Ashes to Ashes

Ashes to Ashes by Isabel Ostrander

Norman Storm, a well-born but financially reckless official of the Mammoth Trust Company, has squandered nearly his entire inheritance on speculative ventures despite his attorney Wendle Foulkes' warnings, leaving only fifty thousand dollars of capital. When he glimpses his wife Leila emerging from a Manhattan office tower she had no reason to visit, and that evening overhears her tell a dinner guest, George Holworthy, a fabricated story about her whereabouts, his suspicion ignites. That night he eavesdrops on a furtive telephone call and watches her steal from the house after midnight to meet someone. The next evening, returning home unannounced, he finds insurance broker Dick Brewster at Leila's side, thanking her effusively and kissing her hands. Believing his wife unfaithful, Storm confronts her; when she refuses to grovel and instead answers with wounded pride, his jealous rage explodes and he strikes her with a golf club, killing her instantly. Storm then constructs, with cold deliberation, an elaborate cover-up: arranging the body to simulate a fatal fall from one of her cataleptic fainting spells, burning a bloodstained handkerchief in a sealing-wax flame, scattering the ashes into the garden, and rehearsing his story before the household staff, the family doctor, and the coroner's investigators. Every detail — the fireplace fender, a stray hairpin, the burning reading lamp — is staged to withstand scrutiny, and his composure carries him through the inquest, which rules the death accidental. Only afterward does the truth surface, delivered by the very people Storm believed guilty. Leila's furtive trip to town had been to secretly purchase, as a birthday surprise for her husband, a coveted strip of land from a neighbor who would deal with no one but her; her lie about the outing was told to protect Julie Brewster, who had begged Leila to cover for an indiscreet flirtation. The midnight meeting had been Leila rushing to comfort the distraught Julie, and Dick Brewster's late-night visit and grateful hand-kissing were his thanks to Leila for talking him out of divorcing his wife and back into reconciling their marriage. Confronted with proof of his wife's total innocence, Storm collapses in a paroxysm of belated horror and grief, though he conceals from Holworthy and the Brewsters the true cause of his breakdown. Unable to purge his guilt or bear the daily reminders of Leila surrounding him at their Greenlea home, Storm shuts up the house, takes a bachelor apartment in the city, and resolves to liquidate his remaining capital and flee the country to forget. His growing sense of invincibility — having outwitted doctors, servants, and investigators alike — curdles into reckless bravado; he even hints obliquely to his trust-company superior about a lucrative deal, ready to gloat once it pays off. That deal is a loan to a supposed Frenchman, Maurice du Chainat, who claims to need capital to rebuild his father-in-law's soap factory in Lille and offers spectacular returns. Ignoring Foulkes' renewed warnings, Storm empties his account to fund it, only to learn days later that "du Chainat" was actually a notorious confidence swindler already exposed for running the identical scam elsewhere — and that the real financier Nicholas Langhorne, whom Storm had smugly tried to needle about the deal, had never been involved at all, deepening Storm's humiliation. A momentary reprieve arrives when news breaks that the swindler has been tracked down and arrested aboard the ocean liner Alsace, raising hope that Storm's money might be recovered — only for that hope to be annihilated when the ship is reported lost at sea with all hands, the con man and Storm's sixty thousand dollars gone forever. Financially ruined, psychologically unraveling under guilt he can never confess, and trapped by circumstance in the very life of memory and surveillance he murdered his innocent wife trying to escape, Storm wanders the rain-soaked city in despair. There he unexpectedly encounters Jack Horton, a forgotten college acquaintance behaving with strange furtiveness of his own, setting up a new, ominous turn in Storm's unraveling fortunes as the narrative's first section closes.

By Isabel Ostrander · First published 1919 · Genre: Mystery, Crime Fiction, Psychological Thriller · 28 chapters · 116,322 words

First lines

"Well, that's the situation. " Wendle Foulkes' keen old eyes narrowed as they gazed into the turbulent ones of his client across the wide desk. "This last batch of securities is absolutely all that you have left of your inheritance from your father. Leave them alone where they are and you are sure of three thousand a year for yourself and for Leila after you."

Norman Storm struck the desk impatiently, and his lean, aristocratic face darkened.

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Ashes to Ashes is listed on Textopian as a novel by Isabel Ostrander, dated 1919 CE.

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Genres

Tags

mystery · detective fiction · crime fiction · murder mystery · suspense · investigation · amateur sleuth · clues · suspects · secrets · deception · danger

Contents

More by Isabel Ostrander