The step on the stair

by Anna Katharine Green

As his interest in me was to all appearance of a kindly sort untinged by suspicion, I felt that perhaps the odds after all, were not so greatly against me. Here was a man ready to help me, and should I need a friend, Providence had certainly shown me in what direction to look.

That night I slept the best of any night since the shock which had unhinged the nerves of every one in the house. I had ascertained that the full name of the lawyer who had been instrumental in drawing up the second will was Frederick W. Jackson, and while uttering this name more than once to myself, I fell into a dreamless slumber.

XXVI

You may recall that my first thought in contemplating the coil in which we had all been caught by the alleged disappearance of the will supposed to contain my uncle’s final instructions, was that an inquiry including every person then in the house, should be made by some one in authority—Edgar, for instance—for the purpose of determining who was responsible for the same by a close investigation into the circumstances which made this crime possible. Little did I foresee at the time that such an inquiry, though shirked when it might have resulted in good, lay before us backed by the law and presided over by a public official.

But this fact was the first one to strike me, as convened in one of the large rooms in the City Hall, we faced the Coroner, in ignorance, most of us, of what such an inquiry portended and how much or how little of the truth it would bring to light.

I knew what I had to fear from my own story. I had told it once before and witnessed its effect. But how about Orpha’s? And Edgar’s? and that of the long row of servants, uneasy in body and perplexed in mind, from whose unwitting, if not unwilling lips some statement might fall which would fix suspicion or so shift it as to lead us into new lines of thought.

I had never been in a court-room before and though I knew that the formality as well as the seriousness of a trial would be lacking in a coroner’s inquest, I shivered at the prospect, for some one of the witnesses soon to be heard had something to hide and whether the discovery of the same or its successful suppression was most to be desired who could tell.

The testimony of the doctors, as well as much of general interest in connection with the case, fell on deaf ears so far as I was concerned. Orpha, clad in her mourning garments and heavily veiled, held all my thoughts. Even the elaborate questioning of the two lawyers who drew up the wills, the similarity and dissimilarity of which undoubtedly lay at the bottom of the dreadful crime we were assembled to inquire into, left me cold. In a way I heard what had passed between each of these men and the testator on the day of the signing. How Mr. Dunn, who had attended to my uncle’s law business for years, had recognized the desirability of his client making a new will under the changed conditions brought about by the reception into his family of a second nephew of whose claims upon a certain portion of his property he must wish to make some acknowledgment, received the detailed instructions sent him, with no surprise and followed them out to the letter, bringing the document with him for signature on the day and at the hour designated in the notes he had received from his client. The result was so satisfactory that no delay was made in calling in the witnesses to his signature and the signing of all three. What delay there was was caused by a little controversy in regard to his former will whose provisions differed in many respects from this one. Mr. Bartholomew wished to retain it,—the lawyer advised its destruction, the lawyer finally gaining the day. It being in Mr. Bartholomew’s possession at the time, the witness expected it to be brought out and burned before his eyes; but it was not, Mr. Bartholomew merely promising that this should be done before the day ended. Whether or not he kept his word, the lawyer could not say from any personal knowledge.

Mr. Jackson had much the same story to tell. He too had received a letter from Mr. Bartholomew, asking his assistance in the making of a new will, together with instructions for the same, scrupulously written out in full detail by the testator’s own hand on bits of paper carefully numbered. Asked to show these instructions, they were handed over and laid side by side with those already passed up by Mr. Dunn. I think they were both read; I hardly noticed; I only know that they were found to be exactly similar, with the one notable exception I need not mention. Of course the names of the witnesses differed.

What did reach my ear was a sentence uttered by Mr. Jackson as coming from my uncle when the will brought for his signature was unfolded before him. “You may be surprised,” Uncle had said, “at the tenor of my bequests and the man I have chosen to bear the heavy burden of a complicated heritage. I know what I am doing and all I ask of you and the two witnesses you have been kind enough to bring here from your office is silence till the hour comes when it will be your business to speak.”