The Corbin necklace
insisted, “because Judy was right there in her room across the hall,
and her door was open when Miss Digby sent me away. Besides, there were
a lot of people down-stairs all the rest of the afternoon. He’d have
had trouble getting away without meeting anybody.”
“What are they doing about it?” I asked. “How many people know the
necklace is gone?”
“Only mother and Uncle Alec, besides Gran and Judy and me. Oh, and
Digs, of course. I went and got mother and she sent me for Uncle Alec.
They jawed about it, there in grandmother’s room, until it was time to
go down to dinner.”
“Didn’t your grandmother herself have anything to say about it?”
“Oh, she was in bed in the next room. The hypodermic put her out, I
guess. It was mostly mother and Uncle Alec. He’s awfully excited about
it. Wants to send for detectives. But mother won’t have it.”
“How about Judy?” I asked. “You’d think her vote would count, as long
as it was to have been her necklace.”
“Judy didn’t vote. She didn’t seem to care what they did. It seemed
as if she was still thinking about something else. I don’t think she
wanted the police, though.”
“What do _you_ want?” I asked.
The intensity of his answer startled me.
“I don’t care much about the necklace now,” he said, “but I want the
thief found. _I’m_ not afraid who it’ll turn out to be.”
“You mean,” I asked, “that you think your mother and Judy _are_ afraid?”
He looked at me steadily but did not answer.
Possibly to his relief, and certainly to my own, we heard a car door
slam just then, and Punch darted to the window to see who it was.
“Here’s mother now,” he said, and went to open the door for her.
I couldn’t see her face when she perceived her small son, but of course
I heard what she said to him.
“Oh, you’re here, are you? We were wondering what had become of you.”
Her tone was composed, almost good-natured, but rather cold. My guess
is she was glad she was saved the trouble of telling me what had
happened, but at the same time a little put out by this indication that
I was deep in Punch’s confidence. He was always rather reticent with
her.
After she’d come into my sitting-room and greeted me, she turned back
to him. “Run along home now,” she said curtly, “and tell Judy I’ll be
back in fifteen minutes.”
He obeyed her with alacrity; he barely nodded a farewell to me as he
said, “All right, mother,” and disappeared. If he felt any curiosity as
to our interview, he didn’t show it. I think he was glad just then not
to talk to her.
She did the polite thing by my broken leg, helped herself, at my
invitation, to one of my cigarettes, and settled down, with a
deep-drawn, very audible sigh, in the big chair which Punch had just
vacated.
“I suppose you know,” she said, “the ghastly thing that’s just happened
over at The Oaks?”
“I know as much about it as Punch knows,” I said somewhat tentatively.
As a matter of fact, Victoria herself had astonished me. For in spite
of her sigh and her use of the word ghastly to describe the theft, her
manner was almost complacent.
It seemed incredible that this should be so, but there was no getting
away from it. The mental picture I’d formed of her during the past
couple of days, derived mostly from the reports I’d been getting from
Punch, had been of a woman driven half frantic by worry, involved in
some sort of dangerous web.
The web appeared, certainly, to be woven about the necklace. She had,
according to Judy, sustained a shock when she read in the paper that it
was to be given to her daughter as a wedding present. She’d quarreled
furiously with old Mrs. Corbin about it. It had caused--apparently,
at least, it was the thing that had caused--sudden alterations in
her plans. I had taken for granted, though on insufficient evidence
perhaps, that it was the theme of that mysteriously emotional
conversation with Judy, which Punch had heard the end of, on the night
of Alexander Corbin’s arrival.
Yet now, within a couple of hours of the discovered theft of the
precious dangerous thing, she sat there looking at me as calm and
contented as a cat who had just licked the meringue off the top of a
lemon pie! Oh, I exaggerate, of course. One does with Victoria.
“I wonder if you _do_ know as much as Punch knows,” she remarked,
thoughtfully exhaling a deep lungful of smoke. “Oh, I suppose so,
though Alec had the idea that Punch might have taken it himself.--Not
to keep, of course,” she added hastily, “but perhaps as a prank to
teach his grandmother a lesson. Or to save it from being stolen by
burglars.”
Victoria went down to her nadir with me just then. I’ve never found it
harder to keep up the appearance of friendliness.
“For that matter,” I said, “I may have taken the thing myself. Gone
over on crutches in my sleep....”
“That is possible,” she interrupted, with a sudden look of interest.
“Oh, not you. Punch! I don’t _think_ he ever has walked in his sleep.
He may have done it this time, though. That necklace has been an
obsession with him for days.”
There was no denying, of course, that this was a possibility. But
Victoria didn’t pursue it.
“I’ll tell you why I came,” she went on, laying down her cigarette and
coming a little more sharply into focus. “Alec is acting rather stupid
about this and stubborn. He gets that from his mother, I guess. He’s
determined to make a hullabaloo about it. Send for detectives, question
the servants, search everybody, and that sort of thing. Judy and I have
done all we could to call him off, without getting anywhere. He feels
his responsibility, he says, as the man of the family. All I could
get him to agree to was to wait until he’d talked to you. He’s in the
dining-room now smoking with the men, but he’s coming over to see you
as soon as he can get away.”
“And _you_ want me to persuade him to do nothing,” I said.
I didn’t inflect it like a question. Cowardice that was, I’ll admit.
And Victoria assumed that I would do as she wished. It is an assumption
she always makes with men, I think.
“Of course,” she went on petulantly, “I don’t know whether it will do
any good. There’ll be my mother-in-law to reckon with as soon as she
comes out of the hypodermic Miss Digby gave her. I want Alec on our
side, actively, you know, before that happens.”
“Yes,” I said faintly, “I see.”
Then I rallied my courage. I admit it was the memory of what Punch had
said--“I want the thief caught. I’m not afraid who it’ll turn out to
be”--which served as my trumpet call.
“Look here, Victoria. There may be a reason why I should try to
persuade Alexander Corbin to let the necklace go and keep the theft
dark, but I won’t undertake it unless I know what the reason is.”
She looked at me a little ruefully. “You never did like me very well,”
she remarked.
“I think I can fairly be counted one of your friends,” I told her, “and
I think I’ve understood pretty well some of your difficulties. I really
want to help you now. But I can’t step off in the dark. I want to know
why the thing Alec proposes isn’t the natural thing to do; the thing
I’d do myself in the circumstances. He _has_ got a responsibility in
the matter, and I don’t wonder that he feels it.”
“Oh, I suppose so,” she agreed.
I looked up at her and saw, to my astonishment, that there were tears
in her eyes.
“You talk about my difficulties. You _don’t_ know them; not the
beginning of them. I’ve been trying for the last ten years to give my
children the sort of bringing up they deserve to have. It’s the only
thing I’ve cared anything about. That’s true, whether you believe it or
not. And I’ve been hampered and suspected and quarreled with all the
time by that terrible old woman who’s my mother-in-law.
“I suppose I’ve made mistakes. We all do. But between her and the
children I’ve been driven half distracted. Not Punch. He’s all right.
But there have been times when I’ve been in despair about Judy.”
“Isn’t she pretty young to have been despaired about?” I protested.
“She ran away from school last fall,” said Victoria. “I wonder if even
_you_ had heard about that? She simply disappeared for almost a month.
There, I’m glad I told you. You’ll have some idea....”
“Good heavens!” I broke in. “Didn’t you hear from her in all that time?
How did you know she hadn’t been kidnapped--murdered?”
“I got a line from her every two or three days, post-marked from
different places, saying she was all right and telling me not to worry.”
“But how did she live?” I asked. “What had she to live on?”
“She earned it,” Victoria said shortly. “You may be perfectly sure I
haven’t asked for details. But she’s volunteered a few. I know she
worked for a while as a waitress in a cheap lunch room.”
“How did you get her back?”
“Oh, she’d had enough of it, I suppose. She wrote me that if I wanted
her to come back she was ready to behave herself. I met her in New
York. Found her in the Martha Washington Hotel, fitted her out with
clothes, and took her, by a lucky chance, down to Belleair.”
“What did she look like--when you found her, I mean?”
“She looked,” Victoria said dryly, “as if she hadn’t found liberty
quite so jolly as she’d expected.”
“What was the particular piece of luck about your choosing Belleair?”
“Why, Bruce was down there playing golf,” she said. “And it just
happened she got him. Of course if he’d known.... But there’s no reason
why he ever should. So now she’s all right. She’s marrying a man--an
orphan, thank heaven!--who’s well-bred and decently rich, and mad about
her.”
“Is she in love with him?” I asked.
“No,” Victoria admitted, “I don’t suppose she is. But she likes him,
and she wants to marry him. She’s going into it with her eyes open. And
not under any pressure from me. I didn’t urge it on her. Anyhow, that’s
_settled_. She’s going to marry him day after to-morrow.
“Well, I’m not going to have her wedding spoiled by exploding a beastly
thing like this in the middle of it.”
“There’s nothing beastly about getting robbed of a necklace,” I said.
“That can happen to anybody.”
She flung out her hands in a gesture of uncontrollable exasperation.
Then she pulled herself together.
“The first discovery a detective would make would be that Mrs. Corbin
is a morphine addict. That would be rather unsavory, wouldn’t it?”
“She gets the stuff legitimately, doesn’t she?” I commented. “Nobody
as old and rich as that could be reduced to trafficking with a peddler.”
“Oh, yes,” she admitted. “Doctor Parkinson prescribes it for her. But
isn’t that bad enough? Bruce would hate it--just the notoriety--worse
than anybody I know. Things like that simply don’t happen in his
family. He’d think less of Judy if it happened in hers.”
She paused a moment; then went on with a rush. “If this meant the
actual loss of the necklace itself, I’d let it go; let the thief make
what he could out of it--rather than turn Judy’s wedding into a beastly
dime novel of a detective story. Have it smeared all over the front
pages of the newspapers. Isn’t that reason enough why Alec shouldn’t
tell the world with a bang what’s happened?”
She could hardly have been aware of what she had said, for she started
when I quoted her own words back at her.
“You said just now that even if it really meant the loss of the
necklace you’d let it go. Do you mean that it doesn’t mean that?”
She took her time before answering. “I’m absolutely sure it doesn’t,”
she said.
“Do you _know_ where the necklace is now, Victoria?”
“No,” she said hotly, “of course I don’t. Not exactly. But I’m
absolutely sure that it’s all right.”
“How about Judy?” I asked. “Does she agree with you, genuinely, that
it’s best to do nothing about it?”
Victoria gave me a rather dry smile. “Judy does,” she said. “You may be