—and that he was a son of the lady who'd died not a month before from a needle-thrust in her hand I thought there was something mighty queer about it all." Odell shrugged. "However, nothing came to the Bureau about it, and it's not up to us to go out looking for trouble. Tell me about it from the beginning, Mr, Titheredge."
"There's little to tell about the two cases if you remember the newspaper accounts, and I would rather have you get the details from the members of the family themselves; but I'll tell you a little about them before we start." The attorney settled forward in his chair. "Mrs. Lorne was the widow of Halsey Chalmers, the rich broker, when she married Richard Lorne five years ago. She had five children all practically grown up except the youngest boy, a hunchback. Her spinster sister. Miss Effie Meade, two or three years her senior, had always lived with her since her first marriage, and that composed the family up to a month ago. Then Mrs. Lorne died; and last week her oldest son Julian was taken off, as you know.
"I don't mind telling you, Sergeant, that I had some quick work then to keep a suspicion of suicide out of the press; for Julian had been pretty wild and had caused his stepfather and me a lot of trouble about money matters—squaring up for scrapes he had got into, and that sort of thing. His own father, Halsey Chalmers, had left an independent fortune to each of the children; but he had tied it up until the boys became twenty-five and the girls twenty-three. I was one of the executors of his estate and co-guardian with their mother. When she married Richard Lorne we put the inheritances into his hands for reinvestment, and he has almost doubled them. I know because we
