House Of Storm (9 page)

“That’s Roy,” he cried and ran to the door, swinging it behind him and again across the veranda and down the steps. She would not look toward Hermione this time: she would not see that small and powerless hand. She would be quiet; she would conquer her trembling, her terror. Jim was right Tell the truth …

But then in a rush all the questions that there’d been no time to ask him came crowding into her mind; he had come back, he’d said, to face Roy, to be with her. Why had he changed his mind? When …? but that didn’t matter then. How had he got back to Beadon Island?

There’d been no time to speak of Roy, either; no time to tell Jim that she’d failed so far to tell Roy that the marriage could not take place. Neither of them had thought of that; the unexpectedness of Hermione’s death, the paralyzing fact of murder had come first, had had to be accepted, had had to be reckoned with. Staring at Hermione’s room—the carpet her slender feet had tread so many times, the books and chairs and cushions she had selected with fine undeviating taste, Nonie found the mere acceptance of murder was a hurdle. Its bare recognition was difficult. Murder couldn’t happen; not to people one knew. Only to accept the fact that it had happened, only to let the wedge of belief enter and find a place in comprehension was in itself like opening a heavy gate, entering an unknown and dark and dangerous wood.

They’d say that Jim did it! All the possible motives they’d seek out were motives they’d say Jim had had; he’d hated her and said so. He’d threatened to kill her and said so. And by reason of her murder he’d inherit money that he hadn’t had, and Middle Road that he loved.

If Nonie had not gone with him to Elbow, if she had not needed him and loved him, he’d have been safe by now. He’d have been in a plane; he’d have been miles away. He’d have had an alibi.

That was important. That was what people did when there was murder. They established alibis. But Jim had returned to Middle Road alone; he had been alone when he found Hermione. He’d had a gun. How nearly she’d made a blunder about that!

She twisted her fingers together and the sapphire Roy had given her caught the light and winked.

There were voices on the veranda; she looked and it wasn’t Roy who had arrived; it was Seabury Jenkins. He stood, gaunt and yellow and bald, his scraggy neck rising from his oilskins, staring down. He was looking at Hermione; as she watched he bent; she could see only the humped thin curve of his back. Jim was speaking; she could see his lips move and the wind was so gusty, the palms and palmettoes around the house clattered and crashed together so loudly that she could not hear what he said or what Seabury replied. Jim was bending, too, on the other side of Seabury. She could see his head jerk upward, his face full in the light as he spoke to Seabury. Their voices were swept away in the wind; and the rain came.

The bamboo screen trembled and shook. The wind swirled back on itself, through the house, flapping Seabury’s oilskins, stirring the folds of Hermione’s dress, wavering along the Turkish carpet. It touched Nonie’s face with hot swift fingers; it flung some door with a crash against the wall. And like an army of wild horses rain was unleashed upon the island.

Like a pantomime, against the background of slashing rain—silver where it caught the light, black and wild beyond—she could see Jim and Seabury talking, pointing to Hermione; Jim was shaking his head, Seabury rose, gesticulating, arguing. Then the picture dissolved and re-formed. Jim and Seabury together were lifting Hermione, moving awkwardly toward the door, carrying her, bringing her for the last time into her house.

For an instant Nonie watched, motionless, and struck with pity for Hermione, struck with horror. Then she saw that they were having trouble with the door, with their sagging burden, with the driving onslaught of wind and rain. She got out of the wicker chaise longue and ran to hold the door for them. They moved past her, awkwardly struggling to hold the terrible burden they carried, somehow, between them. She would not look—and could not avert her eyes quickly enough. Hermione’s long crumpled silk skirt trailed the floor; one green sandal fell and then, as Seabury shifted a sliding grip, the other. The men went on. She heard their footsteps and still would not look but stared instead at the two small bits of green fallen on the red rug, one slipper on its side as if flung there wantonly, the other upright, endowed with a kind of tentative life, waiting.

Rain was driving across the veranda. She closed the main door, pressing with her shoulders against it, so strong already was the wind.

And then she picked up the slippers. She could not bear to see them there. She moved automatically, scarcely realizing her own actions, and put the slippers side by side upon the table and then, because they looked so bare, so terribly untenanted upon the table, she moved them again and placed them below the table, actually under its long green silk flounce so she would not see them. The men had gone behind the bamboo screen; they had turned on lights; they were talking. And then she heard another car slide to a stop outside.

She turned quickly again to the door. As she released the latch the door flung itself backward, wind and rain sweeping across the veranda upon her face. Roy was running up the steps, his face wet with the rain, his oilskins gleaming. A vivid white flash of lightning outlined his running figure, made a sharp black and white chiaroscuro of the driveway and the glittering rain, the thick foliage and the two cars standing below. She thought briefly of Dick Fenby. Was he still in the car or had the storm roused him?

Roy’s running figure blocked out the scene below; the flash of lightning was gone. He caught the door from her hold as he plunged over the threshold and closed it hard against the wind and rain. It shut out some of the tumult of the storm and he stood for a second catching his breath, his oilskins dripping, his face streaming. He took off his rain-streaked eyeglasses and cried: “Nonie, for God’s sake, are you all right? What’s happened? Jebe said she was murdered! She can’t have been …” He heard the voices from behind the screen in Hermione’s bedroom. He glanced that way. “
That’s Jim
! Jebe said it was Jim who phoned. I thought he was scared. I thought he’d got it wrong. But that is Jim!”

She must have nodded, spoken, given affirmation with her eyes. He looked at her for an incredulous, almost an angry moment. “If she was really murdered …
They’ll say he did it
!
Why in hell did he come back
?” cried Roy.

H
E CAME BACK, NONIE
thought, irresistibly, to see me—to see you. To tell you that Jim, your friend, and I, the woman who is so nearly your wife, love each other; he came back to tell you that.

She could not say it then. And it had nothing to do with Hermione’s death … with her murder. Again it was enormously difficult to encompass in her mind the fact of murder. But nevertheless it was of such surpassing importance, such dreadful urgency that other things, no matter how important, must wait.

Roy had not expected a reply. The anger was because of Jim, concerned with his safety. Instantly, as she had done, Roy had seen Jim’s danger. He was shrugging out of his wet oilskins.

“Nonie, this is not a place for you. Did you see Hermione? What happened?”

“I brought Dick home …”

He nodded. “Jebe told me. Where was Hermione? Who found her? Who did it? Was Jim here, then?”

She tried to tell him all at once, quickly.

“They don’t know who did it. Jim found her. Then I came. She was on the step. I had started toward the house to call her—to tell her I’d brought Dick. I didn’t know what to do.…”

“And she was dead then?”

“Yes … Oh, Roy, yes!”

He put his arm around her comfortingly. “I’m going to take you home, away from this. I’ll go and speak to Jim.…” Again anxiety was like anger in his face. “Why did he come back? When did he come back?” He broke off as Jim and Seabury came around the screen and into the hall. Jim cried: “Roy! Thank God you’re here.”

Seabury Jenkins, his thin face worried and drawn, said: “Roy, this is a terrible thing. She was undoubtedly murdered. Shot …”

“Who did it? What happened?”

Seabury shook his head in a stunned way and turned back toward Hermione’s bedroom. “You’d better look at her.”

“Wait, Nonie. Only for a few minutes; then I’ll see that you get back home.” Roy started toward Hermione’s room and Nonie went slowly back to the long wicker chair where she’d sat and had that hurried, incomplete talk with Jim. The three men re-entered Hermione’s room. She heard their low voices, the silences between, as if all of them were thinking, questioning, trying to see some way clear.

Rain lashed the island, beat upon the house, tried to force its way in at the doors and windows. Hermione’s house; now Jim’s house, his plantation, Middle Road that he had loved. “They’ll say he did it,” Roy had cried. “Why did he come back?”

The men emerged gravely together as if they were joined by a mutual weight which they must carry together, as Jim and Seabury had carried Hermione to her house.

Seabury was explaining it to Roy … The rain would have washed away any sort of evidence anyway. Dr. Riordan will have to see her, of course, but …” He shrugged. “We couldn’t leave her in the storm. It wasn’t decent. And we didn’t destroy evidence; there wasn’t any evidence to be destroyed so far as we could see, but if there had been the storm would have done that by now. We had to move her.”

Dr. Riordan then, Nonie thought, must be the official medical officer for the island as Seabury Jenkins, the only lawyer, was magistrate. Roy went to a chair, as if he had aged in those last few moments. “You couldn’t leave her out there, in that,” he agreed and stared at the rug. “Poor Hermione! She had her enemies. She had her faults. But I wouldn’t have wanted this to happen to her.”

“What do we do now?” asked Jim.

Both Roy and Seabury looked at him for a moment without speaking. Seabury’s face was deeply perplexed and yet, it seemed to Nonie, rippled faintly like a lake with a hidden current of questions.

Roy finally sighed, “Suicide.” He looked at the rug and said again, but rather tentatively, “Suicide—or accident.”

Seabury obviously snatched the words and fastened on them with a look of intent inward speculation.

Jim was shaking his head. He said, almost gently, “It’s murder, Roy.”

Roy stared stubbornly at the rug. “Suicide’s always possible. Accident with a gun is always possible. Women don’t understand guns.”

Jim smiled a little and went over to Roy suddenly. He put his hand on Roy’s shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking. But I can’t get out of it that way. It was murder.”

Seabury, his face still troubled, sat down and leaned back, putting his fingers together judicially. “It could have been either suicide or accident. Both are more likely than murder. We’ve never had a murder on the island.”

“You have one now,” Jim said.

Roy looked up at him with a quick flash of his fine eyes. “Look here, Jim, murder’s a nasty business. A murder investigation is certain to do a lot of damage one way or another, and it’s not at all certain to discover the murderer. Sometimes one way, sometimes another, but in this case …”

Jim’s hand seemed to press harder on Roy’s shoulder. “It’s murder. I know what you’re trying to do. I see my position—you see it. But in the first place, it can’t be suicide and it can’t be accident because there was no gun.”

“We haven’t looked for a gun. There might be …” began Roy, but Jim cut him off. “I looked for a gun. There wasn’t any. I looked at the wounds. She didn’t kill herself. There’d be powder burns on her dress. There’d be … It was murder, Roy, believe me. I can’t duck it.”

Roy said after a moment: “Have you searched?”

“Whoever killed her had plenty of time to get away,” Jim said. “Time and darkness.”

Seabury Jenkins passed one long, corded hand over his bald head. “No use searching. I suppose we could do it; get some men from the village to help. But if she was shot by somebody she’d had a quarrel with, somebody maybe who’d worked for her and had a grudge, believe me, he’s gone into hiding by now. There are a thousand places on the island, quick to get into on a night like this, and absolutely hidden away. Nothing easier than to take to the bush, and especially tonight.”

“Did you see anybody?” Roy asked. “Tell us just exactly what happened, Jim. Why did you come back? I thought you’d be in New York by now.”

For a second Jim stood very still, his hand still on Roy’s shoulder. A kind of curtain came down over his face. He did not look at Nonie, yet his thoughts went out to her like a thread for her to wind up into her own. I can’t tell Roy now, he was thinking. Nonie hasn’t yet told him. And then Nonie knew that he was thinking, too: this man whose wife I want to take from him is my friend. He lifted his hand and moved away from Roy. He took a cigarette again and lighted it, and said slowly: “I got the mail boat at Elbow all right, but then by the time I reached Cienfuegos I decided to come back.”

Roy interrupted: “Were you coming back to make peace with Hermione?”

Seabury’s small, sharp eyes blinked. “Peace? You’d gone to Cienfuegos? What do you mean? Had you quarreled with her?”

Jim glanced at him and nodded tersely. “I’d quarreled with her. I left because of that, this afternoon. Then I … As I say, I decided to come back.”

“Why?” Seabury repeated Roy’s question: “To make peace with her?”

Jim said slowly and Nonie alone of them knew, quite honestly: “I don’t know. I suppose that might have happened. I don’t know.”

Seabury said: “But did you come back to see her?”

Roy’s eyes flashed angrily. “You don’t have to answer that, Jim.”

“It’s all right, Roy. I’ll have to answer it sooner or later. I …” Jim looked at Seabury. “No. That’s not why I came back.”

Seabury’s sharp eyes were very bright and observant. “What was your reason, then?”

“It has nothing to do with this,” Jim said bluntly.

“That’s no answer.”

“I can’t help it,” Jim said. “You’ll have to take my word for it.”

“The police will want a better answer than that.”