It was a horrible trip. I had never taken that path at night, and certainly not in a dinner dress; and as I went on it seemed strange and unfriendly. At one place I lost it entirely, and stepping onto some soft ground realized with a shock of horror that this might be where Juliette’s body had been buried. In places, too, the path was steep and in the dim light from my flashlight it became rocky and precarious. As I climbed the noise of the creek sharpened as it fell in small cascades over the ledges.
I still do not know whether I was followed that night or not. I had stopped in the comparative silence beside a pool, and I thought I heard a small sound behind me. I turned, but the path twists at that point and there was no one in sight. Nevertheless, there had been a sound, like a foot against a rock, and I called out sharply.
“Who’s there?” I said.
Nobody answered, and at last I went on.
The camp was quiet when I reached it. In one tent there was a light, evidently from a candle, and one trailer showed a lamp and a man reading beside it. Otherwise it had settled down for the night, a series of large lumbering shadows not unlike a herd of elephants in a clearing.
The Pell trailer also was dark. I knocked at the door, and receiving no reply, called as cautiously as I could. Careful as I had tried to be, however, the man who had been reading not far away heard me. He emerged, located me, and came over.
“Looking for Pell?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I haven’t seen him about today. Kinda queer too. He’s usually in and out.” He eyed me more closely. “You’ll be the young lady who came to see him yesterday. That right?”
“Yes.”
“Wait a minute,” he said, and went back to his own trailer, where a woman now stood on the step.
“Here’s a lady asking for Pell,” he said. “Haven’t seen him, have you?”
She shook her head.
“Haven’t seen him since he started off with that girl yesterday,” she said.
“You didn’t see him come back?” I asked incredulously.
“I don’t know as he did come back,” she said. “I didn’t see him. But there was somebody there last night. It wasn’t Pell. Looked like an older man. Heavy-set fellow. I saw him going in.”
Even then I was not apprehensive, although I was uneasy. The visitor, she said, had stayed quite a little time, a half hour or more. It was only his outline she had seen. He had drawn the curtains before he turned on the lights inside. “He acted like he knew the place,” she added.
Her own idea at the time had been that it was one of the summer colony, but of course she did not know. Some of them had bought pictures from Mr. Pell, she thought. The one thing she was sure of was that it was not Allen Pell himself.
She seemed to enjoy talking, and perhaps she sensed drama of some sort. They all liked Mr. Pell, she said.
“He was pleasant,” she went on. “The children liked him too. He’d draw pictures for them, and he generally had candy for them.”
But for all that, he had kept rather to himself. Not like a young man somehow. “He would sit sometimes inside there at night—you could see him—just looking at nothing.”
He was not around much in the daytime, she explained. “Out on the hills, mostly.” And she added, with a look at her husband: “We had an idea he wasn’t too anxious to be seen around here. He used to watch the cars when new folks came. Might have been in some sort of trouble, we thought.”
That was a new idea to me, and it made me more uneasy than ever. Nor was it reassuring to find that the door of the trailer was locked. I gathered that he had not been in the habit of locking it.
“The man who was here must have had a key,” I said. “Either that or—Perhaps we’d better break a window. He may be inside, sick or—”
I could not go on. I was certain by that time that something had happened to him, and I felt sick and dizzy.
A small interested crowd had already gathered, but my idea met with immediate opposition. Apparently the law of private property was carefully observed. One man, though, who was a locksmith on holiday, offered to try to open the door. This was approved, and with the aid of a flashlight, a file, and innumerable offered keys he finally succeeded.
It was characteristic of the increasing anxiety that when I stepped forward a woman caught me and held my arm.
“Let the men look first,” she said. “With all the killing that’s been going on, I’d wait if I was you.”
I stood while two or three men entered the trailer, and I do not think I breathed until one of them reappeared.
“He’s not here,” he called. “If the lady would like to come inside—”
I found myself shaking violently. Around me the crowd was quiet, intent. Somebody back in the shadows said perhaps the killer was loose again, and was instantly hushed. But I was able to climb the steps and, once inside, to control myself better.
There was no sign of Allen Pell. On the small table were still the remains of that tea the day before, the small cakes from the village pastry shop, the cut bread, the butter, our cups. And as conclusive evidence that he had not come back, his hat lay where he had left it, on the couch.
I must have swayed, for one of the men caught me.
“Get her out of here,” he said. “And don’t touch anything. Somebody better call the police.” And to me: “Don’t worry, lady. He may have fallen and hurt himself.”
They got me out somehow, and the night air revived me. The light shone on a circle of friendly faces, grave and concerned. Someone brought a camp stool, and I sat down. Someone else left for the small administration building and a telephone. But there was a delay. Whoever was in charge had gone off for the night, and the place was locked. It was an impasse until a state policeman roared in on a motorcycle and found us there.
“What’s the trouble?” he inquired.
“The painter fellow’s missing,” he was told.
“What do you mean, missing? How long’s he been gone?”
“Looks like yesterday evening. This young lady came to see him, but he isn’t here.”
He saw me then and recognized me. He touched his cap.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about him, Miss Lloyd. He knows his way about. He’s all over the place.”
But he looked at me curiously. It was about midnight by that time, and I must have seemed a queer figure, in a sleeveless dinner dress, clutching my flashlight, surrounded by a constantly increasing group of campers, and seated on a folding camp chair. But the policeman was young and serious.
“Let’s get this clear. You came up to see Mr. Pell. When was that?”
“I’ve been here a half hour. Maybe more.”
“Did you have any reason to think anything was wrong? Is that why you came?”
“No, I had to see him about something. It was important. It couldn’t wait.”
He looked uncomfortable, as though he did not believe me. But he persisted.
“When did you see him last, Miss Lloyd?”
“I had tea with him here yesterday. He walked part of the way home with me. I”—I almost lost control—“I don’t think he’s been back since. The table is there, just as we left it.”
He glanced around at the crowd.
“Anybody see him since then?”
Nobody had, and he took off his cap and wiped his forehead, his face sober in the light from the open door.
“I’d better get you back home,” he said. “Then I’ll report it. Where’s your car, Miss Lloyd?”
“I walked up.”
“Alone?”
“Yes. My car was out.”
There was a little movement among the crowd. Most of them knew the short cut by the creek, but that I should have taken it on foot that night and alone evidently made them suspicious, not so much of my motives as of my character.
“The servants have my car,” I said lamely. “Mr. Pell had some information for me, and I had to have it at once. It was about my brother.”
/> That, too, was unfortunate. They knew about Arthur. Some of them had helped in the long search for Juliette’s body, and later for Jordan’s. If there was any mischief afoot they were ready to associate Arthur with it. Even the state trooper gave me a quick glance.
“We’ll have to get you back,” he said. “Somebody here drive Miss Lloyd down?”
I may have imagined it, but I thought the crowd hesitated. Then the locksmith volunteered, and the crowd opened silently to let me pass.
What with shock and fear I collapsed that night, and much that I know of the next few days is from the sheriff. The fact remains that for the third time that summer the search started for a missing person. Not that night. The police had contented themselves with locking the trailer again and making a few routine inquiries. But the next morning, with all the now familiar routine of bloodhounds, boys from the CCC camps and amateur searchers of all sorts, it was a ghastly time. But one thing Allen’s disappearance did for us. It left me in a state bordering on delirium, but at least it held Bullard’s hand.
Arthur had an unimpeachable alibi for the day Pell had vanished. He had spent the entire afternoon and evening at home with Mary Lou. The servants testified to that, even the neighbors. Some of them had been in to tea, two others—old friends—had dined and played bridge.
Not that Bullard was willing to concede anything.
“How do we know this case is connected with the others?” he demanded. “Fellow falls over a cliff, or just goes off about his business. That any reason for letting Lloyd give tea parties and play bridge?”
It was soon apparent, however, that Allen Pell had neither gone voluntarily nor fallen over a cliff. The dogs, following his trail to the path, and some forty feet down, stopped at that point; and it was Russell Shand who first saw the rock there, with blood on it.
He came to break the news to me, sitting beside my bed and trying to treat it with a reasonable amount of hope.
“It’s like this, Marcia,” he said. “He may be—Well, considering what’s been going on, we have to face the fact that somebody may have done away with him. On the other hand, there’s a good chance the other way. First place, the blood may not be his at all. Second place, that stone hadn’t been lifted. Looks more as though somebody fell on it.”
I roused myself.
“Fell on it?” I said. “Knocked him out, you mean? Then what about the man in the trailer that night? Who was it? It wasn’t Allen Pell.”
He filled and lit his pipe, with that slightly guilty look he always had when he did so in the house. He had it going well before he answered.
“I don’t know who he was,” he said. “But so far as I can make out he was cleaning up the place.”
“Cleaning it!”
“Fingerprints. And a damned good job he made of it. Maybe that makes sense to you, but by the great horn spoon, it doesn’t to me.” He took a turn about the room, puffing like a locomotive. “Here’s a man who has lived in a trailer for weeks, perhaps months. Now a trailer’s not the size of a barn; even that one of Pell’s. And he was a big fellow. Practically every time he moved he had to touch something. Yet that place hasn’t a print; not even on the dishes! Only ones we found were around the door where those men unlocked the door for you, and we’ve traced them.”
I listened in silence. I was remembering a night by the pond and Allen Pell wiping the back of the bench before we left. Had he himself come back and, for reasons of his own, gone over that trailer? But what reasons?
The sheriff had more to say. Fred Martin, walking up the path soon after I came down that day, had seen nobody and nothing, but thought he had heard a car starting on the road before he reached it.
“He might have hurt himself, and someone picked him up and took him to be fixed up. Or a car might have hit him. Whoever did it might have carried him off. That’s happened before this.”
“I thought that stone was forty feet away from the road.”
“He might have staggered down the hill before he fell.”
But neither of us believed that. I told him why I had gone to the camp that night, and he was properly indignant.
“I wish to God you’d let me handle this case,” he said angrily. “What was the idea? Why didn’t Pell come forward if he knew anything? What’s all the secrecy about? And who is the fellow anyhow? Don’t tell me he’s a painter! If I was to give a guess he’d know more about a polo pony than a paint palette.”
With which alliterative statement he glared at me furiously.
“You people always stand together,” he said accusingly. “I know you. I’ve seen it for forty years. You may differ among yourselves, but you present a united front to the rest of the world. And Pell’s one of you, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know anything about him. I suppose he is what might be called a gentleman.”
He looked at me angrily.
“Gentleman!” he said. “You’d think gentlemen were a class apart! We’ve got more gentlemen working with their hands in this county than in all of New York. All right. Let that go. He knew someone who might have saved Arthur, and he kept it to himself. And unless I miss my guess he knew a lot more. So now we’re back where we started. Suppose you tell me what you know, before something happens to you.”
I felt crushed and guilty. The sheriff looked like a different man. His old easy friendliness was gone, and he was regarding me with hard blue eyes.
“Come on. Out with it.”
So I told him. The night by the pond with Allen Pell—except that I left out the part about Juliette—the other night on the float, and that statement of his, made at the camp, that Arthur would never go to the chair.
“So he knew something,” he said, more quietly. “Well, I’ll tell you this, Marcia. That fellow had something to hide, including himself. If he knew Juliette Ransom he may have killed her. Why not? He was in the hills every day. If Lucy Hutchinson is telling the truth, Juliette looked as though she was waiting for somebody when she left her. Why wasn’t that Pell?”
“And I suppose,” I said indignantly, “that he went off without a hat, leaving that blood on a stone to throw you off the scent!”
“I’ve seen queerer things than that,” he said, and stamped out and down the stairs, slamming the front door in William’s face.
CHAPTER XXIII
I DID NOT SEE HIM again for almost a week. The days dragged on. We had a series of storms, and again the creek poured a heavy stream over the dam like a small Niagara. Maggie was up and about, at night tying a string to her big toe and from that to the foot of her bed, to prevent walking in her sleep; and I, too, was convalescing, looking like a ghost when I saw myself in a mirror, but trying to keep my head up and my chin out, whatever good that may do.
Arthur was back and forth. I gathered that this last mystery had cleared matters between Mary Lou and himself, as well as with the police, for he seemed more like himself. But the general situation was nervous to the point of hysteria, and I crept downstairs one night to dinner, to discover that the authorities had put a guard on night duty around the house. His name was Tate, and after that I had coffee and a tray left for him under the porte-cochere before William went to bed.
The excitement of course was for the crime, if it was one; not for Allen Pell himself. The summer colony knew little or nothing of him. But one day, walking out to the gate—I was still rather tottery—I saw Howard Brooks going by in his car. He did not see me, but he was gazing straight ahead with a sort of blank look on his face; like a man whose thoughts were far away and not too pleasant.
The time came, of course, when I had to get about again, to write notes of thanks for the flowers that had come in, to have my hair trimmed and my nails done, to pick up my life as best I could. But the heart had gone out of me, to use a phrase of Maggie’s. One day I even got into considerable trouble, owing largely to my state of mind.
Once again we had had the usual influx of reporters, and one followed me into Conrad’s one morning, an
d touched his hat apologetically.
“Sorry to bother you, Miss Lloyd,” he said, “but do you connect this Pell story with your—with Mrs. Ransom’s death, and the other one?”
“Why should I?”
“You think not, then?”
“I haven’t said that. Or anything.”
“It was you who found that he was missing, wasn’t it?”
Just then I caught Conrad’s warning eye, and I said no more. The result in the press was startling, in spite of that. I was quoted at length as having stated that there was a possible connection among our three mysteries. Also as having visited the camp late at night and growing hysterical at the discovery that Allen Pell was not there.
Arthur, coming over the next day, read it grimly and turned an unbrotherly eye on me.
“What’s all this trash?” he demanded. “Do you mean to say you went to the camp to see that fellow? At night?”
“I walked up after dinner. The servants had the car.”
“What for? This article makes you look like a lovesick schoolgirl. Don’t tell me you had been meeting this man! I can’t believe it. Who is he? What is he?”
“I don’t know whether he is even alive,” I said, and choked. “As for why I went there, he was trying to help you.”
But Arthur was outraged.
“Who the devil asked for his help?” he almost shouted. “I don’t know him. Never heard of him. It wasn’t enough that I’ve been plastered over the front page of every newspaper in the country. Now you’ve got to do it!”
He was nervous, of course. But then we were all in a state of unstable equilibrium. These are the overtones of crime, I suppose. Any crime. The things that never reach the public. The suspicions and angers, the tight nerves, even of the innocent, the breaks in old friendships, never to be healed, even in family relationships.
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