Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 31, No. 4. Whole No. 173, April 1958

Helen Mabry Ballard Wind in the Afternoon

Neither crisis nor calamity can break the rhythm of farm life — no, not even murder. Yet in a land of white farmhouses, clean fields, and straight fences, why should there be any murder at all? Why?

Abel Walsh stared unhappily at the body sprawled in the barnyard. It lay face down in fallen leaves, one leg angled, the other stretched back until the heavy, manure-caked boot touched the wall of the barn. There were brown leaves on the grizzled hair and over the back, and one leaf that was dyed at the edges near a hole in the dirty gray sweater. The newly risen sun slanted across the enclosure, throwing shadows from a wind-stripped oak against the face of the barn, but it was pallid light with no warmth in it for Walsh and the two men beside him.

The sheriffs unhappiness had nothing to do with the cold, nor with sentiment for the dead Matt Kershaw. It sprang from the humbling suspicion that this was something he couldn’t handle, that no previous experience had prepared him to cope with murder. It was irritating to know that Doc Hans-low would agree; the doubt in the coroner’s eyes had increased the sheriff’s own self-distrust.

He lifted his head and turned to the big farmer in milk-splashed overalls and windbreaker.

“What brought you down here so early, Muller?”

“He’s my brother-in-law, ain’t he?” retorted the farmer, as though that were answer enough. “I found him and called you from the house, then waited till you come. Now I got to get back and finish the chores.”

Walsh looked beyond the yard to the farmhouse and its smokeless chimney.

“Where’s his wife?”

“Don’t you read the paper?” asked the doctor. “They buried her yesterday. Pneumonia. Nancy and I were in high school together — Lord, what a long time ago! She was a pretty little thing, full of laughter.”

“Not now she wasn’t,” growled Muller. “Not after fourteen years with him. Look, Sheriff, I told you I have chores waiting. Hunt me up at home if you need me.”

He turned on his heel, ignoring the coroner’s disapproving stare, jumped into a pick-up, and rattled off down the driveway. The dry leaves rustled, stirred by a puff of wind. Beyond the barb-wire fence a red cow mooed piteously, begging relief for overloaded udder and oozing teats.

“A chore that’s waited too long,” remarked the coroner. “She’s hurting, poor beast.” He blew his fingers for warmth, then thrust them deep in his overcoat pockets. “Come on, Walsh, let’s finish this up before I freeze.”

Finish! thought the sheriff. I don’t even know how to start.

Pride stiffened him. Pull yourself together — do something, anything at all. He stooped and lifted the stained leaf. It came reluctantly, bringing gray fibers from the sweater. He brushed off the other leaves and thought of the wind that had stripped an oak tree and thrown a brown coverlet over both the yard and the corpse.

“Here’s your weapon.” Hanslow, tramping to keep warm, had made a discovery. “Matt’s own rifle, by the nameplate.”

Walsh lifted the gun by the stock, then, remembering fingerprints, hurriedly shifted his hold to the trigger guard. He propped it against the barn and said, “There’ll be a bullet somewhere,” and felt the wall until he found it. He dug it out with his knife, juggled it thoughtfully, then dropped it into his pocket. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s turn him over.”

They rolled the body off the bare ground and onto a drift of leaves.

Hanslow gasped. “Look at his face! He knew, poor devil.” Then the doctor’s fingers moved swiftly, unfastening buttons, probing the wound.

Walsh asked without much hope, “Any chance he did it himself?”

“Not Matt Kershaw! And don’t ask me when — he’s been lying in frost all night. Probably not later than seven yesterday evening, and certainly not earlier than around five because I was down here talking to him.”

“I didn’t know you knew Kershaw.”

“I didn’t, but I knew Nancy and once I even imagined I was in love with her, in the idiotic way boys do imagine they are in love. She didn’t reciprocate, worse luck, so I wooed the family. Ran down to the farm on Saturdays and blistered my palms hoeing her father’s weeds. I was in college when she got married. The news threw me into a two-day drunk and a bitter renunciation of all women. Life is tough for kids.”

“You married yourself,” commented the sheriff.

“Puppy love doesn’t last. Being coroner and staff doctor at the hospital keeps me pretty busy. I’d almost forgotten Nancy until I read the funeral notice, but for old times’ sake I dropped in on the services.”

“Matt asked you home after the funeral?”

“He did not. I came,” said Hans-low disgustedly, “because I was a sentimental fool. I couldn’t get Nancy out of my head. I wallowed in tender memories. After finishing at the hospital I drove out to see the grieving widower. God knows why. I suppose I thought we could weep together. A mistake, because Matt wasn’t grieving — not much he wasn’t.”

Walsh looked down at the body on the leaves. “Was he out here?”

“No, in the barn, feeding the horses. He was shedding no tears and made it offensively plain that he desired no consolation. I washed out sentiment and came home. Fortunately, as it happened, because Belle had invited company for dinner.”

“You left here at five?”

“Thereabouts. Muller may know. That’s his pasture beyond the stubble field and I saw him on the hill driving home his cows. Here’s the wagon come for Kershaw.”

Men in overalls picked up the body and, whistling cheerfully, carried it in a basket to the waiting van.

“Sic transit Kershaw,” murmured the doctor. He pulled thoughtfully at his lower lip. “That’s the first homicide since either of us took office. Are you worried?”

“A little,” confessed the sheriff.

Worried — but not so much as before, because of what he’d picked up just by keeping his eyes open and noticing things. Maybe he wouldn’t get very far, but at least he now had a start.

Hanslow zippered his bag. “I’ll be getting back to town.” He winced as the cow, bellowing now, swung sideways to rake her flank against the barbed wire. “For God’s sake, Walsh, put that poor brute out of her misery.”

Walsh stripped the cow — giving the milk to the hogs for want of a human recipient — and then turned the horses out to pasture. It did not seem to him incongruous that a county official should postpone his own job to finish a dead man’s chores, because as a countryman he knew that was the way it had to be on a farm. Neither crisis nor calamity can break the rhythm of farm life. Chores went on at their appointed times in spite of illness or daylight saving — or even murder. The rhythm neither quickened nor slowed; it was as immutable as the rhythm of the earth itself. Outsiders, accustomed to quick changes and uneven pace, seldom understood this. Dr. Hanslow had thought it odd that the sheriff had allowed Muller to return home to finish what had to be done.

But Muller must be questioned sometime and Walsh now set out to find him. He worked at the problem while his hands automatically guided the car along the country road between stubble fields and rolling, oak-dotted pasture land. Muller had been on the hill near the barn. He could have seen the murderer, or he could have shot Kershaw himself. Either way, what he said — or what he didn’t say — would be important. But the sheriff had never seen Muller before that morning — so how could he tell if the farmer was lying if he didn’t know how the man acted when he was telling the truth? The sheriff wished he knew more about Muller, that he’d had the sense to ask Hanslow about him. He could have learned a lot about Nancy’s brother from Doc, only like a fool he hadn’t thought to ask. Walsh sighed, depressed anew by the conviction of his own inadequacy.

A mailbox, black-lettered ED MULLER, jutted into the road. Walsh braked and studied the white house at the end of the drive, liking the green window-trim, the chrysanthemums blooming by the steps, the shade trees that blocked a view of the barn. He lowered his eyes to the drive and grunted approval of the smooth, graveled bed.

He parked at the house, not because he expected to find Muller indoors in mid-morning, but because talking to the wife might help Walsh’s understanding of the husband. If there was a wife. He wasn’t even sure of that.

There was. He found her in the backyard hanging out the wash. She was a flat-chested, sharp-featured woman who heard his errand without stopping her work, and then said that Ed was at the barn.

She asked grudgingly, “Want I should call him on the extension?”

“I’ll find him, thanks.” He sensed hostility and worked to counter it. “You got a pretty place, flowers and all, and everything so neat. Must take a heap of work.”

He had touched the right chord. She tossed her head and said proudly, “Work or not, that’s how I like it. So does Ed. Even in bad times — that drought five-six years back — even then Ed never let things get run down.”

“The drought hit you hard?”

“It hit everybody hard. But we come through all right.”

Walsh hunkered down by the clothes basket and held up a miniature pair of jeans.

“How old’s the boy?”

“Going on four. That’s another reason. No matter what, that kid’s going to remember a decent home. Good house, nice garden, clean fields, and straight fences. Not weeds and tin cans and an old shack like some.”

“It’ll be a good memory,” said the sheriff, rising.

As he turned to leave she asked abruptly, “You know who did for Matt?”

“I’m working on it.”

The thin lips tightened. “Don’t work at it too hard. Matt was a no-good.”

Ed Muller switched off the ignition and climbed reluctantly out of the pick-up.

“Let’s get it over quick. Everything’s behind this morning, and I got to get back to Kershaw’s.”

“I took care of the cow and the horses and the hogs. Anything else?”

“Thanks,” said the farmer, obviously relieved. “No, that’s all till evening. There’s been a wire sent to Matt’s son by his first wife, but he can’t get here till tomorrow.”

Walsh held out a key. “Better keep this — I locked the house. If Nancy and Doc were schoolmates, she must have been a lot younger than Matt. How come she married a widower twice her age?”

Muller flared into sudden anger. “Because she was a crazy kid and couldn’t see the meanness under his soft-soaping ways. Pa argued, but when a girl’s nineteen she’s of age. Maybe if Ma’d been alive ’twould have been different. Fourteen years of hell she got. Now Matt’s dead, and too late to do Nancy any good. It ain’t right!”

“It ain’t right Matt should be dead — not murdered, anyhow. Which is why I have to ask questions. When’d you ride past with your cows?”

“To hell with the way he died! I’ll answer questions, I’m no fool to buck the law, but I ain’t going to break my neck trying to help you none. It must have been late, because the sun was low and it’d turned cold. Maybe a minute or two after the 4:55 mail plane went over.”

“Did you see Matt?”

“You can’t see into that yard from the hill — the barn hides it, and the oak tree. All you can see is the house and the driveway. Anyhow, I ain’t seen that skunk — alive — since Nancy’s funeral. Nor heard his squawky voice, neither. He phoned last night around six thirty, only I was up here in the barn and the wife took the message,”

“See anybody at all?”

“Only Doc rassling the gate at the end of the drive. Right then was when the wind first sprung up. It pretty near tore the gate away from him.”

“Why’d Matt phone you?”

“Wondered if a couple of missing steers had broken into my pasture.”

“That why you went down this morning?”

“No,” said Muller shortly. “ ’Twas private business.”

“When it’s murder nothing’s private.”

It was not easy to break down the reserve that self-respect had put up between a man’s personal concerns and prying outsiders. Somehow it didn’t seem decent. The sheriff wondered if what you got was worth the price. The big farmer was now scowling sullenly at the ground and repeating that he was no fool to buck the law. The story would come — truthfully enough in such parts as Muller knew could be checked — but at best there would be evasions and omissions, and in the telling of it a deep hurt to the man’s pride.

Still scowling, Muller said, “It was this note he bought up for money I’d borrowed to carry us through the drought. I thought to pay it off right away, but seems like every year there’s something—”

Short crops. Stock hit by blackleg because of poor vaccine. Squirrels that ate off the barley... all bad enough in the telling, but probably much worse in reality. Walsh wondered how much the wife knew. He pitied Muller’s embarrassment and mendaciously invented similar misfortunes of his own.

“If you’ve been a farmer, you understand,” said Muller, reassured. “You know bad luck runs in streaks sometimes — nobody’s fault, it just does. The note’s due again pretty soon and yesterday after the funeral Matt said he wouldn’t renew. We’d had a row. I’d told him overwork had put Nancy in her grave and called him a damned wife killer, so he got mean. I ain’t got the money, I’m strapped. Matter of fact, there’s another note at the bank.”

He had worried through a sleepless night, had even thought of selling out and trying elsewhere.

“Only it’s our home, we got a feeling for it. I thought about leasing but right now it’s hard to find renters. Come dawn, I decided to try making a deal with Matt — let him use some of the pasture for free, or something like that. Only he was already dead.”

“There’s the son.”

“He won’t give no trouble, I know him. Listen, hustle this up, will you? I got work—”

“Get along with it, then. I want to visit with the neighbors.”

The sheriff called at farmhouses and talked to the farm women. Everywhere he asked the same questions, and always in the back of his mind were thoughts of a blood-stained leaf and of a suffering cow that had raked her flank against barbed wire. At the fifth house a breezy woman confessed without shame to eavesdropping on the party line and told him what he needed to know.

The sun was high when he returned to the Kershaw farm. Here he found one of his deputies shoveling a portion of the yard into a cardboard box.

“Photographer just left,” reported the deputy. “You’re in luck. The ground’s just right — not too hard, not too soft. I got it out all in one chunk.”

He fastened the box with gummed paper and handed it to Walsh who scribbled his initials on the brown strip. The deputy added his own, then carried the shovel and box to his car and departed. Walsh followed him with his eyes until the car disappeared around a bend in the driveway. Then he crossed the stubble field, crawled through the six-wire fence that marked the boundary of Muller’s pasture, and climbed the hill.

Halfway up the slope a cow path meandered across the face of the hill. Walsh stopped on the trail and turned to look back across brittle yellow stubble to where barn and oak tree shut off all view of the yard. He shifted his eyes to the ugly, boxlike house some hundred feet to the right of the barn, then followed the length of curving driveway down to the heavy wooden gate. Doc had had trouble with that gate when the wind sprang up.

He looked back at the house. He had been through it that morning before locking up, and in the front hall he had seen the nails and patch of faded wallpaper that marked where Kershaw’s gun had hung. How long would it take a man to get from the cow path to the front hall, grab the gun, and sneak back to the yard? There’d be a stop for the fence, and probably another to peek cautiously around the corner of the barn. Say three minutes altogether, give or take a little either way.

Three minutes, thought Walsh; now I know who shot Kershaw.

He drove back to the county seat and telephoned the coroner for an appointment.

“After dinner,” suggested Hans-low. “Belle’s going to some shindig but I’ll beg off. It’ll be a relief — I’m sick of shindigs.”

Several hours later, in the doctor’s comfortable study, the host was glaring indignantly at his guest. Between them a log fire crackled cheerfully.

“Utter nonsense,” snorted the doctor. “Ed hated Matt, sure — but he wouldn’t kill him! I know, I know, you haven’t said he did, but you might just as well have. Motive and opportunity, you say. What opportunity? Because he rode past with his cows? Matt’s phone call at six thirty knocks opportunity into a cocked hat, but you say anyone could have imitated his squawky voice. You make the preposterous statement that Matt didn’t telephone because he was already dead. Of all the idiotic — Ed phoned himself, I suppose? Anyhow, where’s your evidence?”

“You didn’t give me time to tell it,” said the sheriff mildly. “A let of things point to Matt’s being already dead by then. The cow, for one. She wasn’t just a few hours overdue, she was full to bursting. She hadn’t been milked for twenty-four hours. Why? Horses, hogs, and one cow — that’s all the chores there were — and he was already at the horses when you saw him. If he was alive at six thirty, why hadn’t he milled the cow?”

Hanslow stared. “You call that evidence?” He swung out of his chair, walked across to the bar, and mixed two highballs. He handed one to Walsh.

“Doctor’s prescription. You’re tired and can’t think straight or you’d realize that almost anything could have interfered. Maybe the cow had wandered off. Or the horses had broken loose. Or Matt had a dizzy spell. I don’t know — I just know you can’t make a timetable on the evidence of one unmilked cow.”

Walsh sipped his drink gratefully. He wasn’t really tired, just depressed. A while back, up there on the hill, he’d felt pretty pleased with himself. He’d forgotten about all the mess that had to follow—

“It wasn’t just the cow. There’s something else that I’ll explain later. I’m telling this bit by bit the way it worked out. At first I thought Muller’d made up that phone call, but he didn’t. I found a woman who’d listened in. She’d recognized Matt’s voice — or thought she had — and what it said was just about what Ed had told me. But there’s an extension between Muller’s house and the barn, so he could have made the call himself. For an alibi it would have been better if he picked somebody besides his own wife, but he mightn’t have thought of that. He and his wife are pretty close, most likely she’d come to his mind first. But I do know that Matt didn’t call because he was already dead. So I know when he was killed, and how.”

“How is easy — he was shot. But when?” Hanslow smiled ironically. “Don’t strain my credulity. Did you read it in the cards, or was it the Lord Almighty who told you?”

“I never thought of that,” said Walsh slowly. “The last, I mean. Maybe that’s it. When a dumb cluck like me doesn’t know what to do, maybe God does speak out to point the way to truth. Not in words. But through things. Like a leaking udder. Or a bullet hole in a barn. Or dead leaves. Or a body in the wrong place.”

“It can’t be the highball,” mused the doctor. “It wasn’t that strong. What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about footmarks under the leaves that show where two men had stood, one against the barn, the other some yards in front. They stood for maybe five minutes. I’m talking about a murder that was like an execution. This morning the sun shone full on the barn, but in late evening there’d be shade. A man wouldn’t stand against a shadowed wall, not on a bitter evening when the sun was low. But if somebody with a rifle forced him to — somebody with murder in his heart but with a crazy idea of justice in his mind — then he’d stand there, watching the trigger finger, dying ten deaths while his sins were told over and over and sentence finally passed.”

“You mean Ed had some fantastic notion of avenging his sister? That’s impossible — Ed isn’t the melodramatic type. Anyhow, I maintain Matt was killed later.”

“With dead leaves all over the yard and all over the body — but none underneath? We rolled him over and the ground was bare. With the ground bare underneath his body, that means he was killed before the wind came up — but not so long before but what the blood was still wet enough to stain one of the leaves. No, he was not killed by Muller — Muller couldn’t have got there in time. He was still on the hill, because he saw you at the gate and the hill’s the only place you can see around that bend in the driveway. There was a chance somebody hid in the house till you were gone, the only one Muller might have seen and not reported. His wife would do a lot to save that good home and have security for their boy.”

“Not Kate Muller. It just couldn’t have been.”

“It wasn’t, because right then she was delivering eggs to a neighbor. I talked to the woman who bought them. That leaves only one person. Doc,” said the sheriff dejectedly, “why did you do it? Because of Nancy?”

For a moment the doctor sat very still. Then, unsmiling, he lifted his glass in salute.

“I underrated you, Walsh.” He emptied the glass and rolled it between his hands. “Yes, Nancy. I lied about it being puppy love. It was real. Funny how the real thing sticks long after you think you’ve forgotten. You plug away at work you like, you marry a woman who makes you comfortable and sees that you meet the right people, you get ahead. Damn it, you’re even happy. Then one day you read of the death of a farm girl you haven’t seen for fourteen years, and suddenly nothing else matters.”

He went to the bar, poured himself a stiff shot, drank it, then replenished the glass.

“I saw her in the coffin. Not my Nancy, but a thin, worn-out old woman. Old — at thirty-three. I went to Kershaw’s to find out why. I tried the house first, and when nobody answered the door I pushed it open and called out... I found him in the barn. A vile brute. Nancy had been a bad bargain to him — he admitted it, and he bragged that now he could get someone younger and stronger. I don’t remember going back for the gun, just that all at once I had it. I herded him against the barn and told him why he had to die. He... he was frightened. Ed didn’t hear the shot — a plane flew over just then. Telephoning was as much an alibi for Ed as for me. I wouldn’t want poor Ed to have trouble,”

“Is this a confession?”

“You’ve no witness. I’m safe enough — if that’s what I want. I don’t know — I wiped the gun. I was at home with guests from six o’clock on. Ed and your farm woman will swear that it was Matt who telephoned.”

“The leaves say different.”

“You say there were none under the body. I can say there were. You’ve made mistakes, Walsh. You let Ed go home before we turned the body, and you forgot about technicians, so there are no photographs. It can be your word against mine.”

“I was pretty dumb,” admitted the sheriff. “But I caught on later. We’ve got molds of the footprints and pictures of the ground where he’d bled, and we have a piece of the ground dug up ready for the D.A. Oak leaves are waterproof, Doc. Blood could spill over them and leak through cracks — but it’d be spotty, not in one big patch like this. Your word won’t stand against all that.”

“I see,” said the doctor. “I didn’t know that about oak leaves.” He gulped his drink and rose to lean against the mantel.

He said at last, “Matt was a skunk. Who cares if somebody shoots a skunk?”

“You do, Doc. When a temperate man tries to drink himself blind he cares a lot.”

Yow care because you’re no true murderer, just a decent kindly man who lost his head, Ton care because you’re a doctor, and your job is to save lives, not take them. With the real bad boys, the toughies, the only worry would be not to get caught. For a sensitive man like you it would be something deeper. Drinking wouldn’t help much, you’d still have to live with it. In prison or out, it would always be with you. That would be the real punishment — not bars but the fact that it would always be with you.

The sheriff wanted to tell Doc that he understood, but he couldn’t find the right words.

He cleared his throat.

“Okay,” he said. “Doc, get your hat and let’s go.”