Wall

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  I relaxed again, and neither of us spoke for some time. I dare say we were both looking back, gathering up our defenses. When Arthur did speak it was to ask about the hat he had left in the hospital suite.

  “I’d better get it,” he said. “I’ll dispose of it somehow. No use making things worse than they are.”

  He had actually got up to do it before I could stop him.

  “You needn’t go, Arthur,” I said, unhappily. “It’s not there. It’s gone.”

  He stared at me.

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “I cut it up and threw it into the bay. But I’m afraid—”

  I did not have time to finish, for William came to the door just then to say that there was someone on the telephone for Arthur, and soon after that I heard him driving away in the car.

  I know only by hearsay of the events of the rest of that day. The message had been from Doctor Jamieson, who was also the local coroner, asking Arthur to make formal identification of the body; and this I gather, white-faced and shaken, he did. Then the sheriff took him to that shallow grave up the creek, now carefully roped off from the sightseers who had already gathered. But I do know that at some time in the interval I saw a detective talking to Mike in the garden, and Mike led him toward the toolshed.

  I remember this now, as I say. For a long time it was erased from my memory as though it had never been. Events moved too thick and too fast. There was, for one thing, the arrival of Mary Lou in her car late in the afternoon, a Mary Lou with a sober face, an overnight bag, and the drawing of what purported to be a cat as a gift from Junior.

  “I’ve just heard,” she said. “I do think Arthur could have called up and told me. Where is he?”

  “Somewhere in the village,” I said evasively. “Arthur has Father’s room. Send your bag there, and tell William to put your car away.”

  I was still on the porch when she came back. Death was death to Mary Lou, and although she had taken off her hat, she still wore a black dress. Also, being Mary Lou, she was filled with remorse. It took several cups of tea to restore her to normal.

  “When I think of the perfectly poisonous things I’ve said, Marcia!” she observed solemnly. “Whatever she was she didn’t deserve this.”

  “Someone must have thought she did,” I said.

  But I realized that she was nervous. She talked too much and too fast. She asked a flood of questions, and I was relieved when at last she went downstairs, to receive the innumerable callers who came, their faces grave—as was proper in a house of death—but their eyes wide with curiosity.

  It was a trying time. I went back to bed and lay there, alternately staring at the Currier and Ives prints on the wall and out through the door at the bay, where those wretched gulls sometimes mewed like cats, and again wailed like babies. Offshore at intervals a belated mother seal was teaching its baby to swim. The baby loathed and feared the water, and would turn around and make desperately for the rocks again. I felt rather like the baby, only I had no rock to turn to.

  How far we had traveled from the old days, long before Juliette, when Arthur raced up and down the stairs, while I followed him like a small satellite; and Father and Mother pursued their peaceful summer routine. Father always left a victoria and a trap in the stable, and in the summer the horses were sent up in advance. There were no cars allowed on the island, and the days were a quiet ritual of morning calls, afternoon naps, a drive later on, and then dinner, at home or elsewhere.

  There was no ostentation; but plenty of dignified living. It may have been dull, but at least it was safe. The morning calls were formal ones, with cards left and sometimes a glass of sherry and a biscuit, and often when there were callers there would be a visit to the garden. How well I could remember them.

  “I do want you to see my delphiniums. They are very good this year.”

  Mother in the garden by the sundial in the long sweeping dress of the prewar days, and later, with a broad hat to preserve her lovely skin. Talk of roses and columbines and pansies, instead of taxes and politics; and then at last William at the door, an open carriage and a pair of handsome horses driving away, and everything still again.

  At noon Father would come in in riding clothes, having left his horse at the stables, and Arthur and I, washed and brushed, would go down to lunch. It was my dinner and I was always ravenous, but I preferred the nursery supper upstairs. There was always a frightful decorum about the lunch table. But after lunch I was free to ramble, and I did; along the waterfront or in the mountains, where once Arthur climbed onto a ledge and had to be rescued with ropes.

  All normal. All quiet. In the evenings Father and Mother usually dined out. Mother would come into my room in her silks or brocades—quite as though it had been the city—with her handsome earrings and her pearls, and with her hair built high on her head, as she wore it to the end of her life. She would turn around so I could see her, and then stoop to kiss me good night.

  “Be a good little girl, Marcia, and go to sleep.”

  She would trail out then, leaving behind her a sense of loss and a faint scent of the violet perfume which she continued to use long after the new ones had come into fashion.

  But Father seldom came in. He was of sterner stuff. Looking back now I think we never really knew him.

  I was still back in the old days when I heard Arthur’s voice downstairs, and I knew then that I had never expected him to come back.

  CHAPTER XI

  THAT WAS THE LAST peaceful time I was to know for weeks. Arthur was home again, grave but relieved. The authorities had not held him. They seemed to know nothing of his visit to the island. Shand had been decent to him; more than decent. The autopsy had been held that day, and the inquest would take place on the following Tuesday, at the schoolhouse. Apparently the police had asked for more time.

  Arthur kissed me when he came in, but his real attention was for Mary Lou. I remember that he held her as though he was afraid to let her go; as if in a shaken world it was good to have her there, loving and believing in him. I did not always like her, but that day I forgave her everything, even her jealousy of me, for what she gave him.

  But things were happening that day of which we had no knowledge. There was a conference at the police station late that afternoon. Bullard, the District Attorney, had come over from Clinton, the county seat, and the sheriff was there, as well as the local police chief, the head of the state police, and several detectives. The men from the press associations and reporters from the various newspapers were kept in an outer room. It was a private conference, with Bullard wanting to hold Arthur pending further investigation and Russell Shand opposing him.

  “Where’s your case?” said Shand. “You think you’ve got one, but wait until half a dozen New York big shots come up here and throw it away. Maybe he didn’t like her. Maybe he was sick and tired of paying her that money. Maybe he was here on the island that night. I think he was, at that. Maybe he ran around bareheaded at three o’clock in the morning with a hatchet. He won’t admit it, but say he was for the sake of argument. That hatchet was found before she was killed, and according to Doctor Jamieson the weapon wasn’t a hatchet anyhow, not sharp enough.”

  “Hell bent on clearing him, aren’t you?” said Bullard sourly.

  “I’ll want to be sure he hasn’t got an alibi before we hold him. That’s all. I’m not willing to be made a fool of, if you are. I admit that sloop story looks queer, but both you and I have done the same thing, Bullard. Why shouldn’t a man go sailing if he’s got a mind to?”

  Months later the sheriff told me that story. They had cleared a table, and on it lay the various articles so far collected: my scissors, the broken lock from our toolshed, what was left of Arthur’s hat, and the initial “A,” now glued to a card, Juliette’s sodden cigarette case, the wrist watch with its broken strap, and an envelope containing the butt of a cigarette stained with lipstick. There were photographs too, of the scratches on Eagle Rock and of the grave itself, uncovere
d but with the body still in it, one with the leaves over the face and one without. And something else, which none of us suspected at the time. Somewhere near that log on the hill they had found the print of a woman’s heel, and the plaster cast of it was before them.

  The sheriff eyed it, and then pulled a photograph out of his pocket.

  “For that matter,” he said, “you’ve got about as good a case against Mrs. Lloyd as you have against the husband. Better, maybe. We don’t know he was here. We know she was.”

  “What the devil do you mean?” Bullard snapped.

  “Looks like she was parked beside the road near the bridle path the morning the Ransom woman disappeared,” Shand drawled. “We checked up on all cars and roads right off, and if those aren’t her tire marks I’ll eat them. She hasn’t an alibi worth a cent, at that. I called the garage at Millbank and it seems she got the car about eight-thirty or so the morning of the murder. She called the Lloyd house before that. Sallie Anderson, over at Millbank, remembers the call.”

  There was a long silence, according to his account.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Bullard finally. “She’s a nice woman. I’ve met her. I’ve a sister at Millbank.”

  “That’s the trouble with it,” said the sheriff. “All these people are nice people. Marcia Lloyd is a damn’ fine girl. I’ve known her since she was a baby. And Arthur Lloyd’s no killer.” He leaned over and picked up the lock. “All along,” he said, “you fellows have been leaving out the two things that bother me most. First, who got into that top floor at the Lloyd house and tore it to pieces? What were they after? And second, what brought the Ransom woman here? Money? She could have seen Arthur Lloyd in New York. Looks as though she was scared when she came; and she wasn’t scared of the Lloyds, or she wouldn’t have come here.”

  Bullard stirred irritably.

  “You’ve got to take the general picture, Shand,” he said. “If we can break down his alibi we’ve got him. He had a motive. Who else had? His wife? Maybe you can see her burying that body, but I can’t. And whoever killed her buried her. Knew where to look for her and buried her. Don’t forget that.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” said the sheriff, and the meeting broke up.

  They went across the street to a restaurant for dinner. Bullard was hungry and ate enormously; but the sheriff only ate a sandwich and drank a glass of milk.

  “Too much on my mind,” Shand told me later. “Seemed like my stomach had sort of shut up.”

  But Bullard had it all settled by that time. He wasn’t worrying.

  Even that meal, however, was not to be entirely peaceful. They were still at the table when Fred Martin came in, looking for them, and Fred had a story to tell.

  On the morning of the murder he had seen a woman cut across the corner of the course. She was too far away to recognize, but she had carried a walking stick of some kind. She had not gone directly toward the bridle path, but had disappeared into the woods in that direction.

  “I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” he said, “although it was pretty early. About eight-thirty. But I hear the doc says Mrs. Ransom was struck with a heavy weapon, and if what she was carrying was a golf club—Well, I thought I’d tell you anyway.”

  “No woman did this job,” said Bullard, wiping his mouth with his napkin.

  The sheriff was interested. Fred was definitely of the opinion that it was a member of the summer colony. The native women were not given to early walks in the hills.

  “Kinda queer at that, Fred,” he said. “Nobody’s come forward and said she was there. The villagers don’t use that path. They’ve got other things to do. And we’ve more or less checked up on the summer folks. Not all of them here yet, and only one or two regular walkers among them. Seems to me if she knew nothing she’d come out and say so. Who’d be likely to take a walk like that?”

  Fred looked uncomfortable.

  “Well,” he said, “there’s Miss Lloyd. She gets about quite a lot. And Mrs. Hutchinson. I suppose we can leave out the older women. They don’t walk.”

  Bullard roused at that.

  “Miss Lloyd?” he said. “That’s the sister, isn’t it? I’d like to see her, Shand. Maybe she’s got a motive too. I’d like to bet she hated the Ransom woman like poison.”

  The result was a visit from them both that night. I had managed to get down to dinner, and we were all in the library, Arthur pacing the floor, Mary Lou knitting, and I absently playing solitaire, when they were announced.

  Bullard took the lead, and lost no time in doing it. He started with me.

  “I understand you did not leave the house at all the morning Mrs. Ransom left for that ride,” he said, his eyes like small bright black buttons.

  I was surprised.

  “Why, no,” I said. “She had taken the car. I couldn’t.”

  “You didn’t happen to take a walk?”

  “A walk? No.”

  “I suppose you can prove that?”

  “You can ask the servants.”

  I was puzzled rather than resentful, but I saw Arthur make an impatient gesture.

  “Why question my sister?” he demanded. “What has she got to do with it?”

  Bullard merely smiled, not too pleasantly.

  “Let me do this my own way, Mr. Lloyd,” he said. “I imagine we all want the facts. There is a path leading up into the hills from the golf course, isn’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t take that path that morning? The morning of the murder?”

  “I’ve already said I did not.”

  “Yet Fred Martin, your golf professional, says you did just that.”

  I could only stare at him. The sheriff looked irritated; Bullard kept his bland smile, although he shifted his tactics.

  “You didn’t like Mrs. Ransom very much, did you?” he inquired, almost gently.

  “I did not. But if all this means that you think I killed her—” I began angrily.

  He held up a plump white hand.

  “I haven’t said anything of the sort, Miss Lloyd,” he said, looking almost shocked. “I am only here, as the prosecuting attorney of this county, to ask some questions.”

  “As for instance?” said Arthur, scowling over his pipe.

  He turned his attention to Arthur.

  “Well, what brought Mrs. Ransom here in the first place? Was there any particular reason why she came back just now? I understand—”

  He paused, and Arthur flushed. I saw that he was trying to control himself.

  “I suppose you’ve got to do this,” he said, “but it’s damned unpleasant. Yes, there was a reason. It was money.”

  “Money?”

  “That’s what I said. I’ve been paying her alimony. A lot of it. She took it into her head that she wanted a lump sum instead. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I see,” said Bullard, looking smug. “Alimony, eh? And a lot of it. Rather a—” He checked himself. “And so, instead of going to you, she came to your sister? Isn’t that unusual?”

  “How do I know what’s usual in such circumstances?” said Arthur furiously. “All I know is that she damned well didn’t get it.”

  “You refused?”

  It was a trap, and Arthur almost fell into it. He caught himself in time, however.

  “I called my sister over the long-distance telephone and said it was impossible. You can check the call if you want to.”

  They left soon after that. Arthur was in a white rage, and Mary Lou was blazingly indignant.

  “Well, of all things,” she said, as the door closed behind them. “You’d think they actually suspected you, Arthur, or Marcia.”

  “Perhaps they do, my dear,” said Arthur patiently. “Perhaps they do.”

  I passed a rotten night. It had rained that evening, and the overflow from the pond roared like a small Niagara. Also my ankle was bothering me again. But what kept me awake was a question from the sheriff, after Bullard had gone out to the car.
/>   “Tell me something, Marcia,” he said. “Does Mrs. Hutchinson use a pretty heavy lipstick?”

  “Yes, what about it?”

  He did not answer me. He patted my back and went away. But there was a reason behind that question; and I lay awake and worried over it.

  It was still worrying me the next morning. Lucy, who might at a distance, although taller, be mistaken for me. Lucy, who often walked in the hills, and sometimes, after a game of golf, carried a club with her instead of a stick. Lucy, with her mouth heavily made up, so that she stained every cigarette she smoked. And Lucy, who hated Juliette.

  I could still see her the evening she came in, in her white dress and jade earrings. She had been terrified that day, trembling.

  “It’s been plain hell,” she had said. But after all it had been a long time since she had been in love with Arthur. I thought now that her fright had been for herself, not for him.

  What was I to do? If I told the sheriff about it she could counter with her story about Arthur, and seeing him on the drive.

  In the end I took it to Arthur himself. Mary Lou was still asleep, and he was shaving in the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and told him, and at first he pooh-poohed the idea.

  “Lucy!” he said. “You’re losing your mind, Marcia.”

  He blew out one cheek to run the razor over it, and I wanted to shout.

  “That’s too easy, Arthur. She’s strong as a horse. She often walks in the hills. And she was jealous of Juliette. Bob liked her a lot, at one time.”

  He merely rinsed his razor and leaning over patted me condescendingly.

  “Do all women hate all other women?” he inquired, and grinned at me in much his old fashion. “Keep out of this, my girl. We don’t hide behind the Lucy’s of this world, do we?”

  “But if she did it?”

  “Don’t be a little fool. No woman did this, Marcia. Look at the facts. She was not only killed. Somebody mounted that mare and, carrying her, rode down to the lake. That took strength. I couldn’t have done it myself, and I’m not feeble.”