I barely heard his words. I was staring at the telephone cord, trying to remember the last time we’d used it. I thought it was last night when I phoned Max's Steakhouse for a table. “Sheriff,” I said quietly, “I think you’d better come over here.”
“Who was that?” Annabel wondered, following me outside when I returned to the porch.
“Just Sheriff Lens. He had some new information about the dead woman. I suggested he take a ride over here.”
“Are you getting anywhere with this?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
I shifted the conversation to the weather, commenting on the cloudless blue sky and the comfortable temperature. She was so close to delivery that I didn’t want to upset or frighten her in any way. When I saw the sheriff's car pull up behind the cottage I suggested she might go over to visit Susan Raspin, who'd come out onto her porch.
“What is it, Sam?” my wife asked. “Why don’t you want me here?”
“I just thought you’d be more comfortable there.”
“I’m staying,” she said firmly. Annabel could be stubborn at times.
Sheriff Lens entered through the kitchen door, an expectant look on his face. “You’ve figured it out, haven’t you, Doc?”
“I think so.”
“Well, tell us!” my wife demanded. “Why are you so nervous about it?”
“All right,” I said. “I think we’ve shown that Grace Spring couldn’t have killed herself. And we’ve also shown that her killer couldn’t possibly have left this cottage after he killed her. I think it was Sherlock Holmes who once remarked that when you’ve excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“What are you saying, Doc?”
“The killer was here, and couldn’t have left through the locked doors or windows. Therefore, the killer is still here.”
The sheriff's hand dropped instinctively to the butt of his holstered revolver. “That’s impossible.”
“Is it? My first problem was how Grace Spring got in here in the first place. And why. I thought I’d heard her leave yesterday afternoon while I was on the phone with Annabel. She’d been drinking a cup of tea, but she called out she was leaving and I heard the screen door open and close. I noticed this morning that our phone cord was oddly twisted. Someone other than Annabel or me had used the phone after we left. That’s when I started suspecting that Grace hadn’t left at all. She’d hidden here and phoned her killer after we left for dinner. She’d heard me tell Annabel we’d probably go out for dinner and realized suicide cottage was the perfect setting for what she had in mind.”
“And what was that?”
“She was going to kill her blackmailer and make it look like one more suicide.”
“But where could she have hidden?” my wife asked. “This place isn’t that big. Even the crawlspace behind the sink was too crowded with that ladder in it.”
“She was a small woman. It only took her a moment while I was on the phone to partly open the foldaway bed in the living room and slip inside.” Their eyes went to the sofa and I kept on talking. “Once we were gone she came out and phoned her blackmailer, arranging for him to meet her here on some pretext, probably promising him money. While she waited, she may have slipped out the back door and gone over to her cottage for a weapon. She was ready when he arrived, probably with a gun. That would be the most likely weapon to fake a suicide.”
“You’re saying the blackmailer killed her?” Sheriff Lens asked. “But if she had a gun why didn’t she shoot him?”
“They must have struggled over it and he choked her to death. Once he’d done that, he strung her up to the ceiling hook in hopes we’d miss the finger marks on her throat. It would have been one more death in suicide cottage.”
“Are you telling me that the killer took her place in the foldaway bed, that he’s still there now?”
“That’s just what I’m telling you. He figured we’d never spend the night here after finding the body, and once it was established as a suicide he’d simply walk out the back door. Only we stayed and he was trapped here.”
That was when Sheriff Lens walked over and lifted the sofa seat to check inside. Maybe he thought my idea was too crazy to be true. Maybe it didn’t occur to him that if I was right the killer might be in there with Grace’s gun. As the foldaway bed opened and he came into view, he pointed the gun at me and Annabel did the craziest thing she’d ever done. She launched herself at him like a fury, baby and all...
Old Dr. Sam finished his story and his drink. Looking into his listener’s eyes, he said, “You were born that night, Samantha, one week early.”
“And the killer was...?”
“Our postman, Cally Forbes, of course. He was small like Grace Spring and able to hide in there easily. He’d even gotten out of bed early that morning to use our phone and call in sick. He couldn’t just leave, though, because we’d have discovered the unbolted door and known he’d been hiding. He was the uncle of the girl killed in the accident, and he was convinced Grace had been driving. She started paying him money, maybe out of a guilty conscience, but finally she decided she’d have to kill him. She lured him here after we went to dinner and was waiting with the gun. Most postmen have strong arms and he got the gun away from her, strangling her in the process. Then he found the rope, tied it around her throat to cover the bruises, and lifted her up to that hook with the aid of my stepladder. He put that away and only realized at the last minute she’d have needed something to stand on. He placed the stool there, not realizing in the near-darkness that it was too low.”
Samantha shook her head in wonder. “Mom could have killed herself jumping at him like that. She could have killed me!”
“I guess that’s why we never told you about it till now. You want another scotch?”
She pushed the long dark hair from her beautiful eyes and smiled. “No, let’s go join Mom and the grandkids.”
© 2007 by Edward D. Hoch
Camouflage
by Alanna Knight
A novelist with sixty published titles, as well as a distinguished short-story writer, playwright, and biographer, Alanna Knight hails from Edinburgh, Scotland. Her fiction includes Gothic and historical pieces; as a biographer she is especially noted for her works on Robert Louis Stevenson. Fans of her crime fiction will be glad to see the latest from Allison & Busby, The Inspector’s Daughter.
Charlie negotiated the car round the suburban estate bordering the racecourse in search of a suitably inconspicuous parking place.
As always, that first glimpse of his destination with its shrill buzz of animation set his adrenalin pumping. Elation, fierce and strange, seized him. His body grew firmer, stronger, tense as a hurdler crouched on the starting line, ready for the demands soon to be made upon it.
His mind now stretched beyond the poolroom or the television screen and took on an extra sense of perception, so that when he climbed out of the car in the quiet tree-lined street, he was immediately aware of being watched.
Cautiously, he turned. A youngster, perhaps eleven or twelve, small and thin, with a bland freckled face, was writing down his car number in a small notebook, his expression one of eager triumph.
“Nice Rolls, mister,” he said cheerfully, “bit old-fashioned, but I collect car numbers. Been waiting for a '72 for weeks. Saw a '73 and a '74 yesterday, had to let them go. Just my luck. Be months before I get them now.” A sigh, and looking from Charlie to the car and back again, he frowned. “Your car, mister, is it?”