The Greatest Works of Anna Katharine Green. Анна Грин
she was let in at night by a young man of medium height”—his eye ran up and down the graceful figure of the young élégant before him as he spoke—“who left her inside and then went away. A young man who had a key——”
“A key? Franklin, I——”
Was it a look from Franklin which made him stop? It is possible, for he turned on his heel as he reached this point, and tossing his head with quite a gay air, exclaimed: “But it is of no consequence! The girl is a stranger, and we have satisfied, I believe, all the requirements of the law in saying so, and may now drop the matter. Are you going to the club, Franklin?”
“Yes, but——” Here the elder brother drew nearer and whispered something into the other’s ear, who at that whisper turned again towards the place where the dead woman lay. Seeing this movement, his anxious father wiped the moisture from his forehead. Silas Van Burnam had been silent up to this moment and seemed inclined to continue so, but he watched his younger son with painful intentness.
“Nonsense!” broke from Howard’s lips as his brother ceased his communication; but he took a step nearer the body, notwithstanding, and then another and another till he was at its side again.
The hands had not been injured, as we have said, and upon these his eyes now fell.
“They are like hers! O God! they are like hers!” he muttered, growing gloomy at once. “But where are the rings? There are no rings to be seen on these fingers, and she wore five, including her wedding-ring.”
“Is it of your wife you are speaking?” inquired Mr. Gryce, who had edged up close to his side.
The young man was caught unawares.
He flushed deeply, but answered up boldly and with great appearance of candor:
“Yes; my wife left Haddam yesterday to come to New York, and I have not seen her since. Naturally I have felt some doubts lest this unhappy victim should be she. But I do not recognize her clothing; I do not recognize her form; only the hands look familiar.”
“And the hair?”
“Is of the same color as hers, but it’s a very ordinary color. I do not dare to say from anything I see that this is my wife.”
“We will call you again after the doctor has finished his autopsy,” said Mr. Gryce. “Perhaps you will hear from Mrs. Van Burnam before then.”
But this intimation did not seem to bring comfort with it. Mr. Van Burnam walked away, white and sick, for which display of emotion there was certainly some cause, and rejoining his father tried to carry off the moment with the aplomb of a man of the world.
But that father’s eye was fixed too steadily upon him; he faltered as he sat down, and finally spoke up, with feverish energy:
“If it is she, so help me, God, her death is a mystery to me! We have quarrelled more than once lately, and I have sometimes lost my patience with her, but she had no reason to wish for death, and I am ready to swear in defiance of those hands, which are certainly like hers, and the nameless something which Franklin calls a likeness, that it is a stranger who lies there, and that her death in our house is a coincidence.”
“Well, well, we will wait,” was the detective’s soothing reply. “Sit down in the room opposite there, and give me your orders for supper, and I will see that a good meal is served you.”
The three gentlemen, seeing no way of refusing, followed the discreet official who preceded them, and the door of the doctor’s room closed upon him and the inquiries he was about to make.
Chapter VI.
New Facts
Mr. Van Burnam and his sons had gone through the formality of a supper and were conversing in the haphazard way natural to men filled with a subject they dare not discuss, when the door opened and Mr. Gryce came in.
Advancing very calmly, he addressed himself to the father:
“I am sorry,” said he, “to be obliged to inform you that this affair is much more serious than we anticipated. This young woman was dead before the shelves laden with bric-à-brac fell upon her. It is a case of murder; obviously so, or I should not presume to forestall the Coroner’s jury in their verdict.”
Murder! it is a word to shake the stoutest heart!
The older gentleman reeled as he half rose, and Franklin, his son, betrayed in his own way an almost equal amount of emotion. But Howard, shrugging his shoulders as if relieved of an immense weight, looked about with a cheerful air, and briskly cried:
“Then it is not the body of my wife you have there. No one would murder Louise. I shall go away and prove the truth of my words by hunting her up at once.”
The detective opened the door, beckoned in the doctor, who whispered two or three words into Howard’s ear.
They failed to awake the emotion he evidently expected. Howard looked surprised, but answered without any change of voice:
“Yes, Louise had such a scar; and if it is true that this woman is similarly marked, then it is a mere coincidence. Nothing will convince me that my wife has been the victim of murder.”
“Had you not better take a look at the scar just mentioned?”
“No. I am so sure of what I say that I will not even consider the possibility of my being mistaken. I have examined the clothing on this body you have shown me, and not one article of it came from my wife’s wardrobe; nor would my wife go, as you have informed me this woman did, into a dark house at night with any other man than her husband.”
“And so you absolutely refuse to acknowledge her.”
“Most certainly.”
The detective paused, glanced at the troubled faces of the other two gentlemen, faces that had not perceptibly altered during these declarations, and suggestively remarked:
“You have not asked by what means she was killed.”
“And I don’t care,” shouted Howard.
“It was by very peculiar means, also new in my experience.”
“It does not interest me,” the other retorted.
Mr. Gryce turned to his father and brother.
“Does it interest you?” he asked.
The old gentleman, ordinarily so testy and so peremptory, silently nodded his head, while Franklin cried:
“Speak up quick. You detectives hesitate so over the disagreeables. Was she throttled or stabbed with a knife?”
“I have said the means were peculiar. She was stabbed, but not—with a knife.”
I know Mr. Gryce well enough now to be sure that he did not glance towards Howard while saying this, and yet at the same time that he did not miss the quiver of a muscle on his part or the motion of an eyelash. But Howard’s assumed sang froid remained undisturbed and his countenance imperturbable.
“The wound was so small,” the detective went on, “that it is a miracle it did not escape notice. It was made by the thrust of some very slender instrument through——”
“The heart?” put in Franklin.
“Of course, of course,” assented the detective; “what other spot is vulnerable enough to cause death?”
“Is there any reason why we should not go?” demanded Howard, ignoring the extreme interest manifested by the other two, with a determination that showed great doggedness of character.
The detective ignored him.