Then a sudden discovery jarred George Quinlan’s mind into a new line of activity. He stood regarding a triangular nick in the right front tire, his eyes locked in a stare of incredulous dismay.
Almost mechanically, Quinlan moved the few steps necessary to hold the triangular tom bit of paper over the gouged-out place in the tire.
The mud-stained triangle of paper his wife had carefully saved for him was a perfect pattern, just fitting the hole in the tire.
Quinlan straightened, holding the paper between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. The hand seemed strange to him.
Once, when he had been arresting a man charged with some minor crime, the prisoner had unexpectedly whirled and delivered a smashing punch to the side of Quinlan’s head. The blow had lashed out so fast and hard that not only had Quinlan failed to see it coming, but the smashing impact had, for the moment, robbed him of all memory. And as his senses had begun to struggle for orientation, he had fancied himself in the midst of a strange world wherein surroundings that should have been familiar failed to have any significance whatever.
Now, in the same way, Quinlan’s mind was reeling from the impact of his discovery. It seemed only last week that Beryl had been a baby, getting her first tooth... The worry over whooping cough — the starting of school — blossoming into a young woman — and now this.
Gradually Quinlan’s mind reasserted itself. There was Martin Walworth waiting at the courthouse with the district attorney for this triangular piece of paper. Walworth would make a life-size photograph. The Rockville Gazette would publish it. Everyone in the community from service-station attendants on down would be looking for an automobile with this triangular gouge on the side of the tread on the right front tire.
His first instinctive desire being to protect Beryl, Quinlan thought of changing the tire and putting on the spare. Then he took a deep breath and let his faith in his daughter assert itself. Surely Beryl could have had no part in a murder! It was simply that there were things that needed explaining, and George Quinlan, man of action, had never been one to postpone that which needed doing. Slowly he turned and walked back to the house.
Beryl was crossing the kitchen as the undersheriff opened the back door. She glanced up and smiled casually. Then she caught his eyes and stopped in her tracks.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Upstairs. She... she’s coming down now. Why, Dad?”
“Come to the front room. I want to talk with you. I don’t want her to hear.”
Silently Beryl followed her father into the living room. George Quinlan indicated a chair, but Beryl didn’t sit down. Instead, she remained standing, very trim, very erect, and very white.
“Your car,” Quinlan said with a gesture of weariness. “Last night, after the murder, did you go to the Higbee place?”
For a long moment she hesitated, and in that moment Quinlan knew the most awful suspense he had ever experienced. If she should lie to him now, it would rip his soul to tattered shreds.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I was... The sheriff telephoned. He asked me to look for you.”
George Quinlan ceased to be the father. He was now only a representative of the law, his eyes keeping a steady, insistent pressure upon his daughter’s mind, his questions probing her thoughts. “What did the sheriff tell you?”
“Told me he’d found a cigarette case. He wanted you to take fingerprints.”
“Did he ask you to look for me?”
“He asked me where you were — asked me to try and find you.”
“And you went to the Higbee place?”
“Yes.”
“Looking for me?”
There was a pause, a pause long enough for George Quinlan to be conscious of his perspiring hands, of the hammering of his heart, but his eyes didn’t waver.
“No.”
“Why did you go there?”
“I went... Oh, Dad!” Her lips quivered at the edges, and tears swam into her eyes. Then the mouth became firm. She brushed aside the refuge of tears and met her father eye to eye. “I went there because I thought it was Roy’s cigarette case.”
“Was it?”
“I... I thought so.”
“Was it?”
“Apparently not.”
“What did you do?”
“I took a chamois skin from the car and wiped every single fingerprint off of it.”
“Why?”
“Because... because it was Roy’s cigarette case and he had called me... well, he said it was from Fort Bixling, but I think now it was from San Rodolpho, and I... Dad, I don’t know why I did it. Don’t ask me why. I can’t tell you. All I know is that I thought I had a chance to protect Roy, and all of a sudden it seemed more important to me to do that than anything else on earth. I didn’t care if they killed me, I was going to protect him.”
A vast weariness settled on George Quinlan. This was the end of the trail so far as he was concerned. He was discredited, finished. “You say it wasn’t Roy’s cigarette case after all?”
“Dad, I don’t know. I can’t understand it. Roy was here this morning. He... I asked him for a cigarette... He acted just as naturally as could be, reached into his pocket, took out the silver cigarette case and... and afterwards, after he’d gone, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen the engraving on it. He’d acted so completely offhand about the whole thing that it had put me off my guard. I...”
“Where’s Roy now?”
“At the hotel, I guess. He wanted to clean up and get a short sleep. He wants to come out here a little later. He...”
“Say nothing about this to him,” Quinlan said. “Say nothing about it to anyone.”
“Dad... I... I’m sorry.”
Quinlan looked at her as though she were some stranger in the house.
“Will it make... make much difference?” she asked.
For almost twenty years George Quinlan had been trying to stand between Beryl and life, trying to protect her, to ward off the blows that Fate might deal, telling little white lies when he thought those might be necessary to reassure her. Now, looking at her, he suddenly realized that the time for this had passed. She was a woman, not a child, and she had become a woman by reason of her own act.
“Will it, Dad? Will it make much difference, you know, a good deal?”
“Yes,” Quinlan said and walked out, letting it go at that.
8
As he walked past Beryl’s automobile, the thought occurred to Quinlan once more to change the tire on her car. He shook it off and walked out to where he had left his car. The door swinging open was a grim reminder of the extent of the gap which existed between his life of only a few minutes ago and the maelstrom of events into which he had been swept.
“George, oh, George!”
His wife was calling from the upstairs window.
Quinlan turned. “Yes, dear?”
“You’ll be home for dinner tonight?”
It needed only that homely touch to bring him back to realities. His answer was mechanical. “I don’t know, dear — yet. I’ll telephone.”
“Okay, let me know,” she called cheerily.
Quinlan got in the car. A new worry had entered his mind, the thought of what this would mean to Martha. A man might have enough resilience and dogged determination to slug his way through to a come-back, but Martha couldn’t take it. As the wife of the undersheriff she enjoyed a certain position in the social life of the community. People liked her for herself, but in addition to that liking extended a recognition of the importance of her husband’s position.
Quinlan carefully placed the damning triangle of paper in between the leaves of his notebook. It would hold flat there. It...