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 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 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.”