Wall (40 page)

The story of the tin box had got about. Also, rapidly as the summer colony was diminishing, at least a dozen people came in at odd intervals, and I had all I could do to parry their polite curiosity. Yes, there had been a box, but there were only some letters in it. Letters? What did I mean? Family letters? And how had I found it?”

I did my best. I told them what they already knew, that the hospital room had been broken into, and that I had remembered that the plaster had been repaired on the wall, and thought I would investigate. No, I had not seen the letters. The police had the box.

They had heard about the pearls too, and that was harder to evade.

“I don’t know who starts these ridiculous stories,” I said. “What pearls? I certainly haven’t seen any.”

They would go away at last, leaving me exhausted and short-tempered. It was hard to get rid of them. They were kind. They had been Mother’s friends, or were my own. But into their comfortable and monotonous lives had come another mystery; not horrible this time. Nothing they had to refuse to face; but definitely exciting.

They drove away in their big and little cars, somewhat let down by my prosaic answers. I could almost hear what they said.

“What do you think? If the police have those letters—”

“My dear, Marcia wasn’t telling all she knew. Do you suppose that Arthur—?”

For there was still that story of Arthur’s in their minds; Arthur slipping back to see Juliette; Arthur sleeping in the quarantine room, Arthur chasing an unknown man about the place in the middle of the night. And there was still an old distrust of him, never quite dead. He had married a cheap woman, and they had had to accept her.

Even before the sheriff had got to New York the story had reached the papers. It was entitled “Mysterious Tin Box” in the only one I ever saw. It was rather devastating. Whoever had talked, there was a full and inaccurate description of the bells ringing in the house, and more than an intimation that some ghostly visitant had led me to the wall.

It was on the evening of the day when Russell Shand got that mysterious long-distance call of his that I had a visit from Tony. He was as debonair as ever, even to the flower in his lapel; but under it I felt that he was anxious. He showed strain.

He had come to say good-bye, he told me. He was leaving the next day.

“Unless I’m arrested!” he added lightly.

“Arrested? Why?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Why not?” he said. “There were some letters of mine in that box.”

He had lost his nonchalance by that time. He looked haggard, if that word could ever be applied to him. He stood in front of me, eyeing me with a new seriousness.

“I’ve been all sorts of a fool, Marcia,” he said. “Probably the worst thing I ever did for myself was to let you go. I know you won’t want to talk about it, but I’ve got to. I’ve not only let you down. I damn near cost Arthur his life. Only I’ll say this: I’d never have let him go to trial.”

I felt very strange. Not Tony! Not gay irresponsible Tony, with the flower in his lapel and his carefully tied black tie! My lips felt stiff.

“Are you trying to say—”

“I’m trying to say I knew Arthur didn’t kill Juliette Ransom. I saw him get into that car when he left the island. I even got the number of the car. You see, I didn’t know it was Arthur. To me it was just somebody who’d dropped on me out of a window, and damn’ near got me at that.”

It had been Tony on the roof!

He sat down then, and told me the story. It went back to that last night of Juliette’s life, when I had left them together and gone outside. Juliette had not lost a minute. She had hidden a box in the attic, she told him, and now she couldn’t get at it. The wall had been plastered.

“She had told me where it was, and asked me to get it; and like a fool I said I’d try. You see”—he looked at me unhappily—“I’d written her some letters years ago, and she’d kept them. She offered to give them back if I got the box, and I—well, I fell for it.”

Apparently he had refused at first. He knew the old route by the trellis and up to the window, but he was no housebreaker. He didn’t like the idea. But she was desperate, he said. She began to implore him. She was frightened about something. Her idea was to get the box, which had something in it she wanted, and then to get out of the country. And while he did not trust her, he saw she was in deadly earnest.

When he went out to call me that night he took a turn toward the garden first and looked up. He could still get up there, he saw; and the rest seemed easy. How could he know that Arthur was coming back that night? Was probably even then somewhere about the place? He went home and changed his clothes. Then he got a tire tool from his car and came back. Juliette had said she’d left a hatchet in the room. But he had an alarm. There was a light in the quarantine room, and he was uncertain what to do.

He wandered about for an hour or two. Then, maybe at three o’clock and feeling like all kinds of a lunatic, he climbed the trellis. The next minute somebody looked out and then began to get out of the window overhead.

“I was scared,” he said. “Scared out of my wits. I ran and dodged, but the fellow kept after me. I was all in when he lost me.”

He had hidden in the shrubbery at the foot of the Dean place, he said. He heard Arthur still moving around, he did not know who he was. It seems to have occurred to Tony then that the whole situation was on the off side, as he put it; that whoever it was had had no more business in the house than he had. So far as he knew, the only man in the house was old William, and William could never have run like that.

In the end, as it turned out, he had reversed the previous state of affairs.

“He’d been after me,” he said. “Then when he gave up I followed him along the road. I had worn tennis sneakers, so he never heard me. Anyhow he never looked back. When that car came along and he hailed it I thought maybe the driver was an accomplice. So I took his number. I still have it.”

I sat very still. How simple it sounded! All that long agony, and Tony with the flower in his lapel as he told me; leaving the island the next day, going back to his work and his clubs, his dinners and dances, the whole frivolous structure of his life.

“You have nearly ruined us, Tony,” I said.

“I’d never have let Arthur be convicted.”

“You have already let him suffer intolerably. Why didn’t you speak up at the time? That’s what I can’t forgive.”

He looked uncomfortable.

“See here, Marcia,” he said. “It wasn’t a question only of myself. If I had testified I would have had to mention that infernal box of hers. And she told me there were other letters in it. Some from married men up here, that she meant to collect on. It’s been straight hell, Marcia.”

“Yes. It has been straight hell for everybody,” I agreed. “And it’s still straight hell for some of us.”

He came over to where I sat, and stood looking down at me.

“I suppose it’s no use, Marcia? It’s all over, isn’t it? Between you and me?”

“Yes,” I said steadily. “I’m sorry, Tony. It’s all over.”

It was more nearly over than I knew.

The storm came that night: one of those autumnal disturbances which drive in from the open sea, bringing a heavy surf on the outer rocks and a swell in the bay which broke on our beach in miniature rollers. I remember that it washed in an empty gasoline drum, which at high tide beat against the wall until Mike in rubber boots waded out and salvaged it.

Another of the crows was dead on the porch the next morning. It may have struck one of the windows. Maggie said bad cess to it, but I felt rather grieved. It had had a sort of cocky impudence to it which had amused me, if anything could have amused me that summer.

But there had been a real tragedy also that night before, and one which left me chocked and grieved.

Agnes Dean had died. The night nurse had gone down for her late supper, and when she came back Agnes was dead. She had died alone, her face turned toward the photograph of her daughter, which always sat on the table beside her bed. Her thin tired face looked quite peaceful.

The nurse was young and excitable. She ran downstairs, finding Mansfield Dean in the library. It was late, but he had not gone to bed. He was sitting in front of a fire, his head bent, all his vitality drained out of him. At first she thought he was asleep. She went over and put a hand on his arm.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dean. I—”

She began to cry, and he looked up at her.

“My wife?” he said thickly.

“Yes. Just now. Very quietly.”

She was shaking, and he got up and put a big arm around her to steady her.

“It’s all right, my dear,” he said. “She would have wanted it like that.”

He told her to stay downstairs for a while, and went up himself. She heard him close the door into Agnes’s room, and then a silence. She began to grow frightened. It was uncanny, that silence; no servants called, no sending for a doctor, none of the usual quiet movement of a house after a death. She went up again and opened the door.

Mansfield Dean was on his knees beside the bed, and he held a revolver in his hand.

Her courage came back at once. She spoke sharply.

“Don’t do that, Mr. Dean. That’s cowardly.”

He looked at her strangely. Then he got up, moving slowly and with a quiet deliberation.

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll not add to your troubles.”

He went out then, still carrying the gun. But before he left he broke it and emptied it, as if to reassure her.

I did not know this then. All I knew was that Agnes Dean was dead. It was not unexpected, but the Deans had been a part of us, for a time at least. His big booming voice and his hearty hospitality had been a cheerful addition to the summer crowd. I had seen him on the golf links, playing execrable golf, but always pleasant, even humorous.

“How’s that, Miss Lloyd? A little more twist to it and it would have gone back to the clubhouse!”

I had not known Agnes as well. She was much older than I, of course; and there were times when she stayed quietly at home and let him go out alone.

“My wife’s not well,” he would explain, looking worried. “I thought she’d better rest.”

He had been gregarious. He had liked people. And now he was alone, with the aloneness of a man in trouble. He had plenty of friends but no intimates. With a woman I would have gone up to the house at once. A man was different.

The news came as usual with my breakfast tray, and I felt oppressed and sad. I had had a devastating night, what with Tony’s story and the one thought that never left me: of Allen in that cell at Clinton. Once, too, I thought one of the bells rang, just before midnight. Although the day started badly, it was to be a red-letter one on my calendar, and will be one for the rest of my life.

For it was that day that the sheriff solved our murders.

He had known the answer since the long-distance call when he put Mamie off the telephone. “Get off the wire, Mamie. This is private,” he had said; and listened gravely. But he had really known the answer before that; when he had made that last trip to New York with Howard Brooks.

He had stayed late at the courthouse the night before. Mamie was gone, the building empty. A cleaning woman came with her pail, and he sent her away. “The place is all right,” he said. “If you have to earn your money go and clean up the office of our distinguished Districk Attorney. It needs it!”

On the desk in front of him was a rough transcription of the long-distance call, the statement of a New York jeweler, the medical magazine taken from Doctor Jamieson’s office, and a map of the island. The map had four crosses on it; one for each of the murders, and one for the place where Allen had been attacked at the top of the path up Stony Creek. There was one thing more, and the sheriff concentrated on that. It was the note from the doctor’s wastebasket: “I find myself in an impossible pos—”

He sat for a long time with that in his hand.

He had a few questions written down in front of him, and some of them he checked off. He knew the answers. Even before Mamie got the letter about the Pekingese pup he had known where the clipping came from. He had learned that in New York, at the storage warehouse. But he still had one or two.

Who had taken Jordan’s body out to sea?

Why had Lucy met Juliette the morning she was killed?

Who had attacked Maggie?

Who had ransacked Juliette’s apartment, and our New York house?

He sat over these for some time. Then—about midnight—he jammed on his hat and went to the jail. When he left he had the answers to two of them.

It was a wild night. He got five or six hours’ sleep. Then early the next morning he put on his oilskins and a pair of rubber boots, and drove to the island again.

His case was ready.

At ten o’clock of that day he was waiting in his office, that sheet of paper in front of him, and Mamie keeping off the drifters who otherwise would have wandered in. He was still there when three men came into the room. They came sheepishly, Tony Rutherford, Howard Brooks and Bob Hutchinson. They had not come together, and they eyed each other with suspicion. The sheriff, however, was calm.

“Sit down, gentlemen,” he said. “We’ll make this as painless as possible. I may say that in that safe over there I have some letters that will interest all of you, but nobody knows the combination but myself.”

He smiled at their unhappy faces.

“Live and let live,” he said. “I’m not saying some of you haven’t run pretty close to the edge of the law. I know it, but Bullard doesn’t. So let’s get this over and done with. Now, Mr. Brooks—”

I
WAS AT HOME
that morning. The wind was driving the rain horizontally against the house, and I stood at a window, feeling that my life was as dreary and as hopeless as the weather outside. I was no child. Even if Allen cared for me there were probably years of imprisonment ahead of him; if indeed he escaped something worse.

At eleven o’clock Lucy Hutchinson came plodding once more through the rain. Her nonchalance was gone. She looked tired and almost dowdy.