by Rufus King
Christine came back from the terrace. For a moment she speculated about the closed corridor door. The fog, the stillness, there was nothing she could attribute it to, but she felt very strongly that someone was standing on the other side of the door. Laura? Possibly. Swiftly she opened the door. For no reason on earth that she could determine, it shocked her strongly to find Hugo facing her.
“Hugo—you startled me!”
“Sorry, Christine.”
Hugo came in and closed the door. He took a deliberate stand against it, blocking it almost defensively. “Did you see her?” Christine said. “Is she out there?” Hugo studied Christine’s unnatural pallor, the dilated pupils of her violet eyes.
“See who, Christine?”
“Laura Destin. She came in from the terrace while Lida was in here alone. Lida came in and told me.”
“And you found Laura—gone?”
“Yes. I was lying down and simply took time to throw on this rag. The room was empty, but that terrace door was open. What on earth do you make of it?”
“Obviously the woman is deranged, and even I can not tell what goes on in the mind of a neurotic. Did Miss Belder come back in here with you?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she now?”
“She went upstairs to look for Alan.”
“Then you have been in here alone, Christine?”
“Yes. Hugo, it worries me.”
“May I suggest that you do not worry too much? I am your friend, Christine. All of us are your friends. Everything will turn out all right.”
“You say that so significantly.”
“The more strongly to impress you with my sincerity.”
“You certainly are developing a sibyl touch, Hugo.”
Lida came running down the turret stairs and joined them. She was in somewhat of a state of nerves. “I can’t find him, Aunt Christine. I’ll admit that when I reached the dark stairs to the top floor I just said no!”
“Lida, you’re trembling,” Christine said, putting an arm around her. “I used to too. For the first seventeen years we lived here.”
“I’m all right now.”
“Were you upstairs long?” Hugo asked.
“A lifetime, Doctor.”
There was something in Hugo’s attitude that Lida could not gauge: his eyes were shadowed with a private knowledge which he had no intention whatever, she felt, of sharing with them. It was more than the dark and emptiness of the upper floor which had upset her; it was the completely casual manner with which Christine had accepted Laura Destin’s arrival and presumed departure. It was all right to be eccentric and nicely mad if you didn’t carry it too far.
She felt Christine’s arm press more closely about her, and it was almost as though she were being propelled to the door to Christine’s suite.
“Come with me,” Christine said. “We will smother your nerves with a monologue on your part about each attractive facet of Barry. We will forget Laura. She is gone.”
“It will be bridge as usual, Christine,” Hugo said. “Am I right?”
“Hugo, you remain monotonously right.”
Hugo permitted himself one leisurely smile at the shut door. He turned, and his eyes were speculative on the jog in the wall beside the turret stairs. How far, he wondered, would the others follow along the path which with utter callousness he had so instantly mapped? The full length of it, if he knew them. And he did.
There were only so many worlds which each of them could build, including himself, as warm refuges for their warped and almost clinically selfish lives. No, no matter at what an extravagance of sophistry must this one be permitted to crash down upon their heads.
Hugo did not hurry, and still he wasted no time. His movements suggested the trained precision of a surgeon as he went to the small door of the quick-freezer locker by the turret stairs and opened it.
He reached inside and switched on a light. Stretching along the right wall of this cubicle was a sheeting of silvered metal glazed with light frost. The facing wall was fronted by a rack from which hung Christine’s fur coats and capes and scarfs.
Hugo left the door standing open. He went unhurriedly out into the corridor and, after a very brief while, came back into the room carrying, almost cradled in his arms, Belle Crystal’s corpse.
CHAPTER XII
Hugo went to the cellaret and mixed himself a stiff drink of scotch. He could hear Godfrey’s voice booming louder out in the corridor in one of his interminable reminiscences of meals’ from Godfrey’s Lucullan past.
“—then after the roulade of sand dabs they sprang a Scotch grouse rôti nature that was a lulu. Naturally, Cordelia, the meal ended with petit cœur à la crème aux frais rafraîchies.”
They came in then, and Cordelia said: “It sounds awfully nice, Godfrey, I’m sure.”
She went to the spinet desk and started taking playing cards, pencils and score pads from a drawer while Godfrey joined Hugo at the cellaret.
Hugo asked him: “Has Alan been back in the kitchen with you, Godfrey?”
“Do not be stupid. It is beneath that egocentric vulture’s imaginary birthright even to enter a kitchen. Why?”
“I am interested in where various people recently were.”
The tumbler on the spinet desk, with its still unfinished portion of Christine’s private Prunelle, fascinated Cordelia. She could not resist lifting the glass and sniffing its aroma. Her sense of smell was as keenly trained as her sense of touch, and although she had only once (months ago) tasted the liqueur, its aroma now seemed infinitesimally different—scarcely a shade, but still there was a difference.
Absently she heard Hugo saying to Godfrey: “Have you and Cordelia been together in the kitchen since you went out of here?”
And Godfrey replying testily: “Is this a Gestapo spelling bee you are instituting, Hugo?”
Cordelia carried the glass to her lips. She was about to drink its contents when Hugo said to her sharply: “Cordelia!” She started and jerked the glass down. It struck the desk’s rim and fell to the floor, where the Prunelle emptied slowly out onto the rug.
“Oh dear!” Cordelia picked up the empty glass and went to the cellaret for a bar cloth to mop up the rug.
Hugo’s voice grew sterner: “Listen to me, Cordelia. Was Godfrey with you in the kitchen all of the time you were doing the dishes?”
Godfrey’s voice was virtuous. “Not once were these precious fingers devoid of suds from that rancid sink.”
“Yes, Hugo,” Cordelia said, “Godfrey was with me all of the time—except when he carried the things into the butler’s pantry and put them away.”
“How long did that take him?”
“Answer, Cordelia,” Godfrey said. “Herr Himmler himself is speaking to you.”
A french door opened, and Alan walked in from the terrace. He heard Cordelia say: “I haven’t the remotest idea, Hugo.” He headed directly for the cellaret and poured himself a drink.
“Witch-hunting again, I suppose?” Hugo said to him.
“No, I wasn’t witch-hunting. And stop picking on me, Hugo. I’m upset.”
Cordelia put cards on the bridge table. “I wonder if he’s upset about the annuity?” she said to Godfrey.
Alan’s nerves were completely on edge. “I am upset from just having looked this rat-infested warren over, as well as the grounds, for Laura Destin.”
“And did you see her?” Hugo asked.
“No.”
“Miss Belder did. It would seem that Miss Belder was alone in here when Miss Destin walked in from the terrace to pay a little call on Christine.”
“Oh dear. Oh dear!” Cordelia said, sinking weakly onto one of the small chairs at the bridge table. “Godfrey—a small glass of sherry, please, or, if you insist, some scotch.”
Alan’s handsome face was paper white. He said nothing while Hugo told them Christine’s story—her version, Hugo called it, of the woman’s eccentric arrival and apparent departure.
“Then Christine is all right?” Alan said in a curiously calm voice.
“In a physical sense,” Hugo said, “yes. Lida is in with her, glutting the air with rhapsodies about her unique young man.”
“What do you mean—in a physical sense?”
Hugo finished his drink. He contemplatively observed Godfrey’s great hulk deep in a comfortable armchair. He studied Cordelia’s soft plumpness in the little chair, with the highball she held so lovingly in her dimpled hand. He was complacently interested in the trace of sweat which beaded Alan’s brow. Yes, Hugo decided, they were ripe enough for it now.
“Before I answer that,” he said to Alan, “I am wondering just how far the three of you would go to protect your futures.”
Godfrey set down his empty glass.
“What are you getting at, Hugo?”
“The question seems perfectly plain. You, Godfrey, are forty something, and you, Cordelia, are in your fifties.” Hugo’s tone took on an unpleasant bite. “Your comparative youth, Alan, does not exclude you from the general premises. What would happen to each of us—for I include myself—if we were forced to leave here?” Cordelia’s scotch-hazy eyes were suddenly bleak.
“I don’t know, Hugo.”
Hugo lighted a cigarette while permitting the thought to sink in.
I really don’t know what I would do, Cordelia was thinking, if it weren’t for Christine and Belder Tor. Hugo was perfectly right about her age. As a matter of fact, she would be sixty-one next March. She thought of her comfort here, her little amusements, of the shelter which Christine’s name and position gave to her occasional forays upon the stores. Of all the good food and warmth and of her lovely bed—so soft—like sleeping on a cloud.
Two fat tears shaped and trembled in her eyes. The scotch, added to her nips and Number Thirties, had made her more than usually mellow. She had felt so rosy until—what was it? Oh yes, until Hugo had started to ask his sad questions. How desolate the friendly room had become. From the cluttered storehouse of Cordelia’s memory arose that heartbreaking poem which had driven her in her far-off childhood so satisfyingly into tears.
“Curfew,” she said quietly, “shall not ring tonight.”
They ignored her, except for Hugo, who smiled sardonically and refilled her glass with scotch.
Godfrey was thinking of his comfort too. But it was more than that. Incredibly, he was still complacent of his genius even after the fiasco at the Lewis Galleries last spring. He was determined to make his mark. Never had he doubted his ability to do so except during those moments in the past when downright hunger had weakened him, and as long as Belder Tor sheltered him he would not be without food.
Godfrey was further convinced that the world was not ready for him as yet. But when the boys came home he foresaw a future of a United States gone suddenly Continental. Never before had so many gone abroad to such far-flung corners of the earth. And a complete cross section of the country had gone.
The money had always been here, and soon, with their new and globally nourished good taste, the returning generation would be his plum. The fighting, the war in ipso, had never registered with Godfrey in the slightest, and he viewed the world-shaking struggle solely in such terms as reflected his own special advantages.
“I think I would go pretty far, Hugo,” he said.
Hugo turned to Alan.
“You, Alan, I do not have to ask. Your status has done a complete somersault since Christine sank your golden future into an annuity. You are now in the boat with the rest of us. If anything happens to Christine, you, too, are sunk.”
“Nothing will happen to her. I’ll see to that.”
“Physically, perhaps. But can you protect her mind?”
“You are right, Hugo,” Godfrey said gloomily. “Of course she must be crazy, or she never would put up with us.”
“No, Hugo,” Cordelia said. “She is just refreshingly original.”
“And I tell you that she may already have slipped over the border line and have suffered a mental lapse. Possibly the proper place right now for Christine would be a sanitarium.”
“What good would she do us in a sanitarium?” Godfrey asked.
“Precisely.”
Alan was belligerent. “What are you trying to do? Have her put away? I won’t stand for this kind of talk, Hugo.”
Hugo ignored him. “Would you,” he asked all of them, “connive at covering up a murder?”
Alan’s face lost its last trace of color. His handsome eyes flashed stealthily toward the portrait of Christine on the spinet desk, with its chilling reminder of the presence of the Dove in the house. He did his best to lower the familiar curtain which would shut out whatever deadly thing it might be which Hugo must have hit upon and plainly intended to divulge, but the curtain would not fall.
In spite of this panic which seized him, Alan still could not resist savoring the drama of the situation with its content of sheer theater. What was that play? It didn’t matter: there must have been clusters of them, each with its essential scene when the conspirators were bonded into unity by their evil and common intent.
Only the setting was new. No deserted heath, this room, and definitely not a Moscow cellar during the last days of the czars. But the cast was true to form. Alan’s eyes (now stage-directorial) observed them professionally: the brooding mood, each deep in the slough of his selfish desires, and with it all the beading, wistful fog against the night’s dark panes.
It was a dream which he had dreamed before. It had been dreamed this morning between himself and Joe, only now it was Cordelia and Godfrey who were weighing in the balance the danger to themselves against the advantage. Cordelia, Alan realized, was too filled with scotch to do anything but float like a soft and translucent jellyfish wherever Hugo’s current might dictate.
Godfrey would make his own decision, but it was a foregone conclusion: nothing, no venture, however perilous, would advise him to pull up the roots which he had sunk into Belder Tor.
And of Hugo himself? Fear spread in shallow waves of ice through Alan. What did Hugo know?
“Don’t you think you are stretching this to the breaking point?” Alan asked.
“Christine has killed that woman,” Hugo said.
CHAPTER XIII
Cordelia spilled scotch on her velvet dress.
“You say it so coldly, Hugo,” she sighed.
“Coldly? Why not?” Hugo gave an irritated shrug. “What was the Destin woman to me?” (This was, of course, true. No death would ever have the slightest meaning for Hugo, except his own.) “It is Christine alone who must matter to all of us.”
Godfrey felt a stab of sharp anguish. Here indeed was an enemy powerful enough to shatter his dreams. His sense of security fled before the bitter gale of Hugo’s grim convictions. He tried desperately to keep his voice from shaking.
“What drove her into this stupidity? What made her do it?”
“Does it matter?” Hugo asked impatiently. “Surely we know her well enough to appreciate that she will never tell us. She will never admit for an instant to being the author of this crime. I assure you as a doctor, as a man who has made a profound study of just such mental conditions, that Christine is an utterly conscienceless woman of steel.”
“She is the Borgia type,” Godfrey agreed gloomily. “The Catherine of Russia.”
“It is simple for me to vision her alone in here after Lida Belder went upstairs. Christine looks for Laura. She looks out in the hallway. She sees Laura’s shadowy figure entering that empty room next to the laboratory. Christine follows, then she faces that woman whom she had once thrown out of Belder Tor and who had had the temerity, the audacity, to threaten her.”
Cordelia’s voice floated blurredly through the silence. “Surely she must have threatened dear Christine again. Perhaps with a gun. And then Christine caused her to ‘pass away’ in order to save her own life.”
“And I tell you,” Hugo insisted, “that we will never know the actual details. You
may be right, Cordelia, and I think you are. We must conspire to keep the same silence which I can assure you Christine will keep. Her story will remain unshaken: she came in with Lida Belder, and the woman was no longer here. The incident for Christine is finished.”
“It’s all very well for you to say that the incident is finished,” Godfrey said, with a desperate stab at the practical, “but how about the body? Where is it, Hugo?”
“It was in the room next to the laboratory. I think the room was formerly used as the servants’ hall. I heard a noise in there while I was working, like a chair overturning. As though somebody had stumbled against one in the dark. When I had finished what I was doing I went into the room to see.”
Alan feverishly wiped his brow.
“Are you sure she was dead?”
Hugo looked at Alan pityingly.
“Do not be stupid. I am accustomed to cadavers. I do not know what weapon Christine used, but a blow on the head did the trick.”
“Christine’s mind,” Cordelia said, “must have been a perfect blank.”
Hugo paused while they absorbed the picture. “Well?” he said finally. “Do you want me to call the police? Shall each of our lives be microscopically examined under the light of a murder investigation, in addition to our meal ticket being sent to the chair? All to the stupid purpose that a futile justice be done that lone woman? We can assume that she has no relatives or friends beyond those of the most casual nature, and that no one other than her own crazed self knew of her visit here. I am confident her loss will instigate no inquiry. Are we, for such a tramp, to be uprooted and thrown out to combat the bitter world with our wretchedly minuscule resources?”
“But after all,” Godfrey insisted in a shaken whisper, “there is the woman’s body.”
“That does not trouble me.”
“The lake,” Cordelia moaned. “The gentle and concealing waters.”
“Of course!” Alan said sharply. “The lake. Just off the point where Christine has those damn picnics. There’s a good ninety-foot depth.”