X 2 3
7 * 42.5 m


1


THE OPENING DOOR
by Helen Reilly
"It was a child of five in pursuit of a bouncing ball who
made the gruesome find, with an assist by Patrolman
Crothers. . . . A woman was lying on the ground in the
middle of the miniature thicket. One leg was doubled
under her and her arms were flung out crazily. Her hat
had fallen off. Her face, in profile, plowed the damp earth.
Her eyes were open. Yellow leaves covered her with a
light blanket. The wind blew and the leaves danced, some
of them. Others were held in position by the varicolored
stickiness that was blood from a wound in her breast. . . .
"Above the wind, a siren wailed and two radio cars
swung out of Lexington at a smart clip. . . .
"Shortly thereafter that call went streaming out from
the golden bowl at the top of police headquarters on
Centre Street: 'Homicide in Henderson Park. . . ."'
Thus Inspector McKee Is faced with one of the most
baffling cases of his long career with the New York Police
Department. Incidentally The Opening Door is Helen
Reilly's best mystery. As a serial in the Saturday Evening
Post it attracted widespread attention and made her many
thousands of new fans.
Here is a story in which the lovely Eve Flavell is caught
in a net of suspicion and heartbreak, where the evidence of
murder points clearly to the man she loved and renounced.
McKee, as always, is able to go beneath the surface, and his
investigation is a brilliant reconstruction of old wrongs and
family intrigue.





THE OPENING DOOR


PREVIOUS BOOKS BY HELEN REILLY
NAME YOUR POISON
THREE WOMEN IN BLACK
MOURNED ON SUNDAY
THE DEAD CAN TELL
DEATH DEMANDS AN AUDIENCE
MURDER IN SHINBONE ALLEY
ALL CONCERNED NOTIFIED
DEAD FOR A DUCAT
DEAD MAN CONTROL
MR. SMITH'S HAT
THE LINE-UP
MCKEE OF CENTRE STREET
THE DOLL'S TRUNK MURDER
THE MAN WITH THE PAINTED HEAD
MURDER IN THE MEWS
THE DIAMOND FEATHER
THE THIRTY-FIRST BULLFINCH


THE
OPENING
DOOR
( \ºxº \
by Helen Reilly


THE OPENING DOOR





V£ is -
CHAPTER
1
The murder didn't take place until after 7 p.m.
on the night of December 2nd. At twenty minutes past
four on the afternoon of that day, Eve Flavell reached
the house that had once been her home on Henderson
Square. She looked at her watch as she went round the
corner. It had turned cold in mid-morning and fog had
come sweeping in from the sea. The Square was full of it.
The tops of the trees in the private park about which the
Square was built stood up out of the fog faintly golden or
black-branched against grayness; the leaves still clung
tenaciously to the oaks and beeches. The lighted windows
that in other days would have begun to surround the
Square on all four sides like colored lanterns hemming in a
lovely wood were practically non-existent because of the
dim-out.
Most of the children in the park had gone home. Those
that were still there behind the high iron fence and the
concealing shrubbery weren't making any noise. A sparrow
3


A woman was calling to her from inside the park. Eve
turned. It was Alicia, her brother Gerald's wife. She was
coming down the path between bushes beaded with mois-
ture. Alicia walked stiltedly on high heels, her hips swaying.
Eve wondered how long she had been there, whether she
had been watching her own imbecile indecision. Alicia's
eyes were bright and inquisitive as she opened the tall
iron gate, let it fall to behind her with a clang and joined
Eve on the pavement. She began to talk in her soft, clear,
mannered voice when she was ten feet away.
"Eve, dear, this is wonderful. It's ages since we've met,
centuries, practically. Why didn't you come to my Thanks-
giving party? I was sorry I was out when you called or I
wouldn't have taken any excuse. Work's all very well but
you can run it into the ground. What a perfectly stunning
hat, my dear—but then you always look marvelous."
Eve knew she looked nothing of the kind. You couldn't
fight your way through a mental knothole for forty-eight
hours and come out on the other side unscathed. She was
unpleasantly conscious of her pallor, her burning lids,
although she had done what she could with pancake lip
stick and rouge.
Alicia was examining her with large brown eyes that
appeared to operate on ball bearings. They were slightly
protuberant and exceedingly acute. Eve was afraid of them.
She asked hurriedly after her brother, her five-year-old
nephew. "How is Gerald, Alicia? How's Bunny?"
Gerald and Bunny were fine, simply fine. Gerald was
worried about the war, of course—and business. The in-
vestment market was shot. But definitely. And nurses—
Alicia threw up her hands—they were practically impos-
sible to get. She'd had three in as many weeks; she'd just
been in the park checking up on the latest gem, a woman
with ho teeth and a jaw that ought to be tied up in a rag.
She said with a thin ribbon of bitterness under her viva-
5


city, "It's funny, isn't it, Natalie's grown richer and richer
because of the war and we're getting poorer and poorer?
Well, that's the way it goes."
Her meaningless laugh grated against Eve's ears. The
silver fox jacket Alicia had on was a present from Natalie
and probably the hand-sewn shoes and the alligator bag.
Eve said flatly, "Natalie can't help it if her money's in-
vested in a factory that turns out aeroplane gauges, can
she?" *
Alicia gave a cry. She looked resentful, hurt. "Of course
not, don't be silly, Eve. That's not what I meant at all.
You do manage to twist things. Are you coming or going?"
"I'm on my way in."
The two women crossed the street together and mounted
the steps. Eve thought, It's coming closer. Alicia kept on
talking. "Aunt Charlotte's back, you know. Her stay on
the farm doesn't seem to have done her the slightest bit of
good. She looks worse than when she went up to Vermont
in July. She looks frightful, really. Wait until you see
her."
Eve said quietly, "I have seen her. She stopped in at the
shop the day before yesterday."
Alicia showed her surprise. "Then you've made it up.
Oh, my dear, I'm so pleased. Feuding's silly." Her tone
was cordial, her eyes were probing. "She isn't looking well,
is she? I was horrified when I first saw her. Of course she
isn't getting any younger ... So you're friends again."
Eve and Charlotte Foy, the aunt who had brought up
the three of them—her brother and Natalie and herself—
could never be friends. They were as far apart as the poles,
had absolutely nothing in common, except a vast mutual
distaste and their mutual love for Natalie. Her aunt had
disliked and distrusted Eve since she was a child. It was to
prove Charlotte wrong, to keep her from hurting Natalie,
that Eve was there. She wasn't going to tell Alicia that.
6


She said aloud, smiling lightly, "We were never anything
but friends, underneath. It was simply that we didn't un-
derstand each other. But one grows older and wiser—we'll
hope . . ."
The door was opening. Eve tried to relax tight muscles
and followed her sister-in-law over the threshold. The
staircase rose gracefully at the right and swung up across
the rear wajl. A great clump of rust-colored chrysanthe-
mums bloomed on the Pembroke table beneath an old
mirror that reflected the exquisite lines of the red chalk
drawing Cheverin had done of Natalie's mother as a bride.
The clock ticked on the landing; it was around Eve again,
untouched, unchangeable, the atmosphere from which she
had fled, orderly and gracious and serene and, to her, at
least, completely poisonous. It pressed up against her
stiflingly. Almost, then, she made a movement of retreat.
It was too late. The maid closed the front door behind
them, shutting out the fog and the cold December air. As
she did so, Eve's young half-sister, Natalie, came through
an archway on the left.
Natalie wasn't pretty but she was ineffably smart. She
was tall for a girl, five feet six, with a narrow, fine-featured
face set in a frame of hair the color of unbeaten flax. It
was cut in a long bob that swept her shoulders. Her eyes,
big and brown and shining under a convex forehead, gave
her the air of a serious child. Everything about her was
long and narrow, her straight nose, her wide delicate-
lipped mouth, her arms and legs and hands and feet. Blue
veins showed in her slender wrists below the bracelet
sleeves of a brown wool dirndl with a swinging skirt. She
wasn't really frail, but Charlotte had fussed over her
health from babyhood. In Eve's opinion, if her young half-
sister had been flung out into the Maine woods with a
rusty tin cup to forage for herself, she would soon have put
on the weight her bones called for. Her expression was
7


aloof and a little haughty. It changed to one of quick
pleasure when she saw Eve.
"Darling ... I didn't know you were coming," she
exclaimed. "I expected Alicia but not you. I'm so glad
. . . How did you manage to get away? Never mind—
you're here now anyhow. Come on in to the fire." She
linked an arm through Eve's with one of her quick im-
petuous movements. "There are some people, but they'll
go soon and we can talk. I was going to call you. I was
thinking we might all go up to the country for a week-end
when Bruce gets back. He's in Washington, you know."
Bruce Cunningham, to whom Natalie was engaged, was
a lieutenant in the Air Force. Wounded in an engage-
ment in the Pacific he had been invalided home and was
in New York on convalescent leave.
Eve said she couldn't stay long. She noticed with a
flicker of uneasiness that Natalie looked tired, that she was
thinner, more vibrant, that her laugh was too brittle, her
voice too gay. Her very white skin, skin that went natu-
rally with her fair hair, had a faintly sallow tinge, and the
spatter of freckles across the bridge of her straight nose
was in evidence—always a sign that she wasn't her usual
self.
When she was little, when she was growing up, it was
the first thing that people—nurses, governesses and tutors,
Charlotte—always said, "You're freckles are showing,
Nat."
Alicia said it now. She was extremely observant. "Freck-
les, Nat, darling. . . . What's the matter? Have you been
overdoing it with your countless aid things? You'll wear
yourself out. You shouldn't . . ."
Natalie said with a touch of impatience—she could be
imperious when she wanted to—"I'm all right. I wish
you wouldn't, Alicia. I mean . . . don't say anything in

8


front of Charlotte, for heaven's sake. She worries so—and
she's not well."
The three women entered the big sunken living room,
to the left of the hall and down a shallow flight of steps.
The sea-green draperies at the windows were drawn.
Lamplight drew gleams from the fine pieces of old furni-
ture rubbed to a mirrorlike smoothness, shone tranquilly
on low bookcases, gaily colored satin chairs and the few
good pictures punctuating the ivory walls. Natalie had
done the room over in April, on her twenty-first birthday.
It was a decided improvement. Men and women stood or
sat about in groups, talking in the muted well-bred way
in which the Flavell parties were always conducted. Alicia
darted off to join friends and Eve nodded to several people
she knew distantly and followed Natalie to the fire.
Sofas flanked the white mantel under which flames
leaped cheerfully. Eve's father Hugh Flavel and her aunt,
Charlotte Foy, were on one of the sofas; Charlotte sat up-
right behind the tea things, her capable hands busy. Hugh
lounged beside her, tall and thin, with his slight scholar's
stoop, his eyes palely blue behind pince-nez, his receding
hair brushed smoothly back from the high forehead of his
handsome aquiline face. His serenity, his savoir faire, his
air of being able to command any situation under the sun
were contradicted and betrayed by a small neat mouth
under a clipped mustache that pouted in repose and was
stubborn.
He looked younger and more alive than Eve could re-
call. Charlotte, on the contrary, looked older and stonier,
yet there was very little difference between their ages;
Huge was fifty-one and Charlotte fifty-four.
"Dad, Charlotte, look who's here," Natalie said gaily.
She came of her own accord, I swear it."
If Eve's unsolicited presence in the house from which
9


she had voluntarily and drastically separated herself a long
while ago caused either her father or her aunt any sur-
prise, there was no evidence of it except, perhaps, in an
overlong glance from Charlotte.
Hugh said, "Ah, Eve, my dear. How are you? You're
looking well." There was courtesy but no pleasure in his
greeting. Eve didn't expect it. Her father and she had
never been close, and after some of the things she had said,
in her young violence, four years earlier, they probably
never would be. Hugh was not a forgiving person. She
could hardly blame him. Charlotte produced words as
though she were measuring spoonfuls of sugar. She now said,
in her measured tones, "Nice to see you here, Eve. Sit down.
Tea? No? You'll probably want a drink."
Eve had wanted tea. She settled herself in the corner of
the opposite sofa and smiled at her aunt. "A drink, please,
Charlotte—but I do wish you'd get over the horrid habit of
being right. You know me too well—and all my sins."
The moment the remark was out she regretted it. Char-
lotte flushed and drew in her breath and Hugh's brows rose
humorously. Natalie, who had turned aside to beckon to
one of the maids, looked distressed. Eve knew she was being
a fool, but for the life of her she couldn't help it. The very
sight of Charlotte rubbed her the wrong way. It always had.
She was so correct, so wrapped in rectitude; if only she
wouldn't thrust it down your throat, Eve thought, and re-
minded herself that she hadn't come to quarrel; she had
come for another and very definite purpose. Once it was
accomplished she could go and not return.
Nevertheless, sitting there in the familiar room, a sudden
childish lump rose in her throat and for a moment she found
herself wishing that she had had a more normal youth,
\hat her mother had lived, that her father hadn't married
again, into money, even that her stepmother hadn't died—
in which case Charlotte would never have appeared on the


moved him deeply was a threat to his own comfort. Eve
reflected, watching her young half-sister, that Charlotte had
done her best to spoil her, but there was one quality in
Natalie Charlotte hadn't been able to touch, and that was
her generosity. The purse strings of the fortune left to
Natalie by her mother were never drawn. She was always
wide open, foolishly so sometimes, to an appeal for help. She
had given a pension to Pussy, their old nurse, for life; she
had sent the furnace man's son through college; she was god-
mother to a half dozen local war relief organizations, and
Alicia was always running to her with "cases," not to speak
of Gerald's demands or the demands of her long list of
friends and acquaintances.
Eve tossed her cigarette into the flames. If she was watch-
ing the others, Charlotte was watching her. Eve's spine stiff-
ened. She turned toward the hearth, sipped a highball and
answered Hugh's polite questions. The shop was doing very
well, much better than she had expected. She had had a run
on stockings. . . .
Her father didn't flinch. His small keen eyes were cold
but his manner remained bland, as if what she did were no
longer of any importance. Yet he had objected furiously to
her going into business, had wanted her to remain on and to
marry, well, under the aegis of Natalie's wealth and position,
which would have added to the Flavell prestige. The book
shop he might have been able to swallow, books were .cul-
tural and not undignified, but when she had added stockings
and gloves he had thrown up his hands.
"A female haberdasher, after four years of college—my
dear girl. What an achievement! You must be proud of
yourself."
That was on the day she had refused to live an hour
longer in Natalie's house, on Natalie's money. She had been
very young and very stupid and crude in the way she went


about it, accusing the others by indirection—her father and
Charlotte, her brother Gerald and Alicia—of doing just
that. No wonder they had resented her attitude. They had
said she was pig-headed and ungrateful and eaten up by
jealousy. This last at least was untrue. She was very fond
of her young half-sister, but Natalie's wealth, her friends,
her amusements, pursuits and outlook were not Eve's and
never could be.
She had made the break as complete as possible. It had
been difficult at times but on the whole exhilarating. The
only one she had had any real trouble with was Natalie.
With a large income at her disposal she couldn't under-
stand why Eve wouldn't use her charge accounts or have her
apartment furnished, and at first, anyhow, she had been
hurt and unhappy at the division between them. But if their
daily association had been curtailed their affection for each
other was as strong as ever.
Eve looked at Natalie's bent head, pale against a fall of
green brocade, where she stood at a desk writing a check
for some charity or other for a stout woman in elegant beige
and sables, and warmth stirred in her around a core of cen-
tral deadness. She had been right. She had done the only
thing there was to do. . . .
The room was beginning to empty. Departing guests kept
coming up to say good-bye to Hugh and Charlotte. Eve
smoked and waited, holding taut nerves in check. It
wouldn't be long now. "How's the book coming, Father?"
she asked during a lull.
Hugh was writing a book on Economic Victorianism. He
had been engaged on it for a long while. The first volume,
published nine years earlier, had been well received. The
notices, all good, were pasted neatly in a scrap book that
occupied a lectern of its own in his study.
Her father nodded without removing the cigarette from
13


his lips. His aloof gaze said, "Don't try to come over me with
that. You haven't the slightest interest in my work, or in me.
You never had."
Eve flushed and persevered. "There must be a tremen-
dous amount of research to do."
"There is."
He was, definitely, thinking of other things. The conver-
sation withered. Charlotte made no effort to keep it alive.
Her labors at the tea table over, she had taken up her knit-
ting. Her silence was disagreeable, menacing. It gave her the
air of a judge—which was what she always had been to Eve,
condemning her unheard, in advance, of the gravest crimes.
But when she got up and went to speak to someone, it was
no relief. Eve had always hated to be alone with her father.
She never knew what to say to him. Now, in his absorption
in whatever engrossed his thoughts, he was doubly formi-
dable.
Fortunately Alicia dropped into Charlotte's vacant place.
Hugh was fond of the daughter-in-law whose social back-
ground was excellent, who was decorative, whom he con-
sidered a good wife and mother and who knew how to
flatter him. Talk flowed between them easily.
"You're not looking too well, Dad." Alicia put her dark
madonna-smooth head on one side. "Your eyes, yes, I think
it's your eyes—-they have no light in them. Have you been
doing what Doctor Hendricks ordered?"
Hugh relaxed insensibly. "I can't be bothered with all
that nonsense."
"Oh, but you must. Exercise—have you been taking your
walks?"
"That I do do. Five times around the Square after break-
fast, five times after dinner."
"And something to eat before you go to bed?"
"I generally have a banana and a glass of milk. But
bananas, decent ones, are hard to get."
14


"You've positively got to have them. It's about the only
fruit you care for."
Alicia was in good form. Natalie threw Eve an amused
glance over the shoulder of a man she was talking to and
made a face and they smiled imperceptibly at each other.
Natalie had grown, Eve decided. She wasn't a child any
more. She was out of Charlotte's leading strings. Freedom,
marriage, a new deal, were going to be splendid for her. She
would lose her flashing restlessness and flower like a plant
in the sun. Presently Charlotte came back. "How many for
dinner?" she wanted to know, lighting a cigarette. Eve
shook her head. "Not me, either," Alicia said. "I'd love it,
but we're dining with the Beauferts. Gerald's calling for
me at . . . There he is now."
Eve thought, with an inner flicker of irony, I'm going
to have a full house, and watched her brother advance to-
ward the fire, tall and erect and graceful in a well-cut gray
suit. Gerald was always impeccably turned out. His bills
used to cause riots when he was at college. He was much too
attractive for his own good, she thought. Things had always
been made too easy for him. He had their father's face but
their mother's eyes, gray, thick:lashed, appealing, smoky
eyes. There were new sets of lines at the corners of them,
little crow's-feet of strain. As Alicia had said, he was prob-
ably worried about business. He had an expensive estab-
lishment to keep up—but it was the way he wanted to live.
Gerald greeted Hugh and Charlotte affectionately,
pecked at Alicia's cheek, showed surprise at seeing Eve—
and pleasure. "The return of the prodigal, a nice prodigal.
That hat's good on you, my lass. What brings you to the old
manse? Business folded?"
It was her cue, Eve thought. But she wanted to wait for
Natalie, who was saying good-bye to a man and a girl near
the archway. "The shop? Thanks, no, it's flourishing, Ger-
ald," Eve said aloud.
15


Natalie joined them then, and Hugh and Gerald both got
up. Her father hadn't risen for her, Eve reflected. He
wouldn't. That was part of the unstudied discourtesy with
which he had always treated her. Natalie did look tired. Her
thin cheeks were pale and the dust of freckles across her nose
stood out more prominently than ever.
"Here," Gerald took her by the shoulders and pushed her
into a chair. "You're all in, chicken."
Natalie smiled at him. "I am, rather."
"What you need is a drink," Gerald said. "I'm going to
mix us all one. This is going to be good. I got it from a fellow
who used to be at the old Hoffman House." He went to the
eighteenth-century liquor cabinet against the wall and
opened squat doors.
Alicia peered at him through the low light. "How many
have you had already?"
Her tone was sharp. Charlotte looked at her and then,
quickly, at Gerald. Hugh gazed at the fire, his mouth com-
pressed. He was a practicing Aristotelian and believed in
moderation in all things. Two cocktails, and only two, were
permissible before dinner.
"Drink deep or touch not the Pierian Spring," Gerald
said, turning around and grinning amiably. "Alicia's my
pet prohibitionist, did you know?"
It was family stuff, trivial, unimportant—or so Eve con-
sidered at the time. Nevertheless she registered with a sud-
den sharp flash and a pang of apprehension that it was in
Gerald and Alicia too, a brittle unease, as though they were
deeply stirred about something but didn't want it to show,
wanted it, very determinedly, not to.
She gave herself a mental shake. She was probably imagin-
ing the whole business. She took the glass Gerald handed
her. The stem was cool between her fingers and smooth and
firm; you could hold on to it. Alicia and her father on the
low armchair between the sofas, with Gerald on a hassock
16


in front of her, his shoulders against her knees; beyond the
warm circle of fire and lamplight the rest of the room was
dim, shadowy and empty at last. Now, she thought, now,
and leaned forward a little.
"I've got news for you, Nat."
In spite of herself her voice wasn't entirely level. Char-
lotte's knitting needles came to a halt; Alicia's cigarette
paused in mid-air; her father adjusted his pince-nez. Gerald
said lazily, "Ah-ha, a nigger in the woodpile—I thought so
when I saw you here. Out with it, my girl."
Natalie was looking at her with all her eyes. "News, Eve?
Good news?"
Eve thought, with a bitter pang of self-reproach, She's
afraid. How terrible! I have hurt her in the past—but never
again. Aloud she said, "I hope you'll think it's good. Jim
Holland and I are going to be married."
It wasn't what her father or Alicia or Gerald had expected
to hear. She didn't glance at Charlotte. Natalie jumped up
and gave her a quick kiss. "Oh, Eve, I'm so glad," she
cried. "This is wonderful. I do like Jim and he's been crazy
about you for ages. When did you decide? When's it
to be?"
"Almost immediately," Eve answered. "Probably in a
couple of days. We've gotten the license, taken our tests.
You see, Jim's . . ."
Her voice stopped. She sat very still. Blackness was swim-
ming up around her. She had waited too long. The man who
shouldn't have been there had entered the house unheard
while she was talking.
Bruce Cunningham was back from Washington. He
stood on the top step looking toward the group around the
fire, looking past Natalie, at Eve. The gold buttons on his
uniform winked. Nothing else about him moved.
Eve thought despairingly, Why did he have to come now?
Why couldn't he have stayed away until it was over and I
17


was gone? And then like a warning bell close in fog—
Charlotte.
Charlotte was beside her on the couch. The others hadn't
seen Bruce yet, their backs were to the hall and to the arch-
way leading into it, but Bruce was within Charlotte's field
of vision.
Eve tried to fight clear of destroying panic. They had
noticed her pause. She must make the best of it. She raised
her head, said in a clear light voice, "It's Lieutenant Cun-
ningham, just in time to hear my news," and wondered,
desperately, what was going to happen.
18
4


CHAPTER
2
Nothing happened, absolutely nothing, eve had
stumbled up a whole flight of steps that wasn't there.
Natalie got up and went toward Bruce, her face radiant—
she hadn't expected him for another twenty-four hours, and
they kissed and the rest called greetings and Bruce strolled
up to the hearth, an arm around Natalie's shoulders. He
felicitated Eve.
"I hope you'll be very happy, Miss Flavell. I have no
doubt that Holland will. Lucky fellow."
His lean dark face, with which his light eyes were in such
contrast, was quiet. His smile was pleasant, agreeable, not
sardonic or bitter. He looked as he usually did when he
wasn't particularly interested, except that the line of his
angled jaw was a ridge, which might have been an effect of
light. The others added their good wishes to his. Charlotte's
eyes expressed a grudging approval. Hugh was openly
pleased. He had known Jim for years, had tutored him for
his entrance exams at Yale and evidently considered him
19


had gone to get the purse she had left on a coffee table at
the hearth. She was picking up her purse when Bruce spoke.
His voice was almost at her ear. She hadn't heard him follow
her and her heart hammered, furiously.
What he said, musingly, almost indifferently, was: "You
couldn't wait, could you, Eve? Perhaps it was asking too
much. Are you in love with Holland? He's too old for you—
and too fat."
Eve was indignant and angry and frightened and wildly
amused. Jim wasn't any older, in relation to her, than Bruce
was to Natalie, or not much—and Jim wasn't fat. He was a
big man naturally; it was simply that he couldn't get enough
exercise with his stiff knee. As for waiting—what good
would it have done? Bruce was engaged to Natalie, had been
engaged to her for more than a year, and she was passion-
ately in love with him; you had only to see them together to
realize that. There wasn't the slightest chance of her termi-
nating the engagement of her own accord—which was the
only way it would matter.
Bruce was mad to talk to her like this, here. She said in a
voice as low as his own, "Don't, Bruce. I've made up my
mind and nothing can change it. I'm going to marry Jim.
It isn't any sacrifice. I'm very fond of him. Besides, we've
had all this out before. We're in perfect agreement
on one thing: Natalie mustn't be hurt. And Charlotte
suspects."
"Charlotte—what does she suspect?"
The need for reticence had vanished. "That you . . .
That I . . ."
"How do you know?"
"She came to see me at the shop the day before yesterday.
She told me so."
"Then it was Charlotte who made you do this?"
Her "No," wasn't emphatic enough. She added hurriedly:
"I would have done it anyhow. Jim's a swell guy." She
21


turned her head. No one was looking at them. The others
were listening to Jim telling a story, gesticulating with his
stick. He told a story well. His voice was big, sure. The boom
of it was reassuring, like the rest of him. She glanced up
sideways at Bruce and a wave of sickness went through her.
His mouth was clamped tight and his eyes were narrow and
intent and smolderingly bright on nothing. He was un-
happy, tortured—and in a dangerous mood.
She had seen him like that only once before, on the night
he came to the shop to get some books for Natalie, and they
found out suddenly and without words what had grown up
between them, unbidden, almost unrecognized, until it was
too late. There was nothing they could do about it. They
both realized that, or seemed to. They, or she rather, for
Bruce had been strangely silent, had stamped on the sudden
and terrible knowledge, denying its existence, pretending it
wasn't there. A week later Bruce had thrown up his job and
gone into the Air Force.
If only his wound hadn't sent him home three weeks ago,
if only they had met when he was free. Well, they hadn't,
and wishful thinking was stupid and purposeless and a
waste of time. She had cut the knot of an impossible situa-
tion by engaging herself to Jim. Her announcement had
effectually squashed Charlotte's suspicion. It mustn't be
reawakened. Charlotte mustn't find them together like this,
apart from the others. She was at the telephone in the booth
under the stairs but she would be back at any moment. . . .
Fear unlocked Eve's weary paralysis. She tucked her purse
under her arm, started pulling on her gloves. "I'm going
now, Bruce," she said quietly.
He didn't pay any attention. He remained as he was,
staring down into the fire. "Charlotte," he murmured
thinly.
He had never liked her aunt. Eve was afraid of his tone,
his expression; she was more afraid of their isolation, of the
28


shadowy corners, the unseen eyes that might be raking them
speculatively.
She said, "Don't, Bruce. Think of Natalie. She's the one
we've got to think of," and on that, without waiting for a
response, she walked away, arranging her face, buttoning
her glove, putting on a smile.
Her back was to the fireplace and to the door beside it, a
door leading into the dining room beyond. The door had
been open a few inches. Eve didn't hear it close. Going into
the dining room a few minutes later, Gloria Fox, the parlor
maid, found Charlotte Foy there, her face white, her hands
gripping the back of a tall carved chair. The girl was fright-
ened at her appearance but Miss Foy wouldn't let her call
anyone. She sent her upstairs for medicine, took it, and then
said brusquely, "I'm all right now. Go back to your work."
When she returned to the living room, Bruce Cunningham
was gone. He had an engagement with a fellow officer. He
left after arranging to have dinner somewhere with Natalie.
Eve didn't speak to him directly again. She said good-bye
without looking at him. She didn't need to look. The feel of
him standing there beyond the archway, tall and straight in
his uniform, was all through her. It was Thursday after-
noon. She was going to be married to Jim Holland probably
on Saturday. The anguish of farewell gripped her devastat-
ingly. It wiped out everything else, so that for a while
incidentals were blurred. She heard and saw, spoke and was
spoken to, mechanically, in another world that had no real
existence.
Jim talked about Lordship Beach, said they thought of
taking a house there. It was a swell place with a cliff coming
up out of the sea. "It's rather like Cornwall, isn't it, Eve?"
She said yes. Her father was pleased when he heard that she
intended to give up the shop. "Now that's what I call a
good idea." She said the wedding was going to be quiet but
she and Jim wanted them all to come.
23


"But of course, darling," Alicia exclaimed. Natalie said
wild horses wouldn't keep her away. Charlotte said suddenly
and harshly, "I can't. I've got to go to Boston tomorrow."
She spoke in a loud voice as though she were making; a
declaration of faith before piled fagots. The others stared.
In spite of her detachment, Eve felt a stiffening in them. It
was mostly in her father but—did Gerald glance quickly at
Alicia and did Alicia's face tighten, so that for a moment she
looked hag-ridden, ugly?
Eve was puzzled. She could understand her father, but
not Gerald or Alicia. Boston in that household meant the
Coreys. Natalie's mother, Virginia, had been a Corey. The
old and extremely wealthy Boston family had strenuously
objected to Virginia's marriage to Hugh, who, at that time,
if he was a young and brilliant professor of economics was
also penniless and a widower with two children to boot.
After Virginia's death, the Coreys had tried to obtain cus-
tody of Natalie in the courts. Hugh had very properly fought
them and had won, but he had never forgiven his wife's
people and he hated the yearly trips Natalie made to her
maternal aunt and cousins, trips on which Charlotte occa-
sionally accompanied her.
Jim was disappointed at Charlotte's announcement. Un-
like Bruce Cunningham, he was rather fond of her. He had
known her when she was a good deal younger and she had
been kind to him, as a boy. "Can't you put off your trip?"
he asked.
She said no without explanation. Hugh made no attempt
to hide his displeasure. The paper he was holding crackled
sharply and he turned and walked away. He was in a tower-
ing rage; he did get into them sometimes, very suddenly.
Ordinarily Charlotte was sensitive to his reactions, but not
then. She repeated, "I've got to go." Her face was gray and
there were brownish pockets under her eyes.
There was an odd little pause. Eve felt it again, more
24


strongly, the presence of queer undercurrents in a family
with which she had lost touch. What was worrying her aunt
and Alicia and Gerald—and even Natalie? The whole thing
was disturbing, disagreeable. She welcomed the interrup-
tion when it came.
The phone in the hall rang. This time the call was for
her. It was Clara Long, her assistant, talking from the shop.
A prospective buyer had turned up, was there now—would
Miss Flavell come?
"At once," Eve said. It altered her plans. She and Jim
had intended to go to Tony's for rubbery spaghetti and red
wine; she left the house almost immediately, alone.
Natalie was cross. "Oh, Eve. I was making all sorts of
plans," she said. "I thought you and Jim would have
joined Bruce and me somewhere later on this evening and
we could have gone to El Morocco, they've got a marvelous
new dancer, or to the Casablanca or to the Stork and
talked. . . .'*
"No, my pet," Eve said firmly. Natalie loved to spend
money on people and didn't like to be thwarted, but Eve
ignored her little pout of disappointment, kissed her and
explained that it was impossible. She couldn't afford to
lose a chance of disposing of the business. "I'll call you to-
morrow." She said good-bye to the others, and to Jim,
"There's no reason why you should hurry away. I'll be busy
for a while. Ring me in about an hour."
She didn't encounter anyone in the hall. The door of the
little writing room under the stairs was shut. She opened
the front door, closed it behind her, and was swallowed up
instantly in fog. The fog was thick, impenetrable; it blank-
eted the entire Square. It was cold and very dark. The dim-
out was real here. No lights pierced it. The lamp above the
door shed a feeble glow on the drenched bricks of the steps.
Beyond them there was nothing but blackness and moisture
and a bone-piercing chill.
25


Eve was glad to be alone. She drank in solitude as a
thirsty man drinks water. The Square was quiet, but then it
always had been. Set down in the heart of New York, with
the city sprawling away from it in every direction, it man-
aged to hold itself apart and to produce a fictitious air of
space and privacy and freedom from walls. Beyond it some-
where horns blasted feebly, and out on the river whistles
blew. Eve descended the steps, one hand on the rail. She
reached the pavement and turned left. Before she had gone
more than a few feet she bumped into someone, violently.
Arms steadied her. A man's voice said, "Oops—sorry. Are
you all right?"
Eve said, "Quite all right, thanks," and proceeded more
cautiously on her way.
The park, locked and silent beyond its tall iron gates,
was completely invisible. Her father wouldn't take his walk
that night. Or perhaps he would, with rubbers on and a
coat of just the proper weight. He had always taken extra-
ordinary care of himself. She could imagine him crossing
the street and unlocking the gate and methodically pacing
the paths through the thickets of the artificial wood behind
the tall iron railings for the requisite length of time to the
dot.
She dallied with the thought of her father deliberately,
putting aside thought of Bruce and Jim and herself. Nata-
lie's future was assured, and she had peace with honor; that
was all that mattered. Meet other problems as they arose.
As far as Jim went he was no romantic love-sick boy. He was
a man of thirty-seven and a realist. He wouldn't demand the
impossible. She would make him a good wife, could give
him all he needed, a home, companionship, an intelligent
interest in his work. Their minds were in tune, they were
friends, laughed at the same things. . . .
She collided with a lamp post, blinked wetness that wasn't
fog angrily from her lashes, and went toward the pale glim-
26


mer of two enormous half shut eyes that were the black-
taped lamps of a cab in front of the apartment hotel on the
corner. As she got in, slammed the door and gave the driver
her address, a clock somewhere struck a quarter of six.
There her actual knowledge of what further took place
among the people in the red brick house with the blue shut-
ters on that December day ended. Nevertheless she had in
her possession then, without knowing it, the groundwork
for murder. Certainly on that late afternoon and early eve-
ning, between half-past four when she entered the house
and twenty minutes of six when she left it, the die was cast,
irretrievably, into a cunning and malignant mold of
planned destruction that very neatly, within a hair's breath,
defied detection.
It was almost the perfect crime. A tiny shred of green
stuff invisible to the naked eye was what finally broke the
case—that and a man's hat that didn't fit and a speck of
pink china dug from between the floor boards of a country
house miles away. Christopher McKee, the head of the
Manhattan Homicide Squad, exploring in the same sort of
fog that filled the Square that night, had to learn where to
look for these things and how to interpret them. Before that
much had happened.
27


to lie down for a while before dressing. Bruce Cunningham
wasn't calling for her until half-past seven. She told Annette,
the older of the two maids, not to let her oversleep. "Call me
at a quarter of seven." There was no danger of her over-
sleeping.
When the maid went in she found Natalie clinging to the
foot rail of the bed doubled up with pain, her face as white
as the soft batiste negligee that wrapped her slender twisted
figure.
The maid was alarmed. "Oh, Miss, you're sick!" She ran
and got Charlotte Foy and they put Natalie on the chaise
longue and propped her with pillows.
But once the spasm passed Natalie made light of it, sit-
ting up and throwing her hair back and laughing at their
worry. "It's just my wretched stomach—I shouldn't have
had that drink with Gerald. He mixes such awful concoc-
tions, and liquor always upsets me. That was what was
making my head ache. I'm better already."
She wouldn't have the doctor and she wouldn't put off
her engagement with Bruce. "The air will do me good, and
I won't be late," she promised her aunt. "If your lights are
on when I get back, I'll come in and talk to you."
She was as worried about Miss Foy as Miss Foy was about
her and tried to persuade the older woman to defer her
trip to Boston. "Don't go tomorrow," she pleaded, holding
one of Charlotte's hands in both of hers. "You're not fit to
travel—and I'll worry about you. ... If you'll wait until
next week I'll go with you. But I can't leave before Eve's
wedding."
Charlotte Foy was determined not to postpone her jour-
ney. "I've got to go, Natalie," she said austerely. "Every-
thing has been arranged. You can come up on Sunday or
Monday. I'm not satisfied with Hendricks. I want my Bos-
ton man to see you. And you oughtn't to go out tonight."
Natalie was hurt and more than a little ruffled by her


aunt's refusal to listen to her. She didn't like to have her
proposals brushed aside in such an unceremonious fashion.
She drew herself up stiffly, her mouth quivering and her
eyes sparkling frostily. Then she glanced at the little gold
clock on the table beside her and gave a cry. "Heavens, the
time—and I've got to have a bath and do my hair and dress."
She jumped up and threw off her negligee with such haste
that she tore the delicate embroidery on the wide bishop
sleeve. She let the filmy garment drop to the floor and
started pulling off her stockings.
Charlotte repeated, looking down at her gravely, "I wish
you wouldn't go out tonight," but Natalie didn't pay any
attention. She said with bright impatience, "I'm all right
now, darling, really I am, I haven't a pain or an ache," and
Charlotte shrugged and left her and returned to her pack-
ing, and the maid went too, after drawing a tub for her
young mistress and shaking in the perfumed salts she
wanted.
But Natalie's attack was more serious than she had pre-
tended because when the cook mounted to the first floor to
admit Bruce Cunningham at half-past seven she noticed
that, although Natalie ran lightly down the stairs in a new
short black evening dress that had arrived that morning, she
was pale and peaked-looking and that there were shadows
under her big brown eyes.
The cook, whose name was Joan Adams and who had
been with the Flavells for years, also noticed that his
fiancee's condition made no apparent impression on Lieu-
tenant Cunningham. He kissed her, said briskly, "Hi, Nat—
Ready?" took the mink coat from her arm and put her into
it and they went out.
Fog blew in when the door opened. Miss Adams closed
it, extinguished some of the lights and presently went to
bed. If there were any visitors later, she didn't see or hear
30


them; her room was at the top of the house. So that was all
for the night, as far as independent witnesses were con-
cerned.
It wasn't until twenty minutes past nine on the following
morning that the terrible discovery was made. It took place
under particularly distressing circumstances. It was a child
of five in pursuit of a bouncing ball who made the grue-
some find—with an assist by Patrolman Crothers.
The morning of December the third was clear and bright.
The fog of the night before had been blown away by a
brisk wind out of the northwest and the sun shone brilliantly
in a high blue sky without a single cloud. Patrolman Croth-
ers was completing the last leg of his beat in a pleasant
mental vacuum induced by the change in the weather and
the peace of his surroundings. The streets bounding the
Square were quiet. He liked Henderson Park. It was a
swell neighborhood and everything was neat and prosper-
ous and orderly. Overhead tall trees creaked in the fresh
breeze and children's voices rang inside the shrubbery be-
yond the tall iron railings, but not in any volume. It was a
bit early yet for the nurses to have assembled their charges
in force.
Crothers was in the middle of the south side of the Square
when the uproar began. Beyond the iron fence, inside the
park, a child was running and screaming as he ran. His feet
clip-clopped rapidly on cement. The screams were loud,
frantic. The patrolman came to a halt. He had heard plenty
of kids holler before but not many as bad as this. He peered
through two black iron uprights rimmed with frost. A boy
of five or six in tweed shorts and a tweed overcoat was flying
down the path toward the south gate. Some distance away an
elderly nursemaid charged in pursuit of him, her hat over
one eye, her face red and angry.
3i


precinct detectives had already been at work. The park had.
been evacuated, a sizable area near the north gate had been
roped off and there was an officer at each of the other
three gates.
Doctor Benson, a tour man from the Medical Examiner's
office, was down on his knees examining the body. Off to one
side on a broad cement path, where they could do no harm
by messing up the surface, the second Commissioner and
Assistant District Attorney Smith were talking war and
peace. They greeted McKee. Smith said genially, "One more
for the undertaker, another little job for the cemetery man.
Nasty piece of work."
The Scotsman nodded and went around a sycamore. Feet
in stout black shoes moved big bodies out of the way at his
advent. The initial facts were given to him by Patrolman
Crothers and Radio Patrolman Anders. Kent wrote busily
and McKee listened and looked down into the recesses of
the winter thicket.
Crothers had recognized the victim at once. He was
familiar with the Square and its denizens. He had often
passed the time of day with Miss Foy, with her niece, Miss
Natalie Flavell, and with Miss Flavell's father.
Charlotte Foy had been shot. There was a wound of
entrance just over the heart, a wound of exit between the
shoulder blades. The bullet hadn't yet been found. It might
be anywhere within a considerable radius. The death didn't
appear to be suicide. There was no weapon in evidence.
"Have a look, Inspector?" Pierson asked.
"No," McKee said absently. "We'd better wait until . . .
Where's Dalligan?"
"Here I am." The gangling photographer from Head-
quarters pushed forward, laden down with camera cases.
McKee said, "Good. I want plenty of wide angle shots—
look out!"
34


Dalligan brought the soles of number twelve oxfords to
an abrupt halt and rocked back on his heels. He had been
about to tread on a cigarette sodden with moisture that lay
at the edge of the thicket that was the dead woman's im-
promptu grave. When its position had been photographed,
McKee retrieved it. Its tip was just barely blackened. No
more than a puff or two had gone through the tobacco. He
found the match that had companioned it.
The cigarette was a Lucky Strike. There was a package of
Lucky Strikes in Charlotte Foy's purse. McKee examined
the purse. The only things of interest in it were a large iron
key and a piece of paper with the word "Spencer" and what
appeared to be a telephone number written on it, in pencil.
He studied the position of the body, the surrounding ter-
rain and added up the facts as far as they went.
"Backward, turn backward, oh, time, in thy flight—'*
Mute evidence accomplished this to a limited extent. The
park, one of New York's few private parks, was locked at
all times. Keys were in possession of property owners front-
ing on it. In the case of apartment hotels the doorman
locked and unlocked the gates for guests desiring park
privileges. Charlotte Foy had entered the park at an un-
known hour with her key. She was some distance from her
home and within twenty feet of the north gate when she was
shot.
The Medical Examiner couldn't give an opinion as to
the time of death. McKee could and did. He said that Char-
lotte Foy had been killed before 11 p.m. the previous night.
The blanket of leaves covering her body proved it. The
wind had risen at around eleven. The forty-mile gale out
of the northwest had stripped the last of its leaves from the
beech under which she lay, sending them down in showers.
Assistant District Attorney Smith was puzzled. The night
had been foggy and the blackout in this section almost com-
35


plete, so that the visibility was zero. Yet Charlotte Foy's
assailant had sent a bullet crashing into flesh and bone in
the exact location where it would do the most good.
"I don't get it, Inspector. . . ."
McKee said grimly, "Miss Foy herself provided the neces-
sary illumination when she lit the cigarette. The bullet
was fired then. She never completed her smoke. No, she
went crashing down into those bushes."
Pierson whistled. "Whoever plugged her must have been
a hell of a good shot."
The Scotsman shrugged. He would have nothing to do
with guesses about the bullet, its caliber, the weapon from
which it was fired, the direction and distance from which
it came; that was for the experts after the autopsy had been
performed. For the rest, there was only one other important
physical clue. Bleeding from the wound in Charlotte Foy's
chest had been extensive. It was confined to the thicket in
which she lay. A good three yards from it, near the edge of
a cement path, shorn grass was stained with an irregular
dark patching that was blood. Vague marks led from the •
thicket to this spot. There was none away from it. The con-
clusion was obvious. Someone with blood on his or her shoes
had wiped them repeatedly on the grass to get rid of tell-tale
stains. Someone who had stood over the dead woman, per-
haps to see that life was extinct, perhaps to search her person,
her purse. At any rate, it was someone who had had access to
the park, who either had a key or had been admitted by
Charlotte Foy herself.
McKee stood erect. The Ballistics Squad was arriving.
Kent, who had been doing a little research on the Flavells,
came back. The scene here was under full control; accom-
panied by the birdlike stenographer, McKee left the park
by the west gate and crossed the street to the red brick house
with the blue shutters and the white fan-lit door.
"Mr. Flavell? Yes, sir, if you'll wait here?"
36


Sunlight slanted through half-drawn Venetian blinds, be-
tween sweeping sea-green draperies and lay down in bars
on the polished floor and on the exquisite faded mosaics of
a "very old Bokhara in the beautiful sunken living room
into which the maid ushered the two men. A clump of
stock was fragrant under the sharp black and white of a
Diirer; all was order, beauty and peace. Almost from the
first moment of his contact with it, there was something in
the amosphere of the house that the Scotsman found dis-
turbing. It came, of course, from the people who lived there
—and one who had died. Its emanations were so subtle, its
deviations from the normal so slight, that its true essence
continually eluded his grasp.
It began with Hugh Flavell, twice a widower, a former
professor of economics, an authority on bees and the father
of a very wealthy daughter. Flavell was fifty-odd and didn't
look it, handsome, collected, polite and crisply interroga-
tive, a man of substance and affairs.
"Inspector McKee? Yes, Inspector. Sit down. What can
I do for you?" He smoothed thinning fair hair with a ner-
vous hand.
No word of what had happened had apparently reached
the late Charlotte Foy's brother-in-law, the Scotsman re-
flected, yet he was braced for bad news of some sort. His
lean body was tight under a dark-blue brocaded robe, gray
slacks and a white silk shirt.
McKee told him.
Flavell stared, said "Charlotte . . . No . . . I . . ."
He opened his mouth wider for air, gave a gasp or two,
turned livid and crumpled to the floor. He had fainted. His
head struck the edge of a chair as he went down.
They put him on one of the two couches inglenooking
the fireplace and Kent used a bell pull vigorously. The maid
who had admitted them came quickly and then an older
woman who was the cook, and then Natalie Flavell. Natalie
37


heard the maid telephoning for the doctor. She called down
to know what was wrong. The maid said, "It's your father,
Miss. He's been taken sick. In the living room. . . ."
There was a cry, footsteps ran lightly down the stairs and
Natalie came through the archway. McKee turned. A negli-
gee of jade-green velvet draped the girl's slender height.
Her narrow face, framed in soft hair that swept her shoul-
ders, was frightened. Her features were delicate and firm
with an antique cast to them. She had no eyes for McKee
and Kent. Her concern was all for her father. She hurried
to the couch, dropped on her knees beside it and looked
down at him anxiously. "What is it, Joan?" she asked the
cook. "What happened? How did it come on? Oh, look—he
hurt his forehead. Get water, get some bandaging, get his
medicine. ..."
The cook soothed her. "Now don't you take on, Miss Nat.
It's just one of his attacks. He'll be all right. . . . There
now, you see?"
Flavell was stirring. His color began to return. Natalie
covered him with a blanket the maid brought, put a pillow
under his head. His eyes remained closed but his breathing
was normal and his pulse stronger. He was coming out of it.
It was only when Natalie was sure that he was better that
she gave McKee her attention, and a puzzled frown.
"You were with my father? On business?"
The cook was gone, with Kent. McKee said, "Yes, Miss
Flavell. You'd better sit down. I'm afraid we have had bad
news for you."
Natalie sat, suddenly. "Is it—Bruce?" She waited for a
blow, hands clasped tightly in a green velvet lap. The sha-
dows in her paper-white skin were faintly green. A dust of
freckles across the bridge of her long straight nose stood
up in speckles of cinnamon.
"It's Miss Foy."
"Charlotte. . . . She's been taken sick. She wasn't in her
38


room. . . ." The girl's wide darkly brown eyes raked his
face. Her quivering lips firmed. "She's—is she dead?"
The Scotsman nodded. Natalie didn't seem surprised.
There was a quality of numb acceptance in her stricken
glance. It blew into a thousand pieces when McKee con-
tinued without further preamble, "Miss Foy was shot, some
time last night, in the park across the street."
The girl's reaction was not unlike her father's. "No, no,
no. Oh, no." She jumped up and backed away from him, her
hands out. For a moment it looked as though they were
going to be presented with two patients. But Natalie didn't
faint. In spite of her appearance of fragility she was young
and strong. She was disciplined, too. Tears rolling down
her face, she fought with shock, grief, incredulity, horror
and fear. The fear was very evident. It came last. Watching
it was like watching a tide sweep in. It showed itself in a
sudden checking of her sobs, a caught breath, a glance at
the Scotsman, stabbing, fearful, and sharply withdrawn.
Doctor Hendricks arrived then. He was a stout gray-
haired middle-aged man with a pontifical presence. He had
heard about Charlotte and was appalled. He had attended
the family for years. He ordered Hugh Flavell taken up-
stairs and put to bed. When this had been done he had a
word aside with McKee.
"I'm afraid you won't be able to talk to him for awhile,
Inspector. There's no immediate danger, but excitement's
bad for him, with that pump of his. He's liable to go off in
one of these attacks."
Hendricks clarified Charlotte's position in the household.
He said she was the sister of Hugh Flavell's first wife, Eliza-
beth, who died when the two children of that marriage,
Gerald and Eve, were small. Charlotte had lived with Hugh
and taken care of them until Hugh married again, a few
years later. His second wife, Virginia, was one of the Boston
Coreys. But Hugh was unlucky in his marriages. Virginia
39


/
gree, in Hugh Flavell. After her return, she seemed to have
lost interest in everyone and everything. Where she had
been cheerful and brisk and competent before, she was mo-
rose and brooding. She didn't approve of Natalie's engage-
ment to Bruce Cunningham, and showed it plainly, and
that in turn made Natalie miserable. She's a sensitive high-
strung girl . . ."
"With plenty of money who likes her own way," the
Scotsman interjected.
Hendricks smiled. "Don't we all, Inspector?—And as far
as money is concerned, I've appealed to her plenty of times
for help with some of my poorer patients and never in vain.
No, Natalie wasn't at fault, or Hugh Flavell either, for that
matter; it was Charlotte. She was a different woman when
she came back from Vermont and not a happy person to be
with. Naturally, living close to her had a depressing effect
on the entire household. I felt it myself, on several occa-
sions, when I was there. ... So did others. Her bitterness
toward—toward people she had never been fond of was
simply the result, in my opinion, of a growing lack of con-
trol produced in turn by her physical condition."
Hendricks frowned and was troubled. He had something
on his mind he didn't produce. All in good time, talk to
him later, when they knew more, McKee decided. After the
doctor was gone, McKee spoke to the Medical Examiner's
office and asked for a thorough examination of Charlotte
Foy's general physical condition prior to death, and then
questioned Natalie and the three servants. They were rou-
tine questions designed to establish the immediate past of
a woman who had no future, on earth.
Charlotte Foy had been shot and killed before 11 p.m. the
previous night—but how long before? An analysis of the
contents of the stomach matched with the hour when food
was last eaten would give them an approximation, when
the autopsy was completed. The Scotsman didn't want to
4»


wait for that. The res gestae of the crime put uneasiness
into him; a dark and foggy night, a shot, and the swift and
quiet flitting of the perpetrator:—more than ten hours had
elapsed since Charlotte Foy had been killed and that was
plenty, for escape, for concealment of the gun and the
smoothing of all incriminating traces.
No one knew at what time Charlotte Foy left the house
the night before. Natalie and the upstairs girl, Annette
Lebrun, had last seen her when she went to her room at ten
minutes of seven. By seven the two maids were on their way
to a neighboring movie house. Hugh Flavell was presum-
ably in his study on the third floor, and the cook was in the
basement, except for that moment in the hall at seven-
thirty when Bruce Cunningham called for Natalie. The girl
said she didn't get home until almost twelve, too late to
stop and talk to her aunt.
McKee was keenly interested in Charlotte's trip to Bos-
ton. An incompleted journey was always of interest in a
murder case. If the journey was significant, if, for instance
Charlotte had been prevented from making it, with a bullet,
knowledge of her plans in advance would have been a neces-
sity to the perpetrator.
Natalie said wearily that a Boston call had come through
for Charlotte late the previous afternoon, at a little after
five. "Aunt told us then that she had to go, today, and
wouldn't be here for Eve's wedding."
"Us" comprised herself, her father, her brother Gerald,
Gerald's wife, Alicia, Eve, and Jim Holland, the man to
whom Eve had just become engaged. McKee got the story
of Eve's visit the day before and its purpose, savored its
rarity. He asked exploringly whether there was anyone with
whom Miss Foy had quarreled, anyone with whom she was
on bad terms and Natalie said, "No, oh, no," with too much
emphasis. He showed her the slip of paper scribbled with
42


"Eve," she said around a dry sob. "Eve, Charlotte's
dead. ... I don't know how to tell you. . . . It's fright-
ful. She was shot . . . last night, in the park. The police are
here. . . ." At the other end of the wire Eve Flavell asked
questions, to which Natalie said yes and no a couple of
times, then, "After you left here last night, after you went
back to the shop, you were with Jim, weren't you?"
The answer was evidently in the affirmative because
Natalie said, "Oh, thank God. . . ." McKee lost the rest.
The thud of the knocker filled the lower hall. The maid
opened the door and a woman came in. It was Alicia Flavell,
Gerald's wife. Mrs. Flavell asked where Natalie was; the
girl told her, and she started up the stairs. McKee stepped
backward into the gloom of a landing that led to the floor
above.
Alicia Flavell didn't see him. She was in a hurry. She
went straight to the door of Natalie's room, opened it with-
out knocking. She didn't close it behind her. She was a
woman in her thirties, very smartly dressed with smooth
dark hair under a small hat. Natalie was at a desk on the far
side of the room. She dropped the telephone into its cradle
and turned, her face pinched and tear-stained and woebe-
gone in its window of fair hair. Her nerves were on edge.
She was startled and not too pleased by her sister-in-law's
abrupt entrance. "You—heard, Alicia?"
Alicia Flavell said, "Yes, I heard. I saw them taking Char-
lotte away. . . ." She put her handkerchief to her mouth.
"Someone said she was shot. It doesn't seem possible. . . .
Did she—kill herself?"
Natalie's "No" was small, desolate.
Alicia Flavell's back was to the Scotsman. It was a hand-
some back but uninformative. Her voice was enough. It
was harsh and vibrant around the edges as she said, "Eve
was here last night, Natalie. In the Square, in the house. She
said good-bye when she left in the afternoon. Why did she
44


come back? She didn't like Charlotte . . . Charlotte was
watching her yesterday afternoon and Eve has a pistol. . . .
Oh, Nat—I'm frightened."
She wasn't the only one. Natalie said "Shush," with white
violence, leaping to her feet. It was too late for shushing.
McKee was already in the room. It was shortly after that,
before he had time to do more than ask a few preliminary
questions, that the twin discoveries were made.
For one thing Charlotte Foy's room had been searched
during the night, and, for another, decorating the mauve
broadloom at the foot of the stairs, there was a long
brown stain that was undoubtedly blood, blood that in all
probability had been carried from the pool under the
dead woman in among the bushes in the park across the
street.
45


her stubby fingers. They were busy with compact and lip
stick. Now where—ah, he had it—an advertisement for
creams or powders in a magazine; Alicia Grand, postdebu-
tante of New York and Southampton, winner of . . . some
blue ribbon at some dog show. She wasn't married to Gerald
Flavell then; she must have been post for some time, she
was in her middle thirties.
"Mrs. Flavell, if you please. You were saying to Miss
Flavell a few minutes ago . . ."
"Yes, Inspector," Alicia snapped the compact shut,
dropped it into her purse. Her words had been intended for
Natalie's ear alone. Finding that he had heard her, she didn't
attempt to retreat. She was too shrewd for that. She went at
it in another way, consolidating her losses and taking a
temperamental plea.
"I was upset—naturally, Inspector—one does jump to
conclusions, stupidly. It couldn't have been Eve I saw down
here last night. Natalie says Eve was with Jim Holland all
evening. I was thinking about Eve and Jim and how sudden
their engagement was. That's how I came to make the mis-
take, I imagine. So. . . ."
Pinned down, she admitted that the evening before, at
around twenty minutes or a quarter of eight, she had seen a
woman who might have been Eve Flavell, who looked like
her, certainly, and walked like her, cross the street from the
direction of the park and enter the house. When McKee
said, "You were in the park yourself, Mrs. Flavell?" she gave
him a faint smile, heavy lids at half mast over her full brown
eyes.
"No, I wasn't in the park. I was walking Dum-Dum, my
bull, around the Square. One does use it sometimes."
She was offering him insolence as a red herring—for what?
She had regained her composure. Underneath it she was
badly rattled and not, McKee surmised, because of her im-
\ 47


plication of Eve Flavell. Her voice was cold when she spoke
of her sister-in-law.
He got her story of the afternoon and early evening up to
a quarter of seven, when Jim Holland left the Flavell apart-
ment on the other side of the Square. After that? After that,
except for her stroll with Dum-Dum, she and Gerald had
spent the remainder of the evening quietly at home playing
the radio and reading.
Natalie had listened in silence, a white manikin fright-
ened and angry at both Alicia and the Scotsman. She said
suddenly, turning on the older woman, "But I thought you
and Gerald were dining out, Alicia. You said so when Char-
lotte wanted you to stay here for dinner."
Alicia Flavell flushed. She became embarrassed, prettily.
She said, "I didn't want to mention it but—but, well, the
truth is, Gerald had had too much to drink and wasn't fit
to go anywhere. It isn't really his fault; it's just that he's
worried about business, poor boy. So I made him lie down
on the couch and got him to bed as soon as I could. That's
why I took Dum-Dum out myself. . . ."
Charlotte Foy had been killed at some time between 6:50
and 11 p.m. on the previous night. A man or woman who
knew she was dead had carried her blood from the thicket
where she lay into this house. The visitor hadn't been admit-
ted by a servant, which left Hugh Flavell or a key. Alicia
Flavell had been out in the Square; alone. As far as an alibi
for either herself or her husband was concerned, her story
was worthless.
McKee left the two women without further comment. Be-
fore he got into the Cadillac parked at the curb and drove
away he gave orders to Kent, who had been reinforced by
Wileski and McGill, that there was to be no more telephon-
ing for the next twenty minutes.
Eve Flavell's shop on East 19th Street was a tiny building
crushed down between a garage on one side and an electrical
48


supply house on the other. It had a tiled roof like an im-
mense eyebrow above timbered plaster stained a faint pink.
The single window held a pair of cobwebby stockings flung
across an ottoman, pigskin gloves thrown down on a Chip-
pendale table and an array of bright-jacketed books. Be-
hind them, crisp white-dotted swiss curtains concealed the
interior. The blue door, of heavy planking, had a latch and
wide strap hinges. McKee lifted the latch and walked in.
The shop was long and narrow. The walls were green.
White shelves covered with flat boxes lined the front half;
at the back the little building broadened out into a small
room with a worn Persian rug on the floor, low bookcases
on the left, a beautiful Sheraton desk opposite, several com-
fortable chairs and in the rear wall, between two simulated
windows that were mirrors, a mantel of white brick.
Fire burned redly in an iron basket under the mantel. Eve
deposited a lump of cannel coal on the fire with a tongs,
turned, and stiffened.
McKee studied her as he continued to advance. She wasn't
at all like her half-sister Natalie. She was lovely. Hair that
was bright on the crests and a warm shining chestnut in the
hollows waved away from a face that would have delighted
a sculptor with its sweep of brow and cheek bone, the model-
ing of the jaw and chin.
Like her father and Natalie and her sister-in-law Alicia,
Eve Flavell was frightened and on her guard. Odd to find a
fear that was individual in each of them when apparently
they had nothing to be afraid of, he reflected. They couldn't
all have killed Charlotte Foy, but they could all be conceal-
ing important and incriminating knowledge.
McKee said pleasantly, "Miss Flavell?" and Eve said
"Yes," and moistened dry lips and swallowed. "You've come
about Charlotte? ... Sit down, Inspector. I'd better lock
the door so that we won't be disturbed."
She did so and came back, and they both sat and lit ciga-
49


rettes. Light from a lamp over a bookcase fell on the curve
of Eve's cheek, on a string of pearls around her white throat, tl
on the buttons of her yellow cardigan. "You know how your t
aunt died, Miss Flavell?"
"Yes, in the park. She was shot. Poor Charlotte." Eve i
passed a hand across her eyes. j
The better not to see you with, my dear? There was some- t
thing very charming about this girl, and for the first time I (
in a long while McKee found himself disliking the work he
had to do. Yet, according to Doctor Hendricks and the serv- ]
ants and a neighbor or two, Eve Flavell was not on good i
terms with her aunt. ... 1
He didn't attempt to trap her. He told her what Alicia
Flavell had said about her being in the house the night
before.
Eve looked at him steadily, the pupils of her beautiful
gray eyes large and dark. She said "Alicia," with a wry smile
and looked away from him at the fire. The fear, at which the
Scotsman had guessed, was hard and tight inside of her, an
iron ball crushed up under her ribs, so that the pain was
physical. Think fast, Mr. Moto, she told herself shakily.
This is no ordinary policeman. For all his good manners, his
courtesy, he's an astute, a clever and a ruthless man. Aloud
she said quietly, "Yes, I went back to the Square last night,
Inspector, and I was in the house. But I didn't kill Charlotte.
I didn't know she was dead until Natalie told me a few
minutes ago."
McKee's heart sank. "Why did you go back, Miss Flavell?"
Eve's own heart was pounding. He must never know that
—never. She forced herself to speak slowly. "I went back
because, like an idiot, I forgot my purse. I left it behind me
in the afternoon."
The Scotsman's brows rose. "You came all the way here
without missing your purse, although I presume you took a
cab? Yes—and then, instead of telephoning, and in spite of
*.
50 I


the fact that it was a nasty night, you returned to get it,
through the fog?"
Eve let him finish. "I did miss it. I missed it when I got
into the cab, but there was a woman here I had to see, so I
paid the man off when I arrived. I didn't phone later be-
cause I knew the servants were out and I didn't want to
disturb Father or Charlotte."
Her statement was very thin. There was no way of dis-
proving it. The cook had been in the basement, the two
maids were at the movies, Natalie was out with Bruce Cun-
ningham and Hugh Flavell presumably in his study on the
third floor. Unless Charlotte Foy had admited her. . . .
"Who let you in, Miss Flavell?" N
"I still have a key."
"And a gun?" She was obviously suffering. Anger at her
and at himself for having to go on with it made him curt.
"Oh, yes." Eve produced it, calmly, from a drawer in the
desk, handed it over. It was a Colt .32. The chamber was
full. It bore no traces of having been fired recently. Such
traces could have been removed by cleaning. The rifling on
the barrel, compared with the marks on the lethal bullet—
when it was found—would tell the tale. McK.ee pocketed
the weapon.
Eve said she hadn't been in the park at all; she had no key
for that and the gates were always locked. She reached the
Square at around a quarter of eight and went directly into
the house. She hadn't seen her father, or anyone else. Her
purse was in the living room, behind one of the couch
cushions. She retrieved it and—left.
McKee pounced on her hesitation. "At once?"
Eve thought swiftly. Bruce was with Natalie, so it couldn't
have been Bruce who . . . She told the truth.
"No, not at once, Inspector. I went upstairs to Charlotte's
room. I thought she might have heard me, might wonder
who it was. Charlotte wasn't there, her door was locked, I
5i


tried it—but there was someone in her room." Eve's hands
tightened in the lap of her tartan plaid skirt. It had been bad
enough when it happened, but now—murder had been
abroad in the blackness and the silence of the fog-filled
Square the night before—coldness spread through her. "I
rapped on the door and I called."—"Charlotte," she had
whispered so as not to rouse her father. "Charlotte, it's me,
Eve." Her life, more than her life, had depended upon get-
ting an answer to a single question. There had been none
forthcoming.—"Whoever was inside the room stopped
moving around, didn't speak. I'm sure it wasn't my aunt,
Inspector—or she would have said something."
/ She had no clue to the identity of the person in Charlotte's
bedroom. She admitted that the vague stirrings and rustlings
behind the locked door had upset her. The house had
seemed curiously empty and, yes, frightening—but not
enough to make a fuss about. She could still feel the con-
striction between her shoulder blades when she ran down
the stairs, without looking back, and let herself out into the
open air.
McKee was pleased. His eyes began to shine. They were
getting to it. If this girl was speaking the truth—and he
thought she was, up to a certain point—Charlotte Foy had
gone out of the house on the Square before seven-forty-five.
Her death hadn't been long delayed after she left the house.
The soles of her shoes, protected by the branches which had
closed in over them, were not much more than damp—
which meant that she had been killed between ten minutes
of seven when Natalie and the maid last saw her, and a
quarter of eight, when Eve entered the house.
Anyone with an alibi for those fifty-five minutes could
be struck off the list of possible perpetrators. So far there
were no complete alibis. Hugh Flavell had none, he was
alone in the upper part of the house all evening; the cook
had none, she was in the basement; Natalie had been with
52


the lieutenant she was engaged to, but only from seven-
thirty on; Alicia Flavell was confessedly out and about
Henderson Square from seven-thirty until almost eight,
which left her husband, Charlotte's nephew, uncovered.
This girl certainly had no alibi.
He didn't mention the blood stain on the carpet in the
Flavell hall. A roundup of shoes was being unobtrusively
begun; have Eve's wardrobe examined. He didn't believe
for a moment that she had killed her aunt in cold blood, but
what about hot? He was engaged in probing for the root of
her controlled terror when the phone rang.
Eve sat facing him, an elbow on the flap of the desk. She
turned, lifted the instrument, said "Yes? . . . Sorry, wrong
number."
Her profile, silhouetted against a stretch of green wall,
was a medallion in ivory. The Scotsman made a long arm.
He took the phone from her. He said, "It may be for me,
Miss Flavell," and spoke into the mouthpiece. Instead of an
answer there was a click. Whoever was at the other end of
the wire had hung up on finding that Eve Flavell was not
alone.
McKee replaced the receiver without comment. It wasn't
Natalie and it wasn't Alicia; Kent was taking care of them.
It wasn't Eve's fiance, either. A stick rapped smartly against ,
the closed door and a man called the girl's name in muffled
tones.
"That's Jim," Eve said, jumping up as though movement
of any sort was a relief. She let Holland in. He kissed her
and she said something inaudible to him and they both
came toward the fire. Jim Holland was a big man in his
middle thirties with a strong rugged face that was massive
without being fat, thick brown hair, a high forehead and
intelligent blue eyes. He looked solid and dependable and
clever. He walked with a slight limp, using a cane.
Holland was shaken by the tragedy in the Square. There
53


were lead-colored marks under his eyes and his big mouth
was grim. "I've known Charlotte since I was a kid. It's a
horrible thing—horrible. . . ." He took out a handker-
chief and blew his nose resoundingly. "Has anything impor-
tant been discovered, Inspector?"
The news that Eve had returned to the Square the pre-
vious night rocked him backwards. She hadn't confided in
the man she was going to marry. Holland grew roots in the
floor. He jerked himself out of stillness to say, turning to her
frowningly, "Ha—well, did you see anything that helps,
Eve?"
His devotion to her was obvious; he was evidently head
over heels in love. He had been in the house when Charlotte
Foy announced her impending trip to Boston, a trip that
had been cut down in its youth. According to Alicia he left
the Flavell apartment on the east side of the Square at six-
forty-five.
Jim Holland corroborated her. "It must have been around
that, I should say. I got back to my place on Kossuth Street
at seven, did a little work to pass the time and then came up
here to the shop."
He had arrived at eight-thirty. Eve had fixed scrambled
eggs and bacon and made coffee and they had been together
until eleven, when he went home. He hadn't seen Charlotte
after he left the Flavell house at a little before six; he hadn't
heard a shot while he was negotiating the Square. He began
to look angry. He had a formidable jaw. Eve Flavell might
not always find him as easy to handle as she did now.
Holland had no alibi for the crucial hour. He could have
killed Charlotte Foy; he had no motive, showing. Neither
had anyone else. Holland could have been the person in
Charlotte's bedroom, if he had been able to procure a key
to the front door—which to a man familiar with the house
would have presented no particular difficulty. Search his
rooms for a weapon, for shoes with tell-tale stains on them,
54


the Scotsman decided. Meanwhile—Eve Flavell was even
more anxious to get rid of him than her young half-sister
had been. Oblige her, by all means. She was evidently con-
templating action of some sort, and the sooner the basic
facts were established in the sudden, violent and motiveless
death of a middle-aged woman of excellent character and
good family, the better. Too many people were concealing
too many things. There was a smell of danger about the case
he didn't care for; someone was likely to get hurt.
Five minutes later he left the shop. He didn't turn as he
crossed the pavement to the Cadillac parked at the curb. He
had a shrewd idea that Eve was standing behind the dotted
swiss curtains watching him with those long gray eyes. He
drove away but not far. Around the corner he stopped the
car, got out, found a convenient doorway and waited for
what he was sure was going to happen—and was right. Three
minutes later Eve emerged from the shop, alone. Holland
was evidently playing storekeeper for her. She glanced
quickly up and down the street, crossed it, and began to
walk rapidly south.
55


swered blankly as though he couldn't believe his ears,
harshly, peremptorily, as though he didn't want to believe
his eyes.
McKee abandoned his position between what felt like a
wash basin and a metal clothes hamper and moved unos-
tentatiously out into the corridor. He had a fair view. The
living room was straight ahead and the door was open.
Cunningham stood just inside of it, tall and wide-shoul-
dered, his lean dark face in profile, his peaked cap pushed
to the back of his head. He took the cap off and went on
staring at his visitor. Eve was on her feet in front of the
chair from which she had risen. Her raspberry tweed coat
made a bright spot of color against a window. One hand was
at her throat. Above its round white column her head was
a little bent. Her white triangular face was cold, expres-
sionless.
She was saying in an icy little tone, "You heard about—
Charlotte, Bruce? You know what—happened to her."
She looked ill. The hand hanging at her other side was
clenched.
"Yes," Cunningham said quietly, "I heard. Natalie called
me . . . that was when I gave you a ring at the shop."
"I couldn't talk to you," Eve said. "There was a Police
Inspector with me."
"I gathered as much," Cunningham said drily. "That's
why I think . . . Wasn't it rather stupid of you to come
straight here?"
His cool question appeared to infuriate his fiancee's sister.
She said, her eyes blazing, "I didn't come here because I
wanted to. Disabuse your mind of that idea. I came because
I had to. There are certain things I've got to know. . . ."
Bruce Cunningham balled the gloves he had drawn off,
tossed them into the air, caught them. "Exactly, my angel—
and there are things / want to know. You were in the shop
all last evening with the estimable Mr. Holland, I presume?
58


At least Natalie told me you were. You're sure about it?
I'd like to hear you say so yourself."
There was more than the width of the room between
them. They were antagonists, eyeing each other warily. Eve
thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat and faced Cun-
ningham more directly. "No," she said, "I wasn't in the shop
all evening. I went down to the Square. I wanted to find out
what happened. When I saw nothing of you, I went into the
house to talk to Charlotte. Charlotte wasn't there." Her
hand was at her throat again, a fold of soft flesh between
tight fingers.
"So you think I killed her?" Cunningham said softly.
He was smiling. It wasn't a pleasant smile.
"I don't think anything," Eve cried out at him. "I don't
want to think. Except about Natalie. She's my sister. She
loves you. You're going to be married. I didn't tell the In-
spector about last night. You mustn't either, for Natalie's
sake . . ."
"For Natalie's sake," Cunningham reflected musingly.
He was still smiling, his eyes narrowly bright.
"Yes," Eve told him on a full breath. "For Natalie's sake
—and for hers alone. I don't care about anyone else in the
world. But she musn't be hurt. Nobody knows about last
night but us. ... I didn't say a word to the Inspector.
You musn't either. If the police were to find out . . ."
A dog whined somewhere and claws scratched wood. A
door at the other end of the apartment opened and an Eng-
lish setter bounded along the hall. He caught sight of the
Scotsman and let out a howl.
McKee sighed. He didn't do much field work these days;
as a general rule his place was at the center of a battery of
phones directing an investigation rather than taking an
active part in it. So far his luck had been good. The string
had run out. It was no part of his plan to antagonize these
people at this stage. He did a lightning shift. He was at the
59


outside door, had it open and was standing in the opening
when Bruce Cunningham appeared.
The Lieutenant was something less than pleased to see a
visitor who had walked in unannounced. He controlled
anger at the interruption with difficulty. "Yes? Who are you,
what do you want?" he demanded curtly.
"The door was unlocked," McKee said. "I'm sorry. I
knocked but no one answered." He introduced himself.
Cunningham's manner changed. The savagery went out
of him, he became brisk, civil. He said, "Come in, please, In-
spector." He was a quick thinker. "It's about Miss Foy, I
suppose? Miss Flavell, Miss Eve Flavell, is here now. We
were just on the point of starting for the Square. This way."
They went into the living room. Eve Flavell was sitting
in a chair near one of the two tall windows. Her back was to
the light. Her position was comfortable. The face she raised
to McKee was white, tight, the scarlet of her mouth the only
color in it. She smiled at him.
"Hello, Inspector. We meet again."
"Yes, Miss Flavell." Cunningham was as taut as his pro-
spective sister-in-law, but his powers of dissimulation were
better. He had an interesting face, not handsome but defi-
nite and well-planed. Women would take to him instinc-
tively. There was humor and gentleness in his firm mouth
with indentations at the corners, and his light eyes under
dark strongly marked brows, were intelligent. So was the
shape of his head.
Play it straight, the Scotsman decided, and see what he
got. "You understand the questions I'm going to ask you
are purely routine, Lieutenant? We're interviewing all Miss
Foy's relatives and friends. Now—do you know anything
that will shed any light on her death?"
Cunningham took off his trench coat, folded it and
threw it over the back of a sofa. His uniform molded a lithe
hard figure. "Nothing whatever, Inspector. It's a complete
60


mystery to me. I was dumfounded when I heard about it.
It just doesn't seem possible.
The Scotsman nodded, showed regret.
"I see. ... I had hoped. . . . Well, we go on trying.
From present indications Miss Foy appears to have been
shot and killed between ten minutes of seven and, say, eight
o'clock. Would you mind telling me what you were doing,
where you were, during that time?"
Bruce Cunningham struck a match, held it to a ciga-
rette. In the small flare his face was bleak. He didn't look
toward Eve. He dropped the match into a tray, inhaled
smoke, and said musingly, "Ten minutes of seven. ... I
was here at ten minutes of seven, changing. I had an en-
gagement with Natalie—Miss Flavell—for dinner. I got to
the house at half-past exactly; I remember, because on ac-
count of the fog I was afraid I might be late, but I looked at
my watch when I got there and I wasn't."
McKee watched smoke rising in spirals. Cunningham and
Natalie had been together from seven-thirty on, according
to separate and independent statements. What had Eve
Flavell been referring to when she said, "I didn't tell the
police about last night?" Whatever it was it must have taken
place before seven-thirty. These rooms weren't more than
three or four minutes' walk from the Square. . . . "What
time did you leave here, Lieutenant?"
The setter licked a paw and rolled over on his side. Cun-
ningham sat down on the arm of a chair. He stretched his
long legs out in front of him, thrust his hands into his
pockets, and threw a bombshell in the most casual of tones.
"I left here early. I think it was at about ten after seven.
I had an appointment to meet Charlotte Foy at the north
gate of the park in Henderson Square at seven-fifteen."
A gasp from Eve as he began to speak -was instantly sup-
pressed. Her face was a little death's head, with blackness
for the eyes, in the hollows of the slender cheeks, and beau-
61


tiful temples. McKee stared fixedly at the imperturbable
lieutenant. He himself had already predicated a meeting
between Charlotte Foy and someone else in the darkness
and the fog the night before. It was this man she had gone
to see. She had never emerged from the tryst. Cunningham
was alive, she was dead, with a bullet hole in her. . . .
McKee made no attempt to hide the gravity of the lieu-
tenant's disclosure. Eve Flavell, at least, was fully cognizant
of it. Question and answer after that, clipped, cold, imper-
sonal. Gradually the full story emerged. On the previous
day Bruce Cunningham got back from Washington earlier
than he expected and went directly from the station to
the house on the Square. He arrived there at around five,
left in about half an hour, after making arrangements to
spend the evening with Natalie. He had had no private con-»
versation with Charlotte; she had been called to the tele-
phone shortly after he got there and he was under the
impression that she wasn't in the room when he left.
He hadn't come straight here from the Flavell house;
he had an appointment with a fellow officer, Hilary Fenn,
for five-thirtyish at the Harvard Club, where they had a
couple of drinks together. He got home at about half-past
six, maybe a little later. Meanwhile Charlotte Foy had tele-
phoned.
Bruce Cunningham explained that he had lived in the
apartment before he went into the Army, sharing it with a
writer, Philip Graham. An artist friend of Graham's, Jim
Buchanan, had taken his place when he joined up, but the
two men had insisted on his staying with them while he was
on leave. Philip Graham had answered Miss Foy's call.
Graham was summoned. He was a plump man in his
forties with thinning auburn hair and thick-lensed glasses
over weak eyes. He looked his bewilderment at McKee's
questions, didn't get any explanation of them. He said that
Miss Foy rang up at ten minutes of six the previous evening.
62


truth, wasn't necessarily so. If Cunningham hadn't pulled
the trigger of the gun that had blown a hole in Charlotte
Foy—and while the testimony was damaging it was by no
means conclusive—the perpetrator would have had to know
that Charlotte would be in the park, at the north gate, at
seven-fifteen. The people in the house when she made the
call included Hugh Flavell, Natalie, Gerald, his wife, Alicia,
Jim Holland and the servants. The afternoon that had pre-
ceded the slaying in the misty darkness of the Square was be-
coming more and more important.
Cunningham declared he had neither a pistol nor a re-
volver, offered to let himself, the apartment, be searched
then and there. McKee waved the offer aside. It would be
done later as a matter of course. Cunningham's uniform was
too trimly fitted to conceal the bulge of an iron he would
scarcely have been stupid enough to carry about with him,
and it could have been more than adequately disposed of
in—a clock in a near-by tower struck one—the eighteen
hours that had elapsed since Charlotte Foy was killed.
Get men here to search the apartment, not only for a gun
but for other things, blood-stained footgear, letters, papers,
evidence of any sort that would lay bare the real picture
with which they had certainly not, so far, been presented.
Meanwhile keep an eye on the Lieutenant and Eve Flavell;
he said pleasantly, "You were on your way to the Flavell
house when I arrived. I'm going there now. We may as well
go together."
Eve stood automatically, a robot in raspberry tweed op-
erated by a hidden mechanism. Cunningham put on his
trench coat, tightened the belt, picked up his cap. In spite
of these preparations for departure they didn't immediately
leave.
The front doorbell rang. Before anyone could answer it
the door opened, a voice called "Bruce" softly and a woman
came along the hall and paused on the threshold of the
65


CHAPTER
6
You've been a friend of the flavells for a long
time, Mrs. De Sange?"
"For more than twenty years, Inspector. I knew this in-
fant when she was a young woman of four." Susan De Sange
laid a hand on Eve's, linked tightly together in her lap.
The two women were on the back seat of the cab they
had picked up outside Cunningham's rooms. The lieu-
tenant was with the driver in the front seat. McKee oc-
cupied one of the stools. The light outside the windows was
cold, gray. The sun had vanished and clouds pressed down
threateningly. It looked like snow.
When she had heard that they were on their way to the
Flavell house, Susan De Sange had said she'd go with them,
she wanted to tell Hugh and Natalie how sorry she was,
find out whether there wasn't something she could do.
She went on explaining her link with the Flavells. She
had lived next to them, in a little cottage close to their big
house in Eastport, where the three children had been born
67


the intruder of the night before had removed the contents
of the little chest, or whether it had some other significance,
and presently left Kent sorting through the desk and de-
scended the stairs. He was half way down the top flight when
he pulled to a halt.
Mrs. De Sange was crossing the lower hall. She didn't see
him. She paused near the foot of the staircase, looked over
her shoulder at the living-room archway, and then moved
on out of sight.
McKee reached the main floor in time to see the door of
the writing room close. He opened it without noise. Susan
De Sange was so absorbed in what she was doing that she
didn't hear him. Her back was to the door. She was down on
one knee at the trash basket beside the empire desk.
McKee said, "Looking for something, Mrs. De Sange?
Can I be of any assistance?" and Susan De Sange turned.
She smiled up at him and rose with a single twist of her
strong supple body. Her color was high and her eyes were
bright, otherwise she was perfectly at ease. "Thanks, no,
Inspector. I was looking for something—but it doesn't seem
to be here. Yesterday afternoon Charlotte gave me the name
and address of a mutual friend of ours that we used to know
up in Eastport. I left it behind me when I went. It must have
been thrown away."
She pulled out a chair, sat down at the desk, opened a
gray snakeskin purse with a silver monogram and silver cor-
ners, and extracted a sheet of paper with a list of names on it,
explaining that she was going to let people, friends and
distant connections of Hugh's, know about Charlotte's
death.
McKee left her to her task and sought out the maids. The
trash-basket had been emptied that morning. The papers
were in a receptacle at the foot of the cellar stairs. Kent
joined him and they sorted through empty cigarette pack-
72


gers on the polished wood. "To tell you the truth, Inspector,
I'm beginning to wonder if Charlotte wasn't getting the
least little bit—queer."
The woman lying in among bushes in the Park, across
the street hadn't looked it. The Scotsman waited patiently
for enlightenment. But Hugh Flavell didn't pursue the sub-
ject except to say, "Perhaps I'm wrong, but she, well, during
the last year she took fancies. I never approved of her going
up to Vermont alone—and then there was her anxiety to
hurry on Natalie's marriage, when at first she opposed the
engagement. I suppose it was simply that she was ill."
McKee asked whether a date had been set for the wedding
and Hugh Flavell said no. "Natalie's too young." As she was
in her twenty-second year this didn't seem a very valid
objection. Flavell added, "Bruce feels, and I agree with him,
emphatically, that it's better for them to wait until the
war's over."
His own whereabouts between six-fifty and eight the
night before? He had been in his study, working. No one
had disturbed him. From the study he had gone directly
to bed in the bedroom beyond at, perhaps, eleven o'clock.
McKee thanked him and went downstairs. He was in the
lower hall, wondering if Charlotte Foy had approved of
Mrs. De Sange and her brother-in-law's third drift toward
matrimony, when Kent poked a head over the banister rail-
ing. The blond birdlike secretary was excited. The Scots-
man joined him, and Kent said, "Something I want you to
take a look at," and led the way through the dead woman's
bedroom and into the bath.
The upstairs girl, Gloria Fox, was standing beside the
sunken tub looking scared. The door of the medicine cab-
inet was open. Kent pointed to an empty space between a
bottle of mouth wash and the cabinet wall. "There's a box
of medicine gone from there, Inspector."
"What was in it?"
74


Gloria Fox answered. She said, "It was pills Miss Foy
brought down with her from the country. She took them
whenever she got a pain. She sent me for one yesterday after-
noon."
The box was small, of blue pasteboard and had been
more than half full of little capsules. It wasn't in the dead
woman's purse. Someone else must have removed it. It
could have been taken at any time between late the previous
afternoon and less than ten minutes ago, when Kent had
been with McKee in the cellar. McKee looked grimly at
shining chromium, at a green shower curtain. Question
the people here now? It would be useless. There had been
no check on their movements during that quarter of an
hour's search in the basement, and no one was going to step
forward as the thief. The best thing to do was to get in touch
with Charlotte Foy's doctor in Vermont and find out what
the capsules were. They might be harmless. And then again
—Doctor Hendricks had said that Charlotte was probably
suffering from a serious internal condition—they might not.
A sedative to quiet pain, to quiet. . . . The discovery had
the opposite effect on the Scotsman.
He swung on his heel, descended the stairs, got the name
of Charlotte's Vermont doctor from Natalie, and went to
the telephone. He called Headquarters. He used the word
"urgent" gently, as a curb on his own nerves. After Head-
quarters, the Medical Examiner's office; the post mortem on
Charlotte Foy was in progress. "Look for a drug, a sedative
of some sort, will you? he asked. "And let me know as fast
as possible."
He hung up. Men from the Ballistics Squad and two
homicide detectives, Davidson and Peak, were still search-
ing the park for the bullet that had crashed through Char-
lotte Foy's body to bury itself in the ground, in among
thickets, under piles of leaves or in the branches or trunk
of some tree. They had to have the weapon that had killed
75


her. To search for it adequately they had first to get hold of
the lethal slug.
McKee left the telephone booth and the house. It was ten
minutes of three when he entered the park across the street.
It was five minutes of five when the bullet was finally found.
It was embedded in a small hillock crowned with a statue
of Niobe weeping for her children that was at least eighty
feet from the thicket into which the dead woman had
crashed. Sergeant Wennikoe of the Ballistics Squad un-
earthed it.
Big men in a ring stared at the battered bullet on Wen-
nikoe's palm under a darkening sky. There was something
new, or comparatively new, under the sun. In all the Scots-
man's experience it had happened only once before within
the precints of Greater New York.
Charlotte Foy had been shot and killed not with a pistol
or a revolver but with a high-powered bullet from a hunting
rifle.
76


CHAPTER
7
The murderer, and the murderer alone, knew the
weapon with which Charlotte Foy had been eliminated.
He or she knew, too, that the police would eventually
uncover the make and caliber of the death-dealing gun.
Until a thorough search had been accomplished, the longer
they withheld their knowledge the better chance they had
of discovering the rifle's ownership and whereabouts. It
was Sergeant Jabowski of the 4th Detective Division who
unwittingly made the premature revelation.
Jabowski was in the hall of the Flavell house on the
Square when the call came through. Kent took it. He told
the news to a small group of officers near the front door.
"A rifle," Jabowski exclaimed. "My God, the dame shot
down like a sick dog . . . What do you know?"
Eve was standing just inside the living-room archway.
The sergeant had a carrying voice. She heard him. The
blood drained away from her heart and the walls and floor
77


shook. "No," she whispered soundlessly to herself, frozen
into a terrible immobility. "No. . . . Oh, no."
She stared blindly at a blue horse in watercolor treading
yellow sand in front of a blue sea. It had been a long and
dreadful day; the night before had been almost as bad. She
hadn't expected Charlotte's death—no, never—she had ex-
pected—something. When Natalie told her that Charlotte
was dead her first sensation had been one of release, and
for a moment she had been able to breathe. When she heard
what had actually happened she had been flung back into
darkness. The inner darkness had never quite left her since.
After Bruce had called her the night before at around
seven, telling her that Charlotte wanted to see him, and
where, she had tried to reassure herself. He had said, "I
don't know what she wants. It may be nothing, but I
thought you'd better be prepared. If it's unimportant, I
won't call you back."
It could so easily have been nothing. Charlotte was natu-
rally secretive. She could spend hours of brooding, of mys-
terious comings and goings, of complicated figuring with
paper and pencil, to announce triumphantly that she'd
found a new way of circumventing an upholsterer's estimate
or of how Natalie could fit in a round of social visits.
Eve had tried to tell herself this in the shop, holding cold
hands to the fire or walking up and down the floor, watching
the clock and waiting for the telephone to ring, until she
couldn't stand it any longer. If everything was really all
right, Bruce would go to the house and get Natalie and they
would drive away together. She would know when she saw
him. A glance from a distance as they came out would be
enough. She wouldn't be seen; the darkness would hide her.
So she had gone down to the Square.
But she hadn't taken the fog and the crawling traffic into
consideration, and it was twenty minutes of eight by the
time she got there. There was no sign of Bruce or of Nat'
78


alie; there was nothing but blackness and fog and the sick-
ness of agonizing uncertainty. That was why she had gone
into the house, opening the door quietly with her key. She
had determined to see her aunt and find out whether Char-
lotte had seen Bruce and herself before the fire that after-
noon and, if so, what she meant to do. She hadn't seen Char-
lotte, or anyone else. Her adventures in the house had been
exactly as she described them to the Inspector.
All during the dreadful day she had told herself wearily
that whatever was lost, Natalie at least had been saved. Now
she listened to the echo of Sergeant Jabowski's words and
the inner darkness rose in poisonous clouds, filling her eyes,
pressing against her ear drums, stopping the breath in her
throat. "No," she whispered again.
Charlotte had been killed with a rifle—and Bruce's rifle
was in his apartment.
She had seen the tip of the barrel that morning, where
it rested against the wall behind the golf bag. The other
guns, Hugh's and Natalie's, her own little .22 with the kick
to if, Gerald and Alicia's Remingtons, were up in the house
in Eastport. But Bruce's was here, in New York.
Eve knew little or nothing about the science of ballistics.
She had never been interested in hunting and shooting, as
the others were, had had a tendency to fire the pretty little
rifle Natalie had given her with her eyes shut. She had a
vague notion that you could tell if a certain bullet was fired
from a certain revolver but no idea whether this held true of
other weapons. She did know that the finding of a rifle in
Bruce's apartment would be a catastrophe.
It would bring everything out into the open; Bruce's
telephone call to her after he got Charlotte's message, the
reason for it, and the real reason for her journey to the
Square the previous night.
The rifle mustn't be found.
She lit a cigarette and turned round slowly. Firelight, sub-
79


dued voices, the tinkle of a spoon, the dull bloom of the
silver pot in Alicia's hand; tea had been brought in a few
minutes earlier. The scene was almost exactly as it had been
twenty-four hours ago, except that Charlotte's solid un-
bending presence had been replaced by Susan's easy grace.
The red wing in her hat flashed. Hugh was looking at her
and saying something and smiling. On the other side of the
hearth Alicia and Bruce and Natalie were talking. Natalie's
arm was through Bruce's and her smooth young head was
tawny against his uniform.
How, Eve wondered, was she going to warn Bruce, so he
could go and get his rifle and put it in a safe place until the
one that killed Charlotte was discovered? She couldn't
warn him without attracting the attention of the others.
Yet the rifle had to be taken away.
Bruce's trench coat was across a bench in the hall. Per-
haps his keys were in one of the pockets. She went through
the archway. The hall was empty. Its big shadowy empti-
ness was frightening. Where had the detectives gone? Were
they on their way to nth Street now? She must hurry. She
put on her things, went in to the fire and said to the assem-
bled group. "I've got to go. Clara Long will be wild; she's
got Christmas shopping to do and I promised to be back
early."
Bruce didn't say anything; he didn't look at her. Natalie
said, "Oh, Eve dear, can't you stay?" She seemed to feel the
need of people around her.
Eve thought with a stab of pain, She has Bruce, isn't that
enough?—and was appalled by the fierce quick thrust of
jealousy. Bruce was Natalie's. As much as one person could
belong to another he belonged to her. She looked down into
her half-sister's narrow sensitive face. Natalie's eyes were
swollen with crying. Suddenly Eve saw her, not as she was,
but as a long-legged child with two thick fair braids, run-
ning into the house with her school books under her arm,
80


or coming in from a ride in her first hard hat on her first
pony, and declaring that Eve, home from college, should
have one too. "She's got to or I won't. I won'tl" She was the
most generous, the most open-hearted person in the world.
Remorse and tenderness swooped over Eve.
She stooped and put a hand on Natalie's shoulder, gave it
a little squeeze. "I'll be back later, Nat dear. And do stop
worrying and thinking about things. There's nothing you
can do, and if you go on like this you'll make yourself ill."
Outside the front door she glanced along the quiet street
bounding the Square on the west. A soldier and a girl, a
woman with a pom, an elderly nurse with two children, a
man in a polo coat with his back to her, looking through the
railings into the hidden park. Eve shivered. There were no
policemen in sight.
The light was gray under a pressed-down, heavy sky. The
air was cold. Without any particular reason, as she de-
scended the steps and turned left, Eve thought of the man
with whom she had collided in the fog when she left the
night before. What was he doing there, idling in front of
the house? He hadn't stopped to light a cigarette, or any-
thing. He was just standing still.
She gave herself an impatient shake. What did it matter?
He wasn't anyone she knew. The Square behind her, she
walked rapidly south and then east. Would Mr. Graham be
in Bruce's apartment? If so, he would admit her. Suppose
the police were already there? Worry about that and about
how she was going to get hold of the rifle, what she was
going to do with it, when she got there. If Mr. Graham
wasn't in . . .
She refused to think further. Turning into Eldon Place
she slowed, approaching the brownstone house in which
Bruce was staying, warily. Light traffic was going by in the
street, trucks and private cars spaced the curb sparsely at
intervals, a scattering of pedestrians with bundles, a street
81


cleaner with a cart, a plumber's van.Mc Cracken's Plumbing
Shop At Your Service—Any Time, Any Place; there was no
one who looked remotely like a detective or a policeman
anywhere in the vicinity.
If Eve had turned then, she might have recognized the
man in the polo coat who had been peering through the rail-
ings in Henderson Square looking into a florist window at
the other end of the block. She didn't turn; she mounted the
steps and pressed the third-floor bell. The latch chattered
noisily and her heart gave a great leap of thanksgiving. She
ran quickly up the stairs, raking each hall with an exploring
and fearful glance. They were all empty, innocuous.
Graham opened the door of the apartment.
Eve smiled at him. "Again, Mr. Graham. We are making
nuisances of ourselves, aren't we? I lost an earring this
morning. I wonder if I could have dropped it here. May I
come in and have a look?"
Graham was charmed. They searched the living room
together. Eve rose from beside a chair with the missing sil-
ver trinket in her hand, where it had been all the time. "I
wonder, now that I'm here—the police are simply infesting
the house on the Square, my shop—whether I could sit
down quietly and rest for a little while. I know you're busy
with a story and I don't want to keep you. I think if I just
close my eyes. . . ."
Graham threw his work away. There was no rush about
it. He fussed, fetching a footstool, a cushion for Eve's head.
How was she going to get rid of him? Graham himself
helped her. Would she have a Scotch, or he could shake up a
cocktail? No, she wouldn't have either, but she would like
a cup of tea ... there wasn't a pinch in the house? Oh, then
it didn't matter.
Graham said it did. It wouldn't take him five minutes to
nip round to the delicatessen on the next block. Eve smiled
82


He seemed maddeningly unaware of the danger he was
in. Eve said desperately, "Bruce, I'm going to take the gun
to the shop with me. Then if . . ."'
She paused. The hall was warm, dim; coldness washed
along her arms, down her spine. A sound that wasn't Bruce
had come along the wire. It was small and fragmentary, a
tiny almost imperceptible click. It was, or could be, some-
one putting one of the extensions in the house in the Square
back into place.
Bruce must have heard it too, for he said in a hard curt
voice. "All right, my dear, I'll get in touch with you later,"
and hung up.
Eve dropped the instrument into its cradle shakily and
got to her feet. Fear was around her again, a huge net into
which she blundered at every step. She told herself that she
might have imagined the click; it might have been made by
the operator, by someone calling the apartment. The fear
didn't leave her. . . . She had to get out of here at once.
She picked up the golf bag and started for the door. She
was at it, with the knob in her hand, when she heard the
footsteps, and the voices. Men, two or three of them, were
coming up the stairs.
Eve had locked the door behind Phil Graham. The shrill
ringing of the bell, the knuckles rapping briskly against the
panels thudded against her with a physical impact. The
police were in the hall outside. They had come to search
the apartment for a rifle.
She backed away from the door, clinging to the bag. She
had to get out of here. Her shoulder hit the wall—she
couldn't get out. There was no rear exit, no other door.
... In a moment Graham would come back. And then....
Graham did come back. He bounded up the stairs. Voices
in the hall were a jumble. They moved closer. Eve stood mo-
tionless. There was a roaring in her ears. The sound of the
84


key in the lock pierced the clamor. It was tiny and final.
This was the end. She ran her tongue over dry lips and
closed her eyes.
85


CHAPTER
8
Eve's inertia, her passive acceptance of the inevtta-
ble, didn't last for more than a fraction of a second.
Outside the door of the apartment a detective said,
"What's the matter, Mr. Graham? Haven't you got the right
key?" and Philip Graham said, "It isn't the key—the key's
all right—that damn night latch has slipped again. . . .
This is about the fifth time."
Inside the door the poison of lethargy drained out of
Eve. She understood what was happening. Graham had
guessed that she didn't want to see the police and was trying
to help her. Without being aware that she had moved she
was at the door, had her fingers on the brass latch. It fell
softly into place.
If the sound was audible to the men outside in the hall
there was no immediate reaction. Eve didn't wait for one.
The respite was only temporary. The police would be in the
apartment in a matter of minutes, one way or another. Her
86


brain was functioning again, coldly and clearly. She had to
get out of here. There was no rear door, no other ordinary
entrance or exit—but there was a fire escape. She had looked
at the black veranda stretching across the living-room win-
dows that morning.
She tightened her grip on the golf bag, sped into the liv-
ing room and threw one of the windows up. Out, now.
It was almost dark. She knelt on the fire escape, drew the
unwieldy bag after her, put it down on black iron bars
and lowered the window. There was no clamor from inside
the apartment. Evidently the door still held. Sooner or later
the police would get it open. She would have to hurry, and
she mustn't be seen.
Lighted windows in the backs of other apartment houses
hung the darkness with squares and oblongs of green and
lemon yellow and apricot beyond clothes lines and acanthus
trees and a wildness of poles. An iron ladder led upward.
Eve climbed it, her right hand on the railing, her left arm
holding the golf bag to her. It was heavy and unwieldy and
it bumped enragingly against the treads. She reached the
fourth landing. There were milk bottles on it and a row of
empty flower pots. The end of the bag hit something and
there was a harsh rattle of breakage. A silhouette moved
across the shade of the lighted room inside and a hand
reached out. Eve didn't wait. She leaped up the next ladder.
It seemed to her that the bag was alive, that it had a mon-
strous existence of its own. She struggled with it pantingly.
She was on the top fire escape. Nothing remained but four
rungs going straight up in the air. Could she make it? She
had to. Gritting her teeth and leaning perilously backwards
above purple depth she kept on doggedly climbing, and was
up and over the parapet at last and on solid flatness. She
blundered on a little way, trying to be quiet and putting
distance between herself and the route by which she had
87


der, a voice calling to her to stop. Ten yards, twenty, there
was no hue and cry; she drew a long breath, let air out
of her lungs in a tearing sigh of relief and quickened her
pace.
Behind her, on the other side of the street a man in polo
coat detached himself from the shadow of a high brown-
stone stoop and drifted along in Eve's wake. Two blocks to
the north she signaled a cab. She noticed the man in the
polo coat then, standing on the corner below, without think-
ing anything of him.
She drove straight home, ignorant of pursuit, of the eyes
fastened curiously on her peculiar burden from the interior
of another cab near the garage. Inside the shop, with the
batten door closed securely behind her, she put the bag
down unobtrusively and walked forward.
Clara Long was seated at the desk at the back, making
out bills. She greeted Eve with quiet sympathy. "Poor dear,
you look all in." She didn't appear to have seen the golf
bag. At any rate, she didn't ask any questions. She knew
about Charlotte. Jim had told her before he left that morn-
ing. She said the police had been there. They had poked
around the shop and had gone upstairs.
When she saw that Eve didn't want to talk about her
aunt she added briskly that there had been a half dozen
calls, from Mr. Holland, and Mrs. De Sange, from customers
and one from Natalie. There were no messages. They said
they'd call back.
Pulling off her gloves and hat, hanging up her coat, put-
ting coal on the fire, Eve reflected wryly that she had left
herself wide open. She said she was coming straight back
here from the Henderson Square house and Susan and Nat-
alie knew she hadn't. Philip Graham must know there was
something wrong, too, but he was Bruce's friend. Bruce
could take care of him. To be a good conspirator was an
89


art, she reflected. She had no natural aptitude for it; she
would have to learn. The first thing to do was to hide the
rifle.
Clara was putting her things on. "You're sure there's
nothing I can do, that you don't want me to stay?" she
asked. Eve said no. "You're right. I am pretty well all in.
It's been rather dreadful. ... As soon as you're gone I'm
going to lock the door and go to bed. I've got a ghastly
headache."
She went to the door with Clara, closed the door behind
her and slid the bolt. The blackout shade was drawn. There
was no danger of being seen from the street. There was no
other means of entrance to the shop, except the little mir-
rored windows at the back, and they were both latched se-
curely. The last time she had mislaid her key she had come
in through one of them by breaking a latch, but it had been
fixed and was solidly in place.
She unlocked the golf bag and took out the rifle. It was
hard and cold and smooth and so beautifully balanced that
it didn't seem heavy. The bag she put under the curtain
masking the lower shelves. What should she do with the
rifle, where could she conceal it so that it wouldn't be easily
found? If only, she thought, she could get up to Eastport
and leave it in the game room or slide it into one of the
gun racks with the others, but to leave New York would be
dangerous—until later, anyhow. Perhaps she could make it
tomorrow. Meanwhile . . .
The phone on the desk rang. She jumped, and glared
at it angrily. Why couldn't people leave her alone? Let it
ring, she decided; she had no intention of answering it. But
the shrill summons filed at her nerves and it was a tre-
mendous relief when it stopped.
She looked around frowningly. The police had already
been here and she had handed her revolver over to the In-
9°


spector. It was scarcely likely that they would search the
shop again, soon. But they might. Under the stairs was too
obvious a hiding place; so were the closets. She tried the
rifle in among stocking boxes and it stood up like a sore
thumb. Behind the bookcase was just as bad. She couldn't
put it under her mattress or in a bureau drawer. . . . The
decision was taken abruptly out of her hands.
Someone was rapping on the front door. The rifle joined
the golf bag behind the flimsy curtain. Eve stood erect and
tried to stop shaking. She hadn't answered the phone. She
wasn't going to answer the door, either. She smoothed damp
palms against the wool of her skirt, pushed hair back from
a throbbing forehead.
Who was outside on the pavement demanding admit-
tance? A truck was going by. The singing of tires, the squeal
of brakes—some one called her name. "Eve." It was Jim.
He wasn't alone. Gerald and Alicia and Susan and Bruce
and Natalie were with him. Standing close to the door she
could hear their voices. "She must be in," Jim said. "I'm
worried about her." Natalie said, "If she's not here, where
can she be?" Her father was there, too. "Isn't there a back
way in, Nat?" he demanded impatiently. "Knock again,
Gerald."
If she didn't open the door they might . . . Suppose
they got really upset and sent for a policeman. That would
be nice. That would be lovely. Eve retreated soundlessly
and came on, making her footsteps loud. "Coming," she
called, and turned the key in the lock and opened the door.
They surged into the shop in a body. Jim kissed her.
"Where have you been all day? I've been trying to get you
for the last hour?" She murmured something evasive and
greeted the others. They had come to tell her the news that
was no news. The police were searching the house on the
Square, Gerald and Alicia's apartment, for the rifle with
9i


which Charlotte had been shot and killed. Had she by any
chance brought hers down from the country. If so—she said
she hadn't.
Natalie's slim height was buttoned into a black Chester-
field. Her skin was very white and her eyes were enormous.
She looked frightful. So did Gerald. Their father was
scornfully amused. "They can look the house over and wel-
come. I simply prefer not to be there. But if they break any-
thing, they'll pay for it."
Eve played hostess with what energy she could summon:
"Come on back. Let's sit down." She pushed chairs into
position, put coal on the fire, offered cigarettes. Jim helped
her. She tried to respond to the warmth in his eyes, to the
pressure of his fingers on her arm, tried to answer him co-
herently.
Bruce was with Natalie on the little sofa in front of the
hearth, sitting close to her, an arm along her shoulders. She
was leaning against him as though she were cold. Eve
thought despairingly, I've got to talk to him. He's got to
find some way to get that rifle out of here. . . . But how
can I talk to him with all those people around? At her
elbow Jim said quietly, "What is it, darling? You're wor-
ried about something. Have the police been at you again?"
Eve threw him a smile and turned a little and tried to
catch Bruce's eyes but he was looking down at Natalie, play-
ing with her engagement ring, twisting it to and fro.
Eve tried to deny the pain which assailed her. Weariness
and fear put a nightmare quality into the lights, the shifting
figures, the warmth and comfort of the familiar little room,
with the fire glowing under the white mantel on which the
clock ticked unheard. She could feel Jim beside her, lov-
ing her with a devotion that was big and solid and sure,
and across the rug, less than five feet away, the man in whom
she was absorbed, wrongly, dreadfully, was talking in a low
92


When was she going to be able to talk to Bruce, Eve won-
dered dully as she found some crackers and cheese and
speared olives out of a bottle. She mustn't give the impres-
sion of wanting to hurry them away. If only they'd go, she
thought, and she could speak to Bruce alone and get him to
take the rifle and throw it in the river. It was impossible.
He was engrossed in Natalie, didn't give her so much as a
glance, and she couldn't call him aside and start whispering
to him in a corner.
Gerald's cocktail was awful but she drank it down. Alicia
was in a conversational mood. She said, balancing her glass
and a cigarette in a long jade holder and looking from Eve
to Jim, "What about you two? What about your plans? Are
you going through with your marriage, or are you going to
put it off?"
There was a small silence in the green-walled room with
the fire glowing redly and sending up little tongues of blue
flame. Jim said with a shrug of his big shoulders, pushing
hair back from his high forehead, "Well, after all, it's
hardly decent to—Charlotte isn't buried yet and. . . ."
Eve said quickly, looking at an intricate design in the
border of the worn Bokhara near a chair leg, "I don't see
why we need to wait. Of course, yes, I suppose, for a day
or two, but after that . . ."
Natalie roused herself and sat up. "I think you're quite
right, Eve. No girl likes to have her wedding put off." She
looked accusingly at Jim. "I don't understand you men,"
she said to him sharply. "You rush a girl off her feet and
then when the weather changes you change your mind with
it." Her voice was edged with hysteria. She was beginning
to shake a little. The day, and all that had happened, had
been too much for her. Her freckles were miniature copper
pennies and her mouth was a blur.
Bruce put a hand on her arm. "Hold it, baby," he said
and grinned down at her. The smile didn't go any farther


than his lips. He didn't look at Eve. Jim had turned very
red. Alicia said with a little laugh, "They're trying to make
an unwilling bridegroom of you, Jim. Don't pay any at-
tention."
Jim didn't answer. His eyes sought Eve's and she gave
him a nod of understanding. Natalie was beginning to re-
cover her composure. She said contritely, with a quick rush,
"I'm a fool, Jim. I didn't mean that. It's just my nerves"
Eve shoved her glass in from the edge of the table. That
was Nat all over, she thought, with irritated tenderness,
she was as volatile as quicksilver, down one minute and up
the next.
Jim said gruffly, "Don't give it another thought, kid."
Bruce put an end to it. He got up and pulled Natalie to
her feet. "Far be it from me to break up this gathering. I
don't know about the rest of you, but I'm starving. Come on,
young woman."
Alicia did her lips and Susan threw furs over her shoul-
ders. They were dining at a quiet place Gerald knew of
where they wouldn't be stared at. They wanted Eve to go,
but she refused. Jim asked her to go somewhere alone with
him. She pleaded a headache. "I'm going to have a cup of
soup and go straight to bed."
He looked at her quietly and agreed. "You are tired. You
need a rest. I'll be around first thing in the morning and we
can talk. . . ." It dawned on Eve then that they were to
have been married tomorrow and she had done nothing
whatever about it, had scarcely given her wedding a thought
all day long.
She couldn't worry about it now. Tomorrow was another
day. But her heart twisted when Jim kissed her lips lightly,
without insistence. He was so good. Tears moistened her
lashes. She blinked them away. The good-byes were
endless. Gerald touched her cheek with a gloved fore-
finger.
95


"Not too hot, are you, baby? Take it easy."
"I will, Gerald. Good night, Father. Good night, Natalie
dear. Good night, Sue.... Yes, Alicia, I'll save some nylons
for you if I get any.. . ."
They were gone. Once more the door was closed and
locked and bolted. Eve leaned against it wearily. The visit
had been nerve-racking and a lot of valuable time had been
lost. Detectives were searching the house on the Square,
Gerald and Alicia's apartment. Suppose they came back
here? They might, at any moment. She must hurry.
She got the rifle out from behind the curtain and rested
again, against the shelves. It was good just to stay still and
do nothing. A curious lethargy weighed her down. How still
the shop was after the voices that had filled it. The street
outside was quiet too. The garage, the electrical house, the
business buildings across the way were all closed. Distant
traffic was a faint roar, rising and falling, rising and . . .
Eve's chin hit the button of her sweater and she jerked her
head up and moved out into the middle of the floor, her skin
prickling.
She had said that she was tired, she was righter than she
knew—she was actually falling asleep on her feet. How ri-
diculous, with work to do, important, imperative work. Go
upstairs and throw water on her face and open the windows
there, she decided, the place was too hot. Her forehead was
wet and the rifle was heavy in her hands. Her fingers didn't
seem to have any grip to them. She was still half asleep. Fool,
she raged at herself, wake up, wake up.
The water helped but only for a minute or two, then
fatigue was back over her again, a paralyzing cloak that
wrapped her in thick clinging folds. She picked the rifle
up from the bed where she had laid it, looking longingly at
the bed's flat white surface and turned away. She couldn't
sleep until she had disposed of the gun, safely.
Where could she put it? The shop had no cellar, no con-
96


venient pile of coal. An umbrella stand, a deep one, would
be good. She could wind tape around the barrel and make
it look like a stick and leave it out in the open. There was an
umbrella stand in the hall closet in the house on Henderson
Park; there was no umbrella stand here.
Cellar, umbrella, cellar, the words went round meaning-
lessly in her aching head. Tears of rage and frustration stung
her eyes. What was the matter with her, why couldn't she
think? The chair beside the dressing-table was coming
toward her. The flowers on peach-colored chintz grew larger
and larger and then retreated to pin points in the oddest
manner, as though they were on a trolley and the trolley
was running away on tracks.
She went to the basin and threw more water on her face
and the fog of weariness lifted a little. There was no hiding
place up here, downstairs was better. The mouth of the
staircase yawned blackly, the door at the foot of it was closed.
She was tumbling down the staircase, no, she was going
down mincingly, the rifle absurdly clasped to her breast, a
cold hard doll with one long leg.
She stumbled out into the shop, hit a metal stand with
sweaters suspended from it. They were flat brightly colored
bodies swaying emptily on a gibbet. The lights hurt her
eyes. Sit down for a moment to rest, she thought, and she
would be all right. It was only seven. The clock on the
mantel burred and struck seven wheezy strokes. She
dropped into the nearest chair and closed her eyes. The
darkness was lovely, a deep swinging bed. She lay back on
it to rest for just a minute and fell soundly asleep in the arm-
chair beside the desk, Bruce Cunningham's rifle clasped
loosely in the crook of a relaxed arm.
97


CHAPTER
9
It was almost eight o'clock that night when the
reports, for which Inspector McKee had been anxiously
waiting, came through from the Medical Examiner's office
and from Charlotte Foy's doctor in Vermont. Meanwhile,
McKee knew nothing of Eve's activities, where she had
been, or what she had done. He was busy elsewhere.
Spencer Gorham, the Boston lawyer Charlotte had been
going to see, arrived in New York early in the evening. His
train was late. Due at 5:33, it didn't get into Grand Central
until 6:20. Kent and the head of the Manhattan Homicide
Squad met Gorham at the gate by arrangement.
The lawyer was a small spare man with a dry manner, an
immense bony forehead and frosty twinkling blue eyes. "I
thought I ought to come down to look after Miss Natalie
Flavell's interests, you know," he said, shaking hands with
the two officials. "Her mother's people, Jane and Alex
Corey, who are also clients and friends of mine, are pretty
much upset—not to speak of the young man she left behind
98


It can't go on any longer. It mustn't. It's very terrible. You
will have to help me."
Gorham put down his fork and reached for the salt.
"Naturally, I was alarmed. I tried to get her to speak more
freely. I asked her questions. I asked whether the communi-
cation she had to make, whatever it was she had discovered,
had anything to do with Natalie. She said, 'Yes . . . yes,'
and then she added, 'I'm—frightened,' in a disordered sort
of fashion that had me genuinely worried. But I couldn't
get another word out of her. No . . . she seemed to pull
herself together after that. She said she had to go to the
bank in the morning and that she would take the 1:15 from
Grand Central and would drive straight from the station
to my office as soon as she reached Boston. She asked me to
have her will ready because she intended to make changes
in it, and hung up. That was about all. Well, Inspector,
what do you make of it?"
McKee took a sip of dry sherry and dragged at a crumpled
cigarette. The long low-ceilinged room was blue with
smoke. He looked beyond it, at Charlotte Foy at the tele-
phone and in the beautiful hall of the house on Henderson
Square, and the unplaced group of men and women who
could have overheard her. The call, the prospective trip,
were important. He had felt it all along. He was sure now.
He said, "What was your own reaction, Mr. Gorham? What
did you think? You know these people, I saw them for the
first time today."
Gorham ordered another scotch and communed with the
pale amber liquid in his glass through half closed eyes.
"Well, Charlotte's reference to Natalie was pretty dis-
turbing." He quoted her. " 'I'm—frightened.' What was she
afraid of? Whatever it was, it wasn't for herself. It had some-
thing to do with Natalie, with a threat to Natalie. Char-
lotte was crazy about the child, you know, her whole life
was wrapped up in her. That's why I came down. Hugh
100


Flavell may be Natalie's father, but I'm in charge of her
affairs and I've known her since she was born."
He explained the girl's circumstances. Natalie had been
independently wealthy before the war, with the estate left
to her by her mother. With the war, her holdings, a good
many of them in munitions and aeroplane parts, had quad-
rupled. From a comparatively modest eight or nine hundred
thousand, she now had properties worth four or five mil-
lions. In spite of taxes and the law of diminishing returns,
she was an exceedingly rich young woman. The entire estate
had become her own on the tenth of the previous April,
when she reached the age of twenty-one, but she had re-
tained Gorham to take entire charge of her affairs.
"What was the financial arrangement before last April,
during her minority?" McKee wanted to know.
Gorham said that, as Natalie's duly appointed guardian,
Hugh Flavell had been allowed an annual income of fifteen
thousand a year for her care and upbringing. He said
shrewdly, "There could have been nothing wrong there,
Inspector. Accountants went over the records regularly. I'll
be fair. The Coreys, Jane and Alex, have always considered
that Hugh Flavell feathered his own nest very well indeed.
Of course he benefited by Natalie's income—but you could
scarcely expect him to separate himself from a daughter of
whom he's very fond and set up an establishment of his own.
No, no, whatever Charlotte was going to tell me, I don't
believe it had anything to do with a misappropriation of
funds. As I said, Natalie's her own mistress and can do as
she pleases. And even if such a state of affairs did exist, she
would never prosecute."
The sherry was bitter on McKee's tongue. "In case of
Natalie's death, to whom would her money go, Mr. Gor-
ham?"
Gorham coughed. He lit a cigar. "Entirely unethical, In-
spector, entirely—but in view of—yes. In strict confidence,
101


of course? Well, at my insistence, Natalie made a will on
her twenty-first birthday. In the event of her death, half her
estate would go to Bruce Cunningham, the fellow she's en-
gaged to, and the other half would go to Hugh Flavell for
life with a handsome allowance for Charlotte. On Hugh's
and Charlotte's death, their half would be divided equally
between Gerald and Eve Flavell. But—good God, Inspec-
tor, you don't think . . ."
"Certainly not," McKee assured him. "It's just to get the
picture clear. And now Charlotte Foy's will, the will she
spoke of changing when she reached Boston?"
"One-third of her property goes to her niece, Eve Flavell,
two-thirds to her nephew, Gerald. How much would it have
come to? Not more, I should say than, oh, perhaps forty
thousand all told. Originally Charlotte had nothing of her
own, but she came into a nice little property through a
distant cousin in, let me see, back in '35, I believe. The
farm in Vermont where she spent the summer was part
of it."
McKee looked fixedly at a row of bottles; Eve Flavell
again. Charlotte had been going to change a will under
which Eve stood to benefit to the tune of thirteen or four-
teen thousand dollars. He threw the implication away.
Whatever else might or might not induce Eve to commit
murder, money would have nothing to do with it. He was
sure of that. Her brother, Gerald Flavell, however, was an-
other kettle of fish.
He went on shuttling back and forth between the present
and the past. What had Virginia, Natalie's mother and
Hugh Flavell's second wife, died of?
"Pneumonia following on influenza, following on child-
birth," Gorham said. "She had never been very strong. Like
Natalie, she had been very slender and with a tendency
toward anemia. She never really got on her feet after Nat-
alie's birth."
102


Could Gomam remember a Susan De Sange, a young
widow? Gorham could and did. "Tall, handsome creature
with fine eyes. Lived next door to the Flavell's in Eastport,
in the little cottage at the foot of the lawn. Yes, yes."
"Hadn't there been some sort of"—the lawyer swirled ice
and drained his glass—"unpleasantness between Charlotte
Foy and Susan De Sange in those days?" There had been,
he was positive of it. On a visit to the house in Eastport fol-
lowing Virginia's death, he had been struck with Susan.
Later he asked Charlotte about her and Charlotte had been
grim. She had said that Susan De Sange was not the sort of
woman she cared to have around the house, that she wasn't
a good influence for the children.
"To tell you the truth," Gorham said, his eyes twinkling,
"I thought at the time that Mrs. De Sange was too attractive.
Naturally, Charlotte wouldn't have been pleased to have
Hugh Flavell marry again. She was fond of the children and
to have them, and perhaps Hugh, taken away from her by a
younger, and a very handsome woman, wouldn't have been
pleasant."
The lawyer also knew Jim Holland, the man Eve was
going to marry. Holland's mother had come from Boston
and was a friend of Virginia's. Hugh Flavell had tutored the
lad for his entrance exams to college. "I remember young
Holland as a great gangling lump who was always getting
under foot and turning a fiery scarlet. Good Lord, he's not
mixed up in this?"
McKee shrugged. He pointed out that the only glimmer
of a motive for Charlotte's murder that they had so far been
unable to unearth was inherent in what she had been going
to disclose when she reached Boston. She had been shot
down less than two hours after she announced her impend-
ing journey. The people who were in the house when she
made the announcement were all automatically under sus-
picion. They would remain so until the rifle that had killed
103


her was found and its ownership and possession, from 6:50
until 8 p.m. on the night before, were firmly established.
At the thought that his call might have been instrumental
in bringing about Charlotte's death, Gorham was appalled.
He offered to do anything he could to help. McKee accepted
his offer. The Boston lawyer was familiar with Charlotte's
financial affairs. There was a chance that if he looked over
the contents of her desk he might be able to tell them what
the secret visitor to her room was after, and whether any-
thing had been removed. Spencer Gorham agreed to the
suggestion as soon as it was made. Kent closed his note book
and the three men left the Commodore and drove down-
town.
McKee was glad to get back to the office. A feeling of
pressure, of the need for haste, dogged him naggingly. Yet
everything possible was being done. He was wrong. He had
no sooner entered the long narrow inner office, when the
joint and agreeing reports arrived, from the Medical Exam-
iner's office and from Dr. Steven Harris, in Bennington,
Vermont.
There was morphine in Charlotte Foy's body. It had been
prescribed by Dr. Harris. Each pill in the missing box con-
tained 0.15 grams. The dosage was heavy. Anything less
would have done Charlotte Foy no good, Harris said; the
poor lady had acquired a high tolerance.
Fernandez, the Chief Medical Examiner and McKee's
friend, said, "A couple of those pills would put a normal
man or woman out of the running—for good, Christopher.
The lethal dose is from 0.2 to 0.5 grams. The effect? Dimin-
ishing body temperature, coma, and death due to respira-
tory paralysis. If you know anyone who's liable to get any
of them, you'd better go to work fast."
104


CHAPTER
10
McKee did go to work, he used the telephone,
talked to a half dozen different men and raced through
reports. Detectives searching the Flavell house on the west
side of Henderson Square, Alicia and Gerald's apartment
on the east, Jim Holland's rooms and Bruce Cunningham's
temporary domicile for the rifle that had killed Charlotte
Foy, had been ordered to look for the blue pasteboard box
that had contained the morphine. In each instance the
results were negative. The same thing went for Eve Fla-
vell's shop, which had been gone over earlier in the day.
What now had to be done, the Scotsman decided grimly,
was to search these people individually. It wasn't a pleasant
job, the effects of not doing so might be still more unpleas-
ant—the morphine had not been removed for fun.
According to the latest bulletin, the Flavell family, accom-
panied by Bruce Cunningham, Susan De Sange and Jim
Holland, were dining at the Cedars, a small and very ultra
restaurant on East 52nd Street. Eve Flavell wasn't with
105


remarkably little progress. It was true that they had un-
covered a number of leads, but these would take time to
follow, and with the box of morphine tablets abroad, and
the lethal gun, time was the one commodity they couldn't
afford—not if a second tragedy, following hard on the heels
of the first, was to be prevented. Murder bred murder as
naturally as a guppy spawned eggs. No one knew that better
than the Scotsman. He drove straight to the Cedars, accom-
panied by detectives Wise, Visniski, Peterson and Gish, and
by two policewomen. They waited within call, in the shadow
of the two tall trees that gave the place its name. McKee
went inside.
The Cedars was one of those elegantly quiet places that
made its innings on the staggering check. McKee had been
there before, in dinner clothes and with an innocuous front,
on several unostentatious missions. The head waiter hur-
ried into the small square hall shedding greetings and
smiles. The Flavells? But oui, Monsieur, certainment. . . .
McKee said, "Where," and was told. He waved aside an
escort and paused in the doorway of the long stately inner
room dim in candlelight and looked over men and women's
heads and the sparkle of jewels, at the people he had come in
search of. The Flavells were at a table to the left of the fire-
place at the far end.
It was not a festive occasion for them. Of the lot Hugh
Flavell was the only one who" seemed moderately cheerful.
Natalie, her pale head hatless above a black gown, sustained
herself with obvious effort. She was between Bruce Cun-
ningham and her brother Gerald. Jim Holland was next to
Alicia, who shared Hugh Flavell with Susan De Sange, on
his other side. Flowers, candles in antique silver holders,
the soft clash of knives and forks, the discreet hum of voices;
it was the first time McKee had seen Gerald Flavell and he
studied Charlotte's nephew curiously.
Gerald Flavell had his father's features; he had Eve's eyes
107


with the extravagant dark lashes. He was strikingly hand-
some and—a little soft? A man who paid his way with charm,
"that's the only thing I've plenty of, baby"? It was a quality
that could be a curse to its possessor, as well as to the recipi-
ents. Gerald was younger than Alicia by perhaps four or five
years. She adored him. Bruce Cunningham was moody and
abstracted. Jim Holland was bored.
McKee's gaze moved, and his brows rose. A man at a
neighboring table was watching the Flavells. The man was
alone. He was short, middle-aged and thickset, with power-
ful shoulders and a clever dissipated face. The Scotsman
detached himself from the doorway and started forward.
The members of the Flavell party were not, with the
possible exception of Jim Holland and Natalie, glad to see
him. He was direct. The corner of the long narrow room was
secluded—except for the man at the next table. McKee kept
him within his field of vision while he told them, in a modu-
lated voice, of the disappearance of Charlotte Foy's pills,
pills that had contained morphine.
"For your own sakes," he concluded quietly, "I'm sure
you'll agree to the personal search that has been sug-
gested. . . ."
The police were invariably handicapped in making such
a proposal. The disentanglement of an endless amount of
red tape would have been necessary before it could have
been legally enforced. On the other hand, a point-blank
refusal would in itself be suspicious. They all agreed, with
various expressions of alarm, surprise, wonder and indigna-
tion. When would the search take place? At their conven-
ience, as soon as they had finished dinner. McKee said he
had matrons and detectives waiting.
Dessert had been served but appetites were destroyed.
Natalie stared at McKee, flushing and paling. She knew
something, he decided, not necessarily about the morphine
but something she hadn't told. Susan De Sange was openly
108


shaken. Chairs were pushed back, cordials lowered, napkins
flung down. The check was paid by Hugh Flavell, out of
Natalie's black suede bag, at her insistence. "There are two
fifties there, Papa."
Hugh Flavell looked at the Scotsman icily, a spot of color
high on each cheek. He was a man in a fever, holding himself
in check in the face of an illegal, impertinent and altogether
outrageous intrusion on their private lives. "I suggest, In-
spector, that we return to the Square. . . ."
McKee shook his head. "It will be simpler and easier if
the search is made here, Mr. Flavell. I can assure you that
you will be treated with courtesy—and I'd like you to realize
that this is as much for your own protection as for anything
else." He didn't add that there were too many ways of get-
ting rid of a small blue pasteboard box in a drive of more
than two miles through blacked-out, wartime streets.
They rose in a body. McKee moved aside to let them pass,
and stared. Mrs. De Sange knew the man at the next table
who had been watching the one in the corner. She was
startled, and for the fraction of a second, angry and fright-
ened at seeing him there; her back had been toward him
while she was seated. She nodded stiffly in his general direc-
tion and moved on with Hugh Flavell, the red wing in her
hat making a bright flash in the gloom. The others, Cun-
ningham with Natalie, Jim Holland with Alicia, and
Gerald Flavell lighting a cigarette and bringing up the rear,
obscured McKee's view of the stocky man with the heavy
shoulders and the keen, knowing eyes. It was a pity, in the
light of ensuing developments. The other diners couldn't
give him any information later. They hadn't even noticed
what was taking place; the whole scene had been so quietly
concluded.
There were detectives waiting to receive the party in the
hall. As Gerald Flavell ,passed him McKee turned and sur-
veyed the luxurious disorder of the abandoned table. A
109


cherry tart, ice cream in silver goblets, a glass of chartreuse,
another of brandy, coffee cups; there was nothing informa-
tive. He let a glove fall to the floor, stooped to retrieve it,
glanced at the taupe carpet under the folds of damask and
remained in a motionless crouch.
There was no longer any need to search the Flavells or
Mrs. De Sange or Bruce Cunningham or Jim Holland, the
man Eve Flavell was going to marry. The blue pasteboard
box was lying under the table, almost in the exact center of
the loose grouping of pushed back chairs.
McKee reached. He picked up the box with his glove. He
opened it. It was half full of the deadly little pills. It had
been dropped or thrown to the floor by some member of the
Flavell party, because the thief who had removed it from
Charlotte Foy's bath cabinet knew it would be found in his
or her possession in the course of a search and because . . .
the purpose for which it had been taken had already
been. . . .
The shadowy candlelit room faded out. McKee was
through it and in the hall. There was no sign of the Flavells
or their guests. Peterson and Wise were standing at the foot
of the stairs. The Scotsman threw them orders in passing,
including a summons for Medical Examiner Fernandez.
The air beyond the door was cold. A few snow flakes twisted
down. He crossed the pavement, jumped into the waiting
Cadillac, gave the address of Eve Flavell's shop and said
carefully, his voice flat, expressionless, "I've got to get there
in a hurry. Step on it, will you, Edwards?"
Edwards stepped. The journey that would ordinarily
have taken a full quarter of an hour consumed only a few
minutes. The street outside the little building between the
electrical supply house on one side and the garage on the
other was dark and silent when the Cadillac slowed around
the corner and slammed to a stop. McKee was out of it
while it was still in motion. The precinct man detached
no


CHAPTER
11
"Good night, darling."
"Good night, Nat, dear."
At the foot of the steps in front of the house on Hender-
son Square Natalie looked up at the tall man in uniform
beside her, the gold insignia on his cap flashing in the faint
light coming through the fan above the door. She raised her
face and Cunningham bent and kissed her, lightly. At a
step on the pavement they drew apart.
It was Hugh Flavell, on his way home from seeing Susan
De Sange into the lobby of the Trianon around the corner.
The four of them had driven down in one cab after that
terrible and distressing scene at the Cedars; Jim Holland
had taken another with Gerald Flavell and Alicia. It was
twenty minutes of ten. The night was nasty. Sleet was begin-
ning to fall and wind wailed through the black trees across
the street.
Natalie laid a gloved hand on Bruce's sleeve. "You're sure
you won't come in?"
112


was used extensively by the FBI as well as for deer and other
four-legged game. McKee ran his eye over the plate attached
to the oddly shaped stock. The patent marks were there,
August 27, December 10, '01; Feb. 25, '02; Feb. 17, Dec. 22,
'03; Aug. 21, Oct. 30, '06; July 5, '10. It had been purchased
subsequent to 1910. There was no difficulty in establish-
ing the .351's ownership.
The rifle belonged to Bruce Cunningham. It was regis-
tered in his name in the Permit Bureau at Headquarters.
McKee talked over the phone to the detectives who had
been sent to search the rooms on Eldon Place where Cun-
ningham was staying while he was on leave; he also talked
to Philip Graham. The golf bag in which Eve had carried
the rifle was unearthed. The manner of her exit from the
third floor apartment via the fire escape while Graham, with
mistaken chivalry, had pretended to fumble with the key in
the hall outside the locked door didn't detain the Scotsman.
Why she had gone to so much trouble, did. He shoved con-
jecture impatiently aside. Charlotte Foy had been killed
with a bullet from a rifle—but there were plenty of them
in existence and there was no proof, yet, that the lethal
bullet had come from Bruce Cunningham's gun. They
would know in a short time. Until then there were certain-
ties closer to hand.
Eve had been put out of the running by the man or
woman who had dropped or thrown the box of morphine
capsules under the table in the restaurant on 52nd Street.
Whoever had poisoned her in all probability had elimi-
nated Charlotte Foy. So the killer had to be someone who
(1) had been at the shop earlier that evening and (2) at the
Cedars when McKee reached there.
The list wasn't extensive. Seven people, and seven only,
fitted the requirements. They were Hugh Flavell, Natalie,
Gerald and Alicia, Susan De Sange, Jim Holland and Bruce
Cunningham.
114


front of him. The nostrils of her delicate nose flared, freckles
stood out on her white skin. Her pretty mouth was a red
line.
Holland was equally upset. "Yes" he said, anger thick in
him, "what has Eve done that the police—why couldn't she
come to the phone?"
It would have served no useful purpose to conceal the
girl's condition from her half-sister and the man Eve Flavell
was going to marry. McKee told them what had happened.
He said, "Miss Flavell was poisoned with morphine taken
from the cabinet in Miss Foy's bathroom in the house on
Henderson Square."
Natalie stared at him blindly, her eyes round black
stones. "Poison!" she whispered, "Eve!" and fumbled for
the nearest chair unsteadily and dropped into it, her self-
possession stripped away. She wasn't a smart streamlined
young woman with a fortune tied to her apron strings and
a habit of command; all at once she was a bewildered child,
knocked topsy-turvy and fighting ghosts in the dark.
Jim Holland gripped the back of the chair in which she
sat huddled. He glared redly at McKee. He seemed to have
difficulty with his breathing. "Where is she—Eve?" his
stick rapped the floor sharply. "Where is she now?"
Holland started walking around aimlessly. "Is she going
to get better? . . . She has to." His big face, ordinarily
ruddy, was putty-colored.
McKee shrugged. "She has an even chance. If she recovers
she'll recover fast. We'll know within an hour."
Natalie gave a cry and hid her face in the crook of her
arm.
McKee said quietly, "If you want to help Eve Flavell,
you'll pull yourselves together," and began asking them
questions. They answered dully, lethargically, ears tuned
to footsteps and voices on the floor above. They had seen
nothing suspicious here in the shop earlier that evening nor
116


in the restaurant on 52nd Street, so they declared. It was
Gerald Flavell who had mixed the cocktails before they
went to dinner. Natalie raised her fair head and looked
pallidly at McKee. There was terror in her eyes. "Ohl But
Gerald wouldn't . . ." she faltered. "No, never. . . . Why,
he loves Eve. . . ." Holland swore steadily, his eyes heavy-
lidded, half closed.
Certainly if either of these two had given Eve a dose that
had so nearly proved fatal, they were remarkable thespians,
the Scotsman reflected—but it meant nothing. One of the
seven people, and only seven, could have dumped the mor-
phine into Eve Flavell's glass. . . .
Outside, wind blew and sleet slapped thinly down. The
whisper of starched skirts intruded. One of the nurses was
coming down the stairs. At what she said weight took itself
away from McKee and Natalie sat up, her face illuminated
with a light that made her look slightly mad and Holland
said hoarsely, his voice a croak, "Thank God—Oh, thank
God."
Eve wasn't out of danger but she had taken a turn for the
better and Fernandez was more sanguine. After a word with
him, McKee let Holland and Natalie see her for a moment.
Eve's sleeping quarters were in striking contrast to Nata-
lie's gold-and-white bedroom in the house on the Square.
The shop's upper floor was one long narrow room with a
diminutive bath opening out of it. A maple bed, a bookcase,
a highboy, a small vanity case and two chairs were adequate
but not luxurious. A reproduction of Sarnoff's Winter
Wood was sharply black and white against one wall, where
Eve could look at it when she woke in the morning.
It was then just short of twelve o'clock, and while Fer-
nandez was beginning to hope, he was by no means fully
satisfied. Eve might or might not look at the Winter Wood
again. Her eyes were closed. Thick dark lashes were half
moons of shadow on her lovely worn face. Its contours had
117


been accentuated by the near approach of death. One lax
hand protruded from under the blankets. A nurse held a
finger on the wrist and eyed a watch.
Fernandez stood close by with a hypodermic in readiness.
He gazed with interest at the stricken girl's half-sister, at the
man she was engaged to. Natalie approached the bed slowly,
as though she were afraid of what she was going to find. She
looked down and gave a sudden hard, dry sob that was like
a cough and dropped to her knees. Holland stood just be-
hind her, big and solid, transfixed. His lips opened but no
sound came through. He looked as if he were being torn
apart.
Eve was stirring. Fernandez nodded and the Scotsman
touched Natalie's shoulder and motioned to Holland and
all three of them walked toward the stairs. McKee went
down first, Natalie following slowly on Holland's arm. The
Scotsman stepped out into the long narrow shop. It was
empty and still as it had been when they left it a minute or
so earlier. The door and the windows were all closed. The
curtain across the alcove under the stairs moved a little. He
glanced at it and then away as Natalie went past him and
sank into a chair and began to cry. Sobs shook her long
slender frame, doubled forward over fingers that wrenched
at each other in her lap. "I can't stand it," she said in a
broken voice. "First Aunt Charlotte, and now Eve. She
looks so dreadful . . . What does it mean? Why should
anyone want to hurt Eve?"
Holland leaned heavily against the mantel and stared
down into the replenished fire. The clock on the shelf, a
ridiculous little clock with a loud tick, struck twelve. He
raised his eyes and looked at the clock. The whites rolled.
They were threaded with tiny red veins. He said in a low
voice, "We were to have been married tomorrow. . . ."
McKee told them that the worst was over. Fernandez
corroborated him a couple of minutes later coming down
118


for a puff of a cigarette. When he crushed it out and re-
turned to the second floor, McKee said, "There's nothing
more either of you can do here. Miss Flavell will probably
sleep for hours. What she needs most now is rest and quiet.
.And so," he smiled at Natalie, "do you. Will you take this
young woman home, Mr. Holland?"
Natalie rose obediently and drew her mink coat around
her and wiped her eyes. She opened her purse. "Money?"
she said. "What about money? Those nurses—Eve will need
care. Suppose I leave a check. I haven't more than a hundred
dollars in bills with me—"
But McKee waved the check aside. "It's on the police,
Miss Flavell."
Holland took her arm. "We can see Eve tomorrow, In-
spector?"
"The first thing in the morning," McKee promised, and
on that they said good night.
McKee watched them through the door. It closed behind
them. The untenanted little room at the back of the shop
was warm and quiet. The curtain across the deep closet at
the foot of the stairs hung in straight unstirring folds.
McKee looked at it. He said, not moving, "You can come
out now, Lieutenant Cunningham."
"9


CHAPTER
12
"Thanks, inspector."
The curtain was lifted and Bruce Cunningham, First
Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, uncoiled his length from
the wall against which he had been propped, dipped his
head for the lintel and walked out into the shop. The flier's
tanned face was tightly planed and his eyes and mouth were
narrow, grim, but he wasn't abashed or nervous or in the
slightest degree discomposed. He shrugged his Army over-
coat into place, went past the desk to the hearth, took off his
cap, knocked wetness from it, laid it on the mantel and
turned.
McKee moved an ash tray an inch on top of the bookcase
beside which he stood. "You came here to get your rifle,
didn't you, Lieutenant?" He studied the flier thoughtfully.
Cunningham nodded without haste. "That's right."
"You knew Eve Flavell took it from the rooms on Eldon
Place and brought it back here with her early this evening."
"Yes," Cunningham said, "she told me so over the phone
120


late this afternoon, while I was in the Henderson Square
house." He looked around. "Where is it?"
"It's down at Headquarters being tested," McKee an-
swered pleasantly. "Charlotte Foy was killed with a bullet
from a rifle."
Cunningham smiled. One eyebrow went up crookedly.
"Not with a bullet from my rifle, Inspector. I didn't kill
Charlotte. When I went to meet her on Wednesday night,
the rifle was in the Eldon Place living room, leaning against
the wall beside the bookcase. It was some other gun that
put Charlotte out of the way."
The Scotsman let the assertion pass. There were plenty
of rifles in the world and there was no proof that Cunning-
ham's .351 was the lethal weapon. The Lieutenant moved to
a chair, hitched it closer to the fire, sat down and leaned
toward McKee.
He said in a steady voice, "I was stunned when I over-
heard in there," he waved at the curtained closet, "what
happened to Eve. I didn't know she was in any danger. . . ."
He looked into the fire. "When the doctor came downstairs
and said she was going to be all right. . . ." He gave his
dark head a shake, squared his shoulders and drew a long
breath. "This is the point," he turned more directly to-
ward McKee, "Eve did a very foolish thing when she went
to my place this afternoon and took the rifle and brought it
back with her. But there wasn't anything I could do to stop
her. When I was here with the others earlier this evening,
I had no chance to talk to her alone or to get the rifle from
her then. That's why I came back a little while ago."
McKee said, "Yes. I see. But, would you mind telling me
why you didn't come out in the open, Lieutenant? Why you
hid in there in that closet under the stairs?"
Cunningham examined the toe of a polished brown shoe.
"When I walked in here the shop was empty. Then I heard
Natalie upstairs, heard her coming down. ... I didn't
121


know what happened. Natalie had nothing to do with this
gun episode. I didn't want to pull her into it anyway. She's
had enough to bear as it is. My intention was to get my rifle
and take it to the police myself. The simplest and easiest
thing to do when I found that Natalie was here was to get
out of sight until she and Jim Holland went. Then, while
I was in there, I heard about Eve. . . ."
The Lieutenant turned away. "I was in a spot. I didn't
know quite what to do. While I was thinking it over, Natalie
left." He got up, propped an elbow on the mantel, faced
McKee squarely. "That rifle of mine didn't kill Charlotte,
Inspector. You can count on it. I repeat, it was in the living
room on Eldon Place when I left to go and meet Charlotte
at the north gate of Henderson Park on Wednesday
night."
The Scotsman started to answer and stopped. Instead, he
asked Cunningham a number of questions. The flier's an-
swers were straightforward and jibed with what he already
knew. In spite of himself, the head of the Manhattan Homi-
cide Squad was impressed. Here, he thought, was a man
who had risked his life, day after day, for months, battling
Zeros over the Pacific. He had carried out dangerous mis-
sions with daring and skill. He wore the Order of the Purple
Heart on his breast. Was such a man likely to have shot
down an elderly and defenseless woman out of the dark? It
didn't ring true; it was neither logical nor convincing. On
the other hand, this was a crime in which murder was wear-
ing a mask, and an extremely clever one. Someone in that
group of people around the table at the Cedars had dis-
carded the box of morphine capsules when its usefulness
was at an end. . . .
The wind kept on blowing and the sleet kept on coming
down. Without warning one of the little mirrored windows,
the one to the right of the fire, flew open and let darkness
and a slam of icy particles in. McKee raised his eyes. H<"
122


stared at the black oblong open on the night. He got up and
went to the window and looked out. Less than two feet away
the walls of the building in the rear rose sheerly. But there
was a narrow alley behind the shop that on investigation
angled crookedly to the street farther along the block. The
catch of the window was released from the inside. The only
thing that held the little casement in place was the tightness
with which it fitted into its frame.
McKee pushed it open and shut it a half dozen times with-
out a word. Behind him, Cunningham said, "What is it,
Inspector?"
"Oh, nothing, nothing at all," the Scotsman said airily.
But he had received a blow. It was a hard one. The airtight
case involving seven people, and seven people alone, had
broken down with a crash. Now it was anybody's game. Eve
Flavell's glass, the glass into which the morphine had been
dropped, had been standing on the table below the sill. He
touched his fingers to the green wood.
Cunningham got it. He looked from the window to the
table to McKee's face. He said, "The morphine could have
been dropped into Eve's glass by someone standing out
there. . . . There was a lot of confusion and noise here
and people moving around. . . ."
McKee didn't answer. He stood erect and abandoned the
window, but not its implication. He wanted the man who
was watching the Flavell table up there in the restaurant on
52nd Street. He reached for the phone.
Wanting wasn't having. In the turmoil attendant on the
finding of the box of morphine tablets the man who had
roused the Scotsman's interest earlier had slipped away. It
wasn't of any real importance, or it didn't seem to be, then.
While McKee was in the middle of orders to have the man
traced, the other call came through and with it, except for
minor details, to all intents and purposes the case was
washed up, finished and at a successful conclusion.
123


The experiment with Bruce Cunningham's Winchester,
the results of which Sergeant Cutts of the Ballistics Bureau
communicated to McKee at 1:15 a.m. that morning, had
taken time. It wasn't the first of its kind in the Henderson
Square murder. Before the discovery of the bullet that had
killed Charlotte Foy, other weapons had been collected
from the various people involved.
There was Eve Flavell's Colt, and a museum piece, a
revolutionary blunderbuss that had been removed from
over the mantel in the Gerald Flavell's apartment; there
was an old Army revolver belonging to Jim Holland that
had been his uncle's and that had been recovered from the
bottom of a trunk in his rooms, and there was a curious and
interesting weapon belonging to Hugh Flavell, a walking-
stick shotgun of European manufacture that Flavell had
picked up in the Pyrenees in 1930. All these weapons had
been duly discharged as a matter of routine. They were
automatically discarded after the discovery that Charlotte
Foy had been killed, not with a shotgun or a pistol or a
revolver but with a bullet from a rifle.
Bruce Cunningham's .351 was checked in at Headquar-
ters at half-past ten. At around eleven it was tried out. The
procedure was simple in its early stages. A test bullet from
the .351 was discharged into the open end of a long wooden
box, packed with three feet of cotton, backed up by another
six feet of cotton waste. The lid of the box was unhinged
and the bullet dug from the waste at the far end, encased in
a clinging cocoon of cotton in which it had wrapped itself.
It was lifted out tenderly, tagged, and conveyed, with the
.351, to the room on the floor above with the bright lights
and the microscopes, where Sergeant Cutts went to work.
The lethal and test bullets stood side by side under twin
microscopes. The Sergeant's all-seeing eye moved from one
series of lenses to the other. He revolved the leaden slugs


ing the attack on Eve Flavell. Commissioner Carey sat be-
hind his desk and nodded his agreement. McKee stood at
one of the windows looking out.
The facts were simple, and damning. The rifle with which
Charlotte Foy had been killed not only belonged to Lieu-
tenant Bruce Cunningham, but Cunningham, and Cun-
ningham alone, had had access to it at the time the crime
was committed.
The flier had been taken into custody at 2:15 that morn-
ing. After a quiet denial of having given morphine to Eve
Flavell and a reiteration of his innocence about Charlotte
Foy, he had made no further statement.
The Scotsman's continued silence began to get on Com-
missioner Carey's nerves. "Well, McKee?" he rapped out
at last.
The Inspector turned from the window. "It's all been
said, hasn't it?"
"You're convinced Cunningham is our man?"
"My conviction is neither here nor there, Commissioner,"
McKee answered. "It's a question, now, of proof. The own-
ership of the rifle isn't the important thing—or not the
most important. Guns have been stolen before and used and
thrown away or replaced. As far as this case goes, there's just
one loophole. Graham, one of the two men with whom
Cunningham has been staying, says that the .351 was in the
apartment on the day Charlotte Foy was killed. That's a
lot of hours to cover. The defense will undoubtedly be that
the gun was removed by another person prior to the shoot-
ing and returned after it had taken place."
Dwyer snorted genially. "Nothing doing. No sir. . . .
Wait a minute, Graham's outside. Would you like to talk to
him, Commissioner? Good." He pressed a buzzer and Philip
Graham, Bruce Cunningham's unlucky friend, was brought
in, tired and unshaven and in a fog. A writer by profession,
he had handled crime for years, in fiction; he had found fact
126


something else again. He retold his story for the hundredth
time. Boiled to its bones it was simple and damning for the
Lieutenant.
The .351 had been in the apartment for months. Graham
had noticed it particularly on Wednesday morning because
the dog knocked it to the floor. As McKee pointed out,
there was a possibility that it might have been removed
later on that day. Graham and Joe Buchanan, the man who
shared the apartment with him were in and out; how it
could have been returned was another matter.
Bruce Cunningham had said in a previous statement
that he left home at a few minutes after 7 p.m. on Wednes-
day evening in order to keep his appointment with Char-
lotte Foy at the north gate of Henderson Square. Apparently
he had lied. He did leave the Eldon Place apartment at a
few minutes after seven but he returned unexpectedly, per-
haps a quarter of an hour later.
The writer squirmed in his chair. He hadn't exactly seen
Cunningham come back, but he had called to him. After a
couple of minutes Cunningham left once more. At that
time, twenty to twenty-five minutes past seven, Graham and
Joe Buchanan were both in the apartment. At around eight
o'clock Graham went out for the evening, but Joe Buchanan
remained in the apartment all evening, working on a draw-
ing, and when Graham got back at a little before twelve,
Buchanan told him that the evening had been quiet and
that there had been no alarums and excursions and no
callers.
A statement from Buchanan himself was unavailable at
the moment. On the morning following the murder, before
Charlotte Foy's body was discovered, he left New York to
visit his aunt. Graham didn't know where this aunt, a
Martha Denham, lived. He had said he would be back at
the end of the week.
After a few more questions Graham was dismissed and
127


then Bruce Cunningham was brought in. The flier entered
the room with a confident step, between two detectives. The
Commissioner nodded at them and they withdrew. He said,
"Sit down, Lieutenant," and Cunningham dropped into
the indicated chair.
He bore the marks of what he had been through since
three o'clock that morning. His lean dark face was tired, the
jaw and sensitive clean-cut mouth were sternly set and eyes,
straight-looking intelligent eyes under a good forehead,
were narrow with strain.
He would have been a fool if he hadn't been worried. He
wasn't a fool. He had acted like one in not disposing of the
rifle immediately after he had killed Charlotte Foy with a
bullet from it, McKee reflected. This was one of the peculiar
features of the case that made him uncomfortable, irreso-
lute.
Innocent or guilty, the flier's composure was genuine.
There was no bravado about it. He sat in an easy attitude,
knees crossed, shoulders relaxed, a long tall figure in uni-
form, his head up. He drew a cigarette from his pocket,
tapped it thoughtfully on the back of a brown hand and lit
it without asking permission. He admitted his return to
the Eldon Place apartment after he had, he said, failed to
find Charlotte Foy at the north gate of Henderson Park.
"Yes, I went back there."
Dwyer moved in on him. "We know you went back. You
went back to put the rifle you killed her with in what you
considered, for the moment, a safe place."
"No, Mr. District Attorney," Cunningham answered
with a quirk of his strongly marked dark brows, "I went
back because I forgot my wallet."
Dwyer laughed. "Well, well, well, so you forgot your
wallet? Now isn't that nice?"
Bruce Cunningham remained cool. "I didn't think so
at the time. It was a nuisance."
128


"We don't need to listen to any more of your lies, Cun-
ningham. Those things tell the tale. You shot Charlotte Foy
with that gun. No one else could have got possession of it,
and you have no alibi for the period covering the time with-
in which the shot was fired. You're as guilty as hell. Why
don't you come clean? Give us a confession. It will make
it easier for everyone. If you won't think of yourself, think
of that poor young girl to whom you're engaged, of her
family. Think of the uniform you wear."
For a startled moment McKee was under the impression
that Cunningham was going to break. He sat forward in his
chair staring at the gun, at the bullets, with grim concentra-
tion. There was pallor under his tanned skin and his eyes,
narrowed on the damning exhibit, had a helpless, almost a
hopeless gleam to them. He drew a long breath and sat erect.
"Dilly, Dally, come out and be killed," he said in a tired
voice. "You know, I've often wondered what sort of argu-
ment the police used to get a confession, what it was they
offered a man in exchange for his life. I know now it's
nothing, just bluff and fatigue and strain and to hear you
stop talking. You're a smart man, Counselor. I'm going to
put something to you. You've provided me with opportunity
and a weapon. But what about motive? What possible reason
could I have for killing Charlotte Foy? That's what I'd like
you to tell me. Just that."
He had placed his finger on the weak spot in the State's
case. Nevertheless the question was a mistake. He waited too
eagerly for an answer. That he had a motive, even though
they didn't know what it was, was now certain. Even with-
out motive the evidence against him was overwhelming. He
was taken away. A short conference ensued. The result was
a foregone conclusion. Before 11 a.m. on Friday, December
the 4th, Bruce Cunningham was under arrest in connection
with the murder of Charlotte Foy.
130


CHAPTER
13
"No, PAPA, LET ME ALONE PLEASE."
Natalie rose and walked swiftly to one of the front win-
dows in the living room of the house on the Square and
stood there, looking out. The sweeping sea-green draperies
framed the gray light of mid-afternoon. The girl's slim
black wool back was as straight as a pikestaff and her soft
fair hair fell in a motionless and shining wave to her stiff
shoulders.
Hugh Flavell, who had been leaning toward her suppli-
catingly, sank back cross-kneed into the corner of one of
the deep sofas at the fire with a gesture of despair. McKee
leaned on a yellow satin chair, arms folded along the top,
and watched them both.
Immediately following the scene in the Commissioner's
office, the Flavells had been informed of what had taken
place. Natalie hadn't broken down or had hysterics. After
an outburst of tight-lipped fury at the stupidity of the police
she had gone into action. Within half an hour she had re-
131


tained Gerard Burchall, New York's most eminent criminal
lawyer, to look after Bruce Cunningham's interests.
Whatever else Charlotte Foy's coddling, the swaddling
clothes in which she had wrapped Natalie, had done to her,
it hadn't made her a weakling, the Scotsman reflected.
At the window Natalie repeated icily, "I don't care what
the evidence is, I don't care anything about the rifle. Bruce
didn't kill Charlotte. The idea is too ridiculous for words.
Bruce wouldn't kill anyone."
It was to her father she spoke. Hugh Flavell didn't say
anything.
McKee said soothingly, "Don't worry too much, Miss
Flavell. The formalities of the Lieutenant's release on bail
will be concluded shortly. After all, he isn't in custody on a
charge of homicide but only as a material witness."
He didn't add that it had taken all kinds of persuasion to
convince the District Attorney that at this point the ma-
terial-witness charge was a safer bet than a homicide rap, as
a precautionary measure, until the evidence should be com-
plete—and that Bruce Cunningham wasn't likely to be out
on bail long.
The moment Gerard Burchall informed Natalie that
Bruce Cunningham was eligible for bail she had ordered
him to arrange it. The bail was stiff. Natalie had dismissed
the $100,000 demanded by the court with a few strokes of a
pen.
Dwyer was furious but there was nothing he could do
about it. He was convinced that in the Lieutenant they had
their man and that no further search was required. McKee
didn't agree, which was why he advised going slow. He
wanted the whole canvas laid bare. He wanted the man or
woman with the blood-stained shoes who had searched
Charlotte Foy's bedroom. It wasn't Bruce Cunningham;
Cunningham was with Natalie when that search was being
132


conducted. He also wanted the photograph with the corner
torn off that had cropped up between Susan De Sange and
Charlotte Foy shortly before Charlotte died.
He looked absently at the blaze of a burnt-orange Degas
above a bookcase. Above all, he wanted the missing Bu-
chanan, the third occupant of the Eldon Place apartment,
who had been at home from eight o'clock on, the night
Charlotte was killed and whose testimony that there had
been no visitors, unless it was changed, would put Bruce
Cunningham in the electric chair.
Buchanan had said to Graham of that evening, "No
alarums and excursions and no visitors," which would seem
to indicate that no one except Bruce Cunningham could
have replaced the .351. But Graham's report was only
hearsay and until they talked to Buchanan himself, they
couldn't be sure. He was out of New York, visiting an aunt
who was ill. Graham didn't have the slightest idea where
the aunt lived, except that it was on a farm within a radius
of a couple of hundred miles of the city. The search for
Buchanan was already under way. In addition, McKee was
interested in the gentleman who had been watching the
Flavell table in the Cedars and who had so expeditiously
vanished. Susan De Sange knew this man.
Natalie turned from the window and began to move rest-
lessly around the room. She didn't look at her father; she
was aware of his lack of confidence in Bruce's innocence.
She said, pausing beside a coffee table and shifting a crystal
box with tight fingers, "Someone got hold of Bruce's rifle,
Papa. That's what we've got to prove. It was there, in Bruce's
apartment for months. Anyone could have taken it when
the apartment was empty. I had a key. Suppose other people
had keys, too?"
Hugh Flavell stepped on her mounting hope, cried it
down. "Natalie, my poor darling," he said, "stop and think.
133


You lost your key ages ago and Charlotte had been with us
here in this house for more than ten days. If someone
wanted to kill her with Bruce's rifle—why wait that long?"
Natalie flashed back at him with an accuracy the Scots-
man couldn't have bettered. "If Bruce's rifle was used delib-
erately, Papa, and that's what it looks like, then—the mur-
derer couldn't have used it while Bruce was in Washington.
That's why he waited. That's why it was done on last
Wednesday night. Because Bruce was home and because—"
Yes, she had hold of it. She continued steadily, "Because
someone heard Charlotte telephone to Bruce and ask him
to meet her that night at a quarter past seven in the Park
across the street."
Hugh Flavell was startled, outraged. "Natalie—what are
you saying? Think. That would mean that it was someone
in this house who . . ."
The girl refused to retreat. "Yes," she said drearily, "I
know. But . . ." She dashed tears from her lashes and
turned on her father, "You don't believe Bruce did kill
Aunt Charlotte, do you?"
Flavell hadn't the courage to say yes. He threw up his
hands. "Certainly not."
"All right then," Natalie answered, and drove him into
a corner with remorseless logic. "Whoever did it had to
know where Charlotte was going to be—and how could any-
one know who didn't hear her telephone to Bruce?"
McKee interposed. He said, "Someone could have fol-
lowed Miss Foy when she left here that night."
Flavell seized on the suggestion. "That's it, Inspector,
you've hit on it, I believe. The telephone call had nothing
to do with it. Perhaps Nat is right, perhaps someone did
want to make Bruce look guilty. Very well, the idea would
seem to be that there was someone hanging around outside
the house. . .'."
134
1


It was a possibility the Scotsman had already considered.
He returned to the subject of the key to the Eldon Place
apartment. Natalie said that Bruce Cunningham had left
a key with her when he went to camp in June. She had used
it in July, and in the beginning of August, to send him
things he wanted, some books and a heavy sweater and, later,
some addresses. Then she had lost it. She couldn't say when.
All she knew was that when Bruce came home in November
he had asked her for the key and she had looked in the
compartment in her purse where she kept it and it wasn't
there.
. McKee quirked mental eyebrows when she told him, her
forehead furrowed with concentration, "It's hard to think
back, but Father and Susan were with me once, weren't you,
Papa? And I think Jim Holland went with me the second
time. I met him in the Park; he was on his way here."
"The third time, Miss Flavell?" McKee asked and Natalie
said, "I was alone. . . . No, I wasn't. That's right, Alicia
was with me. Yes, she loved the woodwork in the window
and door frames. ..."
So they were back to it again, McKee reflected wryly,
back to the same people who, if you excluded Bruce Cun-
ningham, could have discarded the box of morphine cap-
sules in the restaurant on 52nd Street. And they were all at
large and there was no proof. . . . He took the thought
away with him and didn't like it.
Earlier that afternoon Dwyer had gone to see Eve Flavell
in the shop on 19th Street. It was unfortunate that he got
to her before the Scotsman did. Eve was still weak from the
aftereffects of the morphine poisoning. Dwyer didn't know
her and he attributed the stricken stillness with which she
received the announcement of Bruce Cunningham's arrest,
seated in a chair in front of the fire against propped pillows,
to physical weakness and to concern for her young half-
»35


sister. He was completely deceived by her lovely expression-
less face, turned a little away from him, and by her averted
eyes and monosyllabic answers.
"You wouldn't want your sister to marry a man like that,
come now, would you, Miss Flavell?"
"No. Oh, no."
"You went to the Eldon Place apartment and took Bruce
Cunningham's rifle in order to shield your sister, because
you didn't want her to suffer—but you didn't know at that
time the purpose for which the gun had been used?"
"No, I didn't know."
Inside herself Eve was summoning every ounce of her
strength to ward off collapse. Dwyer was gentle with her. He
said that Charlotte had discovered something about Bruce
that made him unfit to be Natalie's husband. She had con-
fessed as much to Natalie's lawyer, Spencer Gorham, over
the phone on the afternoon of the day she died. "Your poor
aunt signed her death warrant when she went to meet Cun-
ningham that night, probably to tax him with what she
knew. She played right into his hands. It was a perfect set-
up for murder. It was dark, and there was a heavy fog and
the streets were deserted. . . . Think of his callousness,
Miss Flavell. He shot your aunt down, returned the rifle,
temporarily, to the living room on Eldon Place and then
took your half-sister out to dinner as though nothing had
happened. That was brutal. That was shocking. Have you
any idea, any inkling, of what Miss Foy had on Cunningham
that made it necessary for him to kill her?"
"No, I'm afraid not. No, I haven't." That was it, Eve
thought numbly, sitting very still and trying to rise above
the tumultuous black seas that threatened to overwhelm
her. That was the very heart of it. Charlotte had seen Bruce
talking to her in front of the fire in the house on the Square
that day and that brief glance had undone all that she had
accomplished by the announcement of her engagement to
136


what had led to it. He scolded Eve for taking the rifle and
trying to hide it. "It was all very well to think of Natalie—
but look what happened to you."
He refused to admit that Bruce's arrest was an absurd
mistake. He said soberly, "It doesn't seem possible that Cun-
ningham did it, but after all, someone killed Charlotte, and
the police don't make an arrest on a charge of murder, or
in connection with a murder, unless they've got pretty good
grounds. . . . All right, all right, darling—if it will make
you feel better I'll swear that Bruce Cunningham is whiter
than snow."
Jim's tone was indulgent. But his glance at her was
puzzled and—was there a question in it? Eve said quickly,
"It will break Natalie's heart, Jim. Oh, she won't say any-
thing—but it will kill her." A cold little tongue of warning
was curling round her own sick heart and she told herself
that she would have to school her eyes and her voice, even
her thoughts.
To the consternation of the trained nurse left in charge
by the Chief Medical Examiner, Eve announced a little
later on that she was going out. Jim understood her better
than the strange woman. "She wants to see her sister," he
said. "Better let her have her way or she'll drive herself mad
sitting there and brooding. I'll be responsible for her. I
don't see how it can do any harm. I'll see that she doesn't
tire herself out and I won't let her stay long."
He got a cab and helped the nurse put her into it and they
drove to the house on the Square. When they arrived, Alicia
and Gerald and Susan were there. It was dusk. The curtains
were drawn and the lamps lit. Natalie's skin was paper white
and her bones seemed to have sharpened. When she saw
Eve she jumped up and went to her and took her two hands.
"Are you all right? Ought you to be making this effort?" she
asked anxiously.
"I'm not too hot but I can totter about," Eve said and
138


You could hear the clock tick. Outside, a cab went by in
the street. Eve put her cup carefully on an end table, gray-
ness swirling up around her. What were the others, what was
Natalie thinking? Why had Bruce mentioned the rifle here,
now, before them? They had to know, she told herself con-
fusedly. But what explanation was she going to give that
would sound even faintly plausible.
She didn't have to give any. Natalie did. She thrust her
left arm through Bruce's and reached for Eve's with her
right. Drawing Eve close, she looked up into Bruce's face
and said in clear ringing tones, "She did it for us, darling.
Thank God, she's safe."
Tears rushed to Eve's eyes. The bitter irony of the situ-
ation, of Natalie's generosity, her lack of knowledge of the
real truth, were burning arrows plunged into her breast.
The pain was frightful. She felt she couldn't bear it, and
knew it had to be borne. She didn't glance at Bruce. She
needn't have been afraid. When she did, he was looking
away from both her and Natalie, into the fire.
Listening to Alicia's vivacious babble, to her father's
measured tones, to a quip from Gerald, Eve resolved fiercely
that there was only one thing for her to do. Natalie's happi-
ness was bound up in Bruce. He had to be cleared and she
must help. ... It was then, standing there, that she
thought of the man who had been lurking outside the house
the night Charlotte died.
She began to talk in a quick excited voice. She described
her collision with him at the foot of the steps in the fog. She
said, "He must have been there for some reason. He wasn't
just passing by."
Natalie took fire from her tone. "What did he look like,
Eve?"
But Eve didn't know. He was a voice in the dark, nothing
more.
She realized afterwards that if she had been keener at the
140


time she would have had an inkling then. One voice was
missing from the chorus of questions, one face was averted
in the loose circle around the hearth. It didn't really matter.
On the following day, on a windswept hill sixty miles to
the northeast, under a bleak sky from which snow was be-
ginning to fall, she saw the man who had been lurking out-
side the house on the Square the night Charlotte died, saw
him and heard him, and was beset by pain from a new quar-
ter and as a result of what she saw and heard she came close
to death for the second time within forty-eight hours.
141


CHAPTER
14
Susan de sange's hostess gown of a dark shade of
American Beauty emphasized her height and grace and
the frankly mature richness of her undoubted charm. She
shook hands with McKee pleasantly and waved him to a
chair in the living room of her suite on the ninth floor of
the Hotel Trianon. It was eleven o'clock on Saturday morn-
ing.
It was an ordinary hotel suite, but Susan De Sange had
done something to it. She was a woman who would leave
her imprint on her surroundings wherever they might hap-
pen to be. Magazines and books were scattered about, there
were violets in a low green bowl and a frost of jonquils in ,
front of a mirror perfumed the air.
She was grave but not unduly cast down by Bruce Cun-
ningham's arrest in connection with Charlotte's murder.
She said, "I can speak freely to you, Inspector. I've grown
very fond of Natalie Flavell. ... If he—is that sort of
man, how much better that Natalie should discover it now,
142


Mr. Bently, from the position he was in, had you all more
or less under observation. And by the way, there must have
been a reason for his—interest." <
Susan De Sange shrugged. There was weariness and a
flavor of resignation in her faint smile. Amusement left her.
She ruffled the pages of a book with a shapely hand and
sighed. "Poor Edgar. I'm afraid Hugh was the reason. Yes.
You see, Edgar's been wanting me to marry him for years
and he—well, he doesn't like my interest in the Flavells. I
suppose it's a perfectly natural reaction but it's annoying
and a bore. As far as the other night goes, I'm sure Edgar
didn't see anything important, Inspector. He was here this
morning and if he had seen anything he would have told
me. In fact, to be frank, he would have been glad to."
She explained that Bently was an architect by profession
and lived in Norwalk, Connecticut, and that he was in New
York on a visit, but she didn't know, so she said, where he
was staying. "If I see him again, Inspector, I'll find out and
let you know."
"Thank you, Mrs. De Sange."
He reflected that she might, or might not, be telling the
truth. Voice, expression, carriage, bearing were all they
should have been. As wfth those others, it meant nothing,
McKee reflected. Of all the cases he had ever encountered
this was the most truly Jekyll-Hyde. Behind one of these
innocuous facades lay the will and the ability to kill ruth-
lessly, cleverly, and with the bland face of innocence. Evalu-
ated in general terms, Susan De Sange was no more and no
less suspicious than anyone so far involved. She was an old
friend of whom Hugh Flavell had become enamored when
he met her again in maturity. Eve was very fond of her:
Alicia Flavell disliked her intensely. Alicia's dislike was
understandable. She was working the same side of the street;
she was a favorite of Hugh's and made a fuss over him and
144



over Natalie, and she would resent the intrusion of another
woman into that circle of—eight millions.
McKee told himself impatiently not to keep coming back
to that. The money was not Hugh Flavell's; it was his
daughter's, and Natalie was very much alive. The only con-
crete thing that singled Susan De Sange out for special no-
tice was the photograph that had been torn during her
curious interview in private with Charlotte Foy three hours
before Charlotte died. These rooms, as well as the Flavell
house, had already been searched in vain for the photo-
graph with a corner missing.
He sprang the scrap of photographic paper on her with-
out warning. "Will you look at this, Mrs. De Sange,
please?" He held it out to her with a sudden movement
and kept his eyes on her face—and knew he was right. Oh,
yes, innocent or guilty, this woman had been deeply in-
volved in some fashion or other with the late Charlotte
Foy. Susan De Sange was perceptibly shaken by the little
exhibit. But she was a lady of parts; she recovered herself
swiftly. "You talk in parables, Inspector. I'm afraid I don't
quite . . ."
McKee stopped her. He said in a tired voice, "On Wed-
nesday morning, after Charlotte Foy's body was discovered
in Henderson Square, you went to Bruce Cunningham's
rooms to get him to do something for you. I believe you
wanted him to recover this bit of paper for you from the
writing room in the Flavell house. I can't urge you too
strongly to tell me the truth, for your own sake. Whose
photograph was it, Mrs. De Sange? Who produced it? Why
was it torn? What significance did it have?"
She wasn't going to tell him. Far from it. She gathered
herself together and answered with well-assumed astonish-
ment, "You're wrong, Inspector, quite wrong. I—" she
paused, stared and frowned, "Now that you mention it I
145


do seem to recall that Charlotte had a picture with her
when she came in to me in the writing room, but I don't
know whose it was, or what she was doing with it or what,
if anything, it meant."
McKee told himself that this was a lie out of the whole
cloth. The effort she put into it and her concealed agita-
tion—and more than agitation—were illuminating. Find
the original of the photograph and they would be a good
deal further along. Whatever the story back of the photo-
graph, Susan De Sange wasn't going to give it to him.
He went a few minutes later but before he left he
listened to a one-sided conversation over the telephone.
Hugh Flavell called Mrs. De Sange and asked her to go
up to Eastport with them for Charlotte's funeral. She said,
"I will if you want me, Hugh, dear, if you think I can be
of any assistance. No, no trouble. . . . I've been intend- 1
ing to go up to the cottage anyhow, there are some things
there I want. . . ."
The Flavells were leaving on the twelve-fifteen from
Grand Central. Late the night before, Charlotte Foy's
body had been released by the District Attorney's office and
shipped to an undertaker in the Connecticut town. Until
Buchanan was found, as long as there was a possibility, how-
ever slight, that Bruce Cunningham had been framed, these
people would have to be kept under observation. McKee
thanked Mrs. De Sange and took his departure.
McKee verified the fact that Edgar Bently had called on
Mrs. De Sange early that morning. A man answering his
description had arrived at the Trianon at nine-thirty and
according to the elevator girl and the doorman he left at
around ten.
The Norwalk police corroborated Bently as a consulting
architect whose cottage in Silvermine was also his office. He
was a man of moderate means and kept no servants and the
146


cottage was locked up, so no further information was forth-
coming from that end. To search New York for him would
be a long and possibly an abortive task and the result, if they
did manage to locate him, might be disappointing. His in-
terest in the Flavells might have had an amorous origin
as Mrs. De Sange said, and he might have seen nothing what-
ever in the Cedars. In spite of this, and in spite of the fact
that the Homicide Squad was understaffed and that McKee
got not the slightest encouragement from either Dwyer or
Commissioner Carey, he decided that the attempt to locate
Bently had to be made.
Accordingly, Detectives Gish and Wileski began a tour
of the hotels, and McKee had a delayed conference with
Spencer Gorham, the Boston lawyer who handled Natalie's
affairs. Gorham could find nothing wrong as far as the papers
in Charlotte Foy's desk went. Charlotte had never appar-
ently thrown anything away and his task had been as lengthy
as it was unproductive. Her valuables, stocks and bonds,
personal belongings, etc., were in her safe-deposit box at
the Grant National Bank. To complete the picture the box
would have to be examined. To do this a court order would
be necessary, unless the police wanted to wait until the heirs
had taken out letters of administration.
McKee didn't want to wait. "You know what ought to be
in the box?" he asked, and Gorham said "Yes," displaying
a little green memorandum book that had been in the dead
woman's desk.
The Scotsman had done favors for the Grant National's
first vice-president. Twenty minutes later he and Gorham
were examining a long drawer behind locked gates in the
bank's vault. The lawyer consulted the little green book and
looked. He looked again and raised a shocked face. Nine
thousand dollars in war bonds bought by Charlotte the
previous June were not there.
Inquiry revealed that Charlotte Foy had visited her safe-
»47


deposit box on Tuesday, the day before she died and that
on that day she had removed the small old-fashioned wooden
chest that was in her packed suitcase when McKee looked
her bedroom over. It was possible the bonds had been in
that. They weren't there now. Gerald Flavell had occasion-
ally handled an investment for his aunt, McKee reflected,
and the good-looking and increasingly hag-ridden Gerald
was hard up and owed bills in every direction.
This deduction was apparently wrong. Back at the office
McKee found a message from the Fingerprint Bureau wait-
ing for him. The small wooden chest that Charlotte had
been going to take to Boston with her had been tested for
prints. It had taken time to get a complete set of the men's
and women's under scrutiny. There was one set, and one
set only, on the polished wood of the chest. They were Hugh
Flavell's. The stenographer, Kent, delivered the message to
the Scotsman. It had caused a good deal of excitement. Kent
said, "What do you think of it, Inspector?"
McKee didn't answer. He looked at the clock on the wall
above the green filing cabinet. It was fourteen minutes after
twelve and Flavell's train left at twelve-fifteen. He could
never make it. Sitting there staring across roof tops gloomy
under a sullen sky, he told himself it didn't matter, that the
Flavells were covered, that no member of the party could
hope to slip away for any length of time, that they were
returning to New York in a few hours and that, besides, he
had things to do here, pressing things. Wilenski had called
in. Susan De Sange's cousin by marriage had been located.
Edgar Bently was staying at a small and inconspicuous hotel
on the south side of Henderson Square. McKee swiveled
around in his chair, pushed a weight from his shoulders and
reached for the phone.
At about the same time, in the long shed in Grand Central
148


been christened. All of them dreaded the arrival in the small
town, the formalities that had to be gone through and the
questions, discreet or otherwise, that would be asked.
If it hadn't been for Natalie, Eve wouldn't have come.
She was still weak and more than a bit shaky from the beat-
ing her system had taken. But the Chief Medical Examiner,
who had developed a warm interest in her, had given his
consent. "It won't do you any harm. With a thing like that
you come up as fast as you go down. Only, don't let yourself
get too tired, and don't catch cold."
Natalie had said forlornly the afternoon before, "I wish
you could come, Eve, it would make me feel better—but
not if it's going to do you any harm." Her eyes were enough.
They were worse now. She had changed a good deal in the
last twenty-four hours. Overnight she seemed to have grown
five years older. She was as gentle as ever, but her color was
bad and there was a new stem set to her narrow white face
that made her look a little like a Joan of Arc in a severe
black suit with a big-brimmed black hat covering her soft
pale hair. The effect of her wide brown gaze, no longer
bright and eager but stony and withdrawn, traveling over
their father's face and Gerald's and Alicia's and Susan's and
Jim's, exploringly, marked the distance along the road that
had separated her from them since the previous day.
She had broken down only once, when she was alone with
Eve for a moment last night. Then she had given way to her
fears like a mad creature. "They'll convict him, Eve, for
something he didn't do. They'll put him to death. . . .
I've read stories in the paper, I know. Don't try to deceive
me. ... I can't stand it. Bruce—when I think of him be-
hind bars, in a cell. . . ." Eve had succeeded finally in
quieting her, taking her in her arms and holding her tightly
until she stopped shaking.
"Nothing is sure," she told her. "Nothing will be sure
until they get the man who was in Bruce's apartment all
150


evening. Someone, perhaps that man was hanging around
outside in the Square Wednesday night before Charlotte
went out, will be proved to have gone to Bruce's apartment
and put the gun back. That's what will happen, Natalie, I
promise you."
Jim had backed her up later, but Natalie's response to
him had been cold. She had always been fond of Jim but
she turned from him now, as she did from the others, sensing
the opinion he didn't express. Her instinct was right. To
Eve Jim had said musingly, "It's all very well to try and
keep Natalie's spirits up—but it may be a mistake. It's
damned awkward about that gun, you know."
The acid of pain had eaten through Eve's armor at that
and she had rounded on him furiously. Now they didn't
talk about Bruce or his chances any more. They didn't talk
about Charlotte's murder either. In fact, Charlotte hadn't
been murdered; she had simply died. That was Hugh. He
had set the tone. His late sister-in-law, companion and close
, friend had been taken from them by the grim reaper. Sooner
or later it happened to everyone. Those near and dear
passed on. Well, that was life and there was nothing you
could do but submit.
He was really amazing. For a man who could make a most
ghastly fuss about a burned muffin or a hard hotel bed, he
accepted major wounds with astonishing stoicism. He did
it so well, perhaps because he could make himself believe
practically anything he wanted to. Had he gone out for his
accustomed walk in the park on the night Charlotte died?
Eve wondered. Was her father the one who had left that
dreadful stain at the foot of the stairs in the lovely old house
on the Square.
Let it not, she thought, be Hugh, or Gerald, or anyone
connected with her by ties of blood. How would you ever
get the poison out of your veins? It was, it had to be, the man
waiting so queerly in the darkness and the fog at the foot of
151


the steps the night Charlotte died. Why should anyone
wait like that, without a purpose?
A hand touched her arm and she stiffened. It was only
Jim, leaning across the aisle. "Don't look now, Eve," he
said with a faint grin, "but isn't that gentleman up there
near the water-cooler, the one behind the two sailors, a de-
tective? Wasn't he with the Inspector at the shop that first
day?"
Eve glanced at a big man in profile beyond two blue
jackets at the front of the car who was gazing abstractedly
at a baggage rack. It was Captain Pierson; she recognized
him at once. "Yes, I think so, Jim," she said calmly, but her
heart leaped. Bruce was under arrest, but if the New York
police were certain he was guilty why were they having them
followed and watched? It meant, surely it must mean, that
they weren't sure about Bruce.
When they left the train at Eastport she whispered the
news to Natalie and Natalie drew the same conclusion. Her
face grew bright in the shadow of her hat. Her brightness
didn't last. Hugh took her arm and detached her from Eve,
as Charlotte had always tried to detach her. "Watch the step,
dear." He led her to a long black limousine with the A, B
and C cards on the windshield and they all got in and drove
to the big white house where Charlotte lay waiting.
The undertaker, Mr. Cable, received them at the top of
the steps. Inside an organ was playing Handel softly. The
big twilit spaces were thickly carpeted and full of the heavy
perfume of too many flowers. Men and women were stand-
ing in groups or sitting on little gilt chairs. Eve knew some
of them. She shook hands with the Smiths and the Bensons,
with Miss Judd and the Reverend Doctor Harris and with
Cicely Thwaight, her blooming muted, her sixty-five-year-
old skin rosy, her eyes bright with malicious curiosity under
her white hair.
There were candles at the head and foot of the casket in
152


which Charlotte lay, dressed in familiar black, her hands
folded quietly on her breast. Eve knelt on a gray velvet prie-
dieu and looked down at the woman who had been her
aunt and was frightened. She felt nothing, absolutely noth-
ing. With Bruce's arrest, with the terrible accusation against
him, her capacity for feeling seemed to have stopped as
though her nerve ends had been branded with a red-hot
iron and permanently cauterized. She could see and hear,
listen and reply, but people and things were an indeter-
minable distance away on the other side of a glass wall.
Jim knelt beside her." He was crying. Eve was childishly
surprised. Then she remembered that he had been fond of
Charlotte and that she had been good to him as a boy; she
had sent him pocket money when he was at college and
loaves of the raisin bread she used to bake. Jim took out a
handkerchief and wiped his eyes surreptitiously, and they
both rose.
Gerald was talking to Cicely Thwaight near a clump of
palms. How he had—dwindled, Eve thought dispassion-
ately. He had been gay and fearless and forthright as a boy
but now he looked beaten. He was only twenty-nine but al-
ready there was the foreshadowing of age in his set features,
in his receding hair line. Even the shape of his head ap-
peared to have changed. It was smaller and set differently
on his shoulders. How crazy Charlotte had been about him
as a child and when he was growing up. But he had disap-
pointed her by marrying, and leaving the house and making
a home of his own. Poor Charlotte, all her plans had gone
awry. She had been so set on a marriage between Natalie
and that Boston cousin of the Coreys. Instead, Natalie had
engaged herself to Bruce.
What a battle there had been! Strong as Charlotte's will
was, Natalie's was stronger. Eve had sometimes thought that
if Charlotte had handled the situation differently Natalie
wouldn't have persisted with the engagement. Say no to
153


her sharply and she became determined to have her own
way whether she really wanted it or not. It was a natural
human instinct. It was highly developed in Natalie. Eve
could remember her at seven, screaming herself black in
the face because she wasn't permitted to go to the circus
with Gerald and a boy from school, and becoming ill and
doctors and nurses being sent for and the house on tip-toe.
She had told Eve afterwards, her eyes round in an innocent
little face, "I can make myself sick. I can have a fever if
I want to." If only Charlotte had used tact and judgment,
Natalie might have given Bruce up. If she had, Bruce
wouldn't . . . "Stop it," she whispered to herself and forced
her attention back to the dimly lit rooms.
Alicia was wonderful, circulating about, receiving mur-
mured condolences and asking and answering questions.
She was at her best at funerals and weddings, Eve decided.
She ought to be able to make a fortune with a little hand-
book on what to do when the undertaker comes. Her black
dress was just right, smart without being too extreme, so
was her manner. She was competent, sustained and sus-
taining, sad with the restraint of good taste and full of
solicitude for Hugh and Natalie. She glanced at them con-
stantly to see how they were, whether they needed anything.
"Eve," Jim halted beside her. "Are you all right?
Wouldn't you like to go outside and get a breath of air?"
He looked thoroughly miserable. Poor Jim, he took things
hard, she thought with a pang of mingled affection and re-
morse. Natalie was like him in that; they were both too
easily upset. Eve glanced at her sister. She was standing
stiffly between Hugh and Susan, who were talking to the
Bensons. Natalie wasn't talking. She was staring straight in
front of her, tall and wide-shouldered and too thin in her
black coat and hat and with no more expression on her face
than if she were asleep.
"I don't think we ought to leave Nat," Eve told Jim, and
154 I


come and McKee arranged things 10 that I could leave the
jurisdiction. I have no doubt that there's a gentleman in
a purple derby hiding behind the bushes somewhere."
The voices and the footsteps were coming nearer. Bruce
glanced past Eve and then straight into her eyes. "Are you
going to marry Jim Holland? Are you going through with
it?" He didn't move. His tone sent the blood flying into her
cheeks.
She listened to winter birds chirping. The bars on his
shoulder weren't silver, she thought, they were a steel gray.
There was a faded wreath lying crookedly on a long narrow
mound between them. The roses in the wreath were with-
ered, colorless. She raised her head. The tailored collar of
her coat brushed her hair in back. Her scarlet mouth
steadied. She said, "I don't think I understand you. Am 1
going through with what—?" and gathered herself together
and went on lying slowly and carefully and deliberately.
"Of course I'm going to marry Jim. What has happened has
taught me a good deal. I realize now that I can make Jim
happy and that he can make me happy. Even if there was
no question of Natalie it wouldn't make any difference. I
loved Jim all the time. . . ."
Bruce kept on staring at her. She couldn't tell whether the
light in his narrowed eyes was derision or not. A pulse in her
throat fluttered. "So that's that," he murmured and took
himself away from the headstone and walked past her as
though she were a stranger, as though he had no further in-
terest in her. . . .
Natalie was coming through the gates. Bruce went to her
and took her arm. She was beginning to shake. Gerald said,
"Steady, old girl," and the three of them walked forward.
Jim had already gone on with Hugh and Susan and Alicia.
Eve didn't follow. Her heart was full. She turned into a
gravel path that ran gently down between headstone and
an occasional weathered mausoleum. Fifty feet from the
156


the street, and he had followed her to Bruce's apartment,
because when she hailed a cab a block above Eldon Place
after her escape with the rifle, he had been standing on the
opposite corner.
The services were over and people were beginning to go.
The man in the polo coat had reached the fringe of the
crowd, was in it. All she could see was his hat. Sheer aston-
ishment had brought her to a momentary halt. She
mustn't lose him. She had to find out who he was. She was
starting on again when there was a sound behind her, in
the direction from which she had come. She looked back—
and froze. Susan De Sange was there. She was coming toward
her up the hill. It was to Susan that the man in the polo coat
had been talking and Susan wasn't going to acknowledge
the meeting that had just taken place until she was sure Eve
knew about it. i
Her handsome face was calm under a small black hat
tilted over the shining waves of her hair. There was a white
bird on the hat. She smiled at Eve. She said, lightly and too
casually, "My dear, where did you spring from?"
Eve looked at her and then away. She brushed grass and
a barberry twig from her skirt and stood erect and straight-
ened her shoulders. She had interrupted a talk between the
man in the polo coat and Susan De Sange. The conversation
was going to be resumed; he had said so. When it was, she
meant to be there to hear and see.
She said aloud, marveling at her own mendacity, "I....
Where did you spring from? I was wandering around, look-
ing at headstones. You should have come with me, Sue dear,
some of them are really quaint. . . ."
Her glance shifted and she stiffened in dismay. Bruce was
standing beyond Susan. He wasn't looking at Susan. He was
looking at her. Had he heard Susan and the man in the
polo coat talking? Eve wasn't sure. She was sure of only one
thing. He distrusted her. She might have deceived Susan,
159


she hadn't deceived him. He knew there was something
wrong.
She turned a shoulder on him. They rejoined the others
then. When they got into cars at the gate there was no sign
of the man in the polo coat. They started across to the house
on Red Fox Road, where, Alicia said, tea was waiting.
Bruce didn't go with them.
That was at a quarter of four.
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beautiful old mirror, at the reflected vista of a section of the
long lovely drawing room where they had had tea when
they arrived at four o'clock.
Alicia had seen to everything. The rooms had been
opened and aired and the oil furnace turned on. She had
even had Mrs. Eddey, who lived in the house in winter, make
the scones Hugh liked. Lights and fires and warmth after
coldness, drawn curtains shutting out the gray December
afternoon, should have produced a brighter atmosphere.
They didn't for Eve. Afterwards she was always to remem-
ber that interval as a species of nightmare with a horror all
its own.
The original plan had been that they were to take the
five-thirty-seven train back to New York. But when Susan
announced, stretching shapely hands toward the flaming
logs, that she was going to spend the week-end at her little
cottage at the foot of the lawn, the others decided that they
would stay on.
Hugh was beside Susan on the couch, firelight modeling
his handsome high-nosed face against shadows. He said he
thought it an excellent idea. Then Alicia spoke. It hadn't
escaped Eve that if she was watching Susan closely herself,
Alicia was doing so too. The latter had been upset when she
found that Susan was returning to the house with them. At
the cemetery gates she had said, holding out her hand, "Nice
of you, darling, to take so much trouble for Aunt Charlotte,
particularly when you weren't exactly fond of each other.
. . . You're coming with us? Oh. . . . Splendid!"
That was part of the nightmare, Alicia's sub-acid sweet-
ness, her narrow-eyed vigilance, the significant glances she
exchanged with Gerald at their father's little attentions to
Susan. Why should either of them care if Hugh and Susan
were to marry? How would it affect their interests? It evi-
dently did. Alicia wasn't going to leave Hugh and Susan
alone together. She said brightly, "You're right, Dad, it
162


does seem stupid to go back to town and those dreadful
policemen, when we can have a little peace and quiet here."
Bruce wasn't there then. He had come in for a few min-
utes, had walked with Natalie in the grounds and then into
the village, alone. Gerald was standing on the hearth clean-
ing his pipe. He blew through the stem and grinned mock-
ingly. "You don't mean to say you didn't spot the gent in
the iron derby at the funeral, my pet? He came up with us
in the train. I'll bet you anything you like that he's parked
outside the gates right now."
Alicia looked at him and her color faded. She said sharply,
"What?" Susan dropped the sugar tongs and they hit the
tray with a little crack. She didn't seem to notice. Hugh
flushed angrily and sat up. The retort that although Bruce
was out on bail on a technicality he was really under arrest
for murder and that there was no need to look further was
on his lips. It didn't come out in quite that shape, but the
implication was there. He said, controlling himself with an
effort, "Under the circumstances this—watch on us is an
outrage."
It was impossible to mistake his meaning. Natalie got it.
She was sitting on a hassock near Eve's chair, her tea un-
touched on a table beside her, her elbows on her knees, her
chin on her clasped hands. She was in one of the dark brood-
ing moods that used to make Pussy, their old nurse, so
nervous. Her shoulder was toward the room but she seemed
far away, in a world of her own with no pleasure in it. Their
father should have known better, Eve thought as she turned
and looked at him. Her narrow face went stone white inside
the frame of her pale softly shining hair. She sat like that
for a moment and then leaped to her feet. She stood there,
tall and straight and formidable, her eyes no longer opaque
brown discs but black and brilliant with anger.
"I won't stand this," she said in a hard dry voice, her
hands clenched at her sides, her head thrown back, "I won't.
163


policeman soon, she thought, when she had found out
more. All she knew now was that the man in the polo coat
who had been hanging around the house on Henderson
Square on the night Charlotte died was a friend, or an
acquaintance, of Susan's. If she went to the police with that
they'd say, "Uh-huh—so what?" The man himself would
probably deny everything and declare that she was crazy.
His word would be as good as hers and she had no proof.
No, she would have to go through with what she had in
mind.
The first part was simple enough. At the foot of the lane,
when the car swung into Imperial Avenue, she got out, paid
the man off, said she had changed her mind and gave him a
generous tip. She refused his offer to drive her back to the
house. "Thanks, but it's only a step and I'll be glad of some
exercise."
As soon as the car was out of sight she turned and started
back, not by the route she had come but by a longer and
more roundabout way. She didn't intend to re-enter the
grounds by the front gates but through the fields to the
north and across a little bridge buried in trees that ran
through the property on that side. The police would never
think of posting anyone there. No one who wasn't familiar
with the terrain would know of that way of getting in and
out.
It was very dark but Eve had a torch. She kept it on until
she had traversed what would be three sides of a huge city
block except that it was filled with woods and hills and
hollows instead of bricks and mortar. There was a gate in
the high wall that hemmed in the estate. It was an incon-
spicuous little gate behind a clump of birches. Eve lifted the
latch and pushed the gate open.
The hinges creaked loudly. Her heart hammered and she
held her breath, but no sound broke the stillness, except the
gurgle of water, louder now, just ahead. There was nothing
166


around her but darkness and close-pressing bushes. The
stream she was approaching was narrow and swift and af-
fected by the tides. At low tide it emptied itself into the bay,
at high it rose ten feet between retaining walls stained with
green slime. The tide was going out. Eve came on the bridge
sooner than she had expected. The entrance to it was choked
with shrubbery. She shone torchlight through a gap in black
alders and down on narrow gray boards nailed cross-wise
to spindly uprights. Never substantial, the bridge had been
torn loose in the hurricane and knocked about, but you
could still use it if you were careful. One of the rails was
gone, but the other was there. Eve grasped it, felt it sway in
her grasp, and switched off her torch. The darkness was in-
tense and the slightest gleam of light would be visible from
the lawns and gardens on the far side, once she was out in the
open. She handled the shaky rail gently and started across,
glad that she didn't have to look down on the jagged black
rocks that rose in sharp pinnacles, twenty feet below, foam
swirling round their bases in pools and eddies. At high tide
all you could do was fall into the water but at low . . •
She felt her way forward, testing every step, and was at
last on solid ground on the other side. She came to a halt
a few yards farther on.
If Susan and the man in the polo coat were going to meet
it would be in Susan's cottage, she decided. Refusing an
invitation from Hugh to stay for dinner Susan had said, "I
won't, if you don't mind. I've got some letters to write and
things to sort through and then I'm going to bed. It's been
rather a tiring day."
The big house on the hill above was hidden by trees.
Presently a torch appeared near the front, a bright eye in
the blackness. Someone was coming down the long slope,
over the cobbles that led to the stables and the garage, under
the oaks, and onto the open lawn where it flattened out.
Eve stepped into the lee of a clump of lilacs. They passed
167


within ten yards of her. She could hear the murmur of their
voices, but not what they said. It was her father, with Susan.
No fence separated Susan's place from theirs. Flat stones
led to the brick terrace at the side of the cottage fronting
on the brook. Susan unlocked the door and went in. Hugh
followed and lights sprang up in the windows.
Eve looked through one of them, into the portion of the
living room that was visible. Susan had taken off her coat
and was pulling off her hat. She tossed it to a table and
turned to Hugh. He took both her hands in his and said
something. Shame and distaste flooded Eve and she removed
her gaze. When she looked again Susan was pulling down
the living room shades and her father's torch was a bobbing
circle of brightness receding up the hill. Eve went round the
lilac bushes on careful feet. Her father vanished from sight
in the darkness and she settled down to wait. The cottage
wasn't too well constructed, the rooms were all on one floor
and by listening at a window she was sure that she could
hear whatever was said.
She had been prepared for a long vigil; she had had no
idea of how tedious waiting could be. In the first place, she
was bitterly cold. In the second, as time went on and nothing
happened, doubts began to assail her. It was true that Susan
had talked to the man in the polo coat in the cemetery, true
that she had tried to conceal her meeting with him—but
suppose it was an innocent meeting, that Susan didn't know
he was the man lingering outside the house the night Char-
lotte died? He might even have no connection with the
various things that had happened since: the unlatched win-
dow in the shop, the morphine that had been dropped into
her cocktail. She gave her head a little shake. No. Just as be-
fore the scene in the cemetery she hadn't believed implicitly
in the possible guilt of the man lingering at the foot of the
steps in the Square that night, now she couldn't bring her-
self to believe in his innocence.
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Silence and blackness and the growing tinkle of snow-
flakes on dry leaves, the purr of water. She had no watch and
no really accurate notion of the passage of time.
Over and over again she analyzed the few words she had
heard. "Surprised? You must have known I'd be interested."
Interested in what? In the burial of a woman who had been
murdered? "I think we'd better have a talk, my friend—"
There had been intimacy and a sort of silky threat in his
tone, as though he and Susan understood each other with-
out the necessity for many words. It occurred to Eve sud-
denly how little she knew of Susan, nothing, really—except
that she had lived abroad with a cousin for years and had
traveled a good deal and that the outbreak of hostilities had
forced her back to the United States eighteen months be-
fore. "I'll call you," the man in the polo coat had said. Eve
hadn't heard him call—but it was obvious that Susan had
come down here to her cottage so that she could see him
alone.
Pain and disillusionment mingled with Eve's cold reflec-
tions. She had been very fond of Susan, had liked her better
than any woman she had ever known, and she had thought
that Susan was her friend. Well, think again, she told her-
self.
What was that? Her heart hammered and she stood erect.
Surely there had been a sound somewhere close to her in
the darkness, a whisper of cloth or a footstep—or perhaps a
coat brushing against branches. She stared into the black-
ness, trying to pierce it. She might just as well have been in
a thick sack with the drawstrings tied. Except for a chink of
light here and there inside the cottage off to her left, the
darkness was absolute. She listened, turning her head from
side to side. Sleet tinkled thinly and water ran—there was
nothing else. But her nerves quivered and for the first time
it occurred to her to be physically afraid. She was alone out
here in the darkness and no one knew where she was. She
169


had an almost overwhelming impulse to turn and run, up
the slope and into the big white house, with its lights and
people. Jim would be there, and Natalie—and Gerald.
"Don't be a fool," she told herself furiously—and stiffened.
She was on a stretch of turf perhaps a dozen yards back
from the brook and facing it. The bridge was directly below
and in front of her. Someone was coming toward it from the
lane she had traversed earlier. The hinges of the gate
creaked and a tiny circle of light spotted the gray planking.
It was a man. He was whistling softly through his teeth. It
was the man in the camel's hair coat; there was a shimmer of
pale cloth behind the light. Susan's visitor had arrived.
His torch swept the bridge experimentally, danced back.
He stepped from between the alder bushes and out onto the
planking, and came to a halt. He had stopped whistling.
Eve stared fascinated. A funny thing happened. The torch
he was carrying stood still too. Then it flew into the air in a
wide arc and went out. At the same instant or perhaps the
fraction of a second before, the sound came, very distinct
and clear this time. It was a dull smack—exactly like the
clean hit of a midiron lofting the ball in a two-hundred-
yard drive over the fairway. But it wasn't that. . . .
Weight crushed itself in under Eve's ribs. She tried to
breathe and couldn't. Because there were other sounds. The
man in the polo coat had fallen from the bridge down onto
those jagged black rocks lining the channel. She heard him
land, heard a muffled groan, then nothing—and then the
footsteps.
Someone was running up the slope toward her, from the
bridge, running straight at her, straight for the spot on
which she stood. Horror locked Eve's muscles, her throat. It
came unlocked. She opened her mouth to scream. The
scream didn't emerge. The blow stopped it, and the night
and the darkness and her terror were blanked out as she
fell headlong.
170


I
The Scotsman nodded. "It's all right, Captain. You're not
to blame. If any one is, it's Dwyer. He's going to try for
an indictment of Bruce Cunningham early next week. I
should have come up here as soon as I found out Bently
was in the neighborhood—but no, our estimable District
Attorney had to have a detailed statement from me viva
voce that consumed at least three hours. Exactly what hap-
pened after Miss Flavell fainted?"
"Well, they all came running. Mrs. De Sange was first.
She ran up here to this house and pretty soon they were all
over the place."
"Did they seem surprised to see Eve Flavell?"
"Surprise ain't in it. They were dumfounded. Particu-
larly the big fellow, Jim Holland, and Natalie Flavell. She
kept saying, 'But Eve was going back to New York,' and
wringing her hands like she was half crazy. Holland went
nuts, too. You going to talk to them some more?"
"Not now," McKee said. "Perhaps after I've seen Eve
Flavell." He turned.
Doctor Newbold was coming down the stairs. Newbold
was a thin middle-aged man with glasses and a shock of un-
tidy gray hair. He knew the Flavells, had taken care of them
when they were in Eastport during the summer, as his father
had done before him. He said that Eve was better. She was
a bit bunged up but there was nothing the matter with her
that a couple of days wouldn't cure. What she was suffering
from principally was shock. "She's anxious to see you, In-
spector. I said I'd take you up."
Pierson remained at the door of the living room and
McKee and the doctor mounted the stairs. Eve wasn't in
bed. She was on a chaise longue in front of the wide win-
dows in a big shadowy room with lemon-colored walls and
chinoiserie hangings. The gay French chintz curtains were
drawn across the windows and the lamps were lit. Pillows
banked Eve's head and shoulders. She turned toward her
173


visitors as they came in, and flinched a little. Doctor New-
bold said, "Easy does it. Don't move around too much, Eve,"
and to the Scotsman, "Don't tire her any more than you
have to. I'll give her a sedative later." He went out.
Natalie and Alicia between them had undressed Eve and
put her into white silk pajamas and a white negligee. A blue
satin quilt was thrown over her knees. Her bandaged hands
were linked loosely in front of her and there was a scratch
down one pale cheek where it had come into contact with
the ground. She told him quietly, looking into the depths
of a mirror at shapes that weren't there, everything that hap-
pened from the time of their arrival in Eastport until the
man in the camel's hair coat fell from the bridge at the foot
of the hill.
McKee listened intently, a hand shading his eyes. At the
end Eve said, shivering, "I'll never forgive myself, never.
I should have told someone, that detective, about him, that
he was coming here to see Susan."
"Yes," McKee agreed, getting up and beginning to walk
around the room. "It might have been better. On the other
side of the ledger, your being down at the brook probably
saved Bently from dying then and there. As it is, he has a
chance."
Eve began to feel better. She had only grieved with the
top of her mind for the man who had been smashed up on
those terrible rocks. The real thing, the important thing,
was that the attack on him cleared Bruce. Bruce had been
at the inn when Bently was attacked. He hadn't come over
to the house until afterwards. He had come in to see her for
a minute with Natalie. The doctor wouldn't let them stay,
wouldn't let her answer questions. Bruce had given her one
long smoldering glance, with derision in jt, and bitterness
and anger and a glint of mocking humor. He had been un-
usually tender and loverlike with Natalie. That was the way
it should be, Eve told herself and twisted away from flames
174


tablets was thrown to the floor under the table; he had ob-
viously seen something that made him a danger. But there
was more to his activities than that. McKee told Eve that on
Wednesday morning, the morning of the day Charlotte
died, Bendy had taken a room in a hotel on the south side
of the Square. "He was in the park that afternoon, he was
watching the house, he was also watching Mrs. De
Sange. ..."
Eve's hands gripped folds of blue satin and she closed
her eyes. "Then you think it was Susan who . . .?"
"I don't know, I'm sure. There's—this." There was a
little ping as the Scotsman's thumb nail flicked the edge of
the telephone on a small table near the chaise longue. "Mrs.
De Sange took Bently's call in the library downstairs, but
there are three extensions in the house, this one here in Miss
Flavell's bedroom, one in your father's room and one at the
end of the hall. Any number of people could have listened
in on Bently's call to Mrs. De Sange."
The clock ticked and the fire purred. Outside snow fell.
Eve lay very still. It was Bruce's life or her father's or Nat-
alie's or Gerald's or Jim's, she thought desperately. It
mustn't be Bruce, it mustn't be Natalie or Gerald, or her
father. It wasn't of course. They hadn't touched that man.
But the thought of the others, of Jim or Susan or Alicia in
such a connection, was equally absurd. . . . "Can't you
find out," she said in a low voice, "where they all were when
that man was hit?"
McKee's smile was thin. "This is a big house. Bently was
attacked at around half-past six. The people here, your
father and your half-sister, your brother, his wife and Mr.
Holland, were in their rooms, getting ready for dinner,
which was to be at seven. Mrs. De Sange was, she says, inside
her cottage at the foot of the hill."
Eve's face went blank. "Did you talk to Susan, Inspector?"
"Yes. Oh, yes."
176


"What did she say? Why did she try to conceal from me
that she knew Mr. Bently? Why did she pretend, like that,
in the cemetery?"
McKee didn't answer at once. He was seeing Susan De
Sange looking at him with her brilliant eyes curiously
dulled, her creamy skin blue white, her mouth compressed,
and saying, "Edgar knows nothing, nothing. It was just
bluff. He was trying to put pressure on. . . . He lives by
his wits and he thought there might be money to be made
out of this. Oh, he's shrewd and clever. ... I didn't touch
him. I didn't leave the cottage. I was waiting for him there
when I heard Eve scream. I meant to tell Edgar that he
would have to stop it, stop spying on me and on the Fla-
vells. . . ."
Perhaps; McKee sat down in a slipper chair. He picked up
a fold of the satin quilt and drew it absently through his
fingers. "Do you get the apparent contradiction, Miss Fla-
vell? Edgar Bently was apparently struck down because he
was a danger to someone and that danger would appear to
lie in his presence outside the house on the Square the night
your aunt was killed or in his presence in the Cedars on the
following night when the box of morphine capsules was dis-
posed of. But—and here's the point—if what Mrs. De Sange
says is true and Mr. Bently was after profit, why was he
watching Mrs. De Sange and the house on the Square before
Charlotte Foy died? There's a good deal we don't know.
There's one important thing we do, and that is that your
Aunt Charlotte had important knowledge in her possession
that threatened your half-sister, Natalie. She said so to Nat-
alie's lawyer, Spencer Gorham, over the phone. She said
to him that afternoon, 'I've got to see you, got to tell you
something. . . . It's very terrible,' and when the lawyer
asked her whether it affected Natalie she answered. 'Yes,'
and added that she was frightened."
He settled back in the chair and lit a cigarette. Well, her
177


she might have held her tongue for the sake of the children,
contenting herself with a warning to Susan de Sange to
keep off. Certainly Susan had left Eastport immediately fol-
lowing her husband's death and also certainly nothing had
happened to the Flavell clan for more than twenty years
and then Susan De Sange had reappeared. Shortly there-
after Charlotte had ceased to exist.
Try and find out more about those two deaths, McKee
decided, and returned his attention to Eve. He took her
back to the bank above the brook in darkness, and to the
footsteps that had rushed at her, but she couldn't help him.
They had been just footsteps, and then she was struck.
McKee nodded somberly. "Somebody was trying to cross
the plate before the ball could be fielded and an alarm
raised. You got in the way." He went to a table on which
Eve's hat and coat lay. He picked up her little tricorne, spun
it around on a forefinger. Blades of grass stuck to the soft
black felt and it was out of shape. "This saved you from a
serious, perhaps a fatal, head wound. But . . ." He put
the hat down gently and went back to the chaise longue and
held Eve's lovely eyes, wide and dark with strain, with his
own intent gaze. "You might not be so lucky again. No.
Look, my dear, if you discover anything, and it's quite pos-
sible you will—you're on the inside where you can see and
hear—let me know, let me handle it. Is it a promise?"
Eve stared at her clasped hands. On the inside, with her
father and Gerald and Jim. But Bruce was in danger. His
innocence had to be established, no matter what happened.
. . . Her breath failing at the thought of what might lie
ahead, she pressed shaking lips together and nodded.
Pierson knocked at the door then, and McKee left Eve.
There was news.
Standing in the wide graceful hall at the foot of the stairs
the Scotsman looked at a pair of men's hand-sewn brown
»79


CHAPTER
17
"I DIDN'T KILL HER, INSPECTOR. I DIDN'T. I TELL YOU
you're wrong." Gerald Flavell wiped his face with a hand-
kerchief and did another fast turn up and down the rug.
He ran a finger inside his collar, shook his head as though
he were shaking off a weight. His eyes were cold—and
wary.
"But you admit the shoes are yours," McKee said. "All
right, suppose you tell me why you got rid of them and
exactly what happened."
The two men were in a breakfast room at the back of the
hall. Hugh Flavell and Alicia, Susan De Sange, Natalie and
Jim Holland were still in the living room with Pierson
stolidly at the door. Alicia had given a little gasp when
Gerald was summoned, but that was all.
"I'll tell you," Gerald said, throwing himself into a fragile
chair that creaked protestingly at his impact. "God knows
I'll be glad to get it off my chest. It was a terrible thing to
do. I don't believe I'll ever forget it. I haven't been able
181


When I woke up Holland was gone and Alicia was out with
the pup. I decided then to have a last try at Aunt Charlotte.
I thought if I appealed to her for the boy's sake, that if I
told her that a public foreclosure would just about ruin me,
she might change her mind. So I started across to the house
on the other side of the Square."
"What time . . . ?" Gerald wrenched at his tie. "I think
it was around half-past seven, but I'm not sure. There was
a fog out and my head wasn't any too clear, so I went through
the park where I wouldn't be knocked down by a car. The
east gate is across from the apartment. I unlocked it with
my key and walked along. I had a torch. I was past the foun-
tain and rounding the bulge near the north gate when I
saw a woman's purse lying on the ground. I picked it up. It
was Aunt Charlotte's. I looked around—and saw her."
He paused and covered his face with his hands.
"Go on, please."
Gerald said in a muffled voice, his eyes covered, "She was
lying there, down in among bushes. I didn't know at first
that she was dead. Then I found out and I...." He broke
down completely.
McKee filled the gap. "You wiped your shoes on the grass,
left the park, went across to the Flavell house and let your-
self in. In the hall, at the foot of the stairs, you slipped and
deposited a smear of the blood you hadn't quite removed
from your shoes, on the carpet. What made you slip, Mr.
Flavell?"
"I was startled. There was someone moving around in the
corridor on the floor above."
"Who was it?" Gerald didn't know. The Scotsman did.
The cook and Hugh Flavell were the only two other people
in the house and it wasn't the cook. . . . Leave that for the
moment; he extracted the rest of the story bit by bit. Char-
lotte Foy had loaned the nephew she had indulged and
spoiled various sums over a period of years, nothing big, a
183


hundred now, two hundred again, and Gerald had given her
receipts for these loans. He wanted the receipts back. Her
keys were where she always kept them, in her top bureau
drawer under a pile of handkerchiefs. The receipts weren't
in the desk. He unlocked the suitcase. They were there, with
a rubber band around them. He took them away with him
and destroyed them.
"You also," McKee said pleasantly, "removed nine thou-
sand dollars in war bonds that you intended to cash in on
later, when the furor over your aunt's death had died down.
You were the beneficiary. You knew that your sister Eve
wasn't likely to ask embarrassing questions. . . ."
Gerald turned sullen. "Charlotte wasn't fond of Eve. She
meant me to have them."
"Where were the bonds?"
"In a brown envelope with the receipts."
"Not in the box?"
"In— Oh, that wooden thing of Charlotte's. No."
"What did you do with the contents of that?"
"Nothing. I didn't touch it."
McKee looked steadily at Gerald from under frowning
brows. He could be speaking the truth; he could be lying.
Whatever the little wooden chest had held was of tre-
mendous importance. In every case when you blew the
froth away there was a small nucleus of important fact, a
few drops of the real McCoy, the vital principle, the essence
at the heart of murder, from which it derived. In this case
it was the missing contents of the little wooden chest. Hugh
Flavell's fingerprints and Hugh's alone, were on the box.
McKee had already taxed him with it. Flavell was a clever
man. He didn't deny touching the box. He did deny open-
ing it. He had said, "That little wooden chest of Charlotte's
—it was a nice piece of craftsmanship. I believe I com-
mented on it when I was talking to her in her room Tuesday
night. I may even have picked it up—but it was locked and
184


I certainly didn't open it." If what Gerald said was true,
Hugh Flavell certainly had lied. According to his first state-
ment, on the night Charlotte was killed, Flavell had gone
upstairs to his study on the third floor at around six o'clock
and had remained there until he went to bed in the ad-
joining bedroom at half-past ten, yet Gerald had heard his
father in the second-floor corridor at around twenty min-
utes of eight, as soon as Natalie was safely out of the house.
There had been fear in Hugh Flavell, rigidly controlled,
at the mention of the wooden chest; there was fear in Gerald
Flavell now. The catharsis of open confession, which Gerald
had declared would be a relief, didn't appear to have done
him much good. It wasn't open confession. There were,
definitely, things he wasn't telling. He had been in the bed-
room when Eve tapped at Charlotte's door; he had mixed
the cocktail into which the morphine had been inserted; he
could have gotten rid of the capsules in the restaurant on
52nd Street; he could have bashed Bently over the head
earlier that night. He was guarded, watchful and afraid. He
was also letter-perfect in his story. McKee took him back and
forth over it a half dozen times, and let him go, with a warn-
ing.
"Stick around, Mr. Flavell. In case Joe Buchanan springs
Bruce Cunningham for good, we may want to talk to you in
more detail."
Gerald wheeled on him sharply. "How could Buchanan
do anything for Bruce?"
McKee said quietly, "He could do a lot for him, nega-
tively by saying that he himself went out last Wednesday
night—in which case, with the apartment empty, someone
could have replaced the murder rifle by using the key your
sister Natalie—lost. He could do the same thing positively,
by naming a visitor to the apartment who could have put
the rifle back without using a key."
Something had happened to Gerald Flavell's handsome
185


gray eyes—and they were too ingenuously open, too steady
after the first quick flash. But he had himself well in hand.
"I hope Buchanan does clear Bruce. I didn't kill Charlotte.
I'm sure Bruce didn't either." McKee had nothing to say
to that. He indicated that the interview was over, mo-
mentarily.
At the door Gerald hesitated and then made his request.
He had already declared that Alicia knew nothing about his
coming on Charlotte's body in the park, about his visit to
the house or the war bonds. "Do you have to tell her, In-
spector? Will the others, my father and Natalie, have to
know? Tonight, I mean? If I could sort of break it to them
gently they mightn't feel so bad. . . ."
Flavell's relations with his wife or his family were no
concern of McKee's except insofar as they affected the in-
vestigation. He said indifferently, "Your statement will
have to be checked—but not necessarily tonight," and
watched the young investment broker take heart of grace
and register a gratitude and satisfaction out of all propor-
tion to the boon of temporary silence that had been granted
to him. Gerald was mounting the stairs, his vigor almost
completely restored. His resilience was amazing. The Scots-
man turned away.
There was a call from the office for him. He went to the
telephone at the end of the long hall and dialed operator.
Before he left New York, as soon as he received word that
Hugh Flavell's fingerprints were on the little wooden chest,
he had sent Detective Rumboldt to the house on Henderson
Square to talk to the servants. Rumboldt came on. His quest
had been partially successful. Gloria Fox, the upstairs girl,
had caught a glimpse, no more, of the things the chest con-
tained. Charlotte's secrecy, the care with which she handled
the box, had aroused the girl's curiosity. On Tuesday eve-
ning, while the family was at dinner, she had gone up to
186


why Gerald's creditors were hounding him "like wolves."
Alicia said brightly, "Well, darling, you're alive, I see—
which of us is for the torture chamber next?" •
No one echoed her lightness, her smile. Hugh Flavell
was rising from the couch. His movements were stiff. In-
stead of a young fifty he looked sixty and arthritic. He
walked toward McKee, pulled up a few feet from him. "In-
spector?" His voice was curt.
"Yes, Mr. Flavell?"
"I want an explanation."
The boot, McKee thought ironically, was on the other
foot. Hugh Flavell had lied round the clock, about remain-
ing in his study on the third floor of the house on Henderson
Park on the night Charlotte was killed, and about the little
wooden chest and his casual handling of it. "An explana-
tion of what, Mr. Flavell?"
"Of what my daughter, Eve, was doing down there by the
brook when Bently fell from the bridge, instead of being
on her way to New York on the train."
Susan De Sange who had had time to pull herself to-1
gether, broke in. "I think," she said calmly, "that the poor
child suspected me. She was right in a way. I'm not proud
of Edgar. He came up to me in the cemetery when I was I
going to look at my own graves. Eve heard us talking. I
didn't realize it or I'd have explained to her then who Edgar
was. If I had she would have told me about his being the I
man with whom she collided outside the house on the ,
Square on Wednesday night, and we could have gone to the
police together."
It was very smooth. It was altogether untrue. Susan De
Sange's earlier agitation denied it.
She had addressed the room as a whole. It was Hugh Fla-
vell who answered. He turned toward her. He said, "Eve
suspected you, Susan? Oh, she's a fool, a fool . . ." He was
very angry. He was in love with Susan De Sange. Alicia
188


Flavell and Gerald were emphatically not in love with her.
Alicia's prominent eyes resting on Susan were icily hostile
and she said in an insinuating tone, "If Mr. Bently recovers
it will be nice to hear the explanation of his—attentions to
us, shall we call them?"
The remark could be a feeler as to Edgar Bently's con-
dition. As far as these people knew he was dying when he
was put into the ambulance. McKee had already arranged
a little experiment with Pierson. He laughed lightly and the
Captain tapped and opened the door.
"Telephone call from the Norwalk Hospital for you, In-
spector," he said, and looked around uncertainly. "Do you
want me to . . .?"
"Yes, go on."
"Mr. Bently's conscious and able to talk."
Susan De Sange was staring at Pierson. Something went
inside for her, some stay, some support, so that although
she didn't move it was there, in her still face, her tightly
clasped hands, the impression of a side-slip, a cave-in. . . .
McKee's attention was abruptly diverted.
Hugh Flavell did a retake. He too was staring at Pierson.
Without the slightest preliminary warning he was falling
forward in a slow-motion curve, his face cyanotic, swollen,
his eyes half-closed.
"Papa," Natalie screamed, and jumped up and ran toward
him. Gerald and Jim Holland both leaped. They caught the
stricken man before he reached the floor.
"You're sure Bruce Cunningham was in his room here in
the village when Bently was slugged?" New York's District
Attorney went on pacing the floor of the big old-fashioned
bedroom in the Eastport inn with a slow step.
It was ten o'clock on the morning following the scene in
the dark gardens of the Flavell house on Red Fox Road and
McKee had just finished*telling Dwyer, who at his insistence
189


the door at the south end of the room opened again. Alicia
Flavell stood in the opening. She didn't see him. She ap-
peared to have had an uncomfortable night. Her oval face
was swollen. Her eyes were fastened on Eve and on Cun-
ningham standing beside the couch, his hands in his pockets.
They both turned. There was a curious air of tension about
all three. The room was still for a clock tick. Then Alicia
began to talk.
"You're at it again, aren't you?" she said in a low voice,
with venom in it. "The moment Natalie's back is turned,
you begin. You've succeeded in fooling her, but you haven't
fooled me—and you didn't fool Charlotte, either. Charlotte
saw you that afternoon—the afternoon of the day she died.
She was in the dining room and she opened the door and
looked in and saw you two whispering together in front of
the hearth. . . ."
Eve sat up suddenly on the couch. The blanket fell to the
floor. She swayed a little as she got to her feet. She faced
Alicia, her eyes dark pools of shock and horror. Alicia had
to be stopped, she thought; she couldn't wreck Natalie's life
like this, couldn't smash everything with one blow.
Bruce began to speak. He said in a slow level voice, eyeing
Alicia steadily, "Are you out of your mind?"
Alicia took a step toward him. Her eyes were blazing.
"No, I'm not out of my mind," she said furiously. "Gerald's
been questioned by the police. I think that what you peo-
ple have been up to has been the cause of all that has hap-
pened. I think Charlotte intended to tell you, Lieutenant
Bruce Cunningham, what she thought of you and that after
that she meant to go to Spencer Gorham in Boston and
lay the whole thing before him, so that your marriage to
Natalie could be stopped."
In the background, unseen and unnoticed in the whirl-
pool of clashing interests and emotions, the Scotsman
turned to a window and looked out across maize-colored
192


fields. He didn't want to believe Alicia, but he knew she was
right, knew also that he should have been aware of the truth,
from the beginning. It had been there in Eve last night, in
the face she lifted to his when she spoke of Bruce Cunning-
ham, her lovely eyes wide with renewed hope.
It had been in Bruce Cunningham, too, that day in his
rooms on Eldon Place. McKee looked, without seeing it, at
an old summer house with a cap like a mushroom above
gray water. The whole thing added up damningly. Natalie
had made a will leaving the bulk of her fortune to Bruce
Cunningham in the event of her death. Suppose the Lieu-
tenant had been planning to have his cake and eat it. He
could have intended to marry Natalie and then, later
on. . . .
McKee stood erect. His eyes began to shine between nar-
row lids. All at once he knew his reasoning was completely
and absolutely false. Granting that Bruce Cunningham
loved Eve Flavell, he would never have given her that
lethal dose of morphine. It was a contradiction in terms.
The conclusion was inevitable. Cunningham had been
shopped by someone who had wanted the .351 Winchester
to be found because, if anything happened to Natalie, Cun-
ningham would inherit—but a man accused of a crime
couldn't benefit by it, particularly if he was on his way to
the electric chair. All of which meant that the rifle with
which murder had been done had been removed from the
Eldon Place rooms before Charlotte was killed and re-
turned there after her death on Wednesday night by some-
one else.
The Scotsman wheeled. The door was closed and Alicia
was gone. She had become aware of him, too late. Flight was
her only recourse. A coward had killed Charlotte Foy and
Alicia was a coward. Bruce Cunningham and Eve were both
staring at him mutely. McKee started to speak, and stopped.
There were footsteps and voices in the hall outside. The
193


little wooden chest contained, the chest Charlotte Foy was
taking with her to Boston to show to Natalie's lawyer."
"PshawI A bit of yellow cloth and an ornament of pink
stones. Some old keepsakes."
"Then why were they removed? Why have they dis-
appeared? Why can't we find a trace of them anywhere? And
what about Bently?"
The Commissioner swept Bently aside. "Dwyer thinks
now that the fellow may have fallen off that bridge by .acci-
dent, or that Eve Flavell may have been up to some hocus-
pocus in an attempt to clear Cunningham. No, for once
you're off the track. Cunningham's as guilty as hell."
He told McKee plainly that only his long and brilliant
record kept the case open and kept him on it. The scope he
was permitted was meager. He could have two men and a
couple of days.
McKee picked up his hat, said, "Thanks," dryly, and
walked out of the office and went in search of Sergeant
Cutts. But the head of the Ballistics Bureau was in Detroit.
"We don't know when he'll be back, Inspector, maybe in
a week. . . ."
It was a blow. McKee had been relying on the Sergeant.
He spoke to the telegraph bureau and said he was anxious
to get in touch with Cutts, that it was urgent, and then went
to see Bruce Cunningham, partly to retest his own faith and
partly to find out more about the history of the .351.
The interview between the two men was short and in-
conclusive. It uncovered no new evidence of consequence.
It was to have a far-reaching effect at which neither of them
could guess.
Outside stars sparkled in a frosty sky; inside those walls
the gloom of night was not dissipated by the glare of an un-
shaded electric bulb at the far end of a long narrow cubicle
in front of the cell block. A key grated and the door of
Cunningham's cell opened clankingly and the flier came
196


walking out of the shadows, tall and erect and with a stride,
as though he was glad to stretch his long legs. McKee waited
for him beside a deal table below a barred window.
The Lieutenant's lean definitely planed face was tired
but his glance was steady and direct. The turn of events
hadn't broken his morale, or even put a dent in it. He knew
that McKee had overheard Alicia's charge. He didn't dis-
cuss the situation except to damn her out. "Nice little hell
cat, isn't she?" He struck the table with the palm of a muscu-
lar brown hand and the identification tag on his wrist
tinkled thinly in the stillness.
McKee made no comment. It wasn't basically his affair.
That Bruce Cunningham should have engaged himself to
one sister and then fallen in love with the other was regret-
table, for all their sakes, but it had happened before and it
was a private problem that they would have to work out for
themselves. Its only interest for him lay in the effect it had
had on the murder of Charlotte Foy.
He asked Cunningham questions. The flier said he had
overheard part of the conversation between Susan De Sange
and Bently in the cemetery in Eastport, and that he had
followed Bently to the village and had lost him.
Of the rifle he said that it had been given to him more
than a year ago by a friend in Eastport who was joining the
Canadian Air Force. The Flavells were familiar with it.
Gerald had tried it out on the rifle range in the meadow
across the brook and had been enthusiastic about its per-
formance. All the time he himself had been away the .351
had been in the Eldon Place apartment, as far as he knew.
So much for the gun. As to the gathering in the Flavell
house on the afternoon of Charlotte's death, his recollection
was poor. If he loved Eve Flavell, he was extremely fond of
the girl he had mistakenly engaged himself to. The thought
of her made him miserable. He said curtly, "I went to the
Henderson Square house last Wednesday determined to tell
197


in tissue paper and enclosed in the little wooden chest she
took from the bank the day before she died. Hugh Flavell's
fingerprints, and only Hugh Flavell's, are on the wood of
the chest. He denies having removed the contents. His
denial isn't worth the paper it's written on."
"Yellow cloth . . . and a string of pink stones. . . ."
Like the Commissioner, Bruce Cunningham was completely
at sea.
McKee couldn't enlighten him. "Yes," he said, "and until
we know the meaning of those things we'll go on drift-
ing. ..." His cigarette tasted foul. He threw it on the
cement floor. The simile was too close to fact for comfort.
That was exactly what they were doing—drifting, drifting
around in fog and blackness, rudderless and without oars,
while far off, the distant crash of surf sounded the warning
of impending shipwreck. It hadn't yet come but how long
would this state of affairs last? The answer was simple. It
would last as long as the situation remained static and
Bruce Cunningham was the goat.
Cunningham understood. He said, "The police have to
have a culprit. I've been selected. As long as I'm it, whoever
killed Charlotte won't make another move?"
"That's the general idea," McKee said dryly. He pushed
back his chair and rose. "It's not going to happen like that."
"How are you going to prevent it?"
"By finding out which one of those people disposed of
the box of morphine tablets under the table in the restau-
rant on 52nd Street. Whoever eliminated Charlotte Foy
poisoned Eve."
"It has to be one of them?"
"It has to be."
"A bullet from my .351 did kill Charlotte?"
"Yes."
"But—" Bruce Cunningham ran bemused fingers
through his short dark hair. "The rifle was in the Eldon
200


brother-in-law, Hugh Flavell, after his second wife's death,
Susan had been with her constantly, helping with the chil-
dren and with Hugh. When Susan had been going through
her own trouble, when she lost her baby and, shortly after-
ward, her husband, Charlotte had been more than kind.
McKee lingered over the history of that husband, Lucien
De Sange. Not much was known of him in the country town
except that he was considerably older than his young wife
and that he drank heavily. He was an absentee husband for
the most part. Then, on one of his infrequent trips to the cot-
tage, he had come down with an attack of delirium tremens,
which appeared to have been a habit with him. Susan was
ill herself at the time and Charlotte had nursed De Sange
during the final bout from which he fortunately failed to
recover.
The interesting point, for the Scotsman, was that it was
directly after Lucien De Sange joined Hugh Flavell's second
wife in the cemetery on the other side of the river that the
chasm between Charlotte and Susan opened. Within the
month the younger woman closed the cottage abruptly and
left Eastport. Twenty years passed before she and the Flav-
ell's re-encountered each other, through Eve, in New York.
With Susan's reappearance death had come to the Flavells
again, suddenly and violently. . . .
Was this coincidence, or was it something more sinister?
McKee looked at shadowy pictures of Charlotte Foy alone
with Lucien De Sange during his last hours, listened to the
stricken man's babbling tongue—and told himself that he
was being a fool. Both De Sange and Virginia Flavell, nee
Corey, had been dust for a long while—and there was
nothing to go on now.
He was mistaken. Pierson called him from the police
station in Eastport at twelve-five. Less than a half hour
earlier, when everyone else was in bed in the house on Red
Fox Road, Susan De Sange had gone down to the library and
202


spector, that's a pretty tough nut to crack. Let me see. . . ."
He went on talking in a phone booth in Detroit and in the
narrow room bright with light and empty with silence in
New York McKee went on listening and jotting down in-
structions he didn't understand.
It was twenty minutes of one when he put the receiver
back on the hook. It was twenty-five minutes past two when
Fernandez, who had heard that he was in town, came in and
found him crouched over his desk staring at nothing, his
eyes bright in an exhausted face.
On the desk in front of him there was an array of weapons
that had been brought up from Centre Street. Jim Holland's
Army Colt was there, and Eve's little revolver, and the
revolutionary blunderbuss belonging to the Gerald Flavells
and the walking-stick shotgun of European manufacture
that was Hugh Flavell's, all of which had been collected and
sent to Headquarters on the morning after Charlotte Foy
died.
Fernandez read the tags. He stared. He said, "What the
devil are you up to?"
"Oh, looking for something Cutts told me to look for."
"But, good God, Chris, why?" Fernandez demanded.
"Charlotte Foy wasn't killed with a revolver or a flintlock
or a shotgun, she was killed with a bullet from Bruce Cun-
ningham's .351—or was she?"
"Yes, she was killed with a bullet from Cunningham's
Winchester."
The Chief Medical examiner was exasperated. "Then
what in hell are you doing with those things?"
McKee didn't answer. He went on sweeping a magnifying
glass right and left up and down over weapon after weapon.
It was just short of three o'clock on the morning of Monday,
December the ninth when he found what he had been in-
structed to search for, a tiny brownish-green shred of some
204


voice. "When I know who, besides Gerald Flavell and Hugh,
could have been in the Henderson Square house on Wed-
nesday night after Natalie left it with Bruce Cunningham,
I'll know who killed Charlotte. We won't know why until
we establish what the contents of the chest meant."
"Yellow cloth. . . ." Fernandez murmured rumina-
tively, "perhaps a scarf—remember how Isadora Duncan
was killed?"
McKee's nod was curt. "And lots of others, and not by
accident but by seizing the two ends firmly and* drawing
them tight around a throat. . . ."
"Your idea is that Edgar Bently knows something?"
"Oh, yes,—decidedly yes. Susan De Sange returned from
Europe early in the spring. She didn't come up here into
Connecticut until last Tuesday, the day before Charlotte
died. On that day Bently, who is often in Eastport, ran into
his dead cousin Lucien's attractive widow near the entrance
to Red Fox Road. It appears to have been a chance meeting
and they were only together a few minutes—but I think
Bently followed Susan De Sange to the cottage at the foot
of the Flavell grounds and then to New York. He didn't do
that without a reason. It must have been a pretty good
reason from the lengths to which he went. In New York he
not only took a room in a hotel on the south side of Hender-
son Square that was handy to the Flavells and Susan De
Sange, he was actually watching the Flavell house, with
Susan in it, before, keep that in mind, and very shortly 4
before, the bullet that killed Charlotte Foy was fired."
"That's the one thing I don't get," Fernandez shook his
head discontentedly, "how Charlotte Foy could have been
killed with a bullet from Cunningham's .351, if Cunning-
ham didn't do it."
"Well, he didn't, and she was," McKee said. "The bullet's
in Dwyer's possession, and you can have a look at it any
time you want to."
208


turn. A slow anger built itself up in him. He reviewed the
testimony, holding it in restraint. Natalie's money, the
money that had increased so enormously with the war, was
at the bottom of the whole black business. Charlotte had
been afraid of it all along. When she returned to the Hen-
derson Square house her fear had crystallized. She might not
have known that Natalie was getting the digitalis; she did
know that there was something wrong with her and that the
threat, the danger, was real. It was significant that she hadn't
confided in the people closest to Natalie, in Hugh Flavell
or Gerald or Alicia. Instead she had redoubled her efforts
to get to Spencer Gorham, who was Natalie's lawyer. She
hadn't succeeded. She was dead, and the household that
would have been disrupted and blown apart by her dis-
closures was still a united whole. All those people were to-
gether, here in Eastport, under one roof, the collapsing
Hugh, Gerald and Alicia, Susan De Sange, Jim Holland
and Natalie and Eve. . . .
Digitalis; he put out a nervous hand and called the local
man who was attending Hugh Flavell.
There was digitalis in the house on Red Fox Road.
McKee put the receiver back on the hook and metaphor-
ically felt his way across a mine field in darkness. Bruce Cun-
ningham was in custody for the murder of Charlotte Foy.
Until he had been offered up as the human sacrifice the law
demanded, it was probable that nothing more would^ia^
attempted. Probability wasn't enough. Yet—what cot3fld
they, the police, do to hold the line? Nothing—
The Scotsman sat up sharply. There was a way, he
thought. ... It might not come off, but if it did—he went
on exploring and fingering and arranging; if it did—then
they would have the proof they needed. He got up like a
man walking a tight rope, got into his raincoat, pulled on
his hat and walked out into the bitter rain-swept dusk.
214


CHAPTER
20
"'. . . AND I DO WISH YOU'D MAKE THAT SLATTERNLY GIRL
wear an apron, Stella. I know that help is hard to get and
that it's only for a few days. . . . Oh—you startled me,
Inspector." Alicia whirled round in the middle of the big
hall in the house at the end of Red Fox Road. "Come in."
* -McKee was already in. He had opened one of the double
"front doors without knocking. Alicia dismissed the elderly
Atoiisekeeper she had been berating and extended a gracious
haVid. She had on black satin slacks and a mandarin coat.
Jade earrings swung from her ears and her hair was brushed
back from a smooth olive-skinned face expertly made up,
but she was badly worried inside her handsome decorative
shell; her movements were sharp and her artificial voice was
half an octave too high.
She showed him her worry openly with a conspiratorial
glance around the big hall and up the stairs. "I haven't said
a word, Inspector, not a word, although sometimes it's been
215


was alone. She sat on where he had left her, huddled in a
wing chair beside the leaping fire, the words he had said
repeating themselves over and over in her brain: "When
you and your sister go to bed tonight lock your doors and
see that they're locked. ..."
Fear was one thing, she thought dully, certainty was an-
other; there was no appeal from it. She and Natalie were to
lock their doors against—someone in the house. She began
to shake. Stop, her mind warned her, don't think, just obey
orders she had been given. "Don't leave your rooms, either
of you, no matter what happens. There will be a detective
under your windows all night. If anything alarms you, you
have only to open the window and call Captain Pierson."
He had told her more. Edgar Bently had been struck with
a length of iron pipe—there were specks of rust in the wound
in his head—and there was a lot of iron piping in the stables,
left there by plumbers. . . .
Outside rain beat drummingly against the windows; in-
side, the room was warm, bright. The wide dark floor-
boards, the shimmer of the rug, the pattern of the gray-blue
chintz chair on the other side of the hearth, the fat yellow
sofa against the wall, the dull glow of a cherry-wood desk
taking gleams from the fire and doing things to them were
a shifting kaleidoscope that wouldn't stay in place.
Someone spoke in the hall; someone answered. Eve drew
a long breath, took a compact from her pocket and did her
lips shakily. They smeared and she wiped redness away and
did them again. Danger to Natalie, she thought, to her
young sister whose shoulder blades were too sharp, whose
chin was too pointed, who was painfully wasted under
clothes that were growing too big for her. It wasn't fair.
Natalie had suffered too much already, and for all her cour-
age and fortitude she was in such a state that the slightest
added blow might tip the scales. . . .
"Hello there, build a new plane today, my bucco?" That
217


"Oh, but Eve, look here. . . ."
Alicia and Gerald, and then Natalie, came in and saved
her from another argument for which she hadn't the
strength. Natalie's face was pale and tired in the frame of
her long, soft, fair bob. She looked at Eve hopefully. "I got
down as soon as I could. What did the Inspector want?
Did he say anything about Bruce?"
Eve said cheerfully, "Yes, he saw him and Bruce told him
to tell you that he's getting the first decent sleep he's had
in a year and that you're to pay him a visit on Thursday.
It's all arranged."
Alicia toed a log into place with her slipper and looked
sideways at Eve. "Dear me, you seem to be a favorite. You'd
think the Inspector would have told that to Natalie. Was
that all he wanted?"
"No," Eve said, her dislike for Alicia accelerating sharply,
"he asked me more questions about Edgar Bently, whether
he was alone that night, whether there mightn't have been
someone with him."
It did as well as anything else. Alicia was watching her.
Gerald said with an utter lack of logic, "You mark my
words, that fellow's at the bottom of the whole business.
Wait and see if I'm not right."
"Wait and see," that added itself to the dreadful inner
sing-song that never stopped ringing in Eve's ears. "Lock
your doors tonight and wait and see."
"Edgar? What about Edgar?" a cool contralto voice asked.
It was Susan. She came up to the hearth and looked at Eve
inquiringly. There were no runs in her stockings, no dust
was on her hands. She was her usual calm self, so sure of the
road she was traveling that she didn't have to bother much
about other people.
Eve said as she had been instructed to say, "They don't
know whether he's going to get better or not, Sue. He never
recovered enough to be able to talk," and could have sworn
219


had almost stopped. "Captain," she called in a quick voice,
"Captain Pierson." and waited—and began to shake. There
was no answer; there was nothing but darkness and fog and
the slow drip of water from the eaves and farther off the
whisper of the rising wind.
At that moment the man Eve sought was in a police booth
a quarter of a mile away, talking over the telephone to
Inspector McKee in the Norwalk Hospital. It was twenty
minutes of two.
Pierson said, "I thought you'd like to know," and made
his report. It was brief. Susan De Sange was supposed to be
sleeping in the Flavell house. At twelve-forty-five she left it
and went down to the cottage. She locked the door behind
her when she went in but the Captain had made use of the
cellar door, whose lock had been picked in advance. Pierson
said, "She went on with her search, Inspector, and she sure
gave that room her husband died in a good comb over. Well,
she found what she was looking for about twenty past one.
About time, too—she's been at it for three days."
"Did you see what it was, Captain?" McKee scarcely dared
to hope for an affirmative, but astonishingly Pierson said,
"Yop, I saw it, Inspector. It was a bit of luck. She walked
into the living room and put something down on a table
near the fireplace and went back into the bedroom to
straighten up and I took a look. It was a pink bead."
"A pink . . ."
"Yah. A small, pink bead with holes in it like for string-
ing and a kind of a design in black on one flattish side, a
kind of a little horseshoe. It was pretty dirty, but it was
pink all right."
So they were getting to it at last; McKee thought of the
string of pink beads in the little wooden chest in Charlotte
Foy's bedroom that had vanished out of existence. . . . No,
not quite. "Where is it now, Pierson?"
"She has it, Inspector. She finished with the bedroom and
223


I had plenty of time to duck. I didn't brace her; I didn't
know what you wanted me to do."
McKee said instantly, "Go back to the house and wait.
Todhunter may need you. I'll be along in an hour or so."
He left the telephone booth and went down the wide dim
corridor to the solarium near Edgar Bently's room, where
Fernandez was dozing over a magazine. The hospital was
jammed and Bently had been put, of all places, in one of
the emergency rooms in the maternity section.
Fernandez sat up with a yawn. He came sharply to at-
tention when McKee told him what he had just heard over
the phone. "By George," he whistled softly, "you were right,
after all. She must have taken the stuff out of the little
chest. . . ."
"Yes. How soon will Bently be ready for me?"
"Maybe in another half hour."
It wasn't soon enough. "All right," Fernandez said, "we'll
try him now."
The two men started down the corridor. It was no longer
empty. Nurses, their skirts rustling, were carrying wrapped
bundles to the mothers for the two-o'clock feeding. A baby
wailed thinly. One of the nurses said something to another
and they both stared at the two men. McKee looked past
them at the door of Bently's room. A male attendant was
coming through it with a feeding cup on a tray. He got
hastily out of their way and the cup did a little *dance and
landed on its base jinglingly.
McKee came to an abrupt halt. He stared at the tray
without seeing it. Instead he was seeing Bruce Cunning-
ham's thin dark face when he heard of Alicia's disclosure to
the District Attorney, his sharp movement . . . and in that
instant the tiny missing cog slid into place and it was all
there, the whole picture of Charlotte Foy's murder, full and
clear down to the smallest detail.
224


Fernandez was staring at him. He said impatiently,
"Well?"
McKee said fumblingly, "I've got to go. . . . Bentley's
got to be placed under arrest. . . . I've got to get back to
Eastport," and without another word or so much as a glance
through the half-opened door at the stricken man in the
high white bed he had waited so long to see, he turned and,
conquering an impulse to run, walked rapidly toward the
distant elevators.
825


sound whatever, except the rain outside and the moan of
the wind.
Her back was to the room she had just left. She couldn't
see the closet door beyond the bed open, or the man who
emerged from it, and who stood in concealing darkness,
watching her.
She was seeing something else. Her bedroom was oppo-
site the staircase at the front of the house. The flight going
down was to the right, the flight going up, to the left. The
only way to turn was right. She half turned, and saw it. Her
heart hammered, and for the moment sight left her eyes.
She brushed a hand across them and put it to her throat.
A white satin mule, Natalie's mule, was lying on the fifth
step of the stairs going up in a long flight to the third floor.
Eve didn't waste any time. She was around the newel post
in a flash and was running up the wide shallow treads. She
found the switch at the top and pressed the button. It was
lonely up here and cold, and the long narrow hall, like the
one on the floor below, was empty. Only the emptiness here
was deeper, the silejice more unstirring. This was the old
part of the house and it was seldom visited nowadays; the
strip of carpet down the middle of the hall was faded and
dusty and the plaster needed a coat of paint and the air had a
queer stuffy smell. Natalie wasn't in the huge game room
that took up the whole right side of the top floor. She wasn't
in the first two half-dismantled bedrooms opposite. Eve
tugged at a stiff latch of a third door and confronted a cluster
of decrepit mops, and barely repressed a shriek as a mouse
scuttled between her bare feet. She went on, moving farther
and farther away from the head of the main staircase and
deeper into the faint green gloom toward the back of the
house, in a nightmare of doors with nothing behind them
but cobwebs and blankness and rolled mattresses and bed-
steads in corners. Servants slept here in summer. Now there
was no one.
227


"In the spring of 1921, your father, Charlotte Foy, Ger-
ald, you and little Natalie were living in the house in East-
port. Virginia Flavell, your father's second wife, had been
dead some six weeks. Immediately following Virginia's
death, Charlotte had returned to take care of you all. The
Corey fortune, left in trust for Virginia's infant daughter
Natalie, had put the household on a new footing and there
was no longer any lack of money. There was plenty for
everything."
McKee put an elbow on the mantel and looked down into
the glowing coals. "In the cottage at the foot of the lawn at
that time, Susan De Sange lived alone with her baby, visited
at rare intervals by her husband, Lucien De Sange. Susan
had been a close friend of Virginia's and of Mr. Flavell's.
When Charlotte took over, she and Susan hit it off equally
well and the situation remained the same. That spring there
was an epidemic of whooping cough."
He lit a fresh cigarette and tossed the match into the
flames. "The Flavell children caught it first, you and
Gerald and the six-weeks-old Natalie. But no particular
anxiety was aroused. The attack was light and you all had
the best of medical care. Then Susan De Sange came down
with it and Charlotte had her hands full. She nursed not
only you three children, but also Susan, devotedly. The only
one who escaped the infection was Mrs. De Sange's baby,
largely due to Charlotte's care.
"That was the situation up until the night of June 4,
1921. On that night, after she had returned from the cottage
where she had made Susan comfortable, and had attended
to Susan's baby, Lucy, Charlotte went up the hill and into
the big house. You and Gerald were in bed. Hugh was in
the library working on his books and Jim Holland, a guest
in the house, was studying in his bedroom for his entrance
exams to Yale. It was the nurse's night off. Charlotte went
into the nursery for a final look at the six-weeks-old Natalie.
235


went out that night. The polishing of it, therefore, took
place after she left the house and before Hugh Flavell en-
tered the bedroom. The person who had done the polishing
was the perpetrator. And the only one who could have done
it was Natalie."
Eve's face was still hidden. Give her time, Fernandez
thought. "While we're on the subject, McKee, why pull that
quick-change act in the corridor in the Norwalk Hospital?
Why did you stand there gaping at those nurses, and at the
orderly coming out of Bently's room?"
"I wasn't seeing either of them," McKee said, watching
Eve, "or, rather, I did see the nurses with the babies. It was
the old association of ideas. I had just been told about the
pink bead. Looking at the nurses with their bundles my
mind registered the word 'baby'. The feeding cup the
orderly was carrying jingled at the same moment. The jingle
reminded me of Bruce Cunningham's identification tag.
You see? Baby, identification bracelet, bead. I guessed then
what Charlotte had done. . . ."
Eve sat up. She took a wisp of linen from her sweater
pocket and wiped wetness from her lashes. Her face was in
shadow. "For me," she said in a blurred voice, "the worst
is that I'm responsible for everything that happened. Nat-
alie was driven to what she did because ... of myself and
Bruce."
It was what McKee had been waiting for. "Not at all,
Miss Flavell." He drove at her brusquely. "You're wrong,
completely and absolutely wrong. If Lieutenant Cunning-
ham had never existed Charlotte Foy would have been
killed just the same. From the moment Charlotte told
Natalie the truth she was doomed. Natalie has boasted that
she would have killed Charlotte then and there, in Vermont,
only that she.was afraid of discovery."
"Boasted . . ." Eve cried with sick horror.
Fernandez intervened then. He said quietly, "In my
240