Jack returned with whisky and a pile of blankets. “How’s she doing now? Hold up the flashlight, will you? I want to see that shoulder.” He leaned over the couch. “By God, it doesn’t look serious. I believe she’s only fainted.”
As if to verify his quick, intense relief, Annabelle stirred, shuddered, opened her eyes. She looked blankly at us—at me with the flashlight in my hand, at Jack who held out a glass of whisky to her.
Jack said, “Get that down.”
She accepted the glass obediently, drank, shuddered again, half rose only to sink back again. She whispered. “I remember now. I had the killer trapped when you came crashing down the stairs. What happened? Did he get away?”
“Clean,” Jack said. “I don’t know yet who he was. Do you?”
She said, “No.”
Her dark, questing eyes moved involuntarily to the jimmied window and the heap of coal beneath it. I turned the flashlight. I saw then what I had not seen before. Someone had shoveled deep into the coal, tossed aside a great pile, and a spade stood upright in a hole which tunneled the dirt floor beneath.
“I suppose,” said Annabelle, “the bag went with him.”
“What bag?” I asked.
No one answered. Jack had darted past the heaped up coal and seized the spade. Like a woman in a dream, I watched him begin to dig. Dirt flew helter-skelter. The hole deepened with a swiftness which announced that the hard-packed earth had been previously disturbed. Suddenly the spade met resistance, thudded, stuck. Jack dropped to his knees and commenced clawing with his hands.
“It’s here!” he cried to Annabelle Bayne.
From the excavation he hauled forth a leather Gladstone traveling bag, its handle moist and clamp, but its hardware bright, unrusted, almost new. The Gladstone bag was initialed, the gilt was only slightly discolored and the letters showed plainly. F. E. I repeated the letters to myself a second time before I comprehended their significance. F. E.
I said bewilderedly, “That’s Franklyn Elliott’s bag.”
“Of course,” Jack said. “Elliott buried it in the cellar a week ago. Don’t you understand, Lola? That’s why he broke into the cottage. To leave the bag.” Jack glanced at Annabelle. “Did he tell you? Was he instructed to bury it in our cellar?”
She said, “Yes.”
Those two—Jack and Annabelle Bayne—shared a comprehension in which I had no part. I stared at them and waited. Jack slowly unfastened the catches of the Gladstone bag and pulled back the lid. Money cascaded to the floor. Ten, twenty, fifty-dollar bills—$108,000 in bills—the identical amount which Hiram Darnley had carried and concealed in a similar bag. Jack kicked at the fluttering currency.
He said in a tired way, “The only thing that’s left to do at this point is to call the police. And—” he tried to smile at Annabelle—“you’ll need Dr. Rand’s attentions.”
“The doctor,” said Annabelle, “can wait. I’m not in pain. As for the police, what can they do now?”
I said loudly, “You two—both of you—know something I don’t know. I think I’m going crazy. What’s the money for? Why did Elliott hide it here?”
“The money,” Jack said, “was raised for ransom. First Hiram Darnley raised and attempted to pay it over. The conspiracy went haywire and he was murdered. Then Elliott was contacted and he too…”
Jack broke off.
“Go on,” said Annabelle in a hard, contained voice. Her eyes were dry, direct, steady. “I know Frank’s dead. I’ve known it all along, really, but I wouldn’t—I couldn’t believe it until—until this afternoon.” Tears welled up in the brilliant eyes, but she stubbornly restrained their fall. “I’ve been down here since afternoon. I didn’t leave your place at all. I hoped—never mind what I hoped. Anyhow I heard what went on upstairs.”
She said nothing of the terrible vigil spent crouched in the jelly closet while the storm raged outside, nothing of the thoughts and sensations which crowded in her mind and heart when she learned that her lover had been brutally done to death. Nor did we.
“Let’s move upstairs,” Jack said at last. “Lola and I can carry you.” He sighed. “It’s such a ghastly mess. Why, in God’s name, didn’t Elliott go to the police?”
“Because he was afraid they’d kill her. After Darnley’s murder, he couldn’t take the risk. He was determined to get her back alive.”
“Get who back alive?” I said.
“Luella Coatesnash.”
I gasped. “But Mrs. Coatesnash is dead. She killed herself in Paris.”
“She may be dead,” said Annabelle, “but she didn’t kill herself in Paris. She never went there.”
Jack interrupted. “Mrs. Coatesnash was kidnapped, Lola, kidnapped on the night the Burgoyne sailed. Another woman who resembled her in coloring and build sailed instead, used Mrs. Coatesnash’s passport, went to a grimy little hotel where the old lady wasn’t known…”
“Laura Twining!”
“Who else? Laura impersonated Mrs. Coatesnash till the going got too thick, then killed herself. Silas, who was also implicated, tried to confess his own part in the conspiracy and was murdered for his pains. Only the killer—the third person in the plot and the one real criminal—gets off scot-free.”
Annabelle beat one clenched hand upon her knee. “It’s too late now,” she said. “We’ve muffed it. I’m tough, but I hate to think of that poor old woman, if she isn’t dead already. Can’t you see her? Waiting, watching, hoping… That’s where the killer’s gone, of course. To finish off Luella. There’ll be no third attempt to collect a ransom.”
A chair crashed to the cellar floor. Jack knocked it over in his wild rush toward the door. “I know where Mrs. Coatesnash is! Where she’s been held since February!”
He ran into the yard. I reached him as he leaped into the car, managed to climb in with him. The rain was over, but the driveway was like a miniature ocean. Splashing water in torrents, we raced to the road, turned, sped around the hill and roared into the circular drive before Hilltop House.
“She’s inside!” Jack cried. “She’s got to be! It all fits—the lights, Silas, Laura’s baggage—everything!” He jumped from the car. “You stay here. Lola.”
I alighted at once, and so great was his nervous tension that he didn’t notice. When I said, “Have you got your gun?” he snapped at me, “Naturally.”
A dozen steps carried us to the house. The porch was pitch black, carpeted with dead, soaked leaves, unpleasant underfoot. Jack preceded me lightly, soundlessly to the great front door. Just how he planned to force an entrance I don’t know. I remember my own hysterical suggestion that we should have brought an ax.
“For God’s sake, be quiet!”
Jack struck a match and in the flickering illumination, with a spurt of renewed terror, I saw that the front door was wide open. What was left of it. The set-in oval glass was cracked, and a splintered panel and shattered lock showed evidences of violent assault. A pool of rain water glistened from the foyer. I knew then that the kidnapper was in the house or had been there, and it seemed impossible that Luella Coatesnash should be alive.
Jack was already inside, and starting up the stairs. I went after him. The vaulted hallway was inky black, and quiet as the grave. It was not until we gained the second floor that someone moved on the floor above. Simultaneously I smelled smoke.
Jack caught my wrist in a vise-like grip. “He’s set fire to the house.”
At that moment a shot was fired down the stair well. An invisible mirror broke with a tinkle of glass. A second bullet whizzed by and plaster showered upon us. The kidnapper stood at the head of the stairs, and considering the total darkness his aim was excellent. I screamed. Jack knocked me to the floor, and I slid five steps to the second landing. A third shot was fired, this time from Jack’s gun. He vaulted up the stairs.
Abruptly the shooting stopped. Overhea
d, on the third floor, I heard the impact of two bodies, a savage yell, then the confused, muffled sounds of close-in fighting. A gun angled through the air and hit in the foyer. Whether Jack’s gun or the killer’s gun, I had no way of knowing.
The smoke was thicker; it was pouring down the stair well and far off and above me, someone—a woman—was shrieking. Muffled, hideous, horror-stricken shrieks. I crawled to my feet and staggered toward the third floor, only to be knocked down again as Jack and his murderous adversary crashed past me to the second landing.
Coughing, weaving, I clung to the third-floor balustrade. I was conscious of brilliant, dancing light some time before I identified the source of it. A bonfire—wastepaper, rags and the like—blazed in the open hall at the foot of the ladder which led to the attic. The fire was small, but the ladder had started to char. Clouds of stifling smoke beat against the locked trap door from behind which came those hideous screams.
Tears streaming from my eyes, I tore up the hallway carpet and choked out the fire. The gesture was purely automatic. I neither saw nor felt my blistered hands.
My next move was similarly automatic. A flashlight which had fallen during the previous melee lay upon the scorched floor, throwing a beam of light across my feet. I snatched it, and ran to the second-floor landing. The fight still raged there—two men, struggling fiercely, locked in desperate embrace. I made out Jack’s blond head, and brought the flashlight—my only weapon—down upon the other darker head. The dark head sagged. But Jack hadn’t seen me. The unexpected flank attack caused him to release his hold. His victim slipped his grasp and rolled down the stairs. Jack shouted:
“Duck, Lola. He’s got the gun.”
He had the gun, indeed.
A second later he used it—upon himself. A single shot, followed by a hiccoughing sigh, followed then by silence. Our triple murderer was dead before we reached him.
“Hand me the flashlight, Lola,” Jack said.
With a faint surprise I realized that I still held the flashlight. I gave it over. Jack turned the narrow finger of light upon the dead man, and I looked into Lester Harkway’s face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Homeward Bound
The rest, to coin a phrase, is history.
Standish gives us credit for the solution of the mystery, and personally I feel that we deserve it even though I must confess that I didn’t anticipate the astounding denouement. Until the moment when I looked into Lester Harkway’s still and strangely peaceful face, it had never once occurred to me that he might be our killer. The signs were there to read—his presence on the Post Road the night we delivered Hiram Darnley from New Haven, his interest in the “burglary” of the cellar, his professed anxiety and subtle, insistent suggestion that we abandon the cottage, even the strange way he had eyed that coal which had been dumped squarely upon the spot where, as he knew, Franklyn Elliott had buried the second ransom money.
The gun which he lent to Jack as a “protective” measure was a final bit of insolence. That gun was loaded with blanks, as Jack would have discovered, had he examined it carefully. At every turn Harkway took advantage of our trusting credulity.
In a sense, even now, I feel we were hardly to blame for the many things we didn’t see. As Standish said later on. “A conspiracy is the hardest crime in the world to uncover.” He smiled soberly and added, “Also it is the most difficult crime to maintain.”
To this our own experience testifies.
The conspiracy to kidnap Luella Coatesnash had hardly been set into motion by our three plotters—Silas, Laura, and Harkway—before it fell to pieces. It fell to pieces when Lester Harkway—at the cost of one murder—attempted to cut out his confederates and seize for himself the $108,000 which Hiram Darnley carried in our car. Unfortunately for him, the double-crosser got possession of the wrong bag.
I sometimes try to visualize that moment when Harkway opened the bag, bought so dearly, and saw its worthless contents. He had risked everything and come off with another man’s laundry. I cannot visualize and will never understand his cool and ruthless nerve. By prearranged plan—or so we believe—the policeman followed our car from New Haven, watching the passenger who rode upright and defenseless in the rumble seat. Hiram Darnley was bound for our cottage, where Silas awaited him, prepared to take over the ransom money. But that meant a three-way split--and a three-way split was something which Lester Harkway had decided to prevent.
He saw his chance when Jack began to speed the car. He stopped us, engaged in the three-cornered dispute, and then, immediately we got under way again, he shot Darnley and seized the bag in the seat beside him. It was a terrible gamble, but it worked. Our windows were closed, and the sound of our motor combined with the pop-pop of the policeman’s motorcycle prevented our hearing the shot. We drove into Crockford with a dead man as our passenger.
Even then we might have guessed. But, on Main Street, Blair picked up the exploded automatic shell which fixed the murder in Crockford and removed from our minds any suspicion of the true facts. The presence of that shell when examined closely, and Standish did examine it closely, proved relatively simple. After the discovery of his hideous blunder, after he had discarded the worthless bag, Harkway returned to the spot where the murder had occurred and recovered the shell. When Standish telephoned for him, he carried the tell-tale bit of metal into the village, and casually dropped it for Blair to find.
Lest this recapitulation sound too sure, I hasten to add that we have positive evidence on the point. In the first place, markings on the shell matched precisely markings on other shells fired from Harkway’s service gun. This use of the service gun is curious in itself and another instance of Harkway’s almost fanatic indifference to his own safety, for Standish informs me that police officials must report the disposition of every bullet fired. Just what sort of report Harkway would have made of the bullet fired into Franklyn Elliott’s back I’m not prepared to say, but his official record for March 20th shows that he killed “a brown rat” in his own back yard.
Standish, characteristically thorough, wasn’t satisfied with the knowledge that the bullet which killed Hiram Darnley was fired from Harkway’s gun. He inserted in local papers appeals for interviews with people who had driven to New Haven on the night of March 20th. Here he had a piece of luck.
A Mr. and Mrs. Abramson came forward. March 20th was Mrs. Abramson’s birthday, and the couple had driven to New Haven to celebrate the anniversary. On the trip there both of them had observed a policeman with a flashlight—they identified Harkway from photographs—searching the road at the point where the tragedy occurred. Mrs. Abramson had actually seen Harkway pick up and pocket something which she was ready to swear was an exploded automatic shell. Since the Abramson car didn’t stop, her testimony would seem to be on the positive side, although Standish, who immediately tested her eyesight, found it very good.
At any rate, Mrs. Abramson satisfied us all as to Harkway’s means of shifting the scene of the crime from the place where it occurred to a public street in Crockford.
The first crime, then—the murder of Hiram Darnley—in every detail is clear to us. Method, motive, opportunity—we can reconstruct them all. A blank period follows, a period we can never hope to fathom, since every actor in it is dead. We can only guess at Laura’s frantic thoughts when she learned that Darnley had been murdered, that the plot had gone awry, that instead of the security she longed for she was faced with the electric chair. Our only testimony is the affidavit of a French chambermaid to the effect that “the lady seemed low in her mind.”
Silas and his thoughts during that same interval are similarly obscure. He had grabbed a tiger by the tail—on the one hand was Lester Harkway, of whom he was in mortal terror; on the other was Mrs. Coatesnash, held prisoner in the attic of her own home and in his custody. If he freed the old lady she would instantly expose him, for it was Silas who had forcibly brought her bac
k from New York City to Hilltop House. During those days when he lost weight visibly and jumped at shadows, Silas guarded Luella Coatesnash, fed her, kept her heavily drugged, and slowly approached his own breaking point. I am sure on the afternoon Standish and I made our futile tour of Hilltop House, he was close to a complete confession. He was close to it when Standish picked up the broken hypodermic needle and drew the wrong conclusions; and, when the policeman decided against a search of the attic, I believe the hired man was more disappointed than relieved. He wanted, I am convinced, to have the decision removed from his own hands.
It seems certain that neither he nor Laura ever contemplated murder. Darnley’s death struck terror in them, and brought with it the bitter knowledge that they were merely pawns in Harkway’s larger game. They must have comprehended perfectly the motive which caused Harkway to upset the original scheme, for thereafter, all the evidence goes to show, they acted in unison with him only to save their own necks. Thus, before panic and desperation drove her to suicide, Laura continued to send the cables signed with Mrs. Coatesnash’s name; and Silas worked both with and against the man he hated. He was playing Harkway’s game—and God knows with what aversion and reluctance—when he obliterated the traces left after Jack’s and my midnight foray into the Coatesnash grounds.
It was Lester Harkway, of course, with whom I struggled in the storeroom. I often wonder, with a shudder of reminiscent fear, that he didn’t kill me on the spot. I daresay he felt too secure to think it necessary, and the chilling memory of his low soft chuckle in the darkness would seem to confirm the belief.
He outwitted us at every turn that night. He spirited Laura’s baggage from the storeroom, confident that we would guess—not impersonation—but that Laura herself had been murdered. More important, he prevented any examination of that sunken plot in the rock garden. Ivan, the mastiff, was buried there, Ivan who had been returned from New York with his mistress and promptly killed. Had either Jack or I glimpsed the dog’s body, I am sure we would have guessed the truth. For Ivan supposedly was in Paris with Mrs. Coatesnash!
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