“What makes you think—”
“Then, however,” he concluded, overbearing her with his voice, “you hadn’t the courage to face him—out there, in the dark, alone. You persuaded Mildred to go—in your place. And he killed her.”
“Ha!” The mocking exclamation sounded as though it had been pounded out of her by a blow upon her back. “What makes you say that? Where do you get that? Who put that into your head?”
She volleyed those questions at him with indescribable rapidity, her lips drawn back from her teeth, her brows straining far up toward the line of her hair. The profound disgust with which he viewed her did not affect her. She darted to and fro in her mind, running about in the waste and tumult of her momentary confusion, seeking the best thing to say, the best policy to adopt, for her own ends.
He had had time to determine that much when her gift of self-possession reasserted itself. She forced her lips back to their thin line, and steadied herself. He could see the vibrant tautness of her whole body, exemplified in the rigidity with which she held her crossed knees, one crushed upon the other.
“I know, I think, what misled you,” she answered her own question. “You’ve talked to Gene Russell, of course. He may have heard—I think he did hear—Mildred and me discussing the mailing of a letter that Friday night.”
“He did,” Hastings said, firmly.
“But he couldn’t have heard anything to warrant your theory, Mr. Hastings. I merely made fun of her wavering after she’d once said she’d confront Berne Webster again with her appeal for fair play.”
He inspected her with an emotion that was a mingling of incredulity and repugnant wonder.
“It’s no use, Mrs. Brace,” he told her. “Russell didn’t see the name of the man to whom the letter was addressed. I saw him last Sunday afternoon. He told me he took the name for granted, because Mildred had taunted him, saying it went to Webster. As a matter of fact, he wanted to see if Webster was at Sloanehurst and fastened his eyes for a fleeting glimpse on that word—and on that alone. Besides, there are facts to prove that the letter did not go to Webster.—Do you see how your fancied security falls away?”
“Let me think,” she said, her tone flat and impersonal.
She was silent, her restless eyes gazing at the wall over his head. He watched her, and glanced only at intervals at the wood he was aimlessly shaving.
“Of course,” she said, after a while, looking at him with a speculative, deliberating air, “you’ve deduced and pieced this together. You’ve a woman’s intuition—comprehension of motives, feelings.”
She was silent again.
“Pieced what together?” he asked.
“It’s plain enough, isn’t it? You began with your suspicion that my need of money was heavier in my mind than grief at Mildred’s death. On that, you built up—well, all you’ve just said.”
“It was more than a suspicion,” he corrected. “It was knowledge—that everything you did, after her death, was intended to help along your scheme to—we’ll say, to get money.”
“Still,” she persisted shrewdly, “you felt the necessity of proving I’d blackmail—if that’s the word you want to use.”
“How?” he put in quickly. “Prove it, how?”
“That’s why you sent that girl here with the five hundred. I see it now; although, at the time, I didn’t.” She laughed, a short, bitter note. “Perhaps, the money, or my need of it, kept me from thinking straight.”
“Well?”
“Of course,” she made the admission calmly, “as soon as I took the hush money, your theory seemed sound—the whole of it: my motives and identity of the murderer.”
She was thinking with a concentration so intense that the signs of it resembled physical exertion. Moisture beaded the upper part of her forehead. He could see the muscles of her face respond to the locking of her jaws.
“But there’s nothing against me,” she began again, and, moved by his expression, qualified: “nothing that I can be held for, in the courts.”
“You’ve decided that, have you?”
“You’ll admit it,” she said. “There’s nothing—there can be nothing—to disprove my statement that Dalton’s death was provoked. I hold the key to that—I alone. That being true, I couldn’t be prosecuted in Pursuit as ‘accessory after the fact.’”
“Yes,” he agreed. “That’s true.”
“And here,” she concluded, without a hint of triumph, even without a special show of interest, “I can’t be proceeded against for blackmail. That money, from both of them, was a gift. I hadn’t asked for it, much less demanded it. I,” she said with an assured arrogance, “hadn’t got that far.—So, you see, Mr. Hastings, I’m far from frightened.”
He found nothing to say to that shameless but unassailable declaration. Also, he was aware that she entertained, and sought solution of, a problem, the question of how best to satisfy her implacable determination to make the man pay. That purpose occupied all her mind, now that her money greed was frustrated.
It was on this that he had calculated. It explained his going to her before confronting the murderer. He had felt certain that her perverted desire to “get even” would force her into the strange position of helping him.
He broke the silence with a careful attempt to guide her thoughts:
“But don’t fool yourself, Mrs. Brace. You’ve got out of this all you’ll ever get, financially—every cent. And you’re in an unpleasant situation—an outcast, perhaps. People don’t stand for your line of stuff, your behaviour.”
She did not resent that. Making a desperate mental search for the best way to serve her hard self-interest, he thought, she was impervious to insult.
“I know,” she said, to his immense relief. “I’ve been considering the only remaining point.”
“What’s that?”
“The sure way to make him suffer as horribly as possible.”
He pretended absorption in his carving.
“Why shouldn’t he have provided me with money when I asked it?” she demanded, at last.
The new quality of her speech brought his head up with a jerk. Instead of colourless harshness, it had a warm fury. It was not that she spoke loudly or on a high key; but it had an unbridled, self-indulgent sound. He got the impression that she put off all censorship from either her feeling or her expression.
“That wasn’t much to ask—as long as he continued his life of ease, of luxury, of safety—as long as I left out of consideration the debt he couldn’t pay, the debt that was impossible of payment.”
Alien as the thing seemed in connection with her, he grasped it. She thought that she had once loved the man.
“The matter of personal feeling?” he asked.
“Yes. When he left Pursuit, he destroyed the better part of me—what you would call the good part.”
She said that without sentimentalism, without making it a plea for sympathy; she had better sense, he saw, than to imagine that she could arouse sympathy on that ground.
“And,” she continued, with intense malignity, “what was so monstrous in my asking him for money? I asked him for no payment of what he really owes me. That’s a debt he can’t pay! My beauty, destroyed, withered and covered over with the hard mask of the features you see now; my capacity for happiness, dead, swallowed up in my long, long devotion to my purpose to find him again—those things, man as you are, you realize are beyond the scope of payment or repayment!”
Without rising to a standing position, she leaned so far forward that her weight was all on her feet, and, although her figure retained the posture of one seated on a chair, she was in fact independent of support from it, and held herself crouching in front of him, taut, a tremor in her limbs because of the strain.
Her hands were held out toward him, the tips of her stiffened, half-closed fingers less than a foot from his fa
ce. Her brows were drawn so high that the skin of her forehead twitched, as if pulled upward by another’s hand. It was with difficulty that he compelled himself to witness the climax of her rage. Only his need of what she knew kept him still.
“Money!” she said, her lean arms in continual motion before him. “You’re right, there. I wanted money. I made up my mind I’d have it. It was such a purpose of mine, so strongly grown into my whole being, that even Mildred’s death couldn’t lessen or dislodge it. And there was more than the want of money in my never letting loose of my intention to find him. He couldn’t strip me bare and get away! You’ve understood me pretty well. You know it was written, on the books, that he and I should come together again—no matter how far he went, or how cleverly!
“And I see now!” she gave him her decision, and, as she did so, rose to an upright position, her hands at her sides going half-shut and open, half-shut and open, as if she made mental pictures of the closing in of her long pursuit. “I’ll say what you want me to say. Confront him; put me face to face with him, and I’ll say the letter went to him. Oh, never fear! I’ll say the appropriate thing, and the convincing thing—appropriately convincing!”
Her eyes glittered, countering his searching glance, as she stood over him, her body flung a little forward from the waist, her arms busy with their quick, angular gesticulation.
“When?” he asked. “When will you do that?”
“Now,” she answered instantly. “Now!—Now!—Oh, don’t look surprised. I’ve thought of this possibility. My God!” she said with a bitterness that startled him. “I’ve thought of every possibility, every possible crook and quirk of this business.”
She was struck by his slowness in responding to her offer.
“But you,” she asked; “are you sure—have you the proof?”
“Thanks,” he said drily. “You needn’t be uneasy about that.—Now, if I may do a little telephoning, we’ll start.”
He went a step from her and turned back.
“By the way,” he stipulated, “that little matter of the five hundred—you needn’t refer to it. I mean it will have to be left out. It’s not necessary.”
“No; it isn’t,” she agreed, with perfect indifference. “And it’s spent.”
When he had telephoned to Sloanehurst and the sheriff’s office, he found her with her hat on, ready to accompany him.
As they stepped out of the Walman, she saw the automobile waiting for them. She stopped, a new rage darting from her eyes. He thought she would go back. After a brief hesitation, however, she gave a short, ugly laugh.
“You were as sure as that, were you!” she belittled herself. “Had the car wait—to take me there!”
“By no means,” he denied. “I hoped you’d go—that’s all.”
“That’s better,” she said, determined to assert her individuality of action. “You’re not forcing me into this, you know. I’m doing it, after thinking it out to the last detail—for my own satisfaction.”
XX
DENIAL OF THE CHARGE
Hastings, fully appreciating the value of surprise, had instructed Mrs. Brace to communicate none of the new developments to anybody until he asked for them. Reaching Sloanehurst, he went alone to the library, leaving her in the parlour to battle as best she might with the sheriff’s anxious curiosity.
Arthur Sloane and Judge Wilton gave him cool welcome, parading for his benefit an obvious and insolent boredom. Although uninvited to sit down, he caught up a chair and swung it lightly into such position that, when he seated himself, he faced them across the table. He was smiling, enough to indicate a general satisfaction with the world.
There was in his bearing, however, that which carried them back to their midnight session with him immediately following the discovery of Mildred Brace’s body. The smile did not lessen his look of unquestionable power; his words were sharp, clipped-off.
“I take it,” he said briskly, untouched by their demeanour of indifference, “you gentlemen will be interested in the fact that I’ve cleared up this mystery.”
“Ah-h-h!” drawled Sloane. “Again?”
“What do you mean by ‘again’?” he asked, good-naturedly.
“Crown, the sheriff, accomplished it four days ago, I’m credibly informed.”
“He made a mistake.”
“Ah?” Sloane ridiculed.
“Yes. ‘Ah!’” Hastings took him up curtly, and, with a quick turn of his head, addressed himself to Wilton: “Judge, I’ve been to Pursuit.”
When he said that, his head was thrown back so that he squinted at Wilton down the line of his nose, under the rims of his spectacles.
“Pursuit!”
Wilton’s echo of the word was explosive. He had been leaning back in his chair, eying the detective from under lowered lids, and drawing deep, prolonged puffs from his cigar. But, with the response to Hastings’ announcement, he sat up and leaned forward, putting his elbows on the rim of the table. It was an awkward attitude, compelling him to extend his neck and turn his face upward in order to meet the other’s glance.
“Yes,” Hastings said, after a measurable pause. “Interested in that?”
“Not at all,” Wilton replied, plainly alarmed, and fubbed out his cigar with forefinger and thumb, oblivious to the fact that he dropped a little shower of fire on the table cover.
“I’ll trouble you to observe, Mr. Sloane,” Hastings put in, “that, being excited, the judge’s first impulse is to extinguish his cigar: it’s a habit of his.—Now, judge, in Pursuit I heard a lot about you—a lot.”
“All right—what?”
He made the inquiry reluctantly, as if under compulsion of the detective’s glance.
“The Dalton case—and your part in it.”
“You know about that, do you?”
“All about it,” Hastings said, in a way that made doubt impossible; Sloane, even, bewildered as he was, got the impression of his ruthless certainty.
Wilton did not contest it.
“I struck in self-defence,” he excused himself wearily, like a man taking up a task against his will. “It would be ridiculous to call that murder. No jury would have convicted me—none would now, if given the truth.”
“But the body showed twenty-nine wounds,” Hastings pressed him, “the marks of twenty-nine separate thrusts of that knife.”
“Yes; that’s true.—Yes, I’ll tell you about that, you and Arthur—if you’d care to hear?”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Hastings said, settling in his chair. He was thinking: “He didn’t expect this. He’s unprepared!”
Sloane, who had been on the point of resenting this unbelievable attack on his friend, was struck dumb by Wilton’s calm acknowledgment of the charge. From long habit, he took the cap off the smelling-salts with which he had been toying when Hastings came in, but his shaking hand could not lift the bottle to his nose. Wilton guilty of a murder, years ago! He drew a long, shuddering breath and huddled in his chair.
Wilton rose clumsily and walked heavily to the door opening into the hall. He put his hand on the knob but did not turn it. He repeated the performance at the door opening into Sloane’s room. In all this he was unconscionably slow, moving in the manner of a blind man, feeling his way about and fumbling both knobs.
When he came back to the table, his shoulders were hunched to the front and downward, crowding his chest. His face looked larger, each separate feature of it throbbing coarsely to the pumping of his heart. Pink threads stood out on the white of his eyeballs. When the back of his neck pressed against his collar, the effect was to give the lower half of the back of his head an odd appearance of inflation or puffiness.
Hastings had never seen a man struggle so to contain himself.
“Suffering angels!” Sloane sympathized shrilly. “What’s the matter, Tom?”
“Al
l right—it’s all right,” he assured, his voice still low, but so resonant and harsh that it sounded like the thrumming of a viol string.
He seated himself, moving his chair several times, adjusting it to a proper angle to the table. In the end, he sat close to the table rim, hunched heavily on his elbows, and looked straight at Hastings.
“But, since you’ve been to Pursuit, what do you imply, or say?” he asked, the words scraping, as though his throat had been roughened with a file.
“That you killed Mildred Brace,” Hastings answered, also leaning forward, to give the accusation weight.
“I! I killed her!” Wilton’s teeth went together with a sharp click; the table sagged under his weight. “I deny it. I deny it!” He ripped out an oath. “This man’s crazy, Arthur! He’s dragged up a mistake, a tragedy, of my youth, and now has the effrontery to use it as a reason for suspecting me of murder!”
“Exactly!” chimed Sloane, in tremulous relief. “Shivering saints! Why haven’t you said so long ago, Tom?”
“I didn’t give him credit for the wild insanity he’s showing,” said Wilton thickly.
Whatever had been his first impulse, however near he had been to trying to explain away all blame in the Dalton murder, it was clear to Hastings now that he intended to rely on flat denial of his connection with the death of Mildred Brace. He had, perhaps, decided that explanation was too difficult.
Seeing his indecision, Hastings turned on Sloane.
“You’ve been exceedingly offensive to me on several occasions, Mr. Sloane. And I’ve had enough of it. Now, I’ve got the facts to show that you’re as foolish in the selection of your friends as in making enemies. I’m about to charge this man Wilton with murder. He killed Mildred Brace, and I can prove it. If you want to hear the facts back of this mystery; if you want the stuff that will enable you to decide whether you’ll stand by him or against him, you can have it!”
Before Sloane could recover from his surprise at the old man’s hot resentment, Wilton said, with an air of careless contempt:
“Oh, we’ve got to deal with what he says, Arthur. I’d rather answer it here than with an audience.”
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