“Won’t you come?” she falteringly pleaded, pointing towards the house with its twinkling lights. “You are cold; you are shuddering; they will do the searching who don’t mind night or wet. Follow Anitra, Anitra who is so sorry.”
“No!” he shouted. His tone, his look, were almost those of a madman. He even put out his hands towards her in repulsion. He seemed to cast her away. This gesture, if not his words, reached her understanding. The lawyer saw her sway, fling back her young head with its disheveled locks to the night, and fall moaning pitifully to the ground. Here she lay still, with the wet grass all about her and the last lingering drops of rain beating on her huddled form.
Mr. Harper started to raise her, for Ransom stood petrified. But no sooner had the lawyer made his presence known by this impetuous movement, than Ransom woke from his trance and, darting down, lifted the girl in his arms and began moving with her towards the house. As he passed the lawyer he muttered between set teeth:
“She’s caused me all my misery. But she looks too much like Georgian for me to see another man touch her. God will care for my poor darling’s body.”
CHAPTER XIV
A DETECTIVE’S WORK
Morning.
The living household was about its tasks for all the horror of the night before, and the still unrelieved suspense as to the fate of one of its members.
The maid, who had sat on watch in the upper hall for so many hours the evening before, was again at her post, but this time with her eye fixed only on one door, the door behind which slept the exhausted Anitra. Ransom’s room was empty; he was in the sitting-room below, closeted with the lawyer.
Some one had been there before them. The tray of bottles and glasses had been removed from the table, and in their place were to be seen a woman’s damaged hat and a small tortoise-shell comb. Mr. Harper’s hand was on the former, which was wound about with a wet veil.
“I think I recognize this,” said he. “At least I have a distinct impression of having seen it before.”
“It was picked up with the veil still on it near the entrance of the lane,” explained Ransom.
“Then there can be no doubt that it is the hat Miss Hazen wore during her journey. She tossed it off the moment her foot touched the ground, and taking the shawl from her neck pulled it over her head instead. You remember that she had no hat on when they brought her in.”
“I remember. This is Miss Hazen’s hat without any doubt.”
The lawyer eyed the speaker with curious interest. There was something in his tone that he did not understand.
“And this?” he ventured, laying a respectful finger on the comb.
“Found in the open field between the house and the mill-stream.”
“Do you recognize it?”
“No. Georgian wore such combs, but I cannot absolutely say that this is hers.”
“I can. You see this little gold work at the top? Well, I have an eye for such things and I noticed this comb in her hair last night. There were two of them just alike.”
Instinctively the two men sat with their eyes fixed for a minute on this comb, then, equally instinctively, they both looked up and gazed at each other long and hard. It was the lawyer who first spoke.
“I think that we should have no further secrets between us,” said he. “Here is Mrs. Ransom’s will. There is a name mentioned in it which I do not know. Perhaps you do.” Here he laid the document on the table.
Mr. Ransom eyed it but did not take it up. Instead, he drew a crumpled paper from his own pocket and, handing it to the lawyer, said: “First, I should like you to read the letter which she left behind for me. My feelings as a husband would lead me to hold it as a sacred legacy from all eyes but my own; but there is a mystery hidden in it, a mystery which I must penetrate, and you are the only man who can assist me in doing so.”
The lawyer, lowering his eyes to hide their own suspicious glint, opened the paper, and carefully read these lines:
“Forgive. My troubles are too much for me. I’m going to a place of rest, the only place and the only rest possible to one in my position. I don’t blame anybody. Least of all do I blame Anitra. It was not her fault that she was brought up rudely, or that she knows no restraint in love or in hate. Be kind to her for my sake, and if any one else claims her or offers to take her from you, resist them. I give her entirely to you. It’s a more priceless gift than you think; much more priceless than the one which I take from you by my death. I could never have been happy with you; you could never have been happy with me. Fate stood between us; a darker and more inexorable fate than you, in your kindly experience of life, could imagine. Else, why do I plunge to my death with your ring on my finger and your love in my heart?
“Georgian.”
“Ravings?” questioned Ransom hoarsely, as Mr. Harper’s eyes rose again to his face.
“It would seem so,” assented the lawyer. “Yet there is intelligence in all the lines. And the will—read the will. There is no lack of intelligent purpose there; little as it accords with the feeling she exhibits here for her sister. She leaves her nothing; and does not even mention her name. Her personal belongings she bequeaths to you; but her realty, which comprises the bulk of her property I believe, she divides, somewhat unequally I own, between you and a man named Auchincloss. It is he I want to ask you about. Have you ever heard her speak of him?”
“Josiah Auchincloss of St. Louis, Missouri,” read Mr. Ransom. “No, the name is new to me. Didn’t she tell you anything about him when she gave you her instructions?”
“Not a word. She said, ‘You will hear from him if ever this will is published. He has a right to the money and I entreat you to show your respect for me by seeing that he gets it without any unnecessary trouble.’ That was all she said or would say. Your wife was a woman of powerful character, Mr. Ransom. My little arts counted for nothing in any difference of opinion between us.”
“Auchincloss!” repeated Ransom. “Another unknown quantity in the problem of my poor girl’s life. What a tangle! Do you wonder that I am overcome by it? Anitra—the so-called brother—and now this Auchincloss!”
“Right, Ransom, I share your confusion.”
“Do you?” The words came very slowly, penetratingly. “Haven’t you some idea—some strange, possibly half-formed notion or secret intuition which might afford some clew to this labyrinth? I have been told that lawyers have a knack of getting at the bottom of human conduct and affairs. You have had a wide experience; does it not suggest some answer to this problem which will harmonize all its discordant elements and make clear its various complications?”
Mr. Harper shook his head, but there was a restrained excitement in his manner which was not altogether the reflection of that which dominated Ransom, and the latter, observing it, leaned across the table till their faces almost touched.
“Do you guess my thought?” he whispered. “Look at me and tell me if you guess my thought.”
The lawyer hesitated, eying well the trembling lip, the changing color, the wide-open, deeply flushed eyes so near his own; then with a slow smile of extraordinary subtlety, if not of comprehension, answered in a barely audible murmur:
“I think I do. I may be mad, but I think I do.”
The other sank back with a sigh charged with what the lawyer interpreted as relief. Mr. Harper reseated himself, and for a moment neither looked at the other, and neither spoke; it would almost seem as if neither breathed. Then, as a bird, deceived by the silence, hopped to the window sill and began its cheep, “cheep,” Mr. Ransom broke the spell by saying in low but studiously business-like tones:
“Have you thought it worth while to study the ground under her window or anywhere else for footprints? It might not be amiss; what do you think about it?”
“Let us go,” readily acquiesced the lawyer, rising to his feet with an honest show of alacrity; “after which I must telegraph to New York. I was expected back today.”
“I know it; but your duties there will
keep; these here cannot. Your hand on the promise that you will respect my secret till—well, till I can assure you that my intuitions are devoid of any real basis.”
The lawyer’s palm met his; then they started to go out; but before they had passed the door, Mr. Ransom came back, and lifting the comb from the table he put it in his pocket. As he did this, his eye flashed sidewise on the other. There were strange hints and presentiments in it which brought the color to the usually imperturbable lawyer’s cheek.
In going out they passed the office-door. A dozen men were hanging about, smoking and talking. Among them was a countryman who had just swallowed, open-mouthed, the story of the past night’s tragedy. He was now speaking out his own mind concerning it, and this is what these two heard him say as they went by:
“Do you know what strikes me as mighty strange? That they should clear that stone of the name of Anitra just in time to put Georgian’s in its place. I call that peculiar, I do.”
The lawyer and the husband exchanged a glance.
“Mrs. Ransom had a deep mind,” the lawyer remarked, as the door slammed behind them. “She apparently thought of everything.”
Ransom, directing a look down the street towards the factories and the roaring mill-stream, uttered a shuddering sigh.
“They are still searching,” said he. “But they will never find her. They will never find her.”
The lawyer pulled him away.
“That’s because they search the water. We will search the land.”
“That’s half water, too; but it cannot hide every clew. You have eyes for the imperceptible; use them, Mr. Harper, use them.”
“I will; but this is a detective’s work. Do not expect too much from me.”
“I expect nothing. I do not dare to. Let us tread very softly, that is all, and be careful to talk low, if we have anything to say.”
By this time they had rounded the corner of the house and entered a narrow walk, flagged with brick, which connected the space in front with the rear offices and garden. This walk ran close to the walls which were broken on this side by an ell projecting in the direction of the mill-stream. It was from the roof of this ell that Anitra declared Georgian to have slipped and fallen.
Their first care was to glance up at the roof. It was a sloping one and Anitra’s story seemed credible enough when they noted how much easier it would be to drop upon it from the little balcony overhead than to traverse the roof itself and reach the ground beneath without slipping. But as they looked longer, each face betrayed doubt. The descent from the balcony was easy enough, but how about the passage from Georgian’s window to the balcony? This latter was confined to the one window, and was surrounded by an ornamental balustrade, high enough to offer a decided obstacle to the adventurous person endeavoring to leap upon it from the adjoining window-ledge. However, this leap, made in the dark and under circumstances inducing the utmost recklessness, might look practical enough from the window-ledge itself, and Mr. Harper, making a remark to this effect, proposed that they should examine the ground rather than the house for evidences of Mrs. Ransom’s slip and fall as related by Anitra.
The only spot where they could hope to find such was in the one short stretch—the width of the ell—underlying the edge of the sloping roof. But this spot was all flagged, as I have already said, and when their eyes strayed beyond it to the untilled fields, stretching between them and the great rock at the verge of the waterfall from which she was supposed to have taken her fatal leap, it was to find them as unproductive of evidence as the brick walk itself. Not one pair of feet but many had passed that way since early morning. The ground showed a mass of impressions of all sizes and shapes, amid which it would have been impossible for them, without the necessary experience, to have followed up the flight of any one person. They had come to their task too late.
“Futile,” decided the lawyer. “There is no use in our going that way.” And he turned to look again at the ground in their immediate vicinity. As he did so, his eye lighted on the triangular spot where the ell met the side of the house under the kitchen windows. Here there was no flagging, the walk taking a diagonal course from the corner of the ell to the kitchen door.
“What are those?” he asked, pointing to two oblong impressions brimming with water which disfigured the center of this small plot.
“They look like footprints,” ventured Ransom.
“They are footprints,” decided Mr. Harper as they stooped to examine the marks, “and the footprints of a person dropping from a height. Nothing else explains their depth or general appearance.”
“Couldn’t they be those of a person approaching the ell to converse with someone above? I see others similar to these in the open place over there beyond the kitchen door.”
“It is a trail. Let us follow it. It seems to lead anywhere but towards the waterfall. This is an important discovery, Mr. Ransom, and may lead to conclusions such as we might not otherwise have presumed to entertain, especially if we come upon an impression clear enough to point in which direction the person making it was going.”
“Here is what you want,” Ransom assured him in a low and curiously smothered voice. He was evidently greatly excited by this result of their inquiries, for all his apparent quiet and precise movements. “It’s a woman’s step, and that woman was going from the ell when she left these tokens of her passage behind her. Going! and as you say not in the direction of the waterfall.”
“Hush! I see someone at the kitchen window. Let us move warily and be sure not to confound these prints with those of any other person. It looks as if a great many people had passed here.”
“Yes, this is the way to the chicken-coops and out-houses. But in the ground beyond I think I see a single line of steps again—small steps like these. Where can they be leading? They are deep like those of a person running.”
“And straggling, like those of a person running in the dark. See how they waver from the direct line down there, turn, and almost come up against that wood-pile! Whose steps are these? Whose, Mr. Harper? Quick! I must see where they go. Our time will not be lost. The key to the labyrinth is in our hands.”
The lawyer was in the rear and the eyes of the other were fixed far ahead. For this reason, perhaps, the former allowed himself a quiet shake of the head, which might not have encouraged the other so very much, had he caught sight of it. They were now on the verge of the garden, or what would soon be a garden if these rains betokened spring. A path ran along its edge and in this path the footsteps they were following lost themselves; but they came upon them again among the hillocks of some old potato-hills beyond, and finally traced them quite across the garden waste to a fence, along which they ran, blundering from ploughed earth to spots of smoother ground, and so back again till they came upon an old turn-stile!
Passing through this, the two men stopped and looked about them. They were in a road ridged with grass and flanked by bushes. One end ran east into a wooded valley, the other debouched on the highway a few feet to the right of the tavern.
“The lane!” exclaimed Mr. Harper. “The lead towards the waterfall was a feint. It was in this direction she fled, and it is from this point that search must be made for her.”
Ransom, greatly perturbed, for this possibility of secret flight opened vistas of as much mystery, if not of as much suffering, as her death in the river, glanced at the sodden ground under their feet, and thus along the lane to where it lost itself from view among the trees.
“No possible following of steps here,” he declared. “A hundred people must have come this way since early morning.”
“It’s a short cut from the Ferry. They told me last night that it lessened the distance by fully a quarter of a mile.”
“The Ferry! Can she be there? Or in the woods, or on her way to some unknown place far out of our reach? The thought is maddening, Mr. Harper, and I feel as helpless as a child under it. Shall we get detectives from the county-seat, or start on the hunt ourselves? We might h
ear something further on to help us.”
“We might; but I should rather stay on the immediate scene at present. Ah, there comes a fellow in a cart who should be able to tell us something! Stand by and I’ll accost him. You needn’t show your face.”
Mr. Ransom turned aside. Mr. Harper waited till the slow-moving horse, dragging a heavily jogging wagon, came alongside, and he had caught the eye of the low-browed, broad-faced farmer boy who sat on a bag of potatoes and held the reins.
“Good morning,” said he. “Bad news this way. Any better at the Ferry, or down east, as you call it?”
“Eh?” was the lumbering, half-suspicious answer from the startled boy. “I’ve heard naught down yonder, but that a gal threw herself over the waterfall up here last night. Is that a fact, sir? I’m mighty curus to know. My mother knew them Hazens; used to wash for ‘em years ago. She told me to bring up these taters and larn all I could about it.”
“We don’t know much more than that ourselves,” was the smooth and cautious reply. “The lady certainly is missing, and she is supposed to have drowned herself.” Then, as he noted the fellow’s eyes resting with some curiosity on Mr. Ransom’s well-clad, gentlemanly figure, added gravely, and with a slight gesture towards the latter:
“The lady’s husband.”
The lad’s jaw fell and he looked very sheepish.
“Excuse me, misters, I didn’t know,” he managed to mutter, with a slash at his horse which was vainly endeavoring to pull the cart from the rut in which it had stuck. “I guess I’ll go along to the hotel. I’ve a bag of taters for Mrs. Deo.”
But the cart didn’t budge and the lawyer had time to say:
“Guess you didn’t hear anything said about another lady I am interested in. No talk down your way of a strange young woman seen anywhere on the highway or about any of the houses between here and the Landing?”
“Jerusha! I did hear a neighbor of mine say somethin’ about a stranger gal he saw this very mornin’. Met her down by Beardsley’s. She was goin’ through the mud on foot as lively as you please. Asked him the way to the Ferry. He noticed her because she was pretty and spoke in such a nice way—just like a city gal,” he said. “Is it any one from this hotel?” added the fellow with a wondering look. “If so, she walked a mile before daylight in mud up to her ankles. A girl of powerful grit that! with a mighty good reason for catching the train.”
The Anna Katharine Green Mystery Megapack Page 150
