A Fourfold Alibi

by W. L. Alden

A city boarding house is proverbially addicted to gossip. When, therefore, the twenty-six boarders at Mrs. Burntash’s family boarding-house learned that Mr. Anderson, the occupant of the two pair front, had been found dead on his bed with a dagger sticking in his heart, they felt that fortune had been kind to them in presenting them with a topic of inexhaustible merit. 

For, in the first place, the question whether the dead man had been murdered or had committed suicide was one admitting of a vast deal of discussion. Then, supposing that he had committed suicide, the investigation of his motive would be a rich vein, in the working of which unimaginable scandal might be unearthed. If, on the other hand, he had been murdered, a wide field of conjecture as to the murderer would be at once opened. In whatever light the tragedy might be viewed, it was full of promise to the lover of gossip. So the twenty-six boarders at once fell upon it and discussed it all over the house with the utmost enthusiasm. 

With, however, two or three exceptions. The wife of the dead man naturally did not join in the general conversational uproar, neither did his brother, who occupied the hall bedroom next to the room of Mr. Anderson, and who forgot his own grief in his tender sympathy with the greater loss of the wife. Then there was Mr. Banks, a gentleman who was on bad terms with the deceased, and who had quarreled publicly with him over a question of politics only the day before the tragedy. Mr. Banks said little about the matter, and his reticence was commended and imitated by Mrs. Stein, a fascinating and beautiful widow, who had been but three days at Mrs. Burntash’s but was already the belle of the boarding-house. 

Soon after Mrs. Anderson,… Read More