CHAPTER XXVII

AN INCRIMINATING LETTER

KITTY looked very pretty and quite pathetic in her smartly simple mourning. She saw Barrison at once, and received him with a subdued cordiality that was the perfection of good taste under the circumstances.

“What is it?” she said, in a low voice. There was no artificiality about her now; she was disturbed, apprehensive. “I know it’s something. Please tell me.”

“Yes, there is something,” he said. “It’s about—your sister.”

He could hear her draw in her breath.

“My sister!” she whispered. “Marita! How did you know anything about her?”

“I don’t think we need go into an account of that,” Jim said steadily. “As it happens, I do know quite a good deal about her. I know, for instance, that she was in the theater only a little while before Alan Mortimer was murdered.”

“You know that!” she exclaimed, in unfeigned surprise. “I thought——”

Then she checked herself, but it was too late; she saw at once what she had admitted.

“I knew it,” said Barrison, watching her. “The question is—how did you know it, Miss Legaye?”

She dropped her eyes and was silent until he felt obliged to insist:

“I am afraid I must ask you to tell me about it, though I can easily suppose it isn’t very pleasant for you.”

“Pleasant!” she flashed out at him then. “Think what a position I am in! To lose him—like that—and then—to find my own sister mixed up in it!”

“You think she was mixed up in it, then?”

“How on earth do I know?” she cried excitedly. “I—I—oh, Mr. Barrison, you aren’t brutal, like most detectives; you are a gentleman! Won’t you make it a little easier for me? My sister and I were never very fond of each other, but I can’t be the one to implicate her now. I can’t!”

“It may seem very dreadful to you, of course, Miss Legaye. But—how can you keep silent? She is already under suspicion. I don’t see how you can avoid telling everything you know.”

“I thought—I never dreamed—that it would come to this!” she said miserably. “I thought no one knew of her being there except myself and—and my father.” She seemed to wince as she said the word; Jim remembered that Wrenn had said she was always ashamed of him. “He did not give you this information?”

“He only corroborated what we already knew. Now, please, Miss Legaye, for all our sakes, even for your sister’s, tell me what you know.”

“For my sister’s?” she repeated.

“I don’t know what you have to tell; but, seriously, one of the reasons why I have come to you is that I can’t help hoping that you can supply some tiny link of evidence which will help to clear her. If you saw her leave the theater, for instance——”

She shook her head, with an air of deep depression.

“I did not see her leave the theater,” she said quietly. “I did not see her at all.”

“Did not see her! Then how——”

“Wait, Mr. Barrison, and I will tell you. I will tell you just exactly what happened, and you must believe me, for it is the truth. I did not see my sister, but—I heard her voice!”

Now that she had made up her mind to speak, the words came in a rush, as though she could not talk fast enough, as though she were feverish to get the ordeal over with.

“When I left you to go home, I had to pass his—Alan’s—door, as you know. Just as I reached it, I heard voices inside—not loud, or I suppose they would have been stopped by some one, for the whole stage was supposed to be quiet while the act was on. But there was rather a noisy scene going on then—the bandits quarreling among themselves over the wine, you remember—and, anyway, the voices inside the dressing room could only be heard by some one who was standing very close to the door. I stopped for a moment, instinctively at first, and then—I heard my sister’s voice, panting and excited!”

All this tallied with Wrenn’s story. “Could you hear what she said?” asked Barrison.

“Only a word or two.”

“What words?”

She flashed him a glance of deep appeal, then went hurriedly on:

“I heard her say ‘Coward and cad,’ and—and ‘You ought to be shot, and you know it!’ That’s all.”

All! It was quite enough. Barrison looked at her with faint pity, though he had felt at first that she was not sincere. She had a way of disarming him by unexpected evidence of true feeling just when he expected her to play-act. He could see that she was finding this pretty hard to tell.

“What did you do, Miss Legaye?”

“Do—I? Nothing. What was there for me to do? I went home.”

“Didn’t it occur to you to try to see your sister, to interfere in what seemed to be such a very violent quarrel?”

She shook her head vehemently.

“No, it did not. Why should it? My sister and I had nothing in common. I had not seen her for many years; I—I did not want to see her. For the rest—I knew that she hated Alan Mortimer, and if she was talking to him at all, it seemed quite natural that she should talk to him like that.”

“You did not feel afraid, then—did not look on those chance phrases you heard as—well, a threat?”

She shuddered. “Oh, no; how could I? I thought she was just angry and excited. She always had a frightful temper. How could I guess that she had—anything else—in her mind?”

“So you went straight home, without waiting?”

“Yes.” She bent her head, and added, in a low, troubled tone: “You will think me very selfish, very much a coward, Mr. Barrison, but—those angry voices made me want to get away as fast as possible. I hate scenes and quarrels and unpleasantness of all kinds. I was thankful to get out of the theater, and to know that I had not had to meet Marita, especially in the mood she was in then.”

“I see,” said Barrison, not without sympathy. “And is that all—really and absolutely all—that you know about the matter?”

Kitty hesitated, and then she lifted her head and faced him bravely.

“No,” she said clearly, “it is not all. If you will wait a moment, I have something I ought to show you.”

She rose and went to a desk, returning with an envelope. She sat down again and took a letter from this envelope, which she first read herself slowly and with a curious air of deliberation. Then she held it out to Barrison.

“I am going to trust you,” she said, meeting his eyes proudly, “not to make use of this unless you have to. Wait, before you read it! When I knew of the horrible thing that had happened at the theater that night, I thought of my sister. I—I am afraid it is scarcely enough to say that I suspected her. I remembered the angry words I had heard her say inside the dressing room. I knew her ungovernable rages and the bitterness she had for Alan. And I knew that she was a wonderful shot, and that she had never got out of the habit of going armed. I—well, I felt very sure what had happened.”

She was breathing quickly, and speaking in a hoarse, strained tone.

“I knew that there was more than a chance that some one else knew of her presence, and—I could not bear to have her arrested. I won’t pretend that it was all sisterly affection, but I think it was that, too, in a way. I couldn’t forget that, after all, we were of the same blood, and had been children and young girls together. I—I sent her money; I had seen in the paper that she and her husband were playing in New York, and I sent it to their theater, and with it I sent a note, begging her to lose no time in getting out of town. Was it—do you think it was very wrong?” she asked him rather piteously.

“It was at all events very natural,” Jim answered, a little surprised and touched by what she had told him. “And may I read this now?”

“Yes, read it. It is Marita’s answer to me. She accepted the money and sent me this letter.”

With an odd movement of weariness and sorrow, she turned and laid her hands upon the back of her chair, and her face upon them.

The note was in the same scrawling hand that had made all the threats against Mortimer, that he knew to be that of Marita Blankley. And it ran thus:

Barrison sat very still after reading this. At last he noticed that Kitty had lifted her head and was watching him with an anxious face.

“Well?” she demanded.

“You told me not to use this unless it were necessary,” said Barrison very gravely. “It is necessary now, Miss Legaye. I must take it to headquarters at once!”

She gave a little cry.

“Oh, I was afraid—I was afraid!” she exclaimed. “You think it—it looks bad for her?”

“I think,” said Jim Barrison, “that it is practically conclusive evidence!”