Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 46, No. 6. Whole No. 265, December 1965

The Old Barn on the Pond by Ursula Curtiss

We have never read a story by Ursula Curtiss that did not offer a “certain something” — something all her own. Here, in our opinion, is Ursula Curtiss’ finest story in the shorter-than-novel length — a distinguished and impressive story, admirably conceived and artfully written, and with a truly memorable fillip — we doubt if you will ever quite forget the last scene, even if you try... Don’t miss this outstanding contemporary example of the literate — no, of the literary — detective-crime story...

He came back on a raw, darkly glistening day in March, but it was not at all the triumphant return he had planned. It was a hasty, off-balance thing, like being pushed rudely onto a stage before the raised trumpets had blown a single note.

Conlon’s letter — the letter that had brought him tumbling up from New York to this inhospitable part of the New England countryside — was still in his pocket. He had never liked Conlon, but the architect was Marian’s cousin and it would have looked odd, when he had the old barn remodeled, to have given the job to someone else. And now here was Conlon writing “...have been approached by friends about the possibility of renting your property here for the summer, with an option to buy. As they have a young child, they would like to drain the pond, and although I told them I was certain you would not permit this—”

For a moment the typed lines had blurred before Howard Hildreth’s eyes — except for that one staring phrase.

Drain the pond.

Not yet, he thought lucidly — not after only six months. Anonymous in the 42nd Street Library, he had read up on the subject, and learned that under certain conditions — depth of water, amount of rainfall, and other climatic factors — this kind of soil might have sucked its secret under at the end of a year, provided there was no extensive digging.

But not yet. He had sat down at once to write a brief note of refusal, but another phrase struck up at him from Conlon’s letter. “...I was certain you would not permit this—”

A deliberate challenge? Bill Conlon was Marian’s cousin, remember, and had been away at the time. Better go up there, stay a week or two, establish the impression of keeping the place as a country retreat upon which he might descend at any time. It was only necessary for Conlon; the townspeople, he was sure, accepted his remodeling of the barn as proof of his faith that his missing wife would some day return.

At that thought, alone in his comfortable apartment, Howard Hildreth shuddered...

On the station platform there were gratifying little whispers and stirs of recognition — “Isn’t that Howard Hildreth, the playwright? I’m sure it is” — and a turning of heads which he pretended not to see. He could hardly pretend not to see Conlon, striding across the platform toward him with his fair head a little cocked. Conlon had Marian’s eyes, light gray with a peculiar curl of lid; but that was the only physical resemblance between them.

Hildreth put out a hand and said with an air of geniality, “Well, this is kind. I hope you haven’t been meeting trains all day?”

Conlon sent one of his roving glances around the platform. “Matter of fact, a fellow in our office was supposed to catch this one but he seems to have missed it. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

After his first annoyance at Conlon’s balloon-pricking, Hildreth was pleased; this would give him a chance to demonstrate his calm. He said as they got into the car, “I can see how you thought I wouldn’t be using the place this summer; I’d have been in touch with you sooner about coming up but we’ve had a little trouble in the cast.”

He waited for Conlon to show interest, but the other man only said, “Too bad. Play still going well?”

“Very, thanks.”

“I particularly liked—” Conlon turned a sharp corner with care “— the third act. It packs quite a wallop. Are you working on a new play?”

“I am, as a matter of fact, and I thought a little peace and quiet... You know New York,” said Hildreth resignedly. In his tone were autograph hunters, sheaves of fan mail, a telephone carrying an invitation with each ring.

And part of it was true. The Far Cry was that rarest of things, a hit first play, and the playbill’s revelation that it had been eight years in the writing had given an additional fillip. Eight years — what constancy! No wonder that superb third act expertly shivered like a diamond. Here was no glib young creature with a gift for bubbling out dialogue but a major talent who cut his work like a precious stone.

So the critics said, and the important hostesses, and Howard Hildreth, who had been laughed at in this little town, and had his credit refused and his electric light turned off, found his champagne all the winier and forgot those few hours of frantic typing...

“...not a word,” Conlon was saying, and Hildreth wrenched his attention from his play, his other self. They were out of the town now, rising into little hills and woodland, puddled and glinted yellowly by a sky which, having rained earlier, was now gloating over it.

Hildreth’s mind spun back and recaptured the sense of his companion’s words. He said, “Nor I. But I refuse to believe... you knew Marian—”

“I think she’s dead,” said Conlon bluntly without turning his head. “I think she was dead all the time the police were out looking for her.”

“But... where—?” said Hildreth in a shocked voice.

Conlon waved a hand at the dimming landscape. “There’s almost as much water as there is land around here,” he said. “Lake, marshes, even quicksand. She had such a horror of things eaten up in the water, remember?”

“Stop!” said Hildreth with genuine violence. “You mustn’t talk about her as though— Besides, Marian was happy, she would never have—”

“Committed suicide, or disappeared on purpose?” said Conlon when it was apparent that Hildreth was not going to finish. “Oh, I never thought she had. As you say, I knew Marian... here we are.”

The car had descended a gentle twisting curve. At the bottom, opposite a stand of birches and set perhaps a hundred feet in from the road, was the pond, as round and clear as a wondering eye, lashed by willows that looked lamplit in the approaching dusk.

On the far side of it, on a slight rise, stood the creamy new structure, the remodeled barn, which six months ago had been weather beaten planks and a wobbly brown-painted door. There was no breath of wind; the house and reflection met themselves in a mirror stillness.

Howard Hildreth gazed, and his heart raced with such horror that he wondered if he was about to have a stroke. He wrenched at his horn-rimmed glasses with a trembling hand, and heard Conlon say curiously, “Are you all right, Howard?”

“Yes. These damned glasses — the doctor warned me that I needed new ones.” Even the effort of speaking calmly seemed to put a nutcracker pressure on his heart. “You’ve done a beautiful job of remodeling the barn, Bill. The photographs you sent didn’t do it justice. Shall we go on in?”

The drive up to the house itself was screened by willows. By the time Conlon had helped him inside with his bags, Hildreth was able to say almost normally, “Well, here we are. You’ll have a drink, won’t you?”

Conlon shook his head. He said with a hand on the doorknob, “Sarah — Sarah Wilde, you know — ordered a few essentials for the kitchen, so you ought to get through the night without starving. Well—”

Hildreth did not press him to stay. He said, standing in the open doorway, “These friends of yours that I had to disappoint — do I know them? What’s their name?”

“Pocock,” said Conlon promptly, and it was so unlikely a name that Hildreth had to believe him. Or was it meant to be a shortened version of poppycock?

He did not even look around at the long studio that took up most of the lower front of the house. He waited tensely for the final retreat of Conlon’s motor, and when even the echoes were gone he opened the door and walked the length of the driveway in the lonely frog-sounding dusk.

And there was light enough — just enough — to show him the same sickening apparition. On the far side of the pond stood the new barn, radiantly pale, bearing no resemblance to its former weatherbeaten brown. But at his feet, glassily etched on the surface of the water, lay the old barn, with its knotholes and weatherstains and the wide brown-painted door.

Hildreth drew a long uneven breath. There was no one to see him step squashily to the reed-grown edge of the pond and dip a hand in the icy water. The old barn quaked under the willows, and shook and was presently still again — but it was still the old barn...

He did not drink — Marian had — but he took a tranquilizer and headed for his reviews like a child to its mother’s skirts. The Times, Tribune, Daily News, the out-of-town papers. “Last night at the Odeon Theatre this critic was refreshingly jolted...”

“The Far Cry is just that in a season so far noted for its weary offerings...” “Let us hope we do not have to wait another eight years for the next Hildreth play...”

And presently he knew what had happened to him out there at the pond’s edge. Auto-suggestion, hallucination — at any rate, there was an accepted term for it; if beauty lay in the beholder’s eye, so did other things. He knew what was under that pleasant and pastoral surface, and at the subconscious tension of his mind because Conlon had been with him, his retina had produced the appropriate setting.

But not for Conlon, with all his suspicions — and in retrospect, the man had exuded suspicion. Conlon had looked at the pond and seen nothing amiss; for him, the still water had reflected only his personal creation of shored-up beams and plaster and creamy paint and whatever else went into his remodeling of an old structure. The thought gave Hildreth a satisfaction that, keyed up as he was, bordered on triumph.

What a joke on them all, he mused as he broiled the steak Sarah Wilde had left in the refrigerator, if only he, Hildreth, could see this watery witness, gaze at it in their presence, say casually, “Lovely day, isn’t it?” — and stand there calmly and casually in the midst of their blindness.

Not that the reflection would be on the pond in the morning. Tonight it had simply been a product of nerves and fatigue, and a good night’s sleep would erase it. Still, he was shaken, and he prudently avoided his after-dinner coffee. He darkened the downstairs, flipped on the staircase switch, and went up to his bedroom.

And came face to face with a portrait of Marian which he never knew had been taken.

As the blood came and went from his heart more slowly, he realized that the matted and mounted photograph on the bureau was not a portrait but an enlarged snapshot; on closer inspection it bore a telltale grain and blurriness. It was in color and it showed Marian laughing. There was a halo of sunlight on the close curls that scrambled over her beautifully shaped head, and the same light picked out the comma of mirth beside her mouth although her short, soft, full white throat was in shadow.

Marian laughing...

...laughing at his play, which she was not supposed to have seen at all until he had written the final word — Curtain. Managing to say through the laughter, “My dear playwright, you don’t mean to say you’ve been muddling around with this thing for eight years and missed the whole point? It ought to be satire at the end, don’t you see, and you fox the audience in the third act instead of this heavy Russian gloom going on and on? It would have such a wonderful, final crack-the-whip effect, and you could get rid of Anna coming in and saying—” she draggled at her hair, which was much too short and curly for draggling “—whatever that long lugubrious speech is.”

Her face was brilliant with excited laughter. “Oh, wait till I tell Bill and Sarah we’ve found a way to finish the Odyssey at last! They’ll be so — Howard, for heaven’s sake, I’m only — Howar—”

For such a full throat, it was as soft and weak as a child’s...

In the morning Hildreth looked at the pond, and the old weatherbeaten barn was still there, shaken and distorted under a gently falling rain. Disturbingly, he was not terrified or shocked or even very surprised; it was as though, at some point during his sleep, his brain had accepted this phenomenon as readily as the pond had accepted Marian.

After breakfast he made arrangements for renting a car, and then he called Sarah Wilde.

It was through Sarah, who also had an apartment in the building on East Tenth Street, that he had met Marian Guest. Sarah and Marian were copywriters in the same advertising agency, and although Hildreth had a sober loathing of advertising copy and all the people who wrote it — there was a flippancy about them that appalled him — Sarah was well-connected. An aunt of hers was a best-selling novelist, and it had never harmed any hopeful playwright to have even a hearsay acquaintance with a publisher. He had cultivated Sarah in the elevator, lent her an umbrella one day, and ultimately wound up at a party in her apartment.

And there was Marian, sitting on the floor although there were chairs available. She wore black slacks and an expensive-looking white silk shirt with a safety pin where a button should have been, and, profile tilted in the lamplight, she was explaining with zest how she had come by her black eye and scraped cheekbone. She had been walking her dog, George, and had fallen over a sheep on a leash. “The man said it was a Bedlington but he was obviously trying to cover up his own confusion. Poor George bit him, not the man, and I think he’s got a hairball.”

Although there were two or three other girls present, all with a just-unboxed Madison Avenue attractiveness, the attention seemed to cluster about Marian. She said presently to Howard Hildreth in her boyish and uninhibited voice, “You look terribly broody. What are you hatching?”

“A play,” he told her distantly, and it might have been the very distance that attracted her, as it was the attention focused on her that attracted him. At any rate, he ended up taking her home to her apartment on Barrow Street, drinking innumerable cups of black coffee, and telling her about his play. He began challengingly, prepared for amusement when she learned that he had already been working on it for three years; but she listened, her light clear eyes as wide and sober as a child’s.

She said, “What do you do — for an income, I mean?”

When he said flatly, “I’m a shoe clerk,” she stared past him with a kind of wondering sadness.

“How marvelous,” she had said, “to give that much of a damn about anything.”

There was Marian, summed up in a single sentence; even after they were married she never told him anything as self-revelatory as that And under the influence of her respect for his dedication, his work, which had always been his Work to him, was able to come out in the open with its capital letter. Until she had defected—

But Hildreth had learned to discipline his mind, and he did it now.

He said into the telephone, “Sarah? I’m an ingrate for not calling you last night to tell you how much I like the way you’ve done the place — as well as providing my dinner — but...”

Sarah Wilde cut him off easily. “Do you like it? I’m glad. It’s rather a lot of lavender, but you did specify—”

“Yes,” Hildreth gazed, secretly entertained, at the lavender draperies, the lavender cushions, round and square and triangular, piled on the black tweed couch. Lavender — Marian’s favorite color. Any doubters close to Marian could not help saying to themselves, “Well, if he can live with that...”

“It’s very soothing,” he said to Sarah with the defensive air of a husband standing up for his wife’s vagaries. “Very restful. I like the picture on my bureau, by the way.”

It was as though the telephone cord had been pulled taut between them. “It is a good one, isn’t it? I took it — oh, some time last summer, I think, and I’d forgotten all about it until Bill Conlon happened to see it and thought you’d like an enlargement.”

“It was very thoughtful of you both,” said Hildreth with perfect evenness. “That’s the way I think of her, you know. Laughing. I suppose Bill’s told you that I haven’t given up hope.”

“Of course you haven’t,” said Sarah, bright and artificial.

Between them, in the small silence that followed, lay the many trips that he and Conlon had taken to view unidentified female bodies which corresponded even roughly with Marian’s age and height. It was grim work, which helped; he was always a thoroughly pale and shaken man. And with each fruitless trip, because of the very nature of such an errand, the official belief that Marian Hildreth was dead had grown. Hildreth could tell that Sarah believed it too — in which, of course, she was quite right.

She was veering quickly away from the subject now, saying something about dinner this week. Hildreth accepted for Thursday evening, adding with a deprecating little laugh that he trusted it wouldn’t be an Occasion; he’d come up here to get started on his new play.

“No, just two or three people,” Sarah assured him. “I did tell you, didn’t I, how much I liked The Far Cry? I thought I knew what was coming in the third act, but it was one time I loved being made a fool of.”

Hildreth thanked her, a trifle aloofly, and there was not the smallest alarm along his nerves. He suspected that Sarah and Conlon, mere acquaintances six months ago, would be married before the year was out, but the fact that they had undoubtedly seen the play together didn’t matter. They could not say, “That last act sounds like Marian,” because as far as they knew Marian had never laid eyes on the script — she had said wryly, in fact, two or three days before that last night, “Howard thinks I’ll mark his baby, like a gypsy...”

(What a very tellable joke it would have been, what an irresistible nugget for gossip columns, because Marian’s was not a secret-keeping nature: that Howard Hildreth had toiled unremittingly over his play for eight years, and in the space of a single hour his wife, who had never written anything but tongue-in-cheek praise of vinyl tile and slide fasteners, had off-handedly supplied the satirical twist that made it a success.)

Even at the thought Hildreth felt a qualm of nausea. Although his portable typewriter stood ready on the desk at the far end of the studio, with a fresh ream of yellow paper beside it, he let himself out the front door into the falling rain and walked to the pond’s edge. There was the old barn, shaking dimly under the falling drops, and he knew that in some terrible way he was drawing strength from this private vision, locked under the willows for his eyes, and apparently for his alone...

A notion of incipient madness slid across his mind, but he looked quickly about him and everything else was sane and clear. If Marian thought to retaliate after death...

He drew himself up sharply.

In the afternoon he was gracious to the editor of the local newspaper, with the result that his favorite publicity picture appeared in the next morning’s issue. He was holding his horn-rimmed glasses with one earpiece casually collapsed, and the three-quarter turn of his head almost concealed the double chin developed since those lean days.

“...seeking inspiration for his new play,” said the account below, proudly, and, “Residents will recall the still-unresolved disappearance of Mrs. Marian Hildreth six months ago. Mrs. Hildreth, 38, told her husband late on the evening of October 4, 1963, that she was going out for a walk. She did not return, and no trace of her has since been found. Mr. Hildreth maintains his staunch belief that his wife is still alive, possibly suffering from a loss of memory...”

Hildreth read with calm pleasure the rest of the telling — how the pond on the property had been dragged without result. The police had indeed dragged it over his demurs — “Oh, come now, she wouldn’t fall into a pond she’s lived beside for five years” — and then came the heavily tactful, “Mr. Hildreth, your wife wasn’t — er...?”

Because Marian’s more madcap exploits were not unknown to the local police. They viewed her with a tolerant and even an indulgent eye — that was the effect she had on people; but under the circumstances they could not rule out a tragic and alcoholic whim.

“No,” Hildreth had said with transparent stoutness. “Oh, she may have had a highball or two after dinner...”

He knew, he had known at the moment of her death, that the marital partner was usually Suspect Number One. But that had not actually held true in little Ixton, Connecticut. If there had been any whisper of discord, any suggestion of dalliance by either party, any prospect of inheriting money — or even if Marian’s life had been insured — the police might have looked deeper than they did. As it was, they walked past the burlaped yew, the burlaped roses, Marian’s burlaped body, and then announced that they would drag the pond.

This procedure netted them two ancient inner tubes, a rotted and hinged object which had once been the hood of a convertible, and a rust-fretted oil drum which seemed to have spawned a great many beer cans. If the police had returned at just after dark, when one particular piece of burlap among the yews had been lifted free of its stiffened secret, and the secret transferred to the now officially blameless water... but, predictably, they had not.

They could have no further reason for dragging the pond now — indeed, thought Hildreth, they would need a warrant. And for a warrant they would need evidence.

That was the safety element in a spur-of-the-moment murder. The cleverest planners — Hildreth rejected the word killers — had come to grief over elaborate timetables, unsuspected correspondence, a hint of fear dropped somewhere. There could be none of that in this case. Neither he nor Marian had known what was coming until that moment of her crowing laughter, that intolerable tearing-down of the secrecy and seriousness of his Work.

It was not so much that Marian had burst the bonds of curiosity and somehow contrived to unlock the desk drawer which housed his script, nor even that she had slipped at least temporarily into the ranks of the people who found him clownishly amusing. It was that she was right. Like someone engaged on a painstaking tapestry, he had been following stitch after stitch and lost sight of the pattern, which had leaped at once to Marian’s unbothered and mischievous eye.

It was as if... he could not say at the time, because his logic had smoked away like cellophane in a flame. Later, more calmly, he could compare himself to a woman who, after a long and difficult labor, watches the doctor merrily bearing the infant off to his own home.

But there was no evidence, and he would not be tricked or trapped. His visit here — the first since the five weeks or so after he had reported Marian missing — would proclaim his innocence. Not to the police — he wasn’t worried about them — but to Bill Conlon and Sarah Wilde, the only people who, close to Marian, might just possibly...

Hildreth arranged yellow paper beside his uncovered typewriter in the white-walled lavender-and-black studio, but he did not, that morning or the next or the one after that, commence even the roughest work on a new play.

He told himself defensively that he had spent several months under considerable strain; a man didn’t bounce back from that right away. And critical success was paralyzing in itself: there was the inevitable restudying of the first work in search of the magic ingredient, and the equally inevitable fear of comparison with a second.

At no time did he allow it to cross his mind that there were one-play playwrights as there were one-book novelists, and that his one play would still be in various stages of rewriting except for Marian’s unruly wit. But there was a moment when, seated blankly at the typewriter, he thought, Do I look like the pond? and got up and crossed the room to examine himself in a mirror.

But no; he hadn’t changed at all in spite of his damp little tremor of fright. And if he could see the truth on the pond’s surface, surely he could see it on his own? There was the gained weight, granted, but his dark eyes gave back their old serious look, his eyebrows were forbiddingly level, a lock of hair — now pampered by his New York barber — still hung with dedication.

But when he stared long enough and hard enough, moving his face to within an inch or two of the mirror, tiny little Howard Hildreths peeked out of the pupils, and behind them—

Ah, behind them...

He developed a kind of triumphant passion for the pond. He watched it ballooned with clouds, or covered with nervous little wrinkles under a sudden wind. He saw the weatherbeaten planks and the brown door warp and fly to pieces under the miniature tidal waves caused by water bugs or perhaps frogs. Pretending to enjoy a cigarette in the course of a stroll, he took note of the passing cars that slowed for an admiring view of the clean creamy little house behind the willowed pond, and no car jerked to a shocked halt, no one screamed.

Hildreth had a Polaroid camera, and one afternoon, in a fascinated test, he took a picture of the pond. Conlon’s photographs had shown no abnormality, but this time it was he who was pressing the shutter. The day warranted color film — the willows dripped and candled about the round eye of water, enameled so perfectly that it might have been a brooch.

Wouldn’t it be odd, thought Hildreth, counting excitedly to sixty, if only the camera and I—?

He was peeling the paper shield away-when Sarah Wilde’s voice said at his shoulder, “Oh, may I see?”

The print and its fluttering attachment dropped to the ground.

Hildreth got only a swinging glimpse of Sarah’s slanted white cheek, caught only the beginning of the rueful, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” before he bent, barely circumventing her; if necessary he would have put his shoe on the print.

As it was, he snatched it up and turned away, manufacturing a cough, while he finished stripping the shield. He said a second later, turning back, “Not bad, is it?” and handed the innocent color print to Sarah. No, not the camera and himself — only himself.

Sarah, he thought watchfully, was a remarkably beautiful young woman. Her dropped lashes were a thick unretouched silver-brown, her polished hair a slightly deeper brown; her gaze, when she lifted it, would be gray. With the suave red of her lipstick to counterpoint the water-color effect, she was quietly startling in any gathering.

“Very good indeed,” she said, handing the print back by its edges. “The pond’s so pretty, isn’t it? Especially now.”

She glanced at the circle of water and then back at Hildreth, who following her gaze had still seen the placidly mirrored old barn. A tremble of nerves ran along his throat. To control a wild impulse toward laughter he said in a considering, landownerish way, “It seems quite full, but you’ve had heavy rains this month, haven’t you?” and he slid the print casually into his coat pocket.

“Yes, it is full,” said Sarah in his own considering tone, and there was no doubt about it; the eyes that moved from the pond to his face held some kind of — doubt? Challenge? Hildreth said coolly, “Well, if you’ll excuse me, it’s back to the typewriter,” and he took a step away.

“Wait, I almost forgot what I came for.” Sarah was dipping into her calf handbag. “Here — the mailman put this in my box instead of yours. Wonderful to get fan mail. Don’t forget about dinner tonight — cocktails at six thirty.”

It wasn’t fan mail which Hildreth opened when the red Volkswagen had disappeared over the hill, but one of the many letters which, the police had told him, always arrived in the wake of a disappearance. This one was from Someone Who Can Help, and in exchange for $200 mailed to an enclosed box number in Vermont the writer would put him in touch with his missing wife.

The maddening part of these communications was that they could not be ignored — at least, not by a man in whom hope supposedly sprang eternal. Hildreth, sitting down to write the form reply that thanked the writer and said he was turning the letter over to the officers in charge of the investigation, thought angrily that there ought to be a law.

The afternoon passed slowly. Conlon telephoned to say that there would be a plumber coming over to do something to the downstairs bath, and Hildreth said pettishly, “Really, Bill, forgive me, but I thought all that had been taken care of. One doesn’t greet plumbers in the middle of Scene One, you know.”

He was mollified a little later by a delegation from the local high-school magazine, asking humbly for a “Best Wishes from Howard Hildreth” to be photostated for the graduation issue. One of the shiny-haired wide-eyed girls ventured close to his typewriter, in which Hildreth foresightedly kept a typed yellow sheet — the opening scene of The Far Cry — and he said at once, austerely, “Please don’t — I have a ‘thing’ about work in progress.”

It only added to their awe. But he had had it, thought Hildreth, presently seeing them to the door: he had had all the local adulation he wanted. Imperiously buying delicacies at the only market that carried them, he had seen the fawning face of the manager who only a year ago had told him that if his bill wasn’t settled promptly he would find himself in the small-claims court.

He had been pointed out respectfully on the main street, and had declined invitations from the town’s reigning hostess. More importantly, he had been accepted everywhere without a trace of suspicion; if there was any sentiment in the air, it was one of embarrassed pity for a man who so courageously continued to hope.

In a day or two he could go back to New York, having established to Bill Conlon and Sarah Wilde and everybody else that there was no question of his selling or even renting the property with its pretty, deadly pond.

He was all the more shocked, in the midst of these comfortable reflections, when at a little after three he had a call from a Sergeant Fisk at the police station. Some little girls looking for pussywillows in a field on the outskirts of the town had discovered a woman’s leather handbag and part of a dress with some suggestive stains; would Hildreth please come down and see if he could identify them?

“Certainly,” said Hildreth, staring angrily out the window. “Of course, being out in the weather, I imagine they’re pretty well—?”

“No, sir, they were stuffed in the remains of an old stone wall and they’re still in fair condition. Recognizable, anyway.”

“I’ll leave right away,” said Hildreth, tempering his eagerness with the right amount of dread.

At the police station he was asked to wait — Sergeant Fisk would be right with him.

By four o’clock Sergeant Fisk still was not with him; at four thirty, fuming, Hildreth walked up to the uniformed man at the switchboard and said sharply, “I came here at the request of Sergeant Fisk to look at some objects for identification, and I cannot wait any longer. Please leave a message—”

“Just a minute, sir,” said the policeman unruffledly, and slipped a plug into its socket and inquired for Sergeant Fisk. “There’s a Mr. Hildreth here, been waiting since — okay, I’ll tell him to go right in.”

But the handbag and dress fragment, when Hildreth reached Sergeant Fisk’s office, had been transferred to Lieutenant Martin’s office, where there was some question as to their possible connection with the vanishing of a Colorado couple making a cross-country tour four months ago. Hildreth contained his temper as he went with the sergeant to Martin’s office; he was, he remembered, a man who would do anything to find a clue to his wife’s fate.

He was badly tempted when, at after five o’clock, he surveyed a rotted and mildewed navy calf handbag, empty, and the sleeve and half the bodice of what had once been a yellow wool dress. Why not say, “Yes, they’re my wife’s,” and bury his face in his hands and be done with it?

Because, he thought with a feeling of having stepped back from the edge of a cliff, Marian had never worn yellow — she said it made her look like a two-legged hangover; and there was a suggestion of something on the leather lining of the bag that could easily be a nearly obliterated name or monogram. Hildreth had read what modern police laboratories could do with things like that. So he shook his head and said, “They’re not my wife’s,” and with a shudder at the stains on the rotting yellow wool, “Thank God.”

Three hours, he thought as he drove home seething in the rainy dusk; three hours on a fool’s errand which he could not have risked refusing. Just barely time to dress for dinner at Sarah Wilde’s — and then get out of here, tomorrow.

He was restored at the thought, and at the glimpse of the old barn quivering on the pond in the last of the light as he drove to Sarah’s. His temper was further improved by Sarah’s big casually gay living room — two rooms thrown together in a very old saltbox — and the contrast between an open fire and a cold rattling rain on the windows.

The other guests were already established with drinks — Conlon, a Mr. and Mrs. Slater, and Mrs. Slater’s decorative visiting sister.

Hildreth thawed, physically and temperamentally. He felt a slight jar of recognition when he was introduced to the Slaters, but he had undoubtedly encountered them on the station platform at some forgotten time, or in a local store. He noted with approval that Sarah had obviously got someone in for the evening, because there were sounds of kitchen activity while Sarah sat on the couch, in black and pearls, beside Conlon.

On the rare occasions when he and Marian had entertained, Marian had charged in and out like a demented puppy, crying, “My God, who’s been watching the beans? Nobody!” Or, abashedly, “We all like nutmeg instead of pepper in our mashed potatoes, don’t we?”

Sarah had turned her head and was gazing at him; somebody had clearly asked a question. Hildreth used a handkerchief on his suddenly damp forehead and temples and said, “I got wetter than I thought — that’s really quite a downpour,” and he got up to stand by the fire.

And the bad moment was gone, further wiped out by Sarah’s “You said you mightn’t be here long on this visit, Howard, so we’re having your favorite dinner — you know, what you won’t eat in restaurants.”

“Don’t tell me...?” said Hildreth, delighted, but it was: trout, a crisp deep-gold outside, succulent white within, delicately enhanced by herbs that only hinted at themselves. He ate with deliberate pleasure, not succumbing until close to the end of dinner to his habit of providing backgrounds for people.

The extraordinarily good-looking sister from New Haven — her name was Vivian Hughes — seemed the kind of young woman who, convinced in her teens that she could have any man she wanted, had ended up with none; there was a kind of forced grace to the frequent turn of her head, and lines of discontent around her really striking green eyes.

Mrs. Slater wasn’t a fair test, because she had ticketed herself earlier by a reference to the young twins they had left with a baby-sitter, and by her very casualness she had given herself away. She was the new and on the whole the best breed of mother, thought Hildreth approvingly; slender, amiable, intelligent, she kept her maternal dotings strictly for hearth and home.

Slater? Hildreth gazed obliquely through candlelight at the other man, perhaps a year or two younger than his own forty. The lean, polished, ruddy face suggested an outdoorsman, but everything else pointed to an executive. He went on gazing, and like an exposed print washed gently back and forth in developer, outlines began to emerge.

A desk, not executive-grain but scarred oak. Two telephones on it. A uniformed man in a far doorway saying, “Yes, sir, right away,” then disappearing down one of a warren of corridors.

Yes, Slater was a police officer of some sort, or a detective, glimpsed or perhaps even talked to in the first stages of the investigation six months ago. And Sarah and Con-Ion hoped that he would be terrified by this recognition, and go to pieces. That was the whole point of this friendly little gathering.

How very disappointed they must be. Hildreth stirred his coffee tranquilly, because no motive for murder had existed until sixty seconds before Marian died, and there wasn’t a single clue. In an enjoyment of the attention he now knew to be trained on him he said in a well-fed voice, “Marvelous dinner, Sarah. I don’t know when I’ve had trout like that,” and Sarah said, “As a matter of fact, you never have.”

She was leaning forward a little in the candlelight, her gaze cool and removed. “The trout were from your pond, Howard, and they were caught this afternoon while you were down at the police station. You didn’t know that Marian had had the pond stocked for you, as a birthday present, just before she — disappeared, because you love trout but never trust it in restaurants. We didn’t know about it either until the friend who did it for her stopped by to see Bill a couple of weeks ago.”

Hildreth’s neck felt caught in one of those high white collars you saw on injured people; he could not turn it even when he heard Conlon’s, “Nice fat trout, I thought, but lazy. They bit at anything.”

...while he had sat in the police station, decoyed there by a telephone call.

“You all ate it,” said Hildreth triumphantly, in a candlelight that had begun to tremble and dampen his face. “You all—”

“No. Ours was perch from the Old Town Fish Market,” said Sarah, and although she continued to hold his gaze, her forehead had a cold glimmer and her mouth seemed clenched against a scream.

Hildreth lost them all then. He dropped his eyes, but instead of his dessert cup he saw his dinner plate, with the neat spiny bones from which all the succulent white flesh had been forked away. Marian’s soft white throat, and the busy, inquisitive, nibbling mouths at the bottom of the pond, and the plump things placed on his plate—

He heard his chair go crashing back, and the gagging cry of horror that issued from his own throat as he plunged blindly for somewhere to be sick; and, from a mist, Slater’s voice saying, “...looks like it. Very definitely. We’ll get at it first thing in the morning...”