Arrow Pointing Nowhere, page 18
“They don’t?” Nordhall shifted his legs. “They tip up chairs and tables.” He looked at the highboy opposite, and at Gamadge. “You don’t mean…?”
Gamadge, smiling, shook his head. “I tried.”
“You thought it would be stuck—”
“Mrs. Grove wished to preserve it carefully; and there’s paste in the desk, Nordhall, library paste, and large manila envelopes.”
“You’ve found it!”
“No; I waited for you. What in this room can be lifted but not tipped? What is there that we couldn’t shove our hands under?”
Nordhall gazed about him; then he rose and followed Gamadge to the buhl table.
“Give me a hand,” said Gamadge, his fingers under one end of the inlaid coffer. “This thing weighs a lot—it’s ivory on old brass; and servants wouldn’t be allowed to shove it around on that buhl, and if it’s tipped the lid will fall open. It doesn’t clear the table by more than an inch, and if it’s ever moved at all, which I doubt—” they had raised the coffer, to disclose a thick layer of dust—“it’s lifted as we’re lifting it now.”
They moved the thing to the edge of a solid table, where Gamadge balanced it while Nordhall bent to peer upwards. He gave an exclamation, and ripped something from beneath the coffer. When he rose he held in his fingers a large manila envelope smeared in patches with dried paste.
“Neat,” said Gamadge. “She could just get her fingers under far enough to hold the envelope against the brass till it stuck. Very neat. A most intelligent woman.”
Nordhall gazed at him. “Why did you think it was here?”
“Well, there didn’t seem to be much reason for it to be anywhere else. Let’s see old Fenbrook.”
Nordhall drew a picture from the envelope; a delicately colored view of a white house on a hill, surrounded by trees. A thin leaf of tissue fluttered after it, to be caught on Gamadge’s open hand. Nordhall took it from him; then he laid the thick leaf and the thin aside, and helped Gamadge to replace the inlaid casket.
He turned on a reading lamp, got the magnifying glass from the desk, and put the two sheets side by side. Gamadge watched while he stood bent and peering. Suddenly he cried aloud: “For God’s sake.”
Gamadge said nothing; hands in pockets, he waited.
Nordhall again studied and compared the picture and its guard. When he at last stood up straight his whole body was tense, the lines of his face rigid. He handed the reading glass to Gamadge, and waited. Gamadge bent to the exhibits on the table. When he in turn straightened, Nordhall spoke sharply: “You expected this.”
“Something like it.”
“That poor woman upstairs sent you the anonymous messages.”
“Yes. I’ll tell you the whole story—afterwards.”
“Take care of that.” Nordhall gestured violently at the evidence, and plunged across the room. He dragged the door open, left it open, and disappeared into the hall. He could be heard thundering up the stairs.
Gamadge stood in an attitude of listening, his face raised. He heard voices, a sudden sound of trampling, a shout like a warning. It was answered by the flat, muffled noise of a pistol shot. Gamadge relaxed against the edge of the table; he was smiling.
Presently Blake Fenway appeared in the doorway. He said: “There’s a policeman on the stairs with a gun in his hand; he says I’m not to go up. He won’t tell me who was shot, or what’s happened. Do you understand this?” His face had altered; it resembled that of the portrait over the mantel, even to the severity of the mouth and eyes.
Gamadge said: “I think I know pretty much what occurred upstairs, Mr. Fenway, and why it occurred.” He pointed to the view of Fenbrook. “I found your picture.”
“My picture?” Fenway did not seem to know what he meant. Then, glancing at it, he said in a voice of sudden bewilderment: “What has the picture to do with all this?”
“Will you look at it, sir?”
Fenway came slowly across the room to look down at his picture; he said almost with indifference: “There are marks on it.”
“They are the tracings of your brother’s pencil.”
“My brother’s…what do you mean?”
“Mr. Cort Fenway wrote a letter on thin paper, and the marks of his pencil came through. You can read what he wrote through your glass.”
He offered the glass to Fenway; but Fenway shook his head.
“You’ve read it?” he asked.
“I have read it, and Nordhall has read it.”
“Then tell me what it says.”
“You wouldn’t rather look at it first yourself?”
“Why should I? It is no longer a private document.”
“It’s not a document at all, sir, in the accepted sense of the word. It’s the impression of a document, graven indelibly on these two sheets of paper, and signed with your brother’s signature. There are other such impressions in the book of views, also signed by him, but they’re fragmentary. This is practically whole.”
“If—as you seem to suggest it alleges anything against my brother, it’s a forgery.”
Gamadge looked at the other in surprise. “Against him? It’s much to his credit; it bears out all that I’ve heard or gathered about your brother. I’ll read it to you, Mr. Fenway, but only if you’ll sit down to listen.”
Fenway went over to the fire and sank into his chair. Gamadge could not see his face; he read:
“My dearest Belle,
Since as you tell me our poor little Alden cannot live, we must certainly adopt your boy. I am glad to think that you will be comforted by having a child of your own still with you, and that he is so near you now.
You know how much impressed I was, the last time I saw him, by his intelligence and health and good looks. I shall be more than happy to have him as one of the family. We can arrange the adoption without the slightest risk to you; it will seem natural enough for us to do it.
I have, as you asked, said nothing here about Alden’s hopeless condition, and shall say nothing until you give me leave. I understand that you want to be alone with me in this sorrow.
I shall be with you very soon.
Cort.”
There was absolute silence in the library. When at last Gamadge reluctantly and slowly raised his eyes, he saw that Fenway had turned his head and was looking at him. “Does it mean,” asked a voice that was Fenway’s and yet not his own, “that that young man upstairs—”
“He is nothing to you, sir.”
“Then he’s not—if he’s not Alden, he’s sane.”
“Yes.”
“Belle has been cheating us all these years.” After a pause he added: “And her son has been malingering all his life.”
“I dare say he never had much occasion to play his part until the voyage home, after he and his mother met Mrs. Grove. I suppose all the talk of specialists and sanatoria in Europe was pure invention; we can’t check up on them, you know. And he’s never had tests made by specialists here, has he? Wasn’t he protected from them by Thurley, who never doubted him at all? Why should he have doubted him? That’s why they stayed with you, you know; to avoid the draft tests and enquiries. Thurley would protect him there.”
“Caroline was afraid of him.”
“She must have seen him off guard once or twice, and realized unconsciously that he was sane.”
“In God’s name why did they do it?”
Gamadge, looking down at the view of Fenbrook, asked a question in his turn: “What was to become of that half of the Fenway property if your brother died childless?”
Fenway twisted in his chair to look at the questioner. Gamadge came and sat opposite him.
Fenway said: “It returned to the estate; it would eventually go to Caroline.”
“So I thought, from what little I heard about it. I think Alden died before your brother did, Mr. Fenway.”
“What!”
“He died in this country; Alden was alone with his mother abroad.”
“The villa was isolated, and her servants didn’t sleep on the place. Cort was anxious about her, but she liked to be free of them at night. She was fearless, fearless.”
“Did you cable her when he was taken ill?”
“Immediately.”
“She made plans then; she saw how she could retain the fortune for herself and her own son. I suppose he can’t be much older than Alden would have been if he had lived, two or three years. There wasn’t any rumor or scandal about her, I suppose?”
“No, or my father and mother wouldn’t have allowed the marriage.” He added: “I mean they wouldn’t have financed it. She was very lively and gay, and her mother would have concealed anything; got her to Europe in spite of the other war. Cort was there of course, almost from the first; as a volunteer in France, and then with our army. He would have helped her—it was like him. Yes; that romantic marriage was protection for her; and of course my brother would befriend her boy.”
“Allow her her virtues,” said Gamadge. “If your brother loved her, she loved her eldest son—passionately.”
“Is that virtue?” Fenway’s voice was dry. He went on: “What kind of creature can he be? How can he have carried on such a deception, day and night? I should think he would have gone mad.”
“I think he lived his own life at night, Mr. Fenway. I think he was often out of this house, and that when your daughter brought her dog here he killed it, so that it wouldn’t bark when he went and came.”
“Monstrous!”
“And when the draft menace was over, he and his mother would have gone away together, and he would have dropped his mask. They would have worked out some arrangement by which he might safely have drawn his income after her death. Keep your mind on that income, Mr. Fenway; it was worth everything to them, worth a lot of risk.”
Fenway suddenly looked up. “Mrs. Grove…”
“With Mrs. Grove we arrive at tragedy. Last Thursday afternoon she was in this library, she was interested in the last consignment which her niece had sent down from Fenbrook; the poor woman was very much interested indeed in the book of views, in all things pertaining to you and your family. She found the picture of old Fenbrook; no doubt she had heard of it from you. She found those marks on it, deciphered them, and went directly upstairs to Mrs. Fenway. She insisted on full confession of the conspiracy to you, which meant the loss of what they had risked so much to keep; half the Fenway fortune. She acted without due thought; she couldn’t realize in a moment that the old friend over whom she had once had so much influence, that the young man who had long been to her a nonentity, would commit murder. She confronted two tigers.
“They have been looking for the picture; meanwhile, they have been keeping her as much a prisoner as if she had been in a condemned cell. She was in one; she could only have escaped alive by confiding fully in me. She wouldn’t; do you know why?”
Fenway shook his head.
“Sublime folly! She wouldn’t confide this family secret to anyone but you; her devotion to you and yours cost her her life. But I was wrong a moment ago; she might have saved it this afternoon if she had waited to speak until you were actually there. She didn’t know that they had a prearranged plan for an emergency. The moment they knew that she was going to speak they killed her, and the fellow shot his mother through the arm. I’m sure they’d rehearsed it.”
After a pause Fenway spoke slowly: “I liked her. Caroline didn’t; but I always liked her.”
“Her loyalty to you was absolute, and her affection for her niece Hilda was very great. If it hadn’t been, those two couldn’t have kept her helpless and silent by telling her that there was a trap at Fenbrook.”
“There actually is one?”
“There is one, and it was not made only to frighten her; it would have been used as evidence against her after her death. It was the fear of the trap that made her call me in, God help her.”
“Called you in?”
“By means of a scrap of paper thrown out of a window. The message was vague—it had to be. Imagine her position, hemmed in by those two desperate creatures; and she had nearly two weeks of it! But they couldn’t budge her, and she couldn’t move until I was able to tell her that I had read her instructions correctly and removed Hilda from Fenbrook. Then she acted—half a minute too soon; and then they acted—as they had planned to act if worst came to worst. They could do nothing else; they had to let the picture go; they hoped that if they hadn’t been able to find it it wouldn’t be found.”
Fenway asked: “They meant to kill her even if she gave up the picture to them?”
“I don’t doubt it. They didn’t hesitate to kill Mr. Mott Fenway.”
“They killed Mott!”
“Because he had invited me to come here and look for the lost view. He was against them, and they were afraid of him.”
Fenway’s hand clenched. Gamadge went on: “Your house has been haunted by a sane, intelligent, ruthless man and a woman who would have died for him. Mrs. Grove stood like a rock between them and the ultimate success of the most cynical and heartless imposture I ever heard of. She has accomplished her purpose, and I don’t think she would have grudged the cost to herself. And I tried as best I could to help her accomplish that purpose; for I didn’t look for the picture, and invade the Fenway privacy—” he smiled a little—“until she was no longer able to expose the conspiracy. But I wish she had let me save her.”
“Great Heaven, if she only had!”
“There must be something that inspires devotion in you Fenways, sir.”
“If you had only warned us that something was wrong!”
“I couldn’t for two reasons: I didn’t know what the cost might be to my client—her instructions were as I said very vague; and I had no evidence.”
“No evidence?”
“Against your sister-in-law and her eldest son? No. The evidence,” said Gamadge, pointing to the view of Fenbrook, “is there. It’s all Mrs. Grove had, and Nordhall and I first saw it twenty minutes ago.”
“Nordhall…” Fenway got to his feet. “Where is he? What did he do?”
“I don’t think you’ll go through the agony of your sister-in-law’s arrest and trial, Mr. Fenway. They didn’t search her for a pistol, I suppose.”
“What do you mean?”
“That shot we heard sounded like the other ones—sounded as if it came from one of those little guns. I imagine she had a pair of them, and that when he shouted to her that it was all up with him she used the other one on herself. Do you think she’d live if he couldn’t?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mr. Bargrave
NORDHALL came into the room quietly; he had regained all his calm, and his manner was that of one who brings grave tidings. He said: “I don’t know whether you’ll think it’s bad news or not, Mr. Fenway, or whether it’s news at all; perhaps Mr. Gamadge guessed and told you.”
Fenway spoke with frozen courtesy. He was like a man half stunned, or in a dream: “That my sister-in-law is dead?”
“She’s dead. The minute I told that fellow that we’d found a letter on that picture there, he shoved open the door of his room and shouted out to her that it was all over. She must have had the other little gun in the pocket of her robe all the time. She was lying on top of the bed—hadn’t let the nurse undress her or give her a sedative; she was waiting to make sure everything was all right, that they’d got away with murder. She pulled the gun out and shot herself.”
After a moment Fenway spoke in a louder voice: “Where is Caroline?”
“All right; up on the top floor with Miss Grove. We wouldn’t let them come down. Craddock came—ran half way and then jumped the banisters; but he pulled up short when he saw that fellow—the impostor—I can tell you! Quite a shock for him. But he has Miss Grove to think of. He’s with her now. That’s a nice little lady,” said Nordhall, an eye on Fenway’s expressionless face. “Nice pair they make. Craddock says they’re going to be together from now on, even if they starve to death; till they pass him for the war, of course. The little lady says so too.”
Fenway seemed to come to life at that; he slightly shook his head. “Starve? Craddock must be raving. They won’t starve. I shall make Hilda my responsibility until he can take care of her.”
Nordhall, pleased with his tactics, went on: “I’m glad we didn’t tell her anything about her aunt being suspected of blackmail and the rest of it. Touch and go, wasn’t it? You know, when I saw those marks on that picture, read that letter, the whole thing shifted around in my head like one of those things we used to have in the parlor—what do you call them? Kaleidoscopes. Pattern shifted around in my head. I’ll tell you something, Mr. Fenway; this has turned out better for you than you realize now. I know it’s tough now, but at least you won’t have to see your brother’s wife in court convicted of fraud and conspiracy, and probably of being accessory to murder. Of course that fellow may swear it was all his own idea, and that he coerced her by threats.”
Gamadge moved a shoulder. “She wouldn’t have let him swear to that.”
“The point is,” continued Nordhall, “that just now he’s ready to say anything. He wants to talk to you, Mr. Fenway.”
Fenway raised a blank face. “Now?”
“I know how you feel, sir, nobody on earth you’d less rather see. Eerie, too; you won’t know him. Craddock was knocked silly for a minute. But you’re prepared, and to tell you the truth you’ll be doing us a great favor. He may not talk again. He’s a feller that does what he starts out to do, and just now he’s all keyed up to tell you the whole thing. The statement will be a voluntary statement, you and Mr. Gamadge will be witnesses, it will clear up a lot of things you’d like to know yourself, and I’ve got a stenographer.”
There was a long silence. Then Fenway, leaning back in his chair and averting his face, said in a low voice: “I’ll see him.”
“Thanks very much. People like you can be depended on, Mr. Fenway, and that’s a fact.” Nordhall turned to the doorway and jerked his head. A uniformed man moved out of sight, and then returned.
