House Of Storm (24 page)

She rejected that theory, too, and it left only Jebe. Jebe had said that there were some people who wouldn’t be sorry that Hermione was dead. Jebe had then turned evasive and silent when she had questioned him. But wasn’t the first statement a mere recital of fact that everyone knew? Wasn’t his evasion the quick, innately diplomatic and polite evasion of an old and trained and loyal servant?

Suddenly she realized that the room was very still and had been still for a long time. She was chilled and cramped, huddling there. How long had that utter, complete silence in the room lasted? Was it as empty of other human presence as all at once it seemed?

She waited and listened and cautiously lifted her head. She could see only shadows, with darker, heavier shadows marking tables and chairs. None of them moved; no whisper or motion hovered now in the deep dusk. She waited longer and presently something stronger and more authoritative than sheerly human reasoning began to seep out of that silence and that was an atavistic sense of loneliness. She knew and could not say how she knew that no one now was in the room except herself and it was as sure a knowledge as that one that had warned her of danger.

But she could not trust that knowledge; she had to test it with an argument that reason would accept. She bent and slid one slipper from her foot, stood poised with it in her hand for a second and then flung it lightly across the room.

There was a small thump and clatter as it struck some piece of furniture. And then nothing. No sound, no rush of footsteps, nothing.

Her childish but direct ruse was probably successful, she reasoned; but she waited, too, in case of a trick. Then very cautiously, very quietly, holding her skirt so it would not brush the sofa, groping ahead of her with her free hand so she would not strike some chair or table, she started toward the door. One step and another and, listening, waiting, another. She had a sense of direction now. She knew where the fireplace and sofa which had concealed her stood in relation to the rest of the room and to the door into the hall. But it seemed a long time before she reached the open space that was the door. Her hands felt unsteady and cold, her breath stung in her throat. She waited, too, at the door into the hall and there was no light there, no flare of candles anywhere, and no sound. She knew too, then, the general direction of the stairway.

She searched the gloom and there were only deeper, heavier shadows of walls and furniture. She took a long uneven breath. She reached down and took off the other slipper before she started across the hall, which seemed all at once very wide and unguarded. The storm there was louder than in the room she had just left: it could muffle any sounds of pursuit. She had an impulse to run wildly toward where she thought the stairway must be and barely succeeded in restraining the demand of her own body. She took a step or two and listened; still nothing moved or spoke; nothing came furtively from the darkness. She reached the stairway sooner than she expected and stumbled a little against the lower step and caught at the newel post. The slight sound seemed loud. Her heart pounded suffocatingly while she waited and then clinging to the newel post, sliding her hand upward from it to the banister, she started up the stairway. Halfway along Aurelia said: “Who is that?”

Nonie stopped.

Darkness whirled and circled around her; her hand gripped the banister as if it had frozen upon it. She could not speak; she would not speak. Where was Aurelia?
Where had she been?

And from the darkness below Aurelia said again, more loudly, with that shaken, heavy vehemence in her voice: “Who is that? Where are the lights? Where are the candles? What …?” Aurelia listened too, sharply, intently and then demanded: “
Who is that
?”

And Nonie freed herself from the banister, freed herself from the inertia of terror and ran, lightly, swiftly in her slipperless feet on up the stairs, around the corner, groping surely in the darkness for the door to her own room.

She slid inside, she fumbled for the door, for a lock upon it, and with what seemed then a miracle of discovery found a bolt and closed the door and locked it. And leaned, panting, half-crying, against it.

Aurelia?

After a moment she thought of the candle that, when she went downstairs had burned in the hall. And of the candlestick she had herself carried downstairs, with its reassuring light, and then left there on the table in the hall beside the big, silver candelabra. Well, she couldn’t go back for it.

But she didn’t like the deeper darkness now in the room either. There was only the dark rectangle of the great bed, the dimly lighted blotch which marked the French windows leading upon the balcony. Were there candles anywhere in the room?

The French windows rattled and shook; the rain beat like heavy footsteps upon the balcony outside. Something had come loose about one of the shutters, so it tapped steadily—too steadily.

The wind sounded like a voice, calling her name.

It was a voice, and it was Jim. She ran, stumbling in the gloom, finding her way toward the balcony.

S
HE FUMBLED FOR THE
bolts on the French windows and found them; they were stiff and unwieldy. The storm thrust and battered outside and Jim cried again, “Nonie—Nonie …” and all at once the bolt slid and the door flung itself open. Rain and wind surged into the room and Jim, his face a white oval in the darkness, was in the room too, his wet oilskins brushing against her, pushing his shoulder against the shuttered windows to close them, shutting out the turmoil. After that instant’s wildness the dusky room seemed quiet. She could hear him breathing heavily; she could see him dimly.

“Quite a storm,” he said, panting. “I got up by the trellis—it’s hanging by one end. I made a jump for the railing.”

“
Jim …
”

“What it is? Nonie, what’s wrong?”

His wet oilskin slid to the floor and his hands went out toward her. She cried incoherently: “Someone is here—in the house—downstairs …”

His hands caught her shoulders hard. His voice came hard and tense and frightened out of the dusk: “What do you mean? Hurry, tell me …”

Storm outside, dusk and shadows and strange shapes in the room, and Jim was there—solid and real, to fight off threat. She clung to him and told him what there was to tell and it was suddenly absurdly little.

But he too said in that tense harsh voice: “Aurelia? Aurelia was there?”

“But there are other people in the house, Jim. Roy and Lydia and Dr. Riordan. At least his bag was there …”

“Did you see Riordan?”

“No …”

“Is Dick here?”

“Roy said he had gone after you. To Middle Road.”

A grim note came into his voice: “I thought he would. I did what I had to do there and came back through the banana plantation. Everything is a shambles. The island looks as if it had been under shellfire. I meant to get back before the storm got worse. Nonie …” his voice stopped. The dim outline of his face looked rigid and white and deeply thoughtful. He said after a moment: “Nonie, the time somebody walked along the hedge and frightened you—was it like this? I mean, did you feel the same way?”

The question, coming sharply out of the dusk like that, perplexed her. Her own answer, in a strange way, perplexed her too, for she said immediately, “No.”

“What was different about it?”

“I don’t know. I—yes, I do know. This just now was real.”

“And you aren’t sure that the other thing was real?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand why I answered like that. Yet …”

“Yes—go on.”

She said suddenly: “The other time—it was as if that was meant to frighten me. It did frighten me. But this—just now, that was different. That was real, Jim—that was …” The truth swept up suddenly to such an appalling climax that her own words stopped themselves on her lips. Jim said, “This was intended to be murder.”

The windows rattled savagely behind him, as if the thing he talked of were out there, trying to force its terrible way into the house again. He said: “Listen, Nonie—wait, I want a light. Where’s a candle? Oh, you said you left it down there. I’ll get another. You can’t stay here in the dark. He got out matches; she saw dimly his hand searching his pocket. The matches, however, were wet and would not strike. He fumbled around the great bed and disappeared on the other side of it; there was a sharp sputter and a small glancing light in his hand, touching his brown face, his black hair, shining and wet, and making shadows move in the corners of the room. He had money, a packet of bills in his other hand.

She said something and came to meet him; the bills were folded. Folded an inch or so from the bottom, sharply creased so they stayed together! He said, watching her in the tiny, rosy light: “Your money?”

“Oh, Jim. Where …?”

The flame crawled to his fingers as she stared at the bills. He dropped it and lighted another match. “Are you sure? Could you swear to that fold?”

“It looks like it. It—wait, I’ll get my billfold. Yes, I’m sure …”

“Don’t get it now. There’s not much question of that. It’s your money.”

“Where did you find it?”

“The boy had it. The one with the concussion. He’d stolen it from Hermione.”

“
Hermione
! How could she have got it? How
could
she …?”

“She had it and discovered the boy took it and they had a row and in the course of it he backed away from her, scared, across the veranda there at Middle Road, and fell down the steps. He’s conscious now; able to talk. That’s what happened. Hermione called Dr. Riordan.”

The flame had crawled along the match; he dropped it and the darkness in the room was heavier. The whole house seemed to move closer somehow, listening—threatening. Jim’s voice came harshly again from the deep dusk: “That’s not all he told me. I was right about the gun, Nonie. It belonged to Dick. The boy talked about that, too. Some months ago Dick loaned Hermione his gun. This boy—his name is Happy—does the housework. Johnny, the other one, is the cook boy. Happy had seen the gun around in Hermione’s possession—in her study, in her bedroom. He knew it belonged to Dick, for he had seen Dick cleaning it, and he’d heard them speak of it. He only knew that she had borrowed it. Not why she borrowed it.”

“Why she borrowed it!” Nonie cried. “She was afraid.”

“Maybe.”

Afraid. But you couldn’t be simply afraid. There had to be someone who threatened. “
Who was she afraid of?
”

He said: “It’s easy to see now what happened that night. She came to the door to meet somebody, whoever it was that came to Middle Road prepared to kill. She had the gun in her hand. Whoever killed her snatched it away from her. Perhaps there was a struggle; perhaps she was taken by surprise. Perhaps even she expected somebody else. Probably—almost certainly whoever killed her knew she had the gun.…”

“Dick knew!”

“Anybody might have known. It would have been like Hermione to boast of it, to dare anybody she had quarreled with, to say in so many words: ‘I’ve got a gun—I can protect myself.’ Perhaps she didn’t; perhaps we’ll never know. The only thing we do know is that, that time, she lost. That time she wasn’t strong enough. Somehow, obviously, the gun was snatched away from her by strength or by trickery, and she was shot with it.”

“The boy knew she had it. Happy knew …”

“He was unconscious at the time she was murdered.”

“He might have told someone!”

“He might. Dick might have told someone. The point is the gun disappeared. And eventually somehow the slug might have been traced to it. I’m sure now that Dick took the slug. He knew Riordan was to extract it. He must have been wild to get it into his possession. He came here; there was the bag. Lydia went into the library to take off her coat. Dick had a chance to look in the bag and the chance worked: there was the slug. That’s a guess, but I think it’s what happened.”

“Did Dick kill her?”

He said obliquely: “Nonie, there are some things I’ve got to do—quickly. I want you to stay here and I want you to remember—well, that thing by the hedge, that machete—all of that seemed to me then staged. Phony. I don’t know why—well, yes, I do. I began to think if it had been a real attempt to injure you, it wouldn’t have been delayed like that until you ran to the house. Hermione was murdered with a kind of swift efficiency; so was Seabury. Sounds horrible, put like that, but it’s true. Yet there you were, away from the house, nobody around—all kinds of opportunity. And all that happened was that you were scared and the machete left there on the grass so as to prove that you were right and that somebody had been there. The machete, too, might suggest a crazed workman, a homicidal maniac—something like that. But this thing just now is—different. I can’t say why, but that’s what I think. You were not a danger before; but now I think—well, I’m going to get a light for you.” He went, fumbling in the shadow, toward the little writing table. He struck a match and peered around it and opened a drawer. “There ought to be candles around somewhere.”

She moved to rummage in the drawer. The letter to Aunt Honoria still lay there and caught his eyes. She said, struck with the unpredictability of events, “I was writing that when you came that afternoon. I was writing that and I suddenly knew that it was you …”

His eyes had fastened absently on the written words which leaped out in clear black ink from the white page. The light from the match flared up against his face, touching his cheekbones and chin with a mellow glow. His absent gaze fixed itself until the tiny flame reached his fingers and he dropped it with an exclamation.

“Jim, what were you reading? Why did you look like that?”

“Nothing, nothing. I …Nonie, you’ll do as I say.” The darkness again seemed heavier and thicker; she could barely see the shape of his face and the square bulk of his shoulders. Perhaps it was the plunge into darkness that made his voice sound frightened. He said: “I’ll do what I have to do now. Nonie, you will stay here. Promise me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Is there a bolt on your door?”

“Yes …”

“Lock it.”