The Cases of Susan Dare Read Online Free PDF

Welles. Randy had a motive, but Tryon Welles had not. Tryon Welles wore a ring habitually, and Randy did not. But the ring was an emerald. And Christabel’s ring was what Mars called red. Red—then what would he have called Michela’s scarlet bracelet? Pink? But that was a bracelet. She wrenched herself back to dig at the troublesome phantom of a memory. It was something trivial—but something she could not project into her conscious memory. And it was something that somehow she needed. Needed now.
    She awoke and was horrified to discover her cheek pillowed cosily upon the revolver. She thrust it away. And realized with a sinking of her heart that day had come and, with it, urgent problems. Christabel, first.
    Michela was still silent and sulky. Crossing the terrace, Susan looked at the wisteria winding upward over its trellis. It was heavy with purple blossoms—purple like dark amethysts.
    Christabel was in her own room, holding a breakfast tray on her lap and looking out the window with a blank, unseeing gaze. She was years older; shrunken somehow inside. She was pathetically willing to answer the few questions that Susan asked, but added nothing to Susan’s small store of knowledge. She left her finally, feeling that Christabel wanted only solitude. But she went away reluctantly. It would not be long before Jim Byrne returned, and she had nothing to tell him—nothing, that is, except surmise.
    Randy was not at breakfast, and it was a dark and uncomfortable meal. Dark because Tryon Welles said something about a headache and turned out the electric light, and uncomfortable because it could not be otherwise. Michela had changed to a thin suit—red again. The teasing ghost of a memory drifted over Susan’s mind and away again before she could grasp it.
    As the meal ended Susan was called to the telephone. It was Jim Byrne saying that he would be there in an hour.
    On the terrace Tryon Welles overtook her again and said: “How’s Christabel?”
    “I don’t know,” said Susan slowly. “She looks—stunned.”
    “I wish I could make it easier for her,” he said. “But—I’m caught, too. There’s nothing I can do, really. I mean about the house, of course. Didn’t she tell you?”
    “No.”
    He looked at her, considered, and went on slowly.
    “She wouldn’t mind your knowing. You see—oh, it’s tragically simple. But I can’t help myself. It’s like this: Randy borrowed money of me—kept on borrowing it, spent it like water. Without Christabel knowing it, he put up the house and grounds as collateral. She knows now, of course. Now I’m in a pinch in business and have got to take the house over legally in order to borrow enough money on it myself to keep things going for a few months. Do you see?”
    Susan nodded. Was it this knowledge, then, that had so stricken Christabel?
    “I hate it,” said Tryon Welles. “But what can I do? And now Joe’s—death—on top of it—” he paused, reached absently for a cigarette case, extracted a cigarette, and the small flame from his lighter flared suddenly clear and bright. “It’s—hell,” he said, puffing, “for her. But what can I do? I’ve got my own business to save.”
    “I see,” said Susan slowly.
    And quite suddenly, looking at the lighter, she did see. It was as simple, as miraculously simple as that. She said, her voice to her own ears marvelously unshaken and calm: “May I have a cigarette?”
    He was embarrassed at not having offered it to her: he fumbled for his cigarette case and then held the flame of the lighter for her. Susan was very deliberate about getting her cigarette lighted. Finally she did so, said, “Thank you,” and added, quite as if she had the whole thing planned: “Will you wake Randy, Mr. Welles, and send him to me? Now?”
    “Why, of course,” he said. “You’ll be in the cottage?”
    “Yes,” said Susan and fled.
    She was bent over the yellow paper when Jim Byrne arrived.
    He was fresh and alert and, Susan