The cabdriver knew where Tildy Millett’s place was, sure. A show farm, Lovelawn was. Not many horses out there now, but he’d heard she planned to breed trotters next spring. Maybe she’d be breeding something else, too; there was talking about her latching up with some big advertising man.
I chuckled at his feeble jest. Would he know whether she’d come home by plane, today?
He wouldn’t know. He’d just come on at midnight. But it was only another mile down the pike; there were relatives living with her, if I wanted him to wait while I found out if she was there.
It began to rain. We passed a famous racing stud whose colors I’d bet on often at the tracks. The whitewashed stables and paddocks, the parklike grounds, the long white fences loping over gently rolling hills — very picturesque. The Land of Gracious Living. As advertised. I was in no mood to appreciate it.
Why had Lanerd said Tildy was on her way to Lexington when she hadn’t been? Why had Walch’s club thought he might be in Lexington, when he was on Long Island Sound? Most important, what followed “One for sorrow, two for mirth”?
The cabdriver said, “Here’s Lovelawn. Hey, they got the chain on.” He stopped.
Between fieldstone pillars a massive chain was padlocked.
“I better wait for you, huh? It’s quite a piece up to the house. Maybe there’s nobody home, after all.”
“Stick around ten minutes. If I’m not back by then, I’ll be staying awhile.” I gave him a buck over the fare.
He said okay, I’d get soaked, he’d lend me his slicker only if I didn’t come back he’d have no way to get it.
I thought the rain was letting up, much obliged.
There was a small lodge about a hundred yards inside the gate; no light showing there. If there was any illumination on at the big house I couldn’t distinguish it, though its four tall white columns and its two broad wings showed up clearly enough through the avenue of oaks, every time the lightning flashed.
No one could have heard me coming, with all that grumbling from the thunderheads, the hrrush of the downpour. But it would have been easy enough to see me, if anyone were watching for intruders.
When I got up to the crescent drive around in front of the house I couldn’t see a spark of light in any of the rooms. The brass knocker I used made a ludicrously tiny noise against the artillery overhead. After a minute I circled around the side, past a long screened porch, toward the garage. No sign of life. Except something that jumped my pulse beat in a rush!
In a lucky flash of lightning, two huge black dogs showed up like those single frames that are frozen on a screen when the projector is stopped. They were bounding in midair, racing toward me. Only fifty feet away. Pinschers. Doberman pinschers. The only kind of canine that’s absolutely forbidden in the hotel, because they’re so ferocious.
I’ve read all that mahooly about dogs never harming you, if you stand still and aren’t afraid of them. It did me no good whatsoever. If those galloping hellions could tell by a sense of smell whether a person was scared, I was a gone goose.
I made a leap for that screened porch. The door wasn’t hooked or locked. I made it inside by the thickness of my pants seat. The dogs leaped against the door. Their weight sagged the screen so I thought they’d come right through at me.
They were ugly animals. They weren’t playing at being ferocious. Their snarly growling was ample warning to stay where they couldn’t get at me.
If there was anyone in the Millet house, it seemed impossible for them not to hear the uproar those pinschers were making. True, it was coming down in buckets, water spouting off the roof like hydrants. Also, it was dark as a cave; the lightning had pretty well quit; it settled down to rain in a serious way.
I know — every well-equipped Private I is able to whip out a flashlight at a moment like that. I regretted my lack of foresight. I had two packs of paper matches and my lighter.
I knocked on the doors opening off the porch. Not the slightest stir.
I tapped on the glass with my lighter. Still nothing. Those damned dogs were ripping the screen door with their claws.
I tried the French doors. Locked. One of the dogs got his head and forepaws through the wire, set up a demoniac racket at not being able to get at me. But it wouldn’t be long.
Those French doors have two latch handles. I remembered an old trick from my schooldays; sometimes if I pulled both handles together, the doors would give enough to open, even when locked. I gave a good healthy tug. Bingo!
Then I pulled the door wide, snapped on my lighter to get a glimpse of the room inside. What I got a glimpse of was the moving muzzle of a shotgun swiveling toward me about five feet away!
No champion base stealer ever did a fancier fadeaway dive. I hadn’t hit the floor when the room blew up with a blast that made thunder sound like a bowling alley a block away.
When I hit the floor I went over in a shoulder roll, sure I was hit. The side of my face felt as if somebody’d patted it with a red-hot waffle iron.
The muzzle flare blinded me, but I swung a leg to kick up at the shotgun. I had to gamble it wasn’t a pump gun with half a dozen more shells ready to blow me apart.
A sliver of light showed at the bottom of the chair. I’d forgotten the lighter, in my dive. Somehow the flame was still burning, more than it usually did when I needed it. It had the slipcover of a chair on fire. That was nokay. I f the shotgunner got light enough to aim, I was finished.
I made an ungraceful belly-down lunge, caught an ankle. A bare, slim ankle I could get a grip on. Yair. A girl.
It may have showed a deplorable lack of savoir-faire for me to wrestle around with a girl in a nightgown, but my small stock of savoir-faire was at an all time low. She clawed. I butted. She kneed me. I got a body scissors on her, pinned her beneath me.
Click! The lights went on.
Across the room a small boy, about seven, in blue pajamas, held a hatchet in one hand and kept his other on the light switch.
“You let Nikky alone, you! Or I’ll kill you!”
Chapter thirty-one:
Corpses can’t testify
Misplaced humor’s a common reaction to sudden danger. Stick-up victims often get plugged for wisecracking at gunmen. Something like that must have hit me. I had to snigger at the tousle-haired kid with the tomahawk and the terrified, determined eyes.
“All you need’s a fire helmet, Chief. You got your ax with you, I see. How ’bout puttin’ out that blaze? Huh?”
“You get off Nikky.” He lifted the hatchet threateningly.
“Might have a point there, son.” I did shift my position; with bright lights on it was downright embarrassing, the way Nikky’s nightgown’d been torn. Especially since another woman, a few years older than Nikky, clomped hurriedly downstairs in dressing-gown and mules to seize the boy, gasp at the burning chair, and cry out to Nikky;
“Hold him, while I phone the police!”
Nikky said calmly, “Please don’t, Miss Ellen. Just open the door.”
Miss Ellen ran.
I let go of the tornado beneath me, made a grab for the gun. It was a pump gun. I broke it, fast, to make sure there were more shells in it.
The dogs raced into the hall.
“Call ’em off,” I stepped behind a wingback chair, “or I’ll kill ’em off.”
They bounded into the room.
“Don’t you shoot my dogs,” the boy shouted in a frenzy. “Down, Castor! Down! Pollux!”
Miss Ellen hollered, too, when she saw I was ready to use the gun. “Stop it, Pollux! Pollux!”
It was Nikky who sprang up, flung an arm around the neck of the biggest animal, flailed at the other one with her fist.