The Dark of Summer

EIGHTEEN

A few minutes past eight o'clock that evening, Ben Groves knocked on Gwyn's bedroom door, then shouldered it open, bringing her supper on the familiar sickroom tray.

She sat up, aware that she was not looking her best, and she brushed self-consciously at her tangled yellow hair.

“Sleeping beauty,” he said.

Morosely, she said, “Hardly. I haven't had a shower today, and I know I must look like a witch.”

“Not at all,” he said, putting the tray on her lap and adjusting the two sets of tubular steel legs that supported it on the mattress. “You are lovely, as usual.”

“And you're a liar,” she said.

“Have it your own way,” he said. “You really do look nice. But that's neither here nor there. The important thing isn't how you look, but how you feel, right?”

“Right.”

“So how do you feel?”

“Not hungry,” she said, looking down at the food.

He laughed and said, “I'm afraid you don't have any choice about that. I got strict orders from Mrs. Barnaby to see that you eat it all. And I'm not to let you start the dessert until everything else is gone.”

“Have Uncle Will and Elaine left for their dinner engagement yet?” Gwyn asked, picking up her fork and studying the tray for the least offensive looking dish.

“A few minutes ago,” Ben said.

“Good,” Gwyn said. “I was worried that they wouldn't go. Aunt Elaine has been so good with me, almost too good. I was afraid she'd reconsider at the last moment so she could stay here and look after me.”

He sat down in the easy chair where Elaine usually sat, and he said, “She feels you're recovering nicely.”

Gwyn nodded and forked buttered noodles into her mouth. They had little taste, but more than anything else she had eaten in the last day and a half. She worked at the dish until she had emptied it, which seemed to take forever. Recently, she felt as if her entire lif e consisted of sleeping and eating, and that only the former was not an arduous task.

“I hope your illness didn't have anything to do with the sailing we did the other day,” Groves said, when she had begun to eat the warmed chicken breast on the largest plate.

She looked up, surprised. “How could it?”

“I don't know,” he said. “But you seemed to get sick right after that, so I thought perhaps—”

“Hasn't anyone told you what's wrong with me?” she asked.

“Why should they?”

Gwyn considered this a moment. She should have known that neither Uncle Will nor Elaine would gossip about her to the help, yet she had automatically assumed everyone in the house knew about her ghost. She was relieved that Ben, at least, had been kept in the dark.

“Believe me, Ben, I really enjoyed being on the Salt Joy with you,” she said. “It was the nicest day I've had in a long time. My illness has nothing to do with that.”

“What a relief!” he said. “Well then, maybe we can go out in the boat again, when you're feeling up to it.”

“I don't see why not.”

He peered at her tray with an exaggerated look of anger. “You've hardly touched your chicken, so don't put your fork down yet.”

She laughed and said, “You'd make a very good mother.”

“I try,” he said.

Because she had not taken a sleeping tablet since that morning, and because Ben's presence was considerably more vital, in an undefinable way, than Elaine's was, she found herself more alert, her mind functioning in less of a haze than it had for the past forty-eight hours. Inevitably, then, she began to think about the ghost and about all the things that might be connected with it, and she broached a tangent of the subject with him.

When she'd reached her dessert, she said, “Do you know any of the fishermen who've been giving Uncle Will trouble?”

“A bad lot,” he said.

“Which ones do you know?”

“Younger, Abrahams, Wilson, nearly all of them.”

“Is it true they threatened Uncle Will?”

“They did, all right.”

“How?”

“In vague, but definitely meaningful terms,” he said.

“Do you think that they'd carry through on those threats?”

He grimaced and said, “They're not an easy group of men to get along with, and they don't hold their anger well. Yes, I believe they'd have gone through with the threats if Uncle Will hadn't reported them to the sheriff.”

Outside, night had fallen; the remnants of an orange sunset lighted a half inch of the horizon on the far side of the house but did not light the sky beyond Gwyn's windows.

She ate several more spoonfuls of the same kind of chocolate pudding which she'd been served for lunch, then said, “Do you think they'd be the kind to strike out at me, when they saw they couldn't easily get at my uncle?”

“What do you mean?”

She couldn't tell him without mentioning the ghost, and she did not want him to know about that, because she was still pretty sure that it was only an illusion, the symptom of emotional instability.

He said, “Do you mean would they hurt you?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Not likely,” he said. “At least, I don't think they'd stoop so low as to carry a grudge against innocent bystanders. Why? Has something happened?”

“Nothing, really,” she said.

“Then why did you ask?”

She ate another spoonful of chocolate pudding and, rather than answer him, asked another question. She said, “What do you know about International Seafood Products?”

He looked at her strangely and seemed, at first, unable to find a response. “What do you mean?”

She finished her pudding, enjoying the taste of the last few mouthfuls, and she said, “I understand that ISP wants to build a seafood processing plant nearby.”

He nodded. “ISP wants to, and the fishermen want them to — but everyone else in the area is dead set against it.”

“Why?”

“The filth, of course.”

She said, “As I understand, ISP wants to build a modern plant that wouldn't foul the sea or the air.”

“You've heard wrong, then.”

“But don't they have a plant like that operating up in Maine?”

She thought that there was a look of deep anxiety on Ben's face, though she couldn't imagine what he had to be anxious about. He leaned forward in the easy chair and finally began to reply, when the telephone rang, somewhere downstairs.

“That's Mr. Barnaby's private line, in the study,” he said. “I'll have to go down there to answer it. I'll be right back.”

He departed before she could say anything, and she heard him taking the main stairs two at a time.

Ben picked up the study phone and said, “Hello?”

“It's me,” Penny said. She was calling from the house phone, in the kitchen, to give him an excuse to get out of Gwyn's room, according to plan.

He sat down heavily in Will Barnaby's leather chair, behind the desk, leaned his elbows on the blotter and said, “Elaine told me that the kid would be dopey — from all the drugs she had this morning and from her own state of mind.”

Apprehensively, Penny said, “And she isn't?”

“Depends on your definition of 'dopey,' he said. “She's not her usual self, to be sure. But she's a damn sight more alert than I expected her to be.”

“What happened?”

He said, “She got inquisitive. She wanted to talk about the fishermen, and I think she was close to telling me about you — about the ghost.”

“But she didn't?”

“Not quite. However, she did ask me what I knew about ISP, and she proved to be damned knowledgeable on the subject.”

“You don't think she knows?”

“No. Maybe she suspects something… though she musn't know just what. She thinks maybe the fishermen are behind the ghost.”

Penny said, “Ben, maybe we shouldn't go through with it.”

“It's not that bad,” he said. “I didn't mean to put you on edge, Penny. I only wanted to warn you that she's not a walking zombie, like we thought she'd be at this stage.”

“She may catch on—”

“No, she won't,” he said. “She'll tumble for it, and we'll break her down tonight for sure.”

“Well—”

“Think of all that money,” he said.

“I've been thinking of it for a hundred years.”

“We're too close now to back off.”

She was silent a moment, then said, “You're right. I'm going to go up there now and scare the hell out of that kid.”

“That's the stuff.”

“You be ready, according to the script.”

He said, “Have you ever known me to miss a cue?”

“Never.”

“Okay, go to work, love.”

The final act had begun.

NINETEEN

When darkness came to Jenkins' Niche, it brought Paul Morby with it, more of a ghost than Penny Groves could ever have been. For eight years, Morby had been a member in good standing of the United States Army's Green Berets, one of the world's most deadly, violent and insidious guerrilla warfare fighting forces. He'd spent four long years in Vietnam, having completed more than three hundred missions into enemy-held territory, all of which ended in success. He had killed men, and he had suffered no remorse, for that was what he had been trained to do. When he finally checked out of the service and came home, it was clear to Morby that his fortune lay in the use of those tricks and talents which the army had taught him, and he applied the methods of war to domestic, personal problems — for a fat fee. He had worked for out-and-out criminals, for borderline operators, and for men who were ostensibly honest, such as William Barnaby. Thus far, he had never had to kill anyone for money, and he avoided those jobs in which murder was almost essential or highly likely. He burned down houses, set up banks for men who wanted to rob them, and committed a dozen other prosecutable felonies, all without regret. The Green Berets preferred men with few scruples, then bred the last dregs of honesty from them. It was not in Paul Morby, then, to be sorry about anything that he did. When he came into Jenkins' Niche, just after dark, he did so with only one thought: do the job right, earn the money.

He never thought about taking the money and leaving the job undone, for he wanted to be given any repeat business that Barnaby might have for a man like him, in the future.

Like any good craftsman, he knew that the quality of his product must remain high, higher than any competition's product, if he were to survive at doing what he liked to do. The only difference between Morby and any other craftsman was that Morby's craft was far more dangerous than most; and his end product, rather than some tangible piece of goods like a pair of shoes or a leather wallet, was destruction. Morby liked to destroy, because it was exciting. He couldn't imagine going through life as a clerk or nine-to-five office worker.

He came in by sea, in a midnight black wet suit and diving tanks. He had entered the water farther up the shore, out of sight of the Niche, then swam just below the surface until he rounded the point and struck in among the docked fishing craft. Behind him, on a thin chain latched to his waist, he towed a waterproof tin box which contained the tools of his trade: a well silenced pistol with two spare clips of ammunition, a plastic-wrapped package of gelignite plastic explosives, a mini-timer to set off the charge when he was well away from the scene, and a set of keys which could open the locks on almost any boat made.

The docks were built out from the beach, forming a perfect cover for his final approach. He swam in beneath one of these and came out of the water in the shadow of the old wooden planking, where no one would see him.

He pulled back the black rubber hood that clung tightly to his head, and when his ears had adjusted, he could hear laughter and voices, not too far away along the beach.

Morby smiled to himself, because he knew that, in a little while, none of these men would feel much like laughing.

Unsnapping the chain from his waist, shrugging out of his oxygen tanks, he opened the tin box and took out his pistol, the gelignite, the timer and the keys. The last made a brief jangling noise as he tucked them into a snap pocket of the wet suit, but he was confident that no one had heard them.

Cautiously, he left the shadow of the pier and went to scout around, to locate the bulk of the fishermen who had the night duty in the Niche, and to find the most likely target for the gelignite. Barnaby hadn't cared which boat was blown up, just so one of them got ripped to shreds.

“The cops will find traces of the gelignite,” Morby had warned.

Barnaby had said, “But it's the only way to be sure the boat's a total loss?”

“Yes,” Morby said. “A fire can be fairly rapidly extinguished on a boat. If I set a fire, I'd have an escape problem, and I doubt I'd end up doing much damage.”

“The gelignite, then,” Barnaby said. “And so what if they find traces? Do you really think they'd come back to me, a respectable man of the community, a millionaire?”

“You're the only one who wants them out of the Niche, though,” Morby said, jabbing a thick finger at the older man.

“That's true,” Barnaby had said. “However, why should I pull a stunt like this when they'd have to be out in thirty days anyway?”

“That's a good point,” Morby had admitted. “That ought to convince the cops that you're clean, that on top of your good name and all your money.” He gave Barnaby a searching look and said, “But I've wondered the same thing myself. Why are you going to take a risk like this, when they'll be gone in thirty days, anyway?”

“That's personal,” Barnaby had said.

And Morby, aware that he could not push the point any further, had let it drop at that.

Now he was prowling the Niche in the darkness, listening to the fishermen exchange jokes around a large beach fire, and staking out the most likely looking ships to see which he wanted to blow to smithereens.

Morby went over the side of the Princess Lee, padded along the gangway to the galley steps, went down these one at a tune as silently as a cat on cotton. The galley door was closed, but not locked. He pushed it open without any trouble. He went in, followed a corridor aft, until he found a place against an inner partition, where the gelignite would do its best work. He bent down and began to mold the plastic charge to the base of the wall, stringing it out just enough to rip up the major seam in the floor and let the water in soon after the flames.

In a minute, he was finished. He picked up the mini-timer, set that to a full five minute fuse, jammed it into the gelignite.

He stood up, folded the plastic wrappings and stuffed those into another safety pocket in his wet suit.

The job finished, he turned to leave — just in time to encounter a middle-aged fisherman in blue jeans and a sweatshirt; the man had just come down the galley stairs, as quietly as Morby had, though his quiet had been that generated by familiarity and not by purposeful stealth. He stepped into the corridor and flipped on the overhead lights, bathing Morby in what seemed an intense, white glare.

Morby brought up his pistol.

The fisherman gaped at the sight of the big man in the diving suit, for he had clearly not known there was anyone down here.

“What the hell—” he began.

Morby shot him three times, all in the chest.

The fisherman dropped like one of his anchors, stone dead.

Morby waited, very still, for someone else to follow the dead sailor. When a full minute had passed, he realized that the man had been alone.

Quickly, then, he walked down the corridor, stepped over the body and went up onto deck, without a glance backward. He had not wanted to kill the fisherman, but he'd seen no other possibility. The man had caught sight of his head, his face, and would be sure to remember him. Though Morby lived just outside of Boston, he kept a summer cottage at Calder, and he would have been spotted by this man sooner or later.

Now, with the mini-timer's fuse rapidly running down, Morby went over the side of the Princess Lee, swam to the beach and risked a quick run along the sand to the dock where he'd left his gear. It was still there.

He pulled up his hood, slipped into his oxygen tanks and buckled them across his chest.

The gelignite had not gone off.

He put the pistol and the ammunition clips into the tin box, sealed that, snapped the chain onto his belt. Lifting the box, he started forward, wading into the deeper water under the dock. When he was in up to his waist, the explosion lifted a dark lid off the world and let a fierce red-white light in. The noise followed: like the worst thunder in the world.

Morby grinned, waded deeper, then went under. In the confusion on the beach, it was easy for him to swim out of Jenkins' Niche unnoticed.

TWENTY

While Ben was downstairs on the telephone, Gwyn got out of bed, chose a pair of clean pajamas from the bureau, and went into the bathroom to freshen up and to make herself more attractive. Her hair really needed washing, but once she brushed the tangles out of it, it didn't look too bad. She washed her face, powdered it slightly, applied a thin coat of clear, moisturizing lipstick. Slipping into the clean pajamas, she looked and felt like an altogether different person than the girl who had just eaten supper. She was still tired, very tired, but not so weary as she had been these past two days. And, right now, though sleep was attractive, she did not long for it in quite such an unholy fashion as she had this afternoon.

When she came out of the bath, Ben Groves had not come back yet — though the dead girl was there.

“Hello, Gwyn.”

She stepped around the apparition, went to the bed and got under the sheets, as if it had not spoken.

“That's not a nice way to be.”

She said nothing.

She prayed for Ben to return.

The ghost came and stood at the foot of her bed, raised its arms in her direction. “The longer you ignore me, the more you try to shove me out of your life, Gwyn, the harder it is for me to stay here.”

“Then, go away.”

“You don't mean that.”

“I do.”

“Without you?”

“Yes.”

“But don't you love me?”

Gwyn said, “No.”

“I'm your sister, your blood!”

“You aren't.”

The dead girl made a face, disgusted, and she said. “Don't persist in these foolish denials.”

“They aren't foolish at all. My sister died when she was a little girl, when she was only twelve. You're a grown woman, someone else altogether or a figment of my imagination. No matter that you look like me, that you look like Ginny. You're not.”

“I've explained this all before, Gwyn.”

“Not to my satisfaction.”

“Gwyn, I do need you. The other side keeps tugging at me, wanting me back. If you won't accept me, I can't stay here. But I need you, more than I've ever needed anyone or anything, to make things more pleasant on the other side, to have someone to talk to.”

“I'm imagining you,” Gwyn said.

“You aren't.”

“I may be going mad, but I know it. That's something, anyway.” She was trembling badly.

The ghost climbed onto the bed, making the mattress sink at the bottom, and she crawled up toward Gwyn. She touched Gwyn's bare arm with her fingertips, and she said, “There, now, does that feel like a figment of your imagination?”

Gwyn said nothing.

“I've told you that, temporarily, I'm as real as you are, as fleshy as you, and not to be ignored.”

“Then you'd better get out of here before Ben gets back,” Gwyn said. “If he sees you—”

“Oh, he won't.”

“I thought you said you were as real as me, temporarily?”

“I am,” the dead girl said. “But a ghost has certain abilities that come in handy. I can keep him from seeing me, if I wish.”

Gwyn said nothing.

“Please speak to me, Gwyn.”

“I'd be talking to myself, then,” Gwyn said. “And I really don't need that. So why not go away.”

The dead girl studied her closely for a moment, then crawled even closer on the bed. She said, “Gwyn, I'm your sister, and I love you, and whatever I do is for your own good.”

Gwyn was quiet.

“It's better for you on the other side, with me, in death. Here, you have no one, no one at all; you're alone and afraid, and you're clearly quite ill. I'm going to take you with me, for your own good.”

Gwyn did not realize the full import of what the dead girl had said, for she was still operating under the assumption that she could best handle the situation by ignoring it Then, a moment later, it was too late for her to puzzle out the specter's meaning, for the creature unexpectedly leapt on top of her, bearing down onto the mattress, locking her there with its knees and its weight, clamping two white, dry hands around her neck and feeling for a strangler's grip.

Gwyn frantically grabbed those ghostly wrists.

They felt solid.

She tried to push them away, to break the specter's hold on her throat, but she could not manage that.

“It'll only hurt for a minute,” the dead girl promised her, smiling sweetly down in her face.

Gwyn reared up.

The ghost held her tight.

The pale hands increased the pressure on her throat, like the two halves of a soft but capable vise.

Gwyn gagged, tried to draw breath, found it difficult and almost impossible to do even that small thing.

Terror, then, returned tenfold.

She let go of the wrist and struck out for the dead girl's face, dragged nails along the pale face and brought one thin line of bright blood to the surface.

The ghost cried out and let her go.

Gwyn heaved up again, with all of her might, holding back nothing, her system flooded with adrenalin, and she shoved the specter out of the way. She leaped out of bed, stumbled on a trailing end of the sheet and fell to the floor.

The specter grabbed the back of her pajamas.

“Ben!” she cried.

The word came out in a croak.

Gwyn squealed, rolled forward, freeing herself., scrambled to her feet. Even a couple of minutes ago, she would not have thought she had so much energy left, but now her strength seemed boundless, her endurance without limits.

“You can't run,” the specter said.

She started for the door.

It stepped in front of her.

“You can't run anywhere that I won't follow you, Gwyn.”

The dead girl started forward, holding her hands out, just far enough apart to allow Gwyn's neck to fit between the wriggling fingers…

“Ben!”

The name was louder this time, but would probably still not carry all the way downstairs.

The ghost was much too close.

Gwyn put her head down and ran forward, toward the door, struck the dead girl a glancing blow and dashed into the upstairs corridor. She was disoriented for a moment, not having expected to escape, but located the stairs in short order and ran for them.

“Gwyn, come back to me!”

At the head of the steps, she collided with Ben Groves, who was on his way up, and nearly succeeded in knocking them both down the whole long flight in what would surely have been a deadly fall.

TWENTY-ONE

“Gwyn, what on earth's the matter with you? You were screaming so loudly I could hear you downstairs.”

He held her by her shoulders, tenderly and yet firmly, and he shook her until she stopped sobbing and was able to speak coherently again. She held onto his arms, glad to have him here, feeling protected by him as she had felt on the Salt Joy and on their walk around the grounds. She said, “I'm not losing my mind, Ben.”

He looked perplexed, then smiled tentatively. He said, “Well, of course you're not.”

“But I thought that I was.”

“You've lost me.”

She said, “It was the sickness, that you didn't understand… I was seeing ghosts, my dead sister, hallucinations—” It sounded foolish, like the babblings of a madwoman, as if she had already gone over the edge. She went on, nonetheless: “Now I know I wasn't having hallucinations at all, because she just tried to kill me, to strangle me.”

“She?”

“The — ghost. The woman pretending to be a ghost. I can still feel where her hands were on my throat.”

“You mean there's someone else in this house?” he asked.

“She was just in my room.”

“Let's go have a look,” he said.

“No.”

“Why not? Gwyn, if there's someone in the manor who doesn't belong here, we've got to see who she is.”

“I'm scared, Ben.”

He slid his arms around her, all the way, and gave her a quick, reassuring hug. He said, “There's no need to be scared, Gwyn. I'm here, and I'll take care of you.”

“Don't let her touch me.”

“I won't, Gwyn.”

“She must be a crazy woman.”

“Let's go see what this is all about.”

She turned around to go back with him, and she screamed, bringing her hands up to her face as if she could block out the reality by blocking out the vision itself. The dead girl, impossibly, stood not more than six feet away from them, smiling.

Ben said, “Gwyn? What is it?”

“There she is!”

He looked where Gwyn pointed, pursed his mouth, looked down at the girl at his side. He said. “There isn't anyone here but you and me.”

“There is!”

He gave her a searching look and said, “No one at all, Gwyn. The hallway's empty.”

“You don't see her?”

“There's no one to see, Gwyn.”

The dead girl grinned, wickedly now, and said, in a voice as thin as rice paper, “I told you, before, Gwyn, that we have a few tricks that come in handy.”

“She just spoke,” Gwyn said.

His grip on her tightened, but he said nothing.

“For God's sake, she just talked to me, Ben! You mean to tell me you didn't hear a word of it?”

But she knew that he hadn't.

He said, “No one spoke.”

“She did. Yes, she did.”

“No one but you and I.”

She remembered what Dr. Recard had said— that you could not be going mad if you thought that you were, that the truly mad person was absolutely sure of his sanity. Therefore, if Dr. Recard were to be believed, she must not be insane now, could be nowhere near insane; yet she remained uncheered by this reasoning.

The dead girl stepped toward her.

. “Stay back,” she said.

“I need you,” the specter said.

“Don't touch me!”

Ben said, “Gwyn, there isn't anyone here!”

The dead girl grinned, almost on top of her now, and she said, “A fall down these steps would do it, Gwyn. He'd think you fell, and then you'd be with me forever.”

Her head swam. In the back of her mind, leering, she saw the head of Death, where it always lay at the edge of her memory, waiting to claim her just as it had claimed so many who were dear to her in years past. “No!” she said.

The dead girl reached for her, palms flattened, arms stiff. “Just a quick shove—”

Gwyn pulled away from Ben, who would clearly be no help for her, turned and grabbed the stair railing, started down toward the first floor as fast as she could go.

“Gwyn!” the ghost called after her.

And Ben, not hearing that other-worldly plea, cried, “Gwyn, what's gotten into you.”

She did not answer either of them, did not look back until, as she neared the bottom steps, she heard Ben scream behind her. She whirled in time to see him falling, head over heels, thumping rudely from step to step by the rail, clawing out for support — and then coming to a brutal and final stop. His head caught between two stairs railings, twisted and sheet-white, breaking his neck. His face was streaked with blood, his eyes bulging, more blood running from the corner of his mouth.

“Oh, God,” Gwyn said.

The ghost, smiling, stooped by the body. “He's dead,” she said. “Well, he'll be happier now.”

Madness?

Reality?

The dead girl stood again and started down the steps. “Well,” she said, “you've already reached the bottom, safely enough. We'll have to look for some other way for you to reach your end. But there are plenty, dear, so don't fret. And it'll be less painful than his end was, I assure you.”

Gwyn turned and ran along the hallway, deeper into the dark manor house, alone with the dead girl, so terrified now that she could not even cry, and could barely draw a breath. Madness…?

TWENTY-TWO

The Kettle and Coach, on the outskirts of Calder, was more crowded than usual, and considerably rowdier than the Barnabys liked it, though neither was put out by the cloud of cigarette smoke that hung over the cocktail lounge, or by the roar of conversation that, by its very volume, almost ruled out conversation. They actually seemed to enjoy the close quarters, the hustle and the bustle, and they had a smile and a few words for almost everyone they saw. After all, the more contacts they made, the more sound their alibi for the evening.

From the cocktail lounge, they went into the dining room, where they ate a leisurely dinner, accompanied by a bottle of good wine and a lot of unimportant business talk between Will and Edgar Aimes. It was near the end of this dinner that waiter brought a message from the cocktail lounge.

“Mr. Barnaby?”

Will looked up, smiled. “Yes?”

“A phone call, sir. You can take it in the lounge.”

“Thank you.”

“Business?” Edgar Aimes asked.

“Our friend Mr. Morby, I should imagine.” He smiled at Mrs. Aimes, who had no idea who Mr. Morby was and never would. He said, “You will excuse me,” as if she were the only important person at the table.

His special attention took her mind off Morby. She flushed and said, “Of course, Will.”

He followed the waiter to the lounge and had the proper telephone pointed out to him, tipped the waiter a dollar, waved away the man's profuse thanks, and stepped into the glass booth, drawing the folding door tight shut behind him.

“Hello?”

“Morby here.”

“How are things?”

“The job is finished. I thought you'd like to know that it went well, as smoothly as it could have.”

Barnaby smiled. “I bet those tramps were screaming their heads off, eh?”

“I wouldn't know,” Morby said. “I don't stick around to see how a job affects anyone.”

“Well, I would have,” Barnaby said, chuckling.

“And you'd never last in a profession like this,” Morby said, without rancor, as a man might say the sun will rise in the morning.

“Perhaps you're right.”

“Of course I am,” Morby said. “And if you've any work for me in the future, don't hesitate to call.”

“I won't.”

Morby hung up.

By the time he got back to the dinner table, Barnaby was feeling like a million bucks, or better. And if the second half of tonight's plans were running to schedule, he'd actually be worth far more than a measly million, in just a few months time.

The young fisherman was not going to back down from his position, and the longer he held to it, the more he stirred up the men who were listening to him. His name was Tom Asher, and he swore that the Princess Lee had not been ripped open by an explosion in her fuel tanks nor by any gas fumes trapped in a lower hold. He said, “It was plastic explosives, as sure as I stand here. I was in Vietnam eighteen months, and I saw that kind of blow-up a hundred times. If it'd been a gasoline explosion, from the start, you'd have had a fireball, a big mushrooming effect. But this was compact and neat, ripping right through the top and right through the bottom of the boat. The fireball, what there was of it, came later, when the gas tanks went. You could see that, a second explosion a few seconds after the first. And from the smallness of the fireball, I'd say her fuel tanks were nearly empty. No, it wasn't an accident. It was a shaped charge, a planned blow-up.”

Jack Younger (the elder), was a squat, muscular man with a full gray beard and bushy sideburns, a chest like half a barrel and arms as thick as the limbs of large oak trees. He was the strongest of the fishermen, and he was the most reasonable as well. Right now, he felt as if he were the only thing holding back a second explosion that might be far more damaging than the first.

He said, “Tom, you can't seriously be saying that the Princess Lee was sabotaged?”

“I'm saying it,” the young fisherman told him.

“But who would do a thing of that sort?” Younger asked.

His son stood next to him, a pace or two behind.

He admired his father immensely, and he could usually expect him to win out in any contest of fists or wits. Tonight, however, it was evident to Younger (the younger) that Tom Asher was going to carry the largest part of the group with him.

“I've already named the culprit,” Asher said.

The other fishermen murmured agreement.

What was left of the Princess Lee had burned and sunk in the water of the Niche and had not set fire to any of the other ships, thanks to the quick reaction of all present. Now, the campfire had died down too, and they were all illuminated by an eerie red glow that left the tops of their faces swathed in darkness and turned their chins the color of blood.

“Barnaby?” The elder Younger asked.

“Yes. Who else?”

“But, Tom, use your sense. Why would he resort to some stunt like this, when we must be out of here in another month anyway?”

“That man's not sane,” someone behind Asher said.

“He's nuts,” Asher agreed. “You can't ever say what a nut is going to do — or why.”

“You don't become a millionaire if you're nuts,” Younger cautioned them, wagging a finger like their father.

“Now, Jack,” Asher said, “you know Barnaby was born a millionaire. He didn't have to earn it, not a penny. He's still nuts, I say.”

“But where's your proof?” Younger insisted.

“Aboard the sunken Princess Lee,” Asher said. “The state police will find fragments of the plastic explosives.”

“And will that lead back to Barnaby?”

“It may. That stuff's not easy to get.”

Younger sighed and shook his burly head. “Do you think that a creampuff like William Barnaby could sneak in here—”

“Come off it, Jack!” Asher said. “You know I'm not trying to sell the idea that Barnaby did it himself. He would have hired someone to do it. He did hire someone!”

“Again — proof?”

“I, for one, don't need proof,” Asher said. His features looked like the lines in a grotesque horror mask as the dying firelight washed up over him and bled away into the night.

“Great,” Younger said, “a lynching.”

“No one said anything about that,” Asher said. “We'll just go to the manor and confront him with it We'll make out — as if we saw the man that did it. How's he to know we're lying? If we play it right, we can get him running scared, and he may let something slip.”

“That happens in the movies, not in real life,” Younger said.

Someone said, “Have you forgotten, Jack, that Scott was aboard that boat when she went up, and that there's likely no piece of him left bigger than a quarter?”

They were all very silent.

“I haven't forgotten,” Younger said, sadly.

“Then what the devil are we waiting for?” Asher wanted to know, his face screwed up as if his impatience was a bolt which had tightened inside of his head. He had always been in favor of taking a harder line against Barnaby; now, with the death of Scott against the Princess Lee, he felt that his stand had been the right one all along.

Younger frowned and said, “Well, I see that you're set on it and there's no talking reason to you, no considering what alternatives we might have.”

The men muttered agreement.

“We'll take my ship, then,” Younger said. “But there will not be any violence when we get to the manor, no rock throwing, no window smashing or any contact with Barnaby beyond the verbal. I will not tolerate that, and I'd turn my best friend over to the coppers. Understood?”

“You're right,” Asher said, “We only want to confront that scum with what he's done.”

“And that'll come to naught,” Younger said.

“Maybe it will, Jack,” Tom Asher admitted, now that he had won the main battle and felt that he could afford to make a few small concessions for the sake of unity. “But really, Jack, what else can we do and still keep our self-respect?”

Younger had no answer to that.

They stamped out the fire and drowned it with several buckets of seawater, then boarded the Wanda Lynne, the thirty-six-foot Younger ship.

When they were under way, Jack Younger drew his son close and, in a voice too low for anyone else to hear, said, “You stay by me the whole time, you hear?”

“Sure, Dad,” the boy said.

“If there's any trouble, no matter how harmless it seems at the start, you don't join in with it, but you run.”

Jack Younger, the younger, nodded agreement. As they set out of the Niche toward the open sea, he wondered what knowledge, if any, Gwyn had about this affair…

TWENTY-THREE

Fleeing from the bloody scene on the stairs, her thoughts in a turmoil, Gwyn reached the end of the long, main corridor and pushed open the swinging door, stepped into the dark kitchen, aware that the dead girl was not terribly far behind her. She crossed the kitchen to the outside door, put her hand on the knob before she realized what a fatal error she had made.

Once she left the manor house, she had to cross a long expanse of open lawn before she could reach either the sheltering woods or the steps down to the beach, and the specter was certain to see which way she was going, and give chase. Once her destination was known, she had no hope of hiding there.

On the other hand, if she remained in the house, she could creep from room to room, down the complex hallways, up and down the main and back stairs, like an animal avoiding a hunter, both of them in a confusing maze. The house was certainly huge enough for…

Still standing there, unable to make a decision, she realized how ludicrous her plans were. Since Ben had been unable to see the ghost, then it was either real, or a figment of her imagination, in which case there was no hiding from it.

Abruptly, she had a disconcerting thought: suppose it were imaginary; then who had pushed Ben down the stairs? The answer was chillingly clear: she had pushed him herself.

With the realization that she might be, on top of everything else, a psychopathic murderess, she put her face in her hands, as if her fingers could close out the world. She might have frozen there, in terror at what was happening around her and to her, might have finally broken down if she had been given another full minute or two of silence in which to contemplate her own sickness; however, the specter called out to her from the hallway beyond the kitchen door, jolting her with that by now well-known, ethereal voice. “Gwyn?”

Thrust into action by the circumstances, with no time to think, Gwyn knew instinctively what she must do. She pulled open the rear door to the back lawn and, without stepping outside, she slammed it loudly. Then, moving quickly and noiselessly to the can cupboard, she opened that door, stepped into the tiny closet, and pulled the door almost shut again, leaving only a tiny crack through which she could watch the area of the kitchen by the back door.

Almost at once, the swinging door pushed inward, and the specter glided across the kitchen floor to the back door, stood there peering out at the empty lawn.

Gwyn held her breath, sure that the lovely demon would turn toward her, smiling, reveal that she had not been fooled at all.

When a moment had passed, however, the ghost shouted, in a rather unghostly manner, “Ben!”

He arrived in the kitchen a few seconds later, spattered with a dark liquid which, in the semi-darkness, was not easily identified as blood.

“She's left the house,” the dead girl said.

Gwyn watched from her hiding place in the can cupboard, in shock, as the dead man joined the specter at the back door and, leaning toward the glass, stared intently at the lawn.

“Which way did she go?” Ben asked. He sounded exactly as he had sounded in life.

“I don't know,” the dead girl told him. “By the time I got here, she was out of sight.”

“You're sure she went out there?”

“I heard the door slam.”

He looked around the kitchen, but did not seem to see the cupboard as a hiding place. He said, “Damn!”

“What do we do?”

“Go after her, of course.”

The dead girl was not at all happy about that prospect. She said, “Look, Ben, she's probably gone over the edge already, what with that routine on the stairs. She won't know whether the ghost is real or whether she's imagining everything, but in either case she won't hold onto her sanity. She's probably sitting out there babbling to herself under a tree. We can just wait until Barnaby comes home, go find her, have her examined and committed, and our job is done.”

He thought about it a moment, then said, “No, that won't do.”

“Why won't it?”

He said, “We've got to be sure.”

“I'm already sure.”

Ben said, “But if she catches sight of me, all smeared up like this, after she's just seen me with a broken neck on the stairs, and if I start giving her that spiel about dying so she can be with us, she's bound to flip out. Then we'll both be sure the job's done right.”

The dead girl said, “I don't like this whole job. I like it less and less every minute, and I wish we'd never taken it.”

He put his arm around her and said, “There, there, love. You don't mean that.”

“I do mean it.”

“Just hang on a couple of more hours,” he said. “Then we're done, and we only have to sit around and wait for the money to pour in.”

“If he pays us.”

“He has to pay us.”

“Not if he can find some way around it,” she said. “And what can we do if he refuses to pay — go to the Better Business Bureau?” She laughed somewhat bitterly.

In the cupboard, Gwyn shook her head, as if she thought this was all another delusion and that she could rattle it out of the way. It remained, however, unfolding slowly, whether delusion or reality.

Ben said, “Barnaby will pay. Look, he'll be grateful as hell to us when this is done; without you, he'd not have been able to pull it off. Hell, if he hadn't seen you, he wouldn't even have thought of the whole bit. Besides, he's as deep into this as we are. And, baby, what he's giving us is only a little dribble of the bucketful he'll get his hands on.”

“I guess you're right.”

He kissed her cheek. “I always am. Now come along, love, and let's see where the kid's gotten to.”

She said, “What if she ran for help?”

“The nearest help, by foot, is an hour away,” he said. “And I don't think she's got the strength or the sense of mind to make it. The best thing about the manor is its isolation.”

“But just suppose she does make it,” the dead girl said.

“Playing pessimist tonight, are you?” he asked. “Okay. Even if she reaches help somewhere, they'll need to settle her down before they can get the story out of her. Then, when she's told them about me — and about you — they'll most likely not believe a word of it. If they do, and if they come back here with her, we'll have you tucked away in the attic. I'll have got all the chicken blood cleaned up, and I'll simply explain that the kid has been having — unfortunate emotional problems.” He laughed, coldly. “We just can't lose. If we don't find her in an hour, we come back to the house and clean up and get ready for visitors. But my guess is that she's out there somewhere, completely cracked.”

“I don't know,” the dead girl said. “I wouldn't have fallen for this. It makes me creepy to think she would swallow it so easily.”

“She's been mentally ill before,” he said. “It was natural for her to think she was having a relapse.”

“I guess…”

“Come on,” he said, opening the kitchen door.

Together, they went outside, closing the door after themselves.

Slowly, cautiously, Gwyn pushed open the pantry door, waited in the shadows a moment longer to be certain that they were not going to return, then stepped out into the kitchen, crossed the room to the back door and looked outside. The pair of specters, who were not specters at all, stood on the lawn ten yards away from the house, still a frightening couple. They were calling her name in that same, eerie voice which she had thought, at one time, was so inhuman: “Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn…” That unsettling vocal effect was merely a gimmick, a phony pitch that a professional actor might easily employ, though it sounded hollow and supernatural. They were surveying the woods where they thought she might have hidden, and gradually they became more comical and less terrifying, more human and less unnatural.

As she stood there, Gwyn began to piece together tiny bits of data, previously unremarkable events which now linked into one chain of cause and effect and produced a bracelet of deception…

How unnatural it had been, after all these years, for Uncle Will to write the sort of letter that he had, how pat and perfect and too like a wish or a dream.

And, too, how odd that she had suffered no illusions of ghosts until she was securely in the manor house, under the watchful eyes of — she now realized — complete strangers…

She realized other things as well: The interest which Elaine and Will had shown in hearing of her previous illness was not innocent, but the interest of a pair of vultures listening to their wounded victim tell them how and when it would die and be available for a feast; Fritz and Grace's air of not belonging in the jobs they held — they too must be in on this scheme; the careful admonitions not to go near Jack Younger, not because he would harm her, but because he might convince her of a bit of the truth which would help her to discover the ruse they planned; the sleeping tablets, not meant to help her get better, but to weaken her, to let her slide back into the patterns of her old illness where she would be an easier target for the horrors they had planned to show her tonight; Jack Younger's assurance that her uncle was a bigot, so far as social stations went, though she had thought he had outgrown that pettiness; all the talk at the beginning of her stay in the manor, about the view from her bedroom windows, so silly at the time, but effectively reminding her of Ginny and priming her for the first visit of the ghost; the broom marks which she had seen and which her uncle professed not to be able to pick out… The list went on and on, so that Gwyn wondered, now, how she could ever have overlooked so many things, how she could have let them almost get away with this. She had been near to madness, after all.

However, even now, so soon after the revelation of the hoax, she could understand, just a little, why she had been ripe for this kind of thing. She had wanted to have a family again, wanted that so desperately, that she had been not only capable of overlooking flaws in Will and Elaine, but had been eager to see only the good in them. She had not wanted to do anything to shatter the hope they had given her, and as a result, she had played right into their hands.

There were various bits and pieces of the hoax which she had not yet found satisfactory explanations for: how the blonde girl could look so very much like her, and like Ginny, her exact double, in fact; how she could have known about the Teckert boy, whom Gwyn had forgotten about a long time ago… But, in the end, these were nothing more than technicalities, and they did not change the basic explanation of why she had fallen so completely and so quickly for their deception: she wanted a family; she needed to be loved.

Out on the lawn, still calling her name to the night in those cold and unnatural voices, Ben Groves and the unnamed girl moved out of Gwyn's line of sight as they continued with their fruitless search. There was no kid sitting beneath a tree and babbling…

Gwyn turned away from the window.

She was not particularly angry with anyone, not with Will or Elaine or Ben or this unknown woman, not even as — moment by moment — she realized more fully just what they had been trying to do to her, how little they had cared about her, how utterly ruthless they had been. Instead of anger, she felt a deep, welling sorrow. She was depressed beyond measure by what had happened. Her love had been met by deception, her trust twisted and used against her. Because she had passed through so much of life without loved ones, she had passed through life alone — and, alone, she had never had the opportunity to learn, first-hand, how duplicitous human nature was, how often people used false affection to hide an inner hate. Now, having learned this lesson in one sudden sortie, she was literally stunned.

“Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn. “ hollow and strange, but no longer frightening.

She shook herself out of her negative reverie, aware that she had no time to waste with her sorrow, and she tried to decide what she must do next. Because her own belief in the hoax was, after all she had heard, still rather shaky, she felt that she must do some detective work, snoop around and find out as much as she could, to fortify her belief. Besides, though she knew, almost for certain, what hoax had been played and why, she had no proof of it to take to the authorities. Indeed, if she went to them with what she had now, they would humor her and, as her uncle evidently wished, eventually decide that she was quite incompetent.

She wondered why Uncle Will, a millionaire in his own right, would go to such lengths to get his hands on her fortune. Was it sheer malice, grown from dissatisfaction with his dead sister's husband's successes? Or had his own fortune, somehow, been dissipated, until he had nothing left of the Barnaby estate? Was his hoax, his ruthlessness, based on a desperate need rather than on jealousy and hatred?

No matter. She would find that out eventually, when all of the details were brought into the light. Right now, the most important thing was to take advantage of her solitary inhabitance of the manor, to do some unauthorized prying.

Where should she look first?

It was unlikely that anything having to do with the hoax would be left out in the open, or concealed in a room to which she would have unquestioned access. Therefore, the library and the study were out. Her own room, the kitchen, the dining room, just about every place.. Except Elaine and Will's bedroom — and Ben Groves' room. She already knew who her aunt and uncle were and, to a lesser degree, what they were. However, she now realized, Groves was a complete stranger; and it was Groves who seemed to be close to the blonde who had taken the part of the dead girl.

“Gwyn… Gwyn…”

He had said they could afford to spend an hour out there, looking for her. That left fifty minutes for Gwyn to go through Groves' room. She headed for the main staircase, her heart beating rapidly, but the last of the self-doubts gone.

TWENTY-FOUR

The door to Ben Groves' room was not locked, and there was really no good reason why it should have been, since none of the conspirators in this hoax had any idea that she would be clear-headed enough to tumble onto their secret. She pushed the door open and went inside without turning on any lights.

In the darkness, she crossed to the room's only window and looked out onto the front lawn, where she could hear the “ghosts” calling her name, still: “Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn…” In the dim light of the stars and the moon fragment, she saw that they were down by the edge of the woods, their backs to the house, scanning the trees, hoping to scare her out of them. If they intended to inspect the entire perimeter of the forest, they would be down there a long while yet.

Gwyn found the drawcord for the flimsy set of under-drapes, drew those shut, located the second cord and pulled the heavy, velvet main drapes into place. These were backed by a thick, rubberized material that was sure to keep any light from passing through. She inspected the edges of the window and the place where the velvet panels met in the middle of the glass, and she satisfied herself that there was no crack that would betray her to the people on the lawn.

She turned on the lamp by the bed and began her search.

Feeling like a shameless busybody or like a sneak thief, but not about to call it quits already, she opened all of his bureau drawers and went through his clothes, piece by piece. She even unfolded his shirts to see if he had hidden anything inside of them, papers or photographs, anything at all. She did not know what she might find, and, in the end, she found nothing at all.

Next, she went through the six drawers in the high-boy, through his collection of soaps and colognes, through the jewelry box, gloves, socks, beach towels, sweaters — and through a collection of souvenirs of Europe, and an inordinately large number of mementoes of Great Britain. She examined each of these but found nothing worthwhile in them, nothing that seemed to be applicable to her present problem.

She looked behind the bureau and behind the high-boy, finding nothing but dust.

She looked under the bed.

Nothing.

She lifted the edge of the mattress.

Again: nothing.

In the single closet, she took out four suitcases and opened those, found each of them empty.

She removed his suits from the hangers in the closet, and she went through the pockets of each of them.

She found nothing.

However, as she lifted the last suit off the closet rack, she saw the flight of stairs, leading up into pitch darkness, and she knew, without understanding how, that they led to what she wanted.

Quickly, she returned to the lamp by the bed, turned it off, went to the window and parted the heavy drapes, to see where Ben Groves and the girl were now. Unfortunately, they were no longer in sight, a development which she should have expected but which nonetheless made her heart race and her hands shake against the soft velvet. Though they had given up on the woods, they might not have given up on the search itself. She hoped that was the case. Most likely, they had decided she wasn't in the trees and had gone down to the beach to look for her; she would have to pray that that was the case.

She drew the drapes shut again, left the room and went out into the upstairs hall. There, she stopped with her back against the wall, very still, and listened for voices and for the stealthy tread of feet on loose floorboards.

The house was quiet.

She was pretty sure that she was still alone.

Moving quickly again, she went to the back stairs and down to the kitchen, where she got a flashlight from the utility drawer near the oven. She paused for an instant by the back door, to see if Groves and the girl had returned to the rear lawn; they had not. Then, she went back upstairs again, without turning the flashlight on, having gotten quite adept at finding her way in the dark.

Back in Groves' room, after checking the drapes for cracks again, she switched on the flashlight and went to the closet, ducked inside and went up the stairs to the attic.

She estimated that she had better than twenty minutes, perhaps as much as half an hour, before Groves and the girl would come back to the house. She planned to make good use of each of those twenty minutes, and she had a premonition that she wouldn't need any longer to get to the bottom of the last few mysteries that surrounded this hoax.

Groves and his wife stood on the night beach, squinting both north and south along the silvered sand, she in a white dress of many layers that was not unlike a funeral shroud, and he spattered with chicken blood that had begun to dry and get sticky.

“I simply can't understand where she's gotten to,” he said, more to himself than to Penny.

She said, “Let's go back.”

“Not yet.”

“Ben, if she'd gone crazy, we'd find her wandering around in a daze. She wouldn't be crafty enough to go to ground as she has.”

“Don't be too sure about that,” he said. “The mad can be terribly clever at times.”

“But its all begun to fall apart on us,” she said, miserably.

“Shut up, Penny.”

“But it has.”

He grabbed her and shook her, violently, as if he could rip her loose of her growing anxiety, then let her go so suddenly that she almost fell. He said, “Come to your senses, for God's sake! We haven't lost her. It isn't that bad. She wasn't on the lawn, and she wasn't in the woods, so she must be down here on the beach. It's as simple as that.”

“Unless we've overlooked her,” Penny said, sullen.

“I don't think we have.”

“But I do think we have.”

He said, “Love, you've got to admit that the beach would be the most likely place for her to come to, more so than the woods. After all, the beach has certain, ah, associations for her.”

Penny looked at the sea and hugged herself as it lapped across the beach like a series of huge tongues. She said, “Ben, you don't think that she's drowned herself?”

“Highly unlikely,” he said.

“She was very wrought up.”

“It's still unlikely.”

She said, “Barnaby will kill us if she did.”

“Barnaby won't kill anyone,” he said.

“But if he doesn't get his money, we're sure not going to get ours, and then all of this has been for nothing.”

His voice got ugly, and he snapped, “I told you to shut up! We have not lost her, and she hasn't drowned.”

They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the sea, to the wind, hoping to hear a girl crying…

At last, he called out, “Gwyn!”

They got no answer.

“Gwyn!”

Penny joined him: “Where are you, Gwyn?”

Groves set off southward along the beach, examining the deepest shadows close in to the cliff.

Back at the Kettle and Coach, the Barnaby-Aimes party had finished their dinner, finished dessert and the bottle of wine, and they had all returned to the cocktail lounge, which was as crowded and noisy as it had been earlier in the evening. Now, however, neither Will nor Elaine Barnaby enjoyed the hustle and bustle. It seemed to both of them that the second call they'd been expecting was long overdue.

Will looked at his watch: 11:04. If the kid had held up this long, if the Groves hadn't been able to drive her over the brink in two or three hours, then the success of the entire plan might be up in the air.

At quarter past eleven, Mrs. Aimes said, “It's so rowdy in here. Why don't we all go back to our place, for a nightcap?”

Edgar Aimes looked at Barnaby inquiringly.

“I don't know—” Will said. He looked at his watch again and said, “I'm expecting another call here, and I don't want to miss it. It's a rather important — business thing.”

“At this hour?” Lydia asked.

Elaine said, “Isn't it ridiculous, Lydia? But I'm sure you have the same problem with Edgar. When you manage to get a man like this to go out for an evening, he simply can't let go of the business reins and really relax.”

Lydia sighed and nodded, slipping easily into the role of the proud but beleaguered wife, which Elaine had led her to. She said, “I know only too well what you mean.”

Barnaby said, “Well, if you women wouldn't find so many ways to spend what we make, we'd not be turned into business zombies, and we'd be able to relax.”

Lydia smiled at Elaine. “He has the same line that Edgar always uses. I just ignore it.”

Elaine laughed and said, “I always try to have a comeback, but I think you're right. Let's ignore him.”

Edgar Aimes, having picked up on the ample clues that the Barnabys had given him, and far more observant of such things than his wife, called the waiter and ordered another round of drink. He said, “Well, it may be rowdy, but I'm really enjoying myself tonight.”

Lydia said, good-naturedly, “If I'd drunk all that you have, so far, I imagine I'd be feeling good too.”

Aimes laughed and patted his wife's hand. “I promise you won't have to carry me home, dear.”

“If I had to, I wouldn't.”

Barnaby looked around the cocktail lounge and said, “You hardly ever see this place full of so much life.”

“Full of noise, you mean,” Lydia Aimes said.

Barnaby looked at his watch again: 11:24. What in the hell was keeping Groves' call from coming through?

TWENTY-FIVE

The manor attic was extremely dusty, hung thick with cobwebs in all its corners, unused except for a circular area that had been swept clean around four, large steamer trunks. All of these black, oblong, metal boxes were large enough for Gwyn to curl up in, all were latched, though unlocked. She put her flashlight down on the seat of an easy chair that was not dusty and did not seem to belong up here, directing the beam on the trunks. Then she finished throwing open the latches, lifted the four lids, and began to go through the contents.

She found the rest of Ben Groves' personal belongings, a lot of his clothes and a couple of cases of professional stage makeup. She found similar cases of makeup for the girl, a great deal of women's clothing, and nice costume jewelry. She also found four fat, well-maintained scrapbooks bound in leatherette and stuffed with clippings and she was instantly sure that these were the things that she had hoped to find, even though she had not been able to define their existence, beforehand.

She went back to the easy chair, lifted the flashlight out of the way, and she sat down with the books.

For a moment, she could not bring herself to open them, as if this last act would seal the theory of a hoax, as if she were not already sure and could turn back the clock. Then, with the help of the flashlight, she opened the scrapbook which bore the number One, and she began to read…

They met back at the stone steps in the cliffside, after he had gone south along the beach and she had walked north, and neither of them was leading the girl.

He said, “No luck?”

“Obviously.”

She sounded as weary as Gwyn Keller had been during these last two days, as if she too had been drugged.

He said, “Did you walk in close to the cliff? The shadows there are so damned dense that she could easily hide in them — and there might even be caves to the north, just as there are to the south. She could have found a cave and crawled back into it, out of sight.”

“I thought of that,” Penny said. She sat down on the stone steps, massaging her neck with both hands. “But there weren't any more caves — just shadows.”

He looked out to sea, wiped a hand across his brow to pull off a film of perspiration, and he got a hand slick with re-liquified chicken blood. He wiped that on his trousers and said, “I simply don't buy that other thing.”

“Other thing?”

“Suicide. I don't think she drowned herself, yet—”

“Perhaps we drove her too far.”

Without responding to her, he walked down to the water's edge, hunkered and dipped his hands in the frothy seawater that washed over his feet, scrubbing the blood from between his fingers. That had been a good trick: the fall down the steps, the blood. He had spent two years as a Hollywood stuntman at one time, and he knew how to make that sort of thing look realer than real. He had practiced the fall a hundred times before Gwyn had arrived at the manor house. The blood had been contained in a small, thin, plastic bag which he had taken out of his pocket when her back was turned, tucked into his cheek. During the fall, he had bitten the bag open and let the blood spill out, as if it were his own. Very real. Neat. The only problem was that, now, even when he'd splashed a lot of water in his face, he could taste the damn blood. He would have given anything, just then, for a glass of only slightly diluted mouthwash…

Though he couldn't have that, he felt much better when his face was clean, and the cool water seemed to have cleared his mind as well. He thought again about the possibility that Gwyn was floating, dead, in this same sea, perhaps quite nearby, but he rejected it at once. And, simultaneously, he realized there was another possibility…

He went back to Penny and said, “Let's go back to the house. She might have avoided us in the woods, somehow, and then gone back into the house when she saw us come down here.”

“I don't think we're ever going to find her,” Penny said. “At least, not in time.”

He pulled her to her feet and kissed her once, quickly. “Cheer up, love. We'll find the little bitch. And we'll win this yet.”

The first scrapbook recounted — through dozens of newspaper clippings from their hometown newspapers, tiny snippets of gossip columns in which they had been mentioned, letters from fans, reviews of their work, souvenir casting lists of shows they'd been accepted for, ads for motion pictures in which they'd had bit parts, publicity type sheets, theater programs and hundreds of photographs of them with their actor friends — their individual careers before they had met each other. He had been Ben Groves, then as now, and she had been Penny Nashe, which she still was, at least in her career. He had started out as a stuntman in Hollywood — which explained how he could have made that spectacular fall down the stairs without really hurting himself — and she had been an understudy for a famous Broadway actress, in a hit musical. All of this memorabilia gave Gwyn a picture of two bright, stage-struck, at least minimally talented, eager and ambitious young people, who had the looks and the desire to make it big in show business. But there was nothing here that explained how these two were capable of driving a young girl mad, sheerly for profit.

Oddly, in these pictures, Penny was not the exact double for Gwyn that she was now. In the past, there had been a terribly strong resemblance between them, of course, an uncanny likeness that anyone would have seen in a moment. They could have been taken for sisters — but never for identical twins. How had the likeness increased? How had Penny Nashe become her exact double?

The second scrapbook opened with about fifty wedding pictures, all in color: Ben and Penny, both attractive and snappily dressed, the happy couple, standing before the altar, having rice thrown at them, being driven off in a limousine; later, the reception, feeding each other cake, dancing, laughing with guests, caught up in a whirlwind of love…

Gwyn looked away from the scrapbook, wondering how such a pair, so much in love, could end up — just a few short years later — to be mixed up in a hateful thing like this hoax. But, she knew, there was nothing to be gained from such speculation, because they were mixed up in it, and facts were facts.

Then, as she leafed through the rest of that book, and quickly through the next, she had some idea of what had driven them to this, to working for Will Barnaby. The tone of the scrapbook changed, from one that promised big success just around the corner, to a sad and sorry account of repeated failures: parts in shows that quickly folded on Broadway, smaller and smaller bit roles in films, and those in films that always seemed to lose money, a lot of benefit performances to stay in practice, then a round of the cheaper summer stock, another decension to work at various year-around New England barn theaters, the move to Britain, the failures there as well…

She closed the books, not wanting to know any more of the details, and she returned them to the trunk. She closed the lid on that box and slid the latches in place, and began to paw through the final mound of stuff, though she thought she'd found enough.

All the way up the long flight of stone steps, with a chill wind sweeping down over them, Penny Nashe-Groves tried to think of some way to convince Ben that it was time for them to get out, to call it quits and admit that this job with Barnaby had been just another failure. If they didn't leave now, tonight, she was sure that they were going to get caught in their own trap. Perhaps this was an irrational fear, but it was a very real one to her. She didn't think they were going to achieve what they'd been hired to do; they weren't going to be able to drive the kid crazy. Several times during the past few days, she had been surprised by Gwyn's ability to face up to sessions with the “ghost” and still hold onto her sanity. She had seemed tougher and more resistant to a breakdown than Barnaby had said she would be. There was a special strength in the girl, perhaps a strength that she didn't even know she had, which came from a long time of sorrow, a strength built upon disaster, a dogged determination not to be crushed altogether. It was the kind of strength neither she nor Ben had proved to have; when times had gotten rough for them, they had given in, taken the easy ways to money, doing things she no longer liked to think about — and finally agreeing to participate in this charade with Will Barnaby. Because they lacked this strength, while Gwyn had it, there was no way they could defeat her.

But how was she to get this across to Ben? She loved him, but she had to, admit that he was bullheaded. He'd set his mind on taking the money Barnaby had offered them, and he would die trying for it, if he must. Nothing she could say would change his mind. Therefore, since she could not leave him, they were both doomed.

Her gloom must have been evident in the way she moved, for he put an arm around her slender shoulders when they reached the top of the steps, and he gave her a quick peck on the cheek. He said, “Chin up, love. This is our first big chance in a long time, and you know it. Our luck can't run bad forever, and this is where it changes. Believe me. This is where — this has to be where — it changes.”

“I hope you're right.”

“I am.”

She knew, however, that he was wrong.

Nothing had gone right for them in longer than she liked to think about. She realized now that their bad luck was the result, not of Fate, but of their own character weaknesses. Each of them, even before they had met, was over-reaching, trying for a stardom he didn't deserve. Together they had continued to over-reach, feeding each other's egos instead of helping each other get their feet back on the ground. Though they had wanted so much, they hadn't had the stamina, the will power, or the fanatical dedication to go after it and get it. And because they lacked that strength, they would fail here too.

She was still thinking about this when, halfway across the lawn toward the manor house, she looked up and caught sight of something that made her grab Ben's arm.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I thought that I saw—”

“Yes?”

He was looking eagerly around the lawn, this way and that, certain that she had spotted the girl, unaware that the situation might be far more serious than that, unable to accept the fact that everything, as she had warned him that it might, had fallen through. This was their one big chance. Their luck was turning. He could only imagine that she'd seen the girl and that they could pick up where they'd left off.

“Penny?” he repeated.

She stood close to him, but she was still feeling terribly lonely. She watched the third floor of the house, but she did not want to say anything, for she could not be sure if she had seen what she thought she had. She didn't want him to think she was foolish. If they were to lose all else this night, at least they should keep their self-respect and their respect for each other.

But then she saw it again, longer this time, and she cried out: “There it is again!” She pointed toward the attic window and said. “Up there, a moving light — maybe a flashlight. Do you see it, Ben?”

“The attic!” he said, his spirits sinking in the instant, staring at the one small window which Gwyn had never noticed.

“Oh, God!”

He said, “If she's gotten to the trunks—”

“She knows who we are,” Penny said, miserably, leaning into him for support. “She knows everything about us.”

“Maybe not anything to do with the hoax.”

“She must know,” Penny said. “If she was curious enough to go prowling around, then she must have had some idea even before she got to the attic.” She tried to hold him tight with one arm, and she said, “Ben, let's leave now. Let's not even go back in there to get our things.”

“That's impossible,” he said.

“No, it isn't. We could—”

But he had broken free of her and was running toward the front door of the manor house. She could do nothing but follow him.

TWENTY-SIX

Gwyn found nothing more important in the last steamer trunk than the four scrapbooks, so she left the trunk's contents jumbled, closed the lid and slid the latches into place. It didn't much matter that she'd found nothing more, for she already had everything that she needed. She knew the nature of the mystery into which she'd fallen, knew the actors who had played in it, and she knew what she would have to do to extract herself from it, to ring down the final curtain.

Her Uncle Will had not outgrown his childish prejudices, but had reinforced them, if anything. He still hated her father, and he still cursed her mother for the marriage she'd made. It followed, too, that he hated her, Gwyn, as much or more than anyone, looked on her as a line of tainted blood in the Barnaby family. No wonder, then, that he could set up a plan to drive her mad, with little or no worry to his conscience.

When Ben and Penny returned to the manor, she'd be waiting for them, and she would confront them with everything that she knew and suspected, see if they filled in the last couple of holes for her. Then, she would pack and put her things in the car. If Will and Elaine had gotten home by then, she'd give them a brief but pungent going-away speech to let them know what she thought of them. If they were still out, she would go away without so much as a goodbye.

She supposed she could press charges against them, but she didn't want all the hassle that would involve. She had survived them. That was sufficient.

She went carefully down the attic steps, out through the closet and into Ben Groves' room. There, she turned on all of the lights, as she intended to turn on others throughout the great house. So far as she could see, there was no good reason to maintain secrecy as to her whereabouts. The lights would draw Ben and his wife back to the manor much faster; and the sooner she had an opportunity to talk with them, to tell them what she knew, the better.

She stepped into the hall, illuminated by the yellow wash of lamplight that spilled out of the room behind her, and she was brought up short as Ben shouted at her from no more than ten steps down the hall.

“You! Stop!”

She whirled and shone the flashlight into his face, momentarily blinding him.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“What are you doing here?”

“You appear healthy for a dead man,” she said.

He stopped, unable to find a response.

She said, “I know all about you.”

Behind Ben, Penny moaned softly.

“The show's over,” Gwyn said.

“You had no right to go snooping,” Ben said.

She laughed at him and said, “Look who has suddenly turned into a moralist!”

He took another step toward her, his expression more menacing than subdued.

Quickly, backing against the door frame and keeping the beam of the flashlight centered on Groves' face, she said, “I know enough to have both of you tossed into jail, if I want to see that. I know that you're actors, that you were hired by my uncle to make me think that I'm losing my mind.”

“Ben, let's get out of here,” Penny said.

“Shut up,” he told her.

“Ben—”

“Shut up!”

Gwyn said, “I know that the whole thing was a set-up in order to put me over the edge and get me declared incompetent by a court. Uncle Will needs money, and my inheritance runs past ten million dollars. When I turn twenty-one, in a few months, I should take over its management; but if I'm committed to a mental hospital, someone will have to be appointed guardian and manager of the estate. Who else but Uncle Will?”

“Ben?” Penny called.

He ignored her altogether now, and he took another couple of steps toward Gwyn. His expression was not at all that of a chastened man, but full of bitterness and a dark determination.

“It's over with, don't you understand?” she asked.

“You can't hurt us if you're dead,” Ben Groves said. He was very nearly on top of her now.

“You wouldn't hurt me.”

“Wouldn't I?”

“Ben, don't do it, please don't,” Penny said, following after him, pleading.

Gwyn said, “Don't you see that if you kill me, you'd just be making things worse for yourself? You'd be liable for murder, then, not merely for conspiracy to drive me mad, or to defraud me or whatever. Besides, my death wouldn't help you at all.” She was amazed at her own intense calm, the way the words spilled out of her as if she were just talking about the weather and not about her life, which hung in the balance. She said, “My estate would be tied up in court for years. If the state didn't take every last penny of it, and if by some far-out chance Uncle Will ended up with the leftovers, inheritance taxes would have reduced it by more than half, by as much as sixty percent.”

“So what?” Groves asked. “As far as I'm concerned, five million is as good as ten.”

Beginning to see that he might not be bluffing, that he might mean the threat, she said, “You stay away from me, do you hear? I'm warning you!”

He laughed, his face an ugly mask in the beam of the flashlight. He might be acting, trying to frighten her again, but she did not think that he was.

“Ben, what are you going to do?” Penny asked, sounding all alone and desperate.

“He's going to kill me,” Gwyn said. She realized that the wife was a potential ally now. “He's going to get you both sent to prison.”

“Ben—”

As much to himself as to his wife, Ben Groves said, “If she was to fall down the stairs and break her neck, no one would have to know that it was murder.” As he spoke, he did not remove his eyes from Gwyn, and he took another step in her direction; in a few moments, he would be close enough to grab hold of her… He said, “It would be a nice, clean accident, a very sad thing to have happened, but something that could be in no way construed as an accident. I could even say that she'd been screaming about seeing a ghost and being visited by her dead sister just before she fell, and then all of this charade we've been through wouldn't go unrewarded. Dr. Cotter could testify that she'd had some hallucinations; since he's not in on this, he'd make a very good, very reliable, very convincing witness. There'd be no risk to us…”

“Don't touch me,” Gwyn said.

“You can't hurt her,” Penny said. She had been willing to drive the girl mad. However, the idea of spilling blood repulsed her. Madness was a quiet illness, an invisible one that could be forgotten in short order by those who had caused it; a broken neck, on the other hand, was the kind of thing nightmares were made of.

“Stop him, Penny,” Gwyn said.

“Stay out of this, Penny!” Groves said.

“You'll go to prison, both of you, no matter who throws me down the steps,” Gwyn warned.

In that instant, Groves leaped forward, grabbed her, and pulled her out into the hall.

The flashlight slipped out of her hand as, too late, she realized it might have made a good weapon to use against him. It dropped to the floor and rolled lazily against the far wall, making no noise at all on the carpet, but casting huge and eerie shadows all around them, making this the haunted house they'd tried to convince her that it was.

Gwyn felt his hands go for her throat.

She tucked her chin down.

He forced her head up and got a grip on her neck, just the same.

She wrestled furiously, trying to break free, but she found that he was even stronger than he looked, all muscles that were more than a match for her, even with her special strength that fear gave her.

She kicked his shins, hard.

He growled, and his face was contorted with pain; but he did not let go of her, nor did his grasp slacken.

“Ben, don't hurt her!”

Listen to her, Gwyn pleaded.

His hands clutched her with a more brutal determination than Penny's hands had shown when the actress had been playing Ginny's ghost earlier in the evening. Gwyn felt dizzy and nauseous, and she didn't know how soon she would black out and be at his mercy.

She kicked at his shins again.

“Damn you!” he snarled.

She twisted, bucked, tried to wriggle away from him.

Frustrated with her, he pulled her around, rushed her backward and slammed her up against the corridor wall, effectively cutting down her freedom of movement.

Then, miraculously, Penny was there beside them, pulling at his right arm, trying to make him give up a useless battle, trying to give Gwyn an opportunity to break away.

Groves was beside himself now, and he was in no mood to be dissuaded, not even by Penny. He said, “Get away from me, damn you.”

“I won't let you hurt her!”

“Get away, damn you, you bitch!”

Though she was clearly stunned by the expletive, she did not let go of him, but continued scratching his arm with her long nails, cutting bright red streaks in his thick biceps.

Suddenly, he let go of Gwyn with one hand, swung that hand and struck his wife across the face.

She fell down.

Now that he was holding her against the wall with only his left hand, Gwyn realized that this was her last best chance of escape, and she put out a burst of effort, kicking and clawing and even biting him, until she suddenly broke from his grasp and ran.

“Hey!” he shouted.

She made for the back steps.

“Ben, let her go!” Penny shouted.

But he came after her.

She felt his hands grasping at her pajama blouse.

She leaped sideways, ran on, reached the steps and went down them, fast, so fast that she thought she'd surely fall and kill herself, just as he had pretended to do on the main steps.

At the bottom of the dark steps, as Groves started down from the top, Gwyn made use of the pantry again, as she had before when she'd made them think she'd gone out of the house, when she heard them talking together by the back door. She hoped that this similar ruse would work; if it did not, she was finished.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Just as Gwyn pulled the pantry door shut, leaving only a tiny crack to see out of, Ben Groves came off the stairs and into the kitchen, standing directly in front of her, breathing hard. His back was to her, and he was studying the shadows in the main room, to see if she were cowering in any of them. He seemed to have forgotten about the food cupboard in the wall behind him.

She hoped his bad memory didn't get any better.

“Ben, where are you?” Penny said, as she came out of the stairwell after him. She saw him, went to him and took hold of his arm. She said, “Won't you please let her go?”

He said, “I can't.”

“Of course you can.”

“I've got to find her.”

“Ben, listen to reason.”

He said, “You're the one who's unreasonable. If that kid gets away, we not only lose any chance at the money, but she can identify us, and we'll both end up in jail.”

“Maybe she won't press charges.”

“Like hell.”

“Even if she does press charges,” Penny argued, “they won't give us more than a year or so. That's not long.”

“That's forever,” he disagreed,

“With good behavior—”

“I'd go insane in a prison,” he said.

Gwyn thought, from her hidden perch inside the pantry, that prison, then, would be ironically just punishment for him, after he had spent so much time to make her think she was losing her mind.

“You're just overwrought now—” Penny began.

He said, “You've also forgotten what it's going to be like to face Barnaby if that girl escapes.”

“He'll have to suffer with the rest of us.”

“That's hardly likely,” Groves informed her. “He's too powerful a man, for one thing. And, for another, don't you remember the story of him hiring that guy to burn down that house, so he could force a man to sell the land?”

“So?”

“You seriously believe that a man like Barnaby, a man who has resorted to that kind of force in the past, would take what was coming to him? Of course he wouldn't. He'd cover his tracks so fast that we wouldn't have a chance.”

“You mean he'd hurt us?”

He laughed bitterly. “Hell, love, I wouldn't be surprised if he took it in his mind to kill us.”

“Oh, God, what a mess,” Penny said.

“And my way is the only way out of it,” he said.

“Killing her.”

Groves said, “Yes.”

“I didn't think it would come to this.”

“But it has.” He patted her shoulder and said, “Don't worry, love. I can handle it so that it'll look like an accident. We're going to come out of this smelling like roses.”

Reluctantly, but finally convinced, Penny said, “Okay, kill her. But I don't want to have anything to do with this; I don't want to have nightmares about it for the rest of my life. I don't want any of the responsibility, and I don't want to have to watch you when you — when you kill her.”

Gwyn would have laughed at this hypocrisy if her laughter wouldn't have given her away.

Groves said, “I've got to call Barnaby—”

“Why?” New fear replaced the note of resignation in Penny's voice.

He said, “He should be home to handle the aftermath of all of this. He'll be better prepared to take care of the cleaning up than I will, because he has more contacts. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell him what's gone wrong. With a little bit of luck, I'll catch the kid and have this over with before he gets here.”

“What can I do, anything?” Penny asked.

Gwyn knew, now, that there was no chance of using Penny as an ally in the future.

“Come along with me, to the study,” Groves said. “You can stay there when I'm done with Barnaby, and you can make sure she doesn't use the study phone. She's probably already been on the house phone, somewhere, and found that doesn't work. She'll think of the study line soon.”

Groves and his wife left the kitchen and entered the corridor, the swinging door squeaking shut behind them.

Gwyn waited where she was, wondering if he might be playing a trick, if he suspected she was nearby and intended to come back through that door without warning.

A minute passed.

Then another.

At last, feeling somewhat safer, she came out of the pantry and went to the back door, opened that and stepped outside, closed the door behind her, all without making a sound.

When she had heard Groves say that the main house telephones were out of order, her spirits had sunk to a new low, for she had intended to get to an extension and dial the police the moment she was free to leave the pantry. Now, that course of action was lost to her, and she had a bad moment as she thought that they were too clever for her, that they had thought of absolutely everything.

But that wasn't true.

They hadn't thought of the pantry.

Her spirits boosted again. And, she hoped, they hadn't thought of the three cars in the garage, either. They had expected her to lose her senses tonight, to totter over the brink, beyond help, beyond reason. Perhaps it had not occurred to them to bother disabling the cars; who, after all, would expect a madwoman to proceed rationally to the garage, pull up the door, look for the keys on the ledge where they were kept, and be off…?

No one would.

She hoped.

She stepped off the rear patio, then thought better of exposing herself on the open lawn; she recalled how clearly Ben and Penny had stood out against the dark grass when she had been inside watching them. She went back to the wall, and began to circle the house, staying flat against it, crouching to crawl beneath any window that rose up in her path. In a few minutes, she reached the first study window, where warm yellow light spilled out onto the grass, and she felt a curious temptation to peer inside, to spy on her enemies once more.

That would be foolish, she told herself. She might rise up to look inside — and come face-to-face with Penny or Groves, who would be looking out for her…

But the temptation to be one up on them was too great to resist. She edged up to the window and cautiously lifted her head to peek in over the sill.

No one was looking her way.

Ben was standing beside the desk, holding the phone to his ear and talking animatedly. Apparently, he had her dear Uncle William on the line right now.

Penny sat in the swivel chair behind the desk, staring straight ahead at the bookshelves, as if she were mesmerized.

Gwyn realized, watching Penny, that though these people had come frightfully close to driving her out of her mind, and though Ben had nearly killed her, they were not professionals at this sort of thing, as they were on the stage.

The odds were not, she saw, so heavily weighted in favor of the Groves. Indeed, because her life depended on her success in getting away, and because they were not fighting for their lives, the odds actually might favor her.

Smiling for the first time in a long time, she ducked down again, crept under the window, and went on toward the garage.

TWENTY-EIGHT

At ten minutes past midnight, William Barnaby tipped the waiter another dollar for leading him to the proper phone again, then slid into the booth, closed the door, glanced around to make sure no one was lingering close at hand, and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“You've got to come home.”

“Groves?”

“It's me.”

“What are you saying?'

“Come home straightaway.”

Barnaby bristled at the implication of disaster, and he said, “What has gone wrong out there?”

“It's not so bad as you think.”

“How do you know what I think?” Barnaby roared.

“Look, I think you should be here.”

“What about Gwyn?”

“That's why I called.”

“Did everything go all right?”

“Almost.”

“Almost?” Barnaby asked, incredulous. “This wasn't the sort of situation where it could be 'almost' right. It was work or fail!”

“Just come on home,” Groves said.

“I won't—”

“And be fast!”

He hung up on Barnaby.

“Hello?”

The empty line hissed at him.

“Groves?”

But Groves, of course, was not there to answer.

Barnaby slammed the receiver down in its cradle and sat there in the booth for a moment longer, trembling, thinking furiously. The trick was to get home as soon as he could, but to do it without making either Edgar or Lydia Aimes curious. Edgar was not a strictly honest businessman. He would tolerate the use of a man like Paul Morby, in special cases, if there were enough money to be made to justify violence — but he would never tolerate something like what they'd intended to do to Gwyn… He must never know about it. And, of course, Lydia would tolerate neither Morby nor what had been done to Gwyn, making this a touchy situation.

Two minutes passed before he got up out of the booth and went back into the crowded cocktail lounge. All night, Lydia had wanted to leave, and only his and Elaine's insistence kept them there. She was going to think it strange indeed that he presented such an about-face, without warning and on the heels of another phone call.

By the time he reached their table, however, he thought he knew how to bring it off. He sat down and picked up his drink, took a sip of it and said to Elaine, “It was just Ben. Seems Gwyn wasn't able to eat, and now she can't sleep.”

She picked it up beautifully. “Is she having any more of her — hallucinations?”

“Not really,” he said. “But Ben's worried about her not being able to sleep. She just tosses and turns, he says.”

“I think we ought to go home,” Elaine said.

“She'll be all right,” Barnaby said.

“She's been a fairly sick young girl.”

“There's no need to break up the evening,” he said.

Lydia, seeing an end to the night and anxious for it, said, “I think Elaine's right. From what she's told me about Gwyn, the girl might be on the verge of a relapse.”

“She was fine all day.”

“But you can't tell about these things,” Aimes said. His concern was not part of his wife's, for he had also seen through Barnaby's deception, and he realized there was some crisis brewing. He probably thought it had something to do with Morby. But whatever the cause of it, he was anxious to give Barnaby a chance to leave.

“Well, it looks like you're all against me.” He tossed off the rest of his drink and said, “Let's call it a night.”

They paid the check and went to the lounge where the men separated to get the women's coats,

At the coat rack, Edgar said, “Morby?”

“Not exactly.”

“Don't lock me out. This could mean my neck as much as yours.”

“You're not involved,” Barnaby said. Then he took Elaine her coat, waited to walk to the parking lot with the Aimeses. Both couples had brought their cars, and they separated, at last, to board them.

“What is it?” Elaine said, when they got into her sportscar.

“Whatever it is, it's bad,” he told her. “Let's not waste any time getting home.”

TWENTY-NINE

Gwyn rolled up the first garage door, where the Rolls Royce was kept, stepped inside, walked to the tool cabinet bolted against the lefthand wall, and felt along the top of it for the keys, where she had learned that everyone in the house kept them.

There were no keys there.

Confused, she ran her hand back again, but still found nothing.

“We're one step ahead of you, dear,” Ben Groves said, from the open garage door.

She whirled in time to see him step over the threshold toward her, his big body blocking all escape along that side of the car.

She turned, ran, rounded the nose of the Rolls and stopped to see what he was doing.

“A game of tag, is it?” he asked.

He had not rounded the front of the car after her, but stood across from her, the hood between them. He was smiling, as the safety light in the wire fixture overhead showed her.

“I won't prosecute you,” she said.

“You say that now.”

“I never intended to. I was just going to tell you that I knew what had been done, then I was going to pack and go away.”

“What a story,” he said, shaking his head and grinning. “Didn't anyone ever tell you not to lie?”

“I'm not lying.”

“Of course.” But he clearly did not believe her.

She turned and ran toward the open garage door, aware that he was running too, on the other side of the car.

She came out into open air, felt him take hold of her, screamed, wrenched herself loose and ran.

“Bitch!” he cried.

She ran toward the fountain, darted around it, put the four marble cherubs between her and Groves.

He came up on the other side, no longer smiling, his face set in a hard mask, his eyes hooded, his big hands flexing and unflexing and flexing again. He seemed to have decided that there had been too much chasing and that the time for the final catch was now.

“You getting tired, are you?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“You will, shortly.”

She said nothing.

“I think it'll be over the cliff with you.”

She shuddered.

“That ought to be quick and neat. Well, quick anyway. And it'll look like an accident, which is the most important thing.”

“You'll never get away with it.”

“Don't start that old song again,” he said.

“It's the truth.”

“There is no truth.”

“I think you're the one who's mad, now,” Gwyn said, watching him carefully, ready to circle the fountain if he should start around it in her direction.

“Not mad, just canny,” he said. “There's a vast difference between wisdom and insanity, though the two often look alike.”

Without warning, he leaped into the reflecting pool of the fountain and took three splashing steps straight for her before she realized what he was doing.

Again, she ran, harder this time, aware that he was right behind her and that, if she stumbled or hesitated for even a moment, he would be onto her and he would finish her.

She could hear his heaving breath and the pounding of his feet as he came up closer behind her. She ran back toward the garage, turned the corner and saw Penny coming out of the front door. She veered away from the woman and put her head down, trying to run even faster. Without thinking, in the darkness, she almost ran over the edge of the cliff; it loomed up, marked only by a few rocks which had been daubed with white paint, and she stopped just in time.

Whirling, she found that Groves had stopped a dozen steps away, and that he had her trapped. No matter whether she ran north or south, she would be paralleling the cliff and could easily be pushed off. She did not kid herself that she could run at him and squeeze by. He was too alert for that, now.

“Dead end, isn't it?” he said.

Abruptly, the sound of a racing automobile engine cut through the still night air, and the twin headlamps of a small car appeared on the drive, heading toward the house.

“You can't kill me now,” Gwyn said.

“Oh?”

“Someone's coming. They'll see!”

He smiled again, and he said, “It's only your favorite uncle, my dear. And surely you know that if I don't heave you over, he'll do the job himself.”

She turned to the right and then the left, looking desperately for some escape, when there was no escape, when all her options had been used up. It was then she felt him rushing toward her…

She fell flat and cried out to be saved.

As if in answer to her cry, the big man lost his balance, lunging for her where she no longer was. Then the air was rent with his own longdrawn, hideous scream, and he pitched out into emptiness, past the edge of the cliff, tumbling all the long way down to the rocks and the sand below.

Dazed by how quickly all of this was happening, Gwyn pushed up to her knees, then to her feet, and walked clumsily away from the brink. She saw Penny standing by the garage, her hands raised to her face to stifle her own screams, which she was not managing to do. She also saw Elaine and Will getting out of the sportscar, and by the expression on her uncle's face, she knew that she could not return to the house.

She turned and ran for the steps that led to the beach, ignoring whatever Elaine called out to her.

At the top of the steps, she risked a glance backward, then wished that she had not, for she saw that Will Barnaby was dangerously close and that he would most likely catch her before she had gotten a third of the way down the steps. If he did, then with one hard shove…

She turned and started down, just in time to collide with Jack Younger, the elder, and the couple of dozen fishermen who were on the steps behind him.

The big man grabbed her and steadied her. “What in the name of God is happening up here?” he asked, having just witnessed, from the beach, Ben Groves deadly fall.

She tried to speak.

She couldn't.

Instead, she fell against him, hugging him as if he'd been close to her all her life, and she sobbed so hard that her stomach began to ache and her tears soaked his shirt.

She woke from a nightmare and sat straight up in bed, gasping for breath and calling for help in a tiny voice. Her fear was not abated when she realized that it had all been a dream, for she was in a strange place and could not remember how she'd gotten there.

Then, Louis Plunkett's pretty young wife opened the door and came in, looking worried, and Gwyn recalled the entire thing: the horror of the previous night, Ben Groves' death, being rescued by the fishermen, the police, the sheriff, the kind offer to stay here through the following few days… She had refused Plunkett at first, but had given in when she realized she could not bear to stay in Barnaby Manor, and that she would have to stick around at least until formal charges had been placed against Elaine, Will, and Penny Nashe-Groves. They had gotten here quite late, after four in the morning, and she'd not been asleep until about five, near dawn.

“What time is it?” she asked Ellen Plunkett.

“You slept through lunch, and it's nearly suppertime, a quarter past five,” the slight, freckled woman told her. “But you needed every minute of it.”

“I guess I did.”

Ellen sat down on the edge of her bed and said, “I heard you cry out. Are you okay?”

“I was having a nightmare.”

“Those will fade away,” the slim woman said. “Also, I thought you might want to know what your uncle's admitted to.”

She nodded.

“It seems he met Ben and Penny Groves in London, when he and Elaine were there on vacation, saw her in a new stage show. The show, he says, was rotten, but the girl looked so like you that he got the idea for this hoax. Anyway, he'd known about your parents' deaths from the start, and he'd also known about your bout with emotional illness, about your Dr. Recard and everything.”

“How?” Gwyn asked, amazed.

“He read about your parents deaths in the newspapers, despite what he told you,” Mrs. Plunkett said. “And from that time on, he had you followed by a private detective agency. At least, Louis says it was that way.”

“That's absurd!”

“Not particularly,” the slim woman said. “Remember, you had a fortune coming to you, and he was your last living relative. Naturally, the situation gave him ideas, though he couldn't pinpoint a plan of action — not until he saw Penny Nashe. He talked to the Groves, found they were down on their luck, and talked them into taking on the job. Mrs. Groves underwent limited plastic surgery on her face, to make her look even more like you, and then your uncle wrote you that letter.”

“Weren't Fritz and Grace in on it?” Gwyn asked.

“Yes. They're friends of the Groves. I believe Grace is Penny's aunt, or something like that.”

“One other thing,” Gwyn said. “Penny knew things about my childhood that even I'd forgotten.” She explained about the Teckert boy.

“That's easily explained,” Ellen said. “When Mr. Barnaby knew you were having emotional problems, he paid his detectives to raid Dr. Recard's files. They found a copy of your diary there, which you'd given the doctor for study, and they copied it. Penny could have used a wealth of information that you'd written years ago, but which you'd forgotten yourself.”

“But why go to all this trouble?” Gwyn asked.

“Your fortune, as I understand it, would be enough to make a lot of people go to even more trouble. And your uncle was in very bad financial straights, both from high living and bad investments.”

“So it's over now,” Gwyn said, sighing.

“Yes, it is,” Ellen Plunkett said. “But there's a third reason I've come upstairs to see you.” She smiled mischievously. “There's a boy downstairs who wants to talk to you. He says he's treated you rather poorly and that he wants to apologize. But I think he's here for more than that, because he mentioned something about you and him going into Calder to take in a movie.”

“Jack Younger?” she asked.

“That's right.”

“I've got to shower and dress,” Gwyn said. “He probably won't want to wait. I'll need an hour or—” She kicked back the covers and got up so suddenly she startled Ellen Plunkett. “Tell him I'll shower and dress fast and be down in fifteen minutes. If there's one thing I could use now, it's a good movie. I sure hope it's a funny one.”