“A verdict of suicide would be a relief. Come, come, boys, hands off. Can’t you see you’re bothering him? Where were you heading, Prentice, for Times Square?”
Julian, standing free at last, shifted his gaze distractedly from the vibrant, defiant figure of Nadia Mdevani, to Silas Berry standing like an off-stage critic, to Ordway Belknap who looked a general with the puppets at his disposal, to Sydney Crawford lying crumpled and desperately pathetic across the feet of the still form on the bed, and suddenly he trembled uncontrollably from head to foot.
“Where is Joel?” he cried in a high, piercing voice that froze the room.
XXII
From this moment Thorngate, house and grounds, was pandemonium let loose.
It was clear that the first thing to be done, when it became certain that Joel Lacey was really among the missing, and had last been seen sleeping on the library couch, was to institute a searching party. Because of the numberless recruits, three groups were formed—two taking the great outdoors and one the sliding panels and the secret attics. The way the police, Belknap groaned, came scurrying out of corners, like the Hamlin rats to the piper’s pipe, at news of a safe and sane hunt, when there was never one of them underfoot when he was needed to block a murder, made one positively ill. Not that the hunt wasn’t important. But the bare chances of finding Joel Lacey, much less finding her alive, seemed so slight in view of the thoroughness of the earlier crimes.
In the midst of it all, behind and before, to right and to left, came Julian. Julian joined first one searching party, then another, urging, beseeching, cursing, cajoling, diving into a closet or under a bush as the case might be. Julian was every which way. Julian was at sixes and sevens. Julian had gone berserk. Losing Joel, Julian seemed to have lost whatever of value he had recently possessed: his boyish philosophy, such as it was; his sense of humor, which hadn’t been bad; his kindly, inconsequential wit which had served rather to balance the household during the late unpleasantness. These had vanished in thin air. Instead here was a frantic, unreasonable, hysterical, bothersome young man who dogged everyone’s footsteps like a spoilt child, stubbornly refused to remain even passably steady, and flung wild and outrageous accusations about like so much confetti. No one escaped his fury or his suspicions. Even his idol Berry took a raking over the coals that under normal conditions would have been unpardonable. But when Julian burst into tears at the end of his peroration Berry let that be the end of it.
Julian said no one was trying to find Joel; he said Nadia Mdevani had cremated Joel in the furnaces and they must sift the ashes for her bones; he said Milton Dorn was murdering her by unspeakable degrees in some god-forsaken hole-in-the-wall where her screams would never be heard; that Belknap, Berry, and Stebbins had whisked her off to some Inquisitorial chamber where their minions were torturing a statement from her. He said the whole investigation from A to Z had been stupidly handled (he said it very loud and clear, and embellished it with bad words); that a lot of helpless and innocent people had been kept in a house which had a chronic disposition to murder, where they had been nipped off one by one like sheep by wolves; that Thorngate was proving no better than an Island of Dr. Moreau, only worse, because it was human beings instead of rabbits being experimented with; he said—
But this was going one further than the harassed Belknap could quite tolerate. He thrust Julian gently but firmly from the East Room into the hall, saying, as he closed the door on him:
“Go along, Prentice. I’m sorry. We’re doing all we can, and the best possible. I have even got in touch with Headquarters again and have asked them to send an extra man or two. I admit things are pretty damn thick, but you aren’t thinning them out. So beat it.”