The police car moved with slowness appropriate to the surface. The plow had been through on the road around Lake Carabec, but the thin packed snow it had left behind was very slippery. A link of one of the tire chains continued a rhythmic assault on the under side of the fender. Snow still was falling, but now very lightly.
Where the road came closest to the lake, was separated from it only by an ancient wooden rail and a pitching bank, Sergeant Forniss drove with particular care. At one place, where the road curved sharply in toward the water, part of the rail was down. Something had hit the rail and scarred it, so that unweathered wood showed.
“Somebody had a narrow squeak there,” Heimrich said. To this, Sergeant Forniss said, “Yep. Looks like it.” They came to a driveway and turned up it. Here the plow had not been, but there were ruts in the snow. They followed the ruts until they came to a police car, parked so that it obstructed entrance to, or exit from, a three-car garage. Forniss pulled up beside it.
“Ambulance been and gone,” Forniss said, indicating the broad, deep tracks of a vehicle with chains. “But they’d moved the body anyway.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “They had to, of course.”
The door opened and a young trooper came out. Heimrich said, “Morning, Ray. Had another hunch?”
Trooper Ray Crowley flushed. He looked younger than ever. He said it could be he was nuts. He said there wasn’t much of anything to go on, and the more he heard about it, the more he thought maybe he was nuts.
“But?” Heimrich said.
“Why would a man go out and jump in a cold lake?” Crowley said. “Do it the hard way? Only—his wife says he’s tried several times to kill himself. Says he was in a depression. And—seems she ought to know, being a doctor. Psychiatrist. Also, she says there’s no telling how somebody will go about killing himself.” He paused. “Guess maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you, sir,” he said. “On a hunch, like you say.”
“Well,” Heimrich said. “You did, Ray. And—the water must have been very cold. Not like a nice warm garage, with the motor running.”
“Or sleeping pills,” Ray Crowley said. “Half full bottle in his room. Nembutal, his wife says. She prescribed it. That would have been the easy way.” He looked at Heimrich and Sergeant Forniss. “And then,” he said, “maybe it was just an accident. Only—”
Heimrich waited.
“You want to see where it happened, captain?” Crowley asked. “Or talk to them first?” He gestured toward the house.
“Oh, at the beginning,” Heimrich said. “The end, rather. Where was it, Crowley?”
Crowley led them through the snow, in an area where there had already been much walking in the snow. He led them down to the road, and across it, and then down a sharp slope. There was a small building at the edge of the water.
“Boathouse,” Crowley said. “No boat in it, they say. Here’s where they say it was.”
Near the boathouse, the snow was much trampled down to the water. There was a rimming of ice on the lake, and there it had been broken. (And was now beginning to freeze again.) Something had been dragged through the snow.
“This way when I got here,” Crowley said. “But, you can’t blame them for getting him out, I guess.”
“No,” Heimrich said. He ventured into the trampled area, moving carefully. He slipped and caught himself. “Rock on the surface here,” he said. “Very slippery with the snow on it, naturally. How deep’s the water, Ray? Here at the edge.”
“Three or four feet. According to a man named Perry—he’s a doctor, too—Halley hit his head on something. Knocked himself out, Dr. Perry thinks. As a matter of fact, Dr. Perry thinks it was an accident. Only—what was he doing down here?” He paused. “Of course,” he said, “there’d been a party.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “I supposed there had. He may have been a little drunk. Come out for fresh air—or just to see if it was still snowing—or for any other reason a man who’s a little drunk has for doing things.”
“They say he wasn’t drunk. His wife says that. Dr. Perry says that.”
Captain Heimrich said, “Hm-m,” and came back up the bank, using considerable care. He stood and looked around; looked across the lake. “Pretty here in the summer,” he said. “Always liked Carabec.”
He continued to look around—at the trodden snow by the bank, out of the water. Far out, briefly, a stretch of water caught sunlight. “Breaking up,” Heimrich said. “It’ll get colder, now.” He looked at the boathouse, long and low. The snow had drifted at the end farther from the water. “No boat, you say?” he said, to Ray Crowley. Crowley said that was what they told him. “No night for a boat ride anyway,” Heimrich said.
Three heavy wires, neatly spaced, went into the boathouse, coming down to it from a pole. The wires, supported by two more poles, went up to the house on the other side of the road. “Must have a lathe or something in there,” Heimrich said. “Wouldn’t you think, Charlie?”
Charles Forniss said, “Yep.”
“Seem to have come right to it,” Heimrich said. “The ones who found him, naturally. What did they say about that, Ray?”
They had said, Ray told him, that there were shallow depressions in the snow. Not tracks, in a real sense, but what remained of tracks after blowing snow had almost filled them. A man named Kemper—Thomas Kemper—had noticed them. He and Dr. Perry had followed them.
Heimrich nodded. He looked again toward the boathouse, and the unmarked snow around it. “Snowed hard until an hour or so ago, didn’t it?” he said. “Three hours after they saw these hollows. Maybe more than three hours. But nobody would come down to run a lathe either, you wouldn’t think.”
“There’d still be some marks,” Forniss said.
“Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Depends, doesn’t it? On the wind, for one thing. Well—”
They went back the way they had come, and on the porch of the Halley house they stamped snow from their feet. A tall thin man with glasses opened the door.
“This is Captain Heimrich, doctor,” Crowley said. “And Sergeant Forniss.”
“We were waiting for you,” Brian Perry said. “They’ve taken John’s body. Autopsy, I imagine?”
“Matter of routine,” Heimrich said. “We won’t bother you people long, I hope.”
“He drowned,” Brian Perry said. “Head injury, but that was superficial.”
He stepped away from the door, and they went in, Heimrich first. Perry led them into a long living room. A charred log was all that remained of the cheerful fire of the night before, but the room was warm. There was a dust cover on one long sofa. Heimrich looked at it.
“Wet,” Perry said. “We put him there. Mrs. Halley will be down in a minute.” He looked at Heimrich, then at Forniss. “She thinks he killed himself, you know,” he said. “Blames herself for that. But it does happen, in spite of all we can do.” Perry shook his head slowly. “Come down to it,” he said, “we don’t know too much. Looking at him, I wouldn’t—”
He broke off, at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Heimrich watched a trimly built—delicately built—woman come into the room. She was, he guessed, in her forties. She was very pale. She had not, he thought, been crying. She said, in a voice without emphasis, that they were from the police. Perry told Margaret Halley the names of the policemen.
“I’m sorry we have to—” Heimrich began, and was interrupted. Margaret Halley quite realized what they had to do.
“I know the rules,” she said. “I’m a physician, captain. One gets used to rules. And—other things. Even to sudden death.”
She did not reveal a great deal, Heimrich thought. Except that she was under stress.
“He killed himself,” Margaret Halley said.
“Why?” Heimrich asked her.
“He was sick,” she said. “Mentally sick. Manic-depressive psychosis. I’d thought he was improving but—it isn’t always easy to tell. Sometimes not even possible. Dr. Perry will tell you that.”
Heimrich looked at Perry, and Perry nodded.
“He didn’t leave a note?” Heimrich said.
“He didn’t,” Margaret said. “I wouldn’t have expected him to. You see—it is difficult to explain to a normal person, captain—they get to feeling that nothing matters at all. Not even explaining oneself, which is almost the last thing to go. With anyone.”
“He was depressed last night?”
Margaret Halley looked at Perry, as if she expected him to answer that. But he merely waited. His face showed very little expression, and the rimless glasses, catching lamplight, hid his eyes.
“Toward the end,” Margaret said. “You didn’t notice it, Brian?”
“He became quieter late in the party,” Brian Perry said. “It’s quite possible a depressive phase was beginning. But—I wasn’t attempting diagnosis. I was—” He paused for an instant. “Having a good time.”
She nodded to that. She said that, after the others had gone up to bed, she had sat for a few minutes with her husband, in front of the fire. She had tried to talk about the party, but he had answered very briefly, without interest. She had said that she was sleepy, was going up to bed, and he had looked into the fire, and merely nodded. She had urged him to go to bed, and to that he had said, politely enough but from far away, “Presently. Presently, my dear.” She had asked him if he wanted his usual milk and rum punch and, when he said neither yes nor no to that, had gone to the kitchen, and warmed milk in a saucepan, and poured it into a glass, added rum and bitters and taken it to him. He had nodded, and she had set it down on a table within reach. “He didn’t drink it,” she said. She had left him there. And that, she said now, had been a mistake.
“I was tired,” she said. “Let down, with the party over. All I wanted was to get to sleep. I blame myself for that, captain. I—I feel that I failed. As a person. As a physician.”
Perry seemed about to speak. She said, “It’s no use, Brian.”
“Dr. Perry,” Heimrich said. “This head injury. Was it enough to make him lose consciousness?”
“Yes,” Perry said. “Probably. As a matter of fact, I think it did. I think he slipped, struck his head, and drowned while he was unconscious. I’ve told Dr. Halley that.”
“In other words, that it was an accident?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “It would look like that to me, naturally.”
He looked at Mrs. Halley, and she shook her head. Her expression did not change.
“Why would he go down to the lake?” Heimrich said. “If he wanted to kill himself, there must have been easier ways. Sleeping tablets, for example? They were available, I understand?”
She said, “Yes. Oh yes,” but spoke impatiently.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “There’s no reason you should. But—the lake was part of it. At the center of it.” She looked at Brian Perry. She spoke very slowly. She said, “You realize that, Brian.”
Brian Perry merely looked at her. The glasses still hid the expression in his eyes.
Lynn had waited a long time in the breakfast room which was behind the dining room in the Halley house. At first, Tom Kemper had been with her. Then, after some time, Struthers Boyd had come into the room and complained about a headache. At first, she had watched the snow falling beyond the windows. Then the snow stopped and, after a time, the sun showed itself periodically. The snow on the ground would glitter in sunlight. Then dark shadows would hurry across it. Lucinda Speed came in twice from the kitchen into the small room, and brought fresh coffee. She sniffled when she entered, and sighed deeply when she left, and as she poured coffee for them she shook her head dolefully from side to side. Mrs. Speed, Lynn Ross thought, was equal to the occasion.
Lynn did not, herself, feel adequate to it. What had happened was shocking; it was especially shocking under the circumstances—a party weekend changed suddenly into hopeless dreariness. Yet not, for her, turned into tragedy, even in the commonest, which was the most exaggerated, use of the word. Not, at any rate, into tragedy to be felt as such. She was sorry that John Halley had killed himself; shocked that he had; saddened for Margaret. But it would have been unreasonable to expect that she, Lynn Ross, should feel that sense of loss which turns the shocking into the shattering. She had, most simply, hardly known John Halley.
She told herself this, and yet thought that she should feel more deeply about what had happened—feel something other than a gritty emptiness, a kind of disappointment.
But if she was not equal to the situation, as Mrs. Speed so clearly was, it seemed to her that Tom Kemper was even less so. When she had first met him she had thought, “How cheerful he is,” and, now that cheerfulness was obviously out of the question, she looked at him again and could not think anything at all about him. A youngish man, of medium height, with a rather square face and rather regular features, with lines to show that he smiled a good deal. He maintained an expression of gravity, or, she supposed, an expression so intended. The trouble, she thought, was that gravity was an attitude unfamiliar to Kemper, and one in which he felt insecure. The situation, she thought, was one requiring more maturity than Tom Kemper had achieved. Or, it appeared, than she had either.
She and Kemper had remained in the dining room for only a few minutes after the young trooper had closed the door on them. Then Kemper had said he could use more coffee, and to this she had nodded agreement. They had gone to the breakfast room and Kemper—who clearly knew the house better than she did, which was after all not at all—had gone into the kitchen and come back to say that Mrs. Speed was seeing to it.
The coffee had come, and they had drunk it, and smoked, and talked little. Kemper had said, from a window, that it seemed to be slackening off. He said, again, that he wished they could all get out from under foot. Then he had sat, looking fixedly at his coffee cup, with his expression of gravity in place. Lynn had gone, in turn, to look out the window, and had stayed there for a considerable time—until, in fact, Struthers Boyd had come in and had said, “God! This is awful,” but whether about what had happened or his own headache, which he subsequently mentioned from time to time, was not clear.
They heard sounds from the front of the house—sounds of several men moving around—and then they heard a heavy motor running, and racing, as if a car were having trouble in the snow. At these sounds, they looked toward them, and then, when the sounds led to nothing, away again. “Hope they haven’t forgotten they’ve got us here,” Kemper said, some time later. After that, he went again to the kitchen, carrying the empty coffee pot. He returned with the pot filled.
It was a little after noon that they heard the door from the entrance hall into the dining room open and close again. The young trooper came through the dining room. Inside the door of the breakfast room, he said that he was sorry they had been kept waiting. He said that, if Mr. Kemper didn’t mind, Captain Heimrich would like to talk to him for a few minutes.
“Don’t know what I can tell him,” Kemper said. “But, sure, if he thinks I can.”
Kemper went with the young trooper.
“Sort of making a fuss about it, aren’t they?” Boyd said. He put both hands to his head, and held it tenderly. “Don’t mean that the way it sounds,” he said. “Sorry as hell about poor old John. All I mean is—he slipped and fell in the lake. Or, maybe, went and jumped in. Either way—he’s dead, isn’t he? Fussing about it won’t bring him back to life.”
Lynn said she supposed the police had to find out as much as they could. “If it’s suicide,” she said, “I suppose they have to know. Wouldn’t it make a difference about—oh, insurance?”
“Doubt it,” Boyd said. “Probably had what he’s got a long time. Anyway, he wasn’t a man who needed insurance, you know. That’s for people like me. Not people with as much of his own as John’s got. Or did have. Be Margaret’s now, I suppose.”
“I don’t know, then,” Lynn said. “I suppose they have to find out, if they can. I suppose there’s a law about it.”
Boyd seemed to have lost interest. He tipped the coffee pot over his cup, and swore when only a few drops poured. He got up, apparently with an effort, and went to the kitchen. He came back to say, “She’s making it,” and to sit again, head in hands again. After a time, Mrs. Speed came in once more with coffee. This time she sighed deeply, but did not sniffle.
It was about half an hour after he had taken Kemper away that Trooper Ray Crowley returned. This time he took Boyd away. Boyd groaned.
Captain Heimrich watched the large, drooping, Mr. Boyd leave the living room. Captain Heimrich closed his eyes. He said, absently, that they did not seem to be getting much of any place. It was possible, Sergeant Forniss said, that there was no place to get. At that, Heimrich opened his eyes, and said, “Now Charlie.”
“He drowned himself,” Forniss said. “Or he had an accident. Maybe he went down to the lake to drown himself, and had an accident and fell in before he jumped in. Nothing else shows.”
“If he went to the lake to drown himself,” Heimrich said, “why did he change his shoes? He wouldn’t have been afraid of catching cold, would he, Charlie? And if he went for some other reason, what was the reason?”
Heimrich closed his eyes again, expecting no answer, and getting none that helped. (“Yep,” Forniss said, “I see what you mean.”) They had now spent some time on it, and they were much where they were when they arrived, which was much where Ray Crowley had got before he telephoned. (A smart boy, Crowley was proving himself to be. Something would have to be done about him.)
There had been, in Halley’s room, a bottle half filled with capsules. Halley’s failure to use them, if he wanted to kill himself, was unexplained. But Margaret Halley was sure that her husband had killed himself. She brushed aside the objection to method, but there Heimrich was not sure he followed her. “The lake was at the center of it.” Why? How? “It called him,” she had said, which was no explanation. “It was deep in his subconscious,” she had said, which did not help greatly. And, after she had gone, Brian Perry had said that he did not know, precisely, what she meant, except that in some way the lake might have been a symbol in John Halley’s mind. It was all entirely unsatisfactory.
There was, in the boathouse, an electric generator, installed years before when the electric lines had not reached to the far side of Lake Carabec. Since then, the generator had been kept ready to supply electricity during the power failures which were frequent in the area. The generator did not, as some did, cut in automatically when the power failed. Somebody had to go and start it. And somebody—oh yes, Boyd—remembered that Halley had mentioned the generator during the evening. For what good that did them.
It might have done considerable good. If the power had failed, Halley might have gone down to start the generator, and might have slipped and struck his head and gone into the bitter water of the lake. On hearing of the generator, Heimrich had checked at once. The power had not failed. The New York State Gas and Electric Company was quite sure of this. It was also, from the tone of its voice, a little surprised. (Heimrich learned, later, that several bitter jokesters, brooding on the past and enlivened at parties, had called to report, in accents of vast astonishment, that their power was on. The Company had not been much amused.)
With obstacles to two theories, it was evident that a third remained. It was that, Heimrich supposed, which made him stick at it—perhaps made him exaggerate the objections to either suicide or accident. (After all, Halley just might have gone for a walk, bad night or not; for what is called a “breath of fresh air.” He might even, if he had been drinking, been dizzied by the fresh air.) It did not matter, in the long run, how John Halley had come to die, unless he had been murdered. There was nothing to suggest he had been.
“We may as well get on with it,” Heimrich said, opening his eyes. “Who else have we got?”
“The other women,” Forniss said. “The little blonde. Seems pretty upset, Crowley tells me. Didn’t you, Crowley?”
“More than the others,” Crowley said. “But—maybe she just shows it more.”
“The tall girl,” Forniss said. “Miss—” He consulted notes. “Lynn Ross. She’s the one out in the breakfast room. Her room’s at the back of the house. Not likely she saw anything.”
“Not likely she was awake,” Heimrich said. “However, ask her to come in, will you, Ray?”
Ray went.
“Have you got much idea what sort of man Halley was, Charlie?” Heimrich asked.
“Nope,” Forniss said.
“No,” Heimrich said. “Neither have I.” He closed his eyes. “It’s odd, in a way,” he said.
There were three men in the living room, near the fireplace in which there was no fire. The young trooper in uniform; two solid men, one a little taller than the other. The taller one, Lynn thought, looked like a policeman, although she could not decide why he did. The other, a squarely built man, with a square face, and unexpectedly bright blue eyes, looked—well, like anybody. They stood up when she went into the room.
“My name’s Heimrich, Miss Ross,” the man who did not look, particularly, like a policeman, said. “Captain Heimrich. This is Sergeant Forniss. You’ve met Trooper Crowley. We’re trying to find out what happened.”
“I don’t know,” Lynn said. “Except—somehow—Mr. Halley was drowned. What do you want me to tell you?”
The man named Heimrich smiled faintly, and the smile changed his solid face.
“Now Miss Ross,” he said. “I don’t know, really. Anything you can. You see, Mrs. Halley is afraid her husband killed himself. But it may have been an accident. We’re trying to find out, for one thing, whether during the evening Mr. Halley did anything, or said anything, to indicate he was depressed.”
She did not answer immediately. After she had thought, she shook her head.
“He was quiet toward the end of the party,” she said. “But, I thought he was tired.” She hesitated. “Actually,” she said, “I don’t know I really thought that—thought about it at all. It’s just—when I remember back—” She was not being at all clear, Lynn Ross thought. She wanted to be as clear as she could.
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “It’s often like that, naturally. Did you know Mr. Halley well, Miss Ross?”
“No,” she said. “He was—well, I suppose, just Margaret’s husband. I’d only met him a few times. He was older, of course. Older than she. A good deal older than I am.” She hesitated. “Mrs. Halley was my physician,” she said. She did not know why she said it. It had nothing to do with anything. But Heimrich seemed, somehow, to be waiting for her to say it—to say whatever came into her mind. Why, she thought, in a way it’s as it was with Margaret.
“I had a—a nervous breakdown,” Lynn said. “People call it that. Mrs. Halley—I should say Dr. Halley—got me through it. Did she tell you that?”
“No,” Heimrich said. “She has, actually, told me very little. I haven’t pressed her. She’s—under great strain.”
That was it, Lynn realized. Margaret showed—strain. Not grief so much. Rather a kind of tightness.
“She blames herself,” Lynn said. “She said that to Miss Latham. As much as—” She stopped.
“Yes?” Heimrich said.
“Something about blaming herself as much as Miss Latham could want her to,” Lynn said. “I don’t know what she meant. Perhaps it was just a way of speaking.”
“Perhaps,” Heimrich said. “So you can’t think of anything about Mr. Halley except that he seemed tired toward the end of the party? Tired, but not, that you noticed, particularly depressed?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Margaret would know. Or, Dr. Perry. He’s a psychiatrist too.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “When you went up last night, Miss Ross. After the party?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Halley was still here? In the living room?”
“Sitting by the fire.”
“And the others?”
“Mr. Kemper was still here. And Margaret, of course. I think Mr. Boyd had already gone up. He’d—he’d been drinking more than the rest of us. He dozed off, woke up, said he might as well sleep in bed. He wasn’t drunk at all. Just—sleepy. Sleepy and happy.”
“And Mr. Halley?”
“You mean, had he been drinking a good deal? No, I shouldn’t think so. We’d all had champagne, of course. It’s a time when one always does. He had one long drink afterward, I think.”
“Mr. Halley. Mrs. Halley. Kemper. When you went up. Anyone else?”
“Dr. Perry, I think. Miss Latham went up a few minutes before I did. It was a little after one. Perhaps one-thirty.”
Heimrich nodded.
“During the night,” he said. “You didn’t hear anything. A door closing, say? Or voices? Nothing wakened you?”
She shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said. “Oh—except once. I got cold.”
Heimrich smiled at that.
“No sounds?” he said. “You’re sure it was just because you got cold? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, Miss Ross.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I’d done something wrong about the blanket. It went off.”
“Went off?” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them they seemed even more brightly blue. “You mean, it slipped off the bed?”
“No,” she said. “It’s an electric blanket. It went off—I suppose I did something wrong to it, in my sleep. Tried to turn it down or something, and turned it all the way off.”
“Do you remember doing that?”
For some reason, Lynn thought, he’s not as—as easygoing as he was a minute ago.
“No,” she said. “But it must have been that.” Wait, she thought to herself. I’ve got it wrong somehow. Oh—of course! “When I waked up, because I was cold, I turned the little knob. You know? Turned it all the way off and then turned it on again. But—I had to turn it off first. I remember that.”
“And then, it came on again?”
“Not right away,” she said. “Not—oh, for five minutes, perhaps. I was just about to get up and get a coat or something. And then it came on again.”
“Before you waked up,” Heimrich said. “Had you been asleep long? Did you look at your watch?”
She shook her head, said she had not looked at her watch.
“It’s hard to tell how long one’s been asleep,” she said. “But—I shouldn’t think very long.” She was puzzled, now. “You seem to think this is important,” she said. “How could it be?”
He did not answer at once. Then he said, only, that it was hard to tell what might prove to be important.
“A circuit breaker?” Forniss said. “Off, then on again?”
“You get a flicker,” Heimrich said. “This would have had to be more than that. If Miss Ross is right. Ray, find out whether they’ve got an electric clock. See what time it is. It ought to be—” He looked at his watch—“one-fifteen, or thereabouts. You see the point, don’t you, Ray?”
Ray Crowley flushed. (He was beginning to think he would never get over that habit, so inappropriate in a policeman.) He said, “Yes sir.” Heimrich looked at him, smiled faintly, and said, “Sorry, Ray.”
Ray left.
“Let’s go out and look around, Charlie,” Heimrich said, and led the way out. From the porch, they could see most of what they needed to see.
Poles marched up the road from the south, and marched away to the north. The two high-voltage lines were strung on the crossbars. A big transformer was on the pole nearest the Halley house. From it, a triple line swung up to the house, supported half way along on a private pole. And from it, also, two other sets of triple wires extended, to right and left, along the poles.
“Three on the transformer,” Forniss said.
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “All for one and one for all. We may have to go calling.”
“Probably nobody’ll be at home,” Forniss said. “Maybe Crowley—”
They went back into the house. Crowley met them in the hall. He shook his head. He said, “Not unless one of them brought one along. Or Lucy Speed’s lying. She doesn’t, that I’ve ever heard.”
“We’ll ask,” Heimrich said. “I shouldn’t think anybody’d bring one. You checked the range, naturally? The refrigerator?”
“Yes,” Crowley said. “Range is gas. Not automatic. No defrosting clock on the refrigerator.”
“The primitive life,” Heimrich said. “Most of the houses along the road are closed up for the winter, probably. You’d know about that, Ray? Particularly, the houses on the same transformer box.”
Ray Crowley did know. It was part of his job to know. The Barncastles, who lived up the road—“up” was to the north—closed their house in November, each year, and had this year. The Fosters, down the road, spent winters in the city. But they had a caretaker in the house.
“Drop down and see him, Ray,” Heimrich said. “Find out what time it is. If he has the right kind of clock.”
Ray went.
“You want this Miss Latham?” Forniss asked. Heimrich, with his eyes shut, shook his head. He said they might as well wait for Ray.
“If there’s a clock,” Heimrich said. “And the clock’s right, we’ll see them all together, Charlie. Perhaps one of them will be surprised.”
Heimrich sat for a moment with his eyes closed. Then he got up and went down the long room toward a door at the rear—a door which led to the back hall and kitchen area. Forniss looked after him, and waited. Heimrich was gone only briefly.
“Checking up on young Crowley?” Forniss asked.
“On Crowley? Oh—no, Charlie. Wanted to ask Mrs. Speed something. Seems Mrs. Halley was right. Mrs. Speed cleaned up the room this morning. Found the glass on the table, where Mrs. Halley put it. Hadn’t been touched, Mrs. Speed says. Emptied the rum punch out and washed the glass.”
Forniss waited.
“That’s all,” Heimrich said. “Mrs. Halley said her husband didn’t drink the punch. I supposed she meant while she was there. Now it seems he didn’t drink it at all.”
Forniss nodded, slowly.
“Bears out her theory, naturally,” Heimrich said. “For what it’s worth. Wouldn’t expect a man to drink a glass of warm rum punch if he’d decided to kill himself. Wouldn’t seem to be in character, would it? And, apparently he didn’t.”
“This Mrs. Speed,” Forniss said. “She told Mrs. Halley the punch wasn’t drunk?”
“Now Charlie,” Heimrich said. “No, she says she didn’t. Why should she? A little thing like that, with this dreadful thing happening? Very broken up, Mrs. Speed is. Takes it hard.”
Heimrich sat down and closed his eyes. They waited, Heimrich quite relaxed, Forniss showing some tendency to prowl the room, to look out its windows. Crowley was back in some fifteen minutes. This time, he nodded as he came into the room.
“Clock in the kitchen,” he said. “Right on the nose. And, he didn’t have to set it. Makes it look—” Crowley stopped. It wasn’t his job to say what things looked like.
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “It does, Ray. Will you get them all in here? If they happen to think we’re going to tell them it’s all wrapped up, and that we’re leaving, that will be all right. But, that isn’t particularly important.”
Again Heimrich and Forniss waited. Dr. Brian Perry came in first, and Lynn Ross was with him. Margaret Halley came, alone. Tom Kemper was only seconds behind her. Boyd came alone and, this time after several minutes, Audrey Latham. The slender blonde, still in slacks and a closely fitting sweater, had been crying.
“So you’ve got it all squared away,” Boyd said. “Didn’t take you long. I’ll say that.”
Heimrich looked around at the others before he answered. Dr. Perry’s eyes, he thought, were narrowed behind the rimless glasses; the dark eyes of the tall Lynn Ross were merely puzzled. He could not read anything in Mrs. Halley’s eyes nor, and this a little surprised him, those of the well-set-up Mr. Kemper. Mr. Kemper had a very open countenance. He looked interested; he looked as if he were on his way to being very cheerful. Audrey Latham did not look at Heimrich, but looked, with an odd intentness, at Dr. Margaret Halley. Mr. Boyd appeared quite recovered from his headache. He had probably, Heimrich thought, enjoyed a hair of the dog—although, if what everyone said was true, the dog had been the merest puppy.
“Just about, Mr. Boyd,” Heimrich said. “One or two little points I thought one of you might all help me on. Comparing notes, you know? So that we can get the report accurate.” Heimrich sighed. “They’re great on accuracy,” he said. “Want all the little details just so.” He looked around again, from one to another. “Like times,” he said. “They are very particular about exact times.” He sighed again, a man much put upon. (And trusted that no one would enquire, too specifically, who “they” were. But, in his considerable experience, no one ever had.)
“It doesn’t seem to matter,” Mrs. Halley said. “Why should such things matter to anybody?”
“I know,” Heimrich said. “I’m sorry to bother you. And the others too, naturally. It’s just that I have to follow the rules. If I don’t, they’ll have to send somebody else to fill in the gaps. I want to find out, as closely as I can, when Mr. Halley—went down to the lake. Whether anyone saw him go.”
He looked around, again.
“As Miss Ross remembers it,” he said, “she went up to bed a little after one. Perhaps as late as one-thirty. Miss Latham had gone up a few minutes before. Mr. Boyd a little earlier. Mr. Halley, Mrs. Halley, Mr. Kemper and Dr. Perry were still here, as she recalls it. Is that as you remember it, Mr. Boyd?”
“I guess so,” Boyd said. “Fact is, I went to sleep for a few minutes. Right over there.” He pointed to a chair. “Something waked me up and I figured I wasn’t adding anything to the party and went up to bed. I didn’t notice the time. Maybe around one.”
“And went to bed? And turned off your light?”
Boyd appeared puzzled.
“I don’t see—” he said. “But, sure. Been a long time since I was afraid of the dark.”
“Miss Latham?”
“I guess so,” she said. “How we can—sit here like this—go over and over and over things that don’t matter ….
“And went to bed and turned off your light?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“I went up a few minutes after Miss Ross,” Brian Perry said. “I went to my room, which is on the front—toward the lake—and went to bed and turned off my light. As I was closing my door, I heard someone coming up the stairs and looked back and saw Kemper. I said, ‘Goodnight again,’ or something like that.”
Heimrich looked at Kemper, who nodded.
“Way I remember it,” he said. “I went in and went to bed and turned off my light. What’s so important about turning off the lights?”
“Now Mr. Kemper,” Heimrich said. “They’re very insistent on all these little details. Nothing important. And you, Mrs. Halley—or should I say ‘Doctor’ Halley?” She merely shrugged. “Stayed up with your husband for a time and left him by the fire and went upstairs.”
“I’ve told you that several times,” she said.
“And went to bed and to sleep?”
“And—turned out my light. I must say, I share Tom’s inability to—”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “I realize how trivial it all is, naturally. How—almost unbearable at a time like this. All this—nibbling. However—have you any idea what time you went up, Mrs. Halley? Leaving your husband here by the fire?”
“About two.”
Heimrich closed his eyes. He spoke, next, without opening them.
“Did any of you happen to bring a traveling clock along?” he asked. “An electric clock?”
They looked from one to another. Heimrich opened his eyes.
“I take it not,” he said. “And after two, none of you saw anything of Mr. Halley. Or—heard him go out, say? You, Dr. Perry? Since you had a room at the front of the house.”
“No,” Perry said. “But—perhaps I can help a little. I don’t see the importance of this either, captain. But—I didn’t go to sleep at once. I seldom do. I was lying so that I looked out a window. I could see the light from the living room—this room—on the snow. It reflected into the room. I heard Dr. Halley come up and walk along the hall. Then I dozed. I woke up again, suddenly, an hour or so later. At first I didn’t know what had wakened me. Then I realized that it was a change of light in the room—John had turned the light off downstairs. I suppose I had subconsciously been waiting for that, because then I went to sleep.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “One other point. A very small point. Are there electric blankets in most of the guestrooms, Mrs. Halley?”
“Electric blankets? I really don’t understand— But, no, captain. We don’t use them much in the country. Rural electric service is likely to be erratic. But, I wasn’t sure there would be enough blankets and comforters for everybody, so we brought up the one blanket from town.” She turned, quickly, to Lynn. “My dear,” she said. “Don’t tell me it didn’t work?”
“It—” Lynn began, and Heimrich interrupted her.
“It worked quite well,” Heimrich said. “Very well indeed.” He closed his eyes again. The silence was uneasy. They waited for him to resume. He did not.
“Well,” Boyd said, finally, and his voice was unexpectedly loud after the quiet, “you’ve got all the details you want, captain?”
Heimrich opened his very blue eyes.
“All but one,” he said. “Which of you murdered Mr. Halley?”