AFTER FORTY DAYS AND forty nights the rushing waters quieted and finally began to recede, leaving the highest peak of Miss Hildegarde Withers’s mind exposed to the clear cold air of consciousness. She was being heckled by a masculine voice which kept insisting, “Drink this, like a good girl.”
Slowly she opened her eyes, saw that she was in her own bed and that Dr. Harry Radebaugh was leaning over her. It was dark outside, and the wind blew rain against the windowpane. “I will never again in my whole life drink anything but water,” she murmured with an effort that left her weak. She closed her eyes again.
“But this will settle your stomach,” the doctor insisted. He lifted her shoulders, holding the glass to her lips. Too weak to put up further resistance, she downed the bitter draught.
“Never you mind my stomach,” she begged. “Just give me something to keep the top of my head from coming off!”
Dr. Radebaugh laughed. “You’re going to be all right.”
“Drop that cheerful bedside manner, young man. I know how awful I feel. I’m numb all over. Where did that vixen shoot me?”
“You’re not shot, Hildegarde.” It was the inspector’s voice, and she opened her eyes again to stare at him coldly.
“Neither are you, I observe! Though you should have been, for going to sleep at the post!” She turned back towards the doctor. “Well, what have I got?”
“Just the damnedest hangover that anybody ever had,” the medico told her. “Caused by an overdose of betapentalin.” He snapped shut his leather bag. “Give her two of those pills every hour on the hour, and she’ll be better in the morning.” He went briskly out of the room, his footsteps on the thick broadloom carpet sounding to Miss Withers like the tramp-tramp of an army.
The inspector came over and perched on a chair near the head of her bed. From his breast pocket he produced a cigar, which he rolled around thoughtfully in his fingers. “If you remember, I didn’t get any sleep at all last night,” he reminded her. “And it was so hot down here behind your couch, and the blanket was so soft—”
In spite of herself, the schoolteacher had to smile at the little-boy sheepish expression on his face. “Oscar?”
“Yes?”
“I’ll forget about your going to sleep at the switch if you’ll forget about my stealing your truth pills and then administering them to myself by mistake.”
The wiry little Irishman nodded slowly. “It’s a bargain.”
“Go on and smoke that awful-smelling rope if you want to.” She watched while he got the cigar burning, and then she sighed and leaned back on the pillow. “I suppose the girl got away and it’s all to do over again?”
“Not quite,” he told her. “She got away, in a sense. When you fainted and crashed over chair and table and all, Lawn took a potshot at you, but she missed you a mile. Then she turned the gun on herself, but a rib deflected the bullet, so it missed the heart. We got her into an ambulance and down to the emergency hospital, but she only lived long enough to babble out what amounts to a confession.”
Miss Hildegarde Withers, in spite of her hangover, sat up straight in bed. “Eureka! Or whatever it is they said in Greek. I was right, anyway, even though I was half-guessing. That girl really did commit two murders just so she could get Pat Montague, a young man who seemed to me quite ordinary.”
The inspector took the cigar out of his mouth and blew a beautiful smoke-ring. “I’m afraid there’s somebody who won’t agree with you about that,” he said. “I mean the girl who sat in her car all night outside the main gate at Camp Nivens to make sure Pat Montague wouldn’t get back inside to reenlist in the Army until she’d talked to him.”
“Helen did that?”
He nodded. Now it was Miss Withers’s turn to wear the sheepish expression. She confessed about the letters she was supposed to have returned to Pat Montague in jail, the letters with the secret messages that would have told him all he wanted to know. They must have worked out that code years ago, no doubt to keep as much of their secret as they could from the eyes of Lawn.
“Well, Oscar, don’t keep me on pins and needles. Did Helen get there in time? Did they come to an understanding, or will Pat go back into uniform?”
“You sound,” the inspector told her, “like the announcer on a soap-opera radio program. Relax, Hildegarde. All I know about Pat and Helen is that the Garden City police stopped a big sedan with both of them in it, and there was lipstick on his collar. They were looking for the city hall.”
She sighed. “Then I seem to have played cupid in spite of myself! Pat has his Helen, and when a man wants a woman so badly I suppose he ought to get her, even if she didn’t have the stamina to wait for him. Everybody to his taste, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow. I must admit that in the beginning I was rooting for Lawn. There was an odd girl, a twisted, unhappy girl with just one idea in life! I still wonder why she went to pieces and started shooting. She might still have got away with it because she hadn’t actually done any confessing—”
Inspector Oscar Piper shrugged his shoulders. “The truth was out, anyway. Maybe for the first time, while you were talking, the girl woke up to what a god-awful fool she’d been. People like that always make excuses for what they do and kid themselves along. You made a confession for her, and you probably didn’t mince any words. It’s over, anyway. Even Sheriff Vinge and the D.A. are happy as two clams in a tide pool, because the county is saved the expense of an investigation and trial and all that. They don’t even resent the fact that I brought in the prisoner after I was supposed to be off the case. As a matter of fact, everybody but you came out of this okay—”
“My head, you mean? I suppose it will stop pounding some day.”
But the inspector didn’t mean that at all. “I’ve got some bad news for you,” he told her. “When that girl took a shot at you, she missed you by a yard. But the bullet smashed right into your tank of tropical fish. The boys gathered up what they could in pots and pans out of the kitchen, but I’m afraid there’s one got stepped on.”
“If it’s the female Betta splendens,” Miss Withers said softly, “my regrets are modified by a certain sense of relief.”