Black Curtain (15 page)

"They went out about three quarters of an bout ago. I'd already put Mr. Emil to bed, and it was too good a chance to miss. I just had to slip over for a minute to see how you were getting along. Besides, I sneaked out some more supplies, in case you were running short."

"How is it I didn't hear you coming up?" he asked, helping her to carry the large carton across the threshold.

"Maybe because I'm wearing my sneakers. Dan, listen, I want to warn you. You'll have to be more careful about that candle; you'd better hood it or something, shut the light off on that side, toward the path out there. I could distinctly see a wink of yellow showing through as I rounded the turn of the path just now; there must be a crack underneath the window frame, and if it had been anyone else--"

He seemed to be thinking of something else. "Where'd they go, have you any idea?"

"I don't know, I didn't hear them say."

"Did they take the can?"

"Yes, but that doesn't mean anything, they'd have to, from out here, no matter where they were going. Why? What's on your mind?" She evidently didn't like the turn his questioning was taking.

"I want you to let me in over there, while they're out. I want you to show me the place, Ruthie."

Immediately she was aghast, filled with unreasoning terror on his account. "No, Danny, no! Be careful!"

"You said they went out, didn't you?"

"But there's no telling, they may come back any minute. Suppose they suddenly walk in on you? -Please-, Danny, don't."

He said with a quiet determination that wouldn't brook argument, "Take me oven, Ruthie. I want to see it. If you won't, then I'll go over without you, on my own."

"You crazy fool," she mourned, following him falteringly out of the lodge and swinging the door after her. As they went down the path side by side in the dankness, she scolded querulously: "Instead of hanging around and hanging around, until something's finally -bound- to happen to you, you ought to be a thousand miles away from here and getting farther every minute while you still have the chance. You don't deserve -not- to have something happen, the way you keep going from bad to worse. I don't know why I bother my head about you anyway!"

"I don't know either," he agreed, tightening his grip on her arm, "but thank God you do."

It came sailing toward them at last, the outline of a house rearing against a luminous silverclouded sky, indirect lighting furnished by a hidden moon. "So that's it," he breathed. She gave him a questioning little look of surprise. She didn't know that he was seeing it for the first time. The last roll of film had been underdeveloped; he hadn't been able to get any pictures from it.

He followed her up close to the front door. A peculiar quivery feeling cascaded down his spine. Now at last he was re-entering the very heart of the past, its innermost cone.

She took out her key and opened, then prodded him impatiently through ahead of her, looking fearfully back across her shoulder. "Get in firm before I put the lights on. Get over to the side where you can't be seen through the glass."

It lit up, and for the first time he was looking clown the halls of murder. For the first time he; Frank Townsend, was seeing the place in which Dan Nearing had committed murder.

The house must have been as old as the hills, and pretty run-down. It had a brooding, depressing quality hanging over it, as though there hadn't been much laughter in it down the generations. Not so much active hate, as dourness and helpless frustration. There was a faint, teasing trace of gardenia left on the air. So vague that if you tried for it you couldn't get it; it assailed you only when you had forgotten it.

Ruth lit up a room on the left. "This was Mr. Harry's library and study--remember?" He saw her eyes rest on a painted iron plaque set into the paneling, then drop in embarrassment. He knew what she was thinking: that was the wall safe he was supposed to have burgled.

She killed the lights; they necrossed the hall laterally. "The living room, the same as when you Were here." They went deeper into the house. "-He's- in here. Do you want to see him?" She put on the lights. The old man was lying in a tremendous bed, so big and wide he looked lost in it; he looked shrunken, like a limp rag doll. His eyes were closed, and his face looked more natural in sleep than it did awake. One makes allowances for a sleeping face; it is supposed to have that masklike look. The chair stood empty close up beside the bed.

"We leave him down here at nights now, in this little extra sitting room. Not like when you were here. The chair is too heavy for me to manage up and down the stairs twice a day."

"Do you put him to bed? What do you do about undressing him?"

"Well, I couldn't do that; it wouldn't be nice. I lift him in and out of the bed, yes, he doesn't weigh much. We leave him in this sort of sacklike flannel thing, it's really like a sleeping bag, and then I just put a robe and a comforter oven him in the daytime, when he's up. Mr. Bill changes the foundation garment for him every two or three days--although I usually have to remind him. It's cruel when you're helpless, at the mercy of other people."

As her hand went out to the light switch, Townsend, turning away, received a momentary impression of one of the peacefully lidded eyes peering craftily open at them, but darkness followed too instantaneously for him to confirm it.

They went outside again, and he hesitated at the foot of the stairs. "Don't go up, Dan," she pleaded. 'Your escape'll be cut off, if they happen to come back unexpectedly. There's nothing up there, just the bedrooms."

"What's that? I thought I heard somebody tiptoeing around up there."

"-You- know, that's Miss Adela, the--" She made a little circle with her finger close to her forehead. "She -never- sleeps. She's always creeping around and listening at hen door, even when there's nothing to hear. I don't know why they've left her here in the house, instead of shipping her off to an institution. She hides when I bring her meals up, won't come out until after I've gone. Just the same, I never go in there backwards. Mr. Bill always carries the key to her room around on him, won't let anyone else have it. Like Mr. Harry used to in his day."

"Has she ever been examined? Has any outsider ever had a chance to look her over? How do they know she's actually--?"

"They say they had it done years ago. They say there's no use now any more."

"They say," he repeated laconically. "For all anybody knows, they may be getting away with murder. White murder."

"I used to try to make believe to myself that it was -her-. You know, to try to find an out for you in my mind. She was the only other person here in the house at the time, except the poor old man, of course. But--" She let her arms drop forlornly. "The key to her room was still on his body, and the door was still locked from the outside, when they came back."

They walked through an opening off side to the stairs and into a dining room. A bowl of wax fruit stood under a glass dome that might have been a hundred years old. Beyond, a double door stood closed.

She seemed anxious to go back, he noticed. "Come on, Danny, you've seen everything now."

He went on toward the double door.

"What do you want to go in there for?" she whispered. She tried to hold him back by the arm. "What good will it do?"

He already had them open, had the lights on. "What harm?" he parried inattentively.

She came reluctantly in after him. The glass was lined on the inside with strips of dark-blue roller shades, about one to every three pane widths. There was one that went horizontally across the ceiling too, like an awning, controlled by a drawstring from below. They were patched and mended in places. One of them had a little diamond-shaped rent that had not been repaired.

The room was floored in old-fashioned mosaic, gray with encrusted dust. It had two wicker wing chairs and a wicker settee. It had a long, low, tiletopped table running across one side of it, that had evidently held many of the potted plants and flowers in the old days. The whole enclosure was denuded of them now. A couple of dried-out, trailing, greenish wisps still lingered, swinging from pots hoisted on davits in the corners.

"Is this where he was sitting?"

Her face creased. "Dan, don't -talk- that way--!" She tried to cover her ears; he pulled her hands down. "As if you didn't know--!"

"Don't -look- at it! Come away from it!"

"Oh, I thought those were just rust streaks or something, from the nails in it.

"I don't know why they didn't throw it out long ago!" she flared. "I don't know why they've left it in here." She went on, more quietly, "But no one ever comes in here any more. It's the first time I've been near it myself since that day--"

"It's the first time I have, too," he murmured bitterly, as they turned away.

She reclosed the blue-shaded glass doors after them, with a series of jiggling squeaks. They fell open twice, and she had to force them together.

He stood there, lost in thought. She came up close to him and buried her face against his chest. "Danny, Danny, why did you have to do it? You must've gone nuts when he said you'd been stealing from the safe. Why did you have that gun in your hands! If we could only undo that one afternoon. I would have loved you so. I still do, but I can't have you now."

He let her mourn it out. There was nothing he could say, no way to comfort her. She raised her head. "Come on, Danny, you'd better go now. You've been here long enough."

They repassed the stairs and went on down the hall. He fell behind a moment to light a cigarette. She reached the front door ahead of him, opened it narrowly to look out. Something went wrong. Suddenly a big golden sunrise seemed to beat in at her. The sound of brakes being thrown on punctuated the glare. A car door cracked open Dutside to coincide with her reclosing of the house door. Disjointed, breathless warnings flew from her like spray as she coursed back to him. "I -told- you--! The car--! They're back--!"

She pushed him before her around to the side of the stairs and in through the dark dining-room entrance. "The back! The back! Get out the kitchen door!" Then she took sudden root where she stood in sight at the far end of the hall, because a key was already pecking at the keyhole at its other end.

He just had time to take a floundering step forward before the front door had opened. The edge of a table caught him at the waist, blocked him. He moved around it, found a door, got it open, and started through into what he thought was the kitchen. Shelving bit into him in ridges from his forehead all the way down, and something that was glass or china pinged complainingly.

He managed to back out without knocking anything over. The table edge caught him again, this time across the small of the back. He got down on his haunches, and clung to it, one hand raised to its edge. He was hopelessly trapped there in the dark, in an utterly unknown room. He was afraid to move again, lest he collide with something and give himself away.

A raspy contralto voice was asking, somewhere outside: "Was that you peeping out at us just now?"

Ruth must have nodded, he didn't hear her answer.

"Then why the hell didn't you leave it open so I wouldn't have to go hunting for my key? What're you acting so spooky about?"

Ruth said, "I guess I must have fallen asleep, Miss Alma. And the lights of the car dazzled my eyes for a minute, you know how bleary you feel right after you wake up suddenly."

"We'll have to get you a pair of smoked glasses," the voice said ungraciously.

The whine of the car had shifted around to the garage, broken off short, and tin clanged shut on it.

The contralto voice was nearer the next time it sounded. It must have come down the hail to the back. A shadow flicked across the dimly lighted dining-room opening. "The picture was lousy. We settled for a couple of beers at the tavern." She was obviously unsteady, so the settlement must have been heavier than she was willing to admit. He heard her miss a step on the way up. He heard her mutter, "Pretzels and beer! Beer and pretzels! With God knows how many thousands of bucks in the kitty! I did better for myself when I was freelancing in Shanghai!" A bedroom door slammed above.

For tonight it was all right. Her perceptions were a little blurred. But would she remember in the morning the slight dissonance in Ruth's reception of her? Would she start wondering about it?

The front door closed and the latch went on. Someone else had come in. His mood was as sour as his predecessor's. "Back to the old homestead," Townsend heard him grunt. "Be sure you wake me in time to milk the cows in the morning."

Townsend heard a brief scuffle. He heard Ruth say sharply, "That'll be all of that!" There was a snigger and a heavy tread going up the stairs.

Townsend straightened up, came out around the table, and met her as she edged in on her way through to the kitchen. The start she gave showed she thought he'd gone already. "Danny! What's the matter with you? Why didn't you go? D'you know what could have happened to you if one of them had come back here for a drink of water or something? As a rule that's the first thing they do after they've been out drinking. Lucky they just didn't happen to tonight!"

"I couldn't find the way out, I got balled up in the dark."

"-This- way, what's the matter with you!" She urged him toward a screened opening, unseen. until now. "-Please- go now, Danny. Haven't you taken enough chances for one night?"