Wall

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  But Standish was a voice crying in the wilderness. Demand or no demand, a special session of the grand jury indicted Fred a few days later.

  I know something of what took place there. Little Bullard, pompous and pontifical: “Gentlemen of the grand jury: As prosecutor of this county it becomes my duty to present to you a most unhappy and sensational crime. In this district, known for its freedom from grave derelictions of the law, there took place, on the eleventh day of June, last, the murder of an innocent woman. That this murder was followed by a second one is not within our purview today. We are concerned only with the original crime, the motive for which crime, brutal beyond my imagination to portray, we will endeavor to show you as this session proceeds. On this day the victim, known as Juliette Ransom, went to her death, and we will show you that this death was caused by an injury to the head, inflicted by a heavy weapon.

  “For fear she was not dead, however, her body was then placed in Loon Lake, where flood waters carried it later on to where it was recovered, or near by. An attempt had been made to conceal the body in a shallow grave, but this attempt failed.”

  “Through the efforts of the police certain facts have been discovered which will be presented to you in due time, both by the police and by various witnesses. These facts point to a certain individual as being guilty of this crime, and after hearing the testimony it is your duty to decide whether or not to present a true bill against him.”

  “Gentlemen of the grand jury, the case is now in your hands.”

  The twenty-three men sat in their hard chairs and watched him. They knew him. Knew he needed a scapegoat for the case; but knew also that by that time all the country wanted a scapegoat. Known as the Rock Island murders, the crimes had been exploited from coast to coast. Nor, I dare say, were they ignorant of the reporters, gathered outside in the halls and eagerly searching the faces of the witnesses. An indictment was a story, the big story of the summer when the news was short. Wires had been leased, there was a radio sound truck in the street, and photographers crowded the pavement and halls.

  I have nothing to say against the grand jury. It had been put on the stage and given its lines. Even its props had been provided: the grisly photographs of Juliette as she lay in her grave, Lucy’s golf club, which she had left at the scene of the crime, the wrist watch found on the hillside, that sodden cigarette case rescued from the lake.

  There were not many witnesses: the detective who had found the body, the Boy Scout who had located the watch, the two doctors who had conducted the post-mortem; and a few others, including Ed Smith, to say that she had been in good spirits when he put her on her horse that morning of her death. But there was put into the record that damning testimony of her early marriage to Fred Martin, and her statement to him that there had been no divorce.

  The verdict was settled then and there, although the session lasted two full days.

  I was the one selected to carry the news to Dorothy. She lay in her bed, painfully thin, looking at me with sunken red-rimmed eyes. But she was intelligent. I did not have to tell her.

  “They’ve indicted him, haven’t they?” she said. And when my face told her the truth, she still held on to her self-control.

  “He didn’t do it, of course,” she went on drearily. “He might have wanted to. She had played him a dirty trick, the worst anybody could. And what about the baby?” Her voice broke. “That makes it worse for Fred, doesn’t it? But he never did it, Miss Lloyd. Never. He was too kind, too gentle. If it wasn’t for the baby I wouldn’t want to live.”

  She would carry on, I knew, whatever happened. Her child might not be legitimate, but it was Fred’s and hers. I found myself quietly crying as I got into the car that day and drove back to Sunset.

  Arthur went back to New York and his neglected law practice that night. I could see that he still seethed with resentment against the trick Juliette had played on him. And although he liked Fred, he thought he was probably guilty.

  “I wanted to kill her myself,” he said. “If he had more guts than I had—”

  It was that same night that the Sea Witch came back. I looked out at the harbor to see it at its mooring, and later in the day I had an unexpected visit from Howard Brooks.

  He began without preliminary.

  “What’s all this about Martin?” he asked. “All I get is fury from Mrs. Pendexter and a sort of general hysteria from the rest. Did he do it? Kill Juliette Ransom, I mean?”

  “I don’t think he did. No.”

  “Suppose you begin at the start, Marcia,” he said. “What have they got on him?”

  I told him as best I could. He sat very still, his face expressionless, until I had finished.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said. “That damned wireless of mine broke down the day after we left. I’ve been pretty much cut off.”

  Then he went, getting into his car and driving off without further explanation; but I thought he looked strange when he left; uneasy and apprehensive.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  APPARENTLY OUR MURDERS WERE solved to the public’s satisfaction at last. The reporters went away again, and we had almost a feverish round of gaiety, part of it out of sheer relief and part of it because the season was coming to a close. For early September would see the colony largely dissipated, to meet later perhaps in Palm Beach or California or the Riviera, or not to meet at all until next summer.

  Except for those two graves in the cemetery, Allen Pell’s impounded car and trailer in the local garage, and Fred Martin staring at nothing in that cell of his in the county jail, everything was apparently as it should be. There was no warning of further trouble to come, and indeed my own particular cloud began to lift, leaving me happier than I had been all summer. The first thing to happen was a note from Allen. It had an undecipherable postmark, and the message was brief. Merely, “Don’t worry. All my love.” The signature was a seal’s head, rising above the water; and from that time on I watched the bay carefully.

  The other thing was the return of Jonas Tripp. All along I had felt that the sheriff did not consider the case closed. When he telephoned me that Tripp was back I realized that Arthur must have told him about his alibi. I went to Clinton to see the man. I found him in his back yard, peacefully inspecting a row of cabbages; a positive little man with most astonishing tufts of hair emerging, brush fashion, from his ears and nose. But he confirmed Arthur’s alibi without reservation.

  “Sure I saw him,” he said. “He was sound asleep, but I knew him all right. I remember wondering what he was doing there.”

  Tripp had gone to Canada to visit his wife’s people, and had not known he was needed until he came back the day before. Then he had seen Bullard, and Bullard had not believed him. He told me that with his bristles quivering with indignation.

  “He asked me what I’d been paid to clear Mr. Lloyd,” he said. “And I asked him if he was being paid to persecute people. He didn’t like that,” he added cheerfully.

  All in all, except for my poor Dorothy, life began to take on a more normal aspect. The wave of suspicion had passed. Bob and Lucy Hutchinson had patched up their differences, and Lucy looked happier than I had ever seen her. They gave a picnic on one of the remote beaches one day, or what they called a picnic; that is, we ate on the ground, but there were men to serve the cocktails and the food, and as Tony said, the only real difference was in the knees. Marjorie was there, and I thought she avoided me.

  She did not look well, and Howard Brooks had not come at all.

  I suppose none of us really thought that Fred Martin would be found guilty when he was brought to trial. I did not realize the strength of the case against him. I remember going over my evening clothes with a cheerfulness that seems incredible now; and just before Labor Day I gave a dinner party. Perhaps it was a gesture, like that one of Lucy’s weeks before. Perhaps it was out of sheer relief. Anyhow I gave it, with results so startling that I shiver when I think of them.

  Yet it began quietly enough. Once more Willi
am got out the extra silver, and Mrs. Curtis came in to help. Even Mike was cherishing his late flowers for the house. There was an air of bustle everywhere, of furniture and floor polishing. The days were shorter now. By seven o’clock it was twilight, but long after evening fell I could hear the suppressed activity below stairs.

  Lying upstairs I remembered the parties of my childhood: the florist augmenting the garden flowers with his own, the candles and centerpieces on the long table, the gilt chairs with their rose cushions, and the caterer’s men in their shirt sleeves, making canapés in the pantry. Mother rustling down the stairs, holding up her train, with her pearls around her neck, her diamond solitaires in her ears, and her hair built high in the braids and curls she wore until after the war.

  She would move around, her train over her arm, inspecting everything. Then she would join Father in the drawing room, and I would be sent up to bed; to see from my window the first pair of lights turning in at the drive, and to hear the sound of horses trotting.

  “Now, come away from there and get to bed,” Maggie would say.

  I was thinking of that as I went downstairs the night of the dinner. How far we had gone since those days! Especially Arthur. Arthur and the war. Arthur and Juliette. Arthur and Mary Lou. Arthur and our murders. And now Arthur free at last, busy and working.

  I drew a long breath of sheer relief, and after glancing into the dining room, stepped onto the veranda and looked out over the bay, still faintly opalescent after the sunset.

  Then suddenly I knew I was not alone. I turned with a jerk, to see a man with his back against the wall of the house in order to escape observation from the windows, and to hear a familiar low laugh.

  “Allen!” I said incredulously.

  “Be careful, darling,” he said. “One shout and I’m out! Are you all right?”

  “Yes. But you, Allen. Are you well again?”

  “Well enough. Come over here, won’t you, where they can’t see us. I want to hold you, just for a minute. I’m so frightfully in love with you, Marcia. You know that, don’t you?”

  I did know it. It seemed to me that I had always known it. And nothing else mattered that night except that he was there, alive and warm and strong. I simply put my head on his shoulder and sniffed.

  “You know too much,” he said, almost roughly. “Worse than that, you know me. That may be dangerous. I’m earnest. Deadly earnest, my dear.”

  All sentiment had gone out of his voice. He dropped my hand.

  “You’re not safe. Nobody’s safe,” he said somberly.

  He would not explain that. He knew about Fred Martin, and he said flatly that Fred would never go to the chair. Then he glanced out over the water to where a small cruiser was anchored offshore. It showed only its riding lights, and he nodded toward it.

  “That’s how I came,” he said. “I’ll have to get away pretty soon. But I hate like hell to leave you here alone. You will go, darling, won’t you? Soon?”

  “I’ve got to see Fred Martin through this, Allen. I’ve promised his wife.”

  He gave a sort of groan.

  “Don’t you ever think of yourself?” he said. “Or of me?”

  “Always of you,” I told him, and for the first time he leaned down and kissed me.

  “I’ll have to go,” he said huskily. “I’ll watch you as well as I can. But I’m dodging the police, my darling, and that’s not as easy as it sounds.”

  As it happened that was his good-bye to me, for I heard Mrs. Pendexter’s high-pitched voice in the hall, and when I looked back for him he had gone.

  I suppose the dinner that night was all right. I never have known. I must have talked. I dare say I smiled. Women are good actresses, all of them. But I sat facing a window, and we had not finished the soup when I saw the lights on the cruiser moving out toward the open sea.

  I felt deserted and lonely.

  It was after the meal, while the men were having cigars and brandy in the library, and the women coffee and liqueurs in the drawing room, that Marjorie Pendexter called me into a corner and said she wanted to talk to me.

  She looked feverish that night. Her face was flushed, her eyes almost glittering. But she was steady enough, as though she had made a decision, and meant to stand by it.

  “I’m going to tell you something, Marcia,” she said. “Fred Martin never killed Juliette. I know it.”

  “So does anybody with any sense.”

  She did not hear me. She was busy with her own unhappy thoughts.

  “I think I know who did,” she said, and shivered. “But if Fred’s innocent—Marcia, this Allen Pell who’s been missing; I knew him. So did Howard. Why did you call me up that night? Did you know who he was?”

  I put a hand on a chair to steady myself.

  “Only that Pell was probably not his name.”

  She pulled herself together at that. She even lit a cigarette, and inhaled deeply and exhaled before she spoke.

  “I imagine you’re right,” she said. “I think he was Langdon Page, and that he is on parole from the penitentiary.”

  I must have shown the shock, for she looked at me quickly and asked if I wanted a glass of water. I shook my head.

  “From the penitentiary?” I managed to ask. “For what?”

  “For manslaughter.”

  For a minute the room faded away, all the lights, the women’s bright dresses, the flowers. I heard Marjorie telling me to sit down, and I did so. But just then the men came trooping in, and she had to leave me. I did not see her again until she and Howard were leaving. Then she said merely that she had had a lovely time, only she had lost fifteen dollars at bridge. She evaded my eyes, and when at last I was alone I did not dare to telephone her. Our night operator has a pretty dull time of it, and I did not want her listening in.

  When I did call the next morning I found that she and Howard, with one or two others, had started on a short motor trip to Canada, and I was left with that one word of hers to ring in my ears, day and night. Manslaughter!

  Much of the puzzle was clear to me now; the reason why Allen’s prints had been erased from the trailer, the absence of identifying marks on the clothing there, even that absurd pretense at painting. Allen Pell was Langdon Page, he had killed some person or persons with his car while he was drunk, and he had been drunk because of Juliette.

  There was only one question I could not answer. Had he hated her enough to kill her?

  CHAPTER XXIX

  LACKING MARJORIE, I HAD to know the story somehow. I could not sit still that day. When I tried to walk my knees shook. When I sat out on the upper porch I found myself searching for the small cruiser I had seen the night before. When my lunch came I drank some coffee and sent the rest away untouched.

  It had always been Mother’s custom to thank the servants when a dinner had gone well, and I have done it ever since her death. That day, however, I forgot the dinner entirely, and it was only a reproachful William who reminded me, as he took away the tray.

  “Were things to your liking last night, miss?” he inquired.

  I roused myself.

  “I’m sorry, William. I’ll see Lizzie later. Yes, it went beautifully. I’m afraid I’m tired today. I forgot to speak about it.”

  He cheered visibly.

  “The lobster was especially fine, I believe, miss.”

  “It was indeed. Will you tell Lizzie that?”

  Having been thus tactfully reminded of my duty, I went the rounds later myself. But early that afternoon I found myself at the public library in town, asking if there were any back files of New York newspapers.

  There were none; nor, I was assured, were there any at Clinton. At four o’clock I went back to the house and announced to Maggie that I was going to the Park Avenue house that night for a day or two, and she could come along to make my bed and cook my breakfasts. Perhaps my manner was strange, for she looked at me queerly. She was willing enough, however. Like the others, she looks forward to summers on the island, as an escap
e from the drab monotony of all service, no matter how loyal. Like the others also, the end of the season finds her fed up with the country, and anxious for the city again: its pace, its noise, its general feeling of active living everywhere.

  More than that, she had completely lost confidence in Sunset. It developed as she packed that day that the bells had started ringing during the party, with nobody upstairs at all; and that William, pouring champagne into Mansfield Dean’s glass, had heard them and spilled it.

  “It didn’t hurt the table,” she said. “But it upset him. I’ll be glad to get away from whatever rings them, miss.”

  I paid no attention. I went out onto the porch and stood looking down at the beach. Those wretched crows were there again, strutting impudently about.

  There was no sleep for me in the train that night, and the city was hot when we got there the next morning. Early as it was when we arrived, small heat waves were rising from the streets, and our taxi driver was in his shirt sleeves. The house looked dirty and dreary, its windows shuttered, the pavement unswept and dusty. It had been wired as usual for the summer, and I had telegraphed ahead to have it opened. We descended from the taxi, however, to find a wretched-looking young man on the doorstep, turning a worried face to me.

  “Miss Lloyd, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Is anything the matter?”

  He looked even more uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry. It looks as though somebody had been in the house. The service is okay. I’ve tested it. But I’ve had a look around, and”—he smiled faintly—“I don’t suppose you leave your bureau drawers on the floor!”

  Maggie gave him a ferocious look.

  “Are you telling me—” she began.

  “He is telling me something, Maggie,” I said, effectually shutting her up. “Do you mean,” I inquired incredulously, “that someone has broken into the house?”

  “I’m afraid so. Although how they did it—It’s not all over the place,” he added. “Just some rooms on one of the upper floors.”