Yet there was no real evidence against Alexia. Nor, as to that, against Peter Huber or Maud Chivery. Maud had all but run the household during the long years of Conrad’s widowerhood; it would not have been unnatural for her to feel a kind of jealousy for her young supplanter, Alexia. But that didn’t mean that she had murdered Conrad! And certainly Maud fairly exuded an almost belligerent, tight-lipped respectability which did not go with whatever secret, horribly urgent emotion which, at last unbridled, finds its only relief in murder.
I stopped to think of that and then tried not to. It’s a curious thing about murder, and I learned it during those days in the Brent house and among the low-lying Berkshire hills. Murder as a fact has a strangely insistent, wholly appalling quality; it is almost like a secret and terrible personality. At one instant you may be surrounding yourself with the commonplace, with reality, with everyday things-letting yourself think of the weather or what you had for lunch. And then all at once, the next instant, you get a kind of psychic nudge, as if that grim presence stood invisibly at your elbow and said, mutely, “You may try to evade me, you may try to pretend I have gone, but I’m still here. You can’t see me, you don’t know really where I am, but nevertheless I am here. I have struck and I may strike again. How do you know I won’t? And how do you know whose body is possessed of me and whose arm will do my will?”
It brings your heart to your throat and your breath stinging in your lungs. That’s queer, too, and primitive, I suppose. As is the way your neck muscles, of their own accord, keep wanting to pull your head around so as to look behind you.
Well, that’s the way it is. I felt it then and looked behind me, but there was nothing but hills and gathering dusk and silence.
So I went on in my little list to Peter Huber. Here at last was evidence. He had appeared on the scene almost as soon as I had, with a story to explain it which might or might not be true. He had fumbled around about the telephone call to the doctor; he had run straight upstairs at the sound of something falling and had disappeared. And while he was no relation and so couldn’t profit directly by Conrad Brent’s death, as all of the others might conceivably do, even the Chiverys, he might have a motive, that is, if he were in love with Alexia. Yet certainly no man is going to murder a woman’s husband without making sure that he’s going to get the woman and, if I had eyes in my head, it wasn’t Peter Alexia wanted; it was Craig, and Craig, whatever he admitted and refused to admit, knew it. Besides, Peter Huber was only a friend happening to be there as an innocent bystander does happen to be on the spot and probably wishing heartily he were anywhere else.
Dr. Claud Chivery remained. He had prescribed the famous medicine which might have some as yet unsuggested significance; and somewhere in the history of that long friendship between the Chiverys and the Brents might lie seeds for murder. But again there was no evidence.
It had grown dusk as I stood there, although the sky was still light, so I realized later that, on the little ridge and in my swirling cape and hood, I was silhouetted from below against the clear gray light. A lemon-colored star came out above the eastern hills. It was colder, too, so I pulled my cape more tightly around me and pulled the hood over my head. And it was just then that I heard somebody running heavily across the meadow toward me, through the dusk and the bramble.
And that wasn’t all. Something sung sharply through the dusk over my head; I heard that before I heard the sound of the shot. I literally fell upon my hands and knees behind the stone wall just as both sounds came again. And whoever was running there in the meadow reached the rock wall a few feet away and began to scramble over it.
12
A SINGULAR THING ABOUT gun shots is this: no matter how little experience one has had at either the giving or receiving end, one recognizes the sound of a shot with really a peculiar facility and swiftness.
And just then another shot sung lower, over my head and over the stone wall. And I knew that that scrambling figure was at least thirty feet from me, but that the shots came from somewhere in the darkening, irregular meadow below, possibly from the wooded valley which seemed to outline the bed of a small stream.
I knew too that it wasn’t the cat shooting at me. But that was about the extent of my knowledge.
Whoever had crawled over the stone wall had ducked; at least no figure emerged from the shadow of rock wall and shrubs.
I don’t know what would have happened; perhaps in the end some car was bound to come along and rescue us. It takes a bold murderer to shoot anybody in cold blood on a public highway. But I was never to know because just then, with a loud whirring of the engine, a small automobile whirled around the bend in the road and began to climb the little ridge, its lights streaming ahead of it.
So I did what sounds dangerous and really wasn’t. At least, I don’t believe it was dangerous. I really remember very little of that moment or two during which I crept out, running low in the shelter of the rock wall and into those welcome lights and stopped the car. And it was Dr. Chivery.
He leaned out to look at me incredulously as, keeping the car between me and the dusky meadow, I approached him.
“Miss Keate…”
“Somebody’s shooting at me! From the meadow! Somebody…”
And just then another figure loomed up from the shelter of the wall and it was the maid Anna. Her face was the color of an underdone muffin and her braids had slipped over one ear, giving her a rakish air which was belied by the terror in her eyes. She gasped, “Doctor-please, sir-someone’s shooting-in the meadow…”
Neither Claud Chivery nor I spoke; in the little glow from the dashlight his chin retreated still further and his slightly popped eyes seemed to take on a kind of reflection of the terror in the maid’s face. Then the maid caught a long, rasping breath and said, still panting, “I mean-shooting rabbits, I suppose, sir. I-I was walking in the meadow, when I-I heard someone in the brush along-along the brook. It-it frightened me. I-I ran…” Her eyes shifted to me and back to the doctor. “And just then-as I got to the wall-the shots began. I don’t know who it was, sir. But they-they often shoot rabbits in the meadow. People from town and-and…” She stopped again. And then said, “Doctor, would you mind taking me back to the house? I-I’m afraid I’ve taken more than my usual afternoon time off. Beevens…”
There was another little pause. Then without a word Dr. Chivery reached back, swung open the door to the rear seat of the car and I got in and so did Anna. Still in silence so far as speech went, he turned and reversed and started back for the Brent place. Nobody said anything. There was only the staccato sound of the engine waking echoes along the looming shadows of the hills all around us.
He took us all the way to the house, up the winding drive to the front door, where he deposited us. I thanked him and he drove off into the night again with, it seemed to me, that queer reflection of terror still in his eyes. Anna hurried to open the door for me.
“Anna…”
“Yes, Miss Keate.” She had caught her breath now and straightened the fat blonde braids around her head.
“Who was in the meadow?”
“I don’t know, Miss,” she said flatly-and defiantly.
So I had to let her go.
But she knew as well as I did that unless the rabbit had jumped up in front of the gun and barked at him, our hunter wasn’t shooting at rabbits. It was too dark to have taken a good potshot at anything smaller than a horse-or a human, silhouetted against the gray sky.