Foggy, Foggy Death

by Frances Lockridge

  The sounds were indistinct and, for being indistinct, curiously furtive. It was as if someone, or more than one person, were moving in the downstairs hall with every effort to achieve silence, but failing a little in the effort. Then Karen thought she heard, above this amorphous sound of movement, the faint murmur of a voice. Again it was a furtive sound, as if the voice, too, were used cautiously, not to be overheard.

  For an instant, standing in the dimly lit corridor, Karen only listened. Then she turned toward the stairs. She hurried, but, as if her mood, too, had been set by the furtiveness below, tried to make no sound. Since the hall was heavily carpeted, as that downstairs was not, she was almost successful. She reached the head of the dark, narrow flight—seldom, now, used even by the servants for whose convenience (and concealment) it had been intended. There was only silence below at first; then she heard again the quiet movements, and now, although she could not distinguish words, she was sure that a man was speaking in a voice just above a whisper. Karen started down the stairs, and on the first step the heel of one slipper clicked faintly. Balancing on one foot and then on the other, she took her slippers off, put them on the carpet behind her, and went on down the stairs barefoot. She was driven by urgency, because now she was certain that somehow Mrs. Bromwell was in danger. (This certainty was a deep thing, underlying her conscious knowledge that she had no reason, or only the faintest of reasons, to be afraid. She did not even think of danger to herself.)

  At the foot of the stairs the hall at first seemed dark and empty. Then a dim light grew toward the most distant end of the hall, where it was joined at right angles by another which led toward the kitchen. That transverse hall, or the area beyond it, was lighted, and light flowed from it dimly into the hall in which Karen stood. Seconds passed until, with her eyes adjusted to the faint light, Karen saw two figures near the end of the hall. Even then, they were almost too indistinct to be called figures—they were shadows, one taller than the other; human, but indistinguishable even from one another except by the difference in height. When Karen first made them out, they seemed merely to be standing there, motionless. Karen, watching them, was as motionless.

  Not Mrs. Bromwell, she thought, and then realized that even of that she could not be certain. Mrs. Bromwell was not, she thought, the shorter of the shadows; she might conceivably be the taller. Even that, however, was uncertain; since in the dimness there was no scale to guide her. Then one of them spoke, in the same surreptitious tone. “Here?” She could just make out the word; thought a man had spoken; could not tell from which of the shadows the sound came. There was no audible response, but there was movement. One or the other apparently was opening a door in the right wall of the corridor. It opened as a rectangular blackness, cutting off the end of the hall, and the two human shadows vanished behind it.

  This was only for a few seconds. Then the door swung again, the sharp blackness it had formed receding. Now there was only one human shadow in the hall; Karen thought—but again there was no scale—that the taller person had remained behind. And at the same instant there was again the sound of a voice, but this time muffled and wordless—a kind of gasp, as much as anything, as if breath had been drawn sharply in between half-opened lips. In the next instant, the remaining figure moved and was gone. The movement was so quick, and the light so uncertain, that Karen could not be sure at once where the other person—surely the taller of the two who had been there?—had gone. Then she realized the movement must have been into the transverse hall.

  Karen waited a moment, not knowing quite what she waited for—for something else to happen. But nothing else did happen, and then she felt, again, an elusive “wrongness” about something—a kind of bafflement, as if something incomprehensible had occurred. In an instant this feeling sharpened, at first into surprise and then into fear. Karen remembered on what the door opened. She moved down the hall, then; in a moment she was almost running. Now fear ran beside her.

  She reached the door and did not hesitate. She pulled it open—and looked into blackness. Then she heard someone moaning. She reached for the light switch which should be there on the wall, on her right; fumbled for it and found it. She pushed the tumbler up. There was a click, and nothing more. She heard the moan again and then, clutching the rough handrail, she began to go down the perilously steep flight of steps which led into the old storeroom—the windowless basement room, now almost never used, connected with the main cellars only by a narrow, damp passage.

  Damp and cold, and the odor of dampness, came up to her as she went down the stairs, feeling for each with a shrinking foot. The groaning stopped; then started again.

  “I’m coming,” Karen said. “Who is it?”

  There were words, this time, but they were mumbled, incomprehensible. The voice, however, was a man’s.

  It was a long way down the sharply pitched, perilous flight of rough stairs. She could not hurry; if she hurried she would fall, as the other must have fallen—must have fallen headlong, with only time for that faint gasp of surprise and terror, to the cement floor at the bottom. It was a long way down, and the coldness struck through Karen’s robe and the dampness was in her nose and throat. If there were only light! Months ago the bulb which should have gone on must have burned out unnoticed. If there were even a match—Then Karen remembered an earlier action which had been automatic, below the floor of consciousness, and felt in the right-hand pocket of her robe. Her fingers closed on the rectangular hardness of her cigarette lighter. In a second she had its little flame. And at first it merely blinded her. She held it lower, so that she could see the stairs, and then after another moment she saw the little man who lay sprawled at the foot of the steps. Around his head there was fluid blackness.

  She went the remaining steps more quickly. She knelt on the cement floor beside Bill Higgins; held the little flame of the lighter toward his face. The eyes were open; he was looking at her. He spoke in a mumble.

  “Fell,” he said. “This party—be all right in—”

  The voice stopped. It started again.

  “Hurt myself,” he said. “Said—Bill—gonna hurt your—hurt my head. Not you.”

  “What—?” she began, but he was speaking again.

  “Other party,” he said, but now he was more difficult to understand even than before. “Other party—think they can push—” He groaned, and his small body seemed to shudder with the groan. “Think they can—” he said. “Show ’em in a minute—you—” He groaned again. Bill Higgins said one more thing and it sounded like “catch cold.” Then the small body shuddered once more, violently, and Bill Higgins died. Although Karen had never before seen anyone die, she knew when it was Bill Higgins died. Even as she spoke to him, tried to rouse him, she knew he was dead.

  The lighter flame was shrinking, settling into itself. Karen stood up. She must get someone.

  Then she heard a sound. Someone was coming along the narrow passage from the main cellars. The movements were slow, careful, but the feet grated on the cement. Then, and then for the first time, Karen was frightened for herself; then fear filled her, and as she spoke her voice caught in her throat. But she managed to say, “Who’s there?” in a voice recognizably her own.

  The feet in the passage stopped. But no one answered. Karen flicked down the lighter cap, and stood in darkness. “Who’s there?” she said again.

  Again there was no answer. But then there was again the sound of moving feet; the shuffling of leather on the grit of cement. Karen tried to find the stair rail, but the body of Bill Higgins was between her and it; her naked foot touched the body and she recoiled. She moved to one side, away from both stairs and body, thinking only not to be where she had been a moment before, where the light had showed her standing. But the faint sound of her movement revealed her and she stopped.

  The shuffling sound in the passage continued. It was seconds before Karen realized, could let herself realize, that now it was growing fainter. Whoever had been coming through the passage to the
old storeroom had changed his mind, was going back. Unless—unless it was a trick? A trick planned, or played by her own ears.

  Karen waited, and the sounds continued to diminish. After a little she could no longer hear them, but still she waited. Sounds were strange here, unplaceable—echoes from damp stone lied about sounds. Only after several minutes was Karen sure enough to snap the lighter on again. It burned brightly at first but almost at once the flame began to shrink. It went out, shrank to the charring end of a wick, but only after she had seen her way around Bill Higgins’s body and reached the stairs. She stood on the bottom step for a moment, her feet no longer cringing from the damp coldness of the basement floor. Then she started up.

  She had gone only a few steps up when there was a sound at the door above her. She cringed back instinctively against the rough boards of the stair wall as the door opened. Instantly, then, she was flooded with light, light which blinded her. She threw up her hands involuntarily to shield her eyes. Someone, from the door, was throwing the glaring beam of a flashlight on her face.

  “Oh, you,” a man said, and it was an instant before she recognized the light, penetrating voice of the man who had come to telephone, Stephen Nickel. “What in God’s name?” he said.

  “Higgins,” she said. “The little man. He’s—he fell down the stairs. I—I think he’s dead.”

  She still stood close against the wall. Now the beam of the flashlight left her face, passed briefly over her body and dipped to the foot of the stairs. Stephen Nickel said, “Hell!” and started down. He brushed past her and crouched beside the body, the beam from the torch cruelly illuminating what had been Bill Higgins.

  It was worse to see clearly. It was unbearable to see clearly what the harsh light showed. Karen put an arm against the rough boards and turned her face against it. She was shivering convulsively, only partly from the damp cold. The shivering was beyond her control. She heard movement as Nickel shifted position, but did not look.

  “Well,” Nickel said, “you find them, don’t you?”

  “I—” she began. “He’s—”

  “You’re damned right,” Nickel said. “Dead when you found him, wasn’t he?”

  “Not—not quite,” she said, still without turning, her voice muffled against the sleeve of her woolen robe. “He—he was still alive. For a minute or so.”

  She heard again the sound of Nickel moving, and thought he stood up. Then she was certain. He came up the stairs to her.

  “Conscious?” he said. He was abrupt, demanding.

  She nodded against her arm. The light was on her, now.

  “Say anything?” The abruptness was still there.

  “A little,” she said. “Nothing that—nothing I could understand. That he’d hurt himself. Something about a party—‘this party.’ He said, ‘Other party—pushed,’ something like that. No, ‘Think they can push—’” She stopped. “He—he thought he was going to be all right,” she said.

  “When he said party,’” Nickel said, still holding the light on her. “You thought he meant a person?”

  She nodded.

  “But he didn’t say who?”

  She shook her head.

  “All right,” Nickel said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He held the light on the steps as she climbed them, slowly, her body shaking, to the top. Then he followed her. When they were both in the hall, he closed the door. She started back the way she had come, but he took her arm—not roughly, but with decision—and guided her into the transverse corridor, toward the light.

  “You’re in a jam, you know,” he said. “You find too many of them, Miss Mason. A lot too many. You know you’re in a jam?”

  It was warm in the hall, but her body still shook as if with the cold. It was hard to keep her voice steady; hard to keep her mind steady. “I don’t know,” she said. “I—I just found him.”

  “Just looking for something,” Nickel said. “What? An old hat box? Last summer’s—something?” He was walking her along the corridor; another intersected it and they turned to the right. Then they were in the pantry. And Scott Bromwell was standing at a counter, wearing a robe—as Nickel was—pouring soda on top of whisky in a glass. He turned and looked at them. He kept on pouring and the soda poured over the counter.

  “What the hell?” Scott said.

  “Miss Mason’s found another,” Nickel said. “She’s good at it. The little man, this time. Higgins. Know where Heimrich is?”

  “What do you mean?” Scott said. “What’s he talking about, Karen?”

  She tried to speak and her voice shook too much for words. She tried again.

  “He—he fell down the stairs,” she said. “Into the old storeroom. He’s—he’s dead. His head was all—”

  Scott put the bottle down and, in what seemed the same motion, put an arm around Karen’s shoulder.

  “Come out of it!” he said. He turned on Nickel. “What did you do to her?” he demanded.

  “Found her,” Nickel said. “Just found her. With another body.”

  “He said—” Karen began.

  “I told her it didn’t look so good,” Nickel said. “You think it does, Bromwell?” He was detached.

  Scott’s arm tightened around Karen’s shoulders. But, even as it did, even as she expected him to speak, she felt withdrawal. Then his arm dropped away.

  “Well,” Captain Heimrich’s voice said, “what’s all this about? ‘Found’ Miss Mason, Mr. Nickel? And what didn’t look good?”

  “Higgins,” Nickel said. “He looked dead. Was dead. Fell downstairs, apparently. Or—somebody pushed him. Ask her, captain.”

  Karen looked up at Heimrich, who said, “Well, Miss Mason?” She nodded slowly.

  “I found him,” she said. “In—in the old storeroom. He’d fallen. Before that—”

  Heimrich interrupted. “You know where she means?” he asked Scott Bromwell and, when Scott nodded, said, “Show Forniss.” Then he turned back to Karen and said, “Better come along and tell me, Miss Mason” and then to Nickel, “You too, Mr. Nickel.” He went out of the pantry into the entrance hall and then into the East Room and through it to the library. He sat down where he had sat before.

  “All right, Miss Mason,” he said.

  She told him. She quit shivering as she told the story, and her words came more steadily. Heimrich listened with his eyes open. When she told of the two figures in the hall he interrupted.

  “Now Miss Mason,” he said, “you must have some idea.”

  One, of course, had been Higgins. That was clear enough now. The other—anybody. Anybody tall. Wearing what? She could not be sure. Perhaps a robe. Why a robe? She didn’t know; thought and said it might be rationalization. She could not tell whether the taller person had been a man or a woman; at a distance, in the dark, a man and a woman would be least distinguishable if both wore robes—dressing gowns, something like that. “Go on,” Heimrich said.

  He stopped her again, however, when she told of the opening door, of its closing again, of the disappearance first of the shorter, then of the taller figure.

  “When the door was open,” he said, “you couldn’t see what happened? If anything happened?”

  The door had been between her and the two, Karen said. It opened that way. Heimrich nodded. She told of going down the stairs, of finding Higgins. She told as nearly as she could remember what Higgins had said.

  Over that, stopping her with that, Heimrich took her, it seemed, endlessly. Higgins had said he had fallen? He had not, first, said he had been pushed? That was the way she remembered it. But then this “other party” had “pushed”? This time she shook her head. It had not been that clear. He had said “think they can push.”

  “As if,” she said, “he might have meant to say, ‘Think they can push me around.’ Something like that.”

  “But he didn’t say that?”

  “I think now he might have been going to.”

  “But you can’t think who he might have been
talking about?”

  “No.”

  “Go ahead,” he told her.

  “Then,” she said, “then I think he died. He said something I couldn’t understand. Something—meaningless. About its being cold, I thought. And then he died. Then the lighter burned down and—I heard someone coming.”

  “Coming?” he repeated. “From where?”

  She had to stop, then, and tell him about the storeroom. It was not part of the main cellars under the house. Nobody knew how it had come to be built so. It was distant and inconvenient; in it were stored only those things which had no future except not to be disposed of finally. Trunks which would never again travel; some odds and ends of furniture, never again to be sat upon or slept upon, or eaten from. The storeroom was damp and unventilated, things molded in it; became, finally, not even worth throwing away. A narrow passage connected the storeroom with the main cellars. It was in the passage she had heard someone. She told what she had heard, of her challenge, of waiting, uncertain whether whoever it was retreated or advanced.

  “Your feet must have got cold,” Heimrich said, apparently noticing for the first time that she was barefoot.

  “I was all cold,” she said. “It was—”

  He waited.

  “Whoever it was went away,” she said. “Then I started to go up. Then Mr. Nickel came. He—he went down and looked at—at him. Then we both went up and—and found Scott. Then you came.”

  “Now,” Heimrich said, “let’s go back to the two people you say you saw.” They went back to them; he tried to pry out of her more than she knew, or could remember; tried over and over. “Now, when you saw them at the door—?” “Now, when Higgins spoke—?” “Now, Miss Mason, this sound you say you heard—?”