She sat in her chair again. “I’m acting the old fool,” she told herself. She reached for her knitting; and, for the first time since those terrible days after the accident three years ago that had taken her sight, her hands fumbled, uncertain.
The clamminess gathered in the valleys of her face and would not leave; the house whispered to her darkly. She rose and went into the hallway. She turned toward Frederick’s room. She moved without the aid of a cane. Every room in this house, even to Terry’s laboratory downstairs, was indelibly mapped in her mind. It had been something to occupy her time.
She moved with the silence of one accustomed to searching out for guidance the tiny, ethereal sounds that are a part of silence. Eight paces. The low table with the dragon’s heads carved on it would be here. She stepped aside to skirt the dragon head table, edged toward the wall once more. Then she was standing quite still.
She was achingly attuned to the house, to the night outside. She sensed the presence near her, perhaps the rustle of cloth or the quick stopping of shallow breathing. She froze against the wall, pulses thudding. She whispered, “Pete? What are you doing out of bed, Pete?”
There was nothing, no sound, no awareness except deep inside her, a thousand wings pounding up to her throat. “Terry? Haywood? Ida?” Distantly she heard her voice rising. No one answered; nothing moved save the rustic of the earth beneath the wind and the mocking gaiety of the laughter in brightness downstairs. “Who’s there?”
In her own private world she was swathed in total darkness. Yet she knew dial someone was here in the hallway with her. Someone who would not answer to her question; someone who had stopped breathing until she should pass. And moments before she had heard her son groan…
She moved a still step; then she whirled, almost dropping to her knees, her hand upflung, as she heard the crack of a knee joint in that other world beyond her own.
She waited without knowing what she was waiting for. Then she knew that she was alone. There’d been only the cracking of a knee joint as someone had turned in slow, awkward, silent motion, then long seconds later the crack of a stair down the hall.
She straightened, trembling. She stumbled down the hallway, found the door to Frederick’s room.
The door whispered a creak as she opened and closed it. She stood inside the doorway, her hands clutched before her. If her son had returned, he might have slipped in. she knew. He’d done (hat sort of thing before, lie took a robust pleasure in sending warm little gifts home as total surprises. It was rather late, and if he had returned, he might have planned to surprise them at the breakfast table tomorrow.
“Frederick?”
She moved through the morass of silence. She felt his bed, the rovers untouched. She moved along the bed and her mind was forming new words: “Perhaps it was all in your nerves. Are you growing old and imagining things? It seems…”
She tripped, went to her knees. She shouldn’t have tripped. She should have been passing in front of the chair near the bookcase. There should have been nothing there to trip her…
Enhanced, the clamminess poured back over her like frigid, thick molasses. She touched the shoe that had tripped her, the worsted material of a trousers’ cuff.
He was sprawled in the chair, unmoving. Her exploring fingers increased their tempo, felt for a heartbeat. found none. Found only a wetness that left her fingertips sticky, the heavy, solid shaft of a knife…
She shuddered, closing her eyes tightly as if the darkness cloaking her wasn’t enough. She fell his hand, the signet ring she knew so well. His hand was clenched, and she uncurled the cooling fingers slowly. A button dropped in her palm. A button from a coat.
She sank very quietly in a shrunken, sitting heap on the carpet. She endured a convulsion of silent, dry, hard sobbing deep down inside: her lips whispered, “Frederick… My son…”
Then she rose unsteadily and left the room. She’d never moved about the house without caution before, but in the hallway she moved quickly. In her palm she felt the pressure of the button she’d taken from his hand. It was important, that button, for hint to have torn it loose and clutched it in death. She wondered what sort of grim, short struggle had taken place in the darkness of her son’s room. From downstairs, the brittle laughter of the party beat at her.
The scroll-legged table with the vase was at the end of the hall, below the window. She dropped the coat button into the vase, turned, started toward the stairway, measuring and counting each pace.
She knew when she reached the mouth of the stairway. Without pause she turned, and driving pains clashed across her shins. She tattered swayed, and then she and the ridiculous, low, dragon head table that had been in its customary place down the hallway only moments ago were tangled together, twisting and failing.
In her black maw of night, she knew that whoever had passed her in the hall as she’d gone to Frederick’s room had moved that table, knowing she would start down the stairs and that she never used a cane. It would be so very simple to murder her; move a single piece of furniture from its customary place and she was agonizingly helpless. Then the flashing thought broke off as she clutched at the rail, missed. Somewhere below her she heard the dragon head table in a crashing fall. Then she was plunging down, her world topsy-turvy, pain stinging her shoulder, her head, firing the dark mantel over her sight with flaming stars. Then the stars all fell and went out.
Ida’s voice bit into her consciousness: “Well, can’t you do something for her, Terry?”
And Terry’s voice, quivering with low patience, “Darling, you’ll have to give her a moment.” Elsie Sole felt a hand under her head, cool liquid on her lips. She stirred.
“Well!” Ida’s voice brought a picture of Ida with arms akimbo. “What in the world were you doing. Elsie, trying to carry that table down the stairs?”
She passed her hand over her wrinkled brow, trying to remember. Pictures grew in the black walls of her eyes as consciousness returned. “I wasn’t trying to carry the table down,” she whisperer. “It was placed at the head of the stairs to trip me.”
“Really!” Ida said.
“For God’s sake, shut up!” Terry snapped. “I told you that she’d broken no bones, only stunned herself, when we brought her in here. Hut can’t you have a little mercy on Elsie?”
The click of teeth: Ida was throbbing, eyes blazing. Hut she said nothing else to her weary, tubby husband.
“Peter?” Elsie said. “Where is Peter?”
Haywood helped her to a sitting position. “Asleep,” he said. “Your fall woke him, but I sent him back to bed. Elsie, as the boy’s guardian. I feel that you… well, the way you handle him occasionally has made the boy a very nervous…”
Only then was she aware of the dead silence in the house. “The people,” she said, “the party?”
“They’re gone.” Ida said. “You broke the party up.” A tiny hiccough — perhaps Ida had had a long talk in a corner tonight during the party with young Mr. Carruthers from the estate down the road.
“And you,” Elsie Sole swept blank eyes from one to the other of them, “where have you been all evening?”
“Elsie,” Terry said gently.
She flung his hand away. “No! I’m not unbalanced! I know what I’m talking about!”
“Perhaps it was the accident she was in while riding with you three years ago, Terry,” Ida said nastily.
A chill grew in the room. The accident three years ago. The accident that had taken Elsie Sole’s eyes. “The accident isn’t important,” she breathed. “Not now. When something of real importance happens, the things that seemed to be so important are not very important any longer. You,” she said again, “the three of you. Which of you was out of the room this evening, away from the party?”