Death in the Back Seat

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  I stared hard at the members of the jury! I was prejudiced perhaps, but I didn’t like their looks. Jack was sworn immediately. It was explained to him that the hearing was informal, and it was not explained that the informal hearing might well pave the way to a charge of murder. That was understood.

  The room was very small and, since the windows had been curtained, dark. A single naked electric bulb burned overhead. The furniture was the poorest grade of pine; faded, worn linoleum was spread upon the floor. But the machinery of justice—even in a cheap and illy furnished court room—has a certain frightening, impressive quality. As I remember it, I felt I needed air.

  When Jack began to speak I relaxed. He talked to Dr. Rand as simply and naturally as though the two of them had been alone, and I know his manner had its effect upon the jury. I watched them.

  “He’s going over great,” Harkway whispered.

  His tone seemed abstracted, and I noticed that his eyes were fixed upon a door set in the wall near the jury box. “What’s that?” I whispered.

  “The jury room. I’ve closed that door twice already. It keeps coming open.”

  He rose, tiptoed past the jury, closed the door again and leaned there against the wall. From the witness chair Jack said, “My only connection with Hiram Darnley came through Luella Coatesnash. I believed at the time I met him and I believe now that she sent him to me.”

  “Wait a minute before going on,” said Dr. Rand. “I want to put this cablegram in evidence.” Whereupon he read out the following message, received the day before from Paris: “I did not request Hiram Darnley to telephone the Storms or to go to Crockford. I cannot understand his actions or his use of the name Elmer Lewis. I have not communicated with Darnley since leaving America. Luella Coatesnash.”

  Jack turned white. “That cablegram,” he said, “is a lie. A palpable, unmitigated lie! I have some rights here, and I insist…”

  “Control yourself,” began Dr. Rand. “You’re out of order, you must…”

  He, too, broke off. The members of the jury were surging to their feet. There was a violent commotion near the box, and at first I couldn’t see what was happening. Then I saw. The door to the room beyond was open, and Harkway had seized and was struggling with someone who had been crouched at the keyhole, listening there. It was a woman. One arm shielded her face from view, and then she dropped her arm, ceased struggling and I saw her clearly.

  It was Annabelle Bayne.

  There was a stunned silence. Then, in cold fury, Dr. Rand rose from the bench. “What were you doing in the jury room?” Annabelle Bayne pushed back the hair from her face. “Eavesdropping,” she said clearly, “what do you suppose?” Before, in his outraged astonishment, he could speak she whirled on Jack. “You! Listen, you! I wanted to see how far you’d go in blackening the character of a very old woman who isn’t present to defend herself. That, my fine lad, is a pretty low way to defend yourself from a charge of murder.”

  If I ever saw outright hatred in a human being’s eyes, I saw it in the eyes of Annabelle Bayne as she looked at Jack.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Man with a Bag

  Annabelle Bayne turned on her heel and started to walk quickly from the court room. I’ve never seen an angrier man than Dr. Rand. “Come back here!” he shouted from the bench. “You’re by no means finished with this court.”

  For a moment I think she meant to defy the order, but I suppose his tone alarmed her, for she turned around, came back and quietly sat down. She seemed perfectly self-possessed, and as Jack resumed his testimony she even smiled to herself. An odd, contained and scornful little smile it was.

  A moment later Jack stepped down. He had finished his story in an aura of anti-climax. The jury was inattentive and uninterested. Jack’s future and mine were at stake, but the jurymen were watching Annabelle Bayne.

  “Now, Miss Bayne,” said Dr. Rand, “you will kindly take the stand.”

  The coffee-colored hat went up, the strange eyes flashed, and for a second time I fancy she considered open defiance. She thought better of it, rose and sauntered slowly forward.

  “This is quite beyond me,” she said, as she languidly took the oath. “I know nothing about this case.”

  “You know why you hid in the jury room. That’s a serious offense. Explain it!”

  “I’ve told you what I was doing there,” she said sullenly. “Luella Coatesnash is a friend of mine, an old, very dear friend, and I was determined to hear what was being said behind her back. What that man—” she looked hard at Jack “—was saying. I’ve heard of the rumors and lies he’s been spreading. And I’ve resented them. Luella Coatesnash scarcely knew Hiram Darnley. He might have been her lawyer, but she hardly ever saw him, and she had no conception of his character.”

  The jury overlooked the significance of her statement. Aggravated by her manner, Dr. Rand did not. His voice gained a quick, new interest.

  “Will you please explain that?”

  I thought the witness looked frightened. “Explain what? What is there to explain?”

  “Were you acquainted with Darnley? Did you know him well?”

  “I did not!”

  “You have inferred you were more familiar with his character than Mrs. Coatesnash was. How does that happen?”

  “Oh, I see.” She touched the handkerchief to her lips, glanced up brightly. “I see what you mean. Darnley visited Mrs. Coatesnash here in Crockford many years ago. I met him in a casual way, and took a strong dislike to him. Although Mrs. Coatesnash trusted him implicitly, I considered him stupid, for all his reputation as a brilliant lawyer.”

  “Then you did know him!”

  “If you choose to call it that. I saw him only twice.”

  “When was this?”

  Annabelle Bayne said slowly, “Many years ago. In June of nineteen-twenty. Jane Coatesnash was buried that month, you may remember. Mr. Darnley came to Crockford for the funeral.”

  Suddenly Harkway, who was listening closely, walked to the coroner’s bench, leaned over and whispered something to Dr. Rand. The coroner started. He turned to Annabelle Bayne and said sharply, “Did you see Hiram Darnley’s body while it lay in the undertaking parlors here?”

  She began a glib denial. Her clear brown eyes met my eyes—and then, I suppose, she remembered. She was, for a moment, shaken, definitely alarmed. Her voice faltered, recovered.

  “Yes, I did see the body. It bad almost slipped my mind. I dropped into Brownlee’s Saturday afternoon on my way home from town.”

  A dead silence fell. She appeared not to notice. Her restless hands lay still; her chin rose at its proud, usual tilt. The coroner spoke gravely.

  “Hiram Darnley was not identified until Monday morning. Why didn’t you go to the police and identify him on Saturday?”

  “I couldn’t identify him.”

  “You couldn’t!”

  “I didn’t recognize him,” she said rapidly. “I hadn’t seen the man in fifteen years. His appearance was not memorable or striking. I wouldn’t have known him from Adam if I had met him walking down the street.”

  I knew she lied. Evidently Dr. Rand shared my opinion. He tried hard—quite without result—to shake the witness. Annabelle Bayne stuck stubbornly to her denials, until finally she left the stand and departed from the court room. With her went the material of drama.

  The inquest developed nothing further. At five o’clock the members of the jury retired. Their deliberations were mercifully short. At twenty minutes past the hour Jack and I heard the only verdict which the evidence would allow. Hiram Darnley had met his death at the hands of a person or persons unknown.

  What that stolid country jury really believed I cannot say. Probably most of the jurymen believed that Jack and I had murdered Hiram Darnley or knew who had. But there must have been a minority who like myself, thought Annabelle Bayne could tell more than she had told. For like all juries, the members of that secret panel talked, and it seemed to me that after the coroner’s i
nquest Jack’s and my position in the village became somewhat easier.

  We met John Standish in the lower hall. He congratulated us bleakly on the verdict, and indicated that the “protective custody” was to be lifted, and that Harkway was to report in the morning at the station. The investigation evidently was to be tirelessly pursued, but where it was going and in what direction Standish didn’t say.

  Harkway accompanied Jack and me to supper at the Tally-ho Inn, a guest this time and not a guard. We talked about the inquest. We talked about Annabelle Bayne.

  “Why,” said Jack, “has she such a vigorous dislike of me, and why is she shouting so loudly in defense of Mrs. Coatesnash? Why, for that matter, should the two be friends? Offhand, I’d say they were poles apart.”

  The policeman gave us a curious glance. “Haven’t you heard about Jane Coatesnash? Annabelle Bayne was her chum. After the girl’s death, she and the mother became very close. In a way, it’s an odd relationship.”

  I thought personally that fifteen years would put a pretty severe strain on a sentimental loyalty. I said so. Harkway buttered a piece of bread.

  “Then you don’t know about the girl?”

  “Only that she’s dead. Why? Is there more?”

  “I’m not a very good source.” The policeman reached absently for the coffee pot as I was about to pour, encountered my hand, flushed, permitted me to fill his cup. “Thank you, Mrs. Storm.

  To get back to Jane Coatesnash—if you want the straight facts, it might be better to go to the newspaper files.”

  “The newspapers!” I felt a prickling at the roots of my hair. “What do you mean? What happened to the girl?”

  “Jane Coatesnash was drowned,” said Harkway.

  I must have looked disappointed. At any rate, he smiled, then proceeded to tell us all he knew of the tragedy which had blasted Mrs. Coatesnash’s life. The story, still whispered about the village, was singular, to say the least.

  Fifteen years before, Jane Coatesnash, then a student at Mather College for Women (located high in the Berkshires), had left the campus on a shopping trip. It was her nineteenth birthday. Wearing an expensive fur coat, a gift from her mother, she had started to town to buy a matching hat and gloves. Thereafter she had been seen no more.

  “The girl vanished,” said Harkway. “She vanished like a puff of smoke.”

  A cool salt breeze drifted into the dining room, stirred the cheerful draperies, blew lightly across the table. Jack’s eyes and mine met. Between sips of coffee Harkway continued the narration. After twenty-four hours of what he termed criminal delay, the college authorities telephoned Mrs. Coatesnash. She went immediately to Mather, accompanied by Annabelle Bayne. A frenzied private investigation followed; detectives buzzed up and down the streets of the sleepy little town; thousands of dollars poured into the search. Three days later the story of the missing heiress appeared in every newspaper in the United States. Police of 48 States were on the lookout for a brown-eyed girl in sables. Scores of amateur sleuths participated in the public hullabaloo, lured on by the hope of a $25,000 reward.

  Harkway drained the dregs of his coffee. “No one ever collected the dough. It was posted for months.”

  “You said the girl was drowned.”

  “She was drowned. Jane Coatesnash disappeared in February. Five months later, in June, a couple of fishermen picked up her body in the Connecticut River.”

  Jack said, “Murder? Suicide? Accident?”

  Harkway spread his hands. “The body had been weeks in the water. You couldn’t tell what had happened. The police followed the usual routine, and wrote it off as accidental death.”

  “In that case how could they be sure of the identification?”

  “The local dentist identified the body from work he had done on the teeth. There was a bracelet too, as I recall it, a bracelet that had belonged to the Coatesnash girl. She was drowned, all right. Everyone was satisfied on that count—everyone except the mother.”

  Jack looked a quick question.

  “Hope dies hard,” said the policeman. “People are likely to believe what they want to believe. Also there was one queer angle. The fur coat wasn’t found. Mrs. Coatesnash did everything to trace the coat; you can find advertisements requesting information in newspapers a few years back. Nothing ever came of them; nothing could. But I hear Mrs. Coatesnash, as she got older, went a little potty on the subject. Local people will tell you that she expects to see her daughter coming around any corner, looking just as she looked fifteen years ago.” Hark way folded his napkin. “I’m not acquainted with the old dame myself, but that sounds exaggerated to me.”

  The sad little story had reached its sad conclusion. Hark-way had no other information, and presently he left us. Jack and I lingered in the dining room, talking, speculating, trying to fit together the murder of Hiram Darnley and the fifteen-year-old tragedy. Why we should have believed there was a connection, I do not know. But we did believe it and our instinct was correct, although the link eluded us for days.

  Many times Jack and I have driven past the village burial ground, a calm and lovely place on a wooded hill. We had often planned to examine the quaint old-fashioned stones; that night, for the first time, we walked through the scrolled iron gates. A white moon shone upon the city of the dead, and silvered brief graven paragraphs which perpetuated the memory of forgotten lives. We discovered the plot we sought, paused before a mausoleum of gray granite that bore the Coatesnash name. Luella’s husband lay inside. Beside the mausoleum, a slender marble shaft pointed like a finger toward the sky. There was no name on the shaft, simply the engraved inscription: “Sacred to the Memory of My Only Child”

  Silently we returned to the car.

  Jack proposed the beach road home. It was longer, but on a moonlit night enchanting. The opening of the Crockford summer season was still weeks away, and the neighborhood which would ring with music and with laughter was dark and silent, touched with beauty and a kind of piercing melancholy. The only lights for blocks twinkled from the windows of an old stone house, obviously built years before the plague of country clubs and summer cottages transformed the shores of Long Island Sound. Set upon a natural rise, surrounded by extensive grounds, it commanded the deserted landscape.

  Jack was driving casually and he barely missed a small car without a tail-light, parked beside the road. He cursed, jammed on his brakes. I grabbed his arm.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Don’t do that, Lola!”

  “Look, Jack, look.”

  Jack looked. A short stout man, burdened by a bag, was walking ahead of us along the beach. It was impossible to recognize him from the distance, but he seemed familiar. Jack got out of the car. I got out.

  The man ahead turned into the grounds of the stone house. We crept closer, watched him stroll up a wooden sidewalk, mount steps, knock. Annabelle Bayne opened the door. We saw her clearly as light gushed forth from inside. We identified her guest.

  It was Franklyn Elliott.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Light in a Window

  Hand in hand, with instinctive caution, Jack and I moved away from the lighted dwelling. Sand whispered sibilantly beneath our feet; the waves of Long Island Sound sighed against the beach; overhead the white moon spent itself in prodigal glory. We were too bewildered, both of us, for speech.

  After pleading illness as an excuse to avoid the coroner’s inquest, Franklyn Elliott had come openly to Crockford. But had he come openly? I tried to recall the strolling figure. It seemed to me there had been a furtiveness in the lawyer’s attitude, a surreptitiousness in the very way he walked. And certainly Annabelle Bayne had admitted him with suspicious speed.

  We approached our car. Jack paused beside the other car—a yellow roadster—looked into the empty seat, lighted a match, stooped to examine the license plates.

  “New York plates, Lola. This must be Elliott’s car. He probably drove up from town this afternoon. Sure, it’s his car. His initials are o
n the door.”

  By this time I had my fill of sleuthing. Frankly, I didn’t wish to encounter Franklyn Elliott, particularly in this vicinity. When Jack proposed that we drive on a distance, stop and watch for him, I declined at once, but eventually Jack wore me down.

  A sheltered spot a little off the road and well known to Crockford swains lay near by. The night was clear but cold; we had the place to ourselves. Jack switched off the lights, and silently we settled down to wait. Perhaps half an hour later the yellow roadster shot past toward the village.

  We started in pursuit. There was little traffic; we easily kept the car in sight. Elliott drove at high speed; Jack kept fairly close behind. Soon we found ourselves in the center of the drowsing village.

  The advance car pulled abruptly to the curb, directly in front of the Tally-ho Inn. We parked across the street. It was past eleven. The restaurant was long closed. The adjoining lobby, revealed by plate-glass windows, was empty except for the yawning clerk.

  Franklyn Elliott alighted from his car, removed two bags and walked boldly into the hotel. He crossed the wide, old-fashioned lobby, approached the desk. The clerk roused. The clerk was Bill Tevis, a perennial college boy, who attended school one semester and worked at the Tally-ho Inn the next. He and Elliott held a short conversation. Both men stepped into the clerk’s office. Presently Elliott emerged, started up a broad stairway leading to the rooms, climbed out of sight.

  Bill Tevis came outside and got into the yellow roadster. Jack crossed the street.

  “Hi, Bill! Where you going?”

  A little surprised, Bill answered readily, “To the Inn garage. I’m putting up the car for a guest.”

  “Look here, old man. Do you know who your guest is?”