Kincaid?’
Why, he was one of the best, one of themselves.
‘That’s the craziest thing I ever heard of!’
The young man nodded, shocked like the rest, but self-important with his information.
‘He wasn’t downstairs when Catherine Jones was dancing—he says he was in the men’s locker-room. And Marie Bannerman told a lot of girls that they’d had a row, and she was scared of what he’d do.’
Again an awed silence.
‘That’s the craziest thing I ever heard!’ some one said again.
‘Charley Kincaid!’
The narrator waited a moment. Then he added:
‘He caught her kissing Joe Cable—’
I couldn’t keep silence a minute longer.
‘What about it?’ I cried out. ‘I was with him at the time. He wasn’t—he wasn’t angry at all.’
They looked at me, their faces startled, confused, unhappy. Suddenly the footsteps of several men sounded loud through the ballroom, and a moment later Charley Kincaid, his face dead white, came out the front door between the Sheriff and another man. Crossing the porch quickly, they descended the steps and disappeared in the darkness. A moment later there was the sound of a starting car.
When an instant later far away down the road I heard the eerie scream of an ambulance, I got up desperately and called to my escort, who formed part of the whispering group.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘I can’t stand this. Either take me home or I’ll find a place in another car.’ Reluctantly he shouldered my clubs—the sight of them made me realize that I now couldn’t leave on Monday after all—and followed me down the steps just as the black body of the ambulance curved in at the gate—a ghastly shadow on the bright, starry night.
The situation, after the first wild surmises, the first burst of unreasoning loyalty to Charley Kincaid, had died away, was outlined by the Davis Courier and by most of the State newspapers in this fashion: Marie Bannerman died in the women’s dressing-room of the Davis Country Club from the effects of a shot fired at close quarters from a revolver just after eleven forty-five o’clock on Saturday night. Many persons had heard the shot; moreover it had undoubtedly been fired from the revolver of Sheriff Abercrombie, which had been hanging in full sight on the wall of the next room. Abercrombie himself was down in the ballroom when the murder took place, as many witnesses could testify. The revolver was not found.
So far as was known, the only man who had been upstairs at the time the shot was fired was Charles Kincaid. He was engaged to Miss Bannerman, but according to several witnesses they had quarreled seriously that evening. Miss Bannerman herself had mentioned the quarrel, adding that she was afraid and wanted to keep away from him until he cooled off.
Charles Kincaid asserted that at the time the shot was fired he was in the men’s locker-room—where, indeed, he was found, immediately after the discovery of Miss Bannerman’s body. He denied having had any words with Miss Bannerman at all. He had heard the shot but it had had no significance for him—if he thought anything of it, he thought that ‘some one was potting cats outdoors.’
Why had he chosen to remain in the locker-room during the dance?
No reason at all. He was tired. He was waiting until Miss Bannerman wanted to go home.
The body was discovered by Katie Golstien, the colored maid, who herself was found in a faint when the crowd of girls surged upstairs for their coats. Returning from the kitchen, where she had been getting a bite to eat, Katie had found Miss Bannerman, her dress wet with blood, already dead on the floor.
Both the police and the newspapers attached importance to the geography of the country-club’s second story. It consisted of a row of three rooms—the women’s dressing-room and the men’s locker-room at either end, and in the middle a room which was used as a cloak-room and for the storage of golf-clubs. The women’s and men’s rooms had no outlet except into this chamber, which was connected by one stairs with the ballroom below, and by another with the kitchen. According to the testimony of three negro cooks and the white caddy-master, no one but Katie Golstien had gone up the kitchen stairs that night.
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
