a thin querulous voice called. “It’s goin’ to be a white Christmas.”
Faith Parker’s work-gnarled fingers were red and ungainly against the gay-hued chintz curtain they held aside from a frost-edged window. Her eyes, peering through the glass, were tiny, birdlike in a countenance yellow and wrinkled as old parchment—sere and sharp-featured. Her flat-breasted, scrawny frame was enveloped by an immaculate white Hoover apron, and there clung to her the spicy redolence of the crisp roast meats, the savory gravies, the toothsome, mouth-melting pastries that made The Tavern on Bolton Turnpike the nightly rendezvous of Laneville’s élite.
“It had snowed already the day I came home, just a year ago. There was snow and ice all the way from the college. Lane Hill was all white and the white on the dark boughs of the pines was very beautiful.” Anne Marsh spoke as though to herself. She moved with an unconscious lovely grace between dim booths within which holly-decked tables nestled discreetly. Her garb was that of a slim, athletic boy, high-laced leather boots, whipcord breeches, plaid lumberjacket, visored wool cap, but she was utterly feminine. The thick wool of her mackinaw could not hide the tender curves of womanhood. Tight, tawny curls escaped from under the black cap to set off a wistful small face. Her lips, deeply red and velvet soft, were fashioned for caresses but incongruously were edged with pain. Her long-lashed grey eyes were destined for laughter but mirrored only a lurking, sleepless fear.
“Beautiful,” Anne’s low, throbbing voice repeated. “The icy air was like wine bubbling in my veins, and I was happy. I was coming home to Dad, Faith, to the man who had been father and mother to me as long as I could remember. For two weeks we were going to tramp together over the hills, and spend long evenings together in our workshop, happily contriving some clever, useless little gadget. I reached home, and…”
“Miss Anne! You mustn’t…!”
“And found Dad dead by his own hand; his name, for years so venerated in the city he loved, a synonym for dishonor.” The girl’s mouth twitched with a suffering one so young should not have been called on to endure. “He had stolen the charity money entrusted to him to be distributed at Christmas.”
“He did not steal it,” the older woman denied fiercely. “He did not mean…”
“No, he did not mean to take it. Relying on the promises of a half-dozen of Laneville’s leaders to replace it before it would have to be paid out, he had borrowed the Community Chest funds to save his Union Light and Power Company, to save the hundreds of small investors and the thousands of laborers who depended upon it for their living from disaster. But his false friends broke the promise they never intended to keep. The company failed, and they bought it in for a song, as they had planned. It was they who were the real thieves, but they stole within the law, safely and cleverly.”
“It was that lawyer who told them how to do it Miss Anne. Fulton Zander. He’s shrewd….”
“Shrewd and cunning as Satan. He and his clients are called honest men by the same law that says Webster Marsh was a thief. The same law that says I am a thief— It’s right, Faith. I am a thief, an outlaw. A pariah….”
She checked. Clear and distinct, a cheer came in through the Tavern’s walls, the shrill, piping outcry of many merry children.
“Listen,” Faith Parker exclaimed. “Listen to them orphans. Would they be cheerin’ like that if you hadn’t got that home for them by blackmail, or would they be shiverin’ in Slum Hollow, blue with cold and hunger?” She turned back to the window. “Look at them, Miss Anne. Come here and look at them.”
The girl came alongside of her. Outside, to the left, the wooded height of Lane Hill loomed against the sky’s leaden vault; but to the right, across the concrete bridge over Waley’s Creek, the highway dipped and she could see over the tall hedge that bordered the road.
Far back from the highway a gabled dwelling of time-darkened ivy-clad brick was stately and dignified as when anciently Joshua Marsh had built it to house his progeny of whom she was the last. Over the pillared portico a newly painted sign said, LANEVILLE CHILDRENS’ HOME. On the velvet lawn sloping to the pike, winter had killed the plants and shrubbery, but it was a live and vibrant garden of human flowers. A throng of warmly clad, ruddy-cheeked youngsters darted about, screaming gleefully as the dancing first snowflakes eluded their chubby little hands.
“Oh they are happy, Faith.” A smile tugged at the corners of Anne’s mouth and a little of the bitterness faded from her winsome face. “It was worth the price to give them that.”
She grew sober again, remembering the night of dire peril out of which she had wrenched that home for the homeless. She had felt death’s hot breath on her neck, that dreadful midnight, and almost the teeth of the law’s bulldog had sunk into her soft flesh. If it had not been for Peter…
Her glance came away from the gay scene and strained through the sudden thick veil of white crystals that with silent swiftness already obscured the mountain from which Bolton Turnpike curved.
He was somewhere up there, she thought, the youth who so many times had appeared out of his mysterious abode to save her from disaster and so many times had vanished again into that mystery, carrying her heart with him. Peter! She knew of him only that no matter what the odds against him his dark head was jauntily cocked and his blue eyes dauntless, that there was a heart-shaped little scar at the corner of his mouth….
And that his kisses had burned like white flame on her lips.
Her hands tightened, abruptly, on the sill. “Faith,” she gasped. “Faith. There’s someone…” Then she had whirled to the Tavern door, was out in the blinding swirl, was running up the road.
There it was, the form she had glimpsed through a momentary gap in the seething downfall. She had seen the man stagger, fall. Now he was crawling, like some dark beast, on hands and one knee in the highway. Crawling slowly, painfully, while behind him a scarlet stain trailed for a moment, melting the snowy film, and was almost instantly blotted out by a new coating of white.
“Peter,” Anne whispered through frozen lips. “Peter. What’s the matter? What…”
He kept crawling; as if he did not hear her; hitched himself along, slowly, painfully. The leg from which dribbled that gory thread dragged a lifeless, useless thing, behind him.
“Peter.” The girl bent to him, got shaking hands on his shoulders. “It’s I. It’s Anne. Don’t you understand, it’s Anne Marsh.”
He stopped then, twisted his hanging head to look up at her. His lips were whiter than the flakes that settled on them and melted in the feathery vapor of his breath; his cheeks were sunken, quivering; his eyes were dark pits of agony.
“Anne,” he groaned. “Get away from me. Go away. They mustn’t find you—with me.”
“You’re hurt, Peter. Your leg’s broken.”
“Shot,” he whispered. “I was almost—free. But a lucky bullet—” He coughed, the spasm seeming to rack every fibre of his lithe, slender body. “They know I came this way. You—leave me. They…” He pitched forward, fell inert, a still mound in the snow.
A sudden frigid gust flailed icy particles against Anne’s cheek, but it was not the savage onslaught that lined her face with drab despair. Long ago she had surmised Peter to be one of the bandits who skulked in the No Man’s Land of Lane Hill and descended from it in swift forays. The police had made many raids into that mountain fastness and had returned empty-handed, but they had routed Peter from his hiding place at last. They must be close on his trail. In minutes, in seconds, perhaps, they would overtake him.
If they found her with him—that’s what he had been trying to say—she would be gathered into the net of the law. “Bulldog” Ryan, the plodding, indomitable detective who alone had suspected her own outlawry, would seize the chance to arrest her. Armed with a search warrant he would at least be enabled to probe The Tavern thoroughly, and he would find indubitable proof of her guilt.
“Peter,” Anne groaned, going to her knees beside him. “Peter. Wake up. You’ve got to wake up!”
She shook him with frantic hands. Muted and incoherent through distance a shout reached her from far up the mountain. Another answered. It was nearer. The police! They were still far away, but they were coming fast.
“Peter!” Her palm spatted against his cheek, stingingly. “Wake up.”
“Ugh,” he grunted. “What?”
“Try and get up, Peter. Try hard.” She had an arm under him, was trying to lift him. “If you can hop on your good leg I’ll be a crutch for the other. Get up, Peter. Please get up.”
He was struggling. He was breathing hard, and his eyes were closed, but he was moving, trying to get his uninjured leg under him, thrusting at ground with his cold-blued hands. Anne threw all her small strength into the effort to aid him. She managed to slide her shoulder under his arm pit, to get his arm over her back. She heaved upward, pain tearing at her chest, tearing at her back, his weight like lead holding her down.
The rising wind howled eerily in the tree-tops she could no longer see. It wasn’t the wind. It was the siren of a police car, wailing down the white slope. They dared not go too fast in this white sightlessness but they were coming surely, inexorably.
“That’s it, Peter darling.” Anne’s voice was low, encouraging and very steady. “That’s fine.” She had one arm around his waist, her other hand clutched the wrist of his arm that was around her neck, and they were erect on their knees. “One more try and we’ll make it. When I count three. Do you understand?”
The siren yowled.
The motion of his head was somehow grotesque, as though it were the head of a marionette manipulated by someone unskilled. But it was a nod.
“One…” The siren howl was nearer. “Two…” The hunters were coming faster than she had thought possible “Three!”
Peter’s attempt to rise was pathetic in its feebleness, but he did make it. Anne found some unguessed-at reserve of strength in her aching thighs and with that slight aid they miraculously surged to their feet.
It was too late! They were only fifty feet from the tavern’s door, but the juggernaut must overtake them before they could possibly reach it!
“Run, Anne!” Peter muttered, thick-tongued. “You…can escape.” He had regained a modicum of consciousness, but he was a lax, almost lifeless burden, leaning heavily upon her.
“No!” the girl sobbed. Like a grotesque, three-legged monster in the bleached darkness of the blizzard, the two lurched into the roadside bushes.
Snow-laden withes slapped at them, parted to let them through. Snow poured down, stifling the threshing of the brush, stifling Peter’s moan of anguish. Anne, abruptly rigid, put her lips to his ear.
“Quiet, my dear,” she whispered. “Be very quiet.”
Through the white, almost solid pall the siren’s scream was a long, menacing howl borne on the breast of deafening engine thunder that battered against the screening bushes—and roared away.
“They’ve gone past, Peter,” Anne dared a murmur of throbbing triumph. “The snow covered the marks where you fell, as soon as we got off the road, and they didn’t see it—”
Voices reached the trembling girl, deep-throated, rumbling. And then another made intelligible words, carrying more clearly through the snow-filled air because it was high-pitched and thin and querulous.
“No, I ain’t seen nobody come out of the woods.” Faith Parker said. “I been standin’ right here too, the past half-hour.”
Once more the hoarse rumble. Once more Faith’s reply. Was she talking so loudly on purpose, hoping to be overheard?
“You better come inside if you’re bound on waiting here. There’s a fire an’ I can heat up some coffee, an’ you can watch the road from here while you’re warming up.”
The police were at the tavern, then, watching the road, waiting for their prey. They knew that although they had somehow passed him, he must come out of the woods on the highway. The steep ravine through which Waley’s Creek ran, on whose lip the restaurant’s kitchen door opened, would cut off his escape to the east. West of the road was a treacherous bog, not yet frozen sufficiently to be anything but a death trap for anyone who attempted it in this blinding storm. Death just as sure would overtake the wounded man in the arctic cold of the mountain.
Yes, they could afford to wait there in warmth and comfort while their quarry chose between death or capture.
Anne Marsh’s lids were slitted against the driving, icy blasts. She hugged Peter closer to her.
“Try to walk,” she said. “Please try to walk.”
Perhaps he heard her. Perhaps the movement of his flaccid frame was sheer automatism. At any rate there was some response in him as Anne started off, some little aid to her own painful progress. Otherwise the task she set herself would have been a sheer impossibility.
As it was, every nerve, every cell of her slim young body quivered with exhaustion before she managed to gain the bottom of the creek’s ravine and struggle along the narrow shelf of ground that was all that stretched between the ice-scummed water and the side of the gully through which it ran. They were twenty feet away from the tavern.
Anne stumbled to her knees, let her burden slide flaccidly to the ground. For a long minute she remained like that, pulling deep breaths into her lungs.
After awhile she heaved erect again. And then she did a very queer thing. Facing the earthy wall, she tugged at an ice-encrusted root tendril, reached sidewise and pulled at another.
A section of the bank moved out toward her, as if it were a door on hinges. It was a door, the earth a mere covering for the boards revealed on its inner side.
With a last fierce effort Anne dragged Peter’s motionless form into that space, and the door thudded shut.
Soft footsteps whispered in the dark. A switch clicked. A small windowless room sprang into existence in the yellow light of a single, unshaded bulb, a room that was earth-floored but walled and ceiled by rough, splintered boards. In the center was a time-darkened work bench which had belonged to Webster Marsh.
Every gouge in that old wood was poignant with memory for Anne Marsh, every stain on it spoke of a comradeship few fathers and daughters are ever privileged to know….
But Anne had no time for reminiscence now. Certain strange garments hung from a row of hooks screwed into one wall; disguises that had masked her in her raids on the despoilers of Laneville’s poor. She took an armful, bent and deposited them on the floor and heaved the unconscious man onto the rough pallet.
His countenance was no longer blunt-jawed and competent. It was color-drained, and the laxness of fatigue and suffering made it the poignantly pathetic face of a sick boy. His lips moved.
“Anne,” they muttered. “I love—” and twisted abruptly, writhing with a pain not physical. “No!” he moaned. “She’s his daughter. She’s a Marsh. You must hate her. Hate…”
“Hush, dear.” The girl’s cold hand rested on the sweat dewed brow. “Sleep.”
He sighed, shrugged more closely into the pile on which he lay, was silent. There were tears in Anne’s eyes as she threw off her soaked cap and jacket. What was it that lay between them? The first time she had seen him, up on the hillside where he had rescued her from a kidnap gang he had said something like that when he had discovered who she was.
“If I had known,” he had said. “I wouldn’t have…” But after that he had kissed her, had stopped to kiss her though the police were closing in on him.
Her deft hands unbuckled and tugged off the fur-lined galosh that was wet with something more viscid than thawing ice. Reddened, they rolled up the drenched trouser leg.
Anne shuddered at the scarlet mess the act revealed, but she got to her feet, darted across the room to the closet that contained first aid supplies.
Breath hissed from between her teeth in a gasp of relief as she bathed the blood away. The gash was ugly, but the bullet had only scraped the shin bone, paralyzing but not breaking it.
As she plastered down the end of that white swathing the tramp of heavy feet sounded dully overhead. A door slammed closed. Anne smiled wryly. The police had tired of waiting. They had gone.
She could get hot water now, put up the strengthening broth to heat that Peter would need so badly when he awakened.
She wiped her bloody hands with cotton waste, twisted to the wooden ladder that lifted from the dirt floor and ended against a seemingly solid ceiling. Her hand flashed to the switch as she passed and blackness smashed into the hidden room again.
Anne’s feet whispered on the ladder treads. She reached the top of the ladder, fumbled. Her fingers found nailheads in a beam, pressed them in a certain order. Wood scraped on wood and pale luminance slitted the blackness above her. It grew slowly, became an aperture wide enough to let her through.
She went up into the bedroom she had shared with Faith since death and disgrace had taken her home from her and they had pooled their slender resources to build this tavern. She flung across the room to the single, iron-barred window, twisted at those bars. Behind her there was again the sound of scraping wood.
When she turned there was no longer any aperture in the floor. It was a level of wood, solid, unbroken.
This was not the tavern’s only secret, not the only hidden thing that Bulldog Ryan would give his pension to unearth. That he suspected their existence Anne knew beyond doubt, but the courts demand more than vague suspicions before they issue a search warrant.
The hot breath of the huge range met her as she opened the door to the kitchen. She stepped out into that grateful warmth, pulled it shut behind her.
“Hello,” a toneless voice said. “I see you decided to come back.”
Anne twisted to the sound. The doorway framed the speaker; stocky, derby hat crowning his pinched, pointed visage, a mocking sneer twisting at his thin lips.
The police had gone, but Bulldog Ryan had remained behind.
“Come back?” Anne Marsh managed to force through the clamping muscles of her throat. “I haven’t been anywhere.”
“Yeah.” Ryan stood stolidly motionless on spread, thick legs, but the girl had an impression that he was advancing on her with that plodding, persistent pace with which he had come after her, always come after her for a fear-filled year. “I been right here the past half-hour an’ you ain’t gone out. It must be snowin’ in your room there an’ that’s how you got your tootsies an’ your pants wet.”
The girl said nothing in reply. What was there to say?
“He’s in there, huh,” the heavy, expressionless voice began again. “Slippery Joe.”
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah. I know you’re dumb. I know you don’t know nothing about Joe, just like you was asleep in there when some guy emptied ten grand outta John Simpson’s safe. Somethin’ funny about that room. I been wantin’ to take a look at it for a long time an’ now I’m goin’ to.”
He was moving now. His thick-soled shoes thudding purposefully toward her. “No,” Anne whispered, spreading her arms wide. “You can’t go in there.” He wouldn’t miss the marks her wet boots had made on the floor in there. Not Ryan. They would show him the hidden trapdoor and….“You haven’t got a warrant.”
“No, I ain’t got a warrant. I’m breakin’ the law. But there ain’t nobody here ’ceptin’ you to see me do it, an’ there won’t nobody ask too many questions when I bring in the guy we been huntin’ for a year. Get outta my way!”
Spatulate fingers lashed out at Anne, clamped on her shoulder. The kitchen whirled around her and the floor came up to hit her. Anne rose on hands and knees, stayed that way, heart pounding, a soundless scream twisting her lips as Ryan lumbered through the opened door, and vanished within.
It was over. With only one left of those from whom she had set out to exact vengeance and reparation, Ryan had run her down at last. When the tracks had shown him the trapdoor and he’d broken it open he’d go down through it to find not only Peter but also the disguises that would tie her inescapably to certain unsolved crimes.
“Hey!” he snapped. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“That, Mr. Bulldog Ryan, ain’t the question.”
It was Faith’s acidulous voice that sounded in reply. “It’s what you mean by breakin’ into a lady’s bedroom.”
Anne didn’t know how she regained her feet. But she was erect, and she was where she could see into the room, where she could see Ryan’s broad, squat back and the old woman facing him, a kimono fluttering about her bony, angular form, her wrinkled countenance a mask of righteous indignation.
“Get out!”
“Wait.” His head moved and the gasping girl knew that no inch of the chamber was escaping his scrutiny. “Wait. Now that I’m in here, I’m goin’ to look around.”
“Go ahead and look, if you think it’s going to do you any good. Maybe it will. Maybe it’s the first time you’ve been in a decent woman’s room.”
Anne’s hand went to her breast. It was coming now. He would see the wet marks on the floor and…
There weren’t any there! The boards were dry. The old woman had wiped them dry!
Ryan moved around the room with a clumsy diffidence. He came to the window that was latticed by iron bars. He tugged at the black rods, peered out into the white swirl of nothingness without. Then he turned.
“All right,” he said heavily. “You two have put it over on me again. Maybe I fell asleep standin’ in that kitchen doorway. Maybe the two of you walked in and out of this room and I didn’t see you. Yeah. But I’ve got a hunch there’s something queer about this room, and I’m going to find out what it is damn soon.”
“What do you mean?” Anne couldn’t stop the question, though all she wanted was for Ryan to get out of that room, out of the house.
“I mean that you’ve got about a week more to stay here. Union Light and Power’s bringin’ a high tension line in from Bolton along this road and they’re goin’ to condemn this property for the right of way. Fulton Zander’s in court right this mornin’, gettin’ the papers approved. When their crews start tearin’ down I’m goin’ to be here, with bells on.”
He thudded out into the kitchen and banged the outer door shut.
“Faith,” Anne exclaimed. “You slipped out through the front door and around to the creek. I didn’t know you knew about the secret entrance.”
“I know about that and I know a lot more things. Includin’ that we’re through here. I’m glad of that. Maybe we’ll go away from here now, and live a normal life where you’ll be Anne Marsh and not Webster Marsh’s daughter….”
“I’m still his daughter, Faith, still the daughter of dishonor. There’s Fulton Zander left to deal with.”
“You little fool— Here, where are you going?”
“To make some chicken broth. I…”
“I’ll attend to that. You get some blankets and clean sheets and a pillow and take them down to your Peter. The idea,” she sniffed, “of letting that poor hurt boy lay there on them filthy rags.”
“You’re an angel, Faith….” Anne’s arms were around the stringy, dried-up little figure.
The snow laid a blanket of soft white over the roofs of the mansions along East Drive, and edged the windows of the stores on Main Street with unintended beauty. Even Slum Hollow was crisp and white and clean in the sunset glow when the blizzard ended. And in the hovels of the very poor there was a little laughter, for there would be lots of jobs clearing the streets.
The shovellers started along Main Street at dusk and by ten they had reached the bridge over Waley’s Creek where Bolton Turnpike came down off Lane Hill. They stopped there—because the state highway plows had opened the road to this point—and leaning on their long shovel handles squinted across the bridge at the windows of The Tavern, bright yellow oblongs in the night. That Marsh girl ran that joint, didn’t she? The daughter of that guy Webster Marsh who swiped the Community Chest money last year and made everything so tough?
Yeah. We was pretty sore at him then, even though he bumped himself off, but what was the use keepin’ a grudge? After all the charities around town been gettin’ money all year in all kinds of funny ways, pretty near as much I guess as they woulda got if old Marsh hadn’t done what he did. An’ before that the ginks what worked fer his company were treated white, a lot better than this new gang’s been doin’, cuttin’ wages an’ not givin’ no holidays with pay, an’ so on—
Slim, somehow pathetic in the black of the mourning she still wore, Anne Marsh sat at her desk by the door between the dining room and kitchen and covertly read a yellowed clipping that had appeared in the Laneville Courier the morning after Christmas—a year ago.
“As long as the naked are unclothed,” it ended, “and the hungry unfed, the soul of Webster Marsh shall have no peace.”
“Only a little more, Dad,” the girl whispered. “There’s only one more left who must pay for your rest, and then…”
And then, what? The tavern that had grown to mean home to her would be torn down by the first of the New Year. She would be homeless again, her mission accomplished. Where would she and Faith go? What would they do…?
Anne’s thoughts abruptly ended. Another voice was whispering from under her desk. A ghostly, disembodied voice it was.
“It’s so cosy here, Dickie,” the voice said. “So nice to be alone with you here. It’s always nice at the tavern but tonight the storm’s kept people home, and it’s like everything’s just for us.”
Anne’s hand moved under the desktop to the switch that connected the tuned-down loudspeaker there with the one occupied booth. That was another of the secrets of the tavern, the concealed wires by which she had been enabled to listen in on the conversations of her guests, relaxing and guarded by the seeming privacy the little cubicles afforded them. This was how she had learned the plans by which John Lawton had sought to safeguard his payroll money and had been enabled to circumvent them. This was how Dr. Thomas Wayne had betrayed himself….
“Guess we wouldn’t be here either if the governor hadn’t been called over to Fulton Zander’s house so I could grab the car.” Anne didn’t switch off the talk. She did not make a habit of listening in on lovers’ murmurings, but this…
“Gee! Won’t he be sore?”
“Naw. He seemed all hipped up after that ’phone call. Said something about splitting a melon in cash….Hell! Keep that quiet, Rhoda. I shouldn’t have spilled it. He told me to keep mum about it. Reason why he wasn’t using the boat was because this here meeting was so all-fired secret.”
“Ooh, Dickie, that’s positively thrilling. Tell me some more.”
“But…”
“Oh, you needn’t be afraid I’ll tell anybody. All the girls tell me their secrets and I never repeat them. Come on, I’ll give you an extra kiss if you do.”
“Well, to tell you the truth I don’t know anything more except that it’s the Union Light and Power bunch that’s going to be there.”
“Oh, it’s business.” Anne didn’t have to glance up into the artfully concealed mirror that would have given her a view of Rhoda’s face to know that she was pouting. “I thought it was something interesting.”
“Maybe it’s more interesting than you think. The governor cracked wise about a stickup making a rich haul if he got a notion to…”
The voice clicked off as the kitchen door swung open behind Anne. A neatly dressed waitress came through, swinging supple hips….
“Mary,” Anne said, stopping her, “who are the youngsters in booth ten?”
“The girl’s some dizzy deb from East Drive.”
“And the boy?”
“Him? He’s Dickie Lawton.”
“I didn’t know John Lawton had a son.”
“Gosh, where you been, Miss Marsh? Dickie made the winning touchdown for Yale in the Dartmouth game. He’s All-American left halfback an’ some sugar for the dames.”
“Oh yes. I remember now. Look, Mary, tell Hazel Jervis I want her to take the desk. There isn’t anything doing tonight and I think I’ll go to bed early.”
“Sure.” The girl swung away with her tray. Anne arose and went through the rear door of the dining room.
The trapdoor scraped shut over Anne’s head. She went down into the darkness of the secret room, tiptoed across its floor. Her hands found that which they sought in the blackness.
For a moment there was no sound except the soft whisper of breathing. Of two persons breathing. The girl had not turned on the light because Peter lay here asleep. Peter—her heart sang the name….
And then the song was a dirge as she recalled the muttering of his delirium. “She’s his daughter. You must hate her. Hate…”
Hate! That was her heritage. But why must he hate her?
She stifled a sob. Fabric rustled in the darkness, rubbing against satin-smooth skin….Anne whirled to a sudden footfall, was blinded by yellow light….
Her vision cleared. Peter was crouched against the wall, his hand on the light-switch. His clothing was wrinkled, but dry, his wounded leg straight again. The heart-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth was a white pucker. A small, flat automatic snouted from his fist.
“Up with ’em,” he grunted. “Reach.”
Anne Marsh’s hands went over her head. “Peter!” she gasped. “What…What’s the idea.”
Astonishment peered from the youth’s blue eyes. “It’s—it’s you. It’s Anne.” He pulled the gun dazedly across his forehead. “I heard someone in here, and I thought…”
“You’d been found out. But you saw me when the light came on. Why did you still…?” And then she laughed. “Oh, it’s because I’m dressed as a boy.” Laughed and blushed, remembering that she had made the change with him lying only a yard away, that her dress, her frothy undergarments, still lay at her feet.
His blue eyes laughed with her. “Dressed as a boy but too damned beautiful to be one. You couldn’t fool anybody except a sleep-doped dummy like me. Look at your hair….”
“I’ll fix that.” Anne snatched a checked cap from the hook where the boy’s clothing had hung, stuffed her hair into it. She bent, came up with a handful of black loam from the floor, rubbed it over her face. “How’s this?”
She strode toward him, and she was a grimy-faced, shabby street urchin to the last small inch of her. “Watch yer car, mister?” she whined. “Only cost you a nickle.”
“You’re pretty good, at that.” Peter applauded.
“I ought to be. I’ve had enough practice. But that’s enough fooling. Put out the light. I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Out! Where—what…?”
“Put out that light.” She stamped her foot. “Please. It’s getting late.”
The darkness smashed in again. Once more there was the scrape of wood on wood.
Anne climbed to the road. She was a small, lonely figure trotting toward the heart of the city.
Close-drawn window drapes muffled the scrape of the snow shovels that were clearing East Drive. “We’re all here,” Fulton Zander’s acidulous tones remarked, “If everyone is sure he was not followed here we can get down to business.”
“What’s the idea of all the secrecy?” The question oozed greasily from John Simpson’s thick lips. “You’d think we were running a stag, the way you had us sneak in here.”
“That’s just what my Alice thinks,” Donald Reynolds, grey of hair but dissipated of ferret-like countenance twittered.
Zander’s fleshless lips scarcely moved. “You’ll be able to bribe your Alice with a new diamond for Christmas, Don,” he murmured, “and as for you, Simpson, I imagine some of the big depositors in your bank would be interested in knowing you were here tonight; those who hold bonds of the Union Light and Power Company for example—when I move in court tomorrow for a receivership!”
“A receivership!” John Lawton, Laneville’s department store owner, spluttered; “I thought we were making money.”
“We have been,” Zander replied. “We have been, but the books show the corporation has been running at a terrific loss. I told you a year ago that there was more to my plan than just getting hold of the outfit. You gave me authority to operate it in accordance with my ideas, and I’ve done so. I’ve been…”
“Milking the business. Good man!” Tall, completely bald, Dr. Thomas Wayne was too sardonic even to pretend ignorance of Zander’s machinations as the others were doing. “Gentlemen!” He lifted a small glass, “I give you Fulton Zander, shrewdest lawyer in seven states.”
“I don’t like it,” the last of the half-dozen seated around the table moaned. “I think we’re going too far. I’m sorry I ever threw in with you fellows, I’ve been sorry ever since—ever since Webster Marsh—killed himself.” Fred Harris’s neatly manicured hands tugged at his trim van dyke, trembling, and the tiny lights of hysteria jittered in his red-shot eyes. “I keep seeing him in my sleep, pointing a finger at me, accusing. I feel him looking at us now, listening….”
Outside the snow gleamed with an eerie, internal luminance, but along East Drive bomb-like flares waved the orange-red pennants of their flames to illumine the labors of the shovellers. The lurid glare deepened the shadow of a great fir in the Zander grounds so that it was a tar-hued, impenetrable mass lying against the sidewall of the house.
Within that shadow a black shape crouched silent and motionless and somehow feral. A gloved hand held a small round diaphragm against the wood and from this two slender, hollow rubber tubes curved to shell-like ears covered by hair that light would have revealed as tightly curled and tawny.
Fulton Zander’s eyes moved to the dapper little man, blue lids folding vulture-like over their pale gaze. “Would you like to refuse your share, Harris, and let me split it up among the rest of us?”
“No. I’ll be damned if I will. In for a calf, in for an ox.”
“Then I shall proceed.” The lawyer’s smile was a humorless, vinegary twitch of pallid lips. “I shall not bore you with the manipulations by which it was accomplished, but, as I have already said, while the books of Union Light and Power show it to have run this year at a terrific loss, I have here, in this box, the round sum of fifty thousand dollars in cash. I am reserving ten thousand for myself and distributing eight thousand to each of you. A pretty little Christmas gift from the people of Laneville, gentlemen, I think you will agree.”
“Not bad,” Simpson rubbed pudgey hands. “Not bad,” his buttery accents repeated.
“I take it you are satisfied,” Zander murmured. One of his claws moved to his vest pocket, came out with a small key that it fitted into the cash box’s lock, clicked over…
A dull detonation, the crash of splintering glass, sounded from somewhere outside the room, “What’s that,” Harris squealed. “What was that?”
The attorney’s head jerked up and his beak pointed at the closed door. “An explosion. It sounded like an explosion somewhere at the back of the house.”
“Damned right it was,” Reynolds shoved himself up out of his seat. “Look. Look at that.” His hand pointed to the threshold of the door. Something grey, slender, curled from under it, stretched a lazy tendril into the room. “That’s smoke. The house is on fire.”
Zander leaped to his feet, a moment behind the others because he took time to relock the money box and shove it under his arm. “Fire,” he gasped. “There’s no one back there. I gave the servants a night off. We’ve got to…”
He didn’t need to finish. Wayne had flung the door open on swirling grey smoke, the others were crowding through it behind him. In that moment darkness smashed down on them, stygian, complete.
Someone shouted incoherently. Someone coughed. Then Fred Harris’s cry was a thin squeal in the dark smoke-pall that flickered with a wavering, lurid glow. “The door is wedged.”
“Good thing.” Zander’s voice was cool, collected. “If the bunch of you poured out that way it would be a dead giveaway. Go through the back, the way you came.” Feet thudded, obeying.
In the deserted room a window scraped open, scraped closed again, the sound unnoticed.
Snow-glimmer came in through a smashed window, outlining the gleaming kitchen into which the rout burst. The smoke was fading, here, thinner with a strange swiftness.
“What’s this?” Dr. Wayne exclaimed, pouncing on a round, black object that lay in the center of the kitchen floor. “Well, I’ll be damned. A smoke pot.”
He came up with it, and the others crowded around him. Someone struck flame from a cigarette lighter and astonished eyes widened, staring at that which he held.
It was one of the bomb-like road flares that lined East Drive. Its wick was wrapped around with a grease-smeared rag that still smouldered acridly!
“What the hell, Zander?” Lawton grunted. “What kind of trick is this you’re pulling on us?”
There was no answer.
“Hey, Zander!” The men peered at one another. There were only five of them. Their host was missing.
“Skipped!” Wayne snarled. “The—that’s why he had the front door locked. He got us in here and skipped with the cash.”
“You’re nuts!” Reynolds, holding the lighter, protested. “Something’s happened to him.” He turned, shoved through the white-faced knot, went through the kitchen doorway into the narrow passageway from the front of the house. Then he spoke again, his ejaculation a throaty gasp. “Here he is!”
The others, crowding out behind him, saw Zander too. He was a crumpled, grotesquely awkward heap across the threshold of the room in which the interrupted meeting had been held. A blue bruise on his forehead told what it was that had stunned him.
The cash box was nowhere in sight.
Anne Marsh’s little heels thudded into the soft ground where she had crouched, listening in on the men who had killed her father as surely as though they had held the poison cup to his lips. She huddled in the ebon shadow that had served her so well, and worked at the boy’s jacket she wore, trying to button it over a black metal cash box that held fifty thousand dollars in untraceable cash.
The wide street was a river of eerie light dotted by the mufflered, overcoated forms of laborers. But to her right there was a thick hedge that drowned the radiance, and between her and that shelter there was only ten feet of open ground.
Her muscles tensed, as a sprinter’s would, waiting for the starter’s gun. Then she was off, a flitting shadow across the white snow blanket.
Strong arms clamped around her, pinning her arms to her side, holding her helpless. “Got you!” a toneless voice exclaimed. “Got you at last! And dead to rights.”
Anne moaned, and slumped, knowing it was useless to struggle. Bulldog Ryan’s pinched visage glimmered out of the darkness, his thin lips pulling away from his teeth in a grimace of gloating triumph.
“I figured the only way you could get in and out of that damn room of yours was if there was a tunnel through the bank underneath, and I camped out in the bushes across the creek, where I could keep watch. I followed you, and I let you have plenty of rope, and by jingo, you sure have hung yourself with it.”
“All right,” the girl said, her tones flat, dreary but very steady. “You’ve got me, and it’s all over. Put the handcuffs on me and take me off to jail.”
“I’ll put the cuffs on you all right,” the detective grunted, suiting the action to the word, “but we’re not goin’ to the station yet. We’re goin’ back there an’ see just what it is you’ve been up to.
The electric light wires had been clipped outside the house, could not be repaired till a linesman was called, but someone had found candles and the room with the long table was illuminated once more. Fulton Zander was back in his chair, the bruise livid on his forehead.
“Look here, officer.” The words slid from his thin, scarcely moving lips. “You’ve recovered my cash box and that satisfies me. This is the Christmas season and I’m disposed to be charitable. Let the boy go.”
A twisted steel chain linked Anne’s slender wrist to Ryan’s burly one. “Let him go, is it?” The detective’s eyes were slitted, dangerous. “Him—” His free hand jerked the cap from his prisoner’s head and her hair sprang from confinement, a russet nimbus in the wavering candlelight. “Her, you mean. You don’t know what you’re askin’. This is Anne Marsh, gentlemen, the slipperiest crook that ever prowled Laneville. You ought to know it. There ain’t one of you here she ain’t rooked. I been pluggin’ after her for a year an’ I got her at last, an’ you say let her go. Not if I have to pull you all in for compoundin’ a felony.”
“You can’t do that,” Zander snarled. “We’ll swear you’re lying. A cop’s word against six of the most reputable men in Laneville! Which do you think a jury will believe?”
“I’ve got the cash box and I’ve got the tracks under the window. That’s evidence enough to bear me out, and by God I’ll put it over.”
“Maybe you will,” Simpson wheezed. “But if you try it, we’ll break you. There’s enough influence in this crowd to break a commissioner, let alone a flatfoot.”
Ryan’s big hand fisted at his side. “Break and be damned,” he growled. “This wench goes behind the bars if I have to turn in my badge the next day.”
Anne flung her head back. “You won’t have to turn in your badge, Ryan. It’s been a clean fight between us, an honest fight. Take me in to prison. I’ll sign a confession. And I’ll go on the witness stand and tell the world exactly why the directors of Union Light and Power were here, exactly why they’re threatening you to keep the fact quiet that they were here.”
“And that, gents, is the payoff,” Ryan flung at them. “So long. I’ll see you in court.”
He turned, and there was a curious gentleness in that growl of his. “Come along, Miss Marsh. Come…”
“Not so fast!” A lithe, dark-haired figure confronted him in the doorway, a figure whose slender hand thrust the muzzle of a vicious little automatic point-blank at him. “Back up, Ryan. Let go of that chain and grab air. One peep out of any of you, one move, and I’ll blast you!”
The detective’s thick arms went ceiling-ward. Three voices tangled, each gasping a name.
“Slippery Joe,” Ryan whispered.
“Peter!” Anne exclaimed.
And from Fulton Zander, his face livid as the bruise on his brow, gasped: “Peter Corbin!”
It was this last to which the intruder responded. “Yes, Zander. Peter Corbin.” His mouth twitched, bitterly. “You didn’t know I escaped from the steel-barred hell to which you sent me. You and your boss, Webster Marsh, framing me for sabotage—that you hired done on the Apple Street dynamo to drive the Company stocks down so you could buy it cheap.”
“No!” Anne’s cry was a low throb, pain torn. “No, Peter. Dad never did anything like that. He couldn’t.”
“The hell he couldn’t.” The youth’s laugh was icy. “He packed me away in the pen for twenty years, but I crushed out, and I’ve been skulking in the woods ever since. That’s what Webster Marsh did to me. That’s why I hate his memory, hate everyone who belongs to him.”
“No.” the girl moaned, and was across the room in a flash, was leaning over Zander. “Tell him. If there’s any good in you at all, tell him Dad didn’t do that terrible thing to him.”
Her grey eyes held the lawyer’s vulpine ones, and there was a breath-bated, tense silence in the room. Silence, utter stillness, the only motion that of the barrel of Peter’s automatic flicking from one to another of the group.
“Tell him,” Anne’s tear-filled voice broke that silence. “You must!”
Zander’s fleshless lips moved. “Marsh didn’t know anything about it. I rigged the whole thing, and I bought in the stock.”
The girl spun to the man she loved. “You heard that, Peter,” she cried. “You heard him.”
“I heard him.” The grim lines of the youth’s darkly handsome face broke, and it was boyishly appealing. “I heard him, my darling.” And then it was stern again.
“There’s a roll of wire in my pocket, Anne, cut into short lengths. Get it out and tie it around their ankles and their wrists. Their handkerchiefs will do for gags.”
It was done. Peter and Anne were gone. The six directors who had stolen and milked and wrecked the Union Light and Power Company sat around their leader’s long table, unable to move or speak.
In another chair sat Bulldog Ryan, gagged and bound like the rest. Peculiarly enough, there was the faint shadow of a smile on his face, as though he found some secret satisfaction even in defeat.
The scraping of snow shovels were almost inaudible now, as their wielders worked away from the Zander house. A candle guttered, went out. From an infinite distance the howl of the night express came deepthroated and melancholy into the room.
Bulldog Ryan stirred. His shoulders heaved. His wrists came free of the wires that clamped them. It could be seen now that he had used an old trick, swelling them as the girl lashed them, so that they had actually not been bound at all. He bent, unfastened his feet, rose and thumbed the gagging handkerchief from his mouth.
“I got an awful short memory,” he grunted, “and I think you birds got the same. Nothin’ happened here tonight. Nothin’ at all. Only, I reckon you birds will want to be certain my memory stays bad—so supposin’ you ante up about fifty grand for that Christmas Fund.”
Starting to work on Fulton Zander’s lashings, he sighed. “I’m puttin’ in for retirement in the mornin’,” he muttered. “I’m gettin’ too soft to be on the cops.” He paused. “And anyway, there won’t be no fun in the job, with only common, ordinary crooks to chase.”
Two extracts from the Laneville Daily Courier of Dec. 23rd, 1936. The first:
The COURIER’S CHRISTMAS FUND, that had not filled its quota this year, was put far over the top this morning by two anonymous contributions of fifty thousand dollars. One was delivered by Western Union Messenger. No information as to its source could be obtained except that the package in which the currency was wrapped was left at the depot office by two young men who dashed for the midnight express just as the gates were closing. The other fifty thousand was found in the morning mail at the Fund’s headquarters. There are absolutely no clues as to its source.
The second:
The popular Tavern on Bolton Turnpike closed its hospitable doors forever today. Miss Faith Parker, one of the co-owners, cashed the condemnation award and immediately left for parts unknown. She refused to confirm or deny the rumor that she was to join Miss Anne Marsh, who, it will be remembered, is the daughter of the late Webster Marsh.
Bulldog Ryan sipped his breakfast coffee as he read the two items with his eyes that held a strange light. The tight-lipped mouth quirked faintly. “Hope the old gal don’t have as much trouble findin’ her as I did,” he muttered.