Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 18, No. 3, September 18, 1926

Through a mire of passions, miscarried and vicious, Nem Parsons traced the chance marks leading to the double tragedy

I

Nem Parsons leaned back in his swivel chair, rubbed a reflective thumb across a smooth, pink jowl, and surveyed his caller with blue eyes that were wise and as innocent as an infant’s.

It was a plain, colorless little woman who faced him, hands clasped tightly in her decent black silk lap, worn face twitching with worry; but her halting story kept the old detective alert and interested.

“And there’s no trace of her, hide or hair, since she left the Suttons and started home. I’m near distracted, Mr. Parsons — not that Rose Miller was dear as a daughter to me, being only my husband’s niece and a girl who wouldn’t take a word of warning or scold from any one — but she’s young, and flighty, and hasn’t a soul but me to look after her.”

Parsons puckered his lips, squinted thoughtfully at the cabinet photograph Mrs. Miller had laid upon his desk. From the water marked sepia folder a plump, pretty face, lit by laughing, coquettish eyes that must have been blue, smiled at him.

The girl’s face was shallow; her beauty may have lacked distinction; but Nem knew that those soft, big eyes, that curved mouth and dimpled chin, spelled allure to most men. There was something pitiful about the photograph. It was so like a challenge to a game already won.

For that sweet, come-hither look would attract men who could best Rose Miller so easily, so willingly; that rustic beauty, fresh and lovely now, was destined to early ripeness and decay.

“Must have been a mighty pretty girl,” Nem said softly.

The inadvertent past tense caught the woman up with a gasp.

“Must have been — then you think what I do! Rose never ran away, Mr. Parsons. She’d no reason to, winding me ’n’ her uncle around her finger as she did. I thought of that first off. And if she’d run away she’d never have left all her good clothes, her savings, like she did.

“And who’d she run away with? She liked George Link best of all the fellows she had hangin’ around. But she didn’t like him well enough for that — a fickle, changeable girl was Rose! Besides, he’s as worried as I am. Clean crazy about her, George is.”

Nem grunted, passing an enormous hand tenderly over the graying fluff that fringed his baldness and made him look like an elderly cherub.

“George Link, who has the garage, corner of State and Elm? Nice looking young fellow.”

He hadn’t been on Bridgehaven’s police force for twenty-seven years without knowing a good deal about every one in the small manufacturing city and its environs. Link, he knew, was a hard-working, efficient young mechanic, who had become owner of the garage he had spoken of, in spite of his wild ways.

For George Link was wild, in the parlance of Bridgehaven; attractive to women, with his black hair and ruddy coloring and splendid physique; attracted by them; able to hold a vast amount of bootleg liquor after a grilling day’s work, and still beat all comers at Kelly pool.

Nem felt a sudden prescience of tragedy. The instinct that made him as good a detective as he was told him that Rose Miller was in sore need of aid — or possibly beyond it.

“Yes,” her aunt in law said dully. “If only she hadn’t played fast and loose with him she’d be better off now. Something’s happened to her, Mr. Parsons — something terrible!”

Nem patted her shrunken shoulder reassuringly.

“Now, don’t go imagining things, Mis’ Miller. I’ll go see Link, and then I’ll drop in on the Suttons, where she works. They might know something they didn’t think to tell you over the phone.”

Nem regretted, as he heaved his vast bulk up out of the chair that encompassed it, that Arthur Sutton and his wife had to be involved in the affair, and all that it foreboded.

For the Suttons had had their share of tragedy already. Sutton had brought his wife to Bridgehaven seven years before, when he became professor of economics at the Industrial College on the outskirts of the city. They had not occupied the pretty timbered-brick bungalow two years when an automobile accident left Alice Sutton a cripple for life, paralyzed from the waist down, chained to bed or wheelchair.

Sutton had dedicated his life to the care of the invalid; and, whatever the cost to the man, he had fulfilled his tragic obligation beyond the letter.

When Nem had parted from the troubled little woman on the steps of the red brick building that was headquarters he turned up State Street toward Link’s garage.

During the short walk in the April sunshine he checked off all that he had been told, all that he had gleaned, from Rose Miller’s aunt. And when he faced handsome George Link as that individual crawled out from under a truck, it was with conviction.

“My name’s Parsons,” Nem began, mildly. “Rose Miller’s aunt came down to headquarters this afternoon, feelin’ real worried about Rose—”

Link flung down the greasy wrench he held, wiped his hands on his overalls.

“If she hadn’t, I would have.” His dark eyes glittered. “Want to step into the office? We’ll be more private there.”

He preceded Nem into a cluttered, dingy little room, cleared off one of the two chairs with a sweep of his elbow for his caller, and dropped into the other.

“I suppose you think I know something about her. Ask any one who was at Riordan’s pool parlor last night if I wasn’t there from half past nine till midnight, missing most of my shots, waiting for her!”

He ripped out the words savagely.

Nem dug a leisurely thumb into the bowl of his veteran pipe, waited for Link to vent that which was boiling up within him.

“A little after ten I called up Sutton’s house, and Mr. Sutton said she’d just left. Wherever she went she didn’t come here, as she said she would. And that’s all I know — except—”

His brown jaw clamped in a sort of violent indecision. Nem spoke:

“Except that you’ve got some idea of what might have happened to her.”

The young man’s black eyes flickered, fell. He was obviously ridden by fear; not for himself, but for the girl. Ridden too with a gnawing uncertainty.

“Just that, Mr. Parsons; I’m not saying it did happen — God knows! But the housekeeper where Rose works — Rose is sort of companion nurse to Mrs. Sutton, who can’t walk — has it in for Rose, and on my account.” He hung his dark head, struck the battered oak desk with the flat of his hand.

“Reckon I’d better come clean with you. The housekeeper up there — Ellen Clarke her name is — and I, well, we kept company until Rose came along. Ellen’s older than I am; she’s forty anyway, and I guess she likes me a lot. Women her age get sort of batty about a man, sometimes.

“I’m not holding any brief for myself, but it wasn’t all my fault. Then when I met up with Rose, it was all off. Ellen took it hard, all right. But she soon saw that her ranting around wouldn’t do any good. So she took it out in being nasty to the girl.”

Nem, squinting through his smoke, filled in to his own satisfaction the gaps in the jerky, sordid story.

“And last night — Ellen’s night off it was — she came down here to the garage right after supper, and made an awful rumpus. She was wild, all right. She cried, and raged, and — threatened.” Link’s voice was low, toneless as he recounted the scene. “She swore she’d kill Rose if I didn’t stop seeing her, even if she had to swing for it! I laughed, and she took herself off. And Rose never showed up. That’s all I know.”

II

Nem drew on his pipe, mammoth hands resting idle on his knees.

“Weren’t you kind of uneasy?” he asked meekly.

Link made a vicious stab at the scarred desk with the penknife he was playing with.

“Not then.” A sullen red crept up to his temples. “Rose doesn’t keep all her dates with me, you see. She’s got me coming and going, Mr. Parsons. I... I take a lot from her that I wouldn’t take from any other girl in town.”

There was pathos in his look, and Nem remembered the challenging coquetry of the sepia photograph. But he was too anxious to take the next trolley out to the Sutton’s home on Golden Hill Avenue and interview Ellen Clarke to offer more than brusque solace.

“She may turn up any time. Don’t worry, and keep quiet until you’ve heard from me.”

He saw the street car lurch around the corner, and lumbered toward it. His flapping gray clothes, his clumsy girth and gait, made him elephantine, ludicrous. But he swung on to the trolley ahead of the men who had been waiting for it, and seated himself far up in front, close to the motor-man.

He nodded to the scattered handful of passengers.

“Business kind of dull this time of day, isn’t it?”

The motorman chuckled, not averse to breaking the rule placarded above him.

“It’s lively compared to what it is later on; lots of times I make the run from Golden Hill into town with the car empty. Easy shift, mine. From four to midnight.”

“Guess you know most everybody that gets on and off then?” Nem mused, and leaned forward confidentially to put a question on whose answer hung more than the public employee could guess.

When he got off the street car at the foot of Golden Hill he contemplated the climb ahead of him. The last rays of the April sunshine illumined the hill, cast a sort of glamour upon the modest dwellings that dotted the avenue sparsely. For Golden Hill had never been developed as much as other outlying sections of Bridgehaven. Ten minutes’ walk brought Nem to his destination — the last house on the thoroughfare, just over the crest of the hill.

The Sutton bungalow stood well back from the street, on a lonely site. Beyond it stretched empty fields that would one day be plotted off into neat suburban streets. Behind it, below the flower and vegetable gardens that bespoke Arthur Sutton’s hobby, the lot degenerated into swamp land that had yet to be drained.

Nem mounted the veranda steps, rang. But it was not Ellen Clarke who admitted him. A tall, gaunt man with tired eyes and tufting dark hair, streaked with gray, greeted him with a courteous, questioning word.

Nem stated his business diffidently, was grateful for the professor’s response, as he showed him into the book-lined study to the left of the center hall.

“We’ll be glad to tell you all we know, Mr. Parsons. As a matter of fact, Rose Miller’s aunt got in touch with you at my suggestion. She called up several times during the morning. My wife and I are very much worried, naturally — will you smoke?”

Nem took the proffered cigar, sat gingerly on the worn leather chair. He rather liked Arthur Sutton. What a mask his slender, bony face was; a mask that he had schooled himself to wear, perhaps. His eyes burned through it with some avid significance.

“Unfortunately I can tell you little enough. I went out directly after supper last night; I am tutoring one of my pupils in mathematics — Lloyd Dodge, on Walnut Street.” The ghost of a smile touched his lips.

“My pay isn’t adequate to all my needs, unless I take on some outside work. We worked there until ten, and I strolled home, in spite of the light rain and his offer to drive me back. It was just ten twenty when I unlocked the front door.

“The phone was ringing. It had waked my wife, who was already in bed, asleep. Some man asked for Rose, but she had left some time earlier, it transpired, after getting Mrs. Sutton to bed.” He paused. “My wife is very much of an invalid, you see. When Rose didn’t come at her usual hour this morning we were puzzled, for she has been very faithful. And when the aunt called up to ask about her—”

He shook his head in perplexity.

Nem scratched his creased pink neck with a pudgy forefinger.

“Mind if I go out and talk to the housekeeper?” he asked. “If seems she and Rose Miller weren’t very good friends, but she might know something about the girl.”

He heaved himself up.

“Ellen Clarke?” Arthur Sutton flicked off the ash that tipped his cigar. “Certainly. She is a competent, capable sort of woman. Indispensable to us. But she had little enough in common with Rose.”

He preceded his caller down the pleasant center hall of the bungalow, off which the various rooms opened, to the kitchen.

Through its western windows the setting sun sent its shafts of light upon the immaculate blue and white workroom, upon a tall, deep-bosomed woman who was paring potatoes at the sink.

She looked up, and Nem saw a heavy-boned, rather sullen face between smooth wings of black hair. Her eyes were lightish, hard as agate. Only a handsome, sulky mouth redeemed her from absolute plainness. And that betrayed the volcanic violence of her, at which George Link had hinted.

“This is Mr. Parsons, from police headquarters,” said Sutton, in that lifeless, well modulated voice of his. “I have told him all we know of Rose Miller.”

Nem saw the woman’s thick brows meet; heard the clatter of the knife as it dropped. She raised her hand to her lips, sucked at the bright thread of scarlet that appeared between thumb and forefinger. Nem tendered a large, clean handkerchief, and clucked sympathetically under his breath.

“Right dangerous peelin’ potatoes with a big knife like that. Apt to cut yourself bad.”

She moved her heavy shoulders impatiently.

“What should I know of Rose Miller?”

If the old detective had ever seen hate, it smoldered in her eyes now.

“We’re trying to figure out where she is, and why,” Nem said. “You know any reason why she should run away like this?”

Sutton leaned against the wall, arms folded, thin face immobile. Once more Nem got the impression that he was too absorbed in his own tragic problems to be anything but remote.

The housekeeper’s colorless skin seemed to go a shade paler, then crimsoned in an angry tide.

“No. Wherever she is, good riddance to her! Smirking, doll-faced—”

A soft creaking sound stopped her tirade against the missing girl. Nem turned to see a rubber-tired wheel chair, propelled by the woman who sat in it, glide over the threshold. Alice Sutton had been a pretty girl, might have been a handsome woman. But, though she was no more than thirty, the indefinable aura of age was about her.

Her pallid skin was taut over her cheek bones; her gray eyes sunken; her smooth, parted chestnut hair gave her the look of an austere madonna. A tragic figure, all told, with her thin, fragile hands emerging from the loose sleeves of her dark red dressing gown; her helpless limbs covered by a light robe.

Her eyes met her husband’s, and Sutton explained Nem’s errand.

“If only I could tell you precisely when she left last night!” Mrs. Sutton said, wrinkling her pale forehead. “She got me to bed a little after nine, and gave me my sleeping medicine. Mr. Sutton was out, and it was Ellen’s evening out as well. I told Rose to run along, without waiting for Mr. Sutton to come back.

“She was tidying my room when I dropped off. I have a vague memory of hearing the door close — and then the ringing of the telephone awakened me, some time later. My husband had just come in and was answering it. The call was for Rose—”

“I told Mr. Parsons about it.”

Sutton rearranged a pillow at his wife’s back, and she thanked him with a pale smile.

Ellen Clarke wiped her powerful hands on the crash toweling close at hand.

“She went off in a hurry, Mrs. Sutton; such a hurry that she didn’t stop for her raincoat. It’s hanging in the outside pantry!” she told them defiantly, with a jerk of her dark head toward the door in question.

“And it was raining hard between nine and ten,” Nem mused aloud.

He lumbered across the kitchen in his soft, creaking shoes and opened the pantry door. The small cubicle was used almost as a storeroom. A sink occupied one corner; a washing machine and other articles of household equipment filled most of the available space; but just opposite the door was a row of hooks. From one pended a green glazed raincoat — the sort of protection a girl would choose for inclement weather.

“This it?” Nem asked.

A little surprised gasp from Mrs. Sutton answered him.

“Yes. Why on earth didn’t she wear it? Her frock was light, too—”

But Nem was inside the dark little room, taking the garment from its hook, kneeling with a grunt of discomfort to examine baseboard and floor.

Not one of the three could see what held him tense and expectant. He rose at last, round pink face inscrutable and solemn.

“She didn’t wear it because, unless I’m mightily mistaken, she didn’t leave this house alive, Mrs. Sutton.” His blue eyes fastened upon the frightened, ashen face of the housekeeper, who was plucking at her apron.

“I knew when I came up here that she hadn’t gone back to town by trolley last night, as she always did. Now I know more than that.” He gestured to a dark, brownish stain on the baseboard that the girl’s green coat had concealed. “That’s blood, Mr. Sutton — fresh blood. She was probably lying here, dead, when you got in last night!”

Arthur Sutton passed a dazed hand over his forehead.

“I — such a thing couldn’t have happened!” he muttered mechanically. “Lying here — good God!”

Alice Sutton clutched her husband’s hand.

“No... oh, no!”

Nem looked at her with compassion.

“I’m as sure as if we’d already found her.” He looked away from the housekeeper’s livid face. “We’ll have to search.”

III

His mournful certitude wrenched a shuddering sigh from the invalid’s lips. It evoked a defiant challenge from Ellen Clarke:

“I don’t believe it! If it’s true, it’s no more than what she deserved—”

“Ellen!” said her mistress sharply.

Nem looked at the trembling housekeeper.

“Where did you go after you left George Link’s garage last night, Miss Clarke?”

She glared at him, but terror was writ upon her.

“So this is his doing? Your snooping around here — oh, I could kill him, and her too!” She laughed on a hysterical note. “But I didn’t, God knows!”

“Mighty foolish of you to go down there with your threats,” he said softly.

Alice Sutton spoke in breathless whisper, one thin hand at her throat.

“I... I knew nothing of all this. What does it mean?”

Sutton quelled the housekeeper with a look.

“Is it necessary that my wife listen to all this? She isn’t strong enough to stand such a scene, Mr. Parsons.”

He was behind the wheel chair, and he touched his heart with a slight, significant gesture. Nem glanced at her pityingly.

“ ’Course not; just make her comfortable, and come back to me.”

Sutton guided the noiseless vehicle out through the kitchen to the front of the house. Nem surveyed the housekeeper, waved her into a chair with a curt nod of his head.

“You hain’t answered me, Miss Clarke; where’d you go after you left George Link at the garage?”

Her hands twisted feverishly in her lap; her light eyes gleamed with fear and malevolence.

“I went — walking.”

“Alone?” Nem persisted.

“Alone. Oh, I was mad enough to strangle her; I’ll grant you that. I reckon you know why. He was mine, George was, until she came along with her simpering face and yellow hair. But I took it out just in walking last night. It was pelting rain; blowing hard, too; but I didn’t mind that. I walked out Easton way — miles and miles, I guess!”

“Meet any one?” Nem inquired idly.

She shook her head.

“Not a soul. ’Twas close to one when I came in. I’d sat on a stile, thinking, for I don’t know how long.” Defiance edged her tone again. “I suppose you’re looking for an alibi; why don’t you find your dead girl first!”

He couldn’t help pitying anything so consumed by venom. She was an embodied fury as she crouched there in the kitchen chair, glaring up at him.

“Reckon I will.” He turned to face Sutton, who had come back, and was looking from one to the other. “Guess I’ll have to ask you to show me around, Mr. Sutton. It oughtn’t to take long.”

Sutton shivered, his eyes still resting upon the housekeeper, as if she were exerting some strange charm over him.

“Of course. I still can’t believe — where do you want to look?”

“Start with the cellar,” Nem suggested.

The master of the bungalow led the way through the storeroom, with its gruesome mark of violence, to the cellar door. His flash lighted Nem’s creaking steps down the short flight, while he followed just behind.

The basement was a tidy, barren place. The coal bin was empty, yawning black under the shifting disk of light. The partitioned-off vegetable closet at the far end contained only a few cabbages and perhaps a bushel of potatoes, beneath which not so much as the body of a cat could have been hidden. There was no shed, no possible place of concealment.

“Nothing here, thank God!” Arthur Sutton murmured, mopping his forehead.

He showed the strain imposed upon him by the gruesome task, and Nem felt again that this was an unnecessary evil to fall upon these people, who had already borne so much.

But he peered into the furnace and found its firepot, its grate and ash receptable clean and guiltless.

“Stopped the furnace, I see.”

“The past week’s been unseasonably warm,” Sutton reminded him. “Mrs. Sutton likes the fireplaces. Finished down here?”

Nem covered the last foot of cement, that gave no sign of cleavage; of having been tampered with, and sighed his assent.

“Satisfied. I’ll say you’re a careful housekeeper, professor. You got your cellar slicked up nicer’n most.”

Sutton overlooked the praise.

“Where next?”

Nem pondered, one hand on the stair rail.

“Hain’t no upstatirs to your place, is there?”

“Nothing but an unfinished attic, which is more air space than anything else.”

“How do you get up to it?”

“Only by ladder — and that’s out in the tool house — up through a trapdoor in the center hall.”

Nem smiled.

“ ’Tain’t likely that any one would carry a dead body up a ladder and through a trapdoor when it ’d be a whole lot easier to carry it out of the house. The likeliest way to dispose of a corpse is the ordinary way, professor. Burial. And you’ve got plenty of ground.”

Sutton followed Nem upstairs, and they passed directly outdoors from the storeroom. Nem stood beside his pale, perturbed host, looking down the slope into the little dell that formed the garden. Only a small, unpretentious building that seemed destined for a garage stood between the bungalow and the swamp land.

“How far does your land go, Mr. Sutton?”

“Down to that woven wire fence this side of the swamp.”

“H-m!” With ponderous, easy tread Nem lumbered down the path that led to the small building, tried the door with a rattle of its padlock. “What’s this, a garage?”

Arthur Sutton nodded.

“If ever I can afford a car, yes. Right now I use it as a tool house.”

“Keep your shovels and picks in here?”

“Yes, but the place is always locked.” Nem rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

“Who’s got the key?”

“It always hangs in the outside pantry,” Sutton told him. “Where — you found the blood stain.”

“Mind getting it?” Nem asked, peering through the panes, and turned to watch the professor’s wiry stride up the small slope to the bungalow. He emerged from the outside pantry a moment later with the key dangling from his forefinger, swung down the path to the tool house, and unlocked the swinging doors.

The interior of the tool house, like the cellar, spoke a good word for Sutton’s orderliness. At the far end stood a carpenter’s bench, clean of shavings. A tool cabinet bespoke his handiness. Rakes, shovels, hoes, depended from proper nails on the studding of the little shack, all oiled and polished and clean.

A suit of blue denim overalls hung from another peg, above a clean pair of rubber boots. These Nem inspected with a casual air, and photographic certainty of detail. He came to a pile of gunny sacks stacked neatly in one corner, felt them. They were damp; sufficiently impregnated with fresh loam to soil Nem’s hands. And on one he discovered a tiny green plant.

He looked up, nether lip puckered between his teeth, to see Arthur Sutton staring out of the window, toward the bungalow. He looked troubled; eager, perhaps, to be with his wife in this time of stress.

“What are these for, Mr. Sutton?”

The man started, as if his thoughts were elsewhere.

“Those are fertilizer sacks. I’m saving them because I get a dime rebate on each. Look out — they’re covered with garden loam; I just finished spading my early garden before the rain. I wanted to get the fertilizer in—”

Nem straightened with a grunt. He appeared to have gleaned all he could from the tool house. He stood in the doorway, looking over the land.

“You haven’t planted yet, have you?”

“Not yet,” Sutton said in that tired voice of his. “I’ll do it as soon as the ground dries a little more. It’s pretty damp down there.”

“Reckon gardening’s your hobby, professor,” Nem said. “Do you depend a lot on your garden for your greens?”

“Yes. And I’m a bit late getting things in this spring. I started my hotbed earlier, though,” he vouchsafed as he saw Nem’s round eyes fasten upon the cement cold frame that nestled against the bottom of the south slope. It was perhaps six feet long, and four wide, with thin cement walls two feet high on the north side, sloping to a foot high on the south.

And thither Nem directed their steps. The glass panes had been removed, and were stacked in orderly array against the wall. The tender, early grass of the lawn bordered the frame; and the look of it to the south attracted Nem’s interest. It seemed to have been recently beaten down as with a roller, or some heavy weight, for the length of the hotbed, and was just beginning to straighten up again. The hotbed itself was planted with serried rows of radishes about an inch high. But these brought a puzzled frown to Nem’s brow. They should have been flourishing, yet they drooped forlornly above their rich soil.

He bent grotesquely over them, pudgy hands resting on his knees.

“Radishes look kind of peaked, Mr. Sutton. Funny for ’em to wither down, after last night’s rain.”

But he had no need of calling Sutton’s attention to this irregularity. For he, too, was staring at the hotbed; eyes intent; pale face set.

“You’re right,” he told the detective in a brittle voice. “I’m gardener enough to know that these plants have been tampered with. But — why?”

Nem’s own voice quivered with excitement as he acknowledged the fear that leaped into the other man’s eyes.

“They’ve been taken up and replanted, within twenty-four hours,” Nem said. “It was done in the dark, too — or else done mighty carelessly, for the rows aren’t a mite regular.”

Arthur Sutton was a canny man. He dashed a hand across his brow, that glistened, shuddered.

“It’s the size and shape of a grave, Parsons—”

Nem nodded.

“It is a grave. The Miller girl’s; I figure whoever made it her grave thought resetting the radishes would be blind enough to keep any one from looking further down. Kind of lucky that radishes can’t be transplanted without withering on the next day. Lucky, too, I came up to-day, before they got strong and healthy again.”

Sutton touched the little muscle that throbbed in his lean, dark jaw.

“Horrible!” Yet he seemed to believe Nem’s theory, unwillingly enough. “But the dirt — where was it piled?”

Nem pointed to the trampled-down grass.

“Tarpaulin — no, those burlap fertilizer sacks in your tool house were used to protect the grass. And — I found a young radish plant on one of the sacks. Let’s go get a spade and see how near right I am.”

He had to guide the other man back to the tool house. Arthur Sutton walked like a man in a daze of horror.

“Could Ellen — would she have thought of anything so macabre?”

“She’s big and strong enough,” Nem admitted gravely. “And she hated Rose Miller enough to kill her.” He picked up two shovels, halted by the pile of sackcloth. “Want to lay down the sacks to keep your grass fresh?”

Sutton shook his head.

“Good God, no! Let’s find out as soon as we can—”

So they retraced their steps, and with ruthless disregard for the tender, withered plants, threw out the moist loam in spadefuls.

Nem, panting from the unusual exertion, finished his train of thought.

“She hated the girl, Mr. Sutton, and if the wish could kill — but most every one livin’ would be in the dock if to will some one else dead was murder — steady, there!”

Scarcely two feet down, Nem’s shovel found a soft obstruction which made him withdraw the implement quickly. Sutton stood by, transmuted, fixed with horror, while Nem ladled handfuls of earth aside.

A bit of light blue cotton; a tendril of yellow hair; peeping beneath a ragged square of sackcloth, that Nem drew aside with gentle fingers. And they looked upon lost Rose Miller as she stared up at the sky with sightless, astonished blue gaze, fixed now upon eternity.

“Poor child!” whispered Sutton. And again: “Poor child!”

Nem, still holding the square of burlap that had protected her soft, round prettiness from the desecration of loose earth, uttered an untranslatable sound. He was staring at her stiff, folded hands, arranged as reverently as any corpse’s for Christian burial.

Between the cold fingers were laid a handful of withered crocuses; and in the midst of the faded flowers there protruded, from the girl’s breast, the horn handled knife that had found its sheath in her heart.

“God!” said Arthur Sutton, and turned away.

Nem covered the pitiful, blind face with the sackcloth, looked past his companion to the bungalow on the hill. He was thinking of Ellen Clarke, and the unseemly knife she had used to pare potatoes with. This small sharp blade, that was buried in the crimsoned bosom of the dead girl, must have come from the rack above the sink!

“We won’t leave her like this long,” he said, and they made their way to the house.

IV

The inquest took place in Reynolds’s Undertaking Parlors at noon the next day. After the legal formality, lean, lank Tom O’Malley, chief of Bridgehaven’s police force, walked back to headquarters beside Nem in sulky silence.

At the station he followed Nem into the dreary little den the latter chose as his office, flung himself irritably upon the edge of Nem’s flat top desk.

“Why you haven’t arrested the Clarke woman for the murder is one of the Eleusian mysteries,” he barked bitterly. “She’s as guilty as bloodshed can make her, or I’m an Indian!”

He clamped a thin black cigar into his wide mouth for a dry smoke and rumpled his brick red thatch.

Nem packed a fresh load into his battered pipe and mournfully regarded an incipient crack in the bowl.

“Kind of looks that way, doesn’t it?” he sighed. “ ’Fraid I got a bad piece of wood in this pipe, Tom, though it cost me—”

But O’Malley brushed aside Nem’s divergence.

“It’s a plain, unvarnished case of jealousy,” he snapped. “Motive, opportunity, and malice are all there. You know what women of that age and temperament are — sex complexes and all the rest of it.”

Nem looked down his nose in a way that made O’Malley yearn to punch him.

“So the book says, Tom.”

“It’s as clear as daylight. Ellen Clarke had been brooding over George Link’s defection, at the little chippie’s flaunting him before her, for a long time. Wednesday night brought things to a head. She knew Rose had a date with Link later in the evening. She gave tire girl one last chance when she went down to Link’s garage, stormed at him, threatened — threatened to cut the girl’s heart out if she didn’t let him alone! And he laughed at her. That laugh was what signed the girl’s death sentence, Nem.

“Ellen Clarke didn’t go walking in the rain; not then, anyway. She went back to the Sutton’s, slipped in the back way, knowing that Sutton was out, that Mis’ Sutton would be asleep before ten o’clock, when the girl would be leaving to meet George. The house was hers.

“She hid herself in that back closet you tell about, hate boilin’ up in her. She waited there, fingering that newly sharpened paring knife — waited for Rose to come in for her raincoat. And when she did, Ellen Clarke struck with sure aim. The girl died between nine and ten, remember.

“Sutton never used that outside pantry; when he got in, found the telephone ringing, his wife played into Ellen’s hands by saying Rose had left. Later, when Sutton had gone to bed at the front of the house Ellen stole out, buried the girl, set back the radishes, and crept into bed. Her yarn of rambling through the rain couldn’t be proved, or disproved. If there isn’t a complete chain of circumstantial evidence, then I don’t know a June bug when I see one.”

Nem smoked serenely.

“Sounds real nice,” he commented. “Sure, Ellen Clarke could’ve done all that.”

His chief uttered an unclassified sound between a yelp and a snort.

“What in hell keeps you from arresting her, Nem?”

“Burlap, Tom. Sackcloth, you might say. That and a kind of hunch of mine — mebbe she’s guilty, like you say. Sound’s reasonable. But if she is, she’ll give herself away soon enough. Guilty knowledge gets ’em, every time.”

Nem’s pipe was going at full blast now. He leaned back in his chair, elevated his soft kid shoes to the top of his desk, and loosened their strings with a grunt of relief. Then he leaned back, pudgy hands linked behind his pink, bald head, and contemplated the ceiling.

O’Malley slid off his perch, and went out to his own sanctum. Nem sat where he was for a longish time — a seemingly immobile, ponderous mass of inert flesh. Then the mass took life once more.

“There ought to be something. A girl like that, sentimental, stuck on herself and her conquests—”

He lifted his feet off the desk and tied his shoes. Then he went out once more into the cold, if brilliant sun, of the April afternoon.

A short walk took him across town, into the oldest, poorest section of the city. The small, obscure street he sought, hardly more than a lane, was soon reached. Three ragged children were playing in the spring freshet that ran through the gutter of number sixty-five.

“Rose Miller live here, sonny?” he inquired of one of them.

“Yes, sir. She did, anyhow,” the urchin said, round-eyed and curious.

Nem mounted the two steps that lifted themselves almost from the sidewalk, crossed the dilapidated porch gingerly. His tug at the ancient bell brought to the door Rose Miller’s aunt.

Her face showed lines of sorrow, but no traces of tears. Life had hardened her against surrender to emotion.

“I dropped in, Mis’ Miller, sort of hopin’ that you’d let me look through Rose’s things.”

Her face softened.

“I’ll let you do anything, Mr. Parsons, that’d help you find out who killed the poor girl. What things of hers do you want to see?”

Nem stepped into the shabby hall.

“Everything, I guess. I hain’t lookin’ for anything in particular. Did she have a room to herself?”

“Oh, yes. She was dead set on that from the time she went to work.”

Nem followed her up the narrow, creaking stairs into a small room at the back of the house. The window shades were down. Mrs. Miller bustled across the floor to raise them, flood the room with light.

A little old-fashioned poster bed, neatly made up and covered with a cheap pink spread filled one corner of the room. The windows were hung with flowered challis — the same stuff that, tacked to a shelf, improvised closet space for the dead girl’s dresses.

A dressing table, vain altar to vanity, held a pathetic muddle of rouge and powder, presided over by a gaudy carnival doll, such as are given as prizes at summer beaches. Here stood empty candy boxes, ribbon tied; snapshots of Rose in swimming; Rose surrounded by youths; Rose with George Link.

And one other snapshot, that of a slender, smiling man who shielded his eyes against the sun in such a way as to render the likeness almost unrecognizable. Nem lifted it from its solitary place, scanned it for a long moment, lips puckered in a soundless movement.

Then he turned to the cheap, much carved little desk that stood between the windows. The half dozen books standing there beckoned to him.

“Give me free rein, Mis’ Miller?”

“Of course!”

Nem fingered the few volumes gently. “Pilgrim’s Progress” — unsullied, and probably a school book; “Five Little Peppers,” much thumbed; “Philosophy of Love,” read and reread; as were two novels of Laura Jean Libby’s in paper covers; and — an old copy of Swinburne’s poems.

Swinburne’s lyrics, on Rose Miller’s desk! That was worth any man’s interest. Nem pounced upon the book, and his round blue eyes roved to Mrs. Miller. She was flecking a bit of dust from a chair, evincing no interest. It was clear that she did not guess the strangeness of Rose Miller’s having that Swinburne on her shelf.

Nem looked at the yellowed flyleaf. A name had been erased carefully from the middle of the page, so carefully that the portion of paper that had borne that scrawl of ownership was worn almost transparent. But the first letter of the name was decipherable. Nem brooded over that, and over the inscription that had been made so recently at the top of the page:

There was one marker in the volume — a thin strip of paper half way through. And Nem read the scored stanza to himself, round eyes sorrowful, lips moving softly:

And in the margin was the notation: “So I too thought — until you came.”

Nem laid the book down, turned to Mrs. Miller:

“Rose was sort of popular with the boys, wasn’t she?”

She nodded grimly.

“Too popular; boy crazy, Rose was; but she was a good girl. Mr. Parsons. You... you believe that, don’t you?”

Nem’s childlike eyes circled the room again, with its pathetic notes of sentiment, of aspiration unguided. And he lied stanchly.

“ ’Course she was a good girl!” He ran through the few unimportant letters tucked in the pigeonholes of the desk. “Well, I guess that’s all for now. I’m much obliged, Mis’ Miller.”

She twisted her apron helplessly.

“Did you... did you find anything?”

Nem sighed.

“Quite a lot, Mis’ Miller; quite a lot.”

And he creaked cautiously clown the stairs, out into the April weather.

By means of a transfer at the junction point he rode out to Golden Hill without delay. And he stared out of the car window unseeingly all the way, wrapped in some inner contemplation. Just before the end of the line was reached he astonished the plump old lady across the aisle by murmuring aloud:

“Much good knowin’ does me, when I’ve got no proof. Not a mite of proof—”

After which he lapsed into seemingly somnolent silence.

There were no signs of life, other than a curling plume of smoke, about the Sutton bungalow. Nem paused in front of the house, then, treading noiselessly on the springy turf, he skirted the little porch and terrace and took the garden walk down toward the hotbed with its gruesome heap of dirt still piled by the cement wall.

The toolhouse was open. And Arthur Sutton was in there, standing with his back to the door, arms folded on the tool cabinet, dark head bowed. His attitude was expressive of despair, and, more than that, Nem thought.

“Mr. Sutton—” he said.

Sutton turned as if that gentle summons had been a pistol shot. He was gray of face, grim of jaw. And for that brief, betraying moment his eyes were those of a man doing penance, bitter penance, for past sins or future glory. Even amazement did not cloak that naked suffering of his. But amazement served to cover the transition from agony to nonchalance as he came toward Nem.

“Any news, Mr. Parsons?” he asked impersonally.

“Some!” admitted Nem, and saw a darting flame in those dark eyes.

“What news?”

“That Rose Miller read Swinburne.”

Sutton’s poise was perfect. Nem knew from that instant the full strength of the man he was dealing with.

“Scarcely news, Mr. Parsons, to me at least. The child was ambitious, wanted to cultivate her mind. I helped her. I gave her my own copy of Swinburne, in fact.”

Nem sauntered further into the tool house, closer to Sutton, who still stood beside the tool cabinet.

“Reckon I don’t know much about poetry, Mr. Sutton, but I’d hardly say Swinburne was the sort of lit’ry food for a young, uneducated girl.”

Sutton’s dark pallor was suffused with color.

“She had understanding—” and he snapped his teeth shut over the rest of his speech.

Nem loomed even closer.

“And she had a very decent burial, Mr. Sutton. Doesn’t it strike you as queer that Ellen Clarke, hatin’ her as she did, would have laid crocuses in her hands, covered her dead, pretty face with sackcloth to keep the garden mold from her blue eyes, her yellow hair—”

“What the devil are you getting at?” gritted Sutton.

“Just tryin’ to figure things out,” Nem said softly. “No, Mr. Sutton — the one who buried little Rose Miller was mighty fond of her — or had been.”

Sutton stared at him with a sort of tragic hostility.

“And — who was it?”

Nem parried.

“Ellen Clarke wouldn’t have dragged those denim overalls on over her skirts, either; and she’d have been in too much of a hurry to change.”

“What makes you think they were used?”

“Little flecks of burlap lint, bits of fresh loam, in spite of your brushing. After you’d filled the grave, Mr. Sutton, you carted the sackcloth back to the tool shed, and got the lint on your overalls doing it.”

“You accuse me of Rose Miller’s murder?”

The man’s face was a mask, not good to look upon.

Nem loomed past him, forestalled his sudden protective motion toward the tool cabinet, jerked open the little wooden door and found the trifle he sought: a withered scrap of green and yellow bloom.

“I accuse you of loving Rose Miller; of taking all she had to give, that you were starved for; of bringin’ her to her death — and laying her in her grave — the grave you tried to make decent with sackcloth — and a handful of early flowers. These!”

Nem unfolded his thick fingers upon the ruined crocuses, round eyes fixed upon the unhappy man.

“Arrest me, then,” said Sutton drearily.

But Nem turned to the door.

“You might better act as if you were innocent, for your own sake, professor. Think it over for a spell.”

When Sutton’s tragic face lifted from his hands the detective was gone.

V

Nem Parsons did not pause long in the pleasant blue and white kitchen of the bungalow.

The housekeeper was washing dishes at the sink, and looked up dourly at Nem’s unheralded entry. She straightened, shook her powerful hands free of the soapy water.

“What do you keep pesterin’ me for? Why don’t you go and find out who killed the girl?” she demanded, voice cracking from sheer nervousness.

“Didn’t come to see you, Miss Clarke,” Nem reassured her. “I’d like to see your mistress, Mrs. Sutton. Where is she? In her room?”

A look of intense relief relaxed Ellen Clarke’s sullen features.

“Yes,” she said shortly, and turned back to her work.

Nem passed on through the pleasant hall, bright and vivid again with the lowering sun, his soft shoes making the merest squeak. The door of Mrs. Sutton’s room was open. The invalid herself was there, sitting in her wheel-chair between the two sunny windows. The book she had been reading slid from her thin hands as Nem’s elephantine bulk filled the doorway.

She turned her chair with a deft twist of one hand so that she faced him more squarely, so that the sun streamed in more directly over her shoulders, cast a shining auriole upon her smooth chestnut head, enriched the splendid garnet dressing gown she habitually wore.

“Oh, Mr. Parsons, have you come with news, or to ask more questions?” she wanted to know. Her pale sad mouth smiled mechanically, but her gray eyes, in their hollows, were anything but gay.

Nem cautiously seated himself.

“There’s quite a few things I’d like to know still,” he admitted, apologetically.

She leaned back against her pillows.

“I hope I can help you. I feel so sure that poor Ellen Clarke had nothing to do with Rose’s death—”

Nem shook his enormous head.

“You’re right there, Mis’ Sutton; Ellen Clarke is innocent.”

“Oh.” She caught her breath a trifle. “Then — who could have done it?”

Nem’s childlike eyes were not fixed on Alice Sutton’s face, but on her thin, drooping left shoulder and its covering of patterned silk.

“I reckon I’ll be able to tell you that soon. First off, I want to ask you a question. Did you know of your husband’s friendship for Rose Miller?”

The woman’s graceful, death-white hands tightened upon the arms of her chair, but her face remained immobile.

“Yes. I suppose you’d call it that. We both liked her — were willing to do much for her.”

“What, for example?” Nem urged.

She bit her thin lip.

“Why — consideration, time off, good wages — what a strange question?”

She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue as if she were suddenly athirst. Nem’s bland blue eyes met hers now.

“I think you know what I mean.”

He saw the pulse in her thin throat quicken its beat; her light breath raced unevenly between the pale, parted lips, and he was all solicitude.

“You don’t feel well, do you, Mis’ Sutton? Can I get you something? A glass of water from the kitchen?”

She shut her eyes wearily, as if she craved respite of any sort.

“Yes, please. Do you mind?”

Nem got the water from the housekeeper and took it back to the invalid’s room. Mrs. Sutton roused herself from her lethargy at his reentry, thanked him with a wan smile. Nem stepped close beside her, to help her drink; then awkwardly, inadvertently, as he held the glass for her, he spilled a few drops from the overfull glass upon her shoulder.

All contrition, he waited until she had drained the cold draft, handed back the glass. Then he took his handkerchief and clumsily mopped at the damp spot.

“I’m the awkwardest old cuss that ever wore shoe leather,” he apologized.

“It was nothing,” she brushed aside his regretful words. “I feel better now. What else have you to ask?”

But Nem did not heed her question. He had finished wiping up the water he had spilled. Now he held his broad white handkerchief up to the light. A large stain of lightish red was visible upon it.

Alice Sutton’s deep-set eyes followed Nem’s.

“What’s — that?” she asked.

Nem looked at her pitifully.

“Blood, Mis’ Sutton. Rose Miller’s blood. I saw the dark, stiff stain on your dressing gown in the sun here. It wouldn’t show up anywhere else. Then I moistened it—”

He had to admire her audacity. She laughed a little, though her lips were ashen.

“But the garnet dye—”

“That robe is made of fast dyed silk; ’twouldn’t even run in the wash, I reckon. The stain that came off is blood. I’m sorrier than I can say, but I’ve jest naturally got to hold you for the murder of Rose Miller. Your husband buried her, to protect you; but you killed her, while he was out; while she was getting you ready for bed. She bent over you, and you stabbed her with an upward thrust of that sharp little paring knife—”

Alice Sutton’s lips moved, but she uttered no sound. Nem went on:

“I can show how it happened to be in here — the weapon. You keep your pencils sharpened real nice, don’t you? All of them—” he nodded to the trayful of delicately pointed leads upon her desk — “were sharpened just lately — probably Wednesday. And you didn’t take the knife back to the kitchen.” His eyes left the betraying litter of sharpenings in the shallow waste basket, returned to the invalid. “Too bad you didn’t; for I don’t believe you planned to murder Rose. It was just a wild impulse, wasn’t it?”

Alice Sutton inclined her head.

“It came over me suddenly; I heard her answering the phone, after he — my husband — had gone out. I thought she was promising to meet him. I knew, God help me, that she had won him; her look — the very tones of her voice — betrayed her! And I — chained here to this chair — had to see it all; had to submit to her treachery; his suffering. He did suffer, for he loved me. And I... I loved him more than he can ever know. That was why I sat here that dreadful evening, nursing that sharp, deadly little knife. And then, as she bent over me, young and lovely and alive — as I can never be again—”

Her tragic voice died away; her waxen hands covered her face.

Nem cleared his throat, blinked out at the golden afternoon that had suddenly blurred.

“I’m mighty sorry for you, Mis’ Sutton. But the law—”

The cripple sucked in her breath.

“I know. I know. But my husband? He did what he did to save me; in expiation for his own sin. He must not suffer for mine!”

“I understand!” said Nem gently. “It won’t go hard with him, Mis’ — Sutton. Your confession ’ll clear him, right enough.”

“I’m glad you know the truth,” she whispered at last. “It was too terrible for me to keep — for him. Now — they’ll come and take me away, won’t they?”

Nem bent his head.

“I’m part of the law, Mis’ Sutton.”

She smiled faintly.

“Before you do your duty, will you hand me that little pasteboard box of pellets? My heart is very weak—”

She pointed with an unwavering forefinger to the stand beside her bed. Nem picked up the little round box, shook the tiny pellets.

“Strychnine?”

She breathed short assent, leaned forward to draw his eyes with the magnet of her own.

“I am not strong,” she told him. “I... I cannot face all that is coming. I have suffered so much already.”

She might have been referring to the actual arrest; to the legal procedure she faced. But Nem, reading her piteous look, her stricken face, knew that her words meant infinitely more than that. His big hands closed convulsively upon the heart stimulant she asked for.

“What is the dose?” he wanted to know.

Those tragic, asking eyes!

“Six pellets — crushed in a little water.”

To most people Nem looked like a shabby unwieldy old fellow, distinguished only by a kindly mouth, incredibly innocent eyes. To the woman in the wheel-chair he was suddenly transfigured; he was no longer a bald old man who saw everything; he was justice and mercy incarnate. For without looking at the legend on the box, he spilled six tiny pellets into his enormous palm and reached for the glass of water.

“Here. Reckon these will see you through.”

Then he strode to the door, called the master of the house sharply.

Sutton was close at hand; at the sound of his hurrying footsteps the woman in the chair stirred, lifted her ashen face.

“She wants you,” Nem told him as he brushed past, and watched him bend over his wife in an agony of love and tenderness.

“Alice, you’re ill! Your medicine—”

She seemed to grow smaller, younger; to relax utterly in her husband’s arms.

“Alice... Alice—” he mourned in the prescience of love. But he could not warm her wasted hands, hold off death. He could only kneel beside her, in penitence, as she died.

And Nem, with hushed step, went from the room, tearing to bits the cover of a pasteboard box, on which was printed: Dose one pellet in water.