An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) 📕

coat and hat just where they are. Let me see⁠—it’s two-thirty now. I’ll be up on the four o’clock. The bus from the inn there meets that, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll be over on that, sure⁠—And, Wallace, I wish you’d write down the names of all present who saw the body brought up. What was that?⁠—eighteen feet of water at least?⁠—yes⁠—a veil caught in one of the rowlocks⁠—yes⁠—a brown veil⁠—yes⁠—sure, that’s all⁠—Well, then have them leave everything just as found, Wallace, and I’ll be right up. Yes, Wallace, thank you⁠—Goodbye.”

Slowly Mr. Heit restored the receiver to the hook and as slowly arose from the capacious walnut-hued chair in which he sat, stroking his heavy whiskers, while he eyed Earl Newcomb, combination typist, record clerk, and whatnot.

“You got all that down, did you, Earl?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you better get your hat and coat and come along with me. We’ll have to catch that 3:10. You can fill in a few subpoenas on the train. I should say you better take fifteen or twenty⁠—to be on the safe side, and take the names of such witnesses as we can find on the spot. And you better call up Mrs. Heit and say ’taint likely I’ll be home for dinner tonight or much before the down train. We may have to stay up there until tomorrow. You never can tell in these cases how they’re going to turn out and it’s best to be on the safe side.”

Heit turned to a coatroom in one corner of the musty old room and extracted a large, soft-brimmed, straw hat, the downward curving edges of which seemed to heighten the really bland and yet ogreish effect of his protruding eyes and voluminous whiskers, and having thus equipped himself, said: “I’m just going in the sheriff’s office a minute, Earl. You’d better call up the Republican and the Democrat and tell ’em about this, so they won’t think we’re slightin’ ’em. Then I’ll meet you down at the station.” And he lumbered out.

And Earl Newcomb, a tall, slender, shock-headed young man of perhaps nineteen, and of a very serious, if at times befuddled, manner, at once seized a sheaf of subpoenas, and while stuffing these in his pocket, sought to get Mrs. Heit on the telephone. And then, after explaining to the newspapers about a reported double drowning at Big Bittern, he seized his own blue-banded straw hat, some two sizes too large for him, and hurried down the hall, only to encounter, opposite the wide-open office door of the district attorney, Zillah Saunders, spinster and solitary stenographer to the locally somewhat famous and mercurial Orville W. Mason, district attorney. She was on her way to the auditor’s office, but being struck by the preoccupation and haste of Mr. Newcomb, usually so much more deliberate, she now called: “Hello, Earl. What’s the rush? Where you going so fast?”

“Double drowning up at Big Bittern, we hear. Maybe something worse. Mr. Heit’s going up and I’m going along. We have to make that 3:10.”

“Who said so? Is it anyone from here?”

“Don’t know yet, but don’t think so. There was a letter in the girl’s pocket addressed to someone in Biltz, Mimico County, a Mrs. Alden. I’ll tell you when we get back or I’ll telephone you.”

“My goodness, if it’s a crime, Mr. Mason’ll be interested, won’t he?”

“Sure, I’ll telephone him, or Mr. Heit will. If you see Bud Parker or Karel Badnell, tell ’em I had to go out of town, and call up my mother for me, will you, Zillah, and tell her, too. I’m afraid I won’t have time.”

“Sure I will, Earl.”

“Thanks.”

And, highly interested by this latest development in the ordinary humdrum life of his chief, he skipped gayly and even eagerly down the south steps of the Cataraqui County Courthouse, while Miss Saunders, knowing that her own chief was off on some business connected with the approaching County Republican Convention, and there being no one else in his office with whom she could communicate at this time, went on to the auditor’s office, where it was possible to retail to any who might be assembled there, all that she had gathered concerning this seemingly important lake tragedy.

II

The information obtained by Coroner Heit and his assistant was of a singular and disturbing character. In the first instance, because of the disappearance of a boat and an apparently happy and attractive couple bent on sightseeing, an early morning search, instigated by the innkeeper of this region, had revealed, in Moon Cove, the presence of the overturned canoe, also the hat and veil. And immediately such available employees, as well as guides and guests of the Inn, as could be impressed, had begun diving into the waters or by means of long poles equipped with hooks attempting to bring one or both bodies to the surface. The fact, as reported by Sim Shoop, the guide, as well as the innkeeper and the boathouse lessee, that the lost girl was both young and attractive and her companion seemingly a youth of some means, was sufficient to whet the interest of this lake group of woodsmen and inn employees to a point which verged on sorrow. And in addition, there was intense curiosity as to how, on so fair and windless a day, so strange an accident could have occurred.

But what created far more excitement after a very little time was the fact that at high noon one of the men who trolled⁠—John Pole⁠—a woodsman, was at last successful in bringing to the surface Roberta herself, drawn upward by the skirt of her dress, obviously bruised about the face⁠—the lips and nose and above and below the right eye⁠—a fact which to those who were assisting at once seemed to be suspicious. Indeed, John Pole, who with Joe Rainer at the oars was the one who had succeeded in bringing her to the surface, had exclaimed at once on seeing her: “Why, the pore little thing! She don’t seem to weigh more’n nothin’