CHAPTER XV
I
I had been as nervous as an old woman about Aunt Gracia all during these everlasting proceedings. She and I had ridden to Quilterville together to keep from crowding the carriage.
We were no sooner mounted, and off, than she began to talk to me about hoping I’d be “discreet” at the inquest. I did not understand her, at first. We had held sort of a family council before we had left home and Grandfather had talked to us. Over and over—you know how unusual it is for Grandfather to be reiterative—he had impressed upon us the necessity for telling the absolute truth.
He explained, of course, that he did not suppose any of us would lie, but that affairs of this sort were apt to invite attempted diplomacy, finesse. None of us, Grandfather went on to say, had any reason to fear the truth. Truth, he asked us to remember, was the one thing that could not ultimately be defeated. He gave us rather a sermon, insisting that truth bred truth as surely as cabbages bred cabbages, or as lies bred lies. Grandfather, as you know, would neither dictate nor appeal; but he came closer to each, in this talk to us, than I had ever heard him come.
I was still thinking of his last statement (Lucy would call it a pearl), “One cannot bargain with truth,” when Aunt Gracia began her talk about discretion. It seemed to me that she was unsaying most of the things Grandfather had said; but it was easier to doubt my own understanding than it was to doubt either Aunt Gracia’s dutifulness or her rigid integrity. It wasn’t long, though, until she gave me no opportunity for choice; so then I asked her, straight, if she was disagreeing with what Grandfather had said to us in the parlour.
She answered that Grandfather was old, very old, and at present frightfully weakened from shock, grief, and the impending horror of disgrace. She said that, fundamentally, what Grandfather had been telling us about truth was sound; but, in many circumstances, truth should become a delicate thing, to be handled delicately, not swung as a bludgeon. She said that truth might breed truth, if it were planted in the proper soil. If it were tossed carelessly to the four winds it might breed nothing—as cabbage seeds sown in the sagebrush would breed nothing—or it might breed anything: destruction, disgrace. Grandfather’s idealism, she remarked, like many other beautiful things, was not always the most practical asset in a time of emergency.
You will understand, Judy, that I actually had to turn in my saddle and look to make sure that it was Aunt Gracia, of the nonadjustable moralities, who was riding beside me.
She misread my look, because she said: “Exactly, Neal. We are to use the truth to-day, but we are to use it carefully, with discretion. For instance, dear, the fact that I can find comfort in the knowledge that Dick died in a state of perfect grace, need not be brought out. Unless we are directly questioned, I should think the entire circumstance of Dick’s recent baptism might better be omitted from the testimony. Too, I can see no reason for telling anyone who may be there to-day about the fact that Dick and Christopher had recently exchanged rooms.”
“Aunt Gracia,” I asked, “do you think that some one of us meant to kill Chris, and blundered into Father’s room, by mistake?”
She evaded that by saying it was more important, now, to plan for the future than it was to probe into the past.
I told her that I agreed with her. But, I fancy, we did not mean the same thing. It was a peach of a morning, Judy. The snow had melted. The air was sweet. Hiroshige had done the sky, and our brown old hills lay softly in front of it. It was not the realization of death, it was the realization of life—of a world alive; even our hills were only napping—that made me go suddenly rabid.
Aunt Gracia interrupted my ravings. “Don’t, Neal. Don’t,” she commanded. “You sound like Jasper in Edwin Drood.”
That was plain enough, wasn’t it? “Aunt Gracia,” I said, “it is bothering you, isn’t it, to decide whether I shot Father because I thought that he was going insane, or whether I meant to go into Chris’s room that night, and shot Father by mistake?”
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
“Because you say we must mention neither the baptism nor the changed rooms at the inquest to-day. Because I know that you have suspected me, from the first. Would it help you any to have me swear to you, out here in the open, that I am as innocent as you are?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I swear it, Aunt Gracia.”
We rode along and had made the ford before she said another word. She came up beside me on the east river path.
“Neal,” she said, “this is an irreligious community. Consequently, there are two words they like to roll around their tongues—‘Religious fanatic.’ I am hoping they won’t think of those two words to-day.”
She grew intense. She does, you know, once in a blue moon. She said that she wasn’t a coward. She said she would be glad to say that she had killed Father, and then go to join him, and Mother, and the others in one of the highest states of glory. But, she said, such a false confession could do nothing but bring added shame and grief to the family. If only, she said, she were not a Quilter—then how eagerly she would sacrifice her own life and honour for the honour of the Quilters.
I felt, of course, like asking her not to be an idiot. I didn’t. I produced some banality about the uselessness of such a sacrifice—allowing the real criminal to go free, all that.
“I know,” she answered, “but—the ecstasy of it! The exquisite, vivid ecstasy of such a sacrifice. Or—of any sacrifice. Isn’t it odd, Neal, that no one ever pities Isaac?”
You can understand, Judy, that that just about knocked me a twister. You can understand, too, why I had been dreading Aunt Gracia’s turn as a witness. I tell you what, Jude, every one of the family has got the rotten habit of thinking that, because Aunt Gracia’s mind is different from our own, it is inferior—deformed. We have no right to the comparison. It is as unfair as comparing—well, say ice and water. I’d be bound to muddle a metaphor here—but Aunt Gracia’s mind is surely more fluid in its mysticism than are ours in their set materialism. This is all pretty poor. I wish you might have been there, to-day, to see and hear Aunt Gracia.
II
When I saw her gather up the skirt of her long black riding habit and walk across that dirty room and take her place in the witness chair, the thought flashed through my mind that it was a wonder that Olympe, ill or not, would have forgone such an opportunity. Only, and I’m not meaning to knock Olympe, either, Aunt Gracia’s dignity and distinction were natural, untrimmed: the difference between one of our Percherons in a meadow or decked out in a circus parade.
Hank put her through the usual preliminaries, and then asked her, as he had asked us, to tell the jury what she knew about the murder.
Sitting there, dressed in black in that gloomy room, with her face a white oval and her long hands, white and still in her lap, she needed a Rembrandt. She is old, past thirty, but she is beautiful; especially beautiful with her head tipped as she had it this afternoon, so that her thin features are a bit foreshortened. And as for her voice—they can extol soft, velvety, throaty voices for women. But I’ll take Aunt Gracia’s voice every time—it is like a clear glass bell being rung with decorum.
“My story,” she said, “would be precisely the same as the stories the others have told you. My fright, my efforts to open my door, my release, could further in no way the purposes of this inquiry. You have listened, patiently, to three accounts of the sort; but you are, I believe, no nearer the truth than you were in the beginning. It seems wise to me, now, to bring several matters to your attention.
“You have not taken into account the fact that whoever was in my brother’s room on Monday night must have been there for sometime before the shot was fired. The rope was not put in place after the shot was fired. From the position of the rope in the snow, and from the amount of snow that had fallen on it, we were able to tell that the rope must have been lying, for at least an hour, exactly where we found it.
“My brother was a light sleeper. Does it seem reasonable, even possible, that anyone could come into his room, open a window, tie a rope around his bedstead, toss the rope out of the window, while he slept? Or, while he lay there in bed and calmly watched the person making these preparations? If, for some reason, my brother had been unable to move—though he was not unable to move—don’t you know that he would have called, cried out for help? You have listened to the testimony that members of the family could be plainly heard shouting to one another through the closed locked doors. Would my brother, would any man, lie in silence, motionless, and allow some intruder to remain in his room?
“No; not unless he were forced to do so. What could have forced him? The gun that killed him—nothing else. But not the gun alone. The gun in the hands of some strong, powerful person of whom my brother would have been afraid.
“I wonder how many people in this county would testify that Richard Quilter was a brave man? Every person, I think, who knew him. I wonder how many people would have dared to sneak into my brother’s room and menace him with a gun. Very few, I believe.
“It has been suggested, or, perhaps, I should say insinuated, that my cousin, Irene Quilter, shot my brother. Look at her. Do you think she would have dared? Assume that she did dare. Do you think that she could have frightened my brother—a man six feet tall and afraid of nothing? How long do you think it would have taken him to leap from his bed and seize any weapon held in her trembling hands? She is a frail woman, bred in an Eastern city. Probably she has never discharged a gun in her life. She, as you must know, could not menace a coward for five minutes. Could she have menaced Richard Quilter for an hour—two hours?
“It took a man who was expert with a gun to be able to keep my brother covered while he stooped to tie that rope around the foot of the bed. True, he had it in readiness, or so it would surely seem. He had one loop made, shall we say? But, gentlemen, to draw fifty feet of rope through a loop is not the work of an instant. The murderer had to stoop to fasten the rope. He had to do it with his left hand, while his right hand held the gun that cowed my brother.
“Dr. Elm has told me, and will testify under oath, that my brother was not drugged at the time of his death; that he had been given no drug of any sort before his death. Can you see Dick Quilter, as you knew him, alert, active, fearless, lying there in bed while some weak, inadequate person crouched to place that rope? I think you cannot.
“Three women were in the house that night: an old lady, past sixty—my aunt, Olympe Quilter—Irene Quilter, and I. Also, there was my little niece, Richard’s daughter, a twelve-year-old child. Do you think that Richard would have allowed any one of us to threaten him with a gun for a longer time than it took him to reach us and take the thing away from us?
“My father was in the house that night. You know him. But, aside from that, you have seen him on the witness stand to-day. He is eighty years old. Would Richard have been afraid to unarm him, do you fancy? Would Richard have been afraid to unarm this eighteen-year-old son of his? Or, could Richard have been afraid of our cousin, Christopher Quilter?
“I dislike saying this, here, but I will say it because I must. My brother loved our Cousin Christopher; but he scorned him. He thought, perhaps rightly, that Christopher was a weakling. Though Richard had been ill for some time, he could work all day at tasks that tired Christopher in a few hours. What opportunity in an Eastern university, in his studies abroad, had Christopher had to develop prowess with a gun? He was never a sportsman. As a boy he never went hunting. I doubt that he has fired a gun half a dozen times in his life. All of which would mean nothing, perhaps, but for the fact that Richard knew it as well as I know it. Do you think that Christopher, a man of much frailer physique than my brother, could have frightened him for five minutes; could have kept him cowed and silent for an hour? Do you think that Dick Quilter, with any one of these seven people, would not have made an attempt to save himself?”
Thopson interrupted and wanted to know if Aunt Gracia was not overlooking the fact that, perhaps, Richard Quilter was in the act of making that attempt when he was shot.
“I will remind you,” Aunt Gracia said, “that the rope had been in the position we found it for at least an hour. Nothing but knowledge that such an attempt would mean certain death could have held my brother passive for an hour. As you suggest, it is possible that at last, in desperation, he did make an attempt to save himself. You know the result.
“There is another point that has not been touched upon: the lighted lamp in Richard’s room that night. I had put the small bedside lamp, newly filled, as usual, in his room that evening. At midnight, the lamp was burning low; the oil was all but exhausted. Since, I have refilled the lamp and tested it for time. It took two hours and a half to consume as much oil as had been consumed on Monday night. It had never been my brother’s practice to read in bed. There was no book or magazine near his bed. Why should the lamp have burned throughout the night?
“Assume that when Richard went into his room that night, the murderer was hiding there—probably in the clothes closet—and, after Richard had got into bed, but before he had reached to extinguish the light, the man had stepped out, with the gun levelled on him——”
“Wouldn’t you say, Miss Quilter, that two hours and a half was a long time for the murderer to have spent in your brother’s room?”
“I should, indeed.”
“A long time, too, for such a man as your brother to have allowed himself to be ‘menaced’ without making an attempt to disarm the fellow, without raising his voice in outcry?”
“It seems to me that is precisely what I have been contending, Mr. Thopson. I presume, however, that you have thought ahead to the second point which I was about to make. This:
“We have no way of knowing what went on in Dick’s room that night. None of us, I am sure, knows all there is to be known about any other person. We think that there was no hidden chapter, no hidden page or paragraph in my brother’s life. We cannot know it. Suppose some ruffian was making a blackmailing demand from Richard. Suppose that Richard was as eager as was the man himself to keep the rest of us from knowing that he—the murderer, I mean—was in the house; had any reason for being there.
“We know nothing of these possibilities now. I hope we may know, in time. What we do know now is that no member of this family could have caused Richard one moment’s alarm. That he could have and would have disarmed any one of us in the snatch of a second, and sent us ashamed away from him.
“My brother’s corpse is lying in the adjoining room. I ask the jury to look at it. To see the size of the man, the breadth of his shoulders. I ask them to see what can be seen in his dead face—the strength, the purpose, the courage. I ask them to return and look at us, here. Then they will know, since they are just, wise men, that I have spoken the truth.”
Impressive? Golly, Jude, it was a knockout. On the square, it is thanks to Aunt Gracia—the family disgrace because she happens to be a mystic—that Irene, or Chris, or, probably, both of them aren’t going to have to appear before the Grand Jury. And, if you will forgive the old wise crack, it wasn’t so much what she said as the way she said it. Sitting there, so aloof and so lovely, speaking in that clear, unafraid voice of hers, she conveyed the impression that no man’s doubt could damage her; that any man’s doubt would prove him a fool or a monster. One doesn’t, you know, look at the white moon in a black night’s sky and remark, “I don’t believe it.” And yet, after all, the moon is not a large and luminous dinner plate.
Note, Judy: Aunt Gracia had made a special point, to me in private, of the fact that Father was taking medicine that made him sleep heavily. Dr. Joe knew it. Would he have called a sleeping medicine “drugs”? Possibly, almost certainly, not if he had had a talk with Aunt Gracia before the inquest. Because, you see, if Father had been drugged into a heavy sleep, all Aunt Gracia’s arguments would amount to nothing. The person could have crept into the room, made the arrangements with the rope without waking Father; could have fired the shot, and could have got away. Smash goes the fact of Father’s lack of fear; smash goes the fact of his disarming any one of us; smash goes the expert gunman—smash for all of it. Not much bravery is required to shoot a sleeping man.
It doesn’t seem reasonable to suppose that, even if Father had been drugged and asleep, some guy would have had the nerve to stick around in the room for a couple of hours with the lamp burning. But it is possible, anyway, that Father got into bed and was so dopey, and tired that he dropped off to sleep and forgot to blow out the light.
Here is another thing, Judy. If the guy had been hiding in Father’s room before Father came into it, couldn’t he have fixed the rope then? Sure he could. Father didn’t look under his bed at night, did he? He would have noticed if the window had been open and the rope stretched across to it as we found it. But he wouldn’t have noticed a loop of rope around the leg of his bed. The fellow did not, necessarily, have to pull the fifty feet of rope through the loop with one hand while he used the other hand to keep Father covered with a gun.
Since I didn’t think through to any of this until I was riding home from Quilterville this evening, I am fairly certain that the jury hasn’t come to it yet. For one thing, as I have said, Aunt Gracia obviated doubt by making it seem idiotic and indecent. For another thing, the jury, at the last, was straining every nerve to live up to her description and look like wise and just men.
When Aunt Gracia had finished her speech, which I’ve copied straight from Mattie’s notes for you, she began to gather her skirts into one hand, preparatory to leaving the witness chair.
Chris whispered to me, “Bless her, she’s turned the tide!”
Thopson said, “One moment, please, Miss Quilter.”
Aunt Gracia sat back in her chair, and dropped her hands, quiet as dead things, into her lap again.
III
Thopson started off with a lot of con talk about how helpful she had been, and about how she had his gratitude and the gratitude of the jury for her plain speaking. It was only through such methods as hers, extolled he, that the guilty wretch could ever be brought to justice. It sounded great. But I felt, like the carpenter, that the butter was spread too thick. Aunt Gracia sat, pale and placid, and looking about as susceptible to flattery as my but recently mentioned moon.
“You have implied,” Thopson finally came to it, “that your brother might have had an enemy. By a rigorous searching of your memory, would it be possible for you to recall who this enemy might be?”
“But, of course,” Aunt Gracia answered, “I thought that you knew. Seventeen, nearly eighteen years ago, my brother killed a man as he would have killed a mad dog, or a rattlesnake, or any dangerous thing that was attacking his wife. He was tried, and acquitted. The jury did not leave the room. The judge apologized to Richard—or so I have been told—explaining that the trial had been merely a conformance to the letter of the law.”
“Do you know the name of the man whom Richard Quilter killed?”
“Enos Karabass. The Pennsylvania Dutch, I believe, are unfortunate people to anger.”
“His family lives in this vicinity?”
“No, they do not.”
“Were they informed concerning the manner of his death?”
“We were unable to find that he had any people.”
Thopson gave himself over to pity. “But, my dear Miss Quilter——”
“You asked me if it could be possible that my brother had an enemy. Any man who has ever killed another man might, it seems to me, have dangerous enemies from that time forth.”
“I see. I see. Granted, then, for the sake of argument that that man had a brother, or a son, who wanted to avenge his death. Would it have been possible for him to enter your home without detection?”
“Quite possible. Our outside doors are never locked until the last thing at night. While we were at supper, in the dining room, anyone could have walked in, quietly, and gone upstairs.”
“You have no watchdogs on your place?”
“We have two dogs. I mentioned suppertime because, usually at that hour, the dogs are at the back of the house waiting for, or eating, their suppers.”
“Very well. He could have gotten into the house. He could have hidden in your brother’s bedroom. But—— Could he have gotten out of the house? That is, could he have gotten out of the house without leaving any footprints in the snow? This does seem to bring us back to the beginning, doesn’t it?”
Aunt Gracia said, “He could have got out of the house, because he did get out. How he escaped we have not, as yet, been able to discover. That is the problem to be solved. We have one fact. He is not in our home at present. That leads to another fact, unexplained, but not conjectural. He has escaped. It is stupid, and so it is an insult to the intelligence of this jury for us to keep insisting that the man could not have got out of the house, when we all know that he has got out of the house.”
The jury shone from the sensation of having their intelligences mentioned.
“Very well,” Thopson assumed acceptance, “we’ll rest that for the present. Now, if you please, I’d like to take up, with you, the matter of the locked doors.”
Aunt Gracia invited, “Yes. I wish you would.”
I am asking you, Judy, is she a clever woman, or isn’t she?
“All of the outside doors were locked, on the inside, I presume, on the night of October eighth?”
“No. We have three outside doors. The side door was locked, on the inside. Both the front and back doors were unlocked. Anyone could have come downstairs and have walked straight out of the house through either of those doors.”
“Without leaving footprints in the snow?”
“I am sorry,” Aunt Gracia said, “I thought that we were speaking now only of the doors.”
“Whose duty was it to lock those outside doors at night?”
“It was no one’s duty. Usually, the last person downstairs, in the evening, attended to locking the house.”
“Who was the last person downstairs that night?”
“My brother. That is, he was the last person to retire. It should have been his care to lock the doors.”
“Would it have been possible for him to have forgotten to lock them?”
“Very possible. Locked doors are given, or were given, very little attention on our ranch. I fancy that we slept many nights with the doors unlocked.”
It seemed to me that, if I had been in Thopson’s place, I should have asked, then, how it happened, in a house where locked doors were given no attention, that there were keys for all the upstairs doors. (Aunt Gracia’s statement was truthful enough. She had said, “were given.” A month or so ago, not one of our bedroom doors had a key to it. Aunt Gracia had had to hunt them all out from the hardware box in the attic.) Thopson missed it, however, and went on to ask her to tell him exactly which doors were locked that night.
“Except for the seven bedroom doors, which were locked on the outside,” she said, “and for the side door, downstairs, I think every door in the house was unlocked, including the inside and outside cellar doors. To be sure, I had almost forgotten, the door to the back stairway was locked. Irene Quilter has told you how that came to be locked.”
“Into what downstairs room,” Thopson inquired, “does the back stairway lead?”
“Into the sitting room.”
“Not the room in which Mrs. Christopher Quilter was sleeping that night?”
“Yes.”
“Why, then, did Mrs. Christopher Quilter not unlock that door, and go up the back stairway, instead of going through the several downstairs rooms, in order to use the front stairway?”
“That question is easily answered, Mr. Thopson. The back stairway is crooked and narrow. We none of us ever use it. In her terrorized state, my cousin would surely act according to habit. Her habit was to use the front stairway.”
Can you sort the truth out of that, Judy? Irene, who never did any work, and who was never in a hurry, generally did use the front stairway. The rest of us used the back stairway as often as we used the front one. Do you know why Aunt Gracia deliberately lied about it? I don’t know, entirely. And I don’t know why Irene did not run right up the back stairway that night. I wish that I did know. Though, surely, Aunt Gracia might have been right about Irene’s acting according to habit. It was her habit to go upstairs the front way, and she was badly frightened. I guess we’ll have to let it go at that.
Thopson’s next question was a stunner. “Could you swear, Miss Quilter, that no member of your family could have gone into Richard Quilter’s room, committed the murder, slipped out through the hall and back into his own room? I understand that the turmoil in the hall would have covered any slight noise that night.”
For the first time, Aunt Gracia hedged. “I think that I understand your question, Mr. Thopson; but may I ask you to state it a bit more directly, so that I may give a direct answer?”
“Would you swear that there was not time for any member of your family to have gone into your brother’s room, committed the murder, and got back into his own room, before Irene Quilter came into the upper hall?”
“No. I could not swear to that, because there was time. I could and do swear, however, that no member of our family did do what you have suggested because, though there was time, there was not opportunity. I make this oath for two reasons. The one reason, I have given you: No member of our family could have kept Dick Quilter cowed for five minutes—much less for an hour or longer. The second reason I have not, as yet, given to you. It is this: Each member of the Quilter family was locked in his or her room that night at the time of the murder. All seven bedroom doors were locked on the outside. One of the bedrooms was unoccupied—but that door was also locked. Irene Quilter found seven keys in my brother’s room, and used one key to unlock each door. No, Mr. Thopson, we have more than Irene’s word for that. The keys were left on the outside of the locks. Only a few minutes later my father and I turned all those keys again. We did this, hoping that the murderer might be hiding in one of these rooms, and that we could keep him locked there while we searched the remainder of the house.”
“Granted,” Thopson said, “that six of you were locked in your rooms on that night. There still remains a seventh, Miss Quilter, who was not locked in her room.”
Aunt Gracia said: “Mr. Thopson, please be fair about this. Can you imagine anyone who would plan a murder by carefully establishing alibis for every person in the house except herself? Do you suppose that if Irene Quilter had planned to kill my brother, she would have arranged to be the one person in the house who was not locked in a room at the time?”
“Am I unfair when I suggest that plans sometimes miscarry?”
“No, you are not. That is a fair thing to say. But no person ever plans a murder so that the burden of suspicion, even stupid suspicion, falls upon himself. It would seem, too, Mr. Thopson, that in this instance the murderer’s carefully laid plans had not miscarried. My brother is dead. The murderer has escaped—got clear and away, and, as yet, no one of us has one clue as to his identity.”
She put it over, Judy. All honour to Aunt Gracia! Mr. Ward knew better than to say a word when Thopson signified that he was ready to excuse her. It was she, the family misfortune, who got the verdict for us—the verdict that allowed us all to go free.
Thopson called Dr. Joe again. Dr. Joe testified, under oath, that Father had been given no drug of any sort that night. Do you suppose that Dr. Joe could salve his conscience, if he needed to, with the difference between “had been given no drug” and “had taken no drug”?
As Dr. Joe came back to sit with us, Gus Wildoch and the two guys who had been at the ranch with him came sneaking in at the back of the room. They had been subpœnaed for witnesses, and had been called right after Dr. Joe—as I should have mentioned. But Hank had explained that they had sent in word that they might be a little late, owing to a rush of duties, and he had proceeded to go along without them. I fancy that Hank was trying to keep them out of it. Or, perhaps Gus himself, with his regard for the elder Quilters, was trying to evade testifying. Their evidence, however, was certainly not damaging.
Since each of them said the same thing, in almost the same way, I’ll lump their testimony to save your time and my space.
They had come with Christopher Quilter, at his request, to Q 2 Ranch on the morning of Tuesday, October the ninth. They had seen and had carefully examined the body of Richard Quilter. He had been shot through the left chest. Rigor mortis had been complete when they had arrived. They had inspected the Quilter mansion and grounds. They couldn’t say as to footprints—the place was pretty well tracked up by the time they got there. Gus didn’t “go much on these here footprints, anyhow—too many ways to get around them, such as wearing the other fellow’s shoes.” They had been unable to form any opinions as to who the murderer might be.
Thopson tried none of his baiting with them. The two deputies, I was later informed, were Gus’s two brothers who have come recently from Texas, and the three made rather a formidable trio: combined heights about nineteen feet; combined weights close to six hundred pounds.
They were excused, and Hank grew confidential with the jury. He told them that if they wanted to go into the other room and talk things over for a few minutes, they could—he guessed. But he reminded them that they and he should get home and get their milking and other chores put through. He guessed that they saw, as he saw, that a lot of time had been wasted, and that, “futthermore,” there wasn’t sense nor reason in fiddle-faddling much longer. Some dirty son of a sea cook had broken into the Quilter mansion and shot Dick Quilter and made a getaway. Hank finished by expressing his deep regret that the law wasn’t able to help the Quilters out in any way, right now; and, adding his fervent hope that soon it might be able to lay hands on the Dutchman, or whatever dirty crook had done it, he turned the case over to the jury.
If I had been writing a book, I’d have kept their verdict a dark secret until now. But since I have sacrificed my literary style to your peace of mind, I have had to miss my climax.
However, perhaps this will serve: What Aunt Gracia told the jury, with my comments appended.
- Father was the strongest member of the family.
True a year ago. Not true a week ago.
- Father could have disarmed any member of the
family.
Doubtful, certainly, a week ago. But, say that he could have disarmed any one of us. Would he have tried to? Can you see Father jumping at any one of us, and snatching a gun from us? I can’t. Judy, you and I know that he would have lain there in bed and tried to shame us out of our nonsense. Aunt Gracia was right about that. He couldn’t have feared a one of us. He would have thought that we were staging a bluff. Would he have called it? Yes, and for any length of time. I can imagine him lying there in bed and laughing at us.
- Father had not been drugged. He was in full
possession of all his faculties.
Is this the truth? Did Dr. Joe lie helpfully?
- None of us ever used the back stairway.
We all used it, except possibly Irene.
- Since the murderer was not in our house, he must
have escaped from it.
You don’t need me to point the sophistry of that.
- We were all locked in our rooms. Proof: Irene found
seven keys, unlocked seven doors, and left seven keys
on the outside of the doors.
There are ten doors in our upper hall. Irene found and used seven keys. You can think that out. I’m not going to write it. Remember that all the keys to the locks in the upper hall are interchangeable. The attic door had had no key. It has now. I have brought it down from the hardware box in the attic. My one bit of sleuthing. But whether that was its first or second trip downstairs within the week, it did not say.
IV
Judy, I’m not crazy—though sometimes I feel, almost, as if I were. I am not trying to prove, with this quibbling, that some member of the Quilter family shot and killed Father. It seems to me that the single hope I have left, for anything, is to prove that no member of the family is a murderer. But I am bound to be with Grandfather concerning truth. I have to get my proof through truth—nothing else can satisfy me. I have to establish Quilter innocence, and reëstablish Quilter honour, before I can begin to try to establish anything else.
Aunt Gracia proved Quilter innocence to the six good men and true. I’d give a thousand of the best grazing acres on Q 2 to have had her prove it to me. I’d give more than that. My own life, of course—but it is not worth shucks. I’d give Lucy’s life, or Grandfather’s, just as they would give them, for that certainty.
Do you know, I have found one way I can almost get it. My way hasn’t anything to do with ropes, or keys, or coal oil. It hasn’t anything to do with footprints, or motives, or drugs.
I do this. I take us, one at a time. I begin with Grandfather, and I come straight through the list to Lucy. I stop at each name. I think. I put into that thinking every particle of knowledge I have concerning each person, and I keep out of it every particle of prejudice and every atom of affection or of admiration. I judge them as objectively as I judge cattle for buying or breeding. Each time I do it, I come out with a clean slate. That method, and nothing else, gives me my certainty, my sure knowledge that not one of the Quilter family could be guilty of crime.
And that, after consideration, I am bound to state is a lie. It gives me my certainty—with one exception. That is why I don’t go after it more often. That is why I am afraid of my certainty. Each time, more positively than the last, it omits one person. Probably you don’t need to have me tell you who the one person is. Neal Quilter.
Neal Quilter could have done it. Suppose that he had. Suppose that he had planned the thing keenly, as it was planned, from beginning to end. And then, as Aunt Gracia said, since we are dealing with suppositions, suppose that the horror of having done such a thing should have driven him clear out of his mind; should have caused a real brain storm—so that, when the storm had cleared, he had forgotten every incident connected with the crime.
I wish I knew more about minds. I wish I knew whether a thing of the sort ever had happened or ever could happen. Chris says that great strides in psychology are to be made within the next decade. I tried to pump him about it, since he is interested in the subject. But of course, since I was unwilling to say to him what I have said to you, I got no real satisfaction. Still, since it is recognizedly possible that a man may forget his entire past, including his own name, and continue to go about as a fairly normal person, I don’t see why it should be impossible for him to forget, entirely, some one particular horror.
Granting the amnesia, I could have done it. I could have gone upstairs some time in the late afternoon and fixed that rope on the bed, and collected the keys from the inside of the doors. (Where I got a gun, and what I did with it afterwards, are, of course, other things I would have forgotten. I can reconstruct with the material now at hand. I cannot remember.) Then, on Monday night, before Father put out his light, I could have stepped across the hall to his room. If I had gone in there, threatening him with a gun, do you think he’d have jumped out of bed and taken the gun away from me? I think not. Aunt Gracia was night about that. Father would not have been afraid of any one of us. Why, even I would laugh if any member of our family came dodging into my room flourishing a gun. Or, perhaps I should say, even I, a week ago, would have laughed.
But we’ll say I didn’t show my gun. We’ll say that I kept it in my back pocket for an hour or so while we talked, Father and I. If I had decided to kill him rather than allow him to go insane, I might have desired a long, confirmatory talk. Unless the rope is clear outside the whole affair of the murder—as Chris still insists—we can no longer suppose that I had meant to shoot Chris, and shot Father by mistake. That hour, with the rope out across the porch roof, has to be accounted for.
I might have fixed the rope at eleven o’clock, deciding that I would use it in the next five minutes. And, after that, something might have caused me to delay for another hour. The rope hocus-pocus certainly would not have caused Father to take either me or my threats any more seriously. Can’t you imagine the conversation?
“What are you planning to do with the clothes-line, my son?”
“I am going to use it to escape out of the window after I have shot you.”
We know that Father would have laughed at me; unless, of course, he had decided that I had gone mad. In that case, he might have started to get out of bed to take the gun away from me.
Well, then, I had the rope fixed, we’ll say. I shot Father. I went to the window and discovered the snow. I knew that the rope could not be used, then, because the footprints on the roof would betray me. What might I have done? It is absurdly simple. I might have stepped across the hall to my own room and locked myself in—with the key to the attic door. Yes, as I have said, I have since found the key in the hardware box in the attic. But if Grandfather, or Aunt Gracia, had discovered an extra key in my room, when they were searching the house, would they have declaimed concerning it, or would they have hidden it away in the box?
Why I should have had the key, if I had planned the rope escape, I can’t think. Why I should have planned the rope, I can’t think. I might have had some wily scheme, involving both the key and the rope. Or the entire idea of the rope might have been one of the fool mistakes that murderers, according to the best traditions, always make. Leaving the door between my room and Lucy’s unlocked would seem, certainly, to have been another mistake.
The question of time is a nice one. I needed, after the shot was fired, to have looked out of the window, crossed the full width of Father’s room, got across the hall and into my own room, locked the door, picked up a chair, and battered the door with it. Lucy needed to have got out of bed, put on her slippers, lighted her lamp, run across her room to my door, opened it. It might work out. I don’t know. I think that I couldn’t have done my part of it in two minutes. Then I remember how long two minutes were when you were taking Greg’s temperature.
On the whole, the time seems to be against me. What I could have done with the gun seems to be for me. When I remember how this house was searched, it seems impossible that I could have hidden a gun anywhere in it. It certainly would have been found. I could not have thrown it out of a window. We’d have seen it in the snow. Though, after all, I have a good baseball arm; I might have thrown it out of Father’s open window. No, that’s nonsense. It would have been found, long before this. However, the fact that the gun is gone doesn’t weigh very heavily against the facts that no one got out of the house that night and that no one was hiding in the house that night.
I suppose you might suggest that Chris was as capable of the crime as I was. It won’t do. Chris loved Father: not enough to kill him rather than have him lose that splendid mind of his, but too much to kill him for any other reason. Father had stopped opposing the sale of the ranch. Chris had Father’s ill health and overwork on this place to use as an excuse for selling us out. He had Father’s ability as a rancher to salve his conscience if he stuck us on some dinky valley truck farm. Also, Chris is a rank sentimentalist and—may I say consequently—something of a coward.
Yet, when I go to calling Chris names, I suspect that I should go softly. I have wondered, these last few days, whether instead of fighting what I have always decried as Quilter sentimentality, I have been fighting, merely, a subtle sensitiveness, an ability for loving, which I have been too boorish to possess or to understand. The thought of marrying some queen and giving her a right to paw over me and call me “Boofel,” nauseates me. Look at Uncle Phineas tethered to Olympe. Look at Chris deeded to Irene! You and Greg are different; but you are friends. You bake your bread, instead of feasting on the yeast. And—you are a Quilter woman. But what I started to say was, that I have wondered whether this lack of sentimentality in me denoted simply a hard streak, a streak of yellow, perhaps a streak of cruelty.
I’ve wondered, too, if the fact that Father killed that cur a few months before I was born, and that Mother saw him do it, might have made me different. People seem to think that prenatal influences are important. I have never believed it, because it seems to me if that were true of people it would be true of animals. Still, what do I know about it? Or about anything? There is this: I don’t feel as if I were incapable of love, if love is the rather tremendously serious, and yet, someway, the very humorous, clutching feeling I have for the family and for Q 2. But I do feel as if talking about it, showing it off as Irene and Chris show it off, defiled it.
There is Aunt Gracia, to-day, and the feeling I have about her. She sat there, lying under oath, to save the Quilter family; to save, I know, either Irene and Chris or Irene and me. There isn’t one of us, I suppose, who would not have been willing to sacrifice his own honour, peace of mind, and the rest, to such a cause. But, by Jove, I think Aunt Gracia is the only one of us who is brave enough to sacrifice eternity. I know exactly what she did to-day. Should I go to her and spiel a lot of mushy stuff about loving her for it? Should I cheapen her magnificence to gratify my own emotionalism? Should I write my name in red pencil on the base of a marble column?
In other words—what a good boy am I! Sitting here, teetering with tragedy, and revelling in congratulatory self-analysis. Ask me this, Judy. Ask me why I have not mentioned again the important fact that was brought out during to-day’s inquisition? That is, why I have so carefully avoided further discussion of the fact that Father’s death may bring to his family a payment of ten thousand needed dollars? Should you believe me if I told you that, for the last several hours, I had forgotten it? I hope you are too sensible to believe that. Ask me why, just now, when I was making out the case against myself, I did not mention a ten-thousand-dollar motive? Ten thousand dollars would mean enough money for Irene and Chris to go where they please, with enough left over to carry Q 2 through to safety. I remarked, during the inquest, that I had not known about the accident policy. I seemed to be believed. I seem to have believed myself——
V
Later.
Sorry, Judy dear. I am a fool. Even this forgetting business would, I suppose, need to stop somewhere. I had not known about the policy. And talking is rot. My apology, if you’ll have it, is that Father’s death has been a knockout. I’ve been feeling too much—unaccustomed feelings. I have been thinking, or trying to think, until my brain has worn out from effort.
I am all right again now. I’ve been out with Uncle Phineas walking and waiting for the sunrise. He is all cut up, torn up about Father. And yet, somehow, the fact that he was not here on Monday night, and that he didn’t have the horror of that first hour, seems to make him more wholesome, saner than any of us.
He was here at home when we got back from the inquest last evening. He came running down the path to meet us, with tears washing out of his eyes and all over his cheeks, but he was paying no more attention to them than he would have paid to rain. He is one of us—a Quilter straight through—and neck deep in trouble with us. But it is as if he had come in, on purpose, while the rest of us have been chucked in.
Olympe was out of bed, when we came from Quilterville yesterday, as chipper as you please in Aunt Gracia’s best kitchen dress with a little doily of an apron. She actually had helped Lucy prepare supper for the three of them. Olympe would be correctly costumed for the frying of ham and eggs.
(Dr. Joe has envoys scouring Chinatown for Dong Lee, but he is not to be discovered. He was to have stayed a week; so we know that he’ll be back on Monday; but we could do with him sooner. It is tough for Aunt Gracia, this having him gone just now.)
While the rest of us were getting a pick-up supper in the kitchen, Olympe disappeared. Sure enough, in a few minutes, here she came, wearing that black lace rig of hers, with the red roses and red velvet loops ripped off of it. A pity, since, by that time, Lucy and I were the only ones who had stayed downstairs.
Olympe stopped in the kitchen doorway and asked us where Pan was. We told her that he had gone to Grandfather’s room with him. She trailed forward to the table, delivered the first part of her “God help the Quilter wives” speech, and turned to sweep from the room. Lucy laughed.
You see, in her haste to get into mourning, Olympe had forgotten the back of her gown. Do you remember its long, square train, caught up in two places with great blobs of a horrible shade of red velvet and red roses? She had forgotten to remove them.
It was not amusing. Lucy laughed, as you know, not in spite of our trouble, but because of it. If Lucy had not been all to pieces, unnerved and half hysterical, she could no more have laughed at anything about Olympe than she could have cat-called in church. I don’t recall that any of us children were taught that we must never laugh at Olympe. And yet, of course, laughing at her has always been one of the major Quilter heresies.
Olympe wheeled about. She was so white that the little dabs of rouge on her cheekbones looked as if they might tumble off. I went and stood close to Lucy.
Olympe said, “Are you laughing at me?”
I tried to tell her that Lucy was not laughing. That she was all to pieces, hysterical, and did not know what she was doing.
“She may not know,” Olympe said, “but I know that she is laughing at me. Why? Because I am old, and weak, and no longer beautiful; because my husband humiliates me, and neglects me.”
She trailed away then, riding the trimmings on her train. Lucy, of course, burst into tears.
I have gone well around Robin Hood’s barn, with all this. I wanted to give you something as a sample, perhaps as an excuse for what I am going to ask you to do.
Judy, I want you to write and insist on having Lucy come to you for a time. Don’t hint that it is for Lucy’s sake. Lucy is too game to desert. Say that it is for your sake. Say that you need her to help you with Greg—so on. I don’t need to dictate your letter, but make it strong. I’ll manage her railway fare, somehow or other. She has to get away from here for the present.
She is twelve years old, imaginative and impressionable. We have been fools to leave her alone so much with Olympe, here of late. I don’t need to tell you how brave and sensible Lucy usually is. She will come through even this all right, if we give her half a chance. She won’t get the half chance, here, now, with Olympe treating her to scenes like the one last evening, and telling her—the Lord knows what, and making her promise not to tell. The kid has something extra on her mind. And, though Lucy won’t tell me, I am darn sure it was Olympe who loaded it there. I couldn’t insist that Lucy break a promise. But can you imagine anyone who would be fool enough to add the burden of a secret and a promise to Lucy’s troubles right now?
When this afternoon is over—the funeral is to be this afternoon—I am going to Olympe about it. Not that I think it will amount to a hill of beans; but, since we won’t be able to get Lucy to you for a week or so, I’ll have to get things straightened out for her in the meantime.
She is scared, Judy, Lucy is. When I got her quieted down, last night, I urged her to go upstairs to bed. She wouldn’t go. She said that she was lonesome alone, and that she wanted to stay with me. Then, of a sudden, you know how she lights and flashes, she said: “That is a story, Neal. I’ve turned coward. Please don’t tell Grandfather. I am afraid to go upstairs and stay alone in my room.”
I fixed her a fine bed, and screened it off from the light, on the sitting-room sofa. And, gosh knows, I shouldn’t have thought it strange, even from Lucy, if she had begun to be afraid a bit sooner—the first night or the second. I can’t pretend that any of us has been entirely without something that at least approximated fear. Grandfather has locked the place himself, each night. And, as you know, I have stayed up all night, on guard, every night this week. (Chris offered to spell me, but I’ve liked the quiet nights for writing to you. I have needed the job badly, so I have liked it.) No, Lucy’s fear would have been natural enough, if it had begun sooner. Coming now, it must mean that whatever fool thing Olympe told her yesterday, and made her promise not to tell, has frightened her. With this added to the rest, I am sure you’ll agree with me that we must get Lucy right away from here.
Aunt Gracia is in the kitchen attending to breakfast. I’ll go and cadge an advance snack, and then I’ll ride into Quilterville with this in time to get it off on Number Twenty-four.
Your loving brother,
Neal.
Saturday, October 13, 1900.
Dear Judy: We buried Father to-day. To gratify Aunt Gracia, we had the Siloamite ceremony. They did the best they could to re-break our hearts, if that could have been possible. Since mummery is not always ineffective, there should be a law decreeing that no one but a man’s enemies be allowed to attend his funeral.
The entire county was there, I think. There were ponderously perfumed flowers, tortured into unnatural shapes, over which furry, caterpillarish-looking letters writhed into words, “At Rest,” and such originalities.
When we came home neighbours had been here and had done strange, geometrically unfamiliar things to the rooms, and had left a table spread with an astonishing repast in odd dishes, which we never use. Nothing was lacking, you see, from the best funereal traditions—not even the baked meats. Nothing was lacking, except any sense of the fitness of things, or of the comfort of finality, or the dignity of death, or the realization that we are a supposedly civilized people, living in the year 1900 A. D.
Sorry, Judy. I am not fit to write this evening. I am going to bed to-night. If Chris wishes to keep up this fool night herding he may. I am through.
Your loving brother,
Neal.