The Classic Mystery Novel MEGAPACK®. Hay James
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innocent that we had trapped her in deception, still chattering volubly, she left. We followed her outside. Silas crossed the yard, bound on his evening trip to the furnace. She stopped him to request that he appear at Bayne Place to clip her privet hedges. Beside her smart, low-slung car the four of us stood together in the thickening dusk.
Darkness was falling almost visibly, blotting out the fields and trees. I happened to glance up the hill toward the Coatesnash mansion. I squinted. It seemed to me I had seen light flicker behind one of the upper-story windows. “Silas,” I said, “did Mrs. Coatesnash leave you keys to the big house?”
He started. “No, ma’am. She said she didn’t want me poking in her things. The house is locked up like a drum.”
“Then,” I said, “someone has broken in. I just saw a light on the third floor.”
The darkness blurred Annabelle Bayne’s expression. Her voice was cool and unexcited. “You probably saw a reflection from headlights passing on the hill road.”
All four of us stared toward the vague bulk of the great white house. The chimney shaft rose stark and clear, the cupola had lost its gingerbread in shadows. A second time light arced across an upper-story window. Silas and Annabelle Bayne exchanged a look, a complicated look, a look I couldn’t comprehend, a look which inferred the dimmest sort of understanding. And yet strangely I sensed an antagonism between the two. So they might have looked at each other if one of them guessed something of the other and dared not speak it out.
“It’s only a reflection,” said the woman indifferently, and the hired man bobbed his head in vigorous agreement.
“No one could get into the house, Mrs. Storm.”
“Why should anyone want to?” queried Annabelle.
Whereupon she stepped into her car and drove off toward Crockford. Silas, too, shambled away. Jack and I lingered in the yard. The light did not reappear.
The ringing telephone summoned us inside. Dennis Cark was on the wire. The grocery boy had telephoned reluctantly and admitted it. On the way to the cottage, Annabelle Bayne, he said, had stopped in the grocery store. At first, she made an attempt to conceal her mission, eventually revealed it.
“She tried to find out,” said Dennis Carle’s thin, troubled voice, “how much you owed the store. We wouldn’t say, but she went on to the drug store and asked there too. Don’t tell my boss I told you. I promised not to, but I thought you had a right to know.”
Jack and I regarded each other in mingled wonder and aggravation. Annabelle Bayne’s curiosity had mounted to amazing heights. Evidently she was anxious to learn just how great was our need of money.
I said to Jack, “Perhaps she wanted to know if we could use a certain sum of money—say a hundred and eight thousand dollars.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Two New Suitcases
No better method of heightening curiosity has ever been devised than the unsuccessful effort to turn curiosity aside. By denying the existence of the light. Annabelle Bayne and Silas focused our minds upon it. Because of their behavior, the light gained an importance. Why had they lied? The answer seemed obvious. For an unknown reason they wished to prevent an investigation of the Coatesnash house.
The scene on the lawn had another specific effect. From the moment he sturdily forswore the evidence of his own eyes, we suspected Silas. We added him to a list which had consisted only of Annabelle Bayne and Franklyn Elliott. “People Who Need Explaining,” we dubbed them. A strange dissimilar trio—the lawyer, the sharp, clever writer, the jack of menial trades.
As in the case of the others, our suspicions of Silas were irritatingly indefinite. He acted oddly, but from motives we could not penetrate. With quickened interest we considered his change of manner since the murder, his growing nervousness, his extreme unease. Previously we had put down his condition to an ignorant fear of the law. Now it seemed that Silas might fear something more sinister and more explicit.
“But what?” Jack sat for a speculative interval. “Look. Lola. This sounds fantastic, but think a minute. Why wasn’t Silas the man who hid in the closet?”
“Silas wouldn’t need to break into the cottage. He has keys.”
“But…”.”
I shook my head. “It won’t do, Jack. You have forgotten I dashed inside and phoned Silas. The Lodge is fifteen minutes hard running from the woods. Silas could not have run from there and reached his telephone by the time I rang him up.”
“Then he answered right away?”
“Immediately. It was barely five minutes after you and the black-faced man disappeared.
“Immediately?” Jack frowned. “You phoned late at night, yet Silas always goes to bed with the chickens. And sleeps like a rock.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Did he answer too quickly? He knows we would call on him in case of trouble. How did he sound? Is it possible he was waiting beside the phone Friday night expecting trouble here?”
“He sounded sleepy.”
“That doesn’t signify. How fast did he get down here from the Lodge?”
“Not fast at all. He came the long way round. I remember because I watched the pasture path. I was annoyed when l saw him coming by the road. If Silas expected trouble, he thought of his own skin first. He wouldn’t set foot in the woods till I went in.”
I felt we were unduly complicating the already complicated situation. The picture of Silas seated at his telephone filled with a inexplicable anxiety did not appeal, to me. It argued a craft which I could not concede him.
Late in the evening Jack and I decided to trespass upon our landlady’s grounds. It was an imprudent decision, but we had arrived at a state where action seemed essential. The light which had shone briefly and mysteriously in the deserted dwelling was a powerful lure. As Jack said, sometimes a great deal depends upon trifles. Also, as he didn’t say, sometimes it is well for the innocent to avoid even the appearance of evil.
We planned carefully, deliberately delaying a start until eleven o’clock. Once Silas was safely asleep, the danger of discovery would be slight; if caught we were prepared to say we had strayed thoughtlessly from the road. Jack armed himself with a good, stout monkey wrench—he didn’t own a gun—and, accompanied by Reuben, we set forth on our illegal jaunt. The yellow dog hung at my heels; he disliked the darkness and the sounds of a country night.
Silently we mounted Strawberry Hill, taking the short cut through the rocky pasture. Jack used a flashlight sparingly. The path familiar in the daytime presented unexpected ruts and turnings and long vistas of inky blackness that were, I must admit, dampening. We almost ran into the Lodge. Reuben emitted a yip of pleasure, which I stifled instantly. We waited. Silas slept on, undisturbed.
Softly calling the dog to follow, we crept ahead, past the vegetable gardens, past the grape arbor to the rear of the mansion. At the irregular patch of dead lawn, where on sunny days Mrs. Coatesnash had walked with Ivan, we brought up sharply. One by one Jack illuminated the third-story windows of the big white house. A close inspection disclosed one unshuttered window at the extreme left. Narrow and uncurtained. Jack spoke in a whisper.
“Is that where you saw the light? Could you place it?”
“I think that’s right.”
“Wait here.”
He tiptoed to the rear doors—there were three—separately examined each. He rattled the knobs, causing my heart to beat uncomfortably. He returned to report rear doors and windows locked and apparently impregnable.
“Two of the doors wouldn’t budge a fraction of an inch. I believe they’re barred from the inside. The basement door isn’t barred, but it’s sure as hell locked.”
“You made a lot of noise,” I said nervously.