(Constable Clovis was in the navy. His uniform was too tight. He couldn’t breathe. He was seasick.)
Revel shut the door.
(“Admiral, have you any daughters?” “Certainly. I have twelve daughters, all named Hedy.”)
Revel put him on the rug. His cheek touched the rug very gently.
(“What soft skin you got, Hedy!”)
Upstairs a door opened and shut softly. Dinah stood in the hall a moment, listening, peering through the darkness.
It’s all right, she thought. George must have fixed the policeman by this time.
She crept along the wall to the stairs. There was no sound but the quiet slithering of her dress as it touched the wall. It was as if the house had begun to breathe.
I’m at home in the dark, she thought, like a cat. Little whining cats, Prye had said. He’d said something else too. “I’m not sure you didn’t kill them yourself.” He hadn’t been sure — then. And even now that he was sure, what good did it do him?
At the bottom of the stairs she paused. She could hear the heavy breathing of Constable Clovis through the door of the drawing room. She put her hand on the door and made a small scratching noise with her nails. It sounded like a mouse inside the walls.
“George.”
The door opened. “Yes?”
“Leave this open a crack. Is the policeman all right?”
“Fine.” Revel laughed softly. “He’s dreaming.”
“I’m going down now to get it.”
“Be careful.”
“It’s all right. I can hear the steps creak if someone comes.”
She didn’t want to tell him how frightened she was so she moved away fast toward the basement and opened the door.
The cold air swept past her like ghosts clammy and chill from their graves, laying damp fingers on her cheeks. The steps sighed under her weight.
She opened the door of the billiard room and went in. It was so dark she could feel Dennis’ ghost moving around in the room, looking at her with its three eyes.
She snapped the light on, breathing hard.
There was no ghost, only the chair where Dennis had sat holding his billiard cue, and the fireplace with its dead ashes. She went over to the fireplace and got down on her knees in front of it.
Dennis had built a fire here.
That was the important thing. Everything depended on that, on the fastidious and immaculate Dennis building a fire, getting coal dust on his hands. Dennis had built a fire and then he had died. The policemen left the room as it was; they told Jackson not to clean it. That was the second important thing.
She brushed aside the ashes and put her hand on one of the bricks at the back. It moved under her hand and fell out.
She sat back on her heels, staring at the cavity in the wall without moving. It was there. The money was there. She could see the tip of the brown paper.
I had to be right, she thought. It was the only possible place. And because the policemen hadn’t let Jackson clean the fireplace they hadn’t found out about the clean-out hole at the back.
She put her hand inside the cavity and brought out the package. Fifty thousand dollars. Three men had died because of it and now it was here in her hands, an ordinary package wrapped in brown paper and fastened with twine.
She took off the paper and the twine and put them in the fireplace with some wood on top of them. Then she lit a match and watched the flames grow.
I’ll burn it, every dollar of it. Then they can never prove anything against George.
“Dinah!”
The word was a whisper above the crackling of the flames. Dinah turned her head. Jane was standing in the doorway, her hands at her throat as if she were choking.
So she’s come, Dinah thought. She’s come and I didn’t hear the steps creak and she’ll kill me.
“Dinah, what are you doing?”
Dinah didn’t move. The blood was running out of her head, she was floating, falling, dying—
“Burning,” she said. “I’m burning the money.”
Her hand darted out toward the fire.
“No!” Jane cried. “No! Wait!” She flung herself across the room, stretching out her hands, reaching for the crisp, sweet, burning bills.
Her hands were in the fire, grasping, clutching, growing black as they burned. The fire leaped out at her hair.
Dinah clung to her knees, pulling her away, screaming and laughing and crying for George. They were burning together with their arms locked, lashed together by the flames, rolling and twisting on the floor like pigs on a barbecue.
The pigs squealed and grew black, and the smell of flesh crept up the stairs and Constable Clovis dreamed he was eating roast pork.
“Dead on arrival,” said Dr. Hall, senior intern on the accident ward. “I hate these burn cases. What’s her name?”
“Stevens,” Miss Tomson replied.
“Stevens? I had a Stevens on Accident last week. She was a honey.”
“I remember,” Miss Tomson said coldly. “This can’t be the same one.” She looked down at the corpse and shivered. “I’d hate to be burned, wouldn’t you?”
Dr. Hall said he certainly would.
“We’re using the sulfadiazine spray,” said Dr. Hopkins, chief of staff. “I think she’ll pull through.”
“How much skin area was burned?” Prye asked.
“About 15 per cent. Still, she’s young.”
“Any skin grafting to be done?”
“Quite a bit, naturally.”
“Her husband wants to volunteer,” Prye said. “He feels he’s responsible for the accident.”
“Dear me. What did he do?”
“And there was the two of them,” said Police Constable Clovis, “lying on the floor burned to a crisp.”
Mrs. Clovis, the Clovis brood, and Clovis neighbors listened in open-mouthed amazement.
“What burns me up,” said Clovis, “is that they didn’t take me into their confidence. I could have prevented the whole thing.”
“Harry wasn’t asleep, mind you,” Mrs. Clovis said stanchly. “He was struck, cruelly struck. Show them your head, Harry.”
Clovis obliged.
“What Mrs. Revel should of done,” he went on, “is to tell me she thought she knew where the money was hid. But she figured she’d hint to the Stevens dame that she was going down to get the money and the Stevens dame would follow her and maybe try to kill her. Naturally, I wouldn’t of stood for such a thing, so she got her husband to knock me out.”
“It was just brutal, that’s what it was,” Mrs. Clovis said loyally.
“And then the Stevens dame got down to the cellar without Revel hearing her so he wasn’t in time to help his wife.”
“Will she die?” asked a Clovis neighbor.
“Probably,” Police Constable Clovis said righteously.
“George.”
“Yes, darling.”
“The money is burned. They can’t do anything to you.”
“You mustn’t talk.”
“I guess I haven’t any hair, George. I guess I look awful.”
“You look fine.”
“Are you crying, George?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if this is worse than having a baby. I wonder what kind of babies we’d have.”
“We’ll have fine babies.”
“I’m sorry,” Miss Tomson said. “You’ll have to leave now, Mr. Revel.”
15
“But why?” Nora said. “Why did she kill Duncan? She was very fond of him. She talked about him all the time.”
“Fond?” Prye repeated. “I don’t think either Duncan or Jane was fond of anyone. But she had a sincere respect for him and she was afraid of him. If she hadn’t been they might both be alive today. As long as Duncan lived Jane hadn’t the courage to disobey or disregard him. She was under his thumb almost completely. He chose her friends, prevented her from marrying, was squandering the money some of which should have been hers. How she found out that Duncan had withdrawn his last cent to go into this deal with Revel, I don’t know. But she had the best opportunity to find out. She was living with Duncan and had access to his mail and his check book. She probably knew about the deal right away. If she didn’t she might have suspected something was up when Duncan went all the way to Detroit to come into Canada.”