LITMIR.BIZ

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could hear her suddenly stop her fishing about.

      “Where?” she said.

      “Right here. Fast asleep.”

      I turned off the engine and switched the lights on. Then I stood there motionless, my hand out in front of me.

      It wasn’t Andy Thorp under that wheel. It was Sandra Gould—and it didn’t take the ghastly open-eyed stare on her strangely colored face to tell me she was dead.

      Hardly knowing what I was doing, I took the flash from Alice Gould’s paralyzed fingers and turned its beam on the lifeless girl. Her arms were sunk down at her sides. Clutched in one hand was the torn petal of a blue velvet flower.

      I held the flash on it for a long time. Only in a strange remote part of my consciousness was I aware of Alice Gould’s hands moving over the window ledge and quietly, calmly disengaging from that dead hand the evidence that might easily have hanged her son . . . or her son’s lost lady.

      CHAPTER SIX

      Alice Gould’s simple act of disengaging the torn and crushed velvet petals from her daughter-in-law’s dead fingers was small and unobtrusive enough in itself. Its implications were appalling. Even at that moment, still balanced on one foot on the running board of Andy Thorp’s car, with Sandra Gould sprawled inert and so terribly silent on the seat, I recognized a few of them. First, and above all, it meant that we tacitly and definitely accepted the fact that Rosemary Bishop was in some way involved in whatever had happened. Second, it meant that both of us pledged ourselves to keep the fact from getting out—lined up on Rosemary’s side, as it were, against Sandra—and became quite simply accessories after whatever the fact might turn out to be.

      “I’ll stay here, Grace,” Mrs. Gould said at last, quietly. “You go and get Jim and phone Dr. Potter.”

      “I’ll stay,” I said. “It’ll be better for you to tell Jim.”

      I’m not sure now whether I actually shrank from telling Jim Gould that his wife was dead, or whether it was because in some secret law-abiding place in my heart I felt some obligation to social order. Whether I felt it wasn’t safe to leave Alice Gould alone there with Sandra, or whether already I had some deep-seated fear that Jim . . . But that was nonsense, of course. I think Alice Gould understood, however, because as our eyes met across Sandra’s body a faint infinitely sad smile moved in hers.

      “I’d rather go, Grace,” she said. “I just didn’t like to leave you alone . . . again . . . with death.”

      She went then, and I went over to the switch by the side door to turn on the overhead light. It seemed odd to me suddenly that neither of us had thought of it before. I squeezed in front of Andy’s car and stubbed my toe on something, making noise enough, or so it seemed in the small completely silent segment of night that engulfed me, to wake even Sandra sprawled there. I felt down on the floor to see what it was, and picked up the monkey wrench Jim had had in front of Mr. Toplady’s store that morning.

      I put it on the shelf and went, feeling my way cautiously, in front of Jim’s coupé to the door. I turned on the light. Everything was instantly stark and dismal in the bright glare of the single unshaded bulb set in the middle of the ceiling. A huge moth miller flew in and bashed himself against the bulb; insects of all sorts came suddenly swarming in from the night. I stood alone there with Sandra, waiting.

      Outside I thought I could hear someone coming. I moved back in front of Jim’s car and between his and Andy’s to the door, and looked out. No one was there. I listened a moment, but no one was moving. A dog probably, I said to myself, and looked at my wrist, but I hadn’t my watch on. It seemed a long time that I’d stood there, and it was longer still before I heard a door slam and heavy feet dashing down the brick path from the house.

      Jim came running around to the back, took one look at me and stopped abruptly.

      “Is she dead, Grace?” he asked . . . as impassively as if she were someone he scarcely knew.

      I nodded.

      Then, more like a man walking in his sleep than anything else, he went inside.

      “In Andy’s car,” I said, because he’d gone straight to his own. He looked bewildered and uncertain, but he turned. I saw him catch the window ledge with both hands to steady himself, and stand there motionless . . . for ages, it seemed. Then he dropped his head down on the back of his hands. I thought he was sobbing—his shoulders moved convulsively once or twice—but when I went over to him and put my arm round his shoulders he raised haggard anguished eyes that had no tears in them. I had no idea what was going on in his mind.

      Quite abruptly over our heads we heard a knocking. Old Hawkins’s voice came down querulously.

      “Mis’ Gould, ain’ you all never goin’ to bed? We got to be out here at seven o’clock, an’ you all can sleep till dinnertime.”

      Sandra’s oval face, dyed red with carbon monoxide, stared up at the ceiling. Jim tried to speak, but not a sound came. Outside we heard a car coming along the road from April Harbor, and two long white fingers of light stretched through the night and turned, flattening themselves against us as the car came into the Goulds’ drive. Jim’s mother appeared then too, in the door, and went to the car to meet Dr. Potter. And then, without the least warning, Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck came through the hedge from my garden. Sergeant Buck was dressed. Colonel Primrose had on a striped flannel dressing gown. He looked sleepy; Sergeant Buck did not.

      The Colonel came into the garage. His black eyes darted in every corner at once before they fastened themselves on Jim and me, and beyond us where the light from the ceiling struck Sandra’s head. He glanced out then at Dr. Potter and another man who were hurrying along the drive, and at me, but he said nothing. He merely backed out of their way and stood near the door, the massive square figure of his sergeant looming portentously behind him.

      Jim and I moved back into the narrow space between the fronts of the two cars. I felt his sudden involuntary start as he recognized the man with Dr. Potter. Our Mr. Shryock is something like a turkey buzzard—we see him only at times like this.

      “You say she’s dead, ma’am?” he inquired of Mrs. Gould. He caught sight of Jim and lowered his voice. “Tragic, tragic,” he said. “Tch, tch!”

      Mr. Shryock’s trouble is that he has to reconcile the difficult roles of local undertaker, wanting private business, on the one side and local coroner doing public duty on the other. We’d seen him work before . . . when Chapin was drowned. We saw him now give Sandra’s body a perfunctory glance and look around then at the two men standing silently by the door.

      “I’ll have to have a jury before the body can be moved,” he said. “Will you two gentlemen act? I’ll rout out some more.”

      He stepped briskly out and hailed a man he had left in his car. They disappeared together. In a few moments there was a little circle of our shocked and white-faced neighbors, silent and terribly distressed, standing around outside in the drive, lighting cigarettes, whispering a little among themselves. I looked them over as they came—Ned Bryan, Pinkie Reed, Buzz Dixon. They all lived beyond the Goulds’. I breathed a sigh of relief as I realized that the coroner was headed away from the Bishops’. At least, I thought, they would be spared that embarrassment. But I was wrong. Mr. Shryock came back at last, with him Rodman Bishop, George Barrol and Yancy Holland, the Bishops’ caretaker and man of all work.

      They made up the twelve. Rodman Bishop nodded to the rest of the group, then moved over to Alice Gould and took his stand beside her. His dressing gown and rumpled gray hair seemed extraordinarily deshabille beside her coat and print dress and properly arranged coiffure. George moved in with the other men, looking about as upset as I’ve ever seen him, trying to find out what had happened.

      Mr. Shryock stepped up on a box in the doorway. “This is a very tragic mission, gentlemen, I’ve called you on,” he said. “I must ask you each, constituting the coroner’s jury, to file through the garage here and look at the body. We will then hear

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