There was some sentiment for rescuing him. The sides of the gorge were too steep for a safe descent in good weather, and out of the question now, with snow covering everything and making it impossible to see where you could or could not get a decent foothold. According to Nigel, if you followed the creek a mile or so downstream, you’d reach a spot where the stream could be easily crossed, and from that point you could wade upstream until you reached Orris. Of course it would take a long time to walk a mile cross-country through two feet of snow, and it would take at least as long to return along a frozen creek bed, not to mention the risk of putting a foot wrong and spraining an ankle or breaking a leg.
“Leave him,” Dakin Littlefield counseled.
“But he’ll die!” one of the women wailed. (I believe it was Earlene Cobbett. Her cousin Molly had had a busy night, starring in Carolyn’s dream and then screaming when she discovered Jonathan Rathburn’s body. Now it was the heavily freckled Earlene’s turn, and she’d let out a scream of her own at Greg Savage’s report of Orris’s fall; a propensity for full-throated shrieking seemed to run in the Cobbett family.)
“Not likely,” Littlefield said.
“I don’t see how you can say that,” Mrs. Colibri said. “It seems to me that people die of exposure all the time. And they die of shock, too, when they suffer severe trauma and don’t receive medical attention.”
“Happens all the time,” Littlefield agreed. “But only to people who are alive to begin with.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s already as dead as a doornail,” Littlefield said, his words as cruel as the mouth they came out of. “He had a long drop and a hard landing. He probably dashed out what brains he had on that rock, and if that didn’t kill him the broken neck did. See how he’s lying?”
“It’s an awkward lie,” Colonel Blount-Buller allowed.
“It’s not a hard position to get into,” Littlefield said, “as long as you’re a chicken and somebody’s already wrung your neck for you. Face it, the man’s toast. His future is all in the past. Anybody else goes after him, he’s odds-on to take the same kind of spill this guy took and wind up in the same kind of shape. We already have two men dead, which is on the high side for a quiet weekend in the country. Somebody else wants to round out the hat trick, be my guest, but I think you’re out of your mind.”
“But what are we to do?” Nigel Eglantine asked. “We can’t just leave him there, can we?”
“Why not? He’s not going anywhere.”
Somebody said something about predatory scavengers, and a few heads looked heavenward, as if to spot a vulture circling patiently overhead. There was nothing up there but the sky.
“He’s reasonably safe in this weather,” Dakin Littlefield said. “And the longer he lies there the safer he gets, because once he freezes solid he can quit worrying that something’s going to start gnawing on him. Not that he’s doing any worrying of his own as it is.”
A sob, wrenching enough to melt a heart of stone, tore from the throat of Earlene Cobbett.
It had no discernible effect on Lettice’s new husband. “Say a couple of us managed to get to him,” he went on mercilessly, “which’d be a neat trick, and say we got the body up, which’d be a neater one. Then what?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We’d just have to leave him outside,” he said. “On the back porch, stacked like cordwood and with a rug tossed over him. We may be a few days waiting for the rest of the world to reach us, and he’ll keep a lot better outside in the cold than inside where it’s warm.” His nose wrinkled at the notion. “Where would we put him, anyway? The library’s already out of bounds because there’s a dead body in it. If that genius over there”-a wave in my direction-“hadn’t managed to sell everybody on the idea that Rathburn was murdered, we could have moved him outside before he started to get ripe.”
“I say,” the colonel reminded him. “There are ladies present, Littlefield.”
“Did I curse without knowing it, Colonel? When did ‘ripe’ get to be a swear word?”
Blount-Buller cleared his throat. “All a bit indelicate, wouldn’t you say?”
The debate went on, but I’d lost interest in it. I didn’t much want to walk over to the gully’s rim, but I forced myself, and had a look at the rope cables that had given way, sending poor Orris to his death.
I remembered the words of the clown who’d driven us from the station at Pattaskinnick. Good strong rope, he’d called it, and then he’d gone on to describe how rain could soak into the rope, and how it would swell when it froze, severing fibers, and go on thawing and freezing until it had sustained enough invisible damage that it would, as he’d put it, snap like a twig.
I looked closely at the good strong rope and saw where it had snapped like a twig. And then I turned my head quickly, to make sure nobody was standing too close to me. I was, after all, right at the edge of the gorge, and a quick shove would send me plummeting to a fate worse than Orris’s.
And someone might be inclined to supply that little push.
No one was standing dangerously near me, but I drew back from the brink all the same. Greg Savage was saying something, but I wasn’t paying attention to the words, just waiting for a pause. When one came along I grabbed my chance.
“The body has to stay where it is,” I said. “That’s the way the police will want it.”
Someone wanted to know what the police had to do with it. “You don’t need the police when someone dies accidentally,” I was told. “Not when it’s an obvious accident, not out here in the country. All you need is for a doctor to sign a death certificate.”
I hadn’t known that, and still wasn’t sure it was true. But it didn’t matter.
“It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “There were two ropes securing the bridge on this side of the creek, one on the left and one on the right. These were stout ropes, fully half an inch thick. There’s no reason why they would have snapped.”
“They weren’t steel cables,” Miss Hardesty said. “Rope is rope. It’s strong, but it doesn’t last forever.”
I started to say something, but there was a gasp from Lettice. “My God,” she said, and clutched her husband’s arm. “We were the last people on that bridge!”
“We were the last to cross it,” he corrected her. “The guy down there was the last person on it.”
“Dakin, we could have been killed!”
“We could have been struck by lightning,” he said, “or swept away in a flash flood. But we weren’t. And we weren’t on the bridge when the ropes broke, either, which was lucky for us and not too lucky for that poor slob who was.”
Calling Orris a slob, while perhaps unimpeachable on grounds of fact, seemed to me a clear case of speaking ill of the dead. But I let it go, figuring the lousy maid service the Littlefields could now expect to receive from the scowling Earlene Cobbett was answer enough.
“One rope might break,” I said. “But not two, not both at once.”
“I wonder,” the colonel said. “If one rope was frayed or weakened by the elements, wouldn’t its fellow be similarly stressed?”
“To a degree,” I admitted. “But not to the point where they’d both go at the same instant.”
“I see your point, Rhodenbarr. But say one rope gives way. Wouldn’t that place additional stress on the other? And wouldn’t that be enough to finish off an already weakened rope?”
“There’d be a delay,” I said. “One rope would give way, and there’d be a few seconds while the fibers parted on the other one. Probably enough time for anyone on the bridge to get the hell off it.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “if he had his wits about him. Orris was by no means an imbecile, but none would call him quick-witted. He was unquestionably slow.”