Evidence of Things Seen (9 page)

“You aren't like anybody else; you haven't even asked me a question.”

“No, but I'm dying to; I want to know whether you choked this Miss Radford to death in a moment of antipathy.”

Clara laughed wildly. “You always know just what to say!”

“Glad you think so.”

“I knew I shouldn't have to explain to
you
that I may be arrested.”

“I'm only too thankful you're not in jail.”

“The Hunters are too important; they just did everything for me. And then of course I had no motive.”

“Unless you had run up a terrific bill for eggs and chickens, and couldn't pay.” He added, putting his razor down, “I know what you must have been through, my darling. I think your idea was a very sound one—about postponing the whole thing until tomorrow. This is a reunion.”

“It isn't what it would have been if we were in the cottage. It's all ruined for you.”

“Ruined? I have no time to tell you now whether it's ruined or not. I must get dressed for dinner.”

At dinner the Gamadges were allowed to sit side by side, with the Hunters opposite across a small gate table. This was placed in the great bay of the dining room, which rode like a ship above the valley. There seemed to be quite enough to talk about without any references, on the part of anyone, to the tragedy and all that it had brought in its wake; and by the time Clara had had a glass of dry champagne, the cure begun by Gamadge's first telegram was completed; her natural color came back, and the look that Gamadge had been dismayed to see in her eyes left them, not to return.

After dinner, while they were having coffee and brandy in the yellow room, Gilbert Craye was announced. Hunter was for having him sent home, but Gamadge said he should like to see him. He came in, was immensely surprised to find Gamadge there, shook hands violently all around, and—catching the spirit of the occasion—uttered no word of the tragedy. Perhaps he had come to condole with Clara, but he remained to sing. Fanny played, and he sang classic airs; then, at her request, he sat down and accompanied himself to airs that were not classic. When he left, Clara was in a pleasant half-dream.

“I do think,” said Fanny, when they were all saying good night, “that it was horrid of you, Phin; to make up that thing about Gil Craye flitting like a fly, you know.”

“Because of his pleasing tenor?” Hunter smiled down at her. “Because the small gnats mourn?”

“What's all this?” asked Gamadge.

Hunter repeated his couplet, and Gamadge was highly entertained by it.

“I was tempted beyond my strength,” said Hunter. “Shocking thing. Bad enough to have composed it, worse to repeat it;
you
mustn't.”

Gamadge said: “Clara and I are putting off the affair Radford until tomorrow; and until tomorrow I shall put off trying to thank you and Fanny for all you've done for her; I imagine that I don't know half of it.”

Fanny protested: “We didn't do half enough! We should all have sat up. She shouldn't have been left alone.”

“You were alone, Fanny.” Clara spoke in a low voice.

“Yes, but I didn't sit right there in that awful room!”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” Gamadge urged his wife up the stairs.

“Tomorrow,” said Hunter, “you'll find out that your wife's a thoroughbred.”

“Shall I?” Gamadge looked at Clara and smiled.

Next morning, down on the flat rock beside the Ladder trail, where she had taken him to hear the story, he listened in silence; asked her to repeat it, from her first view of the woman in the sunbonnet to her last conscious thought on Sunday morning after the tragedy; questioned her minutely on each smallest detail, and then repeated Hunter's words: “You're a thoroughbred.”

“I was afraid you'd laugh at me for being so—for thinking it was a ghost.”

“Laugh? The chain of evidence was reinforced progressively by every link. It's an appalling story, and as queer a one as I ever heard in my life. Now let's tackle it from the other point of view—the rationalist's point of view. You can do that now, since you're no longer on the spot.”

“That's what I want to do.”

“We'll make notes. I borrowed a pad from Fanny.” Gamadge produced the pad and a pencil. “What a raving beauty she is, by the way. Craye's in love with her.”

“Is he?” Clara was startled.

“But perhaps he flits from lady to lady, and it means nothing serious. I had a talk with Hunter this morning; he says they got a sworn statement from you on Sunday for the inquest, now adjourned.”

“Yes; I was in bed. Phineas was wonderful, but of course I had to see everybody on Monday. I felt all right, and I got up. The sheriff of Avebury came—a very nice man. He says it must have been an escaped lunatic, and that's what he put in the papers; but he doesn't know what to think, any more than I do.”

“How much did you tell him?”

“Only what actually happened. I didn't mention the things in the attic, or the attic door. Should I have?”

Gamadge put his hand on hers. “My poor child, what an infernal time you've had; some women would have lost their wits.”

“I nearly did that night, when I looked up and saw the door opening.”

“After you heard something drop.”

“Like a piece of wood, a small piece.”

“Did you mention that to the sheriff?”

“Yes.”

“But you managed to conceal the entire ghost angle?”

“I was afraid he'd think
I
was the lunatic.”

Gamadge, his eyes on her profile, set his teeth. After a moment he spoke lightly: “Just as well not to give them the impression that you're fanciful. You'll have to testify at this confounded inquest, and you want them to feel that you have your wits about you.”

“Yes, but how can they think I have my wits about me? Because how could that woman have killed Miss Radford when she never even came into the room?”

“I know.”

“They all want me to say I fainted when I saw her, but I didn't faint. I saw her at twenty minutes to one, and when they took me upstairs it was thirteen minutes to; only seven minutes! I didn't have time to faint.”

“Perhaps they think you made a mistake when you looked at your watch.”

“I didn't. It was twenty minutes to one, and I wondered how I could stand another hour and twenty minutes of it. I thought I'd have to call Phineas Hunter, and say I was frightened, and tell him everything.”

“Well, let's leave the problem and tackle something else. About the dress and the sunbonnet; could you swear that they were the ones you saw in the attic?”

“Yes, I could. I was sure of the color even before I saw her close up, and on Saturday afternoon, and later, in the bedroom doorway, I saw the black sprigs.”

“You described the material to the sheriff?”

“Yes, and to the state's attorney from Stratfield and the captain of the state police. Mr. Ledwell—the state's attorney—was very polite; he's quite a young man, and I could see that he was dying to go on asking me questions until he made sense of the case. But Phineas wouldn't let him stay more than an hour. He was terribly puzzled, and quite irritated; I don't blame him. He made me say again and again that I never heard of Miss Radford till I got here, and didn't know at first that she owned the cottage, and thought she was only the egg-woman. And I told him how Dick Heron had made the arrangements with an agent in Hartford. He kept doing what he called checking up; he checked up with Phineas Hunter, and he called up the agent, and he called Dick. He seemed quite pleased—told me I was fully corroborated,” said Clara, with a dim smile.

“Just his precious routine.”

“Phineas Hunter was wonderful; so polite to them, but right in the offing I could see that they didn't like to offend him, but what can they do? They have to try and find out what happened.”

“Tell you what; if we don't dig something up for them, we'll have Bob Macloud here for the inquest. We'll give him a watching brief,” said Gamadge, in a jocular tone. “Nobody can overstep legal propriety with Bob in a courtroom.”

“I don't think they want to overstep it. Oh—I forgot; they had their own doctor—the medical examiner—to look me over.”

Gamadge slowly pushed the end of his walking stick into the hard turf between his feet. After a pause he asked: “What for?”

“Well, to find out about whether I often faint, and whether I have lapses of memory or lapses of consciousness, or anything. He took notes about my putting my head down because I felt dizzy. I told him every illness I ever had, and every illness I ever heard of in the family.”

Gamadge waited still longer before he put his next question: “How long was your head down?”

“I ought to know by this time, I've thought of it so much! It may have been thirty seconds; ten to get it down, and ten to keep it down, and ten to get it up again.”

“Not long enough.”

“I know it; but they say that I must have rushed to the door and stood there calling Phineas Hunter without looking behind me at what was going on in the room. I didn't. I never looked away from that open doorway once. She never came back.”

“Hunter says you were looking at it when he came, and that it was the first thing he saw, of course.”

“And then he looked at Miss Radford, and knew that something had happened to her. The state police-captain was so puzzled about it all that he was quite cross at first. I don't think he likes summer people much; I suppose they give him a lot of trouble with their cars and accidents. He wanted to know what we had to drink during the evening.”

“Poor fellow, his life is one long pursuit of the fumes of alcohol, I suppose.”

“Phineas mixed cocktails for us at supper. Dr. Knapp did enjoy his so. The state police-captain thought I might have been asleep all evening, and dreamed the woman. But then, who could have murdered Miss Radford?”

“I gather that he wasn't cerebrating actively, or hadn't heard the rest of the story; they know there was a woman, Maggie saw her.”

“I think they think perhaps I made her up later—thought I saw her, I mean, but didn't. They don't know what to think, Henry.”

“They know perfectly well that you're telling the truth as you know it.”

“Yes, but—they make me feel so crazy. The state police-captain was rather impatient with me, but Fanny came in with iced coffee and chocolate cakes, and he had some. That's a good sign, isn't it?”

Gamadge said: “What I mean is, the idiots must see that if you wanted to make up a story you could, and that it would satisfy them all. You could simply say that you did faint.”

“Yes, and because I don't say so they think I'm crazy.”

Gamadge opened Fanny's pad and placed it on his knee. “Let's tackle the thing in our own way. We'll put it in the form of a story, you know, and the story will have a beginning, a middle and an end. It begins on July the sixth, 1941.”

“But that's when I began it! That's when the ghost story begins!”

“My story begins there too.”

“U
NTIL SUNDAY AFTERNOON,
July sixth, 1941,” began Gamadge, “Alvira Radford and her sister Eva Hickson occupied what had once been their farm cottage. The farm itself was down the road, on the other side of the highway; it had been rented, it had been mortgaged, and it now stood empty. Alvira Radford, a woman of small means, had lived in the cottage for economy's sake since—Hunter thinks—1932; Mrs. Hickson joined her some years later, after Hickson died. Alvira does not seem to have known much about Hickson, or Mrs. Hickson's married life; since, if gossip is to be believed, she did not know until Mrs. Hickson's death that that lady had possessed what to Alvira must have seemed a great fortune—one hundred and six thousand dollars.

“Mrs. Hickson, a victim of arthritis, had for some time occupied a downstairs bedroom. This bedroom may at one time have been an entry; it had an outer door, now closed up against drafts. After her death Miss Radford did not have this door opened, and refused her summer tenant's suggestion that it should be opened; her objection being that the process might mar the new paint.

“Late in the afternoon of July sixth, Mrs. Hickson died. She had been ailing for a couple of weeks with what has been vaguely described by a neighbor as gastric stomach, and we do not know whether her doctor expected her to die or not; but although he was not at the cottage when death took place, he gave a certificate. Mrs. Hickson was buried handsomely in Avebury old cemetery, where I suppose her forebears lie.

“Miss Radford stayed on at the cottage for a month after the death; but, having learned that she was sole heir to her sister's money, she immediately ordered repairs and improvements at the farm. These alterations, or what can be seen of them, are in the worst taste; but after moving back to the farm she ordered improvements made at the cottage which are all in very good taste indeed. The local builder was not given a free hand here; somebody was engaged who knew the kind of thing that summer tenants would like. Valuable old furniture was left behind, and a new kitchen wing put on; but the original charm was preserved, and the little place unspoiled.

“Part of its charm consisted in the oddity of its still being—outdoors as well as in—a double cottage. Although its only ground-floor back door had been condemned, it had a back door on the hillside, and no less than three front ones. It had two enclosed stairways, one from the living room and one from the dining room, and two attics. One of these had been fitted up as a bedroom, and ceiled.

“In the other one, the one above the north bedroom, Miss Radford left her sister's possessions—all of them, we guess; the things she had worn, the things she had treasured, the furniture she had brought back from her married home. We shall not be straining conjecture if we conclude that when Alvira Radford left the cottage she meant to leave behind her every possible memory of the sister, all her effects, even the family furniture which they had used in common. The only thing she retained of Mrs. Hickson's was Mrs. Hickson's money.