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.
“How did she act that night?” I asked. “Did she seem excited? Or worried about anything?”
“She didn’t seem the excitable kind. No. She looked kind of determined. I guess she was that sort, though.”
I left the house, still puzzled. Jordan had decided that night on some course of action. She had gone to a telephone and then walked along the bay path on Long Point. She had carried the handbag, and left the key to her room with Eliza. And locked in that room had been only one thing of any possible importance; what the sheriff called the Jennifer letter.
Was it important, after all? Had she kept it merely for her own purposes, perhaps in the hope of securing a situation with “Jennifer”? I could not tell, of course. Yet it is curious that on that very morning the Jennifer of the letter was going through a difficult time of her own, in the cabin of an incoming ocean liner.
I knew that Russell Shand had always considered that the letter had some bearing on the case; but I did not know he had enlisted the New York police to help him. They had traced her name through the telephone number in that book of Juliette’s, and it must have been a shock to her when two detectives from Centre Street met her ship at Quarantine.
It was a long time before I heard that story, and then it was from Russell Shand himself.
“They didn’t think much of me or of that letter either,” he said cheerfully. “It stood out all over them; a country sheriff with two murders on his hands and maybe three, and messing them up to beat the band! The lady was Fifth Avenue and Southampton, and that griped them.”
Her name, it had turned out, was Dennison, Mrs. Walter Dennison; and she traveled with a maid and a dog. What is more, she had the best suite on the ship. The detectives were uncomfortable when they realized what they were up against.
At first she thought they were ship reporters, and she received them with the proper air of resignation plus straightening her hat in case of photographs. The disillusionment must have been a shock.
“Sorry to bother you, madam. We’d like to ask a question or two.”
“For the press?”
They grinned and said no. She stared at them.
“Then who are you?” she demanded.
One of them flashed a badge, and she went pale.
“If you are from the customs—”
“Nothing to do with customs, Mrs. Dennison. Did you know a Mrs. Juliette Ransom?”
Her color came back, but she still looked wary.
“I did. She is dead, isn’t she?”
“Yes. You probably know the circumstances. Mrs. Dennison, we have here a copy of a letter which seems to be yours. It was found among Mrs. Ransom’s effects. Will you glance over it and identify it?”
She did so, with the two men watching her. When she came to the postscript they thought she stiffened, but she handed it back calmly enough.
“It is mine,” she said. “What about it?”
“Do you care to identify the man whose initial you used in that letter?”
“Certainly not. It was a purely personal matter.”
“‘Have just heard about L—. Do please be careful, Julie. You know what I mean.’ That sounds like a warning, Mrs. Dennison. Was this L—liable to do her bodily harm?”
“Of course not. Mrs. Ransom was reckless sometimes. She did a good many foolish things. I was merely telling her to behave herself.”
They did not believe her.
“This L—was a man, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. That doesn’t mean anything. She knew a lot of men. And now,” she added haughtily, “if you’ll give me a chance to get ready to leave this ship, I’d appreciate it.”
They got nothing more from her as the liner moved up the river to its dock. In fact, she ordered them out of her room. Once landed she left her maid to see her trunks through the customs, and still ignoring them marched to her waiting car and got in. But she did not go to her apartment on Fifth Avenue. Some time during that ride uptown she had her bags transferred to a taxicab and quietly disappeared.
“That’s what set me on the trail,” said the sheriff, long after. “All along I’d thought that letter was important. Now I knew it.”
It was August by that time, and August is the gay time on the island. Usually my calendar then is filled from morning until night, from club pool to lunch, from lunch to golf or a sail on the bay, and after that cocktails here and dinner there. But during the early part of that month I did little or nothing.
When it was clear I sat on this upper porch where I am today, and listlessly watched the activity in the bay. Now and then a speedboat would pass, trailing a surfboard with some youngster erect on it. Yachts came and departed, brilliant with paint, their brasswork gleaming in the sun, and once in a while I saw Lucy Hutchinson, usually the head and front of the August season, sitting lethargically on the bench by the sea wall where Bob and I had talked.
Sometimes she saw me and waved, but mostly she ignored me. She looked thin, I thought, and Bob was said to be drinking heavily.
Then one day a British battleship came in, and Tony Rutherford asked me to go to the club to help make it gay for the officers at tea. He seemed to hold no resentment for what had happened on the golf course.
“It’s only tea. Put on your prettiest dress and come along,” he coaxed. “We can’t have all dowagers, Marcia. No use letting the English think the average age of America is over fifty. Be good, won’t you?”
I went and felt better for it. Death and danger seemed far away. The uniforms were dignified, the men charming; and behind them in the harbor—as a background—was their great gray ship. I did my best, and apparently made a conquest of one of the junior officers, for I could not lose him. But as I was leaving I saw Lucy, and she drew me aside into the cardroom and closed the door.
I was shocked when I saw her, close at hand. Her smartness was gone, her face looked ravaged; and after lighting a cigarette she dropped into a chair and stared out at the crowd on the lawn.
“What do you do,” she said finally, “when you think you are losing your mind?”
“You’d have plenty of company just now,” I said, feeling suddenly tired and lost.
She glanced at me quickly.
“I’ll change that question,” she said. “What do you do when you suspect your husband of everything from unfaithfulness to murder? He denies both, of course,” she added.
“I don’t think he killed Juliette, Lucy,” I said. “If that’s what you mean.”
“Why not?” She shrugged her shoulders. “He used to be in love with her, years ago. He’s big enough and strong enough to do anything. And he’s not been the same since she was killed. He’s been like a crazy man. Of course, if he was still in love with her—”
“You don’t believe that, do you? Not seriously.”
“I don’t know what I believe,” she said. “He took her to lunch last winter, That’s all he admits, but how do I know it’s true?”
“A good many men take women to lunch without killing them later,” I said impatiently. “Be yourself, Lucy. What if he did? You lunch with men day after day, don’t you? I expect a good many of them make love to you too. It’s customary. You’d be disappointed if they didn’t. But you are still alive, even if you do look shot to pieces.”
She did not resent that. She lit another cigarette and fitted it neatly into her holder before she spoke again. Then:
“I’m fond of Bob,” she said slowly. “I’m—Well, it’s more than that, of course. I’d have fought and killed to hold him, if it would have done any good. And after I thought the affair with her was over we were happier than we had ever been. I thought I’d got him back. He wasn’t even drinking. Then it started again, last winter. He came home one night—well, plastered is as good a word as any, isn’t it?—and it’s been going on ever since.” She turned and gave me a direct look. “Just why was Juliette murdered, Marcia? Have you any idea?”
“The general public seems to think that Arthur did it, for obvious reasons,” I said bitterly.
“That’s nonsense, of course. You must have some theory. Who wanted her out of the way? Was she dangerous to someone? Was she blackmailing anyone?”
“The police have been over her bank account. It’s all right. If she was getting money she got it in cash.”
“But you think she was spending more than she got from Arthur?”
“She always did that.”
She thought that over.
“It’s not like the old days,” she said. “Credit’s not as easy as it used to be. She had to pay some of her bills, and that crowd of hers had no use for people who couldn’t spend pretty freely. Sometimes I wonder if she was blackmailing Bob.”
She got up. She looked as though she had not slept for a long time; and it was typical of Juliette, I thought, to leave behind her a trail of devastated women: Mary Lou, fighting her own suspicion; Lucy, haggard and uncertain; Marjorie Pendexter, and myself. Even Jordan certainly gone to her death because of some secret knowledge she had possessed of Juliette’s affairs.
Lucy was preparing to go, powdering her nose, reddening her lips; but doing it abstractedly. She looked up at me.
“These men!” she said, with a sort of sullen anger. “You love them. You do all you can for them. And then they run out on you, and you find there’s another woman. He walked out with her after that time he lunched with her, and bought her a diamond bracelet!”
“Juliette! How do you know?”
“I know all right. His secretary paid the bill, and she wrote me the other day, to ask if I didn’t want to insure it!”
There was nothing I could say. She stood still, holding her vanity case.
“What about this Allen Pell?” she said. “He’s in this too, Marcia. Somewhere. Have the police any idea who the man was who went to that trailer of his just after he disappeared?”
“Nobody knows. They haven’t traced him.”
She drew a long breath.
“Sometimes I think I am going crazy,” she said. “Bob was out in the car that evening. I don’t even know where he went.”
I found my junior officer still on duty when I went out, and I had some difficulty in getting away. Also, as a result of anxiety and the long rainy spell, I went down with a feverish cold the next day. Maggie sent for Doctor Jamieson, and it was Doctor Jamieson who added a new angle to the case of Allen Pell.
He tapped me, announced that I would live, wrote a prescription and then sat back to talk. It seemed that Agnes Dean was down again, and that Mansfield Dean was taking it very hard.
“Funny thing,” he said. “These big men who marry fragile women like that and worship them! Of course she has come through a lot. Still, what’s the use of nursing old griefs? Dean rates something.”
It was not until he got up to go that he mentioned Allen. I remember that he looked tired that day. As I look back over this record I find that at some time or other I have said the same thing about most of us. But he looked worried too, and what he had to say put a new light on the situation.
“There’s one thing the police have overlooked,” he said. “Here’s a strong man and a young man. I’ve met him now and then along the roads, and liked him. But you can count on this. Whoever hit him that afternoon was somebody he knew and trusted. He didn’t expect what he got.”
“But no one really knew him, doctor. Not well anyhow.”
“Someone knew him too well for his own good,” he said dryly, and left me to lie wretchedly in bed, thinking that over.