Danger in the Dark (7 page)

“Dennis—will they blame you?”

“No,” he said with quick assurance. “At least, I’ll take good care that they won’t. Trust me. I’ll look out for myself.”

“Dennis, you—you didn’t kill him,” she said. “I mean—if you did it would be me—it would be because of me—I would love you no matter—”

“Well, I didn’t kill him, Daphne,” he said and laughed. A queer, cold little laugh that didn’t sound like Dennis. “I didn’t kill him,” he said. “Someone else had that pleasure.”

She clung to him suddenly and put her head against him, and he looked down at her shining soft hair. After a moment he put both hands around her face and lifted it and kissed her.

“I know, darling,” he said gently. “I know.”

He released her and went to the door.

“I’m going now. Remember, dear, and keep your chin up. Lock the door.”

He was gone, then, making no sound. She crossed the room and locked the door, listening for his footsteps. She heard nothing.

Presently she realized that she must move; must do as Dennis had said to do. Let no one know what that night had been. What was first? Why, to take off that dress, of course. Turn out the light. Pretend to sleep.

There was still no sound in the corridor, and she did not know till afterward that he went to the window seat at the turn of the passage and sat there the rest of the night

The narrow branching corridor was dark—Amelia had never held with night lights—but it was so narrow that no one could approach and pass by him in the direction of Daphne’s room without his knowing it.

He shouldn’t have left her to go through the house alone. The thought of it now appalled him. Yes, it was going to be bad.

He wondered about them all, there in the chill, waiting darkness, thinking of them intimately as he knew them. Gertrude with her slow, blank eyes and those recurrent, violent, nervous headaches and those fits of rage. Amelia with her amazing hidden obstinacy below that fragile, gentle exterior. Amelia should have been a man. And Johnny with his affability, his handsomeness, his bland evasion of the sisters so at last they accepted him as neutral—as property belonging to neither of them. Rowley. … He frowned. He wished that Rowley had not come upon them there in the springhouse. He must watch Rowley; even as a child you could never count on him. Especially when Gertrude got hold of him.

Who
had
killed Ben Brewer?

And how would that death affect the Haviland Bridge Company? How would it affect that family to whom the company was more than meat and bread, for their very being was woven into it?

He sat there till the first, cold gray light of dawn. He didn’t dare smoke, and every small sound the house made during those hours brought him to sharp attention, every nerve alert.

They had, he decided, done everything possible to turn in another direction that floodlight of inquiry which so soon would be upon them. He hoped they had made no mistakes. He went over and over again every step in that grisly process. He was desperately tired. And mainly he wanted to wash his hands, scrub them with clean, hot soapsuds. It wasn’t till the walnut bookshelf in the corner of the hall beside him began to show its outlines clearly, and the fiat little cushion on the window seat took on a bluish green color, that he remembered with horrible abruptness one mistake.

He sat upright—his skin prickling a little with the shock of it. How could they have done that? In all their plan and talk and sweating efforts, when they thought they had covered every possible loophole for suspicion, how could they have forgotten such an important thing! He got up—no one seemed to be stirring; there was no sound in the sleeping house, and with the coming of light it had stopped its creaking. He went through the narrow, silent passages toward the stairway, a tall, grim shadow in disheveled evening clothes. He forgot the third step from the bottom and how it creaked, and cursed himself as he trod on it. That was the sound Daphne had heard. Thank God, she’d run away.

He went on across the wide hall, gray now with sparse cold light, and reached the drawing room. He paused there to listen and to open the door with extreme caution. The drawing room was gray, too—the piano a blunt dark bulk in one corner, the odor from the flowers bitter and strong. He could barely see the outline of the little gilt chair nearest him and, at the far end of the long room, the door that entered the small, oak-paneled library. There was a door from that room, too, into the passage leading, at last, past a closed and useless music room, to the central hall again. The strategic importance of that door and that passage had been a part of their plan. He did not intend to look toward the door leading into the library, but he did so for a very short moment. It was still, however, too dark to see objects clearly at that distance. That was lucky, he thought, and went to the french windows, thrusting his way through the massed ferns and flowers. One jar he sought with his hand, as if to steady it as he passed, and remembered with something like a physical wrench that instant during the night when something had thrust unexpectedly against the jar and it had rocked on its pedestal and threatened to crash to the floor. He had caught it—Rowley had cursed under his breath; his face had been damp and his hands shaking when the heavy vase was upright and steady again.

It was better not to think of that hour or two. The windows—his hands felt along the bolts. The window was closed as, inconceivably, they had left it. How could they have done it! That which was the keystone, the kernel of that plan. They’d closed the window and had turned the Venetian shade so that the small light they were obliged to use—carefully shaded, an instant or two at a time—would not show, in case anyone were in the snow outside, watching them. There was no one there; there could be no one there, and both of them knew it. But nevertheless there was that feeling that they were under observation. Odd. He thought now with sharp recollection of the taxi fellow—but he wouldn’t … Probably he hadn’t even come. There was an automatic bolt on the long french window; when it closed it bolted itself. Part of Amelia’s amazing and thorough system of locking herself in.

He turned and pulled up the Venetian blinds, hating the little sucking whisper they made in that horribly silent room. He found the bolt, released it and opened the window. Hating, too, the sound it made as he pushed it slowly open.

There. That was better. But it had been a near thing, and his hands shook with the sense of catastrophe, narrowly averted.

Was there anything else?

Every instinct urged him to leave that room quickly, without a backward look. He forced himself to remain and to go over every step in that process, every small joint in the edifice they had built up. There was no other mistake—nothing, at least, that he could find. He even went near the window and looked down into the snow. Lucky it had snowed so hard. There were, of course, traces of footsteps—not the outlines of the steps themselves but small, broken depressions, covered now with snow; the outline was there, but nothing that would show, say, a heelprint or the size and outline of a shoe. He wondered about the path leading through the shrubs and thickets of firs up to the springhouse. That was a danger—one of the weak points. Something they could not help. But it would be fatal to go and look. He could only hope the snow had done its work and that the police cars and the doctor’s car coming hurriedly along the drive would destroy any evidence the snow had not covered. When had it stopped snowing—But it had not stopped, although the fall was lighter. That was good. Well, there was nothing more he could do here. And the household would be abroad early that morning—servants letting themselves into the house, starting preparations for a wedding that was not to occur. For the life of him, as he reached the door again, he could not help glancing toward the library. But chairs and piano intervened, and he could see nothing.

Again with extreme caution he let himself out the door. No one was in the hall, and it was perceptibly lighter. There were as yet no sounds from the south L where the kitchen and dining room were. He thought again of Daphne and the stairway in the darkness. He must remember this time about the third step.

Oh, God, the latch on the drawing-room door! He’d forgotten about fingerprints. They’d used handkerchiefs continually, hadn’t they? They’d been very careful about fingerprints. Now he’d smeared his own all over that old latch and the broad iron handle of it. He hesitated and went back. Better wipe it clean; no fingerprints would be bad, but his own found there would be worse. Besides, other people entering the room—as many other people would shortly be entering it—would leave diverse and blurring marks upon it. The police would not find it suspiciously free of fingerprints. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the latch on both sides and closed the door. As he did so a swift, devastating thought flashed over him.

What a grim irony it would be if, in destroying clues to the murderer of Ben Brewer, he managed to leave clues involving himself! A fine net of evidence hopelessly entangling him, so that no explanation, no final truth could possibly extricate him.

There was no way to gauge the potential power of the police; they did things, found things, reasoned from bits of evidence which the layman did not even know existed. Suppose, without knowing it, he had left evidence against himself; evidence that they would link, if they discovered it, with his love for Daphne, her promise to go away with him; with her final decision that she could not go, which would furnish so strong and urgent a motive for the murder of the man who stood between them. Whom she was to marry in so short a time.

It was not a pleasant thought. Neither was the recollection of that other evidence, that ugly, mysterious bit of direct evidence which he had so far concealed.

Well, his only insurance against it was to have made no mistakes. He had thought there was none. But the closed window had shaken him.

He hesitated, wanting to go back again into that room, to look again carefully at every smallest link in that false chain. He fought down the impulse and turned toward the stairway.

But he realized the seriousness of the thing they had done; had realized it from the beginning. It made them technically—didn’t it?—accessories after the fact. That was at the best. At the worst—well, he wouldn’t think of that. At the best they had hindered the police; had obstructed the cause of justice; had completely destroyed any evidence left by the real murderer.

Yet there had been no choice in the matter. He had realized that, too, almost the instant when Rowley had stepped into the springhouse. If Rowley had been only a few moments later! If Rowley hadn’t come at all!

It was unfortunate that Rowley had turned up just at that point. And that he, Dennis, had lied fluently but not too well. But then he had had to lie—tell the only thing he could think of at the moment which would explain his presence there with Daphne and in a small measure protect Daphne.

And Rowley’s tale of finding them there bending over the murdered man would carry a far greater weight of suspicion with the police than their own tale of Rowley’s coming so aptly on the scene.

Who
had
killed Ben Brewer?

Well, that would come later. Just now there was so much to think of, so much to be prepared for. In only an hour or two now the police would be there. Himself, Daphne, all of them facing inquiry.

Oh yes, the third step.

He checked himself on the very verge of putting his weight upon it and grasped the banister so as not to lose his balance.

The hall was lighter, too; thus it was that he saw the reddish smudge on the ivory spindle just below his hand.

He saw and bent to look at it, and every nerve in his body tightened.

It was certainly blood.

Blood, now dried, and faintly smudged. But still—he measured with his own hand—still it was just about the place that someone, grasping the banister—arrested by the creaking of that step as he, Dennis, had been arrested at the recollection of that creaking—would have placed his thumb.

Someone, arrested in his stealthy advance up those steps by the creak of the third step—by Daphne’s pausing ahead of him and her whisper in the darkness, “Dennis—Dennis. Here I am.”

He stood there, staring at that small reddish smudge as if it epitomized—as in a rather horrible way it did—all the ugliness and horror of the night. As if it set a grisly seal upon the thing.

And at the same time it crystallized in the most dreadful way something that had been formless, a nebulous kind of shadow which had not, till then, taken definite shape and form. And that was, of course, that whoever had left that bloody thumbprint on the spindle had been someone in and of the house, familiar with its ways.

He steadied himself; he’d known that all along—at least it had been there in the back of his mind.

There was a sound of some kind from the kitchen wing, and he lifted his head sharply to listen. Laing would be coming into the house soon; if he hadn’t just then. He must not be seen there—still dressed and in that dangerous vicinity.

Well, then—there was a bloody thumbprint probably belonging to the real murderer. What to do with it? Probably belonging to the real murderer. For there was also another possibility, and that was that Rowley or he himself had left that thumbprint on the old ivory spindle.

If it was Rowley’s the whole truth of the thing would immediately come out and would be far more damaging to himself and to Daphne than it could possibly be to Rowley. And if it was his own, added at last to all that other evidence that existed, it would be horribly convincing. Convictions had been made by twelve good men and true on less evidence.

And there was no way to tell certainly which it was. No way to tell even the size of the thing, for it was smudged. Yet there were clear enough lines, too. The police could tell—could identify it swiftly and with dreadful certainty.

There was another faraway sound from the kitchen wing—as if a door had closed and someone had spoken. He must hurry.

Again that devastating thought flashed through his mind.