The Cases of Susan Dare (8 page)

Somehow she got through the confusion in the hall to Lieutenant Mohrn, and Jim Byrne was at her side. Both of them listened to the brief words she said; Lieutenant Mohrn ran rapidly upstairs, and Jim disappeared toward the dining room.

Jim was back first. He pulled Susan to one side.

“You are right,” he said. “The cook and the houseman both say that Marie was very strict about the monkey and that the monkey always obeyed her. But what do you mean?”

“I’m not sure, Jim. But I’ve just told Lieutenant Mohrn that I think there should be a bullet hole somewhere upstairs. It was made by the second bullet. It is in the ceiling, perhaps—or wall. I think it’s in Jessica’s room.”

Lieutenant Mohrn was coming down the stairway. He reached the bottom of the stairs and looked wearily and a bit sadly at the group there. At Caroline crumpled against the wall. At David white and taut. At Jessica, a rigid figure of hatred. Then he sighed and looked at the policeman nearest him and nodded.

“Will you go into the drawing-room, please,” he asked Susan. “And you, Jim.”

The doors slid together and, still wearily, Lieutenant Mohrn pulled out from his pocket a revolver, a long cord, a piece of cotton, and a small alarm clock.

“They were all there hidden in the newel post at the top of the stairway. The carved top was loose as you remembered it, Miss Dare. And there’s two shots gone from the revolver, and there’s a bullet hole in the wall of Jessica’s bedroom. How did you know it was Jessica, Miss Dare?”

“It was the monkey,” said Susan. Her voice sounded unnatural in her own ears, terribly tired, terribly sad. “It was the monkey all the time. You see, he was sitting there, stealing candy
right beside Marie’s chair.
He would have been afraid to do that if he had not known she was dead. And when Jessica entered the room he fled. When I thought of that, the whole thing fell together: the hot house, obviously to keep Marie’s body warm and confuse the time of death; everyone out of the house to permit Jessica to do murder; then this thing you’ve found—”

“It’s simple, of course,” said Lieutenant Mohrn. “The cord fastened tight between the alarm lever and the trigger—the bit of cotton to pad the alarm. The clock is set for ten minutes after five. When did she hide it in the newel post?”

“When I went down to telephone the police, I suppose, and David and Caroline were in Marie’s room.—I want to go home,” said Susan wearily.

“Look here,” said Jim Byrne. “This sounds all right, Susan, but, remember, Marie couldn’t have been dead then. You heard her talk.”

“I had never heard her speak before. And I heard the flat, dead tone of a person who has been deaf a long time. It was Caroline who actually solved the thing. And Jessica knew it. She knew it and at once tried to fasten the blame upon Caroline—to compel her to commit suicide.”

“What did Caroline say?” Lieutenant Mohrn was very patient.

“She said that she’d heard Marie speaking with Jessica in Jessica’s room behind a closed door. And that she’d gone straight on past that door to Marie’s room and found Marie sitting there. Caroline was confused, frightened, talked of astral bodies. Naturally, we knew that Jessica was—rehearsing—her imitation of Marie’s way of speaking.”

“Premeditated,” said Jim. “Planned to the last detail. And your coming merely gave her the opportunity. You were to provide the alibi, Susan.”

Susan shivered.

“That was the trouble. She was sitting directly opposite me when the shot was fired upstairs. Yet she was the only person who hated Marie sufficiently to—murder her. It wasn’t money. It was hatred. Growing for years in this horrible house, nourished by jealousy over David, brought to a climax that was inevitable.” Susan smoothed her hair. “Please may I go?”

“Then Marie was dead when you entered the house?”

“Yes. Propped up by pillows. I—I saw the whole thing, you know. Saw Jessica approach her and talk, heard the reply—and how was I to know it was Jessica speaking and not Marie? Then Jessica bent and did something to her cushions, pulled them away, I suppose, so the body was no longer erect. And she turned at once and was between me and Marie all the way to the door so I could not see Marie, then, at all. (I couldn’t see Marie very well at any time, because she was in the shadow.) And when David and Caroline came upstairs, Jessica warned both of them that Marie was reading. I suppose she knew that they were only too glad to be relieved of the necessity to speak to Marie.” Susan shivered again and smoothed back her hair and felt dreadfully that she might cry. “It’s a t-terrible house,” she said indecisively, and Jim Byrne said hurriedly:

“She can go now, can’t she? I’ve got a car out here. She doesn’t have to see them again.”

The air was cold and fresh and the sky very black before dawn, and the pavements glistened.

They swerved onto the Drive and stopped for a red light, and Jim turned to her as they waited. Through the dusk in the car she could feel his scrutiny.

“I didn’t expect anything like this,” he said gravely. “Will you forgive me?”

“Next time,” said Susan in a small clear voice, “I’ll not get scared.”

“Next time!” said Jim derisively. “There won’t be a next time! I was the one that was scared. I had my finger on the trigger of a revolver all the time you were talking to them. No, indeedy, there won’t be a next time. Not for you, my girl”

“Oh, all right,” said Susan agreeably.

S
USAN DARE SIPPED HER
coffee and quietly contemplated devils. Outside, rain beat down upon cold, dark streets, but inside the drawn curtains of Susan’s small library it was warm, with a fire cheerful in the grate, and the dog lazy upon the rug, and cigarettes and an old book beside the deepest armchair. An armchair which Susan just then decorated, for she had dressed for her dinner
à seul
in soft trailing crimson. Too bad, thought Susan regretfully, that her best moments were so often wasted: a seductive crimson gown, and no one to see it. She smashed her cigarette sadly and returned to her book.

Devils and devil-possessed souls! Of course there were no such things, but it was curious how real the old writers made both. Susan, who was a successful young writer of thrilling mystery novels, was storing up this knowledge for future use.

Then the doorbell rang. The dog barked and scrambled to his feet and bounced into the hall, and Susan followed.

Two men, beaten and wet with rain, were waiting, and one of them was Jim Byrne, with a package under his arm.

“Company?” asked Jim tersely, looking at the dress.

“No. I was alone—”

“You remember Lieutenant Mohrn?”

Of course she did! It was her volunteer work with him on a recent Chicago crime that had led the police force to regard her as a valuable consultant.

“How do you do?” said Lieutenant Mohrn. “I hope you don’t mind our coming. You see, there’s something—”

“Something queer,” said Jim. “In point of fact, it’s—”

“Murder,” said Lieutenant Mohrn.

“Oh,” said Susan. Her own small warm house—and these two men with sober faces looking at her. She smoothed back her hair. “Oh,” she said again.

Jim pushed the package toward her.

“I got size thirty-six,” he said. ‘Is that right?—I mean, that’s what we want you to wear.”

That was actually Susan’s introduction to the case of the Easter Devil. Fifteen minutes later she was getting out of the glamorous crimson gown and into a brown tweed suit with a warm topcoat, and tossing a few things into a bag—the few things included the contents of the package, which proved to be several nurse’s uniforms, complete with caps, and a small kit of tools which were new and shiny.

“Do you know anything about nursing?” Jim Byrne had asked.

“Nothing,” said Susan. “But I’ve had appendicitis.”

“Oh,” said Jim, relieved. “Then you can—oh, take a pulse, make a show of nursing. She’s not sick, you know. If she were, we could not do this.”

“I can shake a thermometer without dropping it,” said Susan. “If the doctor will help—”

“Oh, he’ll help all right,” said Lieutenant Mohrn somewhat grimly. “We have his consent and approval.”

She pulled a small brown hat over her hair and then remembered to change gold slippers to brown oxfords.

In the hall Jim was waiting.

“Mohrn had to go,” he said. “I’ll take you out. Glenn Ash is about an hour’s run from town.”

“All right,” said Susan. She scribbled a note to Huldah and spoke soberly to the dog, who liked to have things explained to him.

“I’m going to a house in Glenn Ash,” she said gravely. “Be a good dog. And don’t chase the neighbor’s cat.”

He pushed a cold nose against her hand. He didn’t want her to go, and he thought the matter of Petruchkin the cat might better have been ignored. Then the front door closed and he heard presently two doors bang and a car drive away. He returned to the library. But he was gradually aware that the peace and snugness were gone. He felt gloomily that it would have been very much better if the woman had stayed at home.

And the woman, riding along a rainswept road, rather agreed with him. She peered through the rain-shot light lanes ahead and reviewed in her mind the few facts that she knew. And they were brief enough.

At the home of one Gladstone Denisty in Glenn Ash a servant had been murdered. Had been shot in the back and found (where he’d fallen) in a ravine near the house. There was no weapon found, and anyway he couldn’t have shot himself. There were no signs of attempted burglary. There were, indeed, no clues. He was a quiet, well-behaved man and an efficient servant and had been with the Denisty family for some time; so far as could be discovered, his life held no secrets.

Yet that morning he had been found in the ravine, murdered.

The household consisted of Gladstone Denisty and his wife; his mother and brother, and two remaining servants.

“It’s Mrs. Gladstone Denisty—her first name is Felicia—whom we want you to nurse,” Lieutenant Mohrn had said. “There’s more to the thing than meets the eye. You see, the only lead we have leads to the Denisty home; this man was killed by a bullet of the same caliber as that of a revolver which is known to have been in the Denisty house—property of nobody in particular—and which has disappeared within the last week. But that’s all we know. And we thought if we could get you inside the house—just to watch things, you know. There’s no possible danger to you.”

“There’s always danger,” said Jim brusquely, “where there’s murder.”

“If Miss Dare thinks there’s danger, she’s to leave,” said Lieutenant Mohrn wearily. “All I want her to do is get a—line on things.”

And Jim, somehow grudgingly, had said nothing; still said nothing.

It was a long ride to Glenn Ash, and that night a difficult one, owing to the rain and wind. But they did finally turn off the winding side road into a driveway and stop.

Susan could barely see the great dark bulk of the house looming above with only a light or two showing.

Then Jim’s hand was guiding her up some brick steps and across a wide veranda. He put his mouth to her ear: “If anything happens that you don’t like, leave. At once.” And Susan whispered, “I will,” and Jim was gone, and the wide door was opening, and a very pretty maid was taking her bag and leading her swiftly upstairs. The household had retired, said the maid, and Mrs. Denisty would see her in the morning.

“You mean Mrs. Gladstone Denisty?” asked Susan.

“Oh, no, ma’am.
Mrs.
Denisty,” said the maid. “Is there anything—? Thank you. Good-night, ma’am.”

Susan, after a thoughtful moment, locked her door and presently went to bed and listened to the rain against the windowpanes and wished she could sleep. However, she must have fallen asleep, for she awakened suddenly and in fright. It had stopped raining. And somewhere there had been a sound.

There had been a sound, but it was no more. She only knew that it had waked her and that she was ridiculously terrified. And then all at once her heart stopped its absurd pounding and was perfectly still. For something—out there in the long and empty hall—had brushed against her bedroom door!

She couldn’t, either then or later, have persuaded herself to go to that door and open it and look into the hall. And anyway, as the moments dragged on, she was convinced that whoever or whatever had brushed against her door was gone. But she sat, huddled under blankets, stonily wide awake until slow gray dawn began to crawl into the room. Then she fell again into sleep, only to be waked this time by the maid, carrying a breakfast tray and looking what she thought of trained nurses who slept late. Mrs. Denisty, she informed Susan, wished to see her.

Not, thought Susan, getting into the unaccustomed uniform, an auspicious beginning. And she was shocked to discover that she looked incredibly young and more than a little flip in the crisply tailored white dress and white cap. She took her horn-rimmed spectacles, which improved things very little, and her thermometer, and went downstairs, endeavoring to look stern enough to offset the unfortunate effect of the cap.

But on the wide landing of the stairs she realized that the thick, white-haired woman in the hall below was interested only in the tongue-lashing she was giving two maids. They were careless, they were lying, they had broken it—all of it. She looked up just then and saw Susan and became at once bland.

“Good morning, Miss Dare,” she said. “Will you come down?” She dismissed the servants and met Susan at the foot of the stairs. “We’ll go into this drawing room,” she said. She wore a creamy white wool dress with blue beads and a blue handkerchief and did not ask Susan to sit down.

“The household is a little upset just now,” she said. “There was an unfortunate occurrence here, night before last. Yes—unfortunate. And then yesterday or last night the maid or cook or somebody managed to break some Venetian glass—quite a lot of it—that my daughter-in-law was much attached to. Neither of them will admit it. However, about my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Gladstone Denisty, whom you are here to care for: I only wished to tell you, Miss Dare, that her nerves are bad, and the main thing, I believe, is merely to humor her. And if there is anything you wish to know, or if any—problem—arises, come to me. Do you understand?”