She had just gone from her second visit, when, before I had time to open my door again, I heard a faint rustling, and a soft padding on the floor. Not knowing what it was or where it was, I was afraid to push the door open. In my narrow hiding place I stood still and waited.
The padding was recognizable now — quiet footsteps, coming nearer. They passed not far from my clothespress door.
I waited.
An almost inaudible rustling. A pause. The softest and faintest of tearing sounds.
I came out of the closet — my gun in my hand.
Standing beside the girl’s bed, leaning over her unconscious form, was old Talbert Exon, his face flushed with fever, his nightshirt hanging limply around his wasted legs. One of his hands still rested upon the bedclothes he had turned down from her body. The other hand held a narrow strip of adhesive tape, with which her bandages had been fixed in place, and which he had just torn off.
He snarled at me, and both his hands went toward the girl’s bandages.
The crazy, feverish glare of his eyes told me that the threat of the gun in my hand meant nothing to him. I jumped to his side, plucked his hands aside, picked him up in my arms, and carried him — kicking, clawing, and swearing — back to his bed. Then I called the others.
Hilary Gallaway, Shand — who had come out from town again — and I sat over coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen, while the rest of the household helped Dr. Rench battle for Exon’s life. The old man had gone through enough excitement in the last three days to kill a healthy man, let alone a pneumonia convalescent.
“But why should the old devil want to kill her?” Gallaway asked me.
“Search me,” I confessed, a little testily perhaps. “I don’t know why he wanted to kill her, but it’s a cinch that he did. The gun was found just about where he could have thrown it when he heard me coming. I was in the girl’s room when she was shot, and I got to Exon’s window without wasting much time, and I saw nothing. You, yourself, driving home from Knownburg, and arriving here right after the shooting, didn’t see anybody leave by the road; and I’ll take an oath that nobody could have left in any other direction without either one of the farm hands or me seeing them.
“And then, tonight, I told Exon that the girl would recover if she didn’t tear off her bandages, which, while true enough, gave him the idea that she had been trying to tear them off. And from that he built up a plan of tearing them off himself — knowing that she had been given an opiate, perhaps — and thinking that everybody would believe she had torn them off herself. And he was putting that plan into execution — had torn off one piece of tape — when I stopped him. He shot her intentionally, and that’s flat. Maybe I couldn’t prove it in court without knowing why, but I know he did. But the doc says he’ll hardly live to be tried; he killed himself trying to kill the girl.”
“Maybe you’re right” — Gallaway’s mocking grin flashed at me — “but you’re a hell of a detective. Why didn’t you suspect me?”
“I did,” I grinned back, “but not enough.”
“Why not? You may be making a mistake,” he drawled. “You know my room is just across the hall from his, and I could have left my window, crept across the porch, fired at him, and then run back to my room, on that first night.
“And on the second night — when you were here — you ought to know that I left Knownburg in plenty of time to have come out here, parked my car down the road a bit, fired those two shots, crept around in the shadow of the house, run back to my car, and then come driving innocently up to the garage. You should know also that my reputation isn’t any too good — that I’m supposed to be a bad egg; and you do know that I don’t like the old man. And for a motive, there is the fact that my wife is Exon’s only heir. I hope” — he raised his eyebrows in burlesqued pain — “that you don’t think I have any moral scruples against a well-placed murder now and then.”
I laughed. “I don’t.”
“Well, then?”
“If Exon had been killed that first night, and I had come up here, you’d be doing your joking behind bars long before this. And if he’d been killed the second night, even, I might have grabbed you. But I don’t figure you as a man who’d bungle so easy a job — not twice, anyway. You wouldn’t have missed, and then run away, leaving him alive.”
He shook my hand gravely.
“It is comforting to have one’s few virtues appreciated.”
Before Talbert Exon died he sent for me. He wanted to die, he said, with his curiosity appeased; and so we traded information. I told him how I had come to suspect him and he told me why he had tried to kill Barbra Caywood.
Fourteen years ago he had killed his wife, not for the insurance, as he had been suspected of doing, but in a fit of jealousy. However, he had so thoroughly covered up the proofs of his guilt that he had never been brought to trial; but the murder had weighed upon him, to the extent of becoming an obsession.
He knew that he would never give himself away consciously — he was too shrewd for that — and he knew that proof of his guilt could never be found. But there was always the chance that some time, in delirium, in his sleep, or when drunk, he might tell enough to bring him to the gallows.
He thought upon this angle too often, until it became a morbid fear that always hounded him. He had given up drinking — that was easy — but there was no way of guarding against the other things.
And one of them, he said, had finally happened. He had got pneumonia, and for a week he had been out of his head, and he had talked. Coming out of that week’s delirium, he had questioned the nurse. She had given him vague answers, would not tell him what he had talked about, what he had said. And then, in unguarded moments, he had discovered that her eyes rested upon him with loathing — with intense repulsion.
He knew then that he had babbled of his wife’s murder; and he set about laying plans for removing the nurse before she repeated what she had heard.
For so long as she remained in his house, he counted himself safe. She would not tell strangers, and it might be that for a while she would not tell anyone. Professional ethics would keep her quiet, perhaps; but he could not let her leave his house with her knowledge of his secret.
Daily and in secret, he had tested his strength until he knew himself strong enough to walk about the room a little, and to hold a revolver steady. His bed was fortunately placed for his purpose — directly in line with one of the windows, the connecting door, and the girl’s bed. In an old bond box in his closet — and nobody but he had ever seen the things in that box — was a revolver; a revolver that could not possibly be traced to him.
On the first night, he had taken this gun out, stepped back from his bed a little, and fired a bullet into the doorframe. Then he had jumped back into bed, concealing the gun under the blankets — where none thought to look for it — until he could return it to its box.
That was all the preparation he had needed. He had established an attempted murder directed against himself, and he had shown that a bullet fired at him could easily go near — and therefore through — the connecting doorway.
On the second night, he had waited until the house had seemed quiet. Then he had peeped through one of the cracks in the Japanese screen at the girl, whom he could see in the reflected light from the moon. He had found, though, that when he stepped far enough back from the screen for it to escape powder marks, he could not see the girl, not while she was lying down. So he had fired first into the doorframe — near the previous night’s bullet — to awaken her.
She had sat up in bed immediately, screaming, and he had shot her. He had intended firing another shot into her body — to make sure of her death — but my approach had made that impossible, and had made concealment of the gun impossible; so, with what strength he had left, he had thrown the revolver out of the window.