THE DAY SEEMED INTERMINABLE. But Maggie had improved greatly. She even remembered something of what had happened.
“I guess I was walking in my sleep,” she said sheepishly. “Anyhow, when I woke up I was in the dark corner of a room somewhere. On my knees too, as if I was looking for something. I was pretty scared, it being dark and everything. I know I got up, and—Well, that’s all I do know.”
“You don’t remember hearing anything? Any sound? Anybody moving?”
She merely shook her head and then clutched at it.
“It still hurts,” she said. “No, miss. That’s all.”
Outside of Maggie’s statement, that day was remarkable for only one thing.
I had a visit from Marjorie Pendexter. She came shortly after lunch. A tall girl, taller than I, I remember her sprawled in a chair, with the drink she had asked for at her elbow, and looking at me with eyes that were haunted.
“I’ve got to talk to someone or go crazy, Marcia,” she said feverishly. “It’s about Howard. He knew Juliette, and—Well, at one time he liked her. You know what I mean. He’d met her about, at house parties, and so on, and you know how men fell for her.”
I stared at her incredulously. She was wearing her engagement ring, a square-cut diamond, and she kept twisting it about her finger.
“Well, really, Marjorie!” I said. “If you’re going to worry about all the men who liked her you’ll have to worry about half the males on this island.”
She did not smile. She lit a cigarette, inhaled and exhaled deeply before she spoke again.
“I suppose it does sound idiotic,” she said. “But he’s not like himself, Marcia. He’s worried about something, and he keeps putting off a cruise we were going to take. He meant to take the Sea Witch to Newfoundland, but now I don’t know when we’re going. Marcia, do you think she was blackmailing him? Juliette, I mean. You knew her better than I did.”
“I wouldn’t know a thing like that,” I said. “He has a lot of money. It’s possible. But I don’t think he killed her, and you don’t think so either,”
“No,” she admitted. “But you know what she did to men. There was one poor devil—” She let that go. “He has a frightful temper, Marcia. It’s over in a minute, but it’s there. If he met her that morning on the path—”
“Well, the probability is that he wasn’t within miles of her,” I said briskly. “What about this poor devil you mentioned?”
“Went crazy about her,” she said. “Took to drinking and killed some people with his car.” She got up. “She deserved what she got,” she said viciously. “I’m not sorry for her. But somebody’s going to the chair for doing his good deed for the day, that morning up on Pine Hill; and I’m plain scared.”
She swore me to secrecy before she left, and when she got into her roadster I thought she looked better, as though talking it out had done her good. But as I watched her go I realized what a change had come over all of us.
It was not only the police and the reporters, both still overrunning the island. It was suspicion and fear. People eyed each other with an unspoken question in their eyes. Bob and Lucy Hutchinson next door were reported as being at daggers’ points, and it had even interfered with the usual informal summer distractions, bathing parties on remote beaches, picnics and the long hikes which were always a part of the life.
In a way, the island at that time was divided into three schools of thought, as old Mrs. Pendexter put it: those who believed Arthur guilty of the murders, those who suspected Lucy, and those who never had an idea in their heads anyhow.
Unfortunately for the Arthur group Lucy’s golf club was found about that time, and quite a number shifted. It was found half buried on a hillside, and the excitement began all over again. It had no fingerprints on it, but there was certain grisly evidence that it had been the weapon in at least one of our deaths.
Fortunately the bells were quiet during that brief interval. That fact at least prevented the servants from leaving in a body. I had my hands full, what with Arthur sitting for hours gazing at nothing, and Mary Lou in and out of the house. She would not bring Junior to Sunset, especially after Maggie was hurt, but she drove back and forth. Alternately gentle and loving to Arthur, and again retiring into a remoteness that made me want to slap her.
One day she said:
“I’m standing by, Marcia. Whether he did these things or not. You know that.”
“You can’t possibly still believe—”
“Oh yes, I can,” she said, with an unnatural composure. “You haven’t known how things have been with us. I hated Juliette myself. I wanted her dead. If I had seen her that morning and there had been a golf club lying by I don’t know what I would have done. Maybe he felt that way too.”
“He detested her, Mary Lou. I heard him talking to her here. He said: ‘You’re fastened on me like a leech, and, by heaven, I can’t get rid of you.’ If that’s love—”
She had turned rather white, but she was still calm.
“It’s not very far from love to hate,” she said in a flat voice. “And somebody got rid of her. Remember that.”
I had no reply to that. I was seeing Arthur at the toolshed, and his stealthy re-entrance into the house.
It seems extraordinary now that life went on more or less as usual during that brief interval of what I call peace, for lack of a better word: I played tennis at the club, lunched out, dined out, and generally tried to be normal in a strange new world. Maggie was up and about. Morning after morning Lizzie demanded the day’s menus, and I had to face the thought of food. But Arthur himself was eating little or nothing, although for a time the police were letting him alone.
One day, needing exercise, I climbed the path beside Stony Creek. There was no sign of that shallow grave where Juliette had been buried, but at one place the ground was trampled, and there were broken branches all about. I shuddered as I passed it.
It was on the way down that I heard heavy footsteps on the path, and saw Mansfield Dean coming up. He had not seen me. He was striding along with his head bent, like a man lost in deep and not too pleasant thought. So far lost that when he finally saw me he looked almost shocked.
He recovered in a moment, however, and was his own hearty self again.
“Well!” he said. “Is this your walk too? I thought it was mine!”
“It used to be,” I told him.
He nodded understandingly.
“Of course. Not so pleasant now. Still—” He drew a long breath. “That’s all over now. We can’t bring them back, and maybe sometimes we wouldn’t want to.”
He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face.
“Too much good food and drink in this place,” he observed, more cheerfully. “No place for a man who has to watch his blood pressure.” Then, as though I might take that amiss: “Fine people, though. They’ve been splendid to Agnes. Everybody’s called. I tell her she’ll have to keep books on her visits.”
I thought he looked tired, as though his wife’s condition had worried him. Perhaps, as Mrs. Pendexter said, he was a self-made man and proud of the job; but he was a simple and natural person. Kindly too. He started to move on, then hesitated.
“I understand those fools of policemen have shown some sense at last,” he said, with some embarrassment. “It’s a pity your brother has been bothered. I’m sorry.”
“They have to do their duty, I suppose.”
Long weeks later I was to remember how he looked that day, his big muscular legs bulging in their golf stockings, his coat over his arm, and his eyes filled with a sort of shy friendliness. I watched him as he went on up the path, his head again bent, and I felt he had already forgotten me.
I sat on a rock beside the path, and looked down to where, far below, I could see the roof of Sunset among the trees. It had been a happy house for many years, until Juliette came into it. Now she was dead, and for days she had lain in that shallow grave somewhere above me on the hill. Why? What had actually happened, that day when Lucy Hutchinson had talked to her, and looking back at a turn of the path had seen her still there, as though she was waiting for somebody.
Had she been followed to the island and killed? And was Jordan’s death merely secondary to that first crime? Certainly the arrival of the two women had set loose a number of forces, still mysterious and certainly deadly.
It was late in July now, but it seemed a long time since the day I had first come to Sunset, and looking out from the porch had had my first view of the bay; the gulls soaring to drop and break their clams on the rocks below; and Maggie gazing down at the three crows, and saying that they meant bad luck. A long time since the postman’s double whistle had meant the small excitement of the day, and a boy on a bicycle with a telegram, a large one. A long time and another life since Arthur had combed the pool at low tide, and I had followed him like a small and reverential satellite.
It was late when I got home. The local caterer’s wagon was driving into the Hutchinson place loaded with the gilt chairs which with us mean a party. It was probably Lucy’s method of holding her chin up, but I resented it that day; and when I found Mary Lou on the veranda and mentioned it, she was fiercely indignant.
“It’s outrageous,” she said. “After all, Bob was crazy about Juliette. Everybody knows it.”
“That was years ago. I don’t suppose he has seen her since.”
“He saw her six months ago.”
I could only stare at her. There were times when she seemed incredible to me. All the problems, the careful balancing of this against that, motivations, human relationships, and she had not thought that fact worth the mentioning.
“You saw them? Together?”
“Certainly they were together. They were lunching at that French place on Sixty-third Street.”
I could have shaken her, but Mary Lou was Mary Lou, and Arthur loved her.
“Why haven’t you said so before?”
“I’m no scandalmonger,” she said virtuously. “I certainly don’t go about telling tales on Arthur’s first wife. Besides,” she added more humanly, “I like Lucy. I like Bob too, for that matter, if he is a fool about women.”
Queer, that mixture of childishness and astuteness which was—and is—Mary Lou. I had never thought that Bob Hutchinson was a fool about women. He was big, active and not too intelligent. For all their bickering he had always seemed to be in love with Lucy. Yet as time went on we were to learn that Mary Lou, who knew him hardly at all, knew instinctively what we had never guessed.
“Did they see you?” I asked.
“No. They left soon after I went in.”
“Did they seem friendly?”
She thought for a moment.
“He looked pretty serious. She was smiling. She was wearing a lot of orchids. Why, Marcia? Surely you don’t think Bob did that awful thing?”
“I think he is as likely a suspect as your own husband,” I retorted indignantly, and left her.
But I thought that over after I had gone up to dress for dinner. Juliette seldom left things as she found them. She could go into any peaceful community and set it by the ears. She was not deliberately malicious. She never gossiped, for the reason, I dare say, that the affairs of other people were of no importance to her. But two days anywhere, and the men were gathered around her, while the women formed a sort of tacit mutual defense society against her, somewhere else.
Now, though dead, she was still leaving discord and suspicion behind her.
But Bob Hutchinson! It seemed incredible. He had a quick temper. I had seen him break a golf club and throw it away, in a fit of anger. He had certainly been infatuated with Juliette at one time. But he had seen her recently. He had even taken her to lunch.
Bob was still in my mind when we went in to dinner that night, and unfortunately I tried to speak of him to Arthur.
“That man you chased from the roof that night, Arthur,” I said. “You must have some idea what he was like. At least you could tell whether he was large or small, couldn’t you?”
He put down his fork and spoon and shoved his chair back.
“I wish to God,” he said violently, “that I could eat one meal in peace. No, I haven’t any idea what he looked like. I’ve said that before. I’ve said it over and over. If I knew who it was I’d go out and get him. I suppose that hasn’t occurred to anybody!”
He slammed out of the room. Mary Lou, who had stayed to dinner, looked frightened, and William disappeared abruptly into the pantry.
“I told you,” said Mary Lou. “He’s not like himself at all. It scares me, Marcia.”
Small as this is, I have related it here not only because it shows our general nervous condition. It shows what Russell Shand was later to state in other words, that we were dealing with people rather than clues; with people and their interrelations, their reactions and their emotions. Indeed up to that time we had virtually no clues, or none that seemed to mean anything. I had found a button in the garden, Jordan for some reason or other had carried away the Jennifer letter but left all the rest of Juliette’s mail, Mary Lou’s car had left tire marks on the shoulder of the road, Lucy Hutchinson had dropped a rouge-tipped cigarette and left the print of a heel on the hill, somebody unknown had buried her golf club, and somebody equally unknown had broken the lock of our toolshed.
But also somebody, still unidentified, had killed two women and had tried to dispose of their bodies. And what about Maggie, and the attack on her?
The one new element, as I saw it that night, was Bob Hutchinson’s possible recent relationship with Juliette.
Mary Lou went upstairs directly after dinner. She went slowly, as though hoping that Arthur would call her back. He did not. He sat in the library with his untouched coffee beside him, and when I found him there later he was looking at the framed photographs of his wife and Junior on the table.
“At least,” he said harshly, “with that dammed alimony out of the way, they’ll have enough to live on.”
I shivered.
“I wish you wouldn’t say such things, Arthur.”
“Why not? This thing’s closing in on me. Even Shand knows it. They’ll arrest me sooner or later. If they don’t, the newspapers will try the case and force them to. Either way I’m through.”
I felt entirely desperate that night. By ten o’clock Mary Lou had not come downstairs again, and Arthur was simply holding a book, not reading it. I threw on a coat and went outside for some air, and it was then that I decided to see Bob Hutchinson and talk to him; that night if I could.
But the party was still going on, and so I walked up and down the driveway until it was over. It was a dark night and cool, and I had reached the gates again when I was suddenly aware of a man close at hand. He was hardly more than a shadow, standing beside a tree and looking toward our lighted windows. I must have startled him, for he hesitated a second and then plunged headlong down the bank toward the pond.
Had we not had so many reporters I might have been alarmed. As it was I was merely astonished. I stood still and listened as he reached the pond, circled it and climbed the bank on the other side. The sounds were distinct, and it was a long time—weeks, in fact—before I realized that only someone familiar with the place could have made that escape in the dark.
It was not quite eleven o’clock when the cars began to leave the Hutchinson driveway, by which I gathered that it had been a dinner for the older group, without bridge. This was borne out when I saw Mrs. Pendexter’s old Rolls emerge, followed by the Deans’ vast limousine, and the coupe from the rectory.
There were other cars too. Evidently Lucy, under a cloud of sorts since the inquest, had been solidifying her position. There must have been most of the older substantial members of the summer colony there that night. In a way it was a triumph for her. They had come, rallying around her, her mother’s daughter and Bob’s wife, and therefore one of them.
But I felt bitter as I saw them go. They had not rallied about Arthur. They had never entirely forgiven him for marrying Juliette. Now, if they secretly applauded him for getting rid of her, by divorce and perhaps by something much worse, they were openly resentful of the scandal. The tradition of their privacy still obtained.
“Give you a list for my dinner?” they said to the press. “Certainly not. How do you know I am giving a dinner?”
And I was Arthur’s sister. I realized that with Juliette’s murder something of the taboo had been extended even to me. We had both broken the law and made the front page of the newspapers.
As a result I was in a fighting mood as the last car turned into the road. I had no plan, unless it was to confront both Bob and Lucy, complacent after their party, and ask them some questions. Why had Bob met Juliette in New York? What actually happened at that spot near the jumps where Lucy sat and waited, smoking her cigarette and with her golf club beside her? And was it Bob who had tried to get into the hospital rooms the night Arthur saw somebody there? Bob, who knew that route by trellis and drain pipe as well as I did.
The light under the porte-cochere blinked out as I approached the house; but the lower floor was still brilliant, and I stopped outside one of the drawing room windows and looked in.
It was a large room. Now it was like a stage setting with two characters behind the footlights. Bob and Lucy were both here, Lucy in black with scarlet slippers and a scarlet belt; smoking a cigarette by the fireplace; Bob in tails standing by a table. The French door was open and I was about to go in when I was stopped by Bob himself.
He had picked up a highball glass, and holding it, stared over it at Lucy.
“Well, thank God that farce is over,” he said.
Lucy stiffened.
“So what?” she said coldly.
“You’ve proved your innocence up to the hilt, haven’t you? Poor Lucy, such a rotten position to be in. But carrying on. That was the idea, wasn’t it? Always carrying on.”
She threw away her cigarette.
“I think you’ve had too much to drink,” she said bluntly.
He surveyed her, from head to toe.
“The brave girl!” he said. “We must go to her dinner. After all, we knew her people. We must rally round the flag. So they rallied, and to hell with them!”
He put down his glass suddenly and flung out onto the terrace. It was so unexpected that he almost touched me. But he did not see me. He went down to the edge of the beach and dropped onto a bench there. I followed him, and when he saw me he looked startled and uneasy.
“Oh, it’s you, Marcia. Pity you didn’t come three minutes sooner. You’d have heard a little exchange of pleasantries,” he said.
“I heard it, I didn’t know what it meant.”
“It sounded fairly obvious, didn’t it? She thinks I killed Juliette Ransom, and I’m not so damned sure she didn’t. There you are. And if you think,” he added savagely, “that we are the only people who feel that way, I’m here to tell you that every woman on the island whose husband ever said a decent word to Juliette is wondering the same thing.”
“But perhaps with less reason, Bob,” I said.
He glanced at me and then looked away. Inside the house the butler and second man were putting out the lights. There was no sign of Lucy, and he drew a long breath. He got out his cigarette case, offered me one and took one himself before he spoke again.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s have this out. What are you talking about, Marcia? You’ve got something on your mind.”
I told him, rather cautiously at first. He had been seen with Juliette, lunching with her, six months before. That didn’t amount to much. Anyone could do that. But he had been crazy about her years ago, and I had a right to know if he had been seeing her in the interval. We knew nothing about her life, or her friends. If he was one of them—
“See here,” he said roughly. “Cut out the preliminaries. Do you think I killed her?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said honestly. “I only know Arthur didn’t.”
He laughed shortly.
“Get this,” he said. “I know Arthur’s in a jam and I’m damned sorry. But until that day six months ago I hadn’t seen Juliette Ransom since her divorce. That’s hard to prove, but it’s a fact.”
“You saw her then, anyhow.”
“I did. I met her on the street and asked her to lunch. Why not? Knowing Lucy, I didn’t tell her about it. That’s all there is to it.”
And that was literally all there was to it, apparently. He knew none of Juliette’s friends, he had never seen Helen Jordan, and—I was to believe it or not—he had never been in Juliette’s apartment.
When at last he got up he flung his cigarette away savagely.
“I wish to God I’d never laid eyes on her,” he said.
He took me back to the house, leading the way through the short cut in the hedge. He was silent and not too friendly, but once at the door he spoke again.
“Are you going to tell Lucy?”
“Not unless I have to, Bob.”
“Things are going pretty haywire with us just now. No need of making them worse. How about the police?”
“I haven’t decided yet. If what you say is true—”
“Listen,” he said gravely. “I didn’t kill her. I don’t know who did. That’s the truth. You’ll have to believe me.”
Then he was gone, and I was in the house again, with only a night light burning in the lower hall, and Arthur sound asleep in his chair.