Murder at Arroways Page 8

  It was Linda who brought the tray. Oliver had carried it as far as the door. By that time Damien’s head was really aching. Listening to Linda’s pretty voice urging her to eat, Damien saw the shadow in the younger girl. For all her bubble Linda wasn’t as cheerful as she determinedly pretended. She said that Miss Stewart was going to stay

  the night, the Black Horse was still full up. “Which means, Damien”—she tucked in a strand of soft hair—“that we can keep you for a few days.” She went, and presently Damien was asleep.

  The sound of church bells woke her at eight o’clock the next morning. Her head was clear. The sun was shining. In the first moments of waking she felt buoyant, light, until she thought of the same hour yesterday morning and what had happened when she opened her door. There was nothing of the kind that day. The house itself seemed to have put on a smiling air. The sunlight was coming through the hall windows, if only for a little way, and birds flew in and out among the scattered oak leaves blowing across the lawn. Roger Hammond was practicing putting shots beyond the driveway, in slacks and a dazzling yellow pullover.

  Damien was hungry. The others had already breakfasted. In the dining-room she found Eleanor Mont lingering over a cup of coffee. They exchanged good mornings. Damien got toast and bacon from the buffet, and they talked idly for a moment or two about how good the sun felt, how Damien was. The older woman was restless, kept moving about in her chair, and yet; she didn’t get up and go. She was hovering on the brink of something. Finally it came.

  “I’m glad to have a minute with you alone, Miss Carey,” she said, playing with a fork. “I want to talk to you before , you make definite plans.”

  “Yes?” Damien lit a cigarette, her curiosity aroused. Was Eleanor Mont going to discuss the question of furniture at last?

  It was something entirely different. It was so different, so complete a reversal of what had gone before, that Damien made no attempt to conceal her surprise. What Eleanor Mont said was, “I'd like to buy Arroways from you, Miss Carey.”

  “Buy Arroways?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought—at least I gathered that you were anxious to get away from Eastwalk.”

  Eleanor nodded. “I do want to get away, for a short time—principally on Jancy’s account; she needs a change. But, Miss Carey, this was my home for a good many years. I was married from this house. Oliver and Jancy were born here. I didn’t think I’d mind leaving, but when it comes down to it,” she smiled wintrily, “I find it a wrench. However, I wouldn’t mind for myself. The person I do mind for is Jancy. If you’d agree to sell, I’d like to give Arroways to Jancy for a birthday present.”

  Damien was too astounded to speak. She simply stared at the other woman, and Eleanor went on, with a touch of feverishness that echoed itself in red patches on her cheekbones. “Jancy always loved Arroways. And, after all, the house can’t be anything but an encumbrance to you. It’s expensive to run, to keep up, and I imagine you’d have trouble with that remodeling project. Moreover, if the housing shortage should come to an end, you might take a big loss. If you’ll agree to sell we won’t have any trouble over price. Jancy’s birthday is next Wednesday week. Why don’t we settle it here and now, between ourselves? I don’t mean formally. But if you say yes, you won’t have any further worry or bother. The lawyers can take care of the details, and you can go back to New York as soon as you like.”

  Damien sat for a moment without speaking. Eleanor Mont was taking too much for granted. Her anger rose. What was going on? Yesterday this woman hadn’t cared a snap of her fingers about the house. And now, twenty-four hours later, she was elaborately enamored of it. On the other hand, though, if she herself could get rid of Arroways at a profit, without further worry or trouble, it would be all to the good. No, she thought, stubbornly. Not like this, in a terrific hurry. She wasn’t going to be rushed.

  Eleanor saw her indecision and tried to clinch the matter. “I’d like to think that this was going to be Roger and Jancy’s home, Miss Carey, that—” She paused. The diningroom door opened, and Jancy came in.

  Jancy evidently hadn’t slept well. She had her mother’s bone structure, plus beauty, but her handsome face was haggard, and her mouth was set in hard lines. “Who was taking my name in vain?” she demanded, hands thrust into the pockets of her white cardigan.

  Eleanor smiled at her daughter. “The hem of your skirt’s coming down, Jancy.”

  Jancy ignored her skirt. “What were you saying about me?” she persisted, in a suspicious, almost sullen voice.

  “Nothing,” her mother told her. “It wasn’t about you, it was for you. I was asking Miss Carey whether she’d let me buy Arroways from her, telling her that I was thinking of giving it to you for a birthday present.”

  Jancy’s dark eyes had been fastened indifferently on the cloth. She raised them. They were blazing. Her wide scarlet mouth twisting itself into ugly lines, she turned with a violent movement and looked directly at her mother. “I hate this house, hate it,” she cried in a loucl furious voice. “The air in it is poisoned. It ought to be burned, razed to the ground. The very sight of it sickens me.”

  She stopped because breath failed her. Her nostrils were pinched. She looked as though she might be going to topple over. Damien was starkly amazed. Eleanor Mont was sitting erect, lips pressed tightly together. Her face was gray. She put down the cup she was holding. “Jancy,” she said, “have you taken leave of your senses? Have you—”

  Her eyes moved. The dining-room door was open. Jancy had left it open behind her. The town prosecutor and Oliver were coming in. Jancy went to one of the windows and lounged there looking out, her back turned. Mr. Luttrell said good morning, and Oliver said, “How are you, Miss Carey?” and Damien said, “Splendid, thanks,” and then Luttrell said, turning to her, “I want to ask you a question or two, Miss Carey.”

  Damien looked up at him with surprise. “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  He must have been told about the missing key to the blue room, she thought, about the wooden ball crashing down and narrowly missing her. Now, perhaps, they would get somewhere, perhaps something would be resolved. If they could find out who had opened the door of Anne Giles’s bedroom—and why. It wasn’t that.

  Looking at her steadily, Luttrell said, “Was Miss Giles a friend, an acquaintance of yours, Miss Carey? Did you know, her before you came up here to Eastwalk? Did you know her in New York, in the past?”

  “Certainly not,” Damien answered coldly. “I never saw Anne Giles until she arrived here at Arroways on Friday afternoon.”

  “So? Odd, very odd.” Luttrell studied Damien thoughtfully and at length. Then he told her. At his request the New York police had examined Anne Giles’s apartment there. Among her papers they found Damien’s name and present address and her unlisted telephone number, together with half a dozen newspaper clippings from the Middleboro Journal published in Middleboro where Damien had lived until after her father died. The clippings dealt with Damien’s graduation from college, her father’s death, various social items about them both.

  Damien stared at Luttrell without seeing him. “I—don't understand it,” she said wonderingly, in amazement. “I never even heard of Miss Giles before I came here to Eastwalk. Sherwas a complete stranger to me. I never so much as—”

  She stopped short. The dead woman’s cousin, Miss Stewart, had come in unheard. From behind the prosecutor she was watching Damien with a queer, searching look.

  Chapter Eight

  A Scream in the Night

  Struggling in the meshes of an invisible net, trying to straighten it out, free herself, Damien was oblivious of the others. Luttrell was not. The whole business was extremely peculiar. He had come to the house the day before simply in search of information about the murdered woman. The Monts were friends of Anne Giles’s; she was an employee of Mont Fabrics. She was staying at their house, or had been staying there before she drove over to her closed and shuttered cottage late on a col
d October night. He hadn't been at Arroways two minutes yesterday morning when he felt the tension. Nothing that had been so far uncovered accounted for it. He had found out from Ida Cambell next door that Jancy Hammond had arrived at the house a few minutes after Anne Giles got there.

  Luttrell had gone to school with Jancy, knew all about her. She had been deeply attached to her father, Randall Mont, had unfortunately been on the scene when Mont’s body was found. No wonder she'd gone into a tailspin afterward. He could understand the Monts’ trying to conceal her presence in Eastwalk, her mother had taken her directly to the sanitarium when they arrived earlier in the week and didn’t want to set tongues wagging. What he couldn’t understand was the state of nerves they were in, Eleanor Mont, Jancy herself, Hiram St. George, and the ordinarily imperturbable Oliver.

  Luttrell’s position was a peculiar one. He had known these people all his life, knew things about them, the way they normally appeared, conducted themselves, that the police couldn’t know—and he was troubled. The very mention of Anne Giles was an irritant. Why should the Monts care whether she had known the Carey girl or not? Eleanor Mont looked as though someone had hit her over the head with a club. Behind that control of his,

  Oliver Mont was following every word with deadly concentration, as if his life depended upon it. Jancy kept her back obstinately turned, but she was listening intently. Luttrell gave himself a mental shake. Intangibles were all very well. What he was after, had to get, was evidence.

  Queer about this Damien Carey who had appeared out of the blue. Had Silver at the bank checked on her to make sure she was the former Susan Mont’s daughter, and Maria Mont’s granddaughter? Was the girl telling the truth when she said she hadn’t known Anne Giles? Maybe— It couldn’t be proved or disproved there. At the end of another five minutes he left the house, and on the way into town he met Linda. He watched her coming toward him up the road, a blue beret on her golden head, her blue coat swinging. He had been more than half in love with Linda for as long as he could remember, had once had hopes. That was over now, but he could never see her without a flash of mingled pain and pleasure, before he reminded himself that that was all over, that she was going to marry Oliver Mont. He stopped the car and got out.

  “Hi, Fred.” Linda came to a smiling halt. Then she glanced up the hill at the roofs and chimneys of Arroways, and her smile vanished, and a frown put two lines on the smoothness of her white forehead between the mild arch of her brows. She looked suddenly tired. “What is it, Fred?” she asked. “There’s nothing wrong at Arroways, nothing new, is there?”

  Her second attempt at a smile wasn’t a success. Luttrell said quietly, “Linda, where did you get that scratch on your hand?”

  She raised her blue eyes to his, made them round. “Mrs. Cambell’s cat.”

  “Don’t,” Luttrell said. “Mrs. Cambell’s cat didn’t scratch you. It’s as mild as milk.” Before she could speak he went on heavily, “Linda, the Giles woman was strangled. Someone pulled that silver necklace tight around her throat until she was dead. The necklace had serrated edges, cutting edges.”

  Horror! Linda stared at him, her breast rising and falling tumultuously. “Fred,” she breathed, “you don’t think that I—oh, FredI"

  “No," Luttrell said more gently, “but I want you to tell me where you got that scratch." And when she obstinately .didn’t speak, “Then I’ll tell you. You had a struggle with someone. You didn’t stay at Arroways the night before last because of Oliver Mont; you stayed there to be with Jancy Hammond, as you’ve done before. They had you playing nursemaid again. Jancy did the scratching when you had trouble with her, tried to restrain her. What time was it?"

  Linda fought back angry tears. Luttrell longed to comfort her, put an arm around her, pull her head to his shoulder. She was a little dope. He didn’t know why he’d asked her about Jancy. She wouldn’t tell him anything that incriminated the other girl; they had always been close friends.

  She said defiantly, "Jancy was with me until after two o’clock on the night Anne Giles was killed.”

  “That’s fine," Luttrell said. “So you’re not worried about Jancy? So who are you worrying about? Oliver Mont?"

  He had touched her on the raw. “No, no, no," she flamed, stamping her foot.

  What a bunch of firecrackers she was, going off with revealing explosions. He eyed her thoughtfully.

  After a moment she went on in a softer voice. “I’m not worried about Oliver and Anne Giles, if that’s what you mean, Fred. It’s just that"— She looked away, suddenly woebegone behind a chin-up posture—“that dreadful woman’s death has been a—blight. Everything’s—different, not like it was. Oliver’s got his business on his mind, and Eleanor has Jancy. Then this—" She raised gloved hands, let them fall.

  Luttrell wasn’t prepared to take her word for any of the Monts’ guilt or innocence—not, at the moment, that they were actually involved. But Linda was being hurt. It angered him. He could sense the uncertainty, the strain in her. She, too, felt the change in the occupants of Arroways, no doubt of it. He said curtly, “Well, better not do any more covering for the Monts, Linda. Remember that," and got into his car and stamped on the starter.

  Driving off, he thought, Damn Oliver Mont. He doesn't really love Linda. It was a family arrangement. He’s more interested in one of those crates of his than in any woman. The engagement was all old Maria Mont’s doing. Maria Mont— The tangle Jancy was in was another piece of Maria’s work. He set his teeth. The man the state police had their eye on, the man they were trying to find, was Mike Jones. Three years ago Mike and Jancy had been madly in love with each other, and Maria Mont had broken it up. Broken Mike Jones, too. Jones was an architect of ability and he had been getting along first rate when it happened. He hadn’t been a bit of good since, and had scarcely done a stroke of work. He drank too much and neglected his business, what Maria Mont had left him of it, and on Saturday night he had been heard cursing Anne Giles out in the tavern on Main Street.

  Luttrell braked for the crossroads, went past the bank. Anne Giles had been Maria's henchman, had kept her informed, carried out her instructions. It was no wonder that Jones hated her. Jones lived in rooms over the factory beside the bridge in town. He had lost his house when the bank foreclosed, people said at Maria Mont's urging. He wasn’t in his rooms, or anywhere else around. The state troopers were looking for him. Luttrell turned heavily into the square and parked his car, wishing he were a hundred miles away. Maybe there’d be news of Mike Jones at the office.

  Meanwhile at Arroways the day wore on wearily for Damien. What was one to do in a strange house filled with strange people on a Sunday, with nothing to fill the time but those constant inner questions? The town prosecutor’s revelation continued to astound her. What possible reason could Anne Giles have had for collecting information about her? The Monts were as curious as she was. After that scene in the dining-room they had tried to interrogate her at various times, Eleanor Mont quietly, Oliver laconically, and Roger Hammond with persistence. She gave the same answer to them as she had given to Luttrell. “I don’t know. I'm as amazed as you are."

  From what Bill Heyward had told her, her grandmother had used the dead woman as an information bureau. Anne Giles might have been keeping an eye on her for Maria. To what end? She thought again of that strange summons to the Mont apartment in New York on the afternoon of the day her grandmother died, and wondered once more why Maria had sent for her. She would never know now.

  There was a peculiarly dead quality to the dull day. Eleanor Mont and Oliver went over to the St. Georges' for lunch, and Damien ate cold chicken and salad with Roger Hammond and Jancy and the nurse. Why had Miss Stewart looked at her like that when Luttrell mentioned the information about her found in Anne Giles’s apartment? Or was it something else? Did the woman actually think that she had attempted to cut off her grandmother’s supply of oxygen when she had wandered into Maria’s room by mistake more than six months ago? Staring at her [acr
oss the table, at her common-sense unrevealing face, [her scrubbed, capable nurse's hands manipulating knife and fork, Damien couldn’t believe it. Yet there had been that look—

  Jancy had recovered from her outburst of the morning. Jancy was another enigma. Why did she hate the house so much—with a hatred that had the same quality in it that her hatred of Anne* Giles had? It was white-hot, searing. Between outbursts, indifference to everything clothed her, an indifference that apparently included her husband, who palpably and rather pathetically adored her. Did she love him, did she even like him? If not, why had she married him? When they left the table Hammond proposed that he and Jancy take Damien to see Hun’s Lake where they swam in summer, and she said drawlingly, “I don’t know about Miss Carey, darling, but I’m not in the mood for sight-seeing, myself. I’m going over to see Linda."

  Damien thanked Roger Hammond and declined. Later on in her room upstairs she was struck by a sudden thought. Jane had lived with them, with her father and herself, for more than fifteen years. She knew things about peopl«, who was whose cousin, and who had married whom, and how many children people had, and she had a phenomenal memory for faces. Perhaps Anne Giles had been one of her father's students at Middleboro, Damien reflected, or had lived in Middleboro. She wasn’t more than thirty or thirty-one, and her father had taught there for almost two decades before he died. Anyhow, call Jane. But not from here.

  She put on her hat and coat and left the house, as usual with a feeling of release, as though a great iron box had snapped open. It was cold and gray out, and the color had been sucked from the landscape. Leaves scurried and ran under the lash of a whipping wind. Crows called distantly, and tree branches creaked overhead.