“Where do you keep these drugs?” Prye said, keeping his voice casual.
She looked up, her pale eyes suddenly shrewd.
“They’ve been stolen,” she said. “They’re all gone. Somebody stole them. All my lovely boxes have been stolen.”
She began to rock back and forth as if she were in great pain. Then she stopped suddenly and said:
“I heard Tom tell you I didn’t believe in doctors. That’s how I knew that he knew. He didn’t want you to get a doctor for me. He was afraid you’d find out that I’d taken sulfanilamide. Tom was very stupid.”
“Was he trying to protect you?”
“Oh yes! You see, he hadn’t any money. I have. I have a lot of money. But if I died he wouldn’t get any of it. I fixed it like that. He wouldn’t get any of it. He had to protect me.”
Mr. Smith shifted his legs. I wonder if dogs ever do this, he thought, ever get all mixed up like this and go crazy. I wonder if Horace would ever go crazy...
“I suppose you gave Jennie some of your drugs on Tuesday after dinner?” Prye said.
“That was easy,” she confided. “I asked her to have a cup of tea with me and I gave her two nembutal capsules. I knew they took about twenty minutes to work, just time enough for her to go down and put Tom’s dinner on the table and wash my dishes. As soon as she came back upstairs to work on her afghan she went to sleep in the chair beside my bed. Nembutal works quickly but the effects wear off soon. I knew I could get her to wake up when I called her.”
“How did you know Tom was going to meet Miss Alfonse at nine o’clock?”
“The phone call,” she said. “I could always tell when Tom was lying, and when he said it was the doctor on the phone I made him tell me the truth. I cried. He couldn’t bear to see me cry, and then he told me it was Miss Alfonse who had called. He didn’t know what she wanted. I told him he’d better meet her and find out.
“He left the house about ten minutes to nine and I put on my raincoat and a pair of shoes and as I passed your boathouse I thought of the ax I’d seen hanging on the wall. I knew you wouldn’t miss it, if you hadn’t been here for two years, so I put it under my coat. He didn’t hear me coming. It was thundering. It was easy to kill him. When I hit him there was a bolt from heaven so that I could see his face. You should have seen it. He was afraid. He was afraid of all the things he’d done—”
Her eyes moved around the room again. She was nodding her head. “You see, it pays to do nothing you’ll be ashamed of.”
The heads bobbed again, one after the other.
“I thought it would be a fine idea to put him in Joan’s canoe. I dragged him along the path to the Frosts’ boathouse. It was very hard. And then she came along. She was scared, too, the nurse. She started to run away when she saw me but I called her back. She was scared, too, but she came. I said I would give her money, a lot of money, if she wouldn’t tell, if she’d help me. So we dragged Tom over and put him in Joan’s canoe and untied the rope. I threw the ax into the lake. I untied the rope of the other boat, too, because it was Susan’s. I hate Susan.”
Susan shrank behind her father, white-lipped, thinking: she hates me but I haven’t done anything to her. I helped her. I was kind to her. I took her the wild-strawberry jam and I picked the strawberries with my own hands, but she hates me. It’s because she’s crazy...
Mary was talking again, her pale eyes flickering over their faces.
“On Wednesday night I was really clever. I sent Jennie downstairs and then I wrote her a letter. I even spelled her name wrong purposely. But nobody noticed.” She frowned at the inspector. “You didn’t even notice.”
“Of course I noticed!” White replied instantly. “It threw me off entirely.”
“You see? Well, then I burned the rest of the paper and envelopes and scattered the ashes out of the window. I went down the back stairs and around to the front door and rapped. I left the letter on the doorstep and then I watched at the dining-room window until I saw Jennie go to answer the front door. Then I went in the back door, up the stairs, and got into bed. Pretty soon you came along with Nora and I heard you talking about pencils. So I hid my pencil on top of the doorjamb in my room. When you came in you thought you were very clever knowing that I’d been out of bed. But you didn’t know I’d done all that, did you? Did you?”
“No,” Prye said, wishing it were over, thinking: it’s not amusing any longer. It’s fun to ride after the hounds but it’s not fun to gang up on the little fox...
“I only made one mistake and that was lying about the ring, and I wouldn’t have made that if I hadn’t been given some morphine. I knew they mustn’t discover my fingerprints anywhere so I always wore gloves. I didn’t find the ring in Tom’s room. I took it off Joan’s finger when she was dead because she wasn’t engaged any longer, an engagement ring was no use to her. I put the ring in Tom’s room. I engaged her to Tom.”
She put her hand to her head again.
“I’m tired. I’m sick, too. It’s been a strain on me. My head hurts. My kidneys are poisoned. That’s what sulfanilamide does, it poisons the kidneys. Mine are all dried up. I must go and find Jennie. I must tell her not to make me any tea tonight because my kidneys are all dried up. I must find Jennie.”
She got to her feet and took a step toward the door.
“Jennie!” she called. “Jennie!”
She stumbled and fell on one knee, clutching at her heart. Prye caught her up and carried her back to the chesterfield. He loosened the neck of her dress and put two fingers lightly on her wrist.
“Jennie,” she whispered, gasping. “Don’t forget — no tea.”
“I’ll tell her,” Prye said unsteadily. “I won’t forget.”
Her face twisted in a spasm of anguish; her body convulsed with pain.
Prye said: “Get my bag and call Innes. It’s angina.”
The little fox in its death throes. The hounds watching, silent. Prye’s two fingers straining for a pulse beat, like two tiny hunters trying to save the little fox when it was too late.
Prye got up quickly and walked to the door.
Chapter Eighteen
Two weeks later a number of changes had taken place in the community. The Little cottage had been let at half price to a young couple who were not superstitious. Nora had painted another sunrise which hung, resplendent, in Prye’s sitting room. Jennie had gone to live with her sister. Susan had bought a new red dress, and Professor Frost was giving his first dinner party in ten years.
Professor Frost struggled with his bow tie and his thoughts.
One spent thirty dollars buying one’s daughter a new dress, then another thirty, he reflected sadly, giving her an opportunity to wear it, and another thirty making oneself conform to the standard set by the new dress. Still, there was a certain gleam in young Bonner’s eye that it might be profitable to foster.
The gleam was very apparent at dinner. Even Susan noticed, and attributed it to the flicker of the candles, or an oncoming fever. She kept her eyes lowered demurely.
“There’s something I can’t understand,” Emily said, thumping the cane which was substituting for her wheelchair for the night. “How could you, a psychiatrist, have missed diagnosing Mary’s condition?”
“Not a fair question,” Nora said. “The defense has had two weeks to prepare his answer.”
Prye smiled. “The defense is ready and offers you the following: I saw Mrs. Little only four times. The first was on Monday after lunch from a distance. The second was on Tuesday morning when she was supposedly having a heart attack and was therefore not in her normal condition. She spoke no more than three sentences. On Wednesday afternoon when I saw her she was hysterical and I administered a sedative. On Wednesday night I had my longest conversation with her, but any peculiarities of speech or action I attributed to the disappearance of her husband and the after-effects of morphine.