“You have one, and wanted another one?” said Mary.
“I don't have to tell you anything about it,” Trappett said, patting the breech of the gun in his hands. “But I'll tell you this much. This evening I was in the tower, high on the stairs. It was dark there, and someone tried to push me over the railing. I fell down the stairs instead.
“During the struggle a little book was stolen from my pocket. In it was written the message of my music box; also a notation I'd made concerning the fact that another music box of David McCulloch's had turned up in an antique shop at Coverlee.”
There, was a scraping sound outside the door. Mary went to open it. In passing Heath she whispered, “Forgive me, Sully. Please.” His smile told her it would be an easy thing for him to do.
When Mary opened the door Lee Bascome fell into the room. His face was a slipping mass of blood. A huge gash laid open his forehead, covered his eyes with a red streaming mask of flesh.
Mary clutched onto the door jamb, staring down, her face deathly. Bascome struggled to his knees, lifted a shaking hand, pointed at Heath. “He—he did it! He's killed me.” He fell back, moaning.
Trappett's words struck Heath's ear in a slitting whisper a moment after the yellow man had cocked the shotgun. “You dirty murderer! You—” The music box slipped from Mary's arms, banged onto the floor.
Bascome was struggling to lift his head. His words came with a moan, “It's—it's not running! There's no sound! No sound!”
As Bascome slipped back onto the floor, Trappett glanced through the doorway, cocked his head as if listening. In that instant his attention was divided. Heath took advantage of it. He leapt and snatched away the shotgun, leveled it at Trappett's face.
“Oh, Sully!” Mary cried. “How could you hurt him like that?” She whirled and ran out into the darkness.
Heath supposed she'd get in the convertible, drive back to Coverlee. He waited for the coupe's motor to throb, but it never happened. Only the slow ticking of the clock on the mantel and Trappett's hard breathing disturbed the stillness.
CHAPTER IV
ONE glance at Bascome told Heath he was dead. Trappett said, “Miss McCulloch may fall into evil hands. Don't you think you'd better go after her?”
Heath smiled. “And let you go? She'll be back in a moment, when she's had time to think things over.” He stepped to the music box, used his toe to lift its lid.
As it started tinkling its dowdy tune Trappett sucked in a hard breath. Heath tried to place the melody. It was familiar, but kept slipping his memory. After a minute or so the music quit and the clicking sound began.
Trappett stirred nervously. His dark eyes poured out hatred upon the county detective. When the clicking ceased the music took up again, tinkling a different tune. But Heath wasn't trying to recognize tunes now. He was looking into Trappett's eyes, fighting the yellow man's mind.
“It happened nineteen years ago in Baltimore,” Trappett suddenly said, his voice wavering, sounding of defeat. “My wife deserted me, taking our year-old baby. I haven't seen them since. It's almost driven me crazy, all these years, never a word from them. Then a few weeks ago I passed a house in Baltimore, heard a music box playing. It was a box just like this one. I listened, believing I had at last truly gone mad.
“I rapped on the door, offered to buy the music box. The family sold it to me, told me the man David McCulloch had sent it to was dead months before it arrived. Had he lived to receive it, then—”
Trappett drew a slashing breath, his big eyes fixed in his head like frozen balls of blackest ink. “Now you know why I came here a week ago. I'll tell you this, I've only been waiting to make sure. A man can't undo murder.
“Then today I saw this music box at Coverlee, thought it might complete the message that is only partially given by my instrument. The old devil in the antique shop wouldn't let me play it. I came nearly killing him for the privilege. He'll never be closer death until he dies. I offered him all the money I have. He wanted more. I came back to borrow the money from McCulloch. He was gone when I got here—I think he was. Someone tried to kill me in the tower, stole my book. Now it has told them all about the music box.”
He drew another hard breath, grinned cheerlessly. “If I'd got the loan from McCulloch it would have been a little like Napoleon borrowing money from his enemies to finance a war against them. A joke for death to laugh at.”
Heath picked up the music box as it stopped playing, holding the shotgun as he would a pistol to cover Trappett. “We'll hear the story over again,” he said, making to put the box on a stand. The shot came from outside, through the open door. The bullet ripped through the music box, tore through the fleshy part of Heath's right hand, between thumb and palm. It did more harm, though, as it passed on and struck Ira Trappett in the chest. The jaundiced man turned halfway around, fell.
Heath leaned quickly and blew out the lamp, then leapt to the open door. He heard someone beyond Mary's car, running away. He was feeling for a match to light the lamp, intending to give Trappett all aid possible, when he heard Mary's cry. Thin at first, it lifted piercingly:
“Sully! Sully, help!”
SHE called him again as he reached the parked cars. He dropped the shotgun, pushed the cracked music box beneath some dead grass, and grabbed the flashlight from Mary's coupe.
She'd called from the direction of the creek, he knew. As he ran through a field he silently thanked the county prosecutor for advising him to make a map of this farm. The agriculture agent had aided him with airplane pictures, taken of the countryside during a soil erosion survey. At the time he'd thought the map-making a bit silly.
He almost fell over the creek bank. He caught himself, knelt, reached down and touched creek mud, wet and slimy. This was the creek bed, but it was waterless. He recalled the jarring blast, the sunk look in Trappett's eyes.
A murky moon lazied from a rack of clouds and found him kneeling beside the waterless creek bed, poised like a runner for the take-off. He was trying to make sense of the inscription under the music box's lid, hoping that Mary would cry out again, give him a lead.
“When the water runs low look at the feet of the weeping one,” he muttered, trying to force his brain to grasp at lost ends of things it couldn't know, laboring to spur it on to the business of evolving something from nothing, fighting to make it tie in the missing parts neglected by the message of the music box. Pressing muddy knuckles to his forehead he groaned, cursed the circumstances, damned the blank wall of mystery that rose before him.
He lifted his face moonward, saw the drooping branches of the old tree above him. A bit of misty something like dew touched his face. It couldn't be starting to rain! The sod in the field had been dry! “A tear!” he said softly. The weeping one. . . He was beneath a weeping willow tree.
He leapt forward, swung around the big bole of the tree, slid down the bank beside it, and found himself in mud up to his knees. He snicked on the flashlight. Tracks! Tracks, fresh and still oozing mud bubbles, showed him a way to a large open rift in the face of an otherwise smooth outcropping of stone. Minutes ago water had covered the rock ledge. Its wet mark was still there, some five feet above the top of the crevice. A man and a girl had recently gone that way, walked right into the earth.