“Aha!” I said. “When did this fight happen?”
“About the end of March.”
“Was that the last time he was in the house?”
“Well, no,” she said. “As a matter of fact, he came back a week or two later whining and halfway apologizing. This time, he wanted money to get his car out of the pound … . Oh, yes, his father bought him the car, but he said Jimmy would just have to work to get the money to get it out of the pound.”
Well, I found all of that interesting. “How long was Jimmy in the house at that time?”
“Why, I don’t know,” she said. “An hour—hour and a half. I could hear him arguing with Holly from the bedroom where I was reading.”
“Where did your husband keep his guns?” was my next question.
“Oh my God, I never thought of that! You don’t think …” I waited for her to complete her question. During the pause, I could see her adjusting to the idea.
“I see what you mean. Jimmy was an heir. But would he go that far?”
“Oh, my dear,” I said, “with all this television, these young people get to hear and see about everything, and I’m just old-fashioned enough to say, ‘Monkey see, monkey do.’”
“But he would have no way of knowing there was no will.”
“Wouldn’t need to,” I said. “He’s his father’s son. He would expect to get something from his father’s estate, will or no will. And even if you told him, he would never be able to understand that his father was financially strapped. Now the guns. Where did your husband keep them?”
They were in the basement, but she said that Charles had kept them locked up. I asked if I could have a look, and she said I could. So we went down some steep stairs from the kitchen. And when we got down to the basement, there was a regular shooting range down there with special lights trained on the targets. It was just elaborate.
“He planned this house around his pistol range,” Alice said. “That’s why the house is so broad across the front. He had his pistol-club buddies come down here once a week. They shot away for more than an hour sometimes. That’s why I made Holly use silencers.”
And that explained something that had been troubling me from the very start.
There were rifles locked in a regular gun cabinet with a glass door, and beneath that there were locked drawers for the pistols.
“And where are the keys kept?” I asked.
“In a drawer in Holly’s bedroom.”
“And you were in your bedroom when the boy was last here?”
“Yes.”
“Reading?”
“Yes—reading and talking on the phone.”
“Is your bedroom closer to the living room than your husband’s?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And would the boy have to pass your door to get to his father’s bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“And was the door open?”
“I believe it was.”
“Would you have seen the boy if he passed your door?”
Well, it turned out that she wouldn’t have seen him because the head of her bed, where she was reading, was against the wall where the door was. So it was plain as day that the boy could have gotten the pistol, ammunition, and silencer. Whether he would know when his father was going to be in Borderville or not, I couldn’t say. But perhaps that would come out later.
“Now I want to know about the house key. Where do you keep it?” I asked.
“I keep mine in my purse, and Holly kept his on his key ring. Martha comes once a week and has her own key,” she explained, “and, oh yes, Paula.”
“Paula?”
“Paula Stout. She’s Holly’s secretary. She feeds the dog when both of us are gone.”
Now I’m a back number, and I am the first to say so, but I have read about all the things that cause feminists to complain—that now secretaries won’t make the coffee and won’t do this and won’t do that. So naturally I raised my eyebrows at a secretary who fed the dog.
“Oh, Paula took care of everything when both of us were gone. She’s been in the office ever since I left it.”
So this Paula was in a position to know that Charles Hollonbrook was going to be in Borderville on May 26 to 27 and probably made the reservation at the Borderville Inn. And she knew Alice would be away—probably even knew why—and with the run of the house she could undoubtedly find the key to the drawers where the pistols were kept. I took my little memorandum book out of my purse and put a line under Paula’s name.
“Now, where can I find her?” I asked.
“At the office. She’s running the office. Or she might be at one of the Ducky’s. We have three franchise shops—Ducky’s, you know—the food shops. Franks, hamburgers, and sausage biscuits. With the real estate as slow as it has been, it has been very good to have Ducky’s. Paula kept up with them for us when Holly was away.”
I wondered if those shops and the people who worked there might be something to look into. How many people we deal with daily whom we may offend—perhaps more seriously than we know! But just then I wanted to know about Paula Stout. Had she been another of Charles Hollonbrook’s conquests?
So I asked.
“Well—” Alice said. “With Holly, it would not be out of line to think so. I have wondered about it myself. After all, he had it on with me when I was just what she is. So why not Paula? I finally decided no, there is nothing there.”
Nothing there? The way she said it left a question in my mind. And it seemed to me I had to know more about this young person who had a key and knew where the victim was going to be and when he would be there.
“Is this Paula unmarried?” I inquired.
“Yes, unmarried.”
“How old?”
“About thirty-five.”
“Does she go out with anybody?”
“No boyfriend—that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
Well, yes, that was what I meant. I got the impression that Alice took Paula for an old maid.
“Now, darling,” I said, “you have to tell me everything if you want me to find the killer. Why don’t you think Paula had a fling with your husband?”
“Because she adored him. She has adored him for more than ten years. Holly could never be faithful to a woman for three years, let alone ten. So—they’ve never been to bed. At least I don’t think they have. Besides, she is a Baptist.”
I don’t know how Baptists get the reputation for being so holy. Aren’t they the ones that are always having to go down to the front of the church to “get right with God”? Well, if they have to get “right with God,” doesn’t that mean they sometimes get “wrong with God”?
But I wrote down Baptist by Paula’s name. And Maud is a Baptist. I was pretty sure Maud would have an opinion about Miss Stout.
“Now, let’s see,” I said. “Going back to the gun club. They met once a week. Did they meet just the same when you and Mr. Hollonbrook were away?”
They did.
Then how did they get in?
It turned out that each of them had a key to the basement door. Alice led me through the furnace room and showed me the door.
“I believe you don’t have neighbors on either side,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“So any one of those men could get into the house without anybody seeing him and get the gun—but he wouldn’t have a key to the drawers, would he?”
“No. Those are only Holly’s guns in the drawers,” Alice said.
“But one of them could search through the house and find the key, couldn’t he?”
“Well, no,” she answered. “When I go away, I always lock the door at the top of the stairs.”
“Maybe Paula could have unlocked it,” I suggested.
“But why would she come down here? There was no need for it.”
That was true—at least we did not know of a reason—unless she took the gun herself. But if she didn’t take the gun and didn’t unlock the door at
the top of the stairs, the men in the pistol-shooting club could not have gotten the Hollonbrook gun without breaking the drawer open. And the drawer showed no sign of having been forced.
I will admit that it looked impossible. A man was shot in a locked room with his own gun—that had been locked in his basement at home. And the key to that drawer was upstairs, and the door between the basement and the upstairs was locked.
It looked as though the men of the pistol club were out of it. Paula and the boy, Jim, could have gotten the gun, and Paula was in the best position to know about Charles Hollonbrook’s movements, while Jimmy was angry with his father. He could have got the key to the drawer—but no! He did not have the key to the house.
“You had a key,” I said, “your husband had a key to the house, and Miss Stout had another. What about the key to the door at the top of the stairs to the basement? Where was it kept?”
“It is always in the lock on the inside of the door.”
“And was it left in the lock when the door was locked?”
“Yes, it was.”
Then it would be impossible to go from the basement upstairs when the door was locked, even if the intruder had a key.
“I suppose the gun club would know when your husband was not planning to be in town,” I said.
“I really don’t know,” she replied. “I suppose they would.”
We had come back upstairs and Alice had gone into the kitchen to get us some coffee. I took the opportunity to go through the house—said I was going to use the powder room, but really I just wanted to see the house. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in it that I would have wanted if you gave it to me—all modern—selected, I imagine, by a decorator and very expensive. All in good taste. But impersonal. That was the word: impersonal. With all the wonderful things that people can have nowadays, it seems to me that they are often very impersonal—no continuity. There was Charles Hollonbrook going from one woman to another. Nothing personal there. And dear little Alice, whatever she had been before she got together with Hollonbrook, he had made her life impersonal. Impersonal people living in an impersonal house with an impersonal marriage. But the personal will break through. It’s like lava inside the mountain. The cold exterior can hold it only so long.
Back in the living room with our cups of impersonal instant coffee and our impersonal Pepperidge Farm cookies, I asked Alice about the first Mrs. Hollonbrook. Had there been any recent friction there?
Only about the children.
“It isn’t as though Chuck has not supported them,” Alice said. “More than supported them. And if they were just a little grateful, he would have given them anything they wanted.”
“Let’s see,” I said, “I believe I was told there were two girls. Tell me about them.”
“One is eighteen, and the other is fifteen,” she replied. “They would soon have expected Chuck to shell out the money to go to an expensive college, though neither one of them would have the grades to get into a really good school.”
“Are they often here at the house?”
“Oh no.” Alice was very definite about that. “Their mother has poisoned them against me.”
“Eighteen and fifteen,” I mused. “The youngest must have been little more than a baby when the divorce broke up the family.”
Alice bridled just a bit at that. And I liked her better because of it. Whether she broke up the marriage or did not break up the marriage—that was her version, you see—she was uncomfortable with the way I had stated it. There was just a little conscience there.
My ways are the old ways, and I don’t care who knows it. When I was a girl, there might as well have been a picket fence around me, the way I was protected. And don’t think I wasn’t rebellious. I gave my parents many an anxious moment. But the man I wanted and got was Lamar, and he was such a darling. I could never even look at another man. And he just better not have looked at another woman.
So there was Linda. And Maud said Linda talked about how she had been mistreated, while Alice said that Linda’s constant nagging had broken up the marriage. What kind of woman was Linda? Could she have been behind the murder? Wasn’t that the way it was in that poem about Edward that I had to learn back there at Catawba Hall? It was one of my elocution readings. Nobody nowadays even knows what an elocution reading is.
Why does your brand sae drap wi bluid
Edward, Edward … ?
I think it was supposed to be up in the Highlands over in Scotland. Miss Langrock said it was an ideal piece for me to read. Thought I was bloodthirsty, I suppose. Anyhow, at the end of the poem, come to find out, the mother sent Edward out to kill his daddy. I guess that kind of thing has been going on for a long time.
But Edward didn’t sneak around and make it look like suicide. And Jimmy Boy did not sound to me like a young man who could pull a thing like that off even if his mother gave him a map of how to do it. Or did he? Sometimes people who don’t seem to have it—you know what I mean—are pretty sneaky and can do on the sly things you wouldn’t think they could do.
Well, I was sitting there. And my cup was empty, and I had eaten my cookies. And I had a few more things I needed to talk about.
I said, “Since Miss Stout is in your employ still and was your husband’s secretary, I would like very much for her to give me a list of people she may know of who would have known that Mr. Hollonbrook would be in Borderville on May twenty-six to twenty-seven. Would you please ask her to do that for me?”
Of course Mrs. Hollonbrook agreed to do as I asked.
“And while you are at it,” I added, “ask her where she was and what she was doing on that night. Say that we are checking the activities of everyone in Stedbury who knew where Mr. Hollonbrook was at that time.” Which, of course, was true.
Alice agreed to that, too.
“Now darling,” I proceeded, “do you by any chance happen to remember the date on the policy your husband took out on this other woman? I think you said Mayburn.”
“February 1.” From the way she answered so quickly, I could see that the poor child’s mind was running in the same direction mine was.
“And the other policy—the one for you—it was still in effect. Do you know when your husband made the last payment on it?”
The answer came just as quickly. “December twenty-nine.”
To me that looked like Charles Hollonbrook decided between December 29 and February 1 that he was interested in a second divorce. But I didn’t discuss it with Alice.
“And the other thing is,” I said, “this clipping.” I picked up the envelope with the clipping from the table where I had laid it when we went downstairs. “Are you intending to give it to me?”
She nodded.
“Do you know who this Kitty Herbert is?”
“Never heard of her.”
“Or Caroline Rawlings?”
“No. The clipping is a complete mystery to me. Hainsford, the place where the Herbert woman murdered her husband, was Holly’s hometown, which might be reason enough for his interest in the story, but not enough to explain why he kept it in a brown envelope in the bank box.”
I had to agree: But whether the clipping was connected with Hollonbrook’s death, I was not prepared to say.
As you can see, I had had a very interesting interview with the young lady. A lot of good stuff, as you might say, had just fallen into my lap.
I thanked Alice for the coffee and cookies and told her, “Now, darling, don’t you worry,” and that sort of thing. Then I told her I wanted to see the dog before I left. So we went to the back door, and I saw that the backyard was enclosed in a chain-link fence and saw where the steps went down to the basement. There was no other house in sight. I didn’t know whether that would be important or not.
It is a sweet dog—cocker spaniel.
Now you have to understand one thing. I am a truthful woman except when I want to tell a fib. But if I make a promise, I always stick by it. A little later on in this book, as you will
see, I made a promise. I said I wouldn’t reveal certain things.
Now how could I write the book and keep the secret? I took my problem to Professor Landrum. He is a Rotarian—senior active—and before he retired he taught English for many years at the college here in Borderville. I asked him, “What must I do?” And he said, “Mrs. Bushrow, there is no problem at all here.” Then he explained.
It seems there is something called a roman à clef. I had to look it up to spell it. It is in the dictionary, all right, and it means just what he said. It’s a novel about things that really happened, but all the names are changed.
So I am changing certain of the names in this book. Kitty Herbert is not the real name, and Caroline Rawlings is not her real name. And none of the names that are connected with her are real. But the rest of the story is all true.
And Professor Landrum told me something else I didn’t know. He said detective stories are classical. I don’t understand literary terms like that. All the same, it is impressive to know that detective stories are classical because they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
While I don’t know how a story can fail to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, I did understand what Professor Landrum meant when he explained that whatever has happened up to the time when the crime takes place settles what happens all the rest of the way until the mystery is solved. Then he said that the middle is the part where everything is developing and confused.
I can tell you right now: This is the middle of the Rotary Club Mystery, because I was confused. I had several notions—quite a few. And some of them turned out to be right. But there was one piece of information that I didn’t even know enough about to ask for it. But it wasn’t on the horizon yet, and you’ll just have to wait for it.
The Rotary Club Murder Mystery Page 8