The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  Annabelle listened tensely. “Is that a short-wave set? Can you get police calls?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “It doesn’t matter.” She forced herself to shrug. “I know they are still broadcasting Frank’s description.” She ended almost like a person speaking to himself: “Frank has been gone four days now. It seems much longer.”

  “You—” Jack hesitated. “—you could help if you would. Are you quite determined to wait out the week?”

  “If the little—the very little—I have to say would help the police find Franklyn Elliott,” she replied fiercely, “I would have said it. Why should I speak prematurely—perhaps endanger his life—merely to satisfy your curiosity?”

  Her hostility stood between us like a stone wall. Outside, the breeze was freshening and clouds were scudding along the sky. We sat in slowly growing tension. Annabelle smoked many cigarettes. She was in a crackling state of nerves. She talked rapidly, pointlessly, and her sentences ran together. At length, abruptly, she rose.

  “I have some news that might interest you self-appointed sleuths,” she said in parting. “Luella’s body arrives in Crockford some time next week. I thought you’d want to know.”

  The callousness with which she spoke echoed an earlier manner, the manner in which she had referred to the suicide. Yet where Franklyn Elliott’s safety was concerned she showed the deepest feeling. Once she had shown feeling for Luella Coatesnash. I remembered the day of the inquest when, in court, she had defended her old friend ardently, violently and to her own great danger. Annabelle dropped the cigarette case into her bag.

  “Bromley is preparing now to receive the body. The funeral will probably be the biggest this town has ever seen.” She wound up in a curious way, “That funeral, if nothing else does, may clear the air.”

  On this elusive note she left. She refused to permit Jack to escort her to her car. She declined to stay for supper, although we urged her strongly.

  “I must get home. I’m terrified of thunderstorms and this one is going to be a lulu.”

  Her prediction was correct. She had hardly stepped outside before the storm crashed down. Wind howled in the trees; a loose shutter whirled from the roof and struck in the yard. There was the sharp imminent smell of rain in the air. Jack started hurriedly closing doors and windows. With Reuben at my heels I rushed out to call Annabelle back. Her car was already gone from the drive.

  I was returning to the house when Reuben seized the opportunity to run across the road. I shouted at him, but he ignored my command, slipped under the pasture gate and made a beeline up the hill toward the Lodge. Poor dog, he, too, was terrified of thunderstorms and the dreary little dwelling still meant home to him. I shouted again, then started in pursuit. The rain was just beginning. A few heavy liquid drops struck upon my bare head, but I thought absurdly that I had time to capture Reuben and regain the cottage. My mistake was brought home to me an instant later. Suddenly the wind increased to gale velocity; there was a deafening clap of thunder; lightning jumped across the sky, and as if by signal the rain poured down. Yards ahead Reuben gave a terrified yelp, scudded off the path and took refuge on the open back porch of the Lodge. Angry and annoyed, drenched to the skin, I joined him there.

  A part of the porch, equipped as the dairy room, was partially sheltered by a lattice to which clung dead morning-glory vines. Whimpering, Reuben crawled behind a pile of milk cans and pressed himself against the wall. I squeezed between a cream separator and an electric ice box—oversize because Silas had stored there Mrs. Coatesnash’s milk and cream—and began to wring out my soaked clothing.

  The dead vines like frantic castanets beat against the lattice, and the whole place was damp, dark, unutterably dreary. Water seeped across the plank flooring and blew in streamers through the crevices. Like Reuben, I pressed farther back against the wall. My eyes were fixed upon the world outside. A world of blackness, wind and rain. Something—I don’t know what—made me turn. There was a window just beside me, a window which looked into the kitchen of the deserted Lodge. I glanced through it.

  I went cold all over.

  Inside in the darkness someone struck a match. A brief flare which flickered and then went out.

  I screamed.

  Someone called, but my vocal cords were too paralyzed to permit of any answer. I couldn’t move or speak or think. I don’t know who I thought was moving inside the Lodge. Silas perhaps looking, just as he once had looked—or Silas’s murderer wearing a blood-stained suit, smiling a sleepy, murderous smile. The door leading from the kitchen to the porch opened, and John Standish stood blinking bewilderedly about. He had a flashlight in his hand. Another man peered over his shoulder.

  My paralysis of fright evaporated into weak and stupefied relief. But still I couldn’t speak. Eventually Standish’s flashlight picked me out.

  “Mrs. Storm! You—what are you doing here?”

  Then at once he came to me, took my arm and pulled me into the dry, dark kitchen. He set his flashlight on the table so that it served as a sort of lamp. He jerked a blanket from a bed in the other room and wrapped it around my shoulders, clucking at the foolishness of young people who don’t know enough to come in out of the rain. He introduced his companion as William Hardisty, a local lawyer who had been designated to take charge of Mrs. Coatesnash’s scrambled affairs. Mr. Hardisty, a methodical, fussy little man, was plainly astounded at my appearance and seemed more than half inclined to make something faintly illegal of it. Standish kept up a flow of bantering talk until, eventually, I smiled. He, too, smiled.

  “I’m sorry we gave you such a turn. We were caught here ourselves. Maybe you’d like a cigarette?”

  I gratefully accepted. Mr. Hardisty continued standoffish. While Standish and I enjoyed a companionable cigarette and while I began to laugh at my late fears, the little lawyer pottered about, listing the furnishings of the Lodge for the purposes of an eventual tax assessment. I believe he termed his activities “protecting the interests of Mrs. Coatesnash’s heirs.” Under the circumstances and with the storm roaring outside, his neat busyness struck me as ridiculous, and I daresay he read my thoughts, for he gave me an occasional cold, suspicious glance. Finally Standish said:

  “What did bring you up the hill, Mrs. Storm?”

  It was only then that I remembered Reuben, and somewhat conscience-stricken went to the door to summon him. A gust of wind and rain blew inside. Despite my urgent calls, Reuben refused to stir, and Standish plowed out after him. Mr. Hardisty followed. Reuben stuck stubbornly behind the milk cans until Standish’s impatient hand hauled him forth.

  The little dog huddled on the floor before the ice box. The hairs on his neck bristled. Through the sound of wind and rain came the ominous growl in his throat. A growl which rose and kept on rising.

  Standish frowned. “What’s got into the dog anyway?”

  “It’s the ice box,” said Hardisty. “It’s something about the ice box.”

  Standish was staring at the great white refrigerator. His flashlight shone on its polished surface.

  He said in a queer voice, “I hadn’t noticed that refrigerator before. I wonder what the trays are doing on the floor?”

  I saw the trays then. The refrigerator was an electric model—one of Mrs. Coatesnash’s real extravagances. The metal trays made to hold squares of ice and the wire fittings fashioned to cut off the interior into separate compartments lay in a scrambled heap under the cream separator.

  “We never touched that ice box,” Standish said.

  He spoke like a man in a dream. He took a slow step, grasped the handle of the heavy metal door before him, and then said in a voice that changed swiftly, hideously:

  “Don’t look, Mrs. Storm!”

  But I had looked. As the catch of the door was unloosed, pressure from behind forced it forward and Franklyn Elliott’s body sagged outward and to the floor.<
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  The lawyer had been shot four days earlier. He had been shot through the back and had died instantly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Triple Murderer

  The car in which Standish and Hardisty had driven to the Coatesnash estate was parked beneath the porte-cochere of Hilltop House. Battling the storm, Standish carried me there. Hardisty, terrified at his precipitation into tragedy, remained in charge of Franklyn Elliott’s body. I can still recall his frightened protestations, the last glimpse of his pale face peering after us. Of the wild ride down the hill I recall nothing whatever.

  Jack met us at the door of the cottage, took one look at me and without a word or question lifted me into his arms and bundled me off to bed. Standish saw me safely settled, and then left at once.

  I remember and cherish his parting pat on my arm, his admonition that I wasn’t in any way to blame myself. There was no reference to my account of having seen Franklyn Elliott flee from the Lodge, no suggestion that a wiser, less prejudiced witness might have realized that a glimpse of a man’s car is not a glimpse of the man himself. The truth—the truth I hadn’t grasped four days before—at least in part was clear. Franklyn Elliott, his motives still obscured in mystery, had gone to the Lodge and had there surprised, red-handed, the murderer of Silas Elkins.

  No other conclusion was possible. Elliott’s movements on that sunlit afternoon were at last apparent. As was customary with all of us, the lawyer had left his car in the driveway up the hill and walked down to the Lodge on foot. He had telephoned Silas. He was expected; he doubtless knocked at the door and then pushed in. He must have seen—in that first, appalled moment of entrance—far too much. He must have seen a murderer stooping over a blood-filmed pail of water, swabbing with a wet towel at crimson stains. Probably he cried out, probably he turned to run. At any rate he paid for his arrival there with his life.

  Whatever disposition the killer had intended to make of Elliott’s body—we believe now that he planned that the lawyer’s body would be found in his abandoned car—was upset by my advent on the scene. There was no time for anything then. No time to finish washing the walls and floors of the incarnadined living room, no time to sweep up the broken crockery, barely time in which to lift Elliott’s body and start with it through the kitchen toward the back path which led to safety and the yellow car.

  The murderer’s situation was desperate. To the original murder of Hiram Darnley there had been added two others—the murder of Silas, who was on the point of disclosing the whole murky dark conspiracy, and then, swiftly following, the murder of the New York lawyer who had opened a door, and in so doing had signed his own death warrant.

  When the killer set foot on the back porch I must have been very close to the Lodge. My approach on the front path could be clearly seen from that porch. And Franklyn Elliott was a heavy man. The whole murderous structure was about to collapse. Burdened with Elliott’s body, the killer could never reach the car or make good an escape. The ice box, swept free of its trays, offered a solution. Here again chance entered into the case, and played into the killer’s hands. Elliott’s absence, coupled with the accident that no one had happened to investigate that open back porch, had deceived us utterly. We had believed, all of us except Annabelle Bayne, that Franklyn Elliott himself was our murderer.

  There were blank spots in the picture—questions which even the finding of Elliott’s body did not answer for us. Elliott’s own behavior remained inexplicable. We did not know why he had broken into the cottage, what he had discovered which had sent him to his death at the Lodge, or why he had failed to share his information with the police. Least of all did we understand Annabelle Bayne. She had been terrified for her lover’s safety; during those four days of his disappearance she must have envisioned just such an end as he had met, yet she, too, had refused to talk with the police.

  I lay on my bed as I thought of these things. I drank the hot milk which Jack brought me, obediently swallowing the sedative he produced from the medicine chest.

  “Try not to think, dear,” he said to me once. “Try to sleep.”

  In my condition sleep was an impossibility. Outside, the storm had taken on renewed life, as if further to banish sleep. A whirlwind was loose in the world that night. Everything that could blow or rattle or shriek was in motion. The noise of the thunder was deafening and each clap was followed by a flash of lightning which turned the bedroom a fierce and vivid blue. Jack stayed close beside me.

  At exactly nine o’clock every light in the house went out. A bad storm almost always resulted in an abrupt and prolonged cessation of our electric power. I knew by previous experiences that there would be no more electricity until morning, and I began to weep. Jack tried to comfort me, then handed me the flashlight and went off to search for candles. The bedroom floor slanted as floors slant in most old houses, and I can recall now the moment when the highboy rolled majestically from one corner to the other. That was just as Jack returned with the candles, and I responded with a fit of violent hysterics.

  Eventually Jack quieted me, and for a long time sat beside the bed, saying an occasional soothing word, holding my hand in his. After a while the sedative commenced to work. I was drowsy when the telephone rang, and Jack gently disengaged his hand to step into the other room. When he came back a few minutes later, I was already half asleep, my brain almost wholly stupefied. I didn’t at once take in the information that Annabelle Bayne was missing.

  “She must be home,” I said stupidly. “She started there hours ago-

  “She didn’t go home. That was Standish calling.” Jack stepped closer to the bed. “I hate like hell to bother you, Lola, but she’s got to be found. Immediately. She—she may be in deadly danger. You went after her when the storm broke. Did you notice which direction her car was headed?”

  “I didn’t see the car at all.” I roused to a vague, drug-laden surprise. “And I remember looking toward the road. She made a fast getaway.”

  Jack was regarding me oddly. “I believe,” he said slowly, “that Annabelle came here on foot. I let her in this afternoon, and I’m almost sure her car wasn’t in the drive then. She couldn’t have walked from far; she must have left her car parked somewhere close. If we know where she left the car, and why she left it.

  I was beyond the point of mental activity, beyond the point of anxiety or wonder. I was indeed only fretfully conscious that Jack had again quit the room to telephone to Standish. Of the long worried conversation which took place between them I had no knowledge. I slept the heavy, unrefreshing sleep of the drugged…

  I woke suddenly. The bedside candle was flickering, and the room was filled with a kind of noiseless bustle. Everything seemed strangely still. The tumult outside had lessened, although the rain poured steadily, softly down and dripped through a window Jack had been unable to force entirely shut. Reuben was curled beside me, his nose cold on my shoulder. I was sleepily pushing him away when I became aware of the sound which had aroused me.

  A low, monotonous buzzing which ceased even as I identified it. The burglar alarm!

  “Jack,” I whispered I reached for his hand, sat up. I knew then that he had gone. He had taken with him the revolver he kept beneath the pillow.

  The night stands forth in my memory as a phantasmagoria of confusion and ascending horror. I remember chiefly the small, agonizing details. I recall that I seized the candle, dropped it and in anguish saw the light plunge out. I groped for matches, found none, stumbled over Reuben on my way toward the door.

  In the living room I discovered a box of matches, but before I had lighted the candle an uproar commenced in the cellar. Something went over with a terrific crash. I heard three shots fired in rapid succession, heard the shatter of glass, the thud of a heavier object. It sounded exactly as though a man had run amuck; but I knew there were at least two persons in the cellar and that one of them was Jack.

  How I
got down the stairs I can’t explain, any more than I can explain why I didn’t fall headlong in my haste. Somewhere en route I lighted the candle, and its yellow, unsteady rays illumined the devastated cellar. The window over the coal had been jimmied, and lumps of coal were strewn wildly about. A dresser lay on its side; the ash can was overturned, and beside it lay a man’s dark felt hat. The signs of furious combat were present, but there was no one in the place. Where Jack had gone was plain enough. The cellar door stood open and rain dashed in.

  I rushed outside. Instantly my candle was doused and with it my sense of direction vanished. I was lost utterly in my own back yard. The wind whipped my night clothes and drowned out the sound of my voice. I rushed blindly toward what I thought was the road. I stumbled; someone seized me, and I screamed like a maniac.

  Jack’s voice said, “Lola! That you?”

  He was kneeling in the yard, and as I remember it he rose, shook me savagely and said, “Stop screaming! Stop it, I say. You’ve got to help me get her inside.”

  “Her? Who?”

  “Annabelle Bayne. I’m afraid she’s badly hurt.”

  I was only then aware of the crumpled figure lying in the sodden grass. Jack again stooped. “She’s coming around, I think. Let’s get going.” He lifted the unconscious woman into his arms, bade me hang on to him, and through the pouring rain guided us back into the cellar. I was moving like an automaton. I had no idea what had happened, and even after Jack had picked up from the floor a fallen flashlight and directed it on Annabelle Bayne’s pale face and the ugly stain on her shoulder, I supposed she had attempted to murder him.

  I said, “Are you all right? I heard her shooting at you.”

  “Shooting at me!” Jack swept a litter of objects from a broken couch and laid Annabelle there. “She wasn’t shooting at me, Lola. As it happens, she saved my life. Here, you chafe her hands—I’ll go upstairs for whisky.”

  Hardly breathing, Annabelle Bayne lay white and motionless, more defenseless than I had ever seen her. I removed the small black hat which still clung tightly to her head, straightened out her clothing, unloosed her soaked and blood-stained blouse. She had been shot through the shoulder, and the wound was slowly bleeding. I tried to staunch it.