“So that’s why she was so good about tending my flowers,” Mrs. Wyler said through clenched teeth.
“Until this year,” Grandfather said. “This year her husband was no longer buried there, so she lost interest. Why did you move the body, Mrs. Loken? The dogs? Betsy digging with her little shovel?”
Mrs. Loken had gone ghastly white, and she wasn’t saying a thing.
“That’s all very well,” the Sheriff growled, “but one finger bone still doesn’t make much of a corpus delicti.”
“Oh, we have the rest of him,” Sergeant Reichel said. “He was buried right where Rastin told us to look — at Mrs. Loken’s lake cottage, under a flowerbed.”
“You told me to do it!” Mrs. Loken shrieked, jumping at Mrs. Wyler. “You said a man like him deserved to be dead!”
They hauled her away, still screaming.
After that the gathering broke up fast, and we were left alone with Mrs. Wyler. She’d aged in those last few minutes until she now looked as old as she actually was, which is a horrible condition for any woman to be in. She said, “I didn’t know. I always talk, but I never thought of anyone doing a thing like that.”
“People react to talk in different ways,” Grandfather said. “Do you know what happened to Mrs. Daille?”
“No—”
“She’d had a nervous breakdown before they moved here. Her doctor thought a quiet place in the country might be good for her. Because Daille was gone so much of the time he didn’t realize what you were doing to her until it was too late. He put her in a private mental hospital down in Indiana — it was expensive, he’s still paying for it — and while she was there she committed suicide. He’s trying to keep it a secret, for Betsy’s sake.”
“Men—” she croaked.
We left her.
“She’s as much a murderess as Mrs. Loken is,” I said, as we were getting into my jalopy.
“Yes,” Grandfather agreed, “but the law can’t touch her. We’ll leave it to her conscience — and hope she has one.”
“You already had everything figured out. Why all that fa de la with the Mother Goose rhymes?”
“Reichel hadn’t found the body yet, and I wanted to make certain I was right. Did you see Mrs. Loken’s face when I first mentioned bones in a flowerbed?”
“No. I was watching Betsy.”
“You and Pilkins both. Put him in the room with a murderess and he looks at someone else.”
“If you’d told me to watch a murderess, I’d have picked Mrs. Wyler. She looks like one. It was her back yard, too.”
Grandfather shook his head. “I knew she wasn’t directly involved in this particular murder because she told the truth about Daille’s wife. She said Daille took her on a trip and came back without her. She wouldn’t have said that if she’d been worried that the police might decide it wasn’t Daille’s wife they were looking for. You see — she hated Daille’s guts, and she really thought he had killed his wife, but where he did it wasn’t important to her. Where was very important to Mrs. Loken. From her point of view Mrs. Daille had to be killed here, to account for the bone. So she lied and said she’d seen Mrs. Daille at home after the trip, and that lie gave her away.”
“I still think something should be done about Mrs. Wyler,” I said. “She’s the only woman I ever met who could play a witch without being made up for the part. Isn’t there some way to punish her?”
“I think maybe there is,” Grandfather said. “It wouldn’t be much, but I suppose I’m bound to do what I can.”
What he did was persuade Jim Daille to sell his house to three crusty old bachelors. It would be nice to report that Mrs. Wyler mended her ways, dieted off a hundred pounds, and married one of them; but she didn’t. She put up with them for all of three weeks, and then she moved away.
Turnabout
by Miriam Allen deFord{© 1971 by Miriam Allen deFord.}
The first anonymous phone call to Mrs. Renfrew was bad enough — but it wasn’t obscene. The second anonymous phone call was worse than obscene…
The first call was annoying. The second was frightening. They both came in the middle of the morning on a weekday, when Howard was least likely to be there.
“Mrs. Renfrew?” The voice was a woman’s, unfamiliar.
“Yes. Who is it?”
“That doesn’t matter — a friend. Does the name Lotta mean anything to you?”
“Lotta? No, I don’t — do you mean your name is Lotta?”
The caller laughed. “Hardly. Well, Mrs. Renfrew, I think it my duty to warn you. Lotta Corey, your husband’s secretary.”
“Oh, nonsense,” Madge Renfrew said brusquely. “My husband often speaks of his secretary, and he has no personal interest in her whatever. In fact, I believe he told me she had been out of the office all last week because of some kind of heart trouble, and if she couldn’t keep up he’d have to replace her.”
The woman laughed again, not pleasantly. “Oh, yes, she has heart trouble, all right. In both senses of the word. Well, if you think I’m some jealous female just being catty, I suggest that you find out where she was when he made that trip to Chicago last month.”
“I think you’re being offensive,” Mrs. Renfrew said coldly. “Goodbye.”
Of all the cliché soap-opera situations, she thought angrily. Wait till she reported it to Howard that evening!
But through the afternoon a memory began seeping in. The way she had tried to get Howard at the hotel he told her he’d be staying at, to remind him he must be back in time for the Barretts’ dinner on Thursday, and how the hotel clerk had said Howard wasn’t registered there. He could have had a dozen reasons for changing hotels and not have thought of telling her. But—
Their marriage was no great romance; neither of them had ever pretended that. If she hadn’t been an heiress, she doubted if he would have married her. She was considerably older, an inch taller, and the best anyone had ever said about her appearance was that she was nice-looking. But they had been getting along well together — had been for 14 years — and he was no gigolo; he worked hard and was prospering in his own right. He was well-born — better than she was — and in earlier days he’d been handsome. They had no children because neither of them wanted any. It was a satisfactory enough marriage, and Madge Renfrew had not the slightest intention of having it broken.
But she did not mention the phone call to Howard that evening.
It was a week later that the second phone call came. This time the voice was a man’s.
It began like the other one: “Mrs. Renfrew?”
“Yes, who is calling?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Just listen. Mrs. Renfrew, my business is killing people. I am what they call a professional killer.”
She was too horrified to speak.
“Perhaps you would like to know that your husband has offered me $10,000 to dispose of you.”
“You’re insane,” she breathed. “Or is this your idea of a crazy joke?”
“No joke. And I’m not insane. I would be, though, if I took up that offer without getting in touch with you first.”
“What— why—”
He chuckled unpleasantly.
“I plan my jobs,” he said in a matter-of-fact way. “I find out all I can about the subject, to make a good clean job of it. I’m not a common thug, Mrs. Renfrew, and I have a reputation in my field. No case I’ve handled has ever been suspected of being anything but a natural death.”