Escape the Night (25 page)

“Yes.” She told him of Amanda’s candid, yet defiant admission.

“But she didn’t say why?”

“No.”

“Serena—has it occurred to you that somewhere, somehow, rather a lot of money must have disappeared?”

“Amanda said Sutton had lost it.”

“I know. But Sutton had really a lot. He was careless about money; that’s true. Careless and kind; he’d always been used to money, and he was generous. But Amanda …” he broke off. “What was there about the bracelet? You started to talk of it …”

It was all right now to tell him everything—even when it concerned Amanda. She told him all she knew of the bracelet. She told him of Amanda’s voice, heard over the telephone from San Francisco: “Put that down,” she had said to someone.

“Who was there? Sutton? Luisa? Put what down?”

“I don’t know. And then that first night I was here, before you came, someone was in the patio—whispering. It sounded as if there were two people, quarreling …”

“I remember. You asked me, but I didn’t think … Go on, Serena.”

When she’d finished, she’d told him even about her completely baffling conversation with Amanda that morning immediately after the police had gone. “She offered a silly bargain, Jem. She said they’d suspect you …”

“Probably would. As I say, you get so you suspect everybody. And if she did quarrel with Luisa … Oh, darling, are you sure you—you believe me about Amanda? I was a prize fool, you know. Luisa had every right to want to get me out of the way. But I didn’t murder her. Or Leda.”

“Oh, Jem, I know that.”

“It would shift the blame, though, if Quayle knew that Luisa objected to me and why.” He lighted another cigarette. The match made a small golden glow in the dusky room. She cried: “Oh, no, Jem, you mustn’t tell them!”

“Better charge me with murder than you!” He put out the match with a jerk. “Oh, I’m not going in for heroics, Serena. That’s just the truth. And I was at Casa Madrone …”

“Jem …”

“Darling. Darling …” He moved toward her, stopped, laughed a little, and went back to lean upon the saddle. “Now then, about yesterday. Quick. Tell me as quickly as you can the whole thing again. Every detail you can remember about Casa Madrone. Hurry …”

So she did that too. And began to remember things she’d forgotten—the faint scent of tobacco as she came into the house; she’d thought someone was already there, smoking. Or had been a few moments before. (“That was Leda,” said Jem, parenthetically. “They found a cigarette stained with lipstick. She’d been smoking while she waited.” And while someone crept close in that still and shadowy house. Serena tried not to think of that and went on.) The paper she’d removed from the lamp that, later, was so strangely broken. The footsteps on the stairs.
The fifth step!

Suddenly the significance of that struck her and she told him of it in detail, excitedly.
“I’d forgotten that!
Does it—why, it must mean that whoever was there knew about that step! Knew that it creaked …”

Jem was struck by it too. After a moment he said soberly: “You knew it and Amanda. She may have mentioned it to someone. But I …” He paused thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think that’s it. I think …” Again he stopped.

It was growing darker. Jem’s face was a white oval in the dusk. He put out his cigarette carefully and said: “Go on. How about the gates? Were they open or closed?”

The gates had been open; so someone might have gone into the drive, unless, of course, Pedro had left the gates open himself. No other car had been there when she came. She’d seen no one. She’d reached there, she thought, considerably after four. She didn’t remember seeing the red and white scarf at all.

“Neither did I. Whoever was there, in the house, must have got quietly into the station wagon, while we were in the house searching, taken your button and Amanda’s scarf, waited until we’d gone and then put them exactly where they were placed. I pointed that out to the police …” He stopped so abruptly that she knew he was keeping something back and asked him. “Did they believe you?”

“I don’t know. They said …” again he stopped. But this time because someone entered the barn.

Whoever it was walked heavily and swiftly along the wide, wooden floor of the middle corridor of the barn, and exactly at that instant Serena remembered the one new thing—the one tangible thing she had happened upon, and that was the little splintered hole in a wooden stair railing that looked as if it might be a bullet hole.

“Jem …”

The footsteps had stopped. Jem met her eyes, and she leaned toward him and whispered: “In the railing—the right-hand stairway of the patio—it looks like a bullet hole. Look at it …”

“Hey, there, Jem! Sissy! Where are you?”

It was Bill Lanier’s voice.

Jem nodded quickly at Serena. “Here we are, Bill,” he called. They rose and moved toward the door. Bill met them. It was so dark that they couldn’t see his face, save for a blur of whiteness. His voice was loud and flat. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Jem. Hello, Sissy. Have you heard the news? I’m your fellow suspect.”

“Well, at least they didn’t arrest you,” said Jem.

“They can put their hands on me any time they want to. Fat chance of me getting away! I’m in the army. I’ve not got gasoline enough to escape by car. There’s no way to get a private plane with the coast as heavily guarded as it is and—why, either of us would be nabbed before we’d been gone an hour! So there’s no use in your trying to escape either, Sissy. But the fact is, as I look at it, if they arrest me, they’ll have to admit you didn’t do it, Sissy; and if they arrest you, now, they’ll have to admit
I
didn’t do it! They don’t want to do either. You and I, Sissy, are suspects. Well, there’s one thing: they haven’t yet said it was collusion!” He laughed raucously and abruptly stopped, and said: “I’ve got the pictures, Jem. All of them. Alice had them in a scrapbook. I’ve got everybody. Even Luisa Condit …” He pulled out a sheaf of photographs—snapshots—from his pocket. “Want to see them? It’s too dark in here.…”

They walked toward the wide, open door of the barn. Jem paused, letting Serena and Bill precede him for a few steps and when she realized he was no longer with them and turned to look back, he was standing at the door of a room opposite the tack room, looking in. It was so dark that she couldn’t see the expression in his face; yet there was something odd and arrested about his attitude. Then Bill turned too. “Hurry up, Jem. We’ve got to see all the clerks tonight. I’ve got their addresses. The store’ll be closed, we’ll have to go to their houses …”

Jem gave a start—as if he’d been thinking so hard that he’d forgotten that Bill was there and what they were doing. But he came immediately. And there in the open doorway they looked at the pictures Bill had brought.

Snapshots, all of them. Taken in a poignantly different world—a world where murder and suspicion and horror hadn’t existed. Yet again Serena thought: was the shadow of murder somewhere there—an unseen presence among them? It didn’t seem real or credible, thinking of it like that, yet she found herself scrutinizing every face as if she might unmask it. Amanda with her hat off and the wind blowing her hair, standing on a rock somewhere, her face lovely and clear. Sutton on a horse, with a rope around the saddle horn and a sombrero in his hand—laughing. Leda—laughing, too; with her blonde curls neat and shining. Dave at the door of his cottage with his glasses off, and a pipe in his mouth, squinting in the sun. Bill in bathing trunks, about to dive. One picture of them all together at a picnic, with Luisa sitting on a rock in the foreground, everyone laughing and everyone’s face perfectly clear and distinct and recognizable. Everyone, that is, except Alice. And, of course, Serena, who wasn’t there. Jem was, though, at Amanda’s side.

“Alice took the picture,” said Bill. “So she’s not there. But I brought a good clear picture of her too.” He showed it to them. And touched it himself, his blunt, strong finger suddenly gentle. “I’m going to prove that she wasn’t there,” he said with a kind of fury in his voice. “I’ll show them. Alice didn’t do it …”

“But nobody thinks she did …” began Serena.

“Alice’ll be safe,” said Bill. “I’ll see to that. Amanda can’t do anything to her.”

“But you …” This time Jem started to speak and stopped and Bill whipped the pictures together and said: “Good God,
I
didn’t want a divorce! I love Alice.”

He put the pictures in his pocket.

“But you wanted to marry Amanda …” began Serena again, and Bill’s black thick eyebrows drew together over his yellow-brown eyes. “Marry Amanda! Listen, I wouldn’t marry her if she was the last woman on earth. You’ve laughed because I said I hated her. I’ve made no bones of it; I do. Good God, don’t you see what she did to me? I love
Alice.
I’ve always loved her. All I wanted was Alice and marriage with her. Then she—oh, I let myself in for a little flirtation with Amanda.…Amanda’s a pretty woman, if she wasn’t such a hellion …” interjected Bill with a childishness that had also something very bitter and very adult in it. “But it didn’t mean a thing. Not a little damned thing. Only Alice found it out. And she was mad and divorced me before I could stop her. She said she’d teach, me and, by God, she did. Marry Amanda!” He gave Serena a look of something very like hatred. “I want Alice. And if it hadn’t been for Amanda, I’d still have her. I tell you, I love Alice …” Bill’s eyes shifted to Jem. His hard, immobile face did not change, but there was suddenly something feral and sly about his tall strong body. But he said without animosity and quite simply: “You’re another, Jem. I’ve watched you. It’s her beauty and her tenacity. She never gives up. You’ve got to be strong enough to get away—to shake off her appeals. I did it. I scared her out of her wits, nearly. I was afraid of her. I’d seen her get you in her clutches. I made all sorts of threats, and she believed me. I didn’t mean anything; but I wasn’t going to have Amanda tie me to her for the rest of my life. Good Lord!” He stopped being simple and earnest and gave one of his sudden loud laughs. “That’s why I’m here now! I want Alice back!”

So that was, really, what Bill Lanier felt about Alice and about Amanda. Yet, even as she thought that, Serena thought of Amanda with a queer kind of wrench at her heart. There was something defenceless and childlike about Amanda’s very blindness.

“The point is,” said Bill abruptly, “we’ve got to find out exactly who was in Gregory’s and who it was that Leda saw. For your sake, Sissy, and”—he grinned suddenly—“for mine. Come on, Jem …”

“Aren’t the police here? I thought I heard their car.…”

“That was me. I stopped and talked to Sutton. He said Amanda had gone to her room with a headache. She saw me coming, is my guess, and ducked. We’d better hurry.…”

Serena walked with them as far as the arched gate and Bill’s car and watched them as they drove slowly out of sight through the fog.

But Amanda’s headache apparently was real, for she didn’t come to dinner and sent down word by Modeste, who took up a tray, that she didn’t want to be disturbed. Sutton said nothing of Bill—nothing of anything, in fact. He turned on the radio during dinner and then read the newspapers determinedly as if to keep Serena from talking to him. He still looked tired and drawn. No one came and no one telephoned and Serena took a book which she didn’t expect to read and went to bed early.

And eventually, telling herself that Jem would somehow, some way find a path for them through that dark and terror-ridden forest, she went to sleep.

She awakened quite suddenly.

Someone was crying—pitifully, in a small whimpering way.

Only it wasn’t a person; it was Pooky. Outside—on the veranda, in the patio, somewhere near. Whimpering sadly. Whimpering, suddenly it seemed to her, with something sharp and worried about it.

Something frightened!

She tried to shut out the sound and couldn’t. She tried to pretend it didn’t matter; that he was all right, and couldn’t. She got up finally, driven by that small—frightened?—whimper, groped for her dark silk dressing gown, wrapped it around her and went to the door.

Opening it, she found that the night had cleared. The veranda made a double rim of shadow around the walls of the house, but the stars were out and so clear that, after a moment, when she went to the veranda railing, she could see objects down in the patio. Shrubs, the flagstone walks, the benches, the two flights of stairs, one at her feet and one across the patio, gray and clear, in the starlight.

Pooky had stopped whimpering when she opened the door. She started to call him.

And stopped because there was something on the stairway at her feet.

Across the patio on the ground floor a door suddenly opened and light blazed out. Someone cried sharply: “Pooky! Stop that!”

The shaft of light from the opened door went straight across the patio to the stairway. She was nearer; she had moved; she was on the stairway, clutching the railing. Just as Sutton called from across the patio: “Amanda—are you out there?” Serena saw what that dark huddle was.

“Amanda,” called Sutton again.

Amanda so beautiful in life was still beautiful with the starlight on her dark hair and outflung white arm. Clearly and strangely, yet with a dreadful horror that enveloped her like the cold clear starlight, Serena saw that.

Sutton came to the railing above and across the patio—came and there was a sharp stillness and then his voice: “Serena, what are you doing?” There was another pause. Then the horror in the night caught him too; caught his voice, made it high in a womanish scream:
“Serena, what have you done?”

Nothing moved in the starlit patio; nothing moved against the white wall or through the black, arched doorway, or among the vine-covered pillars, or back into the shadow of the encircling verandas.

T
HERE WERE THINGS THAT,
forever afterward, Serena remembered very sharply and clearly; but there were many things that she didn’t remember at all—things that nevertheless she later knew must have happened, must have been done and said in her presence.

She always remembered that Sutton, somehow, turned Amanda so the shaft of light from the open doorway fell upon her face and that was kind, too. Even in death Amanda was lovely.