CHAPTER XVI
I
Sunday, October 14, 1900.
Dear Judy: Dr. Joe came home with us last evening, and spent the night here. This afternoon he talked to Grandfather, Uncle Phineas, Chris, and me.
He had heard from Mr. Ward, who had been to see the insurance people. He said that they were inclined to hedge. They had hoped to have it proved that Father’s death was suicidal. Mr. Ward writes, however, that they haven’t a legal leg to stand on, and that he thinks he will have the money for us within two weeks.
Grandfather asked me whether I had thought about what you and Lucy and I would do with the money. I had not, of course. I hadn’t realized that the money would come to the three of us. I told Grandfather we’d do whatever he advised. He said we should have to think it over. We dropped the discussion there.
This evening, when he got me alone, Chris said, flat, that I should have to let him have five thousand dollars. That is, he said if I’d pay the Brindley mortgage so that he could get another mortgage to the extent of five thousand dollars, that would satisfy him. But, in some way, he had to have at least five thousand at once—enough for Irene and him to get back to New York and live until he had made a success of his writing. Otherwise, he said, he should be forced to accept the offer he had for selling the place. He was certain that I would understand why he could not ask Irene to remain on Q 2 Ranch. No man, he said, could ask any sensitive woman to continue life in a place where such a horror had occurred.
I said, “Shall we cast lots for the garments, Chris?” and walked away. But it isn’t as decent as that. It is refined blackmailing—though I don’t know why I modify it.
If we do get the money, he’ll get his five thousand, won’t he, Judy? Cheap at the price, to be rid of them. The other five thousand will carry us along to safety.
In passing, I wonder whether Irene knew that Chris wouldn’t expect or ask her to stay on a place where a horror had occurred? Sorry. That is spite—cad’s talk—nothing else.
Thank the Lord we’ll get Lucy away from this rotten, spite-ridden, fear-ridden hole before long. I wish we might get Grandfather away for a while, too. He has aged, in the past week. I wish, also, that I could keep him from finding out about this last brash move of Chris’s, but I don’t know how to do it.
I’m foundered on this writing business, Judy. It is doing no good. I think I shall pass it up. But I do want to tell you that I have decided I was clear off about Grandfather’s suspecting me. I surely had a brainstorm, right, there for a few days.
Your loving brother,
Neal.
II
Monday, October 15, 1900.
Dear Judy: Your letter in answer to my first one to you came this morning. I’m glad that you think I did right when I told you the truth. But I am sorry that you thought my purpose in writing to you was to gain comfort and consolation for myself.
It is gratifying, of course, to know that you are sure I did not go into Father’s room and murder him in cold blood. Gratifying, too, to be assured that you can’t believe I murdered Father, not even by mistake for Chris. As a matter of fact, I had reached both conclusions some time ago.
Your judgment, from a few thousand miles of distance, that we were all mistaken about nobody hiding in the house, and, probably, all mistaken about there being no footprints in the snow, is also reassuring. And nothing could be more inspirational than your repeated assertion that, until I come to my senses and realize that no member of the family could possibly have done such a wicked thing, I’ll be useless as an aid in discovering the real criminal. Too, your persistent demands that I stop being foolish, hysterical, and begin to think calmly and sanely and search for “clues” (Lord, Jude, that searching for clues came near to being the last straw!), and evolve some sensible theory and some reasonable plan of action, have been carefully noted.
Sorry, but to date I have evolved no such theory or plan. However, other members of the family have been less dilatory. I shall give you the two theories in vogue at present. You may have them to play with, but I should advise against your putting them in your mouth, because, I fear, they might rub off and give you a tummy ache.
The first theory was constructed by Olympe and is, I believe, exclusively her own. It was this theory which succeeded in frightening Lucy—I had given the child credit for much better sense—out of her wits. At Lucy’s earnest solicitation, Olympe graciously allowed Lucy to repeat the production to me. The author, modestly, declined a direct discussion of it.
Lucy tells me that she has enlightened you, to some extent, concerning a gentleman unfortunately named Archie Biggil—ex-husband of Irene’s. That she has told you of his, perhaps belated, ardency; of his jealousy, his passion, and other interesting emotions. Sweet stuff for a kid like Lucy to have been consuming!
Olympe thinks that this Archie Biggil came, armed to the teeth, with great stealth, in the deep darkness of the night, to Q 2 Ranch. She thinks that he wore a red mask; that he crept into Father’s room and shot him, not, as you may be supposing by mistake for Chris—though that, too, would involve one or two minor discrepancies, such as the fact that Archie, not having known of the changed rooms, would have been unapt to make such a mistake—but out of revenge for the unhappiness that Irene had undergone on Q 2.
Olympe advances that Archie, thoroughly provoked, had intended a sort of holocaust, or general slaughter of the Quilters. But, possibly due to his astonishment at having the first murder prove such a noisy undertaking, he had temporarily, though immediately, desisted. He had rushed into the hall. He had met Irene, who, overcome with some emotion (joy? fright? horror? astonishment?), had experienced but one impulse—to wit, the getting of Archie under cover. She had herded him into the attic. She had locked him in one of her trunks for safekeeping! (Your penchant for underscoring permits me only the modest exclamation point. That sentence bravely deserves more.)
Irene’s three large trunks in the attic were locked. They were not searched. They have never, to my knowledge, been searched. Since Olympe has never helped in our searchings, I do not know how she happened to be aware of the locked, unsearched trunks. Evidently, someone has told her of them.
To continue, and to repeat, Irene locked the irritable Archie in one of her trunks and returned below stairs to discover, for the first time, what it was that Archie had been up to. Again, the range of her possible emotions is a wide one. We may assume that her sense of tact soon predominated. Disliking to be involved in the affair, she simply left Archie locked in the trunk. Though, in due time, Olympe seems to prophesy, Irene will relent and unlock Archie.
You may judge what the past week had done to Lucy, when you realize that she could admit junk of this sort into that straight-thinking mind of hers. It makes me ill. Almost as ill as it makes me to wonder why Olympe was so badly in need of a theory that she should proffer this one.
The second theory, given as the joint production of Grandfather and Uncle Phineas, is more ingenuous.
They say they believe that the murderer came to the house sometime shortly after dark, probably while we were all at supper. That he came in the front door and went upstairs. This, I admit, would have been risky, but possible. The front of the house, the hall, the upstairs, were all dark. They have provided the man with a dark lantern of the type that burglars are supposed to carry.
At that time, he could have collected the keys in the upper hall, and gone upstairs to the attic. It was, they think, while he was hiding in the attic that the idea of the rope swung out of the window first came to him. Uncle Phineas makes the picture: The villain crouching, the coil of rope near at hand. He had, so the story goes, while he was making his other plans about locking us all in our rooms, made also his plan of escape. But the coil of rope brought fresh inspirations—a plan for misleading us. He took the rope, crept downstairs again, tied it around the leg of the bed, moved the bed a bit to make us believe that the rope had been used as a means of escape down the side of the house to the ground. He counted on it to send us all rushing from the house in hot pursuit of him. And, they say, but for the snow this plan of his would, probably, have accomplished his purpose. (Yes, you bet. But for the snow. And but for the man’s forehandedness in tossing the rope out of the window at least an hour, perhaps two hours before he got around to the shooting.) However, since the rope had been merely an afterthought, the snow made no difference in his original plan of escape.
This plan, they have decided, must have been to get out of Father’s room into some safe, previously arranged hiding place in the house. Why, with us all locked in our rooms, and with no snow to betray him with footprints, he should have planned to stay in hiding in the house, instead of planning to run right down either stairway and out of the house and away, I don’t know. The fact that he could not have done this, that Irene was downstairs with the stairway doors locked, need not make any difference in the speculations as to what his original plans may have been. He had not, certainly, planned to have Irene locked out of her room. But Grandfather and Uncle Phineas, wedded to the notion of the rope as a “false clue,” insist that, because he wanted us out of the house hunting for him he must have planned to stay in the house.
After the deed, the murderer returned, posthaste, to the attic. He left the attic door unlocked. You may choose your answer to that from the following suggestions:
- He had left the key in the hardware box by mistake.
- He thought that an unlocked door would allay suspicion.
- His hiding place in the attic was so secure that an unlocked door, or two, made no difference to him.
Here, Jude, is where you can come into your own. You are certain that we left some part of the house unsearched. You are right. Until late this afternoon, no one had searched—the roof.
Since the fact that there is no way to get up on the roof except through the trapdoor, directly in the centre of the attic roof and about eleven feet from the floor, seems to bother no one, it need not bother you.
The stepladder, that Monday night when we searched the attic, was nowhere near the trapdoor. There was no box, or chest, or anything else that could have been used to reach the trapdoor, anywhere near it. In answer to Uncle Phineas’s question as to whether I could swear that none of these things had been moved beneath the trapdoor and, afterwards, put back into place—of course I could not. I could swear that nothing appeared to be out of place that night in the attic. I could swear that, if any object, large or small, had been directly in the centre of the attic, beneath the trapdoor, both Grandfather and I should have seen it instantly. But, that, also, is of no consequence; because, according to our most popular theory, this is what happened:
The murderer had moved the stepladder, had ascended it, had opened the trapdoor and got out on the roof. Since the trapdoor claps shut when it is not held, he had fastened it open and had left—— What? Why, a rope, of course, dangling. He had then descended the ladder and had replaced it against the wall of the room up there. Next, he had stolen downstairs and committed the murder. He had then returned to the attic, climbed up the rope to the roof, pulled the rope up after him, and closed the trapdoor. In short, just give that guy enough rope and there was nothing he could not do with it, from fixing “false clues” to climbing eleven feet of it, dangling loose, and excluding, only, hanging himself with it.
Once he found himself on the ten-by-twelve flat piece of roof, he regarded his escape as having been perfectly effected. All that remained for him to do, after that, was to wait until he got ready, climb down his rope again, come down through the house and walk out of it.
In case you don’t like to have him walk out through the locked and doubly guarded doors, you may have this: He stayed above, fluctuating between the roof and the attic, for four or five days. That is, until Friday, when we all except Olympe and Lucy had gone to the inquest; or until Saturday, when we all had gone to the funeral. On either of those days, the snow was melted; so he could have got out of a window, or jumped off the roof, or climbed down his rope from the roof—couldn’t he?—and walked away.
The question of his food and water for five days has, also, a nice variety of answers. I prefer my own: That he ate his rope, and washed it down with snow water from the roof—the special snow that did not come down through the open trapdoor into the attic. You see, if the trapdoor had been left open for any length of time from ten minutes to two hours, during the snowstorm, there would have been snow or melted snow on the attic floor. Do you think that would have escaped both Grandfather and me when we were searching the attic? I know that it would not. I know that if anyone had got down off that dirty, wet roof, even once, he would have left footprints on Aunt Gracia’s spotless floor up there. The floor that night looked as it usually looks; that is, very much like the bread board.
Unfortunately—I quote the elders—Aunt Gracia this morning thought that the weather was threatening and chose to have Dong Lee (he came home last night, garishly dentilated, politely sympathetic, but, seemingly, unperturbed) hang the washing in the attic instead of in the yard. This necessitated the usual cleaning and dusting of the attic. This late afternoon it was impossible to tell, by coatings of dust or the like, whether ladder, chests, boxes, had been recently moved.
Much as she disliked the admission, Aunt Gracia was forced to say that nothing in the attic seemed to have been disturbed; that no traces, even of the most immaculate intruder, had been discoverable. Said Uncle Phineas, no traces of the criminal were to be found in the attic. Said he, any halfway clever criminal would, of course, have removed all traces before leaving the attic.
Finis, then? The attic itself could scarcely be neater and cleaner than this explanation. All that remains to be explained is why Grandfather, Uncle Phineas, Aunt Gracia, and Chris declare that they credit such sort of stuff. And why do they leave me out in the cold with Olympe, Irene, and Lucy?
Stretching a long, long bow I might give Uncle Phineas and, perhaps, Chris credit for honesty when they declare their belief in this nonsense. I know darn well that Aunt Gracia does not believe in it, not for one of her clear-sighted seconds. I know that Grandfather cannot believe it; unless—well, Grandfather is eighty years old, and this week has been a week of steady torture for him.
Reverting, again, to your letter. What I seem to have said about attending the hanging of Father’s murderer has, apparently, shocked you severely. I was one little bloodthirsty lad, wasn’t I, when I wrote that first letter to you? The scarcely gradual tapering of my tone from vengeance to vacuity must prove at least amusing to you. But, at least, I am not a clutching backslider. I state, conclusively, that I no longer have any desire either to discover Father’s murderer or to attend any hanging whatsoever. Quite, quite the contrary. I won’t subscribe to the darn fool lies the others are propounding. But I’d give the spring heifers if I could concoct some lucid, logical lie that would clear the Quilter family.
You say that I asked you to help me in ferreting out the criminal. That should speak volumes for my own condition at the time I wrote. I judge that the sheer shock of the thing reduced me on the instant to a drooling, chattering idiot—swearing my innocence to you, beseeching for your reassurance. You have given it, Jude; lots of it and lavishly—the reassurance. Shall we let it go at that? But, as for the help, I shall have to change my order. Can you, by any effort of wits, produce the lie we are all so seriously needing at present?
Remember, any compound must include that rope. Do you know, sometimes I almost incline to agree with Chris’s ex-theory—that the rope was, somehow, coincidental. Deserting fiction, for the moment, and attempting fact: Can you think of any conceivable reason that Father himself might have had for tossing that rope out of the window early in the night? Suppose that Aunt Gracia’s suggestion about a blackmailer was truer than she thought. Might it have been possible that Father helped him—or anyone—to get into his room that night by means of the rope? Someone, with a fair amount of agility, might have been able to get from the ground to the porch roof by means of the porch pillars and the rope. This would have had to be, of course, before the snowfall started. It is at least possible that, since the rope had been effectual for an entrance, it might have been left in place as an exit. The window’s having been left open would seem peculiar, on so cold a night; peculiar, but not impossible. The impossible element in any of this is the implication that Father could have been induced to stoop to underhandedness or secrecy of any sort.
Aunt Gracia spoke about unknown paragraphs and pages in men’s lives. It went with the jury. Let it go. But it brings us back again to fiction. My thinking machine—I realize that this is in no sense an admission—is not, at present, in working order. You take the rope as a means of access instead of exit and see whether you can produce something that will serve for our present needs.
Your loving brother,
Neal.