Rex Stout by The Sound of Murder Read Free Book Online Page A

breast coat pocket of his new brown suit, held it by a tip and flipped it to open it out, and with it wiped at the smear on the girl’s face. He was as impersonal about it as though he were cleaning a windshield.
    “What is it?” Heather asked.
    “Dirt. It still shows, a couple of scratches.”
    “I fell down in the woods.”
    “Damn it—” Dundee sputtered explosively, and stopped abruptly as his eye caught something through the window. The others looked too, and saw a six-footer in the uniform of the State Police, having emerged from the woods, striding across the meadow.
    “Oh!” Heather gasped. “I wanted—”
    Hicks had her by the arm. “Come on,” he commanded. He spoke rapidly to Dundee, “Engage him. Take him to the house in your car—be busy with those plates—tell him we’re on our way back through the woods—”
    He was moving, with the girl, to the door that led to the inside, to the lair of the dragons that had rumbled and bellowed that afternoon; and, ignoring Dundee’s expostulations, he opened it and pulled Heather through and closed the door behind them.
    He stood there with her, motioning her for silence, and surveyed the place with his eyes. It was a long and spacious room, and appeared to be indeed the lair of dragons, with great vats and furnaces, arrays of benches and retorts and mysteriously complicated paraphernalia, and intricate networks of metal tubing like nests of entwined snakes. The walls and floor were of plastic.
    Straining his ears, he could barely catch the opening and closing of the outside door, and the voices that followed were but the faintest of murmurs. Apparently the soundproofing was good. He put his lips to Heather’s ear and whispered:
    “Back door?”
    She nodded. He signaled to her to lead the way, and she did so on tiptoe, past the long row of cluttered benches and cabinets to the rear, where he cautiously opened a door, and found to his surprise that here was another large room, a jungle of packing cases and cartons and various kinds of materials. He let Heather thread the maze ahead of him, and when they came to another door, a wide one of heavy metal, he noiselessly turned the knob of the Hurley tumbler lock and pulled the door open, passed through after the girl, and closed the door. They were on a concrete landing platform at the rear of the building, and a glance showed him that to the right the woods were only twenty paces away. He paused a moment to listen for the sound of Dundee’s car but heard nothing. They descended the concrete steps and made the woods. Here there was no path and the ferns and undergrowth were dense, but after a little they came to an open spot with an enormous boulder in the middle of it.
    “Sit down,” Hicks said.
    “I want—”
    “Sit down.”
    She sat on an edge of the boulder. On her upper cheek two thin red lines were the scratches the smudge had covered and were vivid on the gray of her skin. Hicks sat on an angle of the boulder facing her and said:
    “You’d better put that ten bucks back in your purse or you’ll lose it.”
    She looked at the bill still clutched in her fingers as if in an effort to make out what it was. “Oh,” she said. “That’s for you.”
    She looked at him. “I remembered what that article said, that you like to pretend you do things only as a matter of business.” The hand she held out with the bill in it was trembling.
    Hicks took the bill from her fingers, got her handbag from where she had laid it on the rock, put the bill in the bag and placed it back on the rock. When his eyes returned to her face he saw that her eyes were shut.
    “What am I supposed to be doing?” he asked.
    Heather didn’t reply. After a silence she said in a dull deadvoice, “All of a sudden I see her. The way she was—her head. Then I shut my eyes, and then I see her plainer than ever.”
    “Sure,” Hicks agreed. “It wasn’t anything to look at. What am I supposed to be doing?”
    “Somebody did