Burnt Offering Page 18

  “Mr. Van Brunt isn’t here,” he said. “Went—you did say he went to New York, Mrs. Van Brunt? On business?”

  She said, with accentuated forbearance, that she had told him that.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “You expect him back—when?”

  “Really,” she said, “this is hardly tolerable, Captain Heimrich.”

  “This evening?” Heimrich said. “Tomorrow? I assume he is coming back?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Because,” Heimrich said, “he leaves places suddenly sometimes, doesn’t he?”

  She looked at him for some seconds. She said she had no idea what he meant by that.

  “When he left here to go to Chicago,” Heimrich said. “A few years ago. I understand he left suddenly.”

  “I have,” Mrs. Van Brunt said, “no idea where you got that impression. It is not in the least true. Furthermore—”

  Again she was interrupted, but not this time by a bell. A door at the far end of the drawing room opened and a tall figure appeared in it.

  “Dark in here,” Henry Van Brunt III said, coming into the room. “I didn’t know you’d planned a party, mother.” He looked around the room. “Well,” he said. “Good evening, everybody.”

  “I was just telling the captain,” Mrs. Van Brunt said, “that you had had to go to New York on business. He was asking when you might be back. But, I haven’t the least idea what concern it is of his.”

  “Now, mother,” Henry said. “Mustn’t be touchy. I keep telling you that, dear.” His voice was light; it displayed affection. “High horse with silver trappings,” he said, and included all of them in, it appeared, a gentle joke. “Too bad they’re not uranium. Pretty much anything is the captain’s business just now, I imagine? That right, sir?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, and found that he was looking at Mrs. Van Brunt, because Mrs. Van Brunt was looking, so intently, at her tall and handsome—and at the moment noticeably debonair—son.

  “I hope—” Mrs. Van Brunt said, and her son looked at her. “Nothing,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about anything,” Henry said. “Everything’s moving along.” There was confidence in his voice; he nodded his head to emphasize his words. He turned to Heimrich, included Sam Jackson, smiled at both, man to man. “Hard for mother to believe I’ve grown up,” he said. It was all most disarming.

  Lightning flashed in the room, in spite of drawn curtains. Thunder shook the air.

  Tightness remained around Mrs. Van Brunt’s eyes. She became, Heimrich thought, conscious that she was being looked at. She smiled, a little hurriedly, and said, “I suppose that’s it, really. I’m so glad things went well, Henry.” And then she said, “But the others aren’t interested in this, of course. Are you, Captain Heimrich?”

  Heimrich was. He did not say so. He said, “You went to New York after you’d stopped by the hospital, Mr. Van Brunt?”

  “That’s right, sir,” Van Brunt said. “Caught an express at Cold Harbor. Saw this—this man I wanted to see. Missed the last express coming back. Closed the gates in my face.” He turned to Jackson. “Locals are as bad as ever,” he said.

  “Henry,” his mother said. “Did you get any dinner?”

  “See how she worries?” Henry Van Brunt said, to everyone. “Sure I did, mother. Drink and a bite at the Commodore bar. While I waited for the train.”

  He was loquacious, Heimrich thought. He seemed elated, almost excited. Perhaps he was one of those exhilarated by great storms.

  “Captain Heimrich got the idea you might not be coming back,” Mrs. Van Brunt said. “Thought you did things—on the spur of the moment. Wasn’t that it, captain? I told him how absurd that was.”

  “Certainly is,” Henry said. “Don’t see where—”

  “He somehow got the idea you had left the bank suddenly,” she said. “When you went out to Chicago.”

  “Blame that on me,” Sam Jackson said. “I thought you had, Henry. Mentioned it to Heimrich here.”

  “I think that was perfectly ridiculous, Sam Jackson,” Myra Burns said. “Why would a young man like Henry want to waste his life in a stupid bank?”

  He’s got them talking, Forniss thought. It’s always helpful when they start to talk—even if they talk around things. Forniss looked at the captain. The captain had his eyes closed. He had once told Forniss that he heard better when he didn’t look—that so words and inflections were more isolated, more revealing. But it was not clear to Forniss what was being revealed. Heimrich opened his eyes. He shook his head very slightly, toward Forniss.

  “I thought,” Mrs. Van Brunt said, “that you were looking for Mrs. Faye. Not for—old gossip.”

  “Gossip?” Heimrich said. “Why do you say gossip, Mrs. Van Brunt?”

  “A word,” she said. “Things that have nothing to do with what you say you came for. Mrs. Faye.” She was, suddenly, again imperious, as she had been earlier. “You can see she isn’t here. Had no reason to come here.”

  “Perhaps,” her son said, “they think we’ve got her hidden. Locked in a closet somewhere.” He laughed. He sobered. “Sorry,” he said. “I do realize it’s not a joke, captain.”

  Heimrich did not smile.

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t a joke, Mr. Van Brunt.” His eyes were open, now. “I really quite expected Mrs. Faye to come here,” he said. “Apparently I was wrong. Or—”

  Thunder drowned his voice. Thunder rolled in the valley.

  XII

  She was conscious, first, of a strange odor, and then of being in a dark place, and then of being very cold. She realized that she was lying on a wooden floor and she heard the storm; it was as if again she were in a drum, with someone beating on the drum. But then she realized that the sound was the familiar one of thunder.

  The odor was pungent, yet a little sweet; it was not unpleasant, and it was almost familiar. She chased memory around and around in her mind and, during those moments, still not wholly conscious, it became a matter of desperate importance that she identify the odor. It seemed that, if she could once lay memory on that one small thing, what had happened would be understandable. Then she would be able to start again. The pungence, the almost sweetness—not a perfume, yet a little like—

  It came suddenly, and very bright. The odor was of a moth repellant; it would come from a little metal box, hanging by a hook. You opened the box and put into it a cake of something—a cake which slowly, over months, spread this odd odor in the air of—of a closet. That was it. She was in a closet. She felt curiously triumphant for a second. She got slowly to her feet. She swayed, and reached out, and found rough textured cloth under her hand, and steadied herself against it. But it moved at her touch.

  There was lightning, then, and it briefly laid fire above and below a door—a thin edge of white fire below, and another above.

  She reached the door, although the light was gone before she could move. She groped for, and found, the knob of the door, and turned it. But already, as she tried, she knew the door would be locked. The door was locked. For seconds more she twisted the knob this way and that, and pushed at the door, and for those seconds she was close to panic. But then she released the knob and merely stood quietly, and by then consciousness was fully back. Memory came with it.

  She had revealed, to the driver of the station wagon, a knowledge that it was dangerous to have—unbelievably dangerous to have. Because of that—because in her involuntary recoil when she saw the driver’s face—she had done the very thing which, midway of doing by intention, she had realized would be fatal. It had not been yet. She was locked up—in a clothes closet, somewhere. But she was alive. And yet, since now she knew the murderer, and was known to know, she could not be left alive. That she had been only hurt and locked up, not killed, must mean—

  She steadied her mind. It must mean that there was, for this time—but almost surely not for long—a reason to keep her alive. She was to serve some purpose of the murderer’s. It then became, in general ou
tline, quite obvious. She was, somehow, to be made to assume the murderer’s guilt. It was to appear that she had killed Orville Phipps and then—and then, of course, herself. But for that, circumstances—she could not do more than guess what they would be—would have to be arranged. Meanwhile she was being—she was being kept in storage. She was something—an object—a convenience—to be used later.

  She began to shiver and for what seemed a long time the trembling was uncontrollable. Her hands shook, and her whole body, and when she tried to set her jaw hard, there were spasms—very quick, quite beyond stopping—in the muscles of her jaws. Finally she took a deep breath, and held it, and then another, and so managed to break the wave-like, rapid rhythms of nerves and muscles. And with that steadying, her mind steadied too.

  It was not only, she thought, that she was frightened. It was that, in the most simple physical sense, she was very cold. She still wore the raincoat over a sleeveless dress, but the coat had absorbed, not rejected, water. It encased her in cold wetness.

  She tugged at the belt, and it stuck in the buckle, and at that small check she began again to tremble. Again she breathed deeply, steadying her shaking hands, and she got the belt unbuckled and the coat off. She let it fall, soddenly, to the floor.

  The linen dress was as wet as the coat had been; it clung to her body and now, reached by the air, the dress was like a film of ice around her. She reached for the zipper at the side, and the zipper stuck, and again the trembling began. She wrenched at the zipper, and began to swear, softly, desperately. The zipper gave and she could, in a second, step out of the soaked dress. She let it, too, fall to the floor. She found she trembled still, with cold and with fear. But it was not as bad as it had been.

  Because it had been so hot that day—how long ago the day was, how hard to remember its great heat!—she had worn only pants under the sleeveless dress. Now she began to chafe her body with her hands, rubbing hard with the palms of hands on belly, down long, slim legs. The exercise, as much as the friction of hands, warmed her. The shivering stopped, and with the warmth of blood in the skin surface, which brought a kind of renewal, her mind became more clear than it had been, and she could think what to do next.

  Her eyes had adjusted, and now it was no longer fully dark in the little prison. The lightning continued—it seemed, indeed, to be growing more frequent, and more intense—and, at intervals which could not be predicted, the closet was briefly, and partially, illuminated by the streaks of white fire above and below the door. (For an instant, after each flash, the room became black again, but almost at once, each time, shadowy outlines reappeared.)

  The closet was fairly large, and generally square. A bar crossed it, and on the bar clothing dangled from hangers—a coat of some sort; a man’s dark suit and another suit, the second tweed; what appeared to be a robe. She reached for the robe, first, but found it was of silk or silk-like material, and the touch of it was cold. She wanted the warmth of wool.

  The jacket of the tweed suit had rough warmth to questing fingers. She slipped it from the hanger, and put it on. It sagged from her slim shoulders, hung loosely about her body. But it was not as grotesquely large as she had expected. She pulled the trousers of the suit from the hanger and stepped into them.

  They did not fit as well as the coat, being too short in leg and much too large at the waist. But there was a belt in the loops, and she tightened the belt to the last hole.

  The man who owned these clothes was a small man, she thought, vaguely, and then vagueness ended. No man owned these clothes—the man who had owned them was dead—the small man was dead. She was wearing a tweed suit which had been Orville Phipps’s; she was in the house which had been Phipps’s; locked in a closet—apparently—of Phipps’s bedroom. She remembered what she could of the house, although for years—not since she was quite a small girl—had she been invited to visit it. The main bedroom was on the second floor. She remembered that. Presumably, she had been carried up a flight of stairs to be tossed into the closet. Or—dragged up.

  She thrust her hands into the side pockets of the dead man’s coat, holding the coat tightly about her. The man was dead, but the coat was warm. In the left pocket her fingers felt a folded paper; in the right—a packet of matches. She took the matches out and struck one, carefully, and then could see more clearly. Clearer vision, however, changed nothing. Sometimes there were trap doors in the ceilings of closets. But there was none here. There was one way out, and that way locked. The match burned out, and the darkness returned. She lighted another match and, by its light, examined the door more closely. It appeared to be a very heavy door. She pushed against it, and felt solidity. She put her whole weight against it, and it did not give at all, and the second match went out.

  But it had showed her, against the closet wall, two pairs of shoes and one of leather boots. She picked up one of the boots, and found it very heavy, made for rough use, in rough country weather; made for dry feet in deep snow. And, set into the leather heel, there was a steel plate.

  She held the boot like a hammer and began to pound at a panel of the door. The steel plate dug into the wood.

  The boot made an awkward tool; it was hard to direct its blows. She tried to hit each time in the same place, and as near as she could to the knob of the door. At first, she thought she was making more noise than progress; at first she waited for the noise of her beating on the door to bring the murderer who had locked her there. But when the first few blows brought no hurrying feet, no rough commands, she decided that she was, for the time, alone in the big house on the hill high above the Hudson, almost as far above the highway in its lesser valley.

  She could, finally, begin to feel that the panel was weakening under the blows; that the steel heel guard was biting more deeply into the old wood.

  But then there was light brighter than any before and the sharp crash of thunder was simultaneous with it. Something—the air itself—seemed to stagger her; it was as if, again, someone had hit her. Again, for a second, she was numb.

  That was close, she thought, that was—Oh God! she thought, it struck the house!

  “Well,” Susan Faye said aloud, in a quite conversational voice. “That’s all I needed. That’s really all.”

  She began to beat, again, on the door. With each jarring blow, now, there was sharp pain in her arms and shoulders.

  The tweed jacket hampered her. She stripped it off. She beat on the door with the leather boot.

  “Why would she come here?” Cornelia Van Brunt demanded. “Why do you think she would? What do you mean?”

  “Her son had been threatened,” Heimrich said. “By someone who called on the telephone. By someone who thinks that Mrs. Faye knows something about Mr. Phipps. Who won’t believe she doesn’t.”

  “That is unfortunate,” Mrs. Van Brunt said. “It has nothing to do with us. Why would it bring her here?” She looked at Sam Jackson, at her own son. “Does anybody know what he’s talking about?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Faye arranged to have her son guarded,” Heimrich said. “Then she went—I think to find the person who had called. To—try to convince the person she knew nothing. Nothing dangerous to a murderer.”

  “You keep saying ‘person,’” Sam Jackson said.

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “A man telephoned, I think. Mrs. Faye thought. A man, as it turns out, that the boy didn’t know. He knows most men around here, his mother says.” He looked, then, at Henry Van Brunt. “He didn’t know you, did he, Mr. Van Brunt? He would have been not much more than a baby when you left the town.”

  “When Phipps was killed, I was on a train which had just pulled out of Chicago,” Van Brunt said, and smiled pleasantly. “I don’t know whether the kid would recognize me or not. I don’t remember ever seeing the kid. How do you know he didn’t know this man who telephoned?”

  Heimrich told him. “How dreadful!” Myra Burns said. Van Brunt shook his head again; he continued to smile. He was not, he pointed out, “pretty old.” He had not w
orn a hat for years, or sun glasses.

  “This is all preposterous,” Mrs. Van Brunt said, firmly. “Even you must see that, captain.”

  Sam Jackson looked at Heimrich. He shook his head, abruptly.

  “You’re wasting time,” he said. “Don’t expect me to waste it with you. I’m going to find Sue.”

  He turned abruptly toward the door. The faint candlelight threw his shadow, long and wavering, against the wall.

  “Mr. Jackson,” Heimrich said. “Does Michael know this man who works for you? This man Burke?”

  Jackson stopped; he turned back and now the shadows were dark on his face, so that his expression could not be guessed at.

  “Burke’s new, you said,” Heimrich told him. “Does he ever wear sun glasses, Mr. Jackson? And—”

  “Goodness!” said Myra Burns. “Do look! It must be the Varney place.”

  She pointed, then, through a window which opened toward the west, which opened toward the road in the valley and the hills beyond. There was a dull glow there against tossing clouds; it was not steady; it seemed to fade and brighten. (As the glow from the burning fire house had.)

  “Goodness,” Miss Burns said. “Do you suppose it was struck by lightning?”

  Jackson looked, and swore, and began to move toward the door.

  But it was Henry Van Brunt III who seemed most startled, who said, rather loudly, “We’ve got to get—” and then stopped, controlling his voice, and finished. “We’d better go and see if we can do anything. There might be someone—another prowler—” Then he went after Jackson.

  It was Sergeant Forniss who tried to call the Cold Harbor Fire Department, and found the telephone dead. He turned from the telephone and Heimrich was beside him, and there was a kind of violence in Heimrich’s face Forniss had not seen there before. But Heimrich still spoke in his usual voice.

  “The rest have gone,” Heimrich said. “All in a great hurry, Charlie. We’d better hurry, too.”

  They ran out of the house, for their car. Heimrich drove now, and he turned the car on Mrs. Van Brunt’s well-cared-for, well-mowed lawn. The car sank a little, but the wheels held.