Susan had flames jumping in the fireplace of the long, low house above the Hudson. She had been sitting in front of the fire reading, and delighting in, S. N. Behrman’s People in a Diary. When she heard the crunch of the Buick’s tires on gravel, she put the book down and went to the door and was there, looking up, when Merton Heimrich opened it. For a second or two she studied his face before he leaned down to kiss her.
“It’s been a long day,” she said. “You need a drink.”
“It has,” Merton said. “I do.” He walked over to the fireplace and stood in front of it and rubbed his hands together. He had had the heater on in the car and his hands were not really cold. The movement of his hands was a symbol; a symbol that summer was over; an acknowledgment that tonight they would not have drinks on the terrace. Tomorrow, if he had time tomorrow, he might as well stow the terrace furniture.
“I’ll—” Merton said but Susan shook her head at him.
“No, I will,” she said. “You’ve had a long Sunday. It would be a good evening for hot buttered rum. Only we haven’t any rum, and I’ve no idea how one butters it.”
Merton sat down in one of the two deep chairs which faced the fire. “There’s something about a hot poker in it, I think,” he said.
“Sounds rather gritty,” Susan said and went into the kitchen to make their martinis. She brought them back and put the tray on the table. She sat beside the big man, who had stretched his legs out, feet toward the fire. They clicked glasses.
They sat for a moment in silence, sipping cold gin and a very little vermouth from chilled glasses with the faint tang of twisted lemon peel rubbed on their edges.
“I can’t get over that bow-and-arrow bit,” Susan said. “It seems so—so archaic. But last night everything did, didn’t it? She’s very ugly, isn’t she?”
When people have been long enough together, transitions become unnecessary.
“Well,” Merton said, “she’s got rather a long nose. Also, she’s been out in the sun a lot. Did you and the Jacksons and Alden finish the last nine?”
“Too blowy, we decided,” Susan told him. “So we had lunch and I came home and did some things around the house. And took a nap, it being Sunday. And, of course, waited.” She sipped from her glass. “I do one hell of a lot of waiting,” she told the glass and the fire. “A while back I hoped—”
She did not finish, or need to. Merton Heimrich knew what she had hoped—that when he became an inspector he would work during set hours, staying at a desk. It had not turned out that way. Heimrich had never thought it would; nor, knowing him, had Susan.
“A man fell down a flight of stairs,” Merton said. “Brick stairs down to a lake. He trusted to a handrail and it came loose in his hand.”
He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and loosened two cigarettes and held the pack out to Susan. She took a cigarette and he took the other, and he lighted both. “We smoke too much,” Susan said, and drew deeply. She said, “An accident? And was he hurt?”
“It looked like being an accident,” Merton told her. “Yes, he was hurt badly. Fractured skull; probable brain damage. He’s still unconscious. Was when I checked last anyway.”
“So if he had something to remember he won’t remember it? Planned that way?”
“I don’t know, dear,” Merton Heimrich told his wife. “We’re just digging around, Charlie and I.”
He finished his drink. Susan moved in her deep chair. “No,” Merton said, “my turn.”
“I thought they were all right,” Susan said. “Almost no vermouth.”
“They were fine,” Merton said, and got up out of the deep chair. “You’ve been playing golf. Building a fire. I’ve been sitting, mostly. Asking questions.”
“There are glasses in the freezing compartment,” Susan said. “You think another log?”
Heimrich looked into the fire. He thought another log wouldn’t do it any harm. He carried the tray into the kitchen and mixed martinis and poured from the mixer into chilled glasses and twisted lemon peel over drinks and rubbed it, gently, around the rims of the glasses. He carried the tray back to the long living room of the house which once had been a barn and put it on the table between them. He put another log in the right place on the fire. He sat and, again, they clicked their glasses together.
“The man who fell downstairs,” Heimrich said, “was a physician. A psychiatrist. He’s a few years older than his wife.”
“You’re a few years older than I am,” Susan said. “It comes out right that way. Not that difference in age has to make a lot of difference, one way or the other. Except—”
She paused and drank. She put her glass down on the table.
“Of course,” she said, “fifty years is a lot of difference. It must have been almost that.”
“Apparently Jameson liked it that way,” Heimrich said. “His second wife was a good deal younger than he was. Not as much, of course, as Dorothy Selby would have been.”
Susan raised her eyebrows and shook her head slightly.
“The girl he was going to marry,” Merton told her.
“Of course,” Susan said. “That child. That poor child.” She sipped again. “I guess,” she said.
“Not in the other sense,” Merton said. “She inherits what may be a great deal of money. From Jameson.”
She said, “Oh.” She said, “Not his sister?”
“The house and the land,” Merton said. “Apparently she’s what they call independently wealthy.”
“It would be nice to be independently wealthy,” Susan told the glass in her hand. “Then I wouldn’t have to wait so much. We could go some place on a ship. One with no murders, I mean.” She looked at him. “You’re waiting for something, aren’t you?” Susan Heimrich said. “Dinner? It’s a casserole, and it’s in the oven.” She sipped again. “On ‘Warm,’” she said.
“Charlie may call,” Merton said.
“And you’ll go out again?”
Heimrich said he shouldn’t think so. He said he thought they were through for the day.
They finished their drinks. They decided against third rounds, Merton after a moment’s hesitation. “We can have it here,” Susan said. “It’s comfortable here. Fires are the one good thing about autumn.”
They had the casserole, which turned out to be a ragout, in front of the fire. They had finished it and little rum cakes and were drinking coffee when the telephone rang. Susan moved in her chair, but Merton was out of his. Susan smiled at the fire and shook her head slightly at it and thought, It’s Charlie Forniss, or he thinks it is. Telephones ringing in their house are usually Susan’s to answer.
Merton said, “Heimrich,” into the telephone and then, “Yes, Charlie?” He listened for a second and said, “No, I didn’t suppose there would be much. Just an accident. One of those things that happen to people who ride horses.”
Heimrich had not been on a horse in several years, although when he was a very young State trooper in western New York horses still were ridden.
“Thing is,” Forniss said, “seems the horse didn’t fall. Just balked a jump in this meadow of theirs. Mrs. Jameson—Janet Jameson, that is—went over its head into a stone wall. Way she tells it, the horse was all right when she rode up. Just munching grass. Mrs. Jameson, though, was dead.”
“She, Charlie? Who was she? And when did this happen?”
“Miss Jameson. Miss Ursula Jameson. Two years ago last spring. The first decent day in a long time, so they decided to go riding. In that meadow the other side of the lake. Part of the Jameson land, the meadow is. The stable was over there, then. Not there any more, M. L. Jameson seems to have had it torn down after his wife was killed. He sold off the horses, including the stallion who refused the jump. He hadn’t ridden much himself for a good many years, the way I get it.”
“He wasn’t riding with his wife that day?”
“Seems he was in New York. Banquet of some Anglo-American outfit. He went in that morning. They had to page him at the dinner to tell him about his wife. The way the trooper got it. The man who checked the accident out. Didn’t check very hard, apparently. Just got the outline. I can’t say I blame him, M. L.”
“All right, Charlie. Tell me what he did get.”
What the trooper had got, almost entirely from Miss Ursula Jameson, was this:
The accident which had taken Janet Jameson’s life had occurred early in the long Memorial Day weekend. Memorial Day had fallen on a Saturday that year: the following Monday, June first, had been the official day for commemoration. Jameson had gone into New York for the dinner a little before midday on Friday. Ursula Jameson and her sister-in-law had been alone in the big house Friday afternoon, except for the servants.
“Not the ones they’ve got there now,” Forniss interjected. “Different set altogether, according to the trooper’s list. Except the Frankels. He’s not what you would call a servant. Caretaker’s more like it.”
“Even Barnes?”
“Yep. Man named Brooks they had then. Seem to run to B’s, don’t they? Of course, The Tor’s a pretty isolated place. Hard to keep a staff in a place like that, I guess. Anyway—”
“So what the trooper got came from Miss Jameson?” Heimrich. said, and got “Yep” for an answer. The “Yep” was modified by “Pretty much, the way it looks.” Heimrich said, “Go ahead, Charlie.”
In late afternoon of that Friday, Janet Jameson had said that, since it was the first nice day they’d had in a month, she thought she’d go riding and asked Ursula if she wanted to come along.
“We’d felt cooped up,” Ursula Jameson had told the trooper who was conducting routine enquiries. She had told Frankel, who was working in the garden, to row across and saddle the horses—Alphonse for Janet, and her mare.
“Alphonse?” Heimrich said.
Forniss agreed it was a funny name for a stallion, but there it was. And the mare’s name was Ophelia.
Frankel had rowed across the lake and saddled the two horses and tethered them. He had rowed back and returned to his gardening. Ursula and Janet had driven Over to the stable.
Heimrich said, “Driven, Charlie? Across the lake?”
There was another way to the stable, in which the Jamesons then had four horses, and the ten-acre meadow which surrounded them. A town road led off NY 11F about a mile south of The Tor. It passed the Jameson property on the far side. A private road led off it, to the stable and the big meadow; towards the lake. Since the private road was unpaved and it was still spring, they had gone in the Jeep. They had not planned to stay long because “the others were coming up.”
“The others, Charlie?”
“The Tennants. The old man’s son. They were due for dinner, the way the trooper got it. Up for the weekend. Anyway—”
The two women had driven around to the stable and found their horses saddled and tethered. According to Ursula Jameson, they had mounted at about four-thirty.
“The trooper got that verbatim,” Forniss said. “One of the few things he did. Want I should read it?”
“Yes, Charlie.”
“So she said, ‘It had been a wet April and the grass was already pretty high. There’s a bridle path which more or less circles the meadow, and Frankel keeps it fairly clean. Frankel exercises the horses, but he hadn’t got around to it for about a week, and they were frisky. Particularly Alphonse, of course. My brother never liked Janet’s riding him, but she had her own way. Mostly she did, actually. The mare was a little jumpy too, and I kept to the path. Janet—well, Janet liked to jump. So did her horse, come to that.
“‘She rode off up the rise and then down on the other side, and I knew she was headed toward the stone fence. Yes, it runs between the main pasture and the second pasture beyond. It’s always been there, as far as I know. In our grandfather’s time they were still farming, I suppose, and the fence was to divide the fields. It’s an easy jump. A few years ago I used to take it often. Too old for it now.
“‘Anyway, she went up the rise and down on the other side. The mare wanted to follow Alphonse, but I wouldn’t let her. I just jogged along on the path. Later I heard a loud whinny from beyond the rise—a scream, almost. The way they sound when they’re frightened. It worried me, so I rode over. Yes, up the rise, until I could look down toward the wall. And—do I have to tell about it, Trooper?’”
Apparently the trooper had asked her to tell about it.
“‘The horse was standing on the near side of the wall. Janet wasn’t on him. Then I saw where he had torn up the turf with his hooves. This side of the fence. And then—then I saw Janet. She was lying with her head against the stone fence and she wasn’t moving. I rode down and—and her head was crushed against the wall. I got down and ran to her but—but even before I got to her I knew it was no use. Knew she was dead. So—I don’t remember at all well. You can see I wouldn’t. I think I thought of rowing back across the lake, but then I remembered the boat would be on the other side. So I must have ridden back to the stable and driven around in the Jeep. I—I can’t tell you any more, Trooper. Don’t you see that?’
“That’s the verbatim,” Forniss said. “According to what Frankel told the trooper, she came up the drive damn fast in the Jeep and stopped it and jumped out, and then, Frankel says, she began to scream. Jameson’s son had just got to the house, and she told them what had happened. Frankel and the son started telephoning for help. Called the local police in Cold Harbor, and they got onto us. Called the hospital for an ambulance. Called the sheriff’s office too, come to that. When they all got there, it was the way Miss Jameson had said. Her horse was still saddled and loose. So was the stallion. Stallion wasn’t hurt. Both the horses were eating grass, one near the stable, the other near the stone fence. Mrs. Jameson was dead. Head all bashed in. They got hold of Jameson, but it took them quite a while. His son did that. The Tennants showed up a little later, according to what the troopers got. Jameson had gone in by train. He hired a car to come back. Didn’t get there until around ten. About the size of it, M. L.”
Heimrich said, “Mmmm.” For some seconds he said nothing more. Then he said, “Frankel rowed across and saddled the horses. Then he rowed back and tied up the boat. Did he see the two women take off in the Jeep?”
“Nothing about that in the report, M. L. Like I said, obvious accident. They—well, they just went through the routine. You think that wasn’t enough?”
“Now, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know, naturally. Probably seemed like enough at the time, anyway. We’ll maybe try to check more tomorrow. You may as well knock it off. Get yourself some sleep.”
Forniss said, “O.K., M. L.,” and hung up. Heimrich stood, looking down at the telephone.
“Do you have to go out again tonight?” Susan asked him from across the room.
For some seconds, Merton continued merely to look at the telephone. Then he said, “No. Not tonight,” but he still stood by the telephone. Then he dialed a number with which the day had made him familiar. After three rings he got, “The Tor.” He knew the voice. He said, “Heimrich, Barnes. I’d like to speak to Mr. Rankin.”
“They’re having dinner, sir. Miss Jameson and Mr. Jameson and Mr. Rankin.”
“Tell Mr. Rankin I won’t keep him long,” Heimrich said and got an agreeing “Sir.” He waited. After several minutes, he got, “Evening, Inspector. You wanted to talk to me?”
“Just to ask you how you found Miss Selby this afternoon. When you drove over to see her.”
“And you had me followed,” Rankin said. “Rather obviously. You might tell that trooper of yours that the lilac bush isn’t all that good a cover.”
“All right,” Heimrich said. “I’ll tell him. How did you find Miss Selby on your—call it sympathy call?”
“Doing as well as can be expected.”
Heimrich sighed. He made his sigh highly audible.
“All right,” Rankin said. “She’s shaken up, of course. She’ll survive it.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Heimrich said. “You consoled her?”
“Tried to, I suppose. You’re reading things in, aren’t you, Inspector? Things I told you weren’t there? She’s a cousin of mine, after all. Family, you could call it.”
“A distant cousin, you said,” Heimrich told him. “Let’s see. It was you yourself who said—what was it?—not within the bounds of consanguinity. Something like that, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t remember, Inspector. Perhaps something like that. Mrs. Selby and my mother were second cousins, I think. Something like that. Which makes Dot and me—well, you figure it out, Inspector. No closer than—oh, than Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, at a guess.”
Heimrich said he saw. He said, “But you did drive over to see her. Felt a duty to a distant relative, Mr. Rankin?”
“We are friends,” Rankin said. “I told you that, too. A few years ago we saw a bit of each other. When she was—oh, about twenty. I took her around a little. She was a damn pretty kid.”
“She still is,” Heimrich said. “A very attractive young woman.”
“So?”
“So nothing in particular,” Heimrich said. “You haven’t seen so much of her recently, I gather. For about how long, would say? That you haven’t seen so much of each other, I mean?”
“A few years,” Rankin said. “Three maybe. Maybe four.”
“Since she started working for Mr. Jameson? As his secretary?”
“Nothing to do with it,” Rankin said. His voice had sharpened. “Nothing to do with anything.”
“All right,” Heimrich said. “I didn’t say it had, Mr. Rankin. Happen to know how long she’s been acting as Mr. Jameson’s secretary?”
“About three—” He. stopped speaking. “Why don’t you ask her that, Inspector?”
“Because, as you say, she’s shaken up. Naturally. We try not to bother people who are—are grieving for somebody. If we can avoid it, of course. Went to work with Mr. Jameson before his second wife had her riding accident, would you say? Her fatal accident?”
“Listen,” Rankin said, “I don’t know anything about the Jamesons. Oh, that Jameson’s previous wife was killed in an accident. Dot told me about that, I think. Just—oh, just in passing. All that I know about the Jamesons is that you’re forcing me to be a guest of theirs. Making me impose on Miss Jameson.”
“Not forcing,” Heimrich said. “Just asking, Mr. Rankin. Asking you to stay around until things get cleared up a little.”
“And how long’s that going to be?”
“Not too long, I hope. Perhaps not long at all. Good night, Mr. Rankin.”
He hung up and went back to his chair by the fire.
“There’s an old movie on at nine-thirty,” Susan said. “One we’ve only seen twice. Well, maybe three times actually. It might be relaxing. Nobody gets killed in it, far’s I can remember.”
“I think small brandies would be even more relaxing,” Heimrich said. “There’s a poem you’ve said to me. I thought of it today. I’ve forgotten why. Something about something’s being tidy?”
“‘It was all very tidy,’” Susan said. “Death’s house, Merton. Robert Graves.”
Merton Heimrich nodded his head and said that, of course, he remembered now. He went off to get them small brandies.
The wind had died down Monday morning and the sun was shining. There had not been a frost overnight. The flowers in Susan’s garden were still alive, although, Merton Heimrich thought as he backed the Buick out of the garage, they looked a little daunted. He got to the headquarters of Troop K in Washington Hollow at about nine-thirty. Charles Forniss was already there; he had got the necessary routine started.
Geoffrey Rankin was listed in the Manhattan telephone directory as “lwyr.” His office address was in the East Fifties. His “Res” was farther east, in the Sixties. A “good” address, by which was meant the address of somebody reasonably prosperous. Only his name was listed at the office address, so presumably he was not a member of a law firm. The New York City police were checking.
Forniss, who knows somebody almost everywhere, knew a man connected with the advertising business in New York. He had waked up the man he knew in his apartment—waked up the man and his wife—and the man had said, “What the hell at this hour, Charlie.” It had not, however, been all that early.
He didn’t know Ronald Jameson. Not personally. Oh, maybe he’d run into him once or twice. At the Advertising Club, it could be. Sure, he knew the firm of Jameson and Perkins by reputation. Not one of the biggest, but one that was getting along all right. “Hell, Charlie, they’ve got the Froth Soap account. Had it for a couple of years, anyway. And Froth Soap isn’t hay, Charles my friend.”
James Tennant, M.D., was a psychiatrist and neurologist. He belonged to several of the appropriate psychiatric and neurological societies. He had graduated in Medicine at Duke University’s medical school and interned at the Duke University Hospital. He had interned in neurology at Johns Hopkins and in psychiatry at Harvard. “Highly qualified man.”
The assurance of his qualification had come from Isadore Werkes, M.D., also a psychiatrist and neurologist, sometime consultant to the Office of the District Attorney, County of New York, and himself also highly qualified. Dr. Werkes knew Dr. Tennant only slightly; he knew of him very well, as did all physicians in their joint field. Dr. Werkes had declined to speculate on Dr. Tennant’s probable income but assumed that it was adequate. Dr. Tennant was accredited to New York Hospital, Doctors Hospital and St. Vincent’s.
Dr. Frank Wenning, who at present was presumably trying to determine the extent of Dr. Tennant’s head injuries, was a neural surgeon. “One of the top men in the field,” Dr. Werkes had said. He belonged to several surgical societies, including the one Dr. Werkes thought the most important among the Eastern societies.
Forniss did not know anybody in Cold Harbor, but the chief of Cold Harbor’s small police force knew Mrs. Florence Selby. And Mrs. Selby was quite a girl. She had taken over her husband’s realestate business when he died. “Probably been running it all along, come to that.”
She made “damn near half” of the real-estate sales in that part of Putnam County. She was on the school board. She was a member of the Republican county committee. “Solid citizen, Lieutenant. They don’t come much solider.”
As far as the chief of police of Cold Harbor, New York, knew, Dorothy Selby was a damn nice girl. Near the top of her graduating class at the Cold Harbor High School. Seemed to remember she’d been editor, or maybe just one of the editors, of the school annual. Gone to college for a while anyway. He didn’t remember where, if he’d ever known. Went later to a secretarial school. Something like that. “Hey!”
Forniss had waited out the “Hey.”
“Seems to me I heard she’s been working for Arthur Jameson. Secretary or something like that. The guy who got killed yesterday. I’ll be damned!”
“Yes,” Charles Forniss said, “Mr. Jameson did get killed yesterday, Chief. We’re just checking around on everybody connected with him. You know how it is, Chief.”
The chief of police said he sure as hell knew how it was. Charles Forniss felt, but did not express, disbelief and thanked the chief of police and hung up.
He told Heimrich this in Heimrich’s office, which was as large as the office he had had at Hawthorne, where, Susan had vainly hoped, he would spend more time during more regular hours.
“All right, Charlie,” Heimrich said, “we’d better go down and have a look at this meadow of the Jamesons’, don’t you think?”
Forniss said, “Maybe so, M. L.,” and they drove southwest on US 44 in Heimrich’s Buick, and on down NY 11F past The Tor’s gateposts.
“This ought to be it,” Forniss said, when they came to a blacktop road that branched to the left from the highway a mile or so below The Tor. They turned left onto the blacktop. For about half a mile the blacktop ran straight. Then it veered to the left and ran along a ridge—must, Heimrich thought, be running more or less parallel to the numbered highway they had quitted.
“Ought to be along here somewhere,” Forniss said. “There’s the house, anyway.”
The Tor jutted across the valley on its high hill. The lake glittered in the morning sun. Now, as they crept along the blacktop, there was a steel mesh fence on their left. For some distance there was no break in the fence. Then there was a gap in it, with stone pillars on either side and a gate of the same steel mesh between them. The gate was closed.
“Pretty much got to be it,” Forniss said, as Heimrich turned the car and headed it toward the gate, following tracks in grass. He stopped the car and Forniss got out of it. He said, “Let’s hope it isn’t locked,” and went up to the gate. It was not locked, and Forniss pushed it open. Heimrich drove the Buick beyond the gate and stopped it, and Forniss closed the gate, which held on a catch, and got back into the car.
Ahead of them were only tracks through the stubble of a mowed field. But the tracks were clear enough. They led down steeply and then up again on a hill. Bisecting the tracks were traces of pine bark, leading away to the north and to the south, lying in the hollow between hills.
“Haying road, looks like,” Heimrich said. “Seem to have hayed twice this year. The pine bark—what’s left of a bridle path, wouldn’t you think, Charlie?”
“Yep,” Forniss said. “Looks like, M. L.”
The Buick followed the tracks, down the slope, up the rise. It stopped at the top of the rise.
They looked down on the lake. It was, from this angle, long and quite narrow. Where the spit of land jutted from the opposite side to this, the meadow side, the distance was not more than a hundred and fifty yards, Heimrich thought. The boat was tied up to the pier on the far side. It bobbed innocently in the moving water. Directly across from it, below them on the meadow side, there was a similar pier of planks.
They got out of the car and followed the tracks down toward the lake. After about fifty feet, Heimrich stopped and pointed to his right. “That’s the fence the horse balked, probably,” he said.
The fence was of dry stone and about three feet high. There was a gap in it off to the road side. The gap was fairly wide. “For the mower and baler and trucks,” Heimrich said. Beyond the fence there was a second field, also standing in stubble. It seemed to be rougher than the field they stood in. The steel fence which ran along the blacktop continued beyond the fence, cutting off the second field from trespass. It ran up a rise and disappeared over it.
“Had the stable pulled down after his wife was killed, after he sold the horses,” Heimrich said. “Don’t see any sign of it, do you, Charlie?”
Neither of them did. Then Forniss said, “Could have been over there,” and pointed to an area near the lake where the grass still grew high and still was green; where it formed a kind of oasis in the stubble. They walked downhill toward it. They went through the tall grass and stopped.
There was a large, rectangular excavation in the grass. It had once been walled with stone; some of the stone had fallen away from the sides and lay in the bottom of the excavation. There were daisies blooming in the excavation. They didn’t, Heimrich thought, know how close winter was coming.
“Sizable stable,” Heimrich said. “Did a thorough job of tearing it down, didn’t they?”
The grass grew high around the excavation because the mowers had carefully avoided falling into it.
Beyond the excavation the land sloped down to the lake, which was only a hundred feet or so from it.
“Think they’d have had a drainage problem,” Heimrich said. “Probably ditched it away. Handy to the boat dock, though. Thought they were going to be dragging the lake again this morning, Charlie.”
Forniss said, “Yep. So did I. Could be they’ve finished, I suppose.”
They walked down to the plank pier and out on it. Like the pier on the opposite side, this one was made of two heavy planks, supported on piles. Heimrich mentioned his guess at the distance between this pier and the other one—the one at the foot of the precipitous flight of brick stairs—to Forniss, who said, “A hundred and fifty at the most, I’d say. Take only a few minutes to row across it.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Wonder why they didn’t just row across instead of going the long way round in the Jeep? Taking the chance of getting mired on this haying road. If you call it a road.”
“Jeeps don’t get mired much,” Forniss said. “Maybe the old girls didn’t like those damned stairs.”
“Mrs. Jameson wasn’t all that old,” Heimrich said. “Late forties, I take it. And athletic. Liked to ride and jump her horse. Probably her sister-in-law’s decision.”
They walked back up the rise toward the Buick. They drove back toward the gate, and Forniss got out to open it. Heimrich got out, too, and looked back the way they had driven.
The rise in the land cut off his view of the lake and of the meadow beyond the rise. Even on a horse, he thought, Ursula Jameson could not have seen over it. Beyond the rise, Janet Jameson, even on her own horse, would have been invisible. As, of course, Ursula Jameson had said.
With the wind in the right direction, as it probably had been since the day was nice that spring of two and a half years ago, Ursula probably could have heard a horse whinny—“scream, almost. The way they sound when they’re frightened.” West winds bring pleasant days in the spring.
They drove the roundabout way back to The Tor.