For I think Arthur has never forgiven me entirely that publicity, tying us once more with what began increasingly to look like another crime.
The police had not been idle during that interval. The usual alarms had gone out over radio and teletype. A detective had traced the trailer and coupe to where they had been bought, for cash; and there was no doubt that Allen Pell had been the purchaser. The transaction had taken place in Boston, early in June, and the dealer had secured the license plates. Allen had registered at a local hotel of the respectable but not showy type; had registered as from New York, and was clearly remembered. Among other things he had taken the examination required in Massachusetts for a driver’s license and passed it. Then one day he had driven the trailer to the hotel, put his bags in it, paid his bill and departed.
He had had no visitors and his bill showed no telephone calls, except one or two local ones, probably to the dealer. There was, however, no Allen Pell in the New York telephone directory.
I did not know this at the time; but the repercussions from that wretched press article were already manifest. It seemed to me that everyone called during the days that followed. Lucy Hutchinson came in one morning, left her umbrella in the hall, damned the weather to William, and came in to where I was trying to read by the fire.
“See here, Marcia,” she said. “As one of the suspects, I certainly have a right to know something about this revolting situation.”
“I don’t know myself, Lucy.”
“You look like death, Bob walks the floor at night, Tony looks like a scared rabbit and revokes at bridge, Howard Brooks has called off a party, we’ve had another crime—which ought to let me out, for I didn’t know the man—and you’re the one who discovers it. And at midnight, up at that camp! It doesn’t make sense.”
“It never did make sense,” I said wanly. “But there’s no mystery in my part of it, Lucy. I had tea with him the day before he disappeared, and he said something that made me wonder.”
She raised the two thin lines she called her eyebrows.
“Tea?” she said. “In the trailer? That was going some for a Lloyd, wasn’t it?”
I must have colored, for she busied herself with a cigarette.
“Sorry,” she said. “He may turn up, you know. Where does he come in in all this, Marcia? I don’t suppose he killed Juliette. Did he know her?”
I evaded that.
“He had found someone to support Arthur’s alibi at Clinton. He didn’t tell me who it was. When I learned Bullard wanted to arrest Arthur, I went up to find out.”
“Leaving me to hold the bag!” she observed, without resentment. “He was gone then, was he?”
“So far as I can find out he never went back, Lucy. He left me at the top of the path. That’s all I know.”
“At a guess, somebody didn’t want him to tell what he knew,” she said shrewdly. “I’m sorry, Marcia, but it doesn’t look so good, does it? If he had to be put out of the way.”
“No,” I said dully.
She did not stay long. This third crime, if it was one, she considered let both Arthur and herself out. She was safe anyhow, she said. She had played bridge the afternoon of Allen Pell’s disappearance, and dined out that night. Before she left she gave me a long look.
“Do you happen to know if Pell was one of Juliette’s discards?” she asked.
“He knew her. I think it was a good while ago.”
But she only whistled softly and went out, and through the window I saw her plodding back through the rain, her feet slapping in galoshes and her umbrella low over her head.
Queer, how life went on much as usual after that. People meeting at the club, at dances, on the street.
“Any news yet about the painter fellow?”
“Haven’t heard any.”
I had to do something to fill in the time. One morning I took Maggie and a nervous Ellen up to the hospital suite, and we put it in order again. Maggie thought she remembered the corner where she had been when she was attacked, and that she had seemed to be looking for something. We examined it carefully, but there was nothing there. The wall was neatly papered with the nursery design I remembered from my childhood, a sea of blue with ships and whales scattered over it; and the baseboard and floor were solid and intact.
“It seems so silly, Maggie,” I said. “What could you have been after? There must have been something in your mind.”
“I don’t know, miss,” she said, looking bewildered. “But I think it had to do with Mr. Arthur.”
Allen Pell had been missing for fourteen anxious days by that time. Over at the sheriff’s office in the Clinton courthouse all sorts of clues had been coming in, to be run down without result. And, although I did not know it, the sheriff himself was doing a bit of literary composition. I saw it later, and it ran as follows:
Dear Sir or Madam: I am interested in a Pekingese pup for my youngest child. Said dog must be housebroken and of a gentle disposition. Price not too high. Yours very truly, Russell Shand.
The address he gave was his house, not his office; and Mamie, his elderly stenographer, typed quite a number of them.
“County paid the time and I paid the postage,” he told me later, when the matter came up. “Cost me about two dollars. Not so many cities that run a real society column.”
Arthur had spent most of that interval at Millbank, and it was about that time, too, that I had a call from Mary Lou. Owing to the rain and cold, Junior had been sick and I had not seen her for some days. When she came in I sensed a change in her. She pulled off her driving gloves and answered my questions about the boy absently. She asked for a cup of coffee, and when it came I saw that she could hardly hold the cup.
“I’ve had plenty of time to think things over,” she said. “I know now that Arthur didn’t kill Juliette, Marcia. I was a fool ever to think it. But I do believe he knows something.”
“What could he know?”
“I think he buried her,” she said quietly. “Found her and buried her.”
I could not think of anything to say. Once again I saw Arthur at the toolshed with that flashlight in his hand, and his stealthy re-entrance into the house that night.
“Why on earth would he do that?” I asked at last. “Why would he have to break in to get a spade? He could have got the key, easy enough. It hangs in the kitchen entry.”
“Not that night,” she said, with the same deadly calm. “I stopped just now and asked Mike. He had it in his pocket that night.”
“But why, Mary Lou? If he hadn’t killed her—”
“Because he still cared for her,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand, Marcia. You see, he had never forgotten her. He was devoted to me, but she was his first love.” She drew a long breath. “She was everything I was not. Reckless and popular and gay. And beautiful, Marcia. Men don’t forget beautiful women. Not entirely.”
She began to pull on her gloves automatically.
“He never really got free of her,” she said. “He never even had a chance to forget her. Every now and then he would see her picture in the newspapers, and each month when he made out her check he had to remember her all over again. So when he found her body—”
She got up, with that new maturity of hers in her face.
“Have the police examined the toolshed?” she asked.
“They’ve looked it over. Not very carefully. Why?”
“Because he has lost his key ring, Marcia. The gold one I gave him. He doesn’t know I know it, but he has. He’s worried about it. If they find it, there or near that grave, they’ll arrest him. That’s all they need.”
She had come to ask me to find it, if I could, and that day after she had gone I examined the shed as well as I could; the lawn mowers, the hundred and one things any gardener accumulates. But it was not there. Nevertheless, as I pulled about the crocks and sacks of fertilizer I was remembering several things. Not only Arthur with the flashlight, trying to get into the shed. Long before that, with Juliette
in her dressing gown and mules, and Arthur in front of her, white to the lips.
“When I look at you,” he had said, “it doesn’t seem possible that you would wreck a man’s life as you have mine.”
What had he meant by that? Was there something more than the mere problem of her support? When he looked at her was he thinking of what life might have been with her had she cared for him? Then later: “God knows I loved you, but you took my pride and crushed it. You killed something in me. And now you’re fastened on me like a leech, and, by heaven, I can’t get rid of you.”
Was Mary Lou right, and had he never been able to get rid of her? Did she haunt his mind? If men leave an indelible mark on the women who have loved them, do women do the same thing to men?
One thing that day or two of activity did for me. They filled in time, let me forget the problem which absorbed all of my days and most of my nights. That afternoon, however, it was to be brought back to me in full force, and of all people by Mrs. Pendexter.
I saw the car stop in the driveway, and a militant old figure alight and address someone inside.
“Are you getting out? Or shall I have to drag you?”
There was a brief pause. Then, slowly and unwillingly, Marjorie followed her, protesting indignantly.
“But I tell you I’m not sure.”
“I’m not asking you to be sure. Who is sure about anything?” demanded the old lady dauntlessly, and prodded her into the house.
The argument was still going on when I reached the drawing room.
“Don’t be a fool,” Mrs. Pendexter was saying. “If you know anything now is the time to say it.”
“But I don’t, mother. At least I’m not positive.”
“All right. Here’s Marcia. Tell Marcia what you told me, and don’t hold out on it either. She says she knew this Pell person, Marcia.”
“Mother!” said Marjorie. “I didn’t say anything of the sort. I only saw him once. I said he reminded me of someone. That’s all. I don’t even remember who it was he looked like.”
“Go on,” said the old lady inexorably.
“Well, that’s all—except that I thought he knew me too. He had been painting, and he pulled down his hat and picked up his stuff. That’s really all.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Mrs. Pendexter. “Tell her when and where this was.”
“It was on Pine Hill, the morning Juliette was—the morning she disappeared. It was close to where it happened, Marcia.”
But she had really nothing much to say. She had got out of her car to gather some lupine, and was on her way back. She “hadn’t wanted to be mixed up in anything” and so she had said nothing. But she had seen Allen Pell there, and later on she saw Mary Lou sitting in her car some distance away. She had not seen Lucy at all, nor Juliette.
“All that happened must have been after I left,” she said. “I took the lupine home and put it in water, and—What good is all this, mother? I couldn’t identify the man, and he is missing anyhow.”
But I was not so certain, after they had gone. Marjorie was a direct person, with the straightforwardness of all people who like horses and the open air. I felt certain that she was holding something back, and that it was concerned with Allen Pell. She might pretend all she could, but I believed she knew who he was. Knew it well, and for some reason would not tell me.
Just what had she said, that day weeks ago when she came to see me? I spent most of the afternoon trying to remember. Then, after giving it up entirely, it came back to me that night after I had gone to bed. Something about a poor devil who had gone crazy about Juliette and took to drinking, with tragic results.
Could that have been Allen Pell? He had certainly been bitter about her. Arthur had been lucky, he said. He had only married her. And, after stating flatly that he had not killed her, there had been something about deserving a good mark for not having done so; “from the angels who keep the book” he had said.
It was possible. I knew that, lying in my bed in the dark, while Chu-Chu snored on her pillow and a sleepy gull mewed outside. And what was it the sheriff had said? “I don’t know anything about this fellow. Pell may be his name, and maybe not. I don’t know any better way to hide out than to take a trailer and keep moving.”
I shut my eyes. There was the motive, if it ever came out. At least the police might think it adequate. She had driven him to drink, and he had killed some people as a result. Then, too, why was he here, on the island? Was that accident? A coincidence? Had he followed her? Had she seen him, that day she rode into the hills and came home frightened?
I could not stay in bed. I got up and went to the telephone in my sitting room, and there called Marjorie. She was still up, she said, playing bridge; but her voice altered when I asked my question.
“I want you to tell me something,” I said. “I promise to keep it to myself. Who was the man who killed those people with his car? I mean, what was his name?”
There was rather a long pause. Then:
“That’s all over and done with, Marcia,” she said. “Why bring it up? It was two or three years ago.”
“Then it certainly won’t hurt to tell me,” I said urgently.
There was another pause. Then her voice again, flat but decisive.
“I’ve forgotten it,” she said, and hung up the receiver.
When I looked out over the bay the next morning I saw that the Sea Witch had gone on its long-deferred cruise to Newfoundland.
CHAPTER XXIV
IT RAINED ALMOST STEADILY for the next few days. Water rolled down the face of the old house like tears, and in the little pools on the upper porch I could see drowned insects floating. The islands in the bay were soft green smudges, as if someone had drawn them with a crayon and then rubbed them. The bay and the sky merged in a mutual gray, so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The tides swept along, carrying with them the flotsam of the shore, dead trees, boxes and barrels, and all day the bell buoy off Long Point rocked and rang.
The gulls had disappeared to hug a lee shore somewhere. The small pleasure craft had left or swung neglected at their moorings. Even my upper porch was bare of furniture except the swing, which creaked back and forth dismally; and I had a strange feeling of being alone with myself, as though the active world had gone and I was its lone survivor.
One day I put on a raincoat and galoshes, and walked to Eliza Edwards’s in the village. It seemed to me that all our mysteries must be connected somehow, and there was a bare chance that the police had overlooked something. Eliza had little or nothing to say, however. It was clear that she resented with all her New England soul the publicity she had had, and the inability to rerent the room Helen Jordan had occupied.
She did not ask me in. We sat on her small vine-covered porch, and she pursed her mouth at my first question.
“I’ve told all I know. She just came, left her stuff and went out. I never saw her again.”
“Surely she said something?”
“She asked where the bathroom was, and she wanted a key to the house. I said I only had one key, and I hadn’t seen it for a year. Nobody in this town is a thief,” she added virtuously.
“I wish you’d think back,” I said urgently. “She didn’t say where she was going? She walked in, ate her supper, and walked out again. Is that all?”
“She asked if I had a telephone and said she’d be back in an hour or so.”
“I suppose you have no idea whom she wanted to call?”
She had not. Almost every roomer she got asked the same question. Generally she sent them to the corner drugstore. She had no idea whether Jordan had gone there or not. All she knew was that she had eaten a good dinner and never so much as said it was good, and had then gone out. She had worn a hat and carried a handbag, and she had locked her bedroom door before she left. It was evident that Helen Jordan’s disappearance and death were a matter of grievance to her.
“Not to mention the police tracking in and out for days,” she
added somberly. “Wear and tear, I called it; but they just laughed at me. I pay my taxes on the dot, and—”
She went on for some time, but I learned something that day, although it seemed of no importance then. Eliza thought she had seen the woman before.
“She was no beauty,” she said. “But I’ve got it in my mind that I’ve seen her somewhere. She was so plain that it stuck out, and it’s easier to remember an ugly face than the other kind. Not lately. Must be quite a while back.”
“Here? In town?”
“Might have been here. Might have been somewhere else. I don’t leave the island much.”
I thought back. Jordan had hardly left Sunset at all after her arrival. She had gone with Juliette once, to the hairdresser’s, but that was about all. Eliza merely sniffed when I mentioned the beauty shop. She had no time for such goings-on, she said contemptuously.
But she had relaxed by that time. She agreed to let me see the room Jordan had occupied for the brief tragic interval before her death; and I added to what she called the wear and tear of her carpets by following her upstairs. The room was small and bare, and a glance told me that there was nothing of any value to be discovered there. A neatly made bed, a pine bureau and chest of drawers, two chairs and a small table, and all spotlessly clean, furnished it. There was no stove or fireplace, and wherever her suitcase had stood, it was now at the police station.
It seemed difficult to believe that a woman, any woman, could slip from life into death and leave so little behind her; a letter—not addressed to her, a handful of possessions in the New York apartment, a suitcase at a police station, and this empty room.
“Was this the way she left it?” I asked.
“All but the suitcase. The police have got that. Somebody’s in a good bag, if I do say it,” she added darkly.
It seemed clear that Eliza had little faith in the forces of law and order. But that was all that was clear. I tried to think.
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