But I didn’t; I got behind the door and I threw myself forward against it and slammed it shut.
I’d have been safer walking back to the main building but I ran instead. Even running, it seemed as though it took me thirty minutes to cover the thirty steps to the kitchen door.
Then I was safe inside.
“Couldn’t do a thing,” Charlie was saying. “Seven bites—and one of them—that one—hit a vein. They die in three minutes, when the fangs hit a vein.”
Otto was lying very still now.
Rex Parker burst in the door, a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other. “The ammonia. One teaspoonful in— Oh! Too late?”
Charlie Lightfoot stood up slowly. He saw me and his eyes widened.
“Bill, you look as though— Good Lord! I remember now I heard that door closing. Did you go out in the yard?”
I nodded and leaned back against the door behind me. Reaction had left me weak as a kitten.
“He left the garage door open,” I told them. “We saw that from the roof. I closed it.”
“You didn’t get bit?”
“No.” I saw a bottle of whiskey on the table and crossed unsteadily toward it to pour myself a drink. But my hand shook and Charlie took the bottle from me. He poured a stiff shot and handed it to me.
He said, “You got guts, Wunderly.”
I shook my head. “Other way around. Too damn afraid of snakes to have slept if I’d known there were a lot of them around loose.”
I felt better when I’d downed the shot.
Charlie Lightfoot said, “I’ll have to go out there and count noses, as soon as I get my puttees back on.”
Parker said, “Are you sure it isn’t too—”
“I’ll be safe enough, Rex. Get me a flashlight or a lantern, though.”
Fillmore’s voice sounded wobbly. “We’ll have to take care of Otto’s body like we took care of Elsie’s. Wunderly, will you tell Andressen to come help me?”
“Sure. Is he in his room?”
Fillmore nodded. “Listen. That’s his cello.”
I listened and realized now, as one can realize and remember afterwards, that I had heard it all along—from the moment Annabel and I had come through the doorway passage from the roof.
I asked, “Shall I look up Dr. Lecky, too?”
“He went over to his house,” Fillmore said. “I’ll call him on the house phone. It’s still working, isn’t it, Rex?”
Parker nodded. “Sure. But look, Mr. Fillmore, better tell Lecky not to try to come over here. There may be rattlers loose around outside, even if the door did get shut before most of them got out.”
Charlie Lightfoot put down the whiskey bottle. “Hell, yes. Tell him within half an hour I’ll know how many are at large, if any. And Fillmore, how about your wife and daughter? Is there any chance either of them would go out of the house tonight? If so, you better warn them.”
“I’ll do that, Charlie. They’re both in for the night. But I’ll phone and make sure.”
I went to the living room first, told Annabel what had happened and told her I was going up to get Andressen.
She said, “I’m going upstairs, too. I think I’ll turn in.”
“Excellent idea,” I told her.
I left Annabel at the turn of the corridor, with a kiss that made my lips tingle and my head spin.
“Be sure,” I whispered, “that you lock and bolt your door tonight. And don’t ask me why. I don’t know.”
Andressen was playing Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Cog D’Or. A pagan hymn to the sun that seemed a strange choice for an astronomer.
My knock broke off the eerie melody. The bow was still in his hand when he opened the door.
“Otto Schley is dead, Eric,” I told him. “Fillmore wants your help.”
Without asking any questions, he tossed the bow down on the bed and flicked off the light switch.
“About Mr. Hill and Paul Bailey,” I asked. “Do you know where they are?”
“Bailey’s probably asleep. He had a spell of the jitters, so Darius and I gave him a sedative—and we made it strong. Darius is probably in his room.”
He hurried downstairs, and I went on along the corridor to Darius Hill’s room and knocked on the door.
He called out, “Come in, Wunderly.”
Chapter 5
A Toast to Fear
I CLOSED the door behind me, and asked curiously, “How did you know who it was?” Hill’s chuckle shook his huge body. He snapped shut the book he had been reading and put it down on the floor beside his morris chair. Then he looked up at me.
“Simple, my dear Wunderly. I heard your voice and that of Eric. One of you goes downstairs, the other comes here. It would hardly be Eric; he dislikes me cordially. Besides, he has been in his room playing that miserable descendant of the huntsman’s bow. So I take it that you came to tell him, and then me, about the second murder.”
I stared at him, quite likely with my mouth agape.
Darius Hill’s eyes twinkled. “Come, surely you can see how I know that. My ears are excellent, I assure you. I heard that scream—even over the wail of the violincello. It was a man’s voice. I’m not sure, but I’d say it was Otto Schley. Was it?”
I nodded.
“And it came from the approximate direction of the garage. There are rattlesnakes in the garage. Or there were.”
“There are,” I said. “Probably fewer of them.” I wished I knew that. “But why did you say it was murder?” I asked him. “Loose rattlesnakes are no respecters of persons.”
“Under the circumstances, Wunderly, do you think it was an accident?”
“Under what circumstances?”
Darius Hill sighed. “You are being deliberately obtuse, my young friend. It is beyond probability that two accidental deaths should occur so closely spaced, among a group of seventeen people living in non-hazardous circumstances.”
“Sixteen people,” I corrected.
“No, seventeen. I see you made a tabulation but that it was made after Elsie’s death so you didn’t count her. But if you figure it that way, you’ll have to deduct one for Otto and call it fifteen. There are now fifteen living, two dead.”
“If you heard that scream, why didn’t you go downstairs? Or did you?”
“I did not. There were able bodied men down there to do anything that needed doing. More able-bodied, I might say, than I. I preferred to sit here in quiet thought, knowing that sooner or later someone would come to tell me what happened. As you have done.”
The man puzzled me. Professing an interest in crime, he could sit placidly in his room while murders were being done, lacking the curiosity to investigate at first hand.
He pursed his lips. “You countered my question with another, so I’ll ask it again. Do you think Schley’s death was accidental?”
I answered honestly. “I don’t know what to think. There hasn’t been time to think. Things happened so—”
His dry chuckle interrupted me. “Does not that answer your question as to why I stayed in this room? You rushed downstairs and have been rushing about ever since, without time to think. I sat here quietly and thought. There was nothing I could learn downstairs that I cannot learn now, from you. Have a drink and tell all.”
I grinned, and reached for the bottle and glass. The more I saw of Darius Hill, the less I knew whether I liked him or not. I believed that I could like him well enough if I took him in sufficiently small doses.
“Shall I pour one for you?” I asked him.
“You may. An excellent precaution, Wunderly.”
“Precaution?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”