"Isn't it time," I said, "to tell me about this? I ought to know, I
think, before she goes. If it is not true, you owe it to her, I think."
But she shook her head.
I looked at the confession, and from it to Miss Emily's pinched old
face.
"To whom it may concern: On the 30th day of May, 1911, I killed a woman
here in this house. I hope you will not find this until I am dead.
"(Signed) EMILY BENTON."
Anne was watching me. I went to the mantel and got a match, and then,
standing near the bed, I lighted it and touched it to the paper. It
burned slowly, a thin blue semicircle of fire that ate its way slowly
across until there was but the corner I held. I dropped it into the
fireplace and watched it turn to black ash.
I may have fancied it--I am always fancying things about Miss Emily--but
I will always think that she knew. She drew a longer, quieter breath,
and her eyes, fixed and staring, closed. I think she died in the first
sleep she had had in twenty-four hours.
I had expected Anne Bullard to show emotion, for no one could doubt her
attachment to Miss Emily. But she only stood stoically by the bed for
a moment and then, turning swiftly, went to the wall opposite and
took down from the wall the walnut-framed photograph Mrs. Graves had
commented on.
Anne Bullard stood with the picture in her hand, looking at it. And
suddenly she broke into sobs. It was stormy weeping, and I got the
impression that she wept, not for Miss Emily, but for many other
things--as though the piled-up grief of years had broken out at last.
She took the photograph away, and I never saw it again.
Miss Emily was buried from her home. I obliterated myself, and her
friends, who were, I felt, her murderers, came in and took charge. They
paid me the tribute of much politeness, but no cordiality, and I think
they felt toward me as I felt toward them. They blamed me with the whole
affair.
She left her property all to Anne Bullard, to the astonished rage of the
congregation, which had expected the return of its dimes and quarters,
no doubt, in the shape of a new altar, or perhaps an organ.
"Not a cent to keep up the mausoleum or anything," Mrs. Graves confided
to me. "And nothing to the church. All to that telephone-girl, who comes
from no one knows where! It's enough to make her father turn over in his
grave. It has set people talking, I can tell you."
Maggie's mental state during the days preceding the funeral was curious.
She coupled the most meticulous care as to the preparations for the
ceremony, and a sort of loving gentleness when she decked Miss Emily's
small old frame for its last rites, with suspicion and hatred of Miss
Emily living. And this suspicion she held also against Anne Bullard.
Yet she did not want to leave the house. I do not know just what she
expected to find. We were cleaning up preparatory to going back to the
city, and I felt that at least a part of Maggie's enthusiasm for corners
was due to a hope of locating more concealed papers. She was rather
less than polite to the Bullard girl, who was staying on at my
invitation--because the village was now flagrantly unfriendly and
suspicious of her. And for some strange reason, the fact that Miss
Emily's cat followed Anne everywhere convinced Maggie that her
suspicions were justified.
"It's like this, Miss Agnes," she said one morning, leaning on the
handle of a floor brush. "She had some power over the old lady, and
that's how she got the property. And I am saying nothing, but she's
no Christian, that girl. To see her and that cat going out night after
night, both snooping along on their tiptoes--it ain't normal."
I had several visits from Martin Sprague since Miss Emily's death, and
after a time I realized that he was interested in Anne. She was quite
attractive in her mourning clothes, and there was something about her,
not in feature, but in neatness and in the way her things had of, well,
staying in place, that reminded me of Miss Emily herself. It was rather
surprising, too, to see the way she fitted into her new surroundings and
circumstances.
But I did not approve of Martin's attraction to her. She had volunteered
no information about herself, she apparently had no people. She was
a lady, I felt, although, with the exception of her new mourning, her
clothing was shabby and her linen even coarse.
She held the key to the confession. I knew that. And I had no more hope
of getting it from her than I had from the cat. So I prepared to go back
to the city, with the mystery unsolved. It seemed a pity, when I had got
so far with it. I had reconstructed a situation out of such bricks as
I had, the books in the cellar, Mrs. Graves's story of the river, the
confession, possibly the note-book and the handkerchief. I had even some
material left over in the form of the night intruder, who may or may not
have been the doctor. And then, having got so far, I had had to stop for
lack of other bricks.
A day or two before I went back to the city, Maggie came to me with a
folded handkerchief in her hand.
"Is that yours?" she asked.