THE INQUISITION
At first glance the man was Clive Creede. And Doris wondered how he
chanced to have left the house and to have approached the veranda in
such a roundabout way.
Then, as he stood before her, she saw he was not in dinner clothes, but
in a dark lounge suit. And as he lifted his soft hat at sight of her,
she saw his forehead was bald and that he wore spectacles. Also that
there was a sagging stoop to his shoulders and the hint of a limp in
his walk.
Clive’s twin brother was the last man she cared to meet in her present
tumultuous frame of mind. At best she had never been able to bring
herself to like him. Yet he had come too close now to be avoided
without rudeness.
As he recognized her, Osmun Creede took an impulsively eager step
forward.
“Why, Doris!” he exclaimed joyously. “This is better luck than I looked
for. What on earth are you doing at Vailholme? And why are you out
here all alone? Doesn’t the same moon that interests you interest Clive
or Vail?”
“Oh, you’ve come to see Clive?” she asked, trying to speak civilly and
not to let herself be annoyed by the man’s awkward attempts at banter.
“Yes,” said Osmun. “He’s stopping with Vail till his house gets
disinfected or loses the reek of some chemicals that made him sick. Why
he should choose to come here instead of to his own brother’s home,” he
added bitterly, “is a mystery to me. Probably he has his own reasons.
Anyhow, I came over to see if he is better and if there’s anything I
can do for him. I didn’t ring because I saw through the windows that
there’s a party of some kind going on. I saw a bunch of people in the
living room. And I’m in tramping clothes. I came around to the side
door, on the chance of finding a servant I could send upstairs to Clive
to find how he is.”
“Clive was out here five minutes ago,” she replied. “He went back to
the interrogation. I’ll--”
“Interrogation?” repeated Osmun, puzzled. “Is it a game? Or--?”
Briefly she outlined to the dumbfounded man the story of the evening’s
events. He listened, open-mouthed, his face, in the moonlight, blank
with crass incredulity. The instant she paused he began to hurl
questions at her. Impatiently she answered them. But in their mid-flow
she turned away and walked to the long window.
“I’m afraid I must go in,” she said, stiffly, his avid curiosity and
his evident relish of the affair jarring her unaccountably. “They may
want to interrogate me, too. The chief was going to examine us all, I
believe. You’ll excuse me?”
“I’ll do better than that,” he assured her. “I’ll come along. I
wouldn’t miss this thing for a million.”
Before she could deter him he had stepped past her and had flung wide
the French window. Standing aside, he motioned her to pass through.
She hesitated. Chief Quimby, catching sight of her on the threshold,
beckoned her in.
“We wondered where you were, Miss Lane,” said he. “We’ve been waiting
for you. Every one else has been questioned. Come in, please.”
Reluctantly she entered. Osmun Creede pressed in, at her heels, closing
the window behind him. The guests were seated in various parts of
the living room, one and all looking thoroughly uncomfortable. At a
table sat the chief. Beside him, holding an open note book, sat the
constable.
Through the doorway Doris could see in the hall a flustered group
of servants, babbling in excited whispers. One woman among them was
repeating snifflingly at intervals that she was a respectable working
girl and that never before in her life had any one asked her such a
passel of turrible questions and she was going to pack up and leave
right away and she’d have the law on them that had asked was she a
thief!
Quimby seemed to note the presence of this offstage chorus at the same
time as did Doris. For he turned to the housekeeper who stood primly in
a far corner:
“You can send them back to the kitchen quarters, Mrs. Horoson,” he
said. “I’m through with them for the present. Only see none of them
leave the house. Let them understand that any one who tries to sneak
out will be followed and arrested. I shall take it as an indication of
guilt. That is all, Mrs. Horoson. We shan’t need you or Vogel any more
either. Or if we do I’ll ring for you.”
“Where is Clive?” Osmun asked Willis Chase, who had greeted the
unpopular twin’s advent with the briefest of nods.
“Gone up to bed,” answered Chase. “Went up as soon as the chief had
finished asking him a handful of questions. Said he felt rotten. Looked
it, too. Chief excused him. He has the two East rooms, if you want to
go up and see him.”
“I shall, presently,” said Osmun. “This is too interesting to leave
just yet.”
He listened to the chief’s few queries of Doris as to the discovery
that her jewel box had been stolen. Doris replied clearly and to the
point, her testimony confirming in all details the story her aunt had
just told.
The last witness being examined, the lanky chief leaned back in his
chair beating a tattoo on his teeth with the pencil he carried. Then he
glanced at his notes and again at the inventory on the table before him.
“I am convinced,” he said slowly, “that all you people have told me the
truth. And I am inclined to believe the servants have done the same.
Taking into consideration their flurry and scare, they told remarkably
straight stories, and it seems clear that none of them were absent from
their duties in the kitchen or in the dining room long enough to have
run upstairs and robbed so many rooms and then to have gotten back
unnoticed. It seems none of them had even gone up so early to arrange
the bedrooms for the night. And there is positively no sign, outdoors
or in, that any professional thief broke into the house. Of course, a
closer search of the rooms and a search of the servants and of their
quarters--and of yourselves, if you will permit--may throw new light on
the case. But--”
He paused. On these summer people and on others of their clan depended
ninety per cent of Aura’s livelihood and importance. Quimby had tried,
therefore, to handle this delicate matter in such a way as to avoid
offense. And, thus far, he had not a ghost of a clue to go on.
“Search away--as far as I’m concerned,” spoke up Willis Chase, in the
short pause which followed. “Three times, on the Canadian border, I’ve
had my car searched for bootleg booze. And every time I hit the New
York Customs crowd, on my way back from Europe, they search my soiled
collars and trunkbottoms with the most loving care. So this’ll be no
novelty. Search.”
“I have a horrible feeling that all the stolen things are going to
be found on _me_,” supplemented Miss Gregg. “They would be, in a
nightmare, you know. And if this isn’t a nightmare I don’t know what
nightmare is. But search if you like. The sooner it’s over the sooner
we’ll wake up.”
“I speak for the good wife as well as for myself,” boomed Joshua Q.
Mosely, “when I say we shall do all in our power to uphold the law. We
are willing to be searched.”
He gazed about him with the rarefied air of one who has just consented
to part with life in the holy cause of duty.
“_I_ am not going to be searched.”
It was Thaxton Vail who said it. Every one turned with something akin
to a jump and stared marvelingly at him.
“I am not going to be searched,” he repeated, coming forward into the
strong glare of lamplight beside the table where sat the two officials.
“And I am not going to permit my guests to be searched. When I say ‘my
guests,’ I do not refer to Mr. and Mrs. Mosely, but to the friends whom
I have known all my life. They are under my roof. They have suffered by
being under my roof. Neither they nor myself shall be humiliated any
further. I’ve listened patiently to this comic opera interrogation, and
I have answered all questions put to me in the course of it. But I’m
not going to submit to the tom-foolery of a search. Please understand
that clearly, Chief.”
He sat down again. There was a confused rustle throughout the room.
Joshua Q. Mosely glared at him with fearsome suspicion. Quimby cleared
his throat, frowning. But before either could speak Osmun Creede had
come forward out of the shadows to the area of light by the table.
“Chief,” he said, his rasping voice cutting the room’s looser sounds
like a rusty file, “I’m the only person here who can’t possibly be
connected with the thefts. I didn’t get here till five minutes ago, and
I can prove by a dozen people that I was dining at the Country Club at
the time the things were stolen. So I can speak disinterestedly.”
“What’s the sense of your speaking at all?” grumbled Chase. “It’s no
business of yours.”
Unheeding, Osmun proceeded:
“Chief, you have established that some one in this house is a thief.
That thief, presumably, had to do his work mighty fast and presumably
he had no time to hide all his loot in a place safe enough to elude a
police hunt. He had only a minute or two to do it in. Therefore, the
chances are that the bulkier or less easily hidden bits of plunder are
still concealed on him. Perhaps all of it. Very good. It would be that
man’s natural impulse to resist search. Practically every one else
here has volunteered to submit to search. One man only has refused. By
an odd coincidence, that happens also to be the one man who was not
robbed. Figure it out for yourself. It--”
“Oz Creede!” Miss Gregg declaimed, as the rest still sat dazed into
momentary stillness at the unbelievable attack. “If you had the
remotest idea how utterly vile and worthless you are, you’d bite
yourself and die of hydrophobia.... I just thought I’d mention it,” she
added, apologetically, to Doris.
But Doris did not hear. The girl’s glowing eyes were on Thaxton Vail,
who had sprung to his feet and was advancing on his accuser.
“Oz,” said Vail, his voice muffled and not quite firm, “I promised your
brother I’d forget I had any grievance against you. May I trouble you
to leave here before I forget that promise?-- As quickly as you can,
please.”
“Hold on there!” blustered Joshua Q., billowing forward. “Hold on
there! There seems to me to be a lot in what this young feller says.
He talks sense, Mr. Vail. And I believe he’s right. This is no time to
go trying to carry things highhanded. Chief, I demand--”
He broke off short in the rolling utterances, his mouth ajar, his
little eyes bulging. Osmun Creede and Vail stood confronting each
other. With a gesture as swift as the strike of a rattlesnake Osmun
thrust out his right hand toward the left waistcoat pocket of Vail’s
dinner clothes.
Now he withdrew the questing hand and was holding it open for all to
gaze on. In its palm glowed dully a huge old hunting-case watch.
“I caught sight of a bulge in that pocket,” he rasped. “So I took a
chance at a search on my own account. Now I’ll go. Not because you’ve
ordered me out, Vail, but because I don’t care to stay under the same
roof with a man who robs his guests. Good-by.”
His words went unheard in the sudden babble of voices and the pressing
forward of the rest. Every one was talking at once. The chief peered,
hypnotized, at the watch Osmun had laid on the table in front of him.
Vail, after a moment of stark blankness, lurched furiously at Creede,
mouthing something which nobody could hear in the uproar.
The constable threw himself between Vail and the sardonically smiling
man. Before Thaxton could break free or recover his self-control Creede
had left the room. But, in the hallway outside, during the moment’s
hush which followed the clamor, all could hear his strident voice as he
shouted up the stairs:
“Clive! Come down here! Come down in a rush! The thief’s found!”
Again Vail took a furious step in pursuit, but again the constable
stepped officiously in front of him. And a second later the front door
slammed.
“Stay where you are, everybody!” commanded the chief, a new sternness
in his voice, as Willis Chase succeeded in working his way around the
constable and Vail and made for the hall. “Where are you going, Mr.
Chase?”
“I’m going to catch that swine!” yelled Willis, wrathfully, over his
shoulder, pausing in the living room doorway as he cleared the last
obstacle and sprang toward the hall. “I’m going to find him and bring
him back by the scruff of the neck. And--”
The constable took a belated step to stop him. Chase turned and bolted.
But as he did so, he collided violently with Clive Creede. Clive had
come downstairs at his brother’s shouted summons, just in time to
receive Chase’s catapult rush.
Under the impact the sick man staggered and would have fallen had not
Chase caught him. At the same time Thaxton Vail called sharply:
“Willis! Come back here! Don’t make a fool of yourself! Come back. I
don’t need any one to fight my battles for me. I can attend to this
myself.”
Apologizing to the breathless Clive for the unintended collision and
helping to steady the shaken man on his feet, Chase abandoned his plan
to overtake and drag Osmun back by force. Sullenly he returned to the
living room, Clive at his side. To the invalid’s puzzled questions he
returned no answer.
As they came in, Quimby was on his feet. His deferential manner was
gone. The glint of the man hunt shimmered beneath his shaggy gray brows.
“Sit down, everybody!” he commanded. “Mr. Vail, I said, _sit down_!
This case has taken a different turn. Let nobody leave the room.
Whitcomb,” to the constable, “stand at the door. Now then, we’ll
tackle all this from another angle. The time for kid glove questioning
is past.”
He eyed them sternly, his gaze focusing last on Thaxton Vail. Then, as
silence was restored, he picked up the watch and held it toward the
blinkingly wondering Clive.