CHAPTER XVIII

Lieutenant Valcour settled himself on the lounge with the sensations of an uneasy sheep dog. To the extent of his ability, his flock was safe in shelter for the night. He considered that Vera and Alice Tribeau were his flock. The vagueness, the distressing indefinableness of the situation irritated him. He couldn’t go charging about like an autocratic seeress, no matter how keenly he felt the strength of his own presentiments. He would have liked to put Mr. Sturm and Will Sturm under lock and key and sit up for the balance of the night with Dr. Harlan and the two women, playing bridge. He smiled at the absurdity, but the basic principles of the desire remained.

He fixed the pillow so that he was half sitting up, his legs stretched out, and the blanket comfortably tucked in about them. The window was cold at his left, and through it there was nothing to see but snow falling so thickly that flakes seemed to crowd past each other in their eagerness to join the drifts.

At his right was the large well of the curving stairs, and directly before him was the door to Vera’s room. He could trace her movements through the faint sound of her slippers when they crossed bare places on the floor. He heard the scrape of a chair, and then there was no further sound. He pictured Vera sitting down; sitting down with her climax. He wondered how many climaxes there had been in her young and stormy life, and how many infinitely more climaxes she had caused in the lives of others.

The lights flickered an instant, sank low, then steadied to partial brightness. Wind from the south was increasing in unsteady gusts that belligerently hurried the already hurrying snow, that rushed with singing, ripping noises through fantastic, jerking branches of the dormant locusts on the lawn. A sharp crackling came from Vera’s room. It startled him into half rising before he realized what it was and sank back again. He could picture the flicker of flames snapping freshly on her hearth. Except for them, everything was very still.

As to Vera’s going in the morning, that would depend a great deal on Alice Tribeau. Attempted murder was attempted murder, no matter how casually or indifferently one cared to treat it. There was no reason why Alice should care to be casual about it. She would certainly bring charges, either definite or indefinite, and probably sue heavily for damages. It was a great country for rushing pell-mell into suits on even slender provocations. Vera, if not as a principal, at least as an important witness, would have to be detained. Perhaps some arrangements could be made for her to return for the trial from wherever she might choose to take herself. He supposed it would be New York. The town was her natural Mecca, assuredly her happiest of hunting grounds.

Vera was up again. He could hear her slippers tapping faintly for an instant…no further sound…she would be lying down, perhaps, and reviewing in a feverish jumble the intense unpleasantness of the past hour. He wondered why he hadn’t heard the bed creak. Old beds in ancient houses invariably creaked. He doubted whether there was a single exception, and the furnishings of this house were genuinely antique. But there had been no creak, no further sound of any nature after that faint short pat of slipper heels on wood several minutes ago.

He felt uncommonly nervous and was unable to attribute it entirely to nerves. It was stupid to be nervous. All Vera had to do was to call out, if for some inconceivable reason she wanted something.

He tried to interest his mind in several cases that were hanging fire down in the city while he was away. The Rosenblum shooting stepped forward preeminently. What a basket of eggs that was—its nerve centers reaching to heaven knows where—a squalid little shooting forming an ugly blot against a background dimly painted with “distinguished” men…It was no use. Vera, and only Vera, was he thinking of.

And her slippers were clicking again. They stopped. Two sharp clicks, as if she had kicked her slippers off.

He sat bolt upright. No voice had spoken. There wasn’t a single sound in the whole deathly hush of the night. He hadn’t heard it, but he had felt it. He had felt somebody calling him: “Mr. Valcour! Mr. Valcour!” He sat very stiff, very still, while the silence brooded heavily, undisturbed. He leaned back again uneasily upon the pillow, and the curious force that had invaded him ceased. It had been like a thread drawing him toward something or somebody, and the thread had snapped.

Indigestion, he reflected, was the basis of most unpleasant emotions (probably a chronic state with most soothsayers), and for the next five minutes he exerted a determined effort to compose himself. He had partially succeeded in doing so when a sudden crash of breaking glass from downstairs brought him with a jerk to his feet.

Glass didn’t crash unless somebody broke it. There must be somebody downstairs, but there could be nobody downstairs. The sound had come from the entrance hall. A branch might have flung against a window pane, but there were no trees near enough for that, and the wind wasn’t strong enough to carry a broken branch as far as that. The sound of the little crash was swallowed up most quickly. He took his flashlight from one pocket and, from another, his gun. Suppose there should have been—still was—a stranger in the house! He rapped gently on the panels of Vera’s door and called softly, “Are you all right, Mrs. Sturm?”

“Yes.” The word came stiltedly, but at once. He pictured, momentarily, her swollen lip.

“Your door is fastened, Mrs. Sturm?”

“Yes.”

Valcour felt a little reassured. He switched on the flashlight and started to descend the curving stairs. With every step he sank deeper into darkness, the cone of his flashlight cutting it more incisively, more brightly. He reached the level of the entrance hall and flashed the light around. The furnishings stared back at him blankly. He illumined the windows with the light and, in the southeastern one, there was a broken pane. Pieces of glass glinted back from the floor at its base. He went over to it. He poked the flashlight through the jagged hole and played it in arcs upon the surrounding surface of snow. There weren’t any tracks. The beam penetrated the falling snow to a distance of at least twenty feet before marking off, and still there were no tracks.

Nothing had been thrown to break the glass, because there was no missile lying on the floor. He raised the lower sash and carefully studied the snowdrift where it clung to the foundation of the house. There was no hole or any depression where a rock or missile might have dropped after striking and breaking the pane…and yet the glass had unquestionably been smashed by being struck from the outside.

He closed the window and thought quite rapidly and clearly…Something must have been swung against the pane from above, from some window that had been opened up above—and the windows directly above were the windows to Vera’s room.

Valcour ran with incredible swiftness for the curving stairs.