The Cases of Susan Dare by Mignon G. Eberhart Read Free Book Online Page B

!” she cried harshly. “ Who shot her ?”
    Susan was vaguely conscious of Caroline’s sobbing breaths and of David’s shoulder pressing against her own. Somehow they had all got to that open doorway and were crowding there together.
    It was Marie.
    She sat in the same chair in which she’d been sitting when Susan saw her so short a time ago. But her head had fallen forward, her whole body crumpled grotesquely into black silk folds.
    Jessica was the first to enter the room. Then David. Susan, feeling sick and shaken, followed. Only Caroline remained in the doorway, clinging to the casing with thin hands, her face like chalk and her lips blue.
    “She’s been shot,” said Jessica. “Straight through the heart.” Then she looked at David. “Did Caroline kill her, David?”
    “ Caroline kill Marie! Why Caroline couldn’t kill anything!” he cried.
    “Then who killed her?” said Jessica. “You realize, don’t you, that she’s dead?”
    Her dark gaze probed deeper and she said in a grating whisper: “Did you kill her, David?”
    “No!” cried David. “ No !”
    “She’s dead,” said Jessica.
    Susan said as crisply as she could: “Why don’t you call a doctor?”
    Jessica’s silk rustled, and she turned to give Susan a long cold look. “There’s no need to call a doctor. Obviously she’s dead.”
    “The police, then,” said Susan softly. “Obviously, too—she’s been murdered.”
    “The police,” cried Jessica scornfully. “Turn over my own cousin—my own nephew—to the police. Never.”
    “I’ll call them,” Susan said crisply, and whirled and left them with their dead.
    On the silent stairway her knees began to shake again. So this was what the house had been waiting for. Murder! And this was why Caroline had been afraid. What, then, had she known? Where was the revolver that had shot Marie? There was nothing of the kind to be seen in the room.
    The air was hot—the house terribly still—and she, Susan Dare, was hunting for a telephone—calling a number—talking quite sensibly on the whole—and all the time it was entirely automatic action on her part. It was automatic, even when she called and found Jim Byrne.
    “I’m here,” she said. “At the Wrays’ Marie has been murdered—”
    “My God!” said Jim and slammed up the receiver.
    The house was so hot. Susan sat down weakly on the bottom step and huddled against the newel post and felt extremely ill. If she were really a detective, of course, she would go straight upstairs and wring admissions out of them while they were shaken and confused and before they’d had time to arrange their several defenses. But she wasn’t a detective, and she had no wish to be, and all she wanted just then was to escape. Something moved in the shadows under the stairs—moved. Susan flung her hands to her throat to choke back a scream, and the little monkey whirled out, peered at her worriedly, then darted up the window curtain and sat nonchalantly on the heavy wooden rod.
    Her coat and hat were upstairs. She couldn’t go out into the cold and fog without them—and Jim Byrne was on the way. If she could hold out till he got there—
    David was coming down the stairs.
    “She says it’s all right to call the police,” he said in a tight voice.
    “I’ve called them.”
    He looked down at her and suddenly sat on the bottom step beside her.
    “It’s been hell,” he said quite simply. “But I didn’t think of—murder.” He stared at nothing, and Susan could not bear the look of horror on his young face.
    “I understand,” she said, wishing she did understand.
    “I didn’t,” he said. “Until—just lately. I knew—oh, since I was a child I’ve known I must—”
    “Must what?” said Susan gravely.
    He flushed quickly and was white again.
    “Oh, it’s a beastly thing to say. I was the only—child, you know. And I grew up knowing that I dared have no—no favorite—you see? If there’d been more of us—or if the aunts