Miss Withers Regrets

by Stuart Palmer

  “You don’t believe that!”

  Miss Withers cocked her head. “The sheriff was very, very convincing. After all, I’m only an amateur.”

  Lawn sat up straight. “Look here, Miss Withers, I want a showdown. You’ve been very nice to me from the beginning. But I’ve got to know where I stand. I’ve got to know what you’re driving at!”

  “Yes?” To gain a little time Miss Withers finished her coffee. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything! But first I want to know where my sister Helen was all last night and where she is now.”

  There was a long pause. “I have my own opinion as to her whereabouts last night, but it’s only a guess. As to her present whereabouts, I think that she might be on her way here.”

  “Oh!” Lawn said. She took up her cup and thoughtfully drank the remainder. Miss Withers heaved a great sigh of relief. She looked at the clock, wondering how long it was before betapentalin took effect. It shouldn’t be so very long, she decided, especially since she had used half the bottle.

  “It’s nearly twelve,” she observed.

  “It’s time Pat was here, if he’s coming,” Lawn said. “What happened to make him change his mind?”

  “He simply sees things more clearly by this time, or I hope he does. You’ve waited for Pat Montague a long time, haven’t you?”

  “That’s no secret. I wanted him since the first day I saw him. And then I had to stand back and watch my sister put her lovely tentacles around and around him, strangling him—” She laughed without humor. “That was why I ran away from home,” Lawn went on. “The time I told you about. Helen and Pat got engaged, and I couldn’t stand it. She could have had anybody, anybody at all, and there was nobody but Pat for me. He belonged to me, don’t you see?”

  All of a sudden Miss Hildegarde Withers felt supremely confident. It must, she thought, have been the few drops of brandy that she let fall into her cup out in the kitchen. Her cup—the cracked one.

  Just to reassure herself, she turned the cup around, but the brandy had made everything fuzzy so that she couldn’t even focus her eyes on the crack. Even so, everything was going swimmingly. “You know,” she confessed, “there was a time when I thought that you yourself might be the murderer of Huntley Cairns.”

  Lawn smiled at that, but she bit at her fingernail again. “Why in the world did you think that?”

  Miss Withers reminded herself that she must be very careful and yet daring too. Then her lips opened of their own volition. “It was because you didn’t have any alibi. Your horse couldn’t come into court and say what time it was that you brought him in from your ride on Saturday afternoon. Who could say whether you came up the hill to the swimming pool after Huntley Cairns was killed or before?”

  “Go on,” Lawn begged. “I hadn’t realized I was that much of a suspect.”

  “I suspected Helen too. Because she spilled cocktails on her dress at the party and was gone a long time while she was supposed to be changing. She could have gone out for a swim, possibly wanting to keep away from her guests until she had regained her composure. She could have been swimming in the pool when Cairns came down for his dip—she could even have pretended a cramp while he was undressing, and when he rushed out to save her she could have pulled him in and drowned him. He was a very poor swimmer, and both you and your sister were brought up in the water, like most of the young people along the Shore.”

  “I can’t believe it!” Lawn whispered. She was crouched back on the divan now, looking smaller, more withdrawn.

  “Neither could I, my child. Then it occurred to me that it might have been you in Helen’s bathing suit, which she’d left in the dressing room.” Miss Withers felt happy and glowing and a little careless. Most of all she wanted to talk and talk and talk. “At any rate, it wouldn’t have been difficult for a good swimmer to pull Cairns down to the bottom of the pool and hook his clothing on to that jagged bit of metal so he’d stay down and probably not be found until the next morning.”

  “Go on, keep talking!” Lawn demanded.

  “Oh, I shall. But just between us both, I’ll admit that this is the last time I’ll have coffee with brandy; it seems to have affected my tongue just a teeny bit. Where was I? Oh, yes, about what happened next—or what could have happened. You slipped out of the pool and into the dressing-room, and to save time you put your riding clothes back on over the wet swimming suit. Outside, Pat Montague and Searles were discovering the body, so you sat tight with the door locked. Searles tricked Pat into going in the other dressing room to phone and locked him in before he rushed to the house to telephone—and you came out and let him go free.”

  Lawn was stiff and frozen, but she still showed no desire to do any confessing, which the schoolteacher thought was very odd. The girl said, “Pat doesn’t believe any of this pipe dream, does he?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But at the time he was fooled by the white bathing suit. And by the moisture which came through your riding breeches from the bathing suit—he thought you had brought your horse in all lathered up, which was contrary to your usual practice. Of course, neither he nor anybody else saw a motive for you to kill Cairns.”

  Lawn smiled faintly. “That’s right. Why would I get rid of him and leave Helen a free, wealthy widow?”

  “That puzzled me too for a while,” the schoolteacher confided. “Then I realized how much you wanted Pat Montague for yourself. You knew that the moment he came back your sister would rush into his arms. She even kept a bag packed with a few of her summer clothes, so that she could elope in a minute if he asked her. But you saw that if your sister were mixed up in a murder Pat wouldn’t ask her!”

  “And so?” the girl prompted.

  “It really worked, didn’t it? Huntley Cairns dead was an obstacle between the lovers that he would never have been living. Pat thought that Helen did it, and she thought that he did. Of course you never meant to have Pat walk in and become suspect number one, even though you knew he would show up soon. You’d received his phone calls meant for Helen, no doubt mimicking the maid. Did you pretend to take a message so he would think Helen didn’t care enough to call back? I’m sure you did. I’m sure you intended the police to suspect Helen, too, because of the damp white bathing suit crammed down in her laundry bag. It was when I saw the suit that I began to feel you must be the murderer, only at that time I didn’t see how.”

  Lawn sat there, stiff and silent. “You see, you’re what the medical profession calls an ‘onychophagist,’ or ‘eater of fingernails.’ And the laces of Helen’s suit were ripped instead of untied—and a person without fingernails has a good deal of difficulty in untying anything, especially when in a hurry.” Miss Withers swayed in her chair, but her voice went steadily, monotonously on. “Pat’s inept arrival on the scene rather spoiled your original idea of involving Helen. And then of course we were all confused by the red herring across the trail—I mean the local committee who were trying to run down the dog poisoner. I wasted a good deal of time on them, and you of course encouraged that, since it took suspicion off yourself and off Pat.” The schoolteacher shook her head sharply. “Have you noticed that this room is going round and round like a carousel?”

  The girl didn’t answer, and Miss Withers picked up her coffee cup again, studying it most carefully. The crack must be somewhere, unless she was losing her eyesight.

  Across the room Lawn Abbott had one fist in the pocket of her tweed riding jacket, a pocket which, Miss Withers remembered, had sagged heavily as the girl entered the room. “Don’t stop now,” Lawn prompted her in a voice that was low and hoarse.

  Miss Withers knew that she couldn’t stop, though she tried to put on the brakes. The words kept pouring out like water from a leaky faucet. “I don’t mind telling you,” she heard herself saying, “that in spite of my suspicions I never really began to understand the setup until Searles was murdered. By that time both you and Helen were very worried about Pat. He was in jail, and it looked as if the polic
e meant to hold him and try to convict him. You both took steps—Helen sent for a clever lawyer with a reputation of saving lost causes. But you realized that if another murder, done in the same general fashion, happened while Pat was locked up, it would clear him completely. You heard over the radio that he had confessed—which he did in an effort to try to save Helen—and that clinched it—”

  “Go on,” Lawn said. “Go on and keep going.”

  Miss Withers leaned back in her chair. She was dizzy and she wanted to lie down and go to sleep, but she knew that she mustn’t do that. There was something that had to come first, only she couldn’t remember quite what it was. Something about a trap that had to be sprung.

  “You picked Searles because he was one of the first on the murder scene and he might have noticed something. It was easy enough to give him a bottle of whiskey to take home last night. I don’t know how you got down to his cottage—I imagine you rode your horse along the beach, as you rode here today. Your radio-phonograph is automatic and, like most automatics, it plays the last record over and over again until turned off. It would have been easy enough for you to step through your window on to the balcony, murder Searles, and get back to turn the machine off before the needle wore out. You didn’t know that you had left a footprint in Searles’s cottage, a size 8½-B footprint.”

  Lawn Abbott shook her head. “I don’t wear that size, nor anything near it.”

  “Not in shoes, no. But riding boots are made several sizes larger than shoes, with a wide, heavy sole. It was you, of course, who shoved Searles’s head into a pail of water—you must have been in the midst of that when you answered his phone at my call. It was really an excellent impersonation, though you only had to speak a word or two. But it was brilliant of you to phone me right back, as if from your home, giving yourself a perfect alibi! You took the whiskey bottle away with you because it would, of course, show traces of the sleeping powder you had borrowed from your father’s bathroom, and you took the gun just in case it would come in handy later—such as now.”

  Lawn took her hand out of her pocket, and the pistol was gripped in it—not aimed, but just cradled easily.

  “Tell me,” she said quietly, “just why do you believe this nightmare you’ve dreamed up?”

  “Because it makes sense,” the schoolteacher whispered. Her lips were a little stiff and strange, as if they belonged to somebody else. “Because from the first it’s been evident that you’re an antisocial type. There’s an old proverb—‘Give a dog a bad name and he’ll live up to it’—and that fitted you. You have a long-standing reputation for making your own rules.”

  “Thinking it and proving it are two different matters,” the girl reminded her. The hands of the clock were now pointing to a few minutes after twelve, but it seemed to Miss Withers that she had been here for two lifetimes.

  “There honestly wasn’t much proof,” the schoolteacher confided, still vainly fighting the heavy compulsion to unburden her mind of any and all secrets. “That’s why I set this trap. That’s why I had someone else listening, ready to arrest you at the right time after you’d confessed everything. You have confessed everything, haven’t you? I rather think you must have, but everything is getting so foggy—”

  She had to squint to see Lawn at all, and even then the girl looked like something seen through the wrong end of an opera glass. There was a long silence, broken only by Lawn Abbott’s quick, irregular breathing and the pounding of Miss Withers’s heart. No, there was another sound, a soft purring, which had been, she realized, going on for some time. …

  Lawn noticed it too. “What’s that?” she cried.

  It came again, a definite, unmistakable snore. Miss Withers fought a losing battle to keep silent and then heard her lips form the words: “Why, my dear, that’s the inspector. I put him there, stretched out on a blanket, so he could overhear your confession. Remember what I said about somebody being here who wanted you? Well, he wants you, for murder—”

  The girl whipped to her feet, Joe Searles’s revolver gripped tight in her hand, and her face hardened into a death mask. Miss Withers tried to scream, but now that she really wanted to make a noise she found herself as mute as in a nightmare.

  “I know she’s going to lean over behind the divan and she’s going to shoot Oscar Piper, the poor dear tired man, and I have to sit here and watch it all because I can’t even stand up …” She tried manfully, but her legs refused to work. Then she fell sideways against the little table which held her coffee cup. There was the shuddering roar of an explosion somewhere inside her head, and the rush of many waters.

  Chapter Sixteen

  AFTER FORTY DAYS AND forty nights the rushing waters quieted and finally began to recede, leaving the highest peak of Miss Hildegarde Withers’s mind exposed to the clear cold air of consciousness. She was being heckled by a masculine voice which kept insisting, “Drink this, like a good girl.”

  Slowly she opened her eyes, saw that she was in her own bed and that Dr. Harry Radebaugh was leaning over her. It was dark outside, and the wind blew rain against the windowpane. “I will never again in my whole life drink anything but water,” she murmured with an effort that left her weak. She closed her eyes again.

  “But this will settle your stomach,” the doctor insisted. He lifted her shoulders, holding the glass to her lips. Too weak to put up further resistance, she downed the bitter draught.

  “Never you mind my stomach,” she begged. “Just give me something to keep the top of my head from coming off!”

  Dr. Radebaugh laughed. “You’re going to be all right.”

  “Drop that cheerful bedside manner, young man. I know how awful I feel. I’m numb all over. Where did that vixen shoot me?”

  “You’re not shot, Hildegarde.” It was the inspector’s voice, and she opened her eyes again to stare at him coldly.

  “Neither are you, I observe! Though you should have been, for going to sleep at the post!” She turned back towards the doctor. “Well, what have I got?”

  “Just the damnedest hangover that anybody ever had,” the medico told her. “Caused by an overdose of betapentalin.” He snapped shut his leather bag. “Give her two of those pills every hour on the hour, and she’ll be better in the morning.” He went briskly out of the room, his footsteps on the thick broadloom carpet sounding to Miss Withers like the tramp-tramp of an army.

  The inspector came over and perched on a chair near the head of her bed. From his breast pocket he produced a cigar, which he rolled around thoughtfully in his fingers. “If you remember, I didn’t get any sleep at all last night,” he reminded her. “And it was so hot down here behind your couch, and the blanket was so soft—”

  In spite of herself, the schoolteacher had to smile at the little-boy sheepish expression on his face. “Oscar?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll forget about your going to sleep at the switch if you’ll forget about my stealing your truth pills and then administering them to myself by mistake.”

  The wiry little Irishman nodded slowly. “It’s a bargain.”

  “Go on and smoke that awful-smelling rope if you want to.” She watched while he got the cigar burning, and then she sighed and leaned back on the pillow. “I suppose the girl got away and it’s all to do over again?”

  “Not quite,” he told her. “She got away, in a sense. When you fainted and crashed over chair and table and all, Lawn took a potshot at you, but she missed you a mile. Then she turned the gun on herself, but a rib deflected the bullet, so it missed the heart. We got her into an ambulance and down to the emergency hospital, but she only lived long enough to babble out what amounts to a confession.”

  Miss Hildegarde Withers, in spite of her hangover, sat up straight in bed. “Eureka! Or whatever it is they said in Greek. I was right, anyway, even though I was half-guessing. That girl really did commit two murders just so she could get Pat Montague, a young man who seemed to me quite ordinary.”

  The inspector took the cigar o
ut of his mouth and blew a beautiful smoke-ring. “I’m afraid there’s somebody who won’t agree with you about that,” he said. “I mean the girl who sat in her car all night outside the main gate at Camp Nivens to make sure Pat Montague wouldn’t get back inside to reenlist in the Army until she’d talked to him.”

  “Helen did that?”

  He nodded. Now it was Miss Withers’s turn to wear the sheepish expression. She confessed about the letters she was supposed to have returned to Pat Montague in jail, the letters with the secret messages that would have told him all he wanted to know. They must have worked out that code years ago, no doubt to keep as much of their secret as they could from the eyes of Lawn.

  “Well, Oscar, don’t keep me on pins and needles. Did Helen get there in time? Did they come to an understanding, or will Pat go back into uniform?”

  “You sound,” the inspector told her, “like the announcer on a soap-opera radio program. Relax, Hildegarde. All I know about Pat and Helen is that the Garden City police stopped a big sedan with both of them in it, and there was lipstick on his collar. They were looking for the city hall.”

  She sighed. “Then I seem to have played cupid in spite of myself! Pat has his Helen, and when a man wants a woman so badly I suppose he ought to get her, even if she didn’t have the stamina to wait for him. Everybody to his taste, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow. I must admit that in the beginning I was rooting for Lawn. There was an odd girl, a twisted, unhappy girl with just one idea in life! I still wonder why she went to pieces and started shooting. She might still have got away with it because she hadn’t actually done any confessing—”

  Inspector Oscar Piper shrugged his shoulders. “The truth was out, anyway. Maybe for the first time, while you were talking, the girl woke up to what a god-awful fool she’d been. People like that always make excuses for what they do and kid themselves along. You made a confession for her, and you probably didn’t mince any words. It’s over, anyway. Even Sheriff Vinge and the D.A. are happy as two clams in a tide pool, because the county is saved the expense of an investigation and trial and all that. They don’t even resent the fact that I brought in the prisoner after I was supposed to be off the case. As a matter of fact, everybody but you came out of this okay—”