The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope

by C. W. Grafton

  I knew exactly what I was going to see and when I turned on the light there she was in a queer position on the floor with her throat cut literally from one ear to the other and blood in every direction. It was a ghastly sight and the first thing I did was to duck into the bathroom and vomit. Then I went back and looked and you didn’t have to have a medical report to know that she was one of the deadest persons who ever lived.

  I took out my handkerchief, wiped the switch carefully and turned the light off. I retraced my steps all over the house trying to remember exactly what I might have touched and wiping every spot I could remember. In the kitchen I wiped off the light bulb and then turned to the door knob. I could have sworn I had left the kitchen door open when I came in. It was not open now.

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  I reached up and turned off the light bulb as quickly as I would turn off the electric chair if I were sitting in it and you gave me the switch. Then I backed quickly into the living room and stood there and listened. I don’t suppose it is physically possible for your heart to be actually in your throat but something was in mine and it was beating loud and fast.

  There was no breeze blowing through the house and frankly I didn’t think that a rat had closed the door. I’m as brave as the next man facing things that I can see and understand, but I was not very enthusiastic about playing games in the dark with somebody fresh from a human barbecuing. I wouldn’t kid you. Me and my knee joints were plain scared and I felt clammy all over.

  Even in such moments you can do a certain amount of figuring after your mind gets over its first numb paralysis. I had just been in every room of the house with the light on and I was sure that whoever had closed the door was on the outside. The person took form in my mind as a shapeless something with dripping fangs and a bloody knife which I called “It.”

  What was It doing? If It had gone about Its business, I was wasting time and if you had asked me where I wanted to waste time I certainly would have told you somewhere else. If It had not gone about Its business, then it was very certain that Its business was me and you can imagine what a comforting thought that was.

  I almost wished a door would open and footsteps would come toward me because then I would know what to back away from and what to do. As it was, the silence was so terrific that I could have cut it into blocks and walled myself in with it.

  I wondered what luck I would have trying to lock the doors and sit tight. One of these days dawn would happen but then maybe I would never live to see it. Dawn is sometimes pink and lovely and I am quite esthetic by nature and the thought of not seeing it one more time and indeed a whole lot of times after that was quite upsetting.

  Well, you can’t stand in one spot forever. Acorns do it and get to be oak trees and leaves grow all over them and by and by they can’t move at all. I ran over the floor plan of the house mentally and thought about the windows, and I was sure they were all shut. Raising a window would make a noise so that was out. There were only two doors, one from the front porch into the living room and one from the kitchen into the back porch. If It was waiting for me, It would wait outside the back door in the first place but I had turned off the light and hadn’t come out, so if It could put two and two together, It was probably waiting for me at the front door. I picked up my feet as carefully as I could and took them over to the front door and listened. After a while I was sure I could hear something breathing. I will bet you even money that I didn’t breathe in or out for as long a time as you would spend taking the dog for a walk. Then I made up my mind. If It was at the front door, then the safest place for me was outside of the back door as fast as I could get there.

  Having made that decision, I didn’t wait. I ran across the room toward the kitchen door, tripped on something and fell heavily, scrambled to my feet, found the back door, took two steps and jumped off of the porch. I could hear light footsteps running down the walk by the side of the house and I struck out across the back yard. It was dark as pitch and after about four steps I tripped and fell again and almost at once something fell over me and nearly knocked my breath out. Before I could even roll over, something whistled past my ear and hit the ground and then a very hard object hit me on the head somewhere and I went out like a candle.

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  The world was revolving and voices came out of the whirlpool in little snatches that did not make sense. I was dizzy and sick at my stomach and pains shot all over me in every direction. I opened my eyes and when I could focus them I saw that I was in a neat bare room in a clean white bed with a nurse who had curves in the right places bending over me watchfully. I signaled for something to be sick in and she produced an object and I put in it whatever I had not put into the bathroom at Miss Katie’s house. The effort made the room go round and round again and when I sat up and put my feet out I was as wobbly as a kid just learning to walk. The nurse said:

  “Lie down. The doctor says you aren’t to move.”

  “Tell the doctor I’ll come back in a day or two and lie down all he wants.”

  I stood up holding to the end of the bed to keep from falling. I didn’t have a thing on except one of these hospital nightshirt arrangements that hangs down to your knees. I said:

  “Get my clothes.”

  “I won’t do any such thing. You’re lucky you aren’t dead. Get back in that bed before I call an orderly. And don’t wrestle with me. You shouldn’t exert yourself.” She took hold of my arm and wanted to help me get back in bed, but I shook loose.

  “Later,” I said firmly. “I wouldn’t get back in that bed if you promised to get in with me. It’ll take more than you and an orderly so you better bring two of them.”

  There was a closet in the corner of the room and I wobbled over and pulled it open and sure enough there were my clothes. I put my pants on first without bothering about underwear since a man without pants cannot make himself very useful in the world. The nurse ran out of the room. I shoved my feet into my shoes. I slipped on my shirt and the coat right on top of it and I don’t suppose I was over ten steps behind her. I can’t tell you yet what direction I took or how I missed the hospital authorities, but pretty soon I found myself in a furnace room tucking in my shirttails and feeling very woozy indeed. I didn’t have to worry about my hair because there was a bandage around it.

  A man in coveralls came in from the bright sunlight outside and stared at me and said:

  “My great aunt Jezebel!”

  I gathered that I was not such a beautiful sight. I said: “Nice day, isn’t it,” and walked past him and went through the door he had come in by. It was the brightest sunlight I had ever seen and it stabbed into my eyes like a pair of knitting needles. I was in a back yard with a pile of coal and there was a cinder drive. I didn’t know where it led to but I walked on it and listened to the cinders crunching under my feet and it was like hearing a sound from another world. Pretty soon my feet didn’t crunch any more and I saw I was in an alley with concrete underneath my feet and I kept walking and blinking my eyes and brushing up against objects of various kinds until I ran into a fire hydrant and found a curb and sat down on it. I could hear a car coming along the street. It stopped near me and I could hear as from a distance some questions and ejaculations which I didn’t try to understand.

  My tongue was big and dry and tied in a square or reef knot, like what you tie when you are a boy scout to get a merit badge. Someone raised my head and I was glad to have help because I could not have done it for myself. With a great effort I said: “Harper. Take me to the Harper home. Don’t argue. It’s important.” A dark brown feeling started up from my heels and turned slightly purplish as it came up my body. There was a tingling feeling all over me. Two people had me under the armpits and were taking me toward the car and the last thing I saw was my feet dragging on the street like a dead man’s feet. My neck was not holding my head up as a good neck should do and I gave up trying.

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  I guess
I was not unconscious more than a couple of minutes because when I came to they were trying to get me out of the car and we were right back in front of the hospital again.

  “Hell’s fire,” I said with considerable heat, “don’t take me in there. That’s where I just came from.”

  “You need a doctor and you are going to get one whether you like it or not.”

  “I don’t need a doctor and I am not going to have one. I was so anxious to get out I even left my underwear. Look and see if you don’t believe me. If you won’t take me out to the Harper place, get out of my way and I’ll walk.”

  My head was much clearer than it had been before and I got out of the car and started walking. The two men stood there looking after me and then got in and drove along beside me.

  “OK, OK,” said the driver wearily, “only instead of walking in the wrong direction, get in and we’ll take you there.”

  I got into the back seat and said, “Thanks a lot. If I’m dead when I get there I absolve you of all responsibility and you can call a cheap undertaker.”

  The news about Miss Katie was, of course, all over town and I learned that she had been discovered and me along with her because someone had tripped over the telephone cord in the living room and what with all the excitement over the death of William Jasper Harper the telephone operator had told the chief of police and he had sent someone around to investigate. I thought it was better not to say that it was I who tripped over the telephone although I was glad that I had. It seems that both Tim and Ruth McClure had vanished.

  It was then about seven o’clock in the morning. As we swung through town a train was just pulling in from the north and as we passed the station I saw a man get off almost before the train had come to a stop. I asked the driver to pull over to the curb and then I thanked him and got out and told him I had changed my mind about going to the Harper place and did I owe him anything.

  He said I didn’t and I doubled back to the station platform and followed Hillman Jolley to the taxi stand. When he got into a cab and said he wanted to go out to the residence of William Jasper Harper, I got in right behind him and said: “Just got in on the train I see.”

  From the look he gave me you could tell that if I had asked his permission to get in with him the answer would have been “No.” I had never met Hillman Jolley and he had never met me and he didn’t know who I was from a hole in the ground. I let him stare at me quite a while and then I said: “My name is Gilmore Henry. I stole some things from your office in Louisville but I sent them all back and I guess you got them. There is no use calling the police because they are all at the place we are going to.”

  When I mentioned my name and what I had done, he jumped and got red in the face but he didn’t say anything. I didn’t see any reason to be unpleasant so I borrowed one of his cigarettes and asked him for a match and took two or three drags that tasted good.

  “Come all the way from Louisville?” I said.

  “No. From Overton. I went down to Overton yesterday morning and then last night I heard about the awful thing that happened down here and being a friend of the family and a business associate I jumped on the first train to see if I could help Janet.”

  “Janet?”

  “Miss Harper.”

  “Old friends?”

  At first he was annoyed as if what business was it of mine, but then he put on an expression of considerable dignity.

  “That would be an understatement. Miss Harper and I have reached an understanding.”

  I was surprised and showed it. I didn’t know that Hillman Jolley was in the field and from the amount of running back and forth that Mr. James Mead had been doing I had somewhere distinctly gotten the idea that he was having things his own way, although I must admit that my impression was gathered only from Mead himself and could have been prejudiced. I muttered something about congratulations and then shut my big mouth and began thinking about how, if at all, this new piece of information might affect things that were on my mind.

  When we pulled up on the Harper drive, I let my companion pay the cab driver because it was cheaper that way. Right in front of us was a gleaming Buick roadster and I recognized the license plates and knew that Mr. James Mead was on the premises. I didn’t pay any attention to Jolley but simply walked through the front door giving the guard a dirty look and getting one in return. I knocked on the dining-room door and stalked in without waiting for an answer. The sheriff, the chief and Mead were conferring over the table. They all looked at me in surprise and I gathered they thought and maybe even hoped that I had been buried by this time.

  The sheriff said: “Well, I didn’t expect to see you for a long time but if the doc let you out of the hospital, you can’t be in such bad shape and we’ll start in right now. What were you doing in Miss Byrnes’s back yard and what do you know about Miss Byrnes anyway?”

  “They tell me she’s dead.”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  “Look,” I said, “Did you find a busted basket full of busted eggs on the other side of the drive last night or this morning?”

  The sheriff and the chief and James Mead exchanged puzzled glances and then all of them looked at me.

  “Yes, we did,” the chief told me. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I don’t know much about this town and maybe I have a way of jumping to conclusions. Every time I’ve seen Miss Katie she has been lugging a basket of eggs around with her and she sells eggs to William Jasper Harper, among others. The basket might have meant Miss Katie was behind the bushes and saw something that happened here last night. Farfetched idea, but I thought it was worth a tumble. I went to see Miss Katie and I never got there. What was I hit with?”

  “A monkey wrench wrapped in a dish towel belonging to the McClures. You never got into the house?”

  “You didn’t find me there, did you?”

  “Wait a minute,” the sheriff broke in. “One thing at a time. Where did you find out about the basket in the first place? We didn’t find it until thirty minutes after Tim McClure—er—shot his way out. By that time we couldn’t find you around. When we found you, you were in Katie Byrnes’s back yard out cold. There was nothing in the newspaper about the basket. Give.”

  I drew in a deep breath. “That’s easy. The place was alive with coppers and I didn’t see what I could contribute. I got out on the road to town and Tim McClure came by in a car and picked me up.”

  The sheriff jumped up and made a strangling noise in his throat. “And you didn’t tell us?” he shouted. “You knew he was a fugitive. Talk fast or I will have you under arrest.”

  “Don’t get excited. He had a gun. Just how far do you think I would have gotten on my way to a telephone?”

  “He didn’t have a gun.”

  “My mistake. I thought he—er—shot his way out. Those were your very words.”

  The chief said: “Damn your impudence, Henry. We’re not here to argue. Don’t change the subject.” Then an idea came to him and his eyes narrowed. “So Tim McClure was with you at Miss Katie’s. That connects. The dish towel from his own kitchen. Now we are getting somewhere.”

  “No, you’re wrong. Tim put me out in front of his place and told me to beat it and keep my mouth shut. He said he was going to find Ruth himself. He didn’t think any of you were very smart. I didn’t think it was the time to reason with him and I wanted to talk to Miss Katie anyway so I headed across the street and was going to use the phone over there.”

  They thought that over for awhile and then the sheriff said: “Could be. I won’t say I believe it but the story is good enough to hold until we see if we can check it. Now about the basket. You keep changing the subject. Let’s get back to the basket.”

  I was getting impatient but I was too close to being arrested myself to turn around and walk out. I said: “Tim said he landed in the basket when he jumped th
e second row of bushes. He had egg all over him. I touched his pants leg and thought it was blood. The significance of it didn’t dawn on either of us for a while. Maybe it didn’t dawn on him at all. Now let me ask a question. Two or three of them. First, where is Ruth McClure and why is she there? Second, where is William Jasper Harper’s will? We ought to look at that right away and see who profits by his death. Third, will you give me five minutes alone with Mr. Mead?”

  Mead broke in at that point. “The will idea naturally occurred to me, not only for its possible criminal implications but also in my capacity as attorney for the family and for the estate. I got Harper’s secretary out of bed in the middle of the night and she said she thought his will was with some other papers in the safe out at the plant office. We went out together and got it half an hour ago. I was just going to open it with you when Henry came in.” He had a briefcase with him and he was unstrapping it as he talked. He brought out a long brown envelope sealed with wax and handed it to the sheriff.

  “Just a minute,” I said leaning over and taking the envelope out of the sheriff’s hands. “Before we open it, let’s satisfy ourselves that no one has been tampering with it.”

  The chief grabbed at the envelope and jumped up and bellowed, “Damn it, I’ve had about enough of your arrogance. You’re getting in my hair and in a minute I’m going to comb you out and mash you between my thumbs. We’ll do all the looking that needs to be done. Give it here.”