“Yes...”
“Do it.”
“D-do it, Ellery?”
“Do it, Nikki.”
When the darkness closed down, someone at the wall gasped. And then the silence closed down, too.
And after a moment Ellery’s voice came tiredly: “It was at this point, Nikki, that you said ‘Stop!’ to Edith Baxter and gave her a few additional instructions. About what to do after the ‘crime.’ As I pointed out a few minutes ago, Dad—it’s during dais interval, with Edith standing in the archway getting Nikki’s afterthoughts, and the room in darkness, that the real murderer must have stolen across the living room from the wall, got past Nikki and Edith and into the foyer, and waited there to ambush Edith.”
“Sure, son,” said the Inspector. “So what?”
“How did the murderer manage to cross this room in pitch darkness without making any noise?”
At the wall, Jerry Baxter said hoarsely: “Look, I don’t have to stand here. I don’t have to!”
“Because, you know,” said Ellery, reflectively, “there wasn’t any noise. None at all. In fact, Nikki, you actually remarked in that intervaclass="underline" ‘I want the room to be as quiet as it is this minute.’ And only a few moments ago you corroborated yourself when you told Dad that the first sound after you turned off the light was John screaming in the kitchen. You said the only other sound was the sound of the flashlight landing in the middle of the room after the murderer got back to the wall. So I repeat: How did the murderer cross this room in darkness without making a sound?”
Sergeant Velie’s disembodied bass complained from the archway that he didn’t get it at all, at all.
“Well, Sergeant, you’ve seen this room—it’s cluttered crazily with overturned furniture, pillows, hassocks, miscellaneous objects. Do you think you could cross it in darkness without sounding like the bull in the china shop? Nikki, when you and I first got here and blundered into the living room—”
“In the dark,” cried Nikki. “We bumped. We scraped. I actually fell—”
“Why didn’t the murderer?”
“I’ll tell you why,” said Inspector Queen suddenly. “Because no one did cross this room in the dark. It can’t be done without making a racket, or without a light—and there was no light at that time or Nikki’d have seen it.”
“Then how’s it add up, Inspector?” asked the Sergeant pathetically.
“There’s only one person we know crossed this room, the one Nikki saw cross while the light was on, the one they found in the closet in a ‘faint,’ Velie. Edith Baxter!”
She sounded nauseated. “Oh, no,” she said. “No.”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Baxter. It’s been you all the time. You did get to the kitchen. You got the mask, the flash, the knife. You came back and tapped John Crombie. You led him out to the kitchen and there you sliced him up—”
“No!”
“Then you quietly got into that closet and pulled a phony faint, and waited for them to find you so you could tell that, cock-and-bull story of being ambushed in the foyer, and—”
“Dad,” sighed Ellery.
“Huh?” And because the old gentleman’s memory of similar moments—many similar moments—was very green, his tone became truculent. “Now tell me I’m wrong, Ellery!”
“Edith Baxter is the one person present tonight who couldn’t have killed John Crombie.”
“You see?” moaned Edith. They could hear her panting.
“Nikki actually saw somebody with a flash return to the living room after Crombie’s death-scream, go to the wall, turn off the flash, and she heard that person hurl it into the middle of the room. Who was it Nikki saw and heard? We’ve deduced that already—the actual murderer. Immediately after that, Nikki turned up the lights.
“If Edith Baxter were the murderer, wouldn’t we have found her at the wall with the rest of us when the lights went on? But she wasn’t. She wasn’t in the living room at all. We found her in the foyer closet. So she had been attacked. She did faint. She didn’t kill Crombie.”
They could hear her sobbing in a great release.
“Then who did?” barked the Inspector. His tone said he was tired of this fancy stuff and give him a killer so he could book the rat and go home and get to sleep.
“The one,” replied Ellery in those weary tones, “who was able to cross the room in the dark without making any noise. For if Edith is innocent, only one of those at the wall could have been guilty. And that one had to cross the room.”
There is a maddening unarguability about Ellery’s sermons.
“But how, son, how?” bellowed his father. “It couldn’t be done without knocking something over—making some noise!”
“Only one possible explanation,” said Ellery tiredly; and then he said, not tiredly at all, but swiftly and with the slashing finality of a knife, “I thought you’d try that. That’s why I sat on the hassock, so very tired. That’s why I staged this whole... silly... scene...”
Velie was roaring: “Where the hell are the lights? Miss Porter, turn that switch on, will you?”
“I can’t find the—the damned thing!” wept Nikki.
“The rest of you stay where you are!” shouted the Inspector.
“Now drop the knife,” said Ellery, in the slightly gritty tones of one who is exerting pressure. “Drop it...” There was a little clatter, and then a whimper. “The only one who could have passed through this jumbled maze in the dark without stumbling over anything,” Ellery went on, breathing a bit harder than usual, “would be someone who’d plotted a route through this maze in advance of the party... someone, in fact, who’d plotted the maze. In other words, the clutter in this room is not chance confusion, but deliberate plant. It would require photographing the details of the obstacle-course on the memory, and practice, plenty of practice—but we were told you spent the entire day in this suite alone, my dear, fixing it up for the party.”
“Here!” sobbed Nikki, and she jabbed the light switch.
“I imagine,” said Ellery gently to the girl in his grip, “you felt someone had to avenge the honor of the Trents, Lucy.”
The Adventure of The Telltale Bottle
Now regarding this folksy fable, this almost-myth, this canard upon history,” continued Ellery, “what are the facts? The facts, my dear Nikki, are these:
“It was not a good harvest. Oh, they had twenty acres planted to seed corn, but may I remind you that the corn had been pilfered from the Cape Indians? And had it not been for Tisquantum—”
“Tis-who?” asked Inspector Queen feebly.
“—corruptly known as Squanto—there would have been no harvest that year at all. For it took the last of the more-or-less noble Patuxet to teach our bewildered forefathers how to plant it properly.”
“Well, you can’t deny they decreed some sort of holiday,” flashed Nikki, “so that they might ‘rejoyce’ together!”
“I have no desire to distort the facts,” replied Ellery with dignity. “To the contrary. They had excellent reason to ‘rejoyce’ — some of them were still alive. And tell me: Who actually participated in that first American festival?”
“Why, the Pilgrims,” said Inspector Queen uneasily.
“And I suppose you’ll tell me that as they stuffed themselves with all the traditional goodies other revered forefathers came running out of the woods with arrows through their hats?”
“I remember a picture like that in my grade-school history book—yes,” said Nikki defiantly.