STRANGE HOUSE
ON THE BLUFFS
Lisa looked across the meadow, and up toward the bluffs. There she saw it—a huge dark shadow of a house perched high on a knoll. It was Bell Mansion, vacant and shuttered since the death of the strange musical genius who had lived in it.
As she stood in the meadow, a faint sound began to drift across the intervening space.
It was the sound of a piano, being played by a virtuoso, coming from the dark, empty mansion on the hill …
THE
CRIME
IS
MURDER
BY HELEN NIELSEN
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
Table of Contents
Cover
Strange House on the Bluffs
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Stranger in the Dark
Also Available
Copyright
Dedication:
For my mother
CHAPTER 1
It was almost impossible to see the road. The rain bore down in a blinding curtain, parted only by the spasmodic arcs of the windshield wipers; and the feeble protest of the headlamps was all but canceled by deluge and darkness. Curran Dawes drove by instinct and memory. Every tortuous curve of the road as it corkscrewed its way up Pineview Bluff, was a challenge to both his nerve and the shuddering frame of his small sedan. And he drove hard, his time-tempered face grim in the reflection of the instrument panel, and his hands like steel on the skittish steering wheel.
It wasn’t late as time is measured. The hands of the panel clock showed twenty-seven minutes before nine; but the road was empty tonight. Almost everyone who lived on the bluffs had gone down to the town auditorium for the climactic event of the Cornish Memorial Music Festival. But three important people were missing. Mere reflection on that fact sent Curran Dawes’s foot harder against the accelerator. It was flat against the floor boards when a burst of light shot around the bend just ahead. The brakes screamed, the small sedan careened crazily toward the ditch, spun about, and finally righted itself, but not before the light was gone and the source of the light, a wildly driven station wagon, had roared past into the black oblivion of the road behind.
For an instant Curran Dawes hesitated, as if considering pursuit. But only for an instant. Three important people were missing from the auditorium, and he’d caught a hasty glimpse of only one face behind the windshield of the station wagon. That left two more….
The road climbed higher and then laced off through the storm-drenched pines. There was no hesitation now. No doubt of which finger to follow. Minutes later the small sedan screeched to a stop before a huge, rambling house half-hidden by shrubbery and vines. But there was no hiding the path of light that fanned out from a door flung open wide to meet the wind and rain. The rain beat a hard tattoo on the gravel walk and bounced up brightly from the cement slab, but Curran Dawes didn’t pause to wipe his feet on the rubber mat in the front hall or to remove his raincoat and dripping fedora. He was no gentleman tonight, and no scholar. He ran down the bright hall. A blast of music came to meet him, reverberating through the awful emptiness of the house and beckoning him on to the open doorway of the study. Here the music became momentarily deafening as the deep throat of a huge cabinet radio caught the full orchestration of a haunting theme, sweet, sensuous, pleading, rising higher and higher toward inevitable triumph. Curran Dawes no longer heard the music. One unlatched French door was being battered by the storm. He crossed the room to close it, swiftly at first, then halting abruptly. For now he could see what lay just inside the windows. The wind had blown in rain and a few dead leaves. Autumn would be early this year.
He stooped and picked one of the wet leaves from a lifeless face. He moved slowly now, like a man who’s finished running a race, and lost, and is trying to regain his wind. When he rose up again, his somber eyes caught on a moving object on the desk. The twin discs of a wire recorder still spun, but the microphone now dangled useless over the edge of the desk. He reached over and snapped off the control button.
Across the room, the orchestra was concluding the theme that now rose and fell, rose and fell, like the ebbing strength of life, until nothing remained but the echo of sound. And then, after a full moment of silence, the startling cacophony of applause.
“You have just heard the first public performance of this year’s Cornish Memorial Award composition, Nocturne Romantic, by—”
The suave voice of the radio announcer was cut off abruptly. Curran Dawes looked up. Another intruder had made the journey through that open front door and down the brightly lighted hall. A woman wearing a wet beret and a dripping trench coat stood beside the console. She stared across the room toward the desk and came slowly forward.
“Professor Dawes,” she began, “what are you doing?”
Her foot, clad in a thick-soled brogue, struck a metal object on the carpet. She looked down. The overhead light glittered on the barrel of a small revolver.
“Don’t touch anything,” the professor warned. “Perhaps you will be kind enough to make a telephone call.”
The woman in the trench coat made no response to his words. She stood there staring first at the revolver and then at the body beside the desk. She seemed unable to comprehend what she saw.
“It’s most urgent,” the professor insisted. “Please call Sheriff Elliot down in the town. Tell him a station wagon is racing down Pineview Road. If he hurries, he may be able to intercept it before it reaches the highway…. Well?”
He had to speak sharply before the woman reacted. Even then she seemed dazed. She said nothing, but she did go out into the hall. Moments later he heard her voice on the telephone.
Now Curran Dawes removed his hat and placed it, heedless of its dripping condition, on the desk. The light made a silver halo of his hair. His head bowed slightly, wearily. He was not a man eminently versed in police procedure, but he knew better than to disturb anything in the room. And yet, there was something he must know. He turned on the wire recorder again and set it at reverse. He allowed the discs to unwind for a few moments, and then switched the control to play. The first sound he heard was the music from the radio—that same theme that had lured him down the hall—and then he heard words, just a few half-whispered words, barely audible against the orchestral background.
Curran Dawes shut off the playback and switched the control to reverse again. This time he let the discs spin all the way back to the beginning of the story.
CHAPTER 2
Had it not been for Martin Cornish, there would have been nothing to distinguish Bellville from any other lakeside settlement. Its scenery wasn’t spectacular; its industry had no marked significance, the old sawmill of its founder, Walden Bell, the elder, having long since ceased to function (a fact fully attested by miles of denuded shore line and hills); and its climate was nothing less than abominable. No one came to Bellville in the winter when it was virtually snowbound. No one came in the spring unless he had a longing for wet feet and neuralgia; and those who did come in the summer, giving seasonal life to the lake-shore cabin and live-bait occupations, brought an adequate supply of mosquito netting, sunburn lotion, and their raincoats. They were also wise enough to depart before the autumn rains really began. Aside from these minor de
terrents, it was a pleasant enough community with its new high school and civic auditorium, and its tree-shaded rows of modest homes, a few of modern construction but the majority still retaining the ornate dignity of an era marked by such nonessentials as cupolas, balconies, and wrought-iron fences. The elite section of Bellville was—and always had been—the Bluffs. Pineview Bluffs, to use the full name, for it was on this lofty terrain that old Walden Bell had built his own mansion and thereby restrained a vigorous instinct for profit in order to retain the natural beauty of the woody growth. From the shore line, the bluffs rose up like a high, green shako in which were scattered perhaps a hundred houses of an architecture no longer stylish, practical, or financially possible. By night, the lights of these great houses glittered like jewels in a blackness sometimes indefinable from the sky; by day they hid like nocturnal owls, eyeless and lost among the pines.
This, then, was Bellville: the Bluffs, the commercial and lowlands residential area, the small beach and modest yacht club where a few dozen small craft nodded restlessly at their moorings or darted about on the sometimes calm, often times treacherous, waters of upper Lake Michigan. Further down the length of the lake were such busy places as Muskegon, Grand Rapids, and the bustling Goliath, Chicago; but these things were a world apart from the unhurried atmosphere of a community of some fifteen thousand souls which was quite devoid of distinction save for the memory of one native son who had not been born on the bluffs, or even in one of the sedate old houses with cupola and wrought-iron fence, but in the bedroom of a tiny flat over a harness shop that had long since been razed to make way for a modern service station.
Members of the Cornish Memorial Award Committee were apt to forget mention of this fact. They would escort visitors through the Cornish Memorial Museum, pointing out the composer’s original manuscripts, carefully preserved under glass, his numerous awards and honors, his handsome portrait, painted at the height of his glory by a foremost portrait artist, and loaned, with appropriate mention, by his widow, Nydia Bell Cornish, whose accompanying portrait revealed a woman as austere as her husband had been vital. They could even display the composer’s piano, roped off by a red velvet cord, where it was alleged his greatest work had been conceived. This wasn’t true, as the members of the committee well knew, for his favorite instrument had been destroyed in the tragic fire that had terminated his brief but brilliant career seventeen years ago. However, for anything so important to the prestige—not to mention the commerce—of Bellville as the annual memorial festival, any contributing illusion was worth preserving.
But nothing could be done to preserve any illusion about Bellville on the gray and dripping day when a mud-spattered station wagon bearing New York plates wound down the Pineview Road, turned into Main Street, and eventually nosed out a parking space halfway between the Merchant’s Bank and the A & P. Behind the wheel sat a small woman in her midtwenties, who wore a beret, a trench coat, and a weary expression which the drab view of Main Street did nothing to brighten.
“I’ve seen better-looking towns on posters captioned, ‘Don’t let this happen to your country—buy bonds!’“ she remarked. “If it’s burial you want, Lisa, wouldn’t it be a good idea to die first?”
Lisa was the woman who sat next to the driver, older—nearly twenty years older—and rather gaunt of face, but not of humor. Her eyes smiled at the smaller woman’s comment.
“You’re just tired,” she said. “Too much unpacking—”
“—and too many cobwebs! Honestly, Lisa, why did we have to come to this miserable place? Why Bellville—and why that awful house?”
“I think it’s quite a lovely house,” Lisa said, “or can be with a little renovating.”
“I know you do; that’s why I’m worried. The way you brightened when the rental agent said the owners were willing to grant an option to buy, and the way you walked through the house that first day looking at everything as if it already belonged to you. I just don’t understand—”
The younger woman’s voice broke off in unanswered silence.
“I should have known better than to take a job as secretary to Lisa Bancroft,” she went on. “Irene Johnson, girl adventurer. That’s what I thought when I started. How exciting to work with a writer! How exciting to see the world! One of these days I’m going to regain my senses and quit.”
Lisa Bancroft smiled. “You’ve been saying that for the past five years, Johnny.”
“I know, but the past five years have been nothing worse than slopping across Scottish moors or sweating out a safari through intercontinental literary teas, but this—” Johnny opened the door of the station wagon and peered up at the sky. The rain that had been falling steadily for several days had slackened to a light drizzle that barely silvered her beret. A fringe of reddish hair had coiled up around the edge of the beret like a narrow ruffle, and a face more disgusted than angry glared back at the weather.
“Well, I might as well get on with it,” she sighed, tugging at the collar of her trench coat. “Have you got the shopping list handy?”
“I’m coming, too,” Lisa said.
“No, you’re not!” Johnny was outside now. She turned back to deliver a stern admonition. “That sidewalk’s a slippery mess, Lisa. It looks as if every farmer in the county has been tracking up and down on it all day in muddy boots. Lisa—”
It was a waste of breath. Lisa was already out of the car, a stout, gnarled walking stick in her hand, and the soft rain dropping unheeded on her uncovered head. She was a tall woman and the long raincoat she wore made her seem even taller; but the hood that was thrown back on her shoulders was going to stay there. Her hair was cut short and swept back off her high forehead—a faint shading of gray showing through the chestnut. She was a determined figure, much too determined for the assistance Johnny offered as she achieved footing on the high curbing. The one leg she partially dragged along was hardly noticeable on level footing, but climbing was hazardous.
And the sidewalk really was slippery. Suddenly Johnny brightened.
“Look, Lisa, there’s a tearoom a couple of doors down. Why don’t you wait there for me while I get the supplies? After all, there’s only one list and probably only one all-purpose store.”
She tried to carry it off lightly. Lisa didn’t like being looked after. Push her too far and she’d take over that list and do the shopping herself. But a tearoom on this particular main street sounded incongruous enough to catch her attention. She turned about and looked at the shop Johnny had sighted. A shingle-type sign jutted out from a wall bracket proclaiming the wares within in old-English script, a charming touch further enhanced by the proximity of the feed store next door.
“At least it doesn’t say ‘ye olde,’” Lisa observed. “Oh, all right. I’ll get under cover like the sensible woman I’m not and let you wrangle with the storekeeper. But don’t forget the light bulbs. There must be a dozen fixtures in that house with empty sockets.”
Johnny was already out of earshot. She moved quickly, and Lisa, moving with the unhurried inevitability of time, turned back to the tearoom. She was tired and the weather was beginning to get on her nerves just as it was on Johnny’s. Not that she’d admit it, not after making that rash, impulsive decision to leave New York and come to Bellville. Or was it really impulsive? Lisa frowned over the thought as she tugged on the tearoom door. Impulses could be deceiving.
But once the door was open, the mood of the moment vanished. Either the establishment had recently changed hands, or the proprietor had a great sense of humor. Instead of a tearoom, Lisa found herself in what seemed to be about nine-tenths confectionery and one-tenth diner. The first thing to meet her eyes was the soda fountain which ran the full length of the shop. The weather seemed to have done nothing to quench young Bellville’s thirst. She saw slickers and raincoats of every hue, and even a few hardy young blades ignoring the elements in heavy purple sweaters bearing huge, white B’s. It was almost four, and at first glance it seemed the entire student body of
Bellville High had taken over en masse. But at the rear of the room were a few small tables that were being ignored by the younger set. Lisa made her way toward the farthest and sat down. In due time she received her tea as ordered: two bags in the pot instead of one and with milk instead of lemon. She was unaware of any observer to this transaction until an unexpected voice took her attention from the activity at the counter.
“Until now, I had supposed that I was the only patron of this establishment who used it for its advertised purpose. May I join you?”
Lisa looked up. The man who had spoken the words hovered expectantly over one of the vacant chairs, a rain-spattered fedora in one hand and a steaming teacup in the other. He had a harmless sort of face, slightly flushed from what must have been surprise at his own forwardness. His eyes were a bright, alert blue, his hair surely a premature white, and his hands had never done duty on one of those muddy farms Johnny had been so perturbed about.
“Miss Bancroft, isn’t it?” he added. “We met last week at Tod Grahama’s office. Dawes is my name. Curran Dawes.”
And then Lisa remembered.
“Of course. The day I stopped by to pick up the keys to the house! Do sit down, Professor Dawes.”
The man sat down, but he still looked embarrassed.
“The title is a bit superfluous,” he said.
“That’s the way we were introduced.”
Now he smiled. “Tod Graham is more than a lawyer and a realty agent,” he explained. “He’s also Bellville’s greatest civic booster. We don’t have good citizens here; we have illustrious citizens. I once held an assistant professorship at the state university, but I’m only a schoolteacher now.”
A sudden burst of laughter from the fountain drowned out his words for an instant. He looked in the direction of the noise and his smile took a slight twist.
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