Hangman's Whip

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  He thought for a moment. “May I see the letter?”

  “I left it in Chicago. But there was nothing in it about poison. She only asked me to come. She didn’t say why.”

  “Then when did she tell you about the arsenic?”

  “The night I arrived. Last Tuesday night. The night before Eve—was murdered.”

  “Miss Search, you saw Dick Bohan that night—Tuesday night, the twelfth—for the first time in how long?”

  Her heart seemed to tighten a little. She said evenly: “Three years.”

  “Since his—”

  “Since his marriage to Eve. Yes.”

  There was a little pause. Then he said: “That was intentional?”

  “Not exactly. That is—Richard wasn’t at home, except for a brief visit or two, until this summer.”

  “You didn’t hear from him during that time?”

  “No. He—he was married to Eve. There had never been any understanding between us.”

  “Until you saw him again? Tuesday night?”

  She said “Yes” wearily, aware of the futility of evasion.

  He scowled at the pencil for a moment or two.

  “We’ve been trying to get a line on her. Miss Ludmilla and Miss Diana gave me addresses—places they had lived, a few people who might know something of Eve Bohan. Too few,” the sheriff added rather grimly. “They seem to have been separated a large part of the time since their wedding—Dick Bohan and Eve. He has been”—he paused and said—“working. New York—Los Angeles—wherever he could get a job flying a plane. For the past year or so he’s been in New York. Presumably Eve lived her own life. He seems to have managed to give her enough money so she could go wherever she pleased—Miami, Havana, Los Angeles. So far as we can discover, she lived comfortably no matter what his circumstances were. I don’t think Miss Ludmilla would have exactly approved of her circle of friends; but so far as I can tell, from what the detectives in cities where she lived have unearthed, there’s nothing really shady. She kept up the appearance and, I think, the fact of respectability. And so far we can find nobody who is known to have had any special grudge against her. I think if she had been really involved with anyone or anything we would have known of it by now. She spent a lot of time with a cousin in Detroit who, when I talked to her at length over the telephone, could give me no information of any value.”

  He sighed and put down the pencil which he’d been rolling in his thick fingers.

  “So you see, so far, the more we inquire the more definitely the thing narrows itself to—Kentigern. The only motive for her murder concerns Dick Bohan. And you. She stood in your way.”

  Repeated denials were futile. Search said: “But Ludmilla and the arsenic. That shows there is something else, something that has nothing to do with Richard and me.”

  “Oh yes, the arsenic. What makes you think the same person murdered Eve and tried to kill Ludmilla Abbott?”

  “It’s hard to believe there are two people—somewhere, close to us—who are both murderers. In intention at least.”

  “Law of averages, huh? Well, I never heard of the law of averages really proving anything.” He eyed her enigmatically for a moment. “Proof, though—absolute factual proof, fingerprints and that kind of thing—is hard to get. We’ve had everything in the cottage fingerprinted and have found only Dick Bohan’s fingerprints and found them all over except—except on the two empty glasses on the table. There were no fingerprints at all on those.”

  After a moment she said: “Richard stayed in the cottage.”

  “I know. He stayed there from the time Eve arrived in Kentigern a day or so after he arrived, about the first of June, until she went away a little over a week ago. When she left he moved into the house. Tuesday night, when she came back, he went to the cottage again. There was plenty of time for him to leave fingerprints all over the place—and plenty of time,” said the sheriff heavily, “to lie there looking up at that rafter brace, planning how to kill her. Plenty of time—” He stopped and said abruptly, “They were all here Tuesday night? Eve, Dick Bohan, yourself—”

  “Yes,” she said in a stifled voice. “Everybody except Calvin. He was in town that night. And—and Howland.”

  “Howland?” He lifted his shaggy eyebrows a little. “Do you have any reason to think Howie Stacy tried to poison Miss Ludmilla?”

  “Poison—but that was Tuesday night. Not—”

  He interrupted. “There was arsenic in the candy you brought her. You came, bringing the candy, Tuesday. It was given to her Thursday.”

  After a moment Search said, whispering: “Not—in that …”

  “Doc says so. He analyzed every piece; gave the whole thing the test for arsenic. He said,” said the sheriff slowly, “that there wasn’t enough in one piece alone to do more than make anybody that ate it pretty sick for a while. But that if anybody ate a lot of it they’d get enough to kill them. Especially if it came on top of other attacks. It seems that Miss Ludmilla is especially fond of that kind of candy.”

  “Yes—yes, she is. That’s why I brought it. But I—I didn’t put the poison in it. And it—it wasn’t in my room all the time.” With horror she heard herself explaining quickly, breathlessly, so it sounded false in her own ears; yet she had to go on. “I thought the maid had put it away. I looked for it and it was gone, but then I found it later in a drawer. But someone could have taken it.”

  He questioned her at length. Where had she bought it, when, exactly what small course had it traveled from the counter of the candy store into Ludmilla’s hands?

  She told him in detail.

  “But Diana wouldn’t put poison in the candy. I didn’t.” Again she realized, rather sickeningly, that a flat denial unsupported by proof meant nothing. Not with the police. Not when it was murder.

  “Who did, then?”

  “There was that night—the first night I was here. Someone could have taken it from my room and put poison in it and then—then put it back again.”

  “Who?”

  Diana, herself, Richard. Then Eve, later, had returned. No one else had been there.

  She shook her head. The sheriff sighed. “That’s all now, Miss Search. Except—when you are ready to tell me who the man was you claim stood in the clearing and watched that cottage—”

  “But I don’t know that either! I tell you I don’t know.”

  He shrugged. “All right. The inquest is set for tomorrow morning, whether we find Dick Bohan by then or not.”

  He let her go then. And talked to Diana and to Calvin and each of the servants, lengthily, with the library doors closed, and then, about noon, crossed the lawns toward the Stacy house.

  Diana, white and shocked-looking, came to Search in the pantry where, because she had to do something, she was arranging the flowers.

  “I don’t believe it!”

  She knew, of course, what Diana meant.

  “Neither did I, at first.”

  “That was it, then. All along. The trouble with Ludmilla, I mean.”

  “Yes. It must have been.”

  There was a long pause broken only by the snip of Search’s scissors. Then Diana said angrily: “There’s nobody who would have poisoned her except—except Eve. And she’s dead!”

  “Eve!”

  Diana shrugged and took up a vase of spiky gladiolas. “Yes, Eve,” she said from behind the flowers. “Unless you’d rather it was me, or Calvin, or Richard. Or yourself—after all, it was you that brought the candy.”

  “Diana, you’re insufferable!” cried Search. “You know I didn’t poison it!”

  “Well, someone did,” said Diana. “And it wasn’t me.” And left the room quickly.

  Since the morning after Eve’s murder, when Diana had issued her ultimatum about Richard, nothing in her words or manner had again referred to it. Her eyes alone remained purposeful.

  But there was nothing she could do, Search reminded herself; nothing.

  The long lake, usually gray and deserted
in rainy weather except for a few fishermen, was that morning alive. It was too still a day for sailboats, but motorboats passed and repassed; the staccato beats of two or three outboards constantly swept up and down the lake and around its wooded points.

  The news of the murder had rocked the village and the entire summer colony. Telephone wires buzzed; newspapers were sold out. A few old friends, sympathetically, had telephoned; more, tactfully, had not. But the idly curious had apparently taken to boats from which, if they drew sufficiently close to the pier, they could see the Abbott place.

  The house was far above the lake; the wide old porch was screened with vines. Yet it gave them all a disconcerting sense of being on a platform, constantly under observation. Ludmilla sat on the porch and rocked and watched.

  “What did Donny say?” asked Ludmilla when Search joined her there just before lunch.

  Search told her.

  “What is he going to do about the attack upon you last night?”

  “Nothing, apparently.”

  Ludmilla rocked in silence. Then she said slowly: “The doors were unlocked, of course. Anyone could have entered the house.”

  “Yes.”

  After a while Calvin came out, too, and sat hunched up on the wide railing, smoking, watching the boats on the lake below and questioning Ludmilla about the attempts to poison her until she became exasperated and lapsed into a deceiving air of bland and childlike candor.

  “Really, Calvin,” she said, “one would think you didn’t believe me.”

  “Oh, my dear auntie! But why didn’t you tell me about it at the time?”

  “Perhaps because I didn’t want to. And don’t call me Auntie.”

  Calvin shrugged. “But—but this is a dreadful thing.”

  Ludmilla had another lapse. “You’re telling me,” she said with great sweetness and rocked violently.

  Early afternoon brought a deputation of reporters. Calvin and Howland saw them.

  “Do be careful,” said Diana sharply. “Don’t antagonize the press. Remember you’re going to want votes.”

  There was still no news of Richard or of the old gray roadster. Yet the police in five states were watching for both.

  It was late in the afternoon that Jonas came to Search with his extraordinary message. She had gone down to the pier and was sitting on the bench where she had sat with Richard that moonlight night so short—and so dreadfully long—a while ago.

  By that time the edge of curiosity on the part of the boat-owning residents had worn off (for, after all, there was nothing to see—only the old Abbott house, rambling, bay-windowed, vine-covered, just as it had always been, with the Stacy house, red brick and massive, at one side of it and woods at the other); the long lake curving in and out around wooded points seemed, from where she sat, almost deserted.

  She was staring at the gray water below her, thinking in weary circles, unable to reach conclusions.

  She did not hear Jonas’ approach but only felt the vibration of footsteps trembling along the wooden planks of the pier. She whirled sharply, her hand going to her throat.

  “Jonas—I didn’t hear you “

  He touched his hat and then pulled it further over his small, always suspicious eyes.

  “I was to tell you when I could find you alone.” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “Somebody wants to see you. Alone.”

  She got up—slowly. “Someone—”

  He nodded. “It’s Mr Richard. … I’ll take you to him.”

  Chapter 13

  IT WAS, PERHAPS, THE one place in the world where no one would have thought of looking for him that Richard had remembered and come back to, and that was the small room over the garage where (once long ago when the garage had been a barn and there’d been a groom for the horses) the groom had lived. He couldn’t have stayed there without Jonas’ help. He couldn’t stay there long in any case. Sooner or later the roadster would be found; sooner or later someone would wonder where Jonas went with the food and soap and towels he had managed for a night and a day to smuggle from the house to the big T-shaped red barn, half hidden with shrubs and trees.

  Jonas led Search there; led her by a circuitous way, along the lake shore, through the woods—wet and chilly—along the old weed-grown drive to the back of the barn and thence, after cautious reconnoitering on Jonas’ part, into the barn.

  The stalls had been removed long ago to make room for cars, but the old feed boxes remained and also the narrow flight of stairs, worn and without a railing, which led to the groom’s room in a gabled corner of the loft.

  “Up there,” said Jonas, jerking his head toward the stairs. “I’ll wait down here. I’ll whistle if anybody comes.”

  Her heart was pounding. She started up the stairs, and Richard was waiting and he heard her. He jerked open the door.

  “Search—”

  They met on the narrow shabby little flight of steps.

  “Search,” he said again and took her in his arms.

  It was enough just then to feel his arms close and hard around her, his mouth upon her own.

  Then she heard Jonas cough. Richard lifted his head. “Okay, Jonas. We’ll get out of sight. This way. Here’s my hideout.”

  It was a tiny room, roughly finished, with a bare floor and bare walls. An army cot was in one corner; there was a chair or two and a table with a faded blotter still tacked to it. On the wall over the table hung a calendar—a girl in a sunbonnet smiling glassily at them from above a yellowed date sheet that said July 192—. The last figure was torn off. Probably the calendar had hung there, its edges curling, during most of the years of her own and Richard’s life.

  She turned quickly toward him.

  “Richard, you shouldn’t have come.”

  He held her so he could look into her face.

  “I had to run away. There wasn’t anything else to do. But you don’t believe I killed her, do you?”

  She put her hands on his shoulders, holding tight.

  “No!”

  “Jonas brought me some papers.” He glanced at a tossed heap on the floor. “I—I hated her, Search.” He said it matter-of-factly, a simple truth. “There at the last, I mean, when she came back. I had thought it was all over, you see. And—and I had seen you. I’d had a glimpse of life—” He stopped and took her hand, held it against his cheek for an instant and then abruptly released it. “But I wouldn’t have killed her.”

  “I know. They didn’t hurt you—when they shot at you, I mean?”

  “Al? No. It was a break for me. He was alone in the room and was nervous. There was a sound somewhere; he turned to look, and that gave me a chance. He’s such a little fellow it wasn’t exactly fair. And he can’t shoot—or maybe he didn’t want to. Anyway, his shots went high.”

  “They’ll arrest you if they find you—”

  “No one but Jonas knows I’m here. You see, there’s some thing I know. It’s not much. But it’s the only chance I see—”

  “You know who killed Eve?”

  He shook his head. “No. It’s only something that might lead to a motive for her murder. I’m not sure. Except—I can’t tell you, Search. Not now. Not yet.”

  After a moment she said slowly: “Richard, where have you been?”

  “I—went to a little town. Upstate. Then I—I had to come back. There’s something I’ve got to do here. And I can’t give myself up to the police and prove that I didn’t murder her until I—get that done.”

  “Where is the car? Will they find it?”

  “I left it in the swamp down at the Dundee farm. Walked over here as soon as it was dark last night. Jonas was still here—luckily; he got hold of some food for me and some clean clothes. Even a razor.” He grinned a little. “So you see, I’m not so bad off. They may not find the car for days, and as long as they don’t find it I’m safe. Search, I had to see you …”

  She put out her arms toward him, wishing, as women have ever wished, that her arms could make an invulnerable circle of p
rotection around him. He hesitated an instant and then caught her to him they stood for a moment locked in each other’s arms—needing each other’s reassurance. Two against the world. But that was marriage, really, thought Search; and then abruptly he drew away.

  “Richard—”

  “Search, I’m not going to do that again.” His face was white, although he smiled a little too. “Come over here, Search. Sit down.” He drew her to the little army cot and sat down beside her and took her hand and held it lightly in both his own. “That’s it, you see,” he said, looking at her hand. “I’ve got to clear myself, completely and publicly. It can’t just be for lack of evidence or because of any loophole a good lawyer could find. I’ve got to find out who murdered her and I’ve got to prove it. I want you to marry me, Search. I love you with every”—he smiled and said it rather dryly—“every beat of my heart and every breath I take. It sounds like a popular song, but it’s true. And we can’t marry until I’ve cleared myself of this.”

  “But whatever happens—”

  “No.” He caught her up quickly and gave her hand a brisk and cheerful little pat. “No sacrifices, Search. I’m not going to let you go through life pointed at, speculated about, the wife of a man who—No, my dear. Now, then. I can’t let you stay here long. Jonas says they know you were at the cottage.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they know why?”

  “Howland as good as told them. Richard, you can’t trust Howland. He wants you to plead guilty. He says it’s the only way.”

  “Howland says that!”

  “Yes. And—oh, Richard, there’s something else. Did Jonas tell you about Ludmilla and the arsenic?”

  A grim little line came around his mouth.

  “Yes. Yes, he told me all that he knew. It—it makes no sense, Search. There’s no possible connection between Eve and Aunt Ludmilla. It doesn’t hook up with the one thing I know.” He paused, staring down at the bare floor, and said abruptly: “The servants and Jonas were questioned about some candy.”

  “Yes,” she told him quickly.

  “They don’t suspect you, do they?”

  “I wasn’t here the other times it happened.”