“No... oh, no!”
Nem looked at her with compassion.
“I’m as sure as if we’d already found her.” He looked away from the housekeeper’s livid face. “We’ll have to search.”
III
His mournful certitude wrenched a shuddering sigh from the invalid’s lips. It evoked a defiant challenge from Ellen Clarke:
“I don’t believe it! If it’s true, it’s no more than what she deserved—”
“Ellen!” said her mistress sharply.
Nem looked at the trembling housekeeper.
“Where did you go after you left George Link’s garage last night, Miss Clarke?”
She glared at him, but terror was writ upon her.
“So this is his doing? Your snooping around here — oh, I could kill him, and her too!” She laughed on a hysterical note. “But I didn’t, God knows!”
“Mighty foolish of you to go down there with your threats,” he said softly.
Alice Sutton spoke in breathless whisper, one thin hand at her throat.
“I... I knew nothing of all this. What does it mean?”
Sutton quelled the housekeeper with a look.
“Is it necessary that my wife listen to all this? She isn’t strong enough to stand such a scene, Mr. Parsons.”
He was behind the wheel chair, and he touched his heart with a slight, significant gesture. Nem glanced at her pityingly.
“ ’Course not; just make her comfortable, and come back to me.”
Sutton guided the noiseless vehicle out through the kitchen to the front of the house. Nem surveyed the housekeeper, waved her into a chair with a curt nod of his head.
“You hain’t answered me, Miss Clarke; where’d you go after you left George Link at the garage?”
Her hands twisted feverishly in her lap; her light eyes gleamed with fear and malevolence.
“I went — walking.”
“Alone?” Nem persisted.
“Alone. Oh, I was mad enough to strangle her; I’ll grant you that. I reckon you know why. He was mine, George was, until she came along with her simpering face and yellow hair. But I took it out just in walking last night. It was pelting rain; blowing hard, too; but I didn’t mind that. I walked out Easton way — miles and miles, I guess!”
“Meet any one?” Nem inquired idly.
She shook her head.
“Not a soul. ’Twas close to one when I came in. I’d sat on a stile, thinking, for I don’t know how long.” Defiance edged her tone again. “I suppose you’re looking for an alibi; why don’t you find your dead girl first!”
He couldn’t help pitying anything so consumed by venom. She was an embodied fury as she crouched there in the kitchen chair, glaring up at him.
“Reckon I will.” He turned to face Sutton, who had come back, and was looking from one to the other. “Guess I’ll have to ask you to show me around, Mr. Sutton. It oughtn’t to take long.”
Sutton shivered, his eyes still resting upon the housekeeper, as if she were exerting some strange charm over him.
“Of course. I still can’t believe — where do you want to look?”
“Start with the cellar,” Nem suggested.
The master of the bungalow led the way through the storeroom, with its gruesome mark of violence, to the cellar door. His flash lighted Nem’s creaking steps down the short flight, while he followed just behind.
The basement was a tidy, barren place. The coal bin was empty, yawning black under the shifting disk of light. The partitioned-off vegetable closet at the far end contained only a few cabbages and perhaps a bushel of potatoes, beneath which not so much as the body of a cat could have been hidden. There was no shed, no possible place of concealment.
“Nothing here, thank God!” Arthur Sutton murmured, mopping his forehead.
He showed the strain imposed upon him by the gruesome task, and Nem felt again that this was an unnecessary evil to fall upon these people, who had already borne so much.
But he peered into the furnace and found its firepot, its grate and ash receptable clean and guiltless.
“Stopped the furnace, I see.”
“The past week’s been unseasonably warm,” Sutton reminded him. “Mrs. Sutton likes the fireplaces. Finished down here?”
Nem covered the last foot of cement, that gave no sign of cleavage; of having been tampered with, and sighed his assent.
“Satisfied. I’ll say you’re a careful housekeeper, professor. You got your cellar slicked up nicer’n most.”
Sutton overlooked the praise.
“Where next?”
Nem pondered, one hand on the stair rail.
“Hain’t no upstatirs to your place, is there?”
“Nothing but an unfinished attic, which is more air space than anything else.”
“How do you get up to it?”
“Only by ladder — and that’s out in the tool house — up through a trapdoor in the center hall.”
Nem smiled.
“ ’Tain’t likely that any one would carry a dead body up a ladder and through a trapdoor when it ’d be a whole lot easier to carry it out of the house. The likeliest way to dispose of a corpse is the ordinary way, professor. Burial. And you’ve got plenty of ground.”
Sutton followed Nem upstairs, and they passed directly outdoors from the storeroom. Nem stood beside his pale, perturbed host, looking down the slope into the little dell that formed the garden. Only a small, unpretentious building that seemed destined for a garage stood between the bungalow and the swamp land.
“How far does your land go, Mr. Sutton?”
“Down to that woven wire fence this side of the swamp.”
“H-m!” With ponderous, easy tread Nem lumbered down the path that led to the small building, tried the door with a rattle of its padlock. “What’s this, a garage?”
Arthur Sutton nodded.
“If ever I can afford a car, yes. Right now I use it as a tool house.”
“Keep your shovels and picks in here?”
“Yes, but the place is always locked.” Nem rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“Who’s got the key?”
“It always hangs in the outside pantry,” Sutton told him. “Where — you found the blood stain.”
“Mind getting it?” Nem asked, peering through the panes, and turned to watch the professor’s wiry stride up the small slope to the bungalow. He emerged from the outside pantry a moment later with the key dangling from his forefinger, swung down the path to the tool house, and unlocked the swinging doors.
The interior of the tool house, like the cellar, spoke a good word for Sutton’s orderliness. At the far end stood a carpenter’s bench, clean of shavings. A tool cabinet bespoke his handiness. Rakes, shovels, hoes, depended from proper nails on the studding of the little shack, all oiled and polished and clean.
A suit of blue denim overalls hung from another peg, above a clean pair of rubber boots. These Nem inspected with a casual air, and photographic certainty of detail. He came to a pile of gunny sacks stacked neatly in one corner, felt them. They were damp; sufficiently impregnated with fresh loam to soil Nem’s hands. And on one he discovered a tiny green plant.
He looked up, nether lip puckered between his teeth, to see Arthur Sutton staring out of the window, toward the bungalow. He looked troubled; eager, perhaps, to be with his wife in this time of stress.
“What are these for, Mr. Sutton?”
The man started, as if his thoughts were elsewhere.
“Those are fertilizer sacks. I’m saving them because I get a dime rebate on each. Look out — they’re covered with garden loam; I just finished spading my early garden before the rain. I wanted to get the fertilizer in—”
Nem straightened with a grunt. He appeared to have gleaned all he could from the tool house. He stood in the doorway, looking over the land.