The Cases of Susan Dare (2 page)

“I said I’d kill her,” said Christabel. “I won’t, of course. But she—oh, you’ve seen how things are, Susan. You can’t have failed to see. She took Joe—years ago. Now she’s taking Randy.”

Susan was thankful that she couldn’t see Christabel’s face. She said something about infatuation and Randy’s youth.

“He is twenty-one,” said Christabel. “He’s no younger than I was when Joe—when Joe and I were to be married. That was why Michela was here—to be a guest at the wedding and all the parties.” They walked on for a few quiet steps before Christabel added: “It was the day before the wedding that they left together.”

Susan said: “Has Joe changed?”

“In looks, you mean,” said Christabel, understanding. “I don’t know. Perhaps. He must have changed inside. But I don’t want to know that.”

“Can’t you send them away?”

“Randy would follow.”

“Tryon Welles,” suggested Susan desperately. “Maybe he could help. I don’t know how, though. Talk to Randy, maybe.”

Christabel shook her head.

“Randy wouldn’t listen. Opposition makes him stubborn. Besides, he doesn’t like Tryon. He’s had to borrow too much money from him.”

It wasn’t like Christabel to be bitter. One of the dogs howled again and was joined by others. Susan shivered.

“You are cold,” said Christabel. “Run along inside, and thanks for listening. And—I think you’d better go, honey. I meant to keep you for comfort. But—”

“No, no, I’ll stay—I didn’t know—”

“Don’t be nervous about being alone. The dogs would know it if a stranger put a foot on the place. Good-night,” said Christabel firmly, and was gone.

The guest cottage was snug and warm and tranquil, but Susan was obliged finally to read herself to sleep and derived only a small and fleeting satisfaction from the fact that it was over a rival author’s book that she finally grew drowsy. She didn’t sleep well even then, and was glad suddenly that she’d asked for the guest cottage and was alone and safe in that tiny retreat.

Morning was misty and chill.

It was perhaps nine-thirty when Susan opened the cottage door, saw that mist lay thick and white, and went back to get her rubbers. Tryon Welles, she thought momentarily, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, would have nothing at all that was florid and complimentary to say this morning. And indeed, in her brown knitted suit, with her fair hair tight and smooth and her spectacles on, she looked not unlike a chill and aloof little owl.

The path was wet, and the laurel leaves shining with moisture, and the hills were looming gray shapes. The house lay white and quiet, and she saw no one about.

It was just then that it came. A heavy concussion of sound, blanketed by mist.

Susan’s first thought was that Randy had shot the bullfrog.

But the pool was just below her, and no one was there.

Besides, the sound came from the house. Her feet were heavy and slow in the drenched grass—the steps were slippery and the flagstones wet. Then she was inside.

The wide hall ran straight through the house, and away down at its end Susan saw Mars. He was running away from her, his black hands outflung, and she was vaguely conscious that he was shouting something. He vanished, and instinct drew Susan to the door at the left which led to the library.

She stopped, frozen, in the doorway.

Across the room, sagging bulkily over the arm of the green damask chair in which she’d sat the previous night, was a man. It was Joe Bromfel, and he’d been shot, and there was no doubt that he was dead.

A newspaper lay at his feet as if it had slipped there. The velvet curtains were pulled together across the window behind him.

Susan smoothed back her hair. She couldn’t think at all, and she must have slipped down to the footstool near the door for she was there when Mars, his face drawn, and Randy, white as his pajamas, came running into the room. They were talking excitedly and were examining a revolver which Randy had picked up from the floor. Then Tryon Welles came from somewhere, stopped beside her, uttered an incredulous exclamation, and ran across the room too. Then Christabel came and stopped, too, on the threshold, and became under Susan’s very eyes a different woman—a strange woman, shrunken and gray, who said in a dreadful voice:

“
Joe—Joe
—”

Only Susan heard or saw her. It was Michela, hurrying from the hall, who first voiced the question.

“I heard something—what was it? What—” She brushed past Christabel.

“
Don’t look, Michela
!”

But Michela looked—steadily and long. Then her flat dark eyes went all around the room and she said: “Who shot him?”

For a moment there was utter shocked stillness.

Then Mars cleared his throat and spoke to Randy.

“I don’ know who shot him, Mista Randy. But I saw him killed. An’ I saw the han’ that killed him—”

“
Hand
!” screamed Michela.

“Hush, Michela.” Tryon Welles was speaking. “What do you mean, Mars?”

“They ain’t nothin’ to tell except that, Mista Tryon. I was just comin’ to dust the library and was right there at the door when I heard the shot, and there was just a han’ stickin’ out of them velvet curtains. And I saw the han’ and I saw the revolver and I—I do’ know what I did then.” Mars wiped his forehead. “I guess I ran for help, Mista Tryon.”

There was another silence.

“Whose hand was it, Mars?” said Tryon Welles gently.

Mars blinked and looked very old.

“Mista Tryon, God’s truth is, I do’ know. I do’ know.”

Randy thrust himself forward.

“Was it a man’s hand?”

“I reckon it was maybe,” said the old Negro slowly, looking at the floor. “But I do’ know for sure, Mista Randy. All I saw was—was the red ring on it.”

“A red
ring
?” cried Michela. “What do you mean—”

Mars turned a bleak dark face toward Michela; a face that rejected her and all she had done to his house. “A red ring, Miz Bromfel,” he said with a kind of dignity. “It sort of flashed. And it was red.”

After a moment Randy uttered a curious laugh.

“But there’s not a red ring in the house. None of us runs to rubies—” He stopped abruptly. “I say, Tryon, hadn’t we better—well, carry him to the divan. It isn’t decent to—just leave him—like that.”

“I suppose so—” Tryon Welles moved toward the body. “Help me, Randy”

The boy shivered, and Susan quite suddenly found her voice.

“Oh, but you can’t do that. You can’t—” She stopped. The two men were looking at her in astonishment. Michela, too, had turned toward her, although Christabel did not move. “But you can’t do that,” repeated Susan. “Not when it’s—murder.”

This time the word, falling into the long room, was weighted with its own significance. Tryon Welles’ gray shoulders moved.

“She’s perfectly right,” he said. “I’d forgotten—if I ever knew. But that’s the way of it. We’ll have to send for people—doctor, sheriff, coroner, I suppose.”

Afterward, Susan realized that but for Tryon Welles the confusion would have become mad. He took a quiet command of the situation, sending Randy, white and sick-looking, to dress, telephoning into town, seeing that the body was decently covered, and even telling Mars to bring them hot coffee. He was here, there, everywhere: upstairs, downstairs, seeing to them all, and finally outside to meet the sheriff … brisk, alert, efficient. In the interval Susan sat numbly beside Christabel on the love seat in the hall, with Michela restlessly prowling up and down the hall before their eyes, listening to the telephone calls, drinking hot coffee, watching everything with her sullen, flat black eyes. Her red-and-white sports suit, with its scarlet bracelets and earrings, looked garish and out of place in that house of violent death.

And Christabel. Still a frozen image of a woman who drank coffee automatically, she sat erect and still and did not speak. The glowing amethyst on her finger caught the light and was the only living thing about her.

Gradually the sense of numb shock and confusion was leaving Susan. Fright was still there and horror and a queer aching pity, but she saw Randy come running down the wide stairway again, his red hair smooth now above a sweater, and she realized clearly that he was no longer white and sick and frightened; he was instead alert and defiantly ready for what might come. And it would be, thought Susan, in all probability, plenty.

And it was.

Questions—questions. The doctor, who was kind, the coroner, who was not; the sheriff, who was merely observant—all of them questioning without end. No time to think. No time to comprehend. Time only to reply as best one might.

But gradually out of it all certain salient facts began to emerge. They were few, however, and brief.

The revolver was Randy’s, and it had been taken from the top buffet drawer—when, no one knew or, at least, would tell. “Everybody knew it was there,” said Randy sulkily. The fingerprints on it would probably prove to be Randy’s and Mars’s, since they picked it up.

No one knew anything of the murder, and no one had an alibi, except Liz (the Negro second girl) and Minnie (the cook), who were together in the kitchen.

Christabel had been writing letters in her own room: she’d heard the shot, but thought it was only Randy shooting a bullfrog in the pool. But then she’d heard Randy and Mars running down the front stairway, so she’d come down too. Just to be sure that that was what it was.

“What else did you think it could be?” asked the sheriff. But Christabel said stiffly that she didn’t know.

Randy had been asleep when Mars had awakened him. He had not heard the sound of the shot at all. He and Mars had hurried down to the library. (Mars, it developed, had gone upstairs by means of the small back stairway off the kitchen.)

Tryon Welles had walked down the hill in front of the house to the mail box and was returning when he heard the shot. But it was muffled, and he did not know what had happened until he reached the library. He created a mild sensation at that point by taking off a ring, holding it so they could all see it, and demanding of Mars if that was the ring he had seen on the murderer’s hand. However, the sensation was only momentary, for the large clear stone was as green as his neat green tie.

“No, suh, Mista Tryon,” said Mars. “The ring on the han’ I saw was red. I could see it plain, an’ it was red.”

“This,” said Tryon Welles, “is a flawed emerald. I asked because I seem to be about the only person here wearing a ring. But I suppose that, in justice to us, all our belongings should be searched.”

Upon which the sheriff’s gaze slid to the purple pool on Christabel’s white hand. He said, however, gently, that that was being done, and would Mrs. Michela Bromfel tell what she knew of the murder.

But Mrs. Michela Bromfel somewhat spiritedly knew nothing of it. She’d been walking in the pine woods, she said defiantly, glancing obliquely at Randy, who suddenly flushed all over his thin face. She’d heard the shot but hadn’t realized it was a gunshot. However, she was curious and came back to the house.

“The window behind the body opens toward the pine woods,” said the sheriff. “Did you see anyone, Mrs. Bromfel?”

“No one at all,” said Michela definitely.

Well, then, had she heard the dogs barking? The sheriff seemed to know that the kennels were just back of the pine woods.

But Michela had not heard the dogs.

Someone stirred restively at that, and the sheriff coughed and said unnecessarily that there was no tramp about, then, and the questioning continued. Continued wearily on and on and on, and still no one knew how Joe Bromfel had met his death. And as the sheriff was at last dismissing them and talking to the coroner of an inquest, one of his men came to report on the search. No one was in the house who didn’t belong there; they could tell nothing of footprints; the French windows back of the body had been ajar, and there was no red ring anywhere in the house.

“Not, that is, that we can find,” said the man.

“All right,” said the sheriff. “That’ll be all now, folks. But I’d take it kindly if you was to stay around here today.”

All her life Susan was to remember that still, long day with a kind of sharp reality. It was, after those first moments when she’d felt so ill and shocked, weirdly natural, as if, one event having occurred, another was bound to follow, and then upon that one’s heels another, and all of them quite in the logical order of things. Even the incident of the afternoon, so trivial in itself but later so significant, was as natural, as unsurprising as anything could be. And that was her meeting with Jim Byrne.

It happened at the end of the afternoon, long and painful, which Susan spent with Christabel, knowing somehow that, under her frozen surface, Christabel was grateful for Susan’s presence. But there were nameless things in the air between them which could be neither spoken of nor ignored, and Susan was relieved when Christabel at last took a sedative and, eventually, fell into a sleep that was no more still than Christabel waking had been.

There was no one to be seen when Susan tiptoed out of Christabel’s room and down the stairway, although she heard voices from the closed door of the library.

Out of the wide door at last and walking along the terrace above the lily pool, Susan took a long breath of the mist-laden air.

So this was murder. This was murder, and it happened to people one knew, and it did indescribable and horrible things to them. Frightened them first, perhaps. Fear of murder itself came first—simple, primitive fear of the unleashing of the beast. And then on its heels came more civilized fear, and that was fear of the law, and a scramble for safety.

She turned at the hedge and glanced backward. The house lay white and stately amid its gardens as it had lain for generations. But it was no longer tranquil—it was charged now with violence. With murder. And it remained dignified and stately and would cling, as Christabel would cling and had clung all those years, to its protective ritual.

Christabel: Had she killed him? Was that why she was so stricken and gray? Or was it because she knew that Randy had killed him? Or was it something else?

Susan did not see the man till she was almost upon him, and then she cried out involuntarily, though she as a rule was not at all nervous. He was sitting on the small porch of the cottage, hunched up with his hat over his eyes and his coat collar turned up, furiously scribbling on a pad of paper. He jumped up as he heard her breathless little cry and whirled to face her and took off his hat all in one motion.