A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Murder at Mother’s Knee

Miss Prince knew all the signs that meant homework hadn’t been done. The hangdog look, the guiltily lowered head. She stood there by the Gaines boy’s desk, one hand extended. “Well, I’m waiting, Johnny.”

The culprit squirmed uncomfortably to his feet. “I–I couldn’t do it, teacher.”

“Why not?”

“I–I didn’t know what to write about.”

“That’s no excuse,” Miss Prince said firmly. “I gave the class the simplest kind of theme this time. I said to write about something you know, something that really happened, either at home or elsewhere. If the others were able to, why weren’t you?”

“I couldn’t think of anything that happened.”

Miss Prince turned away. “Well, you’ll stay in and sit there until you do. When I give out homework I expect it to be done!” She returned to her desk; stacked the collected creative efforts to one side, and took up the day’s lesson.

Three o’clock struck and the seats before her emptied like magic in one headlong, scampering rush for the door. All but the second one back on the outside aisle.

“You can begin now, Johnny,” said Miss Prince relentlessly. “Take a clean sheet of paper and quit staring out the window.”

Although the boy probably wouldn’t have believed it, she didn’t enjoy this any more than he did. He was keeping her in just as much as she was keeping him in. But discipline had to be maintained.

The would-be-author seemed to be suffering from an acute lack of inspiration. He chewed the rubber of his pencil, fidgeted, stared at the blackboard, and nothing happened.

“You’re not trying, Johnny!” she said severely, at last.

“I can’t think of anything,” he lamented.

“Yes, you can. Stop saying that. Write about your dog or cat, if you can’t think of anything else.”

“I haven’t any.”

She went back to her papers. He raised his hand finally, to gain her attention. “Is it all right to write about a dream?”

“I suppose so, if that’s the best you can do,” she acquiesced. It seemed to be the only way out of the predicament. “But I wanted you to write something that really happened. This was to test your powers of observation and description.”

“This was part-true and only part a dream,” he assured her.

He bent diligently to the desk, to make up for time lost. At the end of fifteen minutes he stood before her with the effort completed. “All right, you can go home now,” she consented wearily. “And the next time you come to school without your homework—” But the door had already closed behind him.

She smiled slightly to herself, with a sympathetic understanding he wouldn’t have given her credit for, and placed the latest masterpiece on top of the others, to take home with her. As she did so, her eye, glancing idly along the opening sentences, was caught by something. She lingered on, reading, forgetting her original intention of rising from her desk and going out to the cloakroom to get her hat.

The epistle before her, in laborious straight up-and-down, childish handwriting, read:

When she had finished, Miss Prince turned her head abruptly toward the door as if to recall the author of the composition.

She sat on there for a while, tapping her pencil thoughtfully against the edge of her teeth.

Miss Prince settled herself uneasily on one of the straight-backed chairs against the wall that the desk-sergeant had indicated to her, and waited, fiddling with her handbag.

She felt out of place in a police station anteroom, and wondered what had made her come like this.

A pair of thick-soled brogues came walloping out, stopped short before her, and she looked up. She’d never been face to face with a professional detective before. This one didn’t look like one at all. He looked more like a businessman who had dropped into the police station to report his car stolen, or something.

“Anything I can do for you?” he asked.

“It’s — it’s just something that I felt I ought to bring to your attention,” she faltered. “I’m Emily Prince of the English Department at the Benjamin Harrison Public School.” She fumbled for the composition, extended it toward him. “One of my pupils handed this to me yesterday afternoon.”

He read it over, handed it back to her. “I don’t get it,” he grinned. “You want me to pinch the kid that wrote this for murdering the King’s English?”

She flashed him an impatient look. “I think it’s obvious that this child witnessed an act of violence, a crime of some sort, without realizing its full implication,” she said coldly. “You can read between the lines. I believe that a murder has taken place in that house, and gone undiscovered. I think the matter should be investigated.”

She stopped short. He had begun to act in a most unaccountable manner. The lower part of his face began to twitch, and a dull-red flush overspread it. “Excuse me a minute,” he said in a choked voice, stood up abruptly, and walked away from her. She noticed him holding his hand against the side of his face, as if to shield it from view. He stopped a minute at the other end of the room, stood there with his shoulders shaking, then turned and came back. He coughed a couple of times on the way over.

“If there’s anything funny about this, I fail to see it!”

“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting down again. “It hit me so sudden, I couldn’t help it. A kid writes a composition, the first thing that comes into his head, just so he can get it over with and go out and play, and you come here and ask us to investigate. Aw, now listen, lady—”

She surveyed him with eyes that were not exactly lanterns of esteem. “I cross-questioned the youngster. Today, after class. Before coming here. He insists it was not made up — that it’s true.”

“Naturally he would. The detail — I mean the assignment, was for them to write about something true, wasn’t it? He was afraid he’d have to do it over if he admitted it was imaginary.”

“Just a minute, Mr.—”

“Kendall,” he supplied.

“May I ask what your duties are?”

“I’m a detective attached to the Homicide Squad. That’s what you asked for.”

It was now her turn to get in a dirty lick. “I just wanted to make sure,” she said dryly. “There’s been no way of telling since I’ve been talking to you.”

“Ouch!” he murmured.

“There are certain details given here,” she went on, flourishing the composition at him, “that are not within the scope of a child’s imagination. Here’s one: his mother was standing still, but she was all out of breath. Here’s another: a hat lying in just such and such a place. Here’s the most pertinent of the lot: her scrubbing of the kitchen floor at that hour of the night. It’s full of little touches like that. It wouldn’t occur to a child to make up things like that. They’re too realistic. A child’s flights of fancy would incline toward more fantastic things. Shadows and spooks and faces at the window. I deal in children — I know how their minds work.”

“Well,” he let her know stubbornly, “I deal in murders. And I don’t run out making a fool of myself on the strength of a composition written by a kid in school!”

She stood up so suddenly her chair skittered back into the wall. “Sorry if I’ve wasted your time. I’ll know better in the future!”

“It’s not mine you’ve wasted,” he countered. “It’s your own, I’m afraid.”

A few minutes after her class had been dismissed the next day, a “monitor,” one of the older children used to carry messages about the building, knocked on her door. “There’s a man outside would like to talk to you, Miss Prince.”

She stepped out into the hall. The man, Detective Kendall of the Homicide Squad, was tossing a piece of chalk up and down in the hollow of his hand.

“Thought you might like to know,” he said, “that I stopped that Gaines youngster on his way to school this morning and asked him a few questions. It’s just like I told you yesterday. The first words out of his mouth were that he made the whole thing up. He couldn’t think of anything, and it was nearly 4 o’clock, so he scribbled down the first thing that came into his head.”

If he thought this would force her to capitulate, he was sadly mistaken. “Of course he’d deny it — to you. That’s about as valid as a confession extracted from an adult by third-degree methods. The mere fact that you stopped to question him about it frightened him into thinking he’d done something wrong. He wasn’t sure just what, but he’d played safe by saying he’d made it up.”

He thrust his jaw forward. “You know what I think is the matter with you?” he told her bluntly. “I think you’re looking for trouble!”

“Thank you for your cooperation, it’s been overwhelming!” she said, snatching something from him as she turned away. “And will you kindly refrain from marking the walls with that piece of chalk! Pupils are punished when they do it!”

She returned stormily to the classroom. The Gaines boy sat hunched forlornly, looking very small in the sea of empty seats. “I’ve found out it wasn’t your fault for being late, Johnny,” she relented. “You can go now, and I’ll make it up to you by letting you out earlier tomorrow.”

He scuttled for the door.

“Johnny, just a minute. I’d like to ask you something.”

His face clouded as he came back slowly.

“Was that composition of yours true or made up?”

“Made up, Miss Prince,” he mumbled, scuffling his feet.

Which only proved to her that he was more afraid of the anonymous man with a badge than of his own teacher.

“Johnny, do you live in a large house?”

“Yes’m, pretty big,” he admitted.

“Well, er — do you think your mother would care to rent out a room to me? I have to leave where lam living now, and I’m trying to find another place.”

He swallowed. “You mean move into our house and live with us?” Obviously his child’s mind didn’t regard having a teacher at such close quarters as a blessing.

She smiled reassuringly. “I won’t interfere with you in your spare time, Johnny. I think I’ll walk home with you now — I’d like to know as soon as possible.”

“We’ll have to take the bus, Miss Prince, it’s pretty far out,” he told her.

It was even farther than she had expected it to be, a weather-beaten, rather depressing-looking farm-type of building, well beyond the last straggling suburbs, in full open country. It was set back from the road, and the whole area around it had an air of desolation and neglect. Its unpainted shutters hung askew, and the porch roof was warped and threatened to topple over at one end.

Something could have happened out here quite easily, she thought, judging by the looks of the place alone.

A toilworn, timid-looking woman came forward to meet them as they neared the door, wiping her hands on an apron. “Mom, this is my teacher, Miss Prince,” Johnny introduced.

At once the woman’s expression became even more harassed and intimidated. “You been doing something you shouldn’t again? Johnny, why can’t you be a good boy?”

“No, this has nothing to do with Johnny’s conduct,” Emily Prince hastened to explain. She repeated the request for lodging she had already made to the boy.

It was obvious, at a glance, that the suggestion frightened the woman. “I dunno,” she kept saying. “I dunno what Mr. Mason will say about it. He ain’t in right now.”

Johnny was registered at school under the name of Gaines. Mr. Mason must be the boy’s stepfather then. It was easy to see that the poor woman before her was completely dominated by him, whoever he was. That, in itself, from Miss Prince’s angle, was a very suggestive factor. She made up her mind to get inside this house if she had to coax, bribe, or browbeat her way in.

She opened her purse, took out a’ large-size bill, and allowed it to be seen in her hand, in readiness to seal the bargain.

The boy’s mother was obviously swayed by the sight of it but was still being held back by fear of something. “We could use the money, of course,” she wavered. “But — but wouldn’t it be too far out for you, here?”

Miss Prince faked a slight cough. “Not at all. The country air would be good for me. Couldn’t I at least see one of the rooms?” she coaxed. “There wouldn’t be any harm in that, would there?”

“N-no, I suppose not,” Mrs. Mason faltered.

She led the way up a badly creaking inner staircase. “There’s really only one room fit for anybody,” she apologized.

“I’d only want it temporarily,” Miss Prince assured her. “Maybe a week or two at the most.”

She looked around. It really wasn’t as bad as she had been led to expect by the appearance of the house from the outside. In other words, it was the masculine share of the work, the painting and external repairing, that was remiss. The feminine share, the interior cleaning, was being kept up to the best of Mrs. Mason’s ability. There was another little suggestive sidelight in that, thought Miss Prince.

She struck while the iron was hot. “I’ll take it,” she said firmly, and thrust the money she had been holding into the other’s undecided hand before she had time to put forward any further objections.

That did the trick.

“I–I guess it’s all right,” Mrs. Mason breathed, guiltily wringing her hands in the apron. “I’ll tell Mr. Mason it’s just for the time being.” She tried to smile to make amends for her own trepidation. “He’s not partial to having strangers in with us—”

“Why?” Miss Prince asked in her own mind, with a flinty question mark.

“But you being Johnny’s teacher — when will you be wanting to move in with us?”

Miss Prince had no intention of relinquishing her tactical advantage. “I may as well stay, now that I’m out here,” she said. “I can have my things sent out.”

She closed the door of her new quarters and sat down to think.

The sun was already starting to go down when she heard an approaching tread coming up the neglected dirt track that led to the door. She edged over to the window and peered cautiously down. Mason, if that was he, was singularly unprepossessing, even villainous-looking at first glance, much more so than she had expected him to be. He was thick-set, strong as a steer in body, with bushy black brows and small, alert eyes. He had removed a disreputable, shapeless hat just as he passed below her window, and was wiping his completely bald head with a soiled bandanna. The skin of his scalp was sunburned, and ridged like dried leather.

She left the window and hastened across the room to gain the doorway and overhear his first reaction to the news of her being there. She strained her ears. This first moment or two was going to offer an insight that was never likely to repeat itself, no matter how long she stayed in this house.

“Where’s Ed?” she heard him grunt unsociably. This was the first inkling she had had that there was still another member of the household.

“Still over in town, I guess,” she heard Mrs. Mason answer. She was obviously in mortal terror as she nerved herself to make the unwelcome announcement — the listener above could tell by the very ring of her voice. “Johnny’s teacher come to stay with us — a little while.”

There was suppressed savagery in his rejoinder. “What’d you do that for?” And then a sound followed that Emily Prince couldn’t identify for a second. A sort of quick, staggering footfall. A moment later she realized what it must have been. He had given the woman a violent push to express his disapproval.

She heard her whimper: “She’s up there right now, Dirk.”

“Get rid of her!” was the snarling answer.

“I can’t, Dirk, she already give me the money, and — and she ain’t going to be here but a short spell anyway.”

She heard him come out stealthily below her, trying to listen up just as she was trying to listen down. An unnatural silence fell, then prolonged itself unnaturally. It was like a grotesque cat-and-mouse play, one of them directly above the other, both reconnoitering at once.

He turned and went back again at last, when she was about ready to keel over from the long strain of holding herself motionless. She crept back inside her room and drew a long breath.

If that hadn’t been a guilty reaction, what was? But still it wasn’t evidence by any means.

The porch floor throbbed again, and someone else had come in. This must be the Ed she had heard them talk about. She didn’t try to listen this time. There would never be a second opportunity quite like that first. Whatever was said to him would be in a careful undertone. Mrs. Mason came out shortly after, called up: “Miss Prince, like to come down to supper?”

The teacher steeled herself, opened the door and stepped out. This was going to be a battle of wits. On their side they had an animal-like craftiness. On hers she had intellect, a trained mind, and self-control.

She felt she was really better equipped than they for warfare of this sort. She went down to enter the first skirmish.

They were at the table already eating — such a thing as waiting for her had never entered their heads. They ate crouched over, and that gave them the opportunity of watching her surreptitiously. Mrs. Mason said: “You can sit here next to Johnny. This is my husband. And this is my stepson, Ed.”

The brutality on Ed’s face was less deeply ingrained than on Mason’s. It was only a matter of degree, however. Like father, like son.

“Evenin’,” Mason grunted.

The son only nodded, peering upward at her in a half-baleful, half-suspicious way, taking her measure.

They ate in silence for a while, though she could tell that all their minds were busy on the same thing: her presence here, trying to decide what it might mean.

Finally Mason spoke. “Reckon you’ll be staying some time?”

“No,” she said quietly, “just a short while.”

The son spoke next, after a considerable lapse of time. She could tell he’d premeditated the question for a full ten minutes. “How’d you happen to pick our place?”

“I knew Johnny, from my class. And it’s quieter out here.”

She caught the flicker of a look passing among them. She couldn’t read its exact meaning, whether acceptance of her explanation or skepticism.

They shoved back their chairs, one after the other, got up and turned away, without a word of apology. Mason sauntered out into the dark beyond the porch. Ed Mason stopped to strike a match to a cigarette he had just rolled. Even in the act of doing that, however, she caught his head turned slightly toward her, watching her when he thought she wasn’t looking.

The older man’s voice sounded from outside: “Ed, come out here a minute, I want to talk to you.”

She knew what about — they were going to compare impressions, possibly plot a course of action.

The first battle was a draw.

She got up and went after Mrs. Mason. “I’ll help you with the dishes.” She wanted to get into that kitchen.

She couldn’t see it at first. She kept using her eyes, scanning the floor surreptitiously while she wiped Mrs. Mason’s thick, chipped crockery. Finally she thought she detected something. A shadowy bald patch, so to speak. It was both cleaner than the surrounding area, as though it had been scrubbed vigorously, and at the same time it was overcast. There were the outlines of a stain still faintly discernible. But it wasn’t very conspicuous, just the shadow of a shadow.

She said to herself: “She’ll tell me. I’ll find out what I want to know.”

She moved aimlessly around, pretending to dry off something, until she was standing right over it. Then she pretended to fumble her cloth, let it drop. She bent down, and planted the flat of her hand squarely on the shadowy place, as if trying to retain her balance. She let it stay that way for a moment.

She didn’t have to look at the other woman. A heavy mug slipped through her hands and shattered resoundingly at her feet. Emily Prince straightened up, and only then glanced at her. Mrs. Mason’s face had whitened a little. She averted her eyes.

“She’s told me,” Miss Prince said to herself with inward satisfaction.

There hadn’t been a word exchanged between the two of them.

She went upstairs to her room a short while after. If somebody had been murdered in the kitchen, what disposal had been made of the body? Something must have been done with it — a thing like that just doesn’t disappear.

She sat on the edge of the cot, wondering: “Am I going to have nerve enough to sleep here tonight, under the same roof with a couple of murderers?” She drew the necessary courage, finally, from an unexpected quarter. The image of Detective Kendall flashed before her mind, laughing uproariously at her. “I certainly am! I’ll show him whether I’m right nor not!” And she proceeded to blow out the lamp and lie down.

In the morning sunlight the atmosphere of the house was less macabre. She rode to school with Johnny on the bus, and for the next six hours put all thoughts of the grisly matter she was engaged upon out of her mind, while she devoted herself to parsing, syntax, and participles.

After she had dismissed class that afternoon she went to her former quarters to pick up a few belongings. This was simply to allay suspicion on the part of the Masons. She left the greater part of her things undisturbed, to be held for her.

She was waiting for the bus, her parcels beside her, when Kendall came into sight on the opposite side of the street. He was the last person she wanted to meet under the circumstances. She pretended not to recognize him, but it didn’t work. He crossed over to her, stopped, touched his hat-brim, and grinned. “You seem to be moving. Give you a hand with those?”

“I can manage,” she said distantly.

He eyed the bus route speculatively, then followed it with his gaze out toward her eventual destination. “It wouldn’t be out to the Mason place?” Which was a smarter piece of deduction than she had thought him capable of.

“It happens to be.”

To her surprise his face sobered. “I wouldn’t fool around with people of that type,” he said earnestly. “It’s not the safest thing, you know.”

Instantly she whirled on him, to take advantage of the flaw she thought she detected in his line of reasoning. “You’re being inconsistent, aren’t you? If something happened out there which they want to keep hidden, I agree it’s not safe. But you say nothing happened out there. Then why shouldn’t it be safe?”

“Look,” he said patiently, “you’re going at this from the wrong angle. There’s a logical sequence to things like this.” He told off his fingers at her, as though she were one of her own pupils. “First, somebody has to be missing or unaccounted for. Second, the body itself, or evidence sufficiently strong to take the place of an actual body, has to be brought to light. The two of them are interchangeable, but one or the other of them always has to precede an assumption of murder. That’s the way we work. Your first step is a composition written by an eight-year-old child. Even in the composition itself, which is your whole groundwork, there’s no direct evidence of any kind. No assault was seen by the kid, no body of any victim was seen either before or after death. In other words, you’re reading an imaginary crime between the lines of an account that’s already imaginary in itself. You can’t get any further away from facts than that.”

She loosed a blast of sarcasm at him sufficient to have withered the entire first three rows of any of her classes. “You’re wasting your breath, my textbook expert. The trouble with hard-and-fast rules is that they always let a big chunky exception slip by.”

He shoved a helpless palm at her. “But there’s nobody missing, man, woman, or child, within our entire jurisdiction, and that goes out well beyond the Mason place. Word would have come in to us by now if there were! How’re you going to get around that?”

“Then why don’t you go out after it?” she flared. “Why don’t you take this main road, this interstate highway that runs through here, and zone it off, and then work your way back along it, zone by zone, and find out if anyone’s missing from other jurisdictions? Believe me,” she added crushingly, “the only reason I suggest you do it is that you have the facilities and I haven’t!”

He nodded with tempered consideration. “That could be done,” he admitted. “I’ll send out inquiries to the main townships along the line. I’d hate to have to give my reasons for checking up, though, in case I was ever pinned down to it: ‘A kid in school here wrote a composition in which he mentioned he saw his mother scrubbing the kitchen floor at two in the morning.” He grinned ruefully. “Now why don’t you just let it go at that and leave it in our hands? In case I get a bite on any of my inquiries, I could drop out there myself and look things over—”

She answered this with such vehemence that he actually retreated a step. “I’ll do my own looking over, thank you! I mayn’t know all the rules in the textbook, but at least I’m able to think for myself. My mind isn’t in handcuffs! Here comes my bus. Good day, Mr. Kendall!”

He thrust his hat back and scratched under it. “Whew!” she heard him whistle softly to himself, as she clambered aboard with her baggage.

It was still too early in the day for the two men to be on hand when she reached the Mason place. She found Mrs. Mason alone in the kitchen. A stolen glance at the sector of flooring that had been the focus of her attention the previous night revealed a flagrant change. Something had been done to it since then, and whatever it was, the substance used must have been powerfully corrosive. The whole surface of the wood was now bleached and shredded, as though it had been eaten away by something. Its changed aspect was far more incriminating now than if it had been allowed to remain as it was. They had simply succeeded in proving that the stain was not innocent, by taking such pains to efface it. However, it was no longer evidence now, even if it had been to start with. It was only a place where evidence had been.

She opened the back door and looked out at the peaceful sunlit fields that surrounded the place, with a wall of woodland in the distance. In one direction, up from the house, they had corn growing. The stalks were head-high, could have concealed anything. A number of black specks — birds — were hovering above one particular spot, darting busily in and out. They’d rise above it and circle and then go down again; but they didn’t stray very far from it. Only that one place seemed to hold any attention for them.

Down the other way, again far off — so far off as to be almost indistinguishable — she could make out a low quadrangular object that seemed to be composed of cobblestones or large rocks. It had a dilapidated shed over it on four uprights. A faint, wavering footpath led to it. “What’s that?” she asked.

Mrs. Mason didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, somewhat unwillingly: “Used to be our well. Can’t use it now, needs shoring up. Water’s all sediment.”

“Then where do you get water from?” Miss Prince asked.

“We’ve been going down the road and borrowing it from the people at the next place down, carrying it back in a bucket. It’s a long ways to go, and they don’t like it much neither.”

Miss Prince waited a moment, to keep the question from sounding too leading. Then she asked casually: “Has your well been unfit to use for very long?”

She didn’t really need the answer. New grass was sprouting up everywhere, but it had barely begun to overgrow the footpath. She thought the woman’s eyes avoided her, but that might have been simply her chronic hangdog look. “Bout two or three weeks,” she mumbled reluctantly.

Birds agitated in a cornfield. A well suddenly unfit for use for the last two or three weeks. And then, in a third direction, straight over and across, the woods, secretive and brooding. Three possibilities.

She said to herself: “She told me something I wanted to know once before. Maybe I can get her to tell me what I want to know now.” Those who live in the shadow of fear have poor defenses. The teacher said briskly: “I think I’ll go for a nice long stroll in the open.”

She put her to a test, probably one of the most peculiar ever devised. Instead of turning and striking out at once, as a man would have in parting from someone, she began to retreat slowly, half-turned backwards toward her as she drew away, chattering as she went, as though unable to tear herself away.

She retreated first in the general direction of the cornfield, as though intending to ramble among the stalks. The woman just stood there immobile in the doorway, looking after her.

The teacher closed in again, as though inadvertently, under necessity of something she had just remembered. “Oh, by the way, could you spare me an extra chair for my room I—”

Then when she again started to part company with her, it was in a diametrically opposite direction, along the footpath that led to the well. “Any kind of a chair will do,” she called back talkatively. “Just so long as it has a seat and four—”

The woman just stood there, eyeing her without a flicker.

She changed her mind, came back again the few yards she had already traveled. “The sun’s still hot, even this late,” she prattled. She pretended to touch the top of her head. “I don’t think I care to walk in the open. I think I’ll go over that way instead — those woods look nice and cool from here. I always did like to roam around in woods—”

The woman’s eyes seemed to be a little larger now, and she swallowed hard. Miss Prince could distinctly see the lump go down the scrawny lines of her throat. She started to say something, then she didn’t after all. It was obvious, the way her whole body had seemed to lean forward for a moment, then subside against the door-frame. Her hands, inert until now, had begun to mangle her apron.

But not a sound came from her. Yet, though the test seemed to have failed, it had succeeded.

“I know the right direction now,” Miss Prince was saying to herself grimly, as she trudged along. “It’s in the woods. It’s somewhere in the woods.”

She went slowly. Idly. Putting little detours and curleycues into her line of progress, to seem aimless, haphazard. She knew, without turning, long after the house was a tiny thing behind her, that the woman was still there in the doorway, straining her eyes after her, watching her all the way to the edge of the woods. She knew too, that that had been a give-and-take back there. The woman had told her what she wanted to know, but she had told the woman something too. If nothing else, that she wasn’t quite as scatterbrained, as frivolous, as she had seemed to be about which direction to take for her stroll. Nothing definite maybe, but just a suspicion that she wasn’t out here just for her health.

She’d have to watch her step with them, as much as they’d have to watch theirs with her. A good deal depended on whether the woman was an active ally of the two men, or just a passive thrall involved against her will.

She was up to the outermost trees now, and soon they had closed around her. The house and its watcher was gone from sight, and a pall of cool blue twilight had dimmed everything. She made her way slowly forward. The trees were not set thickly together but they covered a lot of ground.

She had not expected anything so miraculous as to stumble on something the moment she stepped in here. It was quite likely that she would leave none the wiser this time. But she intended returning here again and again if necessary, until—

She was getting tired now, and she was none too sure of her whereabouts. She spotted a half-submerged stump protruding from the damp, moldy turf and sat down on it, fighting down a suspicion that was trying to form in the back of her mind that she was lost. A thing like that, if it ever got to that Kendall’s ears, would be all that was needed to complete his hilarity at her expense. The stump was green all over with some sort of fungus, but she was too tired to care. The ground in here remained in a continual state of moldy dampness, she noticed. The sun never had a chance to reach through the leafy ceiling of the trees and dry it out.

She had been sitting there perhaps two minutes at the most, when a faint scream of acute fright reached her from a distance. It was thin and piping, and must have been thin even at its source. She jarred to her feet. It had sounded like the voice of a child, not a grown-up. It repeated itself, and two others joined in with it, as frightened as the first, if less shrilly acute. She started to run, as fast as the trackless ground would allow, toward the direction from which she believed the commotion was coming.

She could hear waters splashing, and then without any warning she came crashing out into the margin of a sizable and completely screened-off woodland pool. It was shaped like a figure 8.

At the waist, where it narrowed, there was an irregular bridge of flat stones, although the distances between them were unmanageable except by sprinting. There was a considerable difference in height between the two sections, and the water coursed into the lower one in a placid, silken waterfall stretching the entire width of the basin. This lower oval was one of the most remarkable sights she had ever seen. It was shallow, the water was only about knee-high in it, and under the water was dazzling creamy-white sand. There was something clean and delightful looking about it.

Two small boys in swimming trunks, one of them Johnny Gaines, were arched over two of the stepping-stones, frantically tugging at a third boy who hung suspended between them, legs scissoring wildly over the water and the sleek sand below. “Keep moving them!” she heard Johnny shriek just as she got there. “Don’t let ’em stay still!”

She couldn’t understand the reason for their terror. The water below certainly wasn’t deep enough to drown anybody—

“Help us, lady!” the other youngster screamed. “Help us get him back up over the edge here!”

She kicked off her high-heeled shoes, picked her way out to them along the stones, displaced the nearest one’s grip with her own on the floundering object of rescue. He wouldn’t come up for a minute, even under the added pull of her adult strength, and she couldn’t make out what was holding him. There was nothing visible but a broil of sand-smoking water around his legs. She hauled backwards from him with every ounce of strength in her body, and suddenly he came free.

The three of them immediately retreated to the safety of the bank, and she followed. “Why were you so frightened?” she asked.

“Don’t you know what that is?” Johnny said, still whimpering. “Quicksand! Once that gets you—”

There could be no mistaking the genuineness of their fright. Johnny’s two companions had scuttled off for home without further ado, finishing their dressing as they went.

“Look, I’ll show you.” He picked up a fist-sized rock and threw it in. What happened sent a chill down her spine. The stone lay there for a moment, motionless and perfectly visible through the crystalline water. Then there was a slight concentric swirl of the sand immediately around it, a dimple appeared on its surface, evened out again, and suddenly the stone wasn’t there any more. The sand lay as smooth and satiny as ever. The delayed timing was what was so horrible to watch.

“We’d better go,” she said, taking a step backward from it.

“The upper pool’s all right, it’s only got gravel at the bottom,” Johnny was explaining, wiping his hair with a handful of leaves.

She didn’t hear him. She was examining the branch of a bush growing beside the bank that had swung back into place in her wake. It formed an acute angle such as is never found in nature. It was badly fractured halfway along its length. She reached for a second branch, a third, and fingered them. Their spines were all broken the same way.

Her face paled a little. She moved around the entire perimeter of the bush, handling its shoots. Then she examined the neighboring bushes. The fractures were all on the landward side, away from the pool. The tendrils that overhung the water itself — that anyone in difficulties in the sand could have been expected to grasp — were all undamaged, arching gracefully the way they had grown.

She came away with a puzzled look on her face. But only that, no increased pallor.

At the edge of the woods, just before they came out into the open again, the youngster beside her coaxed plaintively: “Miss Prince, don’t gimme ’way about going swimming in there, will you?”

“Won’t they notice your hair’s damp?”

“Sure, but I can say I went swimming in the mill-pond, down by the O’Brien place. I’m allowed to go there.”

“Oh, it’s just that — that place we just came from they don’t want you to go near?”

He nodded.

That could have been because of the quicksand. Then again it could have been for other reasons. “Have they always told you to keep away from there?” she hazarded.

It paid off. “No’m, only lately,” he answered.

Only lately. She decided she was going to pay another visit to that cannibal sandbed. With a long pole, perhaps.

The evening meal began in deceptive calmness. Although the two Masons continued to watch her in sullen silence, there seemed to be less of overt suspicion and more of just casual curiosity in their underbrow glances. But a remark from Johnny suddenly brought on a crisis when she was least expecting it. The youngster didn’t realize the dynamite in his question. “Did I pass, in that composition I handed in?” he asked all at once. And then, before she could stop him in time, he blurted out: “You know, the one about the dream I had, where I came down and—”

Without raising eyes from the table she could sense the tightening of the tension around her. It was as noticeable as though an electric current were streaking around the room. Ed Mason forgot to go ahead eating, he just sat looking down at his plate. Then his father stopped too, and looked at his plate. There was a soft slur of shoe-leather inching along the floor from somewhere under the table.

Mrs. Mason said in a stifled voice, “Sh-h, Johnny.”

There was only one answer she could make. “I haven’t got around to reading it yet.” Something made her add: “It’s up there on the table in my room right now.”

Mason resumed eating. Then Ed followed suit.

She had given them all the rope they needed: Let them go ahead and hang themselves now. If the composition disappeared, as she was almost certain it was going to, that would be as good as an admission that—

She purposely lingered below, helping Mrs. Mason as she had the night before. When she came out of the kitchen and made ready to go up to her room, they were both sprawled out in the adjoining room. Whether one of them had made a quick trip up the stairs and down again, she had no way of knowing — until she got up there herself.

Mason’s eyes followed her in a strangely steadfast way as she started up the stairs. Just what the look signified she couldn’t quite make out. It made her uneasy, although it wasn’t threatening in itself. It had some other quality that she couldn’t figure out, a sort of shrewd complacency. Just before she reached the turn and passed from sight he called out: “Have a good night’s sleep, Miss.” She saw a mocking flicker of the eyes pass between him and Ed.

She didn’t answer. The hand with which she was steadying the lamp she was taking up with her shook a little as she let herself into her room and closed the door. She moved a chair in front of it as a sort of barricade. Then she hurried to the table and sifted through the homework papers stacked on it.

It was still there. It hadn’t been touched. It was out of the alphabetical order she always kept her papers in, but it had been left there for her to read at will.

That puzzled, almost crestfallen look that she’d had at the pool came back to her face again. She’d been positive she would find it missing.

How long she’d been asleep she could not tell, but it must have been well after midnight when something roused her. She didn’t know exactly what it was at first; then as she sat up and put her feet to the floor, she identified it as a strong vibration coming from some place below. As though two heavy bodies were threshing about in a struggle down there.

She quickly put something on and went out to listen in the hall. A chair went over with a vicious crack. A table jarred. She could hear an accompaniment of hard breathing, an occasional wordless grunt. But she was already on her way down by that time, all further thought of concealment thrown to the winds.

Mason and his son were locked in a grim, heaving struggle that floundered from one end of the kitchen to the other, dislodging everything in its path. Mrs. Mason was a helpless onlooker, holding a lighted lamp back beyond danger of upsetting, and ineffectually whimpering: “Don’t! Dirk! Ed! Let each other be now!”

“Hold the door open, quick, Ma! I’ve got him!” Mason gasped just as Miss Prince arrived on the scene.

The woman edged over sidewise along the wall and flung the door back. Mason catapulted his adversary out into the night. Then he snatched up a chicken lying in a pool of blood over in a corner, sent that after him, streaking a line of red drops across the floor. “Thievin’ drunkard!” he shouted, shaking a fist at the sprawling figure outside. “Now you come back when you sober up, and I’ll let you in!” He slammed the door, shot the bolt home. “Clean up that mess, Ma,” he ordered gruffly. “That’s one thing I won’t ’low, is no chicken-stealing drunkards in my house!” He strode past the open-mouthed teacher without seeming to see her, and stamped up the stairs.

“He’s very strict about that,” Mrs. Mason whispered confidentially. “Ed don’t mean no harm, but he helps himself to things that don’t belong to him when he gets likkered up.” She sloshed water into a bucket, reached for a scrubbing brush, sank wearily to her knees, and began to scour ruddy circles of chicken blood on the floor. “I just got through doin’ this floor with lye after the last time,” she murmured.

Miss Prince found her voice at last. It was still a very small, shaky one. “Has — has this happened before?”

“Every so often,” she admitted. “Last time he run off with the O’Brien’s Ford, drove it all the way out here just like it belonged to him. Mr. Mason had to sneak it back where he took it from, at that hour of the night.”

An odor of singeing felt suddenly assailed the teacher’s nostrils. She looked, discovered a felt hat, evidently the unmanageable Ed’s, fallen through the open scuttle-hold of the woodburning stove onto the still-warm ashes below. She drew it up and beat it against the back of a chair.

There was a slight rustle from the doorway and Johnny was standing there in his night-shirt, sleepily rubbing one eye. “I had another of those dreams, Ma,” he complained. “I dreamed the whole house was shaking and—”

“You go back to bed, hear?” his mother said sharply. “And don’t go writin’ no more compositions about it in school, neither!” She fanned out her skirt, trying to screen the crimson vestiges on the floor from him. “Another of them wood-varmints got into the house, and your Pa and your Uncle Ed had to kill it, that’s all!”

Miss Prince turned and slunk up the stairs, with a peculiar look on her face — the look of someone who has made a complete fool of herself. She slammed the door of her room behind her with — for her — unusual asperity. She went over to the window and stood looking out. Far down the highway she could make out the dwindling figure of Ed Mason in the moonlight, steering a lurching, drunken course back toward town and singing, or rather hooting, at the top of his voice as he went.

“Appearances!” she said bitterly. “Appearances!”

She always seemed to meet Kendall just when she didn’t want to. He appeared at her elbow next morning just as she alighted from the bus in town. “How’re things going? Get onto anything yet?”

She made a move to brush by him without answering.

“I haven’t received anything definite yet on any of those inquiries I sent out,” he went on.

She turned and faced him. “You won’t, either. You can forget the whole thing! All right, laugh, you’re entitled to it! You were right and I was wrong.”

“You mean you don’t think—”

“I mean I practically saw the same thing the boy did, with my own eyes, last night and it was just a family row! I’ve made a fool out of myself and gone to a lot of trouble, for nothing.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going to pack my things and leave.”

“Don’t take it too hard—” he tried to console her.

She stalked off. At least, she had to admit to herself, he’d been decent enough not to say, “I told you so,” and laugh right in her face. Oh, well, he was probably saving it up to enjoy it more fully back at the station house with his cronies.

Mrs. Mason was alone in the kitchen again when she returned that afternoon to get her things together. There hadn’t been time before school in the morning. The woman looked at her questioningly, but the teacher didn’t say anything about her imminent departure. Time enough to announce it when she came down again.

In her room she picked up the dress she’d had on the afternoon before and started to fold it over. Something caught her eye. There was a stain, a blotch, that she hadn’t noticed until now. She looked at it more closely, as though unable to account for it. Then she remembered sitting down on a half-submerged stump for a moment, just before hearing the boys’ cries of distress. “No more appearances!” she warned herself, and tossed the dress into the open bag.

She picked up the batch of school papers lying on the table to follow suit with them. There was that composition of Johnny’s that had started all the trouble. She started to reread it. She was standing up at first. Before she had finished she was seated once more. She turned and looked over at the dress she had just put away. Then she got up and took it out again.

There was a timid knock on the door and Mrs. Mason looked in at her. “I thought maybe you’d like me to help you get your things together,” she faltered.

Miss Prince eyed her coolly. “I didn’t say anything about leaving. What gave you that idea? I’m staying — at least, for a little while longer.”

The woman’s hands started out toward her, in a palsied gesture of warning. She seemed about to say something. Then she quickly closed the door.

Her main worry was to get down the venerable stairs without causing them to creak and betray her. The house lay steeped in midnight silence. She knew that Mason and his son were inveterate snorers when asleep — she had heard them at other times, even downstairs when they dozed after meals. Tonight she could not hear them.

She didn’t use the flashlight she had brought with her, for fear of attracting attention while still within the house. The real need for that would be later, out in the woods. The stairs accomplished without mishap, it was an easy matter to slip the bolt on the back door and leave without much noise. There was a full moon out, but whether it would be much help where she was going, she doubted.

She stole around to the back of the rickety tool-house and retrieved the long-poled pitchfork she had concealed there earlier in the evening. Its tines were bent, and with a little manipulation, it might serve as a sort of grappling hook if — if there was anything for it to hook onto. A button was all she needed, a rotting piece of suiting. Evidence. Until she had that, she couldn’t go to Kendall, she had to keep on working alone. Not after what she had admitted to him that morning.

She struck out across the silver-dappled fields. The trees closed around her finally, a maw of impenetrable blackness after the moonlight, and she brought her flashlight into play, following its wan direction-finder in and out among the looming, ghostly trunks.

The bed of quicksand loomed whitely even in the dark. There was something sinister about it, like a vast evil eye lying there in wait. The coating of water refracted the shine of her light to a big phosphorescent balloon when she cast the beam downward. She discovered her teeth chattering and clamped them shut. She looked around for something to balance her light, finally nested it in a bush so that the interlaced twigs supported it. She shifted a little farther along the bank and poised the pitchfork like someone about to spear fish.

She lunged out and downward with it. The soft feel of the treacherous sand as the tines dove in was transferred repugnantly along the pole to her hands. That was all she had time to notice. She didn’t even see it sink in.

A leathery hand was pressed to the lower half of her face, a thick anaconda-like arm twined about her waist from behind, and the light winked out. Her wrists were caught together as they flew up from the pitchfork-pole, and held helpless.

“Got her, Ed?” a quiet voice said.

“Got her,” a second voice answered.

There hadn’t been any warning sound. They must have been lurking there ahead of her, to be able to spring the trap so unexpectedly.

Her pinioned hands were swung around behind her, brought together again. The hand had left her mouth. “You int’rested in what’s down in there?” the man behind her asked threateningly.

“I don’t know what you mean. Take your hands off me!”

“You know what we mean. And we know what you mean. Don’t you suppose we’re onto why you’re hanging around our place? Now you’ll get what you were lookin’ for.” He addressed his father. “Take off her shoes and stockings and lie ’em on the bank. Careful, don’t tear ’em now.”

“What’s that for?”

“She came out here alone, see, early tomorrow morning, and it looked so pretty she went wading without knowing what it was, and it got her.”

She kicked frantically, trying to stop them. She was helpless in their hands. Her ankles were caught, one at a time, and stripped.

“They’ll dredge for her, won’t they?” Dirk Mason mentioned with sinister meaning.

“She’ll be on top, won’t she?” was the grisly reassurance. “Once they get her out, they’ll be no call for them to go ahead dredging any further down.”

She ripped out a scream of harrowing intensity. If it had been twice as shrill, it couldn’t have reached past the confines of these woods. And who was there in the woods to hear her? “Think we ought to stuff something in her mouth?” the older man asked.

“No, because we gotta figure on her being found later. Don’t worry, no one’ll hear her.”

She was fighting now the way an animal fights for its life. But she was no match for the two of them. Not even a man would have been.

They were ready for the incredible thing they were about to do. “Grab her legs and swing her, so she goes out far enough.” There was a moment of sickening indecision, while she swung suspended between them, clear of the ground. Then her spinning body shot away from them.

Water sprayed over her as she struck. The fall was nothing. It was like landing on a satin quilt, the sand was so soft. She rolled over, tore her arms free, and threshed to a kneeling position. There was that awful preliminary moment in which nothing happened, as with that stone she had seen Johnny throw in yesterday. Then a sudden pull, a drawing, started in — weak at first, barely noticeable, giving the impression of being easy to counteract. And each move she made wound the sand tighter around her bared feet, ankles, calves.

Meanwhile, something was happening on the bank, or at least, farther back in the woods; but she was only dimly aware of it, too taken up in her own floundering struggles. It reached her vaguely, like something through a heavy mist. An intermittent winking as of fireflies here and there, each one followed by a loud crack like the breaking of a heavy bough. Then heavy forms were crashing through the thickets in several directions at once, two of them fleeing along the edge of the pool, others fanning out farther back, as if to intercept them. There was one final crack, a fall, and then a breathless voice nearby said: “Don’t shoot — I give up!”

A light, stronger than the one she had brought, suddenly flashed out, caught her, steadied, lighting up the whole pool. Her screams had dwindled to weak wails now, simply because she hadn’t enough breath left. She was writhing there, still upright, but her legs already gone past the knees.

“Hurry up, and help me with this girl!” a voice shouted somewhere behind the blinding light. “Don’t you see what they’ve done to her?” The pole of the same pitchfork she had used was thrust out toward her. “Hang onto this!” She clutched it with both hands. A moment later a noosed rope had splashed into the water around her. “Pass your arms through that and tighten it around you. Grab hold now and kick out behind you!”

For minutes nothing happened; she didn’t seem to move at all, though there must have been at least three of them pulling on the rope. “Are we hurting you?” Then suddenly there was a crumbling feeling of the sand around her trapped legs and she came free.

Kendall was one of them, of course, and even the brief glimpse she had of his face by torchlight made her wonder how she could have ever felt averse to running into him at any time. She certainly didn’t feel that way now.

They carried her out of the woods in a “chair” made of their hands and put her into a police car waiting at the edge of the fields.

“You’d better get back there and go to work,” she said. “Even before you got the rope around me, the downward pull had stopped, I noticed. I seemed to be standing on something... How did you get out here on time?”

“One of those inquiries I sent out finally paid off. A commercial traveler named Kenneth Johnson was reported missing, from way over in Jordanstown. He was supposed to show up at Indian River, out beyond here in the other direction, and he never got there — dropped from sight somewhere along the way, car and all. He was carrying quite a gob of money with him. He left three weeks ago, but it wasn’t reported until now, because he was only expected back around this time. I only got word a half hour ago. I thought of the Masons right away, thanks to you. I started right out here with a couple of my partners to look around, never dreaming that you were still here yourself. Then a little past the next house down, the O’Brien place, we met the kid, Johnny, running along the road lickety-split, on his way to phone in to us and get help. His mother had finally got pangs of conscience and thrown off her fear of her husband and stepson long enough to try to save you from what she guessed was going to happen.”

She went out there again first thing the next morning. Kendall came forward to meet her as she neared the pool. He told her they’d finally got the car out a little after daybreak, with the help of a farm-tractor run in under the trees, plenty of stout ropes, and some grappling hooks. She could see the weird-looking sand-encrusted shape standing there on the bank, scarcely recognizable for what it was.

“Kenneth Johnson, all right,” Kendall said quietly, “and still inside it when we got it out. But murdered before he was ever swallowed up in the sand. I have a confession from the two Masons. He gave Ed a hitch back along the road that night. Mason got him to step in for a minute on some excuse or other, when they’d reached his place, so he’d have a chance to rifle his wallet. Johnson caught him in the act, and Mason and his father murdered him with a flatiron. Then they put him back in the car, drove him over here, and pushed it in. No need to go any closer, it’s not a very pretty sight.”

On the way back he asked: “But what made you change your mind so suddenly? Only yesterday morning when I met you you were ready to—”

“I sat down on a stump not far from the pool, and afterwards I discovered axle-grease on my dress. It was so damp and moldy in there that the clot that had fallen from the car hadn’t dried out yet. Why should a car be driven in there where there was no road?

“But the main thing was still that composition of Johnny’s. Remember where Johnny said the hat had fallen? Through the stove onto the ashes. But in the reenactment they staged for me, Ed Mason’s hat also fell through the open scuttlehold in the stove onto the ashes below. Is it probable that a hat, flung off somebody’s head in the course of a struggle, would land in the identical place twice? Hardly. Things like that just don’t happen. The second hat had been deliberately placed there for me to see, to point up the similarity to what had happened before.”

That night, safely back in her old quarters in town, she was going over back-schoolwork when her landlady knocked on the door. “There’s a gentleman downstairs to see you. He says it’s not business, but social.”

Miss Prince smiled a little. “I think I know who it is. Tell him I’ll be right down as soon as I’ve finished grading this composition.”

She picked up the one Johnny Gaines had written. She marked it A-plus, the highest possible mark she could give, without bothering for once about grammar, punctuation, or spelling. Then she put on her hat, turned down the light, and went out to meet Kendall.