An Aid
“Mrs. Magin,” Miss MacDonald began, right off, the minute the door had
closed behind Danny, “I want to ask you to help me with this case.”
“I couldn’t be any help to you,” I said. I guess I was rather tart
about it.
“Why not?”
“One reason is,” I said, “that anybody who doesn’t know any better
than to suspicion Danny, in this affair, would need a lot more help,
to get anywhere, than I could give them.”
“My only suspicion concerning Miss Canneziano,” she answered, “is that
she knows more than she is willing to tell. I may be wrong about that.
Have you any other reason for refusing to help me?”
“Only that you don’t believe a word I say. If you would consider that
I am, anyway, trying to be honest, and if you’d do the same with the
others, until you are sure that you have reason to do otherwise, I’d
consider it an honor to help you, and I’d thank you kindly.”
“I am afraid that I don’t entirely understand.”
“Crime and wickedness,” I told her, “aren’t the general rules of the
world. If they were, all the good people would have to be locked up,
for safety’s sake, while the criminals ran loose for lack of space to
confine them. Why, instead of doubting my simple word, this morning,
when I told you how Sam always lighted a fire, for any excuse,
couldn’t you have believed that I was telling the truth, and that
whoever put the key in there knew that Sam would light the fire, and
so throw suspicion on himself?”
“That is possible,” she admitted. “But the key, there, leads me to
suppose that whoever put it there, to hide it, would be too stupid for
much subtle reasoning. Keys, you know, don’t burn.”
“They don’t,” I agreed. “But we never take the ashes out of the
fireplace as you did this morning. We open the ash-dump and shoot them
down into a barrel in the basement. Every few months the ashes are
emptied in starvation field, eight miles or more away from here. Not a
bad way to get the key carried off the place, if that was what he
wanted. Not a bad way, either, to throw more suspicion on Sam, if the
key was found.”
“Most criminals are stupid, though,” she clung to her point. “Try as
they may, they always make some stupid blunder.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that the ones who get caught are stupid;
they are the ones who have made the blunder, left the clue. But look
at the number of criminals who get clean away. Not long ago, I was
reading some statistics——”
“You know what Mark Twain said about statistics? ‘There are three
kinds of liars: liars, damned liars, and statistics.’”
I had to laugh. I think she said that to put me in a good humor, for
she went right on to say, “But you haven’t told me, yet, that you will
be my assistant in this case.”
She couldn’t hoodwink me. “I told you that I’d be no use to you, as
long as you doubted every word I said.”
“But,” she argued, “by your own admission you tried to shield Mr.
Stanley, immediately after the murder; stopping to clean away his—the
pipe ashes. If you tried, once, to shield him, wouldn’t you try again
to shield him, if you needed to?”
“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t. I’ll tell you why. That night, and for
several days after, my mind was like a dirty cluttered kitchen. I
couldn’t get enough space cleared in it to start thinking, let alone
working at it. I have tidied up a place, since then, and I’ve done a
batch of thinking. I know, now, that Sam doesn’t need me, nor anyone,
to shield him. Any evidence found against him, will be good evidence,
in the end, against whoever fixed it to throw blame on him.”
“I am inclined to agree with you,” she said. “Now then: Is there
anyone here who would benefit by his conviction?”
“Am I,” I questioned, “your assistant, or am I not?”
“Does it make a difference in your answer?” she questioned in return.
“A deal of difference. Being your assistant honor would bind me,
wouldn’t it? If I know that you are believing that I’ll help, and tell
the truth, I’ll try to. If I think I am to be doubted, anyway, maybe
I’ll say what I’d like to say.”
She sat and looked straight at me for at least half a minute. “I do
believe you,” she said, “and trust you. I have, since I first met you
at the station. I can’t help myself. You’re all right, Mrs. Magin, and
I know it. I’ll agree to your terms. Now then: As my assistant, is
there anyone on the place who would benefit in any way by Mr.
Stanley’s conviction?”
“In a way,” I said, though it all but choked me, “John would. He is to
inherit everything Sam has. But John loves Sam. And John didn’t do
it.”
“Miss Canneziano would also benefit, then, wouldn’t she, since she is
to marry young Mr. Stanley?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “John has plenty of his own, right
now; and Sam would give them anything and everything they wanted
besides, as long as he lived.”
“I had understood,” she said, “that Mr. Stanley objected to the
marriage.”
“Not a bit of it. He has asked them to wait a year. That’s all.”
“Is there,” she asked, next, “any person at present on the ranch whom
you would concede might, possibly, commit a murder?”
“Canneziano.”
“Yes, I know. And leaving him out of it?”
“Well,” I had to hesitate, “I am not sure. Every instinct I have tells
me that neither Hubert Hand nor Mrs. Ricker—— No. It is an awful thing
to say; but, do you know, Gabrielle Canneziano herself was the only
other person who has ever been on this ranch whom I could even imagine
doing such a terrible thing.”
“I wonder why you disliked her so much?” she said.
“Because she didn’t have any of the decent, ordinary virtues,” I
answered. “She didn’t know anything about them. Not charity, nor
gratitude, nor kindness, nor honesty, nor modesty, nor—nor anything.”
“Isn’t it strange that twin sisters, who looked as much alike as these
girls did, should be so entirely different as to character?”
I had not seen her notes at that time. I did not know that she had
written “Innocent” after Danny’s name. I spoke up, pretty hotly.
“Strange or not, it is true. In character those two girls were as
different as night and day. I never even thought that they looked
alike. Who told you that they did?”
“I have seen their photographs,” she reminded me. “Chadwick Caufield’s
album is filled with them.”
“Their photographs may look alike. They didn’t.”
“But they _did_,” she insisted.
“I tell you,” I said, “that they acted so differently, and talked so
differently, and dressed so differently, that there was not one bit of
likeness.”
“A most unusual state of affairs for duplicate twins. These sunshine
and tempest relationships are seldom found, outside a Mary J. Holmes’
novel. Miss Danielle Canneziano came here on a most doubtful errand;
an errand that amounted to robbery, nothing else——”
“If you are accusing Danny——” I interrupted.
“Oh, I am not!” There was a flash of temper in that. “Making all
allowances for mistakes in time, Miss Canneziano could not have
committed the murder herself. But, suppose that her past was not as
innocent and blameless as she would like to have you all think.
Suppose that a revelation of all she knows, or suspects, concerning
her sister’s death, would also bring to light things that she can not
afford to have brought to light concerning herself. It is at least
reasonable to think that she knows more than she is willing to tell.”
“Maybe,” I had to admit. “But I doubt it.”
“Why do you so dislike that admission?”
“Because John loves her. John is a good boy. I’d hate to see his heart
broken.”
“Will you forgive me for saying that young Mr. Stanley does not
impress me as a man who is very deeply in love?”
“I know,” I agreed. “Just now he is a mite put out with Danny. He has
been, ever since she accused Sam.”
“Considering the circumstances under which Miss Canneziano made that
accusation, young Mr. Stanley is acting most unjustly—if that is the
case.”
“All men are unjust to the women they love,” I told her. “It seems to
be a part of it, like a rash with measles.”
She smiled at that, and changed the subject.
“I wonder whether you noticed,” she said, “that coming up from the
station I set a trap for Miss Canneziano. Just for an instant, I
fancied that there was more fear than grief in her attitude toward
meeting her father. I suggested, you remember, that she see him alone?
I wanted to see whether she desired a private interview with him. Her
prompt refusal made it evident that she had no secret to give to him,
and expected to get none from him. That is in her favor. Still——
“Before you go now, since you have agreed to help me, do you mind if I
direct a bit? I want you to keep one eye on Miss Canneziano. I want
you to keep the other eye on Mr. Canneziano, Mr. Hand, and Mrs.
Ricker. Will you do that?”
“One whole eye for Danny,” I questioned, “and only a third of an eye
for each of the others?”
“For the present,” she smiled. “Will you do that?”
I said that I would. It was not until after dinner the next day, when
I was resting in my own room, feeling as virtuous as the three
monkeys, who see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, pleased as
Punch over my failures of the past twenty-four hours, that I realized
that I just naturally could not carry through a job that went as much
against the grain as that job went.
We are, I thought, allowed to know some things—just simple, honest
knowing. And I knew that keeping a suspicious eye on the girl who had
said “bless your heart” to me, on the evening of the second of July,
was as sensible as sitting up for Santa Claus.
Someone knocked on my door. I answered the knock. Miss MacDonald, all
smiles, was standing there.
“Let me come in,” she said; and, as soon as my door was closed behind
her, “A most fortunate thing has happened.”