"I shall, soon," she answered; "unless Fate turns kind for once, I shall tell you all, soon, very soon."
CHAPTER XVI
THE MYSTERIOUS MURDER OF EMMA BELL
The crowd going home from the resorts and roof gardens August 9th was startled by the wild cries of the newsboys: "Extra! Extra! All about the mysterious murder!"
Murders are not so rare in New York as to cause any genuine sensation among its people when one is announced in the public press, but mystery has ever been attractive to the human race, and the details of the present case as contained in the columns of the papers were so involved in conjecture as to arouse the interest of every reader. The only facts that were clear were that Mrs. Emma Bell had been found dead in the sitting-room of her apartment on East 56th Street with a box of candied fruit on the table near her, which had just been opened, and which, according to the postmark stamped on the paper enclosing the box, had been mailed to her from Boston. Written on thin paper that was so pasted as to cover the entire top of the box was the inscription, "With best wishes to you and Alice. J. E."
A weird description of the lifelike appearance of the woman when found, seated in her chair, with eyes staring and pupils dilated, was given in the best reportorial style. The coroner had taken possession of everything and had ordered the apartment sealed until an inquest could be held. Whether or not the candied fruit had anything to do with the death, and if so who could have sent it, were all matters of speculation which the various writers had covered in from one to four columns, according to their respective imaginative qualities and newspaper instinct, but none of them gave the slightest intimation as to the suspected person, if murder really had been committed.
More or less accurate likenesses of Mrs. Bell were given with all the events of her life that seemed spectacular, the most prominent of which was that her neighbors had long speculated as to her source of livelihood, since her husband's death some four years previously, and with characteristic charity such speculation led to hints along salacious trails and the dark recesses of public suspicion. The events of the injury to her little girl, and her treatment by Dr. Earl, and the devotion of the volunteer nurse, lacked nothing in their interesting narration in connection with the supposed murder mystery, and assisted very materially in enhancing that mystery through the glamour of prominent personages who were so well in the foreground of the story.
The coroner's jury sat upon the case as coroners' juries have been sitting upon similar cases ever since English jurisprudence advanced to the stage of not executing people on suspicion. There was the same dank, solemn atmosphere of the morgue, the same density of intellect and understanding, the same owl-like gaze of stupidity that passed muster for wisdom, the same perfervid desire to get a certificate on the public treasury without undue mental or physical effort, the same ambition to give a duly impressive but harmless verdict, that must have characterized the first empaneled jury of this nature. Never by any possibility could these original qualities have deteriorated, and it would require a wild stretch of the imagination to note any traces of improvement.