Corpses at Indian Stone (15 page)

When he was midway on them, he listened. An automatic pump was going somewhere below. It made a muffled, rhythmic noise, but, between its beats, there were minute silences. Aggie heard nothing in them. This cellar had windows--opaque squares that let in little light by day and none at night. He risked another flicker of light. Anyone who happened to be outside would have seen it-but he had to get a bearing through the place. He moved again in the dark--past the furnace and the bins of coal. Ashes gritted under his feet. A door at the end of the furnace room opened into a corridor. He found its handle. Beyond that door were no more windows, so he turned on his light and locked the switch. There was dust enough and cobwebbing enough to suggest that the passage had not been used for years. But the concrete floor was blurred with the evidences of feet going to, and coming from, the wine cellar.

Each inhabitant of Indian Stones who kept a private stock in that cellar had a key for it. Most of those keys were in the possession of servants, who made occasional trips for their employers. Old John had turned over Sarah's key to Aggie. He fitted it, now, into a heavy door at the end of a passage and turned a lock that was stiff with rust. The hinges of the door creaked awesomely. The flashlight showed a narrow flight of steps, carved in stone, winding down out of sight.

With a thought that an unarmed man was pretty helpless in that cool, dry spiral of carved, purplish rock, Aggie listened again and went ahead. The stairs made a complete revolution before debouching on a vast room that was crowded with bins. Two of its walls were raggedly cut from rock; the other two, from hard earth. The low ceiling was shored up by venerable timbers. Names were burned over sections of bins: Waite, Peters, Calder, Drayman, Sommerfield, Plum, and so on. Faded labels above the gleaming bottles denoted types of wine, vintages, and chateaux. Aggie read a few, and reflected in a hasty aside upon the luxuries of the rich. His childhood recollections of this place were not reassuring--now.

He moved past the long racks of almost-level-lying bottles to the far end of the room. There, the bins were built against the wall. A portion of that space--a large portion-

-was devoted to Davis. There was not a bottle in it. The timbers supporting the Calder shelves were massive, for they also served to hold up that part of the ceiling. He played his light full on them; they seemed too ageless and too immovable to permit even the thought of disturbance. They had been there from the beginnings of Sachem House--a century ago and more. A man, Aggie thought, might spend a week--or a month--in the wine cellar--even in search of something--without ever considering the possibility of getting behind those mighty beams.

That was why Sarah had said nobody would find the hiding place. It simply was not suspectible. And yet--the shelves themselves were bolts, and the paneling behind them was a door, hinged on the back of one of the beams, where it appeared to be buried in hard earth. Aggie inspected each shelf with his light. The dust had been agitated. But whether that had been done by somebody getting wine, or by somebody using the passage, he could not tell. One by one, he then slid each shelf to the right an inch or so; they moved along rusty iron brackets in which were the heads of corroded screws. Then he pushed hard against the whole thing, and it swung inward.

He stepped through and closed it. Ahead was another passage, another door. This door also was locked, and the keys for it belonged to four persons, only. He put in Sarah's key. The edges of the keyhole glittered slightly. Was that because it has been scratched by another key? The lock turned. The door opened--in, again.

Aggie stood in the secret vault of the old hotel. It was not a large room. It had been cut from the underlying, ferrous rock. An old, battered mahogany table and two chairs stood in the center of it--furniture condemned to that use, manifestly, after it had served its time upstairs in the Sachem House. The safe had been set into one wall. Its iron façade was taller than Aggie. He shut the door behind him again--and the lock snapped.

He was not afraid--intimidating though his surroundings were--but the darkness and subterranean aspect of his adventure gave him a feeling of urgency. Sarah had written down the combination of the huge old safe. He fished out the paper and went to work on the dials. It took him five minutes to get the ponderous thing open. He could hear nothing of the world above him--nothing from the club--nothing from the roads, where sirens ululated, and the ambulance had come with a winking red light.

The safe was empty.

Its interior was some seven feet in height, about eight feet deep, and four feet wide. If it had once contained pigeon-holes and strong boxes, they had been removed.

There was nothing in it. Nothing at all. He amended that. On the floor were sprinklings of saw-dust. Wisps of straw. A few chips and fragments of pine--bits that might have come from boxes. He had finished his journey. He was startled by his discovery, because it was dramatic. But it was not altogether unexpected. He swung his light once more around the interior of the safe, then he was stabbed by a desire to get out--out of the safe, the hidden room, and the wine cellar. He could imagine the great iron door closing on him. He leaped from the place. That relieved him, partially. He closed the iron door and spun the dials. His hands were shaking. He switched off his light and listened, realizing that his rigidity and concentration were less for good hearing than for recovery.

"Claustrophobia," he said soundlessly to himself. He hurried to the door, unlocked it, stepped into the passage, closed the door, and started toward the back of the wine bins.

His sense of agitation returned. He had thought of the cellar in terms of a forest, or a jungle, where he could hide and watch without being seen. Only when he had started down the winding stairs had he begun to consider his own exposure.

He hesitated, before pulling open the bin door. Finally, standing behind it, with his light out, he drew it back. It squealed dolefully. The wine cellar was black. Holding his torch at arm's length, and shielding his body, he pushed the switch. There was the vinous, moldy aroma. Nothing else. If someone were crouching behind the tiers of bottles, then Aggie had only to cut off his light and he, too, could so conceal himself. He would have as good a chance as the other person of making a run for it.

He shut off his light. He would stand there, in the blackness, behind the movable shelves, until he was ready. Then--a flash for a bearing and a rush into the vast, low chamber. He could feel sweat on his lips and inside his hands as he prepared himself.

There was not a sound anywhere--except one: his heart was audible in that absolute silence. He came around the door and stood in front, without closing it. He aimed the flashlight. He turned it on.

Instantly, he shut it off and dropped to his knees. The light, shooting down the aisle toward the entrance, had touched something that filled him with horror. In the center of the aisle along which he had come, stood a bottle of wine. A tall, thin, green one.

Hock. The bottle had not been there before.

Aggie was scuttling along soundlessly on his hands and knees--away from the Calder bins--away from the bottle; toward the far wall. He expected a light, then, at any instant. A light--and a shot. He swore at himself for not bringing a gun.

He agreed with Danielle--in a savage effort to right his senses by self--

condemnation--that he was a mere professor and no man to skulk through the night on the trail of a murderer. Somebody had followed him. He stopped and listened frantically--as if listening could be extended by passionate effort. Somebody had put that bottle in the aisle to let him know he had been followed. To scare him? Panic him? To make him race through the room--a perfect target? It hardly seemed reasonable. Anyone who wanted to kill him would not put out a warning sign. Such a person would merely hide, and wait for him to come back--walking upright--silhouetted by his light. That would be the thing.

This bottle" on the floor, then, was merely to let him know that he had been observed.

He reached the opposite wall and felt along it until his hands turned the corner of the stairway entrance. He was trembling from head to foot and moving with more regard to speed than to silence. As he wound his way up the stairs, however, he reversed those tactics. For half a minute, he stood at the top of the flight, mopping his face, and listening. There was no sound at all. Nothing. He opened the door with a push. He had not quite closed it. The same awesome squeal assaulted the night. A wink of his electric torch showed the corridor to be empty. He hurried along and, presently, he was in the main cellar.

There, he decided, the person who had set out the bottle would have his best chance-if, indeed, that person had any idea of attacking him. Aggie crouched low and moved among bulky, invisible objects toward the stairs. He hit something and felt it yield and fall away. The feeling was followed by a crash. He had tipped over a wheelbarrow loaded with broken flowerpots. He swore and recklessly switched on his light, from behind a pillar. He shot it around the vast, crowded, dusty furnace room. Nothing there.

He kept it on and raced toward the steps, past the furnace. He had nearly gained his objective when he stopped. His light held on the ash-strewn floor for an instant. A bone--

a veal bone--lay in the dust. A bone gnawed bare--or boiled bare--he did not have time to determine.

The cellar lights flashed on and a voice at the head of the stairs called, "Who's that?"

"Me! Aggie!" He felt enormously relieved. "It's me, Jack!"

The manager of the club was standing at the head of the stairs with a revolver in his hand. He was wearing a dressing gown and bedroom slippers. He grinned faintly.

"My God, Aggie," he said, "how you do get around! What in the world are you doing there?"

"Trying to get out," Aggie said honestly. "And somebody's in this hole--

somewhere." He was running up the stairs. He pulled Jack into the pantry, slammed the door, and locked it. "That ought to hold him. I'll call Wes and--"

He broke off. In the club kitchen, staring at him, were several people. Beth and Martha and Bill Calder. Ralph Patton and Byron Waite. Most surprising, Wes Wickman, in his uniform, looking extraordinarily disheveled. There were grass stains on his hands and there was dirt on his shoes. He was breathing hard but unobstrusively, as if he had recently been engaged in some form of work, and as if he were trying to make that fact unnoticeable. Loaves of sliced bread, a leg of lamb, mustard pickles, were ranged on the center table.

Wes said,
"Who's
in the cellar, Aggie?"

"I don't know. I--"

Beth said, "You look as if you'd been pulled through a knothole! A filthy knothole. Walking in your sleep, I suppose?"

Wes leaned against a huge refrigerator. "Just what in the name of sin does this mean, Aggie? You were first to find Calder. First to find George Davis. First to send out the alarm. And now--while I'm frantically at work over at the Davis place--I get a frenzied message from Sarah via old John saying to go save your life in the club cellar.

What's there?"

"Somebody," Aggie answered. "Look. For heaven's sake--get your men and have that cellar searched."

The state trooper considered. "All right."

Jack spoke. "There maybe
was
somebody down there, at that! Aggie-did you notice if the windows in the furnace room were open, when you went down?"

"No. They were not, that is."

"Open now. Two of 'em." Aggie swore. "I didn't see that. Then--the person's gone."

He looked from face to face. All the expressions were doubtful, accusative. Even the trooper's. That increased his feeling of frustration and of defeat. He needed sleep. He was weak and nervous. He was angry, too. "Hell. Why ask me what I was doing here?

What are all of you doing?"

Byron Waite said nastily, "I presume you expected me to go back to sleep after the racket you raised at my place? I went over to the Davis house. All the lights were on.

I sat with the servants."

"We went there, too," Beth said. "We heard the sirens, Bill and Martha and I. As soon as we could dress. We left Martha's mother asleep--at least--she didn't get up when we did. Wes shooed us away and so we all came up here."

"I was just getting up," Jack said. ''They began banging on the door. I let 'em in.

Nobody's going to sleep any more tonight--so we're making sandwiches. Heard a crash in the cellar. I got the club gun. The Lord knows we're all on edge!"

Wes said dryly, "I think, Aggie, that
I
ought to ask the questions. Don't you?"

Aggie was on the point of answering when the pantry door was shoved open.

Several more people in various stages of dishabille tramped into the club kitchen. They were asking, "What's wrong?" and "What's happened at the Davises?" with the ad-libbed unanimity of a stage crowd. Aggie looked at them disgustedly.

' You go down to your house, Aggie," Wes said. "I'll come along as soon as I take a squint in the cellar. Five minutes. I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you
bad."

CHAPTER 12

When Aggie re-entered his aunt's cottage--at a dogtrot--he saw that Danielle had gone. It gave him a brief sense of dissatisfaction. Sarah had a good fire going. There were sandwiches on the coffee table-and cups. The old lady was lying back in the inglenook, and she greeted him acidly. "You've been gone a thundering long while!"

"I had a lot of ground to cover."

"Well?"

Aggie knew what she meant. He sat down on a bench and leaned over the coffee container. "Gone," he said. "Nothing in the safe."

Sarah pursed her lips. A thin, pensive whistle came through them. "Gone, eh?"

"How much was it, Sarah?"

She shrugged. "The last statement showed--around a million."

"A tidy sum to carry off, hunh?" He dumped sugar directly from a bowl. "I wondered. You know, I forgot to ask. I generally forget all the important things. I wondered if we were talking about a hundred thousand--or some horrendous sum--like a hundred million."