Let Dead Enough Alone Read online

  It was cold where she was and then she realized another thing: it was almost quiet. She could still hear the angry wind, but now it seemed to be at a great distance—muffled, shut out. She listened, making herself listen. She heard harsh, uneven breathing which was not her own. Still, she could see nothing.

  She had been lying prone. Now she raised herself on hands and knees, steadied herself so, and began to move her hands in widening circles on the floor, seeking some contact which would provide orientation. For a time her hands encountered nothing, except the smooth, cold hardness over which they traveled. Then she touched something. Her fingers closed, briefly, on the heel of a woman’s shoe.

  “Audrey?” Lynn said. “Audrey?”

  A strange, quivering moan answered her.

  Lynn, still on hands and knees, moved closer—felt her way closer—felt her way closer along the girl’s body, then felt the rough material of a coat. She drew herself along until she was beside the girl, who lay on her back on the floor. Then one of Lynn’s groping hands, sliding in its search, was in a wetness—a wetness faintly sticky to the touch. She moved her hand a little and touched hair.

  “Audrey,” she said. “Can’t you—”

  And then it was light. The darkness had been complete; now the light seemed as complete as the darkness had been. She was in a place which glared with light. The light was, for that instant, as sudden, as blinding, as the blow had been. Involuntarily, Lynn put a hand—but not the hand which had been in the wetness—to her unprotected eyes. But after a second or two the light dimmed to quite ordinary light—harsh light, certainly, unkind light. But no more light than comes from a moderate-sized bulb, set unshaded in the ceiling.

  She was in a quite ordinary small storeroom. The cold smoothness which had been under her hands (now she sat back on her heels, looking around her) was the smoothness of linoleum, here and there a little worn. On three sides of the room there were shelves, and cans of food were stacked on the shelves—cans of soups, of meats; bottles which held sauces. The fourth side of the room was a door. There was a handhold on the door, and above it a thumbpiece. There was nothing strange or frightening about the room—except the slight girl who lay beside her on the floor; who had turned a little, moaned again, when the light came on. Nothing but the girl, and the blood on the floor and on Lynn Ross’s hand.

  Audrey Latham’s eyes were open, and now her lips were moving. But there was something hideously wrong, something unreally wrong, about her head. Where it rested on the floor, it seemed to rest flatly—as if there were no back to the head. Violent sickness ran through Lynn as she looked down at the girl. She fought it back. Then Audrey tried to raise herself. Kneeling beside her, Lynn put a hand under the girl’s shoulders; let the crushed head rest on her arm and shoulder. Audrey tried to speak and at first unintelligible sounds—dreadful sounds—came from her lips. (And her lips, untouched, were still sweetly curved; still bright with lipstick.) The girl tried again.

  “Tell him—” she said. Lynn bent closer. “Tell—”

  The effort was terrible. The whole slight body seemed to tremble with the effort.

  “Don’t,” Lynn said. ‘I’ll get somebody. Don’t try—”

  But the look in the staring eyes stopped her.

  “—time,” Audrey said. “Listen—” The eyes closed; opened again. The girl moaned again, the moan shaking her body. “Listen?”

  “Yes,” Lynn said. “Yes. I’m listening.” She held the girl close, pillowing the battered head on her shoulder. And blood seeped through the robe, was warm on her skin—and then was cold on her skin. “You’ll be all right,” Lynn said. “You’ll—”

  “—in hand,” Audrey said. “It hurts so—so.” The last word became a moan. “Tell him—like—glass.”

  Lynn waited.

  She tried to fix the words in her mind—words so agonizingly spoken; to the speaker evidently so vital, so necessary. But the words meant nothing. The girl’s eyes closed.

  “Who?” Lynn said. “Tell who?”

  The eyes opened again; they seemed to flicker open.

  “On—stairs,” Audrey said, the words so faint that Lynn could only guess at them. “Thought—I—” The eyes closed again, and a tremor ran through the slight body. Lynn moved; started to free herself. Not these meaningless words, she thought. I’ve got to get somebody. Get—

  “Live and learn,” Audrey said, quite clearly. “Tell—doctor—doctor had—”

  And then her body lost all resiliance in Lynn’s arms; became only a heavy weight. Audrey Latham bled at the mouth and died.

  For a moment, Lynn held the limp body in her arms. Then, very gently, she put it down. She was herself shaking, convulsively. Slowly, she began to get to her feet. And then she saw the hatchet on the floor.

  It was near the closed door. It was an old hatchet, with a rough wooden handle. It did not look sharp. But that was difficult to tell because of what was on the blade—on the whole head—of the hatchet.

  Lynn did not scream. The need to scream was harsh in her throat; seemed to be a sourness in her throat. But she walked the few steps to the door quite steadily, and pressed down on the thumbpiece.

  For an instant, then, when the thumbpiece resisted pressure, she thought she was locked in—locked in with death. But the latch was only stiff; she pressed harder and the latch outside lifted. She opened the door and was in the back hall. And here, too, the lights were bright. And here, as not in the closed-off storeroom, the roaring of the wind was loud. But she cried out for help, and cried above the wind. She heard the sound of men running, and leaned against one of the counters and put her head down, because blackness was beginning again to swirl around her.

  Heimrich came first, and then Brian Perry. She only pointed to the open door of the storeroom. Heimrich went in, and then said, abruptly, “Come here, doctor,” and Perry went into the little room, and crouched beside the body of Audrey Latham. He did not touch it. After a moment, he stood up again. He came out of the room and took Lynn by the shoulders, and turned her and looked into her face.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Lynn said—heard her strange voice saying. “She’s dead, isn’t she? She said, ‘Live and learn’ and then she died. She said—”

  “Get hold of yourself, Lynn,” Perry said. “Do you hear me? Get hold of yourself.”

  He cupped one hand under her chin, to raise it.

  “Don’t!” Lynn said. “It’s—”

  Perry looked, and swore. Then, very gently, he ran his fingers along the delicate bone of Lynn’s jaw. “All right,” he said. “Nothing broken. You were knocked out?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I—I found her. At the foot—she’s dead, isn’t she? You can tell me now. I’m all right.”

  “Yes,” Brian Perry said.

  Heimrich came out of the storeroom. He closed the door behind him.

  “How long would she have lived, doctor?” Heimrich said.

  Brian Perry released Lynn. He turned to Heimrich.

  “How long?” he repeated. “I wouldn’t have expected her to live at all, captain. The skull’s crushed. The—the brain lacerated. Sometimes, of course—”

  “She was alive,” Lynn said. “Lying at the foot of the stairs. Moaning—and—” She took a deep breath. “Her eyes were open,” she said. “Then—afterward—”

  “Wait,” Heimrich said. “Tell me a little at a time.”

  She told him—of the black which came with the blow; of awakening. She did not know how long a time had intervened. Heimrich looked at Perry.

  “Not long,” Perry said. “At least, I’d judge not. She was knocked out. Probably merely by a fist. It may have been only a few minutes. I suppose—whoever it was, dragged them both in there and closed the door. To give himself time? Time to get back to one of the rooms?”

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “But, that’s possible, naturally. She talked, you say—regained consciousness and talked?”

  “I’m not sure she’d lost cons
ciousness,” Lynn said. “She—looked at me, captain.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “She talked? Tried to talk?”

  “She said—words,” Lynn told him. “She said, ‘Tell him’, but not who she meant. And something about stairs and something about a hand. Did she mean—what she was hit with?”

  “I don’t know, Miss Ross,” Heimrich said. “Was that all she said?”

  “She said—almost at the last—quite clearly—‘Live and learn.’ She said, ‘Live and learn.’ And then she died.”

  Lynn was conscious of long shudders which went through her body. Perry turned, quickly. He took her arms again.

  “Breathe deep,” he said. “Just breathe deep.” And his own chest swelled; the slow breathing movement of his whole body was conveyed, through his pressing hands, to hers. “Easy, Lynn,” he said. “Just—easy.”

  “I’m all right,” Lynn said. “She said something about a doctor, too,” she said to Heimrich. She said, ‘The doctor had.’ And she said something was like glass.”

  Heimrich regarded her for a moment.

  “That’s interesting, isn’t it?” he said. “She didn’t say which doctor, Miss Ross? Or what was like glass?”

  She shook her head. The movement made her head ache; increased the pain along the side of her jaw, so that tendrils of pain reached down into her neck.

  “And,” Heimrich said, “you didn’t see the person who hit you?”

  “No,” she said. “Whoever it was came up behind me when I was—”

  “Show me,” Heimrich said. “When you were what?”

  “Like this,” she said, and moved out into the center of the hall and crouched. “Near the foot of the stairs,” Lynn said. “She was—Audrey was on her back, with one leg bent under her. I said something and started to reach out—to see if I could do something and—somebody grabbed me by the shoulders. Pulled me up.”

  She stood up.

  “And hit me,” she said. “I don’t know what with. Here.” She touched the right side of her face.

  “With a fist,” Heimrich said. “At least, the doctor here says so. You didn’t try to turn? To see who it was?”

  “There wasn’t time,” she said. “And—and I was held so I couldn’t move.”

  Heimrich continued to look at her. But he spoke to Brian Perry. He said, “Did you notice, doctor? The knuckles of the girl’s right hand?”

  “No,” Perry said.

  “Bruised,” Heimrich said. “Of course, she may have fallen on her hand when she was struck. That’s probably what happened, naturally. She had quite small hands—was quite a small girl, really. You’re quite sure Miss Ross was hit by somebody’s fist, doctor?”

  Perry moved closer to Lynn Ross, and then—although her head swirled, and fear swirled in her mind—Lynn stood very straight and tall (tall like a tree) and held her chin high. Perry did not touch her face, but only looked at it. He turned to Heimrich.

  “You must know,” he said, “that I can’t be certain, captain. There’s no sign of anything else. No break of the skin. Not a great deal of swelling.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “There isn’t, is there? Of course—” He did not finish. Sergeant Forniss came into the pantry through the door which led to the living room and Heimrich said, “Yes, sergeant. Get through all right?” Forniss merely nodded. “You’d better get the rest of them up, sergeant,” Heimrich said. “They seem to be sound sleepers. You’d think the light would have wakened some of them—or the noise the truck made.”

  “The truck?” Brian Perry said.

  “Generator truck,” Heimrich told him. “Oh, the power’s still off, doctor. We’re rolling our own.” He closed his eyes, momentarily. “Not soon enough,” he said. “However—you’d better go change, Miss Ross. Get some other clothes on. There’s blood on your robe.”

  “It happened the way I said,” Lynn told him, and spoke, by effort, in a level tone. “I—I tried to lift her. That was how—”

  “Now Miss Ross,” Heimrich said. “I haven’t said anything else, have I? Ray?” Heimrich raised his voice at that. Ray Crowley came through a door which led to the kitchen. “The trooper’ll go with you,” Heimrich said.

  Lynn started to move. She swayed; felt herself swaying. Brian reached out a hand toward her, but she moved so that she was not touched. She said, “I’m quite all right,” and turned and went toward the narrow stairway—went up it, using the handrails, and did not look round to see who followed her, but knew that Trooper Crowley came up the stairs behind her. She went along the narrow corridor, bright now, and down the intersecting, wider, hall to the door of her room.

  “Minute, miss,” Crowley said and moved around her and opened the door. He stepped into the room and switched on lights and looked around. “All right, miss,” he said, and stepped back and let her go into the room. For a moment, inside, she hesitated. Crowley stepped farther back into the hall, and she closed the door and was alone in the bright, cold room. For a moment she merely stood there, and found she was shaking—that her whole body was shaking. And not only, she knew, because the room was cold, because light had not brought warmth with it. She listened, and did not, at first, know why she listened. Then she realized that she waited to hear the footsteps of the tall young trooper, walking away from the door on the bare boards of the hall floor. She did not hear him walk away.

  She looked at her hands, and there was blood on her right hand. She shuddered, then, and suddenly, almost desperately, tore off the robe. There was blood on the robe, where the dying girl’s head had rested. She threw the robe to the floor and then, still with a kind of desperation, she tore off what she had worn under the robe—pants, a slip—and threw them on the floor by the robe. There was a little blood on the slip.

  She crossed the room to the bath, moving very fast, almost as if she fled. She tried first the faucet at the tub, but when she turned the knob marked “Hot” only a trickle of water came, and that cold. For a moment, crouched at the tub, her hand in the trickle of freezing water, she felt complete defeat, and, again, the rise of sickness. But she stood, after a moment, and went to the wash basin. The water which should have been hot trickled there, too, and was cold; she turned the other faucet on, and the flow was better and the temperature no worse. She filled the basin and began to scrub her body with the cold water and a rough cloth—scrubbed first at the hand which had been in Audrey Latham’s blood, and then at the shoulder against which she had held the girl’s head.

  But then, long after all the blood had been cleaned away, she went on scrubbing her body with the cold water on the rough cloth, until the skin began to redden and until—almost unbelievably—she felt warmth returning. She dried herself, finally, but still used a kind of violence, although one cannot rub away fear.

  She dressed again in sweater and slacks, and warm socks and loafers over them, and as—almost unconscious of what she did—she sat at the dressing table and brushed her hair, she heard a metallic ping from the radiator. So in time there would be warmth. Then she heard someone knock, lightly at the door. She had been too long, she thought, and stood and was about to answer when someone outside, but quite near the door, said, “Yes, sir?”

  “Oh,” someone said—Brian Perry said, from the other side of the door—“didn’t see you, trooper.”

  “No, sir,” Crowley said. “I guess you didn’t, doctor.” And then, after a moment, Crowley said, “She’s all right, sir. You were worried about her?”

  “Just wanted—” Perry began, but by then Lynn had crossed the room and opened the door. The two men stood quite close together in the hallway. “Apparently,” Brian Perry said, “I needn’t have been.”

  Lynn did not look at either of them. She merely waited.

  “He’s getting everybody together downstairs,” Brian said. He reached out, apparently to touch her shoulder.

  And she was afraid. Until she moved to avoid his hand, she had not realized how afraid she was.

  “I didn’t see who hi
t me,” she said, then, and spoke to a space between the two men. “I didn’t see at all.”

  “Sure not,” Trooper Crowley said. “Don’t you worry, Miss Ross.”

  Brian came so quickly, Lynn thought. He was there as soon as the captain was!

  X

  Brian Perry walked beside her down the hall toward the staircase. The oil stove still burned near the head of the stairs; still gave off the stench of burning oil. But the little circle of light it had thrown against the ceiling had been engulfed in greater light. At the end of the hall, under one of the front windows, a radiator made small, pinging sounds. They went down the stairs, and Trooper Ray Crowley walked close behind them. Lynn looked straight ahead; walked tall down the staircase.

  Someone had removed the oil stove in the lower hall. (That was the thing to do. Think of the small things. Of the oil stoves; of the pinging sound from a radiator; or how bright the light was after darkness. Do not think that Audrey Latham’s right hand was bruised, as if, trying to defend herself against death, she had struck out, futilely, with all she had. Do not think that Brian Perry had been in the pantry as soon as Captain Heimrich had, and that Brian had been fully dressed. As if he had been waiting! Think of the small, ordinary things.)

  Outside, in the night, a motor was running. Listen to the running motor. A generator on a truck—think of the generator. For electricity, they were “rolling their own.” Think of that. There are double doors from the hall into the living room; stand aside while Brian Perry opens the double doors. Go, walking tall, into a room in which there is, or will be, someone who brought a dull hatchet down—more than once; oh, evidently, more than once—on soft blond hair, on the fragile skull beneath the hair. Do not think of that—or of curved lips reddened carefully for the affairs of life—or of blood on them at the end of life.