The Silver Leopard

by Helen Reilly

  The other three, Angela, Nicky, and Stephen Darrell, were unthinkable. And yet, someone had the bonds—Shut up in the prison of her mind, faced with those six blank walls, Catherine tried to batter a way to freedom. There was a lot about Mike they didn’t know. He was away from New York most of the time. During the last year and a half he had aged. For one thing, his hair had turned completely white, and some of his buoyancy, his aliveness, had gone. That could be worry, strain, he might have got mixed up in something dreadful—

  Last but not least there was the little man in the shabby brown chesterfield who had been hanging around outside the Wardwell house on two occasions immediately preceding Mike’s death—

  She took pressing palms from her temples, lighted a cigarette, her eyes going over the big hideous gloomy room that someone had entered while she was out for a walk. Her gaze traveled over the chiffonier that should have been in the Smithsonian Institute, over the bureau with her scarves lying on top of it, the green scarf and the yellow-and-black-striped one. The sheriff must be a family man. He had left them neatly folded. Someone’s elbow had knocked the green scarf half off. It trailed down across the front of the bureau. It—Catherine’s eyes widened and she almost dropped her lighted cigarette. The green scarf hung in straight folds except for one corner. That corner was caught firmly in the opening of the second drawer.

  The second drawer was hand height from the floor.

  To catch the scarf like that the drawer must have been opened and closed after Sheriff Terry had finished with the bureau—after the others had come, into the room-after the room had been searched and found free of incriminating material—when it wouldn’t be searched again.

  Catherine walked across the floor with small stiff steps. She opened the drawer and stood motionless, staring down. The bonds were there, lying on folded newspaper lining the bottom of the drawer. She had never seen them before, but Inspector McKee’s description had been graphic. She recognized them at first glance, two long stiff oblongs of folded paper. She picked them up, unfolded one. It bore an imposing legend in a copperplate script above rows of red and green stamps that were coupons. None of the coupons had been clipped.

  Catherine’s breathing was flat, shallow. Someone, who had been in the room after the sheriff’s search, had opened the drawer under cover of the talk and confusion and moving about and had dropped the bonds into this hiding place when he or she heard they were all to be searched and that their rooms were to be searched.

  She tried to think. Who had been near the bureau? That was no help. All of them could have been near it at one time or another. But—She stopped pushing hair back from a damp forehead and stood sharply erect. There was one way she could find out. Whoever had left the bonds here would come back for them. They were valuable and an effort would be made to retrieve them. All she had to do was wait. Anyone intending to come and get them would tap first to make sure the room was empty. If she didn’t answer, the assumption would be that she wasn’t here—

  She made a survey of possible places in which to conceal herself. The bureau was to the left of the wall, the immense wardrobe to the right. There was a narrow space between the wardrobe and the north wall. That would do. She stepped into the niche, leaned against plaster, and waited.

  Minutes passed. Her forehead and the backs of her clenched hands were covered with a fine dew. The house was well built. There was very little sound, the far-off tinkle of pans, the bark of a dog, the faintest thread of a voice ducking to chickens. She went on waiting and the room waited with her, secret and still. What she could see of the furniture, the bed, the square table, the rocking chair, took on strange shapes, as though they had a watchful life of their own.

  Catherine shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and became rigid, off balance. There it was, according to Hoyle, the thing she had been listening for, the tap on the door. There wasn’t even a preliminary footfall. Two more taps, soft ones, gentle. A pause. Soon now, very soon, she would know.

  The door was opening. Another pause. The door closed softly. Beyond the wardrobe, hidden by it, someone was moving across the floor. Catherine stood up straight. She moved soundlessly out of her hiding place—and barely repressed an involuntary cry. It was Stephen Darrell who had come into the room. His back was toward her. He was at the bureau, stooping over the open second drawer.

  Chapter Thirteen - A Murderer in Their Midst

  CATHERINE GOT HER VOICE under control with a stupendous effort, She said, “Did you want something?” and Stephen Darrell spun round. His face was the face of a stranger, stripped of flesh, the skin taut, his mouth flattened out of shape, his eyes a narrow gleam under a bent forehead. He looked at her and the suggestion of imminent action, of speed, went out of his braced stance. His expression changed to one of open relief.

  “Oh, it’s you. Thank God! You gave me a scare.”

  Catherine stared at him. “Did I?” she said stonily, “I’ll take those bonds, please.”

  Stephen was holding them in one hand. He frowned at her. He shook his head, “I don’t think so—You’re scarcely the person to have them. When the police don’t find them, they’ll probably come back to you. You took a walk this morning. They’ll figure that you hid them somewhere outside.”

  This was intolerable. He wasn’t frightened or discomposed. He was perfectly cool and at ease. Did he think he could twist her around his finger? “Where did you get those bonds?” Her peremptory demand had no effect on him.

  “Just a minute.” He went to the door, opened it, looked out into the corridor, listened, nodded as if he were satisfied, and closed the door. He locked it and turned back into the room. He moved over to the bed, propped his length against one of the bedposts, and scrutinized Catherine’s face thoughtfully.

  “I see. You think I took these bonds from Mike Nye’s desk the night he was killed, don’t you? You’re wrong, Catherine. I didn’t take them. Mike Nye was dead when I went in, and the bonds weren’t there. I never saw hide nor hair of them till this morning.”

  His very quietness was arresting. Catherine was shaken. “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I say,” he answered calmly. “We haven’t much time. I was searched first. But the others won’t be long. I’d better hurry it. Look—this is what happened. I knew you had gone out this morning. I saw you climbing Clawson’s hill when I was in bed. I got up and dressed as fast as I could and started after you.”

  Catherine sat down limply in the rocker. Why should Stephen Darrell have started after her? What had he to say to her or she to him? Anything there was to say between them had been said long ago, without words. That wasn’t what mattered now. It was the bonds that were important.

  Stephen’s unemotional, matter-of-fact tone carried conviction. Catherine believed him. He had never lied to her, not even two years ago, about Hat. Another man might have come and tried to explain things away. Stephen hadn’t. He knew that she knew—and that was that.

  A terrific weight lifted itself away from her. If Stephen hadn’t taken the bonds he couldn’t have killed Mike. It was the killer who had removed the envelope containing the bonds when the lights were switched off in Mike’s living-room. The freezing coldness in her receded. Warmth flowed back into her. The color returned to her cheeks and lips, the light to her eyes. Now she could operate.

  She sat forward, her elbows on her knees. “We’ll have to—Those men are searching for the bonds—I’ll go to them. You can—” She got up.

  “No.” Stephen blocked her path. He stepped between her and the door, stopping her as she had stopped him, when he wanted to go to the police on the night he re-turned the leopard.

  Catherine pulled up short of a physical collision. A foot of space separated them.

  “Don’t you ever learn?” Stephen asked, half-censuringly, half-humorously, one eyebrow lifted. “Do you suppose for a minute that if you go to these policemen here you’ll be believed? Or that I will? Don’t you understand that someone’s trying
to railroad you? You were partially cleared when these bonds entered the picture. That inspector down in New York figured you wouldn’t have mentioned the envelope missing from Mike Nye’s desk if you’d made off with these bonds.”

  He moved a little away from her. “So what happened? The killer was stuck with these things.” He tapped the oblongs of folded paper. “They weren’t an asset any longer, they were a liability. But they could be made use of. Found on you, in your possession, they would put you back into the running, put you out at the head of the hold. Right?”

  Catherine didn’t say anything. With Stephen Darrell’s exclusion, the circle had narrowed. The heating system in the boardinghouse was wretched. The room was cold. In spite of that she felt as if she were stifling.

  Stephen’s expression hardened. His eyes were the color of steel. “Doesn’t the fact that the envelope containing these bonds was thrown down there in the snow under the windows of this room prove to you that someone’s after your scalp? It was done deliberately, don’t make any mistake about that. While Mrs. Muir was serving breakfast a police car came into the grounds. Everyone knew there were police around.”

  Everyone—her aunt and her cousins and Francine and Nicky. “I—suppose you’re right.” Catherine walked to one of the windows and stood with her back to the room, looking out.

  It was beginning to snow again. White fields, black trees, flakes twisting down somnolently from an invisible sky—Hat would be glad of her scalp, she thought. No, it was only men’s scalps Hat dangled from her belt. And her cousin might dislike her, but not to that extent. Moreover, Hat would never have carried the bonds up here with her, in her purse, her coat pocket, tucked into her bra, on a journey during which they were likely to be stopped by the police any moment. Not when she could just as easily have concealed the bonds in the apartment on Lorilard Place. She might flaunt the police at the wheel of a fast car, getting a ticket was a commonplace to her, but she thought too much of her beautiful skin to put it in serious jeopardy. Then—who else? Catherine turned from the window, and her heart hammered against her ribs.

  Stephen Darrell hadn’t expected her movement. She had surprised him. He was looking straight at her. There was no harshness in him now, no irony, no censure. It was a look she had known long ago, unguarded, free, open. It was—Something twisted in her, sharply.

  There was space between them, a few feet of it. The space was annihilated. With a suddenness and swiftness that gave her no time to retreat he was beside her and she was in his arms and for a flashing instant the differences that separated them, the pain, the anger and the bitterness, were obliterated, wiped out of existence. His lips were on her hair, her forehead, her cheek.

  “Catherine, Catherine—” There was a sort of desperation in his low voice.

  Even while the tide of feeling in her rose in a great wave of response, she struggled against it. Stephen was engaged to Hat, she was going to marry Nicky—There could be no unity, no oneness between her and Stephen Darrell now, or as long as they lived.

  He was holding her tightly. Before she could pull herself loose from him in reply to the message telegraphed to her remorselessly by her brain, he let her go of his own accord. His arms fell to his sides. He stepped clear of her and swung around to face the door. His dark head was at an angle, and the coldness, the detachment, the watchfulness, were back in him again.

  Catherine stared at him, confused and frightened. She started to speak. “What—?” He stopped her with an upflung hand.

  It came home to her then with sudden shocking clarity that there was a murderer loose somewhere in this big gloomy old house, a murderer hiding perhaps in a familiar body, behind a familiar face. Whoever had killed Mike Nye had taken the bloodstained envelope containing the bonds from Mike’s desk, and both envelope and bonds had appeared here—

  She turned and looked where Stephen was looking fixedly; at the door, ugly, paneled, motionless in its frame. There was a transom over it. The transom was a little open. Was there someone outside in the corridor, someone who had crept there noiselessly to listen?

  Coldness swept through Catherine again. She had to know. She crossed the floor with a soft rush, twisted the key in the lock, and pulled the door open.

  Silence greeted her, and dimness and emptiness. The doors of the other rooms were all closed. There was no one in sight. To the left, light slanted grayly on the head of the staircase, on buff-colored walls, a stretch of brown carpeting—to the right the hall narrowed. There was a heavy bank of shadow at its inner end, impenetrable, menacing. Had someone in flight found refuge there? Were eyes watching her? She took a quick step in that direction, and came to a halt. Anyone hiding in the darkness at the inner end of the hall would retreat as she advanced, down the dark rear staircase or around the corner into the other wing. She turned back into the room, closed the door, and stood abruptly still.

  The room was empty. Stephen Darrell was gone. He had gone through the window. The bonds were gone, too. He had taken them with him.

  Catherine put her shoulders against the solid surface of the closed door. Tears pricked her eyelids hotly. Why had he gone like that, without a word? Was it because—an intolerable suspicion drove at her—because he felt he had made a fool of himself by his display of tenderness? Had he yielded to a random impulse and then regretted it? Was his upflung hand, his pretense of listening, a way of putting an end to it and of making his escape while her attention was momentarily distracted? Perhaps her response had scared him off. For she had responded, not for long, but for long enough.

  Bitterness drenched her, and self-rage. “You can take it, my girl,” she told herself bitingly. “You got yourself into this, now get yourself out. If Stephen Darrell had cared a snap of his fingers for you, he wouldn’t have asked Hat to marry him.”

  Moreover, even if he had cared for her, which was out of the question, her allegiance was to Nicky.

  Her thoughts scattered before the impact of the actual. She moved away from the door and whirled around. This time there was no mistake. The sound was too loud. It was indescribably alarming. Footsteps were pounding along the corridor.

  The sick fear in her, beginning to be a pattern now, spiraled sharply. She pulled the door open. The runner was Francine.

  “Damn this place,” Francine cried savagely as she came on, her mouth a scarlet slash in the whiteness of her face, “no room telephone, no nothing. I’ll never forgive Hat for dragging us up here to this rat hole.”

  Angela was ill. Francine wanted Tom. She said over her shoulder, “Go to her, will you, Catherine?” and ran on down the hall in the direction of the other wing.

  Chapter Fourteen - Heiress on Paper Only

  “GIVE IT UP, Angela darling,” Hat said in her soft husky voice. “Why not stay here instead of trying to get all the way into town today? Look at that.” She waved at the dazzle of flakes churning thickly beyond the windows of Angela’s bedroom at the front of the boardinghouse. “You’re not fit to travel.” Francine and Tom agreed vociferously.

  “No,” Angela moved in the chair stuffed with pillows. She took her feet off the footstool, pushed it aside. “I feel better, much better. And I want to go back to New York.” She reached absently for a cigarette.

  Three cigarette cases were instantly extended. Tom won the race. He put a cigarette between Angela’s lips, lighted it for her, and tried his hand at persuasion. “What you need is rest.”

  In the background, Catherine resettled herself on the edge of the bed tiredly. More than an hour had passed since her aunt had been taken ill. Angela hadn’t fainted. Unconsciousness would have been less frightening. When Catherine came in, her aunt had been seated on the horsehair couch, gasping for breath, her face paper white, tears rolling down her cheeks unchecked. Mrs. Muir and Hat were scared out of their wits. Catherine shared their, fright. She had been convinced that it was her Aunt Angela’s heart, that she was going to die.

  Tom said no, that it was nerves, the result of the strain sh
e had been under, culminating in what had happened up here.

  Catherine had never seen her cousin before in his professional capacity. Tom’s air of authority was quiet and singularly comforting. If, as an individual, he would never set the Thames on fire, as a doctor he was completely sure of himself, and his handsome grave face and big square-shouldered flat body inspired instinctive confidence. He had given Angela something, and she had gradually pulled out of it. Now she was almost herself again.

  Her aunt was very strong, Catherine reflected. She had never quite realized how strong, perhaps because for so many years John had been the dominant figure in the Wardwell house. The house had revolved around him, his moods, his goings out and comings in, the state of his temper, of his health. Angela wasn’t vocal. She didn’t say much. Her strength was the strength of water, of wind. You might thrust against it and think you were making progress. In the end you were back where you started from.

  She listened receptively to Tom and Francine and Hat urging her to rest and not to attempt too much. When they were through, she repeated that she had to get back to New York. “Mike’s sister, Genevieve Treadgold, will be there. Genevieve telephoned yesterday. She’s going to take Michael back with her to Ohio. I want to see her before she leaves. I’d like a cup of tea, and then I think we’d better be going.”

  So that was that. Tom had warned them all not to talk about what had happened here in the boardinghouse, apparently on the theory that if you ignored a thing hard enough, you could ignore it out of existence. Angela would have none of it. She had insisted on knowing the details. Francine went to order the tea and Angela returned to the subject, posing a question. How could they be sure the envelope thrown down in the snow outside the house was the one Catherine had seen on Michael’s desk the night he died?