In the end they found no one and nothing to prove that anyone had been there; they searched with flashlights by that time, as it was rapidly growing dark, for rejected cartridges, searched all through the leaf mold and thick, slippery pine needles and found none.
They did find, however, a rather curious thing.
Sue did not know of it until later; neither, as a matter of fact, did Woody, for at the time when it was discovered he had come back to the house to telephone to Sheriff Benjamin. He told the sheriff eagerly, his sun-streaked hair tousled, a scratch from a low-hanging branch across his hot, flushed face, somebody had shot at Sue. It meant the murderer was at large and in the woods near their house and it proved therefore that Sue was not the murderer, it proved she was not and Henley must see it.
Sue had not thought of that. Chrisy, also listening, muttered approvingly. “Good out of evil. He don’t touch Miss Sue and he get himself hung.”
It was not, however, so simple; the sheriff was noncommittal, but said he would come and bring Henley. When Woody put down the telephone Sue took it and gave Fitz’s number to an operator who by this time was excited and helpful. “He’s not at home, Miss Poore,” she told Sue agitatedly. “He’s at the garage. He got a flat and phoned to his house for somebody to come after him in his other car, the station wagon, but Miss Duval was there, at his house, I mean, so she got on the phone and told him she’d pick him up in her car. Shall I try to reach him at the garage. Miss Poore, did somebody try to shoot you?”
“Yes, I—please try the garage.…”
“How awful! Oh, Miss Poore, we’re all afraid to go home or anywhere at night—we—here’s the garage.…”
But Miss Duval had already come for Mr. Wilson, a man’s voice said. How long ago? Oh, fifteen minutes or so.… Miss Duval had Mr. Baily’s car. He thought they were going to stop at Duval Hall. He’d heard Miss Duval say something about dinner there. The operator rang the Baily number and Camilla answered; yes, Fitz was there, they were having cocktails and about to have dinner. What did Sue want?
Her voice was not particularly pleasant. It was, indeed, so much like Ernestine’s that again it evoked a shadowy presence of Ernestine—chill, defeated about something she had desired and determining to have it anyway. The image fled, however; Camilla gave a faint scream when Sue told her what had happened. Jed and Fitz must have been very near the telephone. Jed took it and Fitz was at his side; Sue could hear his voice. They would come at once. “Who was it, Sue? Didn’t you see him? Don’t you know who it was?” cried Jed. When she explained the little there was to explain he and Fitz both talked at once; Fitz took the telephone, though; he said, his voice shaken and rough in her ear, “Are you sure you’re all right, Sue? Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes, yes …”
“Did you call the police?”
“Yes, they’re in the woods, searching.”
There was a short silence; then Fitz said, “Have them search the house, too. And the stables. The car’s at the door; we’ll be there in five minutes.”
It was, of course, more than five minutes; it was three miles by highway from Duval Hall; by the time they arrived Woody, with an odd, secretive look in his eyes had also telephoned Wat and Ruby Luddington.
“Why are you phoning them?” asked Caroline. “I think we ought to let Judge Shepson know, but Wat and Ruby …”
Woody, stubborn and secretive, did not reply. And someone answered at the stately, huge Wat Luddington house; it was an even statlier butler, imported by Ruby from New York; he would not be queried or hurried but he at last imparted the information that Mr. Luddington was out. Madam was out too and at Woody’s insistence he said they were both expected home to dinner. Some quality of urgency in Woody’s questioning did however penetrate his calm; he volunteered the information that he believed Mr. Luddington had gone to a political meeting in Bedford and that Madam was exercising one of the horses and ought to have returned by then.
Dinner at the Luddington establishment was at eight-thirty; it was a formal and worldly institution which had been looked upon with slight disfavor on the part of Ernestine and Camilla. Ernestine, however, had pushed the Baily dinner hour up to eight. It seemed very strange now to Sue to remember it and other trivial rivalries between the two women. Ernestine had been the undisputed leader, not only of that small quartet of friends—Ernestine herself and Camilla, Sue and Ruby, but of their little group in the county, the hunting and riding and gay little group—until Ruby with all the DeJong money had returned, married to Wat and setting up an establishment which far surpassed Ernestine’s. The memory of those small battles was like the memory of a gay and sunny world which had never existed.
In that world there was no horror, no dark ways to murder; she thought of Ernestine in her yellow gown with her fingers pressed to her back and blood oozing from between them. She thought of Dr. Luddington. She thought of the shocking crash of sound from the shadowed pine thicket. Woody was telephoning now to Judge Shepson. Some of the police were returning from the pine woods. She could hear their heavy steps on the porch.
It had grown too dark in the woods to continue their search. In any case they were not likely to find anybody; there’d been time for whoever hid in the shadows to have escaped. They felt and said that further search was futile.
One of them, a sergeant, asked Sue if she had heard a car along the road.
“I don’t remember it. But one might have come along. I might not have noticed it.”
“You can’t see much of the highway,” Woody told him. “If you’ll stand there on the steps you’ll see. The laurels make too high a hedge.”
“Mmm,” said the sergeant and no more.
Woody got out bourbon for them which they refused rather wistfully. Chrisy bore in great platters of scrambled eggs and bacon from the kitchen and brimming cups of coffee which they did not refuse. The sergeant kept his own counsel, however, until the sheriff and Captain Henley arrived, when he drew them aside, out on the porch for a low-voiced conversation. They were still there when Fitz and Jed and Camilla came, the gravel flying under the wheels of the car as Jed braked to a quick stop; Judge Shepson, rather flushed and unnaturally vivacious from his before-dinner highball and his hastily eaten dinner, arrived a moment or two later. It began to seem like a kind of party, but a nightmarish party, with bright lights everywhere and revolvers strapped in leather holsters at the troopers’ waists, adding a note of grim masquerade.
Except it was not a masquerade. The sheriff and Captain Henley, having finished with the sergeant took Sue into Caroline’s study again, and with old Reveller eyeing them balefully from the couch, questioned her.
They let Judge Shepson listen; he puffed and crossed and uncrossed his fat old legs in their baggy trousers but did not have much to say. And certainly Sue did not have much to tell.
But she began to perceive, almost at once, that Woody’s rosy and hopeful theory that the attack upon her would go to prove that she was not the murderer was, at least as far as Henley was concerned, merely a rosy and hopeful theory.
He was flatly, arrogantly frank about it. “Are you perfectly sure that this so-called attempt to murder you really occurred?”
The sheriff’s faded blue eyes turned icily toward him; Judge Shepson stirred, opened his mouth, closed it again. Sue said: “Yes—yes—I told you …”
“Exactly,” Captain Henley said. “You told us.”
“But—but the pillar, the splinters …”
Henley got up. “That’s not proof.” He looked at the sheriff. “I frankly have had enough of this. There’s no proof whatever that this attack occurred. It could have been designed with exactly this purpose in view, to make us believe that this girl herself is the object of a murderous attack and that therefore she herself is not guilty. In my opinion it’s an outright attempt to deceive us.”
“You can’t deny the shot,” said the sheriff. “Everybody heard it. Miss Caroline and Woody and the cook …”
“The boy did it him
self. He’d do anything to help his sister.”
“What about the horse?” asked the sheriff.
Judge Shepson leaned forward, his protuberant blue eyes blinking. “What horse?”
It came out then. The sheriff told them. The troopers in searching the woods had found no fugitive, they had found no cartridges, they had found no footprints, no cigarette ends, no matches in the pines—but they had found in the soft clay at the edge of a little gully the mixed, confused hoofprints of a horse.
“It was near a sapling; the sapling is barked a little about the height where the horse could have been tied. The hoofprints are deep and, the sergeant thought, fresh; there’s a little trickle of water through the gully. It looks as if a horse was tied there for maybe half an hour, maybe less, there’s no telling about that, but there are hoofprints.”
The lawyer’s eyes were bulging.
“How far is that from the pines?”
“About a hundred yards; we’ll look at it by daylight.”
“What happened to the hoofprints? Which way did they go?”
“Apparently, as far as they can discover, the horse then jumped the gully; but the hoofprints vanish; of course it was dark by then; but there’s another strip of pine. A carpet of pine needles doesn’t show much.”
Judge Shepson rubbed his hands together and looked at Henley. “You’ll have a hard time disproving that in court!”
“You’ll have a harder time proving that the hoofprints were made tonight,” snapped Henley. He turned to the sheriff. “Look here, Sheriff—we’re wasting time and energy and the taxpayers’ money. Wilkins was right; that girl’s guilty as hell. This is only a dodge …”
The sheriff got up too, unfolding his spare, old bones slowly. “You’ve got to have a case this time, Henley, that’ll hold up in court. And I don’t believe this girl killed Dr. Luddington and I don’t think a jury’ll believe it.”
“You can’t tell what a jury’ll believe,” Henley said angrily. He stood for a moment, his eyes sparkling, his red face shining almost as brightly and furiously as his boots; then without a word he jerked toward the door, in a kind of military motion as if snapping to attention at some drill command heard only by his alert ears, and went out. Sue looked at the sheriff.
But if she had hoped for a word of reassurance he did not give it; he looked tired and discouraged himself. He walked over to the couch and bent to scratch Reveller’s ears; he said: “You didn’t hear a horse, did you? Or anything like it?”
She shook her head. “There was only the sound of the birds rising out of the thicket. I don’t remember anything else.”
“No—rustle in the pines. No breaking branches or anything like that?”
Sue thought back desperately; he saw failure in her eyes. “Well.” He straightened. “Maybe we can find somebody who did see something. Maybe—you tell your aunt to try not to be too upset. And by the way …” he was at the door, his face very lined and white like a papier mâche mask, his faded blue eyes anxious. “By the way, that young brother of yours … tell him to keep a lookout but not to get too hasty with his trigger finger. I’m letting him keep his gun,” he said as an afterthought and nodded and went away.
Judge Shepson gave a kind of sigh and grunt and got up too. “It’s funny about that horse. And your aunt’s old hunter too. You’re sure you tied him up—Jeremy, I mean, there at Dr. Luddington’s?”
Sue nodded. He sighed again, gave her a hazy smile and pat on the shoulder, said, “I don’t see anything we can do tonight,” and ambled away into the hall. He was, she knew, an able lawyer; he had successfully defended Jed. She wished, though, that he had been able to say something solid and heartening.
There were voices from the front of the house, the sound of departing automobiles. Woody came back to the study, followed by Fitz, and Woody was in a white rage; Captain Henley had asked for his revolver, had examined it, had smelled it and then asked Woody point blank if he had fired the shot.
“And the hell of it is, I had fired the gun! I fired it there in the woods. I thought I saw something move and thought I’d better fire first and inquire later. It wasn’t anything, an old hump of dead grass Lij had left there after he mowed. But of course, my gun had been fired. He could smell the powder. One shot was gone out of the barrel.” He appealed to Sue. “You heard me, Chrisy heard me. That damned fool, Henley …”
Fitz said, “Take it easy, Woody. We can’t do everything all at once.” He spoke to Woody quietly, but he looked at Sue and he was frightened. He tried not to show it. Somebody called to Woody from the hall and Woody, still in a rage, went out. Fitz crossed the room to where Sue sat huddled in the old armchair, one foot tucked under her. She looked like a schoolgirl with her brown tweed skirt, her white blouse and yellow sweater, her rumpled hair and he thought she looked not so much frightened as bewildered.
She said, “Why should anybody shoot at me? Why?”
He pulled up Caroline’s footstool, moved to the floor three hunt magazines and a book about kennel feeding, and sat down beside Sue.
“We’ll try to make them give you a police guard. If they won’t Woody’s got a gun and I’ll stay here, too.” He took her hand and turned it over and looked at it as intently as if he were memorizing every line of the pink palm and lifted it to his cheek. As he did so Camilla came flying into the room, her coat billowing around her, saw them and came to an abrupt stop. “Well, my gracious, Sue, do you have to have Fitz hold your hand?”
Jed followed her. Fitz said with a twinkle, “Well, it’s a nice hand,” and Jed, his eyes bright and anxious, cried, “Sue, what happened? Didn’t you see anybody?” His anxiety was genuine; it occurred to Sue rather shame-facedly that as a rule, if Jed had deep feelings, it did not move her. “It’s all right,” she told him quickly. “I wasn’t hurt. I have no idea who it was—or why,” she added with a kind of chill in her heart. She turned to Fitz. “There must be a reason and there can’t be! There’s nobody who would—do—that …”
Wat and Ruby came in; Woody and Caroline came, too. Jed said, “It must have been an accident. Somebody shooting in the woods, afraid to come forward. Or some crackpot …”
Wat, pale and drawn, too, looking suddenly like his father, came to take her hand. “It’s dreadful, Sue, dreadful.” He stood looking down at her, swallowing and for once at a loss for words. But then he seemed to pull himself together, and resume his air of bright, nervous competence. And all at once everybody was questioning, exclaiming, offering opinions, and none of them had an answer.
Ruby’s seemed the most logical and credible. “It’s a tramp, it’s somebody hanging around, hiding in the hills. It’s somebody with a grudge and a twisted, horrible—oh, Wat,” she turned to Wat with a white face, her hands catching each other, a throb in her voice which was unlike Ruby. “Wat, they’ve got to find him. They’ve got to … Can’t you round up a posse and search the hills? That’s what people used to do.”
It was not, said Wat nervously but kindly, a bad idea; not a bad idea at all; except the police were perfectly adequate; they were on the job; they’d swear out deputies if they thought it necessary. He smiled a little, thinly, and patted Ruby’s shoulder. “It’s not like the old times, Ruby; you sound like your own grandfather. A posse,” said Wat and gave the ghost of a chuckle.
“Something’s got to be done,” Ruby said.
“Something is being done,” Wat assured her. “You’ll see. It takes time.”
Ruby, amazingly, began to cry; it was amazing because nobody, as far as Sue knew, had ever seen Ruby so conquered by emotion. Sue was touched and rather apologetic; she wouldn’t have thought that a danger to herself would have so moved Ruby.
Caroline watched with the stricken expression that since Dr. Luddington’s death, since the news of the warrant for Sue’s arrest had fastened itself like a mask upon her face. Camilla touched her hair and slid out of her long coat; she had changed for dinner—for dinner with Fitz as a guest, thought Sue unexpectedly.
The long pink-flowered dress looked out of place and ornate in the comfortable, shabby study. Jed, frowning, watched Ruby, Fitz leaned back on the footstool and linked his hands around his knees. “Look here,” he said, “we’ve not talked like this before. Together I mean and—straight out. We were the people who were closest to Ernestine and to Dr. Luddington. Why don’t we try to put things together? There are no policemen here; we can say what we please.”
“What in the world …?” began Wat, giving Fitz a startled look over Ruby’s heaving shoulder.
“You begin it,” said Fitz. “What were you doing tonight when somebody fired at Sue? Where were you?”
16
IF SUE had thought of it in advance she would have said that any implication such as that Fitz unexpectedly had introduced would have set off an explosion of major proportions; southern tempers ran high, with perhaps pride and a certain combative joy in the tide. Certainly, most of the people she knew had rather a flair for a fracas, particularly Woody, particularly Jed and certainly Camilla and Caroline in their different ways. Wat, of course, was always like a firecracker, waiting for a match. He flared up, but then, he fizzled out, too, as more prudent considerations overcame him. Woody thought as she did; he was standing in the doorway, his eyes lighted. “Whoops! By golly, Fitz. A free-for-all!”
Both of them were wrong. Nobody even glanced at Woody. Everybody in the room was looking at Fitz with startled, yet so far as Sue could see, perfectly genuine surprise. Everyone that is, except Ruby, whose face was still hidden on Wat’s rather scrawny shoulder, but who had stopped crying to listen.
Then Camilla, who was nobody’s fool, leaped several fences. “My gracious, Fitz, Wat wouldn’t shoot his own father!”
Wat in his surprise hadn’t gone that far; now the firecracker in him began to sizzle; his hatchet face turned bright scarlet, he disencumbered himself of Ruby by putting her down rather hard upon the end of the couch, which move Reveller protested with a low growl, and advanced toward Fitz, taking off his coat. “We’ll settle this, Fitz Wilson! We’ll settle this right now, man to man. You’re insulting, sir, insulting. You’ve outraged my grief, my deepest feelings. You’re not fit to call yourself a man, sir, you …”
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