Verner sat back, frowning. “What is Ellen Grove like?”
“Quietly pretty, and very hard-working. She’s a nice girl.”
“She stayed with him all the time?”
“Yes. He was her guardian. Her mother and father were killed in an accident about ten years ago.”
“He had no children of his own?”
“No, and these cabins are worth a lot now, she stands to inherit them — and that, you see, provides a motive, especially since she’d wanted to marry a boy who was just drafted, and Grove refused to give permission. True to form, he had a big fight with the boy, called him all kinds of names, and threw him off the place.”
“Where was he when Grove was killed?”
“Two thousand miles away, in an Army camp.”
Verner looked at the cabin in silence, his gaze remote and speculative.
“The cabin is solidly built?”
“I’ve gone over every part of it. The floor and ceiling are solid, and the walls are just as solid.”
“Then, the door was locked in three different ways, the windows were locked and the screening intact, and the floor, walls, and ceiling were solid?”
The sheriff nodded.
“What chance is there that as she used the electric saw, the murderer hid in Grove’s bathroom — and when Ellen Grove went past into Grove’s bedroom, the murderer stepped out through the opening she had made, and left the cabin through her door?”
The sheriff shook his head regretfully. “That was another triple-locked door.”
“Do you mean that Ellen Grove, when she brought in the electric saw to cut through the wall, stopped and set the saw down in order to lock the door three times behind her?”
“That’s it exactly. You see, Grove was a fanatic about having doors locked at night. Ellen was worried about cutting through this wall, but she was worried about her uncle. She wasn’t thinking too clearly. She remembers setting the saw on a chair by the door of her room, methodically closing the screen door and locking it, just as she would do at night, then closing the inside door and locking the lock, sliding home the bolt, and fastening the chain. And that’s how it was when we got here. Exactly the same as in Grove’s end of the cabin.”
“The screen door, too, was locked from the inside?”
“Didn’t I mention that?” said the sheriff. “Yes, both screen doors were locked from inside. There’s a little lever inside that moves up and down to work the lock. There’s no arrangement for locking them from outside.”
“Then we have two locked doors, one behind the other?”
“Right. And another identical set in the other end of the cabin.”
“How long was Ellen Grove in her uncle’s end of the cabin?”
“Long enough to see what had happened, and to make the phone call.”
“Three or four minutes?”
“Yes, I would say at least that long,” the sheriff replied.
“Were the shades up or down?”
“Down.”
“Did she examine the room?”
“No.”
“When she phoned you, she mentioned that the windows were locked?”
“Yes.”
“How did she know?”
“When she was outside trying to wake up her uncle, she tried the windows.”
Verner nodded. “All right. Let’s take a look at those windows first.”
The sheriff handed Verner a five-cell flashlight to augment the fast-fading light of day, and, one-by-one, they examined the windows. Each one was covered with screening tightly stapled to the window frame, and painted over along the edges so that there remained no place not sealed to the frame. Verner closely examined the screening, and the frames around the windows, then walked slowly around the cabin, shining the light over walls finished with clapboards solidly nailed down, and painted dark-green.
He shone the light along the base of the cabin, built on wooden piles set in the ground, with a tight barrier of dark-green wooden strips to keep out animals. At the back, beside a tank of bottled gas, was a loose section of this barrier. Verner lifted it out with a faint tearing sound, to find an opening thickly covered with spider webs.
He walked slowly back to the front of the cabin, to look at the doors. The screen door by the little sign reading Office was locked. The sheriff swung the other screen door back, unlocked a plain paneled wooden door, snapped on the light, and they entered a cozily furnished girl’s room, where a trace of light perfume lingered in the air.
Verner glanced alertly around, then followed the sheriff through a small dim bathroom, past a tall narrow piece of wallboard leaning against a shower cabinet, through the opening in the bathroom wall, and out through another bathroom. The sheriff snapped on a light, and Verner was in a room where a large desk sat beside a rack of keys hanging from the wall. There was an old-fashioned safe in the corner of the room to one side of a bed covered with a sheet. On the other side of the bed was a night-table bearing a lamp, a phone, and an alarm clock. Directly above the bed was a doorbell, its two wires running down out of sight behind the head of the bed.
Verner looked at the door. It had the key turned in the lock, and a safety chain fastened so that the door could be opened only so far. On the door was a large bolt, whose end fit not into the usual type of thin metal fixture but into the curve of a heavy U-shaped rod of steel set into the wood itself.
The sheriff said drily, “That door is locked.”
Verner examined it closely, to see a slight gouge in the wood, where the bolt passed through the steel U. He slid the bolt back and forth, and it hissed lightly against the steel but didn’t touch the wood.
The door was painted a light cream color, and was old-fashioned, very plain, with thicker sections of wood between the panels. These thicker sections crossed the door from one side to the other, like the rungs of a ladder, and were square-edged, without trim or beveling of any kind.
“This door,” said Verner, “is an inside door, isn’t it?”
“Yes. That came from a house that was torn down when they put the new highway through. You see, with that highway, we expected tourists. Grove bought the doors and windows from the house and used them when he built the cabins.”
“This is lighter than a regular outside door?”
“It’s lighter weight. To do justice to that bolt, Grove should have had a solid oak door. But, that door wasn’t broken down. It tells us nothing.”
Verner shook his head. “Look at the dent in that wood just back of the place where the bolt slides into the U.”
The sheriff bent to study the spot, slid the bolt carefully back and forth, and straightened up, frowning.
Outside, there was a crunch of tires on gravel.
The sheriff murmured, “A tourist, probably. I’ll go out, and—”
Outside, there was the rapid click of a parking brake, then the slam of a car door. A rough male voice shouted, “Anybody home?” There was the sound of heels on gravel, a brief silence, and then a hammering on the other door of the cabin.
The sheriff growled under his breath, reached out to unbolt the door, but Verner stopped him, to speak in a whisper.
“Grove’s cousin?”
“Himself. How did you know?”
“If what I think is true, two minutes alone in here will give him the perfect crime. But the only safe way for him to get in is to come when you’re here, and decoy you outside.”
“You want him kept out?”
“No. Don’t tell him anyone else is here. Let him in by the other door, and give him time to get into this side of the cabin. Then come back in and shout to him to come out.”