Whatever point there was to this conversation was over my head. I asked:
“What’s he up to?”
“Nothing,” the sheriff told me. “You’ll see that it’s nothing, and, by God! I’m going to give him a piece of my mind. I don’t know what’s the matter with Vernon, paying any attention to him at all.”
That didn’t mean anything to me. I peeped out between curtains. Rain and darkness shut out the scenery, but I had an idea that we were beaded for some point on the East road. It was a rotten ride–wet, noisy, and bumpy. It ended in as dark, wet, and muddy a spot as any we had gone through.
Cotton switched off the lights and got out, the rest of us following, slipping and slopping in wet clay up to our ankles.
“This is too damned much,” the sheriff complained.
Vernon started to say something, but the marshal was walking away, down the road. We plodded after him, keeping together more by the sound of our feet squashing in the mud than by sight. It was black.
Presently we left the road, struggled over a high wire fence, and went on with less mud under our feet, but slippery grass. We climbed a hill. Wind blew rain down it into our faces. The sheriff was panting. I was sweating. We reached the top of the hill and went down its other side, with the rustle of sea-water on rocks ahead of us. Boulders began crowding grass out of our path as the descent got steeper. Once Cotton slipped to his knees, tripping Vernon, who saved himself by grabbing me. The sheriff’s panting sounded like groaning now. We turned to the left, going along in single file, the surf close beside us. We turned to the left again, climbed a slope, and halted under a low shed without walls–a wooden roof propped on a dozen posts. Ahead of us a larger building made a black blot against the almost black sky.
Cotton whispered: “Wait till I see if his car’s here.”
He went away. The sheriff blew out his breath and grunted: “Damn such a expedition!” Rolly sighed.
The marshal returned jubilant.
“It ain’t there, so he ain’t here,” he said. “Come on, it’ll get us out of the wet anyways.”
We followed him up a muddy path between bushes to the black house, up on its back porch. We stood there while he got a window open, climbed through, and unlocked the door. Our flashlights, used for the first time now, showed us a small neat kitchen. We went in, muddying the floor.
Cotton was the only member of the party who showed any enthusiasm. His face, from hat-brim to dimpled chin, was the face of a master of ceremonies who is about to spring what he is sure will be a delightful surprise. Vernon regarded him skeptically, Feeney disgustedly, Rolly indifferently, and I–who didn’t know what we were there for–no doubt curiously.
It developed that we were there to search the house. We did it, or at least Cotton did it while the rest of us pretended to help him. It was a small house. There was only one room on the ground-floor besides the kitchen, and only one–an unfinished bedroom–above. A grocer’s bill and a tax-receipt in a table-drawer told me whose house it was–Harvey Whidden’s. He was the big-boned deliberate man who had seen the stranger in the Chrysler with Gabrielle Collinson.
We finished the ground-floor with a blank score, and went upstairs. There, after ten minutes of poking around, we found something. Rolly pulled it out from between bed-slats and mattress. It was a small flat bundle wrapped in a white linen towel.
Cotton dropped the mattress, which he had been holding up for the deputy to look under, and joined us as we crowded around Rolly’s package. Vernon took it from the deputy sheriff and unrolled it on the bed. Inside the towel were a package of hair-pins, a lace-edged white handkerchief, a silver hair-brush and comb engraved G. D. L., and a pair of black kid gloves, small and feminine.
I was more surprised than anyone else could have been.
“G. D. L.,” I said, to be saying something, “could be Gabrielle Something Leggett–Mrs. Collinson’s name before she was married.”