The Winning Clue Part 11

She was a woman about forty years of age, her face a little thin and worn, a good deal of gray in her dark hair. She had been nursing her husband for two years, and the strain had begun to tell. Nevertheless, he soon saw that she was a woman of refinement, possessed of a keen intelligence.

"I wish," he requested, after he had explained his connection with the murder, "you'd tell me all you know about these sisters. I gathered this morning that you were well acquainted with them."

He had always found it easy to gain the confidence of women. They liked his manners, his air of deference, his manifest interest in everything they said.

"I can't say that I've been intimate with them," Mrs. Allen explained in her soft, pleasing voice; "but Mrs. Withers and I knew each other pretty well. She came over to my house quite frequently, and I was in the habit of running in to see her."

"Don't you know the other, Miss Fulton, equally well?"

"No. You see, she was always in, or on, the bed, and she never seemed to want to talk. Besides, she was different from Mrs. Withers--not so bright and attractive, and not so neighbourly."

"Mrs. Withers was always a laughing, sparkling sort of a person, wasn't she?"

"She gave that impression to some people," Mrs. Allen answered thoughtfully, "but not to me. It was her nature to be free and happy.

Most of the time she seemed that way. But there were other times when I could see that she had something weighing on her mind, something depressing her."

"Ah!" Bristow said with deeper interest. "That's just what we want to find out about."

Mrs. Allen sat silent for a moment pursing her lips.

Bristow let her reflect.

"I don't think," she said at last, "Mrs. Withers ever was in fear of anybody or any thing. She wasn't that kind."

"Did she ever tell you anything to make you think that she wasn't happy?"

"I was trying to recall just what it was. Once, I remember, when she was sitting out on the sleeping porch--she sometimes came out there to talk to my husband, who is always in bed--we had been discussing the care with which every woman had to live her life.

"'Women are like politicians,' Mr. Allen said. 'They can't afford to have a dark spot in their past. If they do, somebody will drag it out.'

"At that Mrs. Withers cried out:

"'Oh! how awfully true that is! And how unfair! It never seems to matter with men, but with women it means heaven, or the other thing. I wish I knew----' She broke off with a gasp, and I saw her lip tremble.

"It was funny, but at the time I thought she was referring to her sister, not to herself."

"What made you think that?"

"I don't know. I had no real reason for it. Perhaps it was just because unhappiness seemed so foreign to Mrs. Withers herself."

"Was there anything else?"

"Once, when I ran into Number Five, I found her crying. She was in the living room, all doubled up in a rocking chair, crying silently."

"Did she say why?"

"No; but, while I was trying to soothe her, she said, 'Life's so hard--it's so hard to straighten out a tangle when once you've made it.

If one could just go back and do things over again!' When I asked her if I could help her, she said I couldn't. 'n.o.body can,' she sobbed out on my shoulder. 'It doesn't concern me alone. I'll have to fight it out the best way I can.'"

Bristow was greatly interested.

"What did you conclude from all that, Mrs. Allen?" he asked.

"My impression was very vague," Mrs. Allen returned frankly. "I don't think it is of much value now. I got, somehow, the idea that there was in her life something which she had to conceal, something which might at any moment be discovered. I thought she was worrying about its effect on her husband. Of course, though, that was just my idea."

"I see. Now, just one other thing: what did you think, what do you think, of Miss Fulton?"

"Oh, merely that she's bad-tempered and impatient, always complaining.

She was totally without any appreciation of all that Mrs. Withers did for her. n.o.body likes Miss Fulton particularly. I think all of us, as we came to know the two, were amazed that Mrs. Withers could have such a disagreeable sister."

Mrs. Allen's recital, while interesting and valuable as to Mrs. Withers'

acknowledgment that she felt compelled to keep secret some part of her life, threw no practical light on the situation.

Bristow was silent, thoughtful, for a few moments.

"I've never seen Miss Fulton, except for the glance I had at her this morning," he said. "Was it possible for anybody to mistake one for the other? I mean this: if a man had known that last night Miss Fulton was up and dressed, could it have been possible for him, in a dim light and under the stress of terrific agitation, to have attacked Mrs. Withers under the impression that he was attacking Miss Fulton?"

"Oh, no!" Mrs. Allen said emphatically, and then added: "Oh, I see what you mean. Well, they were of about the same build, although Mrs. Withers wasn't so thin as Miss Fulton is. Then, their hair is different, Mrs.

Withers' black, Miss Fulton's blond. I don't know. I should say it all depended on how dark it was."

When Mrs. Allen had gone, Bristow took from a bookcase one of his sc.r.a.pbooks and went to work pasting into place the clippings he had been reading that morning when interrupted by the cry of murder.

For nine years he had been studying murder cases and the methods of murderers. People had laughed at his fad, but now he was more pleased with himself as a result of it than ever before. He was still pleasantly aware of the prominence he would enjoy in Furmville because of Greenleaf's having called on him for a.s.sistance.

"Every murderer," he had said many times, "makes some mistake, big or little, which will lead to his destruction if the authorities have brains enough to find it."

He thought the rule might apply too widely to this case. In fact, his own trouble now was that too many mistakes had been made, too many clues had been left lying around. In order to determine the guilty person, much chaff would have to be sifted from the wheat of truth.

He was closing his sc.r.a.pbook when the chief of police arrived a few minutes before five o'clock.

"Henry Morley," Greenleaf announced at once, "is a receiving teller in a bank in Was.h.i.+ngton--the Anderson National Bank."

"And receiving tellers," put in Bristow quickly, "sometimes need money--need it to make good other money they have 'borrowed' from the bank. How did you find this out?"

"He told me when I met him at Number Five after leaving you this afternoon."

"Was he still there then?"

"Yes. It seems that Miss Fulton refused at first to see him. When she did see him, it was for only a minute or two. He was very much agitated when he came from her room."

"There's another thing," added Bristow. "Morley has two hours of last night to account for. He told us he missed the midnight train and went to the Brevord to spend the night. As a matter of fact, he registered at the Brevord a little after two o'clock this morning."

The chief's jaw dropped.

"How do you know that?"

"I called up the Brevord and got the information from the clerk."

"That settles it, then," Greenleaf said, his jaw set. "That young man will have to remain with us for a while."