Romance Classics (103 page)

“Drunk,” MacEwen supplied the ugly word. Nora flinched from it, but they saw her accept it.

“She rarely ever drank,” she said faintly. “She would never have struck me — please don’t believe she made a habit of that — ”

“And after that, Nora?” asked Captain Rodolfson gently.

Nora drew a long, hard breath and tilted her chin, tears slipping unheeded down her face.

“And then she opened the door of the stateroom and pushed me outside and locked the door on me,” she whispered piteously. “I was in the salon when Claire came for me and took me in with her. And this morning when I got up, the cabin door was unlocked and I went in to get dressed. And Mother wasn’t there. She isn’t anywhere on the ship — not anywhere at all!”

It was a cry of such childish grief and at the same time such adult heartache that there were murmurs of sympathy around the table, and MacEwen said huskily to Captain Rodolfson, “May I take her out now, sir?”

“I’m truly sorry, MacEwen. I’m afraid not. Not quite yet.”

There was a babble of voices, and Captain Rodolfson had some difficulty in quieting them so that the questioning could be resumed. Apparently no one had seen Vera since dinner last night, until the question reached Claire.

For a moment she sat very still, and then she turned her eyes on Curt and said quite clearly, “I think, Captain, that Mr. Wayne must have been the last person to see Mrs. Barclay.”

Curt stared at her, frowning, and Claire managed the faintest of smiles that was scarcely more than a grimace as she went on relentlessly.

“I saw him leaving her cabin at two o’clock this morning,” she stated so quietly that for a stunned moment no one seemed quite to realize what she had said.

Claire saw the astonishment melt from Curt’s eyes, to be replaced by an anger so blazing hot that she almost, but not quite, quailed beneath it.

“So that’s what you believe!” His voice was a thin thread of sound that barely reached her ears above the sudden hubbub about the tale.

“Well, Curt?” demanded Captain Rodolfson, managing to silence the hubbub, his face showing something of the amazement Claire’s words had brought to him.

“Miss Frazier is partly mistaken,” said Curt clearly. “I was leaving Mrs. Barclay’s cabin door, not her room. I had not been inside the room, nor had I seen her since dinner.”

“And what had taken you to the cabin door, Curt? Speak up, man — you know as well as I do that we’ve got to get to the bottom of all this.”

“One of the crewmen, swabbing the decks, heard a woman crying in the salon and came to summon me,” Curt answered quietly. “He knew something should be done about it and quite right he was. I went into the salon — ”

“But I didn’t see you!” Nora stammered, wide-eyed.

Curt smiled at her. “Of course you didn’t,” he told her gently. “I knew you must have quarreled with your mother, and I went down to see what I could do about it. When she wouldn’t answer the knock at her door, I went back to my own quarters to arrange a place for you to finish the night. When I came back, I saw you and Claire going down the corridor to her room, so I knew she could do a much better job of taking care of you than I could. And I thought you need not find out that anyone except Claire had known about whatever it was that you and your mother were on the outs about.”

Captain Rodolfson had listened with the closest attention, scowling.

“So you didn’t see Mrs. Barclay after dinner?” he probed. “I did not.”

“When you knocked at her door, there was no answer?”

“None at all, sir.” There was no doubting the firmness, the utter conviction of his voice.

The questioning moved on, and Claire leaned closer to Curt and asked softly, “Is that the truth?”

Curt’s eyes were cold and bleak.

“Would you like me to take an oath on it?” he asked.

Color poured into her face and her eyes were shamed.

“I’m sorry, Curt,” she whispered unsteadily.

There was no softening of his hard, set face or warming of the bleak look.

“I should think you would be,” he told her savagely, and returned to his note-taking.

It was not until Major Lesley was reached in the inquiry that there was any break in the steady flow of denials that anyone had seen Vera since dinner.

Major Lesley was in obvious distress when the captain asked the question.

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” the Major’s voice was almost a wail, “I’m so terribly afraid, sir, that I know what must have happened. And worst of all, I know why!”

He looked piteously at Nora, who was staring at him.

“I’m so terribly sorry, my dear,” he said softly.

“Then you did know all along,” Nora whispered as though even now she could not make herself accept that fact.

“Not from the very first, my dear,” Major Lesley told Nora, as though only they two were concerned. “Later, I became sure. But I tried to tell her, Nora, that I was no longer on duty, that I’d keep the secret. I gave her my word. Since she was leaving the country anyway and I had retired from active duty, I couldn’t see that any good purpose would be served by revealing what I knew. But she became overwrought when she discovered we were putting in at a British port because, of course, extradition is possible under British law — ”

The captain was becoming more and more puzzled, and his color was rising.

“What the devil are you talking about, Major? Speak up, man, if you know what happened to Mrs. Barclay,” he demanded in a voice that his crewmen had long ago learned meant they must step lively.

“Oh,” said Major Lesley innocently, “Mrs. Barclay went overboard, sir.”

There was a stunned moment as though, with horror piling on horror, surprise on surprise, no one could manage any answer or make a sound.

“You mean she was murdered?” cried the captain sharply.

“Oh, dear me, no, sir, no! I mean she went overboard of her own will.”

Nora gave a little moan and hid her face against MacEwen’s shoulder.

“Suicide, then? But why?” thundered the captain.

Major Lesley looked once more at Nora, pleading for her forgiveness.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to tell them, Nora,” he said piteously.

“You’d better, Major and be quick about it,” Captain Rodolfson raged.

“Mrs. Barclay, sir, was a notorious confidence woman and she knew I’d recognized her,” said Major Lesley with painful brevity.

“A
what?”
cried the captain.

“You see, sir, before I retired I worked for a firm of private investigators,” Major Lesley said quietly, having himself under better control now that he had mentioned his former work. “One of the best in the business, if I may say so. Mrs. Barclay cut a wide swath. She was very clever, even brilliant. She would appear in a city, establish herself as a wealthy matron with a young daughter, enter the daughter in a fashionable school and then manage to get a job somewhere where she could have the handling of considerable sums of money, always explaining that she found it very tiresome to be idle and letting it be known that she worked for career satisfaction, not for the money. And then one day, Mrs. Barclay and her daughter would be strangely missing — along with a very large sum of cash.”

“A cheat and a swindler,” marveled the captain.

“She was very clever and very elusive,” Major Lesley went on painfully. “Once or twice the law caught up with her. But she never came to trial; there was always something in the case that her swindled employers preferred not to have known — ”

“Blackmail?” demanded the captain sternly.

Major Lesley nodded unwillingly.

“It would seem so, sir,” he agreed, and kept his eyes carefully away from Nora, huddled close in MacEwen’s arms. “So you see, when she saw me aboard the ship, she jumped to the conclusion that I was pursuing her relentlessly, that I meant to turn her over to the authorities.”

He glanced about the faces along the length of the table, and there was more than a hint of apology in his manner and in his voice.

“I suppose I should have.” There was only a trace of defensiveness in his voice. “It was probably my duty, only — well, I was so tired of being a man-hunter. I’d never liked hunting down some hapless wretch, though I knew it had to be done. But once I’d retired and had set out to fulfill a boyhood dream aboard the
Highland Queen
— well, I just hadn’t the heart to bring her down. I tried to tell her so; I thought I had convinced her that she was safe.”

“That,” snapped Mr. Hennessy, speaking for the first time and in a tone of stern censure, “is the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard of. How dared you neglect your duty — ”

“But I told you, I’ve retired,” Major Lesley pleaded.

“Not from the human race, I hope.” Mr. Hennessy was deeply indignant. “And a woman like that is — was — a menace to all decent people.”

He broke off so sharply that Claire knew his wife had kicked him beneath the table, and he glanced at her, then followed the direction of her eyes to Nora, and flushed.

“I’m sorry — ” he began, and then, his brows drawn together in an angry frown, “Or am I? What about the girl, Major?”

Nora lifted a white, terrified face, and Major Lesley said swiftly, “Nora was never implicated in any of her mother’s illegal activities.”

“Oh, but that’s nonsense!” snorted Hennessy. “She must have known what was going on. How could she help it?”

“I didn’t, Mr. Hennessy, truly,” said Nora, steadying her voice with an effort. “I suppose that makes me sound an awful fool. But I didn’t know until we boarded the
Highland Queen
. Oh, I always wondered why we rarely stayed more than six months in a place. I was always making friends, getting good grades in school, and then I’d come home some afternoon and Mother would be packing. And she’d say so gaily, ‘Hurry up and pack, baby — we’re off to new places. This one bores me.’ And off we’d go.”

They were all watching her, listening to her, and there was pity in their eyes. Even Mr. Hennessy looked a little ashamed of himself.

“If you knew nothing of what she was up to, where did you think the money came from that put you in a fashionable school and no doubt gave you good-looking clothes, probably a car,” he wanted to know.

“Oh, Mother told me my father had left it to us, that he had been wealthy and that she liked to travel, but that she wanted me to have an education — ” She broke off and looked piteously about the table. “I know I must have been a fool to have accepted all that. But how was I to know? I just thought she was bored and wanted to live somewhere else, until this time. I wanted so much to graduate with my class. I’d only been in it a few months, but I’d worked very hard and I’d looked forward to all the graduation parties and proms and things. So when she said we were leaving, just two months before graduation, I said I wouldn’t go, and then she had to tell me. And I was terrified, and then when she saw Major Lesley and was so sure she had seen him before — ” She spread her hands in a little gesture of hopelessness.

“I have a very good memory for faces,” said the Major with due modesty. “Mrs. Barclay had managed to evade newspaper photographers on the one or two occasions when she had been apprehended. But I happened to be present one afternoon when she was arraigned. I’ve never forgotten her. She was so very casual, so much the great lady, laughing up her sleeve at the court, and when the company she had victimized dropped the charges against her, for reasons no one but the head of the company, I imagine, will ever know, she swept from the courtroom like an empress. No, I never forgot her. I knew I’d seen her somewhere. I’m a little surprised that she should have remembered me, though on her way out of the courtroom, she ran to avoid a newspaper photographer and stumbled into me. We collided, and she almost went down. I steadied her, and so she got a good long look at my face. And I got a good look at her face. And when we met aboard the Queen, we both remembered.”

He glanced around the table, shrinking a little from the wide-eyed gaze of the other passengers. There was a small, taut silence, and then the captain sighed heavily and passed his hand over his balding head as he peered sharply at the Major, who met his eyes diffidently.

“And that’s why you believe she jumped overboard some time last night,” he said heavily, and his tone made it a statement rather than a question.

“I can’t see what else could have happened, Captain, do you?” the Major asked painfully.

“I’m sure it must have,” said Nora. And now she had withdrawn herself from MacEwen’s embrace and was facing them all with a young, very touching dignity. “And I’m terribly sorry for all the trouble she and I have caused. Please, Captain, may I be excused?”

It was like a well-mannered, carefully brought up child who wishes to leave the table before its elders, and the captain cleared his throat before he could answer. When he did his voice was gruff, yet somehow gentle as though he, too, had been deeply touched.

“Of course, child, of course.”

She got to her feet and turned toward the doorway, and instantly MacEwen was on his feet, following her, leaving a silence behind them that no one seemed in any hurry to break.

Captain Rodolfson got to his feet at last and looked the length of the table and said stiffly, “So that’s it, I suppose, until whatever authorities the line wishes to send aboard at our next port of call. You’ll hold yourself in readiness, Major, for whatever questions they wish to ask; they will probably wish to question all of you again.”

Claire came upon MacEwen just outside Vera’s cabin, and he was scowling blackly. As he saw her, he came swiftly to meet her, his scowl lifting slightly.

“Look, here, Claire, you’ve got to make her see reason,” he burst out swiftly. “She has some crazy idea that because her mother was — well, not quite what she seemed, I should have nothing more to do with her. As if it made any difference to me what her mother was. It’s Nora I love and want to marry.”

“Oh, Mac, you must give her a little time to pull herself together after this horrible shock,” Claire pointed out.

“Well, sure, I’ll give her all the time in the world, only I want to help her! She needs me, and I want to be with her, see her through. I don’t think she realizes what this investigation is going to mean. She’s going to be right in the center of it, and it could be pretty rough. She mustn’t go through it alone. She’s got to let me look after her, stand up for her — ”