The search moved to the servants’ quarters and storage areas on the top floor, then back to the ground floor, with its maze of public rooms, its kitchen and pantry, and the guest bedroom shared by the Misses Dinmont and Hardesty, as well as the Eglantines’ private suite. The whole mass of guests and staff trooped through room after room, like Japanese tourists at the White House, determined to see everything.
They didn’t find Rhodenbarr. Not a trace of him, living or dead.
“He’s not in the house,” the colonel told them. “It would seem that he’s cut out on his own, though how or why escapes me.”
“Maybe he went to get help,” Carolyn suggested. “But all by himself? In the middle of the night? Without a word to anybody?”
“It’s hard to credit,” Blount-Buller agreed. “But we’ve searched everywhere, and if he’s not here he must be elsewhere. Point of elementary logic, wot?”
“Unless…”
Everyone looked at Carolyn.
“Unless something’s happened to him,” she managed, “and he’s with…”
“With?”
“With the others,” she said.
“The others,” several people repeated, puzzled, and then Miss Dinmont, who’d missed the action on the upper two floors but had wheeled herself gamely from room to room on the ground door, said, “Oh, of course. The other victims.”
“Actually,” Greg Savage said, “I thought of that.”
“You did?” his wife said, surprised.
“It seemed like something a compulsive killer might do, keep all his victims together. So I looked out the back door, where we moved the bodies, and they’re right where we left them.”
“Untouched,” someone said.
“Far as I can see. The lawn chairs we used, each with a body on it and a bedsheet tossed over it. Actually I couldn’t swear about the bodies, or even about the bedsheets, on account of the snow, but that’s how we left them yesterday and that’s what it looks like today. Three lawn chairs out there in the snow.”
“Three,” someone said.
“Right. Three bodies, three lawn chairs.”
“There should only be two bodies,” Mrs. Colibri said.
Savage rolled his eyes. “One-Jonathan Rathburn. Two-Orris Cobbett. Three-the cook, and I still don’t know her name, but she makes three, and-”
“Orris fell off the bridge,” someone said.
“And we left him where he fell,” someone else said.
Earlene Cobbett let out a reflexive yelp at this last announcement, but no one paid much attention. “My God,” Greg Savage said. “I figured three deaths, three bodies. But if Orris is still at the bottom of the gully, that means-”
And they rushed off to see just what it did mean.
Three lawn chairs, three bodies wrapped in sheets and covered with snow. They gathered around, no one quite daring to be the first to yank a sheet off a chair and display its contents. “Oh, somebody do something!” Carolyn cried, and the colonel cleared his throat and grabbed a sheet and gave a yank, sending powdery snow flying and displaying the frozen corpse of Jonathan Rathburn.
The second bedsheet went the way of the first, revealing the late cook.
“I can’t stand it,” Carolyn groaned, and the colonel tore away the third sheet, and somebody let out a scream, but it wasn’t Carolyn. Her worse fears went unrealized.
Because, while there was indeed a fresh corpse in the third chair, it wasn’t her uh friend Bernie Rhodenbarr.
It was Gordon Wolpert.
Rhodenbarr did it.
That was the clear consensus. Bernie Rhodenbarr, evidently some sort of crazed mass murderer, had claimed his fourth victim. While pretending to spearhead the investigation, he’d bided his time before adding one more to his chain of murders.
“But that’s impossible,” Carolyn said. “You people don’t know him. He’s a good, decent human being.”
“He proved that Mr. Rathburn had been murdered,” Cissy Eglantine remembered, “when we all thought it was an accident. Why would he do that?”
“To draw suspicion away from himself,” her husband suggested.
“But there was no suspicion, Nigel,” she said. “Not until he told us it was murder. You don’t suppose…”
“No,” he said firmly. “No, darling. It was not a tramp all along.”
“Rhodenbarr did indeed identify Rathburn as a murder victim,” the colonel said, picking up the ball. “And he went so far as to spearhead the investigation, if our amateur efforts were worthy of the label. The bloody cheek of the man!”
More than a few eyes turned toward Wolpert, their owners having taken the colonel literally. But there was no blood to be seen upon the dead man’s cheek. There were ligature marks on his throat, however, and it appeared that he had been strangled.
“And now he’s gone,” Rufus Quilp said. “Vanished, into thin air.”
“Why?” Carolyn demanded.
“Why?”
“Yeah, why? If he’s this diabolical killer who’s knocking people off and pretending to investigate all at the same time, why would he cut out and run? Did anybody see him kill Wolpert?” No one had. “So none of us would have had any reason to suspect him. So why wouldn’t he stick around and keep on playing the game?”
Someone asked her what she was getting at.
“The truth,” she said. “Bernie’s here somewhere. He’s got to be. He wouldn’t kill anybody. And he wouldn’t have left, not without me.”
“If he’s still here,” Dakin Littlefield said, “maybe you’d like to point him out to us.”
“I thought that was him on the third lawn chair,” she said, “and so did everyone else. We were all surprised when it turned out to be Mr. Wolpert.”
“I was surprised,” Millicent piped up. “But I didn’t think it would be Bernie. I thought it would be Orris.”
Everyone looked at her. “Orris is dead,” her father said patiently.
“I know that.”
“He’s at the bottom of the gully,” her mother put in. “Did you think somebody would go to the trouble to move him?”
“I thought he walked,” Millicent said. “You know how people sometimes walk in their sleep? Well, maybe sometimes they walk in their death the same way. It happens a lot in the movies.”
“You’re not supposed to watch those pictures,” Greg said, but Carolyn was wide-eyed, gesturing wildly with her hands.
“Sleepwalking,” she said. “That’s it! Bernie must have walked in his sleep.”
“And while he was sleepwalking,” Rufus Quilp murmured, “he went in for a bit of sleep-strangling.”
“He must have thought he was going to get help,” Carolyn went on, “and he must have forgotten the bridge was out, and-this way, everybody! Hurry!”
And off she went, and off they went after her.
“Look!”
But they were already looking-at a crumpled form down at the bottom of the gully. It lay a few yards distant from another crumpled form, the snow-covered remains of Orris Cobbett. The new crumpled form had a light dusting of snow on it, but not enough to obscure it completely. You could see the pants, the jacket, the shoes.
“That’s his jacket,” Carolyn cried. “That’s his pants. Those are his shoes. Ohmigod, it’s him!”
There was a certain amount of discussion as to what ought to be done next. Someone suggested that Rhodenbarr might still be alive. While the same fall had broken Orris’s neck, the gully’s latest victim might have landed differently, merely breaking a dozen bones and knocking himself senseless. But would he have died of exposure since then? Or might he be still alive, and might quick action prevent his dying of exposure?