AS IT HAPPENED, THAT night ended the bad weather. When I wakened late the next morning it was to sunshine and the wailing cries of the gulls. My cold was better too, and if there had been any real cheer in the world for me just then I would have felt it over Lizzie’s strong clear coffee, her crisp bacon, and a rose fresh from the garden which is Mike’s occasional contribution to my breakfast tray.
After I had dressed and been bundled into the sweaters Maggie forced on me I went downstairs and out into the garden. I was still there, dutifully inspecting the Canterbury bells, when the sheriff drove in.
He took one look at my nose and shoved me back into the house.
“Looks as though you needed somebody to look after you,” he said, apparently forgetting the terms on which we had last parted. “I can’t even go away for a week without something happening to you.”
“I didn’t know you’d been away.”
He tried to appear reproachful, but he only barely missed looking triumphant.
“Sure I have,” he said. “Been doing some traveling too. Thought maybe you’d like the law out of your pocket for a while.”
“Did you learn anything?” I asked eagerly. “About Allen Pell?”
He shook his head.
“No, but I learned a lot about something else.”
He had put me into a chair in the library, and now he sat down and looked me over.
“It’s a funny world, Marcia,” he said. “I don’t get you people at all. I’ve got a farm outside Clinton, and when I breed my cattle you can bet I know all about who’s who, or what’s what.” He looked uncomfortable then, as if he had been indelicate. He went on rather hurriedly. “Yet here’s your own brother, born and brought up like royalty, and what does he do? He marries a girl he doesn’t know a thing about; her folks, if any, or where she came from. All he knows is that she has a pretty face and he wants her.”
“And look where it’s brought him,” I said bitterly.
“Well, look where it’s brought her too,” he said, not unreasonably. “Anyhow, once it’s done it’s done. Nobody looks her up. Nobody knows anything about her.”
“What was the use?” I asked. “She was Arthur’s wife.”
“Sure she was. But did any of you know her real name was Julia, and that she’d been married before? No? I told you, I handle my cattle better than that.”
I could only stare at him incredulously.
“Married before?” I gasped. “Are you trying to tell me she had a husband when she married Arthur?”
“Not necessarily. He may have died, or she may have divorced him. But let’s get back to this. First of all I had to trace her, and that took time.”
Nevertheless, he had done it. It still seems incredible to me, but what with the police radio and a good picture of her, added to the nation-wide publicity, he had done it. “Not alone,” he said. “I had a lot of help, both in New York and elsewhere. But I’ve had an idea all along that this trouble didn’t begin here. You Lloyds may kill—I’ve seen a look in your face once or twice I didn’t like much—but I don’t think you kill for money or money reasons. That set me off. Or up, if you like. I went part of the way by plane.”
He seemed rather proud of that, although he gave me a detailed description of himself in the air, with a paper bag for certain emergencies and a feeling that he was being pretty much of a damned fool for the risk he was taking. “Never drew a full breath till I was down,” he said. But he came back to Juliette after that.
“First thing,” he explained, “she came from Kansas, and when she left there her name was not Juliette Ransom. It was Julia Ransom Bates. Her folks were dead and she lived with the old aunt she told you about. That part was true enough. She’s dead too, but plenty of people remember both of them. According to them, Juliette was the usual small-town pretty girl. Decent, I guess, but shaking her curls and making eyes at the traveling men in the hotel, and driving the local boys crazy. She wasn’t popular with the women, but the men fell for her like ripe apples.
“Anyhow she was eighteen when she lit out one day with a salesman for something or other, one of the hotel crowd, and she married him the next day in Kansas City. I saw the record.”
I said nothing. I was seeing her that day when Arthur brought her into this very house, looking young and innocent and appealing.
“Well, that’s the story,” he went on. “She never came back, the aunt died, and the next line-up we get she’s in New York studying music; or pretending to. She’s smart and she’s good-looking, and Arthur meets her and marries her. Then when she gets her divorce from him, she doesn’t go back to Bates as a name. Not stylish enough, most likely. She’s not Julia Bates. She’s Juliette Ransom, which is the name she used when Arthur married her.”
It was amazing, all of it. What a long way she had gone, this Julia Ransom Bates Something-or-other Lloyd; from the main street of a small town, ogled by the boys on the corner and eyed appreciatively by men in hotel windows, to our house on Park Avenue and this one on the island; and later on to that gay and exotic crowd which lived so fast and precariously in the night clubs and bars of wherever it happened to be.
One thing was certain. When Arthur brought her to us as his shy young bride, she had been already an experienced woman. “Try to forgive me,” she had said to Mother. “I love him so terribly.” She had been no mean actress, Juliette.
But the sheriff was not through. He reached into his pocketbook and drew out a letter.
“There’s something else, Marcia,” he said. “Helen Jordan came from that town too. If Juliette was the pretty girl of the place, Helen was the ugly duckling. Worked in a grocery store, had no family and no prospects. Then two or three years ago she sold what furniture she had and went east. She wrote one or two letters back to a woman she knew, and I got hold of this one. Maybe it means something, maybe not.”
He gave it to me. It was written in a surprisingly good hand, and was undated.
Dear Mabel: Well here I am, and I don’t mind saying it is a new world and no mistake. Day is night and night is day, with my lady sleeping until all hours, and the place looking like hell upset no matter what I do.
There followed a long description of Juliette’s apartment, her clothes and so on. But the last two paragraphs seemed pertinent:
You would hardly know Julia. She’s looking prettier than ever, and that’s going some! But she has something on her mind. She acts scared, and you know that isn’t like her. Some trouble about a man, I suppose. There are plenty of them.
As for me, I am sort of companion and what have you when we’re alone, and a maid otherwise, black silk apron and all. But it is easy and I am seeing life as I never knew it was lived. And what a life! So I don’t mind. I’ll write you more later.
I looked up. It was, I knew, a pretty accurate picture of life as Juliette had lived it, but it told me nothing new except that part about being frightened. Still, two or three years ago was a long time.
“Is that all?” I asked. “Were there any other letters?”
“One or two, but about the same. This woman seems to have been the only friend she left behind. She never mentioned Juliette’s being scared again, if she was scared. It looks as though, whatever it had been, it was over.”
“It may not have been,” I said. “She was nervous when she came here. She said she was in trouble.”
He looked doubtful.
“It must have been some trouble,” he observed, “to last almost three years.”
He went back to Allen Pell then. All search on the island had been abandoned, but he said it was still going on farther afield. Although I knew that that might mean nothing, it gave me at least a margin of hope.
And then, only a few days later, I learned that he was still alive!
Arthur was at Millbank, and I was alone in the house. Also our spell of good weather had broken. Another storm was threatening, and Maggie, who is afraid of lightning, insisted on closing the house early. The result was that the house was stuffy, although it was cool outside, and when the storm finally broke I was in the morning room, with the door open onto the garden trying to read.
Suddenly I heard Tate shout, and the sound of running feet, followed by a shot and excited voices.
“Lemme go. I haven’t done anything.”
“What did you want in that house?”
“Jeez! Can’t a man ask to sleep somewhere out of this rain? Take your hands off me.”
I went to the front door, to find Tate marching along the driveway toward it, holding by the arm a disreputable-looking individual, unshaven, drenched with rain and shivering with cold and terror.
“Shooting at me,” he said resentfully. “Shooting at me for ringing a doorbell. Who are you anyhow?”
“That’s my business,” said Tate, and asked me if he might use the telephone. There was one in the hall, and still holding to his prisoner he called the police station. The man stood sullenly beside him, dripping small pools onto the carpet, and I felt sorry for him. But when I asked him if he would like some brandy he shook his head.
“And get put away for being drunk and disorderly!” he said. “No, thanks, miss. This cop’s got nothing on me and he knows it.”
The servants had been aroused, and were appearing in various states of undress. I managed to get rid of them.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a man looking for shelter. There’s nothing to worry about.”
When I came back the tramp was looking at me. He had sharp little eyes, for all his evident fright.
“Any reason why I can’t stand by that fire in there?” he asked. “I’ve just come out of a hospital.”
He looked it. He was wasted and pale, and after some argument with Tate he was allowed to warm himself in the library while a car was sent to pick him up. He was still there, resigned but unhappy, when the car arrived.
The incident seemed unfortunate but unimportant, my only feeling being that at least the local jail was dry. As a matter of fact, he was kept overnight and dismissed the next morning, with a stern adjuration to leave the town and the island at once. But this was to prove a mistake, as it turned out. I know now that he had not come to ask for shelter. He had come on a definite errand. But I saw him out with some relief that night, and it was not until the next morning that I understood.
I had not gone to sleep until toward daylight, and the unfortunate result was that I slept late. When Maggie’s disapproving face appeared with my breakfast tray I thought the displeasure was for me. It was not. Propped against the coffeepot was a soiled envelope, dry but showing signs of having been wet, and with my name and address, almost obliterated, printed on it with a pencil.
“That tramp must have left it,” said Maggie stiffly. “William sent it up, dirt and all. It was behind a cushion on the library couch.”
She stood over me, filled with curiosity, and she was indignant when I sent her out before I opened it. Like all personal maids long in one position, she lived a purely vicarious life, which was mine, and normally I had no secrets from her. But I had a strange feeling about that letter, although when she had gone and I opened the envelope I found myself at first unable to grasp what it contained. There was in it a single sheet of note paper, without date or place, and on it merely seven words, also printed in pencil and with a shaky hand. They were: “Your man is Jonas Tripp, of Clinton.”
But the signature was unmistakable. It was what looked like a bus, but might have been meant for a trailer.
My first reaction was purely nervous. So great was my relief that I lay back on the pillows and found myself shaking all over. Allen was alive. Whatever happened to him, he was still alive.
It was some time before I remembered the note and looked at it again. What man? The tramp? There were plenty of Tripps around, but I had never heard of a Jonas. “Your man is Jonas Tripp, of Clinton.” Then at last I understood. Jonas Tripp was the alibi witness Allen Pell had found, and Arthur was saved. I felt a wave of relief that set me to trembling again.
All this had taken time, and when I rushed to the telephone in my sitting room it was to find that the tramp had already been reprimanded and released. I tried for Russell Shand then, but he was out somewhere; and so I spent most of the morning in my car, desperately trying to find my man on one of the roads leading to the bridge and the mainland. But after the fashion of his kind he was evidently avoiding the main highways. I did not find him, and I have never seen him since.
I shall always remember that day as one of alternate hope and anxiety. I called Arthur at Millbank and gave him the name of Jonas Tripp, but I hadn’t the heart to mention the news of Juliette’s first marriage. He seemed rather skeptical, but agreed to try to locate him. But my first relief about Allen Pell had been succeeded by fear. He was ill somewhere, or hurt. The tramp said he had just come out of a hospital, and I felt sure that that was where Allen had given him the note. But why not have said so? Why not have told me where he was? Perhaps the messenger was to have given me the details. Still, why the caution of that note, printed and unsigned?
It dawned on me then that, wherever he was, he did not want to be discovered, that he was deliberately in hiding. Why? From whom? The police?
It was a bad time, not improved by a brief call from the sheriff himself late that afternoon. He was in a hurry. He did not come in, and I talked to him in the driveway beside his rattletrap car.
“What about this tramp last night?” he inquired. “Kinda queer some ways, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. We have them now and then,” I said evasively.
“Light in the back of the house and so on?”
“I suppose so. I think William was still downstairs.”
He fiddled with his hat.
“Lights on and servants up,” he said. “Yet this fellow comes to the front door. What’s more, the island’s not too friendly to vagrants and they know it; but he comes right along to this house. Looks as though he might have had a reason, doesn’t it?”
I must have looked uncomfortable, for he gave me a hard look.
“I didn’t ask his reasons,” I said. “He looked cold and he was certainly wet. I suppose he saw the lights of the house from the road.”
“He passed a dozen other places before he got to this one.”
But he asked no more questions, although he made a few uncomplimentary remarks on our local police for releasing the man before he himself had heard about him. I had an uneasy feeling as he did it that he was studying me, but at last he got back into the car and settled himself.
“Don’t be surprised at anything you hear,” he said, almost airily. “At least it’s made Bullard happy, and that’s something.”
I did not know what he meant. It did not greatly concern me at the time. I was busy wondering if I had been right in not telling him about that note; and when the news came, at four o’clock the next afternoon, it was simply stupefying.
Fred Martin had been picked up at his house near the golf club and taken to Clinton for interrogation.