The Hangman's Whip (23 page)

It was true that all along she had seemed thoughtful and definitely purposeful. Yet, so far as Search knew, she had done nothing—except try to cast suspicion upon Search. She thought of that, too, and came to the conclusion that if Diana had really set herself to involve Search she would have done so in a different and in a far more dangerous way. Her words of that afternoon had been merely superficial, a scratch rather than a dagger thrust.

Search put her face against the black screen.

But there was no way, really, to tell what was going on behind Diana’s eyes; what she might do or what she might say. Or what she had done. Except that if the waitress actually had seen anyone leaving the tool shed it had not been Diana, for she would have recognized her height and slenderness and smooth light hair.

The moon was out—later than it had been four, no, five nights ago; its light lay upon the lake, turning it to a quiet deep silver pool. The shadows of trees and shrubbery were black and sharp, and there were eerie white patches of lighted lawn between.

And as she looked downward upon that quiet black and silver world a fringe of blackness below the hydrangeas wavered.

There was no wind.

It wavered again. And something, black as that shadow, moved and parted from it and scuttled swiftly, hunched over like a dog on four feet, across a white open area of lawn just below.

I
T DISAPPEARED INTO THE
edge of shadow on the other side of the white moonlit patch.

She gave a little startled gasp. The eerie patch of whiteness was now perfectly clear, as if no sprawled black figure had pattered quickly and silently across it.

Her heart was pounding in her throat

It was an optical illusion. It was a man. It was neither man nor woman but a creature—padding softly and furtively across that patch of white lawn, disappearing swiftly into the shadow of shrubbery like that from which it came.

It was nothing.

She listened. And stared down at the intermingled shadows and light.

Nothing stirred. There was no sound anywhere.

It had vanished, whatever the thing was, as mysteriously and completely as the man she had seen silently watching the cottage the night of Eve’s murder had vanished.

It was that memory that roused her. She was sure that figure had been that of a man. It had been clear-cut, sharp, definite. And earthly. Not a fantastic creature of the night or of her own imagination or of—

A door somewhere closed very softly.

That, too, was definite. The thing she had seen was flesh and blood. A man—or a woman—hunched over, running swiftly on all fours like a dog.

There was a kind of horror about that. But a door somewhere had closed.

By the time she reached her own door and unlocked and opened it the hall was completely empty. There was no way to tell whether anyone had crept along it, whether the closing of that door had been a bedroom door—or a door to the hall below or the kitchen door. It was so still a night that the sound she had heard might even have come from the Stacy house, although it seemed nearer. That crouching figure had pattered cross the moonlit patch of whiteness in the direction of the lake, but it might have veered in either direction, toward the Abbott house or toward the Stacy house.

A night light was burning in the hall, and it was reassuring in its emptiness and its familiarity.

She thought of the two deputies guarding Richard. What could she tell them? That she had seen a man—only it might have been a woman—and it ran, apparently, on all fours hike a dog?

There was no sound at all from the sleeping house. Perhaps two or three minutes passed. Then she started slowly, looking nervously toward the stair well, toward Richard’s room. Nothing moved along the stairs; she paused and leaned over the railing, but the hall below was a dark, perfectly quiet cavern. As she reached Richard’s room that atavistic sense of danger and urgency which the sight of the crouching figure had roused clutched at her so strongly that it was like a hand reaching out from somewhere behind her. She turned quickly to look over her shoulder, but there was nothing there. She knocked softly on the door. No one answered, and rather than rouse the house she tried the door softly. It opened. The room was dark and quiet except, as she listened, she heard regular, heavy breathing.

It was odd that the room was dark; it was rather curious, too, that simply because the house was so silent and it was such a listening silence she did not want to call out and wake the sleeper but instead, without really thinking, she hunted for the electric-light switch on the inside of the door, found it, and with a little click the room was flooded with light.

It was a comfortable room; a little shabby, with school pictures and a crimson banner, faded, on the wall; there was a long study table with a green-shaded desk lamp on it and cards in a regular pattern for solitaire and a chair pushed away from the table. And then a man, sprawled at length on the old leather couch before the window, gave a startled kind of gurgle and sat up, rubbing his eyes with one hand and reaching a revolver on the floor beside him with the other. He stared and said, “
What—
”

She came into the room and closed the door. It was one of the deputies; he wore no coat, and his badge was pinned to his vest and glittered in the light. Richard was not there nor the second deputy who had been sent to guard him. The deputy’s puffy eyes sharpened. “Oh, it’s you! What are you doing here? You can’t see the prisoner. Sheriff gave orders—” He stopped again, stood up, gave a quick look at the door and said: “Say, how the hell did you get in here? That door was locked.”

“It—it wasn’t locked. I saw something Where is Richard?”

He went quickly to the door, opened it, glanced into the hall, closed it again and turned to look at her. “You oughtn’t to have come in here, miss. I had orders to keep everybody out. I must’ve made a mistake about locking the door “

“
Where is Richard
?”

He rubbed his head and scowled at her.

“Now don’t yell,” he said. “Hysterics won’t do you any good. …” He paused and looked at her and then said: “Okay, if you’re not going to give up till you know. He ain’t here.”

They had taken him away, then; secretly, so no one would know.

“Where is he?”

“I tell you nobody was to know. Sheriff gave orders—”

“Listen. Somebody is on the grounds. I saw him. Just now from the window.”

The sleepy look had quite gone from his face. “Who was it? What was he doing?”

“I don’t know who it was. It was just a—someone who ran across the lawn. He disappeared into the shadow. He—” She stopped and swallowed and watched him.

“Whoever it was was running on all fours.”

“On—” He stared at her, looked very sallow all at once and lifted the hand that held the revolver. “Where’d he go?”

“Into the shrubbery. I couldn’t see any more—then I heard a door somewhere close. So I came to tell you and Richard. I don’t know what door closed. I heard nothing more.”

His slack figure tautened; he took a long breath, said: “Stay here and listen—don’t let anybody in. Do that for me and I’ll tell you what you want to know.” She nodded. He opened the door, gave a quick look into the hall again and vanished, closing the door very softly behind him.

She listened but heard nothing at all, not even the deputy’s footsteps in the hall or in the stairway.

She looked around the room. The bed was turned down but otherwise undisturbed. She went to the window, and that side of the house, below, was all dense black shadow. She came back to the table. A little clock on the table pointed to twenty-three minutes after one.

It was a quarter to two when, without any preliminary sound, the door opened and the deputy returned. Search was sitting in one of the chairs and jumped up, her heart in her throat. He slid into the room and closed the door gently.

“Anybody been in here?”

“Nobody. Did you find—”

He shook his head. “Nothing doing anywhere except a light over in the Stacy house that went out while I looked at it. Somebody was up and around over there. But here—grounds, house, everywhere—it’s as still as a graveyard.” He seemed to consider it an unfortunate simile, for he caught himself up quickly, said, “All’s quiet, anyway,” and came to the table.

“Richard,” she said. He looked at her for a moment.

“All right,” he said. “You know he’s not here. I ought to have locked the door. But listen—I’m only telling you this because you—you like the guy, see? And I’ve got to tell you because you’ve got to see why nobody’s to know he ain’t here. I’m to—keep everybody away. Take in trays of food and act as if he’s here. That’s my orders from the sheriff.”

“I won’t tell.”

He nodded. “I believe you.” He sat down. The light from the desk lamp cast a greenish glow on his face and laid green shadow on the folds of her thin white robe.

He told it briefly, wasting no words. Dick Bohan told the sheriff something that he thought and the sheriff thought was a clue, and it necessitated a trip upstate to some little town there. “Avion,” said the deputy, “that the name of it, Avion.” But the sheriff didn’t want anybody to know they had taken Richard there. So the second deputy and Richard had left the house quietly, after dark, walking in the shadows to the main entrance, where the sheriff’s car picked them up. And he was left to keep everyone out of the room and to foster the impression that Richard was held there, a prisoner. “I don’t know for how long,” he said. “It ain’t my business to know. But that’s the way it is.”

“Did he see Aunt Ludmilla before he went away?”

“No. Didn’t see anybody except—” He stopped quickly.

She said:

“Howland Stacy? Calvin?”

“Come along now, miss—”

“Bea? The maid. Did he see her?”

After a moment he sighed. “Okay, he did.”

“They questioned, her. Didn’t they?”

He gave her a weary look and sighed again.

“All right. They did.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she lied. She told that story about seeing Calvin Peale come out of the tool shed with a rope over his arm because she was paid to do it.”

“
Who—
”

“She wouldn’t tell. I guess she was scared. Now will you go? I—I swear to God, Miss Abbott, there’s not another damn thing I can tell you.”

He looked harassed and pleading. But she thought he was telling the truth.

He went with her, walking as quietly as a cat along the silent hall in spite of his loose-jointed, awkward look. No one was in her room. He looked before he left her there. And, remembering the thing she had seen, again she locked the door.

But hope was in her heart. If the sheriff had done all that—arranged the deception, taken Richard with him to Avion—then the sheriff must believe at least a part of whatever Richard had told him. Therefore he must have a doubt as to Richard’s guilt—a doubt that was strong enough to induce the sheriff at least to investigate that clue.

When she put out her light again the moonlight lay, white and eerie, upon the lawn and the lake below. But there was no sound and no motion anywhere!

Morning was bright and cloudless with the lake a brazen sheet and the sky brilliant. That was Sunday; it began quietly, although from the first there was a singular sense of climax in the air, and the sound of the church bells from the village, tranquil and serene, struck strangely upon their ears, as if it came from an unknown and distant world.

Breakfast was late and unexpectedly lively, for Ludmilla was irritable and snapped at Bea, and Bea burst into sobs in the middle of the dining-room floor, pulled off her cap and flung it at Diana and declared that she wouldn’t stay in that house another hour.

“You’ll stay till I can get someone to take your place,” said Diana. “Or I’ll see to it you never get another job.”

In the end it was Calvin who picked up her cap, patted her heaving back and told her to cheer up and run along.

“Very magnanimous,” said Diana dryly, “considering what she did to you yesterday.”

“She’s a vote,” said Ludmilla, still irritably, and gave her knotted-up hair, already a little on one side, another push so she looked quite distracted.

So far as Search could discover, no one knew of Richard’s absence, so she concluded that the deputy in his room was playing his role successfully. Calvin was indignant because he had not been permitted to see Richard, and there was considerable talk that morning of the best criminal lawyer they could get to defend him (working with Howland) at the trial. Search listened, hoping there would be no trial. Waiting, in spite of herself (too soon, too hopefully), for news.

Two things, however, developed quite early in the day, although neither was in itself revealing. Ludmilla drew Search into her room just after breakfast and told her that sometime during the past twenty-four hours her room had been ransacked and searched. She hadn’t known it until she went to her desk that morning and found it unlocked and, on opening the lid, all the papers in wild confusion.

“Whoever looked in it must have heard somebody coming and simply shut the lid and hurried away. So when I saw that I looked around, and every drawer in that chest and in the chest in my dressing room had been rummaged.”

But up to then she had found nothing missing. And she knew of nothing anybody could possibly want.

“The doctor’s report,” suggested Search. But it was still there, for after a while Ludmilla found it among a stack of tossed letters in the bulging little desk.

And half an hour later Howland arrived, cutting hurriedly across the lawn. He was pale and angry and looked a little frightened too. He had a revolver in the pocket of his coat and patted it, telling them the story, and he wanted to see the sheriff. For someone, in the night, had entered his house and had tried to enter his room. Only a few rooms of the big house had been opened for his visit, and the caretaker’s wife was cooking for him. But whoever was there must have known what bedroom he was occupying. He had roused and heard someone at the door and had grabbed his revolver and got out of bed. And whoever it was had got clean away. “I searched the house,” he said. “Found nothing. Where’s the sheriff? I thought he’d be here. He’s not in his office. I telephoned early this morning.”