The Million-Dollar Suitcase, Alice MacGowan [free ebooks romance novels .TXT] 📗

standing by, watching to see that her mother didn't overdo in talking to me, she said,

"Dear, go down stairs. Jane's left her dinner on the range and gone to the grocery. You look after it while she's away."

When we were alone, she lay back in her chair, eyes closed, or seemingly so, and made her statement. She'd been in her daughter's room only twice between the reception and that daughter's going away.

"But the room was full of other people," a glimmer between lashes. "I could give you the names of those others."

"Thank you," I said. "Mrs. Vandeman has already done that. I've seen them all."

"You've seen them—all?" a long, furtively drawn breath. Then her eyes flashed open and fixed themselves on me. Relief was there, yet something stricken, as they traveled over me from my gray thatch to my big feet.

"Now, Mrs. Thornhill," I said, "aside from those two visits to your daughter's room, where were you that evening?"

A slow flush crept into her thin cheeks. The unreadable eyes that were traveling over Jerry Boyne stopped suddenly and held him with a quiet stare.

"I understood it was my daughter's movements on that evening you wished to trace, Mr. Boyne," she said slowly. "It would be difficult to trace mine. Really, I had so much on my hands with the reception and inefficient help—" She broke off, her eyes never leaving my own, even as she added smoothly, "It would be very, very difficult."

There is an effect in class almost like the distinction of race. These women spoke a baffling language; their psychology was hard for me. If there was something hid up amongst them that ought to be uncovered by diplomacy and delicate indirection, it would take a smarter man than the one who stood in my number tens to do it.

"Mrs. Thornhill," I said, "you did leave the house. You went to Mr. Gilbert's study. The shot that killed him left you a nervous wreck, so that you can't hear a tire blow-out without reënacting in your mind the scene of that murder. You'll talk now."

"You think I will? Talk to you?" very low and quiet, eyes once more closed.

"Why not? It's got to come; here in your own home, with me—or I'll have to put you where you'll be forced to answer questions."

"Oh, you threaten me, do you?" Her eyes flashed open, and looked at me, hard as flint. "Very well. I'll answer no questions as to what happened on the evening of Thomas Gilbert's death, except in the presence of Worth Gilbert, his son."

My retirement down the Thornhill stairs, made with such dignity as I could muster, was in fact, a panic flight. Halfway, Cora Thornhill all but finished me by looking out from the living room, and calling in Ina Vandeman's voice,

"Erne, show Mr. Boyne out, won't you?"

Ernestine completed the job when she answered—in Ina Vandeman's voice, also—

"Yes, dear; I will." It was only the scraps of me that she swept out through the front door.

I stood on the porch and mopped my brow. Across, there at the Gilbert place was Worth himself, charging around the grounds with Vandeman and a lot of other decorators, pruning shears in hand, going for a thicket of bamboos that shut off the vegetable garden. At one side Barbara stood alone, looking, it seemed to me, rather depressed. I made for her. She met me with,

"I know what you've been doing. Skeet came to me about it while Ina was phoning home from the country club."

"Well—she should worry! I've just finished with her list. Got an unbreakable alibi."

"She would have," Barbara said listlessly. "She wasn't at the study that evening."

"Huh! I worked on your tip that she was."

Barbara had pulled off the little stitched hat she wore; yet the deep flush on her cheeks was neither from sun nor an afternoon's hard work. It, and the quick straightening of her figure, the lift of her chin, had to do with me and my activities.

"Mr. Boyne," the black eyes came around to me with a flash, "do you suspect me of trying to pay off a spite on Ina Vandeman?"

"Good Lord—no!" I exploded. "And anyhow, I've just found that what you imitated and Chung recognized, might as well have been the mother's voice as the daughter's."

"Yes," she assented. "Any one of the family—under stress of emotion." Then suddenly, "And why do I tell you that? You'll not get from it what I do. I ought never to have mixed up my kind of mental work with other people's. I'd promised my own soul that I would never make another deduction. Then Worth came and asked me—that night at Tait's. I might say now that I never will any more...." She broke off, storm in her eyes and in her voice as she finished, "But I suppose if he wanted me to again—I'd make a little fool of myself for his amusement just as I did this time and have done all these other times!"

"I'll not ask anything more of you, Barbara," I said to her hastily, confused and abashed before the glimpse she'd given me of her heart. "Except that I beg you to stay good friends with Cummings. That man hates Worth. If you turned him down now—say, for the ball, or anything like that—he'd be twice as hard for us to handle. Keep him a passive enemy instead of an active one, as long as he seems to find it necessary to hang around Santa Ysobel."

"You know what's holding Mr. Cummings here, don't you?" She glanced somberly past the bamboo gatherers to where we saw a gray corner of the study with its pink ivy geranium blossoms atop. "Mr. Cummings is held here by two steel bolts—the bolts on those study doors. Until he finds how they can be moved through an inch of planking—he'll not leave Santa Ysobel."

She'd put it in a nutshell. And I couldn't let him beat me to it. I'd got to get the jump on him.

CHAPTER XXIV THE MAGNET

I had all set for next morning: my roadster at Capehart's for repair, old Bill tipped off that I didn't want any one but Eddie Hughes to work on it; and to add to my satisfaction, there arrived in my daily grist from the office, the report that they had Skeels in jail at Tiajuana.

"Well, Jerry, old socks," Worth hailed my news as I followed out to his car where he was starting for San Francisco, and going to drop me at the Capehart garage, "Some luck! If Skeels is in jail at Tiajuana, and what I'm after to-day turns out right, we may have both ends of the string."

Pink-and-white were the miles of orchards surrounding Santa Ysobel, pink-and-white nearly all the dooryards, every tree its own little carnival of bloom with bees for guests. Already the streets were full of life, double the usual traffic. As we neared the Capehart cottage, on its quiet side street about half a block from the garage, there was Barbara under the apple boughs at the gate, talking to some man whose back was to us. She bowed; I answered with a wave toward the garage; but Worth scooted us past without, I thought, once glancing her way, sent the roadster across Main where he should have stopped and let me out, went on and into the highway at a clip which rocked us.

"Was that Cummings?" holding my hat on. No answer that I could hear, while we made speed toward San Francisco. And still no word was spoken until we had outraged the sensibilities of all whose bad luck it was to meet us, those whom we passed going at a more reasonable pace, scared a team of work horses into the ditch, and settled down to a steady whiz.

We were getting away from Santa Ysobel a good deal further and a good deal faster than I felt I could afford. I took a chance and remarked, to nobody in particular, and in a loud voice,

"I asked Barbara not to make a break with Cummings; it would be awkward for us now if she did."

"Break?" Worth gave me back one of my words.

"Yes. I was afraid she might throw him down for the carnival ball."

Without comment or reply, he slowed gently for the big turn where the Medlow road comes in, swept a handsome circle and headed back. Then he remarked,

"Thought I'd show you what the little boat could do under my management. Eddie had her in fair shape, but I've tuned her up a notch or two since."

I responded with proper enthusiasm, and would have been perfectly willing to be let out at Main Street. But he turned the corner there, ran on to the garage, jumped out and followed me in. Bill, selling some used tires to a customer in the office, nodded and let us go past to where my machine stood. We heard voices back in the repair shop and a hum of swift whirring shafts and pulleys. Worth kept with me. It embarrassed me—made me nervous. It was as though he had some notion of my purpose there. Hughes, at his lathe, caught sight of us and growled over his shoulder,

"Yer machine's ready."

This wouldn't do. I stepped to the door, with,

"Fixed the radiator, did you?"

"Sure. Whaddye think?" Hughes was at work on something for a girl; she perched at one end of his bench, swinging her feet. Worth, behind me, touched my shoulder, and I saw that the girl over there was Barbara Wallace.

She looked up at us and smiled. The sun slanting through dirt covered windows, made color effects on her silken black hair. Eddie gave us another scowl and went on with his work.

"Hello, Bobs," Worth's greeting was casual. "Thought I'd stop and tell you I was on my way—you know." A glance of understanding passed between them. "Better come along?"

"I'd like to," she smiled. "You'll be back by dinner time. If it wasn't the last day, and I hadn't promised—"

Neither of them in any hurry.

"Hughes," I said, "there's another thing needs doing on that car of mine—"

"Can't do nothing at all till I finish her job," he shrugged me off.

"All right," and I stepped through into the grassy back yard, put a smoke in my face, and began walking up and down, my glance, each time I turned, encountering that queer bunch inside: Worth, hands in pockets; the chauffeur he had discharged—and that I was waiting to get for murder—bending at his vise; Barbara's shining dark head close to the tousled unkemptness of his poll, as she explained to him the pulley arrangement needed to raise and anchor the banner she and Skeet were painting.

Suddenly, at the far end of my beat, I was brought up by a little outcry and stir. As I wheeled toward the door, I saw Bobs and Worth in it, apparently wrestling over something. Laughing, crying, she hung to his wrist with one hand, the other covering one of her eyes.

"Let me look!" he demanded. "I won't touch it, if you don't want me to. You have got something in there, Bobs."

But when she reluctantly gave him his chance, he treacherously went for her with a corner of his handkerchief in the traditional way, and she backed off, uttering a cry that fetched Hughes around from the lathe, roaring at Worth, above the noise of the machinery,

"What's the matter with her?"

"Steel splinter—in her eye," Worth shouted.

With a quick oath, the belt pole was thrown to stop the lathe; down the length of the shop to the scrap heap of odds and ends at the rear Hughes raced, returning with a bit of metal in his hand. Barbara was backed against the bench, her eyes shut, and tears had begun to