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“You people always stand together,” he said accusingly. “I know you. I’ve seen it for forty years. You may differ among yourselves, but you present a united front to the rest of the world. And Pell’s one of you, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know anything about him. I suppose he is what might be called a gentleman.”

He looked at me angrily.

“Gentleman!” he said. “You’d think gentlemen were a class apart! We’ve got more gentlemen working with their hands in this county than in all of New York. All right. Let that go. He knew someone who might have saved Arthur, and he kept it to himself. And unless I miss my guess he knew a lot more. So now we’re back where we started. Suppose you tell me what
you
know, before something happens to you.”

I felt crushed and guilty. The sheriff looked like a different man. His old easy friendliness was gone, and he was regarding me with hard blue eyes.

“Come on. Out with it.”

So I told him. The night by the pond with Allen Pell—except that I left out the part about Juliette—the other night on the float, and that statement of his, made at the camp, that Arthur would never go to the chair.

“So he knew something,” he said, more quietly. “Well, I’ll tell you this, Marcia. That fellow had something to hide, including himself. If he knew Juliette Ransom he may have killed her. Why not? He was in the hills every day. If Lucy Hutchinson is telling the truth, Juliette looked as though she was waiting for somebody when she left her. Why wasn’t that Pell?”

“And I suppose,” I said indignantly, “that he went off without a hat, leaving that blood on a stone to throw you off the scent!”

“I’ve seen queerer things than that,” he said, and stamped out and down the stairs, slamming the front door in William’s face.

I
DID NOT SEE HIM
again for almost a week. The days dragged on. We had a series of storms, and again the creek poured a heavy stream over the dam like a small Niagara. Maggie was up and about, at night tying a string to her big toe and from that to the foot of her bed, to prevent walking in her sleep; and I, too, was convalescing, looking like a ghost when I saw myself in a mirror, but trying to keep my head up and my chin out, whatever good that may do.

Arthur was back and forth. I gathered that this last mystery had cleared matters between Mary Lou and himself, as well as with the police, for he seemed more like himself. But the general situation was nervous to the point of hysteria, and I crept downstairs one night to dinner, to discover that the authorities had put a guard on night duty around the house. His name was Tate, and after that I had coffee and a tray left for him under the porte-cochere before William went to bed.

The excitement of course was for the crime, if it was one; not for Allen Pell himself. The summer colony knew little or nothing of him. But one day, walking out to the gate—I was still rather tottery—I saw Howard Brooks going by in his car. He did not see me, but he was gazing straight ahead with a sort of blank look on his face; like a man whose thoughts were far away and not too pleasant.

The time came, of course, when I had to get about again, to write notes of thanks for the flowers that had come in, to have my hair trimmed and my nails done, to pick up my life as best I could. But the heart had gone out of me, to use a phrase of Maggie’s. One day I even got into considerable trouble, owing largely to my state of mind.

Once again we had had the usual influx of reporters, and one followed me into Conrad’s one morning, and touched his hat apologetically.

“Sorry to bother you, Miss Lloyd,” he said, “but do you connect this Pell story with your—with Mrs. Ransom’s death, and the other one?”

“Why should I?”

“You think not, then?”

“I haven’t said that. Or anything.”

“It was you who found that he was missing, wasn’t it?”

Just then I caught Conrad’s warning eye, and I said no more. The result in the press was startling, in spite of that. I was quoted at length as having stated that there was a possible connection among our three mysteries. Also as having visited the camp late at night and growing hysterical at the discovery that Allen Pell was not there.

Arthur, coming over the next day, read it grimly and turned an unbrotherly eye on me.

“What’s all this trash?” he demanded. “Do you mean to say you went to the camp to see that fellow? At night?”

“I walked up after dinner. The servants had the car.”

“What for? This article makes you look like a lovesick schoolgirl. Don’t tell me you had been meeting this man! I can’t believe it. Who is he? What is he?”

“I don’t know whether he is even alive,” I said, and choked. “As for why I went there, he was trying to help you.”

But Arthur was outraged.

“Who the devil asked for his help?” he almost shouted. “I don’t know him. Never heard of him. It wasn’t enough that I’ve been plastered over the front page of every newspaper in the country. Now you’ve got to do it!”

He was nervous, of course. But then we were all in a state of unstable equilibrium. These are the overtones of crime, I suppose. Any crime. The things that never reach the public. The suspicions and angers, the tight nerves, even of the innocent, the breaks in old friendships, never to be healed, even in family relationships.

For I think Arthur has never forgiven me entirely that publicity, tying us once more with what began increasingly to look like another crime.

The police had not been idle during that interval. The usual alarms had gone out over radio and teletype. A detective had traced the trailer and coupe to where they had been bought, for cash; and there was no doubt that Allen Pell had been the purchaser. The transaction had taken place in Boston, early in June, and the dealer had secured the license plates. Allen had registered at a local hotel of the respectable but not showy type; had registered as from New York, and was clearly remembered. Among other things he had taken the examination required in Massachusetts for a driver’s license and passed it. Then one day he had driven the trailer to the hotel, put his bags in it, paid his bill and departed.

He had had no visitors and his bill showed no telephone calls, except one or two local ones, probably to the dealer. There was, however, no Allen Pell in the New York telephone directory.

I did not know this at the time; but the repercussions from that wretched press article were already manifest. It seemed to me that everyone called during the days that followed. Lucy Hutchinson came in one morning, left her umbrella in the hall, damned the weather to William, and came in to where I was trying to read by the fire.

“See here, Marcia,” she said. “As one of the suspects, I certainly have a right to know something about this revolting situation.”

“I don’t know myself, Lucy.”

“You look like death, Bob walks the floor at night, Tony looks like a scared rabbit and revokes at bridge, Howard Brooks has called off a party, we’ve had another crime—which ought to let me out, for I didn’t know the man—and you’re the one who discovers it. And at midnight, up at that camp! It doesn’t make sense.”

“It never did make sense,” I said wanly. “But there’s no mystery in my part of it, Lucy. I had tea with him the day before he disappeared, and he said something that made me wonder.”

She raised the two thin lines she called her eyebrows.

“Tea?” she said. “In the trailer? That was going some for a Lloyd, wasn’t it?”

I must have colored, for she busied herself with a cigarette.

“Sorry,” she said. “He may turn up, you know. Where does he come in in all this, Marcia? I don’t suppose he killed Juliette. Did he know her?”

I evaded that.

“He had found someone to support Arthur’s alibi at Clinton. He didn’t tell me who it was. When I learned Bullard wanted to arrest Arthur, I went up to find out.”

“Leaving me to hold the bag!” she observed, without resentment. “He was gone then, was he?”

“So far as I can find out he never went back, Lucy. He left me at the top of the path. That’s all I know.”

“At a guess, somebody didn’t want him to tell what he knew,” she said shrewdly. “I’m sorry, Marcia, but it doesn’t look so good, does it? If he had to be put out of the way.”

“No,” I said dully.

She did not stay long. This third crime, if it was one, she considered let both Arthur and herself out. She was safe anyhow, she said. She had played bridge the afternoon of Allen Pell’s disappearance, and dined out that night. Before she left she gave me a long look.

“Do you happen to know if Pell was one of Juliette’s discards?” she asked.

“He knew her. I think it was a good while ago.”

But she only whistled softly and went out, and through the window I saw her plodding back through the rain, her feet slapping in galoshes and her umbrella low over her head.

Queer, how life went on much as usual after that. People meeting at the club, at dances, on the street.

“Any news yet about the painter fellow?”

“Haven’t heard any.”

I had to do something to fill in the time. One morning I took Maggie and a nervous Ellen up to the hospital suite, and we put it in order again. Maggie thought she remembered the corner where she had been when she was attacked, and that she had seemed to be looking for something. We examined it carefully, but there was nothing there. The wall was neatly papered with the nursery design I remembered from my childhood, a sea of blue with ships and whales scattered over it; and the baseboard and floor were solid and intact.

“It seems so silly, Maggie,” I said. “What could you have been after? There must have been something in your mind.”

“I don’t know, miss,” she said, looking bewildered. “But I think it had to do with Mr. Arthur.”

Allen Pell had been missing for fourteen anxious days by that time. Over at the sheriff’s office in the Clinton courthouse all sorts of clues had been coming in, to be run down without result. And, although I did not know it, the sheriff himself was doing a bit of literary composition. I saw it later, and it ran as follows:

Dear Sir or Madam: I am interested in a Pekingese pup for my youngest child. Said dog must be housebroken and of a gentle disposition. Price not too high. Yours very truly, Russell Shand.

The address he gave was his house, not his office; and Mamie, his elderly stenographer, typed quite a number of them.

“County paid the time and I paid the postage,” he told me later, when the matter came up. “Cost me about two dollars. Not so many cities that run a real society column.”

Arthur had spent most of that interval at Millbank, and it was about that time, too, that I had a call from Mary Lou. Owing to the rain and cold, Junior had been sick and I had not seen her for some days. When she came in I sensed a change in her. She pulled off her driving gloves and answered my questions about the boy absently. She asked for a cup of coffee, and when it came I saw that she could hardly hold the cup.

“I’ve had plenty of time to think things over,” she said. “I know now that Arthur didn’t kill Juliette, Marcia. I was a fool ever to think it. But I do believe he knows something.”

“What could he know?”

“I think he buried her,” she said quietly. “Found her and buried her.”

I could not think of anything to say. Once again I saw Arthur at the toolshed with that flashlight in his hand, and his stealthy re-entrance into the house that night.

“Why on earth would he do that?” I asked at last. “Why would he have to break in to get a spade? He could have got the key, easy enough. It hangs in the kitchen entry.”

“Not that night,” she said, with the same deadly calm. “I stopped just now and asked Mike. He had it in his pocket that night.”

“But why, Mary Lou? If he hadn’t killed her—”

“Because he still cared for her,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand, Marcia. You see, he had never forgotten her. He was devoted to me, but she was his first love.” She drew a long breath. “She was everything I was not. Reckless and popular and gay. And beautiful, Marcia. Men don’t forget beautiful women. Not entirely.”

She began to pull on her gloves automatically.

“He never really got free of her,” she said. “He never even had a chance to forget her. Every now and then he would see her picture in the newspapers, and each month when he made out her check he had to remember her all over again. So when he found her body—”

She got up, with that new maturity of hers in her face.

“Have the police examined the toolshed?” she asked.

“They’ve looked it over. Not very carefully. Why?”

“Because he has lost his key ring, Marcia. The gold one I gave him. He doesn’t know I know it, but he has. He’s worried about it. If they find it, there or near that grave, they’ll arrest him. That’s all they need.”

She had come to ask me to find it, if I could, and that day after she had gone I examined the shed as well as I could; the lawn mowers, the hundred and one things any gardener accumulates. But it was not there. Nevertheless, as I pulled about the crocks and sacks of fertilizer I was remembering several things. Not only Arthur with the flashlight, trying to get into the shed. Long before that, with Juliette in her dressing gown and mules, and Arthur in front of her, white to the lips.

“When I look at you,” he had said, “it doesn’t seem possible that you would wreck a man’s life as you have mine.”

What had he meant by that? Was there something more than the mere problem of her support? When he looked at her was he thinking of what life might have been with her had she cared for him? Then later: “God knows I loved you, but you took my pride and crushed it. You killed something in me. And now you’re fastened on me like a leech, and, by heaven, I can’t get rid of you.”

Was Mary Lou right, and had he never been able to get rid of her? Did she haunt his mind? If men leave an indelible mark on the women who have loved them, do women do the same thing to men?

One thing that day or two of activity did for me. They filled in time, let me forget the problem which absorbed all of my days and most of my nights. That afternoon, however, it was to be brought back to me in full force, and of all people by Mrs. Pendexter.