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“I had to come,” she said. “I couldn’t stay by myself any longer. They’ve sent for Bob, Marcia.”

“Who?”

“The police. The sheriff.”

I was stunned, but I tried to be helpful.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” I told her.

She did not relax.

“This damned rain!” she said. “Marcia, I knew Juliette had some letters from Bob. I met her that day to try to get them from her. If that comes out—”

I was nervous, and I turned on her rather sharply.

“Are you saying that you killed her?” I asked.

She stared at me.

“Good God, no,” she said.

It was a bad morning. Lucy stayed, smoking incessantly. The surf continued to break against the wall, coming in thunderously, so that the house itself seemed to shake. Cars came and went along the Dean driveway on the hill, and at noon Mary Lou called up from New York. She seemed badly frightened, and said that Arthur had had a telegram and had taken the late train the night before for Clinton.

“It’s too silly,” she said, with her voice quavering. “They’ve got the man who did it, haven’t they? And Arthur’s busy, Marcia. He’s got a lot of business just now. If it’s about that idiotic box you found—”

I kept my temper, although I was alarmed.

“They may want a statement about something from him,” I told her.

She would not ring off. A statement about what? And what about the box anyhow? The papers were full of it. Was it really true, or just a newspaper story? How on earth did I know it was there? Had I seen what was in it? And what about the pearls? Were they there or not, and if so could I keep them? Why not? They were found in my house.

I hung up, feeling slightly stunned. Things must be happening in the courthouse at Clinton. Confident as I was that the sheriff believed Allen innocent, I knew nothing of what had happened since he found the box. Nor were matters improved when Marjorie Pendexter telephoned.

“Marcia,” she said excitedly. “Why on earth have they called Howard to Clinton? On a day like this?

“I didn’t know they had.”

“He went off early this morning, Marcia; you don’t think he’s mixed up in anything, do you?”

“I don’t see how he could be.”

“Let me know if you hear anything, will you?”

I promised I would; but I was badly shaken when, shortly before lunch, I heard the sheriff’s voice on the wire.

“I don’t like to ask you on a day like this, Marcia,” he said. “But if you’ll come over this afternoon I think we can clear this thing up.”

“Clear it up! Then who—who’s guilty?”

I could hear him chuckle over the telephone.

“Way my office looks now you’d think it was a corporation,” he said. “How about three o’clock? If I’m not there just wait for me.”

I drove over. Shall I ever forget it! The storm was worse, if possible. Near the bridge a tree had been blown down, and I had to turn back and make a long detour. Even at that I was early. I sat for an hour in that cluttered office of his, with the safe locked and Mamie typing in the outer room, before he came in; and when he did there was no buoyancy in his step. He walked like a tired man. He nodded at me, took off his hat, sat down and lit his old pipe before he spoke at all.

“Well, Marcia,” he said at last, “I guess we’ve finally got to the bottom of it.”

I could only look at him.

“Maybe we’d better get at it from the start,” he said, turning his swivel chair and looking out the window. “It’s not a pretty story, but maybe it’s understandable. A woman like Juliette Ransom can pretty well play hell with people’s lives. There were some queer things too; like Arthur finding and burying the body. And we had a coincidence or two that balled things up for a while; Fred Martin being on the island, for instance. That fooled me at first, but—” he smiled for the first time—“it fooled Bullard too.”

Then he began the story.

“I suppose I never did believe Arthur did it. Not after the first few days. You get to know a man after thirty-odd years, and he wasn’t the type. Then I had to think. If he hadn’t, who else around here would want to get rid of her? Plenty didn’t like her, but that’s different. Then, too, you’ve got to remember how she was killed. Nobody lay in wait for her with a gun. If Lucy Hutchinson hadn’t left that golf club up there on the path maybe she wouldn’t have been killed at all. In other words, it wasn’t premeditated murder. Somebody just hit her!

“But they meant to kill her. Don’t forget that.”

He turned his office chair and looked at me.

“Well, there she was. She was dead. Maybe whoever did it was sorry, but it was too late. It was daylight, and she had to be got rid of. That fooled me for a long time. I’ve only just got it straight. She was no lightweight; and it took a pretty strong man to get her on that horse and get her down to the lake. If there had been a good prize fighter on the island I’d have arrested him as like as not, for that thing alone.

“Anyhow, there she was, and sometime during the search Arthur, who knew the lake and the creek, found her and buried her. That fooled me too, for a while. You see, I knew he was a lawyer, and that he’d know that if there was no body it would be pretty difficult to prove a murder.

“The Jordan matter didn’t help any either. She was scared. She’d come to me and said she wanted to get out of your house. That sounded like Arthur too. I’d found the hat, you remember, and it didn’t look too good. But the night Helen Jordan went to Eliza Edward’s she left after her supper, locked her room, and telephoned somebody.

“I went over every pay call made in the town that night, but I couldn’t find it. Here she was, a stranger in town. Outside of the hairdresser she hadn’t spoken to a soul. Then who was it she had called?

“It stumped me. She went out and she didn’t come back. It was clear as water that she’d arranged to meet somebody on the bay path somewhere, but who was it? It was almost certainly a man. I couldn’t see a woman killing her and then putting that rope around her neck and dragging her out to sea at night, or any other time. But here again was somebody not ready for a murder, and not used to it either. He didn’t even know enough to put a weight on her body!

“Well, you know about that. Her bag was found, and later she was. The one thing I couldn’t see was why she had carried off that Jennifer letter. It was back in her room, locked in her suitcase, and her room was locked too. The letter wasn’t important, but the postscript bothered me. ‘Have just heard about L—. Do please be careful, Julie. You know what I mean.’

“Who was this L—, and why was Mrs. Ransom to be careful? What did this Jennifer woman know? Well, you know about that too. We found her finally, but she wasn’t talking. She’ll talk now,” he added grimly. “If she doesn’t I’ll lock her up.”

He filled his pipe again and lit it.

“All right,” he said. “There we were. We had two women dead. One of them was a stranger here, the other hadn’t been around for years. I didn’t see the answer on the island, or anywhere near by. So you and I went to Juliette’s apartment in New York.

“We didn’t find much, except a clue to who this Jennifer was. But I did have that old newspaper clipping. Somebody’s marriage had been indefinitely postponed.

“Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but there might be a lot of heartbreak in it. The fellow’s name began with ‘L’ too, Langdon Page. And don’t forget I knew Juliette. I’d seen her around for six or seven summers. I’d seen that apartment of hers too. She was a troublemaker, all right, and here was trouble.

“I wasn’t sure of anything, of course. It mightn’t mean a thing. But as I’ve said I was drowning, and a leaf looked like a lifeboat to me. So I kind of kept after it now and then. I carried that clipping around, and every day or so I’d look at it.

“Then maybe the most curious thing of all happened. Somebody had hated Juliette and got rid of her. Helen Jordan had known too much—she was in the other woman’s confidence—so that she had to be put away too. But by the great horn spoon, what was the idea of knocking out a fellow who called himself Allen Pell, parking him somewhere until night, wiping his fingerprints off that trailer of his, and then carting him a hundred miles to a hospital?

“That spoiled the picture. It just didn’t fit anywhere. Why wipe those fingerprints off? Who did it? It wasn’t Pell himself. I had an idea maybe Pell was dead. Then we got the word that he’d been taken to a hospital, and that didn’t fit either. I couldn’t see Pell, either as the killer or anything else.

“What it looked like was that somebody had hurt the fellow, and then had been damned sorry, if you know what I mean.

“Well, that didn’t look like our killer. It looked at that time as though we had two different bits of trouble on our hands; Pell’s injury and the murders. Three, if you count what had been going on at your house: the hatchet up there in the old attic, the way those rooms had been gone through, and Maggie getting hit on the head and knocked out. And by the way, I may as well tell you that it was Fred Martin who hit Maggie and knocked her out.”

“Fred?” I said, astounded. “But why? He didn’t even know her!”

“Well, Fred’s sorry enough.” The sheriff smiled again. “He thought she was a ghost! He’d heard those stories about your house, and when she stood up in her nightgown he pretty nearly fainted. Then I guess he just lashed out at her.”

Fred, he said, had been about the house for several nights, before Juliette was murdered, trying to see her. He meant to choke the truth out of her, according to his own statement. He was certain she had got a divorce somehow. She was marrying money when she married Arthur, and she wouldn’t take a chance on losing it.

“Maybe he’d have killed her, if he got a chance; he’s only human. However, somebody else did it for him, so that was that.

“However that may be, he knew she had some things hidden. She as much as told him so; and after the excitement of her death began to die down, he went to New York. His mother was sick. That’s correct. But while he was there he got into her apartment, posing as a reporter and paying some bribery. There was nothing there, so he got the idea she had it with her. She’d made some crack about having letters that would blow the island wide open, and he thought maybe she had the record of her divorce among them.

“Anyhow he wanted to get to her room. He got into the house by that window, and—Well, that’s what happened to Maggie. He was scared. He thought maybe he’d killed her. He carried her down and laid her in the hall, and then he beat it.”

He got up and stood for a minute, looking out at the rain. When he turned he eyed me gravely.

“Then you came into it,” he said. “All at once you shoot down to New York. It’s hot. You look as washed out as though you’d been hung on a clothesline. But you go to New York anyhow. Jake Halliday, one of my deputies, sees you at the station here and tells me. So I call up the police there and have a man see what you’re after. I felt pretty foolish when I heard you’d spent some of your time there at the public library!

“But you did something else, Marcia. You went to see a man named Samuel Dunne, and Halliday had no trouble about him. He and the neighbors were holding seances to get in touch with his wife and daughter, who had both been killed by a hit-and-run driver.

“I still couldn’t see it, when Halliday called me up; but I sent him back to the library, and he got the files you’d had. There was Dunne’s story and all the rest of it. What’s more, this Jennifer Dennison was mixed up with it, and so were Howard Brooks and Marjorie Pendexter. And here’s something else. This Langdon Page had got out on parole early in June of this year, and then disappeared. He hadn’t reported since.

“It began to look as though he was our man. Halliday had got the story from the papers. Page had been crazy about Juliette, and had been drinking heavily as a result. Well, a fellow who’s been two or three years in the pen has time to get over a lot of things; especially love for a woman. But we had to remember this. She’d wrecked him. His engagement was broken. Maybe his business was gone. I didn’t know about that.

“Maybe he’d brooded over this thing, his broken engagement and so on, until he wasn’t normal. Still and all, it takes a good bit of brooding to make a man kill a woman for a reason like that, and after three years. It didn’t quite jell, as my wife says.

“Anyhow we didn’t have Pell, or Page, or whatever you want to call him. Halliday got a photograph of him, and the folks at the tourist camp identified him all right. He could have known Juliette was here. We found an item to that effect in one of the society columns. Maybe these fellows in the pen read the society column. They do some queer things. But we didn’t have him and we couldn’t find him. All we knew was that he’d been on the island.

“Bullard had Fred Martin by that time, and was off hell-bent for election! I kept telling him there were too many odds and ends left over, but you know him. He had Martin and he wasn’t letting go. Then the doctor got killed, and there was that fingerprint on the side of the car. There was no use arguing that the print was on the right-hand door and the doctor had been shot from the left. We got the print identified, and it was Page’s, alias Allen Pell!

“Well, you know that part of it. He’d disappeared and we couldn’t locate him. Then one day he walked in and gave himself up, and I’d like to have seen Bullard’s face! Page denied the crimes, but Bullard wouldn’t even listen. He was all set to go again!

“But I wasn’t satisfied. Page wasn’t telling all he knew. That stuck out like a peg leg, and I got an idea he was protecting somebody. But who? He didn’t know anybody much on the island except you—so far as I knew. He had known Marjorie Pendexter and the Brooks fellow, and he might have seen Fred Martin and Dorothy in Florida. He had a place there. But who else?

“Then that tin box turned up. I learned a lot from it. Not the letters from men. Mrs. Ransom had been doing some polite blackmailing, I was sure of that; but I couldn’t see any of the men concerned killing her. But I did get some things that looked phony to me. The necklace was only one of them.

“What, for instance, had sent Juliette around to Page’s apartment as soon as she could get there after that accident of his in New York? He’d run through a traffic light and killed two women and hurt a man. He was picked up unconscious and taken to a hospital; and it wasn’t very long before the police went through his wallet and found out who he was. But she’d been there already! There was a letter or two in that box that he had received only the day before.