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 on 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 cosies. 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,” Joe 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 ingenue 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.”