“Eliminate my two kiddies as soon as possible, won’t you?” laughed Gerty, and Coe promised.
Before Allison came, Fenn Whiting turned up.
He looked at Coley Coe with interest, as they were introduced, and Coe’s business there explained.
“Good work!” Whiting said, heartily. “Count on me to help.”
“First you must be suspected, Fenn,” Elsie said, and Whiting looked inquiringly at Coe.
“After everybody,” Coe returned. “I’ve just crossed off the two Seaman children as suspects, because of the pleadings of their mother, but no one else may be stricken from my list until he is proved to be beyond suspicion.”
“Good! Go ahead. Where do I get off? Want my alibi or what? I’m not impatient, but I’d like to be passed, so I can begin to help you.”
“Good for you, I want help. Start in, will you, by telling me whom you suspect,—if any?”
“Suspect is too strong a word,—but my theory is that Kimball Webb abducted himself, with the connivance and help of his butler and chauffeur.”
“And the knowledge and consent of his mother and sister?”
“That I’m not so sure of. But looked at from the viewpoint of plain common sense, there seems to me no other way for that man to have gotten out of that room and out of that house, but to have walked out voluntarily.”
“A fabrication of the said servants. You may theorize and talk fairy tales all you like, but there’s no other rational explanation.”
“I can’t say. Quite aside from the rudeness and impoliteness of hinting any lack of his desire to marry Miss Powell, I can’t believe such a thing could be true. I’m positive that man, when at his own bachelor dinner, at which I was present, expected and intended to become a bridegroom the following day. Now, I believe something transpired, after his return home, that made it impossible or undesirable that he should be married. I can’t say what,—for I’ve no idea,—but something pretty big and unavoidable.”
“You mean something disgraceful?” the blue eyes of his questioner looked into his own.
The steel grey eyes of Fenn Whiting met the others squarely.
“I don’t want to say that,” he spoke slowly, “but it may have been. Better men than Kimball Webb have been brought to bay by force of circumstances; wiser men than he have been the victims of blackmailing schemes; stronger men than he have met disaster through no fault of their own. I make no suggestions,—I have none to make,—but I maintain the only logical theory of Webb’s disappearance is that he went voluntarily, if not willingly.”