by Ellery Queen
“Father was an extraordinary man. He was big, vital, and noisy. He had a bright-red beard. He used to barge through the village, pounding people on the back, arguing about local politics, and feeding candy to any stray kids who happened to be around. He had a gargantuan sense of humor, earthy and a little vulgar; but not like Ted who’s inclined to needle you.
“Father was always shouting and stamping around the house. But he was a paradox. Rough and gentle; stormy and calm as a millpond. We called him Saint Nick. I think it came from his playing Santa Claus at the village tree one year. You have to know about Saint Nick to account for Stephen.”
“I guess everyone loved your father, Marcia,” Walsh said.
“Maybe Stephen loved him more than any of us. I sometimes think he did. You see, Dr. Smith, Stephen was a town boy. His father was the local handyman. His mother took in sewing. There was no money. Then Stephen’s father went into the army in the First World War and was killed at Belleau Wood. His mother died a year later, and the local authorities dressed Stephen in his best Sunday suit, packed his belongings in a straw suitcase, and brought him to the depot where the train would take him to the state orphanage.
“He was sitting on the straw suitcase crying—because he was afraid—when Saint Nick happened along. He saw Stephen and stopped to ask him what the matter was. Stephen says he knelt down and put one of his big hands on Stephen’s shoulder. When Stephen got through telling his story. Saint Nick took him and the suitcase, chucked them both in his car, and brought Stephen home with him.
“I remember Ted and I were playing upstairs. Ted was eight. I was six. We heard Saint Nick come in and slam the door. We heard him bellow.
“‘Where the blue blasted blazes is everyone? We’ve got company!’
“Aunt Harriet appeared from somewhere and we heard Saint Nick say Stephen had come to stay. Aunt Harriet asked him if he’d adopted Stephen.
“‘Adopted him, kidnaped him, call it what you like!’ Saint Nick said. ‘A public institution’s no place for a boy to grow up.’
“So Stephen came to live with us. He adored Saint Nick. He followed him around like a little spaniel puppy. I’m afraid Ted and I and the rest of the kids were a little snooty at first. Stephen was awed by the house, by the fact that there are six bathrooms, by the stables and the swimming pool. We took all those things for granted and thought he was a little queer,” She glanced at Walsh, a little shyly. “We were a pretty snobbish lot, weren’t we, Jim?”
He smiled. “I used to think so,” he said.
“But Stephen grew up as one of us,” Marcia said. “In addition to us there were other kids. Cleg and—and Bob.” Her voice broke. “I just can’t believe what’s happened tonight. I can’t believe it’s real. Bob was so vital, so alive.”
“Please go on, Mrs. Drake,” the doctor said.
She looked over at the window but he was only one of the shadows. She went on slowly. “We lived that way for ten years, and then Father was killed. It was an airplane accident. A big commercial plane struck a mountainside in Pennsylvania. Ted and Stephen were eighteen when that happened. I was sixteen.
“Well, things happened. Unbelievable things to us. There was no money. Saint Nick had been living to the limit of his earnings. We had to sell this house, the cars, the horses. When that was done and the debts had been paid there was almost nothing. Enough to start me in college. The boys and Harriet insisted that I take the money for that. They were going to work their way through school. Harriet found herself a job in New York.
“It was harder for Ted and Harriet and me than it was for Stephen, I think. He’d always considered his being with us was some kind of miracle. When it ended he was perfectly willing and content to face the problem. We were bewildered and totally unprepared. It had never occurred to us our way of life would ever change. I guess it showed in the results.
“Ted never could quite make it. He flunked out of medical school. He flunked out of art school. He couldn’t seem to get adjusted to the idea that he was on his own. I did a little better than that. I got through college and found myself a job modeling for a photographer. But Stephen—Stephen was miraculous.
“He earned a scholarship his second year in college. He’d gone in for mechanical engineering. He worked in an airplane plant in the summers. Maybe it’s crazy, but I think he had a passion for making better airplanes—planes that wouldn’t kill the Saint Nicks of the world so needlessly.
“After college he became a plant superintendent. All the time he’d been designing an engine of his own. He got someone to back him and formed his own company. Two years later he hit the jackpot—big contracts, money, success.”
“He never quit for a minute,” Walsh said.
“We were all proud of him—terribly proud,” Marcia said. “He gave Ted a job in his plant, but Ted couldn’t make it there either. I don’t want to give the wrong impression of Ted. He was brought up to school horses, to run a big place like this, to live in leisure, gracefully. These things he does well. Isn’t that so, Jim?”
“Best man on a horse I ever saw,” Walsh said.
“Well, one day Harriet, who has a small apartment in town, asked all of us for Sunday breakfast. It was a beautiful Sunday. Stephen suggested we go for a ride in his car. We started out and presently I realized he was heading toward Woodfield. I didn’t want to come back here. It was hard enough as it was. I didn’t want to see all the places and things I’d grown up with.
“When he turned in the driveway of this house I—well, I remember I thought I couldn’t take it. He drove up to the door, and there was Mrs. Crandall who’d been our housekeeper in the old days. That was too much for me. I remember Stephen put his hand over mine.
“‘Don’t cry, angel,’ he said. ‘You see, it’s ours again.’”
Marcia’s voice broke as she told it. Neither of the men spoke and finally she took up the story.
“He’d bought it back,” she said. “Big places were a drug on the market and the banks had it. He’d taken weeks to get things restored just the way they had been. There were even horses in the stable! I can’t tell you what it was like. Stephen expected us all to settle down and live there. I think it was his way of paying us all back for what Saint Nick had done for him. Of course it didn’t make sense—our living off him. But it was so clear he would be deeply hurt if we refused—and we were so weak-minded—” She laughed. “And we wanted to stay here so much.. . .”
“It seems natural enough,” Walsh said. “After all, it was your home.”
“Stephen’s home,” she corrected him. “Well, about six months later he asked me to marry him. I’d begun to think he would never get around to it again.”
“Again?” the doctor asked sharply.
“I—I don’t know why I said that,” Marcia said. “It wasn’t real the first time. It was a long time before—when I was fifteen and he was seventeen. I’m afraid I laughed at him that time.”
“Laughed at him?”
“It was all a mix-up,” Marcia said. “Cleg had done his first picture—a mural over the bar at the country club. There was to be a big party for the unveiling. Cleg had asked me to go with him and I’d accepted. But somehow Stephen had the idea that I was going with him. I don’t remember how the confusion came about, but I do remember Stephen’s face when I told him I was going with Cleg. It turned out he’d planned to propose to me that night. He’d prepared a speech.”
She smiled. “We were here, in the study, when I told him I wasn’t going with him. I guess, since he’d memorized the speech, he decided to get it off his chest anyway. It—it was terribly stuffy, and pompous, and—and now that I recall it—sweet.”
“But you laughed at him,” the doctor said.
“You see, Dr. Smith, he was more like a brother then. I’d never thought of him romantically. Oh, I knew he felt different from the way I did, but it seemed funny at the time. It was pretty cruel, I guess.”
“But it worked out all right,” Wal
sh said.
“It would out perfectly—until two weeks ago.”
The doctor twisted round to look intently and directly at her. “I’m a little confused about time, Mrs. Drake. Stephen was eighteen when he went to college. Four years of that, a job as plant superintendent, then his own company. He must have been twenty-eight or -nine when you were married.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“And you were twenty-six.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a very beautiful woman, Mrs. Drake. You must have had other beaus—other chances to marry.”
Walsh laughed. “She had the whole town by the ears!”
“I had other chances,” Marcia said seriously. “Cleg and Bob were my most persistent suitors. I think in those early days I thought I’d marry one of them. Then, when the collapse came, we got separated. Bob was at medical school. Cleg went abroad to study art. I—I think I was waiting for them when I became conscious of Stephen.”
“Conscious of him?”
“As a man, Dr. Smith. I’d thought of him before as a brother, as part of the setup of my life. I began to feel different. I began to see his worth, his quality.”
“It wasn’t gratitude that made you marry him?”
“Gratitude?”
“For the house—the re-establishing of your life in its old terms?”
“No,” she said quickly. “He had everything that could make a woman happy. Courage, vision, warmth. . .I loved him, Dr. Smith. I love him now with all my heart.”
“You haven’t felt it was a mistake?”
“No!”
“You haven’t wished you had married Cleg or Bob?”
“I wouldn’t change anything—except the mess we seem to be in now.” She leaned forward. “Dr. Smith, what does it all mean? What is this talk about murder? What did Stephen mean when he said he’d been close to killing me?”
“Just that, Mrs. Drake. He has been close. Very close.”
“I don’t understand it! What have I done to make him feel this way? How have I failed him?”
The doctor ignored the question. He seemed to be lost again in the darkness.
“There are some questions about Stephen’s trouble,” Walsh said. His tone suggested it was difficult for him to be impersonal.
“Of course I’ll tell you anything I can, Jim.”
“There was a Sunday, two or three weeks ago,” Walsh said. “Cleg was here for breakfast. You and Ted were going riding. You all went out to the stable together—you and Stephen and Cleg and Ted.”
“You mean the day Stephen found my saddle girth was broken?”
“Yes.”
“What about it?”
“Would you say, Marcia that about marked the beginning of Stephen’s behaving queerly?”
She sat there frowning. Walsh held out his pack of cigarettes and she took one. He flipped on his lighter for her.
“I hadn’t connected the two things,” she said. “But—yes. It was about then things started to go wrong.”
“Do you remember the day you were walking to the village and Stephen caught up with you in the car?”
“Do I remember!” She laughed. “He nearly took off my hide. He—”
“We know about it,” Walsh said. “How did he behave after that?”
“Jim!” she sounded startled. “You mean those things—?”
“Were the close shaves,” Walsh said. “Those and one other.”
“But of course! After that day in the car Stephen seemed to change completely. He avoided me. He’s been sleeping in another room under the pretext that he was restless at night. He refused to go for walks with me. I—I thought I’d done something to make him angry. He wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Did Dr. Bristow notice the change in him?” Dr. Smith interrupted.
“Yes. He was very concerned. He said the physiological tests he’d taken didn’t account for it. He asked me a lot of questions about things that could have upset Stephen.”
Walsh hesitated, then said, “Four or five days ago you were sick, Marcia. You went to bed sometime during the afternoon. I suppose people dropped into your room to see you?”
“Of course. You know Harriet. Stephen was in and out, naturally. Cleg came over for dinner and he and Ted came up to say ‘Hello.’”
“Tell me, Marcia, what did you take for your upset stomach?”
“Bicarbonate.”
“You took some when you went to bed in the afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“I understand you keep it in a glass jar on the second shelf of your medicine cabinet.”
“That’s right,” Marcia said. “This all sounds very clinical!”
“Was that jar in its proper place when you fixed the soda for yourself?”
“Why—why, yes.”
“Did you take more soda later?”
“Really, Jim, I don’t see what this is all about.”
The doctor stirred near the window. “It’s about murder, Mrs. Drake,” he said.
The room was very still for a moment after that. Then Marcia said, “Yes, I took another dose. Stephen fixed it for me when he came up to bed.”
“But he had an accident, didn’t he? He dropped the glass?”
“Yes. It slipped, I suppose. He had to get another glass.”
“And he didn’t say anything to you about why he’d dropped the first one?”
“No. He seemed very upset again. He muttered something about being clumsy.”
Walsh glanced at the doctor.
“What he didn’t tell you, Mrs. Drake,” the doctor said, “was that someone had switched the jars in your medicine cabinet. The jar with the poison for your hand lotion had been put in place of the bicarbonate jar. Stephen had mixed you a dose of medicine that would have killed you. It was when he realized what he’d done that he dropped the glass.”
“But who would have switched the jars?”
“We’d very much like to know that, Mrs. Drake. If we did, we’d know who’s been trying to drive your husband out of his mind. Can you help us?”
She shook her head slowly. “No. The family were all in and out. Cleg was here before dinner. Besides, there’s a door to the bathroom from the hall. I dozed during the afternoon and evening. It could have happened—”
“Any time,” the Doctor said wearily.
“I get a curiously mixed impression of Stephen from talking to him myself and from listening to Marcia,” Dr. Smith said.
Walsh stared disconsolately at an empty package of cigarettes. The doctor walked slowly across the room and then back again, to stand by the desk.
“Here’s a man of great confidence, ability, and drive when it comes to his work,” the doctor said. “He’s really the perfect picture of what we call a ‘self-made man’ in our society. He had a boost that helped him, but it was his own quality and character that carried him through. But somehow I have the notion that he wasn’t so certain or sure of himself in his personal life. They must have raised the devil with him as a child. I don’t think he was ever allowed to forget where he came from—and made to feel there was something a little shameful about it.”
“His family were good people,” Walsh said. “They were poor, but they were good people.”
“To some people, Captain, poverty is a kind of sin. Did you get the impression from Marcia that she and Ted and Harriet were really a little ashamed when they found there was no money?”
Walsh crumpled the empty cigarette package and threw it into the wastebasket. “It’s an interesting observation, Doctor, but has it anything to do with our problem?”
“It has everything to do with it,” the doctor said. “Here we have a man—Stephen Drake—who loves his wife, is apparently blissfully happy in his home, and successful in business. This man suddenly discovers that he has a violent impulse to do his wife harm. Where does that impulse come from? From his life today? They don’t quarrel. Everything has been perfect until this began. No, Captain, we have to go ba
ck into the past to discover the starting point of those impulses.”
Walsh looked incredulous. “You mean something he was sore about when he was a kid would affect him now?”
“I do,” the doctor said. “We hide our emotions of anger, of violence, because they don’t seem worthy or decent. But they’re there! Take Marcia’s story about the first proposal. She laughed at him. She ditched him to go to a party with Cleghorn. How do you suppose he felt then?”
“His feelings were probably pretty badly hurt,” Walsh said.
“Poppycock,” the doctor said impatiently. “That’s the way we explain those things to ourselves. He probably told himself his feelings were hurt—because it would have frightened him to admit to himself he felt like beating her brains out!”
Walsh just stared at the small gray man.
“Our conscious explanation of how we feel when somebody does us a wrong or an injury is always inclined to be noble, Captain. We say our feelings are hurt, or we feel disappointed. But down deep inside we have a good old-fashioned primitive urge to commit mayhem! And that anger smolders and smolders there, carefully hidden through the years. When we are reminded of the experience we dutifully remember that we felt hurt or disappointed, but actually the emotion of anger stirs again. That’s what’s been happening to Stephen.”
“I’m not sure I get it,” Walsh said.
“All these people—Marcia, Harriet, Ted, Cleghorn—know Stephen’s life inside out. They know when he was hurt, when he was disappointed. Somebody knows that on these occasions he was really angry. Suppose he was casually reminded of that proposal—of Marcia’s laughter, of her walking out on Cleghorn’s arm. The same anger he felt then would stir inside him now. And suppose at that very moment—to use our example—he finds a poker in his hand. It would take a conscious effort to subdue the impulse to use it.”
Walsh nodded slowly. “So our murderer revives these old angers—and then confronts Stephen with the saddle girth, the car, the poison jar. Stephen really has to make a decision, doesn’t he? He really has to decide not to take advantage of them, doesn’t he?”
“That’s exactly it,” the doctor said. “It’s my job to find out what happened immediately preceding these experiences. What took place? Who was he talking with? How were these old angers stirred? Your job is more practical.”
