“A woman!” I said. “Who?”
“Her name was Mary Chalmers,” he said. “She was an actress. She and her husband and their baby had come up from New York. She was found this daybreak at the dam by one of the factory watchmen. There was an overturned boat. The baby had been left asleep in the boarding-house where they were staying, and the husband had been heard to say that he would take her rowing on the river. He had been drinking. He was caught trying to catch the early morning train, and was still so befuddled that he could only say over and over again that he had no memory of where he had been. He says he is not guilty and has sent for a lawyer. The coroner has gone to the dam. That is the story and my wife must be prevented from suspecting any of it. The man will probably be held. It looks badly for him, and the case, if tried, will come before me. My wife must be kept away until it is all over; she must not suffer the morbid worry.”
“Did any one hear screams on the river last night?” I asked, biting my finger.
“Several heard them,” he said, nodding.
I felt a great relief from that answer, for I had a dread of being called as a witness and then and there I made up my mind that, come what might, I would tell nothing. “What one sees to-morrow, and what one didn’t see yesterday, makes the road easy,” Madame Welstoke had been used to say, and I recalled her words and thought highly of their wisdom. And yet I have many the time, wondered whether, if I had told of the creature I had seen, scuttling like a crab over the grass in the orchard, I might not have prevented the grisly prank that Fate has played.
That afternoon my mistress, in spite of her gentle protests, was taken to the train by the Judge and Doctor Turpin, who I’ve always remembered as an old fool, trying to wipe the prickly heat off his forehead with a red-bordered silk handkerchief. One of the neighbors, clinking with jet beads till she sounded like a pitcher of ice water coming down the hall, went on the journey to the mountain sanitarium with Mrs. Colfax, as a sort of companion, and when all the fuss of the departure and the slam of the old cab doors and the neighing of the livery-stable hearse horses was over, I was left alone with the baby Julianna and the Judge.
The child was laying on its fat little naked back, kicking its feet at me, when the father came upstairs.
“Please, sir,” said I, “what is the news?”
“The inquest says drowning or blows on the head administered by a party or parties unknown,” he answered gravely. “John Chalmers, the husband, acts like a heeled snake—violent and sinuous by turns. His lawyer has waived all preliminary proceedings and, as luck will have it, we have a clear docket to go to trial with a jury.”
By afternoon the town was filled with reporters who had come up on the midday train. From the back windows you could see them walking along the banks of the river and talking with a man in a red shirt. And later I learned he was the one who had gone out in a rowboat and found the poor woman’s silly hat, that, with its wet yellow roses and lavender veil, had floated around amongst a clump of rushes. With night the city papers came, full of accounts of the actress and how she had played in melodramas, until finally she had played her farewell in a tragedy of real life. One said her husband was going to prove an alibi; another said he had no memory whatever of where he had been or what he had done that evening; and still another paper said the woman had been seen to quarrel with him and join a mysterious stranger, who was described as being a hunchback of terrible ugliness. All three of those I saw said the mystery might never be solved, but that new developments were expected every minute by both the state police and the chief of the local department.