Calamity Town

“What happened? Jim married Nora; in his excited emotional state he completely forgot about those letters which had been lying in the toxicology book for heaven knows how long. Then the honeymoon, Jim and Nora returned to Wrightsville to take up their married life in the little house . . . and the trouble began. Jim received a letter from his ‘sister.’ Remember that morning, Patty? The postman brought a letter, and Jim read it and was tremendously agitated, and then later he said it was from his ‘sister’ and wouldn’t it be proper to ask her up to Wrightsville for a visit . . . ”

Pat nodded.

“The woman who turned up claiming to be Jim’s sister?and whom he accepted as his sister and introduced as his sister?was, we now know, not his sister at all but his first wife.

“But there’s a more factual proof that the letter was from the first wife . . . the business of the identical signatures on the charred flag of the letter Jim received and on Steve Polaris’s receipt for the visitor’s luggage. So it was the first wife who wrote to Jim, and since Jim could scarcely have relished the idea of her coming to Wrightsville, it must have been her idea, not his, and that’s what her letter to him was about.

“But why did she write to Jim and appear in Wrightsville as Jim’s sister at all? In fact, why did Jim permit her to come? Or, if he couldn’t keep her from coming, why did he connive at the deception after her arrival and keep it a secret until her death and still afterward? There can be only one reason: she had a powerful hold over him.

“Confirmation of that? Yes. Jim was ‘squandering’ lots of money?and mark that his squandering habits coincided in point of time with the arrival of his first wife in Wrightsville! Why was he pawning Nora’s jewelry? Why did he borrow five thousand dollars from the Wrightsville Personal Finance Corporation? Why did he keep bleeding Nora for cash? Why? Where did all that money go? Gambling, you said, Cart. And tried to prove it in court?”

“But Jim himself admitted to Nora that he gambled the money away, according to the testimony,” protested Carter.

“Naturally if his secret first wife was blackmailing him, he’d have to invent an excuse to Nora to explain his sudden appetite for huge sums of cash! The fact is, Cart, you never did prove Jim was losing all that money gambling in Vic Carlatti’s Hot Spot. You couldn’t find a single eyewitness to his gambling there, or you’d have produced one. The best you could get was an eavesdropper who overheard Jim say to Nora that he’d been gambling! Yes, Jim drank a lot at theHot Spot?he was desperate; but he wasn’t gambling there.

“Still, that money was going somewhere. Well, haven’t we postulated a woman with a powerful hold on him? Conclusion:he was giving Rosemary that money?I mean, the woman who called herself Rosemary, the woman who subsequently died on New Year’s Eve. He was giving it on demand to the cold-blooded creature he had to continue calling his sister?the woman he’d actually been married to!”

“But what could the hold on him have been, Ellery?” asked Pat. ”It must have been something terrific!”

“Which is why I can see only one answer,” said Ellery grimly. ”It fits into everything we know like plaster of Paris into a mold. Suppose the woman we’re calling Rosemary?the first wife?never did get a divorce? Suppose she’d only fooled Jim into believing he was free? Perhaps by showing him forged divorce papers? Anything can be procured for money! Then the whole thing makes sense. Then Jim, when he’d married Nora, had committed bigamy. Then he was in this woman’s clutches for good . . . She warned Jim in advance by letter and then came to Wrightsville posing as his sister so that she could blackmail him on the spot without exposing her true identity to Nora and the family! So now we know why she posed as his sister, too. If she exposed her real status, her power over Jim was gone. She wanted money, not revenge. It was only by holding a threat of exposure over Jim’s head that she would be able to suck him dry. To do that, she had to pretend to be someone else . . .

“And Jim, caught in her trap, had to acknowledge her as his sister, had to pay her until he went nearly insane with despair. Rosemary knew her victim. For Jim couldn’t let Nora learn the truth?”

“No,” moaned Pat.

“Why not?” asked Carter Bradford.

“Once before, when Jim ran out on her, he’d humiliated Nora frightfully in the eyes of her family and the town?the town especially. There are no secrets or delicacies, and there is much cruelty, in the Wrightsvilles of this world; and if you’re a sensitive, inhibited, self-conscious Nora, public scandal can be a major tragedy and a curse to damn your life past regeneration.

“Jim saw what his first defection had done to Nora, how it had driven her into a shell, made her over into a frightened little person half-crazy with shame, hiding from Wrightsville, from her friends, even from her family. If a mere jilting at the altar did that to Nora, what wouldn’t the shocking revelation that she’d married a bigamist do to her? It would drive her mad; it might even kill her.

“Jim realized all that . . . The trap Rosemary laid and sprung was Satanic. Jim simply couldn’t admit to Nora or let her find out that she was not a legally married woman, that their marriage was not a true marriage, and that their coming child . . . Remember Mrs. Wright testified that Jim knew almost as soon as it happened that Nora was going to have a baby.”

“This,” said Carter hoarsely, “is damnable.”

Ellery sipped his drink and then lit a fresh cigarette, frowning at the incandescent end for some time. ”It gets more difficult to tell, too,” he murmured at last. ”Jim paid and paid, and borrowed money everywhere to keep the evil tongue of that woman from telling the awful truth which would have unbalanced Nora or killed her.”

Pat was close to tears. ”It’s a wonder poor Jim didn’t embezzle funds at Pop’s bank!”

“And in drunken rages Jim swore that he’d ‘get rid of her’?that he’d ‘kill her’?and made it plain that he was speaking of his ‘wife.’ Of course he was. He was speaking of the only legal wife he had?the woman calling herself Rosemary Haight and posing as his sister. When Jim foolishly made those alcoholic threats, he never meant Nora at all”

“But it seems to me,” muttered Cart, “that when he was arrested, facing a conviction, to keep quietthen?”

“I’m afraid,” replied Mr. Queen with a sad smile, “that Jim in his way was a great man. He was willing to die to make up to Nora for what he had done to her. And the only way he could make up to her was to pass out in silence. He unquestionably swore his real sister, Roberta Roberts, to secrecy. For to have told you and Chief Dakin the truth, Cart, Jim would have had to reveal Rosemary’s true identity, and that meant revealing the whole story of his previous marriage to her, the divorce-that-wasn’t-a-divorce, and consequently Nora’s status as a pregnant, yet unmarried, woman. Besides, revealing the truth wouldn’t have done him any good, anyway. For Jim had infinitely more motive to murder Rosemary than to murder Nora. No, he decided the best course was to carry the whole sickening story with him to the grave.”

Pat was crying openly now.

“And,” muttered Mr. Queen, “Jim had still another reason for keeping quiet. The biggest reason of all. A heroic, an epic, reason. I wonder if you two have any idea what it is.”

They stared at him, at each other.

“No,” sighed Mr. Queen, “I suppose you wouldn’t. The truth is so staggeringly simple that we see right through it, as if it were a pane of glass. It’s two-plus-two, or rather two-minus-one; and those are the most difficult calculations of all.”

A bulbous organ the color of fresh blood appeared over his shoulder, and they saw that it was only Mr. Anderson’s wonderful nose.

“O vita, misero longa! felici brevis!” croaked Mr. Anderson. ”Friends, heed the wisdom of the ancients . . . I suppose you are wondering how I, poor wretch, am well-provided with lucre this heaven-sent day. Well, I am a remittance man, as they say, and my ship has touched port today. Felici brevis/” And he started to fumble for Patty’s glass.

“Why don’t you go over there in the corner and shut up, Andy?” shouted Cart.

“Sir,” said Mr. Anderson, going away with Pat’s glass, “ ‘the sands are number’d that make up my life; Here must I stay, and here my life must end.’ “ He sat down at his table and drank quickly.

“Ellery, you can’t stop now!” said Pat.

“Are you two prepared to hear the truth?”

Pat looked at Carter, and Carter looked at Pat. He reached across the table and took her hand.