AN HOUR OR TWO later Dane left the house, as did Floyd and Mason, the latter still carrying the crockery and putting it carefully in the chief’s car. Floyd looked disgruntled. His questions had got him nowhere. Carol had simply looked confused.
“I don’t know,” she said over and over. “Yes, I did go with Major Dane to the hill, but I never thought of burning it. Why should I?”
People were already coming to call by that time. The news that Greg was in town had got around, and the summer colony came in numbers to see its returned hero. Also of course to look at the burned hillside, and to conjecture once more about the murder.
The chief in disgust had wrapped his pitcher and escaped, with his satellite trailing him. And Dane had had to admire the three Spencers. Blood always told, he thought; Elinor delicately pouring tea, Carol seeing that the men—and most of the women—had drinks, and Greg hearty and cheerful, apologizing for his impromptu costume and shrugging off his new honors.
He did not stay long after Floyd’s departure. The pitcher was a solid if chipped piece of evidence, and Carol had known about the metal initial he had found on the hill. On the other hand, she had looked, he thought grimly, as confused and guilty as the innocent often did look.
He stopped by the fountain, a monstrosity of yellow marble with a tall bronze figure on top, and around the basin a row of grinning satyrs, some holding goblets aloft, some playing on pipes or cymbals. He lit a cigarette and sat down on the rim of the basin. Only two or three days earlier he and Carol had sat here, after a futile search of the hill. His leg had hurt damnably, and she had asked him how he got it.
“In Italy,” he had told her. “Old Alex got me back, or I wouldn’t be sitting here. That’s how he lost his eye.”
And later that day Freda had walked across with a beefsteak and kidney pie, not for him but for Alex, with a card which said: “For Alex, with thanks.” Alex had blushed with embarrassment.
“What the hell you been telling?” he demanded. “I’m no bloody hero. If that gets around—”
Dane had laughed.
“I don’t think it will,” he said pacifically. “Calm yourself, old boy. If ever a man deserved a steak and kidney pie you do.”
And now Floyd suspected her of burning the hill. He was not fooling himself. She could have done it, have learned something that made it imperative to destroy the dead girl’s identity. But she was not under arrest. There had been time before the first callers were announced and had traveled the long hall around the patio for Floyd to tell her so.
“I’ll just ask you not to leave this town,” he had said. “I think you’d better stay too, Greg. As for you, Miss Elinor—well, I wouldn’t be in a hurry if I were you.”
“Why should I stay here?” Elinor had demanded. “I’m needed at home. I have a husband there, and a mother.”
“From what I hear they won’t suffer any,” Floyd said dryly. “You got plenty of help, haven’t you?”
Greg’s protest had been violent. He was about to be married, and part of his leave was gone already. But his real resentment had been at the accusation against Carol.
“Preposterous,” he said. “Why would she do it? Ruin a place she’s loved all her life? And you can’t connect her with the murder. Don’t try to push us too far, Floyd.”
“All right,” Floyd said. “Explain that pitcher. That ought to be easy.”
Dane went over that in his mind. The chief was shrewd. Only perhaps he was beginning at the wrong end. What was the motive for the murder? Who was the girl? Why had she come to the Spencer place, claiming to know Carol? And why had she got up late at night, left her room and gone outside. For sometime that night she had been outside. There was the pine needle in her slipper to prove it. Why had she gone out, clad only as she was with her fur jacket to keep her warm? Whom had she met that June night? A woman?
He thought it possible. Could it have been Elinor Hilliard? There was that story of the Dalton girl’s about seeing Elinor’s car. But Elinor had an alibi, or so she claimed. Gregory? He considered Greg Spencer carefully. He might have used his sister’s car, and he was the kind to be tied up with women. Dane knew the type well. Yet there were one or two things against the theory. The dead girl had been small and light, but her body had almost certainly been taken up in the elevator. Gregory, in a hurry as he must have been, would not have needed to use it, not with Lucy in the house.
The bobby pin had belonged to her. He knew that, if Carol did not. The hair caught in it had been bleached and showed dark at the root, whereas Elinor Hilliard was a natural blonde.
All right. Go on from there. Greg would not have used the elevator, even allowing for Lucy’s slight deafness. He had investigated it after Carol had given him the bobby pin, and it made an unmistakable rumbling sound. But Elinor Hilliard could have, taking the desperate chance it must have been.
He considered that carefully. She had presumably been seen that night, or her car had. Also no sooner had she arrived yesterday than the hillside had been burned that night. There was a resemblance here too, he thought. In both cases fires had been set. But once again he found himself up against Lucy’s definite and, he believed, truthful statement that there had been no fire while she was still in the house.
He lit another cigarette and straightened his leg.
Was it possible, he wondered, that the girl had not been killed on Friday night, after all? That she had stayed on for another day, living in the yellow room and eating what she could find? He thought it unlikely. Not only had the postmortem fixed the approximate time as Friday. There was also Lucy’s story of the hand reaching out from the closet door. That had been real enough for her to break a leg, trying to escape from it.
He got up rather drearily and limped home. There was no news from Tim, but he had not expected any. Tim had only had time to reach St. Louis. But Alex found him irritable and without appetite that night.
“For a man who’s trying to get back in this war,” Alex said somberly, “you act like you never heard of a kraut. You eat that custard. It’s good for you—sir.”
He did not eat the custard. He pushed it away and lit a cigarette.
“The police think Carol Spencer set the fire last night, Alex.”
“That girl? I don’t believe it, sir.”
“Nor do I. Just the same she’s in real trouble. A little more and they’ll arrest her for arson, and possibly for concealing evidence of a crime.”
Alex fixed his one eye on the view.
“I’ve been thinking, sir,” he said. “Maybe somebody chased that girl outside.”
“In a fur coat?”
“We don’t know she had it on, do we? It was easy enough to put it on later. As I get it, the idea was to make it look as though she was killed in the house.”
“Why?”
“Well, to let the murderer get away. The Norton woman mightn’t have found her right off. She had a lot to do before she made the beds. Take her two or three days, likely, before she needed to get into the linen closet.”
“And how would you get in the house?”
Alex was thoughtful. His big body tensed with the effort of thinking.
“Well, if you didn’t have a game leg you could shinny up the pillars of that little porch off the kitchen. You can break the lock of a window easy enough, and maybe nobody would notice it up there.”
“Any other way you can think of? As I recall, one window in the yellow room was open when I saw it. That’s where the girl was staying. How about a ladder?”
“There’s a pruning ladder down by the stable. I seen it myself. It’s close up. You don’t notice it unless you’re going by. I use that way for a short cut.”
“You might look at it sometime and see if it’s been moved.”
He sat still for a long time, smoking one cigarette after another. It was useless to try to see Lucy Norton, who was, he was confident, holding in her stubborn head the key to the mystery. He knew, too, that it was possible Carol Spencer had set the fire after all. She would so if she was trying to protect someone. But whom was she trying to protect? Elinor Hilliard? Her brother? Then again he gave her credit for too much intelligence to have left the pitcher where it was found. It would have been easy to bring it back to the house, wash it and return it to the attic.
Or would it? The fire must have caught fast, and the drive been brilliantly lighted almost at once. Had she found herself more or less cut off, unable to get back with the incriminating pitcher in her hand? He considered that. An air warden on his rounds had seen the blaze and run to the Wards’ to telephone. He would have used the path that led to the Spencer place. In that case she could have been cut off, have heard the warden running, taken refuge in the Ward property, and in panic had dropped the thing where it had been found.
The same applied to Elinor, of course. Either one of them could have hidden until the warden had entered the Ward house and then by way of the lower garden and the trees have worked her way back. Gregory was eliminated. It was unlikely that he had known what was in the attic. Unlikely, too, that his surprise when he saw what Mason had carried down could have been assumed.
He looked at his watch. It was almost nine. If Marcia Dalton was at home she would have finished her dinner, and it was time he had a further talk with her.
He said nothing to Alex, except that he was to keep an eye on the Spencer place until he got back, and he did not take his car. He walked down the drive and toward the beach to the Dalton house. A big dog came running at him, but let him alone when spoken to. And he found Marcia alone, playing solitaire in the living room. Her long face lighted when she saw him.
“Well!” she said. “Don’t tell me this is a dinner call. I don’t believe it.”
She was obviously flustered. She insisted on getting him the highball he did not want, informed him that the servants had gone to the movies, and ordered him into a comfortable chair without giving him a chance to speak. Then she sat down, eying him shrewdly.
“So you’re not asked to the party either!”
He looked surprised.
“What party?”
“Elinor Hilliard’s giving one at the club. She left me out too. I suppose Carol told her I’d seen her car, so here I am, sur le branche. I can’t say I mind. I’m a Nurse’s Aide and I’ve been at the hospital all day.” She gave him a sharp glance. “Still on the trail, major?”
His lean face did not change.
“On what trail, Miss Dalton?”
She made an impatient gesture.
“I’m not an idiot. Maybe you’re in love with Carol, I wouldn’t know. But you’re interested in this case. You won’t get far with it, of course.”
“That’s rather an interesting statement.”
“Sure it is. I mean it, too. We’re pretty much of a clan here. We stick together. We have our differences, but when it comes to trouble—You’ll find Carol and Greg Spencer are part of us. Not Elinor.”
“So, granting that I am puzzled by this, I can expect no help. Is that it?”
She did not answer directly.
“You’re up against something more than that,” she told him. “Greg and Elinor will stick together through wind and high water. They’re like twins, only she’s bossed him for years. If Greg set that fire last night, Elinor knows about it. I think he did.”
“I see. And the murder?”
“I never claimed to see anybody in Elinor’s car that night. All I know is that the car was here. I’ll swear to that on a stack of Bibles. But go down to the club some morning and watch them there. I haven’t told them anything, but someone else has. If Elinor was here that night, Greg was with her. At least some man was. He comes back this time, and the hill is burned. Think about that, Major Dane. If this Barbour girl’s clothes were hidden there—”
“Who saw Greg in the car?”
“I didn’t say it was Greg. That’s not only what I think, but what a lot of other people think too.”
“All right,” he said patiently. “Who saw this man in the car?”
“Old Mrs. Ward. Mr. Ward’s a bad sleeper. He walks around sometimes at night, and this night he was gone so long she got worried. She went after him, but she didn’t find him. She saw a car that looked like Elinor’s going down the drive at Crestview, only there was a man in it. He wasn’t driving it. Somebody else was, and that puzzled her. There hadn’t been a murder then, so far as anybody knew, and she happened to speak about it to someone the next day. She thought if it was Greg it was odd he hadn’t stopped to see them. He was a friend of Terry, their grandson.”
Dane sat upright in his chair, staring at her.
“Good God!” he said. “Are you telling me that this summer colony knows a thing like that and won’t tell it?”
“I warned you,” she said comfortably. “We stick together. I’m furious at Elinor tonight, or I’d probably still not be sticking my neck out. Then of course old Mrs. Ward doesn’t see very well. There’s one school that believes she was mistaken. The other school thinks Greg was here; but he’s the local hero, so what the hell?”
He was still astounded. He got up and took a turn or two around the room before he spoke.
“I wonder why you’re telling me this, Miss Dalton. It’s not just because you’re left out of the party.”
For a minute her mask dropped.
“No,” she said. “It’s because Greg needs a friend. I’m fond of him, you see. I never had a chance, of course. But this crowd has got him tried and convicted, and someday Floyd and his bunch will hear it. Maybe Greg did it, I don’t know. But he never planned to do it. He’s not that sort. Only remember this. Lucy Norton had a better reason to let that girl stay in the house than she told at the inquest. And Greg likes women. I guess he’s had his share of them.”
Dane looked undecided. He looked at his watch.
“Maybe I’d better see Mr. Ward,” he said. “If he’s a bad sleeper he may still be up.”
But, although he found Mr. Ward awake and reading in his library, he left at the end of a half hour completely baffled. Mr. Ward was courteous, even affable. He offered a chair and a drink, only the first of which Dane accepted, and he brought up at once the matter of the fire.
“Bad thing,” he said. “I always liked that hill. Of course we’re all a little overgrown. Too much enthusiastic planting in the early days. But a fire…”
When Dane broached the murder however he became reticent.
“Horrible thing,” he said. “Terrible for Carol Spencer, too. I’m glad some of the family are with her. It was no place for her to stay alone.”
That gave Dane his opening. He was quick to take it.
“I understand your wife saw a car leaving the Spencer place the night of the murder. Can you tell me anything about it?”
Mr. Ward frowned.
“I see you’ve heard that story,” he said. “There’s nothing to it. Absolutely. She saw a car, certainly, but it may have backed into the drive to turn around. That’s all I know, sir, or my wife either. The amount of gossip here in the summer is outrageous.”
“She didn’t see who was in it?” Dane persisted.
“She thought it was a man, but she can’t even be sure of that. Her eyes are not what they were, and it was a dark night.”
He rose, and Dane saw he was expected to go. He waited a moment, however.
“You yourself didn’t see this car, Mr. Ward?”
“Certainly not,” the old gentleman said testily.
But Dane persisted.
“The police might like to know all this, Mr. Ward.”
“Neither my wife nor I run to the police with all the tittle-tattle of a place like this. As for the car, it was a car. It might have been anybody’s.”
He himself showed Dane out, but he did not offer to shake hands. He stood in the doorway, small and wiry and watchful, until he could no longer hear Dane’s footsteps on the drive. After that he locked the door, put out the lights and went upstairs to his wife.
“I wish to God,” he said, “that you’d learn to curb your tongue. They’ve learned about Elinor Hilliard’s car. Major Dane has just been here.”
Mrs. Ward sat up in bed. She had lost color, and she wrung her thin old hands.
“Oh, Nat,” she said. “What are we to do? What can we do?”
He was still upset, but he went over and patted her on the shoulder.
“I’ll have to go out,” he said. “Try and sleep, my dear. I’ll not be long.”
She protested almost wildly, but he did not listen. His small neat body was erect and purposeful as he left her, and he stopped long enough in his dressing room to slip a revolver into his pocket.