And when Andy Thorp came he wasn’t yet any more like himself than he had been the day before. He ignored Lucy Lee completely, barely nodded to his mother-in-law and me, and turned to Colonel Primrose.
“I can thank you for muffing a big deal for me.”
He almost snarled it.
“You can thank yourself, Thorp,” Colonel Primrose said curtly. “When you begin to give right answers to the questions that are asked you, and quit telling the most childish falsehoods, you’ll be allowed to go about your business.”
Andy reddened under his sun-tanned hide.
“It would be rather pleasant for everybody if you’d stop being an idiot, Andy,” Alice said gently. “No one thinks you had anything to do with Sandra’s death.”
Andy looked at her an instant, said nothing, dug into his pocket and brought out a battered pack of cigarettes.
“I’d just like to hear again what happened after you left the club, Thorp,” Colonel Primrose said. He spoke quietly, but there was an iron undertone in his voice. It must have been like hearing the head coach again. Andy answered almost civilly, still without even a glance at Lucy Lee.
“Sandra dried out in front of the fire,” he said. “I guess she didn’t have much on but an evening dress. She borrowed somebody’s coat and was waiting for Jim. One of the colored boys came in and said Jim had gone with Grace.”
He looked around at me.
“Sandra wanted to go home then and said she’d join me and Barrol in the car. We waited about ten minutes for her, I guess. George was cold, he didn’t dry out as quick as Sandra, but neither of us had anything to drink on us. I started back to get a pint when she showed up. She was high as a kite.”
He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace and lighted another.
“She’d been drinking, inside?” Colonel Primrose suggested.
“Not while I was there, except a toddy they made her. I don’t know what she was doing that ten minutes George and I waited in the car.”
Colonel Primrose nodded, looking at him steadily and I thought rather oddly.
“We started off and dropped George. He was about half-tight with all the rye they’d poured into him at the club He staggered up the steps, and we came home.”
Andy looked down at the carpet, his face a dull crimson.
“I wanted her to take a ride, but she wouldn’t So we put the car in the garage and started up to the house. Halfway up she asked me for my keys. We had an argument, but I gave ’em to her. She started back to the garage I went on a little way and looked back. She was talking . . . to a woman.”
“Yes,” Colonel Primrose said briskly. “Who was it?”
“I don’t know, I tell you.”
“You didn’t recognize her at all?”
“I didn’t recognize her at all. That’s English, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Colonel Primrose said, almost cheerfully. His old black eyes were shining, for some reason that I at least did not understand. “Yes, that’s English. It was no one you knew?”
“I tell you it wasn’t.”
“Was it light?”
Andy nodded. “It was pretty light.”
“You probably could have told, for instance, if it had been Mrs. Latham, say?”
Colonel Primrose smiled at me. I tried to smile back, but I don’t think my attempt amounted to much.
Andy looked at me an instant. “I should think so.”
“Or . . Mrs. Gould, for instance?”
“It wasn’t. I tell you again, and I hope to God for the last time, I didn’t know her.”
Colonel Primrose nodded absently, as if he were thinking hard about something else.
Then he looked at Andy very queerly.
“It’s rather strange, isn’t it,” he said slowly, “that you should have looked back there and seen Sandra talking to a strange woman . . . a woman that you’d never seen before?”
He shook his head a little.
“I guess it is,” Andy said. “That’s what happened just the same.”
“All right,” Colonel Primrose said. “What did you do?”
“I started back. Sandra ran up to me and said to go on, she’d take care of it. I asked her who it was. She said, ‘Oh, a poor crazy woman.’ I didn’t pay any more attention to it. There are plenty of crazy women around. I came on up.”
“She said just those words?”
Andy nodded. “Just them.”
“Have you got any idea of what the woman looked like?”
There was silence for a moment. Then Andy spoke rather hesitatingly. “I got the idea she was sort of old, from what I could see. I just looked at her for a second. She was standing outside the light at the side of the door there.”
“And that was just before midnight?”
Andy nodded.
“Sandra didn’t tell you what she wanted with the car?”
Lucy Lee moved a little, and Andy’s face flushed still darker.
“I thought she had a date she wanted to keep.”
He kept his eyes fixed on the floor.
“You don’t know who with?”
“I guess you could ask Rosemary’s dago friend if you wanted to find out. Personally I wouldn’t know.”
Colonel Primrose nodded politely. “And you didn’t see her again . . . after you left this house at half past twelve?”
“I didn’t.”
“Sure about it?”
“Why?” Andy said. He stared at Colonel Primrose aggressively, his chin out a little. “Aren’t you?”
Colonel Primrose got up. “Thank you,” he said suavely.
The telephone out in the hall rang: one long, three short. Colonel Primrose glanced at me.
“That’s mine,” I said. I felt a queer little sensation along my spine. “May I answer it, Alice?”
“If you don’t mind,” Colonel Primrose said calmly, “I’ll answer it myself.”
He hesitated a moment, standing there, looking from one of us to the other, and added, “I’ve got an idea it’s the woman Mr. Thorp saw Saturday night.”
He chuckled a little at the expressions on our faces and went out.
The door closed behind him. But when he came back his face was a dead giveaway.
“It wasn’t?” I asked.
“It was Sergeant Buck. He’s back from the village. I think we might be getting along, Mrs. Latham?”
I glanced at Alice Gould, trying to let her know I’d do my best. She nodded imperceptibly. I followed Colonel Primrose out. We walked down the flagstone path past the Thorps’ cottage, and stopped in front of the door.
“There’s a path to your place from here,” he said with a smile. “Where is it?”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because one of my men lost you somewhere in here this morning.”
“Lost me?”
“Yes. You’re being escorted places, after last night. I don’t want you killed, you know. After all, my hostess . . .”
He chuckled. I was quite touched—until he added, “You’re much too good a decoy.”
He chuckled again. I took him down to the break in the hedge. There was obviously no point in not doing it. I saw his eyes sharpen as he spotted the broken spear of crape myrtle. On my side I glanced down at the plantain leaf that concealed the brass jacket of the shell, and started in spite of myself. It was gone. It had been there less than an hour before.
“There’s another matter, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose was saying, just behind me. “When young Andy was hunting his father, and his father denied being out of the house, he was seen by one of the colored boys from the club. He was going to the Bishops’, along the lane from the club. The boy says Mr. Thorp looked as if he didn’t want to be seen. He told Buck that this morning.”
He looked at me and smiled.
“Buck has a great way of getting information,” he said. “I can’t say I always approve of his methods. The queer thing here is that the boy also says he saw you and Miss Bishop leaning on the fence there. So it would seem you’d seen Andy too.”
“Is that why we’re going down this way?” I asked.
“Don’t tell me you thought we were taking a morning stroll.”
“No,” I said. “I thought maybe you were turning my house inside out, and wanted me out of the way for a while.”
I was thinking, desperately fast. Andy had hidden something under the bank. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that it was something that connected him very closely with the death of Sandra Gould.
“I don’t suppose,” Colonel Primrose said placidly, “that your duty as a citizen . . .”
“Rodman Bishop says the trouble with the world is that too many people are dashing about doing their duty—and getting everybody else in trouble,” I said.
“May be something in it,” he admitted cheerfully. “In this case it just happens you don’t have to do yours. There’s Buck I’ve no doubt he’s done it for you.”
The Sergeant’s massive figure was there ahead of us in the lane. He had taken off his coat and was in his vest, with two fancy pink ribbon armbands holding up his shirt sleeves. He was peering over the bank, not far from where Andy had gone down. It must have looked as if an army had gone over, I thought, remembering the rocks we had heard crashing to the beach. I took a deep breath, hoping for the best. It was about all there was left to do.
I followed the Colonel through the wicket into the lane, and peered over the edge. Sergeant Buck was leaning forward, burrowing into the bank like an otter with his great hands. His face hadn’t the slightest expression, not even when he abruptly stopped burrowing and reached into the hole he’d made. Colonel Primrose and I watched him pull out—of all things under the sun—a pair of tiny stained rose-satin slippers.
He held them up towards Colonel Primrose. Then he peered inside them, and pulled out of the toe of one of them a crumpled bunch of blue velvet flowers.
I stared. The slippers were Lucy Lee’s . . . but why should Andy have hidden them, and still more why should he have hidden Rosemary’s flowers? It was beyond me. I think it even puzzled Colonel Primrose. He took them from Buck, who scaled the bank with the most astonishing agility, and turned them over in his hand.
The slippers were a mess. The thin soles were sodden as if they had tramped miles in wet grass, and the brown stain covered the scratched torn toes.
Colonel Primrose examined them intently. The thing that seemed to hold him longest was the black grease spotted on the toes and heels. Finally, without saying a word, he handed them to Sergeant Buck and took the bunch of blue posies. After a moment he gave that to the Sergeant too, and smiled at me. He shook his head a little.
“I think that cleans up one little matter,” he said calmly.
He turned to Buck. “You can run me into the village. Have you got the car?”
“It’s along at the clubhouse, sir.”
“You can pick me up at Mrs. Latham’s.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sergeant Buck passed me with a fish-eyed stare, giving at the same time the general appearance of a snappy salute, and turned on his large heel. I haven’t the slightest doubt that he wished the bullet or bullets—one or both—had got me squarely in the back Indeed I wasn’t at all sure, now that I came to think of it, that it wasn’t Sergeant Buck firing them.
Colonel Primrose held the wicket and I went through.
“You probably thought I was extremely rude last night, by the way,” he said.
“Last night?”
He chuckled.
“In the middle of the night, when you were on the phone I just wanted you to hang up I didn’t want our listener to suspect we knew he was there. And the caller had already hung up.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then they are different.”
“Yes. They are.”
We walked on a moment. Then he said, “The call last night came from the same place. The same party line.”
“You mean the St John’s vestry room?”
“That’s one party.”
“Who’s the other?”
“The other,” he said deliberately, and looking queerly at me, “I think is the ‘crazy woman’ Sandra Gould talked to—and of course later had her quarrel with.”
I stared at him in perfect astonishment.
“It’s quite impossible,” he said soberly. “However, as Sherlock Holmes says, when all the possible things have failed, the impossible must be true That’s where I am now, Mrs. Latham. I’m going to the village to try to prove it By the way, this gossip about Dr. Potter—did you know the village is full of it? He and Jim Gould had a sort of mild run-in in the club bar just before dinner Saturday night.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense!” I said warmly. “Though I don’t see how you could blame Adam Potter really, with Sandra always acting like Circe on her pillar.”
“Island,” Colonel Primrose said. There was a little twinkle in his eyes. “Not a pillar. Aeaea, it was called. Nice name.”
“Island, then. And poor Maggie!”
“I know,” he said. “An invalid, isn’t she. For a long time?” “Years. It’s perfectly foul.”
We had come the length of the garden, and stopped there a moment, looking back.
Colonel Primrose pointed to the hedge.
“Someone shot at you from there last night, Mrs. Latham,” he said very seriously. “Will you stay indoors till I get back?”
I shook my head. “No. But I’ll go over to the Bishops’.”
“All right.”
He hesitated a moment.
“While you’re there you might tell Rosemary that if she lures Jim Gould out again when there happens to be trouble brewing, just about once more, she’ll succeed in hanging him where Parran may fail.”
A horn sounded in the back drive as I nodded.
“There’s Buck. We’ll take you as far as the Bishops’.”
We went around the side walk and Julius, seeing me through the window over the sink, called out: “Mis’ Grace! Oh, Mis’ Grace! They’s a lady here to see you. She’s in the livin’ room. She wants to see somebody, Ah couldn’t quite make out.”
“Maybe it’s you, Colonel,” I said. “Come and see.”
Sergeant Buck had jumped out of the car and was standing at attention on the other side.
“Just a minute, Buck.”
“Yes, sir.”
We went in through the kitchen. Lilac was making watermelon pickles and singing about a sycamine tree and the River Jordan. I got a drink of water at the sink and gave Colonel Primrose one. We went through the pantry into the hall.
It seems odd to me now that I had no intuition about the other side of the living room door. It hardly seems possible. There was no preparation, no foreshadowing, nothing to let us know, in any way, of what was there waiting quietly for us.
I pushed the door open, as I do a thousand times a day, and walked in . . . and stopped, utterly and horribly aghast.
On the sofa in front of the fireplace was a woman I had not seen for years. She had on old-fashioned clothes, and her face was sallow and drawn and unlovely.
My hand dropped slowly to my side and my head swirled. Colonel Primrose steadied me quickly with an arm around my shoulders. We stood there, silent, stupefied, for one terrible instant.
“Who is it?” Colonel Primrose said.
“It’s Maggie Potter!” I whispered.
“Good God!” he said.
Maggie Potter was dead. Even from there I could see the crushed and blackened, blood-and-hair-matted spot on the base of her skull where she had been murderously struck.
I caught myself with a terrible effort.
“But she can’t walk!” I said. “She hasn’t been out of the house for seven years!”
Colonel Primrose shook his head.
“She was out Saturday night,” he said quietly. “And she’s been trying to tell us about it ever since.”
“Over the phone?” I whispered.
He nodded, and looked at me steadily.
“We’ve got to find that clock soon, Mrs. Latham,” he said “It belongs to a murderer.”