Danger in the Dark

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  “When did they leave?”

  “About ten, I think.”

  “The windows were closed then?”

  The windows. Gertrude’s voice was immediately less wary.

  “Yes, of course. That is, I think so. It seems that one of them must have been left open. Without our noticing it. It was wide open this morning when we found him. Wide open and snow blowing in.”

  “All the other windows were locked?”

  “You asked that before,” said Gertrude. “Of course they were locked. Amelia—my sister—always saw to that herself.”

  “But last night apparently she missed the drawing-room window?”

  “Well, it seems so,” said Gertrude. “But after all—in the excitement of the wedding and all—” She stopped again, her eyes very blank and light above her bright blue bosom. Rowley rose from the arm of her chair, walked over to the table and lighted a cigarette.

  Daphne thought: There’s something under this. There’s something he knows. We all feel it. Everybody is on the defensive. Everybody. Even Gertrude feels something hidden in this detective’s questions—feels that they have direction, force, a kind of thrust against us. What was it, then? Where was their mistake? But it was all a mistake. They had been terribly wrong to undertake that ugly deception.

  Yet, if they hadn’t, it would have been worse. She mustn’t look at Dennis: her very look might seek reassurance. She sat perfectly still, her hands clutched together on the lap of her old brown tweed skirt, the brave green scarf at her throat making her eyes darker blue and her face paler. Her soft, short brown hair caught gold highlights. It was impossible, she thought suddenly, that all this could have happened in only a few hours. It was, however, extremely real: the lights, the dark day; the wedding presents on the table (they would have to be sent back, all of them; with a note dictated by Amelia; horrible!).

  The policeman at the shorthand table looked at Jacob Wait and straightened his back with a little sigh. The small table was too low for him; the straight chair too little and stiff. And by the looks of things, there was going to be a lot more notes to take. He wished he could smoke and glanced enviously at Rowley’s cigarette. The plainclothes man by the door looked at Jacob Wait, too, and became, if possible, more impassive. So that was the way the wind was blowing, was it? Well, this time Wait was wrong. It was an open-and-shut case of burglary.

  It was cold in the little library. Cold and gray and, for a moment, very still. So still that they all heard the knock on the door, and Johnny’s neat shoulders jerked toward it and Gertrude put both hands on her bosom.

  “Well,” said Jacob Wait.

  It was the door from the drawing room that opened. There were men with muffled voices in the drawing room. Johnny of them all was the only one who could see into the room, and he stiffened suddenly, staring, his eyes round and fixed in his white face. What were they doing in there? thought Daphne; and then knew.

  A man stood in the doorway and said shortly, “We’ve got the bullet. Want to take a look?”

  Jacob Wait walked into the drawing room and closed the door behind him. Johnny looked white and sat down. Rowley puffed smoke and said, “Well, if that’s all, let’s get out of here.”

  But the policeman was strolling toward the other door, hovering exactly before it.

  “I don’t think Mr Wait’s quite finished questioning,” he said wearily but very politely.

  And he wasn’t. Though it was perhaps five minutes before he returned. A queer, silent five minutes, during which Johnny sat, still and white, and stared at the floor; Rowley smoked rapidly; Dennis refused to look at Daphne; and the policeman drummed on the table with his pencil. Daphne looked at the stubby brown toes of the oxfords she’d put on and thought of the walk over snowy fields she’d taken yesterday. It was then that she’d said good-by to all her former life; said good-by to Dennis. And had been glad that he was not there. And then she’d returned to sit in that deep chair in front of the fire and Dennis had come—out of the twilight and her own thoughts, and he was real. He was real, and he told her he loved her. Had always loved her. Had come home because he loved her. And she must not marry anyone else.

  He’d knelt down with the firelight gleaming on his dark hair and making points of light in his eyes; he’d taken her in his arms and put his cheek against hers.

  And from that moment nothing had been as it was intended to be. It was as if his coming had swung things off a carefully balanced axis; had knocked them from their prescribed course so events and emotions and desires went careening about crazily.

  And among those things, murder had been loosed.

  Well, that was horrible. And Dennis’ return hadn’t caused it.

  She looked at the deep brown chair on the other side of the fireplace. Gertrude was sitting there now, a stiff, strong blue column, her eyes fixed on the door into the drawing room and her wide hands twisting and worrying a little lace handkerchief. Johnny, too, was watching the door now—his usual sartorial perfection indefinably disturbed, his wavy light hair tousled, as if he’d run his hands through it; his handsome face stiff and old-looking with small swollen pouches under his eyes. Rowley was standing at the window with his back to the room and wreaths of smoke floating around his narrow, shining black head. And Dennis.

  Dennis was looking at her. Had been quietly watching her, she knew at once, for some time, sharing perhaps her thoughts. It was a kind of shock to meet his eyes, to let herself receive one long, deep look.

  It was a look that warned; that reminded her of all the things he had told her; and that, yet, encouraged her. Keep your chin up, Daph. It was as if he said it across that still, waiting room.

  Oddly, in that moment, she felt again a little current of warmth and excitement because he was there. Because during that year she’d been so desperately lonely for him; because there had been moments when she couldn’t remember his face clearly at all—and there had been other moments when she remembered it so clearly her heart ached with the memory. Times on a crowded street when someone, walking along ahead of her, moved or turned or carried his shoulders so that for a fleeting instant it was like Dennis and the image remained to haunt her. Because at last she had needed him and had not dared to let him know, and now he was there; across that little space.

  And now, thought Daphne suddenly, she was not to marry Ben Brewer. But she couldn’t more than glimpse that thought, as through an opened gate one may glimpse sunny meadows and blue sky and a dappled road beyond.

  Jacob Wait came suddenly back into the room. And with him all the ugliness and horror of the thing that, inconceivably, had happened, and the briefly opened gate closed again.

  He stood there, a small, dark man, looking at them as if he hated them.

  Phony, he was thinking. Well, he’d better get the thing over.

  “Schmidt.”

  “Yes, Mr Wait.”

  “Take a detailed statement from each of ’em. Beginning—oh, yesterday noon.”

  “Yes, Mr Wait.”

  “Look here,” said Johnny suddenly. “What do you mean, detailed statement? You act as if—as if you suspected some of us. Nobody here had anything to do with it. It was an attempted burglary. None of us knows anything about—”

  “A few windows left open, a heap of wedding gifts on the floor don’t make a burglary,” said the detective in a bored way. “Of course, if we could fix the time a little more accurately it would help. You see, the murder occurred, according to the doctor, near midnight. But the window in there has been open only an hour or two.”

  Chapter 8

  AT THE LITTLE TABLE the policeman’s pencil jerked. He gave the detective one quick, sharp look and went back to writing. After a moment Gertrude said in a loud voice:

  “Window?”

  Rowley turned slowly toward the others and put his cigarette end neatly into an ash tray.

  “How do you know? What do you mean?” he said coolly, facing the detective.

  But Jacob Wait lo
oked back at him with those morose dark eyes, said suddenly, “Flowers” and turned and walked out of the room again.

  It was unexpected.

  “Well!” said Gertrude, staring after him and then around the room. “Well, I must say—

  “What does he mean, flowers?” said Johnny anxiously. “Those flowers in there?”

  “I don’t know what he means,” said Gertrude, twisting her handkerchief. “I know, I think he’s a fool. A plain case of burglary and—”

  Rowley approached her and put his hand on her arm.

  “I suppose he means something about the changing temperature in the room,” said Rowley calmly. “I mean if the window was open all night the flowers would have been exposed to the cold over quite a long period of time. Naturally, then, when the window was closed and the room warmed—if it is warm now—the flowers would droop—turn brown or something. I don’t know exactly what, but I suppose it’s that.” He was speaking to Gertrude and to Johnny, but he was speaking very distinctly, and Dennis was listening. Over Gertrude’s head he and Rowley glanced at each other. What was it? thought Daphne. What had they done—or failed to do? There was a curious white look around Dennis’ mouth. A voice at her elbow said, “Your statement, please, miss.” It was the man called Schmidt.

  “Statement?” said Daphne in a small voice.

  “Just tell me what you did, beginning yesterday about noon—where you went and all that. Particularly anything at all about the murdered—that is, this Mr Brewer.”

  “Yesterday—noon?”

  “Yes, Miss Haviland.”

  “Well, I—I—We had lunch about one-thirty. Just my aunts and I. My father came out from town later in the afternoon. I went for a walk—a long walk. I got home—”

  “Did you see anybody you knew on that walk?”

  “Why, I—No.”

  “What time did you get home?”

  “About—five, I think.”

  “Who’d you see when you got home?”

  “No one. That is, until later. Then the others arrived.”

  “The others?”

  “My father. My cousins, Rowley Shore. Dennis Haviland. Ben—”

  “Ben? That’s Mr Brewer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what?”

  “Why, we—we talked and then dressed for dinner. Then there was dinner, and afterward we all went to watch the flowers being arranged. Then we came back in here and had coffee and went upstairs about eleven.”

  “When did you last see Mr Brewer?”

  “At—Why, in the hall I think, as I started upstairs. He spoke to me. He—” She stopped, and the policeman looked up from his tablet.

  “Oh,” he said. “You was—it’s you he was to marry. Oh—I’m sorry, Miss Haviland. I didn’t realize. Well, that’s all, except did you see him again before you—that is, before he was killed?”

  “No,” she said, thankful for the phrasing of his question. “No.”

  “Thank you.”

  “May I—may I go now?” said Daphne.

  “Oh yes,” said the policeman. “That is, don’t leave the house, of course. Mr Wait will want to see you again. Now then—” He turned toward Gertrude. Daphne rose. It was with a sense of escape that she turned toward the hall. Behind her she could hear Gertrude’s voice, strident, protesting, but shaken in its authority.

  In the narrow little passage, however, she remembered the reporters, the detectives—all those people in the house. What were they doing, she thought—taking fingerprints? Measurements—hunting, with all the resources of modern crime detection at their disposal, for clues?

  Clues; that meant material clues. Such as she and Dennis might have left in the springhouse without knowing it.

  She could not just then face them all; could not cross the hall through the confusion and strange faces and observant eyes; could not run the gauntlet of those cameras. The door of the unused music room was at her elbow, and she opened it and went in. There was no one there.

  It was an unpleasant room, not too well lighted, and seldom used. Someone sometime had filled it with cabinets of music and cabinets for trinkets; ugly massive mahogany and black leather, and Amelia had never changed it. The piano had been moved out and into the drawing room for the wedding, and its moving left a bare space over in the corner. The room was chilly; and seemed, because it was so seldom used, far from the rest of the house.

  Daphne went to a chair. They had been wrong, terribly, dangerously wrong to undertake that deception. Law had its own innate force, its own crushing momentum. You couldn’t do things like that and escape.

  But she hadn’t killed Ben. Dennis knew she hadn’t; he’d found her there and Ben dead in the darkness of the springhouse. But she hadn’t killed him, and Dennis knew it.

  Dennis knew it. But if anyone else had come and found her there, would he have believed her? Would, say, Rowley have believed that she didn’t kill him? That she knew nothing of his murder? Well, Rowley had believed Dennis. Or had he? Was it belief that induced him to accept Dennis’ explanation, or was it for some dark purpose of his own?

  Rowley was always indirect; Rowley had never really liked Dennis.

  And Gertrude—she was thinking of Gertrude when the door opened and Gertrude came into the room.

  “There you are,” Gertrude said. And glanced over her shoulder into the hall and closed the door with a suggestion of stealth. “I thought you might be here.”

  She crossed to Daphne and pulled a small chair up near her. She was excited. Her tight, large bosom rose and fell jerkily, and there was a faint bluish tinge around her mouth and in her cheeks. Her very light blue eyes were still shiny and the pupils in them bright and black. She said to Daphne in a rather husky voice, as if she were trying to lower her habitually loud and forceful tones:

  “I was looking for you. See here, Daphne, I’ve something to say to you. And I think this is a good time. There’s no sense in beating about the bush; I’m like Father, I come straight out with things. Never hesitate.”

  This wasn’t true. But Gertrude had no notion at all of the subtlety and wiliness that lay under and dictated old Rowley Haviland’s purposeful brusqueness, his pose of heartiness and bluff directness.

  “What are they doing?” asked Daphne.

  For an instant Gertrude wavered and looked rather bleak.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Everything’s upset—men all over the house. That little detective poking his nose into everything—upstairs, downstairs—not saying anything.” She stopped and mused and said with a defeated air, “I don’t like him. But Amelia would have the wedding here. If we’d been in town there ‘d been the Chicago police force—much better.” There was in her manner a suggestion that, wherever they were, the thing would have happened. “But, of course,” she said, “there’s nobody can deny it’s a most fortunate thing.”

  “Fortunate—”

  “For the company,” said Gertrude. “For us all. For the Haviland family. There’s no need to pretend, Daphne.”

  The instant of bleakness and of defeat had passed. Her eyes were shining again, and as always with Gertrude there was something reverential about her when she spoke of the company. Gertrude loved exactly three things in life: the company and the memory of her father, which were bound up in each other; herself and the memory of her father, for she felt she was very like him, and honor paid to certain qualities old Rowley Haviland had had was next door to honoring Gertrude herself; and her son, Rowley, who was named for his grandfather, whom she expected to take his grandfather’s place, but who was, regrettably, not at all like Rowley Haviland. Or, at least, so Gertrude felt, for she was able to perceive certain hidden traits in Rowley Shore no better than she had observed those same traits in her father.

  She leaned back in her chair and kept her eyes fastened upon Daphne and said slowly, “There’s no use pretending, Daphne.”

  At first and inconceivably Daphne saw no danger. She was used to Gertrude; accustomed to the
air of hidden significance with which she invested quite unimportant and obvious things.

  She did not see danger except that she did see that there was something triumphant about that bright, light gaze, fixed and shining, as if two marbles had been set in Gertrude’s face.

  Then Gertrude smiled slowly, as if she did not know she was smiling. She said, “Ben Brewer is dead. He’s dead, and the company is saved. Nothing can bring him back now. The way is left open at last for Rowley.”

  “For—Rowley?”

  “Certainly. Rowley ought to have been made president when Father died. Everybody knows that. He is the obvious choice—”

  “My father,” said Daphne. “He—”

  “Johnny!” exclaimed Gertrude, her eyes snapping suddenly. “Not at all! Johnny is no business man. Johnny can manage the social end of things—he always has done that and most successfully. But Johnny has no business instinct at all. Anybody can sway him when it comes to business. Oh, of course, he doesn’t realize that himself. I expect he thinks he’s a model of business acumen. But he isn’t, and it’s a good thing my father left no real responsibility to Johnny. He has no business judgment at all. Why, all this year, Daphne, he has done exactly as Ben Brewer said to do—voted with him always. With Johnny’s block of stock, he and Ben and the stockholders could always far outweigh my vote and Amelia’s. Most unfair, of course, but there it is. Now, though—” Gertrude’s bosom swelled a little, and a slow smile crept around her mouth again. “Now it will be different. Rowley will have the presidency and salary. Ben Brewer’s stock, I happen to know, was willed to you. Johnny’s stock—”

  “To me!” Daphne sprang to her feet. “Ben’s stock to me! Oh no, no!”

  Gertrude eyed her coldly.

  “Didn’t you know that?”

  “Oh no, no! I knew nothing of it. Aunt Gertrude, I—I can’t take it. I won’t take it. Nothing can make me.”

  “Oh, come, come, Daphne. There’s nothing to get so upset about. After all, it was his will to his wife. Nothing more proper, I’m sure.”

  “But I don’t want it. I knew nothing of it. I wasn’t—I’m not his wife. Are you sure, Aunt Gertrude?”