Murder at Arroways Read online

  Helen Reilly

  MURDER at ARROWAYS

  AN INSPECTOR McKEE MYSTERY

  The killer stalked her in the dark silently, desperately she groped for escape ...

  COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED

  STALKED BY A MURDERER .....

  She stood still, her head up. What was that? Had she been followed? Blackness behind her —was there someone hidden in the blackness? She went on, creeping forward, both hands feeling for a door—and found one at last. She felt a sort of latch and pressed it lightly.

  The resultant click was like thunder in the stillness. Now. Damien pulled the heavy door open, raced forward, and came against an inner wall with a crash. A sob of rage and frustration choked her throat. She whirled. The door behind her had closed. . . .

  Love and Hate Involve Them in Murder—

  DAMIEN CAREY—a lovely girl with more charm than money, inherits Arroways after the death of her grandmother, Maria Mont.

  OLIVER MONT—handsome, vital," upsets the wealthy Monts by spurning a position in Mont Fabrics to start his own freight air line.

  ELEANOR MONT—Oliver’s mother, was very ill following the sudden death of her husband, Randall, and now seems secretly devastated by some mysterious trouble.

  JANCY MONT HAMMOND—Eleanor’s beautiful daughter, has become neurotic and taken to drink since her father’s death.

  ROGER HAMMOND—Jancy’s small, middle-aged husband, accepts her indifference and seems to know something that makes him afraid either of or for her. BILL HEYWARD —an easy-mannered young man in love with Damien, has invented a process Mont Fabrics would like to possess.

  LINDA ST. GEORGE—Oliver Mont’s fiancee, is a sweet, uncomplicated girl with dark-gold hair and an eager, laughing mouth.

  ANNE GILES—-production manager of Mont Fabrics, is hard, greedy, smug, with a mannered vivacity.

  HIRAM ST. GEORGE—Linda's retired, wealthy father, is an old friend of the Monts.

  MIKE JONES—was madly in love with Jancy until old Maria Mont broke up the affair—and broke Mike, too. LUCY STEWART—Anne Giles’s cousin, a trained nurse, was with Maria Mont when she died.

  INSPECTOR CHRISTOPHER McKEE—of the Manhattan Homicide Squad, comes into the case when a murder causes investigation in New York. His curiosity goads him into taking a holiday at Arroways.

  LUTTRELL—town prosecutor and friend of McKee’s, knows things about the Monts the police couldn't possibly know.

  AN INSPECTOR McKEE MURDER MYSTERY

  MURDER AT ARROWAYS

  by HELEN REILLY

  author of “Staircase 4"

  "The Farmhouse"

  "The Silver Leopard"

  COVER PAINTING BY EDDIE CHAN

  DELL PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC.

  George T. Delacorte, Jr. Albert P. Delacorte Helen Meyer

  President Vice-President Vice-President

  261 Fifth Avenue Printed in u.s.a. New York 16, N. Y.

  DESIGNED AND PRODUCED BY WESTERN PRINTING & LITHOGRAPHING COMPANY

  MURDER AT ARROWAYS

  Copyright, 1949, 1950, by Helen Reilly. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, Inc., New York, N, Y.

  All the characters and Incidents in this novel are entirely imaginary.

  Murder at Arroways

  Chapter One

  The Crawling Edge of Dread

  “Eleanor—is it true? I can't believe it. It doesn't seem possible!”

  Mrs. Thomas Cambell, a large, handsome woman in her middle fifties paused for breath in the doorway of the sewing-room of Arroways, the Mont house in Eastwalk, Connecticut. It was ten minutes after four on the afternoon of October the eleventh. Ida Cambell had been a friend and neighbor of the Monts' for more than a quarter of a century. She was the one who generally dispensed news of the Monts in Eastwalk, that they were in residence, how they looked, what they had been doing. The rumor concerning them had fallen on her astounded ears via the expressman's wife, while she was selecting a leg of lamb at the village market ten minutes earlier.

  Eleanor Mont was sorting the contents of a Martha Washington stand near one of the long narrow windows. She was a tall, sandy woman in her late forties, with a soap-and-water freshness about her. Warm autumn light reflected from a polished table fell on her serene hands, the fine angular proportions of brow and cheeks. She looked up nearsightedly. Her expression was tight. It loosened. “Oh, Ida—come in. Is what true?"

  “Is what true?" Ida Cambell cried. “Is it true that Ar roways is no longer yours? That it belongs to someone else—that you're not to live here any more—that the house is to be turned over to a stranger?"

  Eleanor Mont settled back in her chair, a handful of colored squares vivid against her tweed skirt. She had been very ill following her husband’s sudden death six months earlier. Traces of illness lingered in her languid movements, in the blue transparency of the skin under her eyes, in the pallor of her face, thoughtful and restrained beneath piled auburn hair just beginning to be touched with gray. The faint silvery veil was attractive. She said, smiling, “Sit down, Ida. I was going to call you. Yes, it’s true that the house is no longer ours. The estate has finally been settled. That’s what I came up from New York for—to clear things away, get the house ready to hand over. It isn’t true that it’s going to a stranger. Damien Carey could scarcely be called that.”

  “Damien Carey!” Ida Cambell’s well-rouged mouth fell open. She was thunderstruck.

  Arroways had belonged to Eleanor’s mother-in-law, Maria Mont, and Damien Carey was Maria Mont’s granddaughter, it was true. Damien’s mother had been Maria Mont’s only child. But from the moment, thirty-one years ago, when her daughter Susan Mont had thrown over the man she was to have married and run off with Rupert Carey, a fellow of whom nobody had ever heard, Maria Mont had neither seen nor spoken to her daughter again. She had held no communication with her. It was as though Susan had never been born. Maria Mont had done more than that. She had, on the other hand, legally adopted the man her daughter was to have married and of whom she herself was passionately fond. Randall Mont was a distant connection of the family, hence the same name, and he had taken the place, in fact, that he had held in Maria’s affections. He became her son by law. When he married Eleanor, Eleanor had become her daughter, their children her grandchildren. She had treated them as such in life and in death.

  Ida Cambell gathered her scattered forces. “You don’t mean to tell me that in the end Maria relented.”

  Eleanor shook her head. “No. It was Maria’s husband, David. This house was his. He left it to Maria for life, stipulating that on her death it was to go to Damien Carey.”

  Ida Cambell’s eyes sparkled. So Maria’s husband, a quiet dreamy man one scarcely recalled, had slipped away leaving a joker in the pack. Maria Mont had had many houses; the one she liked best was this place in Eastwalk to which she had come as a bride and in which she had spent her young married life, before she had been so successful, when the Mont fabric empire was merely an idea in her nimble brain.

  “It must have galled Maria, Eleanor, that she couldn't do what she wanted with Arroways, that it wouldn't go to you."

  “If so, she never spoke of it." There was a cool edge to Eleanor Mont’s tone.

  But Ida Cambell was not to be easily stopped. Eastwalk was a quiet place, and sensations of this magnitude were rare.

  “You didn't know about the house in advance?"

  Eleanor dropped the block of colored squares into a trash basket. They had been intended for a patchwork quilt. A piece of her wedding dress was among them. “No, we didn’t know."

  “Well, all I can say is, it's horrible," Ida exclaimed. “You've had a lot to bear in the last half year, Eleanor. Maria first, and then po
or Randall."

  Slow color crept up into Eleanor Mont’s face. It ebbed, leaving her paler than ever. Her husband had died within a few hours of Maria Mont, of a heart attack. The tragedy was too recent to be touched on in speech. She got up, went to the window, and raised the Venetian blind. October sunlight slanted warmly over lawns from which great trees rose. There was a quality of farewell in the air. The green year was dying. The colors were brilliant, almost improbable in the low light. As she watched, a breeze sent leaves down slantwise like a shower of gold coins from clumped hickories near the stables. She turned back to the cool, shadowed room.

  “Sooner or later, if we live long enough, we all have to bear things, I suppose," she said.

  Her heart had begun its old palpitating—stupidly. Ida Cambell’s insensitiveness, her brash barging in, meant nothing. Ajid her officiousness and curiosity had their uses. She had been a help with the authorities, the police, during those dreadful days at the time of her husband’s death six months ago. She had made a reliable and disinterested witness. One had to be grateful for that.

  “What do the children think of losing the house?"

  The children were Eleanor’s son, thirty, and her married daughter, twenty-three.

  “They’ll miss it, of course—but not as much as if they were younger. They have their own lives now."

  “What’s this Damien Carey like?” Ida Cambell asked. “Have you seen her?”

  “Once.”

  That day in New York when she had first seen Damien Carey rose up, a slab on hinges, every sculptured detail clear, immutable. The past didn’t change. Sleet had already begun to fall. She had just come in from the dentist’s, had had only a glimpse of the girl, in a raincoat, a scarf tied over her hair giving her a nunlike poise and simplicity. As she had stepped out of the elevator in the big apartment house the girl had stepped in. White skin, dark hair, and long brows over gray eyes, a curving mouth.

  “She’s—distinguished-looking rather than pretty,” continued Mrs. Mont. “Both Susan and Rupert Carey are dead, you know. Damien Carey lives in New York.”

  “No money, I suppose. Rupert Carey was as poor as a church mouse—a professor or something, wasn't he, at some obscure little college in Vermont? She won't live in this house, will she?”

  “I really don't-”

  There was a tap on the sewing-room door. It was Agnes, the maid Eleanor had brought up with her from town. Agnes said, “Telephone, Mrs. Mont. It's Miss St. George.” “Tell her I'll be right there, Agnes.”

  Ida Cambell rose perforce, and the two women went along the dim side hall and down the great main staircase. Ida talked about Linda St. George as they went. “Such a sweet child, Eleanor. You're fortunate—but then Oliver’s a dear himself, so much—much steadier.” Ida Cambell fumbled it there. Eleanor always bristled at the slightest hint of a criticism of either of her children. But certainly Oliver wasn't what you’d expect a son of Randall and Eleanor’s to be. Old clothes, disreputable friends, and sometimes being so curt and abrupt, and sometimes laughing when you hadn’t said anything funny. “Oliver and Linda were made for each other,” she went on brightly. “When is the wedding to be? Have they set a date yet?”

  No date had been set. It was beginning to worry Eleanor. She had no intention of letting Ida Cambell see her worry. She said, “We think now it will be in November.” For once duplicity didn’t irk her. She was tired of questions, tired of problems. You could put up a fight for just so long, and then, when you most needed it, you found that your strength had mysteriously ebbed away.

  Saying good-by to Ida in the hall, going toward the library, she thought, Is there anything Vve overlooked, anything anyone could find?—and knew there wasn’t. The police, the medical examiner, the lawyers, had gone over every inch of the house six months ago. If there had been anything to find they.would have found it then. They had found nothing. The crawling edge of dread along her nerves was fatigue.

  She paused in the library doorway. Across the book-lined room Maria Mont gazed down at her from above the mantel. At forty-five, when the portrait was painted, what youthful attractiveness she had had was gone, except for the carriage of the head—and her hands. She had had magnificent hands, square and delicate and strong, and she had been inordinately proud of them. She had used them to express the things she didn’t say, with power and decision.

  Eleanor looked back at the portrait of her mother-in-law, not seeing her in paint on canvas but as she had last seen her in a wide bed propped up on pillows with oxygen tubes in her curved nostrils, her breathing harsh, labored. Only those black tubes had kept her alive hour after hour, day after day, uselessly, without hope of recovery.

  If their positions had been reversed, Eleanor told herself, Maria would have done the same thing—Maria who had moved lives around like a puppeteer manipulating figures on a miniature stage. She turned with a sharp movement and crossed to the desk to answer the phone. Picking up the receiver, her expression lightened as she heard the voice of her future daughter-in-law. Linda was going to be good for Oliver. "She was the sort of girl he needed, sweet, gentle, uncomplicated. Nevertheless, she shrank from Linda’s eager question.

  “Has Damien Carey come? Is she there yet?”

  Damien Carey. Moistening lips that had suddenly gone dry, Eleanor Mont said calmly into the mouthpiece that Damien wasn’t there but that she expected her shortly, and hung up. In the hall the clock struck once. It was a quarter past four.

  Chapter Two

  The Woman in the Ravine

  At almost the same moment Damien Carey got her first glimpse of the house that had so unexpectedly become hers from the seat of a car running across the valley below. The car belonged to a friend, Bill Heyward. Bill was behind the wheel. He had formerly lived in Eastwalk; his aunt still lived there. When he had offered to drive her she had accepted with pleasure. Why not? Bill imagined he was in love with her. He wasn’t. She was simply the girl of the moment—he was devoted to his mother and generally had a girl going to fill in the chinks. But he was a pleasant companion, easy, civilized, no effort, and it was good to get out of the city of stone in which she was reluctantly learning to acclimatize herself. There were no seasons in New York. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, were all the same, except when it snowed. And even that gave only a fleeting illusion, except for the bone-piercing wind at every corner and the piles of black slush in the gutters. It was lovely to be in the country again, particularly after they put the parkways behind them. Pink fields and gray stone walls and patches of woodland, cows in a meadow benignly chewing, brooks, white houses, clean and comely and well-kept, old churches on hills; they were approaching Eastwalk when Bill waved a hand. “There she blows. There’s your baby. That’s Arroways.”

  Damien's dreaming mood broke. She looked up across patched fields rich with yellows and mauves, scarlet and purple, to the pile Bill indicated, crowning the ridge above. Walls and roofs and chimneys were outlined against the sky—even at that distance and partially obscured by trees, the size of Arroways was inescapable. Damien stared upward until a spur of land hid the gigantic thing from view, then sat back limply.

  “What’s the matter?” Bill asked, turning to her. “Don’t you like it? It’s one of our local showpieces. I thought you’d be thrilled.”

  With his hat on, Bill looked young; it hid his premature baldness. He had a nice face. The thing you noticed was his brown eyes. There was an almost piercing quality to them, unexpected in the agreeable mildness of his expression. “I am thrilled—with consternation,” Damien said caustically, lighting a cigarette. “I expected it to be big—but not that big,” she went on more soberly. “The taxes on it must be enormous—and think of the upkeep. How am I to do—whatever it is you have to do with houses to keep them from falling to pieces? It would take half the contents of the United States treasury—” She was dismayed —and bitterly disappointed.

  When she had been told of her inheritance it had seemed like a stroke of magnificent
good luck. Jane, the cousin with whom she lived in the wretched little apartment in New York that was all they had been able to find, wasn’t going to get better. In the years that remained Jane was going to need nurses and doctors and treatments and comfort—things of which Damien’s father had deprived her with the best intentions in the world. But her father was no businessman and he had lost Jane's money together with his own, so that when he died there was literally nothing. What her own job brought in wasn’t enough to live on. The dazzling news about the house seemed like an answer to prayer. Now that she had seen it she realized that this gift from a grandfather she had never known was fairy gold. Worse than that. It was a liability. Great houses like Arroways were a drug on the market. To heat them cost a fortune, and it would take a corps of servants to keep them in order. She said so. “Oh, come,” Bill said. “You can always sell it.”

  “Sell it? To whom? A rich man with seventeen children, perhaps—but rich men don’t have seventeen children—or if they do they don’t stay rich.”

  “Marry me, Damien, and we’ll live in it and have seventeen children.”

  “Thanks, Bill—but not today.”

  Bill didn't insist—that was one of the pleasant things about him. They went on talking of Arroways. Damien said it must have twenty rooms in it.

  “Twenty-four,” Bill told her.

  “That’s right. You knew Maria Mont.”

  It didn't occur to her to call the dead woman grandmother. She had never thought of her in that way. Maria Mont and her adopted family had been shadows until a short time ago. Damien’s experience with Maria then, her two experiences, had been as brief as they were unpleasant.

  Bill said, “Yes, I knew Maria—I went to school with Oliver Mont.”

  Damien moved a little on the green leather cushions of the convertible. After her father's death three years ago Maria Mont had broken her long silence, through a lawyer. She had offered Damien a thousand a year for life on condition that she renounce any and all further claims on the Mont estate. Damien had never had the slightest idea of making any such claims. She had refused the offer out of hand. Oliver Mont had accompanied the lawyer to the Vermont town where her father had taught philosophy. After the lawyer went, Oliver had remained on trying to make her change her mind.