Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/335

 asked her a lot of questions. And Jeanne, instead of telling the truth, which was that she didn't know a thing about it, saw a chance for some tall and fancy lying such as she made a specialty of. She got off a long story about how she'd met the boy on his way to the train, and he'd told her he was going on business, and Marise had asked him to take a message to her mother, and he'd said her mother didn't know him by sight—oh, God knows what! I take it she thought she was safe-guarding the family honor, by making out that Flora didn't know the young man, but she certainly got everything tied up into knots. She'd beat it off to tell the dead boy's family what she'd told the police, so their lies would be of the same color as hers. Oh, it was the damnedest mix-up! Of course they were all set to do their share of lying. They wanted as much as I did to keep the police out of it. Jeanne had beat them to it, and so they repeated her version rather than start something new. But naturally, rattled as they were with the suddenness of it, they didn't get it exactly straight, and that started the police off on an idea they hadn't had before, that maybe there was something more in it than met the eye. They asked some other questions around in Bayonne, and then it was all up.

"Of course Jeanne's story couldn't hold water for a minute. They found out first that he hadn't any business that could possibly have taken him up to the mountains. And the old hag that kept a flower-stand on our street said he had sat all the evening before Flora went away, on the bench across the street from our house, that she'd sold him some flowers at eight when she shut her stall, and when she came back at six the next morning he was there again. And our concierge said—oh, hell, you don't need to know all the details. Everybody was lying and everybody sure that everybody else was, and those fool police inspectors were sure they'd unearth something if they only kept on. Inside twenty-four hours, I saw there was no sort of chance of getting anything straightened out by getting down to the facts, which didn't amount to a whoop anyhow. So we did what you always do in France when you want to get anything done. We used a