Washington Whispers Murder by Brown Zenith & Ford Leslie

Author:Brown, Zenith & Ford, Leslie [Brown, Zenith & Ford, Leslie]
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Published: 1953-08-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

I FELT THE cold prickles up and down my spine, and it took me a second just to manage to turn and look that way too. I couldn’t see anything, and there was something there. I heard it then, the faint far-off scrunch on the oyster-shell road and the soft velvet throb that was a motor of some kind. I’m not a complete coward in town, but there in the country I certainly was, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so near screaming as I was at that moment, until I thought of the children upstairs. And I still couldn’t see anything, because of the light in the room that drew a sharp curtain in front of the frosty milky glow of the moonlight outside.

That’s when I slipped across in front of the growling dog and switched off the library lights. I could see then, and I saw the car, moving slowly, without any lights, along the lane up to the house. The moonlight on the oyster shells made a solid white ribbon to guide it. The moonlight was on the car too, and I could see that it was dark but not black. It was the maroon convertible. The top was down, and in it were three men, two in front and one back. I was already frightened, but to see the car coming steadily on, with no lights, and with three men in it where I’d expected one only, was paralyzing. They must have seen the lights go off, but they came on. And that had a kind of nauseating effrontery that I can’t describe—as if the three men in the car knew that Marjorie and Molly were alone on this isolated farm, and it gave them a gangster’s liberty and a gangster’s courage.

The scrunch of the white-walled tires and the velvet purr of the engine, the growling dog behind me, were the only sounds except the heavy tick-tock of the old clock, like some evil metronome punctuating the silence of the gradually lightening room. Then I moved. I ran across the hall and through the living room onto the front gallery. I didn’t want to call to Colonel Primrose and frighten the children, but I thought I’d be able to duck down past the apple tree there and see him and Marjorie at the pier, and be able to call them. But I didn’t call. They weren’t down on the pier.

The two people coming up from it weren’t Marjorie and the Colonel. They were Molly Brent and Archie. I saw them in the moonlight. It was too late for me to call, they were too close to the house … and I knew then that was why Marjorie and Colonel Primrose, sceing the boat already docked and the two coming up, had gone the other way, out toward the orchard, to let them take that moonlit walk together up the grass from the River. And it was too late … because in that instant there

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