The Dark of Summer

Younger sighed and shook his burly head. “Do you think that a creampuff like William Barnaby could sneak in here—”

“Come off it, Jack!” Asher said. “You know I'm not trying to sell the idea that Barnaby did it himself. He would have hired someone to do it. He did hire someone!”

“Again — proof?”

“I, for one, don't need proof,” Asher said. His features looked like the lines in a grotesque horror mask as the dying firelight washed up over him and bled away into the night.

“Great,” Younger said, “a lynching.”

“No one said anything about that,” Asher said. “We'll just go to the manor and confront him with it We'll make out — as if we saw the man that did it. How's he to know we're lying? If we play it right, we can get him running scared, and he may let something slip.”

“That happens in the movies, not in real life,” Younger said.

Someone said, “Have you forgotten, Jack, that Scott was aboard that boat when she went up, and that there's likely no piece of him left bigger than a quarter?”

They were all very silent.

“I haven't forgotten,” Younger said, sadly.

“Then what the devil are we waiting for?” Asher wanted to know, his face screwed up as if his impatience was a bolt which had tightened inside of his head. He had always been in favor of taking a harder line against Barnaby; now, with the death of Scott against the Princess Lee, he felt that his stand had been the right one all along.

Younger frowned and said, “Well, I see that you're set on it and there's no talking reason to you, no considering what alternatives we might have.”

The men muttered agreement.

“We'll take my ship, then,” Younger said. “But there will not be any violence when we get to the manor, no rock throwing, no window smashing or any contact with Barnaby beyond the verbal. I will not tolerate that, and I'd turn my best friend over to the coppers. Understood?”

“You're right,” Asher said, “We only want to confront that scum with what he's done.”

“And that'll come to naught,” Younger said.

“Maybe it will, Jack,” Tom Asher admitted, now that he had won the main battle and felt that he could afford to make a few small concessions for the sake of unity. “But really, Jack, what else can we do and still keep our self-respect?”

Younger had no answer to that.

They stamped out the fire and drowned it with several buckets of seawater, then boarded the Wanda Lynne, the thirty-six-foot Younger ship.

When they were under way, Jack Younger drew his son close and, in a voice too low for anyone else to hear, said, “You stay by me the whole time, you hear?”

“Sure, Dad,” the boy said.

“If there's any trouble, no matter how harmless it seems at the start, you don't join in with it, but you run.”

Jack Younger, the younger, nodded agreement. As they set out of the Niche toward the open sea, he wondered what knowledge, if any, Gwyn had about this affair…

TWENTY-THREE

Fleeing from the bloody scene on the stairs, her thoughts in a turmoil, Gwyn reached the end of the long, main corridor and pushed open the swinging door, stepped into the dark kitchen, aware that the dead girl was not terribly far behind her. She crossed the kitchen to the outside door, put her hand on the knob before she realized what a fatal error she had made.

Once she left the manor house, she had to cross a long expanse of open lawn before she could reach either the sheltering woods or the steps down to the beach, and the specter was certain to see which way she was going, and give chase. Once her destination was known, she had no hope of hiding there.

On the other hand, if she remained in the house, she could creep from room to room, down the complex hallways, up and down the main and back stairs, like an animal avoiding a hunter, both of them in a confusing maze. The house was certainly huge enough for…

Still standing there, unable to make a decision, she realized how ludicrous her plans were. Since Ben had been unable to see the ghost, then it was either real, or a figment of her imagination, in which case there was no hiding from it.

Abruptly, she had a disconcerting thought: suppose it were imaginary; then who had pushed Ben down the stairs? The answer was chillingly clear: she had pushed him herself.

With the realization that she might be, on top of everything else, a psychopathic murderess, she put her face in her hands, as if her fingers could close out the world. She might have frozen there, in terror at what was happening around her and to her, might have finally broken down if she had been given another full minute or two of silence in which to contemplate her own sickness; however, the specter called out to her from the hallway beyond the kitchen door, jolting her with that by now well-known, ethereal voice. “Gwyn?”

Thrust into action by the circumstances, with no time to think, Gwyn knew instinctively what she must do. She pulled open the rear door to the back lawn and, without stepping outside, she slammed it loudly. Then, moving quickly and noiselessly to the can cupboard, she opened that door, stepped into the tiny closet, and pulled the door almost shut again, leaving only a tiny crack through which she could watch the area of the kitchen by the back door.

Almost at once, the swinging door pushed inward, and the specter glided across the kitchen floor to the back door, stood there peering out at the empty lawn.

Gwyn held her breath, sure that the lovely demon would turn toward her, smiling, reveal that she had not been fooled at all.

When a moment had passed, however, the ghost shouted, in a rather unghostly manner, “Ben!”

He arrived in the kitchen a few seconds later, spattered with a dark liquid which, in the semi-darkness, was not easily identified as blood.

“She's left the house,” the dead girl said.

Gwyn watched from her hiding place in the can cupboard, in shock, as the dead man joined the specter at the back door and, leaning toward the glass, stared intently at the lawn.

“Which way did she go?” Ben asked. He sounded exactly as he had sounded in life.

“I don't know,” the dead girl told him. “By the time I got here, she was out of sight.”

“You're sure she went out there?”

“I heard the door slam.”

He looked around the kitchen, but did not seem to see the cupboard as a hiding place. He said, “Damn!”

“What do we do?”

“Go after her, of course.”

The dead girl was not at all happy about that prospect. She said, “Look, Ben, she's probably gone over the edge already, what with that routine on the stairs. She won't know whether the ghost is real or whether she's imagining everything, but in either case she won't hold onto her sanity. She's probably sitting out there babbling to herself under a tree. We can just wait until Barnaby comes home, go find her, have her examined and committed, and our job is done.”

He thought about it a moment, then said, “No, that won't do.”

“Why won't it?”

He said, “We've got to be sure.”

“I'm already sure.”

Ben said, “But if she catches sight of me, all smeared up like this, after she's just seen me with a broken