Cornell Woolrich

Murder at Mother’s Knee

Chapter One

Teacher Learns a Lesson

Miss Prince knew all the signs that meant homework hadn’t been done. The hangdog look, the guiltily-lowered head. She stood there by the Gaines boy’s desk, one hand extended. “Well, I’m waiting, Johnny.”

The culprit squirmed uncomfortably to his feet. “I... I couldn’t do it teacher.”

“Why not?”

“I... I didn’t know what to write about.”

“That’s no excuse,” Miss Prince said firmly. “I gave the class the simplest kind of a theme this time. I said to write about something you know about, something that really happened, either at home or else where, it doesn’t matter. If the others were able to, why weren’t you?”

“I couldn’t think of anything that happened.”

Miss Prince turned away. “Well, you’ll stay in after the rest and sit there until you do. When I give out homework I expect it to be done!” She returned to her desk, stacked the collected creative efforts to one side of her, and took up the day’s lesson.

Three o’clock struck and the seats before her emptied like magic in one headlong, scampering rush for the door. All but the second one back on the outside aisle.

“You can begin now, Johnny,” said Miss Prince relentlessly. “Take a clean sheet of paper and quit staring out the window.”

Although the victim probably wouldn’t have believed it, she didn’t enjoy this any more than he did. He was keeping her in just as much as she was keeping him. But discipline had to be maintained.

The would-be compositor seemed to be suffering from an acute lack of inspiration. He chewed the rubber of his pencil, fidgeted, stared at the blackboard, and nothing happened.

“You’re not trying, Johnny!” she said severely, at last.

“I can’t think of anything,” he lamented.

“Yes, you can, too. Stop saying that. Write about your dog or cat, if you can’t think of anything else.”

“I haven’t any.”

She went back to her papers. He raised his hand finally, to gain her attention. “Is it all right to write about a dream?”

“I suppose so, if that’s the best you can do,” she acquiesced. It seemed to be the only way out of the dilemma. “But I wanted you to write something that really happened. This was to test your powers of observation and description, as well as your grammar and composition.”

“This was part-true and only part a dream,” he assured her.

He bent diligently to the desk, to make up for time lost. At the end of fifteen minutes he stood before her with the effort completed. “All right, you can go home now,” she consented wearily. “And the next time you come to school without your homework—” But the door had already closed obliviously behind him.

She smiled slightly to herself, with a sympathetic understanding he wouldn’t have given her credit for, and placed the latest masterpiece on top of the others, to take home with her. As she did so, her eye, glancing idly along the opening sentences, was caught by something. She lingered on reading, forgetting her original intention of rising from her desk and going out to the cloakroom to get her hat.

The epistle before her, in laborious, straight up and down, childish handwriting, read:

Johnny Gaines,

English Comp. 2 Something that happened at our house.

One night I wasn’t sleeping so good on account of something I eat, and I dreamed I was out in a boat and the water was rough and rocking me up and down a lot. So then I woke up and the floor in my room was really shaking kind of and so was my bed and everything. And I even heard a table and chair fall down, downstairs. So I got kind of scared and I sneaked downstairs to see what was the matter. But by that time it stopped again and everything was quiet.

My mother was in the kitchen straitening things up again, and she didn’t want me to come near there when she first saw me. But I looked in anyway. Then she closed the outside door and she told me some kind of a varmint got in the house from outside, and my pa had a hard time getting it and killing it, and that was why everything fell over. It sure must have been a bad kind of one. because it scared her a lot. she was still shaking all the time. She was standing still, but she was all out of breath. I asked her where it was and she said he carried it outside with him to get rid of it far away from the house.

Then I saw where his hat got to when he was having all that trouble catching it, and he never even missed it. It fell through the stove onto the ashis. So she picked it up out of there when I showed her, and the ashis made it look even cleaner than before when he had it on. Almost like new Then she got some water and a brush and started to scrub the kitchen floor where she said the varmint got it dirtied up. But I couldn’t see where it was because she got in the way. And she wouldn’t let me stay and watch, she made me go upstairs again.

So that was all that happened.

When she had finished it, Miss Prince turned her head abruptly toward the door, as if to recall the composition’s author. Needless to say, he had escaped by now into freedom, was no longer within reach.

She sat on there for awhile, tapping her pencil thoughtfully against the edge of her teeth.

Miss Prince settled herself uneasily on one of the straight-backed chairs against the wall that the desk-sergeant had indicated to her, and waited, fiddling with her handbag.

She felt out of place in a police-station anteroom, and wondered what had made her come like this. Back in the schoolroom it had seemed like a sensible impulse, and she had promptly acted upon it. Now that she was here, for some reason it seemed more impulsive than sensible. Maybe she should have just taken it up with the principal and let him decide—

A pair of thick-soled brogues came walloping out, stopped short before her, and she looked up. She’d never been face to face with a professional detective before. This one didn’t look like one at all. He looked more like a business man who had dropped into the police station to report his car stolen, or something.

“Anything I can do for you?” he asked.

“It’s... it’s just something that I felt I ought to bring to your attention,” she faltered. “I’m Emily Prince, of the English Department, over at the Benjamin Harrison Public School.” She fumbled for the composition, extended it toward him. “One of my pupils handed this in to me yesterday afternoon.”

He read it over, handed it back to her. “I don’t get it,” he grinned. “You want me to pinch the kid that wrote this, for murdering the King’s English?”

She flashed him an impatient look. “I think it’s obvious that this child witnessed an act of violence, a crime of some sort, without realizing its full implication,” she said coldly. “You can read between the lines. I believe that a murder has taken place in that house, and gone undiscovered. I think the matter should be investigated.”

She stopped short. He had begun to act in a most unaccountable manner. The lower part of his face began to twitch in various unrelated places, and a dull red flush overspread it. “Excuse me a minute,” he said in a choked voice, stood up abruptly, and walked away from her. She noticed him holding his hand against the side of his face, as if to shield it from view. He stopped a minute at the other end of the room, stood there with his shoulders shaking, then turned and came back. He coughed a couple of times on the way over.

“If there’s anything funny about this, I fail to see it!”

“I’m sorry,” he said contritely, sitting down again. “It hit me so sudden, I couldn’t help it. A kid writes a composition, the first thing that comes into his head, just so he can get it over and go out and play, and you come here on the strength of it and ask us to investigate. Aw, now listen, lady—”

She surveyed him with eyes that were not exactly lanterns of esteem. “I cross-questioned the youngster. Today, after class. Before coming here. He insists it was not made up — that it’s true.”

“Naturally he would. The detail — I mean the assignment, was for them to write about something true, wasn’t it? He was afraid he’d have to do it over if he admitted it was imaginary.”

“Just a minute, Mr.—”

“Kendall,” he supplied.

“May I ask what your duties are here?”

“I’m a detective attached to the Homicide Squad. That’s what you asked for.”

It was now her turn to get in a dirty lick. “I just wanted to make sure,” she said dryly. “There’s been no way of telling since I’ve been talking to you.”

“Ouch!” he murmured.

“There are certain details given here,” she went on, flourishing the composition at him, “that are not within the scope of a child’s imagination. Here’s one: his mother was standing still, but she was all out of breath. Here’s another: a hat lying in just such and such a place. Here’s the most pertinent of the lot: her scrubbing of the kitchen floor at that hour of the night. It’s full of little touches like that. It wouldn’t occur to a child to make up things like that. They’re too realistic and undramatic to appeal to it. A child’s flights of fancy would incline toward more fantastic things. Shadows and spooks and faces at the window. I deal in children. I took a course in that. I know how their minds work.”

“Well,” he let her know stubbornly, “I deal in murders. I took a course in that. And I don’t run out making a fool of myself on the strength of a composition written by a kid in school!”

She stood up so suddenly her chair skittered back into the wall. “Sorry if I’ve wasted your time. I’ll know better in the future!”

“It’s not mine you’ve wasted,” he countered. “It’s your own, I’m afraid.”

Her footsteps went machine-gunning out of the place. He went over and draped himself against the sergeant’s desk. “Ever hear of anything like that? A kid in her class writes a composition, and she—”

It was a full ten minutes before they could quit roaring about it.

Chapter Two

Quiet Rooms for Rent

A few minutes after her class had been dismissed the next day, a “monitor,” one of the older children used to carry messages about the building, knocked on the door. “There’s a man outside would like to talk to you, Miss Prince.”

She stepped out into the hall. The man, none other than Detective Kendall of the Homicide Squad, was standing tossing a piece of chalk up and down in the hollow of his hand.

She surveyed him coldly.

“Thought you might like to know,” he said, “that I stopped that Gaines youngster on his way to school this morning and asked him a few questions. It’s just like I told you yesterday. The first words out of his mouth were that he made the whole thing up. He couldn’t think of anything, and it was nearly four o’clock, so he scribbled down the first thing that came into his head.”

If he thought this would force her to capitulate, he was sadly mistaken. “Of course he’d deny it — to you. That’s about as valid as a confession extracted from an adult by third-degree methods. The mere fact that you stopped to question him about it, frightened him into thinking he’d done something wrong. He wasn’t sure just what, but he played safe by saying he’d made it up. Don’t you know by now that the policeman is the most feared of all things to a child?”

“I’m not in uniform,” he protested.

“It doesn’t matter, he sensed you for someone in authority. They’re smart that way. I saw the frightened look on his face even after he got here. I can imagine how tactful you were about it, too!”

He thrust his jaw forward. “You know what I think is the matter with you?” he told her bluntly. “I think you’re looking for trouble! I think you’re just trying to find something wrong, no matter how you do it, to give yourself some excitement!”

It was a case of perfect mutual hostility, although she may have had a slight edge on him in this regard.

“Thank you for your co-operation, it’s been overwhelming!” she said arctically. She snatched something from him as she turned away. “And will you kindly refrain from marking the walls with that piece of chalk! Pupils are punished when they do it!”

She returned stormily to the classroom. Her victim sat hunched forlornly, looking very small in the sea of empty seats. “I’ve found out it wasn’t your fault for being late, Johnny,” she relented. “You can go now, and I’ll make it up to you by letting you out earlier than the others tomorrow.”

He scuttled for the door.

“Johnny, just a minute, I’d like to ask you something.”

His face clouded and he came back slowly toward her desk.

“Was that composition of yours true or made up?”

“Made up, Miss Prince,” he mumbled, scuffing his feet.

Which only proved to her he was more afraid of the anonymous man with a badge outside than he was of his own teacher, nothing else. She didn’t press the point.

“Johnny, do you live in a fairly large house?”

“Yes’m, pretty big,” he admitted.

“Well, er — do you think your mother would care to rent out a room to me? I have to leave where I am living now, and I’m trying to find another place.”

He swallowed. “You mean move into our house and live with us?” Obviously his child’s mind didn’t regard having a teacher at such close quarters as an unmixed blessing.

She smiled reassuringly. “I won’t interfere with you in your spare time, Johnny. I think I’ll walk home with you now, I’d like to know as soon as possible.”

“We’ll have to take the bus, Miss Prince, it’s pretty far out,” he told her when they had emerged from the building.

It was even farther than she had expected it to be, a weather-beaten, rather depressing-looking farm-type of building, well beyond the last straggling suburbs, in full open country. It was set back a sizable distance from the road, and the whole plottage around it had an air of desolation and neglect. Its unpainted shutters hung down askew, and the porch-shed was warped and threatened to topple over at one end.

Something could have happened out here quite easily, and gone unrevealed, she thought, judging by the looks of the place alone.

A toilworn, timid-looking woman came forward to meet them as they neared the door, wiping worried hands upon her apron. “Mom, this is my teacher, Miss Prince,” Johnny introduced.

At once the woman’s expression became even more harassed and intimidated. “You been doing something you shouldn’t again? Johnny, why can’t you be a good boy?”

“No, this has nothing to do with Johnny’s conduct,” Emily Prince hastened to explain. She repeated the request for lodging she had already made to the boy.

It was obvious, at a glance, that the suggestion frightened the woman. “I dunno,” she kept saying. “I dunno what Mr. Mason will say about it. He ain’t in right now.”

Johnny was registered at school under the name of Gaines. This must be the boy’s step-father then. It was easy to see that the poor, harassed woman before her was completely dominated by him, whoever he was. That, in itself, from Miss Prince’s angle, was a very suggestive factor. She made up her mind to get inside this house if she had to coax, bribe or browbeat her way in.

She opened her purse, took out a large-size bill, and allowed it to be seen in her hand, in readiness to seal the bargain.

The boy’s mother was obviously swayed by the sight of it, but still being held back by fear of something. “We could use the money, of course,” she wavered. “But... but wouldn’t it be too far out for you, here?”

Miss Prince faked a slight cough. “Not at all. The country air would be good for me. Couldn’t I at least see one of the rooms?” she coaxed. “There wouldn’t be any harm in that, would there?”

“N-no, I suppose not,” Mrs. Mason faltered.

She led the way up a badly-creaking inner staircase. “There’s really only one room fit for anybody,” she apologized.

“I’d only want it temporarily,” Miss Prince assured her. “Maybe a week or two at the most.”

She looked around. It really wasn’t as bad as she had been led to expect by the appearance of the house from the outside. In other words, it was the masculine share of the work, the painting and external repairing, that was remiss. The feminine share, the interior cleaning and keeping in order, was being kept up to the best of Mrs. Mason’s ability. There was another little suggestive sidelight to the situation in that, to Miss Prince.

She struck while the iron was hot. “I’ll take it,” she said firmly, and thrust the money she had been holding into the other’s undecided hand before she had time to put forward any further objections.

That did the trick.

“I... I guess it’s all right,” Mrs. Mason breathed, guiltily wringing her hands in her apron some more. “I’ll tell Mr. Mason it’s just for the time being.” She tried to smile to make amends for her own trepidation. “He’s not partial to having strangers in with us—”

“Why?” Miss Prince asked in her own mind, with a flinty question-mark.

“But you being Johnny’s teacher— When will you be wanting to move in with us?”

Miss Prince had no intention of relinquishing the tactical advantage to be gained by taking them by surprise like this. “I may as well stay, now that I’m out here,” she said. “I can have my things sent out after me.”

She closed the door of her new quarters and sat down to think.

Until and unless she unearthed definite, specific evidence that what Johnny had seen that night was what she thought it was, she must keep an open mind and an unwarped sense of proportion, she warned herself, and not be swayed by appearances alone, no matter how incriminating they seemed. Positive evidence, not appearances.

The sun was already starting to go down when she heard the thud of an approaching tread coming up the neglected dirt track that led to the door. She edged over to the window and peered cautiously down. Mason, if that was he, was singularly unprepossessing, even villainous-looking at first glance, much more so than she had expected him to be. He was thickset, strong as a steer in body, with lowering, bushy black brows and small, treacherously alert eyes. He had removed a disreputable, shapeless hat just as he passed below her window on his way in, and was wiping the completely bald crown of his head with a soiled bandanna. The skin of his scalp was sunburned, and ridged like dried leather. The adverse impression was so overwhelming that she felt it was too good to be true, not to be relied on. Again, appearances.

She left the window, hastened across the unreliable flooring of her room on arched feet to try and gain the doorway and overhear his first reaction, if possible.

She strained her ears. This first moment or two was going to offer an insight that was never likely to repeat itself quite as favorably again, no matter how long she stayed here.

“Where’s Ed?” she heard him grunt unsociably. This was the first inkling she had had that there was still another member of the household. Who he was and what relationship he bore, she could only conjecture.

“Still over in town, I guess,” she heard Mrs. Mason answer timidly. She was obviously in mortal terror as she nerved herself to make the unwelcome announcement she had to. The listener above could tell that by the very ring of her voice. “Johnny’s teacher’s come to stay with us — a little while.”

There was suppressed savagery in his low-voiced rejoinder. “What’d you do that for?” And then a sound followed that Emily Prince couldn’t identify for a second. A sort of quick, staggering footfall. A moment later she realized what it must have been. He had given the woman a violent push to express his disapproval.

She heard her whimper: “She’s up there right now, Dirk.”

“Get rid of her!” was the snarling answer.

“I can’t, Dirk, she already give me the money, and... and she ain’t going to be here but a short spell anyway.”

She heard him come out stealthily below her, trying to listen up just as she was trying to listen down. An unnatural silence fell, prolonged itself unnaturally. It was like a grotesque cat-and-mouse play, one of them directly above the other, both reconnoitering at once.

He turned and went back again at last, when she was about ready to reel over from the long strain of holding herself motionless. She crept back inside her room and drew a long breath.

If that hadn’t been a guilty reaction, what was? But it still wasn’t evidence, by any means. It could have been just nosiness, too.

The porch-structure throbbed again, and someone else had come in. This must be the Ed she had heard them, mention. She didn’t try to listen this time. There would never be a second opportunity quite like the first. Whatever was said to him would be in a careful undertone. Mrs. Mason came out shortly after, called up: “Miss Prince, like to come down to supper?”

The teacher steeled herself, opened the door and stepped out. This was going to be a battle of wits. On their side they had an animal-like craftiness. On hers she had intellect, a trained mind, and self-control.

She felt she was really better equipped than they for warfare of this sort. She went down to enter the first skirmish.

They were at the table eating already — such a thing as waiting for her had never entered their heads. They ate crouched over low — like the animals they were — and that gave them the opportunity of watching her surreptitiously from their overhanging brows. Mrs. Mason said: “You can sit here next to Johnny. This is my husband. And this is my step-son, Ed.”

The brutality on the son’s face was less deeply ingrained than on Mason’s. It was only a matter of degree, however. Like father, like son.

“Evenin’,” Mason grunted.

The son only nodded, peering upward at her in a half-baleful, half-suspicious way, plainly taking her measure.

They ate in silence for awhile, though she could tell both their minds were busy on the same thing: her presence here, thinking about that, trying to decide what it betokened.

Finally Mason spoke. “Reckon you’ll be staying some time?”

“No,” she said quietly, “just a short while.”

The son spoke next, after a considerable lapse of time. She could tell he’d premeditated the question for a full ten minutes past. “How’d you happen to pick our place?”

“I knew Johnny, from my class. And it’s quieter out here than farther in.”

She caught the flicker of a look that passed between them. She couldn’t read its exact meaning, whether acceptance of her explanation or skepticism.

They shoved back their chairs, one after the other, got up and turned away, without a word of apology. Mason sauntered out into the dark beyond the porch. Ed Mason stopped to strike a match to a cigarette he had just rolled. Even in the act of doing that, however, she caught his head turned slightly sideways toward her, watching her veiledly when he thought she wasn’t looking.

The older man’s voice sounded from outside: “Ed, come out here a minute, I want to talk to you.”

She knew what about — they were going to compare impressions, possibly plot a course of action.

The first battle was a draw. No hits, no steals, no errors.

She got up and went after Mrs. Mason. “I’ll help you with the dishes.” She wanted to get into that kitchen.

She couldn’t see it at first. She kept using her eyes, scanning the floor surreptitiously while she, wiped Mrs. Mason’s thick, chipped crockery. Finally she thought she detected something. A shadowy bald patch, so to speak. It was both cleaner than the surrounding area, as though it had been scrubbed vigorously, and yet at the same time it was overcast. There were the outlines of a stain still faintly discernible. But it wasn’t very conspicuous, just the shadow of a shadow.

She said to herself: “She’ll tell me. I’ll find out from her what I want to know.”

She moved aimlessly around, pretending to dry off something, until she was standing right over it. Then she pretended to fumble her cloth, let it drop. She bent down for it, and planted the flat of her hand squarely on the shadowy place, as if trying to retain her balance. She let it stay that way for a moment.

She didn’t have to look at the other woman. A heavy mug slipped through her hands and shattered resoundingly at her feet. Emily Prince straightened up again, and only then glanced over her way. Mrs. Mason’s face had whitened a little. She averted her eyes.

“She’s told me,” Miss Prince said to herself with slow, inward satisfaction.

There hadn’t been a word exchanged between the two of them.

She went upstairs to her room a short while after. If somebody had been murdered in that room she had just been in, what disposal had been made of the remains? Something must have been done with them, they must be lying concealed someplace around — a thing like that couldn’t just be made to disappear.

She sat there shuddering on the edge of the cot, wondering: “Am I going to have nerve enough to sleep here tonight, under the same roof with a couple of possible murderers?” She drew the necessary courage, finally, from an unexpected quarter. The image of Detective Kendall flashed before her mind, laughing uproariously at her. “I certainly am!” she seethed. “I’ll show him whether I’m right or not!” And she proceeded to blow out the lamp and lie down.

Chapter Three

Nobody Missing

In the morning sunlight the atmosphere of the house was less macabre, more bearable. She rode in to school with Johnny on the bus, and for the next six hours put all thoughts of the grisly matter she was engaged upon out of her mind, while she devoted herself to parsing, syntax and participles.

After she had dismissed class that afternoon she went around to her former quarters to pick up a few belongings. This was simply to allay suspicion out at the Masons’. She left the greater part of her things undisturbed where they were, to be held for her.

She was waiting for the bus, collected parcels beside her, when Kendall hove into sight on the opposite side of the street. He was the last person she was anxious to meet under the circumstances. She pretended not to recognize him, but it didn’t work. He crossed over to her, stopped, touched his hat-brim, and grinned. “You seem to be moving. Give you a hand with those?”

“I can manage,” she said distantly.

He eyed the bus right-of-way speculatively, then followed it with his gaze out toward its eventual destination. “It wouldn’t be out to the Mason place?” Which was a smarter piece of deduction than she had thought him capable of.

“It happens to be.”

To her surprise, his face sobered. “I wouldn’t fool around with people of that type,” he said earnestly. “It’s not the safest thing to try on anyone.”

Instantly she whirled on him, to take advantage of the flaw she thought she detected in his line of reasoning. “You’re being inconsistent, aren’t you? If something happened out there which they want to keep hidden, I agree it’s not safe. Which isn’t going to stop me. But you say nothing happened out there. Then why shouldn’t it be safe?”

“Look,” he said patiently, “you’re going at this from an entirely wrong angle. There’s a logical sequence to things like this.” He told off his fingers at her, as though she were one of her own pupils, which was to her only an added insult. “First, somebody has to be missing or unaccounted for. Second, the body itself, or evidence sufficiently strong to take the place of an actual body, has to be brought to light. The two of them are interchangeable, but one or the other of them always has to precede an assumption of murder. That’s the way we work. Your first step is an imaginary composition written by an eight-year-old child. Even in the composition itself, which is your whole groundwork, there’s no direct evidence given. No assault was seen by the kid, no body of any victim was seen either before or after death. In other words, you’re reading an imaginary crime between the lines of an account that’s already imaginary in itself. You can’t get any further away from facts than that.”

She loosed a blast of sarcasm at him sufficient to have withered the entire first three rows of any of her classes. “You’re wasting your breath, my textbook expert. The trouble with hard-and-fast rules is that they always let a big chunky exception slip by, and then try to ignore it because it doesn’t get inside the frame.”

He shoved a helpless palm at her. “But there’s nobody missing, man woman or child, within our entire jurisdiction, and that goes out well beyond the Mason place. Word would have come in to us by now if there were! How’re you going to get around that?”

“Then why don’t you go out after it, to places from which it wouldn’t be likely to come in to you of its own accord?” she flared. “Why don’t you take this main road, this interstate highway that runs through here, and zone it off, and then work your way back along it, zone by zone, and find out if anyone’s missing from other people’s jurisdictions? Believe me,” she added crushingly, “the only reason I suggest you do it, is that you have the facilities and I haven’t!”

He nodded with tempered consideration. “That could be done,” he admitted. “I’ll send out routine inquiries to the main townships along the line. I’d hate to have to give my reasons for checking up, though, in case I was ever pinned down to it: ‘A kid in school here wrote a composition in which he mentioned he saw his mother scrubbing the kitchen floor at two in the morning.’ ” He grinned ruefully. “Now why don’t you just let it go at that, leave it in our hands? In case I get a bite on any of my inquiries, I could drop out there myself and look things over—”

She answered this with such vehemence that he actually retreated a step away from her on the sidewalk. “I’ll do my own looking over, thank you! I mayn’t know all the rules in the textbook, but at least I’m able to think for myself. My mind isn’t in handcuffs! Here comes my bus. Good day, Mr. Kendall!”

He thrust his hat back and scratched under it. “Whew!” she heard him whistle softly to himself, as she clambered aboard with her baggage.

It was still too early in the day for the two men to be on hand when she reached the Mason place. She found Mrs. Mason alone in the kitchen. A stolen glance at the sector of flooring that had been the focus of her attention the previous night, while she stood chatting with the woman, revealed a flagrant change. Something had been done to it since then, and whatever it was, the substance used must have been powerfully corrosive. The whole surface of the wood was now bleached and shredded, as though it had been eaten away by something. Its changed aspect was far more incriminating now than if it had been allowed to remain as it was, to her way of thinking. They had simply succeeded in proving that the stain was not innocent, by taking such pains to efface it. Be that as it might, it was no longer evidence now, even if it had been to start with. It was only a place where evidence had been.

She opened the back door and looked out at the peaceful sunlit fields that surrounded the place, with a wall of woodland bringing up in the distance on one side. She pretended to gulp enjoyable quantities of air. It was enjoyable, but she wasn’t thinking of that. In one direction, up from the house, they had corn growing. The stalks were head-high, could have concealed anything. A number of black specks — birds, but whether crows or just what species she wasn’t rustic enough to be able to tell — were hovering above one particular spot, darting busily in and out. They’d rise above it and circle and then go down in again, but they didn’t stray very far from it. Only that one place held any attraction for them.

Down the other way, again far off, so far off as to be almost indistinguishable, she could make out a low quadrangular object that seemed to be composed of cobblestones or large rocks. It had a dilapidated shed over it on four uprights. A faint, wavering footpath led to it. “What’s that?” she asked.

Mrs. Mason didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, somewhat unwillingly, the questioner thought: “Used to be our well. Can’t use it now, needs shoring up. Water’s all sediment.”

“Then where do you get water from?” Miss Prince asked.

“We’ve been going down the road and borrowing it from the people at the next place down, carrying it back in a bucket. It’s a long ways to go, and they don’t like it much neither.”

Miss Prince waited a moment, to keep the question from sounding too leading. Then she asked casually: “Has your well been — unfit to use for very long?”

She didn’t really need the answer. New grass was sprouting everywhere, but it had barely begun to overgrow the footpath yet. She thought the woman’s eyes avoided her, but that might have been simply the chronic hangdog look that was a result of her browbeaten attitude. “ ’Bout two or three weeks,” she mumbled reluctantly.

Birds agitated in a cornfield. A well suddenly unfit for use for the last two or three weeks. And then, in a third direction, straight over and across, the woods, secretive and brooding as always. Three possibilities. Three choices in direction. But only one of them the right one.

She said to herself: “She told me something I wanted to know once before. Maybe I can get her to tell me what I want to know now too.” Those who live in the shadow of fear have poor defenses. The teacher said briskly: “I think I’ll go for a nice long stroll in the open.”

She put her to a test, probably one of the most peculiar ever devised. Instead of turning and striking out at once, as a man would have in parting from someone, she began to retreat slowly, half-turned backwards toward her as she drew away, chattering as she went, as though unable to tear herself away, to cover up the close scrutiny she was subjecting her to.

She retreated first in the general direction of the cornfield, as though intending to ramble among the stalks. The woman just stood there immobile in the doorway, looking after her.

The teacher closed in again, as though inadvertently, under necessity of something she had just remembered she wanted to tell her. “Oh, by the way, could you spare me an extra chair for my room, I—”

Then when she again made to part company with her, it was in a diametrically opposite direction, along the footpath that coursed toward the well, as if without noticing where her steps were taking her. “Any kind of a chair will do,” she called back talkatively. “Just so long as it has a seat and four—”

The woman just stood there, eyeing her without a flicker.

She changed her mind, came back again the few yards she had already traveled. “The sun’s still hot, even this late,” she prattled. She pretended to touch the top of her head. “I don’t think I care to walk in the open. I think I’ll go over that way instead, those woods look nice and cool from here. I always did like to roam around in woods—”

The woman’s eyes seemed to be a little larger now, as she shifted directions in accordance with this restless boarder of hers. She swallowed hard. Miss Prince could distinctly see the lump go down the scrawny lines of her throat. She started to say something, then she didn’t after all. It was flagrantly obvious, the way her whole body had seemed to lean forward for a moment, then subside again against the door-frame. Her hands, inert until now, had begun to mangle her apron. It was almost like a pinwheel, the way it swirled one way, then the other, in their hidden clutch.

Not a sound came from her. Yet, though the test seemed to have failed, it had succeeded. Miss Prince went on, this time without any further backward parleying.

“I know the right direction now,” she was saying to herself grimly, as she trudged along, head bent. “It’s in the woods. It’s somewhere in the woods.”

She went slow. Idly. Putting little detours and curleycues into her line of progress, to seem aimless, haphazard. She knew, without turning, long after the house was a tiny thing behind her, that the woman was still there in the doorway, straining her eyes after her, watching her all the way to the edge of the woods. She knew, too, that that had been a give-and-take back there just now. The woman had told her what she wanted to know, but she had told the woman a little something too. She must have, she couldn’t possibly have failed to, in the course of the mental fencing-match they had just had. If nothing else, that she wasn’t quite as scatterbrained, as frivolous, as she had seemed to be about which direction to take for her stroll. Nothing definite maybe, but just a suspicion that she wasn’t hanging around out here altogether for her health.

She’d have to watch her step with them, just as much as they’d have to watch theirs with her. A good deal depended on whether the woman was an active ally of the two men, or just a passive thrall involved against her will.

She was up to the outermost trees now, and soon they had closed around her, the house and its watcher was gone from sight, and a pall of cool blue twilight had dimmed everything. She beat her way slowly forward. It was not a dense copse, the trees were not set thickly together by any means, but it was extensive, it covered a lot of ground. There were avenues, alleys running through it in various directions, natural ones, not man-made, but none of them was continuous, it just happened to be the way the trunks were ranged around.

She had not expected anything so miraculous as to stumble on something the moment she stepped in here. It was quite likely that she would come out again none the wiser this time. And many more times to come. But she intended returning here again and again if necessary, until—

If there had been a murder, then there was a body somewhere. Johnny had turned his composition in three days ago. Even if his “dream” had taken place two or three weeks before that, there must still be a body somewhere. There would still be a body a year from now.

She was getting tired now, and she was already none too sure of her own whereabouts. She spotted a half-submerged stump protruding from the damp, moldy turf and sat down on it, fighting down a suspicion that was trying to form in the back of her mind that she had lost herself. A thing like that, if it ever got to that Kendall’s ears, would be all that was needed to complete his hilarity at her expense. The stump was green all over with some sort of fungus, but she was too tired to care. The ground in here remained in a continual state of moldy dampness, she noticed. The sun never had a chance to reach through the leafy ceiling of the trees and dry it out.

Chapter Four

Nightmare

She had been sitting there perhaps two minutes at the most, when a faint scream of acute fright reached her from a distance. It was thin and piping, and must have been thin even at its source. She jarred to her feet. That had sounded like the voice of a child, not a grown-up. It repeated itself, and two others joined in with it, as frightened as the first, if less shrilly acute. She started to run, as fast as the trackless nature of the ground would allow, toward the direction from which she believed the commotion was coming.

She could hear water splashing, and then without any further warning she came crashing out onto the margin of a sizable and completely screened-off woodland pool. It was shaped like a figure eight.

At the waist, where it narrowed, there was an irregular bridge of flat-surfaced stones, although the distances between them were unmanageable except by sprinting. There was a considerable difference in height between the two sections, and the water coursed into the lower one in a placid, silken waterfall stretching the entire width of the basin. This lower oval was one of the most remarkable things she had ever seen. It was shallow, the water was only about knee-high in it, and it was surfaced with dazzling creamy-white sand. There was something clean and delightful-looking about it.

Two small boys in swimming-trunks, one of them Johnny Gaines, were arched over two of the stepping-stones, frantically tugging at a third who hung suspended between them, legs scissoring wildly across the surface of the sleek sand below. “Keep moving them!” she heard Johnny shriek just as she got there. “Don’t let ’em stay still!”

She couldn’t understand the reason for their obvious terror. The water below him certainly wasn’t deep enough to drown anybody—

“Help us, lady!” the other youngster sobbed. “Help us get him back up over the edge here!”

She kicked off the impediment of her high-arched shoes, picked her way out to them along the stones, displaced the nearest one’s grip with her own on the floundering object of rescue. He wouldn’t come up for a minute, even under the added pull of her adult strength, and she couldn’t make out what was holding him, there was nothing visible but a broil of sand-smoking water around his legs. She hauled backwards from him with every ounce of strength she had in her body, and suddenly he floundered free over the lip of the low spillway.

The three of them immediately retreated to the safety of the bank, and she followed. “What got you so frightened?” she asked.

“Don’t you know what that is?” Johnny said, still whimpering. “A quicksand! Once that gets you—”

There could be no mistaking the genuineness of their fright. His two companions had scuttled off for home without further ado, finishing their dressing on the hoof as they went.

“Look, I’ll show you.” He picked up a fist-sized rock, shied it in. What happened sent a slight chill down her spine. The stone lay there for a moment, motionless and perfectly visible through the crystalline film of water. Then there was a slight concentric swirl of the sand immediately around it, a dimple appeared on its surface, evened out again, and suddenly the stone wasn’t there any more. The sand lay as smooth and satiny as ever, clean and delightful-looking. The delayed timing was what was so horrible about it.

“We’d better go,” she said, taking a step backward from it.

“The upper pool’s all right, it’s only got gravel at the bottom,” Johnny was explaining, wiping off his hair with a handful of leaves.

She didn’t hear him. She was examining the branch of a bush growing beside the bank that had swung back into place again in her wake. It formed an acute angle such as is never found in nature. It was badly fractured halfway out along its length. She reached for a second frond, a third, fingered them. Their spines were all broken in that same way.

Her face paled a little. She moved around the entire perimeter of the bush, handling its shoots, careful to overstep the treacherous cup under her. Then she examined the neighboring bushes in the same way. The fractures were all on the landward side, away from the pool. The tendrils that overhung the water itself, that anyone in difficulties in the sand could have been expected to grasp at and cling to, were all perfectly undamaged, arching gracefully just the way they had grown.

She came away with a puzzled look on her face. But only that, no increased pallor.

At the edge of the woods, just before they came out into the open again, the youngster beside her coaxed plaintively: “Miss Prince, don’t gimme ’way about going swimming in there, will you?”

“Won’t they notice your hair’s damp?”

“Sure, but I can say I went swimming in the mill-pond, down by the O’Brien place. I’m allowed to go there.”

“Oh, it’s just that... that place we just came from they don’t want you to go near?”

He nodded.

That could have been because of the quicksand — possibly. Then again it could have been for other reasons as well. “Have they always told you to keep away from there?” she hazarded.

It paid off. “No’m, only lately,” he said guilelessly.

Only lately. She decided she was going to pay another visit to that cannibal sand-bed. With a long pole, perhaps.

The evening meal began in deceptive calmness. Although the two Masons continued to watch her in sullen silence, there already seemed to be less of overt suspicion and more of just casual curiosity in their underbrow glances. A casual remark from Johnny suddenly brought on a crisis when she was least expecting it. The youngster didn’t realize the dynamite in his remark. “Did I pass, in that composition I handed in?” he asked all at once. And then, before she could stop him in time, he blurted out: “You know, the one about the dream I had, where I came down and—”

Without raising eyes from the table she could sense the tightening-up of tension around her. It was as noticeable as though an electric current was streaking around the room. Ed Mason forgot to go ahead eating, he just sat looking down at his plate. Then his father stopped too, and looked at his own plate. There was a soft slur of shoe-leather inching along the floor from somewhere under the table.

Mrs. Mason said in a stifled voice, “Sh-h, Johnny.”

There was only one answer she could make. “I haven’t got around to reading it yet.” Something made her add: “It’s up there on the table in my room right now.”

Mason resumed eating. Then his son followed suit.

She had given them all the rope they needed. Let them go ahead and hang themselves now. If the composition disappeared, as she was almost certain it was going to, that would be as good as an admission in itself that—

She purposely lingered below, helping Mrs. Mason as she had the night before. Then when she came out of the kitchen again and made ready to go up to her room, they were both sprawled out sluggishly in the adjoining room. Whether one of them had made a quick trip up the stairs and down again, she had no way of knowing — until she got up there herself.

Mason’s eyes followed her in a strangely steadfast way as she started up the stairs. Just what the look signified she couldn’t quite make out. It made her uneasy, although it wasn’t directly threatening in itself. It had some other quality that she couldn’t figure, a sort of shrewd complacency. Just before she reached the turn and passed from sight he called out: “Have a good night’s sleep, Miss.” She saw a mocking flicker of the eyes pass between him and Ed.

She didn’t answer. The hand with which she was steadying the lamp-chimney she was taking up with her, shook a little as she let herself into her room and closed the door. She moved a chair before it as a sort of frail barricade. Then she hurried to the table and sifted through the homework papers stacked on it.

It was there. It hadn’t been touched. It was out of the alphabetical order she was always careful to keep her papers in, it had gotten in between the M’s and N’s in some way, but it had been left there undisturbed for her to read at will.

That puzzled, almost crestfallen look that she’d had at the pool that afternoon, came back to her face again. She’d been positive she’d find it missing.

She retired and blew out the lamp finally.

How long she’d been asleep she could not tell, but it must have been well after midnight that something roused her. She didn’t know exactly what it was at first, then as she sat up and put her foot questioningly to the floor, she identified it as some sort of a strong vibration coming from someplace below. As though two heavy bodies were threshing about in a struggle down there. She quickly put something on and went out to listen in the hall. A chair went over with a vicious crack. A table jarred. She could hear an accompaniment of stentorian breathing, an occasional wordless grunt. But she was already on her way down by that time, all further thought of concealment thrown to the winds.

Mason and his son were locked in a grim, heaving struggle that floundered from one end of the kitchen to the other and back again, dislodging everything in its path. Mrs. Mason was a helpless onlooker, holding a lighted lamp back beyond danger of upsetting, and ineffectually whimpering: “Don’t! Dirk! Ed! Let each other be now!”

“Hold the door open, quick, Ma! I’ve got him!” Mason gasped just as Miss Prince arrived on the scene.

The woman edged over sidewise along the wall, flung it back. Mason catapulted his adversary bodily out into the night. Then he snatched up a chicken lying in a pool of blood over in a corner, sent that after him, streaking a line of red drops across the floor. “Thievin’ drunkard!” he shouted, shaking a fist at the sprawling figure outside. “Now you come back when you sober up, and I’ll let you in!” He slammed the door, shot the bolt home. “Clean up that mess, Ma,” he ordered gruffly. “That’s one think I won’t ’low, is no chicken-stealing drunkards in my house!” He strode past the open-mouthed teacher without seeming to see her, still heaving with righteous indignation, stamped up the stairs.

“He’s very strict about that,” Mrs. Mason whispered confidentially. “Ed don’t mean no harm, but he helps himself to things that don’t belong to him when he gets likkered up.” She sloshed water into a bucket, reached for a scrubbing-brush, sank wearily to her knees, and began to scour ruddy circles of chicken-blood on the floor. “I just got through doin’ this floor with lye after the last time,” she mumbled.

Miss Prince found her voice at last. It was still a very small, shaky one. “Has... has this happened before?”

“Every so often,” she admitted. “Last time he run off with the O’Brien’s Ford, drove it all the way out here just like it belonged to him. Mr. Mason had to sneak it back where he took it from, at that hour of the night.”

An odor of singeing felt assailed the teacher’s nostrils. She looked, discovered a felt hat, evidently the unmanageable Ed’s, fallen through the open scuttle-hole of the wood-burning stove onto the still-warm ashes below. She drew it up, beat it odorless against the back of a chair.

There was a slight rustle from the doorway and Johnny was standing there in his night-shirt, sleepily rubbing one eye. “I had another of those dreams, Ma,” he complained. “I dreamed the whole house was shaking and—”

“You go back to bed, hear?” his mother said sharply. “And don’t go writing no more compositions about it in school, neither!” She fanned out her skirt, trying to screen the crimson vestiges on the floor from him. “Another of them wood-varmints got into the house, and your Pa and your Uncle Ed had to kill it, that’s all!”

Miss Prince turned and slunk up the stairs presently, with a very peculiar look on her face. The look of someone who has made a complete, unmitigated fool out of herself. She slammed the door of her room behind her with — for her — unusual asperity. She went over to the window and stood looking out. Far down the highway she could make out the dwindling figure of Ed Mason in the moonlight, steering a lurching, drunken course back toward town and singing, or rather hooting, at the top of his voice as he went.

“Appearances!” she scowled bitterly. “Appearances!”

Chapter Five

Dangerous Ground

She always seemed to meet Kendall just when she didn’t want to. He appeared at her elbow next morning just as she alighted from the bus in town. “How’re things going? Get onto anything yet?”

She made a move to brush by him, first, without answering.

“I haven’t received anything definite yet on any of those inquiries I sent out,” he went on.

She turned and faced him. “You won’t, either. You can forget the whole thing! All right, laugh, you’re entitled to it! You were right and I was wrong. Now go ahead, make the most of it!”

“You mean you don’t think—”

“I mean I practically saw the same thing the boy did, with my own eyes, last night and it wasn’t anything of the sort. It was just a family row! I’ve made a fool out of myself and gone to a lot of trouble, for nothing!”

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going to pack my things and come away from there, right today, you can be sure of that!”

“Don’t take it too hard—” he tried to console her.

She stalked away. At least, she had to admit to herself, he’d been decent enough not to say, “I told you so,” and laugh right out in her face. Oh well, he was probably saving it up to enjoy it more fully back at the station-house with his cronies.

Mrs. Mason was alone in the kitchen again when she returned that afternoon to get her things together. There hadn’t been time before school in the morning. The woman looked at her questioningly, but the teacher didn’t say anything about her imminent departure. Time enough to announce it when she came down again.

In her room she picked up the dress she’d had on the afternoon before and started to fold it over. Something caught her eye. There was a viscous stain, a blotch, on the rear of it that she hadn’t noticed until now. She looked at it more closely, as though unable to account for it. Then she remembered sitting down on a half-submerged stump for a moment, just before hearing the boys’ cries of distress. “No more appearances!” she warned herself half under her breath, and tossed the garment into the open bag.

She picked up the batch of school papers lying on the table to follow suit with them. There was that composition of Johnny’s that had started all the trouble, staring her in the face again. She started to reread it. She was standing up at first. Before she had finished she was seated once more. She turned and looked over at the dress she had just put away. Then she got up and took it out again. That and the other things that had preceded it.

There was a timid knock on the door and Mrs. Mason looked in at her. “I thought maybe you’d like me to help you get your things together,” she faltered.

Miss Prince eyed her with cool imperturbability. “I didn’t say anything about leaving. What gave you that idea? I’m staying — at least for awhile longer.”

The woman’s hand started out toward her, in a palsied gesture of supplication and warning. She seemed about to say something. Then she quickly closed the door again with stealthy terror.

Her main worry was to get down the venerable stairs without causing them to creak and betray her. The house lay steeped in midnight silence. She had felt certain Mason and his son were inveterate snorers when asleep, she had heard them at other times, even downstairs when they dozed after meals. Tonight for some reason she couldn’t hear them.

She didn’t use the pocket-light she had provided herself with, for fear of attracting attention while still within the house. The real need for that would be later, over there in the woods. The stairs accomplished without mishap, it was a fairly easy matter to slip the bolt on the back door and get out without too much noise. There was a full moon up, but whether it would be much help where she was going, she doubted.

She stole around to the back of the rickety tool-house and retrieved the long-poled pitchfork she had concealed there in readiness earlier in the evening. Its tines were bent, and with a little manipulation, it might serve as a sort of grappling hook if... if there was anything for it to hook onto where she was taking it. A button was all she needed, a rotting piece of suiting an inch square. Evidence. Until she had that, she couldn’t go to Kendall about this, she had to keep on working alone. Not after what she had admitted to him that morning.

She struck out across the silver-dappled fields. The trees closed around her finally, a maw of impenetrable blackness after the moonlight, and she brought her pocket-light into play, following its wan direction-finder in and out between the looming, ghostly trunks.

The bed of the quicksand loomed whitely even in the dark. There was something sinister about it, like a vast evil eye lying there in wait. The thin coating of water over it refracted the shine of her light to a big phosphorescent balloon when she cast it downward on it. She discovered her teeth chattering and clamped them shut. She looked around for something to balance her light, finally nested it within a bush so that the interlaced twigs supported it. She shifted a little farther over along the bank and poised the pitchfork like someone about to spear fish.

She lunged out and downward with it. The soft feel of the treacherous sand as the tines clove into it was transferred repugnantly along the pole to her hands. That was all she had time to notice. She didn’t even see it sink in.

A leathery hand was pressed smotheringly to the lower half of her face, a thick anaconda-like arm twined about her waist from behind, and the light winked out. Her wrists were caught together as they flew up from the pitchfork-pole, held helpless.

“Got her, Ed?” a quiet voice said in the dark.

“Got her,” a second voice answered.

There hadn’t been a warning sound around her. They must have been lurking there concealed ahead of her, to be able to spring the trap so unexpectedly.

Her pinioned hands were swung around behind her, brought together again. The hand had left her mouth. “You int’rested in what’s down in there?” the man behind her asked threateningly.

“I don’t know what you mean. Take your hands off me!”

“You know what we mean. And we know what you mean. Don’t you suppose we’re onto why you’re hanging around our place? Now you’ll get what you looked for.” He addressed his father. “Take off her shoes and stockings and lie ’em on the bank. Careful, don’t tear ’em now.”

“What’s that for?”

“She came out here alone, see, early tomorrow morning, and it looked so pretty she went wading in the thing without knowing what it was, and it got her.”

She kicked frantically, trying to impede them. She was helpless in their hands. Her ankles were caught, one at a time, and stripped.

“They’ll dredge for her, won’t they?” Dirk Mason mentioned with sinister meaning.

“She’ll be on top, won’t she?” was the grisly reassurance. “Once they get her out, they’ll be no call for them to go ahead dredging any further down.”

She ripped out a scream of harrowing intensity. What if it had been twice as shrill as it was, it couldn’t have reached past the confines of these woods. And who was there in these woods to hear her? “Think we ought to stuff something in her mouth?” the older man asked.

“No, because we gotta figure on her being found later. Don’t let it disturb you, no one’ll hear her.”

She was fighting like something possessed, as any animal fights for its life, but she was no match for the two of them combined. Not even a man would have been.

They were ready for the incredible thing they were about to do now. “Grab her legs and swing her, so she goes out far enough.” There was a moment of sickening indecision, while she swung suspended between them, clear of the ground. Then her spinning body shot from them.

Water sprayed over her and she had struck. The fall was nothing. It was like landing on a satin quilt, the sand was so soft. She rolled over, tore her arms free, and threshed to a kneeling position. There was that awful preliminary moment in which nothing happened, as with that stone she had seen Johnny throw in yesterday. Then a sudden pull, a drawing, started in — light at first, barely noticeable, giving the impression of being easy to counteract. And each move the wrong one, fastening it tighter around her bared feet, ankles, calves.

Meanwhile, something was happening on the bank, or at least, farther back in the woods, but she was only dimly aware of it, too taken up in her own floundering doom. It reached her vaguely, like something through a black mist. An intermittent winking as of fireflies here and there, each one followed by a loud crack like the breaking of a heavy bough. And heavy forms were crashing through the thickets in several directions at once, two of them fleeing along the edge of the pool, others fanning out farther back, as if to intercept them. There was one final crack, a floundering fall, and then a breathless voice nearby said: “Don’t shoot — I give up!”

A light, stronger than the one she had brought, suddenly flashed out, caught her, steadied, lighting up the whole pool. Her screams had dwindled to weak wails now, simply because she hadn’t enough breath left. She was writhing there like a crazed rumba-dancer, still upright, but her legs already gone past the knees.

“Hurry up, help me with this girl!” a voice shouted somewhere behind the blinding light. “Don’t you see what they’ve done to her?” The pole of the same pitchfork she had used was thrust out toward her. “Hang onto this a minute.” She clutched it with both hands. A moment later a noosed rope had splashed into the water around her. “Pass your arms through that and tighten it around you under them. Grab hold now! Now kick out behind you!”

For minutes nothing happened, she didn’t seem to move at all, though there must have been at least three of them behind the rope, judging by the amount of pull it was exerting. “Are we hurting you?” Then suddenly there was a crumbling feeling of the sand all around her trapped legs and she came out flounderingly, like a dead fish.

Kendall was one of them, of course, and even the brief glimpse she had of his face by torchlight made her wonder how she could have ever felt averse to running into him at any time. She certainly didn’t feel that way now.

They carried her out of the woods in a “chair” made of their hands and put her into a police-car waiting at the edge of the fields, although she was already beginning to insist that her feet were all right, just “pins and needles” with numbness.

“You’d better get back there and go to work. Even before you got the rope around me, the downward pull had stopped, I noticed. I seemed to be standing on something.

“We got them both,” Kendall said. “And of course the mere fact that they would try anything like that on you is the give-away, evidence or no evidence.”

“How did you get out here on time?”

“One of those inquiries I sent out finally paid off. A commercial traveler named Kenneth Johnson was reported missing, from way over in Jordanstown. He was supposed to show up at Indian River, out beyond here in the other direction, and he never got there, dropped from sight somewhere along the way, car and all. He was carrying quite a gob of money with him. He left three weeks ago, but it wasn’t reported until now, because he was only expected back around this time. I only got word around eleven tonight, a little over an hour ago. I thought of the Masons right away, but mainly thanks to you. I started right out here with a couple of my partners to have a little talk with them, look around, but never dreaming that you were still here yourself. Then a little past the next house down, the O’Brien place, we met the kid, Johnny, running along the road lickety-split, on his way to phone in to us from there and get help. His mother had finally gotten pangs of conscience and thrown off her fear of her husband and step-son long enough to try to save you from what she guessed was going to happen.”

She came out again the first thing next morning. Kendall came forward to meet her as she neared the pool. He told her they’d finally gotten the car out a little after daybreak, with the help of a farm-tractor run in under the trees, plenty of stout ropes, and some grappling hooks. She could see the weird-looking sand-encrusted shape standing there on the bank, scarcely recognizable for what it was.

“Kenneth Johnson all right,” Kendall said quietly, “and still inside it when we got it up. But murdered before he was ever swallowed up in the sand. I have a confession from the two Masons. He gave Ed a hitch back along the road that night, like a fool. Mason got him to step in for a minute on some excuse or other, when they’d reached his place, so he’d have a chance to rifle his wallet. Johnson caught him in the act, and Mason and his accomplice of a father murdered him between them with a flatiron. Then they put him back in the car, drove him over here, and sent it in. No need to go any closer, it’s not a very pretty sight.”

On the way out he asked: “But what made you change your mind so suddenly? Only yesterday morning when I met you you were ready to—”

“I sat down on a stump not far from the pool, and afterwards I discovered axle-grease on my dress. It was so damp and moldy in there that the clot that had fallen from the car hadn’t dried out yet, the way it would have in the open. Why should a car be driven in there where there was no road?

“But the main thing. was still that famous composition of Johnny’s. I happened to reread that, immediately after the re-enactment they had staged for my particular benefit. Ed Mason’s hat, the second time, was lying in the exact same place and manner that Johnny had seen the other hat, Johnson’s, lying the first time. Both fell through the open scuttle-hole in the stove onto the ashes below. Is it probable that a hat, flung off somebody’s head in the course of a struggle, would land in the identical place twice? Hardly. Things like that just don’t happen. It had been deliberately placed there for me to see, to point up the similarity with what had happened before.”

That night, safely ensconced back in her old quarters in town, she was going over back-schoolwork when her landlady knocked on the door. “There’s a gentleman downstairs to see you. He says it’s not business, but social.”

Miss Prince smiled a little. “I think I know who it is. Tell him I’ll be right down as soon as I’ve finished grading these papers.”

She picked up Johnny Gaines’. She marked it A-plus, the highest possible mark she could give, without bothering for once about grammar, punctuation or spelling. Then she put on her hat, turned down the light, and went out.

Content

Cornell Woolrich
Murder at Mother’s Knee

Chapter One Teacher Learns a Lesson

Chapter Two Quiet Rooms for Rent

Chapter Three Nobody Missing

Chapter Four Nightmare

Chapter Five Dangerous Ground