Kastle Krags Part 12

"And what is your occupation, Mr. Pescini?" the coroner asked.

"I am in the publishing business, in New York."

"You have a long acquaintance with Mr. Nealman?"

"Something over four years."

"Where were you when you heard David Florey scream?"

"On the veranda."

"Alone?"

"Yes, alone. I had been with Mr. Van Hope and Nealman a few moments before. I was rather hot, and I went out on the veranda for a breath of air. I rushed out toward the sound, and Nealman and his party caught up with me."

He testified that he had taken part in the search, and was utterly baffled as to the solution of the mystery.

Nopp was in the music room, he said, looking for a certain record that he wished his friends to hear. He had been in the billiard room a few seconds before. He had heard the cry but faintly, and had not been especially alarmed. The shouts of the other guests, he said, rather than the scream of the dying man, had caused him to rush out and join in the investigation. He had known Nealman a long time, was an architect by profession, and had been one of those to partake in the hunt through the gardens.

Last of all the white men, he called on me. I told of my relations with Nealman, the work I had been hired to do and, my own reactions to the fearful scream in the darkness. I had been with Marten, Van Hope and Nealman and had sent through the calls to Ochakee.

"You saw or heard nothing beyond that which these other gentlemen have testified?"

"Nothing at all," I answered.

"You have made no subsequent discoveries?"

Just for a moment I was silent, conjecturing what my answer should be.

Was I to tell of the cryptogram I had found beside the body, and its theft during the night?

I couldn't see how the least good would come of it. Indeed, if last night's intruder was in the room, listening to my testimony, he would be very glad to know if I had discovered the theft. I had resolved to work out the case in my own way, employing the methods of a naturalist, and these agents of the law were not my allies.

"Nothing has come to my observation," I told him simply.

If he had pressed the matter he might have got the admission out of me; but fortunately he turned to other subjects.

There was quite a little stir of interest throughout the circle when he began to question Edith. None of us will forget the picture of that golden head, graced by the sunlight slanting through the leaded panes of the window, the flushed, lovely face, the frank eyes and the girlish figure, lost in the big chair. She was in such contrast to the rest of us. Except for the housekeeper, buxom and fifty, she was the only white woman present; and she could have been the daughter of any one of the gray men in the circle.

She had gone to her room about ten, she said, and had read for perhaps an hour. Her room was just over the front hall. About eleven she went to bed, and the coroner's questions brought out the interesting fact that seemingly she had been the last of the household--unless the murderer himself was to be included thus--to have seen Florey alive. Her bed stood just beside the front window, and just before she had retired she had seen him walking out toward the lagoon.

The whole circle, tired of the dull testimony of the past hour, leaned forward in rapt attention. "He was alone?" the coroner asked.

"Yes. I think I heard the door close behind him--I'm not sure. Then I saw his form in the moonlight on the front lawn."

"You recognized him at once?"

"Not at once. I thought perhaps it was one of the guests. But in a bright patch of moonlight I saw him plain."

"Where did he go?"

"He turned down the driveway toward the lagoon. I didn't see him again."

At the sound of the piercing scream she got up and put on a dressing-gown, but she did not come down at once. She was afraid, she said--she didn't know what to do. She had no knowledge as to the activities and the positions of the other members of the household at the time of the crime.

She had come to work as her uncle's secretary but a few weeks before; and she verified perfectly Nealman's testimony in regard to the dead servant. If he had had enemies in the household she had not been aware of it, she knew of no chronic malady, and she did not think that he carried any large amount of money on his person. The scream had seemed to her to be one of unfathomable fear.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Gentry, was the last of the white people to be called upon; and her testimony threw no new light upon the problem. She was in bed and asleep, and the shouts of the men without had wakened her.

The coroner called on the negroes in turn, and I was a little amazed at the ease with which he wrung their testimony out of them. He knew these dark people: no northern man could have hoped to have been so successful. Sometimes he shouted at them as if in fury, sometimes he wheedled or jested with them.

Not one of them but could prove an alibi. They were all in their own quarters, they said, at the moment of the tragedy. Because this was the South and they were black, they did not know Florey, a white man, very well. And they had all been frightened nearly out of their wits by the events of the night.

One by one he questioned them, but the inquest ended just as it began--with the affair of Florey's murder as great a mystery as ever.

At the end of the fatiguing afternoon we were face to face with the baffling fact that only four men had proven satisfactory alibis--Lemuel Marten, Van Hope, Nealman and myself--and that any one of the dozen or more men and women in that great, rambling house might have done the deed.

CHAPTER XIII

Two telegrams had come for Mr. Nealman during the inquest; but the negro messenger who had brought them had been too frightened by the august session in the living-room to disturb him. It came about that Nealman didn't get them until he and Van Hope left the room together.

The yellow envelopes were lying on a little table in the hall, and Nealman started, perceptibly, at the sight of them. Except for that nervous reflex through his body I wouldn't have given the messages a second thought. Nealman picked them up, and still carrying on a fragmentary conversation with his friend, tore out the messages.

He did not merely tear off the edges. In his eagerness his clawing fingers ripped the envelopes wide open, endangering the messages themselves within. He opened one of them, and his eye leaped over the script.

He took one curious, short breath, then opened the second message, more carefully now. Then he crowded both of them into his outer coat pocket.

At that point his conversation with Van Hope took a curious trend. He still seemed to be trying to talk in his usual casual voice; yet a preoccupation so deep, so engrossing was upon him that his friend's words must have seemed to reach him from another sphere. It was a brave effort; but his disjointed sentences, his blurred perceptions, told the truth only too plainly.

Nealman had received disastrous news. His lips were smiling, but his eyes were filled with some alien light. What that light was neither Van Hope nor I could tell. It might have been frenzy. Quite likely it was fear.

"Bad news, old man?" Van Hope blurted out at last, impulsively. They were old friends--he was risking the charge of ill-bred curiosity to offer sympathy to the other.

"Not very good, old man. I'll see you later about it. If you'll excuse me I'll go to my room--and answer 'em."

He turned up the stairs--Van Hope walked out onto the verandas. I waited for Edith, and in a moment we were walking under the magnolias, listening to the twilight boomings of a bittern on the lagoon.

"And what do you think of it?" I asked her.

No human memory could forget her l.u.s.trous eyes, solemn and yet lighted by the beauty of her thoughts, as she gazed out over the waters, troubled by the flowing tide.

"I can't make anything out of it," she told me at last. "It doesn't seem to make good sense. Yet there have been hundreds of more baffling mysteries, and they all were cleared up at last. Cleared up intelligently, too, if you know what I mean."

"You mean--with credible motives and actions behind them."

"Yes, and _human_ actions. I'm thinking about--you know what. Human agents were the only agents in this crime. In the end it will prove out that way."