The Corbin necklace
He was feeling rather silly as he came down-stairs from The Club over
having doubted Bill Grant’s authenticity as a cousin of the bridegroom
and having almost suspected him of being a burglar. He had half a mind
to try to do as Judy had commanded and forget the necklace. But to his
orderly young mind this would have been impossible. He simply couldn’t
leave loose ends.
So he crossed to his grandmother’s door and knocked lightly. He didn’t
suppose she was there, for she seldom came down-stairs but once before
dinner. He just wanted to make sure, once more, that everything was
all right. He was on the point of letting himself in, since no voice
answered his knock, when he heard footsteps. The door was opened,
and he was confronted by Miss Digby. She had a sort of harassed,
interrupted air as she opened the door, and it changed to something
like exasperation when she saw who the visitor was.
“What do you want?” she demanded. She didn’t offer to let him in.
“Nothing,” he told her truthfully. “I just wanted to make sure that
everything was all right.”
“Oh, Punch,” she cried, “go away! Stop bothering about that necklace.
Your grandmother’s just come up to lie down. She’s going to rest until
dinner time. The strain of meeting so many people was a little too much
for her. So don’t be a nuisance if you can help it.”
“All right,” he said, “I won’t,” and she closed the door.
He hung about the upper hall for a little while hoping, since Judy’s
door was half open, that she would come out, but she didn’t, so he went
forlornly out to the court.
His spirits came up, little by little, out here in the sunshine. There
was a lot of good fast tennis. Applebury played insatiably; a hard,
wary, efficient sort of game. It was evident he loved it. Punch kept an
eye open for Bill Grant, who he hoped would appear among the onlookers,
but in this he was disappointed.
He saw him later, though, at the pool, when the tennis was over.
Everybody went in then, including Punch himself. Judy, with a cane, and
a good big bandage showing through her stocking, came down to watch the
sport. She gave so good an imitation of a girl with a damaged ankle
that Punch found himself wondering whether perhaps it hadn’t been true
that she’d slipped on the rug. And certainly there seemed to be nothing
now the matter with her spirits. He was heavily at a discount with
himself as a detective when he went into the house to dress for dinner.
This didn’t take him long--all his movements are singularly neat and
swift--and he was the first person to come down from the top floor.
His grandmother’s door was open now and when he paused there a moment
she called to him to come in. She was dressed for dinner and all ready
for her ride down in the elevator. She struck him, just as she had
on her first appearance the day before, as being rather unusually
bright-looking somehow. And again almost unnaturally amiable.
“How about it, Punch?” she asked. “Shall we give your sister something
to make up to her for her bad ankle? Nobody will look at her ankles
if she has the pearls around her neck. Why shouldn’t she wear them
to-night? Give that bridegroom of hers a treat. Let him see what he’s
going to get.”
Punch was moved to protest. “I sort of don’t think she’d want to
wear them to-night,” he said. “It’s nearly two whole days before the
wedding.”
“Go and call her,” his grandmother commanded, starting to wheel herself
over to the safe. “No, don’t stop to help me. I don’t need it. Go tell
your sister as soon as she’s dressed to come to me.”
Punch went on the errand a little reluctantly, and gave the message to
Judy through the door.
He meant to dart back to his grandmother’s room in time to see her open
the safe. He was curious as to whether this time it was locked or not.
But Judy detained him.
“I’ll go now,” she said. “I’m dressed all but my dress, and I don’t
want to put that on till it’s time to go down to dinner. Come in here a
minute.”
She was putting on, as he entered the room, some sort of kimono-like
garment of orange-colored silk. But she arrested the action to laugh at
the sight of him.
“You look so nice and innocent, with your hair brushed,” she
explained, and having her arms in her sleeves by this time, she came
over and hugged him. “Oh, Punch, you’re a dear,” she cried. “You made
an instantaneous hit this afternoon. Do you know that?”
It wasn’t the caress that made him uncomfortable, nor yet the
compliment. It was the sort of wildness there was about her look.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she went on, still holding him
by the shoulders and looking at him very intently. “I don’t know that
it matters--much--what does. Only--you haven’t forgotten what you said
this afternoon? You’re on my side, you know.”
He told her that he was and that he hadn’t forgotten.
“All right,” she said. “Come along to grandmother. Do you know what she
wants?”
He was afraid, somehow, that if he told her she’d refuse, so instead
of answering her question he reminded her that she was starting off
without her cane. She laughed and darted across the room to get it.
Then, with her arm through his, she limped decorously down the hall to
her grandmother’s room.
The old lady had opened the safe door, and had the brown morocco case
in her lap.
“That isn’t your dinner dress, is it?” she complained at sight of her
granddaughter. “I sent word you were to come when you were dressed. I
wanted to see how you’d look in the pearls. However, now you’re here,
you may as well put them on.”
Punch had been watching his sister, for the sight of the morocco case
in his grandmother’s lap had convinced him that everything was all
right. He saw her eyes widen a little.
At the same moment his grandmother uttered a wheezy sort of shriek. He
turned and looked. The box she held in her hand was empty.
“Shut the door!” Judy commanded, and his prompt obedience came none too
soon, for with the old woman’s next breath she cried out, full voice,
“They’re gone. She’s taken them. Your mother’s taken them.”
“Are they _really_ gone?” Judy asked.
Then to Punch’s amazement she began to laugh.
CHAPTER IV
SOMETHING BEHIND
I had three visitors that evening. Punch was the first. He ditched the
dinner at The Oaks and rode over on his bicycle in time to dine with
me--to go through the motions of dining with me, rather, for he ate
hardly anything.
He was, of course, terribly cast down by the loss of the necklace which
he had tried so conscientiously to guard. He felt, too, that if the
others had treated the case as seriously as he had done, it needn’t
have happened. They hadn’t treated it seriously, none of them, with the
exception of Uncle Alec. They’d laughed at him for having the necklace
on the brain. They’d implored him to forget it and not be a pest.
He didn’t, though, entirely acquit himself of negligence. That
half-hour or more while they had waited in the veranda for the arrival
of the guests, he himself with the others, might have given the
thief, assuming that he’d secreted himself in the house at some time
previously, his opportunity. And this was just the time, Punch said,
when he should have been on the job.
“Oh, come!” I protested. “There were plenty of other chances for the
thing to be taken. You couldn’t have stayed on guard all the time.”
He insisted with a vehemence which didn’t strike me as quite like him
that this was when the necklace had disappeared.
“The necklace is known to have been seen,” I argued, “by nobody since
your grandmother showed it to you yesterday afternoon. She put it back
in the safe and locked it up. It seems to me our difficulty is that
there have been so many chances to take it.”
“For who to take it?” he asked me.
“Why, for almost anybody who was in the house,” I said.
A queer look went over his face, as if that off-hand remark of mine had
frightened him.
“Not for any one who _would_ take it,” he said. “Of course there were
chances for people who wouldn’t.”
At that I got an idea. I asked him suddenly, “How do you know that the
necklace has really been taken? Your grandmother sprang the loss of it
on you and Judy in a rather dramatic way. Isn’t it possible that she
adopted your idea that the jewels ought to be hidden somewhere rather
than kept in the safe? She’d been rather annoyed at your insistence
that they oughtn’t to be in the safe, although she’d become convinced,
more or less, that you were right about it. She’d been still more
annoyed at Judy for saying she didn’t want the necklace.
“Well, then, she sends you to get Judy, opens the safe, tucks the
pearls away somewhere--in her own dress perhaps--and then springs the
empty box on the pair of you. Isn’t that possible? She has guarded
against their being stolen, and she’s scored off you and Judy at the
same time.”
“She wasn’t paying any attention to Judy and me. She didn’t even notice
that Judy laughed. She was screaming that mother had taken them.
Practically out of her head. Miss Digby had to give her a hypodermic to
quiet her.”
That shattered my theory. It had been no joke, even of the grimmest,
for the old woman. But my mind had already fastened on something else.
“Judy laughed, you say, when she saw that the necklace was gone?”
He hadn’t told me that before.
“Yes,” he said.
I remarked that it was natural enough that she should be a bit
hysterical for the moment after a loss of that kind.
“That wasn’t the _way_ she laughed,” he told me. “She laughed as if it
was something that didn’t matter very much, but was rather funny. As if
she was really thinking about something else. But I don’t know why she
laughed nor what the other thing was she was thinking about.”
His voice had faltered, but he had forced it to the end of the
sentence, and I perceived what I might have guessed earlier. The thing
the boy was agonizing over lay deeper than the disappearance of the
necklace, although behind it perhaps, and connected with it.
“Well,” I said cheerfully, “we know Judy didn’t steal the necklace
anyway, nor your mother, either. Go back to the time the people came
and tell me everything that’s happened.”
It steadied him to have a piece of perfectly straight reporting like
that to do; something that called the faculties of his active, orderly
mind into play, and he went ahead and gave me the narrative of the
afternoon, substantially as I have put it down in the preceding
chapter. I didn’t interrupt him with questions. But when he had
finished I asked a few.
“Miss Digby wouldn’t have stayed in the room while your grandmother was
lying down, would she?”
“Not in her bedroom,” he said. “But it’s her sitting-room next door
where the safe is. I thought she was going to stay in the sitting-room,
but I’m not sure she did.”
“If she went away,” I pointed out, “there’d have been a chance for
some one to open the safe if it weren’t locked, or to unlock it if he
knew the combination, and get the necklace while your grandmother was
asleep. For that matter, isn’t it likely that Miss Digby knows the
combination to the safe herself? She must have seen your grandmother
open it a hundred times.”
“Yes,” he said, “I suppose she does.” Then he laughed. “Old Digs didn’t
take the necklace though,” he said.
I agreed with him about that. It wasn’t possible seriously to suspect
Miss Digby.
“I’m not talking about the probability that any one stole it,” I
explained. “I’m trying to include all the people who had a chance to
take the necklace at that time.”
“Well,” he said, “if Digs went out, everybody who was in the house had
a chance.”
“Including,” I remarked, “your assumed thief who had concealed himself
somewhere on the premises.”
“It wouldn’t have been so good a chance for him as the other time,” he