"No Clue!". Hay James
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don't understand that exactly. You mean you employed her eight months although she was incompetent?"
"That's pretty bald," Webster objected. "Her incompetence came, rather, from temperament. She was, toward the last, too nervous, excitable. She was more trouble than she was worth."
"Ah, that's different," Hastings said, with a significance that was clear. "People might have thought," he elaborated, "if you had fired her for other reasons, this tragedy tonight would have put you in an unenviable position—to say the least."
He had given words to the vague feeling which had depressed them all, ever since the discovery of the murder; that here was something vastly greater than the accidental finding of a person killed by an outsider, that the crime touched Sloanehurst personally. The foreboding had been patent—almost, it seemed, a tangible thing—but, until this moment, each had steered clear of it, in speech.
Webster's response was bitter.
"They'll want to say it anyway, I guess." To that he added, in frank resentment: "And I might as well enter a denial here: I had nothing to do with the—this whole lamentable affair!"
The silence in which he and Hastings regarded each other was broken by Arthur Sloane's querulous words:
"Why—why, in the name of all the inscrutable saints, this thing should have happened at Sloanehurst, is more than I can say! Jumping angels! Now, let me tell you what I——"
He stopped, hearing light footfalls coming down the hall. There was the swish of silk, a little outcry half-repressed, and Lucille Sloane stood in the doorway. One hand was at her breast, the other against the door-frame, to steady her tall, slightly swaying figure. Her hair, a pyramid on her head, as if the black, heavy masses of it had been done by hurrying fingers, gave to her unusual beauty now an added suggestion of dignity.
Profoundly moved as she was, there was nothing of the distracted or the inadequate about her. Hastings, who had admired her earlier in the evening, saw that her poise was far from overthrown. It seemed to him that she even had considered how to wear with extraordinary effect the brilliant, vari-coloured kimono draped about her. The only criticism of her possible was that, perhaps, she seemed a trifle too imperious—but, for his part, he liked that.
"A thoroughbred!" he catalogued her, mentally.
"You will excuse me, father," she said from the doorway, "but I couldn't help hearing." She thrust forward her chin. "Oh, I had to hear!—And there's something I have to tell."
Her glance went at last from Sloane to Hastings as she advanced slowly into the room.
The detective pushed forward a chair for her.
"That's fine, Miss Sloane," he assured her. "I'm sure you're going to help us."
"It isn't much," she qualified, "but I think it's important."
Still she looked at neither Berne Webster nor Judge Wilton. And only a man trained as Hastings was to keenness of observation would have seen the slight but incessant tremour of her fingers and the constant, convulsive play of the muscles under the light covering of her black silk slippers.
Sloane, alone, had remained seated. She was looking up to Hastings, who stood several feet in front of Webster and the judge.
"I had gone to sleep," she said, her voice low, but musical and clear. "I waked up when I heard father moving about—his room is directly under mine; and, now that Aunt Lucy is away, I'm always more or less anxious about him. And I knew he had got quiet earlier, gone to sleep. It wasn't like him to be awake again so soon.
"I sprang out of bed, really very quickly. I listened for a few seconds, but there was no further sound in father's room. The night was unusually quiet. There wasn't a sound—at first. Then I heard something. It was like somebody running, running very fast, outside, on the grass."
She paused. Hastings was struck by her air of alertness, or of prepared waiting, of readiness for questions.
"Which way did the footsteps go?" he asked.
"From the house—down the slope, toward the little gate that opens on the road."
"Then what?"
"I wondered idly what it meant, but it made no serious impression on me. I listened again for sounds in father's room. There was none. Struck again by the heavy silence—it was almost oppressive, coming after the rain—I went to the window. I stood there, I don't know how long. I think I was day-dreaming, lazily running things over in my mind. I don't think it was very long.
"And then father turned on the light in his room." She made a quick gesture with her left hand, wonderfully expressive of shock. "I shall never forget that! The long, narrow panel of light reached out into the dark like an ugly, yellow arm—reached out just far enough to touch and lay hold of the picture there on the grass; a woman lying on the drenched ground, her face up, and bending over her Judge Wilton and Berne—Mr. Webster.
"I knew she'd been hurt dreadfully; her feet were drawn up, her knees high; and I could see the looks of horror on the men's faces."
She paused, giving all her strength to the effort to retain her self-control before the assailing memory of what she had seen.
"That was all, Miss Sloane?" the detective prompted, in a kindly tone.
"Yes, quite," she said. "But I'd heard Berne's—what he was saying to you—and the judge's description of what they'd seen; and I thought you would like to know of the footsteps I'd heard—because they were the murderer's; they must have been. I knew it was important, most important."
"You were entirely right," he agreed warmly. "Thank you, very much."
He went the length of the room and halted by one of the bookcases, a weird, lumpy old figure among the shadows in the corner. He was scraping his cheek with his thumb, and looking at the ceiling, over the rims of his spectacles.
Arthur Sloane sighed his impatience.
"Those knees drawn up," Hastings said at last; "I was just thinking. They weren't drawn up when I saw the body. Were they?"
"We'd straightened the limbs," Webster answered. "Thought I'd mentioned that."
"No.—Then, there might have been a struggle? You think the woman had put up a fight—for her life?—and was overpowered?"
"Well," deliberated Webster, "perhaps; even probably."
"Strange," commented the detective, equally deliberate. "I hadn't thought so. I would have said she'd been struck down unawares—without the slightest warning."
IV
HASTINGS IS RETAINED
Arrival of the officials, Sheriff Crown and the coroner, Dr. Garnet, brought the conference to an abrupt close. Hastings, seeing the look in the girl's eyes, left the library in advance of the other men. Lucille followed him immediately.
"Mr. Hastings!"
"Yes, Miss Sloane?"
He turned and faced her.
"I must talk to you, alone. Won't you come in here?"
She preceded him into the parlour across the hall. When he put his hand on the electric switch, she objected, saying she preferred to be without the lights. He obeyed her. The glow from the hall was strong enough to show him the play of her features—which was what he wanted.
They sat facing each other, directly under the chandelier in the middle of the spacious