by Craig Rice
It was a small, stucco cottage, two rooms, a kitchen and a bath. Its great attraction was the garden around it—a tiny square of neat and frequently mowed green lawn, and then, a profusion of brilliant roses. April had seen it a dozen, a hundred times before, yet always as she reached the top of the path she stopped and gasped at the riot of color. Roses so dark red they seemed almost purple, great yellow roses, white ones, bright red ones, enormous pink ones. A vine heavy with tiny scarlet blooms ran up one side of the stucco bungalow, and another, with tiny pink blooms, climbed over the arched gate. Mrs. Cherington stood among her flowers, dressed in overalls, her face hidden by a wide straw garden hat. She had a pair of pruning shears in her hand.
Definitely not the type for overalls, April reflected. Not with that figure. She looked almost a little funny. Then she raised her head and called a greeting, and April suddenly realized that Mrs. Cherington was anything but funny. She’d never noticed the deep lines in Mrs. Cherington’s forehead and around her once-pretty mouth. She’d never noticed that look in Mrs. Cherington’s eyes, that was present even when she smiled. It made her feel a little uncomfortable.
“Hello, April,” Mrs. Cherington said. “I just made some molasses cookies. Want some?”
“Oh, gosh!” April said. Mrs. Cherington’s cookies were famous, and molasses cookies were April’s favorite. Especially with raisins, and Mrs. Cherington always put in lots of raisins. Then suddenly she remembered. She was really here to spy on the Cheringtons, to try and find out something they didn’t want her to know. It was distinctly bad etiquette to accept molasses cookies from someone you were spying on. “Well—” she said slowly.
She paused, gulped, and said, “Well, I really came over to ask you a big favor. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. We got her a present but we didn’t get any flowers, and—”
“And of course you’ve got to have flowers,” Mrs. Cherington said. “And you shall. All you want.” She looked affectionately at April. “Your Mother is a very lucky woman.”
“We’re the lucky ones,” April said. Mrs. Cherington’s eyes were misty. April looked away and said, “Well, we thought—maybe just a couple of roses—”
“A couple!” Mrs. Cherington sniffed. “A big bouquet! The very best ones we can find. Do you want to pick them out?”
“I’d—rather you did,” April said. “You know which ones you can spare.”
Mrs. Cherington looked thoughtfully around her garden. “I tell you what. Roses ought to be cut in the early morning, when the dew is still on them. Tomorrow morning I’ll make you a bouquet, and you can send Archie up to get it.”
“You’re swell!” April said.
“I like you, too,” Mrs. Cherington said. She resumed her pruning. “And the molasses cookies are on a plate on the kitchen table.”
“I—” April stood for a moment, deep in thought. She was making up her mind about something and, she told herself, it wasn’t because of the cookies either, or the roses. And it wasn’t just because she liked Mr. and Mrs. Carleton Cherington III. It was that—well, the evidence in Flora Sanford’s Manila envelope wasn’t sufficient motive for murder. Once, it might have been. But—why, it was hardly enough to be cause for blackmail. He had already been dishonorably discharged from the army and had served his term in prison. If Mrs. Sanford had given away what she knew, they would simply have moved to another tiny bungalow in another town, changed their name again, and planted another rose garden. There was nothing she could have done to them that would have made it necessary for her to be murdered.
April felt a sense of relief so great that for a minute she was afraid she might cry. She said, “Golly yes, I’d love a cookie.” She started around the side of the house toward the kitchen.
“Not one cookie,” Mrs. Cherington called, “take a handful. They’re best when they’re still warm.”
“Don’t tempt me too far,” April said.
Mrs. Cherington’s warm, friendly laugh echoed across the rose garden. “Go in the side door and get a paper bag out of the broom closet, and take some home to Dinah and Archie. If there aren’t enough on the plate, you’ll find more in the stone crock on the pantry shelf.”
“Thanks,” April called back. “You’re wonderful!” She darted in the side door. Dinah and Archie adored molasses cookies with raisins. Tomorrow they’d bring Mrs. Cherington a big bunch of radishes from their back-yard garden, and the Sunday paper. And a bowl of the ice cream Dinah was going to make for Mother’s Sunday dinner.
She found a paper bag in the broom closet and started for the kitchen.
Funny, many times as she’d been in the Cherington cottage she’d never noticed that photograph at the end of the hall. It had been there all the time. Seeing it, now, she remembered that it had been there. But she’d never stared at the face in it before. It was a beautiful face, framed in a cloud of soft, dark hair. Something hauntingly familiar about it. Where had she seen it before?
Oh, gosh, yes, of course! It was Mrs. Cherington, when she was years and years younger. April stepped closer and looked thoughtfully at the picture. No lines on the forehead or shadows in the dark, almost wistful eyes. The corners of the mouth curved in a faint, shy smile. It was a happy face, a trusting one.
April thought of Mrs. Cherington’s plump, rouged face, the plucked eyebrows, and the eyes that could fill so easily with tears. “It’s a darn shame,” she whispered to the photograph. It smiled back at her. It was signed in the corner, “All my love. Rose.” So that was Mrs. Cherington’s name. No wonder the Cheringtons raised roses for a hobby.
She went on into the kitchen. There was a plate heaped with cookies on the table. They were warm, and they smelled lush. April stared at them ecstatically. Great big fat ones, thick with raisins!
Mrs. Cherington was always making cookies, always ten times as many as she and Mr. Cherington could possibly eat. And all the neighborhood children haunted the Cherington kitchen. She should have had about ten of her own, April reflected.
She reminded herself not to be a pig, and selected exactly nine cookies, three for Dinah, three for Archie, and three for herself. She considered taking one extra, to eat on the way. No, that wouldn’t be fair. She took one long sniff instead.
Nobody who made cookies like these could ever, possibly, be guilty of murder!
She put the cookies carefully in the paper bag and went on out the back door. On the back steps she paused suddenly, and gasped. Old Mr. Cherington was sitting on the back-yard garden bench. And he was holding a gun in his hand.
April said, “Oh!”, took one more step, and stood still.
He looked up at her, smiled, and said, “Hello there, April.”
She forced her face into a smile and said, “Hello, yourself. I’ve been robbing the kitchen.” She hoped her voice wasn’t trembling. “But I only stole nine cookies. So don’t point that at me.”
Mr. Cherington laughed. “I’m not pointing it and it isn’t loaded.” He admired it as it lay on his palm. “And you could hardly call this a deadly weapon. It’s a twenty-two— a lady’s toy—or maybe, a lady’s ornament.” He tilted it so that the sunlight reflected on the mother-of-pearl handle. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Not to me,” April said. “Guns scare me.” Especially a gun resting in the hand of someone who might still be a murderer, in spite of her reasoning about the motive, in spite of Mrs. Cherington’s photograph, in spite of the molasses cookies.
She couldn’t help it, she had to stare at Mr. Cherington. He was handsome, he was darn handsome. Tall, and slender and very straight. Military-looking. Well, after all, he’d been Colonel Chandler once, and a war hero. He had gray eyes, beautiful gray eyes. His thin face was tanned. His white hair and neat little white beard were just the right touch. Only, his hair shouldn’t have been white. It had been dark in a picture taken just five years ago, and he hadn’t had the small beard.
April found herself remembering the poem she’d had to study for English class. “My hair is white, but no
t with years …” Had Mr. Cherington’s hair—she couldn’t think of him as Colonel Chandler—turned white in prison? Or had it—what was the phrase?—“turned white in a single night”? But Mother had said that was a crazy superstition, and a scientific impossibility. White hair was something that had to do with vitamins. Maybe a person didn’t get vitamins in prison. Now, April told herself, you’re being silly. Silly, because you’re scared. And there wasn’t any reason— couldn’t be any reason—for being scared of Mr. Cherington.
She swallowed hard, looked at the gun, and said, “Well, it would look cute on a charm bracelet.”
“That’s about all it’s good for,” Mr. Cherington said. He laid the little gun down on the table in front of the bench.
April walked over to the bench, sat down beside him, and stared at the gun with fascinated eyes. It was tiny, it was pretty, and it certainly didn’t look deadly. She said, “May I touch it?”
“Help yourself,” Mr. Cherington said. “I told you it isn’t loaded.”
April picked it up, and her skin prickled all over. It fitted comfortably into her hand. She pointed it at the top of the pine tree across the street from the Cherington cottage and said, “Bang!”
Mr. Cherington laughed. “If you’d aimed like that, you’d have hit some other tree two blocks away. Look, let me show you. First get the horizontal range, and then—”
“Never mind,” April said hastily. She laid the little gun gingerly on the table. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Couldn’t do much damage, though,” Mr. Cherington said. “If you really wanted to shoot somebody—” He paused, and said, “But Louise is fond of it. That’s why I’ve been cleaning it for her.”
“You know so much about guns,” April said admiringly. “You must have been in the army once.” She hoped her voice sounded normal, because her stomach had turned into a little ball of ice.
It was a good thirty seconds before Mr. Cherington said, “Oh, you can learn all about guns from reading books in the public library.”
But that isn’t how you learned about them, April thought. She said, “I s’pose so,” and kicked her heels against the bottom of the bench. “Say—tell me something.” She wished there was a way to sneak the cookies back into the kitchen. It didn’t seem quite right to take them, now.
“Delighted,” Mr. Cherington said.
“Well—” She gulped. “You know so much about guns, and everything.” She paused. Maybe the way she felt was what books described as one’s blood running cold. Hers suddenly seemed to be full of ice cubes. “Tell me. Who do you think murdered that Mrs. Sanford?”
“Mrs. Sanford?” Mr. Cherington stood up. “Oh, yes.” April had a feeling that he was stalling, the way Archie did when Mother wanted to know why he hadn’t come straight home from school. “Yes, Mrs. Sanford.” Then he smiled at April, warmly, affectionately. “I’m sorry. I’m not a detective.”
“Make a guess,” April said.
Mr. Cherington looked at her, without seeing her. And without seeing the garden and trees and sky behind her. He said, as though he’d forgotten anyone was there, “Someone —who knew what she deserved.”
April smothered a gasp and stood perfectly still, not making a sound.
Suddenly he seemed to remember he had a young guest. He handed her the bag of cookies she’d laid on the table. He smiled at her and made her a courtly bow, as though she were a great lady. He said, “Come over again, soon. Before this batch of cookies is all gone.” Then he picked up the gun, turned, and walked—no, marched—into the house, very straight, head held high, shoulders square.
April watched him until the screen door banged shut. Then she scrambled through the kitchen garden, climbed over the picket fence, slid down the grassy hillside to the path, and ran the rest of the way home, down the path, along the alley, across the back lawn.
Dinah was putting away the last dishes in the kitchen. April dumped the paper bag on the table and said, “She’ll make a bouquet for us. Archie can get it in the morning.” Then she plumped down in a kitchen chair.
Dinah slammed the door to the china cupboard. “Swell,” she said. Then she looked in the paper bag. “Oh, gosh! Super!” Then she looked at April. “For Pete’s sake!” Dinah said. “You fixed it up about the flowers. You brought home cookies.” She reached automatically for a handkerchief. “So what the heck are you bawling about?”
April grabbed the handkerchief, blew her nose loudly, and went on crying. “That’s the whole trouble,” she said through the handkerchief. “I’m darned if I know!”
Chapter Fifteen
Through the gap in the hedge they could see Sergeant O’Hare sitting on a bench in the Sanford garden. Not sleeping, not reading, just sitting.
“I think I better go home,” Slukey whispered. “I think Ma’s calling me.”
“Slu-key!” Archie whispered reprovingly, “you do not neither hear your ma calling you. But if you’re too scared to go along with me ’n’ Flashlight, maybe you’d better run home to your ma.”
“Who’s scared?” Slukey said.
“Not good ol’ Slukey,” Flashlight said. He peered through the hedge at Sergeant O’Hare. “He does look awful official.”
“He’s looking for a murderer,” Archie said. “He ain’t even intr’sted in the fact that you let Mrs. Johnson’s chickens loose onto the club-house lawn. Of course, if you guys don’ wanna come along with me, I can always get Admiral an’ Wormly.”
“Sure we’re gonna come along,” Flashlight said indignantly.
“Well, then,” Archie said. “You ’member, now. If you get stuck, you just shuddup, and lemme talk.”
“You c’n talk all you wanna,” Slukey said. “I ain’ gonna talk to no p’liceman.”
“You don’t hafta,” Archie said. “All you hafta do is come along an’ act like I told you.” He drew a long breath, said, “Oke, le’s go,” and charged through the gap in the hedge, Flashlight and Slukey right behind him. A few feet beyond the gap he pulled up short, stared at Sergeant O’Hare as though surprised to see him, then waved cordially and called, “H’ya, there!”
“H’ya, yourself!” Sergeant O’Hare called back. He was glad to see them. For the last half-hour he’d been sitting there on the garden bench, feeling depressed. Bill Smith too had been puzzled over the sprig of geranium that had suddenly appeared in the portrait in the Sanford house, but he’d scoffed unpleasantly at O’Hare’s theory that the murder was the work of a maniac. Yes, even in spite of the knife with A WARNING printed on the blade in red letters. When the red had turned out to be lipstick, O’Hare had voiced his belief that the murderer was obviously not only a maniac but a lady maniac. Bill Smith had laughed harshly and told the sergeant to watch the house in case any more lady maniacs turned up, while he went to contact the fingerprint bureau. Since then, O’Hare had been sitting in the garden, depressed and brooding.
“C’mon over,” he called to the three small boys who’d appeared at the edge of the lawn.
“He ain’t no p’liceman,” Slukey said. “He ain’t got a uniform.”
“He’s a detecative,” Archie said scornfully. “A p’lice detecative, like Dick Tracy. Naturally he ain’t got a uniform.”
“He don’t look like Dick Tracy,” Flashlight said.
“Well, naturally he don’t look like Dick Tracy,” Archie said. “On account of he ain’t Dick Tracy. He’s Detective Sergeant Mr. O’Hare, and once he captured nine bank robbers all at one time, and he didn’t have a gun, neither.” He raised his voice. “Did you have a gun, Mr. Sergeant O’Hare?”
“Huh?” the sergeant said, startled.
“When you captured all them bank robbers.”
“Oh,” Sergeant O’Hare said, remembering. “No, I didn’t have a gun. Just my bare hands. There were eight of them.”
“Nine,” Archie reminded him.
“That’s right, nine. One of them almost got away, though, after I’d subdued the rest. He was armed with a knife, a revo
lver, and a submachine gun. I got him just in the nick of time.”
“Gosh!” Flashlight breathed.
“And you know,” O’Hare said reminiscently, “that very same night was when the mad gorilla escaped from the zoo—”
For a good ten minutes he told of the chase for the mad gorilla, ending with an exciting description of his capture of it in the thirty-fourth floor of a deserted elevator shaft.
“Golly!” Slukey murmured.
Archie kicked Slukey gently on the ankle, by way of prompting. Slukey jumped, remember, and said, “If you’re a p’liceman, why ain’tcha got a badge and a gun?”
“I’ve got a badge,” O’Hare said, throwing open his coat. “See? And I’ve got a gun.” He drew it from his underarm holster and laid it on his lap.
“Oh, boy,” Flashlight said reverently. “Can I just touch it once? With one finger?”
“Sure,” O’Hare said amiably.
“Say,” Archie said, “say, y’know what? I read in a comic book about how a cop could look at a bullet and tell what kind of a gun it came out of. Is that the truth?”
“Well,” the sergeant said. “Well, yes.”
Archie turned triumphantly to Slukey and Flashlight. “See,” he said, “I tole you so.”
“Aw, I still don’t believe it,” Flashlight grumbled.
“Show him the bullet,” Archie said. “He’ll show you.
Flashlight dug into his pocket, unearthed a variety of strange objects, and finally produced the bullet. It was embedded in a wad of chewing gum, and covered with cake crumbs and dirt. “Maybe I oughta clean it off a little,” Flashlight said apologetically. He located an almost clean handkerchief in another pocket and went to work.
“Spit on it,” Slukey advised.
“Rub some sand on it,” Archie said. “That’s the only way to get that there gum off of it.”