Five Fatal Words (26 page)

"Theodore Cornwall is one of the joint heirs to an income from an estate valued at two or three hundred million dollars and that estate goes to the last Cornwall brother or sister surviving. Donald was his nephew. I have an Associated Press Dispatch here which tells me that Theodore Cornwall, if he has lost his life in his reckless parachute jump, will be the fourth member of the family to die within the last three months, and that he will be survived by two sisters. That means that one of those sisters will inherit one of the greatest fortunes, in the country. But I haven't only tragedy to bring you. Here's a story about a cuckoo clock--"

Melicent did not hear the story about the cuckoo clock; the voice went on, relating it; but Melicent Waring stood in front of the radio, her hands clenched tight together, and spoke back at it.

"He isn't dead," she denied in a low, vibrant voice. "He can't be dead." She referred to Donald.

Theodore Cornwall might be dead. A seizure of horror passed over her, thinking of that; but nothing in her rose to refuse the whole idea of it. On the contrary, it was only reasonable that he would die. Was he not T in the frightful series of fate; had he not been the next doomed to die; had not he, indeed, read his fatal message? No; she could not deny the death of Theodore Cornwall. She could not, in fact, think about him. He became a figure in the background--a figure she could not have expected to survive. But for Donald to die! Donald to be swept away, never to hear his voice once more!

So Melicent, standing there speaking back at the radio, discovered the secret within her which had underlain all she had done in the last frightful weeks. It was Donald. Her mind numbly traced the whole history of her relations in the Cornwall family. By instinct and without words she knew she had decided to stay with them because at the very beginning when the stark tragedies stalked the family a young man with red hair and blue eyes had come through the front door and asked her if she had a name.

She knew that while he had been friendly with her, and often shared his confidence with her, he still remained enigmatic. His past was more or less a mystery.

She was not fully informed about his education, where he had traveled, for whom he had cared, what sort of things he liked, what he disliked--the innumerable details of habit, choice, and behavior, which combine to make up a personality. Her glimpses of his human likeableness had been brief at the best.

But now, from the ether had come word that he was almost surely dead. She did not rush upstairs to tell Hannah Cornwall of the accident. She sat in front of the radio without even the relief of tears and said, "It can't be. It mustn't be." Until at last she said, "I love him," and after that she wept.

A few minutes passed while her shoulders shook and her head was held in her hands. The radio announcer vanished from the air and in his place came two world-famous comedians. She did not hear them. She was thinking that she had stayed with the Cornwalls, not because she was bold or brave, not because she was a steadfast person, but because she was in love. And now they said that the man she loved was gone forever.

There would be no opportunity to participate in that period of human ecstasy during which two people find themselves drawn rapidly and willingly closer and closer together.

She did not doubt but that if he had not already been in love with her she could make him love her. He had been all his life a wanderer, a forlorn man, a hungry man, a man to whom had come many splendid things but not love. She knew, in fact, that he had tried to interest her in a way so casual that that very quality would have revealed its desperation if she had been careful to notice it. Now it was too late.

She remembered her duty. She appreciated what the news would mean to Hannah Cornwall. Daniel. Everett. Alice. Theodore. But one letter--H--remained to complete the word "Death" upon the Cornwall tombstones. H for Hannah. Melicent thrust aside the agony of that moment and went upstairs.

On the door of every bedroom in the castle of Silas Cornwall was a huge cast-iron ring, which served as a knocker and also turned back the latch. Melicent stood in front of Hannah's door. She felt weak and lost and hopeless. The Cornwall tragedy had suddenly become a tragedy of her own. She knocked, and Hannah, who asked a question from the room behind the door, let her in quickly, because every syllable Melicent spoke was freighted with disaster.

Hannah Cornwall did not say "What's happened?" or "What's the matter?" Any such inquiry would have been superfluous. She merely let the girl into her room, relocked the door and waited like a prisoner preparing for his own execution.

Melicent's voice was low and very soft. "I was listening to Lawrence Bartlett on the radio just now. In the middle of his broadcast about the day's news he said that your brother Theodore and Donald had been going from Chicago to New York in an aeroplane and that something had gone wrong and that they had jumped in parachutes and probably fallen into a lake or something, because they haven't been found."

Hannah sat down in a chair and looked steadily at her secretary. In spite of her shrewdness and the quick perception of her mind, she did not quite understand. She belonged to a generation which had not known the radio, and probably under the shock of impending knowledge her mind acted as it had when she was younger. She could not quite understand the source of what Melicent had said or acclimatize her thoughts to the shocking fact that this new Cornwall tragedy had been thrust almost physically over hundreds of miles of space through the walls of "Alcazar."

"I don't understand," she said.

"I was listening to the radio--" Melicent repeated tremulously. 

"Yes, the radio. Go on, Miss Waring."

"--to a man who broadcasts the news every night. He just gives little snatches of a few things that have happened during the day, but no details. That's the trouble. He doesn't really know what did happen. All he knows was that Donald and your brother had jumped out of an aeroplane and that they were lost."

"This came over the radio?"

"Yes, Miss Cornwall, over the radio."

"It couldn't be a trick to disturb us?"

"No, Miss Cornwall. It was no trick."

"And it is said both of them were dead?"

"No. It just said that probably both of them were dead."

The obtuseness of Hannah Cornwall was more than Melicent could bear. She repeated in a very low voice, "Maybe he's dead. Maybe Donald's dead," and she threw herself face down on a sofa and began to cry again.

When their distress is very real and very strong, people cry only in short snatches.

Comforting attention will sometimes prolong those periods of tears, but no one comforted Melicent. She soon realized that she was surrounded by frigid silence and after a while she remembered that for the second time her inadvertent behavior was reflecting an interest in Miss Cornwall's nephew to the old lady. She sat up.

Hannah was in a chair a few feet from her. Hannah's arms were on the arms of the chair. Her hands hung down at rigid right angles. Her back was steel stiff and her face was engraved with fear. She did not blink her black eyes and even her mouth did not twitch. The iciness of realization had crept through her while Melicent wept. She was frozen to death with terror.

Melicent made a miserable attempt to project solace to the stiff statue. "Maybe they'll be all right. Maybe I could call up the newspapers and find out about them. Maybe it's just a rumor."

Hannah said nothing.

"I'll go now." She stumbled across the room and took up the receiver of the telephone. Then she remembered she would have to look up a number and she did so.

The pages slithered under her shaking fingers. It was with difficulty that she concentrated her eyes on the letters. She found the number of the newspaper office and she called it.

"I'd like to speak to someone who knows about the aeroplane disaster over the Allegheny Mountains this afternoon. I'm speaking for Hannah Cornwall, a sister of one of the men on that plane." Her voice quivered and halted. She waited for a long time and then repeated her question.

A man at a desk in New York City answered it with terse courtesy. "A report has just come in from Bellmede, Pennsylvania, saying that one of the men landed safely in his parachute. The 'chute the other one jumped in didn't open and he was killed."

Melicent asked, "Which one landed safely?" and it took all the strength she had.

But there was no comfort for her.

The man at the other end of the wire merely said, "Don't know yet. Call up in half an hour," and hung up.

She set the telephone back on the stand and turned her attention toward Hannah with renewed hope. One of the men had landed safely. Donald was young. Donald was strong. And Donald was certainly that one.

"One landed safely. They don't know which one. Oh--"

Miss Cornwall ignored the exclamation wrung from the girl and for the first time in several minutes she spoke. Her voice was at a dead level and seemed to be activated by a portion of her mind wholly beyond human feeling. "Now begins the day which I have dreaded all my life. Now it's here. I'm next. There's no one between me and death." As she continued she made wide gestures of pointing with her hands; slow, sweeping mechanical gestures. "Try all the doors, Miss Waring, and be sure they are locked and bolted." Melicent began mechanically to obey. "Now look out each window and see if there was anything or anyone on the walls."

Melicent leaned out into the icy air, opening the windows each in turn and looking down.

"Now turn over on your back and look up. See that nothing is being let down into this chamber. Look in every closet. Look for small things as well as large." With increasing chill Melicent obeyed these laconic commands. "A small thing would be big enough." Miss Cornwall accompanied Melicent's acts with words. "A tiny snake, a tarantula. We will plug the keyholes and caulk the cracks in the floors, and cement the fireplace. Look up the chimney, Miss Waring."

This rapid survey of the room brought back Melicent a little of her self-control and she realized that her employer was practically out of her senses. The one fact Hannah had gathered from the news that had come over the radio was that according to the fatal words she would be the next to die. Theodore had obviously made a brave stand and she assumed that Theodore was dead.

"On that table, Miss Waring, is the afternoon's mail which I have not yet opened.

There are half a dozen letters. You will take those letters outside, open them yourself and read them."

Melicent picked up the letters and then began, "Doesn't everything always--"

She was stopped by a scream. Hannah Cornwall leaped to her feet, plugged her ears and screamed at the top of her voice. Melicent believed that the old woman had gone completely mad and she shrank away from her. But Hannah was talking again almost immediately in the same level monotone. "I didn't mean to frighten you so badly. I just wanted you to stop talking. Hereafter, you will write down everything you say to me before you say it. Do you realize that you began talking to me with three words that began with 'D'-'E' and 'A'? Hereafter, none of your messages will have such an unfortunate commencement. I will see to it that I do not read or hear a message that has meant the end of my brothers and sister. You will help me to see to that."

Melicent moved closer to Hannah Cornwall. She was numb and horror stricken.

"But, Miss Cornwall, don't you see it isn't the messages that caused the deaths? And if whoever was responsible for them vanished, he could do what he planned to do without sending the messages just as well as after having sent them?"

Hannah blazed illogically into anger. "Are you attempting to tell me what I shall or shall not do ?"

"I'm sorry."

Hannah cut her off. "Don't be sorry. Be careful. Of all the people which surround me, you are the only one in whom I have any confidence whatsoever and my confidence in you is limited by the fact that you are oblivious to many things. From now on I am going to be sealed in this room. No one shall see me but yourself. You will read all communications which come to me and you personally will purchase all my food and convey it here. I shall cook it myself. I will have these windows painted and nothing will be visible to me except blue sky. The house will be guarded day and night. I am the next Cornwall to get the message but I shall never get it." A smile appeared on her face, a ghastly smile anticipating a grim triumph. "When Death writes letters to me, I will not read them, and so I will live. I will live!" She stood up and almost shouted the word

"Live!" Then drama departed from her and her cold, gloomy mood reasserted itself. "Call the newspapers again. Find out."

Melicent was on her way to the telephone when it rang. Before she answered it, Hannah had fairly shouted, "I will rip that thing from this room against the chance I might answer it and hear five words before I thought of what I was doing."

"Hello?" Melicent said. "This is the Pittsburgh operator. We have a call for Miss Hannah Cornwall from Bellmede, Pennsylvania."

"Speaking," Melicent replied and she waited, waited to see what voice she would hear. And then, in spite of the dreadfulness of her situation, in that moment the whole world spun, shuddered, and righted itself once more, for to her ears, loud and strong, came the voice of Donald Cornwall.

"Hello--Aunt Hannah?"

She answered simply. "This is Melicent."

"Oh, hello, Melicent. Is everything all right with you?"

"It's all right."

"We've had a terrible accident here. It's caught up with us, I guess. You know what I mean."

"Yes," Melicent replied. She turned her head in the direction of Hannah and for a moment her eyes perceived the glassy intentness of the sharp, black eyes in the head of the older woman.

Donald said: "If you know what I mean, I'll go ahead. Uncle Theodore was killed this afternoon. We reached Chicago this morning after a delay which to me seemed not to matter; but it upset Uncle Theodore. You see, his instructions were to--return to New York at the end of ten days."