It was a neat and treacherous little trap, clearly one that Sid should have anticipated, and she cursed herself because she hadn’t. She had surely been right in thinking that the murder had been done somewhere besides Dreamer’s Park, and if she now said Dreamer’s Park she would give herself away as a liar, but she didn’t, of course, know where else to say. But Sara knew where else. The little trap, however neat and deadly, was also a confession.
Now it was Sid who was doing the furious thinking, and she explained afterward that it was one of the odd experiences in which someone in a crisis is able to do something normally impossible. She was required to know in an instant where Sara had killed Beth, and it was actually a little longer before she knew. All of a sudden she was hearing Cotton McBride say again that the wound had really been a sort of puncture with dirt around the edge, and then she was in the cemetery, helping bury Beth again, and she was seeing now what she had seen then without really noticing, and what she saw was a metal vase for flowers with a spike on the bottom that you push into the ground to keep the vase from falling over. She had, she said later, an exhilarating feeling of assurance.
“Surely,” she said assuredly. “I’ll meet you beside your brother Sherman’s grave.”
Silence again. Then Sara’s voice, curiously flat and almost apathetic. “Shall we say at eight o’clock?”
“Eight o’clock will be fine,” Sid said.
She hung up with a feeling of having done quite well. In fact, she didn’t know how she could have done much better.
“Sara’s guilty, as I thought,” she said. “We’re going to meet at eight.”
“I could almost swear.” Millie said, “that you said beside her brother Sherman’s grave.”
“I had to name the murder scene to prove I was not lying, which I was.”
“How did you know?”
“It came to me suddenly when I remembered the little metal vases with spikes.”
“Oh. That explains everything. A cemetery seems an odd place for Beth to have gone with Sara, however. Why do you suppose she went?”
“Well. Gid said Beth was sentimental in her way, and she must have been. It’s not so odd, really, that she went with Sara to visit Sherman’s grave, especially if Sara suggested it.”
“As for me, I can think of many places I’d prefer to a cemetery as a place to meet someone who has killed once and might again. Especially at eight o’clock. Isn’t it beginning to get pretty dark right around then?”
“That’s only so much the better.”
“Where, may I ask, am I supposed to hide?”
“The Pike plot, as I recall, is right next to the Thatcher mausoleum, and the mausoleum’s just the place.”
“If you imagine that I’m going to hide in a mausoleum at eight o’clock, you’re simply mistaken. Or any other time, for that matter.”
“Not in it. Behind it. It’s kept locked.”
“Well, behind is bad enough, hut I agree. What time shall we meet and go?”
“We had better go separately, I think. I’ll go by the main entrance, but you had better slip in at the far side near the mausoleum. It will entail some walking through a field, for there is no road approaching on that side. You must give yourself time to be in position shortly before eight.”
“I’ll be there,” Millie said. “You can count on me.”
So there they were at eight o’clock, Sid beside Sherm’s grave and Millie behind the Thatcher mausoleum. And there at eight also, a thin and ghostly shape approaching slowly among the headstones, was Sara Pike.
She stopped when she was quite near and leaned forward to peer through the shadows. She was wearing a loose, light coat that hung freely from the shoulders, although it was a warm evening, and her hands were thrust deeply into the pockets of the coat.
“Who is it?” she said. “It’s Sydnie Jones, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Why are you here? Was it you who called? It’s a trick, isn’t it?”
Her voice was thin and clear but somehow remote, as if it carried through the air from a great distance.
“It’s no trick,” Sid said. “I had to talk with you, and I knew you would refuse if I merely asked.”
“Have you come here alone? You haven’t, have you? Who is with you?”
“No one is with me, as you can see.”
“Are you sure? You could he lying. Someone is behind the mausoleum!”
“No one is there, but you can look if you like.”
“I shall. Please stand where you are while I do. I don’t want you to come near me.”
It was a precarious moment for the plan, and Sid was depending heavily upon the sharp ears and physical agility of Millie, who did not disappoint her. When Sara was at the front of the mausoleum, about to turn the corner to the adjacent side, Millie popped into view at the rear, and she kept popping around corners out of sight just ahead of Sara until the mausoleum had been circled entirely and she was back where she had started. The suspense to Sid was severe, but the sudden shock of seeing that Millie was not alone was even worse, and the person with her, popping around corners with equal agility, was no one but Cotton McBride.
Sara, having circled the mausoleum, turned and came back toward Sid, stopping about six feet away, her hands still thrust deeply into the pockets of her light coat.
“You see?” Sid said. “There is no one here but you and me.”
“Why do you want to talk with me? What do you want?”
“I want to talk with you because Gid, as you know, is in jail on suspicion of having killed Beth Thatcher, but he didn’t do it, as you also know, because you did it yourself right here where we are.”
“Who says I did?”
“I say it.”
“You say it, but you can’t prove it. You told me on the phone that you saw me, but you didn’t. You’ve only made some guesses.”
“Deductions are what I’ve made, and they’re true ones.”
“That doesn’t matter. Even the truth must be proved. Who will believe that I did it? What reason did I have?”
“The reason is lying here between us.”
“Sherm? Do you mean Sherm? How do you know? More guesses?”
“More deductions. He killed himself, and it was covered up as heart failure because he had had rheumatic fever as a boy.”
“You’re very clever. You must be very clever indeed. But no matter. It’s all true.” Sara’s voice took on a kind of singsong, crooning tone and tempo. “He was tender and brilliant and very good, and I loved him more than anyone else in the world, more by far than everyone else put together, and then he deliberately killed himself with the sleeping medicine he sometimes used to lake at nights. He went to sleep and never woke up, and the empty bottle was there beside him when I found him, and I hid the bottle and told the doctor he simply died in his sleep. He was a friend of the family’s and pretended to believe it for our sake, and now he’s dead, too, and can never say differently. So far as anyone will ever know, Sherm died in his sleep of a bad heart, but he really died of a bad woman, a pretty little tramp. I loved him and would have taken care of him always, but he didn’t want me, he wanted the tramp instead and didn’t want to live without her, and so he killed himself, killed himself over that tramp, and left me all alone for all these years.”
“I’m sorry. Truly I am.”
“Don’t dare to be sorry. I won’t have you being sorry, for you are married to the man who was partly to blame, but now he is going to pay me back for it, and then I will be sorry for you.”