Dr. Spain confirmed Malone’s pronouncement. “Darned funny business,” he said, “but I remember a case up near Two Rivers where a man and his wife were—”
Malone never heard the rest of the story. He’d had another thought. There was something Henry Peveley had said to him that night in the Hermitage Tavern—!
He announced his theory to Jerry Luckstone, who promptly sent for the high-school physiology teacher to come to Hausen’s Undertaking Parlor.
The physiology teacher identified the skeleton as the one that had been stolen from the high school four years before. He knew it by the initials Arthur Wilks had carved on the right clavicle, back in ’28.
Jerry Luckstone sat down heavily on one of Charlie Hausen’s folding chairs, waited till Dr. Spain and the high-school teacher had gone, and said helplessly to Malone, “But why? Why would anyone steal a skeleton from the high school, and bury it in Harold McGowan’s grave?”
Malone wondered if it was etiquette to light a cigar in a small-town undertaking parlor. He decided that it was. “Why?” he repeated. “Because Ellen McGowan was afraid some question might arise sometime in the future, and there might be a disinterment. She didn’t know that anyone could tell the body had never been embalmed, and she didn’t remember that a female skeleton looked any different from a male one. All she knew was that there was a skeleton in the high-school building.”
“You mean,” Sheriff Kling said stupidly, “you mean she put it there?”
Malone looked at the sheriff and then at Jerry Luckstone. “He isn’t very bright, is he?”
“Well God damn it,” the sheriff said, his neck reddening, “why didn’t she put her own pa’s body in his grave, since he was dead?”
Everybody looked expectantly at Malone.
“Because,” the little lawyer said, looking at his cigar, “she couldn’t get it out from under the concrete floor in her basement.” He added wearily, “I suspect we’d better get Ellen McGowan’s brother in and talk to him.”
He refused to make any more explanations in the meantime. However, he did agree with Jerry Luckstone that the basement floor in the McGowan house had better be investigated, and at once.
For a long hour he sat with Helene, Jerry Luckstone, the sheriff, and Charlie Hausen in the old New England parlor of the house where Ellen McGowan had lived since her birth, forty-six years before. The sound of pickaxes rang from the cellar below, and occasional voices of workmen.
No one said very much. The deputy sheriff had driven out to Luke McGowan’s farm to get him. By some miracle the reporters had not discovered yet that anything was going on. For this little while, there was peace.
However, it was an uneasy peace. Helene sat turning over the pages of a woman’s magazine, without looking at them, her dress like a spot of flame in the shadowy room. Sheriff Kling and Charlie Hausen sat talking in low tones about the proper procedure to follow in case Malone was right about what lay under the concrete floor of Ellen McGowan’s basement. Jerry Luckstone was silent, looking at Malone out of the corner of one eye, with almost a kind of superstitious awe. And Malone just sat and worried.
Once the lawyer rose, went to the telephone, and called Dr. Spain. He wanted to know the exact state of Harold McGowan’s health before he presumably went to California.
“Bad heart,” the doctor said. “Very bad heart. Might have gone like—that, anytime.” Malone could visualize him snapping his fingers. “Or he might have lived for twenty years.” He went on to cite two cases he knew of that had lived for twenty years, before Malone could stop him.
Shortly before the deputy arrived with Luke McGowan, the young district attorney could hold back his questions no longer.
“She didn’t murder him, did she?”
“No,” Malone said. “No, she didn’t murder him.” That was all he would say.
A few minutes later Joe Ryan came back with the awkward, gangling, sunburned man Malone recognized as Luke McGowan.
Evidently the deputy had told him nothing. The big farmer stood still for a moment in the middle of the floor, listening to the unmistakable sounds from the basement below, turning white under his tan.
“You aren’t” —he began, and stopped. “You can’t—” He shut his lips firmly, as though he’d resolved not to say another word.
“Now look here, Luke,” Sheriff Kling began in an officious tone.
Malone held up his hand. “Just a minute, Mr. Kling.” He paused and looked around the room. “If we go through a procedure of questioning Mr. McGowan here, it’s going to take us all night. There aren’t any questions we need answered anyway. At least there aren’t any I don’t know the answers to. So I’m just going to tell you what did happen, and Mr. McGowan can tell you if I make any mistakes.”
“He’s right, Marv,” Jerry Luckstone said.
Charlie Hausen nodded briefly.
Malone paused to mop his brow and look around him uncomfortably. This was the first room he’d been in where he was sure he shouldn’t light a cigar.
“Ellen McGowan’s father had a bad heart,” he began slowly. “He knew it because he’d seen Doc Spain. The chances are his daughter knew it too; they were pretty close.”
He paused again, glancing quickly at Luke McGowan. The farmer’s face was impassive.
“Maybe he planned to go to California for his health. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. I just know these two things.
He was short about twenty thousand dollars in his accounts. Before anything could be done about it, he dropped dead.”
There was an uneasy little stir in the room.
“You’re guessing,” Sheriff Kling said.
“Sure I’m guessing,” the lawyer told him. “If you can make a better guess, go to it.” There seemed to be a different tone to the sound of the pickaxes from the floor below. “I was guessing when I told Jerry here to have that grave opened up, too.”
He looked to see what effect this pronouncement would have on Luke McGowan. The big man was frowning in a dazed way, looking from one to another in the room.
“He dropped dead,” Malone repeated tersely. “Doc Spain just told me it might have happened at any time. If the news of his death had been made public, his accounts would have had to be balanced. The shortage would have appeared, and everybody in the world would have said he’d embezzled county funds to play the market. Everybody except Ellen McGowan.”
Malone turned slightly so that he couldn’t see Luke McGowan’s face any more.
“She was a proud woman,” he said. He took a cigar out of his pocket, looked at it lovingly, and put it back again. “And she worshiped her father. There must have been some pretty terrible hours while she decided what to do. Finally she went for her brother Luke, and they buried their father’s body in the basement, and a few days later Luke laid a concrete floor over it.”
The sound of pickaxes had ceased now and there was another sound, a strange, rasping one.
“Ellen McGowan got away with the fiction of his having gone out to California,” Malone said. “And in the time he was supposed to be there, she appropriated—let’s not say embezzled—enough money from the Farmers’ Bank to wipe out the shortage in his accounts. Then—knowing she couldn’t keep up the fiction indefinitely—she announced his death, out in California. Still, there was the danger that even if she arranged to have an empty coffin sent from California, and saw to its burial here, someone sometime might begin asking questions and investigating. She remembered the skeleton in the high-school anatomy class—” Malone wheeled around like a top to face Luke McGowan. “Did she steal it from the high school or did you?”
“I did,” Luke McGowan said almost automatically.
There was a moment of absolutely dead silence in the room.
“There you are,” the little lawyer said, mopping his brow. He looked accusingly at Luke. “And if you hadn’t blabbed the whole story to Cora Belle Fromm one night when you were full of gin, she’d be alive today.”
Luke McGowan dropped his eyes. “I didn’t know anything would happen to her if I told her. I didn’t mean her no harm.”
“If,” Malone began, and stopped suddenly. It was as though a blinding flash had suddenly gone off in his brain. Cora Belle had learned the story. The Farmers’ Bank belonged to Senator Peveley. Cora Belle had done the Senator a “great service” for which he’d made a will leaving her half his estate. The Senator had gone around being angry for a week. He’d had a book of the school-fund records in his office the day of his death. He’d come over to the courthouse in a rage, and he’d been killed by someone who knew he was going to be there.
“What is it?” Jerry Luckstone asked anxiously.
“Nothing,” Malone lied. Someone knew he was going to be there, and hid in the broom closet at the top of the little staircase, waiting for him.
But there was more to it than that. There was something else. And he didn’t know what it was.
There were heavy footsteps on the cellar stairs. A voice said, “I guess you better come down here.”
Malone turned to Helene. “Don’t you dare go down those stairs. You wait right here.”
He led Jerry Luckstone, Sheriff Kling, and Charlie Hausen through the door to the stairs. Luke McGowan looked toward the door and shook his head, the deputy sheriff stayed behind, watching him.
A few minutes later Malone returned, wiping great beads of perspiration from his brow. His face was very white.
“Well, I was right,” he said.
The other three men came into the room close behind him.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Charlie Hausen said, shaking his head admiringly.
Sheriff Kling scratched behind one ear. “Then I guess the Senator found out about it and she killed him, and she must of blew up the bank to get rid of those records, and then Cora Belle—”
Malone was silent. It would be so easy, now. All he had to do was say now, “Yes, she did. Yes, that’s the way it was,” and the worry and terror would be over. The words formed on his lips.
But there was that air of quiet pride in the little old parlor, there were those names he’d read only that evening, Ailanthus McGowan, b. Vermont, 1817, who was killed at Antietam; Watchful McGowan, and Lucius McGowan. Ellen McGowan had lived six years with her father’s body buried beneath the cellar floor and had embezzled thousands of dollars to save his name and her pride. His fingers tightened on the smooth walnut back of an old chair that must have been brought out from Vermont long before the Civil War.
“No,” he said in a curiously flat voice. “No, she didn’t murder anybody.”
“But,” the sheriff said stupidly. “Then who did?”
“I don’t know,” Malone said. “I almost know, but I don’t quite.”
There was a Bacchanalian howl from the street as a car screamed around the corner on two wheels. Malone lifted the window curtain and looked out.
“Citizens’ Committee stuff,” Deputy Ryan said. “All the hard-drinking young punks in town have joined up and they’re searching houses, and burning down back fences, and raising hell generally.”
He paused and looked anxiously at the sheriff. “Also they’re putting up posters demanding you resign.”
“Well, damn it,” Marvin Kling said testily, “I’m doing all I can.”
“They’re saying Cora Belle was raped,” the deputy said. “They say they’re going to—” He remembered a lady’s presence in the room and stopped with a sudden gulp.
“She wasn’t raped,” the sheriff said. “Doc Spain would of said so. She was just murdered. And I’m doing everything I can to find the murderer.” His voice was wild. “You go put up posters telling ’em I’m doing everything I can. Election’s coming in three months.” He looked at Malone with desperate red-rimmed eyes. “For the love of God, mister, if you know who it is—”
“I don’t,” Malone said. “But maybe if you’ll just stop heckling me for a while, I will.”
Helene’s voice broke in suddenly. It had a strange, high-pitched note, though her face was rigidly calm.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Who the hell cares who murdered all these people? Where’s Jake? Forget all this stuff and think about that for a while. Where’s Jake?”