“But, I say, Nick, you don’t mean to say that she believed she could fool me—to say nothing of my father and mother—do you?”
“Certainly not.”
“Then how——”
“You, as well as your father and mother, were condemned to death.”
“Good Heaven!”
“With you three out of the way it would be an easy matter to deceive others. When the little matter of the quarrel, which amounted to nothing, occurred between you and Mercedes, Isabel overheard it, doubtless, and as the time was ready to act, she acted. She had already started her warfare against your mother. You say you thought your mother was poisoned by something she had eaten. I have no doubt that she was, only I have many doubts that it was accidental. The poison was somehow administered by Isabel, and in getting your mother out of the house, she did what she wanted to do; for she opened the opportunity for her own disappearance, after which there were other ways in which you and your mother were to be gotten rid of after some approved plan which offered small chance of detection. Isabel was establishing an alibi for herself, as well as for your pseudo sister. You would have had another Cadillac needle jabbed into your back, on the street somewhere; your mother would have been poisoned again while she is in Newport, and your father—well, he may or he may not get home alive. Let us hope that he will; that the time is not yet ripe to play their act upon him, and if our work to-night is good, I hope we can prevent the further working of the plot against you.
“Hush! Don’t interrupt me yet. There is absolutely nothing that we can do to prevent the happening of the things I have mentioned, except what we have elected to do to-night. Now let us take one more step backward.
“We will say that we are almost at the time for the culmination of the plot. We will say that we can look in upon a reverie of Rogers wherein he cogitates upon the mightiest stroke of all. He hates Orizaba. More than that, he fears him. Still more, with Orizaba out of the way there will be one less person to enjoy the millions of your father when they shall have been won. Still more yet, there is a chance that by murdering Orizaba, he can throw suspicion upon you, Danton, and this he decides to do. That later he changed his mind on that point is one of the psychological puzzles of the human mind. I won’t pretend to answer that, unless it was the thought that he could still further divert suspicion from himself in the final crimes, if, by chance, suspicion should ever fall upon him. In putting Orizaba out of the way, Isabel was both neutral and passive. There had never been affection between them, nor did she delight in the thought that her brother would be master of that future in which she wished to be the queen.
“There! That is the story I have woven from the somewhat tangled thread provided by Sarah Kearney. Now I come down to the night of the disappearance of Mercedes.
“Sarah put her to bed as usual, Saturday night. Sunday morning, Sarah was sent away upon a cooked-up errand. When she returned, the baggage had been taken from the house, and her mistress, as she supposed, was in the act of driving away in the coupé. As a matter of fact, Reginald, it was Isabel who was inside the coupé, posing as Mercedes, and it was a woman who had been introduced into the house to do hemming on linen who was acting the part of Isabel.”