The Corbin necklace
perfectly sure of that. Call her up on the phone if you like and ask
her.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it. And I’ll do what I can to
bring Alexander around to your way of thinking.”
She nodded and got up to go, without, I’m glad to say, embarrassing me
by any overwhelming manifestations of gratitude. I wasn’t enthusiastic
over what I’d let myself in for.
I didn’t believe Victoria was as sure as she pretended to be that
the necklace would turn up all right. The start of interest she had
betrayed over the idea that Punch might have taken it while walking
in his sleep had looked genuine, and Victoria never was much of an
actress. If it was genuine, it revealed two things. First, that she
hadn’t carried off the necklace herself on that hurried trip to town
yesterday, and second, that she didn’t know who had taken it. All she
had was a theory, but it must be one in which she felt a good deal of
confidence.
Whom could that theory concern? It seemed to narrow itself down to
Judy. A reduction to absurdity, of course. Why should Judy steal the
necklace which her grandmother meant to give her for a wedding present?
And yet, why had Judy faked a sprained ankle? Why had she asked her
brother whether he’d be on her side whatever she did? Why had she
laughed in that queer way when she saw the empty box from which the
necklace had been taken?
My belief in the child’s honor, in her essential straightness, was
impregnable. It had not been in the least shaken by Victoria’s account
of her escapade last fall, the running away from the school she had
hated--earning her own living by being a waitress in a quick lunch.
Good lord!
I could understand her doing that, though. What was harder to
understand was her sudden surrender. It wasn’t like Judy to come to
heel just because she’d found that liberty wasn’t quite what it was
cracked up to be. Something worse than that must have happened to her.
Whatever had happened, though, even if she’d got involved in devious
ways, I was sure they weren’t of her seeking. I felt about this present
business much as Punch did. I wanted the thief caught; the air, so
sultry with mystery and suspicion, cleared by a good fresh wind.
And yet I had just given Victoria my promise to do what I could to help
hush things up. Why the devil had I done that? Well, I knew why. It
was because, when she had said that her children were all in the world
that she really cared anything about, I had believed she was telling
the truth. All the same I didn’t relish the prospect of my talk with
Alexander Corbin.
That, however, came off better than I had anticipated. I found I liked
him, just as Punch had done. And he showed no trace of the stubbornness
of which Victoria had accused him. He seemed to me extraordinarily
open-minded, and he carried the virtue of candor further than I’d have
been able to do myself, I think, in similar circumstances.
I remembered him faintly, as one would remember the younger brother of
a boyhood friend, and by way of putting some feeling of cordiality
into my greeting, I told him so, without the qualifications.
“That’s nice of you,” he said. “But you wouldn’t have recognized me if
you’d met me on the street.”
“No,” I admitted, “I don’t suppose I should.”
“Well, there you are!” he said. “I doubt if anybody would. I’m all
but a total stranger. And I find myself in the middle of a family
snarl like this. I come on here for my niece’s wedding, and within
twenty-four hours a highly portable piece of my mother’s property,
worth perhaps a hundred thousand dollars, disappears.”
“Good God!” I cried. “You aren’t trying to tell me that any one
suspects _you_ of having taken it?”
“That’s very polite of you,” he remarked kindly, “but I don’t see why
they shouldn’t. It’s evident that Victoria and Judy both regard it as
an inside job of some sort. And surely I’ve a more obvious motive,
as they say in detective stories, for taking it than any one else in
the family. I quarreled with my mother pretty near thirty years ago;
I’ve come home at last to make it up; I find her so shaken by age
and--infirmity that it’s very doubtful if any new will she made now
would hold water,--and I steal the necklace by way of getting my share
of the estate.
“It’s all rot, of course, but that’s how it looks. What I’d like to do
is to put a cordon around the house and have everybody in it searched,
beginning with me and Applebury’s maiden aunts. I want it found, if
it involves tearing the plaster off the walls. Of course it isn’t
possible to go to such lengths as that, but it seems as if one might do
something.
“Yet here’s Victoria pleading with me to let it ride; not turn a hand
nor say a word. She seems to think she knows where it is, or at all
events, that it will turn up. Well, that’s all right if she’s got the
correct hunch. But suppose she hasn’t? I’ll feel uncommonly flat facing
my mother to-morrow when she comes out of the effect of the stuff
they’ve given her, if I have to tell her that the necklace hasn’t been
heard from, and that I’ve done nothing toward recovering it.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “that you haven’t done the best thing possible
toward recovering it.”
He looked at me with a stare of surprise. “You mean by doing nothing,
by saying nothing?” he asked. “That’s what you must mean, of course,
because that’s all I’ve done. But I’m not sure that I see how you
figure it out. Effect of suspense and uncertainty--that sort of thing?
Psychology getting in its deadly work?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Well, it won’t, and I’ll tell you why. A thing like that can’t be
kept dark. It’s known already--half known. Things like that get passed
around. I could feel it crackling all around the dinner table to-night.
By morning everybody in the house will know that something’s happened.
And Victoria might as well have let me call the police in the first
place.”
“No,” I insisted. “There’s a difference between knowing a thing that’s
admitted and knowing a thing that’s not admitted. Society--with a big
S--lives on that difference. We never call anybody a liar. We go on
acting as if we believed the official version of things until the facts
fairly stare us down.”
He laughed. “That statement is true,” he said, “and it’s equally true
of the Moro chieftains in the island of Mindanao.”
“All right,” I said. “Now consider this. There are three sorts of
persons in that house: family, guests and servants. They’re all going
to stay until after the wedding, day after to-morrow. There’s no reason
why anybody should leave, at least, and if anybody does, on whatever
pretext, he’ll be under heavy suspicion. But it’s not likely that the
person who took the necklace will try to leave. The hullabaloo and the
breaking up of the party is very likely just what he’s hoping for. But
nothing happens. Nothing’s said. And the inference from that is that
some one’s been found out. That we know and therefore we can afford to
wait. So there’s a pretty good chance that the thief, so to speak, will
take his first opportunity to restore the necklace.”
“That’s ingenious,” he was polite enough to say. “But I confess the
strong-arm method appeals to me rather more.”
“It can’t be applied,” I said. “A search is no good unless you search
everybody.”
“That’s what I want,” he insisted. “That’s exactly what I mean.
Everybody.”
“Including your mother?” I asked.
Again I encountered his quick intense stare. It wasn’t hostile, though.
He was thinking, hard.
“You’re right,” he said. “That can’t be done.”
He seemed to be coming around all right by himself, so I let him alone.
There was a ruminative silence between us for a while.
“That’s a nice little niece of mine,” he said at last. “Hard to realize
she’s getting married, though. I wish I knew her better.”
“What do you think of her young man?” I asked.
“Oh, a perfectly sound fellow, I think,” he said, without enthusiasm.
“No mistaking his type. He’s what he is, plain as a flagstaff. Great on
discipline and exercise. Plays a very good game of bridge and takes it
as seriously as he does the Constitution of the United States. He’ll
have a thick neck by the time he’s forty, and be one of the pillars
of an intensely respectable club. Seems like rather a sledge-hammer,
though, for little Judy.”
“Is that at all the way she feels, do you think?” I asked.
He was properly non-committal about that. “Oh, don’t ask me,” he said.
“The etiquette is so different from what it was in my day. Then a
young couple like that would have played up--held hands, slunk off by
themselves whenever they got a chance. I’ve hardly seen these two
together since he got here. That’s the modern manner, I suppose.”
I’d been thinking over what Punch had told me of the arrival of the
guests. There had been nothing unnatural about Judy’s greeting of her
fiancé or of the others who came down from the station in the same car
with him. Punch had spoken of hearing her laugh two or three times
after he’d taken his sentry post on the davenport up-stairs. Whatever
had happened to her had happened after that.
“Is there anybody in the crowd that came down on the special car,”
I asked, “anybody who arrived at The Oaks later than Bruce did, who
has--well, attracted your attention in any way? Anybody who seemed to
have any special effect on Judy?”
For the third time he turned upon me that intense stare of his.
“No,” he said, “I can’t say there is. I don’t know why you asked me
that, but I’ll tell you this. I happened to be looking at her--it’s
the natural thing to do--and I saw her face change. I couldn’t say
now whether it was with pleasure or the reverse. She was looking past
me. Then she turned with a sort of gasp, and bolted into the house.
It must have been just then that she hurt her ankle. I know I turned
around to try to see who or what she’d been looking at, but I didn’t
make anything of it. It was something, though, or somebody.”
I nodded. “That’s it,” I said. “There’s something behind, that Judy and
her mother know more about than we do. Wheels within wheels, you know.”
“All right,” he said, getting up with a rueful sort of laugh, “I won’t
throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery just yet. We’ll let another
day go by and see what happens. But if nothing does happen within the
next twenty-four hours, I think it will be a case for the police.”
CHAPTER V
THE LEGS OF A SUIT OF PAJAMAS
Punch didn’t want to be sent to bed, so he was adroitly evading his
mother’s notice, flitting about the edges of the evening’s gaiety and
lingering in the shadows. It was a warm windless evening. It would be
stuffy in his little room on the top floor and he was feeling wide
awake and rather restless. But out-of-doors, in the verandas and on
the lawn, it was nice. The moon was dead full, hanging, an undisputed
dignitary, in the cloudless sky. Not so exciting as when it went
sailing through a scud of flying clouds, but he didn’t crave excitement
just now. He’d had enough.
They were dancing in the big west drawing-room--some of them were. Some
of them seemed to share--though it couldn’t be from the fear of being
sent to bed--his own preference for the shadows. In a sort of glade
down at the bottom of the lawn, so far away that the music must almost
have been inaudible, one pair were dancing, barefoot, Punch believed.
There’d been some talk of what fun it would be, and Judy had applauded
the idea, though she herself wasn’t dancing, of course, because of her
ankle.
She was permanently established in a long chair in the corner of the
veranda, holding a sort of court between dances, and always with one
man or another beside her when the music played. She adored dancing,
Punch knew, and he wondered a little that she didn’t permit her ankle
to get better.