“I saw it in the paper tonight for the first time,” he was saying. “It knocked me dumb. When I think of this houseful of women, and a thing like that occurring!”
Gertrude’s face was still set and white. “That isn’t all, Halsey,” she said. “You and—and Jack left almost at the time it happened. The detective here thinks that you—that we—know something about it.”
“The devil he does!” Halsey’s eyes were fairly starting from his head. “I beg your pardon, Aunt Ray, but—the fellow’s a lunatic.”
“Tell me everything, won’t you, Halsey?” I begged. “Tell me where you went that night, or rather morning, and why you went as you did. This has been a terrible forty-eight hours for all of us.”
He stood staring at me, and I could see the horror of the situation dawning in his face.
“I can’t tell you where I went, Aunt Ray,” he said, after a moment. “As to why, you will learn that soon enough. But Gertrude knows that Jack and I left the house before this thing— this horrible murder—occurred.”
“Mr. Jamieson does not believe me,” Gertrude said drearily. “Halsey, if the worst comes, if they should arrest you, you must—tell.”
“I shall tell nothing,” he said with a new sternness in his voice. “Aunt Ray, it was necessary for Jack and me to leave that night. I can not tell you why—just yet. As to where we went, if I have to depend on that as an alibi, I shall not tell. The whole thing is an absurdity, a trumped-up charge that can not possibly be serious.”
“Has Mr. Bailey gone back to the city,” I demanded, “or to the club?”
“Neither,” defiantly; “at the present moment I do not know where he is.”
“Halsey,” I asked gravely, leaning forward, “have you the slightest suspicion who killed Arnold Armstrong? The police think he was admitted from within, and that he was shot down from above, by someone on the circular staircase.”
“I know nothing of it,” he maintained; but I fancied I caught a sudden glance at Gertrude, a flash of something that died as it came.
As quietly, as calmly as I could, I went over the whole story, from the night Liddy and I had been alone up to the strange experience of Rosie and her pursuer. The basket still stood on the table, a mute witness to this last mystifying occurrence.
“There is something else,” I said hesitatingly, at the last. “Halsey, I have never told this even to Gertrude, but the morning after the crime, I found, in a tulip bed, a revolver. It—it was yours, Halsey.”
For an appreciable moment Halsey stared at me. Then he turned to Gertrude.
“My revolver, Trude!” he exclaimed. “Why, Jack took my revolver with him, didn’t he?”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake don’t say that,” I implored. “The detective thinks possibly Jack Bailey came back, and —and the thing happened then.”
“He didn’t come back,” Halsey said sternly. “Gertrude, when you brought down a revolver that night for Jack to take with him, what one did you bring? Mine?”
Gertrude was defiant now.
“No. Yours was loaded, and I was afraid of what Jack might do. I gave him one I have had for a year or two. It was empty.”
Halsey threw up both hands despairingly.
“If that isn’t like a girl!” he said. “Why didn’t you do what I asked you to, Gertrude? You send Bailey off with an empty gun, and throw mine in a tulip bed, of all places on earth! Mine was a thirty-eight caliber. The inquest will show, of course, that the bullet that killed Armstrong was a thirty-eight. Then where shall I be?”
“You forget,” I broke in, “that I have the revolver, and that no one knows about it.”
But Gertrude had risen angrily.
“I can not stand it; it is always with me,” she cried. “Halsey, I did not throw your revolver into the tulip bed. I —think— you—did it—yourself!”
They stared at each other across the big library table, with young eyes all at once hard, suspicious. And then Gertrude held out both hands to him appealingly.
“We must not,” she said brokenly. “Just now, with so much at stake, it—is shameful. I know you are as ignorant as I am. Make me believe it, Halsey.”
Halsey soothed her as best he could, and the breach seemed healed. But long after I went to bed he sat downstairs in the living-room alone, and I knew he was going over the case as he had learned it. Some things were clear to him that were dark to me. He knew, and Gertrude, too, why Jack Bailey and he had gone away that night, as they did. He knew where they had been for the last forty-eight hours, and why Jack Bailey had not returned with him. It seemed to me that without fuller confidence from both the children—they are always children to me—I should never be able to learn anything.
As I was finally getting ready for bed, Halsey came upstairs and knocked at my door. When I had got into a negligee—I used to say wrapper before Gertrude came back from school—I let him in. He stood in the doorway a moment, and then he went into agonies of silent mirth. I sat down on the side of the bed and waited in severe silence for him to stop, but he only seemed to grow worse.
When he had recovered he took me by the elbow and pulled me in front of the mirror.
“`How to be beautiful,’” he quoted. “`Advice to maids and matrons,’ by Beatrice Fairfax!” And then I saw myself. I had neglected to remove my wrinkle eradicators, and I presume my appearance was odd. I believe that it is a woman’s duty to care for her looks, but it is much like telling a necessary falsehood—one must not be found out. By the time I got them off Halsey was serious again, and I listened to his story.
“Aunt Ray,” he began, extinguishing his cigarette on the back of my ivory hair-brush, “I would give a lot to tell you the whole thing. But—I can’t, for a day or so, anyhow. But one thing I might have told you a long time ago. If you had known it, you would not have suspected me for a moment of—of having anything to do with the attack on Arnold Armstrong. Goodness knows what I might do to a fellow like that, if there was enough provocation, and I
