by Ellery Queen
The doctor’s tone was good-humored. “The script is still in preparation, Mr. Hunter. Give us time.”
Ted went out through the open French windows to the garden. Walsh looked at the doctor. “Do you really suspect Ted?” he asked.
“It could be,” the doctor said. “I think we know as much about this as we’re ever going to know.”
“That’s great,” Walsh said sourly. “What next?”
“We sit here, Captain, and sweat it out.”
An hour went by. The Drake household made no pretense of going about its normal routine. There was a subdued quietness about the place, as if they were all conscious of Stephen lying upstairs in his heavy, drugged sleep.
“I envy him those pills,” Cleg said. He and Marcia were sitting on the open terrace at the east side of the house. The morning sun was hot, and there was a humid haze in the air suggestive of possible thunderstorms later in the day. Marcia had on a pair of black glasses to shield her eyes from the sun. She was stretched full length in a deck chair. Cleg sat beside her on the little stone parapet of the terrace.
“I’ll never forget how he looked last night, Cleg,” Marcia said. “It was as if he’d died inside.”
“How long are the pills supposed to keep him under?” Cleg asked.
“The doctor said he should sleep around the clock. He went to bed at two. He should be awake soon, I guess.”
“Damn him!” Cleg said. Marcia turned her head. “I mean the doctor,” Cleg said.
“He’s only doing what he thinks is right, Cleg.”
Cleg fished in his pocket for his pipe and pouch. “I guess I’m not a moralist when it comes to a thing like this. Bob’s gone. Nothing we can do will bring him back. In a way Stephen’s gone, too. But he can be brought back with proper care and treatment. If the doctor had kept his mouth shut about this murder theory, Walsh and Malcolm would have passed the whole thing off as an accident. In the long run it would have been better that way.”
“But if it wasn’t Stephen, Cleg?”
“Darling, let’s not kid ourselves,” Cleg said. He scowled down at the bowl of his pipe, prodding at the tobacco in it with his forefinger. “I’m sorry about this morning. I’m sorry I said what I did—about how I—about loving you.” He didn’t look up. “You’ve always known it, haven’t you?”
“Yes, Cleg.”
“I’ve never pushed it, have I? We’ve been alone together a thousand times—when you’ve posed for me, riding together, walks. Have I ever pleaded my case, or tried to drive any kind of a wedge between you and Stephen?”
“No.”
He looked directly at her, but the black sunglasses kept him from seeing anything she might be feeling. “I’m not pleading for myself now. I want Stephen to get well, to get back to normal. I want it because I know you love him and because it would make you happy.”
“Yes,” she said in a lifeless voice. “That would make me happy.”
He stared at her, the pipe arrested halfway to his mouth. “Good God, Marcia, is it possible that wouldn’t make you happy! The way you said it, I—”
“Cleg, stop it. Don’t you see, unless this thing is completely cleared up, Stephen and I haven’t got a chance? We’ll always wonder if the smash could happen again; we’ll always wonder if he did do it. That terrible reserve that’s been between us since this began won’t just melt away.”
He ran a hand through his thick, brown hair. “Marcia, if there’s anything in the world I could do to help, if there’s any part of this you haven’t told me and that you need help with, if talking would help to clarify it—”
“There’s nothing, Cleg.”
Harriet came out onto the terrace with a sewing basket. Cleg sighed and struck a match for his pipe. Harriet sat down in a wicker chair.
“What are they doing—Walsh and the doctor?” she asked.
“They’re in the study,” Cleg said. “Trying to figure things out, I guess.”
“Yesterday at this time this was such a lovely world,” Harriet said.
Ted came around the corner of the house, whistling an off-key tune. “Hullo, characters,” he said. He sat down next to Cleg on the parapet. “Got to find somebody to fill in for George. It’s a lot of work taking care of five horses. Any report on how he is?”
No one said anything.
“Don’t let our mastermind get you down, chums. He doesn’t know where he’s at right now.” He looked past them to the side door of the house. “Hold onto your hats, kids. It looks like the convention is about to reconvene.”
Walsh came out of the house and stood looking back at the French doors. Just behind him was Dr. Smith—and leaning on the doctor’s arm was Stephen.
Marcia got quickly to her feet and went to Stephen. He looked down at her with a small twisted smile. He seemed tired, almost beyond endurance.
“It looks as if this were the payoff,” he said in a voice that was almost a whisper.
“Come over to the big chair, darling. You mustn’t stand,” Marcia said.
“Darling. . .” He checked her, his hand on her arm. His voice was so low that only the doctor could hear him. “Whatever happens—whatever happens please believe I love you with all my heart.”
“I know, Stephen,” she said.
She and the doctor led him to the big chair and he sat down. A kind of embarrassment seemed to have fallen over the others. They murmured greetings.
“You’re looking better, Stephen,” Harriet said. “But should you be up? Isn’t this asking too much of him, Doctor?”
Dr. Smith’s face was, as usual, expressionless. “The best possible therapy for all of you is to settle this matter, once and for all,” he said.
“You’ve pulled a rabbit out of your hat, Doctor?” Ted drawled.
The doctor turned away without answering, walked over to the far corner of the terrace away from the group, and sat down on the parapet. He bent forward, looking down at the irregular pattern of the stone terrace. Walsh stood in the center of the gathering, thumbing through the pages of a small notebook.
“Hear yez! Hear yez!” Ted said. “This court is now in session.”
Walsh ignored him. “There are one or two points we can only clear up with all of you together,” he said. “I want to try to recall something that happened two weeks ago—the day Stephen discovered Marcia’s saddle girth had been tampered with.”
“May I ask a question?” Ted said. There was a mischievous light in his eyes. “Has tampering been established, your Honor?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Walsh said. “You all had breakfast here on the terrace, I believe. What did you talk about?”
The question was completely unexpected. No one answered for a moment. Then Ted laughed outright. “I’m afraid the family conversation isn’t so scintillating that we can remember it two weeks later, Jim.”
“It’s important to remember,” Walsh said. “You were here, Cleg. Do you remember?”
“I remember something we talked about,” Cleg said. “Me.”
“Absorbing topic,” Ted said.
“I’d just gotten word from New York,” Cleg said, “that a gallery there was going to give me a one-man show. I came over to tell the family. That’s how I remember. I was excited about it. I think I pretty well monopolized the conversation. It’s to be my first show, you see.”
“And that talk led to what?” Walsh asked.
“When an artist talks about himself,” Ted said, “it never leads to anything but more talk about himself.”
Marcia turned the dark sunglasses toward Walsh. “I remember we talked about Cleg’s first public showing,” she said. “I spoke about it when I was talking to you earlier—the mural at the country club.”
“Lord!” Cleg said. “That was fifteen, sixteen years ago. We did talk about it, didn’t we?”
“Who brought it up?” Walsh asked.
“It came naturally out of talking about this new show of mine—also a first.” He glanced at Ted. “
I think it was you, Ted, who asked if we remembered that unveiling at the country club when we were kids. God, I was eighteen and I thought I was a second El Greco in those days. I remember Saint Nick took my hide off for it. He thought it stank. He never kidded around about his opinions on art.”
“I always liked that mural, Cleg,” Harriet said, looking up from her sewing.
“You and the bartender at the club were the only ones.”
“About that Sunday morning,” Walsh said.
“It’s funny,” Marcia said, “but I remember it all quite well now. We had different reasons for remembering that unveiling. Cleg, of course, remembered it because he was making his first public appearance as an artist. I remembered it because I got mixed up on my dates, and because Stephen—because Stephen proposed to me.”
“And you had laughed at him,” Dr. Smith said unexpectedly.
“Yes.”
“I remembered it,” Ted said, “because I was in love with three girls and having a hell of a time keeping them all going at once.”
“I remembered it,” Harriet said dryly, “because Saint Nick couldn’t find his dress studs and I thought he was going to take the house apart stone by stone.”
Walsh waited. “And how about you, Mr. Drake,” he said, turning to Stephen. “Didn’t you take part in the conversation?”
Stephen had been sitting with one hand shading his eyes. He lowered the hand and looked at Walsh. “Yes, I took part in it,” he said, his voice very low. “I remembered being laughed at.”
“Stephen!” Marcia said, as if he’d hurt her.
Cleg broke in quickly. “I remember I said something about wishing he’d given up then.”
“You all went out to the stable after that?”
“Yes.” It was Stephen who answered the question.
Ted flipped his cigarette away onto the grass. He looked across at Dr. Smith with an ironical smile. “I think I see where this is leading,” he said. “You asked me a question a while back, Dr. Smith. You asked me if I thought you were a fool.”
“Well?”
“I might ask you the same question. You’re trying to indicate by this line of talk that I started the conversation that drove Stephen haywire. Is that supposed to be evidence?”
“It’s a fact, at any rate,” the doctor said. “That conversation definitely reminded Stephen of a very bad moment in his life—a moment when he was laughed at, made a fool of. A moment when the anger he’d felt in the past was recollected and revived. Just beyond that conversation the saddle girth waited for him.”
Ted smiled blandly. “You mean that’s how I’m supposed to have planned it?”
“That’s how somebody planned it,” the doctor said.
“Why, it’s magic!” Ted said dryly. “Only I’m afraid that’s all it is—magic. About the saddle girth, Doctor.”
“What about the saddle girth, Mr. Hunter?”
“You see, I didn’t slug George, Dr. Smith. If I was your man, I’d have known better. That girth is in the stable right now. I’ve had it in my hands this morning. Whoever was looking for it didn’t know that George had it repaired the day after it was discovered. Call the shoemaker in town. You’ll find he sewed it up for George.” He shook his head. “If somebody was looking for the girth, they just didn’t know their onions. It had long since ceased to be evidence.”
Stephen raised his head. “It’s no use, Dr. Smith,” he said, in a harsh voice. “It’s just another of the things I did without remembering—like pushing Bob.”
“You remember everything that really happened, Stephen,” the doctor said. “You’re rattled now. If you stop to think you’ll remember that you ordered George to have that girth repaired, that you checked with the shoemaker yourself.”
Stephen’s eyes widened. “I did. I remember that. . .but. . .”
“What you remember, happened,” the doctor said. “What you don’t remember, didn’t happen.” He shifted his glance to Harriet. “Wouldn’t it save time and trouble, Miss Moore, if you told us about your search for the saddle girth?”
Harriet was a motionless statue in the wicker chair. Everyone was looking at her. There was blank astonishment in Ted’s blue eyes.
“Harriet!” he said.
She didn’t look at him. “I don’t know how you know. Dr. Smith,” she said, “but it’s true.”
“Harriet!” Ted said again.
Her voice was almost inaudible. “I—I didn’t mean to hurt George,” she said. “I—I couldn’t risk his waking up. I—I never struck anyone before in my life. I—” She stopped.
“But Harriet, why?” Ted said.
“Last night, when Marcia came up to bed she told me the doctor’s theory. I—I understood from what she said that the saddle girth was—was evidence. I had to find it—to destroy it.”
“Harriet!” Stephen said in a shocked voice. “You did this to protect me?”
“To protect this household,” Harriet said without looking up.
“It’s no use, Miss Moore,” Dr. Smith said. “You did it to protect the murderer—because he was the person you loved most in the whole world.”
“Please!” Harriet whispered.
“She did it to protect you, Mr. Hunter,” Dr. Smith said. His voice suddenly held the deep anger of a sentencing judge. “She knew it was you who had been working on Stephen. She knew it was you who’d pushed Dr. Bristow off the ledge.”
“That’s crazy,” Ted said impatiently.
“She was willing to protect you at any cost,” the doctor said. “You were her son. None of the others mattered to her. I think she deeply resented the success and happiness that had come to Stephen and Marcia. She wanted the world for you; she wanted to be proud of you. You made it hard for her, Mr. Hunter.”
There was no color in Ted’s face. There was an unbelieving, dazed expression as he stared at Harriet.
“You have been going through life, Mr. Hunter, distrusting everyone, hating everyone because you felt there was no one on whom you could depend. All the time this woman, who was more a mother to you than a mother might have been, was prepared to back you in anything. I think she has prayed for the day to come when she could be openly proud, openly happy. When she knew what you’d done she was still willing to go to the very limit for you. She misunderstood the significance of the saddle girth. She thought you’d slipped up. She tried to cover up for you.”
Ted ignored the doctor. “Harriet, why did you think it was me?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t answer.
“I’ll tell you how she knew, Mr. Hunter,” the doctor said. “She had seen it going on. She had watched you slyly, cleverly probing at Stephen. She didn’t know then that the object in this was murder, but she knew you were trying to undermine his security, to make him doubt Marcia, to make him feel that he was an intruder in his own home. Because you never thought of this as his home, Mr. Hunter. You thought of it as yours! You felt that somehow Stephen had stolen it from you and that Marcia had helped him to do it.”
“Ted!” Harriet said. “Oh, Ted!” She lifted her hands to her face.
Ted had turned toward the doctor. There was an odd, fascinated look in his eyes. The doctor continued in his monotonous voice.
“Your two years in medical school, Mr. Hunter, hadn’t been a total loss. They’d given you some understanding of how the human mind works. You experimented, I suspect, at first. You found a way to make Stephen miserable. It was just a game. Then, when he became ill, it occurred to you that you could carry it further. You could get rid of him and Marcia and be completely clear of any kind of legal guilt.
“But you underestimated Stephen. He didn’t know what was happening to him, but he fought. He fought the whole thing, stubbornly, fiercely. Finally, when he doubted his own strength, he went to Bristow. Bristow had probably seen the needling process in action, and now he could see where it really led. I suspect the first time he spoke to you about it was last night on the mountain. Am I right?”
Ted didn’t answer.
“You and he got to the ledges first. He probably told you he knew what was up and that he was going to expose you. You had to do something then or never, so you did it. Even then you saw a way to implicate Stephen. At the same time that you pushed Bristow you said in Stephen’s ear, ‘Stephen, what have you done?’
“And poor Stephen, who thought no one but Bristow knew his secret, who still thought it was some kind of madness, believed it was Bristow who had spoken. If it had been anyone else, they’d have said more about it later, wouldn’t they? So—he was convinced he had done it.”
Sweat trickled down Ted’s face. No one else seemed capable of movement. When the doctor hesitated, it was as if the whole world were suspended in space.
“And why did you have to get rid of Bristow?” the doctor asked. “He couldn’t make a criminal charge against you. But he could tell Marcia and Stephen. You couldn’t risk that, Mr. Hunter. You couldn’t risk it because it would have meant you couldn’t live here any more. That was the one thing in the world you couldn’t face. Not to live here in this place that spelled safety and security for you would be to die.
“You were already committed to murder because you couldn’t bear to share it. People meant nothing to you; people were to be distrusted. You had to have this place to be safe, have it all to yourself, shut everyone else out of it. Your plan to get it was a crazy, twisted scheme, but it nearly worked. Stephen would kill Marcia, and then Stephen would be hanged or sent away for life. They have no children. You are obviously an heir—you and Harriet. Perhaps if it had worked you’d have turned your attention to Harriet.”
“No!” Ted said sharply. “Harriet! I meant it for both of us. I swear it. I meant for us both to be here forever. I knew you loved me and trusted me and believed in me. You were the only one.”
“But she didn’t trust you,” the doctor said grimly. “She didn’t believe in you. That’s why she made the futile, hysterical attempt to find the saddle girth she thought was so important.” He paused a moment. “That’s the picture in broad terms. Shall I go on, Mr. Hunter?”
Ted didn’t answer, but he got up, went quickly to Harriet’s chair, dropped on his knees, and buried his face in her lap. Her thin, bony fingers stroked his hair.