The Balcony

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  Patience was immediately diverted. “Sinus, eh? When work piles up we can count on Eliot taking to his bed.”

  “Enough! Enough!” Richard waved his hands. “Where is my sister? You say she’s gone. I say she’s not! I say the fiends of hell themselves could not drag her from this house when her only brother was expected.” I took this opportunity to do the natural thing which everybody had overlooked. I started up the stairs, and Glenn grinned and came after me. In ragged order the others followed, Wanda continuing her protestations, Richard his loud summons of his sister.

  I was the first to reach Amanda’s door. It seemed impossible that she would not have heard the approaching clamor, but I rapped anyway. Richard arrived and began a thunderous pounding.

  In the fraction of a moment that elapsed between my rap and his arrival, a curious thing occurred. From behind the door I heard a slight noise. It was difficult to describe—that short, sharp report. It sounded a little as though something small and metallic—a coin perhaps— had fallen from a height. Before I could mention the small sound, Great-uncle Richard had ceased pounding to try the door, and had found it locked. This threw him into a frenzy.

  “If the door is locked Amanda is inside!”

  “Not necessarily,” said Wanda, and smiled her contemptuous little smile. “She always locks her room. She’s very careful about it.”

  “Since when?” demanded Richard incredulously.

  “Since Miss Patience Hieronomo arrived,” said Wanda blandly.

  Patience turned bright red. She would have spoken, but I spoke first.

  “Please, please, be quiet. I thought I heard a noise inside.”

  Great-uncle Richard at once increased his uproar. “You heard a noise inside. Then Amanda is in there. Good God, she must be ill. She’s fainted!” With one sweeping gesture, he thrust me toward the others. “Stand back! Stand back! I'm going to break down the door.”

  It was my first experience with the artistic temperament, and I couldn’t cope with it. Richard Hieronomo tore off his dinner coat. His wife emitted a squeak of weak dismay.

  “Richard! Richard! Please try to calm yourself, my dear.”

  He shook her off. He bared his arms.

  “Stop acting, Richard,” snapped Patience. “I’m convinced Amanda isn’t in the house. Anyhow you can’t break down that door. It’s solid oak.”

  That may have stopped him. He actually paused. Into the pause broke Wanda’s voice, demure and innocent:

  “What you need, Mr. Hieronomo, is an ax.”

  Triumph blazed in Great-uncle Richard’s eye. “An ax! A sensible woman speaks at last.” He pushed Wanda toward the stairs. “Lead, wench, lead me to a broadax, a halberd, a mace! You and I will find a way to reach my sister.”

  After that no further protest was of the slightest use. Patience, who insisted acidly that Amanda was as healthy as an ox, argued to the last. Five minutes after our disordered group had flocked downstairs, we were again collected at Great-aunt Amanda’s door. Richard Hieronomo, ax in hand, was in charge.

  “We’re coming, Amanda,” he shouted and raised the flashing blade. “In a minute you’ll be in your brother’s arms.”

  “Richard, really . . said the exasperated Patience.

  “It might be better,” Hoy suggested mildly, “if you used a crowbar first and tried to force the lock. Less destructive.”

  Richard’s answer was to swing the ax. Splinters flew and flew and flew. The door was stout, but Richard was vain. Too vain to permit either Glenn or Hoy to relieve him at his melodramatic and destructive task. At last the groaning panel gave. Panting breathlessly, red as a turkey cock, Richard laid down the ax and squeezed through the jagged aperture. The rest of us crowded pell-mell after him.

  We entered a large, a pleasant and an entirely empty room.

  “She—she isn’t here,” said Richard.

  “What did you expect?” retorted Patience in scathing tones. “Wait until she sees that door!”

  Richard, looking suddenly bleak and crestfallen, glanced at his wife. “Well, Lucy, apparently you and I aren’t so important to Amanda as I imagined!” The words were jaunty, but the tone was not.

  Hoy, like the rest of us, was gazing curiously around the room. I saw him start. He crossed to a dressing table set against the wall. A champagne glass, still filled with flat champagne, was resting there. Simultaneously, Wanda pointed toward the bed where a velvet evening gown overlapped silver slippers wrapped in tissue paper.

  “Mrs. Silver,” said the maid, happy to seize the center of the stage, “came here and got out her dress and slippers. She came in, and then she must have changed her mind. Remember, it was quarter of five when I heard her leave.”

  “You’ve told us that,” said Patience tartly.

  A closet door was standing open, revealing a row of battered boots, a pair of walking shoes, and, hung in neat array, Amanda’s modest wardrobe, mostly riding habits. The only incongruous note was a fluffy negligee in salmon pink. Wanda moved upon the closet, peered curiously inside.

  “Mrs. Silver didn’t take a coat. But then she seldom bothers.” I thought the pretty face looked vaguely disappointed. There was a vague air of disappointment in her tone. “Well, what do you intend to do next? Shall I serve dinner—or what?”

  “We’ll wait,” said Patience firmly, “until we hear from my sister.”

  Somehow, even then, I had a cold and curious little feeling that we might have a long, long wait.

  VI

  THE TWO HOURS THAT ELAPSED BEFORE the six of us finally sat down to a stone-cold dinner remain in my mind as hours of sheer torture. Great-aunt Amanda did not return. There was no word from her. Richard, who with every passing second became increasingly agitated and vocal, was determined to call the police. Patience stood firm against it.

  “What are we to tell them? That Amanda chose to leave her own home without notifying the household? We’d have the whole town agog and Amanda furious.”

  “She wouldn’t leave when I was coming.”

  “You don’t know what she’d do. No more than I. I’m convinced that something’s gone wrong about the sale. I know Amanda hasn’t been herself. Not since I arrived last week, anyway. Why should she lock her door against me?”

  Richard turned to peer at me suspiciously. “You said you heard a noise.”

  “I thought I did,” I said, wearily. I had looked long and vainly in Aunt Amanda’s room and had failed completely to discover the origin of the sharp, small sound. “I may have been mistaken.”

  “I suppose,” said Patience, slowly, “Amanda didn’t drop any hint about her plans when you went up to help her dress.”

  “You’ve forgotten, Aunt Patience. I didn’t see her after she left the drawing room.”

  Patience gave me an odd look. “But surely, dear, you went upstairs almost directly afterwards.”

  “I—I only knocked at the door. She didn’t answer. Then—then I decided to go outside a while.”

  Patience frowned. “This was at four o’clock?”

  “A little afterwards,” I said faintly. “Anyhow, I went outside.”

  Richard’s glance had become intent. He leaned forward in his chair. “That’s right. I remember now. When I arrived, you were coming around from the rear grounds. You were out then for an hour and a half?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Our gloomy anxious group was gathered in the formal dining room—for all its Chippendale and Sheraton, a cheerless kind of place. The house was still without electric power. In the candlelight everyone seemed very quiet. I felt the beating of my heart.

  “I took a walk,” I said.

  Uncle Richard made no comment. I saw him glance at his wife, and then at Patience. Hoy, a bald-headed man of forty-seven, had been eliminated from the agitated counsel of his elders exactly as though he were as young as Glenn and I. He saw a chance to make a remark.

  He said cheerfully, “You should have invited Glenn along. Glenn’s quite a walke
r, too.”

  An awkward pause ensued.

  Patience suddenly stood up. “To satisfy you, Richard, I’m going to telephone Verona. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find Amanda there."

  She went out and presently returned, apparently in a more cheerful frame of mind. She had not reached the real-estate agent but that very fact seemed to be proof to her that the two women were together. She pointed out that Verona Gay had been on the grounds that morning.

  Eventually she silenced Richard. Our dismal little party trailed into the drawing room that now was dismal too, all its temporary gaiety gone. We spent a wretched evening.

  I went upstairs rather late. Glenn, who had spent the evening in my vicinity, possibly to protect me from the dour, suspicious glances of my Great-uncle Richard, was sharing a bedroom with his father on the lower floor, but he followed me out into the foyer.

  We paused a moment beside the stairway. I found my ugly second cousin’s presence oddly comforting. Since dinner, it had seemed to me that slowly and imperceptibly a chasm had widened between me and the other members of the family. It wasn’t only Great-uncle Richard whom I caught watching me, but his wife and even Great-aunt Patience . . .

  Glenn put out a freckled hand which swallowed up my own.

  “Nervous, cousin?”

  “Not—not particularly.”

  “Say the word, and I’ll ask Aunt Patience to put me on your floor.”

  That I couldn’t do.

  When I reached the blackness of the upper corridor, however, I wished I had him along. My candle threw great flickering shadows, shone eerily on the shattered door of Great-aunt Amanda’s room. I went on into my great-grandfather’s room. Beneath John S. Hieronomo’s somber, watching eyes, I got my night things. My candle threw a yellow circle around me, a spot of light that moved as I moved. Most of the vast room was in Stygian darkness. The air was icy cold. I was shivering as I undressed. Perhaps it was imagination, reaction from that endless evening, but all at once the room itself became horrible to me. Dreadful shapes and shadows seemed to linger in the inky corners, to stand beside the desk, to crouch behind the massive wardrobe. The tremendous canopied bed seemed not yards but miles away. I could sense, not see, its ghostly outlines in the gloom.

  I started bravely in that direction, clinging tightly to the candle. A draught of freezing air blew across my face, something moved and rustled. I gasped.

  The window on the balcony was open.

  The draperies were stirring in and out, dragging across the snowy floor beyond. I had not been able to force the warped pane, but someone had. Someone had stepped through the window and to the balcony. Even by candlelight the prints of heavy riding boots were visible in the snow.

  At that I fled.

  By the time I reached Aunt Patience’s room, I had conquered my causeless terror, but I was frantically determined that Patience should admit me. I knocked and pounded until finally she came. She had obviously climbed from bed. Cold cream glistened on her cheeks, a net restrained her hair, a chinstrap held her quivering chin in place.

  “What in the world?”

  “Aunt Amanda was in my room this afternoon! On the balcony. Her boots left marks in the snow.” Patience didn’t say a word. “Shouldn’t we call the others?” I asked, made desperate by her quiet.

  “What purpose would that serve?” she asked slowly, and in a more friendly tone. She drew me into the room. “You’ve let yourself become unstrung, my dear. We can’t all behave like your Uncle Richard. Why shouldn’t Amanda have stepped into your room? Possibly she was hunting for you.”

  “On the balcony?”

  She said sharply, “One thing’s certain, Anne. I am convinced Amanda left this house of her own free will. That’s enough for me until morning. I’ve had enough excitement tonight.”

  Then she looked at me indecisively, sighed and asked if I cared to stay the night with her. She more than filled the bed herself. I accepted gratefully a narrow, bumpy couch. I expected to lie awake but despite my firm resolves, I slept.

  Actually, I didn’t wake until nearly eight o’clock. Patience was already gone. I threw on my bathrobe, and stepped into the hall. Wanda, equipped with a broom and mop, was just starting into the room I had vacated with such relief. She saw me coming from Patience’s room, and paused to stare.

  “Any news of Aunt Amanda?” I asked eagerly.

  “She isn’t back,” replied the girl, assuming an air of unconcern. “Your Uncle Richard’s got his way at last. They’re phoning the police.”

  I went down immediately. Glenn, Patience, Hoy and Lucy were clustered anxiously around the telephone closet. Richard was at the instrument. He hung up the telephone. “The Sheriff is coming,” he began. “He seems to think . . .”

  Great-uncle Richard never finished the remark. From the upper floor came a piercing scream, and then another and another.

  I don’t know who first reached John S. Hieronomo’s room. I do know that when Glenn and I rushed in, the others all were there and that Wanda was continuing her senseless screaming and that no one was attempting to bring her back to sanity.

  The room that had been so dark the night before was bright with sunlight. Sunlight was dancing on the canopied four-poster bed, was shining on the carpeted platform which supported it. One might have wondered at Wanda’s screams, at the horrified faces of the family. Even before we crossed the room, however, and went around the bed, I think I must have known what we would find.

  The crumpled body of Amanda Silver lay on the far side of the carpeted platform. She was still in riding clothes. Her booted feet touched the floor, one of her hands clutched the coverlet of the bed, the other trailed along the steps. Blood, now dried and dark, had spilled in an ugly flood from a forehead wound and stained her blouse and jacket.

  “Murdered—my sister—foully murdered!” This from Richard in a choked voice.

  “She—she never left the house at all,” someone said.

  The voices were far-off and queer. And then I felt Glenn’s steady fingers on my arm.

  “Pull yourself together, Anne.”

  He swung me toward a window. In a kind of nightmare dream I saw that the window now was closed, that window on the balcony! The snow beyond, and the footprints that had marked it, were no longer there. The balcony floor was swept clear and clean; the footprints had vanished.

  VII

  ANY EMERGENCY IS A TEST of human character, and it has been said that murder is the ultimate emergency. I can’t say that I met the test too well. My recollection of the interval that followed our discovery of Aunt Amanda’s body is inchoate and cloudy. I have a confused memory of Glenn Hieronomo moving from my side and kneeling on the carpeted platform to make what must have been the most difficult examination in his brief career in medicine. Aunt Amanda had been shot to death; she had died very quickly with a bullet in her brain.

  “There’s no possibility of suicide,” said Glenn, and got stiffly to his feet. “The gun isn’t anywhere around. Unless—” he glanced toward Great-uncle Richard. “Shall I look under the bed?”

  Richard didn’t seem to hear. The tall, dark man, who quite suddenly appeared his fifty-eight years and more, had gone instantly to his tiny wife. Or perhaps she had gone to him. For once it was difficult to tell which was the protector, whether Richard was supporting Lucy or Lucy was supporting him. For once the actor wasn’t conscious of his audience. Hoy, his own face pale, stood beside them.

  Patience, who like Hoy seemed somehow thinner and more like the gaunt Hieronomos, had sunk numbly to a chair. I watched her eyes move slowly from her fallen sister, stop at her father’s portrait—catch the sombre, red-brown gaze of the man who had met his own violent end just twenty-five years before, and on another bleak Thanksgiving Day.

  “How the past returns,” she whispered to herself.

  “The gun isn’t underneath the bed,” announced Glenn a moment later. “Or anywhere about. It’s murder, all right.”

  Patience
seemed to come to herself. “When? Can you tell us when it happened, Glenn?”

  “She’s been dead some time,” said Glenn, and I saw how ashen his face was. He was staring at the carpeted platform that served as Amanda Silver’s bier. “The coroner will have to fix the hour, of course—that’s not my job. But I’m quite sure that she’s been dead since— since some time yesterday.”

  Patience wet her lips. “But that’s not possible.”

  “I’m afraid it is, Aunt Patience. She’s been dead for many hours.”

  Hoy said uneasily, “It’s—it’s unfortunate we didn’t think to search the house last night.”

  And then he glanced from Patience to me. Patience was looking at me too. I was too stunned and shocked to grasp the implication that might be read into the long delay that elapsed between the murder and our discovery of it, and how that delay was to affect my own position in the coming days. Others in the group, I know, were already speculating about something that had yet to occur to me. I did wonder confusedly why no one had heard the shot.

  “The room is soundproof,” Patience said. “I—I would have supposed, my dear, you knew.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” I said mechanically, and did not observe the oddness of her tone.

  Throughout, Wanda continued her senseless shrieking, like Cassandra shrieking to a multitude too stunned to quiet her. Glenn grasped her by the shoulders and marched her from the room, and I followed them. No one of us could be of further help to Aunt Amanda.

  Once he pushed the hysterical maid into the hall, Glenn took stringent measures. He began to shake the girl. “Stop! Stop, I say!” Wanda only screamed the harder. I approached and suggested water. I started toward a bathroom.

  “Anne, wait—wait a moment.” Startled by his tone— an odd, uncertain note in it—I hesitated. “You—well, Anne, you’d better go back to the others. Stay with them.”

  I looked at him, perplexed by the expression on his ugly, freckled face. At this point Wanda abruptly decided to abandon her hysterics. She closed her mouth and screamed no more. Her bright eyes flickered from Glenn to me.