“And here is still another account, this one from tonight’s paper,” he continued, unfolding the sheet which had caused his original protest:

High School Co-ed Takes Life in Attic

The family and friends of Edna May McCarty, fifteen-year-old co-ed of Harrisonville High School, are at a loss to assign a cause for her suicide early this morning. The girl had no love affairs, as far as is known, and had not failed in her examinations. On the contrary, she had passed the school’s latest test with flying colors. Her mother told investigating police officials that overstudy might have temporarily unbalanced the child’s mind. Miss McCarty’s body was found suspended from the rafters of her father’s attic by her mother this morning when the young woman did not respond to a call for breakfast and could not be found in her room on the second floor of the house. A clothesline, used to hang clothes which were dried inside the house in rainy weather, was used to form the fatal noose.

“Now then, my friend,” de Grandin reseated himself and lighted a vile-smelling French cigarette, puffing furiously, till the smoke surrounded his sleek, blond head like a mephitic nimbus, “what have you to say to those reports? Am I not right? Are there not too many—mordieu, entirely too many—suicides in our city?”

“All of them weren’t committed here,” I objected practically, “and besides, there couldn’t very well be any connection between them. Mrs. Westerfelt and her daughters carried out a suicide pact, it appears, but they certainly could have had no understanding with the two men and the young girl—”

“Perhaps, maybe, possibly,” he agreed, nodding his head so vigorously that a little column of ash detached itself from his cigarette and dropped unnoticed on the bosom of his stiffly starched evening shirt. “You may be right, Friend Trowbridge, but then, as is so often the case, you may be entirely wrong. One thing I know: I, Jules de Grandin, shall investigate these cases myself personally. Cordieu, they do interest me! I shall ascertain what is the what here.”

“Go ahead,” I encouraged. “The investigation will keep you out of mischief,” and I returned to the second chapter of Haggard’s The Wanderer’s Necklace, a book which I have read at least half a dozen times yet find as fascinating at each rereading as when I first perused its pages.

The matter of the six suicides still bothered him next morning. “Trowbridge, my friend,” he asked abruptly as he disposed of his second helping of coffee and passed his cup for replenishment, “why is it that people destroy themselves?”

“Oh,” I answered evasively, “different reasons, I suppose. Some are crossed in love; some meet financial reverses, and some do it while temporarily deranged.”