Free Dorothy Eden by Eerie Nights in London Page A

come again very soon and we won’t speak of grief at all, we’ll have music, and laughter. I know what we will do. We’ll have a party, a house-warming for you. Mr. Moretti—can you endure his white eyebrows, my dear, like caterpillars—shall play the violin, and we may even entice Miss Glory to perform on the piano. And we’ll have some good food and wine—ah, that will be gay!” The old fingers moved on the palm of Cressida’s hand with their cool, dry touch. “You’re so like her, my dear, it’s unbelievable.”
    Impulsively Cressida leaned forward to kiss Arabia’s cheek.
    “It would be nice to be gay,” she said.
    Downstairs, in the haven of her own room, she regretted a little that she had not asked Arabia the reason for her macabre joke of the previous evening. (Had she been locked in Lucy’s room because the old lady had determined, in her obsessed mind, to get an occupant for it?) But a question such as that would probably have provoked an even more agitated outburst from Arabia, so perhaps it was best to pretend the thing had never happened. Arabia would answer a question just as it suited her to do, that was obvious. No Monty, she had said. But there had been a Monty, someone who did not fit into the pattern of Lucy’s gay innocent life.
    Arabia was a devious old woman, but she was also kind and immensely lovable and very lonely. Cressida was now not without qualms as to the situation in which she was finding herself, but her ready sympathy and affection was all for Arabia. She had no intention of letting her slight, never-quite-quelled, undercurrent of apprehension drive her from Dragon House. Indeed, she could not have gone, for, more even than Arabia, Lucy was holding her. She had to look at that diary again, study every entry, find out what had led to Lucy’s death. It was almost as if Lucy were urging her to do this—was it to right some wrong?
    Although it was late Cressida sat down to make notes.
    “No Monty,” she wrote. “Only Larry, and other obviously harmless friends. Was Monty undesirable, a fortune-hunter or a ne’er do-well, or just socially inferior? Did he ever send Lucy red roses? (N.B. Must look in Lucy’s room for old snapshots, etc. Perhaps old letters—everything of hers was untouched, Arabia said.)
    “No grave,” she went on. “Why was Arabia so distressed when I asked—”
    Abruptly Cressida stopped and the pen fell from her hand as a shriek sounded upstairs.
    It was a high involuntary scream, and instantly suppressed. A moment later there were running footsteps. They seemed to come down the stairs. They were very soft, as if someone were in stockinged feet.
    After a moment of petrified terror Cressida pulled herself together. Someone was in trouble. She had to go and see who it was.
    She was almost sure the scream had come from the rooms where Mrs. Stanhope and Dawson lived. Out in the hall she switched on all the lights she could find. Then, sure that there was no one lurking in the shadows, she ran up the stairs. At the top she had to stop to get her breath. Her heart, with haste and terror, was drumming uncontrollably.
    “Don’t stop to be frightened,” she admonished herself, and tapped briskly at Mrs. Stanhope’s door. After a moment Dawson’s voice, breaking into an unexpectedly deep note, called, “Who’s there?”
    “It’s me. Cressida Barclay. Is there anything wrong?”
    The door opened slowly. Dawson, in his pyjamas, his shot stiff hair stuck on end, stood there, blinking. He hadn’t his glasses on and he looked suddenly childlike and scared.
    “I thought I heard someone scream,” Cressida said. “I had to come up. Is your mother all right?”
    Dawson looked shame-faced. “It was me,” he said. “Ma had a nightmare about that girl who was strangled and she came in and woke me up. I felt her hand on my face, and I yelled.”
    Mrs. Stanhope, bundled into a wool dressing-gown, that almost obscured her so that one could see only the large