Sergeant Reichel had gone over to use the radio on his police car, and he came back and said to Grandfather, “They found it.”
“Congratulations,” Grandfather said. “I can’t remember a more efficient investigation.”
“Congratulations to you. It was right where you said it would be.”
“Yes. Well — people tend to repeat themselves.”
“I don’t want to sound inquisitive,” Sheriff Pilkins growled, “but if it’s this murder case of mine that you two are talking about I’d like to know what’s going on.”
“Where can we talk?” Grandfather asked. “Mrs. Wyler’s house?”
“Certainly not!” she snapped.
“Thought maybe you’d want to know why we were digging up your yard,” Grandfather said. “We’ve bothered Daille’s housekeeper plenty for one day, but I suppose we can go back there.”
Mrs. Wyler decided that maybe we could use her house, but she wouldn’t let us in until she’d spread newspapers all over her living-room floor. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone, so I stood in the corner behind Grandfather. Mrs. Wyler had her own oversized chair on the other side of the room, Ruth Loken and Joyce Dockett sat on the sofa, and the deputies and State Troopers played Alphonse and Gaston with the chairs that were left.
“The first question,” Grandfather said, keeping his eyes on Tru Wyler, “was where the bone came from. The only place for some distance around here where any dirt has ever been turned over is the flowerbed in your back yard.”
“I didn’t see any flowerbed,” the Sheriff objected.
“I had bad luck with it this year,” Mrs. Wyler said. “Nothing came up but weeds.”
“I saw it because I was looking for it,” Grandfather told the Sheriff. “Once I’d found it, there wasn’t much of a problem in figuring out what had happened. Look at it from Daille’s point of view. He had a body to dispose of, and in Mrs. Wyler’s yard there was a flowerbed maybe just spaded for the season and the right size for burying a body. What could be simpler than to go out on a night when no one was home, bury the body in the flowerbed, carry away any surplus dirt, and leave the bed all ready for planting?”
Mrs. Wyler said, “You mean all this time — in my flowerbed—”
Grandfather nodded. “For almost a year. But this spring Mrs. Dockett adopted a couple of stray dogs, and Daille looked out one day and saw the dogs digging in the flowerbed. Of course that wouldn’t do, so he picked another time when his neighbors were away, dug up the body, and hid it somewhere else. His timing was a little off, though. The flowers had already been planted. After he turned the dirt over they didn’t do well.”
Sheriff Pilkins leaned forward. “The bone?”
“Working at night he easily could have overlooked one little bone. Or maybe the dogs did dig up something. Anyway, Betsy found it.”
“So that’s what you were getting at with that Mother Goose stuff about bones in flowerbeds!”
Grandfather grinned. “Not exactly, but that’s why we dug up your yard, Mrs. Wyler. I figured that the body wouldn’t be there, but we had to check, and there was always the chance that more than one bone had been overlooked.”
She nodded, working the accordion under her chin. “I see. He dug up the body—” She paused. “My flowers were planted toward the end of April, so if he dug there shortly after that — for a moment you had me fooled, Mr. Rastin. I thought you were an exceptional man, meaning that you might possibly possess normal intelligence. I was wrong. This year Daille was gone all spring. If the dogs were digging in my flowerbed he wouldn’t have seen them, and he couldn’t have done any digging there himself.”
“He could have returned at night. With you and Mrs. Loken gone—”
“No.” She shook her head. “It’s no use, Mr. Rastin. You can’t think that body into my flowerbed. It was early summer last year when Mrs. Daille disappeared, and my flowers had a nice start by then. He couldn’t have buried her there without ruining them, and last year the flowers were beautiful.”
The Sheriff said drily, “I can’t see Daille burying his wife so shallow that a dog could disturb the body.”
“Frankly, neither can I,” Grandfather agreed unexpectedly. “And if he wouldn’t do it that way, and if the flowerbed wasn’t disturbed when she disappeared, and if he wasn’t home this spring to dig her up, that brings us to the next question: Whose body was it? Because there was a body in your flowerbed, Mrs. Wyler. That was where the bone came from. Unfortunately, Sheriff Pilkins has a talent for jumping at conclusions. Daille’s daughter had the bone, Daille’s wife was missing, so he jumped. The fact is, on this short street there are four missing persons.”
“Four?” the Sheriff exclaimed.
“One wife,” Grandfather said, “and three husbands. Do you have anything to say about that, Mrs. Wyler?”
“Only that you get more ridiculous every time you open your mouth. All our husbands—”
“Divorced you? Ever since I heard about that I’ve been wondering if perhaps one of them didn’t act soon enough. But first, tell me how it is that you happen to have a flowerbed, Mrs. Wyler. I don’t mean to be discourteous, I’m just looking at the situation objectively. You don’t impress me as the gardening type. Did you plant the flowers yourself?”
“Well—”
“And spade the ground? And weed it? A flowerbed entirely surrounded by weeds would require a lot of weeding.”
Mrs. Wyler sat very still. She was looking a little the way the Egyptian Sphinx would look if it had a lot of chins. Then, very slowly, she turned to Mrs. Loken. “Ruth — Ruth always spaded it. Spaded it and planted it and weeded it. She said she was glad to do it for me. The whole thing was her idea. I was away, and when I came home she said, ‘You always talked about having a few flowers. Well, I’ve made a flowerbed for you.’ That must have been ten years ago.”
“Eleven,” Grandfather said. “Enough time to account for the fact that there wasn’t any tissue left on the bone. And this year she stopped weeding it?”
Mrs. Wyler did her accordion nod.
“And the first year she planted it was the year her husband ‘divorced’ her?”
Mrs. Wyler hesitated. “I think — yes—”
“We had four missing persons on this street,” Grandfather said. “Thanks to some remarkably quick and efficient investigating by Sergeant Reichel, three of them are accounted for. Daille’s wife died down in Indiana, as Daille said, and is buried there. Mr. Wyler divorced his wife twenty years ago, and he died five years later and is buried in Hollyhock Cemetery in Wiston. Mr. Dockett is still alive, living in Cincinnati. He remarried and has seven children. Mr. Loken disappeared eleven years ago and hasn’t been seen or heard from since — not until this evening, anyway, except for one finger bone. Would you like to tell us about him, Mrs. Loken?”
Now she was the Sphinx, minus chins, staring straight ahead and not moving a muscle.
Grandfather turned to Mrs. Wyler. “Let’s start over again. Instead of a husky man we have a rather small woman with a heavy husband to dispose of. That’s the description the sergeant turned up — a small man, with small hands, but very obese. Daille’s house hadn’t been built eleven years ago, and Mrs. Loken’s only neighbors were Mrs. Wyler, who frequently stayed overnight with her sister, and Mrs. Dockett, who even then was hard of hearing. Maybe Mrs. Loken had the idea of dragging the body to that wood on the other side of the highway, but she quickly found out that she couldn’t do it. She made a flowerbed instead.”