MR. HOLCOMBE was up very early the next morning. I heard him moving around at five o'clock, and at six he banged at my door and demanded to know at what time the neighborhood rose: he had been up for an hour and there were no signs of life. He was more cheerful after he had had a cup of coffee, commented on Lida's beauty, and said that Howell was a lucky chap.
"That is what worries me, Mr. Holcombe," I said. "I am helping the affair along and–what if it turns out badly ?"
He looked at me over his glasses. "It isn't likely to turn out badly," he said. "I have never married, Mrs. Pitman, and I have missed a great deal out of life."
"Perhaps you're better off: if you had married and lost your wife–"' I was thinking of Mr. Pitman. [Page 214]
"Not at all," he said with emphasis. "It's better to have married and lost than never to have married at all. Every man needs a good woman, and it doesn't matter how old he is. The older he is, the more he needs her. I am nearly sixty."
I was rather startled, and I almost dropped the fried potatoes. But the next moment he had got out his note-book and was going over the items again. "Pillow-slip," he said, "knife broken, onyx clock–wouldn't think so much of the clock if he hadn't been so damnably anxious to hide the key, the discrepancy in time as revealed by the trial–yes, it is as clear as a bell. Mrs. Pitman, does that Maguire woman next door sleep all day ?"
"She's up now," I said, looking out the window.
He was in the hall in a moment, only to come to the door later, hat in hand. "Is she the only other woman on the street who keeps boarders ?" [Page 215]
"She's the only woman who doesn't," I snapped. "She'll keep anything that doesn't belong to her–except boarders."
"Ah!"
He lighted his corn-cob pipe and stood puffing at it and watching me. He made me uneasy: I thought he was going to continue the subject of every man needing a wife, and I'm afraid I had already decided to take him if he offered, and to put the school-teacher out and have a real parlor again, but to keep Mr. Reynolds, he being tidy and no bother.
But when he spoke, he was back to the crime again: "Did you ever work a typewriter?" he asked.
What with the surprise, I was a little sharp. "I don't play any instrument except an egg-beater," I replied shortly, and went on clearing the table.
"I wonder–do you remember about the village idiot and the horse ? But of course you do, Mrs. Pitman; you are a woman of imagina- [Page 216] tion. Don't you think you could be Alice Murray for a few moments ? Now think–you are a stenographer with theatrical ambitions: you meet an actor and you fall in love with him, and he with you."
"That's hard to imagine, that last."
"Not so hard," he said gently. "Now the actor is going to put you on the stage, perhaps in this new play, and some day he is going to marry you."
"Is that what he promised the girl ?"
"According to some letters her mother found, yes. The actor is married, but he tells you he will divorce the wife; you are to wait for him, and in the meantime he wants you near him; away from the office, where other men are apt to come in with letters to be typed, and to chaff you. You are a pretty girl."
"It isn't necessary to overwork my imagination," I said, with a little bitterness. I had been a pretty girl, but work and worry–
"Now you are going to New York very soon, [Page 217] and in the meantime you have cut yourself off from all your people. You have no one but this man. What would you do? Where would you go ?"
"How old was the girl?"
"Nineteen."
"I think," I said slowly, "that if I were nineteen, and in love with a man, and hiding, I would hide as near him as possible. I'd be likely to get a window that could see his going out and coming in, a place so near that he could come often to see me."
"Bravo!" he exclaimed. "Of course, with your present wisdom and experience, you would do nothing so foolish. But this girl was in her teens; she was not very far away, for he probably saw her that Sunday afternoon, when he was out for two hours. And as the going was slow that day, and he had much to tell and explain, I figure she was not far off. Probably in this very neighborhood."
During the remainder of that morning I saw [Page 218] Mr. Holcombe, at intervals, going from house to house along Union Street, making short excursions into side thoroughfares, coming back again and taking up his door-bell ringing with unflagging energy. I watched him off and on for two hours. At the end of that time he came back flushed and excited.
"I found the house," he said, wiping his glasses. "She was there, all right, not so close as we had thought, but as close as she could get."
"And can you trace her?" I asked.
His face changed and saddened. "Poor child!" he said. "She is dead, Mrs. Pitman!"
"Not she–at Sewickley!"
"No," he said patiently. "That was Jennie Brice."
"But–Mr. Howell –"
"Mr. Howell is a young ass," he said with irritation. "He did not take Jennie Brice out of the city that morning. He took Alice Murray in Jennie Brice's clothing, and veiled." [Page 219]
Well, that is five years ago. Five times since then the Allegheny River, from being a mild and inoffensive stream, carrying a few boats and a great deal of sewage, has become a raging destroyer, and has filled our hearts with fear and our cellars with mud. Five times since then Molly Maguire has appropriated all that the flood carried from my premises to hers, and five times have I lifted my carpets and moved Mr. Holcombe, who occupies the parlor bedroom, to a second-floor room.
A few days ago, as I said at the beginning, we found Peter's body floating in the cellar, and as soon as the yard was dry, I buried him. He had grown fat and lazy, but I shall miss him.
Yesterday a riverman fell off a barge along the water-front and was drowned. They dragged the river for his body, but they did not find him. But they found something–an onyx clock, with the tattered remnant of a muslin [Page 220] pillow-slip wrapped around it. It only bore out the story, as we had known it for five years.
The Murray girl had lived long enough to make a statement to the police, although Mr. Holcombe only learned this later. On the statement being shown to Ladley in the jail, and his learning of the girl's death, he collapsed. He confessed before he was hanged, and his confession, briefly, was like this:
He had met the Murray girl in connection with the typing of his play, and had fallen in love with her. He had never cared for his wife, and would have been glad to get rid of her in any way possible. He had not intended to kill her, however. He had planned to elope with the Murray girl, and awaiting an opportunity, had persuaded her to leave home and to take a room near my house.
Here he had visited her daily, while his wife was at the theater.
They had planned to go to New York to- [Page 221] gether, on Monday, March the fifth. On Sunday, the fourth, however, Mr. Bronson and Mr. Howell had made their curious proposition. When he accepted, Philip Ladley maintained that he meant only to carry out the plan as suggested. But the temptation was too strong for him. That night, while his wife slept, he had strangled her.
I believe he was frantic with fear, after he had done it. Then it occurred to him that if he made the body unrecognizable, he would be safe enough. On that quiet Sunday night, when Mr. Reynolds reported all peaceful in the Ladley room, he had cut off the poor wretch's head and had tied it up in a pillow-slip weighted with my onyx clock!
It is a curious fact about the case that the scar which his wife incurred to enable her to marry him was the means of his undoing. He insisted, and I believe he was telling the truth, that he did not know of the scar: that is, his wife had never told him of it, and had been [Page 222] able to conceal it. He thought she had probably used paraffin in some way.
In his final statement, written with great care and no little literary finish, he told the story in detail: of arranging the clues as Mr. Howell and Mr. Bronson had suggested; of going out in the boat, with the body, covered with a fur coat, in the bottom of the skiff: of throwing it into the current above the Ninth Street bridge, and of seeing the fur coat fall from the boat and carried beyond his reach; of disposing of the head near the Seventh Street bridge: of going to a drug store, as per the Howell instructions, and of coming home at four o'clock, to find me at the head of the stairs.
Several points of confusion remained. One had been caused by Temple Hope's refusal to admit that the dress and hat that figured in the case were to be used by her the next week at the theater. Mr. Ladley insisted that this was the case, and that on that Sunday afternoon
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While his wife slept.
[Page 223] his wife had requested him to take them to Miss Hope; that they had quarreled as to whether they should be packed in a box or in the brown valise, and that he had visited Alice Murray instead. It was on the way there that the idea of finally getting rid of Jennie Brice came to him. And a way–using the black and white striped dress of the dispute.
Another point of confusion had been the dismantling of his room that Monday night, some time between the visit of Temple Hope and the return of Mr. Holcombe. This was to obtain the scrap of paper containing the list of clues as suggested by Mr. Howell, a clue that might have brought about a premature discovery of the so-called hoax.
To the girl he had told nothing of his plan. But he had told her she was to leave town on an early train the next morning, going as his wife; that he wished her to wear the black and white dress and hat, for reasons that he would explain later, and to be veiled heavily, that to [Page 224] the young man who would put her on the train, and who had seen Jennie Brice only once, she was to be Jennie Brice; to say as little as possible and not to raise her veil. Her further instructions were simple: to go to the place at Horner where Jennie Brice had planned to go, but to use the name of "Bellows" there. And after she had been there for a day or two, to go as quietly as possible to New York. He gave her the address of a boarding-house where he could write her, and where he would join her later.
He reasoned in this way: That as Alice Murray was to impersonate Jennie Brice, and Jennie Brice hiding from her husband, she would naturally discard her name. The name "Bellows" had been hers by a previous marriage and she might easily resume it. Thus, to establish his innocence, he had not only the evidence of Howell and Bronson that the whole thing was a gigantic hoax; he had the evidence of Howell that he had started Jennie Brice to [Page 225] Horner that Monday morning, that she had reached Horner, had there assumed an incognito, as Mr. Pitman would say, and had later disappeared from there, maliciously concealing herself to work his undoing.
In all probability he would have gone free, the richer by a hundred dollars for each week of his imprisonment, but for two things: the flood, which had brought opportunity to his door, had brought Mr. Holcombe to feed Peter, the dog. And the same flood, which should have carried the headless body as far as Cairo, or even farther on down the Mississippi, had rejected it in an eddy below a clay bluff at Sewickley, with its pitiful covering washed from the scar.
Well, it is all over now. Mr. Ladley is dead, and Alice Murray, and even Peter lies in the yard. Mr. Reynolds made a small wooden cross over Peter's grave, and carved "Till we meet again" on it. I dare say the next flood will find it in Molly Maguire's kitchen. [Page 226]
Mr. Howell and Lida are married. Mr. Howell inherited some money, I believe, and what with that and Lida declaring she would either marry him in a church or run off to Steubenville, Ohio, Alma had to consent. I went to the wedding and stood near the door, while Alma swept in, in lavender chiffon and rose point lace. She has not improved with age, has Alma. But Lida–Lida, under my mother's wedding veil, with her eyes like stars, seeing no one in the church in all that throng but the boy who waited at the end of the long church aisle–I wanted to run out and claim her, my own blood, my more than child.
I sat down and covered my face. And from the pew behind me some one leaned over and patted my shoulder.
"Miss Bess!" old Isaac said gently. "Don't take on, Miss Bess!"
He came the next day and brought me some lilies from the bride's bouquet, that she had sent me, and a bottle of champagne from the [Page 227] wedding supper. I had not tasted champagne for twenty years!
That is all of the story. On summer afternoons sometimes, when the house is hot, I go to the park and sit. I used to take Peter, but now he is dead. I like to see Lida's little boy; the nurse knows me by sight, and lets me talk to the child. He can say "Peter" quite plainly. But he does not call Alma "Grandmother." The nurse says she does not like it. He calls her "Nana."
Lida does not forget me. Especially at flood-times, she always comes to see if I am comfortable. The other day she brought me, with apologies, the chiffon gown her mother had worn at her wedding. Alma had never worn it but once, and now she was too stout for it. I took it; I am not proud, and I should like Molly Maguire to see it.
Mr. Holcombe asked me last night to marry him. He says he needs me, and that I need him. [Page 228]
I am a lonely woman, and getting old, and I'm tired of watching the gas meter; anal besides, with Peter dead, I need a man in the house all the time. The flood district is none too orderly. Besides, when I have a wedding dress laid away and a bottle of good wine, it seems a pity not to use them.
I think I shall do it.
THE END
