And now he’d just seen Hunking — with Corinne standing beside him — poke a flamingo piece of material at the dogs.
Thoughtfully, Old Francis climbed back through his bedroom window, and went for a stroll through his collection rooms. Visual contact with his artifacts always helped him meditate; gathered over a life time, they included everything from a slab smuggled from Stonehenge, to a crux ansata from Hatshepsut’s tomb.
Stopping amid his medieval English collection, where Hurk, his silent, Hungarian factotum was busy polishing the glass of a display case, Stoddard stared at a crossbow on the wall and thought of murder.
But he knew that before he could start to plan, they would have to make the first move...
Corinne made it that evening at dinner.
“Oh, guess what, darling,” she said over dessert, “I met Mr Hunking in town this morning. He’s the dog man, who came about poor Howitzer, remember? He told me he’d been digging in his yard for a new kennel spot, and he came across a big rock with pictographs on it — actual writing, he seems to think. And yet the Digger Indians, who used to live in these hills, were supposed to have no written means of communication. Of course, he knows about your interest in all those old things, and he wondered if you’d come down and take a look at it.”
“Of course, I’d be glad to,” Old Francis said as Hurk poured him a second demi-tasse. “Any particular time?”
“He said he’d be there around nine tomorrow morning.”
“Nine it is. I’m most interested in old pictographs.”
So while Corinne still slept, early next morning, Old Francis got up, as he sometimes did, to go for a constitutional in the woods. This time he went down the hill towards the dog man’s place, and hid in a clump of bushes near the trailer, in which electric light still burned.
After a while, Hunking came out, busied himself with his dogs, and went back inside again. Stoddard stretched his rheumatic limbs, and looked at his watch. Seven forty-five. At eight, Hunking reappeared and seemed to be stretching some kind of line, invisible from where Stoddard crouched, across the gate opening. Then he went to the kennel and fussed around the trap door there.
At which Stoddard saw the light. But he waited.
At eight-thirty, Hunking went into his trailer and emerged presently with a rifle, stuffing shells into his pockets. He climbed a side fence opposite Stoddard and disappeared into the woods. Shortly afterwards, Stoddard retreated up the hill under cover of the underbrush, and returned home...
“Oh, darling, it’s late,” Corinne said, as Old Francis crept back, puffing, into bed beside her.
“I went for a walk,” Stoddard said, “but I’m not feeling well, and I think I’ll spend the day in bed.”
“But what about Mr Hunking and the rock!” Corinne cried.
“It’s been there a good many generations, apparently, and it’ll wait a day longer. Tell Mr Hunking I’ll be there tomorrow at nine, will you? And I won’t disappoint him this time.”
Hunking’s gory death made quite a splash in the neighborhood. According to the newspapers, Mr Francis Stoddard III, the retired steel magnate on Vernal Hill, had come down to pay a visit to the dog man and found four of his huskies bloodily muzzling what was left of him. Commendably level-headed, Mr Stoddard had not fled, leaving the dogs to roam the countryside to jeopardize others; he had slipped quietly back to his car, seized a pistol from the glove compartment, and had shot the hounds one by one.
The fact the dogs had not attacked Mr Stoddard himself was accounted for by the fact their hunger and rage had been sated by their unfortunate owner. Indeed, many people weren’t at all surprised that Hunking’s own dogs had finally turned on him. He had been known as a hard kennel master.
But when Corinne learned the news, she’d run hysterically to Old Francis, who sat in his library reading a vellum-bound copy of Machiavelli’s Principle.
“You did it,” she cried. “You killed Bert Hunking. His own dogs would never have killed him!”
“But they did, my dear,” Stoddard said graciously, and rose to set a chair near his. He looked taller, younger. The challenge which Hunking’s threat has presented, and his success in meeting it, had obviously done more towards rejuvenation than living two years with Corinne had.
“Sit down, Corinne, and let’s have a talk.”
Caught in the spell of her husband’s transformation, his wife sat down silently and stared at him.
“The dogs did it, although you might say I maneuvered it. And of course you could go to the police and tell them, but that wouldn’t be wise. I know that you and the dog man had been intimate. In Hunking’s trailer, I found some notes of yours, signed with the obnoxious name of Doodles, which make it quite clear that you, as well as he, had planned to make me the victim of his dogs. Which disappointed me very much, my dear, but I’m not going to hold it against you.”
“What are you going to do?” she whispered.
“Nothing, except what I’ve already done. I saw my lawyer this afternoon, after the unfortunate — accident, and changed my will. You get nothing — I repeat, nothing — if you are guilty of a single disloyal act against me from this moment on, until the time I die — of a natural death, of course. I’ve also made that stipulation. So you see, if you tried testifying against your husband...”
Corinne’s eyes narrowed, and Stoddard sensed the struggle of her will against his. Outwardly flighty, he suspected his wife was steel inside, and wasn’t likely to forgive him for what he’d done.
“You hate me that much?” she asked.
“Not at all. Curious as it may seem, I want to keep you with me. Shall we shake on it?”
Her hand was as cold as death...
But within a week after Bert Hunking’s demise, Corinne had decided to relocate her maid, who like a duenna had occupied a nearby room, to another part of the house. And in bed, whenever Stoddard laid a tentative hand upon her shoulder, she no longer turned away and pretended to be asleep.
Breakfast together became a cheerful event, instead of a sullen hangover from the night before, and Stoddard, who already looked younger as the result of his punitive action against the dog man, began to act like a boy, going so far as to make paper airplanes out of the morning newspaper and launching them at Hurk as he served them.
Corinne and “Young Francis” as she now called him, began to take walks together, hand in hand, along woodland paths. Then one day as they sat at the top of the hills, near the edge of the reservoir, she said casually:
“I can’t understand how everything has changed between us, Francis. It must be because you fought for me.”
“Oh, I didn’t exactly fight,” he said modestly.
“What did you do? You know, I can’t imagine how you managed it. That man — I really can’t think of him as having meant anything to me — wasn’t easy to fool. He was strong. And those dogs could have torn you apart...”
“I know.”
“It was clever of you to gain the advantage the way you did.”
“A combination of desperation and imagination, I suppose.”
“No jealousy?”
“That too, of course.” He looked at her shrewdly. “You’d really like to know how I did it?”
She lifted his hand and kissed it. “Very much,” she said.
“All right. I went down the first morning early and acquainted myself with the set-up, and I know I don’t have to tell you the details of that.”