The Case of Jennie Brice (serial, Everybody's)/Part 2
[PART II]
FIRST INSTALMENT
Jennie Brice was an actress, married to Philip Ladley, a playwright. They lived in a Pittsburgh boarding house kept by Mrs. Pitman, who tells the story. On the first day of the flood of 1907, the Ladleys had been quarreling. At two o'clock the next morning, the other boarder, Mr. Reynolds, wakened Mrs. Pitman to say that some one had taken the boat from where it was tied in the flooded hall. Two hours later Ladley rowed in, explaining that he had borrowed the boat in order to get some medicine for Mrs. Ladley. At breakfast-time Ladley told Mrs. Pitman that his wife had gone away early that morning, for the week. Presently Peter, the Ladleys' dog, brought in a water-soaked slipper of Jennie Brice's; then a broken knife that had been in Mrs. Pitman's room the night before, unbroken. When, in addition to these suspicious signs, Mrs. Pitman saw blood-stains on the boat-rope, she decided that Jennie Brice had been murdered. At the foot of the stairs, as she came down to start for the police station, she found a little, elderly man in a boat, with a tub of raw liver for distribution to starving dogs and cats. She told him her suspicions, and while they were talking Mr. Ladley escaped. Then Mrs. Pitman and the little man, Mr. Holcombe, went to investigate the Ladleys' room.
Their first discovery was that Mrs. Pitman's onyx clock was gone from the mantel-shelf.
CHAPTER III—CONTINUED
Perhaps it seems strange, but from the moment I missed that clock my rage at Mr. Ladley increased to a fury. It was all I had left of my former gentility. When times were hard and I got behind with the rent, as happened now and then, more than once I'd been tempted to sell the clock, or to pawn it. But I had never done it. Its ticking had kept me company on many a lonely night, and its elegance had helped me to keep my pride and to retain the respect of my neighbors. For in the flood district onyx clocks are not plentiful.
I stood staring at the mark in the dust of the mantel-shelf, which Mr. Holcombe was measuring with a pocket tape measure.
“You are sure you didn't take it away yourself, Mrs. Pitman?” he asked.
“Sure? Why, I could hardly lift it,” I said, with my lips trembling.
He was looking carefully at the oblong of dust where the clock had stood. “The key is gone, too,” he said, busily making entries in his note-book. “What was the maker's name?”
“Why, I don't think I ever noticed.”
He turned on me angrily. “Why didn't you notice?” he snapped. “Good Lord, woman, do you only use your eyes to cry with? How can you wind a clock, time after time, and not know the maker's name? It proves my contention: the average witness is perfectly unreliable.”
“Not at all,” I snapped. “I am ordinarily both accurate and observing.”
“Indeed!” he said, putting his hands behind him. “Then perhaps you can tell me the color of the pencil I have been writing with.”
HE MADE A SPLINT FOR THE DOG, LIDA HELPING. HE FOUND EXCUSES TO TOUCH HER HAND OR HER ARM—LITTLE CARESSING TOUCHES THAT MADE HER COLOR HEIGHTEN.
“Certainly. Red.” Most pencils are red, and I thought this was safe. But he held his right hand out with a flourish. “I've been writing with a fountain pen,” he said, in deep disgust.
But the next moment he had run to the wash-stand and pulled it out from the wall. Behind it, where it had fallen, lay a towel, covered with stains, as if some one had wiped bloody hands on it. He held it up, his face working with excitement. I could only cover my eyes.
“This looks letter,” he said, and began making a quick search of the room, running from one piece of furniture to another, pulling out bureau drawers, drawing the bed out from the wall, and crawling along the base-board with a lighted match in his hand. He gave a shout of triumph finally, and reappeared from behind the bed with the broken end of my knife in his hand.
“Very clumsy,” he said. “Very clumsy. Peter the dog could have done better.”
I had been examining the wall-paper about the wash-stand. Among the ink spots were one or two reddish ones that made me shiver. And, seeing a scrap of note-paper stuck between the base-board and the wall, I dug it out with a hairpin, and threw it into the grate, to be burned later. It was by the merest chance there was no fire there. The next moment Mr. Holcombe was on his knees by the fireplace.
“Never do that, under such circumstances,” he snapped, fishing among the ashes. “You might throw away valuable— Hello, Howell.”
I turned and saw a young man in the doorway, smiling, his hat in his hand. Even at that first glance, I liked Mr. Howell, and later, when every one was against him, and many curious things were developing, I am glad to remember that I stood by him.
“What's the trouble, Holcombe?” he asked. “Hitting the trail again?”
“A very curious thing that I just happened on,” said Mr. Holcombe. “Mrs. Pitman, this is Mr. Howell, of whom I spoke. Sit down, Howell, and let me read you something.”
With the crun4pled paper still unopened in his hand, Mr. Holcombe took his note-book and read aloud what he had written. I have it before me now:
“'Dog meat, two dollars, boat hire'—that's not it. Here. 'Yesterday, Sunday, March the 4th, Mrs. Pitman, landlady at 42 Union Street, heard two of her boarders quarreling, a man and his wife. Man's name, Philip Ladley. Wife's name, Jennie Ladley, known as Jennie Brice at the Liberty Stock Company, where she has been playing small parts.'”
Mr. Howell nodded. “I've heard of her,” he said. “Not much of an actress, I believe.”
“'The husband was also an actor, out of work, and employing his leisure time in writing a play.'”
“Everybody's doing it,” said Mr. Howell, idly.
“The Shuberts were to star him in this,” I put in. “He said that the climax at the end of the second act”
Mr. Holcombe shut his note-book with a snap. “After we have finished gossiping,” he said, “I'll go on.”
“'Employing his leisure time in writing a play—'” quoted Mr. Howell.
“Exactly. 'The husband and wife were not on good terms. They quarreled frequently. On Sunday, they fought all day, and Mrs. Ladley told Mrs. Pitman she was married to a fiend. At four o'clock Sunday afternoon, Philip Ladley went out, returning about five. Mrs. Pitman carried their supper to them at six, and both ate heartily. She did not see Mrs. Ladley at the time, but heard her in the next room. They were apparently reconciled: Mrs. Pitman reported Mr. Ladley in high good humor. If the quarrel recommenced during the night, the other boarder, named Reynolds, in the next room, heard nothing. Mrs. Pitman herself was up and down until one o'clock, when she dozed off. She heard no unusual sound. At approximately two o'clock in the morning, however, this Reynolds came to the room, and said he had heard some one in a boat in the lower hall. He and Mrs. Pitman investigated. The boat which Mrs. Pitman uses during a flood, and which she had tied to the stair-rail, was gone, having been cut loose, not untied. Everything else was quiet, except that Mrs. Ladley's dog had been shut in a third-story room.
“'At a quarter after four that morning Mrs. Pitman, thoroughly awake, heard the boat returning, and, going to the stairs, met Ladley coming in. He muttered something about having gone for medicine for his wife, and went to his room, shutting the dog out. This is worth attention, for the dog ordinarily slept in their room.'”
“What sort of a dog?” asked Mr. Howell. He had been listening attentively.
“A water spaniel. 'The rest of the night, or early morning, was quiet. At a quarter after seven, Ladley asked for coffee and toast for one, and, on Mrs. Pitman remarking this, said that his wife was not playing this week, and had gone for a few days' vacation, having left early in the morning.' Remember, during the night he had been out for medicine for her. Now she was able to travel, and, in fact, had started.”
Mr. Howell was frowning at the floor. “If he was doing anything wrong, he was doing it very badly,” he said.
“This is where I entered the case,” said Mr. Holcombe. “I rowed into the lower hall shortly after noon, to feed the dog, Peter, who was whining on the staircase. Mrs. Pitman was coming down, pale and agitated over the fact that the dog, shortly before, had found floating in the hall down-stairs a slipper belonging to Mrs. Ladley, and, later, a knife with a broken blade. She maintains that she had the knife last night up-stairs, that it was not broken, and that it was taken from a shelf in her room while she dozed. The question is, then, why was the knife taken? Who took it? And why? Has this man made away with his wife, or has he not?”
Mr. Howell looked at me and smiled. “Mr. Holcombe and I are old enemies,” he said. “Mr. Holcombe believes that circumstantial evidence may properly hang a man; I do not.” And to Mr. Holcombe: “So, having found a wet slipper and a broken knife, you are prepared for murder and sudden death!”
“I have more evidence,” Mr. Holcombe said eagerly, and proceeded to tell what we had found in the room. Mr. Howell listened, smiling to himself, but at the mention of the onyx clock he got up and went to the mantel.
“By Jove!” he said, and stood looking at the mark in the dust. “Are you sure the clock was here yesterday?”
“I wind it every Saturday. I wound it night before last, and put the key underneath. Yesterday, before they moved up, I wound it again.”
“The key is gone also. Well, what of it, Holcombe? Did he brain her with the clock? Or choke her with the key?”
Mr. Holcombe was looking at his note-book. He was loftily indifferent to Mr. Howell's amusement. “To summarize,” he said, “we have here as clues indicating a crime, the rope, the broken knife, the slipper, the towel, and the clock. Besides, this scrap of paper may contain some information.” He opened it and sat gazing at it in his palm. Then: “Is this Ladley's writing?” he asked me, in a curious voice.
“Yes.” I glanced at the slip.
Mr. Holcombe had just read from his note-book: “Rope, knife, slipper, towel, clock.”
The slip I had found behind the washstand said: “Rope, knife, shoe, towel, Horn—” The rest of the last word was torn off.
Mr. Howell was staring at the mantel. “Clock!” he repeated.
CHAPTER IV
It was after four when Mr. Holcombe had finished going over the room. I offered to make both the gentlemen some tea, for Mr. Pitman had been an Englishman, and I had got into the habit of having a cup in the afternoon, with a cracker or a bit of bread. But they refused. Mr. Howell said he had promised to meet a lady, and to bring her through the flooded district in a boat. He shook hands with me, and smiled at Mr. Holcombe.
“You will have to restrain his enthusiasm, Mrs. Pitman,” he said. “He is a bloodhound on the scent. If his baying gets on your nerves, just send for me.” He went down the stairs and stepped into the boat. “Remember, Holcombe,” he called, “every well-constituted murder has two things: a motive and a corpse. You haven't either.”
“If everybody waited until he saw flames, instead of relying on the testimony of the smoke,” Mr. Holcombe snapped, “what would the fire loss be?”
Mr. Howell poled his boat to the front door, and, sitting down, prepared to row out. “You are warned, Mrs. Pitman,” he called to me. “If he doesn't find a body to fit the clues, he's quite capable of making one to fill the demand.”
“Horn—” said Mr. Holcombe, looking at the slip again. “The tail of the 'n' is torn off—evidently only part of a word. “Hornet, Horning, Homer—Mrs. Pitman, will you go with me to the police station?”
I was more than anxious to go. In fact, I couldn't bear the idea of staying alone in the house, with Heaven only knows what concealed in the depths of that muddy flood. I got on my wraps again and Mr. Holcombe rowed me out.
We rowed to the corner of Robinson Street and Federal—it was before Federal Street was raised above the flood level—and left the boat in charge of a boy there. And we walked to the police station. On the way Mr. Holcombe questioned me closely about the events of the morning, and I recalled the incident of the burned pillow-slip. He made a note of it at once, and grew very thoughtful.
He 1eft me, however, at the police station. “I'd rather not appear in this, Mrs. Pitman,” he said apologetically, “and I think better along my own lines. Not that I have anything against the police: they've done some splendid work. But this case takes imagination, and the police department deals with facts. We have no facts yet. What we need, of course, is to have the man detained until we are sure of our case.”
He lifted his hat and turned away, and I went slowly up the steps to the police station.
At the door some one touched me on the arm. It was Mr. Holcombe again.
“I have been thinking it over,” he said, “and I believe you'd better not mention the piece of paper that you found behind the wash-stand. They might say the whole thing is a hoax.”
“Very well,” I agreed, and went in.
The police sergeant in charge knew me at a glance, having stopped at my house more than once in flood-time for a cup of hot coffee.
“Sit down, Mrs. Pitman,” he said. “I suppose you are still making the best coffee and doughnuts in the city of Allegheny? Well, what's the trouble in your district? Want an injunction against the river for trespass?”
“One way and another the river has brought me a good bit of trouble,” I said. “I'm—I'm worried, Mr. Sergeant. I think a woman from my house has been murdered, but I don't know.”
“Murdered!” he said, and drew up his chair. “Tell me about it.”
I told him everything, while he sat back with his eyes half closed, and his fingers beating a tattoo on the arm of his chair.
When I finished he got up and went into an inner room. He came back in a moment.
“I want you to come in and tell that to the chief,” he said, and led the way.
All told, I repeated my story three times that afternoon, to the sergeant, to the chief of police, and the third time to both of them and two detectives.
The second time the chief made notes of what I said.
“Know this man Ladley?” he asked the others. None of them did, but they all knew of Jennie Brice, and some of them had seen her in the theatre.
“Get the theatre, Tom,” the chief said to one of the detectives.
Luckily, what he learned over the telephone from the theatre corroborated my story. Jennie Brice was not in the cast that week, but should have reported that morning (Monday) to rehearse the next week's piece. No message had been received from her, and a substitute had been put in her place.
The chief hung up the receiver and turned to me. “You are sure about the clock, Mrs. Pitman?” he asked. “It was there when they moved up-stairs to the room?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You are certain you will not find it on the parlor mantel when the water goes down?”
“The mantels are uncovered now. It is not there.”
“You think Ladley has gone for good?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He'd be a fool to try to run away, unless—Graves, you'd better get hold of the fellow, and keep him until either the woman is found, or a body. The river is falling. In a couple of days we will know if she is around the premises anywhere.”
Before I left, I described Jennie Brice for them carefully. Asked what she probably wore, if she had gone away as her husband said, I had no idea; she had a lot of clothes, and dressed a good bit. But I recalled that I had seen a black and white dress with the red collar, and they took that down, as well as the brown valise.
The chief rose and opened the door for me himself. “If she actually left town at the time you mention,” he said, “she ought not to be hard to find. There are not many trains before seven in the morning, and most of them are locals.”
“And—and if she did not, if he—do you think she is in the house—or—or—the cellar?”
“POOR OLD PETER! WHO DID THIS TO YOU? WHO HURT YOU?” HE LOOKED AT ME AND WHINED.
“Not unless Ladley is more of a fool than I think he is,” he said, smiling. “Personally, I believe she has gone away, as he says she did. But if she hasn't— He probably took the body with him when he said he was getting medicine, and dropped it into it the current somewhere. But we must go slow with all this. There's no use shouting 'wolf' yet.”
“But—the towel?”
“He may have cut himself, shaving. It has been done.”
“And the knife?”
He shrugged his shoulders good-naturedly.
“I've seen a perfectly good knife spoiled, opening a bottle of pickles.”
“But the slippers? And the clock?”
“My good woman, enough shoes and slippers are forgotten in the bottoms of cupboards year after year in flood-time, and are found floating around the streets, to make all the old-clothesmen in town happy. I have seen almost everything floating about, during one of these annual floods.” i
“I dare say you never saw an onyx clock floating around,” I replied, a little sharply. I had no sense of humor that day.
He stopped smiling at once, and stood tugging at his mustache. “No,” he admitted. “An onyx clock sinks, that's true. That's a very nice little point, that onyx clock. He may be trying to sell it, or perhaps—” He did not finish.
I went back immediately, only stopping at the market to get meat for Mr. Reynolds's supper. It was after half-past five and dusk was coming on. I got a boat and was rowed directly home. Peter was not at the foot of the steps. I paid the boatman and let him go, and turned to go up the stairs. Some one was speaking in the hall above.
I have read somewhere that no two voices are exactly alike, just as no two violins ever produce precisely the same sound. I think it is what they call the timbre that is different. I have, for instance, never heard a voice like Mr. Pitman's, although Mr. Harry Lauder's in a phonograph resembles it. And voices have always done for me what odors do for some people, revived forgotten scenes and old memories. But the memory that the voice at the head of the stairs brought back was not very old, although I had forgotten it. I seemed to hear again, all at once, the lapping of the water, Sunday morning, as it began to come in over the door-sill; the sound of Terry rifling the parlor carpet, and Mrs. Ladley calling me a she-devil in the next room, in reply to this very voice.
But when I got to the top of the stairs, it was only Mr. Howell, who had brought his visitor to the flood district, and on getting her splashed with the muddy water, had taken her to my house for a towel and 'a cake of soap.
I lighted the lamp in the hall, and Mr. Howell introduced the girl. She was a pretty girl, slim and young, and she had taken her wetting good-humoredly.
“I know we are intruders, Mrs. Pitman,” she said, holding out her hand. “Especially now, when you are in trouble.”
“I have told Miss Harvey a little,” Mr. Howell said, “and I promised to show her Peter, but he is not here.”
I think I had known it was my sister Alma's child, from the moment I lit the lamp. There was something of Alma in her, not Alma's hardness or haughtiness, but Alma's dark blue eyes with black lashes, and Alma's nose. Alma was always the beauty of the family. What with the day's excitement, and seeing Alma's child like this, in my house, I felt things going round, and clutched at the stair-rail. Mr. Howell caught me.
“Why, Mrs. Pitman!” he said. “What's the matter?”
I got myself in hand in a moment and smiled at the girl. “Nothing at all,” I said. “Indigestion, most likely. Too much tea the last day or two, and not enough solid food. I've been too anxious to eat.”
Lida—for she was that to me at once, although I had never seen her before—Lida was all sympathy and sweetness. She actually asked me to go with her to a restaurant and have a real dinner. I could imagine Alma, had she known! But I excused myself.
“I have to cook something for Mr. Reynolds,” I said, “and I'm better now, anyhow, thank you. Mr. Howell, may I speak to you for a moment?”
He followed me along the back hall, which was dusk.
“I have remembered something that I had forgotten, Mr. Howell,” I said. “On Sunday morning, the Ladleys had a visitor.”
“Yes?”
“I did not see him, but—I heard his voice.” Mr. Howell did not move, but I fancied he drew his breath in quickly. “It sounded—it was not by any chance you?”
“I? A newspaper man, who goes to bed at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning, up and about at ten!”
“I didn't say what time it was,” I said sharply.
But at that moment Lida called from the front hall.
“I think I hear Peter,” she said. “He is shut in somewhere, whining.”
We went forward at once. She was right. Peter was whining and scratching at the door of Mr. Ladley's room, although I had left the door closed and Peter in the hall. I let him out, and he crawled to me on three legs, whimpering. Mr. Howell bent over him and felt the fourth.
“Poor little beast!” he said. “His leg is broken!”
He made a splint for the dog, and with Lida helping, they put him to bed in a clothes-basket in my up-stairs kitchen. It was easy to see how things lay with Mr. Howell. He was all eyes for her: he found excuses to touch her hand or her arm—little caressing touches that made her color heighten. And with it all, there was a sort of hopelessness in his manner, as if he knew how far the girl was out of his reach. Knowing Alma and her pride, I knew better than they how hopeless it was.
I was not so sure about Lida. I wondered if she was in love with the boy, or only in love with love. She was very young, as I had been. God help her, if, like me, she sacrificed everything, to discover, too late, that she was only in love with love!
CHAPTER V
Mr. Reynolds did not come home to dinner after all. The water had got into the basement at the store, he telephoned, one of the flood-gates in a sewer having leaked, and they were moving some of the departments to an upper floor. I had expected to have him in the house that evening, and now I was left alone again.
But, as it happened, I was not alone. Mr. Graves, one of the city detectives, came at half-past six, and went carefully over the Ladleys' room. I showed him the towel and the slipper and the broken knife, and where we had found the knife blade. He was very noncommittal, and left in a half-hour, taking the articles with him in a newspaper.
At seven the doorbell rang. I went down as far as I could on the staircase, and I saw a boat outside the door, with the boatman and a woman in it. I called to them to bring the boat back along the hall, and I had a queer feeling that it might be Mrs. Ladley, and that I'd been making a fool of myself all day for nothing. But it was not Mrs. Ladley.
“Is this Number 42?” asked the woman, as the boat came back.
“Yes.”
“Does Mr. Ladley live here?”
“Yes. But he is not here now.”
“Are you Mrs. Pittock?”
“Pitman, yes.”
The boat bumped against the stairs and the woman got out. She was as tall as Mrs. Ladley, and when I saw her in the light from the upper hall, I knew her. It was Temple Hope, the leading woman from the Liberty Theatre.
“I would like to talk to you, Mrs. Pitman,” she said. “Where can we go?”
I led the way back to my room, and when she had followed me in, she turned and shut the door.
“Now then,” she said, without any preliminary, “where is Jennie Brice?”
“I don't know, Miss Hope,” I answered.
We looked at each other for a minute and each of us saw what the other suspected.
“He has killed her!” she exclaimed. “She was afraid he would do it, and—he has.”
“Killed her and thrown her into the river,” I said. “That's what I think, and he'll go free at that. It seems there isn't any murder when there isn't any corpse.”
“Nonsense! If he has done that, the river will give her up, eventually.”
“The river doesn't always give them up,” I retorted. “Not in flood-time, anyhow. Or when they are found it is months later, and you can't prove anything.”
She had only a little time, being due at the theatre soon, but she sat down and told me the story she told afterward on the stand:
She had known Jennie Brice for years, they having been together in the chorus as long before as “Nadjy.”
“She was married then to a fellow on the vaudeville circuit,” Miss Temple said. “He left her about that time, and she took up with Ladley. I don't think they were ever married.”
“What!” I said, jumping to my feet, “and they came to a respectable house like this! If this comes out, I'm ruined.”
“Well, perhaps they were married,” she said. “Anyhow, they were always quarreling. And when he wasn't playing, it was worse. She used to come to my hotel, and cry her eyes out.”
“I knew you were friends,” I said. “Almost the last thing she said to me was about the black and white dress of hers you were to borrow for the piece this week.”
“Black and white dress! I borrow one of Jennie Brice's dresses!” exclaimed Miss Hope. “I should think not. I have plenty of my own.”
That puzzled me, for Jennie Brice had said it, that was sure. And then I remembered that I had not seen the dress in the room that day, and I went in to look for it. It was gone. I came back and told Miss Hope.
“A black and white dress! Did it have a red collar?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I remember it. She wore a small black hat with a red quill with that dress. You might look for the hat.”
She followed me back to the room and stood in the doorway while I searched. The hat was gone, too.
“Perhaps, after all, he's telling the truth,” she said, thoughtfully. “Her fur coat isn't in the closet, is it?”
It was gone. It is strange that, all day, I had never thought of looking over her clothes and seeing what was missing. I hadn't known all she had, of course, but I had seen her all winter in her fur coat and admired it. It was a striped fur, brown and gray, and very unusual. But with the coat missing, and a dress and hat gone, it began to look as if I had been making a fool of myself, and stirring up a tempest in a teapot. Miss Hope was as puzzled as I was.
“Anyhow, if he didn't kill her,” she said, “it isn't because he didn't want to. Only last week she had hysterics in my dressing-room, and said he had threatened to poison her. It was all Mr. Bronson, the business manager, and I could do to quiet her.”
She looked at her watch, and exclaimed that she was late, and would have to hurry.
I saw her down to her boat. The river had been falling rapidly for the last hour or two, and I heard the boat scrape as it went over the door-sill. I did not know whether to be glad that the water was going down and I could live like a Christian again, or to be sorry, for fear of what we might find in the mud that was always left.
Peter was lying where I had put him, on a folded blanket laid in a clothes-basket. I went back to him, and sat down beside the basket
“Peter!” I said. “Poor old Peter! Who did this to you? Who hurt you?” He looked at me and whined, as if he wanted to tell me, if only he could.
“Was it Mr. Ladley?” I asked, and the poor thing cowered close to his bed and shivered. I wondered if it had been he, and, if it had, why he had come back. Perhaps he had remembered the towel. Perhaps he would come again and spend the night there. I was like Peter: I cowered and shivered at the very thought.
At half-past nine o'clock I heard a boat at the door. It had stuck there, and its occupant was scolding furiously at the boatman. Soon after I heard splashing, and I knew that whoever it was, was wading back to the stairs through the foot or so of water still in the hall. I ran back to my room and locked myself in, and then stood, armed with the stove-lid lifter, in case it should be Ladley, and he should break the door in.
The steps came up the stairs, and Peter barked furiously. It seemed to me that this was to be my end, killed like a rat in a trap and thrown out the window, to float, like my kitchen chair, into Mollie Maguire's kitchen, or to be found lying in the ooze of the yard, after the river had gone down.
The steps hesitated at the top of the stairs, and turned back along the hall. Peter redoubled his noise: he never barked for Mr. Reynolds or the Ladleys. I stood still, hardly able to breathe. The door was thin, and the lock loose: one good blow, and
The door-knob turned, and I screamed. I recall that the light turned black, and that is all I do remember, until I came to, a half-hour later, and saw Mr. Holcombe stooping over me. The door, with the lock broken, was standing open. I tried to move, and I then I saw that my feet were propped up on the edge of Peter's basket.
“Better leave them up,” Mr. Holcombe said. “It sends the blood back to the head. Half the damfool people in the world stick a pillow under a fainting woman's shoulders. How are you now?”
“All right,” I said feebly. “I thought you were Mr. Ladley.”
He helped me up, and I sat in a chair and tried to keep my lips from shaking. And then I saw that Mr. Holcombe had brought a suit-case with him, and had set it inside the door.
“Ladley is safe, until he gets bail, anyhow,” he said. “They picked him up a half-hour ago as he was boarding a Pennsylvania train bound east.”
“For murder?” I asked.
“As a suspicious character,” he replied grimly. “That does as well as anything, for a time.” He sat down opposite me, and looked at me intently.
“Mrs. Pitman,” he said, “did you ever hear the story of the horse that wandered out of a village and could not be found?”
I shook my head.
“Well, the best wit of the Village failed to locate the horse. But one day the village idiot walked into town, leading the missing animal by the bridle. When they asked him how he had done it, he said: 'Well, I just thought what I'd do if I was a horse, and then I went and did it.'”
“I see,” I said, humoring him.
“You don't see. Now what are we trying to do?”
“We're trying to find a body. Do you intend to become a corpse?”
He leaned over and tapped on the table between us. “We are trying to prove a crime. I intend for the time to be the criminal.”
He looked so curious, bent forward and glaring at me from under his bushy eyebrows, with his shoes in his hand—for he had taken them off to wade to the stairs—and his trousers rolled to his knees, that I wondered if he was entirely sane. But Mr. Holcombe, eccentric as he might be, was sane enough.
“Not really a criminal!”
“As really as lies in me. Listen, Mrs. Pitman. I want to put myself in Ladley's place for a day or two, live as he lived, do what he did, even think as he thought, if I can. I am going to sleep in his room to night, with your permission.”
I could not see any reason for objecting, although I thought it silly and useless. I led the way to the front room, Mr. Holcombe following with his shoes and suit case. I lighted a lamp, and he stood looking around him.
“I see you have been here since we left this afternoon,” he said.
“Twice,” I replied. “First with Mr. Graves, and later”
The words died on my tongue. Some one had been in the room since my last visit there.
“He has been here!” I gasped. “I left the room in tolerable order. Look at it!”
“When were you here last?”
“At seven-thirty, or thereabouts.”
“Where were you between seven-thirty and eight-thirty?”
“In the kitchen, with Peter.” I told him then about the dog, and about finding him shut in the room.
The wash-stand was pulled out. The sheets of Mr. Ladley's manuscript, usually an orderly pile, were half on the floor, and the bed-coverings had been jerked off and flung over the back of a chair.
Peter, imprisoned, might have moved the wash-stand and upset the manuscript— Peter had never put the bed-clothing over the chair, or broken his own leg. I told Mr. Holcombe then about the dog, and finding him shut in the room.
“Humph!” he said, and, getting out his note-book, he made an exact memorandum of what I had told him, and of the condition of the room. That done, he turned to me.
“Mrs. Pitman,” he said, “I'll thank you to call me Mr. Ladley for the next day or so. I am an actor out of employment, forty-one years of age, short, stout, and bald, married to a woman I would like to be quit of, and I am writing myself a play in which the Shuberts intend to star me, or in which I intend the Shuberts to star me.”
“Very well, Mr. Ladley,” I said, trying to enter into the spirit of the thing, and, God knows, seeing no humor in it. “Then you'll like your soda from the ice-box?”
“Soda? For what?”
“For your whisky and soda, before you go to bed, sir.”
“Oh, certainly, yes. Bring the soda. And—just a moment, Mrs. Pitman: Mr. Holcombe is a total abstainer, and has always been so. It is Ladley, not Holcombe, who takes this abominable stuff.”
I said I quite understood, but that Mr. Ladley could skip a night, if he so wished. But the little gentleman would not hear to it, and, when I brought the soda, poured himself a double portion. He stood looking at it, with his face screwed up, as if the very odor revolted him.
ALL THAT EVENING MR. HOLCOMBE SAT ON THE FLOOR, WITH HIS EYE TO THE REFLECTING MIRROR AND HIS NOTE-BOOK BESIDE HIM.
“The chances are,” he said, “that Ladley—that I—having a nasty piece of work to do during the night, would—will take a larger drink than usual.” He raised the glass, only to put it down. “Don't forget,” he said, “to place a large knife where you left the one last night. I'm sorry the water has gone down, but I shall imagine it still at the seventh step. Good night, Mrs. Pitman.”
“Good night, Mr. Ladley,” I said, smiling, “and remember, you are three weeks in arrears with your board.”
His eyes twinkled through his spectacles. “I shall imagine it paid,” he said.
I went out and I heard him close the door behind me. Then, through the door, I heard a great sputtering and couching, and I knew he had got the whisky down somehow. I put the knife out, as he had asked me to, and went to bed. I was ready to drop. Not even the knowledge that an imaginary Mr. Ladley was about to commit an imaginary crime in the house that night could keep me awake.
When I was almost asleep, I roused with a start to recollect that I had forgotten to tell Mr. Holcombe about Mr. Howell's visit that afternoon. But I was too tired to get up.
Mr. Reynolds came in at eleven o'clock. I was roused when he banged his door. That was all I knew until morning. The sun on my face wakened me. Peter, in his basket, lifted his head as I moved, and thumped his tail against his pillow in greeting. I put on a wrapper, and called Mr. Reynolds by knocking at his door. Then I went on to the front room. The door was closed, and some one beyond was groaning. My heart stood still, and then raced on. I opened the door and looked in.
Mr. Holcombe was on the bed, fully dressed. He had a wet towel tied around his head, and his face looked swollen and puffy. He opened one eye and looked at me.
“What a night!” he groaned.
“What happened! What did you find?”
He groaned again. “Find!” he said. “Nothing, except that there was something wrong with that whisky. It poisoned me. I haven't been out of the house!”
So for that day, at least, Mr. Ladley became Mr. Holcombe again, and as such accepted ice in quantities, a mustard plaster over his stomach, and considerable nursing. By evening he was better, but although he clearly intended to stay on, he said nothing about changing his identity again, and I was glad enough. The very name of Ladley was horrible to me.
The river went down almost entirely that day, although there was still considerable water in the cellars. It takes time to get rid of that. The lower floors showed nothing suspicious. The papers were ruined, of course, the doors warped and sprung, and the floors coated with mud and débris. Terry came in the afternoon, and together we hung the dining-room rug out to dry in the sun.
As I was coming in, I looked over at the Maguire yard. Molly Maguire was there, and all her children around her, gaping. Molly was hanging out to dry a sodden fur coat, that had once been striped, brown and gray.
I went over after breakfast and claimed the coat as belonging to Mrs. Ladley. But she refused to give it up. There is a sort of unwritten law concerning the salvage of flood articles, and I had to leave the coat. But it was Mrs. Ladley's, beyond a doubt.
I shuddered when I thought how it had probably got into the water. And yet it was curious, too, for if she had had it on, how did it get loose to go floating around Molly Maguire's yard? And if she had not worn it, how did it get in the water?
CHAPTER VI
The newspapers were full of the Ladley case, with its curious solution and many surprises. It was considered unique in many ways. Mr. Pitman had always read all the murder trials, and used to talk about the corpus delicti and writs of habeas corpus—corpus being the legal way, I believe, of spelling corpse. But I came out of the Ladley trial—for it came to trial ultimately—with only one point of law that I was sure of: that was, that it is mighty hard to prove a man a murderer unless you can show what he killed.
And that was the weakness in the Ladley case. There was a body later on, but it could not be identified.
The police held Mr. Ladley for a day or two, and then, nothing appearing, they let him go. Mr. Holcombe, who was still occupying the second floor front, almost wept with rage and despair when he read in the papers that Ladley had been released. He was still working on the case, in his curious way, wandering along the wharves at night, and writing letters all over the country to learn about Philip Ladley's previous life, and his wife's. But he did not seem to get anywhere.
The newspapers had been full of the Jennie Brice disappearance. For disappearance it proved to be. So far as could be learned, she had not left the city that night, or since, and, as she was a striking-looking woman, very blonde, as I have said, with a full voice and a languid manner, she could hardly have taken refuge anywhere without being discovered. The morning after her disappearance a young woman, tall like Jennie Brice and fair, had been seen in the Union Station. But as she was accompanied by a young man, who bought her magazines and papers, and bade her an unexcited farewell, sending his love to various members of a family, and promising to feed the canary, this was not seriously considered. A sort of general alarm went over the country. When Jennie Brice was younger she had been pretty well known at the Broadway theatres in New York. One way or another, the Liberty Theatre got a lot of free advertising from the case, and I believe Miss Hope's salary was raised.
The police communicated with Jennie Brice's people—she had a sister in Olean, New York—but she had not heard from her. The sister wrote, I heard later, that Jennie had been unhappy with Philip Ladley, and afraid he would kill her. And Miss Hope told the same story. But—there was no corpus, as the lawyers say, and finally the police had to free Mr. Ladley.
Beyond making an attempt to get bail, and failing, he had done nothing. Asked about his wife, he merely shrugged his shoulders and said she had left him, and would turn up all right. He was unconcerned: smoked cigarettes all day, ate and slept well, and looked better since he had had nothing to drink. And, two or three days after the arrest, he sent for the manuscript of his play.
Mr. Howell came for it on the Thursday of that week.
I was on my knees scrubbing the parlor floor when he rang the bell. I let him in, and it seemed to me that he looked tired and pale.
“Well, Mrs. Pitman,” he said, smiling, “what did you find in the cellar when the water went down?”
“I'm glad to say that I didn't find what I feared, Mr. Howell.”
“Not even the onyx clock?”
“Not even the clock,” I replied. “And I feel as if I'd lost a friend. A clock is a lot of company.”
“Do you know what I think?” he said, looking at me closely. “I think you put that clock away yourself, in the excitement, and have forgotten all about it.”
“Nonsense.”
“Think hard.” He was very much in earnest. “You knew the water was rising and the Ladleys would have to be moved up to the second floor front, where the clock stood. You went in there and looked around to see if the room was ready, and you saw the clock. And knowing that the Ladleys quarreled now and then, and were apt to throw things, you took the clock to the attic and put it, say, in a trunk.”
“I did nothing of the sort. I went in, as you say, and I put up an old splasher, because of the way he throws ink about. Then I wound the clock, put the key under it, and went out.”
“And the key is gone too!” he said thoughtfully. “I wish I could find that clock, Mrs. Pitman.”
“So do I.”
“Ladley went out Sunday afternoon about four, didn't he—and got back at five?”
I turned and looked at him. “Yes, Mr. Howell,” I said. “Perhaps you know something about that.”
“I?” He changed color: twenty years of dunning boarders has made me pretty sharp at reading faces, and he looked as uncomfortable as if he owed me money. “I!”
I knew then that I had been right about the voice. It had been his.
“You!” I retorted. “You were here Sunday morning and spent some time with the Ladleys. I am the old she-devil. I notice you didn't tell your friend Mr. Holcombe about having been here on Sunday.”
He was quick to recover. “I'll tell you all about it, Mrs. Pitman,” he said smilingly. “You see, all my life, I have wished for an onyx clock. It has been my ambition, my Great Desire. Leaving the house that Sunday morning, and hearing the ticking of the clock up-stairs, and recognizing by the sound that it was an onyx clock, I clambered from my boat through an upper window, and so reached it. The clock showed fight, but after stunning it with a chair”
“Exactly!” I said. “Then the thing Mrs. Ladley said she would not do was probably to wind the clock?”
He dropped his bantering manner at once. “Mrs. Pitman,” he said, “I don't know what you heard or did not hear. But I want you to give me a little time, before you tell anybody that I was here that Sunday morning. And, in return. I'll find your clock.”
I hesitated, but, however put out he was, he didn't look like a criminal. Besides, he was a friend of my niece's, and blood is thicker even than flood-water.
“There was nothing wrong about my being here,” he went on, “but—I don't want it known. Don't spoil a good story, Mrs. Pitman.”
I did not quite understand that, although those who followed the trial carefully may do so. Poor Mr. Howell! I am sure he believed that it was only a good story. He got the description of my onyx clock and wrote it down, and I gave him the manuscript for Mr. Ladley. That was the last I saw of him for some time.
That Thursday proved to be an exciting day. For late in the afternoon Terry, digging the mud out of the cellar, came across my missing gray false front near the coal vault, and brought it up, grinning. And just before six, Mr. Graves, the detective, rang the bell and then let himself in. I found him in the lower hall, looking around.
“Well, Mrs. Pitman,” he said, “has our friend come back yet?”
“She was no friend of mine.”
“Not she. Ladley. If he's not free now, he will be this evening and he'll probably be around for his clothes.”
I felt my knees waver, as they always did when he was spoken of.
“He may want to stay here,” said Mr. Graves. “In fact, I think that's just what he will want.”
“Not here,” I protested. “The very thought of him makes me quake.”
“If he comes here, better take him in. I want to know where he is.”
I tried to say that I wouldn't have him, but the old habit of the ward asserted itself. From taking a bottle of beer or a slice of pie, to telling one where one might or might not live, the police were autocrats in that neighborhood. And, respectable woman that I am, my neighbor's fears of the front office have infected me.
“All right, Mr. Graves,” I said.
He pushed the parlor door open and looked in, whistling. “This is the place, isn't it?”
“Yes. But it was up-stairs that he”
“I see. Tall woman, Mrs. Ladley?”
“Tall and blonde. Very airy in her manner—patronizing.”
He nodded and still stood looking in and whistling. “Never heard her speak of a town named Horner, did you?”
“Horner? No.”
“I see.” He turned and wandered out again into the hall, still whistling. At the door, however, he stopped and turned. “Look anything like this?” he asked, and held out one of his hands, with a small kodak picture on the palm. It was a snapshot of a children's frolic in a village street, with some onlookers in the background. Around one of the heads had been drawn a circle in pencil. I took it to the gas-jet and looked at it closely. It was a tall woman with a hat on, not unlike Jennie Brice. She was looking over the crowd, and I could see only her face, and that in shadow. I shook my head.
“I thought not,” he said. “We have a lot of stage pictures of her, but what with false hair and their being retouched beyond recognition, they don't amount to much.” He started out, and stopped on the door-step to light a cigar.
“Take him on if he comes,” he said. “And keep your eyes open. Feed him well and he won't kill you!”
I had plenty to think of when I was cooking Mr. Reynolds's supper: the chance that I might have Mr. Ladley again, and the woman at Horner. For it had come to me like a flash, as Mr. Graves left, that the “Horn—” on the paper slip might have been “Horner.”
MR. HOLCOMBE CAME BACK THAT EVENING. HE THOUGHT THE BODY WAS THAT OF JENNIE BRICE, BUT THE HEAD WAS GONE.
CHAPTER VII
After all, there was nothing sensational about Mr. Ladley's return. He came at eight o'clock that night, fresh shaved and with his hair cut, and, although he had a latch-key, he rang the door-bell. I knew his ring, and I thought it no harm to carry an old razor of Mr. Pitman's with the blade open and folded back on the handle, in my left hand.
But I saw at once that he meant no mischief.
“Good evening,” he said, and put out his hand. I jumped back, until I saw there was nothing in it and that he only meant to shake hands. I didn't do it: I might have to take him in, and make his bed, and cook his meals, but I did not have to shake hands with him.
“You too!” he said, looking at me with what I suppose he meant to be a reproachful look. But he could no more put an expression of that sort in his eyes than a fish could. “I suppose, then, there is no use asking if I may have my old rooms. The front room. I won't need two.”
I didn't want him, and he must have seen it. But I took him. “You may have it, as far as I'm concerned,” I said. “But you'll have to let the paperhanger in to-morrow.”
“Assuredly.” He came into the hall and stood looking around him, and I fancied he drew a breath of relief. “It isn't much yet,” he said, “but it's better to look at than six feet of muddy water.”
“Or than stone walls,” I said.
He looked at me and smiled. “Or than stone walls,” he repeated, bowing, and went into his room.
So I had him again, and if I gave him only the dull knives, and locked up the bread-knife the moment I had finished with it, who can blame me? I took all the precaution I could think of: had Terry put an extra bolt on every door, and hid the rat poison and the carbolic acid in the cellar.
Peter would not go near him. He hobbled around on his three legs, with the splint beating a sort of tattoo on the floor, but he stayed back in the kitchen with me, or in the yard.
It was Sunday night or early Monday morning that Jennie Brice disappeared. On Thursday evening, her husband came back. On Friday the body of a woman was washed ashore at Beaver, but turned out to be that of a stewardess who had fallen overboard from one of the Cincinnati packets. Mr. Ladley himself showed me the article in the morning paper, when I took in his breakfast.
“Public hysteria has killed a man before this,” he said, when I had read it. “Suppose that woman had been mangled, or the screw of the steamer had cut her head off! How many people do you suppose would have been willing to swear that it was my—was Mrs. Ladley?”
“Even without a head, I should know Mrs. Ladley,” I retorted.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Let's trust she's still alive, for my sake,” he said. “But I'm glad, anyhow, that this woman had a head. You'll allow me to be glad, won't you?”
“You can be anything you want, as far as I'm concerned,” I snapped, and went out.
Mr. Holcombe still retained the second-story front room. I think, although he said nothing more about it, that he was still “playing horse.” He wrote a good bit at the washstand, and, from the loose sheets of manuscript he left, I believe actually tried to begin a play. But mostly he wandered along the water-front, or stood on one or another of the bridges, looking at the water and thinking. It is certain that he tried to keep in the part by smoking cigarettes, but he hated them, and usually ended by throwing the cigarette away and lighting an old pipe he carried.
On that Thursday evening he came home and sat down to supper with Mr. Reynolds. He ate little and seemed much excited. The talk ran on crime, as it always did when he was around, and Mr. Holcombe quoted Spencer a great deal—Herbert Spencer.
“Spencer,” Mr. Holcombe would say—“Spencer shows that every occurrence is the inevitable result of what has gone before, and carries in its train an equally inevitable series of results. Try to interrupt this chain in the smallest degree, and what follows? Chaos, my dear sir, chaos.”
“We see that at the store,” Mr. Reynolds would say. “Accustom a lot of women to a silk sale on Fridays and then make it tooth-brushes. That's chaos, all right.”
Well, Mr. Holcombe went out that evening, coming in about ten o'clock, and I told him Ladley was back. He was almost wild with excitement: wanted to have the back parlor, so he could watch him through the keyhole, and was terribly upset when I told him there was no keyhole, that the doors fastened with a thumb bolt. On learning that the front parlor was to be papered the next morning, he grew calmer, however, and got the paperhanger's address from me. He went out just after that.
Friday, as I say, was very quiet. Mr. Ladley moved to the back parlor to let the paperhanger in the front room, and, evidently not caring to talk to Mr. Reynolds, had his meals in his room. He smoked—and fussed with his papers all day; and Mr. Holcombe stayed in his room, which was unusual. In the afternoon Molly Maguire put on the striped fur coat and went out, going slowly past the house so that I would be sure to see her.
At four o'clock Mr. Holcombe came to my kitchen, rubbing his hands together. He had a pasteboard tube in his hand about a foot long, with an arrangement of small mirrors in it. He said it was modeled after the something or other that is used on a submarine, and that he and the paperhanger had fixed a place for it between his floor and the ceiling of Mr. Ladley's room, so that the chandelier would hide it from below. He thought he could watch Mr. Ladley through it; and, as it turned out, he could.
“I want to find his weak moment,” he said excitedly. “I want to know what he does when the door is closed and he can take off his mask. And I want to know if he sleeps with a light.”
“If he does,” I replied, “I hope you'll let me know, Mr. Holcombe. The gas bills are a horror to me as it is. I think he kept it on all last night. I turned off all the other lights and went to the cellar. The meter was going around.”
“Fine!” he said. “Every murderer fears the dark. And our friend of the parlor bedroom is a murderer, Mrs. Pitman. Whether he hangs or not, he's a murderer.”
The mirror affair, which Mr. Holcombe called a periscope, was put in that day and worked amazingly well. I went with him to try it out, and I distinctly saw the paperhanger take a cigarette from Mr. Ladley's case and put it in his pocket. Just after that, Mr. Ladley sauntered into the room and looked at the new paper. I could both see and hear him. It was rather weird.
“God, what a wall-paper!” he said.
CHAPTER VIII
That was on Friday afternoon. All that evening, and most of Saturday and Sunday, Mr. Holcombe sat on the floor, with his eye to the reflecting mirror and his note-book beside him. I have it before me.
On the first page is the “dog meat—two dollars” entry. On the next, the description of what occurred on Sunday night, March fourth, and Monday morning, the fifth. Following that came a sketch, made with a carbon sheet, of the torn paper found behind the washstand:
Illustration: A torn scrap of paper with some writing
And then came the entries for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Friday evening;
6:30—Eating hearty supper.
7:00—^Lights cigarette and paces floor. Notice that when Mrs. P. knocks, he goes to washstand and pretends to be writing.
8:00—Is examining book. Looks like a railway guide.
8:30—It is a steamship guide.
8'45—Tailor's boy brings box. Gives boy fifty cents. Query. Where does he get money, now that J. B. is gone?
9:00—Tries on new suit, brown.
9:30—Has been spending a quarter of an hour on his knees looking behind furniture and examining base-board.
10:00—He has the key to the onyx clock. Has hidden it twice, once up the chimney flue, once behind base-board.
10:15—He has just thrown key or similar small article outside window into yard.
11:00—Has gone to bed. Light burning. Shall sleep here on floor.
11:30—He can not sleep. Is up walking the floor and smoking.
2:00 a.m.—Saturday. Disturbance below. He had had nightmare and was calling “Jennie!” He got up, took a drink, and is now reading.
8:00 a.m.—I must have slept. He is shaving.
12:00 a.m.—Nothing this morning. He wrote for four hours, sometimes reading aloud what he had written.
2:00 p.m.—He has a visitor, a man. Can not hear all—word now and then. “Llewellyn is the very man.” “Devil of a risk—” “We'll see you through.” “Lost the slip—” “Didn't go to the hotel. She went to a private house.” “Eliza Shaeffer.”
Who went to a private house? Jennie Brice?
2:30—Can not hear. Are whispering. The visitor has given Ladley roll of bills.
4:00—Followed the visitor, a tall man with a pointed beard. He went to the Liberty Theatre. Found it was Bronson, business manager there. Who is Llewellyn and who is Eliza Shaeffer?
4:15—Had Mrs. P. bring telephone book: six Llewellyns in the book; no Eliza Shaeffer. Ladley more cheerful since Bronson's visit. He has bought all the evening papers and is searching for something. Has not found it.
7:00—Ate well. Have asked Mrs. P. to take my place here, while I interview the six Llewellyns.
11:00—Mrs. P. reports a quiet evening. He read and smoked. Has gone to bed. Light burning. Saw five Llewellyns. None of them knew Bronson or Ladley. Sixth—a lawyer—out at revival meeting. Went to the church and walked home with him. He knows something. Acknowledged he knew Bronson. Had met Ladley. Did not believe Mrs. Ladley dead.
9:00 a.m.—Ladley in bad shape. Apparently been drinking all night. Can not eat. Sent out early for papers, and has searched them all. Found entry on second page, stared at it, then flung the paper away. Have sent out for same paper.
10:00 a.m.—Paper says: “Body of woman washed ashore yesterday at Sewickley. Much mutilated by flood débris.” Ladley in bed, staring at ceiling. Wonder if he sees tube? He is ghastly.
That is the last entry in the note-book for that day. Mr. Holcombe called me in great excitement shortly after ten and showed me the item. Neither of us doubted for a moment that it was Jennie Brice who had been found. He started for Sewickley that same afternoon, and he probably communicated with the police before he left. For once or twice I saw Mr. Graves, the detective, sauntering past the house.
Mr. Ladley ate no dinner. He went out at four, and I had Mr. Reynolds follow him. But they were both back in a half-hour. Mr. Reynolds reported that Mr. Ladley had bought some headache tablets and some bromide powders to make him sleep.
Mr. Holcombe came back that evening. He thought the body was that of Jennie Brice, but the head was gone. He was much depressed, and did not immediately go back to the periscope. I asked if the head had been cut off or taken off by a steamer; he was afraid the latter, as a hand was gone too.
It was about eleven o'clock that night that the door-bell rang. It was Mr. Graves, with a small man behind him. I knew the man: he lived in a shanty-boat not far from my house—a curious affair with shelves full of dishes and tinware. In the spring he would be towed up the Monongahela a hundred miles or so and float down, tying up at different landings and selling his wares. Timothy Senft was his name. We called him Tim.
Mr. Graves motioned me to be quiet. Both of us knew that behind the parlor door Ladley was probably listening.
“Sorry to get you up, Mrs. Pitman,” said Mr. Graves, “but this man says he has bought beer here to-day. That won't do, Mrs. Pitman.”
“Beer! I haven't such a thing in the house. Come in and look,” I snapped. And the two of them went back to the kitchen.
“Now,” said Mr. Graves, when I had shut the door, “where's the dog's-meat man?”
“Up-stairs.”
“Bring him quietly.”
I called Mr. Holcombe, and he came eagerly, note-book and all. “Ah!” he said, when he saw Tim. “So you've turned up!”
“Yes, sir.”
“It seems, Mr. Dog's—Mr. Holcombe,” said Mr. Graves, “that you are right, partly, anyhow. Tim here did help a man with a boat that night”
“Threw him a rope, sir,” Tim broke in. “He'd got out in the current, and what with the ice, and his not knowing much about a boat, he'd have kept on to New Orleans if I hadn't caught him—or Kingdom Come.”
“Exactly. And what time did you say this was?”
“Between three and four last Sunday night—or Monday morning. He said he couldn't sleep and went out in a boat, meaning to keep in close to shore. But he got drawn out in the current.”
“Where did you see him first?”
“By the Ninth Street bridge.”
“Did you hail him?”
“He saw my light and hailed me.”
“You threw the line to him there?”
“No, sir. He tried to work in to shore. I got my small boat and rowed along River Avenue to below the Sixth Street bridge. He got pretty close in there and I threw him a rope. He was about done up.”
“Would you know him again?”
“Yes, sir. He gave me five dollars, and said to say nothing about it. He didn't want anybody to know he had been such a fool.”
They took him quietly up-stairs then and let him look through the periscope. He identified Mr. Ladley absolutely.
When Tim and Mr. Graves had gone, Mr. Holcombe and I were left alone in the kitchen. Mr. Holcombe leaned over and patted Peter as he lay in his basket.
“We've got him, old boy,” he said. “The chain is just about complete. He'll never kick you again.”
But Mr. Holcombe was wrong in thinking we had him.
I washed that next morning, Monday, but all the time my mind was with Jennie Brice. The sight of Molly Maguire, next door, at the window, rubbing and brushing at the fur coat, only made things worse.
At noon when the Maguire youngsters came home from school, I bribed Tommy, the youngest, into the kitchen, with the promise of a doughnut.
“I see your mother has a new fur coat,” I said, with the plate of doughnuts just beyond his reach.
“Yes'm.”
“When did she buy it?”
“She didn't buy it. Say, Mrs. Pitman, gimme that doughnut.”
“Oh, so the coat washed in!”
“No'm. Pap found it, down by the Point, on a cake of ice. He thought it was a dog, and rowed out for it.”
Well, I hadn't wanted the coat, as far as that goes; I'd managed well enough without furs for twenty years or more. But it was a satisfaction to know that it had not floated into Mrs. Maguire's kitchen and spread itself at her feet, as one may say. However, that was not the question, after all. The real issue was that if it was Jennie Brice's coat, and was found across the river on a cake of ice, then one of two things was certain: either Jennie Brice's body, wrapped in the coat, had been thrown into the water, out in the current, or she herself, hoping to incriminate her husband, had flung her coat into the river.
I told Mr. Holcombe, and he interviewed Joe Maguire that afternoon. The upshot of it was that Tommy had been correctly informed. Joe had witnesses who had lined up to see him rescue a dog, and had beheld his return in triumph with a wet and soggy fur coat. At three o'clock Mrs. Maguire, instructed by Mr. Graves, brought the coat to me for identification, turning it about for my inspection, but refusing to take her hands off it.
“If her husband says to me that he wants it back, well and good,” she said, “but I don't give it up to nobody but him.”
With Molly holding one arm and I the other, we took it to Mr. Ladley's door and knocked. He opened it, grumbling.
“I have asked you not to interrupt me,” he said, with his pen in his hand. His eyes fell on the coat. “What's that?” he asked, changing color.
“I think it's Mrs. Ladley's fur coat,” I said.
He stood there looking at it and thinking. Then: “It can't be hers,” he said. “She wore hers when she went away.”
“Perhaps she dropped it in the water.”
He looked at me and smiled. “And why would she do that?” he asked, mockingly. “Was it out of fashion?”
“That's Mrs. Ladley's coat,” I persisted, but Molly Maguire jerked it from me and started away. He stood there looking at me and smiling in his nasty way.
“This excitement is telling on you, Mrs. Pitman,” he said, coolly. “You're too emotional for detective work.” Then he went in and shut the door.
It was on Monday evening that the strangest event in years happened to me. I went to my sister's house! And the fact that I was admitted at a side entrance made it even stranger. It happened in this way:
Supper was over, and I was cleaning up, when an automobile came to the door. It was Alma's car, and empty. The chauffeur gave me a note:
- Dear Mrs. Pitman.—I am not at all well, and very anxious. Will you come to see me at once? My mother is out to dinner and I am alone. The car will bring you.
I put on my best dress at once and got into the limousine. Half the neighborhood was out watching. I leaned back in the upholstered seat, fairly quivering with excitement. This was Alma's car; that was Alma's card-case; the little clock had her monogram on it. Even the flowers in the flower holder, yellow tulips, reminded me of Alma—a trifle showy, but good to look at. And I was going to her house!
I was not taken to the main entrance, but to a side door. In this back hall there were even pieces of furniture from the old home, and my father's picture, in an oval gilt frame, hung over my head. I had not seen a picture of him for twenty years. I went over and touched it gently.
“Father, father!” I said.
Under it was the tall hall chair that I had climbed over as a child, and had stood on many times, to see myself in the mirror above. The chair was newly finished and looked the better for its age. I glanced in the old glass. The chair had stood time better than I. I was a middle-aged woman, lined with poverty and care, shabby, prematurely gray, a little hard. I had thought my father an old man when that picture was taken, and now I was even older. “Father!” I whispered again, and fell to crying in the dimly lighted hall.
Lida sent for me at once. I had only time to dry my eyes and straighten my hat. Had I met Alma on the stairs, I would have passed her without a word. She would not have known me. But I saw no one.
Lida was in bed. She was lying there with a rose-shaded lamp beside her, and a great bowl of spring flowers at her elbow. She sat up when I went in, and had a maid place a chair for me beside the bed. She looked very childish, with her hair in a braid on the pillow, and her slim young arms and throat bare.
“I'm so glad you came!” she said, and would not be satisfied until the light was just right for my eyes and my coat unfastened and thrown open.
“I'm not really ill,” she informed me. “I'm—I'm just tired and nervous, and—and unhappy, Mrs. Pitman.”
“I am sorry,” I said. I wanted to lean over and pat her hand, to draw the covers around her and mother her a little—I had had no one to mother for so long—but I could not. She would have thought it queer.
“Mrs. Pitman,” she said, suddenly, “who was this Jennie Brice?”
“She was an actress. She and her husband lived at my house.”
“Was she—was she beautiful?”
“Well,” I said slowly, “I never thought of that. She was handsome, in a large way.”
“Was she young?”
“Yes. Twenty-eight or so.”
“That isn't very young,” she said, looking relieved. “But I don't think men like very young women. Do you?”
“I know one who does,” I said, smiling. But she sat up in bed suddenly and looked at me with her dear, childish eyes.
“I don't want him to like me!” she flashed. “I—I want him to hate me.”
“Tut, tut! You want nothing of the sort.”
“Mrs. Pitman,” she said, “I sent for you because I'm nearly crazy. Mr. Howell was a friend of that woman's. He has acted like a maniac since she disappeared. He doesn't come to see me, he has given up his work on the paper, and I saw him today on the street—he looks like a ghost.”
That put me to thinking.
“He might have been a friend,” I admitted. “Although, as far as I know, he was never at the house but once, and then he saw both of them.”
“When was that?”
“Sunday morning, the day before she disappeared. They were arguing something.”
She was looking at me attentively. “You know more than you are telling me, Mrs. Pitman,” she said. “You—do you think Jennie Brice is dead, and that Mr. Howell knows—who did it?”
“I think she is dead, and I think possibly Mr. Howell suspects who did it. He does not know, or he would have told the police.”
“You do not think he was—was in love with Jennie Brice, do you?”
“I'm certain on that,” I said. “He is very much in love with a foolish girl, who ought to have more faith in him than she has.”
She colored a little, and smiled, at that, but the next moment she was sitting forward, tense and questioning again.
“If that is true, Mrs. Pitman,” she said, “who was the veiled woman he met that Monday morning at daylight,and took across the bridge to Pittsburgh? I believe it was Jennie Brice. If it was not, who was it?”
The third instalment of “The Case of Jennie Brice” will appear in the December number. Prizes amounting to $11,540 await ingenious readers of the story. Details of the contest will be sent upon application to “The Jennie Brice Disappearance Bureau,” care of Everybody's Magazine.