“You haven’t planted yet, have you?”
“Not yet,” Sutton said in that tired voice of his. “I’ll do it as soon as the ground dries a little more. It’s pretty damp down there.”
“Reckon gardening’s your hobby, professor,” Nem said. “Do you depend a lot on your garden for your greens?”
“Yes. And I’m a bit late getting things in this spring. I started my hotbed earlier, though,” he vouchsafed as he saw Nem’s round eyes fasten upon the cement cold frame that nestled against the bottom of the south slope. It was perhaps six feet long, and four wide, with thin cement walls two feet high on the north side, sloping to a foot high on the south.
And thither Nem directed their steps. The glass panes had been removed, and were stacked in orderly array against the wall. The tender, early grass of the lawn bordered the frame; and the look of it to the south attracted Nem’s interest. It seemed to have been recently beaten down as with a roller, or some heavy weight, for the length of the hotbed, and was just beginning to straighten up again. The hotbed itself was planted with serried rows of radishes about an inch high. But these brought a puzzled frown to Nem’s brow. They should have been flourishing, yet they drooped forlornly above their rich soil.
He bent grotesquely over them, pudgy hands resting on his knees.
“Radishes look kind of peaked, Mr. Sutton. Funny for ’em to wither down, after last night’s rain.”
But he had no need of calling Sutton’s attention to this irregularity. For he, too, was staring at the hotbed; eyes intent; pale face set.
“You’re right,” he told the detective in a brittle voice. “I’m gardener enough to know that these plants have been tampered with. But — why?”
Nem’s own voice quivered with excitement as he acknowledged the fear that leaped into the other man’s eyes.
“They’ve been taken up and replanted, within twenty-four hours,” Nem said. “It was done in the dark, too — or else done mighty carelessly, for the rows aren’t a mite regular.”
Arthur Sutton was a canny man. He dashed a hand across his brow, that glistened, shuddered.
“It’s the size and shape of a grave, Parsons—”
Nem nodded.
“It is a grave. The Miller girl’s; I figure whoever made it her grave thought resetting the radishes would be blind enough to keep any one from looking further down. Kind of lucky that radishes can’t be transplanted without withering on the next day. Lucky, too, I came up to-day, before they got strong and healthy again.”
Sutton touched the little muscle that throbbed in his lean, dark jaw.
“Horrible!” Yet he seemed to believe Nem’s theory, unwillingly enough. “But the dirt — where was it piled?”
Nem pointed to the trampled-down grass.
“Tarpaulin — no, those burlap fertilizer sacks in your tool house were used to protect the grass. And — I found a young radish plant on one of the sacks. Let’s go get a spade and see how near right I am.”
He had to guide the other man back to the tool house. Arthur Sutton walked like a man in a daze of horror.
“Could Ellen — would she have thought of anything so macabre?”
“She’s big and strong enough,” Nem admitted gravely. “And she hated Rose Miller enough to kill her.” He picked up two shovels, halted by the pile of sackcloth. “Want to lay down the sacks to keep your grass fresh?”
Sutton shook his head.
“Good God, no! Let’s find out as soon as we can—”
So they retraced their steps, and with ruthless disregard for the tender, withered plants, threw out the moist loam in spadefuls.
Nem, panting from the unusual exertion, finished his train of thought.
“She hated the girl, Mr. Sutton, and if the wish could kill — but most every one livin’ would be in the dock if to will some one else dead was murder — steady, there!”
Scarcely two feet down, Nem’s shovel found a soft obstruction which made him withdraw the implement quickly. Sutton stood by, transmuted, fixed with horror, while Nem ladled handfuls of earth aside.
A bit of light blue cotton; a tendril of yellow hair; peeping beneath a ragged square of sackcloth, that Nem drew aside with gentle fingers. And they looked upon lost Rose Miller as she stared up at the sky with sightless, astonished blue gaze, fixed now upon eternity.
“Poor child!” whispered Sutton. And again: “Poor child!”
Nem, still holding the square of burlap that had protected her soft, round prettiness from the desecration of loose earth, uttered an untranslatable sound. He was staring at her stiff, folded hands, arranged as reverently as any corpse’s for Christian burial.
Between the cold fingers were laid a handful of withered crocuses; and in the midst of the faded flowers there protruded, from the girl’s breast, the horn handled knife that had found its sheath in her heart.
“God!” said Arthur Sutton, and turned away.
Nem covered the pitiful, blind face with the sackcloth, looked past his companion to the bungalow on the hill. He was thinking of Ellen Clarke, and the unseemly knife she had used to pare potatoes with. This small sharp blade, that was buried in the crimsoned bosom of the dead girl, must have come from the rack above the sink!
“We won’t leave her like this long,” he said, and they made their way to the house.
IV
The inquest took place in Reynolds’s Undertaking Parlors at noon the next day. After the legal formality, lean, lank Tom O’Malley, chief of Bridgehaven’s police force, walked back to headquarters beside Nem in sulky silence.
At the station he followed Nem into the dreary little den the latter chose as his office, flung himself irritably upon the edge of Nem’s flat top desk.
“Why you haven’t arrested the Clarke woman for the murder is one of the Eleusian mysteries,” he barked bitterly. “She’s as guilty as bloodshed can make her, or I’m an Indian!”
He clamped a thin black cigar into his wide mouth for a dry smoke and rumpled his brick red thatch.
Nem packed a fresh load into his battered pipe and mournfully regarded an incipient crack in the bowl.
“Kind of looks that way, doesn’t it?” he sighed. “ ’Fraid I got a bad piece of wood in this pipe, Tom, though it cost me—”
But O’Malley brushed aside Nem’s divergence.
“It’s a plain, unvarnished case of jealousy,” he snapped. “Motive, opportunity, and malice are all there. You know what women of that age and temperament are — sex complexes and all the rest of it.”
Nem looked down his nose in a way that made O’Malley yearn to punch him.
“So the book says, Tom.”
“It’s as clear as daylight. Ellen Clarke had been brooding over George Link’s defection, at the little chippie’s flaunting him before her, for a long time. Wednesday night brought things to a head. She knew Rose had a date with Link later in the evening. She gave tire girl one last chance when she went down to Link’s garage, stormed at him, threatened — threatened to cut the girl’s heart out if she didn’t let him alone! And he laughed at her. That laugh was what signed the girl’s death sentence, Nem.
“Ellen Clarke didn’t go walking in the rain; not then, anyway. She went back to the Sutton’s, slipped in the back way, knowing that Sutton was out, that Mis’ Sutton would be asleep before ten o’clock, when the girl would be leaving to meet George. The house was hers.
“She hid herself in that back closet you tell about, hate boilin’ up in her. She waited there, fingering that newly sharpened paring knife — waited for Rose to come in for her raincoat. And when she did, Ellen Clarke struck with sure aim. The girl died between nine and ten, remember.