It is a short run from Van Brunt to Cold Harbor. They reached it a little after two and cruised its main street slowly. There was a store front marked, “FLORENCE SELBY, REAL ESTATE.” The wording was repeated on the windows of the floor above. The door to the ground floor was a sheet of heavy plate glass. The door was locked. They looked through it into a room with several desks and two sofas.
“Looks fairly up-and-coming,” Forniss said. “Not run-down any.”
Heimrich agreed that Florence Selby, Real Estate, was either prosperous or making a good show of prosperity. They drove on to the Cold Harbor police station.
“No,” the sergeant behind the desk told them, “they’re not open Sundays usually. Except in summer. You go out Vine Street maybe a mile, and the Selby place is on the right. Got a sign like the one on the office. Want to give Mrs. Selby a ring, see if she’s home?”
Heimrich did not want to give Mrs. Selby a ring. They drove a little less than a mile on Vine Street, after they had found Vine Street. The sign at the foot of a driveway was half lost in a big lilac bush, which still kept all its leaves. The sign was not exactly like the one on the office windows. The sign read: “FLORENCE SELBY, REALTOR.”
Heimrich turned the Buick into the driveway and drove up it.
The drive up to the Selby house was by no means as long as that to The Tor. It climbed somewhat; it was reasonably straight except that, halfway up, it had detoured around a big maple. The Selby house was a long, low one-story, stretching across a rise. There was a turnaround in front of the long white house, and from it the driveway ran on around the house. A two-level house, Heimrich thought, with probably a garage under the rear of it. He stopped the car, and they got out and walked to the front door of the long house. Heimrich found a doorbell button and pressed it, and chimes sounded softly from inside the house.
Nothing else happened. They waited for some seconds and Heimrich pressed the button again, and the chimes sounded again. And again nobody came to the door.
“At church maybe,” Forniss said. “Or some place, anyhow.”
“Or,” Heimrich said, “gone over to the Jameson place to offer sympathy and, as people say, anything they can do to help.”
They stepped away from the door and started back toward the Buick. Trees were sighing and creaking in the wind. At the top of the big maple tree leaves were beginning to turn. They were also beginning to blow off.
“We’ll wait around a—” Heimrich said, and did not finish. From somewhere there was a girl’s voice. “Oh, no,” the girl said, her voice clear above the grating of the blown trees.
They turned away from the car and walked the drive which circled the house. It went down steeply. When they were around the house they looked down—looked beyond a terrace to a spread of lawn.
On the lawn a slender young woman in a yellow and black pants suit and a heavier and older woman in a sweater and a tweed skirt were shooting arrows at a target. There was one arrow in the rim of the target and several others lying on the grass near it.
The older woman notched an arrow and pulled back on the bowstring and let the arrow fly. The wind caught the arrow and blew it wide of the target.
“I guess you were right, dear,” the older woman said. There’s too much wind. We’ll have—”
But then the two archers heard the crunch of feet on the gravel drive, and both turned.
The older woman put her bow down on the grass and walked toward Heimrich and Forniss. She was smiling. She said, “Mr. Wellingmacker! You made it after all. I’d about given you—”
“No, Mother,” Dorothy Selby said. “They’re not your prospects.” She came across the grass. “You’re a police inspector, aren’t you?” she said, looking up at Heimrich. “You were at Arthur’s party last night?”
There was lightness in her voice and a smile in it. Her long blond hair was tossed by the wind. There was gaiety in her face and in her movements. She said, “You must think we’re both crazy. Shooting arrows in a wind like this. They blow every which way, of course.”
She stopped suddenly and her face changed.
“You are the policeman, aren’t you?” she said.
“Heimrich. This is Lieutenant Forniss. I take it you haven’t—”
“Wait a minute,” the older woman said. “Heimrich? Didn’t I sell a house to some relatives of yours a few years back? Down in Van Brunt? Wait a minute. Alden, that was it. John Alden. I remember because—”
“Wait, Mother,” Dorothy Selby said. “Haven’t what, Inspector Heimrich?”
It was, of course, quite possible, Heimrich thought. News of Arthur Jameson’s death by violence had been on the radio. But not everybody listens to the radio on Sunday mornings, when radio broadcasts are apt to devote themselves to sermons and religious music. And certainly the practice of archery under the circumstances implied innocent ignorance of the circumstances. Unless the duty sergeant back in town had decided to make a telephone call on his own? Decided to alert Mrs. Florence Selby and her daughter to the impending arrival of two members of the New York State Police?
“Nobody’s telephoned you today?”
Florence Selby stood with her feet apart, as if she defied not only the wind, but police asking questions. “I took my phone off the hook first thing this morning. So Dorothy could sleep. And so I wouldn’t be bothered with househunters who think a real-estate agent is at their beck and call any hour of the day or night.”
“Then I’m afraid I’m the one to give you bad news, Miss Selby,” Heimrich said. “Very bad news, I’m sorry to say. Mr. Jameson—”
All the light went out of Dorothy Selby’s young face.
“Arthur,” she said. “Something’s happened to Arthur. That’s what you’re going to say, isn’t it?”
Her voice, which had been high and gay, was low and trembled a little. She reached out and took her mother’s hand, which had reached toward her.
Heimrich has had to break bad news many times. It is a policeman’s lot. The response of people who hear such news is varied. Sometimes they scream and break into tears. Sometimes, with voice rising in hysteria, they fight against acceptance of the news. Now and then they faint.
And sometimes all life fades out of their faces, as light had faded out of Dorothy Selby’s.
“I’m afraid Mr. Jameson is dead, Miss Selby,” Heimrich said.
She said, “Oh. Oh!” She turned to her mother, and Mrs. Selby put her arms around the pretty young woman in the gay yellow and black pants suit. “But he was all right last night,” Dorothy Selby said, her voice muffled against her mother’s heavy sweater. “Last night he was all right. He—”
And then her slim body began to shake against her mother’s, and she said, “No. No. No,” and went on saying the same word over and over in her muffled voice.
Mrs. Selby’s voice did not shake. It was only a little loud. “Well, Inspector?” Florence Selby said, and her arm tightened about her daughter. “You may as well get on with it, Inspector.”
“Mr. Jameson was killed this morning,” Heimrich said. “Somebody shot an arrow into his neck.”
The girl freed herself from her mother’s arm. She turned suddenly and looked away toward the target with a single arrow stuck in the rim of it, with other arrows lying on the ground around it.
“He’d been out fishing on the lake,” Heimrich said. “Apparently he was just rowing in when somebody shot him from the bank.” He paused. Dorothy Selby kept on looking at the target. Then she put her hands up over her face.
It might as well be said, Heimrich decided.
“Archery isn’t a very common sport around here, is it, Mrs. Selby?” he said. “Not for years, anyway. Most people play golf, or tennis.”
“There’re still some of us around,” Mrs. Selby said. “You’re sure somebody shot Mr. Jameson with an arrow?”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “With a steel arrow. Tipped with feathers.”
“A steel arrow,” Mrs. Selby said. “People are all the time trying to improve things. I wouldn’t be caught dead with that kind of arrow. Oh! Not the best way of putting it, was that?”
“Perhaps not,” Heimrich said. “Since Mr. Jameson was. Did either of you have occasion to—”
“We’ll go inside,” Mrs. Selby told him. “Get out of the wind if you’re going to ask us questions.”
She began to strip a leather glove off her right hand. On her left wrist there was a leather cuff. She saw Heimrich and Forniss watching her.
“The damn things scratch,” she said. “Dig in.”
The two policemen looked at Dorothy Selby, who was wearing a wrist guard but not a glove.
“The young think they know everything better,” Mrs. Selby said. “Think they’re tougher. Wait a minute.”
She walked off across the grass and picked up her bow, and her daughter’s bow, from it. She went to the target and pulled the arrow out of it. She picked up the arrows which had missed the target. She brought the bows and arrows back and held them out toward Heimrich. “Look at them,” Florence Selby commanded.
Heimrich looked at them.
“All wood, aren’t they?” Florence Selby said.
Heimrich agreed that the arrows, and the bows too, were wooden arrows and wooden bows.
“Come on,” Mrs. Selby said, and walked off. She marched off, Heimrich thought. She marched with no evidence of any doubt that she would be followed.
Her daughter followed her, and Heimrich and Forniss followed her. She led them toward a terrace which stretched for most of the width of the house. She led them, on the way there, past a twocar garage with two cars in it. One of the cars was a black Volks. The other was also black. It was, however, a Mercedes, and, Heimrich thought, a new one. The Mercedes is popular in that part of the country among those who can afford them.
There were director’s chairs and summer chaises on the terrace and little tables by them. The wind had blown over two of the director’s chairs. Well, Heimrich thought, yesterday it was summer, or almost summer. Mrs. Selby pulled open a wide sliding glass door and went through the doorway. They followed her, and Dorothy Selby, into a long room with doors at either end. Both doors stood open. At one end the door opened on a bedroom; at the other to a tiny kitchen. It was not especially warm in the long room, although it was warmer and quieter than it had been outside.
Mrs. Selby put the two bows and the half-dozen or so arrows down on a sofa. “We’ll go upstairs,” Mrs. Selby said. She reached back and put an arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Half supporting the slighter woman, she went across the room toward a staircase. Forniss stopped and looked at the bows and arrows lying on the sofa. He looked at Heimrich. Heimrich shook his head and they followed the two women to the staircase and up it.
They went from the stairs into a large living room, comfortably furnished with deep chairs and two sofas and several tables and a large television console. There was a fieldstone fireplace at one end of the room, with a fire laid in it and not lighted. It was pleasantly warm and quiet in the big room, and sunlight came in through windows at the south end and lay on a rug which, to Heimrich’s nonexpert eyes, appeared to be an Oriental.
Mrs. Selby walked firmly down the room to the fireplace, and Dorothy sank down into a deep chair. Mrs. Selby took a packet of matches from the pocket of her tweed skirt and struck one and lighted the fire. Heimrich had half expected her to use a kitchen match and strike it with her thumbnail.
Paper caught in the fireplace, and kindling caught and fire leaped up against logs—logs well laid for a fire, Heimrich thought. The fireplace was efficient; the flue drew well. Mrs. Selby was an efficient woman, except when it came to shooting arrows into a target on a windy day. Of course, it had been less windy early in the morning, and the lake below The Tor was in a sheltered place.
Mrs. Selby came back from the fireplace, and did not look behind her to see if her fire was burning well. Fires Florence Selby lighted always burned well. Mrs. Selby spoke from the middle of the room. She said, “You may as well sit down. Do you want drinks?”
Forniss shook his head and Heimrich said, “Not right now, Mrs. Selby. Just a few—”
“Well,” Florence Selby said, “I do if you don’t. And Dorothy needs one.”
Dorothy Selby did not say anything. She sat deep in the chair, and it seemed to Merton Heimrich that she sat limply and that life had not come back into her face. Heimrich sat down in one of the less deep chairs. Forniss went down the room to the fireplace and looked into the waxing fire and then turned from it and stood leaning against the fieldstones which surrounded it. He also stood near a glass door through which Heimrich could see his Buick, its tall radio antenna waving a little in the wind.
Mrs. Selby came back from a bar at the end of the room most distant from the fireplace. She had a squat glass in either hand, one a little fuller than the other. She held the fuller glass out to her daughter, who did not at first reach for it. Mrs. Selby said, “Your drink, Dorothy,” and Dorothy reached out and took the almost full old-fashioned glass.
Mrs. Selby, Heimrich thought, took her bourbon on the rocks. Dorothy got water with hers.
Florence Selby sat down, firmly, on a sofa near her daughter’s chair. She took a long swallow from her glass.
“All right,” she said, “did either of us have occasion to what, Inspector? Since you want to put it in that rather stilted way. Go up to The Tor this morning and shoot an arrow into Arthur Jameson? You said in his neck, didn’t you?”
“In his neck,” Heimrich said. “If you want it that way, Mrs. Selby, did you? Either of you?”
“You’re naive,” Florence Selby said. “Do you expect we’ll say yes, of course we did?”
“No,” Heimrich said. “It’s not often that easy, Mrs. Selby. Did either of you know that Mr. Jameson was in the habit of going fishing in early mornings? Particularly early Sunday mornings?”
“I did,” Dorothy said. She had not touched her drink. She still held it in her hand. But her voice had grown somewhat stronger.
“I’ve worked with—for—Arthur two, three years,” Dorothy said. “Taking dictation on his book. He told me about his going fishing. About how there was only one right way to cook lake bass. He told me—well, we talked sometimes. He told me a good many things, I suppose.”
“That he wanted you to marry him, among other things,” Heimrich said. He added, “Naturally.”
“Yes.”
“And you said yes,” Heimrich said.
“You were at the party,” Dorothy said. Her voice now was definitely stronger. There was even a kind of bite in it. Compared to her mother’s voice, Dorothy’s held more of a nibble than a bite, but the bite was there. “You heard what he said.”
“And you were crazy,” Mrs. Selby said to her daughter. “Arthur was old enough to be your grandfather.”
“You’ve told me that, Mother,” Dorothy said, and a kind of resigned quiet had come back into her voice. “You’ve told me that rather often, in fact.”
“For all the good it did me,” her mother said.
Dorothy did not answer that. She sipped from her glass.
“I take it,” Heimrich said, “that you did not approve of this marriage, Mrs. Selby? Did your daughter tell you about Mr. Jameson’s fishing habits?”
“Yes. I guess so. The old boy didn’t have anything real to do. Never had had. People like that have to make up habits. Things they do regularly.”
Heimrich said he supposed so. He said, “You went up to the Jameson house last night, Mrs. Selby. That’s what we’ve been told, anyway. Rather late in the party. When the party was pretty much ended. To bring her home, I take it?”
“You can take it any way you like.”
Mrs. Selby again drank deeply from her glass. She looked over it at Heimrich.
“Why?”
She shook her head as if the question had no meaning.
“She had stayed overnight at The Tor before,” Heimrich said, and put obvious patience into his voice. “When they worked late on Mr. Jameson’s book. Last night you drove up there to bring her home. But I assume she had her own car. There are two cars in your garage. A Volks and—”
“Circumstances had changed,” she said. “I’d think you’d understand that. Under the new—circumstances—it wouldn’t have been seemly for her to stay overnight there.”
It had been years, Heimrich thought, since he had heard anyone use the word “seemly.” But he nodded his head. He said, “I see, Mrs. Selby.”
“Because,” Mrs. Selby said, “if he felt that way about her, wanting to marry her, she shouldn’t stay there overnight. It wouldn’t look right. Anybody can see that, I’d think.”
“You didn’t approve of your daughter’s marrying Mr. Jameson,” Heimrich said. “You’d told her that, I gather. Merely because you thought he was too old for her?”
“Isn’t that enough? Look at her, Inspector. Just look at her! She’s young. She’s attractive. She’s got her life ahead of her. Arthur Jameson was an old man. A silly old man. In my time, we’d have called him a cradle snatcher.”
Heimrich nodded his head. Jameson was also a rich old man, he thought. “Was that your only reason for opposing your daughter’s marriage, Mrs. Selby?”
“I’d think that was enough. I’d seen what—” She stopped. Heimrich waited. “He was married twice before,” she said. “Janet was a lot younger than he was. So is my daughter. Only more so. Both wives are dead, aren’t they? Well?”
It did not seem to add to anything, in Heimrich’s mind. Apparently it did add to something in Florence Selby’s. He merely shook his head.
“Janet was a friend of mine,” Florence said. “A very dear friend. She was hardly past her middle forties when he let her take that no-good horse. Knowing it was a no-good horse.” She drank what remained in her glass. She got up and started toward the bar. She stopped midway. “Of course,” she said, “she was a great one for doing what she wanted to do. Like Dorothy there. Words just bounced off of her, the way they bounce off Dorothy.”
Heimrich looked at Dorothy Selby. She did not seem to be looking at anything. She lifted her shoulders slightly. She sighed. It was a sigh of resignation.
“Miss Selby,” Heimrich said, “did you know—”
Mrs. Selby turned from the bar. She said, “Just wait until I come back, will you? Before you start to bully the girl?”
The tone was one of command. Heimrich said, “Certainly, Mrs. Selby.” He lighted a cigarette, and made his waiting evident. Mrs. Selby came back, carrying a glass of bourbon on ice. She sat down where she had sat before. She said, “All right. Did she know what?”
“That last night after the party,” Heimrich said, “Mr. Jameson drew up a new will—or signed a new will, anyway. In it, I understand, Miss Selby is his residual legatee. Which means—”
“I know what it means,” Mrs. Selby said. “You think I’m illiterate? Not to Ursula?”
“To Miss Selby,” Heimrich said. “Miss Jameson gets the house and land. From what I understand, Miss Jameson is already a rich woman. Miss Selby, did you know about this bequest? It’s not, as I get it, contingent on your marrying him. I mean, there are no strings attached.”
Dorothy Selby looked at him. She lifted her glass and drank from it.
“Well, girl?” Mrs. Selby said.
Still the girl hesitated. Mrs. Selby said, “Well?” again, in a sharper tone. She said, “Wake up, Dorothy!”
“He said something about it,” Dorothy said, her voice low and the words coming slowly. “I asked him not to. I asked him to wait, anyway, until we were married. I—I thought he had agreed to. You say he actually signed a will saying that?”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “He’d signed a will saying that. Last night. After your mother had—had taken you home. You did take her home, Mrs. Selby?”
“She’s got her own car. She drove back in it. I followed her in mine. She—”
Dorothy interrupted her mother. She said, “You think I killed him, don’t you, Inspector? To get all that money. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
“Now, Miss Selby,” Heimrich said, “I don’t think anything yet.”
Which was truer than he liked to admit to himself.
“Because,” the girl said, “I’m going to get a lot of money now that he’s dead. Because you saw me using a bow and arrow.”
“That’s nonsense, girl,” her mother said, and spoke sharply. “The man’s not a fool. Anyway, you’re not very good at it. Not half as good as I am, for all you’re so much younger. And anyway, you were here all morning.” She turned to Heimrich. “I can tell you that, Inspector. That Volks of hers makes a lot of noise when it starts up. She’d have had to go right under my windows. And—I was awake at about six. At a few minutes after six, actually. The—I guess it was the wind woke me up. Or—”
Heimrich waited.
“All right,” she said. “I was worried about the girl. I couldn’t sleep. That was it.”
Dorothy said, “Oh, Mother.”
“I’d have heard you,” Mrs. Selby said. “You ought to do something about that car, Dorothy. It sounds as if it were falling apart.”
“It’s just a little noisy,” Dorothy said. “It’s perfectly all right.”
“Tomorrow,” Mrs. Selby said, “we’re going to buy you a new one. I won’t have you rattling around in that wreck any more.”
Dorothy said, “Oh, Mother,” in a voice heavy with resignation.
Heimrich stood up. He said, “We’ll be getting along now, Mrs. Selby.”
“That’s all you’re going to ask us?”
“For now,” Heimrich said, “that’s all we’re going to ask you, Mrs. Selby. You both say you didn’t drive up to Jameson’s place this morning and shoot an arrow into him.”
“Did you expect us to say anything else, Inspector?”
“No,” Heimrich said. “I wouldn’t have expected either of you to say anything else.”
“I suppose you’re going to confiscate our bows and arrows?”
Heimrich shook his head. He thought the expression on Florence Selby’s face was one of some disappointment. He walked up the room, and Lieutenant Forniss opened the door for him. He turned in the doorway. “You can tell if a gun has been used recently, Mrs. Selby,” he said. “I don’t see how you could tell about a bow.”
When they were in the Buick, Charles Forniss said, “Phew.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said, “Mrs. Selby is quite somebody, Charlie. Probably bullies a lot of people into buying houses they don’t really want to buy.”
He turned the radio on, tuned to the State Police frequency. It began to babble at them.
“At a percentage,” Charles Forniss said. “She’s in a pretty good line of business, at a guess. The place looks like it.”
Heimrich guided the Buick down the driveway. He said, “No, I don’t think they’re much in need of money, Charlie. But it’s hard to guess what people think they need, naturally. I wonder if the girl’s Volks does make all that racket.”
“Some of them do,” Charlie said and reached out for the radio transmitter because, out of the jumble of cross talk the words, “Car Ten. Car One-oh. Acknowledge, please.”
Charles Forniss said, “Car Ten.”
“Inspector Heimrich to call in, please. Inspector Heimrich to—”
“Message received,” Forniss said. “Over and out.”
They went in search of a telephone which would not jangle with static. They went to the Cold Harbor police station, and Heimrich went into it. He was gone several minutes, and when he came out to the car he came shaking his head.
“Apparently,” he said, when he was back under the wheel, “the bow you found wasn’t the one we want, Charlie. One of the lab boys—one who knows a little about archery, apparently—thought it looked pretty old. Pretty beat up was the way he put it. Tried pulling the bowstring. Pulled it, he says, only a couple of inches before it broke.”
Forniss said, “Mmmm.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said, “according to the lab boy it belongs in a museum. If it belongs anywhere.”
Forniss said, “Mmmm,” again. Then he said, “Seems to me I read somewhere that they sometimes make bows out of steel. Ever hear of that, M. L.?”
“Until today,” Heimrich said, “I can’t remember hearing much of anything about bows. Steel, you say? The bottom of the lake, Charlie?”
Charles Forniss said it could be.
“You waded out to the boat,” Heimrich said. “You and Mr. Rankin. I gather it isn’t a very deep lake?”
“Not as far as I went,” Forniss said. “Only, it was shelving down. Could be it’s a lot deeper twenty-thirty feet out.”
“The bottom, Charlie?”
“Felt soft,” Forniss said. “Squushy.” He paused and lighted a cigarette. “Yep,” he said. “A steel bow probably would sink into it, M. L. If somebody stood on the bank and threw it. You could hurl a steel bow quite a distance, I’d think. If you held onto one end of it and swung.” He paused again. “If you were strong enough,” he said. “This gardener guy, Frankel his name is, is pretty hefty. So is Rankin, come to that. But so’s this cook of theirs.”
“And,” Heimrich said, “it wouldn’t take a hell of a lot of strength. Just a good swing. I suppose we’ll have to drag.”
“A steel-rod sort of thing,” Forniss said, and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. “With a string tied to both ends of it. In the mud. Maybe under the mud, if it hit that way.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said, “we’ll need luck, Charlie. And if we get it, what’ll we get? A steel-rod sort of thing with a string tied to it. You saw that Mrs. Selby was wearing a glove. Maybe they all wear gloves when they’re shooting arrows at targets. Or at people, naturally.”
“The girl wasn’t wearing a glove,” Forniss said. “Not when we saw her.” He shook his head. “If somebody had to kill the old boy,” he said, “why didn’t he use a gun? A bow and arrow, for God’s sake!”
“Guns make a lot of noise,” Heimrich said. “And also maybe a gun wasn’t as handy—”
“Car Ten,” came out of the radio’s mumble. “Car One-oh. Come in, Car Ten.”
Forniss said, “Car Ten, go ahead,” into the transmitter. “Message for—”
And then static took over, blared over words. Forniss turned the radio up. The static went into a roar. He said, “Damn the God-damn thing.”
“Thunderstorm around probably,” Heimrich said. “We’ve had the wind shift.”
They had been cruising up NY 11F, toward The Tor. Heimrich pulled the Buick to the side of the road. He got out of it and Forniss slid across into the driver’s seat. Heimrich went into the rear of the car and pulled the telephone out of the box it lived in. He got the operator, and static. He got the Washington Hollow Barracks. He said, “Inspector Heimrich. You have a message for me? The radio’s conked out.”
He got a renewed blast of static for an answer. There were a few words mixed with the jagged rush of sound. He said, “I can’t read you. Try—”
Suddenly, the static faded out. A voice came through, and the words came through. Heimrich listened to the words. He said, “All right, we’re on our way.” He hung up and went back to the front seat and sat beside Charles Forniss.
“Dr. Tennant has fallen downstairs,” Heimrich said. “The stairs down to the lake. He seems to have landed on his head.”