The Case of Jennie Brice (serial, Everybody's)/Part 1
[PART I]
WE HAVE just had another flood, bad enough, but only a foot or two of water on the first floor. Yesterday we got the mud shoveled out of the cellar and found Peter, the spaniel that Mr. Ladley left when he “went away.” The flood, and the fact that it was Mr. Ladley's dog whose body was found half buried in the basement fruit closet, brought back to me the strange events of that other flood five years ago, when the water reached more than half-way to the second story, and brought with it, to some, mystery and sudden death, and to me the worst case of “shingles” I have ever seen.
“PROBABLY MR. PITMAN WAS A MAN," SHE SAID, FIXING HER HAIR. “MY HUSBAND IS A FIEND, A DEVIL.”
My name is Pitman—in this narrative. It is not really Pitman, but that does well enough. I belong to an old Pittsburgh family. I was born on Penn Avenue, when that was the best part of town, and I lived, until I was fifteen, very close to what is now the Pittsburgh Club. It was a dwelling then: I have forgotten who lived there.
I was a girl in 'seventy-seven, during the railroad riots, and I recall driving in the carriage over to one of the Allegheny hills, and seeing the yards burning, and a great noise of shooting from across the river. It was the next year that I ran away from school to marry Mr. Pitman, and I have not known my family since. We were never reconciled, although I came back to Pittsburgh after twenty years of wandering. Mr. Pitman was dead: the old city called me, and I came. I had a hundred dollars or so, and I took a house in lower Allegheny, where, because the place is partly inundated every spring, rents are cheap, and I kept boarders. My house was always orderly and clean, and although the neighborhood had a bad name, a good many theatrical people stopped with me. Five minutes across the bridge, and they were in the theatre district. Allegheny at that time, I believe, was still an independent city. But since then it has allied itself with Pittsburgh: it is now the North Side.
I was glad to get back. I worked hard, but I made my rent and my living, and a little over. Now and then on summer evenings I went to one of the parks, and, sitting on a bench, watched the children playing around, and looked at my sister's house, closed for the summer. It is a very large house: her butler once had his wife boarding with me—a nice little woman.
It is curious to recall that, at that time, four years ago, I had never seen my niece, Lida Harvey, and then to think that, only a day or so ago, she came in her automobile, as far as she dared, and then sat there, waving to me, while the police patrol brought across in a skiff the basket of provisions she had sent me.
I wonder what she would have thought, had she known that the elderly woman in a calico wrapper with an old overcoat over it, and a pair of rubber boots, was her full aunt!
The flood and the sight of Lida both brought back the case of Jennie Brice. For even then, Lida and Mr. Howell were interested in each other.
This is April. The flood of 1907 was earlier, in March. It had been a long, hard winter, with ice gorges in all the upper valleys. Then, in early March, there came a thaw. The gorges broke up and began to come down, filling the rivers with crushing, grinding ice.
There are three rivers at Pittsburgh, the Allegheny and the Monongahela uniting there at the Point to form the Ohio. And all three were covered with broken ice, logs, and all sorts of d6bris from the upper valleys.
A warning was sent out from the Weather Bureau, and I got my carpets ready to lift that morning. That was on the fourth of March, a Sunday. Mr. Ladley and his wife, Jennie Brice, had the parlor bedroom, and the room behind it. Mrs. Ladley, or Miss Brice, as she preferred to be known, had a small part at a local theatre which kept a permanent company. Her husband was in that business too, but he had nothing to do. It was the wife who paid the bills, and a lot of quarreling they did about it.
I knocked at the door at ten o'clock, and Mr. Ladley opened it. He was a short man, rather stout and getting bald, and he always had a cigarette. Even yet, the parlor carpet smells of them.
“What do you want?” he asked sharply, holding the door open about an inch.
“The water's coming up very fast, Mr. Ladley,” I said. “It's up to the swing-shelf in the cellar now. I'd like to take up the carpet and move the piano.”
“Come back in an hour or so,” he snapped, and tried to close the door. But I had got my toe in the crack.
“I'll have to have the piano moved, Mr. Ladley,” I said. “You'd better put off what you are doing.”
I thought he was probably writing. He spent most of the day writing, using the wash-stand as a desk, and it kept me busy with oxalic acid taking ink spots out of the splasher and the towels. He was writing a play, and talked a lot about the Shuberts having promised to star him in it when it was finished.
“Hell!” he said, and, turning, spoke to somebody in the room.
“We can go into the back room,” I heard him say, and he closed the door. When he opened it again, the parlor was empty. I called in Terry, the Irishman who does odd jobs for me now and then, and we both got to work at the tacks in the carpet, Terry working by the window, and I by the door into the back parlor, which the Ladleys used as a bedroom.
That was how I happened to hear what I afterward told the police.
Some one—a man, but not Mr. Ladley— was talking. Mrs. Ladley broke in; “I won't do it!” she said flatly. “Why should I help him? He doesn't help me. He loafs here all day, smoking and sleeping, and sits up all night drinking and keeping me awake.”
The voice went on again, as if in reply to this, and I heard a rattle of glasses, as though they were pouring drinks. They always had whisky, even when they were behind with their board.
“That's all very well,” Mrs. Ladley said. I could always hear her, she having a theatrical sort of voice—one that carries. “But what about the prying she-devil that runs the house?”
“Hush, for God's sake!” broke in Mr. Ladley, and after that they spoke in whispers. Even with my ear against the panel, I could not catch a word.
PERHAPS IT WAS THE CANDLE-LIGHT, BUT HE LOOKED GHOST-WHITE AND HAGGARD
The men came just then to move the piano, and by the time we had taken it and the furniture up-stairs, the water was over the kitchen floor, and creeping forward into the hall. I'd never seen the river come up so fast. By noon the yard was full of floating ice, and at three that afternoon the police skiff was on the front street, and I was wading around in rubber boots, taking the pictures off the walls.
I was too busy to see who the Ladleys' visitor was, and he had gone when I remembered him again. The Ladleys moved up to the second-story front, which was empty, and Mr. Reynolds, who was in the silk department in a store across the river, had the room just behind.
I put up a coal-stove in a back room next the bathroom, and managed to cook the dinner there. I was washing up the dishes when Mr. Reynolds came in. As it was Sunday, he was in his slippers and had a newspaper in his hand.
“What's the matter with the Ladleys?” he asked. “I can't read for their quarreling.”
“Booze, probably,” I said. “When you've lived in the flood district as long as I have, Mr. Reynolds, you'll know that the rising of the river is a signal for every man in the vicinity to stop work and get full. The fuller the river, the fuller the male population.”
“Then this flood will probably make them drink themselves to death!” he said. “It's a lulu.”
“It's the neighborhood's annual debauch. The women are busy keeping the babies from getting drowned in the cellars, or they'd get full too. I hope, since it's come this far, it will come farther, so the landlord will have to paper the parlor.”
That was at three o'clock. At four Mr. Ladley went down the stairs, and I heard him getting into a skiff in the lower hall. There were boats going back and forth all the time, carrying crowds of curious people, and taking the flood sufferers to the comer grocery, where they were lowering groceries in a basket on a rope from an upper window.
I had been making tea when I heard Mr. Ladley go out. I fixed a tray with a cup of it and some crackers, and took it to their door. I had never liked Mrs. Ladley, but it was chilly in the house with the gas shut off, and the lower floor full of ice-water. And it is hard enough to keep boarders in the flood district.
She did not answer to my knock, so I opened the door and went in. She was at the window, looking after him, and the brown valise, that figured in the case later, was open on the floor. Over the foot of the bed was the black and white dress, with the red collar.
When I spoke to her, she turned around quickly. She was a tall woman, about twenty-eight, with very white teeth, and yellow hair which she parted a little to one side and drew down over her ears. She had a sullen face and large, well-shaped hands, with her nails long and very pointed.
“The 'she-devil' has brought you some tea,” I said. “Where shall she put it?”
“'She-devil'!” she repeated, raising her eyebrows. “It's a very thoughtful she-devil. Who called you that?”
But, with the sight of the valise and the fear that they might be leaving, I thought it best not to quarrel. She had left the window and, going to the bureau, had picked up her nail-file.
“Never mind,” I said. “I hope you are not going away. These floods don't last, and they're a benefit. Plenty of the people around here rely on 'em every year to wash out their cellars.”
“No, I'm not going away,” she replied lazily. “I'm taking that dress to Miss Hope at the theatre. She is going to wear it in 'Charlie's Aunt' next week. She hasn't half enough of a wardrobe to play leads in stock. Look at this thumb-nail, broken to the quick!”
If I had only looked to see which thumb it was! But I was putting the tea-tray on the wash-stand, and moving Mr. Ladley's papers to find room for it. Peter, the spaniel, sat up and begged for a lump of sugar, and I gave it to him.
“Where is Mr. Ladley?” I asked.
“Gone out to see the river.”
“I hope he'll be careful. There's a drowning or two every year in these floods.”
“Then I hope he won't,” she said calmly. “Do you know what I was doing when you came in? I was looking after his boat, and hoping it had a hole in it.”
“You won't feel that way to-morrow, Mrs. Ladley,” I protested, shocked. “You're just nervous and put out. Most men have their ugly times. Many a time I wished Mr. Pitman was gone—until he went. Then I'd have given a good bit to have him back again.”
She was standing in front of the dresser, fixing her hair over her ears. She turned and looked at me over her shoulder.
“Probably Mr. Pitman was a man,” she said. “My husband is a fiend, a devil.”
Well, a good many women have said that to me at different times. But just let me say such a thing to them, or repeat their own words to them the next day, and they would fly at me in a fury. So I said nothing, and put the cream into her tea.
I never saw her again.
CHAPTER II
There is not much sleeping done in the flood district during a spring flood. The gas was shut off, and I gave Mr. Reynolds and the Ladleys each a lamp. I sat in the back room that I had made into a temporary kitchen, with a candle, and with a bedquilt around my shoulders. The water rose fast in the lower hall, but by midnight, at the seventh step, it stopped rising and stood still. I always have a skiff during the flood season, and as the water rose, I tied it to one spindle of the staircase after another.
I made myself a cup of tea, and at one o'clock I stretched out on a sofa for a few hours' sleep. I think I had been sleeping only an hour or so, when some one touched me on the shoulder and I started up. It was Mr. Reynolds, partly dressed.
“Some one has been in the house, Mrs. Pitman,” he said. “They went away just now in the boat.”
“Perhaps it was Peter,” I suggested. “That dog is always wandering around at night.”
“Not unless Peter can row a boat,” said Mr. Reynolds dryly.
I got up, being already fully dressed, and, taking the candle, we went to the staircase. I noticed that it was a minute or so after two o'clock, as we left the room. The boat was gone, not untied, but cut loose. The end of the rope was still fastened to the stair-rail. I sat down on the stairs and looked at Mr. Reynolds.
“It's gone!” I said. “If the house catches fire, we'll have to drown.”
“It's rather curious, when you consider it.” We both spoke softly, not to disturb the Ladleys. “I've been awake, and I heard no boat come in. And yet, if no one came in a boat, and came from the street, they would have had to swim in.”
I felt queer and creepy. The street door was open, of course, and the lights going beyond. It gave me a strange feeling to sit there in the darkness on the stairs, with the arch of the front door like the entrance to a cavern, and see the lights on the water, and now and then a chunk of ice slide into view, turn around in the eddy, and pass on. It was bitter cold, too, and the wind was rising.
“I'll go through the house,” said Mr. Reynolds. “There's likely nothing worse the matter than some drunken mill-hand on a vacation while the mills are under water. But I'd better look.”
He left me, and I sat there alone in the darkness. I had a presentiment of something wrong, but I tried to think it was only discomfort and the cold. The water, driven in by the wind, swirled at my feet. And something dark floated in and lodged on the step below. I reached down and touched it. It was a dead kitten. I had never known a dead cat to bring me anything but bad luck, and here was one washed in at my very feet.
Mr. Reynolds came back soon, and reported the house quiet and in order.
“But I found Peter shut up in one of the third-floor rooms,” he said. “Did you put him there?”
I had not, and said so; but as the dog went everywhere, and the door might have blown shut, we did not attach much importance to that at the time.
Well, the skiff was gone, and there was no use worrying about it until morning. I went back to the sofa to keep warm, but I left my candle lighted and my door open. I did not sleep: the dead cat was on my mind, and, as if it were not bad enough to have it washed in at my feet, about four in the morning Peter, prowling uneasily, discovered it and brought it in and put it on my couch, wet and stiff, poor little thing.
I looked at the clock. It was a quarter after four, and except for the occasional crunch of one ice-cake hitting another in the yard, everything was quiet. And then I heard the stealthy sound of oars in the lower hall.
I am not a brave woman. I lay there, hoping Mr. Reynolds would hear and open his door. But he was sleeping soundly. Peter snarled and ran out into the hall, and the next moment I heard Mr. Ladley speaking. “Down, Peter,” he said. “Down. Go and lie down.”
I took my candle and went out into the hall. Mr. Ladley was stooping over the boat, trying to tie it to the staircase. The rope was short, having been cut, and he was having trouble. He looked up quickly when he heard me. Perhaps it was the candle-light, but he looked ghost-white and haggard.
“I borrowed your boat, Mrs. Pitman,” he said, civilly enough. “Mrs. Ladley was not well, and I—I went to the drug-store.”
“You've been more than two hours going to the drug-store, then,” I said coldly.
He muttered something about not finding any open at first, and went into his room. He closed and locked the door behind him, and although Peter whined and scratched, he did not let him in.
“WELL, SHE'LL NEVER WEAR IT AGAIN.”
He looked so agitated that I thought I had been harsh, and that perhaps she was really ill. I knocked at the door, and asked if I could do anything. But he only called “No” curtly through the door and asked me to take that infernal dog away.
I went back to bed and tried to sleep, for the water had dropped an inch or so on the stairs, and I knew the danger was over. Peter came, shivering, at dawn, and got onto the sofa with me. I put an end of the quilt over him, and he stopped shivering after a time and went to sleep.
The dog was company. I lay there, wide awake, thinking about Mr. Pitman's death, and how I had come, by degrees, to be keeping a cheap boarding-house in the flood district, and to having to take impudence from everybody who chose to rent a room from me, and to being called a she-devil. From that I got to thinking again about the Ladleys, and how she had said he was a fiend, and to doubting about his having gone out for medicine for her. I dozed off again at daylight, and, being worn out, I slept heavily.
At seven o'clock Mr. Reynolds came to the door, dressed for the store. He was a tall man of about fifty, neat and orderly in his habits, and he always remembered that I had seen better days, and treated me as a lady.
“Never mind about breakfast for me this morning, Mrs. Pitman,” he said. “I'll get a cup of coffee at the other end of the bridge. 1 see the boat is back, safe enough. I'll take it and send it back with Terry.”
He turned, and went along the hall and down to the boat. I heard him push off from the stairs with an oar and row out into the street. Peter followed him to the stairs.
At a quarter after seven Mr. Ladley came out and called to me. “Just bring in a cup of coffee and some toast,” he said. “Enough for one.”
He went back and slammed his door, and I made his coffee. I steeped a cup of tea for Mrs. Ladley at the same time. He opened the door just wide enough for the tray, and took it without so much as a “thank you.” He had a cigarette in his mouth as usual, and I could see a fire in the grate and smell something like scorching cloth.
“I hope Mrs. Ladley is better,” I said, getting my foot in the crack of the door, so he could not quite close it. It smelled to me as if he had accidentally set fire to something with his cigarette, and I tried to see into the room.
“What about Mrs. Ladley?” he snapped.
“You said she was ill last night.”
“Oh, yes! Well, she wasn't very sick. She's better.”
“Shall I bring her some tea?”
“Take your foot away!” he ordered. “No. She doesn't want tea. She's not here.”
“Not here!”
“Good heavens!” he snarled. “Is her going away anything to make such a fuss about? The Lord knows I'd be glad to get out of this, infernal pig-wallow' myself.”
“If you mean my house—” I began. But he had pulled himself together and was more polite when he answered. “I mean the neighborhood. Your house is all that could be desired for the money. If we do not have linen sheets and double cream, we are paying muslin and milk prices.”
Either my nose was growing accustomed to the odor, or it was dying away: I took my foot away from the door. “When did Mrs. Ladley leave?” I asked.
“This morning, very early. I rowed her to Federal Street.”
“You couldn't have had much sleep,” I said dryly. For he looked horrible. There were lines around his eyes, which were red, and his lips looked dry and cracked.
“She's not in the piece this week at the theatre,” he said, licking his lips and looking past me, not at me. “She'll be back by Saturday.”
I did not believe him. I do not think he imagined that I did. He shut the door in my face, and it caught poor Peter by the nose. The dog ran off howling, but although Mr. Ladley had been as fond of the animal as it was in his nature to be fond of anything, he paid no attention. As I started down the hall after him, I saw what Peter had been carrying—a slipper of Mrs. Ladley's. It was soaked with water; evidently Peter had found it floating at the foot of the stairs.
Although the idea of murder had not entered my head at that time, the slipper gave me a turn. I picked it up and looked at it—a black one with a beaded toe, short in the vamp and high-heeled, the sort most actresses wear. Then I went back and knocked at the door of the front room again.
“What the devil do you want now?” he called from beyond the door.
“Here's a slipper of Mrs. Ladley's,” I said. “Peter found it floating in the lower hall.”
He opened the door wide, and let me in. The room was in tolerable order, much better than when Mrs. Ladley was about. He looked at the slipper, but he did not touch it. “I don't think that is hers,” he said.
“I've seen her wear it a hundred times.”
“Well, she'll never wear it again.” And then, seeing me stare, he added: “It's ruined with the water. Throw it out. And, by the way, I'm sorry, but I set fire to one of the pillow-slips—dropped asleep and my cigarette did the rest. Just put it on the bill.”
He pointed to the bed. One of the pillows had no slip, and the ticking cover had a scorch or two on it. I went over and looked at it.
“The pillow' will have to be paid for too, Mr. Ladley,” I said. “And there's a sign nailed on the door that forbids smoking in bed. If you are going to set fire to things, I shall have to charge extra.”
“Really!” he jeered, looking at me with his cold, fishy eyes. “Is there any sign on the door saying that boarders are charged extra for seven feet of filthy river in the bedrooms?”
I was never a match for him, and I make it a principle never to bandy words with my boarders. I took the pillow and the slipper and went out. The telephone was ringing on the stair landing. It was the theatre, asking for Miss Brice.
“She has gone away,” I said.
“What do you mean? Moved away?”
“Gone for a few days' vacation,” I replied. “She isn't playing this week, is she?”
“Wait a moment,” said the voice. There was a hum of conversation from the other end, and then another man came to the telephone.
“Can you find out where Miss Brice has gone?”
“I'll see.”
I went to Ladleys' door and knocked. Mr. Ladley answered from just beyond.
“The theatre is asking where Mrs. Ladley is.”
“Tell them I don't know,” he snarled, and shut the door. I took his message to the telephone.
Whoever it was swore and hung up the receiver.
All the morning I was uneasy—I hardly knew why, Peter felt it as I did. There was no sound from the Ladleys' room, and the house was quiet, except for the lapping water on the stairs and the police patrol going back and forth.
At eleven o'clock a boy in the neighborhood, paddling on a raft, fell into the water and was drowned. I watched the police boat go past, carrying his little cold body, and after that I was good for nothing. I went and sat with Peter on the stairs. The dog's conduct had been strange all morning. He had sat just above the water, looking at it and whimpering. Perhaps he was expecting another kitten—or perhaps
It is hard to say how ideas first enter one's mind. But the notion that Mr. Ladley had killed his wife and thrown her body into the water came to me as I sat there. All at once I seemed to see it all: the quarreling the day before, the night trip in the boat, the water-soaked slipper, his haggard face that morning—even the way the spaniel sat and stared at the flood.
Terry brought the boat back at half-past eleven, towing it behind another.
“Well,” I said, from the stairs, “I hope you've had a pleasant morning.”
“What doing?” he asked, not looking at me.
“Rowing about the streets. You've had that boat for four hours.”
He tied it up without a word to me, but he spoke to the dog. “Good morning, Peter,” he said. “It's nice weather—for fishes, ain't it?”
He picked out a bit of floating wood from the water and, showing it to the dog, flung it into the parlor. Peter went after it with a splash. He was pretty fat, and when he came back I heard him wheezing. But what he brought back was not the stick of wood. It was the knife I use for cutting bread. It had been on a shelf in the room where I had slept the night before, and now Peter brought it out of the flood where its wooden handle had kept it afloat. The blade was broken off short.
It is not unusual to find one's household goods floating around during flood-time. More than once I've lost a chair or two, and seen it after the water had gone down, new-scrubbed and painted, in Molly Maguire's kitchen next door. And perhaps now and then a bit of luck would come to me—a dog kennel or a chicken-house, or a kitchen table, or even, as happened once, a month-old baby in a wooden cradle, that lodged against my back fence, and had come forty miles, as it turned out, with no worse mishap than a cold in its head.
But the knife was different. I had put it on the mantel over the stove I was using upstairs the night before, and hadn't touched it since. As I sat staring at it, Terry took it from Peter and handed it to me.
“Better give me a penny, Mrs. Pitman,” he said, in his impudent Irish way. “I hate to give you a knife. It may cut our friendship.”
I reached over to hit him a clout on the head, but I did not. The sunlight was coming in through the window at the top of the stairs, and shining on the rope that was tied to the banister. The end of the rope was covered with stains, brown, with a glint of red in them.
I got up shivering. “You can get the meat at the butcher's, Terry,” I said, “and come back for me in a half-hour.” Then I turned and went up-stairs, weak in the knees, to put on my hat and coat. I had made up my mind that there had been murder done.
III
I looked at my clock as I went downstairs. It was just twelve-thirty. I thought of telephoning for Mr. Reynolds to meet me, but it was his lunch-hour, and besides, I was afraid to telephone from the house while Mr. Ladley was in it.
Peter had been whining again. When I came down the stairs he had stopped whimpering and was wagging his tail. A strange boat had put into the hallway and was coming back. Mr. Ladley, with his hat in his hand, reached the landing just behind me, but, on seeing the boat, turned and went back to his room.
“Now', old boy!” somebody was saying from the boat. “Steady, old chap! I've got something for you.”
A little man, elderly and alert, was standing up in the boat, poling it along with an oar. Peter gave vent to joyful yelps. The elderly gentleman brought his boat to a stop at the foot of the stairs and, reaching down into a tub at his feet, held up a large piece of raw liver. Peter almost went crazy, and I remembered suddenly that I had forgotten to feed the poor beast for more than a day.
“Would you like it?” asked the gentleman. Peter sat up, as he had been taught to do, and barked. The gentleman reached down again, got a wooden platter from a stack of them at his feet and, placing the liver on it, put it on the step. The whole thing was so neat and businesslike that I could only gaze.
“That's a well-trained dog, madam,” said the elderly gentleman, beaming at Peter over his glasses. “You should not have neglected it.”
“The flood put him out of my mind,” I explained, humbly enough, for I was ashamed.
“Exactly. Do you know how many starving dogs and cats I have found this morning?” He took a note-book out of his pocket and glanced at it. “Forty-eight. Forty-eight, madam! And ninety-three cats! I have found them marooned in trees, clinging to fences, floating on barrels, and I have found them in comfortable houses where there was no excuse for their neglect. Well, I must be moving on. I have the report of a cat with a new litter in the loft of a stable near here.”
He wiped his hands carefully on a fresh paper napkin, of which also a heap rested on one of the seats of the boat, and picked up an oar, smiling benevolently at Peter. Then, suddenly, he bent over and looked at the stained rope-end tied to the stair-rail.
“What's that?” he said.
“That's what I'm going to find out,” I replied. I glanced up at the Ladleys' door, but it was closed.
The little man dropped his oar and, fumbling in his pockets, pulled out a small magnifying-glass. He bent over, holding to the rail, and inspected the stains with the glass. I had taken a fancy to him at once, and in spite of my excitement I had to smile a little.
“Humph!” he said, and looked up at me. “That's blood. Why did you cut the boat loose?”
“I didn't,” I said. “If that is blood, I want to know how it got there. That was a new rope last night.” I glanced at the Ladleys' door again, and he followed my eyes.
“I wonder,” he said, raising his voice a little, “if I come into your kitchen, if you will allow me to fry a little of that liver. There's a wretched Maltese in a tree at the corner of Fourth Street that won't touch it, raw.”
I saw that he wanted to talk to me, so I turned around and led the way to the temporary kitchen I had made.
“Now,” he said briskly, when he had closed the door, “there's something wrong here. Perhaps if you tell me, I can help. If I can't, it will do you good to talk about it. My name's Holcombe, retired merchant. Apply to First National Bank for references.”
“THAT'S A WELL-TRAINED DOG, MADAM.”
“I'm not sure there is anything wrong,” I began. “I guess I'm only nervous, and thinking little things are big ones. There's nothing to tell.”
“Nonsense. I come down the street in my boat. A white-faced gentleman with a cigarette looks out from a window when I stop at the door, and ducks back when I glance up. I come in and find a pet dog, obviously overfed at ordinary times, whining with hunger on the stairs. As I prepare to feed him, a pale woman comes down, trying to put a right-hand glove on her left hand, and with her jacket wrong side out. What am I to think?”
I started and looked at my coat. He was right. And when, as I tried to take it off, he helped me, and even patted me on the shoulder—what with his kindness, and the long morning alone, worrying, and the sleepless night, I began to cry. He had a clean handkerchief in my hand before I had time to think of one.
“That's it,” he said. “It will do you good, only don't make a noise about it. If it's a husband on the annual flood spree, don't worry, madam. They always come around in time to whitewash the cellars.”
“It isn't a husband,” I sniffled.
“Tell me about it,” he said. There was something so kindly in his face, and it was so long since I had had a bit of human sympathy, that I almost broke down again.
I sat there, with a crowd of children paddling on a raft outside the window, and Molly Maguire, next door, hauling the morning's milk up in a pail fastened to a rope, her doorway being too narrow to admit the milkman's boat, and I told him the whole story.
“Humph!” he said, when I had finished. “It's curious, but—you can't prove a murder unless you can produce a body.”
“When the river goes down, we'll find the body,” I asserted, shivering. “It's in the parlor.”
“Then why doesn't he try to get away?”
“I think he is ready to go now. He only went back when your boat came in.”
Mr. Holcombe ran to the door and, flinging it open, peered into the lower hall. He was too late. His boat was gone, tub of liver, pile of wooden platters and all!
We hurried to the room the Ladleys had occupied. It was empty. From the window, as we looked out, we could see the boat, almost a square away. It had stopped where, the street being higher, a door-step rose above the flood. On the step was sitting a forlorn yellow puppy. As we stared, Mr. Ladley stopped the boat, looked back at us, bent over, placed a piece of liver on a platter, and reached it over to the dog. Then, rising in the boat, he bowed, with his hat over his heart, in our direction, sat down calmly, and rowed around the corner out of sight.
Mr. Holcombe was in a frenzy of rage. He jumped up and down, shaking his fist out the window after the retreating boat He ran down the staircase, only to come back and look out the window again. The police boat was not in sight, but the Maguire children had worked their raft around to the street and were under the window. He leaned out and called to them.
“A quarter each, boys,” he said, “if you'll take me on that raft to the nearest pavement.”
“Money first,” said the oldest boy, holding his cap.
But Mr. Holcombe did not wait. He swung out over the window-sill, holding by his hands, and lit fairly in the center of the raft.
“Don't touch anything in that room until I come back,” he called to me, and, jerking the pole from one of the boys, propelled the raft with amazing speed down the street.
The liver on the stove was burning. There was a smell of scorching through the rooms and a sort of bluish haze of smoke. I hurried back and took it off. By the time I had cleaned the pan, Mr. Holcombe was back again, in his own boat. He had found it at the end of the next street, where the flood ceased, but no sign of Ladley anywhere. He had not seen the police boat.
“Perhaps that is just as well,” he said philosophically. “We can't go to the police with a wet slipper and a blood-stained rope and accuse a man of murder. We have to have a body.”
“He killed her,” I said, obstinately. “She told me yesterday he was a fiend. He killed her and threw the body in the water.”
“Very likely. But he didn't throw it here.”
But in spite of that, he went over the parlor and all the lower hall with his boat, feeling every foot of the floor with an oar, and finally, at the back end, he looked up at me as I stood on the stairs.
“There's something here,” he said.
I went cold all over, and had to clutch the railing. But when Terry had come, and the two of them brought the thing to the surface, it was only the dining-room rug, which I had rolled up and forgotten to carry up-stairs!
At half-past one o'clock Mr. Holcombe wrote a note, and sent it off with Terry, and, borrowing my boots, which had been Mr. Pitman's, investigated the dining-room and kitchen from a floating plank; the doors were too narrow to admit the boat. But he found nothing more important than a rolling-pin. He was not at all depressed by his failure. He came back, drenched to the skin, about three, and asked my permission to go through the Ladleys' bedroom.
“I have a friend coming pretty soon, Mrs. Pitman,” he said, “a young newspaper man, named Howell. He's a nice boy, and if there is anything to this, I'd like him to have it for his paper. He and I have been having some arguments about circumstantial evidence, too, and I know he'd like to work on this.”
I gave him a pair of Mr. Pitman's socks, for his own were saturated, the boots having leaked, and while he was changing them the telephone rang. It was the theatre again, asking for Jennie Brice.
“You are certain she is out of the city?” some one asked, the same voice as in the morning.
“Her husband says so.”
“Ask him to come to the 'phone.”
“He is not here.”
“When do you expect him back?”
“I'm not sure he is coming back.”
“Look here,” said the voice angrily, “can't you give me any satisfaction? Or don't you care to?”
“I've told you all I know.”
“You don't know where she is?”
“No, sir.”
“She didn't say she was coming back to rehearse for next week's piece?”
“Her husband said she went away for a few days' rest. He went away about noon and hasn't come back. That's all I know, except that they owe me three weeks' rent that I'd like to get hold of.”
The owner of the voice hung up the receiver with a snap, and left me pondering. It seemed to me that Mr. Ladley had been very reckless. Did he expect any one to believe that Jennie Brice had gone for a vacation without notifying the theatre? Especially when she was to rehearse that week?
I went back and told Mr. Holcombe, who put it down in his note-book, and together we went to the Ladleys' room.
The room was in better order than usual, as I have said. The bed was made—which was out of the ordinary, for Jennie Brice never made a bed—but made the way a man makes one, with the blankets wrinkled and crooked beneath, and the white counterpane pulled smoothly over the top, showing every hump beneath. I showed Mr. Holcombe the splasher, dotted with ink as usual.
“I'll take it off and soak it in milk,” I said. “It's his fountain pen; when the ink doesn't run, he shakes it, and”
“Where's the clock?” said Mr. Holcombe, stopping in front of the mantel with his note-book in his hand.
“The clock?”
I turned and looked. My onyx clock was gone from the mantel-shelf.
The second instalment of “The Case of Jennie Brice” will appear in the November number.