Wall by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Author:Mary Roberts Rinehart [Roberts Rinehart, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3651-0
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-07-16T20:17:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXI

I WENT DOWNSTAIRS THE next morning to find the sheriff on the front veranda, looking out over the bay. He smiled when he saw me.

“Always did say this was the best view anywhere around, Marcia,” he said. “I came out here so I could smoke my pipe.” His eyes twinkled. “Never forget the time the silver was stolen here—that’s why the safe was put in—and I lit it in the library. Your mother just about took my head off.”

He became serious after that. He didn’t like the way things looked. Of course he was only a country law enforcement officer, and he supposed a man with real brains would have had somebody behind the bars before now. Himself, he wasn’t so sure. No use hurrying things anyhow.

I listened, rather puzzled.

“Are you trying to say that you think Arthur is innocent?” I asked hopefully.

But he shook his head.

“Don’t go too fast,” he said. “I’m saying that this thing’s a lot deeper than it seems on the surface; that’s all. We’ve got two crimes, both different. One’s a crime of passion. Maybe nobody went up that hill to kill Juliette Ransom. Maybe nobody meant to kill her at all. I’ve been mad enough myself to cut a fellow’s throat if I’d had a razor in my hand at the minute. But the Jordan case is different. That looks cold and premeditated. Somebody arranged to meet her and put her out of the way. She knew too much. I’d give a good bit to know what she did know, at that.”

After that he seemed to be thinking out loud, rather than talking to me. Granting Arthur hadn’t done it, who on the island would have hated Juliette enough to have struck her that murderous blow with the club? A discarded lover? A jealous woman? He glanced at me when he said that.

“I’m not thinking of Arthur’s wife,” he said dryly. “Not that she couldn’t have done it. You take these small home-loving women and they will fight like tigers when they’re roused. But she is out of the Jordan business. I’ve checked that. She was here in the house the night the Jordan woman disappeared. You and she played Russian bank. Remember that?”

I nodded. It was my first realization of the pitiless publicity in which we had become involved. Our every act was known, and even my own servants, faithful for years, had evidently told all they knew.

The sheriff tapped his pipe on the railing and watched the ashes fall into the water.

“Not that I think a woman did it,” he went on. “Both look like jobs for a man, and a pretty strong one at that. But about Arthur now—it’s six years or more since Juliette Ransom left him. Seems to me that’s a long time for anyone to hold a grudge, especially a murderous one.”

“Why think it was someone who belongs here? She could have been followed, couldn’t she?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Whoever did it knew the island pretty well. That’s as far as I go.

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