Through repeated practice, I had trained myself to act perfectly natural in these situations, even when I was sure there was no audience. Now I put a faintly puzzled look on my face when my call brought nothing but silence, and began to look through the house. I covered the three downstairs rooms, letting my expression grow more puzzled all the time.
Then I mounted the stairs, glanced into both bedrooms and the bath, and came downstairs again. For a few moments I stood in the front room with the vaguely irked expression of a man who is more disappointed than worried at not finding his wife home when he expected her.
Finally I went out the back way, crossed the lawn to the Erlings’ and knocked at their back door. Ed Erling came to the door.
“Evening, Mr. Henshaw,” he said with a note of surprise in his voice. “Come on in.”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m just looking for my wife. She over here?”
He shook his head. “Haven’t seen her.”
“I guess she must be over at the Shermans’. She can’t be far, because she left the back door unlocked.”
“Oh, you been out?” he asked.
“Mr. Benjamin took me to the school board meeting and I just got home. Well, thanks, anyway. I’ll get over to the Shermans’.”
That was normal enough, I thought as I crossed my back yard again toward the house the other side of mine. When it came time for Ed Erling to remember how I had acted tonight, he’d certainly recall that there had been nothing in my manner to indicate I was making an attempt to cover up a guilty conscience. I hadn’t tried to look worried or implant in his mind that I was afraid something had happened to Hazel. I had made it a simple inquiry such as any husband might make when he unexpectedly found out his wife had gone out.
I stayed close to the rear of my own house as I crossed the yard, so as not to tread on any of the tulipbeds Hazel had set out all over the yard. In the dark I passed within feet of the old dry cistern with the pile of new lumber next to it, but didn’t even glance in that direction. It was so dark I couldn’t have seen it anyway, though from the corner of my eye I could make out the dim outline of the lumber pile next to it.
Of course Hazel wasn’t at the Shermans’ either. This time I let myself look thoroughly puzzled.
“She can’t have walked down to one of the stores, because even the drugstore closes at ten,” I said. “Wonder where she went?”
“Did you have the car?” Mrs. Sherman asked.
“No. Mr. Benjamin drove me to the school board meeting and back. I haven’t looked in the garage.”
“Why don’t you look?” George Sherman asked.
I peered out across the dark yard. “You have a flashlight you could loan me, Mr. Sherman? Hazel will skin me if I walk on one of her tulip beds.”
“Sure,” Sherman said.
While he was gone after the flashlight, Mrs. Sherman asked, “Isn’t your sister home either, Mr. Henshaw?”
“Mavis left for Chicago earlier this evening to visit our folks,” I said.
George Sherman came back with the flashlight and handed it to me. I wanted him to stroll over to the garage with me, but I couldn’t just bluntly ask him to. The whole thing would seem more natural if he trailed along on his own hook.
One of the first things I’d learned about George Sherman when I’d rented the bungalow next door to him six weeks before was that he was an avid Cleveland fan. Now I used the knowledge as bait.
As I moved across the back porch, I said, “Cleveland dropped one yesterday, I noticed.”
With Sherman this was enough to start an evening-long dissertation. On several occasions I had listened to him explain his favorite ball club’s 1954 Series performance so convincingly, he nearly had me believing its four straight losses were entirely due to bad breaks instead of the Giants’ superior playing. Now he followed me down the porch steps explaining the Cleveland misfortunes which had brought about yesterday’s loss. When I switched on the flashlight to start across the back lawn, he continued to follow, still talking.
The night was so dark, we could see nothing either side of the flashlight beam. When we neared the small pile of new lumber next to the cistern, I interrupted his apologia.
Flicking the beam over the pile, I said, “I’ve got to get to work on that cistern cover tomorrow before some kid falls through those rotten boards.”
Then I let the light play over the square wooden cover of the cistern.
“It was that triple of Los Angeles’ in the fifth,” Sherman resumed. “With a batting average of only a hundred seventeen, who’d ever expect — Hey, looks like somebody already fell through there.”
I had moved the light away from the cistern after holding it only long enough to give him a good look. Now I swung it back again.
“Yeah,” I said, walking toward the cover, whose rotten boards we could now see had given way in the center, leaving a gaping hole.
When I knelt at the edge of the hole and directed the light downward, George Sherman leaned over and peered into the deep pit also.
“My God!” he said. “There’s somebody down there!”
No one in Tuscola was even faintly suspicious of Hazel’s death. The primary reaction of everyone in town seemed to be sympathy for me at losing my bride after less than two months of marriage. If this was tempered by the thought that a skinny bride of nearly forty whose main attraction had been a rather vapid good nature shouldn’t be an irreparable loss to a tall and fairly good-looking man of thirty-five, it wasn’t apparent.
Nevertheless, the police had to make a routine investigation because of the nature of the presumed accident. Chief Howard Stoyle handled it personally, having me stop by his office the next morning. I found Tom Benjamin there too.
After the usual sympathetic cliches everybody uses in such circumstances, the fat chief said, “This is routine, you understand, Mr. Henshaw, but I have to ask some questions about last night. Just to try to fix the time of death and so on. Now I understand you were away from home at a school board meeting when it happened.”
“Yes,” I said. “Mr. Benjamin took me. I’ve been trying to get acquainted with as many facets of the town as I could, and he thought I might like to see the board in action.”
“Your wife was all right when you left?”
“She waved to me from the door. That was about eight-thirty. The meeting was scheduled for a quarter of nine.”
I looked at Benjamin for confirmation, and the old hardware merchant said, “That’s right. She was alive at eight-thirty. I yelled hello to her from the car and she called hello back.”
“What time was the meeting over?” Chief Stoyle asked.
“About ten-fifteen,” I said. “It must have been about ten-thirty when Mr. Benjamin dropped me in front of my house.”
“That places it between eight-thirty and ten-thirty,” the chief said thoughtfully. “Which conforms to the coroner’s guess. It was eleven when he examined the body, and he placed the time of death as two to four hours earlier. Far as you know, was your wife alone all evening?”
“My sister took the evening train to Chicago last night,” I explained. “Mr. Benjamin and I drove her to the station.”
When Benjamin nodded agreement to this, Chief Stoyle said, “Then she won’t be able to tell us anything. No point in talking to her.”
“She’ll be available if you want her,” I said. “I wired her this morning asking her to come home at once. It’s only about a four-hour train trip, so she should be in by evening.”
“Fine. But I don’t think I’ll be wanting her.”
I said, “I can’t understand what Hazel was doing out there in the dark.”