Another Key
As indicated by her notes for July eleventh, on that afternoon Miss
MacDonald had cleaned the attic, thoroughly, and had found nothing to
pay her for her trouble. Keeping me in the dark, as she had, I
supposed, when she said early the next morning that she wanted to
clean the living-room, that she had got at least a hat full of clues
from the attic.
Land knows, the way I had been neglecting things, the living-room was
badly in need of a good cleaning. I wanted her to allow me to help
her, but she would not. It was luck that I happened to come in with
the floor wax just as she was looking at something that she had dug
out of the ashes in the fireplace.
“What’s that?” I questioned.
“I believe,” she answered, “that it is the missing key to the attic
door.”
She got up, shook out her skirts, and went straight upstairs. I
trailed along. I stood by and watched her while she fitted the
blackened key into the lock. It turned both ways, as smoothly as you
please.
Without bothering to say anything to me, she went up and down the
hall, trying the key in the locks of the other doors. It fitted none
of them. She went downstairs again, with me trailing after her, and
tried the key in all the locks downstairs. It fitted none of them,
either.
“Do you know,” she asked, showing at last that she was conscious of my
presence, which I was beginning to doubt, “when you last had a fire in
that fireplace?”
I thought a minute, and then told her on the night of the fourth of
July, during the storm.
“Do you remember who kindled the fire?”
“It had been fixed there, ready for the match, for weeks. Things have
gone to rack and ruin here lately; but I always used to see to it that
the fire was set in the fireplace, ready to light when needed.”
“Do you happen to know who applied the match to the fire that night?”
“Sam did.”
“But surely, even though the rain had come up, a fire on the fourth of
July could not have been necessary?”
“We don’t have fires here when they are necessary,” I told her. “We
have them when they are possible without absolute suffocation. Half a
pint of rain is plenty of excuse for Sam to light a fire at any time,
even if he has to open all the doors and the windows to cool off.”
What I was saying was the honest truth; but I had a mean feeling that
she didn’t believe me.
Right here, with apologies to Miss MacDonald and others of her
profession, I want to say that if they would just remember that nine
times out of ten a person who pretends to be telling the truth is
telling it, it would save them a lot of mistakes, and a lot of worry.
The man who spends his time biting his money to see whether or not it
is genuine doesn’t, usually, have much of it to bite; to say nothing
of the wear and tear on his own teeth, which would be considerable.
I was standing by the living-room windows, trying to keep my temper
down with some such consoling thoughts as these, when I saw a car
drive up and the coroner and the undertaker getting out of it.
I told Miss MacDonald the news, and asked her what in the world she
supposed they were coming here for, at this time in the morning.
“I needed to see them again,” she answered. “Mr. Stanley telephoned to
them last evening.”
“Well,” I said, “that means that I’ve got about half an hour to
disguise a family meal as a company dinner——”
“Don’t bother,” she interrupted. “They won’t be here for
luncheon—dinner. I need to see them only about ten minutes.”
I didn’t bother—answering. If she didn’t know any more about the ways
of people in this country than that, I didn’t see why I should take it
on myself to teach her.
But she was right. She talked to them a few minutes; and, though I
insisted that they stay for dinner, off they went. It was an insult to
the Desert Moon Ranch. Everyone on the place, but Miss MacDonald, knew
it. Two weeks before, if a couple of friends had left the ranch at
eleven-thirty in the morning, with no reasonable excuse for so doing,
Sam would have blown up and burst with rage. That noon he was not even
decently indignantly interested.
He had plenty of interest, though, concerning the finding of the attic
key. He had had it all settled, and was satisfied that, since it had
been proven that Gaby had been killed on the stairway, it had also
been proven that no member of the household could have been
implicated. Now this second key coming to light, the key that must
have been put over back of the wood before the fire was lighted that
night, and that must have been blackened in that one fire, because
there had been no fire in that fireplace since, dragged, to quote Sam,
not wishing to use such words on my own hook, “Every damn one of us
back into the damn mess again.”
“Sam,” I said, and I guess my only excuse is that I was still angry at
having my honest word doubted, “do you know what I think? I think that
Miss MacDonald—though land knows she is a nice girl, and a living
wonder as help in the kitchen and around the house—is going to be a
flat fizzle from start to finish when it comes to discovering the
murderer.”
“That’s kind of the way I got it sized up, too,” Sam said. “But if
she’s good help to you, she’s worth a lot more than her expenses.”
“It isn’t the cost of her,” I said. “I’m afraid she is going to do a
lot of harm around here.”
“Good-night, Mary!” he said. “If anyone can do any more harm around
here than has been done already—why, leave ’em do it.”
“Not much with your ‘leave ’em do its,’” I said. “My idea is that
we’ve had about enough trouble. What I’m getting at is this, Sam: I
think that fool girl, at present, is suspecting you more than any
other one of us.”
“That’s the way I had that sized up, too,” he said. “But let her go
ahead. If she can prove I’m guilty, I’m willing to hang for it.”
“Don’t be a fool, Sam,” I snapped. “Did you ever happen to hear of
circumstantial evidence?”
“You bet. But they can’t hang more than one innocent person on
circumstantial evidence, and there’s enough of that stuff around here
now to hang about five or six of us. I’ll take my chances with the
rest of you, Mary.”
“Lands, Sam,” I was taken aback, “do you think she suspects me?”
Something pretty close to the old twinkle came into Sam’s eyes. “Well,
Mary, Gaby was one extra to do for and she came late to meals and
pestered you quite a lot. Furthermore, though it hasn’t been made a
point of, you were all alone in the kitchen for the hour between five
and six o’clock. You might have slipped up and have done the deed
between the time you put the meat on and took the biscuits out.”
I knew that he thought he was being funny; but I didn’t like it. “See
here, Sam,” I began, “Danny was going back and forth all the time——”
“‘Now then,’” Sam interrupted, mocking Miss MacDonald. “Did Miss
Canneziano have any particular reason for watching you? No. I see.
Then, I am afraid, she can not be positive that you were not out of
the kitchen. Twenty minutes often seem like two hours and sixteen
minutes——
“I’ll tell you what, Mary,” Sam got suddenly serious. “I’m going to
wait a few more days, and then if this lady isn’t progressing a deal
faster than she is at present, I’m going to pay her off, full amount,
of course, and wire to ’Frisco for a plain, ordinary, he-man detective
to come up here and take hold of things. By the way,” he went on,
“does it seem to you that Danny and Canneziano are getting along all
right?”
“I judge it isn’t a case of their getting along, much,” I said. “So
far as I know, she hasn’t spoken a word to him since she greeted him
the evening she came home.”
“Well,” he hesitated, “well—I know a mite further than that. I’ll tell
you, sometime that isn’t dinner time—maybe.”
He went into the dining-room, and I followed him.
All during that dinner, and the same had been true of every meal since
the first breakfast I’ve mentioned, John hardly took his eyes off of
Miss MacDonald. I made a way to speak to him about it, alone, right
after dinner.
“John,” I said, “for Mercy’s sakes, what do you want to sit and stare
at Miss MacDonald for, during meals, like she was the place where you
had lost something?”
He blushed. “Gosh, Mary! I haven’t been doing that, have I?”
“You certainly have. It doesn’t look nice, John. Why do you do it?”
“I didn’t know that I did. But, on the square, did you ever see
anything as pretty—I mean, as clean and—well, kind of comforting
looking? She changes so, too; like a diamond, or a desert, or a
sunrise, or—something. Did you ever see anyone as interesting to look
at, Mary?”
“Never mind asking me,” I said. “Just you go and ask Danny some of
those questions.”
“Danny,” he answered, “is—well, Danny is Danny, of course. She’s
different.”
“Better take to watching how different she is,” I advised, and left
him to think it over, and went into the living-room.
Canneziano was loafing around in there. “Mary,” he said, “I’ll make a
dicker with you.”