I followed him out to a dusty car in front of the office. Rolly senior didn’t go with us.
“Somebody told you about it?” the deputy sheriff asked when we were riding.
“I stumbled on him. Know who the Carters are?”
“Somebody special?”
“You heard about the Riese murder in the San Francisco temple?”
“Uh-huh, I read the papers.”
“Mrs. Carter was the Gabrielle Leggett mixed up in that, and Carter was the Eric Collinson.”
“Tch, tch, tch,” he said.
“And her father and step-mother were killed a couple of weeks before that.”
“Tch, tch, tch,” he said. “What’s the matter with them?”
“A family curse.”
“Sure enough?”
I didn’t know how seriously he meant that question, though he seemed serious enough. I hadn’t got him sized up yet. However, clown or not, he was the deputy sheriff stationed at Quesada, and this was his party. He was entitled to the facts. I gave them to him as we bounced over the lumpy road, gave him all I had, from Paris in 1913 to the cliff road a couple of hours ago.
“When they came back from being married in Reno, Collinson dropped in to see me. They had to stick around for the Haldorn bunch’s trial, and he wanted a quiet place to take the girl: she was still in a daze. You know Owen Fitzstephan?”
“The writer fellow that was down here a while last year? Uh-huh.”
“Well, he suggested this place.”
“I know. The old man mentioned it. But what’d they take them aliases for?”
“To dodge publicity, and, partly, to try to dodge something like this.”
He frowned vaguely and asked:
“You mean they expected something like this?”
“Well, it’s easy to say, ‘I told you so,’ after things happen, but I’ve never thought we had the answer to either of the two mix-ups she’s been in. And not having the answer–how could you tell what to expect? I didn’t think so much of their going off into seclusion like this while whatever was hanging over her–if anything was–was still hanging over her, but Collinson was all for it. I made him promise to wire me if he saw anything funny. Well, he did.”
Rolly nodded three or four times, then asked:
“What makes you think he didn’t fall off the cliff?”
“He sent for me. Something was wrong. Outside of that, too many things have happened around his wife for me to believe in accidents.”
“There’s the curse, though,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, studying his indefinite face, still trying to figure him out. “But the trouble with it is it’s worked out too well, too regularly. It’s the first one I ever ran across that did.”
He frowned over my opinion for a couple of minutes, and then stopped the car. “We’ll have to get out here: the road ain’t so good the rest of the way.” None of it had been. “Still and all, you do hear of them working out. There’s things that happen that makes a fellow think there’s things in the world–in life–that he don’t know much about.” He frowned again as we set off afoot, and found a word he liked. “It’s inscrutable,” he wound up.
I let that go at that.
He went ahead up the cliff path, stopping of his own accord where the bush had been torn up, a detail I hadn’t mentioned. I didn’t say anything while he stared down at Collinson’s body, looked searchingly up and down the face of the cliff, and then went up and down the path, bent far over, his tan eyes intent on the ground.
He wandered around for ten minutes or more, then straightened up and said: “There’s nothing here that I can find. Let’s go down.”
I started back toward the ravine, but he said there was a better way ahead. There was. We went down it to the dead man.
Rolly looked from the corpse to the edge of the path high above us, and complained: “I don’t hardly see how he could have landed just that-away.”
“He didn’t. I pulled him out of the water,” I said, showing the deputy exactly where I had found the body.