Danger in the Dark

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  Daphne shrunk a little as she advanced briskly.

  “Now, Johnny,” she went on, decisively, “I hope you broke it to Daphne as gently as possible. Don’t be troubled about any of the arrangements, Daphne. I’ve seen to everything. Even to calling Dr Lonergan to tell him there would be no wedding.” She paused and said in an absent way, “He was very shocked. Really quite upset. Well, of course, it’s a most unusual thing—three hours before the ceremony. But there, I came to see about you, Daphne. I’m afraid the police will want to see you; I think you’d better get up and dress.”

  Johnny turned from the window and said. “But we—”

  Gertrude interrupted instantly: “No, Johnny, I’m afraid we can’t. They’ll want to see her, I’m sure—and after all it isn’t as if—well, I mean to say—Well, anyway, don’t you think you’d better see them if they ask for you, Daphne?”

  Gertrude’s glittering eyes were traveling about the room. In another second she would note the stain on the yellow dress. Daphne sat up quickly.

  “I’ll get dressed at once,” she said, clutching the yellow eiderdown around her rumpled little nightgown. “I’ll hurry.”

  Gertrude’s eyes leaped to her at once. She’d spoken too hastily, too eagerly, thought Daphne. But Gertrude was never very quick in perception, although her slow suspicions, once roused, were extraordinarily stubborn.

  Johnny, however, turned quickly from the window.

  “That’s a good girl,” he said rapidly and in a relieved way. “That’s my girl. Keep a—er—stiff upper lip. She’ll be all right, Gertrude.” He came over to Daphne, still rattling the keys in his pocket, and kissed her lightly. “Come along, Gertrude. We’d better get back downstairs again. Be there when they arrive.” He took Gertrude’s firm arm and turned her toward the door.

  And as Gertrude, always reluctant under pressure, disappeared, Johnny looked back at Daphne.

  “You—you are all right, aren’t you, honey?”

  “Yes.”

  It didn’t satisfy him. He started to speak, stopped, and finally put up his hand in a gesture meant to be, vaguely, encouraging. The onyx ring on it flashed, and he was gone, and Daphne got up and closed the door and locked it and looked at the yellow gown.

  She must do something with it. Call Maggie and ask her to sponge it? But Maggie would be curious. Would remember. Besides, velvet didn’t clean readily. Send it to the cleaners? But that would be difficult that morning; impossible, really, with the telephones in constant use, with people everywhere, with police and inquiry and—No, that was no good. She went to more drastic remedies. Suppose she burned the dress in that little fireplace. It would be very easy to do—except, of course, for the fur bands on the shoulders. But would not Gertrude and Amelia discover its absence—question it? Not necessarily. For in the back hall downstairs were two trunks already closed and locked and labeled. She could suddenly see those labels: “Mrs Benj. Brewer, S.S. Conte Grande, 1st class”—all of it written by Amelia. In a corner of her room was another trunk, still open and unlocked, waiting for the last-minute things. Of course, they all knew she’d worn the yellow gown at dinner. But there would be confusion about it; it might be days—weeks even—before either of the aunts noticed its absence.

  And she could remove the bands of fur and hide them somewhere.

  She took the dress in her hands, and again someone came to the door and it was Maggie. Daphne had time only to hang the dress, hurriedly, far back under the sloping roof of the little closet.

  It was a different Maggie, electric with excitement, her cap on one ear and her apron disheveled.

  “They’ve come, Miss Daphne,” she said. “And Miss Gertrude sent me to help you dress. Oh, Miss Daphne,” cried the woman. “Ain’t it horrid! Him dead and all, right on your wedding day.” She looked at the wedding veil, shuddered, crossed herself and said excitedly, “There’s reporters here already. What’ll you be wearing?”

  There was, even there, a perceptible sense of the tremor and confusion that filled the house; of distant doors closing: of movement and people and voices. Of cars suddenly in the driveway.

  Chapter 7

  IT WAS, HOWEVER, A good hour later that they sent for Daphne. Johnny, biting his small mustache, adjured her not to be nervous.

  “It’s only a matter of form,” he said. “Only a matter of form. But think before you speak, my dear. Think before …” They were at the head of the stairs, and he waited for her to precede him down that narrow stairway. Past the place where she’d stood for a terrified moment during the night. Down into the wide, familiar hall that was all at once different, for there were people there, crowds of people—and sudden, blinding flashes of light.

  She shut her eyes involuntarily and put her hands upward to shield her face and knew that Dennis had come from somewhere and was standing just below her on the stairs.

  “No pictures,” he was saying pleasantly and very firmly. “Not just now—please.”

  Gertrude’s voice, strident and protesting, came from somewhere, too; then Johnny was leading her across the hall and into the little passage leading to the library.

  Reporters. Reporters, police, inquiry—and they were plunged in the middle of the confusing, terrifying maelstrom. And it was, of course, the wedding, the romance that would give the thing extra news value.

  The door to the library opened.

  There were two men standing at the table, which was still laden with a confusion of wedding gifts and wrappings. As she entered, both of them looked up sharply. One, the small one with the somber dark eyes, nodded briefly, and the other, looking at her curiously, came at once to the door and went out. Johnny fidgeted and resorted to a social manner.

  “You’d better sit down, my dear,” he said. “This is the man from the county police headquarters. Mr. Wait—my daughter. I hope you won’t need to ask her many questions just now, Mr. Wait. This—this dreadful business has been, naturally, a very great—”

  “I’ll talk to Miss Haviland alone,” said Jacob Wait briefly, looking as if, quite suddenly, he had conceived a brooding hatred for her. As indeed was not far from the truth. For he had just looked again at the dead man, and he felt sick with the sight and smell of murder.

  He turned toward Daphne, and the light fell more strongly upon him. He was a bored-looking little man, dark, with large, morose dark eyes in which there was a new kind of glow. So there was a pretty woman in the thing, he was thinking. Burglary, huh? A pretty woman—more than pretty, he decided swiftly; she had the cleanness of line, the restraint and sensitive delicacy of feature that the Anglo-Saxon races breed. She had also, probably, temperament; looked it, anyway.

  Burglary.

  The glow that entered his eyes was actually one of hatred. He hated murder because, always, it got under his skin. Because he was acutely sensitive to it, as if he were inconceivably equipped with tentacles which, in spite of himself, reached out and absorbed the horror and sick reality of the thing. So, besides hating murder, he also hated the people involved in the thing.

  But more than anything he hated it when there was a woman. A beautiful woman. There was a small, warm strain of Jewish blood in him; thus he was deeply imaginative and perceptive; thus also he was direct, so that he recognized certain fundamental principles of behavior. When a woman entered the thing there were likely to be any number of emotions involved in it. He hated emotions, too, because he understood their importance.

  So he looked at Daphne with a morose, ruby glow away back in his dark eyes. There she was. And there was murder.

  Burglary, huh? Another word linked itself with “burglary” and “murder” in Jacob Wait’s mobile consciousness. That word was “phony.”

  It was a word that changed his course entirely and immediately. He stood there for a moment looking down at Daphne while she braced herself to look back at him. To answer the questions he would ask her. To avoid traps; to evade. To lie, if necessary, without flinching.

  So it was a queer kin
d of shock when, abruptly, he didn’t ask anything. He turned instead, walked to the door, spoke to someone beyond it and came back and stood again behind the tall chair, resting his arms upon its high back and looking thoughtfully at the floor.

  And suddenly Gertrude came into the room, with a queer startled look in her blank blue eyes, and was followed by Rowley and Dennis and Johnny and someone else—a man Daphne had never seen before, but who, she knew at once, was attached to Jacob Wait and the police. All at once another man, in uniform this time, was in the room, too, and was seated at a small table and bending over a shorthand tablet. And Dennis was looking at her.

  She met his eyes for only a brief, guarded instant. He turned abruptly and sat down in one corner of the divan opposite, so his back was to the right. Johnny hovered in the background; Rowley, his opaque dark eyes sullen in his sallow face, sat on the arm of his mother’s chair, and she put one strong hand on his knee.

  “Everybody here but Miss Amelia Haviland,” said Jacob Wait with a rather startling knowledge of names and faces. “Close the door, Schmidt. Did you send for Miss Haviland, too?”

  Schmidt, the plain-clothes man, a weary, thin man with a lined face, signified that he had and closed the door.

  “Let her in when she comes,” said Jacob Wait and looked at them thoughtfully. “I asked you to come in here,” he said briefly, “because they are some things we aren’t quite sure about. It occurred to me it would save a little time, perhaps, to have you all together. It is painful, I know. I’ll be brief.” He said it neatly and smoothly but with no particular conviction. He added without a pause, “Did you hear the shot, Mrs Shore?”

  Gertrude was taken aback by the abruptness. She looked at him, blinked slowly and said, “Uh—”

  “Did you hear the shot, Mrs Shore? Your room is nearest this end of the house, I believe. At least it seemed to me it was directly above the drawing room.”

  “Oh,” said Gertrude. “I didn’t know you’d been upstairs. Why, yes. I mean that is, my room. No, I didn’t hear the shot.”

  “Did anyone hear the shot?”

  No one had; at least no one admitted it.

  “You understand,” said Jacob Wait, “that we’d like to fix the time of the murder. It is of considerable importance.”

  “I don’t see,” said Gertrude, recovering, “that it makes any difference whether we heard the shot or not. It seems to me you should be getting out—police and—and cars and try to catch the murderer. He’s likely miles away by this time. I should think you would be watching the roads and getting in touch with towns around here and—”

  “That,” said Jacob Wait, managing to check Gertrude and still speak without emphasis, which was rather a feat, “has been attended to. All that,” he said, his eyes smoldering. “What time did you go to your room last night, Mrs Shore?”

  Gertrude wheezed and turned a soft mauve. “About eleven, I think. We all came upstairs at the same time.”

  “When did you last see Mr Brewer?”

  “Why, I don’t—” She stopped, thought, blinked and said forcefully, “We were all in this room together. I think Daphne was the first to go—that is my niece. I went upstairs a moment or so later; I stopped in the lower hall to speak to my sister, who was looking at the lock of the front door. I think the men—that is, my brother and Mr Brewer and the boys”—her wide hand indicated Rowley and Dennis—”stayed here awhile. But it was only for a few moments, for I heard them on the stairs and in the upper hall shortly after I’d reached my own room.”

  “Is that right, Mr. Haviland?” said Jacob Wait, looking at Johnny.

  Johnny, also startled, blinked, too, and pushed his hands in his pockets and said, “Yes. We had a highball,” he said, explaining. “Ben was just ahead of me, going upstairs. We stopped a moment in the upper hall, and he said good night and turned and went down the hall to his room. At least, I suppose he did. I didn’t wait.”

  “His room is beside your room, Mrs Shore, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Gertrude. “Just above this room. Which explains why he heard the burglars when no one else heard them. And then, of course, Ben Brewer always heard things.

  He was—” She stopped abruptly, looked at her hands and concluded, “He was extremely alert,” and left it there.

  “Did no one else hear any sound during the night?”

  Again no one had. Rowley was looking at the floor, so his narrow eyes were shadowed, but there was a kind of tight look around his thin mouth. Daphne wondered, suddenly, how Rowley felt about it; Rowley had been, except when he was obliged to side with his mother, rather neutral in that year-old battle. Yet he had felt, certainly, no faith in and no liking for Ben Brewer.

  She didn’t dare look at Dennis; she was afraid that in spite of herself her look would reveal something. But she was acutely conscious of his presence there on the divan; his tall, tweed-clad figure; his brown face and the queer kind of tenseness, of readiness about him which she sensed rather than saw. Jacob Wait said suddenly:

  “How was Mr Brewer dressed last night?”

  He had not addressed anyone in particular. Someone—Gertrude, was it?—started to speak and stopped, and Johnny said uncertainly, “Do you mean at dinner? Why, he wore ordinary evening clothes. Tails. White tie. Why?”

  “I take it you had touched nothing about the body when you called us?” said Jacob Wait. “Is that right, Mr Haviland?”

  “Why, yes. Yes, of course,” said Johnny, looking anxious. “We saw at once what had happened. Oh, I believe we—we felt for a pulse. That kind of thing. But he was dead. There was nothing we could do, and someone said we mustn’t move the body. Then Dennis talked to county police headquarters, and they told us not to touch anything. So we didn’t.”

  “When we arrived, then, the body was exactly as it was found?”

  “Why, I—” Johnny’s light, worried blue eyes went around the room and returned to Jacob Wait. “Why, I think so. Yes. He had on that bathrobe—and still had on the trousers of his evening clothes—I noticed that. And no shoes. He’d probably taken them off so as not to make any sound.”

  “Then he was probably undressing when he heard the burglars?”

  Johnny blinked again, jingled things in his pockets and said explosively, “Good God, I don’t know. Looks that way. He had no coat on—no shirt or vest—still he might‘ve been asleep or in bed, and just pulled on trousers and bathrobe—”

  “First removing his pajamas,” said Jacob Wait, “and putting on his underclothing.”

  Johnny frowned.

  “Well, I don’t know what he did,” he said. “Maybe he was just undressing when he heard them. How do I know?”

  “If he was undressing when he heard sounds in this room and came downstairs, then the affair must have taken place very shortly after eleven. That is, very shortly after you had all gone to your rooms. Thus it seems that someone else ought to have heard the sound of the shot at least. If Mr Brewer was only undressing to go to bed, it doesn’t seem as if everyone would be already and very soundly sleeping.”

  He still addressed Johnny, who frowned again and chewed his trim little mustache and said rather pettishly that it didn’t seem so.

  “But perhaps,” said Johnny, brightening, “he didn’t undress at once. Maybe he sat and—and smoked awhile. Something like that.”

  “Perhaps,” said Jacob Wait. “But there was only one cigarette end in the tray in his room. However, you are perfectly right, Mr Haviland. He might not have undressed at once. Indeed, our only possible conclusion is that he didn’t. Yet he must have been killed about midnight or shortly after.”

  Gertrude’s eyes snapped.

  “Midnight!” she said suddenly. “Oh no. He couldn’t have been killed then. I—” She stopped so abruptly, it was as if the momentum of her speech carried her on: “I heard—” she mumbled and sat there with her wide face flushed and her eyes like glass, staring at the detective. Rowley had put his long thin hand over his mother’s hand b
ut otherwise had not moved.

  “You heard what?”

  “Nothing,” said Gertrude, staring. “Nothing.”

  “Come, come, Mrs Shore. You were about to say you heard something to indicate he was not killed at midnight. What?”

  “I—,”

  “You heard—”

  “I heard—sounds,” said Gertrude reluctantly.

  “Sounds? Where? What kind of sounds?”

  “In his room,” she said slowly, as if the detective dragged out the words one after another. “As if—he were walking about.”

  “What time was that?”

  “About—I think about two o’clock,” said Gertrude. “However, I—I’m not at all sure of it. In fact, I think I’m entirely mistaken. And I know nothing at all about it—nothing at all.”

  “Thank you, Mrs Shore. Did you hear anything else?”

  “Anything—No! Certainly not! Sounds at night are very confusing; very—”

  “Thank you.”

  It stopped her. She opened her mouth, closed it, gave Daphne a queer glassy look which had something perplexed and troubled and at the same time stubborn about it and then stared at the floor.

  Who had been in Ben’s room, walking about? Dennis, probably, or Rowley. Getting that bathrobe; doing what they could to bolster up the burglar theory. How much in that moment of perplexity had Gertrude’s slow but tenacious reasoning grasped? Rowley probably had thought of all those details: he was innately ingenious.

  And—and something had gone wrong.

  There was too much the detective wanted to know.

  They all felt it. As if it were a chill little wind creeping through the room which tinged the most inconsequent inquiries with significance. Inconsequent, apparently tangential inquiries, such as the next one. “When,” said Jacob Wait, “were the flowers arranged for the wedding?”

  He looked at Gertrude, who considered it suspiciously, decided she could safely reply and did so: “Last night. The men came as we were finishing dinner.”