Wall

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  I went to the head of the back stairs. She was still in the kitchen, moving about. I could hear her running water for the kettle and building up the fire in the stove. It would be half an hour or more before she came back, and as quickly as I could I got the key and, passing her open door, went up the staircase in the wing.

  I was nervous, but with the lights on the rooms seemed as usual, and I retrieved the hat from under the mattress on the bed and took a quick survey of the place. The bed would have to be remade eventually. It showed signs of having been used. But with Ellen’s careful counting of the weekly sheets it would be difficult to account for the extra ones. I got the hat, none the better for its flattening, turned the pillow to its fresh side, and went downstairs again.

  But I knew that somehow I had to dispose of the hat. It would be impossible to conceal it from Maggie, and I dared not throw it away as it was. In the end I got a pair of scissors, and I was on the upper porch, cutting it into bits and dropping them into the water below, when Jordan’s voice behind me almost sent me over the railing.

  “I’ve brought you some tea and toast, miss,” she said.

  I simply let go of the scissors and what remained of the hat, and they fell into the water. When I turned she was just behind me, holding a tray.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You startled me. Will you put it in my room?”

  I watched her putting it down, and her face was set and hard. She went out again without speaking, but I knew then that she was a potential enemy, and a suspicious one.

  The county sheriff, Russell Shand, came to see me early the next morning. He looked tired but indomitable as usual, and I was sitting up in bed when he came in, my tray beside me and my arms and neck bare. He was not abashed. He pulled a chair beside the bed and eyed the coffee pot.

  “Got a toothmug or something around that I could use?” he inquired. “I could do with a bit of coffee.”

  He got up and brought a glass from my bathroom, and not until he had filled it did he give me any news.

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose you want to know. We haven’t found her, but if that mare could talk I guess she’d tell us a story. The dogs flivvered out on us; ran in circles and then sat down. But we trailed the horse from where we found her things down to Loon Lake, and I’m afraid that’s where she is.”

  I must have looked shocked, for he added quickly:

  “Maybe not. I’m only saying it looks that way. Either that or she fixed it to look so.”

  “Fixed it?”

  “She might have had some reason for disappearing. It’s been done before; and from what I gather she had her own ways of doing things.”

  “She had no money with her. And where could she go? All she had was her alimony, and we—Arthur—paid that monthly by check. I imagine she is in debt. She always has been. But she’d never run away because of that.”

  He gave me a shrewd look.

  “Well, it looks as though one idea’s ruled out,” he observed, and went on to elaborate what Tony had already told me.

  “No real evidence of any struggle,” he said. “Ground was soft enough; but it’s pretty thick with leaves and pine needles.”

  However that might be, that smeared cigarette looked as though she had stopped there for some time, and there was nothing to show how she had left, or been taken away. It was his idea that whoever had attacked her, if that had happened, had put her across the pommel of the saddle and ridden straight down to the lake. There was no trail and the trip itself must have been a desperate one, in full daylight with the possibility of hikers around, and with the slope itself steep and dangerous. Here and there the mare had slipped, and that was how they had followed her. “No horse on earth would take that trip by itself,” he said.

  “Of course that’s the way it looks now,” he went on, putting down the glass. “May be some other explanation. But there are some scratches on Eagle Rock, at the edge of the lake, and if I was betting on it I’d say she went in there, or near there.”

  The searchers had found no footprints along the bank anywhere, and they were preparing to drag the lake.

  “They’re still looking,” he said, “but I figured they could do as well without me. Was she wearing any jewelry when she left?”

  “I suppose not, with riding clothes.”

  He was thoughtful for a minute, tugging at his lower lip.

  “If it wasn’t robbery, then by the great horn spoon, what was it? Of course she’s an attractive woman, or was; but I don’t remember a sex crime on this island, and I’ve been here forty years. Arthur come yet?”

  “No. He ought to be here soon.”

  He picked up his hat from the floor and got up. “The women downstairs say she brought a maid with her. I’d better talk to her.”

  My heart sank, but there was nothing to do. I told him Jordan was probably in her room, and listened while he rapped and was admitted. Then the car drove in, and I heard Arthur coming up the stairs.

  He looked quite normal, grave and weary but otherwise himself. Indeed I had the feeling that once over the initial shock he had already realized that a new and happier life might be opening for him.

  “Have they found her?” he asked.

  “Not yet, but they think—”

  I told him what the sheriff had said and he listened carefully. Then he put the question that was in both our minds.

  “Does anyone know I was here?”

  “No. At least—Arthur, why on earth did you go without your hat?”

  “Because I didn’t mean to go at all. Not then, anyhow.”

  The sheriff was still with Jordan, and so he told me the story, talking in a low voice. He had dropped asleep that night in the hospital room, and was wakened by a sound outside the open window. It sounded as though someone was on the drawing room roof below. He got off the bed and listened, and at last he looked out. There was a light fog, but he could see a figure beneath him. It had climbed the trellis from the garden and was working its way over the edge of the roof.

  The idea of someone breaking into the house had infuriated him. He had remembered the hatchet, and as cautiously as he could he located it and stuck it in his belt. By the time he got to the window again the man was standing below, apparently examining the drain pipe.

  “What I meant to do,” he said, “was to slide down and grab him. But he was too quick for me. He jumped into the garden and ran for it. I jumped too, but he had a start. I lost him finally.”

  “Lizzie saw you, Arthur. She didn’t recognize you, but she says you had the hatchet in your hand.”

  He looked sheepish.

  “I did, at that. I had to take it out of my belt, because the darned thing nearly pulled my trousers off.”

  The rest of his story was equally direct. He had looked at his watch and seen it was only three o’clock, but to get back meant either rousing the house or climbing the pipe again, and he wasn’t sure of the last. He weighed a lot more than he had in the old days.

  “I was going to leave before daylight anyhow,” he said, “and as I had my cap in my pocket I just went on.”

  It was as simple as that! He always used a cap on the sloop, of course, and he had slipped off from the sloop for that secret visit to Juliette.

  He had slogged along for a mile or so, he said. At the end of that time he got a lift from a car, driver unknown, as far as the county seat, and later in the morning he took a train to where he had left the sloop the night before, in a sheltered cove he knew about. He had just got back when I telephoned the yacht club.

  “Then it was you who threw the hatchet into the pond?”

  “I threw it away. I don’t know where it landed.”

  “This man on the roof? Did you recognize him, Arthur? Have you any idea who it was?”

  “Somebody trying to break in. That was enough for me.”

  “You can’t describe him?”

  “No. Except that he can run like blazes.”

  “When did you catch a train?”
>
  “Not until ten-thirty. Why?”

  “Arthur,” I said desperately. “Juliette left here before eight, and she was due back at the riding academy at ten o’clock. Whatever happened to her, it happened between eight-thirty and ten o’clock. Where were you then?”

  He stared at me.

  “Waiting for a train. You know how few there are.”

  “Where were you? Did anybody see you? Can you prove it?”

  “I don’t know anybody in Clinton. I sat on a bench along the waterfront and slept. I was tired.”

  “This man who drove you? Have you his name, or the license number of his car?”

  “No. He’d spent the night in a tourist camp and was on his way west. He had some coffee in a thermos bottle, and he gave me some. See here, Marcia, you don’t think I had a hand in this—whatever happened?”

  “What does it matter what I think?” I said bitterly. “It’s what Russell Shand thinks that matters, if he ever learns that you were here.”

  We heard the sheriff coming back along the hall and I composed myself as well as I could. He was carrying Juliette’s jewel case, a tan leather box with velvet cushions, and after shaking hands with Arthur he put it on the bed in front of me.

  “That woman in there says they’re all here. Maybe you’d better look, Marcia.”

  I went over it carefully, but Arthur kept his eyes averted as I drew out its contents. Many of the pieces I recognized; the pearls he had sold some bonds to buy after their marriage, the large square-cut diamond engagement ring, the star sapphire Mother had given her one Christmas as a peace offering, and a familiar brooch or two. But there were some things I had never seen: three bracelets, one of rubies, one of sapphires and one of emeralds, a small jewel-studded watch and a pair of diamond earrings, elaborate and obviously valuable. Even then, though I was sick with anxiety, I resented those jewels, bought as only Arthur and I knew at what cost.

  “I didn’t know she had all this,” I said. “I suppose her insurance people would know if there was anything else.”

  “The Jordan woman says all she wore was a plain wrist watch on a leather strap.”

  He left the case with me and he and Arthur went out. Soon after that I heard his car drive away, and learned that Arthur had gone with him. At lunchtime Arthur came back alone, looking white and sick. He ate no lunch, but had a highball or two and smoked incessantly.

  “I don’t get it, Marcia,” he said. “Who would want to do away with her?”

  “I imagine the popular idea would be that you and I had at least a certain amount of reason,” I said.

  He had been up at Loon Lake, it developed. They were still dragging it, with a dozen boats out; and it seemed certain now that she was there. A Boy Scout had turned up her wrist watch on the steep side of the hill where the mare had gone down. It may have caught on a branch and been torn off, for the strap was broken.

  There was only one bit of comfort in the whole situation. So far nobody suspected that Arthur had been on the island, and I began to hope that even Jordan was not suspicious. True, he had taken a train from Clinton, but as we seldom used the station there I had some hope that he had escaped recognition.

  Naturally both the village and the summer colony were ringing with the news. I was deluged with cards and flowers. Mansfield Dean left a bottle of old port and a note saying that he was there to be used, in case I needed him. Tony was off with the searchers so I saw nothing of him, but Mrs. Pendexter sent some flowers from her garden, and wrote on the card in her crabbed old hand: “Don’t worry too much. Plenty of people wanted her out of the way. But it’s a little early to hope!” Which was precisely like her, although it seemed callous at the time.

  I spent the afternoon on the upper porch. It was a brilliant day. Far out two sailing yachts were moving briskly along, and the Sea Witch was moored in the harbor, not far from shore. Around me went on the usual life of the house. I heard the garbage wagon rumble in, stop and go out again, the postman’s car and his double whistle, the distant sound of Lizzie—hatchet or no hatchet!—beating eggs in the kitchen for a cake. But I was rather surprised to see Jordan, her black dress blowing around, on the beach, walking aimlessly about. I called down and asked her if she had eaten any lunch, and she said she had. Then she turned and disappeared, walking toward the pond.

  On an impulse I got up and went into Juliette’s room. It was neater than I had ever seen it, for she had a capacity for disorder. But if I had hoped for anything there to explain what had happened I did not find it. The bed was turned down, showing its silk sheets carefully pressed; the baby pillows of pale blue and rose were piled at the head, her gold toilet set and gold-topped bottles were in order on her dressing table, and the desk by a window was in order. With an ear open for Jordan I glanced over the letters there. They had been brought on from New York, and were mostly unpaid bills. Indeed there was only one letter and that without an envelope. On the surface it seemed of no importance. It was signed Jennifer, and it was largely gossip. It had, however, a rather cryptic postscript:

  “Have just heard about L—. Do please be careful, Julie. You know what I mean.”

  It did not seem important then, in view of Juliette’s life as she had lived it. It sounded like a warning against recklessness of some sort, but nothing more. There certainly was nothing to show that it was to loom large in all our lives before it was explained. I merely put it back where I had found it.

  At six o’clock Arthur came back. He looked exhausted, but he called Mary Lou at once. Whatever he was feeling he was tender and cheerful over the wire.

  “No news,” he said. “You’re not to worry, darling. Better get the doctor to give you something so you can sleep.”

  But he was not cheerful with me. All that day his own situation had been increasingly clear to him. He had a motive for wanting Juliette out of the way, and he had no real alibi for the hour of her disappearance. I think it was then that he began to hope that her body would not be found.

  “We still don’t know that anything has happened to her,” he said. “And if it has—”

  “I’m afraid it has, Arthur.”

  He nodded.

  “It may,” he said. “But it would be damned hard to prove, unless they find her.”

  I asked him then if he knew any friend of Juliette’s called Jennifer, but he did not. He didn’t know any of her crowd, and he didn’t want to. He paced the floor for a minute or two.

  “See here, Marcia,” he said. “What brought her here anyhow? She could have put that fool proposition of hers to me in New York. But she didn’t. She came here. I don’t understand it.”

  “She may have thought I would be easier than you.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ve been wondering,” he said, “if she was hiding from something. Or somebody. And that idea of leaving the country! It sounded phony at the time, but maybe there was something in it. After all, that fellow on the roof—Did she seem frightened?”

  I thought that over.

  “She said she was in some sort of trouble. I thought it was money. But she may have been afraid of somebody. I thought she looked uneasy. She came in from a ride one day and went to bed. She may have seen someone then.”

  “You don’t know who it might have been?”

  “I haven’t an idea.”

  He went upstairs after that. I had given him Father’s old room, next to Mother’s at the end of the hall; a big room, with an enormous walnut bed which had been exiled from the city house, and the sagging easy chair where Father used to doze with an unread book on his lap, after his long rides and a heavy lunch. Juliette and Jordan had the rooms he and Mary Lou had always used.

  I waited until I heard him turn on the shower and knew he was all right. Then, starting upstairs to dress for dinner, I was surprised to find Lucy Hutchinson in the lower hall. She was in evening dress, but she looked strained and unlike herself.

  “I saw Arthur coming in,” she said. “I suppose there�
�s no news?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  She seemed scarcely to have heard me. She said she was going to a cocktail party and on to a dinner later, and just wanted to know if I had heard anything. Then, in the act of leaving, she asked suddenly if she could talk to me privately.

  “Bob’s up at the lake,” she said. “All the men are, apparently. Goodness knows who will turn up for the party. I’ll keep you only a minute, Marcia.”

  She was looking very smart, as usual. She wore a white dress with a short train, jade earrings and jade-green slippers. Also she carried a long jade cigarette holder, and the loose cape she wore was lined with the same color. She had the gift of clothes. But as I took her into the morning room and she went to a window and stood looking out, I could have sworn that she was shaking, and her rouge stood out in purplish patches on her cheeks.

  “I think I’d better tell you,” she said at last. “I know that Arthur was here the other night.”

  I stared at her back. I literally could not speak.

  “Of course I’m not telling it,” she went on. “But if they put me on the stand—what will I do, Marcia? I’m fond of him. There was a time when he could have had me if he’d wanted me, but he didn’t. I—well, there it is.”

  “How do you know he was here?”

  “I saw him.”

  She had seen him. She was driving her car home from somewhere or other, and she and Bob had been quarreling. Fussing, she called it. As a result she had passed the entrance to their place, and so she headed into our driveway in order to back and turn. Arthur was just ahead, in the full glare of the headlights, and he had looked back. She had known him at once.

  “Did Bob see him?” I asked, still shaken.

  “I think not. He was too busy giving me the devil!”

  There was nothing to do but to tell her, and I did so; that Arthur had talked to Juliette the night before, had spent the night here, but had left long before daylight. She was visibly relieved, and as her color came back her make-up was less obvious.