I climbed up the driveway a second time. Bradshaw had reached the house. He was sitting on the doorstep with a sick look on his face. Light poured over him from the open door and cast his bowed shadow brokenly on the flagstones.
“She is dead, Mr. Archer.”
I looked in. Helen was lying on her side behind the door. Blood had run from a round bullet hole in her forehead and formed a pool on the tiles. It was coagulating at the edges, like frost on a dark puddle. I touched her sad face. She was already turning cold. It was nine-seventeen by my watch.
Between the door and the pool of blood I found a faint brown hand-print still sticky to the touch. It was about the size of Dolly’s hand. She could have fallen accidentally, but the thought twisted through my head that she was doing her best to be tried for murder. Which didn’t necessarily mean that she was innocent.
Bradshaw leaned like a convalescent in the doorway. “Poor Helen. This is a heinous thing. Do you suppose the fellow who attacked us–?”
“I’d say she’s been dead for at least two hours. Of course he may have come back to wipe out his traces or retrieve his gun. He acted guilty.”
“He certainly did.”
“Did Helen Haggerty ever mention Nevada?”
He looked surprised. “I don’t believe so. Why?”
“The car our friend drove away in had a Nevada license.”
“I see. Well, I suppose we must call the police.”
“They’ll resent it if we don’t.”
“Will you? I’m afraid I’m feeling rather shaken.”
“It’s better if you do, Bradshaw. She worked for the college, and you can keep the scandal to a minimum.”
“Scandal? I hadn’t even thought of that.”
He forced himself to walk past her to the telephone on the far side of the room. I went through the other rooms quickly. One bedroom was completely bare except for a kitchen chair and a plain table which she had been using as a working desk. A sheaf of test papers conjugating French irregular verbs lay on top of the table. Piles of books, French and German dictionaries and grammars and collections of poetry and prose, stood around it. I opened one at the flyleaf. It was rubberstamped in purple ink: Professor Helen Haggerty, Maple Park College, Maple Park, Illinois.
The other bedroom was furnished in rather fussy elegance with new French Provincial pieces, lambswool rugs on the polished tile floor, soft heavy handwoven drapes at the enormous window. The wardrobe contained a row of dresses and skirts with Magnin and Bullocks labels, and under them a row of new shoes to match. The chest of drawers was stuffed with sweaters and more intimate garments, but nothing really intimate. No letters, no snapshots.
The bathroom had wall-to-wall carpeting and a triangular sunken tub. The medicine chest was well supplied with beauty cream and cosmetics and sleeping pills. The latter had been prescribed by a Dr. Otto Schrenk and dispensed by Thompson’s Drug Store in Bridgeton, Illinois, on June 17 of this year.
I turned out the bathroom wastebasket on the carpet. Under crumpled wads of used tissue I found a letter in an airmail envelope postmarked in Bridgeton, Illinois, a week ago and addressed to Mrs. Helen Haggerty. The single sheet inside was signed simply “Mother,” and gave no return address.
Dear Helen
It was thoughtful of you to send me a card from sunny Cal my favorite state of the union even though it is years since I was out there. Your father keeps promising to make the trip with me on his vacation but something always comes up to put it off. Anyway his blood pressure is some better and that is a blessing. I’m glad you’re well. I wish you would reconsider about the divorce but I suppose that’s all over and done with. It’s a pity you and Bert couldn’t stay together. He is a good man in his way. But I suppose distant pastures look greenest.
Your father is still furious of course. He won’t let me mention your name. He hasn’t really forgiven you for when you left home in the first place, or forgiven himself either I guess, it takes two to make a quarrel. Still you are his daughter and you shouldn’t have talked to him the way you did. I don’t mean to recriminate. I keep hoping for a reconcilement between you two before he dies. He is not getting any younger, you know, and I’m not either, Helen. You’re a smart girl with a good education and if you wanted to you could write him a letter that would make him feel different about “things.” You are his only daughter after all and you’ve never taken it back that he was a crooked stormtrooper. That is a hard word for a policeman to swallow from anybody and it still rankles him after more than twenty years. Please write.
I put the letter back in the wastebasket with the other discarded paper. Then I washed my hands and returned to the main room. Bradshaw was sitting in the rope chair, stiffly formal even when alone. I wondered if this was his first experience of death. It wasn’t mine by a long shot, but this death had hit me especially hard. I could have prevented it.
The fog outside was getting denser. It moved against the glass wall of the house, and gave me the queer sensation that the world had dropped away, and Bradshaw and I were floating together in space, unlikely gemini encapsulated with the dead woman.
“What did you tell the police?”
“I talked to the Sheriff personally. He’ll be here shortly. I gave him only the necessary minimum. I didn’t know whether or not to say anything about Mrs. Kincaid.”
“We have to explain our discovery of the body. But you don’t have to repeat anything she said. It’s purely hearsay so far as you’re concerned.”
“Do you seriously regard her as a suspect in this?”
“I have no opinion yet. We’ll see what Dr. Godwin has to say about her mental condition. I hope Godwin is good at his job.”
“He’s the best we have in town. I saw him tonight, oddly enough. He sat at the speaker’s table with me at the Alumni dinner, until he was called away.”
“He mentioned seeing you at dinner.”
“Yes. Jim Godwin and I are old friends.” He seemed to lean on the thought.
I looked around for something to sit on, but there was only Helen’s canvas chaise. I squatted on my heels. One of the things in the house that puzzled me was the combination of lavish spending and bare poverty, as if two different women had taken turns furnishing it. A princess and a pauper.
I pointed this out to Bradshaw, and he nodded: “It struck me when I was here the other evening. She seems to have spent her money on inessentials.”
“Where did the money come from?”
“She gave me to understand she had a private income. Heaven knows she didn’t dress as she did on an assistant professor’s salary.”
“Did you know Professor Haggerty well?”
“Hardly. I did escort her to one or two college functions, as well as the opening concert of the fall season. We discovered a common passion for Hindemith.” He made a steeple of his fingers. “She’s a– she was a very presentable woman. But I wasn’t close to her, in any sense. She didn’t encourage intimacy.”
I raised my eyebrows. Bradshaw colored slightly.
“I don’t mean sexual intimacy, for heaven’s sake. She wasn’t my type at all. I mean that she didn’t talk about herself to any extent.”
“Where did she come from?”
“Some small college in the Middle West, Maple Park I believe. She’d already left there and come out here when we appointed her. It was an emergency appointment, necessitated by Dr. Farrand’s coronary. Fortunately Helen was available. I don’t know what our Department of Modern Languages will do now, with the semester already under way.”