Puzzle for Fiends (27 page)

And, as I stared, a woman’s figure appeared in the doorway behind Jan. Her white hand moved to his arm. He turned, blotting her from view and, from the way he stopped, I could tell that he was kissing her.

They stayed there together clasped in a fierce embrace. I could see the girl’s two white hands scurrying to and fro across Jan’s great back. And I thought with a hatred that made me dizzy and even blotted out my fears for Marny:
So Selena came with him. He woke her up and she came too.

Dimly, as I watched them, I thought:
This is the way Nate must have felt all the time. Poor Nate.

And then, suddenly they were gone. I heard the front door open. There was a brief pause. Then, unexpectedly, I heard the station wagon roar alive and drive away.

It had all happened so quickly that I couldn’t make sense of it. Why should they bring gasoline here and then go away? Marny? Was it something to do with what they’d done to Marny?

As I stood there rigid, I heard the faint sound of feminine footsteps approaching from the kitchen. And I understood then. She had sent Jan away. Jan wasn’t a fellow conspirator then. He was only an innocent stooge. That’s why the floor boards were back in place. His one function had been to bring the heavy cans of gasoline. And his reward had been that kiss. She was using him just the way she had used Gordy, Nate, and me.

From now on, Selena was working it on her own.

I knew then what I would have to do. I would wait until I saw her again in the living-room. Then I would slip round to the back door. In the shock of seeing her immobilized victim-to-be walking into the room, she would be caught unaware—and caught red-handed.

The shadowy figure appeared once more in the kitchen door. She hesitated a moment. Then she ran to the far corner of the room and started tugging up the floor boards. It was horrible seeing her on her knees, avidly dragging up the boards which would reveal what I knew to be hidden there.

It didn’t take her long. In a few moments she stood up and hurried across the room. She picked up one of the heavy cans of gasoline. She half carried, half dragged it to the far corner. I heard a little wrenching sound as she freed the cap. She swung the can up and tilted it. I heard a splashing sound—the sound of the gasoline pouring into the shallow pit beneath the floor.

The plan was diabolically simple. With all that gasoline, one match could destroy the tindery house, Gordy, the car, everything. And at this distance from anywhere, no one would notice the glare. Some day, indefinitely in the future, someone would notice that the old house had burned down at last. And that would be that.

When the can was empty, she dropped it. The fumes of the gasoline must have choked her, for she turned away and headed straight toward the window.

Just before she reached it, I ducked out of sight. But I had seen enough to make the hairs at the back of my neck crawl, enough to make the very ground beneath my feet seem insubstantial.

Because, in moving toward the window, she came directly into the path of the moonlight. I could see her clearly for the first time.

And it wasn’t Selena.

It was Marny.

I leaned
back against the clapboard wall. My thoughts were spinning like a kid’s firework. Then, as they steadied, I saw how appallingly I’d let myself distort the truth. I had reconstructed the entire murder design in all its detail. Once again I had been helplessly tricked. I had done exactly what I had been supposed to do. I had fallen into the deadliest of all the traps that had been set for me.

It was so easy to see now that every action, every motive I had ascribed to Selena applied just as well to Marny. Old Mr. Friend had found Marny and Jan together. He had called Marny in. He had threatened to cut Marny out of the will. Marny had given him the overdose just as the drunken Gordy walked in. Marny had lured Gordy here to this old house and shot him—and later had used Jan to do whatever dirty work was necessary.

The skein of her cunning was untangled for me then. How had I found the “suicide note” that evening? Simply because Marny, who knew I was going to take old Mr. Friend’s poems to my room, had thrown the book down on the piano, knocking over the photograph so that I would find out what was hidden in its back. That, of course, had been the first step in the remorseless plan which was to have ended with me committing suicide in the living-room. She had been able to read my thoughts, as plainly as if they were headlines, before I had even thought them myself. She knew I would be curious and pick up the note. She knew I would read it. She knew that, from the deliberately misspelled “weather” I would think Selena had written it. She knew that, once I thought that, I would remember my bargain with her and somehow get away from Selena to her.

The device of the letter hidden in the photograph frame had been a risky one. It might not have worked. But her need to lure me out of the protection of Selena’s room was so great that she had to take the risk. If that plan had failed, she would have had another one ready.

But I had risen to the first bait; and once I had trundled myself in the chair to Marny as my only ally, the rest seemed simple to her. She had already stolen Gordy’s gun. She could have wheeled me into the living-room, offered me a drink from the doped bottle, and, after I had passed out...

But, by the grace of something, things hadn’t happened that way. I’d been smart enough to figure out that Gordy was in the farmhouse and had insisted on coming here to prove it. She couldn’t refuse to drive me without arousing my suspicions. So from then on she had to go along with me, improvising.

She’d improvised brilliantly, however. She must have made arrangements earlier for Jan to bring the gasoline, arrangements she’d had no chance to alter. She knew then that even if she strung along with me, she would have to be there in the house alone to receive the Dutchman when he came, so that he wouldn’t snoop around and find the body. So she pretended she’d dropped the keys to the car and had gone back for them. She had pretended to take a drink from the doped whisky, which
she
had brought with us, in order to be sure that I would follow her lead and drink too.

Now, while she was meticulously setting about her task of destroying Gordy’s body, I was supposed to be lying doped in the car.

Once the fire started, all she had to do was to drive me home, bundle me into the chair, wheel me into the living-room and fake the suicide, note and all. Even if the police made an autopsy and found traces of the sleeping powder, they’d never suspect. After all, I was an invalid and full of sleeping powders anyway.

And, as she had said herself, there was nothing to fear from the rest of the family. Once I was dead, and there was no saving me, Mimsey, Selena, and Nate were too deeply involved in the conspiracy against the League to expose the fact that I wasn’t the real Gordy.

Yes. That was brilliant improvising, all right.

I thought of Marny from the beginning—Marny posing as the frank one who only joined the conspiracy under pressure, Marny subtly poisoning my mind against Selena with warnings and lies about Jan, Marny assuming the role of little helper so that I would trust her and, when the time came, go with her like a lamb to the slaughter.

A shiver wracked my body. From inside the room I could hear muffled sounds as Marny dragged a second can of gasoline across the floor. I couldn’t bring myself to look in through the window.

Marny had talked about fiends. The shiver tingled up my spine again.

There had only been one fiend in the Friend house after all.

I forced myself to plan, because the danger was still great. It would be hopeless to rush her in the house because she had the gun. She would be able to use it long before I could clinch with her.

Gradually I saw I had one advantage. She didn’t know that I had discovered the casts were fakes.

I was supposed to be back in the car, immobile in my casts and doped with the whisky.

Okay. That’s where I was supposed to be. That’s where I would be.

I slipped away from the house and around the garage to the trail. Silently I made my way back through the cold, desolate moonlight to the car. The flakes of plaster gleamed white on the grass where they had spilled. I tidied them up and tossed them under a bush. I got into the car. I pulled a robe from the back and wrapped it around my legs, concealing the fact that the cast had gone.

I thought of releasing my right arm from the cast and decided against it. I would not be able to hide the fact that the cast was gone, and the added mobility would not be worth the loss of the surprise element. With two legs, one arm, and preparedness, I should be more than a match for her.

I put the whisky bottle ostentatiously on my knee and slumped back against the upholstery with my eyes closed and my mouth open. She would be coming soon. One match would be enough to start the building blazing. She would want to get away quickly then and finish her grisly job in the living-room.

I didn’t hear her come. Suddenly, I was conscious of her face at the car window, only a few inches from mine.

For a long moment she stood there, quite still, watching me. Through my lashes, I could see her black, glossy hair, the white oval of her face and her eyes. They were shining with a flat, hard brightness.

“Are you awake?” she whispered.

I made a vague answering grunt as if I was dimly reacting to sound in a doped stupor.

She leaned even closer. I could feel her breath warm and rapid against my cheek. Then she giggled. It was a high, tittering sound like a little girl trying to repress irrepressible mirth in church.

She drew her head back from the windows. I could hear her pattering around the car. The outer door opened. She squeezed into the driver’s seat next to me. She giggled again, excitedly, bubblingly. I’d never heard anyone make a sound quite like it before and it curdled my blood.

Her hand, reaching to put the key in the ignition, brushed against my knee. I could feel its hectic warmth even through the robe.

I was thinking rapidly. She had the gun. There were only two places she could be carrying it. In one or the other of the pockets of her jacket. Since she would want it in her right hand, if she had to use it, it was probably in the right hand pocket. And the right hand pocket was on my side.

Lurching a little as if I was moving in my sleep, I turned my head and squinted down. Was there a faint bulge in the black flannel of the pocket?

She had started the engine. She would have to back onto the trail. That would be the moment to act, when her hands were busy.

The car began to lumber backward. I pretended to be thrown against her. Swiftly my left hand grabbed at the pocket.

She screamed, a sudden, sharp scream. Her right hand hurtled down, clawing at the back of my hand with long fingernails. The car stalled. The nails dug deeper. Her other hand made a lunge at my face. I could feel the nails scratching savagely down my cheek. For one second I almost had the gun. Then she wrenched it out of my grasp.

I saw the muzzle pointed at me. I jerked her wrist upward. There was an explosion and then the tinkle of smashed glass.

I had hold of her wrist now with my only hand. She was fighting with the seething ferocity of a demon, and screaming—screaming that shrill, rasping scream which wasn’t a scream of fear but a scream of rage.

She made a sudden plunge at my eyes with her nails. I ducked and at that moment she shook her wrist free. I grabbed it again in a second. And, the moment I grabbed it, another shot rang out. And a third.

Her screaming stopped as if someone had cut a sound track with a knife. The gun clattered to the floor. Her hands were scrambling wildly. One of them caught my wrist and clung on. I could feel the pressure tightening until it was almost unendurable. Then her body started to slide downwards. Gradually the fingers unwound from my wrist. She was slumped on the floor of the car now. I could see something dark welling up, soaking her white blouse under her left breast. Her head was propped against the seat. Her eyes stared blankly and a little gurgling sound came from her lips.

I bent over her. My hand fumbled for her wrist and felt the pulse. One of the bullets must have got her in the heart.

She was dead in less than a minute.

I got out of the car, my head swimming. I walked stumblingly around the bushes to the trail. I stared at the farmhouse. An ominous red light was pulsing beyond the windows. It had begun all right.

Gordy’s funeral pyre was lit.

I went back to the car. I hadn’t meant it to happen this way. That thin, rasping scream still rang in my ears. Beyond Marny on the floor something gleamed white. I leaned over her and picked it up. It was the suicide note. I put it in my pocket.

I had to get away, far, far away. I knew that. But how? In this car with its splintered windshield and the body of Marny sprawled across the floor?

I didn’t really think. I just remembered. I remembered that other car, which Gordy had used, parked in the garage with its key in the ignition. I ran towards the burning building. Flames were tonguing through the windows now, but the conflagration hadn’t reached the garage yet. It would, of course. In a few minutes the house, the garage, everything would be swallowed up.

I reached the garage, pushed back the old squeaking double doors and ran to the car parked inside. Clumsily, with my one good hand, I started the engine and backed it out, making it leap down the gravel path well away from the menace of the flames.

I sat for a minute in the front seat, trying to make myself think. I looked in the glove box. There were cigarettes. I lit one and leaned back against the upholstery.

The horror was over, but it had left chaos behind it. Marny had murdered her father and her brother and now Marny was dead, having tried to kill me. But how to explain that to Inspector Sargent without getting myself inextricably committed?

I would have to disappear. I saw that at once. If the police knew there had been two Gordy Friends, it would be fatal for everyone. And I could escape in this car. Gordy was supposed to have vanished in it weeks ago. No one would miss it. I could drive as far away as I liked. What did it matter that I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged? That was child’s play in comparison with what I would have to face if I remained at the Friend house.