Domino

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  What plan he might be concocting to embarrass me and humiliate Persis, I would never know. At just that moment a ringing cry of terror stopped him. The sound came from the back of the stage, high above it. Ingram turned to stare upward, and a sigh of horror whispered through the crowd.

  Over our heads Belle Durant clung with both hands to the rail of the catwalk that led across the stage above the flats. A hush fell over the entire theater, and with the strange fatality of slow movement we watched as the railing began to crumble in her grasp, breaking away. Then the action speeded up dreadfully, and she fell through the broken boards of the catwalk, crashing to the stage.

  The sound of her fall echoed sickly for a moment in the crowd’s stunned silence. I rushed toward her, reaching her before Ingram could recover, since he moved less easily than I. Belle’s satin dress made a pool of green on the floor of the stage, and I dropped to my knees beside her.

  She opened her eyes and looked up at me. “See—Tully,” she said, and closed them again.

  Then Ingram was there, pushing me aside. He knelt, checking for a pulse in her neck, shouting for medical help. I got to my feet, stunned and helpless, making no sense of her last whispered words.

  A woman dressed incongruously as a dance hall girl came out of the crowd in response to Ingram’s call for a doctor and mounted the steps to the stage. There were others crowding around now—Caleb and Gail and Hillary, among all the strangers.

  My grandmother would be alone, I thought. I must go to her at once, but I found it hard to move in my state of shock. The thunderbolt had indeed fallen from the sky.

  It was Hillary who drew me away gently and took me through the crowd to where Persis sat alone near the lobby entrance. Her face was white, her mouth drawn and grim, but when she held out her hand to me it did not tremble.

  “It was Belle, wasn’t it? Is she—do you know?”

  I shook my head, still feeling numb. “A doctor is with her. And Mr. Ingram.”

  “Him! Why was she up there? How did it happen?”

  “I don’t know. That catwalk was already splintered. Why she would go out on it—” I broke off, afraid to think about possibilities.

  “She wouldn’t,” Persis said. “She didn’t like that gallery. I doubt that her fall was an accident.”

  Caleb had fought his way through the crowd to Persis’ side, and he spoke sharply. “You don’t know that it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Belle spoke to me,” I said. “She told me to see Tully. He’s the caretaker in Domino, isn’t he? But why would she tell me to see him?”

  No one answered me.

  “Go and find out how she is,” Persis said to Caleb.

  He hurried away, and she sat with her eyes closed. I shook my head at Hillary when he would have spoken. I wished that Jon were here, wished for his capability and good sense. We needed him badly now, and where was he?

  By the time much of the crowd was spilling out of the theater, chattering excitedly, speculating. The floor was less crowded than before, and Caleb came back to us quickly.

  “I’m afraid she’s dying. It will take too long for an ambulance to get here and move her to a hospital. Ingram’s talking about flying her out by helicopter. But he can’t do that until daylight.”

  “Here they come,” Hillary said.

  Ingram himself was carrying her, and when I saw his stricken face I knew how much that hard man cared about Belle Durant.

  Her red wig had fallen off, and her own vividly tinted hair hung loose. I could see blood streaking her face, see how pale she looked above the green décolletage. The doctor walked beside her, spangles glittering, but no longer seeming incongruous. I felt reassured by the look of concern on the woman’s face.

  “Will you go with them, Hillary?” I pleaded. “Maybe he’ll let you be there.”

  Hillary pressed my shoulder and went away.

  It was Caleb who took charge. He gave Persis his arm to lean on, and I walked on her other side. We forced our way through the foyer and onto the street, crowded now with all those costumed visitors, looking strangely as though they belonged. As though they had all been here before on the streets of Jasper.

  “We’ll never get a car through this jam,” Caleb said.

  Persis ceased to lean so heavily on my arm and drew herself tall. “I can walk. Just help me a little.”

  Somehow we got her through. Before we turned our back on the Opera House, I looked again toward the Timberline, where Ingram was carrying Belle into the lobby. Gail Cullen stood near the entrance. She had lost or discarded her hat, and she was staring wide-eyed at the woman in Ingram’s arms, the sequins glittering on her jacket in the Timberline’s lights. Hillary ran up the steps behind them as I watched. Then Caleb pushed a way along the street for us, and we walked on toward Morgan House.

  I thought of that moment when I’d heard voices in the dressing room loft. The words had been soft, whispered, and I couldn’t tell whether they had belonged to a man or woman, or both. If only I had—but that sort of regret was a waste. The thing was done.

  Sharp in my memory, nevertheless, was the sight of Mark Ingram standing arrogantly on the stage, ready to carry out some dreadful plan that would have humiliated my grandmother. His ingenuity would have taken care of that, I knew, and only Belle’s fall had stopped him. Now we might never know what he intended, and that was certainly just as well.

  Away from the glare of light and the sound there were few stragglers. My long skirts hampered me on the rough walk, and once when I stepped on the hem I heard a rip. Persis moved slowly, but steadily and surely, pausing now and then to lean on Caleb’s arm and rest. I still wondered where Jon could be and why he wasn’t with us. A high, full moon lighted our way to Morgan House.

  When we reached it, the porch light was on, and there was Jon, sitting comfortably on the steps, with a beer can in his hand.

  “Why didn’t you stay?” I cried. “We needed you!”

  “You’re home early,” he said. “I was going to join you again in a little while. It sounds as though the festivities have moved outdoors. What do you mean—you needed me?”

  “It’s too late now,” I told him. “Belle—” But I couldn’t get the words past the choke in my throat.

  Caleb helped Persis up the steps to where she could sit in the swing. Then in dry, unemotional terms he explained what had happened, and Jon listened grimly.

  “Belle was pushed out on that catwalk,” Persis said when Caleb finished. “She must have been pushed.”

  “You can’t say that,” Caleb reproached her. “We don’t know any such thing.”

  I broke in to tell Jon what Belle had whispered to me.

  “Tully?” he said. “I wonder why Tully. Maybe I’d better ride over to Domino in the morning and see what I can find out from the old man. I came back to the house so I could have it to myself and make a search that I’ve wanted to make for a long time. You’d better come inside and see what I’ve done, Mrs. Morgan. You won’t like it, but I had to try, and I wasn’t sure you’d agree if I asked permission.”

  She let Caleb help her up from the swing. “First I want to know how Belle is. Laurie, will you call the hotel?”

  I went into the hall to the telephone, and a stranger answered. “Belle is dead,” he said shortly. I hung up, feeling ill. Ill and surrounded by evil, by the constant threat of an evil that could strike any of us down at any time. Belle, so warmly outspoken, had drawn fire. We would all miss her terribly.

  The others saw my face when I came back.

  “She’s gone?” Persis said.

  I nodded, and Caleb bent toward her.

  She pushed him away. “I’m all right. Just angry for now. I’ll cry later. Belle was my friend, and this has happened because of me. We’ve got to fight that man, punish whoever did this. You must go to Domino as soon as you can, Jon.”

  “I’ll go,” he said. “But right now come into the back parlor, Mrs. Morgan, so you can see the mess I’ve made.”r />
  He led the way to the open door and reached in to turn on lights. Persis closed her eyes, and I remembered that she hadn’t set foot in this room for twenty years. Lights flashed on, and she opened her eyes and looked about the room. It had obviously been searched, for old dust and cobwebs had been disturbed, a rug thrown back at one corner, furniture moved about, one of the draperies down in a heap by the window. Persis said nothing, her eyes searching, remembering.

  “What were you looking for?” Caleb asked, his voice oddly harsh.

  “For something I didn’t find,” Jon said. “Though I think someone else did. Not the police, or it would have come out in the papers. I always wondered about that missing deringer.”

  “Let it go, Jon,” Caleb said. “Just let it all go. It can’t possibly matter now.”

  “It can matter a lot if we find a way to prove that Laurie never killed her father.”

  The hush was suddenly intense, and I found that my knees wouldn’t hold me. I went shakily to the old horsehair sofa and sat down on its slippery surface. Persis followed me carefully into the room, ignoring Caleb’s offer of his arm, and sat in a chair. How strange we all looked in our costumes for the ball. Strange and somehow appropriate in this old room.

  “Go on,” Persis said. “What are you talking about?”

  “One of those guns was missing, wasn’t it? So it might have been fired when the other one was fired. Perhaps at the same time, so that only one shot seemed to be heard. In that case there ought to be another .41-gauge bullet around somewhere. There were no traces of blood found at the time to show that Noah might have been wounded when he left. So the second bullet, if there was one, should be here in this room. But no one ever reported finding such a bullet, though I understand the police went over the room thoroughly.”

  Both Persis and Caleb were staring fixedly, and he went on.

  “Tonight I decided to come in here while you were all away and make a real search myself. Of course I didn’t find anything. But I think the second gun was fired—not the one that killed Richard Morgan, but a second deringer in Laurie’s hands. The bullet could have gone astray—and I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. I think it must have struck up there near the corner of the ceiling, so that it cut the wallpaper and cracked the plaster, but its force must have been spent, so that it ricocheted to the carpet, or some other part of the room.”

  I found myself shaken by a mingling of hope and anxiety and disbelief. “But—but then who—”

  “Found the bullet? That’s what I’d like to know. Was it you, Mrs. Morgan?”

  She looked both shocked and confused, and her face told us the truth. “No, of course not, Jon,” she said. “I never thought of such a thing. What are you getting at?”

  “Mr. Hawes?” Jon questioned.

  The creases that ran down Caleb Hawes’ cheeks looked deeper than ever, and his color was a pasty gray. He came to stand beside Persis’ chair, beseeching her.

  “Yes, I found the bullet. It’s with those jewels that were hidden away. I searched before the police came and I found it, just as Jon had said.” He broke off for a moment, seeking control, then went on. “Will you forgive me for what I thought? I believed that you fired the gun that killed Richard, Mrs. Morgan. And if that was what you’d done, I had to protect you.”

  “I? Kill my son?”

  He stumbled on, all his careful control crumbling. “I thought you’d picked up the second gun that Laurie had loaded and you’d tried to shoot Noah Armand. But in the struggle Richard must have stepped in the way and you shot him instead. I always thought that was why you concocted the story of an intruder, faked the theft of the jewelry. I thought you had hidden the gun, and all I wanted was to see that your secret was kept.”

  For a long moment no one said anything. Then Persis spoke sadly. “My old friend! But what a fool you’ve been. Of course it was Laurie. She was the one I was protecting. And her mother. From all the scandal that would have made the newspapers and the investigation a circus.”

  But Jon was already contradicting her. “No—I doubt that it was Laurie. The spent bullet must have come from Laurie’s wildly fired gun. But it would have been Noah Armand who shot and killed your son, Mrs. Morgan. Then it was he who took away the second deringer that he had used.”

  I still couldn’t believe or understand, and I was shaking my head. “Even if what you say is true, Jon, how can we ever know which gun killed my father?”

  “Noah wouldn’t have missed. Not when they were so close.”

  “But then my mother must have seen it all. My mother was here in this room, and she would have known that Noah killed my father. Yet she never said anything.” Tears came into my eyes, and I looked at my grandmother. “She let me believe—”

  “Stop that!” Persis said. “You didn’t believe anything. You didn’t remember, and you can’t start judging her now. Love does crazy things to people. I know. I loved that man once, and it took a long while for me to come to my senses and face my mistake. Just be glad. Be grateful to Jon for working this out, and let everything else go—including any blame you may want to heap on Caleb.”

  I roused myself to stare at Caleb Hawes. “That was why you hated to have me come here, wasn’t it? Because you wanted to protect my grandmother.”

  His look was still unforgiving—of me. “I owe Mrs. Morgan a great deal. She was kinder to me than my own family. I wanted to do what I did.”

  Jon came to sit on the sofa beside me, taking my hand. “Just hang in there, Laurie. Don’t try to sort it all out right away. Just try to believe. That’s all you need to do.”

  “I wish I could,” I said. “But I don’t think we’ll ever really know.”

  Grudgingly Caleb had arrived at a moment of total confession. “There’s more. Mrs. Morgan, I was the one who put the sleeping capsules in your milk.”

  “You?” Persis made a despairing gesture. “But why—why?”

  He stumbled on desperately—a man I could hardly recognize. “I thought if I could stop you from making a new will—just for a little while—you might fall out with Laurie. Or she might leave. That was why I hung that wreath on her door.” He turned to me. “And that’s why I opened your door the first night you were here. I wanted to frighten you so that you wouldn’t stay. I hoped you’d go back to New York before you could further damage your grandmother. I knew you would think it the sort of trick that Gail would play. You’d never have blamed me.”

  To my surprise, Persis had recovered from her first astonishment and was nodding her head thoughtfully. “Yes. Perhaps I can understand—a little. None of us ever gave you a chance to use your own talents, did we, Caleb? And desperation always gives bad advice.”

  I wished that I could be as generous, but there was nothing I could say to this man now. Perhaps I would never really know the truth about Caleb Hawes. Whether it was my grandmother’s well-being he protected or his own interest in her will—how could anyone tell? Perhaps he didn’t know himself by this time.

  “At least this would explain Noah Armand’s disappearance,” Jon said. “He knew he’d murdered Richard Morgan, and he took himself off as fast as he could, and was never heard from again.”

  My hand tightened on Jon’s. There was something that Persis still didn’t know.

  “The second deringer!” I cried. “Someone put that second gun back in the box with the other one. It’s there right now.”

  Persis gasped, and Caleb scowled at me. But he went to the mahogany box and opened it, displaying both pistols, one more tarnished than the other, which had stayed in its case all these years.

  Caleb spoke in apology. “When Laurie told me this second gun had turned up, I thought you’d put it there for some reason of your own, Mrs. Morgan.”

  “Of course I didn’t!”

  “I realize that now. But if you didn’t put it there, then what does its reappearance mean?”

  “I think we all know what it means,” Persis said softly. “It means that
Noah Armand has come back.”

  “Maybe,” Jon said. “Anyway, I’m not going to wait for morning to ride to Domino and talk to old Tully. There’s a full moon, and I’ll go there tonight. Mrs. Morgan—those pieces of jewelry that you pretended were stolen—are they in the house in Domino?”

  “Yes, they are there. Caleb can tell you where the box is hidden, since he placed it there for me. You may as well retrieve the box and bring it back. You want that bullet, don’t you?”

  Dully Caleb explained where he had hidden the tin box that contained Persis’ jewels, and Jon started for the door.

  I stood up, making the quickest decision of my life. “I’ll go with you. I want to hear what Tully says.”

  Caleb said, “That’s absurd,” and Jon looked at me uncertainly.

  “If I were your age, I would go,” Persis said, and I dropped a kiss on her cheek.

  “I won’t try to argue with two Morgans,” Jon said. “Go get out of that fancy dress, Laurie. I’ll saddle up and wait for you.”

  I ran for the stairs, pulling up my long skirts so as not to stumble. In my room I changed quickly to jeans and low boots. My hair was tumbling from its coil on top of my head, and I pulled out the pins and let it hang free. No time to do anything about it now, and I’d cope with tangles later.

  Persis had returned to the parlor with Caleb, and she held out a hand to me. “Be careful, Laurie. You’re all I’ve got now. And that man is dangerous.”

  This time I knew she didn’t mean Mark Ingram.

  “I’ll be with Jon,” I told her, and we went outside together.

  The ranch seemed quiet, with only the underlying night sounds busy with their whispering. The moon was bright, but it had started to dip down the sky toward the mountains. Over near the Timberline voices still sounded, carrying in the mountain stillness. Lights were ablaze down there, and pain returned as I thought of Belle. Anger as well. Then I turned my back and started for the glow of the barn.

  Wind blew cold down the valley, and Old Desolate stood high and black against the sky, with moonlight shining on its rocky head. I held back my tumbling thoughts. I couldn’t wholly accept as yet, or understand. Time enough for all that later. Now I was going to Domino again, and once more I was riding there with Jon.