QED (3 page)

Dr. Conklin Farnham took the stairs two at a time. Mum, still dough-faced but recovered from the first shock, had insisted on returning to her brother-in-law's bedside; the doctor found her there. Christopher and Ellen, acting like trespassers, hung about in the hall outside their father's room, Joanne with them. They waited without words.

When Dr. Farnham emerged, his shoulders elevated in a chilling shrug. “He's had a stroke, all right. He's paralyzed.”

“Poor pop,” said Christopher. He had not called his father that in twenty years. “What's the prognosis, Doctor?”

“It depends on a number of things, most of them unpredictable.”

“Any chance of a recovery from the paralysis, Dr. Farnham?” Joanne asked in a tight voice.

“The paralysis will gradually lift, but just how soon or how completely I can't say. It all depends on the extent of the damage. He ought to be in the hospital, but we're absolutely jammed just now, not a bed available, even in the wards. And I'd rather not risk the long jaunt up to Connhaven on these winter roads. So it looks like a home job, at least for now. He'll need nurses—”

“How about me?” asked Margaret Caswell, materializing in the doorway.

“Well.” The doctor seemed doubtful. “I know you've done your share of patient-care, Mrs. Caswell, but in a case like this … Although it's true we haven't got an R.N. available right now, either …”

“I've taken care of Godfrey for over a quarter of a century,” Mum Caswell said, with the obstinacy she showed in all matters pertaining to Godfrey Mumford. “I can take care of him now.”

January 4–5:
The first forty-eight hours after a cerebral thrombosis, Dr. Farnham told them, were the critical ones, which was all Mum had to hear. For the next two days and nights she neither took her clothes off nor slept; nor was there anything Joanne could do or say to move her from Godfrey Mumford's bedside, not even for ten minutes.

When the crisis was over, and the patient had survived—and was even making, according to the doctor, a sensational recovery—Jo and Ellen were finally able to pry Mum out of the sickroom and get her to lie down for a few hours. She fell asleep smiling triumphantly, as if she had scored a hand-to-hand victory over the Reaper.

Wolcott Thorp, apprised by Christopher of the stroke, drove down from Connhaven on the night of the fifth, looking like a miniature Russian in his old-fashioned greatcoat and astrakhan hat.

“Godfrey's all right, isn't he? He's going to live?”

They reassured him; and he sank into a chair in the foyer, beside the little table with the silver salver on it. “All my old friends are going,” he mumbled. He was so pale that Joanne got him some brandy. “And those of us who survive feel guilty and overjoyed at the same time. What swine people are …”

It was some time before he was able to go upstairs and look in on the patient, who was being tended again by Margaret Caswell. For ten minutes Thorp chattered to his friend with desperate animation, as Godfrey stared helplessly back at him; until, clearing his throat repeatedly as if he himself had developed a paralysis, Thorp allowed Mum to shoo him out.

“It's too much to have to watch,” Thorp told Jo and the twins downstairs. “I'm too big a coward to sit there while he struggles with that paralysis. The way he tried to talk! I'm going home.”

“But you can't, Uncle Wolcott,” said Jo, giving him the courtesy title she had used since childhood. “It's started to snow, and the report on the radio is that it's going to be a heavy one. I'm not going to let you take that long drive back over slippery roads. The plows won't even have had time to go over them.”

“But Joanne,” said the old curator weakly, “I have a huge day tomorrow at the Museum. And really, I'd rather—”

“I don't
care
what you'd rather. You're not leaving this house tonight, and that's that.”

“Jo's right, you know,” Christopher put in. “Anyway, Uncle Wolcott, you don't stand a chance. This is the new Joanne. Look at that chin, will you?”

“You look at it,” said his sister Ellen. “Oh, hell, why did I ever come home? Who's for a snack?”

January 6:
The snow had fallen through half the night. From the kitchen window Christopher could look out across the white earth, an old bed with fresh sheets, past the glasshouse to the woods, where the conifers stood green among the sleeping nudes.

From behind him came a rattle of pans and the homely hiss of bacon; all around him, creeping like woodsmoke, lay warmth. Making the sounds and evoking the smells was Joanne; when her mother had turned nurse, Jo had taken over the housekeeping and cooking chores. Chris had promptly given himself the KP assignment for breakfast.

It was not a morning for fantasy; the day was too clear, the smells too real—it should have happened on a black night, with wind tearing at the house to an accompaniment of creaks. But, as Jo and Chris later agreed over clutched hands, perhaps that was what made it so creepy—the dreadful nightmare striking on a crisp morning to the smell of frying bacon.

For at the very instant that Christopher turned away from the window with a wisecrack about to part his lips—at the very instant that he opened his mouth—he screamed. Or so it seemed. But it was a fantastic coincidence of timing. The scream was hysterically feminine and originated upstairs. It was repeated and repeated in a wild fusillade.

Jo stood fixed at the kitchen range with the long fork in her hand; then she cried, “
Mother!
” and flung the fork down and ran for the doorway as if the kitchen had burst into flames. And Chris ran after her.

In the hallway stood Wolcott Thorp, one leg raised like an elderly stork, caught in the act of putting on his galoshes in preparation for his return to Connhaven. The curator was gaping at the staircase. At the top of the flight sagged Margaret Caswell, hanging on to the banister with one hand, while her other hand clawed at her throat.

And as she saw Jo and Christopher, Mum screeched, “He's dead, he's dead,” and began to topple, ever so slowly, as in a film, so that Joanne, streaking past old Thorp, was able to catch her just before she could tumble. And Christopher followed, bounding up the stairs. He collided with his sister on the landing.

“What is it?” yelled Ellen; she was in a hastily donned robe. “What in God's name has happened now?”

“It must be father.” Christopher dodged around her, shouting over his shoulder, “Come on, Ellen! I may need help.”

In the hall below, activated at last, Wolcott Thorp hopped for the phone, one unhooked galosh flapping. He found Dr. Farnham's number jotted on a pad for ready reference and dialed it. The doctor, located at Wrightsville General Hospital, where he was making his morning rounds, would come at once. Thorp hung up, stared for a moment at the telephone, then dialed Operator.

“Operator,” he said, swallowing. “Get me the police.”

Chief of Police Anselm Newby cradled the phone cautiously, as if it might respond to rougher treatment by snapping at him, like a dog. He inclined his almost delicate frame over his desk and fixed bleak eyes, of an inorganic blue, on his visitor. The visitor, relaxing on the back of his neck, had the sudden feeling that he was unwelcome, which was ridiculous.

“Ellery,” said Chief Newby, “why the hell don't you stay in New York?”

Ellery slid erect, blinking. “I beg your pardon?”

“Where you belong,” said the Chief in a rancorous tone. “Go home, will you?”

A manifest injustice. Home, thought Ellery, is where the heart is, and for many years he had had a special coronary weakness for Wrightsville. He had arrived in town only yesterday on one of his spur-of-the-moment visits; and, of course, the very first thing this morning he had sought out the Chief in police headquarters at the County Court House Building.

“What,” Ellery inquired, “brings this on? Here we were, wallowing in remembrance of things past, warm as a pair of tea cozies. In a moment I become
persona non grata
. It's obviously the telephone call. What's happened?”

“Damn it, Ellery, every time you come to Wrightsville a major crime is committed.”

Ellery sighed. It was not the first time he had been so indicted. Before Newby's tenure there had been the salty old Yankee, Chief Dakin, with his sorrowful accusations. It's a continuing curse, he thought, that's what it is.

“Who is it this time?”

“They've just found Godfrey Mumford. That was a friend of his, Wolcott Thorp, on the phone, to notify me of Mumford's murder.”

“Old Mumford? The Chrysanthemum King?”

“That's the one. I suppose there's nothing I can do but invite you along. Are you available?”

Mr. Q, rising slowly, was available, if with reluctance. His Wrightsville triumphs invariably left an aftertaste of ashes.

“Let's go,” said Wrightsville's perennial hoodoo.

Christopher, dressed for the snow, blundered on Joanne on his way to the front door. She was crouched on the second step of the staircase, hugging her knees. Jo had not cried, but her eyes were pink with pain.

“You need fresh air,” prescribed Christopher. “How about it?”

“No, Chris. I don't feel like it.”

“I'm just trundling around the house.”

“What for?”

“Come see.”

He held out his hand. After a moment she took it and pulled herself up. “I'll get my things on.”

Hand in hand they trudged around the house, leaving a double perimeter of footprints in the deep snow. Eventually they came back to where they had started.

“Did you notice?” Christopher asked darkly.

“Notice? What?”

“The snow.”

“I could hardly not notice it,” said Joanne. “I got some in the top of one of my boots.”

“Tracks.”

“What?”

“There aren't any.”

“There are, too,” said Jo. “A double set. We just made them.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh, stop talking like a character in a book,” Jo said crossly. “What are you driving at?”

“
We
left a double set of footprints,” said Christopher. “Just now. But nobody else left any. Where are the tracks of the murderer?”

“Oh,” said Jo; and it was a chilled, even a tremulous “Oh”—like a little icicle preparing to fall to bits.

They stood there looking at each other, Jo shivering, like a scared and forlorn child.

He opened his arms. She crept into them.

It was Ellen who answered the door. She had used the short wait to recover her poise; she had, so to speak, raised the Union Jack. Chief Anselm Newby stepped in, followed by Ellery.

“You're the Chief Constable,” Ellen said. “The last time I was in Wrightsville, Dakin was Constable.”

Newby received this intelligence with a displeasure that even Ellen Nash recognized. In Anse Newby's glossary, constables were exceedingly small potatoes, found in tiny, dying New England villages.

“Chief of Police,” he corrected her. Professionally he used a quiet voice, with an occasional whiplash overtone. He evidently felt that this was such an occasion, for his correction flicked out at her, leaving a visible mark. “The name is Newby. This is Ellery Queen, and he's not a constable, either. Who are you?”

“Mrs. Nash—Ellen Mumford Nash, Mr. Mumford's daughter,” said Ellen hastily. “I've been visiting over the holidays from England.” This last she uttered in a defiant, even arrogant, tone, as if invoking the never-setting sun. It made Newby examine her with his mineral eyes.

The tension Ellery detected under the woman's gloss was clearly shared by the group huddled in the entrance hall behind her. His glance sorted them out with the automatic ease of much practice. The handsome young fellow was obviously the brother of the constable-oriented Anglophile, and he was (just as obviously) feeling proprietary about the grave and lovely girl whose elbow he gripped. Ellery became aware of a familiar pang. What quality in Wrightsville is this, he thought, that it must cast in every murder melodrama at least one ingénue with a special talent for touching the heart?

His glance passed on to the snow-haired lady, fallen in with exhaustion; and to the little elderly gentleman with the jungle eyebrows and the musty aura of old things, undoubtedly the Wolcott Thorp who had announced the finding of the body to Anse Newby over the phone. Newby, it appeared, knew Thorp; they shook hands, Thorp absently, as if his thoughts were elsewhere—upstairs, in fact, as indeed they were.

When the Chief introduced Ellery, it turned out that some of them had heard of him. He would have preferred anonymity. But this was almost always the toe he stubbed in stumbling over a skeleton in some Wrightsville closet.

“Rodge and Joan Fowler were talking about you only a few weeks ago,” Joanne murmured. “To listen to them, Mr. Queen, you're a cross between a bulldog and a bloodhound when it comes to—things like this. You remember, Chris, how they raved.”

“I certainly do,” Christopher said gloomily. He said nothing more, and Ellery looked at him. But all Ellery said was, “Oh, you know the Fowlers?” Then he was being introduced to Ellen.

“
That
Queen,” said Ellen. Ellery could have sworn, from the way her nostrils flared, that he was giving off unsocial odors. And
she
said nothing more.

“Well,” the Chief of Police said in a rubbing-the-hands tone of voice, “where's the body? And did anybody notify a doctor?”

“I did, just before I telephoned you,” Wolcott Thorp said. “He's waiting in Godfrey's bedroom.”

“Before we go up,” suggested Ellery—and they all started—“would you people mind telling us how the body was found, and so on? To fill us in.”

They told their stories in detail, up to the point of the call to headquarters.

Newby nodded. “That's clear enough. Let's go.”