Miss Withers Regrets (12 page)

“Dear me, no,” Miss Withers assured her. “Snooping is for me a labor of love, and I don’t want to lose my amateur standing at this late date. As for the progress I’m making, all I can say is that I’ve tripped over a number of threads. I don’t know just where they lead, except that they do not lead towards Pat Montague. If he had had murder in his heart he wouldn’t have come along the highway in broad daylight to crash a party he hadn’t been invited to. He’d have sneaked in after dark, with an Army pistol or a hand grenade or something—”

“You mentioned
threads
,” Lawn reminded her.

“I did. One thread seems to lead to a group of outstanding local citizens who made a mysterious proposition to me some weeks ago. Another indicates your gardener, who may not be a murderer but who takes it upon himself to water lawns and flowerbeds in the heat of the day, which, according to the best horticultural authorities, is simply not done. A third is tangled up with the personality and background of Cairns himself—how he managed to make a million dollars or so in three years, and just what sort of public relations he was mixed up in. He doesn’t seem the type, somehow—”

“To make money, you mean? But everybody’s been making money the last three years.”

“Every one fortunate enough not to wear a uniform, you mean. However, I was referring to Cairns’s personality. He isn’t like any public-relations man I ever knew. They are usually ex-reporters or disappointed writers. Cairns was in his late thirties, which means that he came to maturity in the between-war era. I would expect any publicity or public-relations man to have some manuscript poetry in the back of his desk, or the first draft of the great American novel. At the very least there should be some worn volumes of James Branch Cabell and Floyd Dell and Ronald Firbank somewhere in his library.”

Lawn nodded. “Huntley was different.” She pointed. “You know, I wouldn’t like to admit it to everybody, but every book in the library in there was bought in bulk from a dealer in town. He got what they call publishers’ remainders. Those are the ones that they can’t sell in the ordinary way. He didn’t care, as long as they filled up the shelves. Neither did Helen; she’s no reader. If there isn’t any dancing or bridge or anything, she just goes to sleep.”

“Very sensible of her, in a way. But to return to my threads—the last one has to do with a book in a red jacket, a book that seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the library and which somebody must have been searching for at the time I dropped in.”

Miss Withers was watching Lawn’s face very closely, but the girl only looked blank at the mention of the book. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Who’d want to take one of the books? I told you they were all remainders, at ten or twenty cents apiece. So there isn’t much chance of a first-folio Shakespeare or a Gutenberg Bible or anything. I mean, there couldn’t be anything of the slightest value.”

“I doubt very much,” observed Miss Hildegarde Withers, “if this murder was committed for money. After all, nobody benefits financially but your sister, and she had everything already.”

“Everything,” Lawn agreed softly “Except Pat Montague.”

“But, child, didn’t you indicate yesterday that your sister had never loved anything except herself?”

The girl smiled wryly. “There’s love—and then there’s wanting somebody because he’s all the things your husband isn’t. Because he’s tall and good looking and dances well and is a sort of war hero and represents the things you’ve lost. As I told you, Helen is emotionally immature.”

“In your opinion, would Helen have run away with Pat Montague if he’d asked her to?”

Lawn thought about that for some time. Then she shook her head. “She’s too conventional. Besides, Pat wouldn’t have asked her to—not after he’d actually seen for himself that she was really and truly married to somebody else. Pat’s a poet, really, but he’s the soul of honor.”

“Too honorable to hold a successful rival under water until he drowned, at any rate?” Miss Withers nodded. “By the way, I almost forgot to ask. Just what was the final autopsy report?”

“What everyone expected. The autopsy surgeon backed up everything that Harry Radebaugh had diagnosed Saturday night, just after it happened. Huntley died from something called ‘syncope,’ which means he strangled all at once, from shock.”

“Did you testify?”

“Just about the snag at the bottom of the pool. I don’t know how much stock they put in what I said. I tried to point out some other things to them, but they cut me off short. I guess they thought I was just trying to protect my sister and her guilty lover, which is a laugh. The whole police theory in this case is ridiculous. Come on, I’ll prove it to you—”

Lawn leaped suddenly to her feet and drew Miss Withers out through the rear of the house, down the steps, across the patio, and down the path which led around the bathhouse. Before them lay the big concrete-lined hole in the ground which had once been the swimming pool, with only a few puddles of murky water at the bottom.

“It was here that they found him,” Lawn said, pointing towards a corner of the pool at the deep end, the widest part of the oval. Peering down, Miss Withers could see the exit of the drainpipe, and by squinting a little she fancied that she could make out the jagged bit of metal which had caught and held the body of Huntley Cairns.

“Dear, dear!” she said.

“Now, look, Miss Withers,” Lawn said abruptly. “Do you know how long a garden rake is?”

“When I was a girl,” the schoolteacher said, “there used to be a riddle about how long is a piece of string, but I forget the answer.”

“This is no riddle. Because garden rakes are all approximately the same length. Wait a minute.” The girl disappeared around the corner of the building and in a moment was back with an ordinary rake. She held it erect on the tiles so that the teeth came almost but not quite to her forehead. “You see? They don’t make rakes any longer than this. The one the police took away as Exhibit A was just like this. And yet Pat is supposed to have murdered Huntley by holding him under with a rake, like this.”

Lawn took the tool to the edge of the swimming pool, reached down with it as far as she could. “You see? The pool was just ten feet deep here, and the rake handle is barely five. If you allow a couple of feet for the width of the body, then the murderer must still have reached down a good three feet into the water in order to hook Huntley’s shorts on to that projecting bit of metal.”

The schoolteacher inclined her head gravely. “Your mathematics seem correct,” she admitted.

“Well, then! Pat’s sleeves were only wet a little at the wrist when I let him out of that dressing room Saturday night. Jed Nicolet can testify to the same thing because he saw Pat in the bar only a little while later.”

“And how about Searles’s sleeves?”

“I didn’t see him. But it wouldn’t matter, even if he was dripping to the shoulder, because he did most of the work hauling the body out, remember. He must have had to reach down as far as he could to hook the rake—” She stopped, biting her lip. “What a grisly business this is!”

Miss Withers was inclined to agree with her. They headed back for the house by way of the toolshed so Lawn could replace the rake. The flagged path led them almost to the kitchen door, and then the schoolteacher stopped short, pointing a lean finger. “What’s that?”

Lawn hesitated. “It looks like Helen’s white bathing suit. I guess Beulah hung it out.”

“A little odd, isn’t it? I mean, the pool has been dry since yesterday morning, so she can’t have been swimming.” The schoolteacher looked at the brief lastex garment, made so form-fitting that it had to be laced like a football at either side, and noticed that the laces had been tied tight and then torn instead of being untied.

“Helen never takes any care of her things,” Lawn informed her. “I used to have to mend them for her, and now Beulah has to do it.”

They came into the kitchen, where Beulah, her face darker than usual, was cleaning up the table on which Searles had left the makings of his sandwich. She was mumbling something about “trash” but looked up blankly at Miss Withers’s opening question.

“Yassum,” she said. “I hanged out Miss’ Cairns’s suit. It sho’ woulda mildewed fast, tucked down into her laundry bag all wet like she left it.”

“When,” asked Miss Withers softly, turning to Lawn, “just when was the last time your sister wore that suit that you know of?”

Lawn shrugged. “I don’t know. She may have tried the pool out Friday, the day before the party. They’d filled it then.”

“I see. I thought for a moment…” Miss Withers shook her head. “By the way, I wonder how long it would take a man to remove his coat and shirt and then whisk them on again after he had done—well, whatever it was.”

Lawn’s eyes narrowed. “Still aiming at Pat? A man, I know, has lots of buttons on his shirt, and then there’s a necktie and all that. Of course Searles doesn’t wear a tie, but he wears a sweater under that foul old jacket, and probably long underwear under that. But—but a woman! It would be easy enough for a woman, because women usually wear loose sleeves that could roll to the shoulder in a jiffy”

“You mean, darling, sleeves like the ones on the dress I wore at the party?” They both looked up with a start to see Helen, a symphony in black, standing in the door of the dining room. Behind her was Thurlow Abbott, looking older and tireder.

The two sisters faced each other, and for a moment Miss Withers could see a resemblance between them, which flickered and was gone. “Why, yes,” Lawn said slowly. “Helen, I want to talk to you.”

“Surely not now!” Helen said. “It wouldn’t be any use. You see, I know what you’re up to. You’ve failed to pin this mess on to Pat, and so you’ve decided on me.”

There was a long silence. “You’re so beautiful,” Lawn told her. “And so good. It’s a shame that you couldn’t have been just a little brighter!” The girl turned towards Miss Withers. “Please excuse me, it’s getting very, very stuffy in here. I’m going to change my clothes and then go down and have a long talk with the horses in Mame Boad’s stable.” She ran out of the room.

“My daughter Lawn,” said Thurlow Abbott in his croaking voice, “gets more difficult every day. By the way, Miss Withers, may I ask just what it was you wanted?”

“To find out how and why your son-in-law was murdered, and who did it!”

“But it wasn’t murder!” Helen cut in. “Didn’t you know? The police are being awfully slow and stupid about it all, but I thought you would see. When they drained the pool yesterday they found Huntley’s wristwatch at the bottom. He must have missed it when he was dressing after his swim and rushed out just as he was. In trying to reach it, he fell in and was drowned.”

“Huntley was, I’m afraid, a very week swimmer,” Thurlow Abbott chimed in. “Not the athletic type at all, you know.”

“And that watch was his pride and joy,” Helen added. “Huntley loved gadgety things like that. He’d have gone almost out of his mind if he’d looked at his wrist and seen that it was missing.”

“Was he so proud of it,” Miss Withers probed gently, “that he’d have gone swimming without noticing that he’d left it on?”

Helen thought he might. “You see, except in the tub, he never took it off, not even when he slept. It was waterproof and shockproof and everything proof.”

The schoolteacher stilled an impulse to ask if the watch had been equipped with an outboard motor too—so that it could travel from the shallow end of the pool, where a poor swimmer like Cairns would presumably have been disporting himself, down to the deep end, fifty feet or more away. But for the moment that could wait. She smiled at Helen Cairns and then asked, “There is just one other thing I must ask you now. Where did your late husband hide things?”

The beautiful face went blank. “Hide things? But he didn’t. He wasn’t the hiding type. Why, he even told me what I was getting for my birthdays and Christmases weeks before the day.”

“I wasn’t thinking of presents,” Miss Withers went on. “I was wondering whatever became of the book—the book with the red jacket.
Oriental Moments
was the title, I believe.”

She had great hopes of that shot in the dark, but it fizzled out like a wet firecracker. Either Helen and her father had never heard of the book, or else they were far better actors than she had given them credit for. And long experience with the little hellions of her third-grade classes back at Jefferson School had taught her a number of ways to tell when any one is lying. She shrugged. “Well, perhaps it will turn up when we least expect it. Like your white bathing suit.”

Helen froze. “My what?”

“Your white bathing suit that your maid found in your laundry bag in grave danger of mildew.”

“I don’t understand.” Helen was frowning, but she looked a little pale. “I used the suit Friday, but—I’m sure I left it in the dressing room.”

“Did you really? Well, thank you very much, anyway. I’m on my way down to the jail now, in hopes of seeing the proper authorities and getting young Montague released. He couldn’t have drowned your husband, Mrs. Cairns. The rake wasn’t long enough. Would you have any message for Pat, in case I get in to see him?”

Helen looked quickly at her father, who still hovered nervously in the background. “Why, no. Of course not.” But she walked with Miss Withers through the house, almost to the front door. Making sure that they were alone, she produced from her breast a thin packet of letters tied neatly with red string. “Just give these back to him, will you, before the police find them. Tell him—oh, there’s nothing I can say to Pat now!” Helen turned and went back towards the stairs, half-running, and with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth.

Miss Withers stood stock-still, looking after her. Then she saw Thurlow Abbott coming towards her, his face strained and drawn. “I hope you’ll make allowances for my daughter Helen,” he said. “She is very distrait. An old, forgotten love popping up suddenly out of the past, reviving old memories—”

“Forgotten?” Miss Withers echoed doubtfully.

“Helen fancied herself in love with young Montague many years ago,” Abbott told her. “It was nothing but a boy-and-girl affair, really. They were not suited to each other in any way. I tried of course to advise her, but it is difficult for a father to be a mother.”