Maud grinned. She held it carelessly and trundled off toward the kitchen.
Isabel said, "I think . . ." She hesitated. "Will you excuse me? I have some things to attend to." She swooped away.
Alice and Duff were alone. She handed him the carbon copy of her work.
"He's fixed it," she said, still grim. "You see if he hasn't."
20
At five o'clock that afternoon, Fred pulled the big car up by the side of a dirt road, in a pleasant spot, where woods grew up a little slope at their right, and the road fell away before them down a hill and bent along the course of a brook. The silence was perfumed with pine and the smell of warm dust. There was no traffic. There was peace.
Alice leaned back on the cushions beside Duff and sighed, "I wish we'd brought a picnic."
Fred squirmed around to face them over the top of the front seat. "We've been gone nearly an hour. Is it all right to stay away so long?"
"He ought to be safe," said Duff cheerfully. "Killeen's there and Susan's there. The will's signed and the will's gone. And Alice is here with the pillbox."
"The pillbox," said Alice, wonderingly.
"We won't start with that," said Duff, "but we'll get to it." He passed cigarettes and stretched out his long legs. "Well, no soap on the telephone call. The telegraph office sent my wire up to Susan by somebody who happened to
be going that way. He doesn't know, they don't know, what time it got to her. Late, says they. Susan, the source of our impression that the call was maJde around eleven, is frank to say that she is by no means sure. It was raining, she thinks. The rain fell from eleven on. The tele' phone company doesn't take kindly to looking up their records, which rather leads me to believe that their records aren't so very complete. They say they'll try. But they can't tell me, right now, when that call was made. And you kids, right there La the house, never heard it at all."
"We can't help it," said Alice. "We just didn't"
"Why didn't you, I wonder?"
Fred said, "Ilie only thing I can say is that the phone sounds pretty dim when you're in Innes's room with the door closed. And aroimd eleven o'clock ... uh ... we were both in the closet, it so happens."
"That's right, we were," said Alice, very solemnly, because she wanted ta smile.
"Another thing," Fred went on. "If the water is running in the bathroom right next to the backstairs there, I guess I couldn't hear any bell. Well, it was running about eleven ten."
Alice said, "That was me."
"And then again, I was in there myself about twelve o'clock," said Fred, matter-of-fact.
"Thanks," said Duff. "It's a pleasure to listen to intelligent people. But do you know, I don't think we're going to find out exactly when that phone rang."
"Why does it matter so much?"
"Perhaps it doesn't," said Duff placidly. "After all, if we can't prove it rang at eleven o'clock or nearly, neither can we prove that it didn't. I mean, vice versa, of course."
Alice and Fred looked bewildered.
"So we'll build up what we know, doing without the one little fact it seems we can't have. Settle down, you kids, and breathe the nice fresh air. I'ingoing to talk for quite a while."
Having made this statement, he said nothing. The was good. They were far, far away from the Whitloc! house, and peace settied cozily around them. Alice relaxed. She was glad that Innes had insisted tliat Art Killeen
stay at the house. It's better, she thought, with just us. Duff was the most peaceful man in the world, and one needn't strain oneself with Fred, of course. She smiled lazily at Fred, who took off his cap and put his feet up.
"If you're sure Innes is O.K.," he murmured.
"Oh, Inues has fixed that," said Alice sleepily.
"I'll be goldamed if I'd have bought them off," said Fred. "He let them get away with it. He appeased them, that's what he did."
"He didn't want to die."
"Nuts," said Fred. "So nobody wants to die." He muttered something under his breath.
"No isolationist, he," said Duff suddenly. He jerked his thumb at Fred, and Alice giggled. Fred ruffled up his hair with his fine hand and grinned sheepishly.
"This is a nasty murder," said Duff. "This murder that hasn't happened yet. Does it strike you that all these attempts have been singularly slipshod? A lamp falls over. It might hit the right victim. It might not. It didn't hit anyone, but it was a very careless business."
"Yeah," said Fred, half-kidding, "the murderess certainly shoulda been more careful."
"The detour sign moved," went on Duff. "What a haphazard device that was! How easy it would have been for a strange car, a car full of innocent, unknown people, to have gone over into that pit and been killed. How uncertain a method it was of getting the right parties."
"Which was us," Fred grimaced. "But I see what you mean."
"It's almost as if the murderer's right hand doesn't know what his left is doing," mused Duff. "Like the veal in the meat loaf. Less crime than carelessness. Criminal carelessness. One could say one hadn't thought. A kind of unconscious murder."
"The dampers turned wasn't so darned unconscious." "Who can say?" said Duff. "A woman doesn't understand a furnace. Or so she tells herself. She will make it nice and warm for Innes. She will put plenty of coal on. She doesn't understand dampers and drafts. She closes it up, with the very best intentions."
"You mean that? You think it was a mistake?" "It was no mistake," Duff said, "but a person skilled at deceiving herself could have done the murder and looked the other way."
"What's the bearing?" asked Fred.
"I'm being profound and psychological," said Duff sternly. "Be quiet. Now, we must say to ourselves, why? What motive? You tellme it must be on account of money. Murder for money. It's not unheard of."
"Seems to me I've heard of it," said Fred. "Yeah."
"Who wants money that bad and why?''
"Do you have to ask why?" said Alice in a timid voice.
"Money buys," said Duff, "but it buys a lot of different things. Take Gertrude. What does she want to buy?"
"Her clothes are terrible," said Alice.
"Be quiet," said Fred, "or else be profound, like us. She'd buy the status quo, eh, Mr. Duff?"
"Her prestige," said Duff. "Yes, I think so, don't you?"
"She's got to be the Whidock in the Whitlock house on the hill." Fred nodded
"But she's got her own money," objected Alice. "She's the one who's got some left."
"The regime was on the verge of a change, however," said Duff quietly. "Innes was balking. He was going to take over. The bank would know. Gerrtrude would no longer be mistress of her own fortune, in the bank's eyes. Therefore I suppose the town would know. Charity of their brother. The Whitlock girls,"
"Oh," said Alice.
"Did Gertrude like the idea?"
"She didn't like it," said Alice. "I remember."
"Vanity in her poison," said Duff, in his gentlest voice. "But not hatred. Not revenge."
"No?"
"No, because Gertrude rather likes being blind Don't gasp. She was an unattractive, a haughty, and a proud young girl, unlikely to marry. Unfitted to marry. Unapproachable. Maybe she knew that. Her excuse, you see, for being a spinster, lies in her blindness. A tragedy all her own, which she loves and cherishes, believe me."
"I can't believe . . ."
"However it may have been at the beginning, that's Gertrude now. But she must maintain her picture of herself. Her tragedy must be high class and take place in
dignified economic circumstaiices. She wouldn't enjoy the picture of herself as blind and poor"
"No."
"Gertrude deceives herself easily, wouldn't you say so?"
"She swallowed an awful lot of terribly sticky flattery from you," said Alice.
"She lapped it up."
"Yeah, she would," said Fred.
"Yet, Gertrude's idea of keeping up to snuff, so Josephine tells me, is by giving orders. That's the one element in her character . . . Tell me, is it possible? Can you imagine, with any reality, Gertrude Whitlock, in person and not by deputy, knocking over a lamp and then forgetting it, rather? Gertrude wishing her brother dead so that she might keep her own fortune and have another and stay where she is, a tragic and a lovely legend in the town for the rest of her days?"