“Darnley’s secretary,” whispered Harkway. “Name’s Anita Willetts. She’s come to confirm the identification.”
I remembered then the stricken woman I had seen in Franklyn Elliott’s office. I said, “Where’s Elliott?”
“He sent word this morning he was ill. Miss Willetts came instead.”
“I thought Elliott had to come.”
“No,” Harkway said slowly, “No. At this stage he has a legal right to refuse to leave the State of New York. A coroner’s inquest is not a trial.”
Trial or not, Jack and I were there and I bitterly resented Franklyn Elliott’s absence. I fancied Harkway also resented it, though discretion kept him quiet. Jack and I sat down and Harkway tiptoed off upstairs.
“I’ll get a line,” he said, “on what’s going on.”
I knew precisely what was going on. John Standish, I had been informed, would make an opening speech, and, from that locked and curtained room three flights above, I almost fancied I could hear the rumbling accents of his voice, explaining to the members of a local jury at what date and hour, under what circumstances, and exactly how he had found a dead man in our car. A dead man and a bag which contained over a hundred-thousand dollars. I was convinced he would not mention Franklyn Elliott.
“You,” said Jack suddenly to me, “are the greenest-looking woman I ever saw. Go over and get yourself a drink of water. And say to yourself as you go, ‘the Storms may be down, but damned if they’ll ever admit it.’”
I went past Dennis Clark to the water cooler. Anita Willetts didn’t look up from her chair, but wept steadily on. I saw her fumble for another handkerchief, and I put mine in her hand. She looked up then from reddened, swollen eyes, hesitated and finally took the handkerchief.
I drew a glass of water and drank it slowly. “You’re Lola Storm, aren’t you?” said Anita Willetts, presently. A certain awkwardness in her tone made me nod and turn at once to leave. She did something which surprised me. She leaned out, and patted my hand. “Sit down, my dear. You needn’t leave. I feel quite sure you and your husband didn’t murder Mr. Darnley.”
She had obviously adored the dead man, and I was deeply touched. I was disconcerted when she added shrewdly, “If you’d wanted to kill him, you had only to drive him on to your cottage. Or so it seems to me.” She must have seen me flush, for she added, “I don’t mean to be offensive, but it was odd, your picking him up. But then—” and again her eyes overflowed “—Mr. Darnley had been acting so oddly I can’t help believing your story is true. In a way I feel responsible for the dreadful thing that happened to him.”
“You feel responsible!”
“Because of that money he carried in his bag,” said Miss Willetts, evidently grateful for a chance to unburden her mind. “I got that money for him, Mrs. Storm. Every noon hour for two weeks I cashed checks for him at his various banks. I used to feel extremely nervous coming back to the office with several thousand dollars in my purse, and Mr. Darnley made me nervous by his attitude. He warned me to tell no one about the money, particularly I wasn’t to let anything slip to Mr. Elliott. I thought it was all wrong then, and that last day when he told me he was making a trip, and started off to the train with those two bags, well, I think I knew he would never come back.”
“You saw him start to the train,” I said excitedly. “You knew he was coming to Crockford!”
“No, Mrs. Storm. He told me he was going to Chicago.”
She had little more to add. She had been shocked, perplexed and bewildered by the whole affair. When she had last seen Hiram Darnley in the office at one o’clock on that Friday afternoon, when he had picked up those traveling bags, he had worn a mustache, he had been dressed in quiet, impeccable taste. “He was,” said Miss Willetts sadly, “a most fastidious dresser. I’ve seen the clothes he wore up here, and I can’t conceive how he could bring himself to put them on.”
Presently she was called upstairs to testify. Dennis Cark followed her. It was four o’clock when Lester Harkway appeared at the door and said, “Well, Mr. Storm, it’s your turn next.”
Jack took a long breath and rose. I rose, too. I knew it wasn’t exactly legal, my going to the court room while Jack testified, but I didn’t expect to yield the point without a battle. None was necessary. Harkway conveniently looked away when we reached the proper door, and I slipped in. The policeman even found an inconspicuous chair for me, and though Dr. Rand, who was presiding from a raised bench which overlooked the room, certainly saw me, he gravely pretended not to.
I stared hard at the members of the jury! I was prejudiced perhaps, but I didn’t like their looks. Jack was sworn immediately. It was explained to him that the hearing was informal, and it was not explained that the informal hearing might well pave the way to a charge of murder. That was understood.
The room was very small and, since the windows had been curtained, dark. A single naked electric bulb burned overhead. The furniture was the poorest grade of pine; faded, worn linoleum was spread upon the floor. But the machinery of justice—even in a cheap and illy furnished court room—has a certain frightening, impressive quality. As I remember it, I felt I needed air.
When Jack began to speak I relaxed. He talked to Dr. Rand as simply and naturally as though the two of them had been alone, and I know his manner had its effect upon the jury. I watched them.
“He’s going over great,” Harkway whispered.
His tone seemed abstracted, and I noticed that his eyes were fixed upon a door set in the wall near the jury box. “What’s that?” I whispered.
“The jury room. I’ve closed that door twice already. It keeps coming open.”
He rose, tiptoed past the jury, closed the door again and leaned there against the wall. From the witness chair Jack said, “My only connection with Hiram Darnley came through Luella Coatesnash. I believed at the time I met him and I believe now that she sent him to me.”
“Wait a minute before going on,” said Dr. Rand. “I want to put this cablegram in evidence.” Whereupon he read out the following message, received the day before from Paris: “I did not request Hiram Darnley to telephone the Storms or to go to Crockford. I cannot understand his actions or his use of the name Elmer Lewis. I have not communicated with Darnley since leaving America. Luella Coatesnash.”
Jack turned white. “That cablegram,” he said, “is a lie. A palpable, unmitigated lie! I have some rights here, and I insist…”
“Control yourself,” began Dr. Rand. “You’re out of order, you must…”
He, too, broke off. The members of the jury were surging to their feet. There was a violent commotion near the box, and at first I couldn’t see what was happening. Then I saw. The door to the room beyond was open, and Harkway had seized and was struggling with someone who had been crouched at the keyhole, listening there. It was a woman. One arm shielded her face from view, and then she dropped her arm, ceased struggling and I saw her clearly.
It was Annabelle Bayne.
There was a stunned silence. Then, in cold fury, Dr. Rand rose from the bench. “What were you doing in the jury room?” Annabelle Bayne pushed back the hair from her face. “Eavesdropping,” she said clearly, “what do you suppose?” Before, in his outraged astonishment, he could speak she whirled on Jack. “You! Listen, you! I wanted to see how far you’d go in blackening the character of a very old woman who isn’t present to defend herself. That, my fine lad, is a pretty low way to defend yourself from a charge of murder.”
If I ever saw outright hatred in a human being’s eyes, I saw it in the eyes of Annabelle Bayne as she looked at Jack.
CHAPTER TEN
The Man with a Bag
Annabelle Bayne turned on her heel and started to walk quickly from the court room. I’ve never seen an angrier man than Dr. Rand. “Come back here!” he shouted from the bench. “You’re by no means finished with this court.”
&n
bsp; For a moment I think she meant to defy the order, but I suppose his tone alarmed her, for she turned around, came back and quietly sat down. She seemed perfectly self-possessed, and as Jack resumed his testimony she even smiled to herself. An odd, contained and scornful little smile it was.
A moment later Jack stepped down. He had finished his story in an aura of anti-climax. The jury was inattentive and uninterested. Jack’s future and mine were at stake, but the jurymen were watching Annabelle Bayne.
“Now, Miss Bayne,” said Dr. Rand, “you will kindly take the stand.”
The coffee-colored hat went up, the strange eyes flashed, and for a second time I fancy she considered open defiance. She thought better of it, rose and sauntered slowly forward.
“This is quite beyond me,” she said, as she languidly took the oath. “I know nothing about this case.”
“You know why you hid in the jury room. That’s a serious offense. Explain it!”
“I’ve told you what I was doing there,” she said sullenly. “Luella Coatesnash is a friend 6f mine, an old, very dear friend, and I was determined to hear what was being said behind her back. What that man—” she looked hard at Jack “—was saying. I’ve heard of the rumors and lies he’s been spreading. And I’ve resented them. Luella Coatesnash scarcely knew Hiram Darnley. He might have been her lawyer, but she hardly ever saw him, and she had no conception of his character.”
The jury overlooked the significance of her statement. Aggravated by her manner, Dr. Rand did not. His voice gained a quick, new interest.
“Will you please explain that?”
I thought the witness looked frightened. “Explain what? What is there to explain?”
“Were you acquainted with Darnley? Did you know him well?”
“I did not!”
“You have inferred you were more familiar with his character than Mrs. Coatesnash was. How does that happen?”
“Oh, I see.” She touched the handkerchief to her lips, glanced up brightly. “I see what you mean. Darnley visited Mrs. Coatesnash here in Crockford many years ago. I met him in a casual way, and took a strong dislike to him. Although Mrs. Coatesnash trusted him implicitly, I considered him stupid, for all his reputation as a brilliant lawyer.”
“Then you did know him!”
“If you choose to call it that. I saw him only twice.”
“When was this?”
Annabelle Bayne said slowly, “Many years ago. In June of nineteen-twenty. Jane Coatesnash was buried that month, you may remember. Mr. Darnley came to Crockford for the funeral.”
Suddenly Harkway, who was listening closely, walked to the coroner’s bench, leaned over and whispered something to Dr. Rand. The coroner started. He turned to Annabelle Bayne and said sharply, “Did you see Hiram Darnley’s body while it lay in the undertaking parlors here?”
She began a glib denial. Her clear brown eyes met my eyes—and then, I suppose, she remembered. She was, for a moment, shaken, definitely alarmed. Her voice faltered, recovered.
“Yes, I did see the body. It bad almost slipped my mind. I dropped into Brownlee’s Saturday afternoon on my way home from town.”
A dead silence fell. She appeared not to notice. Her restless hands lay still; her chin rose at its proud, usual tilt. The coroner spoke gravely.
“Hiram Darnley was not identified until Monday morning. Why didn’t you go to the police and identify him on Saturday?”
“I couldn’t identify him.”
“You couldn’t!”
“I didn’t recognize him,” she said rapidly. “I hadn’t seen the man in fifteen years. His appearance was not memorable or striking. I wouldn’t have known him from Adam if I had met him walking down the street.”
I knew she lied. Evidently Dr. Rand shared my opinion. He tried hard—quite without result—to shake the witness. Annabelle Bayne stuck stubbornly to her denials, until finally she left the stand and departed from the court room. With her went the material of drama.
The inquest developed nothing further. At five o’clock the members of the jury retired. Their deliberations were mercifully short. At twenty minutes past the hour Jack and I heard the only verdict which the evidence would allow. Hiram Darnley had met his death at the hands of a person or persons unknown.
What that stolid country jury really believed I cannot say. Probably most of the jurymen believed that Jack and I had murdered Hiram Darnley or knew who had. But there must have been a minority who like myself, thought Annabelle Bayne could tell more than she had told. For like all juries, the members of that secret panel talked, and it seemed to me that after the coroner’s inquest Jack’s and my position in the village became somewhat easier.
We met John Standish in the lower hall. He congratulated us bleakly on the verdict, and indicated that the “protective custody” was to be lifted, and that Harkway was to report in the morning at the station. The investigation evidently was to be tirelessly pursued, but where it was going and in what direction Standish didn’t say.
Harkway accompanied Jack and me to supper at the Tally-ho Inn, a guest this time and not a guard. We talked about the inquest. We talked about Annabelle Bayne.
“Why,” said Jack, “has she such a vigorous dislike of me, and why is she shouting so loudly in defense of Mrs. Coatesnash? Why, for that matter, should the two be friends? Offhand, I’d say they were poles apart.”
The policeman gave us a curious glance. “Haven’t you heard about Jane Coatesnash? Annabelle Bayne was her chum. After the girl’s death, she and the mother became very close. In a way, it’s an odd relationship.”
I thought personally that fifteen years would put a pretty severe strain on a sentimental loyalty. I said so. Harkway buttered a piece of bread.
“Then you don’t know about the girl?”
“Only that she’s dead. Why? Is there more?”
“I’m not a very good source.” The policeman reached absently for the coffee pot as I was about to pour, encountered my hand, flushed, permitted me to fill his cup. “Thank you, Mrs. Storm.
To get back to Jane Coatesnash—if you want the straight facts, it might be better to go to the newspaper files.”
“The newspapers!” I felt a prickling at the roots of my hair. “What do you mean? What happened to the girl?”
“Jane Coatesnash was drowned,” said Harkway.
I must have looked disappointed. At any rate, he smiled, then proceeded to tell us all he knew of the tragedy which had blasted Mrs. Coatesnash’s life. The story, still whispered about the village, was singular, to say the least.
Fifteen years before, Jane Coatesnash, then a student at Mather College for Women (located high in the Berkshires), had left the campus on a shopping trip. It was her nineteenth birthday. Wearing an expensive fur coat, a gift from her mother, she had started to town to buy a matching hat and gloves. Thereafter she had been seen no more.
“The girl vanished,” said Harkway. “She vanished like a puff of smoke.”
A cool salt breeze drifted into the dining room, stirred the cheerful draperies, blew lightly across the table. Jack’s eyes and mine met. Between sips of coffee Harkway continued the narration. After twenty-four hours of what he termed criminal delay, the college authorities telephoned Mrs. Coatesnash. She went immediately to Mather, accompanied by Annabelle Bayne. A frenzied private investigation followed; detectives buzzed up and down the streets of the sleepy little town; thousands of dollars poured into the search. Three days later the story of the missing heiress appeared in every newspaper in the United States. Police of 48 States were on the lookout for a brown-eyed girl in sables. Scores of amateur sleuths participated in the public hullabaloo, lured on by the hope of a $25,000 reward.
Harkway drained the dregs of his coffee. “No one ever collected the dough. It was posted for months.”
“You said the girl was drowned.”
“She was drowned. Jane Coatesnash disappeared in February. Five months later, in June, a couple of fishermen picked up her body in the Connecticut River.”
Jack said, “Murder? Suicide? Accident?”
Harkway spread his hands. “The body had been weeks in the water. You couldn’t tell what had happened. The police followed the usual routine, and wrote it off as accidental death.”
“In that case how could they be sure of the identification?”
“The local dentist identified the body from work he had done on the teeth. There was a bracelet too, as I recall it, a bracelet that had belonged to the Coatesnash girl. She was drowned, all right. Everyone was satisfied on that count—everyone except the mother.”
Jack looked a quick question.
“Hope dies hard,” said the policeman. “People are likely to believe what they want to believe. Also there was one queer angle. The fur coat wasn’t found. Mrs. Coatesnash did everything to trace the coat; you can find advertisements requesting information in newspapers a few years back. Nothing ever came of them; nothing could. But I hear Mrs. Coatesnash, as she got older, went a little potty on the subject. Local people will tell you that she expects to see her daughter coming around any corner, looking just as she looked fifteen years ago.” Hark way folded his napkin. “I’m not acquainted with the old dame myself, but that sounds exaggerated to me.”
The sad little story had reached its sad conclusion. Hark-way had no other information, and presently he left us. Jack and I lingered in the dining room, talking, speculating, trying to fit together the murder of Hiram Darnley and the fifteen-year-old tragedy. Why we should have believed there was a connection, I do not know. But we did believe it and our instinct was correct, although the link eluded us for days.
Many times Jack and I have driven past the village burial ground, a calm and lovely place on a wooded hill. We had often planned to examine the quaint old-fashioned stones; that night, for the first time, we walked through the scrolled iron gates. A white moon shone upon the city of the dead, and silvered brief graven paragraphs which perpetuated the memory of forgotten lives. We discovered the plot we sought, paused before a mausoleum of gray granite that bore the Coatesnash name. Luella’s husband lay inside. Beside the mausoleum, a slender marble shaft pointed like a finger toward the sky. There was no name on the shaft, simply the engraved inscription: “Sacred to the Memory of My Only Child”
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