The Avenger 36 - Demon Island (6 page)

Globes of light blossomed before Tucker. It got brighter and brighter all around. As if the night were ending and a warm new day was—

Then his life was ended.

“Sugar?” asked Heather Brail.

Little Nellie Gray crossed her legs. “Plain, please.”

The actress handed her the tea cup. “I’m not actually English, despite the name they’ve stuck on me and the publicity buildup,” she said. “But I do find I like a cup of tea now and then.”

The two women were in Heather’s room in the mansion. The night fog pressed against the leaded windows.

“It’s hard to avoid some affectations in your line of work,” Nellie said.

Heather smiled. “You’re quite fond of Cole Wilson, aren’t you?”

Nellie blinked. “Well . . . yes. I’m fond of all the guys I work with in Justice, Incorporated.”

“A little more than that in Cole’s case, isn’t it?”

Nellie turned to look at the Black Forest clock on the mantle. “No, not really. I have to be democratic, being the only girl on the team. I . . . I can’t have favorites.”

“I see,” said the auburn-haired girl after sipping her tea. “Somehow I get the impression you don’t care for me much. And I thought it might be because you felt Cole and I are close friends.”

“You are, aren’t you?”

“Yes, we are friends. I like him quite a lot,” said Heather. “I’m very concerned right now. I’d like to know where he is and be certain he’s still all right. It’s not a romance, however.”

“Oh, so?” Nellie set her tea cup on the table beside her chair.

“Yes, really.”

The little blonde said, “What do you think about the Fiddler girl?”

“Fanny and I aren’t very close,” replied Heather.

“Trying to talk to her at dinner,” said Nellie, “I got the feeling she was keeping something back. But I can’t figure out what.”

“It wouldn’t be uncharacteristic of Fanny if she lied to us,” said Heather. “But I don’t think she went off that night to meet a man in the woods or anything like that. I wouldn’t have asked Cole to look for her in that case. Fanny is very determined to become a star . . . she’s got a lot more drive in that direction than I have, really. Not that there aren’t girls—and quite prominent ones, too—who wouldn’t have a little romance with one of the crew during a location trip. Fanny simply isn’t one who would.”

“What about her background?” asked Nellie. “She might meet somebody who had something on her.”

“It’s possible.” Heather shook her head. “Fanny Fiddler—and that’s her real name, by the way—is one of those rare movie people who was born right here in southern California. She was a cheerleader in high school. I’ve never heard of anything dark and shady in her past.”

“Terence O’Malley said she looked scared,” Nellie mused. “I’m inclined to agree.”

“Yes, she does seem very upset and worried about something,” said Heather. “Unfortunately, Fanny isn’t the kind of girl to let down her hair and tell us what’s bothering her. She might confide in her agent, but I doubt even that.”

“Maybe I can try,” suggested Nellie. “I hate to think of Cole being lost and Fanny Fiddler knowing something that might help us find him.”

“Mr. Benson and Smitty are out looking right now,” said Heather. “They may well find him.”

“Maybe,” said Nellie.

“I thought California was all sunshine and flowers,” said Smitty.

“Not at night,” said the Avenger.

The fog was rushing in from the ocean, surrounding them as they explored the forest beyond the castle.

“We might as well be on Long Island.”

The Avenger, clad now in dark clothes and minus his assumed Dr. Winters beard, was studying the ground with the aid of a flashlight. “I’d say Cole came this way that night.”

The giant squinted, looking over his shoulder. “Yeah, that’s part of one of his footprints, sure enough,” he said.

“We’ll keep heading in this direction then.”

“Hey, Dick, you got any idea what’s going on here?”

“Not yet, Smitty, no.”

“It’s hard to get a handle on this business. I mean, is it spooks or what?”

Dick Benson kept moving ahead, flashlight probing at the fog-swirled ground. “This island may have more than one secret,” he said.

“You mean because of them bootleggers who used to hang out here?”

“There’s no evidence, from a quick check of the castle, that it was ever used to house the rumrunning operation,” said the Avenger as they moved slowly through the foggy night.

“Meaning they had a secret hideout some place else?”

“I think so. Perhaps something built underground . . . or tied in with the caves we saw along the shore,” he said.

“You think Cole’s there? In some hidden setup?”

“The odds favor that, since his body hasn’t turned up in the Pacific as yet.”

“Huh? How do you know that?”

“I used O’Malley’s radiophone hookup with the shore to check with the Coast Guard this afternoon,” answered the Avenger.

“You thought Cole was dead and floating in the drink?”

“I was hoping he wasn’t, Smitty, but it had to be investigated.”

“Glad you didn’t say anything in front of Nellie,” said the giant. “So at least we know he didn’t drown.”

“It’s less likely that he did,” said the Avenger. “We still can’t be absolutely sure, since not all people who drown show up again. And sometimes a body stays in the water several weeks before it turns up.”

“Brr.” Smitty hunched his big shoulders. “Well, anyhow, the odds are he ain’t floating with the fishes?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

Smitty pondered for a few seconds. “Okay, so he’s maybe in some underground hidey-hole,” he said finally. “How’d he get there?”

“It’s possible he simply had an accident,” said Benson. “He might have fallen into some abandoned facility.”

“Yeah, but O’Malley’s guys been beating the bush for a couple of days. If Cole just fell in a ditch or something they’d have spotted him by now.”

The Avenger said, “Yes, that seems likely. Therefore, we have to assume that there are other people on this island. Either that or someone with the motion-picture crew is up to something besides movie making.”

“Could be that Fanny Fiddler dame,” the giant decided. “She looks like a tough little bimbo.”

“No, I don’t think she—”

Off to their left came the sound of someone moving through the forest.

“We got company,” whispered Smitty.

The Avenger nodded.

They began to work their way, making almost no sound, toward the sounds.

They had covered about a hundred yards when Smitty suddenly exclaimed, “Geeze!”

A man’s body was sprawled on the sward in front of them.

Benson knelt beside him and felt his pulse. “Dead,” he said. “Only minutes ago.”

Smitty hunkered down. “It ain’t Cole?”

“No,” said the Avenger, standing up. “He may be someone from the movie gang, but I don’t recognize him. Bring him back to the castle, Smitty. Give this area a good going over first.”

“You going to try to catch . . . whoever it was?”

Without replying the Avenger moved away from the body of Tucker.

A swirl of white up ahead. Not mist but cloth.

The Avenger, bent low, stalked swiftly among the trees.

He was trailing a woman. He was fairly certain of that. He couldn’t identify her in the few seconds he’d seen her up ahead in the fog.

A woman in a flowing white gown.

His acute hearing picked up the faint signs of her passage through the misty forest.

She was making her way toward the castle.

The man she had killed wasn’t anyone who had come to Demon Island to work on Terence O’Malley’s film. Then who is he? the Avenger asked himself.

Quite probably he was someone who knew something of the whereabouts of Cole Wilson. And now he was dead, and beyond telling them anything.

The Avenger slowed, realizing that he no longer heard anything from the fleeing girl.

There was only silence.

Has she stopped? he wondered.

He took another careful step ahead.

Then something hit him in the back, a tremendous blow between the shoulder blades.

It threw the Avenger face forward onto the ground.

He was up in an instant, his unique .22 pistol in his hand.

There was no one there. Nothing. Only the fog.

She was in the musty, shadowy room and she didn’t know why. She had awakened a moment ago and found herself putting on her night dress and robe.

Fanny Fiddler glanced around her, shivering.

This was the wardrobe room. The clothes and costumes for
Demon Island
hung here. Props sat in two trunks against the stone wall. Through the one high window came a little fogged moonlight.

The dark-haired girl tied and untied and tied again the cord belt of her robe. I’m not supposed to be here, she thought.

She’d been in bed, trying to read a book of Carl Sandburg poems. She’d fallen asleep. Then there’d been . . . what?

She pressed a hand to her throat.

Something painful had happened then. But what?

Her mother had died very young. Lord, if it was something like that . . . some kind of attacks that would kill her.

No, but it wasn’t. It was . . . nothing. She looked into her mind and couldn’t get a single picture of what had happened.

It had been the same way the other night. The night that good-looking Wilson guy had disappeared. Fanny knew Terry O’Malley thought she was keeping something back from him. She really wasn’t.

Well, she had a terrible feeling that something very bad was happening to her. She didn’t want to talk about it. Not to anybody.

You couldn’t really confide in anybody anyway. Tell somebody you were scared to death. Or that you were darned afraid you were going to die. You wouldn’t get sympathy. You’d just as likely find an item about it in Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons.

Now, though, she’d maybe have to talk to somebody.

Maybe that Dr. Winters. He was supposed to be an expert on the occult.

Whoa now, old girl, she said to herself. Why’d you think of him? A ghost doctor isn’t what . . . but it is.

Yes, that was it. Fanny was certain—well, nearly certain—that what was happening to her involved . . .

“Darn it.”

Every time she got close to putting a finger on what it was, she lost it.

Fanny moved slowly across the room toward the door.

Something had a hold on her. Something that could take her and make her get up and go out of the castle and . . .

“My lord!” She found it difficult to breathe.

She’d seen a man’s face in her memory. A man choking and gagging his life out.

A man with her hands around his throat.

She swayed. Knocked against a rack of costumes and set them to rattling on their hangers.

Then she ran to the door and got out of the shadowy room.

Terence O’Malley was sitting in a wicker armchair, making notes in the margins of the next day’s shooting script. “Oy,” he said, “are we ever running behind schedule. And if I shoot the chase stuff out in the forest the way I want to, I’ll really go over budget. That’s the trouble with being a true artist in a junk business.”