Strangers on a Train

Fifteen

Not more than seven yards and not less than five,” the grave, self-assured young man in the chair replied. “No, I did not see anyone.”

“I think about fifteen feet,” said the wide-eyed girl, Katherine Smith, who looked as frightened as if it had just happened. “Maybe a little more,” she added softly.

“About thirty feet. I was the first one down at the boat,” said Ralph Joyce, Miriam’s brother. His red hair was like Miriam’s, and he had the same gray-green eyes, but his heavy square jaw took away the resemblance. “I wouldn’t say she had any enemy. Not enough to do something like this.”

“I didn’t hear one thing,” Katherine Smith said earnestly, shaking her head.

Ralph Joyce said he hadn’t heard anything, and Richard Schuyler’s positive statement ended it: “There weren’t any sounds.”

The facts repeated and repeated lost their horror and even their drama for Guy. They were like dull blows of a hammer, nailing the story in his mind forever. The nearness of the three others was the unbelievable. Only a maniac would have dared come so near, Guy thought, that was certain.

“Were you the father of the child Mrs. Haines lost?”

“Yes.” Owen Markman slouched forward over his locked fingers. A glum, hangdog manner spoilt the dashing good looks Guy had seen in the photograph. He wore gray buckskin shoes, as if he had just come from his job in Houston. Miriam would not have been proud of him today, Guy thought.

“Do you know anyone who might have wanted Mrs. Hames to die?”

“Yes.” Markman pointed at Guy. “Him.”

People turned to look at him. Guy sat tensely, frowning straight at Markman, for the first time really suspecting Markman.

“Why?”

Owen Markman hesitated a long while, mumbled something, then brought out one word: “Jealousy.”

Markman could not give a single credible reason for jealousy, but after that accusations of jealousy came from all sides. Even Katherine Smith said, “I guess so,”

Guy’s lawyer chuckled. He had the affidavits from the Faulkners in his hand. Guy hated the chuckle. He had always hated legal procedure. It was like a vicious game in which the objective seemed not to disclose the truth but to enable one lawyer to tilt at another, and unseat him on a technicality.

“You gave up an important commission—” the coroner began.

“I did not give it up,” Guy said. “I wrote them before I had the commission, saying I didn’t want it.”

“You telegraphed. Because you didn’t want your wife to follow you there. But when you learned in Mexico that your wife had lost her child, you sent another telegram to Palm Beach that you wished to be considered for the commission. Why?”

“Because I didn’t believe she’d follow me there then. I suspected she’d want to delay the divorce indefinitely. But I intended to see her—this week to discuss the divorce.” Guy wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and saw his lawyer purse his lips ruefully. His lawyer hadn’t wanted him to mention the divorce in connection with his change of mind about the commission. Guy didn’t care. It was the truth, and they could make of it what they wished.

“In your opinion was her husband capable of arranging for such a murder, Mrs. Joyce?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Joyce with the faintest quiver, her head high. The shrewd dark red lashes were almost closed, as Guy had so often seen them, so that one never knew where her eyes rested. “He wanted his divorce.”

There was an objection that Mrs. Joyce had said a few moments before that her daughter wanted the divorce and Guy Haines did not because he still loved her. “If both wanted a divorce, and it has been proven Mr. Haines did, why wasn’t there a divorce?”

The court was amused. The fingerprint experts could not come to agreement on their classifications. A hardware dealer, into whose store Miriam had come the day before her death, got tangled up as to whether her companion had been male or female, and more laughter camouflaged the fact he had been instructed to say a man. Guy’s lawyer harangued on geographical fact, the inconsistencies of the Joyce family, the affidavits in his hand, but Guy was sure that his own straightforwardness alone had absolved him from any suspicion.

The coroner suggested in his summation that the murder would seem to have been committed by a maniac unknown to the victim and the other parties. A verdict was brought in of “person or persons unknown,” and the case was turned over to the police.

A telegram arrived the next day, just as Guy was leaving his mother’s house: ALL GOOD WISHES FROM THE GOLDEN WEST UNSIGNED “From the Faulkners,” he said quickly to his mother. She smiled. “Tell Anne to take good care of my boy.” She pulled him down gently by his ear and kissed his cheek.

Bruno’s telegram was still wadded in his hand when he got to the airport. He tore it into tiny bits and dropped them into a wire trashbasket at the edge of the field. Every one of the pieces blew through the wire and went dancing out across the asphalt, gay as confetti in the windy sunlight.