“It’s my job.”
“I’ll give you another job. I’ll pay you two dollars an hour to look out of the window. You have suspicious eyes. They annoy me.”
“I can’t help my eyes,” the matron said calmly.
“No, but you still have control over your eyelids. Close them. Or look at something else. I’m abnormally sensitive. For a murderer, that is. Or perhaps murderers are abnormally sensitive. Are they?”
“I don’t know. I never saw one until you.”
In his room further along the hall Ralph was eating his dinner under the watchful eyes of a uniformed policeman. He fought down his resentment for some time, and then he threw down his fork with a clatter and said loudly:
“Like my table manners?”
“Sure,” the policeman said. “They’re all right.”
“I don’t like your tone. You don’t have to humor me.”
“Sure. I know that.”
“I’m tired of being patronized!” Ralph shouted.
“Sure you are.”
“You can go to hell!”
“Sure,” the policeman said affably.
“We all got to eat,” Jennie said. “Try some of this jelly, that’s a dear. Miss Susan made it for you specially.”
“I’m not hungry,” Mary Little said, shaking her head. “I don’t want anything.”
Jennie was alarmed.
“You’re not thinking of starving yourself to death, surely?”
Mary sighed and reached out for the jelly and began to eat it listlessly.
“That’s a dear,” Jennie said. “Mustn’t grieve over a man like Mr. Little. He isn’t worth it. He sinned against—”
“Stop it! Go down and get your dinner.”
“Just the same I’m right.” Jennie went to the door and said over her shoulder: “You’re better off this way. The murderer’s done you a favor, that’s what!”
Mr. Smith picked up his telephone.
“Hello. Certainly I’d like to come. I’ll be there at nine. All right.”
Mr. Smith replaced the receiver and looked thoughtfully at Horace.
“I’m sorry in a way,” he told Horace. “After all, she did push you in the lake.”
It was Jennie who opposed the meeting most violently. She insisted it would not be fair to Mrs. Little to have all those people traipsing into her house. Mary herself was completely apathetic.
At nine o’clock the residents had all arrived.
Emily had made the trip in her wheelchair (“Might as well give that damned matron something to do!”) and was installed beside the front windows which looked out on the veranda and over the lake. Mary, in a dowdy black dress, was sitting on the chesterfield near the doorway, with Jennie hovering around her.
The rest were seated in chairs placed along the opposite walclass="underline" Mr. Smith, Professor Frost and Susan, Nora, and Ralph Bonner with his uniformed attendant. The police matron, Dr. Prye, and Professor Frost were the only occupants of the room who did not appear harassed and guilty.
“We look like a Rogues’ Gallery pygmalionized,” Nora said to Ralph. He stared at her blankly and she said: “It’s all right. Don’t laugh. I don’t want to put anyone out.”
“Miss Shane,” Inspector White said, “we are about to begin.”
His eyes moved about the room, stabbing them each in turn.
“This meeting has been called at the instigation of Dr. Prye. He has some questions to ask each of you and I want you to answer these questions as if they came from me. Go ahead, Prye.”
Prye went over to the doorway.
“Miss Bonner,” he said loudly.
Emily jumped, and the large capable hand of the police matron descended instantly on her shoulder.
“Get your hands off me!” Emily shouted. “Really, Prye. My nerves. Having that creature’s unlovely pan in front of my face for five hours—”
“Emily,” Prye interrupted, “on Wednesday night after you had dinner in your room, what did you do?”
“I’ve told you at least fifty times, I went to sleep.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Certainly it’s unusual. It’s unheard of. I’m a nervous wreck. I was doped. My head felt funny. I floated.”
“You were woozy,” Mr. Smith encouraged her.
“That’s just it. Woozy,” Emily cried. “Who is that man? He has a feeling for words. Sympathetic. Why, it must be Mr. Smith—”
“Thank you, Emily,” Prye said in a tone of finality. “Ralph Bonner.”
Ralph started, got to his feet, and sat down again, flushing.
“Ralph, on Monday night you went out for a walk by yourself. I suggest that you went to see Joan Frost. Did you?”
“No.”
“I suggest it again.”
“All right,” Ralph said. “Yes.”
“Did you see her?”
“Yes. Through the window. She was packing to go away with — with him.”
“With whom?”
“Tom Little,” Ralph said.
Mary clutched Jennie’s hand. “No! It’s a lie! He’d never have left me. Ask Jennie. He’d never really have left me.”
She sank back, panting, and Jennie patted her hand. “There. You mustn’t get excited. It’s all for the best.”
Prye turned to Susan.
“Susan, will you come over here, please?”
Susan, after an anguished look at her father, advanced timidly toward the doorway.
“Give me your hand, please,” Prye said.
“You don’t have to, Susan!” Ralph shouted. “You don’t have to listen to him!”
“You may challenge me to a duel later,” Prye said cheerfully. “Your hand, Susan.”
She held out a trembling hand. He took it, bent over it for an instant, and straightened up again. Susan gasped.
“I’ve read somewhere,” Professor Frost said conversationally, “that modern psychiatrists are reforming our mental institutions because they have such excellent prospects of becoming future occupants.”
“You’re misinformed,” Prye said. “The profession with one of the highest incidences of mental disease is teaching. Probably the teaching of classics.”
“I can believe it,” Frost said. “It’s the strain of trying to communicate the subtleties of the lyrical meter of Euripides to students who cannot scan Shakespeare.”
Prye held up his hand. “Granted without argument. Jennie, you’re next.”
“I won’t budge,” Jennie said. “I know my rights as well as the next one. I won’t budge.”
Inspector White rose to glare at her. “I have invested Dr. Prye with the authority to conduct these interviews. You will do as he says.”
Jennie did.
Prye spoke to her mildly. “Jennie, I’d like you to put your one hand tightly over your right ear and close your eyes until I tell you to open them. Tell me when you hear a noise.”
“I won’t,” Jennie said. “What kind of noise?”
“That’s what I want you to tell me.”
She closed her eyes intensely. Prye took out his pocket watch and held it about five feet away from her left ear, then four feet, then three, then two.
“There!” Jennie cried. “I hear a watch.”
The trial was repeated with her right ear with approximately the same result.
“Hocus pocus,” Nora said. “You should have been in vaudeville.”
“I am,” Prye said. “Professor Frost.”
Frost got up, smiling. “I offer myself in the interests of more virile vaudeville. Name your experiment, Dr. Prye.”
“A purely verbal experiment,” Prye said. “Right in your line. You keep a diary. I’ve seen it but I haven’t read it.”
“It wouldn’t interest you,” Frost said blandly.
“Was there anything in your diary which would have led your daughter Joan to believe that you intended to have her committed to an institution?”
“There was. I was.”
“You believed she was insane?”