Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (108 page)

“I can’t
believe
it,” Norma said.

“It happened, Norma. Benefit of some unfriendly person, who knows who.”

“What do you mean, unfriendly person?”

“The mechanic said my brakes had been tampered with.”

There was a moment of silence and then everyone started talking at once: John too had come in and was listening. At the word “tamper” there was bedlam, Pompey wringing his hands and Norma exchanging glances with John, and although there had been no headache before, there was one now. In fact, if she didn’t get to bed soon, she would require first aid.

“Excuse me,” she said, her forehead beading with perspiration. “I just want to sleep, if you don’t mind. I’m really fatigued. It’s been a long day, with a few puzzles and unfathomables. May I just go up to bed, please?”

“Get out of my way, just get out of my way,” Norma said, brushing John aside. “Can’t you see she’s had enough? Let me help her, let me help her …”

“No, not even you, Norma,” Margo said, the room swimming around her. “I’m okay, really okay, just leave me be. Just leave me be. That’s bad grammar, but I can’t think straight … only, let me alone, all of you, just let me alone.”

At last in her room, the light fading, questions, questions, and flopping, like a fish, into the bed, covers hastily drawn down. She burrowed into the pillows, while a cold, still voice whispered into her ear, and demonic laughter rang out, and her temples throbbed with excruciating pain.
Now I know
, she thought, in the purple light of a dying summer evening.
Now I know.

Someone here wanted her to die.

Someone.

Someone …

Aunt Vicky was calling her.

“Help, Margo … help … please help …”

The voice faded away.

Turning, Margo sighed.

In her sleep, she brushed a fly away from her face.

“Margo …”

Now, listen, Aunt Vicky was calling, you heard that, didn’t you?

There was that frightful struggle to pull out of sleep; there were nets around her; her feet were in sand. There was a cloud across her face; ropes binding her arms.

“Ugh,” she moaned, wrestling, trying to unbind herself.

Something’s wrong.
Her mind, waking slowly, acknowledged it.
Something’s wrong.

Trouble, there was trouble, she had to do something; Aunt Vicky was calling out. The fear woke her up, the terrible fear.

Aunt Vicky wasn’t dead. She was in the fruit cellar, where they had buried her under the coal heap, and she was choking in soot …

I’m coming
, a part of her mind cried, but she couldn’t work her way out of this thick fog … there was no life left in her. That was because they had covered her up with sand, first her feet, then her legs, her arms, torso …

Laughing, they filled a bucket of sand, held it poised. Laughing.

“Not my face,” she cried, her eyes bulging, and then they upturned the bucket and it was in her nose and mouth and finally her eyes. There was nothing left after that: she was dead too, under the silver-white sand, they would never find her there. Not for years and years.

Her blood bubbled up from under the sand.

“Look at that,” one of them said. “Those pretty red bubbles, oh, what fun …”

Her eyes snapped open.

Her heart was pounding like a trip hammer. The taste of brass was in her mouth. It was blood, she thought at first, but that was only the dream. The taste was disgust, revulsion, the abhorrence of a sick dream.

She turned on her back and put a hand over her clamorous heart.
How awful
, she thought,
how awful. What puts this garbage into our minds?

And then there was something that was not a dream. Not dream, but reality. She was fully awake now, and she heard it clearly. A voice from downstairs, faint but distinct.

“Help …”

Aunt Vicky was dead, it wasn’t Aunt Vicky. It was Pompey. Pompey …

What were they doing to him?

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she cried, springing out of bed. “Just a second … I’m coming …”

Pompey …

She grabbed a robe, shoveled into it, not bothering to tie the sash. There was that eerie voice, pleading.

Dashing out, she raced down the hall. Light came fitfully from the windows at either end, just a vapor of light, but she saw the stairs, and she listened.

Once more, a wisp of sound, the voice came.

And then she acted.

Put her foot on the first step, for guidance, and then started down. She was mumbling. “I’m coming, don’t worry, don’t worry …”

If Pompey’s going to die I won’t be able to stand it
, she thought, her eyes trying to plumb the darkness. I couldn’t bear that. Oh, please …

Halfway down there was a snake. The snake coiled around her legs, malevolent and evil, and, sucking in her breath, she knew that this time it was the end. Words came to her mind, words not even part of her faith … “Holy Mary, Mother of God …”

Then thought vanished and she plunged down the stairs, like someone shot out of a cannon.

For seconds, perhaps minutes, there was only numbness, of the mind and spirit. As for her body, she felt every bone, every tendon. She was stunned, dazed, knew it, tried to function properly, failed to do so, and lay in the thick, silent dark sucking her tongue, into which she had bitten. Slowly, lethargically, she raised a finger to her mouth.

It came away wet.

And sticky.

She was never sure how long she lay there, carefully feeling herself, moving cautiously. She knew at once that there were no bones broken. You broke a bone, you didn’t have to guess about it. She did know that she had massive bruises, that she would be stiff for days and, as for tennis, forget it. When she finally pulled herself up she was flaming with pain, crying with the anguish of it.

God help me
, was her next thought, and then,
Who did this terrible thing to me?

She groped her way to the Long Room, found a lamp and switched it on. Then she went out to the hall again and snapped on a light there, looked up the stairs. She knew the snake was a figment of her imagination. There was no snake.

And then she saw what had tripped her up.

A length of twine, tied to one side of the banister halfway up the stairs, hanging free now, but that was because she had dislodged it from its mooring, for it had been strung across the stairwell, like a booby trap, from one side of the banister to the other.

I must have a charmed life
, she thought and, pale and shaking, saw that what had almost killed her was a length of the twine Ed Corliss was ticketing the historic pieces with that filled Brand Manor. There was no doubt at all: it was the same, identical twine that encircled desks and tables and lamps and sofas, ending in little, neatly-lettered tags …
Hitchcock lamp, circa
1729 …
See page
21
in the catalogue …

She stood weaving, blurry-eyed.

And Ed Corliss had his own key …

With a sudden murderous compulsion, she dragged herself to the stairs and yanked the cord away from its mooring. Then she crept painfully down again and dropped it conspicuously on the living room rug.
I
want it to be seen
, she thought, half out of her mind.
Let whoever has done this infamous thing see it, and know.

She looked at it, and it was suddenly as lethal as the snake she had thought of. It was evil, that bit of twine, worse than the most poisonous cobra. The mind that had stretched it across the stairs was a hideous mind. That someone could think up such a heinous thing …

She turned out the lamp in the Long Room. It was suddenly imperative to get back to bed. Pain made her nauseated; she was rocking on her heels. One minute more and she might keel over.

In the dark, fumbling, she turned. The light from the hall was sixty watts, feeble, in a small tole lamp. She stumbled against a table, muttered a half-crazed imprecation, and it was then that the fear came, the terrible fear.

Because someone had been down here, calling up.

“Help …”

Someone who knew the workings of her mind. That she would think of Pompey. Someone clever and intelligent. Death was in her mind, because she had walked into a house of recent death. Pompey was an old man. Instinctively, without thought, she had rushed down because of Pompey.

And this person had taken that into account, had guessed her reactions.

I could have been smashed beyond recognition
, she thought, my neck broken, my spine fractured. There was a good chance that it could have been that way, a better than even chance.

And someone had hoped for the worst.

It was at that moment that she heard the sound.

Just a breath of sound. Faint, like the rattle of paper … like material brushing past a chair, like fabric chafing against fabric.

The hair rose on her head.

And then … and then …

It came to her, like a thunderbolt, that whoever had called up those dark stairs would be here now. Would have to be here, unless he had gone out the back door, and that would be easily heard in the quiet. She was not alone.

Someone was here, near her.

Very near.

How she got up those stairs again, her body battered as it was, she never knew. What saved her was that her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, and the faint moonlight, and the fact that she knew every turn and corner and nook and cranny and unexpected round and squiggle of the old house. She streaked out of the Long Room, hurtling up the steps two at a time, dashed down the upper corridor to her room, flung the door shut, leaned against it panting and gulping, shaking uncontrollably.

There was someone downstairs.

She cried tears of pain, sagged, gritting her teeth.

But there was someone downstairs …

There was no specific area where she hurt. She hurt all over.

But there was someone downstairs …

She listened for a sound, pressing her ear to the door. She stayed there, patient, hoping for something tell-tale, give-away … and remembered a childhood horror story about two people on opposite sides of a door. The victim hearing the sinister breathing, faint with fright, listening to the dread breath of a murderer …

She heard nothing. The house was as silent as a tomb.

Finally she left her post, went into the bathroom, ran a hot tub, a half-way measure for wrenched muscles. She lay in it, kneading her legs and arms and rubbing the worst bruises with her fingers.

There was no sense in trying to dry herself; the perspiration was dripping off her. She wrapped herself in a towel, lit a cigarette and paced the room, thinking. It was difficult to concentrate, but she must, she must …

Ed Corliss, then.
His
twine.

He came and went on his job, had a key. And that soft, eerie sound downstairs, like the breathing over the telephone.

It seemed fantastic that this polite, perhaps over-polite young man would want harm to come to her. What could possibly be his reason? And yet she didn’t know all the facts … there might be something she couldn’t even guess at.

If Ed Corliss, to hazard a guess, stayed up half the night in order to make intimidating phone calls, he would also be capable of quietly driving out to Brand Manor and letting himself in just as quietly and then rigging up that trap on the staircase. If you could do one rotten thing, you could do another rotten thing.

But
, she thought,
there is also John.

John wouldn’t have to resort to devious measures, such as parking a car outside, making sure the front door was closed without waking a household, wary lest a key scrape in the lock.

Because John lived here.

She felt a fluttering in her chest. Yes, and John had lived here always … all his life, more or less. Like Pompey, it was his home. He had been loved and cosseted, his shirts ironed by Pompey’s sister, Clara; he had had the best of all possible worlds for years and years and years.

And now he was threatened with eviction, or something very close to it, should she, Margo, choose to take over the house for herself.

Take it further
, she thought. Suppose he was seething with discontent, rebellion, anger, fury … suppose he had taken a length of Ed Corliss’ twine, rigged it up on the stairs, thus throwing suspicion on Ed, and then, downstairs in the dark, called up, simulating her aunt’s voice?

Insane as the supposition seemed, it was logical enough. Desperate people did desperate things. Had it been John downstairs, in the horrible dark … waiting until she went upstairs again, when his plan had misfired …

Or …

A chill went through her.

Or had he been stealthily moving toward her to finish her off? Take a heavy object and smash in her skull?

And leave the front door open, so that it would be thought an intruder had entered, and done the foul deed.

And had he tampered with her brakes?

Even in a small town there were marauders … no place was totally safe these days. The garage boy had talked about vandals. Yes, and if there were vandals there could also be murderers. So that John — if it was John — could have a point. And in the morning, when Pompey wakened him, telling him about the ghastly event in the night, he could rush downstairs, hold a hand to his mouth, raise a fist in anger, revulsion and shock.

Anyone could be a good actor if it meant his own safety and security.

She lit another cigarette, patting at her damp face with a tissue. She was trying to remember the terms of the will. Let’s see … the will said that if she, Margo, didn’t choose to live at Brand Manor, the house then went to the Historical Society. So what would John’s case be?

He couldn’t win either way. If she accepted the gift of the house, he lost. If she refused, he lost. Then why would he try to do harm to her?
Nothing makes any sense
, she told herself, and sat down. It hurt. She walked, and it hurt. She lay down, and it hurt.

Let’s face it, I feel awful,
she thought.
It’s terrible to feel so badgered, so hounded, and a solid ache from top to toe, to boot.
Angry tears sprang to her eyes. Why should she have to endure this lonely pondering
… why?