AT first glance the man was Clive Creede. And Doris wondered how he chanced to have left the house and to have approached the veranda in such a roundabout way.
Then, as he stood before her, she saw he was not in dinner clothes, but in a dark lounge suit. And as he lifted his soft hat at sight of her, she saw his forehead was bald and that he wore spectacles. Also that there was a sagging stoop to his shoulders and the hint of a limp in his walk.
Clive’s twin brother was the last man she cared to meet in her present tumultuous frame of mind. At best she had never been able to bring herself to like him. Yet he had come too close now to be avoided without rudeness.
As he recognized her, Osmun Creede took an impulsively eager step forward.
“Why, Doris!” he exclaimed joyously. “This is better luck than I looked for. What on earth are you doing at Vailholme? And why are you out here all alone? Doesn’t the same moon that interests you interest Clive or Vail?”
“Oh, you’ve come to see Clive?” she asked, trying to speak civilly and not to let herself be annoyed by the man’s awkward attempts at banter.
“Yes,” said Osmun. “He’s stopping with Vail till his house gets disinfected or loses the reek of some chemicals that made him sick. Why he should choose to come here instead of to his own brother’s home,” he added bitterly, “is a mystery to me. Probably he has his own reasons. Anyhow, I came over to see if he is better and if there’s anything I can do for him. I didn’t ring because I saw through the windows that there’s a party of some kind going on. I saw a bunch of people in the living room. And I’m in tramping clothes. I came around to the side door, on the chance of finding a servant I could send upstairs to Clive to find how he is.”
“Clive was out here five minutes ago,” she replied. “He went back to the interrogation. I’ll—”
“Interrogation?” repeated Osmun, puzzled. “Is it a game? Or—?”
Briefly she outlined to the dumbfounded man the story of the evening’s events. He listened, open-mouthed, his face, in the moonlight, blank with crass incredulity. The instant she paused he began to hurl questions at her. Impatiently she answered them. But in their mid-flow she turned away and walked to the long window.
“I’m afraid I must go in,” she said, stiffly, his avid curiosity and his evident relish of the affair jarring her unaccountably. “They may want to interrogate me, too. The chief was going to examine us all, I believe. You’ll excuse me?”
“I’ll do better than that,” he assured her. “I’ll come along. I wouldn’t miss this thing for a million.”
Before she could deter him he had stepped past her and had flung wide the French window. Standing aside, he motioned her to pass through. She hesitated. Chief Quimby, catching sight of her on the threshold, beckoned her in.
“We wondered where you were, Miss Lane,” said he. “We’ve been waiting for you. Every one else has been questioned. Come in, please.”
Reluctantly she entered. Osmun Creede pressed in, at her heels, closing the window behind him. The guests were seated in various parts of the living room, one and all looking thoroughly uncomfortable. At a table sat the chief. Beside him, holding an open note book, sat the constable.
Through the doorway Doris could see in the hall a flustered group of servants, babbling in excited whispers. One woman among them was repeating snifflingly at intervals that she was a respectable working girl and that never before in her life had any one asked her such a passel of turrible questions and she was going to pack up and leave right away and she’d have the law on them that had asked was she a thief!
Quimby seemed to note the presence of this offstage chorus at the same time as did Doris. For he turned to the housekeeper who stood primly in a far corner:
“You can send them back to the kitchen quarters, Mrs. Horoson,” he said. “I’m through with them for the present. Only see none of them leave the house. Let them understand that any one who tries to sneak out will be followed and arrested. I shall take it as an indication of guilt. That is all, Mrs. Horoson. We shan’t need you or Vogel any more either. Or if we do I’ll ring for you.”
“Where is Clive?” Osmun asked Willis Chase, who had greeted the unpopular twin’s advent with the briefest of nods.
“Gone up to bed,” answered Chase. “Went up as soon as the chief had finished asking him a handful of questions. Said he felt rotten. Looked it, too. Chief excused him. He has the two East rooms, if you want to go up and see him.”
“I shall, presently,” said Osmun. “This is too interesting to leave just yet.”
He listened to the chief’s few queries of Doris as to the discovery that her jewel box had been stolen. Doris replied clearly and to the point, her testimony confirming in all details the story her aunt had just told.
The last witness being examined, the lanky chief leaned back in his chair beating a tattoo on his teeth with the pencil he carried. Then he glanced at his notes and again at the inventory on the table before him.
“I am convinced,” he said slowly, “that all you people have told me the truth. And I am inclined to believe the servants have done the same. Taking into consideration their flurry and scare, they told remarkably straight stories, and it seems clear that none of them were absent from their duties in the kitchen or in the dining room long enough to have run upstairs and robbed so many rooms and then to have gotten back unnoticed. It seems none of them had even gone up so early to arrange the bedrooms for the night. And there is positively no sign, outdoors or in, that any professional thief broke into the house. Of course, a closer search of the rooms and a search of the servants and of their quarters—and of yourselves, if you will permit—may throw new light on the case. But—”
He paused. On these summer people and on others of their clan depended ninety per cent of Aura’s livelihood and importance. Quimby had tried, therefore, to handle this delicate matter in such a way as to avoid offense. And, thus far, he had not a ghost of a clue to go on.
“Search away—as far as I’m concerned,” spoke up Willis Chase, in the short pause which followed. “Three times, on the Canadian border, I’ve had my car searched for bootleg booze. And every time I hit the New York Customs crowd, on my way back from Europe, they search my soiled collars and trunkbottoms with the most loving care. So this’ll be no novelty. Search.”
“I have a horrible feeling that all the stolen things are going to be found on me,” supplemented Miss Gregg. “They would be, in a nightmare, you know. And if this isn’t a nightmare I don’t know what nightmare is. But search if you like. The sooner it’s over the sooner we’ll wake up.”
“I speak for the good wife as well as for myself,” boomed Joshua Q. Mosely, “when I say we shall do all in our power to uphold the law. We are willing to be searched.”
He gazed about him with the rarefied air of one who has just consented to part with life in the holy cause of duty.
“I am not going to be searched.”
It was Thaxton Vail who said it. Every one turned with something akin to a jump and stared marvelingly at him.
“I am not going to be searched,” he repeated, coming forward into the strong glare of lamplight beside the table where sat the two officials. “And I am not going to permit my guests to be searched. When I say ‘my guests,’ I do not refer to Mr. and Mrs. Mosely, but to the friends whom I have known all my life. They are under my roof. They have suffered by being under my roof. Neither they nor myself shall be humiliated any further. I’ve listened patiently to this comic opera interrogation, and I have answered all questions put to me in the course of it. But I’m not going to submit to the tom-foolery of a search. Please understand that clearly, Chief.”
He sat down again. There was a confused rustle throughout the room. Joshua Q. Mosely glared at him with fearsome suspicion. Quimby cleared his throat, frowning. But before either could speak Osmun Creede had come forward out of the shadows to the area of light by the table.
“Chief,” he said, his rasping voice cutting the room’s looser sounds like a rusty file, “I’m the only person here who can’t possibly be connected with the thefts. I didn’t get here till five minutes ago, and I can prove by a dozen people that I was dining at the Country Club at the time the things were stolen. So I can speak disinterestedly.”
“What’s the sense of your speaking at all?” grumbled Chase. “It’s no business of yours.”
Unheeding, Osmun proceeded:
“Chief, you have established that some one in this house is a thief. That thief, presumably, had to do his work mighty fast and presumably he had no time to hide all his loot in a place safe enough to elude a police hunt. He had only a minute or two to do it in. Therefore, the chances are that the bulkier or less easily hidden bits of plunder are still concealed on him. Perhaps all of it. Very good. It would be that man’s natural impulse to resist search. Practically every one else here has volunteered to submit to search. One man only has refused. By an odd coincidence, that happens also to be the one man who was not robbed. Figure it out for yourself. It—”
“Oz Creede!” Miss Gregg declaimed, as the rest still sat dazed into momentary stillness at the unbelievable attack. “If you had the remotest idea how utterly vile and worthless you are, you’d bite yourself and die of hydrophobia.... I just thought I’d mention it,” she added, apologetically, to Doris.
But Doris did not hear. The girl’s glowing eyes were on Thaxton Vail, who had sprung to his feet and was advancing on his accuser.
“Oz,” said Vail, his voice muffled and not quite firm, “I promised your brother I’d forget I had any grievance against you. May I trouble you to leave here before I forget that promise?— As quickly as you can, please.”
“Hold on there!” blustered Joshua Q., billowing forward. “Hold on there! There seems to me to be a lot in what this young feller says. He talks sense, Mr. Vail. And I believe he’s right. This is no time to go trying to carry things highhanded. Chief, I demand—”
He broke off short in the rolling utterances, his mouth ajar, his little eyes bulging. Osmun Creede and Vail stood confronting each other. With a gesture as swift as the strike of a rattlesnake Osmun thrust out his right hand toward the left waistcoat pocket of Vail’s dinner clothes.
Now he withdrew the questing hand and was holding it open for all to gaze on. In its palm glowed dully a huge old hunting-case watch.
“I caught sight of a bulge in that pocket,” he rasped. “So I took a chance at a search on my own account. Now I’ll go. Not because you’ve ordered me out, Vail, but because I don’t care to stay under the same roof with a man who robs his guests. Good-by.”
His words went unheard in the sudden babble of voices and the pressing forward of the rest. Every one was talking at once. The chief peered, hypnotized, at the watch Osmun had laid on the table in front of him. Vail, after a moment of stark blankness, lurched furiously at Creede, mouthing something which nobody could hear in the uproar.
The constable threw himself between Vail and the sardonically smiling man. Before Thaxton could break free or recover his self-control Creede had left the room. But, in the hallway outside, during the moment’s hush which followed the clamor, all could hear his strident voice as he shouted up the stairs:
“Clive! Come down here! Come down in a rush! The thief’s found!”
Again Vail took a furious step in pursuit, but again the constable stepped officiously in front of him. And a second later the front door slammed.
“Stay where you are, everybody!” commanded the chief, a new sternness in his voice, as Willis Chase succeeded in working his way around the constable and Vail and made for the hall. “Where are you going, Mr. Chase?”
“I’m going to catch that swine!” yelled Willis, wrathfully, over his shoulder, pausing in the living room doorway as he cleared the last obstacle and sprang toward the hall. “I’m going to find him and bring him back by the scruff of the neck. And—”
The constable took a belated step to stop him. Chase turned and bolted. But as he did so, he collided violently with Clive Creede. Clive had come downstairs at his brother’s shouted summons, just in time to receive Chase’s catapult rush.
Under the impact the sick man staggered and would have fallen had not Chase caught him. At the same time Thaxton Vail called sharply:
“Willis! Come back here! Don’t make a fool of yourself! Come back. I don’t need any one to fight my battles for me. I can attend to this myself.”
Apologizing to the breathless Clive for the unintended collision and helping to steady the shaken man on his feet, Chase abandoned his plan to overtake and drag Osmun back by force. Sullenly he returned to the living room, Clive at his side. To the invalid’s puzzled questions he returned no answer.
As they came in, Quimby was on his feet. His deferential manner was gone. The glint of the man hunt shimmered beneath his shaggy gray brows.
“Sit down, everybody!” he commanded. “Mr. Vail, I said, sit down! This case has taken a different turn. Let nobody leave the room. Whitcomb,” to the constable, “stand at the door. Now then, we’ll tackle all this from another angle. The time for kid glove questioning is past.”
He eyed them sternly, his gaze focusing last on Thaxton Vail. Then, as silence was restored, he picked up the watch and held it toward the blinkingly wondering Clive.