Burnt Offering Page 23

  Outside, but very close, there was, briefly, the sound of a siren.

  “They made good time,” Brian Perry said, and stood up. He walked out of the breakfast room and through the larger room beyond—the now rather dreary room in which, last night, they had dined with candles on the table. Lynn, finishing her coffee, and her cigarette, heard the voices of men from the hall. After a time, the voices ceased and she heard the front door close. They had—she supposed they had—gone down to the lake.

  There was no one in the hall when she went into it; there might, from the silence, have been no one else in the house. She went up the stairs slowly, and toward her room. She reached the door of what, she knew now, was Audrey Latham’s room. She heard a voice behind the door—a level voice, Margaret Halley’s voice.

  “—will do no good to anyone,” Margaret Halley said. “I’m sure you will agree to that, Miss Latham. No possible good. Merely add needless unpleasantness to what—”

  “Leave me alone,” Audrey said, and her voice rose, sounded close to hysteria. “You think I don’t know about you and—”

  Lynn had, involuntarily, hesitated when she heard Margaret speaking. Now she went on—quickly but as quietly as she could, so that the two behind the door would not have the embarrassment of realizing that they might have been overheard. She closed the door of her room behind her, softly. It was still cold in the room. The little indicator light of the blanket still showed red. She had forgotten to turn it off. She turned it off, and shivered in the chill of the room. She went into the bathroom and found it warmer, and let water run and found it hot. She showered, then, in water as hot as she could stand, and afterward dressed in a warm sweater and slacks.

  What do I do now? she wondered. What can I do? She had planned, after she had changed, to go to Margaret Halley; to offer to do whatever she could do. But there had been something in Margaret’s voice, heard through the closed door—a quality which made her sure that, whatever Margaret felt, it would be useless, almost an impertinence, to go to her with conventional words.

  The “dark year” had left, somewhere deep in her mind, a tiny shadow of its darkness: a dread of indecision. Standing now in the center of the small room, that dread for an instant grew larger. What do I do? I must decide what to do. But she looked at the small darkness and it vanished. This was not the same; not in the least the same. There were not now, in a real sense, alternatives to choose between. Since she could do nothing, it did not really matter what she did. She chose, therefore, and simply, to go where it would be warmer.

  She went out of her room and along the hall toward the stairway. Tom Kemper came toward her. He had changed to a dark suit. He said, “I was looking for Margaret. Do you know where she is?” And then, “Somebody ought to be with her.”

  “She was with Miss Latham a little while ago,” Lynn said. “I heard her voice. In Miss Latham’s room.”

  “Why the—” Kemper began, and his youthful, open face was briefly knotted in an expression Lynn could not interpret. “That’s all right, then,” he said. “This is awful, isn’t it?”

  She nodded her head. There was no point in adding one meaningless word to another.

  He half smiled.

  “Aside from everything else,” he said. “Of course it is a hell of a sad thing—a tragic thing. Aside from that, I mean. I feel a lot in the way. Don’t you?”

  That was how Lynn did feel. It was a trivial way to feel, an inappropriate way. The human mind is by no means always equal to the tragic.

  “That’s exactly how I feel,” Lynn said. “As if—well, as if I ought to go back to New York. Just—disappear.”

  “Get out from under foot,” Kemper said. “That’s it. But—I suppose we can’t do that. Not right away.” He paused, then came on toward her. “The police have got here,” he said. “A trooper. Gone down to the lake, with the doctor. They have to check up on things like this, you know. Accidents. Or—” He did not finish.

  “Suicide,” Lynn said. “Margaret thinks Mr. Halley killed himself.”

  “I know,” Kemper said. “I’m afraid maybe she’s right. The poor old guy had these—these spells. Times when he got very down. Margaret’s been afraid for a long time that—well, that something like this would happen.”

  “If the police think that, they’ll want to ask questions, won’t they?” She said, “Whether any of us noticed anything? Whether he said anything? Find out what we know before we leave?”

  “I suppose so,” Kemper said. “It oughtn’t to take long.” He smiled again, faintly. “No use standing here, is there?” he said, and motioned to the staircase. They went down into the entrance hall. It was empty. The double doors to the living room were closed. They went into the cheerless dining room. Kemper went to a window. He said the snow seemed to be about over. Then he said, “Here they come,” and Lynn joined him at the window.

  A uniformed trooper was coming toward the house, wading slowly through deep snow. Dr. Brian Perry was with him. They came up on the porch and stamped their feet. At the window, Lynn could hear the front door open. “I’ll ask her to come down,” Brian Perry said, and they could hear him going up the stairs. The trooper came to the door of the dining room, and looked at Lynn and Tom Kemper. He was very young, Lynn thought. He said, “Good morning,” in a pleasant voice. He said, “My name’s Crowley. Trooper Crowley.” He waited, politely.

  Lynn told him who she was. Kemper said he was Thomas Kemper.

  “It’s a bad business,” Crowley said. “Very bad for everybody.”

  “Did he—” Lynn began, and the young trooper shook his head.

  “Don’t know much about it,” he said. “Could have been an accident. But why was he down there? Could have been suicide. But why do it the hard way?” He looked at them. “I suppose neither of you knows the answers?”

  “How could we?” Kemper said.

  “That’s right,” the trooper said. “Well, be somebody else along, probably. Detective captain, most likely.”

  “I gather,” Kemper said, “we wait till he comes?”

  “Wish you would,” Trooper Crowley said. “Might be something he’d want to ask you. Quite a snow, wasn’t it?”

  He seemed very young indeed. He seemed to be making conversation, and looked from one to the other. Kemper said it had been quite a snow.

  “Have the plows through pretty soon,” the trooper said. “Well—” He went out of the room, then. He closed the door behind him.

  Captain M. L. Heimrich, criminal identification division, New York State Police, was sound asleep. Then he was wide awake. There was no transition. Captain Heimrich, lying in bed in his room at the Old Stone Inn, Van Brunt (Town of Van Brunt, County of Putnam) looked at his watch, and was somewhat surprised. It showed him the time was ten twenty-five. No, ten twenty-seven. It had been years since he had slept so late. He could not remember when he had slept so late.

  But it had been years, also, since he had taken a young woman out for New Year’s Eve. The one thing had led to the other, naturally. Heimrich sat up in bed and lighted a cigarette, carrying the unusual one step further. He did not, normally, smoke before breakfast. He seemed to be walking new paths.

  It had been a pleasant evening. It had been one of the pleasantest evenings he could recall. He was still somewhat surprised that he had brought himself to embark upon it. He was an old dog, learning new tricks.

  It had started with a notice, to its customers, from the Old Stone Inn of Van Brunt. As was its custom, the Inn had announced, there would be a special New Year’s Eve dinner. Dinner would be followed by dancing. Only forty reservations were to be accepted, so that such prized guests as Captain M. L. Heimrich would find the inn uncrowded. The Inn hoped that the valued guest to whom this invitation was directed, would make his reservation in good time, thus securing a table advantageously placed.

  Heimrich had received this invitation some days before Christmas, at the Hawthorne Barracks of the State police. He had folded it neatly and
placed it in a wastebasket. Some little time later he had taken it out, and unfolded it carefully, and read it again, with the thought that the Inn must be more or less scraping the bottom of its barrel of valued guests. Heimrich had stayed there for a few hot summer days during the investigation of the murder of the late supervisor of the Town of Van Brunt. He had not had, particularly, the sense of being valued. Over the whole incident, he had thought, the Inn, together with the rest of Van Brunt, would have preferred that a veil be drawn.

  Heimrich had folded the invitation again, with the same care, but this time had put it in his pocket. Being a deliberate man, he had thought matters over for the rest of that day, and for most of the next. The matters he thought of appeared, at first, ridiculous. He was old for this sort of thing. A young woman like Susan Faye—a slender gray-eyed young woman, with square shoulders and other seemly attributes—would long since have planned for the holidays. In Van Brunt, and its environs, there were doubtless many young men of her own age who would be delighted to take Susan Faye to the special dinner (to be followed by dancing) at the Old Stone Inn. He—he must be fifteen years older than she. Perhaps even a year or two in excess of fifteen. He would be making himself ridiculous. He was anything but a dancing man.

  “Why—hullo, captain,” Susan Faye had said, when she answered her telephone. It had been absurd of him to find her voice exciting.

  She had been very well. Yes, young Michael had also been very well. The Colonel had eaten something which had disagreed with him, but was now, also, in admirable health.

  “Is he still as sad as always?” Heimrich asked.

  “He seems to be,” Susan Faye said, in her grave young voice, and did not hurry Captain Heimrich.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said then, apropos of nothing in particular. “Mrs. Faye, I wondered whether by any chance you—”

  She heard him through, which, as he spoke, he felt to be more than he deserved.

  “I’d like to very much,” Susan had said. “There is nothing I’d like better, Merton.”

  Captain Heimrich, who had always regarded his given name with dogged disapproval, found that it sounded pleasantly in his ears.

  At three minutes after midnight Heimrich, putting down the glass from which he had drunk a toast to the New Year, found that Susan Faye, sitting beside him on the banquette, was looking up at him, as if there were still something to be expected. For a moment, Heimrich had been at a loss, and then he remembered. Somewhat to his astonishment, and greatly to his enjoyment, Captain Heimrich had kissed the sweet, wide mouth of Mrs. Susan Faye, widow, mother of a boy of seven (and a half, by now) and custodian of the largest of Great Danes. Leaving her at her home some time later, Heimrich had kissed her again. He had driven back to the inn through heavy snow, and had been quite unconscious of the fact that dangling links on one of the tire chains were banging angrily against the fender.

  Heimrich, who was a very solid man, with a brown face which might have been carved from some durable wood, got out of bed. He wore dark blue pajamas. He went into the bathroom, and ran a tub, since there was no shower. He had one foot in it when the telephone rang. He had a momentary feeling of pleased expectancy, which was, again, ridiculous. He said, “Heimrich speaking,” wished for the briefest of instants that he had used other words, and discovered that he had not needed to.

  “Yes, Charlie,” he said, to Sergeant Charles Forniss, speaking from Hawthorne. “Yes, I was awake.”

  “Young Crowley,” Forniss said. “Trooper Ray Crowley?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I remember Crowley.”

  “Just phoned in,” Forniss said. “Answered a squeal from up around Lake Carabec. Man named Halley—John Halley. Found in the lake. Wife says it’s suicide. Says she was afraid he might. Man had been in a depression.”

  “Crowley doesn’t like it? Say why?”

  “Halley had to walk a hundred yards, through pretty deep snow. Jump in a very cold lake.”

  “Well?”

  “There was a bottle of sleeping pills on the bed table in his room. All of them he would have needed.”

  “All right,” Captain Heimrich said. “I’ll pick you up, Charlie.”

  Buy Let Dead Enough Alone Now!

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1955 by Richard and Frances Lockridge

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-5037-1

  This 2018 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  MysteriousPress.com

  www.openroadmedia.com

  THE CAPTAIN HEIMRICH MYSTERIES

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.

  Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.

  MysteriousPress.com. offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom

  MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  The Mysterious Bookshop, founded in 1979, is located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It is the oldest and largest mystery-specialty bookstore in America.

  The shop stocks the finest selection of new mystery hardcovers, paperbacks, and periodicals. It also features a superb collection of signed modern first editions, rare and collectable works, and Sherlock Holmes titles. The bookshop issues a free monthly newsletter highlighting its book clubs, new releases, events, and recently acquired books.

  58 Warren Street

  info@mysteriousbookshop.com

  (212) 587-1011

  Monday through Saturday

  11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

  FIND OUT MORE AT:

  www.mysteriousbookshop.com

  FOLLOW US:

  @TheMysterious and Facebook.com/MysteriousBookshop

  SUBSCRIBE:

  The Mysterious Newsletter

  Find a full list of our authors and titles at www.openroadmedia.com

  FOLLOW US

  @ OpenRoadMedia