“And the way he told me, the way he looked, I was afraid, too,” said Craig. “But now that Drue-where are you going, Miss Keate?”
“To my room,” I said. “I’ll be back presently.” I didn’t hurry until I was out of the room. I didn’t want him or Peter to stop me. For I had to do something-anything. Night was coming on; it was already nearly dusk and there was still no word of Drue. I kept thinking of all the little wooded valleys and hedges and clumps of shrubs among the low-lying hills.
I took my cape. No one was in the upstairs hall; the door to Craig’s room was closed as I had closed it when I left the two men together. I crept down the stairway.
But Beevens was in the hall below.
And he had something in his hand.
I suppose it was curious, the way the kaleidoscope had already and all at once started to fall together, so the frantically whirling pieces-some big and making links like bridges, some small and unimportant but still essential-began to make a complete and coherent picture. Beevens made his contribution then for he had the famous clipping.
It was in his large hand and he gave it to me.
“I had removed it that evening, Miss, when I emptied the ash trays. The night Mr. Brent was murdered, I mean. And someone had crumpled it up and dropped it in an ash tray. I emptied them, as I always do when I remove the coffee tray. It was in the rubbish barrel and I found it and ironed it out and, well, here it is. I thought I’d better give it to you.”
I didn’t ask him why; perhaps because in an odd, unspoken way Beevens and I had been allies from the first. Indeed, he was the only one (except for Drue) whom I had not at one time or another suspected of murder, and I think he may have felt the same way about me. At any rate, he did trust the clipping to me to do with it as I saw fit. And I thrust it into my pocket quickly and went out the door.
Beevens didn’t question, naturally; he didn’t even look an inquiry as he held the door for me.
But only Beevens saw me go. On the way to the garden and the little path that started there and wound its way up and down, beside a rock wall or two, across a wooded strip, and low, rolling and dusky meadows toward the Chivery house I did glance at the clipping. It was only a few paragraphs about the arrest of some Bund members; the date line was some five weeks earlier; rather to my disappointment there was no mention of Frederic Miller. There was, in fact, no mention of any names. I looked at it quickly, hurrying toward the garden and the path, glanced at the other side which was equally short and clueless, being an account of a submarine sinking somewhere off the New England coast and part of an advertisement for stirrup pumps in case of incendiary bombs. So I thrust it into my pocket and encountered the medicine box and wished I’d given it to Craig.
As a matter of fact, however, the medicine box was one of the unimportant details in the picture; part of it, but unimportant. So nothing was changed because the little box remained in my capacious pocket. And I passed the garden where Craig had been shot (mistakenly, he’d said, by his father) and started along the winding path. It was latish by that time; still light enough to see but late enough to remind me of the dusk of the previous night and the body of Claud Chivery there in the trees. I walked faster. And realized suddenly that I was straining my eyes to watch the hedges and the clumps of shrubbery along the way, and listening with all my ears for sounds from behind me. Yet it was a relief to act; even if it meant scurrying along the uneven little path, wishing my long blue cape and my starchy white uniform wouldn’t make swishing sounds in the quiet which might obscure other sounds.
Naturally, I looked behind me now and then, too. But there wasn’t anything, and the police were busy then at the little lake in the hills beyond the north meadow.
Eventually I reached the Chivery cottage. I couldn’t have missed it, for the path led directly to the road that came out from town (going along east of the meadow where Claud Chivery had died). I crossed the road and there was the white picket fence and gate where Claud Chivery had been photographed stepping into his car, that strange look (of premonition?) in his haggard face.
The cottage had a deserted look and it was deserted. The one general maid Maud kept lived out and didn’t come to work when Maud was away. It was an odd little instance of Maud’s parsimony, but I didn’t know that until later.
The steps weren’t swept and the shreds of vines clinging to the trellis around the little porch looked dreary and unkempt. The door, however, was unlocked. I hadn’t thought of that till I got there; it seemed to me a stroke of luck.
So I opened it and went in; the hall was dreary, too, and dark and looked overfurnished with mahogany and chintz and a gleaming, heavily framed mirror that gave me back a dark and shadowy glimpse of myself. The first thing I saw, however, was the knife-a plain, bone-handled carving knife, lying on the table beside a silver card tray and a vase of withered chrysanthemums. I must admit I stopped rather short and listened, and looked at the knife.
But it was only a knife, inanimate and clean, and I didn’t hear a sound, unless the dry leaves on the little porch outside scraped softly against the trellis. The cottage was breathless, undusted, unaired, with the furniture taking over the place a little inimically the way it only does in an empty house.
That perhaps as much as anything convinced me there was no one in the cottage; but I looked anyway around the first floor, treading very lightly and holding my cape close to me so it wouldn’t brush against anything, pausing to listen as a cat does in strange territory, hearing nothing.
On my right hand, opening from the narrow hall was a living room, very precise, but dark with its curtains drawn and more withered flowers on a table. This led back to a small dining room so neat and yet so deserted that you couldn’t imagine a meal being served on that glistening table with its silver cockatoo ornament and candlesticks; beyond this was a kitchen; from here you went to a kind of passage with narrow back stairs leading upward, a store closet or two and then (by a door which I opened very cautiously) into what was evidently Dr. Chivery’s consulting room-all white enamel and glistening instrument cabinets. From here, in turn, I went on into his study, or perhaps his reception room which led again to the front hall; this made a complete circuit of the first floor of the house. Nothing had moved, nothing had breathed and all the chairs and bookshelves watched me with cold, alien eyes. Out in the tiny hall again, I glanced up the front stairs, a narrow carpeted flight broken by a landing.
There again I looked at the knife.
It was just a knife; somebody had left it there casually, I decided, in the pursuit of household duties, and forgotten it. Perhaps it had been used to open mail or to cut the strings of a package.
I did have, though, a strong aversion to touching it; after I’d seen Claud Chivery. So I listened again and, as nothing anywhere in that silent little house moved, I went back to the doctor’s study.
His books were ranged neatly along bookshelves. I didn’t turn on the light. It was still light enough to see, and I set myself to look for the book-a book about toxicology, Craig had said; if Chivery had a fairly large library that would cover a wide field.
As a matter of fact, it didn’t; I ran hastily through the shelves, selected I believe four or five books which I thought might bear fruit, shook them upside down vigorously with the leaves open, over the big roll-top desk, and, unexpectedly, one of them did. An odd piece of fruit it proved to be, too. For a paper fluttered out, I seized it-incredulously, really not quite believing that I might actually have at last, in my hand, a tangible clue. It was a piece of thin white stationery, like that I had seen on writing tables here and there in the Brent house, and there were hurried, pencilled notes upon it.