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Mrs. Pendexter chose that time for one of her huge parties, and on her insistence I went. With Tony, as a matter of fact, and wearing a new white chiffon dress and Tony’s orchids.

“Of course you’re coming,” she said to me over the telephone. “What was Juliette to you but a nuisance? Don’t tell me you’re hypocrite enough to go into mourning for her.”

“I was thinking of Arthur.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” she retorted. “Nobody thinks he did it, or would blame him if he did. As to that Jordan woman, I knew when I saw her that she would come to some bad end.”

The party was for Marjorie and Howard Brooks, and as Howard had brought up his yacht, it was moored to the Pendexter dock and brilliantly lighted. Part of the time we danced there, on the deck, and Howard showed me over the boat. It was a beautiful thing, and he said he was planning to go on to Newfoundland in it, taking Marjorie and a party.

“She’d like it if you could come,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to get away, either.” He smiled. “Juliette alive was a strong man’s burden, but Juliette murdered is a lot worse. Better think about it.”

“I didn’t know you knew her,” I said.

“Not well. I saw her now and then. I have a place on Long Island, you know, and I’d see her about. Not my sort, of course.”

He let it go at that, and I could not pursue the subject. We went over the yacht, its bedrooms, each with a bath, its imposing quarters for the owner, the bar, the living rooms. But I was wondering. Just how well had he known Juliette? Just how long had he been on the island when she disappeared? A day or two, at the most. And he was not the type that would kill, I thought. He was too self-controlled. He was strong enough, broad-shouldered and muscular. On the other hand, he had a sort of shy modesty that made the whole idea seem idiotic.

“Silly thing to have a yacht this size,” he said. “But Marjorie likes it. I hope you’ll come along.”

“I may be able to, if Arthur gets out of this mess,” I told him.

“Of course he’ll get out of it,” he said heartily.

But I never made that cruise; and the time was to come when, needing Marjorie badly, I was to look out over the bay and see that the
Sea Witch
had gone, taking her with it.

T
HE INVESTIGATION WAS STILL
going on. One day I saw Arthur with Russell Shand in the grounds, examining the door of the toolshed and then apparently retracing his direction the night he had climbed out of the hospital room after the unknown intruder. So far as I could see the man, whoever he was, had first made for the Hutchinsons’ grounds. Once there, he had apparently doubled on his tracks, for Arthur and the sheriff reappeared beyond the garage and followed the driveway toward the gate.

It looked as though the sheriff was coming to the conclusion that there was something in Arthur’s story, and I felt happier than I had for a long time. It was also hopeful that a group of fingerprint men and photographers came over from the county seat that afternoon and went up to the hospital rooms. They were there for a long time, but a careful search revealed nothing of interest or value, and I could see that the sheriff was puzzled.

“What,” he said, “would Juliette Ransom have been looking for in that attic of yours?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“Well, she was there,” he said. “Her prints are all over the place. They match up with the ones in that bedroom of hers. If we knew what she was after we’d know a lot. How long since she’s been here? To live, I mean.”

“More than six years. Seven, I think.”

“Queer,” he said thoughtfully. “If I hadn’t been over those rooms with a fine-tooth comb, I’d say one of two things. Either she came back to hide something there, and that’s unlikely. Or she came to get something, and somebody got her first. At least that’s what it looks like, or why did she stay on, when she knew she couldn’t get that money from Arthur?”

The idea that there was something hidden in the room interested him, and later that day he took a detective up again. They sounded the walls in both rooms and even lifted a loose floor board or two, but they found nothing.

Before he left that afternoon he told me something that only added to my bewilderment. He said that Jordan had visited him at the police station the day of her disappearance. She had driven up in a taxi and, sitting across the desk from him, had said she wanted to leave Sunset.

“I’m afraid,” she said. “I guess I know too much. So I thought—”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of being killed.”

“Who would want to kill you?” he asked.

She had shut her mouth firmly.

“I’m not accusing anybody. I just want to be safe, and I’m not safe in that house.”

That is all she would say. She not only wanted to leave the house. She wanted to leave the island. But she was needed for the inquest, and he could not let her go. Further than that she would not explain. He had done everything but threaten her with arrest, but she remained stubbornly mysterious.

“I’m not talking,” she said. “Not yet anyhow.”

That was all he got out of her. He had given in at last and got the room for her at Eliza Edwards’s, and she went there that same afternoon. Where she went from there he did not know, except that it was probably to her death.

As I have said, I made an attempt at normal living during that interval. The Shore Qub had opened the first of July, and now and then I stopped there on my way home. One day I saw Mansfield Dean there, an enormous figure in a pair of bathing trunks and nothing else. He was entirely unself-conscious, and he walked across the lawn and asked me if I would go to see his wife again.

“She’s been sick,” he said, “and she liked you. I know you have plenty on your hands, but she’s pretty lonely. She’s used to having young people about.”

He looked pathetic, I thought. Evidently he was worried about her; and so I went that same afternoon. I found Mrs. Dean on the terrace, and I was shocked at the change in her. Thin before, she was emaciated now. She gave me a friendly smile, but her hand was bloodless and cold. She did not directly mention our trouble, nor did I; but once I turned from the panorama of bay and sea before us to find her eyes fixed on me with a curious intensity.

She colored above her pearls and looked away quickly.

People had been very kind, she said. Quite a number had called, but of course she had not been able to see them. Later on she would get about more.

“It would please Mansfield,” she said. “He is gregarious. He likes people. And of course, for the last year or so—”

She was silent for a moment.

“I think my life ended then,” she said, and closed her eyes.

I felt awkward and constrained. There was nothing to say, although I tried. She did not really hear me; she seemed far away in some distant tragic past; and I left her like that, polite but detached.

Those days before Jordan’s body was found were the longest I have ever lived through. Arthur, asked to remain within call, spent much of his time at Millbank. He looked older and very tired. I saw little of Tony Rutherford after the Pendexter dance, and Allen Pell had apparently left the hills and was painting from a small boat. Once I saw him tied to a channel marker a hundred yards from the house, and he waved to me, but did not come in. But most of the time he spent on one or another of the islands. I saw him there several times through the field glasses, clad in old white duck trousers, and once he was moving along a beach. He was walking with his head down, as though he was looking for something, and I wondered what that something was.

Then one day the first clue to Jordan’s fate was discovered.

The butler to one of the families along the bay path, a man named Sutton, had been taking a swim and landed to rest, on the rocks at Long Point. The path there was some twenty feet above him, and he climbed to it and sat down.

He had been there five minutes or so before he saw something. Below him, and above high-water mark, was a woman’s bag, firmly wedged between the rocks.

He was interested but not suspicious. He opened it, sitting down comfortably to do it. Inside was the usual lipstick, a few dollars in money, a key or two, a fresh handkerchief and a partly used package of cheap cigarettes. But there was a slip of paper also, and Sutton opened and read it. It began without salutation:

I would like to have a talk with you, but not here. The quietest place would be the path along the sea wall after dinner tonight about nine o’clock. Let me know if you care to do this, and if you need funds. A.C.L.

Sutton was no fool. He recognized the initials, and as soon as he was dressed he went to the police station. The sheriff happened to be there. He took the bag and read the note, and later on he had Sutton show him where the bag was found. When he sent for Arthur late that afternoon he was sitting behind the shabby desk, with the bag in front of him.

“Did you ever see that pocketbook, Arthur?” he asked.

Arthur stared at it.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I have,” said Russell Shand. “The last time I saw it a woman was sitting where you are now, holding it. And she said: ‘I am afraid. I guess I know too much. I want to get out of that house.’”

Arthur was pale but composed.

He admitted the note immediately, but said that it had been written a day or two before Jordan disappeared. He had gone to the sea wall, but she had not come. As for the reason for the note, he had felt all along that she held the key to the mystery of Juliette’s death; but it was difficult to talk to her at the house. That key, he was certain, lay in the past few years after Juliette had left him. He absolutely denied any knowledge of Jordan’s disappearance; or of her death, if she was dead.

“Why should I kill her?” he demanded. “If she knew anything incriminating about me she had had plenty of time to tell it.”

“Had she made any demand on you for money?”

“Blackmail, I suppose you mean. No.”

The sheriff was hard and truculent that day. Until then he had believed Arthur innocent, but now he was not so sure.

“You say you were out for a drive the night the Jordan woman disappeared. Where did you go?”

“Back into the hills. I had no objective.”

“Did you get out of your car at any time?”

“No.”

“Were you near the bay path at any time?”

“Absolutely not.”

“How well did you know this woman, Arthur? The Jordan woman,”

“I had never seen her until I came here, after my—after Juliette had disappeared. I never exchanged a word with her.”

“But you admit that you wrote this note.”

“I did. I have explained that.”

The sheriff blew up then.

“You’ve got to get a better story than that,” he said. “By the great horn spoon, Arthur, I’ve stuck by you as long as I can. But you’re coming clean now. Why didn’t she meet you? Did she ever explain that? And why write to her at all! Couldn’t you have talked to her? Not deaf and dumb, was she?”

“I don’t know why she didn’t meet me,” said Arthur unhappily. “She stayed in her room, with the door locked. As for the note—” he colored—“I slipped it under her door. Good God, sheriff, I had to see her somehow. She knew who killed Juliette. I’m certain of it.”

But there was no murder still, at least not officially, and he came home to dinner, to say nothing about the bag, to refuse food, and to prowl around the house until late that night. Once I remember he came to my room, where I had in despair gone to bed, and asked what had happened to the house bells. They were ringing in the pantry from empty rooms.

“Why don’t you have them looked after?” he demanded irritably.

“I have,” I told him.

“Well, it’s a damned nuisance,” he said, and went off again.

It was the next morning that Jordan’s murder became an established fact. She had been missing for two weeks by that time, and it was a fisherman, out all night with his nets, who found her on his way home at daybreak.

He was a practical man, not unused to the tragedies of the sea. He saw the body floating, face down, and with a gaff he managed to hold it until he could get a rope around it. Then, still practical, he merely towed it to the town dock and called up to a man fishing there.

“Get somebody to telephone the police station,” he said. “I’ve got a body here.”

He was smoking his pipe quietly when the chief of police arrived. A crowd had formed on the dock overhead, the intent silent crowd of such occasions. The chief drove them back, and in due time the body was taken out of the water and to the mortuary. There was no question of identification. The underclothing was marked with indelible ink and she still wore the suit she had worn in the sheriff’s office.

It took no lengthy examination to discover the hole in the back of her skull, or that there was a piece of rope around her neck.

I
T WAS EVIDENT THAT
she had been murdered. Doctor Jamieson, straightening from the preliminary examination, merely shrugged his shoulders.

“Back of the head bashed in,” he said. “Then towed out to sea.”

He believed she had been dead before she was put into the water. The rope around the neck was too loose for strangulation. As for the rope itself, it looked like part of a boat’s painter. It had been cut with a sharp knife, and the knot was an ordinary double one. But the weapon had not been the one which had killed Juliette. This wound looked as though it had been made with a rock.

I was fairly dazed by the situation. Arthur had been sent for at once, and came home looking sick.

“I’m in for it now,” he said. “I wish you’d go over to Mary Lou. Tell her about Jordan, but let the rest wait. I’d better not leave the island.”

He told me as much as he knew, and that he was to be interrogated that night. Bullard was away for the day, and wouldn’t be back until late.

I went to Millbank, and to my surprise Mary Lou took the news better than I had expected.

“Jordan!” she said. “Why, he didn’t know her. It’s all ridiculous.” And she added, with that occasional shrewdness of hers, “I suppose they have to have a scapegoat, and Arthur happens to be it. But it may help him, Marcia. He couldn’t have killed them both.”