‘Respectfully Yours,
‘Wendell Marsh.’
‘Three Forks Junction, NJ,
‘June 16.’
At the bottom of the page a lead pencil had scrawled the single line in the same cramped writing:
‘For God’s sake, hurry!’
Madelyn retained her curled-up position on the bench, staring across at a bush of deep crimson roses.
‘Wendell Marsh?’ She shifted her glance to me musingly. ‘Haven’t I seen that name somewhere lately?’ (Madelyn pays me the compliment of saying that I have a card-index brain for newspaper history!)
‘If you have read the Sunday supplements,’ I returned drily, with a vivid remembrance of Wendell Marsh as I had last seen him, six months before, when he crossed the gang-plank of his steamer, fresh from England, his face browned from the Atlantic winds. It was a face to draw a second glance – almost gaunt, self-willed, with more than a hint of cynicism. (Particularly when his eyes met the waiting press group!) Someone had once likened him to the pictures of Oliver Cromwell.
‘Wendell Marsh is one of the greatest newspaper copy-makers that ever dodged an interviewer,’ I explained. ‘He hates reporters like an upstate farmer hates an automobile, and yet has a flock of them on his trail constantly. His latest exploit to catch the spotlight was the purchase of the Bainford relics in London. Just before that he published a three-volume history on The World’s Great Cynics. Paid for the publication himself.’
Then came a silence between us, prolonging itself. I was trying, rather unsuccessfully, to associate Wendell Marsh’s half-hysterical letter with my mental picture of the austere millionaire…
‘For God’s sake, hurry!’
What wrenching terror had reduced the ultra-reserved Mr Marsh to an appeal like this? As I look back now I know that my wildest fancy could not have pictured the ghastliness of the truth.
Madelyn straightened abruptly.
‘Susan, will you kindly tell Andrew to bring around the car at once? If you will find the New Jersey automobile map, Nora, we’ll locate Three Forks Junction.’
‘You are going down?’ I asked mechanically.
She slipped from the bench.
‘I am beginning to fear,’ she said irrelevantly, ‘that we’ll have to defer our strawberry shortcake!’
3
The sound eye of Daniel Peddicord, liveryman by avocation, and sheriff of Merino County by election, drooped over his florid left cheek. Mr Peddicord took himself and his duties to the tax-payers of Merino County seriously.
Having lowered his sound eye with befitting official dubiousness, while his glass eye stared guilelessly ahead, as though it took absolutely no notice of the procedure, Mr Peddicord jerked a fat, red thumb toward the winding stairway at the rear of the Marsh hall.
‘I reckon as how Mr Marsh is still up there, Miss Mack. You see, I told ’em not to disturb the body until –’
Our stares brought the sentence to an abrupt end. Mr Peddicord’s sound eye underwent a violent agitation.
‘You don’t mean that you haven’t – heard?’
The silence of the great house seemed suddenly oppressive. For the first time I realised the oddity of our having been received by an ill-at-ease policeman instead of by a member of the family. I was abruptly conscious of the incongruity between Mr Peddicord’s awkward figure and the dim, luxurious background.
Madelyn gripped the chief’s arm, bringing his sound eye circling around to her face.
‘Tell me what has happened!’
Mr Peddicord drew a huge red handkerchief over his forehead.
‘Wendell Marsh was found dead in his library at eight o’clock this morning! He had been dead for hours.’
Tick-tock! Tick-tock! Through my daze beat the rhythm of a tall, gaunt clock in the corner. I stared at it dully. Madelyn’s hands had caught themselves behind her back, her veins swollen into sharp blue ridges. Mr Peddicord still gripped his red handkerchief.
‘It sure is queer you hadn’t heard! I reckoned as how that was what had brought you down. It – it looks like murder!’
In Madelyn’s eyes had appeared a greyish glint like cold steel.
‘Where is the body?’
‘Upstairs in the library. Mr Marsh had worked –’
‘Will you kindly show me the room?’
I do not think we noted at the time the crispness in her tones, certainly not with any resentment. Madelyn had taken command of the situation quite as a matter of course.
‘Also, will you have my card sent to the family?’
Mr Peddicord stuffed his handkerchief back into a rear trousers’ pocket. A red corner protruded in jaunty abandon from under his blue coat.
‘Why, there ain’t no family – at least none but Muriel Jansen.’ His head cocked itself cautiously up the stairs. ‘She’s his niece, and I reckon now everything here is hers. Her maid says as how she is clear bowled over. Only left her room once since – since it happened. And that was to tell me as how nothing was to be disturbed.’ Mr Peddicord drew himself up with the suspicion of a frown. ‘Just as though an experienced officer wouldn’t know that much!’
Madelyn glanced over her shoulder to the end of the hall. A hatchet-faced man in russet livery stood staring at us with wooden eyes.
Mr Peddicord shrugged.
‘That’s Peters, the butler. He’s the chap what found Mr Marsh.’
I could feel the wooden eyes following us until a turn in the stairs blocked their range.
A red-glowing room – oppressively red. Scarlet-frescoed walls, deep red draperies, cherry-upholstered furniture, Turkish-red rugs, rows on rows of red-bound books. Above, a great, flat glass roof, open to the sky from comer to corner, through which the splash of the sun on the rich colours gave the weird semblance of a crimson pool almost in the room’s exact centre. Such was Wendell Marsh’s library – as eccentrically designed as its master.
It was the wreck of a room that we found. Shattered vases littered the floor – books were ripped savagely apart – curtains were hanging in ribbons – a heavy leather rocker was splintered.
The wreckage might have marked the death-struggle of giants. In the midst of the destruction, Wendell Marsh was twisted on his back. His face was shrivelled, his eyes were staring. There was no hint of a wound
