Which explains the oasis of neatness in which it operates. When I come in the door, now, I generally register—there’s a flicking light on the machine, nag, nag, nag—if there is a message. This morning, there was.
I prodded the machine a few times—I’ve never actually worked out how it functions, but I keep hitting buttons until it starts to spew out messages—and out came the reedy tones of the Rev. Wylie.
“Carlton,” he said, “this is Ephraim Wylie. Please meet me at the church as soon as possible. There is something I must tell you. The time now is 11 a.m.”
You note that “The time now, etc.” This is what you’re supposed to say when you get confronted by one of these machines, but nobody ever does. The Rev. had though, and I realized that he must have left the message on my machine about fifteen minutes ago. I ran up to the church. What the devil—pardon, heck—could he want? True, I had not weeded the gardens in front of the church this week—one of my duties—but he never summoned me into his presence for sins like that. Usually, he would just kind of press my hand as I came out of the church and murmur, “Too busy this week, were we, Carlton, to do our Christian duty?” leaving me feeling like a piece of cheese.
No, this had to be something a little more important, but what it could be, I couldn’t imagine. I got to the church in about two minutes, and spotted the Rev. as soon as I came in the door at the top of the main aisle. He was sitting in the Flannery box pew, the very one the late Ernie Struthers had occupied, briefly. He had his head down, and appeared to be praying, so I tiptoed down the aisle, and slid into the pew immediately behind him.
We sat there. He kept praying, and I kept sitting. After a couple of minutes, I began to get fidgety. I mean, dammit, he had asked me to meet him here, so why did he choose to go into a marathon prayer session? Could I interrupt him? I mean, what if he’d just established contact, so to speak, and along I came and broke the connection?
I picked up a copy of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer from the little shelf in front of me. Not the new prayer book, you understand, the one where God is bit of a wimp, and full of forgiveness, but the old one, where—to cite but one instance of celestial tough-mindedness—“the wrath of God is upon him that removeth a neighbour’s landmark.” I wondered what they had replaced that with in the new version, and reflected that I would probably never know. We don’t go for new versions in Bosky Dell.
This was getting ridiculous. I decided to draw the Rev’s attention to my presence, even at the risk of a lightning bolt.
I coughed.
No response.
I whispered, “Psst . . . Rev. Wylie.”
No response.
Finally, I reached out and touched the back of his shoulder, very gently.
“Psst . . . Rev. Wylie, it’s. . . . Yikes!”
The “Yikes” was not a whisper, more of a blood-curdling shriek. When I touched his shoulder, the Rev. kind of slumped sideways, and then forward, and then, with a dull thump, toppled completely off the bench and onto the floor. To leap out of my pew, open the door to the box pew, and slide inside didn’t take me a minute. Call it ten minutes. I knew what I was going to find, didn’t I? Another corpse. I thought, briefly, of nipping quietly out the door, but something told me that leaving behind a note to explain that I’d decided to move to another country and take up another life would not establish my innocence. I sat there, trying to decide what to do.
I looked down, for inspiration, at the Book of Common Prayer in my hands, which informed me that “Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen,” a thing I hadn’t known before. So, you see, the day wasn’t entirely wasted. I picked up the leaflet from the previous Sunday and stared at that. I learned that life is abuzz with excitement these days in the Mother’s Guild. Mary Miller, to name but one fascinating incident, recently reported on “Some Aspects of Christian Mothering” to an appreciative Wednesday evening audience.
Finally, I worked up the nerve to get up and go round to the front of the Flannery pew. Gingerly, I opened the door to the pew—it squeaked, causing me to shed about ten years’ growth—quietly, I eased onto the seat and bent down to look at the body. Then I jumped about seven feet in the air as a voice in my ear said, “What the hell is this?”
It was Hanna, of course, large as life and twice as bumptious.
“Good God, Carlton,” she said, “is that another body?”
I gurgled. I pointed.
“Well, well,” said Hanna, “look at that. It’s another one of those thingies, Carlton. Right in the middle of his breadbasket.”
Whatever happened to the girls who fainted at the sight of blood? You remember them, they were wispy little things, and when anything went awry, they sank to the ground with a soft moan and the big, strong he-man had to step in and take over. I, for one, miss them.
“Hey,” Hanna went on, “this must come from the same set of your dad’s that the other one came from, the one that did in what’s his name . . . Carlton, what was his name?”
“Ernie,” I gasped. “Ernie . . . Struthers.”
“There, I knew you could talk. Looked for a while there as if the cat had got your tongue. Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Is that one of your dad’s punch pinners, or whatever?”
“Pin punch. It’s called a pin punch.”
“Is it called one of the Withers’s pin punches?”
Naturally, what else? There were the condemning initials on the handle, staring up at me.
“Yes,” I croaked.
“Well,” said the young blight to civilization, “I certainly look forward to seeing how you talk yourself out of this one, Withers. It should be quite a treat.”
“You mean, you don’t think I did this one, either?”
The look was full of scorn.
“Carlton,” she said, “I remembered this morning that your car was out of action, so I drove out to give you a lift. I was driving along the street here, heading for your place, when I saw you go into the church, which seemed funny to me, so I hung around and looked in the window. There you were, sitting in a pew, and there was the minister, in front of you. You sat there and sat there, and I didn’t want to interrupt. I thought maybe you were having a little religious chat. Getting straight on supralapsarianism or something. So I waited. After a while, I saw you poke the Rev. on the shoulder and him fall over. And still you sat there, apparently deep in thought. So I decided to come in, and here you are, bending over the body.”
“And? . . .”
“Well, heck, Carlton, you might just as well have a sign around your neck saying ‘I Done It.’ Which means, of course, that you didn’t.”
For once, her contrary nature was working on my behalf.
“Thank you for that vote of confidence.”
“Think nothing of it. Whether the police will take the same view, of course, is another matter.”
While she talked, Hanna was peering around the late Rev., not touching him, but looking as if she wanted to.
“What are you looking for?”
“I dunno. Clues.”
“Well, you don’t just find clues sort of strewn around the corpse like . . .”
“Aha!” Hanna suddenly leaned down and plucked something from the floor, which she immediately flourished under my nose. “What’s this, know-it-all, if it isn’t a clue?”
She held in her hand one of Ray Furlinger’s mottoed pens, of the type used by C. Withers of the Silver Falls Lancer. I groaned.
“Why are you groaning?”
I explained.
“Well, it’s a plant,” said Hanna. “That’s obvious. Anyone could get hold of one of these; you probably strew them all over the p
lace, don’t you?”
I nodded. There were fifty pens in a box, but only about half of them worked, so I tended to carry half a dozen or so in my pockets. I had pretty well broadcast them throughout the village by now, an ink-stained Johnny Appleseed.
“You’re right, this pen being here doesn’t mean a thing,” I told Hanna. “I may have dropped it here myself, just now.”
She replied, in her usual cheerful tones, “Of course, I doubt if that’s what the cops will say when you give it to them.”
“Am I going to give it to them?”
“Of course you are. This is evidence in a murder investigation. Two murder investigations, now. You didn’t do either of the killings, we both know that. But if you start suppressing evidence . . .”
“You don’t think I could just kind of oil out the door and pretend nothing happened?”
“Nope.”
“Wait for someone else to find the remains?”
“You blew that hope when you let out that shriek. Doors have been banging for the past five minutes and, unless I miss my guess, there will be a lynch mob here any second now.”
“We do not lynch people at Bosky Dell.”
“Tell them that.” She gestured behind her.
I looked up and sure enough there was a gaggle—call it two gaggles—of people, one at each of the doors at the top of the aisles. There was a fair amount of stirring and muttering, as if they were trying to pick out a tree and calculate the length of rope required.
I waved. Not a cheery wave, kind of a floppy wrist-bend.
“It’s the Reverend Wylie,” I explained. “He’s been stabbed.”
Arthur Blenkins, the retired stockbroker, pushed through the mob. He was wearing a hat, which he took off.
“Stabbed, was he?” queried Arthur.
“Yes.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yes.”
“Jesus in a jelly-jar,” interrupted Hanna, to whom our slower-moving rural ways are obviously a trial, “don’t stand here blabbing. Somebody go and call the police.”
Arthur answered in an injured tone, “No need to be offensive. No need to call the police, either,” he added, “there’s a couple of them over at Carlton’s place right now.”
Chapter 18
Hanna and I walked, quickly, but without vulgar rushing, along Forest Road, heading back for my cottage. Along the way, I told her—it had slipped my mind, earlier—about the sunglasses I had found on the couch the other night.
“Boy,” she said, “this case has more plants in it than a greenhouse. Has Hanson given it to the cops yet?”
“I guess so, he was in the OPP office right after I spoke to him.”
She nodded with satisfaction. “It’ll keep those yo-yos busy, anyway,” she said.
“Just give them one more reason to suspect me.”
“Not this time. The fact that you turned the thing over to Hanson clears you. If it was anything genuine, all you had to do was ditch it.”
That was true, and helpful; it gave me something positive to think about as I tottered off to meet the cops once more. Behind us came the gaggles from the church, muttering to each other and telling each other, no doubt, that they had always known that Carlton Withers was a wrong ’un. We made up the largest parade the village had seen since Cosmo Furlow, our radical chic lawyer, staged an anti-nuclear march a couple of years ago, and very prudently provided free drinks for all the marchers.
As soon as my cottage came into sight, I knew that something else had gone terribly wrong. All the lights were on, in broad daylight, which was wrong, but not terribly wrong. What was terribly wrong was that everything inside, to the extent that I could see inside the cottage, was neat, while the front lawn was bedecked with what looked like the midden pile from a medieval village. Or, to put it another way, all my most precious possessions were dumped on the grass, while the interior of the old homestead appeared almost nude. The Dutch break-front dresser, standing in the dining room, and normally decently dressed in clothes, plates, tennis rackets, and the other debris of the busy life of a man about town, stood positively naked, except for a fringe of cake plates—my mother’s collection—which had not seen the light of day for months. The curtains, which are normally hitched together with a large safety pin (to narrow Mrs. Golden’s view inside), hung neatly on each side of the living-room window, and the living room itself, instead of groaning under its proper load of blankets, old fruit, decaying dinners, books, newspapers, magazines, and other assorted oddments, contained instead nothing but the usual collection of furniture and an unusual collection of two upright bodies: Detectives Smiley and Thuggy.
The buggers had invaded my privacy.
I went through the front door, baying like a Bassett Hound, but Smiley stopped me with a raised hand. It contained a search warrant. Apparently the lads had been through the place and decided—not that I could blame them—that the heave-and-scoop method was the best way to dig out my secrets. It hadn’t taken them long.
“Well done, men,” I told them. “I understand Maids Unlimited is looking for a few recruits. I’d be happy to recommend you.”
Thurston grunted. “Read the warrant.”
I sat down in an old armchair. It was green, a fact that I had forgotten—out of sight, out of mind—and read the warrant. It seemed to be in order—but how would I know if it weren’t? I looked around the cottage, which also seemed to be in order, for a change.
“So, having nothing else to do with your time, you decided to come out and do my house cleaning. Find anything?” I asked Smiley.
“Just this,” Thuggy replied, “we found this, buried in the junk on the chair right where you’re sitting.” And he held up a black notebook, one of those little numbers you can pick up in any five-and-dime store for about a buck. (That’s why they call them five-and-dime stores.) I’d never seen it before. I’m still working on my collection of telephone memo pads from Ray Furlinger’s.
“Don’t come the innocent with me,” Thuggy rasped, “you know as well as I do what it is.”
“But I don’t. I’ve never seen it before; I swear it.”
“It’s Ernie Struthers’s record book,” explained Smiley.
“His record book? Records of what?”
But I knew, didn’t I?”
“His blackmailing racket,” Thuggy replied; with grim satisfaction. “I guess you found it on him when you killed him, and decided you might take over the business, eh?”
There was a silence. Hanna looked at me. I looked at the floor. Hanna said, “Carlton . . .”
I looked at the floor some more.
“I think you’d better tell them about the minister,” Hanna said.
Actually, the shock of having my home invaded had driven the late Rev. right out of my mind.
“What about him, then?” demanded Thuggy.
I gave him a winning smile. “Gosh, Detective Thurston, you’re not going to believe this . . .”
“Try me.”
“You know the, um, Rev. Mr. Ephraim Wylie?”
“The late,” Hanna put in, “Rev. Mr. Ephraim Wylie.”
“No,” said Thuggy, “should I?”
“Oh, yes, yes indeed, Detective Thurston,” I said. “He was a fine, fine man. One of my dearest friends.”
“But now he’s dead, right?” asked Smiley.
“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, he is.”
“Recently?” Thuggy wanted to know.
“Quite recently. As a matter of fact, today. About an hour ago.”
“Oh ho,” said Thuggy, and it was an “Oh ho” full of suspicion and menace. “And how did he come to die, this Rev. Whatshisname?”
“Wylie. Ephraim Wylie. He was, more or less, what you might call . . . stabbed.”
“Oh ho,” said Thuggy. “And I suppose the
re was a tool just like the other tool from your dad’s set stuck into him?”
“More or less, well, yes.”
“And I suppose you’re going to tell us you didn’t do this one, either?”
“Officers, I swear to you, I didn’t.”
I said it with the utmost sincerity, but my words were greeted with what I can only call a high degree of skepticism. Hanna put forward her view that things looked so black for me I must, perforce, be innocent, but the policemen, as she had foreseen, were not convinced. She also introduced the ballpoint pen clue.
“It probably fell out of the killer’s pocket during the struggle,” said Thuggy nastily.
“But Carlton had no reason to want Rev. Wylie dead,” Hanna pleaded, and then rather wrecked the thing by asking me, “Did you, Carlton?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “He was a friend of mine, and a friend of my father’s.”
“So was Ernie Struthers,” grumbled Thuggy as he whipped out the handcuffs and did his duty.
Chapter 19
The lone cell in the OPP headquarters at Silver Falls is cold, small, cramped, and damp, with two tiny metal cots, a sink, and one overhead light constituting the combined amenities. It possessed an even crummier ambience than the interrogation room upstairs. It smelled of old urine, stale socks, and Saturday night drunks, who are the usual guests. I was a celebrity. The last time the Silver Falls rozzers had made a really big arrest was back in 1967, when a local woman carelessly spiced up her husband’s hot chocolate with a dash of arsenic. Molly, this lady’s name was, and a cruel fate had condemned her to marry a man named Jolly. He called her, “My dolly, Molly Jolly,” which may have been why she slipped the poison into his bedtime drink. She got off. This was in the days when Canada still hanged people, and no jury was going to hang a woman just because she wasn’t such a hot cook; but she did spend several nights in the hoosegow, which was probably the last time it got a good cleaning. My cell, not to dwell on the matter, was a playground for cockroaches and other multi-legged beasts, and the walls were inscribed with slogans not fit for Sunday school. I bore up bravely. My own cottage, when you came right down to it, had kind of eased me into this sort of living.
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