“Naturally. And there are several points on which I feel that you can help.”
Still in that friendly, reassuring fashion he seated himself upon the bed, and began to sketch in what he had been able to learn of the respective backgrounds of Dorothy Fithian and Kirkland Anderson. They had hailed from the same small town in Maryland, a whistle stop named Mystic, but Dorothy, the elder by half a dozen years, had left home while Anderson was still a schoolboy. When Anderson came to Grosvenor as a fledgling interne, some seven years later, he had found Dorothy a fixture there. She had been helpful in small ways. On several occasions, usually accompanied by Nancy Anderson, the two had gone out together.
“But I should tell you,” said the inspector, “that Anderson’s real interest in Dorothy Fithian did not develop until after she went to Broad Acres. During the past ten days there has been almost daily telephone communication between the two, and many meetings.”
Was there a note of speculation in his eye? I could not decide. He went back to talking of Dorothy Fithian’s history. I was familiar with much of what he said, and I listened absently as he explained that several years before Dorothy had married an aimless young no-account named Robert Fithian, a product of the eastern shore of Maryland, that Fithian had been sickly, and had died as the result of an automobile accident the preceding spring. Certain revealing items in Dorothy’s bankbook, said the inspector, showed that she had virtually bankrupted herself upon the funeral. I remembered that elaborate tombstone of which Dorothy had been so proud.
“Robert Fithian,” Chant said, “was evidently the only person who touched Dorothy’s cold, queer heart. I’m told she was quite broken up about his death. But her own family evidently meant nothing to her.”
“Her family!” I sat up in my chair. “Dorothy told Marian she hadn’t a relative in the world.”
“Dorothy Fithian,” said the inspector wearily, “was a creature of almost instinctive duplicity. She leaves a mother and a sister who still reside in Mystic. Their name is Brown. But they haven’t been in touch with Dorothy—so they tell me—for months and know nothing of her affairs. The Browns didn’t even know that Anderson was at Grosvenor or that Dorothy was seeing him. The last they heard was at the time of Fithian’s funeral.”
The inspector rose from the bed to walk moodily up and down the room.
“It’s a discouraging case to work on. The Browns know nothing of Dorothy. You,” he turned his eyes on me, “appear to know less. What Nancy Anderson knows she won’t tell.”
“You’ve talked to Nancy Anderson?”
He nodded. “I’ve talked to her at length. Unfortunately Nancy Anderson is like any other loyal sister whose brother is in serious trouble. Suspicious, frightened, terrified that anything she says may harm her brother. She declines to cooperate in any way. Not that one can blame her.”
Again the inspector made a turn of the room. “One would think the mustard-colored car would be easy to trace, yet we can’t find Anderson. Apparently we can name our murderer, yet we can’t figure out his motive. It’s been suggested—indeed, the District Attorney believes—that the murder resulted from some emotional crisis, that Dorothy Fithian wanted to marry and that Anderson did not. Personally, I think that’s nonsense. Ask yourself, Miss Tilbury, what a woman of her type had to gain from throwing in her lot with a penniless young physician.”
“She married a poor man once.”
“The better reason,” Chant said, smiling, “for avoiding the same mistake a second time. I’ll admit,” he continued soberly, “that I’m unable to understand why Dorothy Fithian and Kirkland Anderson met so often the past few days, or what it was that held the two of them together. I do know that there was some private matter between them, something which caused Anderson to become jumpy, nervous, something which made him lose interest in his work. Something which kept him and Dorothy Fithian for lengthy intervals on the telephone and made necessary those frequent meetings. Now,” he said and flashed me one of his warmest smiles, “here is where I hope that you can help. For I feel that somehow that private matter concerned your family.”
“Do you say that,” I said faintly, “because Anderson telephoned to Marian?”
“Partly because of that. I believe that some special meaning lies in that call. I want you to think, think hard. Can you think of any reason—no matter how remote—why Anderson might have desired to talk with Mrs. Brierly?”
“No,” I said.
“Nevertheless he did call, and Miss Fithian lied to you. Again I want you to think hard. Did you observe anything odd about Dorothy’s manner as she took the call?” I started to shake my head, and then I recalled the swiftness with which Dorothy had risen to answer the telephone, and how emphatically she had said to Anderson, “I can’t help it—she’s gone out.”
The inspector was interested. “One might guess then that Anderson expected to find Mrs. Brierly in, or that he had attempted to reach her on other occasions and failed. Is that your impression, Miss Tilbury?”
“I suppose it is,” I said reluctantly.
He had taken the attitude that it was my desire to help, and he didn’t seem aware of an unwillingness I felt must be most apparent. I glanced uneasily at Simon, and he looked uneasily back at me.
“Hold in mind, Miss Tilbury,” continued the inspector, “the fact that Anderson’s interest in Dorothy Fithian developed after she went to Broad Acres. Hold in mind that telephone call. Did you know,” he said then, suddenly, “that Dorothy had made rather unusual efforts to go to Broad Acres?”
I only nodded. I couldn’t speak. I felt quite sure that now he would mention Fred Brierly, and when that happened I didn’t know what I was to say.
“All this,” broke in Simon, “seems rather pointless.”
“I can’t feel,” said the inspector gently, “that any bit of information is pointless in this case. We’re faced, Dr. Hargreaves, with a complicated crime.” And then, to my amazed relief, he failed to mention Fred Brierly, or to intimate that he had any interest in my brother-in-law. He walked over to stand before me.
“Can you suggest any reason why Miss Fithian might have desired to take your case?”
“None,” I said, and forced myself to meet his eyes.
“Well,” said Chant regretfully, “perhaps no reason exists, and perhaps I’m wrong. Certainly if Dorothy had any design in going to Broad Acres, it would seem she surrendered the design with great abruptness. That’s odd too. That swift, that secret departure.” Discouraged with my apparent lack of information he nevertheless tried again. “Can you think of any incident—it doesn’t matter how trivial—can you think of anything at all which happened yesterday, which might have caused the girl to leave your house so suddenly?”
“No,” I said, this time honestly.
The inspector sighed. “I could go on indefinitely, enumerating the contradictions in this case, the questions I cannot answer.” He began to list them. “When did Miss Fithian write those letters you glimpsed in her purse? What became of them? Were they mailed, or did Anderson take them? Why did Miss Fithian pack her bags, drive eighteen miles to Washington, and return with Anderson to the strawstacks? What purpose did she hope to accomplish? What purpose had Anderson in mind?”
“Murder,” said Simon, very clearly.
“No,” said Chant and turned away from me. “I am certain, Dr. Hargreaves, that you are wrong, certain that Kirkland Anderson did not intend to commit a murder when he left this room.” He gestured toward the turned-down bed, the pajamas and the slippers. “Everything about this place is indicative of Anderson’s intention to return. To be sure he tacked that sign upon his door, which might point to a desire to set up an alibi of sorts, a desire to suggest that he was in his room after he had gone, but then he destroys any such idea by rushing boldly through the lobby where he is seen by half a dozen people. No, Anderson did not plan his murder. Consider the method itself—strangling. Always clumsy, and almost invariably, in my experience, the result
of an emotional explosion.”
The inspector was silent a moment. Silent and perplexed.
Finally he said, “This may sound strange, but considering the two personalities, Anderson’s and Dorothy’s, considering the two departures, his so bold and open, hers so secret and furtive, one might think that it was Dorothy Fithian who intended to go out and commit a murder.”
Simon reacted with considerable energy. “I call that nonsense, Inspector Chant. I thought policemen dealt in facts, not in clairvoyance. The facts seem simple—Dorothy dead and murdered, Anderson alive, a fugitive.”
“Sometimes even in police work,” said Chant deprecatingly, “it does no harm to go beyond the facts, and to use imagination. I don’t say Dorothy Fithian planned to commit a murder. I merely say her actions need explanation. And I do believe that Anderson had no plan at all when he left this hospital.”
“I daresay,” and Simon’s tone was freighted with irony, “he arrived at some plan before the evening was over.”
The inspector took Simon’s sarcasm in sober earnest. “You’ve expressed my belief exactly.” He hesitated. “Although the murder itself looks unpremeditated, hurried, and very clumsy, what followed wasn’t clumsy in the least.” He directed his attention to me. “The cutting of your telephone wires, the draining of your gas tanks to cut you off from help—that took clear, cool thinking. One might almost hazard, with apologies to you, doctor,” Chant glanced toward Simon, “—that the murderer had impressed into impromptu service someone else’s scheme, a scheme thought out beforehand which had somehow misfired or—or been interrupted. Perhaps, if we may go on guessing, the scheme was interrupted by the death of its instigator.”
“Complicated rubbish,” said Simon. “I don’t like guessing. I see no sense in it.”
The inspector said abruptly, “I should tell you, doctor, that my theory has a certain basis in fact. I started ‘guessing’ when I learned of Nancy Anderson’s reaction to the news about her brother.”
“I thought,” said Simon sharply, “she had refused to talk.”
“She made one remark, Dr. Hargreaves. An odd remark, and spoken under the stress of great emotion and shock. Nancy Anderson said, ‘It can’t have happened that way, not when I feared so much it would be the other way around, and that Dorothy would do harm to Kirk.’” The inspector sighed. “But, having made that remarkable statement, the girl shut up like a clam and refused to talk.”
Simon had risen and I was pulling on my gloves. The inspector came quickly to my side.
“If I’m correct, Miss Tilbury, Nancy Anderson knows something about that private matter between Dorothy and her brother. More than she is willing to tell us. I believe some member of your family may be concerned and that it’s possible Nancy Anderson will come to you. If she does, don’t frighten her. Find out all you can.”
I made that promise gladly.
But as we moved toward the door, the inspector picked up his hat. “I hope,” he said casually, “you don’t mind driving me to Broad Acres. I suppose you have your car?”
We had our car, and it was impossible for me to say that I minded very much, just as it was impossible for me to say that I needed an opportunity to sift the many things that I had learned since the early morning hours, or that I desired to be alone with Simon, to talk with him, and perhaps to clarify my problems.
“I’ve been wanting to talk with Miss Jane,” explained Inspector Chant. He looked at me reproachfully. “I didn’t understand from you last night that your niece had had an accident.”
I stood very still. “Who told you about Jane’s accident?”
He smiled. “Your cousin did. I gathered that the incident was concerned with a falling typewriter, and that the young lady was more or less confused about what actually happened. But anyhow I’d like to hear her story. I’m wondering,” he ended thoughtfully, “whether it might not help me figure out something which has me completely baffled.”
“What, Inspector?”
“I want to know,” he said quietly, “why those fires were lighted in the strawstacks. Why Kirkland Anderson, or someone else, deliberately drew you away from the house and to the hiding-place of Dorothy Fithian’s body.” Simon and I were very silent. The inspector turned off the overhead light, and then rejoined us. For a moment the three of us stood grouped in the center of the dusky little room. Inspector Chant’s pleasant unrevealing smile was almost lost in the gloom, but as I peered up at him it came to me quite definitely that he was no friend of mine.
I started toward the door. The door was closed against the hall. I laid my hand on the knob. My preoccupation and my growing perturbation were so intense that I did not hear the sound of the key as it was placed in the lock on the other side. But the inspector heard. He seized my arm.
“Don’t move, Miss Tilbury.”
I didn’t move. The door opened wide. Light gushed in from the hall, and brilliantly framed two people who hesitated at the threshold. The blonde broad-shouldered girl was Nancy Anderson. The dark man who towered over her was tanned so black by the Bermuda sun that at first I didn’t recognize him, and then I did. Nancy Anderson’s companion was Ted Breen.
10
Amazed, I stared at Ted Breen. He stared back at me. It was Kirkland Anderson’s sister who took the situation in hand. I know now that she must have been deeply shocked to find us there, possibly as shocked as Ted himself, but no trace of any emotion was evident as she walked on into her brother’s room.
I realized almost instinctively that the tall girl was acting. Perhaps the strangeness of the occasion and my own reactions to it helped me to the knowledge. At any rate I found distinctly unconvincing that calmness of hers, that bland pretense that she had really expected, when she opened the door, to find Inspector Chant and two middle-aged strangers awaiting her.
“Will you sit down, Miss Anderson?” asked the inspector.
“Oh, no,” replied the girl. “No, I wouldn’t dream of it. This may sound silly, but I don’t like you, Inspector. I don’t like you in the least. You can’t fool me—I know you’re determined to hang my brother.” Her face contorted, and it was painfully apparent that her defiance was defensive purely, and that she was sunk in grief. “I don’t suppose,” she said, “you’ll tell me whether you’ve found Kirk.”
“We haven’t found him,” said the inspector.
“I see.” She seemed so desolate, that tall blonde girl, so young to bear such a weight of tragedy, that I could not repress an involuntary gesture of sympathy. The gesture must have caught her eye, for she turned savagely on me. “Who are you'? What are you doing in my brother’s room?”
“Nancy, please!” The girl’s defiant attitude found no echo in Ted Breen. “Try to control yourself. This does no good.”
“I’m sick of controlling myself,” began Nancy Anderson, and looked at him and suddenly was silenced. She started blindly toward the hall as Ted Breen turned to me.
In view of our surprising meeting his first words seemed woefully inadequate.
“I—I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Miss Tilbury.”
“Nor I you,” I said. “I thought you were in New York with your family.”
“I—I came down this morning.”
He didn’t explain what had brought him from New York to Washington, nor why he had come to Grosvenor Hospital with Nancy Anderson. To be quite fair, he had no opportunity to explain.
I wasn’t aware that Nancy had stopped in the doorway, nor indeed that she had re-entered the room until she was at my side and I felt the hard grip of her fingers on my arm.
“Miss Tilbury?” she said. “Are you Margaret Tilbury?” I looked up, startled by her tone. There was no question of the genuineness of the emotion which leaped to life the instant Nancy Anderson heard my name. She wasn’t acting now. There was hatred in her eyes. Bewildered and uncomprehending, I heard her say:
“My brother’s in trouble. I’m in trouble, too. But you—I suppose you don’t care what you
’ve done to Kirk. You’re responsible for what happened last night! You could have prevented it!”
“My dear child,” I said, too dumbfounded by the extraordinary scene to be conscious that the inspector was listening intently, “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve done your brother no injury. I’ve never even met him.”
“What’s the use of talking?” Abruptly the violence left her, and I sensed queerly that she regretted her words and would have chosen to recall them. I thought that she was frightened. She backed away from me.
The inspector stepped into her path. “What do you mean? How could Miss Tilbury be responsible?”
“I’ve said too much already.” Nancy Anderson now looked definitely alarmed. “You can’t make me talk, Inspector. You or anyone else. Why should I talk until I see my brother again and find out myself what happened last night?”
“You should realize,” said the inspector gently, “that your attitude is hardly helpful to your brother’s case.”
“That,” said the girl, “is for me to decide. You can’t convince me, Inspector, that our interests are the same, nor can you make me talk. If I were you I’d stop trying. She paused in the doorway. “Are you coming with me, Ted?”
“I’m coming,” replied Ted Breen.
The two of them went out together. I believe that Ted desired to stay; in fact, I know now that he wished to talk with me, but when Nancy Anderson departed, he followed her. My thoughts were in great confusion. I couldn’t understand Ted’s presence in Washington; and I particularly could not understand Nancy Anderson’s unprovoked attack on me. But once the girl was gone, my own worries returned to plague me. I know now that I underestimated the importance of that scene in the hospital room. I decided, and the inspector appeared to agree with me, that Nancy Anderson, too hysterical to be logical, hated me because of my unwitting connection with her brother’s plight. After all it was I who had employed Dorothy Fithian.
In the conclusions I arrived at I was mistaken, just as Inspector Chant was mistaken. Nancy Anderson’s dislike of me was not based upon illogical prejudice; it sprang not from fancied grievance but from a grievance which was real and valid and of which I was entirely ignorant. Nancy Anderson could have spared herself and others from disaster if she had only spoken what was on her mind, but on that morning in the hospital she was in mortal terror that anything she said would increase her brother’s difficulties. By the time she made up her mind to speak, it was too late.
The Strawstack Murders Page 11