The Man Who Died Twice

by The Man Who Died Twice (retail) (epub)

  He found himself waiting in alarmed anticipation for a repetition of that cry; instead he heard a thudding sound near the other end of the veranda as if someone had fallen heavily to the ground. In his lingering bewilderment it was the first thing that occurred to him and he stepped to the corner of the house, a sudden tightness working on his muscles as he peered through the darkness and stopped again to listen.

  He heard what sounded like steps almost at once, running steps it seemed, distinct at first but swiftly fading. And now he was at the railing, hurrying along it until something—was it an obscure figure or his imagination?—caught his eye as it moved in flight across the slope of the lawn. After that Ward acted without much conscious thought but with purpose none the less.

  Not yet knowing for sure what had waked him or what his waking meant, he simply accepted the fact that something was wrong. On the assumption that someone had jumped from the balcony, his own decision was instinctive rather than calculated as he vaulted the railing and raced down the slope towards the rim of trees that bordered the beach.

  He saw nothing at all now, heard nothing but the pounding of his own steps. Once he stopped abruptly to sweep the starred darkness with his glance and there was still nothing to see and he looked back towards the house and the lighted room on the second floor. Then he went on, stubbornly, plunging into the undergrowth, stumbling now and then but avoiding the blacker outlines of the tree trunks to come at last to the open reaches of the beach.

  Here he stopped again, not knowing which way to turn. Ahead of him the surface of the water looked black and glistening except for the irregular white lines of an incipient surf that kept curling in with monotonous regularity to break upon the hardened sand.

  He was, he knew now, quite alone. Even though he could see better here where the sand made the darkness less intense, there was nothing to see except the dark border of the trees, the blacker shapes of the rocks off to one side where the water broke white against their sides.

  He cursed softly as he caught his breath. He told himself that if he actually had been chasing a prowler the man could easily have stood aside in the undergrowth until he passed and then retraced his steps undetected. The thought irritated him. He kicked at the sand in his frustration; then abruptly he turned left and trudged along, stopping now and then to listen, and eying intently the bordering trees and undergrowth.

  After fifty yards of this he stopped to look seaward. In the diagonal distance he saw the riding light of some craft but he could not tell if it was anchored or not. Closer in he made out the vague outline of the jetty he had noticed the other afternoon, its spindly length ending in some bulkier object he could not define. It was only then that he thought he saw something else on the surface of the water.

  He stared hard and in his staring his perceptive powers seemed to lessen. He could not tell whether what he saw was a rock or a skiff of some kind. That was his first impression—that it was a small boat—because he thought it moved.

  He walked on, then stopped again. He looked away to rest his eyes and when he finally picked out this object he sought he could not tell whether it was moving diagonally away from him towards the jetty’s end or whether it had not moved at all. The next time he glanced away he lost it entirely and now he bent over and moved along close to the water to see if he could locate any marks on the sand that might help.

  Without a flashlight it was a futile effort and when at last he straightened he stood in front of a bungalow set well back among the trees. This, he knew, would be the Dunhams’ cottage and as soon as he saw the crack of light behind the drawn curtains he started towards it.

  Judith Dunham opened the door seconds after he had knocked. She stood silhouetted against the room’s light, one hand holding the knob and her face completely shadowed. She said: “Oh—” in a soft gasp, at the same time taking a small backward step.

  “I hope I didn’t frighten you,” Ward said. “I saw your light and”—he hesitated, wondering how best to express himself—“I wondered if you heard anyone prowling around outside.”

  “Come in, please.” She stepped aside. “Is there someone prowling about?” she said when she had closed the door. “Why on earth would anyone do that?”

  Why indeed? Ward thought. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know that anyone was—here. I think there was someone up at the house.”

  He tried to explain what had happened and in the telling the details sounded inadequate, even to him. He had moved well into the room now and as he talked she turned so that the light from the floor lamp fell across her face.

  She was wearing dark-blue slacks and a matching blouse, very thin, so that he wondered if the outfit was meant to be lounging pajamas. She had sneakers on her feet and there was sand on the edges of the soles. There was a streak or two of sand on the fiber rug as well but he could not tell whether this was fresh or not. On the table beside the lamp a magazine was open and placed face down, and smoke curled up from a cigarette that had not yet burned down in its ashtray.

  He noticed all this as he spoke but she seemed not to be aware of his interest. She stood very erect, her Titian hair held in a ribbon now instead of a bun, the normal reserve of her longish, high-cheekboned face giving the impression of impassiveness. Except for a smudge about her wide mouth she wore no makeup, but for all of this her color was high and he noticed for the first time that her eyes were a deep green, promising somehow an inner warmth beneath the reserved exterior if one could but reach it.

  “But how extraordinary,” she said when he finished. “Are you sure you—”

  Whatever she had in mind was left unsaid because down the hall opening from the living-room a door banged open. Steps shuffled in the passageway.

  “What in God’s name goes on out here?” Gordon Dunham barked irascibly. “You know I have trouble sleeping, Judith—”

  As he spotted Ward, he stopped abruptly in the doorway, a scowling, bathrobed figure with tousled sandy hair. He blinked and glanced quickly from one to the other.

  “Oh, hello,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine what was going on out here. What’s up?”

  “Jim thinks there was a prowler up at the house,” the woman said.

  “A prowler?” Dunham gave the word a preposterous inflection. “At the house?”

  Ward had to go into his story again and this time it sounded less convincing.

  “Jim thought we might have heard something down here,” Judith said.

  “Well, I didn’t,” Dunham said. “I must have been asleep for hours.” He looked at his wife. “I thought you were, too. What time is it anyway?” He turned to look at the clock on the bookcase. “Five of two?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Judith said, indicating the magazine. “I’ve been reading.”

  “Since eleven?”

  “You know very well, Gordon, that I went to bed when you did. Some time later I got up and closed your door so I wouldn’t wake you and came out here.”

  Dunham continued to look at her, the line of his mouth tight and his eyes narrowed. “Well,” he said finally, “did you hear anything?”

  For a moment she returned his glance, nothing showing in her face; then her gaze moved on. “No,” she. said calmly, “I didn’t.”

  Ward looked again at the sand on the edge of her sneakers, his lean face somber and his mind busy as he speculated on the scene he had witnessed. It was apparent now that the two used separate bedrooms and that, judging from appearances, there was very little in common left between them. He recalled what MacQuade had said about the Dunhams, remembered the scene at the Club Morgan and Tenney’s description of an earlier incident in which Dunham was involved.

  Now he heard the other sigh, watched him dig his hands deeper into his bathrobe pockets. “Are you sure the fellow turned this way?”

  Ward shook his head. “I don’t know which way he turned. I lost him when he reached the line of trees.”

  “But there was a prowler?”

  �
��I thought that’s what he was.”

  “Maybe we should find out. Want me to go back up there with you?”

  Ward said that would not be necessary. “If I find it’s anything important I’ll give you a ring.”

  Dunham shrugged. “Funny,” he said. “Could have been a native I suppose but—”

  He did not finish and Ward backed towards the door. He said he was sorry to cause them all the trouble. He said nothing at all about the cry that had wakened him because in his present state of mind he was not even sure that there had been a cry—until he returned to Highpoint.

  Coming up the slope he saw that the light was on in his room and he went directly there to find Alma and Len Osborne waiting for him in robes and slippers. Osborne came to his feet immediately, his hard-jawed face grim and his black brows bunched.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded coldly.

  Ward glanced at the girl in the chair. Huddled there she seemed small and strangely pale. Her dark-blue eyes were wide and troubled as they met and held his own.

  “Well?”

  The jarring hardness in Osborne’s voice nettled Ward as he faced the other, and for a moment they stood that way, measuring each other in open defiance; two men who stood about the same height, with Osborne perhaps twenty pounds heavier and the more threatening of the two because of his darker coloring.

  “What do you mean where have I been?”

  “Please!”

  The girl’s voice was low and uncertain and suddenly Ward was ashamed. He felt the stiffness leave him and the weariness start. That something had happened was obvious but all he knew at the moment was that he had been chasing futilely about the beach and barging in on people in search of someone he had quite possibly not even seen.

  “I was down on the porch,” he said. “I must have dozed off in one of the chairs and I woke up thinking I’d heard some one scream.”

  “You did. You heard Alma.”

  She nodded faintly when Ward looked at her and so, still not knowing any answers, he took a breath and repeated his story for the third time.

  Even before he finished the tension had gone out of Osborne’s shoulders. A lock of hair had fallen over his brow and he pushed it back impatiently. “So that’s it,” he said quietly. “Do you want to tell him about it?” he asked the girl.

  Alma told her story in quick, breathless phrases while Ward sat on the edge of the bed and listened with growing bewilderment. When she finished he questioned her but she could add nothing to what had already been said.

  “It was the scream that did it,” Osborne said. “She got it out before the pillow hit her and that scared him off. I heard it too and came running down the hall—it couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds—but when I got here she had the light on and the window was open wide. You must have heard him when he dropped to the ground.”

  “Why?”

  They looked at him. “Why what?” they said.

  “Why should it happen at all? What did he want? What was he after?”

  “I’ve been trying to think.” Alma shook her head, the faraway look still in her eyes. “There just isn’t any reason unless—”

  She did not finish and Ward, remembering the story of the poisoned cat, did not want to speculate.

  “I looked in here right off,” Osborne went on, “and you weren’t here so I went downstairs and around the veranda …”

  “So you figured it must have been me.”

  Osborne shrugged and glanced away sheepishly. “Put yourself in my place. What would you have thought?… It didn’t make any sense but you didn’t come back—”

  In his mind Ward was asking one question: Who? Not Osborne, not him. Then who? “Maybe we’d better go to bed,” he said.

  “Yes,” Alma said and stood up. “We had. We won’t tell Johnny either, please.”

  Osborne opened the door, looked back at Ward. “Sorry I jumped you,” he said. “I guess I had the wind up.

  But even as he spoke Ward got the idea that he was not completely exonerated, and in this he could hardly blame Osborne. He carried this thought to bed with him, but not for long. Sleep came quickly and the next thing he remembered was the pounding on his door which woke him just as it had the morning before.

  Except this time it was earlier. He could tell the moment he opened his eyes. And it was not Osborne who entered at his call, but Kate Royce. She looked at him with red-rimmed eyes and bit her lip before she spoke.

  “You’d better get up,” she said in a voice that was dull and heavy and seemed to come with great effort. “Johnny passed away last night. Died in his sleep.”

  9

  KATE ROYCE was waiting for Ward when he came downstairs. She stood alone by the rear windows and when she heard him she walked over to meet him, her strongly boned face impassive now, her gray glance direct.

  “I’ll phone New York,” he said.

  “Perhaps that would be best,” she said, her voice controlled. “But until you do you’re Jim MacQuade. There’s nothing for you to do now until the doctor finishes. You’d better go get your coffee.”

  She had him by the arm as she talked, guiding him into the hall leading to the dining-room. She left him at the doorway and he went on in to find Len Osborne at the buffet, elbows on the top and staring fixedly out the window. He did not glance round until Ward had poured his coffee and then he turned slowly, dark eyes somber and his tanned face grave.

  “Sort of hits you, doesn’t it?” he said. “Even when it’s sort of expected, even when you tell yourself it’s the easiest way to go.”

  “I keep thinking of yesterday,” Ward said. “He was so—so alive and—” He groped for the next word and it wasn’t there and he stopped to try again. “I saw him last night. I turned out his light for him.”

  “Oh?” Osborne gave him a long look. “When was that?”

  “After I came downstairs. Before I went out and fell asleep in the chair. Somewhere around one o’clock, I guess. Tenney ran out of gas and came back to borrow a car.”

  “Melvin?” The black brows bunched in a scowl. “I didn’t know that.”

  “You’d gone to bed,” Ward said, and went on to tell what had happened. “After he left the light was still on in Johnny’s study so I went in and turned it off.”

  “And he was asleep then?”

  Ward started to say yes; then stopped, a little shocked when he stopped to think, when he realized he could not be sure.

  “I—I thought he was.”

  Osborne refilled his cup and hunched over it, his elbows spread wide. “Well, the doctor may know about that. They’ll probably do a post mortem and—”

  “A post mortem?” Ward stared at him, his face perplexed. “Why?”

  “Because it’s—well, just a thing they do around here.” Osborne picked up a folded copy of the Advocate and leafed through it. “Here,” he said, and began reading an item.

  “‘Doctor so-and-so performed a post mortem examination on the body of seventy-three-year-old so-and-so, who died suddenly in Trafalgar Square shortly before midday on—’”

  “Yes,” Ward cut in, “but that’s different. The man died suddenly, unexpectedly.”

  “All right. Take this one: ‘Twenty-five-year-old Dorothy Lee of such and such a place died at her home at about one-thirty Monday. An autopsy was performed by Doctor so-and-so and death was attributed to natural causes.’” He tossed the paper aside. “They’ll probably have some idea whether Johnny was asleep when you saw him or not. Not that it makes any difference.”

  He was silent then and so was Ward, because from out of nowhere the story of the poisoned cat came again to plague him. He tried not to think about it, but it was there just the same, and there would be an autopsy and—

  “How’s Alma taking it?” he said abruptly.

  “Hard. She was out front. Why don’t you go out and talk to her?”

  The Dunhams were talking to Kate when Ward started across the drawing-room. They s
topped to watch him and something in their faces told him it would be better not to join them. He hesitated but went on, feeling their eyes upon him and wondering if their collective thoughts were saying: There goes the guy who’s going to get half of Johnny’s estate.

  He wanted to stop and confront the Dunhams. He wanted to shout: “You’ve got it all wrong. It’s not me that’s going to collect.”

  He got himself in hand and continued to the veranda, and when he saw Alma in the chair he drew up another chair next to her. She looked at him with haunted eyes as he sat down, her small face swollen and strangely pale. Then her gaze moved on to contemplate the sea and the horizon.

  He waited while the silence spread about them. Finally he said: “Don’t feel too sorry for Johnny.” He wanted to say more. He thought of Osborne’s remark about this being an easy way to go but the words gagged him. He felt more desolate every time he looked at her. After what seemed like a long time she spoke.

  “I’m not, Jim,” she said softly. “I’m thinking about yesterday and how happy he was and how wonderful it is that he could have that last day with you.”

  That did it for Ward. A sudden inner sickness began working on him and he could feel the hardness clogging his throat. He tried to swallow it away and it was still there. For it was not just the words he had heard that moved him and brought the embarrassing warmth behind his eyes, it was a feeling of shame and foreboding, the realization that she would soon know the truth about his deceit.

  Why couldn’t he tell her now instead of letting her think such things? Why? Because Kate said not to? Who was Kate to make his decisions?

  Yet for all this inner argument he remained silent, and now his thoughts came back to MacQuade, and the trip they’d had. Out of all this there came one thought that helped him:

  MacQuade never knew the truth. He had wanted his nephew with him. He had died believing this had come about. That much was good, Ward told himself. John MacQuade had liked him. He was certain of this much, and if he had been successful in his impersonation—as he knew he had—then some good had come of it, at least for MacQuade. In addition he was ready to admit that Kate’s campaign of secrecy had, in this respect, been fully justified.