SO AGNES DEAN WAS our killer. As I write this I am still filled with horror. I can see her in her black dress, with all the panoply of wealth about her, looking at me with tragic eyes.
“I think life ended for me then,” she had said.
But not only her life, and Emily’s. She had killed Juliette on that bridle path, picking up Lucy’s club and swinging it with the strength of a madwoman. Then quite calmly she had gone away, and Allen had found the body.
Whether she meant to murder that day nobody knows. She was unarmed. Of course she had known of Juliette’s part in the tragedy of Emily’s suicide. The whole pitiful story was in her daughter’s farewell note. Now, the sight of Juliette sitting on that log had driven her over the edge. There was Lucy’s golf club. So she used it.
She apparently felt no remorse whatever.
“She killed Emily,” she said, “and I killed her. An eye for an eye, Mansfield.”
And after the first shock he had taken her into his arms and promised to protect her.
During that interval Allen had found the body, and he knew at once what had happened. He and Mansfield Dean were friendly, and Mansfield had been afraid of what might happen ever since Agnes had learned Juliette was on the island. Together they had tried to keep a watch on her. But that day she had slipped away early in the morning. She had seen Juliette going out in her riding clothes, and had taken the short cut up the creek.
The two men were frantic with anxiety. She could not live long, and they wanted to save her the disgrace of discovery. Then, too, she seemed more normal after that. They thought it was over.
They retained their affectionate relations. Together they joined that ghastly search for Juliette’s body, and when at last it was discovered, buried, they could not understand it. Because Mansfield Dean was a sentimental man, deeply stricken, he had ordered those anonymous flowers for the cemetery. That was one of the things the sheriff had learned in New York. He had been more successful than I had.
“Confidential order, sir,” said a clerk. “Sorry.”
“You’ll be sorrier if you don’t tell me, son,” said the sheriff, and flashed his badge.
Then Jordan’s death came, like lightning out of a clear sky. Agnes had apparently not known the woman. But both her husband and Allen believed now that Jordan had telephoned her the night she left Eliza Edwards’s. Whether she accused Agnes of Juliette’s murder and attempted blackmail, I do not know. It seems more likely that she accused Allen, and Agnes knew he was not guilty.
“Helen Jordan knew the whole story,” he said. “Not only that Juliette had driven the car that night; but about Emily, and the Deans. I had warned Juliette about Mrs. Dean, but she said she wasn’t afraid. She could manage any woman! I suppose Jordan believed I had killed Juliette. Anyhow the inquest was to be the next day, and she probably threatened to tell what she knew. That was the end, for her.”
It was possible, though, he added, that Jordan’s death was not premeditated. She might have slipped or been pushed off the path onto the rocks below. All he knew was that Agnes Dean drove her car back to the house that night and walked calmly into the library there.
“I’ve killed the Jordan woman,” she said.
Mansfield had not believed her. There were intervals when she imagined things, and he had never heard of Helen Jordan.
“The Jordan woman? Who is she?” he asked.
“Juliette Ransom’s maid,” she said, and went on upstairs to her room.
He followed her. She was in bed by that time, with that photograph of Emily beside her, and he began to be uneasy.
“See here,” he said. “Is this true? Or did you imagine it?”
“Go and look on the rocks along the bay path,” she told him, and picked up a book.
No one will ever know what the next few hours cost him. He found Jordan where Agnes had said, and he drove wildly up to the camp to find Allen. He was hardly rational himself by that time.
“She’s killed another woman,” he said. “What in God’s name am I to do?”
Allen was stunned. His first thought was to make certain Jordan was dead and then leave her where she was. But Mansfield would not agree to it. He had been devoted to his wife, and he knew, too, that she had not long to live. He would confess himself, before he would let her suffer. In the meantime, he wanted to get rid of the body.
Allen wanted to tow it out to sea in his boat. He was accustomed to the water. Dean was stubborn about this.
“It’s my job,” he said. “Show me how to start the engine. That’s all I want. I’ll do the rest.”
In the end it was arranged that way, Allen staying at the Dean house to watch Agnes, now in a state where she might wander out at any time; and Mansfield Dean to that ghastly task he had set himself.
It must have been a hideous experience. He knew nothing of death and less of the ocean, and noise of the engine in the quiet probably rolled like thunder in his ears. I had heard it myself that night, as it left the foot of Cooper’s Lane.
But he did what he had set out to do. He found the body, but he could not beach the boat. He waded ashore and carried her out. She was dead and there was blood on her, and so he took the painter, knotted it around her neck and headed for the open sea, towing the body behind him. The whole experience was sickening, and there was one period of undiluted torture. That was after he had cut her loose, and the engine stopped.
He could not start it again. He worked over it, sweating profusely. And then something floated beside him, and he thought it was the body. He nearly went mad; and the thing stayed there, bobbing about within a few feet of him. When at last the engine started he was completely collapsed. He saw then that it had been a floating log, but he headed the boat toward shore and lay down in the bottom of it. He could not get his breath for a long time.
When he finally reached home Agnes was quietly sleeping in her bed.
He was never quite the same after that. All his effort was directed toward saving Agnes from herself. On the surface he had not changed. He carried on, but that vast vitality of his began to fail him. The day I met him on the Stony Creek path I had seen the change in him.
And then came another complication. Allen had fallen in love with me, and Arthur was in danger of being tried for murder. He did not know what to do. He left me at the path and turned to see Mansfield Dean, coming along in his car. Mansfield got out, and the two men walked together a few feet down the path. Allen had his hands in his pockets, and his head down.
“See here, Mr. Dean,” he said. “I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve just seen Marcia Lloyd, and I can’t let her brother go to trial.”
“What do you mean by that?” Mansfield Dean said thickly. “By God, Page, if you let me down now—”
“I’ll not let an innocent man go to the chair,” said Allen.
Then Dean hit him! He still had his hands in his pockets, and he hadn’t a chance. His head struck a stone, and he was out like a light.
Dean himself was horrified. He was fond of Allen, and although it was broad daylight, he could not leave him there. He might not be found for hours, if then.
“He did what he could,” Allen said. “Put yourself in his place! He hadn’t even meant to hit me. But now he had me on his hands, and he had to get rid of me somehow.”
He did pretty well, all things considered. He got Allen into the back of the car and started with him to the local hospital. But he was thinking, and part way there he turned back. If Allen died, he wanted none of the local police about, to hear any final statement. And he did not want him identified if he lived.
“I was a pretty logical suspect for Juliette’s murder, if the story came out. And Dean is a fair man. He didn’t know what to do. I suppose he did the best he could. He hid his car—and me—on a wood road somewhere in the hills; and he took the key of the trailer out of my pocket and went back there that night. He cleaned it for fingerprints, locked it and went back to the car. It must have been a pretty wild night for him.”
Allen was still unconscious when Dean reached the hospital, a hundred miles or so away; and as he said, I knew the rest of the story. He put some money into Allen’s pocket, rang the night bell, and drove away as soon as the porter had gone for help.
“So there I was,” he said. “I couldn’t come back. How did I know he’d cleaned my prints off the trailer? All I knew was that the police were after me, probably for two murders. And I had to play against time. If Mrs. Dean died I could tell the truth. If not—”
He let that go. He had done the best thing he could think of, and sent a vagrant from the hospital with the note to me. But there was something else to be done. He had met me. He didn’t want to serve the rest of his term for manslaughter, and there was something that would help to clear that up: Juliette’s note to him that she would drive back to town with him from Long Island. She was dead now, and it could not hurt her.
“I suppose that’s what she went to get, the night I was hurt,” he said. “Even I had forgotten all this time that it couldn’t have been there. I had an idea it was hidden with the pearls—unless she had destroyed it—and she said you had them and didn’t know it.”
He had got in touch with a burglar he had known in the pen, and had him go over the house, especially Juliette’s former rooms. But there was nothing there; no letters, no pearls, and by that time there was a nation-wide search for him, and he expected to be picked up at any time.
It was then that he took to the sea again. He located the former captain of his yacht, told him as much as he dared, and through him bought a small secondhand cruiser. Howard Brooks had financed the deal. Allen was out of money, and did not dare to draw any. And he came back to the island.
“Partly to see you, my dear,” he said, “and partly to see how things were going.”
They were going badly. Dean had missed his revolver and was afraid Agnes meant to kill herself. He himself was worried about me, and about the doctor.
“She knew I liked you. She probably suspected I was in love with you, and she resented that. She thought it was disloyal to Emily. She may have thought I had told you too much. I was anxious about the doctor too. She had told Dean that the doctor was giving her medicine to make her talk. Whether it was true or not, if she thought it—”
However that might be, he had gone to the doctor and warned him. He had not told him all the story; merely that she was emotional and unbalanced, and possibly dangerous. But he thought the doctor knew a lot, and had guessed the rest. He had listened and nodded.
“I can take care of myself,” he had said sturdily. “I’ve had to do it for a good many years.”
A night or two later she had shot him.
She was dressed for a dinner party when she did it, and for the ball to follow. Not in costume, but wearing all her pearls, and a beautiful small tiara. Then she had sent her maid away and gone outside for air. Nobody saw her going down to the road in that black dress of hers, with a black wrap over it. When Dean came down she was back in the hall, inspecting herself in a mirror and entirely calm.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“You’re always lovely to me, Agnes.”
And that was all.
She had known the doctor would be coming back from Dorothy’s and had gauged her time well. She had stopped his car in the road and shot him. It was probable, Allen thought, that she never spoke to him at all; and the first real knowledge Dean had of her guilt was the night she died. He found the gun under her mattress then, and the nurse had discovered him with it in his hand.
He had meant to kill himself, but the nurse had stopped him. The next morning in the rain he had gone up Stony Creek and buried it. He took the police there later on.
It was the doctor’s murder that had decided Allen. Up to that time he had hoped that her heart would give out before she could do any more damage. Now he told Dean he was going to surrender himself. Dean had taken it hard.
“Give her a little time,” he said. “For God’s sake, Lang! She’s dying! She can’t do anything more. Let her go in peace.”
And that he had done, sitting still under their questioning there in Bullard’s office, feeling faint and exhausted, but still holding out. Then she died, that night in her sleep. Died just in time to escape Russell Shand, in dripping oilskins, confronting Mansfield Dean the next morning in his library. He had come back from burying the revolver, and one look at the sheriff’s face was enough. He knew that the long struggle was over.
“Sorry to trouble you at such a time, Mr. Dean,” Shand said quietly. “I guess you know why I’m here.”
Mansfield Dean looked at him, his face gray but his head erect on his tired body.
“God works after his own fashion,” he said strangely. “At least he has saved her this.”
It was after he got that story that the sheriff went back to the courthouse. Though it was still early, Bullard was already behind his desk, looking busy and important, with a group of men around him.
“Just dropped in,” said the sheriff, “to say it’s all over. You can let Page go, and Martin too.”
“You’re crazy,” said Bullard reddening.
“Well, you’re a fool,” said the sheriff cheerfully. “If the public knew about both of us we’d soon be out of office. As a matter of fact,” he added, “our killer escaped last night. I got there this morning, but I was too late. She was gone.”
“She was gone! What the devil do you mean?”
“She was dead,” said the sheriff soberly.
He told them then, and they crowded around him—all but Bullard—and shook him by the hand. The New York men even asked him if he didn’t want a job with them; but he refused with a grin.
“I’m only a country policeman,” he said. “What would I do in the big town?”
He had his conference that morning: Bob, Tony, Howard, and eventually Arthur. The tin box was on the table, and they were an anxious lot. At last he gave them back their letters, and then got up.
“I suppose it’s no use reading a lecture to you fellows,” he said. “Looks to me as though one woman had played you all for suckers. The good Lord makes a woman like that now and then. But you’ve done your best to clutter up this case. So if you don’t mind getting the hell out of here, I’ll get back to my real business.”
They went out, grinning and sheepish; but Arthur stayed and the sheriff opened the tin box again.
“Something you and the Martins will be glad to have,” he said. “She was divorced from Fred all right. She was your legal wife. But as one married man to another, I wouldn’t tell Mary Lou there was ever a question of it.”
And it speaks well, I think, for the Lloyd blood that Arthur managed to smile.
I am still here. Since I commenced this story the fall has come in earnest. The days are bright and even warm, but the nights are cold. At bedtime Maggie tucks me under an eiderdown, and puts a little blanket into Chu-Chu’s bed. But the house is still and peaceful. No bells have rung since Agnes died. But I am not satisfied that they had any connection with our dreadful experiences, and I am sending for the electrician to come again tomorrow.
Except for a few die-hards, the summer people have gone. The house on the hill above Sunset is empty, but Mrs. Pendexter still drops in.
“I always did suspect that Dean woman,” she says, with her usual shrewdness. “It had to be either her or her husband. The rest of us had wanted to kill Juliette for years, but hadn’t done it. And I liked him.”
I am much stronger. Soon the new doctor will let me go back to New York. He is very scientific. Every so often he jabs me and carries away some blood on a slide. He takes it back to the old doctor’s house and into the laboratory. What does he see under the microscope? I wonder. The times when it chilled with horror or went sick with fright? I think not. He is a very material person.
As I finish this I can hear Mike in the garden, getting ready for the winter. He fills a wheelbarrow with leaves and dumps them on the mulch pile behind the toolshed, there to rot and grow rich in decay. And downstairs William is putting away the silver. He is looking forward to the winter, and my wedding. Every now and then he appears with a suggestion.
“I was thinking, miss. About the reception. Perhaps we’d better—”
He is younger than he has been for many years. So is Lizzie. So is Maggie, planning my clothes for me and already seeing me in white satin, and a veil, coming down the aisle. Her child. Her little girl, now grown up and a bride. How little we know about them, those faithful people who serve us through a lifetime.
Yesterday I took the car out. I stopped at the cemetery, and looked at those three tragic graves: Juliette’s, Helen Jordan’s and the doctor’s. There are fresh flowers on all of them every week, and I understand the order is to go on. I passed the golf course too, and saw Fred Martin there as usual, his old cap on his head and his hands in his pockets, giving a lesson.
“See what you did that time?” he was asking. “Wonder to me you didn’t bang that ball over to my house and hit the baby!”
He is crazy about the baby.
Now and then the sheriff drops in to see how I am getting along. He came only a day or two ago.
“Kind of got the habit,” he said. “Now I’ve got to find out who stole Mrs. Pendexter’s cook’s overshoes out of the station wagon while she was at the movies. Well, I suppose that’s life.”
Then he saw my manuscript and eyed it.
“If that’s a letter to your young man,” he observed, “it’s sure a long one.”
“It’s my attempt to tell what happened here this summer,” I told him. “After all, people ought to know. About Allen, and everything.”
He looked alarmed at first. Then he grinned.
“Put Bullard in,” he said. “He’s out of office soon, and he’s got no comeback. I wish you’d seen his face that morning when I walked in and told him to let both Page and Martin go. It looked like a poached egg.”
I saw him out, and as he went he cocked an eye up at the old hospital suite.
“If you’re writing that story,” he said, “you’d better call it ‘The Wall.’ That’s what it looked like I was up against for a while. And, by the great horn spoon, part of the case was lying behind one all the time.”
The postman whistled as he left, and I waited for my daily letter. I carried it out to the porch and read it there, with the seals in the bay and the gulls patiently fishing at the edge of the low tide. The sun was out and the bay was calm and still. There was a boy on the shore, throwing pebbles into the water, and I remembered Juliette doing the same thing and watching the little waves it had caused. “Like life,” she said. “The damned things go on and on.”
But it wasn’t true, I thought. They went so far and then stopped; and everything was quiet again.
Standing there, I opened and read my letter.
“My darling—” it began.