The police have begun an investigation.
Pieter Claessens had arrived at La Rochelle three days after the discovery of the girl who was still known only, in the phrase of the press, as “the Fort Bayard Unknown.” He read in the papers the account of the yachtsmen’s find. There was a photograph of the girl. And there was the statement that she had on her left wrist the scar of an old burn.
This was what clinched the identification for her guardian. He said that she had received the burn when she was only four, from the explosion of an alcohol heater.
That was as far as the affair had gone. You can imagine the many questions that arose:
Who had kidnaped Clara Van Gindertael thirteen years ago?
Why had she been taken to Fort Bayars?
Who had regularly brought her provisions?
What interests were at work behind this maddening drama?
The one most concerned, the victim herself, could not speak a word. According to the doctors, it would take many years to make a normal human being of her. Some specialists doubted that it could ever be done.
Reporters argued furiously over Fort Bayard. Photographs of the spot had appeared in all the dailies. The most unlikely hypotheses had been seriously considered.
It was a wonder that George was still at liberty. I knew myself that this was at the express order of G.7, who had telegraphed from Paris to La Rochelle as soon as he got wind of the affair.
What was his own opinion? And why had our first step been to visit the fort, though it has seemed more logical to me to start off by seeing the victim herself, especially since we had to come through La Rochelle?
I had no idea.
G.7 was as calm as the fisherman.
The two men were not without certain points of resemblance. One was as niggardly with words as the other. They both had the same clear eyes, the same imposing figure.
Was their silence with each other a sort of challenge?
I was ill at ease. I wandered clumsily around the square enclosure, my feet slipping on the seaweed. The empty food containers had a more sinister significance here than elsewhere.
There was a mountain of them.
It was beginning to get dark all around us, though it was only three o’clock. We heard the prow of the boat striking against the wall with every wave.
As for G.7, he paced up and down with long slow strides, his head lowered.
“You’ve been married how long?” he asked suddenly, turning toward George.
The fisherman started, then answered promptly: “Eighteen years.”
“You... you love your wife?”
I saw his Adam’s apple quiver. It was some moments before he spoke. At last I heard a dull murmur: “... and the kids...”
“Let’s go!” G.7 concluded unexpectedly. He turned toward the only break in the walls through which we could get back to the cutter. He took my arm. And he whispered, while George hoisted the sails, “The affair has only begun!”
I heard the rest of his speech in snatches. There was a storm coming up. I kept my eyes riveted on George, who sat motionless in the stem, wrapped up in his oilskin, the helm between his legs, his attention fixed on the swelling of the sail.
“The guilty man,” G.7 said, “betrayed himself, you see. Reread that clipping I gave you. Reread the description of the child. The point at that time was to give the most complete description possible, wasn’t it? A description that would help find her? It lists the details of shoes, even socks. And it doesn’t say a word about the burn on the wrist. Why? Because that burn didn’t as yet exist! Thanks to that, I knew the truth even before we came here...
“Or listen: Pieter Claessens has no fortune of his own. But he’s the uncle and guardian of Clara, who is very rich in her own right. At the same time he is the child’s heir...
“Is he afraid to commit, strictly speaking, a crime?... Does he fear that he’ll be accused... I don’t know... At any rate he shuts up Clara, or has her shut up, in Fort Bayard and there abandons her to her fate... She is sure to die there...
“After the delays of legal formalities, he inherits. He returns to his own country. He doesn’t think of the child again...
“Then why, suddenly, after thirteen years, does he feel this intense need of knowing what’s become of her, of making sure that she’s really dead? I’ll bet anything you please that he had his eye on an inheritance which only the girl herself could receive...
“Claessens tells himself that she may be alive, that people may have picked her up... He comes back secretly to see... At Fort Bayard, he finds her...
“But still he has to find her officially. There still has to be his official identification. Merely a resemblance, after so many years, wouldn’t do for the courts... Some identifying mark is better... a scar, for example... He has only to burn the girl’s wrist...
“Claessens returns to Holland and waits long enough for the scar to seem reasonably old. The girl’s exposed life would help there. His accomplices play out the comedy of the yacht and the discovery. The papers announce the find. He rushes to the spot — too fast, in fact. Beforehand he spreads the story of the scar...
“There was the slip! I repeat, if that scar had existed at the time of the kidnaping, it must have appeared in the description...
“Do you understand now that the affair has only begun? That man thinks himself safe, free from all suspicion... Another man has been accused.”
“George?” I asked.
G.7 glanced at the fisherman and lowered his voice. “And George won’t talk... He hid his discovery for motives that I can’t explain to myself too clearly... These simple people can sometimes have horribly complicated souls. Was he afraid that they’d think his story was a myth? That his wife might suspect him of palming off as a foundling a child of his own? Again, I don’t know... He fed the child. Little by little she became a woman... Now do you begin to see? It is monstrous, I know. They say that Clara, despite her strange life, is beautiful...”
Up till then I had never stopped looking at George. Now I turned abruptly to the sea. It was a relief to lose myself in the tumult of the raging elements.
71
Sweet, Sweet Murder
H. A. DeRosso
I don’t know why everyone thinks we Smedleys are unusual. We’re like everybody else, with two arms and two legs and a head and a body. And our brains are always working. I remember my great-uncle Simeon, who was the intellect of the family and cleaned up after horses in the days before automobiles, well, he took up yoga or something and while in suspended animation thought up a whole book and wrote it down afterwards in Greek. Anyway, that’s what every publisher he sent it to said it was. And people think my cousin Albert is strange because he walks around at night with a lighted flashlight, looking for dew-worms. It isn’t his fault he’s allergic to night air and has to look for devices in his living room. And take me — I like peanuts salted in the shell. I throw the peanuts away and eat the salted shells because I like them, and how else are you going to get salted shells except with peanuts? Everybody has their little idiosyncrasies. But people just seem to make more fuss over those adopted by the Smedleys.
This brings me quite naturally to Uncle Phil. Everyone else in our family thinks of Uncle Phi as the black sheep, but to me he always was and still is a great man. Unfortunately, he was born ahead of his time, and what he did, I am sure, would have found favor in a later era. In a way, he was a pioneer, and pioneers always have tough going. Look at the Donner party that was caught in the Sierra Nevadas in the middle of winter, but that’s another story.