I SAT STILL. MY hands and feet were like ice, and it seemed to me that for hours I had been there, listening to the rain against the window, to the tap-tap of the typewriter outside, and to that inexorable voice, going on and on.
The sheriff looked at me sharply.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Don’t jump at things, Marcia, I haven’t said he was guilty. I’ve only said it looked like it.”
I breathed again, and he got a piece of note paper out of his wallet and laid it out on the desk.
“Well,” he said, “to make a long story short, I went down to New York again. I saw the police who’d found him after the car struck the pole, and I found the intern who’d picked him up out of the street. All I have to say is that if he was driving the car that night he took a flying leap from under the wheel, over the other seat and the door, and out on his head. It should have killed him, but it didn’t. So what?”
I did not reply, and he sat looking at the paper before him.
“I didn’t believe it,” he said slowly. “I had the picture pretty well before I went down this last time. I knew she’d been at his apartment that night after the thing happened. My idea was that he had been hurt, but she wasn’t. She got out of that car and ran, and nobody ever saw her. But when she reached home she started thinking. There was something in his place she had to get; and get it before the police arrived there.
“Did she get it, or not? It seemed to me part of the case turned on that. And if she did, where was it? If it was a letter she might have burned it. Chances were if she found it she did. But maybe she didn’t. She was scared, and she kept on being scared. She fired her maid and sent out to her old home for the Jordan woman. Remember what Helen Jordan wrote? ‘She has something on her mind. She acts scared, and you know that isn’t like her.’
“Well, later on she was more scared than ever. You can figure it like this. Page had gone up for eight years. Even with time off she had five years or more. But he’s paroled, and all at once she wants to leave the country. Why? Was she afraid of him? He’d kept quiet through the trial. He knew she did it, but he’d kept quiet. What had happened in that interval to scare her?
“So far as I could make out, maybe two people knew she’d been in that car. One was Page. The other looked like the Dennison woman, from that letter of hers. But she wasn’t afraid of the Dennison woman. Then who was she afraid of? Was it Page? Or was it somebody else? And here were Tony Rutherford and Bob Hutchinson and Howard Brooks all cluttering things up; not to mention Fred Martin and Arthur, and even you yourself!
“Well, there I was. I took a look at that house of yours on Park Avenue, and it wasn’t hard to find out how it had been entered. Some bars had been sawed out of a basement window, and it looked like a professional job to me.
“Ever try to saw an iron bar? Well, it’s not easy. They’d been sawed out and then set back into place with gum of some sort. Just to look at them, you’d never know they’d been touched.
“Now that was queer too, Marcia. There was quite a lot of stuff around, pictures and Oriental rugs and so on. But this fellow isn’t interested. He goes up to what’s got to be the room Juliette used to occupy there. A blind man would know it was hers, and it’s there he looks things over!
“Well, we haven’t many professional burglars on the island. But we did have one fellow who’d been in the pen. That was Page; and I reckon when we get all the pieces together we’ll find Page sent somebody into that house of yours, to look for something. But don’t hold it against him. Likely he had his reasons.
“Anyhow, the upshot was that I wasn’t sure that Juliette hadn’t got what she went after that night after she’d killed those people. It wasn’t in the box. That’s sure. So I had a talk with the Brooks fellow, and he let me look over Page’s things in the warehouse. At first it seemed like I’d gone up a blind alley. Then I found this, in the pocket of a dressing gown. She’d missed it, after all! If that’s what she went to his apartment for, she completely forgot, in her panic, that if he had saved it at all it would have to be in his bag in the car.”
He picked up the paper in front of him and gave it to me. My hands shook as I tried to hold it. It was in the square bold writing which had been familiar to me for so many years. “Dearest: If you’ll leave the club at nine I’ll meet you at the gate. Jennifer is sending me in her car. You can drive me back to town, and we can talk things over. Ever yours, Juliette.”
I sat staring at it.
“She did it, then?” I said dully,
“She did it, and the Dennison woman knew about it,” he agreed. “I’ve got the story from him. She claimed he’d been drinking and she took the wheel. She wanted him to break his engagement to this Emily Forrester—you might keep that name in mind—and he refused. Guess he’d seen through her by that time! Anyhow she was furious. Maybe she’d been drinking too, I don’t know. But she stepped on the gas and went through the traffic light like a bat out of hell. When she knew what she had done she tried to turn a corner and hit a post. He went out, but she was behind the wheel and wasn’t hurt. At least he thinks not. Nobody saw her. The street was dark, and she just slipped away.”
He took a long breath and got his cold pipe going again.
“Well, that’s it,” he said. “Or it’s part of it. I told you it’s not a pretty story, and it isn’t. All told, it took six lives before it was finished: those two women who were killed by the car, three here, and one more. Can you guess who it was?”
I shook my head. I felt sick and dizzy.
“Then I’ll tell you,” he said. “You saw that clipping, and I’ve mentioned the Forrester girl. How do you think she felt about this? Pretty hard on her, wasn’t it? Here she was, all ready to marry Page; the trousseau bought, the invitations ready to go out. Then he gets eight years in the pen. That was a lifetime to her; and while I gather Page wasn’t in love with her—he’s a gentleman. He doesn’t say so, but I get it—she was in love with him.
“Anyhow, she stood it for a good while. Then I don’t know what happened. Maybe she learned about Juliette. Maybe she learned that he wasn’t guilty, and had taken the rap for another woman. I wouldn’t put it past Juliette to tell her herself! But she couldn’t stand it. She—”
“You mean that Emily Forrester killed Juliette!” I gasped.
“I mean,” he said, “that Emily Forrester killed herself.”
I do not recall all that followed. Sitting there with my mind racing I was only aware that the case against Allen was building up, slowly and inexorably. The sheriff went on. The clipping had interested him from the start. He had sent out what he called the dog letters, in the hope of locating the Forrester girl.
“I had the whole United States to go over,” he explained. “But if I could find who advertised those pups I’d find the girl. But when I did find out I knew who she was already. Got it out of some letters in the warehouse.”
He got busy on the long-distance telephone when he came back, and it was then that he learned about that suicide of hers.
“Kind of knocked me out for a minute,” he said. “There was the motive for Page, right enough; and I began to wonder if Bullard wasn’t right, after all. But there was something else in that telephone call. I had to begin my thinking all over again. So—”
He did not go on. I heard footsteps in the hall outside, and Allen came in, a deputy sheriff beside him. My heart almost broke when I saw him, he was so changed, so gaunt and thin. He had been shaved and someone had brought him fresh linen, but his eyes looked sunken in his head.
The sheriff got up.
“Sit down, Page,” he said. “I want you to tell Marcia here what you told me. Go easy with it. She’s had a pretty bad time herself.”
It was all incredible; the sheriff going out and taking the deputy with him, Mamie typing in the next room, the rain still washing down the windows, and Allen making no move toward me. Looking strained and awkward, and unsmiling as though we were strangers; as though—
“I didn’t want to do this, Marcia,” he said. “It’s the sheriff’s idea. I—how much do you know?”
“Only that you never murdered anybody,” I said, as steadily as I could.
He nodded, but still he did not come near me. Instead he went to the window and stood there, with his back to me. Then he apparently came to a decision, for he turned again.
“This is with gloves off,” he said. “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, at last, my darling.”
“Nothing will change me, Allen.”
And at that use of his old name he gave me a faint twisted smile.
“I suppose a man’s sins live after him,” he said. “And it is the innocent who suffer. He told you about Emily?”
“Yes. I—I’m sorry.”
“I killed her,” he said. “I killed her, as surely as if I had fired that bullet myself. But that is my only murder, Marcia. I want you to know that.”
He told me about her then, speaking in a sort of drab monotone as if he was afraid to let any emotion come to the surface. He had been engaged to her. The thing had drifted along. Perhaps he was never in love with her, but he was fond of her. He had meant to carry on.
Then he met Juliette, a few months before the wedding. Emily was a quiet girl, rather shy; and there was Juliette, his own age or older, reckless and fascinating.
“I’m not excusing myself,” he said. “I went crazy about her.”
But it did not last. He began to see her, I gathered, as the cheap woman Mary Lou had called her. She was not in love with him, but he could give her ease and security, and she wanted both. When he told her he was through she was like a madwoman. She wouldn’t let him go, and toward the end she threatened to send his letters to Emily.
“I got tight that day,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do. And I guess you know what happened. She drove the car, and she killed Mrs. Dunne and her daughter.”
When he came to he was in the hospital. He had been identified, and Howard Brooks was sitting by the bed. He told Howard the facts, but later on thinking it over he decided to take the responsibility himself.
“I’d been drinking,” he said. “It was my fault she had had to drive that night. I wasn’t hiding behind her.”
Howard had thought he was a fool, but was sworn to secrecy.
He stood trial and went to the penitentiary. He didn’t care what happened to him by that time. The pen was not too bad. He worked in the library and tried painting in his leisure. After a time he got a few lessons. But life was over. He painted to keep sane. That was all.
Then after almost two years Emily shot herself. He had never dreamed of such a thing. It almost killed him. I gathered indeed that he almost killed himself. Not that he loved her. For the sheer tragedy of it. She had left a letter for her family, but none for him.
When his parole came it meant nothing to him.
“I had three deaths on my soul by that time,” he said, still in that flat monotonous voice. “I didn’t want to see anybody I knew. I wanted to lose myself, my name, my identity, everything. And I didn’t want to stay in any one place. I’d been shut away for a long time. I wanted the sky and—Well, you understand, don’t you?”
That was why he changed his name. His first name had been Allen anyhow, although it was never used; and he took Pell out of the telephone book. And that, too, was why he bought the trailer. At first he felt rather absurd. Later on he liked it. He was free. He would even sleep beside it on the ground, for the sheer relief of waking and seeing the stars overhead.
Then one day soon after he got it he saw a New York newspaper, and read that Juliette had come to the island.
He had not seen her since his release, but he gathered that his freedom had come as a shock to her.
“For more than one reason,” he said. “She’d gone to my apartment that night after the accident and had taken her letters to me. But she had taken something else, Marcia. Emily’s father was giving her some pearls as a wedding gift and had had the jeweler deliver them to me. She took them too.”
The other reason, he said, was that she was afraid of him. She had thought she had anywhere from five to eight years of security, but here he was, free again.
“She had a twisted sort of mind,” he said. “I’d gone to the pen instead of her, she had stolen Emily’s pearls, and now Emily was dead. She knew how she would feel under those circumstances, so she thought I would also. God knows all I wanted was never to see her again, but—”
She seems to have been genuinely alarmed. She had gone to Howard Brooks and told him she meant to leave the country, getting a lump sum from Arthur and also collecting on some love letters, Howard’s among others. I have always been sure, too, that she meant to recover and sell the pearls.
But there she was, on the island, and Allen followed her there.
“Why?” I asked, puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“I was afraid she would be killed. I told her that,” he said, and went on.
He had met her on the bridle path one morning. He had tried to see her before, but he had failed. Maybe I remembered one night when I had looked out, and he was on the beach below. But this day they met face to face, and she looked ready to faint. She had even tried to ride past him, but he caught the bridle of her horse and stopped her.
“Don’t be foolish,” he told her. “I’ve got to talk to you. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She was quieter after that. She said all she asked was to be allowed to leave America and live abroad. And she mentioned the pearls, as a sort of bribe! She would return the pearls to him; she would do anything, if he would only let her alone.
“The pearls!” he told her roughly. “They are not mine. Return them where they belong.”
She gave him an amused half-smile. She was herself again by that time.
“I’ll have to get them first,” she told him. “Marcia Lloyd has them now, but she doesn’t know it!”
He let her go then, but before she left he gave her a warning; and this time she seemed impressed.
“I’m telling you,” he said contemptuously as he released the bridle. “You don’t have to leave America on my account; but you’d better leave it in your own.”
That was the last time he ever spoke to her. On the night before her death she had taken my car and driven up to the camp, perhaps to tell him that she was trying to get the pearls. He was not there. And when he saw her again she was lying dead on the bridle path, with Lucy’s golf club beside her, and her hat and gloves not far away, on the ground.
He glanced at me and then looked away again. His hands were clenching the arms of his chair.
“What was I to do?” he said. “There she was and nobody could bring her back to life. I wasn’t afraid for myself, but I knew what would happen if she was found there. So I—”
“You put her into the lake?” I said, horrified.
“I put her into the lake,” he said gravely.
I felt frozen. I must have made some movement, for he reached over and caught my hands.
“My poor darling,” he said. “I know how it sounds, but I didn’t kill her. You must believe that.”
He went on after that break. He had carried Lucy’s club up onto a hillside later on and buried it. The rains must have uncovered it. And he had had to tell Howard Brooks the story. Howard had been the first to see the danger.
“You damned fool!” he said bitterly. “If the story ever gets out, who will believe you didn’t murder her? I’m not so sure myself!”
But Howard had stood by. They belonged to the same yacht club; Allen had a boat of his own somewhere. Both Howard and Marjorie had known he was on the island, although Marjorie had complicated matters later. She had been both jealous and suspicious. She knew Howard had once been interested in Juliette, and they had not dared to tell her the whole story, for obvious reasons.
“The whole story!” I asked desperately. “But what is it, Allen? Why don’t you tell me? What is the story?”
He looked at me, his face stern and yet sad.
“I thought you knew,” he said simply. “Mansfield Dean was Emily’s stepfather.”
I can still remember the shock of that minute. Not Mansfield Dean! Not that big booming kindly man, whose dead wife still lay in his house. I must have gone very pale. I know I got up, for the next minute Allen’s arms were around me.
“My poor girl,” he said. “I thought you knew. I thought the sheriff had told you. And it’s all over now, darling. Try to remember that. It’s all over.”
I was crying unrestrainedly by that time. He still held me, but he seemed to be trying to explain something to me; that I must remember that Juliette’s death had been on impulse, and that Jordan might have fallen or been pushed onto the rocks. But I really understood very little until he came to Doctor Jamieson’s murder.
That, he said, had been cold and premeditated; and his voice hardened.
“I tried to warn him,” he said. “I told him; but he thought he could take care of himself.”
I looked at him in complete confusion.
“Told him what?” I asked.
“The truth,” he said grimly. “What he had guessed already. That Agnes Dean had been emotionally unbalanced since Emily’s death. And was dangerous.”