“But on Saturday,” said Johnny, “the rain didn’t start until two o’clock. So she couldn’t have begun to paint the rain in until two. Yet thirteen minutes later, the time of her death, the painting’s supposed to be finished! I think Mr. Casavant will agree that, no matter how fast a worker Fanny Adams was, she could hardly have painted this rainstorm in in its present finished form in a mere thirteen minutes.”
“No, no.” Casavant nibbled his perfect fingernails.
“So I repeat, this is the wrong painting.”
They studied the canvas.
“But what’s it mean?” asked Andy Webster, bewildered.
Johnny shrugged. “I don’t know, beyond the obvious fact that somebody switched paintings on the easel. Removed the picture she was actually working on and substituted this one. The question is, What happened to the other painting? Seems to me we ought to look for it.”
But he did know. Or thought he knew. Johnny was a hunch player. In a world in which the odds went crazy it seemed as reasonable a way of life as any. He wondered if he would be proved right.
They were banging the slide-doors of the cabinets and beginning to haul out canvases when Roger Casavant smacked his pale forehead with his palm, “Wait! She kept a master list in here... she’d assign a number and title to a picture when she started one. Didn’t she keep it—? On the top shelf somewhere!”
“One side, slow boy,” grunted Usher Peague. “Found!”
It was a sheaf of plain yellow papers clipped together.
They crowded around the newspaperman.
“God bless her practical old soul,” said Johnny, “if she didn’t even check off the ones she’d sold!... Wait, wait. Number 259, not marked sold. September-something. What is that?”
“September Corn in the Rain,” read Judge Shinn.
“That’s it!” Johnny was at the easel turning the painting over. “Ought to be a number on it somewhere... There was! But it’s been scraped off. See this paper shred still stuck to the frame?” He turned the painting face up again. “Any doubts? This is September Corn in the Rain. And now I remember something, Judge. Orville Pangman’s crack Friday morning about the rains last September coming too late to save the crop — he lost practically his whole stand of corn because of the drought! September corn isn’t normally this dried-up-looking, is it?”
“No,” muttered Judge Shinn. “You’re right, Johnny. Last September’s corn grew to a good height, but it went completely to pot one night between sunset and dawn.”
“Here’s a notation of the one she was painting,” cried old Andrew Webster. “The last entry on the last sheet.”
“Let’s see!” said Johnny. “Number 291, July Corn... Search the backs of the canvases for a Number 291!”
They found it midway in the rack, where it had been thrust apparently at random.
“Easy! Gently! This has unique value,” snarled Roger Casavant. He turned July Corn to the light. Then he removed the canvas that was on the easel, propped it against the window, and put the new canvas in its place.
The differences from September Corn in the Rain were evident even to a layman’s eyes.
“No F.A. on it,” said Judge Shinn. “So she didn’t get to finish it—”
“Not nearly finished,” said Casavant impatiently. “It’s the same scene painted in the same perspective and from the same vantage point. But observe her treatment of the rain. She’d hardly begun to paint it in. She hadn’t even got around to making the stones of the fence look wet, or the foreground or barn roof. And the leaves of the young corn are still vigorously erect, not beaten down as they would have to be if she’d begun the painting as corn in a rainstorm.
“What happened, of course,” said Casavant, “was that she had begun to paint the picture as a dry scene. She did considerable work on it before the storm came up. When the rain started, she had the choice of either stopping work and waiting for another rainless day, or incorporating the rainstorm into her picture. Every other artist I know of would have stopped and waited. But I suppose something in the changed conditions piqued her. This was an experiment of a most unusual sort — a sort of overleaf reflection of nature, rain attacking a world that was dry to begin with. Of course, the sky must have been dark and threatening all day, so that the mood of the picture as far as she’d gone was in harmony with the suddenly altered conditions. If only she’d had time to finish this!”
Pay-off, thought Johnny. My man comes in at — what? — thirty-five to one? He felt a glow whose warmth surprised him.
“She did have time to do one thing,” smiled Johnny, “and for that Joe Kowalczyk can light a candle to her memory.”
“What’s that?” demanded Casavant.
“Aunt Fanny added something else that hadn’t been there when she started the picture. Look at the interior of the lean-to.”
On the floor of the lean-to in the unfinished painting a pile of firewood had been painted in. The individual sticks had merely been sketched; she had not even had time to give the wood grain or character. But it was recognizable as a woodpile.
“Just for the hell of it, and to make the acid test of your claim, Mr. Casavant, that when Fanny Adams did paint what she saw she painted it exactly as it was,” murmured Johnny, “suppose you count the pieces of wood she sketched in.”
Casavant produced a lens. He went close to July Corn and peered at the lean-to. “One, two, three, four...” He kept counting until he reached twenty-four.
Then he stopped.
“Twenty-four,” said Johnny softly. “And what’s Kowalczyk kept saying? That he split six lengths of log into quarters and stacked them in the lean-to. What price reliability now, Mr. Adams? Was Pal Joey telling the truth?”
“I’ll be jiggered,” said Adams in a feeble way.
“You’ve done it,” chortled Andy Webster. “By God, that Army training has something to recommend it after all. Let’s get back in there!”
“Yes, who knows?” echoed Peague. “Even into those sunless mentalities some light of doubt may fall.”
“Only thing is,” said Johnny with a frown, “what does it lead to? Seems as if it ought to give us a lot. But I just can’t put my finger on it.”
“Never mind that now,” said Judge Shinn grimly. “I want to see their faces when this is brought out.”
They hurried back to the courtroom.
They had to wait before they could spring the big surprise. First Adams rested his “case.” Then there was some legalistic hocus-pocus, and Andrew Webster opened the “defense.” He put Josef Kowalczyk on the stand as his first witness, and a long struggle began with the prisoner’s monosyllabic English. Through all of this Johnny was conscious of a restlessness about him, a feel of pressures building up. When Ferriss Adams sharply cross-examined, while Adams and Webster wrangled, the tension mounted in the room. About him Johnny could hear the stealthy creak of campchairs as bottoms tightened. They know something’s due to pop here and they’re worried stupid, Johnny thought with enjoyment as he kept chasing the artful dodger in his head: Keep dodging, I’ll corner you in time, there’s plenty of that, these poor benighted Hindus aren’t going anywhere, wriggle, you bastards. You’ll soon be wriggling like worms on a hook.