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Updated: June 24, 2025
I knew where she was going, knew she was going to Sloanehurst." "How did you know that, Mr. Russell?" "I mean I was certain of it. She'd told me Mr. Berne Webster, the lawyer she'd been working for, was out here spending the week-end; and I knew she was coming out to meet him." "Why did she do that?" Mr. Russell displayed pathetic embarrassment and confusion before he answered that.
I suppose," she said with a wintry smile, "you'd call it an attempt to blackmail if he had let it go far enough. "She wrote him a letter, on grey paper, and sent it, in an oblong, grey envelope, to him here at Sloanehurst last Friday night. He got it Saturday afternoon.
"Been in there all this time writing to him!" "Yes! Look at it!" she taunted viciously, and waved the envelope before his eyes. "Sloanehurst!" Taking up his hat, he went with her to the elevator. Mr. Jefferson Hastings, unsuspecting that he was about to be confronted with the most brutal crime in all his experience, regretted having come to "Sloanehurst." He disapproved of himself unreservedly.
The usual thing happened; he discharged her two weeks ago. "He wants to marry money. You know about that, I take it Miss Sloane, daughter of A. B. Sloane, Sloanehurst, where she was murdered. They're engaged. At least, that is was Mildred's information, although the engagement hasn't been announced, formally. Fact is, he has to marry the Sloane girl."
"Her mother and her closest friend, her would-be fiancé, say she wrote to you Friday night, addressing her letter to Sloanehurst. The flap of an envelope, identified by her mother and friend, and bearing the impression in ink of her handwriting, is found in the fireplace of your room here. The man who followed her out here, who might have been suspected of the murder, has proved an alibi.
"If Russell's guilty," Hastings said, glad of the information that the accused man was then at Sloanehurst, "I hope we can develop the necessary evidence against him. But " "The necessary " "Let me finish, Mr. Sloane, if you please!" The old man was determined to disregard the other's signs of suffering.
"No; it isn't," she agreed, with perfect indifference. "And it's spent." When he had telephoned to Sloanehurst and the sheriff's office, he found her with her hat on, ready to accompany him. As they stepped out of the Walman, she saw the automobile waiting for them. She stopped, a new rage darting from her eyes. He thought she would go back.
He plucked at his lower lip with spasmodic fingers. His eyes were downcast. He attempted a self-deprecatory smile which ended in an unpleasant grimace. "She wouldn't say. But it was because she was in love with him." "And you were jealous of Mr. Webster?" "We-ell yes, sir; that's about it, I guess." "Did Miss Brace tell you she was coming to Sloanehurst?" "No, sir. I suspected it."
But, being innocent and knowing the weight of the circumstantial evidence against me, I could not resist the temptation to make my alibi good. I neither committed that murder nor witnessed it. The story I told at the inquest of what happened to me and what I did at Sloanehurst stands. It is the truth."
At the station he bought the afternoon newspapers and turned to Eugene Russell's statement, made to the reporters immediately after his arrest. It ran: "I repeat that I'm innocent of the murder. Of course, I made a mistake in omitting all mention of my having ridden the first four miles from Sloanehurst.
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