Margaret Millar

The Weak-Eyed Bat

Chapter One

It was, thought professor Henry Frost, a pitiable state of affairs that he, a gentleman and a scholar, author of an authoritative work on the Ionic dialect in Homer, should have sired two such oddities as the Misses Joan and Susan Frost. In Joan's case his paternity was open to doubt, since the second Mrs. Frost had been notoriously liberal-minded along certain lines; but Susan was undoubtedly his own flesh and blood.

“A poor thing,” said Professor Frost over his bacon and eggs, “but mine own.”

Susan was, as usual, picking listlessly at her food in the faint hope that someone would comment on her lack of appetite. She raised her large doleful brown eyes at her father’s remark.

“What did you say, Father?” she asked in a voice which left no doubt that she was using up her last few pitiful ergs in an effort to be polite.

“I said,” Professor Frost said mildly, “that the bacon is delicious this morning.”

Susan blushed. “Really? How nice! I had it made especially for you, Father. It was especially—”

“She raised the pig herself in an incubator,” Joan remarked, “especially for you, Papa, because you are such a dear good papa, the hell you are.”

“Joan!” Susan said in mechanical shock.

Professor Frost regarded them both with distaste, but since Joan had resumed reading her letters, his distaste began to distill like dew on his elder daughter, Susan.

Certainly no one could say that he was not a man of kindly disposition and infinite patience, but Susan’s ability to strain one’s patience went far beyond infinity. Nobility on a large scale was Susan’s forte, he reflected. When a neighbor fell sick it was Susan who sat at the bedside shedding cheer with a false vivacity that was horrible even to contemplate. It was to this habit of Susan’s that Professor Frost attributed his unfailing good health. Far better to die in one’s boots, he thought.

“Isn’t it a beautiful morning?” Susan said sadly. “Muskoka has such a lovely climate.”

She waited for a reply to this conversational tidbit but none came, so she chewed with faint sorrow on a piece of toast.

Hattie Brown, a local girl hired for the summer, shuffled into the dining room and set the coffee percolator in front of Susan. Susan began to pour.

Joan thumped her last letter on the table and yawned audibly, stretching her brown arms over her head.

“You have quite a range of pretty noises,” her father said, “but it’s hardly necessary to display them at the breakfast table.”

“I agree,” Susan said automatically.

“Oh, dry up.” Joan reached for her coffee. “You’re both very boring. Such a perfect gentleman and such a perfect lady making such polite conversation.”

Yes, Professor Frost reflected, when one contemplated Joan, one was forced to admit the virtues of Susan. Whereas one could and often did ignore Susan, one had Joan thrust upon one.

One could only describe Joan as violent — violently blonde, violently eighteen, and violently female. A large, handsome Amazon with a loud laugh, Joan was as uninhibited as a tornado.

People were likely to miss small sums of money or pieces of jewelry after a visit from Joan. No charge had ever been laid against her, but doors were locked and husbands put out on leashes by vigilant wives.

She pushed her coffee cup away and lit a cigarette. “Got a hundred?” she asked casually.

Her father frowned at her across the table. “A hundred what?”

“Dollars, dear Papa.”

“What for?”

“For dear Mamma. One of my letters is from Mamma. She’s in Mexico and needs a hundred dollars, and after all you were married to her.”

“Let me see the letter,” Professor Frost said.

“The hell I will! Don’t you believe me?”

“No.”

“All right. I’ll settle for fifty.”

It promised to be an uncomfortable scene and Susan said quickly: “I see Dr. Prye arrived last night.”

Joan’s interest was immediately diverted. Her pale blue eyes began to gleam and Professor Frost sighed.

For Joan all Gaul was divided into two parts, male and female. It was an eminently simple division and it was only natural and just that Joan, who had an eminently simple mind, should accept it. But still it disheartened the author of a book on the Ionic dialect in Homer. Perhaps there were places where one sent girls like Joan, a kind of combined finishing school and reformatory. He must ask Prye. Prye would know what to do.

Restored once more to his scholastic calm, Professor Frost excused himself and went up to his study. Joan stared after him, looking unusually thoughtful.

“The lousy bastard,” she said.

Susan jumped to her feet, her small thin hands clenched at her sides. “Don’t you dare!” she shouted. “Don’t you dare to say that word. You of all people!”

Joan threw back her head and began to laugh, a brittle, unpleasant laugh that shattered against the walls.

“God, you’re funny.” She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in Susan’s face. “What are you trying to do, insult me? Do you think I’d waste my anger on a poor anemic sniveling little hypocrite like you? Get out.”

Susan pointed a shaking finger at her.

“You’re a bad woman,” she hissed. “You and Tom Little. Don’t you suppose that everyone—”

“Oh, get out.”

Susan collapsed into a damp trembling bundle.

Although such scenes were not uncommon in the Frost household, Miss Hattie Brown found them freshly interesting each time. Via Hattie, the residents of the six cottages and the surrounding countryside were apprised of the situation in the Frost family play by play.

In her bedroom in the huge white house which was the only year-round residence in the community, Miss Emily Bonner was sitting in her wheelchair by the window. She had an excellent view of the other five houses, and with the aid of a pair of field glasses she was enjoying it.

The leather on her field glasses was well worn, a fact which would have alarmed her neighbors had they known it. But Emily’s love for voluminous clothing was not without its advantages. Even so bulky an article as a pair of field glasses could be popped up a large sleeve or down a well-padded bosom. And surely a poor old crippled woman had a right to some pleasure.

Miss Bonner’s age increased by unmathematical leaps and bounds. While lesser women were subtly subtracting a year here and a year there, Miss Bonner did not hesitate to add ten years when the spirit moved her. After all, if one couldn’t retain the privileges of extreme youth one might as well claim those of extreme age. The result was that at the age of sixty-five Miss Bonner was variously credited with seventy to eighty-five years, and people agreed that she was remarkably well preserved.

On occasions her nephew and heir, Ralph Bonner, had been tactless enough to question her antiquity. Although he was not astute, Ralph calculated that since his late father had been only a few years younger than his aunt Emily she could not be over sixty-five. Miss Bonner took a firm stand over this heresy: either she was seventy-five, as currently claimed, or she would leave her money to a home for poor old crippled women like herself.

Ralph made few such excursions into the realm of logic. There were already other more important points of disagreement between himself and his aunt. The chief of these was his residence in the Muskoka house. There was no amusement for a young man of twenty-three living all year round in a lonely country house in northern Ontario with only an aged aunt and a staff of servants for company. Ralph wanted to go out into the world, to meet life face to face.

“Oh, nonsense!” was Miss Bonner’s retort to these ravings. “I find it much more strategic to avoid a personal encounter with life.”

“But I—”

“Nonsense!”

The interviews always ended on the same note, and Ralph was still in Muskoka.

There were compensations, however. In the winter there was skiing and in the summer there was Joan Frost. Every June, July, and August Ralph, as the nearest male, was favored with Joan’s rather spasmodic attentions. Early this summer he had proposed, and Joan, after weighing Ralph’s assets — he was good-looking and had a substantial allowance — and his defects — he was a poor fish — had consented to marry him. In return Joan got a square-cut emerald ring and the satisfaction of seeing Miss Emily Bonner riled.

Miss Bonner did not like Joan. Her vocabulary, always vigorous, broke all records when Ralph stammered out the news of his engagement.

“A slut!” she shouted. “A hussy! A thief! The worthless offspring of a degenerate mother and an inept, pettifogging, embalmed old fossil of a father!”

Satisfied with this piece of rhetoric, Miss Bonner passed into a coma for the rest of the day. The next morning, greatly refreshed, she interviewed Joan Frost.

The results of that interview were not made public but close observers stated that old Emily was never the same from that day on. Her subsequent tirades lacked the old fire, and she was overheard telling the pastor of the Methodist Church in Clayton that she would be ninety come September.

In the house which adjoined Miss Bonner’s and was connected with it by the narrow lane running in from the main road Tom Little was talking on the telephone. The telephone was in the sitting room and Mary Little was in the dining room, so his remarks to Joan Frost were necessarily vague. He replaced the receiver with a sigh of relief and went back to his breakfast.

“Who was that, dear?” Mary asked in a sweet voice with just a trace of a whine.

“Some insurance agent,” Tom said with practiced ease. “Wanted to come out and see me about a policy. I said he could come but I wasn’t having any.”

“I heard what you said, dear.”

It was, Mary thought, getting more and more difficult to believe the best of Tom.

Tom’s thoughts were more specific: damn that gentle way she has of calling me a liar!

They had been married for ten years. At twenty-five Mary had been a tall, thin, plain-looking girl with a sizable fortune and a zeal for reform. At twenty-four Tom had been ripe for reform and in need of money. Dark, handsome, and rather dissipated, Tom was always attractive to women and it required more than marriage vows to dull his eye for a pretty face. There had been a procession of ladies, each one followed by a brief period of repentance. The latest was Joan Frost.

“Poor Tom,” Mary frequently said to the sinner, “you’re not really bad, you’re just weak.”

It was a charitable diagnosis and Tom accepted it eagerly and promised to become strong. But Tom at thirty-four was the same as Tom at twenty-four except for a slight paunch, a set of wrinkles, and a new method of parting his hair to hide the thin spots.

At present, the first of August, relations between the Littles were good. Tom was confident that he and Joan had been very discreet, and Mary was confident that Tom’s feelings for the young Frost girl were so far paternal.

“We have a new neighbor, Tom,” Mary said. “Some doctor from Detroit, I think Jennie said.”

Jennie Harris was the Littles’ general maid and a fund of information. She was nearly sixty, and probably one of the pioneers in the difficult art of listening in on six-party country telephone lines. Thus her range of knowledge was even greater than Hattie Brown’s since Hattie’s adenoids gave her away every time she lifted the receiver.

“Yes, I saw him,” Tom said absently.

“He only came last night, dear. When did you see him?”

“Last night.”

“Really? I didn’t know you were out last night.”

“I took a walk. Can’t I take a walk if I want to?”

“Why, of course, dear! I just wondered.”

Throughout the grapefruit there was silence. Tom did not like silences. He had learned from experience that they were hostile to him.

“A lot of Americans around this year,” he said. It was the best he could do but it elicited no response. “Funny they come all the way up here.”

Mary looked up reproachfully. “Funny! Why, I thought you loved it up here, dear. The only reason we took this place for the summer was because—”

“I like it,” Tom said hastily. “Mad about it. Lots of nice swells and things. Besides, it will be good for your heart.”

“But, Tom! We didn’t come here for me, we came here for you.”

“All right.”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“I do like it. What are you arguing about?”

“Dear, I’m not arguing. You know I can’t argue on account of my heart!”

Miss Nora Shane, the occupant of the fifth cottage along the lane, was facing the east. In order to paint a sunrise she had struggled out of bed at five o’clock, missed her breakfast, fought off the hordes of mosquitoes and black flies who mistook her paints for something edible, and acquired a patch of sunburn on the tip of her nose. As an added humiliation the dispirited sun on her easel looked exactly like the dispirited sun that had risen out of the lake.

“Photographic,” Miss Shane said bitterly. “Hellish.”

She rubbed a paint-smeared hand absently along her nose. It was a good nose, small and straight beneath its redness. Everything about Miss Shane, except the frown on her forehead, was good. She had sharp blue eyes and a curved red mouth. Her hair, hanging down her back in two thick plaits, was as straight and black and smooth as an Indian’s. She was tall and slim, and even when she was stripping a sunrise from its moorings her movements were graceful. “Lousy,” said Miss Shane, sternly self-critical. “Photographic.”

For three full months Mr. Smith, who lived in the last cottage in the community, had eluded the efforts of all those who sought to penetrate his mystery. Since he rarely used the telephone Jennie Harris, the Littles’ general maid, could contribute nothing of interest about him. Since he had resisted the onslaught of Joan Frost, Hattie Brown was equally without knowledge. Even Miss Bonner’s field glasses merely revealed the fact that he went for a swim every morning at ten o’clock and was kind to his dog.

It was generally assumed, of course, that Smith was not his real name and that his horn-rimmed spectacles and his small black mustache were a disguise.

Although some of the residents resented the mystery, others, like Miss Emily Bonner, were grateful for the opportunity to speculate without fear of being contradicted by fact. Miss Bonner’s current opinion was that Mr. Smith was evading the police and that his dog had been stolen from an American millionaire and was being held for ransom. This belief was rapidly gaining on the “mad-scientist” theory of Miss Hattie Brown.

On the first of August Mr. Smith’s fortress remained unstormed, and he ate his breakfast in the exquisite privacy which he deserved.

Chapter Two

“I’m an airman,

I’m an airman,

I fly, fly, fly, fly, fly,

Up into the sky—”

The disembodied voice was floating out of the windows of the cottage between the Littles’ and the Frosts’. The most that could be said for the voice was that it was full of enthusiasm.

Miss Nora Shane heard it and was disposed to be critical. She set her campstool and easel on the ground, put her hand to her mouth, and yelled: “Oh, dry up! Dry up!”

She regretted it almost instantly. The voice certainly dried up but a face appeared at one of the back windows of the cottage. The face was better than the voice. It was, in fact, quite ingratiating except for a quarter-inch stubble of beard.

“Hello,” the face said. “Dry up yourself.”

It was one of those remarks to which a reply was impossible without loss of dignity, so Nora picked up her campstool and prepared to retreat. The situation would have been saved if the face hadn’t added:

“This is my own property. There’s no law against singing on your own property.”

“Perhaps not,” Nora conceded coldly. “Sing on your own property by all means, but see that your singing doesn’t carry over on to my property.”

“Once these liquid notes leave my larynx I disclaim all responsibility for where they land,” the face replied with equal coldness. “Besides, your left foot is three inches over on my property and the rest of you is on the Frosts’ property. So far as I can see you have no say in the matter.”

The only retort Nora could think of was, “Nuts!” so she said that. It was very weak. Even the young man at the window thought it was very weak. He smiled and said:

“You sound hungry. I’m just frying some bacon and eggs. Would you like some?”

Nora’s voice was frigid. “No, indeed, thank you.”

“Newly laid eggs and sizzling hot bacon,” the young man continued, “from the chicken and the pig respectively. You’d better come in out of the sun. Your nose is sunburned.”

The face disappeared from the window and in a minute its owner had opened the back door of the cottage and was standing on the screened veranda. He was extremely tall and thin. He wore a pair of baggy grey flannels and a blue denim shirt. His black hair was lightly touched with grey.

“I never sunburn,” Nora said.

The man gazed at her in reproof. “The beaches are strewn yearly with the crisp corpses of those who never sunburn. I think you could use some breakfast.”

From the window issued a small puff of smoke followed by a larger puff. Pretty soon it was billowing out in vast clouds, filling the air with the odor of burned bacon.

“Fire!” Nora shouted.

In an instant she was leaping toward the kitchen. The stove was shrouded in smoke. She grabbed a towel from the rack, draped it over the handle of the iron frying pan containing what had been bacon, and carried it outside. She was coughing and spluttering and the tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“Don’t just stand there!” she yelled. “Do something!”

She dashed back into the kitchen, turned off the stove, and began sopping up the spilled grease with another towel.

The tall young man was staring at her admiringly. “Gosh,” he said.

The smoke gradually swept out of the window and disappeared into the thin clear air.

“Gosh,” he said again. “Typhoon O’Grady in person. You are Irish, aren’t you?”

Nora sank weakly into a chair. “Is that all you have to say to someone who saved you from being burned alive? I’d like another towel, please. I’m covered with grease.”

“Sorry,” he said with an apologetic smile. “I’m rather short of towels. Would my shirt do?” No, the shirt would not do. Nora did the best she could with her handkerchief.

“Glad you dropped in,” he said. “My name is Prye, Dr. Paul Prye.”

“Is it?” Nora said.

“What’s — I mean, haven’t you got a name?”

“Certainly. They call me little Mary Smith. You remember little Mary Smith—”

“The name is still Paul Prye.”

“Honestly?”

He was very sad. “Sorry, but there it is.”

Nora looked sympathetic. “You can’t help it, I guess. I’m Nora Shane.”

“That’s nice.”

“It’s all right.”

The conversation died temporarily.

“Sorry about the breakfast,” Prye said finally. “But how was I to know that the instant I turned my back there’d be spontaneous combustion? No one knows these things.”

“Have you any eggs left?” Nora asked. “I’m pretty good at scrambled eggs.”

Prye produced a carton of eggs from the icebox.

“And the butter please?”

“Butter,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Butter. I can’t definitely remember buying any butter but I feel sure I couldn’t have forgotten.”

Even without butter the breakfast was a success. The Muskoka air has a pronounced effect on the appetite, and since this was Prye’s first visit in two years, he ate largely.

Nora nibbled and watched. Although she spent her summers in ascetic solitude transferring nature to canvas, it was pleasant to know that the rest of the summer needn’t be completely ascetic. Prye was, she thought, about thirty-four. Given the attentions of a barber and a valet he might be quite distinguished-looking.

She lit a cigarette over her coffee and said: “Are you a real doctor? I mean, not divine or philosophic?”

“Neither divine nor philosophic,” Prye assured her solemnly. “I’m a kind of cosmopolitan quack. If a lady in San Francisco wants to know why her husband has taken to eating paper bags, she might call on me. Then I simply go to the lady’s house, ostensibly as a guest, and observe her husband in his natural environment. He might be a diet faddist who thinks paper bags are teeming with vitamins, but the probabilities are that he is suffering from hallucinations and eating paper bags at the dictates of some inner voice. Then I recommend a sanatorium and a course of treatment.”

“You’re a psychiatrist?”

“A consulting psychiatrist.”

Nora frowned and pressed out her cigarette in an ashtray. “Are you up here — on business?”

“Strictly on a holiday,” Prye said lightly.

“You weren’t called up here?” she persisted.

Prye laughed. “Why? Have we a maniac in our midst?”

“Not exactly. Just someone who shouldn’t be allowed to— Oh, forget it. You’ll know all there is to know in twenty-four hours. I like your cottage. Is it yours?”

“It is. You hint darkly, Miss Shane. What’s it all about?”

“Nothing. Nobody. I simply don’t like the feel of things around here. I expect you laugh at a woman’s intuition?”

“When it’s called that I chuckle mildly. But I recognize intuitive powers as facts in men as well as women. Intuition is simply the result of a highly sensitive subconscious which reacts to subtleties that are missed by the conscious mind. A shade of expression on the part of a guest, a slight gesture, a tone of voice, may make a hostess ‘intuitive’ about that guest’s likes and dislikes. Mind readers and their ilk have this quickness of perception. I believe, although you needn’t quote me in a scientific journal, that the subconscious can be trained just as any other part of the body can be trained.”

“How?” Nora asked.

Prye shrugged. “If I knew how, I’d build me a race of supermen. But I do think that the subconscious should have and was intended to have a live function, and by a live function I mean that it should be capable of being used at the will of the individual. Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information. Their memories are phenomenal. Possibly — who knows? — this ability is what constitutes ‘intelligence.’ ”

Nora smiled across the table at him. “You sound like a prophet, Dr. Prye.”

“I was afraid of that,” Prye said, grinning. “But at least I’ve paraded my chief failing for you. Hey!”

Nora had gotten up so quickly that the ashtray at her elbow fell on the floor.

“I’m going,” she said hastily. “Haven’t time to explain.” She went to the door.

Prye said, “What’s all this?”

She pointed out the window and then slipped quietly out to the back veranda.

Prye looked out of the window. Advancing along the lane toward his cottage was a tall yellow-haired girl. She was dressed in a scant yellow bathing suit and her skin was tanned to a deep brown. She walked quickly and heavily, as if she were angry. A few seconds later there was a loud series of knocks on the front door.

Prye opened the door. For a moment Joan stared at him with eyes that seemed almost colorless against her brown skin.

“Hello, Prye,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” She came in without waiting for him to speak.

Prye raised an eyebrow. “Quite an entrance, Joan. Have you been going to dramatic school?”

He opened the door of his sitting room and she went in and sat down on a red leather couch.

“Sit down, Prye,” she said.

Prye sat down. “Anything to oblige,” he murmured. “Two years ago I was Dr. Prye to you, youngster. Now I’m Prye. What else has happened in two years?”

She did not smile. “This isn’t a social call. I don’t want to make small talk with you. I think you’re a heel.”

“Flatterer.”

“Why are you here? How much are you getting?”

Prye looked puzzled. “I’m holidaying, and unfortunately no one’s paying me for it.”

She kept staring at him with her pale eyes and Prye shifted uncomfortably. “So help me,” he said.

“Well, I’ve warned you. Remember that.”

“Now who’s out to get me?” Prye sighed.

“I am.”

“Any special reason?”

“My father’s coming to see you today. He’s going to ask you to do something, and if you agree to do it you’ll never get out of here alive.”

Her tone changed suddenly. She leaned forward on the couch, frowning. “See here, Prye. Suppose a person is insane or just considered insane, and suppose the person gets away before he can be locked up, what then?”

About to laugh, Prye checked himself at the expression on her face.

“It would depend,” he said, “on the laws of the country and the particular type of insanity involved.”

“I mean, would they send policemen after the person?”

“If he was dangerous. Most of them aren’t but some are.”

“By dangerous you mean capable of killing?”

“Roughly speaking, yes.”

“Would you consider me dangerous?”

Prye smiled at her. “I don’t know, Joan. Do you feel like killing anyone?”

She rose and began to stride up and down the room.

“You and your stupid traps!” she shouted. “You want me to say I’d like to kill someone. Well, I do say it. That doesn’t mean anything. Everyone feels like killing someone. Everyone. Most of all I’d like to get him!”

“Who, your father?” Prye said easily. “How is your father, by the way?”

“He’s a sarcastic old son of a bitch the same as he always was. Do you want to know what he’s doing now? He’s up in his study writing. And do you know what he’s writing? He’s writing about me. And do you know what for?”

“Nope,” Prye said cheerfully.

“To show you. He’s putting it all down, what I say and what I do and what I eat. Oh, he thinks he’s being very cute about it.”

“Sure of your facts, Joan? It doesn’t sound like your father.”

“I know.” She came over to his chair and stood above him. “You came two days too soon, Prye. Your best bet is to pretend you aren’t here, or to go away. I’m not in this alone. I have friends.”

“In what alone?”

“Be a good boy until Wednesday, Prye, and I’ll buy you an ice-cream cone. If you aren’t a good boy I’ll put you to bed on the bottom of the lake.”

She went out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Prye shook his head sadly.

“That from an eighteen-year-old,” he said aloud. “Could there be a new Youth Movement for the suppression of everyone over thirty? Is all this adolescent venom concentrated on me? Yes. Why? Couldn’t say. Is death with honor preferable to an ice-cream cone without?”

The door of the sitting room opened softly.

“Make mine strawberry without,” Nora said. “How do you like our Joan?”

Prye jumped to his feet. “I thought you were going home, Miss Shane.”

“You mustn’t be so trustful,” Nora said severely. “The trouble with you is, you’re an idealist.” She took a cigarette and lit it with exaggerated calm.

Prye watched her bitterly. “What in hell is going on up here? I come for a holiday and before I can even tuck in my first calorie a strange woman tells me to dry up, and after breakfast a girl who was playing with caterpillars two years ago threatens me with death. Could it be a case of mistaken identity?”

“No,” Nora said.

“All right, I give up. Explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain, yet.”

“You must have had some reason for eavesdropping. Or do you do it instinctively?”

“I wanted to hear what she said,” Nora replied coolly. “Joan is interesting, don’t you think?”

“No.”

“Are you a good friend of Professor Frost’s?”

“Not exactly.”

“But you know him quite well?”

“Well enough. If you’ve any more questions, Miss Shane, I hope you won’t be bashful about asking them.”

“I won’t,” Nora said. “Professor Frost sent for you, you know.”

“I don’t know!” Prye said violently. “I’ve never had a letter from him in my life!”

“He wrote one. I was in the Clayton post office one day when Joan came in with a pile of letters. She looked through them before putting them in the box and I saw her pick one out and tear it up when she went outside. And I — well, I picked up the pieces. It was addressed to you.”

Prye frowned. “When was this? What did it say?”

“About two weeks ago. I didn’t patch the whole thing together, but I know it came from Professor Frost. When I found out this morning that you were a psychiatrist I began to add things up.”

“What answer did you get?”

“That this particular section of Muskoka is unhealthy.”

“For me?”

“For all of us.”

“Do you ever hear voices, Miss Shane?”

Nora grinned. “Not a whisper. But I have eyes, and they’ve seen a number of queer things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as Joan getting engaged to Ralph, and Miss Bonner having a spotlight put up at the entrance to the lane, and Miss Bonner’s pearl ring turning up in the secondhand shop in Clayton, and Mr. Smith—”

“Where does Smith live?”

“In the last cottage. He’s been there for three months and hasn’t spoken to anyone except to order them away.”

“I detect a personal note in your voice, Miss Shane. So Mr. Smith ordered you away, the rat.”

Nora blushed and said stiffly: “I was merely walking along his lane. I wasn’t tearing it up by the roots.”

“Still, it’s his lane, isn’t it? All right, go on.”

“No. You’ve broken the spell. For a minute I was on the verge of telling you the story of my life. Thanks for stopping me.” She went over to the window. “Want to see something cute?”

She pointed out toward the beach where a man in bathing trunks was lying on a small strip of sand. He seemed to be asleep.

Prye glanced down at her quizzically. “Your love interest?”

“Joan’s, at the moment. And a badly soiled bargain he is.”

“Married, of course?”

“Of course. To a woman with a lot' of money and a weak heart and a passion for forgiving him his trespasses.”

“That sounds all right.”

Nora’s voice was rather distant. “Certainly it is. If Mary Little wants to try and house-train a pet louse, let her. But somebody should tell Ralph Bonner about it, somebody impersonal and calm, say a doctor, for instance.”

“Say what doctor, for instance?” Prye demanded coldly.

“You see Ralph is so innocent and idealistic, he might do anything. I’ll bet you could tell him almost painlessly.”

“I’ll bet,” Prye said gloomily, “that no one could painlessly inform a man that his fiancée is a little tramp.” Prye sighed heavily as a knock sounded on the front door. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. It’s a lynching party. Say I’m not at home.”

Nora tiptoed to the door and looked out cautiously from the shelter of chintz curtains. She turned back to him, frowning.

“It’s Miss Bonner’s nurse.”

“I didn’t know Miss Bonner had a nurse,” Prye said. “What’s she like, bloodthirsty?”

“Miss Alfonse is a perfect lady and she’ll cut the throat of the first guy that says she’s not.”

Prye grinned and went to the door, and Nora tiptoed back to the sitting room.

Miss Harriet Alfonse was on the point of knocking a third and last time when the door opened with a suddenness that made her jump. Miss Alfonse’s nerves were congenitally bad, and the strain of her profession, not entirely confined to nursing, had aggravated her condition. At thirty-one she passed as a well-preserved forty. The fact was that Alfonse was much too conscientious: when she chose a new name out of the telephone book she worked out a completely new personality to fit it.

She had long black hair neatly pinned into a roll at the back of her head, and only close observers suspected that Alfonse’s hair was too black to be true. She was tall, stout, and rigidly corseted. Her features were attractive in repose, but when she smiled she was not convincing as Miss Harriet Alfonse whose life of genteel poverty in Georgia had necessitated her going to work to save the old plantation. Miss Alfonse had never seen a plantation.

Her voice was prim. “Miss Bonner would like to see you before lunch,” she told Prye.

“You’re Miss Bonner’s nurse?”

“Nursing companion,” Miss Alfonse said loftily, in character.

Prye studied her. “Haven’t we met before some place?”

No Alfonse could be approached so blatantly. “No, indeed. Shall I tell Miss Bonner to expect you?”

“I’ll come over with you now,” Prye said suddenly. “I’d like to talk to you, Miss—?”

Miss Alfonse did not believe in mixing business and pleasure, but she permitted herself to smile. After all, one could never have too many irons in the fire and Dr. Prye was certainly distinguished-looking, perhaps even wealthy.

Her smile grew warmer and faded. “No, thank you,” she said with regret. “I am quite capable of finding my way back.”

Illustrating her point, she walked down the veranda steps unerringly. Prye watched her. In her white uniform with her neat hair and her sensible low-heeled white shoes she looked like a competent hospital supervisor. But there was something about her smile, a certain wariness, that Prye found familiar. He went back to the sitting room.

“Nice girl, Alfonse,” Nora said with a grimace.

“How long has she been here?” Prye asked.

“Two months. Miss Alfonse and I came up by the same train as a matter of fact. I was all set to let down my back hair and start a beautiful friendship with her but Alfonse was not in the market. Very aloof, and if I remember correctly she had a lovely Southern drawl which has since disappeared. Still, Miss Bonner likes her after two months, and that’s a character reference supreme.”

“I think I know this Alfonse,” Prye said thoughtfully.

“She doesn’t know you,” Nora said. “I was watching her from the window. Fumble around in your subconscious, Dr. Prye. Under what circumstances would you a remember her when she doesn’t remember you?”

Prye turned the question over in his mind all the time he was shaving, unpacking white flannels and a blue blazer, and walking up the lane to Miss Bonner’s white house.

The Bonner residence, since it was permanent, was the only one in the vicinity equipped with all the niceties of civilization: a doorbell, a houseman, a cook, two maids, fourteen gilt-framed oil paintings, a two-car garage, a motor launch, and a spotlight.

Miss Bonner had many vagaries and no one had been surprised when she announced her intention of erecting a powerful spotlight at the entrance to the lane. Sin, she propounded, flourished in the dark, and the spotlight would discourage prospective burglars. Since the surrounding countryside was a deep forest her explanation satisfied everyone but Nora.

Prye rang the bell and almost immediately the door opened and revealed a small rotund Chinaman in a white coat. His round face was creased with smiles.

“Dr. Prye. Most charming to see you again. I’m glad.”

“Hello, Wang. You’re looking well and a bit heavier.”

“Injudicious eating,” Wang said with a broad grin. “Miss Bonner is awaiting you in her room. Miss Bonner is a very, very old lady. She no longer comes downstairs.”

Prye made suitable noises of surprise. “How time flies.”

Wang looked wise. “Some persons say she is over a hundred and will never die.” The prospect seemed to depress him.

“Exaggeration,” Prye said cheerfully. “Don’t bother showing me up. I remember the room.”

He took the red-carpeted steps two at a time, stopped in front of a thick oak door, and rapped lightly.

“Come in!” a voice roared. “Come in!”

Miss Emily Bonner was sitting in her wheelchair by the window, and since she expected to shake hands with Prye, the field glasses were nestling in the folds of a feathery pink negligee. She was so massive that she overflowed her chair and seemed hidden by her own fat.

“Ha. Prye. You’re late.” From under piles of frizzy grey hair her shrewd little eyes glowered at him.

Prye took both her hands. “Hello, Emily. You’re looking younger every day.”

“Younger. Ha. You must be blind, Prye. I’ll be ninety soon.” She took her hands away crossly. “Sit down.”

Prye sat down in a chair facing her and watched her, half-smiling.

“Still an old fibber, eh? When did you take to your chair, Emily?”

Miss Bonner growled. “You’re like all the rest of these doctors — take everyone else’s symptoms altogether too lightly. Look at me, for instance. High blood pressure. Arthritis. Enlargement of the heart. And never a crumb of sympathy!”

“That couldn’t have been you cavorting around the beach two years ago, then,” Prye said solemnly. “Extraordinary likeness, though.”

“Oh, nonsense! Your memory’s going, Prye. Why, only yesterday I had a temperature of a hundred five degrees. Don’t believe me, eh?” She took a deep breath and let out a roar: “Alfonse! Alfonse!”

The nursing companion rustled starchily into the room and said: “Yes, modom?”

“Alfonse, what was my temperature yesterday afternoon at four o’clock?”

“One hundred and five, modom.”

“All right. Go away.”

Alfonse went away, leaving no doubt in Prye’s mind why Miss Bonner thought highly of her nurse.

“Look here, Prye,” Emily said suddenly. “I don’t want to talk about myself. Do you remember Joan Frost?”

“Vividly,” Prye said with feeling.

“She’s engaged to my nephew. What does that suggest to you?”

“That they’re going to get married.”

“They are not going to get married!” Emily cried. “She’s a vixen and I have no intention of allowing my money to be spent on the upkeep of vixens. I want the affair stopped, and you’re the man to stop it.”

“I rarely dabble in love affairs. The heart is too incalculable an organ.”

“Nonsense! You love dabbling in everything that doesn’t concern you. Now I’m fond of Ralph, at least as fond as one can be of someone living in the same house. But I know his weakness. He’s got to marry some big strapping girl who’ll keep him toeing the line.”

“And carry on your good work, I suppose?” Prye suggested.

Emily, surprisingly, did not take offense. “Precisely. Ralph has no head at all.”

“If you want the engagement broken why not do something about it yourself? Your staggering list of ailments doesn’t include laryngitis, I note.”

“Leave me out of this. What can you do?”

“Well,” Prye said pensively, “I suppose I could attempt to woo the young lady myself, but I’m afraid I’m off to a bad start. Our interview this morning was hardly amorous.”

“Your interview! What did she say to you?”

“A great deal,” Prye said easily. “None of it repeatable. But the general idea was that I’m of a low order, barely clinging, in fact, to the bottom rung of the social ladder.”

“Exactly what she would say. She hates everyone.”

“Including Tom Little?”

Emily regarded him grimly. “So you know. You must have had a busy time since your arrival.”

Prye smiled modestly. “Information thrusts itself upon me. Why not send your heir and nephew away for a time?”

“He won’t go.”

“I hope you’ve been too wise to threaten him with disinheritance. But I seem to recall that you threaten quite a number of people in that way whether they’re due to inherit or not.”

“Naturally I’ve told him he won’t get any of my money if he marries that creature. He said he didn’t want any of it, that he was going to join the Air Force.” Emily took out a pink lace handkerchief and dabbed at eyes that were completely tearless. “So you’ll just have to see that she gets put in jail, Prye.”

He started. “Good God. Is that all? Do you want to prefer charges against her?”

“No. I won’t have anything to do with it. I have my reasons. She’s been stealing consistently for years now. Her father manages to get her out of it.”

“She can’t be arrested unless she is charged specifically.”

Emily put down her handkerchief and snorted. “Do you mean to tell me that the law won’t protect me against thieves?”

“Not unless you cooperate. If Joan has taken anything from your house—”

“No, no,” Emily said quickly.

Prye rose from his chair and went over to the window. “Nice view you have here, Emily. Why don’t you give up scheming and enjoy it? Girls of eighteen are changeable creatures and even psychiatrists sometimes need a holiday.”

Emily thumped a fist on the arm of her wheelchair.

“Prye, I admire you. I rarely ask favors and I’m not asking one now. I’ll pay you a thousand dollars to get rid of that girl permanently. Perhaps you’ll think of something even better than putting her in jail.”

“That shouldn’t be difficult,” Prye said dryly. “Why your sudden aversion to interfering yourself? I’ve always considered you an expert in that line.”

Emily twisted the huge diamond imbedded in her fat finger. “That’s none of your business, Prye.”

“Joan has something on you?” he asked casually.

“Nonsense. My life has been tediously virtuous.” She mused a moment, smiling. “Once I was very like Susan, you know. Always trying to do the right thing and getting in everyone’s hair.”

“I haven’t seen Susan for two years.”

“She’s getting rather horrible. Half worm and half mouse. She’ll be a silly old woman like me some day.”

Emily took a deep breath, and this time Prye knew what to expect.

“Alfonse! Alfonse!”

When Alfonse came into the room she was smiling, and her smile was the key that Prye was seeking. Eight years previously Miss Alfonse had had blonde curls, a slim figure, and a vacuously pretty face. Her name, too, had been changed in the interval. Except for her smile she bore no resemblance to the young girl in Chicago who had been in the dock on a charge of murdering a child under bizarre circumstances.

Prye followed her downstairs, and at the door he said, “You don’t remember me, Miss Alfonse?”

She was going to smile coyly at him but there was something forbidding in his voice, and the smile froze to her face.

“No,” she said uncertainly, “I don’t remember you.”

Chapter Three

“O popoi,” said professor Frost aloud.

Homer put “O popoi” into the mouths of heroes, and although classicists translated it delicately as “My good sir!” Professor Frost believed that it meant something a great deal stronger. Certainly it did when he said it, and whatever its meaning “O popoi” had an explosive, violent sound which was somehow satisfying.

He laid down his pen and glanced at his watch. It was 11:57. In three minutes Susan would appear, with July’s bills, apologetic but firm, and glowing with the light of good deeds done. Since the occasion came only once a month, Professor Frost conceded her the pleasure of pointing out her little economies. Not without misgiving, however. Since he was fifty-five and might reasonably expect to live to seventy, he considered the prospect of one hundred and ninety similar scenes, and sighed.

But at twelve o’clock, duty, incarnate in his daughter Susan, bombed his ivory tower with leaflets.

“Only thirty-nine dollars and twenty-one cents for groceries this month.”

She set the bill in front of him and he gazed at it profoundly and said, “Hm.”

“I’ve cut it four dollars this month.”

At the tone of her voice Professor Frost crossed himself piously and thought, “I sincerely hope, God, that you are not missing this.”

“Joan’s dress was twenty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents.” Righteous wrath with an overtone of pity.

“The meat bill is fourteen dollars and fifty cents. That’s too much.” Stern self-rebuke.

Professor Frost raised his handsome white head to study his paragon. Blessed Susan meek and mild, he composed, soul of fish and brain of child. He was pleased with this effort, and half-ashamed of his pleasure he atoned by saying:

“You manage very well, Susan. I’m always amazed at your head for business.”

In his own ears it sounded ironic but Susan blushed with happiness. When she blushed, her father decided, Susan was almost pretty in a wild-rose fashion. Her hair was brown, thick, and wavy. She had a good nose, straight and small. Thank heaven he’d been able to contribute something to her features, if only a nose! Her eyes were pretty if one discounted their expression, large and brown and long-lashed. She was too thin.

What Susan needed was two quarts of good red blood. Or a pretty dress. Or perhaps some male attention.

Joan’s emphatic footsteps on the stairs broke into his thoughts. She came in without knocking, still wearing her yellow bathing suit and obviously in a high rage.

“It’s customary to knock, I believe,” Professor Frost said mildly. “Susan and I are busy. Did you want anything in particular?”

“If I didn’t I wouldn’t come near you for the rest of my life.” She turned to Susan who at this unfilial address had been congealed bending over the milk bill. “Beat it. This is business.”

“I shall remain right here,” Susan replied, clutching at the remnants of her dignity. “When you are in this mood my place is with my father.” Wild horses couldn’t have dragged her away, father or no father.

Joan barely glanced at her: Susan wasn’t worth hating.

Amused, Professor Frost smiled at his younger daughter. “And what is the cause of these primeval passions, my dear?”

“Full of big talk as usual, aren’t you?” Joan said, sitting on his desk. “You can’t make me feel cheap with your lousy two-bit words.”

“Quite so, Joan,” he said calmly. “You are cheap, although I scarcely expect you to accept my evaluation of you.”

“You should be more respectful toward your father,” Susan unwisely interrupted.

Without turning Joan said, “You milksop. Don’t peddle your virtue around me.”

“Susan, perhaps you had better leave. I assure you I won’t require your protection. Joan’s periodic tantrums are more interesting than dangerous.”

“What’s that you’ve been writing, dear Papa?” Joan said. She snatched his diary from the desk and read aloud to Susan: “ ‘Virtue is a clammy thing, rather oppressive in these quantities.’ That’s you, Susan. Now shall I read something about me?”

“If you must humiliate yourself, Joan,” Professor Frost said.

“Listen to this. ‘June first. Am rather out of pocket this month, Joan’s penchant for the possessions of others having extended to Miss Bonner’s pearl ring. Total outlay: two hundred dollars.’ ”

“Joan!” Susan cried, horrified.

“This diary is worth a lot to me. I think I’ll keep it. If you don’t mind.”

Professor Frost held out his hand for the diary. “Certainly I mind. Don’t be childish, Joan. It has no value to you. It’s purely a personal record.”

She jumped off the desk and swung round to face him. “Personal record, hell! I know what you’re going to do with it, you bastard.”

He caught her hand, hard. “Put it back on my desk, Joan. Instantly. Put it back.”

Her fist caught him on the cheek. He lurched back, grasped at the desk helplessly, and fell to the floor. Joan watched impassively as Susan helped him to his feet.

“I’m packing,” she said calmly. “I’ll be gone tonight. And may the devil protect me from ever meeting either of you again.”

“Tom dear, you’re not eating,” Mary Little said at lunch. “What is the matter? You know you can tell me everything, dear, and I always understand.”

Tom choked and reached out hastily for a glass of water.

“It’s not about that young Frost girl, surely?”

“Of course not,” Tom said in an injured tone.

Mary sighed. She would have liked to believe the best, but it was so often wrong that she was compelled to believe the worst.

“Has she been forcing her attentions on you, Tom, dear?”

“No,” he said, with some truth.

“Oh dear! Tom, you’re not feeling — weak again, are you?”

“Why don’t you eat your lunch and not bother about me?” Tom speared a lettuce leaf viciously. “I’ve got a stomachache.”

Mary sighed again. How much better it would be for everyone if he really had a stomachache. But no, the trouble was spiritual.

“Tom, dear, you mustn’t try to deceive me. No matter how black the truth is—”

“It isn’t black,” Tom said loudly. “I haven’t done anything. There’s nothing to tell. I have a stomachache.”

Jennie saved the situation, as she often did, by bringing in the tea. She was apparently in the throes of some tremendous excitement, for her plump cheeks were pink and shining and her glasses had slid down almost to the end of her nose. She was very fond of Mrs. Little, and the relations between them were informal.

“They just had an awful row up at the Frosts’,” she announced with pride.

“It isn’t kind to gossip, Jennie,” Mary said, hoping that Jennie would not take this reprimand too seriously. Jennie didn’t.

“Miss Joan is running away. And she knocked her father down flat on the floor and pulled out handfuls of Susan’s hair. Oh, it must have been wonder — dreadful!” Jennie’s informant, Hattie Brown, frequently sacrificed truth to drama.

Tom turned pea-green. “That’s enough, Jennie.”

“Is Professor Frost seriously injured?” Mary asked in a shocked voice.

“Good gracious, I forgot to ask, Mrs. Little.”

“And Joan is really going away? Has she left yet?”

“She’s going tonight.”

“Thank you, Jennie. You may go now.”

Jennie hurried out, and Mary turned to her husband.

“Is that what is worrying you, Tom?”

“I’m not worried. I have a stomachache.”

“Poor Tom,” Mary said, shaking her head. “You are feeling weak again, aren’t you?”

“Oh hell,” Tom said.

She got up and came around the table to him, and put her hand fondly on his head.

“We’ll fight it together, Tom, as we always do.”

Tom’s face was ghastly. From the kitchen came Jennie’s voice raised in ecstatic song: “In the good old summertime, tra la.”

In her room on the ground floor Joan Frost finished her lunch. She set her tray on the floor outside the door and locked the door. Then she lit a cigarette and once again picked up her father’s diary. Now that she was leaving and had nothing to fear she could read his diary with considerable enjoyment. Later she would burn it, of course, but it was amusing to see how she had made him squirm.

“Joan has been sent home from Bishop Bethune. She is, according to the headmistress’ report, completely intractable. That lady made no definite accusations, but she made it clear that she considers Joan responsible for certain petty thefts that have occurred in the senior dormitory. Rather than be humiliated in this fashion I would increase her pocket money (already twice as much as Susan’s) but this would appear to be superficial treatment at best. Susan is uncommonly pleased at Joan’s return. The air bristles with righteous reproach.”

“Milksop,” Joan said absently, and flicked over the pages.

“Joan has just brought me the news of her engagement to Ralph Bonner. Although she has an emerald ring to substantiate her statement, I shall shelve it temporarily. Miss Bonner’s opinion of Joan is so low — and I have heard it so often — that I am forced to believe Joan’s fabrications are becoming more ambitious. Faced with the choice of Joan or death, Emily would, I fancy, choose the more innocuous.”

“What the hell does he mean by that?” Joan said.

“Susan managed to convey to me, with extreme reluctance, of course, the information that Joan is casting a predatory eye on that most unattractive fellow, Tom Little. She seemed disappointed that I did not immediately challenge the fellow to a duel. But I have two reasons for my isolationist policy in this affair: my efforts would be ineffectual, and I feel that to Mary Little forgiveness is the breath of life.”

“Is it?” Joan said softly. “Is it really?”

She closed the book and hid it beneath a pile of dresses in her suitcase. Then she went over to the mirror and examined her face intently, as if it were the face of a stranger. She was still at the mirror when Ralph came.

He knocked timidly at her door. Ralph was always a little frightened of Joan, and he knew from the sound of her voice over the telephone that she was going to be unpleasant.

She unlocked the door and he went in, a tall, handsome young man with a slightly vacant expression as if he were bewildered by everything that happened to him. All his efforts to help himself had been thwarted: Wang chose his clothes and dressed him, and Emily did his thinking and provided pocket money. Joan Frost was his first close contact with the world, and in her hands he was a baby in a blizzard.

He had a strong sense of chivalry gleaned from books, and when his aunt expended her vocabulary over Joan’s faults Ralph attributed it to jealousy and stood up for his fiancée. The tales connecting Joan and Tom Little he dismissed as malicious gossip.

“Hello, Joan,” he said, standing just inside the door. “I— Well, here I am.”

“You’re a simpleton, Ralph. I know you’re here. Sit down.”

He sat down nervously on the edge of a chair.

“Do you suppose your father—? I mean, after all, it’s your bedroom, and—” He looked down and saw the suitcase lying open on the floor. “Oh. Going away?”

“I am.”

“Oh.”

Joan laughed again. “Is that all you have to say, you spineless little fish?”

He glanced around the room, flushing. “The windows are open, Joan. I mean, I don’t want anyone to hear you talk like that. It might give them the wrong impression.”

“I don’t care who hears what I’m going to say to you, Ralph.”

The conversation lasted half an hour. At two, Dr. Prye saw Ralph walking along the lane.

“Young Bonner looks drunk,” he said to Nora.

Nora went to the window. “You’d get drunk, too, if you were engaged to Joan. Peace through alcohol.”

Prye turned to her with a puzzled frown. “Maybe he’s not drunk. He looks ill. Perhaps I should—”

“No, you shouldn’t.” Prye raised his eyebrows and Nora blushed. “Don’t get mixed up with this business,” she said quickly.

“You’re being a mysterious girl again, Nora. What business?”

Nora waved her hand vaguely. “All this. There’s going to be trouble and you’d be in the middle of the circle. Now you may dissolve in hilarity if you wish.”

Prye did not laugh. “How you prophesy, Nora. The Irish must be fey.”

“Sometimes,” she said seriously.

“I don't mind trouble. If there is any I’d rather be in the center than describing futile arcs on the edge.”

“If Joan were removed,” Nora said quietly, “the cause would be removed. That’s what psychologists try to do, isn’t it?”

“In a sense. But your view of the situation is too simple, too narrow. Joan is a catalyst, she merely aids the chemical reaction.”

“Is she insane?”

Prye drew a long breath. “That’s practically the only question a psychiatrist hesitates to answer. I occasionally can make a snap judgment that a person is not insane. But the other is more serious. Before taking away anyone’s legal rights and confining him in an institution I like to be sure of my facts. I must have time, opportunities for testing, a number of interviews, a behavior chart, a family history, and a physical checkup.”

“All that means you don’t know?” Nora said primly.

“I don’t.”

“What do you think, then?”

“I think that the slander laws in Canada are strictly enforced and that I have no intention of flouting them. And now if you’ll excuse me—”

“You’re going out?”

“I thought I’d take a stroll up the lane. I want some birch bark to build myself a canoe.”

Nora pursed her lips and said musingly: “You wouldn’t be going to the Bonners’, of course.”

“Naturally I have to pass the house. I can’t help the way the lane runs, can I?”

“Certainly not! In case of accidents who is your nearest relative?”

“The Pryes all die quietly in the line of duty,” Prye said. “See you later. I might have some news for you.”

Once out of the house he walked swiftly. On the veranda of the next cottage a woman was sitting knitting, and at the sound of his footsteps she raised her head and smiled. Prye smiled back at her. Even at a distance Prye saw that she looked ill. Her face was pale and set in the patient resignation of a chronic invalid.

“Hello,” she called. “Isn’t it a beautiful morning?”

Prye stopped and said: “Very. You’re Mrs. Little, I know.”

“And you’re Dr. Prye,” she said, pleased. “Welcome to our little circle. Won’t you come up and sit down?”

“Sorry. I’d like to but I have an engagement. Ask me again some time, will you?”

“Come in any time. I’d like you to meet my husband.”

She said it quite proudly, and Prye walked away hastily to avoid answering.

The wives of philanderers, he reflected, are wondrous to behold. They forgave and forgot; they were even proud of their pitiful spouses. Perhaps it was the fact that even though Tom could have Sadie or Mabel or Elsie he stayed married to Mary. Not surprising, Prye decided cynically, when it was Mary’s hand which rocked the moneybags.

Prye rang Miss Bonner’s doorbell and waited. Wang was in a particularly cheerful mood when he opened the door.

“Miss Bonner is very angry,” he announced. “Her temperature has soared to one hundred nine.” There was no doubt that Emily was very angry. Before Prye was halfway up the stairs he could hear her shouting at Miss Alfonse, and when he reached the second floor Miss Alfonse herself came scurrying out of the room and disappeared down the hall.

Prye went in without knocking. Emily’s head was resting against the back of her wheelchair. She was breathing hard.

From the doorway Prye said, “Hello, Emily. What’s the row?”

She opened her eyes and Prye saw that they were glassy.

“It’s Ralph,” she said in a whisper. “He’s just come from seeing that girl and he’s locked himself in his room.”

“Surely not an extraordinary thing,” he said lightly. “They’ve probably quarreled. Give him a chance to get over it.”

“No. It’s worse than that. They had an awful scene at the Frosts’ this morning. Joan knocked her father down. She’s leaving tonight and I don’t think she’s going alone.”

“You’re afraid Ralph is going with her?”

“I know it. He’s packing now. That’s why he’s locked his door. That double-crossing little slut.”

Prye raised his brows. “I thought all sluts were female.”

“That slut,” she repeated, as if she had not heard him.

“I’ll speak to Ralph if you like. Shall I?”

She made no reply, and he went out, shutting the door behind him. Wang was standing in the hall.

“Hear everything?” Prye asked coldly. “In that case you’ll know I want to speak to Ralph. Which is his room?”

Wang pointed to a closed door on the opposite side of the hall and Prye went over and pounded on it for some time. There was no response.

“Ralph!” he called. “Hey! Fire! Burglars!”

Wang smiled sadly. “Even the infallible Dr. Prye must sometimes fail,” he said, shaking his head, “although his tongue is as persuasive as a thumbscrew.”

“A pretty thought,” Prye said dryly. “I don’t suppose you know why he’s locked himself in his room.”

Wang looked modest. “My head throbs with ideas on the subject, but my heart says no.”

“Your heart says no what?”

“It says no, do not tell.”

Prye stamped furiously down the steps and back to his cottage. Nora was gone.

“Peace,” Prye murmured. “Perfect peace.”

The afternoon was full of it. When he went swimming the beach was deserted. When he returned there was no Nora and no Professor Frost. He lay down to sleep and not even a mosquito cut the silence. At five o’clock he got up in desperation and phoned Nora and offered her dinner if she was prepared to make it. They dined sumptuously out of cans.

It was about eight-thirty when he took her home, but already dark and moonless. Nora went into her cottage and Prye remained standing on the path, breathing in the heavy odor of sweet grass and pine needles which clung stickily to the sultry air.

A mosquito fastened itself to his wrist and he slapped it. The sound rang out sharp and echoed away. Immediately afterward, from the grove of silver birches behind Nora’s cottage, there was a soft rustle.

He closed his coat to hide his white shirt front and stepped off the path into the grove. The darkness poured around him like thick black oil, and the air seemed to be sucked out of the forest. Breathless, he turned to go back. There was a sudden swish behind him and he fell forward on his face. His head kept getting bigger and bigger and when it was as big as a house it splintered into little stars.

By that time he did not know or care that Miss Bonner’s spotlight had been shattered into a thousand pieces and that Mr. Smith’s dog was howling like a falling bomb.

Chapter Four

Mr. Smith said, “Oh, dry up, Horace. You’d think somebody was being murdered.” He resumed his reading.

Nora was making dispirited daubs at her sunrise.

“He’s nice,” she said aloud.

She absent-mindedly painted a purple petunia in the middle of the sun.

In the kitchen of Miss Bonner’s house Wang heard the spotlight shatter.

“Miss Bonner,” he told the cook, “is pursued by demons envious of her great age.”

“Oh, you’re a nasty little heathen,” said the cook, shaken.

“I am immune from demons,” he added pensively, “because of my vast wisdom.”

“Alfonse! Alfonse!”

Miss Bonner rose like a phoenix from her cold compresses. “Alfonse! Where is that half-witted little Southerner? Alfonse!” Although Miss Bonner’s house was equipped with bells, she preferred her voice as the instrument of urgency.

“Alfonse! Where is that woman?”

The sound floated into the kitchen window.

“Observe,” Wang said with complacence. “She calls out in agony.”

“What do the demons do?” the cook asked fearfully.

“They tickle the feet,” Wang said.

At five minutes to nine Miss Alfonse was running breathlessly up the steps into Miss Bonner’s room.

“Modom,” she cried. “Your spotlight. It’s broken! It’s gone!”

“Where’s Ralph?” Emily whispered. “Where’s Ralph?”

Miss Alfonse was trembling. “I don’t know.”

“The Frost girl. Has she left yet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where have you been?” Emily said suspiciously.

Alfonse gulped. “Just— I just sat down by the lake. I thought you were sleeping. I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t see anyone.”

“Oh, get out of here. Phone Prye.”

Alfonse returned in a few minutes.

“The line is busy, modom.”

“Well, tell them to get off the line!” Emily shouted. “Do you want us to be murdered in our beds? Get Prye.”

In all the cottages the phones rang two long and one short.

“Oh, dry up, Horace,” Mr. Smith said.

“That’s a new ring,” Nora said to herself. “It must be Dr. Prye’s.”

In the Little cottage Jennie fidgeted and fumed. She was in the dining room and Mr. Little was in the sitting room, and she couldn’t very well answer the phone with him there, knowing it wasn’t their ring. She crocheted on furiously.

Two long and one short.

It was fifteen minutes past nine.

“Why doesn’t he answer?” Nora said. “Something’s wrong.”

Two long and one short. She got up quickly and went out into the darkness. The lights were on in Dr. Prye’s cottage. Of course he was there. Perhaps he didn’t know that it was his ring. Then she heard him say, “Nora?” in a whisper.

“Where are you?” she called.

“Quiet! I’m over here.”

She stumbled in the direction of his voice. “Damn. Damn these logs. Are you hurt? Where are you? I can’t see anything. Strike a match.”

She nearly fell over him. He was sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree.

“Give me your arm,” Prye said. “I can’t get up. That’s fine. I knew you were the kind of girl who doesn’t shriek.”

He got to his feet, hanging on to her heavily, and they stumbled through the woods. Prye crawled up the steps of the back veranda and sat down on the kitchen floor. The back of his head was matted with blood and distorted by a huge swelling. Beneath a thick layer of dirt and damp leaves he was grinning.

“I feel woozy,” he said. “Listen hard. Phone Miss Alfonse. Tell her to bring bandages and iodine. And watch her.”

“You need a doctor,” she cried.

“The hell I do. Get Alfonse. But keep an eye on her while she does it. If she gave me this wallop she might be tempted to finish the job.”

He tried to get to his feet and couldn’t, and Nora hurried to the telephone, her legs shaking under her.

Half an hour later Prye’s head had been dressed and he was lying in bed asleep. Miss Alfonse was washing her hands in the bathroom and Nora stood in the doorway, still trembling.

“Is he hurt badly?” she asked.

“Just a scratch,” Miss Alfonse said cheerfully. “He’s thick-headed.”

“But all that blood! It must have come from somewhere.”

Miss Alfonse dried her hands calmly. “There’s enough left.”

“Hadn’t we better phone the police?”

The towel dropped out of Alfonse’s hands. She bent over to pick it up and her voice was muffled. “The police? I don’t see why.”

“Because she shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it,” Nora said savagely.

“She?”

“Joan Frost.”

Alfonse arched her brows and said: “Did Miss Frost hit him? That is interesting.”

“I’m going to call the police.” Nora turned and started to go out.

Miss Alfonse put her hand firmly on Nora’s arm. “I wouldn’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Dr. Prye wouldn’t like it. He gave me orders when you were out of the room.”

Nora stared at her. “I wasn’t out of the room.”

“You’ve forgotten. You were excited. The sight of blood frequently affects—”

“I wasn’t out of that room and you know it!”

“Don’t you remember?” Miss Alfonse said in surprise. “You must have had a greater shock than I realized. Shall I give you a sedative, Miss Shane?”

“I wasn’t out of the room,” Nora said again, but her voice was uncertain.

Alfonse patted her shoulder gently. “I’m sorry, Miss Shane. You’ve had a bad time of it. If there’s anything you need, just call me. Good night.”

She turned and went down the stairs with her firm, soft steps.

It was ten o’clock when the car drove up the lane, crunching over the remnants of Miss Bonner’s spotlight. It passed slowly, for the driver was peering out of the window into the darkness.

“One, two, three, four,” he said confidently. “This must be it. Creepy place.”

He got out at the Frost cottage, a small fat man in a cabman’s uniform, and knocked on the door, keeping as close to it as possible.

The door opened slightly, and he was inspected and passed by Miss Hattie Brown.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Party here called for a taxi at ten o’clock sharp.”

“Nobody here wants a taxi,” Hattie said, “unless— Wait a minute.” She went down the hall and rapped on a door. “Miss Joan! Did you order a taxi? Miss Joan?”

There was no answer. She tried the door, but it was locked.

“Nobody here wants a taxi,” she repeated. “Our young lady was going to leave tonight, but I suppose it was just one of her tantrums. She gets them bad.”

This was interesting, of course, but not business. “That’ll be one-sixty please, at ten cents a mile.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Hattie demanded. “I’m not going to pay you. You didn’t take anyone any place—”

“What’s going on down there?” Professor Frost appeared at the head of the stairs.

Hattie and the cabdriver explained simultaneously.

“That’s enough, Hattie. Tell Susan to pay him.”

“Miss Susan isn’t here. She went out a while ago.”

A two-dollar bill fluttered down the steps. Hattie eyed the driver malevolently as he deposited it in his pocket and went out. She locked the door behind him. Professor Frost was still standing at the head of the stairs, and she said uncertainly:

“Anything wrong, sir?”

He shook his head but he didn’t move away. His cheek was swollen and slightly blue, and he looked grouchy, Hattie thought. She returned thoughtfully to the chaste passions of Lady Amelia struggling in the arms of the mad poet Pearce.

Tom Little groaned and stretched his arms above his head. He looked at his watch and said, “My God.”

In the next room Jennie laid down her crocheting and got to her feet. Her eyes were hostile but she said respectfully enough: “Did you want something, Mr. Little?”

“Have there been any calls for me?”

“No sir. The telephone rang but it wasn’t our ring.”

He sat up straight in his chair and stared at her out of bloodshot eyes. “You’re positive?”

“I know our ring when I hear it,” she said shortly.

“Is my wife asleep?”

Jennie nodded.

He rose with exaggerated nonchalance. “I think I’ll take a walk. I feel dopey. Don’t wait up for me.”

He buttoned his coat and went out, and Jennie turned off the lights. She watched for him from her window, but she could see nothing.

At eleven o’clock Prye woke up and raised his head and Nora said: “Lie down. That’s the least you can do.”

“Oh, you’re still here?” Prye tried to grin but it wasn’t worth the effort. “I had no idea you were so devoted. By the way, thanks for finding me.”

“It was nothing at all,” Nora said politely. “I often find people lying half-dead in the woods, especially if they don’t mind their own business. Who hit you?”

“I forgot to ask. I am becoming more and more careless.”

“You didn’t see anyone at all?”

“That’s right.”

She was silent a minute, frowning.

“Joan’s hair is yellow,” she said finally. “Did you smell anything?”

“The usual smells. Grass. Trees. Damp earth.”

“Perfume?”

“No perfume.”

“That’s funny. She reeks of perfume,” Nora said thoughtfully. “She could have hidden her hair under a cap. No, she wouldn’t have. If she hit you she’d want you to know about it. I don’t think she’d care about being caught or arrested. She’s never tried to conceal anything and she gets away with it every time.”

Prye ran his fingers around the bandages on his head. “Neat work. I hope you thanked Miss Alfonse prettily.”

“I did not. Did you ask her not to call the police?”

“I never thought of the police,” Prye said. “But I can easily understand why Miss Alfonse did.”

“Why?”

“You have your little mysteries, Nora. Miss Alfonse is mine.”

“You may have her,” Nora said. “I’m scared of her. She’s creepy.”

Miss Alfonse certainly did not look creepy at the moment. She was clad in serviceable broadcloth pajamas and an old wool dressing gown. She had been arguing with Miss Bonner for some time and she was tired.

“You have nothing to report to the police,” she said again. “If Miss Frost has done any damage, she will have to pay for it.”

“I want her locked up,” Miss Bonner said. “I want her behind bars so I know where she is and what she’s doing. I don’t care how late it is. The police don’t keep office hours.”

Alfonse attempted a tolerant smile, but it was not a success. Her voice was sharp. “They have to sleep. Even I have to sleep, Miss Bonner. I shall phone the police if you insist.”

“I insist,” Emily said grimly.

“Very well.”

Alfonse walked out of the door, closed it behind her, and went to bed.

Horace had stopped howling, but he lay with his nose pressed against the crack of the front door, whining intermittently.

“What’s the matter with you, Horace?” Mr. Smith said angrily. “Do you want out?”

Horace did. Mr. Smith put on a coat and snapped a leash on Horace’s collar. They were gone only a short time. When they came back Mr. Smith was looking quite pale. It did not take him long to pack, and within an hour he was roaring up the road in his car, with Horace curled up asleep in the back seat.

All the houses were dark by that time, and all the residents were asleep, except one who was dead.

Chapter Five

At eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, August the second, Dr. Prye started groggily out of bed and began to dress before Nora could appear with a number of good reasons why he should not. He took a half-grain of codeine to dispel the strong conviction that his head was falling off, and then looked in the mirror to make sure it hadn’t already fallen off.

It was still there, noticeably so. Miss Alfonse had been thorough. The bandages covered his head like a turban, and since this made him resemble a Hindu, he carried out the motif by winding a bright yellow scarf over the bandages, and went down to breakfast.

When Prye entered the kitchen Nora was at the stove frying bacon, and she did not turn around. She said coldly over her shoulder:

“I suppose you think you’re surprising me? Well, you’re not. Once a damn fool always a damn fool.”

“Oh, good morning, Nora,” Prye said, pulling out a chair from the table. “Could that bacon be for me?”

“Certainly,” Nora said bitterly. “I never eat when I know there’s going to be a death in the house.”

She flipped the bacon out of the pan, set the plate in front of Prye, and eyed the yellow scarf coldly. “Disguise? Or a new idea from Esquire? Or is that crack in your skull deeper than I thought?”

Prye crunched bacon. “As a matter of fact, I’m going visiting this morning.”

“Over my dead body,” Nora said.

“If necessary, over your dead body. Since I don’t want to alarm anyone I thought I’d camouflage the bandages.”

“Why go visiting at all? You managed to stir up trouble quite nicely yesterday just by staying at home and perhaps you’ll do even better today.”

“I believe,” Prye said thoughtfully, “that I stirred up more than you realize. Or rather you did.”

“I did!” Nora protested.

“You did. You see, the trouble occurred when I was taking you home. There aren’t any jealous rivals hovering around, are there?”

“Hundreds. The line forms on the left.”

“I asked a serious question.”

“Well, it’s a lousy one,” Nora said warmly. “If I say yes, you’ll think I’m conceited; and if I say no, you’ll think I should have had enough pride to say yes. Well, pride’s not my strong suit. I say no. No rivals.”

“In that case I was assaulted for myself alone.”

“That’s what I figured,” Nora said demurely.

“But who, I ask you, wants to assault me? What have I done? Nothing.”

“Don’t be modest.”

“So,” he went on, ignoring her, “I came to the conclusion that I was put out of the way because I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suppose two people had arranged to meet in that grove of birches—”

“No one would meet there. It’s swarming with mosquitoes.”

“Yes, but isn’t it a nice spot for a murder? Dark, cozy, warm. And the mosquitoes keep away other people.”

“Excluding you,” Nora said. “So the idea is that you walked in on a murder, and in order to teach you not to walk in on murders the murderer tapped you on the head?”

“That’s it,” Prye said. “Good, don’t you think?”

“So where is the body?”

“I’m not that far yet. After all, you can do a lot of things with a body. Bury it. Throw it into the lake. Even put it up a bushy tree. I knew a fellow once who fixed up a pulley, hanged his wife, and left her in a tree.”

“I’ll bet you know lots of lovely, lovely people. Did you go to school with Jack the Ripper and send him valentines?”

Prye got up from the table, grinning. “I’ll be gone for some time. I want to see if anyone is missing. If you’d like to make yourself useful you could organize a search.”

“What do I look for?”

“Everything. Bodies, bloodstains, weapons, signs of recent digging. I lost a collar button here two years ago. You might keep an eye out for that, too.”

“Very funny,” Nora said.

Miss Hattie Brown was never at her brightest in the mornings anyway, and when she opened the back door and beheld an incredibly tall Hindu wearing a yellow turban she let out a shriek and started to close the door. Prye, his hand on the outside knob, smiled winningly at her.

“Why, Hattie. Don’t you remember me? Dr. Prye. I treated your tonsillitis a couple of years ago.”

Remembrance came in a rush. It was difficult to forget a ten percent silver-nitrate solution applied to a tender area.

“I remember you,” she said tartly. “For a minute I couldn’t understand your rigging.” Her expression made it clear that she still didn’t understand it.

Prye touched the yellow scarf. “This? Merely to protect my head. I find the sun up here too strong for the first day or so. Is Professor Frost up?”

“He’s up, but he’s not down,” Hattie said. “He said good morning to me through the door.”

“How’s Miss Susan?”

Hattie sniffed faintly. “She always goes out half an hour before breakfast for one of them quiet times of hers.”

“Where?”

“In the woods. She’s got a place built there between trees where she sits and thinks.”

“And where’s Joan?”

The air whistled through Hattie’s adenoids. “I don’t know about Miss Joan. I left her tray outside her room as usual, but it’s still there.”

“Did you knock?”

“Sure I knocked, but she didn’t answer. Sometimes she does that just on purpose, but still, after that business about the taxi last night, I don’t like it.”

The story of the taxi driver changed hands.

“I think I’ll see Professor Frost,” Prye said when she had finished.

Hattie showed Prye into the sitting room and went upstairs. In five minutes Professor Frost appeared in the doorway, smiling, his right hand extended.

He was wearing a dark red smoking jacket. His hair was somewhat whiter than Prye remembered it, but otherwise he was the same. His face was deeply tanned and set in a smile that always seemed sardonic though occasionally it wasn’t. His features were almost theatrically handsome except for his left cheek which was swollen and blue. One eyebrow was slightly higher than the other and it gave his face an expression of amused contempt. Prye felt, as he had always felt in Frost’s presence, like a freshman with a theme overdue.

“Hello, Prye.” They shook hands, smiling at each other rather uneasily.

Frost waved him to a chair. “Sit down. It’s good to see you again. You’re looking well, although yellow is not your color.”

Prye sat down. “You haven’t changed,” he said pointedly. “I've always admired your technique of making people uncomfortable.”

Frost spread his hands in a deprecatory gesture. “So few appreciate it, and I like appreciation, so I’m really glad you’ve come. Did you want to see me about anything in particular?”

“I thought you wanted to see me” Prye said.

“Did you?”

“Well, did you?”

“No.” Frost smiled dryly. “Perhaps I’m hypersensitive but the conversation appears rather odd to me. Shall we begin again? First, I take it that this isn’t a social call.”

“That’s right. Miss Bonner’s spotlight was broken last night and I’m trying to find out who did it.”

“That hardly seems worthy of your talents, Prye. Sorry I can’t help you. Immediately after dinner I retired to my study to work.”

“And stayed there?”

“And stayed there.”

“I wonder if Susan heard anything,” Prye said casually.

Professor Frost smiled. “I wonder.”

“You’re fencing.”

“Of course I’m fencing,” Frost said mildly. “I’m waiting for you to be frank with me. You see, there’s about an inch of white cloth protruding from your headdress. It looks like a bandage, though I may be wrong.”

Prye felt himself blushing.

“Apparently,” Frost went on, “you have a head injury. Now if you had sustained it in an ordinary manner, you wouldn’t circumlocute before breakfast. So I infer that someone struck you and you want to know if I did it. I did not. Now perhaps you will allow me to adjust your — ah, turban?”

Prye, his face vividly pink, suffered in silence as Professor Frost deftly tucked the bandages beneath the yellow scarf.

“Ah, that’s better,” Frost said. “One cannot be expected to see the back of one’s own head. Are your injuries serious?”

“No, they’re not,” Prye said crossly. “I’d like to see Joan, if I may.”

“You have my permission, certainly, but I don’t guarantee her availability. It is some twenty hours since I’ve seen her. She intended to leave here last night. Hattie no doubt told you about the cabdriver’s calling?” Prye nodded, and Frost went on. “It leads me to believe that Joan is following her not infrequent custom of locking herself in her room to sulk. Spasmodic hibernation is one of her favorite devices.”

“May I look to make sure?”

“If you must. Joan’s room is on this floor. You might try peering into the windows. Hattie will provide you with a stepladder.” He raised one eyebrow, and Prye’s ears under the bandages began to get warm. “In the interests of knowledge I would gladly offer you my shoulders to stand on, Prye. But I am not a young man, and I am particularly fond of this smoking jacket.”

Prye went out, muttering under his breath. The ladder was located and propped against the side of the house, and Prye, hoping vainly that the earth would swallow him, mounted under the interested gaze of Hattie. He could see nothing of Joan, so he tried the window, found it unlocked, and maneuvered himself into the room.

A gust of heavy perfume hit him and he winced and left the window open.

It was, he thought, just an ordinary female room, with a lot of bottles and jars and a frilly bedspread. Then he saw a suitcase standing on the floor near the bed. It was packed but not closed.

He knelt beside the suitcase and inspected its contents: a few scant pieces of underwear, a negligee, three dresses. All of the dresses looked new and quite expensive.

“Wonder why she was traveling light,” he said aloud. His eye went to the clothes closet, packed tightly with dresses and coats. “If she intended to stay away, why leave behind most of her clothes? Answer: she intended to buy new clothes. Where was she getting the money? Professor Frost? Unlikely. Susan? She hasn’t any. Ralph Bonner? Perhaps. Tom Little? Definitely no. Tom gets his money from his wife and she could hardly be expected to finance his elopement. Miss Bonner seems the best answer.”

He rummaged through the clothes again, and this time his hand came in contact with a small red leather book, and he brought it out. It was the diary of Professor Frost. After a short struggle with his conscience he put it in his coat pocket and got to his feet. The key of the door was still in the lock. He turned it and went out into the hall.

Frost was standing beside the door, waiting. “I heard you talking. She’s in there, is she?”

“I was conferring with myself,” Prye said with dignity. “Joan has gone.”

“I hope your curiosity has been satisfied?”

“Far from it,” Prye said. “She picked a peculiar way to leave — through the window.”

“Joan chose this room, I believe, with such possibilities in mind. She was very... ah, athletic.”

“And she forgot her bag. Packed it and then forgot it. That’s odd, too. Don’t you agree?”

Frost paled, but he said steadily, “We are accustomed to oddities in our family.”

“I hope so,” Prye said grimly.

“What are you implying?”

“Nothing. Many thanks for the ladder. I’ll lend you mine sometime.”

He went out, pleased with himself. Five minutes later he closed Mr. Smith’s gate behind him, not quite so pleased. Mr. Smith, too, was gone, but unlike Joan he had remembered to take his luggage, his car, and his dog.

Prye walked thoughtfully along the lane. There was, he reflected, no reason why Mr. Smith should not leave, but the coincidence was strange. Or was it a coincidence? Two disappearances could equal an elopement.

But Mr. Smith, Nora had said, didn’t even speak to anyone in the community. And Joan’s bag had been left behind.

“I think,” Prye said, “that from now on I shall mind my own business. Starting tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, since he was only a few yards from the Littles’ cottage, he might just as well finish what he had started.

Tom Little opened the door. It was Prye’s first glimpse of Tom. He was no romantic figure that morning. He wore an old blue wrinkled suit, the coat stretched tight across his stomach. Beneath his eyes were two yellow bags of flesh like small shriveled lemons.

An aging Romeo, Prye decided, with a moribund liver.

“Hello,” he said cheerily, inserting his foot neatly in the doorway. “You’re Mr. Little, aren’t you? I’m Dr. Prye. Mrs. Little invited me to come and see her. Is she in?”

Tom looked startled. Turbaned men were not rare in his life, but they were usually very small and appeared before breakfast riding tiny blue elephants across the foot of his bed. He passed his hand across his eyes.

“I must apologize for my getup,” Prye said. “I forgot to bring along my sun helmet and this was the best I could do.”

In spite of Prye’s explanation Tom did not dissolve into amiability.

“My wife can’t see you today. She’s ill.”

“I’ll come in and take a look at her,” Prye said, coming in. “Where is she, upstairs?”

“She’s in bed,” Tom said shortly. “She said she didn’t want a doctor. She gets these spells every once in a while. They’re not serious.”

“Heart?”

“Yes. She has some stuff to take. She doesn’t want a doctor,” he repeated. “She doesn’t believe in doctors.”

“I frequently meet with resistance on the part of my patients,” Prye said easily.

“But she—” Tom stopped, shrugged his shoulders. “Very well. I’ll take you up.”

The curtains had not been drawn in Mary Little’s room and the sun was pouring in the windows, bringing to life the flowers in the chintz curtains and the rag rugs. In contrast the woman on the bed was like a corpse, and Prye drew in his breath at the sight of her.

Her face was the color of dull lead and the thin hands that rested outside the covers were blue. He took hold of one and found it as cold as death. She turned her head at his touch and a strand of drab hair fell across her forehead.

“Hello, Mrs. Little,” Prye said in his professional voice. “What seems to be the matter this morning?”

She pressed her hand silently to her heart.

“Any pain at all?”

“I’m all right,” she whispered.

“Any pain?” he repeated, frowning.

“Under my arm. Not really bad.”

“Down your left arm into your fingertips?”

She nodded.

“Have you had it before?”

She nodded again. She seemed to find it difficult to breathe.

“Is it worse this time?”

“No. The same. Please. I just want to lie here. I’m tired.”

Prye drew Tom out into the hall and closed the door. “How long has she been like this?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Just this morning, I guess.”

“Has she had a shock of any kind?”

Tom’s face turned slightly green. “What do you mean? What would give her a shock?”

“She hasn’t heard any bad news, such as a death?”

Tom put his hand on a table to steady himself. “What do you mean, a death? Has anyone died?”

“I don’t know,” Prye said truthfully. “I merely thought one of her relatives may have died.”

Tom’s relief was obvious. “Oh. No, she has no relatives living.”

“See here, Little. I don’t know much about heart diseases, but your wife looks pretty bad to me. I suggest that you call in your regular doctor immediately.”

“We have no regular doctor. She doesn’t want one. She—”

“Get Dr. Innes from Clayton. He’s a good man.”

“She did go to him last month. He told her she wasn’t to get excited. If I called him now when she doesn’t want him, she’ll get excited and—”

“Are you prepared to face a charge of criminal negligence?”

Tom tried to smile. “You’re joking. You don’t think my wife is going to die.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Prye said irritably. “That’s why I’m telling you to get Innes and do it right away.”

Prye left him standing in the hall, still clutching the table for support.

The front door of Miss Bonner’s house opened so promptly that Prye suspected Wang of spending much of his time at the windows in anticipation of callers. As always, Wang was as serene and golden as the moon.

“Good morning, Dr. Prye,” he said, breaking into smiles. “The new fashion in hats eminently suits your great handsomeness.”

“Thank you, Wang,” Prye said. “I’d like some information from you.”

“For the inestimable Dr. Prye I would remove my right hand.” He coughed. “If necessary.”

“Very good of you, Wang.”

Wang beamed modestly. “They say of me that my deep loyalty comes next only to my vast wisdom and my fathomless patience.”

“How is Miss Bonner this morning?”

“Miss Bonner,” Wang announced, “is in violent conflict with the young gentleman nephew and the big black nurse.”

Prye looked skeptical and Wang added gently: “My impeccable honesty comes next only—”

“I believe you,” Prye said.

Miss Bonner’s voice bounced down the steps: “Get out! Get out, both of you! I feel faint!”

Wang smiled smugly at this timely corroboration of his impeccable honesty.

“Wang! Wang!” Miss Bonner shouted. “Where is that yellow devil? Wang!”

“She wants you,” Prye prompted.

Wang was unmoved. “My vast wisdom tells me it would not be strategic to approach. Perhaps you would care to—?”

“I would not,” Prye said instantly. “I have what I came for.” Wang’s face fell, and Prye said: “Perhaps I’ll need your help later. Keep your ears open.”

“I already possess great information of a private nature.” He added tactfully: “I could not divulge except to persons of discretion with the mouth of a clam like Dr. Prye.”

He bowed Prye out of the door.

In the sitting room of Prye’s cottage a slim, middle-aged man with white hair was reciting Euripides to calm himself. The treatment was effective, for when Prye came in he was able to say in an impersonal voice:

“I’ve come for my diary, Dr. Prye.”

Prye, about to make a reply both innocent and crushing, was waved to silence.

“You may read it if you like,” Professor Frost went on, “if you haven’t already done so. But I should like it back. It contains a number of notes I shouldn’t care to lose. Another small matter: don’t allow Joan’s disappearance to mislead you. This is not the first time my daughter has quit my roof.”

“Without her luggage?”

“Yes.”

“Did she have any money with her?”

“Joan has sources of money other than myself.”

“You don’t want to call in the police?”

Frost shook his head. “No.”

“Suppose I call in the police to investigate the assault on me?”

“That’s your affair. Although I know no reason why Joan should attack you and break Miss Bonner’s spotlight I don’t find it impossible to believe she did. You are wondering at my lack of paternal feeling?”

“Oh no,” Prye said politely.

“There are two reasons, I suppose. I have a mind that is dispassionate by nature and by training. And Joan is not my daughter.” He sat back in his chair, completely at ease. “You know, I’ve always wanted to say that to someone. I suppose vanity prevented me. But it is difficult to retain one’s vanity in the presence of a man who has one’s diary in his pocket. I hope it won’t tempt you to blackmail, Prye.”

“No. Blackmail is too dangerous,” Prye said easily.

“It depends on the blackmailee, I suppose. I don’t think I’d be very dangerous. I have a horror of violence. Perhaps that is why I am such an ineffectual person.”

“Are you proffering me a psychological alibi? If so, I must refuse it. Many people have a horror of violence until they’re faced with the necessity for it.”

“I see,” Frost said, amused. “In the event that my diary contains enough evidence to hang me I should leap at your throat, eh?”

“My head is more vulnerable at present,” Prye said with a grin. “To get back to Joan, what were her relations with Tom Little?”

“Intimate.”

“Does Mrs. Little know of the affair?”

“She’d be a fool if she didn’t. But I’m prepared to believe she is a fool.”

“Did you ever speak to Little about Joan?”

Professor Frost shuddered delicately. “God forbid.”

“How did Susan and Joan get along?”

“By extraordinary sadist-masochist teamwork. Joan gives it and Susan takes it. On the surface, that is. Sometimes I suspect Susan of having an infinitesimal spark of fire, although I’ve never seen it.” He rose from his chair. “You have asked me a great many questions, Dr. Prye. I believe I have acquitted myself nobly under the circumstances.”

Prye smiled. “The circumstances being that it’s none of my business?”

“Exactly. Good morning.”

During the walk home Professor Frost said “O popoi” a number of times. Prye, not being a classicist, simply said “Nuts!” But the spirit was the same.

Shortly afterward Nora appeared dragging her trophies behind her: a moth-eaten bathing suit, a pair of sun glasses with one lens, and five buttons. Her slacks were dotted with burs and dirt. Her opening words were to the effect that she didn’t care whether every man, woman, and child in Muskoka had disappeared, she was going swimming.

“There are a lot of bloodstains,” she added casually.

“Where?” Prye shouted.

“Where you were hit.”

He sat on a rock and watched her dive. When she was out of wind and tricks she swam to the shore and came toward him, her body shining in the sun like a new penny.

“Souvenir of Muskoka,” she said, holding out her hand. “Our own special brand of flotsam and jetsam.”

Prye stared. “Where did you get that?”

She stared, too, her eyes widening. “I don’t know. I just grabbed it under the water.”

It was a thin strand of yellow she held in her hand, and as she spoke a drop of water trickled off the end of it and the end writhed into a small yellow curl.

Lake Rosseau slapped his shores with a chuckle, like a fat evil old man slapping his thighs...

Chapter Six

Joan frost was under the water with her long yellow hair swaying a little with the waves like a mermaid’s, and the back of her head split open. Her legs were wrapped in an old sugar bag. The bag was tied with a rope around her waist and it was heavy with stones.

It took two of them to bring her up, and one of them went home. He was quite sick, because he’d always been crazy about big, strapping blondes anyway and some of her yellow hair had floated across his face.

The other one was the chief constable, a short, stocky, middle-aged man with red hair. He wore an old-fashioned jersey bathing suit and drops of water fell from his hair down the tip of his nose. He might have looked funny carrying Joan out of the water if it hadn’t been for the sugar bag and the hole in her head.

Nora had been sent to break the news to Professor Frost and Susan, so there were only three of them left: Prye still sitting on the big rock, Jakes the Clayton constable, and the district coroner, Dr. Prescott.

“We never had a murder here before,” Jakes was repeating in an awed voice. “I guess she was dead before she was put in there, Prescott.”

Prescott, a solemn little man, nodded. “Very dead. Some of her head is missing.” He was kneeling beside Joan, and his knee was resting in a little lake of water fed by rivulets from Joan’s hair.

“The rope looks like an ordinary clothesline and it’s tied in several simple, tight knots. The bag is jute, and the discolorations are probably blood. Her knees are bent, so it seems likely that she was tied up before rigor mortis set in.”

Prye cleared his throat and both pairs of eyes turned to him instantly.

“Are you still here?” Jakes said. “I thought I told you—”

“I was merely going to ask,” Prye said blandly, “if the bag around her legs might have been used as the weapon. With the stones inside, I mean.”

“Why should you think of that?” Jakes demanded.

“It just occurred to me that it would give the murderer a nice swing. Besides, Miss Shane, acting on my suggestion, searched the woods for some kind of weapon and none turned up.”

“Are you trying to tell me you knew she had been murdered?” Jakes’s voice squeaked with wrath.

“I suspected someone had after this.” He unwound the yellow scarf from his head. “Some person decided that I should have a gentle push over the brink at approximately eight forty-five last night. Now my theory is—”

“Why didn’t you report this, Dr. Prye?” Jakes asked with official severity.

“As a matter of fact, I passed out, and by the time I came to, my ears were bandaged and you know how it is trying to talk over a telephone with your ears bandaged.”

“I do not,” Jakes said coldly. “Start from the beginning. What are you doing up here? Why were you hit over the head?”

Prye told his story, with certain reservations. He left out his interview with Miss Bonner and his discovery of the diary in Joan’s suitcase.

“There were no signs in Miss Frost’s room that she had been murdered there? Or knocked unconscious and taken out through the window?” Jakes said, when Prye had finished.

Prye shook his head. “She left of her own accord, probably to go to a prearranged meeting place.”

“Why?” Jakes asked. “With whom?”

Prye shrugged. “Anyone. Any reason. A murderer would be a fool to kill her in her own room with her father and the maid close by. Besides, I have a theory. Want to hear it?”

“Theories aren’t much good.”

“Mine always are,” Prye said modestly. “I think I stumbled accidentally on the meeting between Joan and her murderer. Suppose Joan hadn’t arrived yet, and the murderer was preparing his weapon, putting stones into the bag. Naturally I’d be in the way when the time came, so the weapon was given a kind of preliminary tryout on me. Perhaps it wasn’t quite ready, wasn’t heavy enough, and that’s why I wasn’t killed.”

“Sounds all right,” Jakes admitted without enthusiasm.

Prescott looked up, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. “The bag will be examined for bloodstains as a matter of routine, and if there are any bits of skin or hair clinging to it we will know whether it was the instrument used. But we’ll have to send everything to the lab in Toronto and that may take a week at least.”

Prye frowned and said, “That’s too long.”

“No one can run away,” Jakes said.

“No?” Prye related Smith’s disappearance with considerable relish, but Jakes was unimpressed.

“He won’t get far. We have our methods of finding people. He won’t be able to get into the States and if he stays in Canada the Mounties will have him shortly.”

“I thought the Mounties were busy elsewhere in wartime,” Prye said casually.

“Did you?”

Jakes’s voice discouraged further questions but Prye was not easily discouraged. “I suppose they’ll stop him at the border?”

“I wish that ambulance would come,” Jakes said.

“I wonder why criminals always make a dash for the border. It doesn’t even seem to matter what border. Smith, though, will go by Detroit.”

“Will he?” Jakes said.

“Unless he’s very subtle. Then he’ll just stay in Windsor and grow a mustache.”

“He has a mustache. You talk too much, Dr. Prye.”

“Just nerves,” Prye said, and relapsed into silence.

It was true. The discovery of Joan Frost had shaken him considerably. But for a whim or an error on the part of the murderer his legs might be wrapped in an old sugar bag. You couldn’t depend on another whim or error, and the nights in Muskoka were very dark.

“Oh hell,” he said. “They’re not that dark. I don’t think I’ll go home after all.”

“I don’t think you will either,” said Constable Jakes.

The ambulance came, and Joan Frost was placed on a stretcher and covered with a sheet. The stretcher was narrow, and Dr. Prescott sat beside her so she would not roll off. Constable Jakes stayed behind. He had put on a dark blue suit, and his hair had dried and was as bright and unruly as a bonfire.

“What about fingerprints?” Prye asked. “And photographs?”

“I see no necessity for photographs,” Jakes said stiffly, “and no hope of fingerprints.”

“Are you going to question everyone now?” Prye pursued.

“No. I haven’t had my dinner.”

“You mean you’re going to have your dinner first?”

“I am. My sister is cook at Miss Bonner’s home.”

“You understand I’m not hurrying you. I’m just interested in the way Canadian policemen work.”

“You’ll have a very good chance to find out,” Jakes said dryly.

Prye sighed. “Why don’t you have lunch with me? We could talk things over while we eat and save time.”

“You Americans,” Jakes said, and went sadly up the lane.

Miss Emily Bonner saw him coming through her field glasses. She knew why he was coming because she had seen what had been taken out of the water. For a full minute she watched him, and then she heaved herself out of her chair and went to her dressing table. From the folds of a green lace negligee she took a bundle of fifty one-hundred-dollar bills, held together with a rubber band, and pushed it down her bosom. The field glasses were ejected and took up temporary lodging in her right sleeve. No one would ever think of searching a poor old crippled lady.

Constable Jakes was shown up to her room shortly after she had finished her lunch. They had known each other for fifteen years. Miss Bonner frequently assured those interested that Jakes was an old fool. Jakes contented himself with describing Miss Bonner as the biggest liar in Muskoka. Their greetings were not cordial.

Emily said: “Well. What do you want?”

Constable Jakes sat down and ran a cold eye over the room. “Too many fripperies in here, Emily.”

“Did you come here to discuss my house furnishings?”

“No,” Jakes said slowly. “I wanted to ask you if you murdered Joan Frost last night.”

Emily’s head fell back and her left arm dangled over her chair.

“Now, Emily,” Jakes said mildly, “none of this play acting. Don’t pretend to me that you’ve fainted.”

Emily’s head snapped back. “I’m not pretending anything of the sort!” she cried. “Can’t you see you’ve given me a terrible shock? Haven’t you anything better to do than frighten helpless women and children?”

“I never frightened a child in my life,” Jakes shouted, stung.

“I’ll bet you’ve frightened dozens of them. Go away.”

“I just came. You didn’t answer my question.”

“You ask me, me, if I killed a poor young girl in the first bloom of her youth. How was she killed?”

“Hit on the head. I heard she was engaged to Ralph. Is that so?”

“Puppy love. She was only a child, a willful, erring child.”

“That isn’t what you used to call her,” Jakes said firmly. “When did you last see Joan Frost, Emily?”

“I don’t remember,” she replied sadly. “When you get as old as I am, Jakes, you’ll find it isn’t so easy to remember.”

“Maybe so. What were you doing when this spotlight of yours was broken?”

“Lying down. I’d just had a terrible—” She closed her lips tightly.

“I know about that business with Ralph,” Jakes said.

Emily snorted. “That sister of yours! I’ll have to fire her.”

“Go ahead. You were scared Ralph was going to run away with Joan, eh?”

“It was nothing of the sort. Instead of trying to find the murderer you are harrying a poor old woman who’s tied hand and foot to a wheelchair.”

“This Dr. Prye. What about him?”

“Well?”

“Did you know he’d been attacked?”

“No — yes! How should I know? Is he hurt?”

“Not much. Why is he so interested in Joan Frost?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Emily said in a bored voice.

“It had nothing to do with the conversation you had with him yesterday morning?”

“Go away. I feel faint. Get my nurse.”

“Now, Emily,” Jakes said, sighing, “I’m not saying you murdered the girl, but someone did, and you had a motive.”

“If I murdered everyone I disliked, there’d be havoc around here. Havoc.” She glared at him fiercely. “And you’d be in it.”

Constable Jakes got slowly to his feet. “It’s funny you didn’t ask more questions about the murder. Did you know about it before?”

“If you had an ounce of grey matter—”

“Maybe Ralph told you? Ralph was out last night about the right time. He quarreled with the girl yesterday, too.”

“Ralph never quarreled with anyone in his life. You’re being victimized, Jakes, by a pack of unscrupulous liars. Good day to you.”

Constable Jakes went out of the room looking depressed. He had often read of methods of making witnesses tell the truth — rubber hoses and telephone directories. But it would be silly to cut up a perfectly good garden hose on the off-chance, and the Clayton telephone directory could be used lethally on nothing larger than bees.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs Miss Harriet Alfonse was crossing the hall, and she quickened her pace noticeably.

“Hey,” Jakes said. She turned around and flashed him a brilliant smile.

“Miss Alfonse, I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

“Certainly,” she said graciously. “I’m not too busy at the moment.”

Since Miss Dorothy Jakes was the cook for the household, Constable Jakes was vicariously acquainted with Miss Alfonse. The acquaintance was colored somewhat by the feud between Miss Jakes and Miss Alfonse which had arisen out of the latter’s preference for breakfast in bed. But no matter what her eating habits, Constable Jakes decided, Miss Alfonse was a handsome woman for her age.

They went into the library. Alfonse beckoned Constable Jakes to sit down while she shut the door of the library carefully.

“What did you want to see me about?” she said with an arch smile. “Have I been breaking the law?”

“Maybe. What do you know about Miss Bonner’s spotlight being smashed last night?”

First she looked intense, then puzzled, then blank. Constable Jakes was certain this was leading up to something but all she was said was: “I don’t know anything about it.”

“You were down at the lake at that time, weren’t you?”

“What time?” Miss Alfonse asked cagily.

“About a quarter to nine.”

“Yes, I was down at the lake. I was getting some air.”

“How were you getting your air?” Jakes asked earnestly. “Were you sitting, walking, canoeing?”

“Sitting.”

“You were alone?”

Miss Alfonse looked prim. “Well, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Who was with you?”

“I’d rather not say just now. I have my reputation to consider.”

Jakes sighed. “In these parts we don’t hold it against a girl if she goes down to the lake for some courting. Who was this man?”

“I have my family to consider, too,” she said. “I come from a very old family.”

“All right. Did you know this Joan Frost well?”

“What do you mean, did I know her? Has something happened to her?”

“She was murdered last night. We found her body in the lake.”

Alfonse sagged. Jakes thought for a minute that it was only the starch in her uniform that was holding her up. But no. Members of very old families may droop but they never lose consciousness.

“How ghastly,” she whispered.

She was standing up straight again but something had gone wrong with her face. It kept changing, floating almost, from one expression to another, as if it couldn’t make up its mind. Jakes felt as if he had walked in on a naked woman who was searching desperately for her clothes. He looked out of the window.

“You knew her, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Yes, I did. Everyone did.”

“Did she come to this house often?”

“Not often since I’ve been here.”

“Where did you live before you came to Miss Bonner’s?”

To Jakes’s ears her laugh sounded quite gay. “Oh, I’ve lived here, there, and everywhere. Wherever my profession calls me. I answered Miss Bonner’s advertisement in a Toronto paper a little over two months ago. I’ve become quite fond of Muskoka. The air is so fresh, so bracing, so invig—”

“Yes,” said Jakes. “To get back to last night, what time did you leave this house?”

“Around seven-thirty, I suppose.”

“You had an appointment?”

“Well, not exactly. No, I wouldn’t say I had an appointment.”

Jakes snorted impatiently. “If I find out you had a motive for murdering the girl, you’ll have to give the man’s name to protect yourself.”

“I had no motive,” Miss Alfonse said easily. “And a great many others had.”

She paused significantly and Jakes said: “All right. Who?”

“Miss Bonner.”

“But Miss Bonner is a cripple.”

Miss Alfonse smiled. “Quite.”

“You mean she isn’t a cripple?”

“I’m only a nurse. I can’t diagnose. You’ll have to ask a doctor.”

“Can she walk at all?”

“When I help her to bed she leans on me very heavily.” She looked at him sharply and lowered her eyes. “May I go now?”

“All right, but I want to see you again. Perhaps you’ll be more frank with me next time.”

A sniff, a swish, and a rustle, and Miss Alfonse was gone. The interview had not been pleasant but it had relieved her mind a good deal: the policeman was a fool.

In the library Jakes sank into a chair and took out his notebook. He sat biting the end of his pencil because he didn’t quite know what to write in his book. Finally he wrote, “All men are liars,” and decorated the inscription with curlicues. It was Constable Jakes’s most profound contribution to the case.

“Ah, there it is!” The voice came from outside the library window, and simultaneously a yellow turban rose from behind a bush.

“Just missed it!” Prye said, smacking his hands together. “Why, hello, Constable Jakes! This is a surprise.”

“Not to me it isn’t,” Jakes said, frowning. “How long have you been behind that bush?”

Prye came closer to the window. “Behind what bush? Oh, that bush. Not very long. I was just trying to capture a rare specimen of butterfly, an aesophagus major. It eluded me.”

“There is no butterfly called the aesophagus major,” Jake said in a flash of inspiration.

Prye looked shocked. “There you go being positive — the one thing policemen and doctors can’t afford to be. I heard of a doctor once who prescribed medicine for a man with some atropine in it. The man took the required amount, but the next day he came back to the doctor and told him the medicine had made him very ill. ‘Oh, pooh,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m positive there’s not enough atropine in that to hurt you. I’ll take twice as much as that just to show you.’ Well, the doctor did and the doctor died. He had bought the drug at a different supply house, you see, and it was much stronger than what he had been using.”

“Well?” Jakes said.

Prye sighed. “All right, there is no butterfly called the aesophagus major. I want to talk to you about Miss Alfonse, but not through a window. Shall I come in or will you come out?”

“I’ll come out,” Jakes said. “I have to see Professor Frost now, I suppose.”

He came out of the house and joined Prye and they began to walk slowly down the lane.

“Alfonse’s gag about not revealing the name of the man who was with her is tottering with palsy,” Prye said. “I hope you didn’t put your faith in it.”

“Naturally I didn’t,” Jakes said uncomfortably. “But I can’t understand why everyone has to lie when everyone can’t be guilty.”

“Everyone isn’t guilty of the murder,” Prye said, grinning, “but we're all guilty of something, if of nothing more than driving through a red light in Hoboken ten years ago. Fear of the law and policemen is universal. Probably it’s a throwback to childhood when we were told that the policeman would get us if we didn’t wash behind our ears. The new generation of mothers is wiser. They say, ‘Don’t ask anyone but a policeman, Junior!’ thus lining Junior up on the side of law and order.”

“Are you kidding?” Jakes demanded.

“No. I’m just explaining that fear is the most potent reason for lying. Sometimes, however, the fear of policemen has a very real basis. In Alfonse’s case it has.”

He paused, and Jakes said: “Well, what did she do? Kill off a patient?”

“Precisely,” Prye said.

“Murder!” Jakes shouted. “I’m going right back there and—”

“No, that would be foolish. It wasn’t the ordinary kind of murder at all. It was crazy, so crazy that two psychiatrists decided that she was crazy. I testified that she was sane, but I was outnumbered and she was sent to an institution. That was eight years ago.”

“What about the murder?”

“Well, she was employed as nursemaid in the house of a wealthy widower in Chicago. His wife had died in childbirth. When the baby was a few months old Miss Alfonse — she called herself Marion Allen then — went out one day for some amusement. She and the baby took a ride on a roller coaster. Miss Allen enjoyed the ride but the baby was taken off dead.”

“Good God! She didn’t do it on purpose?”

“At the time everyone thought not. But the various little incidents from her past began to crop up. Among them were three marriages with no intervening divorces. A charge of criminal negligence was laid. Then a housemaid came forward and testified that Miss Allen had hinted several times that if it weren’t for the baby she could have the widower down on his knees. Even though the State’s case was a slim one, the charge was changed to second-degree murder. The upshot was that Miss Allen was found to be insane and sent to a mental institution.”

“The other psychiatrists were wrong and you were right?” Jakes asked.

“Of course,” Prye said modestly.

“I’ve been hearing funny things about this Joan Frost. Was she crazy?”

“She wasn’t normal,” Prye said cautiously. “She seemed to believe that she was of Olympian stature and that someone was persecuting her.”

“Who was?”

“Her father.”

“That’s silly. What object would a fine old gentleman like Professor—”

“Not so loud. Sound carries up here and windows are open. Now I want you to look slowly behind you, Jakes, up at the second window on the left on the second floor of Miss Bonner’s house. What do you see?”

“Nothing much,” Jakes said. “Just the glare of the sun on the window. No, it can’t be that! That window’s open. It’s Emily’s room.”

“I can’t imagine Emily playing with mirrors,” Prye said, “but I like the idea of field glasses, don’t you?”

“Do you really think she’s got a pair of field glasses up there?”

“Certainly. I saw them. She keeps them tucked in her bosom.” Prye blushed. “I don’t want you to think I make a practice of that sort of thing. I couldn’t help noticing that she was a funny shape. I mean—”

“Don’t apologize,” Jakes said. “We all have our weaknesses.”

Chapter Seven

Duty’s handmaiden, Susan Frost, had spent some busy hours. She found and pressed an old black dress; she prevailed upon Hattie to tone her loud, sharp cries down to soft moans; she soothed her father until he sought peace in his room. Then she made lunch.

“My duty,” Susan said, “is with the living.”

She whipped up an omelet in a very spirited manner, unconsciously keeping time to Hattie’s moans, and whisked it into the dining room.

“The wages of sin,” Susan said, “is death.”

Professor Frost said nothing at all, and Susan’s tongue froze in her mouth. She stabbed her omelet with a fork and the breath wheezed out of it. Watching her, Professor Frost smiled to himself, as self-contained and indestructible as an atom. An asocial atom, he reflected, not to be coaxed or harried into joining a fraternity of atoms, not to be touched by the quick or the dead.

He liked this quality in himself, partly because it saved him trouble and partly because it annoyed Susan. It must be, he decided, very difficult for Susan to pour her virtue into a sieve.

Atomos, uncuttable. I am uncuttable, he thought. I am Adam Uncuttable. I think if I choose a new name it will be Adam Uncuttable.

“Will you excuse me, my dear?” he said.

“I wish you’d stay down, Father. There are so many arrangements to be made. I can’t manage—”

He patted her shoulder. “Of course you can, Susan.”

He went upstairs to his study and stared out of the window for some time. He saw Prye and Jakes coming along the lane. Jakes had his head tilted up as if he were listening to Prye. Frost was shaking with silent laughter when he went down to let them in.

Constable Jakes was obviously embarrassed. “I've come to ask you some questions, Professor Frost,” he said uneasily. “I’m sorry I have to bother you but—”

Frost smiled. “Perfectly all right. Dr. Prye is to be present in what capacity?”

“Disinterested onlooker,” Prye said. “Do you object?”

“Of course not. I think you will add charm to the interview and charm is probably what it will need. Come in here, will you?”

They went past him into the sitting room and Frost closed the door.

“Sit down,” he said, and sat down himself near the window.

Prye let out a gasp. The outlines of a small square book were visible in Frost’s coat pocket. Prye’s hand flew to his own pocket. It was empty.

“Have you a pain, Dr. Prye?” Frost asked politely.

“Yes, in my neck,” Prye said coldly. “I’ll have to take better care of myself and my possessions. One meets the damnedest people, doesn’t one?”

“One does,” Frost agreed.

Jakes, puzzled by the conversation, waved them to silence and turned to face Frost.

“You know that your daughter has been murdered, Professor Frost. I’m in charge of the case until the Provincial Police take over, and while I don’t know much about murders, I suppose the best thing is to ask you who’d be most likely to murder her.”

“My daughter was provocative, Constable Jakes. She made many enemies, but if I’m going to name them I consider it only fair that my own name be at the top of the list.”

There was an awkward pause. Jakes said lamely: “I didn’t know you—”

“You will, Jakes, you will. My maid is an incorrigible gossip and my daughter Susan an incorrigible fool and between the two of them you will glean enough evidence to hang me. So I have decided to supply details myself, hoping that my candor will predispose you in my favor. Am I being lucid?”

Jakes coughed. “Not very.”

“It isn’t the heat, it’s the lucidity,” Prye murmured.

“Really, Prye,” Frost said. “You’re doing a great deal of talking for a disinterested onlooker, aren’t you?”

“Just holding my end up,” Prye said.

Jakes frowned and said loudly: “See here, you two. You shouldn’t be carrying on a private conversation. I’m supposed to be asking questions and getting answers.”

“Go ahead,” Frost said.

“What is this motive you had for doing away with your daughter?”

“A motive of convenience — and that’s what the majority of motives for murder resolve into, whether they are based on love or money. I find myself breathing more easily now that I am sure Joan’s absence is permanent. There are, of course, others who will be relieved.”

“Miss Bonner?”

Frost nodded.

“What about the Littles?” Jakes pursued. “Did you know Mrs. Little is seriously ill?”

“She always is. She’s a hypochondriac.”

“Not this time,” Prye said. “It’s a heart attack and a bad one. What interests me is, what caused it? Does she know or suspect that her husband murdered Joan? Did she hear or see something?”

Frost’s voice was without expression. “The fact that Tom Little was my daughter’s lover suggests a number of motives. I don’t know whether it’s customary for an honorable man to kill daughter or lover or both, but it’s barely possible that I am an honorable man and killed Joan to prevent any more sizable blots on the family escutcheon. Or Tom Little might have tired of Joan. Or Mrs. Little might not approve of adultery. Or Ralph Bonner— No, I cannot seriously suspect Ralph. He is a dull young man.”

“You don’t need an I.Q. of one hundred forty to commit a murder,” Prye said.

“By dull I meant lacking in initiative,” Frost said. “After all, you must admit it required some initiative to think of using the bag of stones both to kill her and to weight her body.” Jakes drew in his breath sharply.

“I see,” Professor Frost said steadily, “that I am as good as hanged. I presume you regard that as a slip of the tongue, Constable Jakes, an inadvertent admission of guilt? It was not. I don’t make slips. When Miss Shane described, at my request, the discovery of Joan’s body, and told me that no weapon of any kind had been found near the scene of the murder, I assumed that the weapon and the weight were one. It was a logical assumption though based on slight evidence.”

“Too logical,” Jakes said grimly.

“We have missed the important point,” Prye said tactfully. “If the motive was to get rid of Joan, why didn’t the murderer let her leave of her own accord? The taxicab came at ten o’clock to take her away, yet sometime before nine she was murdered. Why was one hour so important?”

“Joan’s departures have never been final,” Frost said. “There was no reason for anyone to believe that this one would be.”

“Maybe,” Jakes said, “the murderer didn’t know she was going away. Why was she leaving yesterday?”

Prye shifted his legs and looked blank.

“Seems a funny coincidence,” Jakes went on, “that she picked on the time of Dr. Prye’s arrival. Was she avoiding you, Prye? Was she scared of you?”

“Not exactly,” Prye said.

“Don’t you think you’d better explain that?”

“I do. I will.”

Frost smiled sardonically. “Prye would prefer to explain in my absence. He is a man of exquisitely delicate feelings and the mere thought of incriminating someone else is abhorrent to him.”

“The very word,” Prye said.

“I’m not getting anywhere at all,” Jakes said irritably. “Dr. Prye, will you please go home? No one could possibly conduct an interview with you in the room.”

Prye grinned. “I was just leaving. Good-bye.”

He went out the front door singing, and a minute later he was tapping quietly at the back door. Hattie was washing the dishes and Susan was drying them and they both let out a cry of surprise when he walked in.

“Why, Dr. Prye!” Susan said.

“Hello, Susan.”

“Whatever have you done to your head?”

“I bound it so it won’t get any bigger. It’s sort of a Chinese custom.”

“I never heard of it before,” Susan said earnestly.

Prye blushed. “I just came over to tell you how sorry I am about Joan.”

Susan gulped, laid down her dish towel, and prepared for a good long cry.

Recognizing the symptoms, Prye said hastily: “You’re bearing up wonderfully, as I expected you would.” He turned to Hattie, who was still sniveling intermittently. “Hattie, you should take a lesson from Susan.”

Susan did not beam but she looked less mournful. “We must be brave, Hattie, as Dr. Prye says.”

This suggestion did not appeal to Hattie. As long as she was not brave Susan did a considerable part of the housework. Hattie was not lazy but she was an opportunist. She redoubled her cries.

Susan threw her a long narrow look and said to Prye: “Perhaps we had better go into the sitting room.”

“Why not come for a stroll instead? It will do you good.”

Susan flushed and said she would like to come, but first she would have to see if her father was all right.

“He’s all right,” Prye said dryly. “Confine your sympathies to Jakes.”

“Who is Jakes?”

“Constable Jakes is interviewing your father.”

“What on earth for?”

Prye took a deep breath. “When a murder is committed a policeman is assigned to find out who did it.”

“But surely they don’t suspect us, her own family!”

“Murders are frequently family affairs.”

He held the door open for her and they went down the small path that led into the grove of birches.

“Do you remember, Susan, when you had a kind of chair built between two trees somewhere near here?”

“Of course. It’s still here. I used to sit there when I wanted to be alone with God, but I... well, I don’t go there any longer.”

“Why not?”

“Because Joan used it. She met Tom Little there. I know because I fol—” Her teeth bit the word in two.

“You followed her?”

“I did,” Susan said with defiance. “I wanted to see, I had to see, if she was committing sacrilege.”

“Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“Probably not,” she said coldly. “By sacrilege, I meant if she were using a consecrated place for secular purposes.”

“Well, that’s one way of putting it,” Prye said dryly. “How long has your mother been dead, Susan?”

“There is no death, Dr. Prye.”

“All right. When did she change her status?”

“When I was five.”

“Dream of her often?”

“Very often. Why?”

He ignored the question. “Ever dream of your father?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did you ever buy a red dress?”

“A red dress! What on earth does it matter? I never have, of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Because it wouldn’t be suitable. I don’t believe in calling attention to myself.”

“How much do you weigh, Susan?”

“You’re making fun of me! It isn’t very kind of you to make fun of me with my sister not yet cold in—” She turned her head away abruptly. “But I forgive you.”

Prye grinned. “Don’t forgive me yet. I have one more question. Last night after dinner you went out of the house. Where did you go?”

“I wanted solitude so I went down to the lake about seven-thirty. I must have gone to sleep on the beach because it was ten by the time I got back.”

“What were you wearing?”

She frowned, but her voice was patient. “I cannot understand your interest in my clothing, but I was wearing a grey dress.”

“With short sleeves?”

“Yes.”

“Will you roll up your sleeves for me, please?”

She hesitated, looking down at her black dress with a puzzled expression. “What’s wrong with my dress? You’re not— You couldn’t be looking for bloodstains!”

Prye sighed heavily. “No. Don’t be afraid, Susan. I’m harmless.”

She flushed and slowly rolled up her sleeves and revealed her thin white arms. Prye glanced at them briefly.

“You’re a very lucky girl, Susan.”

She stared at him a moment, paling, and then she started to run back down the path and into the front door of her cottage.

“Good God,” Prye said, “she’s going to tell Papa what a cad I am.”

He started for his own cottage, stopped suddenly, and then went back to the Frosts’. Hattie was alone in the kitchen.

“Have you any mosquito oil in the house, Hattie?” he asked.

“Miss Joan had some in her room,” Hattie said after a pause.

“What about Susan?”

“She hasn’t any. She never puts anything like that on her face or hands. She doesn’t believe in it. Not even powder,” Hattie marveled.

“So the only mosquito oil is in Joan’s room?”

“I’m positive.”

“Thank you, Hattie,” Prye said, and went out. Almost absent-mindedly he loitered near the screen door. In less than a minute he heard Susan come back into the kitchen.

“What did he want?” she asked Hattie.

“Something about mosquito oil. I guess he wanted to borrow some.”

“You fool!” Susan hissed. “You little fool! What did you tell him?”

Hatties voice shook. “I just told him Joan had some. I said you didn’t believe in stuff like that.”

There was a silence and then Susan’s voice again:

“You’re not to say anything, anything at all. You are to keep your mouth shut. Do you understand?”

It was unfortunate that Nora chose that moment to come walking up the path to the Frost cottage. At the sight of Prye crouching beside the back door and gesticulating wildly she called in a loud, clear voice:

“What are you hiding there for?”

Nora and Susan reached the veranda at the same time and stared coldly at Prye as he got to his feet and brushed off his trousers.

“Nice work, girls,” he said. “Perfect timing.” He turned to Susan. “I suppose it will do no good to apologize?”

“No good at all,” Susan said tightly.

“Well, in that case I’ll be going. Come along, Miss Shane, and I’ll throw you in the lake just for the practice.”

Susan strode back into the house, slamming the door behind her, and Prye and Nora walked down the steps.

“Sorry,” Nora said affably, “but how was I to know you were eavesdropping?”

Prye smiled bitterly. “I suppose you think I sit down on strange verandas to bite my fingernails.”

“Hear anything interesting?”

“No.”

“Liar. You’re bursting with information.”

“Three bits of information,” Prye said. “One, Constable Jakes is over his head. Two, so am I. Three, Susan Frost is a humbug.”

“I knew all that,” Nora said smugly.

Prye ignored this. “Now I don’t care whether Susan is a humbug or not because aren’t we all? But when she tells me that she went to sleep on the beach last night in a short-sleeved dress I demur.”

“All right. Why do you demur?”

Prye beamed. “Because she has no mosquito bites and the only mosquito oil in the house was in Joan’s room, which is always kept locked. Not a profound piece of detection, but cute, don’t you think?”

“Aren’t there people who are immune to mosquitoes?”

“No. There are mosquitoes which are choosy about their meals, but not in Muskoka. There are probably about sixty varieties of mosquitoes in Canada, and speaking from personal experience I think they’re all represented in this area.”

“Still, you haven’t proved anything,” Nora objected. “A lot of people lie. Even if she wasn’t sleeping on the beach, she may not have been slugging her sister.”

“Where was she if she wasn’t on the beach?” Prye asked rhetorically. “Well, there are only a limited number of places she could have been. Hattie says she was not at home. None of the residents saw her so she wasn’t visiting. That leaves her skulking around in the woods. Now why was she skulking around in the woods?”

“Best place if you’ve got to skulk.”

“I think she was trailing someone.”

“Who?”

Prye looked down at her with dignity. “I don’t know. I’m simply deducing and I haven’t reached that point yet, but she was probably trailing Joan. Suppose she suspected that Joan was planning an elopement. Naturally she would be interested in knowing who was going with her. So she put on a grey dress to disguise herself as a birch tree and went out to mingle with other birch trees.”

“Who was that birch tree I saw you with last night?” Nora said. “That was no birch tree, that was brown-eyed Susan Frost.”

“The question which now arises is chronological,” Prye said sternly. “Which incident happened first, the spotlight, me, or Joan? I think it’s probable that Joan was lolled first and that I was hit because I interrupted the removal of her body, and that the spotlight was broken to give the alarm, that is, to call attention to me. All of which leads me to believe that the murderer is a man or woman with scruples. Or else I am going to be used. Suppose that my presence is necessary to the murderer in some way...”

“Theory. For all you know, the spotlight might not have been broken by the murderer at all. Probably some nasty little elf did it to throw you off the track. You start off with Susan’s mosquito bites and end up with a murderer who gives you a crack on the skull and then gets soft-hearted and gives the alarm. You’re not logical.”

Prye was staggered. “Me! Not logical! To think I was on the point of becoming serious about you, given a little luring!”

“You can lure yourself around the block,” Nora said. “I’m going over to see Tom.”

“Why?”

“Because I think he killed Joan. On the same night, his current amour is murdered and his wife has a heart attack. Mary is rather plain, she controls the money, and she is in poor health. If I were Tom—”

“You’d have a perfect alibi ready.”

Nora nodded. “I would. Want to come along?”

Tom Little had his perfect alibi. It was all the more convincing as it came not from Tom, but from Jennie Harris.

Mrs. Little had retired immediately after dinner as usual, and at seven-fifteen Jennie had finished the dishes and sat down in the dining room to work on her afghan. Tom was in the sitting room all evening, sleeping. She could see his legs, and he snored at intervals.

“You wouldn’t be tempted to lie for Mr. Little, would you, Jennie?” Prye asked.

“Lie? For him? I should say not!”

“Are you an expert at crocheting afghans?”

“I’m pretty good,” Jennie admitted.

“Then your attention wouldn’t be fully taken up by your work? Could you, for instance, have become completely engrossed in it for half an hour?”

“No sir. I don’t even have to look when I crochet. That’s how I’m so sure about Mr. Little being there all the time. I could see him and hear him. What more do you want?”

“And you were in the dining room for at least two hours?”

Jennie nodded.

Nora stayed in the kitchen, unsatisfied with Jennie’s answers, and Prye went out to the veranda. Dr. Innes was still upstairs with Mary Little and Prye could hear the drone of voices from the front bedroom, Dr. Innes’ and Tom Little’s. Tom seemed to be angry and he did not accompany Innes downstairs.

“Hello, Prye,” Innes said cheerfully. “Got a pretty sick woman on my hands.”

Prye smiled. “How sick is pretty sick?”

“Pulse weak, unsteady, running at one hundred thirty with a skip beat in every ten. Blood pressure one hundred systolic, sixty diastolic, compared with her normal of one hundred thirty systolic and eighty diastolic. Face and hands cyanosed. Periodic attacks of severe pain on the left side.”

“What are you doing about it?”

Innes shrugged. “What can I do? Rest, quiet, amyl nitrate. Heart patients are the very devil anyway. The nearest electrocardiograph machine is forty miles away and they refuse to move it up here. In any case, I can’t read electrocardiograms. We have to send them to Toronto, and that takes time.”

“What’s the cause of the attack?”

Innes peered at him over his spectacles. “Well, what causes heart attacks? Strain, shock, exertion, worry, overeating, drinking — almost anything if your heart’s not good to begin with.”

“Didn’t you ask her?”

“I did,” Innes said with a dry smile. “She said it was the will of God.”

Chapter Eight

At four o’clock Dr. Prye was lying on the red leather couch in his sitting room. His head was throbbing like a T-model Ford, and every beat of his heart backfired at the back of his skull. He was thinking of a bag of stones and a pair of hands, fat red hands like Emily Bonner’s, and strong thin hands like Professor Frost’s, and the pale blue hands of Mary Little...

He started to get up, but his head fell off and rolled across the floor, and by the time it came rolling back he was asleep. He did not hear the knock on the front door. It was a soft, furtive sound followed by the gentle opening and closing of the door and light footsteps in the hall. Then the door of the sitting room opened noiselessly and a woman slipped through it and stood looking down at Prye.

Her gaze was so intense, so malignant that he moved in his sleep, and she retreated. A minute later she was knocking again, loudly this time, venting her anger until her knuckles stung.

“Great Scott,” Prye said, lifting his head from the pillow. “Must you do that? Come in!”

She went in, closing the door behind her.

“So you’ve remembered,” Prye said.

“Yes, a few minutes ago,” she said. “I came right over.”

It wasn’t Miss Alfonse any longer. The clothes were the same, but the accent, the leer, the gentility had been swept away by a hurricane of fury.

“You’ve ratted, I suppose? It’s smug hypocrites like you who keep a woman from going straight. Some little slut gets herself murdered as she deserves and you try to pin it on me. Sure I made a mistake once. But it was a mistake. The law said I wasn’t responsible.” Her voice was rising like a police siren. “I wasn’t responsible, see? I was crazy!”

“I think,” Prye said, “I can stand almost anything better than a noisy female. If you’ll sit down calmly, Miss Alfonse, I’ll get you a drink. What will you have?”

“Brandy,” Miss Alfonse said shortly. “A lot of it.”

She had a lot of brandy.

“What are you,” she said, “a detective?”

“No. Just a doctor.”

“I see. It’s money you want, is it?”

“No. I want information.”

“What for, if you’re not a detective?”

Prye shrugged. “When a young girl is murdered the day after my arrival and some of my oldest friends are suspected of murdering her, I feel obliged to help the police.”

“Very noble, I’m sure. What’s it got to do with me? They’re not my oldest friends.” Her sharp brown eyes pecked at him. “And they’re not yours either, I bet.”

Prye beamed at her benevolently. “You’re very shrewd, Miss Alfonse. They’re not.”

“I’m smart enough,” Alfonse said abruptly. “The thing is, are you?”

“You mean, am I smart enough to mind my own business?”

“That’s it.”

“Frankly, no. I thought you and I could make a deal. You probably know more about this community than I could discover in a year.”

“I don’t want to spoil anybody’s fun. Just go on detecting for a year. By that time...” Her jaws clamped on the words. “You might get another tap on the head, Prye.”

“From you?”

She gazed at him steadily. “When I hit you, you’ll stay hit.”

“Don’t be foolish, Miss Alfonse. You’re not in a position to make threats. Policemen are easily convinced that history repeats itself and with your history—”

She turned and walked to the door.

“Stool pigeon,” she said over her shoulder.

“Wait.”

She stopped, her hand on the doorknob.

“If you know anything about this murder,” Prye said, “I’ll insure your life for fifty thousand dollars and retire. Those are your prospects. But as a matter of fact I don’t think you do know anything about it.”

“No?” She smiled.

“Unless you did it yourself. My guess is that you’re stalling. You wanted me to keep quiet about you until you had a good story fixed up. I advise you to polish up your alibi.”

She was still smiling. “It’s got a shine like a silver dollar and you’re going to feel very, very silly.”

Miss Alfonse was herself again. She was humming as she walked up the lane, and there was a new jauntiness in her step and the set of her shoulders.

Prye, watching her from the window, raised a puzzled eyebrow. Miss Alfonse had come in like a lion and gone out like a lamb, and he did not trust lambs.

“What is she feeling so good about?” Prye said bitterly. “Was it something I said, or something she thought, or—? To hell, Miss Alfonse, with you. You’re a liar and probably a murderer, and my mother won’t allow me to speak to the likes of you.”

“Are you,” inquired a bewildered voice from the doorway, “crazy?”

Prye turned his head. “Hello, Jakes. Come in. In a sense, yes, I am crazy. But not because I’m talking to myself.”

“Maybe not,” Jakes said darkly.

“As a matter of fact, have you never noticed that most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness?”

“No,” Jakes said.

“Well, listen next time you hear a couple of women talking. They’ll each have a list of likes and dislikes that they intend to reel off. Now wouldn’t it be much simpler for Mrs. Smith to sit in front of a mirror and read her list without competition: ‘I like broiled mushrooms, horses, daffodils, Faith Baldwin, and Havana cigars.’ See what I mean?”

Jakes scratched the side of his nose.

“Never heard of a woman smoking cigars,” he said at last.

Prye sighed. “Oh well. Any new developments?”

“That’s why I came. The police are here.”

“Aren’t you the police?”

“Not anymore. Inspector White of the Provincial Police is in charge from now on. Just as well, too. I don’t know anything about murder. I wouldn’t know even what to look for.”

“How about looking for sugar bags?” Prye suggested.

“No use. Professor Frost says all the cottagers buy sugar in that quantity.”

“Do you always believe what people tell you? Don’t answer that — I’ll use it against you. Has Joan Frost’s room been sealed?”

“Locked, you mean? Certainly. The windows are locked, too,” he added proudly. “A mouse couldn’t get in there.”

“I don’t care if three mice get in as long as one of them isn’t Susan Frost.”

“Susan’s a very nice girl,” Jakes said severely. “There’s only one person I really suspect and that’s Tom Little. He had a motive and he’s a thoroughly bad man. What’s more, he’s probably poisoning his wife.”

“With what?”

“With what?” Jakes thought a moment. “With a foreign poison. That’s it. Some foreign poison!”

Prye sighed again. “Oh well. This maid of the Littles’ — Jennie Harris — do you know her well?”

“For thirty years. She’s a silly woman but as honest as they come.”

“In that case you’ll be looking around for a new suspect because Jennie had Tom Little within sight and hearing from seven-fifteen until ten o’clock last night.”

“Well,” Jakes said slowly, “I never caught her doing anything dishonest.”

Prye shook his head solemnly. “Constable Jakes, you have a Neanderthal simplicity that strikes at my heart.”

Jakes flushed. “It’s all very well for you to go around believing people are liars and murderers, but I’m a policeman. I have to prove they are.”

“All I ask is an open mind. According to you, Professor Frost is a gentleman and Susan is a very nice girl, and you’ve known Miss Bonner and Jennie for years, and Ralph is a nice boy, and Mary Little is being poisoned by her cad of a husband. That lets them out. Now who’s left? Tom Little, who has an alibi, the servants, Nora Shane, and myself. Nora had no connection with Joan at all. As for me, I admit I wouldn’t have minded paddling her hinterland, but further I would not and did not go. So now where are you?”

“I don’t know and it’s not worrying me. It’s Inspector White’s case. With you helping him I bet he’ll crack it right away.”

“With me helping?” Prye repeated. “You mean I’m requested to help? There’s a catch in it.”

“Oh no,” Jakes said virtuously. “White is a very shrewd man, very smooth.”

Prye smiled thinly. “Yes, but I don’t care much for very shrewd, very smooth—”

“You will. Everybody likes Inspector White.”

Constable Jakes was wrong. There was at least one man who did not appreciate Inspector White. He was a small, chubby-cheeked man with the face of an aging cherub. He had a mustache, a pair of spectacles, and a dog, and his name was Smith. Mr. Smith had been on his way to Flint, Michigan, but between Mr. Smith and the entrance to the Detroit-Windsor tunnel there had loomed up several yards of Royal Canadian Mounted policemen. So Mr. Smith was back in Muskoka.

“Well, here we are again, Mr. Smith,” Inspector White boomed. “Wonderful place, Muskoka. Can’t understand why you ever wanted to leave.”

“Can’t you?” Mr. Smith said glumly.

“The breeze.” Inspector White took a deep breath. “Wonderful, eh?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Smith.

“And the view. A magnificent view, eh?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Smith.

They were walking toward Mr. Smith’s cottage. Inspector White was a huge, broad-shouldered, jovial-looking man in a grey-blue uniform with a black Sam Browne belt. Beside him Mr. Smith looked very small and unhappy, like an erring angel who has been deprived of his harp as a disciplinary measure.

Inspector White had been an insurance salesman and a minister before his curiosity had led him into police work, and both professions had left their mark on him. His voice was still as convincing, his smile still as warm, as when he had topped all selling records for the Behemoth Life Insurance Company. Inspector White’s tactics remained essentially the same from job to job, and he was never more friendly and informal than when he was interviewing a possible murderer.

Mr. Smith dolefully unlocked the front door of his cottage and they went inside, followed closely by Horace.

“Very cozy,” Inspector White said. “Very cozy. Wish I had the time to spend a summer in one of these cottages.”

“I wish you had, too,” Mr. Smith said truthfully.

“Shall we eat first and then talk?”

“Sit down please. I prefer to talk. The whole business is a mystery to me. I was simply stopped at the border and told I’d have to return here.”

The inspector settled himself in an armchair. “Well, well. It isn’t so easy to get across the border as it used to be, is it? How long have you been in Canada, Mr. Smith?”

“Six months.”

“Six months? You’re a lucky man to be able to take a holiday for six months. I hope you get down on your knees and thank the Almighty for the blessings which—” Inspector White suddenly recalled that he was no longer in the ministry. “Well, well,” said Inspector White, giving himself time to make this mental adjustment. “Now, Mr. Smith, what made you decide to leave here last night?”

Mr. Smith blinked behind his glasses and coughed in a deprecating manner. “I’m a sort of nomad, as it were. I like to wander here and there, more or less.”

Inspector White smiled warmly. “I know exactly how you feel, Mr. Smith. You wanted to get away from it all.”

“That’s it. That’s it exactly.”

“These nomadic impulses. We all get them. We all try to escape from ourselves. Still, it was very bad luck that you picked last night. Other people might not understand. I like to believe the best of my fellow men. It may have been only coincidence that you left shortly after the murder.”

“Murder,” Mr. Smith repeated slowly. “So there was a murder, after all.”

“After all? What do you mean by that? Come, come, Mr. Smith, tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Who was killed?”

“A young lady, Miss Frost.”

“And you think I killed her?”

Inspector White shook his head vigorously. “I do not. It looks bad for you, but until things are completely black I can always see a ray of light. Mr. Smith, you do not look like a murderer. You look like a kindly man who has been buffeted by fate.”

“Are you trying to kid me?” Mr. Smith said coldly. “I only spoke to the Frost girl once in my life. She pushed Horace into the lake and Horace bit her on the leg, and I warned her to leave my dog alone.”

“She must have been a peculiar, unfeeling girl to do that,” Inspector White suggested.

“Other than that I know nothing about her.”

“But you’ve heard things, perhaps?”

“No.”

“Or seen things?”

“No. I mind my own business, Inspector White. I know nobody in this community.”

“Why did you come here in the first place?”

Mr. Smith smiled sourly. “For peace and solitude. According to the tourist folders Muskoka is crammed with peace and solitude, but I haven’t seen any of it.”

“I sympathize with you, Mr. Smith. I’m not a man to underrate peace. What has disturbed you?”

“Noises. Singing. Radios blaring. The confounded telephone ringing all the time. People sneaking around my cottage.”

“What people?”

“A Chinaman, for one. And a black-haired girl carrying a lot of boards and things.”

“That would be Miss Shane. I understand she’s an artist.”

“Then what was she doing with a Chinaman trying to break into my cottage?” Mr. Smith demanded.

“They were trying to break in? When was this?”

“About two or three weeks ago. I had gone into Clayton to get some provisions. The supply boat wasn’t due for two days and I was out of kibble.”

“Oh yes, kibble.”

“Dog food,” Mr. Smith explained. “When I came back it was about seven o’clock and just starting to get dark. I found the Chinaman standing on Miss Shane’s shoulders trying my kitchen window.”

Inspector White looked incredulous. “The Chinaman standing on her shoulders? Now I wonder why she didn’t stand on his—”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Smith said, sighing.

“And that’s why you decided to leave Muskoka last night?”

“No, it’s not. I left last night because I was afraid something had happened.”

“How right you were,” the inspector murmured solemnly. “Still, I wonder what made you think that.”

“Well” — Mr. Smith paused uncomfortably — “the truth sounds pretty silly. After dinner last night I read for some time. Around nine o’clock, or perhaps it was earlier, Horace began to howl. He had never done that before” — here Horace wagged his tail proudly — “and I thought he was sick so I took him out on the leash. He was acting funny, violent, you know, pulling me all over the place. Finally he stopped at one place in the woods and I couldn’t budge him. So I turned on my flashlight. The ground was covered with blood.”

“Is Horace a bloodhound?”

Mr. Smith seemed embarrassed. “I... well, I bought him for a setter.”

“These things happen,” Inspector White said philosophically. “So you were afraid that something unpleasant had occurred?”

“I was. I didn’t want to become involved in a scandal of any sort, so I just packed up and left.”

There was a long silence during which Inspector White kept nodding his head with grave sympathy. “Are you married?” he said at last.

Mr. Smith clutched the arms of his chair. “No, I’m not married,” he said violently. “I’m not married at all! I—” He leaned back and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “The fact is, I don’t like women.”

“That’s very interesting,” Inspector White said warmly. “To a certain extent I share your prejudice, though don’t repeat me, Mr. Smith. Now I wonder what caused your dislike in the first place.”

Mr. Smith lifted his eyes wildly to heaven, and as if in answer to his plea a knock sounded on the front door.

Mr. Smith started to get up but the inspector waved him back. “I’ll go, Mr. Smith. Might be the murderer, you know, ha ha.”

Mr. Smith smiled feebly and the inspector went out. A minute later he came back, followed by the tallest man Mr. Smith had ever seen.

“Mr. Smith, I’d like you to meet Dr. Prye. Dr. Prye is practically a neighbor of yours back home. He comes from Detroit. I feel his assistance in this case will be invaluable.”

Prye grinned and held out his hand. Smith, after staring at it glumly for a moment, shook hands and told him to sit down.

The inspector regarded them fondly. “Mr. Smith was just about to tell me why he never married. Go right on, Mr. Smith.”

“I think,” Smith said, “that I’ve done all the talking I want to do right now.”

“What Mr. Smith needs,” Prye said, “is a drink.”

The inspector frowned. “I don’t approve of alcoholic beverages. Still, if they’re to be used medicinally— Yes, I think that if you took Mr. Smith over to your cottage, Dr. Prye, and gave him a drink, he would feel much better. You do look a bit peaked, Mr. Smith.”

“Quite peaked,” Prye added.

Smith took off his glasses and went over to the mirror. “I think you’re both a little crazy. I look the same as I always do.”

Prye took him gently by the arm and led him to the door. “It pays to be on the safe side.”

While Dr. Prye’s brandy was exploring the interior of Mr. Smith, Inspector White was exploring the interior of Mr. Smith’s cottage.

Only two interesting things came to light. The first was the large heap of charred paper in the fireplace; the second was a book. It had been wedged behind a writing desk against the wall and had obviously been overlooked in Smith’s hasty departure. The inspector turned it over in his hand thoughtfully and wondered why Mr. Smith should be interested in the civil statutes of the State of Michigan.

“I’m being a cad,” Prye told Smith. “I’m plying you with liquor to make you talk.”

Mr. Smith laughed boisterously at this. “Make me talk. That’s a good one. Brandy never affects me at all. Some people get awfully talkative on a couple of drinks of brandy, but it takes more than a couple of drinks of brandy to make me talkative.”

“I can see that,” Prye said. “It takes three.”

“The funny part is that even if I did get talkative, I wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Anything worth talking about, I mean. Anyone can talk, but talk and say something, that’s a different thing.” He leaned forward with an elaborately confidential air. “I don’t trust him, my good doctor.”

“You don’t trust whom?”

“Sure,” Mr. Smith said.

Prye nodded sadly. “Perhaps you’d like me to put you to bed, Mr. Smith?”

“My good doctor, I couldn’t think of it. Let me put you to bed.”

“All right. Just lie down on the chesterfield while I put out the cat. On it, Mr. Smith, not under it.”

Mr. Smith stretched out happily on the chesterfield. He murmured something about brandy and closed his eyes. Prye removed his spectacles from his nose and put them on the mantel. Then he pulled down the blinds and went to find Inspector White.

“Nice guest you gave me,” Prye said. “He passed out.”

“Good, good,” the inspector said heartily. “That is, I don’t like the idea of his being intoxicated but I think it’s better all-round that he is. I’ve been searching.”

He pointed out the burned paper in the fireplace and handed Prye the book he had found. “Funny book to have, eh?” he said.

Prye opened it. “Not if he’s a lawyer practicing in Michigan. Smith’s his right name apparently, John Wayne Smith.” Prye laid the book back on the table. “It should be easy to find out if he’s a lawyer. I’d like to look over that charred paper. Any objections?”

The inspector shook his head, and Prye knelt down and poked in the fireplace.

“Too far gone. Even a lab man couldn’t make anything of it. Find any letters?”

There was a slight movement from the hall and both men turned their heads toward the door.

“So,” said the dry voice of Mr. John Wayne Smith. “I believe this constitutes illegal entry. I shall take the greatest of pleasure in laying a charge against both of you.”

Chapter Nine

It was, Jennie reported later, exactly a quarter past six that the Littles’ telephone rang two long and two short and Mr. Little crossed the sitting room and answered it.

“I want to speak to Mr. Little,” a woman’s voice said.

Ordinarily a mysterious female voice on the telephone would interest Tom but tonight he answered listlessly, “Tom Little speaking.”

“Are you alone, Mr. Little?”

“No. Who is this?”

“This is Harriet Alfonse, Mr. Little. I believe we have something to discuss. Would nine o’clock at Mr. Smith’s pier suit you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tom said shortly.

“I can’t explain over a telephone. I’ll see you at nine o’clock then.” Miss Alfonse hung up. Tom replaced the receiver and went slowly upstairs.

“Who was that, dear?” Mary called out from her bedroom.

“Just the doctor,” Tom said. “He wanted to know if you were feeling better and I told him you were.”

Mary was supported by several pillows. Her color was more natural and her hair was neatly plaited.

“I don’t feel much better, dear,” she said gently.

Tom sat down in a chair by the window and looked out over the lake.

“Tom dear, you don’t have to worry. Jennie has already told me.”

Tom’s head jerked toward her. “Told you what?”

“About the Frost girl. I know it’s a horrible thing to say, but I feel it’s all for the best.” Mary had a comfortable philosophy. Things were always for the best.

“Did you see her, Tom?”

Tom was staring out of the window again. He was not seeing the lake or the sun about to drown itself, but a tall yellow-haired girl in a yellow bathing suit. She was standing on the end of a diving board. Then she dived, and the water closed over her head and she didn’t come up.

Tom shut his eyes. “No, I didn’t see her. They took her away in an ambulance.”

“She must have looked terrible with part of her head missing. Did you know part of her head was gone, Tom?”

Tom gazed at her. There was no expression in his eyes.

“Sometimes I think you’re a bitch,” he said.

She began to cry, and the tears roiled down her cheeks aimlessly, like pebbles down two pale hills.

Miss Alfonse, on the other hand, was happier than she had been for twenty-four hours. She put down the telephone and sat back in her chair in the library. She was quite safe, after all. She, too, stared out over the lake. She saw a huge white house with a Cadillac waiting at the front door, and coming down the steps was Miss Alfonse herself swathed in mink from head to foot.

The door of the library opened and Ralph Bonner came in. He didn’t see her until he had picked up the telephone, and then he laid it down with a thud.

“Oh, sorry.” He turned to go out.

“Don’t be sorry,” Miss Alfonse said archly.

“No? All right. I was just going to — to call the cleaners. White flannels, you know.” He sat down on the edge of a chair, tugging at his collar.

“Mr. Bonner — Ralph,” Alfonse began, “I have something to confess to you.”

He looked startled. “No, please don’t. I mean, I’m not feeling so well today. Headache.”

Alfonse’s professional interest was aroused and she leaned toward him. “What a shame! Where is your poor head aching? Here?” She touched his forehead lightly.

Ralph drew away from her hand, flushing. “It’s nothing. Nerves, I guess. Joan and all that.”

“Oh, you poor boy,” Miss Alfonse said softly.

The unexpected sympathy struck Ralph above the heart. His face began to crumple and he put up his hand to hide it.

“It’s worse, too, Ralph, knowing that you were so near when it happened.”

“What do you mean I was near?” he asked in a muffled voice.

“I saw you.”

He rose so quickly that the chair overturned. “What are you getting at?”

“I won’t say anything, Ralph. Nothing could ever induce me to tell, unless” — she paused a moment, watching the blood flow from his face — “unless I lose my job. I don’t want to go away from here.”

“I don’t — I can’t understand you.”

Alfonse rose, too, and stood in front of him.

“Can’t you?” she said.

She moved briskly to the door and went out. He heard the soft, stealthy tap of her rubber-soled shoes and the swish and crackle of her uniform — queer, menacing sounds. He wanted to run out of the door away from them. He sat down again and buried his face in his hands.

Prye found him there half an hour later, sleeping.

“Ralph,” Prye said. “Hey. Wake up. Do you want a stiff neck?”

Ralph raised his head. “Oh. Hello, Dr. Prye.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Lousy.”

“Want to talk?”

“No.”

Prye smiled. “You have to some time. They have a new policeman on the job and he doesn’t care if your aunt owns all Muskoka. I think he’d like to know what you and Joan were talking about yesterday afternoon.”

“It’s got nothing to do with her death.”

“I saw you going home afterward. You looked upset.”

“I was,” Ralph said. “I wanted to kill myself. I went home to do it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t have anything to do it with,” Ralph said.

“Did she give you back her ring?”

“No.”

Prye frowned. “Funny. She wasn’t wearing it when she was found.”

“She didn’t give it back.”

“Was it a good fit?”

“Of course. I had it made for her.”

“It couldn’t have slipped off?”

Ralph shook his head.

“Was it an expensive ring?” Prye asked.

“Not very. I paid about a thousand dollars for it. Why are you interested in her ring?”

“At two o’clock you were talking to Joan and she was wearing a thousand-dollar ring. She did not give it to you. She had no opportunity to pawn it. It wasn’t found in her room and she wasn’t wearing it. I’d like to know where it is.”

Ralph seemed uninterested. “Sorry. I can’t help you.”

“She kept the ring but she sent you away yesterday, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Was she angry at you or was it done in cold blood?”

Ralph looked sick. “She wasn’t angry.”

“She gave you a reason, though?”

“She said she was going away and not coming back.”

“Was she going with anyone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she ask you for any money?”

Ralph hesitated a moment and then shook his head.

“Hattie Brown says you were in the house for half an hour. It didn’t take Joan half an hour to say what you’ve told me. She embellished her remarks, I gather?”

Ralph tugged at his collar again and the button came off and rolled along the floor. He bent over to pick it up, mumbling, “Sorry.”

Prye lit a cigarette, inhaled, and began once more. “Last night after dinner you went out. Mind telling me where?”

“I went for a walk. Aunt Emily was getting on my nerves. She kept pounding on my door. She thought I was packing to go away with Joan. So I skipped out while she was having her dinner.”

“Where did you walk?”

“I don’t remember.”

“In what direction?”

Ralph looked up, bewildered. “Why, you suspect me!”

Prye sighed. “Cheer up. Everybody suspects me.”

“But... but in the summer we all go out after dinner. It’s the best time of day.”

“That’s the trouble. A lot of people were out last night presumably taking the air, but at least one of them was doing more. Perhaps it was you. Or Susan. Or Miss Alfonse.” He emphasized the last name and Ralph started to flush. “If by any chance you were taking a walk with Miss Alfonse it would make your future look brighter in one sense at least.”

“Well, I was taking a walk with Miss Alfonse,” Ralph said hurriedly. “We wanted to discuss my aunt’s condition. After all, I’m her nephew.”

“Very touching,” Prye said. “Wang tells me that you and Miss Alfonse had another discussion a little while ago. Was that about your aunt’s condition, too?”

Ralph collapsed in a chair. “Why is everybody picking on me? I didn’t murder Joan. She didn’t give me my ring back. I don’t know anything about anything.”

“I’m convinced,” Prye said. “But perhaps when your brain has had a little nourishment knowledge will descend on you. You’d better go and have your dinner.”

“Do you really think that would help?”

“No,” Prye said.

He walked to the door slowly, hoping Ralph would call him back and reveal all. As nothing of the kind happened, he slammed the door behind him and went in search of Wang.

“The next time two people go into that library for a private discussion sneak out and listen at the window,” he told Wang.

Wang nodded sadly. “The doors are unnecessarily thick. Only Miss Bonner’s voice is sufficient to penetrate.”

“But particularly watch the big black nurse.”

“I watch incessantly inasmuch as the demons whisper as she walks.”

“Starch.”

“Some persons say so. But my ears are attuned to demons and my eyes quick to see their fingers plucking at her dress. Persons who are not me miss these manifestations.”

“I don’t suppose these demons took it into their heads to murder Joan Frost?”

“They have no heads,” Wang said solemnly.

“All right, if you say so. Has Miss Bonner had her dinner?”

“Miss Bonner has eaten hugely. She will not be pleased to see you.”

Nor was she.

“Well?” she demanded when he opened the door. She was sitting in her wheelchair. Wrapped in a blue negligee which was covered improbably with pink feathers, she was like a huge and terrifying tropical bird.

“Well?” she said again.

“I was just passing,” Prye said glibly, “and I thought I’d drop in and see how you were.”

“Passing? Where to? I’m not at all well. I have an excruciating pain in my heart. Go away.”

“I’m not surprised. The pain is gas, and the cause is overeating.”

Emily snorted. “Overeating! I merely peck at my food. What do you want, Prye? Speak and go.”

Prye settled himself in a chair without haste. “Have you seen the new policeman in charge?”

“No.”

“His name is White, Inspector White. He’s had a lot of experience. After five minutes’ conversation you’ll consider him your best friend, and after ten minutes he’ll have the story of your life. Interested?”

Emily pressed her lips together tightly. “No, I’m not.”

“You should be. I don’t think he’s going to like Ralph’s story. I don’t myself. What’s more, when he finds out that you drew five thousand dollars from the bank yesterday and had it sent out to you by special messenger he’s going to be pretty curious about that, too.”

“Let him,” Emily said briskly.

“The bank, of course, didn’t want to give out this information, but they don’t like the word murder. I spoke to the manager myself. He was surprised at the amount of the withdrawal.”

“It costs a lot to run a house like this.”

“It does,” Prye agreed. “Still, the bank manager seemed fairly certain that this withdrawal was over and above your usual monthly one. Now I suggest that you intended to give Joan a going-away present. Probably it was her idea. Wasn’t it?”

“This is your story.”

“Well, I’d say it was her idea then. She knew that it was worth five thousand dollars to you to keep her out of the family. Where was the money to be handed over?”

“In the— Damn you, Prye.”

“That’s what I thought. You were to give her the money last night before she left. The meeting place was probably the grove of birches between my cottage and Miss Shane’s. You remember that little seat that Susan had built between two trees? Well, that’s the place. The trees are close together there and it’s quite private. It had to be private because you didn’t want Ralph to know you were buying Joan off. The funny part of it is that Joan had already decided to leave Muskoka for reasons of her own and not because you offered her five thousand dollars to leave.”

“The dirty little cheat,” Emily whispered.

“After dinner last night you told Miss Alfonse you were going to lie down. I suppose you did lie down for a while, but when it was dark and Miss Alfonse was out of the way, you got up again. How did you get out of the house without anyone seeing you?”

“Walked,” Emily said curtly.

“And when you arrived at the meeting place?”

“I didn’t arrive.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’d forgotten about the spotlight. It is turned off and on in the kitchen and Wang and the cook were in there. I was afraid someone would see me so I broke it. I threw a stone at it.”

Prye grinned at her. “You have many buried talents. All right, you threw your rock. Why didn’t you go on and meet Joan as you had planned?”

“The noise. I had no idea how much noise it would make. I was afraid someone would come along and see me, especially Ralph, so I went back into the house and lay down again. Alfonse found me there.”

“You didn’t see Joan at all?”

“No.”

“Nor anyone else?”

“I saw no one.”

Prye leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling. “It’s a good story. I like it. I almost believe it.”

“Thanks,” Emily said grimly.

“But something entirely different may have happened. Suppose you did meet Joan Frost, and instead of handing over the money you killed her. Then you came back and threw a rock at the spotlight.”

“Why did I break the spotlight at all if that’s the case?”

“Because, in a manner of speaking, it would give you some sort of alibi. The spotlight breaks with a loud noise, the noise attracts people, and the people find you in bed. Whereas if the spotlight had not been shattered someone might not have turned up so soon after the murder.”

“Plausible,” Emily said. “It’s not true, however.”

Prye paid no attention. “It’s another case of misdirection. Attention is fixed at one point, the spotlight, while at another point Miss Emily Bonner is covering up the traces of her trip into the woods. Besides, who would suspect Miss Bonner of damaging her own property?”

“You, apparently. Have you any more theories, Prye?”

“At least one other that concerns you, Emily. You went out last night to meet Joan, but somebody had arrived there before you. Do you know who it was?”

“Certainly. It was you.”

“It was not me,” Prye said violently, “and you know it. It was Ralph.”

Emily affected great surprise. “Was it really? I guess my eyesight isn’t as good as it used to be.” She leaned back and closed her eyes.

“Now I suppose you’re going into a trance,” Prye said bitterly.

“No, I’m merely tinkering with an idea,” she said, stroking her pink feathers. “Suppose I hire you to protect Ralph’s interests. You have a very versatile mind. If you can build up as good a case against someone else as you have against Ralph and myself I’ll pay you the five thousand dollars that was to go to Joan.”

“That sounds like bribery.”

She let out a deep sigh. “Which is precisely what it is. Are you bribable, Prye?”

“Not at the moment. I just came by ten thousand dollars honestly and I like the feeling.”

“By honestly, you mean by sending some poor millionaire to an insane asylum so his relatives can spend his money? All right. I know how I stand. You are to be refused admittance to this house from now on. You have no official standing which gives you the right to spy on my household and entrap my nephew into making dangerous admissions.”

Prye got to his feet. “It wasn’t a millionaire. He isn’t in an asylum. Ralph made no dangerous admission that I didn’t already know. And I’ll have my official standing by tomorrow morning. But by that time you’ll have changed your mind again.”

“Very likely,” Emily said wearily. “Good night.”

It was eight o’clock and nearly dark when Prye left Miss Bonner’s house. The sky growled, and in the west an army of clouds was mobilizing, and suddenly they began to march across the sky. Their guns flashed, and soft little bullets of rain pelted the lake and the earth.

Nora was waiting for him at his cottage, huddled beside the window watching the storm.

“Hello,” she said. “I’ve come to sit out the storm with you.”

Prye took off his wet coat and she hung it up for him.

“Scared?” he said. “I thought it took a lot to scare the Irish.”

“It does. This is it. The storms up here are too primitive for my taste.” She curled up in a chair beside the fireplace and lit a cigarette. “In the city you simply draw the curtains and read a book. But in the country you review your past, ask humbly for pardon, and wait for the end.”

She paused.

“Well, do I continue this soliloquy or would you like to chime in?”

“I’m thinking,” Prye said.

Ten minutes later he was still thinking and ten minutes after that Nora announced that she might as well go home.

“No. Stay a while,” Prye said. “I like having you around. It helps me think.”

“That’s practically a proposal.” Nora sighed, and relapsed once more into a short silence.

“Damn it all,” she said in a shaky voice. “I don’t want you to think. I need cheering. I wish that lightning would either strike me or go away. It’s like walking in front of a gang of small boys with snowballs in their hands. I bet you’re not thinking anyway.”

“You’re a nasty little cynic,” Prye said. “Just to prove that I’m thinking I’ll do it out loud. There are two things I’d like to know: first, why did the murderer choose that particular time and place?”

“Because if he hadn’t chosen that particular time and place he would have had to choose some other particular time and place. What next?”

“What happened to Joan’s engagement ring?”

“She flung it at Ralph’s head. Anything else?”

“Have you ever seen the ring?”

“Certainly. So have you. She was wearing it when she was tossing herself around in here yesterday. It’s a square-cut emerald with four diamonds, and Miss Bonner told Mary who told Susan who told me that it cost two thousand dollars. Like the nasty little cynic I am, I deduct twenty-five percent for feminine inaccuracy and that leaves fifteen hundred dollars. Which is not enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Reward for murder,” Nora said. “Unless some tramp killed her. But so many of us had motives that it seems redundant to consider outsiders.”

“Quite redundant,” Prye said gravely. “There are no tramps around here and tramps don’t often kill. Besides, no average-sized man would have stood a chance of overpowering Joan.”

“She was very strong,” Nora said, nodding.

“Most of them are.” He was quiet a moment and Nora looked up, puzzled.

“What do you mean?”

“An uninhibited person has much more strength and energy than a conventional and sane person of the same stature.”

“Are you really telling me that strength, ordinary physical strength, is partly mental?” she asked.

“I believe so,” Prye said, smiling. “You are holding to the layman’s rigid distinctions between mind and body. The distinction is fine for philosophers, but it’s anathema for psychologists. I consider the mind and the body so much of a unit that I believe the muscles themselves have the power to remember, to think, if you will. But to go back to the strength exhibited by a manic-depressive, for instance, in his manic phase.

“His activity is superhuman, and if you have never seen it, unbelievable. He moves constantly, tearing his clothes or his mattress, talking or swearing or singing at the top of his lungs, not taking time off even to eat, and sleeping almost not at all. It is violent and undirected activity. He performs the first thing that comes into his mind, heedless of the consequences to himself, to others, or to the objects he handles. In a word, he is thoroughly uninhibited.

“In a sane person much of the body’s energy is taken up by the inhibitory processes. The sane man hesitates, ponders, makes a decision, and perhaps changes it. His whole being is not behind the deeds he does. If a man goes swimming immediately after eating the conviction that he should have waited for half an hour will tug at him, will help to dissipate the energy that would ordinarily be going into his stroke. But to the manic tearing at his clothes, what he is doing is right, is the only thing to do, in fact. No inhibitions are dissipating his strength. He becomes, temporarily, a physical superman.”

The room suddenly lit up as if a sun had fallen through the roof. The thunder tore the air and left a hole of silence.

In the next cottage Mary Little raised her head from the pillow and cried: “Jennie! Wake up, Jennie! Something’s been hit!”

Jennie opened her eyes and mumbled a reply. Her head was sunk on her breast.

“Go downstairs and get Tom. I’m nervous. Wake up, Jennie!”

Jennie got up and tottered into the hall, yawning. She came back in a minute, fully awake now and frightened.

“Mr. Little isn’t here,” she cried.

“He must be here! He couldn’t be out in this storm.” Mary reached for her water glass. “He must be here.” Her fingers were shaking and the water dribbled down her chin and the glass fell from her hands.

The army of clouds scattered across the sky in retreat, their ammunition spent. At midnight a star appeared, impaled on a sliver of moon, and still Tom Little did not come home.

Chapter Ten

At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, August the third, a young woman in Toronto was telephoning a wireless message to Dr. Prescott, Clayton, Muskoka.

Regarding jute bag and contents. Bag contains numerous bloodstains type AB and several pieces of skin from scalp. Rocks similarly stained. Adhering to bag many small hairs, ash blonde and curly. Fibers indicate bag soaked from twelve to twenty hours. Letter follows.

Rushmore, Connaught Laboratory.

In Flint, Michigan, the chief of police was composing a telegram to Inspector White.

John Wayne Smith, owner of two independent drugstores. No police record in Michigan but am investigating. Married a year ago and divorced in Florida shortly afterward. Ex-wife’s address unknown. Smith reputed well off and of excellent character. Left Flint last January ostensibly to travel.

Dr. Hartford, superintendent of the Mercy Sanctuary in Chicago, replaced in the files the case history he had been studying, read once more the telegram from Dr. Prye, and took up a pen.

Marion Allen released seven years ago after six months’ observation period. Present whereabouts unknown. Immediately after entrance her symptoms obviously faked. Would have been released sooner if she had not engineered an escape by injuring an attendant and stealing his keys. Allen clearly a conspiratorial type. Her history filled with babblings but gives us no information regarding her family and personal life. I.Q. listed as 96 but she was uncooperative and I would add twenty at least. Have a good multiple-personality case I'd like you to see. Drop in when you can.

Hartford, Superintendent.

Dr. Hartford could afford to be more verbose than the others. He added “Collect” at the bottom of the telegram form.

In cottage number four Susan Frost was packing a picnic basket. Not, of course, for a picnic, with Joan barely cold in her grave. Susan liked to think of Joan in a quiet coffin, looking serene and saved, rather than on the autopsy table in Dr. Prescott’s office.

The wild-strawberry jam, the calves’ foot jelly, and the invalid soup were going to Mary Little. The whole community knew that Tom had run away and that poor Mary was very ill. Susan hummed a little song, whisked a snowy napkin over the basket, and went out.

There was a speedboat out on the lake, a red boat with a broad young man bent over the wheel. She shaded her eyes and watched for a minute. Ralph was going too fast, circling the lake as if it were too small to hold him. Her hand dropped to her side and she walked hurriedly past Prye’s cottage, a slow blush spreading across her face even to the tip of her nose. But she was quite composed again when Jennie answered her knock.

“I’ve brought something for Mrs. Little,” Susan said shyly. “I wonder if I could go up and see her for a minute.”

“The Lord bless you,” Jennie said fervently. “I can’t do a thing with her. Mr. Little didn’t come home all night and she’s thinking he’s dead like — like the other one. And the doctor’s bringing a baby and can’t come until after lunch.”

The situation was made to order for Susan. She gave Jennie the basket and a reassuring smile, pushed up her sleeves, and went upstairs with brisk, firm footsteps. The door of Mary’s room was open, and she tapped softly on the wall and went in.

“Why, hello, Mary,” she said cheerfully. “What’s this I hear about you being a naughty girl and imagining things?”

The woman on the bed opened her eyes, and if there was any expression in them it was one of faint distaste. The two devout ladies of the community did not, in fact, care for each other.

“Have they found Tom?” Mary asked, scarcely moving her lips.

Susan sat down on the edge of the bed. “Found Tom? What nonsense, Mary! You’re not to bother your head about other people right now. I’ve brought you some delicious wild-strawberry jam. I picked the strawberries with my own hands.”

Why this should impart a special flavor to the jam Mary did not know and she was too polite to ask.

“They’re not looking for him,” she said. “They think because I’m sick that I’m not rational, that I’m imagining things.”

Susan smiled gayly. “Well, you are just a teeny weeny bit, aren’t you?” She took one of Mary’s hands and then dropped it suddenly. It was ice-cold. “Has Dr. Prye been here?”

“Yes. But I forgot—”

Susan’s eyes narrowed. “You forgot what, Mary?”

“Nothing.”

“Really, Mary, one would think you didn’t trust me. What did you forget?”

Mary turned her head away. “Just the phone call.”

“What phone call?”

“Ask Jennie.” She was breathing hard, pressing a hand to her heart as if it hurt her.

Susan got off the bed and stood up. “I think you should have a sedative, Mary dear. I really do. I’ll go and get—”

“No! You’re like the rest of them. You want to put me to sleep so I won’t bother you, so I won’t talk.”

“What rest of them? Who wants to put you to sleep, Mary?” She bent over the bed and her voice sank to a soft whisper. “Who wants to put you to sleep, Mary?”

“They want me to think that Tom murdered her and ran away. They don’t want me to talk. They’re afraid of me.”

“Who are they, Mary?”

The whisper spun round and round the room as if it could not get out...

“Yes, there was a phone call,” Jennie told Prye half an hour later. “I was in the kitchen making Mrs. Little’s tea and the phone rang in the sitting room and Mr. Little answered it.”

“Did you hear what he was talking about?” Prye said. “Think, Jennie.”

Jennie looked up at him unhappily, and then suddenly her face brightened. “He was talking about not knowing what someone was talking about.”

Prye groaned inaudibly. “Are you sure the similarity of phrase isn’t confusing you?”

“I heard him say that he didn’t know what someone was talking about,” Jennie repeated. “I even remember the time. It was six-fifteen.”

“And what did you do after you prepared Mrs. Little’s tea?”

“I took it up to her room and sat with her until she’d finished. Sometimes she asks me to have a cup of tea with her just for the sake of company. He was never any company for her. Then I went down again and made his dinner, and then I went back upstairs.”

“What did Mr. Little do after dinner?”

“Sat in the front room reading.”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary about his actions?”

“Well—” Jennie hesitated and then plunged in. “Mr. Little could be quite nice when he wanted to, but he never wasted any of his niceness on me. So I just let him alone. He was grouchy last night.”

“You sat in Mrs. Little’s room all evening?”

“Yes, sir. I started to work on my afghan but I was tired and I dozed off. But that was all right because Mrs. Little was dozing, too.”

“You went to sleep before or after the storm?”

“It must have been before. When Mrs. Little woke me up it was nearly ten o’clock and the storm was real bad then. Mrs. Little was scared and sent me downstairs to get him. But he was gone just as if the spirits had got him, like that Chinaman says.”

“Did the spirits take his hat and coat, too?” Prye asked gravely.

Jennie went out of the room and came back in a few minutes with the news that the spirits had thoughtfully taken along Tom’s hat and coat and a pair of rubbers.

“I want to look at Mr. Little’s room,” Prye said. “I’ll go up alone.”

Tom’s bedroom adjoined Mary’s. Prye went in quietly and closed the door behind him. There was no evidence that Tom had done any packing. The room was neat, the clothes hung up carefully in the closet. Prye went over to the dresser and pulled out a drawer. It shrieked.

“Who’s there?” Mary called out.

Prye stood still.

“Who’s there?” she called, and this time there was panic in her voice.

Prye said, “Damn!” and went out into the hall.

“It’s Dr. Prye, Mrs. Little. I was just—”

“What are you doing in Tom’s room?”

“Inspector White sent me over to see if any of your husband’s clothes were missing.”

“Sent you over!” Mary said bitterly. “It’s not important enough for him to come himself.”

“He’s busy organizing a search of the woods,” Prye was able to say truthfully. “Do you mind if I go on with my job?”

There was no reply. He went back into Tom’s room. Tom was a careful man. His drawers were all in order, and even his correspondence had been arranged in three piles in his writing desk: letters from friends, bills, and business matters. None of the envelopes of the personal letters bore feminine handwriting.

Prye walked slowly toward the door, vaguely dissatisfied. He turned his head and let his eyes wander once more around the room, over the dresser, the cedar chest, the desk, the bed with its covers turned down. There was nothing out of place. Then he looked down and saw on the rug a tiny shaft of green light which should not have been there.

It lay on the ledge of the window, a large square emerald ring flanked with diamonds that caught the sun. It seemed as if someone had put it down casually and forgotten about it. Prye covered it with his handkerchief and placed it in his coat pocket.

In five minutes he was back in his own cottage. With the aid of two mirrors he unwound the bandages from his head and replaced them with a pad of absorbent cotton and several strips of adhesive. Then he jammed a hat over his head and surveyed himself. The effect was not pretty because his ears bent a little; but at least the bandages were invisible.

“If I’m lucky,” he said aloud, “it will be a he, or else a she who won’t expect me to take my hat off.”

He wasn’t lucky. The middle-aged spinster in charge of the switchboard at the telephone exchange in Clayton palpably expected him to remove his hat and eyed him none too cordially as he tugged at the brim. It came off with a rush accompanied by a piece of adhesive and a quantity of Prye’s hair.

Prye pointed to the hair. “A toupee,” he said. “Dam thing won’t stay on.”

“Accounts payable at the desk,” she told Prye severely. Then she doffed her earphones, patted her hair, and appeared behind the desk.

“Jekyll and Hyde,” Prye murmured.

“Name, please,” she said, keeping her eyes fixed glassily on the switchboard.

“Who? Me?” Prye said.

“Of course you,” she said to the switchboard.

“Prye. Dr. Prye. But my bill isn’t due yet. As a matter of fact, I just dropped in to get an idea of how a switchboard works. Very interesting, isn’t it?”

“Not if you have to do it,” she replied coldly.

“No. I can see that.”

A red light glowed on the board and in an instant she had replaced her earphones and was asking in a lilting voice which bore no resemblance to her own: “Number, please?”

She came back behind the desk.

“It’s quite simple, you see,” she informed him.

“I’m afraid I’d feel an awful temptation to listen in on calls,” Prye confessed. “Or else I’d get tangled up in the wires and strangle myself.”

Prye led the laughing but she joined in. When she had finished she regarded him with condescending benevolence. “I daresay it’s possible.”

“You don’t mean to tell me you manage the exchange all by yourself?” Prye said.

“From seven to seven. Another girl comes on at night.”

“Terrible business, this murder out at the Point,” Prye said casually.

She froze again, her mouth hard and tight as if she had swallowed some liquid air.

“It’s a pity that telephone operators aren’t permitted to listen in on calls,” Prye went on. “They could probably help the police a great deal. Now take this business out at the Point. Mr. Little received a phone call last night around six o’clock. If we could verify what was said over the line perhaps we could find Mr. Little.”

“He’s gone?” she exclaimed. “Why, I never dreamed—”

Prye leaned over the desk. “If you should remember that call, Miss—?”

She was quite pale. “Jones. Miss Jones. I can tell you where the call came from but that’s all. It was Miss Bonner’s house.”

“Was it a woman or a man?”

“A woman with a funny name.”

“Miss Alfonse?”

“That’s it,” she said uneasily. “Really, I can’t tell—”

“She asked for Mr. Little and told him who was speaking. He seemed puzzled, didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“How did you know?”

“Oh, I know what was said. I’m just checking up on it, you see.”

“Oh.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “In that case I don’t mind admitting that I did listen to the call. It was so short, I hardly had time not to listen. This Miss Alfonse wanted to meet Mr. Little at some pier at nine o’clock. Is that what you heard?”

“Precisely,” Prye said. “My informant wasn’t quite clear as to whether he said he’d meet her or not. Did he?”

“She seemed to take it for granted that he would,” Miss Jones replied. “She just hung up.”

“Thank you, Miss Jones. Do you like roses?”

“Well, yes, I do, but—”

“No trouble at all,” Prye said, smiling. “Good day.”

The business district of Clayton occupied no more than three blocks on the main street, and Prye had no difficulty finding the town’s only cab station. The manager himself greeted Prye. He had taken the call from the Point at about five o’clock on Monday afternoon. The caller gave her name as Miss Frost, and told him she wanted a taxi at ten o’clock sharp, that she intended to catch the ten-twenty to Toronto. Prye gave the man a dollar and went out.

He found Constable Jakes in his office which was part of the jail itself. The emerald ring was brought out, and Constable Jakes laboriously began to test it for fingerprints. There were none. Prye listened patiently to a recital of the wrongs he had committed by taking the ring: removal of evidence without proper witnesses and failure to seal the ring in an envelope complete with signatures of witnesses.

It was one-thirty by the time he reached Dr. Prescott’s office and was admitted to the autopsy room.

On a slab in the center of the room lay the body of Joan Frost. A butterfly incision had been made in her trunk and the skin lifted back. A suction tube was drawing off the blood. In a pail by the table was her heart and her stomach and her lungs.

“For the love of heaven!” Prye said in a strangled voice.

Prescott looked up, surprised. He was packing the body with sawdust before sewing the skin back on.

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t like this room,” Prye said, reeling toward the door.

Prescott was slightly huffed. He pulled a sheet over the body and washed his hands, and they went out to his front office.

Prescott was smiling. “I’m an undertaker, too. Sit down.”

Prye sat down weakly. “Sorry. Never could stand postmortems.”

“Why did you want to see the body?”

“Did you notice her left hand?” Prye asked.

“Yes. She’d been wearing a ring on her third finger. The skin there was not tanned like the rest of her hand, and it was slightly puffed.”

“The ring fitted tightly then?”

“I’d say so. The report from the Connaught Lab came in this morning. It seems you were right about the bag of stones being used as the weapon. There were pieces of skin and some hairs clinging to it, and the bloodstains were the same type as the body’s.”

“Find anything else interesting?” Prye said.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘interesting,’ but the girl had obviously had relations with at least one man. He may have killed her. The point will have to be brought out at the inquest tomorrow, I suppose, though it’s a delicate one and we try not to offend our summer residents.”

“You may be having a double inquest,” Prye said. “Unless I miss my guess, the man in question has joined his ancestors.”

“Really? Well then, we don’t have to bring that up at all.” Prescott seemed relieved. The summer residents were profitable to him for they had a penchant for admiring poison ivy and picking up odd germs to which the local people were immune.

“The inquest is, after all, merely to ascertain the cause of death and I think that is quite clear. You will attend, Dr. Prye?”

The question was asked merely out of courtesy, as a subpoena had already been delivered to Prye.

Prye touched his coat pocket. “I’ll be there by special invitation. By the way, I prefer to have nothing said about the attack on me if you can avoid it.”

“I’m afraid we can’t. We would like the jury to inspect your head—”

Prye groaned aloud.

“—because you are, in a manner of speaking, like the sole survivor of a sinking ship. From the nature of the attack on you the jury will be able to form a better idea of how the girl was attacked.”

“It seems unnecessary,” Prye said gloomily. “You know how the murder was done — I know — the police know. Probably the only people who don’t know are the coroner’s jury.”

“Democracy,” Prescott said severely. “We must live by the precepts of democracy, Dr. Prye.”

Dr. Prye conceded the point and went out to order some roses for Miss Jones. He was not in the best of humor when he arrived home, but the sight of Nora awaiting him on his front veranda was cheering.

Nora had weathered the first murder, but the storm and the possibility of a second murder had shaken her considerably.

Her cottage, which she had chosen because it was cool and surrounded by trees, now appeared to her as a deathtrap, a spot designed by nature for murderous assaults. She had eaten both breakfast and lunch locked in the kitchen, and at one-thirty she sprinted to Prye’s cottage with no thought for dignity. Dignity was a desirable quality, she reflected, but speed was more important under the circumstances.

“Mind if I rent a few inches of your veranda for a week or so?” she asked, getting to her feet as Prye came up the steps.

He took her hand and said in a fatherly tone: “My dear girl, what would people think? If you compromise yourself in the eyes of man, don’t expect me to marry you.”

“I don’t,” Nora said affably. “But it might be rather nice if you’d ask me so I could say no.”

Prye held the screen door open and she went in.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I don’t think I’d like being a doctor’s wife. Take being the wife of a street cleaner, for instance, a street cleaner called Harry. Well, Harry comes home all covered with dirt from street-cleaning and sees me looking cool and clean and fetching, and says to himself, ‘I’m a lucky man.’ Then take you, for example. You come home after spending the day being chased around wards by competent and beautiful nurses. You aren’t a bit like Harry. You say, ‘Where in hell is my dinner?’ ”

Prye grinned down at her. “All right. Where in hell is my dinner?”

“You don’t get any dinner,” Nora said distantly. “Why not let one of your competent and beautiful nurses pack you a lunch?”

“Miss Alfonse is the only nurse around here and if she packed me a lunch I’d want it thoroughly tested in a lab.”

Nora took his hand and drew him into the sitting room. She looked suddenly very serious and Prye said: “Something eats you, Nora?”

She removed her hand from his and frowned at him.

“Look, I want to apply for a position.”

She paused, and Prye prompted: “Well, what would you like from me, references?”

“I’m applying to you.”

“To me?”

“I’m... well, I’m not exactly frightened to stay alone in my cottage, but I would feel better if you gave me a job as cook. That will solve everything: I can stay here and at the same time hold up my head in good society. Does the idea appeal to you?”

“Strongly. But it might be better for you to ask the Frosts to put you up. Joan’s room will be vacant. It will save wear and tear on your reputation.”

“Joan’s room!” Nora cried. “Are you delirious? I wouldn’t sleep in Joan’s room for... for anything! I’m surrounded by homicidal maniacs and you gibber about my reputation! How do you suppose my reputation will survive being murdered?”

“I can’t think of any reason why you should be murdered unless there’s something you haven’t told me. Is there?”

“No.”

“Then Mr. Smith must have been imagining things when he told Inspector White that you and Wang—”

“Well, that mean little wretch,” Nora said warmly.

“I suppose you and Wang are a gymnastic team and you were just practicing outside Mr. Smith’s kitchen window? Are you in good form?”

“Tolerable,” Nora said.

“And that’s your story?”

“Yours, but I’m using it. You may tell Inspector White if you wish. You may also give me an alibi for last night in case Tom Little turns up murdered.”

Across the lake from Prye’s cottage a small boy was sailing a toy boat along the shore. He was so engrossed in his play that the drifting canoe almost touched him before he looked up and saw it.

The canoe was half-submerged, and on the bottom of it a man lay face down in several inches of dirty pink water. A hat had been jammed on the back of his head and it was covered with brownish stains.

Tom Little was still wearing his rubbers and his coat although he had not needed either for some time.

The small boy caught the rope of the canoe and held it while he stared with interest at this curious object. Then he went quite calmly to tell his mother.

Chapter Eleven

“My Baby!” cried Mrs. St. Clair Remington. “To think that my baby should find a dead man! Why, he doesn’t even know what death is. My poor baby!”

Apparently her baby was hardened to this sort of thing. He squirmed expertly out of her grasp and was in the act of crawling between Inspector White’s legs in order to get another look at the corpse. The inspector reached down and grabbed him.

“A dreadful experience for the young,” Inspector White said solemnly. “If you have some place where we could discuss this, Mrs. Remington, we shall be able to prevent his youthful mind being wounded further.”

Dr. Prescott and two provincial policemen were left at the beach and Mrs. Remington led the way to her cottage.

“How many people have you told about the discovery?” the inspector asked.

“No one at all. That is, except my sister who is staying with me.”

“The servants?”

“Oh yes, and my maid Lucy. Run along, Tommy. Go up to your room and get your nice new airplane, that’s a good boy.”

Tommy made it plain, by a series of grimaces, that he had no intention of going. Although bribery was against his principles, Inspector White said: “I’ll give you a quarter.”

“For fifty cents I can buy a water pistol,” the baby said musingly.

“Tommy! Really, Inspector, he never acts like this! I can’t understand—”

Fifty cents changed hands and the door was locked behind Tommy. Mrs. Remington sank into a chair, sighing audibly.

Inspector White remained standing. “I want you to assist the cause of justice, Mrs. Remington.”

It was a good beginning. Mrs. Remington began to flutter like a light-mad moth.

“I want you to keep this discovery a complete secret. Tell no one, not even your husband.”

“I haven’t any husband.”

“Good,” Inspector White said vigorously. “How far is the nearest cottage?”

Mrs. Remington looked vague. “Quite, quite far.”

“Is there any possibility that someone else saw this canoe?”

“I don’t think so. You see, this is a kind of cove, very private. And with all those trees and things— Oh no.”

Inspector White spent another five minutes swearing her to secrecy and went out to give orders to his men. Dr. Prescott was to accompany the corpse to Clayton, one policeman was to remain at the spot where the body was discovered and keep an eye on the Remingtons. The other man, who was in plain clothes, was to find out who owned the canoe. Inspector White himself put through an enigmatic call to Prye’s cottage.

Dr. Prye, strengthened by food, was about to go up to Miss Bonner’s for a stern interview with Alfonse when the telephone rang.

“Prye? White speaking. Walk to the end of the lane and I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. Don’t tell anyone.” Inspector White rang off and Prye turned to Nora.

“Sorry, I have to go out,” he said. “Stay here if you like, but lock the doors.”

“Where are you going?” she asked nonchalantly.

“Sh! My lips are sealed, but I don’t mind telling you that I’m going out to foil a plot to blow up the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.”

“Wise guy,” Nora said without heat.

She watched him out of the window. Wherever Dr. Prye was going he seemed in no hurry to arrive. He wandered casually up the lane, stopping to fling a flat stone into the water and watch it skip along the surface.

Emily saw him, too, and immediately shouted down to Wang to lock all the doors and windows, Prye was coming. But Prye passed her house with barely a glance and soon he was hidden by trees.

At the place where the lane crossed the main road Inspector White was waiting in his official car. He opened the door with a curt, “Come in.”

Prye got in and slammed the door. “Found him?”

“We found him,” Inspector White said grimly. “In a canoe on the other side of the lake. He was hit over the head like the girl, but there was no trace of the weapon. It looks like an ax job. I’ve seen quite a few of them. But ax murderers are usually a simple, crude, stupid class of criminal, and this man isn’t.”

“Or woman,” Prye said. “When was Little killed?”

“Prescott says between fifteen and twenty hours ago, roughly sometime during the storm. He must have left his house after the storm started because he was wearing his coat and hat and rubbers.”

“Why put him in a canoe?” Prye said slowly.

“I have an idea about that. My theory is that the murderer wanted the body to be found but not on the spot where the murder was committed. Unless we get eyewitness testimony we stand no chance at all of finding out where Little was killed: the storm will have washed away all traces of the crime and we certainly can’t have every piece of earth in Muskoka tested for invisible bloodstains. Since a drifting canoe is sure to be discovered on a lake of this size I assume that the murderer did not want to conceal the body as he did Miss Frost’s; perhaps he meant us to find Little. In that case, he will be disconcerted if we do not find him, won’t he?”

Prye nodded. “So your idea is to pretend that the body has not been discovered and to wait for the murderer to make the next move?”

“That’s it. And whether I’m right or wrong, secrecy can do no harm.”

“I think you’re wrong. Whose canoe was it?”

“I have a man tracing it but we don’t know yet.”

“I hope it’s Joan Frost’s,” Prye said.

Inspector White took his eyes off the road to stare at him. “Why do you say that?”

Prye was silent a minute. Then he said thoughtfully: “How neat it will be if the canoe is Joan’s. See the pattern behind the two murders? Joan is killed and her body left in the water. Her engagement ring is found in Tom’s room. There was no attempt to conceal it. Then Tom is killed in the same way, and his body is placed in a canoe. And if the canoe belongs to Joan Frost, see how completely the two deaths are interwoven? It’s almost as if the murderer is trying to make us see the essential justice of his crimes.”

“Always providing,” Inspector White put in dryly, “that the canoe does belong to Joan Frost.” He turned his car around in the middle of the road. “We’re going back now. I have a job for you, Prye.”

“Before you tell me about the job, let me tell you about Miss Jones. She’s the—”

“I met Miss Jones this morning,” Inspector White said. “Miss Jones is a very simple woman and you should never send roses to simple women over forty. They get suspicious and sometimes inform the police.”

“Duped,” Prye said sadly.

“On the strength of Miss Jones’ evidence I should arrest this Alfonse woman.”

“Not yet. We don’t know whether she kept the appointment or not. We don’t know definitely whether it was Miss Alfonse speaking and not someone who merely used her name. She may have a cast-iron alibi for the times of the telephone call and the murder. Besides, why should Miss Alfonse, who barely knew Tom Little, decide to kill him?”

“Perhaps because he knew she committed the first murder.”

“How could he? He wasn’t even outside the house on Monday night. Now what’s the job I’m to do?”

“Get people talking about the storm. Was it a bad storm? Did they sit up and watch it or go to bed? Did they hear any trees fall?”

“Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it,” Prye murmured.

Inspector White frowned and said, “Roughly, that’s it. Though I don’t approve of deceit, you understand it’s necessary.”

“Perfectly. Had a bad storm in these parts last night, Inspector. Do you remember it?”

“Vividly,” Inspector White said with a smile. “I was marooned in an undertaking parlor in Clayton.” He stopped the car and opened the door. “From here on you’ll be walking, Prye.”

“Walking! It’s half a mile!”

“Just the right distance to allow a tactful interval between our arrivals.”

Prye was left standing in the middle of the road.

“Duped again,” he said, and began to walk.

Sitting behind the desk in his study, Professor Frost turned another page of his Thucydides and sighed. He was making notes for his book on the humor of the Greeks and skimming Thucydides in the thin hope of finding just one example.

At last his eye brightened. “The Spartans set out, not toward Sparta, but—”

Yes. Undoubtedly humor, of a kind. The Spartans, who were constantly setting out toward Sparta, were this time setting out not toward Sparta. With a pleased smile he noted the page and line and closed the book.

A timid knock at the door and a soft “Father, are you busy?” announced the entrance of Susan. Susan always knocked and she always said, “Father, are you busy?” but she managed to get inside the door without waiting for an answer.

“I am busy, my dear,” her father said mildly. “I am always busy. Nevertheless, I shall take time off to settle any family difficulties. What is it — a mouse in the cupboards? A broken dish?”

“A policeman,” Susan said with gentle reproach.

“Really. What does he want?”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“Extraordinary. I can’t believe my conversation would interest a policeman in the least. However, I’ll be down shortly. Give him a cookie and tell him to wait.”

“A cookie? What kind of cookie?”

“That was a joke, Susan, a meek and miserable little joke. Thucydides does not inspire me to great heights.”

“I don’t understand you, Father,” Susan said mournfully, and went out into the hall.

Inspector White had settled himself comfortably in the sitting room. The leather chair was cool, and when Susan reappeared he estimated her age in the hope that she would be under eighteen and would not expect him to get up again. It was no use. Susan was over eighteen and looked it. He rose to his feet wearily while she delivered her message in a ladylike voice.

“Prissy,” thought Inspector White. “Prim and prissy.” Aloud he said: “Thank you, Miss Frost. This has been a very trying experience for you and your father, extremely trying.”

With no effort at all Susan looked extremely tried.

“The police are doing their utmost, you may be sure, Miss Frost. So far we have uncovered no evidence which points conclusively to one person, and that is why we must continue to bother you in this way. Ah, Professor Frost? I’m Inspector White of the Provincial Police.”

Professor Frost crossed the room and the two men shook hands, watching each other carefully through their smiles. Frost turned to Susan and she went out without speaking.

“Sorry to break up your work,” Inspector White began in his loud, pleasant voice, “but I’d like to know more about Monday afternoon and perhaps you can help me.”

“Perhaps,” the professor said, looking slightly bored.

“Your daughter, Joan, I am told, locked herself in her room shortly before lunch on Monday. After lunch she admitted a visitor, Ralph Bonner. In your first statement you told Constable Jakes that you heard none of the ensuing conversation. Is that right?”

“Right.”

“Would you care to change that statement?”

“I have no reason to.”

“Despite the fact that the windows were all open, you heard no sounds of quarreling?”

“I wasn’t listening. I never hear anything when I’m not listening.”

Inspector White smiled coldly. “You must have remarkable powers of concentration, Professor Frost.”

“I have indeed,” Frost agreed blandly.

“You were in your study all Monday afternoon?”

“I was.”

“You would not be in a position to say whether your daughter went out of the house or not?”

“No. Why?”

“Her engagement ring has been found. From the position in which it was found I thought it probable that she had left it there herself. Since she was wearing it when she was talking to Mr. Bonner, she may have taken it off later in the afternoon. But if she did not go out the ring must have been removed after her death.”

Frost seemed uninterested. “It was a valuable ring. I hardly think Joan would have left it anywhere.”

Inspector White coughed slightly, and said casually: “Bad storm last night. One of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Frost began to smile ironically. “Inspector, I do not consider you the type of man who voluntarily discusses the weather. I am forced to conclude that Mr. Little’s disappearance interests you. Perhaps you have found him, murdered, of course, and are asking me to provide my alibi, if any. But I am a most unnatural creature, a moth in the social fabric let us say. And since I have this contemptible habit of solitude I deserve to suffer for it. I am suffering for it. I have no alibi. Are you too warm, Inspector?”

“No,” the inspector said shortly.

“Then I shall go on to say that the word alibi means ‘elsewhere,’ although in English it has come to be used as a noun signifying the statement made by a suspected person and attested by witnesses that he was elsewhere at the time of a crime. But what time, my dear Inspector, and what crime? Until one has these pertinent facts how can one prove one was elsewhere? You follow me?”

“Closely,” the inspector said.

“In that case I must repeat, what time and what crime?”

“I don’t know,” the inspector said somewhat truthfully. “But the very fact that a man has disappeared gives me the right to question his acquaintances about their own movements.”

“God forbid,” Professor Frost said fervently, “that I should go down in history as an acquaintance of Tom Little’s. But I see your point of view. I can only say that I know nothing about his disappearance. I was, as usual, working alone in my study.”

“You own this cottage?”

“Yes.”

“Come here every summer?”

“Yes.”

“Have you a car?”

“A kind of car.”

“But like the others up here you usually travel around in boats?”

“I don’t travel around at all,” Frost said, amused. “I don’t like boats. My daughter Susan attends to the necessary shopping.”

“But you have a boat?”

“Two of them. A canoe and a dinghy with an outboard motor. They belong to my daughters.”

“May I see your boathouse?”

“Of course. Susan will take you.”

“I prefer to go alone.”

Inspector White came back in ten minutes, looking hot and harassed.

“You may have had two boats,” he said slowly, “but you haven’t any now.”

At that moment Dr. Prye was straggling up the lane. He was extremely warm. The sun and wind had painted his face a brilliant red, and by way of minor irritation his shoes were filled with a pound of small pebbles and sand. He felt precisely in the right mood to deal with Miss Emily Bonner.

“Miss Bonner,” Wang told him, “has given orders and I find myself grieved to be unable to admit you.”

“We’ll fix that,” Prye said grimly. “Out of my way, purveyor of demons.”

Wang stood back, grinning. “In the event that you force your way in I shall be held blameless. For the sake of verisimilitude you may push me aside with violence.”

Prye pushed him aside and made for the stairs. He knocked lightly on Emily’s door and she called out: “Who’s there?”

Prye raised his voice to the approximate pitch of Wang’s. “The indescribable doctor is storming the portals with a million men and three machine guns.”

He opened the door and went in. “Are you presentable, Emily, or shall I close my eyes?”

“How did you get in?” she demanded. “Get out. Go away.”

“Later. Mind if I sit down?”

“I mind very much. Wang! Wang!”

At the ninth “Wang” the little Chinaman appeared at the door wreathed in smiles.

“Miss Bonner desires me?”

“Stop that incessant grinning and go down and phone the police. I want this man arrested for... for—”

“Attempted rape,” Prye suggested.

“I want him arrested for something! Hurry up. I’m going to faint.”

Wang departed, and Prye sat down and lit a cigarette. The silence was broken only by the sound of Emily’s heavy breathing.

“I’m a louse,” Prye said to open the conversation.

Emily glared at him without speaking.

“No one but a louse,” he continued, “would browbeat a poor old crippled lady on the point of fainting, although I may say that when ordinary people faint the blood leaves the head whereas your blood, Emily, seems to be all concentrated in your head. That is if the color of your face is any indication.”

Emily made no reply, and in a short time Wang came back.

“I am desolated that the police are not in,” he announced. “They have all gone swimming, owing to the unkindly weather.”

“Most unfortunate,” Prye said, “although one can see their point of view.”

“You’re lying,” Emily said flatly. “This man has bribed you.”

“My impeccable honesty has never been questioned. I am stabbed by the dagger of distrust, and I go to my room to bleed in silence.” He bowed himself out.

“You have corrupted my servants,” Emily said in a tear-laden voice, “broken into my house, and insulted my nephew and myself, merely because some homicidal maniac escaped from an institution and killed one of our little community.”

“A homicidal maniac with bushy hair and big hands all-the-better-to-strangle-you-with-my-dear, and a wild gleam in his eye? I’ve read of them but I’ve never seen one. The bushiest hair I know belongs to a musician, the biggest hands to a sculptor, and the wildest gleam to a fellow who got a tip on a sure thing in the third at Pimlico. The homicidal maniac of fiction has no prototype in fact.”

“How interesting,” Emily said coldly.

“More interesting, I think, is the fact that the insane and the sane kill for exactly the same motive: to make life easier for themselves, to rid themselves of money troubles, wives, mistresses, rivals, grudges, or fears, real and imagined. If an insane man appears to kill without motive it is because we do not know enough of his history to find the motive. His victim, for instance, might bear a strong resemblance to his uncle Theodore who once gave him a chocolate-coated onion on April Fools’ Day, and the crime becomes a motivated one. The difference, then, between the murders committed by the sane and the insane lies in their attitude to consequences. The sane man will go to infinite pains to avoid the consequences. The really insane man will not try to avoid them because he thinks he is doing the right thing. I have used as examples the two extremes, sanity and insanity. But there are middlemen.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The middlemen are the dangerous ones. They are able to keep their places in society, and to lead, on the surface, normal lives. They may be considered slightly ‘odd’ but if they are lucky enough to avoid great shocks or strain they may continue to pass as normal beings. An automobile accident, a serious illness, the death of a close relative — any of these may be the detonator. The obsession, the phobia, or whatever has been festering in the mind, passes out of control.”

He paused, staring at her rather ferociously, and she said with a laugh: “You should have been a missionary, Prye. You love to enlighten. Do you think I’m your middleman?”

Without answering he got up and went over to the window.

“Seeing a storm from this room must be rather terrifying, especially a storm in the grand manner like last night’s.”

Emily sniffed faintly. “Do you call that a storm? Wait until you see a real one.”

“Don’t you have trouble with the servants during a blow?”

“They get used to it as I did. All except that sniveling little wretch of an Alfonse. She was quite hysterical. I almost sent for you.”

“Really. What time was that?”

“Around ten, I suppose.”

“She got over it all right?”

Emily nodded grimly. “After I stuck her head in the bathtub she did.”

“What bathtub?”

“My bathtub. What does it matter what bathtub?”

“I was simply wondering whether she came in here to have her hysterics and why she didn’t come sooner. The storm began at least an hour before that.”

“Oh. That is curious, isn’t it? Well, I can’t help you. All I know is that she came in here shrieking at ten o’clock.”

“And what did you do?”

“There was only one thing I could do. I held her over my knee and wheeled into the bathroom and pushed her into the tub. Then I turned on the cold water.”

Prye threw back his head and let out a roar of delight.

“What’s so funny?” Emily said.

“The thought of two overweight women dashing around a bathroom in a wheelchair.”

“It doesn’t amuse me in the least,” she said coldly. “Now I suppose you intend to go and browbeat my nurse so that she’ll be completely useless for a week. That will mean another seventy-five dollars wasted.”

“Do you pay that woman seventy-five dollars a week?”

“Of course. I have to pay my servants well for the inconvenience of being snowbound three months of the year.”

“Where did you get Alfonse?”

“I advertised in a Toronto paper,” Emily said.

“Did you check her references?”

“No, I didn’t. I looked at them though. There were at least twenty of them, and all spoke very highly of her. One of them, I remember, was a Lord Somebody-or-other who had a coat of arms on his note paper. Or was it a picture of his castle?”

“If I know Alfonse,” Prye said dryly, “it was both.”

“Dr. Prye” — Wang’s voice came from the hall — “Dr. Prye is most urgently requested.”

Prye went out, closing the door behind him tightly despite Emily’s protests.

“The telephone message originates in Miss Jennie Harris,” Wang said softly. “I am to inform you that Mrs. Little is half-dressed. She said you would understand.”

Prye sighed. “I do. Where is Miss Alfonse’s room?”

Wang pointed to a door at the end of the long hall, and Prye said: “Would you like to sit outside that door until I get back?”

Wang beamed and nodded his head vigorously.

“Let nobody in or out. I want Miss Alfonse to be in the best of health at least until I have a chance to talk to her.”

Chapter Twelve

Mary Little was already downstairs by the time Prye arrived. Her dress was ripped where she had torn it out of Jennie’s hands, her hair was flying over her shoulders, and she wore no shoes or stockings. Jennie was clutching one of her hands, periodically emitting a low moan.

Prye stood in the doorway watching them, not speaking. Under his gaze the tableau became fixed, self-conscious, and with a little shudder Mary stopped struggling and met his eyes. She looked embarrassed and half-ashamed, but she said defiantly:

“You can’t stop me, you can’t!”

Prye smiled. “Stop you making a fool of yourself? Well, I can try. Jennie, perhaps we’d better help Mrs. Little back to her room.”

“I’m not going back to my room,” Mary said. “I’m going out to find my husband. If you interfere with me, I’ll... I’ll—” She clung to the banister, breathing hard. Prye picked her up easily and carried her upstairs. He put her on the bed and she started to cry and beat her hands feebly on the pillow.

“Stop that,” Prye said. He called down to Jennie and told her to bring up his instrument bag. She brought it up, laid it on a chair, and backed out of the room. Prye went on talking in a steady, monotonous voice as he prepared a hypodermic needle with one eighth grain of morphine.

“I told you this morning that the police were doing their best to find your husband. I spend half my time soothing hysterical women like you. Sometimes they’re merely pretending, and in that case a smart slap on the face is the best cure.”

“Oh!” Mary gasped.

“Others have momentarily lost their powers of reasoning and I give them a hypodermic. That’s you. I have here a one eighth grain of morphine sulphate. It may put you to sleep and it may not, but it will ease your mind for a while.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” she protested weakly. “I’m scared. I—”

He rubbed her arm with an alcohol swab, still talking in a voice that had become a drone. She did not even wince as the needle entered her arm.

“You’re a good hypnotic subject. You’re practically asleep already. That’s because you’re suggestible. If I suggested that you were a cow you’d probably moo. It’s nearly three o’clock and the only thing to do at three o’clock in the middle of summer is to go to sleep. I wish to hell I were asleep. Mary?”

He touched her shoulder and she did not move. Her breathing was more even. He felt her pulse and found it fast and weak. Then he went out and closed the door.

“Is she all right?” Jennie asked fearfully when he came downstairs.

“My patients are always all right,” Prye said with dignity, “but if she has a relapse at seven o’clock let me know.”

Jennie was gazing at him, awed. “How did you do it?”

Prye smiled modestly. “Sheer force of personality though the opium poppy did its bit, too.” He went out whistling, and while Jennie was sitting down to have a nice long cry he was pounding on Miss Alfonse’s door.

Miss Alfonse was certainly in her room. There were rustlings and creakings from inside. But she made no move to open the door. From his pocket Prye took a small triangular piece of metal, a recent gift from a friend of his whose intermittent address was San Quentin, and within a minute the door was unlocked.

Prye rapped once again. “Miss Alfonse, shall I come in or would you prefer to come out?”

“You can come in,” she answered in a flat voice.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing her uniform. Her face was pale and completely without expression.

“Wise guy, eh?” she said.

“I have my talents,” Prye said. “One of them is saving young ladies from certain death. If you’re a lady you qualify. Even if you’re not a lady, somebody probably loves you and I don’t want you to be murdered. At a quarter after six last night you phoned Tom Little. What for?”

“I wanted to play honeymoon bridge and I needed a partner.”

“That’s your attitude, is it?”

“Until I can think of a better one, and I’m not thinking myself into a brain strain for your benefit.”

“I wouldn’t even ask you to,” Prye said. “Miss Jones, though, didn’t mention honeymoon bridge to me, but there was something about a pier. Miss Jones is the switchboard operator at Clayton. She’s got a dozen roses and I’ve got a record of your conversation with Little.”

Miss Alfonse’s face did not change but her fingers plucked at the chenille flowers on her bedspread.

“Mr. Little and I had business together,” she said at last.

“It must have been peculiar business because Tom Little hasn’t been seen since. Here’s another interesting point: at nine o’clock you had your appointment with Little, and an hour later you were throwing a fit in Miss Bonner’s room.”

“The hell I was.”

“That’s her story.”

“She’s an old goat,” Miss Alfonse said tightly.

“Now here’s my idea. On Tuesday you told Constable Jakes that you had an alibi for the time of Joan’s murder. Yesterday you and I had a little chat. At first you were pretty skittish but by the time you left you were feeling good again. I think I know why.”

“All right. Why?”

“Because you didn’t have an alibi but you had suddenly thought of a fine way to get one. It had to be a man because you had already told Jakes you were out with a man that night. It had to be someone who would be glad to provide an alibi for himself, and it couldn’t be Ralph because you have other ideas about Ralph. Tom Little filled the bill nicely. He was one of the chief suspects, he had an elastic code of ethics, and he would be sap enough to fall in with any scheme presented by a lady in the right way. It’s lucky for you that he disappeared, because Little already had an alibi and it wouldn’t have looked well if he had two of them. When you’re counting alibis and not apples, one plus one equals none.”

Miss Alfonse sat rigid, a film of ice forming over her eyes.

“Now just suppose that you met Tom Little as you had planned and told him your intellectual blitz. He would naturally wonder why you were so anxious to have an alibi and it might have occurred to him that your anxiety had its source in a guilty conscience. So Tom says, ‘Nuts to you, Miss Alfonse. I know now who murdered Joan. Wait right there until I go and get a policeman.’ But you don’t like that idea at all. You have given yourself away, you are desperate. You reach down and pick up a rock and several people are given the opportunity to quote ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum.’ As simple as that.”

Miss Alfonse got up and went over to the window. Without turning her head she said: “You mean he’s dead?”

“We think so,” Prye said.

“What did I do with the body?”

Prye went over to the window and stood beside her and they both looked out at the lake. It was dimpling in the sun like a fat baby.

“Nasty place to end up, isn’t it?” Prye said. “Joan knows about that. I guess Tom knows, too. Funny about Tom. You’d expect him to have more sense than to go traipsing about in the woods with someone he scarcely knew. People take foolish risks sometimes. When someone has committed one murder the second is easier. The third? The third is the simplest of all. The murderer is in good training.”

Miss Alfonse turned on him savagely. “What in hell are you talking about?”

Prye did not raise his voice. “You. You’re the third.”

For a minute the silence was so thick that Prye’s skin began to crawl with invisible insects. Then he heard Emily shouting “Wang!” and he began to smile.

“How much are you getting?” he asked.

“For what?”

“Keeping your mouth shut.”

“I don’t know anything. I didn’t keep that date with Tom Little. I’m scared of thunderstorms. I wouldn’t go out in one unless I had to.”

“You had to,” Prye said.

She shook her head.

“You’re being very naive, Miss Alfonse, to trust a murderer.”

“I won’t,” she said in a firm voice. “I know what I’m doing. What’s more, I know what you’re doing. You’re bluffing, and you’re a mile wide of the mark.”

“If you say so,” Prye agreed politely.

“I’m not worried about not having an alibi. A lot of other people haven’t. And I’m not worried about getting a bash on my head for the simple reason that I don’t intend to turn my back to anyone. Not even to you, Dr. Prye.”

She had backed to the door, and now she opened it and waited for him to go out. He heard the lock slipping into place behind him.

It was nearly four o’clock when he arrived at his cottage. Nora and Inspector White were waiting for him in the sitting room, and he greeted them gloomily and flung himself into a chair.

“What’s the matter?” Nora asked.

“The heat,” Prye said. “And murders. And storms and liars. If this were an epidemic of typhoid, we’d inoculate. But it looks like an epidemic of murder.”

Inspector White coughed gently. “In my own way I have inoculated.”

“Have you men posted at each end of the lane and throughout the woods? Have you a string of spotlights put up? Have you told everyone to stay inside and lock their doors? It may sound drastic but I for one would rather be drastic than dead.”

“I have sent for more men,” Inspector White said. “But there are only a limited number available and the commissioner—”

“To hell with the commissioner,” Prye said. “If there aren’t enough men, why doesn’t he hire some deputies?”

“Could I help?” Nora said in a small voice. “I can fire a gun.”

“The trick is to hit something,” Prye said. He turned to Inspector White. “You have a fine reputation, Inspector. You understand criminals and how they work. You know all about fingerprints and poroscopy and moulages and ballistics and the other tools of crime detection. But I don’t think these murders are in your field at all. I think they’re in mine. I think we are dealing with a mind that believes it is divinely inspired to dispense justice, with a person who considers himself an instrument of God.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m guessing, I’m having hunches, my subconscious is getting up steam. Call it what you like. But I assure you that I would rather deal with the lowest gangster on the continent than with one of these instruments of God. Nothing can stop them, you see. They’re not afraid of the laws in this world or in the next. They are simply and irrevocably and terrifyingly right.

“There are dozens of these people in the violent wards of institutions. They perform strange and wonderful rituals at the dictates of this inner voice that they call God. You’ve never been in a violent ward. They don’t encourage visitors because it isn’t safe. You wouldn’t like to go through one. I saw a nurse putting up a Christmas tree one day last December and the next day the tree was gone except for the main trunk. There wasn’t a piece of tinsel or an ornament or a shred of evergreen left. We operated on the man who ate it but he died anyway. At home I have a collection of fifty-seven articles taken from a woman’s stomach, including a spectacles frame and eleven nails. She died, too.

“Even in sane people, or those who pass for sane, we sometimes find this terrible compulsion, this overwhelming obedience to a voice within themselves. Sometimes the commands are trivial — ‘Always lick a stamp from left to right.’ Sometimes they’re important — ‘Kill Joan Frost.’ In one case it’s superstition or a compulsion neurosis. In the other, it’s murder, murder at the bidding of God and for the good of all, murder for the sake of justice. A man obsessed by the idea of justice for his race is murdering half of Europe. And close beside us a man or woman has taken justice into his own hands and doles it out with a bag of stones and an ax.”

He sat down suddenly and smiled.

“Impassioned oratory is not my strong suit.”

Nora was staring at him, half-hypnotized.

“Is it true?” she whispered.

“Is what true?”

“About the Christmas tree?”

“Certainly it’s true.”

She got up quickly and left the room. Inspector White’s voice was rather uncertain. “I hope you’re wrong. I’ve never had anything to do with a maniac.”

“Not exactly a maniac,” Prye smiled. “Our murderer is living, outwardly at least, a normal life. He has an obsession which he is still sane enough to keep to himself. He may be obeying the laws of God, you see, but he is well aware of the laws of man. An obsession is, after all, merely an idea which has gotten out of control, just as a phobia is a fear that has gotten out of control. We all have phobias to some extent. My own is acrophobia. I’m terrified of heights. I also have a phobia of having a phobia which I suppose would be called phobia-phobia if anyone were silly enough to name it. Don’t mind me, Inspector, I always talk too much when I’m tired, which brings us to that controversial question: What is tiredness? Shall we go into it?”

“Not now,” the inspector said. “Besides, what good would it do to know what tiredness is? When I’m tired I rest, and then I am no longer tired.”

“Simply and beautifully said. What this country needs is more simple and beautiful sayings said by more simple and beautiful people.”

Inspector White rose briskly. “You’d better rest, Prye. I’m expecting some men at four-thirty. By the way, you were right about the canoe. It belonged to Joan Frost. But the dinghy with the outboard motor is also missing, so dream about that, will you?”

He went out, and in ten minutes Prye was asleep stretched out on the leather couch. Nora found him there later, and feeling tenderly maternal she covered him with a blanket although the thermometer was near the 90° mark.

At half-past eight on Wednesday evening Jennie Harris was in the sitting room of the Littles’ cottage working on the afghan that was to become famous in a certain area of Muskoka. She crocheted absently, one eye on the clock and one ear cocked for any sounds upstairs. But when a sound finally came it was not from upstairs but from the front door. Later Jennie described the knock as “soft and mysterious.” She heard no footsteps, and her hearing, she said, was very good considering that she was over sixty.

She put down her afghan and went to the door. She was not frightened. If, as Hattie Brown had told her, there were fifty policemen guarding the community, what was there to be afraid of? Nothing, absolutely nothing. But her feet faltered, and she called out, “Who’s there?” before she unbolted the door.

No one answered because there was no one there.

She stood peering out into the darkness for a full minute listening, too frightened to go further and too curious to go back. Gradually her eyes became adjusted to the darkness and she saw at her feet a long white envelope. She stooped and picked it up, conscious of eyes upon her.

A tree rustled beside the veranda and she let out a cry and leaped back into the house. She locked and bolted the door and leaned against it, trembling.

“Holy Moses,” Jennie said reverently.

“Is there another man in your life?” Prye asked Nora.

She was down on her knees in front of the fireplace. In the grate she had collected a pile of paper, wood shavings, and dry timber in the hope that the application of a lighted match would produce a roaring fire. Vast clouds of smoke issuing from the grate hinted at fire but no fire was visible.

“Because if there is another man in your life,” Prye shouted above the crackle, “I wish you would sit down quietly and write him a letter.”

She struck another match and replied absently: “Don’t like writing letters. I like building big homey fires. Have you any marshmallows?”

Prye went over, grasped her hands, and pulled her to her feet.

“We have no marshmallows,” he said as gently as possible. “But we have two murders, and I want to think about them. Think, see?”

“You thought last night,” Nora said practically, “and nothing came of it.”

Prye held her two shoulders in his hands. “Look, if you’re a good girl I’ll marry you.”

“Gentlemen’s agreement, or will you put it in writing?”

“Writing.”

“Do I get kissed?”

She got kissed. Then she sat down and folded her hands primly.

“That was nice,” she said. “All right. Who did the murdering?”

“I don’t know,” Prye said. “I theorized this afternoon but I think I was partly right. Joan was killed because she was hated. It may have been a personal hatred on the part of those who came into daily contact with her like Susan and her father, or an impersonal hatred on the part of someone who hated her for what she was, who thought she wasn’t fit to live.”

“It wasn’t Susan,” Nora said scornfully.

“No? Professor Frost said something peculiar the other day. He told me Susan had a spark of fire some place within her but he’d never seen it. I have — when she was talking about Joan. Susan was out on Monday night. Susan is a nice girl but she is twenty-six and plain and dowdy, and has never been kissed and has never had a pretty dress or been to a dance. And she is in love with Ralph.”

“I knew that a month ago,” Nora said.

“In my profession we regard such paragons as Susan with a cold eye. They have no normal outlets for their feelings. Compared with Joan, Susan is so unattractive that she has come to believe that unattractiveness is a virtue in itself. It is deplorable the value that most women and many men place on physical charm so that the lack of it warps their lives or, more rarely, turns them into geniuses in the artistic fields. If Susan had the nicest legs in Ontario she wouldn’t be Susan, she might even be Joan.

“So we have two sisters, and one of them is beautiful and bad and the other is plain and good. The beautiful but bad is engaged to the man that the plain but good loves and so everybody does not live happily ever after. No — one of them dies. With Joan dead, Ralph is ripe to fall into the nearest arms. Well, there’s Susan’s motive and it’s a strong one. Her opportunity is better than anyone’s. She simply had to wait for Joan to go out, follow her, and kill her. She may have had the bag of stones already prepared, or she may have known that Joan was going to meet someone in the grove of birches, arrived ahead of time, and prepared it then.”

“It was a funny weapon to use for murder,” Nora said. “It shows such economy of thought and effort — to kill and to weight the body down with the same thing. It suggests a neat logical mind, a cold-blooded, detached kind of mind. Like Professor Frost’s. But it’s impossible to think of Professor Frost as a murderer. He’s so mild and harmless.”

“If I remember correctly, seventy percent of the murders in the United States are committed by people who have never been arrested before and who were probably considered mild and harmless. I rather like Frost in the role of murderer. He’s so sure of himself it would only amuse him to see us trying to fasten the crime on him. I don’t mind amusing people but I hate to do it by my blundering ineptitude.”

“He wouldn’t care enough to murder anyone,” Nora said.

“Not ordinarily. But what happened on Monday morning might have swayed him. Frost thinks well of himself and his ability to control situations and people. He wouldn’t have liked Joan stealing his diary and slapping him across the face. But I don’t have to find a motive for Frost. He admitted he had one.”

“He wouldn’t have done that if he were really the murderer,” Nora objected.

Prye smiled dryly. “If Frost is guilty he’ll give us all aid short of war. To admit his motive and his lack of an alibi would merely titillate his sense of humor. If he’s the murderer he won’t be caught.”

“Aren’t you being modest, darling?”

“Never,” Prye said glumly. “I simply recognize a first class opponent when I see one. He has the whip hand to begin with — his part is merely that of passive resistance. Mine is to collect positive proof. He’s cool. He has the ability to make me feel like an ass. He has a charming talent for picking pockets — yes, my pocket! He knows we have nothing definite against him.”

The telephone began to ring, two long and one short.

“Is that your ring?” Nora asked.

“Yes. I’ll get it. Probably Jennie saying Mrs. Little has jumped out of a window.”

He went out to the kitchen, picked up the phone, and said: “Dr. Prye speaking.”

“He’s dead!” Jennie whispered over the phone. “We got a letter. Says to tell Mrs. Little he’s dead. Says to tell her his body—”

“I’ll be right over. Be quiet and don’t make a fuss and don’t say anything to Mrs. Little.”

Chapter Thirteen

Prye turned out the light in the kitchen, opened the door, and went on to the veranda. He gave a long, low whistle and about two hundred yards away a bush began to move. He whistled again, keeping in the shadows, and finally the bush stood straight up and began to walk toward him. It materialized as a policeman wearing a grey-blue uniform.

“Anything wrong, Dr. Prye?” he asked.

“Have you seen anyone going into the Littles’ cottage?”

“Haven’t seen a thing,” the policeman said, sounding rather angry. “It’s too damn dark. But there was a light for a minute on the veranda. Somebody opened the door and looked out.”

“All right. I want to go over there. You may come along and then go and find Inspector White.”

Nora arrived in time to hear him, and she clutched his arm firmly. “Hey. You can’t leave me here.”

“You’ll be safer behind locked doors,” Prye said.

“The hell I will. Either you take me or I yell.”

Prye and the policeman exchanged glances of resignation. Then Prye sighed and put his hand under her arm, and the three of them went down the steps.

They walked close together along the path, their feet sweeping away the silence.

“I knew a girl once,” Nora said by way of conversation, “who used to have to walk through a place like this every night. She used to pretend she was crazy — you know, muttering to herself — so that if anyone crazy wanted to attack her the crazy person would think she was crazier and wouldn’t. Should we?”

“Should we what?” Prye said.

“Pretend we’re crazy.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Prye said coldly.

“Oh well. It was just an idea.”

“Wait!” The policeman grabbed Prye by the arm, and all three of them stood still. “Hear anything?” he whispered.

From a near-by tree came a soft, slithering sound. Prye reached for the policeman's flashlight and went quietly toward the tree. It blazed suddenly into light and from one of the middle branches a pair of porcupines regarded him with frightened eyes, their quills sticking straight out from their bodies.

Prye laughed and switched off the flashlight. “They’re more scared than we are.”

Nora said shakily: “They are not. It’s just that I haven’t got any quills to prove it. Do you suppose the murderer is still — here?”

“Not unless he’s a damn fool,” the policeman said. He left Nora and Prye on the steps of the Littles’ veranda and went off again to find Inspector White.

Jennie, wild-eyed and pale, let them into the house. Without speaking she drew the envelope from the pocket of her apron, handling it as if it were an incendiary bomb.

“Have you had your fingers all over this?” Prye asked, frowning.

“It says to me on the envelope,” Jennie said tartly. “Why shouldn’t I put my fingers on it?”

Prye took the envelope. It was a cheap, ordinary brand with “Jenny” penciled on the outside in block letters. The letter inside was simple:

“Mr. Little is dead. I killed him because he was no use to the world. His body is in a canoe on the lake. I am not a cold-blooded murderer, so I am telling you this in order that you may tell your mistress at the proper time. I do not kill without reason.”

The letters were small and neat.

“My name’s spelled wrong,” Jennie said. “I guess that’s a clue.”

“I guess,” Prye said. “How did you get this letter, Jennie?”

“Someone knocked at the door and when I went to see who it was there was no one there. There was just this lying on the veranda.”

“You saw nothing?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“No sir. Except... well, I thought I heard a noise in one of those trees.”

“Was it a sharp crack like a twig breaking?”

“No sir. It was soft, sort of a swish, like the rustle of a taffeta petticoat, if you know what I mean.”

“It wasn’t the rustle of leaves?”

“I don’t think so,” Jennie said, her lips pressed together. “I think it was demons, evil demons.”

Prye smiled. Wang’s ideas seemed to have achieved popularity in the district. Demons whose fingers plucked at Alfonse’s uniform and whispered as she walked—

“Could it have been someone wearing a crisply starched uniform?”

“Maybe, if it wasn’t demons, which I believe it was.”

“All right, it was demons,” Prye said. “You needn’t say anything to Mrs. Little about this letter right now. It may be a hoax. Murderers aren’t usually so lavish in their admissions and I can’t think what is to be gained by a letter like this.”

Nora nudged Prye and turned to Jennie with a bright smile. “I wonder if I could have a sandwich, Jennie.”

“A sandwich!” Jennie couldn’t have been more surprised if Nora had asked for a human head fried in olive oil. “You mean to eat?”

“Just one,” Nora said pitifully. “I didn’t have any dinner.”

Jennie was disposed of.

“So,” Nora hissed. “You can’t think of what the murderer had to gain by this letter! You and the inspector had it all figured out that Tom’s body was meant to be found and now that your argument is proven you’ve forgotten about it. The murderer wants the body found and tells you where to find it. He wasn’t seen and he wasn’t heard, and you’re no closer to him now than you were before. He’s gained his point and risked nothing.”

“Risked everything,” Prye said brusquely. “If we weren’t living in the backwoods this note would hang him. Paper and pencils can be traced. Pencils, like bullets, leave their distinctive marks, and a handwriting expert can deduce almost as much from printing as he can from handwriting. He measures the spaces between letters, words, and lines, the pressure used, the slant of lines and letters, and the width of margins. If ink had been used he could tell what kind of ink, and by the use of a tintometer estimate how long ago the note was written. But there are only about a dozen of these experts on the continent and none of them is in Muskoka. All I can do is observe the obvious facts: that the pencil had a soft lead and the paper is cheap and matches the envelope. We don’t stand much chance of finding the supply the paper came from, since the murderer has probably burned it by this time.”

“Why don’t you get everyone to print the alphabet in block letters and compare them?” Nora suggested.

“One test would do no good. The murderer would take pains to print his letters in a different way. Such a test is useful only when it is repeated after a period of time. After a month, for instance, the subject of the test would no longer remember how he had forged each letter in the first place, and the differences in the two tests, while not conclusive in a court of law, would give us a definite lead. But I don’t care to wait a month. Do you?”

“No,” said Nora, shivering.

When Inspector White arrived he was in the worst of humor. The delivery of the letter under the noses of eight of his men he construed as an insult to his ability and he was quite correct in assuming that the commissioner would think the same.

But the inspector was a hardy optimist, and eventually his trained eye detected a silver lining: “The letter clears up one thing anyway. We’re not dealing with an outsider, but with someone who is living among us, someone who knows Jennie and who is well-posted on the routine in the various cottages.”

“That cheers me,” Nora said.

Inspector White seemed to become aware of her for the first time. “What are you doing here, Miss Shane?” he said sternly.

“Well, I’m — helping. I mean I came over to help but I find there is nothing to help with, so I’m just leaving.”

Inspector White regarded her coldly. “You’re staying. Mr. Smith has been busy all day lodging complaints with Constable Jakes. One of the complaints is against you and a Chinaman called Wang. Mr. Smith claims that the two of you were trespassing not ten feet away from a no-trespassing sign and that you were effecting an entrance through his kitchen window with intent to rob.”

“I thought he was away,” Nora said.

“Obviously.”

“He’s a silly creature anyway. We weren’t going to rob him, we weren’t even trying to get in his silly window.”

“You were posing for a photograph,” Prye said helpfully.

Nora ignored him and said to the inspector: “I’ve known Wang for years, you see. He used to be our houseboy until Miss Bonner lured him away by offering him higher wages.”

“Down with capitalism,” Prye said.

“Anyway,” Nora went on coldly, “he told me he thought Miss Bonner was spying on me with a pair of field glasses and I don’t like to be spied on. I thought I could find out the truth more delicately than asking her outright.”

“So you tested her,” Prye said, and turned to Inspector White. “Sometimes Miss Shane becomes lost in the intricacies of her own mind. She is trying to reduce to words a very complex and typically female idea: if Miss Bonner had field glasses she would see the tableau arranged for her by Miss Shane and Wang and if she saw it she would immediately question Wang on his behavior. Did she?”

“No,” Nora said. “Ralph told me later she was sleeping at the time.”

Inspector White rose to his feet and said in his most impressive tones: “Miss Shane, your explanation is so absurd that I believe it. Your actions were irresponsible, frivolous, and illegal.”

“I’ll sit in the corner,” Nora said, very subdued.

Inspector White took the letter from the table and reread it.

“Prye, who wrote this?”

Prye looked up, startled. “The murderer, I suppose. No reason why anyone else should. Besides, the murderer is the only one who knew where the body was and had a motive for writing the letter.”

“Professor Frost knew this afternoon that we had found Little’s body. How does that information strike you?”

Prye was silent for a minute. “Interesting point, isn’t it? Does the letter eliminate Frost as the murderer since he already knew Little had been found, or does it point to him?”

“Exactly,” the inspector said dryly. “Frost had a more reasonable motive for writing the letter than anyone else. He knew the body had been found and the murderer presumably did not know, therefore Frost is not the murderer. That would be his logic. I think I’ll start a pencil collection.”

“It’s just as easy to get rid of a pencil as it is to burn paper,” Nora said.

“There is a possibility that the letter writer does not know that pencils can be checked through their graphite composition,” Inspector White said. “Prye, you may collect your own, Miss Shane’s, and whatever pencils you find in this house.”

After another stern, quelling glance at Nora the inspector went out and Prye turned to Jennie, who, from the doorway, had been absorbing the conversation through both ears.

“Jennie, you heard what the inspector said. Your pencils, if you please.”

“My pencils!” Jennie began to wail, and Prye clapped a hand over her mouth.

“You live in the community. You might have written the note and merely pretended you found it. And when the inspector says he wants a pencil collection he means all the pencils and no silly middle-aged female is going to change his mind. Now scat.”

He took his hand away and Jennie hurried into the kitchen.

“The iron hand,” Nora said, wrinkling her nose. “I hope it rusts.”

“Did I ask you to come along? For a thin dime I’d ask Inspector White to arrest you.”

“You’re rapidly losing your glamor for me,” Nora said haughtily.

Jennie came back looking rather sulky. She held out the small stub of a pencil liberally decorated with toothmarks.

“Not a respectable pencil at all,” Prye said. “Aren’t there any others in the house?”

“I thought there was some more but I can’t find them. That’s my own personal pencil for making out my grocery lists. But I think Mr. Little had some for marking bridge scores.”

“And they’re gone?”

“They’re not down here.”

“We’ll have to look upstairs,” Prye said. “Come along, Nora.”

“But Mrs. Little?” Jennie said.

“We’ll be quiet,” Prye replied. “At least I will, and Miss Shane will do her best.”

They went upstairs on tiptoe. Prye listened at Mary Little’s door and could hear no movement from within.

“Do I just look for pencils?” Nora whispered. “Or should I pick up anything else that’s interesting?”

“You have one charge hanging over your head now,” Prye hissed.

“I simply meant clues or things,” Nora said coldly, and disappeared into a bedroom. From the ensuing noise it was evident that she was taking her work seriously. When Prye entered five minutes later he found her carefully probing the wainscoting with a hairpin.

“Darling,” Prye said grimly, “what are you doing?”

Nora got up on her knees and pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. “Doing? You sent me here, didn’t you? I’m looking for pencils.”

“I didn’t tell you to tear down the house. I merely wanted you to ascertain whether any place which might reasonably be expected to contain pencils does or does not contain them.”

“Does not,” Nora said. “A pen though.”

“Come on, we’re leaving.” He helped her to her feet and wiped off a smudge on her forehead with a handkerchief. “Ready?”

“Of course.” She strolled nonchalantly to the door. Prye stopped her.

“You wouldn’t by any chance have decided to keep the pen, would you?”

She sighed and reached into her pocket. “You’re fey,” she said glumly. “Positively fey.” Prye laid the pen on the table and they went out into the hall. Mary Little’s high, querulous voice came from her bedroom.

“Jennie! What is the hall light on for? Jennie!”

Prye sent Nora downstairs and went into the bedroom.

Mary Little was sitting up in bed. At the sight of Prye her face blanched and her hands clenched into two thin blue fists.

“They’ve found him,” she whispered.

Prye nodded.

“He’s dead? Of course he’s dead. That’s why you’re here, to tell me. But nobody had to tell me. I waited for him all night and when he didn’t come home I knew he was dead.” She spoke quickly and jerkily, as if she had no control over her words. “I knew it. You don’t believe in things like that, like knowing that something has happened to someone you love.”

“I do believe in them,” Prye said quietly.

She did not reply but kept staring through him at the wall. He had his hand on her wrist. “You’re looking better tonight,” Prye said. “You had a nice sleep.”

“Did I?”

“Are you well enough to talk to me?”

“Of course. That stuff you gave me was very good. Are you going to give me any more of it?”

“Later, if you need it,” Prye said. “I have to ask you some questions, Mary, if we’re going to find the person who killed Tom. Did you just wake up when you called out a few minutes ago?”

“Yes.”

“Your pulse is one hundred thirty,” he said. “You’ve been awake for some time. You’ve been out of bed, haven’t you?”

Her face was ghastly. “I— No. Yes, yes, I was.”

“How long were you out of bed? Where did you go?”

“The window,” she said, closing her eyes. “I was — saying good-bye to Tom.”

Prye frowned. “How long were you there?”

“A long time.”

“Could you see anything from the window? Was your light on?”

“My light was off. I could see the moon and the trees and I saw you come with Nora, and then I saw Nora leave again. She looks very pretty in her white dress.”

“Nora is still here,” Prye said softly. “She is wearing a dark blue dress.”

“No, you are wrong.” Her voice was hysterical. “You are wrong. She is wearing a white dress. She walked toward the woods.”

Prye said, “All right. Of course I’m wrong, Mary. I never could remember women’s clothes.”

She lay back breathing more easily, and after a time Prye said: “On Monday night Jennie said you went to bed right after dinner as you’ve been doing for some time. Yet on Tuesday morning I found you suffering from a severe shock. Why?”

“I can’t tell you,” she whispered.

“But it had something to do with Tom?”

She shook her head.

“You went out of the house on Monday night, didn’t you, Mary?”

She seemed both puzzled and surprised. “No. I... I didn’t have to.”

“What does that mean?”

“I found something in Tom’s room. Tom often had headaches and I went in to get some of his headache tablets.”

“And you found?”

Her mouth was working. Her words were barely audible.

“I found her ring.”

Prye waited for her sobbing to stop, turning her words over in his mind. If Mary had found Joan’s ring in Tom’s room it meant that Joan had visited or met Tom some time on Monday afternoon.

“What time was this?” Prye said at last.

“I don’t know. I guess around eight o’clock.”

“What did you do with the ring?”

“I can hardly remember but I think I threw it out of the window. And then I came back and I don’t know anything after that except that I wanted to die. I thought I was dying.”

“You didn’t know that Tom and Joan were — well acquainted?”

“No. How could he? She was just a child. But Tom’s dead now and so is she and I don’t blame either of them. I was such a fool. Pretty soon it won’t matter what any of us did.” Her voice had begun to fade, as if she were too tired and depressed to talk any longer.

A potential suicide, Prye thought. He rose briskly and prepared a hypodermic, and in ten minutes she was sleeping again. Prye went downstairs and gave some orders to Jennie. Then he and Nora walked up the lane to Miss Bonner’s house.

It was ten o’clock. The veranda sprang into light at their knock and two bright black eyes surveyed them from the small window in the top of the door.

“Like a speakeasy,” Nora said. “Hurry up, Wang. Somebody’s after me with an ax.”

The door opened and Wang bowed humbly before Nora. “I offer my head on a platter for presuming to keep you waiting, but such are my commands.”

Prye smiled at him rather fiercely. “Someday, Wang, somebody is going to take you literally.”

“Some persons are deeply touched by my protestations of loyalty,” Wang announced in an injured voice. “Even the heart of Miss Bonner is not inflexible.”

“Miss Bonner still up?”

“Miss Bonner is as unsleeping as the evil eye.”

“That’s a pity,” Prye said. “It means that Miss Shane will be forced to entertain her while I talk to Miss Alfonse.”

“You entertain your own Eumenides,” Nora cried.

“Since Miss Alfonse and I will require the strictest privacy, I hope you are prepared to be reasonable, Nora.”

“I am always reasonable. But Emily will throw me out on my ear. I called her a name once to somebody I thought I could trust and she has a good memory.”

“That’s fine,” Prye said heartily. “That’s your excuse for calling on her. Apologize for the name you called her. Tell her it was a case of mistaken identity. Or if it was a nice name tell her it was not a case of mistaken identity. Do you get the idea?”

“Not after you’ve finished mangling it,” Nora said, and followed Wang up the steps with dignity.

A few minutes later Prye went up. He stopped for a while outside Miss Bonner’s door and listened.

“A liar, that’s what it was!” Emily was saying. “I have strong information to the effect that you called me a liar, Miss Shane.”

Prye walked down the hall and rapped softly on the door of Miss Alfonse’s room. There was no answer. Without wasting further time he took the picklock from his pocket and opened the door.

The room was in darkness. He fumbled for the light switch, listened for movements in the room. But when the light went on there was nobody there. The uniform that Miss Alfonse had worn that day lay crumpled on the bed. A drawer in the dresser was open, spilling out clothes on to the floor. Prye went over automatically and began to pick them up. Then he saw the small, dark-red pool at his feet.

Chapter Fourteen

Prye closed Miss Alfonse’s door behind him and went quietly downstairs.

“Wang, phone Professor Frost’s cottage and ask Inspector White to come here immediately.”

“Do you anticipate another murder?” Wang asked serenely.

“Anticipate is not the word,” Prye said. “Where did Miss Alfonse have her dinner tonight?”

“In her room.”

“After I left this afternoon did she go out?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Did anyone come to see her?”

“Assuredly not. I have watched the doors with the eyes of a lynx.”

Prye went back upstairs, rapped lightly on Emily’s door, and walked in.

“What,” Emily demanded, “is going on here tonight? First Miss Shane forces herself on me with the thinnest story I have ever heard—” Her voice faded as Prye continued to stare at her.

“What have you been doing all evening?” he asked gravely.

Her eyes narrowed, almost disappeared under fat lids. “What for? What’s happened?”

“I don’t know,” Prye said.

“I’ve been sleeping.”

“It’s amazing how much sleep the people in this vicinity require. Susan sleeps on the beach. Tom sleeps in the sitting room. You sleep—”

“I was doped,” she said acidly. “I never go to sleep after dinner.”

“After one of your dinners I’m surprised you don’t sleep forever. Who doped you? And why? And with what? And when?”

Nora seized her opportunity to slip quietly through the door.

“That’s your business,” Emily said. “Aren’t you a doctor?”

Prye knelt down and looked carefully at her eyes.

“Your pupils seem normal to me, Emily. That, and the fact that you are a notorious liar, almost disqualifies your statement. Where’s Miss Alfonse tonight?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her all day.”

“Is that unusual?”

“I give her one day a week off and she asked for today.”

“Who brings up your dinner when Alfonse is off duty?”

“The cook.”

“And you think the cook doped you?”

Emily banged her fist on the arm of her wheelchair. “No, I don’t! But someone did.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“Coffee taste all right tonight?”

“Very peculiar,” she said firmly. “It tasted very peculiar, now that I remember it.”

“I understand you’ll be ninety soon, Emily. People of ninety usually haven’t a keen sense of taste.”

“I— Nonsense!”

“They imagine things, too, sometimes, and invent things.”

“I’m sixty-five,” she said in a resigned voice.

“That’s better. Much more convincing. And you’ll want to be as convincing as possible when Inspector White gets here.”

“Why?”

“Because Miss Alfonse has disappeared and there’s a pool of blood in her room.”

The breath was pushed out of her and she folded like an accordion.

“Think it over, Emily,” Prye said. “Here is how it will look to Inspector White. Miss Alfonse met Tom Little last night and witnessed his murder. Tonight she disappears from a room on the second floor of your house with you and Ralph a few yards away.”

Emily had recovered. She took a wisp of handkerchief from one of her innumerable hiding places and dabbed at her eyes. She stopped crying in a minute to ask: “What’s the second floor got to do with it?”

“Miss Alfonse’s door was locked. Apart from the difficulty of the murderer getting past Wang downstairs there was the difficulty of getting into Alfonse’s room to kill her. It’s odd that Miss Alfonse, who was very much on her guard against just this, should have let anyone into her bedroom, unless she couldn’t have stopped him. This is your house. I presume you have a set of keys to the various doors, and if Miss Alfonse was, by any chance, doped, it wouldn’t have been difficult for you or Ralph to get into her room. And it might be rather cute of you to have suggested that you were doped before anyone discovered that she was.”

“And the body?” Emily asked calmly.

“Flung from the window perhaps.”

She began to laugh, first softly, and then with uncontrollable mirth.

“I didn’t know I was that funny,” Prye said coldly.

Emily wiped her eyes. “Y-you are. Y-you’re a s-scream! You 1-1-look so s-serious!” she gasped.

“Well, damn it, I am serious.”

“I know. That’s what’s so f-funny.”

Prye grasped the handle of her wheelchair and wheeled her toward the bathroom. “The bathtub seems called for.”

“Stop!” she yelled.

Prye stopped. Emily’s face had lost its color.

“Not that bathtub,” she said in a sickly voice.

Ten minutes later Inspector White and two policemen were examining the room formerly occupied by Miss Alfonse. Prye stood by the window, peering at the ledge and then out into the darkness below.

Inspector White straightened up to his full height and let out an involuntary cry of rage.

“It’s appalling!” he shouted in Prye’s direction. “It’s absolutely incredible that someone could get into this room, murder a woman, dispose of the body, and walk away scot-free. It will cost me my job. It will terrorize the countryside. We will lose our tourist trade and be derided by the newspapers. Will you stop fingering that ledge and listen to me?”

“Sure,” Prye said. “But I don’t give a damn about the newspapers or the tourist trade. All I want to know is, where is Miss Alfonse? If she was flung from this window and then dragged down to the lake you’d expect to find some blood splattered around. But there isn’t any, except that neat little pool on the floor. You’ve been on the scene of a murder before. Did you ever see one arranged like this?”

“You’ve missed something,” the inspector said in a hard voice. “Come here.”

He pulled open the bottom drawer of the dresser. On top of a pile of clothing lay a pair of scissors, a package of cotton, and a roll of adhesive tape. They were covered with blood.

“You see,” the inspector said, “the murderer stanched the wound with cotton and the plaster was used to bold the cotton on.”

“Why bother about that and leave the pool of blood on the floor?” Prye asked.

“The blood on the floor may have been overlooked.”

“Or planted.”

“Why planted?” the inspector roared. “Where would the blood come from to plant? And why?”

“I don’t know, but I like to think of possibilities. And certainly one possibility is that Miss Alfonse, for reasons of her own, would like us to believe she was murdered. She didn’t know that Little’s body had been found, and she may have gotten ideas. If one body remained undiscovered it wouldn’t look so suspicious if another one—”

“You mean this is a fake!”

“Possibly. You see, I think it’s strange that anyone could have murdered Miss Alfonse. She was sly and suspicious, and she knew who the murderer was.”

Inspector White’s face seemed to be expanding like a red balloon.

“I can see the adrenalin pouring into your system,” Prye said. “A bad thing. Be kind to your adrenals and they’ll be kind to you. Of course Miss Alfonse knew who murdered Little. She had information which was worth a great deal of money, and if she divulged it she would kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. Golden eggs were right down Miss Alfonse’s alley. So it’s possible that this charming tableau” — he waved his arm around the room — “was arranged by Miss Alfonse herself, perhaps with the aid of the murderer.”

“She can’t get away, even if you are right. Look how we got Mr. Smith.”

“Miss Alfonse is a professional,” Prye said, “and Mr. Smith is the veriest amateur. The difference glares. And speaking of Mr. Smith, would you mind if I borrowed your gun?”

“My gun? What for?” the inspector asked suspiciously.

“Because I want to scare the pants off Mr. Smith.”

“You can’t do that! It isn’t legal. See Section—”

“Unload it. It’s just for a prop anyway. There are too many mysteries around here and I might be able to clear up one of them.”

“The law—”

“If I do anything illegal,” Prye said, “you may put me in jail. After all, that’s what the law seems to be — curative rather than preventive. I’d rather be cured than prevented. Do I get the gun?”

Inspector White took the gun from the holster attached to his belt, removed the cartridges, and handed it over.

“Keep everything as legal as possible,” he said, sighing.

Mr. John Wayne Smith was lying in bed reading a detective story. Although the heroine was unwittingly about to marry a werewolf Mr. Smith was not, in fact, very interested. He was not in the proper frame of mind to read a detective story; he scorned and was skeptical. He was not even convinced that werewolves ever entertained thoughts of matrimony, let alone reached the point where they decked themselves out in morning clothes and slunk up the aisle.

Since Mr. Smith was reading about a wedding it was not surprising that his first thought when he heard the knock on his front door was: “She’s come for me!”

Mr. Smith was not a coward, however. He pulled on his bathrobe, whistled to Horace, and went downstairs.

Prye was already inside, and when Smith reached the middle of the stairs he was greeted informally.

“Mr. Smith, I’m a reasonable man,” Prye said. “I’ll give you five minutes.”

Mr. Smith saw the revolver and clutched the banister.

“Go get him, Horace!” he yelled.

It was a tactical error. Horace had already met, sniffed, and approved Dr. Prye, and he seldom took his master’s commands seriously anyway.

“Into the living room, Mr. Smith, with your hands up.”

Mr. Smith went.

“Would you like to sit down, Mr. Smith?”

Mr. Smith sat down.

“What are you doing in Muskoka, Mr. Smith?”

“J-just living.”

Prye patted Horace’s head with one hand and dangled the revolver in the other.

“I said five minutes, Mr. Smith.”

“I’m... I’m dodging the police,” Smith said in a strangled voice. “And other p-people.”

Prye nodded approvingly. “That’s better, Mr. Smith. Why?”

“They want me. At least they don’t want me but somebody else does.”

“It’s thin, Mr. Smith, it’s very thin,” Prye said musingly. “Next thing you’ll be telling me you’re a fugitive from the OGPU.”

Mr. Smith gathered up his dignity. “I am a fugitive from a determined woman.”

“What woman?”

“My wife. That is, my ex-wife. She divorced me.”

“And now she’s after you again, Mr. Smith?”

“Not exactly,” Smith said unhappily. “I... I neglected to— That is, I found the alimony exorbitant.”

“You’re an alimony jumper.”

“Well, yes.” Mr. Smith was stirred to eloquence by his injuries. “If the judge had been more reasonable— But three hundred dollars a month simply because I worked in my store on Sundays and caused her grievous mental anguish! I didn’t mind the money, but the way she gloated... Well, I simply ran away.”

“But she’s on your trail?”

Mr. Smith shuddered and pulled his bathrobe closer around him. “I have heard so.”

“What will she do if she finds you?”

“She’ll gloat,” Mr. Smith said simply.

Prye tossed the revolver in the air and caught it again.

“I’d rather be gloated at than arrested for murder,” he said. “Why didn’t you clear this up before instead of trying to escape on Monday night?”

“The press. If I got my name or my picture in the papers she’d be here like a shot. She always reads all the papers.”

“Did you know someone else has disappeared?” Prye asked.

“Yes. Inspector White said Mr. Little had gone.”

“Besides Mr. Little.”

“No— I— Who was it?”

“Miss Alfonse is missing,” Prye said, watching him closely.

Smith’s only reaction seemed one of relief.

“Nobody I know,” he said.

“She was Miss Bonner’s nurse.”

“I’ve seen her once or twice,” Smith said. “I didn’t know her.”

“What were you doing at nine o’clock last night, Mr. Smith?”

“I’ve told Inspector White all that. I was reading.”

“Reading what?”

Mr. Smith blushed. “A detective story. I’ve been reading a lot of them to find out about disguises and things. I thought perhaps I could disguise myself. But it seems you have to be a very good actor to disguise yourself.”

Prye glanced at him coldly. “You did all right on Tuesday pretending you were drunk.”

“Oh that. Well, you see, alcohol has a very peculiar effect on me. It goes right to my head and wears off almost instantly. So I really was drunk. More or less.”

“Less,” Prye said.

“I’m sorry I did that. I guess it makes me look very suspicious.”

“I guess.”

“But you don’t actually suspect me, do you?”

“To me you are white like snow,” Prye said.

They had both forgotten the revolver and Horace seized his chance. He pranced around the room holding it between his teeth.

It took quite a long time to persuade Horace to relinquish it and still longer to placate Inspector White when he saw the marks of Horace’s teeth. It was one o’clock by the time Prye got into bed.

He pulled the night table up to his bed and lit a cigarette.

Mr. Smith was temporarily erased from the list of suspects. Although his pier had probably been the scene of Tom Little’s murder, Smith had no connection with the other members of the community. If his story about hiding from his ex-wife was true — and it could easily be checked — Mr. Smith would have been too engrossed in his own affairs to bother about those of complete strangers.

Miss Alfonse’s name, too, was written off. Technically she could have been the murderer and arranged for her escape in such a way as to suggest that she herself was murdered. But this possibility seemed remote. Even though Alfonse might have considered getting rid of Joan so that she could marry Ralph herself, she had no motive for killing Tom Little. Besides, all her actions were explicable when one assumed that she was guilty only of having knowledge of the real murderer.

It was Little’s murder, in fact, that was difficult to fit in. It was practically impossible that Tom was killed because he knew the identity of the murderer — he was not shrewd enough to have guessed, and he could not have been an eyewitness to Joan’s murder. Jennie Harris was no friend of Tom’s, and if she said that he sat sleeping in a chair all Monday evening, there he must have sat. Nor was his death a question of money: his life had not been insured and his wallet and the large gold signet ring on his hand had remained untouched.

But Tom Little had been killed, and no one kills without a reason.

Prye’s mind kept returning to the theme of justice.

“I do not kill without reason,” the murderer had written. Had he meant a moral reason?

Prye stubbed his cigarette impatiently.

“The whole thing may be a blind,” he said aloud. “There may be some good earthly reasons behind these murders. The murderer may be leading us astray, perhaps for the sake of amusement. We are not amused.”

The sardonic smile of Professor Frost rose before his eyes. Yes, he thought, it would move Frost to hilarity to watch me chasing my tail and running up blind alleys, and climbing stepladders to search for someone who was already at the bottom of the lake.

But unless Frost’s exterior was a complete fraud what Nora had said of him was true: he wouldn’t care enough to murder anyone. He was an intellectual turtle. He would not attack even in self-defense, but would tuck his head back under his shell and read a book.

Who would kill for moral reasons?

“Practically any psychotic,” Prye said to himself. “Those with a severe psychosis might kill in response to their auditory or visual hallucinations. But even so apparently harmless a creature as an idealist will kill to preserve his ideals. He might toss a bomb into a capitalist’s lap and save the working classes. Or if his ideal has already been shattered he might kill for revenge. And that spells Ralph Bonner to me.”

Yes, Ralph was a queer boy. Living under the thumb of a querulous, wealthy old woman had retarded his emotional and mental development, so that at twenty-three he was as unsophisticated and helpless as a boy of sixteen. And what do unsophisticated boys of sixteen do when they are confronted with the fact that this is not the best of all possible worlds? Do they run for a handkerchief or a bag of stones?

It was two o’clock, so Prye called Ralph an uncharitable name and turned over and went to sleep.

In the room next to his, Inspector White was emitting a series of gargantuan snores, and across the hall Nora was dreaming of bloody axes and floating bodies. Professor Frost was still searching for humor in Thucydides. The policeman on duty was yawning and waiting for sunrise.

Of them all Miss Alfonse was the only one at peace, and that was something.

Chapter Fifteen

Early on Thursday morning Sergeant Workman and Corporal Hollis of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were reconnoitering the shores of Lake Rosseau, searching for traces of a Harvard Bomber and four crewmen from Camp Borden. The plane had not returned to its base after it took off on Tuesday afternoon and it was considered lost in one of the Muskoka lakes.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen did not find the plane but they did find something almost as interesting. It was lying face down in the shallow water by the shore, cold and bloated and blue.

Miss Alfonse spoiled Corporal Hollis’s dinner and his new brown boots. She had been dead for some time and the water had swollen her body so that her black bathing suit had split down the back, revealing several inches of dirty pink satin.

Sergeant Workman bent over the body and examined the pink strip of satin.

“A girdle,” he said to Corporal Hollis, snorting with disapproval. “Silly women wear tight girdles and tight bathing suits to stop their circulation and then they wonder why they drown. Go and get Jakes. This is his corpse.”

Corporal Hollis was glad to get away. Sergeant Workman, on the other hand, was glad of a rest, even in his present company. He sat down on a pile of pine needles and rested his head against a tree. But he couldn’t help thinking of the pink girdle. He wasn’t interested in girdles usually. They were scarcely fascinating to a man with a wife and three grown daughters, all of them forcibly compressed by Lastex.

“I’m getting senile,” Sergeant Workman growled, but he got up and went over to the corpse and turned it on its back. He noticed the wide strip of adhesive tape in the crook of the left arm.

It wasn’t the thing to do but Sergeant Workman did it. He unhooked Miss Alfonse’s pink girdle and found something which surprised him a great deal: in a rubber cosmetic bag next to Miss Alfonse’s skin there were fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. They were soaked with water.

At ten o’clock the residents of Clayton and the surrounding countryside were gathered in the small district courthouse for the inquest on the body of Joan Frost. The coroner’s jury had been chosen and were sitting in their places looking stern and dignified to conceal their nervousness.

Of the witnesses only Professor Frost and Susan had arrived. Susan’s eyes, almost hidden by a black lace handkerchief, were darting about the room. Her father made no pretense of grief. He was staring around him with obvious enjoyment, nodding to people he knew: the postal clerk and the florist and a little man who sold fish. They nodded back at him, but stiffly, as if they might lose caste. This delighted Professor Frost. He thought: “By Zeus, I’m like Thucydides watching the battle from the mountain.”

“It’s time to begin,” the court stenographer advised Dr. Prescott. Prescott wore his official frown. “Hardly anyone is here. Where’s Dr. Prye? Where’s White? Where’s Jakes?”

The room began to buzz with conversation. The audience wanted the curtain to go up. But where were all the actors?

Prescott pounded his gavel and cleared his throat.

“We are here today to decide the manner in which the deceased met her death.”

A policeman approached and said in a whisper: “You’re wanted on the telephone in the office.”

Prescott, flustered and red-faced, left the court.

The buzzing increased as if a swarm of bees were coming closer and closer. At ten-thirty the room was in an uproar. Not only were the actors missing, the coroner was missing!

Behind her black handkerchief Susan’s lips moved: “I think we’d better leave, Father. Something has gone wrong.”

He took her arm and they walked out, Thucydides descending the mountain with a gold-star widow.

Some time later the jury, after a whispered colloquy with the court stenographer, filed out of the room. The more frivolous members of the audience broke into boos and demanded their rain checks, but they tired of this, and soon they, too, walked out.

“Well, I,” said the court stenographer, “shall be damned.”

At two o’clock Dr. Prescott tossed Miss Alfonse’s left lung into a pail, took off his gown, washed his hands, and went out to his front office. Prye and Inspector White were sitting waiting for him. Neither of them looked cheerful.

“There’s not much doubt,” Prescott said. “She was drowned. Both lungs were filled with water.”

“Could she have been drowned some other place, say in a bathtub, and then thrown into the lake?” Prye asked.

“If the bathtub was filled with lake water,” Prescott replied wearily. “The water in her lungs was lake water.”

Inspector White leaned forward and said: “Any bruises or broken bones?”

“None at all. But the cut in her left arm is fairly deep, and she probably lost a lot of blood. I can’t understand how the cut could have been made without a struggle, and there was no struggle.”

“Dope?” the inspector said.

“I was looking especially for traces of a narcotic. There were none. I can only suggest that the wound was self-inflicted and that she cut deeper than she realized. The loss of blood weakened her and she drowned. The bathing suit, the cut, the absence of bruises or narcotics, the lake water in her lungs, all point to accidental death. Or suicide.”

“How long has she been dead?” Inspector White asked.

“According to the stomach content, digestive processes were well-advanced. Say three hours after she ate.”

“She had dinner in her room at six-thirty,” Prye said. “That would make it about nine-thirty. And you’re sure that her death was an accident or a suicide?”

“Unless more evidence turns up, I’ll say it’s accidental death.”

The inspector and Prye went out and climbed into White’s car.

“The bank,” White said tersely.

The bank manager identified the waterlogged bills as the bills he had sent out to Miss Emily Bonner by special messenger on Monday morning. There was no doubt whatever. No one in Clayton had ever withdrawn so much money under such peculiar circumstances, and the manager had listed the numbers of the bills.

Inspector White was quiet on the way back to Prye’s cottage. He drove with his eyes fixed on the road ahead of him as if he were driving very carefully. But he did not swerve to avoid bumps, and soon Prye’s head began to sing like a coloratura soprano in the act of going mad.

“Are you astigmatic or thinking?” Prye asked dryly.

White’s eyes unfroze. “Sorry. I’m a little of both. I was wondering what to do about the Bonners. It’s fairly certain that one or the other of them, perhaps both, helped Alfonse arrange the murder setting, gave her five thousand dollars to keep her mouth shut, probably with a promise to pay more later, and let her escape. Alfonse could not leave by road, since both ends of the lane were under guard, so she tried to swim to the opposite shore. Probably there was a car waiting to pick her up at a certain point. If you have enough money cars can be hired with no questions asked. But in arranging her own murder Miss Alfonse was too conscientious. She cut too deep and so she drowned. A pretty piece of irony, isn’t it?”

“If one could depend on irony,” Prye said, “one could build a philosophy around it. But irony is not dependable. Which of them are you going to arrest?”

“Neither,” White said simply. “I’ll keep them under guard until I can collect more evidence.”

“Where are you going to collect this evidence?”

“The Chinaman.”

Prye smiled thinly. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? I’ve dealt with close-mouthed men before and they’ve talked.”

“No doubt,” Prye said, still smiling. “But Wang is not close-mouthed, he’s open-mouthed.”

Wang did his utmost to justify his reputation. At the sight of the inspector and Prye he bent double and launched instantly into effusions.

“Many persons speak highly of the majesty of the law. But with my own eyes I see their words paling when I am confronted with—”

“Wang!” Prye said sharply.

“Your tone misgives me,” Wang said, grinning. “I fear I have inserted my foot into the lion’s mouth.”

Inspector White had been prepared to use his old strategy of smiling tact and friendliness, but Wang had used it first. When two Dale Carnegie converts meet, Prye thought, one of them has to give in.

It was the inspector who did. He glared. “I have some questions to ask you, Wang, and I want answers to all of them.”

“I trust my inadequate knowledge of the English language will not prevent my supplying the answers you desire.”

“I trust not,” White said grimly. “Did you see Miss Bonner come downstairs on Monday night?”

Wang was shocked. “Miss Bonner is unsound of limb and never comes downstairs.”

“She says she did.”

“One is forced to conclude that Miss Bonner is a victim of the inconsistency which characterizes her sex,” Wang said regretfully. “With some reluctance I concede that Miss Bonner has a tendency to stop short of or go beyond the truth.”

Prye groaned. “You don’t share the tendency, of course. If you do I’m going to tie a rock around your neck and give you to the carp.”

“Gladly I proffer my neck,” Wang said sadly. “Life is hollow without the good opinion of the inestimable doctor.”

Prye and the inspector exchanged glances. Then Prye took Wang by the shoulder and rocked him back and forth twice.

“How much do you get for being blind and deaf?”

Wang smiled gently. “The words are blown from my lips by the winds of wisdom.”

“You’re afraid to talk?”

“I fear only Mr. Einstein and his vast concept of the fourth dimension. And I fear chaos. I am a thinker. All thinkers fear chaos.”

“Oh my God,” Prye said.

Inspector White thought of his adrenals just in time and managed to say calmly:

“Why don’t you talk, Wang?”

Wang’s face was mildly reproachful. “My tongue hesitates to be a rudder for a ship of destiny that is not my own.”

“That’s enough!” the inspector cried, waving his hands. “Go away. I’ll put you in jail when I have the time.”

Wang turned to leave, and as he passed Prye one yellow eyelid descended on one bright black eye.

Inspector White did not approve of swearing but Prye’s, “Damn that man!” was a kind of vicarious catharsis. He whirled up the steps with the delicacy of a hurricane and caught Miss Emily Bonner in the act of transferring herself from a frilly pink negligee to an equally frilly green negligee.

Emily was not discomfited. She fixed him with a cold eye and said to Prye: “I don’t like the company you keep, Prye. Remove it while I finish dressing.”

“I have some questions for you to answer, Miss Bonner,” Inspector White said ominously. “And Dr. Prye will take notes.”

Emily murmured, “Indeed?” and went on tying a green ribbon. Prye took refuge in a corner of the room and pulled out a notebook and pen.

“We’ll start with Monday morning,” the inspector said. “You telephoned your bank and made arrangements for the delivery of a large sum of money.”

“I did.”

“Blackmail money?”

“No. My life holds no secrets. The money was an insurance policy on Ralph’s happiness. Joan telephoned me on Monday morning and said that she would leave Muskoka if I gave her five thousand dollars. I made the arrangements immediately.” She smiled faintly. “I’ve always been good at spotting a bargain.”

“What was to be the method of transferring this money?”

“That was another stipulation of Joan’s: I was to bring it to her in person. I believe she meant it to be an added humiliation.”

“She specified the meeting place?”

“Yes. ‘Susan’s Sit-Out’ as she called it. I expect the allusion was to sitting out a dance. Anyway, I agreed. I told Miss Alfonse she could have the evening off to go to a movie, and I left the house about a quarter after eight. No one saw me leave. I’ve told Prye the rest of it. Must I repeat?”

“Yes,” the inspector said abruptly. “Why are you confined to a wheelchair if you can walk by yourself?”

Emily showed no trace of embarrassment. “Prye could probably explain it to you better than I can. But I expect it’s because I have no husband and no children and because I’m ugly and fat. But mostly I think it was because I was tired, much too tired to be anything but an onlooker.”

Prye looked up from his book. “ ‘And I’m the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt, Out of the grange whose four walls make his world.’ ”

“Yes. I felt like that,” Emily said. “I simply went back to my four walls, like the old bat that I am.” Her huge body shook with laughter.

The inspector waited for her to stop. “All right. You left the house and then what happened?”

“I didn’t want Ralph to see me, of course, for a number of reasons. When I got outside I saw the spotlight, and since the switch is in the kitchen I threw a stone at the thing and broke it. I am not used to walking or to keeping rendezvous in dark woods, so I’m afraid I lost my courage. I returned to the house.”

“You still saw no one?”

“No one. I went back to bed and Miss Alfonse found me there a few minutes later.”

“How many minutes?”

“Possibly five or ten.”

“Then what did you do?”

Emily smiled at him. “I trembled, Inspector White, I shook and trembled. Naturally I had to raise a row about the spotlight because I didn’t want anyone to know I had broken it myself. I was afraid of what Joan would do when I didn’t meet her to hand over the money, so I telephoned the police, ostensibly to find out who broke the spotlight, actually, of course, to protect Ralph and myself”

“Protect you?” White repeated. “You were afraid of the girl?”

“I think it’s wise to be afraid of someone who is capable of anything,” Emily said calmly. “Joan’s ego was inflated like a barrage balloon.”

Prye stopped writing. “Delusions of grandeur. A symptom common to many mental diseases but not necessarily indicative of one. A mild type of this delusion is exhibited by people who are compensating for a physical defect or social and financial inferiority.”

White put up his hand. “That’s enough. I merely want to know whether you considered Joan Frost capable of violence and of inspiring Miss Bonner with fear.”

“Yes, and yes,” Prye said.

White thanked him dryly and returned to Miss Bonner. “We come to Tuesday. Go on.”

“On Tuesday morning I saw Constable Jakes taking Joan out of the water. I have a pair of field glasses. Since I have more than once observed Prye staring suspiciously at my contours you may know about the glasses. They keep me amused. I saw the bag tied around Joan’s waist and knew she had been murdered, so I kept quiet about the money. Prye, however, is a congenital snoop. How did you guess about the five thousand dollars, Prye?”

Prye grinned. “Your contours again, Emily. You have improbable bulges which lend themselves to odd interpretations. Besides, Joan wouldn’t have departed without money and you seemed the most likely source.”

“You are quite impossible, Prye,” Emily said.

The inspector intervened. “What did you do on Tuesday night after dinner?”

“Nothing in particular. I read for a while, watched the storm when it came up, and the rest of the time I just sat. I realize that people who just sit are highly suspicious characters but that’s what I did. At ten o’clock Alfonse burst into the room with a case of hysterics. I treated her as I saw fit and packed her off to bed. Have you found her, by the way?”

“Yes. This morning.”

“Well?”

“She was drowned,” White said slowly. “Apparently it was an accidental death.”

“Apparently? Don’t you know?”

“It was an accident in that she drowned accidentally. But the circumstances of her going for a swim at that time of night—”

“For a swim?” Emily echoed. “That’s absurd. She was afraid of the water at night. She had always lived in the city. She certainly wouldn’t go swimming at night for pleasure.”

“Perhaps not for pleasure,” White replied. “But how about for five thousand dollars?”

Emily stared thoughtfully out of the window.

“My five thousand dollars, I suppose?”

“Yours,” Inspector White said grimly.

“In that case, I don’t think I’ll say anything more at present.”

“Miss Bonner, I am placing you under guard as a material witness for the time being.”

Emily was very meek. “Quite. May I talk to my nephew first?”

“You may not. Any conversations you have in future will be in the presence of the matron who is arriving shortly. Your nephew will be under similar restrictions.”

“You lout,” Emily said distinctly.

There was an uncomfortable silence for a time broken by Prye’s voice: “Emily, if you were prepared to pay over five thousand dollars to Joan why did you call me in on Monday afternoon to elaborate plans for putting her in jail?”

“The money. It didn’t seem a great deal until I saw it.” She shrugged her fat shoulders expressively. “I thought there might be some other way to get rid of her.”

“Murder,” the inspector said, “is the only permanent way.”

“I daresay you’re right, Inspector,” she replied. “But you’re very tiresome.” She put her head back and apparently went to sleep.

Ralph was equally apathetic about his technical arrest. He answered White’s questions in a monotone, and his story was substantially the same as the one he had told Prye. There was one difference: he made no mention of Miss Alfonse accompanying him on his walk.

“What did you do Tuesday night?” the inspector inquired. He spoke more mildly than he had to Emily, for Ralph was looking rather dazed.

“Nothing much,” Ralph said listlessly. “Just sat around.”

“Your aunt just sat around, too.”

“Oh. Well, she always does. Can’t walk, you know.”

“Did you know your aunt had a large amount of cash in her room?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you often go into her room?”

“Only when she sends for me.”

“I understand that you and your aunt had a quarrel on Tuesday morning in the presence of Miss Alfonse.”

“I guess we did if someone told you.”

“What was the quarrel about?”

Ralph looked hopelessly puzzled. “Couldn’t say, really. Couldn’t follow her. I mean, she gets ideas into her head.”

“What ideas?”

“Thinks women are after me, you know. Very embarrassing.”

“What women?” the inspector said impatiently.

“Oh. Well, that nurse. Thought the nurse was after my money — her money, that is — and raised a row. A very odd woman, my aunt. Can’t understand her.” He made a helpless gesture with his hands.

On the way downstairs Inspector White was looking almost as bewildered as Ralph himself.

“A peculiar boy,” he said to Prye. “He seems almost half-witted. Do you think he is?”

“Half-witted is not a psychological term,” Prye said severely. “Do you mean idiot, imbecile, moron, dull, or borderline? He isn’t any of those. He may lack a few points of the hundred but he’s not congenitally subnormal. I’m going to see the cook. Come along?”

“No, thanks,” White said. “Miss Bonner pays her servants too well.”

Miss Dorothy Jakes was pleased that she was finally going to get some attention.

“Miss Alfonse?” she repeated in reply to Prye’s question. “Yes, she did come down to the kitchen last night while I was getting Miss Bonner’s dinner. I thought it was funny at the time.”

“Why?”

“Well, because I knew her. A lot she cared what Miss Bonner had for dinner, her and her vitamins! She wouldn’t even take the tray up.”

“Who poured Miss Bonner’s coffee?”

“She did, I guess. It was on the tray when I took it up and I can’t remember pouring it myself.”

“Does Mr. Bonner ever come into the kitchen?”

“Oh no, sir! Whatever else they may say about Mr. Bonner, he is a gentleman.”

That places me, Prye thought. Aloud he said: “What else do they say about Mr. Bonner?”

Miss Jakes pointed eloquently to her head.

Chapter Sixteen

Late Thursday afternoon the residents had their first experience of the thoroughness of police routine. Inspector White with his eight subordinates and Constable Jakes with his two regular men ransacked each cottage in turn from attic to cellar.

Skeletons rattled in closets: Tom Little’s empty whisky bottles; a package of old love letters tied with blue ribbon and addressed to Emily Bonner; the receipt for Mr. Smith’s first and last alimony payment. But no bloody gloves or axes. Even Inspector White’s pencil collection had yielded no results. An ordinary microscope which was all the apparatus available proved merely that five of the pencils made markings similar to the ones on the note from the murderer.

In spite of the dearth of evidence Inspector White had regained his optimism: eventually the Chinaman would talk, and perhaps Miss Bonner herself would break down and confess under the strain of being closely guarded. In any case the investigation was nearly closed — Miss Bonner’s money had been found on Miss Alfonse’s body, and Miss Alfonse had probably witnessed the murder of Tom Little, and perhaps had assisted in it.

Prye did not share the inspector’s optimism. After dinner he sprawled in a chair in his sitting room while Nora sat hugging her knees in front of the fireplace, watching him.

“You look funny when you frown,” she said.

“You’re not laughing,” he said.

“No.”

There was a pause, the scrape of a match, a drawn out sigh as Prye inhaled.

“What are you thinking about?” Nora said finally.

“Lambs.”

“Counting them?”

“No. Wondering about them. Cute iddy-biddy lambs, all of them telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. While two people are being murdered, the lambs who had motives for murdering them were crocheting or walking or sleeping or writing books or reading. Not a damn one of them was murdering.”

“If anyone is lying, I’ll bet on Emily,” Nora said.

“I won’t. Emily is certainly a liar, but her lies are the Munchausen type, ambitious and without subtlety. She tells them with the air of a Cassandra, never expecting to be believed.”

“But the money—”

“Alfonse was found with Miss Bonner’s money on her but that doesn’t prove that Emily gave it to her. Remember Alfonse was a nurse and she poured Emily’s coffee on Wednesday night and Emily says she went to sleep after drinking that coffee. There are two possibilities if Emily is telling the truth: that Ralph arranged for Alfonse to dope Emily so that he could steal the money and give it to Alfonse in return for her silence; or that Alfonse discovered the money herself and arranged to steal it and run away. The five thousand was enough for a quick escape and later on when the murder investigation was closed Alfonse could return and demand a much larger sum from the real murderer. Inspector White is closing his ears to this explanation because it will leave him without his murderer. Policemen like to make arrests just as bakers like to make bread — it’s expected of them, it’s their job.”

Nora shivered and drew closer to the fire. “So it’s not settled yet?”

“No.”

“And it’s one of us?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know which one?”

He didn’t answer for a minute. He was watching the light flicker over the thick black braids wound around her head.

“I think I know which one.”

“Why are you staring at me like that?”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t think — you can’t think — I did it?” she cried hysterically.

In cottage number four Professor Frost was gazing profoundly at his blancmange. Susan watched him with increasing wrath. He had said nothing throughout the meal. He had stared at each article of food as he stared at her, looking through it, seeing it as the pitiful thing it really was.

“Why don’t you talk to me?” she asked desperately. “Can’t you say anything?”

He started and raised his head. “Eh? Sorry. I was thinking.”

“You think all the time!” she cried.

He put his table napkin away without haste. “That’s quite true, my dear. What do you want to talk about? If you have a specific subject in mind I shall be delighted to help you cope with it.”

“Cope with it!”

She got up and struck her fist on the table. Her coffee spilled out on the tablecloth. “Shall we go into the other room, my dear?” her father said mildly. “There are too many — ah, spillables and breakables in here.”

She glared at him, speechless. Then she snatched her cup from the table and hurled it against the wall.

“There!” she said triumphantly. “There!”

“Excellent,” said Professor Frost, picking up his own cup. “Mind if I have a shot at it, too?”

The stolid, middle-aged police matron looked strangely out of place in Miss Bonner’s frilly bedroom. Miss Bonner certainly thought so.

“Can you play solitaire?” she asked coldly.

“I can,” the matron replied, “but I’m not supposed to.”

“Why not?”

“I have to watch you.”

Emily grunted. “You’ve been watching me for four hours. You must have an incredible capacity for boredom.”

“It’s my job.”

“I’ll give you another job. I’ll pay you two dollars an hour to look out of the window. You have suspicious eyes. They annoy me.”

“I can’t help my eyes,” the matron said calmly.

“No, but you still have control over your eyelids. Close them. Or look at something else. I’m abnormally sensitive. For a murderer, that is. Or perhaps murderers are abnormally sensitive. Are they?”

“I don’t know. I never saw one until you.”

In his room further along the hall Ralph was eating his dinner under the watchful eyes of a uniformed policeman. He fought down his resentment for some time, and then he threw down his fork with a clatter and said loudly:

“Like my table manners?”

“Sure,” the policeman said. “They’re all right.”

“I don’t like your tone. You don’t have to humor me.”

“Sure. I know that.”

“I’m tired of being patronized!” Ralph shouted.

“Sure you are.”

“You can go to hell!”

“Sure,” the policeman said affably.

“We all got to eat,” Jennie said. “Try some of this jelly, that’s a dear. Miss Susan made it for you specially.”

“I’m not hungry,” Mary Little said, shaking her head. “I don’t want anything.”

Jennie was alarmed.

“You’re not thinking of starving yourself to death, surely?”

Mary sighed and reached out for the jelly and began to eat it listlessly.

“That’s a dear,” Jennie said. “Mustn’t grieve over a man like Mr. Little. He isn’t worth it. He sinned against—”

“Stop it! Go down and get your dinner.”

“Just the same I’m right.” Jennie went to the door and said over her shoulder: “You’re better off this way. The murderer’s done you a favor, that’s what!”

Mr. Smith picked up his telephone.

“Hello. Certainly I’d like to come. I’ll be there at nine. All right.”

Mr. Smith replaced the receiver and looked thoughtfully at Horace.

“I’m sorry in a way,” he told Horace. “After all, she did push you in the lake.”

It was Jennie who opposed the meeting most violently. She insisted it would not be fair to Mrs. Little to have all those people traipsing into her house. Mary herself was completely apathetic.

At nine o’clock the residents had all arrived.

Emily had made the trip in her wheelchair (“Might as well give that damned matron something to do!”) and was installed beside the front windows which looked out on the veranda and over the lake. Mary, in a dowdy black dress, was sitting on the chesterfield near the doorway, with Jennie hovering around her.

The rest were seated in chairs placed along the opposite wall: Mr. Smith, Professor Frost and Susan, Nora, and Ralph Bonner with his uniformed attendant. The police matron, Dr. Prye, and Professor Frost were the only occupants of the room who did not appear harassed and guilty.

“We look like a Rogues’ Gallery pygmalionized,” Nora said to Ralph. He stared at her blankly and she said: “It’s all right. Don’t laugh. I don’t want to put anyone out.”

“Miss Shane,” Inspector White said, “we are about to begin.”

His eyes moved about the room, stabbing them each in turn.

“This meeting has been called at the instigation of Dr. Prye. He has some questions to ask each of you and I want you to answer these questions as if they came from me. Go ahead, Prye.”

Prye went over to the doorway.

“Miss Bonner,” he said loudly.

Emily jumped, and the large capable hand of the police matron descended instantly on her shoulder.

“Get your hands off me!” Emily shouted. “Really, Prye. My nerves. Having that creature’s unlovely pan in front of my face for five hours—”

“Emily,” Prye interrupted, “on Wednesday night after you had dinner in your room, what did you do?”

“I’ve told you at least fifty times, I went to sleep.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Certainly it’s unusual. It’s unheard of. I’m a nervous wreck. I was doped. My head felt funny. I floated.”

“You were woozy,” Mr. Smith encouraged her.

“That’s just it. Woozy,” Emily cried. “Who is that man? He has a feeling for words. Sympathetic. Why, it must be Mr. Smith—”

“Thank you, Emily,” Prye said in a tone of finality. “Ralph Bonner.”

Ralph started, got to his feet, and sat down again, flushing.

“Ralph, on Monday night you went out for a walk by yourself. I suggest that you went to see Joan Frost. Did you?”

“No.”

“I suggest it again.”

“All right,” Ralph said. “Yes.”

“Did you see her?”

“Yes. Through the window. She was packing to go away with — with him.”

“With whom?”

“Tom Little,” Ralph said.

Mary clutched Jennie’s hand. “No! It’s a lie! He’d never have left me. Ask Jennie. He’d never really have left me.”

She sank back, panting, and Jennie patted her hand. “There. You mustn’t get excited. It’s all for the best.”

Prye turned to Susan.

“Susan, will you come over here, please?”

Susan, after an anguished look at her father, advanced timidly toward the doorway.

“Give me your hand, please,” Prye said.

“You don’t have to, Susan!” Ralph shouted. “You don’t have to listen to him!”

“You may challenge me to a duel later,” Prye said cheerfully. “Your hand, Susan.”

She held out a trembling hand. He took it, bent over it for an instant, and straightened up again. Susan gasped.

“I’ve read somewhere,” Professor Frost said conversationally, “that modern psychiatrists are reforming our mental institutions because they have such excellent prospects of becoming future occupants.”

“You’re misinformed,” Prye said. “The profession with one of the highest incidences of mental disease is teaching. Probably the teaching of classics.”

“I can believe it,” Frost said. “It’s the strain of trying to communicate the subtleties of the lyrical meter of Euripides to students who cannot scan Shakespeare.”

Prye held up his hand. “Granted without argument. Jennie, you’re next.”

“I won’t budge,” Jennie said. “I know my rights as well as the next one. I won’t budge.”

Inspector White rose to glare at her. “I have invested Dr. Prye with the authority to conduct these interviews. You will do as he says.”

Jennie did.

Prye spoke to her mildly. “Jennie, I’d like you to put your one hand tightly over your right ear and close your eyes until I tell you to open them. Tell me when you hear a noise.”

“I won’t,” Jennie said. “What kind of noise?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me.”

She closed her eyes intensely. Prye took out his pocket watch and held it about five feet away from her left ear, then four feet, then three, then two.

“There!” Jennie cried. “I hear a watch.”

The trial was repeated with her right ear with approximately the same result.

“Hocus pocus,” Nora said. “You should have been in vaudeville.”

“I am,” Prye said. “Professor Frost.”

Frost got up, smiling. “I offer myself in the interests of more virile vaudeville. Name your experiment, Dr. Prye.”

“A purely verbal experiment,” Prye said. “Right in your line. You keep a diary. I’ve seen it but I haven’t read it.”

“It wouldn’t interest you,” Frost said blandly.

“Was there anything in your diary which would have led your daughter Joan to believe that you intended to have her committed to an institution?”

“There was. I was.”

“You believed she was insane?”

“Certainly.”

There was a sudden shocked silence in the room, but Frost continued to smile.

“Father!” Susan said angrily.

He looked down at her, genuinely amused. “My dear, I was literally tom between Horace and Socrates: speak no ill of the dead, and the truth shall make us free. One discards Horace on general principles.”

“You are a cad, sir!” Ralph said hotly.

“I am, indeed,” Frost murmured. “Interesting point there. If I am a self-confessed cad, am I to be despised as the cad I am or to be honored as an honest man? Impossible to be both, you see. But in these marvelously complex times I fancy I should be honored as an honest man. One has only to admit a fault, not rectify it.”

Every eye in the room was on him, his theatrically handsome face, the gestures of his fine long hands, the play of the light on his white hair...

There was a little click, and he was no longer there but lost in the darkness that swallowed the room.

A figure leaped past Prye through the doorway. Chairs scraped. Voices began to shout. Someone yelled: “Turn on the light!”

The lights clicked on.

Prye was standing with his arms spread across the doorway. A gun appeared in Inspector White’s hand.

“Don’t shoot,” Prye said in an urgent voice. “Don’t shoot at her, you fool!”

Nora started to shriek, “Jennie! It was Jennie!” and without any fuss the police matron walked over and slapped her smartly across the face.

Inspector White came toward Prye, pointing his revolver, menace glowing on his face. “You let her get away,” he hissed. “You — let — her — get — away!”

“Use your head,” Prye said, grinning not very successfully into the barrel of the revolver. “The person you want is still in this room.”

The revolver wavered and sagged in White’s hand.

Chapter Seventeen

They were all watching each other now with eyes that were puzzled, frightened.

“I should have found you out sooner,” Prye said. “You were careless about fingerprints.”

“Fingerprints!”

The word came from the back of Emily’s throat. She was sitting bolt upright in her chair. “There were no fingerprints on anything.”

“That’s right,” Prye said, looking at her gravely. “But when a person innocently drinks a cup of coffee, for example, his or her fingerprints are left on the cup. And when a person picks up a ring and flings it out of the window, there should be fingerprints on the ring.” He turned his head and faced Mary Little. “That’s right, too, isn’t it, Mary?”

Her eyes were hidden by her thick white lids. She said, “I guess so.”

“You said you had been in bed before you picked up the ring, Mary?”

“Yes.”

“Do you usually wear gloves in bed?”

She made no reply. She was staring down at her hands as if they did not belong to her, as if they were strangers who had trapped her.

Prye was thinking, I can’t tell yet. She hasn’t done anything to prove it, she may be as sane as I am...

Then he saw her put her head on one side, half smiling. She seemed to be listening, her whole body in an attitude of attention, her lips moving in soundless reply.

“Did you ever have a streptococcus infection, Mary?” he asked gently.

The smile faded from her face; her head jerked up.

“Yes. A year ago.”

“Do you remember what your doctor prescribed for you then? Was it sulfanilamide?”

She leaned forward toward him.

“I ought to have finished you,” she said in an impersonal voice. “You are an evil man.”

The others were watching her, paralyzed.

“I am not responsible to the laws of this world,” she said. “I am only an instrument. I have nothing to fear.”

“You remembered your reaction to sulfanilamide from last year?”

“Oh yes,” she said, nodding her head. “It was very unpleasant. I got all blue and cold. The doctor called it a complete collapse, so I had to stop taking it. But there was some of it left. All this time I’ve saved it.”

Prye’s face was grave. “Why did you save it, Mary?”

She did not hear him and he repeated the question.

“I knew I had to kill him some time, as soon as they told me to kill him. I saved it for an alibi. But I had to use it when I killed her. He remembered about the sulfanilamide from last year, so I had to kill him right away, too. I killed two birds with one stone.” She paused, looking around at them all with eyes that were growing excited. “I killed two birds with one stone.”

“Sulfanilamide can easily be detected in the blood stream,” Prye said. “Weren’t you afraid of that?”

“Of course not. I already had heart trouble and there was no reason for Dr. Innes to suspect anything else. I knew you weren’t much of a doctor. The only reason I let you live was to give me an alibi by swearing I had a heart attack. How did you find out about the sulfanilamide?”

“I didn’t,” Prye said. “But when I discovered you lied to me about throwing the ring out of the window I began to wonder if your heart attack had not been artificially stimulated or induced in some way. I’ve had very little experience with sulfanilamide and the possibility of its use didn’t occur to me until this afternoon.”

“I was very clever,” Mary said.

She looked around for approval, and the others, seeing Prye nod, nodded, too. One head after another bobbed up and down, puppet heads jerked by invisible strings. Nora thought, it’s crazy, we’re crazy, she’s saner than any of us. She put her hand to her mouth to hold back the hysterical giggle that kept bubbling up in her throat.

Mary was talking again in her quiet, even voice, speaking distinctly, as if she were teaching a lesson to some backward boys and girls.

“If Jennie hadn’t been so silly as to give me a chance to escape— Poor Jennie. As soon as you tested her hearing she knew I had killed them. Jennie is quite deaf. She didn’t hear me come downstairs on Monday night and go out the back door. I told her that I wanted to sleep, that she was to stay downstairs. Afterward she told you that she could hear quite well. She worried about that, because my alibi depended partly on her hearing. Poor Jennie. You must not be hard on her for giving me my chance.”

“Nothing will happen to Jennie,” Prye assured her.

“I was the chosen instrument and I alone.”

She’s proud of it, Nora thought. Anyone who is still proud can’t be very unhappy. I mustn’t be sorry for her. She’s still proud. And they’ll take good care of her...

“I was sitting in the dining room on Monday morning when I heard Miss Bonner’s ring,” Mary said. “I listened. I knew she was going to meet Joan at nine o’clock in the woods and I knew Joan was going away that night. Then at lunch Tom was acting strangely. He wouldn’t eat. He said he had a stomach ache. Tom was very stupid. I knew right away what he was going to do. I knew she was the thirteenth. And the thirteenth had to die.”

“You killed Joan because she was the thirteenth?” Prye asked quietly.

“Of course! Why don’t you listen to me? You’re stupid. You’re stupid like Tom.”

The words were tumbling out of her mouth. She put her hand to her head and closed her eyes for a minute.

Here is madness, Professor Frost was thinking. Here is real madness, not the lyrical, beautiful madness of Medea slaying her children. There’s no ecstasy in the madness of this plain, dowdy woman, no Euripides to write her speeches, no catharsis for us who are listening, no catharsis, no hope...

“It was very cunning of you to drug Tom on Monday night,” Prye said.

“Yes, it was very cunning. I put some veronal in his coffee at dinnertime. I know a great deal about drugs. I’ve always been sick. I get prescriptions from doctors and I save them.”

“Where do you keep these drugs?” Prye said, keeping his voice casual.

She looked up, her pale eyes suddenly shrewd.

“They’ve been stolen,” she said. “They’re all gone. Somebody stole them. All my lovely boxes have been stolen.”

She began to rock back and forth as if she were in great pain. Then she stopped suddenly and said:

“I heard Tom tell you I didn’t believe in doctors. That’s how I knew that he knew. He didn’t want you to get a doctor for me. He was afraid you’d find out that I’d taken sulfanilamide. Tom was very stupid.”

“Was he trying to protect you?”

“Oh yes! You see, he hadn’t any money. I have. I have a lot of money. But if I died he wouldn’t get any of it. I fixed it like that. He wouldn’t get any of it. He had to protect me.”

Mr. Smith shifted his legs. I wonder if dogs ever do this, he thought, ever get all mixed up like this and go crazy. I wonder if Horace would ever go crazy...

“I suppose you gave Jennie some of your drugs on Tuesday after dinner?” Prye said.

“That was easy,” she confided. “I asked her to have a cup of tea with me and I gave her two nembutal capsules. I knew they took about twenty minutes to work, just time enough for her to go down and put Tom’s dinner on the table and wash my dishes. As soon as she came back upstairs to work on her afghan she went to sleep in the chair beside my bed. Nembutal works quickly but the effects wear off soon. I knew I could get her to wake up when I called her.”

“How did you know Tom was going to meet Miss Alfonse at nine o’clock?”

“The phone call,” she said. “I could always tell when Tom was lying, and when he said it was the doctor on the phone I made him tell me the truth. I cried. He couldn’t bear to see me cry, and then he told me it was Miss Alfonse who had called. He didn’t know what she wanted. I told him he’d better meet her and find out.

“He left the house about ten minutes to nine and I put on my raincoat and a pair of shoes and as I passed your boathouse I thought of the ax I’d seen hanging on the wall. I knew you wouldn’t miss it, if you hadn’t been here for two years, so I put it under my coat. He didn’t hear me coming. It was thundering. It was easy to kill him. When I hit him there was a bolt from heaven so that I could see his face. You should have seen it. He was afraid. He was afraid of all the things he’d done—”

Her eyes moved around the room again. She was nodding her head. “You see, it pays to do nothing you’ll be ashamed of.”

The heads bobbed again, one after the other.

“I thought it would be a fine idea to put him in Joan’s canoe. I dragged him along the path to the Frosts’ boathouse. It was very hard. And then she came along. She was scared, too, the nurse. She started to run away when she saw me but I called her back. She was scared, too, but she came. I said I would give her money, a lot of money, if she wouldn’t tell, if she’d help me. So we dragged Tom over and put him in Joan’s canoe and untied the rope. I threw the ax into the lake. I untied the rope of the other boat, too, because it was Susan’s. I hate Susan.”

Susan shrank behind her father, white-lipped, thinking: she hates me but I haven’t done anything to her. I helped her. I was kind to her. I took her the wild-strawberry jam and I picked the strawberries with my own hands, but she hates me. It’s because she’s crazy...

Mary was talking again, her pale eyes flickering over their faces.

“On Wednesday night I was really clever. I sent Jennie downstairs and then I wrote her a letter. I even spelled her name wrong purposely. But nobody noticed.” She frowned at the inspector. “You didn’t even notice.”

“Of course I noticed!” White replied instantly. “It threw me off entirely.”

“You see? Well, then I burned the rest of the paper and envelopes and scattered the ashes out of the window. I went down the back stairs and around to the front door and rapped. I left the letter on the doorstep and then I watched at the dining-room window until I saw Jennie go to answer the front door. Then I went in the back door, up the stairs, and got into bed. Pretty soon you came along with Nora and I heard you talking about pencils. So I hid my pencil on top of the doorjamb in my room. When you came in you thought you were very clever knowing that I’d been out of bed. But you didn’t know I’d done all that, did you? Did you?”

“No,” Prye said, wishing it were over, thinking: it’s not amusing any longer. It’s fun to ride after the hounds but it’s not fun to gang up on the little fox...

“I only made one mistake and that was lying about the ring, and I wouldn’t have made that if I hadn’t been given some morphine. I knew they mustn’t discover my fingerprints anywhere so I always wore gloves. I didn’t find the ring in Tom’s room. I took it off Joan’s finger when she was dead because she wasn’t engaged any longer, an engagement ring was no use to her. I put the ring in Tom’s room. I engaged her to Tom.”

She put her hand to her head again.

“I’m tired. I’m sick, too. It’s been a strain on me. My head hurts. My kidneys are poisoned. That’s what sulfanilamide does, it poisons the kidneys. Mine are all dried up. I must go and find Jennie. I must tell her not to make me any tea tonight because my kidneys are all dried up. I must find Jennie.”

She got to her feet and took a step toward the door.

“Jennie!” she called. “Jennie!”

She stumbled and fell on one knee, clutching at her heart. Prye caught her up and carried her back to the chesterfield. He loosened the neck of her dress and put two fingers lightly on her wrist.

“Jennie,” she whispered, gasping. “Don’t forget — no tea.”

“I’ll tell her,” Prye said unsteadily. “I won’t forget.”

Her face twisted in a spasm of anguish; her body convulsed with pain.

Prye said: “Get my bag and call Innes. It’s angina.”

The little fox in its death throes. The hounds watching, silent. Prye’s two fingers straining for a pulse beat, like two tiny hunters trying to save the little fox when it was too late.

Prye got up quickly and walked to the door.

Chapter Eighteen

Two weeks later a number of changes had taken place in the community. The Little cottage had been let at half price to a young couple who were not superstitious. Nora had painted another sunrise which hung, resplendent, in Prye’s sitting room. Jennie had gone to live with her sister. Susan had bought a new red dress, and Professor Frost was giving his first dinner party in ten years.

Professor Frost struggled with his bow tie and his thoughts.

One spent thirty dollars buying one’s daughter a new dress, then another thirty, he reflected sadly, giving her an opportunity to wear it, and another thirty making oneself conform to the standard set by the new dress. Still, there was a certain gleam in young Bonner’s eye that it might be profitable to foster.

The gleam was very apparent at dinner. Even Susan noticed, and attributed it to the flicker of the candles, or an oncoming fever. She kept her eyes lowered demurely.

“There’s something I can’t understand,” Emily said, thumping the cane which was substituting for her wheelchair for the night. “How could you, a psychiatrist, have missed diagnosing Mary’s condition?”

“Not a fair question,” Nora said. “The defense has had two weeks to prepare his answer.”

Prye smiled. “The defense is ready and offers you the following: I saw Mrs. Little only four times. The first was on Monday after lunch from a distance. The second was on Tuesday morning when she was supposedly having a heart attack and was therefore not in her normal condition. She spoke no more than three sentences. On Wednesday afternoon when I saw her she was hysterical and I administered a sedative. On Wednesday night I had my longest conversation with her, but any peculiarities of speech or action I attributed to the disappearance of her husband and the after-effects of morphine.

“In short, I had no opportunity to examine Mrs. Little under proper conditions, and since I did not question her alibi for the two murders, I was not looking for evidences of insanity. Even now I cannot name definitely her particular mental disease although I’m fairly certain that it was a type of schizophrenia which is nearly always incurable and progressive.”

“But if she actually heard voices and believed in them,” Mr. Smith put in, “why didn’t she tell someone?”

“That would be the usual thing,” Prye said, “but I have had many patients suffering from auditory hallucinations who could and did conceal them. An observant nurse might come upon them in an attitude of listening, or moving their mouths in reply to the voices. Lastly, I offer in my own defense the old truism that the dividing line between sanity and insanity is difficult to fix. Insanity may even be a matter of convention: a Wall Street broker who spends half his time peering at ticker tape would be just another maniac to the Australian aborigines.”

“Darling,” Nora said sweetly, “are you lecturing again?”

“You wanted to know, and when people want to know, I tell them,” Prye said modestly.

“We could make it a sort of quiz night,” Mr. Smith suggested. “One question from each of us. The ladies first, of course. Miss Frost, have you anything to ask?”

Susan blushed a little. “Well, yes. About that — you know — my hand.”

“It was, as Nora said, mostly hocus pocus,” Prye replied. “I wanted to make Jennie feel more at ease when I came to test her hearing. But it served another purpose. Susan’s hand and arm smelled distinctly of oil of lavender, which is one of the constituents of mosquito oil. Now Hattie told me that the only mosquito oil in the house belonged to Joan and was locked in Joan’s room. Susan, on the other hand, had told me that she went to sleep on the beach on Monday night. But Susan was miraculously free of mosquito bites. I gathered then that Susan had seen Joan on Monday and had borrowed the mosquito oil, and therefore could be telling the truth about her movements on Monday night.”

“I saw Joan,” Susan admitted in a trembling voice. “I used the mosquito oil as an excuse. She let me into her room sometime after Ralph left.”

She paused and Prye said, sighing, “You wanted your father’s diary.”

“Yes.”

Prye turned his head toward the head of the table. “Your diary has caused me a lot of trouble. I hope it’s worth it.”

“Not any longer,” Frost said, smiling. “I burned it. A gesture symbolic of a new life. You see, I am a sentimentalist after all. If I weren’t I wouldn’t have struggled into a stiff collar two sizes too small.”

“You look very handsome,” Emily said graciously.

“I’d like to ask a question that’s bothering me,” Nora said. “If Mary was out in the storm on Tuesday night she must have been wet when she got home. Why didn’t Jennie notice it when she woke up?”

“Mary was damp and Jennie did notice. When Mary came back to the house she took off her wet clothes and got into bed. The only thing she couldn’t cover up was her wet hair, so she took the precaution of spilling a glass of water. Jennie assumed that she was nervous because of the storm and that the glass slipped out of her hands.”

Ralph leaned across the table toward Prye. “What was that business of Jennie turning off the lights and trying to escape?”

“Jennie could scarcely explain it herself,” Prye answered. “The main idea, though, was to give Mrs. Little a chance to get away. It was one of those impulsive gestures based on a genuine fondness for Mrs. Little and a feeling that both murders had been justified. The hearing test I gave her was very crude but it served the purpose of making her realize that I suspected her hearing was subnormal and consequently suspected the alibi that partly depended on her hearing. The majority of people are able to hear this watch of mine at a distance of three and a half feet with one ear closed.”

They were silent a minute.

“What did Mary mean when she said her kidneys had dried up?” Emily asked suddenly. “Or was that just a delusion?”

“A delusion based on the fact that sulfanilamide in large quantities does poison the kidneys. This type of delusion is very common among the mentally ill. One man may claim he can’t eat because he has no stomach, another may insist his throat is blocked or his bowels are shriveled. Knowing the effects of the drug Mary thought her kidneys had dried up.

“Because of some of its unpredictable qualities sulfanilamide itself lately has given place to its compounds, sulfapyridine and sulfathiazol. The effects of these are less unpleasant. In Mary’s case, however, her system must have been saturated with the drug to have such results. I estimate that she took one hundred and twenty grains in twenty-four hours, about the maximum dosage. The cyanosis, the fall of blood pressure, and the weak pulse are symptomatic of both sulfanilamide poisoning and a heart attack.”

“My question,” Professor Frost said, “is hypothetical. Suppose, Prye, that Mrs. Little had not confessed and had not been insane, could you have proved your case against her in a court of law?”

“That would depend,” Prye said dryly, “on the judge, the jury, Jennie, and the talents of the counsel for the defense, in other words on the variable human element. My chief point was the sulfanilamide. Its presence in the blood stream could easily be verified; but what about the reason for its presence? I would tell the jury that the drug had been used to simulate the symptoms of a heart attack and establish an alibi for the accused. The defending lawyer would insist that poor Mrs. Little had felt an attack of strep throat coming on and had used the medicine which a doctor had prescribed the year before for the same thing.

“Juries love fingerprints, but they frown on cases built up on lack of fingerprints. Besides, Mrs. Little could have denied the story she told me of flinging the ring out of the window; or, better still, her lawyer could have the story thrown out of court because she had been given an eighth grain of morphine a few hours previously.

“Her motive has always been obvious, but so many of you had obvious motives. Offhand I’d say I could have built a better case against Miss Bonner, and by better I mean a case composed of tangibles, the tangibles being fifty one-hundred-dollar bills.”

Ralph looked at Emily in astonishment. “What were you doing with five thousand dollars in bills, Aunt Emily?”

Emily said calmly: “I was going to buy you a new car, my dear.”

“You were! Really, I— That’s awfully nice of you.”

“It’s nothing at all,” Emily said. “Just a little present for your birthday.”

“But my birthday isn’t until January!”

Emily gazed at him reproachfully. “You can’t expect a poor old crippled lady to remember dates.”

“Of course not!” Prye said severely, and Emily had the grace to blush. “Mr. Smith, your question is the last one. I hope it’s good.”

“It isn’t good, no,” Mr. Smith said cautiously. “I merely want a simple explanation about that nurse dying, Miss Alfonse.”

“It’s been explained two hundred times,” Emily said acidly, “but I suppose I can endure it once more.”

“Perhaps you could endure it better,” Prye said, “if you explained it yourself.”

Emily was pleased. “I’d be delighted. Stop me if I use any words of over four letters. To begin with, this Miss Alfonse answered an advertisement of mine for a nursing companion, with references, unimpeachable character, other help kept, country house, all conveniences, good salary — you know the sort of thing. Her references were excellent, which is not remarkable since she wrote them herself. At first she was very satisfactory. It was only when she began to ogle Ralph that I suspected she had low designs.”

Ralph looked uneasy, and Susan lowered her eyes.

Nora said: “Cute way of describing marriage — a low design.”

“That’s as good a way as any,” Emily said severely. “To continue, I honestly believe Alfonse would have tried to marry Ralph if Tom Little had not been murdered. But the fact that she became a reluctant accessory to the murder upset all her plans. She had intended to marry for money but here was a situation which would bring her a lot of money with no trouble at all beyond keeping silent. She accepted Mary Little’s offer and promised to keep her mouth shut.

“As soon as Prye found out that Alfonse had made a date with Tom Little at nine o’clock the night he was murdered, Alfonse realized that she would have to get away from Muskoka immediately. If she stayed, Mary Little might confess to the murders and implicate her. If she got away, she could go into hiding somewhere and contact Mary Little later on to get her hush money. The chief difficulties in escaping were that the road was guarded at each end by policemen and that she had not much money on hand.

“I don’t know how she found out about my five thousand dollars, but I have an idea that it was right after Tom’s death when she came into my room with a case of hysterics. Perhaps the hysterics were feigned and she wanted to get me excited so she could see if I had the money hidden in my clothes. I suspect she heard Prye and me talking about it in my room.

“Anyway, I did have the money in my clothes and she did find out about it. So she made her plans for taking the money. It was easy enough for her to go down to the kitchen and dope my coffee. When I was asleep she came into my room and stole the bills. Back in her own room she put on a girdle so as to have some place to keep the money safe, and over it she wore a bathing suit. With a pair of suture scissors she cut her left arm, let the blood flow on to the floor, and then bandaged her arm and waited for her chance to go downstairs without being seen, I suppose. She couldn’t take any of the boats to escape because she had deliberately planned her actions to suggest that she had been murdered. So she was forced to swim across the lake. Well, she didn’t make it. And that’s all.”

Miss Alfonse’s epitaph, Prye thought: “And that’s all.” Aloud he said: “She cut her arm too deeply, you see. The loss of blood weakened her and she drowned. Perhaps it was a longer swim than it looked.”

“Shall we have coffee now?” Susan suggested. She rose from her chair, self-consciously smoothing out the new red dress. The fires of hell, her father thought, the fires of hell licking at Susan, thank God. Smiling, he pushed back his chair and went to the door.

The others followed him, Emily tapping her cane and leaning on Mr. Smith’s arm; Ralph and Susan walking stiffly, far apart, not looking at each other.

Nora tugged at Prye’s coat sleeve and held him back.

“One more question,” she said ominously.

“Name it.”

“Just how many murders do you average a year?”

“One doesn’t average murders,” Prye said with dignity. “One cannot help them. One is powerless to dam the flow of destiny.”

“You can drag your feet out of the current,” Nora said coldly. “I don’t want to be widowed while I’m walking up the aisle.”

“Aisle?” Prye paused. “Did you say aisle?”

“I did.”

“You’re surely not one of those women who’d ask a man to go waltzing up an aisle in spats and striped pants—”

“That’s me,” Nora said amiably. “You’ll be disarming. As for me, I won’t want to spoil your effect, so I’ll content myself with looking ethereal in white satin, with a long, long veil and a single calla lily.”

Prye sighed and bent down and kissed her.

“No greater love,” he said sadly.

Content

Margaret Millar
The Weak-Eyed Bat

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen