“I don’t imagine any of us will be exactly hungry,” said Allen, rising.
I rose too. Hilary and the doctor had, of course, gone; Allen and Evelyn strolled toward the hall, and Janice disappeared toward the kitchen. I think it was the word refrigerator that, without my knowing it, impelled me to follow Janice, for when I turned to go into the kitchen I’m sure that only the thought of arranging a dainty breakfast tray for Adela was in my mind.
Back of the dining room was a generous butler’s pantry, and beyond this and through a swinging door a large, clean kitchen with starched white curtains and shining floor. It was a big old room, only fairly modern in its appointments, but obviously meant for cooking, for the preparation of generous meals, and the storing of bounteous supplies. It was as vital and essential a part of the life the house had known as was its library with its worn books. Show me a woman’s kitchen, her books, and her dressing table, and I can tell you much of the woman.
But I gave the room only a brief glance, for Janice was standing at its far end; her back was turned toward me, and she had not heard my entrance. Emmeline was not to be seen.
Janice was standing directly before the large refrigerator. Its heavy door was open. The girl’s head was bent over a large brown wicker basket, and I could see that she was exploring its depths with her hand. It was, I had no doubt, the egg basket in which Emmeline had found the revolver.
There was a noise at the side door, and Emmeline entered. At the sound Janice’s head went up with a jerk and turned, and I could see how paper-white her face was, as if the frightened racing of her heart had drawn every drop of blood from it.
Emmeline stopped still when she saw Janice.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said harshly. “What do you want?”
“Emmeline,” said Janice breathlessly. “Who has been in the kitchen? Has Jim Strove been here?”
“What’s that?” said Emmeline. “Talk a little louder.”
Janice gave her a hopeless look, became conscious again, it seemed, of the egg basket, and turned and replaced it carefully in the refrigerator.
“Better put those eggs in a pan,” she said loudly and closed the door of the icebox with a muffled bang and turned and saw me.
It gave me a sort of pang to witness the stark terror in her white face, the sudden flaring of it in her wide dark eyes, the way her hand groped backward as if for support. I advanced at once.
“I came to get a breakfast tray for Miss Adela,” I said. “Perhaps you would better ask Emmeline for it. She is not accustomed to my voice, and I have difficulty making her understand. I think your sister will want something hot to drink as soon as she wakes.”
It gave her time for recovery. She needed only a few seconds. She repeated my request to Emmeline.
“Oh,” said Emmeline. “Then Miss Adela’s got back.”
CHAPTER VII
She walked stiffly toward a cupboard and took down a tray.
“I’ll fix it right away,” she continued. “She’ll be tired.”
I found my voice.
“Got back? Why, what do you mean? Did she go some place? I thought she was in her room. I thought she was sleeping.”
Apparently Emmeline did not hear me, though she gave me a sharp and comprehensive glance. Janice, too, looked surprised and alarmed.
“What do you mean, Emmeline?” she said quickly. “Isn’t Miss Adela in her room? She said nothing to me of any errand. Tell me at once what you mean. Where did she go?”
But Emmeline was very deaf indeed. She said:
“The grocery list is there on the table, if you want to order, Miss Janice. I thought the family would all be together likely for meals today. What would you think of pressed chicken with cucumber salad for lunch? And maybe a lemon cream pie.”
Janice turned rather helplessly to me.
“Will you see if Adela is in her room, Miss Keate? I can’t imagine what Emmeline means.” She took up the grocery list, absent-mindedly scanning it, and I went to the door. It was entirely by accident that I caught my skirt in the swinging door and was obliged to linger a moment to release it. And I heard Janice say clearly:
“Tell me at once where Miss Adela went.”
And Emmeline replied hoarsely:
“Cemetery. What about the lemon cream pie?”
“What do you — no, not pie. Hilary can’t eat it. His blood pressure, you know.”
Emmeline probably did not understand her, for Janice shouted, “Blood pressure. Hilary,” and I went reluctantly away.
The cemetery. Well, that was a peaceful enough errand. But it did occur to me that the Thatchers took an unusual and peculiar interest in cemeteries. Although, in view of the fact that there was about to be an addition to the family burial plot, Adela’s interest was perhaps not incomprehensible.
Thinking that Emmeline might be mistaken, I went to Adela’s room and knocked. When she did not reply I opened the door cautiously and then more boldly. The bed was empty, Adela was certainly gone. The dog, Pansy, got up wearily from her corner and waddled over to me, sniffing suspiciously and puffing as if she had asthma. A dog’s barking had awakened me; it must have been Pansy, left alone. Adela, then, had been gone for some time.
It was an hour or so yet before the inquest. I went downstairs again and out to the wide porch. There were chairs out there, and it was pleasant and cool out of the sun, although the morning gave promise of an unusually hot and stifling day.
Higby was not to be seen, and the lawn was deserted save for the birds bathing and drinking and fluttering their wings under the gentle spray of the lawn sprinkler which someone had turned on. Death and murder might visit that house, but its routine was unchanging.
Back of me, from the depths of the house I could hear an occasional murmur of voices and the frequent ringing of the telephone; several cars drove slowly past with their occupants craning their necks to stare at me and at the house, although no one stopped — I suppose Adela had never encouraged the informality of early morning calls — and presently Allen came out with a sheaf of telegraph blanks in one hand. He did not see me, and strode briskly along the turf path, his crisp light hair shining in the sun, his tall body lean and lithe and young.
Sitting there, I had my first opportunity to weigh and sift, so to speak, the evidence I possessed.
There is also this about murder: I discovered it during the Thatcher case: every man becomes a hunter. I could not have helped making every effort to discover the identity of the person who killed Bayard Thatcher — who had deliberately taken the life of a fellow man. It is not a mere matter of vulgar prying into other people’s affairs. Not in the least. It is exactly as if a tiger had escaped and were preying upon human life. It is a matter of self-preservation: the tiger must be discovered and captured.
On reflection it seemed to me there were three major considerations. There was first the problem of whether or not all of them — Adela and Hilary and Evelyn and Emmeline and Janice — yes, and even Higby — were telling the truth. If they were telling the truth, Evelyn had left Bayard alive, Emmeline had found him dead, and only Janice and Emmeline had been inside the house in that short interval. Besides, of course, the highly problematic burglar.
Second, if they were not telling the truth, the problem of the identity of the murderer was still limited to the immediate family circle of Adela, Hilary, Evelyn, Janice, and Emmeline. And, of course, Higby. There had been no one else about.
Unless, and here was my third consideration, unless Higby and Emmeline were both lying to the same purpose and someone had entered the house at the back, unknown to me. I knew that Emmeline, Higby, and I between us commanded a view of the entire house, and that one of us could scarcely have failed to see any intruder coming or going. Much, it seemed to me, hinged upon the truth of their testimony.
There was, too, ever in my consciousness the fact of Bayard’s having been wounded by a revolver shot only a day or so before he’d been killed. He had known that first attack fo
r what it was, and I reproached myself for having been so loath to credit his statement. Still, I had urged him to protect himself, to leave. And that very afternoon he had been killed.
The family knew, in all likelihood, who had fired that first shot that wounded Bayard’s shoulder. It was not probable that there were two people intent upon doing away with Bayard Thatcher. If I could discover who made that first attack — But they wouldn’t tell. None of the Thatchers would tell.
And there were other things that seemed to me highly significant. Why did I hear — that calm afternoon — no sound of the shot? Why were Bayard’s eyes closed? Who had tried to enter his room that first night? Why was there blood on the wrong rug?
And was there a possibility that it was a burglar after all? If not, what had happened to the diamonds?
Then there was the problem of Janice and the revolver and the egg basket. Janice and her presence in the house alone with Bayard for the ten minutes or so immediately preceding the discovery of his death. Janice and the mysterious letter. Had the letter any possible bearing upon the situation? I must find some way to return the letter to her.
It seems unbelievable now to think that, from the very beginning, I had the key to the puzzle in my own hands. And didn’t know it. Did not recognize it for what it was. It was all so simple, so dreadfully simple once I recognized that clue, and it was a mere matter of recognition.
When I finally returned to Adela’s room I was a little astonished to find her sitting calmly, talking to Janice. She was dressed in plain white and looked weary but cold and a little severe, with her gold-rimmed eyeglasses and her white gloves and delicate handkerchief at hand. As I asked her if she felt well, she replied in the coolest affirmative and told me it was time for me to prepare to go with them to the inquest.
“Did Evelyn go home?” she asked Janice.
“Just to change her dress. She’ll be back soon.”
“Well, you’d better get ready at once, Miss Keate. Allen will take us all in the big car. We’ll meet Hilary at the courthouse, I suppose. We are all rather anxious to get it over. Not a pleasant affair.”
How well I remember Adela’s deliberately elegant voice calling it “not a pleasant affair.” It was odd, that inquest. Odd, but after all not much happened. Not much, perhaps, with Dr. Bouligny presiding, could happen. It all lasted barely half an hour.
It was held in the old courthouse, C — being, as perhaps I have indicated, the county seat. The main street of the town, as we drove through it a few moments before ten, looked like a market day, it was so full of automobiles belonging to the farmers who had driven in to talk of the news and to attend the inquest. I daresay they felt a little cheated at the brevity of the proceedings in the packed courtroom. But I doubt if those old walls ever held a half hour so crowded with secret drama. It was not, however, until much later that I knew the true significance of those careful questions, and those cautious, guarded replies.
I sat, of course, with the family. It was something to witness their determined calm, their dignity of bearing; to note the manner with which they met the nods and looks and subdued greetings of their neighbors and acquaintances. There was no condescension in the Thatcher manner, no patronage; at the same time, there was something which said: “This dreadful thing has happened to us, it’s true. We admit it openly. But we are still Thatchers.”
An analyst would have said their very manner admitted the thing they were so determined to keep hidden. But I am not an analyst, and it was only later that I received that.
Inwardly I was shocked at the cut-and-dried way in which Dr. Bouligny and Hilary between them managed to hurry the inquest along. It was done so deftly and so adroitly that it almost convinced me — would have quite convinced me had I not known what I knew — and the jury did not even leave the room to make its decision that Bayard Thatcher met his death at the hands of an unknown person. Much was made, and in a most effective way, of the loss of the Thatcher diamonds, of which everyone in the room seemed to know.
Only once did anything threaten to break through that carefully built up fabric of supposition. That was when one of the jurors, a farmer with a weatherbeaten face and shrewd gray eyes, asked rather hesitantly if it wasn’t true that Bayard Thatcher had been shot in the shoulder just a day or so before he was killed.
“The question,” said Dr. Bouligny in a stately way, “is irrelevant. However,” he added quickly, as the farmer appeared about to speak again, “he was. It is no secret. He was cleaning a revolver, and it went off accidentally, wounding him slightly. I myself was the attending physician. I know exactly how it happened. It has nothing at all to do with a burglar shooting him yesterday. Higby, we’ll have your testimony now.”
And Higby’s testimony, under Dr. Bouligny’s inquiries, emphasized the fact that the lawnmower had been a noisy one, that he’d been at some distance from the house during the late afternoon, and that in traversing the lawn back and forth all that long afternoon there had been many times when his back was turned to the library windows.
“But not long enough for anybody to cross the lawn and get the screen off a window and get into the house without I saw him,” muttered Higby stubbornly. His meaning was clearer than his syntax, and Dr. Bouligny wound him up rather hurriedly and sent him back to his seat. And Adela, beside me, touched her blue lips with a delicately laced handkerchief.
My own testimony was equally brief, and when, after asking me only a very obvious question or two, Dr. Bouligny dismissed me with thanks I caught Hilary giving Dr. Bouligny a relieved and distinctly congratulatory glance.
As I say, the decision was very prompt. Riding home in the sedan at the side of Adela, I reflected that at least no one had come out openly to accuse any of the Thatcher family of murder. There would undoubtedly be talk; I could see it even then in the glances, the bent heads, the whispers, the way the groups on the sidewalks stopped talking and watched us pass, but at least the inquest was safely over. And I thought of Adela’s despairing cry, “What will people say?”
The sheriff followed us home, and I sat and listened while Adela gave a description of the vanished diamonds. I can still hear her deliberate voice:
“One ring, set with a carat diamond, a blue Jaegar, and two pearls.”
And Jim Strove scratching away in a notebook: “How do you spell Jaegar?”
“Two carat Wesseltons set in a ring with a design of clasped hands. One necklace, eleven diamonds. One sunburst, twenty-six — oh, but you would know my mother’s sunburst anywhere, Mr. Strove. You’ve seen her wear it hundreds of times.”
“Oh, sure, Miss Adela. But I’ve got to telegraph this all over the country. You’ll have to give me a more detailed description of the stones. Don’t you have a written record? A jeweler’s —”
“Yes. Yes. Very well. One sunburst —”
On and on it went, emblematic of a time when a family was scarcely a family until it had collected a certain amount of land, silver, and diamonds. The collection was not enormous, and none of the pieces was very valuable; still, all put together it was nothing to be sneezed at.
I left them presently and went to my own room to change from the street gown I had worn at the inquest. I found Florrie there, her stolidity shaken and her hair a bit wild. She was changing the bed, flourishing the sheets widely. She gave a little gasp when I entered.
“Do you mind, ma’am,” she said, “if I finish the room while you are here?” And as I said no, she continued, “I’m late about things this morning. Seems like I’m kind of nervous. Keep feeling like something’s coming at me from behind.”
“Nonsense. Not in broad daylight.”
She gave me a slow look.
“It happened yesterday in broad daylight,” she said, shaking out a pillow case.
Well, of course that was true.
“And —” she added, holding the pillow by one corner between her teeth and speaking through them — her teeth, I mean — so that her words had a sort of hissing fer
ocity — “it can happen again.”
“Nonsense,” I repeated. And because I rather agreed with her than otherwise I said briskly, “Nothing is going to happen. You’re a little nervous, that’s all.”
“And who wouldn’t be nervous?” she asked fiercely. “A man shot all to pieces in the very house. Mark my words, ma’am, it ain’t going to end there. You see,” she added, releasing the pillow and speaking with greater clearness, “I’m a seventh daughter.”
“A seventh daughter! Do you mean a Native daughter? Or a Daughter of the Revolution? Or a — By the way, hasn’t Miss Thatcher told you not to hold pillows between your teeth like that?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “But when I get excited I sort of forget. It’s lots easier. The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter.”
It began to sound like a lodge. She picked up the other pillow, caught it expertly between her teeth, and hissed, “I see things!”
“You see things! What on earth —”
She took the pillow out of her mouth and said, “I mean I see things. I’ve got second sight. That is, sometimes I have second sight. And I’ve got it right now. I see trouble.”
Her earnestness was rather convincing. I was a little taken aback and vaguely uneasy in the face of such certainty.
“Why, you can’t!” I cried. “That’s all nonsense.”
She gave me a strange look; her plain face was still, almost trance-like.
“Can’t I?” she said in a low voice. “Then why do I feel death in this house? Why did my mother know it yesterday? Before we had heard what happened here. Why did she say to me, ‘Florrie, don’t you go back to that Thatcher house. There’s been trouble there.’”
The girl took a step or two in my direction, and I found myself retreating a little.
“And there was trouble, wasn’t there? When I got back last night. There’d been murder. And I see —” she was motionless now, her eyes fixed in a vacant way — “I see more trouble. I see death.”
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