Escape the Night (13 page)

Once down into the valley however she knew and remembered the road, which on the other side climbed again. She had to drive slowly however, for fog so masked the road that it became increasingly difficult to follow it. Once, in trying to hurry, she saw the edge of a deep and dangerous drop barely in time to wrench the wheel so sharply that a button of her blue jacket caught in the wheel and was jerked off. It was a narrow escape, and she slowed down again so it was probably well after four o’clock when she came to the familiar curve leading into a short-cut above Carmel. This road again branched bewilderingly but climbed steadily upward and eventually came upon Madrone Road.

Casa Madrone. How long it had been since the day when she’d locked the front door and put the big brass key in her pocketbook and gone away! That made her think of Jem again. And suddenly, inexplicably but irresistibly, all her utter faith and confidence in him came back, like a warm tide. Suppose Luisa
had
threatened Amanda; suppose Jem
had
been in love with Amanda; that was in the past and this was now, and last night Jem had said, “I love you, Serena.”

It was indescribably welcome. There was no accounting for it, but there it was, sustaining her like a rock. As if Jem’s arms were strongly around her again, shutting out everything else.

Inexplicably, too, she went on with more confidence in herself.

It was growing dark early, as it did on foggy days. She was leaning forward, peering through the spaces the wiper made clear on the windshield when she reached the gates of Casa Madrone.

Her own house.

Her own gates, grilled iron between tall, ivy-laden, brick posts. The gates were open so Leda must be there already. The shrubbery had grown, and it pressed in upon the driveway which was narrow and weed-grown. Small, wet wisps of broom and heather brushed the sides of the car with swishing fingers. The drive turned twice and then suddenly reached a small space lined with dripping madrone trees and laurels before the old, Spanish house, with its great front door and double veranda. She stopped the car, looking rather uncertainly around her. Leda’s car was not in the courtyard.

She rather wished she hadn’t come.

The house would be cold that day, and dank, as it had been closed so long. Obviously the sensible thing to do was to enter, make sure the draft on the fireplaces was turned right and light a fire. If wood were laid for one. She turned off the engine of the station wagon, and it seemed disconcertingly quiet and lonely with only the dripping, gray-green of trees and shrubbery around her and the long, silent and empty house. On clear days there was a view of the blue sea far below, but there was none now and, besides, the foliage had grown too thick and dense around the house; probably it had closed the view that there had once been. She got out and walked along the mossy, brick walk, toward the entrance.

She wondered if Amanda ever came to the house. She was poignantly aware of its familiar, gracious lines, of the tall eucalyptus trees at each end, leaning protectively over the house, ghostly now in the fog. Damp tendrils of shrubbery and vines that had overgrown the walk touched her ankles softly. She crossed the lower veranda and put the key in the lock of the wide door, old and dark and made of a single beautiful slab of wood.

It was locked. Whoever had said the house was not locked was wrong. She turned the key and the door opened readily. The interior of the house was a deep twilight, cold and dampish. It smelled of old wood and old leather, of dust and camphor and, surprisingly, of tobacco; almost as if someone had smoked a cigarette in the house quite recently. But Leda hadn’t a key to the house. Even if she had come, waited for Serena and gone again, she could not have waited inside the house.

She sniffed again and decided she was mistaken. A narrow stairway led upward, dimly, straight ahead. She remembered it clearly and the soft patina of the old railing under one’s fingers and the way the fifth step from the top creaked. She and Amanda used to make a long step over that one when they were late coming in at night and didn’t want to wake Aunt Jane. A tall, massive chest which had come around the Horn stood beside the door and she remembered it and the array of riding gloves and used golf balls and railway timetables that had littered it during her father’s lifetime. A lamp, covered with newspapers, stood upon it and she pulled off the papers which slipped off lifelessly and damply. The lamp’s light shade loomed up eerily like another face at the same height as her own.

Caught by memories, she closed the outside door, cutting off much of what light there was. There was a long, narrow drawing room at her left with a fireplace at each end of it. She turned in that direction and entered the room, stopping when she had crossed the threshold, for the room was in deep twilight. The shutters of the French windows upon the veranda were closed and light filtered only dimly through them. There was a roll of rugs just inside the room on the floor.

Only it couldn’t be a roll of rugs. All the rugs had been stored in the attic; the old polished floors were bare. And a roll of rugs wouldn’t have looked just like that, soggily huddled beside the sheeted outline of a sofa.

Wouldn’t have been wrapped in a light thing that looked like a coat.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even kneel beside that inert shadowy figure. Her eyes, though, were more accustomed to the twilight, and she could even see that the thing on the floor had a face, and its hair was flung outward below it.

This time there wasn’t any doubt about its being murder.

She didn’t actually think that or anything, for it was just then that someone started down the stairs, out in the hall, above, and it was someone who was making every effort not to be heard.

But memory, fantastically and sharply, woke again, so she listened for the creak of the fifth step.

Whoever it was knew about the fifth step, too, and dextrously avoided it and came on so lightly and so adroitly that she could scarcely hear the whisper of that motion, but she did hear it, for she knew it when it stopped. There was a straining hush. It was like an evil spell put upon her and upon Leda Blagden, dead at her feet with her blonde curls and her dreadful face.

A voice spoke abruptly into the hush, breaking it and breaking that spell. “Amanda!” it cried. “What are you doing here?”

It was Jem’s voice. She whirled around and, as she did so, there was a loud swish and clatter and crack like a whip against the wall, against the door, against something in the hall that fell and shattered upon the bare floor.

L
ONG-DEAD ECHOES ROSE
and throbbed and rocked tumultuously through the silent rooms, against the low ceilings, all over the house. The shadows, the clattering echoes, the horrible awareness of Leda Blagden’s body, just there where the dim light streaking through the shutters fell upon it, all of it was a nightmarish welter of confusion. A dark abyss of horror from which she grasped at one real and solid fact. She had heard Jem’s voice—hadn’t she? Then he must be there, somewhere.

She thought she cried: “Jem …” Then she knew that he was running forward actually from the other end of the long drawing room, toward her. And toward Leda. His face and the light raincoat slung over his shoulders loomed out of the shadows. He came closer. “Serena!” he cried. “I thought you were Amanda. That coat …” He saw Leda. He jerked to a stop, catching at the back of the sofa.
“For God’s sake, what
…!” He knelt down over Leda’s body.

The echoes were dying in the house. Where had Jem come from? Not the hall, because someone had stood there on the stairway, and something had lashed and clattered and thudded upon the bare floor. So then Jem must have been in the back of the room, since he couldn’t have been the person on the stairway. But had he been there all along? Had he watched her own entrance and dreadful discovery? No, that wasn’t possible either. He’d have stopped her, he’d have tried to do something for Leda. Then she remembered, still groping out of that dark abyss into which she’d descended, for real things, solid things, that there was a second door from the narrow drawing room, leading also to the hall which ran back past the stairway, past the door at the other end of the room, past the dining room and a small study, and on to the kitchen regions. So Jem must have come from that way. She was holding to the back of a chair, a tall, narrow Spanish chair, and the carved wood felt cold and damp under her hands. She said in a half-whisper: “Jem, is she dead?”

He was bending over that huddled body in the light polo coat. He looked up slowly: “Yes. I can’t … What happened, Sissy?”

She forced a voice out of her own numb and frozen throat. “I don’t know. Isn’t there something …?”

“I can’t hear you. What did you say?”

“Isn’t there something?” she began again and stopped.

“You mean something we can do? No. It’s too late.” He looked down at Leda. The shadows all around seemed to give his face a white rigidity. “She’s dead. She’s been dead, I think, for awhile. I don’t know how long. I think she was strangled. It looks like it, but there’s nothing around her throat now.”

Serena’s hands left the cold, carved wood and went upward stiffly to her own throat. Leda, and her blonde curls. Leda, dead.

“I came to meet her …” she whispered. Jem did not appear to hear her. He said again: “What happened, Sissy? What did you knock over just now?”

“What did I …?”

“That noise, I mean. I was in the back of the room. I couldn’t see what happened. It’s so dark …”

“Jem, Jem, I didn’t! It was somebody else! Somebody in the hall! Somebody on the stairway …”

He was up before she’d finished. At the hall door she would have followed him, but he put his hand hard on her shoulder and pushed her backward into the room again and was gone. But she couldn’t stay in that room with Leda. She had to see the hall, too, and see what had thudded and echoed against the floor and whether anyone still stood there, watching from the shadowy reaches of the narrow stairway.

Of course no one was there. There’d been time for whoever it was to get away. In all that confusion of sound it would have been easy, or perhaps light, furtive footsteps, running, had been a part of those sounds. The hall was almost dark. Jem was running upstairs, one of the steps creaked loudly and she could see his light raincoat swing into the shadows up at the curve in the stairway. The railing caught a dull and subdued highlight from somewhere. Then she trod on something that crackled and looked down. The lamp that had stood on the chest in the corner lay in chunks and pieces on the floor. The shade had rolled off and was battered-looking, caved in along one side. The lamp cord, detached four years ago when she’d closed the house, clung to a part of the base of the lamp almost at her feet.

So that was what had broken. Whoever had been on the stairway hadn’t stopped there but had actually come quietly on, down into the hall, and had been near enough the chest to knock over the lamp. He could have gone then, very quietly out the front door and into the wet shrubs and madrone trees. Or he could have run lightly down the narrow hall, and out the back door, if it was open. As it must be; Leda must have known it and entered the house by that door. It had been Leda, she remembered suddenly, who had said the Casa Madrone was not locked. There was, of course, a large bolt on the inside of the door just off the kitchen, and no key. There had never been a key. In the days when the house was built, people didn’t use keys for the back entrance. There was always somebody around the kitchens, a horde of servants—Indians, Portuguese, Mexicans; a new and modern lock had been put on the great front door, but they’d used the same worn but solid bolt for the back door that three or four generations of Marchs had already used. Sometime, someone (the caretaker probably) had opened that door and forgotten to bolt it again. So whoever was there could have escaped that way.

Who
was
there? Leda’s murderer? It
was
murder, wasn’t it? Murder—a strange and incomprehensible word—a dreadful word. It meant Leda there behind her. In the quiet, empty house, among the wet and dripping madrone trees.

She would follow Jem upstairs.

She could hear him, for his footsteps were heavy and quick, muffled by the thick walls but audible. Obviously he was searching; a door banged, a chair or some heavy article of furniture was pushed aside. She didn’t follow him; she just stood there, hands tight on the railing, refusing with all her will to look back toward the door into the drawing room. Leda.

Jem was coming down by way of the back stairs, a narrow twisting little flight of steps, that came out in the kitchen hall and were dark and smelled of old wood. The whole house had an indescribably familiar, yet half-forgotten smell of old plaster and old wood and old chimneys—and lingering traces of lavender and the potpourri her grandmother had made of the roses from the garden. It seemed very clear in the dusk. There’d been tobacco scent, too. She’d noticed it when she entered, she remembered suddenly, and had thought that someone must have been smoking there quite recently.

And thought sharply,
someone? Leda? Or Leda’s murderer?

Who might still be in the house.

She hadn’t thought of that.

It took awhile to get a fact like murder into one’s mind. It took awhile to drag one’s self out of that dreadful pit of confusion and darkness and horror. She must steady herself, think, do something.

Well, then, what?

A door off in the distance opened and a faint chill draft crept along the hall. It was the back door. Jem had gone outside then, searching. But one man alone couldn’t search the close-pressing shrubs, and the trees and the hedges. There were a hundred ways for anybody who wanted to, to escape. If whoever had stood there on the stairway had murdered Leda, then it was dangerous, too. Dangerous to search, dangerous to know, dangerous …

Moments must have passed and she was still clinging to the railing as if frozen to the spot when there were sounds again in the back and Jem appeared suddenly at the end of the hall, running toward her. “Serena?” He came again from the gloom at the end of the hall as he had emerged from the darkness at the end of the long drawing room. “Are you all right? I shouldn’t have left you alone. I didn’t think. I …”