“I have a nervous feeling,” Miss Shearing said, “that this is something more than just Stinky Cotton on the loose! After I whipped them to ribbons an hour ago—oh, listen! Is that water running again?”
Asey went in to see.
“Is it all right? ” she asked when he returned a moment later. “Did—oh, what have you got? Where’d you find that?”
“The little silver bud vase,” Asey said. “From the Lulu Belle. An’ as smart a place to hide it, down among the wet bath towels behind the tub, as I could ever imagine!”
12
ELIZABETH SHEARING looked at him blankly.
“The little silver bud vase from what?”
“The Lulu Belle. An’ a very bright place to hide it, Miss Shearing!” Asey said. “If I’d had any ideas of huntin’ for it, which I hadn’t, I don’t think I’d have wasted any time gropin’ around behind the tub in all that slosh. Not very much time, anyway. Was it my comin’ here that scared you?”
She continued to stare at him.
“Must, have been,” Asey continued. “You saw me, an’ you panicked. But you planned it fine, just the same. First you come up here an’ gave that pipe a good kick—oh, I should have spotted that one, right off the bat! That pipe never bust by itself! Then you phoned for help, an’ sat there holdin’ on for dear life. It didn’t matter who came first, whether it was me or someone else. The bud vase is all hidden in the wet towels!”
“Just a minute! There was no vase—”
“Happens that I come,” Asey went on, “an’ you know you’re safe. That’s one place Mayo won’t look. Mayo’s been there. He knows you just tossed the towels there in a hurry to mop up the water. No bud vases there! No, sir!”
“Are you,” Elizabeth Shearing said, “mad?”
“On the contrariwise, I’m delighted,” Asey purposely misunderstood her. “This is the first tangible thing I’ve been able to get my teeth into! As long as you stayed away an’ minded your own business, you had me licked. I was stymied. But now that you got panicky an’ sneaked that bud vase away—” he paused and smiled. “Wa-el, Miss S., we got something to work on, now!”
“Mr. Mayo,” her low voice was controlled and even, “I do not know what it is that the project has done. I do not know what you think I’ve done to aid or abet them! But until you tell me, all this somewhat sinister talk of yours isn’t of much avail, is it? Just tell me, please, what the Larrabee group has done!”
“Let’s stop playin’,” Asey said. “The project crowd hasn’t done anything, an’ you know it. Where’s Mrs. Boone? What did you do with the body?”
Miss Shearing reached out on the marble-topped table, shook a cigarette from an opened package lying there, and lighted it with steady fingers before answering him.
“I’m trying to think,” she said, “which one it might be. Such an amazingly horrible way of getting back at me for giving them a scolding they damned well knew they all deserved! The only one with sufficient imagination to think of hiring you would be Gerty—and Gerty wouldn’t think this was funny. Neither, Mr. Mayo, do I!”
“Why’d you panic in the first place, I wonder?” Asey seemed almost to be asking himself. “I understand your putting the vase in the towels when you saw me come here—that was smart. The mistake you made was callin’ my attention to the pipe again. But why’d you take that bud vase away from the Lulu Belle? Bothered about fingerprints, maybe? I don’t understand it!”
“Is the Lulu Belle that juke joint they were going to?” Miss Shearing asked. “Is that where the vase came from?”
“I must’ve guessed right when I was talkin’ to the doc about the problems of counter-action that you’d run into when everything was kept quiet an’ under cover,” Asey said. “When you don’t know what action to counter, you can counter awful wrong—an’ didn’t you! Didn’t—”
“Mr. Mayo, will you stop just long enough to let me ask one question—is this a joke?” she demanded. “Has the project’s sense of humor gone completely berserk? Or—have you?”
“If it had been anything else in the world,” Asey said, “except that bud vase that was used to kill her—an’ goodness knows you wouldn’t have bothered to take any of the others!—I might feel inclined to string along a while with this wonderful, well-bred, blank amazement of yours. But under the circumstances—”
“When you came into the lobby downstairs just now, Mr. Mayo,” she interrupted, “was there anyone in the so-called office?”
“No,” Asey said.
“Did you ring? Did anyone answer?”
“I punched the bell, but nobody came.”
“And did anyone ask your business?” Miss Shearing went on. “Did anyone stop your coming up to this floor, up to this room here? If I hadn’t been in, was there anything to prevent you from putting a bud vase behind that tub? Or a Maharajah’s emerald? Or a small atom bomb? Or anything else you might care to name?”
“No, but—”
“The Smalleys, who run this place,” Miss Shearing continued, “are occupied with dirty dishes, with a faulty hot water heater, a broken refrigerator, a stove with a missing part or two, a sick chef, and a few other similar problems. Except when we came this morning, there hasn’t been a soul in that office all day!”
“But—”
“But,” she wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise, “the situation doesn’t seem to be considered at all unusual. In fact, I gathered it was quite the normal state of affairs. Anyone—and I mean anyone at all—could come and go at will and at random anywhere in this inn! So under the circumstances, Mr. Mayo, let’s concede that if you found anything behind that tub, it doesn’t necessarily follow that 7’m the only person who could have placed it there! I can’t prove to you that I didn’t, but there certainly does seem to me some basis for reasonable doubt in your mind!”
“But why—” Asey paused. After all, she was as likely a person to plant things on as anyone!
“I thought you’d hesitate,” she said. “Now, tell me what’s happened, please!”
He noticed, as he told her in a few crisp sentences about finding Mrs. Boone’s body over in the Lulu Belle, and of its disappearance, that her face remained immobile. He might have been telling her about yesterday’s weather.
“An’,” he added, “if you can prove to me that you were sittin’ with the local bank president in his office on main street from a little after twelve until one-thirty—that’s the time she was last seen to the time we found her, I’ll retract every harsh word I said. If you can prove you were closeted with the minister in his study around two, when Dr. Cummings discovered the body was gone, I’ll also eat every last inch of all them lamp cords, to boot!”
Miss Shearing took off her glasses, laid them on the table top, and told him, without change of expression, that his digestion was perfectly safe.
“Why? Where were you durin’ the time she was killed, an’ the time that her body was taken away?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Mayo, and I’m beginning to feel afraid.”
“What d’you mean, you don’t know?” Asey demanded.
“I literally don’t know! I was driving. I might have been in any one of a dozen towns. I simply don’t know! Look, have you ever been suddenly terrified? Because I am, now. Don’t you see?” She got up and started to pace around the room. “That vase was planted there behind the tub! It was already there when I came in and found the water spurting—oh, don’t you understand the real purpose of someone’s causing that leak? The vase wasn’t hidden there. It was put there to be found!”
“Wa-el,” Asey began, “I s’pose—”
“Certainly,” she went on, “there’s no more effective way of calling attention to any given spot than to cause a flood in it. Whoever ultimately came to fix the pipe, whether it was one of the Smalleys, or a plumber, or some innocent bystander like yourself, would find that vase. And if by some chance they happened to miss it, it would be found by whoever ultimately took the wet towels aw
ay—and I remember now that I noticed that one of them had fallen down behind there even before I started to mop! Whether anyone put additional towels into that slosh or not, don’t you see, one had already been put there. Even if everything else failed, that one towel would make things work—someone would surely reach over and pick it up and find the vase! And when this business of Mrs. Boone came to light, why I’d be suspected, immediately!”
Asey thought to himself that you could almost hear her brain ticking it out—Item One, Item Two, Item Two-A, Item Three, and so on to General Conclusion. Miss Shearing wasn’t a one to bother with gestures, or posing, or what Cummings had called the dramatic hesitation. Her mind just bit into problems like a bull-dozer, and levelled them off with equal dispatch.
She sat down suddenly in the gilt rocker, as if her legs had given way.
But her mind hadn’t. She went right on talking.
“No, Mr. Mayo, I didn’t put the vase there to hide it from you. Someone else put it there to be found, and given to you. Look, we’ve got to review this situation, right from the start yesterday—why are you chuckling? What’s so amusing?”
“I’m just sort of surprised,” Asey said, “to find someone who knows where it started. Why yesterday?”
“Carolyn decided yesterday to come down here with Layne. She wanted to find out for herself why the projects were working out so badly, and why the crowd seemed to get into so much hot water. I knew why. I’ve theoretically been in charge of half a dozen of them—except that I’ve never had a single chance to be in charge!”
“How come?”
“Because the minute I arrive anywhere with them, I’m sent for by Carolyn and given some other job to do some other place. Without any restraining hand, those kids have raised simple hell! There’s one girl—well, d’you know the phrase ‘Hubba-hubba’?”
“You mean Gerty,” Asey said. “We’ve met.”
“I mean Gerty, and I should have guessed she’d meet you at once. Gerty doesn’t mean to, but she treats every place we go to as if it were something just liberated from the fascist yoke,” Miss Shearing said with a little grin, “and as if she had just fifteen minutes to see everything and meet everyone before she got her orders to march on. So she meets everyone, and she sees everything—and Gerty’s infectious. The rest follow her, dumb with pleasure, and they have the time of their lives!”
“But not much work gets done?”
“Not very much. Cotton and Briggs and the older men are getting through next month, and they were scattered all over the world for the last three or four years—can you imagine what a violently glowing interest they take in projects like this one? Can’t you just see them hurling themselves into a spirited investigation of garbage collections, and traffic problems, and the ethics and prejudices of towns under nine hundred population? It’s a holy wonder to me that they’ve behaved half as well as they have!”
“Why didn’t Mrs. Boone figure that out?” Asey asked. “Wouldn’t that particular bunch have been better off without quite so much projectin’ around? Couldn’t they have done it all in a library?”
“Carolyn,” Miss Shearing said, “would have referred to that as a reactionary statement, and told you that it’s obsolete to learn by learning. You learn, Mr. Mayo, by doing!”
“Oh?”
“She’s written a splendid little pamphlet on the situation, and I’ll gladly send you a free copy—provided that I’m in any position to have free access to the mails in the near future. What’s done with leading female suspects these days, by the way? All I can think of is that series of terrible woodcuts of women sitting in cells and picking oakum.”
“Almost anyone,” Asey said gravely, “would refer to that as a reactionary notion. Oakum’s obsolete. You’ll probably learn a good useful trade, like permanent wavin’, or spot weldin’.”
“Elizabeth Shearing, Girl Welder—oh, I don’t feel like japing, Mr. Mayo! But if I don’t, I’ll burst out into tears! Look, when I came today, Layne brought Carolyn to meet me. She had the inevitable errands for me to do, and I rebelled. It was such utter nonsense, my driving back to Boston to find out about something that could be settled with a simple phone call! So I told her that I’d go at once—but I didn’t. I went into the telephone office, called Boston, got the information she wanted, and then I went gaily off, riding around the Cape!”
“Did anyone know that you didn’t mean to go back to Boston?”
She shook her head. “I doubt it. I didn’t tell anyone, and I turned as if I were going in that direction when I set out. Then this afternoon about—oh, I don’t know exactly when—say around three o’clock, I telephoned the Douglass house and—”
“At long last!” Asey said. “At long last! Who’d you talk with?”
“Mrs. Framingham. Aunt Mary. I gave her the message for Carolyn.”
“Exactly what,” Asey said, “did you tell her? An’ I mean—exactly’ ”
Miss Shearing thought for a moment.
“I said, tell Mrs. Boone every thing’s all right, and not to worry, and Shee’s hair—”
“And what?”
“Hu Shee. Carolyn’s poodle, you know. He was being clipped,” she explained. “That was the crux of Carolyn’s problem. That was why she wanted me to drive back to Boston, to find out about Shee. Anyway, I said that Shee’s hair was okay. That’s about as exact as I can be! I didn’t repeat, and I didn’t go into any detail, because I didn’t really want to talk with Carolyn.”
Asey tilted back in his rocker, stared up at the fruits and flowers on the ceiling, and shook his head.
“Mrs. Boone’s all right,” he murmured, “not to worry, an’ she’s here okay!”
“No, Mr. Mayo, you’ve got it wrong!” she protested. “Tell Mrs. Boone—”
“I’ve got,” Asey said, “what Aunt Mary apparently got! Uh-huh, an’ I see how it could happen, too!”
After all, he thought, Miss Shearing couldn’t invent a poodle named Hu Shee on the spur of the moment!
“I do know where I phoned from,” she remarked. “It was a little variety store in Chatham. They probably could tell you the time—except I’m sure it was long after two, and you don’t care where I was then!”
“What did you do after givin’ the message to Aunt Mary?” Asey asked.
“I went to a beach, and sat in the sun, and had as pleasant a time as you could wish for. I came back full of vigor and told off the project en masse—I’d never had the chance before,” she said with a smile, “and I’d learned from a few carefully placed questions in the village that they’d been acting like demons! So there you are, Mr. Mayo! What would you do in my place? There on the table beside you is that vase, and I don’t know where I was.”
“Isn’t there anything you can think of that would place you at any particular place at any particular time? Didn’t you eat any lunch?”
“Yes, but it was some sandwiches that my housekeeper had put up for me. Oh,” she said with a sigh, “if only I’d stopped to ask a two-headed woman the time! Or run over a cow as church bells were sounding! Or get stalled on a railroad track with the freight coming! But I didn’t. There’s always my speedometer, of course. The oil was changed yesterday, and they wrote down the mileage—no, I see from the look on your face that won’t work!”
“Too many loopholes. You could’ve rewritten the figures,” Asey said, “or rolled up mileage before you came here to account for what you claim you rolled up this afternoon.”
“I suppose so! I’m afraid, Mr. Mayo.” She got up and started to pace around the room again. “Not so much because I’m in such a horrible position, either. I didn’t kill Carolyn, I had nothing to do with it, and I’m sure that you—or someone—will be able to prove it. I have what amounts to a childish faith in the truth! What terrifies me is that someone planned to put me in this hole! It’s the realization that someone must hate me so profoundly—or do you suppose that I just appeared to be the best bet? After all, for all that anyone kne
w, I might be able to account for my time down to a split second!”
“Wa-el,” Asey drawled, “d’you s’pose someone possibly might’ve figured out that maybe you had a motive for killin’ her?”
“I can’t think why!” she retorted promptly.
“You were the head of Larrabee before Mrs. Boone came there, weren’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I was,” she said. “My father started it, you know.”
“An’ Mrs. Boone displaced you?”
Miss Shearing perched on the arm of the easy chair, and smiled.
“That depends on your point of view, Mr. Mayo. I still run the place. I’m paid more than she is—although frankly Carolyn doesn’t—I mean, didn’t—know that! And I never felt that she’d stay at Larrabee forever. Not,” she added hastily, “that I anticipated anything like this! But Carolyn wasn’t a person who stayed put. She always had a next step.”
“You mean you think that Larrabee was just another rung of the ladder for her?”
“Definitely. Writer, columnist, lecturer, judge, college president—she wasn’t going down, Mr. Mayo. She was on the up, as Gerty would say.”
“An’ what,” Asey said, “do you guess the next step would’ve been?”
“The seat of the Honorable Willard P. Boone,” Miss Shearing said, “who isn’t young, and probably not immortal. College president, senator—you see my point.”
Asey looked at her thoughtfully.
“Kind of awful philosophic about it all, aren’t you?” he inquired.
She shrugged. “Admitting that she brought things to the college that I never could have is no discredit to me. Everything she did for it, everything she did to make it grow, only made my job grow, too. She didn’t displace me, or hinder my career, or thwart me. On the contrary, Carolyn furthered my career, and I’m very well aware of the fact!”
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