Ill Met by Moonlight. Leslie Ford

you!”

      His voice rose almost to a scream in that last sudden outburst. We all stared at him. He dropped his head in his hands again, making curious strangled sobs. Jerry Nolan patted him anxiously on the back.

      Mr. Shryock looked at him for an instant. Then he nodded soberly and picked up the note on the table in front of him.

      “Is there anyone here who can identify Mrs. Alexandra Gould’s handwriting?” he asked.

      Jerry Nolan flushed and raised his hand. There were several others, including myself and Andy. Mr. Shryock passed the thin elegant bit of gray note paper to Jerry.

      “Do you recognize this as Mrs. Gould’s handwriting?”

      Jerry nodded. I thought he rather paled too.

      “Will you give it to the next gentleman?”

      Bailey Fisher took it and handed it quickly to Frank Gerber, nodding his head.

      “That’s her writing, all right,” Frank said. He gave it to me. I looked at it.

      “Can you identify that as Mrs. Gould’s writing, Mrs. Latham?”

      “I can,” I said in a low voice. I’d seen it—a childish uneducated scrawl—a thousand times. She was always writing notes about something.

      I handed it back. My heart was like a lump of ice in the pit of my stomach.

      The coroner put on his horn-rimmed spectacles and surveyed us over them for an instant.

      “I have here a letter that you have heard identified as positively as possible under the circumstances. I’m going to read it to you and then I shall ask for your verdict, gentlemen.”

      He looked down. We waited. I could hear Sheila scratching at the door upstairs. Outside a few early birds were chirping, getting the business of worms under way. The clock on the hall landing struck four-thirty.

      My dearest darling Jim,—You must forgive your Sandra and forget her forever. It is wrong and wicked to kill myself, I know, but I have ruined your whole life Jim and you have been so good to me. In my country we are not afraid of death and I am not afraid now. Good-by, Jim. They say it does not hurt very much this way.—SANDRA.

      The coroner stopped. All of us sat mute and horror-stricken. To hear Sandra’s childish English in the coroner’s flat nasal Maryland whine seemed unbearably incongruous. After a long time he looked up.

      “Mrs. Gould senior found that note on her daughter-in-law’s dressing table tonight. That is why she was out searching for her. I think we know what happened, gentlemen. I await your verdict.”

      I waited for it too. And when it came, after the twelve men, ten of us from April Harbor and two outsiders, had adjourned to the dining room, I sat with my head down, my hands shaking so I had to hold them stuck deep down in my pockets to keep them still.

      They filed back. Rodman Bishop stood up, white-haired, square-faced, hard-jawed. “The jury finds that Alexandra Gould met her death at her own hands from inhaling carbon monoxide fumes while of an unsound mind,” he said.

      Mr. Shryock looked at the State’s Attorney. Mr. Parran nodded sleepily.

      “Thank you, gentlemen, thank you,” Mr. Shryock said. He rubbed his hands together and looked about. “I think that will be all. I’ll make my report in longhand, Mr. Parran, my typewriter’s being overhauled.”

      I still sat there, my hands steadied against the seams of my pockets. Suddenly I looked up. Colonel Primrose was looking intently at me. My lips were very dry. I tried to moisten them without his seeing me. Surely there was no way of his knowing what was beating in my brain until it was numb with dread! The coroner’s hand stuck down towards me brought me to with a start. I scrambled to my feet and said good night to him and to Mr. Parran. Rodman Bishop patted my shoulder.

      “You’d better get a little sleep, Grace,” he said. I thought he was telling me something else too.

      I closed the door after them, and stood a moment looking out to the bay, silvery calm in the gray dawn. I knew Colonel Primrose was standing in the middle of the room behind me, waiting. At last I turned around and faced him, my hands behind me holding onto the door-knob to steady me.

      Our eyes met, his sparkling black and penetrating, mine trying to hide what was in them. Then he smiled, suddenly and kindly.

      “It’s hardly fair, is it? Especially when you didn’t invite me here.”

      I took a deep breath.

      “Maybe you’ll want to tell me about it in the morning,” he said after a moment. “I don’t mind confessing to you that all this worries me.—You’d better go back to bed.”

      I’m afraid I literally fled upstairs. I don’t know what on earth Sergeant Buck thought, because he came in just at that moment—after having put the bottles away and washed up the glasses, I was morally certain. I saw him give the Colonel a pained admonitory look.

      “Up to your old tricks, sir!” he said severely, shaking his head.

      And I, stupidly, was the one who misunderstood him.