Wall (27 page)

I saw the car stop in the driveway, and a militant old figure alight and address someone inside.

“Are you getting out? Or shall I have to drag you?”

There was a brief pause. Then, slowly and unwillingly, Marjorie followed her, protesting indignantly.

“But I tell you I’m not sure.”

“I’m not asking you to be sure. Who is sure about anything?” demanded the old lady dauntlessly, and prodded her into the house.

The argument was still going on when I reached the drawing room.

“Don’t be a fool,” Mrs. Pendexter was saying. “If you know anything now is the time to say it.”

“But I don’t, mother. At least I’m not positive.”

“All right. Here’s Marcia. Tell Marcia what you told me, and don’t hold out on it either. She says she knew this Pell person, Marcia.”

“Mother!” said Marjorie. “I didn’t say anything of the sort. I only saw him once. I said he reminded me of someone. That’s all. I don’t even remember who it was he looked like.”

“Go on,” said the old lady inexorably.

“Well, that’s all—except that I thought he knew me too. He had been painting, and he pulled down his hat and picked up his stuff. That’s really all.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Mrs. Pendexter. “Tell her when and where this was.”

“It was on Pine Hill, the morning Juliette was—the morning she disappeared. It was close to where it happened, Marcia.”

But she had really nothing much to say. She had got out of her car to gather some lupine, and was on her way back. She “hadn’t wanted to be mixed up in anything” and so she had said nothing. But she had seen Allen Pell there, and later on she saw Mary Lou sitting in her car some distance away. She had not seen Lucy at all, nor Juliette.

“All that happened must have been after I left,” she said. “I took the lupine home and put it in water, and—What good is all this, mother? I couldn’t identify the man, and he is missing anyhow.”

But I was not so certain, after they had gone. Marjorie was a direct person, with the straightforwardness of all people who like horses and the open air. I felt certain that she was holding something back, and that it was concerned with Allen Pell. She might pretend all she could, but I believed she knew who he was. Knew it well, and for some reason would not tell me.

Just what had she said, that day weeks ago when she came to see me? I spent most of the afternoon trying to remember. Then, after giving it up entirely, it came back to me that night after I had gone to bed. Something about a poor devil who had gone crazy about Juliette and took to drinking, with tragic results.

Could that have been Allen Pell? He had certainly been bitter about her. Arthur had been lucky, he said. He had only married her. And, after stating flatly that he had not killed her, there had been something about deserving a good mark for not having done so; “from the angels who keep the book” he had said.

It was possible. I knew that, lying in my bed in the dark, while Chu-Chu snored on her pillow and a sleepy gull mewed outside. And what was it the sheriff had said? “I don’t know anything about this fellow. Pell may be his name, and maybe not. I don’t know any better way to hide out than to take a trailer and keep moving.”

I shut my eyes. There was the motive, if it ever came out. At least the police might think it adequate. She had driven him to drink, and he had killed some people as a result. Then, too, why was he here, on the island? Was that accident? A coincidence? Had he followed her? Had she seen him, that day she rode into the hills and came home frightened?

I could not stay in bed. I got up and went to the telephone in my sitting room, and there called Marjorie. She was still up, she said, playing bridge; but her voice altered when I asked my question.

“I want you to tell me something,” I said. “I promise to keep it to myself. Who was the man who killed those people with his car? I mean, what was his name?”

There was rather a long pause. Then:

“That’s all over and done with, Marcia,” she said. “Why bring it up? It was two or three years ago.”

“Then it certainly won’t hurt to tell me,” I said urgently.

There was another pause. Then her voice again, flat but decisive.

“I’ve forgotten it,” she said, and hung up the receiver.

When I looked out over the bay the next morning I saw that the
Sea Witch
had gone on its long-deferred cruise to Newfoundland.

I
T RAINED ALMOST STEADILY
for the next few days. Water rolled down the face of the old house like tears, and in the little pools on the upper porch I could see drowned insects floating. The islands in the bay were soft green smudges, as if someone had drawn them with a crayon and then rubbed them. The bay and the sky merged in a mutual gray, so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The tides swept along, carrying with them the flotsam of the shore, dead trees, boxes and barrels, and all day the bell buoy off Long Point rocked and rang.

The gulls had disappeared to hug a lee shore somewhere. The small pleasure craft had left or swung neglected at their moorings. Even my upper porch was bare of furniture except the swing, which creaked back and forth dismally; and I had a strange feeling of being alone with myself, as though the active world had gone and I was its lone survivor.

One day I put on a raincoat and galoshes, and walked to Eliza Edwards’s in the village. It seemed to me that all our mysteries must be connected somehow, and there was a bare chance that the police had overlooked something. Eliza had little or nothing to say, however. It was clear that she resented with all her New England soul the publicity she had had, and the inability to rerent the room Helen Jordan had occupied.

She did not ask me in. We sat on her small vine-covered porch, and she pursed her mouth at my first question.

“I’ve told all I know. She just came, left her stuff and went out. I never saw her again.”

“Surely she said something?”

“She asked where the bathroom was, and she wanted a key to the house. I said I only had one key, and I hadn’t seen it for a year. Nobody in this town is a thief,” she added virtuously.

“I wish you’d think back,” I said urgently. “She didn’t say where she was going? She walked in, ate her supper, and walked out again. Is that all?”

“She asked if I had a telephone and said she’d be back in an hour or so.”

“I suppose you have no idea whom she wanted to call?”

She had not. Almost every roomer she got asked the same question. Generally she sent them to the corner drugstore. She had no idea whether Jordan had gone there or not. All she knew was that she had eaten a good dinner and never so much as said it was good, and had then gone out. She had worn a hat and carried a handbag, and she had locked her bedroom door before she left. It was evident that Helen Jordan’s disappearance and death were a matter of grievance to her.

“Not to mention the police tracking in and out for days,” she added somberly. “Wear and tear, I called it; but they just laughed at me. I pay my taxes on the dot, and—”

She went on for some time, but I learned something that day, although it seemed of no importance then. Eliza thought she had seen the woman before.

“She was no beauty,” she said. “But I’ve got it in my mind that I’ve seen her somewhere. She was so plain that it stuck out, and it’s easier to remember an ugly face than the other kind. Not lately. Must be quite a while back.”

“Here? In town?”

“Might have been here. Might have been somewhere else. I don’t leave the island much.”

I thought back. Jordan had hardly left Sunset at all after her arrival. She had gone with Juliette once, to the hairdresser’s, but that was about all. Eliza merely sniffed when I mentioned the beauty shop. She had no time for such goings-on, she said contemptuously.

But she had relaxed by that time. She agreed to let me see the room Jordan had occupied for the brief tragic interval before her death; and I added to what she called the wear and tear of her carpets by following her upstairs. The room was small and bare, and a glance told me that there was nothing of any value to be discovered there. A neatly made bed, a pine bureau and chest of drawers, two chairs and a small table, and all spotlessly clean, furnished it. There was no stove or fireplace, and wherever her suitcase had stood, it was now at the police station.

It seemed difficult to believe that a woman, any woman, could slip from life into death and leave so little behind her; a letter—not addressed to her, a handful of possessions in the New York apartment, a suitcase at a police station, and this empty room.

“Was this the way she left it?” I asked.

“All but the suitcase. The police have got that. Somebody’s in a good bag, if I do say it,” she added darkly.

It seemed clear that Eliza had little faith in the forces of law and order. But that was all that was clear. I tried to think.

“How did she act that night?” I asked. “Did she seem excited? Or worried about anything?”

“She didn’t seem the excitable kind. No. She looked kind of determined. I guess she was that sort, though.”

I left the house, still puzzled. Jordan had decided that night on some course of action. She had gone to a telephone and then walked along the bay path on Long Point. She had carried the handbag, and left the key to her room with Eliza. And locked in that room had been only one thing of any possible importance; what the sheriff called the Jennifer letter.

Was it important, after all? Had she kept it merely for her own purposes, perhaps in the hope of securing a situation with “Jennifer”? I could not tell, of course. Yet it is curious that on that very morning the Jennifer of the letter was going through a difficult time of her own, in the cabin of an incoming ocean liner.

I knew that Russell Shand had always considered that the letter had some bearing on the case; but I did not know he had enlisted the New York police to help him. They had traced her name through the telephone number in that book of Juliette’s, and it must have been a shock to her when two detectives from Centre Street met her ship at Quarantine.

It was a long time before I heard that story, and then it was from Russell Shand himself.

“They didn’t think much of me or of that letter either,” he said cheerfully. “It stood out all over them; a country sheriff with two murders on his hands and maybe three, and messing them up to beat the band! The lady was Fifth Avenue and Southampton, and that griped them.”

Her name, it had turned out, was Dennison, Mrs. Walter Dennison; and she traveled with a maid and a dog. What is more, she had the best suite on the ship. The detectives were uncomfortable when they realized what they were up against.

At first she thought they were ship reporters, and she received them with the proper air of resignation plus straightening her hat in case of photographs. The disillusionment must have been a shock.

“Sorry to bother you, madam. We’d like to ask a question or two.”

“For the press?”

They grinned and said no. She stared at them.

“Then who are you?” she demanded.

One of them flashed a badge, and she went pale.

“If you are from the customs—”

“Nothing to do with customs, Mrs. Dennison. Did you know a Mrs. Juliette Ransom?”

Her color came back, but she still looked wary.

“I did. She is dead, isn’t she?”

“Yes. You probably know the circumstances. Mrs. Dennison, we have here a copy of a letter which seems to be yours. It was found among Mrs. Ransom’s effects. Will you glance over it and identify it?”

She did so, with the two men watching her. When she came to the postscript they thought she stiffened, but she handed it back calmly enough.

“It is mine,” she said. “What about it?”

“Do you care to identify the man whose initial you used in that letter?”

“Certainly not. It was a purely personal matter.”

“‘Have just heard about L—. Do please be careful, Julie. You know what I mean.’ That sounds like a warning, Mrs. Dennison. Was this L—liable to do her bodily harm?”

“Of course not. Mrs. Ransom was reckless sometimes. She did a good many foolish things. I was merely telling her to behave herself.”

They did not believe her.

“This L—was a man, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. That doesn’t mean anything. She knew a lot of men. And now,” she added haughtily, “if you’ll give me a chance to get ready to leave this ship, I’d appreciate it.”

They got nothing more from her as the liner moved up the river to its dock. In fact, she ordered them out of her room. Once landed she left her maid to see her trunks through the customs, and still ignoring them marched to her waiting car and got in. But she did not go to her apartment on Fifth Avenue. Some time during that ride uptown she had her bags transferred to a taxicab and quietly disappeared.

“That’s what set me on the trail,” said the sheriff, long after. “All along I’d thought that letter was important. Now I knew it.”

It was August by that time, and August is the gay time on the island. Usually my calendar then is filled from morning until night, from club pool to lunch, from lunch to golf or a sail on the bay, and after that cocktails here and dinner there. But during the early part of that month I did little or nothing.

When it was clear I sat on this upper porch where I am today, and listlessly watched the activity in the bay. Now and then a speedboat would pass, trailing a surfboard with some youngster erect on it. Yachts came and departed, brilliant with paint, their brasswork gleaming in the sun, and once in a while I saw Lucy Hutchinson, usually the head and front of the August season, sitting lethargically on the bench by the sea wall where Bob and I had talked.

Sometimes she saw me and waved, but mostly she ignored me. She looked thin, I thought, and Bob was said to be drinking heavily.

Then one day a British battleship came in, and Tony Rutherford asked me to go to the club to help make it gay for the officers at tea. He seemed to hold no resentment for what had happened on the golf course.

“It’s only tea. Put on your prettiest dress and come along,” he coaxed. “We can’t have all dowagers, Marcia. No use letting the English think the average age of America is over fifty. Be good, won’t you?”