Return to the Scene Read online

  Kay Winyard’s return to the scene was a pilgrimage of hate. She went back to Bermuda, back to the scene of her own past indiscretions in order to keep history from repeating itself.

  Kay returned to the scene to stop a wedding.

  It was stopped—by murder.

  Against the glamorous and exotic setting of Bermuda unfolds the story of a family shaken by murder, banded together in hatred of the victim, banded together against the law. Not even to each other dare they admit their suspicions—their almost certain knowledge that the murderer is one of themselves.

  Valiantly they lie about the torn, bloodstained dress that one of them has deliberately destroyed, about the silver bathing cap clutched in the dead man’s hand, about the weird tracks on the swimming beach and the water-stained leather cushion.

  And then, crashing through their flimsy structure of lies, comes the second murder—cold-blooded, daring, vicious. They know then that they must tell the truth, that none of them is safe until the murderer is found.

  Return to the Scene has all the mounting suspense of unknown danger, all the drama of normal lives destroyed by murder, all the excitement of the chase. But even more, Return to the Chase is that rare achievement, a perfect puzzle that will keep the reader guessing until the last page.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form

  Copyright, I941, by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

  Published by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

  Rockefeller Center, I230 Sixth Avenue,

  New York, N. Y.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  RETURN TO THE SCENE has been serialized in the

  American Weekly under the title THE GREEN DIARY

  Books, Inc. Edition

  First Printing, March 1944

  Second Printing, May 1944

  The characters and situations in this work are wholly fictional; do not portray, and are not intended to portray, any actual persons or parties.

  Chapter One

  THE GREAT PLEASURE ship gave a majestic snort and nosed toward the dock through the brilliant Bermuda waters. Kay Winyard, leaning her elbows on the rail of the sun deck, thought: It’s absurd to be afraid. Ivor can’t mean anything to me. He can’t hurt me any more.

  Passengers were pressing around her, shouting greetings to sun-tanned friends on the wharf below. Flanking the liner, speedboats cut jade grooves in the turquoise water. Tall yachts tilted in the faint breeze of a halcyon summer day. The shining panorama of Hamilton stretched before Kay with its white toy houses, its streets thronged with carriages, cyclists, and vacationists in gay beach clothes. It was frighteningly the same as her memory of it.

  Kay had known this moment would be an ordeal. But it was harder even than she had imagined. Almost it seemed as if Bermuda had stood still during the three years of her absence, as if, fantastically suspended in time, this was the same summer day, these the same carefree people who had stood there on the dock, waving to departing friends, when she had last left the Islands—three years ago.

  She had left Bermuda then hating its drowsy beauty, hating everything about it that reminded her of Ivor, thinking that nothing could ever thaw the circle of ice around her heart.

  She had sworn that she would never, never come back.

  Now, she was here again.

  And suddenly she felt afraid. She was crazy to have come to fight Ivor in Bermuda. It had been dangerous enough when he had been her lover. It was going to be a thousand times more dangerous now that she was to make him an enemy.

  Bermuda, with its exotic days, its breathless moon-drenched nights, would always be on Ivor’s side.

  Kay’s slim fingers closed tightly over the rail. She tried to steady herself, tried to make herself feel the way she had felt when she left America, angry and purposeful—instead of afraid. Over and over again she thought of her sister’s amazing cable, those few terse words that had left a world of things unsaid but had brought the past blazing to life and made it suddenly the present and the future:

  ELAINE TO MARRY IVOR DRAKE HERE IN BERMUDA NEXT WEEK. CAN YOU COME.

  MAUD.

  That was all Kay knew. No details. Not even of how the Chilterns’ depleted finances had made a Bermuda vacation possible. Nor of how they had met Ivor.

  But the bare facts in that cablegram were more than enough.

  Ivor to marry Elaine Chiltern—Maud’s daughter, Kay’s only niece.

  Ivor was not going to marry Elaine.

  Whatever happened, at whatever sacrifice, she was going to see that this impossible, shocking marriage never took place. The liner lay right along the Front Street wharf like some gigantic tame animal basking in the sun at the roadside. A chain of colored porters was hurrying the baggage on shore; the passenger gangplank swayed out to the dock; tourists, cheerful and laughing, were pouring out into the shadowy half-light of the customs shed.

  As Kay looked down at the bright, animated scene she thought of Rosemary Drakes diary, that little green leather book securely packed in her suitcase, that terrible revelation which Ivor’s young wife had sent her just before her tragic death. The thought of Rosemary’s diary brought her strength. Surely, when Maud and Gilbert Chiltern read it, they would have to see the truth about Ivor. They would have to stop their daughter’s wedding then.

  Below in the crowd on the wharf, a young man with tousled, sun-bleached hair was pushing his way to the railing. Kay saw him and waved.

  “Terry…!”

  Within a few minutes she was on the dock and Terry Chiltern, absurdly large in scanty shorts and a blue open-necked polo shirt, was hugging her to him like a young, affectionate bear.

  “Kay, darling, it’s grand to see you. One whole year—it seems like a century.”

  Laughing, Kay disentangled herself and looked at this twenty-year-old boy who, though only eight years younger than she, was ridiculously her nephew. In a way she could see mirrored in Terry’s face all the eventful things that had happened to the Chilterns during the last twelve months when she had been parted from them by the rigorous demands of her dress-designing job with a Hollywood studio. The final collapse of Gilbert Chiltern’s never very dependable income and the tragic paralytic stroke which had permanently invalided him, had left their mark on his son. There was the same frank, mobile face, the same tall, rangy body. But it had filled out into a man’s body with broad shoulders and thick-set muscles; and Terry’s eyes had the steadiness of a man’s.

  “Well,” he said amusedly, “do I pass muster?”

  “With flying colors. One attractive, dangerous, not-too-young nephew.”

  “And one attractive, dangerous, much-too-young aunt.” Terry slid his arm around her waist. “Let’s cope with the customs. Elaine’s waiting at transportation. She’s dying to see you.”

  Indifferent to appraising feminine glances, Terry drew her through the crowd of tourists to a corner marked W. In a successfully short time he had disarmed a customs official into passing her baggage unopened and had corralled a porter.

  He came back to her, grinning. “Let’s get out of this dump.” Suddenly the grin went. “I guess you want the latest bulletin on the family romance. The glamorous bridegroom’s having a last fling in New York, but he’ll be back tomorrow. The wedding’s set for Tuesday. You better brush up on your bouquet holding technique because you’re slated for maid of honor.”

  As he spoke Kay glanced at him anxiously. But she was almost certain from his face that he knew nothing of her own relationship with Ivor. Then Ivor for some tortuous reason of his own had not told the Chilterns of the episode which she herself had always been so careful to keep
from them. That was a comfort.

  And Ivor would not be in Bermuda until tomorrow. That was a comfort too.

  They had reached the dazzling sunshine of Front Street now and were threading their way past parked bicycles and buggies with white-coated drivers and calm, blinkered horses wearing rakish straw hats. Kay saw the ridiculous red-painted toy they called a train, squatting at the roadside; to the rear of the liner’s gigantic bulks showed the small, black-tipped funnel of the Somerset ferry.

  This was Ivor’s Bermuda, just as she remembered it—bright, leisurely, remote from the world.

  And the sight of it swung back the floodgates of memory. Sunshine on white coral streets… Ivor’s little brown speedboat rushing like a comet through the sky-blue waters… the taste of salt spray on her lips… Ivor’s delirious, crazy love-making… and always the sharp, nostalgic scent of cedar wood and the heavy sweetness of oleanders.

  Suddenly it seemed incredible that she was here in Bermuda with Terry; that he should be talking about Ivor’s wedding to Elaine. And she, Kay Win-yard, a maid of honor!

  The porter lumbered ahead with the baggage on a truck. Terry guided Kay along the crowded sidewalk, past the little railroad terminal toward the cement public dock.

  “The boat’s here,” he said, “complete with Elaine and boatman.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone to the expense of hiring a boat for me.”

  “Hiring a boat! My dear bourgeois aunt, didn’t you know? We’re not just marrying Ivor. We’re marrying a cruiser, a speedboat, a sailboat, two punts, everything but a submarine.”

  “So it’s Ivor’s boat.” Kay stopped and stared at him, understanding suddenly dawning. “You mean you’re staying at—at Ivor’s house?”

  “Of course.” Terry stopped too. His young face was twisted in a smile that had no humor in it. “How else do you suppose the penniless Chilterns could spend four luxurious months in Bermuda? All we are and all that we ever hope to be we owe to my angel sister and her expensive taste in husbands.”

  His voice was rasping with an undercurrent of bitterness that was utterly unlike the Terry she had known. It made Kay wonder. Just as the news he had told her made her wonder—and be afraid. She should have realized that the family could never have moved to Bermuda without financial aid from somewhere. But that Maud Chiltern should have accepted all this from Ivor! Maud who had always been so stubbornly independent, who, at the lowest moment of their fortunes, had refused a penny even from Kay, her own sister!

  They reached the dock. Ahead, moored to a bollard, lay a luxurious black cabin cruiser. The porter was swinging her baggage on board to a blunt-faced young boatman with a crew haircut. Standing watching them, her dark hair hanging almost to her shoulders, was a slim girl in an oyster-white playsuit with a green scarf loosely knotted around her throat.

  “Kay, darling!” Elaine Chiltern hurried to them and kissed Kay lightly on the cheek. “This is heaven. I couldn’t be happier.”

  The past year had done something even more sensational to Elaine than to her brother. At nineteen, this girl, with her boy’s figure, her long-lashed green eyes, and her delicate profile, was breath-takingly lovely, the finished portrait from the rough sketch of a girl Kay had last seen.

  It was no wonder Ivor wanted her, Kay thought. Ivor, who always wanted perfection and who inevitably destroyed it.

  Elaine pulled her affectionately into the boat and along the deck toward the cockpit. As she passed the boatman she said stiffly: “We’ll go right home, Don. You can come back later and pick up my things from the customs.”

  Terry was already ensconced forward, perched on the cabin, his bare legs dangling over the side. He had picked up a beribboned Cuban guitar and was strumming it softly.

  “I composed a little number to greet you, Kay.”

  In a low, sweet baritone he started to sing:

  Return to Bermuda,

  Return to the scene,

  Bring love and bring happiness

  Where heartbreak has been.

  As that lilting, unconsciously ironical song mingled with the warm air, the sleek cruiser nosed away from the dock and headed out into the lagoon blueness of the Great Sound. Elaine dropped down at Kay’s side and, drawing up her slim legs, clasped her hands around her knees.

  It was only then that Kay noticed on her finger the large flawless emerald engagement ring. The sight of it made her suddenly aware of the biting reality of the situation. For it was the same stone that Ivor had given to her, Kay Winyard, on that crazy moonlight night when she had promised to be his wife. The same stone that she had thrown hysterically at his feet that other night in the playhouse when she had learned the whole brutal saga of Rosemary and had finally seen through the fascinating sham of Ivor into the devious, twisted mind that lay behind.

  Now Ivor had had that same emerald reset for her own niece!

  Around her the translucent water glided by and the bright strip of shore line with its pattern of white houses, pink oleanders, and dark strong cedars. But she was only dimly conscious of them. Too vividly her mind conjured up pictures of Ivor with Elaine; Ivor’s kisses on that young mouth; Ivor’s fingers caressing that honey-smooth skin.

  Elaine at nineteen! What chance had she against Ivor’s glamour? How could she, any more than poor, hero-worshiping Rosemary, detect the intricate pattern of calculated cruelty which was there for those who could see?

  Elaine’s voice sounded, mingling with the soft sweetness of Terry’s song.

  “… my wedding dress, all my trousseau have arrived on the boat. Isn’t it exciting?”

  Her wedding dress…!

  At last, after they were through the bridge and making for the farthest curve of a narrow, humpy peninsula, Hurricane House reared up from a screen of cedar and tamarisk with its cool-white facade and cool-lemon shutters.

  Terry said: “There’s the house.”

  Kay was watching it, remembering every little detail of the white chimneyed roof, the green lawns, the wooden dock thrusting out like a fist into the water.

  As the cruiser swung left, making for the dock, a canoe slid out from behind a clump of dark, leggy mangrove. In it, indolently working the paddle, was a girl in a lavender and green Hawaiian swimming suit, a cloud of vivid chestnut hair loose around her shoulders.

  “Hi, Simon. Wait for me.”

  Terry’s smile was vivid. Jumping up, he kicked away his shoes and stripped off the blue polo shirt. For a second he stood poised on the edge of the deck, his naked torso gleaming like a statue in the sunlight. Then he dived overboard, cutting through the smooth water as cleanly as a knife.

  In a few moments he was wallowing around the canoe as much at home in the water as a polished young seal.

  Kay asked: “Who’s the girl, Elaine?”

  “Oh, she’s just Simon Morley. From New York. She’s staying in the house across the bay.”

  Elaine’s mouth had hardened and her green eyes, watching her brother, held a queer, intent expression. She did not speak again until the boat eased to the dock. Then quickly, before the boatman could help her, she jumped up onto the little wooden platform. Offering a hand, she pulled Kay up too.

  In an odd tight voice she said: “Don, you can go back to Hamilton and pick up those things at the customs for me.”

  The boatman who had been attaching the painter to the dock turned abruptly and stared at her.

  “You better give me some money,” he said. “Or has Mr. Drake paid for the duty as well as the wedding dress?”

  The unmistakable undercurrent of insolence came as a jolt to Kay. She stared at Ivor’s boatman. At a first glance she had thought him one of the ugliest young men she had ever seen. He looked rather like a blond gorilla with his square head under the crew haircut, his stocky body, and his muscular arms, bare to the elbow.

  But it was an interesting gorilla, with very white teeth and bright blue eyes that were dangerously aware.

  He was gazing at Elaine, half angrily, half cont
emptuously.

  “Well, do you expect me to pay the duty?”

  All the color had drained from Elaine’s lips. Suddenly, with fingers that trembled, she snapped open her white pocketbook, pulled out some dollar bills, and flung them down on the dock.

  Her dark hair swirling around her shoulders, she spun round and ran blindly away up the shaded tamarisk walk toward the house.

  The boatman vaulted onto the wooden platform, calmly picked up the money, and thrust it into his trousers pocket. He looked at Kay.

  “Nice-mannered girl!” he grunted. “No one introduced me, by the way. I’m Don Baird, the boatman, suitably quartered in the slave cottage.” He nodded toward a little white cottage half hidden in the cedars and grinned. “Don’t worry. I’m quite respectable to meet socially. Third year law at Columbia. This is just a summer job.” The grin went and his blue eyes were quizzical. “You don’t remember me, do you?” Key felt rather dizzy and didn’t know quite what to say. “Remember you?”

  “I remember you. I recognized you the moment I saw you. You’re not the type of girl a man forgets.” He was watching her appraisingly now. “Three years ago I spent the summer with Rosemary and her people in the house across the bay where Simon Morley lives now. That’s how I got this job. Knew all the channels.” Dimly apprehensive, Kay remembered back to a seventeen-year-old boy with a homely face and an infectious grin who used to tag around after Rosemary and fish for white grunts off Ivor’s pier.

  “You! The boy with the fishing line and the red sailboat.”

  “That’s it.” He smiled, his teeth gleaming whiter than coral in the blinding sunlight. “The funny looking kid with the red sailboat. I guess I had funny ideas too. Often on moonlight nights way back in those days when Ivor Drake was a bachelor, I used to sail by here wishing I was rich and handsome like him. Sometimes I used to see him sitting alone on the terrace, always with a glass of liquor in his hand; sometimes there were parties with women in expensive dresses and guitars playing so you could hear them singing over the water; and sometimes I saw him alone with a beautiful girl I supposed he was going to marry.”