Murder at Arroways Page 7

  "I am.” There was something almost ferocious in Jancy’s smiling answer. She went on briskly, "How do you like your ancestral manor?”

  Damien felt awkward, didn’t know exactly how to proceed. There were so many things she couldn’t touch on with Jancy. She said, “It’s certainly large enough. I haven’t seen all of it yet. I’ve been wondering—with the housing shortage that persists—whether it couldn’t be made over into apartments—”

  Jancy saved her the trouble of continuing a forced conversation by ending it herself. “You haven’t done anything with Oliver, have you?” she asked, too sweetly. “I saw you with him earlier this afternoon, and hfc’s not to be found. Linda’s been looking for him.”

  The insinuation in Jancy Hammond, it could be just that, coming on top of Bill’s insane suggestion was too much. Damien said curtly, “I haven’t seen your brother in some hours,” and Jancy nodded and walked on into the living-room.

  Damien drew a long breath. Forget the Monts— She looked around her. Living-room, dining-room, library, the door leading to the corridor that opened on the terrace; another door at the back of the hall led into a part of the house she hadn’t yet explored. She stepped into a corridor about twenty feet long by five feet wide. A narrow staircase, a back stairs, mounted into thick gloom. She went past a servants’ dining-room and an immense pantry. The kitchen was at the far end, a faint clatter of pots came from behind the closed door there. Nearer, the mouth of another staircase descended into more blackness. There was a switch at the top. Damien pressed it and went down into dimness.

  She was in a cement corridor that opened out in the middle into a square room. She looked into a laundry on the right, into a long game room straight ahead that held a pool table, a folding Ping-pong table against a wall, an assortment of worn leather chairs. There was a fireplace in the south wall, a bar in the corner. Half windows, up near the ceiling, were masked by bushes growing around the base of the house. With those cut away, the game room would have plenty of light. It would make a wonderful living-room. There was enough space down here, she hadn’t yet explored half of it, for at least two apartments. She switched off the light, left the game room, and studied the square room in the center that she had already traversed. It would do ay a central hall with apartments on either side. There were garden tools neatly arranged against one wall, lawn chairs were stacked against another. A big board in the east wall held rows of hooks from which keys hung. Yes, there was plenty of space.

  It was cold, and there was a chill in the air. The stillness was absolute. Damfen went on exploring, fighting a faint and highly unreasonable feeling of uneasiness. She wasn’t an interloper, the house belonged to her. Someone had once been a good amateur carpenter. A long narrow room to the west was fitted up as a carpenter shop. Dust lay on the tools, neatly arrayed on deal tables, saws and hammers and chisels and drills and all sorts of strange objects. Gazing at a particularly vicious-looking thing like a huge ice pick, a shiver went through Damien. The isolation began to press in on her, the emptiness.

  She thought of Anne Giles and the man with the scarred finger tip, the man who was missing, whom the police hadn’t yet caught, and went quickly to the door and switched off the light. The cellar of a house like this wouldn’t be a bad place to hide in. She told herself that was being absurd, started to walk on, and stood still, her hackles rising.

  Was that a step, the echo of a step, a faint tinkle? She listened tautly, relaxed when there was no further sound. She still hadn’t seen the whole basement. The rest of it could wait. With her nerves in the state they were, the upper floors provided a better field for exploration.

  She went up the back stairs, past the first floor to the second. Gradually the arrangement of the house was becoming a little plainer. There were irregularities but roughly the central hall was the leg of a T, the arms the corridors running into the flanking wings on either side of the bulk of the main house. She was in the eastern wing. Eleanor Mont’s bedroom was in the wing to the west so that there was no danger of disturbing her.

  Oliver slept somewhere on the third floor. The wing she was in consisted of a sewing-room at the far end with long narrow windows from which you could see the stables and which would make a good kitchen, and four bedrooms, two facing the front of the house, two the rear. Damien examined the two rooms at the front cursorily, wondering vaguely what furniture belonged to the Monts and what to her. Eleanor Mont had never yet got round to saying. You could hardly blame her, in view of what had happened. Some of the stuff was good, but a lot of it was old without being old enough, big double beds, cumbersome dressers and chests and chairs and tables.

  The rooms at the back overlooked the tennis court and the gardens and the little guest house near the wall that bounded the property. The first room was small and a bad shape, as though part of it had been cut off. It probably had, for an adjoining bath. There was a bath between the two rooms at the front. Damien tried the door in the inner wall. It was locked. She went out into the corridor to the second door, the door nearest the main hall, and opened it. Instead of leading directly into a bedroom it opened on a narrow transverse corridor that ended in a window. The wind was higher. The shade of the window flapped.

  The door to the fourth bedroom was in the right hand wall—Damien recognized it then. It was the room in which Anne Giles had slept—or was to have slept—on Friday night. Eleanor Mont had locked it after the town prosecutor had gone until such time as the dead woman’s cousin arrived to take possession of her belongings. The curious thing was that the key was now in the lock.

  Damien stared at it. Had the cousin come? Was she inside the room packing the dead woman’s bag? A draft stirred Damien’s hair, and the door at her back, the door leading into the corridor, closed with a slam. At the same moment the door of the bedroom assigned to Anne Giles began to open. It kept on opening, slowly and majestically, as though it were being pulled inward by an unseen revelatory hand, on a stretch of blue carpet, a large window through which gray light filtered, the edge of a bureau, the foot of the bed, a stretch of smooth blue coverlet, a portion of wall.

  The fear in Damien was childish, unreasoning. Her exclamation rang in her ears, and only that. There was no other break in the stillness. Nevertheless, she wasn't going in there. She ran out into the corridor, along it, out into the main hall and down the stairs. Jancy Hammond had gone into the living-room. When Damien reached it, the living-room was empty. She returned to the foot of the stairs and looked uncertainly around, her hand on the coldness of the wooden ball at the top of the newel post. It was after four o’clock and growing dusky out, and there were no lamps on. The skylight far overhead was a purplish blur. Was that a sound up there in the direction from which she had come?

  Damien stepped backward into the stairwell and gazed upward, listening and trying to see— And did see—so fast that there was no terror, no time for terror, just for an involuntary contraction of muscles. She wasn’t fast enough. The crash wiped the scream from her lips, smothered it in hard blasting waves of sound.

  Chapter Seven

  The Missing Key

  “I’m perfectly all right, perfectly. I heard it coming and jumped out of the way. It didn’t hit me. It just grazed me as it went past.”

  Damien rubbed her shoulder and arm where she sat in a tall carved chair near the library, to which Oliver had carried her. The occupants of the house were all there. At one minute there had been no one, there had been nothing but that dark shape spinning down, and then she had fallen, the world smashing against her eardrums. Cries of alarm, running footsteps; she had a queer fancy that the people surrounding her had sprung out of the walls as though they had secret hiding-places behind them where they lived their real lives, Eleanor Mont and Oliver and Jancy and Roger Hammond, and then Linda had come, and finally Hiram St. George and a strange woman.

  The mahogany table that stood against the rise of the stairs in the middle of the stairwell was grim evidence of what would have hap
pened to Damien if she had been struck directly, instead of receiving a glancing blow. The shape that had come hurtling down was one of the big wooden balls that decorated a second-floor newel post. The table was in splinters.

  Horror, sympathy, solicitude, conjecture. The ball was loose. A vibration had sent it over the railing. One had fallen last year— They should have seen to it then, but the house had been closed. Damien had had a lucky escape. Roger Hammond suggested a doctor, but she said no, almost irritably. “I really am all right.”

  “Perhaps I could look at it.” The strange woman, a large red-haired woman with a plain angular face and round blue eyes, said, “I’m a nurse.” Her face was vaguely familiar. Eleanor Mont introduced her. She was Miss Stewart, Anne Giles’s cousin. Damien recognized her then.

  Miss Stewart was the trained nurse who had rebuked her when she blundered into the room in the Mont apartment in New York where her grandmother lay dying. Damien thanked Miss Stewart and declined her ministrations with firmness.

  Damien had gasped out her news about the door of Anne Giles’s bedroom when Oliver had first picked her up. He and Hiram St. George and Roger Hammond went upstairs. They came down in a minute with varied and curious expressions on their faces. Oliver was frowning, thoughtful, his eyes steady and blank. St. George was bluffly flabbergasted and at sea. Roger Hammond was smiling with an amusement he tried to conceal.

  Eleanor Mont said, “Well?” and Oliver shook his head.

  “The door of the blue room is locked, and there's no key in it.”

  More exclamations. Linda said, “Perhaps someone took the key out—” Jancy Hammond said, “Or perhaps it was never there,” and they all looked away from Damien, at each other, and then back at Damien again.

  “The key,” Damien said clearly, “was in the lock. It must have already been turned. The wind, there was a draft in the corridor, blew the door open while I was standing there. That was the way it was when I left it, the key in the lock and the door half open.”

  No one made any comment. The key with which Eleanor Mont had locked the door the morning after Luttrell went was in her bedroom. “I’ll go and get it,” she said. “We’d better look at the room.” They all went, in a body, and Damien insisted on going with them. Her cheeks had begun to burn. She was angry under those stares of incredulity, disbelief. She didn't know whether or not Oliver was also a doubting Thomas. She had an odd reluctance to meet his eyes since he had picked her up and carried her away from the floor beside the smashed table. She hadn’t known he would be so concerned, could be so gentle, didn’t want him not to believe her.

  Eleanor got the key and gave it to him. It was Oliver who opened the blue-room door. They stood in a huddle around him just over the threshold. The room was in order. Wide bureau with a brush and comb of Anne Giles’s on it, a white handkerchief, a box of face powder, between heavy silver candlesticks with blue candles in them. The draperies hung straight and still beside the wide window, the last of the light purple beyond the pane. Two armchairs, the smooth bed, the rug straight. Except for the things on the bureau there was no sign of Anne Giles’s brief occupancy, no sign, either, of anything having been moved, disturbed. Oliver opened a closet door. A white satin slip on a hanger, beside it a black suede topcoat and underneath two bags, a pigskin dressing-case and a tan calf brief case. That was all. The bags were strapped and hadn't been unpacked.

  This time Damien felt them all carefully not looking at her in the stillness. Outside, wind blew loudly. Oliver broke the pause. He said, “Yours isn’t the only key, Mother. There must be others."

  There were. Spare keys were kept on the key panel in the basement. Damien remembered the sound then, the faint tinkle and what could have been the ghost of a footstep, that she had heard when she was in the carpenter shop beyond the central room. Someone, she was sure of it, had taken the key then. She was right. Oliver came back to say that the spare key to the blue room was gone.

  Downstairs in the living-room, over drinks Hiram St. George fixed, they discussed the missing key in grave voices. Someone had undoubtedly removed the key from the panel in the basement, and gone upstairs and opened the door of the blue room. This was a bald fact and there was no getting away from it. “But who would—and why?" Linda said helplessly. “And how could anyone, any stranger, get into the house?"

  Roger Hammond took a deep swallow of Scotch and water. “How? If I’ve said once, I’ve said a hundred times that it’s insane to leave the doors open up here the way you people do. Anybody could have gotten in. In any number of ways. There are three doors in the basement, and four on the first floor."

  As you, Damien thought, looking at the dazzling sheen on his black oxfords, got in last night without anyone having heard you, apparently. Yet what Roger Hammond said was true. On the other hand, how would an outsider know where to look for the key, one particular key? Suppose it wasn’t an outsider who had taken the key, suppose it was someone in the house, in the room? She glanced from face to face. No sign of guilt, self-consciousness, nothing but troubled wonder—

  There was another thing. Damien was willing to accept accident as the cause of the heavy wooden ball’s crashing down, but it could have been deliberately pushed down in order to distract attention, send everyone running to the main hall while the person with the key locked the door and put distance between himself and the murdered woman’s room. She tried to remember who, after Oliver, had appeared first, and in what order others had come, and couldn’t. Certainly, she reflected, they were taking the whole thing rather lightly. If it wasn’t one of themselves who had unlocked and relocked the door of Anne Giles’s room within the last half hour, there had been a stranger prowling in the house. Oliver and Hammond did go off and make a cursory search of it, and of the grounds, and Eleanor went and questioned the maid, without result.

  To Damien’s distress the subject of the remodeling of the house was brought up. Jancy had told her mother. Damien needn’t have felt sensitive about it. The idea didn’t seem in the least repellent to any of them. Eleanor seemed to be thinking more of getting away from Arroways, getting South, and neither Oliver nor Jancy appeared to care. Twenty minutes later Damien was alone in the living-room on a sofa before the fire. Oliver and Linda had walked into town, and the others had vanished one by one. Oliver had assured her before he left that she needn’t be afraid of running into anyone, all the doors were properly locked.

  Damien put her head back and gazed into the flames, thinking of Bill Heyward and the scar on his forefinger and the man he hadn't wanted her to see—and of his allegations about Oliver Mont—until the clock in the distant corner that had startled her the night before struck five. She sat up. She had meant to phone Jane hours ago, from town, but both booths in the stationery store had been occupied. Find Eleanor Mont and say she wanted to make a long-distance call. Again the thought, After all, it’s my house—but the Monts were still here, and Arroways had been theirs for a long while. Odd that they showed no emotion about losing it, but then Maria Mont had had lots of other places that were now theirs.

  When she got up she found to her surprise that she was a little unsteady on her feet. She crossed the room, opened the door. Eleanor Mont was standing in the middle of the hall reading a letter. She was in profile to Damien, her head bent. She read a few lines carelessly, went back and began to read again. As she read, the change in her was shocking. She lost height, dwindled. The hand holding the sheet of paper fell to her side. She stared fixedly at a stretch of wall. Then she threw her shoulders back and up, a woman dragging herself erect after a frightful blow, and started for the stairs, moving much as she had moved late Friday afternoon when she parted from Anne Giles in the guest house. Her eyes were round black disks in a face as white as the ball of paper in her clenched fingers. She didn't see Damien. She reached the stairs, clung to the newel post for a moment, then started to climb.

  Her dragging footsteps slowly receded. It crystallized in Damien then, the conviction that there wer
e odd things going on in the house, in Eleanor Mont, for which there was no adequate explanation. Were they connected with Anne Giles? Bill Heyward had said two camps, the Monts in one, Anne Giles in the other—but that was only while Maria Mont was alive—and Maria was dead. She neither liked nor disliked Oliver's mother, but there had been something touching in the tragic white mask of her face. The phone was in the library. Walking toward it Damien almost stepped on an empty envelope lying on the rug. She picked it up. It was addressed to Eleanor Mont, had held the letter that had so shaken Eleanor. It was postmarked Paris and had come by air mail. The return address leaped at Damien in bold black letters from the upper left-hand corner. Castle, 22 Rue de Tivoli, Paris, France. Damien put the envelope on a Pembroke table under a mirror, went into the library, and put her call through.

  Jane was glad to hear from her. She said that the new drug was working wonders, and that Martha, their cleaning woman, was a find. Jane evidently knew nothing of the murder in Eastwalk, which was a break. Damien said, “I won’t tell you the news about Arroways until I get back, except that the house is tremendous.” She’d probably be home on Wednesday. The office didn’t matter, she had told Miss North she might be detained. Anyhow, she’d call Jane again before she left.

  She was still a little dizzy. She was also grayly depressed, wanted to get away from the sight of the Monts, the sound of them. Upstairs in her room she got out of her dress, put on a robe and slippers, took an aspirin, and tried to read. Her head ached dully. After a while she dozed, woke to find Eleanor Mont on the threshold. “We wondered where you were,” Eleanor said brightly. “We were worried about you. Wouldn’t you like a cocktail before dinner?”

  Damien wasn’t the first nor would she be the last to marvel at the power and the strength of the human entity for dissimulation. Eleanor Mont looked perfectly normal. Damien confessed that she felt rather rocky, and Eleanor said kindly, “You see? You didn’t get off as lightly as you thought. That ball dropping was enough to shock anyone. I would suggest bed. I’ll have them send you up a tray.”