The Weak-Eyed Bat

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.

“In short, I had no opportunity to examine Mrs. Little under proper conditions, and since I did not question her alibi for the two murders, I was not looking for evidences of insanity. Even now I cannot name definitely her particular mental disease although I’m fairly certain that it was a type of schizophrenia which is nearly always incurable and progressive.”

“But if she actually heard voices and believed in them,” Mr. Smith put in, “why didn’t she tell someone?”

“That would be the usual thing,” Prye said, “but I have had many patients suffering from auditory hallucinations who could and did conceal them. An observant nurse might come upon them in an attitude of listening, or moving their mouths in reply to the voices. Lastly, I offer in my own defense the old truism that the dividing line between sanity and insanity is difficult to fix. Insanity may even be a matter of convention: a Wall Street broker who spends half his time peering at ticker tape would be just another maniac to the Australian aborigines.”

“Darling,” Nora said sweetly, “are you lecturing again?”

“You wanted to know, and when people want to know, I tell them,” Prye said modestly.

“We could make it a sort of quiz night,” Mr. Smith suggested. “One question from each of us. The ladies first, of course. Miss Frost, have you anything to ask?”

Susan blushed a little. “Well, yes. About that — you know — my hand.”

“It was, as Nora said, mostly hocus pocus,” Prye replied. “I wanted to make Jennie feel more at ease when I came to test her hearing. But it served another purpose. Susan’s hand and arm smelled distinctly of oil of lavender, which is one of the constituents of mosquito oil. Now Hattie told me that the only mosquito oil in the house belonged to Joan and was locked in Joan’s room. Susan, on the other hand, had told me that she went to sleep on the beach on Monday night. But Susan was miraculously free of mosquito bites. I gathered then that Susan had seen Joan on Monday and had borrowed the mosquito oil, and therefore could be telling the truth about her movements on Monday night.”

“I saw Joan,” Susan admitted in a trembling voice. “I used the mosquito oil as an excuse. She let me into her room sometime after Ralph left.”

She paused and Prye said, sighing, “You wanted your father’s diary.”

“Yes.”

Prye turned his head toward the head of the table. “Your diary has caused me a lot of trouble. I hope it’s worth it.”

“Not any longer,” Frost said, smiling. “I burned it. A gesture symbolic of a new life. You see, I am a sentimentalist after all. If I weren’t I wouldn’t have struggled into a stiff collar two sizes too small.”

“You look very handsome,” Emily said graciously.

“I’d like to ask a question that’s bothering me,” Nora said. “If Mary was out in the storm on Tuesday night she must have been wet when she got home. Why didn’t Jennie notice it when she woke up?”

“Mary was damp and Jennie did notice. When Mary came back to the house she took off her wet clothes and got into bed. The only thing she couldn’t cover up was her wet hair, so she took the precaution of spilling a glass of water. Jennie assumed that she was nervous because of the storm and that the glass slipped out of her hands.”

Ralph leaned across the table toward Prye. “What was that business of Jennie turning off the lights and trying to escape?”

“Jennie could scarcely explain it herself,” Prye answered. “The main idea, though, was to give Mrs. Little a chance to get away. It was one of those impulsive gestures based on a genuine fondness for Mrs. Little and a feeling that both murders had been justified. The hearing test I gave her was very crude but it served the purpose of making her realize that I suspected her hearing was subnormal and consequently suspected the alibi that partly depended on her hearing. The majority of people are able to hear this watch of mine at a distance of three and a half feet with one ear closed.”

They were silent a minute.

“What did Mary mean when she said her kidneys had dried up?” Emily asked suddenly. “Or was that just a delusion?”

“A delusion based on the fact that sulfanilamide in large quantities does poison the kidneys. This type of delusion is very common among the mentally ill. One man may claim he can’t eat because he has no stomach, another may insist his throat is blocked or his bowels are shriveled. Knowing the effects of the drug Mary thought her kidneys had dried up.

“Because of some of its unpredictable qualities sulfanilamide itself lately has given place to its compounds, sulfapyridine and sulfathiazol. The effects of these are less unpleasant. In Mary’s case, however, her system must have been saturated with the drug to have such results. I estimate that she took one hundred and twenty grains in twenty-four hours, about the maximum dosage. The cyanosis, the fall of blood pressure, and the weak pulse are symptomatic of both sulfanilamide poisoning and a heart attack.”

“My question,” Professor Frost said, “is hypothetical. Suppose, Prye, that Mrs. Little had not confessed and had not been insane, could you have proved your case against her in a court of law?”

“That would depend,” Prye said dryly, “on the judge, the jury, Jennie, and the talents of the counsel for the defense, in other words on the variable human element. My chief point was the sulfanilamide. Its presence in the blood stream could easily be verified; but what about the reason for its presence? I would tell the jury that the drug had been used to simulate the symptoms of a heart attack and establish an alibi for the accused. The defending lawyer would insist that poor Mrs. Little had felt an attack of strep throat coming on and had used the medicine which a doctor had prescribed the year before for the same thing.

“Juries love fingerprints, but they frown on cases built up on lack of fingerprints. Besides, Mrs. Little could have denied the story she told me of flinging the ring out of the window; or, better still, her lawyer could have the story thrown out of court because she had been given an eighth grain of morphine a few hours previously.

“Her motive has always been obvious, but so many of you had obvious motives. Offhand I’d say I could have built a better case against Miss Bonner, and by better I mean a case composed of tangibles, the tangibles being fifty one-hundred-dollar bills.”

Ralph looked at Emily in astonishment. “What were you doing with five thousand dollars in bills, Aunt Emily?”

Emily said calmly: “I was going to buy you a new car, my dear.”

“You were! Really, I— That’s awfully nice of you.”

“It’s nothing at all,” Emily said. “Just a little present for your birthday.”

“But my birthday isn’t until January!”

Emily gazed at him reproachfully. “You can’t expect a poor old crippled lady to remember dates.”

“Of course not!” Prye said severely, and Emily had the grace to blush. “Mr. Smith, your question is the last one. I hope it’s good.”

“It isn’t good, no,” Mr. Smith said cautiously. “I merely want a simple explanation about that nurse dying, Miss Alfonse.”

“It’s been explained two hundred times,” Emily said acidly, “but I suppose I can endure it once more.”

“Perhaps you could endure it better,” Prye said, “if you explained it yourself.”

Emily was pleased. “I’d be delighted. Stop me if I use any words of over four letters. To begin with, this Miss Alfonse answered an advertisement of mine for a nursing companion, with references, unimpeachable character, other help kept, country house, all conveniences, good salary — you know the sort of thing. Her references were excellent, which is not remarkable since she wrote them herself. At first she was very satisfactory. It was only when she began to ogle Ralph that I suspected she had low designs.”

Ralph looked uneasy, and Susan lowered her eyes.

Nora said: “Cute way of describing marriage — a low design.”

“That’s as good a way as any,” Emily said severely. “To continue, I honestly believe Alfonse would have tried to marry Ralph if Tom Little had not been murdered. But the fact that she became a reluctant accessory to the murder upset all her plans. She had intended to marry for money but here was a situation which would bring her a lot of money with no trouble at all beyond keeping silent. She accepted Mary Little’s offer and promised to keep her mouth shut.

“As soon as Prye found out that Alfonse had made a date with Tom Little at nine o’clock the night he was murdered, Alfonse realized that she would have to get away from Muskoka immediately. If she stayed, Mary Little might confess to the murders and implicate her. If she got away, she could go into hiding somewhere and contact Mary Little later on to get her hush money. The chief difficulties in escaping were that the road was guarded at each end by policemen and that she had not much money on hand.

“I don’t know how she found out about my five thousand dollars, but I have an idea that it was right after Tom’s death when she came into my room with a case of hysterics. Perhaps the hysterics were feigned and she wanted to get me excited so she could see if I had the money hidden in my clothes. I suspect she heard Prye and me talking about it in my room.

“Anyway, I did have the money in my clothes and she did find out about it. So she made her plans for taking the money. It was easy enough for her to go down to the kitchen and dope my coffee. When I was asleep she came into my room and stole the bills. Back in her own room she put on a girdle so as to have some place to keep the money safe, and over it she wore a bathing suit. With a pair of suture scissors she cut her left arm, let the blood flow on to the floor, and then bandaged her arm and waited for her chance to go downstairs without being seen, I suppose. She couldn’t take any of the boats to escape because she had deliberately planned her actions to suggest that she had been murdered. So she was forced to swim across the lake. Well, she didn’t make it. And that’s all.”

Miss Alfonse’s epitaph, Prye thought: “And that’s all.” Aloud he said: “She cut her arm too deeply, you see. The loss of blood weakened her and she drowned. Perhaps it was a longer swim than it looked.”

“Shall we have coffee now?” Susan suggested. She rose from her chair, self-consciously smoothing out the new red dress. The fires of hell, her father thought, the fires of hell licking at Susan, thank God. Smiling, he pushed back his chair and went to the door.

The others followed him, Emily tapping her cane and leaning on Mr. Smith’s arm; Ralph and Susan walking stiffly, far apart, not looking at each other.

Nora tugged at Prye’s coat sleeve and held him back.

“One more question,” she said ominously.

“Name it.”

“Just how many murders do you average a year?”

“One doesn’t average murders,” Prye said with dignity. “One cannot help them. One is powerless to dam the flow of destiny.”

“You can drag your feet out of the current,” Nora said coldly. “I don’t want to be widowed while I’m walking up the aisle.”

“Aisle?” Prye paused. “Did you say aisle?”

“I did.”

“You’re surely not one of those women who’d ask a man to go waltzing up an aisle in spats and striped pants—”

“That’s me,” Nora said amiably. “You’ll be disarming. As for me, I won’t want to spoil your effect, so I’ll content myself with looking ethereal in white satin, with a long, long veil and a single calla lily.”

Prye sighed and bent down and kissed her.

“No greater love,” he said sadly.