Wall (44 page)

“Partly to see you, my dear,” he said, “and partly to see how things were going.”

They were going badly. Dean had missed his revolver and was afraid Agnes meant to kill herself. He himself was worried about me, and about the doctor.

“She knew I liked you. She probably suspected I was in love with you, and she resented that. She thought it was disloyal to Emily. She may have thought I had told you too much. I was anxious about the doctor too. She had told Dean that the doctor was giving her medicine to make her talk. Whether it was true or not, if she thought it—”

However that might be, he had gone to the doctor and warned him. He had not told him all the story; merely that she was emotional and unbalanced, and possibly dangerous. But he thought the doctor knew a lot, and had guessed the rest. He had listened and nodded.

“I can take care of myself,” he had said sturdily. “I’ve had to do it for a good many years.”

A night or two later she had shot him.

She was dressed for a dinner party when she did it, and for the ball to follow. Not in costume, but wearing all her pearls, and a beautiful small tiara. Then she had sent her maid away and gone outside for air. Nobody saw her going down to the road in that black dress of hers, with a black wrap over it. When Dean came down she was back in the hall, inspecting herself in a mirror and entirely calm.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“You’re always lovely to me, Agnes.”

And that was all.

She had known the doctor would be coming back from Dorothy’s and had gauged her time well. She had stopped his car in the road and shot him. It was probable, Allen thought, that she never spoke to him at all; and the first real knowledge Dean had of her guilt was the night she died. He found the gun under her mattress then, and the nurse had discovered him with it in his hand.

He had meant to kill himself, but the nurse had stopped him. The next morning in the rain he had gone up Stony Creek and buried it. He took the police there later on.

It was the doctor’s murder that had decided Allen. Up to that time he had hoped that her heart would give out before she could do any more damage. Now he told Dean he was going to surrender himself. Dean had taken it hard.

“Give her a little time,” he said. “For God’s sake, Lang! She’s dying! She can’t do anything more. Let her go in peace.”

And that he had done, sitting still under their questioning there in Bullard’s office, feeling faint and exhausted, but still holding out. Then she died, that night in her sleep. Died just in time to escape Russell Shand, in dripping oilskins, confronting Mansfield Dean the next morning in his library. He had come back from burying the revolver, and one look at the sheriff’s face was enough. He knew that the long struggle was over.

“Sorry to trouble you at such a time, Mr. Dean,” Shand said quietly. “I guess you know why I’m here.”

Mansfield Dean looked at him, his face gray but his head erect on his tired body.

“God works after his own fashion,” he said strangely. “At least he has saved her this.”

It was after he got that story that the sheriff went back to the courthouse. Though it was still early, Bullard was already behind his desk, looking busy and important, with a group of men around him.

“Just dropped in,” said the sheriff, “to say it’s all over. You can let Page go, and Martin too.”

“You’re crazy,” said Bullard reddening.

“Well, you’re a fool,” said the sheriff cheerfully. “If the public knew about both of us we’d soon be out of office. As a matter of fact,” he added, “our killer escaped last night. I got there this morning, but I was too late. She was gone.”

“She
was gone! What the devil do you mean?”

“She was dead,” said the sheriff soberly.

He told them then, and they crowded around him—all but Bullard—and shook him by the hand. The New York men even asked him if he didn’t want a job with them; but he refused with a grin.

“I’m only a country policeman,” he said. “What would I do in the big town?”

He had his conference that morning: Bob, Tony, Howard, and eventually Arthur. The tin box was on the table, and they were an anxious lot. At last he gave them back their letters, and then got up.

“I suppose it’s no use reading a lecture to you fellows,” he said. “Looks to me as though one woman had played you all for suckers. The good Lord makes a woman like that now and then. But you’ve done your best to clutter up this case. So if you don’t mind getting the hell out of here, I’ll get back to my real business.”

They went out, grinning and sheepish; but Arthur stayed and the sheriff opened the tin box again.

“Something you and the Martins will be glad to have,” he said. “She was divorced from Fred all right. She was your legal wife. But as one married man to another, I wouldn’t tell Mary Lou there was ever a question of it.”

And it speaks well, I think, for the Lloyd blood that Arthur managed to smile.

I am still here. Since I commenced this story the fall has come in earnest. The days are bright and even warm, but the nights are cold. At bedtime Maggie tucks me under an eiderdown, and puts a little blanket into Chu-Chu’s bed. But the house is still and peaceful. No bells have rung since Agnes died. But I am not satisfied that they had any connection with our dreadful experiences, and I am sending for the electrician to come again tomorrow.

Except for a few die-hards, the summer people have gone. The house on the hill above Sunset is empty, but Mrs. Pendexter still drops in.

“I always did suspect that Dean woman,” she says, with her usual shrewdness. “It had to be either her or her husband. The rest of us had wanted to kill Juliette for years, but hadn’t done it. And I liked him.”

I am much stronger. Soon the new doctor will let me go back to New York. He is very scientific. Every so often he jabs me and carries away some blood on a slide. He takes it back to the old doctor’s house and into the laboratory. What does he see under the microscope? I wonder. The times when it chilled with horror or went sick with fright? I think not. He is a very material person.

As I finish this I can hear Mike in the garden, getting ready for the winter. He fills a wheelbarrow with leaves and dumps them on the mulch pile behind the toolshed, there to rot and grow rich in decay. And downstairs William is putting away the silver. He is looking forward to the winter, and my wedding. Every now and then he appears with a suggestion.

“I was thinking, miss. About the reception. Perhaps we’d better—”

He is younger than he has been for many years. So is Lizzie. So is Maggie, planning my clothes for me and already seeing me in white satin, and a veil, coming down the aisle. Her child. Her little girl, now grown up and a bride. How little we know about them, those faithful people who serve us through a lifetime.

Yesterday I took the car out. I stopped at the cemetery, and looked at those three tragic graves: Juliette’s, Helen Jordan’s and the doctor’s. There are fresh flowers on all of them every week, and I understand the order is to go on. I passed the golf course too, and saw Fred Martin there as usual, his old cap on his head and his hands in his pockets, giving a lesson.

“See what you did that time?” he was asking. “Wonder to me you didn’t bang that ball over to my house and hit the baby!”

He is crazy about the baby.

Now and then the sheriff drops in to see how I am getting along. He came only a day or two ago.

“Kind of got the habit,” he said. “Now I’ve got to find out who stole Mrs. Pendexter’s cook’s overshoes out of the station wagon while she was at the movies. Well, I suppose that’s life.”

Then he saw my manuscript and eyed it.

“If that’s a letter to your young man,” he observed, “it’s sure a long one.”

“It’s my attempt to tell what happened here this summer,” I told him. “After all, people ought to know. About Allen, and everything.”

He looked alarmed at first. Then he grinned.

“Put Bullard in,” he said. “He’s out of office soon, and he’s got no comeback. I wish you’d seen his face that morning when I walked in and told him to let both Page and Martin go. It looked like a poached egg.”

I saw him out, and as he went he cocked an eye up at the old hospital suite.

“If you’re writing that story,” he said, “you’d better call it ‘The Wall.’ That’s what it looked like I was up against for a while. And, by the great horn spoon, part of the case was lying behind one all the time.”

The postman whistled as he left, and I waited for my daily letter. I carried it out to the porch and read it there, with the seals in the bay and the gulls patiently fishing at the edge of the low tide. The sun was out and the bay was calm and still. There was a boy on the shore, throwing pebbles into the water, and I remembered Juliette doing the same thing and watching the little waves it had caused. “Like life,” she said. “The damned things go on and on.”

But it wasn’t true, I thought. They went so far and then stopped; and everything was quiet again.

Standing there, I opened and read my letter.

“My darling—” it began.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1938 by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch

978-1-4804-3651-0

This 2013 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.mysteriouspress.com

www.openroadmedia.com