She moved forward from the doorway, past a table holding delicate analytical balances. Then she stood rooted to the floor. She’d left the lab door open. She was a dozen feet away from it. Not a breath of air stirred in the lab to close the door — yet the latch had clicked.
In that frozen moment she knew. She saw her mistake, the one tiling she had overlooked; such a simple, obvious thing to cost her life. She knew who was in the lab with her. He hadn’t been asleep when she’d entered his room upstairs. He’d known every move she had made. He, too, had been wailing for the house to sink in slumber.
Her fingers groped, touched on a bottle, went on to another. It was a pathetic weapon, a hopeless weapon. He’d followed her down here, wanting her here in the depths of the house where the others upstairs and the two household servants wouldn’t hear her screams. It was so simple for him now. With a scratch of a match he could dispel the darkness in that other world, while she could never dispel that in her own. A scratch of a match and she would be cornered, at his mercy.
She knew all of it now. He’d seen Frederick returning, rutting across the lawn possibly. He had gone to Frederick’s room and killed her son. That had been simple, too, for Frederick trusted him. All he had to do was move close to Frederick and plunge the knife. He had heard her coming to Frederick’s room, known what she would find. He had been afraid to be absent from the party too long and had gone back, placing the dragon head table to trip her. He’d known that in tripping her he would cause enough excitement to allow him to slip hack to Frederick’s room and hide her son temporarily. Later tonight he’d planned to hide Frederick permanently. Earlier in the evening, with murder already shaped in his mind, he’d gotten poison from the lab, tinkered with the capsules.
Now he was here because she had overlooked a perfectly obvious fact. He would strike a match — there was a dim chance that the lights might be seen if anyone else should happen to wake — and seconds later it would be all over for her.
Her hands clutched the pathetic bottle to her. She said, “Haywood?”
He didn’t speak.
“It goes back to the accident three years ago, doesn’t it?” she said. “The accident that took my sight. Only it wasn’t an accident. It was you who fixed Terry’s car to crash with us. I was Peter’s guardian while Frederick was absent hack then, and you wanted the job. The young Spanish-English girl who was Peter’s mother was wealthy, Haywood. and you knew that Frederick had never had need of that money, hut had left it for Peter. As his guardian, while Frederick was away, you’d have access to that money. It was too strong a temptation for you to turn down. So you fixed my accident. I didn’t die, but the accident served your purpose, for I was blind, and Frederick turned to you to watch after his son.
“It wasn’t blind luck that led you to know Frederick had returned tonight. He’s probably hinted it in the many letters he’s written about Pete. You took my eyes, and my son…” The old, blind woman strangled on the words and Haywood said heavily, “Yes. I’m sorry. But that doesn’t make any difference, does it? I wanted a fortune and I planned to get it through Pete. I knew no one had seen Frederick return here tonight. If only he could die and disappear, there’d never be any danger about the money of Pete’s that I’ve squandered. Yes,” he sighed, “and that I wanted to squander. With Frederick dead, Pete would be in my keeping until he was of age. It’s as simple as that, Elsie, and I’m sorry that I must hurt you more. But how did you know?”
“The button,” the old blind woman said, “I knew it was a coat button. a man’s button, yet no buttons were missing from the front of the coats of the only two possible men who could have killed Frederick, who had motive. That meant the button had come from the inside of a coat. And Terry’s one colorful characteristic is the fact that he wears only single-breasted suits. That meant that you, Haywood, had had your double-breasted coat unbuttoned at the moment you stabbed Frederick. Blindly, he had struck out, grabbed the inside button and in the shock of physical contact you hadn’t noticed…”
“I’m sorry, Elsie,” he said again, and his voice, tight, brittle, told her far more than that. She’d tabulated every nuance of their voices; she knew he was moving.
She heard the scratch of a match; he knew her approximate location from the words she’d spoken in the dark; the flare of the match would reveal her exact position.
Every remaining sense of her that she had so carefully developed in the past three years splashed vivid messages over her brain. The scratch of the match, the scuff of his foot, his hard breath. With a sweeping motion she swung the bottle, heard liquid gurgle; then she heard the bottle striking bone and knew her senses hadn’t lied when they’d told her his position.
He shouted hoarsely, and she moved along the table. Then the explosion of a gun rocked the lab. A gun. She hadn’t expected a gun. Strangulation, or a knife, but not a gun. She stumbled, fell, and far off in the distance, she heard him yelling, the crash of gunfire. He hadn’t hit her yet, but her senses swirled away, came bark. Then she fainted.
She liked the sound of this man’s voice, the strong timber of it. He was sitting beside her bed; he was a detective. He had told her that the sounds of gunfire had attracted Terry to the lab. and Terry had overpowered Haywood before Haywood had finished the task he’d set himself in cornering Elsie Sole in the lab.
“He wasted a lot of lead,” the detective said, “but he didn’t hit you. You’ll be here with young Peter a long time, Elsie Sole. You and Terry. It seems that Ida is using this — the scandal of Terry’s brother — to leave Terry. He’s broken up about Haywood, but in his way he’s courageous. He’s a very likable little man, engrossed in his work. Not at all like his brother. You and Pete will have to help him, and he’ll help you.”
“No,” she said, “not at all like his brother. Haywood, he…”
“Thanks to what you did to him. he’ll crack. He’ll talk plenty.”
“Thanks to what?”
“Naturally, you didn’t know that the letters on the bottle you picked up in the lab were H2SO4. And even if your fingertips told you that, you didn’t know what the letters meant. You didn’t know that you were splashing sulphuric acid in his eyes…”