"Will you tell us what you know about it?"
"It is writing."
"Writing?"
"It was writing, but the water washed it away."
Then, instantly and with great rapidity, followed a wild torrent of words and incomplete sentences. It is inarticulate, and the secretary made no record of it. As I recall, however, it was about water, children, and the words "ten o"clock" repeated several times.
"Do you mean that something happened at ten o"clock?"
"No. Certainly not. No, indeed. The water washed it away. All of it. Not a trace."
"Where did all this happen?"
She named, without hesitation, a seaside resort about fifty miles from our city. There was not one of us, I dare say, who did not know that the Wellses had spent the preceding summer there and that Charlie Ellingham had been there, also.
"Do you know that Arthur Wells is dead?"
"Yes. He is dead."
"Did he kill himself?"
"You can"t catch me on that. I don"t know."
Here the medium laughed. It was horrible. And the laughter made the whole thing absurd. But it died away quickly.
"If only the pocketbook was not lost," she said. "There were so many things in it. Especially car-tickets. Walking is a nuisance."
Mrs. Dane"s secretary suddenly spoke. "Do you want me to take things like that?" she asked.
"Take everything, please," was the answer.
"Car-tickets and letters. It will be terrible if the letters are found."
"Where was the pocketbook lost?" Sperry asked.
"If that were known, it could be found," was the reply, rather sharply given. "Hawkins may have it. He was always hanging around. The curtain was much safer."
"What curtain?"
"n.o.body would have thought of the curtain. First ideas are best."
She repeated this, following it, as once before, with rhymes for the final word, best, rest, chest, pest.
"Pest!" she said. "That"s Hawkins!" And again the laughter.
"Did one of the bullets strike the ceiling?"
"Yes. But you"ll never find it. It is holding well. That part"s safe enough--unless it made a hole in the floor above."
"But there was only one empty chamber in the revolver. How could two shots have been fired?"
There was no answer at all to this. And Sperry, after waiting, went on to his next question: "Who occupied the room overhead?"
But here we received the reply to the previous question: "There was a box of cartridges in the table-drawer. That"s easy."
From that point, however, the interest lapsed. Either there was no answer to questions, or we got the absurdity that we had encountered before, about the drawing-room furniture. But, unsatisfactory in many ways as the seance had been, the effect on Miss Jeremy was profound--she was longer in coming out, and greatly exhausted when it was all over.
She refused to take the supper Mrs. Dane had prepared for her, and at eleven o"clock Sperry took her home in his car.
I remember that Mrs. Dane inquired, after she had gone.
"Does any one know the name of the Wellses" butler? Is it Hawkins?"
I said nothing, and as Sperry was the only one likely to know and he had gone, the inquiry went no further. Looking back, I realize that Herbert, while less cynical, was still skeptical, that his sister was non-committal, but for some reason watching me, and that Mrs. Dane was in a state of delightful antic.i.p.ation.
My wife, however, had taken a dislike to Miss Jeremy, and said that the whole thing bored her.
"The men like it, of course," she said, "Horace fairly simpers with pleasure while he sits and holds her hand. But a woman doesn"t impose on other women so easily. It"s silly."
"My dear," Mrs. Dane said, reaching over and patting my wife"s hand, "people talked that way about Columbus and Galileo. And if it is nonsense it is such thrilling nonsense!"
VI
I find that the solution of the Arthur Wells mystery--for we did solve it--takes three divisions in my mind. Each one is a sitting, followed by an investigation made by Sperry and myself.
But for some reason, after Miss Jeremy"s second sitting, I found that my reasoning mind was stronger than my credulity. And as Sperry had at that time determined to have nothing more to do with the business, I made a resolution to abandon my investigations. Nor have I any reason to believe that I would have altered my att.i.tude toward the case, had it not been that I saw in the morning paper on the Thursday following the second seance, that Elinor Wells had closed her house, and gone to Florida.
I tried to put the fact out of my mind that morning. After all, what good would it do? No discovery of mine could bring Arthur Wells back to his family, to his seat at the bridge table at the club, to his too expensive cars and his unpaid bills. Or to his wife who was not grieving for him.
On the other hand, I confess to an overwhelming desire to examine again the ceiling of the dressing room and thus to check up one degree further the accuracy of our revelations. After some debate, therefore, I called up Sperry, but he flatly refused to go on any further.
"Miss Jeremy has been ill since Monday," he said. "Mrs. Dane"s rheumatism is worse, her companion is nervously upset, and your own wife called me up an hour ago and says you are sleeping with a light, and she thinks you ought to go away. The whole club is shot to pieces."
But, although I am a small and not a courageous man, the desire to examine the Wells house clung to me tenaciously. Suppose there were cartridges in his table drawer? Suppose I should find the second bullet hole in the ceiling? I no longer deceived myself by any argument that my interest was purely scientific. There is a point at which curiosity becomes unbearable, when it becomes an obsession, like hunger. I had reached that point.
Nevertheless, I found it hard to plan the necessary deception to my wife. My habits have always been entirely orderly and regular. My wildest dissipation was the Neighborhood Club. I could not recall an evening away from home in years, except on business. Yet now I must have a free evening, possibly an entire night.
In planning for this, I forgot my nervousness for a time. I decided finally to tell my wife that an out-of-town client wished to talk business with me, and that day, at luncheon--I go home to luncheon--I mentioned that such a client was in town.
"It is possible," I said, as easily as I could, "that we may not get through this afternoon. If things should run over into the evening, I"ll telephone."
She took it calmly enough, but later on, as I was taking an electric flash from the drawer of the hall table and putting it in my overcoat pocket, she came on me, and I thought she looked surprised.
During the afternoon I was beset with doubts and uneasiness. Suppose she called up my office and found that the client I had named was not in town? It is undoubtedly true that a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive, for on my return to the office I was at once quite certain that Mrs. Johnson would telephone and make the inquiry.