Miss Withers Regrets (9 page)

“And what did Lawn ever do that was on the wrong side of the ledger?”

“Aw, I don’t like to …”Adele shrugged. “Well, when she was in school, some swanky place near Boston, because that was when Thurlow Abbott still had some of his money, a poor little music teacher with a wife and three children got kicked out of his job for being caught kissing her. And she was supposed to have run away and got into some trouble and been in jail down south somewhere. Then a boy at Bar Harbor, two summers ago, tried to kill himself because she wouldn’t run away with him. Besides”—and Adele made it clear that this was the crowning argument, the clincher—“besides, she hasn’t any women friends, and she doesn’t seem to want any!”

Miss Withers nodded. “Perhaps that is why Lawn didn’t show up at her sister’s housewarming, at least until the last minute. Well, I must be getting along. Thank you both for your help.” She gathered her umbrella and pocketbook.

“That’s all right. Drop in and listen to that new radio program, The Beale Family, any afternoon at five.” Adele glared at her husband and then headed for the stairs.

Midge Beale walked to the door with Miss Withers. “Don’t mind Adele, she’s just hung over. Wonderful little wife—best housekeeper you ever saw. She can make a dollar do the work of three.”

“How nice—and how loyal of you to say so.”

He shrugged. “If my opinion is worth anything,” Midge went on, “you won’t get anywhere asking questions of Bennington and the rest of them. These local bigwigs stick together, and they’re closemouthed. You should have seen the fuss Bennington and Nicolet made at the party when they thought I was eavesdropping on them in the library. And all they were doing was having a huddle over Huntley Cairns’s taste in literature.”

Miss Withers, about to head down the steps towards her taxi, stopped short. “Literature? You mean they were interested in his library?”

“That’s right. And then they got started arguing with Mame Boad over whether or not I liked dogs. There was something Nicolet found in the far bookcase—something in a thin red book that he was going to read out loud, only Bennington stopped him because I was there. They were all hopped up about it.”

“Thank you so much,” Miss Withers said. “It doesn’t seem pertinent at the moment, but you never can tell. I’m just collecting bits of cardboard now; I’m not trying to fit them into the puzzle yet.” She frowned. “I wonder—no, I guess not. Good night, Mr. Beale.”

She climbed into the taxi, hesitating before she gave the driver an address. She would have given anything for a talk with Pat Montague in the jail. His version of the fracas with Huntley Cairns in the Sands Point club men’s room might be very interesting. But Pat was in no mood to see her, even if she could get by the barriers outside.

Or if she could only get into the Cairns house for an hour—that might lead to the uncovering of something. But the inspector had that staked out for himself. She would only be in the way.

“ ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ ” she said.

The driver turned. “What say, lady?”

“The hotel, please,” requested Miss Hildegarde Withers wearily.

She dined alone in the big hotel dining room, wondering, as always, how hotel chefs manage to make everything taste like canned salmon. Then she marched back to her cottage and unlocked the door.

“Merciful heavens!” cried the schoolteacher. “The room is a shambles!”

At any rate, shambles or not, it was evident that the place had been hastily but thoroughly searched in her absence. Cushions were askew on the davenport and on the chairs, the tacks along the edge of the carpet were all pulled out, and books had been taken out of their shelves and put back upside down, which made Miss Withers dizzy to look at. Even the cover of the aquarium had been removed and replaced so that it did not quite fit.

In the bedroom there were fewer signs of disturbance, and none at all in the kitchenette and bath. Nothing whatever seemed to be missing. Miss Withers sat down on the bed, frowning intently. What in the world could any one have imagined they would find here?

There was no sign that the lock had been forced, and the screens and windows were all in place, unmarred. “This lock will have to be replaced at once,” Miss Withers decided, “or I shan’t sleep a wink tonight, not a wink.”

She picked up the phone and gave crisp and definite instructions to the man at the desk. He was very dubious about the possibility of getting a locksmith at this hour and on a Sunday, too, but she gave him what was usually referred to as a piece of her mind and hung up.

Miss Withers came into the living room, knelt down while she straightened the books, and then on an impulse she returned to the phone. “Get me the local police station,” she insisted.

The night clerk, evidently a very uneasy and suspicious type, tried to find out why she wanted the police. “Never you mind, young man!” she snapped. “Just get the police. I want to talk to Inspector Oscar Piper. I’m going to report that my cottage was broken into this afternoon and turned topsy-turvy—”

“Yes, I know,” sounded a quiet voice behind her. She whirled, to see the inspector himself standing in the front doorway.

“Oscar!” she cried. “I was just trying to get hold of you! I don’t understand. Has this vandalism already been reported?”

He came into the room, looking slightly sheepish. “Well, I know all about it,” the inspector said slowly. “You see, Hildegarde, I ordered it done.”

She stared at him balefully. “Do I understand you to say—”

“I sent Sergeant Fischer over here,” Piper confessed as he sank uninvited into her most comfortable chair. “Relax, and I’ll tell you about it. You see, we were hunting for Huntley Cairns’s wristwatch.”

She blinked. “Well, why hunt for it here—was the light better or something? I assure you that I haven’t set up as a fence.”

“The watch was missing,” said Piper wearily. “It’s one of those jobs set in solid crystal that tell the hour and the day and the year. His wife gave it to him when they were married, and we had to make sure that young Montague hadn’t taken it off the body and then secreted it here when he knew he was going to be arrested.”

“But you didn’t find it, did you?”

The inspector looked at her, a shy leprechaunish smile lighting his face. “Oh, sure we found it. But not here. They finally got around to draining the swimming pool this afternoon, and it was buried in the mud and stuff at the bottom. Here it is, still ticking.”

He showed her the tiny, glittering thing. One link in the flexible platinum band was broken. “It’s a clue, anyway,” the inspector pronounced.

“The law,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers, “puts a great deal too much faith in tangible things, such as clues and weapons and alibis, and not enough in the imponderables. Whose brilliant mind was it, by the way, that leaped to the conclusion that Pat Montague might have removed the wristwatch from his victim before drowning him? Is it now the official police theory that this was robbery, with murder only an accidental by-product?”

The inspector looked uncomfortable. “We have to eliminate every possibility,” he said defensively. “Young Montague might have known that the watch was a wedding present from Helen to her husband, and in a flareup of jealousy—”

“Never in a million years, Oscar Piper.” Miss Withers handed back the watch. “What else did the majesty of the law uncover up at the scene of the crime, if I’m not too inquisitive?”

The inspector took out a long greenish-brown cigar, sniffed it, and put it away in his pocket again. “It’s a funny setup,” he admitted. “When I first arrived at the Cairns place I could see that nobody was especially anxious to cooperate. The old man is a phony, like most actors. The widow is supposed to be crying her eyes out with grief, but if you ask me, she’s more scared than sorrowful. The kid sister doesn’t care a whoop in hell for anybody or anything, or at least that’s the impression she wants to give—but she hangs around, all the same, trying to kibitz on what we’re doing. The servants are pulling the old, old gag—they pretend they don’t quite understand and retreat into a mess of ‘Yassuhs’ and ‘Ah sho’ly don’ know nuffins.’ ”

“Defense mechanism,” the schoolteacher put in. “In looking over the place, didn’t you stumble on anything—anything unusual?”

He scowled. “We went all through the place, particularly Cairns’s desk in the library, but we didn’t find much except receipted bills. The house cost twice as much as he had expected, but I guess he expected that. Cairns’s closet was full of super deluxe elevator shoes, guaranteed to make a man two inches taller overnight—”

“I wonder,” Miss Withers observed, “why people laugh so much at someone who tried to make himself look taller with special shoes, or younger with hair dye or a toupee, or slimmer with a corset. Because, basically, we all want to appear at our best.”

“Ugh,” said the inspector. “Well, now you know about as much as I do. Except that in Helen Cairns’s closet she kept a weekend case packed and ready. We thought we had something there for a minute, but she explained that she had packed it six months ago, after she’d had an argument with her husband about plans for the new house, and she had never unpacked. Nothing else incriminating around the place.”

“There wouldn’t be,” said the schoolteacher. “This is an odd sort of murder, Oscar, and it’s not according to the formula at all. I can’t help feeling that either the wrong person was murdered, or it was at the wrong time, or—or something!”

He looked at her. “Come clean, Hildegarde. What have you been up to?”

She told him sketchily about the call on the Beale family. “I can’t help wondering,” she said, “if there could be any tie-up between what Midge Beale told me and something that happened about six weeks ago, when I first came here. I had a call from a little group of upstanding, public-spirited local citizens—Dr. Radebaugh, Mrs. Boad, and Commander and Mrs. Bennington. They at first gave me the impression that they were collecting for a home for wayward girls or something, but finally they admitted that they wanted me to do a job of confidential sleuthing for them. My reputation as a meddler had preceded me, I imagine via Mr. Nicolet, who remembered our day in court. At any rate, they wouldn’t tell me what they wanted me to do until I promised to help them, and I wasn’t willing to buy a pig in a poke. Besides, I had only just given you my solemn promise not to mix into police affairs, so I told them that I had retired, or reformed, or something, and sent them on about their business. I’d give anything now to know what it was that they wanted.”

The inspector pointed out reasonably that nobody could have been after her to solve the Cairns murder six weeks before it happened. As a matter of fact, it was clear that nobody had planned this murder ahead of time because nobody could know that Huntley Cairns would be so excited about his new swimming pool that he would leave his guests in the house and rush out for a quick dip—especially when it was drizzling. “This murder,” he concluded, “was done on the cuff—on the spur of the moment.”

“There is always the possibility,” Miss Withers mused, “that the local committee, or some Machiavellian member of it, contemplated a murder and wanted to get me on their side beforehand—or to send me off on some wild-goose chase.”

“Relax, Hildegarde! Nobody ever has to send you on a wild-goose chase. You go by yourself. And don’t worry. If you think it’s important I’ll find out what it was that the local committee had on its mind.” He picked up his hat and started for the door.

“With a rack and thumbscrew, Oscar—because I have a feeling that they have, as you say, ‘clammed up.’ On second thought, the rack and thumbscrew would be a very good idea.”

“I won’t even have to use a rubber hose,” he promised, and took his departure.

N
EXT MORNING MISS HILDEGARDE
Withers arose early and at once set about removing from her little cottage all traces of the police search, putting everything back into its spick-and-span—though slightly prim—order. This accomplished, she sat herself down with a pot of coffee and a plate of molasses cookies to study the morning papers.

The local sheet, unfortunately, had almost nothing at all. “Tragic Accident Mars Cairns Party” was the head. The news story gave the impression that the police investigation into Huntley Cairns’s death was a mere formality and that a verdict of accidental death would most certainly result from the coroner’s inquest, scheduled for today.

So Knight’s County still clung to the archaic “crowner’s quest” instead of trusting to a medical examiner! That would make things a bit harder all around, the school ma’am decided. So she put the Shoreham
Standard
aside and took up the metropolitan sheets.

It was immediately clear to Miss Withers that the heat was on. The Manhattan dailies hadn’t been able to get much more out of the inspector than had she last evening. But to make up for the paucity of news, there was a good deal of art, some of it obviously dug up out of the files and the rest being photographs of the Cairns house, the gardens, swimming pool, etcetera.

There were photographs, some of them three or four years old, according to the hat and dress styles, of most of the principals in the case. “Wife in Pool Mystery with Other Man” was an old shot of Helen with Pat Montague at Café Society Uptown. Thurlow Abbott was in the picture too—which must have been the reason it was taken, for in those days he had still been remembered as a celebrity. There was also “Pool Widow with Husband in Happier Days,” which was Helen and Huntley Cairns down in the Village at Asti’s. Then there was a shot of Helen, Lawn Thurlow Abbott, and Huntley Cairns in the Easter parade outside St. Patrick’s on the Avenue, and another picture of Lawn, looking very like a defiant ghost, tied up with the scandal about the boy at Bar Harbor. The original caption, reprinted here, was “Deep-freeze Girl Jilts Social Registerite—He Tries Gas.”

Miss Withers decided that Lawn looked scared to death, and why wouldn’t she? And she’d just had that unhappy experience with the music teacher, too! Remembering certain music teachers of her acquaintance, and social registerites, too, the schoolteacher was inclined to be a little more sympathetic towards Lawn than her own friends and family seemed to be.