Somewhere in This House

by Rufus King

  A pin point of light swung in arcs, grew greater suddenly, became a lantern being swung in the shed door, became a waving pool of light that illumined the fur-coated and hatted figure of Mr. Sturm. Valcour saw him speak briefly to Dr. Harlan, saw Dr. Harlan swallowed up by the shed…

  His legs were molten lead and his cheeks pained terrifically. The final ten steps were torture. “Alice Tribeau?” he said.

  “My son has carried her upstairs, sir, to her room.” Mr. Sturm stood aside to permit Valcour to enter. “Dr. Harlan has hurried up at once to attend to her. If you are not too exhausted, perhaps you will assist me in heating blankets by the kitchen stove.”

  Valcour was gone. His fur coat lay misshapen on the kitchen floor where he had dropped it. His feet were aching with pain as they flew with him up the curving stairs.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  Will wondered why his father hadn’t left the lights on. The kitchen was a well, glowing feebly a bronzy red, and Alice Tribeau was very heavy in his arms. His father had left the lights on. The incandescent bulbs were hot copper wires clearly visible through the glass.

  Where were the candles? There weren’t any candles. Vera had ordered them and they hadn’t come. Probably lied; Vera always lied. Must get Alice Tribeau up to her bed and wrap her (his father had outlined the course of treatment as eminently proper) in heated blankets. No use, though, stumbling about in the dark, and the power line giving out as it always did during storms.

  The stump of a candle in a glass stick showed pallidly on a shelf beside a round-faced, importantly busy alarm clock. He shifted Alice Tribeau in his arms so that he could reach out and get the candle.

  He opened, with difficulty, the door of the dining room and went on without closing it. Golly, how heavy she was! There was a chair near the foot of the curving stairs, and he sat on it for a moment before negotiating them.

  He could hear her breathing quite plainly, coming just from below his chin where her head was leaning. It was a languorous sort of breathing, very indifferent and not at all peaceful, as if she didn’t care much one way or the other. If her lungs cared to keep up the business, all right. It was up to them, rather than her.

  The curving stairs were endless—it was too dark to see a thing, for the power line had definitely decided to succumb to the storm and every light in the house had gone dead completely—and he had to feel for each tread with the toe of his foot. What a fool he’d been to drink tonight. His nerves were tenpenny nails jabbing the entire inner surface of his skin.

  Well, they’d got to the upper hall and were passing the door of Vera’s room, where the body of that dead woman was lying on the bed. He pressed for guidance against the railing of the stair well and continued toward the end of the hall. There wasn’t any use in stopping to light the candle, as he never could hold it and Alice Tribeau at the same time.

  The sheer physical discomforts, to him, of the business of lugging her up to her room like this totally minimized in his mind her own imminent danger of suffering, as he thought of it, from exposure. His feet felt the way before him and he kicked open the door to the maid’s room.

  He managed to find the bed and lowered Alice Tribeau onto it with heaven knows how great a sense of physical relief. His arms felt as if they wanted to be replaced in their sockets, and the tendons in his legs were painfully tight and stiff.

  The candle had tumbled helplessly to the floor during the operation, and he struck a match and found it. Its light was ridiculously inefficient to dispel such a tremendous quantity of darkness, but it served to show him Alice Tribeau (he hadn’t had a good look at her since the moment he’d caught sight of her black blotch lying off to one side in the snow) and to reassure him that she looked perfectly solid, safe, and all right.

  He set the candle on a table beside a water pitcher and then pulled a heavy comforter from under Alice Tribeau’s legs. Her fur coat was still on, and he imagined it wiser to leave it on. Later, when Fred got back, Fred could undress her and roll her up in heated blankets. Doctors were the lads for such jobs.

  He threw the comforter over her and tucked it deeply in around her, covering her arms completely and her scarlet, icy hands. Her face was absurdly little—it reminded him of a French radish—on the big thick pillow, and from her chin down her body was a cocoon tightly wrapped in the comforter’s representation of pumpkin vines giving strange birth to flowering yellow roses.

  He ought to go back and find Fred and Valcour and tell them that the search was ended. But his father was down at the shed door swinging a lantern, and there wasn’t much sense in making the business a silly relay chase and…

  Someone was walking with hurried steps along the pitch-black hall. He hoped it was Fred so that the right thing could be done for Alice.

  “Hi—Fred!” he called. “That you?”

  The steps increased their haste and Fred was in the room, a mountain of shaggy fur with ice crustings on his brows and lashes, and with hard tight cheeks of mulberry scarlet.

  “She’s O. K., Fred. I’ve bundled her up.” Funny that Fred didn’t say anything. Maybe his voice was frozen (what an idea!) but he certainly looked winded. He wasn’t even bothering to take off his coat, but was staring about for something—not at Alice Tribeau; he hadn’t even glanced once at Alice Tribeau—something that he needed in a hurry.

  “Where’s my bag?” he said. “I know—it’s in Vera’s room.”

  Will saw him snatch up the candle and vanish into the hall. The blackness, filled with running footsteps and Alice Tribeau’s indifferent breathing, was very brief, and Dr. Harlan and the candle and the medicine bag were back in the room again.

  “Why don’t you take off your coat, Fred?”

  Dr. Harlan was fumbling among bottles. He selected one—it was plain that he shielded its label—and poured some of its contents into a glass.

  “Her heart,” Dr. Harlan said. “She needs a stimulant. Such exposures have proven fatal.” He paused in his breathless hurry long enough to look very steadily at Will and say, “In nine cases out of ten such exposures have proven fatal.”

  Dr. Harlan poured a little clear water from the pitcher. He shook the glass to blend the water with the medicine.

  “Hold her shoulders up,” he said, “so I can pour this down her throat.”

  Will shoved his hand and arm in under Alice Tribeau’s back and lifted her so that she was sitting upright. He braced her with his shoulder.

  “How can you make her drink when she’s unconscious?” he said.

  Dr. Harlan was steadying Alice Tribeau’s head, leaning over her, his shaggy fur-coated bulk masking the candle and shrouding her in a storm of black.

  “Reflex action of the throat muscles,” he said. “Keep her steady.”

  The rim of the glass rested against Alice Tribeau’s lips, and Dr. Harlan started—his hands had grown suddenly quite controlled—to tilt it…

  “Do you think that is quite wise, Doctor?”

  Valcour, his lungs so overstrained that he could scarcely speak, was reaching out and taking the glass from Dr. Harlan’s hand, was holding it in his own hand. It was his left hand he had transferred it to, because his right hand had instantly gone into his right coat pocket and stayed there, gripping the butt of his gun.

  Will was the more astonished of the two. He removed his supporting shoulder and had presence of mind enough to lower Alice Tribeau with some sort of ease back against the pillow before standing up and advancing angrily upon Valcour.

  “You don’t understand about her heart,” Will said. “Nine times out of ten these exposures are fatal.”

  Valcour evaded Will’s hand, outstretched to get the glass, and continued staring at Dr. Harlan’s face while he regained some sort of normalcy in his breathing.

  “Do not interfere with me,” he said to Will. “Go down and help your father heat blankets. Do anything you like. Leave
me here with Dr. Harlan.”

  There was something funny about this. Will felt an unflattering deficiency to cope with it. His father was a good idea always, whenever there was a climax to any trouble. He looked at Fred, sitting on the edge of the bed, a shaggy bundle of muscle with bright black eyes glittering under ice.

  “Leave us, Will,” Dr. Harlan said. “Just leave me here with Valcour.”

  CHAPTER XXXII

  They waited until the sound of Will’s footsteps had died away, until nothing could be heard in the big black house at all but the uneven breaths of the two of them and the impersonal breathing of Alice Tribeau.

  “What put you wise?” Dr. Harlan said. Valcour’s eyes were not unfriendly. He wasn’t looking at Dr. Fred Harlan. He was looking at a lump of living clay that had been driven into doing certain unnatural and unfortunate things by the incomprehensible power named, among so many other names, destiny.

  “You saw, as you thought, your chance,” he said, “and you took it.”

  “That’s right, Valcour. I wanted to get back the letter. The amounts she kept asking for had grown pretty steep, and she was threatening exposure—my wife, you see; my practice. What made you know it was my letter?”

  “You left a prescription blank on Mr. Sturm’s desk. The writing on it was the same as the writing in the letter. I apologize, Doctor, believe me, for any comments—”

  “That’s all right, Valcour. Any fool who calls a woman like that his Star Child—calls anybody his Star Child…I had no intention of killing her.”

  “I don’t think you had. What was it you used? One of your surgical knives?”

  “Yes. I always keep two or three of them in my pocket. They fit in a flat metal case, you know. I use them for lancing and different things. You aren’t basing this case simply on that letter?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t mind telling you the other things. You used surgeon’s thread, of course, to swing the metal doorstop against the downstairs window when you broke its glass. I’ve got a bit of it that was left when you yanked it off. Mrs. Sturm surprised you, didn’t she, when she found you in the cupboard?”

  Valcour wanted to brush some melting snow from his eyebrows, but he did not do so. His left hand still held the glass of medicine and his right, in his pocket, still closed relentlessly about the butt of the gun.

  “Yes, she did. I’ll ask you to believe me when I tell you that I don’t remember killing her. I know I killed her—there’s no doubt of that—and I remember hurrying in that suffocating swelter of dresses to get the knife out, and I remember her face when she separated them and looked at me. I know my hand went out and that (it seemed instantaneously) I caught her before she fell, and I knew she was dead. I think the thing I hated most of all was answering you when you called through the door and asked her if she was all right—answering you in her voice, imitating her—and she was dead.”

  “There’s a towel, too, Doctor. You moistened it by dipping an end in that pitcher of water. Then you wiped the knife off with it and cleaned the blood from your hands. Alice Tribeau saw you. Her incoherent statements reported to us by Mr. Sturm about blood and a pitcher of water made you realize that she must have seen you.”

  “How about those missing snowshoes, Valcour?

  “They are no longer missing, Doctor. They’re under the mattress in Mr. Sturm’s bed. I don’t think that for a minute he ever really believed his son guilty, but he was taking no chances and, also, strengthening a line of defense that might conceivably have had to be used. He said to me, earlier tonight, that there were no limits, either illegal or unmoral, that he would not go to to protect his son.”

  The candle sputtered, dimmed, recovered, and threw steadily its little ineffective light.

  “You may know all those things, Valcour, but there are certain matters about all this you’ll never know.” Dr. Harlan’s laugh was unpleasant. “I might call them the guiding hand. You yourself formed part of it.”

  Valcour was frankly puzzled. “I did, Doctor?”

  “Why, yes; it came over me while I was in the cupboard. You were so obsessed with that idea that whoever had shot Alice Tribeau had done so under the impression that she was Vera, and, therefore, anyone who should kill Vera would naturally appear to you to be the same person who had shot Alice. Well, I was at Mason’s Forks, over four miles away, and in your company, when Alice was shot. I figured, during that wretched moment when I was getting the knife from its case, that that would let me out. Who did shoot Alice Tribeau?”

  “Mrs. Sturm shot her, Doctor. I have a letter which she evidently intended leaving for Alice Tribeau in the morning. It is not an absolute confession—Mrs. Sturm was too good a blackmailer herself to write anything as foolish as that—but it states that she will send Alice Tribeau five hundred dollars as soon as she is again in ‘funds.’ Alice Tribeau herself had admitted to me that the five hundred dollars is nothing less than a bribe to keep her from admitting that she saw Mrs. Sturm poisoning her father-in-law’s tonic. She further states in the letter that she hopes Alice will recover entirely from ‘that unfortunate little shooting affair, which, of course, Alice must realize was accidental.’”

  “Alice isn’t a fool.”

  “Undoubtedly not, Doctor. But she was very fond of Mrs. Sturm. Such women have the ability to stir up strange friendships and affections in others. We can check up later on that poison she bought, ostensibly for rats, from the druggist. I imagine it was something that acted slowly, that she’d been making a regular practice of dosing Mr. Sturm’s tonic with it. She felt, you see, he was slated to die and undoubtedly argued herself into hastening the process. Her mind we can easily consider as having been diseased. Heaven knows when or why she took the gun from Will Sturm’s smoking stand. She’d look there for cigarettes, of course, if she needed any, and the gun may have appealed to her as something handy to have about her—well, for possibilities. She wasn’t exactly sane.”

  Dr. Harlan said very deliberately, “I wasn’t either when I killed her.”

  So that was it. Valcour smiled a little. The insanity plea was even at this advanced stage being established.

  Dr. Harlan went on: “And then, too, Valcour, there were those things I’ve hinted at and bundled under the title of the guiding hand.”

  The remark in itself was an added stone to the bulwark of insanity.

  “I’m not worrying, Doctor,” Valcour said. “There’s a stumbling block before you that you haven’t thought about. There’s Alice Tribeau.”

  “What of it? I’m not saying, am I, that she didn’t see me wiping the knife off and cleaning the blood from my hands.”

  “It isn’t that. It’s premeditated murder I’m speaking about. That will counteract the force of your possible insanity plea. You were quite sane, I’m sure, when you mixed this dose of poison.”

  Valcour gently indicated the glass in his left hand.

  Dr. Harlan didn’t say anything for a while. He stared heavily at the glass of liquid in Valcour’s hand. The candle light glowed through it smoothly.

  “That isn’t poison,” he said.

  “I’m having it tested in the morning, Doctor.”

  “Rubbish—here, I’ll prove it to you. Pour some in this empty glass on the table and I’ll drink it. It’s nothing but a mild stimulant for the heart.” There was something queer about Dr. Harlan’s eyes as they looked at Valcour. They weren’t sharp any more, and not nearly so emphatically black. They gave to his face, to his whole body, the semblance of a tired and heavy animal asking a superior intelligence for help to stop some incurable pain.

  Valcour wasn’t sure, he was never sure even years and years after, just what he would have done if Mr. Sturm hadn’t come into the room just then, followed by Will with an armful of hot blankets. He did know, though, that his hand had deliberately and consciously started toward the second glass.

  “I can’
t do it, Doctor,” he said. “But I’d like to do it very much.”

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  The certain man in the City of New York, who was influential both politically and financially and who was, as well, a man of family, sat in the chair with difficulty. He wanted to get up and rush to the desk. He wanted to snatch the folded letter from the police commissioner’s manicured fingers.

  “It’s it, isn’t it?” he said.

  The commissioner idly tapped the desk top with the letter. “Yes,” he said, “it’s it.”

  The man felt better. He rested more easily in the chair. Then he stiffened nervously again. “Photographic copies,” he said. “Did Valcour look for photographic copies?”

  “He’s staying on up there. This is all he sent. If there had been any photographic copies there he’d have found them and sent them down by now.”

  “What’s he still sticking up there for?” the man said.

  “She was murdered.”

  The man’s pudgy hands closed convulsively. “That’s a help.” He began to sweat a little. “Who did it?”

  “Some local light up there. She’d been blackmailing him—” the commissioner paused an instant before adding—“too.”

  The man was out of the chair. He was leaning across the desk and his breathing wasn’t very steady. “Murder. That means publicity.” His slightly pig-like eyes were filled with fright. “I’ve seen nothing in the papers.”

  “It’s been in the papers.”