The ghost girl

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I What They Found in the Ice i

II The First Covert 13

Chapter I

WE didn’t often talk about crimes in our family.

Not, at least, about the mysterious, inexplicable crimes of violence that trumpeted their horrors at you every little while from the front pages of the papers. When you have been there yourself, have seen names you know and love pilloried there, you know altogether too well how it feels, to take an idle curious interest when the thing happens to someone else.

But this present mystery proved an exception. It seemed so completely detached from all human motive, so devoid of the usual accessories of grief, and agony, and shame, that we found ourselves discussing it that night without reservation — Jack and Gwendolen, his pretty young wife, and Madeline and I. If we discussed it with a sort of exaggerated nonchalance, which showed that really in the background of all our minds that other mystery still lurked and cast its shadow — the murder of the man who had been Madeline’s husband and Jack’s father- — I doubt if any outsider would have been able to detect it.

But Jeffrey wasn’t an outsider. And he has the

I most amazingly sensitive perceptions of any man I know. That is, perhaps, the reason why he can paint the way he can; can open up the innermost recesses of character in those beautiful, terrible canvases of his. We weren’t expecting him; didn’t know, indeed, that he’d come back from his two months’ vacation. And you might have expected that our surprise and pleasure at the sight of him and the warmth of our greetings, would have veiled everything else. We were all trying to shake hands with him at once and patting him on the back, demanding to know when he returned and why he didn’t tell us in advance; so that we gave him no chance to answer or even to take off his overcoat.

But instead of even trying to answer, he stepped back and stood looking at us, from one face to another and puckered up his eyebrows in a puzzled frown.

‘‘ What in the world,” he asked, “ have all you people been talking about? ”

Nobody answered for a minute. There was something almost uncanny about it. Madeline gave a little shiver. Jack’s wife stood looking at Jeffrey with that level, thoughtful look of hers, and finally said: —

“ I’m glad I haven’t any secrets. Could you keep your own, do you think, as well as you can read other people’s? ”

“ I don’t know,” said Jeffrey. “ It would be an interesting experiment to try. But what a perfectly detestable character you’re giving me. I own I deserve it, walking into a roomful of people and asking them what they’ve been talking about.”

“ You know perfectly well,” said Madeline, “ that in this household there never could be a wish to keep anything from you. You’ve earned, many times over, the right to ask us what we have been talking about. But, in this case, it wasn’t a secret at all. We were talking about the girl they found in the ice last month.”

Jeffrey looked puzzled. “Found in the ice?” he questioned. “Who?”

“ You don’t mean to say you haven’t heard of it! ” I cried. “ The country’s been ringing with it.”

“Yes, but I haven’t been in the country,” said Jeffrey. “ I only landed late this afternoon. Went straight over to The Atlas, got my first fresh water bath in three weeks, dined and came up here. Didn’t even stop to read the evening papers.”

“ You’re looking pretty well,” I commented, “ certainly a sight better than when you went away. You had us all worried.”

“ It was fearfully unmannerly of me,” said Jeffrey to Madeline, “to run off that way without a word, but I suspect I did need a rest pretty badly. I decided to go all in a minute. The decorators were at work there in the studio and every time they 3 pulled down a bit of loose plaster, I went up in the air. So at last I gave the key to my Jap and fled.”

“ Sit down,” I commanded him, “ and light a pipe, and tell us all about it. Where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing.”

Jeffrey lighted a pipe obediently enough, and settled down in the big chair which Jack rolled round in front of the fire for him, but then instead of beginning his Odyssey, as I had commanded him, he smoked in silence for a minute, then turned to Gwendolen and asked:

“What about the girl in the ice? Oh, my adventures will keep,” he went on, as I started to protest. “ You will be hearing about them for the next six months. A returned traveler’s a nuisance anyway. Besides, you’ve whetted my curiosity. Be a good chap and let Mrs. Jack satisfy it.”

It was natural that he should have turned to Gwendolen for the story. We all did that when we wanted the facts about anything. Her voice was so lovely in the first place, that there was a sort of sensuous pleasure just in listening to her. And then, when Gwendolen told it, you knew it was so.

People have a way of talking about truth-telling as if it were simply a matter of good intentions. You have told the truth unless you meant to be a liar. And yet, if you will stop to think, you can probably call to mind half a dozen people who you know are honest, and whom you wouldn’t believe on 4 oath. And if you’re a lawyer like me, your difficulty will be the other way; to think of half a dozen whose account of an occurrence you could believe absolutely and literally and without discounts or reservations. Well, Gwendolen would certainly head the list in my half dozen.

“ I don’t know where you were two months ago,” Gwendolen began, ‘‘ and you may not have heard that we had a week of the coldest weather they have known here since they began to keep the records. The thermometer stayed below zero for six days. Most of the time it was a long way below. It came very suddenly, so that the river, which had been entirely open, froze within that week over eight inches deep and the ice people began cutting. Six weeks ago an ice cutter at Silver Springs discovered a body frozen in the ice. It was a grl — a young woman somewhere in her twenties. Even in the picto£s they took of her, she was very very beautiful.^’And what she must have been really, well, one tan imagine it! Because, you see, the body wasn’t changed at all. It had frozen juit exactly as it was, probably within a few hours after it had been put in the water.”

“ Been put! ” echoed Jeffrey. ‘‘ Then she hadn’t drowned herself? ”

“ No,” said Gwendolen, “ it was — murder. She had been shot through the heart ”

“ Still,” interrupted Jeffrey, “ why murder? Why 5 not suicide with the revolver and a tumble into the river? ”

“ It was murder,” said I, for Gwendolen had hesitated over the horror of the thing.

“ No powder marks around the wound, I suppose,” suggested Jeffrey. “ Shot fired from a distance.”

I nodded.

“How was she dressed?” he concluded. He turned to Gwendolen with that question.

“ That’s one of the weirdest things about it,”

said G^

“ She was in evening dress —

dressed

a ball, and her hair — perfectly

wonderi

must have been from the picture

— was ' .

ay, too.”

“ Am

en’t identified her? ” questioned

Jeffrey.

body was literally in perfect pres-

ervatior

y

“ It

Gwendolen. “You could evr

see the

larks of the rings on her finger

they sai “Th

) robbery, doesn’t it? ” said Je

rey. “ She’d have worn her rings to the ball.”

“ She hadn’t been at the ball,” said Gwendole “At least, she wasn’t in ball dress when she W' murdered. There was no bullet hole in the bodice of her gown and no stain of blood on the white satin. They dressed her that way after she was killed. So you see it wasn’t robbery.

“ I can’t help thinking,” Gwendolen concluded, “ that the murder was committed by some Insane person. Because, It doesn’t seem that anyone In his senses would have run that risk and taken that trouble to do, what one would think, must make the identification easier.”

“ It Is possible,” said Jeffrey, “ that If he’d read the weather report, he wouldn’t have done it.”

The remark sounded perfectly flippant to me, but I caught a sudden look of Intelligence In Gwendolen’s eyes and saw that Jeffrey had meant something by It. In the same moment he saw the bewilderment In mine.

“ Assuming,” he explained, “ that the person was still sane, he might almost safely have counted on the current carrying the body away altogether and never being found. And If he wanted to dispose of the dress at the same time, perhaps that was as good a way to do It as any. But he didn’t count on the freeze. That must have caused him some pretty bad nights, I should think, and days hardly better. It’s perfectly extraordinary, when you come to think of It, that she hasn’t been Identified. You say the pictures were published in the papers? ”

“ Everywhere,” I exclaimed. “ The country’s been ringing with It.”

“ Well,” said Jeffrey, In the tone of one who dismisses the subject, “ that’s very Interesting.”

“ Walt a minute ! ” exclaimed Jack. “ I can show you the picture. I cut it out of the paper and laid it away somewhere.”

“ Don’t bother! ” exclaimed Jeffrey.

“ No bother at all.” Jack already had his hand on the door.

“ To tell you the truth,” Jeffrey admitted, “ I don’t believe I want to look at it. Let’s talk about something else. Dead faces are beginning to get a little on my nerves. Oh, it’s nothing serious,” he went on, seeing the look of surprise on our faces, “ and no doubt it’s silly of me to feel that way about it. But — well, I mean it just the same.”

“ I suppose,” said Madeline, “ that you’re loaded up with commissions after your vacation. You must have sitters three or four deep clamoring at your studio door.”

“ I don’t know,” said Jeffrey. “ I haven’t seen my business man since I came back. Haven’t even been to my studio. But I hope to heaven he doesn’t get me any more commissions like the last one. You knew what that was, didn’t you?” He turned to me. “ The thing I was at work on when I bolted? ”

“ I seem to remember,” said I, “ that you were doing some work for Miss Meredith.”

The Miss Meredith? ” questioned Madeline.

Jeffrey nodded. “ The same. The queer, rich, invisible Miss Meredith.”

We all exclaimed over his last word. “ Invisible I 8

Then what were you painting? A spirit picture of her?”

The last question was Jack’s. It seemed to effect Jeffrey a little unpleasantly, foi he gave a little shake to his head as one will when a fly is buzzing about one’s ear,

“ I wasn’t doing a portrait of her,” he explained. ‘‘ I was painting from a photograph, and a few relics and souvenirs, what was meant for a portrait of a niece of hers — I think it was a niece — who, I understand, died several years ago.”

I laughed. “ I knew some men did that sort of work. It’s rather a new line for you, isn’t it? ”

“ Never before,” said Jeffrey, and never again! Of course they offered me a perfectly immoral price for it, but even at that, I shouldn’t have done it, except for the fact that I found the photograph they showed me rather attractive.”

“ Beautiful, I suppose,” said Madeline. “ That shouldn’t be wondered at. They say Miss Meredith was a great beauty in her day.”

“Yes,” said Jeffrey, “it was extraordinarily beautiful.”

“ That wasn’t what you meant, though,” commented Gwendolen.

“ No, it wasn’t,” Jeffrey admitted. “ There was something about it that was queer. I — I don’t believe I can explain it any better than that. And that’s not explaining it at all.”

2 9

He fell into a little thoughtful silence and we all watched him curiously. I’d felt all the evening, and I found after he’d gone, that the others shared the feeling, a sense of difference in him. He seemed well again, but I felt perfectly sure that the thing he had recovered from cut a good deal deeper than a mere attack of nerves and had a solider cause than the activities of the decorators who were pulling down loose plaster in his studio building.

Whatever that cause was, he didn’t mean to tell it. He brought back, with a little effort I would have sworn, his old smile and took up the conversation again.

“ The queerest thing about it is,” he said, “ that Miss Meredith herself never came to see me, nor let me come to see her. I wasn’t surprised when the arrangements for the portrait were made by a man who seemed to be a sort of confidential agent of hers, as well as her private physician — a rather charming chap named Crow, but when the arrangements were completed and I expressed a wish to talk with Miss Meredith herself as someone who had known the girl whose portrait I was to paint, and could supply me with some of those intimate little details, tricks of speech, habits of manner and so on, that'you have to know before you can paint a portrait. Crow seemed a little embarrassed and said he was afraid it was impossible. Miss Meredith was in a rather disturbed nervous state and couldn’t see anybody.

If I’d ask him the questions, or better still, write them out, he’d undertake to get answers for me. I was in two minds about chucking up the whole thing, but it seemed Miss Meredith was very anxious that I paint the portrait. And then — well, I wanted to paint it myself.”

The same troubled, thoughtful look came back into his face with that last sentence.

“ How did you come out with it? ” I asked. “ I suppose under such a handicap, it would be impossible really to satisfy her.”

“ On the contrary,” said Jeffrey, “ she was greatly pleased with it. She came to the studio to see it, the day I went away.”

“ Surely you saw her then,” said Jack.

Jeffrey shook his head. “ No,” said he. “ They made a special arrangement to come and look at it while I was out. As a matter of fact, I haven’t been back to the studio myself since she came and saw it. Crow called me up at my apartment that evening and congratulated me on having succeeded so well with it.”

He fell silent again after that and said nothing at all for a long time. At last, with a little sigh, and another shake of the head, he rose to go.

“ I’m quite all right again,” he assured us. “ You’re not to worry about me.” For he saw plainly enough what we were thinking. “ All I need

II is work, and I imagine there’s plenty of that stacked up ahead of me at the studio.”

But, after he had got into his overcoat and gloves, he stood a moment looking at us thoughtfully, hat in hand, his other hand on the door-knob.

“ You people were faced once with an insoluble contradiction,” he said slowly. “ A thing that must be true and yet couldn’t be true. Well, that’s the sort of problem I’ve been gnawing away at for the last three months. A perfect circle. You follow it all the way around and bring up where you began. I’m going to quit. I’m going back to work. Good-night I ” And with a nod, he was gone.

Chapter II

WHEN I walked into my office about half past nine the next morning, I was greeted by my clerk with the information that Jeffrey had been trying to get me and wanted me to call him up as soon as I came in. While we were talking, the ’phone rang and Madeline called to say that Jeffrey had been trying to get me at the house. So, without stopping to take off my overcoat or hat, I called up his studio.

I heard him unhook the receiver before the bell had stopped ringing and knew he must have been waiting by the instrument for my call. The quality of his voice shocked me. It was harassed, uneven, keyed up clear to the breaking point with unnatural excitement.

“ Tm awful sorry to trouble you, old man,” he said. “ It’s a shame to break up your work right at the beginning of the day, but I guess you’ll have to come to the rescue.”

“ What’s the matter? ” I asked.

“ Do you mind coming up? I can’t leave here for an hour or two, and I simply can’t talk over the ’phone.”

“ I’ll be in the Subway in three minutes,” said 1. “ Hold hard till I get there.”

With that I hung up, told my clerk I probably shouldn’t be back that morning and started up town. I’d have been wise, I suppose, to put a brief in my pocket to read on the way up — something to keep me from speculating and worrying about Jeffrey’s case until I had some data to go on. But I doubt if anything could have kept my mind off him.

Jeffrey wasn’t one of my oldest friends — not one of that little group of people all of us carry along in diminishing numbers through life from boyhood — people whose circumstances and relations we know almost instinctively; people whose world we were born a part of. Friends of this class we are apt to think we know all about. And, as far as externals go, we do. Really, we are likely to know very little indeed about their interior qualities — their soul machinery, and we live along side by side with them for years, in a state of partial, or sometimes total misunderstanding.

The friendship between Jeffrey and me was the other sort. We were both grown-up men when we first laid eyes on each other and the thing that made our friendship was a sort of instinctive sympathy — a mutual ability to understand each other — that had carried us across all the preliminaries of mere acquaintance in one jump.

The result of this was that, so far as externals went, we knew relatively little about each other. It had never seemed worth while to stop to tell, when there were so many more important and interesting things to talk about. Jeffrey, I was sure, couldn’t have furnished a would-be biographer with any connected account of my experience previous to our meeting three or four years ago, and I was in the same case with him.

I knew he was a brilliantly successful portrait painter; I knew, in a fragmentary way, that as a very young man, he had supported himself as a newspaper artist. I knew he had a perfectly enormous list of casual acquaintances — people from every walk of life, way down to the very lowest stratum of the underworld.

I have described him heretofore as a man of pure genius — a man who relied, further than anyone else I have ever known, on a queer set of intuitions that seemed to begin where ordinary logical processes of thought left off. He claimed, you may remember, a special extra sense for crime; said he could detect crime on a man’s soul as easily as I could detect whisky on his breath. It was a perfectly unbelievable claim, of course, and I should have treated it as fanciful, except for the uncanny demonstration of it which he had given in our own mystery — the mystery of Doctor Marshall and the Whispering Man. Jeffrey had solved that and had done it, so far as any of us could see, by the exercise of this same sheer intuition, which he claimed. Either by that, or by the blindest luck in the world. And, in doing so, he had saved Gwendolen’s life.

In a word, I knew the man himself as intimately, perhaps, as I knew anyone in the world, except Madeline. But, about his history, I knew nothing. I couldn’t even have sworn that he had no brothers or sisters, though I had never heard of any. A perfect stranger might have come up to me and told me any sort of weird or tragic adventures as having belonged to Jeffrey’s past somewhere, and I couldn’t have contradicted him.

I did know this though; he was the sort of person adventures happen to — imaginative, possessed occasionally by powerful impulses ; full of that strange quality we call, for lack of a better word. Temperament. Given the right combination of circumstances and the right incentive, and Jeffrey might have done almost anything.

So I will have to confess that as I rode up town on my way to his studio, knowing only that he was in some sudden, unexpected difficulty, my thoughts ran riot. I conjectured a whole chamber of horrors about him, terrible hands reaching out of that blank past of his and snatching at him. I’d have said, when I knocked at his studio door, that nothing I could find on the other side of it would surprise me.

i6

But what I did find did surprise me, and that was nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, I mean. There was no veiled lady in black, looming tragically in a dark corner; no mysterious communication; no spot — oh, I had been ready for anything ! — of blood on the studio floor. Simply everything as I had always seen it and Jeffrey himself — quite his old self, smiling apologetically and holding out his hand to me.

‘‘ I telephoned you not to come,” he said, “ but you had already started. I was too late. I’m dreadfully sorry. There’s nothing the matter — nothing that an hour or two won’t set right. And I really don’t need you a bit. Only, if you’ve got the leisure. I’d be awfully glad to have you stay.”

“Well, but what was it?” I gasped. “What did you think it was? ”

Jeffrey didn’t answer for a second or two.

“ You remember that portrait I was telling you about last night?” he asked. “The thing I painted from a photograph for — for Miss Meredith?”

I nodded, but Jeffrey wasn’t looking at me, so after a moment of silence, I said “ Yes.”

He brought himself up with a little start. “ Well, when I came to the studio this morning, I found it gone. I thought at first that Miss Meredith might have taken it with her the day she came to the studio to look at it — I haven’t been back in the place since then, you know. Of course that would have been an awfully funny thing for her to do, but she’s eccentric they say, so I asked my Jap boy about it. He said no, that didn’t happen. They went away and left it just as it was on the easel. So it was perfectly plain that the thing had been stolen.

“ It seemed such a queer, inexplicable thing for anyone to steal, that I was — a little bit upset about it. So I called on you for First Aid, as I am afraid I have got the bad habit of doing. But afterward I got a clew that suggested a perfectly plain explanation. I think I’ll have the thing back before noon. It’s all right, you see. I’m frightfully ashamed of myself for having troubled you with it.”

Still he wasn’t looking at me and I stared at his inexpressive back in perfectly blank amazement. Amazement that had. I’ll admit, a little flavor of indignation in it.

He had given me a very bad quarter of an hour and his explanation of it seemed absolutely childish. Was the loss of a portrait — a thing that couldn’t mean more than two weeks’ work to his facile brush, an adequate explanation for that broken cry of distress I had heard over the telephone? The thing was preposterous !

Then I remembered his manner at the house last night; the little shiver with which he had spoken of dead faces and how they were getting on his nerves; the impatient jerk of his head that had accompanied

i8

Jack’s jocular remark about a spirit portrait, and last of all, the thing he had said just as he was going out the door, about the irreconcilable contradiction that had been confronting him for months — the thing that must be true, yet couldn’t be true.

After all, the thing that gave me the privilege of being called his friend, was my ability to understand and make allowances. Somehow or other, he had had a bad quarter of an hour himself that morning. Perhaps in some queer way I couldn’t guess at, the discovery of his loss had brought up the old contradiction to stare him in the face — had given him a moment of almost superstitious panic, which, now that a rational explanation had suggested itself as an alternative, he didn’t feel like acknowledging the existence of, even to me.

I went over to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘‘ All right,” I said, “ let’s find it. I’m sure I haven’t anything better to do and if there turns out to be anything else you want to tell me about it later, why you can tell it and be sure that I shall try to understand. Come ! Let’s get down to business. What is your clue? ”

“ It’s almost childishly simple,” said Jeffrey. “ I’m ashamed of myself that I didn’t think of it the moment I discovered the loss, instead of blowing up that way. Why, you’ll think of it yourself in a minute. And here’s your chance ! ” he added, as a knock at the door interrupted us.

His Jap was out somewhere, so Jeffrey answered it himself.

“ How do you do, Mr. Peterson,” he said, and ushered the stranger in.

Peterson was a clumsy looking man of the “skilled mechanic” type; warmly and comfortably and properly dressed enough, but his clothes looking as if he were in the habit of getting down on his hands and knees and carrying heavy objects around in his pockets.

“ Mr. Peterson,” said Jeffrey, “ is the decorator who did over the building last Fall.” Then he astonished me by turning to Peterson and saying: “ Pm thinking of having a little more work done. Oh, this is perfectly satisfactory and I wouldn’t think of calling in the landlord. It’s on my own account entirely. Don’t you think yourself. Drew,” he turned to me, “ that the walls would compose into better looking panels, if we had a second frieze carried around there about a third of the way down? ”

“ I don’t know anything about art or composition,” said I. “You certainly know that. You will have to decide that for yourself.”

It was too ridiculous. Here was Jeffrey who had run away for a two months’ vacation because the decorators got on his nerves, deliberately invoking them again, when he got back. Naturally enough, Peterson favored the project.

“That’s, very well done,” said Jeffrey, “ — the 20 upper frieze. It’s very skilled work, you know. Has to be done by hand.” Then he turned back to Peterson. “ I’d want the same man to do it that did the other.”

Peterson shook his head. “ I can’t accommodate you there, I’m afraid, sir. I had to turn that fellow off. Oh, he was a good workman, but rules are rules.”

“ He came on the job drunk, I suppose,” said Jeffrey.

“ No,” said Peterson, he was steady enough. Why, I don’t mind telling you, though it seems rather hard, I turned him off because his wages were garnisheed by a Loan Office. You can’t get skilled work out of men with that on their minds.”

“ I see,” said Jeffrey. “ But you think you could find me someone else just as good?”

“ Oh, yes,” said Peterson. “ No trouble about that.”

“ Well,” said Jeffrey, “ I’ll let you know. Call you up in the morning when I’ve made up my mind. Thank you very much for coming.”

Peterson had opened the door and was in the act of starting out, Jeffrey watching him absent-mindedly, a frown on his face.

“ Poor devil,” he said, under his breath. Then suddenly struck with an idea, he called out. “ Oh, Peterson. Give me that chap’s address, will you — the one you discharged. I’m supposed to belong to 21 some sort of protective league for that Loan Shark business. Maybe we could do something to help him out.”

Peterson hesitated a minute, then took a shabby notebook out of his pocket and read out the name and the address of the man he had discharged.