CHAPTER LXI.EpilogueSam says, bitterly, that the only thing I need to explain is the one thing that can ever be explained: how one girl, by changing her clothes and by washing her face, could turn a houseful of supposedly sensible people into a packet of blithering, bat-blind fools for a generous period of time. I can explain that, I think; but I am going to leave it until later, and go clear back to the second of July, the day that Gabrielle received the code letter.In her talk with John (John says it was in no sense a confession, that it was nothing but a taunt for us all, a final, regretless, high fling of defiance) there in his room, during the twenty minutes or so that she talked to him, before she shot herself, some things, which might still not be clear to us, were made plain. Also, many of Miss MacDonald’s previously formed opinions were directly or indirectly verified. Miss MacDonald had said, you remember, that the murder had been wickedly premeditated.“When I read that letter,” Gabrielle said to John, “and found myself penniless and planless on a Nevada ranch, I at once made up my mind to kill Danielle, the little fool, and take her place.”How she persuaded Danny to accept the idea of the masquerade, and to change clothes with her, on the fourth of July, we do not positively know. That is the “hole” that Miss MacDonald mentioned in her puzzle. To my mind, there is little doubt that she gained her way very easily, by using her own unhappiness and disappointment as tools with which to remove Danny’s scruples and prod her pity. I am sure, remembering Danny’s troubled manner at the time, that she consented unwillingly, that she thoroughly disliked the idea, and that she was afraid of its consequences.When the two girls went upstairs together, on the afternoon of the fourth of July, they must have gone to effect the transformation. Perhaps, then, for a brief minute or two, the thing did seem amusing to Danny; for I know that I heard the girls laughing together, as I have mentioned, when I was on my errand upstairs.We do not know, when the disguise had been completed, by what pretext Gabrielle lured Danny into the attic. Their trunks were in the attic. There could be a dozen simple reasons why Danny might consent to go up there with her. Coming downstairs again, Gabrielle caught her by the throat, and strangled her, instantly, by means of the deadly jiu-jitsu hold, which she had learned from her “Strangler” lover. It is a hold that requires little strength—though Gabrielle’s trained fingers were strong enough—but much scientific skill.She took the earrings from Danny’s ears—or, perhaps, Danny had not yet put them on—went to her own room, arranged her make-up, got into the wrap, which completely covered Danny’s clothes that she was wearing, pulled the hat down over her eyes to conceal the change in hairdressing, and walked through the living-room, for us all to see her, at four o’clock.When Chad went to the porch with her (this John found out by insistent questioning) she told him that Danny had left the house, earlier, by the back way. That she and Danny had arranged a joke on the rest of us, to enliven the dull afternoon, and asked him to help with it by calling, in Danny’s voice to her, when he came back into the house. Chad did it. That was why, since he was standing down by the front doors, the voice supposed to come from the upper hall had a strained and an unnatural sound. Gabrielle had reckoned that Chad, in spite of her request, would be too stupid to discover the facts. Probably she thought that, at any rate, she would be able to impose silence upon him. It was one of her many mistakes. We think that he must have known for the remainder of the afternoon that Gabrielle was masquerading as Danny. His happy mood was caused by the fact that Gabrielle had given him a confidence and had allowed him to perform a small service for her. When he saw what had happened, and when he realized that the girl whom he had worshipped was a murderer, he killed himself. Strange, that in spite of everything, he still loved her enough to leave the confessional note to shield her. The men think that he left the note to shield the rest of us, rather than to shield her. I do not believe it.She had planned to go straight around the house and re-enter it through the back door. Martha’s being by the rabbit hutch was something she had not counted on. It was necessary to distract Martha’s attention, and to get her to come at once into the house. She gave her the monkey bracelet. As she did so, probably because of the act of kindness, Martha made one of her frequent mistakes and called Gabrielle “Danny.” Gabrielle told John (concerning Martha, John also questioned her insistently) that she then showed Martha the poison in the charm, and told her that it was a love potion that would make Chad love her, “like a lady,” if she would swallow it, and never tell anyone anything about it. That, of course, was Martha’s secret concerning the happy surprise that had to do with herself and Chad.Martha out of the way, Gaby must have run quickly around to the back of the house and up the back stairway. To toss the hat and wrap back on the body, replace the earrings, scatter the pipe ashes over the beaded bag (I declare to goodness, I can more easily think of her lying there in her white silk dressing-gown, than I can think of her, brushing those pipe ashes up, from somewhere, in order to save them for that purpose), and drop the tatting shuttle there, required not more than one or two minutes of time. Another two or three minutes to wash her face thoroughly and to douse on some of Danny’s perfume, and she was coming downstairs again, with the headache that necessitated the drawing of the curtains—to make her safety a bit safer, just at first.She told John that those few minutes when she had to walk through the room, make the trip around the house, and get upstairs again, were the only moments of fright that she had had, from the first to the last. Once safely established in the rôle of Danny, she said, she knew that she had nothing to fear.I think, however, that there were other times when she was afraid. I am certain that real fear was there in her room, that day, when the engagement ring dropped from her finger. Though I believe that her fear, then, was caused wholly from superstition, and not from any dread that the slight difference between her hands and Danny’s hands might be noticed.I am sure that her fear for John, on the fourth of July, was real enough. She knew that each minute he was away, longer than the time necessary for the trip, was a minute lost from the perfect alibi she had so mistakenly tried to arrange for him by sending him away from the ranch. She had not known that Danny’s fingers had closed on the stair’s tread. When John came in the back way she was afraid that it would be remembered later—as it was—and that someone would suspect—as Hubert Hand did suspect—that John had carried the body in at that time.She had counted on her note to Danny, and on the fact that, as Danny, she was downstairs within ten or twelve minutes after the time we had seen Gaby walking down the path and had heard Danny’s voice calling after her, to prove her own innocence. They, and the gentleness of Danny’s disposition, did this to perfection.Her original plan had been to prove that Sam was the murderer. With Sam out of the way, and with John in possession of his fortune, she had thought, I suppose, that she would have no trouble in persuading John to leave the Desert Moon. But she was afraid of the idea. Knowing John’s devotion to Sam, she could not reckon, with any sureness, how disgrace and sorrow might affect John. It was too big a risk to take, unreservedly. So, though she picked the quarrel with Sam, strewed the pipe ashes on the bag, put the key in the fireplace, wrote on the photograph, she left loopholes in the shapes of the many other false clues. It is only my own notion that, if she had not thought the definite accusation of Sam, which she made during the session on the fifth of July, was necessary to protect John, she would have backed out, by that time, and not have made it.It is again only my notion that the request, which she put in her note to Danny, to have Danny take her body to San Francisco for cremation, was made because she thought that it would be desirable for her to be able to leave the ranch at once—perhaps for several weeks. Mrs. Ricker’s expressed suspicion probably made her realize the wisdom of returning as rapidly as possible to the Desert Moon.Gabrielle Canneziano was a born criminal. Almost all of her life had been spent among criminals. She knew their ways, and she knew the ways of honest people toward them. Consequently, she was too clever to drop her disguise, even for a minute, in San Francisco. When, on the afternoon of the fourth of July, she had come downstairs as Danny, she had come resolved from that time forth to be Danny, in thought and in deed, up to the level best of her ability. That she never doubted her ability to turn from black to white within the space of an hour, is a splendid example of Miss MacDonald’s contention concerning the egotism of criminals.Miss MacDonald says that her first real clue was the one I gave to her when I said that no one, except Gaby herself, who would do such a wicked thing, had ever been on the ranch. If she had been on the ranch, she might have committed the murder. She had all three of the primary motives for murder: love, revenge, and greed. The unique feature in this case—Miss MacDonald says that each case has its unique feature—was that the murdered girl had been a duplicate twin.The hazy, incomplete notion, Miss MacDonald says, had just come into her mind; she had not begun to accept it, she was only allowing it, dimly, to take form, when I returned to the room that day with my hand full of letters written by Danny. Handwriting, as surely as fingerprints, Miss MacDonald says, proves identity.She asked me, straight, whether I had seen Danny writing the checks and addressing the envelopes. I answered, straight and positively, that I had. (And not twenty minutes before that Miss MacDonald had warned me that people often thought that they saw things they did not see.)I had not. I had seen the person whom I supposed was Danny writing checks and addressing envelopes. I had turned my back on her, and had walked to the door, when she called after me and gave me the envelopes containing the checks.Danny herself had written those checks and had addressed those envelopes on the third of July. Owing to all the furore that had been going on in the house that day, she had left her desk before she had torn the checks from her check-book, and had never gone back to it to finish her task. It is possible that Gabrielle had deliberately arranged that, also; but I think not. At any rate, she had had the checks in her possession, and had waited for a date that had a three, or an eight in it, to produce them. Circumstances and I played well into her hands that day; she had only to insert a one in front of the three to make me her fool.Miss MacDonald, as you have seen, blames herself and not me for the mistake. She says that she should have known better than to believe me; or, to quote her exactly, she should have “doubted your accuracy of observation.” But, not until the morning that we found Daniel Canneziano murdered did it occur to her to doubt it.She says that it was not clairvoyance, not intuition, not even common sense, that it was nothing but a memory that took her, that morning, straight back to the idea that Gabrielle Canneziano could be the guilty person. Oddly, the conviction had come to her before we found Canneziano’s body.Sitting across the table from Gabrielle, posing as Danny, that morning at breakfast, she had thought, idly, of the breakfast that she and Danny had had together in the dining-car. She had taken her chair, that morning, just as Danny had handed the order slip for her breakfast to the waiter. Too vaguely to be certain that it was really a memory, she seemed to see that slip of paper covered with writing. Just then, with the aroma of coffee in her nostrils, and with her iced grapefruit and rolls in front of her, she remembered that it was the same breakfast both she and Danny had had that morning. Would such a small order cover an order slip with handwriting? Not, it was certain, with the neat handwriting that had made out those checks and addressed those envelopes. Right then she resolved to lose no more time; to get, as soon as possible, a sample of the handwriting of the girl who was sitting across the table from her.Canneziano’s murder, discovered in the next half hour, strengthened her vague suspicions into as much of a certainty as she ever allowed herself before she had positive evidence.As I have written, she spent the following week in efforts to get that evidence; at last, fearing that she was suspected, she detailed the task to me.You have seen how I failed. How Gabrielle at once saw through my trick of attempting to disable my right hand by burning it; and how, realizing that she was trapped, she had run upstairs, first to satisfy her longing to be herself again, even for a few brief minutes, then to taunt John, and, finally, to take her own life.For I think, in spite of her denials to John, that she killed herself because she knew that she was trapped, though her vanity and her audacity held to the end.“I knew I should have no trouble in making you believe that silly doll story,” she said. “It was the truth, I knew, too, that the dick would read the code letter. She was so slow about it, that I had to steal it to make her do it. It was time, you see, for the gentle Danielle’s story to be verified. I knew that the dick had a copy of it—she’d been baiting me with the thing. I have kept a step or two ahead of her lumbering pace, all the time.“Don’t fancy that I had overlooked the matter of the handwriting. I’m not a fool. I thought of it before I killed the girl. There were a dozen ways I could have gotten around it—could yet get around it. If necessary, I could even have disabled my own right hand. I had rather planned, at first, to do that. But, later, I found that I loved my pretty little white hand better than I had supposed. Just as I have discovered that I loved the gay Gaby better than I had supposed—so well, indeed, that I have decided that death as Gaby is infinitely preferable to life as the shiny nosed Danielle. I have seen this coming. I have not cared.“I got rid of that cur, Canneziano, not because I was afraid of him, but because he tried to double cross me. I had promised to do much for him, after you and I were married; and he would have sold me out for a few thousand dollars. He came here, hoping that Danny might pay him a pretty sum for his silence about my past. He knew his muttons. She would have been fool enough to have done it; poor slain sister stuff; more to be pitied than blamed—all that, you know. He should have played with me, instead of against me. I had a few old scores to settle with him. Most of my rage about the money was because I had thought it would be such good fun to get the best of him. And I did—so that is all right. I hid in his room early that evening. It was frightfully amusing to watch him locking his door and his windows to make his sleep a safe one. It was. I did the job so neatly that he never woke at all.“For that matter, it has all been amusing. You have all been such utter fools. But I am tired of it now. Oh, very tired. Particularly, I am tired of my cruel plan to destroy the gay Gaby by burying her alive. I am going now to do it in a swifter, kinder way.”Sam insists that her success, even for so short a time, is an indictment against all of us; that it shows that none of us was capable of looking deeper than clothes and face paint. I do not agree with him. Gabrielle was a professional actress. She had lived with Danny long enough to learn all her ways, her mannerisms, her habits in conversation. She did not dupe Chad, who loved her, and who was an expert in voices. She did not dupe Canneziano, who had known both of the girls all their lives.The murder itself, by stupefying us all with horror, with fear, with suspicions, did much to help her. But without that dulling of our perceptions, I think that the imposture would have been successful. At the time of the murder, the two girls had been on the ranch with us less than two months. Strangers never get much deeper than surfaces in so short a time. There was nothing remarkable, it seems to me, about her being able, quite easily, to deceive all of us, with the single, glaring exception of John.John is one of a large class of people who could all be filed under the recipe for simple acceptors. It is a necessary class; a class that acts as an oil to the hinges of the world, making it move smoothly: the gentle, thoroughly honest class that by quietly believing what it is told to believe, keeps us out of revolutions, and rebellions, and the like. I am not saying that the doubters and the rebels are not necessary (as Sam would say, “It takes that sort to make all sorts”), but Heaven help us if they predominated.When John came home from Rattail, on the fourth of July, he was faced with the apparent fact that Danny, in the course of a few hours, had changed essentially. That was what had bothered him so; what had made him jerk his head, and blink his eyes, and complain of a touch of sun. John had never recognized, much less admitted to himself, that there was the slightest similarity between the two girls. Consequently, in spite of a change, Danny must be Danny; she looked like Danny, she talked like Danny, and we all said that she was Danny. John believed.Very shortly after that, John was faced with another apparent fact. Gaby had been murdered. He could see that, with his own eyes, as we all could see it.He at once set the fact of Danny’s change against the fact of Gaby’s murder—and there he stuck fast; too loyal to go further; too dismayed to retreat. He did not believe that Danny had killed Gabrielle. He had known Danny too well to harbor such a belief. He was forced to believe that she knew who had done it. Consequently, her accusation of Sam could be nothing but a wicked accusation. Only—Danny could not be wicked.The mystery was a torture which Danny’s presence intensified unbearably; so he avoided her; and, unable to blame her for anything, blamed himself and hated himself for his suspicions and for his failing loyalty. I’ll venture, though it can be only a venture, that the realization of his interest in Miss MacDonald, and his inability to be rid of it, was another cause for John’s befuddlement.That interest, of course, has all disappeared for the present. Though he despised himself for it, John might have been untrue to a changed, living Danny; might, in the end, have jilted her meanly. John is male. But to a Danny who is no longer living, John, now, must always be true. John is young. I reckon he has fine honest plans for being faithful to her memory for the remainder of his life. Miss MacDonald is also young, and lovely, and heart whole. She has promised to come and visit us for a month next June.Just now, with our thermometers at fifty below zero, and our chilblains burning, and the coyotes piercing the nights with their lank, long, frozen screeches, and the cold old owls always grieving forth their mournful “chuck-a-loo, whoo, whoo, whoo’s” June looks mighty far away.But, five fingers and a thumb, and she will be here, smelling of sunshine and tasting like smiles; painting our deserts with rainbow colors for as far as the eyes can see; spreading sunsets that catch you right up into their midsts; offering dawns that share their youth with you and that make you believe all over again in things which you had long ago stopped believing. Now I don’t know shucks about romance; but I have a notion that June, in our northeastern Nevada, stirs up whole batches of the stuff. I am counting on her to serve it, fresh and sweet, this year.It isn’t June, though, and it isn’t romance that I am trusting for the final chore: it is something more lasting than either, something sturdier, something for which I can not find a name. But I know that it is induced by a mixture of long years of right living, and clean thinking, and sanity, and courage; so I am expecting it to clear away the shadows from the Desert Moon and leave it, riding high as it used to ride, high and proud, a brave, shining thing in our valley.The End
Sam says, bitterly, that the only thing I need to explain is the one thing that can ever be explained: how one girl, by changing her clothes and by washing her face, could turn a houseful of supposedly sensible people into a packet of blithering, bat-blind fools for a generous period of time. I can explain that, I think; but I am going to leave it until later, and go clear back to the second of July, the day that Gabrielle received the code letter.
In her talk with John (John says it was in no sense a confession, that it was nothing but a taunt for us all, a final, regretless, high fling of defiance) there in his room, during the twenty minutes or so that she talked to him, before she shot herself, some things, which might still not be clear to us, were made plain. Also, many of Miss MacDonald’s previously formed opinions were directly or indirectly verified. Miss MacDonald had said, you remember, that the murder had been wickedly premeditated.
“When I read that letter,” Gabrielle said to John, “and found myself penniless and planless on a Nevada ranch, I at once made up my mind to kill Danielle, the little fool, and take her place.”
How she persuaded Danny to accept the idea of the masquerade, and to change clothes with her, on the fourth of July, we do not positively know. That is the “hole” that Miss MacDonald mentioned in her puzzle. To my mind, there is little doubt that she gained her way very easily, by using her own unhappiness and disappointment as tools with which to remove Danny’s scruples and prod her pity. I am sure, remembering Danny’s troubled manner at the time, that she consented unwillingly, that she thoroughly disliked the idea, and that she was afraid of its consequences.
When the two girls went upstairs together, on the afternoon of the fourth of July, they must have gone to effect the transformation. Perhaps, then, for a brief minute or two, the thing did seem amusing to Danny; for I know that I heard the girls laughing together, as I have mentioned, when I was on my errand upstairs.
We do not know, when the disguise had been completed, by what pretext Gabrielle lured Danny into the attic. Their trunks were in the attic. There could be a dozen simple reasons why Danny might consent to go up there with her. Coming downstairs again, Gabrielle caught her by the throat, and strangled her, instantly, by means of the deadly jiu-jitsu hold, which she had learned from her “Strangler” lover. It is a hold that requires little strength—though Gabrielle’s trained fingers were strong enough—but much scientific skill.
She took the earrings from Danny’s ears—or, perhaps, Danny had not yet put them on—went to her own room, arranged her make-up, got into the wrap, which completely covered Danny’s clothes that she was wearing, pulled the hat down over her eyes to conceal the change in hairdressing, and walked through the living-room, for us all to see her, at four o’clock.
When Chad went to the porch with her (this John found out by insistent questioning) she told him that Danny had left the house, earlier, by the back way. That she and Danny had arranged a joke on the rest of us, to enliven the dull afternoon, and asked him to help with it by calling, in Danny’s voice to her, when he came back into the house. Chad did it. That was why, since he was standing down by the front doors, the voice supposed to come from the upper hall had a strained and an unnatural sound. Gabrielle had reckoned that Chad, in spite of her request, would be too stupid to discover the facts. Probably she thought that, at any rate, she would be able to impose silence upon him. It was one of her many mistakes. We think that he must have known for the remainder of the afternoon that Gabrielle was masquerading as Danny. His happy mood was caused by the fact that Gabrielle had given him a confidence and had allowed him to perform a small service for her. When he saw what had happened, and when he realized that the girl whom he had worshipped was a murderer, he killed himself. Strange, that in spite of everything, he still loved her enough to leave the confessional note to shield her. The men think that he left the note to shield the rest of us, rather than to shield her. I do not believe it.
She had planned to go straight around the house and re-enter it through the back door. Martha’s being by the rabbit hutch was something she had not counted on. It was necessary to distract Martha’s attention, and to get her to come at once into the house. She gave her the monkey bracelet. As she did so, probably because of the act of kindness, Martha made one of her frequent mistakes and called Gabrielle “Danny.” Gabrielle told John (concerning Martha, John also questioned her insistently) that she then showed Martha the poison in the charm, and told her that it was a love potion that would make Chad love her, “like a lady,” if she would swallow it, and never tell anyone anything about it. That, of course, was Martha’s secret concerning the happy surprise that had to do with herself and Chad.
Martha out of the way, Gaby must have run quickly around to the back of the house and up the back stairway. To toss the hat and wrap back on the body, replace the earrings, scatter the pipe ashes over the beaded bag (I declare to goodness, I can more easily think of her lying there in her white silk dressing-gown, than I can think of her, brushing those pipe ashes up, from somewhere, in order to save them for that purpose), and drop the tatting shuttle there, required not more than one or two minutes of time. Another two or three minutes to wash her face thoroughly and to douse on some of Danny’s perfume, and she was coming downstairs again, with the headache that necessitated the drawing of the curtains—to make her safety a bit safer, just at first.
She told John that those few minutes when she had to walk through the room, make the trip around the house, and get upstairs again, were the only moments of fright that she had had, from the first to the last. Once safely established in the rôle of Danny, she said, she knew that she had nothing to fear.
I think, however, that there were other times when she was afraid. I am certain that real fear was there in her room, that day, when the engagement ring dropped from her finger. Though I believe that her fear, then, was caused wholly from superstition, and not from any dread that the slight difference between her hands and Danny’s hands might be noticed.
I am sure that her fear for John, on the fourth of July, was real enough. She knew that each minute he was away, longer than the time necessary for the trip, was a minute lost from the perfect alibi she had so mistakenly tried to arrange for him by sending him away from the ranch. She had not known that Danny’s fingers had closed on the stair’s tread. When John came in the back way she was afraid that it would be remembered later—as it was—and that someone would suspect—as Hubert Hand did suspect—that John had carried the body in at that time.
She had counted on her note to Danny, and on the fact that, as Danny, she was downstairs within ten or twelve minutes after the time we had seen Gaby walking down the path and had heard Danny’s voice calling after her, to prove her own innocence. They, and the gentleness of Danny’s disposition, did this to perfection.
Her original plan had been to prove that Sam was the murderer. With Sam out of the way, and with John in possession of his fortune, she had thought, I suppose, that she would have no trouble in persuading John to leave the Desert Moon. But she was afraid of the idea. Knowing John’s devotion to Sam, she could not reckon, with any sureness, how disgrace and sorrow might affect John. It was too big a risk to take, unreservedly. So, though she picked the quarrel with Sam, strewed the pipe ashes on the bag, put the key in the fireplace, wrote on the photograph, she left loopholes in the shapes of the many other false clues. It is only my own notion that, if she had not thought the definite accusation of Sam, which she made during the session on the fifth of July, was necessary to protect John, she would have backed out, by that time, and not have made it.
It is again only my notion that the request, which she put in her note to Danny, to have Danny take her body to San Francisco for cremation, was made because she thought that it would be desirable for her to be able to leave the ranch at once—perhaps for several weeks. Mrs. Ricker’s expressed suspicion probably made her realize the wisdom of returning as rapidly as possible to the Desert Moon.
Gabrielle Canneziano was a born criminal. Almost all of her life had been spent among criminals. She knew their ways, and she knew the ways of honest people toward them. Consequently, she was too clever to drop her disguise, even for a minute, in San Francisco. When, on the afternoon of the fourth of July, she had come downstairs as Danny, she had come resolved from that time forth to be Danny, in thought and in deed, up to the level best of her ability. That she never doubted her ability to turn from black to white within the space of an hour, is a splendid example of Miss MacDonald’s contention concerning the egotism of criminals.
Miss MacDonald says that her first real clue was the one I gave to her when I said that no one, except Gaby herself, who would do such a wicked thing, had ever been on the ranch. If she had been on the ranch, she might have committed the murder. She had all three of the primary motives for murder: love, revenge, and greed. The unique feature in this case—Miss MacDonald says that each case has its unique feature—was that the murdered girl had been a duplicate twin.
The hazy, incomplete notion, Miss MacDonald says, had just come into her mind; she had not begun to accept it, she was only allowing it, dimly, to take form, when I returned to the room that day with my hand full of letters written by Danny. Handwriting, as surely as fingerprints, Miss MacDonald says, proves identity.
She asked me, straight, whether I had seen Danny writing the checks and addressing the envelopes. I answered, straight and positively, that I had. (And not twenty minutes before that Miss MacDonald had warned me that people often thought that they saw things they did not see.)
I had not. I had seen the person whom I supposed was Danny writing checks and addressing envelopes. I had turned my back on her, and had walked to the door, when she called after me and gave me the envelopes containing the checks.
Danny herself had written those checks and had addressed those envelopes on the third of July. Owing to all the furore that had been going on in the house that day, she had left her desk before she had torn the checks from her check-book, and had never gone back to it to finish her task. It is possible that Gabrielle had deliberately arranged that, also; but I think not. At any rate, she had had the checks in her possession, and had waited for a date that had a three, or an eight in it, to produce them. Circumstances and I played well into her hands that day; she had only to insert a one in front of the three to make me her fool.
Miss MacDonald, as you have seen, blames herself and not me for the mistake. She says that she should have known better than to believe me; or, to quote her exactly, she should have “doubted your accuracy of observation.” But, not until the morning that we found Daniel Canneziano murdered did it occur to her to doubt it.
She says that it was not clairvoyance, not intuition, not even common sense, that it was nothing but a memory that took her, that morning, straight back to the idea that Gabrielle Canneziano could be the guilty person. Oddly, the conviction had come to her before we found Canneziano’s body.
Sitting across the table from Gabrielle, posing as Danny, that morning at breakfast, she had thought, idly, of the breakfast that she and Danny had had together in the dining-car. She had taken her chair, that morning, just as Danny had handed the order slip for her breakfast to the waiter. Too vaguely to be certain that it was really a memory, she seemed to see that slip of paper covered with writing. Just then, with the aroma of coffee in her nostrils, and with her iced grapefruit and rolls in front of her, she remembered that it was the same breakfast both she and Danny had had that morning. Would such a small order cover an order slip with handwriting? Not, it was certain, with the neat handwriting that had made out those checks and addressed those envelopes. Right then she resolved to lose no more time; to get, as soon as possible, a sample of the handwriting of the girl who was sitting across the table from her.
Canneziano’s murder, discovered in the next half hour, strengthened her vague suspicions into as much of a certainty as she ever allowed herself before she had positive evidence.
As I have written, she spent the following week in efforts to get that evidence; at last, fearing that she was suspected, she detailed the task to me.
You have seen how I failed. How Gabrielle at once saw through my trick of attempting to disable my right hand by burning it; and how, realizing that she was trapped, she had run upstairs, first to satisfy her longing to be herself again, even for a few brief minutes, then to taunt John, and, finally, to take her own life.
For I think, in spite of her denials to John, that she killed herself because she knew that she was trapped, though her vanity and her audacity held to the end.
“I knew I should have no trouble in making you believe that silly doll story,” she said. “It was the truth, I knew, too, that the dick would read the code letter. She was so slow about it, that I had to steal it to make her do it. It was time, you see, for the gentle Danielle’s story to be verified. I knew that the dick had a copy of it—she’d been baiting me with the thing. I have kept a step or two ahead of her lumbering pace, all the time.
“Don’t fancy that I had overlooked the matter of the handwriting. I’m not a fool. I thought of it before I killed the girl. There were a dozen ways I could have gotten around it—could yet get around it. If necessary, I could even have disabled my own right hand. I had rather planned, at first, to do that. But, later, I found that I loved my pretty little white hand better than I had supposed. Just as I have discovered that I loved the gay Gaby better than I had supposed—so well, indeed, that I have decided that death as Gaby is infinitely preferable to life as the shiny nosed Danielle. I have seen this coming. I have not cared.
“I got rid of that cur, Canneziano, not because I was afraid of him, but because he tried to double cross me. I had promised to do much for him, after you and I were married; and he would have sold me out for a few thousand dollars. He came here, hoping that Danny might pay him a pretty sum for his silence about my past. He knew his muttons. She would have been fool enough to have done it; poor slain sister stuff; more to be pitied than blamed—all that, you know. He should have played with me, instead of against me. I had a few old scores to settle with him. Most of my rage about the money was because I had thought it would be such good fun to get the best of him. And I did—so that is all right. I hid in his room early that evening. It was frightfully amusing to watch him locking his door and his windows to make his sleep a safe one. It was. I did the job so neatly that he never woke at all.
“For that matter, it has all been amusing. You have all been such utter fools. But I am tired of it now. Oh, very tired. Particularly, I am tired of my cruel plan to destroy the gay Gaby by burying her alive. I am going now to do it in a swifter, kinder way.”
Sam insists that her success, even for so short a time, is an indictment against all of us; that it shows that none of us was capable of looking deeper than clothes and face paint. I do not agree with him. Gabrielle was a professional actress. She had lived with Danny long enough to learn all her ways, her mannerisms, her habits in conversation. She did not dupe Chad, who loved her, and who was an expert in voices. She did not dupe Canneziano, who had known both of the girls all their lives.
The murder itself, by stupefying us all with horror, with fear, with suspicions, did much to help her. But without that dulling of our perceptions, I think that the imposture would have been successful. At the time of the murder, the two girls had been on the ranch with us less than two months. Strangers never get much deeper than surfaces in so short a time. There was nothing remarkable, it seems to me, about her being able, quite easily, to deceive all of us, with the single, glaring exception of John.
John is one of a large class of people who could all be filed under the recipe for simple acceptors. It is a necessary class; a class that acts as an oil to the hinges of the world, making it move smoothly: the gentle, thoroughly honest class that by quietly believing what it is told to believe, keeps us out of revolutions, and rebellions, and the like. I am not saying that the doubters and the rebels are not necessary (as Sam would say, “It takes that sort to make all sorts”), but Heaven help us if they predominated.
When John came home from Rattail, on the fourth of July, he was faced with the apparent fact that Danny, in the course of a few hours, had changed essentially. That was what had bothered him so; what had made him jerk his head, and blink his eyes, and complain of a touch of sun. John had never recognized, much less admitted to himself, that there was the slightest similarity between the two girls. Consequently, in spite of a change, Danny must be Danny; she looked like Danny, she talked like Danny, and we all said that she was Danny. John believed.
Very shortly after that, John was faced with another apparent fact. Gaby had been murdered. He could see that, with his own eyes, as we all could see it.
He at once set the fact of Danny’s change against the fact of Gaby’s murder—and there he stuck fast; too loyal to go further; too dismayed to retreat. He did not believe that Danny had killed Gabrielle. He had known Danny too well to harbor such a belief. He was forced to believe that she knew who had done it. Consequently, her accusation of Sam could be nothing but a wicked accusation. Only—Danny could not be wicked.
The mystery was a torture which Danny’s presence intensified unbearably; so he avoided her; and, unable to blame her for anything, blamed himself and hated himself for his suspicions and for his failing loyalty. I’ll venture, though it can be only a venture, that the realization of his interest in Miss MacDonald, and his inability to be rid of it, was another cause for John’s befuddlement.
That interest, of course, has all disappeared for the present. Though he despised himself for it, John might have been untrue to a changed, living Danny; might, in the end, have jilted her meanly. John is male. But to a Danny who is no longer living, John, now, must always be true. John is young. I reckon he has fine honest plans for being faithful to her memory for the remainder of his life. Miss MacDonald is also young, and lovely, and heart whole. She has promised to come and visit us for a month next June.
Just now, with our thermometers at fifty below zero, and our chilblains burning, and the coyotes piercing the nights with their lank, long, frozen screeches, and the cold old owls always grieving forth their mournful “chuck-a-loo, whoo, whoo, whoo’s” June looks mighty far away.
But, five fingers and a thumb, and she will be here, smelling of sunshine and tasting like smiles; painting our deserts with rainbow colors for as far as the eyes can see; spreading sunsets that catch you right up into their midsts; offering dawns that share their youth with you and that make you believe all over again in things which you had long ago stopped believing. Now I don’t know shucks about romance; but I have a notion that June, in our northeastern Nevada, stirs up whole batches of the stuff. I am counting on her to serve it, fresh and sweet, this year.
It isn’t June, though, and it isn’t romance that I am trusting for the final chore: it is something more lasting than either, something sturdier, something for which I can not find a name. But I know that it is induced by a mixture of long years of right living, and clean thinking, and sanity, and courage; so I am expecting it to clear away the shadows from the Desert Moon and leave it, riding high as it used to ride, high and proud, a brave, shining thing in our valley.
The End