Chapter 7
It was too early to get up when Susan awakened the next morning, and she didn't feel like moving anyway. "A dog!" she kept groaning, recalling only too vividly the insane fucking she had taken from the huge boxer the night before. Each time she said it she shuddered with a mixture of totally incompatible emotions.
There was no denying that she'd enjoyed it tremendously while it was going on, but now it was daylight. Her body and mind were rested and free of the perverted lust which had dominated her actions then. She could hardly believe that she, Susan Polk, had done such a disgusting thing. But she had, and her conscience wouldn't let her forget it. Her guilt was eating her insides like some gigantic malignancy.
She didn't want to get out of bed and face the world. Only she and the dog knew what they'd done, but Susan couldn't bear the thought of looking at her face in the mirror. She lay in bed trying not to think, which of course caused her to think constantly.
Sex wasn't all she thought about, however. After a while, she began to think about her dilemma, about her inheritance and what she'd already gone through to get it, and what she might yet have to go through before she could claim it. If she wasn't killed first.
Susan didn't know what to believe. Her andmother had vanished, and no one seemed to care. Now Miss Olson was gone, with nothing but Simmons' word that she'd left on her own. Charles and Reyes had been upset about Miss Olson's departure, but not Simmons. Had he actually seen her leave? He'd admitted to lying once. Could he not be lying now?
The horrid maid wouldn't have left unless the coins had been found. Of that, Susan was reasonably sure. But Simmons hadn't mentioned Miss Olson's struggling with a heavy valise until Susan herself had brought up the question of the coin collection. Now she wondered. And shuddered.
The troubled young lady was still lying in bed, deep in disquieting thought, when Simmons entered her room without being courteous enough to knock first.
"Good morning, darling," he gushed, approaching her bed with a glass of orange juice.
She cringed, forced a "good morning," took the glass and had one sip from it before she set it on the bedside table.
"I trust you slept well, Susan. Krista's dog didn't keep you awake, I hope."
"No," Susan said, watching Simmons closely. She'd been wondering about the dog. Miss Olson had been very attached to the boxer. It didn't make sense that she would leave without taking Perro with her. And the barking last night, she had decided, shouldn't have upset Simmons the way it had.
"Where is the dreadful beast, my love?"
Susan looked, as if for the first time, at the slender, middle-aged butler who had screwed her twice and was now calling her his "love". Her skin crawled.
"Come, come, my sweet. Charles is waiting with the car. I've ordered him to take the wretched animal in to the city and deliver it to the humane shelter. Is the mutt under the bed? Locked in the bathroom?"
She gulped and said nothing while Simmons squatted and peered under the bed. When he started toward the bathroom door, she said, "He isn't in there, either. After I quieted him down last night, I let him back out."
Simmons spun around. "You didn't!"
Why is he so furious? Susan wondered, as she watched the butler turn almost apoplectic. What's so terrible about a dog barking? Why is he so determined to get rid of Perro?
"I did," she said. "I didn't think it would hurt anything. And I didn't hear any more barking, did you?"
"You little idiot!" he hissed. "I told you to keep the animal here!"
"How dare you call me an idiot!" Susan hissed right back at him. "This is my house, Simmons!"
That was all it took to remind Simmons of his place. She was still the mistress and he the servant. Until they were married, he had no legal claim to any of her money. Apologizing profusely, blaming his outburst on the mental strain he'd been under, Simmons assumed the role of placating lover. He sat on the edge of the bed, holding her hand and stroking it as he begged her forgiveness. When he thought he had wormed his way back into Susan's good graces, he kissed her on the forehead and left.
Susan watched the door close behind Simmons, and she shivered. She suspected that the coins had not been found. She didn't believe Simmons had seen Miss Olson walking away. She feared he had killed her and disposed of her body.
Those coins must be found, she decided. My life could depend on it! Charles and Reyes won't go away until the case of coins is found. Simmons may not leave even then. But I can worry about him later. Right now, I've got to get busy and find that case! I've made a list of the most likely places where Grandmother would hide them. I've got to start looking. Simmons knows the house as well as I do, but he doesn't want the coins found now. It would make him out a liar, and a murder suspect. He won't look for them. The others don't know where to look, and Simmons won't let them in the house anyway. The case has to be hidden somewhere in the house, and it's up to me to find it!
She didn't want to go down in the cellar. That was where her mother had hanged herself. She could still picture her mother's body swaying on the end of that rope, with her mouth gaped open and her eyes bulged out.
The cellar was also where she'd lost her virginity at the tender age of twelve, and she'd been made to suffer for it ever since.
No, Susan Polk certainly didn't want to go down into the cellar, because that's where the two most traumatic events of her childhood had occurred. Just thinking about opening that door and descending those creaky old stairs caused her to break out in a cold sweat.
But she had to do it. It was mid-afternoon. She'd searched all the first and second floor places on her list and hadn't located the case of coins. It had to be in the cellar. There were several places down there where it could be hidden. Good places. Places where no one would think to look unless they'd grown up in the house and played down there and knew about them. There were hiding places in the cellar which even Simmons wouldn't know about. But Susan knew them all. The problem was getting up the nerve to go down there.
It was the ideal time. She was alone in the house, as she had been most of the day. Simmons had taken his pistol and gone out to the woods to search for Miss Olson's dog again.
I'm a rational human being, Susan thought as she stood trembling at the top of the stairs. She had turned on the lights and was peering down into the cellar. The floor was still dirt, but the stairs leading down to it were no longer old and rickety. The creaky ones she remembered had been torn out and replaced while she was away at college. There's nothing down there that can harm me. It's all in my head. I shouldn't be afraid of a cellar. It's irrational. I'm not a little girl any longer, and I've got to quit thinking like one. I'm going to do it. Right now. I'm going down those stairs and find that case of coins. Then I'm going to put them right back again and call the police. I want the police here when I let the servants see that I've found the coins. They're mine, and I'm going to keep them and sell them later. I'll have the police take them out of the house and keep them for me until I can put them away in the safe deposit box where they belong.
It required a great deal of courage for Susan to walk down the stairs into the cellar, but she did it. The air was cool and damp, the way she remembered it. There were no windows. The earth floor was surrounded with walls of mortar and native stone. Overhead were hand-hewn beams which Negro slaves had helped cut and prepare just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War.
Susan paused beneath the beam which her mother had used to commit suicide. She looked up and shuddered with the horrible memory. Panic gripped her. It was irrational but real nevertheless, and she felt like dashing back to the stairs and fleeing the cellar without having accomplished her mission.
The urge was strong, but she shook it off and tore her gaze from the death beam. Her heart palpitating, she walked toward the corner where she'd given up her virginity, as if some unseen force was drawing her there. Again she paused, and relived the degrading scene in her mind.
Then she smiled ruefully. How innocent that long-ago incident seemed now, without her grandmother around to tell her she was sinful and wicked.
It had been an act of love, actually, or at least they'd thought themselves to be in love. Susan couldn't recall the boy's name, but she could still visualize his face, so full of excitement and concern as he gazed down at her and inserted his small, hard penis into her immature vagina.
She wondered whatever had happened to him. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, she hoped he was happy and well, because she'd never blamed him for her own misfortune.
As she stood there for long minutes, thinking about the boy and what they had done together, her mind carrying on from there and evaluating her grandmother's years-long reaction to her one pubescent mistake, an amazing thing happened. Susan could feel a great burden lifting from her shoulders. She realized how small her original sin had been, and how out of proportion the guilt and shame her domineering grandmother had heaped upon her truly was.
She felt so good, so lightened of her oppressive load, that she let the guilt slip from her without lowering herself to hate her grandmother any more than she already did. Suddenly she was glad she'd driven herself down into the cellar, because in so doing she had met head-on a trauma from her past and was free of it at last.
For over half an hour she poked around in the cavernous cellar, searching for the case of coins. She didn't bother with the obvious places, since she knew they would've already been gone through by the servants. Instead she concentrated on the secret places where she herself had hidden things during childhood play.
Finally she had searched them all, finding an abundance of memories but no sign of a case full of valuable rare coins. There was only one more place to look. In the small, tomb-like room where the wines and brandies were kept.
Susan tugged open the heavy, squeaking door and peered into the nearly pitch-blackness of the dank wine cellar. She reached inside and ran her hand along the doorframes, her fingertips brushing the unevenness of the stone wall, until she found the ancient electric switch and turned on the dim light.
She stepped inside and hugged herself as she looked about. There was really no place to hide anything in the wine cellar. Wooden racks lined three of the walls. They were mostly empty now. Only a dozen or so cobwebbed bottles of vintage wine remained. For the most part, Susan could look right through the racks at the mortar and stone behind them.
Cardboard boxes were stacked almost hip high along the fourth wall. The lettering on them said they contained imported brandy, which Mrs. Robards had come to prefer over wine and had bought by the case because she could get it cheaper that way.
Since Simmons had been helping himself to the brandy, Susan knew he would've found the case had it been hidden among the boxes. She was about to give up the search and leave when she noticed something that didn't look right. She walked over to the neatly stacked boxes and saw that they were sitting out several inches from the wall. There was no apparent reason for it, because she could see nothing behind them.
I've got to see for sure, Susan thought, her hopes soaring. But there's not enough light. I'll have to move the boxes.
The top row proved easy to move, because they were all empty. Some of the second row were, too. It didn't figure. Susan wondered why anyone would keep empty boxes, and in a stack with full and partly full ones.
But she didn't have time to ponder the reasons behind eccentricities, either Simmons' or her grandmother's. In her haste to move the boxes, she dropped one of the full ones from the second row. It landed on her toe, and she let out a yelp to go 'along with the rattling sound inside the box.
Ignoring the pain and not bothering to open the box and check for breakage-Susan went on moving boxes as fast as she could.
When she'd moved the bottom row of brandy cases, Susan saw that someone had been digging behind them, and beneath them, as well. A good-sized area of the dirt floor had been dug up. Quite recently, too, if the freshness of the earth was any indication.
A flood of fearful excitement washed over Susan. She shuddered. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to bury something, and they'd attempted to conceal that fact. Susan didn't know what was down in the freshly turned ground. It could be the case of coins. She hoped it was, but she feared it might be a body. A cold shiver ran up her spine.
Whatever was down there, Susan knew she had to dig it up. Beneath the new stairs, she'd already discovered while searching for the case of coins, was a bunch of rusty old hand tools which should have been discarded rather than stored. That's what she'd thought when they were in her way. Now she was glad they hadn't been discarded, because she seemed to recall noticing a garden spade among them.
Her palms sweating and her heart pounding in her chest, she dashed out to see. She saw the spade, grabbed it and hurried back to the wine cellar. What she failed to see was that someone had closed the door at the top of the stairs.
Susan had scooped out perhaps two dozen spades of loose dirt when the man slipped unnoticed into the wine cellar with her. He had an ax handle in his hand. He raised it and sneaked up behind the hunched over girl, aiming for the back of her head. It was a solid blow. Susan didn't even whimper. One second she was shoveling dirt, the next she was lying in it.
It was nearly dark when she came to, and she had a splitting headache. She was in her room, on her bed, without remembering how she'd gotten there. A note was pinned to the pillow. She groaned, rolled over and turned on the bedside lamp so she could see to read it. It was printed, and obviously not with the hand whoever had left it used for writing.
Susan Polk, Don't make me kill you. Stay out of the cellar!
Susan was terrified, but she wouldn't let herself go to pieces. She couldn't afford that now. The medicine cabinet in her grandmother's private bathroom contained all sorts of pain killers. She chose plain aspirin, took two of them, then began pacing the bedroom and forgot all about her headache as she racked her brain.
One thing was certain. Whatever was buried in the wine cellar was important. Whoever put it there had knocked her out to keep her from digging it up. He'd threatened to kill her if she went back down there, too. She didn't dare return to the cellar alone, but whatever was buried there had to be dug up.
She tried to figure out which one of the men might have hit her over the head and carried her back to her room. She couldn't. She hadn't seen him, hadn't even known he was there. It might have been any one of the three, she realized. And then it hit her. She didn't dare go back down there alone, because whoever had left the note would be watching to see that she didn't, or to kill her if she did. It was too risky to confide in one of the men and have him go with her, because either of them could be the guilty one. But there was nothing to keep her from taking all three of the servants down there at the same time and having them work together. They weren't all killers. If they were, she would've already been murdered. Figuring she would be safe with all three of the men digging, perhaps safer than if she left things as they were, Susan acted on her plan immediately.
Since she now suspected Simmons as much as the others, she went for the men herself instead of sending him to fetch them into the house. She had Reyes bring two shovels with him, and when she had them gathered in the kitchen she announced they were all going down into the wine cellar and dig up something that had been secretly buried there. She watched their faces as she talked, but their expressions told her nothing. No, she didn't know what was buried, was her answer to their questions, they would just have to all go down there and find out together.
The men seemed excited but reluctant. They really had no choice but to do as she said, though, and Susan knew it. Refusal to dig would cast suspicion on the refuser, and the police, although stymied at the moment, had not closed the case of her grandmother's disappearance. The police! Susan thought as she and the men went down the cellar stairs. Why didn't I think to call them?
But it was too late then, and she didn't really feel threatened since all three of the servants were present.
Susan stood by nervously as the men dug up the soft spot in the floor of the wine cellar. There were no sounds other than labored breathing and the shovels cutting into the dirt and then of it falling as they threw it onto the growing mound. She wished someone would say something, anything, but no one did. The men were apparently as nervous as she herself. Then someone said something, and she regretted having wished they would. "It's a body!"
"Wh-whose?" Susan gasped.
"Just a minute ... let me uncover the face!"
Oh shaky legs, Susan walked to the edge of the waist-deep excavation. Charles and Simmons were standing at one end of it, their shovels idle as they gazed down at the other end, where Reyes was squatting, his hands busy brushing dirt to the sides.
Susan didn't want to look, but she couldn't tear herself away. The sight was horrifying and fascinating, both at the same time. Part of a face was visible. Susan felt as if everything were spinning around her. Her spine was like an icicle. Her heart was in her throat. Reyes kept brushing dirt, revealing more and more of the face, until finally enough of it was exposed for Susan to recognize it.
"It's Mrs. Robards!" Reyes gasped, recoiling in horror from the bluish face with the gaping, dirt-filled mouth and bulging, unseeing eyes.
The shocked announcement came too late for it to register on Susan's ears. She had seen the lifeless face of her murdered grandmother, and she had slumped silently onto the mound of earth beside her shallow grave.
When Susan regained consciousness, she was once again in her dead grandmother's room, lying on the bed. Only this time there was no note. The gardener, butler and chauffeur were in the room with her. She could hear their anxious voices before her mind cleared enough for her to make out what they were talking about. She opened her mouth and let out the scream which fainting had left lodged in her throat.
The sound of her terror caught the men's attention. They walked to the bed and stood looking down at her, one at the foot and one on each side.
"I'm going to call the police!" Susan wailed, sitting bolt upright and shaking her head to clear it.
"No one's going to call the police, baby," Charles said.
"But my grandmother's been murdered!" Susan groaned, and when no one argued that fact, she added, "One of you did it! One of you killed her!"
"Maybe," Reyes grunted. "Maybe not."
"We've had a discussion which you were unable to join, Susan," Simmons explained. "Now, no one is going to kill you, so just relax."
"But-" Susan started to protest, but Simmons slapped her.
"Shut up and listen!" he snapped. "We've already reached a decision, so we're not interested in anything you have to say. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps one of us did kill your bitch of a grandmother. Then again, maybe Krista killed her. The old witch deserved what she got, whoever did it. Does it really matter who murdered her? We don't think so. Here's the way it looks to us, Susan.
"We all had reason to kill her. That's why we're not going to permit you to phone the police. We would all three be suspect, don't you see? Now that would never do. Murder is a messy business. Trials are long and costly, and we don't have the money it would take to hire good lawyers.
"We're going to leave, Susan. But first we're going to find that case of rare coins and divide them among us. Now, we don't want you in our way, and we can't have you phoning the police. Remove your clothes, please. We're going to bind and gag you."