“It’s hard to resolve human feelings into the simplicity of A.B.C.s,” she said. “I can’t just say I loved Herbert because I was married to him and because he was the first person I ever loved, or that no matter how many other people there may be later in my life I will always return to him in my heart, just because he was the first person whom I loved, and expect you to understand.” She brushed with elementary strokes through fog in her effort to be explicit. “I love Tom Hollander, too, just as much as I loved Herbert. It isn’t nice, but it’s the truth. Love isn’t a unit, a single emotion tightly wrapped up in one word. It’s a hundred feelings and desires and any number of little human hurts that are longing to be made well again.” A certain bitterness crept into her manner: a bitterness of revolt. “The whole wretched business is too stylized. It’s quite all right to love your father and your mother equally; in fact, it’s held wrong not to—exactly fifty percent of your parental love must go to each. Brotherly love must also be reduced to proportionate fractions. The love for one’s neighbours is presumably scattered into legion. But if a woman announced that this otherwise divisible quality is spent upon more than one single man—”
Her laughter wasn’t very pleasant to hear. Lieutenant Valcour felt a little upset; there was something disturbingly reasonable in her attitude. Was it pure sophistry? Not really. There was a strong element of fact and truth running through it all. It was useless to parade before her the different clichés of what any universal acceptance of her implied philosophy would do to society. He imagined rather accurately the treatment she would hand out to them. And like most people who had got what they wanted, he didn’t know even faintly what to do with it. He couldn’t come out flatly and ask her if she was planning to marry Hollander, and apart from the insight it gave him into her character there hadn’t been any special advancement toward a definite solution of the problem of who did kill her husband, and for what motive. Lieutenant Valcour began to feel that it was he who had landed in the quicksands rather than herself.
“You have been very patient with me, Mrs. Endicott, and very kind. To an extent I am beginning to understand you. We have arrived again, but perhaps with a surer footing this time, at our stumbling block. Before we attack it, I wonder if you cannot think of any reason why your husband should have joined you up here in the attic when he found you here yesterday afternoon.”
Mrs. Endicott was still too drugged with abstracts to attend very kindly to the mechanics of detailed fact.
“Well,” she said, “it wasn’t to commit suicide. That leaves your other nine tenths, doesn’t it?”
“You mean that he must have been just looking for something?”
“There’s hardly any other plausible explanation.”
“But does he keep things up here?”
“He may have. This is his trunk.”
She moved off toward the window, disinterested in anything further that he might care to do. A complete lassitude drenched her, and she sunned it negligently in the light sifting down through dusty panes.
Lieutenant Valcour righted the upended trunk and raised its lid. There were some papers lying loosely in its upper tray. He studied them curiously until he came across a certain one that caused him to draw his breath in sharply. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. Then he closed the trunk. His manner, as he approached Mrs. Endicott, was implacably stern.
“I want you to tell me,” he said, “just where about this house you have hidden Marge Myles.”
XXIX
6:30 a.m.—As Is Mirage
Mrs. Endicott stared sharply at Lieutenant Valcour. She was suddenly tensely alert.
“I think,” she said, “that you have gone mad.”
“Do you still maintain the pretence that when you were on the sill of your window and looking toward your husband’s room you saw nobody on the balcony?”
“There is no reason why I should alter the truth.”
“I shall be as patient with you, Mrs. Endicott, as you have just been with me. Listen carefully to me, please, and I will tell you why it is I believe Marge Myles killed your husband, and why I think you have given her sanctuary after the crime by concealing her some place within this house.”
“I’ve no alternative but to listen, Lieutenant. But you are wrong—absurdly wrong.”
“We will start with the initial premise, Mrs. Endicott, that Marge did murder Harry Myles in that canoe episode on the lake. I know that she has been paying blackmail to her stepmother, Madame Velasquez, for a long while, probably since the time of the crime itself. Well, a woman of her type doesn’t pay hush money easily; she makes very certain, first, that the blackmailer really has the goods on her. Which made it simple for your husband.”
“Herbert? Are you suggesting the fantastic idea that Herbert was trying to blackmail her?”
“People are blackmailed into giving up more things than money, Mrs. Endicott. I’m not suggesting that your husband was after money, but I do suggest that to further some abortive purpose Mr. Endicott held the postscript forgery that you made over Marge Myles’s head as a threat. I have just found that letter in his trunk, and it is now in my pocket.”
“Abortive purpose—Don’t go on just for a moment, please—I’m trying to make it fit.”
“It’s something along the lines of cruelty that I’m suggesting—some special cruelty.”
“Perhaps. Herbert liked to see things squirm. He was subconsciously sadistic.”
“He probably drove her pretty far, because she made up her mind to get that letter—he undoubtedly greatly magnified its importance as
