Night Walk

by Elizabeth Daly

  NIGHT WALK

  Elizabeth Daly

  FELONY& MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  CONTENTS

  1. At Edgewood

  2. At the Library

  3. At the Wakefield

  4. At the Carringtons’

  5. Psychological

  6. The Facts

  7. Descendants

  8. Case Histories

  9. Inside Stuff

  10. Monsters

  11. Criminology

  12. Eliminations

  13. Triumph of Vines

  14. Clearance

  15. The Trellis

  16. Obsession

  17. Evidence

  18. Love Letter

  19. Night Walk

  CHAPTER ONE At Edgewood

  IT WAS NOT yet ten o’clock, but Miss Martine Studley, proprietor of Edgewood, came into the lounge and tactfully discouraged her four patients from beginning another rubber of bridge. August 26th, 1946, had been a close, warm day for the time of year, and it was a stuffy night. The patients looked bored with the game, all but old Mrs. Norbury; and if old Mrs. Norbury wasn’t dog-tired, thought Miss Studley, she ought to be.

  Miss Studley never described her guests as “patients,” nor would she allow Edgewood to be referred to as a sanatorium or even a rest cure. It was simply a place where persons (very well-off persons) who had been sick or were overworked or merely needed a little country air could go and be sure of what attention they required. If they were really ill, or disabled, Miss Studley wouldn’t take them. They were all sent to Edgewood by expensive doctors who were well aware that Miss Studley had filled a need.

  Alcoholics or other addicts, mental cases and people likely to depress other people, were taboo. The doctors fully understood this, and it was only after long telephone conversations with Miss Studley that reservations at Edgewood were made.

  Miss Studley was a graduate nurse, who had made such a huge success of private nursing (she had had two substantial legacies) that she was able to buy the fine old house at the edge of the woods and remodel it. She had an assistant, Miss Pepper, who gave massage. Edgewood, thus christened by its present owner, was ideally situated for her purpose—in the little village of Frazer’s Mills, five miles from the big town of Westbury and the railroad, two and a half hours’ journey by car from New York. It was open all the year round. It stood well back from the street, the last house of the village to the north, with large shady grounds and its own vegetable garden.

  Miss Studley was a well-built, good-looking woman of forty with fresh color and a great deal of thick brown hair. She always wore her uniform and cap; they gave the guests confidence. She knew exactly how to treat people who were not quite well and wanted attention but no nagging and no rules. There were no rules at Edgewood except doctors’ orders that came with the guests.

  On this Thursday before Labor Day there were only four guests, two men and two women, and they were not very well assorted this time. There was old Mrs. Norbury, a repeater, from Long Island, who had a mild form of arthritis; a Mrs. Turnbull from Pittsburgh, recently widowed, in her forties, charted as “run-down”; a businessman of sixty from New York named Haynes, who had a heart condition. Edgewood was just right for him—invigorating but not too high, a nice change from the city; and a youngish man from a Jersey suburb, named Motley, sent as an obstinate case of trigeminal neuralgia.

  Fortunately they were all bridge players.

  Miss Studley came into the lounge, watched them finish the rubber and tot up the score, and then asked them if they didn’t think they might as well call it a day.

  “Just as you like, of course,” she said in her cheerful way. “Sit up all night if you like. But Mrs. Norbury is practically off the train, and Miss Pepper wants to give her massage. Anybody hungry? Miss Pepper will come right up with eggnog or iced cocoa if you are.”

  Nobody was hungry except old Mrs. Norbury, who had the digestion of an ostrich and meant to order an iced cocoa as soon as she went upstairs.

  Mrs. Turnbull, a tall woman with a set, foolish smile, who played a wicked game of contract, got up and said she was all ready to go to bed and read. She said good-night, and tottered up the stairs on high-heeled gilt slippers. Warm as the evening was, she wore a white fur wrap. When she was out of sight Mrs. Norbury cackled: “Early fall fashions for the country.”

  Miss Studley thought a little intramural gossip was good for the guests. She said: “I never saw anything like that emerald bracelet.”

  “Those pearls real, I wonder?” asked Mr. Motley. He was a rather handsome man of thirty, tanned and black-haired, with a cool, competent look about him. He had been in Washington during the war, and was now looking about, so he said, for a business opening.

  “Real? Certainly,” said Mrs. Norbury. “Her second-best string, no doubt.”

  “And ermine!” Miss Studley looked impressed

  “Ermine? My dear woman, that is a white mink dolman.”

  “Is it? What would it cost?”

  “About thirty thousand, I suppose. Or more.”

  “Well, well,” said Mr. Haynes. He was a tall gray-headed man with a gray moustache, well-turned out and very quiet. He seldom talked to anybody.

  “Golf tomorrow, sir?” asked Motley, rising. “If so I’ll go up and read in bed myself.”

  “Very glad to play. Too bad you haven’t somebody in your own class.”

  “You’ll both soon find partners at the Westbury Club,” said Miss Studley. Edgewood guests usually did find partners at the club, through friends or their doctors; or Miss Studley arranged it through friends of her own. She had been born and brought up in Frazer’s Mills, commonly known as The Mills, and knew everybody for miles around.

  The guests went up the stairs that rose gracefully in a curve from the north end of the lobby. Miss Studley turned out all the lights, left the front door open until later, and went upstairs herself. She had no office on the ground floor; her theory being that Edgewood ought to look like a country-house and not like an institution. Her office sitting room was on the top floor. No guest could possibly get the feeling that anybody was being watched or spied on.

  Miss Pepper would lock up last thing before she went to bed; but as a matter of fact doors were often left unfastened all night at The Mills. It was a tight little community where everybody knew everybody and there were few strangers at any time, except Miss Studley’s handpicked guests. The surrounding woods belonged to large estates and were patrolled by game wardens, and at night the silence was vast and deep.

  It was an odd little place, a settlement which had come into being a hundred years before almost by chance; the mills that named it were miles off and in ruins. It consisted of one long street, a back road that branched off from the Westbury road and rejoined the Westbury road to the north beyond a small place called Green Tree, which had not even a post office. There was almost no through traffic at all.

  By twenty-five minutes past ten Mrs. Norbury was established on her sofa with a magazine, waiting for her massage and her iced cocoa. She wore a loose flowered dressing gown, made so that it should at no point constrict her stout person; it was one of a series always in construction for her at a convent.

  Her room was on the second floor in the rear, almost opposite the main stairway and near the head of another flight which led directly down to a side door. This door, like the others at Edgewood, had a screen, and like the others was often left open in hot weather for most of the night. It was open tonight, and the hall lights were unlighted; gnats did sometimes get into Edgewood; though The Mills was supposed to be free of them, and—according to old residents—was practically free of mosquitoes.

  Mrs. Norbury’s sofa was near the window, across the room from the door. She heard a fa
int sound from the direction of the door, looked up, and saw the knob slowly turning. The door was pushed open a little way. Then, as she watched it, expecting to see Miss Pepper and her tray (though Miss Pepper always knocked), it slowly and quietly closed.

  Miss Pepper seemed to be acting in a peculiar way. Mrs. Norbury, slightly surprised, sat looking at the door. She called out: “Who’s that?” but no one answered.

  There was a slight eeriness about the whole thing. Mrs. Norbury got herself off her sofa, disentangled her feet from the long dressing gown, and waddled to the door. She opened it and looked out.

  She saw nothing in the dark hallway but the dim shapes of closed doors; but she thought she heard the screen at the foot of the side stairs close gently. She turned and gazed downwards. It was darker out than in, but she was sure that there was motion outside the screen; something moved away.

  Mrs. Norbury, an intrepid old lady whose mind dealt almost exclusively with fact and who was annoyed by oddities, knew that anybody in Edgewood was free to take an evening stroll if he liked, and often did so; there were dry walks through the grounds, and one of them led around to the front drive. The garage was out there, and all the people in the house had cars except herself and Mrs. Turnbull, whose large impressive automobile was driven by a chauffeur; he had deposited Mrs. Turnbull at Edgewood and left, to return when she was ready to go. Jaunts to and from Pittsburgh were trifles in Mrs. Turnbull’s philosophy of life.

  But why should the person open Mrs. Norbury’s door and retreat without explanation or apology? Every room had its private bath, even newcomers had no excuse for opening wrong doors. But Mrs. Turnbull was evidently a flighty person—except at bridge; her room was next door. She might have made the mistake, been too shy or ill-mannered to apologize, retreated in silence. Somebody else had gone out.

  Since she couldn’t explain the occurrence, and had learned from long experience that a great many occurrences had no rational explanation at all, but were the result of people’s foolish impulses, Mrs. Norbury went back to her room and settled down again.

  At half past ten Miss Pepper knocked and came in, bearing a jug of gratifying proportions on a tray. She was a brisk, freckled girl with many interests besides her job, and she was accustomed to minimize the alarms of the patients. She would not draw distinctions between the nervous system of Mrs. Norbury, for instance, and that of Mrs. Turnbull.

  When Mrs. Norbury related her experience she said, to that lady’s rage, that she had just imagined it.

  “It? What?”

  Miss Pepper had not been paying much attention. She put the tray down and looked vaguely at the door. “Perhaps the latch is loose.”

  “And the wind blew it open?” Mrs. Norbury fanned herself with her magazine.

  “It’s such an old house. They get warped.”

  Mrs. Norbury said distinctly: “Somebody opened my door and shut it again. This strong wind we have tonight wouldn’t turn door handles. I never heard of a hurricane turning door handles.”

  Miss Pepper still thought that the whole thing was probably Mrs. Norbury’s imagination. However, she said cheerfully: “If it worries you I could speak to Miss Studley. Would tomorrow do? She might be in bed.”

  Mrs. Norbury began to laugh. “If it was anywhere else,” she chuckled, “know what I’d think? I’d think somebody came to pay a call on Mrs. Turnbull, and that I scared the life out of him.”

  Miss Pepper laughed too. “Try to scare up anything like that in Frazer’s Mills!”

  “Poor Miss Studley.”

  “She’d have a fit.” Miss Pepper also was highly amused. She said: “I think somebody went out for a stroll and caught their sleeve on the knob going by. Look how loose the thing is.”

  CHAPTER TWO At the Library

  THE RIGBY LIBRARY in Frazer’s Mills is next door to Edgewood, its grounds separated from the Edgewood grounds by an eight-foot hedge. This hedge stops short where the Rigby lawn turns into what used to be the Rigby kitchen gardens.

  The Library is large for a place as small as Frazer’s Mills, and if it were not the pride of the town, would be its white elephant. It had been donated, together with its books, by the last of the Rigbys, who had died many years before. The endowment no longer did more than pay taxes and repairs on it; the Mills now paid the librarian’s salary and bought what new books it could. The house was a small but handsome brick building painted gray, with casement windows. Its front door, smothered in shrubbery, faced Edgewood. It had one large ground-floor room, lined to the ceiling with books—there had never been any reason for building stacks.

  Miss Bluett, the librarian, was a native of Frazer’s Mills, and had had no other job during the whole of her professional life. She had wanted no other. With what little money she had of her own, and her salary, she could live comfortably; she thought Frazer’s Mills the most desirable place in the world, and she ran the Library as she chose.

  At half past ten on Thursday night she was working late. There had been a local donation of books to the Library, she had had a chance to get them brought in that evening, and as she intended to start her Labor Day vacation on Friday morning she had decided to inspect and label the consignment beforehand; the Library Committee met the following week, and she didn’t want to hurry with her report.

  The books had been taken out of their boxes by Hawkins, the Library handyman, and stacked around her desk. The desk was in a corner to the right of a back passage, diagonally across the room from the front door. Hawkins had left a narrow path for her between the piles of books.

  Her desk lamp was on, the only light she needed. Several of the narrow casement windows were open for coolness, and so was the front door; but it had a screen. There was only one other door, the cellar entrance, which Hawkins kept locked because he had tools there.

  At present Miss Bluett was down on her knees among the stacks of bound magazines, peering sideways at titles and muttering. She knew that the gift had all come out of the Carringtons’ garret, and she was not particularly grateful for it. Most of it was battered, none of it was valuable so far as she could tell.

  She heard a faint scratching or rattling somewhere behind her, thought vaguely of squirrels or luna moths—remarkable how much noise a big moth could make against a screen—and went on opening the big volumes of periodicals, one of which lay on her desk. The noise persisted. She looked over her shoulder at the screen door, and thought she saw the latch move. She had not fastened it, such a thing would never have occurred to her. She called out: “Who is it?”

  She got no answer. The latch stopped moving, and something darker than shadow passed across the screen. She got to her feet.

  The Library, isolated among its trees and well back from the street, was as quiet as death. Miss Bluett was far from nervous, nothing ever happened in The Mills to make people nervous; but the silence that had followed her question frightened her very much. She stood looking at the screen, and her throat was dry. There was nothing to prevent the visitor from coming in, and she certainly couldn’t get to the door first.

  But a faint rustle from the rhododendrons to the right of the doorway told her that the visitor had departed. She waited a few moments, and then came to life. She strode to the light switch and turned it on; the ceiling bulbs flared. Then she snatched up a large red book from the nearest pile—it happened to be an old volume of Who’s Who—and walked across to the door. She turned the handle of the screen, and found that it was locked after all.

  Miss Bluett stood looking at it. She knew what had happened—the latch, like all the old fittings, was loose; it had locked itself when she closed the screen after her firmly, as she closed everything.

  She wondered what the accident of the locked screen door had saved her from. She had not much imagination, but she couldn’t help feeling that it had saved her from undesirable company. At any rate, whoever it was had apparently tried to get in, had failed, had not answered when she called out, and had gone quietly away. Miss Bluett di
d not propose to follow.

  But it was one thing to be as frightened as she had been, another thing to admit it to others. Miss Bluett was a little tender of her own reputation for good sense. She did not wish the neighbors to tell her it had been a wandering dog or a wandering boy—there was only the Stapler boys, where she boarded—and to ask her if she had started looking for the burglar under the bed. Even with the perspiration of terror undried on her palms, Miss Bluett could not confess that she was afraid to go home alone.

  She went back to her desk, sat down, and called up the Stapler house. She got Mrs. Stapler, and asked her if the boys were home, and if one of them could come for her with a flashlight. It was as dark as pitch out, and she had forgotten her own torch. “And I don’t want to fall over myself the day before my vacation.”

  Mrs. Stapler said that Willie would be delighted. Miss Bluett put her own torch in her desk drawer, and sat in the glare of the lights, looking at the doorway, until Willie came. She could not even shut and lock the front door—Willie might suspect why. Miss Bluett was a martyr to her own pride. Willie’s piercing whistle, often an annoyance to her, was music in her ears.

  Outside the door she paused. “I thought I heard a big dog around here, Willie. You see any place where he might have gone through those rhododendrons?”

  Willie said they did look tore some.

  CHAPTER THREE At the Wakefield Inn

  BETWEEN THE OLD Rigby place and the more spacious Wakefield property to the south lies the Bay Horse Tavern. It is down on the street, only a narrow yard separating its porch from the footway; but behind it and up to the woods stretches a strip of wasteland overgrown with sumac, goldenrod and brambles, once the Tavern’s stable yard and gardens.

  The Tavern has no license to dispense liquors now, it is a tavern only in name; but it takes roomers upstairs, and its old sign—or a copy of it—hangs out below; a horse’s head bridled. This is sentiment; the ground floor of the Tavern is given over to a drugstore, a general store and the post office.