The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope

by C. W. Grafton

  “That’s right. I knew if my thinking was straight Mrs. Harper was in considerable danger. I had guards posted at the door in an effort to ensure her safety until I could figure the thing out. Jolley seemed the most likely, but I was stupid and I couldn’t get around the fact he was in Overton the day before and came in on the train that didn’t leave Overton until after both Harper and Miss Katie were murdered. By the time I heard about Janet’s airplane, it was too late. Miles took care of both of us while I was just starting back to town and by the time we got out of that damn cabin the work was done. It’s funny how you can figure out the tough parts and trip on some little silly thing like that. I even came down from Louisville in a plane myself and should have been able to figure, but I checked with the airport and all chartered planes were accounted for and the private plane just never occurred to me. When I drew up the wills I was afraid something might happen to Mrs. Harper. Someone had listened in on my conference with her and knew there were supposed to be two of them. I drew them both just alike so that if anything happened, twenty-five years and a couple of million dollars would not be wasted. Mrs. Harper was smart. She read both wills and knew exactly what was on my mind and went right through with it. Jolley knew the first will was supposed to give everything to Janet and since he still had an idea she would eventually marry him, he saw a neat way to keep the whole thing in the family while he was getting himself out of his financial jam at the same time.”

  “Aren’t you even going to look at these papers?”

  “Yes, I guess so. You say there’s nothing here?”

  “Not as far as I can see. What was it supposed to be? I never have understood that either.”

  I squirmed around in the bed and my side didn’t come apart as far as I could tell so I said: “Do you suppose there’s anything wrong with putting a couple of pillows behind my back and letting me sit up for a while? Get me another cigarette while you’re at it.” It felt much better sitting up. The package was tied up in brown paper and when I opened it there was nothing but a gray ledger such as the drugstore down on the corner might use. The thing was full of neat meticulous entries in regular amounts covering deposits and withdrawals beginning in May 1915. There wasn’t a thing to identify where the money came from or where it went to. There were no loose papers. I examined the backs of the ledger carefully but couldn’t find any evidence that they had been tampered with. I sat and stared at the thing.

  “Your father was a careful man,” I said. “He kept a strict account of every penny he got from Harper and he was careful to make the entries so that in the event of his death, this book wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone who didn’t know the facts. Harper didn’t know whether your father had been careful or not. He wanted to make sure that his secret didn’t get out. His one big mistake was in offering you much too high a price for your stock. If he had offered to take it off your hands at the market or maybe a little better, the chances are you would have accepted his help and thought nothing of it, but he was so afraid the one scandal in his life would come out while he had to face it that he overplayed the thing and not only offered you something too good to be true, but made such a point of wanting to get all the records that naturally you got suspicious. Yet somehow I can’t believe that this book was all he wanted to get his hands on. It doesn’t quite ring true.”

  “You’ve had an idea all this time and you’ve been looking for something,” said Ruth. “Jolley was looking for something too. He searched our house twice and it must have been just as hard for him to locate the lockbox at the bank as it was for us. William Jasper Harper also had something in his mind. What have you been looking for?”

  “Maybe I’m wrong, but this is the way I have it figured out. Before he was married, William Jasper Harper had an affair with Catherine Murdoch. He was probably in love with her—a little school teacher up in the city whom he probably went off and spent weekends with. He was a big shot from a family that practically owned this town and controlled half of this end of the State. For generations the family had been presidents of this and that and directors of everything else and trustees of churches and colleges and patrons of the Red Cross and the children’s hospital. Whether he ever intended to marry her, no one will ever know, but I guess he was young and hotheaded and thought he could postpone his problems. He wasn’t going to be able to postpone them very long because little Catherine Murdoch got pregnant and he must have been worried to death. Then there’s an explosion in the house one day and a fire, probably accidental. Katie is horribly burned and her sister, Phoebe, gets her to the hospital and then rushes her off by train to Louisville with a doctor in attendance. Maybe they were rushing to a specialist. Maybe not. I haven’t had a chance to go over this part of it with Phoebe, but the adoption papers didn’t say anything about a birth certificate and it sounds to me as if she was rushed out of town because they were afraid the baby was going to be born prematurely and if it was born in the hospital, there would have to be a birth certificate and people would find out about it and Katie Murdoch would never live it down. The baby was either born on the train or in a private residence in Louisville and the doctor probably listened to reason in the form of a sizable chunk of William Jasper Harper’s bank account. Once he took the money and conveniently forgot what had happened, he couldn’t bring up the subject later without confessing to his own professional misdoing.”

  “Well, where does that get us?” Ruth asked. “I’m a long way from following you.”

  “Well, Catherine Murdoch didn’t die. She and Tim lived in Louisville. Probably not with Phoebe or I would have run across their trail when I was looking for her. Catherine was horribly disfigured and couldn’t make a living any more and I guess they lived off Harper and were satisfied with the arrangement for a while until it must have occurred to them that as every year went by they would have a weaker and weaker case to present if Harper ever got the idea he wanted to get out from under. Furthermore if Harper died, they didn’t know whether they could ever get anything from the estate to take care of Katie and Tim. So there must have been something put in writing. John McClure might have been satisfied to adopt Tim without any written guaranties but I can’t figure Miss Katie giving him up unless she were absolutely sure that he would be provided for permanently.

  “In the meantime, William Jasper Harper has got himself married to a blue blood. Before he did that he could have married Catherine Murdoch, burns and all, and things would have been bad enough, but once he was married and had a little girl of his own, he was in a worse predicament than ever. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth about it but there are cases in the law books where a contract is made to prevent the institution of bastardy proceedings. That is a court proceeding for the purpose of proving the paternity of a child and forcing the father to support it. Such a contract is perfectly valid and can be enforced against the man’s estate so long as it doesn’t try to give everything to the illegitimate child to the exclusion of any natural children.

  “Now look at it this way. William Jasper Harper makes a will at the same time the adoption is perfected. But it isn’t the kind of will that Catherine Murdoch would have been satisfied with because it makes no provision at all for Tim but leaves everything to Mrs. Harper. We find that Mrs. Harper made a will at the same time leaving everything to her husband. It can’t mean but one thing. Harper wanted to keep scandal away from his family as long as he could, even in the event of his own death. So he makes a clean breast of it to his wife and she gets in on the agreement. They each make wills leaving everything to each other and when one of them dies the other is to make a will providing for Tim and Janet on an equal basis. This postpones the evil day until both of them are dead which is all they can hope for. If the survivor fails to make the kind of will provided for in the agreement, the agreement itself can be produced and enforced so that the same object is achieved. This means that Tim is going to be taken care of as long as that contract is in writi
ng and nobody loses it. Now do you begin to get the idea?”

  “I think I do. But does a contract like that have to be in writing? Couldn’t the people who were there prove it by their testimony?”

  “Yes, they could,” I told her, “but in order to testify, my little chickabiddy, you have to be alive. Hillman Jolley didn’t know whether there was an agreement in writing or not, but either way he had to close the mouths of all the witnesses—at least all of whom he knew about. You see, as accountant for Harper Products Company, he probably advised with William Jasper Harper about personal income tax matters and returns as well as those of the company. He stumbled on to some of the essential facts and drew some pretty intelligent conclusions and inferences but whether he picked up his information from Harper’s personal records or whether he figured them out from observing the way John McClure and his family lived, probably we’ll never know. At any rate, he was feeling around in the dark. When I was questioning him just before his death, I gathered that he didn’t know about the Murdoch girls and had never identified Miss Katie as being Tim’s mother. From the facts before him, he must have figured that Harper himself and probably his wife were parties to the agreement. Of course, John McClure had to be a party since he was going to assume the burden of caring for Tim. It seems almost certain that your mother knew about it too, because you can hardly adopt someone without your wife knowing a good deal about it. If there were any other parties or witnesses, Jolley could only hope that they had disappeared completely or were dead. He didn’t know who the mother was and he didn’t know where to start looking for her. Old Harper must have been pretty careful not to have any such information lying around, since he proceeded with extraordinary care in every other respect.

  “Now we can go on from there. Your mother has been dead for a number of years, which eliminates one of his problems. He accounts for your father and no one would ever have suspected if he hadn’t tried the same thing on me and failed. He would probably have figured out some very inconspicuous way of removing Mr. and Mrs. Harper from the picture, except that his financial difficulties on the stock transaction forced his hand and he had to act on the spur of the moment or lose everything he had spent three years working for. Miss Katie would, I think, still be living but she showed up at the wrong place at the most unfortunate time. She kept a sharp watch on you and Tim and it looks like somehow she found out that Tim was going out to have a showdown with Harper so she tagged along to make sure he wasn’t mistreated.”

  Ruth interrupted and said: “She didn’t find out somehow. She knew for a certainty. She was at our house when Tim got to discussing the thing and she did her best to sidetrack him. But Tim’s got quite a temper and naturally he was curious about his own past. He flung out of the house determined to raise hell until he found out everything Harper knew. Miss Katie was frightfully upset and left the house immediately. I guess she followed Tim out there.”

  “That fits,” I observed. “Tim came out through the French windows and walked down the drive to where his car was parked on the street. He must have passed right by Miss Katie and probably she didn’t speak up because she was afraid he would either resent her meddling or jump to the conclusion which suggested itself to me within twenty-four hours after I got to Harpersville. While she was waiting for Tim to get clear away from there, she notices Jolley and stays to see what is going on. The rest you know from what Jolley said himself, if you heard the story. He killed Harper, saw Miss Katie leave, followed her and murdered her before she could notify the police.”

  “You mentioned Phoebe Murdoch,” said Ruth, “who’s she?”

  “Never mind. The story’s over and the book’s closed. You’ll never have any trouble from her and the less you know about it the better.”

  Ruth went over to the window and stood and looked out for several minutes. Then she came back and stood by my bed again and looked down at me. “You know, Gil, it all seems like a nightmare. I guess Mr. Harper thought he was doing the right thing, or the easy thing, at the time, but when you stand in the way of the truth and try to keep secrets about people’s lives, all you do is take a little trickle of trouble that would run off down the hill and be forgotten, and build it up behind a dam until the pressure gets too great and the dam breaks and everybody in the path of it is obliterated. Until a couple of weeks ago, life went on so quietly and happily and now we’ve all been caught in the maelstrom and those of us who have survived are tossed up on the banks to treat our wounds and get over them the best we can. It’s been a terrible thing, but all we can do is put it behind us and try to start living again. I’m making my start right now and I’m going to look forward and not back and try to cover up the horror that we’ve all been through. I would like to think that Tim’s secret is safe forever but your reasoning has been perfect and it looks as if there’s bound to be a written contract somewhere that will bob up to haunt us tomorrow or next week or next month or maybe our children after us.”

  I took her hand and said: “No, I doubt it. Jolley couldn’t find it. Harper didn’t know where it was and we haven’t been able to find it. Your father knew its importance and wouldn’t have tucked it away any old place where it couldn’t be found for Tim’s protection. Of course, it’s possible that with the passage of all these years the thing began to lose its significance to him. Tim has grown up and he’s a big fellow with a bright mind, able to take care of himself and make his own way in the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if your father didn’t simply destroy the instrument, preferring to let Tim stand on his own feet rather than take the chance of having somebody discover the one thing which might hurt him in the eyes of his friends. I think we can assume that the written agreement is no longer in existence. Take my word for it and don’t worry your pretty head.”

  She lit a cigarette for me and I took two or three drags in silence. At length she sighed and smiled at me and said: “Well, Janet will be coming back in a minute with something to eat and I expect you’ll want to be alone with her. I don’t know what to say to you so I won’t try except that I want you to know that the door of our home will always be open and anything we ever have, or all of it, is yours for the taking and you mustn’t even bother to ask.”

  She walked on out and closed the door. I waited until I was fairly certain she wouldn’t be back for something she might have forgotten and then picked up the gray ledger again. Janet had left her pencil on the table by the bed. I took the ledger, opened it wide and then bent the covers back until they touched. That made the part of the book that connects the two covers stick out. I took the pencil and pushed around down in the hole and a piece of paper which had been rolled into a cylinder and squashed flat, fell out on the bed beside me. I opened it just long enough to tell that the search was at an end, then I struck a match, set fire to it and nursed the flame until every particle of it was destroyed.

  I was glad it didn’t take a minute longer. There was a great clattering of the elevator door and then a regular procession came into my room.

  First, there was the nurse, with curves sticking out in every direction, as usual, and a table which she set up with a flourish. After that came a colored waiter with a big grin and an enormous tray which was simply hopping up and down with delicious smells. Janet brought up the rear with the color back in her cheeks again and her slightly horsey face transfigured by a gorgeous smile.

  Janet had already paid for the meal and I let her tip the waiter without a murmur. I didn’t know what the future was going to bring but if Janet had her way, I didn’t want to start any bad habits.

  The waiter and the nurse made a discreet withdrawal to positions prepared in advance and I saw that the table was set for two.

  I didn’t know what to say so I fell back on inanities and said brightly: “Well, I see you’re eating with me.”

  “Yes,” said Janet, “you might as well get used to it.”

  It was pretty awkward trying to eat sideways fr
om the bed and I thought it would be a lot more convenient if my dinner had been on a tray, but I was beginning to get the idea that Janet was a very determined sort of creature and as long as she was paying for it, I thought it would be better to keep my damn mouth shut.

  It was a glorious meal. When it was all gone and I had polished off my third cup of coffee, she said: “Happy?”

  “I suppose I will be. Right now there’s one thing that’s worrying me. You gave me a few bad moments out at Sheely’s and I want to know the truth. Either you take an awful long time in the bathroom or else you made a telephone call. If you made a telephone call, it doesn’t escape me that about the right time elapsed and then someone was waiting outside and did his best to bend some of my skull bones.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Janet, “so that’s the way you figured it.”

  “Well, all right. Did you or didn’t you make a phone call?”

  Janet Harper blushed and looked away and then she looked back at me and her eyes had a twinkle in them. “You really want to know?”

  “I did a minute or two ago but I don’t like the expression on your face and if it’s all the same to you, we can skip it.”

  “You could have skipped it a couple of minutes ago but you have a nasty, suspicious mind and if you don’t get an answer, you’ll be consumed by the poison of curiosity for the rest of your life, so I’ll tell you. I made a phone call but it wasn’t the kind of call you thought it was. It made me madder than hell. I called to find out whether you can get a marriage license in the middle of the night and the county clerk’s office wouldn’t answer. I guess the telephone people are used to that sort of thing because some little bitch in the telephone exchange had the nerve to break in and call me Dearie and tell me I would have to be patient until morning.”