Violet smiled. “Precisely. Sebastian, you said you thought she was acting strangely, and you were right. It was a lot more than just nerves. I don’t know how you do it, but you have the knack of hitting pretty close to the mark without ever trying to do so.”
“Casual grace, Sis.”
“More likely idiot’s luck. But whatever it was, you were right on target. No wonder she got so upset. Coming on top of everything else, it’s amazing she didn’t entirely unravel on the spot.”
Sebastian sighed and shook his head.
“The poor woman!” Cerise said.
“Yes, it’s really very sad,” Violet said, looking anything but. “The one consolation is that it’s unlikely she’ll have to stand trial. We can probably arrange for her to be placed in some comfortable institution. And, after thirty-five years with the Colonel, an asylum might seem pleasant by comparison. The question is, what do we do with her while we’re waiting to be picked up from here?”
After some discussion they decided that the thing to do was to offer Budgie lots of comfort and support, but at the same time make sure that she was kept under careful observation and control. While it seemed likely that her murderous spree had run its course, no one could be entirely certain. After all, she had already twice attacked Sebastian, and given her seriously disturbed state, virtually anything could still happen.
One possibility that they were very aware of was suicide. Beyond whatever sympathy and affection they felt for her, they all realized it would be much better for them if Budgie did not kill herself. Violet may have been looking towards headlines; but the others too saw how much simpler it would be to present the authorities with a live deranged murderer, instead of four bodies and a complicated tale of madness, revenge, and remorse.
No, Budgie had to be kept safe and secure. Two people would stay with her as much as possible. If she had to be left alone, it would be in a room that had been cleared of anything potentially dangerous and then locked from the outside.
But first they had to find her. They decided to start by searching the house. Sebastian would take the attic, Cerise the second floor, Violet and Mr. Ching the main floor, and Derrick the cellar. Whoever found her would be very careful not to upset her, and would get help if it seemed at all necessary. If they didn’t locate her inside, they would search the island.
They then split up, leaving Mrs. Argus behind. She waited a moment, then went into the hall outside the lounge. She cautiously looked around, then silently moved down the corridor and disappeared into the study, a sly look on her face.
For several minutes, no sound was heard throughout the house.
Suddenly there was a terrified scream, a crash of breaking glass, a sickening thud.
Within seconds, Violet, Cerise, Derrick, and Mr. Ching had converged on the foyer, where they exchanged questions of confusion and concern and regarded each other with expressions of rapidly mounting panic. This continued for quite a long while, no one knowing what to do, each reluctant to take the lead, until finally Sebastian came down the main stairway. Then, without a word but with a nearly overwhelming sense of dread, they ran out the large front door.
From the landing, Mrs. Argus watched their departure. Her eyes shone merrily. Two red spots brightened her sallow, sunken cheeks. Her head nodded, and her thin lips were pulled back in a rictus grin.
Outside, Cerise screamed, “My God!” and brought her hands up to cover her face in a futile attempt to blot out the horror.
Derrick was pale and seemed to have difficulty breathing.
Violet grimly shook her head, expelling a hiss of air between clenched teeth.
The look in Mr. Ching’s dark eyes belied his otherwise impassive exterior.
“Well, Sis, it looks as though you were right,” Sebastian said quietly, gazing down at the yellow-clad blob spread out on the flagstone terrace. “Aunt Budgie must have been unbalanced. She just fell off her perch.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“God! I cant take any more of this!” Cerise sobbed.
Sebastian patted her shoulder and tried to comfort her, but even he was starting to feel somewhat more repressible than usual.
“And we were just talking about this. Too late,” Derrick sighed heavily, looking away from the thing at their feet. “She must not have been able to stand it any longer. But what a way to do it! Poor woman.…You know, Violet, I wasn’t entirely convinced before, but now it certainly seems that you were correct.” He sighed again. “At least the insanity’s finally over.”
Violet grunted in acknowledgement. She shielded her eyes with a hand, and looked up at the facade of the building. Silently she pointed to a dormer window on the top floor. All but a ragged fringe of the glass was gone, giving it a blank, gaping look, and clearly marking it as Budgie’s point of departure.
“She must have taken a real run at it,” Violet said, “to have landed this far out from the house. It must be—what?—almost twenty feet. Remarkable. That was one determined lady.… I guess we should check up there. Maybe she left a note. But first I suppose we’d better put her in with the others.”
Derrick and Mr. Ching carried poor Budgie into the freezer, and then the whole group went up to the top floor. The atmosphere, though naturally still sombre and subdued, was definitely less oppressive than it had been, even half an hour earlier.
It took them several tries to locate the correct passageway in the labyrinth of the attic, but when they did so, they found Mrs. Argus waiting patiently outside a door.
“She was here,” the mad woman said pleasantly. “And She must have been quite upset,” she added in a tone that suggested this was a fascinating piece of gossip. Her eyes and lips formed perfect circles of delight, then she tittered and ran—almost skipped—down the hall, and vanished around a corner.
“Watch it,” Sebastian cautioned the others. “You’ll have a nasty fall if you step on any of the marbles she left behind.”
They looked in the open doorway and saw the broken window that they had observed from below. Then, one by one, their faces took on stunned, puzzled looks as they saw that everything else in the room was broken as well. Plasterboard had been torn from the walls, revealing the studs behind, and strips of flooring had been pulled up from the supporting joists. The electrical outlets were ripped out, and the wiring lay twisted across the floor like slender yellow and black entrails. What had once been a heavy straight-backed chair was in splinters, and a mattress had been reduced to fuzzy clumps of stuffing and tiny blue-and-white striped bits of rag. Even the thick enamel paint had been pulled away from the ceiling and hung down like decorative crepe-paper streamers. The chaos was total; it was as though the room had been ripped apart by a giant, unseen hand, a wild, invisible, awesomely destructive power.
“Well, Violet, there was only one flaw in your analysis,” Sebastian said quietly. “It was wrong.”
“Yes,” Derrick said. “I don’t care how strong Budgie was. Or how disturbed. She didn’t do this.”
“And look. The window is three feet off the floor. Aunt Budgie didn’t get any running start. No, Sis. Her defenestration was not self-generated, so to speak. She was thrown out.”
“It’s still going on,” Cerise said to herself, almost whimpering. “It’s still going on.” With a nervous backward glance, she left the small room, followed by Derrick and Mr. Ching.
“Sebastian,” Violet said, “you were supposed to investigate up here. Do you mean to say you didn’t hear anything?”
“Well, actually, Sis, I never got up here. Call of nature, you know.” He shrugged, grimaced sheepishly, then quickly followed the others.
Violet lingered for a moment, speculatively staring at the empty doorway. Her ordinarily unflappable brother seemed unusually uncomfortable, ill at ease. Odd. Notwithstanding his ability to spew out an endless stream of outrageous hyperbole, he’d never been able to lie very convincingly. What, she wondered, was he not saying?
When Violet got back to the lounge,
she found Derrick, Cerise, Sebastian, and Mrs. Argus already there. Mr. Ching had gone off to work on lunch, a piece of news that did nothing to lighten the mood in the room.
Cerise paced the lounge restlessly, looking up at the high walls, her teeth pressed into her lower lip. “I still say we’re being observed. Someone—or something—is watching us. Is it just me? Am I going crazy? Doesn’t anyone else have that feeling?”
“I’ve noticed it,” Derrick said, “but I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Me, too,” Sebastian said.
Mrs. Argus grinned broadly.
“I say, Violet,” Derrick said. “You may think this is stupid, but do you suppose there might be anything to that curse business, after all?”
Violet looked at him disbelievingly, wanting to shout that he was right, that she did think he was an incredible dolt, but she contented herself with a slight sneer.
“You can all believe in the supernatural if you want—the ghosts of the Mohawks, or whatever, walking the halls—but I think the explanation will be much more mundane.” Violet paused, wrinkling her brow in concentration. By this point, there was every reason for her to be a trifle gun-shy, but it seemed she could no more stop analysing and detecting than she could stop breathing. “I think maybe I got it backwards.”
“Huh?” Derrick said.
“I can’t yet figure how it goes, but I’m pretty sure Mrs. Hook enters into it, and unless I’m really off the mark, she’s pretty close to the centre. I said there was something strange going on between her and Budgie, and I thought that maybe Mrs. Hook was doing a bit of blackmail. But perhaps that’s what I got backwards. Maybe Mrs. Hook is the doer, and Budgie found out. Certainly, Budgie seemed very scared of Mrs. Hook.”
“And with good reason,” Sebastian said. “The woman’s an absolute terror. If looks could kill, we’d all be in the freezer by now—but I still can’t see any reason for her to have done what you’re suggesting.”
Violet nodded. “Nor can I…yet. However, some possibilities do come to mind. Maybe she and Budgie were in league with each other, and planned to share the estate after Budgie inherited. If there were two people working together, it would explain a number of things.”
“But, Sis, if that’s what it is, why kill the golden goose? Or in this case, the yellow budgie.”
“You saw what happened to Budgie. She cracked up. Maybe she couldn’t stand it any longer, and threatened to confess everything, not caring about the consequences. Mrs. Hook would then have had to act out of simple self-preservation. Besides, this particular golden goose—as you put it—had no more eggs to lay.”
“A conspiracy? Really, Violet!” Derrick said with surprising vehemence.
Violet stared at him, wide-eyed, until he blushed and looked away.
“Okay,” she went on. “It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. Maybe Mrs. Hook found out about the will and acted on her own. Then she went to Budgie, told her what she’d done, and demanded her share. Only Budgie, instead of being grateful, fell apart, and Mrs. Hook had to kill her too. Again, to protect herself.”
“Oh, Sis! Come on.”
Violet shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened. Or, if you prefer, how about a servant who gets fed up and does away with his or her employer? Why, whole households have been wiped out in that manner.”
“That’s right!” Derrick said. “Wasn’t there something like that a few years ago? An entire family killed? It was quite a sensation.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Violet said. “I never read the tabloids.”
“No,” Sebastian mumbled. “Not since they stopped writing about you.”
“What?”
“Nothing, Sis.” He held up his hands. “Which do you think it is? A mad servant? A conspiracy? Or what?”
“I don’t know. I was merely suggesting three possibilities that occurred to me. I’m not saying it’s necessarily any one of them. I do know two things, however. First, of all the people here, no one has had better opportunity than Mrs. Hook. She’s the only one of us who could go literally anywhere without arousing any suspicion or curiosity. If any of us were seen going into or coming out of someone else’s room, for example, it would cause comment. But not Mrs. Hook. She could go anywhere, be seen anywhere, without anyone thinking twice about it or even noticing it. After all, she’s the housekeeper, just doing her job. She has access everywhere, virtually complete freedom of movement. Indeed, we so accept the presence of the housekeeper that we fail really to see her, and that gives her a kind of invisibility.”
Mrs. Argus chuckled to herself. “Oh, She’s invisible, all right.”
“Speaking of people who should disappear…,” Sebastian grumbled.
“You said there were two things you knew?” Derrick said.
“Yes. The second is that there is something very definitely not right about Mrs. Hook. I don’t know what it is, but if we find it, I think we’ll have the solution.”
“Well, I think we’d better,” Sebastian said. “And fast. I mean, really! We’re dropping like flies. If things continue at this rate, there will be a very intimate group for dinner tomorrow.”
“My God!” Cerise screamed, looking from face to face, her eyes wild and desperate. “How can you just sit here, calmly speculating about it all? Is it So-and-so? Is it this one? That one? Is this the reason? Is that? My God! Don’t you see what’s happening? Don’t you feel it? It’s like we’re being manipulated in someone’s fiendish game!”
“Hee, hee, hee,” Mrs. Argus giggled in a knowing kind of way.
Cerise looked at her, then started sobbing. Sebastian gave the old crone a glare of unrestrained hatred, and led Cerise to a couch where he tried to comfort her. Derrick cleared his throat several times, then got up and turned on the old floor-model radio. Static-laden music filled the lounge, as the five remaining party guests sat silently, each along with his or her own thoughts, conjectures, or fears.
Abruptly, the music was cut off, and replaced by a breathy, excited voice.
“We interrupt our program of dance-band music to bring you an important bulletin. It appears that a menace from the past may be among us again. Officials at the Lakeview Institution for the Criminally Insane have just announced that Francis Hacker, the notorious mass murderer who once slaughtered eight innocent people in this area, escaped from the facility approximately thirty-six hours ago. While there is as yet no indication of the fugitive’s whereabouts, local authorities fear the killer may be coming in our direction. It will be remembered that Hacker was employed at the Sill family estate on Komondor Island at the time of the murderous rampage. Chief Bently has warned everyone in the vicinity to be on the lookout for this dangerous maniac, and to report immediately any strange or unusual occurrences.
“When questioned as to why they had waited so long to announce the escape, Institution officials said they had hoped to be able to recapture the fugitive without causing any unnecessary panic. Cries of ‘cover-up’ are already being heard, and a full investigation is being demanded in high government circles. When asked how a dangerous lunatic could escape from a supposedly maximum-security facility, officials speculated that Hacker was assisted by an outside confederate.
“To repeat, local residents are advised to be on the alert for Francis Hacker, convicted mass murderer of.…”
A harsh crackle cut off the announcer’s voice and the radio went dead. Derrick’s efforts to restore reception met with no success. All eyes in the room were fastened upon the old instrument, but its muteness only served to intensify the stunned silence in the lounge.
Gradually, however, the shock of this latest thunderbolt began to diminish. Held breaths were exhaled, rigid bodies relaxed somewhat, goggling eyes blinked and refocused. In a curious kind of way, there was a sense of relief. The menace had in no way abated, but at last it had been identified; it had a name, it could be understood, the terrible lurking shadow now had substance. And even more, a thought be
gan to dawn on them, which Derrick was the first to speak aloud.
“I say, Violet! This means you were wrong all along. It’s not one of us.”
“Yes, Sis. I suppose what’s been happening here just might be classified as the strange or unusual occurrences they want reported. It looks as though there’s an intruder after all.”
“Thank God!” Cerise said. “I don’t know why that should make me feel so much better, but it does. I guess it’s because I can now look at the rest of you and not have to wonder.”
Violet looked from Derrick to Sebastian to Cerise, slowly nodding her head. “Are you sure about that?”
“Of course, Sis. You just heard that announcement.”
“Yes, I heard the announcement, but I didn’t hear anything about an intruder.”
“What are you talking about?” Derrick said. “There’s this escaped madman, Hacker.”
Violet looked at him for a long time before saying very softly, “Who—as far as I can see—could still be one of us.”
“I say! Ridiculous! You must be mad.”
“Yes, Sis, come on. Give it a rest.”
“Look,” Violet said, “how many times have we been all over this goddamn island and through this goddamn house? And have we seen even one sign of this intruder? No, we haven’t. So where the hell is this wraith hiding?”
“Okay, Sis, but that still doesn’t mean…I mean, it couldn’t be.…”
“Why not?” Violet challenged. “Before coming here, we were almost all strangers to each other. Not a single one of us can be vouched for by more than one other person—if that. And even that doesn’t mean anything since you all heard that they suspect Hacker had an accomplice.”
“So you’re suggesting that Hacker is one of us?” Cerise said.
“That’s right.”
“Well, Violet,” Sebastian said, “I trust you know it couldn’t be me.”
“I don’t care what she says,” Derrick said. “I don’t know that it couldn’t be you.”
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