"Well, no. There was nothing said about a pillow-slip. Didn"t he say he burned it accidentally?"
"So he claimed." Mr. Holcombe made another entry in his book.
"Then I said every murder had a weapon. He was to have a pistol at first, but none of us owned one. Mrs. Ladley undertook to get a knife from Mrs. Pitman"s kitchen, and to leave it around, not in full view, but where it could be found."
"A broken knife?"
"No. Just a knife."
"He was to throw the knife into the water?"
"That was not arranged. I only gave him a general outline. He was to add any interesting details that might occur to him. The idea, of course, was to give the police plenty to work on, and just when they thought they had it all, and when the theater had had a lot of booming, and I had got a good story, to produce Jennie Brice, safe and well. We were not to appear in it at all. It would have worked perfectly, but we forgot to count on one thing--Jennie Brice hated her husband."
"Not really hated him!" cried Lida.
"_Hated_ him. She is letting him hang. She could save him by coming forward now, and she won"t do it. She is hiding so he will go to the gallows."
There was a pause at that. It seemed too incredible, too inhuman.
"Then, early that Monday morning, you smuggled Jennie Brice out of the city?"
"Yes. That was the only thing we bungled. We fixed the hour a little too late, and I was seen by Miss Harvey"s uncle, walking across the bridge with a woman."
"Why did you meet her openly, and take her to the train?"
Mr. Howell bent forward and smiled across at the little man. "One of your own axioms, sir," he said. "Do the natural thing; upset the customary order of events as little as possible. Jennie Brice went to the train, because that was where she wanted to go. But as Ladley was to protest that his wife had left town, and as the police would be searching for a solitary woman, I went with her. We went in a leisurely manner. I bought her a magazine and a morning paper, asked the conductor to fix her window, and, in general, acted the devoted husband seeing his wife off on a trip. I even"--he smiled--"I even promised to feed the canary."
Lida took her hands away. "Did you kiss her good-by?" she demanded.
"Not even a chaste salute," he said. His spirits were rising. It was, as often happens, as if the mere confession removed the guilt. I have seen little boys who have broken a window show the same relief after telling about it.
"For a day or two Bronson and I sat back, enjoying the stir-up. Things turned out as we had expected. Business boomed at the theater. I got a good story, and some few kind words from my city editor. Then--the explosion came. I got a letter from Jennie Brice saying she was going away, and that we need not try to find her. I went to Horner, but I had lost track of her completely. Even then, we did not believe things so bad as they turned out to be. We thought she was giving us a bad time, but that she would show up.
"Ladley was in a blue funk for a time. Bronson and I went to him. We told him how the thing had slipped up. We didn"t want to go to the police and confess if we could help it. Finally, he agreed to stick it out until she was found, at a hundred dollars a week. It took all we could beg, borrow and steal. But now--we have to come out with the story anyhow."
Mr. Holcombe sat up and closed his note-book with a snap. "I"m not so sure of that," he said impressively. "I wonder if you realize, young man, that, having provided a perfect defense for this man Ladley, you provided him with every possible inducement to make away with his wife? Secure in your coming forward at the last minute and confessing the hoax to save him, was there anything he might not have dared with impunity?"
"But I tell you I took Jennie Brice out of town on Monday morning."
"_Did you_?" asked Mr. Holcombe sternly.
But at that, the school-teacher, having come home and found old Isaac sound asleep in her cozy corner, set up such a screaming for the police that our meeting broke up. Nor would Mr. Holcombe explain any further.
CHAPTER XVI
Mr. Holcombe was up very early the next morning. I heard him moving around at five o"clock, and at six he banged at my door and demanded to know at what time the neighborhood rose: he had been up for an hour and there were no signs of life. He was more cheerful after he had had a cup of coffee, commented on Lida"s beauty, and said that Howell was a lucky chap.
"That is what worries me, Mr. Holcombe," I said. "I am helping the affair along and--what if it turns out badly?"
He looked at me over his gla.s.ses. "It isn"t likely to turn out badly,"
he said. "I have never married, Mrs. Pitman, and I have missed a great deal out of life."
"Perhaps you"re better off: if you had married and lost your wife--" I was thinking of Mr. Pitman.
"Not at all," he said with emphasis. "It"s better to have married and lost than never to have married at all. Every man needs a good woman, and it doesn"t matter how old he is. The older he is, the more he needs her. I am nearly sixty."
I was rather startled, and I almost dropped the fried potatoes. But the next moment he had got out his note-book and was going over the items again. "Pillow-slip," he said, "knife _broken_, onyx clock--wouldn"t think so much of the clock if he hadn"t been so d.a.m.nably anxious to hide the key, the discrepancy in time as revealed by the trial--yes, it is as clear as a bell. Mrs. Pitman, does that Maguire woman next door sleep all day?"
"She"s up now," I said, looking out the window.
He was in the hall in a moment, only to come to the door later, hat in hand. "Is she the only other woman on the street who keeps boarders?"
"She"s the only woman who doesn"t," I snapped. "She"ll keep anything that doesn"t belong to her--except boarders."
"Ah!"
He lighted his corn-cob pipe and stood puffing at it and watching me.
He made me uneasy: I thought he was going to continue the subject of every man needing a wife, and I"m afraid I had already decided to take him if he offered, and to put the school-teacher out and have a real parlor again, but to keep Mr. Reynolds, he being tidy and no bother.
But when he spoke, he was back to the crime again: "Did you ever work a typewriter?" he asked.
What with the surprise, I was a little sharp. "I don"t play any instrument except an egg-beater," I replied shortly, and went on clearing the table.
"I wonder--do you remember about the village idiot and the horse? But of course you do, Mrs. Pitman; you are a woman of imagination. Don"t you think you could be Alice Murray for a few moments? Now think--you are a stenographer with theatrical ambitions: you meet an actor and you fall in love with him, and he with you."
"That"s hard to imagine, that last."
"Not so hard," he said gently. "Now the actor is going to put you on the stage, perhaps in this new play, and some day he is going to marry you."
"Is that what he promised the girl?"
"According to some letters her mother found, yes. The actor is married, but he tells you he will divorce the wife; you are to wait for him, and in the meantime he wants you near him; away from the office, where other men are apt to come in with letters to be typed, and to chaff you. You are a pretty girl."
"It isn"t necessary to overwork my imagination," I said, with a little bitterness. I had been a pretty girl, but work and worry--
"Now you are going to New York very soon, and in the meantime you have cut yourself off from all your people. You have no one but this man.
What would you do? Where would you go?"
"How old was the girl?"
"Nineteen."
"I think," I said slowly, "that if I were nineteen, and in love with a man, and hiding, I would hide as near him as possible. I"d be likely to get a window that could see his going out and coming in, a place so near that he could come often to see me."
"Bravo!" he exclaimed. "Of course, with your present wisdom and experience, you would do nothing so foolish. But this girl was in her teens; she was not very far away, for he probably saw her that Sunday afternoon, when he was out for two hours. And as the going was slow that day, and he had much to tell and explain, I figure she was not far off. Probably in this very neighborhood."