At One-Thirty by Isabel Ostrander (best book series to read .txt) 📖

craft in it, as if a sudden thought, an excess of caution, had sealed her lips. Yet her sentence seemed to have been, on the face of it, simple enough: she had started to say that she was the mother of the dead man. Why had she checked herself?

“I am glad to have come, if I can be of any assistance, Mrs. Appleton.” Gaunt said, after waiting vainly an appreciable moment for her to continue. ” I shall want to have a little talk with you later, as well as with the other members of your family and the servants; but just now my business lies with Coroner Hildebrand. Coroner, you’ve stretched a point before this for me. May I examine the body, if I disarrange nothing?”

“Why, yes, I think so, Mr. Gaunt. The body is still here in the chair. Nothing has been disturbed except by the physician’s cursory examination—nothing more was necessary. The man’s been dead for hours, shot through the heart.”

“Oh, I knew the body was still here.” Gaunt smiled. “There is a certain slight, but unmistakable, odor about death, even when so short a time has elapsed after it has taken place, which is plainly evident to a nose trained for it.”

“To your nose, you mean,” returned the Coroner, as the two men moved toward the grim chair with its silent occupant.

Now a new sound broke upon the significant. stillness. It was a woman’s heartrending sob, long drawn out, as if pent up beyond the Umit of human endurance, and rising in the crescendo of ungovernable hysteria.

“Oh-h-!” the moan ended in a shriek of despair. “This is horrible—I cannot bear it another moment! I shall go mad—mad!”

“Natalie!” the calm, cutting voice of the elder Mrs. Appleton fell like a dash of icy water on the agonized wail. “If you have no respect for the living, at least try to show some for the dead. This is no fitting time and place to indulge your undisciplined, selfish emotions.”

“Oh, hush, dearest—please, please hush!” It was a third woman’s voice, low, slightly husky, vibrant with the deepest tenderness and a controlled passion. If the voice of the elder Mrs. Appleton had impressed Gaunt as being the most rigidly unfeeling he had ever heard, that of the last speaker was the most eloquent of the music of the soul. He had never in all his career heard a human voice with so subtle and poignant an appeal. Here was a woman who would be true and loyal to the core, and who had a capacity for loving, if her low, throbbing tones did not belie her, to the uttermost abnegation of self. He had no difficulty in his own mind in placing the two voices. The one, raised high and shrill in an abandonment of hysterical despair, had yet in its cadence the drawling sweetness of the lower, more vibrant tones. They were the sisters, the two with whom the elder Mrs. Appleton and her living son did not ‘^ get on “; the one trembling in hysteria was the widow of the murdered man, and the other was the sister-in-law, whom Yates Appleton had called Barbara.

There was a sudden whirl, a soft rustle, and something hurled itself violently between Gaunt and the coroner, laying a small icy hand on each, imploringly.

“Oh, you will let me go to my room?” the hysterical voice sobbed, plaintively. ” I can’t stand any more—indeed, indeed, I cannot! How can I be expected to endure it here another moment, with his eyes staring at me so horribly?”

“It will be best for her to go, if you please,” put in the low, vibrant tones. “There are reasons why my sister’s strength must not be overtaxed any more than necessary, just now. I will answer for her presence when you wish to question her.”

“And I desire my daughter-in-law to remain. Her proper place is beside the body of her husband. You are beginning early. Miss Ellerslie, to issue orders in my son’s house!” The voice of the elder Mrs. Appleton did not tremble, but it vibrated harshly with her unconcealable animosity, like jangling wires.

“This is my sister’s house now, Mrs. Appleton.” The low, soft tones, with the little drawl, were courteous; but there was now an undertone of the passion of which Gaunt had felt the possibility, although it was under admirable control. “My sister has been tortured enough. Have we your permission to retire. Coroner Hildebrand?”

“Yes, Miss Ellerslie, I wish you would all do so, please—you, Mrs. Appleton and Mr. Appleton, also. I wish to make a thorough examination of this room, with Mr. Gaunt and the Inspector. We will interview you later.”

Mrs. Finlay Appleton opened her lips to protest; but, realizing that she was endangering her dignity by a further exhibition of ill-nature, she led the way haughtily from the room, her son following widi evident relief in her wake, and the group of open-mouthed servants clustered at the door disappearing like chafF in her path.

The four men were alone; the quiet, spare figure of Gaunt, the Coroner, and a burly Inspector, and stolid-looking officer, who had stood silently at one side during the preceding scene.

“Who is it—Inspector Hanrahan?” asked Gaunt, with a swift smile.

“Yes, Mr. Gaunt. How are you, sir?”

“I thought I recognized the brand of your tobacco — and isn’t Officer Dooley here? I know that asthmatic breathing of his.”

Officer Dooley grinned and shifted from one foot to another like a bashful boy.

“If you don’t train down, Dooley, you will be too fat for the force, before you know it. Now for business. Coroner. Any possible idea at what time Mr. Garret Appleton met his death?”

“No, Mr. Gaunt. I should say, in the neighborhood of one o’clock, but of course we can’t be absolutely certain.”

Gaunt had approached the body, and was passing his fingers lightly and thoroughly over it.

“No doubt about robbery being the motive?” he asked, as he worked.

“Oh, no,” the Inspector put in, easily. “No weapon found, window open, tracks before window in the carpet and on the curtains, and Mr. Appleton’s jewelry and money gone.”

“I understand.” Gaunt bent and sniffed the powder-blackened shirt about the wound. “Looks as if Mr. Appleton might have recognized, or thought he recognized, the thief, doesn’t it, when he let him get as near as he did to shoot him, without attempting to get on his feet, or make any outcry?”

‘“Maybe he did jump to his feet, and fell back again when he was shot?” suggested the Inspector, thoughtfully.

“Hardly, seeing the way he was clutching the arms of the chair. Even death didn’t release that vise-like grip. He might have clutched his breast when the shot tore its way through him, if he had had time. No, it looks as if he’s been sitting there a long time, grasping the arms of his chair, and the end found him without the movement of a muscle. Then there’s another thing.”

Gaunt was talking Very fast now, but his fingers were working faster, darting with lightning-like rapidity over the dead man’s clothing.

“Whoever robbed him, made a pretty thorough job of it. They evidently weren’t afraid of being disturbed at their work, and that seems strange, when a revolver presumably lay smoking on the table and the reverberations of its explosion must still be echoing through the sleeping house. They didn’t tear out the vest-or cuff-buttons, or the shirt-studs, but removed them carefully, although with bungling fingers, as you can feel, here, and here. And—wait! That’s a curious thing about the inside of the vest-pocket.”

“What is?” asked Coroner Hildebrand.

“Never mind, I’ll look into that later. Got a list of the missing jewelry, money, watch, and all that?”

“Inspector Hanrahan has, of course. He—”

“Well, I don’t want it now. This the window which was found open after the bird had flown.””

Gaunt felt his way over to the window, felt the sill and the fastenings, and the velvet and^ lace hangings, and the rich pile of the carpet at his feet. When he encountered there some sticky, congealed wet places, he knealt and smelt them^ kneading his hands in the damp velvet.

When he rose and turned, his usually impassive face was alive with interest—tl very different interest from that which had glowed upon it when he stood in his library window in the early morning. Now, it was keener, more poignant, and there was nothing in it of pleasurable sensation— rather, a sharp mental interest. He came slowly back to that figure in the chair, wiping his hands carefully on his handkerchief as he did so, while the other men watched him in a sort of fascination, as silent as it was intent.

Then he took the cold head in his hands, feeling its shape with the trained, sure delicacy of a surgeon, a phrenologist. His deft fingers passed downward more softly, more gently over the dead features, tracing each strained muscle each curve and angle, seeing, with his ten marvelous eyes of the fifth sense, the expression on the face of the murdered man.

At length, he turned to where the others stood.

“Well?” the Inspector’s voice grated with suspense in the silence. “Found out anything, Mr. Gaunt?”

“A little, though I haven’t begun to examine the room thoroughly yet. There are a lot of queer features about this case, which you mayn’t have found time to go into. In the first place, those tracks over there at the window were not made by muddy feet, but bloody hands.”

“Of course,” the Coroner returned, impatiently, “we know that. Those traces were left by the murderer, going out.”

“How about coming in? He didn’t leave any traces then, although it rained hard last night, and there’s soft loam and top soil in the garden beneath this window. I can smell the late autumn flowers. Again, the window was opened from the inside, not out, and the person who opened it was afraid, not of taking his time about it, but of making a noise; for he opened the catch of the window in the proper way, and then painstakingly bent and twisted it with some blunt instrument to give it the appearance of having been forced, though, had he dared make any noise, he could have shattered it with a single blow. And moreover, gentlemen, that blood about the window was not fresh blood, wiped from the murderer’s red hands in making good his escape. It was stale^ congealed blood when it, was applied to the carpet and curtains. When the window was forced and the semblance of robbery and escape given to the scene of murder in this room. Garret Appleton had already been dead for some hours.”