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But it was then, and to the doctor, that I told the story about the hospital suite. Not all of it, of course. Nothing about the bell ringing there. That was absurd and not pertinent. Nothing about Arthur’s night there. But about the state it was in, and the general mystery. He seemed rather amused at first, for he knew the place well. But before he left he went up there, and he came down looking bewildered.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “When did it happen?”

“I think it was the day before Juliette disappeared.”

“You think she did it?”

“I think she and Jordan did it. But why? What were they looking for, doctor? Juliette hadn’t been here for years, and there’s nothing of hers there.”

“You’re certain of that?”

“What could it be? And why should it be important now? Besides, I have been all over the place. There’s nothing.”

He was thoughtful, however.

“I don’t think you ought to keep it to yourself, Marcia. It’s queer, any way you look at it.”

“I’ve had enough of Russell Shand and his outfit,” I said, and closed my eyes.

He wrote out a prescription for me and left soon after. But the repercussion was not far off. Late that afternoon Maggie roused me to say that the sheriff was downstairs again, and that I was not to get up. He would see me where I was.

The bromides had quieted me, but I was still not too sure of my legs. And it was with Russell Shand standing over me as I lay in bed that he said:

“So you’ve been holding out on me again!”

“I thought there was such a thing as professional confidence,” I said resentfully.

“Don’t blame the doctor. He thinks you need protection. If what he says is true—”

“You can go and look,” I said, feeling helpless and annoyed. “Maybe it will make sense to you. It doesn’t to me.”

He was gone for some time. When he came down he stopped at Jordan’s door and, after some rather forcible urging, was admitted. His face was flushed when he came in to me a half hour later.

“There’s a lot to be said for the third degree,” he said, angrily. “If I had my way with that woman—See here, Marcia, tell me about all this. And why in God’s name didn’t you tell me before?”

“I’ve had other things to think about.”

“There was no other reason?”

I saw that it was no good. He drew a chair by the bed and looked at me thoughtfully.

“I suppose it was in order when you came?”

“Of course. Mrs. Curtis always cleans it.”

“Clean sheets on the bed and all that?”

Too late I remembered. I must have looked fairly desperate, for he reached over and patted my hand.

“Why not come clean, Marcia?” he said. “It pays in the end. Somebody has slept in that bed, or on it. I’m making a guess that it was Arthur. I’m guessing too that he left in a hurry, without his hat. And it isn’t far from that to Lizzie’s bareheaded man with a hatchet. That’s right, isn’t it?”

I could not answer. Suddenly I found myself crying as though my heart would break. He handed me a large bandanna handkerchief, but I could not stop and at last I felt him give me a sort of apologetic touch on the shoulder and go creaking out of the room.

The day was endless. Endless and terrifying. For I did not fool myself. There was a murder now, with a body, and at any minute the police might appear with a warrant. I knew that if the truth ever came out Arthur was the logical suspect. And there was that wretched story of Mike’s. I had no hope that he would keep it to himself. Probably all the servants knew it already.

I lay there in bed, thinking it over. I thought of Mary Lou, and Junior. I thought of Mother and Father, and the old days in the house before Juliette came and peace departed. I remembered Arthur and myself as children, gathering clams and starfish and other queer jetsam of the sea, and the eel that had slithered down the stairs. But most of all I was thinking of Juliette, and Juliette’s death.

I lit a cigarette and tried to recall the events of the last few days. It seemed an eternity since she had stepped blithely out of the bus and had said: “Don’t faint, Marcia. It’s me!” An eternity too since she had thrown those pebbles into the pond, and watched the widening circles, “Like life,” she had said.

Now she was gone. What had happened to her? What had occurred, between her arrival and her disappearance, to set such a stage for her? Whom had she seen? Had she been followed to the island and murdered, or was someone on the island guilty?

She had received no mail, and so far as I knew had sent none. Yet she had had friends, such as they were. I had never seen her New York apartment, but I had heard enough to know what it was like, either filled with people or empty while she and her crowd danced the night away, moving on and on.

“Why go home? The night’s still young.”

And Juliette going on, the center of the exotic gaiety, to come home at dawn and sleep the day through. Extravagant riotous living it had been, on Arthur’s money and mine, but I did not grudge it to her now. Yet that day for the first time I wondered if somewhere in it was not the answer to her death. She had been in a jam, to use her own words. She had even wanted to get out of the country. Not only that. She could have left no forwarding address for her mail when she left New York. Certainly that in itself was unusual.

In other words, had she been looking for some sort of sanctuary when she came to Sunset? It might be. Probably the last place she would be expected to go was where she had come.

I was still there, still thinking—and wondering—when Arthur arrived. He had had the news, but he had not yet gone to the village; and he looked completely devastated.

“I suppose you’ve heard,” he said. “They’ve found her.”

“Yes, Mike told me. And the doctor.”

He looked down at me quickly.

“Mike?” he said. “What does he know about it?”

“Only what everybody does, I suppose,” I said wearily.

He sat down on the porch rail then and lit a cigarette, but I saw that his hands were shaking.

“I don’t need to tell you what this means, Marcia,” he said. “They have a murder now and a body. They’ll have to pin it on somebody, and I’m the somebody. Why not? I had the motive, and it won’t take them long to learn that I was here the night before, or to break down that alibi of mine. They can trace the sloop, and what about the plane? I didn’t give the pilot my right name, but I don’t suppose he’s a fool.”

“But plenty of people come here by plane, Arthur.”

He looked at me and I think for the first time he realized what I had been through. Anyhow he leaned over and patted me—on my bad ankle, as it happened.

“Poor little sister,” he said. “I’m sorry, my dear. Sorry as hell. But it’s bound to come out sooner or later. Haven’t you seen the papers lately?”

“I didn’t want to see them,” I quavered.

He drew a long breath.

“Well, your picture has been in them, and mine. And I might as well tell you: a car turned into the driveway the night I came to see Juliette. The lights were right on me. If whoever was in that car saw me and knew me, I’m through.”

“I know about that, Arthur. It was Lucy Hutchinson.”

He stared at me. “Lucy Hutchinson,” he said. “Good God! Lucy!”

“She won’t talk. She told me so.”

“Listen, Marcia,” he said gravely. “There’s a woman in this somewhere. Maybe not Lucy, but a woman. Shand got a lipstick of Juliette’s from Jordan, and he says the smear on that cigarette they found was not the same.”

“You don’t think it was Lucy’s!”

“I don’t know. She walks up in the hills, you know. If she had a golf club with her—”

I found myself gazing at him with a sort of terror.

“Arthur!” I said. “How do you know she was killed that way?”

He looked startled.

“I don’t know,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “I haven’t seen the—seen the body yet. But I gather she was struck with something. Good Lord, Marcia, don’t look at me like that. I didn’t kill her, and I’m damned sure Lucy didn’t. I’m about off my head with worry, that’s all.”

I relaxed again, and neither of us spoke for some time. I dare say we were both looking back, gathering up our defenses. When Arthur did speak it was to ask about the hat he had left in the hospital suite.

“I’d better get it,” he said. “I’ll dispose of it somehow. No use making things worse than they are.”

He had actually got up to do it before I could stop him.

“You needn’t go, Arthur,” I said, unhappily. “It’s not there. It’s gone.”

He stared at me.

“Gone? Gone where?”

“I cut it up and threw it into the bay. But I’m afraid—”

I did not have time to finish, for William came to the door just then to say that there was someone on the telephone for Arthur, and soon after that I heard him driving away in the car.

I know only by hearsay of the events of the rest of that day. The message had been from Doctor Jamieson, who was also the local coroner, asking Arthur to make formal identification of the body; and this I gather, white-faced and shaken, he did. Then the sheriff took him to that shallow grave up the creek, now carefully roped off from the sightseers who had already gathered. But I do know that at some time in the interval I saw a detective talking to Mike in the garden, and Mike led him toward the toolshed.

I remember this now, as I say. For a long time it was erased from my memory as though it had never been. Events moved too thick and too fast. There was, for one thing, the arrival of Mary Lou in her car late in the afternoon, a Mary Lou with a sober face, an overnight bag, and the drawing of what purported to be a cat as a gift from Junior.

“I’ve just heard,” she said. “I do think Arthur could have called up and told me. Where is he?”

“Somewhere in the village,” I said evasively. “Arthur has Father’s room. Send your bag there, and tell William to put your car away.”

I was still on the porch when she came back. Death was death to Mary Lou, and although she had taken off her hat, she still wore a black dress. Also, being Mary Lou, she was filled with remorse. It took several cups of tea to restore her to normal.

“When I think of the perfectly poisonous things I’ve said, Marcia!” she observed solemnly. “Whatever she was she didn’t deserve this.”

“Someone must have thought she did,” I said.

But I realized that she was nervous. She talked too much and too fast. She asked a flood of questions, and I was relieved when at last she went downstairs, to receive the innumerable callers who came, their faces grave—as was proper in a house of death—but their eyes wide with curiosity.

It was a trying time. I went back to bed and lay there, alternately staring at the Currier and Ives prints on the wall and out through the door at the bay, where those wretched gulls sometimes mewed like cats, and again wailed like babies. Offshore at intervals a belated mother seal was teaching its baby to swim. The baby loathed and feared the water, and would turn around and make desperately for the rocks again. I felt rather like the baby, only I had no rock to turn to.

How far we had traveled from the old days, long before Juliette, when Arthur raced up and down the stairs, while I followed him like a small satellite; and Father and Mother pursued their peaceful summer routine. Father always left a victoria and a trap in the stable, and in the summer the horses were sent up in advance. There were no cars allowed on the island, and the days were a quiet ritual of morning calls, afternoon naps, a drive later on, and then dinner, at home or elsewhere.

There was no ostentation; but plenty of dignified living. It may have been dull, but at least it was safe. The morning calls were formal ones, with cards left and sometimes a glass of sherry and a biscuit, and often when there were callers there would be a visit to the garden. How well I could remember them.

“I do want you to see my delphiniums. They are very good this year.”

Mother in the garden by the sundial in the long sweeping dress of the prewar days, and later, with a broad hat to preserve her lovely skin. Talk of roses and columbines and pansies, instead of taxes and politics; and then at last William at the door, an open carriage and a pair of handsome horses driving away, and everything still again.

At noon Father would come in in riding clothes, having left his horse at the stables, and Arthur and I, washed and brushed, would go down to lunch. It was my dinner and I was always ravenous, but I preferred the nursery supper upstairs. There was always a frightful decorum about the lunch table. But after lunch I was free to ramble, and I did; along the waterfront or in the mountains, where once Arthur climbed onto a ledge and had to be rescued with ropes.

All normal. All quiet. In the evenings Father and Mother usually dined out. Mother would come into my room in her silks or brocades—quite as though it had been the city—with her handsome earrings and her pearls, and with her hair built high on her head, as she wore it to the end of her life. She would turn around so I could see her, and then stoop to kiss me good night.

“Be a good little girl, Marcia, and go to sleep.”

She would trail out then, leaving behind her a sense of loss and a faint scent of the violet perfume which she continued to use long after the new ones had come into fashion.

But Father seldom came in. He was of sterner stuff. Looking back now I think we never really knew him.

I was still back in the old days when I heard Arthur’s voice downstairs, and I knew then that I had never expected him to come back.

T
HAT WAS THE LAST
peaceful time I was to know for weeks. Arthur was home again, grave but relieved. The authorities had not held him. They seemed to know nothing of his visit to the island. Shand had been decent to him; more than decent. The autopsy had been held that day, and the inquest would take place on the following Tuesday, at the schoolhouse. Apparently the police had asked for more time.

Arthur kissed me when he came in, but his real attention was for Mary Lou. I remember that he held her as though he was afraid to let her go; as if in a shaken world it was good to have her there, loving and believing in him. I did not always like her, but that day I forgave her everything, even her jealousy of me, for what she gave him.