The Late Clara Beame

by Taylor Caldwell

Laura sat up suddenly, her mouth open.

  “Answer me,” Alice demanded. “You remember. You and I shared Sam’s room and mine, with the twin beds, because there was a bathroom off it. Sam slept in the spare room, and Hank and David had the two sofas in our living room. Sam had a cold.” Alice went on quickly. “His colds usually turned into bronchitis, and so about four in the morning I decided to take him some cough medicine. I saw that his door was open, and when I went in you were picking up a glass from the floor near his bed. You looked — stealthy. That’s all I can call it, Laura! That’s why I ran back to my own room and watched you, while you took the glass to the bathroom down the hall.”

  Laura seemed stunned.

  Alice stood up, caught Laura’s shoulder, and shook it.

  “And that’s why the police couldn’t find the glass, or any glass in the bedrooms, which had Sam’s fingerprints on it! You washed the glass in the second bathroom, Laura! Why? You’ve got to tell me. That’s why the police kept coming back again and again, driving us mad!”

  Suddenly Laura’s face turned crimson. “Why didn’t you ask me before? It’s so simple.”

  “Is it, Laura? Tell me how simple it all was!”

  Laura’s hands began to twist the fringe of the afghan. “You make it sound so — . Well, I woke up in the night, and it was dark. We had only been in your apartment in Chicago once before. I wanted a drink of water, and I couldn’t find the bathroom! I’d stumbled around the bedroom for a couple of minutes, before I found the door to the hall. I’d forgotten that Hank and David were sleeping in the living room. I honestly thought Henry was in that other bedroom. Remember? We left the boys arguing about who’d sleep in the bedroom! I — I simply assumed that it was Henry.”

  She knew how important it was to convince Alice, but her voice faltered. “I wanted to see — if Henry was — all right. It was the first time we’d ever slept apart. I still thought it was Henry in the bed, then my foot hit against the glass. There was a little light from the street. I bent down to pick up the glass and saw the back of Sam’s head on the pillow and his red hair. So I went out of the room to the bathroom down the hall, remembered that Sam had a cold, and washed the glass out with soap and hot water before I used it.”

  She looked up at the silent, white-faced Alice. “What in God’s name,” she cried wildly, “have you been thinking all this time! What?”

  “The glass was on the floor, as if it had been dropped?”

  “Yes!”

  “There was no sign of anyone there, then? You didn’t hear or see anyone?”

  “No! I could hear the boys snoring in the living room, and the sound of distant traffic. That’s all.”

  “Did you know what time it was?”

  “Yes. I had my wrist watch on. As a matter of fact, I looked at the time, in the bathroom. It was ten after four.”

  “The doctors said Sam died between three and four,” Alice told her. “And you’re sure you didn’t hear anyone talking to Sam, or moving around?”

  “No. I told you — ” She stopped, her face pale.

  “What?” Alice demanded.

  Laura’s hands were suddenly still. “When I came out of the bathroom,” she whispered, “Dave was near the door. He — he looked very sleepy.”

  “Dave!”

  Laura nodded. “He was as surprised as I was. He — he was just reaching for the doorknob. You see, I’d turned out the light, because I was leaving.”

  Alice walked to the window and stood, staring out. “You never told the police about that?”

  “Why should I have?”

  “Why did you take the glass with you, when you saw it was Sam there, and not Hank?”

  “I — I don’t know. I’d picked it up. And then when I saw it was Sam, I just hurried out of the room. I didn’t want to disturb him. I didn’t know he was — And then when I was in the bathroom I saw there wasn’t any glass there, so I washed — Sam’s — glass — and drank from it.”

  Alice turned back to her. “What made you keep quiet about it? Why didn’t you tell the police?”

  “I told Henry,” Laura said. “I didn’t think it meant anything. Why should it have? Henry said I shouldn’t bother mentioning it to the police. It would just cause complications — ”

  “In a plain case of suicide.” Alice finished the sentence.

  “Of course,” Laura agreed weakly. “It was all terrible enough, as it was.”

  “Of course. Have you and Hank discussed your being in Sam’s room since then?”

  “No. I — I forgot all about it until now. It was painful to remember.”

  Alice took a deep breath. “Well, I’m sorry. Forget it again.”

  At that moment there was a sharp report outside, with thunderous echoes which reverberated across the countryside. And then a series of alarmed shouts.

  Alice swung around and ran from the room. Laura got out of bed and quickly put on slippers and a robe. She was hurrying down the stairs just as the front door opened, and she saw her husband and Evelyn come in, both of them white-faced.

  “Someone took a shot at me!” Henry’s voice was high-pitched and trembling.

  He stared blindly at the two women.

  “I said,” he almost shouted, “someone tried to kill me!”

  Chapter 6

  David came into the hall with a book in his hand. “What’s going on here? Who shot off that gun?”

  He looked at the two silent women, and at Henry, in his plaid lumberjacket, his boots and legs dappled with snow. Henry took off his plaid cap and stared at it as if it were an object he had never seen before. He was shaking badly. Evelyn, the little wizened handyman, breathed loudly in the sudden quiet. David turned to him.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, sir,” Evelyn wheezed, “we was just coming out of the woodshed — Mr. Frazier here said we had enough up from the freezers — and then we heard this bang. Sounded right close by. Mr. Frazier ducked; not that it’d done much good if he’d really been hit. You know, you don’t hear the bang first, it’s the bullet you get. Then comes the bang. And there’s the bullet, yessir, right in the door of the woodshed. Still there, matter of fact. What I’d like to know, who tried to kill Mr. Frazier?”

  There were running footsteps, and John Carr appeared. He looked at the group in astonishment. “What’s wrong?”

  “Hank says someone tried to kill him. Shot at him, just now,” David told him. “Didn’t you hear anything?”

  “Yes, I did. A hunter?”

  “In this weather?” David asked. “In all these drifts?”

  It was then that Laura screamed, and Henry ran to his wife and caught her in his arms. Mrs. Daley and Edith appeared from the back of the house, their eyes wide. “What’s the matter?” Mrs. Daley asked. “What’s wrong with Mrs. Frazier?”

  David turned to her quickly. “Did you see anyone outside except Mr. Frazier and Evelyn?”

  “Lord, no,” Mrs. Daley replied. “No one can walk in that snow. Was that a shot we heard?”

  “It was,” John Carr told her. “You’d have seen anyone if there had been anyone to see? The shot was fired from close range.”

  “I’d have seen anyone.” Mrs. Daley was thoughtful for a moment. “In fact, I was looking out the window at my feeding shelf for birds, and the woodshed is right there, thirty feet away. Then Edith said something from the stove, and I turned my head, and the bang came. I sort of thought it was hunters from the village, though it isn’t the season.”

  David and John Carr exchanged a glance. Henry had finally calmed Laura. “She’s all shaken up. I’m going to take her back to bed.” He did not look at the others as he and Laura climbed the stairs.

  “It’s all right; it probably was some fool of a hunter,” David commented. “Alice? John?
Let’s go into the living room.”

  But Alice caught his arm. “I want to talk to you.” John Carr nodded, then left them alone. “David. Laura saw you — that morning. At four o’clock. She just told me.”

  David glanced around quickly.

  “Of course she did.” Then he frowned at his sister. “How did she happen to tell you?”

  She was silent. “Keep out of this!” he warned her. “You do your part; I’ll do mine.”

  When Henry came downstairs a little later, he was still pale. “I’ve given her a sedative. We’ll let her sleep.” He reached for his pipe. “There’s only one other window facing the woodshed side. The hall window, upstairs. And there are no tracks in the snow except mine and Evelyn’s.”

  “Then who fired the shot?” John Carr asked anxiously.

  Henry filled his pipe and lit it. His audience waited tensely.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he answered in a slow voice. “Does anyone here have any ideas?”

  “How could a hunter get up here so far, in the snow?” David asked incredulously. “It must be six feet deep in some places. And the village is miles away; he couldn’t have driven.”

  “That’s what I figured out all by myself.” Henry’s tone was sarcastic.

  “Unless,” John Carr pointed out, “it was a stray shot, a spent bullet.”

  “Those mostly come from rifles. I don’t think that bullet was a rifle shot. In fact, even though only the end is sticking out, I’d say it was a forty-five.” Henry looked slowly from David to John. “That shot wasn’t fooling. It struck hardly a foot from my head. Somebody tried to kill me.”

  “Or,” John Carr said softly, “warn you.”

  There was silence in the room. The smoke curled up slowly from Henry’s pipe. He leaned against the fireplace.

  “Now, who would want to kill me or warn me?” He looked at the two men. “Another thing,” Henry went on, “the only place from which that shot could have come is this house. No tracks in the snow for forty feet or more around, except Evelyn’s and mine. So, either the shot was fired from the kitchen door, which would make the criminal Mrs. Daley or Edith, and that’s damn silly, or it was fired from the upstairs window in the hall, which is the only window facing the woodshed besides the kitchen window.”

  Again, he looked at each of them. “And the window’s been opened. The snow’s disturbed. So who in this room, dear friends, tried to kill me? Which one of you?”

  Alice’s smile was hollow. “I was with Laura.”

  “So it narrows down to you, Dave, or you, John.”

  “Are you serious?” David exclaimed.

  “I am. John?”

  “Why in God’s name should I try to kill a comparative stranger?” John Carr’s expression was no longer pleasant. “What could be my motive? I never knew you until a short time ago.”

  “I don’t know anything about you,” Henry told him, “except what I’ve gotten from you. And a few others.”

  “I refuse to defend myself against ridiculous suspicions.” John’s face was flushed. “Has it ever occurred to you that there may be someone else in this house besides us, somebody hidden?”

  The fire quieted on the hearth, then suddenly leaped high.

  “Someone in this house?” Henry repeated. “That’s impossible.”

  “How many rooms are there?” John asked. “Eight bedrooms on the second floor, and one room and the attic on the third.” Henry paused. “That’s funny. I thought I heard someone on the third floor, this morning, when I got up. But I assumed it was Mrs. Daley or Edith, though they don’t sleep on the third floor. Let’s go!”

  The three men hurried from the room.

  When they encountered Mrs. Daley on the second floor, her arms full of linen, Henry asked her: “Were you up in the attic this morning? I thought I heard footsteps.”

  She was alarmed. “Why, no. Neither was Edith. No one goes up there, except in the spring and fall. Do you think there’s a burglar?”

  Henry patted her arm. “We’re just going to look around. Keep an eye on Mrs. Frazier until we come down, will you?”

  They climbed the steep attic stairs in almost total darkness and Henry pushed open the big trapdoor. It moved easily and the dusty attic, filled with shadowy shapes, lay before them. At the far end of the room there was a closed door. It opened into a bedroom, unmade, neat, and bitterly cold. This was where Evelyn often slept, instead of in his own room over the garage, if the house was filled with guests.

  The window in the room had been opened. Snow was melting on the floor. John Carr went to the window and peered out. “Look!” he shouted to the other men. Just below the window, some seven or eight feet, was the roof of the room over the attached garage. There were footprints in the snow, which led to the far side of the roof.

  “So that’s how it was,” Henry said. “You could go ten feet from the house and be lost. Look, the prints are already filling in. In a few minutes they’ll be gone.” The wind lifted the snow, and even as they watched, the edges of the holes blurred and smoothed.

  “Look here.” John was holding something in his hand, and the small object gleamed faintly in the half-light. It was the jacket of a bullet. “A forty-five, I think. On the floor.”

  “But why here?” David asked him. “This window doesn’t face the woodshed.” He squinted out into the storm. “But look. If you go along that roof, where the prints are, you can turn and face the woodshed! But who in hell — ?”

  “That’s always the question,” John Carr commented. “Who? Why? Something in your dark past, perhaps? Examine the victim and you’ll get your best clues about a murderer or would-be murderer. Let’s go down where it’s warm, before we all get pneumonia. And let’s interrogate, as the mystery novels call it.”

  They went downstairs, shuddering in the cold, and grouped themselves around the fire.

  Alice listened earnestly to their description of the attic bedroom, then interrupted. “But the shot couldn’t have been fired from the roof of the garage. The hall window on the second floor had been opened, facing the woodshed, remember?”

  “Trust a woman to ruin a perfectly good solution,” David said gloomily. Then added: “Just a moment,” and left the room.

  “She’s right, you know,” John said. “Intruder or not, he came down to the second floor and fired from the hall window. Still, I found the shell in the attic. But we can’t have two separate murderers. That would wreck the whole picture. I like tidy explanations. The shot was fired either from the hall window or the roof of the garage. Take your choice. If from the hall window, what was our boy doing in the attic? Have we got an unseen witness, after all?” He paused to light a cigarette.

  Alice stared at the fire. “At any rate, the intruder’s gone,” Henry remarked. “I think I’ll take a look at Laura. I wish to God the phone was all right; I’d call the police.”

  David came back into the room, half laughing. “One mystery solved. Mrs. Daley said she shook a bedroom rug out of the hall window half an hour before that shot was fired. So, she’s the one who disturbed the snow. Now we have only one mystery left.”

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Daley spoke to her niece in a low voice: “Not a word out of you, ever, my girl. To nobody. If you do — ”

  Edith whimpered. “I’m frightened. I don’t like to get into such things.”

  “Keep quiet, and you won’t,” her aunt told her. “People only get into trouble when they talk too much. A long tongue is a long rope, for hanging.”

  Laura awoke in the cold gray twilight of her room, with a sense of foreboding. She huddled under the heavy blankets, reluctant to get up. If only she had listened to Henry when he had quoted Benjamin Franklin to her: “Guests, like fish, stink after three days.” It was much too long for people who are really strangers to be together.
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br />   David and Alice provided problems enough, but now there was John Carr.

  And here I lie, Laura thought, quivering like jelly, and it’s my house, and they’re my guests. Her head swam from the sedative, and she groaned as she remembered that the lines were down, and the telephone out. If only none of them had come, there would be peace. She tried to get up the courage to dress and go downstairs and be the bright hostess and pretend that all this had not happened.

  The gale was worse. The stone house was like a ship on a sea: waves of snow roared around it and hissed against the windows.

  Laura tried to shake off the questions Alice had asked, but they returned to her. Had she seen or heard anyone? No, only David, that night. Only David.

  But, had there been only David? The memories were painful but she couldn’t help reliving in her mind that whole terrible night. They had all gone to bed a little after midnight. Alice had slept at once, but Laura, missing her husband, had not fallen asleep immediately, and had awaked a few hours later. Why? There was something —

  Yes, now, a year later, she remembered. Footsteps. Soft footsteps in the hall outside the bedroom door. Stealthy footsteps. But, she had told herself, it must have been one of the men on his way to the bathroom. Moving so as not to disturb the others. She had half fallen asleep again — she remembered now — and in that semiconscious state she had heard something. A voice? Voices? The sound of something falling or rolling? No, she had been dreaming. Still, she had gotten up, and had been thirsty. The room had been dark. She had heard the distant murmur of traffic. She had lost her way in the room and had found herself in the hall. Then all had been as she had told Alice this morning.

  Not one person, not even herself, had admitted to the police that they had been up during the night. She had forgotten. Had the others forgotten, too? It was possible. But what had she heard?

  The bedroom door opened and Henry came in, carrying the little oil stove that heated the dining room.

  “Awake?” he called cheerfully. “I brought the stove so you won’t freeze while you dress. How are you, darling?”