Medford sneered, “The trouble is with that argument, it proves too much. You’re proving that no horse could have kicked the girl.”
“That’s right, Medford,” the sheriff said. “You’re gradually getting the idea. And if you want to see what killed the girl, here it is.”
The sheriff nodded to Quinlan. Quinlan brought forward the iron club with the horseshoe welded onto it.
The Grand Jurors left their seats and crowded around the lethal weapon.
“Where did you get this?” Medford asked.
“Now, never mind,” the sheriff said. “I’m making an explanation right now. Now, you gentlemen hadn’t better touch this yet because there’s some blood and hairs on the horseshoe that we may need for evidence. There aren’t any fingerprints on the thing because we’ve tested it carefully. Someone rubbed it with a piece of chamois skin or something and got all the fingerprints off. Now, if you boys will just go back and sit down, I’ll tell you what happened.”
The Grand Jurors resumed their seats. The district attorney moved over to regard the welded horseshoe in frowning anger.
“To kill a girl with a horseshoe so it would look like an accidental kick by a horse,” the sheriff went on, “you’d want to be sure everyone knew she’d gone into a barn. Now, I’ve got a theory that when this Estelle Nichols wrote her friend that she’d sleep in barns if she had to, she signed her death warrant right there. I think someone who knew about that letter got Estelle Nichols in the barn, and then, when he had her in the right position, clubbed her over the head. You see, he had to make just one blow do the job in order to make it look right. He had this diary with him and he needed both hands to swing this club around with the force he needed. He’d torn one page out of the diary, which was the only reason he was after it in the first place. And not having any more use for the diary, he just tossed it into the manger when he swung around to strike that blow. He intended to go pick up that diary later on, but he’d figured without the mare. The mare was so nervous that he was afraid to go into the stall. As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t any particular need to get that diary because he’d already torn out the one page that he’d wanted destroyed.”
“You say this was a man?” the foreman asked the sheriff.
“Sure it was a man,” the sheriff said. “For one thing, look at the welding job. You don’t go into some blacksmith shop and ask to have a club welded on a horseshoe when you’re intending to go out and murder someone with it. You do the job yourself. Since the war there are some women that know a lot about welding, but to me it looks like a man’s job. And there are two or three other things that make it look like a man that’s been around the country a little bit but not quite enough. A man who doesn’t realize there’s a difference in the size of shoes on horses. A man who doesn’t know the difference between barley and oat hay. Remember what Estelle Nichols wrote this Adrian girl in a letter. You’ve got a photograph of it there. Somethin’ about in spite of the fact she was hypnotized she hoped Mae would listen when Estelle told her the things that you just couldn’t put on paper. Figure that out and that means a man.”
Heads nodded in unison around the Grand Jury room.
“Now then,” the sheriff said, “if it’s a man, it means that Mae Adrian is protecting him, because, according to my theory, the man must have seen that letter from Estelle saying she was going to come out here and sleep in stables if she had to. Right away he made up his mind that he was going to see she was killed in a stable so it would look like an accidental death.
“You can figure it out for yourselves. If this Estelle Nichols really had been sleeping in stables, she wouldn’t have slept in one this close to the end of her journey. She could have hitchhiked her way into the city within a couple of hours, joined her friend and had a bath and a good bed. What’s more, no one’s ever found anything belonging to this young woman except the clothes she was wearing. Now, if she’d been hitchhiking, she certainly must have had a few things with her. Therefore, the way I figure it, she had already been in to see Mae Adrian. And the man that killed her picked her up and brought her back to the Calhoun barn. Then he probably went back to Mae Adrian and said to her, ‘Look, Mae, the most awful thing happened. Estelle and I were in a barn and a horse kicked her. I don’t want anybody to know that I was in there with her because it would ruin my business. And seeing it was an accident, you just keep quiet and it will all blow over.’
“Remember that this club shows the murder had been deliberately planned. The man who did it hoped he could make an ‘accident’ out of it; but in case he couldn’t, he had a second string to his bow. He was going to frame it on Frank Garwin. Why? Because he knew for one tiling young Garwin was going to be in Rockville that night. For another, he knew about Estelle asking for Frank’s address in that letter.
“That gives us another clue. The man not only knew Mae Adrian real well, but he also knew Frank Garwin, and he also must have known Sid Rowan and his wife were planning on a movie show. And he also knew Garwin would have an alibi for the last part of the evening. So, if he had to make it murder and pin it on somebody, he wanted the time-element mixed up so it would seem the mare hadn’t been able to eat her hay because of the body being there. So after the killing he put more hay down the feed chute — but he gave himself away by putting in barley hay instead of oat hay. He tried to show the mare wasn’t hungry, and in doing that left the best clue of all, because the mare had been hungry and had eaten her hay — the oat hay Sid Rowan had put down for her. But later on the murderer had tried to show the mare wouldn’t eat by putting down more hay — and because he couldn’t tell the difference between oat hay and barley hay, he proved the fact we were dealing with cold-blooded murder.
“But this murderer was feeling pretty well satisfied with himself. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the death would have been considered just an accident and passed off as such. But if something went wrong, he had only to plant the murder weapon in a car which Frank Garwin had been in the night of the killing — and then be sure the weapon was found at just the right time. That was the most important thing of all.
“To fix that up, he did a simple thing. He unscrewed the valve seat in one of the rear tires on Turlock’s car just enough to make some of the air leak out. Now if you gentlemen are interested in all this, let’s get Mae Adrian in and ask her a couple of questions.”
There was a chorus of quick, eager assents.
Rush Medford started to say something, then, at the expressions he saw on the faces about him, changed his mind and remained silent.
Mae Adrian came in and was sworn.
The foreman said to the sheriff, “Suppose you ask her the questions, Bill.”
The sheriff smiled at the nervous young woman. “Mae,” he said in his kindly, drawling voice, “you might as well answer a few questions for us here. We don’t like to pry into your private affairs, but we’ve got to clean this thing up.”
She nodded.
“Now then,” the sheriff said, “when you said that you were about to do something Estelle didn’t approve of, did that mean you were going to get married?”
“Well, not exactly, I was going with someone, and I was going to let him invest some money I had inherited.”
“Pretty handy with tools, isn’t he? Makes you little gadgets out of steel and things?”
Her face lit up. “Yes indeed, he does. He makes me hammered-brass trays and he welds tubing into ornamental candlesticks and...”
“And what’s his name?” the sheriff asked.
“He doesn’t want me to tell who he is and I’m not going to.”