Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     PROMPTLY at the hour named, I made my appearance at Mr. 
Gryce's door. I found him awaiting me on the threshold.
     "I have met you," said he gravely, "for the purpose of requesting
you not to speak during the coming interview. I am to do the talking;
you the listening. Neither are you to be surprised at anything I may do
or say. I am in a facetious mood"—he did not look so—"and may take
it into my head to address you by another name than your own. If I do,
don't mind it. Above all, don't talk: remember that." And without
waiting to meet my look of doubtful astonishment, he led me softly
up-stairs.
     The room in which I had been accustomed to meet him was at the
top of the first flight, but he took me past that into what appeared to be
the garret story, where, after many cautionary signs, he ushered me
into a room of singularly strange and unpromising appearance. In the
first place, it was darkly gloomy, being lighted simply by a very dim
and dirty skylight. Next, it was hideously empty; a pine table and two
hard-backed chairs, set face to face at each end of it, being the only
articles in the room. Lastly, it was 

surrounded by several closed doors with blurred and ghostly ventilators 
over their tops which, being round, looked like the blank eyes of a row 
of staring mummies. Altogether it was a lugubrious spot, and in the pre- 
sent state of my mind made me feel as if something unearthly and 
threatening lay crouched in the very atmosphere. Nor, sitting there cold 
and desolate, could I imagine that the sunshine glowed without, or that
life, beauty, and pleasure paraded the streets below.
     Mr. Gryce's expression, as he took a seat and beckoned me to do
the same, may have had something to do with this strange sensation, it
was so mysteriously and sombrely expectant.
     "You'll not mind the room," said he, in so muffled a tone I
scarcely heard him. "It's an awful lonesome spot, I know; but folks
with such matters before them mustn't be too particular as to the
places in which they hold their consultations, if they don't want all
the world to know as much as they do. Smith," and he gave me an
admonitory shake of his finger, while his voice took a more distinct
tone, "I have done the business; the reward is mine; the assassin of
Mr. Leavenworth is found, and in two hours will be in custody. Do you
want to know who it is?" leaning forward with every appearance of
eagerness in tone and expression.
     I stared at him in great amazement. Had anything new come to light?
any great change taken place in his conclusions? All this preparation
could not be for the purpose of acquainting me with what I already
knew, yet—
     He cut short my conjectures with a low, expressive chuckle. "It was
a long chase, I tell you," raising his voice still more; "a tight go;
a woman in the business too; but all the women in the world can't pull the

wool over the eyes of Ebenezer Gryce when he is on a trail; and the
assassin of Mr. Leavenworth and"—here his voice became actually
shrill in his excitement—"and of Hannah Chester is found.
    "Hush!" he went on, though I had neither spoken nor made any move;
"you didn't know Hannah Chester was murdered. Well, she wasn't
in one sense of the word, but in another she was, and by the same hand
that killed the old gentleman. How do I know this? look here! This
scrap of paper was found on the floor of her room; it had a few
particles of white powder sticking to it; those particles were tested
last night and found to be poison. But you say the girl took it
herself, that she was a suicide. You are right, she did take it
herself, and it was a suicide; but who terrified her into this act of
self-destruction? Why, the one who had the most reason to fear her
testimony, of course. But the proof, you say. Well, sir, this girl left
a confession behind her, throwing the onus of the whole crime on a
certain party believed to be innocent; this confession was a forged
one, known from three facts; first, that the paper upon which it was
written was unobtainable by the girl in the place where she was;
secondly, that the words used therein were printed in coarse, awkward
characters, whereas Hannah, thanks to the teaching of the woman under
whose care she has been since the murder, had learned to write very
well; thirdly, that the story told in the confession does not agree
with the one related by the girl herself. Now the fact of a forged
confession throwing the guilt upon an innocent party having been found
in the keeping of this ignorant girl, killed by a dose of poison, taken
with the fact here stated, that on the morning of the day on which she
killed herself the girl received from some one manifestly acquainted

with the customs of the Leavenworth family a letter large enough and
thick enough to contain the confession folded, as it was when found,
makes it almost certain to my mind that the murderer of Mr. Leaven-
worth sent this powder and this so-called confession to the girl, meaning
her to use them precisely as she did: for the purpose of throwing off
suspicion from the right track and of destroying herself at the same
time; for, as you know, dead men tell no tales."
     He paused and looked at the dingy skylight above us. Why did the
air seem to grow heavier and heavier? Why did I shudder in vague
apprehension? I knew all this before; why did it strike me, then, as
something new?
     "But who was this? you ask. Ah, that is the secret; that is the bit
of knowledge which is to bring me fame and fortune. But, secret or not,
I don't mind telling you"; lowering his voice and rapidly raising it
again. "The fact is, I can't keep it to myself; it burns like a
new dollar in my pocket. Smith, my boy, the murderer of Mr.
Leavenworth—but stay, who does the world say it is? Whom do the
papers point at and shake their heads over? A woman! a young,
beautiful, bewitching woman! Ha, ha, ha! The papers are right; it is a
woman; young, beautiful, and bewitching too. But what one? Ah, that's
the question. There is more than one woman in this affair. Since
Hannah's death I have heard it openly advanced that she was the guilty
party in the crime: bah! Others cry it is the niece who was so
unequally dealt with by her uncle in his will: bah! again. But folks
are not without some justification for this latter assertion. Eleanore
Leavenworth did know more of this matter than appeared. Worse than
that, Eleanore Leavenworth stands in a 

position of positive peril to-day. If you don't think so, let me show you 
what the detectives have against her.
     "First, there is the fact that a handkerchief, with her name on it,
was found stained with pistol grease upon the scene of murder; a place
which she explicitly denies having entered for twenty-four hours
previous to the discovery of the dead body.
     "Secondly, the fact that she not only evinced terror when
confronted with this bit of circumstantial evidence, but manifested a
decided disposition, both at this time and others, to mislead inquiry,
shirking a direct answer to some questions and refusing all answer to
others.
     "Thirdly, that an attempt was made by her to destroy a certain
letter evidently relating to this crime.
     "Fourthly, that the key to the library door was seen in her
possession.
     "All this, taken with the fact that the fragments of the letter
which this same lady attempted to destroy within an hour after the
inquest were afterwards put together, and were found to contain a
bitter denunciation of one of Mr. Leavenworth's nieces, by a gentleman
we will call x — in other words, an unknown quantity—makes out
a dark case against her, especially as after investigations
revealed the fact that a secret underlay the history of the Leavenworth
family. That, unknown to the world at large, and Mr. Leavenworth in
particular, a marriage ceremony had been performed a year before in a
little town called F— between a Miss Leavenworth and this same x.
That, in other words, the unknown gentleman who, in the letter partly
destroyed by Miss Eleanore Leavenworth, complained to Mr. Leaven-
worth of the treatment received by him 

from one of his nieces, was in fact the secret husband of that niece. And 
that, moreover, this same gentleman, under an assumed name, called on 
the night of the murder at the house of Mr. Leavenworth and asked for 
Miss Eleanore.
     "Now you see, with all this against her, Eleanore Leavenworth is
lost if it cannot be proved, first that the articles testifying against
her, viz.: the handkerchief, letter, and key, passed after the murder
through other hands, before reaching hers; and secondly, that some one
else had even a stronger reason than she for desiring Mr. Leavenworth's
death at this time.
     "Smith, my boy, both of these hypotheses have been established by
me. By dint of moling into old secrets, and following unpromising
clues, I have finally come to the conclusion that not Eleanore
Leavenworth, dark as are the appearances against her, but another
woman, beautiful as she, and fully as interesting, is the true
criminal. In short, that her cousin, the exquisite Mary, is the
murderer of Mr. Leavenworth, and by inference of Hannah Chester
also."
     He brought this out with such force, and with such a look of triumph
and appearance of having led up to it, that I was for the moment
dumbfounded, and started as if I had not known what he was going to
say. The stir I made seemed to awake an echo. Something like a
suppressed cry was in the air about me. All the room appeared to
breathe horror and dismay. Yet when, in the excitement of this fancy, I
half turned round to look, I found nothing but the blank eyes of those
dull ventilators staring upon me.
     "You are taken aback!" Mr. Gryce went on. "I don't wonder. Every
one else is engaged in watching the movements of Eleanore Leavenworth;

I only know where to put my hand upon the real culprit. You shake your
head!" (Another fiction.) "You don't believe me! Think I am
deceived. Ha, ha! Ebenezer Gryce deceived after a month of hard work!
You are as bad as Miss Leavenworth herself, who has so little faith in
my sagacity that she offered me, of all men, an enormous reward if I
would find for her the assassin of her uncle! But that is neither here
nor there; you have your doubts, and you are waiting for me to solve
them. Well, nothing is easier. Know first that on the morning of the
inquest I made one or two discoveries not to be found in the records,
viz.: that the handkerchief picked up, as I have said, in Mr. Leaven-
worth's library, had notwithstanding its stains of pistol grease, a
decided perfume lingering about it. Going to the dressing-table of the
two ladies, I sought for that perfume, and found it in Mary's room, not
Eleanore's. This led me to examine the pockets of the dresses
respectively worn by them the evening before. In that of Eleanore I
found a handkerchief, presumably the one she had carried at that time.
But in Mary's there was none, nor did I see any lying about her room as
if tossed down on her retiring. The conclusion I drew from this was,
that she, and not Eleanore, had carried the handkerchief into her
uncle's room, a conclusion emphasized by the fact privately
communicated to me by one of the servants, that Mary was in Eleanore's
room when the basket of clean clothes was brought up with this
handkerchief lying on top.
     "But knowing the liability we are to mistake in such matters as
these, I made another search in the library, and came across a very
curious thing. Lying on the table was a penknife, and scattered on the
floor beneath, in close proximity to the chair, were two or three

minute portions of wood freshly chipped off from the leg of the table;
all of which looked as if some one of a nervous disposition had been
sitting there, whose hand in a moment of self-forgetfulness had caught
up the knife and unconsciously whittled the table, A little thing, you
say; but when the question is, which of two ladies, one of a calm and
self-possessed nature, the other restless in her ways and excitable in
her disposition, was in a certain spot at a certain time, it is these
little things that become almost deadly in their significance. No one
who has been with these two women an hour can hesitate as to whose
delicate hand made that cut in Mr. Leavenworth's library table.
     "But we are not done. I distinctly overheard Eleanore accuse her
cousin of this deed. Now such a woman as Eleanore Leavenworth has
proved herself to be never would accuse a relative of crime without the
strongest and most substantial reasons. First, she must have been sure
her cousin stood in a position of such emergency that nothing but the
death of her uncle could release her from it; secondly, that her
cousin's character was of such a nature she would not hesitate to
relieve herself from a desperate emergency by the most desperate of
means; and lastly, been in possession of some circumstantial evidence
against her cousin, seriously corroborative of her suspicions. Smith,
all this was true of Eleanore Leavenworth. As to the character of her
cousin, she has had ample proof of her ambition, love of money, caprice
and deceit, it having been Mary Leavenworth, and not Eleanore, as was
first supposed, who had contracted the secret marriage already spoken
of. Of the critical position in which she stood, let the threat once
made by Mr. Leavenworth to substitute her cousin's name for hers in

his will in case she had married this x be remembered, as well
as the tenacity with which Mary clung to her hopes of future fortune;
while for the corroborative testimony of her guilt which Eleanore is
supposed to have had, remember that previous to the key having been
found in Eleanore's possession, she had spent some time in her cousin's
room; and that it was at Mary's fireplace the half-burned fragments of
that letter were found,—and you have the outline of a report which in
an hour's time from this will lead to the arrest of Mary Leavenworth
as the assassin of her uncle and benefactor."
     A silence ensued which, like the darkness of Egypt, could be felt;
then a great and terrible cry rang through the room, and a man's form,
rushing from I knew not where, shot by me and fell at Mr. Gryce's feet
shrieking out:
     "It is a lie! a lie! Mary Leavenworth is innocent as a babe unborn. 
I am the murderer of Mr. Leavenworth. I! I! I!"
     It was Trueman Harwell.