Murder at Arroways Page 12

  That footfall somewhere out in front and to the right I was the maid, Agnes, going about her business. It had to be. There was no one else in the house. Coldness washed up in her. It wasn’t Agnes. The maid had passed her down the road, saying that she was going over to Cobb’s for eggs. Not the maid— And the others in the village— The oldness in Damien lapped higher, became an icy tide. Anne Giles had said a few hours before she died that there was a rumor that Maria Mont came back to Arroways to wind the clocks of which she had been fond, waited around until it was time—

  The clock! Damien caught at the stair rail. That was what halted her in her tracks, before the sound of the foot-tep. The clock near the library door had stopped. Her gaze between half-drawn lids probed the shadows. Was Maria going to materialize out there in front of her, drift toward her, through her, and down the stairs to wind the clock in the hall below? Fright, as illogical as it was spurring, sent her flashing up the remaining steps and along the hall to her own room. She opened the door, closed it behind her, her breathing ragged. There was a key in the lock. Lock the door, lock the other door on the far side of the bathroom, lock herself in here until people came. She started to turn her head, stopped turning it, and stood completely still. She was too late.

  Chapter Twelve

  Death in the Woods

  The intruder who had been in her room was gone, purpose accomplished. It wasn’t fear Damien felt, it was sheer unadulterated astonishment Her luggage had been i searched. There was no doubt of it. Her suitcase and hat-box weren’t where they had been before. When she left the room half an hour earlier, the closet door had beeni closed. Now it was open, and the bags were in a different position.

  The search had been carefully conducted. She opened her bags. Her things showed no sign of having been disturbed. But they had been, she was sure of it. Why? By whom? What had she that anyone could want? Clothes, slips, an extra dress, stockings, a couple of skirts, some blouses, and a few papers—her baptismal certificate and a copy of her father’s will that she had produced for Mr. Silver, and the deeds to Arroways in a long white envelope.

  Everything was so much in order that she began almost to disbelieve the evidence of her senses. Then she found her lipstick. She had used it before leaving the room, had left it lying on top of the bureau. The bureau was in line with the closet door. The gold case, crushed flat, oozed red paste that was like bright-red blood. It was a lipstick of a new shade that had just been put on the market, and she had bought it the morning she left New York. Whoever had searched her things had knocked it from the bureau and it had rolled into the closet, where the searcher had stepped on it when he or she replaced the bags.

  He? She? The house was empty. Damien listened, her head to one side. No it wasn’t, not now. Downstairs the front door closed, and voices sounded distantly. Damien picked up the lipstick, using a tweezers, deposited it in an envelope in her purse, put the purse under her arm, and left the room.

  Luttrell, the tall Inspector McKee, Eleanor Mont, and Hiram St. George were in a huddle in the middle of the downstairs hall. McKee and the town prosecutor faced the other two. There was a new air of gravity about Luttrell. He looked harried. He gave Damien an absent glance as she reached the foot of the stairs, turned back to Eleanor Mont, and went on with what he had been saying. “Something new has come up. Is Jancy—Mrs. Hammond—anywhere around? We’d like to ask her a few questions.”

  Eleanor Mont showed no emotion of any kind. She seemed to have put on some sort of invisible armor that turned back the thrust and cut off fresh attacks. She said mildly, “My daughter's not here, Mr. Luttrell, but we can get her for you. She’s over at the St. George house. Call her, will you, Hi, and ask her to come over?”

  Something new has come up—Damien wondered what it was with part of her mind, with the other whether Eleanor Mont and Hiram St. George had just entered the house or whether they had been in it for some time. They went into the living-room. She followed. Roger Hammond was there, in a chair in a corner, buried behind the financial pages of a Herald Tribune. At their entrance Hammond put the paper down and started to his feet. When Eleanor Mont said, “Mr. Luttrell wants to talk to Jancy,” he sank back with an effect of collapse, as though he had been suddenly deboned by an expert chef. His handsome face wasn’t one to change readily. He couldn’t control his color. He went dead white. Damien felt suddenly sorry for him. Roger Hammond adored the wife who treated him with an almost cruel indifference. Did he know something that made him afraid for her?

  They all sat down, with the exception of the Inspector, who stood near a window at the far end of the room, detached, disassociating himself from Luttrell's officialdom, but keenly observant. Why was he studying her like that? Damien averted her eyes. When he had questioned her that morning she had kept her word to Oliver, hadn’t said that Oliver had driven Anne Giles over to the cottage on wasn’t Oliver and it wasn’t Linda who had searched her room. Jancy, Damien decided, was a different proposition. What a strange girl she was, sometimes beautiful and perfectly groomed, at others untidy and sullen and almost plain. She was in an in-between mood that afternoon. Her blouse was coming out of her skirt, as though she had given it an impatient tug, but she carried herslef with assurance, her chestnut head at an arrogant tilt, her tangerine lipstick on straight, as she strolled to a sofa near the fire and settled herself in a corner of it.

  “Yes, Mr. Luttrell?” She looked at the prosecutor with I mockery. “I was enjoying my tea. An egg from one of Linda's hens, you know. Fresh. I hope it’s something important you want to talk to me about.”

  Luttrell nodded. He had glanced once toward Linda and uneasily away. Hammond was sitting sharply erect in the winged chair in the corner near the hearth. Luttrell said, “I don’t know whether you can tell us anything or not, Mrs. Hammond. Last night, between ten and, say half past, did you leave the house, this house? Did you go out into the grounds—for any reason?” He put an accent on the last three words.

  Jancy stared at him. “I did not. Why do you ask?” “Because,” Luttrell said, his eyes steady on her face, “the man who was in the grounds last night, the man who stood behind the oak tree out there watching the house for some time, the man who carried the ladder to the window of the blue room, entered it, and slashed open Anne Giles’s bags was Mike Jones.”

  If Luttrell had hoped to knock the pins from under Jancy with this statement, he failed miserably. Jancy continued to look at him without the slightest change of expression. Either, Damien concluded, Jancy no longer cared anything about Jones or, like her mother, she had armed herself in advance for this frontal attack. Luttrell said that the vet, Hanley Williams, passing along the back road late the night before had seen Mike Jones leaving the Arroways grounds a minute or two after the ladder went down.

  “You didn’t see Mike Jones last night, Mrs. Hammond, don’t know where he is?”

  Jancy repeated stolidly that she hadn’t seen Mike Jones last night or on any other night since her marriage, that she hadn’t been out of the house the previous evening at all, added with a flash of her dark eyes, “Why concentrate on me?”

  Her husband was in the room. Luttrell couldn’t say, “Because you used to be in love with Mike Jones and, according to rumor, still are.” He put the question perfunctorily to the others. None of them had seen Mike Jones. The crash of the broken window and the maid’s scream—her room was directly above the blue room—was the first thing that had aroused them.

  Five minutes later Luttrell and the Inspector left the house, but not the grounds. They crossed the tennis court toward the little house on the rise at the back. The Scotsman was preoccupied, uneasy. Too many questions remained unanswered. There were gaps in the evidence with which Luttrell had presented him, dissonances. Above all, there was the emotional tension in the big house behind them. So far Bill Heyward had made no attempt to get into communication with Mike Jones, and with Jones at large, on the loose, anything could happen. He hadn’t been in favor of bracing J
ancy Hammond but, after all, it was Luttrell’s case. A queer case, a case that refused to jell. He said aloud, “You naven’t yet gotten to the bottom of why Anne Giles was killed.”

  “Those rings, McKee—”

  “Personally I’m not satisfied writh the rings, in the shape they’re in.”

  “Don’t you agree that Anne Giles’s bags were slashed open in a search for the rings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then-”

  “The rings are somewhere in it, certainly,” the Scotsman conceded. “I simply don’t feel that they’re in the right slot. Never mind. Let’s get on with this.”

  He opened the door of the little house, went in, and closed the door. Luttrell didn’t go in with the inspector.

  He went around to the back.

  Inside the little house McKee talked to the air. Outside, standing close to the wall, in among the bushes that stood closely against it, the town prosecutor listened, and wrote, McKee came out. Luttrell had heard almost every word the Scotsman pronounced. According to Damien Carey, Eleanor Mont and Anne Giles had had their business conference in the little house late Friday afternoon. McKee said, “A business conference undoubtedly—Miss Giles was " of a businesslike turn of mind. The question is—what business? Anyhow, there was a noise among the bushes in back after Mrs. Mont left. There could have been a listener there.”

  “You think Anne Giles may have had something on Mrs. Mont?”

  “I do. And I think Eleanor Mont is terrified that we’re going to find out what it was—Mrs. Mont and Hiram St. George.”

  Luttrell scowled at oak leaves drifting across the tennis court. “Mike Jones knew Anne Giles was here. He could have been behind the house.”

  The name of the missing man seemed to touch McKee on the raw. “Let’s get back,” he said. “There may be news,” and started forward at a fast pace.

  Inside the house, less than a quarter of an hour after the Inspector and Luttrell went, Damien discovered who had entered her room and searched her bags.

  With the genius for ignoring disagreeable facts that the Monts were bringing to a high state of perfection, the subject of Mike Jones was dropped. The talk turned to Miss Stewart, who was going to stay on for a day or two. Anne Giles had apparently made no will, and the nurse would inherit her estate as next of kin. As soon as the police were through with it the cottage had to be closed.

  Jancy had gone upstairs. Linda and Oliver on a distant love seat talking in low voices, their close-together heads bright; opposite Damien, Roger Hammond changed his position. He sat back in his chair, stretched his well-shod feet out in front of him, and crossed them at the ankles. On the sole of the right shoe, worn faintly gray, there was a large, irregular red smear. The grayness had dulled the brilliant scarlet a little, but on the cream-colored background of the rug just in front of his chair, where his right foot had rested firmly earlier, a smear of her lipstick, a lip stick different from Jancy’s, from Eleanor Mont’s, and from Linda’s, glowed in shadow.

  Damien’s first impulse was to lean forward and say, “Mr. Hammond, why were you searching my room a little while ago? What was it you were looking for?” She repressed it. A direct question to Roger Hammond would get her no place. For all his amiability he was anything but forthright. He would give her some trumped-up story that was a he. No, she thought, tell the Inspector what had | happened. The Inspector would know how to get at the truth—and it would be a relief to go to the police with definite evidence. But there was no particular hurry. Roger Hammond couldn’t get away. They had all been instructed to remain in Eastwalk. Meanwhile, keep an eye on Mr. Hammond—

  Nothing that transpired during the rest of the afternoon and evening shed any light on Roger Hammond’s search of her belongings. Slow anger was gathering in her. Everyone in the house was covering up, for himself or someone else; she was the only one excluded, kept in the dark. When she went to bed that night she locked her bedroom door and the door leading into the adjoining room, and before she fell into a troubled and broken sleep finally made up her mind to tell Oliver that she could no longer remain silent, that she was going to make a clean breast of everything to the Inspector from New York.

  On the next day, Tuesday, Damien implemented her decision. At half past one, coming out of the dining-room where she had had a solitary sandwich and a cup of coffee from the buffet, there was no one else in evidence, she ran into Oliver in the hall. She had written a letter to Jane, had the letter in her hand, had her coat on. The last time she had seen Oliver was late the previous afternoon. Under his gaze, and he seemed to be making a habit of gazing at her when they met unexpectedly, as though she were something strange that had sprung up out of the floor boards or descended from the ceiling, she felt awkward, uncertain. In contrast to his enigmatic scrutiny his voice was matter of fact.

  “Going into town?"

  When she said yes, he said, “I’ve got to go in myself, I’ll drive you in,” and she said that that would be fine and went upstairs to get her bag and gloves. On the way down a minute later she stood still on the shadowy landing. The front door was open, and Linda was in the hall. She had on a white polo coat, and her cheeks were flushed by the wind. She caught sight of Oliver, and her face lit up and she went over to him with a dancing step.

  “Darling, where have you been?” she demanded. “I've been looking all over for you. The Brewsters are up from Virginia and they want us over for lunch. It’s not too late. They’ve got some new boxers. I'm dying to see them.” “The Brewsters or the boxers?” Oliver twined a loose strand of Linda’s fair hair around one of his fingers, and she nuzzled a cheek against his shoulder and laughed. “The Brewsters and the boxers.”

  Oliver sighed. “The Brewsters may want us, but, dogs or no dogs, do we want the Brewsters—that’s the question.” “Oh, Oliver, don't be difficult,” Linda coaxed. “Jude Brewster's sweet, and Tom’s nice, too.”

  “Nice and dull, my pet. Not to put a fine point on it, they’re both crashing bores. Why not admit it?”

  He spoke carelessly but with decision. The effect on Linda was instant The gaiety went out of her, and her face crumpled. She looked like a child who had been slapped for no reason and was about to burst into tears. She didn’t. She flamed into sudden anger, stamping her foot knd crying, “Oliver, you’re horrid. My friends—it’s always taiy friends. Phil Curry tells long stories, so we don’t go there any more. Maida’s got nothing but dusting on her mind, so we don’t go there. Who do you like?”

  “Now, Linda." It was Oliver’s turn to cajole. He did it awkwardly, but there was genuine concern in him. He put out his hands to draw Linda to him, but she struck his hands down and backed away.

  “Who do you like?” she repeated, her voice high.

  “Linda—” Oliver paused.

  Another voice cut across his. Jancy Hammond had come into the hall. She stood leaning against the doorway to the transverse corridor. She said drawlingly, removing a cigarette from her lips and blowing smoke, “Oliver likes unattached ladies, don’t you, brother dear? It used to be Anne Giles, or was for a while. Now—"

  It was her turn to pause. Oliver stopped her. “That's enough, Jancy." He spoke quietly, dian’t move, simply looked at his sister, holding her eyes steadily with his.

  Jancy retired from the fray. She shrugged, gave a short laugh, and strolled on into the corridor. Linda stared in bewilderment. Her anger had subsided as suddenly as it had risen. Strife of any sort was repugnant to her. She said indignantly to Janet’s receding back, “You’re silly, Jan. Oliver never liked Anne Giles," and to Oliver, “It's all right, darling. I’m sorry I was such a beast. Forget about the Brewsters. They are on the dull side. Anyhow, I’ve got letters to do for Father, and I want to wash my hair."

  Damien remained where she was in concealing gloom until Oliver and Linda had gone outside, then she descended the remaining flight of steps. Whether or not Oliver Mont was currently interested in someone besides Linda, Jancy had been right about Anne
Giles, she knew that of her own knowledge. Her earlier distrust of him came flooding back strongly. And yet she was puzzled. Oliver wasn’t the philandering type. He hadn't that particular sort of male vanity, didn't appear to need that form of reassurance. It wasn't any of her affair. Drive into town with him, say what she had to say and get it over with. Then go to the Inspector.

  The front door opened, and Oliver came into the hall.. He said, “Ready?" and she said yes and went out with him to his car. As they put Arroways behind them and swung into King Street she began to talk. Oliver didn’t interrupt her. He listened in silence until she had finished, although once or twice he turned and looked into her face.

  The news that her room had been entered and searched by Roger Hammond appeared to startle him as much as it had startled her. “You’re sure it was Roger? The lipstick? Yes, I see—"

  He brooded over that beside her at the wheel but a million miles away, then said slowly, not looking at her but ahead of him at colored leaves and black tree branches, “You feel you must tell the police about Jancy, Miss Carey, that Jancy was running around loose the night Anne Giles was killed?"

  Damien felt an odd sense of loss at his “Miss Carey/’ his air of formality, remoteness. The feeling angered her. Why should she care whether Oliver Mont censured her or not? She couldn’t run her life to suit him. He had no claim on her, shouldn’t have requested her to conceal evidence in the first place. Her yes was unnecessarily curt. She added to it. “You asked me to keep still until the police found the murderer. They don't seem to be much nearer now than they were three days ago. Tell me, do you think Mike Jones killed Anne Giles?"

  Oliver shrugged flat shoulders moodily, his eyes on the road. “How should I know? Jones was hanging around in the grounds outside the house on Sunday night when the blue room was entered and Anne’s bags were ripped open. Who else could have done it? You wouldn't consider waiting until the police find Jones?"