Clues
“What I can not understand,” she said, “is, that Gaby knew that she
might be killed. And yet, so far as anyone knows, she did not do one
thing to save herself. If only, only she had confided in me! Surely I
could have found some way to help her—to save her.”
“You know, dear,” I said, “I think that Gaby was not—well, at least
not doing any clear thinking, those last few days.”
“I know. I thought it was only her disappointment. But now—— Who could
be quite sane with such a fear confronting her? Yet—she left all of
her things in order; as if, deliberately, she prepared for death. She
burned her papers and letters. See——” Danny pointed to the fireplace.
I crossed the room and looked into it. Papers had recently been burned
there. I took the poker and stirred in the fluttering, black bits; but
nothing had escaped the flames. I hung the poker back in the rack with
shovel and tongs and bellows. It did not catch on its hook. As I bent
to fix it, I saw a little white circle, down in the corner of the
stand. I stooped and picked it up. It was a tiny round of celluloid,
with the letter “Q” printed on it.
“It is one of the caps for her typewriter keys,” Danny replied to my
question. “She put them on over the keys; softer for her finger tips,
or saved her finger nails—something of the sort.”
“I wonder why she burned them?” I said.
“Do you think that she did?”
“Well, this one being here on the hearth——”
“It probably rolled there, sometime, when she was taking them off her
machine.”
“Why did she take them off, if she always used them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shall we,” I suggested, “look and see whether the others are where
she kept them?”
Danny opened the desk drawer. “They aren’t here, at any rate,” she
said, and came back to me, and reached out her hand for the little
cap, and turned it over in her fingers. “It could mean only,” she
said, “what we knew before. That she expected death. That she tried to
leave everything tidy and in order.”
“I don’t know,” I objected. “It seems more than orderly, to have taken
these off the machine and burned them. It seems right down queer.”
She smiled a little pitying smile at me, and patted my shoulder. “Poor
Mary,” she said.
“Well,” I tried to defend myself, “in all the mystery stories that I
ever read it was always some stray, meaningless little thing that
solved the mystery in the end. A criminal never was discovered without
any clues, was he?”
“I believe,” she said, “that you are the only one in the house who
hasn’t looked at what Gaby had in her bag——”
She walked to the table by the window. I followed her. I dreaded
seeing that bag again; but I was curious about its contents. It was
lying limp on the table.
She picked it up, brushed it flickeringly with the tips of her
fingers, and blew on it, as if she were trying to blow something off
of it. “Everything,” she explained, “sticks to the little pointed
beads.”
I took it from her and looked at it closely; but I could see no speck
of ash, no minute particle of tobacco, nor of dust on its pattern of
parrots, tree branches, and flowers.
“It is a beautiful thing,” I said.
“Gaby got it in Vienna.”
“I’ve wondered,” I said, “why it was that Gaby had all the beautiful,
expensive things, such as this. Your clothes are pretty and tasty, but
they aren’t near the quality of Gaby’s.”
She hesitated a moment before answering. “I have been in England for
the past eight years, while Gaby has been on the continent, where
beautiful things are more plentiful, and cheaper.”
“Lands alive! I thought you girls had lived together, all these
years.”
“No,” she said, and picked up Gaby’s cigarette case, and handed it to
me.
It was made of a dull gold, with her monogram, “G. C.” set in tiny
black opals, with green and blue lights flickering in them as if they
were alive.
I opened the case. It was full of cigarettes, except for a space at
one side, where about two of the pesky little things would have fitted
in.
“And, see,” Danny said, opening the gold match-box that was like the
cigarette case, “it is quite empty. It doesn’t seem reasonable that
she would start out with an empty match-box. I believe that she used
the matches to smoke the cigarettes.”
“She wouldn’t have used a box of matches to light two cigarettes.”
“She may have shared her matches with another person, who was
smoking.”
“Likely she had only a few of these short matches,” I said. (Sam would
use about as many matches as that box would hold to get rid of one
pipeful of tobacco.)
I picked up another little gold box. It had powder, rouge, lipstick,
and a mirror in it. I had seen it often enough before. I put it back
on the table, and took up a beaded coin purse that matched the large
bag. It was entirely empty.
“Isn’t it queer that that should be empty?” Danny asked. “And her
bill-fold is missing. She surely would not start to go anywhere with
not a cent of money. Doesn’t it look as if she had been robbed?”
“Only,” I said, “if anyone had robbed her, why would he have left the
valuable gold cigarette case, and vanity case, and match-box?”
“He might have thought they would be hard to dispose of.”
I stood silent, thinking and shaking my head.
“Mary,” Danny’s voice, always low, grew lower still with her
intensity, “there is one thing that no one has thought of. Daniel
Canneziano could have reached here from California in a few hours, by
aeroplane.”
“I had thought of that. But, Danny, no aeroplane ever came within
twenty miles of the ranch without every man-jack of us hearing it, and
rushing out with our heads tipped back to gape at it. Aeroplanes
aren’t stealthy things, you know, that people can slip up in, and slip
off again.”
“But, on the third of July, two aeroplanes passed over, going to the
Telko celebration.”
“On the third,” I reminded her, “as advertised. And you know how much
noise they made. And how we all went out and watched them, from tiny
specks in the south until they were tiny specks and lost in the north
again.”
She shook her head, and drooped her shoulders with a sigh.
I picked up a little red handkerchief. It was crumpled in a ball; if
ever I saw a handkerchief that had been cried into, and turned to a
dry spot, and squeezed, and cried into again, it was that little red
wad. It was dry now, of course; exposed to the air in this altitude. I
wondered whether it had been dry when it had come out of the bag. It
was a question not to be asked; so I dropped the handkerchief on the
table, certain, only, that the fastidious Gabrielle had never started
out with a handkerchief in that condition in her Vienna bag, and
picked up the carved ivory cigarette holder. It fell to pieces in my
fingers.
“Was this broken in her bag?” I questioned.
“Yes. Snapped in two. And she loved it.”
I fitted the pieces together again, on the table, and took up a folded
sheet of paper, and opened it, and read:
“Glorious Gaby: Be a good sport. Be a darling. Be game—that is, be
Gaby, and meet me this afternoon, around four thirty, in the cabin. H.
H.”
“Well!” I said.
“Yes, I know,” Danny answered, “but Hubert Hand swears that he wrote
that note several weeks ago. Too, we know that he was playing chess
with Uncle Sam at half-past four.”
“He could have gone to the cabin later, when the men went to do the
chores. Or was he right with Sam and Chad all the time?”
“I suppose so. He must have satisfied the coroner’s jury, at the
inquest, of his innocence. Mary,” her voice went all tense again,
“does it seem to you that the jury was very readily satisfied?”
Perhaps this would be as good a place as any to explain that this tale
is not being written to prove that Mary Magin was, or is, a wise,
clever, or smart woman. As I have said before, and will say again,
from the beginning to the very end I was a fool. I made mistakes, over
and over; and, as will be told, I made a disastrous mistake in the
end. If I had been blind, deaf and dumb, I could not have been as big
a fool; for then, all the time, I should not have been imagining that
I saw things, which I did not see; heard things, which I did not hear;
and I should have been obliged to keep my clattery old tongue quiet.
The only virtue I can claim, concerning this story, is that if I were
a vain or a conceited person, I should never have written it.
I spoke sharply, too sharply to her in answer to what I had imagined I
had seen in her attitude. “Never mind about the jury being easily
satisfied. Sam is not going to be. He told me this morning that he
would find the murderer if it took every dollar he had in the world to
do it. Sam is going to get to the bottom of this. Be sure of that.”
“I—wonder,” she said.
“What do you wonder?”
“Mary!” she exclaimed, close to a reproach, “I merely wonder whether
or not Uncle Sam will succeed.”
I looked at her brown eyes, all red and swollen from tears, and at the
deep, dark circles under them, and I was ashamed.