Her eyes were wide open, staring at the sky in mute surprise. The white cotton nightgown clung like a shroud to the firmly molded curves of her body, somehow making her look even younger than she was.
I looked up again, directly into the blazing eyes of Galbraith Hazelton.
“Boyd!” he said thickly. “What are you doing here— you murderer! It’s your fault that she’s dead. I told you —I warned you—if the balance of her mind was any further upset, anything could happen!”
“Mr. Hazelton,” Greer said curtly, “I—”
Hazelton’s face was crimson with hate, the mustache brisding furiously, as he took a step toward me.
“She took her own life!” he snarled. “Sometime during the night she crept out of the house and down here to the lake. She must have just walked straight into the water and—”
His face puckered childishly and he started to cry, hesitantly, like a kid who’s been beaten and doesn’t know why.
“She was alone,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Don’t you see that? How she must have felt? Alone—cut off 80
from every other human being on this earth—so alone that she couldn’t face up to it any more. Rather than face it, she took her own life.” His voice built up to a crescendo again. “You drove her to it, Boyd! The truth is you murdered her just as surely as if you’d shot a bullet into her heart.” He took another step toward me and swung wildly, screaming “Murderer!” over and over until Greer gestured briefly, and Karnak stepped forward and grabbed Hazelton’s arms, pinning them to his sides.
“Take him up to the house,” Greer said thinly, and Karnak led the old man gently away.
The medical examiner knelt down beside Clemmie’s body and opened up his bag.
“You found her?” Greer asked Pete.
“That’s right, Lieutenant,” Pete nodded vigorously. “Seven o’clock this morning. Miss West told me she wasn’t in her room and she couldn’t find Miss Clemmie anywhere inside the house at all. So I said I’d look around outside. By the time I got down here to the lake it was around seven-thirty. Then I saw her, floating face down out there in the center. I went in after her and brought her back to the edge. Then I saw she was dead and there wasn’t nothing I could do for her, so I went back to the house and told Mr. Houston—he said for me to come back here and wait, and that’s what I did.”
“That’s your slicker she’s lying on?” Greer queried. “Sure,” Pete nodded. “I took it off before I went in to get her, and when I brought her out I put her on it because 1 figured it wouldn’t be nice to let her get dirtied up by those rushes.”
The young doctor straightened up, his face pallid.
“Not much I can do until we get her downtown. Lieutenant,” he said hoarsely. “Death by drowning I’d say now. She was in the water a few hours.”
“Yeah,” Greer nodded. “You want to move her, that’s O.K. with me. Let the boys get their pictures and she’s all yours.”
“O.K.,” the doctor croaked, his face turning green at the thought.
“We’ll go back to the house,” the Lieutenant said. “There’s nothing more we can do here.”
“Lieutenant,” I said. “Her nightgown—it’s white.”
“I can see that,” he said.
“No stains,” I said.
“She was in the water a few hours,” the examiner said. He grunted, but there was a question in his tone.
“Those stains don’t wash out,” I told him. ‘Try it yourself and see, when you get home.” I pointed at the green smears across the cuffs of his pants.
He looked down at them for a moment, then dropped to his knees beside the body, studying the nightgown closely without touching it
“The heartbreaking picture of loneliness her old man painted,” I said slowly. “During the night she crept out of the house and down to the lake—then walked straight into the water.”
Greer straightened up, looking around keenly.
“You can’t get nearer than fifty yards to the lake without having to go through the rushes,” he said. “But she didn’t go through the rushes and she got right into the lake.”
“So she flew?”
He nodded. “So she was carried—and that makes it murder!”
“It was what they call the hard sell,” I said.
Greer grinned faintly. “There you go again, pushing it too far, Boyd. You made your point about the stains—a good point. You don’t have to remind me what the old man said about suicide—I remember.”
He looked at Tighe. “You’d better stay here until things are cleaned up and the body’s moved. Then come up to the house.”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” Tighe nodded. “I’ll handle it.”
“I want that nightgown photographed from every 82
angle,” Greer continued. “I want all of it to show up just the way it is now—nice and white and no stains.*’
“I’ll make sure they cover it,” Tighe said.
We walked back slowly toward the farmhouse again— the look on Greer’s face said he still didn’t want to talk, so I kept my mouth shut.
“You’d better come inside with me, Boyd,” he said suddenly when we were close to the front door. “But don’t say anything, you understand? No questions, no answers, no observations, no social gossip. While you’re in there, you’re a Rhode Island clam—one word and I’ll have you back inside that cell so fast you won’t even remember having ever been out!”
“Don’t push it, Lieutenant,” I grinned at him. “You made your point!”
The living room was still Early Colonial but nobody cared any more so it seemed to have lost its self-consciousness. Most of the people in the room looked like something out of a Greek tragedy, ten seconds after Doom struck.
Galbraith Hazelton sat slumped in an armchair, gazing dully at the fireplace. Side by side on the couch sat Martha and Sylvia, their faces blank with shock. Houston stood at one end of the couch, blinking calmly through his half-framed glasses.
Karnak stood beside the door looking like a chunk of masonry someone forgot to remove. Greer was in the center of the room, the cold fire burning steadily in back of his eyes, and the remote, contemptuous look on his face. I stood beside Karnak, and if I’d been anybody but me I would have felt embarrassed. That’s one thing about having a perfect profile—it gives you confidence to overcome the embarrassing social situation.
“Miss West,” Greer said so suddenly that she jumped violently. “You were the one who discovered she was missing?”
“That’s right, Lieutenant,” Sylvia said in a small voice.
“She liked a cup of coffee in bed in the mornings before she got up. I took her coffee in and saw she wasn’t there.”
“What then?”
“Well, I didn’t think much about it—she was probably in the bathroom, I thought. So I put the coffee down on the bedside table and went out again. I guess it would be about twenty minutes later when I looked in again and saw the coffee was still untouched—that was when I started to look for her inside the house.”
“You couldn’t find her, so you told the others,” Greer nodded. “And Rinkman went outside looking for her?” “That’s correct, Lieutenant,” she said in a low voice. He kept up a steady flow of questions with an effortless machine-precision, but the answers didn’t get him any place. The girls had gone to bed around eleven the night before. Houston and Hazelton had retired an hour later. No one had waked up during the night to hear any strange noises, see any strange people and so on.
“Lieutenant!” Galbraith Hazelton said finally, in a hoarse voice. “Why do you keep wasting time with all these stupid questions! We all know Clemmie took her own life—and we all know why!” He glared at me malignantly. “It was Boyd’s murderous interference into something he didn’t understand—his criminal disregard of my warnings and—”
“Mr. Hazelton,” Greer interrupted him coldly. “Your daughter didn’t commit suicide, she was murdered.” “Murdered? That’s impossible—how could she have been murdered!”