“She was crazy with fear and with self-reproach. Really, Sarah, she was afraid of everything. She was nearly out of her mind. I tried to get her to talk and she-oh, in the end she promised to tell me what she knew if I’d help her get away from the house. She was afraid to talk there, in the house. Terrified. As if something might jump out of the walls. I couldn’t do anything with her. She was hysterical. But she kept saying she knew something.”
“So you came here?”
“In the night. I was going to find out the thing she knew, Sarah. She said this house was empty and no one would look for us here. I wasn’t afraid, not at first. I gave her some sedative to put in some coffee for the boy on guard…”
“I know that, too.”
“And she brought me some of her own shoes to wear. I was afraid of waking the trooper so I took my slippers off so as to creep past him, and along the hall, and forgot to carry some shoes with me to put on once we were outside. Anna was waiting for me and she went back and got a pair of her own. You see, she was kind. I wasn’t afraid of her. But then when we got here she wouldn’t talk. All day I’ve been trying to persuade her. But she’s still half-crazy with fear. Finally, when I said if she wouldn’t tell me whatever it was she had promised to tell me, I was going back to the Brent house, she stopped me. Obviously, she was afraid to talk, and afraid that I would tell that she knew something. She wouldn’t say who she was afraid of, or why. She’s in a completely hysterical state; I don’t think she knows what she’s doing. She got a knife from the kitchen. She wouldn’t have hurt me with it, but she threatened and looked so-so determined…”
I thought of the knife in the hall. Then that was why it was there, near the door and the telephone, so Anna could snatch it up and prevent Drue’s leaving. And I thought, too, of that long, horrible day, with a knife in the hands of a woman who was berserk with fear.
“I don’t think she would really have hurt me,” whispered Drue again in a voice that denied her words. “But she threatened everything. Even suicide. I hoped that eventually we’d be found. Or that I could get away…”
I interrupted again, catching Drue’s wrist for silence. We both listened, and I was sure that a door closed softly downstairs. The front door? Then perhaps Alexia was gone.
For a long moment there was no sound at all; gradually I became convinced that she’d gone and that, except for Drue and me, the house was empty again. In any case we had to get away. Hurriedly I whispered to Drue, “Where’s your cape?”
“Over there. On the chair. Are we going?”
“Get it. We’d better try the back stairs and go out through the kitchen and back door. It’s safer. I think Alexia’s gone; if she’s not, we can manage her.”
“Alexia!”
“She’s wearing clothes like Nicky’s; they’re so much alike. We can’t talk now! I’ll explain later.”
She swept up her cape and put it around her shoulders.
“Now then,” I said, my hand on the doorknob.
I took a long breath and opened the door quietly. Nothing happened. After a moment, my revolver well in advance, I poked my head out into the hall. It was darker, but still I could have seen a moving figure. When I was sure it was empty, I motioned to Drue to follow me. We tiptoed toward the back stairs and still no one made any sound at all anywhere, except for the tiny whisper of our clothing.
It was sensible and safer for us simply to leave and let the police wrestle with all the problems my visit to the cottage had stirred up. The police-it was just then that I realized that I didn’t have the piece of paper with those betraying, perhaps convicting notes about digitalis written upon it. I hadn’t even thought of it since I’d seen Alexia standing there in the doorway of the study with the knife in her hand.
I had to have it. Everything, even to Drue’s life, might depend upon that scrap of paper. It was, I felt sure and Craig had agreed, the reason for Dr. Chivery’s murder; he had told Craig of it, guardedly. But someone else had known it, too; had remembered it perhaps, and the fatal carelessness of the instant when it had been left, forgotten in that book. And somehow had discovered that Claud had found it, as he naturally would do if he had doubts about Conrad’s death and turned to his books in order to refresh his memory about digitalis and its effects. I didn’t know how Claud had given away his secret, but obviously he had done so. And what really did I know and what could I prove without those notes? How could Drue be cleared without them?
I must have dropped the paper in the little study. Again there was no time for thinking. I said, whispering, to Drue, “I’ve got to get something,” and went quickly toward the front stairs, leaving her in the upper hall.
No one was in the hall below; it was shadowy but still it was unearthly quiet. I went down a step at a time, pausing to look and listen, and wishing the treads wouldn’t creak. Halfway down I wished I’d given Drue the revolver; I’d forgotten I had it.
But I didn’t go back, for it would take only a moment, I thought, to slip into the study, look behind the curtains, clutch the paper where I was sure, now, I’d dropped it, then go through the consulting room to the back stairs and call to Drue-if indeed she wasn’t by that time in the kitchen.
The continued silence in the house reassured me.
At the bottom of the stairs I paused again and heard nothing. I turned into the study, my eyes intent on the strip of fast-fading gray daylight between the long linen draperies.
Somehow it was too silent in the house and in the little room; the silence had a quality of breathlessness, of hushed waiting. As if from somewhere eyes were watching me. Yet the room was undisturbed, quite as it had been and no one sat at Dr. Chivery’s deserted desk, or stood there in the niche of the windows where I had stood. I reached it and pulled back the curtain. And on the floor lay a flat piece of paper.
I stooped and got the thing in my hand before I drew a breath. And it was only then that I saw that there was a letter-a note rather, only a few lines-written on one side of the paper. It was so short a note that I read it instantly, there in the growing dusk, holding it so the last light fell through the window upon it. The handwriting was as black and neat as printing. “I don’t like being put off like this. I know what I’m doing. I don’t want anyone’s advice. I have the money, and am ready to give it to you to use as you see fit. M. Chivery.”
Maud. It confirmed my feeling that Dr. Chivery had connected the notes about digitalis with Maud; so he had kept it a secret; he had replaced the paper in the book on toxicology; he had told Craig something of his indecision; he had referred to Maud by the use of a feminine pronoun and Craig had thought that he might have referred to Drue. “I’ve got to be sure,” Craig had said, “before I tell the police about it.”
Who else then had known? And had killed Chivery to keep him quiet. I turned over the paper and the notes on digitalis were on the other side of it.
And all at once four things leaped out from the chaos of seemingly unrelated fact and surmise. They strung themselves together like beads on a chain. Knots on a rope might have been a more fitting simile.
But it had to be that way. For a fifth thing suddenly added itself and that was motive. A motive for Conrad’s shooting Craig by mistake and in self-defense. A motive for Conrad’s murder. And, because of that a motive for Dr. Chivery’s murder which was the paper in my hand.
It wasn’t all clear in detail. In fact it was like a blaze of light in a dark room.
And it was just then as I stood there, stunned by that sudden coherence and understanding, unable to believe it and yet unable to do anything but believe it, that someone laughed softly somewhere near me.
I whirled around. I crushed the paper in my hand; I shoved it under my cape into my pocket. Along with a medicine box and a clipping. Alexia was standing in the doorway of the consulting room, watching me quietly, her face a pale triangle in the dusk.
I had the revolver. I had only to call to Drue for help. Then I saw that Alexia had put down the knife somewhere, for her hands were empty. Nevertheless my heart was in my throat.
She said suddenly, in a low, rather lazy voice, “So it’s you. Meddling again.”
I wanted that letter. And Drue was safe so long as I had my eyes on Alexia. I held the revolver so she couldn’t fail to see it, even in the dusk that filled the room. But I really didn’t know what to do. In what must have been a kind of stupefied attempt at reason I said, “Let’s talk this over quietly, Mrs. Brent.”
It had the quality of a delirious understatement. I plunged on, a little berserk myself and still unable to think. “I’m glad you put the knife down. That would only make things worse…”
“Oh, would it?” she said, half smiling. There was a little silence. And in the silence I heard the stairway creak again.
It was not Drue. I believe it was the smile on Alexia’s face that convinced me.
Someone was creeping up those stairs. And Drue was alone up there, and I had to deal somehow with
