Epilogue
Sam says, bitterly, that the only thing I need to explain is the one
thing that can ever be explained: how one girl, by changing her
clothes and by washing her face, could turn a houseful of supposedly
sensible people into a packet of blithering, bat-blind fools for a
generous period of time. I can explain that, I think; but I am going
to leave it until later, and go clear back to the second of July, the
day that Gabrielle received the code letter.
In her talk with John (John says it was in no sense a confession, that
it was nothing but a taunt for us all, a final, regretless, high fling
of defiance) there in his room, during the twenty minutes or so that
she talked to him, before she shot herself, some things, which might
still not be clear to us, were made plain. Also, many of Miss
MacDonald’s previously formed opinions were directly or indirectly
verified. Miss MacDonald had said, you remember, that the murder had
been wickedly premeditated.
“When I read that letter,” Gabrielle said to John, “and found myself
penniless and planless on a Nevada ranch, I at once made up my mind to
kill Danielle, the little fool, and take her place.”
How she persuaded Danny to accept the idea of the masquerade, and to
change clothes with her, on the fourth of July, we do not positively
know. That is the “hole” that Miss MacDonald mentioned in her puzzle.
To my mind, there is little doubt that she gained her way very easily,
by using her own unhappiness and disappointment as tools with which to
remove Danny’s scruples and prod her pity. I am sure, remembering
Danny’s troubled manner at the time, that she consented unwillingly,
that she thoroughly disliked the idea, and that she was afraid of its
consequences.
When the two girls went upstairs together, on the afternoon of the
fourth of July, they must have gone to effect the transformation.
Perhaps, then, for a brief minute or two, the thing did seem amusing
to Danny; for I know that I heard the girls laughing together, as I
have mentioned, when I was on my errand upstairs.
We do not know, when the disguise had been completed, by what pretext
Gabrielle lured Danny into the attic. Their trunks were in the attic.
There could be a dozen simple reasons why Danny might consent to go up
there with her. Coming downstairs again, Gabrielle caught her by the
throat, and strangled her, instantly, by means of the deadly jiu-jitsu
hold, which she had learned from her “Strangler” lover. It is a hold
that requires little strength—though Gabrielle’s trained fingers were
strong enough—but much scientific skill.
She took the earrings from Danny’s ears—or, perhaps, Danny had not yet
put them on—went to her own room, arranged her make-up, got into the
wrap, which completely covered Danny’s clothes that she was wearing,
pulled the hat down over her eyes to conceal the change in
hairdressing, and walked through the living-room, for us all to see
her, at four o’clock.
When Chad went to the porch with her (this John found out by insistent
questioning) she told him that Danny had left the house, earlier, by
the back way. That she and Danny had arranged a joke on the rest of
us, to enliven the dull afternoon, and asked him to help with it by
calling, in Danny’s voice to her, when he came back into the house.
Chad did it. That was why, since he was standing down by the front
doors, the voice supposed to come from the upper hall had a strained
and an unnatural sound. Gabrielle had reckoned that Chad, in spite of
her request, would be too stupid to discover the facts. Probably she
thought that, at any rate, she would be able to impose silence upon
him. It was one of her many mistakes. We think that he must have known
for the remainder of the afternoon that Gabrielle was masquerading as
Danny. His happy mood was caused by the fact that Gabrielle had given
him a confidence and had allowed him to perform a small service for
her. When he saw what had happened, and when he realized that the girl
whom he had worshipped was a murderer, he killed himself. Strange,
that in spite of everything, he still loved her enough to leave the
confessional note to shield her. The men think that he left the note
to shield the rest of us, rather than to shield her. I do not believe
it.
She had planned to go straight around the house and re-enter it
through the back door. Martha’s being by the rabbit hutch was
something she had not counted on. It was necessary to distract
Martha’s attention, and to get her to come at once into the house. She
gave her the monkey bracelet. As she did so, probably because of the
act of kindness, Martha made one of her frequent mistakes and called
Gabrielle “Danny.” Gabrielle told John (concerning Martha, John also
questioned her insistently) that she then showed Martha the poison in
the charm, and told her that it was a love potion that would make Chad
love her, “like a lady,” if she would swallow it, and never tell
anyone anything about it. That, of course, was Martha’s secret
concerning the happy surprise that had to do with herself and Chad.
Martha out of the way, Gaby must have run quickly around to the back
of the house and up the back stairway. To toss the hat and wrap back
on the body, replace the earrings, scatter the pipe ashes over the
beaded bag (I declare to goodness, I can more easily think of her
lying there in her white silk dressing-gown, than I can think of her,
brushing those pipe ashes up, from somewhere, in order to save them
for that purpose), and drop the tatting shuttle there, required not
more than one or two minutes of time. Another two or three minutes to
wash her face thoroughly and to douse on some of Danny’s perfume, and
she was coming downstairs again, with the headache that necessitated
the drawing of the curtains—to make her safety a bit safer, just at
first.
She told John that those few minutes when she had to walk through the
room, make the trip around the house, and get upstairs again, were the
only moments of fright that she had had, from the first to the last.
Once safely established in the rôle of Danny, she said, she knew that
she had nothing to fear.
I think, however, that there were other times when she was afraid. I
am certain that real fear was there in her room, that day, when the
engagement ring dropped from her finger. Though I believe that her
fear, then, was caused wholly from superstition, and not from any
dread that the slight difference between her hands and Danny’s hands
might be noticed.
I am sure that her fear for John, on the fourth of July, was real
enough. She knew that each minute he was away, longer than the time
necessary for the trip, was a minute lost from the perfect alibi she
had so mistakenly tried to arrange for him by sending him away from
the ranch. She had not known that Danny’s fingers had closed on the
stair’s tread. When John came in the back way she was afraid that it
would be remembered later—as it was—and that someone would suspect—as
Hubert Hand did suspect—that John had carried the body in at that
time.
She had counted on her note to Danny, and on the fact that, as Danny,
she was downstairs within ten or twelve minutes after the time we had
seen Gaby walking down the path and had heard Danny’s voice calling
after her, to prove her own innocence. They, and the gentleness of
Danny’s disposition, did this to perfection.
Her original plan had been to prove that Sam was the murderer. With
Sam out of the way, and with John in possession of his fortune, she
had thought, I suppose, that she would have no trouble in persuading
John to leave the Desert Moon. But she was afraid of the idea. Knowing
John’s devotion to Sam, she could not reckon, with any sureness, how
disgrace and sorrow might affect John. It was too big a risk to take,
unreservedly. So, though she picked the quarrel with Sam, strewed the
pipe ashes on the bag, put the key in the fireplace, wrote on the
photograph, she left loopholes in the shapes of the many other false
clues. It is only my own notion that, if she had not thought the
definite accusation of Sam, which she made during the session on the
fifth of July, was necessary to protect John, she would have backed
out, by that time, and not have made it.
It is again only my notion that the request, which she put in her note
to Danny, to have Danny take her body to San Francisco for cremation,
was made because she thought that it would be desirable for her to be
able to leave the ranch at once—perhaps for several weeks. Mrs.
Ricker’s expressed suspicion probably made her realize the wisdom of
returning as rapidly as possible to the Desert Moon.
Gabrielle Canneziano was a born criminal. Almost all of her life had
been spent among criminals. She knew their ways, and she knew the ways
of honest people toward them. Consequently, she was too clever to drop
her disguise, even for a minute, in San Francisco. When, on the
afternoon of the fourth of July, she had come downstairs as Danny, she
had come resolved from that time forth to be Danny, in thought and in
deed, up to the level best of her ability. That she never doubted her
ability to turn from black to white within the space of an hour, is a
splendid example of Miss MacDonald’s contention concerning the egotism
of criminals.
Miss MacDonald says that her first real clue was the one I gave to her
when I said that no one, except Gaby herself, who would do such a
wicked thing, had ever been on the ranch. If she had been on the
ranch, she might have committed the murder. She had all three of the
primary motives for murder: love, revenge, and greed. The unique
feature in this case—Miss MacDonald says that each case has its unique
feature—was that the murdered girl had been a duplicate twin.
The hazy, incomplete notion, Miss MacDonald says, had just come into
her mind; she had not begun to accept it, she was only allowing it,
dimly, to take form, when I returned to the room that day with my hand
full of letters written by Danny. Handwriting, as surely as
fingerprints, Miss MacDonald says, proves identity.
She asked me, straight, whether I had seen Danny writing the checks
and addressing the envelopes. I answered, straight and positively,
that I had. (And not twenty minutes before that Miss MacDonald had
warned me that people often thought that they saw things they did not
see.)
I had not. I had seen the person whom I supposed was Danny writing
checks and addressing envelopes. I had turned my back on her, and had
walked to the door, when she called after me and gave me the envelopes
containing the checks.
Danny herself had written those checks and had addressed those
envelopes on the third of July. Owing to all the furore that had been
going on in the house that day, she had left her desk before she had
torn the checks from her check-book, and had never gone back to it to
finish her task. It is possible that Gabrielle had deliberately
arranged that, also; but I think not. At any rate, she had had the
checks in her possession, and had waited for a date that had a three,
or an eight in it, to produce them. Circumstances and I played well
into her hands that day; she had only to insert a one in front of the
three to make me her fool.
Miss MacDonald, as you have seen, blames herself and not me for the
mistake. She says that she should have known better than to believe
me; or, to quote her exactly, she should have “doubted your accuracy
of observation.” But, not until the morning that we found Daniel
Canneziano murdered did it occur to her to doubt it.
She says that it was not clairvoyance, not intuition, not even common
sense, that it was nothing but a memory that took her, that morning,
straight back to the idea that Gabrielle Canneziano could be the
guilty person. Oddly, the conviction had come to her before we found
Canneziano’s body.
Sitting across the table from Gabrielle, posing as Danny, that morning
at breakfast, she had thought, idly, of the breakfast that she and
Danny had had together in the dining-car. She had taken her chair,
that morning, just as Danny had handed the order slip for her
breakfast to the waiter. Too vaguely to be certain that it was really
a memory, she seemed to see that slip of paper covered with writing.
Just then, with the aroma of coffee in her nostrils, and with her iced
grapefruit and rolls in front of her, she remembered that it was the
same breakfast both she and Danny had had that morning. Would such a
small order cover an order slip with handwriting? Not, it was certain,
with the neat handwriting that had made out those checks and addressed
those envelopes. Right then she resolved to lose no more time; to get,
as soon as possible, a sample of the handwriting of the girl who was
sitting across the table from her.
Canneziano’s murder, discovered in the next half hour, strengthened
her vague suspicions into as much of a certainty as she ever allowed
herself before she had positive evidence.
As I have written, she spent the following week in efforts to get that
evidence; at last, fearing that she was suspected, she detailed the
task to me.
You have seen how I failed. How Gabrielle at once saw through my trick
of attempting to disable my right hand by burning it; and how,
realizing that she was trapped, she had run upstairs, first to satisfy
her longing to be herself again, even for a few brief minutes, then to
taunt John, and, finally, to take her own life.
For I think, in spite of her denials to John, that she killed herself
because she knew that she was trapped, though her vanity and her
audacity held to the end.
“I knew I should have no trouble in making you believe that silly doll
story,” she said. “It was the truth, I knew, too, that the dick would
read the code letter. She was so slow about it, that I had to steal it
to make her do it. It was time, you see, for the gentle Danielle’s
story to be verified. I knew that the dick had a copy of it—she’d been
baiting me with the thing. I have kept a step or two ahead of her
lumbering pace, all the time.
“Don’t fancy that I had overlooked the matter of the handwriting. I’m
not a fool. I thought of it before I killed the girl. There were a
dozen ways I could have gotten around it—could yet get around it. If
necessary, I could even have disabled my own right hand. I had rather
planned, at first, to do that. But, later, I found that I loved my
pretty little white hand better than I had supposed. Just as I have
discovered that I loved the gay Gaby better than I had supposed—so
well, indeed, that I have decided that death as Gaby is infinitely
preferable to life as the shiny nosed Danielle. I have seen this
coming. I have not cared.
“I got rid of that cur, Canneziano, not because I was afraid of him,
but because he tried to double cross me. I had promised to do much for
him, after you and I were married; and he would have sold me out for a
few thousand dollars. He came here, hoping that Danny might pay him a
pretty sum for his silence about my past. He knew his muttons. She
would have been fool enough to have done it; poor slain sister stuff;
more to be pitied than blamed—all that, you know. He should have
played with me, instead of against me. I had a few old scores to
settle with him. Most of my rage about the money was because I had
thought it would be such good fun to get the best of him. And I did—so
that is all right. I hid in his room early that evening. It was
frightfully amusing to watch him locking his door and his windows to
make his sleep a safe one. It was. I did the job so neatly that he
never woke at all.
“For that matter, it has all been amusing. You have all been such
utter fools. But I am tired of it now. Oh, very tired. Particularly, I
am tired of my cruel plan to destroy the gay Gaby by burying her
alive. I am going now to do it in a swifter, kinder way.”
Sam insists that her success, even for so short a time, is an
indictment against all of us; that it shows that none of us was
capable of looking deeper than clothes and face paint. I do not agree
with him. Gabrielle was a professional actress. She had lived with
Danny long enough to learn all her ways, her mannerisms, her habits in
conversation. She did not dupe Chad, who loved her, and who was an
expert in voices. She did not dupe Canneziano, who had known both of
the girls all their lives.
The murder itself, by stupefying us all with horror, with fear, with
suspicions, did much to help her. But without that dulling of our
perceptions, I think that the imposture would have been successful. At
the time of the murder, the two girls had been on the ranch with us
less than two months. Strangers never get much deeper than surfaces in
so short a time. There was nothing remarkable, it seems to me, about
her being able, quite easily, to deceive all of us, with the single,
glaring exception of John.
John is one of a large class of people who could all be filed under
the recipe for simple acceptors. It is a necessary class; a class that
acts as an oil to the hinges of the world, making it move smoothly:
the gentle, thoroughly honest class that by quietly believing what it
is told to believe, keeps us out of revolutions, and rebellions, and
the like. I am not saying that the doubters and the rebels are not
necessary (as Sam would say, “It takes that sort to make all sorts”),
but Heaven help us if they predominated.
When John came home from Rattail, on the fourth of July, he was faced
with the apparent fact that Danny, in the course of a few hours, had
changed essentially. That was what had bothered him so; what had made
him jerk his head, and blink his eyes, and complain of a touch of sun.
John had never recognized, much less admitted to himself, that there
was the slightest similarity between the two girls. Consequently, in
spite of a change, Danny must be Danny; she looked like Danny, she
talked like Danny, and we all said that she was Danny. John believed.
Very shortly after that, John was faced with another apparent fact.
Gaby had been murdered. He could see that, with his own eyes, as we
all could see it.
He at once set the fact of Danny’s change against the fact of Gaby’s
murder—and there he stuck fast; too loyal to go further; too dismayed
to retreat. He did not believe that Danny had killed Gabrielle. He had
known Danny too well to harbor such a belief. He was forced to believe
that she knew who had done it. Consequently, her accusation of Sam
could be nothing but a wicked accusation. Only—Danny could not be
wicked.
The mystery was a torture which Danny’s presence intensified
unbearably; so he avoided her; and, unable to blame her for anything,
blamed himself and hated himself for his suspicions and for his
failing loyalty. I’ll venture, though it can be only a venture, that
the realization of his interest in Miss MacDonald, and his inability
to be rid of it, was another cause for John’s befuddlement.
That interest, of course, has all disappeared for the present. Though
he despised himself for it, John might have been untrue to a changed,
living Danny; might, in the end, have jilted her meanly. John is male.
But to a Danny who is no longer living, John, now, must always be
true. John is young. I reckon he has fine honest plans for being
faithful to her memory for the remainder of his life. Miss MacDonald
is also young, and lovely, and heart whole. She has promised to come
and visit us for a month next June.
Just now, with our thermometers at fifty below zero, and our
chilblains burning, and the coyotes piercing the nights with their
lank, long, frozen screeches, and the cold old owls always grieving
forth their mournful “chuck-a-loo, whoo, whoo, whoo’s” June looks
mighty far away.
But, five fingers and a thumb, and she will be here, smelling of
sunshine and tasting like smiles; painting our deserts with rainbow
colors for as far as the eyes can see; spreading sunsets that catch
you right up into their midsts; offering dawns that share their youth
with you and that make you believe all over again in things which you
had long ago stopped believing. Now I don’t know shucks about romance;
but I have a notion that June, in our northeastern Nevada, stirs up
whole batches of the stuff. I am counting on her to serve it, fresh
and sweet, this year.
It isn’t June, though, and it isn’t romance that I am trusting for the
final chore: it is something more lasting than either, something
sturdier, something for which I can not find a name. But I know that
it is induced by a mixture of long years of right living, and clean
thinking, and sanity, and courage; so I am expecting it to clear away
the shadows from the Desert Moon and leave it, riding high as it used
to ride, high and proud, a brave, shining thing in our valley.
The End
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
This transcription follows the text of 1928 edition published by
Grosset & Dunlap. However, the following errors have been corrected
from the original text:
* “advertisments” was changed to “advertisements” (Chapter VI).
* “the the same” was changed to “the same” (Chapter VII).
* “conforting” was changed to “comforting” (Chapter XVII).
* “Gay” was changed to “Gaby” (Chapter LI).
* Two occurrences of mismatched quotation marks were repaired.
* The alphabetical list indices (in Chapter XLIV) was repaired to
not skip over “G”.
Additionally, the printed version of the coded letter excerpts (in
Chapters XXV and XLVIII) contained three typographical errors; these
have been corrected.