"I'm not so darned sure of it," he said calmly.
If he had any reason, he refused to give it. I told him, in my turn, of Carter's escape, aided by the police, and he smiled. "For a suicide it's causing a lot of excitement," he remarked. When I told him the little incident of the post-office, he was much interested.
"The old lady's in it, somehow," he maintained. "She may have been lending Fleming money, for one thing. How do you know it wasn't her hundred thousand that was stolen?"
"I don't think she ever had the uncontrolled disposal of a dollar in her life."
"There's only one thing to do," Burton said finally, "and that is, find Miss Jane. If she's alive, she can tell something. I'll stake my fountain pen on that--and it's my dearest possession on earth, next to my mother. If Miss Jane is dead--well, somebody killed her; and it's time it was being found out."
"It's easy enough to say find her."
"It's easy enough to find her;" he exploded. "Make a noise about it; send up rockets. Put a half-column ad in every paper in town, or--better still--give the story to the reporters and let them find her for you. I'd do it, if I wasn't tied up with this Fleming case. Describe her, how she walked, what she liked to eat, what she wore--in this case what she didn't wear. Lord, I wish I had that assignment! In forty-eight hours she will have been seen in a hundred different places, and one of them will be right. It will be a question of selection--that is, if she is alive."
In spite of his airy tone, I knew he was serious, and I felt he was right. The publicity part of it I left to him, and I sent a special delivery that morning to Bellwood, asking Miss Letitia to say nothing and to refer reporters to me. I had already been besieged with them, since my connection with the Fleming case, and a few more made no difference.
Burton attended to the matter thoroughly. The one o'clock edition of an afternoon paper contained a short and vivid scarlet account of Miss Jane's disappearance. The evening editions were full, and while vague as to the manner of her leaving, were minute as regarded her personal appearance and characteristics.
To escape the threatened inundation of the morning paper men, I left the office early, and at four o'clock Margery and I stepped from a hill car into the park. She had been wearing a short, crepe-edged veil, but once away from the gaze of the curious, she took it off. I was glad to see she had lost the air of detachment she had worn for the last three days.
"Hold your shoulders well back," I directed, when we had found an isolated path, "and take long breaths. Try breathing in while I count ten."
She was very tractable--unusually so, I imagined, for her. We swung along together for almost a half-hour, hardly talking. I was content merely to be with her; and the sheer joy of the exercise after her enforced confinement kept her silent. When she began to flag a little I found a bench, and we sat down together. The bench had been lately painted, and although it seemed dry enough, I spread my handkerchief for her to sit on. Whereupon she called me "Sir Walter," and at the familiar jest we laughed like a pair of children.
I had made the stipulation that, for this one time, her father's death and her other troubles should be taboo, and we adhered to it religiously. A robin in the path was industriously digging out a worm; he had tackled a long one, and it was all he could manage. He took the available end in his beak and hopped back with the expression of one who sets his jaws and determines that this which should be, is to be. The worm stretched into a pinkish and attenuated line, but it neither broke nor gave.
"Horrid thing!" Margery said. "That is a disgraceful, heartless exhibition."
"The robin is a parent," I reminded her. "It is precisely the same as Fred, who twists, jerks, distorts and attenuates the English language in his magazine work, in order to have bread and ice-cream and jelly cake for his two blooming youngsters."
She had taken off her gloves, and sat with her hands loosely clasped in her lap.
"I wish someone depended on me," she said pensively. "It's a terrible thing to feel that it doesn't matter to anyone--not vitally, anyhow--whether one is around or not. To have all my responsibilities taken away at once, and just to drift around, like this--oh, it's dreadful."
"You were going to be good," I reminded her.
"I didn't promise to be cheerful," she returned. "Besides my father, there was only one person in the world who cared about me, and I don't know where she is. Dear Aunt Jane!"
The sunlight caught the ring on her engagement finger; and she flushed suddenly as she saw me looking at it. We sat there for a while saying nothing; the long May afternoon was coming to a close. The paths began to fill with long lines of hurrying homeseekers, their day in office or factory at an end.
Margery got up at last and buttoned her coat. Then impulsively she held out her hand to me.
"You have been more than kind to me," she said hurriedly. "You have taken me into your home--and helped me through these dreadful days--and I will never forget it; never."
"I am not virtuous," I replied, looking down at her. "I couldn't help it. You walked into my life when you came to my office--was it only last week? The evil days are coming, I suppose, but just now nothing matters at all, save that you are you, and I am I."
She dropped her veil quickly, and we went back to the car. The prosaic world wrapped us around again; there was a heavy odor of restaurant coffee in the air; people bumped and jolted past us. To me they were only shadows; the real world was a girl in black and myself, and the girl wore a betrothal ring which was not mine.
CHAPTER XV
FIND THE WOMAN
MRS. BUTLER came down to dinner that night. She was more cheerful than I had yet seen her; and she had changed her mournful garments to something a trifle less depressing. With her masses of fair hair dressed high, and her face slightly animated, I realized what I had not done before--that she was the wreck of a very beautiful woman. Frail as she was, almost shrinkingly timid in her manner; there were times when she drew up her tall figure in something like its former stateliness. She had beautiful eyebrows, nearly black and perfectly penciled; they were almost incongruous in her colorless face.
She was very weak; she used a cane when she walked, and after dinner, in the library, she was content to sit impassive, detached, propped with cushions, while Margery read to the boys in their night nursery and Edith embroidered.
Fred had been fussing over a play for some time, and he had gone to read it to some manager or other. Edith was already spending the royalties.
"We could go a little ways out of town," she was saying, "and we could have an automobile; Margery says theirs will be sold, and it will certainly be a bargain. Jack, are you laughing at me?'
"Certainly not," I replied gravely. "Dream on, Edith. Shall we train the boys as chauffeurs, or shall we buy in the Fleming man, also cheap."
"I am sure," Edith said aggrieved, "that it costs more for horse feed this minute for your gray, Jack, than it would for gasoline."
"But Lady Gray won't eat gasoline," I protested. "She doesn't like it."
Edith turned her back on me and sewed. Near me, Mrs. Butler had languidly taken up the paper; suddenly she dropped it, and when I stooped and picked it up I noticed she was trembling.
"Is it true?" she demanded. "Is Robert Clarkson dead?"
"Yes," I assented. "He has been dead since Sunday morning--a suicide."
Edith had risen and come over to her. But Mrs. Butler was not fainting.
"I'm glad, glad," she said. Then she grew weak and semi-hysterical, laughing and crying in the same breath. When she had been helped upstairs, for in her weakened state it had been more of a shock than we realized, Margery came down and we tried to forget the scene we had just gone through.
"I am glad Fred was not here," Edith confided to me. "Ellen is a lovely woman,and as kind as she is mild; but in one of her--attacks, she is a little bit trying."
It was strange to contrast the way in which the two women took their similar bereavements. Margery represented the best type
of normal American womanhood; Ellen Butler the neurasthenic; she demanded everything by her very helplessness and timidity. She was a constant drain on Edith's ready sympathy. That night, while I closed the house--Fred had not come in--I advised her to let Mrs. Butler go back to her sanatorium.
At tweIve-thirty I was still downstairs; Fred was out, and I waited for him, being curious to know the verdict on the play. The bell rang a few minutes before one, and I went to the door; some one in the vestibule was tapping the floor impatiently with his foot. When I opened the door; I was surprised to find that the late visitor was Wardrop.
He came in quietly, and I had a chance to see him well, under the hall light; the change three days had made was shocking. His eyes were sunk deep in his head, his reddened lids and twitching mouth told of little sleep, of nerves ready to snap. He was untidy, too, and a three days' beard hardly improved him.
"I'm glad it's you," he said, by way of greeting. "I was afraid you'd have gone to bed."
'It's the top of the evening yet," I replied perfunctorily, as I led the way into the library. Once inside, Wardrop closed the door and looked around him like an animal at bay.
"I came here," he said nervously, looking at the windows, "because I had an idea you'd keep your head. Mine's gone; I'm either crazy, or I'm on my way there."
"Sit down, man," I pushed a chair to him. "You don't look as if you have been in bed for a couple of nights."
He went to each of the windows and examined the closed shutters before he answered me.
"I haven't. You wouldn't go to bed either; if you thought you would never wake up."
"Nonsense."
"Well, it's true enough. Knox, there are people following me wherever I go; they eat where I eat; if I doze in my chair they come into my dreams!" He stopped there, then he laughed a little wildly. "That last isn't sane, but it's true. There's a man across the street now, eating an apple under a lamppost."
"Suppose you are under surveillance," I said. "It's annoying to have a detective following you around, but it's hardly serious. The police say now that Mr. Fleming killed himself; that was your own contention."
He leaned forward in his chair and, resting his hands on his knees, gazed at me somberly.
"Suppose I say he didn't kill himself?" slowly. "Suppose I say he was murdered? Suppose--good God--suppose I killed him myself?"
I drew back in stupefaction, but he hurried on.
"For the last two days I've been wondering--if I did it! He hadn't any weapon; I had one, his. I hated him that day; I had tried to save him, and couldn't. My God, Knox, I might have gone off my head and done it--and not remember it. There have been cases like that."
His condition was pitiable. I looked around for some whiskey, but the best I could do was a little port on the sideboard. When I came back he was sitting with bent head, his forehead on his palms.
"I've thought it all out," he said painfully. "My mother had spells of emotional insanity. Perhaps I went there, without knowing it, and killed him. I can see him, in the night, when I daren't sleep, toppling over on to that table, with a bullet wound in his head, and I am in the room, and I have his revolver in my pocket!"
"You give me your word you have no conscious recollection of hearing a shot fired."
"My word before Heaven," he said fervently. "But I tell you, Knox, he had no weapon. No one came out of that room as I went in and yet he was only swaying forward, as if I had shot him one moment, and caught him as he fell, the next. I was dazed; I don't remember yet what I told the police."
The expression of fear in his eyes was terrible to see. A gust of wind shook the shutters, and he jumped almost out of his chair.
"You will have to be careful," I said. "There have been cases where men confessed murders they never committed, driven by Heaven knows what method of undermining their mental resistance. You expose your imagination to 'third degree' torture of your own invention, and in two days more you will be able to add full details of the crime."
"I knew you would think me crazy," he put in, a little less somberly, "but just try it once: sit in a room by yourself all day and all night, with detectives watching you; sit there and puzzle over a murder of a man you are suspected of killing; you know you felt like killing him, and you have a revolver; and he is shot. Wouldn't you begin to think as I do?"
"Wardrop," I asked, trying to fix his wavering eyes with mine, "do you own a thirty-two caliber revolver?"
"Yes."
I was startled beyond any necessity, under the circumstances. Many people have thirty-twos.
"That is, I had," he corrected himself. "It was in the leather bag that was stolen at Bellwood."
"I can relieve your mind of one thing," I said. "If your revolver was stolen with the leather bag, you had nothing to do with the murder. Fleming was shot with a thirty-two." He looked first incredulous, then relieved.
"Now, then," I pursued, "suppose Mr. Fleming had an enemy, a relentless one who would stoop to anything to compass his ruin. In his position he would be likely to have enemies. This person, let us say, knows what you carry in your grip, and steals it, taking away the funds that would have helped to keep the lid on Fleming's mismanagement for a time. In the grip is your revolver; would you know it again?"
He nodded affirmatively.
"This person--this enemy finds the revolver; pockets it and at the first opportunity, having ruined Fleming, proceeds humanely to put him out of his suffering. Is it far-fetched?"
"There were a dozen--a hundred--people who would have been glad to ruin him!" His gaze wavered again suddenly. It was evident that I had renewed an old train of thought."
"For instance?" I suggested, but he was on guard again.
"You forget one thing, Knox," he said, after a moment. "There was nobody else who could have shot him: the room was empty."
"Nonsense," I replied. "Don't forget the warehouse."
"The warehouse!"
"There is no doubt in my mind that he was shot from there. He was facing the open window, sitting directly under the light, writing. A shot fired through a broken pane of one of the warehouse windows would meet every requirement of the case: the empty room, the absence of powder marks--even the fact that no shot was heard. There was a report, of course, but the noise in the clubhouse and the thunder-storm outside covered it!"
"By George!" he exclaimed. "The warehouse, of course. I never thought of it!" He was relieved, for some reason.
"It's a question now of how many people knew he was at the club, and which of them hated him enough to kill him."
"Clarkson knew it," Wardrop said, "but he didn't do it."
"Why?"
"Because it was he who came to the door of the room while the detectives and you and I were inside, and called Fleming."
I pulled out my pocket-book and took out the scrap of paper which Margery had found pinned to the pillow in her father's bedroom. "Do you know what that means?" I asked, watching Wardrop's face. "That was found in Mr. Fleming's room two days after he left home. A similar scrap was found in Miss Jane Maitland's room when she disappeared. When Fleming was murdered, he was writing a letter; he said: 'The figures have followed me here.' When we know what those figures mean, Wardrop, we know why he was killed and who did it."
He shook his head hopelessly."
"I do not know," he said, and I believed him. He had got up and taken his hat, but I stopped him inside the door.
"You can help this thing in two ways," I told him. "I am going to give you something to do: you will have less time to be morbid. Find out, if you can, all about Fleming's private life in the last dozen years, especially the last three. See if there are any women mixed up in it, and try to find out something about this eleven twenty-two."
"Eleven twenty-two," he repeated, but I had not missed his change of expression when I said women.
"Also," I went on, "I want you to tell me who was with you the night you tried to break into the house at Bellwood."
He was tak
en completely by surprise: when he had gathered himself together his perplexity was overdone.
"With me!" he repeated. "I was alone, of course."
"I mean--the woman at the gate."
He lost his composure altogether then. I put my back against the door and waited for him to get himself in hand.
"There was a woman," I persisted, "and what is more, Wardrop, at this minute you believe she took your Russia leather bag and left a substitute."
He fell into the trap.
"But she couldn't," he quavered. "I've thought until my brain is going, and I don't see how she could have done it."
He became sullen when he saw what he had done, refused any more information, and left almost immediately.
Fred came soon after, and in the meantime I had made some notes like this:
1. Examine warehouse and yard.
2. Attempt to trace Carter.
3. See station agent at Bellwood.
4. Inquire Wardrop's immediate past.
5. Take Wardrop to Doctor Anderson, the specialist.
6. Send Margery violets.
CHAPTER XVI
ELEVEN TWENTY-TWO AGAIN
BURTON'S idea of exploiting Miss Jane's disappearance began to bear fruit the next morning. I went to the office early, anxious to get my more pressing business out of the way, to have the afternoon with Burton to inspect the warehouse. At nine o'clock came a call from the morgue.
"Small woman, well dressed, gray hair?" I repeated. "I think I'll go up and see. Where was the body found?"
"In the river at Monica Station," was the reply. "There is a scar diagonally across the cheek to the corner of the mouth."
"A fresh injury?"
"No, an old scar."
With a breath of relief I said it was not the person we were seeking and tried to get down to work again. But Burton's prophecy had been right. Miss Jane had been seen in a hundred different places: one perhaps was right; which one?
A reporter for the Eagle had been working on the case all night: he came in for a more detailed description of the missing woman, and he had a theory, to fit which he was quite ready to cut and trim the facts.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 33