by Ellery Queen
Ellery laughed.
“You’re talking like the old Patty I knew¯”
“You think so?” asked Pat in a queer voice.
“But you don’tlook¯”
“No,” said Pat. ”No, I don’t. I’m getting to be an old hag. Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular,” said Ellery vaguely, turning the car south and beginning to drive toward Wrightsville Junction.
“But tell me! What brings you back to Wrightsville? It must be us¯couldn’t be anyone else! How’s the novel?”
“Finished.”
“Oh, grand! Ellery, you never let me read a word of it. How does it end?”
“That,” said Mr. Queen, “is one of my reasons for coming back to Wrightsville.”
“What do you mean?”
“The end,” he grinned. ”I’ve ended it, but it’s always easy to change the last chapter¯at least, certain elements not directly concerned with mystery plot. You might be of help there.”
“Me? But I’d love to! And-oh, Ellery. What am I thinking of? I haven’t thanked you for that magnificent gift you sent me from New York. And those wonderful things you sent Muth, and Pop, and Lola. Oh, Ellery, you shouldn’t have. We didn’t do anything that¯”
“Oh, bosh. Seeing much of Cart Bradford lately?”
Pat examined her fingernails. ”Oh, Cart’s been around.”
“And Jim’s funeral?”
“We buried him next to Nora.”
“Well!” said Ellery. ”You know, I feel a thirst coming on. How about stopping in somewhere for a long one, Patty?”
“All right,” said Pat moodily.
“Isn’t that Gus Olesen’s Roadside Tavern up ahead? By gosh, it is!”
Pat glanced at him, but Ellery grinned and stopped the car before the tavern, and helped her out, at which she grimaced and said men in Wrightsville didn’t do things like that, and Ellery grinned again, which made Pat laugh; and they walked into Gus Olesen’s cool place arm in arm, laughing together; and Ellery walked her right up to the table where Carter Bradford sat waiting in a coil of knots, and said: “Here she is, Bradford. C.O.D.”
* * *
“Pat,” said Cart, his palms flat on the table. ”Cart!” cried Pat.
“Good morrow, good morrow,” chanted a cracked voice; and Mr. Queen saw old Anderson the Soak, seated at a nearby table with a fistful of dollar bills in one hand and a row of empty whisky glasses before him.
“Good morrow to you, Mr. Anderson,” said Mr. Queen; and while he nodded and smiled at Mr. Anderson, things were happening at the table; so that when he turned back, there was Pat, seated, and Carter seated, and they were glaring at each other across the table. So Mr. Queen sat down, too, and said to Gus Olesen: “Use your imagination, Gus.” Gus scratched his head and got busy behind the bar. ”Ellery”¯Pat’s eyes were troubled¯”you tricked me into coming here with you.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d come, untricked,” murmured Mr. Queen. ”/ asked Queen to come back to Wrightsville, Pat,” said Cart hoarsely. ”He said he’d¯Pat, I’ve tried to see you. I’ve tried to make you understand that we can wipe the past out, that I’m in love with you and always was and always will be, and that I want to marry you more than anything in the world¯”
“Let’s not discuss that anymore,” said Pat. She began making pleats in the skirt of the tablecloth.
Carter seized a tall glass Gus set down before him; and Pat did, too, with a sort of gratitude for the diversion; and they sat in silence for a while, drinking and not looking at each other.
At his table old Anderson had risen, one hand on the cloth to steady himself, and he was chanting:
“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree toad is a chef-d’oeuvre of the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven¯”
“Siddown, Mr. Anderson,” said Gus Olesen gently. ”You’re rockin’ the boat.”
“Whitman,” said Mr. Queen, looking around. ”And very apt.” Old Anderson leered, and went on:
“And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow, crunching with depressed head, surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels!”
And with a courtly bow the Old Soak sat down again and began to pound out rhythms on the table. ”I was a poet!” he shouted. His lips waggled. ”And 1-look at me now . . . ”
“Yes,” said Mr. Queen thoughtfully. ”That’s very true indeed.”
“Here’s your poison!” said Gus at the next table, slopping a glass of whisky before Mr. Anderson. Then Gus looked very guilty and, avoiding the startled eyes of Pat, went quickly behind his bar and hid himself in a copy of Frank Lloyd’s Record.
Mr. Anderson drank, murmuring to himself in his gullet. ”Pat,” said Mr. Queen, “I came back here today to tell you and Carter who was really responsible for the crimes Jim Haight was charged with.”
“Oh,” said Patty, and she sucked in her breath.
“There are miracles in the human mind, too. You told me something in the hospital waiting room the day Nora died¯one little acorn fact¯and it grew into a tall tree in my mind.”
“ ‘And a mouse,’ “ shouted Mr. Anderson exultantly, “ ‘is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels!’ “
Pat whispered: “Then it wasn’t Jim after all . . . Ellery, no! Don’t! Please! No!”
“Yes,” said Ellery gently. ”That thing is standing between you and Cart. It’s a question mark that would outlive you both. I want to erase it and put a period in its place. Then the chapter will be closed, and you and Cart can look each other in the eye again with some sort of abiding faith.” He sipped his drink, frowning. ”I hope!”
“You hope?” muttered Cart. ”The truth,” said Ellery soberly, “is unpleasant.”
“Ellery!” cried Pat.
“But you’re not children, either of you. Don’t delude yourselves. It would stand between you even if you married . . . the uncertainty of it, the not-knowing, the doubt and the night-and-day question. It’s what’s keeping you apart and what has kept you apart. Yes, the truth is unpleasant. But at least it is the truth, and if you know the truth, you have knowledge; and if you have knowledge, you can make a decision with durability . . . Pat, this is surgery. It’s cut the tumor out or die. Shall I operate?”
Mr. Anderson was singing “Under the Greenwood Tree” in a soft croak, beating time with his empty whisky glass.
Patty sat up perfectly straight, her hands clasped about her glass. ”Go ahead . . . Doctor.”
And Cart took a long swallow and nodded.
* * *
Mr. Queen sighed.
“Do you recall, Pat, telling me in the hospital about the time I came into Nora’s house¯last Hallowe’en¯and found you and Nora transferring books from the living room to Jim’s new study upstairs?” Pat nodded wordlessly. ”And what did you tell me? That the books you and Nora were lugging upstairs you had just removed from a nailed box. That you’d gone down into the cellar just a few minutes before I dropped in, seen the box of books down there all nailed up, exactly as Ed Hotchkiss had left it when he cabbed it from the station weeks and weeks before . . . seen the box intact and opened it yourself.”
“A box of books?” muttered Carter.
“That box of books, Cart, had been part of Jim’s luggage which he’d shipped from New York to Wrightsville when he came back to Wrightsville to make up with Nora. He’d checked it at the Wrightsville station, Cart. It was at the station all the time Jim and Nora were away on their honeymoon; it was brought to the new house only on their return, stored down in the cellar, and on Hallowe’en, Pat found that box still intact, still nailed up, stilled unopened. That was the fact I hadn’t known¯the kernel fact, the acorn fact, that told me the truth.”
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br /> “But how, Ellery?” asked Pat, feeling her head.
“You’ll see in a moment, honey. All the time, I’d assumed that the books I saw you and Nora handling were merely being transferred from the living-room bookshelves to Jim’s new study upstairs. I thought they were house books, books of Jim’s and Nora’s that had been in the house for some time. It was a natural assumption¯I saw no box on the living-room floor, no nails¯”
“I’d emptied the box and taken the box, nails, and tools down to the cellar just before you came in,” said Pat. ”I told you that in the hospital that day.”
“Too late,” growled Ellery. ”When I came in, I saw no evidence of such a thing. And I’m not a clairvoyant.”
“But what’s the point?” frowned Carter Bradford.
“One of the books in the wooden box Patty opened that Hallowe’en,” said Ellery, “was Jim’s copy of Edgcomb’s Toxicology.’’’’
Cart’s jaw dropped. ”The marked passage about arsenic!”
“Not only that, but it was from between two pages of that volume that the three letters fell out.”
This time Cart said nothing. And Pat was looking at Ellery with deep quotation marks between her eyebrows.
“Now, since the box had been nailed up in New York and sent to General Delivery, Wrightsville, where it was held, and the toxicology book with the letters in it was found by us directly after the box was unpacked¯the letters fell out as Nora dropped an armful of books quite by accident¯then the conclusion is absolutely inescapable: Jim could not possibly have written those three letters in Wrightsville. And when I saw that, I saw the whole thing. The letters must have been written by Jim in New York¯before he returned to Wrightsville to ask Nora for the second time to marry him, before he knew that Nora would accept him after his desertion of her and his three-year absence!”
“Yes,” mumbled Carter Bradford.
“But don’t you see?” cried Ellery. ”How can we now state with such fatuous certainty that the sickness and death Jim predicted for his ‘wife’ in those three letters referred to Nora? True, Nora was Jim’s wife when the letters were found, but she was NOT his wife, nor could Jim have known she would BE his wife, when he originally wrote them!”
He stopped and, even though it was cool in Gus Olesen’s taproom, he dried his face with a handkerchief and took a long pull at his glass. At the next table, Mr. Anderson snored.
Pat gasped: “But Ellery, if those three letters didn’t refer to Nora, then the whole thing¯the whole thing¯”
“Let me tell it my way,” said Mr. Queen in a harsh voice. ”Once doubt is raised that the kwife’ mentioned in the three letters was Nora, then two facts that before seemed irrelevant simply shout to be noticed. One is that the letters bore incomplete dates. That is, they marked the month, and the day of the month, but not the year. So the three holidays¯Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s¯which Jim had written down on the successive letters as marking the dates of his ‘wife’s’ illness, more serious illness, and finally death, might have been the similar dates of one, two, or even three years before! Not 1940 at all, but 1939, or 1938, or 1937 . . .
“And the second fact, of course, was that not once did any of the letters refer to the name Nora; the references were consistently to ‘my wife.’
“If Jim wrote those letters in New York¯before his marriage to Nora, before he even knew Nora would marry him¯then Jim could not have been writing about Nora’s illness or Nora’s death. And if we can’t believe this¯an assumption we all took for granted from the beginning of the case¯then the whole structure which postulated Nora as Jim’s intended poison victim collapses.”
“This is incredible,” muttered Carter. ”Incredible.”
“I’m confused,” moaned Patty. ”You mean¯”
“I mean,” said Mr. Queen, “that Nora was never threatened, Nora was never in danger . . . Nora was never meant to be murdered.’’’’
Pat shook her head violently and groped for her glass.
“But that opens up a whole new field of speculation!” exclaimed Carter. ”If Nora wasn’t meant to be murdered¯ever, at all¯”
“What are the facts?” argued Ellery. ”A woman did die on New Year’s Eve: Rosemary Haight. When we thought Nora was the intended victim, we said Rosemary died by accident. But now that we know Nora wasn’t the intended victim, surely it follows that Rosemary did NOT die by accident¯that Rosemary was meant to be murdered from the beginning?’’’’
“Rosemary was meant to be murdered from the beginning,” repeated Pat slowly, as if the words were in a language she didn’t understand.
“But Queen¯” protested Bradford.
“I know, I know,” sighed Ellery. ”It raises tremendous difficulties and objections. But with Nora eliminated as the intended victim, it’s the only logical explanation for the crime. So we’ve got to accept it as our new premise. Rosemary was meant to be murdered. Immediately I asked myself: Did the three letters have anything to do with Rosemary’s death?
“Superficially, no. The letters referred to the death of Jim’s wife¯”
“And Rosemary was Jim’s sister,” said Pat with a frown.
“Yes, and besides Rosemary had shown no signs of the illnesses predicted for Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. Moreover, since the three letters can now be interpreted as two or three years old or more, they no longer appear necessarily criminal. They can merely refer to the natural death of a previous wife of Jim’s¯not Nora, but a first wife whom Jim married in New York and who died there some New Year’s Day between the time Jim ran out on Nora and the time he came back to marry Nora.”
“But Jim never said anything about a first wife,” objected Pat.
“That wouldn’t prove he hadn’t had one,” said Cart.
“No,” nodded Ellery. ”So it all might have been perfectly innocent. Except for two highly significant and suspicious factors: first, that the letters were written but never mailed, as if no death had occurred in New York; and second, that a woman did actually die in Wrightsville on New Year’s Day of 1941, as written by Jim in his third and last letter a long time before it happened. Coincidence? My gorge rises at the very notion.
“No, I saw that there must be some connection between Rosemary’s death and the three letters Jim wrote¯he did write them, of course; poor Judge Eli Martin’s attempt to cast doubt on their authenticity during the trial was a brave but transparent act of desperation.”
Mr. Anderson woke up, looking annoyed. But Gus Olesen shook his head. Mr. Anderson tottered over to the bar. ” ‘Landlord,’ “ he leered, “ ‘fill the flowing bowl until it does run over!’ “
“We don’t serve in bowls, and besides, Andy, you had enough,” said Gus reprovingly.
Mr. Anderson began to weep, his head on the bar; and after a few sobs, he fell asleep again.
“What connection,” continued Mr. Queen thoughtfully, “is possible between Rosemary Haight’s death and the three letters Jim Haight wrote long, long before? And with this question,” he said, “we come to the heart of the problem. For with Rosemary the intended victim all along, the use of the three letters can be interpreted as a stupendous blind, a clever deception, a psychological smoke screen to conceal the truth from the authorities! Isn’t that what happened? Didn’t you and Dakin, Bradford, instantly dismiss Rosemary’s death as a factor and concentrate on Nora as the intended victim? But that was just what Rosemary’s murderer would want you to do! You ignored the actual victim to look for murder motives against the ostensible victim. And so you built your case around Jim, who was the only person who could possibly have poisoned Nora, and never for an instant sought the real criminal¯the person with the motive and opportunity to poison Rosemary.”
Pat was by now so bewildered that she gave herself up wholly to listening. But Carter Bradford was following with a savage intentness, hunched over the table and never taking his eyes from Ellery’s face.
“Go on!” he said. ”Go on, Queen!�
�
“Let’s go back,” said Mr. Queen, lighting a cigarette. ”We now know Jim’s three letters referred to a hidden, a never-mentioned, a first wife. If this woman died on New Year’s Day two or three years ago, why didn’t Jim mail the letters to his sister? More important than that, why didn’t he disclose the fact to you or Dakin when he was arrested? Why didn’t Jim tell Judge Martin, his attorney, that the letters didn’t mean Nora, for use as a possible defense in his trial? For if the first wife were in all truth dead, it would have been a simple matter to corroborate¯the attending physician’s affidavit, the death certificate, a dozen things.
“But Jim kept his mouth shut. He didn’t by so much as a sober word indicate that he’d married another woman between the time he and Nora broke up almost four years ago and the time he returned to Wrightsville to marry her. Why? Why Jim’s mysterious silence on this point?”
“Maybe,” said Pat with a shiver, “because he’d actually planned and carried out the murder of his first wife.”
“Then why didn’t he mail the letters to his sister?” argued Cart. ”Since he’d presumably written them for that eventuality?”
“Ah,” said Mr. Queen. ”The very counterpoint. So I said to myself: Is it possible that the murder Jim had planned of his first wife did not take place at the time it was supposed to?”
“You mean she was alive when Jim came back to Wrightsville?” gasped Pat.
“Not merely alive,” said Mr. Queen; he slowly ground out the butt of his cigarette in an ashtray. ”She followed Jim here.”
“The first wife?” Carter gaped.
“She came to Wrightsville?” cried Pat.
“Yes, but not as Jim’s first wife. Not as Jim’s any-wife.”
“Then who¯?”
“She came to Wrightsville,” said Ellery, “as Jim’s sister.”
Mr. Anderson came to life at the bar and began: “Landlord¯”
“Go home,” said Gus, shaking his head.
“Mead! Nepenthe!” implored Mr. Anderson.