Murder at Arroways Page 4

  Damien drew sharply back. Had he seen her staring down? She wouldn’t want him to think she was spying. Where could he be taking Jancy at that hour of the night? Then she remembered the doctor he had spoken of, under whose care Jancy had been. Poor Jancy, and the poor Monts, for the matter of that—but the situation wasn’t new.

  Damien went back to bed. She didn’t hear the car drive away. She heard the small slap of dry leaves driven against the window by the wind and then nothing until she opened her eyes and it was morning.

  The day was gray, bleak, but it was day. The darkness was gone. It was five minutes of eight. Damien showered and dressed with a feeling of lightness. Presently she would go into town to the lawyer’s and sign papers, and then she would go back to New York. And that would be the end of Oliver, of the Monts, as far as she was concerned. She was putting on lipstick when she heard the running footsteps outside her door. There was a rush to them. Her heart stood still. The nurse had run like that the night her father died. She snatched the door open. It was Linda, still in the blue bathrobe, as though she had never taken it off. Damien went to her. Linda had come to a halt near the head of the stairs. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. Her eyes were dilated, unseeing. She said, “It's

  Jancy; she—” and stopped.

  Downstairs in the lower hall there were other voices. Oliver’s was one of them. He said, “Dead? Dead?”

  Beside Damien, Linda quietly folded.

  Chapter Four

  The Body on the Floor

  “More coffee, Eleanor?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You, Miss Carey?”

  Damien said yes. Hiram St. George poured, carefully. The youth had gone out of him. He looked old and tired Nearly half an hour had passed since that moment in the upper hall when Oliver Mont spoke below them and Lin da collapsed, to drag herself to her feet and lean over the banister, listening. It had taken awhile to penetrate. Doors opening and closing sharply, more hurried footsteps, exclamations; like Linda, Damien had been at first deceived. Someone was dead. Linda thought it was Jancy. It wasn’t Jancy. It was Anne Giles.

  Curiously, Damien wasn’t surprised. And yet one didn’t ordinarily expect a house guest to be killed in the night, even at Ajrroways. It was in almost a cozy atmosphere that they were given the details. Black fluid, hot and strong, heavy cream, lump sugar in a Georgian bowl, polite hands lifting and passing things, gray light seeping through the tall windows on damask with a fleur-de-lis pattern; they were in the dining-room: Oliver and his mother, Hiram St. George, Linda, and Damien. The man who did the telling wasn’t a stranger to the Monts. He was a tall, thin, young man with a gentle expression, in a shabby overcoat that had frayed cuffs and a button missing. Likable, not frightening. His name was Luttrell, and he was the town prosecutor.

  The shocking discovery had been made early that morning, at 6:23 or 6:24, to be exact. Two hunters, a Phineas J. Whitcombe and a Thomas Rayburn, out after pheasant, had bagged other game. The two men left the Black Horse Inn at daybreak and were on the wooded slopes along the river to the south of the town when they sighted a covey of birds in an open meadow surrounded by trees. Both men fired, a shade too late. Rayburn, however, winged a large hen. She flew into the underbrush for cover with the hunters in pursuit.

  Charging through a fringe of evergreens, the two men suddenly found themselves with their noses almost in contact with a big window in the side of a house. The lights were on in the room inside. It was a sort of combination studio and living-room, furnished with a typewriter and a filing-cabinet, odd lengths of fabric, and chairs and tables and sofas. There was a fireplace in the wall opposite the window. A woman was lying on the floor in front of the fireplace. If it hadn’t been for an out-thrust silken leg and a flash of scarlet nail polish they would have mistaken her for a bundle of rags. The woman didn’t move. She just lay there, on and on. The eagerness of the chase wiped from their wind-stung faces, the two men turned and looked at each other. Twenty minutes later the police arrived, then the medical examiner and the town prosecutor.

  Oliver said harshly out of the silence, “What? How did —Anne die?”

  Luttrell plucked at a loose thread on his sleeve. “Suffocation. Miss Giles was strangled with a silver necklace she wore. She was hit first by a blow on the head from behind that must have stunned her. After that the necklace was pulled tight around her throat."

  His even words brought Anne Giles into the room, made them see the staring eyes, the protruding tongue, the heavy silver chain digging into flesh. Damien gazed at the opposite wall, her mouth dry. The paper was green and gold. An old muffin warmer and two candlesticks on the buffet needed polishing. The white candles in the candlesticks were faintly yellow. Outside, the wind blew.

  Luttrell went on in his quiet way. “We won’t know until after the autopsy what time Miss Giles died, except that it was before two a. m. Rigor was well developed.”

  Linda choked. Oliver put an arm around her, and she rested against him, fighting sickness, a handkerchief to her mouth. Eleanor Mont's skin was blue over the bony structure of her face. St. George’s ruddy color was gone; so was his air of command. He was badly shaken.

  Oliver and his mother proceeded to give the prosecutor an account of Anne Giles’s arrival late the previous afternoon. No, she wasn’t expected. Eleanor Mont said she had come up on business. It was about the St. Louis branch— “Whether we should discontinue or not. Anne had just come back from a swing through the West.” The evening had been quiet, uneventful. They had all gone to bed fairly early. Miss Carey had gone first, Anne Giles went next, then Linda, and Oliver and his mother shortly afterward. St. George, who had dined at the Black Horse, had stopped in to collect Linda at around eleven but she was already upstairs. “She was staying the night so as to have a full day with this man of hers,” St. George said. “Mrs. Mont was the only one up. I didn’t see Anne. Why,” he struck the cloth violently with his hand, “did she go out at that hour of the night? Why did she go over there to her cottage? It was closed for the winter, the water was shut off, I helped her close it when she was here in late September.”

  “Why she went over there,” Luttrell agreed, “is what we’ve got to find out. She didn’t mention it to any of you? None of you had any idea she intended to go?”

  None of them had—except Damien. Struggling up out of dull stupefaction her mind was beginning to work. She said, “Mr. Luttrell, there was something. When Miss Giles said good night to me in the living-room, she said, ‘Perhaps we can meet tomorrow—if I don’t go back to New York.’ In the ordinary course, we were both here in this house, we would have met anyhow. Doesn’t it look as though she might have intended to go away before morning?”

  Linda spoke then. She had gotten hold of herself, was sitting erect, a dust of freckles across the bridge of her small nose golden against her pallor. “Perhaps it was that telephone call,” she explained. “Anne Giles had a long telephone call from someone at around ten o’clock.”

  The maid had answered the phone when it first rang. Summoned, she said that it was a man who had asked for Miss Giles. She didn’t know the voice. After that Oliver and his mother told Luttrell what they knew of Anne Giles generally. She was in her early thirties, had been with Mont Fabrics for almost ten years, for the last three of which she had been getting $25,000 a year. She was an extremely clever executive. She had an apartment in New York and the cottage in Eastwalk. She had spent a good deal of time in the cottage during the summer months, commuting to and from town so as to be near Maria when Maria was alive, so as to be in daily consultation with her when necessary.

  “What about relatives?” Luttrell asked.

  Eleanor Mont shook her head. “She came from a small town in Idaho as a young girl. I never heard her speak of anyone. I know her mother and father were both dead and that she was an only child."

  “Wait a minute, Mother.” Oliver lit a cigarette. Flame glinted along a tight jaw line. He stared at the flame as if he h
ad never seen one before, blew it out. “That nurse, the night nurse we had for Maria toward the end, the good one—she was a distant relative of Anne’s, a cousin, I think. Don’t you remember? Anne got her for us when Maria took a dislike to that pretty little Miss Fox. Her name was Miss Stewart, that's right, Lucy Stewart. She works in New York, must live there. It ought to be easy enough to find her.”

  “Yes.” Luttrell then asked whether they knew anyone— “Miss Giles had a responsible position to which power was attached”—who disliked her, had a grudge against her.

  Damien thought instantly, couldn’t help but think, of Jancy, standing on the terrace yesterday afternoon and lashing out at the sight of Anne Giles. “What’s that woman doing here?” If ever there had been hatred in a human voice, it had been in Jancy Mont’s. She sat with her eyes fastened on the cloth, glued to it, aware suddenly that she had become the focus of someone’s attention. Had she made an involuntary movement that had attracted Mr. Luttrell’s notice? It wasn’t Mr. Luttrell; it was Oliver. Glancing through her lashes, she found his gaze on her, bright and absent but wary underneath, as he said, “Lots of people disliked Anne—office people—she had an edge to her tongue, but certainly not enough to kill her—at least I don’t believe so.”

  Luttrell accepted that, and Oliver looked away from Damien, confident that she wasn’t going to mention Jancy. Anger stirred faintly in her. She had no wish to become, in however slight a degree, an accessory after the fact of murder. And yet Jancy could scarcely have been involved. She had only been missing for a short while, not more than half an hour, when Oliver found her and took her over to the sanitarium at a little after twelve. The cottage was three miles to the south of Arroways. Jancy wouldn’t have had time to go there, and do what had been done.

  Hiram St. George was talking. Shock, the impact of the unexpected, had relaxed its grip, and he looked less shaken. He said, his deep pleasant voice thoughtful, “How do you people figure it, Luttrell?”

  And the prosecutor said, “Miss Giles went over to that place of hers to meet someone. The lights were on, and the fire had been started. She couldn't have gone there just to get something—she wouldn’t have done it in that manner or at that hour of the night.” He shrugged. So far there were no clues to who her visitor had been. No footprints. The ground immediately around the cottage was firm, dry. The state police were trying for fingerprints when he left. He got a list as far as the Monts could give it to him, of Anne Giles's friends and associates both in Eastwalk and in New York, then asked the question that produced the same sickness in Damien that patched Eleanor Mont's thin skin and made Linda into a wax mannequin, her vivacity and life doused. Oranges, figs, raisins, and walnuts—she had read of a case once where after a whole year the police had been able to break a murder case by the contents of a woman’s stomach.

  “What time did you have dinner last night, Mrs. Mont. and what did Miss Giles eat?”

  Eleanor Mont told him. There was worse to come. So far, Luttrell's inquiries had been academic. He was there not because he had the slightest suspicion that any of the Monts had been concerned with Anne Giles’s death but because she had been a friend and a business associate of theirs, and had been staying in the house the night before, or was supposed to have been staying there. His next question showed him in a new light, put a different construction on his presence. For all his rather shy, self-effacing manner, he had eyes in his head, keen eyes. He saw what Damien hadn’t seen. He said gently, putting his pencil aside, “Your hand, Miss St. George—that’s a nasty scratch. How did you get it?”

  Stillness. The gray light in the room gathered solidity, weight. Linda sat staring down at her hand lying on the cloth, the nails unvarnished, buffed, at the vivid pink line that ran diagonally across the back of her hand and disappeared under the cuff of her blue wool sweater.

  Jancy was going to erupt now, Damien was sure of it. They would have to produce her. She recalled Linda's agitation when they met in the hall the previous night, the way Linda had said briefly after a hesitation, “Jancy’s not in her room. She’s gone.” There had been a struggle between Linda and Jancy and Linda hadn’t wanted to talk about it—but the other girl’s presence in the house would have to come out now.

  Luttrell was waiting. Just when the pause threatened to become significant, Linda spoke. She spoke idly, easily, her downcast eyes still on the red line.

  “It was hurt last night. It was Mrs. Cambell’s cat, Tidy. Tidy doesn't like to be picked up. I always forget.”

  The iron ring holding them all tight loosened. The air became breathable. Luttrell said, his interest evaporating, “You ought to put iodine on it,” and rose. “If I could see the room Miss Giles had last night? Maybe there will be something there that will explain her trip over to her cottage, whom she was going to meet.”

  Oliver said, “Of course. Come along, and I’ll show it to you.” The door closed behind them. Damien looked at

  Linda, at her hand. Linda glanced toward Eleanor Mont and gave her head a slight shake. Evidently Eleanor hadn’t yet been told about Jancy's outbreak the night before. Then where did she think Jancy was? But perhaps she hadn’t had time yet to go to her room.

  Hiram St. George pushed back his chair and got up with a little cough, and Damien repressed a start. St. George had told the prosecutor, by implication, anyhow, that he had stopped in at Arroways at around eleven the previous night and, finding Linda in bed, had gone his way. It wasn’t true. He had been up on the second floor of the house much later than that. He was the man she had heard after she left Linda at five or ten minutes past twelve on her way to her room. She was astounded, studied St. George with new eyes. He was a man of leisure, retired and with money, an old friend of the Monts’, the father of the girl Oliver was going to marry. The Monts' interests would be his. Was it Jancy again, were they all engaged in a conspiracy to protect her, not because they thought she had killed Anne Giles but because they were afraid the police would think so? If so they were doing an excellent job.

  St. George got bacon and eggs for himself from a chafing-dish on the buffet and toast for Linda and Eleanor Mont. “Eat, both of you. You’ve got to,” he said heavily. “This is a frightful business."

  “Yes.” Eleanor Mont poured fresh coffee into her own cup and Damien’s, asked Damien what her plans were, saying apologetically, “I intended to leave here this morning. That’s impossible now. There will be things to be done. That relative of Anne’s, Miss Stewart, will probably come up. I’m going to have to stay on for at least another few days.”

  Damien said that she was in Eastwalk simply to see the lawyer in town, at his request, and that the house was Mrs. Mont’s for as long as she wanted it.

  Eleanor Mont thanked her without irony. She wasn’t a subtle woman, and she hadn’t much humor. She was direct, simple, but for all that she had her reservations. Not a word about Jancy’s almost fanatical hatred of the dead woman; it was evidently to be hidden away, suppressed. And then, suddenly and dreadfully, Jancy put in an appearance.

  Damien, Linda, Eleanor Mont, and Hiram St. George had left the dining-room and were in the hall when a man came walking down the stairs, moving easily, as though he belonged there. He was smallish, dark, in his middle forties, and remarkably good-looking. Wavy black hair was brushed carelessly back from a very white forehead above chiseled features. His grooming was impeccable. It was the first thing you noticed about him. The man was Jancy’s husband, Roger Hammond.

  In a tone of astonishment, Eleanor Mont said, “RogerI When did you get here?”

  Roger Hammond ignored that. “Where’s my wife?” he demanded, but without rancor, like a man who simply wanted to know. The cheerful note in his voice seemed natural and at the same time forced, as though he had made cheerfulness a habit. “Jeanette’s not in the house and she’s not over at the sanitarium. I just called Doctor Marsh.”

  The front door opened, and Oliver came quickly into the hall. Light glinted on his head, his fac
e was in shadow. “Keep your shirt on, Roger.” He closed the door behind him. “You heard about Anne Giles?”

  Jancy’s husband nodded without interest. “Your maid told me. I never cared for the woman. Where’s Jeanette?” It was at that moment that a door at the back of the hall opened and Jancy walked into the hall from the western end. She came to a halt near the foot of the stairs, thrust her hands into her pockets, and stared at the group watching her across thirty feet of space. Her eyes were dull in a thin, dark face from which the life had gone. She held herself stiffly, with an air of bravado. Her skirt and coat were rumpled, dusty, her stockings were full of runs, and her hair was in wild disorder. “So that woman’s dead, is she?” she said in a clear bell-like voice that had a somnambulistic quality about it. “Oh, yes, I heard. I was in the pantry when old lady Luttrell was here. I wanted to walk in and tell Luttrell I was glad she was dead, but”— her smile was a grimace, bitterly jibing—“family pride, you know. For the honor of the name. I decided not to.” She looked at her husband. “What brought you up here, Roger? When did you come? You didn’t kill her, did you?” Her tone was faintly hopeful.

  “Jeanette!” Hammond said sharply.

  “Jeanette, Jeanette, Jeanette,” she mimicked, then, as Oliver and her husband started toward her, she cried, “Let me alone,” and dashed up the stairs and out of sight.

  Damien had turned away. Again she had a feeling of intrusion, of being an unwanted stranger. She looked through the window at sparrows pecking on a stretch of fading grass. Jancy had managed to get out of the sanitarium again. She seemed to have a habit of appearing at awkward moments, wouldn't stay put under a doctor’s care. What was going to happen now? Would Oliver take her back to the sanitarium again, and if so wouldn’t Luttrell find out that she was in Eastwalk, had been at the house the night before? In that case it was foolish of the Monts to try to conceal her. Abruptly, she stopped thinking about Jancy.