Margaret Millar - The Devil Loves Me

So she’s come, Dinah thought. She’s come and I didn’t hear the steps creak and she’ll kill me.

“Dinah, what are you doing?”

Dinah didn’t move. The blood was running out of her head, she was floating, falling, dying—

“Burning,” she said. “I’m burning the money.”

Her hand darted out toward the fire.

“No!” Jane cried. “No! Wait!” She flung herself across the room, stretching out her hands, reaching for the crisp, sweet, burning bills.

Her hands were in the fire, grasping, clutching, growing black as they burned. The fire leaped out at her hair.

Dinah clung to her knees, pulling her away, screaming and laughing and crying for George. They were burning together with their arms locked, lashed together by the flames, rolling and twisting on the floor like pigs on a barbecue.

The pigs squealed and grew black, and the smell of flesh crept up the stairs and Constable Clovis dreamed he was eating roast pork.

“Dead on arrival,” said Dr. Hall, senior intern on the accident ward. “I hate these burn cases. What’s her name?”

“Stevens,” Miss Tomson replied.

“Stevens? I had a Stevens on Accident last week. She was a honey.”

“I remember,” Miss Tomson said coldly. “This can’t be the same one.” She looked down at the corpse and shivered. “I’d hate to be burned, wouldn’t you?”

Dr. Hall said he certainly would.

“We’re using the sulfadiazine spray,” said Dr. Hopkins, chief of staff. “I think she’ll pull through.”

“How much skin area was burned?” Prye asked.

“About 15 per cent. Still, she’s young.”

“Any skin grafting to be done?”

“Quite a bit, naturally.”

“Her husband wants to volunteer,” Prye said. “He feels he’s responsible for the accident.”

“Dear me. What did he do?”

“And there was the two of them,” said Police Constable Clovis, “lying on the floor burned to a crisp.”

Mrs. Clovis, the Clovis brood, and Clovis neighbors listened in open-mouthed amazement.

“What burns me up,” said Clovis, “is that they didn’t take me into their confidence. I could have prevented the whole thing.”

“Harry wasn’t asleep, mind you,” Mrs. Clovis said stanchly. “He was struck, cruelly struck. Show them your head, Harry.”

Clovis obliged.

“What Mrs. Revel should of done,” he went on, “is to tell me she thought she knew where the money was hid. But she figured she’d hint to the Stevens dame that she was going down to get the money and the Stevens dame would follow her and maybe try to kill her. Naturally, I wouldn’t of stood for such a thing, so she got her husband to knock me out.”

“It was just brutal, that’s what it was,” Mrs. Clovis said loyally.

“And then the Stevens dame got down to the cellar without Revel hearing her so he wasn’t in time to help his wife.”

“Will she die?” asked a Clovis neighbor.

“Probably,” Police Constable Clovis said righteously.

“George.”

“Yes, darling.”

“The money is burned. They can’t do anything to you.”

“You mustn’t talk.”

“I guess I haven’t any hair, George. I guess I look awful.”

“You look fine.”

“Are you crying, George?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if this is worse than having a baby. I wonder what kind of babies we’d have.”

“We’ll have fine babies.”

“I’m sorry,” Miss Tomson said. “You’ll have to leave now, Mr. Revel.”

“But why?” Nora said. “Why did she kill Duncan? She was very fond of him. She talked about him all the time.”

“Fond?” Prye repeated. “I don’t think either Duncan or Jane was fond of anyone. But she had a sincere respect for him and she was afraid of him. If she hadn’t been they might both be alive today. As long as Duncan lived Jane hadn’t the courage to disobey or disregard him. She was under his thumb almost completely. He chose her friends, prevented her from marrying, was squandering the money some of which should have been hers. How she found out that Duncan had withdrawn his last cent to go into this deal with Revel, I don’t know. But she had the best opportunity to find out. She was living with Duncan and had access to his mail and his check book. She probably knew about the deal right away. If she didn’t she might have suspected something was up when Duncan went all the way to Detroit to come into Canada.”

“Why did he?”

“The commuters between Windsor and Detroit keep the border officials pretty busy at certain hours and Duncan wanted to get through with a minimum of inspection. Jane probably didn’t understand what the deal was between Duncan and Revel but she grasped the essential fact: that Duncan had withdrawn all his money and was bringing it across the border. Rightfully the money was hers. Duncan had wasted many times his share. So she began to plan.

“The very planning of the murder was indicative of the type of mind behind it. She was not intelligent or quick-witted and she realized it. Her knowledge of her own mind motivated the studied, cautious planning of Duncan’s murder: the letter written to me with Duncan’s fountain pen, containing whole sentences from one of Duncan’s own letters to her; the destruction of the pen afterward; her own poisoning in circumstances that would force us to believe Duncan was the intended victim; the perfectly calculated amount of atropine she took—”

“How could she have known?” Nora asked.

Prye smiled. “Lots of pleasant books on the subject in every library. Jane’s own role in the drama was easy enough to play. There was very little acting required. She had a great respect for Duncan, she was dumb, she did resent Duncan’s being found by a lowly milkman, and so on. Her chief asset was the lack of imagination that attended her stupidity. She had only to wipe her mind clear of the fact that she had committed the murders and then act natural.”

“But Dennis?”

“My guess is that Dennis was sent back to the house by Revel to find the money and that he found it. It’s fairly likely that Dennis had been searching for it from the time that Duncan refused to hand it over. He’d searched in the ordinary places. There remained the basement.

“At any rate, Dennis told Jackson in the second-floor hall that he was going down to the basement to practice some billiard shots. Jane overheard the conversation and was instantly suspicious. She had read the letter written by Duncan to Revel and she knew Dennis was Revel’s agent. She knew too that the police had let him go and that he had come back. Dennis went to the basement and Jane made her preparations. She had taken Duncan’s gun from his clothes when she’d killed him. She started to go down after Dennis. At this point I arrived with Revel and we delayed her for some time. She didn’t have to force those tears she shed on Revel. She was pretty frantic at the delay. I made it worse by practically forcing her to come into the drawing room with me. She stayed with me until she thought of an excuse for getting out. She told me she had an idea, that she was going up to her room to verify it. Instead she went down to the basement, shot Dennis, and then went upstairs. The whole thing could have been done in three minutes.

“Hilda saw her going into her room immediately after she’d killed Dennis. Jane was bright enough to admit this to Sands. Of course she was going into her room, she confessed; she had just come from the drawing room, where she had thought of something important, a letter that Duncan had written her from Detroit. The letter had already been destroyed, of course, after she’d copied from it when she wrote the note to me.