CREEDE had changed his dark habiliments of the preceding night for a suit of flannels. His sagging shoulder and slight limp were accentuated by the outdoor garb. Doris drew back from the doorway at sight of him. But Vail stood where he was.
“I met Clive down the road,” began Osmun, with no salutation, as he mounted the veranda steps. “I was driving here to see him—to try once more to persuade him to come to Canobie with me. I made him drive on home in my runabout—he wouldn’t come back here with me—while I stopped to get his luggage. May I trouble you to have it brought down?”
He spoke with studied formality, his rasping voice icy and aloof.
“The servants aren’t up yet,” said Vail, no more warmly. “If you’ll wait here a minute I’ll go and get it for you myself.”
He did not ask Osmun to enter, nor did Creede make any move to do so.
As Vail retired into the house on his quest, Osmun’s blinking eyes, behind their thick spectacles, caught sight of Doris Lane just within the shadow of the hall.
“Doris,” he said quickly, “if you and Miss Gregg want to get away I can have a car of mine here inside of twenty minutes. And if you and she will stay on at Canobie till Stormcrest is ready for you to go back to it I’ll be happier than I can say.”
“Thank you,” she made cold answer. “But we are very comfortable here. We—”
“Here?” echoed Creede. “But, dear girl, you can’t possibly stay on, either of you, after what’s happened. Clive told me about it just now. It’s unbelievable! And I know how eager you both must be to get away.”
“You are entirely mistaken,” she returned. “Why should we go away? Of course, poor Willis Chase’s death is an awful shock. But he was never a very dear friend to any of us, long as we’d all known him. And Aunt Hester has decided that as soon as the inquest is over, we can settle down to life here as well as anywhere until Stormcrest is—”
“I wasn’t thinking of the associations that must hang over this house,” explained Creede. “I suppose Chase’s body will be taken away directly after the inquest. I was thinking of the man who is your host. Clive has just left me in a huff because I told him I believed Thaxton Vail is the only person with the motive or the opportunity for killing Chase. It is true. A thousand things point to it.”
“I am afraid nobody whose opinion is worth while will agree with you,” she answered. “I don’t care to discuss it, please. You’ll excuse me, won’t you, if I go in? I must find Aunt Hester and—”
She finished the sentence by turning on her heel and disappearing down the dusky hall. Halfway in her retreat, she passed Quimby and Dr. Lawton and two of the three constables coming down from their examination of the upper rooms.
“Anything new, Doctor?” she asked Lawton, detaining him as the three others continued their progress to the front door.
The doctor waited until the trio passed out of earshot. Then, lowering his voice, he said quizzically:
“The chief’s got another bee in his bonnet now. He’s all up in the air over it. He says it lands the case against a blank wall.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, puzzled at his hint.
“Why,” said the doctor, as if ashamed to mention so fantastic a thing, “you know there was a shoe mark on the window-sill and a scrap of mud where the killer had stepped on the sill on the way out.”
“Or in,” suggested Doris.
“Out,” corrected Lawton.
“How do you know?”
“The chief put his magnifying glass over it in the strong light just now,” said Dr. Lawton. “Then he made us all take a peep. There was a faint outline of the ball of a shoe pressed against the white woodwork of the sill. And the shoe faced outward. That was clear from the curve of its outer edge. It was a left foot at that. A tennis shoe.”
“He wore tennis shoes to muffle the sound of his steps?” cried Doris.
“That’s what I thought first,” answered Lawton. “So did the chief. But we both changed our minds.”
“Why?”
Again the doctor hesitated almost shamefacedly.
“It’s so—so queer,” said he. “I can’t expect you to believe it. I didn’t believe it myself till the chief made me examine the marks under the magnifier and again under his pocket microscope. It was a tennis shoe. Of course Quimby began to ransack Thaxton Vail’s boot trees and to compare his soles with the size of this. Well, the sole-mark on the sill was fully two sizes larger than any of Thaxton’s soles.”
“I don’t see anything unbelievable about that,” she commented. “It clears Thax all the more completely.”
“You’re right,” said Lawton. “It clears Thax all right as far as it goes. But that isn’t the unbelievable part of it. There was a pair of tennis shoes under the edge of the bed. Lying a yard or so apart and in the shadow. We none of us saw them first on account of the light. Not till we had tested all Vail’s shoes by that imprint on the sill. Then the chief hit his toe against one of them. He stooped down and hauled them out. They had bits of mud still sticking to their instep. But the left one had much less than the other. They were bigger than any of Vail’s shoes. But we didn’t notice that till we had tested the left one—the one with the least mud on it—against the sill’s imprint. It fitted exactly. It did more. The sole-grips were new rubber with a funny crisscross pattern. And those grips were precisely the same as the marks on the sill. The microscope proved it. The step on the sill was made by that very shoe. There couldn’t be any doubt of it.”
“But—”
“Then came the oddest part,” continued the doctor. “You’ve seen Cooley, the night constable? He clerks, part-time, in the new shoe store they’ve opened this year at Aura. And he grabbed hold of those tennis shoes and gave them one good look. Then he vowed they are a pair his boss had sent for—all the way from New York—to a pedic specialist—for Willis Chase.”
“What?”
“He said Chase came into the shop last week and told them he had been having trouble with his arches. He’d had the same trouble once before. And that other time he had been recommended to a man in New York who made shoes that helped him very much. He gave them the man’s address and had them send for this pair of tennis shoes for him. The shoes came two days ago. The clerks all studied them carefully because the ‘last’ was so peculiar. Cooley said he could swear to them. Then he proved it. Just inside the vamp he had scribbled Chase’s initials, ‘W. A. C.,’ in pencil, when they came to the shop. He had done it to make sure they wouldn’t get mixed up with the rest of the stock by some green clerk before Chase could call for them. And sure enough there were the initials. The shoes were Chase’s. Apparently he had kicked them off under the edge of the bed when he undressed.”
The girl was staring at him in frank perplexity.
“But,” she argued, “you just said the left shoe of that pair was the same shoe that had made the mark on the white woodwork of the window-sill when the murderer escaped. How could it——”
“That’s the part of it none of us can understand. Chase couldn’t have killed himself and then walked to the window with his shoes on and stepped on the sill and then come back to bed and taken his shoes off and lain down again. Yet there isn’t any other solution. Don’t you see how crazily impossible the whole thing is? And the murderer couldn’t have been wearing Chase’s shoes and then stopped on the other side of the sill and taken them off and tossed them back under the bed. From the position of the window they couldn’t possibly have been thrown from there to the spot where we found them lying.”
The girl’s puzzled eyes roamed to the veranda. Osmun Creede had halted the chief. Quimby was talking earnestly to him, presumably reciting the impossible tale of this latest development.
Perhaps it may have been the effect of the light, but Doris as she watched half fancied she saw Osmun’s lean face grow greenish white and his jaw-muscles twitch convulsively as if in effort to keep steady his expression. But at once the real or fancied look was gone, and he was listening stolidly.
“It must be a cruel blow to him,” she mused to herself, “to find still further proof that Thax is innocent. No wonder he seems so stricken!”
Thaxton Vail interrupted her reverie by coming downstairs, carrying Clive’s suitcase and a light overcoat and hat. These he bore to the veranda and without a word handed them to Osmun.
Creede took them in equal silence. Then as he turned to depart he favored Vail with an expressionless stare.
“You’ve got more brain—more craft—than I gave you credit for, Thax,” he said abruptly. “They’ll never convict you.”
He descended the steps and made off limpingly down the drive without waiting for further speech.