The Missing Box
Miss MacDonald came down to breakfast in the morning, trim and white
as a new candle. She ate heartily, complimenting the food. She asked
after Danny, who had not come down for breakfast. She talked about how
splendidly the high altitude and the marvelous Nevada air made her
feel. She told us, who had lived here all our lives and didn’t know
it, that the air in Nevada was supposed to be the best in the entire
United States for growing things. And, all the time, she was either
not noticing, or pretending not to notice, how we were all hanging on
her every word, and watching her every movement.
I guessed the others were doing as I was doing; watching for
penetrating glances, and listening for catches in her innocent
questions. But, at that, I blushed for them; particularly for John,
who sat and stared at her as if she were something he had to learn by
heart, before the meal was over. She caught him at it, several times;
but, though he would then have the grace to blush, and go glancing
about, he’d begin again, at the beginning, the minute she looked away.
When we had finally finished breakfast, she asked Sam if she might
detain him. I stayed on, when the others had left the dining-room. She
said pointedly, though politely and to Sam, not to me, that she wanted
to speak to him alone.
I took myself off. But the open window in the pass pantry was too big
a temptation; so I went in there, softly, and stood far back and to
the side.
Her very first words took me right off my feet. “Mr. Stanley,” she
questioned, “do you trust your housekeeper?”
“Mary?” Sam drawled. “Well, now, I don’t know as to trusting——”
I don’t know how to express what my feelings were when I heard Sam say
that. Pulverized is a word that would edge it, I guess—as if I had
been caught in a sausage machine, and ground up into small pieces,
each one hurting on its own hook.
“But,” Sam continued, “if Mary was going on a long journey, to
indefinite foreign parts, and felt the need of my right eye to take
along with her, I’d loan it to her for as long as she wanted it—no
questions asked. I can’t say that I’d go much further than that,
though.”
I was whole again, and warm and glowing. Sam, the old ninny, getting
his dander up, and to a beautiful woman like that, just because she
had asked him a simple question.
She laughed; a cheery, escaping sort of laugh, like something with
bright wings suddenly flying loose.
“Come back into the dining-room, then, Mrs. Magin,” she called to me.
“You can hear better in here.”
I came in, a mite shamefacedly. “It was my overweening curiosity,” I
explained.
Sam murmured, “‘Satiable.’”
“I like people with curiosity,” she said. “I understand them, too;
because, I suppose, I am one of the most curious persons in the world.
Another thing, I have never found a truly curious person who was a
wicked person. As much as any generalization can be made, all
criminals are egotists. Curiosity means interest in the affairs of
others. Of course, one has to be able to discriminate between innate
curiosity and the slyness of self protection—— But, forgive me, Mr.
Stanley, I am chattering away your time. Now then.”
(Later we became accustomed to that brisk professional opening of
hers, that “Now then,” as a signal for getting right down to business,
but it was as surprising, heard for the first time, as biting your
tongue.)
“Gabrielle Canneziano was last seen, alive, where and at about what
hour?”
We told her.
“Did she seem at ease, happy, untroubled?”
Sam said, “I was playing chess. I didn’t notice.”
“I did,” I said. “She was unhappy, troubled, and frightened.”
“Frightened? Are you positive that you had that impression at the
time?”
“Yes. I spoke to Mrs. Ricker about it, right then.”
“Did she agree with you, then?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Did Gabrielle Canneziano speak to any one of you, as she walked
through the room?”
I told her about Gaby’s gesture to Chad, and about him following her
to the porch and talking to her there.
“Chadwick Caufield? The man who killed himself when the body was
found?”
“Yes.”
“Did he leave the porch with her?”
“No. He came straight back into the house.”
“What other members of the household were in the room at that time?”
Sam told her.
“That leaves her sister, and your son and daughter as the only members
of the household who were absent at the time. How long before Martha
Stanley returned to the house?”
Sam said, “I was playing chess. But I know it wasn’t long.”
“It wasn’t more than five or six minutes,” I said.
“How long before Danielle Canneziano came downstairs?”
I told her about Danny’s calling after Gaby. “It wasn’t much more than
ten minutes after she called, not fifteen minutes, I am sure, before
Danny came downstairs.”
“Since you are a cook,” she said, “you probably have more than the
average ability in estimating time.”
“Good cooks,” I told her, “don’t estimate. They know. When I’m boiling
three minute eggs, I use my watch, and always have.”
“At least, then,” she said, “you know how difficult it is to deal
accurately with minutes. With every desire and reason to be honest,
five minutes, in the testimony of a witness, may be anything from two
minutes to seventeen; ten minutes, anything from five minutes to
twenty-three; twenty minutes, anything from nine minutes to
forty-five; forty-five minutes, anything from twenty-odd to an hour
and a half. Now then.”
She went on with her questioning. We had finished breakfast at eight
thirty o’clock. At eleven thirty, I felt that she knew everything that
Sam and I knew about the case, and, probably, a deal more.
She knew about the two girls searching for something.
She knew about Gaby’s getting the code letter; about her peculiar
actions afterwards. She knew about the quarrel with Sam.
She knew about John having gone to Rattail for medicine that Danny
said she had not sent for.
She knew about him taking four hours, instead of two to make the trip;
about the reasons he had given for that; about him going straight
upstairs, the back way, and staying there for half an hour. In answer
to her questions, it was Sam and not I who told her about John’s
acting so bothered and troubled when he came down for supper.
She knew about all of our actions between five and six o’clock. She
knew that Sam was unwilling to swear that Hubert had been in the barn
during that entire time. Sam insisted upon telling her about Danny’s
suspicions concerning himself: that he had left Chad, the
ventriloquist, in the barn to hood-wink Hubert, and had gone off
somewhere.
She knew about me asking Chad to close the attic; about the locked
door; the key in my pocket. She knew that I had found the body, and
had stopped to clean away Sam’s pipe ashes.
She had seen the note that Chad had left. She had compared it, through
her magnifying glass, with other specimens of his handwriting. She had
stated, positively, that the note had been written by the same hand
that had written the names and jokes under the pictures in his kodak
album. She had spent ten minutes, or more, looking at these pictures.
Then she had asked Sam to explain, in detail, why he had entirely
discounted Chad’s note of confession.
Sam said, “The body was cold and stiff when we found it. That is
proof, isn’t it, that she had been dead more than an hour?”
“If you are certain of that, it is positive proof that she had been
dead much longer than one hour.”
“I am certain. Well, until seven o’clock that boy had not been out of
my sight for one minute, after Gaby walked through the room, alive,
for us all to see her, at four o’clock.”
“Twice,” Miss MacDonald objected, “you have told me that you could not
answer a question because, at the time, you were absorbed in your
chess game. How, then, can you be certain that Chadwick Caufield was
not out of the living-room for a short time, say fifteen minutes,
between four and five o’clock?”
“Because he was playing the piano all that time.”
“You are certain that you would have noticed it, had he stopped
playing?”
“Certain. He was spoiling my game, and driving me half crazy with his
noise. I kept hoping that he would stop. Kept forcing myself not to
ask him to stop.”
“Why shouldn’t you ask him, if it was annoying you to that extent, in
your own home?”
“Well, it was Chad’s home, too. He had as much right, I reckon, to
play his music as I had to play my chess game.”
I liked the look Miss MacDonald sidled at me when Sam said that.
“You, too, are sure,” she questioned me, “that Chadwick Caufield was
at the piano during that entire hour?”
“I know it.”
“What sort of music was he playing?”
“He was improvising. It was happy, cheerful sort of crooning music—if
you know what I mean.”
“Yes. He did not seem worried, depressed?”
“Not a bit. He seemed happier than usual, I thought.”
She went on with her questions. They brought us to Martha’s death. She
took what seemed like a long time asking us questions about Martha’s
health. Had she ever complained of dizziness? Shortness of breath?
Indigestion? And all sorts of other seemingly unimportant things.
“Where,” she finally came back to the powders again, “was this
sleeping medicine purchased?”
Sam told her in San Francisco, with a doctor’s prescription.
“Have you still some of them left, in the original box?”
“A few, I think.”
“Good. Will you get it for me, Mr. Stanley?”
“I’ll get it,” I said, and my opinion of her as a detective was
lowered, then and there. If she had not found out, by this time, that
it was useless to send a man to look for anything anywhere, but, most
particularly, in a bathroom medicine closet, she still had too much to
learn.
I had seen the powder box, left out of place on the table, the morning
of the fifth of July, when I had gone into the hall bathroom. I had
picked it up, out of habit, and replaced it in the medicine closet. I
thought that I could put my hand right on it.
I could not. When I opened the mirror door, the box was not to be
seen. I searched and searched. I might have spared myself the trouble.
From that day to this, the box, with the remaining powders in it, has
never been found.