by Helen Reilly
After a moment he stood erect, turned, followed the wall of the house and dropped from sight around the corner of the front porch. It was then, and only then, that Muriel Cambridge moved. Using the same caution she had previously employed she advanced on the house. Pierson lost her in the shadows under its walls.
The captain felt his way down the slope. The snow was driving hard. He groped through half-a-dozen namless barriers that were bushes and young trees blanketed with whiteness until the side of the house was directly in front of him. Its length was indented with a small oblong patch that was a recessed porch, screened with bare, strangling lilacs. A square of orange was a window which he recognized as one of the windows of Luke Cambridge’s study.
The porch was an excellent vantage point for observation. It also offered protection from the storm of which Pierson had had quite enough. He was pushing his way carefully through the lilac hedge when a sudden dark movement near the study window brought him to an abrupt halt. Muriel Cambridge had forestalled him. She was crushed back into an angle of the porch with her face turned toward the bright panes, staring intently into the room within.
Pierson silently retreated. Clear of the bushes, he rubbed his chin and studied the layout. Half a minute later, after he made his way around the corner of the house and through a thick planting of blue spruce, he was himself looking into the interior.
He was standing outside one of the windows of Luke Cambridge’s bedroom. The shade had not been drawn because the spruce formed a natural blind. The bedroom offered nothing, but the captain had an excellent and almost unobstructed view of a large portion of the study. The door leading into it was wide open.
Luke Cambridge was seated at a long Sheraton table close to the south wall, his back to the small-paned window from beyond which, in blackness, his niece-in-law watched, unseen. Luke was leaning back in a stiff Windsor chair, his hands idle along the arms, his head bent, gazing fixedly down at an assortment of papers scattered in piles on a large green blotter in front of him. His lean aquiline face beneath the thick shock of smooth white hair was etched in sharp planes against a tapestry to the right of the door leading into the hall. He appeared to be lost in thought and not very pleasant thought. His mouth had a heavy twist to it and he was scowling.
A sound inaudible to Pierson galvanized him into life. He turned his head sharply and jumped to his feet. With a quick motion he scooped up the papers on the blotter before him. One fell from his fingers to the floor. He retrieved it hastily and passed from view.
Two things happened almost at the same moment. There was a brilliant flare-up of light in the book-lined study, and the door opened and Leslie Cambridge walked in. Pierson knew what had occurred. Luke Cambridge had gone in the direction of the big stone fireplace. It was evident that he had thrown the papers he was carrying into the flames.
As Leslie stood in the doorway his glance in the direction of the hearth was sharp. As he turned to Luke his expression changed from one of avid curiosity, suspicious curiosity, to a frank and open smile. Luke didn’t smile. He stood staring irascibly at the younger man.
The captain could hear nothing of the interchange that followed, but there was challenge in the question Luke flung at his nephew and the answer was in the negative. Leslie shook his head and began to talk. Cambridge listened in silence until he had finished.
Then his doubled fist went down on the Sheraton table beside which he was standing. His back was turned and Pierson couldn’t see his face, but whatever he said was both unpalatable and frightening to the younger man. Leslie Cambridge flinched and pulled himself erect as though he had received a blow. He was at first injured and indignant, and then pleading and conciliatory. He began to talk again, even more rapidly, as if he were excusing himself or explaining something away.
While this was going on Luke Cambridge didn’t look at his nephew. He was moving around the study. He turned over a magazine, straightened a row of books, pushed a pen set into place. A slight draft flutttered the curtains of the window behind the table, the window beyond which Muriel Cambridge was probably still crouched, an unseen witness of the scene between her husband and her husband’s uncle. The table was fairly close to the bedroom door. Something fluttered beneath it, slithered gently across the floor and through the open door into the bedroom. Luke Cambridge didn’t notice it.
Leslie was still going strong. He was a man to whom speech evidently came easily, who used it, perhaps, in lieu of other things. His argument, reinforced with gestures, wasn’t going down well with his uncle. Luke Cambridge swung and closed the bedroom door. As he did so Pierson caught a glimpse of his face. It was hard and tight-lipped. There was anger in it and contempt and a cold determination. The shutting of the intervening door cut the scene abruptly. But Pierson didn’t immediately move. The shutting of the door had done something else. It had sent the small pale object that had blown from under Luke’s table across the bedroom floor toward the rear wall. There was a lamp lit on a table beside the bed off on the right. Light fell on a white sheet of paper, a sheet of paper torn from a pad. There was something written on it in pencil.
The captain stared at the scrap of paper longingly. Luke Cambridge had shown agitation in his haste to destroy the papers upon which he had been working when his nephew entered the room. The little sheet might contain something important. If only he could get hold of it.
He tried the window outside which he stood. It yielded. He pushed it up a tentative two inches. Luke’s voice was now thinly audible. “One week,” he was saying. “Yes, I’ll give you one week, but I want it clearly understood .. The voice dwindled, stopped. Luke and his nephew were evidently moving from the study out into the hall.
The captain seized his chance. He was not a particularly adventurous man, but he was dogged, and a longing to possess the little sheet of paper lying on the floor in front of him and some six feet away quickened his wits. If he only had a cane with a hook on the end of it—he glanced round absently. There was no cane available but there was something much better. He pulled down a bough of one of the silver spruces and ripped it from the trunk. It was four feet long, would do. Raising the window to its full height, he leaned forward. Half a minute later, when he let it fall gently into place, he had the sheet of paper tucked into his pocket.
It was time to make tracks. McKee was sending men up from New York to relieve himself and Kent, the latter keeping an eye, loosely, on the Gregory Cambridge house on the far side of the estate. Pierson decided he had better check on Leslie and his wife before joining Kent. Backing out of the thicket of silver spruce, he started around the house in the direction of the front door, giving the side porch a wide berth and sticking to the cover of trees and shrubs. He had reached the end of the porch wall, which was masked by feathery hemlocks, when he heard the front door close.
Pierson remained where he was. Light heralded the approach of Leslie Cambridge. He was carrying a torch. Presently he came into view, walking briskly, out in front and some fifteen feet beyond. As he cleared the porch and started across the snow-covered lawn toward the path by which he had reached Luke’s house his wife advanced to meet him, stepping out from under the wide branches of a huge cedar of Lebanon to which she had evidently shifted her base.
Two figures in the darkness and the driving snow, one large, one small. Their outlines were blurred, but Pierson got the general drift of that sudden encounter. Muriel Cambridge was furious at her husband. A start from Leslie of surprise, alarm, a fierce accusation from the woman, “You fool, you, what have you done now? What have you done? Do you want to ruin us?” In spite of the whistling of the wind, the soft whir and whisper of the whirling flakes, the bite in her voice registered clearly. Stammered words from Leslie Cambridge to the woman he had sworn to love and cherish: “I didn’t. No. I mean—you don’t understand
” The promise didn’t appear to have been necessary. For all her smallness, Muriel Cambridge was more than able to take care of herself. A huge blast of whiten
ess blew down, enveloped the couple. When it passed they were farther away, moving back in the direction of the pretty little Tudor cottage on the other side of the hill. Pierson watched them safely up the face of the rise, then turned and tramped off westward toward Gregory Cambridge’s house on the other side of the estate.
CHAPTER 5
KENT, meanwhile, had had a dull, cold, uncomfortable and unproductive stretch keeping an eye on the other branch of the family. A more resourceful man than Pierson, however, he had managed to gather gleanings, general stuff, the feel of the house and its occupants, that might be of service later.
The house itself was on a slope, with a driveway running in from the road and circling it under tall oaks. The long low garage was on the far side of a big gravel enclosure at the back. Kent kept his distance at first, then, nothing happening, he decided to try to get a closer view. He blessed the landscape gardner who had devised the planting of dwarf shrubbery to break the angle where house walls met earth. It not only facilitated an immediate approach but it provided a welcome barrier against the worst of the storm.
In his drifting tour of the extensive structure he got a good-sized cross section of the activity, pursuits, of the people inside. The curtains were not all drawn. Those on the sides of the house away from the street and some at the back were open. A blue-and-white kitchen with two maids in it gave him an excellent slant on the interrelationships of the various members of the family. Cold as it was outside, the kitchen was warm and one of the windows was open a little at the top so that the voices of the two maids, seated at a white porcelain table over a cup of tea, came out quite clearly.
A wedding was in the offing. Ellen Cambridge was to be married the following week. The name of the man she was to marry was Toby Newell. Kent gathered that they were very much in love and that Luke Cambridge hadn’t approved of the marriage at first but had finally come around. Ellen sounded like a favorite of his.
Luke seemed to be very important. It was Mr Luke this, Mr Luke that. He entered largely into every phase of the family’s doings that were touched upon. One of the maids contributed that Andrews, Luke’s houseman, said he’d been a devil for the last three weeks. It was his spleen, there was something the matter with his spleen.
Gregory Cambridge’s wife and daughter were popular with the servants, Gregory Cambridge wasn’t. “ ‘A side of bacon,’ he says to me, ‘and six hams.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘after all, Mr Cambridge, this is a big house and there’s lots of mouths to feed.’ Mind you, he eats plenty himself.” It was Gregory, apparently, who attended to the finances even in the culinary department.
Muriel, Leslie’s wife, was a snooper. “The other day,” the younger maid said, “when Mrs Irene and Miss Ellen were out, she had the nerve to walk into the kitchen and look at the icebox. And she asked me all sort of ^questions about who was here at the party the night before, and did she use the new china, and who sat where and was there champagne?”
Tea finished, the two maids left the kitchen and Kent transferred himself to the other side of the house. There he got very little for his pains. In the long living room Irene Cambridge was reading in a deep chair near the hearth, firelight dancing over her figure, knees crossed, coppery head bent. Her hair, no doubt, was touched up, but the process was skillful and she created an astonishing illusion of youth when you calculated that she must be nearing her forties, if she wasn’t actually ip them. For all the ease of her posture she was nervous.
She kept glancing now and then, uneasily, at the door leading into the hall. Gregory Cambridge wasn’t visible but the daughter, Ellen, was seated at a table desk, pencil in hand, making out a list of what appeared to be names. From time to time she asked her stepmother a question. The relationship between the two women seemed to be warm, friendly.
There was a telephone on the desk. It rang. The girl took the receiver off the hook. Her face, somewhat heavy in repose, was suddenly illuminated. A smile curved her lips. She talked-for a minute or two, nodding her head a couple of times and still smiling, dropped the instrument into place and said something to Irene Cambridge. The latter nodded and turned a page.
Kent left the occupants of the living room and shifted his attention to the lighted windows of the room beyond, the room in which McKee had interviewed this branch of the family earlier in the evening. He drew a blank. Not only were the shades drawn, the curtains were pulled too.
It was bitterly cold. The cold began to get into Kent’s bones. He burrowed deeper into the shrubbery, took out a torch, shielded it with his hand and looked at his watch. The relief men ought to be arriving soon. Then he could collect Pierson and they could be on their way. What he wanted most in the world was a good shot and a hot cup of coffee. He slipped the extinguished torch back into his pocket. A car was coming up the driveway.
It went past within ten feet of Kent, to halt at a side door half-a-dozen yards farther along. It was a long, low, black convertible coupe. Kent caught a glimpse of the man at the wheel. He was young. Adding the telephone and the lateness of the hour, it was probably Ellen’s fiance, Newell. About to jump out, the young man changed his mind. The car moved on again. It was making for the garage. The snow was coming down heavily. Newell, if it was Newell, had evidently decided to put his car under cover.
The coupe came to a stop in front of the garage doors and the man in it jumped out. He had on a raccoon coat. It was only then that Kent saw that there was a light inside the garage, not much of a light but some. It hadn’t been there a quarter of an hour earlier. The raccoon-coated visitor was standing on tiptoe, peering in. He rapped on the glass of the small window in the upper part of the garage door. Instantly the light went out.
In the flood of brilliance from his head lamps the owner of the car doubled around the corner of the garage and vanished from sight. There was urgency in his movements. Kent decided to see what was up. It was lucky he did. The groan, the muffled cry which touched his ears when he had reached as far as the back of the coupe would have been inaudible if he had been any farther away.
Charging in the direction from which the sounds came, the side of the garage, Kent stumbled and almost fell over an inert obstacle, which he recognized as fur with a body inside of it, lying in the snow. He switched on his torch. It was the driver of the coupe. Blood was running down his chin and his eyes were closed.
It was the glare of Kent’s torch that brought Pierson running. Puffing hard up the slope the captain yelled:
“What is it? What the hell’s the matter?”
It was the man on the ground who supplied the answer.
He opened his eyes, stared up dazedly at the two men over him, struggled to his knees and said thickly:
“Where is he? Did you get him?” His glance narrowed.
“Who the Who are you anyhow?” He looked from
Pierson to Kent to the side window of the garage. The window was open.
“Police officers,” Kent said curtly. “What happened?” “Yeah,” Pierson said, “what happened?”
The young man in the raccoon coat rose to his feet, dusting off the snow.
“There was someone in the garage. I rapped. I thought it was someone from the house. And then the light went out. I ducked around the side here. A man was climbing out the window. He got me in the jaw before I could get him. Where is he? He can’t have gotten far.”
Pierson and Kent looked at each other. They withdrew a few feet. There were footprints in the snow leading away from the garage in the direction of a stone wall to the north. Kent said in a low voice, “Plenty of tracks, Captain. I’ll follow. You take this fellow into the house. Stick around and I’ll get in touch with you later.” He faded into a cloud of whirling flakes.
Kent had been right. The man in the raccoon coat was Toby Newell. Pierson helped him into the house. They went through a side door, along a narrow corridor, along the main hall and into the living room. As Pierson opened the door Ellen Cambridge jumped to her feet. She looked at Toby Newell, cried
out and ran to him. There still was blood on his chin and his face was pale.
“Toby,” she cried. “Toby! What is it? What happened? Are you hurt? Did you fall or something?”
The glance the stalwart young man gave her was wryly humorous.
“I fell all right, darling. But not of my own volition; I was pushed. Some guy busted into your father’s garage. When I tried to nab him he socked me and beat it.”
Irene Cambridge had risen. She was alarmed and solicitous. “You poor boy. Are you badly hurt? You’d better have a drink. Sit down here, sit down.”
Between them the two women put Newell on a davenport in front of the fire. It was at that point that Pierson became aware of the combined scrutiny of all three. He shuffled his feet and said stolidly, addressing himself to Irene, “I—I-The inspector had an errand in the neighborhood and I was waiting for him at the front gate. When I seen—saw—that there was something wrong I ran up. Me and Kent, that’s the chief’s secretary, was waiting for the inspector.”
Pierson was uncomfortably aware that it didn’t go down very well, but it was the best he could do at short notice. Presently he found himself seated in a chair and sharing the same refreshment with Newell, a man-sized shot from a decanter of scotch. A glow stole through the captain. This was something like.
Ellen sat with her arm linked through Newell’s and her round, childish head pressed against the shoulder of his tweed jacket. He was a big young man with square shoulders and long legs. His rugged features were well cut. A pair of frank eyes beneath a broad intelligent forehead gave an impression of capability and strength. The lovers were engrossed in themselves, but Irene Cambridge was worried about her husband.
She left the room, returned to say, “I don’t know where Gregory can be. Ellen dear, did your father say he was going out?”
The girl stopped murmuring to Newell.