The Cases of Susan Dare (6 page)

Afterward Susan tried to remember whether she could actually hear David’s steps upon the padded stairs or whether she was only half consciously calculating the time it took to climb the stairs—the time it took, or might have taken to walk along the hall, to enter a room. She was sure that Jessica did not speak. She merely sat there.

Why did Jessica become rigid and harsh again when David spoke of Marie? Why did—

A loud, dreadful crash of sound forever shattered the silence in the house. It fell upon Susan and immersed her and shook the whole house and then receded in waves. Waves that left destruction and intolerable confusion.

Susan realized dimly that she was on her feet and trying to move toward the stairway, and that Jessica’s mouth was gray, and that Jessica’s hands were clutching her.

“Oh, my God—David—” said Jessica intelligibly, and pushed the woman away from her.

She reached the stairway, Jessica beside her, and at the top of the stairs two figures were locked together and struggling in the upper hall.

“Caroline,” screamed Jessica. “What are you doing? Where’s Marie—where—”

“Let me go, Caroline!” David was pulling Caroline’s thin clutching arms from around him. “Let me go, I tell you. Something terrible has happened. You must—”

Jessica brushed past them and then was at the door of Marie’s room.

“
It’s Marie
!” she cried harshly. “
Who shot her
?”

Susan was vaguely conscious of Caroline’s sobbing breaths and of David’s shoulder pressing against her own. Somehow they had all got to that open doorway and were crowding there together.

It
was
Marie.

She sat in the same chair in which she’d been sitting when Susan saw her so short a time ago. But her head had fallen forward, her whole body crumpled grotesquely into black silk folds.

Jessica was the first to enter the room. Then David. Susan, feeling sick and shaken, followed. Only Caroline remained in the doorway, clinging to the casing with thin hands, her face like chalk and her lips blue.

“She’s been shot,” said Jessica. “Straight through the heart.” Then she looked at David. “Did Caroline kill her, David?”

“
Caroline
kill Marie! Why Caroline couldn’t kill anything!” he cried.

“Then who killed her?” said Jessica. “You realize, don’t you, that she’s dead?”

Her dark gaze probed deeper and she said in a grating whisper: “Did you kill her, David?”

“No!” cried David. “
No
!”

“She’s dead,” said Jessica.

Susan said as crisply as she could: “Why don’t you call a doctor?”

Jessica’s silk rustled, and she turned to give Susan a long cold look. “There’s no need to call a doctor. Obviously she’s dead.”

“The police, then,” said Susan softly. “Obviously, too—she’s been murdered.”

“The police,” cried Jessica scornfully. “Turn over my own cousin—my own nephew—to the police. Never.”

“I’ll call them,” Susan said crisply, and whirled and left them with their dead.

On the silent stairway her knees began to shake again. So this was what the house had been waiting for.
Murder!
And this was why Caroline had been afraid. What, then, had she known? Where was the revolver that had shot Marie? There was nothing of the kind to be seen in the room.

The air was hot—the house terribly still—and she, Susan Dare, was hunting for a telephone—calling a number—talking quite sensibly on the whole—and all the time it was entirely automatic action on her part. It was automatic, even when she called and found Jim Byrne.

“I’m here,” she said. “At the Wrays’ Marie has been murdered—”

“My God!” said Jim and slammed up the receiver.

The house was so hot. Susan sat down weakly on the bottom step and huddled against the newel post and felt extremely ill. If she were really a detective, of course, she would go straight upstairs and wring admissions out of them while they were shaken and confused and before they’d had time to arrange their several defenses. But she wasn’t a detective, and she had no wish to be, and all she wanted just then was to escape. Something moved in the shadows under the stairs—moved. Susan flung her hands to her throat to choke back a scream, and the little monkey whirled out, peered at her worriedly, then darted up the window curtain and sat nonchalantly on the heavy wooden rod.

Her coat and hat were upstairs. She couldn’t go out into the cold and fog without them—and Jim Byrne was on the way. If she could hold out till he got there—

David was coming down the stairs.

“She says it’s all right to call the police,” he said in a tight voice.

“I’ve called them.”

He looked down at her and suddenly sat on the bottom step beside her.

“It’s been hell,” he said quite simply. “But I didn’t think of—murder.” He stared at nothing, and Susan could not bear the look of horror on his young face.

“I understand,” she said, wishing she did understand.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Until—just lately. I knew—oh, since I was a child I’ve known I must—”

“Must what?” said Susan gravely.

He flushed quickly and was white again.

“Oh, it’s a beastly thing to say. I was the only—child, you know. And I grew up knowing that I dared have no—no favorite—you see? If there’d been more of us—or if the aunts had married and had their own children—but I didn’t understand how—how violent—” the word stopped in his throat, and he coughed and went on—“how strongly they felt—”

“Who?”

“Why, Aunt Jessica, of course. And Aunt Marie. And Aunt Caroline.”

“Too many aunts,” said Susan dryly. “What was it they were violent about?”

“The house. And each other. And—and other things. Oh, I’ve always known, but it was all—hidden, you know. The surface was—all right.”

Susan groped through the fog. The surface was all right, he’d said. But the fog parted for a rather sickening instant and gave her an ugly glimpse of an abyss below.

“Why was Caroline afraid?” said Susan.

“Caroline
?” he said, staring at her. “
Afraid
!” His blue eyes were brilliant with anxiety and excitement. “See here,” he said, “if you think it was Caroline who killed Marie, it wasn’t. She couldn’t. She’d never have dared. I m-mean—” he was stammering in his excitement—“I mean, Caroline wouldn’t hurt a fly. And Caroline wouldn’t have opposed Marie about anything. Marie—you don’t know what Marie was like.”

“Exactly what happened in the upstairs hall?”

“You mean—when the shot—”

“Yes.”

“Why, I—I was in my room—no, not quite—I was nearly at the door. And I heard the shot. And it’s queer, but I believe—I believe I knew right away that it was a revolver shot. It was as if I had expected—” he checked himself. “But I
hadn’t
expected—I—” he stopped; dug his fists desperately into his pockets and was suddenly firm and controlled—“but I hadn’t actually expected it, you understand.”

“Then when you heard the shot you turned, I suppose, and looked.”

“Yes. Yes, I think so. Anyway, there was Caroline in the hall, too. I think she was screaming. We were both running. I thought of Marie—I don’t know why. But Caroline clutched at me and held me. She didn’t want me to go into Marie’s room. She was terrified. And then I think you were there and Jessica. Were you?”

“Yes. And there was no one else in the hall? No one came from Marie’s room?”

His face was perplexed, terribly puzzled.

“Nobody.”

“Except—Caroline?”

“But I tell you it couldn’t have been Caroline.”

The doorbell began to ring—shrill sharp peals that stabbed the shadows and the thickness of the house.

“It’s the police,” thought Susan, catching her breath sharply. The boy beside her had straightened and was staring at the wide old door that must be opened.

Behind them on the padded stairway something rustled. “It’s the police,” said Jessica harshly. “Let them in.”

Susan had not realized that there would be so many of them. Or that they would do so much. Or that an inquiry could last so long. She had not realized either how amazingly thorough they were with their photographs and their fingerprinting and their practised and rapid and incredibly searching investigation. She was a little shocked and more than a little awed, sheerly from witnessing at first hand and with her own eyes what police actually did when there was murder.

Yet her own interview with Lieutenant Mohrn was not difficult. He was brisk, youthful, kind, and Jim Byrne was there to explain her presence. She had been very thankful to see Jim Byrne, who arrived on the heels of the police.

“Tell the police everything you know,” he had said.

“But I don’t know anything.”

And it was Lieutenant Mohrn who, oddly enough, brought Susan into the very center and hub of the whole affair.

But that was later—much later. After endless inquiry, endless search, endless repetitions, endless conferences. Endless waiting in the gloomy dining room with portraits of dead and vanished Wrays staring fixedly down upon policemen. Upon Susan. Upon servants whose alibis had, Jim had informed her, been immediately and completely established.

It was close to one o’clock when Jim came to her again.

“See here,” he said. “You look like a ghost. Have you had anything to eat?”

“No,” said Susan.

A moment later she was in the kitchen, accepting provender that Jim Byrne brought from the icebox.

“You do manage to get things done,” she said. “I thought newspaper men wouldn’t even be permitted in the house.”

“Oh, the police are all right—they’ll give a statement to all of us—treat us right, you know. More cake? And don’t forget I’m in on this case. Have you found out yet what Caroline was afraid of?”

“No. I’ve not had a chance to talk to her. Jim, who did it?”

He smiled mirthlessly.

“You’re asking me! They’ve established, mainly, three things: the servants are clear; there was no one in the house besides Jessica and David and Caroline.”

“And me,” said Susan with a small shudder. “And—Marie.”

“And you,” agreed Jim imperturbably. “And Marie. Third, they can’t find the gun. Jessica and you alibi each other. That leaves David and Caroline. Well—which of them did it? And why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But, Jim, I’m frightened.”

“
Frightened
! With the house full of police? Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Susan again. “It’s nothing I can explain. It’s just—a queer kind of menace. Somewhere—somehow—in this house. It’s like Marie—only Marie is dead and this is alive. Horribly alive.” Susan knew she was incoherent and that Jim was staring at her worriedly, and suddenly the swinging door behind her opened, and Susan’s heart leaped to her throat before the policeman spoke.

“The lieutenant wants you both, please,” he said.

As they passed through the hall, the clock struck a single note that vibrated long afterward. It had been, then, eight hours and more since she had entered that wide door and been met by Jessica.

Lights were on everywhere now, and there were policemen, and the old-fashioned sliding doors between the hall and the drawing room had been closed, and they shut in the sound of voices.

“In there,” said the policeman and drew back one of the doors.

It was entirely silent in the heavily furnished room. Lights were on in the chandelier above and it was eerily, dreadfully bright. The streaks showed in the faded brown velvet curtains at the windows, and the wavery lines in the mantelpiece mirror, and the worn spots in the old Turkish rug. And every gray shadow on Jessica’s face was darker, and the fine, sharp lines around Caroline’s mouth and her haunted eyes showed terribly clear, and there were two bright scarlet spots in David’s cheeks. Lieutenant Mohrn had lost his look of youth and freshness and looked the weary, graying forty that he was. A detective in plain clothes was sitting on the small of his back in one of the slippery plush chairs.

The door slid together again behind them, and still no one spoke, although Jessica turned to look at them. And, oddly, Susan had a feeling that everything in that household had changed. Yet Jessica had not actually changed; her eyes met Susan’s with exactly the same cold, remote command. Then what was it that was different?

Caroline—Susan’s eyes went to the thin bent figure, huddled tragically on the edge of her chair. Her fine hair was in wisps about her face; her mouth tremulous.

Why, of course! It was not a change. It was merely that both Jessica and Caroline had become somehow intensified. They were both etched more sharply. The shadows were deeper, the lines blacker.

Lieutenant Mohrn turned to Caroline. “This is the young woman you refer to, isn’t it, Miss Caroline?”

Caroline’s eyes fluttered to Susan, avoided Jessica, and returned fascinated to Lieutenant Mohrn. “Yes—yes.”

David whirled from the window and crossed to stand directly above Caroline.

“Look here, Aunt Caroline, you realize, that whatever you tell Miss Dare, she’ll be bound to tell the police? It’s just the same thing—you know that, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, David. That’s what—
he
—said.”

Lieutenant Mohrn cleared his throat abruptly and a bit uncomfortably.

“She understands that, Wray. I don’t know why she won’t tell me. But she won’t. And she says she will talk to Miss Dare.”

“Caroline,” said Jessica, “is a fool.” She moved rigidly to look at Caroline, who refused to meet her eyes, and said: “You’ll find Caroline’s got nothing to tell.”

Caroline’s eyes went wildly to the floor, to the curtains, to David, and both her hands fluttered to her trembling mouth.

“I’d rather talk to her,” she said.

“Caroline,” said Jessica, “you are behaving irrationally. You have been like this for days. You brought this—this Susan Dare into the house. You lied to me about her—told me it was a daughter of a school friend. I might have known you had no such intimate friend!” She shot a dark look at Susan and swept back to Caroline. “Now you’ve told the police that you were afraid and that you telephoned to a perfect stranger—”

“Jim Byrne,” fluttered Caroline. “His father and my father—”