“They reached the convent wall, and one of the men climbed upon another’s shoulders, seized the woman and dragged her up, then leaped the wall. The second man mounted on the third one’s shoulders, reached the wall-crest, then leaned down and assisted his companion up. As the last one paused a moment on the summit of the wall, preparatory to leaping over into the garden, he spied Mademoiselle Veronica, jumped down and seized her, then called to his companions. They bade him bring her, and he dragged her to the wall and forced her up to the villain waiting at the top. Thereafter they drew her to the garden, gagged her with handkerchiefs and ripped her stockings off, binding her hands and feet with them. Then, while she sat propped against the wall, she witnessed the whole vile scene. The base miscreants removed the effigy of Christ from the crucifix and broke it into pieces; then with railway spikes they nailed the woman upon the cross, and thrust a crown of barbed wire on her head and set an inscription over her. This done, they stood away and cursed her with all manner of vile oaths and pelted her with snowballs while she hung and died in torment.
“At length the coming of the dawn warned them their time was short, and so they gave attention to their second victim explaining that the one whom they had crucified had paid the penalty of talking, they then informed poor Mademoiselle Veronica that they would save her from such fate by making it impossible that she should betray them. And then they took the bindings from her wrists and ankles, made her resume her stockings and walk with them until they reached the wall. Across the wall they carried her; then in the snow outside they bade her kneel and clasp her hands in prayer while she looked her last upon the world.
“The poor child thought they meant to kill her. How little could she estimate their vileness! For, as she folded her hands in supplication, zic! a sudden knife-stroke hit her wrists, and scarcely realizing what she did, she found herself looking down at two small, clasped hands, while from her wrists there spurted streams of blood. The blow was quick and the knife sharp; she scarcely felt the stroke, she told me, for it was more like a heavy blow with a fist or club than a severing cut which deprived her of her hands.
“But before she realized what had befallen her she felt her throat seized by rough hands, and she was choked until her tongue protruded. A sudden searing pain, as though a glowing iron had been thrust into her mouth, was followed by a blaze of flashing light; then—darkness—utter, impenetrable darkness, such as she had never known before, fell on her, and in the snow she writhed in agony of mind and body. Shut off from every trace of light and with her own blood choking back the screams for help she tried to give, in her ears was echoed the laughter of her tormenters.
“The next she knew she was lifted from the snow and borne on someone’s shoulders to a house, bandages were wound about her wrists and eyes, and anon a biting, bitter mixture was poured into her tortured mouth. Then merciful oblivion until she woke to find herself in Mercy Hospital with Jules de Grandin questioning her.
“Ah, it was pitiful to make her tell this story with her feet, my friends, and very pitiful it was to see her die, but far rather would I have done so than know that she must live, a maimed and blinded creature.
“Ha, but I have not done. No. She told me of the men who did this sacré, dastard thing. Their leader was a monstrous-looking creature, a person with an old and wrinkled face, not ugly, not even wicked, but rather sad and thoughtful, and in his wrinkled face there burned a pair of ageless eyes, all but void of expression, and his body was the lithe, well-formed body of a youth. His voice, too, was gentle, like his eyes, but gentle with the terrible gentleness of the hissing serpent. And though he dressed like us, upon his head was set a scarlet turban ornamented with a great greenish-yellow stone which shone and flickered, even in the half-light of the morning, like the evil eye of a ferocious tiger.
“His companions were similar in dress, although the turbans on their heads were black. One was tall, the other taller. Both were swarthy of complexion, and both were bearded.”
“By their complexions and their beards, and especially by their noses, she thought them Jewish. The poor one erred most terribly and slandered a most great and noble race. We know them for what they truly were, my friends, Kurdish hellions, Yezidee followers and worshippers of Satan’s unclean self!”
He finished his recital and lit another cigarette. “The net of evidence is woven,” he declared. “Our task is now to cast it over them.”
“Ye’re right there, sor, dead right,” Costello agreed. “But how’re we goin’ to do it?”
De Grandin looked at him a moment, then started, as one who suddenly recalls a duty unperformed. “By blue,” he cried, “we must at once to Monsieur the Coroner’s; we must secure those photographs before it is too late!”
11. The Strayed Sheep
“HULLO, DOCTOR DE GRANDIN,” Coroner Martin greeted as we entered the private office of his luxurious funeral home, “there’s been a young man from Morgan’s Photonews Agency hanging around here waiting for you for the last hour or so. Said you wanted him to take some pictures, but couldn’t say what. It might be all right, then again, it mightn’t, and he may be on a snooping expedition—you never can tell with those fellows—so I, told him to wait. He’s back in the recreation room with my boys now, smoking his head off and cussing you out.”
The quick smile with which de Grandin answered was more a mechanical facial contortion than an evidence of mirth. “Quite yes,” he agreed. “I greatly desire that you let us take some photographs of Mademoiselle l’Inconnue—the nameless lady whose body you took in charge at the convent this morning. We must discover her identity, if possible. Is all prepared according to your promise?”
Professional pride was evident as Mr. Martin answered, “Come and see her, if you will.”
She lay upon a bedstead in one of the secluded “slumber rooms”—apartments dedicated to repose of the dead awaiting casketing and burial—a soft silk comforter draped over her, her head upon a snowy pillow, and I had to look a second time to make sure it was she. With a skill which put the best of Egypt’s famed practitioners to shame, the clever-handed mortician had eradicated every trace of violent death from the frail body of the girl, had totally obliterated the nail-marks from her slender hands and erased the cruel wounds of the barbed wire from her brow. Even the deeply burned cross-brands on her cheeks had been effaced, and on her calm, smooth countenance there was a look of peace which simulated natural sleep. The lips, ingeniously tinted, were slightly parted, as though she breathed in light, half-waking slumber, and so perfect was the illusion of life that I could have sworn I saw her bosom flutter with faint respiration.
“Marvellous, parfait, magnifique!” de Grandin pronounced, gazing admiringly at the body with the approval one artist may accord another’s work. “If you will now permit the young man to come hither, we shall take the pictures; then we need trouble you no more.”
The young news photographer set up his camera at de Grandin’s orders, taking several profile views of the dead girl. Finally he raised the instrument till its lens looked directly down upon the calm, still face, and snapped a final picture.
Next day the photographs were broadcast to the papers with the caption: “Who Knows Her? Mystery woman, found wandering in the streets of Harrisonville, N.J., was taken to the psychopathic ward of City Hospital, but managed to escape. Next morning she was found dead from exposure in a garden in the suburbs. Authorities are seeking for some clue to her identity, and anyone who recognizes her is asked to notify Sergeant J. Costello, Detective Bureau, Harrisonville Police Dept. (Photo by Morgan’s Photonews, Inc.)”
WE WAITED SEVERAL DAYS, but no response came in. It seemed that we had drawn a blank.
At last, when we had about abandoned hope, the telephone called me from the dinner table, and Costello’s heavy voice advised: “There’s a young felly down to headquarters, sor, that says he thinks he recognizes that there now unknown gur-rl. Says he saw her picture in th’ Springfield Echo. Will I take �
��im over to th’ coroner’s?”
“Might as well,” I answered. “Ask Mr. Martin to let him look at the body; then, if he still thinks he knows her, bring him over and Doctor de Grandin and I will talk with him.”
“Right, sor,” Costello promised. “I’ll not be botherin’ ye wid anny false alarrms.”
I went back to dessert, Renouard and Jules de Grandin.
SOME THREE-QUARTERS OF AN hour later while we sipped our postprandial coffee and liqueurs in the drawing-room, the doorbell shrilled and Nora ushered in Costello and a serious-faced young man. “Shake hands wid Mr. Kimble, gentlemen,” the sergeant introduced. “He knows her, a’right. Identified her positively. He’ll be claimin’ th’ remains in th’ mornin’, if ye’ve no objections.”
De Grandin shook hands cordially enough, but his welcome was restrained. “You can tell whence the poor young lady came, and what her name was, perhaps, Monsieur?” he asked, when the visitors had been made comfortable with cognac and cigars.
Young Mr. Kimble flushed beneath the little Frenchman’s direct, unwinking stare. He was tall, stoop-shouldered, hatchet-faced, bespectacled. Such animation as he had seemed concentrated in his rather large and deep-set hazel eyes. Except for them he was utterly commonplace, a man of neutral coloring, totally undistinguished, doomed by his very nature to the self-effacement consequent upon unconquerable diffidence. “A clerk or bookkeeper,” I classified him mentally, “possibly a junior accountant or senior routine worker of some sort.” Beside the debonair de Grandin, the fiery and intense Renouard and the brawny, competent Costello, he was like a sparrow in the company of tanagers.
Now, however, whatever remnant of emotion remained in his drab, repressed personality welled up as he replied: “Yes sir, I can tell you; her name was Abigail Kimble. She was my sister.”
“U’m,” de Grandin murmured thoughtfully, drawing at his cigar. Then, as the other remained silent:
“You can suggest, perhaps, how it came she was found in the unfortunate condition which led to her incarceration in the hospital, and later to her so deplorable demise?” Beneath the shadow of his brows he watched the young man with a cat-stare of unwinking vigilance, alert to note the slightest sign betokening that the visitor had greater knowledge of the case than the meager information in the newspaper supplied.
Young Kimble shook his head. “I’m afraid not,” he replied. “I hadn’t seen her for two years; didn’t have the slightest idea where she was.” He paused for a moment, fumbling nervously with his cigar; then: “Whatever I may say will be regarded confidentially?” he asked.
“But certainly,” de Grandin answered.
The young man tossed his cigar into the fire and leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers interlaced. “She was my sister,” he repeated huskily. “We were born and reared in Springfield. Our father was—” He paused again and hunted for a word, then: “A tyrant, a good church-member and according to his lights a Christian, so righteous that he couldn’t be religious, so pious that he couldn’t find it in him to be kind or merciful. You know the breed. We weren’t allowed to play cards or dance, or even go to parties, he was afraid we might play ‘kissing games.’ We had family prayers each night and morning, and on Sunday weren’t allowed to play—my sister’s dolls and my toys were put away each Saturday and not allowed outside the closet till Monday morning. Once when he caught me reading Moby Dick—I was a lad of fifteen, too, then—he snatched it from me and threw it in the fire. He’d ‘tolerate no novel-reading in a Christian home,’ he told me.
“I stood for it; I reckon it was in me from my Puritan ancestors, but Abigail was different. Our grandfather had married an Irish girl—worked her to death and broke her heart with pious devilishness before she was twenty-five—and Abigail took after her. Looked like her, too, they said. Father used to pray with her, pray that she’d be able to ‘tear the sinful image of the Scarlet Woman’ from her heart and give herself to Jesus. Then he’d beat her for her soul’s salvation, praying all the time.”
A bitter smile lit up his somber features, and something, some deep-rooted though almost eradicated spirit of revolt, flickered in his eyes a moment. “You can imagine what effect such treatment would have on a high-spirited girl,” he added. “When Abby was seventeen she ran away.
“My father cursed her, literally. Stood in the doorway of our home and raised his hands to heaven while he called God’s curse upon a wilful, disobedient child.”
Again the bitter, twisted smile flickered across his face. “I think his God heard him,” he concluded.
“But, Monsieur, are we to understand you did not again behold your so unfortunate sister until—” de Grandin paused with upraised brows.
“Oh, yes, I saw her,” the young man answered caustically. “She ran away, as I said, but in her case the road of the transgressor was hard. She’d been brought up to call a leg a limb and to think the doctors brought babies in their satchels. She learned the truth before a year had gone.
“I got a note from her one day, telling me she was at a farmhouse outside town and that she was expecting a baby. I was working then and making fairly good money for a youngster, keeping books in a hardware store, but my father took my wages every Saturday night, and I was allowed only a dollar a week from them. I had to put that on the collection plate on Sunday.
“When Abby’s letter came I was almost frantic. I hadn’t a nickel I could use, and if I went to my father he would quote something from the Bible about the wages of sin being death, I knew.
“But if you’re driven far enough you can usually manage to make plans. I did. I deliberately quit my job at Hoeschler’s. Picked a fight with the head bookkeeper, and made ’em discharge me.
“Then I told my father, and though I was almost twenty-one years old, he beat me till I thought I’d drop beneath the torture. But it was all part of my plan, so I gritted my teeth and bore it.
“I got the promise of another job before I quit the first one, so I went to work at the new place immediately; but I fooled the old man. My new salary was twenty dollars a week, twice as much as I’d received before, but I told him I had to take a cut in pay, and that they gave me only ten. I steamed the pay envelope open and took out ten dollars, then resealed it and handed it to him with the remaining ten each Saturday. He never knew the difference.
“As quickly as I could I went to see my sister, told her not to worry, and engaged a doctor. I paid him forty dollars on account and signed notes for the balance. Everything was fixed for Abigail to have the proper care.
“He was a pretty little fellow, her baby; pretty and sweet and innocent as though he hadn’t been a”—he halted, gagging on the ugly word, then ended lamely—“as if his mother had been married.
“Living was cheaper in those days, and Abby and the baby made out nicely at the farm for ’most two years. I’d had two raises in pay, and turned the increase over to her, and she managed to pick up some spare change at odd work, too, so everything went pretty well—” He stopped again, and the knuckles of his knitted hands showed white and bony as the fingers laced together with increased pressure.
“Yes my friend, until—” de Grandin prompted softly.
“Till she was taken sick,” young Kimble finished. “It was influenza. We’d been pretty hard hit up Springfield way that spring, and Abigail was taken pretty bad. Pneumonia developed, and the doctor didn’t hold out much hope to her. Her conscience was troubling her for running out on the old man and on account of the baby, too, I guess. Anyhow, she asked to see a minister.
“He was a young man, just out of the Methodist seminary, with a mouth full of Scriptural quotations and a nose that itched to get in other people’s business. When she’d confessed her sin he prayed with her a while, then came hot-foot to the city and spilled the story to my father. Told him erring was human, but forgiveness divine, and that he had a chance to bring the lost sheep back into the fold—typical preacher’s cant, you know.
“I was of age, then, but
still living home. The old man came to me and taxed me with my perfidy in helping Abby in her life of shameful sin, and—what was worse!—holding back some of my salary from him. Then he began to pray, likening himself to Abraham and me to Isaac, and asking God to give strength to his arm that he might purge me of all sin, and tried to thrash me.
“I said tried, gentlemen. The hardware store I worked in had carried a line of buggy-whips, but the coming of the motor car had made them a back number. We hadn’t had a call for one in years, and several of the men had brought the old things home as souvenirs. I had one. My father hit me, striking me in the mouth with his clenched fist and bruising my lips till they bled. Then I let him have it. All the abuse I’d suffered from that sanctimonious old devil since my birth seemed crying out for redress right then, and, by God, it got it! I lashed him with that whip till it broke in my hands, then I beat him with the stock till he cried for mercy. When I say ‘cried’, I mean just that. He howled and bellowed like a beaten boy, and the tears ran down his face as he begged me to stop flogging him.
“Then I left his house and never entered it again, not even when they held his funeral from it.
“But that didn’t help my sister. The old man knew where she was living, and as soon as his bruises were healed he went out there, saw the landlady and told her he was the baby’s grandfather and had come to take it home. My sister was too sick to be consulted, so the woman let him take the boy. He took him to an orphanage, and the child died within a month. Diphtheria immunization costs money, and the folks who ran that home—it was proof of a lack of faith in Providence to vaccinate the children for diphtheria, they said; but when you herd two hundred children in a place and one of ’em comes down with the disease, there’s bound to be some duplication. Little Arthur died and they were going to bury him in Potter’s Field, but I heard of it and claimed the body and gave it decent burial.
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