Wall (28 page)

I went and felt better for it. Death and danger seemed far away. The uniforms were dignified, the men charming; and behind them in the harbor—as a background—was their great gray ship. I did my best, and apparently made a conquest of one of the junior officers, for I could not lose him. But as I was leaving I saw Lucy, and she drew me aside into the cardroom and closed the door.

I was shocked when I saw her, close at hand. Her smartness was gone, her face looked ravaged; and after lighting a cigarette she dropped into a chair and stared out at the crowd on the lawn.

“What do you do,” she said finally, “when you think you are losing your mind?”

“You’d have plenty of company just now,” I said, feeling suddenly tired and lost.

She glanced at me quickly.

“I’ll change that question,” she said. “What do you do when you suspect your husband of everything from unfaithfulness to murder? He denies both, of course,” she added.

“I don’t think he killed Juliette, Lucy,” I said. “If that’s what you mean.”

“Why not?” She shrugged her shoulders. “He used to be in love with her, years ago. He’s big enough and strong enough to do anything. And he’s not been the same since she was killed. He’s been like a crazy man. Of course, if he was still in love with her—”

“You don’t believe that, do you? Not seriously.”

“I don’t know what I believe,” she said. “He took her to lunch last winter, That’s all he admits, but how do I know it’s true?”

“A good many men take women to lunch without killing them later,” I said impatiently. “Be yourself, Lucy. What if he did? You lunch with men day after day, don’t you? I expect a good many of them make love to you too. It’s customary. You’d be disappointed if they didn’t. But you are still alive, even if you do look shot to pieces.”

She did not resent that. She lit another cigarette and fitted it neatly into her holder before she spoke again. Then:

“I’m fond of Bob,” she said slowly. “I’m—Well, it’s more than that, of course. I’d have fought and killed to hold him, if it would have done any good. And after I thought the affair with her was over we were happier than we had ever been. I thought I’d got him back. He wasn’t even drinking. Then it started again, last winter. He came home one night—well, plastered is as good a word as any, isn’t it?—and it’s been going on ever since.” She turned and gave me a direct look. “Just why was Juliette murdered, Marcia? Have you any idea?”

“The general public seems to think that Arthur did it, for obvious reasons,” I said bitterly.

“That’s nonsense, of course. You must have some theory. Who wanted her out of the way? Was she dangerous to someone? Was she blackmailing anyone?”

“The police have been over her bank account. It’s all right. If she was getting money she got it in cash.”

“But you think she was spending more than she got from Arthur?”

“She always did that.”

She thought that over.

“It’s not like the old days,” she said. “Credit’s not as easy as it used to be. She had to pay some of her bills, and that crowd of hers had no use for people who couldn’t spend pretty freely. Sometimes I wonder if she was blackmailing Bob.”

She got up. She looked as though she had not slept for a long time; and it was typical of Juliette, I thought, to leave behind her a trail of devastated women: Mary Lou, fighting her own suspicion; Lucy, haggard and uncertain; Marjorie Pendexter, and myself. Even Jordan certainly gone to her death because of some secret knowledge she had possessed of Juliette’s affairs.

Lucy was preparing to go, powdering her nose, reddening her lips; but doing it abstractedly. She looked up at me.

“These men!” she said, with a sort of sullen anger. “You love them. You do all you can for them. And then they run out on you, and you find there’s another woman. He walked out with her after that time he lunched with her, and bought her a diamond bracelet!”

“Juliette! How do you know?”

“I know all right. His secretary paid the bill, and she wrote me the other day, to ask if I didn’t want to insure it!”

There was nothing I could say. She stood still, holding her vanity case.

“What about this Allen Pell?” she said. “He’s in this too, Marcia. Somewhere. Have the police any idea who the man was who went to that trailer of his just after he disappeared?”

“Nobody knows. They haven’t traced him.”

She drew a long breath.

“Sometimes I think I
am
going crazy,” she said. “Bob was out in the car that evening. I don’t even know where he went.”

I found my junior officer still on duty when I went out, and I had some difficulty in getting away. Also, as a result of anxiety and the long rainy spell, I went down with a feverish cold the next day. Maggie sent for Doctor Jamieson, and it was Doctor Jamieson who added a new angle to the case of Allen Pell.

He tapped me, announced that I would live, wrote a prescription and then sat back to talk. It seemed that Agnes Dean was down again, and that Mansfield Dean was taking it very hard.

“Funny thing,” he said. “These big men who marry fragile women like that and worship them! Of course she has come through a lot. Still, what’s the use of nursing old griefs? Dean rates something.”

It was not until he got up to go that he mentioned Allen. I remember that he looked tired that day. As I look back over this record I find that at some time or other I have said the same thing about most of us. But he looked worried too, and what he had to say put a new light on the situation.

“There’s one thing the police have overlooked,” he said. “Here’s a strong man and a young man. I’ve met him now and then along the roads, and liked him. But you can count on this. Whoever hit him that afternoon was somebody he knew and trusted. He didn’t expect what he got.”

“But no one really knew him, doctor. Not well anyhow.”

“Someone knew him too well for his own good,” he said dryly, and left me to lie wretchedly in bed, thinking that over.

A
S IT HAPPENED, THAT
night ended the bad weather. When I wakened late the next morning it was to sunshine and the wailing cries of the gulls. My cold was better too, and if there had been any real cheer in the world for me just then I would have felt it over Lizzie’s strong clear coffee, her crisp bacon, and a rose fresh from the garden which is Mike’s occasional contribution to my breakfast tray.

After I had dressed and been bundled into the sweaters Maggie forced on me I went downstairs and out into the garden. I was still there, dutifully inspecting the Canterbury bells, when the sheriff drove in.

He took one look at my nose and shoved me back into the house.

“Looks as though you needed somebody to look after you,” he said, apparently forgetting the terms on which we had last parted. “I can’t even go away for a week without something happening to you.”

“I didn’t know you’d been away.”

He tried to appear reproachful, but he only barely missed looking triumphant.

“Sure I have,” he said. “Been doing some traveling too. Thought maybe you’d like the law out of your pocket for a while.”

“Did you learn anything?” I asked eagerly. “About Allen Pell?”

He shook his head.

“No, but I learned a lot about something else.”

He had put me into a chair in the library, and now he sat down and looked me over.

“It’s a funny world, Marcia,” he said. “I don’t get you people at all. I’ve got a farm outside Clinton, and when I breed my cattle you can bet I know all about who’s who, or what’s what.” He looked uncomfortable then, as if he had been indelicate. He went on rather hurriedly. “Yet here’s your own brother, born and brought up like royalty, and what does he do? He marries a girl he doesn’t know a thing about; her folks, if any, or where she came from. All he knows is that she has a pretty face and he wants her.”

“And look where it’s brought him,” I said bitterly.

“Well, look where it’s brought her too,” he said, not unreasonably. “Anyhow, once it’s done it’s done. Nobody looks her up. Nobody knows anything about her.”

“What was the use?” I asked. “She was Arthur’s wife.”

“Sure she was. But did any of you know her real name was Julia, and that she’d been married before? No? I told you, I handle my cattle better than that.”

I could only stare at him incredulously.

“Married before?” I gasped. “Are you trying to tell me she had a husband when she married Arthur?”

“Not necessarily. He may have died, or she may have divorced him. But let’s get back to this. First of all I had to trace her, and that took time.”

Nevertheless, he had done it. It still seems incredible to me, but what with the police radio and a good picture of her, added to the nation-wide publicity, he had done it. “Not alone,” he said. “I had a lot of help, both in New York and elsewhere. But I’ve had an idea all along that this trouble didn’t begin here. You Lloyds may kill—I’ve seen a look in
your
face once or twice I didn’t like much—but I don’t think you kill for money or money reasons. That set me off. Or up, if you like. I went part of the way by plane.”

He seemed rather proud of that, although he gave me a detailed description of himself in the air, with a paper bag for certain emergencies and a feeling that he was being pretty much of a damned fool for the risk he was taking. “Never drew a full breath till I was down,” he said. But he came back to Juliette after that.

“First thing,” he explained, “she came from Kansas, and when she left there her name was not Juliette Ransom. It was Julia Ransom Bates. Her folks were dead and she lived with the old aunt she told you about. That part was true enough. She’s dead too, but plenty of people remember both of them. According to them, Juliette was the usual small-town pretty girl. Decent, I guess, but shaking her curls and making eyes at the traveling men in the hotel, and driving the local boys crazy. She wasn’t popular with the women, but the men fell for her like ripe apples.

“Anyhow she was eighteen when she lit out one day with a salesman for something or other, one of the hotel crowd, and she married him the next day in Kansas City. I saw the record.”

I said nothing. I was seeing her that day when Arthur brought her into this very house, looking young and innocent and appealing.

“Well, that’s the story,” he went on. “She never came back, the aunt died, and the next line-up we get she’s in New York studying music; or pretending to. She’s smart and she’s good-looking, and Arthur meets her and marries her. Then when she gets her divorce from him, she doesn’t go back to Bates as a name. Not stylish enough, most likely. She’s not Julia Bates. She’s Juliette Ransom, which is the name she used when Arthur married her.”

It was amazing, all of it. What a long way she had gone, this Julia Ransom Bates Something-or-other Lloyd; from the main street of a small town, ogled by the boys on the corner and eyed appreciatively by men in hotel windows, to our house on Park Avenue and this one on the island; and later on to that gay and exotic crowd which lived so fast and precariously in the night clubs and bars of wherever it happened to be.

One thing was certain. When Arthur brought her to us as his shy young bride, she had been already an experienced woman. “Try to forgive me,” she had said to Mother. “I love him so terribly.” She had been no mean actress, Juliette.

But the sheriff was not through. He reached into his pocketbook and drew out a letter.

“There’s something else, Marcia,” he said. “Helen Jordan came from that town too. If Juliette was the pretty girl of the place, Helen was the ugly duckling. Worked in a grocery store, had no family and no prospects. Then two or three years ago she sold what furniture she had and went east. She wrote one or two letters back to a woman she knew, and I got hold of this one. Maybe it means something, maybe not.”

He gave it to me. It was written in a surprisingly good hand, and was undated.

Dear Mabel: Well here I am, and I don’t mind saying it is a new world and no mistake. Day is night and night is day, with my lady sleeping until all hours, and the place looking like hell upset no matter what I do.

There followed a long description of Juliette’s apartment, her clothes and so on. But the last two paragraphs seemed pertinent:

You would hardly know Julia. She’s looking prettier than ever, and that’s going some! But she has something on her mind. She acts scared, and you know that isn’t like her. Some trouble about a man, I suppose. There are plenty of them.

As for me, I am sort of companion and what have you when we’re alone, and a maid otherwise, black silk apron and all. But it is easy and I am seeing life as I never knew it was lived. And what a life! So I don’t mind. I’ll write you more later.

I looked up. It was, I knew, a pretty accurate picture of life as Juliette had lived it, but it told me nothing new except that part about being frightened. Still, two or three years ago was a long time.

“Is that all?” I asked. “Were there any other letters?”

“One or two, but about the same. This woman seems to have been the only friend she left behind. She never mentioned Juliette’s being scared again, if she was scared. It looks as though, whatever it had been, it was over.”

“It may not have been,” I said. “She was nervous when she came here. She said she was in trouble.”

He looked doubtful.

“It must have been some trouble,” he observed, “to last almost three years.”

He went back to Allen Pell then. All search on the island had been abandoned, but he said it was still going on farther afield. Although I knew that that might mean nothing, it gave me at least a margin of hope.

And then, only a few days later, I learned that he was still alive!

Arthur was at Millbank, and I was alone in the house. Also our spell of good weather had broken. Another storm was threatening, and Maggie, who is afraid of lightning, insisted on closing the house early. The result was that the house was stuffy, although it was cool outside, and when the storm finally broke I was in the morning room, with the door open onto the garden trying to read.