by Helen Reilly
Hanging up and returning to his interrupted meal Todhunter reflected grayly that a break couldn't come soon enough for him, or for Duvette, who was as stumped as he was. Three murders and nothing to go on, nothing to get your teeth into. His despondent mood wasn’t improved by the fact that he couldn’t eat the dessert, a fudge cake with ice cream he had been particularly looking forward to. The Questing party was lip and moving.
Four women and five men; last night there had been five women and four men. Candy Font’s likeable ex-husband had been added— Elizabeth Questing had absented herself, deliberately. Madame Flavelle, tied to the group by invisible strings, had been permanently removed. In all probability one of the people strolling ahead of him down the path through moonlight and shadow, fully fed and at ease, outwardly anyhow, had sent a bullet into Davidson and pulled a noose tight around the Frenchwoman’s neck.
Fifty yards in front of the little detective, between George Langley and Nils, Rose was filled writh the same edged uneasiness. She couldn’t put out of her mind the look she had seen Harry Belding send after Elizabeth. It was one of those unforgettable glimpses that come and go in a flash and are more revealing than years of apparent knowledge. And yet watching Harry during dinner, his affability, his quiet attention to people’s needs, his pleasant smile, the hooded venom of that dark glance seemed utterly impossible. The same thing went for Gertrude. She was exactly as always, vague, bumbling, pathetic in her anxiety to please.
Through all this and above and below it was her consciousness of Nils, sitting across the table during dinner and devoting himself to Candy. Yet more than once she had found his gaze fastened on her when she turned unexpectedly. He was too adult to try for an effect in so obvious a way—and his absorption in Candy Font seemed genuine. She had flung herself into a political argument with Colonel Eden and Daniel, who had responded nobly, but whose attention was elsewhere. The fastidiousness in him was offended by Candy’s open glow at Nils, her demure smiles and downcast eyes. He was horribly old fashioned. He just plain didn’t like his wife making a public exhibition of herself.
Nils was walking now at Rose’s elbow. They hadn’t said a single word to each other. George Langley, on her left, did enough talking for ten. They came out in the open in front of the lodge. The lake, the mountains, their rims cutting sharply into the stars, the flowers, colorless in moonlight—the night was breathtakingly beautiful. Langley dropped back to light a cigarette and Nils said, “I think they take this in in wTinter, roll it up and put it away for the next season. It’s too perfect,” and then in a lower musing tone, “I wonder if she has them.”
He was looking at Candy, standing with Daniel and Loretta and Colonel Eden near the flower beds, gazing at the view.
“What do you mean, Nils?”
“The jewels, lovie, Davidson’s haul. The rest of it. I tried to find out today. I played every tune I knew, pulled out every stop. I figured that if she had them she might want to get rid of them to the best advantage, now that they’re good and hot. She thinks I’m an unconventional guy, knows I’ve been around. I intimated broadly that a little dash of larceny wouldn’t hurt anyone, was good for the health. No soap. I might have saved my breath. Maybe 1 figured wrong. If she has them, she may just want to keep them by her, to run through her fingers.”
There was a cold ferocity in him that was bone chilling. “Nils, you can’t think Candy shot Davidson—”
He turned and looked down at her. “Why not? Someone did.” Before she could speak, George Langley rejoined them and they all started up the path to the lodge, sprawled on the rise above. Low lamps scattered about the long terrace were pools of soft light. Rose’s disorganized thoughts returned to Elizabeth with a rush. What was Elizabeth going to say? What was she going to tell that Colonel Eden didn’t want her to tell? Her questions that afternoon about the farm . . . the run-down condition of the place here . . . Could Elizabeth have lost her money . . .
Rose moved out in front, was up the steps ahead of the others. Elizabeth wasn’t in the hall, the study off it, the living room. The doors were all open. Everything was just as it had been when they left the lodge. It was nine o’clock and Elizabeth had said nine and she was always punctual. When you met her anywhere you had to be there to the minute . . .
The living room bore no aspects of festivity, the dining room neither, except for a bank of silexes on a buffet. There was no birthday cake as there had been last year, no array of champagne in ice buckets, just the empty rooms . . .
The others were coming up the terrace steps. Rose went quickly down the corridor to Elizabeth’s suite. The bedroom door was the nearest. She opened it. The room was dim in the light from the corridor. The great flat bed was smooth. Elizabeth wasn’t there. Rose crossed the bedroom and opened the sitting-room door. Mirrors, chintz, chairs, pictures, bookcases, a long low couch under a bank of windows, a tray table beside it holding a small silver cocktail shaker, half a sandwich and a coffee jug—Elizabeth was lying on the couch, a hand trailing over the edge. Her eyes were closed. There was something queer about her face, a#sort of glisten . . .
Rose ran across the floor.
“Elizabeth,” she said loudly, “Elizabeth ”
Elizabeth didn’t stir.
FOURTEEN
“Rose! Come away.”
Colonel Eden had followed Rose into the room. Light glittered on the buttons of his uniform. He was curt, commanding, kept his voice low. “Elizabeth’s tired. She needs sleep. Don’t wake her. Stop. Come away.”
His hand was on Rose’s arm, peremptorily. He reached out to turn off the lamp beside the couch.
“No,” Rose said, her eyes on Elizabeth’s face, on its pallid glisten, the closed eyes, the mouth. Her lips were slightly parted on a gleam of teeth. No breath came through them. She looked young and defenseless—and frightful. Sleep?—this wasn’t sleep, natural sleep.
Rose stooped. “Elizabeth,” she called again sharply, “Elizabeth”
“Excuse me, Miss—if you’ll just move aside?”
It was the little New York detective. He had come into the room without making a sound. He knelt, studied Elizabeth, touched her forehead. He raised an eyelid gently, let it fall. He took Elizabeth’s wrist, feeling for a pulse.
Now it was Eden who went to pieces, staring over the detective’s shoulder.
“Is there something wrong? Oh, God—”
He was wildly alarmed. There was horror in him, and despair, as though he had already given up hope, recognizing its uselessness in the light of something, some knowledge, that had suddenly come home to him.
Todhunter laid Elizabeth’s arm along her side and got up.
Elizabeth wasn’t dead. She was under the influence of a heavy sedative. He didn’t like the pulse. ... A doctor would be advisable. “Call the Chalet, Miss O’Hara. And then fresh coffee. Now, Colonel—if you’ll help me, we’ll try and rouse her.”
Rose flew for the phone. The doctor would be there directly.
She ran out, down the hall and into the dining room. The others didn’t know. A hum of voices drifted in from the invisible terrace. She grabbed up a silex, a cup, and raced back.
Eden and Todhunter were walking Elizabeth up and down the floor. Up and down, up and down. "Elizabeth dear, try. Keep trying." “That's it, Mrs. Questing. That’s good, that’s fine.” Elizabeth was conscious but only just. Her half-open eyes were darkly fixed under lowered lids. Her mouth was distorted. Her hair had come undone, fell around her shoulders, across her forehead. She didn’t seem to know where she was, who she was.
If only the doctor would come. He did come. At Todhunter’s suggestion Rose went to meet him, and brought him in the side way, over the south terrace and through one of the long windows. The doctor examined Elizabeth, and the bottle of sleeping pills on the table at the head of the couch, and confirmed Todhunter's guess. He gave Elizabeth an injection. At the end of ten agonized minutes the doctor nodded and said something to Todhunter and Todhunter came ove
r to Rose standing rigidly behind a chair gripping the back of it with her hands.
Rose said, “Is she—is she going to be all right?" and Todhunter nodded.
“You might tell the others, Miss O’Hara. They'll be wondering/'
The relief was overwhelming. “Tell them—tell them what?"
“Tell them that Mrs. Questing accidentally took too much sedation."
Accidentally. Rose stared at him. Did he believe it? Had Elizabeth tried to kill herself, commit suicide? No, not Elizabeth . . . and yet—she wasn’t herself, she was strange, different. Terror of the unknown, the unpredictable was there in the room, close pressing in the night. It filled the empty orderly spaces, wiping out the light, carrying its own darkness within itself, a blanketing suffocating poisonous darkness. Rose fought free of it, standing up straight, pulling cool air from the wide open windows into her lungs.
When she appeared on the terrace they all looked up, looked past her. Seven people. She spoke and they were all on their feet, staring at her, clustering around her. Distress, concern, anxiety, questions. Seven of them; Daniel, Candy, Loretta Pilgrim, Langley, Nils, and Harry and Gertrude Belding.
She said that the doctor was with Elizabeth, that she wasn’t seriously affected, and that there was nothing to worry about, that she’d be all right in a little while.
It was Nils who saw the strange man first, he was the farthest away. The man was standing on the landing at the top of the steps peering in under the sweep of the awning. He was a gnome painted on blackness, a small man with a nutlike brown face between a violent plaid shirt and a shapeless hat. Below and beyond him on the gravel a car was pulled up, the parkers on.
“You want something?” Nils asked, and the man said, “Mrs. Questing—”
Rose went quickly forward, recognizing the strangeness instantly, passionately not wanting the others to hear. She moved fast. She said to the face outside the screen, “I have a message for you,” and in a lower voice, “come down to the car,” and ran down the steps.
The man was a Steve Tomkins. He lived in Field. He had formerly worked for Elizabeth. The car, an ancient English Ford, was his own and he had come at Elizabeth’s orders to drive Elizabeth to Calgary. Rose stared at a shimmer of water between pine trunks.
“Tonight?”
“Yes, Miss.”
Tomkins was genuinely sorry to hear Mrs. Questing was ill. He would have been there earlier only that he had to change a tire. “My missus thinks the earth of Mrs. Questing, Miss, and that’s a fact. She’s been awful good to our kids and to me. She got me my job with the C. P. She ain’t been looking well. Tell her I hope she’ll soon be better.”
He got into the car and drove off and Rose went slowly up the steps. Someone asked, “Who was that?” and she said, “Just a man who used to work for Elizabeth.” More questions, she answered mechanically that there was nothing anyone could do just then, and started back the way she had come. Elizabeth had intended to leave Amethyst Lake secretly that night, to slip away without a word. . . . One thing at least was now certain. Her cousin had definitely not tried to commit suicide.
When Rose entered the sitting room Elizabeth’s color was slightly better and her eyes were wider open, and stayed open. She was able to help herself, paused to drink more coffee and went on pacing between the two men, standing straighter and with a firmer step. Rose crossed over to the couch to be out of the way and sat down. She poured coffee into the cup Elizabeth had used, not from the silex on the other side of the room but from the vacuum jug on the tray table near the head of the couch. There was only a little in it. She picked up the cup, and her hand jerked and the coffee splashed over her knees.
"Don’t,” Eden called sharply. "Don’t touch anything on that table.”
He didn't release his hold on Elizabeth, kept walking and told her, moving up and down the floor, about the eggnog and the scene of die afternoon. "I was suspicious, there was an air of guilt . . . and yet I couldn’t really believe it, it was too incredible.” To be on the safe side, because in spite of himself he remained uneasy, he had decided to mix Elizabeth’s cocktail himself. "I was a fool. I should have done something more.”
Elizabeth’s fingers pressed his sleeve above the gold braid. “Dear Hugh,” she murmured. "It’s not your fault. After I drank the daiquiris I took a pill myself. I thought I’d rest for an hour or so, not sleep, just rest. Then when I began to feel drowsy I drank the coffee, three cups of it in succession—and after that I don’t remember any more.”
Todhunter was at the table beside the couch sipping daintily at the cup Rose had put down. He replaced the cup on the saucer and nodded.
"In the coffee.”
Elizabeth halted swayingly between the two men. She turned her head and looked at the little detective.
"Gertrude—when she came back?”
“I think so, Mrs. Questing.”
“Ah.”
Elizabeth went on walking as though everything were clear, understandable. The doctor was bewildered and confused. So was Rose. But certain things were obvious. Elizabeth had been going to say something, make an announcement of some sort. Colonel Eden didn't want her to do it. He had implored her not to. That was why he didn't want her waked, roused, when they came in first and found her. He hadn't been very subtle about it. Gertrude Belding was apparently equally anxious that she shouldn't speak and had taken steps, definite steps. Where, at what point, did their interests coincide? Ther were utterly different people. Their only lint was Elizabeth. It had become very plain during the last hour that Hugh Eden loved Elizabeth.. Gertrude Belding was her employee., and presumably devoted to her. but vou couldn't take that for granted—you couldn't take anything for granted now.
The attempt to drug Elizabeth into silence was not going to succeed. Presently she took charge herself, fighting her way up out of the pit that had threatened to engulf her, by sheer force of will.
"I want something to wake me up. Doctor, I've got things to do."
What things? . . . Rose scrubbed at the coree on her skirt with a balled tissue. Her cousin was certainly not going to be able to leave for Calgary that night.
The doctor demurred, but Elizabeth overrode him. made him ^ive her a stimulant of some sort, dexedrine probably. He did so with the greatest unwillingness, said it was inadvisable, a strain on the svstem.
"What vou need most now is rest, Mrs. Questing."
"Later, Doctor. Hugh—" She sent Eden to tell the others to wait, that she would be with them shortly. "Rose, come with me.”
She had been in a drugged sleep at nine o'clock. It was twenty-five minutes of eleven when she left the sitting room on Eden's arm. Outwardly she was almost herself. Rose had helped her dress, not protesting, because she saw it would do no good. Elizabeth wore a long black sheath high at the throat that left her arms bare. Her lace was white under her smooth black hair, her amber eves deep in her head, her onlv color the scarlet of her lips, which she had applied with steadiness. The dress cried aloud for jewels, she wore none.
Exclamations of solicitude when she entered the living room. Was she well enough . . . was it wise of her to? . . . Elizabeth said she was much better and seated herself in a chair to the right of the fireplace. Eden stood behind her chair. Daniel Candv and Loretta were on a sofa facing the hearth Nils near a long window, George Langley on the piano stool and Todhunter in the background. Rose took the chair she had occupied that afternoon.
Gertrude Belding was bringing coffee, serving it. She looked just the same. There was no evidence of guilt in her. But then she was always uncertain, apologetic, self-accusatory, so that you couldn’t tell. Did Harry Belding suspect his wife? If he did, he didn’t show it either, wheeling in, at Elizabeth’s direction, a cart holding liqueurs, asking what everyone would have.
“Brandy for me." . . . “Nothing, thanks” . . . “I’ll have brandy”
. . . “Well, a tiny sip of chartreuse.” The tinkle of the spoon, the crackle of the fire—and a hidden roa
r of curiosity, expectancy. The great beautiful room rocked with it. Elizabeth was the focus. She waited until everyone had been served, accepted a light for her cigarette from the Colonel, and sat back.
“I asked you to stay because I have something to say to you.”
No one spoke, stirred, the very air in the room seemed to stand still. Rose held a brandy snifter between pressing palms into which Harry Belding had poured a good dollop. Elizabeth didn’t seem to be speaking to anyone in particular, she was facing the couch on which Loretta Pilgrim sat, her eyes were on the middle distance beyond it. She inhaled smoke, expelled it, watched it rise.