Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

The constable rejoined them, his face still slightly greenish. He had a drink, too.

“How many of them were there when they first moved in here?” Stillman asked him.

“Only two. Only him and his wife, from first to last.”

“Then you never saw her; they hid her from sight, that’s all.”

“They’ve been kind of standoffish; no one’s ever been inside the place until tonight.”

“It’s her, all right, the real mother,” Bliss said, as soon as he’d gotten his mental equilibrium back. “I don’t have to see the face; I know I’m right. No, no more. I’m O.K. now, and I want to be able to think clearly. Don’t you touch any more of it, either, Still. That’s who it must be. Don’t you see how the whole thing hangs together? Smiles did show up here Tuesday night, or rather in the early hours of Wednesday morning; I’m surer than ever of it now. You asked me, back at my house, for a motive that would overshadow that possible insurance one of mine. Well, here it is; this is it. She was the last one they expected to see, so soon after her own marriage to me. She walked in here and found an impostor in the place of her own mother, a stranger impersonating her. They had to shut her up quick, keep her from raising an alarm. There’s your motive as far as Smiles is concerned.”

“And it’s a wow,” concurred Stillman heartily. “The thing is, what’ve they done with her, where is she? We’re no better off than before. She’s not around here; we’ve cased the place from cellar to attic. Unless there’s another of those trick walls that we’ve missed spotting.”

“You’re forgetting that what you said about the first one still goes. There hasn’t been time enough to rig up anything that elaborate.”

“I shouldn’t have taken that drink,” confessed Stillman.

“I’m convinced she was here, though, as late as Thursday night, and still alive in the place. Another of those tantalizing things just came back to me. There was a knock on one of the water pipes somewhere; I couldn’t tell if it was upstairs or down. I bet she was tied up someplace, the whole time I was sitting here.”

“Did you hear one or more than one?”

“Just one. The woman got right up and went out, I noticed, giving an excuse about getting a fresh handkerchief. They probably had her doped, or under some sedative.”

“That’s then, but now?”

“There’s a lot of earth around outside, acres of it, miles of it,” Cochrane put in morbidly.

“No, now wait a minute,” Stillman interjected. “Let’s get this straight. If their object was just to make her disappear, clean vanish, as in the mother’s case, that would be one thing. Then I’m afraid we might find her lying somewhere around in that earth you speak of. But you’re forgetting that her clothes turned up in your own furnace at home, Bliss — showing they didn’t want her to disappear; they wanted to pin her death definitely on you.”

“Why?”

“Self-preservation, pure and simple. With a straight disappearance, the investigation would have never been closed. In the end it might have been directed up this way, resulted in unearthing the first murder, just as we did tonight. Pinning it on you would have not only obviated that risk, but eliminated you as well — cleaned the slate for them. A second murder to safeguard the first, a legal execution to clinch the second. But — to pin it successfully on you, that body has to show up down around where you are, and not up here at all. The clothes were a forerunner of it.”

“But would they risk taking her back to my place, knowing it was likely to be watched by you fellows, once they had denounced me to you themselves? That would be like sticking their own heads in a noose. They might know it would be kept under surveillance.”

“No, it wouldn’t have been. You see, your accidental switch to that hitchhike from the bus resulted in two things going wrong. We not only went out to your house to look for you when you didn’t show up at the terminal, but, by going out there, we found the clothes in the furnace sooner than they wanted us to. I don’t believe they were meant to be found until — the body was also in position.”

“Then why make two trips, instead of just one? Why not take poor Smiles at the same time they took her clothes?”

“He had to make a fast trip in, the first time, to beat that bus. They may have felt it was too risky to take her along then. He also had to familiarize himself with your premises, find some way of getting in, find out if the whole thing was feasible or not before going ahead with it. They felt their call to us — it wasn’t an accusation at all, by the way, but simply a request that we investigate — would get you out of the way, clear the coast for them. They expected you to be held and questioned for twenty-four, forty-eight hours, straight. They thought they’d given themselves a wide enough margin of safety. But your failure to take the bus telescoped it.”

Bliss rose abruptly. “Do you think she’s — yet?” He couldn’t bring himself to mention the word.

“It stands to reason that they’d be foolish to do it until the last possible moment. That would increase the risk of transporting her a hundredfold. And they’d be crazy to do it anywhere else but on the exact spot where they intend her to be found eventually. Otherwise, it would be too easy for us to reconstruct the fact that she was killed somewhere else and taken there afterward.”

“Then the chances are she was still alive when they left here with her! There may still be time even now; she may still be alive! What are we sitting here like this for?”

They both bolted out together, but Bliss made for the front door, Stillman headed for the phone in the hall.

“What’re you doing that for?”

“Phone in an alarm to city headquarters. How else can we hope to save her? Have them throw a cordon around your house—”

Bliss pulled the instrument out of his hands. “Don’t! You’ll only be killing her quicker that way! If we frighten them off, we’ll never save her. They’ll lose their heads, kill her anywhere and drop her off just to get rid of her. This way, at least we know it’ll be in or somewhere around my house.”

“But, man, do you realize the head start they’ve had?”

“We only missed them by five or ten minutes. Remember that coffeepot on the stove?”

“Even so, even with a State police escort, I doubt if we can get in under a couple of hours.”

“And I say that we’ve got to take the chance! You noticed their tire treads before. He has a walloping bad patch, and he’s never going to make that bad stretch on the road with it. I saw his car last night when it raced past, and he had no spares up. There’s no gas station for miles around there. All that will cut down their head start.”

“You’re willing to gamble your wife’s life against a flat tire?”

“There isn’t anything else I can do. I’m convinced if you send an alarm ahead and have a dragnet thrown around my house, they’ll scent it and simply shy away from there and go off someplace else with her where we won’t be able to get to her in time, because we won’t know where it is. Come on, we could be miles away already, for the time we’ve wasted talking.”

“All right,” snapped the detective, “we’ll play it your way! Is this car of yours any good?” he asked Cochrane, hopping in.

“Fastest thing in these parts,” said the constable grimly, slithering under the wheel.

“Well, you know what you’ve got to do with it: cut down their head start to nothing flat, less than nothing; you’ve got to get us there five minutes to the good.”

“Just get down low in your seats and hang onto your back teeth,” promised Cochrane. “What we just turned up in there happened in my jurisdiction, don’t forget — and the law of the land gives this road to us tonight!”