Miss Withers Regrets (17 page)

Nothing was being served by Ava Bennington this evening except worry. Worry and conversation, and from the roadway Miss Hildegarde Withers couldn’t hear enough of that to know what they were talking about. She explored the garage entrance, came close enough to the house to get entangled in the woven wire of an abandoned puppy run, and finally managed to mount a stone wall, crawl beneath a sagging clothes line, and find her way down the slope toward the group of people.

“Yoo-hoo!” she cried as she stumbled down upon them, her voice quavering a little as she saw the surprised hostility in their drawn, gray faces. She only hoped that she was getting closer to the secret of all this; getting warmer, as the children said.

If she was getting warmer, the five people around the outdoor grill looked cold, for all the mugginess of the night. Jed Nicolet had a wet, unlighted cigarette drooping from his mouth, and his thin fox face was a mask of perturbation. Mame Boad, wearing comfortable shoes and an uncomfortable expression, was biting thoughtfully at her pearls. Dr. Harry Radebaugh seemed to have lost ten pounds since she had seen him last, and as for the Benningtons, they looked as if they had been washed in overhot water and shrunk a size and a half.

“I told you so,” said Jed Nicolet to nobody in particular.

The schoolteacher thrashed through the last of the rosebushes and came out on the stone flagging of the patio. “I’ll skip all explanations and apologies,” she said. “We may as well come to the point at once. If you good people are having a meeting to decide which of you murdered Huntley Cairns, I’d like to get in on it.”

There was a long, ominous silence, somehow made heavier still by the flicker of heat lightning off across the water to the north. It was Commander Bennington, true to Navy traditions, who recovered himself first. “My good woman,” he began, “you appear to be under the impression—”

“I am,” Miss Withers assured him. “Very, very much under the impression. May I sit down?”

Mame Boad, in spite of herself, tittered a little. Then Dr. Radebaugh, with chilly gallantry, provided a deck chair. Miss Withers sat down in it firmly. “Before we go any further,” she opened up, “or before you have me thrown out of this conclave, let me say that I have a pretty fair idea of everything that has been going on, with the exception of the detail of who actually murdered Huntley Cairns, and that seems hardly more than a formality from this point on.”

They all stared at her with a horrified fascination. Miss Withers began almost to enjoy herself. “I know why you came to me as a committee when I first arrived in Shoreham—Mr. Nicolet modestly remaining in the background—and what commission it was that you wanted me to undertake. When I refused, you decided to be your own detectives. That is why you accepted invitations to the Cairns housewarming and why you were huddling in the library shortly before he died. You were looking through his books for some clue as to his tastes and inclinations, all of which mystified Mr. Midge Beale very much at the time. I found all this out by roundabout methods—”

“The book,” Jed Nicolet remarked.
“Oriental Moments.”

“Exactly.” Miss Withers removed the rental-library volume from her handbag and opened it to the place she had marked. “I read from Chapter Five, page sixty-two,” she said. “Quote: ‘It was at this dinner party at General Choy’s that Manya Werenska made her classic suggestion for dealing with the Japanese in case they ever actually occupied the city. All the officers, she insisted, should be invited to lunch and then fed meatballs filled with sharp splinters of bamboo rolled up tightly and bound with some animal fiber such as bacon rind. It was a method of poisoning wolves in the Pekin hills, dating back into antiquity like everything else in China. When the digestive juices acted on the fiber, the bamboo splinter would open up and—’ ”

“That’s enough!” cried Ava Bennington.

“It would seem to be plenty,” Miss Withers agreed. “There is no need to go into the grisly details. For your further information, I was, until last fall, a dog owner myself. My wirehaired, Dempsey, died—but he died of old age.”

The circle suddenly closed more tightly about her. “Can you understand,” Dr. Radebaugh asked quietly, “how a man feels who brings up an English setter from puppyhood so that it’s his best friend and only immediate family, and then watches it die in convulsions?”

“Your dog came home to die,” Jed Nicolet said softly. “Wotan lay in the gutter all night where a hit-run driver left him.”

“But he didn’t die,” Mame Boad cut in. “You saved him. Me, I had seven cockers racing around the place in the spring, all the finest show stock, with bloodlines that meant one of them would stand a chance as best of breed and maybe best in show at Morris and Essex. Now I have one—the runt—and I have her because she was too slow to grab the poisoned meat that some fiend threw into my yard at night.”

“By ‘fiend’ you refer, I presume, to the late Huntley Cairns?” Miss Withers pressed.

“He ran down my dog,” Nicolet put in. “I proved there were black dog hairs on his front bumper and even started suit. But he settled out of court, and for plenty.”

“No doubt that made you all focus your suspicions on Cairns,” Miss Withers pointed out. “But isn’t there quite a difference between running over a dog in the dark and setting out to poison all the dogs in a township?”

Bennington shook his head. “Don’t forget that the book was in Cairns’s library. Jed Nicolet took it away with him, and he’ll bear witness that there were dirty smudges on that particular page, too. My wife’s poodles were saved the first time, when we pumped the arsenic out of them, but two weeks later somebody shoved some meat through a slit in the top of the car door, and that was the end of them. Peritonitis works fast, and Dr. Harvey found a sliver of bamboo in each dog.”

“Bamboo—at least an American cane that has the same properties—grows as far north as this,” Dr. Radebaugh pointed out. “There’s a clump of it on Cairns’s property.”

Miss Withers nodded. “So you all brought in a mental verdict against Huntley Cairns! For that matter, none of you remembered that there were five other people in the Cairns house who had access to the library and who could have read that book and made use of the device. Six, actually, if you include the gardener, who seems to have had the run of the place.”

There were flashes of heat lightning all across the eastern sky now, and the crickets and tree frogs sounded like a modern symphony heard through a curtain.

“Like most people who are fond of animals,” Miss Withers went on, “I’ve read now and then in the newspapers about dog-poisoning epidemics, and I suppose I’ve said to myself that the person who would do a thing like that ought to have a dose of his own medicine. However, there is always recourse to the law—”

“Sure, sure!” cut in Jed Nicolet bitterly. “As a member of the bar, I might inform you that dog poisoners usually get off with a suspended sentence, or at worst with a nominal fine for malicious mischief. The owner can of course start a civil suit, but most juries fix the value of any dog at no more than ten dollars.”

“Then the law, as Mr. Dickens had somebody say, is an ass. But all that is beside the point.” Miss Withers wagged her forefinger. “You are all gathered here because you believe that one of you took the law into his own hands last Saturday—after the discovery of this book in Cairns’s library—and drowned him then and there in his own swimming pool.” She cocked her head. “True or false?”

Nobody needed to answer. “Which explains,” went on Miss Withers, “Mr. Nicolet’s effort to help Pat Montague, the innocent bystander. You are all reasonably nice people, and you wouldn’t like to have an innocent man suffer for the crime you are sure one of you committed.” She paused for a dramatic moment, which was spoiled by the whine of a mosquito dive-bombing her ear. “The sad part of it all, however, is this. If any one of you did murder Huntley Cairns, you got the wrong man!”

They stared at her, but nobody spoke.

“That is all, or nearly all, I came here to say,” she told them. “Think it over and consult your consciences. And remember that if Huntley Cairns met his death because of the dog-poisoning epidemic in Shoreham, the whole thing was a criminal mistake!”

“Wait a minute,” Commander Bennington argued. “How can you explain away the smudge on that particular page of a book in Cairns’s own library?”

She smiled at him. “Cairns was a dapper, fastidious man, very careful of his person. Why should he have left smudges in the book? Isn’t it more likely that someone else with access to the house picked up that volume, idly attracted by the somewhat misleading promise of its title and jacket drawing, and then stumbled on the handy, vicious method of killing animals? As a matter of fact, the same person searched the Cairns house this morning for that book, hoping to destroy it, but of course Mr. Nicolet had carried it away the other evening for evidence.”

Jed Nicolet shrugged. “Suppose I did! Why are you telling us all this?”

“Simply because I think that you know, or suspect, which one of you murdered Huntley Cairns. Up to now you have kept quiet out of a mistaken loyalty, in the belief that the murder was justified. I’m telling you that it was not—that somebody else poisoned the dogs of this town—and I have a very good idea who it was!”

“Such as?” demanded Ava Bennington breathlessly

“I’m not mentioning any names. Of course, certain inferences could be drawn from the fact that in the first phase of this poison epidemic arsenic and other poisons readily obtainable in ordinary garden and orchard sprays, such as arsenate of lead, were used. Quite naturally, after the local veterinarian performed his autopsies and started to ask questions of the local dealers about abnormal purchases of such sprays, the poisoner had to turn to something different. It appears that he found it in a book in Cairns’s library. But all that is circumstantial. Observe the motive—and consider who it is in all the world that has a perpetual grievance against the whole race of dogs.”

“Someone who raises cats, of course!” said Mame Boad.

“Maybe someone who was bitten by a dog in early childhood and grew up with an abnormal phobia,” suggested Dr. Radebaugh.

Miss Withers shrugged her shoulders. “Perhaps. But in that list you should include a landscape gardener whose days are spent in one never-ending feud with the whole canine tribe!”

They were all standing now, making a circle of blankly hostile faces. “That’s all for now,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers firmly. “Class dismissed!”

She turned and headed back up the slope. Let them think over what she had said, and perhaps there would be a crack in that smug suburban armor plate.

When she had reached the stone wall she looked back, but they were all standing there, eyes turned up the slope, as if they were expecting to see her climb astride a broomstick and take off into the sky.

O
N THE WAY BACK
Miss Withers changed her mind, or at least altered it slightly after her fashion. “I believe, young man, I’d like to stop off at the Cairns house,” she told the driver.

“Okay with me,” he assured her jovially. “As long as that little old meter keeps ticking. You know, you’re getting to be about my best customer. I sure hope you’re on an expense account.”

“I only wish I were,” she admitted.

“You mean you’re doing all this sleuthing for free?” he demanded, looking over his shoulder. “Anyway, lady, it’s a waste of time. When a guy gets murdered, all you gotta do is lock up his wife. Or vice versus, as the case may be.

“A cynical but realistic attitude,” the schoolteacher observed. “That’s the way the police usually think, I must admit.”

“Sure. Take my own case. My old lady went over the hill with my bank account before I was out of boot camp. I’d have given her the deep-six if I coulda got a furlough then, but I cooled off in time. But now in this Cairns killing, the way I figure it, they ought to have Mrs. Cairns locked up instead of that young guy. Or her father, even. That old goat would split a nickel lengthwise to avoid giving more than the exact ten-per-cent tip.”

“Oh, then, Mr. Thurlow Abbott is a customer of yours?”

“Lady, when there’s only two hacks in the village, everybody’s a customer at one time or another. I’ve even hauled Mr. Cairns when his own car was in the shop and his wife or her sister had the other one. Him and Mr. Abbott had a good argument in this heap one night—”

“Really?” Miss Withers was elaborately casual. “Too bad you didn’t overhear what it was about.”

“I did.” The driver turned into the Cairns driveway, stopped, and climbed out to scrub at his windshield, well plastered with dead bugs. “At least I heard Cairns say something about business, and Thurlow Abbott piped up in that raspy voice of his and said that Cairns wouldn’t have had any business if it wasn’t for him. Want me to wait, ma’am?”

“As usual,” she sighed, and went up the steps to ring the bell. She had to bear on it three times before there was any answer, but finally it opened a crack and she saw the sepia face of Beulah, which broadened into a smile.

‘“Evening, Miss Withers.”

“Is Miss Lawn Abbott at home? I’d like to see her.”

The girl hesitated. “Well, she is, and she isn’t.”

“Just as a favor to me, Mrs. MacTavish, can’t you elaborate?”

That won a wider smile. “Miss Lawn locked herself in her room, and she won’t answer when anybody knocks, because I took her up some dinner on a tray.”

“You don’t suppose that something might have happened to her?”

Beulah shook her head. “I wouldn’t worry about that, ma’am. She had the radio on loud for a while, and now she’s playing records, like she usually does when she has an argument with her sister or her father. Symphonies, mostly—all heavy, sad music. Listen!”

Sure enough, the schoolteacher could hear the throbbing beat and rumble of a symphonic orchestra, mostly basses and brasses, filtering through a closed door or two. “Jeff says she blows off steam that way,” the girl went on. “Only if she’s going to play so you can hear it all over the house, I wish she’d play something cheerfuller.”