“Nancy is a queer girl,” said the inspector moodily. “I would like to read her thoughts. Unfortunately I see no way of getting at them. She’s quite right. I can’t make her talk.”
“Could she have any connection with the murder?” asked Simon quietly.
“No,” said the inspector. “She played bridge last night with three other girls. Her alibi is perfect. But nevertheless I’m confident she knows something. She and her brother were very close. Why,” asked Chant restlessly, “did she come to this room? Why, for that matter, did she telegraph the Breens this morning?
“Did she wire Ted?”
The inspector shook his head. “No, she wired the elder Breen. Mr. Breen, as a member of the board of directors, was instrumental in getting Anderson his internship here.” Chant hesitated. “If I’m any judge, the girl wants to confide in someone. Naturally she won’t trust me—one can hardly blame her.”
“Can’t you arrest her as a material witness?”
“I could, but I infinitely prefer that she have her freedom. Unwittingly she may lead us to her brother. Or she may make up her mind to talk to young Breen. If she does, Miss Tilbury, I’m counting on you to notify me.”
“You’re counting on me!” I said. “How am I to find it out?”
“I understand,” said Chant dryly, “that Ted Breen is an admirer of your niece. You’ll probably be seeing something of him. It’s possible Miss Jane will be willing to help us out. There’s no reason why Breen should be antagonistic to the truth.”
In view of what had occurred the night before, I seriously doubted Jane’s willingness to assist in the investigation of Dorothy Fithian’s murder. She herself had been antagonistic to the truth. But I didn’t speak of this to Inspector Chant.
“By the way,” I said, “what is Ted Breen’s connection with the case?”
“That,” replied Inspector Chant, “is another thing I want you to find out.”
Presently we left the hospital and started off toward Broad Acres.
11
I dreaded the interview with Jane more than I can say. In the end, however, it turned out as surprisingly as anything about the mystifying affair. I had laid various plans to prepare the child, but when we reached the house the inspector neatly circumvented them by following me upstairs. Jane’s bedroom door was open, and lively strains of music came from there. Ames had brought up the portable radio and was installed beside it, and Jane, looking pale but very pretty in her favorite dressing gown, was listening critically from bed. It was with a sinking heart that I introduced Inspector Chant into the scene.
To my amazement the young people greeted the inspector cheerfully. I did think my niece sent me an appealing glance but I couldn’t be sure, and almost at once and with no sign of hesitation she plunged into the story of her adventure. She related it readily, and in detail. Then, to add the final touch to my bewilderment, she reversed her story of the night before and announced baldly that she believed someone had struck her on the head.
“I can’t be positive,” she said, “because my back was turned. But this is how it was.” She lifted earnest eyes to the inspector. “I was standing in the alcove off Aunt Margaret’s room. All at once I had a kind of feeling of someone watching me. It frightened me. I wanted to get out of there. I started to rush from the alcove, and that’s all that I remember.”
I was too dumbfounded to weigh the consequences of speech. “But Jane! Last night you thought my typewriter fell and hit you. When Simon suggested…”
“Last night,” Jane said quickly, “I was too upset to think straight. Maybe you’d be, too, Aunt Margaret, if you’d just been knocked unconscious.”
The speech was glib, but this time I couldn’t miss her look of almost desperate appeal. I’m fairly certain that the inspector sensed the words trembling on my lips, although it wasn’t evident in his manner. He asked a few additional questions of Jane, decided that she herself must have knocked the typewriter from the highboy as she fell, and then excused himself and went to examine my bedroom and the alcove. I could see my niece hoped I would accompany him. I stayed. She hurriedly suggested that Ames start the radio.
“Not now, Ames,” I said. “First I’d like an explanation from Jane.”
For a moment I fancy she meant to pretend she didn’t grasp my meaning, and then she leaned from bed and took my hand and gripped it tightly in her own. A small hand, hot and feverish.
“I know I’m worrying you, Aunt Margaret,” she said in a humble little voice. “I’m truly sorry. I must have seemed demented last night. I think perhaps I was. It wasn’t until today I realized I’d have to talk to Inspector Chant.” Her voice dropped lower. “I’m all right now, Aunt Margaret. Everything’s changed today. Please believe me, and please don’t worry.”
“Of course I’ll worry,” I said flatly. “Why should you tell one story last night, and a different one today?”
“I—I wasn’t myself last night.”
“You’ve said that once.” I leaned forward. “You saw someone upstairs last night. Who was it, Jane?”
“I saw no one in your bedroom,” she replied with effort.
“You saw someone, Jane, on the upper floor. Last night you thought that person struck you down, and so you blamed your injuries on the falling typewriter. But today you read the papers, you realize that Kirkland Anderson may have been hidden in the alcove, may have struck you on the head, and now you admit to the attack. Jane, you’re protecting someone.”
“You’re quite wrong,” she whispered.
“Are you willing to swear that you told the inspector everything you know?”
She said “Yes.” She saw my face and I daresay her own honest truthful soul couldn’t let that unqualified statement stand. She added lamely, “I told him everything that could possibly interest him.” Again she clutched my hand. “If you don’t believe me, ask Ames.”
I looked at Ames, and realized that he at any rate was in her confidence. Whatever had been troubling her she had shared with him. That didn’t reassure me.
“Ames,” I said, “you and Jane have something on your minds about this awful affair, and I am entitled to hear it.”
“You would be,” he admitted reluctantly, “only this has nothing to do with what happened to Dorothy. You must believe me, Aunt Margaret. Jane’s right. You’d only worry where there’s no cause for worry.”
In an irritated and uneasy frame of mind I finally left them, and went to find Inspector Chant. He was in the alcove off my bedroom. The curtains which concealed my heavy outdoor clothes had been drawn back and revealed a cluttered space some three feet deep and entirely adequate to shelter an intruder. But the inspector had evidently completed his examination of the curtained nook. He had placed the portable typewriter upon the highboy, and he was thoughtfully lifting the cover, then letting it drop into place again. It was an odd procedure, and I requested an explanation.
“I’ve been trying to reconstruct that attack last night,” he said. “Assume that the silent watcher is either in the bedroom or is concealed behind those curtains. I favor the curtains myself. At any rate we can be certain that the watcher’s eyes are fixed on Miss Jane who is standing where I stand now. She is looking at the typewriter. She hears a rustling sound, she starts to turn her head. She is brutally attacked. Why?” He looked at me sharply. “There must have been something dangerous to the intruder, not in the bedroom, but in the alcove where your niece was standing—something he did not want her to see. Now, what could that have been?”
On rare occasions I am blessed with flashes of insight. I wish I had them oftener.
“My typewriter!” I said.
“Exactly,” said the inspector.
“But Jane saw the typewriter.”
“She didn’t lift the cover,” said Inspector Chant. “I am convinced,” he said slowly, “that Dorothy typed out and left on the roller of your typewriter some kind of message. Possibly it was a hurried note to explain her abrupt departure
from your household, possibly it was something quite different. But I’m confident she left a message. It’s gone now. It went last night.
He lifted the cover of the typewriter and showed me something I hadn’t seen before. Caught beneath the metal paper-holder was the corner of a sheet of paper, torn jaggedly. Someone, evidently in a tremendous hurry, had certainly ripped a sheet of paper from the roller. The corner was blank, but I easily recognized a fragment from a sheet of my most expensive stationery. I could almost see Dorothy Fithian casually looking through my desk and making her selection before she sat down to type that message which was to be a factor in sending three people to death, and two others deep into the valley of the shadow.
The inspector left soon after that, considerably pleased with himself and carrying my typewriter. He was a firm believer in scientific investigation, and since the roller of my machine was fairly new, I believe he had some hope that the use of various acids might bring up certain of the words which Dorothy had typed. This effort failed. Indeed we never learned precisely the wording of that fatal message, although we learned its context when we discovered who had destroyed it and why.
I was weary to exhaustion and after the inspector’s departure I planned to have a tray in bed. There were things I needed to think about. I have the capacity of deceiving myself only for a limited length of time. All day long I had been thrusting from my mind anything and everything which didn’t point to Kirkland Anderson’s guilt. “Discrepancies” was Chant’s term. I went into my bedroom and took down my hair and started to brush it, and a mood so starkly honest came upon me that it seemed to me the discrepancies almost outweighed the case itself. Discrepancies which Inspector Chant didn’t know about. Jane’s extraordinary reversal since the night before, Verity’s dark hints, Fred’s acquaintanceship with Dorothy Fithian—no one of these things fitted into any easy solution of the tragedy.
I thought about the hedge shears, and the telephone wires cut at the box behind the shrubbery, and I knew beyond all doubt, regardless of Anderson’s guilt, that it was not he who had cut those wires. It was someone who knew the ways of my household. Someone close to us. Someone not a stranger.
My mind went on. I had momentarily assumed that the message which vanished from the typewriter concerned Anderson, and jeopardized him to the point that he had broken into the house to obtain and to destroy it. I perceived a fatal flaw in that wishful reasoning. No man would run such a risk, and then admit his guilt by flight. If Anderson hadn’t broken into the house, who had? Who had struck down Jane? And—did she know?
With my hair hanging down my back and my hairbrush in my hand, I started for my niece’s room. I had worked myself up to a point near hysteria, and I don’t know what might have occurred if, in the hall, I hadn’t happened to run into Fred. Regardless of circumstances Marian always insists that we dress for dinner, and Fred was holding a collar button in his hand, and looking for someone to adjust it for him. He pounced upon me.
“Margaret, if you’ll just oblige me…” He saw my face. “What is it?”
I didn’t answer. He bustled me into the bedroom he shared with Marian, pushed me on a chaise longue and forced me to sniff ammonia, never ceasing his plaintive demands to hear what had so disturbed me.
“You looked as though you’d seen a ghost.”
I managed a shaky laugh. “You won’t believe me, Fred, if I say my own thoughts frighten me.”
Fred wasn’t an imaginative man, but one of his comfortable qualities was his ability to take other people seriously. “Do you want to talk about it, Margaret? Or would you rather not?”
I considered. “I believe I’d rather not.”
He looked definitely relieved. “Of course,” he said slowly, “I know, in a general way, what you were thinking about. If you’ll take a bit of advice, don’t think, my dear. Leave that kind of thinking to the police.”
“Fred,” I said, “I’ve been wanting a talk with you.”
“Can’t it wait till after dinner?”
“I’m afraid not.” Very slowly I said, “Simon and I saw Dr. Smedley today.”
“Well?” Fred was facing the mirror, and he turned around to look at me. He cleared his throat. “Well, Margaret?”
“Dr. Smedley said he had introduced you and Dorothy Fithian last spring long before she came here. Is that true, Fred?”
My brother-in-law stood quite still. He was very pale. Pale and motionless. One hand relaxed and his shirt studs fell to the floor.
“Well, Fred?”
“Are you going with that story to the police?” he said at length. “Are you going with it to Marian? Is that why you’re putting me on the carpet?”
“I’m not accusing you, Fred,” I said quietly. “Perhaps Dr. Smedley was mistaken.”
“It’s true enough,” Fred said sullenly, “that Smedley introduced me to Dorothy. I knew her. But certainly I had nothing to do with her coming here to nurse you. You’ve known me many years, Margaret. Can you believe I’d deliberately bring that girl under the same roof with my wife and daughter?
“You didn’t speak of having met her, Fred.”'
“It’s not important. It didn’t seem important enough to mention.”
I thought of the luncheons and the flowers, and again my heart sank. His acquaintance with Dorothy must once have been important to Fred. I might have questioned him further except for the fact that at that juncture Marian came into the room.
My sister has a nice talent for losing the large in the little, and forgetting what she wants to forget. She had been badly frightened not twelve hours earlier. She had spent the afternoon in earnest legal conferences with Harold but now she was full of plans for dinner, and much too preoccupied to be aware of any tenseness in the air.
“Harold’s promised to come to dinner,” she said blithely, “and, oh, I should tell you we’re expecting someone else.” She looked at me with a “guess who” air. Marian has never learned that I refuse to “guess who.”
“Jane,” said Marian triumphantly, “is expecting Ted Breen. Isn’t that nice for her?”
“I suppose it is,” I said, a trifle blankly.
“He came down this morning,” Marian explained, importantly, and extremely pleased. “The Breens got in from Bermuda just last night. But Ted saw those awful newspaper accounts, and rushed straight to Jane.”
“Did Ted tell you that?” I asked sharply.
“Well, no,” she admitted. “But it’s certainly plain enough. He’s daft over Jane, or would be if she’d give him the least encouragement. Now, with all this trouble, he sees his chance to help her. I call it pretty sweet.”
I didn’t mention my own conviction that it was not Jane who had brought Ted Breen to Washington, nor did I speak of my earlier meeting with him. Later on when I dropped into my niece’s room I found her delighted at the prospect of the visitor. A visitor who was not connected with the dire events which had been visited upon our troubled household.
She said frankly, “It will be nice for a change to talk about Bermuda.”
“I saw Ted this afternoon,” I said slowly, “at Grosvenor Hospital.”
“You did! Why didn’t you tell me, Aunt Margaret?”
“I’m telling you now, my dear.”
She gave me a queer look. Jane was no vainer than most young girls, but she was taken aback to realize that her admirer had not rushed straight from the train to her. “What was he doing at the hospital, I wonder.”
“I’m wondering too,” I said quite truthfully.
At seven o’clock when Ted arrived I was dressing. I didn’t know that he was in the house, until I happened to walk in on Jane to ask if she planned to dine downstairs. Ted was standing near the door, my niece was huddled in bed, listlessly examining a great sheaf of flowers. I saw at once that the two had been quarreling.
“Well, if that’s the way you feel,” Jane was saying.
“It’s the only way to feel,” Ted said stubbornly.
I attemp
ted a hurried departure, but Jane would not have it. “Please stay, Aunt Margaret. This concerns you—it concerns us all. Ted,” she said coldly, “has made up his mind that Kirkland Anderson didn’t murder Dorothy.”
“I didn’t say that,” protested Ted. “But it does seem to me that Anderson is entitled to state his case before he’s written off. as guilty. I should think, Jane, you might defer your judgment until…”
“Until he’s captured?” sweetly inquired my niece.
To my own relief Marian and Ames came in just then, and in the first flurry of greeting no serious conversation could be sustained. Marian, who had noticed nothing amiss, was evidently determined to clear the room. Ames was starting out to round up additional chairs when she said firmly, “Never mind, Ames, we’re expected downstairs. Ted, I thought you and Jane might like to share a bedside meal together. You’re not to bother, Margaret. I’ve got it all arranged.”
Thus disposed of, I rose at once. Ted Breen said quickly, “Please don’t go. There’s something I—I want to say.” He couldn’t seem to find the proper words. He hesitated visibly. Finally, with considerable embarrassment, he turned to Marian. “I was at Grosvenor this afternoon, Mrs. Brierly, and there I was given to understand that you’d taken Dorothy Fithian into the house because of references from my mother.”
A slightly blank look came on my sister’s face. Then, a little indignantly, she said, “We didn’t ask for a written reference, Ted, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t feel it necessary, after Dorothy had nursed you through appendicitis.”
The Strawstack Murders Page 12