“Poor thing,” Sarles said. “Head all smashed in, mister.”
Bedlow had carried his dying wife and Sarles had walked along behind him, ready to steady him if he needed it. He hadn’t needed steadying.
“He kept saying her name over and over,” Sarles said. “But she didn’t hear him, I guess. As good as dead already.”
“Before he shouted,” Forniss said. “As if something had happened. You hear anything before that?”
“Called her a couple of times,” Sarles said. “First from up near the house. Then from closer. Then maybe five minutes and he yelled. When he found her.”
“Nothing else?”
Forniss had lowered his voice.
“What say?”
Forniss repeated what he had said, and spoke more loudly.
“Nope.”
He looked at Forniss and frowned slightly.
“Nothing the matter with my hearing, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Jason Sarles said.
“Sure not,” Forniss said. There was no point in starting an argument. Probably there hadn’t been any sound that would carry a hundred yards, anyway. A heavy stone breaking a fragile skull doesn’t make much noise.
“The asparagus bed,” Forniss said. “You said you were cleaning it up?”
“Raking. Getting stones out.”
A rake makes a noise when it hits stones. A man gets preoccupied when he’s doing his job.
“From where you were working you couldn’t see down here? The pool? The path?”
“Roof of the house. That’s all.”
“There’s another way in? I mean—to the garden? A service road of some sort?”
“Sure. Comes in back of the pool house and swings around. Way I come in, mostly. Right now, it’s pretty soft, with the frost out. You figure somebody—”
He stopped, because Forniss had walked abruptly away. He walked to Crowley, who had beckoned and bent to look at what Crowley had found.
Dry leaves had collected in a little hollow, halfway between where the stone lay and the pool. There was blood on the dried leaves and, beyond them, on grass, on other leaves, more spots of blood.
More pictures—not that they would show much; would show more than dead leaves with, possibly, spots on them.
“When you get what you want,” Forniss told the trooper with the camera, “take the chunk of rock, and some of the leaves too, I guess, to the sub-station. And call the barracks and tell them it doesn’t look so much like accident, and tell them why. O.K.? And tell them I’ll be at the house. Oh—and that the coroner better have a long look at her, because this chunk of rock is jagged, and the pool floor isn’t.”
The trooper said, “O.K., sergeant.”
“Better come along with me, Ray,” Forniss said, to Raymond Crowley, and watched the kid’s face brighten.
A hell of a time for the captain to be on leave, Forniss thought. A captain is better than a sergeant for talking to people like Bedlow. Any captain than any sergeant, which is the way things are.
So—the captain wasn’t here. And Forniss was here.
He led the way up the path, and around the house and across the turnaround toward the front door. A Jaguar was standing in the turnaround. Been driven through mud, the Jaguar had. Got mud on its pretty feet.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1960 by Richard and Frances Lockridge
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5044-9
This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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