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“When did that take place?”

“On the day before Mrs. Ransom disappeared.”

“Was there anything of value in those rooms?”

“Nothing whatever, so far as I know.”

“You have no explanation, then, of why this was done?”

“None whatever.”

“Do you think this had any reference to the deceased’s presence in the house?”

“I think she did it herself,” I said bluntly.

I was excused rather hastily after that, and Helen Jordan was called.

But Helen Jordan was not present, nor did a messenger sent hurriedly to Eliza Edwards’s, where she had taken a room, find her there. Instead Mrs. Edwards herself arrived, to state breathlessly that her boarder’s clothing and suitcase were still there, but that her bed had not been slept in.

Helen Jordan had disappeared.

T
HE INQUEST WAS ADJOURNED
following that discovery. I had a fleeting glimpse of old Mrs. Pendexter, her black eyes snapping with interest; of Fred Martin and Dorothy; of Mansfield Dean alone; and, as we went out, of Allen Pell alone and lighting a cigarette, but watching the crowd sharply. Then we were back at the house, Mary Lou to go to bed taking a bottle of aromatic ammonia with her and Arthur to pace the library floor downstairs and drink one Scotch and soda after another without perceptible effect.

“Now where are we?” he demanded. “That woman’s gone. She knew something, so she’s gone. Cleared out.”

“Without her suitcase?”

He stopped and stared at me.

“What do you mean?” he said. “You don’t think—”

“I’m not thinking, Arthur. She may be all right. On the other hand, we might as well face it. She may have been murdered.”

“Murdered?” he said thickly. “Who on earth would want to murder her?”

“It would be extremely interesting to know,” I retorted, and went out to see if Mary Lou’s tray was ready.

Lunch—such lunch as we could eat—was over when I heard a car drive up. It was the sheriff, and I found him in the hall, with the door open and the engine outside still going. I did not like the expression on his face.

“Which of your maids here would know what clothes the Jordan woman had?” he asked abruptly. “I want to find what’s missing.”

“She’s still gone, then?”

“She’s still gone,” he said laconically.

I thought Ellen might know, although Jordan had been rather secretive. I called Ellen, and the sheriff told her to get her hat and coat. She looked terrified and glanced at me.

“It’s all right, Ellen,” I told her. “You’re not under arrest. Do what you’re told.”

He brought her back in an hour or so. She had not, I gathered, been very useful. All of Jordan’s clothes that she remembered were there, except what she had worn when she left us; but she might have had others. However, there was her suitcase and her unused bed, and Russell Shand was in a bad temper and did not care who knew it. He went upstairs and examined her room, and then called for the key to Juliette’s room. When I found him there he was staring with some contempt at the rose silk sheets on the bed, and he held such mail as she had brought with her in his hand.

“See here, Marcia,” he said. “Do you know any friend of Mrs. Ransom’s named Jennifer?”

“No. I don’t know any of her friends.”

“Then I wish I knew why the Jordan woman thought a letter with that signature was worth taking away with her.”

“She took the letter?” I said incredulously.

“She did. We found it in her suitcase.”

“I have read it. There was nothing in it of any importance.”

“Maybe not. Damned if I know.” He took out his notebook and glanced at a notation he had made in it. “‘Have just heard about L—,’” he read aloud. “‘Do please be careful, Julie. You know what I mean.’ Now what does that refer to?”

I had no idea, and said so. He stood looking thoughtfully at the book in his hand.

“Well, by the great horn spoon, you can bet that Helen Jordan thought it meant something,” he said. “Why was Mrs. Ransom to be careful about this L—? Was L—dangerous?

“It sounds like it.” He put away the notebook. “The devil of it is,” he added, “that there’s a fair chance we’ll never know why she took it with her. Something’s happened to her, Marcia. You’d better realize that.”

“You think she has been murdered?” I said weakly.

“Well, look at the facts. She got to the Edwards house all right. She went up to her room, put the suitcase in a closet, took her pocketbook and went downstairs to her supper. After supper she locked her door and went out, maybe eight o’clock. She gave Eliza Edwards the key and said she would be back in an hour or so. But she didn’t come back. She hasn’t been seen since. Nobody knew her in town, so we can’t trace which direction she took; but she left this letter, her bankbook, and a hundred dollars in cash in that suitcase. That doesn’t look like running away, does it? Yet from the minute she stepped off the porch of the Edwards house last night she hasn’t been seen.”

He ran his hand over his bristling hair.

“Now and then,” he said, “I read these magazines that deal with crime. Real crime. Well, where do they start off? They’ve got something. They get a microscope and put a hair under it; or they take the dust out of somebody’s pockets and find where he’s been and what he’s been doing. But in one of these cases we’ve got a body and no clues; and, by the great horn spoon, in the other we haven’t even got a body!”

Some time during the interview I gave him the button I had found in the garden at the foot of the trellis. He stood turning it over in his hand, and his face relaxed into a grin.

“Now if I was a real policeman,” he said, “I suppose I’d start with this and go places. But hell, it’s just a button to me!”

We buried Juliette from the old ivy-covered Episcopal church the next day. None of her friends appeared, from New York or elsewhere, and Tony hastily recruited a group of men to act as pallbearers, and was himself one of them. Neither Lucy nor Mary Lou appeared, but Arthur and I went together. It was Arthur who had ordered the pall of small green orchids which covered the casket, and except for my own cross of lilies there were no other flowers.

The church was crowded and I myself felt sad and remorseful. Whatever Juliette’s faults she had not deserved this, I thought; to lie there shut away forever from the life she had loved, never again to put on her pretty clothes or to lie between her soft silk sheets. Frivolous and selfish she had been, but what could she have done to earn her death?

“For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner …O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen.”

The words echoed and re-echoed in my mind as the service went on. I wondered if Arthur heard them and was remembering that time when he had brought her to us, and stood uneasy but stubborn before Father’s hardening face, and Mother’s helpless one.

“This is my wife,” he had said. “I hope you will all be good to her.”

How pretty she had been that day, and how alluring. Going to Mother and kissing her, and reaching her heart by what she said.

“Try to forgive me,” she pleaded. “I love him so terribly.”

Acting? Perhaps; but perhaps not. Maybe we had changed her, showed her a side of life she had never known, expensive and expansive living. But Mother had tried hard to make friends with her. When Father wanted to trace her people through a detective agency she vetoed it at once.

“Why?” she said. “It is her future that matters, not her past. Anyhow, that seems respectable enough, and she is Arthur’s wife. Don’t forget that. She is Arthur’s wife.”

But she never became one of us, in the family sense of the word. Mother furnished a suite for them both in the Park Avenue house, but it bored her. And I was too young to be a companion to her. In the end she simply moved Arthur away, and when I finally made my debut she was tight at my coming-out ball.

I could still remember the shock that was; Father standing stiff before William, and telling him to get that girl out of the house.

“And never let her come back,” he added.

She came back, of course. Even Father had to permit that. But gradually she had drifted away, to take exquisite care of her body, to learn to dress, to gather around her the floaters who drift about New York, and eventually to ruin Arthur, financially and otherwise.

I had tried to be friendly, but she had never liked me.

“If you want your precious brother back, why don’t you take him?” she asked me once.

And so I had let her go. I was young and active. I had my own crowd, my own amusements. Now and then, riding in the park, I saw her on a livery hack; and once she cut me dead. I remember going home and crying it out on Maggie’s shoulder.

“Now, now, my lamb, don’t you worry. She’s just common. She always has been common.”

But I had never hated her. She had been lovely to look at, gay and reckless. And now there she was, lying in state in the church under her pall of small green orchids. All over. Everything over. And the service going on.

“O most merciful Father, who has been pleased to take unto thyself the soul of this thy servant—”

What was Arthur thinking, there beside me in his morning coat and striped trousers, wearing the black tie which Mary Lou had so bitterly resented that morning? For almost six years Juliette had been his wife, and for at least two of them he had been passionately in love with her. Now she was dead, and there were many who believed that he had killed her.

We stood by in the cemetery until the service was over and they began to lower the casket into the grave. Then Arthur turned away abruptly and I followed him. The crowd opened to let us through; but from somewhere on the outskirts there was a sharp hiss. He appeared not to hear it.

There was a shock waiting for us on our return. Mary Lou had moved into Mother’s room and was shut away there! I remember my indignation when I heard it, and Arthur’s face. I still resent that childishness of hers; but I know now that it was largely terror. Little by little her small familiar world was slipping away from her, and she could not hold it. Arthur, on the witness stand, telling of deceiving her to meet Juliette. Arthur suspected of killing Juliette. And now Arthur going to her funeral; sitting in the church for everyone to see, standing by while the casket was lowered. It was as though the years with her had been wiped away, and Juliette had been still his wife.

I went up at once, to find her on the small balcony outside Mother’s room, with its flower boxes around the railing. She had a sodden handkerchief in her hand, and her eyes were red and swollen.

“What is all this nonsense?” I said sharply. “Can’t you forget yourself and think of Arthur? He needs you, and you act like a child!”

“He doesn’t need me,” she said. “I’m going back to Millbank.”

I felt old enough to be her mother just then. What I wanted was to give her a good shaking. But she was pitiful too, and I rang the bell and ordered some tea for her. When I came back she was wiping her eyes.

“Now listen to me,” I said, more gently. “You can’t escape life by running away from it. I could damn’ well do some running myself, if it comes to that. But Arthur needs you. He’s built the only life he has around you. If you desert him, what are other people going to do?”

And then she took my breath away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I suppose I’m scared, Marcia. You see, I was there myself that morning.”

“There? What on earth do you mean?” I was shocked because it was not until much later that the sheriff told me all about it.

“I wanted to talk to her,” she said hysterically. “We couldn’t go on as we were. I thought if I told her how things were she might do something. She’d ruined us. She’d ruined you. Why shouldn’t I see her?”

I reached out and caught her by the shoulder.

“Did you see her?” I demanded. “Is that what’s wrong with you? Did you find Lucy’s golf club and then quarrel with her? Did you—”

“You’re crazy,” she gasped. “I never killed her. I didn’t even see her.”

“And you suspect Arthur!” I said. “Arthur, who wasn’t even near her. What if I tell that to the police?”

She was shaken, but her story was clear enough. She had telephoned to Sunset early that morning and learned that Juliette was going to ride. The temptation had been too much for her. She had taken her car and driven over, and at a spot where the road is not far from the bridle path she had stopped it. But she never left it, she said.

“I couldn’t,” she said. “There was a man on the hillside, and he was getting ready to paint something. I didn’t want to be seen, so I just sat still for a while, and then went back home.”

“I think you’re entirely unbalanced,” I told her, and went down to explain to Arthur. On the whole, dangerous as it might be, that statement of hers relieved the tension between them.

“You’re an idiot,” he told her. “It was a fool thing to do. Now give me a kiss and go and fix your face. It needs it!”

But to me privately he showed some apprehension.

“Sooner or later they’ll learn about that,” he said, “and they’ll suspect her of driving over to pick me up that morning. If they do there’ll be hell to pay. What got into her anyhow?”

The next few days were quiet. Mary Lou was herself again, repentant and loving. I worried over the bills as usual. Why is there no sympathy for the people with houses and servants who can’t get rid of either of them? And meals in the servants’ dining room resolved themselves into small courts of inquiry, with no regrets for the missing Jordan.

For Jordan was still missing. The search followed the general lines of the previous one, but with less excitement. Perhaps we were getting used to murder and sudden death. But no clues had been found, and no body. Bloodhounds, given one of her gloves, made nothing of it in the village. Taken on a route encircling the settlement they followed the bay path for a mile or so without enthusiasm, and then gave it up.

The adjourned inquest was postponed once more. I tried to pick up my life as best I could, played some golf and some bridge, even went to a small dinner or two. Eventually Mary Lou went back to Millbank and Junior, leaving Arthur with me. And the excitement was dying away. It was as though, with Juliette dead and buried, everybody wanted to forget her. As for Jordan, I think only the police and ourselves believed that anything had happened to her. Nobody knew her. She might have had her own reasons for taking a stealthy departure, but the colony was not particularly interested.