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No Clue! A Mystery Story

<h2>VI</h2> <h3>ACTION BY THE SHERIFF</h3> Mrs. Brace did not ask Hastings where he had got the fragment of grey envelope. She made no comment whatever. He reversed the flap in his hand and showed her the inner side on which were, at first sight, meaningless lines and little smears. He explained that the letter must have been put into the envelope when the ink was still undried on the part of it that came in contact with the flap, and, the paper being of that rough-finish, spongy kind frequently affected by women, the flap had absorbed the undried ink pressed against it. "Have you a hand-mirror?" he asked, breaking a long pause. She brought one from the bedroom. Holding it before the envelope flap, he showed her the marks thus made legible. They were, on the first line: "—edly de—," with the first loop or curve of an "n" or an "m" following the "de"; and on the second line the one word "Pursuit!" the whole reproduction being this: edly de Pursuit! "Does that writing mean anything to you, Mrs. Brace?" Hastings asked, keeping it in front of her. She moved her left hand, a quiet gesture indicating her lack of further interest in the piece of paper. "Nothing special," she said, "except that the top line seems to bear out what I've told you. It might be: 'repeatedly demanded'—I mean Mildred may have written that she had repeatedly demanded justice of him, something of that sort." "Is it your daughter's writing?" "Yes." "And the word 'Pursuit,' with an exclamation point after it? That suggest anything to you?" "Why, no." She showed her first curiosity: "Where did you get that piece of envelope?" "Not from Berne Webster," he said, smiling. "I suppose not," she agreed, and did not press him for the information. "You said," he went to another point, "that the sheriff attached no importance to your belief in Webster's guilt. Can you tell me why?" Her contempt was frank enough now, and visible, her lips thickening and assuming the abnormally humid appearance he had noticed before. "He thinks the footsteps which Miss Sloane says she heard are the deciding evidence. He accuses a young man named Russell, Eugene Russell, who's been attentive to Mildred." Hastings was relieved. "Crown's seen him, seen Russell?" he asked, not troubling to conceal his eagerness. On that, he saw the beginnings of wrath in her eyes. The black eyebrows went upward, the thin nostrils expanded, the lips set to a line no thicker than the edge of a knife. "You, too, will——" She broke off, checked by the ringing of the wall telephone in the entrance hall. She answered the call, moving without haste. It was for Mr. Hastings, she said, going back to her seat. He regretted the interruption; it would give her time to regain the self-control she had been on the point of losing. Sheriff Crown was at the other end of the wire. He was back at Sloanehurst, he explained, and Miss Sloane had asked him to give the detective certain information: He had asked the Washington police to hold Eugene Russell, or to persuade him to attend the inquest at Sloanehurst. Crown, going in to Washington, had stopped at the car barns of the electric road which passed Sloanehurst, and had found a conductor who had made the ten-thirty run last night. This conductor, Barton, had slept at the barns, waiting for the early-morning resumption of car service to take him to his home across the city. Barton remembered having seen a man leave his car at Ridgecrest, the next stop before Sloanehurst, at twenty-five minutes past ten last night. He answered Russell's description, had seemed greatly agitated, and was unfamiliar with the stops on the line, having questioned Barton as to the distance between Ridgecrest and Sloanehurst. That was all the conductor had to tell. "Mrs. Brace's description of Russell, a real estate salesman who had been attentive to her daughter," continued Crown, "tallied with Barton's description of the man who had been on his car. I got his address from her. But say! She don't fall for the idea that Russell's guilty! She gave me to understand, in that snaky, frozen way of hers, that I was a fool for thinking so. "Anyway, I'm going to put him over the jumps!" The sheriff was highly elated. "What was he out here for last night if he wasn't jealous of the girl? Wasn't he following her? And, when he came up with her on the Sloanehurst lawn, didn't he kill her? It looks plain to me; simple. I told you it was a simple case!" "Have you seen him?" Hastings was looking at his watch as he spoke—it was nine o'clock. "No; I went to his boarding house, waked up the place at three o'clock this morning. He wasn't there." Hastings asked for the number of the house. It was on Eleventh street, Crown informed him, and gave the number. "I searched his room," the sheriff added, his voice self-congratulatory. "Find anything?" "I should say! The nail file was missing from his dressing case." "What else?" "A pair of wet shoes—muddy and wet." "Then, he'd returned to his room, after the murder, and gone out again?" "That's it—right." "Anybody in the house hear him come in, or go out?" "Not a soul.—And I don't know where he is now." Hastings, leaving the telephone, found Mrs. Brace carefully brushing into a newspaper the litter made by his whittling. Her performance of that trivial task, the calm thoroughness with which she went about it, or the littleness of it, when compared with her complete indifference to the tragedy which should have overwhelmed her—something, he could not tell exactly what, made her more repugnant to him than ever. He spoke impulsively: "Did you want—didn't you feel some impulse, some desire, to go out there when you heard of this murder?" She paused in her brushing, looking up to him without lifting herself from hands and knees. "Why should I have wanted to do any such thing?" she replied. "Mildred's not out there. What's out there is—nothing." "Do you know about the arrangements for the removal of the body?" "The sheriff told me," she replied, cold, impersonal. "It will be brought to an undertaking establishment as soon as the coroner's jury has viewed it." "Yes—at ten o'clock this morning." She made no comment on that. He had brought up the disagreeable topic—one which would have been heart-breaking to any other mother he had ever known—in the hope of arousing some real feeling in her. And he had failed. Her self-control was impregnable. There was about her an atmosphere that was, in a sense, terrifying, something out of all nature. She brushed up the remaining chips and shavings while he got his hat. He was deliberating: was there nothing more she could tell him? What could he hope to get from her except that which she wanted to tell? He was sure that she had spoken, in reply to each of his questions, according to a prearranged plan, a well designed scheme to bring into high relief anything that might incriminate Berne Webster. And he was by no means in a mood to persuade himself of Webster's guilt. He knew the value of first impressions; and he did not propose to let her clog his thoughts with far-fetched deductions against the young lawyer. She got to her feet with cat-like agility, and, to his astonishment, burst into violent speech: "You're standing there trying to think up things to help Berne Webster! Like the sheriff! Now, I'll tell you what I told him: Webster's guilty. I know it! He killed my daughter. He's a liar and a coward—a traitor! He killed her!" There was no doubt of her emotion now. She stood in a strange attitude, leaning a little toward him in the upper part of her body, as if all her strength were consciously directed into her shoulders and neck. She seemed larger in her arms and shoulders; they, with her head and face, were, he thought, the most vivid part of her—an effect which she produced deliberately, to impress him. Her whole body was not tremulous, but, rather, vibrant, a taut mechanism played on by the rage that possessed her. Her eyebrows, high on her forehead, reminded him of things that crawled. Her eyes, brilliant like clear ice with sunshine on it, were darting, furtive, always in motion. She did not look him squarely in the eye, but her eyes selected and bored into every part of his face; her glance played on his countenance. He could easily have imagined that it burned him physically in many places. "All this talk about Gene Russell's being guilty is stuff, bosh!" she continued. "Gene wouldn't hurt anybody. He couldn't! Wait until you see him!" Her lips curled momentarily to their thickened, wet sneer. "There's nothing to him—nothing! Mildred hated him; he bored her to death. Even I laughed at him. And this sheriff talks about the boy's having killed her!" Suddenly, she partially controlled her fury. He saw her eyes contract to the gleam of a new idea. She was silent a moment, while her vibrant, tense body swayed in front of him almost imperceptibly. When she spoke again, it was in her flat, constrained tone. He was impressed anew with her capacity for making her feeling subordinate to her intelligence. "She's a dangerous woman," he thought again. "You're working for Webster?" Her inquiry came after so slight a pause, and it was put to him in a manner so different from the unrestraint of her denunciation of Webster, that he felt as he would have done if he had been dealing with two women. "I've told you already," he said, "my only interest is in finding the real murderer. In that sense, I'm working for Webster—if he's innocent." "But he didn't hire you?" "No." Seeing that he told the truth, she indulged herself in rage again. It was just that, Hastings thought; she took an actual, keen pleasure in giving vent to the anger that was in her. Relieved of the necessity of censoring her words and thoughts closely, she could say what she wanted to say. "He's guilty, and I'll prove it!" she defied the detective's disbelief. "I'll help to prove it. Guilty? I tell you he is—guilty as hell!" He made an abrupt departure, her shrill hatred ringing in his ears when he reached the street. He found it hard, too, to get her out of his eyes, even now—she had impressed herself so shockingly upon him. The picture of her floated in front of him, above the shimmering pavement, as if he still confronted her in all her unloveliness, the smooth, white face like a travesty on youth, the swift, darting eyes, the hard, straight lines of the lean figure, the cold deliberation of manner and movement. "She's incapable of grief!" he thought. "Terrible! She's terrible!" Lally drove him to his apartment on Fifteenth street, where the largest of three rooms served him as a combination library and office. There he kept his records, in a huge, old-fashioned safe; and there, also, he held his conferences, from time to time, with police chiefs and detectives from all parts of the country when they sought his help in their pursuit of criminals. The walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling. A large table in the centre of the room was stacked high with newspapers and magazines. Dusty papers and books were piled, too, on several chairs set against the bookcases, and on the floor in one corner was a pyramid of documents. "This place is like me," he explained to visitors; "it's loosely dressed." He sat down at the table and wrote instructions for one of his two assistants, his best man, Hendricks. Russell's room must be searched and Russell interviewed—work for which Hastings felt that he himself could not spare the time. He gave Hendricks a second task: investigation of the financial standing of two people: Berne Webster and Mrs. Catherine Brace. He noted, with his customary kindness, in his memorandum to Hendricks: "Sunday's a bad day for this sort of work, but do the best you can. Report tomorrow morning." That arranged, he set out for Sloanehurst, to keep his promise to Lucille—he would be there for the inquest. On the way he reviewed matters: "Somehow, I got the idea that the Brace woman knew Russell hadn't killed her daughter. Funny, that is. How could she have known that? How can she know it now? "She's got the pivotal fact in this case. I felt it. I'm willing to bet she persuaded her daughter to pursue Webster. And things have gone 'bust'—didn't come out as she thought they would. What was she after, money? That's exactly it! Exactly! Her daughter could hold up Webster, and Webster could hold up the Sloanes after his marriage." He whistled softly. "If she can prove that Webster should have married her daughter, that he's in need of anything like sixty-five thousand dollars—where does he get off? He gets off safely if the Brace woman ever sees fit to tell—what? I couldn't guess if my whittling hand depended on it." He grimaced his repugnance. "What a woman! A mania for wickedness—evil from head to foot, thoroughly. She wouldn't stick at murder—if she thought it safe. She'd do anything, say anything. Every word she uttered this morning had been rehearsed in her mind—with gestures, even. When I beat her, I beat this puzzle; that's sure." That he had to do with a puzzle, he had no manner of doubt. The very circumstances surrounding the discovery of the girl's body—Arthur Sloane flashing on the light in his room at a time when his being awake was so unusual that it frightened his daughter; Judge Wilton stumbling over the dead woman; young Webster doing the same thing in the same instant; the light reaching out to them at the moment when they bent down to touch the thing which their feet had encountered—all that shouted mystery to his experienced mind. He thought of Webster's pronouncement: "The thug, acting on the spur of the moment, with a blow in the dark and a getaway through the night——" Here was reproduction of that in real life. Would people say that Webster had given himself away in advance? They might. And the weapon, what about that? It could have been manufactured in ten minutes. Crown had said over the wire that Russell's nail file was missing. What if Webster's, too, were missing? He would see—although he expected to uncover no such thing. He came, then, to Lucille's astounding idea, that her father must be "protected," because he was nervous and, being nervous, might incur the enmity of the authorities. He could not take that seriously. And yet the most fruitful imagination in the world could fabricate no motive for Arthur Sloane's killing a young woman he had never seen. Only Webster and Russell could be saddled with motives: Webster's, desperation, the savage determination to rid himself of the woman's pursuit; Russell's, unreasoning jealousy. So far as facts went, the crime lay between those two—and he could not shake off the impression that Mrs. Brace, shrilly asserting Russell's innocence, had known that she spoke the absolute truth. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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