SUSAN DARE WATCHED A thin stream of blue smoke ascend without haste from the long throat of a tiger lily. Michela, then, had escaped also. She was not, however, on the long veranda, for the clear, broadening light of the rising moon revealed it wide and empty, and nothing moved against the silvered lawn which sloped gently toward the pine woods.
Susan listened a moment for the tap of Michela’s heels, did not hear it or any other intrusive sound, and then pushed aside the bowl of lilies on the low window seat, let the velvet curtains fall behind her, and seated herself in the little niche thus formed. It was restful and soothing to be thus shut away from the house with its subtly warring elements and to make herself part of the silent night beyond the open windows.
A pity, thought Susan, to leave. But after tonight she could not stay. After all, a guest, any guest, ought to have sense enough to leave when a situation develops in the family of her hostess. The thin trail of smoke from the lily caught Susan’s glance again and she wished Michela wouldn’t amuse herself by putting cigarette ends in flowers.
A faint drift of voices came from somewhere, and Susan shrank farther into herself and into the tranquil night. It had been an unpleasant dinner, and there would be still an hour or so before she could gracefully extract herself and escape again. Nice of Christabel to give her the guest house—the small green cottage across the terrace at the other side of the house, and through the hedge and up the winding green path. Christabel Frame was a perfect hostess, and Susan had had a week of utter rest and content.
But then Randy Frame, Christabel’s young brother, had returned.
And immediately Joe Bromfel and his wife Michela, guests also, had arrived, and with them something that had destroyed all content. The old house of the Frames, with its gracious pillars and long windows and generous dim spaces, was exactly the same—the lazy Southern air and the misty blue hills and the quiet pine woods and the boxed paths through the flowers—none of it had actually changed. But it was, all the same, a different place.
A voice beyond the green velvet curtains called impatiently: “Michela—Michela—”
It was Randy Frame. Susan did not move, and she was sure that the sweeping velvet curtains hid even her silver toes. He was probably at the door of the library, and she could see, without looking, his red hair and lithe young body and impatient, thin face. Impatient for Michela. Idiot, oh, idiot, thought Susan. Can’t you see what you are doing to Christabel?
His feet made quick sounds upon the parquet floor of the hall and were gone, and Susan herself made a sharply impatient movement. Because the Frame men had been red-haired, gallant, quick-tempered, reckless, and (added Susan to the saga) abysmally stupid and selfish, Randy had accepted the mold without question. A few words from the dinner conversation floated back into Susan’s memory. They’d been talking of fox hunting—a safe enough topic, one would have thought, in the Carolina hills. But talk had veered—through Michela, was it?—to a stableman who had been shot by one of the Frames and killed. It had happened a long time ago, had been all but forgotten, and had nothing at all to do with the present generation of Frames. But Christabel said hurriedly it had been an accident; dreadful. She had looked white. And Randy had laughed and said the Frames shot first and inquired afterwards and that there was always a revolver in the top buffet drawer.
“Here she is,” said a voice. The curtains were pulled suddenly backward, and Randy, a little flushed, stood there. His face fell as he discovered Susan’s fair, smooth hair and thin lace gown. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you were Michela.”
Others were trailing in from the hall, and a polite hour or so must be faced. Queer how suddenly and inexplicably things had become tight and strained and unpleasant!
Randy had turned away and vanished without more words, and Tryon Welles, strolling across the room with Christabel, was looking at Susan and smiling affably.
“Susan Dare,” he said. “Watching the moonlight, quietly planning murder.” He shook his head and turned to Christabel. “I simply don’t believe you, Christabel. If this young woman writes anything, which I doubt, it’s gentle little poems about roses and moonlight.”
Christabel smiled faintly and sat down. Mars, his black face shining, was bringing in the coffee tray. In the doorway Joe Bromfel, dark and bulky and hot-looking in his dinner coat, lingered a moment to glance along the hall and then came into the room.
“If Susan writes poems,” said Christabel lightly, “it is her secret. You are quite wrong, Tryon. She writes——” Christabel’s silver voice hesitated. Her slender hands were searching, hovering rather blindly over the tray, the large amethyst on one white finger full of trembling purple lights. It was a barely perceptible second before she took a fragile old cup and began to pour from the tall silver coffee pot. “She writes murders,” said Christabel steadily. “Lovely, grisly ones, with sensible solutions. Sugar, Tryon? I’ve forgotten.”
“One. But isn’t that for Miss Susan?”
Tryon Welles was still smiling. He, the latest arrival, was a neat gray man with tight eyes, pink cheeks, and an affable manner. The only obvious thing about him was a rather finical regard for color, for he wore gray tweed with exactly the right shades of green—green tie, green shirt, a cautious green stripe in gray socks. He had reached the house on the heels of his telephoned message from town, saying he had to talk business with Christabel, and he had not had time to dress before dinner.
“Coffee, Joe?” asked Christabel. She was very deft with the delicate china. Very deft and very graceful, and Susan could not imagine how she knew that Christabel’s hands were shaking.
Joe Bromfel stirred, turned his heavy dark face toward the hall again, saw no one, and took coffee from Christabel’s lovely hand. Christabel avoided looking directly into his face, as, Susan had noticed, she frequently did.
“A sensible solution,” Tryon Welles was saying thoughtfully. “Do murders have sensible solutions?”
His question hung in the air. Christabel did not reply, and Joe Bromfel did not appear to hear it. Susan said:
“They must have. After all, people don’t murder just—well, just to murder.”
“Just for the fun of it, you mean?” said Tryon Welles, tasting his coffee. “No, I suppose not. Well, at any rate,” he went on, “it’s nice to know your interest in murder is not a practical one.”
He probably thought he was making light and pleasant conversation, reflected Susan. Strange that he did not know that every time he said the word “murder” it fell like a heavy stone in that silent room. She was about to wrench the conversation to another channel when Michela and Randy entered from the hall; Randy was laughing and Michela smiling.
At the sound of Randy’s laugh, Joe Bromfel twisted bulkily around to watch their approach, and, except for Randy’s laugh, it was entirely silent in the long book-lined room. Susan watched too. Randy was holding Michela’s hand, swinging it as if to suggest a kind of frank camaraderie. Probably, thought Susan, he’s been kissing her out in the darkness of the garden. Holding her very tight.
Michela’s eyelids were white and heavy over unexpectedly shallow dark eyes. Her straight black hair was parted in the middle and pulled severely backward to a knot on her rather fat white neck. Her mouth was deeply crimson. She had been born, Susan knew, in rural New England, christened Michela by a romantic mother, and had striven to live up to the name ever since. Or down, thought Susan tersely, and wished she could take young Randy by his large and outstanding ears and shake him.
Michela had turned toward a chair, and her bare back presented itself to Susan, and she saw the thin red line with an angle that a man’s cuff, pressing into the creamy flesh, had made. It was unmistakable. Joe Bromfel had seen it, too. He couldn’t have helped seeing it. Susan looked into her coffee cup and wished fervently that Joe Bromfel hadn’t seen the imprint of Randy’s cuff, and then wondered why she wished it so fervently.
“Coffee, Michela?” said Christabel, and something in her voice was more, all at once, than Susan could endure. She rose and said rather breathlessly:
“Christabel darling, do you mind—I have some writing to do—”
“Of course.” Christabel hesitated. “But wait—I’ll go along with you to the cottage.”
“Don’t let us keep you, Christabel,” said Michela lazily.
Christabel turned to Tryon Welles and neatly forestalled a motion on his part to accompany her and Susan.
“I won’t be long, Tryon,” she said definitely. “When I come back—we’ll talk.”
A clear little picture etched itself on Susan’s mind: the long, lovely room, the mellow little areas of light under lamps here and there, one falling directly upon the chair she had just left, the pools of shadows surrounding them; Michela’s yellow satin, and Randy’s red head and slim black shoulders; Joe, a heavy, silent figure, watching them broodingly; Tryon Welles, neat and gray and affable, and Christabel with her gleaming red head held high on her slender neck, walking lightly and gracefully amid soft mauve chiffons. Halfway across the room she paused to accept a cigarette from Tryon and to bend to the small flare of a lighter he held for her, and the amethyst on her finger caught the flickering light of it and shone.
Then Susan and Christabel had crossed the empty flagstone veranda and turned toward the terrace.
Their slippered feet made no sound upon the velvet grass. Above the lily pool the flower fragrances were sweet and heavy on the night air.
“Did you hear the bullfrog last night?” asked Christabel. “He seems to have taken up a permanent residence in the pool. I don’t know what to do about him. Randy says he’ll shoot him, but I don’t want that. He is a nuisance of course, bellowing away half the night. But after all—even bullfrogs—have a right to live.”
“Christabel,” said Susan, trying not to be abrupt, “I must go soon. I have—work to do—”
Christabel stopped and turned to face her. They were at the gap in the laurel hedge where a path began and wound upward to the cottage.
“Don’t make excuses, Susan honey,” she said gently. “Is it the Bromfels?”
A sound checked Susan’s reply—an unexpectedly eerie sound that was like a wail. It rose and swelled amid the moonlit hills, and Susan gasped and Christabel said quickly, though with a catch in her voice: “It’s only the dogs howling at the moon.”
“They are not,” Susan said, “exactly cheerful. It emphasizes—” She checked herself abruptly on the verge of saying that it emphasized their isolation.
Christabel had turned in at the path. It was darker there, and her cigarette made a tiny red glow. “If Michela drops another cigarette into a flower I’ll kill her,” said Christabel quietly.
“What—”
“I said I’d kill her,” said Christabel. “I won’t, of course. But she—oh, you’ve seen how things are, Susan. You can’t have failed to see. She took Joe—years ago. Now she’s taking Randy.”
Susan was thankful that she couldn’t see Christabel’s face. She said something about infatuation and Randy’s youth.
“He is twenty-one,” said Christabel. “He’s no younger than I was when Joe—when Joe and I were to be married. That was why Michela was here—to be a guest at the wedding and all the parties.” They walked on for a few quiet steps before Christabel added: “It was the day before the wedding that they left together.”
Susan said: “Has Joe changed?”
“In looks, you mean,” said Christabel, understanding. “I don’t know. Perhaps. He must have changed inside. But I don’t want to know that.”
“Can’t you send them away?”
“Randy would follow.”
“Tryon Welles,” suggested Susan desperately. “Maybe he could help. I don’t know how, though. Talk to Randy, maybe.”
Christabel shook her head.
“Randy wouldn’t listen. Opposition makes him stubborn. Besides, he doesn’t like Tryon. He’s had to borrow too much money from him.”
It wasn’t like Christabel to be bitter. One of the dogs howled again and was joined by others. Susan shivered.
“You are cold,” said Christabel. “Run along inside, and thanks for listening. And—I think you’d better go, honey. I meant to keep you for comfort. But—”
“No, no, I’ll stay—I didn’t know—”
“Don’t be nervous about being alone. The dogs would know it if a stranger put a foot on the place. Good-night,” said Christabel firmly, and was gone.
The guest cottage was snug and warm and tranquil, but Susan was obliged finally to read herself to sleep and derived only a small and fleeting satisfaction from the fact that it was over a rival author’s book that she finally grew drowsy. She didn’t sleep well even then, and was glad suddenly that she’d asked for the guest cottage and was alone and safe in that tiny retreat.
Morning was misty and chill.
It was perhaps nine-thirty when Susan opened the cottage door, saw that mist lay thick and white, and went back to get her rubbers. Tryon Welles, she thought momentarily, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, would have nothing at all that was florid and complimentary to say this morning. And indeed, in her brown knitted suit, with her fair hair tight and smooth and her spectacles on, she looked not unlike a chill and aloof little owl.
The path was wet, and the laurel leaves shining with moisture, and the hills were looming gray shapes. The house lay white and quiet, and she saw no one about.
It was just then that it came. A heavy concussion of sound, blanketed by mist.
Susan’s first thought was that Randy had shot the bullfrog.
But the pool was just below her, and no one was there.
Besides, the sound came from the house. Her feet were heavy and slow in the drenched grass—the steps were slippery and the flagstones wet. Then she was inside.
The wide hall ran straight through the house, and away down at its end Susan saw Mars. He was running away from her, his black hands outflung, and she was vaguely conscious that he was shouting something. He vanished, and instinct drew Susan to the door at the left which led to the library.
She stopped, frozen, in the doorway.
Across the room, sagging bulkily over the arm of the green damask chair in which she’d sat the previous night, was a man. It was Joe Bromfel, and he’d been shot, and there was no doubt that he was dead.
A newspaper lay at his feet as if it had slipped there. The velvet curtains were pulled together across the window behind him.
Susan smoothed back her hair. She couldn’t think at all, and she must have slipped down to the footstool near the door for she was there when Mars, his face drawn, and Randy, white as his pajamas, came running into the room. They were talking excitedly and were examining a revolver which Randy had picked up from the floor. Then Tryon Welles came from somewhere, stopped beside her, uttered an incredulous exclamation, and ran across the room too. Then Christabel came and stopped, too, on the threshold, and became under Susan’s very eyes a different woman—a strange woman, shrunken and gray, who said in a dreadful voice:
“Joe—Joe—”
Only Susan heard or saw her. It was Michela, hurrying from the hall, who first voiced the question.
“I heard something—what was it? What—” She brushed past Christabel.
“Don’t look, Michela!”
But Michela looked—steadily and long. Then her flat dark eyes went all around the room and she said: “Who shot him?”
For a moment there was utter shocked stillness.
Then Mars cleared his throat and spoke to Randy.
“I don’ know who shot him, Mista Randy. But I saw him killed. An’ I saw the han’ that killed him—”
“Hand!” screamed Michela.
“Hush, Michela.” Tryon Welles was speaking. “What do you mean, Mars?”
“They ain’t nothin’ to tell except that, Mista Tryon. I was just comin’ to dust the library and was right there at the door when I heard the shot, and there was just a han’ stickin’ out of them velvet curtains. And I saw the han’ and I saw the revolver and I—I do’ know what I did then.” Mars wiped his forehead. “I guess I ran for help, Mista Tryon.”
There was another silence.
“Whose hand was it, Mars?” said Tryon Welles gently.
Mars blinked and looked very old.
“Mista Tryon, God’s truth is, I do’ know. I do’ know.”
Randy thrust himself forward.
“Was it a man’s hand?”
“I reckon it was maybe,” said the old Negro slowly, looking at the floor. “But I do’ know for sure, Mista Randy. All I saw was—was the red ring on it.”
“A red ring?” cried Michela. “What do you mean—”
Mars turned a bleak dark face toward Michela; a face that rejected her and all she had done to his house. “A red ring, Miz Bromfel,” he said with a kind of dignity. “It sort of flashed. And it was red.”
After a moment Randy uttered a curious laugh.
“But there’s not a red ring in the house. None of us runs to rubies—” He stopped abruptly. “I say, Tryon, hadn’t we better—well, carry him to the divan. It isn’t decent to—just leave him—like that.”
“I suppose so—” Tryon Welles moved toward the body. “Help me, Randy”
The boy shivered, and Susan quite suddenly found her voice.
“Oh, but you can’t do that. You can’t—” She stopped. The two men were looking at her in astonishment. Michela, too, had turned toward her, although Christabel did not move. “But you can’t do that,” repeated Susan. “Not when it’s—murder.”
This time the word, falling into the long room, was weighted with its own significance. Tryon Welles’ gray shoulders moved.
“She’s perfectly right,” he said. “I’d forgotten—if I ever knew. But that’s the way of it. We’ll have to send for people—doctor, sheriff, coroner, I suppose.”
Afterward, Susan realized that but for Tryon Welles the confusion would have become mad. He took a quiet command of the situation, sending Randy, white and sick-looking, to dress, telephoning into town, seeing that the body was decently covered, and even telling Mars to bring them hot coffee. He was here, there, everywhere: upstairs, downstairs, seeing to them all, and finally outside to meet the sheriff … brisk, alert, efficient. In the interval Susan sat numbly beside Christabel on the love seat in the hall, with Michela restlessly prowling up and down the hall before their eyes, listening to the telephone calls, drinking hot coffee, watching everything with her sullen, flat black eyes. Her red-and-white sports suit, with its scarlet bracelets and earrings, looked garish and out of place in that house of violent death.
And Christabel. Still a frozen image of a woman who drank coffee automatically, she sat erect and still and did not speak. The glowing amethyst on her finger caught the light and was the only living thing about her.
Gradually the sense of numb shock and confusion was leaving Susan. Fright was still there and horror and a queer aching pity, but she saw Randy come running down the wide stairway again, his red hair smooth now above a sweater, and she realized clearly that he was no longer white and sick and frightened; he was instead alert and defiantly ready for what might come. And it would be, thought Susan, in all probability, plenty.
And it was.
Questions—questions. The doctor, who was kind, the coroner, who was not; the sheriff, who was merely observant—all of them questioning without end. No time to think. No time to comprehend. Time only to reply as best one might.
But gradually out of it all certain salient facts began to emerge. They were few, however, and brief.
The revolver was Randy’s, and it had been taken from the top buffet drawer—when, no one knew or, at least, would tell. “Everybody knew it was there,” said Randy sulkily. The fingerprints on it would probably prove to be Randy’s and Mars’s, since they picked it up.
No one knew anything of the murder, and no one had an alibi, except Liz (the Negro second girl) and Minnie (the cook), who were together in the kitchen.
Christabel had been writing letters in her own room: she’d heard the shot, but thought it was only Randy shooting a bullfrog in the pool. But then she’d heard Randy and Mars running down the front stairway, so she’d come down too. Just to be sure that that was what it was.
“What else did you think it could be?” asked the sheriff. But Christabel said stiffly that she didn’t know.
Randy had been asleep when Mars had awakened him. He had not heard the sound of the shot at all. He and Mars had hurried down to the library. (Mars, it developed, had gone upstairs by means of the small back stairway off the kitchen.)
Tryon Welles had walked down the hill in front of the house to the mail box and was returning when he heard the shot. But it was muffled, and he did not know what had happened until he reached the library. He created a mild sensation at that point by taking off a ring, holding it so they could all see it, and demanding of Mars if that was the ring he had seen on the murderer’s hand. However, the sensation was only momentary, for the large clear stone was as green as his neat green tie.
“No, suh, Mista Tryon,” said Mars. “The ring on the han’ I saw was red. I could see it plain, an’ it was red.”
“This,” said Tryon Welles, “is a flawed emerald. I asked because I seem to be about the only person here wearing a ring. But I suppose that, in justice to us, all our belongings should be searched.”
Upon which the sheriff’s gaze slid to the purple pool on Christabel’s white hand. He said, however, gently, that that was being done, and would Mrs. Michela Bromfel tell what she knew of the murder.
But Mrs. Michela Bromfel somewhat spiritedly knew nothing of it. She’d been walking in the pine woods, she said defiantly, glancing obliquely at Randy, who suddenly flushed all over his thin face. She’d heard the shot but hadn’t realized it was a gunshot. However, she was curious and came back to the house.
“The window behind the body opens toward the pine woods,” said the sheriff. “Did you see anyone, Mrs. Bromfel?”
“No one at all,” said Michela definitely.
Well, then, had she heard the dogs barking? The sheriff seemed to know that the kennels were just back of the pine woods.
But Michela had not heard the dogs.
Someone stirred restively at that, and the sheriff coughed and said unnecessarily that there was no tramp about, then, and the questioning continued. Continued wearily on and on and on, and still no one knew how Joe Bromfel had met his death. And as the sheriff was at last dismissing them and talking to the coroner of an inquest, one of his men came to report on the search. No one was in the house who didn’t belong there; they could tell nothing of footprints; the French windows back of the body had been ajar, and there was no red ring anywhere in the house.
“Not, that is, that we can find,” said the man.
“All right,” said the sheriff. “That’ll be all now, folks. But I’d take it kindly if you was to stay around here today.”
All her life Susan was to remember that still, long day with a kind of sharp reality. It was, after those first moments when she’d felt so ill and shocked, weirdly natural, as if, one event having occurred, another was bound to follow, and then upon that one’s heels another, and all of them quite in the logical order of things. Even the incident of the afternoon, so trivial in itself but later so significant, was as natural, as unsurprising as anything could be. And that was her meeting with Jim Byrne.
It happened at the end of the afternoon, long and painful, which Susan spent with Christabel, knowing somehow that, under her frozen surface, Christabel was grateful for Susan’s presence. But there were nameless things in the air between them which could be neither spoken of nor ignored, and Susan was relieved when Christabel at last took a sedative and, eventually, fell into a sleep that was no more still than Christabel waking had been.
There was no one to be seen when Susan tiptoed out of Christabel’s room and down the stairway, although she heard voices from the closed door of the library.
Out of the wide door at last and walking along the terrace above the lily pool, Susan took a long breath of the mist-laden air.
So this was murder. This was murder, and it happened to people one knew, and it did indescribable and horrible things to them. Frightened them first, perhaps. Fear of murder itself came first—simple, primitive fear of the unleashing of the beast. And then on its heels came more civilized fear, and that was fear of the law, and a scramble for safety.
She turned at the hedge and glanced backward. The house lay white and stately amid its gardens as it had lain for generations. But it was no longer tranquil—it was charged now with violence. With murder. And it remained dignified and stately and would cling, as Christabel would cling and had clung all those years, to its protective ritual.
Christabel: Had she killed him? Was that why she was so stricken and gray? Or was it because she knew that Randy had killed him? Or was it something else?
Susan did not see the man till she was almost upon him, and then she cried out involuntarily, though she as a rule was not at all nervous. He was sitting on the small porch of the cottage, hunched up with his hat over his eyes and his coat collar turned up, furiously scribbling on a pad of paper. He jumped up as he heard her breathless little cry and whirled to face her and took off his hat all in one motion.
“May I use your typewriter?” he said.
His eyes were extremely clear and blue and lively. His face was agreeably irregular in feature, with a mouth that laughed a great deal, a chin that took insolence from no man, and generous width of forehead. His hair was thinning but not yet showing gray and his hands were unexpectedly fine and beautiful. “Hard on the surface,” thought Susan. “Terribly sensitive, really. Irish. What’s he doing here?”
Aloud she said: “Yes.”
“Good. Can’t write fast enough and want to get this story off tonight. I’ve been waiting for you, you know. They told me you wrote things. My name’s Byrne. James Byrne. I’m a reporter. Cover special stories. I’m taking a busman’s holiday. I’m actually on a Chicago paper and down here for a vacation. I didn’t expect a murder story to break.”
Susan opened the door upon the small living room.
“The typewriter’s there. Do you need paper? There’s a stack beside it.”
He fell upon the typewriter absorbedly, like a dog upon a bone. She watched him for a while, amazed at his speed and fluency and utter lack of hesitancy.
Presently she lighted the fire already laid in the tiny fireplace and sat there quietly, letting herself be soothed by the glow of the flames and the steady rhythm of the typewriter keys. And for the first time that day its experiences, noted and stored away in whatever place observations are stored, began to arouse and assort and arrange themselves and march in some sort of order through her conscious thoughts. But it was a dark and macabre procession, and it frightened Susan. She was relieved when Jim Byrne spoke.
“I say,” he said suddenly, over the clicking keys, “I’ve got your name Louise Dare. Is that right?”
“Susan.”
He looked at her. The clicking stopped.
“Susan. Susan Dare,” he repeated thoughtfully. “I say, you can’t be the Susan Dare that writes murder stories!”
“Yes,” said Susan guardedly, “I can be that Susan Dare.”
There was an expression of definite incredulity in his face. “But you—”
“If you say,” observed Susan tensely, “that I don’t look as if I wrote murder stories, you can’t use my typewriter for your story.”
“I suppose you are all tangled up in this mess,” he said speculatively.
“Yes,” said Susan, sober again. “And no,” she added, looking at the fire.
“Don’t commit yourself,” said Jim Byrne dryly. “Don’t say anything reckless.”
“But I mean just that,” said Susan. “I’m a guest here. A friend of Christabel Frame’s. I didn’t murder Joe Bromfel. And I don’t care at all about the rest of the people here except that I wish I’d never seen them.”
“But you do,” said the reporter gently, “care a lot about Christabel Frame?”
“Yes,” said Susan gravely.
“I’ve got all the dope, you know,” said the reporter softly. “It wasn’t hard to get. Everybody around here knows about the Frames. The thing I can’t understand is why she shot Joe. It ought to have been Michela.”
“What—” Susan’s fingers were digging into the wicker arms of her chair, and her eyes strove frantically to plumb the clear blue eyes above the typewriter.
“I say, it ought to have been Michela. She’s the girl who’s making the trouble.”
“But it wasn’t—it couldn’t—Christabel wouldn’t—”
“Oh, yes, she could,” said the reporter rather wearily. “All sorts of people could do the strangest things. Christabel could murder. But I can’t see why she’d murder Joe and let Michela go scot-free.”
“Michela,” said Susan in a low voice, “would have a motive.”
“Yes, she’s got a motive. Get rid of a husband. But so had Randy Frame. Same one. And he’s what the people around here call a Red Frame—impulsive, reckless, bred to a tradition of—violence.”
“But Randy was asleep—upstairs—”
He interrupted her.
“Oh, yes, I know all that. And you were approaching the house from the terrace, and Tryon Welles had gone down after the mail, and Miss Christabel was writing letters upstairs, and Michela was walking in the pine woods. Not a damn alibi among you. The way the house and grounds are laid out, neither you nor Tryon Welles nor Michela would be visible to each other. And anyone could have escaped readily from the window and turned up innocently a moment later from the hall. I know all that. Who was behind the curtains?”
“A tramp—” attempted Susan in a small voice. “A burglar—”
“Burglar nothing,” said Jim Byrne with scorn. “The dogs would have had hysterics. It was one of you. Who?”
“I don’t know,” said Susan. “I don’t know!” Her voice was uneven, and she knew it and tried to steady it and clutched the chair arms tighter. Jim Byrne knew it, too, and was suddenly alarmed.
“Oh, look here, now,” he cried. “Don’t look like that. Don’t cry. Don’t—”
“I am not crying,” said Susan. “But it wasn’t Christabel.”
“You mean,” said the reporter kindly, “that you don’t want it to be Christabel. Well—” He glanced at his watch, said, “Golly,” and flung his papers together and rose. “There’s something I’ll do. Not for you exactly—just for—oh, because. I’ll let part of my story wait until tomorrow if you want the chance to try to prove your Christabel didn’t murder him.”
Susan was frowning perplexedly.
“You don’t understand me,” said the reporter cheerfully. “It’s this. You write murder mysteries, and I’ve read one or two of them. They are not bad,” he interpolated hastily, watching Susan. “Now, here’s your chance to try a real murder mystery.”
“But I don’t want——” began Susan.
He checked her imperatively.
“You do want to,” he said. “In fact, you’ve got to. You see—your Christabel is in a spot. You know that ring she wears—”
“When did you see it?”
“Oh, does it matter?” he cried impatiently. “Reporters see everything. The point is the ring.”
“But it’s an amethyst,” said Susan defensively.
“Yes,” he agreed grimly. “It’s an amethyst. And Mars saw a red stone. He saw it, it has developed, on the right hand. And the hand holding the revolver. And Christabel wears her ring on her right hand.”
“But,” repeated Susan. “It is an amethyst.”
“M-m,” said the reporter. “It’s an amethyst. And a little while ago I said to Mars: ‘What’s the name of that flowering vine over there?’ And he said: ‘That red flower, suh? That’s wisteria.’ ”
He paused. Susan felt exactly as if something had clutched her heart and squeezed it.
“The flowers were purple, of course,” said the reporter softly. “The color of a dark amethyst.”
“But he would have recognized Christabel’s ring,” said Susan after a moment.
“Maybe,” said the reporter. “And maybe he wishes he’d never said a word about the red ring. He was scared when he first mentioned it, probably; hadn’t had a chance to think it over.”
“But Mars—Mars would confess to murdering rather than—”
“No,” said Jim Byrne soberly. “He wouldn’t. That theory sounds all right. But it doesn’t happen that way. People don’t murder or confess to having murdered for somebody else. When it is a deliberate, planned murder and not a crazy drunken brawl, when anything can happen, there’s a motive. And it’s a strong and urgent and deeply personal and selfish motive and don’t you forget it. I’ve got to hurry. Now then, shall I send in my story about the wisteria—”
“Don’t,” said Susan choking. “Oh, don’t. Not yet.”
He picked up his hat. “Thanks for the typewriter. Get your wits together and go to work. After all, you ought to know something of murders. I’ll be seeing you.”
The door closed, and the flames crackled. After a long time Susan moved to the writing table and drew a sheet of yellow manuscript paper toward her, and a pencil, and wrote: Characters; possible motives; clues; queries.
It was strange, she thought, not how different real life was to its written imitation, but how like. How terribly like!
She was still bent over the yellow paper when a peremptory knock at the door sent her pencil jabbing furiously on the paper and her heart into her throat. It proved to be, however, only Michela Bromfel, and she wanted help.
“It’s my knees,” said Michela irritably. “Christabel’s asleep or something, and the help in the kitchen are scared of their shadows.” She paused to dig savagely at first one knee and then the other. “Have you got anything to put on my legs? I’m nearly going crazy. It’s not mosquito bites. I don’t know what it is. Look!”
She sat down, pulled back her white skirt and rolled down her thin stockings, disclosing just above each knee a scarlet blotchy rim around her fat white legs.
Susan looked and had to resist a wild desire to giggle. “It’s n-nothing,” she said, quivering. “That is, it’s only jiggers—here, I’ll get you something. Alcohol.”
“Jiggers,” said Michela blankly. “What’s that?”
Susan went into the bathroom. “Little bugs,” she called. Where was the alcohol? “They are thick in the pine woods. It’ll be all right by morning.” Here it was. She took the bottle in her hand and turned again through the bedroom into the tiny living room.
At the door she stopped abruptly. Michela was standing at the writing table. She looked up, saw Susan, and her flat dark eyes flickered.
“Oh,” said Michela. “Writing a story?”
“No,” said Susan. “It’s not a story. Here’s the alcohol.”
Under Susan’s straight look Michela had the grace to depart rather hastily, yanking up her stockings and twisting them hurriedly, and clutching at the bottle of alcohol. Her red bracelets clanked, and her scarlet fingernails looked as if they’d been dipped in blood. Of the few people who might have killed Joe Bromfel, Susan reflected coolly, she would prefer it to be Michela.
It was just then that a curious vagrant memory began to tease Susan. Rather it was not so much a memory as a memory of a memory—something that sometime she had known and now could not remember. It was tantalizing. It was maddeningly elusive. It floated teasingly on the very edge of her consciousness.
Deliberately, at last, Susan pushed it away and went back to work. Christabel and the amethyst. Christabel and the wisteria. Christabel.
It was dark and still drizzly when Susan took her way down toward the big house.
At the laurel hedge she met Tryon Welles.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”
“At the cottage,” said Susan. “There was nothing I could do. How’s Christabel?”
“Liz says she is still asleep—thank heaven for that. God, what a day! You oughtn’t to be prowling around alone at this time of night. I’ll walk to the house with you.”
“Have the sheriff and other men gone?”
“For the time being. They’ll be back, I suppose.”
“Do they know any more about—who killed him?”
“I don’t know. You can’t tell much. I don’t know of any evidence they have unearthed. They asked me to stay on.” He took a quick puff or two of his cigarette and then said irritably: “It puts me in a bad place. It’s a business deal where time matters. I’m a broker—I ought to be going back to New York tonight—” He broke off abruptly and said: “Oh, Randy—” as young Randy’s pale, thin face above a shining mackintosh emerged from the dusk—“let’s just escort Miss Susan to the steps.”
“Is she afraid of the famous tramp?” asked Randy and laughed unpleasantly. He’d been drinking, thought Susan, with a flicker of anxiety. Sober, Randy was incalculable enough; drinking, he might be dangerous. Could she do anything with him? No, better leave it to Tryon Welles. “The tramp,” Randy was repeating loudly. “Don’t be afraid of a tramp. It wasn’t any tramp killed Joe. And everybody knows it. You’re safe enough, Susan, unless you’ve got some evidence. Have you got any evidence, Susan?”
He took her elbow and joggled it urgently.
“She’s the quiet kind, Tryon, that sees everything and says nothing. Bet she’s got evidence enough to hang us all. Evidence. That’s what we need. Evidence.”
“Randy, you’re drunk,” said Susan crisply. She shook off his clutch upon her arm and then, looking at his thin face, which was so white and tight-drawn in the dusk, was suddenly sorry for him. “Go on and take your walk,” she said more kindly. “Things will be all right.”
“Things will never be the same again,” said Randy. “Never the same—do you know why, Susan?” He’s very drunk, thought Susan; worse than I thought. “It’s because Michela shot him. Yes, sir.”
“Randy, shut up!”
“Don’t bother me, Tryon, I know what I’m saying. And Michela,” asserted Randy with simplicity, “makes me sick.”
“Come on, Randy.” This time Tryon Welles took Randy’s arm. “I’ll take care of him, Miss Susan.”
The house was deserted and seemed cold. Christabel was still asleep, Michela nowhere to be seen, and Susan finally told Mars to send her dinner on a tray to the cottage and returned quietly like a small brown wraith through the moist twilight.
But she was an oddly frightened wraith.
She was alone on the silent terrace, she was alone on the dark path—strange that she felt as if someone else was there, too. Was the bare fact of murder like a presence hovering, beating dark wings, waiting to sweep downward again?
“Nonsense,” said Susan aloud. “Nonsense—” and ran the rest of the way.
She was not, however, to be alone in the cottage, for Michela sat there, composedly awaiting her.
“Do you mind,” said Michela, “if I spend the night here? There’s two beds in there. You see—” she hesitated, her flat dark eyes were furtive—“I’m—afraid.”
“Of what?” said Susan, after a moment. “Of whom?”
“I don’t know who,” said Michela, “or what.”
After a long, singularly still moment Susan forced herself to say evenly:
“Stay if you are nervous. It’s safe here.” Was it? Susan continued hurriedly: “Mars will send up dinner.”
Michela’s thick white hand made an impatient movement.
“Call it nerves—although I’ve not a nerve in my body. But when Mars comes with dinner—just be sure it is Mars before you open the door, will you? Although as to that—I don’t know. But I brought my revolver—loaded.” She reached into her pocket, and Susan sat upright, abruptly. Susan, whose knowledge of revolvers had such a wide and peculiar range that any policeman, learning of it, would arrest her on suspicion alone, was nevertheless somewhat uneasy in their immediate vicinity.
“Afraid?” said Michela.
“Not at all,” said Susan. “But I don’t think a revolver will be necessary.”
“I hope not, I’m sure,” said Michela somberly and stared at the fire.
After that, as Susan later reflected, there was not much to be said. The only interruption during the whole queer evening was the arrival of Mars and dinner.
Later in the evening Michela spoke again, abruptly. “I didn’t kill Joe,” she said. And after another long silence she said unexpectedly: “Did Christabel ask you how to kill him and get by with it?”
“No!”
“Oh.” Michela looked at her queerly. “I thought maybe she’d got you to plan it for her. You—knowing so much about murders and all.”
“She didn’t,” said Susan forcefully. “And I don’t plan murders for my friends, I assure you. I’m going to bed.”
Michela, following her, put the revolver on the small table between the two beds.
If the night before had been heavy with apprehension, this night was an active nightmare. Susan tossed and turned and was uneasily conscious that Michela was awake and restless, too.
Susan must have slept at last, though, for she waked up with a start and sat upright, instantly aware of some movement in the room. Then she saw a figure dimly outlined against the window. It was Michela.
Susan joined her. “What are you doing?”
“Hush,” whispered Michela. Her face was pressed against the glass. Susan looked, too, but could see only blackness.
“There’s someone out there,” whispered Michela. “And if he moves again I’m going to shoot.”
Susan was suddenly aware that the ice-cold thing against her arm was the revolver.
“You are not,” said Susan and wrenched the thing out of Michela’s hand. Michela gasped and whirled, and Susan said grimly: “Go back to bed. Nobody’s out there.”
“How do you know?” said Michela, her voice sulky.
“I don’t,” said Susan, very much astonished at herself, but clutching the revolver firmly. “But I do know that you aren’t going to start shooting. If there’s any shooting to be done,” said Susan with aplomb, “I’ll do it myself. Go to bed.”
But long after Michela was quiet Susan still sat bolt upright, clutching the revolver and listening.
Along toward dawn, out of the mêlée of confused, unhappy thoughts, the vagrant little recollection of a recollection came back to tantalize her. Something she’d known and now did not know. This time she returned as completely as she could over the track her thoughts had taken in the hope of capturing it by association. She’d been thinking of the murder and of the possible suspects; that if Michela had not murdered Joe, then there were left Randy and Christabel and Tryon Welles. And she didn’t want it to be Christabel; it must not be Christabel. And that left Randy and Tryon Welles. Randy had a motive, but Tryon Welles had not. Tryon Welles wore a ring habitually, and Randy did not. But the ring was an emerald. And Christabel’s ring was what Mars called red. Red—then what would he have called Michela’s scarlet bracelet? Pink? But that was a bracelet. She wrenched herself back to dig at the troublesome phantom of a memory. It was something trivial—but something she could not project into her conscious memory. And it was something that somehow she needed. Needed now.
She awoke and was horrified to discover her cheek pillowed cosily upon the revolver. She thrust it away. And realized with a sinking of her heart that day had come and, with it, urgent problems. Christabel, first.
Michela was still silent and sulky. Crossing the terrace, Susan looked at the wisteria winding upward over its trellis. It was heavy with purple blossoms—purple like dark amethysts.
Christabel was in her own room, holding a breakfast tray on her lap and looking out the window with a blank, unseeing gaze. She was years older; shrunken somehow inside. She was pathetically willing to answer the few questions that Susan asked, but added nothing to Susan’s small store of knowledge. She left her finally, feeling that Christabel wanted only solitude. But she went away reluctantly. It would not be long before Jim Byrne returned, and she had nothing to tell him—nothing, that is, except surmise.
Randy was not at breakfast, and it was a dark and uncomfortable meal. Dark because Tryon Welles said something about a headache and turned out the electric light, and uncomfortable because it could not be otherwise. Michela had changed to a thin suit—red again. The teasing ghost of a memory drifted over Susan’s mind and away again before she could grasp it.
As the meal ended Susan was called to the telephone. It was Jim Byrne saying that he would be there in an hour.
On the terrace Tryon Welles overtook her again and said: “How’s Christabel?”
“I don’t know,” said Susan slowly. “She looks—stunned.”
“I wish I could make it easier for her,” he said. “But—I’m caught, too. There’s nothing I can do, really. I mean about the house, of course. Didn’t she tell you?”
“No.”
He looked at her, considered, and went on slowly.
“She wouldn’t mind your knowing. You see—oh, it’s tragically simple. But I can’t help myself. It’s like this: Randy borrowed money of me—kept on borrowing it, spent it like water. Without Christabel knowing it, he put up the house and grounds as collateral. She knows now, of course. Now I’m in a pinch in business and have got to take the house over legally in order to borrow enough money on it myself to keep things going for a few months. Do you see?”
Susan nodded. Was it this knowledge, then, that had so stricken Christabel?
“I hate it,” said Tryon Welles. “But what can I do? And now Joe’s—death—on top of it—” he paused, reached absently for a cigarette case, extracted a cigarette, and the small flame from his lighter flared suddenly clear and bright. “It’s—hell,” he said, puffing, “for her. But what can I do? I’ve got my own business to save.”
“I see,” said Susan slowly.
And quite suddenly, looking at the lighter, she did see. It was as simple, as miraculously simple as that. She said, her voice to her own ears marvelously unshaken and calm: “May I have a cigarette?”
He was embarrassed at not having offered it to her: he fumbled for his cigarette case and then held the flame of the lighter for her. Susan was very deliberate about getting her cigarette lighted. Finally she did so, said, “Thank you,” and added, quite as if she had the whole thing planned: “Will you wake Randy, Mr. Welles, and send him to me? Now?”
“Why, of course,” he said. “You’ll be in the cottage?”
“Yes,” said Susan and fled.
She was bent over the yellow paper when Jim Byrne arrived.
He was fresh and alert and, Susan could see, prepared to be kind. He expected her, then, to fail.
“Well,” he said gently, “have you discovered the murderer?”
“Yes,” said Susan Dare.
Jim Byrne sat down quite suddenly.
“I know who killed him,” she said simply, “but I don’t know why.”
Jim Byrne reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and dabbed it lightly to his forehead. “Suppose,” he suggested in a hushed way, “you tell all.”
“Randy will be here in a moment,” said Susan. “But it’s all very simple. You see, the final clue was only the proof. I knew Christabel couldn’t have killed him, for two reasons: one is, she’s inherently incapable of killing anything; the other is—she loved him still. And I knew it wasn’t Michela, because she is, actually, cowardly; and then, too, Michela had an alibi.”
“Alibi?”
“She really was in the pine woods for a long time that morning. Waiting, I think, for Randy, who slept late. I know she was there, because she was simply chewed by jiggers, and they are only in the pine woods.”
“Maybe she was there the day before?”
Susan shook her head decidedly.
“No, I know jiggers. If it had been during the previous day they’d have stopped itching by the time she came to me. And it wasn’t during the afternoon, for no one went in the pine woods then except the sheriff’s men.”
“That would leave, then, Randy and Tryon Welles.”
“Yes,” said Susan. Now that it had come to doing it, she felt ill and weak; would it be her evidence, her words, that would send a fellow creature over that long and ignominious road that ends so tragically?
Jim Byrne knew what she was thinking.
“Remember Christabel,” he said quietly.
“Oh, I know,” said Susan sadly. She locked her fingers together, and there were quick footsteps on the porch.
“You want me, Susan?” said Randy.
“Yes, Randy,” said Susan. “I want you to tell me if you owed Joe Bromfel anything. Money—or—or anything.”
“How did you know?” said Randy.
“Did you give him a note—anything?”
“Yes.”
“What was your collateral?”
“The house—it’s all mine—”
“When was it dated? Answer me, Randy.”
He flung up his head.
“I suppose you’ve been talking to Tryon,” he said defiantly. “Well, it was dated before Tryon got his note. I couldn’t help it. I’d got some stocks on margin. I had to have—”
“So the house actually belonged to Joe Bromfel?” Susan was curiously cold. Christabel’s house. Christabel’s brother.
“Well, yes—if you want to put it like that.”
Jim Byrne had risen quietly.
“And after Joe Bromfel, to Michela, if she knows of this and claims it?” pressed Susan.
“I don’t know,” said Randy. “I never thought of that.”
Jim Byrne started to speak, but Susan silenced him.
“No, he really didn’t think of it,” she said wearily. “And I knew it wasn’t Randy who killed him because he didn’t, really, care enough for Michela to do that. It was—Tryon Welles who killed Joe Bromfel. He had to. For he had to silence Joe and then secure the note and, probably, destroy it, in order to have a clear title to the house, himself. Randy—did Joe have the note here with him?”
“Yes.”
“It was not found upon his body?”
It was Jim Byrne who answered: “Nothing of the kind was found anywhere.”
“Then,” said Susan, “after the murder was discovered and before the sheriff arrived and the search began, only you and Tryon Welles were upstairs and had the opportunity to search Joe’s room and find the note and destroy it. Was it you who did that, Randy?”
“No—no!” The color rose in his face.
“Then it must have been then that Tryon Welles found and destroyed it.” She frowned. “Somehow, he must have known it was there. I don’t know how—perhaps he had had words with Joe about it before he shot him and Joe inadvertently told him where it was. There was no time for him to search the body. But he knew—”
“Maybe,” said Randy reluctantly, “I told him. You see I knew Joe had it in his letter case. He—he told me. But I never thought of taking it.”
“It was not on record?” asked Jim Byrne.
“No,” said Randy, flushing. “I—asked him to keep it quiet.”
“I wonder,” said Susan, looking away from Randy’s miserable young face, “just how Tryon Welles expected to silence you.”
“Well,” said Randy dully, after a moment, “it was not exactly to my credit. But you needn’t rub it in. I never thought of this—I was thinking of—Michela. That she did it. I’ve had my lesson. And if he destroyed the note, how are you going to prove all this?”
“By your testimony,” said Susan. “And besides—there’s the ring.”
“Ring,” said Randy. Jim Byrne leaned forward intently.
“Yes,” said Susan. “I’d forgotten. But I remembered that Joe had been reading the newspaper when he was killed. The curtains were pulled together back of him, so, in order to see the paper, he must have had the light turned on above his chair. It wasn’t burning when I entered the library, or I should have noted it. So the murderer had pulled the cord of the lamp before he escaped. And ever since then he has been very careful to avoid any artificial light.”
“What are you talking about?” cried Randy.
“Yet he had to keep on wearing the ring,” said Susan. “Fortunately for him he didn’t have it on the first night—I suppose the color at night would have been wrong with his green tie. But this morning he lit a cigarette and I saw.”
“Saw what, in God’s name,” said Randy burstingly.
“That the stone isn’t an emerald at all,” replied Susan. “It’s an Alexandrite. It changed color under the flare of the lighter.”
“Alexandrite!” cried Randy impatiently. “What’s that?”
“It’s a stone that’s a kind of red-purple under artificial light and green in daylight,” said Jim Byrne shortly. “I had forgotten there was such a thing—I don’t think I’ve ever happened to see one. They are rare—and costly. Costly,” repeated Jim Byrne slowly. “This one has cost a life—”
Randy interrupted: “But if Michela knows about the note, why, Tryon may kill her—” He stopped abruptly, thought for a second or two, then got out a cigarette. “Let him,” he said airily.
It had been Tryon Welles, then, prowling about during the night—if it had been anyone. He had been uncertain, perhaps, of the extent of Michela’s knowledge—but certain of his ability to deal with her and with Randy, who was so heavily in his debt.
“Michela doesn’t know now,” said Susan slowly. “And when you tell her, Randy—she might settle for a cash consideration. And, Randy Frame, somehow you’ve got to recover this house for Christabel and do it honestly.”
“But right now,” said Jim Byrne cheerily. “For the sheriff. And my story.”
At the doorway he paused to look at Susan. “May I come back later,” he said, “and use your typewriter?”
“Yes,” said Susan Dare.