CHAPTER XI
I
I can’t star myself, much, for the next few minutes. Chris, Grandfather, Aunt Gracia, and Irene were in the room before I had realized that Father was dead. Then I thought that he had shot himself.
Grandfather took Lucy’s place beside Father. He looked up at us and told us, “Richard has been shot and killed.”
It would be Grandfather, wouldn’t it, out of the whole herd of us, who would know without any proof, simply and surely know, that Father was not a suicide? I don’t mean to be crumby and sentimental about it; but it is pretty rotten to think that, though Father had spent his life earning such a surety, Grandfather was the only one of us who would give it to him, then, on the minute and without proof. I wish I might even say that, having been told, we accepted Grandfather’s statement on the instant. We did not. No, not us.
Chris said something about where was the gun. He began to tear through the bedding hunting for it. So did Aunt Gracia. So did Irene. So did I. There was no gun to be found. Father was not a suicide. He was shot, from a distance of at least several feet, with a .38 calibre gun. Since every man in the county who has a gun has a .38 calibre Colt’s, we are not, in spite of Chris’s contentions to the contrary, going to be able to do much with that information. The point I am making, now, is that Father was not a suicide. I’ll go into it more fully, later.
It was Lucy who first called our attention to the open window and to the rope. Now, Judy, read this carefully and see what you can do with it.
The window was wide open from the bottom. There was a thick rope hanging over the sill and out of it. One end of the rope had been tied with a slip knot around one of the heavy legs of the bed. The rope went across the carpet to the window, across the window sill, across the porch roof beneath the window, and dangled to the ground.
Looks easy, doesn’t it? Some dirty cur had shot Father and had got out of the window by means of the rope. But the rope was covered with snow, and there was not a handprint in the snow on the window sill, nor a footprint in the new snow on the roof.
When I saw that rope, I would have jumped right out on to the roof, if Chris had not stopped me. He told me not to track the snow. He said that we must have a lantern. I ran down to the kitchen and got one. Read this, Jude. I have told you once, but I want to tell you again. We swung the lantern out over the porch roof, and the snow was a clean, unbroken sheet.
Chris looked at the clock on Father’s mantelpiece. It said ten minutes past twelve. Twenty-five minutes, at the most, since we had heard the shot. Not long enough for the snow, if it had been snowing hard, to have covered the footprints. We went to the window again. No snow was falling. And I know that none had been falling at ten minutes to twelve. There is no dodging it: the rope had not been used. Or, as Chris keeps insisting, it had not been used as a means of escape. Since he can’t produce any sort of theory as to what it might have been used for, I’ll leave you that, for what it is worth, and get along.
The murderer had not climbed out of the window. There were, then, just two things that he could have done:
1. He could have got out of the house some other way.
2. He could have stayed in the house.
Grandfather said: “He has not escaped this way. He has escaped some other way.”
“If he has escaped,” Chris said. “If he hasn’t, he is not going to.”
Irene screamed, “He may still be right here in this room,” and would have had a heart attack, if there had been time; but there wasn’t.
With Grandfather directing, we made a quick, thorough search of Father’s room. Chris, clinging to the suicide theory, I suppose, devoted his time to the bed. (He made one queer discovery; but, since it cannot amount to anything, I’ll get along and tell you about it later.) He found no gun, of course. The only gun in Father’s room was in his clothes closet, twenty feet away from the bed. His gun was fully loaded, and behind some boxes on the top closet shelf. You don’t need this, but I’ll give it to you. With the wound, if he had had strength to move, which he had not, Father could not have moved without leaving a trail of blood. Irene had blood on the front of her wrapper and on her sleeve. She got it there when she had been lifting Father. Those were the only blood-stains anywhere that were not on the bed covers.
The room was easy to search. There was nothing anyone could have got under but the bed, and nothing to hide behind. We pounded through the clothes closet, and that ended the search there.
Grandfather said that Chris, he, and I would go to search the house. He said for Aunt Gracia, Irene, and Lucy to stay in Father’s room, lock the door after us when we left, and close and lock the window.
Lucy said, “But where is Olympe?”
II
We all, including Grandfather, forgot the plan of having the ladies lock themselves in Father’s room. We all went rushing like mad things down to Olympe’s room. Irene kept mooing: “I unlocked her door. I unlocked her door last of all.”
The door was unlocked. There, stretched straight on the floor in her nightgown, was Olympe. Irene screamed as only Irene can scream. She thought, I guess, as I thought—that Olympe had been murdered, too. Aunt Gracia ran to her. She found that she was breathing all right, that she had merely fainted.
Every second seemed precious to us, just then. So, after we had made a quick but absolutely complete search of Olympe’s room, we left Lucy and Irene with her, and went on to go through the rest of the house.
I had brought two lanterns from the kitchen. I had a notion of taking one of them and running out to search the grounds. Grandfather pointed that, if the fellow was outside he was, and far on his way. But, if he was inside, we had a chance of finding him and keeping him here.
Aunt Gracia had insisted upon coming with us men. That made Grandfather, Aunt Gracia, Chris, and I the ones who searched the house that first hour. Grandfather said for Aunt Gracia and Chris to take one of the lanterns and search the front of the house, and for him and me to take the other lantern and search the back of the house. Chris got the gun out of Father’s closet and, at Grandfather’s bidding, I got Grandfather’s gun out of the commode drawer in his room. We thought it fortunate, just then, that both guns had their chambers full, ready for use.
While we had been getting the guns, Grandfather had been locking the bedroom doors on the outside. Irene had left the keys in the locks, of course. Grandfather explained, as he finished that job, that if the man was hiding in any of those rooms he would stay there until we were ready for him, or break his neck trying to get out of a window.
Grandfather and I went down the back stairway. We found the door at the foot of it locked on the sitting-room side. (Irene had locked it earlier in the evening. That comes in her story. Perhaps I should have told her story to you first of all. But I think I shall do better if I try to keep to the order of events as they came to me.)
As Grandfather and I ran back upstairs, to go down the front stairway, I happened to think that the door to the attic stairway had had no key, and that it should be locked. Grandfather told me that he had locked it with the key to my door. I am telling you this, in particular, to show you how quick, and fast, and straight Grandfather was thinking that night. But for him and his alertness some loophole might have been left, something might have been overlooked, as Dr. Joe persists. I know that with Grandfather directing as he directed all that night, nothing was overlooked.
We made a thorough search of every inch of space downstairs. Then Grandfather insisted on going with Chris to search the cellar. He asked me to stay on the first floor with Aunt Gracia. She and I went all through the downstairs rooms and halls again, and found nothing. We went back upstairs to Olympe’s room. She had revived, but had not got hold of anything as yet. She looked old, years older than Grandfather, lying there in her bed, asking over and over: “What is it? Why are you all up? What is the trouble?”
I thought that we should tell her. The others wouldn’t let her be told. They said we must wait until she was stronger. Aunt Gracia skipped out to get some peach brandy for Olympe. I noticed, then, that Lucy was fingering a gun, fooling with it as she might have been fooling with a hairbrush. I went and took it away from her and asked her where she had got it.
“It was under Olympe on the floor when we picked her up,” Lucy said. “I hadn’t really noticed what it was.”
It was Uncle Phineas’s old .32 Colt’s. I broke it. The chambers were all empty; so it could not have been either harmful or useful.
Grandfather came upstairs. He said that he and Chris had found no one in the cellar, and no traces of anyone’s having been there. He had left Chris downstairs, with Father’s gun, guarding the lower floor. He said for me to go down and help Chris, while he searched the attic and the upper floor. I couldn’t quite see Grandfather searching the most dangerous parts of the house, alone, while I went to squire Chris. Before I had time to object, Aunt Gracia, who had come back with the peach brandy, said nonsense. She would go down with Chris, if he needed someone, and I should go with Grandfather.
Since Uncle Phineas’s old gun was in my hands, I hunted around and found some cartridges for it, and gave Grandfather’s gun back to him. The attic was the same old story. We were pretty thankful up there for Aunt Gracia’s housekeeping niceties. It was easier to search than the parlour had been. All the trunks, chests, and boxes against the wall—nothing but vacant spaces. Grandfather and I opened all the chests and trunks that weren’t locked—that was all of them except Irene’s three big trunks—and poked through all the boxes, big and little. The partitioned room up there was as clean and as empty as a dish in the cupboard. The bed covers were all put away, the mattress rolled back, the wardrobe open to air.
We came downstairs. But before we had unlocked a bedroom door, Chris shouted to us from the lower hall and asked us to come down.
He had got an idea, and a doggone good one. He had been to all the downstairs windows and doors. Each window sill had rolls of unbroken snow on it, and so had each of the three door sills. Unbroken, that is, except for the slight crumbling caused by Chris’s having opened the windows and doors. He had put candles into empty cans—they throw a much better light than a lantern does, you know—and we used them at each downstairs window and door. Read this, Judy. Nowhere near a window, nowhere near a door, was there a footprint nor a break in the snow of any kind. As far as we could throw the light, say eight to ten yards at least, the snow was a clean unbroken sheet.
Put it like this, to make it clearer. The fellow had not got away before the shot was fired. If he had got away since, he would have had to leave some sort of tracks in the snow. There were no tracks in the snow. Ergo: he had not got away. Ergo: he was in the house.
I said, “He is right here in this house!”
Chris cursed and said that he was. “What’s more,” he added, “we’ll keep him right here. I think we’ll find a good use for him—later.”
III
Well, Jude, I guess we kept him here. I guess he is still here with us. We spent all that night, or, rather, that morning, searching and re-searching the house and guarding to keep anyone from leaving it. No one left it. Up to the present, two o’clock Thursday morning, we have found no one in hiding here.
About four o’clock Tuesday morning Chris took a notion to go to Quilterville and inform the sheriff—Gus Wildoch still has the job, you’ll remember—and telegraph to Dr. Joe. He started out of the back door down toward the barn. Irene stood in the doorway and yelped until she made Chris come back. I couldn’t blame her much. Grandfather thought, too, that it would be wiser to wait until dawn.
When Chris came back, we tested our lights’ efficiency on his tracks. They showed clearly. And, when daylight came, there they were—a deep line of woven footprints going part way to the barn and coming back to the house. Any other tracks, which had been made any time after the snow had stopped, around midnight, would have shown as plainly as those that Chris had made.
I didn’t think of it at the time, but I believe now that that fact had something to do with curbing Chris’s enthusiasm for bringing Gus Wildoch to the place. At any rate, instead of leaving at dawn, Chris yielded to Aunt Gracia’s urging and waited for some of the hot coffee she was making.
Shortly after six o’clock we gathered about the table in the dining room. Lucy had finally crawled into bed with Olympe, and they had both got off to sleep about five; so, naturally, we did not disturb them.
Aunt Gracia poured Grandfather’s coffee, passed it, and said:
“No one has left the place since Dick was killed last night. No one is hiding in the house at present. That can mean just this: Whoever murdered Dick is in this house and is not in hiding.”
How was that for a stunner, Judy, after the night we had all put in?
Irene stuttered something about not understanding.
Whether she did or not, and I’ll bet she did, Grandfather and Chris and I understood right enough. For the first time in my life, I guess, I heard Grandfather’s voice go harsh when he spoke to Aunt Gracia.
“My daughter,” he said, “that conclusion is premature.”
Aunt Gracia replied, “I’m sorry, Father; but I have been sitting quiet for hours, praying for guidance and thinking. I can reach no other conclusion.”
We had tried to get her to stay in Olympe’s room with Olympe and Irene and Lucy, but we could not keep her there. So, at last, we allowed her to sit in the lower front hall through the night. It seemed the safest place, since we had the front stairway door locked. We thought that no one would risk making a getaway through the front door. I gave her Uncle Phineas’s old gun and I took my rifle. Grandfather stayed in the back of the house with his gun. Chris kept making a steady round of the house, using Father’s gun. Chris and I changed places—I was in the upper hall—from three to four o’clock. At four, because she insisted, and because we felt certain there was no danger by that time, we allowed Aunt Gracia to make another thorough search with Chris. Irene, who had come out of Olympe’s room when Chris had started for Quilterville, tagged along with him and Aunt Gracia on this last search of theirs. Except for not whistling up Whatof and Keeper, which did not occur to any of us until they showed up for their breakfasts on Tuesday morning, I can’t see that we overlooked a single bet. Can you?
Returning to our coffee-cup conversation, Grandfather said, in answer to Aunt Gracia’s reply about thinking: “I have been thinking myself, dear—or attempting to do so. We have all been trying to think, I fancy. I, too, have reached but one conclusion: that constructive thinking is impossible for any of us, as yet. Minds in the states that our minds are in just now are illy working machines, Gracia. We’ll do well not to rely on them, for the present.”
“No, Father,” Aunt Gracia actually said, “that won’t do. Christopher is going, in a few minutes, to town for the sheriff. Before he gets here, with other outsiders, it is necessary for us to put our minds in order. Seven people were in this house last night after Dick was killed. No one could have left the house without making footprints in the snow. There are no footprints. We knew that in the night. This morning has proved it. There are no footprints. Whether we are willing to admit it or not, each one of us here knows that no one is hiding in this house. That brings us to this, and evasion is useless: One of us seven must be the person who killed Dick.”
“Seven people, yes,” Grandfather said. “But seven people all locked in their rooms. No judgment that does not take into consideration those locked doors, is sound.”
Aunt Gracia said, “Six people locked in their rooms.”
Judy, if she had smashed a bomb down on the dining table she couldn’t have caused a worse explosion. I don’t know what the others had thought about Irene being out, wandering around alone in the halls at midnight. I had not thought anything. I hadn’t had time to give it a thought. Grandfather was right, as he always is, about our minds being broken machines that night and morning. Mine is yet, for that matter. I’d be crazy if it weren’t for the order I was getting by writing this all out to you.
Irene began a bout of violent hysteria, screeching wedlock’s warcry at Chris: “I told you so! I told you so!”
Chris lost his head completely. He cursed, and banged the table with his fists, and shook his long forefinger, arm’s length, at Aunt Gracia, and shouted.
Grandfather stood up, straight, at the head of the table. Gosh, but he can tower! I’ll remember him like that. He said to Chris, “Sir, restrain yourself, and comfort and quiet your wife.” He turned to Aunt Gracia. “Daughter, explain to me the meaning of your last statement.”
“But I thought you knew, Father,” Aunt Gracia said, “that Irene was not locked in her room last night.”
While Grandfather said: “I had not known that. I had thought that Christopher had been the first to succeed in opening his bedroom door, and that he had sent Irene to release us while he stayed with Dick,” he kept on towering. Then he put his palms flat on the table and, slowly, sat down again in his chair.
Chris roared, “Uncle Thaddeus, are you going to sit calmly there and allow Gracia to accuse my wife of murder?”
Irene said: “She did it herself. That’s why she is accusing me.”
Yes, Judith, this conversation took place on the Q 2 Ranch, in the year 1900.
By some blessed miracle, Grandfather did not hear this speech of Irene’s. He spoke to Chris. “I think Gracia made no such accusation, Christopher.” And to Aunt Gracia, “You meant to make none, did you, Daughter?”
“No,” Aunt Gracia answered. “I said, only, that Irene was not locked in her room last night. That she was in the hall, with the keys, and that she let us all out of our rooms. I think that circumstance should be explained.”
Chris started up a lot of con talk about his wife doing no explaining. Grandfather said, “If you please, Christopher?” and little Chris subsided.
“My dear,” Grandfather said to Irene, “if you will, please tell us exactly what occurred last night with reference to yourself. I ask for this, you all understand, not as an explanation of Irene’s actions, but as a possible means for helping us all forward toward the truth.”
Irene lifted her head from Chris’s padded shoulder and looked first at Aunt Gracia and then at me. I felt as if she were clawing those light blue eyes of hers into my face. I thought: “She thinks I murdered Father,” and looked up to see Grandfather following her stare. I met his eyes. They didn’t claw, Judy. They did something worse than that. Just for an instant, before they looked away, they speculated—they doubted. You’ll say I imagined that. All right. Remember the time we tried lying to Grandfather about the Evans kids’ bobsled? Did we imagine that look, that time?
Say, Jude, wouldn’t it be horrible if a person could do some vile thing and then, from the shock of it, or something, forget about it right off? I mean—not know that he had done it. But Lucy was right in my room, within two minutes after we had heard the shot.
No matter. What I am trying to get to is Irene’s story. This was the first time that any of us, except Chris, I suppose, had heard it. That is why I have waited to tell you. If I am to get this thing organized, at all, I’ll have to keep the events in order as nearly as I can.
I think I’ll step outside again, and get another whiff or two of cold air before I begin on Irene’s story. I don’t know how important it is, or may be. But I want to present it to you as clearly as I can.