The Dark of Summer

prying.

Where should she look first?

It was unlikely that anything having to do with the hoax would be left out in the open, or concealed in a room to which she would have unquestioned access. Therefore, the library and the study were out. Her own room, the kitchen, the dining room, just about every place.. Except Elaine and Will's bedroom — and Ben Groves' room. She already knew who her aunt and uncle were and, to a lesser degree, what they were. However, she now realized, Groves was a complete stranger; and it was Groves who seemed to be close to the blonde who had taken the part of the dead girl.

“Gwyn… Gwyn…”

He had said they could afford to spend an hour out there, looking for her. That left fifty minutes for Gwyn to go through Groves' room. She headed for the main staircase, her heart beating rapidly, but the last of the self- doubts gone.

TWENTY-FOUR

The door to Ben Groves' room was not locked, and there was really no good reason why it should have been, since none of the conspirators in this hoax had any idea that she would be clear-headed enough to tumble onto their secret. She pushed the door open and went inside without turning on any lights.

In the darkness, she crossed to the room's only window and looked out onto the front lawn, where she could hear the “ghosts” calling her name, still: “Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn…” In the dim light of the stars and the moon fragment, she saw that they were down by the edge of the woods, their backs to the house, scanning the trees, hoping to scare her out of them. If they intended to inspect the entire perimeter of the forest, they would be down there a long while yet.

Gwyn found the drawcord for the flimsy set of under-drapes, drew those shut, located the second cord and pulled the heavy, velvet main drapes into place. These were backed by a thick, rubberized material that was sure to keep any light from passing through. She inspected the edges of the window and the place where the velvet panels met in the middle of the glass, and she satisfied herself that there was no crack that would betray her to the people on the lawn.

She turned on the lamp by the bed and began her search.

Feeling like a shameless busybody or like a sneak thief, but not about to call it quits already, she opened all of his bureau drawers and went through his clothes, piece by piece. She even unfolded his shirts to see if he had hidden anything inside of them, papers or photographs, anything at all. She did not know what she might find, and, in the end, she found nothing at all.

Next, she went through the six drawers in the high-boy, through his collection of soaps and colognes, through the jewelry box, gloves, socks, beach towels, sweaters — and through a collection of souvenirs of Europe, and an inordinately large number of mementoes of Great Britain. She examined each of these but found nothing worthwhile in them, nothing that seemed to be applicable to her present problem.

She looked behind the bureau and behind the high-boy, finding nothing but dust.

She looked under the bed.

Nothing.

She lifted the edge of the mattress.

Again: nothing.

In the single closet, she took out four suitcases and opened those, found each of them empty.

She removed his suits from the hangers in the closet, and she went through the pockets of each of them.

She found nothing.

However, as she lifted the last suit off the closet rack, she saw the flight of stairs, leading up into pitch darkness, and she knew, without understanding how, that they led to what she wanted.

Quickly, she returned to the lamp by the bed, turned it off, went to the window and parted the heavy drapes, to see where Ben Groves and the girl were now. Unfortunately, they were no longer in sight, a development which she should have expected but which nonetheless made her heart race and her hands shake against the soft velvet. Though they had given up on the woods, they might not have given up on the search itself. She hoped that was the case. Most likely, they had decided she wasn't in the trees and had gone down to the beach to look for her; she would have to pray that that was the case.

She drew the drapes shut again, left the room and went out into the upstairs hall. There, she stopped with her back against the wall, very still, and listened for voices and for the stealthy tread of feet on loose floorboards.

The house was quiet.

She was pretty sure that she was still alone.

Moving quickly again, she went to the back stairs and down to the kitchen, where she got a flashlight from the utility drawer near the oven. She paused for an instant by the back door, to see if Groves and the girl had returned to the rear lawn; they had not. Then, she went back upstairs again, without turning the flashlight on, having gotten quite adept at finding her way in the dark.

Back in Groves' room, after checking the drapes for cracks again, she switched on the flashlight and went to the closet, ducked inside and went up the stairs to the attic.

She estimated that she had better than twenty minutes, perhaps as much as half an hour, before Groves and the girl would come back to the house. She planned to make good use of each of those twenty minutes, and she had a premonition that she wouldn't need any longer to get to the bottom of the last few mysteries that surrounded this hoax.

Groves and his wife stood on the night beach, squinting both north and south along the silvered sand, she in a white dress of many layers that was not unlike a funeral shroud, and he spattered with chicken blood that had begun to dry and get sticky.

“I simply can't understand where she's gotten to,” he said, more to himself than to Penny.

She said, “Let's go back.”

“Not yet.”

“Ben, if she'd gone crazy, we'd find her wandering around in a daze. She wouldn't be crafty enough to go to ground as she has.”

“Don't be too sure about that,” he said. “The mad can be terribly clever at times.”

“But its all begun to fall apart on us,” she said, miserably.

“Shut up, Penny.”

“But it has.”

He grabbed her and shook her, violently, as if he could rip her loose of her growing anxiety, then let her go so suddenly that she almost fell. He said, “Come to your senses, for God's sake! We haven't lost her. It isn't that bad. She wasn't on the lawn, and she wasn't in the woods, so she must be down here on the beach. It's as simple as that.”

“Unless we've overlooked her,” Penny said, sullen.

“I don't think we have.”

“But I do think we have.”

He said, “Love, you've got to admit that the beach would be the most likely place for her to come to, more so than the woods. After all, the beach has certain, ah, associations for her.”

Penny looked at the sea and hugged herself as it lapped across the beach like a series of huge tongues. She said, “Ben, you don't think that she's drowned herself?”

“Highly unlikely,” he said.

“She was very wrought up.”

“It's still unlikely.”

She said, “Barnaby will kill us if she did.”