by Rufus King
“Lida,” Christine said, “I’ve been looking all over for you. I heard the sound of voices in here. Barry telephoned. They’ll be here early this afternoon and will stay overnight. Cordelia darling, we can open up the rooms next to Hugo’s, don’t you think? Do you mind, dear, if you were to attend to it right after we get back from the picnic?”
“I will see that the rooms are prepared, Christine.”
CHAPTER XVIII
The picnic began.
It was an involved affair, as everything which Christine arranged for was involved, and necessitated the use of many baskets. The procession started from the terrace, with its destination a particularly uneventful flat rock at the lake shore, with an outdoor fireplace that was to do the trick on the chickens and corn.
Belder Tor was alone.
The Catskill Mountains were not at their best. Thunderheads loomed over Roundtop, and the closer sky was a lowering gray. Blankets were spread on the flat rock and a fire shortly leaped into flame on the outdoor hearth.
Christine’s accurate eye surveyed the scene. Alan was busily absorbed in mixing cocktails. Godfrey was arranging chickens on the grill. Cordelia was busy husking corn while Hugo, with sardonic precision, was collecting a stock of firewood.
“I wonder,” Christine said to Lida, “whether you would mind doing a little thing for me, dear?”
“Of course not, Aunt Christine.”
“The air is chillier than I had thought. Would you go back to the house and bring me my beaver jacket?” Christine opened her bag and took a tagged key from it. “Here, dear. It is in the freezer locker. The door I locked last night.”
Belder Tor, when Lida neared it, seemed curiously dead. She went by way of the terrace and caught, just as she opened a french door of the morning room, the ringing of the telephone bell. She ran over to the spinet desk, and Barry’s voice came back at her as she lifted the handset and said: “Hello?”
He was, he told her, at Kingston. Complete with parents. He had slaughtered the Chelsea aunts as the simplest means of getting rid of them, so they had had an earlier start than had been expected. Right now they were at lunch. They would continue on to Belder Tor at its conclusion.
“And we,” Lida told him, “are having a picnic down by the lake. I just ran back to get Aunt Christine’s beaver jacket.”
He asked her whether the night had been made hideous by screams, and she said no: nothing but a mysterious cerise-colored bag which she would tell him about when he got there. They said good-by.
Lida unlocked and opened the freezer door.
A wave of cold shoved against her. The light which Hugo had turned on was still lighted. She stepped inside and looked for beaver.
She saw the woman’s face.
Even as horror wrenched her, the smear of lipstick across the woman’s lips pinged her consciousness. The cosmetic had streaked down from the right corner of the mouth, giving the dead mask the grotesqueness of a tragic grimace. Sharply the realization came to Lida that her conjectures, on finding the cerise bag, had been correct: the woman, as she had been applying the lipstick, had been struck a blow across the mouth, for the flesh above the lip was slightly lacerated as if it had been raked by a bit of metal.
Lida thought she had screamed, but she had not. The sound had been constricted within her throat. She left the locker and shut its door. She left the key in its lock.
Dizziness suddenly overcame her as she stumbled toward the desk to telephone the police. She sank onto the desk chair and tried to ward off fainting by applying the usual home remedy of lowering her head down between her knees.
Lida was in this ungainly position when the door to Christine’s suite started to open. She caught sight of the moving door and sat up. No one but herself was in the house. The door couldn’t be opening. But it was.
She observed the door stupidly and saw an elderly, gentlemanly looking man, quietly dressed in dove-toned grays and wearing a fedora hat, step in. He carried a businesslike-looking brief case in one of his silk-gloved hands.
The man started almost imperceptibly as he saw Lida and stood still. He took off his hat.
He said in a gentle, cultured voice: “I hope I haven’t alarmed you. I was certain that everyone would be out of the house because of the picnic for at least another hour.” He took a step nearer to her. “Are you well? Your face is very pale.”
Lida, through her recurring waves of nausea, tried to place him. There was something very reassuring about him, in the way that Sergeant Asher had been reassuring. Her sick, shocked mind seized this as a life belt.
She said impulsively: “I know. It’s about Miss Banning. Are you connected with Sergeant Asher? I was about to telephone the police.”
The man’s gentle voice hardened and he said swiftly: “Do not. Yes, I am a detective. Tell me what the trouble is.”
Lida’s feeling of relief was almost pitiful.
She said, “There is a dead woman in that freezer.” The Dove, again gentle, walked calmly to a french door, opened it, took a leisurely look toward the picnic grounds, then closed the door again. He drew a chair over close to Lida and sat down.
“Now tell me. Just tell me all about it.”
Lida, on this closer view of him, thought his skin peculiarly white: of that unattractive pallor found in people whose job or fancy prevents them from the sun.
“Aunt Christine was cold and asked me to fetch her a fur,” she said. “She gave me the key to the locker.”
“Have you the key with you now?”
“It’s in the door.”
“I see.” The Dove added soothingly: “Are you quite certain that you did not call the police?”
“Yes. I was just going to when I felt faint. It was the way she looked that sickened me. There’s a cut on her lip as if someone had struck her across her mouth. The lipstick’s all smeared down.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s a woman who has been threatening Aunt Christine for years. Her name is Laura Destin. She came last night and wanted to see Aunt Christine, but she wasn’t here when we came back into the room.” Sickness again started to engulf Lida and she added miserably: “And that’s all.”
“All?”
“Well, no one admits to seeing her again after I left her here, and they all insisted she had gone away because she was insane. But she couldn’t have, because she left her handbag and she’s in there dead.”
“She—she left her handbag?”
“I found it this morning when I was helping Mr. Lance to straighten up the room. It has her alias in it on her driver’s license and car registration cards. Belle Crystal.”
The Dove for a moment closed his gentle eyes. He felt bitterly disturbed and put out. For the first time in his exemplary career he found himself confused. That was the trouble, of course, with moving out of one’s class, one’s familiar little circle.
He should have refused Joe right at the start, should have told Joe he wouldn’t even consider any proposition involving these hybrids. During his jobs on good dependable gangsters he had always known precisely where he stood. The unpredictable had been an absent factor.
Certainly there had been no picnics where the principal in the case had felt cold and wanted a fur coat. There had been no clavichords which the principal alone had been supposed to play but which had suddenly produced a second performer. Nor any Prunelle liqueur, reserved for the principal, and then, after the remainder of the drink had been well spiked with poison, dumped unceremoniously onto the floor by a klepto-dipsomaniac.
Nor, even before Belle, had any of Joe’s women ever poked her nose into the orderly procedure of the day.
“Where,” the Dove sighed, “is the bag now, please?”
“It’s under the cushion of that chair, where she had hidden it.” Lida glanced toward the freezer door and shuddered. “I knew she never would have gone away without it.”
The Dove lifted the chair cushion and picked up the cerise handbag.
&nb
sp; “Aren’t you going to telephone?” Lida asked him.
“Why?”
“Don’t you always telephone headquarters and have the homicide squad sent out?”
The Dove started to open Belle’s handbag.
“There will be plenty of time.”
“Oh!” Lida wailed, the thought just striking her.
It was a good loud wail, and the Dove, startled, shut the handbag and faced her.
“You have thought of something?” he said.
“Barry’s driving his mother and father here. They ought to be here in under an hour. Oh, can’t we stop them?”
“Why?”
“Why! It’s such a horrible—I mean, how would you feel? They’ve never even met!”
The Dove did not even attempt to sort this out. He said: “In under an hour.” He put his brief case, hat, and Belle’s bag down on the desk.
“Yes. Didn’t you hear the telephone?”
“Not with the doors closed.”
Lida suddenly began to be not quite satisfied.
“What were you doing in Aunt Christine’s rooms, anyhow?”
The Dove gently flexed his fingers.
“Arranging—that is, examining some things.”
“But Miss Banning’s room is upstairs.”
“You will understand that in my profession I cannot talk quite freely?”
“Of course,” Lida agreed, still not liking it.
“Are you feeling a little stronger now?”
The Dove’s manner was most soothing and greatly restored Lida’s initial feeling of confidence and security.
“Oh, I’m all right with you here. It was just the first shock that made me feel faint.”
The outer day had been slowly darkening as the thunderheads moved nearer from Roundtop. The room, correspondingly, had slowly darkened too.
The Dove thought: She will have to be silenced. Without dispute that fact was the beginning and the period to his problem. He gave himself somewhere in the neighborhood of ten or fifteen more minutes before the others would wonder why she had not returned to the picnic. Before then she would have to disappear.
How difficult it was. Her vanishment from life was an entirely different matter than that of a woman like Belle. Belle was just a friend of Joe’s who wouldn’t show up again, as other of his friends had failed to do. Without any later or annoying remarks.
But this girl had a Barry who was no Joe. Barry would yell his head off and rip things through the middle until his rage and grief would have got at the vitals of it. Possibly the entire Vanbuskirk clan would bring their powerful batteries into play.
And Barry’s road would lead via the weak-sister Alan to Joe, and then via Joe to the Dove. His confusion deepened. He could not let her go and himself walk out, and thus happily wash his pale white hands of the whole messed-up affair. Joe would get him for it if he did. Joe would get him through the offices of some other Dove.
Kill her now.
The method was of small consequence, when you came right down to it. Then conceal the body and at greater leisure devise a scheme for cutting this Gordian knot.
He stepped gently over to the quick-freezer door and opened it.
“I wonder whether you would mind?” he said.
“What?”
“Showing me just what you mean about the cut?”
Lida joined the Dove at the freezer door.
“Don’t you see it?” she asked. “It’s as if a sharp piece of metal had torn the upper lip.”
The Dove sighed again, and his fingers closed with the force of steel around Lida’s throat. From the position where they were standing he had a full view of the terrace windows and he heard, coming faintly from outdoors, Christine’s voice calling: “Yoo-hoo—yoo-hoo! Oh, Lida dear—”
The Dove hurled Lida into the freezer and slammed its door. He locked it and shoved the tagged key into his coat pocket. He caught a glimpse of Christine out on the terrace. Swiftly he picked up his hat, brief case, and Belle’s handbag from the desk.
He drifted up the turret stairs.
CHAPTER XIX
Christine was tired from hurrying, an act so rare that for a moment she caught her breath and sank into an armchair for a breathing spell. The room pressed dimly and quietly about her, and she wondered, as her eyes negligently rested on the terrace windows, what on earth Alan was running for. He all but burst into the hushed, storm-darkened room.
“Christine!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. Alan saw her in the armchair. “Oh—are you all right?”
“Certainly I am. I’m a little out of breath from hurrying, that’s all.”
In spite of his superb physique, Alan himself was a little winded. For a passing flash the fact annoyed him, but then, after all, when he considered what he’d been through! What he was going through.
He said: “Cordelia told me just now that when Lida took so long getting you whatever it was you wanted that you thought the Vanbuskirks might have got here ahead of time. She said you came up to welcome them.”
“I did. Lida is a darling child, but I intend making every effort to see that this agreeable marriage takes place. And what spurred you into this three-alarm entrance, darling?”
Sarcastic old beast! thought Alan.
“I—I hurried to welcome them too,” he said. “Where are they?”
“Evidently they haven’t come.”
“Where’s Lida?”
“I don’t know. Do you suppose she’s all right? Go upstairs and see.”
Never! Oh no, never would he leave this precious old lump alone down here in the storm-sultry gloom, an atmosphere so dismal that it could have been tailor-made for the Dove.
“I won’t leave you down here alone,” Alan said with truculence.
Christine was thoroughly aggravated and said sharply: “Will you stop this childish nonsense? Go up to her room and ask her whether she is all right.
Alan glanced with a shudder toward the freezer and silently asked heaven to give him strength. Where was the key to that wretched locker which Hugo, with all the éclat of a cretin, had selected as a good safe catacomb?
“You’ll call, Christine, if you need me?”
“I will shriek. Alan, I think I will shriek anyhow if you don’t stop worrying over the ridiculous possibility of Laura Destin’s still being in the house.”
Defeated, Alan squared his handsome shoulders and darted up the turret stairs.
Christine leaned back and closed her eyes, pressing her hands against them, and the dark sky burst as a nerve-shattering, earsplitting crash of thunder exploded the stillness. It shocked Christine thoroughly, and she stood up and went to a terrace window, where rain began to pelt down in a sudden mountain torrent.
How Charley, Christine thought, would have loved it. It always had brought out the Grieg in him, and he would insist that she vie with the thunder by pounding out, on the clavichord, the “Hall of the Mountain King.” Christine left the window and turned on lamps as Cordelia, wet through, hurried breathlessly in from the terrace.
“It’s a cloudburst,” Cordelia said, hurrying right on to the turret stairs. “I’ll have to change this dress.” Godfrey and Hugo ran in. Both of them were panting. “Christine,” Godfrey said with considerable pleasure, “the picnic is ruined, and thank God.” He sneezed. He said: “I knew it!” and headed for the cellaret, where Hugo joined him.
“And where, Christine, are the happy lovebirds and the cortege of parents?” Hugo asked. “Not drowned, I hope.”
“They haven’t come yet, Hugo. Lida is upstairs in her room for some reason or other. I sent Alan up to see whether she was all right.”
“What got into her?”
“I don’t know. When she was gone for so long I felt sure that the Vanbuskirks must be here. Boston always is so previous.”
Alan, about finished with panting, ran down the turret stairs.
“Christine, she isn’t there,” he said.
“How perfectly weird, A
lan, she must be.”
“Well, she isn’t. I knocked a couple of times and then went right in.” Alan eyed the slow drips of water fringing Godfrey and Hugo. “Have a pleasant swim?” he asked.
“I am getting right out of these clothes,” Godfrey said sternly, “before I am attacked by pernicious pleurisy.”
Hugo said: “Me too.” Then he turned to Alan. “As for the teapot-tempest mystery of the disappearing Miss Belder, I leave it in your drier hands. I would suggest that she probably walked down the road to that view of the Notch in the roseate hope of glimpsing her young man’s car.”
“Hugo,” Christine said, “that must be it.”
Godfrey looked spitefully at Alan.
“If your chivalry feels like blooming a bit, you might go down the road and see. I advise the Australian crawl.”
“Bring her back in a sponge,” Hugo added as he and Godfrey dripped up the turret stairs.
“Why don’t you, Alan,” Christine said, “take her an umbrella?”
“I’ll be damned if I will. She’s still got her two feet.” Alan flung himself into a chair. “I suppose the immediate program,” he said petulantly, “is a slow starvation until Godfrey feels dry enough to cook lunch?”
“Oh, stop being so irritable, Alan. What’s got into you lately?”
“I want to go to Mexico.”
“Well, I told you that we would.”
“I want to go now.”
“Alan, we are staying right here until Christmas—and that is final.”
They heard, above the lashing of the rain, the sound of someone out on the terrace pounding on one of the french doors.
“What’s the silly fool knocking for?” Alan said. “Why doesn’t she come right in?”
“Oh, really, Alan!”
Christine opened the terrace door, and Stuyvesant Swain, very wet, very irritated, faced her.
“Stuyvesant darling—how nice!”
Stuyvesant came in and shook rain from his hat. “Christine, if it were not for my fond memories of Charley, I would wholeheartedly curse Belder Tor and everyone in it, including yourself. I rang that damned front doorbell for the duration of six shower baths, and nothing happened. So I came around here.” He held out a wet hand. “How do you do?”