LOCKSMITHS, IT APPEARED on investigation the next morning, were so far participating in the current prosperity that they could be high-handed about employment. The kindest of them was willing to rearrange his schedule so that he could repair the McKinnons’ back door a week from the next Monday. When advised of their needs he merely said, “Whyn’tcha put a chair under the knob and go out the front?” and hung up.
“And the chair,” Todd observed, “I’d already thought of.” He bent once more to fiddle with the lock, whose repair was beyond his powers. When he straightened up, it was to glance around the kitchen as if trying to capture an elusive memory. “I keep thinking that there was something different here when I came down the second time last night,” he said slowly. “The first time, just after young Al left, I didn’t look around inside as carefully as I might; but there was some li’le thing that photographed itself on my mind, and I can’t get it now.”
“Well, nothing’s missing,” Georgine said, hanging up the last cup and flinging her dishtowel over a rack. “All the pots and pans are here, and the remains of the cake, and the knives—now, if our steak knife had gone, we could really get worried.”
“No, it was something on a wall. As you say, though, there’s nothing missing now.” He sat down beside the table and began absently to run a scale or two on his mouth-organ.
Georgine waited. In a minute or two he would work up to the Running Jump Symphony, and when—yes, there it came. “Look, chum,” she said ominously, “you can’t do that there ’ere. I’m going mad hearing that theme. Can’t we talk it out?”
“What? Oh. Yes, I suppose so. Georgine, if you wanted to lose a horse, where would you take it?”
“Haven’t you got that wrong?” Georgine said. “I thought it was, ‘I thought where I’d go if I was a horse and I went there’—”
“No, I meant what I said.”
“I see.” She thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose in a field with a lot of other horses.”
“Yes.” He tapped the mouth-organ on his palm, his agate eyes narrowed and hard. “I wonder if there are any landladies’ conventions, or clubs, or hideouts.”
“Are you still thinking about that woman?”
“Still thinking. Does it bother you?”
“No, I’ve recovered pretty well.” Georgine polished the drainboard. “It—the thing that bothers me most is the uncertainty, not knowing what would have happened to me; it would be easier somehow if I knew they’d meant to kill me.”
Todd looked at her soberly for an appreciable time. Then he said, “You’ve never been to the Colony. Want to drive out there with me?”
Georgine’s heart seemed to leap sideways like a skittish colt. Mentally she spoke soothing words to it, telling herself that Todd had been safe on that other occasion, that she’d be with him, that she needn’t even get out of the car unless she chose…
“All right,” she said finally. “I suppose there’s some definite reason?”
“Not definite. Just a long chance.” He got up and went into the hall. “While you’re getting dressed I want to make a telephone call.”
From upstairs she could hear him, not all the words, but enough to make out that he was talking to Mrs. Majendie. One sentence rose clearly. “Not yet? You haven’t looked for her?” Then the softer murmur again.
He explained, as they got into the car. “I wondered if Miss Godfrey might have gone back to the Colony the other night. Mrs. Majendie says no, that it would be unlikely, and that she hasn’t seen her since the big scene on Tuesday, but that she’d evidently been home—which we knew already— and had cleaned up the house in a frenzy of leave-taking and done a few things about the garden that she’d been putting off.”
“Why do you want Miss Godfrey?” Georgine said. “No, you drive, I don’t want to be entertained with mouth-organ solos all the way out there.”
Todd started the car. “I don’t want her. I most particularly don’t want her at the Colony. She’s probably got some other place she goes to when the Cosmos won’t vibrate right.”
They were through the tunnel and running smoothly along through the milder air of the Orinda section before Georgine said, “Todd, do you think this whole thing began at the Colony?”
“It depends,” he said thoughtfully, “on which theory and which motive I’m on at the moment. If Chloe Majendie’s been directing the Hand of God, it started when Nikko Majendie was caught getting out of that warm bed, but if she didn’t take revenge on his partner in sin, that theory falls through. I sure hate to give it up—I’ve never bagged a Ritual Repeater.”
Georgine gave a spurt of unsympathetic laughter. “I doubt if anyone ever has. But what about it if Nikko died naturally?”
“Then it might still have started out here, with the one who had the forbidden baby—and was probably nursed by Joan, too. The old girl has her uses; you could forgive quite a lot of oddities if you had a good chauffeur and gardener and nurse rolled into one. —Joan was around, no doubt, when Bell Johnson started off on her wedding trip,” said Todd meditatively, “and she was certainly there when Hartlein paid his evening call and laid the inhaler on the table, and had to be reminded of it.”
They drove for a mile or so in silence. Then Georgine said, “Todd, I don’t see how a person could follow two or three patterns at once.”
“How’s that again?”
“Look; you’ve got Joan being a Ritual Repeater, and a Maniac, and a Perfect Murderer—trying to implicate someone else—and even, partly, the Policeman’s Little Helper. It’s too much.”
He thought it over, slowing the car to watch the road signs. “You’ve got a point there. Of course, I don’t confine myself to that one theory. What if the murders didn’t start at the Colony, but with the death of Bell and her husband? They might be caused by simple greed. We’ve got Cass and Ryn both inheriting from Bell; we’ve got Cass collecting some of Hartlein’s insurance, and technically both of those murders are of the Perfect type… Or suppose that old debbil Sex is at the bottom of all this, you could see David Shere bumping off his lost love and the successful rival, all in one, and then going on to the just impediment in the person of Hartlein, and removing that, and even taking a few swipes at a sister who might be some other kind of impediment.”
“No, I couldn’t. The methods are too indirect.”
Todd slowed for a turn, and glanced sideways at her. “Ah, my dear stooge, but have you considered that that furious manner Shere affects may be put on just so that we’ll consider him a big straightforward bumbling schoolboy? ‘Not in character,’ we say, and dismiss him. If you could really work a personality disguise, it’d beat all the false beards and plastic surgery that ever turned up in the history of crime.”
“Okay, but I’ll stick to my own character reading. And not one of these patterns takes in that business with the Trumbull, yesterday.”
“No,” Todd said, “but if we could get to the bottom of that, maybe we could work it in. You know what it fits? The pattern of the Nervous Murderer, and we haven’t got one of those yet.”
“Well, dear, by all means have one. Let’s get in the whole collection, even if we have to kill me off to make it plausible.”
Todd laughed callously and swung the car into the gateway of the Beyond-Truth Colony.
The grass circle was as smooth and verdant as ever, the walks and shrubbery as neat, but today the Sabbath hush was absent. There were sounds of activity, of lawn-mowers and clippers and voices calling; in fact, the first person the McKinnons met was Mr. Alvah Burke, clad in overalls, standing on a ladder and clipping away at the top of a hedge near the circle. He turned and saw them and descended with a look of ingenuous pleasure on his sprightly old face. “Well, well,” he said. “Back again, eh? And with a lady, too. There’s lots of our visitors that get interested and come back.”
Todd introduced him to Georgine, and added, “I’m afraid we’re still in no state to be converted, Mr. Burke. We came to call on one of your other visitors.”
“Yes? Who would it be?”
“She calls herself Mrs. Trumbull, but that may not be the name she’d give you. She would have come here last night, and I think that one of Mrs. Majendie’s nieces would have brought her out and arranged for her stay.”
“A stranger, you mean? There’s not a soul here that we don’t know,” said Mr. Burke, and shook his head for added emphasis, his candid old eyes on Todd’s. “I guess you made a mistake, Mr. McKinnon. Nobody’s here but our own members.”
Todd grinned at him. “Honest, Mr. Burke? We just want to talk to the guest, that’s all. You mean nobody came here last night?”
“No one but members.” The old gentleman smiled back at him. “That’s World Truth, sir.”
“Nobody could have come without your knowing?”
“Well, now, that’s possible. You might ask the ladies, I reckon. There’s a lot of them over there turning out the guest cottage.”
Todd thanked Mr. Burke, and directed Georgine across the circle toward the guest cottage. “Hell,” he said in a low voice as they walked, “I think he is telling World Truth, too. Most transparent old codger I ever met. We might as well look around, though.”
As they neared the guest cottage, it was evident that the ladies who “took pride,” in Mr. Burke’s earlier phrase, were doing it today in the most strenuous fashion. Cheerful elderly voices were exchanging directions and comment from every point in the cottage’s vicinity; a corps of four were washing windows, several more were attacking wicker furniture with a paint-spray gun, and a plump gentleman was pruning vines under the instruction, given in no uncertain terms, of another. The ladies had all protected their hair with bandannas, and their wash dresses and aprons might have been photographed on the spot for a soap advertisement.
“Oh, dear,” Georgine murmured. “I ought to wash our upstairs windows this week.”
“Easy,” Todd said. “I didn’t bring you out here to get those ideas in your head.” He tipped his hat back to look up at a window whence one of the ladies had just hailed him by name.
“Good morning,” she was saying briskly. “We were sorry you and your friend couldn’t stay for the meeting on Tuesday.” He had to gaze at her for an appreciable moment before he recognized the Miss Cortelyou who had guided him, today wearing her nice old face completely unadorned.
He repeated his request, while Georgine stood mutely trying to look as if she had left her own house in irreproachable order: a difficult feat at any time.
“Why, no,” said Miss Cortelyou after a minute’s pause, “I haven’t seen anyone who isn’t a member. All the ladies are here this morning, anyway. You can look around and see for yourself.”
“When I made that remark about the field of horses,” said Georgine, sotto voce, “I should have added that the horses ought to be all alike.” A shapeless gray-faced woman working with a spray gun, who might have been near enough to hear a word or two, glanced up at her and looked faintly surprised; and then wiped her forehead with a short sleeve and returned to work.
“Well, Holmes,” Georgine added, “it was a wonderful idea, only it didn’t work.”
Todd shook his head. He had completed a survey of all the visible ladies, and now was leading his wife slowly around to the back of the cottage where one or two other workers were hanging blankets on a line. Georgine could sense the rising of those invisible antennae of his; he let go her arm and walked quickly around to confront a woman whose face had been hidden.
“Oh, how do you do,” the woman’s voice said pleasantly. “I hope Mr. Burke told you all you wanted to know, the other day?” Todd’s voice, politely answering, sounded deflated.
“ ‘A blank, my lord,’ ” said Georgine softly as they retraced their steps.
“You’re right, damn it. I expect we’d better go back to the City and look for that landladies’ convention.” He took off his hat in farewell to Miss Cortelyou and started back across the lawns. “And I can tell you that, from the landladies I’ve known, I’d just as soon jump into a den of lions.”
“How do they keep their grass like this?” Georgine inquired inattentively. “It’s almost like a putting green.”
They reached the car. Todd held open the door for her, and she got in, smiling. “I’ve just reacted to the landladies’ convention. It’s one of those pictures that kind of builds up in your mind, all of the brass-haired and high-busted ones in a solid phalanx, with those distrustful eyes on you and their eyebrows… Todd!”
“What’s the matter?”
“We’re a pair of perfect fools! Didn’t you rather expect to find Mrs. Trumbull with all her make-up on?”
Todd paused in the act of inserting his ignition key. “You think one of those women was the Trumbull after all?”
“You don’t know what a difference it makes if you take off everything.”
“That I would have noticed, like the witches’ sabbath.”
“Lunkhead,” said Georgine without rancor. “I mean the eyebrows, the mascara, the corsets—and the henna. Yes, I looked too, for an edge of red hair to show under one of those kerchiefs, and they were all gray except for the one with the spray gun. Hers was still pinkish, Todd. She couldn’t wash out all the henna overnight.”
“Nobody but members,” he said slowly, thoughtfully. “I believed that story. I still believe it. But if those old innocents were telling the truth both ways—Georgine; wait here for a minute.”
It was not much more than the actual sixty seconds before he came back through the screen of trees that masked the guest cottage. Ahead of him walked the woman who had been using the spray gun. She walked hurriedly, unsteadily, with her head bent, like the pictures of an accused person coming out of court and ducking the photographers.
Todd herded her almost to the car; he sat her down on a stone bench on the edge of the grass circle, and beckoned Georgine to join him. The woman looked up defiantly, and it was easy enough now to paint, in imagination, the black eyebrows and the dark lipstick on her colorless face, and to recognize her.
“Georgine,” said Todd softly, “this is Mrs. Trumbull, of course, but it’s also Frances Sagers.”
Georgine’s eyes began to spark a vivid and ominous blue. They met Todd’s, hard as a whetstone, and the woman’s, sullen and fearful. Slowly she got out of the car, closed the door and leaned against it.
“So they were telling the truth,” she said. “Once a member, always a member; and the old people took you in because they thought you’d returned to the fold. It might have worked except that my husband spotted the connection between you and the Beyond-Truth.” She waited a minute, remembering the cruelty of the lies that had been told her yesterday. “Todd, do the people out here know what kind of member she was—what she did to Dr. Majendie?”
“Not yet,” said Todd. He glanced at Mrs. Trumbull, who had shut her mouth in an ugly stubborn line. Georgine guessed what kind of pressure he had exerted to get the woman to come with him.
“They couldn’t do anything,” said Mrs. Trumbull roughly. “They wouldn’t—the old softies. Wouldn’t even believe you.”
“They’d believe Mrs. Majendie,” Todd pointed out. “She’d be interested personally, too. You got off too easily that other time. She was sorry for you—and she went farther yet, she recommended you for the job at the lodging-house.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Perhaps not, but what was done couldn’t have been fixed up without your connivance.” Todd looked at her implacably, and his eyes narrowed. “Where were you, all those years between the early Thirties and the middle Forties?”
“None of your business.”
“We can find out from Mrs. Majendie. She’ll tell us when she knows it’s important. But in the meantime, I can make a guess. Shere said you’d come ‘from the South,’ but I’d bet that it wasn’t any farther south than the Tehachapi Mountains. You were in the women’s prison, weren’t you?”
The woman said nothing, but a muscle twitched in her face.
“What you pulled on Dr. Majendie,” Todd added, “was the old hotel-room con game. You probably tried it again, and one of the times you got caught.”
Georgine watched the colorless face. Trumbull wasn’t the smartest deceiver in the world; her eyes jerked nervously sideways and her lips tightened. Georgine nodded as she met Todd’s look.
“And after you got out, you came crawling back to Mrs. Majendie, and said you were sorry, you meant to go straight now, she’d been kind to you before and maybe she’d help you again. That was the set-up, wasn’t it? But,” said Todd softly, “You weren’t going straight yesterday. She’ll have to know that, and so will the police. You know about terms for multiple offenses.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Mrs. Trumbull burst out again, a frightened tremor in her voice. “She came over there and made me do it—threatened me, same as you’re doing now, only she was going to tell Mr. Shere all about me, he didn’t know before.”
“Who came over there?”
“That girl, that girl! And it didn’t sound like any great harm, she knew a woman in Berkeley who’d been telling lies about her, and she wanted to give her a scare. That’s what she said.”
“What girl?” Todd repeated patiently.
The Trumbull’s voice was sullen. “The Johnson girl.”
“Which one?” said Georgine with emphasis.
“I don’t know. I can’t hardly tell ’em apart, I never saw much of either of ’em, only that time they took me to see Mr. Shere. She just said she was Miss Johnson.”
“What did she look like?”
“Well, kind of middle-sized, pretty, with dark hair. She had on one of those camel-hair coats that cost a mint.”
“They both have them. How about her eyes, and her hair, and the shape of her face?”
“I don’t know, I tell you. She had on dark glasses, those slantwise ones, kind of like a mask—and her eyes looking through—” She paused, swallowed and added, “But you couldn’t see the color.”
“Mrs. Trumbull,” said Todd with quiet concentration, “that sounds as if you’d felt something wrong about her too. She frightened you, didn’t she? Aside from the threats, I mean?”
“Yes, she did. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to—so help me, I did go straight after I got out, and I got a man friend that’s—well, she did scare me into it. And she said there wasn’t any harm in what was going to happen.”
“But what was planned?”
“I don’t know.” The rough voice was desperate. “I was just to do the telephoning, and meeting at the door, and then show you—” she looked at Georgine, with a sort of miserable appeal in her eyes—“to the stairs. I don’t know what else.”
“And then the plan was changed, because my wife didn’t, after all, come alone. The Johnson girl rushed you out the back door, isn’t that so?”
“That’s right. Said there was going to be trouble, and I better get out. And she drove me to the bus station and left me. I was to stay out here until she ’phoned me to come back.”
“There was going to be trouble,” said Todd thoughtfully. “There still could be, you know, unless we find out which of the Johnson girls worked out that plan.”
“What was her hair like?” Georgine said.
The woman shrugged. “I told you. Black. Done up in a kind of thick roll at the back of her neck, coming up to cover her ears.”
“Could have been either of them,” Todd said. His eyelids contracted, and he met Georgine’s look. She shook her head. She said, “That hair-do would disguise the shape of her cheeks, and so would the glasses. She didn’t mean Mrs. Trumbull to know which one she was.”
Todd stood up. “Perhaps we’d better take you in to talk to the police—and Mrs. Majendie.”
“No, for God’s sake,” the woman said with sudden desperation. “I couldn’t tell you any more, I swear it. And you know nothin’ happened, you can’t pin that business on me! Just lemme stay here, I won’t move from the place. You tell the old people I’ve got to.”
“That might do,” said Todd deliberately. He looked at Georgine again and gave an infinitesimal shrug. She knew what he meant; there was, after all, nothing of which to accuse Mrs. Trumbull, and there was also the strong impression that she had told all—or nearly all—she knew. She would be safe here.
And yet—there was the uncertainty, still unresolved, and the added fact that this woman also had felt the sense of something wrong. Eyes, looking at her through dark tilted glasses: that had been enough.
“Let’s drop it,” said Georgine abruptly. “For now, anyway.”
Todd nodded. In silence he gestured to Mrs. Trumbull, so that she rose and started back, walking behind him, across the green circle. Georgine sat waiting for him, feeling that if she moved too suddenly her nerves would give out an audible twang. Something wrong was abroad, something evil, but nothing that you could grasp; an evil so nebulous that for the police and the law it would not exist; a crime as yet invisible, related to life only as the Beyond-Truth was to ordinary fact, a kind of vibration of wrong-doing which only the initiate could see.
Todd came back. Watching his approach, she thought, —We’ll drive home, we’ll be in time for a late lunch, and afterward I am really going to wash the upstairs windows; I might even—yes, I will, I’ll put the bedroom rugs through the washer.—
***
The lunch part of this program went off as planned, but the rest of it fell far short of Georgine’s ideal. She had seen herself being the conscientious housewife while Todd was at home, scrubbing away to the accompaniment of cheerful sounds from the typewriter. It developed, however, that Todd meant to drive up to Cuckoo Canyon and gently sound out Mrs. Majendie on the subject of Frances Sagers’ relations with her nieces.
“Oh, Todd, no!” she said violently. “You’re just sticking your neck out!”
“Dear Georgine, I’ve got to stick it out. I’ve got to get those damned stories of mine into workable shape. Do you know how many I’ve managed to finish so far? Two; and not masterpieces, either. It’s not enough.”
She answered his inquiring look. “Of course I’m scared. Nobody seems to have a sense of danger except me. Hugh Hartlein did, of course; and look what happened to him!”
“As a matter of fact,” said Todd rather sheepishly, “the police say that he was a suicide.”
Georgine looked at him. “Now he tells me! How did they finally decide on that?”
“Three days before he died he’d sent an old suit up to his mother’s home. They found aluminum filings embedded in the material, and traces of crystalline cyanide in a pocket. He made that inhaler himself. They think he stole the cyanide from the Majendie greenhouse, and of course he planted the experimental inhalers in the compost heap.”
“You sound,” Georgine said, “as if that doesn’t satisfy you.”
“It’s hard to go against that kind of evidence,” said Todd slowly. “Maybe I’d be like Nelse and say that the case is closed, except for those goings-on yesterday. They might have fitted into a murder pattern, but they certainly don’t into a suicide. And maybe the police can afford to ignore the Trumbull business; I can’t.”
“Oh, dear me. I see. If there’s no mystery about Hartlein, that other thing is just—the result of dislike.”
“Yes, and who hates you that much?”
“I thought nobody did,” said Georgine plaintively. “I’ve done nothing but ply them with creamed shrimps and coffee and Coca-Cola, and I wish to heaven they’d feed me some time! The only one—”
“Yes?”
“I can’t make anything of this either, but every time David Shere and I have met we’ve ended up fighting—or at least, he’s been mad at me.”
“And that doesn’t fit any of the patterns either,” said Todd, unhappily running a palm across his hair, “unless he got the idea that you’d done him out of the money. I admit I wouldn’t mind finding out that it was Shere. I want very much to poke somebody in the nose over that business yesterday. You’re sure you won’t put the Curse of Rome on me if I go now?”
“No, I think you have to be at least a Cardinal to do that. But I will assert myself somehow; wear a sweater under your coat!”
“I’ll wear five sweaters if you like,” said Todd, springing up. “Batten down the hatches, Georgine, and don’t speak to any strange men. I shouldn’t be gone more than an hour.”
He drove slowly up to Cuckoo Canyon under a sky which today was veiled by a thin, mean-looking haze behind which the sun and all warmth had retired. The wind had blown itself nearly out. Gardeners who would not have dared to light a trash fire in the dry northern gale of the past few days were now busily raking up leaves and cramming them into incinerators, or watching over smoldering piles in the gutters, hurrying to get their yards cleaned up before the winter rains began in earnest. Todd sniffed the pleasant smoke soberly. His mind was busy with the proper opening for the afternoon’s business: —Mrs. Majendie, we’ve found Frances Sagers, but I assure you it was quite by accident; —Mrs. Majendie, just how much do your nieces know about Frances Sagers’ past history? —Mrs. Majendie…
He hadn’t yet found the really tactful approach when the low redwood house came in sight over the top of the cliff. He parked his car beside the Majendie driveway and strolled into the garden, where a shapeless felt hat was moving deliberately along behind a tall row of chrysanthemum bushes.
Chloe Majendie reached the end of the row and saw him. She said, “Good afternoon, Mr. McKinnon,” in her beautiful deep voice, and came into the open with her eyes fixed on his. “How may I help you this time?”
“By letting bygones be bygones, for one thing,” Todd replied. “When this is all over, Georgine and I would very much like to call on you as friends.”
“And I should like to have you. But surely ‘this’ is all over now?”
“Not quite, I think. I was a li’le worried over Miss Godfrey, Mrs. Majendie.”
“I doubt that you need to be,” said the old lady kindly.
“Has she come home, may I ask?”
“No, not yet. I never have known where she’s gone on her other—let us call them, leaves of absence.” Mrs. Majendie’s eyes twinkled faintly. “Nor have I known when to expect her, but I think she’ll be home soon.” She looked at him curiously. “Was it she who inspired this call?”
“As it happens, no,” said Todd, smiling. “I was just leading up to my other subject in what I hoped was a graceful way. Easing into it, you know. Start with Joan, ask if her handbag had been returned safely, work round to your nieces—seemed less abrupt, I thought.”
Mrs. Majendie’s attention had been caught earlier in his remarks. “Her handbag?” she said. “Joan’s?”
“Yes. It was left at our place, and I returned it to Ryn last night.”
“Was her money in it, Mr. McKinnon?”
“Yes. Rather a large amount, I believe.” He debated a moment and added, “Georgine said that Miss Godfrey was a bit upset, still, and indicated she didn’t want to take along anything you’d given her.”
“That would scarcely include money. She earned her salary.” Chloe’s lips pressed together briefly. “Will you come in, Mr. McKinnon?”
Todd followed her into the house, and sat down on the chair she indicated. From another room her voice sounded intermittently, the words inaudible. It was evident that she was telephoning. —So much for tact, he told himself resignedly. — The old lady’s got off on another subject and I’ll never get her back to Frances Sagers until she’s exhausted it.—
It was perhaps ten minutes before Mrs. Majendie reappeared, and when she did her craggy old face looked flushed and anxious. “I called Ryn,” she said. “The child’s been asleep all morning after a bad night, and hadn’t had a chance to bring the bag up. And I called the bank. Joan hasn’t cashed any checks, Mr. McKinnon. She would need money; she’s not as unworldly as that.” She paused a moment, and her keen eyes seemed to glaze over. “I believe I will sit down. —This is Thursday afternoon, and I haven’t seen Joan since she left us at the Colony on Tuesday. She was gone when I got home that night.”
“We saw her here at about six o’clock. She was sweeping the porch,” said Todd.
“Yes, I noticed. Coals of fire on my head, was how I interpreted it. She did a number of odd jobs that we usually finished together: swept every ash out of the fireplace, tied up the old newspapers, fumigated the—”
Her voice broke off as if something had clutched her windpipe. She had been gazing past Todd; now she looked at him squarely, and her weathered face turned ashen gray. “She fumigated the greenhouse,” she said on the merest thread of sound. “I saw the sign on the door, ‘Danger, cyanide fumes, do not open for forty-eight hours.’—That last is to make sure that the fumigation is thorough. But—I didn’t go in.”
Todd said nothing. The little core of concentration was drawing together in his mind.
Old Chloe’s voice and vigor had returned. “There’s only one thing to do, of course,” she said, rising. “That’s to go and investigate. Will you be so kind as to come with me?”
“Of course,” Todd murmured. After the comfortable warmth of the house, the cold November air hit him with a physical shock as he followed her across the porch, but it did not dissipate his almost hypnotized attention. —Mrs. Majendie had not thought of the greenhouse until now—until she had an impartial witness.—
The dowdy, impressive old figure moved deliberately across the garden to the edge of the cliff, the first point at which both the greenhouse and the Johnsons’ cottage, far below, were visible. The greenhouse stood on a natural shelf at the second turn of the path. Mrs. Majendie looked down at it, paused only briefly, and began to round the hairpin curve.
At the same moment something moved in the Johnsons’ garden. Someone had come quickly out of the house and was running through the gate, up the road to the place where the cliff path began. A long, full, gray-green coat swung out behind the figure as in desperate-seeming haste it began to climb…
Mrs. Majendie had reached the door of the greenhouse. Her big hand reached out and unhooked the hand-lettered sign from the doorknob, opened the door and motioned Todd back.
“We’ll wait for just a minute,” she said quietly. “Let the place air before we go in.”
Through a clear space scratched in the thin whitewash that covered the glass Todd could see the wooden tables inside, covered with flats of earth in which small leaves showed green. He glanced downward at the plank walk between the tables. A short cylindrical glass jar was visible there, partly filled with a colorless liquid. Through the open door he glimpsed two more. The warm, steamy, earthy smell of all greenhouses drifted out and blew softly away on the wind.
“Now,” said Mrs. Majendie, and walked in with a firm step. She looked up and down along the ground. Complete stillness came over her, and at the same moment Todd saw what she had seen. From under one of the tables protruded a thin brown hand, curled like a bird’s claw.
Without moving, old Chloe said, “My poor Joan. My poor, poor Joan.” Then she bent with surprising ease and swiftness, going on her knees beside the thin body that the table all but concealed. She touched the hand briefly. “She’s dead, I’m afraid. She must have died a good many hours ago.”
“Please,” said Todd sharply, “I needn’t remind you not to move anything, I suppose?” He in turn glanced around. The plank walk was clean and dry. There was nothing on it but the three jars.
Mrs. Majendie shook her head. “I gave way to an impulse, last Tuesday,” she said as if to herself. “It was a terrible mistake for me to tell you about my husband. This is what I have done.”
Todd, now squatting beside her, remarked, “You will forgive me for doubting that?”
“Why else should the poor soul kill herself?”
“You think that is what she did?”
Mrs. Majendie got to her feet, more stiffly than she had gone down. “I am afraid so.” She took a container from a high shelf and glanced into it. “We were low on the cyanide eggs. There were only three left. Joan knew where they were, she used them all in these three jars of acid to—to make sure. And then she lay down, I think, and closed her eyes.”
“Yes. They’re closed. I have never heard how the gas chamber—” Todd broke off and stretched to look around past the top of the still head. “There’s something—the pieces of a heavy flowerpot, I should think, and the earth that may have spilled out of it. Did you leave broken pots under these benches as a rule?”
The old lady looked at him keenly. “Never to my knowledge.”
“And—I can’t see very well without moving her, but there’s something like a bruise on the far side of her head.”
“There is? Could Joan have been bending over, and tipped the pot off the table so that it stunned her?”
“And put the eggs into the acid afterward, Mrs. Majendie?”
“Mr. McKinnon, what do you want me to tell the police?”
Todd looked up at her. Presently he got to his feet and brushed the knees of his trousers. “I should tell them that you have found Miss Godfrey dead, and that’s all,” he said.
“I’m grateful for your advice. You will stay until they come? Yes, of course, you would have to.” She turned her head. “Very well, Ryn, come in if you want to, but I see no need for it.”
For the past few minutes Todd had forgotten about the figure that had been climbing the cliff path. He glanced outside at Ryn Johnson, who was standing motionless on the gravel, her green coat tightly wrapped around her, her eyes dark and ringed with what seemed like fatigue. “Joan?” she said unsteadily.
He turned back and stooped once more. Yes, he was right. The loose earth from the pot had been pushed into a ridge on the far side of Joan Godfrey’s head. It looked very much as if she had been pushed under that bench after she was unconscious.
He went out, shutting the door behind him. He’d done the best he could for Nelse, but he hadn’t been quick enough to keep Mrs. Majendie from picking up that can that had held the cyanide eggs. He had, however, noted just where she’d taken hold of it.
“—see her Tuesday night?” Mrs. Majendie was finishing a sentence to her niece.
Ryn shook her head dumbly, her eyes fixed on Chloe’s. With a sudden unaccountable feeling that was like a crackling of the nerves, Todd realized that he had never before seen either of the Johnson girls with their aunt. Perhaps this was hardly the right time for evaluating an attitude, but something about Ryn’s tucked-in chin and the way her eyes were lifted gave the impression that she loved and admired her Aunt Chloe and went in terror of her.
“It’s a shock, I know,” said the old lady with great kindness, “but you must get yourself in hand, my dear. What time did you get home on Tuesday night?”
Ryn Johnson forced out a few hoarse words. “Not late. About—eleven.”
“I was home by then, myself. Joan was already gone. When did Cass come in?”
Again Ryn shook her head. With what seemed like a great effort she unclasped one hand from the front of her coat, and moved it shakily in the direction of the greenhouse. “Is there—” she said in a painful whisper, “is—is it only Joan—in there?”
Todd looked at her narrowly, turned and stepped back into the greenhouse. There was another bench at the far end, on which some sacks had been spread out to dry, their hanging ends shadowing the space underneath. He bent swiftly and looked.
There was a large basket there. He took a plant stake from the table near him and carefully lifted the basket’s lid. For a long minute he gazed at what was inside it.
From the open air came that almost unrecognizable voice. “Cass—Cass hasn’t been home since yesterday morning. She was asleep when I got in Tuesday, she left Wednesday before I got up—I didn’t know where she was going, she didn’t come home at all last night, I sat up waiting for her—this morning I called David Shere, but he hadn’t seen her—”
Todd stepped out again. “She’s not in there, Ryn. We’d better tell the police that she’s disappeared, at the same time we—”
Ryn’s shadowed eyes turned to his. “But you did see something. I heard you suck your breath in.”
“Yes. There’s a wicker carrying basket, and Joan’s Siamese cat is inside it.”
“I thought she had taken Dian with her,” said Mrs. Majendie gravely. “Evidently she did—but farther than I knew. Isn’t that a point in favor of suicide, Mr. McKinnon?”
“That’s hardly for me to say. It isn’t just—” Todd hesitated—“that the cat has been gassed. Its head was crushed, Mrs. Majendie. It looked almost as if someone had—swung it against a rock wall.”
“Joan—” said Mrs. Majendie in a low voice, “Joan would never have done that to her cat.”
Todd, his attention caught by a stifled sound from Ryn, looked around quickly. She was gazing at her aunt, and this time the meaning of the look was plain; she was in mortal terror.
“We—we must get the police. I’ll call them, I’ll call Howard, you stay here, I’ll do it,” she cried out through chattering teeth; and then she had wheeled and was off up the slope toward the redwood house.
Her eyes, her voice, every movement of her body while she stood there had told a story of cruel strain; Todd had stood near her, expecting that at any minute she might crumple up in a faint; but her feet were swift and steady on the cliff path, her speed did not slacken as she rounded the turn, the green coat flying out behind her, and disappeared beyond the lip of the cliff.