“The stove, huh?” His mouth twisted into a crooked grin, “Too bad you had to horn in,” he purred. “It would’ve been just made to order.”
“What do you mean?” she said frightenedly. “What are you saying?”
He flicked ashes onto the floor, eyed them thoughtfully.
“Well, now, for instance, if you hadn’t got in there in time — whatever dough he has socked away would be rightfully yours, him being without any family or friends.” He winked at her. “And I’m your loving stepbrother, ain’t I? Fair and square all around.”
Her face was white and quivering. “Why, if I hadn’t tried to save him, that would have been — murder!” she gasped. “Jerry, you’re bad all the way through!”
He kept on grinning at her, unmoved. “Don’t look so scared. Who said anything about murder? If anything happened with the stove like that a second time — without nobody laying a hand on him — would that be murder?”
He pushed his chair back, slowly rose to his feet, stretched enjoyably. Then he deliberately winked at her once more, in ghastly mockery, and ambled out of the kitchen.
She stood there without moving after he’d gone, as if she were turned to stone. What he’d just said kept ringing in her ears over and over, in a sort of terrifying refrain. “Would that be murder? Would that be murder?”
The next day at dawn again she slowly climbed the stairs, carrying the hot shaving water. The same deathlike silence brooded over the house, her creaking tread the only sound that broke it. She stopped before the door and knocked. There was no answer — this time not even a groan, nothing. She didn’t wait to knock again. She quickly put the water down, thrust her face close to the door seam, sniffing. A faint reek seemed to cling to the woodwork. A little like sulphur, a little like rotten eggs, a little like — death in its grave.
She wrenched the door open. Then she stopped short, stood there, staring. The room was empty; he wasn’t in it.
The air on the inside was fresh and clean. The window stood wide open. But around the soft, spongy woodwork of the doorframe, where there were cracks and seams, that lethal odor still exuded, as if left over from before.
The bed had been slept in; its coverings were all awry. The old-fashioned nightshirt that he wore was nowhere in sight. But neither were his outer clothes, his daytime clothes. As though he had put them on over it. And when did he ever do that?
She went over to the stove, reached down, and touched the rounded belly of it. It was still warm. Lukewarm, about blood heat, from recent use.
She raised the lid and peered down into it. The ashes were caked. In their center a little pool of water, that somebody had cast in to quench them, still lingered undissolved. It hadn’t had time to work through them and disappear yet. It wasn’t the water that she had flung in twenty-four hours ago; that would have been absorbed long ago.
“Would that be murder? Would that be murder?” dinned in her ears.
There was a pinched look of certainty on her face. She noticed other things about the room, telltale signs, but they were secondary to this one main fact: that the death stove had been lighted a little while ago, and that the old man wasn’t to be found now. She noticed places where the wallpaper had been gashed, as if with a penknife. Places where the baseboards around the walls had been loosened and pried out. Even the seat of an overstuffed chair had been ripped, and some of the hair filling had been spilled out. As if someone had been in here looking for something. She tottered down the stairs, clinging to the banister rail with both hands for support. There was one more test. The bolt, on the inside of the front door. If Mr. Davis had left this house on his own two feet, unharmed, it would be still open. He had no way of closing it behind him on the inside.
She reached the door and the bolt was closed tight, drawn all the way across into its socket, as far as it could go. There was no further room for doubt now. He hadn’t left this house alive. And, more than likely, he hadn’t left it at all. She crept down the gloomy steps to the cellar door. She stopped and stood listening. She could hear a heavy foot stamping down on something. Over and over again. Not as in walking, but as in flattening something out, evening it off.
She stood there, afraid to move. He must have heard her. The sound stopped. There was a watchful silence, one of them on each side of the door listening to the other, neither making a sound.
She palmed the door frightenedly at last with the flats of her two hands. “Jerry, open this door! Let me in!” She heard something heavy scrape across the floor, as if it were being dragged. She couldn’t tell what it was, whether it was the leg of a chair or some long-handled implement.
She pounded again, frantic.
“Jerry, for the love of heaven, open this door!”
Suddenly it swung back and he was standing there in front of her. He was fumbling with his hands, furtively stroking them down his sides as if to clean them off. He kept standing there in her way, as if to keep her from going in.
“Let me in here,” she said in a choked voice.
“What’s the rush?” he asked coolly. “How about some coffee? Don’t I feed today?” But he stood aside and let her pass. “Can you?” she said accusingly, as she reeled past him. “Can you, after what...?”
“Sure I can,” he said callously. “Why not?” He started to roll a cigarette, and he struck the match with his thumbnail. She saw the nail; it was black underneath, as if he’d been digging in fresh earth with it...
She looked around her, and the cellar spoke. The cellar told her its ghastly story. Far more eloquently, far more truthfully, than he would have, if she’d asked him instead. It was dim, but there was enough light to see by. Murder needs very little light to be revealed. A dusty bulb hung against the wall at the end of a loose wire, and by its dingy light she could see the story the cellar had to tell her.
The cot stood in a different place than yesterday. He’d moved it all the way across, from one wall all the way over to the other. And underneath where it stood now there was a peculiar shadow on the floor that overlapped it a little at one end. It wasn’t a shadow made by the light bulb, because it was at the wrong end of the cot for that; it overlapped the cot at the same end that the light was, instead of at the opposite one, as normal shadows do. So maybe it was a damp patch on the floor, where the underfill had been dug up and then battened down again. Her eyes were not as sharp as they had once been.
Over in the corner stood a shovel that belonged upstairs, that had not been down here until today. She’d used it at times to shovel snow away from the door, and the last time she’d seen it had been all tawny-red from rust, from its cutting edge up to its neck. It wasn’t now any more. There was a dark wavy line running along its bite, as if it had recently been thrust into damp earth.
“Cold down here, ain’t it?” he said with brutal relish. “That why you’re shivering?”
Her teeth were chattering. “Where is he?” she said. “He isn’t up in his room.” She kept her eyes on that shadowy patch under the cot.
“I know he ain’t,” he said. “He left the house. I saw him go. I had the cellar door open on a crack.”
“But he never goes without waiting for his shaving water.”
“Well, he did this time. Here, he left something for you.”
He fumbled in his clothes and brought out a rumpled scrap of paper. “He put it on the table just inside the front door. I picked it up and brought it down here with me.” It said in penciclass="underline" “Mrs. C. — I won’t be back tonight, you can lock front door. Mr. D.”
She looked at him accusingly. “That’s not like his writing. I’ve seen his writing.”