We were discussing unsolved murders, the Baron de Hirsch, Lieutenant Oliver Baynes of the State Police, and I. At least, de Hirsch was discussing them. Baynes and I were allowed only to listen while the tall, hawk-nosed Hungarian, with scintillating deduction and impeccable logic solved half a dozen famous cases which remain in the files of various police departments, still marked “Open.”
De Hirsch can be a very irritating companion. His self-assurance is colossal, and his appreciation of his own cleverness is unconcealed. I am always tempted to ask him why, if he’s so smart, his shoes always need repairing and his clothes mending. But I never do.
I could see Oliver Baynes getting restless. Baynes is short and dumpy, red-faced, slow-spoken and unimpressive. But he’s a good cop—one of the best.
He drained his glass of beer—it was a hot August afternoon—and as he reached for another can, looked across at me. “Get your friend to solve the case of the blonde blackmailer for us,” he said, the sarcasm in the remark hidden behind a completely blank countenance.
De Hirsch paused. His deep-set black eyes glinted; his large, beaked nose flared.
“The case of the blonde blackmailer?” he asked, softly, politely.
“Her name was Marianne Montrose.” Baynes used the can opener and got foam on his sleeve. “Last February 13th, between three and four in the afternoon, she walked up twenty-three snow covered steps to a house on a hilltop about thirty miles from here. She went into that house and never came out again.”
Baynes poured the beer, slurped the head off his glass.
“Later, we searched the house and she wasn’t there. There was snow two feet deep all around the house. There wasn’t a mark in it to show she had been taken away in any manner. Besides, the owner and only resident is a man with a heart condition, who could be killed by any exertion. So he didn’t carry her away or dig a hole and bury her or anything like that. But she wasn’t there, and she was seen to enter, and her footsteps went up in the snow on the steps. Went up and never came down again. You tell us what happened to her.”
De Hirsch’s eyes held steady on Baynes. “Give me the facts,” he said, “and I will.”
He didn’t say he’d try, he said he would.
“I’ll get my dope sheets,” I told him, nettled. “It’ll be nice to know the truth. Besides, I’ll get another article out of it.”
Baynes sipped his beer and said nothing, merely looked sleepy. De Hirsch poured himself another generous helping of brandy—my brandy, for we had gathered at my summer cottage.
I went to my files and brought back the folder on Marianne Montrose. It was pretty complete. As a true-crime writer for the popular magazines, I kept detailed notes on every case I use. I had already written this one up, giving it the Big Question Mark or “What Happened to Lovely Marianne?” treatment.
“Where do you want to start?” I asked. “Here’s the statement of young Danny Gresham, the last person who spoke to Marianne before she went into the house and vanished.”
De Hirsch waved away the typescript.
“Read it to me,” he said, his manner gracious.
Oliver Baynes made a noise through his nose. He might have been laughing. I glared at him and began to read:
Morgan’s Gap, Feb. 3.
From statement by Daniel Gresham, 19.
“I was in the office of the Morgan’s Gap Weekly Sentinel, reading proof. It was half past three. The temperature outside was about eight above zero, I guess, maybe six. It was a nice brisk day. I was thinking of calling up my girl, Dolly Hansome, and making a date to go skiing. The snow was nice and deep, with a good crust on it, and some fresh snow on top. While I was thinking about Dolly, a snappy blue coupe pulled to a stop outside.
There was a girl driving. She looked like Dolly Hansome, but taller and better developed—more womanly, that is. She had blonde hair, long, and curly under a red cap and was wearing a red ski suit. She got out and stood looking across the valley and up the slope toward Mr. Mark Hillyer the mystery writer’s house. The Eyrie, Mr. Hillyer calls it, that means nest. It’s a very good name for it, the way it perches all by itself on top of the ridge.
You might think it was a funny place for a man with a bad heart to live all by himself. In the summer you can drive right around and up to the back of the house where the terrace is, but in the winter the town only cleans the road up to the steps out in front.
That means that Mr. Hillyer never leaves the house after the first big snow, but he doesn’t seem to care. In the fall he puts in three thousand gallons of fuel oil and a big stock of canned goods and he’s all set. Every day Mrs. Hoff goes up to cook and clean. She doesn’t mind the steps and neither does her brother-in-law, Sam. He keeps the steps swept, and clears off the north terrace.
Mr. Hillyer likes to be alone. He doesn’t care for people. He’s a tall, thin man with a long, disappointed face and a sharp way of saying things. He’s written twelve mystery books and has a lot of clippings and reviews. He’s especially proud of the ones that mention how clever his plots are. He hasn’t written any new books for five years, though. I guess he’s discouraged because the ones he did before never sold very well.
Oh, sure, about the girl.
She stood looking up at the house, then turned and came in the office. I jumped up to help her. She smiled and said hello. Her voice was low and husky and sort of gave you a tingly feeling, if you know what I mean. She asked if I was the editor. I said I was the assistant. Then she asked if she could use the phone. I said sure, of course, certainly, and handed it to her. She asked for Mark Hillyer’s number. I couldn’t help hearing what she said. Sure I remember the words, just about.
“‘Hello, Mark,’ she said, and her voice was different now. ‘This is Marianne. I’m phoning from the village. I trust you’re expecting me and, Mark, darling—just in case you might have been getting any funny ideas in that clever brain of yours—they know here at the newspaper office I’m coming up to see you. I’ll be up in ten minutes.’”
She hung up and smiled at me, and her voice was back again the way it had been.
“Mark Hillyer doesn’t like me,” she said. “And he’s a very, very clever man. I do think he would kill me if he could get away with it. But he can’t. Just the same, if I’m not back here in an hour, you’ll send the police up to look for me, won’t you? I’ll stop on my way back, just to let you know I’m all right.”
And she smiled at me again and naturally I said sure, of course, I’d get Constable Redman to come up and look for her. I was pretty thrilled; it was sort of like a scene out of one of Mr. Hillyer’s books. Of course, I didn’t think she really meant what she’d said. But when she drove off, I went to the window to watch her.
She drove away, and a minute later I saw her car starting up the road that winds around to get to Mr. Hillyer’s Eyrie. A lot of kids were out on the lower slope with skis and sleds and these new aluminum bowls having a swell time sliding all over the place. I thought of calling Dolly again, but somehow I didn’t feel as interested as I had just a couple of minutes earlier.
I saw the convertible reach the turnaround at the foot of the steps to Hillyer’s house—the snow plows clear it out. The girl parked the car and got out. She started up that flight of steps. I saw her reach Mr. Hillyer’s little front porch. The door opened. She went in and the door closed.
I kept an eye on Mr. Hillyer’s house all the rest of the afternoon as I worked, until it got dark. But the girl never came out again.”
End of statement by Daniel Gresham.
I paused and glanced at de Hirsch. He sat back, his head cradled on the back of the chair, staring upward at my ceiling.
“A most interesting opening for a murder case,” he said tolerantly, looking at me. “Naturally, any theory I have at this point must be completely tentative. Please continue.”
I read:
Morgan’s Gap, Feb. 14.
From statement by Constable Harvey Redman.
“At about five-thirty yesterday young Danny Gresham came busting into my office, saying a pretty girl had gone up to see Mr. Mark Hillyer and might be in danger. At first I thought it was more of his imagination, but he gave me all the facts and I figured maybe we’d better go see. Anybody who writes books like Hillyer does might just as easy kill someone for real.
I got flashlights and we went in my old car. We got to Hillyer’s place just about six. Sure enough, there was Miss Montrose’s convertible still parked in the turnaround. And Danny showed me a woman’s prints in the drifted snow on the steps.
There was one set of prints going up.
None coming down.
So he was right about her still being there, anyway.
We climbed up, stepping wide of the prints, and knocked. Mr. Hillyer let us in, looking surprised. I told him what the woman had told Danny, and asked where Miss Montrose was. Mr. Hillyer laughed.
‘I’m afraid Miss Montrose is having a joke on you and Danny,’ he said. ‘She left here an hour ago, just about dark.’
‘Mr. Hillyer,’ I told him, ‘there’s a woman’s footprints coming up your steps and none going down. Besides, her car is still there.’
‘By George, that’s odd!’ Mr. Hillyer said, but he said it as if he were laughing.
‘That’s what I think,’ I told him. ‘That’s why I’m asking where the lady is.’
‘But I don’t know where she is,’ he said, looking me in the eye. ‘Constable, I’ll be frank with you. That girl is a blackmailer.
‘She came here today to collect a thousand dollars from me. I paid it. Then she left. And that’s absolutely all I know. I insist that you search this house to see if you find any trace of her or evidence that I did anything to her. All I want is to be in the clear.’
Danny and I searched the house. Mr. Hillyer sat in his chair by the fireplace in his writing den, smoking and waiting.
The house was easy to reach, being only six rooms on one floor. No cellar, no attic. Oil burner’s in a little closet. Floors are cement. Walls are double cinderblock with insulation in between.
The girl wasn’t in the house. No trace she’d ever been there, either. No signs of a struggle, no bloodstains.
Danny and I went outside. There weren’t any marks in the snow around the house. The north terrace had been shoveled off, but the snow had drifted right up to it and there was a light sprinkle of snow on the tiles. No marks in it at all. That didn’t mean an awful lot, though, because the drifts went all the way down the slope to Harrison’s Gully, a quarter mile away almost. There’s usually a breeze coming up from the gully and it would lay more snow on the terrace pretty quick.
Danny tried the crust, though, and broke right through, after only a step. Nobody could have gone over that snow without leaving marks. Besides, Mr. Hillyer’s heart would have killed him if he’d tried.
So, after we looked in the garage and searched the car and especially the trunk without finding her, we told Mr. Hillyer it looked like Miss Montrose had left all right.
‘I’m glad you’re satisfied I’m not hiding her, constable,’ he chuckled. ‘In spite of the story she gave Danny, and in spite of her footprints coming only toward the house and her car still being there, it’s perfectly obvious I couldn’t have killed her and hidden her body—unless of course I carried it away over a glass bridge.’
I told him I didn’t follow that.
‘Why, constable,’ he said, ‘I guess you don’t know your mystery fiction. One of the most famous stories is about a man who’s killed by a glass knife. Then the murderer drops the weapon in a pitcher of water and it becomes invisible and nobody can find it. So maybe I killed Miss Montrose and carried her away over a glass bridge—one that’s invisible now. Or I have another theory for you. Maybe a flying saucer came down and whisked her away. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I imagine that’s what must have happened.’
‘I don’t guess you’re taking this very seriously, Mr. Hillyer,’ I told him. ‘But I am and I’m going to call in the State Police.’
So I did. Let them decide where that girl went. I got other things to bother about right now.”
End of statement by Constable Harvey Redman.
I stopped reading. My throat was dry. I poured myself some beer. De Hirsch opened his eyes.
“Admirably complete,” he said kindly. “You’re a good researcher, even if you haven’t much imagination.” He turned to Baynes. “I suppose you took over the case then, Lieutenant?”
“Yeah,” Baynes grunted, eyeing him. “But not until Troopers Reynolds and Rivkin had answered the constable’s call. They made a search. Same results. Then the case got dumped in my lap. I get all the screwy cases. I went out the next day. But questioning Hillyer was like asking the cat what happened to the canary. He talked about the blackmail angle, though. Said he’d made a slip years ago, and Montrose knew about it. Since then he’d been paying her off a thousand dollars a year. Every year, when she happened to be near, she’d let him know she was coming over in a day or two and he’d get the thousand ready in cash for her.
“I checked with New York. She was in the racket, all right. So his story was probably true. I checked the local bank, too. They’d mailed him ten hundreds, just three days before.
“I looked around the house. Just like the constable and my troopers said. Crusty snow, but not strong enough to hold up a man. Even skis left marks. Maybe a toboggan wouldn’t.
“Trouble was, he’d never had anything like a toboggan, or even skis or a sled, in the house. Mrs. Hoff had cleaned that morning and even gone into the garage to get her cleaning things. She’d have seen anything as big as a toboggan, and she swore the whole idea was just a pipe dream. And he couldn’t have ordered one special by phone because it would have to be delivered, and nobody had delivered anything but food or mail there for weeks. I checked.
“I didn’t have anything to take its place, though. The girl had to go somewhere! I got four troopers who could ski, and set them to covering all the region around the house. They covered everything within a quarter of a mile, including a couple of small dips and gullies, and didn’t find a trace of her or of any tracks in the snow. Then it started snowing again, and I had to call the search off. But I’d made sure she wasn’t any place where she could be found.
“Hillyer enjoyed every minute of it. He enjoyed giving interviews and he posed for pictures. He passed out autographed copies of his books to the feature writers. He looked ten years younger all of a sudden; he was having so much fun.
“He passed out plenty of double talk about the mystery of it all. He quoted this guy Charles Fort, who wrote about mysterious disappearances. He talked about spontaneous vanishment, and warps in the space-time continuum, and abduction by little green men in flying saucers. He had the time of his life.
“So, finally, we had to table the case. Absolutely all we really knew was what we knew to begin with. A girl walked up those steps into his house and just vanished. So we sat back to wait for new developments. Then came June.”
Oliver Baynes paused to finish his beer.
De Hirsch nodded his great, Roman head. “And in June,” he said, “the body was found.”
Baynes looked at him in surprise.
“Yes,” he agreed. “In June, Marianne Montrose stopped being one kind of mystery and became another kind of mystery. You see—”
But de Hirsch had raised a restraining hand.
“Let Bob read it,” he suggested. “I know he has it written out, in a fine, dramatic style. And sometimes I find a certain pleasure in his prose.”
So I read:
Morgan’s Gap, June 3.
Based upon statements by Willy Johnson, 11, and Ferdie Pulver, 10.
The two boys stopped beside the deeply blue pool, no more than thirty yards across. They were in a long, narrow depression with almost sheer sides fifty feet high. It ran for three hundred yards to a rocky ledge where a small waterfall emptied into the natural trap and flowed down to make the pool at their feet. The pool in turn emptied out through a narrow throat in the rock, just wide enough for a small boy to negotiate, too narrow to admit an adult.
Willows and alders, green with new leaves, stretched upward toward the sunlight. Redwing blackbirds darted in and out, and high overhead crows soared on black pinions. A chipmunk, unafraid, chattered at the boys from a branch.
They were barefoot, their shoes in their hands, and the water was icy cold. But, entranced by the secret little world of the gully, they hardly noticed the water’s temperature.
“Gee!” Ferdie said. “This is swell. Let’s bring a gang and play pirates, huh?”
“Pirates!” Willy sniffed. “Fishin’ is more fun. C’mon, throw in your hook.”
He thrust a reluctant worm onto the hook of a handline and tossed it into the pool. It rippled in the green water and sank from sight. He waited all of thirty seconds, then impatiently jerked it.
“Gosh!” he shouted. “I caught something…aw, heck, it’s snagged.”
He pulled hard. The line came in, slowly, with an almost unyielding dead weight. Ferdie wasn’t paying any attention. He was staring up the gully to where a small fragment of something white dangled from a silver green willow.
“What’s that?” he asked nervously. “You thinkin’ it’s a ghost, huh, Willy?”
“Heck, no.” Willy didn’t even look. He was gasping as he tugged in his line. “Gee, I got a big branch of somethin’…”
Something dark and red surged upward to the surface, and broke the water with a slow swirling motion. Then the awkward mass turned over and a pale, oval face appeared, surrounded by a halo of golden hair that rippled in the water with a life of its own.
“Jeez!” Willy shrilled. “It’s a deader! C’mon, Ferdie, let’s get out of here!”
Behind them, as their yells died out in the distance, the pale face and golden hair seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if waiting. Then they sank slowly back into the dark, quiet depths from which they had come…
“Well,” Oliver Baynes took up the narration as de Hirsch helped himself to more of my brandy—finished the bottle, incidentally, “Willy’s parents called the constable, and the constable called me. A couple of hours later, half a dozen of us got out up at Mark Hillyer’s house. The only decent way to reach the gully without doing mountain climbing was to go down through Hillyer’s property. He was perfectly agreeable, and when we told him what we were up to, he only seemed interested.
“‘If you find her,’ he said, ‘look in the pocket of her ski suit. She had a thousand dollars of mine when she left, and I shall put in a claim for it.’
“We reached the gully, over some very rough ground, and lowered in on ropes. Then we started grappling for the body. We found it inside of twenty minutes. As it came up, Danny Gresham—who was with us—gave a yell.
“That’s her! But how’d she get here so far from the house? She might have flown!”
“She looked well preserved—that water was almost ice cold. She had ten hundred-dollar bills in her ski suit pocket, too. We grappled some more, and finally came up with her ski cap and one mitten. I left the men grappling, and made a search of the gully myself. Outside of a few old beer bottles and some tin cans, there wasn’t a thing that shouldn’t have been there.
“We grappled in that pool all day. I was still hoping to find a toboggan or something, but we never did. Nothing. There was the body, a quarter mile from the house, and no clues as to how it got there.
“We lifted the body out and had an autopsy. She’d died of cold and exposure. Stomach was empty—no telling how long after her last meal she’d died. No trace of poison in tissues.”
Oliver Baynes looked challengingly at de Hirsch.
“Well,” he said, “there’s your case of the blonde blackmailer. Now let’s hear you explain it without any double-talk about spontaneous vanishment, warps in the space-time continuum, glass bridges, and flying saucers.”
My Hungarian friend put his finger tips together, making a steeple of his hands.
“I can’t,” he said blandly. And as a look of guarded triumph appeared on Baynes’ red features, de Hirsch added, “without mentioning the glass bridge, the flying saucer, and above all the winding sheet.”
“Oh, sure!” Lieutenant Baynes looked disgusted. “Give us some more jabberwocky and admit you don’t know what happened to that girl!”
“But I can’t do that,” de Hirsch objected, giving Baynes a pleasant look. “Because, you see, I know what happened to her. At least, I will know when you add the one item you have left out of your narration.”
“Left out?” Baynes blinked.
“The white object Ferdie Pulver thought might be a ghost,” de Hirsch said.
“Oh, that!” Baynes shrugged. “That was just an old, tattered bedsheet tangled in the branches of the willow trees. Had Hillyer’s laundry mark. He said it must have blown off the clothesline during a windy spell in the spring. It didn’t mean a thing. We had experts go over it, practically thread by thread. Just an old bedsheet.”
“Not a bedsheet,” de Hirsch murmured in gentle correction. “A winding sheet. Thus it is as I said—a glass bridge, a flying saucer, and a winding sheet. Don’t you see, in the arrogance of his pride in his own intellect, Hillyer told you the truth! He gave you all the clues. At least, he gave them to Constable Redman, and they were in the constable’s statement. He killed Marianne Montrose, and whisked her away in a flying saucer over a glass bridge to nowhere—which is to say, eternity.”
Baynes chewed his under lip. He stared at de Hirsch, puzzled. So did I. It was exactly the situation de Hirsch enjoyed most—when he could dispense bafflement in the guise of enlightenment.
Slowly Baynes reached into his pocket. He took out a wallet. From the wallet he took a twenty-dollar bill.
“Twenty dollars say you’re just double-talking, like Hillyer,” he stated flatly.
De Hirsch’s eye brightened. Then he sighed and shook his head.
“No,” he murmured. “We are both guests of an old and valued friend. It would not be the act of a gentleman to take money from another guest on such a simple matter.”
Now Baynes gritted his teeth. He took two more bills from his wallet.
“Fifty dollars say you don’t know any more than we do,” he snapped.
De Hirsch turned deep, black eyes on me. I hastily computed what I would receive for a true detective article I’d recently finished, and took out my checkbook.
“I’ll say a hundred you can’t give us the solution,” I announced, looking him fixedly in the eye. I knew my Hungarian friend did not have a hundred, did not have fifty, and I doubted if he had five.
The Baron de Hirsch straightened. “You make it impossible for me, as a gentleman, to refuse,” he said. “But I’ll need some help… I’ll need a clothespin.”
Baynes’ open mouth closed. My closed mouth opened.
“In the left-hand drawer beside the kitchen sink,” I said. “Should be some there. Mrs. Ruggles, the cleaning woman…”
Rising with a single lithe motion, de Hirsch had already left the room, taking out a large, immaculate linen handkerchief as he went. And a fountain pen.
I looked at Baynes. He looked at me. Neither of us spoke. De Hirsch was gone about five minutes. I heard a drawer open. I heard a muffled sound that might have been the icebox opening, or the deep freeze. Presently he came back and sat down. He opened the fresh bottle of brandy I’d silently brought after he had picked up the empty and stared at it in a speculative manner.
“It will take a few minutes,” he said amiably. “Meanwhile, we can talk. What do you think of the political situation?”
“The hell with the political situation,” Baynes growled. “What about Hillyer and the girl? How did he kill her?”
De Hirsch struck his palm against his head.
“I forgot to ask!” he exclaimed. “Does Hillyer suffer from insomnia?”
Baynes wrinkled his brows. “Yeah,” he said. “He does. That was part of the report I got from his doc. But what—”
“Naturally, I assumed it,” de Hirsch broke in. “But of course, one must never assume anything. Why, Lieutenant, Hillyer killed her by putting sleeping tablets in a drink. When she was unconscious, he whisked her away and buried her in the deep snow of Harrison’s Gully. There, in due time, her body absorbed the sleeping potion. She awoke, nearly frozen. For a brief, mercifully brief time, she struggled against the iron bonds that held her. Then the soft sleep that comes to those who freeze took her and in merciful arms carried her down the long dark steps that led to death.”
“Very fancy prose,” Baynes grunted. “But you haven’t said anything. There weren’t any bonds of any kind. Not a mark on her. Nothing. Maybe he did knock her out with sleeping tablets. That I figured. But then what?”
The Baron de Hirsch took his time about answering.
“Tell me, Bob—” he turned to me, “—would you say Mark Hillyer has achieved a minor form of immortality from this case? The fame that he always sought, and never found?”
“It certainly has,” I agreed. “Already there’s a big argument among crime fans as to whether he did or didn’t kill her. The mystery of how she got into the gully is as tantalizing as the mystery of what happened to the famous Dorothy Arnold. A hundred years from now, Hillyer’s name would still be popping up in books as the double-domes of the next century argue about his guilt or innocence. As Baynes said, he’s riding high. He has a new book due out, and all his old ones have been reprinted. He’s famous, all right, and he’ll stay famous as long as the case goes unsolved. In fact, the longer it goes unsolved, the more famous he’ll be like. Like Jack the Ripper.”
“Ah,” de Hirsch said. “And as soon as it is solved, he is merely infamous—a sordid murderer. A shock to an ego—especially to one such as his. But now I think we can discuss the mystery of the glass bridge, the flying saucer and the winding sheet—all of them invisible.”
He rose and went to the kitchen. Again I heard the icebox, or the deep freeze, open and shut. He came back carrying something balanced on his hand. It was covered with a napkin so we could not see what it was. He set the object on the polished top of the coffee table.
“Now,” he said, his voice suddenly crisp and authoritative, “let us go back to last February. It is a bitterly cold afternoon. Mark Hillyer, bleakly furious, stands at the window, waiting to see a blackmailer’s car drive up. We know what else he saw—children at play. Watching them, an idea exploded in his mind, complete and exquisite, like Minerva springing from Jove’s forehead. He could be rid of his blackmailer quite safely, needing only a minimum of luck. If he failed—well, he was a sick man and could plead provocation. If he succeeded—what a pleasure to watch the stupid world puzzle over the mystery he had created!
“He acted at once. He got an old bedsheet, the largest he owned, and spread it flat on the flagstones of the north terrace. He did certain things to it, and went back inside. A few minutes later Montrose arrived. He talked with her, gave her a drink heavy with sleeping potion. In twenty minutes or so she collapsed, unconscious.
“He tumbled her from her chair to the floor. He nudged her onto a small rug. No exertion, you see, nothing to strain his bad heart.
“He slid the rug across the floor and out onto the north terrace. There he rolled the unconscious woman onto the spread-out bedsheet. He arranged her so that she was curled up in the center of it…”
With a theatrical gesture, de Hirsch whipped the napkin off the object on the table. We saw that it was his linen handkerchief. Something lay in the center of the handkerchief—a clothespin, with little eyes and a mouth inked on it, as if it were a woman reduced to scale, and the handkerchief a bedsheet.
To see the clothespin doll, I had to pry up one corner of the handkerchief. For each of the four corners had been folded into the center, completely covering the thing, as if in an envelope. And the handkerchief was stiff and hard.
Then he saw what de Hirsch had done. He had sprinkled water on the handkerchief and put it into the deep freeze. Like laundry on a wash line on a winter day, the handkerchief had become stiff, unbending. Inside it, imprisoned in it, was the clothespin representing a woman. The whole thing made a neat package several inches square. If it had been a real bedsheet and a real woman curled up in the center of it, it would have been no more than three feet square.
And at last, Baynes and I understood all that Mark Hillyer had done.
He had sprinkled a large bedsheet with water on a bitterly cold day. He had put an unconscious woman in the center of it, curled up, and then folded the corners over her. The cold had frozen the wet bedsheet into a sort of box as stiff, as hard as board. In a matter of minutes Marianne Montrose, unconscious, was a prisoner inside a frozen shroud that was as formidable as iron bonds. Then he had thrust the broad, flat object off the terrace onto the hard-surfaced snow. Because of the dispersal of weight, it had left no mark. Instead it had slipped away smoothly down the slope, picking up speed, whisking over rough spots, until at last it shot off the edge of the crusty snow and tumbled deep into the clinging drifts of windblown snow within the permanently shadowed depths of the gully.
As if in example, de Hirsch flicked the frozen handkerchief with his finger. It spun across the table and off the edge, dropping into a wastebasket. There, among white sheets of discarded typewriter paper, it suddenly vanished.
“A flying saucer,” de Hirsch boomed. “In Danny Gresham’s statement, he specifically mentioned the new aluminum bowls some of the children were playing with in the snow. These are metal saucers in which a child sits and whisks down a slope at truly terrifying speed. They ride the surface, scarcely sinking into a crust at all. It was these that Hillyer saw, these from which he gained his idea.
“The glass bridge was already there—a slick, thin coating of ice which covered the drifts from his house to Harrison’s Gully. The flying saucer he made from a sheet sprayed with water in the icy air. And it became the girl’s winding sheet when he laid her upon it and folded the edges over her and froze them down.
“Off it went, spinning, sliding, skidding. It could not stop. Over the edge, into the gully. A white object in white snow. Invisible to the searching eyes. A little wind-blown snow over it, and it had vanished. To find it one would have had to step on it. Little chance of that.
“Lassd! Or to put it in French, voila! A baffling, an impenetrable mystery has been created by the use of an old bedsheet and the natural forces of winter. A woman has been transported a quarter of a mile by means of a seemingly miraculous agency. A sick man has committed the seemingly perfect murder!”
“The rat!” Baynes burst out. “Telling me to my face how he did it, and making me think he was double-talking me! Why, that girl and that sheet probably hung in the branches of that tree until spring. Then when the thaw came, the sheet unfroze, she fell out and was carried along by the brook down into the pool, leaving nothing—no trace, no clue, just an old bedsheet!”
“But if one with imagination sees the bedsheet as a winding sheet—” de Hirsch reached for the money and my check, on the table, “—and if one takes the remarks of a clever man at face value, a mystery may become quite commonplace.”
“We’ll never be able to prove it,” Baynes growled.
“Talán!” de Hirsch commented. “Perhaps not. But we can let him know that his mystery is a mystery no longer, and that he will be the subject of not so-clever studies of homicide in the year 2000. I will write him a letter.”
He went off to my study and typed for half an hour. He mailed the letter that same afternoon. The next morning Mark Hillyer received it. I don’t know what it said, but Oliver Baynes, via the housekeeper, described its reception.
Mrs. Hoff was dusting in the study when the mailman came. She took the letter to Hillyer on the terrace, and he interrupted his writing to open it. He had hardly more than glanced at it when he became deathly pale—so pale Mrs. Hoff turned back in alarm. As he read further, an ugly, mottled flush spread over his features. He scarcely looked at the second page before ripping the letter up and flinging the pieces into a big ashtray. He lit a match with hands that shook so violently he could hardly bring match head to striking surface, and burned the torn pieces.
As if still unable to relieve his rage, he seized the ashtray and flung it furiously down on the tiles. For an instant, he stood looking north toward Harrison’s Gully, his hands clenching and unclenching.
Then his breath began to come with difficulty. He turned, reaching for support, but collapsed before he could reach his chair. Clawing at his chest and throat, he gasped, “Medicine—my medicine…”
His heart stimulant was not in the medicine cabinet, but on his bedside table. It took Mrs. Hoff two or three minutes to find it. When she hurried back with it, Hillyer was dead.
I admit I was somehow shocked. But de Hirsch accepted Hillyer’s death with composure.
“Utovegre!” he commented. “Which is to say, it is as good as a confession.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: There have not been many MWA anthologies to which Robert Arthur has not contributed. He is a writer in the classic tradition; “The Glass Bridge” is a lovely variation of the “locked room” situation.