House Of Storm (18 page)

Seabury, staring at the rug, shook his head. “Cash,” he said. “And bank balance.” He hesitated as if questioning his next statement but then went on: “Her bank balance is by no means what I’d expect it to be; but Hermy put most of her income back into Middle Road—not always advisedly, she was pennywise and pound foolish in a queer way. We’ll have to check on that—if we can. She was very secretive and, so far as I know, never kept books. She prided herself on her memory. It is more difficult to check on things because she dealt in cash. She—well, to tell you the truth, she liked cash. She paid bills in cash; used cash wherever she could. It was one of her peculiarities.”

All of them stared at him and Seabury stared at the carpet.

Roy said finally: “How short is the bank balance?”

Seabury shrugged in a helpless way. “It may not be short. How can anyone tell? I only meant that I’d have expected her to have a fairly substantial sum on deposit. There isn’t; yet she may have been barely breaking even. Her tax accounts may show something, or nothing. She could have done anything with money—or had none to do much with! The way Hermione used cash we may never get at the real facts. We’ll try. But that’s the sum of the will.”

And Nonie thought suddenly: cash. Cash in her alligator bag, bills amounting to twelve hundred dollars. Disappeared. Vanished. Cash.

She hadn’t told Roy or Aurelia. The fact of murder had seemed to block everything else, like a barrier to the normal, commonplace highway of everyday living. A strange and perilous detour into nightmares.

But twelve hundred dollars in a roll of bills in her brown alligator bag, in her own room upstairs, could have nothing to do with the murder of Hermione Shaw. Aurelia called the curiously formal little meeting to a close.

“We’ll have supper,” she said. “It’s on the table. Put those papers away, Dick. There’s nothing we can do tonight.” She listened to the wind. They all listened and Aurelia said: “You’ll have to stay here tonight, Seabury. You can’t possibly make it to the village in this.”

All of them agreed; there was nothing they could do then. Supper was a repetition of the afternoon’s meal, except the storm was wilder; so wild, so strong, so ominous that it took precedence, again, over murder. Dr. Riordan came in, breathless, wet, haggard, in the middle of it.

“Trees down everywhere,” he said. “It’s the worst storm I remember. I’ll take up your invitation, Roy, if you don’t mind. The road to Beadon Rock is blocked.”

Aurelia made a place for him at the table. The house shuddered and sighed and the sea pounded wildly, almost, it seemed, at the foundations of the house. Aurelia, with her fine dark eyes still angry and determined, took the helm again and sent everyone to bed. “We can’t do anything tonight,” she repeated and added rather grimly: “And from the sound of the storm we may be blown off to sea by morning.”

Already small pools of water were seeping irresistibly from under the shutters; the world outside was a black and lashing wilderness of rain and wind and torn and frantic shrubbery. Actually the storm had not yet reached its height, but it laid a kind of spell, a waiting, leaden paralysis upon them all.

Nonie had no chance to talk to Jim alone. Roy said good night to her with his usual gentleness and did not refer to Jim or their talk. Aurelia, coming to Nonie’s room to see that the balcony shutters were securely bolted, was exactly as usual. There was no flicker of recognition of the change in Nonie’s relationship to her. “Good night, my dear,” she said calmly. “Don’t be afraid of the storm.…”

Yet the house was like a ship at sea, rocked and battered upon all sides. The people within it were hypnotized by its sound and power and by sheer physical weariness. Probably nobody in the house expected to sleep and probably nobody in the house could have resisted that dark and welcome tide of weariness.

There was, however, one presence on the island which escaped that paralysis, which did not sleep, which traveled through the night and storm, from Middle Road plantation to Beadon Gates.

Sometime in the night the telephone in the pantry began to ring.

Nonie, in her room at the head of the stairs, heard and went to answer it.

Probably, half-asleep, she obeyed a dreamlike quality of compulsion in that continued, imperious summons. Certainly she was fully aware only of its insistent demand—not of the dimly lighted hall, the descending stairs, the empty, wide hall below. The storm surged around the house. The ringing of the telephone stabbed sharply through its wild monotony. Halfway across the dining room Nonie stopped abruptly; the pantry was lighted too.

So someone else had heard the telephone! Why hadn’t he answered that repeated summons? She moved on, slowly, to the open pantry door. She stopped there, again, this time like a sleepwalker, terribly aroused on the edge of a precipice.

The brass plate on the door was sweaty and cold under her hand. Her light silk robe swirled around her feet; her slippers were brightly scarlet below it. The windows rattled and creaked and the sea raged out in the blackness like a devouring beast. But the beast had got into the house; the beast had traveled from Middle Road to Beadon Gates. Seabury Jenkins was in the pantry and he had not answered the telephone because he lay huddled below it. His face, mercifully, had fallen against his arm. He had been murdered and a machete lay on the floor, almost touching him.

The telephone rang and rang and finally stopped.

N
ONIE WAS LIKE A
sleepwalker only now she was running.

A mirror in the hall gave her a flickering reflection of a woman with a white face and frightened eyes and flying white skirts. The storm battered at the door as if it had desperate, determined being. It sifted through the hall, tinkled the lusters on the chandelier, followed her up the stairs. Her hands beat against a closed door, desperately, like the storm. She looked over her shoulder but nothing, really, had followed her up the stairs, catching at her flying skirts.

Then, all at once, Roy was in the hall, Jim was there, everyone was there.

Roy was tugging at a red bathrobe; Jim came, running, in slacks, his shoulders bare and brown. Dick Fenby came and Dr. Riordan and Lydia with her red hair tousled and a black-silk robe pulled tightly around her lovely figure, her green eyes glittering. Nonie still felt as if she stood, clinging, to the perilous edge of a precipice and did not know how she had got there.

There was no comfort in the company, no safety anywhere, only questions, exclamations, half-words; suddenly the men plunged downstairs and she and Lydia were left at the top of the stairs, with lights glittering everywhere now, with sounds and footsteps, and voices suddenly dying away below, submerged by the storm, muffled by distance. “I’m afraid to go down,” Lydia whispered. “I’m afraid—are you sure he was dead, Nonie?”

She must have replied for Lydia sucked in her breath so sharply that it was like a stifled scream. Aurelia came then, from the end of the hall, hurrying from the shadows, her full dark eyes flashing, her face flushed, her great gray braid swinging over her shoulder.

“Aurelia, Seabury was killed,” Lydia cried.

“I know, I heard what you said.”

“Nonie found him. She says the telephone was ringing.…”

“I’m going down.”

Lydia caught at her arm. “Oh, no, Aurelia …”

Aurelia’s dark eyes flashed scornfully at Lydia. “Do you think I’m afraid?” She shook off Lydia’s clasp and started quickly down the stairs, her strong, brown hand holding the banister.

They watched her go. When her gray braid and her wide shoulders disappeared around the newel post Lydia gave a kind of cry and sat down on the top step, swathing her black robe around her knees. She listened, Nonie listened; there was no sound at all except the battering of the storm. Lydia’s head was bent forward, the light shining on her thick red hair. Her face from that angle looked sharp and rather predatory; her green eyes were fastened on the visible section of the hall, watching and waiting with the poised yet tense patience of a cat at a mousehole.

Nonsense, thought Nonie sharply, deriding her own fancy. Nonsense! She sat down beside Lydia.

Moments passed and there was still no discernible sound from the back of the house. At last Lydia shifted her knees slightly.

“This rather brings it home,” she said, her voice husky. She shot a look at Nonie. “Who killed him?”

Nonie shook her head. She was watching that small visible part of the hall as fixedly as Lydia, listening, too; waiting, too. Lydia said, “Didn’t you see anybody?”

“No …”

“How long do you suppose he’d been dead?”

Nonie was cold. The house felt chill and dank. The house she’d thought, only yesterday, was listening and waiting much as she and Lydia were waiting now.

The memory touched her and went away; it too had been fancy. The house could not have known in advance the dark and terrible thing that was to happen within its thick and storm-beleaguered walls.

Lydia was insistent. Her suddenly sharpened face was turned, ferreting. “How long do you think he’d been dead? Wasn’t there anybody around? Any sound—anything? Have you no idea who did it?”

Even Nonie’s lips seemed cold and numb. She tried to reply: “I heard the telephone and went to answer it. I wasn’t really awake. The lights were on in the pantry. I saw him as soon as I reached the door. I didn’t see anybody else anywhere.”

It was a story she was to tell many times before that long night was over. It was a story she was to seek through in her mind many more times, trying to find a facet, a small forgotten chink through which some fact might be perceived, some vista into truth discovered.

Lydia said nothing. The silence lengthened indeed until it took on something that was not quite silence, that was not quite passive, that had a probing, urgent question of its own. Nonie turned suddenly to look at Lydia and Lydia was looking at her with bright, speculative eyes. For another moment that long look held them, so near they could have touched each other, neither of them moving. What is Lydia trying to say? thought Nonie. What does she mean? What is the thing in her eyes?

Then Lydia touched her lips with her tongue. “I was awake. How could anybody have slept tonight? But I didn’t hear the telephone. You say you heard it?”

“Yes.”

“And went down to answer it?”

“Yes …”

“Don’t you think that was—well, rather an odd thing for you to do? In the dark. After Hermione’s murder. After the thing you said happened to you this morning. Weren’t you afraid?”

Something was flickering in Lydia’s eyes—peering out and sliding back again, like a small animal crouched behind a wall. Nonie, watching it, said slowly: “I don’t know. I was half-asleep. Yes, I suppose I’d have been afraid as soon as I really waked.”

“But you must have been awake—you put on a robe, you put on slippers …” Her bright glance touched them and came back to Nonie’s face. “You went downstairs. You weren’t walking in your sleep, I suppose!” said Lydia and gave a small laugh.

As a matter of fact, it was exactly how Nonie had felt. She had been only half-aware of her own actions. The telephone had demanded imperatively, so she obeyed as if the house and everything in it was quite as usual, in its normal, accustomed order. Not in terrible disorder; not in fear; not drifting into a nebulous and shadowy other world where there were no rules, no sure and certain paths.

“I didn’t think of being afraid. I didn’t think of murder.…”

Lydia gave a short laugh which was like a nervous catching of breath. Her teeth were small and rather sharp. The word “predatory” floated through Nonie’s mind again. “It’s odd you wouldn’t be afraid. It’s odd, too, when you come to think of it, that you found Hermione only a few moments after she was shot. And now Seabury …”

Odd: yet it happened naturally, not because anybody had planned it that way; not because of the inevitability of a path put down for her to follow. She had gone to Hermione’s because she had taken Dick home; she’d gone to the telephone because it had been ringing and she’d not yet grown accustomed to fear. How could anyone grow accustomed to anything so horribly preposterous as murder!

Then the thing in Lydia’s eyes peered boldly out. She said: “Some people might think it more than odd,” and looked with unmasked hatred into Nonie’s eyes.

Hatred! But there was no reason for that, no basis of fact; nothing but a look in Lydia’s eyes. Hatred was as difficult a hurdle for conscious recognition to take as murder. Yet Nonie could not dismiss it as fancy, either.

“What do you mean, Lydia? What are you trying to say?”

Lydia blinked. “I didn’t mean anything, Nonie. I don’t think you murdered Hermione. Why should you? Or Seabury—no matter what he may have discovered about Hermione’s death.”

“Then you must not speak like that, Lydia.”

“And who’s going to stop me from thinking and saying what I wish to say? Roy? Do you think Roy will protect you?”

All at once it was a childish scene; they were two schoolgirls bickering. Nonie said with sudden weariness: “Oh, Lydia, don’t. It’s silly of us to quarrel like this. You don’t think I murdered Hermione. I don’t think you did.”

“Whoever murdered her will hang for it! Have you thought of that? And if it’s the wrong person—why, that’s murder, too!” She caught her breath sharply and locked her hands together hard. The storm seemed to rock the house. The men were returning. Nonie heard Jim’s voice and Roy’s in the hall below.

Like a dream again except that everything was so sharp and brightly focused, one scene dissolved into another.

Nonie and Lydia went downstairs and neither perhaps was quite aware of moving; the men were talking, Aurelia was talking, everyone was talking, and the things they said, the way they moved about, the pictures that formed and broke and formed again made a dreamlike background for the sharp bright reality of small things, details such as the way Aurelia sat in one of the great armchairs, with her head sunk on her chin and her great dark eyes fastened on nothing, staring. Jim went upstairs and came down pulling on a sweater. Dr. Riordan, in Roy’s pajamas, much too big for him, went upstairs too and came down in a few moments, fully dressed. Roy’s red bathrobe had wet patches on it, and Dick Fenby, his thick hair tousled and wet, his small face very white, was wrapped in an oilskin which glittered with rain, for they had taken Seabury’s body away—to one of the plantation outbuildings, away from the house, to remain until it could be sent to the village, struggling through the storm to do so, as they had struggled to bring Hermione into the house for the last time. Obviously Seabury had died from a sudden, murderous blow of the machete, probably from behind as he stood waiting at the telephone. The sound of the storm had covered the approach of the murderer. He had died, almost certainly, at once. The murderer had escaped and, except for the machete, had left no sign or clue, and that in all probability would not prove to be a clue. A salient fact began to emerge; it was Roy finally who put it clearly into speech.