Curtis was running down the path which led to the pool and the guest house beside it.
As they went that way, both running, Dinah and Mary saw Curtis stop—then step forward, then step aside.
James Bedlow was coming up the path, coming slowly, heavily. He held his wife in his arms and, even from a distance, it was clear that she was limp in his arms. Jason Sarles, a burly man in khaki slacks and shirt, walked a little behind, close, hands ready as if to support the older man if he faltered.
It was Dinah who turned back, went across the terrace, opened the french doors which led into the dining room.
As he carried his wife into the house, through the dining room into the living room, James Bedlow kept repeating her name—repeating it with a kind of entreaty, as if he were calling to her across a space which widened.
And as he carried the slender woman across one room and into the other, blood dripped from her head on the tile of the dining room floor, on the carpet in the living room. It did not show so much on the deep redness of the carpet.
III
They read of it first in the Brunswick News, at the end of a long day. It was possible, Susan had thought dining the last hour or so, with Jacksonville safely behind them but Brunswick still too distantly ahead, that they set too much store by restaurants. The Deck is indeed an admirable restaurant, and for those who drive between New York and Florida there are not, after all, too many such. The Deck has a cocktail lounge which is comfortable and dimly lit; in it, when the time comes, one may eat at leisure, and sometimes of pompano. It is still a long way from Palm Beach to Brunswick, Georgia. The Sunshine State Parkway helps, but between Melbourne and Daytona, U.S. 1 actively, even sneeringly, hinders.
It was after the first and most needed drink in The Deck’s lounge that Susan picked up the copy of the Brunswick News they had brought along to discover how the world wagged, a matter which for some time had concerned them minimally. It seemed to wag as usual, in a notably wabbly fashion. It did not appear, at first glance, that they had missed much. Another satellite or two; a few more missiles splashing and people not splashing yet.
“The same people are at the same party, saying the same things,” Susan told the big man beside her. “We missed nothing, were not missed.”
Heimrich made agreeing sounds and closed his eyes. He could still see school buses in the town of Eau Gallie.
Then Susan said, “Oh!” as if the word were the expression of a twinge of pain. She said, “Why. How awful!”
Heimrich opened his eyes and turned to her. She was reading a short item below the fold of the Brunswick News.
“We were talking about her only yesterday,” Susan said, and held the paper out to Merton Heimrich, pointing with a slim finger.
It was not a long story, and the headline was inconspicuous. Brewster, New York, is also a long way from Brunswick, Georgia.
“Publisher’s Wife
Accident Victim”
the headline read, and the story, under a Brewster dateline, was short:
“Mrs. James Bedlow, wife of the owner and publisher of the New York Chronicle, died late yesterday of injuries sustained when she fell into an empty swimming pool on the Bedlow estate, three miles south of here.
“Mrs. Bedlow, who had been walking alone during the late afternoon, was found unconscious in the pool by her husband, who had gone in search of her when she failed to return to the house at the expected time. She was lying in the deep end of the pool and apparently had slipped on a patch of ice remaining near the pool’s edge and fallen headlong.
“The publisher, aided by a gardener, carried his wife to the house but she died before medical attention could be secured. Mrs. Bedlow, who was in her early thirties, was the former Ann Lynch.”
Merton Heimrich saw shock in his wife’s eyes. He reached out and touched her hand. She smiled, not very certainly, and said, “I know.” She picked up her glass and finished the few drops remaining in it, and Heimrich looked across the room at the barman and raised two fingers.
“It’s because we were talking about her,” Susan said. “I don’t know why that should bring it close, make it real. It does.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Of course.”
“And,” Susan said, “that she was rather young and quite beautiful. And that it is spring, when—” She raised her shoulders.
“I’m maudlin,” she said. “I’m tired, I suppose. It’s pleasant here. We will be very careful when we drive tomorrow, won’t we?”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “For ten miles or so, anyway.”
“I know,” she said. “And then it will seem so safe and sure, and that nothing can ever happen. Not to us. She went for a walk, before cocktail time, probably, and—” She put a hand over her own lips. It was almost as if she slapped herself.
“It is,” Susan Heimrich said, “a long time between drinks. And I want pompano, if they have it. Why is it so hard to get pompano in the North? Even at very good places. Because it doesn’t ship well? Or—”
“We drove too far today,” Heimrich said. “You’re tired, Susan. We can’t help things happening to people.”
“I know,” she said. “What does the paper say about the weather? That’s what we got the paper for, really.”
The paper said about the weather that it was expected to be fair and somewhat warmer in Georgia, except for partial cloudiness and a chance of a few showers in the interior sections. It said about the weather that fair skies and continued seasonably cool temperatures were expected in the coastal areas of North and South Carolina.
The rooms in the Oak Park Motel in Brunswick are large rooms—large enough to contain two beds of double-bed size. In his bed, Heimrich waited—as for some nights he had learned to wait—for the deep and regular breathing which would tell him that she slept. He did not hear it, when he thought it was time to hear it, and said, “Susan?”
“I’m all right,” she said. “I’m perfectly all right, darling.”
But her voice was not all right and Heimrich went to lie beside her and put his arms around her.
“Really all right,” she said. “I’m in a mood. A silly mood. It’s nothing, dear.”
He said, “Shh-h,” very softly.
“Of course,” she said. “It must be time for the peepers to be starting up. Where we live. Don’t you think? Nothing else really tells of spring. Of things beginning over. Nothing like the peepers.”
“I know,” he said. “They’ve probably started in Van Brunt.”
“And,” Susan said, “where she lived. Near Brewster. They start in the late afternoon and—she would have heard them, if there is water near, wouldn’t she? Heard them as—”
She shivered a little in his arms. Only a little.
“Heard them and thought of spring,” Susan said. “Of tomorrow and—”
“There,” he said. “Don’t think about it.”
“No,” she said. “I’m lonely, darling. Only a little, only for a moment. And—afraid. Only a little. Are you ever afraid?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Comfort me, darling,” Susan Heimrich said. “Comfort us both.”
* * *
It was, Sergeant Charles Forniss, New York State Police, admitted to himself, a matter of going through the motions. Violent death—obviously accidental but still violent death. Hence, people to be talked to, reports to be made. Probably people ought to cover empty swimming pools. People didn’t. A great many things were not done that ought to be done, and people died as a result of things not done. In such cases, the police can only make reports.
If the accident victim had been some country tramp, and not the wife of James Bedlow, who had made a fortune in oil in Oklahoma and seemed on the way to making another as a newspaper publisher (which is rather harder), the motions would still have been gone through, the reports made. Not, probably, under the direction of a detective sergeant; admit that slight difference. Forniss parked his police car in the Bedlow drive at a lit
tle after nine on Friday morning and, as he walked around the house to the scene of such activities as there were, wondered if the captain and that nice girl he’d married had started back yet. As he remembered from a post card Susan had sent, this was the day of their start.
(At that moment, Heimrich had been driving through West Palm Beach, seeking the Sunshine State Parkway, which momentarily had proved elusive.)
A trooper was taking pictures by the pool. Trooper Raymond Crowley was walking up the path which led from pool toward house, and looking at the ground on either side. Another trooper, standing near a bath house—which, Forniss thought, was somewhat larger than the houses most families live in—was talking to a burly man in khaki slacks and shirt. Probably, from the looks of him, the gardener. What was his name—oh yes, Sarles. The man who had helped Bedlow get the dying woman out of the pool. Must have been something of a problem.
“Finding anything?” Forniss asked Crowley, who was nearest—and who was also an acting corporal.
“Oh, morning, sergeant,” Crowley said. “Nope. Not a—”
And at that moment found something which made a case, and in the end a resounding case, out of an incident. What Raymond Crowley found was a stone—a heavy stone which still might be held in a hand; a jagged stone. It lay in undergrowth some feet from the path and Crowley, not finishing his sentence, leaned down to look at it. Then he got down on his knees on the wet ground.
There was not really much to distinguish it from other stones, and it is stony earth in Putnam County. Stones work up in the soil during late winter and lie exposed, and there were half a dozen other stones within a radius of a few yards of the one Crowley looked at, and bent closer to, and did not touch. The only odd thing about this stone was that one side of it was rusty red in color.
Crowley looked up at Forniss, but Forniss had already moved quickly down the graveled path. He squatted beside the trooper and looked at the stone. “Well,” Charles Forniss said. “What do you know, Ray?”
Forniss got a knife from his pocket. Carefully, he prized with the blade at the color on the stone. It flecked off. He lifted a fragment on the knife blade, examined it more closely, touched the fragment with a moistened finger and then touched tongue again to finger.
He called the photographer, then; said, “Get a shot of this, will you? Several shots. So we can fix its position.” The photographer came, obediently. He looked at the stone, so like so many stones, and then at Forniss.
“Seems to have got blood on it somehow,” Forniss said.
News of violent death reaches the police automatically if an ambulance is summoned, and Dinah Bedlow, the evening before, had made an emergency call for an ambulance after she had, on her first call, failed to reach the nearest physician. She had, trying again to get a doctor a few miles away, been successful, and he had reached the house within twenty minutes—reached it and found Ann Bedlow dead. It would not, he had had to tell them, have made any difference if he had been earlier. There would have been nothing he could have done.
State troopers had trailed the ambulance in and learned from Norman Curtis, acting as spokesman for the others, what had happened—what seemed to have happened. One of the troopers, with a flashlight, had gone down to the pool and looked into it, and his flashlight had shown blood on the pool’s floor, near the side, in the deep end. The sky had clouded over and hastened darkness; further investigation—the going through of the motions—had been postponed until morning and morning’s light.
The body of Ann Bedlow had been taken to a hospital mortuary, for autopsy by, or at the direction of, the proper authority—in Putnam County the coroner, at this time Dr. Eugene Smith. There had been no urgency in taking any of these steps; what had happened was sad and obvious.
Not obvious any longer—a stone with blood on it; almost certainly blood. Analysis would be required; analysis would, Forniss was certain, only verify. Exhibit A the stone was—would some day be. A stone which might fit a hand, might be used as a weapon held in a hand. Or might, of course, have been thrown.
There was always that, Forniss thought, moving down the path toward the big bath house, where a trooper and a man in khaki stood, no longer talking now, merely looking at the others. Somebody might have thrown a stone at Ann Bedlow—thrown it perhaps in sudden, violent anger, not meaning murder; thrown harder and more accurately than he had intended; realized the woman was mortally hurt and staged an accident. Carried her, it could be presumed, to the pool and dropped her in, head first.
Possible—not, Forniss thought, too likely. A hand lifted with a stone in it, brought down to kill—that was more like it. Murder was more like it.
He went down to the bath house primarily to get out of the way of the photographer. Crowley could be used—crouched by the stone, pointing at it—for perspective shots.
“This is Mr. Sarles,” the trooper told him, when he joined them. “Find something, sergeant?”
“Yep,” Forniss said, and told them what.
Sarles was the burly man. He had a red face, blue eyes. He was about, Forniss thought, fifty. Not that that mattered.
“You’re saying she was killed?” Sarles said, and Forniss said it looked that way.
“Then it could mean something,” Sarles said. “Somebody’s holing up in here.” He gestured over his shoulder, at the guest house. “Broke in around back. Want to see?”
Forniss wanted to see.
“First I knew about it was this morning,” Sarles said. “Couple of hours ago.” They had gone around the house by then, to a door in the rear. The lock had been forced, possibly with a jimmy, perhaps merely a heavy screwdriver. They opened the door and went into a kitchen—small, very modern. It was warm in the kitchen.
“Keep the heat on all winter,” Sarles said. “Big house and this one too—same system. See what I mean, somebody’s been holing up?”
Forniss saw—saw a refuse bin of opened cans, saw dirty dishes in the sink; saw, too, that food had dried on the dishes.
A bathroom opened off a corridor leading from the kitchen. There was a used—probably often used—towel on a rack. “Made himself at home,” Forniss said, to Sarles, and Sarles said, “Sure did,” and guided on—guided to an attractive bedroom, with twin beds, and one of them slept in. Several times slept in, Forniss thought.
The living room was across the corridor—a room of modern furniture. There was, at first glance, no sign that the intruder had reached this room.
“They close the house in the winter?” Forniss said, as they went across the living room, out the front door.
The house had been closed since Thanksgiving—the main house and, of course, the combination bath house and guest suite. Sarles had checked both from time to time, the pool house about ten days before. He had not gone into it, but looked through windows. There had been no sign, then, that anybody was holed up in the house.
“You live on the premises?” Forniss asked, as they stood again on the flagstones in front of the pool house.
Sarles didn’t. He had his own house a few miles away, and his own wife in it. He was a full-time gardener for the Bedlows; had been, for Bedlow, for more than ten years. When the house was closed in the winter he kept the drives open, worked on stone fences as they needed it and on trees as trees needed care; he saw that the heat stayed on; that the reserve generator was exercised weekly. From mid-February on, he had “plenty to do” in the greenhouse.
“Yep,” Forniss said, watching the photographer and Crowley as he listened. “No idea when somebody broke in here?”
Sarles hadn’t. He sounded aggrieved. Some time within ten days. Once the family was back—they had been back for a week—he didn’t check on things so much. “I’m a gardener,” he said. “Not a watchman.”
“Sure,” Forniss said. “You’ve told them up at the house?”
Sarles had telephoned, using an extension in the greenhouse. He had told Simpkins, who had said he would tell Mr. Bedlow when Mr. Bedlow came down to breakfast
. Sarles supposed he had told “the old man.”
“You ought to know,” Sarles said, and still seemed aggrieved, “sort of thing happens all the time. Young squirts, mostly. Break things up just for the fun of it.”
“Sure,” Forniss said.
All the same, somebody had broken into the house, not to break things up but to live in it. For several days at least. Somebody, conceivably, Ann Bedlow had walked in on the evening before? Somebody it had been, for some reason, dangerous to walk in on? A man hiding, with the law after him, ready to strike—to kill if it came to killing—to avoid being caught?
The photographer had finished. Crowley, crouched low, was moving again along the path, looking on either side of it. The other trooper was working up the path toward the house as Crowley worked down it. Crowley was rather like a dog looking for a trail. Good kid, Crowley. If Mrs. Bedlow had been struck down on, or near, the path, and carried to the pool for the “accident” there would be traces. Jagged scalp wounds, even if only the scalp is involved—not the skull, not the brain under it—bleed profusely.
Odd the stone had been left so near the path, so unconcealed. Tossed a few feet into deep grass, it would have lain undetected. And with a good rain to wash its surface, it would soon have been nothing at all—not Exhibit A, not any exhibit. It was almost, Forniss thought briefly, as if they had been meant to find it.
That seemed unlikely. They had been meant to see an accident. Why, then? Strike her down; put the stone down so that hands would be free to carry; drop her in the pool. And, forget the stone? Or—hear somebody coming and have to run for it? The last, probably.
“Tell me about yesterday,” Forniss said. “You helped Mr. Bedlow with her, they tell me.”
“He yelled,” Sarles said. “First her name, and you could tell something had happened. Then he yelled for me. I came running and—”
“Where were you, Mr. Sarles?”
Sarles had been in the garden—the vegetable garden. Up “there.” About a hundred yards. He had been cleaning up the asparagus bed, because with any decent weather they’d begin to cut in a few weeks. He had run down the slope. Bedlow had been going down into the pool, at the shallow end. When Sarles saw what Bedlow saw, he went after him. They got her out.
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