Free The Silent Hour by Elisabeth Grace Foley

delayed giving the message, to allow himself a few hours’
time for something—or Tom Hall really did receive the
message that night, and lied about Old Ted not arriving till
morning, in order to give himself time to do something
before presenting himself at the sheriff’s office.”
    “I heard somebody at the house that night,”
said Gennaro. “They rode off before I got close enough to see who
it was, but they hadn’t showed a light—so I knew they were up to no
good. I went to town next morning and I heard Jim had been in jail
all night, so he couldn’t have been here. That’s how I figured it
wasn’t him who shot the Major.”
    “And that is how I knew it was Tom
Hall,” said Mrs. Meade.
    Andrew Royal lifted a hand and started to
speak again, but once more Dr. Dunton got in before him. “But why
that night? Why did he have to lie about it? If he was after the
money, why did it have to be just then?”
    “He needed the money,” said Mrs. Meade, “for
Jim’s bail.”
    “That’s foolishness,” said Andrew Royal
abruptly. “Tom Hall’s well-off enough to have posted bail himself.
And if he was stingy enough to want Jim to pay his own bail he
could’ve said so.”
    Mrs. Meade shook her head. “No, Andrew,
that’s just it—that was the whole motive for the murder. I very
much fear that more people in Sour Springs are going to be hurt by
this than just poor Major Cambert. When you come to examine the
accounts of the First National Bank, I suspect you will find little
actual money in the vault. I don’t know whether Mr. Hall has been
speculating with his investors’ money, or whether he simply
mismanaged it, but I think he had reached a point where he was
desperate for a sum of cash to keep up the pretense of solidity a
little longer. He knew Major Cambert had money—in cash, and plenty
of it, kept at home. Perhaps he tried unsuccessfully to convince
Major Cambert to deposit it in the First National—and then when
that failed, he plotted murder.”
    “He was always trying to get Grandfather to
put his money in the bank,” said Jim quietly from his pillow.
“They’d been wrangling about it that week, before Grandfather and I
quarreled—just in their usual friendly way. I never suspected
anything different.”
    He lifted tired, pain-shadowed eyes to Mrs.
Meade’s face. “Did Hall try to frame me for the murder?”
    “He certainly made use of the quarrel, which
everyone in Sour Springs knew about, to divert suspicion,” said
Mrs. Meade gently. “But I think he tried to plan it so as to avoid
any real condemning evidence against you—making certain you were
away from the house before he entered, and so forth. He was quite
sincere about defending your innocence, for it was necessary that
you be kept alive and out of prison for him to have a trustee’s
access to your inheritance. That is what he really wanted, you
know. Major Cambert must have told him he would be executor and
guardian. He could have secretly used your money to try and keep
his bank afloat, no doubt convincing himself he could repair his
fortunes and return the money in the year before you came of age—as
many another untrustworthy trustee has done before him.”
    Andrew Royal was about to speak, but when Dr.
Dunton seemed about to ask a question he desisted and glared at
him, evidently feeling it was a lost cause trying to get in ahead.
But the doctor had apparently changed his mind, and Mrs. Meade went
on:
    “He had no alibi for that night either, you
know. His wife was away and he was home alone. So Randall and I
discussed it, and agreed that the way to alarm him was to make him
believe his extraction of the bail money from the safe was about to
be discovered. Randall was to convince Jim to jump bail (as I
believe the expression is), to stay away for a few days and take
some money from home with him—all in plain hearing of Old Ted, who
would carry the news to Hall. There was always the slight chance
that we were