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“You mean, was someone keeping her? I wouldn’t know that, naturally.”

He looked uncomfortable. He still has an idea that I know nothing of the facts of life.

“Well, something of the sort,” he said. “My own guess would be no. Women of her sort usually want marriage, with plenty of money. They play around, but the real idea is safety, with some man legally providing for them. I’ve been seeing a lot of them in the summer for forty years, and that’s the way it looks to me.”

“What you mean is that, if she was spending more than she had, where did it come from,” I said.

He ran his hand over his head in what was becoming a familiar gesture to me.

“Well, that’s what I’m asking myself,” he said slowly. “Maybe she had something on somebody, if you know what I mean.”

“It sounds like blackmail.”

“With a woman like Juliette Ransom you can’t leave that out, Marcia.”

He was silent for a time. He lit his pipe and moved about the room.

“There’s something else too,” he said. “Where did she come from, Marcia? Who were her people? You don’t know, and as far as this place is concerned she might have come out of an egg.”

I was dirty and tired before we finished that day. I managed to get in a shampoo and manicure; and with the brutal frankness of all beauty parlors, Andre came in and suggested that I needed a facial.

“You ’aven’t been sick?” he inquired. “Sickness, it is bad for the face.”

But I told him I would leave my face as twenty-nine years had made it, and he left me, looking disgruntled.

One thing more I did that day. I saw the florist who had received the weekly order for flowers for Juliette’s grave. After I had explained he went back and examined his books, only to return with a blank look on his face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The order is confidential.”

I didn’t tell the sheriff about my visit to the florist. Its implications were too frightening.

I slept badly on the train that night. Except for the discovery that someone had been there ahead of us, the trip seemed to me to have been entirely futile. As a result I found myself bitterly and resentfully going back over the past six years, years of struggle for Arthur and deprivation of a sort for me, while Juliette had lived her extravagant carefree days.

For it had been a struggle. Poverty is a relative matter. We were not poor, in the ordinary sense of the word. I had been able to keep the servants, and save them from going on relief. So far I had kept up my taxes and retained my property. But the demands on both Arthur and me were heavy, and lying in my hot berth that night I wondered.

Had Arthur known and resented that riotous life of hers, lived largely at his expense? He must have. The people she played with were constantly in the newspapers. They staged the first treasure hunt in Manhattan. They took prizes, sometimes largely unclothed, at some of the less reputable costume balls. During prohibition days they patronized the best speakeasies. During the Harlem vogue they were there. They preferred Miami to Palm Beach, but were photographed in scanty bathing clothes anywhere from Nassau to Bermuda. During the racing season they went to the tracks. During the hunting season some of them followed hounds, usually on horses belonging to other people. They went to bed at dawn and rose at noon, they kept going on a diet largely of cocktails, highballs and champagne, and they succeeded pretty successfully in copying a half-world which probably never existed outside fiction and the movies.

I faced the problem squarely that night. Either Arthur had known all this, and in desperation ended it; or it was in that pleasure-seeking life of Juliette’s that the key lay to her death. I did not think that it lay on the island. The life there was too quiet for her particular crowd, and I remembered something she had said to Arthur when she was preparing to leave. “Well, thank God I’ll never have to go to Sunset again.”

But she had been killed on the island. Then why, and by whom?

I dozed off while puzzling over this, and wakened to dress and to find William, white of face and shaken, waiting on the platform when the train pulled in the next morning.

“I’m sorry to have bad news, miss,” he said. “There’s been a little trouble at the house.”

“What sort of trouble?” I asked apprehensively.

“It’s Maggie,” he said. “Either she fell down the stairs from the hospital rooms or somebody hit her on the head.”

I
T WAS ALMOST TWENTY-FOUR
hours before Maggie was fully conscious. Even then she had no explanation. I thought she had probably been walking in her sleep again, for the door to the hospital suite had been found open and the key still in it. However she got there, she remembered nothing, except that when she wakened she was in her bed, with an icecap on her head, a trained nurse in the room, and Doctor Jamieson sitting beside her.

That was not until the next day. Arthur, uneasy and alarmed, had sent Mary Lou back to Millbank, and had spent much of the time since either with Maggie—he had always been devoted to her—or with one of the county detectives in examining the scene of the attack.

When she was able to talk he was there, holding her hand and looking more weary and desperate than ever.

“Try to remember, Maggie. What took you up there, in the middle of the night?”

“I don’t know,” she said dully. “I must have been dreaming.” Which is her own euphemism for her occasional sleepwalking.

“You didn’t see anybody?”

“I didn’t even know I was there.”

That was all we could get out of her, but it was evident that she had been there. Not only was the key in the door. Beside a bed in the far room they had found one of the long hairpins she used, and it had a bit of blood on it. Not only that. The window over the drain pipe had been opened with a jimmy, or some such tool.

But the whole affair was puzzling. Maggie had been struck down in that room; but when Ellen found her early the next morning, still unconscious, she had been rather neatly laid out on the hall floor at the foot of the stairs. And there was a pillow from Jordan’s room under her head!

That day Arthur urged me to leave the island and go back to the New York house.

“I want you out of this devilish business,” he said. “I’ve got enough to do to worry about myself. If this keeps on—” He smiled faintly. “If Bullard could do it, he would pin this last thing on me too. Maggie knows too much, so I try to get rid of her by banging her on the head.”

I refused to go; but I told him then about that trip to the city, and of the condition of Juliette’s apartment. He dismissed it with a shrug.

“Probably reporters,” he said. “They get in everywhere. Like termites!”

As for the rest, he had never heard of Langdon Page or of Emily Forrester. He knew no one, on the island or off, who had been an intimate part of Juliette’s life after their separation; he vaguely remembered a Jennifer, called “Jen,” but had forgotten her last name.

Maggie’s trouble, however, had shaken him. For the first time since Juliette’s death we went back that day to our old friendly intimacy. He knew nothing of Juliette’s death. “There must have been a lot of people who wanted her out of the way.” But why kill the Jordan woman? She had seemed inoffensive enough, what little he had seen of her.

“But why write that note?” I said. “Why on earth not have seen her here?”

“I had a fat chance, didn’t I?” he said dryly. “I tried to once, and she slammed the door on me.”

But he had felt responsible for her, and also, he said, she had worried him.

“The way she acted wasn’t normal,” he said. “She was afraid, and I knew darned well it wasn’t of me.”

“Are you sure of that, Arthur?”

“Good God, yes,” he said impatiently. “Are you beginning to wonder, like the rest of them?”

Nevertheless, it was good to be together again, in our old frank companionship. We were on the upper porch at the time, smoking, with Arthur as usual on the rail, and the gulls circling about noisily over the water. But there was one question I had to ask him, and I did it then.

“Arthur, could it have been Tony Rutherford you saw on the roof that night, and followed?”

He stared at me in amazement.

“Tony? Great Scott, no! What on earth would he be doing there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think I found a button from his golf coat below the trellis, in the garden.”

He laughed at that. I had caught the detective fever, he said. Somebody always left a cuff link or a button about for the police to find. And if I knew what was good for me I’d take a nap and leave the matter to the authorities.

Nevertheless, his face, when he left and went into the house, was thoughtful.

I did not take a nap. I swam off the float that afternoon, and afterwards sat in the sun and thought of Allen Pell. It was hard to fit him into that life of Juliette’s as her apartment had revealed it. Yet he must have been a part of it, have stood at that bar of hers—or behind it—mixing drinks, laughing, talking. There must have been other times, too, when the crowd had gone and only the two of them had been there together. But I did not want to think of them. I went up to the house and dressed for dinner, feeling considerably depressed.

It was that night that I began to wonder if Arthur had a part in the mystery after all.

I had been in and out of Maggie’s room all day, and at midnight I relieved the nurse so she could go down to her supper. Lizzie had left a thermos of coffee and a tray for her in the dining room, and I told her not to hurry.

“Please don’t leave her, Miss Lloyd,” the nurse said as she went out. “She seems to be asleep, but now and then she tries to get out of bed.”

She went on down, and I sat beside Maggie’s bed for some time. It was strange to see her there, asleep, her work-roughened hands still, her hair in two long braids on the pillow. I had forgotten that she had such pretty hair. It was a long time since the days when, waking in the morning, I had watched her hurriedly combing it.

“Now just be patient, Marcia. I’ve got to get some clothes on, haven’t I?”

“Well, you don’t have to comb your hair forever.”

She was sleeping quietly now, and I was in the bathroom, putting fresh ice in the icecap when I glanced out and saw someone with a flashlight near the shrubbery. As I watched, the light moved toward the toolshed, and focused on the lock there.

I was frightened. I remember standing still, staring out, and in the silence I could hear the nurse clattering china and silver below. Then I dropped the icecap and ran to Arthur’s room.

He was not there. He had not even gone to bed. I stood in the doorway, gazing in. There was his book. On the table was a still smoking cigarette. But he was gone.

When I went back to the head of the stairs he was coming in by the front door. The hall was dark, but I could see the vague outline of his body, and hear him quietly closing the door. I slipped away then, but standing in the door of Maggie’s room I heard him come stealthily up the stairs, and shortly after his door closed.

When I went back to Maggie I found that she had one foot out of the bed, and was trying to get up. I put her down again, and when the nurse came up I left them. But as I got into bed that night I knew that, for all his frankness that day, Arthur had still not told me all he knew.

I slept soundly that night. I suppose the mind reaches a point where sleep is pure escape. When I wakened the sun was shining into my room, and Arthur’s shower was running. There was a comforting odor of coffee and bacon from below, a fisherman’s boat was on its way in, loaded with cod, and the most impudent of the crows was on my table outside, busily throwing away one cigarette after another.

It was all normal, even to the huge red jellyfish drifting about. But when I went out to drive away the crow I saw that there was something else there, only partially submerged and drifting in with each wave, to recede before the next one. It looked like a man’s handkerchief, rather gaudy in color, and I had a sickening feeling that I knew it.

One thing was certain. I had to get it. Looking back, I am not sure why I felt that this was necessary. I did, however, and after dressing hastily I went downstairs. The old fishing tackle was still in a hall closet, its lines moldering, its hooks rusty. The rods, though, were in good condition, and I took one and went out onto the veranda. It was not so easy as I had thought. The thing slipped away, came back, and was lost again; and William’s face was a study when he finally found me there, still making frantic jabs for it. He was imperturbable when at last, somewhat flushed, I brought it in.

“I saw it floating,” I said unnecessarily. “I think it belongs to Mr. Arthur.”

“Yes, miss,” he said. “Your tray has gone up, miss.”

He knew it was not Arthur’s. It was not only gaudy in color. It was smeared with paint, and I was certain I had seen it before. I dried it and hid it, but it was to worry me for some time to come.

I remember the rest of the day chiefly for certain things which seemed comparatively unimportant at the moment. One was the sheriff, calling up from the county seat.

“Here’s something to chew over, Marcia,” he said. “About that New York business. Pretty nearly every man on the island’s gone back by train at one time or another; but in the last week or so not so many. Fred Martin from the golf club, to see a sick mother. I’ve talked to Dorothy, and the mother’s a fact. Mr. Dean, probably to pick up another million or so. And young Rutherford and Bob Hutchinson together for one day, to order some cups for the golf tournament. That’s about the list from your neighborhood.”

“It’s an impossible list,” I said uncomfortably.

“Well, it is and it isn’t. At least two of them knew her.”

That was all he had to say, except that the Page-Forrester matter was still on his mind.

“You might ask if anybody knows those names,” he said. “People have a way of knowing other folks in the same walk of life. You know what I mean. They meet here and there. Anyhow it won’t hurt.”

It seemed a thin thread to me, but as Russell Shand said later, by that time—so far as our crimes were concerned—he had sunk for the third time and a straw looked as big as a log to him.