SOMETHING BEHIND
I had three visitors that evening. Punch was the first. He ditched the
dinner at The Oaks and rode over on his bicycle in time to dine with
me--to go through the motions of dining with me, rather, for he ate
hardly anything.
He was, of course, terribly cast down by the loss of the necklace which
he had tried so conscientiously to guard. He felt, too, that if the
others had treated the case as seriously as he had done, it needn’t
have happened. They hadn’t treated it seriously, none of them, with the
exception of Uncle Alec. They’d laughed at him for having the necklace
on the brain. They’d implored him to forget it and not be a pest.
He didn’t, though, entirely acquit himself of negligence. That
half-hour or more while they had waited in the veranda for the arrival
of the guests, he himself with the others, might have given the
thief, assuming that he’d secreted himself in the house at some time
previously, his opportunity. And this was just the time, Punch said,
when he should have been on the job.
“Oh, come!” I protested. “There were plenty of other chances for the
thing to be taken. You couldn’t have stayed on guard all the time.”
He insisted with a vehemence which didn’t strike me as quite like him
that this was when the necklace had disappeared.
“The necklace is known to have been seen,” I argued, “by nobody since
your grandmother showed it to you yesterday afternoon. She put it back
in the safe and locked it up. It seems to me our difficulty is that
there have been so many chances to take it.”
“For who to take it?” he asked me.
“Why, for almost anybody who was in the house,” I said.
A queer look went over his face, as if that off-hand remark of mine had
frightened him.
“Not for any one who _would_ take it,” he said. “Of course there were
chances for people who wouldn’t.”
At that I got an idea. I asked him suddenly, “How do you know that the
necklace has really been taken? Your grandmother sprang the loss of it
on you and Judy in a rather dramatic way. Isn’t it possible that she
adopted your idea that the jewels ought to be hidden somewhere rather
than kept in the safe? She’d been rather annoyed at your insistence
that they oughtn’t to be in the safe, although she’d become convinced,
more or less, that you were right about it. She’d been still more
annoyed at Judy for saying she didn’t want the necklace.
“Well, then, she sends you to get Judy, opens the safe, tucks the
pearls away somewhere--in her own dress perhaps--and then springs the
empty box on the pair of you. Isn’t that possible? She has guarded
against their being stolen, and she’s scored off you and Judy at the
same time.”
“She wasn’t paying any attention to Judy and me. She didn’t even notice
that Judy laughed. She was screaming that mother had taken them.
Practically out of her head. Miss Digby had to give her a hypodermic to
quiet her.”
That shattered my theory. It had been no joke, even of the grimmest,
for the old woman. But my mind had already fastened on something else.
“Judy laughed, you say, when she saw that the necklace was gone?”
He hadn’t told me that before.
“Yes,” he said.
I remarked that it was natural enough that she should be a bit
hysterical for the moment after a loss of that kind.
“That wasn’t the _way_ she laughed,” he told me. “She laughed as if it
was something that didn’t matter very much, but was rather funny. As if
she was really thinking about something else. But I don’t know why she
laughed nor what the other thing was she was thinking about.”
His voice had faltered, but he had forced it to the end of the
sentence, and I perceived what I might have guessed earlier. The thing
the boy was agonizing over lay deeper than the disappearance of the
necklace, although behind it perhaps, and connected with it.
“Well,” I said cheerfully, “we know Judy didn’t steal the necklace
anyway, nor your mother, either. Go back to the time the people came
and tell me everything that’s happened.”
It steadied him to have a piece of perfectly straight reporting like
that to do; something that called the faculties of his active, orderly
mind into play, and he went ahead and gave me the narrative of the
afternoon, substantially as I have put it down in the preceding
chapter. I didn’t interrupt him with questions. But when he had
finished I asked a few.
“Miss Digby wouldn’t have stayed in the room while your grandmother was
lying down, would she?”
“Not in her bedroom,” he said. “But it’s her sitting-room next door
where the safe is. I thought she was going to stay in the sitting-room,
but I’m not sure she did.”
“If she went away,” I pointed out, “there’d have been a chance for
some one to open the safe if it weren’t locked, or to unlock it if he
knew the combination, and get the necklace while your grandmother was
asleep. For that matter, isn’t it likely that Miss Digby knows the
combination to the safe herself? She must have seen your grandmother
open it a hundred times.”
“Yes,” he said, “I suppose she does.” Then he laughed. “Old Digs didn’t
take the necklace though,” he said.
I agreed with him about that. It wasn’t possible seriously to suspect
Miss Digby.
“I’m not talking about the probability that any one stole it,” I
explained. “I’m trying to include all the people who had a chance to
take the necklace at that time.”
“Well,” he said, “if Digs went out, everybody who was in the house had
a chance.”
“Including,” I remarked, “your assumed thief who had concealed himself
somewhere on the premises.”
“It wouldn’t have been so good a chance for him as the other time,” he
insisted, “because Judy was right there in her room across the hall,
and her door was open when Miss Digby sent me away. Besides, there were
a lot of people down-stairs all the rest of the afternoon. He’d have
had trouble getting away without meeting anybody.”
“What are they doing about it?” I asked. “How many people know the
necklace is gone?”
“Only mother and Uncle Alec, besides Gran and Judy and me. Oh, and
Digs, of course. I went and got mother and she sent me for Uncle Alec.
They jawed about it, there in grandmother’s room, until it was time to
go down to dinner.”
“Didn’t your grandmother herself have anything to say about it?”
“Oh, she was in bed in the next room. The hypodermic put her out, I
guess. It was mostly mother and Uncle Alec. He’s awfully excited about
it. Wants to send for detectives. But mother won’t have it.”
“How about Judy?” I asked. “You’d think her vote would count, as long
as it was to have been her necklace.”
“Judy didn’t vote. She didn’t seem to care what they did. It seemed
as if she was still thinking about something else. I don’t think she
wanted the police, though.”
“What do _you_ want?” I asked.
The intensity of his answer startled me.
“I don’t care much about the necklace now,” he said, “but I want the
thief found. _I’m_ not afraid who it’ll turn out to be.”
“You mean,” I asked, “that you think your mother and Judy _are_ afraid?”
He looked at me steadily but did not answer.
Possibly to his relief, and certainly to my own, we heard a car door
slam just then, and Punch darted to the window to see who it was.
“Here’s mother now,” he said, and went to open the door for her.
I couldn’t see her face when she perceived her small son, but of course
I heard what she said to him.
“Oh, you’re here, are you? We were wondering what had become of you.”
Her tone was composed, almost good-natured, but rather cold. My guess
is she was glad she was saved the trouble of telling me what had
happened, but at the same time a little put out by this indication that
I was deep in Punch’s confidence. He was always rather reticent with
her.
After she’d come into my sitting-room and greeted me, she turned back
to him. “Run along home now,” she said curtly, “and tell Judy I’ll be
back in fifteen minutes.”
He obeyed her with alacrity; he barely nodded a farewell to me as he
said, “All right, mother,” and disappeared. If he felt any curiosity as
to our interview, he didn’t show it. I think he was glad just then not
to talk to her.
She did the polite thing by my broken leg, helped herself, at my
invitation, to one of my cigarettes, and settled down, with a
deep-drawn, very audible sigh, in the big chair which Punch had just
vacated.
“I suppose you know,” she said, “the ghastly thing that’s just happened
over at The Oaks?”
“I know as much about it as Punch knows,” I said somewhat tentatively.
As a matter of fact, Victoria herself had astonished me. For in spite
of her sigh and her use of the word ghastly to describe the theft, her
manner was almost complacent.
It seemed incredible that this should be so, but there was no getting
away from it. The mental picture I’d formed of her during the past
couple of days, derived mostly from the reports I’d been getting from
Punch, had been of a woman driven half frantic by worry, involved in
some sort of dangerous web.
The web appeared, certainly, to be woven about the necklace. She had,
according to Judy, sustained a shock when she read in the paper that it
was to be given to her daughter as a wedding present. She’d quarreled
furiously with old Mrs. Corbin about it. It had caused--apparently,
at least, it was the thing that had caused--sudden alterations in
her plans. I had taken for granted, though on insufficient evidence
perhaps, that it was the theme of that mysteriously emotional
conversation with Judy, which Punch had heard the end of, on the night
of Alexander Corbin’s arrival.
Yet now, within a couple of hours of the discovered theft of the
precious dangerous thing, she sat there looking at me as calm and
contented as a cat who had just licked the meringue off the top of a
lemon pie! Oh, I exaggerate, of course. One does with Victoria.
“I wonder if you _do_ know as much as Punch knows,” she remarked,
thoughtfully exhaling a deep lungful of smoke. “Oh, I suppose so,
though Alec had the idea that Punch might have taken it himself.--Not
to keep, of course,” she added hastily, “but perhaps as a prank to
teach his grandmother a lesson. Or to save it from being stolen by
burglars.”
Victoria went down to her nadir with me just then. I’ve never found it
harder to keep up the appearance of friendliness.
“For that matter,” I said, “I may have taken the thing myself. Gone
over on crutches in my sleep....”
“That is possible,” she interrupted, with a sudden look of interest.
“Oh, not you. Punch! I don’t _think_ he ever has walked in his sleep.
He may have done it this time, though. That necklace has been an
obsession with him for days.”
There was no denying, of course, that this was a possibility. But
Victoria didn’t pursue it.
“I’ll tell you why I came,” she went on, laying down her cigarette and
coming a little more sharply into focus. “Alec is acting rather stupid
about this and stubborn. He gets that from his mother, I guess. He’s
determined to make a hullabaloo about it. Send for detectives, question
the servants, search everybody, and that sort of thing. Judy and I have
done all we could to call him off, without getting anywhere. He feels
his responsibility, he says, as the man of the family. All I could
get him to agree to was to wait until he’d talked to you. He’s in the
dining-room now smoking with the men, but he’s coming over to see you
as soon as he can get away.”
“And _you_ want me to persuade him to do nothing,” I said.
I didn’t inflect it like a question. Cowardice that was, I’ll admit.
And Victoria assumed that I would do as she wished. It is an assumption
she always makes with men, I think.
“Of course,” she went on petulantly, “I don’t know whether it will do
any good. There’ll be my mother-in-law to reckon with as soon as she
comes out of the hypodermic Miss Digby gave her. I want Alec on our
side, actively, you know, before that happens.”
“Yes,” I said faintly, “I see.”
Then I rallied my courage. I admit it was the memory of what Punch had
said--“I want the thief caught. I’m not afraid who it’ll turn out to
be”--which served as my trumpet call.
“Look here, Victoria. There may be a reason why I should try to
persuade Alexander Corbin to let the necklace go and keep the theft
dark, but I won’t undertake it unless I know what the reason is.”
She looked at me a little ruefully. “You never did like me very well,”
she remarked.
“I think I can fairly be counted one of your friends,” I told her, “and
I think I’ve understood pretty well some of your difficulties. I really
want to help you now. But I can’t step off in the dark. I want to know
why the thing Alec proposes isn’t the natural thing to do; the thing
I’d do myself in the circumstances. He _has_ got a responsibility in
the matter, and I don’t wonder that he feels it.”
“Oh, I suppose so,” she agreed.
I looked up at her and saw, to my astonishment, that there were tears
in her eyes.
“You talk about my difficulties. You _don’t_ know them; not the
beginning of them. I’ve been trying for the last ten years to give my
children the sort of bringing up they deserve to have. It’s the only
thing I’ve cared anything about. That’s true, whether you believe it or
not. And I’ve been hampered and suspected and quarreled with all the
time by that terrible old woman who’s my mother-in-law.
“I suppose I’ve made mistakes. We all do. But between her and the
children I’ve been driven half distracted. Not Punch. He’s all right.
But there have been times when I’ve been in despair about Judy.”
“Isn’t she pretty young to have been despaired about?” I protested.
“She ran away from school last fall,” said Victoria. “I wonder if even
_you_ had heard about that? She simply disappeared for almost a month.
There, I’m glad I told you. You’ll have some idea....”
“Good heavens!” I broke in. “Didn’t you hear from her in all that time?
How did you know she hadn’t been kidnapped--murdered?”
“I got a line from her every two or three days, post-marked from
different places, saying she was all right and telling me not to worry.”
“But how did she live?” I asked. “What had she to live on?”
“She earned it,” Victoria said shortly. “You may be perfectly sure I
haven’t asked for details. But she’s volunteered a few. I know she
worked for a while as a waitress in a cheap lunch room.”
“How did you get her back?”
“Oh, she’d had enough of it, I suppose. She wrote me that if I wanted
her to come back she was ready to behave herself. I met her in New
York. Found her in the Martha Washington Hotel, fitted her out with
clothes, and took her, by a lucky chance, down to Belleair.”
“What did she look like--when you found her, I mean?”
“She looked,” Victoria said dryly, “as if she hadn’t found liberty
quite so jolly as she’d expected.”
“What was the particular piece of luck about your choosing Belleair?”
“Why, Bruce was down there playing golf,” she said. “And it just
happened she got him. Of course if he’d known.... But there’s no reason
why he ever should. So now she’s all right. She’s marrying a man--an
orphan, thank heaven!--who’s well-bred and decently rich, and mad about
her.”
“Is she in love with him?” I asked.
“No,” Victoria admitted, “I don’t suppose she is. But she likes him,
and she wants to marry him. She’s going into it with her eyes open. And
not under any pressure from me. I didn’t urge it on her. Anyhow, that’s
_settled_. She’s going to marry him day after to-morrow.
“Well, I’m not going to have her wedding spoiled by exploding a beastly
thing like this in the middle of it.”
“There’s nothing beastly about getting robbed of a necklace,” I said.
“That can happen to anybody.”
She flung out her hands in a gesture of uncontrollable exasperation.
Then she pulled herself together.
“The first discovery a detective would make would be that Mrs. Corbin
is a morphine addict. That would be rather unsavory, wouldn’t it?”
“She gets the stuff legitimately, doesn’t she?” I commented. “Nobody
as old and rich as that could be reduced to trafficking with a peddler.”
“Oh, yes,” she admitted. “Doctor Parkinson prescribes it for her. But
isn’t that bad enough? Bruce would hate it--just the notoriety--worse
than anybody I know. Things like that simply don’t happen in his
family. He’d think less of Judy if it happened in hers.”
She paused a moment; then went on with a rush. “If this meant the
actual loss of the necklace itself, I’d let it go; let the thief make
what he could out of it--rather than turn Judy’s wedding into a beastly
dime novel of a detective story. Have it smeared all over the front
pages of the newspapers. Isn’t that reason enough why Alec shouldn’t
tell the world with a bang what’s happened?”
She could hardly have been aware of what she had said, for she started
when I quoted her own words back at her.
“You said just now that even if it really meant the loss of the
necklace you’d let it go. Do you mean that it doesn’t mean that?”
She took her time before answering. “I’m absolutely sure it doesn’t,”
she said.
“Do you _know_ where the necklace is now, Victoria?”
“No,” she said hotly, “of course I don’t. Not exactly. But I’m
absolutely sure that it’s all right.”
“How about Judy?” I asked. “Does she agree with you, genuinely, that
it’s best to do nothing about it?”
Victoria gave me a rather dry smile. “Judy does,” she said. “You may be
perfectly sure of that. Call her up on the phone if you like and ask
her.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it. And I’ll do what I can to
bring Alexander around to your way of thinking.”
She nodded and got up to go, without, I’m glad to say, embarrassing me
by any overwhelming manifestations of gratitude. I wasn’t enthusiastic
over what I’d let myself in for.
I didn’t believe Victoria was as sure as she pretended to be that
the necklace would turn up all right. The start of interest she had
betrayed over the idea that Punch might have taken it while walking
in his sleep had looked genuine, and Victoria never was much of an
actress. If it was genuine, it revealed two things. First, that she
hadn’t carried off the necklace herself on that hurried trip to town
yesterday, and second, that she didn’t know who had taken it. All she
had was a theory, but it must be one in which she felt a good deal of
confidence.
Whom could that theory concern? It seemed to narrow itself down to
Judy. A reduction to absurdity, of course. Why should Judy steal the
necklace which her grandmother meant to give her for a wedding present?
And yet, why had Judy faked a sprained ankle? Why had she asked her
brother whether he’d be on her side whatever she did? Why had she
laughed in that queer way when she saw the empty box from which the
necklace had been taken?
My belief in the child’s honor, in her essential straightness, was
impregnable. It had not been in the least shaken by Victoria’s account
of her escapade last fall, the running away from the school she had
hated--earning her own living by being a waitress in a quick lunch.
Good lord!
I could understand her doing that, though. What was harder to
understand was her sudden surrender. It wasn’t like Judy to come to
heel just because she’d found that liberty wasn’t quite what it was
cracked up to be. Something worse than that must have happened to her.
Whatever had happened, though, even if she’d got involved in devious
ways, I was sure they weren’t of her seeking. I felt about this present
business much as Punch did. I wanted the thief caught; the air, so
sultry with mystery and suspicion, cleared by a good fresh wind.
And yet I had just given Victoria my promise to do what I could to help
hush things up. Why the devil had I done that? Well, I knew why. It
was because, when she had said that her children were all in the world
that she really cared anything about, I had believed she was telling
the truth. All the same I didn’t relish the prospect of my talk with
Alexander Corbin.
That, however, came off better than I had anticipated. I found I liked
him, just as Punch had done. And he showed no trace of the stubbornness
of which Victoria had accused him. He seemed to me extraordinarily
open-minded, and he carried the virtue of candor further than I’d have
been able to do myself, I think, in similar circumstances.
I remembered him faintly, as one would remember the younger brother of
a boyhood friend, and by way of putting some feeling of cordiality
into my greeting, I told him so, without the qualifications.
“That’s nice of you,” he said. “But you wouldn’t have recognized me if
you’d met me on the street.”
“No,” I admitted, “I don’t suppose I should.”
“Well, there you are!” he said. “I doubt if anybody would. I’m all
but a total stranger. And I find myself in the middle of a family
snarl like this. I come on here for my niece’s wedding, and within
twenty-four hours a highly portable piece of my mother’s property,
worth perhaps a hundred thousand dollars, disappears.”
“Good God!” I cried. “You aren’t trying to tell me that any one
suspects _you_ of having taken it?”
“That’s very polite of you,” he remarked kindly, “but I don’t see why
they shouldn’t. It’s evident that Victoria and Judy both regard it as
an inside job of some sort. And surely I’ve a more obvious motive,
as they say in detective stories, for taking it than any one else in
the family. I quarreled with my mother pretty near thirty years ago;
I’ve come home at last to make it up; I find her so shaken by age
and--infirmity that it’s very doubtful if any new will she made now
would hold water,--and I steal the necklace by way of getting my share
of the estate.
“It’s all rot, of course, but that’s how it looks. What I’d like to do
is to put a cordon around the house and have everybody in it searched,
beginning with me and Applebury’s maiden aunts. I want it found, if
it involves tearing the plaster off the walls. Of course it isn’t
possible to go to such lengths as that, but it seems as if one might do
something.
“Yet here’s Victoria pleading with me to let it ride; not turn a hand
nor say a word. She seems to think she knows where it is, or at all
events, that it will turn up. Well, that’s all right if she’s got the
correct hunch. But suppose she hasn’t? I’ll feel uncommonly flat facing
my mother to-morrow when she comes out of the effect of the stuff
they’ve given her, if I have to tell her that the necklace hasn’t been
heard from, and that I’ve done nothing toward recovering it.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “that you haven’t done the best thing possible
toward recovering it.”
He looked at me with a stare of surprise. “You mean by doing nothing,
by saying nothing?” he asked. “That’s what you must mean, of course,
because that’s all I’ve done. But I’m not sure that I see how you
figure it out. Effect of suspense and uncertainty--that sort of thing?
Psychology getting in its deadly work?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Well, it won’t, and I’ll tell you why. A thing like that can’t be
kept dark. It’s known already--half known. Things like that get passed
around. I could feel it crackling all around the dinner table to-night.
By morning everybody in the house will know that something’s happened.
And Victoria might as well have let me call the police in the first
place.”
“No,” I insisted. “There’s a difference between knowing a thing that’s
admitted and knowing a thing that’s not admitted. Society--with a big
S--lives on that difference. We never call anybody a liar. We go on
acting as if we believed the official version of things until the facts
fairly stare us down.”
He laughed. “That statement is true,” he said, “and it’s equally true
of the Moro chieftains in the island of Mindanao.”
“All right,” I said. “Now consider this. There are three sorts of
persons in that house: family, guests and servants. They’re all going
to stay until after the wedding, day after to-morrow. There’s no reason
why anybody should leave, at least, and if anybody does, on whatever
pretext, he’ll be under heavy suspicion. But it’s not likely that the
person who took the necklace will try to leave. The hullabaloo and the
breaking up of the party is very likely just what he’s hoping for. But
nothing happens. Nothing’s said. And the inference from that is that
some one’s been found out. That we know and therefore we can afford to
wait. So there’s a pretty good chance that the thief, so to speak, will
take his first opportunity to restore the necklace.”
“That’s ingenious,” he was polite enough to say. “But I confess the
strong-arm method appeals to me rather more.”
“It can’t be applied,” I said. “A search is no good unless you search
everybody.”
“That’s what I want,” he insisted. “That’s exactly what I mean.
Everybody.”
“Including your mother?” I asked.
Again I encountered his quick intense stare. It wasn’t hostile, though.
He was thinking, hard.
“You’re right,” he said. “That can’t be done.”
He seemed to be coming around all right by himself, so I let him alone.
There was a ruminative silence between us for a while.
“That’s a nice little niece of mine,” he said at last. “Hard to realize
she’s getting married, though. I wish I knew her better.”
“What do you think of her young man?” I asked.
“Oh, a perfectly sound fellow, I think,” he said, without enthusiasm.
“No mistaking his type. He’s what he is, plain as a flagstaff. Great on
discipline and exercise. Plays a very good game of bridge and takes it
as seriously as he does the Constitution of the United States. He’ll
have a thick neck by the time he’s forty, and be one of the pillars
of an intensely respectable club. Seems like rather a sledge-hammer,
though, for little Judy.”
“Is that at all the way she feels, do you think?” I asked.
He was properly non-committal about that. “Oh, don’t ask me,” he said.
“The etiquette is so different from what it was in my day. Then a
young couple like that would have played up--held hands, slunk off by
themselves whenever they got a chance. I’ve hardly seen these two
together since he got here. That’s the modern manner, I suppose.”
I’d been thinking over what Punch had told me of the arrival of the
guests. There had been nothing unnatural about Judy’s greeting of her
fiancé or of the others who came down from the station in the same car
with him. Punch had spoken of hearing her laugh two or three times
after he’d taken his sentry post on the davenport up-stairs. Whatever
had happened to her had happened after that.
“Is there anybody in the crowd that came down on the special car,”
I asked, “anybody who arrived at The Oaks later than Bruce did, who
has--well, attracted your attention in any way? Anybody who seemed to
have any special effect on Judy?”
For the third time he turned upon me that intense stare of his.
“No,” he said, “I can’t say there is. I don’t know why you asked me
that, but I’ll tell you this. I happened to be looking at her--it’s
the natural thing to do--and I saw her face change. I couldn’t say
now whether it was with pleasure or the reverse. She was looking past
me. Then she turned with a sort of gasp, and bolted into the house.
It must have been just then that she hurt her ankle. I know I turned
around to try to see who or what she’d been looking at, but I didn’t
make anything of it. It was something, though, or somebody.”
I nodded. “That’s it,” I said. “There’s something behind, that Judy and
her mother know more about than we do. Wheels within wheels, you know.”
“All right,” he said, getting up with a rueful sort of laugh, “I won’t
throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery just yet. We’ll let another
day go by and see what happens. But if nothing does happen within the
next twenty-four hours, I think it will be a case for the police.”