Danger in the Dark

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  She avoided it, not quite sure she’d counted the steps right, relieved when the next step and the next did not, either of them, utter that small sharp rasp, clear and distinct in the midnight silence of the hall.

  That step and the next; she was near the top really when the third step creaked.

  Creaked once and stopped.

  Even her heart stopped beating to listen. It was the step near the bottom of the stairs, the third step. No doubt about that; she knew it too well.

  But there was no further sound from the cavernous blackness below her. Ceilings were high in the old house; the stairway beautiful and old but very narrow. So narrow two people could barely pass upon it.

  Two people!

  It was Dennis!

  She was so certain of it, and the certainty came with such a rush of relief, that she turned and clutched the banister and whispered into the darkness below:

  “Dennis—Dennis. Here I am.”

  He did not answer.

  “Dennis—” she started to whisper again and stopped.

  For it was not Dennis.

  It was as if something inside her had screamed it.

  She turned blindly in the darkness and ran up those remaining steps, found the wall, turned, running along that hall whose every twist and turn she knew so well, clutching her skirt, following the wall with a groping hand—so narrow it was that anywhere along it, if the doors were closed, she could have touched wall with both hands. She found her own door; always her room since she was a child. She flung herself inside it; found the lock and the heavy old key and turned it and reached for the light switch.

  She gasped for breath and leaned against the door and blinked in the sudden light that spread over the little, bright room with its chintz and brass fenders and old mahogany.

  The first thing she saw was her wedding veil—a white cloud of net with an old rose-point border, hanging there from the chandelier. Ghostly. Accusing, as if she had killed Ben Brewer. As if she had been the cause of his death.

  “I can’t let you marry him,” Dennis had said. “You are never to be his wife.”

  But he hadn’t meant that.

  He hadn’t meant murder. But the thought of it added a last touch of horror and despair. She stumbled to the chaise longue and sat there before the dead fire, her face in her hands, her coat dragging from her shoulders, stained yellow folds of velvet around her wet, gold slippers.

  There were in the house, that cold winter night of December ninth when Benjamin Brewer was murdered, only members of the family. They had assembled for the wedding, and in spite of its pretensions and the aroma of tradition and wide-flung connections with which the Havilands had managed to surround themselves it was not, now, a large family. And it was one in which a curious little pattern seemed to repeat itself but did not in actuality. For Dennis, brought up under Amelia’s care though he had been, was actually the son of a distant cousin. Daphne was the daughter of Johnny Haviland’s young wife, and very like her, everyone said. Of the three Haviland children—children that is, of old Rowley Haviland dead, now, a year—Gertrude was the one who had given old Rowley a grandson. She had promptly named her son Rowley and had even, after her divorce, considered dropping her married name, which was Shore. But she was a conventional woman and did not like resorting to her maiden name, with the complication, always having to be explained, she thought, of a son growing up. Besides, if she resumed the name of Haviland it would put her on an equal footing again with Amelia, who had never married. So she called herself Mrs. Haviland Shore and strove to forget the brief advent of Archibald Shore who had been definitely a mistake—which in itself rather astonished Gertrude, for she felt she had inherited something of her father’s acumen and force, and he did not make mistakes.

  Also she kept a separate residence, living in the ugly, massive house on Bench Street near the lake and the Loop and coming to Amelia’s house in St Germain only for holidays. But she spoke of her house as the Family Residence and Amelia’s house as the Country Place—where Amelia said, neatly and definitely, “my house” and “your house.” And she’d felt that the family residence was the place for any family event of importance such as a wedding.

  But Amelia had felt so, too, about her own house and had won in the little conflict. Mainly because, in the first days after that engagement had been announced, Gertrude had declared that, wedding or no wedding, Ben Brewer would never darken her doors, and she was obliged to stick to it even when the marriage became, as it was from the first, inevitable.

  So Amelia won, and Gertrude assuaged her feelings by recalling the already well-known and oft-referred-to fact that old Rowley Haviland had died in her house. It had been a definite feather in her cap. It was due actually to the fact that he was stricken suddenly one day of cerebral thrombosis and there was” time only to be rushed from the Loop office to her home in Bench Street, where he died, speaking no word and looking to the last remarkably able and fierce. But still he did die there and was buried from there.

  And after the funeral the famous will was read. That, too, in Gertrude’s house, and obscurely Amelia blamed her for it, as if, had the thing taken place in her house, the will would have proved more suitable.

  But still in effect there was an odd mother-son, father-daughter, mother-son pattern. Gertrude Haviland Shore and her son, Rowley Shore. John Haviland and his stepdaughter, Daphne. Miss Amelia Haviland and Dennis Haviland.

  Not that Amelia was in any possible sense motherly. But she had in a remote, detached way done her duty by this son of a distant Haviland; had given him a home and cod-liver oil, schooling and dancing lessons and braces on his teeth, sundry effective disciplining. Had seen to it that Dennis had everything in the way of good schools, travel, and social background that Gertrude had given her own son.

  From almost the first, too—after the death of that other Daphne—Daphne had been, but more remotely, in their charge. The aunts saw to clothes and dentists; and later, chaperoning. But after all, Daphne was a girl; the other two were boys. They brought them all up as cousins and Havilands. But Daphne would grow up and marry out of the family.

  She would marry out of the family and, which was more important, out of any possible connection with the Haviland Bridge Company.

  For this family had a center, a spring, a tenacious, sturdy core, and that was the business. The plant. The Haviland Bridge Company. They lived by it; it usurped their greatest and deepest interests; it was not only a source of income, it was a well of pride; and it was deeply personal, blood of their blood and bone of their bone.

  It had been that from the first to old Rowley Haviland. He was domineering, shrewd, fiercely possessive as he grew older, and notional; he had had to incorporate, and he had hated that and had hated the men who invested money in Haviland Bridge stock, though he used them and the money they brought. He kept to the last the control of the thing in his own hands.

  But he came to the end of his furious, engrossed career in perplexity. His daughters were not men. And his son, Johnny Haviland, was not the man, he felt, to undertake the management of the company. There had been rocky times in the not far distant past. There were more rocky times to come. Johnny had his uses and his values; there was no one who could keep the stockholders in good temper when dividends were low better than Johnny; nobody who could better soothe and manipulate a delicate situation. Johnny was handsome, charming, social—all those things had their uses, as Rowley Haviland knew. But he needed a man with force and drive and, when necessary, ruthlessness. He needed, too, he realized sadly, a man with brains.

  So he looked about for such a man and found him. It was not easy—neither the decision nor the training and advice he had to give—for Rowley Haviland was jealous of his own power to the last. But his love for his company—the thing he had made through years of sweating labor and anxiety, sleepless nights, grueling days when he’d learned hard lessons of self-preservation—years of wariness, of selfishness, of grim and determined fighting
for his own existence and devil take the hindmost—his love for the thing he’d built out of those years was greater than his hatred for the man who would eventually take his place. So he selected Benjamin Brewer, a man of about thirty-five; young enough to give the company years of vigor and usefulness, old enough to have business judgment and acumen. But then Ben Brewer had been born with all that, and it matured under Rowley Haviland’s teaching. Force and drive and hardness; no sentiment when it cost you something; no wavering: Ben Brewer, said Rowley Haviland in his will, was to succeed him; was to have a block of stock which he had enabled the younger man to buy; was to manage the affairs of the Haviland Bridge Company with all the autocracy and power which old Rowley Haviland had possessed. For the stockholders’ vote alone was not a majority. And while the blocks of stock which the old man left to his three children were in themselves a large share, still he left the stock with strings on it. They could not sell. They could not dispose of it. They could not borrow on it. They were to live on the income of that stock; they could will it as they pleased, although he preferred it to be kept, as it had always been, a family business. But he tried, so far as he could see, to guard against any rashness, any costly mistakes, any possible contingency which might endanger the fabric of the thing he had built. And since he could see very far the will was as tight and explicit as a will could be. There was no possible chance of breaking it. They had to accept it.

  And with it, Ben Brewer.

  It was a shock to Gertrude and Amelia. They were as fiercely jealous of possession as their father had been; and as jealous of the company. This outsider, this upstart, this stranger put in over their heads to manage the Haviland Bridge Company—to exercise, even, control over their own fortunes. It was an outrage; old Rowley Haviland had not been responsible when he died. No one should have permitted him to make, or have the power to make, so unfair a will.

  So they fought it. Or, rather, tried to fight it. For their father had foreseen even that. And had made the provisions of the will so tight that no lawyer would undertake that fight. Their only possible argument, they were told, was to prove Ben Brewer incompetent, and this, in spite of the fact that they believed him incompetent, and believed that under his management the company would soon cease to exist, they had been unable to do. And it was true that things had not been going too well; that certain innovations had been not too successful. But still they had to accept Ben Brewer.

  Gertrude seethed and talked. Amelia kept her thoughts, whatever they were, to herself and quietly put what money she could into annuities.

  Johnny through it all took neither side, unless passively, by retaining his own position as a vice-president, he sided with Ben. All of them—Johnny, and Rowley Shore, and even Dennis—were engineers. It was a foregone conclusion. For there was the company. Johnny had long been a part of it. Rowley had an office and a title in the design department and was reasonably efficient. Dennis, more distantly related, and standing no chance of inheriting (unless from Amelia), would still have been given a place in the company if he had wanted it. He chose a three-year contract with a Russian firm; he emerged with a considerably deeper understanding of the exigencies of the profession he had chosen, a curious, reluctant love for it, and enough money to bring him home at the time of his grandfather’s death. There was also in the famous will a five-thousand-dollar cash bequest to each of the three children, Daphne, Rowley and Dennis. Daphne bought Haviland Bridge shares with her money, scarcely conscious of the transaction. Rowley took his and said nothing. Dennis bought traveler’s checks and went around the world.

  Slight as the transaction was, it was Daphne’s only definite connection with the company up till then.

  It was only after Rowley Haviland died that the aunts began to perceive her possible importance in the close-knit scheme of their lives. Eight months after old Rowley Haviland died and the management of the Haviland Bridge Company passed out of his hard, ruthless old hands, Daphne became engaged to Benjamin Brewer.

  And the wedding was to take place in Amelia’s house.

  It lay sprawled and rambling and old, on a hilltop just out of St Germain and overlooking the river. It was always an old house; it could never have had a youth. Amelia had managed to retain the charm of high ceilings and spacious drawing rooms belowstairs and such minor beauties—paneled old doors, small fireplaces, a handsome fanlight or two—as the house provided. There were many added wings and irregularities of structure; unexpected steps up or down; narrow passages and narrow stairs; floors that creaked and doors that hung unevenly. They needed the fireplaces, for in the winter cold drafts crept between window and door casings and found their way through the house. Amelia had also retained, but certainly without intending to, the spirit, the curious secret personality that an old house, much and long lived in, possessed. Especially a house with many closed rooms.

  The servants lived in rooms over the rebuilt garage. Usually Amelia was alone at night in the house. She had a complicated system of locks and bolts and, during the years since Dennis had been away, preferred it that way and flouted Gertrude’s protests. Her locks were efficient, she said.

  Not a flea could get in—or out—of the house after she had locked up for the night. She often said it.

  Daphne was thinking of that—dully, with dreadful, blank weariness, when Dennis came.

  She heard the low tap of his fingers, and she knew it was Dennis and went to the door. His face was gray. Rowley was not with him.

  He said, whispering:

  “It’s done, Daph. I’ve got to talk to you. Before the police come.”

  It was then three o’clock.

  Chapter 5

  HE GAVE A QUICK look down the dark little passage and came into the room, closing the door.

  “No one is about,” he said in a half-whisper. “At least, the house is quiet—everybody’s asleep. God, what a business!”

  “What have you done, Dennis?”

  “Everything’s all right. At least, I think it is. We’ve fixed it to look all right.” He hesitated. “I’d rather not tell you exactly how, in case—Look here, Daph. We couldn’t talk with Rowley there. I told him anything I could think of to explain our presence in the springhouse. Tell me now—what did happen?”

  “Did Rowley find out why we were there?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I got the bag back to my room. Look here, Daph—how long had you been in the springhouse when I came?”

  She began to tremble again, and he saw it.

  “I’ve got to know, my dear. I can’t do anything to help you unless I know.”

  “Yes. Yes.” She sat down on the end of the chaise longue again, looking at the man opposite her but seeing that dark twilight in the springhouse and a black huddle on the floor.

  He watched her for a moment, then sat down himself on the little green slipper chair near her and took her hands in his own.

  “It’s like this, Daphne. We’ve only got a few moments—every second I stay here is a danger to you. For anything that is done this night, anything at all that anybody has seen or heard, will have tomorrow a—oh, a horrible significance. But we’ve got to see exactly where we stand. There’ll be police, inquiry. You don’t know what it means. I want you to know exactly what to say, to be prepared.”

  “Will they say I did it?”

  He looked deeply into her eyes for a long moment.

  “Not if I can help it,” he said then. “You see, you are bound to be one of the prime objects of police inquiry. If, that is, if—anything goes wrong. If they aren’t satisfied. You were to be married to him. You didn’t love him—”

  “But no one knew.”

  He looked away at that, frowning.

  “There’ll be—well, listen, Daphne. When we were in the library tonight—when I—when I had you in my arms and was trying to make you promise to go away with me—and I—I kissed you, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well—someone closed the door.”<
br />
  “Dennis!”

  “Yes. I—I hated it, of course. But there was no use telling you about it. I just saw the door move and close. I had closed it myself before we began to talk. I didn’t want anyone coming in, interrupting. I was—I was determined you were not to marry him. I would have killed him first.”

  “Yes, you said—” She stopped abruptly and caught her breath and cried in horror, “Dennis, you said that! You said—”

  “Did I? I suppose so. Well, then that was overheard, too. And I’d just kissed you and said, ‘We’ll meet at the springhouse, then, at midnight or as soon as the house is quiet’—and I looked up and over your little head and the door was closing. Slowly and without a sound.”

  “Who—”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who it was or how long someone had been there. I didn’t go to see, because I didn’t think it mattered. I’d won. I was—I was dizzy with triumph. And with loving you, Daphne. All I could think of was that you were going away with me. You’d promised. I’d have you, in spite of them all.” He dropped her hands and rose suddenly and walked to the little mantel and stood there looking down at her again.

  “This is the thing, Daphne: Somebody knew about us. Knew I’d persuaded you to go away with me. The night before your wedding to Ben Brewer. Do you see? And to meet me at the springhouse. Now then, Ben is found murdered at the springhouse—murdered at the very time we were to meet. Murdered. Well, you see, Daphne?”

  She nodded, too sunk in horror and—now—something like terror, to speak.

  “So you see, falling in with Rowley’s plan was the only thing to do. It offered escape—and besides, there was good sense in what he said. He’s rotten selfish and remarkably cold-blooded.” He paused, thinking of Rowley’s cold-bloodedness. He, Dennis, could do a thing if he had to—but Rowley’d been so extraordinarily calm. He felt dimly that he had underrated this cousin of his. “Now then, my dear—won’t you tell me what actually happened?”