“I’d noticed that,” said Todd. “But you weren’t in it.”
“I might have been, last night.” Ryn’s head swung from side to side as if she were in dreadful pain. “And we always— if I hadn’t sat up—” Her voice rose to a shrill cry. “I never believed it, I never would—oh, no, no, I can’t—” She put both hands suddenly to her face and ran from the room. Her feet thudded on the stairs.
Officer Wilmoth came in from the hall, where he had just finished a rapid and low-toned conversation on the telephone. Todd looked at him inquiringly. “We can’t very well begin an investigation before tomorrow,” said Wilmoth serenely, “but if there’s any evidence, it’ll be found. The laboratory does very precise work.”
“Evidence?” Georgine said hoarsely. “Of what, arson?”
Todd looked at her and smiled. “That, of course; but there’s the possibility of a body as well.”
“Cass?” She gulped. “Could they—Officer Wilmoth, if that were possible, how did Nelse dare send that girl here to us?”
“I couldn’t say, Mrs. McKinnon,” said Wilmoth.
“But I thought she—Ryn believed it was a trap for her!”
“She certainly gave that impression,” Todd remarked. “But reactions can be prepared in advance—can’t they, Wilmoth?”
“I couldn’t say that either, Mr. McKinnon.”
***
The army of invasion had come, billeted itself in Georgine’s house for most of the evening, and departed. Nelsing had been there; the fire chief had been there, along with a special investigator; the telephone had rung and an assistant Inspector or two whom the McKinnons knew only by sight had arrived for brief murmured colloquies with Nelsing. When they left, the personnel of the house was the same, but considerably shaken—with the exception of Officer Wilmoth, who quietly emptied all the ashtrays and washed the coffee cups, and then stationed himself at the foot of the stairs, holding—but not detectably reading—a copy of the Readers’ Digest.
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” Georgine muttered fiercely into the darkness, at some unnoted hour of the morning. “If I don’t have nightmares about your being burned alive, I’ll sleep too hard and anything might happen.”
“Relax, dear heart,” Todd’s soothing murmur replied. “It’s all over now. You’re still unstrung, that’s all.”
“You’re the one who ought to be unstrung.”
“No, I feel fine. Nasty trick that was, springing the news on Ryn the way I did, but I hoped for—something more definite than I got, and Wilmoth was there to make it official.”
“She probably deserved it. I hope she’s having nightmares, seconal or no seconal. I keep thinking I hear her stirring around.”
“Maybe she is,” said Todd placidly. “If so, the handsome watchdog will know about it.”
In spite of herself, Georgine began to sink deeper and deeper into drowsiness. The familiar night sounds came comfortingly to her ears: a soft scrape of vines against the house wall; farther away, clear down at the edge of the Bay, the rapid trundling sound of freight trains picking up speed on their northward journey, and the sweet minor chords of their whistles; farther still, a mysterious hooting from ships miles across the water. She lifted her head as Todd, after a long silence, slipped out of bed and through the bedroom door, and then she lay down again, resigned to sleep.
He was gone for some minutes, but came back before she had quite lost consciousness. “Just our guest,” he said softly. “Wandering. She’d got into the den by mistake for the bathroom. I locked her in this time, and Wilmoth’s got the key.”
“Aha,” said Georgine sleepily, “chasing brunettes up and down the hall.”
“She doesn’t run very fast, either.”
“Is no woman safe from you?”
“ ‘I wish it was you, Georgie,’ ” replied Todd.
She gave a faint chuckle, and suddenly slept, to wake again as suddenly to Friday morning and a clock whose hands pointed to 8:20. Oh, heavens! Breakfast for everyone, and a whole morning of appointments to be kept, and her shopping list for the week-end mislaid somewhere—
But Ryn Johnson would be out of the house when she came home.
***
Todd had been up since half-past seven. He had fortified himself with a cup of coffee, taken in the company of Officer Wilmoth—who after a night of watching still looked well-groomed, clear of eye and entirely capable—and had gone at once to his workroom. By the time Georgine called him to breakfast he had achieved several pages of typescript, a detailed outline of his story about the devoted sister, complete with psychological and material clues. It was headed “Perfect Murder,” although this was naturally not its title, but referred to the behavior pattern by which Todd set such store. He stood looking down at it thoughtfully, stubbing out a cigarette. Everything was in line for the framing of the innocent sister by the devious one. He couldn’t at the minute figure out how Harrington Harte, his despised fictional detective, was going to trap the criminal, but that was a minor matter.
He left it and ran downstairs just as Ryn emerged from her room, hollow-eyed and walking slowly. She had answered every question put to her by Nelsing and the fire chief, the night before, with the vague expression of a person suffering from shock, who does not know what she is saying, and her answers had contributed exactly nothing to the sum of general information. She was now moving past the head of the stairs as if she hadn’t seen him, as if the sedative were still fogging her brain.
She ate a little breakfast in the same manner. At the end of this extremely silent and hurried meal, Todd saw Georgine out the front door, promising to wash the dishes, to get Ryn into someone else’s hands, to do everything. In the kitchen, Ryn still huddled over her coffee cup. In the hall, Officer Wilmoth was conducting a low-toned telephone conference.
The door had barely closed behind Georgine when he called Todd to the telephone. “Listen, Mac,” said Nelsing’s voice, “there wasn’t any body in the Johnson cottage. We’re taking the guard off Ryn, she can go anywhere she likes.”
“Oh, you are?” said Todd skeptically.
“Yes,” said Nelsing with peculiar dryness, “we are. I’ve told Wilmoth he can go. You want to give Ryn a lift up to the Canyon?”
“Certainly,” Todd replied. Nelse wouldn’t say it, but it stuck out a mile; they were letting Ryn free in the hope that Cass Johnson would try to get in touch with her. “I’ll dump her. From then on it’s your show.”
Ryn came with him like a sleep-walker. He watched her go toward the ruins of her home, where two or three men were standing looking over the destruction; then he turned his car around and headed for the Tunnel Road.
It took him half an hour to get to the Valley Ranch School, and to get his stepdaughter out of classes on the plea that he needed her help for an hour. Barby came leaping out, alight with joy. “Toddy, you angel!” she screamed. “You came just at the right time to get me out of that droopy old History class, did you know it? Where’s Mamma? Are you just taking a drive, or do you really want me for something?”
“I didn’t know, she’s at the dentist’s, and I do want you,” Todd replied. He gave her a conspiratorial glance as the car swung out onto the highway. “I didn’t want to tell the Head why, it might have seemed a li’le too frivolous, but I need you to do a couple of imitations for a woman I know.”
“Oh, I’d love to! I’d just adore it! Toddy, did you see where they’re going to put our swimming pool if we ever get the money to build it? Gosh, I wonder if we ever will, it’d be simply super to have it there all the time.”
“Cricket, on a cold day like this the very thought of a swimming pool makes me shudder.”
“Why, the sun’s shining,” said Barby, surprised. “And I’m missing History,” she added, to herself, and relapsed into a contented silence.
Within twenty minutes they had turned in at the gate of the Colony, which Barby surveyed with a complete lack of curiosity, and had parked at the point nearest t
he guest cottage. “You wait here, if you don’t mind, until I call,” Todd said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you beforehand, you might have brought along your History text to study.”
Barby turned an appalled look on him, and then burst into giggles. “Silly man,” she said maturely. He grinned back at her, waved as he neared the screen of trees, and then quickened his steps toward the white cottage.
Mrs. Trumbull was there. She had the look of someone who had accepted confinement, but was growing restive under the necessity; her magazine lay unread in her lap, and there was a large pile of cigarette stubs in the tray beside her. She got up when she saw him, and opened her mouth as if to begin a complaint, but Todd cut in: “Mrs. Trumbull, do the people out here know that Mrs. Majendie’s companion has been murdered?”
“I guess they do, but they don’t talk about it. I heard it on the radio.” The woman sat down again, eyeing him curiously.
“Didn’t you begin to feel a li’le queer when you heard it? The Johnson girl who was in your house on Wednesday is more than likely the murderer.”
“Huh?” Mrs. Trumbull said blankly. “I figured it was the old lady.”
“There’s very li’le evidence against her. There’s a pile of it against either Ryn or Cass Johnson. I want to know which.”
“I told you I didn’t know.”
“There’s a way you might be helped to identify her. It’d be to your interest to find out.”
“How’s that?”
“Suppose,” Todd said, “the sister who’s a murderer came out here to see you. Suppose she offered to take you somewhere else, to lie low for a few days. Would you want to get in the car and drive off with her? You know, you’re a witness to some phase of this business—just as Joan Godfrey was.”
Mrs. Trumbull looked back at him shrewdly. Her hair had not been retouched, but she had put on her make-up again; the hard eyes under the thread of penciled brow considered and accepted the argument. “I get you. I’d figure it out if I could. There’s been—something I didn’t like about this, specially after I saw what kind of woman your wife is.”
“That’s a nice mild way to put it,” Todd observed. “You were holding out on something the other day, weren’t you, because my wife was here? I think you knew what the Johnson girl meant to do to her.”
The woman stirred, and gave an embarrassed half-laugh. “I wouldn’t have stood for no killing, I can tell you that. But the girl made it seem like it wasn’t going to be much, it was to get even with her for something she did—I was going to take her up to that room where the old drunk was, and the Johnson girl was going to dope her somehow, chloroform maybe, and then put her in bed with him. Then Mr. Shere was supposed to come and—”
Todd would have sworn that not a muscle of his body or face had moved; but the woman, looking at him, suddenly sprang to her feet, and backed off across the room, her face gray under the paint, her hands outstretched as if to ward him off. “Don’t you do it, don’t you touch me!” she whispered. “I didn’t think it up, maybe I wouldn’t ’a’—”
“It wasn’t going to be much!” He heard his own voice savagely ripping out the words. “You god-damn filthy hag, telling me you didn’t think it up—when you were jailed not long ago for just that sort of game! You’d have been party to that, you thought it was funny. I could—”
“Don’t you dare touch me,” the woman whimpered. “It wasn’t me that wanted to do it, I tell you she threatened me—”
Todd took in a rasping breath and drew a hand across his mouth. His control was coming back slowly, and for a moment more he stood looking at her. “All right,” he said at last. “She’ll be dealt with first. You stay here.”
He went out and called Barby. In the minute it took her to run across from the car he schooled his features and voice to blankness. “In here, cricket,” he said. “You don’t need to be polite to this woman, nor—nor even go near her. Just stay near the door.” They went into the small living-room, immaculate in its paint and fresh chintzes. The woman was still in its farthest corner, backed up against the wall as if she were trying to push through it.
“Now,” Todd said, “one of the Johnson girls went upstairs in Mrs. Trumbull’s house. Barby, will you walk the way Cass does?”
“What—” Barby said. “Oh, yes, I know what you mean!”
She turned her back and with remarkable fidelity imitated the rabbit-like wiggle of Cass’s hips. Todd looked at Mrs. Trumbull, whose face expressed nothing but the aftermath of terror. “Now,” Todd said, “do Ryn’s walk.”
After a moment of the slow gliding movement, again reproduced faithfully by Barby, there was a croaking sound from the corner. “I don’t rightly know,” Mrs. Trumbull muttered through dry lips. “I watched her go up, all right, and it—it seems as if she started up like that one, like the kid just showed, and—and at the top she kind of swung her hips like the first one. Honest, Mister, before God I’d tell you if I knew. I want to know, too, like you said.”
Todd believed her. He looked at her in weary defeat. This was a washout again, and he’d counted on it—more heavily than ever since the Trumbull’s revelation. If Ryn had been the woman, she might have remembered Cass’s characteristic walk and superimposed it on her own. If Cass were imitating Ryn, her own unconscious habit might have asserted itself as she reached the top of the stairs. He shrugged, and said in a tired voice, “Okay, cricket, let’s get out of here.” They left the woman still pressed into the corner; her hard frightened eyes watched them go.
On the way back to the school, Barby said little, but looked curiously at Todd more than once. “You look awful queer, Toddy,” she ventured at last.
“I feel rather queer, cricket. Never mind, it’ll pass.”
“Why did you want that woman to tell you if she’d seen Ryn or Cass?”
“It’s rather complicated,” he told her, “but one of the Johnson girls did something very unkind to your mother.”
“She did?” said Barby, up in arms at once. “I didn’t like those girls much.”
“You entertained them nicely the day they had lunch with you, Georgine said. I guess you told them about your father.”
“Yes. Wasn’t it all right? Mamma never told me not to mention it.”
“Perfectly all right. One has to make conversation somehow. What else did they want you to talk about?”
“Oh, about school—oh, that reminds me, what time is it? Nearly half-past eleven? Oh, for Pete’s sake step on it, Toddy, I can’t miss riding class!—School, and what kind of neighbors we had on Cragmont, and how we got on with ’em. I told ’em about the Manfreds’ being away and how we kind of looked after their house, but we had to lock it up every time we’d used the mangle or aired out, and then they’d do the same for us. And they wanted to know about your writing and if you’d ever solved a real case.”
“Did you give me a good reputation?”
“Well,” said Barby candidly, “you always say yourself that you guess the answer after the police’ve announced it, so that’s what I told ’em. —Oh, good, we’re in time, nobody’s mounted yet! Lookit, there’s my horse. I’m coming, Goldie!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, presumably to the horse, and flung herself out of the car before Todd had brought it to a complete halt. “Hey, wait, kids! Wait’ll I get my jeans on!” The sweater and skirt and the blonde mop vanished through the door of the school.
Todd drove away, unconsciously scowling at the road so that an innocent hitch-hiker, catching sight of his face, almost dove into a ditch with his thumb gesture half completed. He had gone only about three miles on his homeward way when an ominous unsteadiness of the wheel, coupled with a bumping sound, told him that his rear tire had decided to join the day’s list of failures.
“Fooled you one way, though,” he snarled at the tire. “We’re in sight of a service station.”
The station looked more like a one-car garage, set on the edge of the road with no other building in sight, but its sign announced
that its Prop. also had tires and accessories for sale… “And lucky for you I’ve got ’em,” the morose Prop. assured Todd ten minutes later. “That spare of yours ’ud blow out before you got to the Tunnel. Wouldn’t dare put it on. Now this one you come in on, I could fix you up with a noo toob an’ vulcanize the tire, but it’d take an hour, maybe, an’ I wouldn’t answer for it even then. Wore right down to the fabric, that is. You need a noo one, Mister.”
“All right,” Todd said impatiently. “Put on a new one. I guess I’ve got money enough.”
He had, but barely. The tire took all of his emergency ten dollars, and a bit more. Well, he didn’t need money to drive the few miles back to Berkeley; forty cents would be enough margin… He helped the Prop. to change the tire; a growing sense of uneasiness was nagging at him even during this brief delay. There was something that Barby had said, about the Manfreds’ house—no, that wouldn’t work, of course; Georgine was careful about locking it every time she left, and the police would have noticed an open window or a forced door. And yet, there was something—
He paid, got in his car, and turned the ignition key, and was some distance up the road before his subconscious memory became conscious thought. Key—the key of the Manfreds’ house, hanging up inside his own kitchen door. That was what had been missing when he inspected the kitchen on Wednesday night; and later that same night, when the door had blown open—as he’d thought—the key had been returned. Both the Johnsons had heard Barby telling about the house—and Ryn had insisted on staying with the McKinnons the night before.
Todd swore, scanned the side of the road for signs of habitation, and braked to a grinding halt in front of a minute crossroads grocery. He had come by back roads, a short cut from Barby’s school which would bring him out nearly at the mouth of the Tunnel; but in the occasional way of short cuts, it was proving far less practicable than the highway route. He demanded of the storekeeper, “Got a ’phone here?”
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