And Kenwick found the Mont-Mer papers even more lavish in descriptive detail than those of the city had been. There was a picture of the murdered man and one of himself spread upon the front page of the evening sheet, and below, a cut of Rest Hollow, with the inevitable black cross marking the spot under the dining-room window where the body of Ralph Regan had been found. The morning daily matched this with a picture of the handsome Kenwick home in New York, and an account of the death, the previous spring, of Everett Kenwick and his wife, victims of influenza. As he read, Kenwick reflected that Richard Glover must have been very busy, very busy indeed since the night that they had encountered each other at the theater.
And outside the county jail the city buzzed with comment and speculation. Mont-Mer real estate men were elated over this unexpected scandal in high society which had resulted in putting their town "on the map." Better a gruesome publicity, they told each other, than no publicity at all. Tourists from Los Angeles and the near-by towns motored up during the week-end and made futile attempts to gain access to Rest Hollow. The old conservative residents of the aristocratic little city were horrified, and the colony of Eastern capitalists, who made up a large part of the suburban population, were hotly resentful of the hideous notoriety which had invaded their retreat by the sea. The two country estates that bordered Rest Hollow were put on the market at what the local realty dealers advertised as "spectacular bargains."
After the body of Ralph Regan had been exhumed and identified by the grief-stricken little woman who was his sister, the links of the chain which incriminated Kenwick seemed to fall of their own volition into place. He reviewed them himself, sitting alone in Mont-Mer's bleak little jail.
There would be first the testimony of the coroner who would describe the gunshot wound. And then the evidence that he, Kenwick, had been armed on that fatal night. The woman, or whoever it was that occupied the right wing of the house, would narrate in detail all that he had said about being a good shot and would doubtless follow this with the testimony that he was obviously looking for trouble. The revolver, which he had left on the table in the den, would add its mute confirmation of these assertions. And his own mode of departure from that house, under such circumstances, was sufficient in itself to send him to the electric chair without any further testimony. Glover would be, of course, the star witness for the State, and against his glib and convincing story would be pitted the word of a man known to have been of an unsound state of mind and never proved to have recovered from it. It was this last evidence, he knew, that would acquit him. With the brand of Cain upon his forehead he would be set free. The ghastly notoriety which he had striven, with the difficult patience of the impatient temperament, to avoid, had struck him with the force of a bomb and blown him skyward to be the cynosure of every eye. Never while the world stood could he ask Marcreta Morgan to take the name of Kenwick. Acquittal on any terms was all that most men would have asked of fate. But Kenwick was made of finer stuff. And so far as his future was concerned, he was already tried, convicted, and sentenced.