The Dragon’s Teeth (8 page)

“If I could only
go
somewhere,” she said fiercely to Vi. “Vi, she's deliberately humiliating me! She takes every opportunity to wave him in my face, like a—like a flag!”

“Then why don't you go away?” asked Vi practically.

“I can't! I've asked Mr. Goossens, but uncle's will calls for my remaining on the grounds a full year, and he says there's nothing he can do about it. Vi!” Kerrie clutched her friend. “You don't think she's trying to …
drive
me away?”

“I wouldn't put it past her,” said Vi grimly. “She's the type. I s'pose if you lived somewhere else this year you'd be cut out of the will and she'd get your share?”

Kerrie's eyes snapped. “So that's what she's up to! Isn't satisfied with twenty-five hundred a week and wants mine, too!”

“Twenty-five hundred a week don't go very far when you're trying to corner the mink and sable markets, the way she's doing.”

“Well, she won't chase me away! I'll fight her!”

“Atta girl,” said Vi enthusiastically. “Only let me get in a sock once in a while, will you, hon?”

After that, it was interesting. Kerrie no longer fled. She was careful to join them whenever they began to whisper. At other times she permitted herself to be cultivated by Mr. Edmund De Carlos, who had been quietly pursuing her ever since she had moved in. Mr. De Carlos began to glow with a hot, somehow sinister, light. He became insistent. She must go out with him—often. He had discovered New York. He would show it to her. They must be great friends. Once, she accepted—that was the night when Beau, squirming in tropical tails, escorted the beautiful Miss Cole to the summer theatre.

Everything went smoothly, and dully, until they were on their way home in De Carlos's limousine. Then something happened. And after that Kerrie refused Mr. De Carlos's invitations. In fact, she tried to ignore him, finding herself beginning to be terrified.

But Mr. De Carlos's light glowed hotter and more sinister. His wild and reckless excursions into New York's night life almost ceased. He spent most of his time on the estate—watching Kerrie. When she went riding, he followed. When she went boating, he followed. When she swam, there he was on the edge of the pool, a little tense. She stopped tramping in the woods.

Kerrie was thoroughly frightened. Vi suggested slipping poison into his soup, but Kerrie was not to be cheered by jests.

“Then why don't you talk to Ellery about it?” asked Vi. “He's a man, and a detective, besides.”

“I'd rather die! Oh, Vi, it isn't just the way De Carlos looks at me. I've handled men with that kind of look before. It's—something else.” She shivered. “I don't quite know myself.”

“It's your imagination. Why don't you make a few friends? You've been here weeks and weeks and you don't know a soul.”

Kerrie nodded miserably.

Vi sought out Beau. “Listen, you. I don't like your taste in women, but I used to think you were a pretty decent guy once. If you're any part a man, you'll keep your eye on this bedbug De Carlos. He's got what they call ‘designs' on Kerrie, and I don't mean the kind of designs they put on doilies.”

“Seems to me,” said Beau indifferently, “she's sort of egged him on.”

“How quaint!” said Margo, slipping the strap of her bathing suit back over her magnificent shoulder.

“I wasn't talking to you, grandma!”

“Well,” said Beau hastily, “I'll keep my eye peeled.”

After that, Beau came even more frequently.

VI.
The Knife and the Horseshoe

Someone struck by night.

Kerrie lay in her four-poster. It was warm, and she was covered only to the hips by a thin silk quilt. She was reading Emily Dickinson, absorbed in the lovely, piercing cries of ecstasy.

Kerrie's suite lay in an ell of the mansion, one story above the terrace which encircled the house. There were strong vines and trellises of roses on the walls outside her windows.

The windows were open, and through the still curtains the gardens below sounded drowsy with the peaceful seething of crickets. There was an occasional river sound: a splash of oars, the stutter of an outboard motor, once the faint shouts of people being borne upstream by a Hudson River excursion boat.

It was quite late. Kerrie had heard Margo and Beau drive up two hours earlier, laughing intimately over some incident of their evening in town together. She had heard Margo invite Beau to stay the night, and Beau's booming acceptance. They had settled down on the terrace below Kerrie's windows with a portable bar, and after a clink of glasses there had been a silence.

Kerrie would have preferred noise. She had actually slipped out of bed and shut the windows to keep out that silence. But later, when she opened them again—it was so stuffy, she said to herself—and just happened to look down, the terrace was empty again.

Then she had heard De Carlos come home, lurching on the gravel driveway and cursing his chauffeur in a thick, liquorish voice. That was when she had got out of bed the third time and locked the door which led to the corridor.

But the house had settled into quiet since and Kerrie, intent upon the poet's verse, almost forgot she was unhappy. Her lids began to droop; the lines swam. She yawned, saw that it was past three by her bed clock, flung the book aside, and turned off the bed-lamp.

And instantly things changed. Instantly.

Instantly she quivered with wakefulness.

It was as if the light had been a thick bright gate, and that turning it off had opened the gate to something that had lain in wait outside, in the thicker darkness.

Kerrie lay motionless, straining her ears. But there was nothing to be heard, unless it were the shrilling of the tireless crickets or that slight recurrent creak—like the creak of a slowly swinging shutter. The shutter! Of course.

But there was no wind. Not even a breeze.

Kerrie told herself indignantly she was a fool. She turned over on her right side, drawing her knees up to her chest and pulling the silk quilt up so that her nose and eyes were covered.

That creak.

Abruptly she sat upright in bed. In the darkness she concentrated all her forces of vision on the windows. The darkness was thin and soupy, as if it had been strained through a sieve. She could just make out the curtains.

They were stirring! … No. They were not.

There! Again!

This is ridiculous, she thought in panic. It's a sudden breeze that's sprung up on the river. It's a breeze moving the curtains. A breeze …

Well, there was a simple way to find out. Just get out of bed and march across the floor to the window, and poke your head out. That's all. Very simple. Then you would know it was a breeze, and that you'd been imagining things like a tot frightened by the dark, and you could go back to bed and sleep.

She slid under the quilt and curled up in a taut ball again, almost smothered.

She could hear her heart clamoring, as if it had slipped out of her chest and taken up a position just above her ear. Oh, this is childish! And she found her legs and arms shaking.

What should she do? Jump out of bed, race across the room to the door that led across the boudoir and into Vi's room …

Her heart stopped clamoring. It seemed to stop altogether.

There was something
—
something
—
in the room.

Kerrie knew it. She knew it. This wasn't imagination. This was knowledge.

She followed the steps that could not be heard with ears that could not hear … from the window, across the patch of hardwood floor to the edge of the hooked rug, on the rug … toward her bed, toward her, where she was lying in a ball under the quilt.…

Roll over.

She rolled over and off the bed. In the same instant something struck the bed where she had been lying. There was a hissing sound, like the sound of a snake.

Scream.

Kerrie screamed. Screamed and screamed.

HER nightgown crumpled, her eyes still red from sleep, Vi met Kerrie in the boudoir.

“Kerrie! What on earth—”

“Vi, Vi!” Kerrie lunged for her friend's high bosom and held on for dear life. “Something—somebody—in my bedroom—tried …”

“Kerrie, you had a nightmare.”

“I was awake, I tell you! Somebody—climbed up the vines—I think—tried to—knife me—”

“Kerrie!”

“When I screamed, he—it jumped back through the window—I saw the flash of the curtains—”

“Who was it?”

“I don't know. I don't know. Oh, Vi—”

“You stay here,” said Vi grimly. She grabbed an iron poker from the rack of firetools at the boudoir fireplace and ran into Kerrie's bedroom. She snapped on the light.

The room was empty.

Kerrie followed to the doorway, looking in, her teeth chattering. The curtains were still moving a little.

Vi looked at the bed; Kerrie looked at it. There was a fresh slash a foot long in the silk coverlet. Vi threw back the coverlet; the sheet and mattress were slashed, too.

She went to the windows and locked them.

“Got away clean. Kerrie, haven't you any idea—”

“N-n-no. I couldn't really s-see. It was too d-dark.”

“Kerrie. Hon. You're—”

There was a sharp-and-soft rap on the corridor door.

The two women looked at each other.

Then Vi moved to the door and said: “Who—is it?”

“Queen. Did—Who screamed in there?”

“Don't let him in,” whispered Kerrie. “You—I'm not dressed.…” She felt calm suddenly.

Vi unlocked the door and opened it to a space of two inches. She looked at Beau coldly. He was in pajamas and his hair was a tumbled log-jam.

“What's wrong?” he demanded in an undertone. “Where's Kerrie? It was Kerrie who screamed, wasn't it?”

“Somebody climbed in from the terrace just now and tried to knife her. She yelped, and whoever it was beat it.”

“Knifed!” Beau was silent. Then he cried: “Kerrie!”

“What do you want?”

“Are you all right?”

“Perfectly all right.”

Beau grunted with relief. “Who was it?”

“I don't know. I didn't see.”

“Knifed, huh,” muttered Beau. “Listen. Don't say anything about it. I'll—I'll keep my eyes open. And after this keep your doors and windows locked at night!”

“Yes,” said Kerrie.

Vi shut and locked the door. With Kerrie following her closely, she shuffled on her bare soles to the boudoir door and locked that. Then she locked her own bedroom door.

“I guess we're safe now, hon.”

“Vi,” whispered Kerrie. “Are you—scared?”

“Not … much.”

“Would you mind if I spent the rest of the night with you?”

“Oh, Kerrie!”

Kerrie fell asleep in Vi's bed, clutching Vi's big warm body desperately. Vi lay awake for a long time, staring into the darkness.

Beau did not sleep at all. He returned to his room, dressed, and began a noiseless tour of inspection. He found the place where the intruder had climbed into Kerrie's room—from the terrace directly under her windows. He climbed the vine like a cat, examining each foot of it in the light of an electric torch. But except for several bruises and, in one place, a snapped piece of trellis-work, there were no clues.

He sought out the night-watchman. But the watchman had seen and heard nothing.

In the house again, he stole into Edmund De Carlos's bedroom. In the heavy half-light the man's beard jutted toward the ceiling, his mouth open and his teeth palely visible as he snored. There was a smell of alcohol about his bed. He was sprawled on it fully clothed.

Beau listened to his snores, eyes on the motionless figure. The snores were regular, too regular. And there was a tension about the supine man which was not like the relaxation of sleep.

De Carlos was shamming.

Beau almost yanked him out of bed by the throat. But then he turned and quietly left the man's room. He spent the rest of the night patrolling the corridor outside Kerrie's suite.

DE CARLOS absented himself during the next three days. He was reported to be bucking an intimate little poker syndicate somewhere in town.

The morning he returned, livid under his beard and cursing his losses, Beau was not there; and Kerrie felt an overwhelming desire to get away from the house.

She dressed in a riding-habit and went down to the stables with Violet. A groom saddled two horses—
Panjandrum,
Kerrie's white Arabian mare, to which she was passionately attached, and
Gargantua,
the big roan stallion Vi rode.

They trotted into the cool of the woods side by side. The nightmare of three nights before seemed far away, as if it had happened in a world of dark dreams. The sun's rays seeped through the trees like sparkling water, splashing the bridle-path with drops of light.

Kerrie inhaled deeply. “This is the first time in ages I've felt really alive. Trees have an odor, Vi, did you know that? I never realized it before.”

“So have horses,” said Vi, wrinkling her nose. “Gee up, you plug!”

“You're
so
romantic! I'm going to run for it.”

“Kerrie! Be careful!”

But Kerrie was gone, the little white mare skimming down the path, her fine neck extended, her slender legs contemptuous of the speckled earth. They vanished round a turn.

Vi kicked
Gargantua's
vast sides but, turning his massive head in mild inquiry, he continued his lumbering trot. “Come on, you! Shift into high!”

Gargantua
stopped altogether, his big ears twitching.

Somewhere ahead there had been a cry, a crash.

“Kerrie!” shrieked Vi. She began to belabor the stallion's ribs so violently that he bounded forward.

She thundered round the turn and there, a hundred yards ahead, made out two figures, one moving, the other still. The white mare's body sprawled on the bridle-path; she was thrashing about, kicking with three legs. The fourth, her right foreleg, was crumpled under her like a snapped twig.