Fair Warning (11 page)

She did realize that either they had not found the letter yet, or they were holding it back as a final coup for the time when she became so confused and so worn with physical fatigue that her defense would go down altogether before it.

The detective was back again. If Dr. Blakie and Rob had tried to interfere, it was not successful. What were they doing with those others? The place had grown still, and there was, now, no motion in the halls and no blurred sound of voices.

It began again. This time about Ivan’s property. Was he a rich man? Had he willed her any money? She didn’t know! Hadn’t he told her, then? No. But she was his wife; why hadn’t he told her? Oh, she didn’t know.

Time went on, and Marcia gradually became just a voice, disassociated from the white-faced girl in the chair, with her crumpled chiffon trailing around her silver slippers, and Ivan’s blue flannel jacket around her slender chilled white shoulders. She was becoming a little incoherent; she couldn’t sit upright, but leaned against the chair. They kept telling her to look at them, and she couldn’t because the light was so bright. Because her eyes were so queer and dazed. Yet her voice kept on answering and kept on telling the things it had to tell them.

But no more.

She clung to that desperately, time after time whipping herself to a keener comprehension of what she was about to say, and rousing herself in time to see a trap, avoid it, and watch for another. The light everywhere was so bright and so strong that the circle of faces seemed to float in it.

Presently the story was being told again—the story of how she came down the stairs and how there were no lights and how she came into the library. Only someone else was telling it. And when it came to the part where she’d bent over Ivan it was being told wrong. “… and he sat in the chair reading and you took the knife in your hand and reached over and stabbed—”

“No, no!” screamed Marcia. And still did not, could not, faint.

At two o’clock they let her go. She swayed when she stood, and one of the policemen helped her upstairs. No one was about. Rob, Beatrice, Dr. Blakie had all gone. Or had been sent away.

The police were doing their duty.

They were paid by taxpayers to enforce law and order. Murder was murder. It was their business to find the murderer, and he deserved no mercy as he had given none. They didn’t take any one of them to the station that night for questioning merely because they were as good as under arrest where they were, and there was not yet a strongly enough indicated line for a direct charge.

The policeman’s attitude hinted this as he helped Marcia to her room, and she all but collapsed on the chaise longue. He did tiptoe to the bathroom as if someone were asleep near by and get her a drink of water. If she didn’t murder him she didn’t. But somebody had. And why not the woman who was alone with him, who found him dead, who was his wife?

He put the glass in her hand.

“Drink it,” he said. “You’ll feel better. And by the way, ma’am—about the knife—does it work?” He added rather hurriedly, “For dandelions, I mean.” It was the man who had got the fanatic gleam. He shook his head disappointedly as he saw she had no comprehension of his words, muttered, “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” and went away.

After he’d gone Marcia got up and reached the door and locked it. And reached the chaise longue again before a swimming gray pool of shadows engulfed her.

It passed somehow into sleep, for she lay there unstirring, a small, limp heap of rose-pink chiffon, one bare arm outflung, and blue shadows under her eyes. Across the room was the door to Ivan’s empty, silent room. It was closed and had been locked since the first night he was in the hospital.

Across the dark garden a light burned in the Copley house, and Bunty wriggled and sighed and turned and finally crept under the bed to avoid its glare and slept.

The Godden house became completely silent. A final car roared away into the night and left it, at last, alone in its own dark being. Neighbors, aware of the tumult and sounds and, swiftly, of the reason for it, had stopped watching from their windows long ago, and their houses were dark.

It began to rain again, steadily and monotonously, pushing at the french doors in the library and dripping rhythmically from the eaves. It was colder, too, and a policeman who was a darker bulk in the dark garden sneezed and thought of a warm kitchen and a pot of coffee. Besides, there was nothing going on; there never was right after a murder. People were too scared. The murderer too anxious to avoid drawing attention to himself. It was all nonsense keeping a policeman out there. In the rain. One man in the house was enough.

But he was afraid of Jacob Wait. So he went down to the summerhouse, which sheltered him a little, and huddled there smoking and listening to the steady downward beat of the rain. His pipe made a small crimson glow, lost and forgotten in that black, wet night so filled with its own commotion. Below him was the lily pool, drenched and full. Odd how the steady beat of the rain sounded like footsteps. So like, indeed, that once he rose and went to the door of the summerhouse and peered through rain and blackness. There was nothing, and the rain beat steadily again and with no change in its rhythm. He went back to the bench and probably slept a little.

There was another shadowy, dark bulk in the house, too, and he was tired and very sleepy and shared the views of the man in the garden. Besides, it was such an empty-feeling house at night, filled only with the murmurous beat of the rain on the windows. He would hear anything that went on inside the house. But nothing would happen. Not right after the murder. It never did. He kept thinking of the kitchen, too. It was at the end of that passage back of the dining room. There would likely be something in the refrigerator. Anyway, it would be more comfortable than the front of the house. That was all right in the daytime. But not at night. Not just after a murder had been done there. Not with the black rain beating and beating against the doors as if it wanted to come in. As if something out there wanted to come back.

He crossed himself and swore and went to the kitchen, closing all intervening doors.

The rain beat against the black windows of Marcia’s bedroom, and the eaves dripped steadily like stealthy feet, and Marcia awoke.

She awoke at first to a confused sense of discomfort and chill. Something had happened. Something which accounted for her lying there on the chaise longue, dressed, in the murmurous blackness. Then she remembered in one swift, terrifying rush. And there was something she was to do. Something terribly important. Something that meant—

The letter, of course. Rob’s letter to her.

It was as if it had waked her. Her head began to clear. She struggled, moved, sat up in a small huddle.

Her arms were bare and cold, and without thinking of it she put on the flannel jacket which had slid away from her while she slept.

The police were probably gone by this time. If they were—and they must be—now was the time to recover the letter. It must be found. When they made so much of, even, that moment or two with Rob in the dusk just before Ivan was murdered, what couldn’t they make of that letter?

She was terribly, acutely clear about it, as one is in emergency.

She unbuckled her silver slippers, and thought fleetingly of fastening them so long ago, it seemed, and how clumsy her fingers had been. Without them, now, there would be less danger of Beatrice’s hearing her as she passed her door. She pulled up the sleeves of the flannel jacket which were much too long. The room suddenly seemed safe.

She opened the door without making any sound.

The hall was wide and long, passing a succession of black, closed doors before it passed Beatrice’s door, and at last she reached the well of the stairs. It was shadowy and dim, lighted only by one small night light at the top of the stairway, but it was empty.

Her chiffon skirts, too long now without her high heels, whispered lightly along the floor, but the steady beat of the rain submerged it and all lesser sounds. She crept down the few steps to the landing and paused there, clinging to the banister.

Below was a pool of shadow, except for a small light on the table away at the front of the hall, so heavily shaded that it lay only upon the polished surface of the table and upon an Indian vase beside it.

There was no light coming from the library door. Either there was no one there or the door was closed. But there was certainly no one in the hall, and she could hear no voices.

The rain beat steadily upon the colored panes behind her, but there was no other intrusive sound. And there was a quality of immobility, of desertedness about the hall below that convinced her, rather than any more reasonable evidence, that there was no one about.

She went on down the stairway, clutching her skirt so it would not trip her.

The library door was closed. She put her hand on the doorknob, turned it with the most extreme caution, and opened the door a fraction of an inch. No one stopped her, and there was no light within.

They had gone, then, finally. The whole empty room waited for her. A moment more and she would have that letter in her own hands. That letter and Rob’s life and her own.

Safer to close the door behind her. Safer not to turn on the lights, for the room was empty. The beating of the rain was, of course, clearer now and nearer, for it was at the windows, at the very doors, pushing against them.

But she was sure again, by some indefinable quality in the still blackness around her, that there was no living thing near.

The big chair would be slightly to the left, the chair and the chalked oval on the floor and the lamp. The long desk considerably to the right. The table again at the left. She must find her way through the darkness straight across the room.

She groped and found the chair. She could feel the thick nap of the carpet through her thin silk stockings. Right there below her feet Ivan—she moved instinctively to one side—now the table—careful, though, for fingerprints—

She found the edge of it. The blackness was curiously thick, and something was askew about it. A chair rose up before her hand which ought not to have been there. She circled it cautiously. Ah—there were the french doors, a wide, unbroken rectangle which was faintly less dark than the rest of the room. The cupboard would be at the left.

She found the wood panels, the small latch. She opened it carefully; she could find the letter in the dark. She would know the feel and shape and size of it. If not, there were matches on Ivan’s desk.

She groped inside. Frantically, swiftly, now that she was so near the end of it. Frenziedly. For it wasn’t there.

She couldn’t give up—it had slipped down somewhere—somewhere among those smooth, cool stacks of magazines, somewhere between those rougher-textured boxes of paper. Matches.

She found them and was back at the cupboard. Lighting them, thankful the sound of the rain drowned the tiny sharp sputters of that lighting. One after another at last in reckless, frantic haste, searching, hunting, burning her fingers, dropping the match and lighting another. The tiny sharp flares wavering in the darkness, lighting for an instant her own white face and the outlines of the table behind her and the blank stacks of magazines and boxes on the shelves. A quart bottle of ink. A small paper sack containing something heavy like sugar and tied firmly and marked. An empty vase. It was distressingly orderly, and the letter was not there. There was no place for it to have slipped within. It would have fallen, of course, directly behind the closed doors. And the neat stacks inside the cupboard were placed well back.

She gave up when she had used up the small packet of matches, though she had known from the first.

The little pasteboard fold with advertising printed on it dropped from her hand.

Well, what now? It was gone. Rob …

All around her that surging blackness. Rain against the windows, rain against the doors, blackness everywhere. What could she do? What was there to do? She stood there numbed by the shock of it as if it were a physical blow.

There was nothing in all that murmurous darkness to tell her to go away. Nothing in the beat of the rain to say “Hurry, hurry. Don’t stay here.” All the familiar objects in that room were engulfed in blackness and sound and could not warn her. Had failed once already that April night to warn.

She did move away from the cupboard. She must have closed it without knowing it. She turned blindly in the darkness, and because she could no longer see the lighter rectangle of the french doors and guide herself by it she lost herself somehow in that black room among suddenly strange and bewildering objects or more bewildering space.

Where was she? What was this thing brushing her hand? A window curtain? But what window?

The beat of the rain was suddenly louder and sharper. As if it were in the room.

As if the french doors had opened in that blackness, letting it in.

S
HE DIDN’T KNOW, EVER
, exactly when or how she knew that something had entered the room, but quite suddenly she knew it. And that whatever that thing was, it was definitely, strongly inimical.

It was not Rob. It was nothing friendly. It was stealthy and purposeful and horribly evil. It was as if murder itself had become living and was walking there on furtive feet in the black and murmurous night. Detached from human warmth, hot only in its own terrible hunger.

But murder can’t walk.
Murder cannot walk! It cannot make stealthy footsteps, one and then another along the thick carpet!

It was as if she went entirely out of her frightened body. What was this?—the cold glass of the aquarium, she was at the end of the room. Hurry, then, holding your heart so it cannot leap and betray you.

Marcia got to the door and knew nothing of how she did it in that confusing cavern of blackness filled with the surging, pouring beat of the rain. At the door something queer happened. The sleeve of the flannel jacket seemed to catch on something, and the jacket twitched itself away from her. It happened in an instant, easily because it was so loose.