“She…” He stopped and gave me a long look and then said very slowly, “Exactly what do you mean?”
“Are you trying to make me believe that you know nothing about that?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea as to what you’re driving at. What do you mean?”
“Now, see here,” I began incredulously and then, at the look in his face, gave up. “Oh, all right. Drue said that your father explained to her why you wanted her to ask for a divorce.”
“But I didn’t…” Again he checked himself and said, “For God’s sake go on. Why would I want a divorce?”
“To get into the training school, of course. Your father told her they wouldn’t take married men.”
“They wouldn’t at the time. But I could have gone to another…” He broke off again to question me. “He told her that?”
“Yes. He said it was the thing above everything else that you wanted to do-or at least he succeeded in making her think that. He convinced her so thoroughly that she consented to ask for a divorce-believing that you didn’t want to ask her for it yourself. And that once the training was over you would come back and marry her again. He told her,” I added, quoting, “that it would be merely a long engagement.”
Craig’s eyes were very intent and very bright-and a little sad. He looked at me for a long moment or two as if to test the things I had said and measure them in his mind against what he had formerly believed. “So,” he said at last, “he did that. And then I suppose if she wrote to me, he…”
“Obviously,” I said, seeing that he was reluctant to say it. “Obviously your father got the letters. And Drue being the kind of girl she is, I don’t think she would write very many letters without a reply.”
“No,” he said slowly, staring at the mound his feet made under the eiderdown. “No, she wouldn’t write very many times without a reply.”
I said, “I’m going to get Drue. I think I can manage somehow to get her past the guard; perhaps I can’t but…”
“Wait a minute,” he said sharply. And stared at his feet, frowning. And finally said, “No.”
“But…”
“No, don’t. You’ve forgotten Nicky.”
“Nicky!” I cried. “Drue’s not in love with Nicky and never was! You’re as stubborn as your father!”
“He had to finish what he’d begun. He couldn’t help being the way he was.”
Nor you the way you are, I thought in furious exasperation.
“Oh, Good Heavens! Can’t you see she’s in love with you? That’s why she came here. She wanted to find out what had happened, why you demanded a divorce without even seeing her again. They drove her away-your father and Alexia and Nicky. Your father planned the whole thing. He paid Nicky for whatever he did to help.”
He stopped my headlong flight into conjecture-yet, knowing Drue, knowing something of Nicky, it seemed to me reasonable conjecture. But he said, “So she went away with Nicky. Willingly.”
“But she-there’s an explanation for it. Give her a chance and give yourself one. That-why, that’s why your father meant to send her away. The night he died. She told him, I heard her; she warned him. She said she was going to find out the truth about the divorce.”
There was a little silence, then he shook his head slowly and deliberately. And I lost my temper. “All right,” I snapped, “think as you please. It’s your loss. You can fix your own pillows and dress your own wound, too, because I’m through with you. I wash my hands of you. If you’d even tell the truth about the things you know it would help. You know who shot you, don’t you? And you knew there’d be another murder. And you know about the yellow glove-the glove that they found beside Claud Chivery. And I think you know why he was killed.”
“If I knew anything I could tell the police I would do so. But you see, Miss Keate, that’s the trouble. If I tell who shot me, it’ll make it that much the worse for Drue. It wasn’t the same person. The person that shot me, I mean, was not the person that killed my father-or Claud Chivery. If I tell the police that they’ll say she murdered my father.”
After a moment I said heavily, “Was it your father, then? Why? Was it a quarrel over-well, was he jealous of Alexia?”
I couldn’t read his eyes. He drew up his knees and clasped his unbandaged arm around them. “Forget that, Miss Keate,” he said decisively. “The thing for us to do is to insist upon Drue’s alibi for that night when I was shot.”
“You said ‘There’ll be murder done.’ You said that the afternoon before your father was murdered.”
“I remember, vaguely. I wasn’t sure-I’m not sure now exactly why I was shot. But I had a vague notion that I ought to tell Claud that it was an attempt at murder.”
“But that isn’t what you said. You didn’t say ‘There was an attempt at murder.’ It was in the future, as you put it. You said ‘There’ll be murder…’ ”
“I know. You see, I had sense enough to know that since the first attempt had failed another attempt might be made.”
“Do you mean you wanted protection?”
“In a sense. Yes. I wanted someone to know. I wasn’t clear in my head. I only knew there was danger-everywhere.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Because,” he said.
Which was not exactly illuminating. “Why Claud?” I persisted, getting nowhere fast.
“Because Claud was Claud. He wasn’t much in the way of force. Yet he-he knew all about us; he smoothed things over, he could always manage my father; he was in the queerest way devoted to him. I think,” said Craig slowly, “it was partly because of Maud; she thought there was no one like my father. In many ways Maud has a much stronger character than Claud had; he gave in to her about everything but money. Maud’s a little overfond of money and would have been a sucker for get-rich-quick schemes if Claud had let her!”
“Oh, she wouldn’t have murdered Claud on account of the will,” said Craig quickly. “They did have a quarrel lately about money. Claud told me. But it was only about some money they had invested, twenty thousand or so; Maud wanted the cash in order to make another investment. Claud didn’t know-or at least didn’t tell me what it was.”
“I suppose,” I said on a wave of astuteness, “that Claud knew who shot you. And got rid of the bullet so it couldn’t be traced.” (As he would have done, I thought, for Conrad, to keep a family secret.)
But Craig’s face was instantly blank and hard. “Do you?” he said flatly. So I got nowhere with that. And, as I lifted my arm to look at my watch, something rustled in my pocket and I remembered what, actually, I’d forgotten, the Frederic Miller checks. I gave them to him at once. “They were in Alexia’s room, in the cupboard…”
He snatched them out of my hand; he looked at them and examined them and questioned me and then lay for a long time staring at the sprawling gilt figures on the dark wall paper, a queer look in his eyes, his fingers tapping the checks, an expression in his face that I couldn’t read. I tried to question him.
“Do you know who Frederic Miller is, is that it?”
“No-no-that is, perhaps I do. I’m not sure. Let me think…”
But he didn’t want to think any longer, for almost at once he turned quickly to me, excitedly. “Look here, Miss Keate. Will I be able to get out tomorrow?”
“You may be able to get out of bed and walk around the room-that’s about all,” I said slowly. “You’ve done extremely well, as a matter of fact.”
“Can I get to the Chivery cottage?”
“No.”
“But I’ve got to.”
“All right. You’re free, white and twenty-one. Go ahead and kill yourself.”
“I’ll keep these checks.”
“Are you going to give them to the police?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve got to think. If they arrest Drue, I’ll do anything-everything…”