I sat limp and shaken.
“Kirkland Anderson had no chance to live,” said the inspector, “after he had confided in Dorothy Fithian. Isn’t it plain to you, Miss Tilbury, why she took that gun? Isn’t it plain that Dorothy Fithian, instead of bringing Anderson to you as she had undoubtedly promised to do, intended to murder him?”
Inspector Chant strolled across the room, opened the connecting door into that other room and looked into the quiet place where Dorothy Fithian had spent so many unquiet hours.
“It’s a pity,” he said, “the walls can’t talk. They could tell us a tale of a bold and intricate woman. A clever woman too—a woman who had figured the last evening of her life to the minute and the second, a woman who thought that she had covered everything.”
He turned around. “Dorothy Fithian, of course, didn’t mean to hang for Anderson’s murder. I can’t prove this, but I’m convinced she meant Fred Brierly should hang for it—that she intended to transport Anderson to Broad Acres, shoot him and leave his body in the strawstacks along with Brierly’s gun. She had arranged—” and the inspector’s smile was grim, “that Fred Brierly should make that trip from the theater to the strawstacks. It was a deadly and poisonous frame-up that Dorothy had in mind—a double frame-up. Intricate, bold, and cunning—characteristic of Dorothy’s thinking. She kills Anderson and Fred Brierly takes the blame.”
Inspector Chant’s grim smile deepened. “Dorothy Fithian figured on everything except her own death. That,” and the inspector’s voice matched his smile, “must have been unexpected.”
“But who killed her?”
“I don’t know—yet.”
“But you know why she died?”
“It’s a fairly easy guess, Miss Tilbury. Consider the circumstances. Some other person was implicated in the plot to murder Anderson. Some other person was privy to Dorothy’s plans. We can know that positively. We can know because this person actually disguised himself in Dorothy’s clothes, met Anderson in her place, shot him and disposed of his body in the Potomac River.”
Excitement gleamed in the inspector’s eyes and warmed his tone. Excitement and conviction. His triumphant words came tumbling forth.
“Surely you see the answer to Dorothy’s death! My answer is that the unknown—hopelessly involved with Dorothy Fithian—seized the chance to rid himself not only of Kirkland Anderson, but of Dorothy, too. There’s ironic justice, if you have a taste for it! The set-up which Dorothy Fithian herself had skillfully figured out made her own murder simple. Her murderer was strictly an opportunist, a man willing to gamble all on the priceless opportunity with which his victim had presented him.”
The inspector had spoken swiftly, without hesitating or faltering and everything he said had the ring of truth. Now he hesitated.
“To name the unknown, Miss Tilbury, we must know what menace, what danger, Anderson presented to Dorothy Fithian and to someone else, what story he meant to tell you. Can’t you help? Can’t you suggest a possible answer to the riddle?”
Hopelessly I shook my head.
He looked at me strangely. He paraphrased a remark which Fred had made. “Dorothy Fithian was a creature of amazing determination. She came into this house, I am satisfied, for an objective in which some other person was involved. I am also satisfied that Dorothy Fithian would not have left the house until she believed her purpose was accomplished.”
I said, “Certainly her purpose in coming to Broad Acres was not to murder Kirkland Anderson. That is ridiculous.”
“So ridiculous,” said the inspector crisply, “that I’m surprised you mention it. Didn’t I just say that Kirkland Anderson endangered the project which brought Dorothy Fithian to Broad Acres? From her point of view, he must have been an interruption, an evil to be got swiftly from the way—”
“But,” I broke in, confused, “you said that when Dorothy Fithian left the house her purpose was accomplished.”
“I said she believed her purpose was accomplished. Which, Miss Tilbury, is quite a different thing.”
The inspector seated himself upon my bed, and linked his hands about his knees.
“Let’s try to get a picture of this person who murdered Dorothy Fithian. This person who was deeply involved in Dorothy’s cherished plan, but who nevertheless hated her. This person was endangered by Anderson as much as Dorothy was. But after Anderson and Dorothy were safely dead, let’s entertain the possibility that this double killer felt—free. He could now abandon the project which had brought him and Dorothy Fithian together. He could rehabilitate himself. He could cancel out the forces which Dorothy Fithian had set in motion before her death. Do you follow me?”
“I don’t,” I said. “I frankly don’t. What forces? What are you talking about?” I gave him a quick, sharp glance. “You could speak more clearly if you chose!”
He said patiently, “For various reasons I wish that you would figure this out yourself. I am not deliberately mystifying you. I say, in utter sincerity, that I do not know the name of Dorothy Fithian’s murderer. All I know is that he must have been involved in the plan which brought the girl to Broad Acres.”
“But you know what that plan was.”
“I can guess,” said the inspector, “on the basis of the letter she wrote—in your name—to Anderson. On the basis of her character.” He leaned slightly forward. “I want to put a rather curious question. Think before you answer. What one thing meant everything to Dorothy Fithian?”
“Money,” I said at once.
“Precisely. And who has money, Miss Tilbury?”
His question lingered in the air, sinister and disturbing. His gaze was disturbing, too. I think then somewhere in my subconscious mind the truth must have stirred. For although my room was warm, I shivered. I didn’t say a word.
“You have money, Miss Tilbury,” the inspector said quietly. “A great deal of money.”
Whatever had caused the involuntary shiver failed to reach my conscious mind. That tiny gust of fear was no more reasoning than the fear of an animal which scents a personal danger. I looked at the inspector, utterly bewildered.
“Dorothy Fithian had no chance whatever to obtain my money, or any part of it.”
“Don’t forget the unknown person, Miss Tilbury. Obviously if Dorothy Fithian had designs upon your fortune, her hopes would rest upon some other person.”
“My money is my own until my death.”
“Exactly!” said the inspector. The room was very still. The inspector’s voice had a still, hushed quality. “But typhoid fever is not only a very rare disease. It is very often fatal.”
“Typhoid fever,” I repeated with a sense of deadly shock. I tried to rise and found that my knees would not support my weight. “What are you suggesting?”
“I am suggesting, Miss Tilbury, that the bacteria which gave you typhoid fever came from Kirkland Anderson’s laboratory at Grosvenor Hospital. That Kirkland Anderson suspected it when he studied your case in late July. That he suspected even then that some member of your household was attempting to do away with you by means of typhoid fever germs.”
A cold and frightening clarity spread through my brain, and it was as though a great light shone there. Many things that had been baffling about my illness came back to me. Modern sanitation has virtually conquered typhoid fever, and yet I had been a victim of it. Typhoid fever is almost always epidemic, almost inevitably it strikes down several members of a family, and yet I alone had been stricken. Typhoid fever usually originates in polluted water, and yet Dr. Smedley, distressed and perplexed, had tested our drinking water and found it pure.
I remembered quite suddenly the milk bottle which Verity had filled with water from the subsidiary well, and I remembered Simon’s preoccupation in his medical books. Had Simon suspected too?
To the inspector I said, “Can you prove this?”
“I haven’t a Chinaman’s chance of proving it as things stand now. I doubt that Anderson himself had actual proof in the beginning. But
I believe, Miss Tilbury, that a conspiracy to cause your death—entered into by Dorothy Fithian and someone else—provides the background of the subsequent crimes. I can believe nothing else.”
I said slowly, painfully, “But the conspiracy failed. I had typhoid fever in mid-July and I recovered. My illness last summer cannot explain what happened on September 27th. It cannot explain the note which Dorothy left in the typewriter, the fires set in the strawstacks, the reason the murderer came to this bedroom.” I picked up the forged letter and looked at it. “Evidently Kirkland Anderson did not write to me until early September. Why did he wait two months before he attempted to communicate with me?”
“Something must have happened in early September which reawakened his suspicions.”
“What?”
The inspector did not reply. Instead he sighed heavily. “I don’t want to build up another theory, Miss Tilbury. A theory without fact or substance. I think I know the meaning of everything that occurred on September 27th. But a vital clue is missing. If I’m correct, the clue—the missing clue—which would make sense of everything, must be lodged somewhere in your memory. I cannot lead you or put it in your mind. I want you to sit here, look at this room, cast back your mind to the night of September 27th, and remember the room as it was then. You have told me repeatedly that nothing was out of place, or in any way unusual except the position of your typewriter. Yet if I am right—if my theory is correct—something else unusual occurred in your room that night. Something which I hope registered on your consciousness. Look around the room, Miss Tilbury, and think, think hard. I’ll come back tomorrow and hope that you have news for me.”
He picked up his hat and coat and started toward the door. He hesitated briefly there. “Another thing—when I return tomorrow I will want to see a copy of your will. I want to know who benefits by its terms.”
With that statement he departed, and I was left alone. I must have sat for fifteen minutes, motionless, dazed, and shaken. I knew even then that everything Inspector Chant had said was true, and I felt I could not bear the knowledge that one of my own had conspired with Dorothy Fithian to cause my almost fatal illness. I could not go down to breakfast, face my family and realize that someone among them had coldly, calculatingly fed me typhoid fever germs. Someone not brave enough to point a pistol to my head.
Dorothy Fithian might have obtained the germs, hers might have been the planning, but someone dear to me had actually infected me with the bacteria. I had been stricken before Dorothy came to Broad Acres.
A long time passed while I struggled with my agony of spirit. A long time passed before my mind returned to the riddle of September 27th. Dorothy’s object in coming to Broad Acres had been to bring about my death, and the inspector had said Dorothy left the house in the belief that her object was accomplished. I did not understand how that could be. I did not understand why the murderer had entered my bedroom. What clue did Inspector Chant believe to be lodged in my memory?
I looked around my softly lighted and cheerful bedroom. It seemed to me that everything was exactly as it had been on September 27th when we had come in to find Jane unconscious in the alcove. Except that my typewriter was on my desk instead of lying on the floor. I got up stiffly from my chair. I moved the typewriter from the desk and placed it on the floor. Then I remembered that the window on the trelliswork of English ivy had been wide open, and I crossed the room and opened it.
Again I surveyed my small domain. The bed was turned down exactly as it had been on September 27th. My dressing gown was carefully folded at the foot. Even the arrangement of toilet articles on my dressing table seemed the same.
I was satisfied that the scene was now complete. As though to prove the faultiness of human memory, Philomena rapped at the door and with her usual weary air brought in my nightly jug of tepid milk. I gestured her to put it on the bedside table.
I had completely overlooked the presence of my milk jug on September 27th, but dimly it came to me that the vacuum jug had been on the bedside table, and that I had moved it as Jane was lifted to the bed. As Philomena placed the jug on the table, I expected a sense of satisfaction which did not come. I frowned.
I said to Philomena, “You didn’t bring my milk in the usual jug.”
She wasn’t an expressive woman. “No,” she said.
“Please bring the other jug,” I said.
She gave me a look of dumb surprise, but went downstairs and returned with the usual jug. A metal affair, which I had purchased at the local drugstore.
“You didn’t bring the cap,” I said.
“The cap is lost.”
I felt a prickling of the spine. “What do you mean—it’s lost? Who lost it?”
“Not me, Miss Tilbury,” Philomena said sulkily. “I come in to clean one morning and the cap of the jug was gone. The jug wasn’t no good without a cap, so I had Thomas order another from the village.”
“What morning?” I said sharply. “How long has the cap of the vacuum jug been gone?”
Her sulky surprise increased. “Quite some time, Miss Tilbury.” She meditated. “Since you’re so particular, 1 reckon the vacuum cap was gone the morning—the morning after,” she said circuitously, “that Monday night.”
“Why didn’t you speak to me about it then?”
“I figured,” said Philomena tartly, “you’d mislaid the cap yourself. You’d drunk up all your milk.”
I had drunk no milk on the night of September 27th. I sent Philomena away. Moving very slowly I went to the open window. The ivy which leaped upward from the ground and clung like fingers to the house looked brown and dry as though frost had touched it. But the sluggish tide of close-meshed leaves, rattling in a thin, cool wind, concealed all signs of what I sought. I lighted a match and leaned out.
Some six feet above the ground the house was recessed to form the bay of a window directly below. The ivy had long since blotted out the lower window and surged triumphantly across the bay and toward the roof.
The cap of my vacuum jug lay on the bay of the window below, nearly obscured and almost covered by the English ivy. It had fallen there, I knew, on the night of September 27th, and I could think of only one reason why it had come to fall. I could think of only one reason why the milk I had not drunk had vanished from the vacuum jug.
I went downstairs and started outside. In the kitchen, at the ice box, I passed Ames. I must have had the dazed expression of a sleepwalker. But Ames was thoroughly engaged in demolishing a chicken planned for next day’s luncheon. He started guiltily, then grinned.
“Thank God it’s you, Aunt Margaret. I thought it might be Verity. Won’t you join me?”
“No,” I said. “The cap of my vacuum bottle fell out the window and I want it.”
He looked astonished. “Can’t it wait until morning?”
“I want it now.”
Still puzzled but somewhat amused, Ames abandoned is drumstick to follow me from the house. I had provided myself with a flashlight and I managed to indicate the position of the vacuum bottle cap, completely invisible from where we stood. Ames was strong and acrobatic but the ivy vines would not support his weight. He went and got a ladder, leaned it against the bay and climbed. Presently, after considerable fumbling and rustling among the leaves, he located the cap and tossed it down.
The night was moonless. In the darkness we were hidden from one another, but the boy’s voice sounded uncertain and perplexed.
“The thing feels rusty, Aunt Margaret.”
“I daresay it does,” I said.
“I thought—didn’t you just drop it out the window?”
“No,” I said.
Ames descended from the ladder. “Something queer is going on, Aunt Margaret. You can’t tell me—What are you looking at?” he asked then, a little shrilly.
I had turned the flashlight upon a French lilac bush which disputed possession of the ground directly beneath my window with the tangled, twisted roots of the ivy. The French lilac bush, like t
he lower leaves of the ivy, was browned and dry and punctured with tiny holes. The French lilac bush was dead.
I stared stupidly at the shriveled leaves of the lilac bush, I stared at the cap of the vacuum bottle. I had found the missing clue—the clue the inspector wanted. With that clue two certainties emerged from the confusions and complexities of September 27th. Two certainties—amazing and strange and contradictory.
On September 27th a second attempt had been made to end my life. Dorothy Fithian had made it. On that fatal evening, before she walked downstairs, she had placed some virulent poison in my milk. That was why she had believed her purpose was accomplished. She had confidently expected me to drink the milk.
But someone had upset her plan. After Dorothy was dead, after Kirkland Anderson had been sent to a watery burial, someone had entered my bedroom. Someone had seized the vacuum bottle and poured the deadly draught of milk out the window before it could reach my lips.
The unknown could only be Dorothy’s confederate, and her murderer. It was a fantastic situation. As I stood there I realized that I owed my life to a triple killer. A killer who had plotted with Dorothy that I should die, and then changed his mind. But I had no idea as to the identity of that person.
I broke one of the punctured leaves from the lilac bush. Again Ames spoke uncertainly. “What’s wrong with the bush, Aunt Margaret? It looks dead.”
Quite deliberately I examined the dried and ruined leaf. I said, “Some new kind of pest must have taken hold. Remind me to speak to Thomas tomorrow.”
He wasn’t satisfied, but silently he followed me back into the house.
25
I hope never again to spend a night like that last night before the apprehension of our killer. I knew the plot or almost all of it. I knew that what had led up to all the murders had been a botched conspiracy to bring about my own death. A conspiracy which had been entered into by Dorothy Fithian and someone else. Someone who would gain by my death and share with her. Someone close to me. But I could not name that person.
The Strawstack Murders Page 23
