“We were all in and out,” Haywood said.
Terry’s voice came quietly. “What are you trying to say, Elsie?”
“I am trying to say,” she worried her hands together, “that Frederick is upstairs in his room — murdered.”
“Elsie,” Terry said again in that gentle, coaxing tone.
“A good night’s sleep…” Haywood began.
Ida hiccoughed gently. “Let’s go up. Let’s see what she’s talking about!”
The house whispered a grim promise of things to come as they went upstairs, down the hall to Frederick’s room.
Strangely reluctant, they paused, shrinking away, until Elsie Sole opened the door of the room. She fumbled, found the light switch beside the door, clicked it on.
Time swirled through the blackness of her night. After awhile she let out her breath. “You see…”
Terry took her hands in his, and Haywood’s arm slipped about her shoulder.
“We see,” Terry said gently, “an empty room. Only an empty room. Nothing has been bothered, nothing touched.”
“But the chair before the bookcase…”
She felt Terry and Haywood turn. “The chair is empty,” Haywood said. “Perhaps you were asleep, Elsie, thinking of him. A dream sometimes can seem very real…”
A dream? That dragon head table a dream? The touch of her son’s cooling flesh a dream? And the coat button in his hand?
Her voice was edged with hysteria. “But some sign… Blood on the chair… A wrinkle in the carpet…”
They moved deeper in the room, she between Terry and Haywood. The house flung their rasping breathing back at them, the four walls of this room mocking her.
“There’s nothing,” Terry said. “Please, Elsie…”
“But the…” She snapped the words off. Not the button. She wouldn’t mention the button. The button would prove this hadn’t been a dream. But one of the persons in this room would be very glad to get his hands on that button…
“I… I… Feel… I’d better go back to my room, I guess.”
At the door of her room, Terry and Haywood volunteered to sit with her for awhile. “No, I’ll be all right,” she said. “Good night.”
She eased inside her room, heard them move away. The house whispered grim threats. Young Peter next, maybe. Or Elsie Sole, herself. The wan, lonely noises of night insinuated themselves into her mind. She knew only one thing — it hadn’t been a dream.
But who would believe that? Not the police, for the police need evidence. They’d pat her on the shoulder, advise a sedative, and under cover of the darkness of her world, they’d tap their temples suggestively. An old blind woman going insane… Visioning murder.
Frederick would have walked up the road from the small train station in the village. The village boasted only one taxi, which went out of operation very early in the evening. Frederick would have left his bags checked, intending to take Haywood’s or Terry’s car and drive down for them tomorrow. Say that he had come in on the nine o’clock train. He’d walked up the two mile stretch of road from the village. No one had seen him; he’d entered the house like a shadow and like a shadow had dissolved. Rut hers was a world of shadows; so she could believe. She knew it was no dream. She knew it — and one other person knew it…
She made her way carefully to the door of her small bath. She opened her medicine cabinet and her fingers searched the left side of the second narrow shelf for a squat, square bottle. It contained capsules of headache medicine sans acetanilid because she was the age that acetanilid did not react favorably on the heart. After her fall over the dragon head table she needed a couple of those capsules. Her fingers passed a slim round bottle, a bottle with bumps raised over the glass, found the squat, square bottle. She opened it, removed two capsules.
She placed the capsules upright between her thumb and forefinger in order to lay them on her tongue. Then delilberately, stilling the sudden crawling of her flesh, she went back to her bedroom. She laid the capsules side by side on the dresser and pushed the ends of them against the base of the mirror. Then with her finger she touched the other ends of the two capsules.
Her first impression had been right. One of those capsules was a trifle longer than the other, as if something had been added to its contents in a minute quantity. But a minute quantity of many poisons was enough to drain the life from a human being…
The nights whispered to her, her own and that night outside. She was alone, an old blind woman. What, she asked herself, could an old blind woman do against a man with the strength to kill in his arm and the craftiness of murder in his heart? The nights were hushed, listening for her answer. Muddled in her chair, she knew she had none.
She waited, listening. Two hours must have past. She heard the familiar noises of the house in slumber. It was an old house, this place that Terry’s father had willed to him. When its occupants slept, the aged joints of the house itself relaxed with an occasional creaking pop. Terry waged a periodic war against mice with stuff from his lab; hut he’d never been quite successful, and every night the mice made faint scurryings in the depths of the walls. They were there tonight. They were her barometer of safety; when the mice were silent a human being was stirring.
She rose from her chair, opened her door. The hallway, too, was sleeping. A faint breeze, chill and heady with the promise of dew, trailed its fingers across her face; tiny drops of perspiration drank in the chill in the breeze and stabbed cold needles in her flesh.
She moved down the hallway an inch at a time, thinking of deliberately misplaced furniture. She turned the knob of Haywood’s door until the latch clicked. She eased inside the room, stood a moment. Bedsprings threatened to shrill as he shifted his weight. Then he was breathing again deeply and regularly.
The door of his closet was open. Very quickly now she worked, her hands sweeping over the front of his coats. She was positive that button had come from a man’s coat. Exactly the size and weight, too plain to have come from any of Ida’s things.
She felt no missing buttons. She counted the suits quickly, racking her memory for the number that Haywood had. They were all here.
Then she was hack out in the hall, wiling dry of energy. But there was still Terry’s room. She started down the long hallway.
Now she listened more intently. The buzzings in her head were her nerves singing. There had been no buttons missing from the front of Haywood’s coat…
She opened Terry’s door, heard his gargling snore. It took her fifteen minutes to cross the room to the closet door. Her trembling hands touched his clothes, searched. No buttons missing from the first suit, nor the second, nor any of them.
She stood a moment, not understanding. She was positive that had been a button from a man’s coat.
The party… Someone at the party! It would have been a simple matter for anyone to have seen Frederick crossing the lawn. There were few neighbors near this house, and those knew Frederick and his habits well. One of them had seen him, had gone to his room. Waited for Frederick…
But — the lah! An old coat of Terry’s was down there and one that Haywood used for gardening now and then was in a little junk room off the lab.
She’d been in the lab many times before. She knew the exact spot of the steam table, the test tube racks, the shelves that held flasks and beakers. Before the accident three years ago she’d done unimportant little tasks for Terry in the lab now and then.