He filled his pipe again and lit it.
“All right,” he said. “There we were. We had two women dead. One of them was a stranger here, the other hadn’t been around for years. I didn’t see the answer on the island, or anywhere near by. So you and I went to Juliette’s apartment in New York.
“We didn’t find much, except a clue to who this Jennifer was. But I did have that old newspaper clipping. Somebody’s marriage had been indefinitely postponed.
“Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but there might be a lot of heartbreak in it. The fellow’s name began with ‘L’ too, Langdon Page. And don’t forget I knew Juliette. I’d seen her around for six or seven summers. I’d seen that apartment of hers too. She was a troublemaker, all right, and here was trouble.
“I wasn’t sure of anything, of course. It mightn’t mean a thing. But as I’ve said I was drowning, and a leaf looked like a lifeboat to me. So I kind of kept after it now and then. I carried that clipping around, and every day or so I’d look at it.
“Then maybe the most curious thing of all happened. Somebody had hated Juliette and got rid of her. Helen Jordan had known too much—she was in the other woman’s confidence—so that she had to be put away too. But by the great horn spoon, what was the idea of knocking out a fellow who called himself Allen Pell, parking him somewhere until night, wiping his fingerprints off that trailer of his, and then carting him a hundred miles to a hospital?
“That spoiled the picture. It just didn’t fit anywhere. Why wipe those fingerprints off? Who did it? It wasn’t Pell himself. I had an idea maybe Pell was dead. Then we got the word that he’d been taken to a hospital, and that didn’t fit either. I couldn’t see Pell, either as the killer or anything else.
“What it looked like was that somebody had hurt the fellow, and then had been damned sorry, if you know what I mean.
“Well, that didn’t look like our killer. It looked at that time as though we had two different bits of trouble on our hands; Pell’s injury and the murders. Three, if you count what had been going on at your house: the hatchet up there in the old attic, the way those rooms had been gone through, and Maggie getting hit on the head and knocked out. And by the way, I may as well tell you that it was Fred Martin who hit Maggie and knocked her out.”
“Fred?” I said, astounded. “But why? He didn’t even know her!”
“Well, Fred’s sorry enough.” The sheriff smiled again. “He thought she was a ghost! He’d heard those stories about your house, and when she stood up in her nightgown he pretty nearly fainted. Then I guess he just lashed out at her.”
Fred, he said, had been about the house for several nights, before Juliette was murdered, trying to see her. He meant to choke the truth out of her, according to his own statement. He was certain she had got a divorce somehow. She was marrying money when she married Arthur, and she wouldn’t take a chance on losing it.
“Maybe he’d have killed her, if he got a chance; he’s only human. However, somebody else did it for him, so that was that.
“However that may be, he knew she had some things hidden. She as much as told him so; and after the excitement of her death began to die down, he went to New York. His mother was sick. That’s correct. But while he was there he got into her apartment, posing as a reporter and paying some bribery. There was nothing there, so he got the idea she had it with her. She’d made some crack about having letters that would blow the island wide open, and he thought maybe she had the record of her divorce among them.
“Anyhow he wanted to get to her room. He got into the house by that window, and—Well, that’s what happened to Maggie. He was scared. He thought maybe he’d killed her. He carried her down and laid her in the hall, and then he beat it.”
He got up and stood for a minute, looking out at the rain. When he turned he eyed me gravely.
“Then you came into it,” he said. “All at once you shoot down to New York. It’s hot. You look as washed out as though you’d been hung on a clothesline. But you go to New York anyhow. Jake Halliday, one of my deputies, sees you at the station here and tells me. So I call up the police there and have a man see what you’re after. I felt pretty foolish when I heard you’d spent some of your time there at the public library!
“But you did something else, Marcia. You went to see a man named Samuel Dunne, and Halliday had no trouble about him. He and the neighbors were holding seances to get in touch with his wife and daughter, who had both been killed by a hit-and-run driver.
“I still couldn’t see it, when Halliday called me up; but I sent him back to the library, and he got the files you’d had. There was Dunne’s story and all the rest of it. What’s more, this Jennifer Dennison was mixed up with it, and so were Howard Brooks and Marjorie Pendexter. And here’s something else. This Langdon Page had got out on parole early in June of this year, and then disappeared. He hadn’t reported since.
“It began to look as though he was our man. Halliday had got the story from the papers. Page had been crazy about Juliette, and had been drinking heavily as a result. Well, a fellow who’s been two or three years in the pen has time to get over a lot of things; especially love for a woman. But we had to remember this. She’d wrecked him. His engagement was broken. Maybe his business was gone. I didn’t know about that.
“Maybe he’d brooded over this thing, his broken engagement and so on, until he wasn’t normal. Still and all, it takes a good bit of brooding to make a man kill a woman for a reason like that, and after three years. It didn’t quite jell, as my wife says.
“Anyhow we didn’t have Pell, or Page, or whatever you want to call him. Halliday got a photograph of him, and the folks at the tourist camp identified him all right. He could have known Juliette was here. We found an item to that effect in one of the society columns. Maybe these fellows in the pen read the society column. They do some queer things. But we didn’t have him and we couldn’t find him. All we knew was that he’d been on the island.
“Bullard had Fred Martin by that time, and was off hell-bent for election! I kept telling him there were too many odds and ends left over, but you know him. He had Martin and he wasn’t letting go. Then the doctor got killed, and there was that fingerprint on the side of the car. There was no use arguing that the print was on the right-hand door and the doctor had been shot from the left. We got the print identified, and it was Page’s, alias Allen Pell!
“Well, you know that part of it. He’d disappeared and we couldn’t locate him. Then one day he walked in and gave himself up, and I’d like to have seen Bullard’s face! Page denied the crimes, but Bullard wouldn’t even listen. He was all set to go again!
“But I wasn’t satisfied. Page wasn’t telling all he knew. That stuck out like a peg leg, and I got an idea he was protecting somebody. But who? He didn’t know anybody much on the island except you—so far as I knew. He had known Marjorie Pendexter and the Brooks fellow, and he might have seen Fred Martin and Dorothy in Florida. He had a place there. But who else?
“Then that tin box turned up. I learned a lot from it. Not the letters from men. Mrs. Ransom had been doing some polite blackmailing, I was sure of that; but I couldn’t see any of the men concerned killing her. But I did get some things that looked phony to me. The necklace was only one of them.
“What, for instance, had sent Juliette around to Page’s apartment as soon as she could get there after that accident of his in New York? He’d run through a traffic light and killed two women and hurt a man. He was picked up unconscious and taken to a hospital; and it wasn’t very long before the police went through his wallet and found out who he was. But she’d been there already! There was a letter or two in that box that he had received only the day before.
“Now that was a queer thing. She must have hotfooted it there pretty quick. The police were there three hours later, and they found his stuff scattered all over the place. His Jap slept out. There was nobody in the apartment. But less than three hours after he’d killed those people she was ther
e! He was unconscious in a hospital, nobody knew anything about it. But apparently she did.
“You see what I mean. Not only was there something in his apartment she had to have. She knew about what had happened several hours before the morning papers had it.
“I didn’t know then what she was after, but I was sure of one thing. She’d been in that car with him that night; and I wasn’t so darned sure she hadn’t been driving it. In that case—”
He stopped and drew on his pipe.
“In that case it was pretty bad news,” he said slowly. “Suppose she was driving that car? Suppose, being a man, he took the rap for her? He may have hoped she’d come out and confess. When she didn’t, what could he do? Accuse her? He had no proof, and I’d say he wasn’t the man to hide behind any woman’s petticoats. He might have been drunk, and she took the wheel. In that case he’d reason the punishment was up to him.
“But you can see where that left me. That gave him a motive for killing her; not premeditated murder, but rage and resentment. That was the kind of murder it had been! Not only that either. There was another reason for his wanting to kill her. I’ll get to that later.”
CHAPTER XXXIX
I SAT STILL. MY hands and feet were like ice, and it seemed to me that for hours I had been there, listening to the rain against the window, to the tap-tap of the typewriter outside, and to that inexorable voice, going on and on.
The sheriff looked at me sharply.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Don’t jump at things, Marcia, I haven’t said he was guilty. I’ve only said it looked like it.”
I breathed again, and he got a piece of note paper out of his wallet and laid it out on the desk.
“Well,” he said, “to make a long story short, I went down to New York again. I saw the police who’d found him after the car struck the pole, and I found the intern who’d picked him up out of the street. All I have to say is that if he was driving the car that night he took a flying leap from under the wheel, over the other seat and the door, and out on his head. It should have killed him, but it didn’t. So what?”
I did not reply, and he sat looking at the paper before him.
“I didn’t believe it,” he said slowly. “I had the picture pretty well before I went down this last time. I knew she’d been at his apartment that night after the thing happened. My idea was that he had been hurt, but she wasn’t. She got out of that car and ran, and nobody ever saw her. But when she reached home she started thinking. There was something in his place she had to get; and get it before the police arrived there.
“Did she get it, or not? It seemed to me part of the case turned on that. And if she did, where was it? If it was a letter she might have burned it. Chances were if she found it she did. But maybe she didn’t. She was scared, and she kept on being scared. She fired her maid and sent out to her old home for the Jordan woman. Remember what Helen Jordan wrote? ‘She has something on her mind. She acts scared, and you know that isn’t like her.’
“Well, later on she was more scared than ever. You can figure it like this. Page had gone up for eight years. Even with time off she had five years or more. But he’s paroled, and all at once she wants to leave the country. Why? Was she afraid of him? He’d kept quiet through the trial. He knew she did it, but he’d kept quiet. What had happened in that interval to scare her?
“So far as I could make out, maybe two people knew she’d been in that car. One was Page. The other looked like the Dennison woman, from that letter of hers. But she wasn’t afraid of the Dennison woman. Then who was she afraid of? Was it Page? Or was it somebody else? And here were Tony Rutherford and Bob Hutchinson and Howard Brooks all cluttering things up; not to mention Fred Martin and Arthur, and even you yourself!
“Well, there I was. I took a look at that house of yours on Park Avenue, and it wasn’t hard to find out how it had been entered. Some bars had been sawed out of a basement window, and it looked like a professional job to me.
“Ever try to saw an iron bar? Well, it’s not easy. They’d been sawed out and then set back into place with gum of some sort. Just to look at them, you’d never know they’d been touched.
“Now that was queer too, Marcia. There was quite a lot of stuff around, pictures and Oriental rugs and so on. But this fellow isn’t interested. He goes up to what’s got to be the room Juliette used to occupy there. A blind man would know it was hers, and it’s there he looks things over!
“Well, we haven’t many professional burglars on the island. But we did have one fellow who’d been in the pen. That was Page; and I reckon when we get all the pieces together we’ll find Page sent somebody into that house of yours, to look for something. But don’t hold it against him. Likely he had his reasons.
“Anyhow, the upshot was that I wasn’t sure that Juliette hadn’t got what she went after that night after she’d killed those people. It wasn’t in the box. That’s sure. So I had a talk with the Brooks fellow, and he let me look over Page’s things in the warehouse. At first it seemed like I’d gone up a blind alley. Then I found this, in the pocket of a dressing gown. She’d missed it, after all! If that’s what she went to his apartment for, she completely forgot, in her panic, that if he had saved it at all it would have to be in his bag in the car.”
He picked up the paper in front of him and gave it to me. My hands shook as I tried to hold it. It was in the square bold writing which had been familiar to me for so many years. “Dearest: If you’ll leave the club at nine I’ll meet you at the gate. Jennifer is sending me in her car. You can drive me back to town, and we can talk things over. Ever yours, Juliette.”
I sat staring at it.
“She did it, then?” I said dully,
“She did it, and the Dennison woman knew about it,” he agreed. “I’ve got the story from him. She claimed he’d been drinking and she took the wheel. She wanted him to break his engagement to this Emily Forrester—you might keep that name in mind—and he refused. Guess he’d seen through her by that time! Anyhow she was furious. Maybe she’d been drinking too, I don’t know. But she stepped on the gas and went through the traffic light like a bat out of hell. When she knew what she had done she tried to turn a corner and hit a post. He went out, but she was behind the wheel and wasn’t hurt. At least he thinks not. Nobody saw her. The street was dark, and she just slipped away.”
He took a long breath and got his cold pipe going again.
“Well, that’s it,” he said. “Or it’s part of it. I told you it’s not a pretty story, and it isn’t. All told, it took six lives before it was finished: those two women who were killed by the car, three here, and one more. Can you guess who it was?”
I shook my head. I felt sick and dizzy.
“Then I’ll tell you,” he said. “You saw that clipping, and I’ve mentioned the Forrester girl. How do you think she felt about this? Pretty hard on her, wasn’t it? Here she was, all ready to marry Page; the trousseau bought, the invitations ready to go out. Then he gets eight years in the pen. That was a lifetime to her; and while I gather Page wasn’t in love with her—he’s a gentleman. He doesn’t say so, but I get it—she was in love with him.
“Anyhow, she stood it for a good while. Then I don’t know what happened. Maybe she learned about Juliette. Maybe she learned that he wasn’t guilty, and had taken the rap for another woman. I wouldn’t put it past Juliette to tell her herself! But she couldn’t stand it. She—”
“You mean that Emily Forrester killed Juliette!” I gasped.
“I mean,” he said, “that Emily Forrester killed herself.”
I do not recall all that followed. Sitting there with my mind racing I was only aware that the case against Allen was building up, slowly and inexorably. The sheriff went on. The clipping had interested him from the start. He had sent out what he called the dog letters, in the hope of locating the Forrester girl.
“I had the whole United States to go over,” he explained. “But if I could find who advertised those pups I’d find th
e girl. But when I did find out I knew who she was already. Got it out of some letters in the warehouse.”
He got busy on the long-distance telephone when he came back, and it was then that he learned about that suicide of hers.
“Kind of knocked me out for a minute,” he said. “There was the motive for Page, right enough; and I began to wonder if Bullard wasn’t right, after all. But there was something else in that telephone call. I had to begin my thinking all over again. So—”
He did not go on. I heard footsteps in the hall outside, and Allen came in, a deputy sheriff beside him. My heart almost broke when I saw him, he was so changed, so gaunt and thin. He had been shaved and someone had brought him fresh linen, but his eyes looked sunken in his head.
The sheriff got up.
“Sit down, Page,” he said. “I want you to tell Marcia here what you told me. Go easy with it. She’s had a pretty bad time herself.”
It was all incredible; the sheriff going out and taking the deputy with him, Mamie typing in the next room, the rain still washing down the windows, and Allen making no move toward me. Looking strained and awkward, and unsmiling as though we were strangers; as though—
“I didn’t want to do this, Marcia,” he said. “It’s the sheriff’s idea. I—how much do you know?”
“Only that you never murdered anybody,” I said, as steadily as I could.
He nodded, but still he did not come near me. Instead he went to the window and stood there, with his back to me. Then he apparently came to a decision, for he turned again.
“This is with gloves off,” he said. “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, at last, my darling.”
“Nothing will change me, Allen.”
And at that use of his old name he gave me a faint twisted smile.
“I suppose a man’s sins live after him,” he said. “And it is the innocent who suffer. He told you about Emily?”
“Yes. I—I’m sorry.”
“I killed her,” he said. “I killed her, as surely as if I had fired that bullet myself. But that is my only murder, Marcia. I want you to know that.”
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