A Shadow
When it came to helping in the kitchen, that girl was more help in
five minutes than Belle, Sadie and Goldie, all three of them together,
had been in half a day. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t say where
is this, and how do you do that? She pitched in as if she had been
working in that kitchen with me for the past twenty years. How she
knew where I kept the potatoes, where the best paring knife lived, and
the particular kettle that was best for cooking the potatoes in, I
don’t know, and I never shall know. Most mystery stories, especially
of late, have an element of the supernatural in them. I tell you, that
girl’s knowledge of my ways, and the manner in which she took hold in
the kitchen, are as supernatural as anything ever brought to my
notice. The first thing I knew, she was peeling the potatoes, and
peeling them thin and clean. She didn’t ask how many would be enough.
When she got them peeled and washed, she put them on, in boiling
water, with no inquiry as to where I kept the salt. She did not talk
as she worked. I was glad of that; for, after three solid hours of
conversation, I needed, badly, a silent space. I wanted to think.
Those last words of hers, “utter nonsense,” in answer to Sam’s
statement, kept ringing in my ears.
I tried to think whether there was any way a person could get upstairs
without coming through the house. We had no fire escapes. There were
no trees close enough to the house so that even Douglas Fairbanks
could swing to an upstairs window from one of them. There were no
vines growing on the house. Without about a twenty foot ladder, which
we didn’t have on the place, and which would be hard to go conveying
about, to say nothing of disposing of it afterwards, there was not any
possible way for anyone to get to the second floor of our house,
except by means of the back or the front stairway.
Since Gaby had been killed on the attic stairway, and since all who
knew about that sort of thing agreed that she had been dead at least
two hours when we found her, she must have returned to the house
sometime between four and five o’clock, and have stolen upstairs with
none of us seeing or hearing her. Since she could do that, there was
no reason to suppose that someone else could not have done the same
thing; either coming in with her at the time, or coming before or
after she did. I had to conclude that another person certainly had
done just that; had entered the house and had gone upstairs during
that hour. Who? The person whom she had been fearing? Not one of us,
that seemed a certainty. And yet, Miss MacDonald had said, “nonsense.”
I remembered, again, her strange, mad actions immediately after she
had received the code letter. I remembered how she had looked in the
hall that day, when I had told John that I thought I had seen the
ghost of Sin. In Gaby’s note to Danny she had written that she had
purposely kept her fears and her danger a secret from Danny.
Undoubtedly, the secret was written in the code letter. Had she told
Danny partly the truth about the contents of that letter, or had she
told her falsehoods from beginning to end? Or had Danny told us only a
part of the truth? Why did we all keep forgetting how Danny had tried
to call Gaby back, when Gaby had started on that fatal walk?
I have said before, and I say again, I knew that Danielle Canneziano
had not murdered her sister. But I knew, too, that if she had some
reason, some better reason than I could conceive, for keeping quiet,
for not telling everything she knew, Danny was capable of so doing. I
remembered our talk in her room on the morning of the fifth of July. I
remembered how she had acted when her engagement ring had slipped from
her finger—and I tried to turn my thoughts into different channels.
There was Chad’s suicide and his confession. It could be possible that
he had killed himself because he had loved Gaby. But that would not
account for his confession to the crime. It could mean but one thing—a
desire to shield someone. Would he have cared about shielding some
unknown scoundrel who had crept into the house and killed the girl
whom Chad loved? Had Chad, then, mistakenly suspected Martha, or Sam,
or John, and killed himself and left the note to aid one of them? Not
likely. Men do not kill themselves, leaving a written confession to a
crime of which they are innocent, because of some mere suspicion.
I remembered my conversation with Hubert Hand in the hall that
morning. What was it that he had thought I had overheard in the cabin
and had bribed me not to tell? It was reasonable enough to suppose
that, at that time, he had hoped to keep his entire story, his prison
records, his reason for coming to the Desert Moon, his relations with
Mrs. Ricker and Martha, a secret; just as I had hoped to keep the fact
of finding Sam’s pipe ashes a secret.
Sam’s pipe ashes, again. If someone had put them there, in an effort
to implicate Sam, it would have had to be someone who knew Sam’s ways.
My thoughts were off again. You can’t, I told myself, get shed of a
following shadow by running away from it. You have to turn and face
it, before you can go the other way. I faced it.
John. He had left the ranch at two o’clock. He could easily have
gotten back by four, or shortly after. Suppose that he had left the
machine down the road, quite far down the road in the spot where the
tire tracks showed that the machine had been stopped and started
again, the spot where we thought he had changed a tire? He could have
climbed the fence, taken a short cut to the house, and gotten here in
half or three quarters of an hour. He could have met Gaby; could have
stolen into the house with her. He could have killed her, and stolen
out of the house again. A short cut across the fields, and a drive to
the house would get him here by six o’clock—the time he did get here.
If he could be wicked enough to murder, he could be wicked enough to
arrange clues to throw suspicions on his father and his sister. If he
were low enough to do that, he would be low enough to rob her of a
little money. In other words, grant that John is a blonde, and you can
go along and grant that he has blue eyes and tow hair. It was all of
it false, I told myself, from its wicked beginning to its wicked end;
false and unfair. But I had faced it. Now I could turn and go in
another direction.
I had not realized how deeply I had been thinking, dawdling over my
work in consequence, until I saw that Miss MacDonald had taken up the
pork chops, and had them in the warming-oven, and was making gravy, as
smooth and tasty looking pan-gravy as I ever saw.
“Good lands!” I said. “I’ve certainly come to one conclusion.”
“It is a little early for conclusions, isn’t it?” she asked.
“It is a lot too late for this one.”
“Please——” she began; but, for once, I got the best of her.
“My conclusion is,” I said, “that, by hook or crook, Sam Stanley has
got to get me some efficient help in this house. When I think of what
I’ve put up with, all these years in the way of help, and then see the
way you pitch in, it makes me mad all over.”
“I wish,” she said, “that I might drop this case, right now, and stay
here for all time, and be your assistant and a thoroughly domestic
person, and forget that there were crimes and criminals in the world.”
“Maybe,” I said, eagerly, but knowing of course that it was too good
to come true, “when you’ve finished with this case, you could do that.
You’d be one of our family, and Sam would pay—well, I guess anything
you’d care to ask.”
“No,” she smiled, “it is tempting—now. But that desire of mine to give
up my profession is a phase that I always pass through at the
beginning of each difficult case. In a few days, when I begin to get
hold of something, and when things begin to take shape, all my love of
the work will return. It is only at first, when I seem to be in a maze
of mystery, like this, that I get so discouraged. I always do it,
right at first; and I always think that here is the case of which I am
going to make an absolute failure.”
“Have you ever failed on a case?” I asked.
“Indeed I have, on several. It is queer, though; in each case that has
been a failure, it has seemed that the solution was written plainly
from the start. It was—written all wrong. Judging from that, I should
be unusually successful in this case.”
Poor girl, no wonder that she was discouraged. She has given me leave,
now that it is all over, to use any of her notes that I care to use in
the writing of this story.
“Far be it from Lynn MacDonald,” she said, when I asked her about
using the notes, “to refuse advertisement of one of her banner cases.
My rivals will say that I succeeded in this because, as often happens,
my luck stood by me. But you and I, we understand about luck, don’t
we, Mary?”
“If you aren’t afraid,” I said, “that your notes may give away some of
the secrets of that luck of yours, so that your rivals will be able to
lay their hands on some of the same brand?”
She laughed. “I never write down a secret. That is a safe enough rule
for an honest person, who plans to remain honest. For a dishonest
person, or for one who contemplates any sort of evil, or admits the
possibility of such a course, the safe rule would be: ‘Never, under
any circumstances, put pen or pencil to paper.’”
As Sam would say, “It is a poor rule that won’t work both ways.”
The notes that Miss MacDonald had made, before this conversation of
ours, that day in the kitchen, and on the evening of that same day,
July eleventh, are as follows.