Country homes -- Fiction; Middle-aged women -- Fiction; Murder -- Investigation -- Fiction; Mystery fiction
I looked through the dusk to where Gertrude’s light dinner dress
gleamed among the trees. She HAD made a plucky fight, poor child.
Whatever she might have been driven to do, I could find nothing but a
deep sympathy for her. If she had only come to me with the whole truth
then!
“Miss Innes,” Mr. Jamieson was saying, “in the last three days, have
you seen a—any suspicious figures around the grounds? Any—woman?”
“No,” I replied. “I have a houseful of maids that will bear watching,
one and all. But there has been no strange woman near the house or
Liddy would have seen her, you may be sure. She has a telescopic eye.”
Mr. Jamieson looked thoughtful.
“It may not amount to anything,” he said slowly. “It is difficult to
get any perspective on things around here, because every one down in
the village is sure he saw the murderer, either before or since the
crime. And half of them will stretch a point or two as to facts, to be
obliging. But the man who drives the hack down there tells a story that
may possibly prove to be important.”
“I have heard it, I think. Was it the one the parlor maid brought up
yesterday, about a ghost wringing its hands on the roof? Or perhaps
it’s the one the milk-boy heard: a tramp washing a dirty shirt,
presumably bloody, in the creek below the bridge?”
I could see the gleam of Mr. Jamieson’s teeth, as he smiled.
“Neither,” he said. “But Matthew Geist, which is our friend’s name,
claims that on Saturday night, at nine-thirty, a veiled lady—”
“I knew it would be a veiled lady,” I broke in.
“A veiled lady,” he persisted, “who was apparently young and beautiful,
engaged his hack and asked to be driven to Sunnyside. Near the gate,
however, she made him stop, in spite of his remonstrances, saying she
preferred to walk to the house. She paid him, and he left her there.
Now, Miss Innes, you had no such visitor, I believe?”
“None,” I said decidedly.
“Geist thought it might be a maid, as you had got a supply that day.
But he said her getting out near the gate puzzled him. Anyhow, we have
now one veiled lady, who, with the ghostly intruder of Friday night,
makes two assets that I hardly know what to do with.”
“It is mystifying,” I admitted, “although I can think of one possible
explanation. The path from the Greenwood Club to the village enters the
road near the lodge gate. A woman who wished to reach the Country Club,
unperceived, might choose such a method. There are plenty of women
there.”
I think this gave him something to ponder, for in a short time he said
good night and left. But I myself was far from satisfied. I was
determined, however, on one thing. If my suspicions—for I had
suspicions—were true, I would make my own investigations, and Mr.
Jamieson should learn only what was good for him to know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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