One by one he questioned them, but the inquest ended just as it began—with the affair of Florey’s murder as great a mystery as ever. At the end of the fatiguing afternoon we were face to face with the baffling fact that only four men had proven satisfactory alibis—Lemuel Marten, Van Hope, Nealman and myself—and that any one of the dozen or more men and women in that great, rambling house might have done the deed.
CHAPTER XIII
Two telegrams had come for Mr. Nealman during the inquest; but the negro messenger who had brought them had been too frightened by the august session in the living-room to disturb him. It came about that Nealman didn’t get them until he and Van Hope left the room together.
The yellow envelopes were lying on a little table in the hall, and Nealman started, perceptibly, at the sight of them. Except for that nervous reflex through his body I wouldn’t have given the messages a second thought. Nealman picked them up, and still carrying on a fragmentary conversation with his friend, tore out the messages.
He did not merely tear off the edges. In his eagerness his clawing fingers ripped the envelopes wide open, endangering the messages themselves within. He opened one of them, and his eye leaped over the script.
He took one curious, short breath, then opened the second message, more carefully now. Then he crowded both of them into his outer coat pocket.
At that point his conversation with Van Hope took a curious trend. He still seemed to be trying to talk in his usual casual voice; yet a preoccupation so deep, so engrossing was upon him that his friend’s words must have seemed to reach him from another sphere. It was a brave effort; but his disjointed sentences, his blurred perceptions, told the truth only too plainly.
Nealman had received disastrous news. His lips were smiling, but his eyes were filled with some alien light. What that light was neither Van Hope nor I could tell. It might have been frenzy. Quite likely it was fear.