Rex Stout - Double for Death

As they disappeared through the door to the main hall, Nancy Grant entered at the other end of the room from the front terrace. She looked comparatively cool, but not very fresh, since she was wearing the same skirt and blouse she had had on when escaping from the window of the courthouse Monday morning. She looked around and saw no one, stood undecided, and finally went and stretched herself out on an upholstered bench in front of an open window, with her eyes closed. A few minutes later she opened them, hearing steps, and saw Jeffrey Thorpe approaching. He looked fresh but not cool and certainly not festive.

“I was looking for you,” he said.

She said nothing.

“My sister asked me to find you. We’ll eat in the dining room in a quarter of an hour. Your uncle’s upstairs taking a shower. If you’d like to have one I’ll show you a room.”

Nancy shook her head. “No, thank you. I just had a shower.”

“May I ask where?”

“In a dressing room at the swimming pool.”

“What did you go down there for?”

“To take a shower.”

“And then walked all the way back?”

“I saw no other way of getting back. I came by degrees.”

“You should have—” Jeffrey stopped. “No. There’s no should about it. You’re here only because you can’t help it.” He was scowling. “Damn it, you’re talking to me.”

“Not with any great enthusiasm.” Nancy sat up, removed her legs from the bench and adjusted her skirt. “Since I’m talking to you, I might as well say something. I’ve heard you say twice that I hate you. That isn’t true. That time at the opera you were arrogant and offensive, you acted like a brainless imbecile, and you helped to place me in a humiliating and embarrassing situation. I don’t hate you at all. I simply have no use for you.”

“I don’t believe it.”

She looked up at him indignantly. “May I ask why you don’t believe it?”

“Because I don’t want to and because I’ve been thinking about it.” His scowl deepened. “The kind of collisions here have been between you and me and aren’t the kind that produce that state of mind. They have thrown out sparks. I have never seen so many sparks in so short a space of time as you produced that night last winter.”

He straddled the bench facing her. “You might suppose that the decent thing to do, with my father killed only six hours ago and me suspected by some people of killing him, would be to keep my mouth shut. But how do I know what’s going to happen? How do I know but what before the night’s out I’ll actually be charged with murder and put in jail? I wish I could tell you what’s been going on in my head this afternoon. I’ve been remembering days when my mother was still here and the way my father treated her, and working up a hatred for him that I never felt when he was alive, and then the realization would come that he’s dead now too, and I would remember the things he did for me. He did do things for me, no doubt of that, and I tried to go over it all and decide whether I was as bum an excuse for a son as he was for a father. I decided that I probably was. But in the middle of thoughts like that would come thoughts about you.”

He put out a hand, but she drew away and he let it fall to the bench. “Another reason why I don’t believe that you simply have no use for me. If that’s the way you really feel, you would have told what’s-his-name about seeing a gun in my pocket this morning. I know you didn’t tell him, because if you had—”

“How did you—” Nancy was looking at him. She looked away again. “How did you know I saw the gun?”

“I heard what your uncle said to you. That’s another thing. He didn’t tell either, so you must have asked him not to.”

“I didn’t! He suggested it himself, that we should mind our own business. And I did tell Mr. Fox. I... I didn’t mean to, but it was out before I knew it.”

“When did you tell him?”

“When we were all sitting out on the terrace. Soon after they called you into the house.”

“That doesn’t matter anyway. Your profile is the most beautiful... absolutely the most beautiful...” His voice began to tremble and he gave it up. “Fox knows that there isn’t a chance in the world that I killed my father.”

“How does he know that?”

“Because he knows people and he knows how much I’m in love with you, and he knows that in the condition I’m in I’m about as murderous as a butterfly, unless it was someone between you and me — Yes, Bellows?”

“Mrs. Pemberton sent me, sir. The gong sounded some minutes ago.”

“I didn’t hear it.” Jeffrey got off the bench and faced Nancy. “If you’d rather not go in with me, follow Bellows. I’ll be in in a minute.”

Before the cold consommé had been finished, Miranda was feeling that it had been a mistake to tell Bellows that her father’s chair should be left in its accustomed place, vacant. Not that she had any idea that without it the occasion might have been one of merriment, but after all people eating at one’s table are one’s guests, no matter what circumstances collected them, and the ostentatious broad back of that empty chair seemed a calculated reproach to them and a deliberate solicitation of gloom. As the cold meats were being served, she murmured something of that sort to Andrew Grant on her right and to her astonishment he replied that he hadn’t noticed it.

The meal dragged along under the buzz of the electric fans. Certainly no one was endeavoring to prolong it for the sake of conviviality, but then no one was in a hurry to finish in order to do something else. There was nothing to do. The continued presence of the authorities made it probable that another campaign of questioning was in preparation; they all knew that the famous Inspector Damon of the New York police had arrived and was in the library. Dusk deepened in the room and, as the sherbet and raspberries were served, Bellows switched on the lights. The desultory and intermittent mutterings of conversation continued; there was nothing to talk about, since no one tried to talk of the only thing in their minds. The state of their nerves, their readiness to be startled by any incident whatever, was displayed when Tecumseh Fox addressed Miranda across the table, necessarily raising his voice above the fans:

“May I say something, Mrs. Pemberton? I’d like to play a game.”

Eight pairs of eyes jerked to him. Miranda raised her brows: “A game?”

“Yes. Call it that.” Fox signaled to Bellows, and the butler got something from a buffet and approached with it. “I’m going to ask you all to join in, if you don’t mind.” He took the tray from Bellows and nodded thanks and sent a swift glance around the table: Miranda and Grant, Jeffrey and McElroy, Kester and Fuller, Nancy and Henry Jordan. “This may seem frivolous to you, but it won’t hurt you any. I have here eight pads of paper and eight pencils. I’m going to pass them around and ask each of you to write something, all of you the same thing, which I’ll dictate, and sign your names for identification. I hope you’ll have no objection, Mrs. Pemberton, since—”

“Whether I sign my name or not,” put in Fuller dryly, “depends on what you ask me to write.”

“Perfectly harmless.” Fox smiled at him. “Just a pledge of our forefathers, a sentence of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. Bellows, if you will please hand the pads and pencils around—”

The butler took them, but instead of distributing them, he suddenly stiffened and stood rigid as the sound of peremptory shouts came in at the windows, apparently at some distance, and then jerked around as the explosion of a gunshot shattered the air. Everybody else jerked with him; and Redmond, crossing with a tray of iced tea, let it drop to the floor without even making a grab, and pierced the already offended air with a bloodcurdling scream.