushed now, but I’ll be back. The Colonel wants us to keep still about last night.”