Wall

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  She lay back in her chair. The color had faded out of her face, and she seemed on the verge of collapse.

  “Not Howard,” she said. “O my God, not Howard.”

  That was all there was to that interview. She was plainly beyond more questioning. I tried, but she only shook her head. In the end I called the butler and got her some brandy, but as I left I could feel her eyes, enormous in her pale face, following me like those of a scared child.

  I came back home, to this porch, to the monotony of high tide and low tide, dawn and sunset. It seemed as though the world had suddenly stood still; that everything had stopped and only my mind went on, feverishly active.

  Nevertheless, there was tragedy in the making during that interval. No more murder, thank heaven, but real trouble; the sheriff with Arthur’s key ring locked in his office safe, and those letters of his about a dog going their slow way to the dead letter office and back to Mamie, in his office. And even before that one of the minor miracles of modern criminology: those photographs of the fingerprints from the doctor’s car on their way to Washington. A machine started, a slow quiet movement, inevitable as fate itself, and then a card dropping.

  A thousand miles away at the doctor’s funeral a reverent voice intoning: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” And in Washington, in his shirt sleeves—for the day was hot—a small man with spectacles picking up that card, examining it and carrying it away.

  “Here it is,” he said.

  There was no excitement. The card might send a man to his death, but there it was merely routine. Less than an hour later, from another room in the building, a longish telegram went to Russell Shand, and Shand took it to the District Attorney.

  Bullard read the message and looked up, angrily flushed.

  “What does that prove?” he said. “That this Page—or Pell—killed some people with his car! Any drunken fool does that. We know he saw the doctor and rode in that car of his. Why wouldn’t his prints be on it? We’ll get him, but then what? If we keep on we’ll have half the people of this county in jail.”

  “Who put them there?” said the sheriff belligerently. “You’ve been playing to the newspapers ever since this thing broke, Bullard. Now, by the great horn spoon, suppose you let somebody else have a chance?”

  He went to New York a day or two later. This time the police there were playing ball, as he put it. He did not have to go to the library, as I had. They had the files and the records of the trial. They gave him a small room somewhere, and when he finally emerged, hot and dirty, he hauled a small newspaper clipping from his pocket and showed it to them.

  “Got any idea where that would come from?” he said.

  They had none. They examined it curiously.

  “What about it?” they said. “His marriage was off. That wouldn’t be news. He’d gone up for eight years.”

  “I was thinking,” said the sheriff, “about that ad on the other side. I’ve got a hunch that when I find who was selling those pups, I’ll have got somewhere in this case.”

  They laughed. They had been polite that day, but he was still a country sheriff to them, “stepping high over plowed ground,” as he said.

  He did not come back at once. He went over Juliette’s apartment again, and one day the harassed young man let him into our house, in response to a wire from me. He spent some time in the basement, which because of its barred windows had not been wired, and I believe he came up smiling. And he saw Samuel Dunne in the red brick house and even sat in at one of the meetings.

  “Darndest thing I ever saw,” he told me later. “If everybody didn’t have an Aunt Mary I’d think I heard from the old lady. Least it sounded like her. She told me to go back home and mind my own business!”

  The evening before he left he went to see Arthur at his apartment. Arthur and Mary Lou were dressing for dinner on some hotel roof to escape the heat, and Mary Lou absolutely refused to leave the two men together. “What concerns Arthur concerns me,” she said. “Only I wish you’d let him alone. Fred Martin did those murders, and you know it.”

  There was no use in temporizing. Russell Shand got out that key ring and put it on a table.

  “Thought you’d like this back Arthur,” he said.

  Mary Lou was fixing her hair at a mirror, but she saw Arthur’s face and turned. She looked from one man to the other, and it was she who broke the silence.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Mike found it in the toolshed.” He looked at Arthur, and then unexpectedly he put out his hand.

  “Kind of awkward, losing a bunch of keys,” he said quietly. “I lost mine once, and I went around like a hen with her head off until I found them.”

  He went away at once, leaving Arthur staring after him. A wise and kindly man, our sheriff. “I sort of thought I’d better leave,” he told me afterwards. “Looked like Mary Lou was getting fixed to kiss me, and I’d kept the record clean up to then.”

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  HE CAME BACK THE next day. Not alone. He had two New York detectives with him. They took a drawing room and sat up half the night, discussing the case. The alarm for Allen—he was still Allen to me—was out in earnest now. Once again radio and teletype were busy. There was an intensive search going on, this time with a grim determination and a dogged persistence that were new.

  Only Russell Shand kept his head.

  “Sure I want to find him,” he told Bullard. “I haven’t said yet I want to see him convicted; that’s all. And I’d hold onto Martin. A day or two more won’t hurt him.”

  For as the facts became known, as such facts do become known, there was a rising demand that Fred Martin be released. The Clinton Paper had an editorial on the subject.

  “We have the anomalous situation of one man being held for a murder, while an intensive search goes on for another individual suspected of the same crime; a man, moreover, who already has a conviction for manslaughter to his credit. Granting that Fred Martin had a possible motive, his past record is clean. He married a second time under a misapprehension, but there is nothing essentially criminal in such an act. On the other hand, the man Page—or Pell, as he called himself—was not only in the vicinity during all three murders. He had known Juliette Ransom well. He undoubtedly knew Helen Jordan, the second victim, and was afraid of what she might tell, and his fingerprints have been found on the murder car owned by Doctor Jamieson.

  “Compared with all this, the case against Fred Martin becomes negligible.”

  It was on the second day after his return that the sheriff brought one of the detectives to the house. Probably Bullard had been riding him hard, for he was grim and unsmiling.

  “Sorry, Marcia,” he said. “This is Mr. Warren. He’s working with us. He wants to ask you some questions.”

  I was trembling, but at least I kept my voice steady. There was a fire in the library, for the weather had turned cold, and the sheriff stood in front of it, not talking but watching me.

  “Just tell him everything, Marcia,” he said. “We know most of it anyhow.”

  I could not do that, but I went as far as I could.

  I told of my first meeting with Allen, and of going to the trailer for tea; but when I explained the reason for going back to the camp the next night, the detective stopped me.

  “What do you think he meant, that he would let no innocent man go to the chair?”

  “I thought he knew something he had not told me.”

  He looked significantly at the sheriff; but he was gazing serenely out a window.

  “I see. And did he say why he wanted an alibi for your brother?”

  “He didn’t think he was guilty.”

  “Still, wasn’t that rather unusual? Unless he actually knew your brother was innocent?”

  “How could he know that? He didn’t even know Arthur.”

  “He might know who was guilty, Miss Lloyd.”

  There was more, of
course. Some of it I have forgotten. At last he came directly to the point.

  “You don’t know where he is now? Pell, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “Just how often have you seen him?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Five or six times.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  I did not mention the cruiser. I could not.

  “I was giving a dinner. I went out onto the porch and he was there. I had only a minute to talk to him. People were arriving.”

  “And the date?”

  I gave it to him and he wrote it down. Then he leaned forward.

  “What was that talk about, Miss Lloyd? Please be accurate. You may have to repeat this under oath.”

  He looked surprised when I told him.

  “He wanted you to leave the island? Did he say why?”

  “He seemed to think I wasn’t safe here.”

  Warren sat still, drumming with his fingers on the arm of his chair. The sheriff smiled for the first time.

  “I told you, Warren,” he said. “Too many things don’t jibe. Why did he want Marcia to leave the island? So he wouldn’t kill her? Who put that hatchet I told you about in the room upstairs? Who in hades knocked Pell out and then carted him off to a hospital? And why didn’t he kill the doctor when he made that call on him, if he was going to kill him at all? They were out together in that same car.”

  Warren was silent.

  “What’s more,” the sheriff went on, “a man can kill people with his car and not be a killer. Look at that key ring! If the gardener here had found it a month or so ago it would have caused Arthur Lloyd a lot of trouble. But Arthur Lloyd was no killer. We’ve had one attack and one murder since, with a clear alibi for him in both cases. As it is—”

  “What about the key ring?” I gasped.

  The sheriff looked at me and smiled.

  “It’s like this, Marcia. I expect it was Arthur who found that body up the creek. Just happened on it, most likely. Well, what would he be likely to do? He knew there was a good circumstantial case against him. What’s more, he was a lawyer and he knew that without a body there was no murder, in the eyes of the law. No corpus delicti.”

  “You mean that he buried her?” I asked weakly.

  “That’s about it. Mike had the keys to the toolshed that night, so he broke in and got a spade. It stood out like a sore thumb all along that whoever buried her did it decently. She wasn’t just tossed in and covered up. It was a fool thing to do, probably, but after all she’d been his wife. Then after he did it he found he’d lost his keys! Must have been a pretty tough situation for him, when you think about it.”

  I could imagine that now. Poor Arthur! I found my lips trembling. The detective looked almost shocked.

  “Took a good-sized chance, sheriff, didn’t you?” he said. “If you knew all that—”

  The sheriff smiled.

  “I know these people,” he said. “You don’t.”

  The detective got up. It was apparent that he disapproved of all this. These were not the hard-boiled methods of a big city. All this nonsense about knowing people! Who knew anybody else when it came to murder?

  He cleared his throat.

  “We might look at those rooms, sheriff,” he said. “You’ve got that hatchet on your brain!”

  I went up with them. It was a bright cold day, with the sun pouring in; and nothing could have been more normal than the hospital suite appeared, now set in order again. The wallpaper was as fresh as the day it had been put on, twenty-odd years ago. In the nurse’s room the cot was neatly made up, and the trunks and boxes were closed and in their places. The broken china had been removed, but the toys remained, and on top of a wardrobe Arthur’s old cage still stood, mute reminder of the white mice he had kept, and which had filled in his convalescence from everything, from whooping cough to mumps.

  I stood there looking at it. It reminded me of something, but I could not think what it was. Mother had loathed the creatures, but I had liked them. It had been one of my virtues in Arthur’s eyes. Then what—

  The men examined the other room carefully. I could hear them raising the window, and even turning back the rug. When they reappeared it was the sheriff who spoke.

  “That night Maggie was hurt up here, Marcia,” he said. “She ever remember any more about it?”

  “She thinks she was walking in her sleep. She has an idea she was in that room when she was struck.”

  “What part of the room?”

  “In the corner by the bed there.”

  I went to the doorway and showed him, and he went back again and rapped on the wall. It was solid, and he looked baffled.

  “What was she doing there?” he asked. “Or does she remember?”

  “She thinks she was on her knees, as though she was looking for something. But she doesn’t know what it was.”

  They went away soon after that, Mr. Warren looking faintly amused and mildly superior.

  “There’s your hatchet!” he said, as they got into the sheriff’s car. “A sleepwalker! You’ll probably find that she carried it up there herself.”

  “Might be,” said the sheriff. “Only trouble with that, she’s a peace-loving woman, and it’s kind of hard to think of her carrying it about here with her. Then, too, where did she get it? They don’t stock that kind in town.”

  I was left, still trying to remember about Arthur’s mouse cage. That afternoon something happened which drove all thought of it out of my head. William, bringing me my tea in the morning room at five o’clock, told me about it. He put down the tray, lifted and replaced the sliced lemon, coughed apologetically, and said:

  “I understand they have found the man they were looking for, miss.”

  “What man?” I said, my heart sinking.

  “The painter. Mr. Pell.”

  I still do not know how he learned it. I never have known how our secrets, such as they are, are always known by our servants before we learn them. But I do know that I dropped the empty tea cup and broke it to pieces.

  “Where did they find him?”

  “Well, they didn’t exactly find him, miss.” He had stooped and was picking bits of china from the floor. “That’s one of the old Dresden cups. Your mother thought a lot of those cups,” he said, with reproach in his voice.

  “What do you mean?” I said frantically. “Get up, William, and look at me. What is this story you are trying to tell me?”

  He looked hurt.

  “He wasn’t exactly found,” he repeated, straightening stiffly. “I understand he walked into the courthouse at Clinton and gave himself up, miss.”

  I sat there, staring at him. I believe he brought a brush and pan and gathered up the scattered pieces of the cup. I think he spoke to me, and I answered. But I remember nothing until Maggie found me with my tea untouched and my face gray, and with William’s help got me upstairs and into my room. There she put me to bed, an electric pad at my feet—“They’re like ice, miss”—and brought me some whisky in a glass.

  She asked no questions. She merely mothered me. When I was breathing better she stood over the bed and put a hand on my forehead, as she had done so often when I was a child.

  “I expect he’s all right,” she said, in her expressionless voice. “That Russell Shand is no fool. They’d have arrested Arthur if it hadn’t been for him. There’s a lot of stuff nobody knows yet. When that comes out—”

  “Oh, Maggie!” I said, and cried as I had not cried for years, with my head on her stiffly starched breast.

  The details came in slowly. On that afternoon, at two o’clock, a man walked into the courthouse. The place was strange to him, and he asked for the sheriff’s office. The sheriff was out, and after some hesitation he inquired for Bullard. He was neat enough, but he looked tired and dusty; and the secretary in the District Attorney’s outer office looked at him askance.

  “He’s busy,” she said. “He’s in conference.”

  Allen smiled, as if
something amused him.

  “You might take in my name anyhow—or a stick of dynamite!” he said. “You’ll find the effect will be about the same.”

  It was. Bullard was inside with a half dozen men: two deputy sheriffs, a reporter or two, a county detective, and one of the men from New York. The desk was littered, and in the resulting rush for the door papers were scattered all over the floor. The two deputies got out first and caught Allen by the arms. He stood perfectly still, and they looked a little foolish.

  “I understand you are looking for me,” he said. “The name is Page. Langdon Page.”

  “You dirty so-and-so!” said the New York man furiously. “What’s the idea anyhow? If you think you’re going to softsoap yourself out of this mess—”

  “There’s a young lady in the room,” said Allen, grinning at him. “You might remember that. I suppose there is some place else to go?”

  “And how!” said the New York detective derisively.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  I DID NOT KNOW all this at the time. Bad as things were, I did not believe for a moment that they could hold him for the murders. He had broken his parole, and now he had surrendered. He would be taken back; years would pass, and he might still be there in prison, locked up away from the open he had loved so much. Any dreams I might have had had died hard that night.

  To make matters worse, the house was strange again. After a series of bright days a fog had come in, crawling along the surface of the water and gradually blotting out the islands. As always it brought in a raw dampness, and in spite of the electric heating pad I shivered in my bed.

  I did not sleep much, but I dozed at intervals, rousing with the jerk which means tense nerves. It was only eleven o’clock when I heard Chu-Chu growling, and sat up in bed. The house was very still, the servants sleeping. As I sat up I realized that the bells were ringing again.

  I still have no explanation. It was not late. Perhaps Samuel Dunne and that eerie circle of his was sitting that night, hearing from Verna, or Emily or Jean. Perhaps they even liberated some force which reached the house. Whatever that explanation may be I only know that, lying wide awake after the bells had stopped and the house was quiet once more, I remembered what I had forgotten about the mouse cage; and so took the first step toward solving our mystery.