Miss Withers Regrets

by Stuart Palmer

  Ten minutes later they were being driven out of town in a police sedan, the inspector dispiritedly huddled in the front seat beside the driver, and Miss Withers chatting away happily in back. “Murder will out, Oscar,” she told him. “Sometimes it needs help, that’s all. It’s really too bad that you don’t care for tropical fish, or you might see what I have in mind. But forget the fish. Has it ever occurred to you that we are often amply repaid by a study of dogs and what happens to them?”

  “I suppose so,” Piper grunted noncommittally. He turned to the uniformed driver. “Kick it up.”

  The car lurched ahead. “As a matter of fact,” continued the schoolteacher, “even the proverbs about dogs are interesting. There is the lovely Mexican one about ‘he who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas,’ and then there’s ‘a dog’s life,’ as though most dogs did not live a very carefree and enviable existence indeed, except, of course, the dog’s unfortunate enough to live in the neighborhood of Shoreham. They also say that ‘every dog has his day,’ though of course it is usually a night, instead—”

  The inspector leaned over and hit the siren a short blast to give them the right of way at an intersection. When the din ceased Miss Withers’s voice was blithely continuing: “But as a matter of fact, I have recently come to the conclusion that ‘give a dog a bad name’ is the most apt of all our proverbs about our four-footed friends.”

  With a wild gleam in his eye the inspector hit the siren and kept it going, so that they raced through the early morning streets of Shoreham village at sixty miles an hour, accompanied by a wailing as of all the devils of hell.

  They found the Cairns house shuttered and silent, but after a couple of rings at the doorbell Thurlow Abbott appeared, still chewing on his morning toast. “If you’re looking for my daughter Helen, she still isn’t home,” he announced.

  Miss Withers spoke up to say that they had hardly expected to find Mrs. Cairns at home. “The inspector and I only wanted a look at your bathroom,” she informed him.

  “The bathroom?” Abbott blinked, and then his face brightened. “Oh, the sleeping powders! It’s just as I said, the bottle is there. Why, I even took a capsule last night!”

  Miss Withers nudged the inspector, feeling somewhat triumphant. They followed Thurlow Abbott across the long drawing room and up the stairs and at last were led into the small but luxurious bath which opened off the hall and also into his room. “There!” he croaked. “There were fifty capsules originally. I’ve taken two or three.”

  For the first time the inspector began to take an interest in what was going on. “We may have something here, after all!”

  But Miss Withers was counting them. “Forty-seven,” she totaled with a certain satisfaction. Then she peered at the label, which had been filled out in neat typescript by the druggist: “Mr. Thurlow Abbott—May 12—Dr. Radebaugh,” plus a key number.

  “I think this ought to be Exhibit A or something,” she told the inspector as she slipped the bottle into her handbag.

  “Let’s get going,” he urged. “I’m anxious to toss that bottle into Sheriff Vinge’s fat face, and then—”

  “Softly, Oscar, softly,” Miss Withers said. “We have a trump card in our hand, sure enough. But we need something more. While we’re here”—she turned to Abbott—“can you tell us if any one in this house made a telephone call early this morning?”

  He frowned and shook his head. “At least not until after I left for the police station with Officer Lunney. But we can ask the servants.”

  They went back downstairs again. In the kitchen both Jeff and Beulah insisted that to the best of their knowledge and belief nobody had called out at all that day.

  “But the phone rang and rang, though,” Beulah suddenly put in. “It was a few minutes after six, and we weren’t even up yet. It stopped ringing before I could slip something on and—”

  “You mean, whoever was calling hung up? Or was it answered?” Miss Withers was impatient.

  “I guess they hung up. Nobody was home but Miss Lawn, and like I told you, she’s been locked in her room in a temper since before dinnertime last night.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “Yes, Oscar. A family disagreement, I believe.”

  “My daughter Lawn,” Thurlow Abbott put in, “has a most violent temper. A very perverse girl, all her life—she just won’t pull her oar in time with the rest. She was annoyed last night because Helen and I were using both cars.”

  “Did she know what you were using them for?” the schoolteacher put in.

  He shook his head. “Helen didn’t see any point in telling her. At any rate, Lawn blew up as usual. When she is in a temper she has a way of locking herself in her room and playing symphony music full blast.”

  Jeff and Beulah both nodded. “That’s just how it was last night, from eight o’clock until well after midnight. She played a lot of Rachmaninoff,” Jeff said.

  “And Debussy,” his wife added.

  “And Shostakovitch’s Fifth and Eighth, over and over again. Then she suddenly switched to an old record of the suicide song, and she played that until we thought we’d have to put cotton in our ears.”

  “What suicide song?” the inspector demanded.

  “Lawn,” said Thurlow Abbott, “has a recording of ‘Gloomy Sunday,’ the song that was supposed to have started a wave of suicides in Vienna before the war. When I got home last night, after waiting out at the Newark airport until after midnight, she had it on full blast. That’s why I had to take a sleeping powder to get any rest.”

  “The poor girl,” Miss Withers was murmuring in an absent tone. For a moment or two she had withdrawn from the conversation, busy with something in her handbag. She turned suddenly to Thurlow Abbott. “By the way, did the sleeping pill do its work? I mean, did you go directly to sleep?”

  He nodded, obviously surprised.

  “How very odd,” the schoolteacher observed. “Well, Oscar, we seem to have done everything here that can be done. Thank you very much, Mr. Abbott, for your help. Please go on with your breakfast, we can see ourselves out.”

  But he followed them part of the way. “I’m really worried,” he said. “About Helen—”

  “She’ll turn up,” the inspector said confidently.

  “And anyway,” Miss Withers pointed out, “Helen is of age, and she’s chosen her own path. If I may make a suggestion, there is someone else who needs you more right now.” She looked towards the upper floor.

  Abbott smiled. “You mean Lawn? She’s sufficient unto herself.”

  “I wonder,” said Miss Withers softly. “I wonder if any of us is ever that sufficient?” She took the inspector’s arm and led him out of the place, a very much happier man than he had been only half an hour before.

  But they paused in the front doorway. “Maybe I ought to use the phone,” he suggested, “to order a broadcast sent out to pick up Helen Cairns? Or Pat Montague?”

  The schoolteacher shook her head. “I’m not so sure, Oscar. Things are moving a little too fast for me.”

  Then he grinned, himself again. “Don’t be so mysterious. I know why you asked Abbott if the sleeping pill worked. You wanted to find out if, without his knowing it, maybe Helen came back here last night after he was asleep and maybe made or answered a phone call this morning.”

  “Something like that, but not quite,” she confessed. “You see, Oscar, I made a little experiment. It’s very odd about Thurlow Abbott’s getting to sleep so quickly last night. Because I tasted two of those sleeping capsules, and they’re filled with common baking soda!”

  The inspector’s shoulders sagged again. “Judas Priest in a bathtub!” he moaned.

  Miss Withers stared at him rather queerly. “We still have a trump,” she pointed out. “Even if we have to refill this bottle with genuine capsules. Because Sheriff Vinge is wrong, and we both know he is wrong.”

  “He probably knows he’s wrong too,” Piper said. “But knowing it and admitting it are two different things.”


  She nodded without listening. “You know, Oscar, it’s a shame that your men didn’t get to the Turkish bath soon enough to catch Pat Montague and find out just what shoe size he wears.”

  The inspector looked at her blankly. “You’re not starting to suspect him, after sticking up for him all this time?”

  “Of course,” she continued, “it just occurred to me that we might determine his size from other sources.”

  “You mean the Army? They’re great on detail, but I doubt if they keep a record of the shoe size of every first lieutenant.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant—well, didn’t Pat Montague, by his own admission, take a walk from the highway over there down through the lawns and flower gardens to the swimming pool? That was only last Saturday, and there’s only been a sprinkle of rain since then.”

  “Sure enough. I should have remembered. Come on.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll let you do the leg work,” said Miss Withers. She watched while he hurried off and then pushed in against the front door, which she had never quite allowed to close during their conversation.

  Once inside, she listened for a moment. There was no sound in the house except the clatter of Thurlow Abbott’s coffee cup in the dining room. She went swiftly and silently across the drawing room, up the stairs, and along the hall, to tap gently with her fingernail upon a certain door. There was no sound from within. “Lawn!” whispered Miss Withers, and then tapped again.

  “Oh, go away!” came a voice from within, a voice with a sob in it.

  “It’s I—Miss Withers. I’ll go, but first I have important news for you.”

  The lock clicked, and the door opened to disclose Lawn Abbott in black silk pajamas, her eyes red-rimmed. “I don’t much care what news you have,” the girl said. “He’s really gone—to reenlist in the Army!”

  Miss Withers nodded wisely. “So that’s what he called up to tell you this morning! Still, there might be ways to prevent him from taking that step.”

  “It’s no use, I tell you!” The girl shook her head so furiously that the long dark hair whipped her face.

  “If I may say so,” the schoolteacher said gently, “your greatest mistake has been your insistence on playing a lone hand. You have friends—you have always had friends, no doubt, who would have been glad to help you if you’d let them.”

  Lawn flickered a thin bitter smile. “Well, perhaps. But it’s too late now.”

  “Is it? I wonder. Offhand I can think of a number of ways of bringing Pat Montague back, still in civilian clothes. And I don’t mean under arrest, either.”

  The girl waited, statuelike, her lips parted.

  “I can’t say any more now,” continued Miss Withers. “I’m not even supposed to be here. But I’ll make you a promise. If you’ll be at my cottage at noon there’ll be somebody waiting there who wants to see you more than anybody in the world.”

  Lawn Abbott automatically gnawed at the nail of her right forefinger. “I don’t believe you,” she said tonelessly.

  “Or somebody who will want to see you,” the schoolteacher corrected herself, “by that time. He’ll be waiting there at noon, remember. I’ve got to run now, before the inspector misses me.”

  She turned and hurried out of the place, her heart pounding. As luck would have it, the inspector was just returning from his search of the grounds, a wry smile on his face. “What luck, Oscar?” she hailed him.

  “Don’t quite know. I found the tracks all right, where Pat Montague stumbled through a soft flowerbed. His print is just the size of mine, and I wear a nine. Do you suppose your flour moulage could be off half a size? That’s less than a quarter of an inch.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “It could be tested, I suppose. But that can wait. Oscar, where is Camp Nivens located?”

  “The Army separation center?” He thought. “It’s out beyond Garden City. Why?”

  “How long would it take to get there from here?”

  “No more than an hour, certainly, by auto. Three times that long by train, because you’d have to go all the way into Penn Station and change.”

  Miss Withers looked pleased. “Then it’s going to be more simple than I thought. Oscar, I wish you’d get the Garden City police on the phone.”

  “But why?”

  She shook her head. “I told you this was the last day on the case,” she reminded him. “If you’ll do what I ask, I’ll make it the last half-day.”

  The inspector held the car door open for her, but this time he climbed into the back seat beside her. “I don’t know what you’re up to, exactly,” he admitted. “But you’re acting as if you knew something.”

  She nodded. “I think I do, Oscar. I think I’ve known for some time, but a lot of possibilities had to be eliminated first. As a matter of fact, I’ve dropped hints enough so you ought to know too. But please let me play it my way. It’s easier to demonstrate than explain, and besides, there are some holes big enough to drive a truck through in my hypothesis.” She went on to explain just what it was that she wanted him to say to the Garden City police.

  The inspector nearly fell out of the car. “What earthly good will it do,” he demanded, “to locate Pat Montague and to run down Helen Cairns and to tell them that the case is all solved when it isn’t?”

  “Sheriff Vinge says it is,” she reminded him. “Besides, the important thing is to have a report on what Pat and Helen do afterwards.” There was a reassuring ring of confidence in her voice.

  She was to regret that confidence, and very soon. The inspector dropped her off at the hotel, promising to reappear later on when he had attended to all the things that needed attending, and she forced herself to make breakfast. But there was nothing of it except the coffee which attracted her, and she drank that clear and black. Her hand, she knew, was full of the top honors, all the face cards. But suppose, as in the old story about the man who played cards on an ocean liner with the devil, her adversary should choose to lead out the green ace of Hippogriffs?

  Miss Withers turned on the fluorescent light above her tank of tropical fish and noticed that the leaves of the aquatic plants were turning yellow along the edges and that the water was roiled and cloudy. She shrugged and then crossed the room to seat herself on a hard chair, with—as she would have expressed it—one eye on the door and one on the telephone.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers was still sitting there, in almost the same position, when finally there came the sound of quick, nervous steps along the path and a sharp tat-a-tat-tat on the door. She opened it hastily and saw that Lawn Abbott stood there—a strange, new Lawn. The dark circles were gone from around her eyes, and her mouth looked softer. She was flushed and breathless, almost as if she had run all the way.

  “Is he here?” she cried.

  The schoolteacher indicated the clock. “You’re a little early, child,” she pointed out.

  Lawn slapped her silver-mounted crop against her riding-breeches. “I’d have been earlier yet if my father hadn’t gone off somewhere in the little car. And of course Helen is still using the sedan. So I had to saddle up that big hack of mine and ride down—it’s not much more than a mile along the beach. I hope the hotel people won’t mind; I tied him to a clothesline out back.”

  “Do sit down,” invited Miss Withers, indicating the divan.

  But Lawn Abbott was in a prowling mood. “Tell me,” she begged. “You’ve heard from Pat? He’ll really be here?”

  “Be patient, young lady. I made you a promise, didn’t I? I’m glad you came early, though, because we have a lot to talk about. We may as well have our chat over a nice cup of coffee, don’t you think?” She started for the kitchen.

  “None for me,” Lawn said quickly. “I’m too excited.” She hesitated. “I need something all right. You haven’t—no, I don’t suppose you’d have a drink in the house?”

  Miss Withers blinked. “You mean you’d like a slug in it, as the inspector so inelegantly says? I’ll see if I can’t arrange it.” She tu
rned the burner on under the coffee pot and then after a few minutes poured out two cups, but her mind was elsewhere. Out in the living room Lawn was pacing up and down like a bear in a cage.

  “I don’t see why you’re taking all this trouble,” she was saying.

  “You’ve never been an old maid,” the schoolteacher advised her as she reached up to the top shelf to take down the half-pint bottle of cognac that had been purchased for her Thanksgiving plum pudding. She carefully poured a modicum into the cup that wasn’t cracked. “There is, you know, a certain pleasure in straightening out people’s lives—in a way it’s being Dea ex Machina—”

  “The what?”

  “The Goddess from the Machine, who swoops down to make everything come right, at least in the classical theater.” Miss Withers added, “I hope!” in a lower voice, and then let fall a few drops of the spirit into the other cup. She certainly needed some outside help if she was going to carry off the next half-hour successfully. After a moment’s delay she finally entered the living room, bearing a tray which held, besides the two cups of coffee, a sugar bowl and cream pitcher. She put the tray down on the low table before the divan, wishing with all her heart that her visitor would light somewhere. She didn’t want Lawn glancing into the dark corner behind the divan, at least not yet.

  Coffee could hardly be drunk standing, that was one good thing. Lawn dropped down on the cushions as she accepted her cup. She accepted it and made a wry face.

  “Isn’t it all right?” Miss Withers asked quickly. “Perhaps the slug was too strong—I never use alcohol myself—”

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Lawn said, drinking deeply.

  Miss Withers took her own cup and retreated across the room. She took a sip and decided that while some people might like coffee with brandy she would have it plain for the rest of her life. “It’s too bad,” she began pleasantly, “that you didn’t come down to the open house at the police station this morning.” She sipped again. “The whole mystery was solved, you know.”

  Lawn’s cup clattered in the saucer. “What did you say?”

  “It was solved. The investigation is over. Sheriff Vinge decided that Searles murdered your brother-in-law and then killed himself when he thought he was going to be caught.”