“Matter of fact, Phoebe,” I said, “we’ve come here now because we want to find out more about what Ernesta was doing. You feel up to answering questions?”
“What is there to say about Ernesta? She went to New York to shop and get her jade. She came back. She got a flat. She walked home across the mountain. She—” Phoebe put a hand up to her forehead.
“It’s not as simple as that, Phoebe. Ernesta went to New York, yes. But she came back here again Friday night.”
Phoebe stared. “Friday?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Of course I didn’t know, and I don’t believe it. She wasn’t here at the house. Where did she stay?”
“We don’t know. Maybe in one of the nearby towns. But we do know she went to the mill Friday night and again Saturday night.”
“But how do you know?”
“Lorie saw her.”
“Lorie didn’t tell me.”
“She wasn’t going to tell anyone. I made her admit it.”
Phoebe got up and glanced from Cobb to me. “But why would Ernesta have done something so strange?”
“There’s quite a lot you don’t know about Ernesta. Did you know, for example, that she’d been married to Renton for three months?”
“To Renton? Married? Why, I knew they—”
“She’d been keeping it a secret because she was afraid Lorie would use it as an excuse to marry Caleb. There’s something else. Ernesta was going to have a baby and went to New York to see a doctor. At least that’s what she told Renton. Maybe there wasn’t any more truth in it than in the reason she gave you for the trip.”
Phoebe made a bewildered gesture. “But why didn’t Ernesta tell me all this? I was her sister. I—”
“She was probably afraid it would get back to Lorie. But that doesn’t matter right now, Phoebe. We’re trying to piece together what she did. She went to New York Wednesday. She came back Friday. She went to the sawmill. She either stayed there or went away again and came back Saturday. She left the mill again Saturday night very late. Where she went, we don’t know. We don’t know anything more until she called about the flat tire this afternoon.” I paused. “When she called, why didn’t Lorie warn her how dangerous it would be walking home alone over the mountain?”
“She couldn’t. Ernesta didn’t make the call herself.”
I stared then. “She didn’t?”
“You know there’s no phone anywhere near Breakneck. It was some farmer or someone passing in a truck. She asked him to deliver the message and started walking home.”
I remembered then the phrase Lorie had used when she told me about the flat tire: A call came through from Mother. She hadn’t said Ernesta herself had called. I had only assumed it. An idea began to stir. I put my hand in my pocket for a cigarette, and my fingers felt a small object. In the first second, it meant nothing. Then I realized it was the package which Dawn had thrown out of the window to me. I slid the object out of its wrapping and recognized it by touch as my daughter’s red marble.
And suddenly a second idea, even more revolutionary than the first, came racing into my mind.
I turned to Phoebe excitedly. “What color was Ernesta’s jade?”
She looked at me as if I were crazy. “Why on earth do you want to know?”
“You always think of jade as green. Was it green?”
“No. It was very valuable and quite rare, I think. It was a sort of dark red.”
“Like this?”
I brought Dawn’s marble out of my pocket. I had never had more than a glimpse of it before. At first glance it was extraordinarily like a marble, round, smooth, about the same size. But its dark red surface gleamed with a richness that was far too beautiful for a child’s marble and, as I turned it in my fingers, I saw that a tiny hole, for threading, had been drilled through its center.
I held the marble out to Phoebe. She peered at it with an exclamation of surprise.
“Why, yes. That’s one of the beads from Ernesta’s necklace.”
Cobb stood at her side, staring down, his face scarred with astonishment. “In the name of glory! The marbles the kids played around with!”
I said: “You never found those marbles, did you, Cobb? They weren’t in their pockets, and Leaf never found them by the duckpond?”
“No. And I guess they slipped my mind. I never figured that—”
“—that the case could be solved by a couple of marbles,” I quoted. “Exactly. Neither did I. And I laughed at Dawn this morning when she said the marble was a clue. But don’t you see it now? The kids found their marbles in the mill or near the mill Saturday night. George Raynor, Dr. Jessup, and Love went to the mill to pick up the children and saw the marbles too. But they none of them realized how important the marbles actually were.” I turned to Phoebe. “Had anyone in Skipton seen Ernesta’s jade?”
“No one but me, that I know of. She only got them a few weeks ago. They belonged to her husband’s aunt. She died and left them to Ernesta. She never wore them because they had to be restrung.”
“Get it, Cobb?” I was almost as breathless now as my daughter. “The thing in the sawmill. The thing that seemed innocent but really was terrifically dangerous. The thing was—the jade beads. The kids were killed because they found them. Love and George and Dr. Jessup were killed because they’d seen them. All three of them talked about the marbles. Sooner or later, if they’d stayed alive, they’d have talked about them in front of Phoebe, and Phoebe would have realized exactly what the marbles were. They were all killed because, if they hadn’t been killed, they could have destroyed the murderer by one chance word.”
Phoebe broke in: “But I don’t understand, Hugh.”
“The twins, George Raynor, Dr. Jessup, and Love Drummond all had to be killed, and someone else’s death had to be fitted into the pattern also. The murderer thought of the song. It was an ideal framework to string the deaths on—a device that would carry us miles away from the true motive.”
“But I still don’t see.”
“You must see. Ernesta didn’t leave her car with a flat tire on Breakneck and make the telephone call this afternoon. The murderer did. Ernesta didn’t drive her car down from the sawmill Saturday night. The murderer did. Lorie saw the car, but it was dark, and she didn’t see the driver. She only assumed it was Ernesta. But she did see Ernesta in the car on Friday. Ernesta drove up to the mill on Friday to meet the murderer. Ernesta never came back.”
“Westlake!” Cobb took a quick step toward me.
“The jade, Phoebe,” I said. “Don’t you understand? The jade necklace was very valuable. And it must have broken. Ernesta would never have left the beads lying around the sawmill if she’d been alive.”
“Then…?”
“That’s it. And if one of the White kids hadn’t had a crush on Dawn and given her one of his marbles we’d never have known. The thing in the mill was Ernesta. On Saturday night, during the picnic, Ernesta was lying dead in the mill. And the twins, George Raynor, Dr. Jessup, and Love Drummond had the clue.”
I paused, staring down with awed fascination at the little red bead which had proved so much.
“That’s what I meant about another death having to be fitted into the pattern. Ernesta wasn’t the last to be killed. She was the first. And that’s why the fire was started—to keep us from telling that the body had been dead several days. Ernesta wasn’t the six proud walkers. If we have to fit her into the song, she was:
“One is one
And all alone
And ever more shall be-O.”
CHAPTER XXII
The problem which had seemed insoluble a few minutes before was astonishingly simple to me now. Both Cobb and Phoebe were watching me with a sort of awed wonder.
I said: “I don’t think Ernesta lied about anything. I think she just didn’t tell all the truth. She went to New York to pick up her jade, the way she told Phoebe. She also went to see Dr. Delacroix, the way she told Renton. She even sent a j
ar of caviar to make sure the picnic would be a success without her. The one thing she kept to herself was that she intended to sneak back here secretly on Friday night when we all thought she was still in New York. What her object for coming back was, I don’t know. But it’s easy to see what happened.”
Cobb said: “She went to the sawmill.”
“Yes. She arrived there, went to the upstairs room and waited, smoking a cigarette. Probably she had a date. The person she had planned to meet came. Either the whole thing had been a calculated plot to murder her, or there was some unexpected quarrel. The necklace was broken in the struggle. The beads scattered unnoticed on the floor. Ernesta was killed.”
I went on: “Say the murderer didn’t know that Renton and Avril used the mill for their rendezvous. He certainly didn’t know that we would decide to change the picnic ground and go up there on Saturday. To him the mill would have seemed as safe a place as any in Skipton to conceal the body until he had worked out a plan for disposing of it.”
“And Mrs. Bray’s car too?” asked Cobb.
“Yes. The tracks we saw in the mill were probably made by Ernesta’s car. She probably parked it there and the murderer decided it was the best place to leave it.”
Phoebe was still staring at me. Cobb had taken out his brier pipe and was putting it between his teeth.
“The murderer was in a spot,” I said. “Everyone thought Ernesta was in New York. If her body was found, the first thing we’d have done was to investigate her reason for coming back early. That would have led us directly to him. Ernesta was due to return today. He must have decided to fake the death so that it would look as if she had come home today as scheduled and had been killed walking home. He probably planned to use the trick he used eventually. He probably planned to leave the car and the body at the mill until today; then to drive the car up to Breakneck; to send the phony message about the flat tire; and then to start a forest fire. If it had worked, there was a very good chance that we’d have accepted her death as an accident, never have checked on her movements in New York, and never dreamed that she had, in fact, been murdered three days ago.”
Cobb was sucking ferociously on his pipe. “You’ve got it, Westlake. Pretty sure you’ve got it. That’s the way he was figuring on fixing things. Then it all went wrong because on Saturday, instead of going to Mrs. Bray’s regular picnic ground, you all went up to the clearing near the mill. The murderer was on the picnic, of course. He saw the White kids going off to the mill. He saw George Raynor, Dr. Jessup, and Miss Drummond go after them. He heard them talking about the marbles when they came back and realized they’d found the beads from the necklace. The body itself had been hidden somewhere safe, of course, maybe in the sawdust pile.”
“Sure,” I said. “And once they came back to the picnic chattering about the marbles, he saw he’d have to kill five more people unless he wanted to run the risk of almost certain exposure. Lorie was singing the song while the twins were away. Dawn had already made up her jingle about throwing the ‘horrid White boys’ in the pond. Those two things must have given him his idea. The people he had to kill could be fitted into the pattern of the song. He could use the song to make us think his necessary murders were the work of a senseless maniac. He could also use the song to make us think that Ernesta’s murder was the last in the chain instead of the first.”
Cobb was looking at me grimly. “I guess that covers ’most everything, don’t it? Lorie saw the car coming down from the mill Saturday night. That’s easy enough to explain. With the twins killed, he couldn’t risk leaving Mrs. Bray’s car up at the mill. He waited till late and then drove it someplace safe until it was time to plant it with the flat tire on Breakneck.”
“Sure,” I said.
None of us spoke for a moment. The quietness of the room was charged with suspense. Suddenly Phoebe said:
“But who did Ernesta come back to meet? What happened between them? Why was she killed?”
Those, of course, were the points that remained obscure. We knew everything now except the all-important fact of who had murdered Ernesta and why.
At that moment the telephone in the hall rang. The three of us exchanged tentative glances. I was nearest to the door. As I stepped into the hall the phone shrilled again.
I picked up the receiver. I said: “Hello.”
A voice came from the other end of the wire. It was Rebecca’s voice. I recognized it at once. But it made my heart turn over inside me because it was shrill and incoherent with panic.
“Dr. Westlake, thank the Lord that you. … Come quick. You got to come quick.”
“What is it, Rebecca?”
“Dawn,” she gasped. “They got Dawn. I tried, Dr. Westlake. Honest I tried. But they got her.”
“I’ll—I’ll be right over.”
As I dropped the receiver back on the stand, fear was like ice in my veins. I heard sounds behind me. I turned. Cobb was at the door of the living room, staring at me questioningly.
I grabbed his arm. “It’s Dawn,” I managed. “Something’s happened to Dawn.”
The inspector’s face crumpled with anxiety. Simultaneously we ran to the front door. Ernesta’s black sedan was parked outside where Lorie must have left it. The keys were in the ignition. Cobb jumped into the driver’s seat. I clambered in next to him. He started the car roaring down the hill.
The moments of our drive to my house were the worst I have ever experienced. Rebecca’s choked, despairing voice still echoed in my ears. Now that it was perhaps too late, I saw how inevitable the danger for Dawn had been. Earlier that afternoon she had prattled about her marble when all the suspects were collected outside my door. The moment the murderer knew that Bobby White had given her one of the beads, Dawn must have been sentenced to death. She was an even greater menace to him than the other victims had been, for she not only possessed one of the beads, she was already calling it a clue.
Sick with fear, I realized then why the murderer had specified over the phone that Lorie should select me to help her retrieve Ernesta’s car. He had wanted me safely out of the way in order to leave the field clear for his seventh and most cold-blooded crime.
And I had abandoned Dawn with no one to take care of her but Rebecca who was loyal as a spaniel but no match for the man who had killed six people in three days.
I was tortured by self-recriminations. Why had I insisted upon staying on in Skipton? Why hadn’t I taken Rebecca’s advice and fled back to Kenmore two days ago? Why, oh why had I gone off with Lorie to get Ernesta’s car?
We reached my house and, leaving the car, I dashed up the path to the front door. It was thrown open by Rebecca, and the sight of her only added to my panic. She was in a state of almost complete collapse. Her large bosom was heaving, her apron and her bare arms were stained with blood, and her eyes were the eyes of a wild woman.
Babbling incoherently, she grabbed my arm and dragged me into the living room.
“She don’t answer, Dr. Westlake. I hollers her name and she don’t answer.”
Dimly, as through cheesecloth, I was conscious of my daughter’s small figure stretched out on the couch. She was wearing a brief blue dress which left her bare legs and knees exposed. To my tormented eyes, she looked tiny and unreal as a doll.
I stumbled to the couch and dropped to her side, putting my ear against her breast. I could only hear the pounding of my own heart. I groped for her pulse, but I could feel nothing except the blood racing through my own fingers.
“Let me, Westlake.”
Cobb was gently pushing me away. He lowered himself beside the couch and took Dawn’s wrist. I tried to watch him, but I couldn’t. Rebecca was whimpering and wringing her hands. With all the strength left in me, I forced myself not to listen to her.
A great gap of time seemed to stretch between the moment when Cobb pushed me aside and the moment when finally I heard his voice murmuring:
“She’s okay, Westlake. Unconscious, but her pulse is okay.”
&nb
sp; I turned to look at his tentatively smiling face, which seemed to have lost ten years since I had seen it a few moments before. I felt twenty years younger myself.
In control again, I ran to the closet, picked up my medical bag and returned. As I examined Dawn the last vestiges of anxiety left me. The inspector had been right. Dawn was breathing regularly and, even as I held her wrist between my fingers, the pulse strengthened. There was no sign of any wound, no drop of blood, but behind her left ear was an ugly swelling from a blow which, had it been struck an inch or so higher, might have proved fatal.
I applied a few simple restoratives, and miraculously the color crept back into her cheeks. A minute or two later her eyelids fluttered open. She stared up at me with a smile that was almost triumphant.
“I told you I had the clue,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t a real marble. There was a hole through it. It was a jewel, wasn’t it? A jewel of great price. And he killed everyone to get it.”
Having delivered herself of this colorful though inaccurate conception of the case, my daughter closed her eyes and gave a little sigh.
In a few seconds she was fast asleep.
She did not even wake as I carried her upstairs and slipped her into her bed.
CHAPTER XXIII
Rebecca’s recovery was even more spectacular than my own. When I returned downstairs she was sitting in the living room with Cobb, grinning contentedly and completely oblivious to the charnel appearance of her bloodstained apron.
She glanced up at me eagerly. “She all right now, Doctor, ain’t she?”
“Sure. When she wakes up, she’ll be as good as new.”
“If anything happened to that child, I could never have rested easy in my bed.” Rebecca nodded her head darkly. “No, sir. And me acting so foolish when I was meant to be protecting her.”
Until then both Cobb and I had been too obsessed by our fears for Dawn to investigate exactly what had happened. Now it was of the utmost importance to me to know. Rebecca was only too eager to hold the floor.
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