The Clarrington Heritage Page 16

  Shuddering, her teeth chattering, she had torn herself from that empty room and run down the stair to her own landing.

  She had to call for help. God grant that Penelope hadn’t torn out the phone wires!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Tower Apartment

  Marise could still feel the sick despair that had gripped her as she searched for her son. It had never, she realized, entirely left her. She’d carried its dregs in her soul through the intervening decade. Now it was part of her blood and bones, and she had not been consciously aware of it.

  On that terrible night she had gone to earth like an animal pursued by predators. Her own place, her own rooms held the last remnants of sanity and safety in a world gone completely mad.

  She tore her door open without pausing, for she had left it unlocked after finding Benjie’s key...the moment seemed years ago, now, instead of minutes. That hasty trip was a blur in her mind, for all her thought had been concentrated on the boy.

  She recalled setting the automatic lock and pressing the light switch, before turning toward the phone table. Penelope stood there, smiling calmly, waiting for her in the center of her own sitting room. The missing carving knife was in her hand.

  The dark pantsuit the woman had worn to her twin’s funeral was now gaily patterned with scarlet and rust. Her fingers were dark with blood as well, and the underside of her jaw was spattered with it. The smile faded, leaving her expression quizzical...the look of a cat regarding a mouse that had escaped, only to be caught again.

  Penelope was big, stocky and powerful, and she knew her own strength. Her stance was easy but alert, as if she discounted anything Marise might do to resist her.

  Marise understood; she was expected to try to run, and any attempt at flight would be thwarted instantly. Suddenly her world shrank to the dimensions of this single room.

  Time slowed. Grief and fright and anger chilled out of her consciousness as her mind frosted to a single point of survival. There was one chance for life, and she had to live until she found Benjie. She asked only that much of fate. Let her find her son, alive or dead, and she would die without a whimper.

  Marise moved forward toward the watching, waiting woman. Penelope didn’t expect her to do that, and her eyes narrowed. This reaction was not one she was used to, it was obvious. She backed a step, and her air of confidence diminished just a little. As Marise drew nearer she backed another step; perhaps she remembered the smaller woman knocking her unconscious, on their first encounter so long before.

  Certainly Marise was remembering. She held to the thought with desperate tenacity. She had done it once, and she had to do her best to repeat her feat. That attack had been unexpected, however, and now Penelope was wary, recalling what she might do.

  Only her training, Marise realized, could bring her out of this room alive. That and the cold sharpness her mind had become, razor honed with desperate need. She had to lull Ben’s twin, get her off balance, so she moved forward again, almost within reach of the madwoman.

  Penelope stood almost against the curving wall of the sitting room now, and had begun glancing rapidly from side to side, as if she expected someone to attack her from behind and come to Marise’s aid. Yet she had to know the two of them were the only living people in the house unless Benjie—but Marise pushed the thought aside.

  Penelope stepped forward, her big hot body almost touching Marise. She had not flinched, Marise recalled with pride. Instead, she reached forward, almost casually, and whipped the carving knife out of Pen’s hand. Without interrupting the motion, she flung it away behind her and heard it clatter against some piece of furniture.

  “What did you do with the cleaver?” she asked, her voice glacially calm.

  Penelope hadn’t expected that or any question from her, it was obvious. She had become so used to being the silent, unseen terror, instantly imprisoned again when she was caught, that she didn’t know how to deal with words. Almost solely in her own rooms had anyone spoken to her.

  “I...left it...somewhere,” she faltered. Now the black eyes were wary, unsure of what she might expect. There was a flicker of something wild behind them.

  Marise caught the signal immediately and stepped sideways, knocking against the phone table. Pen’s rush carried her past, but Marise had no chance to strike her.

  “You killed your father,” Marise said in a conversational tone. “Didn’t you?”

  The woman turned, looking crafty now. “I’m no fool,” she said. “I knew too much of that medicine would kill him. I hoped they’d think you murdered him and would send you off to prison, but they didn’t. Too bad.”

  “And Miss Edenson?”

  “How could I? I was locked up then and couldn’t manage to get out. Still, I did...arrange it. Yes, I did arrange it, just like I did Mother. I made the plans and somebody else did the work for me. Wouldn’t you like to know who?” The black eyes were mocking, and Marise felt a sudden rush of fury.

  But Penelope moved before she could use any of the tactics she had been considering. She dashed toward the knife, out in the room, swooped upon it and turned again to face Marise.

  “Now we’ll see,” she panted. “You came here into my house, married to my brother. You tricked them all into loving you too, though they never loved me. They locked me up, all alone, except for Andy. And he was only there part of the time.

  “When Hildy told me about you I meant to kill you, right off, but I didn’t have the chance. I only had time to fix your bridal chamber for you.” She smirked.

  “Then you were gone so much, or locked up in here with Ben... my Ben! I got out a few times and talked to you. You heard me too, didn’t you? I hoped I could frighten you away, if I couldn’t kill you, but you were too stupid to run. Now look what you’ve made me do!”

  Though she heard the words, Marise was watching her eyes. When those moved off her face, she knew what she had to do, but she smiled carefully and said, “You know better than that. Nobody made you do anything.” She took a deep breath.

  “I don’t believe in that famous Clarrington madness. I think what you suffered from was the old Clarrington greed, that grasping for things and money and power, but you carried it to an awful extreme. I wonder if the same wasn’t Clara’s problem, and the musician uncle’s too. The old grabby tendencies that made cousins marry cousins for so long to get land, despite the odds, and made the problem.

  “One in every generation got the benefit of that, it seems. The rest gave them the benefit of too many doubts, I feel certain.”

  Those eyes shifted, just a fraction. Marise reached behind her, tore the phone loose from the wall with a single pull, and met the woman’s rush with all her strength behind the weight of the instrument.

  Penelope stood for a moment, her ruined face filled with shock and surprise. The phone dropped from Marise’s hand and she staggered back to lean against the wall. Now she had done her best, and it hadn’t been enough.

  Her sister-in-law took a step forward, but her foot crumpled beneath her. She fell onto her bloody face at Marise’s feet.

  Marise remembered...it had taken her some time to gather the strength to move. And in that interval she heard something on the stair. Had it been a footstep?

  In this present, she still strained to remember the sound. She had been exhausted, drained, so battered emotionally and physically that she had hardly known what she was doing. Had she actually heard anything at all, or had her imagination, strained past belief, laid the groundwork for the trap in which she found herself?

  In the time when she thought she was asleep in the study, had she herself opened the iron gate and the heavy front door for Penelope? Had some latent madness in herself been drawn by that tragic woman to do such a mad thing? Was she driven into insanity by the losses she had sustained?

  She sighed with effort, trying to remember. Was she guilty, alon
g with Penelope, of the deaths of Hildy and Andy, Lina and Benjie, as well as of the death she did recall? She closed her eyes, straining toward that frozen moment in the tower room.

  There had been something on the stair, and she had still thought so as she went down to the parlor to telephone for Evan Turner. Had it been a mouse?

  Perhaps.

  She barely remembered that phone call to Evan, who had become such a good friend while working with Ben in the woods. She knew he had suffered a bad night himself, after carrying Ben to his grave the afternoon before, but he had been the one she thought of and the one whose number she could remember without looking it up.

  His voice had been fogged with sleep when he answered the phone. That was one landmark in the fog of the night. He must have had trouble going to sleep too.

  She recalled her words quite clearly. “Mr. Turner, can you come? We have a...problem here.” The understatement, when she thought of it, had left her half amused and half shaken for all the years since.

  Later he told her he had come in a rush, to find the front gate standing open and the front door unlocked. Only the open parlor door had revealed that she was there, mercifully unconscious at last, beside the dropped phone.

  Ten minutes later the patrol car had passed, having been delayed by a traffic accident on the other side of town. It had been the officer in it who found Hildy and Andy, or what was left of them.

  He and Evan had searched the house as well as possible. They’d found Aunt Lina, Benjie’s empty room, the remains of Penelope in the tower sitting room. “It was like a nightmare,” Evan told her later.

  “She still had the knife in her hand, glued fast with blood. She lay there with her skull smashed in and the broken phone beside her. God only knows how you managed to stop her with such an unlikely weapon.”

  Of course there had been a lot of publicity, for the Clarrington name carried a lot of news value. The Clarrington flaw had been thoroughly aired, not only by the media, but by the gossips all over the state who had known any of the family.

  Even Clara was dragged from her obscure niche in history and examined closely. Nothing could be proved at this point in the game, but speculations had struck very close to the truth. Marise realized that, weeks later, when she was able to read newspapers.

  Luckily, nobody ever thought to investigate the British branch of the family and its terrible end. She was glad to let them lie, untroubled, in their graves. Their fates would have added a note of the macabre to the nasty situation.

  Marise had been ill for a long time. Strain, her bad reaction to the tranquilizers, and shock had taken their toll, and that last night had been the final straw. Dr. Pell had sedated her and she was in the hospital, unconscious, while the investigation went on. She did not know when the bodies were buried, quickly and quietly, and the house returned to some sort of order.

  The family had come to so sudden an end that there was no provision made for carrying on the full activities of Clarrington Enterprises. But the limited board of that time had been in place, and Evan had taken charge, with her short-term power of attorney, and proved himself to be so knowledgeable and competent she had decided, later, to put him in permanent control.

  For she was, quite literally, the only heir. That distant cousin had died of a heart attack the night after Ben’s funeral, leaving her Ben’s heritage. Aunt Lina’s interest had been left to Benjie, and it had also come to her as his surviving parent.

  So she organized the Board in the most effective way she could find. She overrode all objections, as she could do as almost the sole stockholder. Then she moved back into the house that had held all her happiness and all her nightmares, and closed its doors behind her.

  She sighed. What had she dredged up from the past in this traumatic reliving of it? She could find only the things she had known before...or was there more? She had a feeling there might be, if she could find it.

  One thing was certain. Someone had let Penelope into the house that night. If it had not been she, then who had it been? There simply was nobody else.

  A sudden thought occurred to her as she rose wearily to face another night in the bedroom she had shared with Ben. She searched her memory, but she could find no answer.

  I’ll ask Evan when he calls, she thought, turning out the light and closing the door of the study.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Outside

  Evan dialed Marise’s number with some unease. He’d been feeling strange about her since their last talk before he went on his business trip. Mrs. Fisk’s delayed message woke that uneasiness even more as he waited for an answer as the phone at the other end buzzed and buzzed.

  “Clarrington House,” came the answer at last. Ah. “Marise? Evan Turner. Mrs. Fisk said you called and asked for me to call back. She said you sounded disturbed, which seemed to please her a lot. But I hope it wasn’t urgent. She didn’t give me your message at once.”

  When she spoke, her voice seemed odd. “Evan, I’ve had a letter. A very strange letter. I’d like for you to stop by when you have the time and read the thing. It...upset me. I realize it may be from some crank, but it’s been so many years since our tragedy that it seems unlikely. Do you mind?”

  As if he ever minded! “Of course not. I have news from our Washington lobbyist too. You were right we hadn’t approached the committee from the right angle. Your plan worked beautifully, and I think you’ll be pleased.”

  “Good.” Her tone dismissed that triumph, somewhat to his surprise. She’d been so intent on getting the results they needed.

  “Evan....” She sounded hesitant.

  “Is there something else, Marise?”

  Now her voice was thick, as if she were forcing her words past some inner reluctance. “It never occurred to me to ask, and I know it sounds completely insane, but I never knew where you found Benjie’s body. I couldn’t make myself go to the cemetery, after, to see the markers.”

  Even now, he knew that speaking about Benjie was almost more than she could endure.

  “I wasn’t able to think about my son at all. I shut what had happened out of my mind, and I knew it at the time. I just couldn’t let it get close to me, if you see what I mean. That night I couldn’t look for him myself, and it just now occurred to me—he was the only one I didn’t find, or at least know for certain where he was.” She swallowed hard.

  “I think I can handle it now. Will you tell me?”

  Evan turned his head to stare from the office window at a rank of high clouds. He gripped the phone so tightly his knuckles whitened and his fingers almost numbed. Yet he managed to keep his voice quite calm.

  “Look here, my dear, this isn’t something to discuss over the phone. As I’m coming out anyway, why don’t we talk about it after I get there. Can you wait?”

  Her laugh might as well have been a groan. “I’ve waited for ten years to ask the question. I should be able to wait for a few hours to get the answer. Certainly. We’ll talk about it when you get here. Come by around five-thirty, after you leave the office, if that’s convenient. I’ll have...tea and cookies.” Her voice was trying for lightness, but she wasn’t able to achieve it.

  “I’ll come earlier. By five, if that’s all right with you,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Fine.” The receiver clicked in his ear, and he replaced the phone, feeling thoughtful. He felt himself frowning and deliberately smoothed the line from between his eyebrows.

  He pulled his leather bound directory toward him and looked up a number. Then he dialed again.

  “Forrest? This is Evan Turner. Do you recall our special inquiry some years ago? Yes, I agree. And nothing ever turned up? I see. No, not really, I just thought something might have surfaced at last. Thank you, Forrest. Yes, you too. Goodbye.”

  He glanced up to see Fisk standing in the doorway. “I need your signature on these stock certificates,” sh
e said. “If you’d listen to me, we’d insist on going public, instead of splitting the existing stock and having it all go to someone who doesn’t need a dime. I think that woman’s off her rocker; she sounded really awful when she called.”

  He frowned so fiercely she closed her mouth and looked nervous. “The day you’ve handled the sort of problem Marise Clarrington did ten years ago—the day you can deal with the sort of mess I’m about to dump into her lap—I may listen to you, Gertrude. For now, shut up.” She looked shocked, and it made him feel cruel.

  “You know a lot about the law and title deeds and conveyances, but you know nothing about people. Work on your attitude, woman, and leave your ambitions time to mature, why don’t you?”

  Before she could think of a fitting reply, he signed the proffered papers, picked up his briefcase, and left the room. He knew she stared after him, and he hoped she was stunned enough to set her brain working.

  But once the door closed behind him, Evan didn’t give the lawyer another thought. All the time he drove toward Myrtle Street he was thinking furiously about what he must tell Marise Clarrington.

  She might be angry about this, and he wouldn’t blame her. She might slip off the tightrope she had walked for so long and become really unbalanced. Any one of a dozen things might happen. He hated to pull up to the curb and park in front of that massive gate.

  It opened to his key, and he locked it carefully behind him. Too much had happened because the gate had somehow been opened at the wrong time. He was almost as compulsive as Marise about securing it.

  He could hear the doorbell buzz in the entry, and Marise’s familiar step sounded on the other side of the door that still snarled with jungle animals. When it opened he reached to take her hand.

  “Marise. You look a bit worried. Are you all right?”

  She looked up and nodded slightly. “I took your advice, Evan. I relived everything that happened. It’s...something of a strain, as you might imagine.”