Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 2, February 1964

The Sensitive Juror by Richard Deming

When we speak of one who possesses a sensitive mind, we are ordinarily referring to a quality of intelligence. Occasionally though, we may find more apt usage for the phrase.

The panel members had been instructed not to discuss the case among themselves while waiting their turns to be called to the stand and questioned to determine their suitability to sit as jurors. But since the whole thing had been in the papers, they all no doubt had already formed opinions.

Plump, middle-aged Jennifer Hamilton was convinced of Jonas Will’s guilt long before the bailiff stuck his head into the panel room and called, “Miss Jennifer Hamilton.”

As she followed the bailiff up the hallways to the courtroom door, and then the length of the courtroom to the stand, she forgot the defendant completely. With the gaze of every spectator on her, she could think of nothing but whether Her hair was still in place and whether the long wait for her turn had allowed her new spring suit to wrinkle. She wished desperately that she had possessed enough sense to ask permission to go to the ladies’ room and check her appearance in the mirror before she was called.

When she took the stand after being sworn in, she held her knees tightly together and primly tugged her skirt down over them. It was the first time in her forty-four years that she had ever faced an audience.

The district attorney was a red-faced man of middle age with a hoarse but kindly voice.

He said, “State your name, please.”

“Jennifer Hamilton,” she said in a nearly inaudible voice.

“Will you speak a little louder, please, so the judge can hear you?”

“Jennifer Hamilton,” she managed more distinctly.

“Is that Miss or Mrs.?”

“Miss,” she said. “I have never been married.”

“What is your work, Miss Hamilton?”

“I am a bookkeeper for the Bond Trust Company.”

“How long have you been a resident of New York City?”

She had to think about that, and was appalled to realize how long it had been since she had come to the city bubbling with youth and ready for adventure. Now the bubble of youth was gone and she had yet to find the hoped-for adventure. Perhaps she hadn’t been as lucky as she thought when she obtained a job with the Bond Trust Company on the day she arrived in town. For all the adventure to be found in a bookkeeping department that employed only women, she might as well have remained in the small Missouri town where she was born.

“Twenty-five years,” she said in a low voice.

“Will you speak louder, please?”

“Twenty-five years,” she repeated defiantly.

“Hmm. Now, Miss Hamilton, you are aware that this is to be a trial for first-degree murder, and if convicted, the accused may be sentenced to death in the electric chair. Do you have any religious or moral objections to capital punishment which might influence your verdict?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you personally acquainted with or related to the accused, Miss Hamilton?”

Jennifer glanced over at the defense table for the first time. Jonas Will was a tall, lean, personable man of about fifty-five, with wavy, prematurely white hair which contrasted sharply with his healthily tanned features. He was much more handsome than his newspaper pictures. “Why, how distinguished he looks,” she thought with astonishment. She had expected to see someone more sinister. Could a gentleman of such obvious breeding be a wife murderer?

“No,” she said.

“Were you acquainted with the. deceased Mrs. Edna Will, or with any of her or the accused’s relatives, or in any way do you have a relationship with either the accused or the deceased, however distant, which might prejudice your verdict?”

“I never heard of them before I read the newspapers.”

That brought on the next question. “This case, unfortunately, has received considerable publicity. As a result of what you have read or heard, have you formed any opinion of the accused’s innocence or guilt which might make you unable to render an impartial verdict?”

Jennifer glanced at the defendant again. He was gazing at her intently, and there was something deep in his clear gray eyes which unexpectedly touched her. She was surprised at how honest and straightforward his gaze seemed. There was nothing pleading in it, yet he seemed to be saying to her, “My life may be in your hands. I ask no favors, but I am entitled to a fair judgment, unbiased by what you have read or heard of me.”

She said quite honestly, “I would not let what I already know of the case influence me. I am sure I could render a verdict based entirely on the evidence presented here.” She was a little surprised at her own words, for ten minutes earlier she had been convinced of the man’s guilt. Now, after one look at him, she suddenly had an open mind.

The district attorney seemed pleased by her answer. He had only one further question. He asked if she were acquainted with, or had ever had professional dealings with either himself or the defense attorney. When she said no, he turned her over to the counsel for the defense.

The defense attorney was a thin, suave man named Martin Bowling.

Approaching her with a smile, he said, “Miss Hamilton, you are an attractive, well-groomed woman of considerable charm. Yet you say you have never been married. I can hardly believe you have never been asked. I hope I’m not touching an old wound, but was there, perhaps, a tragedy in your life at one time? Perhaps a deceased lover you have never forgotten?”

As a matter of fact Jennifer never had been asked to marry, but she wasn’t going to admit that. Blushing furiously, she said, “No, he didn’t die,” leaving the implication that there had been a lover she was unable to forget, but something other than death had parted them.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” Bowling said in a kindly voice. “I merely wanted to make sure your single state doesn’t indicate a general dislike of men. You are not then, I take it, what is generally known as a ‘man-hater’?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I like men very much. I mean—” Her blush deepened and she paused in confusion.

“Mr. Right just hasn’t yet come along, eh?” the lawyer said with a charming smile. He turned to the district attorney. “Miss Hamilton is acceptable to the defense if she is to the prosecution.”

“No objection,” the district attorney said. “You may step down and take seat number eight in the jury box, Miss Hamilton.”

Jonas Will was charged with the premeditated murder of his wife in order to obtain control of her assets. The state took a full week to build its case, and it was a damning one. Through a series of witnesses and documentary exhibits the prosecution established the following series of events:

Jonas Will had married widowed Edna Barnes in New York City the previous December and the couple had set up housekeeping in a brownstone house his bride owned in upper Manhattan. A week after the wedding Will appeared at his wife’s bank with a power of attorney and closed out her account of some twenty-four hundred dollars. The following day he disposed of some stocks and bond in her name, totalling an additional three thousand dollars. He then put the house up for quick sale and let it go for seventy-five hundred dollars, about half its real value.

Meantime, the new bride had not been seen by neighbors since a few days after the wedding. Will’s explanation was that his work required a move to the west coast and that his wife had gone ahead to locate a new home while he wound up their affairs here.

Sixty days after the wedding Will left-town with all the woman’s assets converted to cash.

There had been some gossip among neighbors about the strange disappearance of the new Mrs. Will, and the new owner of the brownstone house became suspicious of a fresh cement patch in the basement. Digging it up, he discovered a grave containing a female body which had been partially destroyed by sulphuric acid.

Too much of the body had been consumed by acid for positive identification, but pathologists established that the woman had been the age and size of Edna Barnes Will. They further established that death had resulted from a blow on the head, and had occurred at approximately the time Edna was last seen by neighbors.

Police investigation turned up that a five-gallon carboy of sulphuric acid had been purchased by a man answering Jonas Will’s description four days after the wedding.

The prosecution stressed that the woman’s body had been toothless, and that Edna Barnes Will had worn a full set of dentures.

A week after discovery of the body, Jonas Will had been located and arrested in San Francisco. After waiving extradition, he had been returned to New York to face the charge of first-degree murder.

The defense took another week to present its case.

Jonas Will’s explanation was that his wife actually had gone ahead to San Francisco to locate a home there. As evidence, he produced a telegram from that city reading: ARRIVED SAFELY. LOVE, EDNA. A San Francisco hotel manager testified that a wire reserving a room in the name of Mrs. Edna Will had been received from New York several days prior to the time the telegram to Jonas was dated, but the reservation had never been claimed. The defense contended that Edna had arrived in San Francisco by train, had sent the wire from the railway station, and had disappeared en route to the hotel.

Jonas Will’s rather lame explanation to the prosecution’s question as to why he had instituted no investigation after nearly two months passed with no word from his wife after the initial wire, was that he knew she was a poor correspondent, and he had been busy winding up their local affairs. He claimed to have been completely mystified when he arrived in San Francisco and discovered she had never checked into the hotel.

It was established that he had inquired after his wife at the hotel and subsequently had made a report of her disappearance to the San Francisco police.

The defense contended that the body buried in the basement of the brownstone house was not that of Edna Barnes Will. Attorney Martin Bowling suggested that the woman had been murdered and buried prior to the marriage of Jonas and Edna, implying that the victim, whoever she was, had been murdered by Edna. To substantiate his theory, he produced a building supply dealer who testified he had delivered a sack of cement and some sand to the address in November, several weeks before Jonas moved into the house.

The defense had no theory as to the reason for Edna’s disappearance between the rail station and hotel in San Francisco, merely pointing out that hundreds of similarly mysterious disappearances occur in different parts of the country each year.

It had been widely reported in the newspapers that Jones Will had only a year previously been acquitted of a similar charge of wife murder, but neither the prosecution nor defense mentioned this. In his instructions to the jury the judge, in obvious reference to this previous trial, cautioned that nothing the jurors had read or heard about the defendant outside of the courtroom should be considered in reaching a verdict.

Jennifer listened attentively to everything said during the trial. But most of the time her eyes were on the defendant instead of on the attorney or witness speaking. And quite often she found his gaze fixed on her too. Perhaps she imagined it, but sometimes there seemed to be a strange sort of telepathic communication between them.

“I am innocent,” she kept imagining his mind saying over and over to hers. “Don’t let them convict an innocent man.”

As the trial progressed, she found herself paying more and more attention to this secret voice and less and less to the evidence. She began to resent it when the prosecution made a telling point, and to offer up a silent cheer whenever the defense scored.

By the time the jury finally filed out to consider a verdict, she was convinced of Jonas Will’s innocence.

There were nine men and three women on the jury. The foreman was a scholarly appearing man of about Jennifer’s age whom she had overheard tell one of the men that he was a science teacher at an industrial high school.

When they were all seated around the long table in the jury-room, the foreman said, “Does anyone want to discuss the case before we take a ballot? Or shall we have a vote first and save discussion until we find out if there is any disagreement?”

One of the women, a slim housewife of about thirty, said, “I don’t see that there’s anything to discuss. Let’s take a vote.”

When there was general assent, the foreman passed out slips of paper to serve as ballots. Each juror wrote down his verdict, folded the paper and passed it back.

After opening all the slips, the foreman announced, “Eleven guilty, one not guilty.”

“How could anyone vote not guilty?” the woman who had requested the vote exploded. “This is the second wife he’s killed!”

Jennifer was usually silent in any sort of a group discussion, but then she had never before sat in a group discussion where she had any sort of strong opinion one way or the other.

She found herself saying diffidently, “We’re not supposed to consider that previous, case. Anyway, he was acquitted, so he must have been innocent.”

“Innocent!” the slim housewife said. “He just had a jury of idiots. His wife was found buried and he’d made off with her money, just like this time. It was all in the paper.”

Jennifer’s tone became more firm. “We can’t even discuss that case. We took an oath to consider only the evidence presented in court. I, for one, don’t think the dead woman was Edna Will. I think she was someone Edna Will murdered before she married the defendant, and that’s why Edna disappeared. She’s hiding somewhere to escape punishment for her crime.”

“Oh, for heaven’s, sake!” the slim woman said with disgust.

The foreman said, “I think we had better open the floor to general discussion. And since we are eleven to one for conviction, we’ll let the recalcitrant lady give her reasons, for differing with the rest of us, then start at my left and move right around the table, giving each person a chance for rebuttal.”

With all eyes on her, Jennifer was momentarily overwhelmed. But finally she managed in a shaking but stubborn voice, “The judge said if we felt reasonable doubt of guilt, we must find the defendant innocent. And they never even proved the dead woman was Edna Will. How about that telegram making a room reservation, and the one from her in San Francisco to her husband here?”

The man to the foreman’s left said, “Anybody can send a telegram. He could have had a confederate out there, or even have flown there and back himself. You can make it round trip by jet in about eight hours.”

“You can’t consider remote possibilities,” Jennifer protested. “The prosecution never proved anyone other than Edna Will sent either telegram, so we have to assume she did. That wasn’t disproved.”

“I don’t have to assume it,” the man second from the foreman said. “He sent those telegrams, or had them sent, just so he’d have some defense if anything went wrong. For the same reason, he inquired at the hotel, and made a report to missing persons in San Francisco. But for the two months she was supposedly in San Francisco locating a house, he never wrote or wondered why she didn’t write. Does that sound like the normal behavior of newlyweds?”

“They were mature people,” Jennifer said a trifle shakily. “They both had been married before. It wasn’t like young love.”

The third woman, a middle-aged stenographer who wore a wedding band but no diamond, said, “This whole discussion is ridiculous. He killed her, stole her money, and that’s all there is to it.”

But the discussion went on, and for the first time in her life Jennifer had a lot to say. She was hardly eloquent, but she put up such a persistent and stubborn argument that eventually she won over one of the men. The jury had filed out at one P.M. After four hours of Jennifer’s championship, the vote stood at ten for conviction, two voting not guilty.

By seven P.M., when the bailiff brought in their dinner and they took a half-hour break, she had won four more converts and the jury was evenly divided. Four of the men and both the other women were still holdouts.

By ten P.M. the vote had swung to ten to two, with only the slim housewife and the middle-aged stenographer still holding out for a guilty verdict.

At ten thirty the foreman said, “I think we have reached an impasse. I’ll take one more vote; then I suggest we inform the court we’re hopelessly deadlocked.”

“That will mean a whole new trial,” one of the men growled. “All this waste of time and money.”

The stenographer said grumpily, “I’m not going to be the cause, of making them do this all over again. I still think he’s guilty, but I’ll go along with the rest of you rather than have it declared a mistrial.”

The slim housewife didn’t have the moral stamina to stand all alone. Deserted by the last of her supporters, she threw in the towel too.

“All right,” she snapped. “We’ll turn him loose to kill a few more wives.”

It was just a week after the trial that Jennifer came home from work one day to find a visitor waiting in the hall outside her apartment door. It gave her quite a start to recognize the tall, distinguished figure.

Jonas Will was already holding his hat in his hand. He inclined his body slightly in a bow which had a touch of old-world flavor. He said, “I hope you won’t think I’m presumptuous for dropping by, Miss Hamilton. But I felt I had to.”

“Of course not, Mr. Will,” she said, flustered. “Won’t you come in?”

She tried to put the key in the lock upside down, laughed nervously, and managed to get the door open on the second try. Inside she flicked her gaze around the front room and was relieved to note it was in its usual immaculate condition, with everything in its proper place.

“Won’t you sit down?” she said. “May I take your hat?”

“I won’t be long enough for you to bother hanging it up,” he said, smiling.

He seated himself in an easy chair and held the hat in his lap. Laying her bag on an end table, she sank onto the sofa and looked at him inquiringly.

“I looked up your address in the phone book,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind. I felt I had to come by and thank you.”

She blushed. “I merely voted as I thought was right, Mr. Will. I was only one of twelve.”

“The twelve deliberated for nine hours,” he said dryly. “There must have been considerable disagreement. I think perhaps I owe my life to you.”

Jennifer felt her blush deepen. “You owe your life to your innocence, Mr. Will. I assure you that, if I had thought you guilty, I would have voted with the rest, and we wouldn’t have been out five minutes.”

His clear gray eyes studied her face. “So it was only you on the first vote. I sensed it. Did you know I was watching you throughout the trial?”

“You were?” she said in simulated surprise.

“Don’t pretend,” he said quietly. “Of course you knew. I recognized you as a sensitive the moment you stepped on the stand.”

“As a what?” she asked with raised brows.

“A sensitive. A person capable of receiving telepathic communication. I can’t, unfortunately. I can only transmit.”

She looked at him in astonishment. “Do you mean those were actual thought transmissions? I wasn’t imagining it?”

He smiled. “You weren’t imagining it, Miss Hamilton. I have always been able to transmit to a limited number of people. Very few have the sensitive receptivity to receive thought waves from a telepathist. And, of course, even if they have, it doesn’t mean anything unless we’re on the same wave length. It requires a particular type of mind to become a sensitive, the receptive mind of a person more interested in listening than in thinking of what to say next. It has to be a mind uncluttered by self-centered thoughts.”

“You mean an empty mind?”

His smile broadened. “You have a sense of humor as well as a receptive mind.” Rising to his feet, he said, “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time, Miss Hamilton. I just wanted to thank you for what you did.”

At the same time, his mind spoke to her almost as clearly as his voice, “You are a charming woman, and I’d like to stay longer, but I can’t with decency intrude on you any longer.”

Her heart began to thump. It was a totally new experience to feel that a man had any opinion of her at all, let alone to get the impression he considered her charming. Had she actually again read his. mind, or was it merely imagination combined with wishful thinking?

She decided that, imagination or not, she would give him a chance to stay longer if he wished.

She said, “Are you just going to walk in, excite my curiosity by telling me I’m some kind of mind reader, then walk out again without further explanation? I usually have a cocktail when I come home from work. Would you like to join me and tell me a little more about this while we’re having it?”

He hesitated before saying, “If it won’t be an imposition, I’d enjoy it.”

He ended up by staying for dinner.

That was the beginning of it. During the next few weeks, Jonas Will gradually became a nightly companion. At first he appeared only at intervals of several days, but finally he fell into the habit of picking her up after work daily and taking her somewhere for a cocktail. Afterward, they would sometimes have dinner at her apartment; sometimes they would dine out and then attend a movie. On the whole their evenings were very quiet, but compared to Jennifer’s previous recreational activity, they were riotous. She felt as though she had suddenly been swept from her humdrum life into one of glamourous adventure.

While they eventually got to the point where she was calling him Jonas and he was calling her Jennifer, he was always circumspect, never even taking such a liberty as squeezing her hand in the darkness of a movie. Yet she sensed in him a growing romantic interest which made her heart flutter. It was nothing he said or did, but occasionally she continued to get momentary glimpses of his thoughts, or at least to imagine she did. And when this happened, it was always some warm and admiring thought she felt pulsing from his mind to hers.

They had much discussion about this apparent extra-sensory ability of hers, for the subject fascinated her. She had never before experienced it with anyone else, and she strove for an explanation of why and how her latent ability to read minds had suddenly developed.

“Not minds,” he said, smiling. “Just one mind. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon, particularly among married couples who have unusually close relationships. Psychologists don’t know much about it, but there’s one theory that the minds of certain so-called ‘sensitives’ act much as radio receivers tuned to a single narrow band. The theory is that such minds are able to receive thought waves transmitted at a precise frequency. A latent sensitive may go through life without ever encountering a telepathist who transmits on the proper wave length. I’m probably the first you ever met exactly attuned to you.”

It pleased her to know the phenomenon was something common among married couples with unusually close relationships. Although Jonas hadn’t even suggested any feeling for her deeper than friendship, it gave a romantic touch to their relationship. She began to dream a little.

The dream was shattered one night as they sat in the front room of her apartment. Jonas announced that he probably would be leaving town in a week or two.

In a way it wasn’t a complete shock, for she knew he had been searching for an out-of-town position. He had explained that the sales job he had moved to San Francisco to take had gone up in smoke the moment he was arrested for murder. And there was too much scandal attached to his name for him to get anything in New York. He had a few-thousand-dollar reserve, he had told her, but he couldn’t live on it forever. He wanted to move to some new place where he was unknown and try to rebuild his life under another name.

“I’ve been a bit limited as to the jobs I could apply for,” he said. “I’ve been applying under the name of Henry Gunner, so I had to pick jobs where I figured they wouldn’t bother to check references. This is only a car sales job on straight commission, but if I make good in it, eventually I can apply for a better job and have a ready-made reference under my new name.”

“Where is it?” she asked.

“St. Louis. It isn’t definite yet, but it looks good. I have to fly down there Monday for a personal interview.”

“I hope you get it,” she said in a voice she managed to keep steady. “But St. Louis is a long way off. I don’t suppose we’ll cross paths very often.”

“There’s one way they could cross daily,” he said.

The shattered parts of her dream began to come together again in her mind and her heart began to thump. “What way is that, Jonas?”

“If we were married.”

She gazed at him, her heart now beating wildly. She was utterly unable to speak.

“Of course there’s a difficulty there,” he said. “It’s quite possible Edna’s still alive.”

The thought jolted her. As certain as she was that the body discovered in the basement of the brownstone house wasn’t that of Edna Barnes Will, she hadn’t given a thought to the possible whereabouts of Edna Will since the day Jonas appeared at her door.

“Of course it wouldn’t mean anything to me from a moral point of view if she were,” Jonas said. “If she’s still alive, she must have known I was on trial for her murder, because everyone in the country knew. I’d hardly want to return to a wife who deliberately intended to let me die for something she knew I didn’t do.”

Jennifer remained silent.

“The State of New York has declared her dead,” Jonas went on. “So I don’t believe I could be arrested for bigamy if she ever turned up. I’m merely thinking of you. I would hate to have you undergo the distress of discovering you had been living in sin, perhaps ten years after our marriage.”

Jennifer blurted out, “Suppose I was willing to take the chance?”

He smiled at her. “I hoped you’d say that. It isn’t really much of a chance, because we’ll be starting a new life under a new name, and it’s unlikely she could find us, even if she did eventually reappear. At worst, it would mean a quick trip to Reno for me and then our remarriage. One of our U.S. presidents was once confronted by the same problem and surmounted it without scandal.”

Searching back into her memory for her high school knowledge of history, she nodded. “Andrew Jackson. But there was a little scandal, wasn’t there? Didn’t he challenge someone to a duel for making a remark about his living in sin with his wife?”

“Attitudes have changed since then, my dear. No one will condemn us if it ever comes to necessary legal action. It will be accepted as an honest error, easily straightened out. But it’s up to you.”

“I’ll marry you,” she said, before he could change his mind.

She had been sitting on the sofa and he in an easy chair. Rising, he crossed over and kissed her for the first time.

This was on Saturday, June twenty-ninth. Monday morning Jonas flew to St. Louis. At four P.M. he phoned her long-distance at her office.

“I got the job,” he said jubilantly. “I start Monday, July fifteenth. I’m going to stay here a few days to try to get us some place to live, but I’ll be back Friday. We’ll be married Saturday and start for St. Louis in my car about Tuesday, July ninth.”

“So soon?” she said, both appalled and delighted at the short time remaining before she would be a married woman. “I’ll have to give notice, and there’s an apartment lease, and...”

“Then you’d better start hustling,” he said cheerfully. “We’re leaving for St. Louis just a week from tomorrow.”

When she hung up, she went right in and gave her notice to her boss. After her quarter century of service he was very understanding. He waived the usual two-week requirement and told her she could just finish out that week.

She was in a flurry of activity all the rest of that week. She managed to find a woman willing to buy up the rest of her apartment lease and also take the furniture off her hands, though she had to let the latter go for about a fourth of its value. There were also utility services to be terminated, charge accounts to close, and packing to do.

The last was the biggest problem, for Jonas phoned again on Wednesday and, when she mentioned her packing job, he limited her to two suitcases to take in the car. Everything else had to be expressed to St. Louis to be held until called for.

She managed to get everything accomplished but the closing out of her bank accounts by the time Jonas got back on Friday.

He came in on a morning plane and picked her up at her office at noon. They spent her lunch hour getting blood tests and the license, as New York had a twenty-four-hour waiting period, and this had to be accomplished if they expected to get married the next day.

Jonas registered his name on the license as Henry Gunner. Jennifer was a little dubious about this until he explained that a marriage was legal under any name, as long as the proper persons went through the ceremony. It would hardly be feasible to use his real name, Jonas said. In the first place it would be front-page news if it leaked out that a man twice acquitted of wife murder was remarrying, and neither of them wanted that type of publicity. More important, since they would be living under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Gunner in St. Louis, it would certainly be more convenient to have that name on their marriage certificate.

Jennifer agreed he was right.

They were married by a justice of the peace Saturday evening. Jonas, who had been living in a furnished room, gave it up and moved into Jennifer’s apartment.

In the excitement of preparing for the wedding and the move, there had been no time to discuss financial affairs with Jonas. And of course that was the farthest thing from her mind on her wedding night. But at breakfast the next morning she decided to bring it up.

“Will we be able to live on what you earn as a car salesman, Jonas?” she asked him. “Or will you want me to get a job too when we get to St. Louis?”

“Let’s see how I make out first,” he suggested. “I have about four thousand dollars to carry us for a while.”

“I have some money too,” she said. “Tomorrow I planned to close but my checking account and get traveler’s checks for it. There’s only a couple of hundred dollars in it. But what should I do about my savings account? Just leave it here, and have the bank where we open an account in St. Louis handle the transfer?”

“Why don’t you get a bank draft for it, made out to Jennifer Gunner? That will be as safe as traveler’s checks, and you can just deposit it in a savings account when we get to St. Louis. As a matter of fact, have the balance in your checking account included in the single bank draft too. I have enough traveler’s checks to carry us.”

So that was what she did. Jonas hadn’t asked her how large her savings account was and she hadn’t told him, wanting to save it as a pleasant surprise. For twenty-five years she had been regularly saving a part of her salary. The bank draft she got was for seventeen thousand, two hundred and forty-eight dollars.

They left for St. Louis early Tuesday morning. Jonas did all the driving, as she had no license. They were in no hurry, since he had until the following Monday to report to work. They took three days and made a honeymoon trip out of it. It was early Friday evening when they drove over Mac-Arthur Bridge into St. Louis and stopped for dinner before driving on.

Jonas had told her he had rented a “summer cottage sort of place” for a month, to serve as a temporary base while they did serious house hunting. It was some distance from town, he explained, but he would take her in with him each day when he drove to work, and drop her at some real estate office to spend the day looking at houses which might prove suitable.

She hadn’t realized it would be so far from town, though. The cottage was on the Meramec River, at good ten miles from the extreme south edge of town, and probably twenty miles from the downtown district. It was all by itself on a stretch of clay and gravel beach, not even in sight of any other cottage. It was raised on stilts to keep it above flood waters, and boards had been nailed to the stilts on two sides to form a rough, open carport beneath the building. A wooden stairway led upward from the carport to the cottage.

Inside, it was much more pleasant than its outside appearance had indicated, Jennifer was gratified to find. There was a big front room full of rustic furniture, a large kitchen, and a bedroom and bath. The furnishings were old but adequate. She decided that after a thorough cleaning it would be livable for the short time they planned to be there.

Friday night they retired early, tired from the long trip. Saturday morning Jonas took her shopping at a plaza on the highway, and she stocked up with groceries and cleaning supplies. The rest of that day and all day Sunday she scrubbed and cleaned until the three rooms glistened.

Sunday evening after dinner, as they sat in the front room, Jonas said, “Tomorrow I start to work. How will you spend the day, dear?”

She looked at him in surprise. “I thought you were taking me in to start house hunting.”

“Not tomorrow,” he said. “I wouldn’t know where to drop you. I’ll pick up a St. Louis paper and tomorrow night we’ll make a list of real estate companies that advertise rentals. Then I’ll take you in the next day. You could use one day of rest before you start hunting.”

“All right,” she said agreeably. “I suppose there isn’t that much rush.”

“I may as well open your savings account for you while I’m in town tomorrow, if you want to endorse that bank draft and give it to me.”

“Our savings account,” she corrected, with a smile. “We’re not going to have the kind of marriage where we keep everything separate, are we?”

“Ours then,” he said, smiling back. “Anyway, you better endorse the draft while you’re thinking of it.”

She went into the bedroom to get the bank draft from her bag, turned it over and endorsed it on the dresser. It gave her a pleasantly warm feeling to write, “Mrs. Jennifer Gunner”. It was the first time she had had occasion to write her new name.

When she carried the draft back into the front room and handed it to Jonas, he merely glanced at it, then folded it and put it in his pocket.

“Aren’t you a little surprised at the amount?” she asked with pride.

“Not really,” he said. “You’d been working for years and your tastes are simple. I assumed you’d have a tidy sum tucked away.”

She frowned, a little hurt by his casual acceptance of the amount. “I thought you’d be proud of me.”

“Oh, I am,” he assured her. “I’m just not surprised.”

She examined him dubiously, and suddenly something from the trial popped into her mind. She couldn’t imagine why she recalled it at that precise moment, but all at once she remembered the handwriting expert testifying that it was actually Edna Will’s signature on the power of attorney which had given Jonas control of his wife’s assets. All her assets were contained in the bank draft she had just handed him, she realized, and her actual signature was on it.

“Did you know Edna long before you married her?” she asked abruptly.

He gave her an odd look. “That’s a peculiar question, right out of the blue. Not very long.”

“How’d you meet her, Jonas?”

He gazed at her for a moment before saying casually, “She was on the jury at my first trial.”

Almost on top of the words she caught a vagrant thought from him, and this time she knew it wasn’t imagination. As clearly as though he had spoken aloud she heard his mind saying, “I always try to find one sensitive in the jury box.”

She gazed at him with growing horror, and he stared back at her with a sudden sadness in his clear gray eyes.

“I let the wrong thought slip, didn’t I?” he said. “I meant to let it last one more night, but of course I can’t now. That’s the trouble with picking sensitives. You always have to keep a curb on your thoughts.”