House Of Storm (13 page)

He pulled up a chair for her. Jebe pattered out in his straw slippers and put another cup of coffee on the table before her. How had it gone so far with Jim?

Major Wells began questioning her, politely and quickly. “I understand that you arrived only a few minutes after Mr. Shaw claims he heard the shot and found that his aunt had been murdered. Will you tell me what you saw and did?”

Claims. An invidious word, used in that way; a word that cast doubt, raised objections. She glanced at Jim again; he, too, had slid back into his chair and was sitting forward, one elbow on the table, smoking, his chin on his hand, his face enigmatic.

“Just tell them,” Roy said encouragingly. “It’s only for the record. I’ve already told them that Dick had had one over the eight and that you took him to Middle Road.”

“Tell the truth,” Jim had said the night before. She took a long breath and began. It was of course surprisingly short. She had driven up to the steps; she had found Hermione’s body on the steps. Jim had come to the door.

A wave washed in, its white top emerging surprisingly somehow from the black sea, its crash loud against the coral rocks below. Major Wells said, “Did you hear the sound of the shot?”

“No.” Was that a dangerous admission? Did it involve Jim? She saw that if she had heard the shot it would have substantiated Jim’s statement, and consequently the time of the murder. “I was in the car,” she added. “The noise of the engine was so loud, I don’t think I could have heard it.”

“You wouldn’t have more than started from Beadon Gates then,” Roy said. “Jim had had time to examine Hermione, and to make two telephone calls before you arrived.” He looked at Major Wells. “She couldn’t have heard it.”

“Did you see a gun anywhere?” Major Wells asked. “Anywhere at all?”

“No. That is” …
“Tell the truth,” Jim had said.
“There was only Jim’s gun. On the table in the hall.”

She held her breath for an instant, but then Major Wells nodded. He knew about Jim’s gun then, so that was all right. “Tell the truth,” Jim had said. Had they extracted the bullet that killed Hermione? Had they had time and tools and instruments to prove that it was not fired from Jim’s gun? Obviously not; the men had barely arrived.

“Did you see anyone about the place? Besides Mr. Shaw, I mean. Or anyone along the road or driveway?”

“No one.”

Major Wells’ eyes were like bright little daggers but showed no expression.

“Is there anything at all that you can think of that might be evidence?” he said after a pause.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

Roy said, “I don’t like to hurry you, Major, but the sea is rolling up.”

“I know, I know.” The commissioner rose, picking up the sun helmet that lay on a near-by table. “We’d better get over to Middle Road and take a look there. Are you ready, Shaw?” His manner, his voice changed subtly when he spoke to Jim. Nonie was aware of it instantly and, she thought, so were the others, for there was a kind of blankness, a rather chill curtain over their faces.

“The car is over here,” Roy said, and then turned to her. “My dear, I was sorry to have to send for you but they are rather hurried. This storm …”

She had to talk to him alone; obviously she could not just then. Yet it was with a sense of being swept willy-nilly along a strong current of events, that she saw him leave.

Jim had gone on ahead. Roy turned briskly away, towering above the wiry little police commissioner with his bare knobby knees and red hair. Their footsteps thudded across the porch; the car lights had been turned on and shone out making black and blue shadows of the shrubbery. The sky was dark and seemed to hang so near that it almost touched the house; the sea was only beginning to glisten away out toward the eastern horizon.

She sat down slowly at the lighted, littered table and Jim came back, running up the steps. “I said I’d forgotten my sun helmet,” he said. “Look here, darling, it’s all right. I’ll have to get through all this but it’s all right.”

She wanted to cling to him; she wanted to question; she wanted to reassure herself by his own strength. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“There was something about the way Major Wells spoke.”

He looked away from her quickly, out to the half-hidden, half-lighted sea. But he said as quickly: “He’ll have to question me, of course. But he won’t charge me with murder. And if he should …”

“Jim, tell me the truth. Have they arrested you? Are they going to arrest you?”

He looked back at her directly. “It’s their job to hold me for inquiry. They may even have to make a formal charge. But it’ll be all right. I promise you, darling. You must believe me. Now, then, about Roy and the wedding. I’ve got to stop that.”

“I haven’t told him. There’s been no time.”

“We’ll tell him together. I’ve got to go now, darling. Where’s my helmet? Oh, here.” He snatched it up from the chair. “Remember what I’ve told you.”

Remember not to worry. Remember things will be all right. Remember Jim could not be charged and tried—or convicted—for murder because he didn’t do it.

She watched him running across the veranda, his black head disappearing down the steps.

The car started. The sound of the engine died rapidly away down the drive, muffled by the thick encroaching hedges, put at last upon the public highway.

It was very quiet after they had gone; quiet and still dark, for dawn was slow in coming. She sat for awhile, drinking the hot coffee, watching the slow reluctant night creep inward from the sea, as if to take a refuge on the island. Aurelia obviously had slept late. Servants were about and there were lights at the kitchen end of the house but there was no sound for a long time except the stirring of the birds and the wash of the waves.

Perhaps she sat longer than she meant to, entangled by her thoughts, caught in the strange, nether world that was not day nor night. Later it seemed to her that she had been gradually aware of sounds of the waking plantation; of machinery starting somewhere in the distance, of the faraway rattle of wagons and sound of voices. Consciously she heard only the sound of the waves. She did remember noting their increased rhythm and the wider, more turbulent white tops that curled in and out along the shadowy coastline below.

The sea itself was glistening with light when she rose and walked across the veranda and down the steps; the land, however, was still submerged in gray and the shadows under the hedges were thick. Not a leaf stirred. A sign of storm? She thought that and went on along the white shell path between the thick wet hedges of hibiscus and tamarack, and great rustling clumps of bamboos. The coffee had thoroughly roused her, the coming storm plucked at her nerves; she’d take a turn in the garden and then go back to sleep. What were they doing now at Middle Road?

Would they arrest Jim?

The hedges made a dark and leafy tunnel. Her footsteps crunched softly upon the tiny white shells that paved the path. How frightened she had been the night before, running along that path, her flying skirts whispering of terror! Even now the soft crunch of the shell seemed to make a syncopated rhythm of her footsteps, like a soft pursuing echo, barely out of time.

The storm had strewn the path with torn leaves and broken branches. She stopped to pick up a fallen loop of bougainvillaea.

She stopped but the soft echo of her footsteps went on.

Only it was not an echo. Someone was walking with her, very lightly, very softly on the other side of the thick hedge.

A
NOTHER WOMAN TOOK POSSESSION
of Nonie’s body; another woman cried out in her heart, telling her what to do; she whirled and ran, scrambling and slipping in the shells, ran and ran as in a dream, making no progress, always with sliding shells and hedges on either hand, so high she could not see above them, so thick with foliage she could catch no glimpse of movement through them. She reached the steps. She ran past the empty lighted table, the chairs pushed this way and that, the flung-down napkins as the men had left them. She did not stop until she was inside the house, leaning against the massive table that ran along the maroon-colored wall, gasping for breath.

Jebe in the dining room heard her and came. Jebe, when she had told him someone was in the garden, someone was furtively walking with her on the other side of the hedge, shook his head and mumbled and ran to call Aurelia. Aurelia came at once, her face tired and lined, and sent Jebe to search the garden.

There was an air of indulgent skepticism about Jebe until then. It changed to reluctance when Aurelia ordered him to search the garden. However, he obeyed, taking Archie, the kitchen boy, with him.

Aurelia eyed her in a troubled way.

“Could you have imagined it, Nonie?”

“There was someone on the other side of the hedge.”

“Who could it have been?”

“I couldn’t see. The hedge is too thick.”

Aurelia waited a moment, and then went to the dining room and came back with coffee for herself. She sat down with a sigh opposite Nonie and looked out across the veranda. Dawn had come fully by then. Morning had come but there was no sun, only a pearly, subtly ominous light.

“Where is Roy? Where is Jim?”

“The police commissioner came from Port Iles. They’ve all gone to Middle Road.”

Aurelia sipped her coffee and huddled her robe around her.

“Nonie, are you sure you heard someone? You had a dreadful shock last night, of course. It would be natural for you to be nervous …”

“Someone was there.” But, by then, she was beginning to feel uncertain and ashamed of her flight. “It may have been only one of the boys. But there was something so”—she hunted for a word—“so stealthy about it. As if whoever it was didn’t want to be seen. As if …” As if he were stalking her, she thought; as if he were following her, walking so softly, so dangerously. She did not say that to Aurelia. It would sound silly, frightened, childish.

Aurelia frowned and sipped more coffee. “It must have been one of the servants.”

Nonie shoved her hands down tight into the pockets of her white slacks so Aurelia could not see them trembling.

Aurelia pushed back her heavy gray braid and sighed. “What did the police commissioner think of it all?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jim went with them to Middle Road, you said.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry Jim came back to the island last night. It puts him in a bad light.” Aurelia broke off to listen. Sounds of lifted voices, exclamations, running feet came from the back of the house.

“What’s that?” Aurelia cried and hurried toward the kitchen and Nonie followed.

A high babble of voices quieted at Aurelia’s approach. Jebe stood in the center of the little ring of maids and cook, and Archie—all of them looking at an object in Jebe’s hands. They had found no one in the garden. No one was there. But someone had been there, for Jebe and Archie had found a machete.

The long sharp cane knife, with its wicked wide blade, looked like a cutlass in Jebe’s trembling and frightened hands.

He had found it near the hedge, below it, as a matter of fact, flung down. It had not been there overnight. The grass below did not show the heavy marks it would have left. The handle of the machete was not wet; the blade was not rusted as it would have been.

Aurelia questioned; she sent for the garden boy, she questioned Jebe and Archie and the cook, and the maids.

In the end if anyone knew anything of the machete that knowledge was successfully concealed. Yet that very concealment was damning. A cane knife was one of the most common of plantation tools; there could have been a hundred innocent reasons for its having been found almost anywhere about the grounds. Aurelia sent for Smithson, the overseer.

He came at once. He was a big, slow-spoken man, with blunt honest features and he did not relish the interruption. He had been supervising some loading, he told Aurelia, taking off his peaked, white-straw hat. Her questions were rapid and to the point.

“You know about the murder last night, Smithson?”

“Yes, Miss Beadon.”

“Miss Nonie thought someone was hiding in the garden awhile ago. She was frightened and came to the house. Jebe found no one in the garden but he found this.”

The overseer looked at the machete and said nothing.

“Is a cane knife missing?”

He shrugged. “That is not possible to say, Miss Beadon.”

“I know. I realize that. But …” Aurelia hesitated. “What about the men? Could one of them have come to the house this morning?”

He seemed to take time to think, to check over his field hands. Finally he shook his head. “I don’t think so, Miss Beadon. Everybody was present and accounted for. We’re very busy just now.”

“You’re a good overseer, Smithson,” Aurelia said. “You don’t miss much.”

“I try not to, Miss Beadon.”

“Well,” she hesitated again, at a loss. “Very well, then. I’ll not keep you any longer.”

He gave the machete another long deliberate look. “Anybody on the island could have got hold of a cane knife.” He glanced at Jebe. “You’re sure that was all?”

Jebe nodded anxiously. Smithson had a stolid, slow authority which everyone on the place seemed to respect. He turned to Aurelia. “If I were you, Miss Beadon, I’d let Mr. Beadon know about this.”

“Yes, you’re right, Smithson. He’s busy at Middle Road but …Yes, I’d better let him know. Thank you.”

The overseer made a short, grave bow and went away, his white shirt already clinging damply to his broad, muscular back, his blue jeans faded and white with the sun and many washings.

“We’ll phone to Roy,” Aurelia said. “I expect I ought to have done that immediately. But I didn’t think.… This machete changes it.…” She did the telephoning herself from the old-fashioned telephone fastened upon the pantry wall. It was so high that Nonie would have had to stand on tiptoe to reach it and was the only telephone in the house.

Nonie could hear Roy’s exclamations, the short, sharp sound of his questions, the pause while apparently he told the others what had happened. He came back to the telephone and Aurelia after an instant turned to Nonie. “He wants to talk to you.”