The Man Who Died Twice

by The Man Who Died Twice (retail) (epub)

  Gilette had a little trouble digesting the statement. He stared at her, jaw sagging until he realized it was sagging and then he tightened it. It took an obvious effort to get himself in hand and when he did his color was high and there were unpleasant glints in his eyes.

  “I think you had better tell me the rest of it,” he said.

  “I intend to.”

  And then Kate was repeating the story Ward had told her. It was complete with all the nuances of motive, friendship, and background, and it embarrassed Ward as he listened because the way she told it she made him sound too compassionate and big-hearted and naïve. At that he was glad that he was spared a second explanation of his plan and hopes, and his only regret was that Alma was not here to learn the truth. He would have liked to watch her reactions, to see how she accepted the impersonation. Now it would have to be done all over again because that she should understand and forgive him was the most important thing of all.

  He realized Kate had finished and that Gilette was still having trouble accepting the things she said. His gaze was still baffled but he did very well with his temper and his voice.

  “Presumably you believed all this,” he said. “I can understand that, if what he said was true. What I do not understand, what is quite beyond me, is why, once he knew that the real nephew was dead, he did not tell the truth.”

  “He wanted to,” Kate said. “That was his first impulse. I had to argue with him.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Because”—Kate looked over at Ward and her smile was twisted but kind—“I thought he was too easygoing. Johnny was dead, murdered; Alma was in danger. I wanted someone right here in the house I could depend on.”

  Osborne stirred in his chair and laughed shortly. “How flattering you are, Kate.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it quite that way. You’re off most of the day and your evenings are usually otherwise occupied. Duncan was gradually falling in love with Alma—at least I hope I’m right in that—and he could be here.” She looked again at Gilette.

  “I had to argue with Duncan,” she said. “I made him mad—at me mostly—because I thought he had a streak of stubbornness in him and I knew if he made his mind up he’d stick it out. You see, Freddie, you weren’t making too much progress,” she said apologetically. “I wanted Duncan working too so I told him the only way he could clear himself was to help find the guilty one.”

  Gilette blew out his breath, glanced at Jarvis, and shook his head. Jarvis shrugged faintly in his understanding. Then, before Gilette could make any further comment, Mike Fabyan appeared in the doorway.

  “Am I intruding?” he asked in a voice that suggested he did not much care. “Is this a meeting of the Board of Governors or something?”

  He leaned for a moment against the casing, big and brown and sinewy-hard. He wore a rumpled linen suit and no tie, his cap was cocked jauntily to match his grin, and his glance lingered longest on Judith Dunham.

  “I am not normally an altruistic character,” he said, taking a folded paper from an inside pocket, “but I am suspicious of gifts. I’m perfectly willing to pay my debts,” he said. “All I want is a reasonable extension.”

  He stepped forward and put the paper in Kate’s lap. She looked at it bewilderedly and then at him.

  “What is it?”

  “The mortgage Johnny held on my boats.”

  Gilette sat up and was instantly attentive. “Where did you get it?”

  “Came in the mail. This morning.”

  “What about the envelope?”

  “Gone.” Fabyan spread his hands. “I threw it over the side before I knew what I had. When I looked for it, it was gone.”

  “I guess you didn’t know, Mike,” Kate said quietly.

  “Know what, my dear?”

  “Know that Johnny added a paragraph to his will that discharged—or canceled or whatever you call it—that mortgage along with two others.”

  Fabyan showed his teeth and his mustache arched upward at the corners. “Don’t kid me, Kate,” he said. “I have a weak heart.”

  Kate examined the document. Then, slowly, she tore it in half and handed Fabyan the pieces. He looked at them, his grin gone and his dark eyes obscured. He cleared his throat.

  “Well,” he said, “I—that is—”

  He sought a word that apparently escaped him. He put the two halves in his pocket and looked up, his dark face enigmatic and composed.

  “What I mean is—thanks. Especially to Johnny.”

  He turned at once, clapping on his cap as he left the veranda. Judith Dunham watched him go and when she saw that Ward noticed this she busied herself with a handkerchief that had been balled in her palm.

  “We realized those mortgages were missing last night when Miss Simmons and I went through the safe,” Gilette said, talking to no one in particular. “The safe was unlocked the morning we found Mr. MacQuade.… It would be a nice motive,” he said slowly, turning now to Jarvis. “Instead of stealing just one mortgage why not all three?”

  Jarvis’s mute gesture indicated he agreed; Osborne did not. “If your idea is that Mike took them,” he said, “why bring his back?”

  “It would be the clever thing to do,” Dunham said, breaking into the discussion for the first time. He sat up and scratched behind his ear. “If Mike took just his he knew it would be missed. It would make a motive for murder.”

  Gilette, as though he did not like this assumption of his prerogative, continued to Jarvis.

  “He could have mailed or destroyed the others,” he said, “but by bringing his own back with that display of innocence, and by gambling that the executors would give him an extension, he is saying, in effect: Do not consider me because I have no motive.”

  He turned to Kate, his manner at once business-like. “I’m sorry. Miss Royce, but I don’t see how we can wait any longer for Miss Simmons. It is urgent that we see her.”

  “I explained—” Kate began.

  Gilette held up his hand. “I know.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “It’s well after eleven and I must insist that you call her. I don’t like to throw my weight around but—”

  He broke off reluctantly but the implication was there and Kate sighed and stood up. She said all right, and when she disappeared inside. Ward turned to Judith. He touched her hand and motioned towards the end of the veranda. He smiled and asked her if she had a minute she could spare.

  Her green eyes inspected him before she allowed them to smile but she said: “Why, yes,” graciously, and accompanied him to the comer of the railing. “How does it seem,” she said, “to be Duncan Ward again? It is Duncan, isn’t it?”

  Ward said it was a great relief, and that he hoped it would not make too much difference.

  “It may to Alma.”

  He glanced away, a little embarrassed because what he had in mind had nothing to do with pleasantries. “What I wanted to find out,” he said, “is whether you told me the truth the other night when I came to your place. I mean, you should decide pretty soon whether you’re going to stick to that story or not.”

  She drew her head back and her glance came up, speculating. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “You said you couldn’t sleep and got up to read. But there was sand on your sneakers. It looked like fresh sand to me.” He hesitated. “I don’t seem to be putting this very well but what I’m getting at is this: Fabyan’s schooner was tied up at the oil company jetty. I think I saw someone in a skiff. If you were on the beach with Fabyan, why then you couldn’t be sure your husband might not have left the house and come back before you did. On the other hand if you were reading, then Fabyan might have come ashore for some other purpose …”

  He never did finish the thought, nor was he able to get any reaction from the woman, because just then there was a commotion inside and she stepped to the window. Ward heard Kate’s voice and that of another woman and now Kate and a maid were on the veranda.

  “She’s not in h
er room,” Kate said to Gilette. “Her bed’s been slept in but she’s not there.” She looked from face to face, her expression distraught and tension working on her voice. “Has anyone seen her? Where could she be?”

  “Let’s not go off the deep end,” Osborne cautioned. “She might be on the beach; she sometimes goes down for an early dip. She might have gone riding.”

  “Then why hasn’t somebody seen her?”

  Osborne said maybe someone had, but Kate was not having any of that. She sent the maid down to the beach on the run and told Osborne to inquire at the stables and then she hurried back inside on some mission of her own.

  20

  THEY searched the house thoroughly first and then the immediate beach, the outbuildings, including the stables, and the abandoned stone tower which had once powered a sugar mill and was now used as a storehouse of sorts. Finally, at twelve thirty, they had to agree that Alma was indeed missing and from that point on Major Gilette took over.

  His manner became calm yet urgent, and his comprehension of the task confronting them was complete and immediate. Because no one knew the purpose behind Alma’s disappearance—it was never suggested that she might have been killed, though this was a thought that crept into Ward’s mind in spite of his effort to keep it submerged—it was decided not to put out a general, islandwide alarm at this time. There was still the possibility that she had gone off by herself, though for what reason no one could guess, and the hope was that she would turn up during the afternoon. Meanwhile Gilette organized the spare manpower at his command.

  He telephoned first the outlying police stations in the nearby Parishes, explaining what he wanted done. He then got out a map and went over it with Osborne and Kate and Dunham and Jarvis. There was talk of caves and gullies, an underground river; there were names of places and roads that meant nothing to Ward. Certain men were detailed to search the immediate beach with its underbrush, rocks, and small coves. Two men were assigned by telephone to cover every craft in the Careenage, and finally those present were given a task.

  Kate and Osborne went off on horseback, disappearing up the slope and into the interior. Gilette took one car, Jarvis another. Dunham, when his area had been mapped for him, went home to get his own car and presently Ward was riding along Highway Two with the sergeant in the tan ducks, who had accompanied Gilette and whose name was Towhill.

  Their immediate objective was an area of deep gullies and small caves in the west central part of the island, but in general the task for today was one of inquiry rather than search.

  For, as Towhill explained, this was a densely populated island. To be sure, there were open spaces and hills and shoreline that were unoccupied, but there was no road which was not traveled daily. There were certain rather obvious places where a person might hide or be hidden, but the best chance short of an all-out search was the natives, who could be depended upon to tell what they had seen and who had passed by.

  “No one,” Tow hill said, “can hide on this island, sir, without he has help and people to hide him. People live too close together.”

  Ward saw what the sergeant meant as the afternoon wore on. He saw deep gullies cut in the high bluffs that rose like a backbone in the center of the island and stretched north. Deep clefts like river beds cut the upper ridges at varying intervals and some of these were spanned by massive stone bridges built during the old days of slave labor. Below them the trees were tall and close-standing, some of them palms—cabbage and macaw—and some he could not name. Near the bottoms the boulders were clad with creepers and ferns and occasionally he had a glimpse of a pool or small stream.

  “Small caves down there,” Towhill said once, pointing. “Pools where the water drips down through the porous rock.”

  “You’d have to go over it foot by foot,” Ward said.

  “Right, sir. Tomorrow we maybe do that. Today we talk.”

  And that is what the sergeant did. He traveled side roads that were winding and precipitous and tree lined, others that were flat and open, all of them narrow. He stopped at country stores, often located at an intersection or a turn in the road, never more than rude shacks, open-windowed, uninviting. He spoke to the loungers on the steps, to the women who stood so classically erect with bundles and trays and sheaves of cane on their heads. He stopped buses and trucks and paused briefly wherever he found a man or woman trudging the roadside. In all he spent four hours covering no more than twenty crisscrossed miles, and when he came back to Highpoint at five thirty, though he had no word of Alma, he had left word behind so that she could not even enter that area without being noticed.

  Ward stood in the courtyard and watched the sergeant drive away. He was hot and tired and dirty. His shirt clung wetly to his back and his angular face was tense and shiny with sweat as he fought against the feeling of helplessness and futility that had been nagging him ever since noon.

  Even in the beginning he had realized that in a physical way he could offer nothing to the search. Gilette’s plans and instructions had meaning only to the others who knew the island, and Ward understood that if he was to accomplish anything at all it would have to come from some other direction. As a stranger with no working knowledge of the physical problems he had throughout the afternoon devoted himself to the one thing he was trained to do: to think, to use his lawyer’s mind.

  As a passenger, listening to the sergeant’s comments and observations, it had been difficult to concentrate but he had kept trying, not wondering so much why Alma was missing or where she could be, but thinking beyond this to the murder of MacQuade and Tenney, trying to remember the little things, to find a pattern, to form a working hypothesis that would somehow lead to the guilty one. This, he kept telling himself, demanded no knowledge of geography. There was an answer somewhere and he had to find it while there was still time.

  He told himself this once more as he stood in the court and so intent were his thoughts that when he heard the laughter it took him a few seconds to discover where it came from. Over by the garage two colored boys were playing, the object of their hilarity a clumsily fashioned wooden boat which was being pushed back and forth along the paving. They stopped when they heard the horseman coming down the drive.

  Len Osborne turned his horse towards the stables in back of the garage and Ward waited for him, aware at once of the look of grim discouragement on the other’s dark and shiny face. He made himself ask a question; he asked if Osborne had any luck, knowing the answer just as he knew the other did not want to talk.

  “None.” Osborne started past. “What time is it?” he asked tonelessly, and when Ward told him he continued on into the house.

  Ward took a breath and tried to pull back his shoulders. He glanced again at the two small boys, hearing part of what one of them said. They wore shorts that were very short and faded, with ragged jerseys, and one was tipping the handmade boat from side to side.

  “Ain’t spirits that rock de boat, mahn.”

  “What, then? ’Cause I see it rock.”

  “De boat rock, den it’s a devil fish tugging at de anchor.”

  He broke off in a howl of laughter and Ward shook his head, uncomprehending, and trudged into the house, seeing no one and continuing on to the veranda. Here the chairs stretched emptily on either side of him in a disordered row and the quiet was complete; even the breeze was still as he stood there and spoke silently to himself.

  “Think, damn you,” he said. “Think!”

  Far off to the left a freighter angled southward and he wondered about its destination. Closer inshore and angling sharply nearer were a half dozen fishing boats coming in with the day’s catch, their huge sails close-hauled. Somehow the word boat stuck in his consciousness. There came an association with the toy boat the boys had been playing with, and now he looked out over the treetops at the small cabin-cruiser which rode motionless and secure upon the almost glassy surface.

  He heard someone come through the doorway and glanced round to find Dunham watching him an
d mopping his round pink face. Ward asked if he had heard anything, and Dunham said no, and still some part of his mind continued its speculation, which Dunham’s appearance had failed to interrupt. Finally he pointed towards the cruiser and said:

  “What about that? Do you think it’s been looked into?”

  Dunham moved up beside him. He was still working with the handkerchief, patting it down inside his collar now, his thinning sandy hair wet and matted.

  “I should imagine so,” he said thoughtfully. “You’d think whoever searched the beach would have had a look, wouldn’t you?”

  He was silent a moment while a frown began to work on his brows.

  “Still,” he said, “it wouldn’t do any harm to have another look.” He considered the idea one more second. “Perhaps it would be a good idea. Shall we give it a try?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll get the oars.…”

  “Can we get into the cabin?”

  “There’s a key. In that highboy where we keep the car keys. You know the one? Has a wooden marker.”

  They met on the grassy slope in front of the house, and when they reached the beach Ward saw that the skiff he had noticed the other afternoon was no longer resting bottom up. It was close to the water now and he knew that someone had used it quite recently. It took all the edge off his new-found hope but he said nothing about this as they dragged the boat into the water.

  Dunham was wearing shorts, and now he kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks. “You get in,” he said. “I’ll push off. Can you manage the oars?”

  Ward rowed out to the cruiser in water so clear the gently sloping bottom seemed no more than a foot away. He asked about this and Dunham said the cruiser drew about two and a half feet, adding that there was always four to six feet of water, depending on the tide. The boat itself lacked the sleek perfection of similar craft Ward had seen in the States, for it was more crudely fashioned, rugged and well designed, but lacking the brightwork and glass and over-all air of sportiness that he had come to expect in a cabin cruiser. At home he would have considered it more of a work boat than a pleasure craft.