Escape the Night (24 page)

Dave was shaking his head. Jem said: “The keys were left in the car, or so Alice said. But she didn’t think it had been moved. It was in exactly the same place where she’d parked it. She couldn’t remember exactly how much gasoline she’d had, so there was no way of checking that. And the police went over the car for fingerprints and found those of Alice and Bill, but Bill had driven her home from here last night so there was every reason for his fingerprints to be on the handle of the door and on the wheel.”

“Haven’t they arrested him?” asked Amanda incredulously.

“No. Why should Bill murder Leda? Why should he go to the trouble of using Alice’s car instead of the one he already had? And, as to that, why should he leave your red and white scarf, Amanda, to be found?”

“That’s obvious! He did it to give them a false clue. He’d know it was my scarf. It had my name on it. And I’ve remembered that I left it in the pocket of the station wagon. I tried and tried to think where I’d had it last and then I remembered. I’d had it around my head—oh, one day last week, while I was driving somewhere. And I took it off and stuffed it in the pocket of the station wagon. So he could easily have got it out and left it there to incriminate me. He hates me. He’d love to make them think I did it. Oh, that’s clear enough.”

“He doesn’t hate Serena,” said Dave. “He wouldn’t have put the button into Leda’s hand for the police to find.”

“Bill would do anything,” began Amanda, when Jem interrupted: “Well, anyway, they were both questioned. Alice and Bill. The police feel that whoever did it had to know about the back door being open.”

“So Johnny said.” Sutton went to a chair. “But that would limit the suspects to
us!
Just the people who were at the dinner at the Lodge the night Serena got home. Johnny, Alice, and”—he glanced around—”you, Dave, Serena, Jem, Amanda and me. That,” said Sutton as Alice had said, “is preposterous.”

“Well,” said Dave, “of course one of us could have told somebody—and God knows if any of us did tell anybody he’d better remember it and say so.”

“Pedro must have known it,” said Sutton.

“They had Pedro at the station.” Jem reached for a cigarette and lighted it before he continued. “He said he had a key. He said he hadn’t been in the house since last month and insisted he didn’t leave the back door unbolted.”

“Nonsense!” Amanda’s tone was sharp. “The man’s lying to cover his own carelessness.”

“Maybe. However, he’s been working in one of the fish canneries in Monterey. He’s on an afternoon shift and had a complete alibi. So he didn’t kill her.”

Amanda said quickly: “Bill wasn’t at dinner with us the night Sissy came home. But Alice could have told him how to get into the house. Or Leda herself could have told the murderer that she could get in the house by the back door. So he needn’t have known but could have followed her there.”

“The police considered that.” Jem put his glass down on the mantel and turned to Serena. “Serena,” he said directly, “I want to talk to you. Have you been out of the house today? How about a walk?”

“I’d like it.” Serena rose. Nobody spoke as she and Jem walked out of the living room and through the hall. The patio looked dreary and foggy; the flagstones were wet. They went out the arched door in the white wall. The Pacific was gray and met the sky distantly. Point Cypress was barely visible. Today, if a silver dirigible floated high in the air it was obscured by clouds. The mountains were hidden too. They walked on a few steps to a low rock wall that bordered the open space and overlooked that broad panorama below and stopped.

Jem stood, for a moment, tall and solid beside her, looking out into the distant gray of sea and sky, his straight nose and chin and dark hair outlined clearly, his eyes narrow and thoughtful. Then he said slowly: “Serena, are you sure Luisa didn’t scream?”

She wrenched her thoughts back to a rocky, narrow path and Pooky scrambling at her feet.

“No. I think I’d have heard it even above the pounding of the waves.”

“When Leda talked to you over the telephone she said she knew how Luisa must have died, didn’t she?”

Serena nodded. “She said it was the only way Luisa could have been murdered.”

“And Luisa didn’t scream.” Jem paused again and said: “Serena, before I go any further I’ve got to tell you something. It’s not very—pleasant. It’s about Amanda and me. You see …” Jem’s whole face seemed to set itself. “She’s why I came, you know. Because I—well, I’ve been in love with her for years.”

T
HE SHADOWY BLACK ROCKS
of Point Cypress seemed to move a little above the slow gray waves. One of the bungalows down in the village looked very yellow and bright. Serena knew that Jem had looked down at her quickly and hard, and then back at the sea and valley below them. He said, his voice suddenly uneven: “Let’s get away from the house. We can’t—all those windows …” He turned toward the driveway that led along the hedge, toward the corrals and barns and low-lying sheds. Serena walked beside him. Everything seemed very sharp and clear and somehow poignant as if it had significance—even the sound of the gravel below their feet and the touch of the damp, cool air upon her face. They went through the opening in the hedge and came into a wide, empty space, surrounded with low sheds and barns and the white painted fences of a corral. Jem glanced around and said in an absent way, “The fog’s wet. You ought to have on a coat. Let’s go in here …” It was one of the barns—low and sprawling, with a wide kind of corridor through it. There were no horses there. It was for hay and feed and storage. A yellow barn cat flashed out of sight through the open door at the back. Jem paused. “Here’s the tack room,” he said, and they entered a small room, shadowy with its one window, redolent of leather and harness oil and old wood. The walls were of wide, time-weathered planks, and on them hung bridles and spurs and saddles, all polished and soft as silk and gleaming faintly in the gray light. It was a beautiful room, really, with much of California’s golden, rich, violent, beautiful history held within it as if it were a leather-bound, old book. That was, Serena thought, mainly owing to the saddles; all kinds of them, old and new. McClellan saddles, like rocking chairs, little English saddles, flat as pancakes and almost as small, and several Spanish saddles, tooled in rich designs, old and soft and silky with great hooded stirrups, and gold and mother-of-pearl ornamentations. Jem turned over a wooden box and said: “Here, sit down. I—want to look at you.”

She did so. He leaned against a great, black-leather Spanish saddle. “You knew it. Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Well, it’s true. I came to the wedding, you know, and … I’ve tried to get away, really, Serena; but every time I’ve got away I’ve—come back.”

There was too much she wanted to say. She couldn’t find the right, clear words. She moved the toe of her white sport moccasin in a small design on the dusty floor. He said: “That’s all, Serena. But I had to tell you.”

There was another soft silence in the shadowy little room. Serena said finally in a low voice, watching the toe of her slipper, “Is she in love with you?”

“I—I thought she was. She said she was. I—we even thought of leaving together, the day before her wedding. Oh, I was crazy, of course. I don’t think she’d really have done it, or that I would, but we did talk of it; and then we came to our senses and—oh, agreed to forget it. All of it. I went away and … It’s a long story, Serena. And as I said, not very pleasant. I’ve been back three times. She wasn’t happy with her marriage, you see, and wrote to me, and she—seemed to need help, although when I got here there was never anything much I could do for her. She didn’t want to leave Sutton and by that time I didn’t think she should leave him. He’s—a good egg, you know. I wasn’t—I’m not particularly proud of … But there’s been nothing, Serena …”

She interrupted. “I know that. Is that why you sold your ranch?”

“Well, yes. She was having a bad go … Sutton had no money.…”

“Jem, did you give her money? Is that why you sold your ranch?”

“Well—yes. I stayed around here six weeks or so. There was never anything I could do, really. Except let her talk to me. So I went away again …”

“How much money?”

He looked away and then straight down into her eyes. “I loaned her some; not very much, Serena. I don’t want it back.”

“What did she do with it?”

“Why, I—don’t know. Used it about the ranch, she said. I never asked. There were no strings attached, you know.”

“Jem, is she in love with you now? If you asked her to, would she leave Sutton and marry you?”

“Good God, no! To both questions. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Serena. She’s not in love with me, but she’s always seemed to need me. Do you see? Oh, I’ve known I was a fool, but when she needed me, what could I do?”

“Needed you? How?”

Jem said slowly: “I don’t know. She wasn’t happy. She—said she needed me.”

“And you always came?”

“Yes. There was a kind of obligation …”

“Obligation …”
cried Serena in a sudden surge of fury—and caught herself; she must be reasonable and clear and honest. “Jem, all that doesn’t matter. She’s beautiful and men do fall in love with her.…”

“I wasn’t in love,” began Jem. “I know that now, but …”

Again he stopped. Serena said in a whisper: “Did you love her—the night I came home?”

She was looking hard again at the round, white leather tip of her shoe. It was very still in the shadowy, long barn, very quiet in the small fragrant tack room. And Jem leaned over and pulled her up from the wooden box. He held her close so he could look into her eyes. “I haven’t loved her for a long time. I was held to her—I’m trying to be honest, Serena—but I haven’t loved her. Now I know that whatever feeling I had, or thought Ï had four years ago, wasn’t real. And even that is all in the past because—I love you, Serena.” His eyes were dark and urgent, his hands on her shoulders hard and sure. “I think—somewhere—I got mixed. I think I have loved you since the night she was married. Only I didn’t know it. I might never have known it if you hadn’t come back. It’s never been Amanda in the same way that it’s you. There’s something between you and me that—I don’t understand it—but it’s as if we were—were each other. No barriers. I—I’m not good at words.” He pulled her close into his arms. “I love you,” he whispered against her face and then moved so his mouth came down hard upon her own.

The small tack room was very shadowy, very still, very far away from the world and barricaded against it. Presently Serena moved, too, in that enchanted, guarded, place and put her arms up around him and he bent so his face pressed against her own.

But they weren’t really barricaded from the world.

For, very remotely at first, a sound came through the fog, and gradually nearer. It was the sound of a car coming up the mountain road. It came nearer, reached the level road; came to the archway in the patio and with a slurring of wheels stopped. Jem listened.

“That must be the police. Listen, Serena … Oh, God, I meant to talk of so many things. There’s so much I want you to know—I want to explain and make you see how or why I felt as I did. And God knows I don’t see why I acted as I did—or how she could—well, pull me as if she had me on a string tied to one of her fingers. Now it seems like a—oh, a sickness, a fever—not real. Something I know happened, yet that happened to another person. There isn’t time to talk. Serena, will you believe that it’s the real me, now? I don’t know how to say it.…”

“I believe you.”

He took her in his arms again. And finally laughed a little, unsteadily, and made her sit down on the box. “Sit there again. Away from me. Where I can’t reach you! I’ve got to talk.…”

It was as if a dark and dangerous forest lay between them and bright and sunny plains, and there was no clear and discernible path through the forest but instead many paths, some treacherous, all full of danger.

She sat down on the wooden box and Jem leaned against the saddle. “I love you more than I ever thought anybody could love anything. Sometime I’ll make you understand that. Now then.” He made a great business suddenly of getting out cigarettes, lighting one for her and one for himself—listening too, she knew, for sounds from the house. And then began to talk, quickly, very quietly and urgently.

“I went to Gregory’s. Bill admits taking Leda to Monterey. Now if we can prove that she was at Gregory’s it would help to substantiate her telephone call to you. I questioned the clerks. So far none of them remember having seen Leda; but I wasn’t too sure that all of them knew her by sight. Then I tried to find out who it was that Leda saw in the store—but I drew a blank. There were three clerks, and a bookkeeper; all but one of them knew Sutton and two knew Johnny by sight and were fairly certain of—well, the rest of us at the dinner. Alice and Bill—Dave and me and Amanda. They were a little vague—and one of them was new to Monterey and didn’t know any of us by name. So there’s a possible loophole there. He might possibly remember having seen—somebody—and be able to identify him.”

“Him …” It made it seem horribly definite. Him. Sutton—Bill—Jem—Dave—who else? Oh, yes, Johnny, who had an alibi, or Pedro, the caretaker, who could not conceivably have a motive.

“Well—or her,” conceded Jem, which made it worse. Alice, Amanda, herself.

“Jem, do
you
think it was one of us? It couldn’t be!”

He said after a moment that it was the police who held that theory. “God knows I hope they’re wrong. But the point is
somebody
was in Gregory’s, and it was somebody Leda knew. And the presence of that person, combined with something Leda saw in the store, gave her the idea as to how Luisa was murdered. I looked around; but a hardware store, if you’re looking for them, does seem to have a lot of lethal weapons.” He listened again, eyes narrowed and dark head turned toward the house, and then went on swiftly: “You get so you suspect everybody—look for motives. Serena—Amanda didn’t give you any money. Why is she insisting that she did?”

“I don’t know. There’s some reason. I don’t know what it is.”

“Did she admit the truth to you, when you were alone?”