The sheriff took the picture down, placed it on a table, took a heavy-bladed pocket knife from his trousers and began prying at the brads which held the back of the picture in place. The brads came out easily, and the sheriff lifted out the cardboard section which backed the picture. He gave a low whistle.
Age had discolored the back of the picture, but that discoloration was slightly less pronounced over an oblong space some two and a half inches wide by six inches long.
“Gone!” Quinlan exclaimed.
The sheriff scratched the grizzled hair along the back of his head.
For some seconds they regarded the dismantled picture. Then the sheriff said, “Notice this was exactly behind the jester in the picture.”
Quinlan’s nod was. perfunctory. “Knowing where it was isn’t going to help us to tell where it is,” he said.
Bill Eldon rehung the picture, and was meticulously careful to see that it was hanging straight.
“Now, clues,” the sheriff said, when the picture had been hung to suit him, “are peculiar things. They’re combinations of a little bit of everything. Lots of clues get thrown out the window, just lots of them. Now, take that girl for instance, lying face down and stabbed. Notice something about her, George?”
“What?”
“No purse.”
“You mean she... Say, that’s right! She didn’t have any purse.”
“No purse,” the sheriff said. “That wouldn’t mean so much by itself, because she might have been running and somebody was chasing her and caught up with her and stabbed her, and her purse might have been left at the place where she started to run from, or she may have left it somewhere here in the house. But we don’t find it here in the house—”
“Go on,” Quinlan said eagerly.
“Simple as can be,” the sheriff observed. “This Dow girl was pretty smart. You have to be quick-thinking to be a cashier in a cafeteria. That’s not the sort of job you can go to sleep on. Well, she got Roy Jasper to come up here to the house with her, show her around, and take the responsibility of getting the door open. Then she started searching, and the probabilities are she hadn’t searched very long before she stumbled onto this picture and that gave her an idea she was on the right track.
“So what does she do? Does she tell Roy what she’s discovered and then let him dismantle the picture with her? She does not. She stalls, pretends she hasn’t noticed anything, gets rid of Roy, and then later on comes back by herself. It’s late afternoon. She doesn’t drive her car inside the gate. She leaves it down the road a ways and walks in. And just as she’s congratulating herself on being smart, the gate opens and Sam Beckett comes through with a tractor and starts plowing.
“The girl can’t walk out of the house in broad daylight and stumble across that plowed ground where Sam Beckett will ask her what she’s been up to and who she is. So she waits for darkness to make her getaway.
“So she sits still, and by and by it begins to get dark and she hears all the little night noises — and then she hears a new noise. Someone else has been hiding in the house, someone else who was waiting for it to get dark. She hears cautious steps, a board creaks, all the night noises stop — all except this steady, stealthy approach of someone who’s been hiding in the house — waiting.
“She fights back panic, clutches her purse, gropes her way to the side door, and starts running. And the thing behind her, the thing that’s been waiting for darkness to make its stealthy approach, starts running, too.”
“Gosh, Bill,” Quinlan said, “you’re building up quite a scene from just a few clues — from the absence of a few clues, in fact.”
“But that’s the way it had to be,” the sheriff said. “If she’d come in after Beckett started plowing, her tracks would be in the plowed ground, and by counting the furrows where these tracks quit, you could tell just how far Beckett had got with his plowing before she walked in. But there aren’t any tracks. So both the girl and the person who killed her must have come in before the plowing started.”
“Guess you’re right, Bill.”
“Well, she broke and run. What did she run for?”
“Her automobile.”
“No, George, I don’t think so. You have to put yourself in her shoes. She ran for the closest protection she could find.”
“The tractor!” Quinlan exclaimed.
“Now you’re gettin’ it, son. She’d been hiding from the man on the tractor, but now, all of a sudden, she wanted to be near him mighty bad. She was running for the tractor — then something made her swerve.”
“How do you know she swerved? Maybe she just didn’t get there.”
“Nope. The body was found on the plowed ground. That means she got to the furrow the tractor was plowing, and swerved. Now what would make her detour away from safety just when she was getting close?”
Quinlan shook his head. Then after a moment he said, “The trouble with all this is it leaves the murderer in here. How could he have got out if there were no tracks?”
“He left tracks, George.”
“He couldn’t have, Bill. He didn’t.”
“Oh, bosh!” the sheriff said. “Sure he left tracks. He left the sort of tracks that nobody bothered to look at. That’s the angle I’m working on now, the way the murderer got out of here.”
“You mean he went out on Sam Beckett’s tractor? You mean—?”
The sheriff suddenly slid from the end of the table. “Come on, son,” he said to Quinlan. “We’ve got a job to do — and we’ve got to do it fast.”
Lights blazed in the office of Rush Medford. Edward Lyons sat near the telephone where he could rush in reports to his newspaper. Martin Walworth, his bushy eyebrows drawn to ominous lines, gave Roy Jasper and Beryl Quinlan the benefit of his accusing gaze. The court reporter, his pen moving smoothly over a shorthand notebook, took down the questions and answers.
Rush Medford looked up as Bill Eldon and the deputy entered the room. There was exasperation on his face. For more than an hour and a half now they had been grilling the suspects and they knew just as much as they had known before, no more, no less.
Sheriff Eldon’s slow drawl came as a sharp change from the staccato bark of questions which had been fired by the criminologist. The sheriff pulled off his big sombrero, grinned at the district attorney, turned to Walworth and said, “Well, I guess I have to admit that some of these rule-of-thumb methods aren’t as good as these modern scientific methods.”
Walworth said angrily, “If these two would consent to a lie-detector test I’d very soon tell you what’s—”
“You mean they won’t?” the sheriff interrupted.
Beryl Quinlan said, “As long as you are antagonistic to my father we aren’t going to cooperate. We’ll answer questions, and that’s all.”
“Come, come,” the sheriff said soothingly. “Why don’t you take a lie-detector test, Beryl? It might help things along.”
“We will if you say so.”
Walworth heaved an audible sigh of relief. “I’d want them to step in this room one at a time,” he said.
“Sure, sure,” the sheriff announced. “Go ahead, Beryl.”
The district attorney glanced suspiciously at the sheriff, but his suspicions seemed allayed by the guileless expression on the veteran’s grizzled countenance.
Walworth had his apparatus all set up and it took him only a few minutes to take Beryl Quinlan into another office where he spent some twelve minutes with her on the lie-detector. Then he called for Roy Jasper, strapped the electrodes and controls to him, and again propounded his questions.