Miss Withers Regrets

by Stuart Palmer

  “Pat Montague seems to be taking his confinement as well as can be expected,” the schoolteacher began. “It is being very difficult for that young man, you know. He doesn’t know just yet what he wants or where he’s going except that if he ever gets out he plans to reenlist.”

  Lawn chewed eagerly on a fingernail. “Did you give him my message?”

  “Why, yes—yes, I did. I think he was very pleased. As a matter of fact, being in jail is giving that young man an excellent chance to do some thinking—some very overdue thinking. But more of that later. Are you—I mean, can you speak freely?”

  Lawn looked quickly towards the kitchen, where Beulah and Jeff were making definite but diminished rattling noises indicative of dinner to come. Then she looked towards the stairs and nodded. “Free as the breeze. Helen is in her room taking a beauty sleep, and father has retired with a bottle and a book of his old press clippings. What is it? Do you want me to come into town? Because if you do, I can catch a ride in with Searles; he’s just about ready to leave for the day—”

  Then the girl listened for a while. Finally she said, “Yes, but I don’t get it.”

  “Just call all of them,” came the schoolteacher’s clipped Bostonian accents. “The Benningtons, Mrs. Boad, Dr. Radebaugh, and Jed Nicolet. I was going to ask Adele Beale to do it for me, but she’s disappeared. You know all those people as well or better than she does, anyway, and certainly better than I do.”

  Lawn suddenly sat up very straight, her face flushed and excited. “Of course,” she said. “It takes a lot of crust, but I’ll do it. If you think it will help Pat—”

  Miss Withers’s voice sounded pleased. “And may I suggest that you do the telephoning where you can be sure of privacy? This matter is extremely confidential, you know.”

  “That will be easy,” Lawn promised. “Dad and Helen are avoiding me as if I had the leaping leprosy, anyway. I’ll report my results later, okay?”

  Hanging up, the girl rose and crossed the room to the liquor cabinet. She took up a bottle, uncorked it, and then hastily put it back, recognizing it as Scotch whiskey. She poured a jigger of brandy, took a sip, made a face, and then returned to the divan, carefully carrying the glass. “The things I do for that man!” she said to herself, and picked up the telephone again.

  It was a rather longer ordeal than she had at first imagined, but she had the drawing room all to herself, without any one’s disturbing her at all. Once she thought she heard an upstairs door open and steps in the hall, but when she looked up at the landing nobody was there.

  Meanwhile, Pat Montague was himself in an extremely unhappy frame of mind, having just been led down the jail stairs by Officer Lunney and brought into the sheriff’s office. The room was full of officers in and out of uniform, some of them old acquaintances by this time and some new. Two of them seemed to be putting the finishing touches to an electric chair, which was hooked up with something that resembled an old-fashioned crystal radio receiver.

  “It isn’t really the hot-squat, Montague, though I’ll admit it looks a little like it,” Vinge greeted him.

  Pat swallowed with difficulty.

  Inspector Oscar Piper came towards him. “You asked for it, so here it is. It’s perfectly clear, isn’t it? You are submitting to the lie-detector test willingly and of your own volition. The law says that no man can be forced to testify against himself. You want to submit to the test because you hope it will prove the truth of statements previously made by you, is that right?”

  The prisoner nodded.

  “You have a right to have an attorney present if you wish.”

  Pat shook his head. “No, thanks, Inspector.”

  Piper shrugged and turned to the sheriff. “I guess we can get going,” he said.

  And Miss Hildegarde Withers waited beside the telephone. Having dropped a stone into the pool, she sat still and let the ripples spread out to engulf her destined victim. Or was it victims?

  To pass the time she picked up a magazine which contained a fascinating treatise on the genetics of tropical fish, particularly of two varieties whose normal habitat was the jungles, the tierra caliente of Southern Mexico. The article made clear how easy it would be to develop wagtails, albinos, comet platys, and something known as the black-bottomed wagtail platy, all from the crossbreeding of the wild swordtail and the platyfish.

  She put down the book and wondered if the murder instinct could be bred out of mankind and if murderers were perhaps only sports, mutants, or throwbacks to Cain or the Neanderthal. When highly developed tropical fish mated at random the offspring reverted to the original types. Yet of course all humans mated at random, or at least according to the dictates of happenchance. Midge Beale, catching pretty, shrewish Adele on the rebound from her romance with Huntley Cairns. Helen Abbott, lonely and confused and unwilling to wait for a sweetheart in uniform, drifting into matrimony with the first man who asked her. Her father, a widower, marrying the Princess Zoraida …

  The impulse to murder, Miss Withers thought, must be a recessive trait in all human beings. Why was it, then, dominant in a few? Of course Bertillon and Lombroso had believed that murderers differed in appearance from other people, but the schoolteacher knew to her sorrow that this was not true.

  There was no sign, like the overlong tail fin of the swordtail cropping up in a litter of comet platys, to mark the throwback.

  The schoolteacher got up and made herself a lettuce sandwich and drank a glass of milk, still carefully keeping her eyes from the telephone, on the old theory about the watched pot. She felt possessed of an inner tension which could only partially be explained by the oppressive stillness of the air.

  Murderers, according to the inspector at least, were usually trapped because they could not let well enough alone. As a rule, they felt sure that they had left something undone and many times came out into the open to cover up tracks that didn’t exist. The murderer of Huntley Cairns had so far avoided making this mistake, at least. Perhaps with a little teasing, a little goading, he would show himself one of these moments—to the discerning eye.

  But the telephone didn’t even ring once. Miss Withers thought of the bathtub, remembering the old story about the pretty girl who said that on a Saturday night she had to take three baths before the phone would ring. The not ringing of the telephone became a tangible thing, an audible sound in itself, just as the absence of the vibration of a ship’s engines, when for some reason they have to be stopped at sea, can awaken every passenger.

  “This is silly,” decided Miss Withers. She went over to the phone, gave the Cairns number to the operator at the desk, and waited. Lawn Abbott answered immediately in her natural voice.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I didn’t call you back because it was no dice. I called them, all of them, over and over again.”

  “You mean they won’t come?”

  “Nope. Nobody home. The Benningtons’ maid finally answered and said they had gone out for dinner and the evening. Jed’s houseboy wouldn’t say anything except that Mister Nicolet was out. Harry Radebaugh has his phone connected up with a switchboard service for doctors, and they answered but wouldn’t say anything except that they would have the doctor call later. I finally got hold of Trudy Boad and she said at first that her mother was out. I called back and she said her mother had gone to bed and couldn’t be disturbed.”

  “I see.” Miss Withers’s plans swiftly rearranged themselves, like the pattern in a child’s kaleidoscope. “It would appear that the group is holding its own convocation. I shall still try to crash the party.”

  “But how can you?” Lawn cried. “You don’t know where—”

  “They will be at somebody’s house,” the schoolteacher told her. “I shall simply climb into a taxicab and go exploring—to the homes of all of them. Outside one house there will be five or six cars, so that will be the meeting place. Anyway, thank you for your help. Let’s hope that tonight will see the end of all this trouble.”

  “I wish—�
�� the girl began, and stopped.

  “Is anything wrong?” Miss Withers pressed after a moment.

  “Only my sister and my father…” Lawn began. Then her tone changed. “And I’m really very sorry, but we have no comment to make and nothing whatever to say for publication. Good-bye!”

  The line went dead.

  “Family trouble again,” Miss Withers deduced. Again she felt that there was something to be said for living alone, where one’s telephone calls, entrances, and exits could be questioned by nobody. She asked the desk to summon her a taxi and headed forth into the summer twilight.

  “Among the most gala social events of the summer season (according to the Shoreham Standard) are the justly famous evenings around the barbecue pit at the delightfully informal home of Commander and Mrs. Sam Bennington, and invitations thereto are much sought after.”

  Not on this particular evening. Five unhappy people were gathered together around the bare and cheerless charcoal grill at the foot of the garden. Overhead an unshaded electric bulb cast a pale and unflattering light upon the group, as well as attracting a horde of June bugs, Mayflies, gnats, and mosquitoes who had nothing else on that evening.

  From the roadway, an onlooker could have seen only the glow of the light and heard only a hum of voices that now and again rose to a crescendo and then died suddenly and started all over again. There was no tinkle of ice in tall julep glasses, no sharp spat! of the ping-pong ball hit across the deserted table. Nor was there any rich, sizzling scent of charcoal-broiled beefsteaks.

  Nothing was being served by Ava Bennington this evening except worry. Worry and conversation, and from the roadway Miss Hildegarde Withers couldn’t hear enough of that to know what they were talking about. She explored the garage entrance, came close enough to the house to get entangled in the woven wire of an abandoned puppy run, and finally managed to mount a stone wall, crawl beneath a sagging clothes line, and find her way down the slope toward the group of people.

  “Yoo-hoo!” she cried as she stumbled down upon them, her voice quavering a little as she saw the surprised hostility in their drawn, gray faces. She only hoped that she was getting closer to the secret of all this; getting warmer, as the children said.

  If she was getting warmer, the five people around the outdoor grill looked cold, for all the mugginess of the night. Jed Nicolet had a wet, unlighted cigarette drooping from his mouth, and his thin fox face was a mask of perturbation. Mame Boad, wearing comfortable shoes and an uncomfortable expression, was biting thoughtfully at her pearls. Dr. Harry Radebaugh seemed to have lost ten pounds since she had seen him last, and as for the Benningtons, they looked as if they had been washed in overhot water and shrunk a size and a half.

  “I told you so,” said Jed Nicolet to nobody in particular.

  The schoolteacher thrashed through the last of the rosebushes and came out on the stone flagging of the patio. “I’ll skip all explanations and apologies,” she said. “We may as well come to the point at once. If you good people are having a meeting to decide which of you murdered Huntley Cairns, I’d like to get in on it.”

  There was a long, ominous silence, somehow made heavier still by the flicker of heat lightning off across the water to the north. It was Commander Bennington, true to Navy traditions, who recovered himself first. “My good woman,” he began, “you appear to be under the impression—”

  “I am,” Miss Withers assured him. “Very, very much under the impression. May I sit down?”

  Mame Boad, in spite of herself, tittered a little. Then Dr. Radebaugh, with chilly gallantry, provided a deck chair. Miss Withers sat down in it firmly. “Before we go any further,” she opened up, “or before you have me thrown out of this conclave, let me say that I have a pretty fair idea of everything that has been going on, with the exception of the detail of who actually murdered Huntley Cairns, and that seems hardly more than a formality from this point on.”

  They all stared at her with a horrified fascination. Miss Withers began almost to enjoy herself. “I know why you came to me as a committee when I first arrived in Shoreham—Mr. Nicolet modestly remaining in the background—and what commission it was that you wanted me to undertake. When I refused, you decided to be your own detectives. That is why you accepted invitations to the Cairns housewarming and why you were huddling in the library shortly before he died. You were looking through his books for some clue as to his tastes and inclinations, all of which mystified Mr. Midge Beale very much at the time. I found all this out by roundabout methods—”

  “The book,” Jed Nicolet remarked. “Oriental Moments.”

  “Exactly.” Miss Withers removed the rental-library volume from her handbag and opened it to the place she had marked. “I read from Chapter Five, page sixty-two,” she said. “Quote: ‘It was at this dinner party at General Choy’s that Manya Werenska made her classic suggestion for dealing with the Japanese in case they ever actually occupied the city. All the officers, she insisted, should be invited to lunch and then fed meatballs filled with sharp splinters of bamboo rolled up tightly and bound with some animal fiber such as bacon rind. It was a method of poisoning wolves in the Pekin hills, dating back into antiquity like everything else in China. When the digestive juices acted on the fiber, the bamboo splinter would open up and—’ ”

  “That’s enough!” cried Ava Bennington.

  “It would seem to be plenty,” Miss Withers agreed. “There is no need to go into the grisly details. For your further information, I was, until last fall, a dog owner myself. My wirehaired, Dempsey, died—but he died of old age.”

  The circle suddenly closed more tightly about her. “Can you understand,” Dr. Radebaugh asked quietly, “how a man feels who brings up an English setter from puppyhood so that it’s his best friend and only immediate family, and then watches it die in convulsions?”

  “Your dog came home to die,” Jed Nicolet said softly. “Wotan lay in the gutter all night where a hit-run driver left him.”

  “But he didn’t die,” Mame Boad cut in. “You saved him. Me, I had seven cockers racing around the place in the spring, all the finest show stock, with bloodlines that meant one of them would stand a chance as best of breed and maybe best in show at Morris and Essex. Now I have one—the runt—and I have her because she was too slow to grab the poisoned meat that some fiend threw into my yard at night.”

  “By ‘fiend’ you refer, I presume, to the late Huntley Cairns?” Miss Withers pressed.

  “He ran down my dog,” Nicolet put in. “I proved there were black dog hairs on his front bumper and even started suit. But he settled out of court, and for plenty.”

  “No doubt that made you all focus your suspicions on Cairns,” Miss Withers pointed out. “But isn’t there quite a difference between running over a dog in the dark and setting out to poison all the dogs in a township?”

  Bennington shook his head. “Don’t forget that the book was in Cairns’s library. Jed Nicolet took it away with him, and he’ll bear witness that there were dirty smudges on that particular page, too. My wife’s poodles were saved the first time, when we pumped the arsenic out of them, but two weeks later somebody shoved some meat through a slit in the top of the car door, and that was the end of them. Peritonitis works fast, and Dr. Harvey found a sliver of bamboo in each dog.”

  “Bamboo—at least an American cane that has the same properties—grows as far north as this,” Dr. Radebaugh pointed out. “There’s a clump of it on Cairns’s property.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “So you all brought in a mental verdict against Huntley Cairns! For that matter, none of you remembered that there were five other people in the Cairns house who had access to the library and who could have read that book and made use of the device. Six, actually, if you include the gardener, who seems to have had the run of the place.”

  There were flashes of heat lightning all across the eastern sky now, and the crickets and tree frogs sounded like a modern symphony heard through a curtain.

  �
��Like most people who are fond of animals,” Miss Withers went on, “I’ve read now and then in the newspapers about dog-poisoning epidemics, and I suppose I’ve said to myself that the person who would do a thing like that ought to have a dose of his own medicine. However, there is always recourse to the law—”

  “Sure, sure!” cut in Jed Nicolet bitterly. “As a member of the bar, I might inform you that dog poisoners usually get off with a suspended sentence, or at worst with a nominal fine for malicious mischief. The owner can of course start a civil suit, but most juries fix the value of any dog at no more than ten dollars.”

  “Then the law, as Mr. Dickens had somebody say, is an ass. But all that is beside the point.” Miss Withers wagged her forefinger. “You are all gathered here because you believe that one of you took the law into his own hands last Saturday—after the discovery of this book in Cairns’s library—and drowned him then and there in his own swimming pool.” She cocked her head. “True or false?”

  Nobody needed to answer. “Which explains,” went on Miss Withers, “Mr. Nicolet’s effort to help Pat Montague, the innocent bystander. You are all reasonably nice people, and you wouldn’t like to have an innocent man suffer for the crime you are sure one of you committed.” She paused for a dramatic moment, which was spoiled by the whine of a mosquito dive-bombing her ear. “The sad part of it all, however, is this. If any one of you did murder Huntley Cairns, you got the wrong man!”

  They stared at her, but nobody spoke.

  “That is all, or nearly all, I came here to say,” she told them. “Think it over and consult your consciences. And remember that if Huntley Cairns met his death because of the dog-poisoning epidemic in Shoreham, the whole thing was a criminal mistake!”