“That’s not true!”
“Ask him. He came to see me, and it was his plan you’ve been following today.” Margo laughed. “I knew about your marriage and where you would stop on your ‘honeymoon’ before you did!”
“Get out of here!”
“Not yet, dearest.” Margo rested her gloved hands on the back of Kerrie’s chair. Kerrie could hear her breathing, but she did not look up and around. “Not until I’ve made you see just how big a fool you’ve been. That’s my revenge, darling. You were willing to give up a fortune because you love him. And so you married him. But why do you think he married you? Because he loves me!”
“No,” said Kerrie with a rising nausea. “No...”
“Then where is he on your wedding night?”
“He had to go out somewhere — he’ll be back soon—”
“He didn’t have to go out. I told him to. Men are weak,” Margo smiled, “and I wasn’t taking a chance on your husband’s showing weakness at the wrong moment. You are attractive in a wishy-washy sort of way, you know. So I made him promise he’d marry you and ditch you — yes, the very first night; and he has, you see.”
“I don’t believe — a single word,” whispered Kerrie.
“All the rest was his idea — to marry you so that you forfeited your share of Uncle Cadmus’s estate and it would pass to me. As it has. So you’ve nothing at all, darling — no money, no husband. The money is his and mine now, and you may get a divorce if you like. Not that it will do you the least good — you’ve forfeited your inheritance by marrying! Don’t you agree you’ve been a fool? Such an empty-headed, trusting, ridiculous fool?”
And Margo’s voice sharpened until it hissed through the ache in Kerrie’s head, and without looking up Kerrie knew that her cousin’s white face and Egyptian eyes were hateful with triumph.
And Kerrie said: “I want you to stay here, Margo. I shan’t let you go. You’ll stay here until Ellery gets back—”
“He won’t be back,” drawled Margo. “You may as well pack up and get out.”
“I want to see your face when he denies your lies. I want you to stay—”
“I’d be glad to, my dear, except that I’ve more important things to do, and it would all be so useless, wouldn’t it?”
“If — that were — true,” said Kerrie in a remote voice, “I think — I’d kill him.”
“That would be gratitude!” laughed Margo. “Kill him! You ought to thank him. Don’t you know you owe him your silly life?”
Kerrie barely heard the mocking words.
“You’re a lucky miss. He’s saved you that by marrying you. And if you hadn’t been lucky, you’d have been a dead pigeon long before this. Or didn’t you know that, either?”
What was she saying? thought Kerrie dully.
“Do you think that little visit to your room was a joke? Or that your mare stumbled by accident? Or that what happened in the garage last night happened by chance, or some one’s blunder? Do you?”
“No!” cried Kerrie. “I knew! All along. I knew it was you. You. You!”
“You did?” Margo laughed again. “Clever girl! But it wasn’t only I who planned those attacks. You didn’t know that, did you? It was I — and somebody else.”
“Somebody else!” cried Kerrie, sitting up straight in the armchair.
“I and—”
The world exploded over Kerrie’s head. She fell back in the chair, half-deafened, half-blinded by three incredible flicks of fire.
Behind her she heard a gasp, a gurgling cry, and then the sound of a sliding, slipping body. And finally a hollow thud on the carpet.
Kerrie gripped the arms of the chair and blinked into the moonlit court, and saw the flutter of the blind in that window diagonally across from where she was sitting, only eight feet away, and a hand... a hand, reaching out, holding something, making an odd tossing motion... and something hurtled past her head and landed with another thud on the floor.
And Kerrie got out of the chair and stumbled over Margo’s body lying still on the floor, and mechanically picked up the object, turning it over and over and over.
It was a little pearl-handled 22, and smoke was still curling from its muzzle.
Her revolver. Hers. The one that had been stolen from the pocket of her roadster. Smoking...
Only then did eyes and brain coordinate — only then, as she knelt beside Margo, holding the .22 in a cold clutch, holding it and staring down at the mushroomed splash of red at Margo’s throat, at the red ruin of Margo’s left eye, at the red crease across Margo’s right cheek.
Margo was still. Margo was dead.
Some one had shot Margo three times across the angle of the court from that room with the fluttering blind. Margo was dead.
There was a sound at the door.
Kerrie turned, still on her knees, the revolver still in her hand.
Margo was dead.
And there was her husband in the doorway. So purple-eyed and haggard. Staring at the bloody dead woman on the floor. At the revolver in his wife’s hand.
Part Four
XII. Silence, Please
But Kerrie did not see him. She was still blind from the brilliance of those three red flashes slashing over her head into the throat and eye and cheek of Margo. Blind, deaf, stunned with the three sounds of a world tumbling.
“She’s dead,” Kerrie said in a clear voice. “Margo’s dead. Her eye is dead. Blood on her neck. She has one eye. See how funny she looks. See how funny—”
Beau stood in the doorway trying to speak.
“One moment she was alive. Then she was dead. She died over my head. I heard her gurgle her life away. I heard her die behind me.” Kerrie began to laugh.
Beau stumbled in. “Kerrie!”
He dropped beside her. He could think of nothing to do but put his arms about her and press her face against his chest. He couldn’t bear to look at her face. It was white, fixed, a plaster-of-Paris mask made by a crude workman. Her eyes were shiny with something not fear, not panic, not horror; something inscrutable and dead, like the eyes of a wax-works figure.
At his touch she stopped laughing. “She came to laugh at me. Said you and she had planned the whole thing. Our elopement. Marriage. She said you told her where you were taking me. That’s how she knew where to find me. Your plan. You didn’t love me, she said. You loved her, she said. This was your scheme to get hold of the money Uncle Cadmus left me. To share it with her. The two of you...”
“Kerrie, stop.”
“She began to talk about the attacks. She admitted she had made them. She and some one else—”
“Some one else!” muttered Beau. “Who?”
“She didn’t get a chance to tell me. She began to. But then the three shots from the window...”
The window. Beau got to his feet, walked stiff-legged to the window by the armchair. Open. The blind blowing. Kerrie in the chair, Margo standing behind the chair — direct line of fire — in the throat, the eye... Revolver.
“Revolver,” he said hoarsely. “What happened?”
“It’s mine,” said Kerrie, as in a dream. “Mine. I bought it. When you — warned me to be careful. It was stolen from the pocket of my car. Must have been some time yesterday, because I missed it when I was locked in the garage.”
“Yours!” Beau took a forward step, and stopped. “But if it was stolen—”
She looked up at him in a dumb way. “Hand. Or fingers. Threw it from that window. In here. Right after the shots.” She looked down at her own hand in the same way, the hand which still gripped the pearl-handled .22.