Hunter's Green

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  I found my voice then and began to call for help. It was Justin I shouted for, my voice rising above the rain sounds with the wind helping me as it blew toward the house. Justin heard me and shouted an answer that came to me distantly, faintly. Long before he reached me I could hear him crashing through the woods in my direction. There were others as well, running behind him. I could hear the thud of feet, the thrashing of wet brush, and I stopped screaming to listen again for any sound of the car that had hunted Dacia down and had not stopped to help her. There was nothing to be heard except the rain and the sound of running. I knew without doubt what had happened and that evil was intended. There was nothing to do but stumble to my feet and wait at the side of the road, huddled in Dacia’s orange coat, while she lay dead in mine. A pawn’s death had been intended. I was the pawn, not Dacia. She had been mistaken for me.

  Justin gave me scarcely a glance as he came around the curve and crossed the road. All his attention was for the girl in green—green with that dreadful scarlet trim.

  “Eve!” he cried as he bent over her. “Eve, my darling!” He picked her up in his arms and blood streaked the plastic hood as it fell across her face, washing away in the rain. The truth was in his eyes, his voice, his words. Never again would I doubt that he loved me—but this was too tragic a price to pay for the knowledge.

  Marc and Nigel came into view beyond and Justin carried Dacia toward them. I hurried beside him, choked with emotion—for him, for Dacia, unable to speak. Finally he looked at me—looked past the orange coat and into my eyes, then at the face of the girl he carried.

  “A car struck her down,” I told him breathlessly. “A car struck her and didn’t stop!”

  For the space of an instant I saw his stark relief and my heart leaped exultantly. The feeling was no more than a flash between us because all concern must be for Dacia.

  Marc recognized me at once and made no mistake about the coat I wore. He knew it was Dacia whom Justin carried.

  “Give her to me,” he said. There was bitterness in him as he took the slight figure into his arms and looked past her at me. I knew very well that he would prefer me dead, if that would bring Dacia back to life. Here and there on his face scratches flamed red—marks which my own fingernails had left.

  Already Justin was hurrying ahead. He did not see his brother’s look or hear his words.

  “You changed coats with Dacia and this happened,” Marc said and the accusation was clear. As though I had done this to harm Dacia and save myself.

  I walked behind him on the path, possessed by such horror as I had never felt before. Horror for Dacia—horror for me. Yet no matter how disturbing was my fear, there was something else as well—something to comfort me. I need no longer doubt that Justin loved me.

  Nigel fell quietly into step beside me. He had heard Marc’s words, if Justin had not. At least Nigel would listen, and I found myself trying to explain.

  “Dacia’s coat was wet, so she took mine and left her own behind. I had nothing else to wear, so I put hers on. I didn’t know she had come this way too. I heard a car, and I ran toward the road and found her lying there.”

  “Who would have a car out on the course on a day like this?” Nigel said.

  I could only shake my head. We had reached the place where the path opened upon Athmore lawns, and as though in answer to his question a white figure came running toward us—not from the direction of the house, but from the topiary garden behind. It was Alicia Daven in her shiny wet coat.

  “What has happened?” she cried to Marc. “Has Eve been hurt? I heard shouting and I came this way.”

  Vaguely I wondered why she was outdoors at all, when I had last seen her standing at a drawing-room window. Some question must have crossed Nigel’s mind too, and I knew by the look he gave her that he did not like or trust this woman.

  Marc told her coldly what had happened as he walked ahead of us carrying Dacia, and she listened with an air of anxiety that did not seem altogether real. She was anxious enough, but I sensed that it was for another cause.

  The scene in the Hall of Armor almost repeated the night of the fire, except that now there was no excited Dacia dancing about, and Maggie was not there either. Someone went to look for her, and after a delay she came into the hall to take quiet, efficient charge.

  “I stopped upstairs to ring the doctor,” she said to Marc. “He’ll take care of getting an ambulance here.”

  “It’s too late,” Marc said savagely and laid his burden upon a couch. As he leaned above Dacia I thought I had never seen so grieving a look upon his face. It seemed that Marc could care genuinely about someone, after all.

  Justin reached past his brother to take Dacia’s wrist between his fingers. After a moment he shook his head. Maggie gave him a small pocket mirror and he held it to the girl’s parted lips. We all stood motionless, bound by a common dread. Slowly a faint mist clouded the glass. A spark of life still flickered in Dacia’s young body. Marc sat beside her holding her hand, whispering to her softly, trying to coax back her fighting spirit.

  Through all this Alicia stood a little apart, quiet and hardly noticed, her hands thrust deep into the slash pockets of her coat. Only I found myself looking repeatedly her way, wondering what it was I sensed in her that made me distrustful and uneasy.

  Once Nigel, watching at a front window, turned to look at her speculatively. “Where did you leave your car, Alicia?” he asked.

  I heard her quick intake of breath. She did not answer him directly, but turned to Justin. “I left it at the front door. I waited in the drawing room for you. When you didn’t come, I went to the front windows and looked out—and found my car gone. That’s why I went outdoors. It wasn’t in the garage area and I was trying to find out who had taken it, where it had gone.”

  Marc did not speak, or raise his gaze from Dacia’s face, but I saw the quick turning of Maggie’s head as she stared at Alicia.

  The woman appeared not to see her look. “We must find my car,” she said.

  Justin gave quick orders and the search was on.

  Shortly after, the ambulance arrived, and the doctor. The police followed, since Justin had phoned for them. Marc went off with Dacia to the hospital and no one made any effort to prevent his leaving. I felt a further twinge of uneasiness as he walked out the door. Maggie watched him, and I knew she was uneasy too.

  The constable questioned Justin, and then the rest of us, and we all answered as best we could. What seemed to emerge was the picture of a hit-and-run accident. Someone had struck Dacia down, then panicked and fled. The police were quietly purposeful. This sort of thing was not new to them. I wondered what they thought of two accidents so close together at Athmore.

  No one mentioned the switch in coats, or any possible intent to kill. Yet Marc had believed in this, and so did I. In fact, I might have blurted everything out if it had not been for Maggie. She came to sit beside me and once she put a hand upon my arm. “Wait—don’t judge,” she seemed to warn me, as plainly as though she had spoken. So I was silent, for the moment at least.

  Eventually someone came to report finding Alicia’s car on the test course, not far from where Dacia had been struck down. The front fender was dented and a headlight bore the marks of a severe impact. The girl must have been struck and flung to the side of the road while the white car was going at high speed. Whoever had driven it had abandoned it just around the next curve, and fled on foot through the rain.

  Fled where? Back to the house? Back to where he could come out with the others when my shouting had summoned help? The constable asked a good many questions, but did not speculate aloud about what might have happened. It seemed that everyone except Dacia and Alicia and me had been indoors out of the rain. But while each one accounted for his own presence in the house, each had been alone and lacked other corroboration. Maggie was in her sitting room, Nigel had returned to the library. Justin was still in his bedroom. No one seemed to know where Marc had been, though Maggie admitted
that he had looked in on her some time earlier to ask if she knew Dacia’s whereabouts. She did not, and presumably he had gone looking for her. Whether outside, or inside, no one knew.

  To me it began to seem that almost anyone might have looked out a window and seen a girl in a green coat walking toward the path that led to the ruins—a path that must inevitably follow the test course for a short distance. But if anyone had seen her, he made no admission of the fact.

  Alicia, of course, was questioned carefully, but she seemed to give a straightforward account, apparently horrified at the use to which her car had been put. She had left it standing in front of the door, she repeated, the keys in the ignition. She had not given it another thought until, while waiting for Justin to come downstairs, she had wandered to the front windows of the drawing room and looked out, to discover the car gone. She had thereupon gone out in the rain to find where it had been put.

  “Didn’t you take it for granted that it had been moved to the garage, and let it go at that?” the constable asked her.

  Alicia shrugged. “I chose to look myself. I like my property to remain where I leave it. And of course when I found that it had not been put into the garage I was annoyed. I started around the back of the house to find someone to question, and heard Mrs. North calling for help. The moment I saw what had happened, I began to worry if it was really my car which had struck Dacia down.”

  In the end the servants were better able to vouch for each other’s activities than were those within the house. No strangers seemed to have been noticed around the place, and the mysterious Leo Casella was supposed to be back in London.

  The police left to turn in their report and Maggie went at once to ring up the hospital for word of Dacia. I managed to slip away unnoticed and climbed the stairs to my room. A deep trembling reaction was taking place in me. I was the only one of them—except Marc—who was convinced that it was my death which had been intended, and not poor Dacia’s. It was a miracle that I could walk upstairs on legs that were slightly rubbery, but still sound, that I could reach out with a hand that was whole and open the door of my room. I was alive only because Dacia had been sacrificed, and that was a dreadful thing to be grateful for.

  I closed my door behind me and stood in the center of the shabby blue rug, looking vaguely about me. At least there had been no further searching of my room. But how was I to remain in this house when I knew without doubt that someone wanted me dead? Yet if I went to Justin or Maggie with this story, I knew very well the reception I would receive. They had not believed me last night, nor would they now. Athmore blood was thicker than any ties of marriage. They would stand together and protect one another against an intruder like me. And because they stood together, I would still be in danger, with no one to believe in that danger and help me. Yet I would stay. I had seen Justin’s face when he thought me dead. I had heard him call me his darling. I had something real to fight for now.

  This was the time to make myself a promise. I went to my dressing table to stare into the mirror. My face was pale, my hair tangled, my eyes dark with shock—yet there was something different about the face that looked out at me. Not mere stubbornness or the ability to endure. This was an Eve who knew she was loved, knew she must have the courage to set herself against whatever evil force had, struck Dacia down. This was the promise I must give myself.

  In one corner of the mirror a square of white caught my eye and I stared at it, startled. A small envelope had been thrust into a corner of the glass, with my name written across its face. I picked it up and tore it open, looking first for the name that signed the few lines of handwriting.

  At the bottom of the notepaper, written in a rather scrawled young hand, was the signature: “Dacia.”

  XI

  My gaze darted to the beginning of the note and I read it through. Then read it again.

  Eve:

  I must talk to you alone. We’d better meet away from the house. I can’t find you, so I’ll leave this note and hope that you’ll look for me out near the ruins where there’s a bit of shelter. You often go there, so no one will give it a thought. But—and this is important—don’t tell Marc you’re meeting me. In fact, it’s better if you don’t tell anyone.

  Dacia

  I had not found the note in time. I had not met her after all, and now I might never know what she had to tell me. Don’t tell Marc, she had written. If she had not made that whimsical switch to a dryer coat than her own, she might still be unhurt and as lively as ever, while I—going out to her rendezvous—might be dead.

  Could it be that the note was a trap and that Marc had persuaded her to write it? There was never any telling when Dacia spoke the truth, or when she would turn facts to her own advantage. But I could not condemn her now, no matter what she might have done. The memory of her white face streaked with a scarlet that washed away in the rain was too clear.

  A sudden knock at my door made me fold the note and slip it into a drawer before I called, “Come in.”

  Maggie walked into the room and closed the door behind her, stood with her back against it. For a strange, arrested moment we regarded each other in wary suspicion. The smell of doubt, of distrust, was in the air. This was the hostile woman I had known before I’d left Athmore that other time. It was not the Maggie who had counseled me as Justin’s wife, or who had wanted me to stay when I met her in the topiary garden on my arrival this time.

  She wore her roughest country clothes. Her leather jacket was rubbed and old, the trousers worn at the knees where she had knelt at her gardening. Even her shirt had a button missing. It was as though she had snatched at whatever she could find to put on, uncaring.

  “What do you hear from the hospital?” I asked.

  She raised her shoulders slightly. “They’re giving out no information and I couldn’t get hold of Marc.”

  “Dacia’s a fighter,” I said. “If she has a chance, she’ll pull through.”

  “She must pull through!” Maggie’s concern was real, but it seemed more for Justin and Marc than for Dacia. “It’s bad enough the way things are,” she went on. “But if Dacia dies—”

  I found my old resentment rising against Maggie’s blind devotion.

  “Nothing is worth Dacia’s life,” I said. “Or mine, for that matter. You know about the switch in coats, don’t you?”

  She moved away from the door and crossed to the blue chaise longue, dropping into it as though her legs were as uncertain as mine.

  “Sit down, do!” she said impatiently. “Whether we like it or not, there’s something we need to have out between us.”

  So she would not talk about the coat. I seated myself on the padded bench before the dressing table and clasped my hands together tightly.

  “The matter of Marc?” I asked.

  She nodded fiercely. “Yes! I’m grateful at least that you did no foolish blurting out to the police about that affair on the roof last night. And that you attempted no further accusations against Marc today.”

  “Why did you think I might?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? The beastly way you feel about him is written in your face for anyone to see.”

  “It would be dreadful, wouldn’t it, if he caused Dacia’s death, when it was mine he intended?”

  “Stop that!” She spoke so sharply that I stared at her.

  “You really are worried about Marc, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Stop it, stop it,” she repeated. “Oh, you don’t know Marc. You’ve never known him. He’s capable of pranks, but not of murder.” She sprang to her feet and went to a side window, flung it open upon the clatter of rain on thick vines.

  “Haven’t you always deceived yourself about him?” I pressed her quietly. “Isn’t it time for you to face the facts about your cousin Marc?”

  For a few moments she was silent, her face lifted to the spatter of rain that came through the window, as though she needed its cooling touch. When she spoke it was without turning to look at me.

 
; “The facts, as you call them, are something I faced long ago. This makes no difference in the way I feel about him. I’m only a few years older than Justin, but I’m more than ten years older than Marc. When I used to come here on visits as a young girl he was the baby I adored. And he liked me better than any nurse or governess. I was the one who taught him games to play, and got him onto his first pony. A good thing it was I taught him to ride, as it developed, even though he never really cared for riding. When he was fourteen, he saved me from serious injury. I’ve not often had a horse run away with me, but we had a bad-tempered filly in those days—a proper rogue. She got out of my control and headed for the woods one morning, where she’d certainly have smashed me against the close-set trees. Marc saw us go and he came after me on his own mare and made a dramatic rescue, scooping me onto his own horse. It wasn’t very gracefully managed, because in the end we both fell off and sat on the grass hugging each other and laughing, just to be alive and unhurt. He was too old to be my son, but truly he’s the only son I’ve ever had. Or wanted.”

  Her story touched me, warmed me. Warmed me toward Maggie, if not toward Marc. He had never lacked courage or the ability to perform spectacular acts. But this did not make him trustworthy. I put my hand to the bruise on my temple, touching the hurt of it gingerly. I had that to remind me of what Marc was really like.

  “He changed as he grew up,” Maggie said sorrowfully, as if in answer to my thoughts. “Justin was always too impatient with him, too intolerant. He needed a father’s hand, instead of a young cousin’s. I failed him, Eve. I know I failed him. I owe him my life, yet I haven’t been able to help him as I always wanted to. Whatever I try to do for him fails.”

  She was silent for a moment, reaching her hands into the rain, placing their cool wetness against her cheeks. There was nothing I could say. She was either trying to make me understand something, or she was trying to becloud the issue.