So in the end, only to save time, I imagine, Nugent let the thing rest and asked her what she knew of Drue’s disappearance, and she said and insisted that she knew nothing and had not seen or talked to Drue for at least twenty-four hours.
Finally they let her go. Nugent looked baffled and Craig angry.
“There are points,” said Nugent, “to the earlier forms of medieval torture.”
Craig said slowly, “But Maud is honest, as a rule. And I think Claud’s death has changed her view of the whole thing. I think what she was trying to say was that now she was on the side of-of…”
“Law and order,” suggested Nugent.
“Yes. In a sense.”
“Well, she’s not doing a very good job of cooperating. Whose Spanish jewels? And where are they?”
“Probably in Spain,” said Craig. “Maud was made for a sucker’s list. The point is to find Drue. All these other things can wait, can’t they?”
“Unless they can be made to point the way to Drue,” said Nugent. “I’ll do what I can with these checks.”
“For God’s sake, do it quickly,” said Craig with a kind of groan.
It was, I believe, just then that the trooper who’d been on guard in the hall the night before came to Nugent. I hadn’t realized until I saw him in the direct gray light from the windows how young he was. A boy, really, bony and tall with a thin, angular face which wore just then a look of desperation. But he had the courage to tell Nugent the truth-and then stand there biting his lip, but with his young eyes direct, waiting what came. I don’t know what his punishment was; even then I felt sorry for him. But the point was that Anna had gone to Drue’s room about eleven (to turn down the beds, she’d told the boy who’d believed her); she’d stayed with Drue, talking, for a while. Then she’d gone away but later-very much later, perhaps two in the morning-had brought him some coffee. He drank it, of course; and presently remembered sitting in a chair which faced Drue’s door.
And that was all he’d remembered until he awoke, with a queer taste in his mouth, about six in the morning.
Nobody knew what Anna had put in the coffee; until I went and looked in my little instrument bag and some sedative I’d had-harmless in itself-wasn’t there.
And when they sent for Anna, she was gone, too.
They found then-something after noon it was, I think-the bloodstained, yellow string glove-the mate to the one found near Claud Chivery; it was hidden under her flat, narrow little mattress.
But they didn’t find Anna.
Oddly enough no one had missed her-oddly, but still comprehensibly. She had been ill and hysterical the day before; Beevens had told her to take that day off, to stay in her room and rest; Gertrude was to do Anna’s work for her. In searching for Drue they had not (consequently informed of Anna’s illness by Gertrude) entered Anna’s room. It was an oversight, which only went to prove that such things (homely, trivial, perfectly understandable things like that) do happen and do complicate any police inquiry.
Nugent was furious and so were the troopers responsible for the omission, especially when they found the glove, which certainly ought to prove something and didn’t, except it pointed suspicion toward Anna in a definite, material way that all my own odd encounters with the maid had never suggested.
Certainly, however, Anna’s disappearance completed our demoralization.
Craig said, “They went together. They must have gone together. So Drue’s-not alone…” and something like hope quickened in his eyes.
But I was afraid. So I told Nugent in detail all I knew of Anna-footsteps running from the meadow in the dusk-a black eye-an impression that someone was in her room with her and that she was frightened.
It was too little, however, and too tenuous a story.
Nugent looked at the small, black notebook again. “We’ve questioned the servants,” he said, “over and over. Anna was nervous but she seemed to know nothing…” he stopped, frowning, and then read aloud: “William Fanshawe Beevens-British birth, age fifty-four; Gertrude Schieffel, American birth. Mrs. Lydia Deithaler-that’s the cook; here we are-Anna Haub, German birth, age thirty-six, came to America from Bavaria fourteen years ago, in employ of Conrad Brent since 1929, no former police record. That’s all.” His lean dark face was so concentrated with thought it made me think again of a dark, sharp hatchet with glowing green eyes-which I realize however would be more or less in the nature of a phenomenon. “No former police record. No suspicious facts. She lived a quiet, hard-working life, apparently perfectly honest and devoted to the Brent family. Devoted…” he said thoughtfully, and looked at Craig who shook his head.
“I don’t think she had any interest whatever in Germany or in the Bund. She must have left some kind of family in Germany-but if so I can’t remember ever hearing of any of them. No, I don’t think Anna would be likely to know anything of the Frederic Miller checks. Even if our surmise should turn out to be the answer, and Frederic Miller actually was somebody interested in the Bund. Anna wasn’t smart enough, in just that way, I mean. She was shrewd but not-not scheming. Not clever.”
“What do you think has happened to her?”
“God knows,” said Craig. “If they’re together though, she and Drue, there’s some hope…”
I had let him get up again and sit in a chair, wrapped in a long camel’s hair dressing-gown; he put his face then in his hands with a kind of desperate gesture.
It was after he knew about Anna that he redoubled his efforts to do something that, he was convinced, only he could do.
Twice already, that day (when I was out of the room) he’d tried to walk-once getting as far as the linen room again and the second time halfway down the stairs where he was found sitting, dizzily clinging to the bannisters, by one of the troopers and brought back.
The third time, late in the afternoon, with still no news, he sent me on a pretext to the kitchen, and this time he got as far as trousers and a sweater, and the fireplace bench of the lower hall. I found him there myself grimly upright, clinging to the bench with his eyes shut as if the room was going around him.
Peter helped me get him back to his room. And it was then that we had our long and curiously illuminating, and at the same time curiously baffling talk. It was long, that is, in content, not in time. All of us, I know, were strongly aware of the passage of time. It was growing dusk in the room, I remember, although it was still light outside with the clear, cold light of a late winter’s afternoon. And Drue’s disappearance was still unexplained.
Peter eased Craig down into a chair and then stood there looking rather ruefully down at him.
“You’d better go back to bed,” I said, but Craig shook his head obstinately.
“Well, then,” said Peter, “let me be your leg man. Just tell me whatever you want me to do and I’ll do it. If I can.”
“Find Drue, of course,” said Craig, his head back against the cushion and his face white. I got some spirits of ammonia and in my agitation held the bottle too close to his nose. He sat up abruptly, gasping, and Peter said soberly, “I wish I could. I’ve helped look, you know. She’s not in the house. She’s not in the barns or the greenhouse. I looked myself and the police looked, too, of course. My opinion is, Craig, that she went away of her own will. Voluntarily. She must have gone like that because otherwise she would have been heard in the house. Even if the guard was drugged he would have roused, I should think, if she’d screamed or made some kind of struggle. I would have heard it. All of us would have heard it. She went of her own will. I feel sure of that.”
“But what happened afterward?” said Craig. “Why did she go like that? Why is Anna with her?”
“Are you sure that Anna went with her?” asked Peter. “Or do we just feel that they must be together because they are both gone?”
“I’m not sure of anything,” said Craig, and pushed away the bottle of ammonia. “For God’s sake, get that thing out of the way! If Chivery was murdered because he knew too much of my father’s death, then maybe Drue knew the same thing. Maybe she…” He stopped as if unable to say it. And Peter said quickly, “Craig, if anything had happened to her, they’d have found-well, found her by now.”
“Then why doesn’t she telephone? Why doesn’t she let me know where she is? Why doesn’t she…” Craig stopped again and put his hand over his face.
I said, “Why didn’t you tell her how you felt about her? Then she wouldn’t have gone away without telling you.”
“She doesn’t love me,” said Craig from behind the hand that shaded his eyes. “It’s Nicky she was in love with. She feels sorry for me now; and she feels it her duty to take care of me.”
I started to expostulate and then stopped. What was the use! The more desperately I worked to get the two
