Questions
“I was afraid of that,” Miss MacDonald said, when I returned with my
information and nothing else to the dining-room. “Now then: Would it
be possible for you to remember who last took one of these powders,
and when, with no ill effects?”
“Danny and Mary each took one the night of the fourth, when Martha
did,” Sam answered. “I’ve asked them about it, and both of them say
that they did not feel queer at all, afterwards. They were both wide
awake in the morning.”
“My word!” said Miss MacDonald.
“I think,” I offered, “that something was all wrong with Martha’s
heart before she took the powder. She acted sleepy, stupid, all
afternoon.”
“From noon on, you mean?”
“No—at least, I didn’t notice until later in the afternoon. Mrs.
Ricker said that she had a hard time keeping her awake between seven
and eight o’clock.”
“I see. Mrs. Ricker did not take one of the sleeping powders that
night?”
“She didn’t need one,” Sam explained. “She is naturally calm. She
didn’t go all to pieces like the other girls did.”
“And yet, I have gathered that she was far from calm when her daughter
died?”
“She went clear, raving crazy,” I said.
“Yes. Now then——”
“Hold on a minute,” Sam said. “I think that you think, from the
questions you have been asking, that the sleeping powder, like I gave
the other girls, would not have caused Martha’s death. Now I want to
know——”
“I am sorry, Mr. Stanley,” she interrupted, “but I have explained that
I can not answer questions.”
“Suppose I insist on a few common sense questions being answered,
right now?”
“You can’t do that. You can hamper me in my progress. You can dismiss
me from the case, right now. But you aren’t going to do either, are
you?”
“I won’t hamper you, if I can help it. I won’t dismiss you, as you
say, now, either. It wouldn’t be right, without giving you a chance,
after you came all the way up here, and you know it. That’s why you
should try to be reasonable.”
“I am trying to be reasonable, Mr. Stanley.” Her smile at Sam, just
then, looked as if she might be trying to be something a mite more
charming than reasonable, besides. “Now then——”
She was off again, leading us with her questions, through Mrs.
Ricker’s confession and her suspicions of Martha.
“After Martha came into the house with the bracelet,” she asked, “was
she out of the room again within the hour; or even within the second
hour, between five and six?”
“She was not out between four and five,” I said. “She might have been
any place, for all I know, between five and six. I was in the
kitchen.”
“Did you have any particular reason for watching her between four and
five o’clock?”
“No.”
“Then, I am afraid that you can not be positive that she did not leave
the room.”
“I am positive,” I insisted. “There weren’t any goings nor comings. We
all stayed right in the room. It was too hot to move around. I know
that Martha did not leave the room. She sat beside Chad on the piano
bench, for a while. She sat on the arm of Sam’s chair, watching the
chess game——”
“Gosh!” Sam said. “I remember that, now. She was fooling with my hair.
I kept smelling the blacking on her shoes.”
“You couldn’t have,” I said. “Because, Sam, she was wearing white
shoes.”
“She used some preparation to clean her white shoes, I suppose?” Miss
MacDonald asked.
“Some stuff called ‘White-o-clean.’ We all use it.”
She asked for the bottle. When I brought it, she smelled of it, and
asked Sam to. “Is that the odor you noticed?” she questioned.
“Nothing like it.”
“Now then.”
“Hold on,” Sam said. “I’ve got two things to tell you that you are
overlooking, and I know that they are both mighty important.”
“What are they?”
“The first one is this. Gaby had lived here close to two months.
Martha had never harmed her. Does it stand to reason that, on the very
day Gaby was afraid she was going to be killed, Martha would do it?
There’s too much coincidence in that, isn’t there?”
“I think so,” she answered, breaking her rule for once, at least.
“Though we can not ever discount coincidence. In the first place, what
appears to be coincidence usually proves not to be coincidence at all,
in the end. In the second place, genuine coincidences are much more
frequent than is generally supposed, or admitted. But, Mr. Stanley,
unless the other thing you have to tell me is a fact, and not an
opinion, I am going to ask you not to tell it to me, at least not
until later.”
“It is straight fact.”
“Very well, then?”
“I’d rather show you,” Sam said. “Then you wouldn’t have to take my
word for it. Will you come out to the rabbit hutch with me?”
“But,” she questioned, “can that be necessary?”
“You can judge for yourself. Martha was always trying experiments with
feeding her rabbits. I guess she thought that they might like grain.
Maybe they do. I don’t know. Anyway, she, or someone, had tugged a
half sack of grain up there. A lot of it had spilled out under the
berry bushes. It is all fresh sprouted, and growing fine. Is that
important, or not?”
Her brows puckered. “I’m sorry—I don’t follow you.”
“There wasn’t a spot out there, except under those bushes, where
Martha could have hidden the body. A body, even as small as Gaby’s,
would have smashed down and broken those fresh sprouts of grain.”
“But—the body was never there.”
“Mrs. Ricker said that she thought it was. We just told you.”
Her mouth popped open with surprise. “But, Mr. Stanley, you couldn’t
have considered Mrs. Ricker’s opinion seriously? Is it possible that
you don’t know that Gabrielle Canneziano was murdered right there on
the stairs, where she fell, and where she was found?”