Danger in the Dark (22 page)

“How did you know?” said Amelia, not troubling to deny.

Jacob Wait looked annoyed.

“It seems,” he said, “that you don’t know much of what we’ve been doing. What we always do. We know all this from the family doctor, from the doctor you went to for advice, from Mr Brewer’s own lawyer—Mr Brewer was perfectly aware of what you were doing. From the stockholders who have been getting letters signed with your name and your sister’s—violently abusive letters, casting doubts upon Mr Brewer’s sanity. We know that you did everything possible to have him removed and were told that the only possible way you could accomplish his removal was to prove his mental inability to carry on business. We know that—”

“Letters?” said Amelia wonderingly and turned to Gertrude. “I wrote no letters. I suppose you did that.”

Gertrude’s face was purple; she looked at Amelia and looked quickly away and shrank back against the couch so she seemed to cower before that ever-gentle little voice.

“I—” said Gertrude and mustered up defense. “I had to do something. Certainly I had to do something. You were talking to every stockholder—insinuating—seeing doctors. I told you all along that Ben knew. I told you he was only waiting till you had everything done you could do and he was going to turn around and—and make you sorry,” finished Gertrude childishly. “He—”

Amelia’s eyes flashed away back in the shadow of her deep eye sockets.

“Listen, Gertrude,” she said. “If you are trying to make it look as if I feared Ben Brewer, you are not succeeding. I was afraid of what he would do as manager of the company. Everybody knows that. But I was not afraid of him physically.”

“I didn’t mean—I never thought—I didn’t mean that, Amelia—I never thought you murdered him. Really I—”

“Be still,” said Amelia and put her hand on Gertrude’s knee. “Don’t babble.” Gertrude’s silence assured so long as that small, beautiful hand touched her knee, Amelia turned to the detective. “Certainly I tried in every way I knew to get Ben Brewer out of the company. It made no difference to me whether or not he married my niece.”

“Did you or did you not press this marriage?”

“I did neither,” said Amelia. “You asked me that before. It was going to take place. Daphne was of age and my niece. I know my duty. But I brought no pressure to bear upon her. Did I, Daphne?”

If it was an attempt to shift the burden of questioning, it failed. Daphne caught her breath and started to speak, and the detective said, “Did you think that you could influence him through your niece?”

“Certainly not,” said Amelia.

“If everything else failed, still you had him in the family. You had a tighter hold than you would have had otherwise. And he would be the husband of a niece whom you had cared for—who was under heavy obligation to you. It looks very much as if that was your plan, Miss Haviland. Otherwise why would this girl have been about to marry a man whom she was not in love with? Why, unless she had been urged to do so?”

“She was not urged to marry Ben Brewer,” said Amelia flatly. “Ask her. Ask her father. Ask anyone.”

“But on the night before the wedding something happened,” said the detective. He paused. He hated talking so much. But they had to be beaten down—they had to be frightened—they had to realize that murder was nothing you could pass over, seal up, pretend hadn’t happened, escape from. “I told you,” he said rapidly, “that you didn’t know what the usual routine of our work consisted of; it’s this—masses of information from everybody. Look here—we know, for instance, the color of the gown you wore at dinner the night Ben Brewer was murdered. We know what time he left his apartment and how long he was in his office and who came to see him. We know when he arrived here. We know when Dennis Haviland returned home. We know how long you all talked before you went to dress for dinner. We know—good God, we know what you ate. We know what time the florists came. We know what flowers they used for decorations and what you paid for them. We know who suggested the decoration. We know—well, we know that Ben Brewer quarreled with the woman he was to marry and told her she could never influence him and there was no use trying to do that.”

“I told you that,” said Daphne. “You made me.”

He did not look at her.

“So you see, Miss Haviland, there’s no use in lying. We—”

“I see,” said Amelia gently. “Do you know who murdered Ben?”

For just an instant Jacob Wait did not reply. Not because Amelia’s pretty sarcasm had touched him. But because he saw, suddenly, that he was using a completely futile method. Futile, at least, with the two elder women. The men understood the inexorability of evidence, of law, of police methods. The girl, too, was sensible. But the two women had been for too long padded against the rebuffs and struggles of the world; for too many years they had been secure. For too long they had immersed themselves in the tight little world of the Haviland Bridge Company and the Haviland family.

“No,” he said simply. “I still lack proof.”

He let them wait for a completely still, shocked moment to understand—rather, to repeat to themselves—what he had said.

Daphne thought, He thinks it’s Dennis. This tilt with Amelia means nothing: he only wants her—wants us all—to talk. He knows about the springhouse; he knows there were two. He knows they were people who had access to the house; he knows—and has known from the beginning—that there were no burglars. He knows what we did—but he can’t yet prove it is Dennis. He can never prove it, really, because Dennis didn’t kill him. He didn’t kill Archie—Dennis couldn’t kill anyone.

But there was Dennis’ revolver—linked to the springhouse by that dark juxtaposition. There was that burden of evidence against Dennis, that inexorable heaping of one thing upon another. And there was the wedding ring.

A crime of passion—that was what they would call it. She was, too, appalled at the vistas of exploration—of inquiry and information—which the detective’s swift words had opened before her. It was as if curtains around them had parted here and there and revealed unknown dangers pressing upon them.

Masses of information, he had said. All the day before and the day before that the police had worked, gathering information—any and all information—and out of it, quite evidently, they were going to construct motives, evidence.

And Amelia. Daphne had known, of course, that Amelia never gave up; that her seeming acquiescence and acceptance of Ben Brewer as president of the Haviland Bridge Company was merely her way of biding her time. Of carrying on that unremitting program to oust him secretly. Under cover.

She glanced at her father, wondering if he had known to what vicious lengths Amelia’s desires had carried her. He caught her look and tried to smile reassuringly and put his hand over her own for a moment. But he looked shocked; he hadn’t known, she decided swiftly, and hadn’t been a party to it. He had gone on trying to keep peace, hoping for the best.

The detective was going to say something. More questioning or more direct accusation. She braced herself for it.

But it was neither. The detective turned and said to one of the policemen, as if it were a forgotten chore, “Get the hammer the woman talked about and have it examined for fingerprints. Question her more. Don’t bring her up here yet.” The policeman vanished. Wait turned abruptly to Amelia again. “Why were you paying Shore? What did he know?”

Amelia looked at Johnny. “He’ll not believe us,” she said to him, and Johnny looked up at the detective. “She doesn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t know.”

“Why did you pay him, then?”

“We hadn’t paid him yet,” said Johnny truthfully. “But we were going to. The thing was, he was out to make trouble for us. He threatened us. But he refused to tell us what he knew, except that it was a motive for the murder of Ben. Amelia and I decided it was best to give him what he asked; we are not in a position at the moment to bargain. But we—well, we don’t know what information he held. I mean,” said Johnny, “said he held. It was all one so far as our feelings and situation are concerned.”

“But you don’t know exactly what. Well,” said the detective shortly, “we’ll have to see if we can find out. Who found his body tonight? One at a time, please. We’ll begin with you, Miss Haviland. When did you first know of Shore’s death?”

It was then about two, and the detective did not release them until five, but kept them there, questioning them.

And in the end it summed up to exactly nothing.

They had all heard the sound of the blow. Nobody, it developed, had been asleep. There was confusion about voices and about lights and about who saw what in the hall.

“But Dennis found the body,” said Gertrude. “I remember that. And we were all there in the doorway when he turned him over and said ‘He’s dead.’”

Everyone agreed.

Daphne had told her own story wearily. She could not tell of Archie Shore’s visit to her room, and that because of it she had been curiously, directly certain that Archie Shore had murdered Ben. But she had been wrong: she had to be wrong, for Archie himself was murdered.

So she told only what she had to tell. When she got to the instant or two in the darkened corridor, however, the sheer terror of it came over her again, and she was all at once horribly conscious of the ring of eyes, all watching her. “… And whatever it was passed me,” she said and faltered, struck with the thought that—incredibly—one of those pairs of eyes might be hiding the truth of it. Because one of those people had certainly passed her—running away from the thing that had been done. Running down the corridor toward her.

But it wasn’t possible; she knew them all too well; she had known them all too long, too intimately.

Yet people changed. And she’d been away at school. She’d been engrossed herself in the business of growing up, becoming an adult, changing. Then why couldn’t some of them have changed? Rowley and Dennis had had to grow up, too; had been away themselves. And the older generation—her father and her two aunts—well, people did change. There was some artist—she groped vaguely for his name—who’d changed so much that even his paintings of the earlier period showed no relation whatever to the later period. There was the story of the famous physician, known for his mercy and philanthropy and charity, turning, in the last year of his life, murderer. People did change.

“Who passed you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why were you up and dressed and in the corridor?”

It was like cold water dashed in her face, dispelling the mists of weariness and dazed horror, opening her eyes to the thing she had walked into.

“I was going to the playroom. This room.”

“Why?”

Why?

Dennis stirred suddenly and spoke for her.

“I asked her to meet me here. I wanted to talk to her.”

“Oh,” said the detective, turning to Dennis. “Oh. You again.”

B
UT DENNIS’ STORY WAS
brief, clear and undeviating. The detective’s questions could not shake or change it.

“I was in my room. I was about to go to the playroom. I heard the sound of the blow—except I didn’t know, then, what it was. I hurried into the corridor and ran along it—”

“You were expecting something to happen?”

“No,” said Dennis. “At least, no more tonight than any other time.”

“Then what did you do?”

“Well, I ran along the corridor and heard someone knocking at a door. Then in the darkness I came upon Daphne pounding on the door to Aunt Amelia’s room. I said, ‘Is it you, Daphne?’ or something like that. I was expecting her, you see. Then she said something, I don’t know what—it’s all very confused, because other doors were opening and people were coming out and wanting to know what had happened. Anyway, I went to the door of the playroom—”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just did. It was near. Anyway, I turned on the light and there he was. And that’s all.”

“You saw no one coming from the southern end of the corridor?”

“No.”

Nor had anyone. Or, at least, no one remembered and admitted it. But then none of them had a very clear notion of the thing.

He kept on, making them repeat, asking a steady stream of questions about the smallest things. Who turned on the light in the playroom? Oh, Dennis Haviland. Who turned on the hall light? Oh, no one remembered. Rowley thought he did. Where was the switch? He turned to Daphne again and plied her with a hundred questions about that ugly moment in the corridor. Had anything touched her? Had the person who passed her spoken? Was it a man or a woman? She didn’t know. Well, was there a kind of rustle of skirts? She didn’t know that either. Well, how did she know the person passed her at all? Oh, just a feeling.

It went on and on.

The little room grew warmer as the cannel coal began to crack and blaze fiercely. Warmer, that is, near the fireplace. It was a bitterly cold night, with the windows frosted and little icy drafts along the old floor. There was a knitted scarf folded across one end of the couch, and once Gertrude got up with a rather desperate look on her face, took the scarf and wrapped herself in it. Johnny went to the fire and put on more coal, bending over, too, to take the chunks of coal in his hands. His neat black satin coat swung out as he bent over; the homeliness of it emphasized, as did the shabby, familiar room, the unquestionable reality of the thing. He turned, dropping the loose cotton gloves on the coal scuttle, and sat down again beside Daphne.

And Jacob Wait asked who had last talked to Archie Shore. After some discussion it was found to be Laing, who had brought him cigarettes.

“He was in the best of spirits,” said Laing. “Very cheerful, indeed. That was about ten o’clock.”

“Your room is opposite the room Shore used, Miss Haviland. Did you hear or see anything out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”

Amelia decisively had not.

And the questions went on.

The detective did not make any further comments concerning the activities of the police. Once or twice his questions showed a startlingly complete knowledge of the household—its usual routine; occasionally he would revert to the night of Ben Brewer’s death, as when he turned suddenly to Rowley again and made him go over, step by step, the events of that night. Again there was that guilty look in Rowley’s sallow, long face, but again he avoided the thing that actually occurred in the springhouse.