As I remember it after five years, the foregoing is a pretty accurate summary of the situation when Charley Kincaid was accused of first-degree murder and committed for trial. Other people, chiefly negroes, were suspected (at the loyal instigation of Charley Kincaid’s friends), and several arrests were made, but nothing ever came of them, and upon what grounds they were based I have long forgotten. One group, in spite of the disappearance of the pistol, claimed persistently that it was a suicide and suggested some ingenious reasons to account for the absence of the weapon.
Now when it is known how Marie Bannerman happened to die so savagely and so violently, it would be easy for me, of all people, to say that I believed in Charley Kincaid all the time. But I didn’t. I thought that he had killed her, and at the same time I knew that I loved him with all my heart. That it was I who first happened upon the evidence which set him free was due not to any faith in his innocence but to a strange vividness with which, in moods of excitement, certain scenes stamp themselves on my memory, so that I can remember every detail and how that detail struck me at the time.
It was one afternoon early in July, when the case against Charley Kincaid seemed to be at its strongest, that the horror of the actual murder slipped away from me for a moment and I began to think about other incidents of that same haunted night. Something Marie Bannerman had said to me in the dressing-room persistently eluded me, bothered me—not because I believed it to be important, but simply because I couldn’t remember. It was gone from me, as if it had been a part of the fantastic undercurrent of small-town life which I had felt so strongly that evening, the sense that things were in the air, old secrets, old loves and feuds, and unresolved situations, that I, an outsider, could never fully understand. Just for a minute it seemed to me that Marie Bannerman had pushed aside the curtain; then it had dropped into place again—the house into which I might have looked was dark now forever.
Another incident, perhaps less important, also haunted me. The tragic events of a few minutes after had driven it from everyone’s mind, but I had a strong impression that for a brief space of time I wasn’t the only one to be surprised. When the audience had demanded an encore from Catherine Jones, her unwillingness to dance again had been so acute that she had been driven to the point of slapping the orchestra leader’s face. The discrepancy between his offense and the venom of the rebuff recurred to me again and again. It wasn’t natural—or, more important, it hadn’t seemed natural. In view of the fact that Catherine Jones had been drinking, it was explicable, but it worried me now as it had worried me then. Rather to lay its ghost than to do any investigating, I pressed an obliging young man into service and called on the leader of the band.
His name was Thomas, a very dark, very simple-hearted virtuoso of the traps, and it took less than ten minutes to find out that Catherine Jones’ gesture had surprised him as much as it had me. He had known her a long time, seen her at dances since she was a little girl—why, the very dance she did that night was one she had rehearsed with his orchestra a week before. And a few days later she had come to him and said she was sorry.
‘I knew she would,’ he concluded. ‘She’s a right good-hearted girl. My sister Katie was her nurse from when she was born up to the time she went to school.’
‘Your sister?’
‘Katie. She’s the maid out at the country-club. Katie Golstien. You been reading ’bout her in the papers in ’at Charley Kincaid case. She’s the maid. Katie Golstien. She’s the maid at the country-club what found the body of Miss Bannerman.’
‘So Katie was Miss Catherine Jones’ nurse?’
‘Yes ma’am.’
Going home, stimulated but unsatisfied, I asked my companion a quick question.
‘Were Catherine and Marie good friends?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘All the girls are good friends, here, except when two of them are tryin’ to get hold of the same man. Then they warm each other up a little.’
‘Why do you suppose Catherine hasn’t married? Hasn’t she got lots of beaux?’
‘Off and on. She only likes people for a day or so at a time. That is—all except Joe Cable.’
Now a scene burst upon me, broke over me like a dissolving wave. And suddenly, my mind shivering from the impact, I remembered what Marie Bannerman had said to me in the dressing-room: ‘Who else was it that saw?’ She had caught a glimpse of some one else, a figure passing so quickly that she could not identify it, out of the corner of her eye.
And suddenly, simultaneously, I seemed to see that figure, as if I too had been vaguely conscious of it at the time, just as one is aware of a familiar gait or outline on the street long before there is any flicker of recognition. On the corner of my own eye was stamped a hurrying figure—that might have been Catherine Jones.
But when the shot was fired, Catherine Jones was in full view of over fifty people. Was it credible that Katie Golstien, a woman of fifty, who as a nurse had been known and trusted by three generations of Davis people, would shoot down a young girl in cold blood at Catherine Jones’ command?
‘But when the shot was fired, Catherine Jones was in full view of over fifty people.’
That sentence beat in my head all night, taking on fantastic variations, dividing itself into phrases, segments, individual words.
‘But when the shot was fired—Catherine Jones was in full view—of over fifty people.’
When the shot was fired! What shot? The shot we heard. When the shot was fired … When the shot was fired …
The next morning at nine o’clock, with the pallor of sleeplessness buried under a quantity of paint such as I had never worn before or have since, I walked up a rickety flight of stairs to the Sheriff’s office.
Abercrombie, engrossed in his morning’s mail, looked up curiously as I came in the door.
‘Catherine Jones did it,’ I cried, struggling to keep the hysteria out of my voice. ‘She killed Marie Bannerman with a shot we didn’t hear because the orchestra was playing and everybody was pushing up the chairs. The shot we heard was when Katie fired the pistol out of the window after the music was stopped. To give Catherine an alibi!’
I was right—as everyone now knows; but for a week, until Katie Golstien broke down under a fierce and ruthless inquisition, nobody believed me. Even Charley Kincaid, as he afterward confessed, didn’t dare to think it could be true.
What had been the relations between Catherine and Joe Cable no one ever knew, but evidently she had determined that his clandestine affair with Marie Bannerman had gone too far.
Then Marie chanced to come into the women’s room while Catherine was dressing for her dance—and there again there is a certain obscurity, for Catherine always claimed that Marie got the revolver, threatened her with it and that in the ensuing struggle the trigger was pulled. In spite of everything I always rather liked Catherine Jones, but in justice it must be said that only a simple-minded and very exceptional jury would have let her off with five years. And in just about five years from her commitment my husband and I are going to make a round of the New York musical shows and look hard at all the members of the chorus from the very front row.
After the shooting she must have thought quickly. Katie was told to wait until the music stopped, fire the revolver out the window and then hide it—Catherine Jones neglected to specify where. Katie, on the verge of collapse, obeyed instructions, but she was never able to specify where she had hid the revolver. And no one ever knew until a year later, when Charley and I were on our honeymoon and Sheriff Abercrombie’s ugly weapon dropped out of my golf-bag on to a Hot Springs golf-links. The bag must have been standing just outside the dressing-room door; Katie’s trembling hand had dropped the revolver into the first aperture she could see.
We live in New York. Small towns make us both uncomfortable. Every day we read about