Miss Withers Regrets (27 page)

“I’ll see what I can do,” she promised him tartly. Unfortunately, at the moment, she had no premonition whatever of how close one of these days that dead body would come to being her own.

“Just as a personal favor,” he begged, “don’t come around Headquarters throwing monkey wrenches. This is no time to go stirring up trouble. We’ve got enough. I’ll be blamed for any toes you step on, and they’re out to nail my hide to the barn door as it is. Reorganization is being discussed again—there’s a new assistant-commissioner, you know—and Homicide is the only bureau in the Department to have an inspector in charge; all the rest get along with a captain.”

“Mercy, Oscar! They’re not actually trying to demote you?”

He hesitated. “Something like that. Maybe it will blow over; it has before.”

“I hope so. Of course I wouldn’t for the world do anything that would add to your troubles, unless I felt it my bounden duty. All the same—”

Then the soup arrived. “Thanks,” said the Inspector. “I knew you’d see it my way. As for this wild idea of yours, remember that while once in a blue moon a Tufverson case comes along, as a rule people don’t get murdered without a corpse being left around.”

“Yes, I know. Physicists say that matter is indestructible. And I’ve also heard somewhere that when you drop a stone into a body of water the ripples go out widening and diminishing forever.”

“You can’t see ’em, so what’s the difference? Eat your soup.”

“There are stars, Oscar, too far away for us to see with the naked eye, but we can measure the heat they give. When a person drops out of sight, like a stone in water, it must start ripples of another sort, ripples invisible and yet—”

“Crackers?”

“What? Oh, no, thank you. Oscar, you must excuse me. I just happened to think of something. You’ll have to hear the Chorus by yourself—I must rush home at once.” She was scrambling to her feet.

“But
why?
” He stared at her, open-mouthed.

“Every single Christmas card I received this year is standing on the mantel above my fireplace, and—” Gloves, bag, and umbrella in her hand, the schoolteacher was already hurrying out of the place.

The Inspector started to rise, and then sank back into his seat. He sighed and shook his head. Since their first meeting beside a corpse in the penguin pool of the old Aquarium, more years ago than he liked to remember, an odd friendship had existed between the professional policeman and the eccentric, irrepressible schoolma’am. The bond had deepened in spite of—or perhaps because of—a series of sparring-matches between them, with no holds barred and with honors to date about even.

But snowflakes! Murder victims by the thousand, ripples that rippled on forever, and finally the old girl rushing off in a dither because she’d left her old Christmas cards, the most useless objects known to man, unguarded on the mantel.
I hate to admit it,
Piper said to himself,
but she’s slipping fast
. A little sadly, he settled down to the job of finishing two dinners.

The unknowing object of all this solicitude climbed resolutely up the steps of the respectably dingy brownstone on West 74th Street, carefully knocked the snow from her overshoes, and then entered her own little apartment. For the first time in months she felt herself again.

Miss Hildegarde Withers had long looked forward to the frabjous day when she could retire from P.S. 38 and its generations of grubby urchins on a modest pension and devote the rest of her days to her chosen avocation of being self-appointed gadfly to the police department. But now when that time had come she hadn’t quite known what to do with herself. She seemed no longer to happen luckily in on the scenes of murder—the laws of Probability and Coincidence were belatedly beginning to take effect—nor did she now manage as in the past to beat the paddy-wagon and the medical examiner to the most interesting corpses and then affix herself like a burr to the Inspector’s coat tail. What few cases the little man did discuss with her when he dropped in for a visit were solved already by routine methods, or else were trite and uninteresting.

Not for her were the mild aseptic activities and amusements available to a woman of her age, income, and position in society; welfare groups and improvement clubs bored her to tears. And yet there hadn’t seemed to be anything else.

For a while she had thrown herself with characteristic enthusiasm into her recently acquired hobby of raising tropical fish, and the glass breeding-tanks had multiplied in the little apartment until the load of their necessary heaters, aerators, and lights had kept blowing the fuses and she had at last been forced to give away every one of the tiny jeweled fish. No pet had replaced them. After Dempsey, the effervescent wire-terrier who had shared so many of her earlier adventures, breathed out his span of life it had seemed somehow disloyal to think of getting another dog. Cats always gave Miss Withers a sense of inferiority, they were so aloof and self-sufficient. Canaries made her nervous with their twittering.

What she had really been yearning for was a knotty problem on which to try the sharp edges of her mind. Now she squatted on the floor, happy as a clam in a tide-pool, riffling through the basketful of Christmas cards which in the old tradition she always kept around, like her little spruce tree and the mistletoe and holly, until Twelfth Night. There were almost two hundred of the greetings, many of them from former pupils now gone out into the world. Cheery bits of cardboard, she thought, though she wondered as always just what covered bridges and baby rabbits and elves and palm trees had to do with the Nativity. There were cards embossed and printed and engraved, cards a composite of family snapshots, hand-painted cards and comic cartoon cards and cards painfully printed in Crayola by sticky little fingers.

But in all the lot there was no card from Alice Davidson.

Though she might have been sitting down to a table loaded with spicy Italian delicacies, Miss Withers had no regrets as she made herself a frugal meal of tuna-fish salad and tea. This problem was not one for the Inspector’s official mind, at least not yet. He would never in the world understand why Alice was one of the people to whom the sending of Christmas cards was almost a compulsion-neurosis, as inevitable as death and taxes.

There had been one from her every year for seven years, until this Christmas. Indeed, her not sending a greeting was a tangible thing, like the
not
-striking of a familiar clock that has run down.

The schoolteacher filled up her teacup again, frowning with concentration as she tried to remember everything possible about Alice Davidson. It was little enough. The girl (every female a few years younger than herself was a girl to Miss Withers) had lived in the apartment directly across the hall. She’d been a friendly, shy little thing, anxious to please. They had drifted into a casual, neighborly sort of friendship unusual in New York, which involved the occasional borrowing of a cup of sugar or an egg, the signing for each other’s telegrams or packages, sometimes the sharing of a meal or tickets to a concert.

Miss Withers had been happy to oblige by slipping in to feed the love-birds (a pair named Tabby and Towser because they fought like cats and dogs) when Alice was away for the week-end, and Alice when she felt like a breath of air had sometimes borrowed Dempsey and the leash and let the madcap terrier drag her around the Park.

All that had taken place back in a happier, pre-war era, when apartments were available and most New Yorkers obeyed a sort of lemming-like urge to pull up stakes at least once a year. Alice too had moved away, and the two women drifted out of touch so that at last there was only the exchange of Christmas cards with a scribbled note inside which remained as the last tenuous link between two ships that had passed in the night.

Miss Withers shook her head. She was an avid reader of the Vital Statistics column in the
Times,
and Alice’s name hadn’t appeared there among the deceased or married. Call it intuition or extra-sensory perception or just an old-fashioned hunch, she felt it in her bones that Alice Davidson would have sent her a Christmas card again this year if she hadn’t been—prevented.

Alice had always made so much of the holiday season, clinging to the old forms and observances like most lonely people who remember a happy, small-town childhood.

Here at last, she felt, was something to go on. Not quite of course the nice fresh corpse that the Inspector had asked for. But he was involved in his own problems at the moment anyway. She would have to carry on her own investigation, very quietly. Picking up the Manhattan telephone directory, she began by making three calls. From the first she learned that the number listed for Alice Davidson had been discontinued. From the second she discovered that Miss Davidson had given up the lease on her furnished apartment on East 47th Street October first, and moved to a big hotel on Park Avenue. The third call, to the Hotel Grandee, finally produced the information that Alice Davidson had checked out October 11th last, and that the only address they had was what she had written when she registered, and that was 47th Street again. She was right back where she had started.

The street noises from outside and from Central Park West were hushed now by the heavy snowfall so that after an hour or so Miss Withers began to feel that she was floating in a void, as alone as Beebe in his bathysphere, and almost expected some great curious monster to come bumping its nose against her window pane. Finally she snapped out of the mood and prepared for bed, giving her hair its requisite hundred strokes. It took her a long time to get to sleep that night, and when she did she immediately found herself helplessly drifting, then moving faster and faster at breathless speed down winding, formless avenues of oblivion. No, it was a taxicab she was in, and she dared not speak to the driver for fear he might turn his head.

She tried to catch a glimpse of the signs on the lamp posts that hurtled by, but they all read
Dead End Street
. Faster and still faster they plummeted toward their destination, which suddenly turned out to be a vast mausoleum of black marble bearing the sign
Dead Letter Office,
and then somehow she was inside, watching the dead letters being shoveled into open graves marked
Dead Storage
. The faceless attendants in white were about to shovel her in along with the letters, but Miss Withers said firmly to herself,
This is only a nightmare and I must wake up at once!
So she did.

She sat up in bed to face the pale glow of Manhattan’s dawn, shivering a little. It had been a very real and unpleasant fantasy indeed. Miss Hildegarde Withers was not given to oneiromancy; she turned neither to Freud nor to the Gypsy Dream Book to have her dreams analyzed, but it was perfectly clear what her subconscious mind had been trying to tell her about the reason why Alice Davidson hadn’t sent her a Christmas card this year.

“He that will go to the City
…
must needs go out of this World.”

—John Bunyan

T
HOUGH SHE HAD BEEN ACUTELY
uncomfortable for every single minute of the eight hours she had spent in that day-coach, Miss Withers stood on the station platform and looked wistfully after the rear end of the departing train. The town of Bagley’s Mills, Pennsylvania, might not have been the identical whistle-stop immortalized by Irvin S. Cobb when on a lecture tour he looked out of his Pullman window early one rainy morning and whispered, “Oh, God, what a wonderful place to die in!” but it would have done just as well.

There was of course no waiting taxicab or bus, so she plodded through the slushy mixture of coal dust and snow toward the distant business section. Eventually her quest led her past innumerable miners’ shanties to the hill at the far edge of the town, where she climbed the steep steps leading to what had no doubt once been the local mansion, now a sagging and decrepit edifice covered with architectural gingerbread and bearing signs reading:
Justice of the Peace
and
Abstracts
and
Tourists Taken
.

To reach the door the schoolteacher had to run the gantlet of snowballs hurled with more malice than accuracy by what seemed a horde of screaming red-nosed little girls on either side of the uncleared walk. Nor was there any warmth in the expression of the gloomy gray man who answered her knock. He was thinnish, stooped, and balding, and there was egg on his vest and bitterness in his eye.

“Mr. Davidson?” she opened briskly. “I am Miss Hildegarde Withers—”

“I’m Judge Davidson—but we don’t want to subscribe to anything or buy anything,” he said quickly.

But the door was firmly blocked by her overshoe. “It’s about
Alice!
”

“What about her?”

“If I might come in—?”

He hesitated, then silently stood aside. Miss Withers marched into a hall filled with mittens, overshoes, and skis, and then on into a big battered living-room from which numerous larger girls of assorted sizes, all wearing a uniform of boys’ shirts and blue-jeans, hastily exited on a barked command of “Scat!”

“Oh, you run a girls’ school?” Miss Withers asked innocently.

“My daughters,” admitted Davidson. “My wife,” he added, nodding toward a shapeless, pink-faced woman who hastily entered from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron.

“How do you do?” said the schoolteacher politely.

But her host gestured impatiently toward a chair. “Now what’s this about Alice? What’s the fool girl been up to now?”

“George!” murmured the fat woman vaguely.

“Well,” began Miss Withers, “it’s rather a long story. It began, you see, with a Christmas card—”

He wasn’t listening. “She’s been home on vacation since before Christmas, but of course she never tells us anything. Not Alice!”

The schoolteacher felt as if she had sat down in a chair that wasn’t there. “Do I understand you to say that Alice Davidson is here in this town, in this
house?
”

“Why wouldn’t she be? It’s her home, isn’t it?”

“But—”

“As a matter of fact, she’s up taking a bath right now.”