“That,” Roger Marsh asserted with a strained effort to speak calmly, “is absurd and impossible. My wife died almost four years ago.”
Inspector Whipple, who had just arrived in Baltimore to interview Roger Marsh, gave the photograph a puzzled stare. It was the picture of a woman, one which he had taken himself only day before yesterday in Seattle. “Then this,” he said, “can’t be your wife.”
Roger tried hard to control himself. “Of course not,” he said stiffly.
“You admit it looks like her?”
“I admit it does. If you’d shown it to me four years ago I might have sworn it was Caroline. But since you took it only this week, it has to be someone else.”
They were in the drawing room of the old Marsh house. Five generations of Marshes had lived here amid high-ceilinged elegance, the gentlest and richest of the old Maryland culture.
And Roger Marsh, severely handsome at thirty-three, looked part of it. A portrait of his great-grandfather over the mantel had the same narrow granite face, the uncompromising gaze of a man who doesn’t believe in change. Apparent too was a long-bred restraint which would be instantly revolted by anything sensational.
Inspector Whipple studied the man sitting opposite him; then he said, “Who, Mr. Marsh, was with your wife when she died?”
Roger reminded himself that this police officer was his guest for the moment and must be treated as such. When he spoke, it was with a carefully disciplined patience. “I was. So was our family doctor. So was a nurse at a local hospital.”
“Tell me the how, when and where of it, Mr. Marsh. You’d been married how long?”
“I was married eight years ago,” Roger told him. “Seven years ago I went into the army. Judge Advocate’s department, foreign service. In London, three years later, I received a cablegram from Dr. Cawfield, our family physician, saying my wife had pneumonia. So I got an emergency leave and flew home.”
“Was she still living when you arrived?”
“Yes, but failing fast. She lingered on for six more days.”
“Did she have a twin sister? An identical twin?”
“She did not,” Roger said. “What are you suggesting. Inspector?”
“You’re quite certain the woman who died was your wife?”
With a stern effort Roger controlled his irritation. “Are you implying I didn’t know my own wife? I tell you I was there at her bedside. So was Dr. Cawfield. During those last six days she was occasionally able to talk and receive visitors. Many of her closest friends called to see her.”
“Was her casket open at the funeral? Did lots of people who knew her well see her then?”
“Scores of them,” Roger said, his face flushed.
“The woman in Seattle,” Whipple explained, “is known to the police as Eva Lang. She’s a confidence woman and five years ago she killed a man in Detroit. The crime was witnessed. Police had a good description of her but no fingerprints. A week ago we raided a farm near Walla Walla, Washington, where four wanted men were hiding out. Three of them were killed in the fight; the fourth escaped. But we picked up a woman living with them who was identified as Eva Lang. Her defense is: ‘I’m not Eva Lang; I’m Mrs. Roger Marsh.’ ”
Roger reclaimed the photograph and gave it a long bitter stare. “This woman just happens to look like Caroline. So now she’s using that fact to save her life.”
“She gave us a list of twenty-eight people in Baltimore who, she claims, will verify that she’s Caroline Marsh,” Inspector Whipple said. He handed Roger a list of names.
Roger saw that his own name headed it. Next came Dr. Cawfield; Effie Foster, who had been Caroline’s most intimate friend, was third. Others on the list were neighbors, club-women, friends.
“This is the most ridiculous hoax I ever heard of,” Roger said. “These same people were at her funeral.”
Whipple nodded in sympathy. “No doubt you’re right. But it’s something we have to straighten out. Did your wife have any distinguishing scars?”
Roger concentrated. “Only one,” he said. “Just after we were married, she burned the third knuckle of her right hand with a hot iron. It left a small star-shaped white scar.”
The statement startled Whipple. “Our prisoner in Seattle,” he said, “also has a burn scar on the third knuckle of her right hand.”
Roger closed his eyes for a moment. This can’t be happening, he thought. His mind clung stubbornly to the one certain fact: Caroline’s death four years ago. “If Caroline had had a twin sister,” he snapped, “she would have told me. I don’t want to be brusque, Inspector, but I have no desire to be dragged into this.”
“The trouble is, you’re already in,” Whipple argued amiably. “It’s like this: the Detroit police want to try Eva Lang for that murder she committed five years ago. But when she claimed she’s your wife and named twenty-eight witnesses to prove it, Detroit got worried. If she really is the wife of a wealthy Maryland lawyer, extraditing her as Eva Lang might get them in hot water. So they tell us to disprove the Marsh angle first, then they’ll take her to Detroit for trial. That’s why I came here to Baltimore. I want to take the top three persons named on the list back with me to Seattle. They can look at her, talk to her and say whether she’s your wife.”
“You want to take me, Dr. Cawfield and Effie Foster clear across the continent just to say a living impostor isn’t a woman who died four years ago? I won’t do it. Talk to Dr. Cawfield while you’re here and with nurses at the hospital and the mortician if you want to; then go back to Seattle and tell Eva Lang to retract her ridiculous statement.”
Whipple smiled tolerantly. “I don’t blame you for wanting to avoid publicity. But you’re heading right into it. Because ultimately she’ll go on trial for murder and her defense will be that she’s your wife. You yourself will be subpoenaed as a witness to identify her. It’ll be a field day for the papers. So why not silence her at once, in the privacy of the Seattle jail? Think it over, Mr. Marsh.”
Reluctantly Roger realized the inspector was right. “Very well,” he agreed. “I’ll go. She may look like Caroline, but she isn’t. I can trip her up with questions. Small details that no one but Caroline could know.”
Whipple gave a shrewd nod. “That’s the idea. And now about taking along Dr. Cawfield and some close woman friend. We want to keep this hush-hush if we can. So why not call them up and ask them to come over?”
An hour later Inspector Whipple sat facing an audience of three. Dr. Elias Cawfield, gray, oldish, testy, was taking Whipple’s questions as an insult to his professional integrity. “I issued that death certificate myself,” he blazed at Whipple. “I’ll have you know, sir, that—”
Effie Foster, a plump blonde of Roger’s age, put a hand over the doctor’s lips. “Now let’s not get excited,” she soothed. “That woman’s just trying to put one over and of course we won’t let her get away with it.”
“Does she presume to give any details as to how she’s been spending the last four years?” Roger asked the inspector.
“Plenty of them,” Whipple said. “Personally, I don’t believe her, not for a minute. I think she’s Eva Lang, a career adventuress guilty of murder and trying to avoid the penalty by claiming another identity.”
“If she gave details,” Roger said, “let’s hear them.”
“She claims that you, her husband, went off to war seven years ago, leaving her in this house with a couple of servants. But as the war went on and the housing and manpower shortages grew, she turned over the lower floor to a society of ladies who made bandages for veterans, laid off the servants and occupied the second floor alone.”