Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 59, No. 1. Whole No. 338, January 1972

Grandfather and the Little Bone by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.{© 1971 by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.}

The time has come — indeed, it’s long overdue — to begin a Detective Dossier on Lloyd Biggie, Jr.’s Grandfather William Rastin…

The octogenarian sleuth, though past his biblical span, still has the build of a blacksmith, which he was until the horseless carriage took over; a stubborn coot, he has never changed his opinion of a contraption he considers noisier, smellier, and less dependable than a horse.

Grandfather Rastin is a lifelong resident and senior citizen of Borgville, Michigan, and its most prominent landmark. His other opinions in this “age of anxiety” are also worth your attention: for example, he does not think it’s a coincidence that the rocking chair and 20th Century civilization declined simultaneously. (For other opinions, especially of human nature, see stories.) And he regards himself as more of a bucolic philosopher than a detective. He once opined: “A bad apple may spoil the barrel, but it can make a much more interesting cider.”

Grandfather’s “Watson” is his grandson, Johnny Rastin, a precociously mature high-school student who also functions as the old gentleman’s chauffeur, errand boy, Number One assistant, and partner-in-plots against Grandfather’s pet peeve, Sheriff Pilkins. Grandfather and grandson don’t always see eye to eye — but they do agree that while the local townspeople are not the most interesting human beings in the world, they are the most interesting in Borg County, Michigan…

Mr. Osborne, our high-school principal, claims that feeding time at the zoo is a quiet and peaceful occasion compared with lunchtime in the Borgville High cafeteria. He says he could shoot a cannon off and it wouldn’t even be noticed if no one smelled the smoke. He may be right, because once when Mrs. Patousel slipped behind the counter and broke her leg no one heard her yelling for help until half the students had left for class.

It only goes to show that discovering a murder isn’t anything like getting a leg broken. Everyone in the cafeteria heard Sue Byers scream.

What happened was that Dianne Storrow was excavating in her purse for a letter she wanted to pass around, and something came to the top that she’d forgot she had. She said, “Oh, that old bone,” and tossed it onto the table. No one paid any attention.

Two minutes later Sue Byers, who was sitting across the table, looked up and saw the bone.

You should know this about Sue Byers. She lives with her uncle, who is Borgville’s only doctor, and her ambition is to be a doctor herself. She spends all her spare time studying her uncle’s medical books, and she already knows so much about anatomy that the boys are afraid to go out with her.

She took one good look at that bone and screamed, and one second later the cafeteria was so quiet that Fatty Fasuli later claimed he was able to hear the ice cream melting on his pie a la mode.

Sue stood up and motioned to Mr. Sadler, the biology teacher. He came and looked at the bone, then he looked at Sue, and finally he said, “I think so.”

“I know so,” Sue said.

“Where did it come from?” Mr. Sadler asked.

“That old bone?” Dianne said. “I’ve had it in my purse since last summer. You see, I had this job—” Then she understood, and she screamed.

A lot of lunches didn’t get finished that day. Mr. Sadler picked up the bone and whisked both girls off to Mr. Osborne’s office, and everyone else left off eating and tried to figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until after school that we finally found out: since the middle of the summer Dianne had been carrying a human finger bone around in her purse.

My Grandfather Rastin already knew about it when I got home. Doc Byers had told him. Doc was plenty irked at Sheriff Pilkins, because the Sheriff thought a doctor should be able to take one look at that little hunk of bone and tell him the initials of the person whose body it had come from. All Doc was willing to say was that it was human and had probably belonged to an adult with small fingers.

“Male or female?” the Sheriff wanted to know.

“Adult,” Doc said.

“Small stature, you say?”

“Small fingers,” Doc said.

“Well, if the fingers were small, then the hands must have been small, and if the hands were small—”

“I’ve seen smaller fingers than that on hands that were bigger than yours,” Doc said.

“Women have small fingers. Could it have been a woman?”

“There’s no way I know of to determine sex from one finger bone,” Doc said. And walked out, slamming the door.

Grandfather said meditatively, “Women’s purses being what they are, I suppose something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“Dianne’s purse isn’t exactly a purse,” I told him. “It’s more like an oversized feedbag with drawstrings. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had a skull or two rattling around at the bottom.”

“It would surprise me,” Grandfather said. “The word I got was that she gave the whole shebang to the custodian to burn, even including what v/as left of this week’s allowance.”

“Has anyone admitted losing a finger bone?” I asked.

Grandfather didn’t answer.

“For that matter, where did Dianne get it?” I asked.

Grandfather sighed. “I guess we’d better go over to Wiston.”

I got out my jalopy.

Along the way he told me what had happened. “Fellow named Daille,” he said. “Jim Daille. I knew his grandfather. He has some kind of construction job, and from early spring until late fall he travels around the state working on highways and bridges. He’s a widower, and he hires a housekeeper to look after his daughter Betsy, who is three.

“Last summer his housekeeper had to quit suddenly and she persuaded Dianne Storrow to take the job until Daille could find a replacement. Dianne’s parents weren’t enthusiastic about the situation, but the pay was good and Daille wasn’t at home — he didn’t come home all the time she was there — and after a couple of weeks he sent a woman down from the upper peninsula to take over.”

“How does the bone come into it?” I asked.

“The child had it. Every night Betsy picked out a bedtime story she wanted to hear, and one night it was the one about the wee little woman who found a wee little bone. Remember it? She put the bone in her wee little cupboard, then she crept into her wee little bed and blew out her wee little candle, and suddenly, in the dark, she heard a wee little voice say, ‘Give me my bone!’ ”

“I remember,” I said.

“And the voice kept asking until the wee little woman sat up in bed and said, ‘TAKE IT!’ The story almost frightened Betsy into a fit. She jumped out of bed and got the bone from her toy box and gave it to Dianne, and then she hid under the covers and cried herself to sleep. Dianne put the bone in her purse, meaning to dispose of it when the child wasn’t around, and of course she forgot about it.”

“Then the main question is where the kid got it.”

“Right. And if Sheriff Pilkins doesn’t handle it just right, Betsy will be too scared to tell him anything.” He thought for a moment and added, “As long as I’ve known Pilkins he’s never handled anything right.”

We turned onto Shady Lane, which was a little dirt street leading off Highway 29 a couple of miles north of Wiston. There was plenty of shade but only four houses, set far apart on the north side of the street, and just beyond the fourth house the street dead-ended up against an eight-foot, woven-wire fence topped with four strands of barbed wire and plastered with NO TRESPASSING signs. That is, it was supposed to dead-end there, but some idiot had mistaken Shady Lane for the Indianapolis Speedway and crashed through the fence and into the pines.

We drove the length of the street, pursued by two barking mongrels, and we found five Sheriff and State Police cars parked near the last house. I managed to pull in between two of them without picking up any fresh scratches.

Grandfather was looking at the hole in the fence. “That’s very interesting.”

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“The old Forsythe estate.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

He didn’t answer. He thinks slang is vulgar if anyone else uses it.

Sheriff Pilkins came to meet us with two dogs frisking at his heels. He said, “You heard what happened?”

Grandfather nodded.

“Daille’s wife disappeared over a year ago. At first Daille said she was visiting relatives, and then he said she took sick suddenly and died.”

“That shouldn’t be hard to prove one way or the other,” Grandfather observed.

“Yeah, once we get our hands on Daille. No one knows where he’s working, not even his housekeeper. Or so she says. If she tips him off that we’re looking for him we may have a long look.”

Grandfather jerked a thumb at the hole in the fence. “Looking in there?”

“Later, maybe. That happened last spring, which was a long time after Daille’s wife disappeared. With all the wide-open spaces available around here I can’t see him climbing a fence to dispose of a body.”

“There are worse places to hide a body than a thick pine forest surrounded by a fence and No Trespassing signs.”

The Sheriff shrugged. “For that matter, one of these dratted dogs could have brought the bone from miles away and buried it in the kid’s sand box. But this is where it turned up, and this is where there’s a person missing, and that’s reason enough to start looking here.”

The Sheriff walked away, but the two dogs stayed and started frisking around Grandfather. I asked him if any of Old Man Forsythe’s wives were missing, and he said there wasn’t any point in an outsider trying to keep track of them when Forsythe had never been able to.

For years the kids had been calling the house on the Forsythe estate Bluebeard’s Castle, but I never could figure out why. It was just a big old house, and Old Man Forsythe’s beard wasn’t blue at all but a kind of dirty red that turned white as he got older; besides, he didn’t have nearly as many wives as Bluebeard did. He’d been dead for a long time, but the surviving wives were still fighting over his estate, which was probably why the hole in the fence hadn’t been fixed.

“Isn’t Forsythe buried in there somewhere?” I asked.

Grandfather stared at me. “I forgot about that. He had his own private cemetery. That’s why the wives are contesting his will. He’s buried in the central plot, surrounded by graves of his favorite dogs, and the wives don’t inherit anything unless they agree to be buried with the dogs.”

He chased after the Sheriff and said something to him, and the Sheriff raised both hands forlornly and headed for his patrol car.

“Is he going to check the grave?” I asked.

Grandfather nodded. “Forsythe had small hands.”

We walked around a bit, dodging the dogs. In the distance some deputies and State Troopers were moving in a line between the Forsythe fence and Highway 29. Otherwise, except for the shade trees along the street and the muddy ruts by the houses where the people parked their cars, all we saw as far as the eye could see was weeds.

As far as my eye could see. Grandfather is past 80, but he sees a lot more than I do. He says my trouble is that I don’t know the difference between looking and seeing. We circled behind the houses and walked to the highway and back again, and along the way Grandfather picked up one of those little shovels that kids play with in the sand, and a doll’s leg, and a marigold blooming so deep in the weeds that I was surprised it bothered, and a ham bone the dogs had been gnawing on.

Grandfather pocketed the shovel and the doll’s leg. The marigold he sniffed, making a face, and then he threw it away. The ham bone he scowled at and gave to one of the dogs, which ran off closely pursued by the other. After he showed me where to look I helped him out by finding a petunia and two moss roses near where he’d found the marigold. These were the only signs of cultivation in sight and might have been helpful if we’d been looking for a sloppy horticulturist instead of a murderer.

We went back to the Daille house, and Grandfather knocked on the door. Daille’s housekeeper was a girl who couldn’t have been long out of high school. She wasn’t dressed for company, her hair was a mess, and behind smudged glasses her eyes were very, very scared.

“I’m an old friend of Jim’s family,” Grandfather said. “I thought perhaps I could help.”

“Oh,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”

She already had a roomful of company, but that was only because the living room was small and one of the three women present was large enough to make a gymnasium look crowded. As we walked in they looked us over as though we were some kind of rare insect showing up out of season. Something crashed in the next room, and the housekeeper excused herself over her shoulder as she dashed out.

“I’m Bill Rastin,” Grandfather said. “This is my grandson, Johnny.”

“We’re Betsy’s neighbors,” the fat woman said. “I’m Tru Wyler, and this is Ruth Loken and Joyce Dockett.”

Grandfather wanted to know who lived where, and the Wyler woman, with the tone of her voice making it very clear that it was none of his business, explained that Ruth Loken lived next door, and Joyce Dockett lived nearest the highway, and she lived between them. The other two could have done a Mutt-and-Jeff act. Even when sitting down the Dockett woman looked tall enough to play for the Boston Celtics, and Ruth Loken was tiny. Both of them looked positively undernourished beside Tru Wyler.

The Wyler woman’s head fascinated me, it was so perfectly balanced: several layers of platinum blonde hair piled up on top and several layers of chin piled up underneath. She caught me staring at her and she stared right back, and there’s no telling where that might have ended if Daille’s daughter hadn’t started crying in the next room.

“Men!” Tru Wyler said, turning toward the doorway. “That poor kid came down here to look after Betsy because she thinks Daille’s going to marry her. A pretty sneaky way of getting a housekeeper to work for nothing, I’d say.”

Then Betsy ran into the room. She was a cute little kid with blonde hair tied in pigtails and she went straight to Tru Wyler, who gathered her up and cooed, “Hello, honey baby.” Betsy cooed back and gave Wyler a smacking kiss. The fat woman began making faces at her, and since she had so much material to work with she was able to put on quite a show. Betsy laughed herself into a spasm of coughing, and Tru Wyler got that stopped and began whispering baby talk. Grandfather, who thinks children are people, gave her a look of absolute disgust. Fortunately she didn’t notice.

Sheriff Pilkins came stomping up the steps. I opened the door for him, and he looked in, glared at Tru Wyler — who glared right back at him — and jerked his thumb at Grandfather. Grandfather excused the two of us, and we went outside.

“Forsythe’s grave hasn’t been touched,” the Sheriff said.

“Since when?” Grandfather wanted to know.

“Since it was sodded, right after he was buried. There’s a full-time caretaker.”

“I didn’t say it was a good idea.” Grandfather gestured at the horizon, beyond which the police search had disappeared. “If Daille wouldn’t climb a fence with a body, what makes you think he’d tote it way over there?”

“I don’t. I’ve called them back.” He pointed at the fence. “We’ll have a look in there.”

“What are you looking for?”

“The body that bone came from,” the Sheriff snapped. He stomped away, and Grandfather and I went back into the house.

Tru Wyler was still cooing over Betsy. The housekeeper was sitting across the room. Grandfather took the only other chair, and I stood by the door.

“Is this the book?” Grandfather asked, picking one up from an end table.

The housekeeper nodded. “The Sheriff was looking at it.” It was a typical Mother Goose book for children, with stories and nursery rhymes, and most of the colored pictures had been touched up, but not improved, with crayon scribbles. Grandfather turned the pages slowly. Betsy and Tru Wyler continued to coo, and Loken and Dockett watched them and tried not to look jealous. The housekeeper looked as if she’d rather the whole parcel of us cleared out.

A car drove up outside and a moment later a young man came charging up the front steps. He took one step into the room, pointed at Tru Wyler, and shouted, “Out!”

Her face turned a sort of mottled crimson, which did not go at all well with her platinum hair. She wrapped her arms protectively around Betsy and said, “Wife killer!”

He stepped across the room. They faced each other, Wyler in the chair and the man standing over her, and both of them breathing hard and openly hating. He’d come directly from work, probably driving a long way, and his shirt was crusted with salt where perspiration had dried and his curly hair was a tangle and he looked deadly. She looked hot and flustered even though she had on a light summer dress and didn’t have one platinum hair out of place.

Suddenly he snatched at Betsy. The kid started to howl, and Tru Wyler held on, and for a moment I thought they were going to play tug of war with her. Then Daille drew his fist back, and Tru Wyler seemed to know that any notions he might have about chivalry wouldn’t apply to her. She let go, and he handed Betsy, still howling, to his housekeeper and chased her out of the room with a glance.

He pointed at the door, which the two younger women were already using.

It was something to see Tru Wyler struggle out of that chair. Her chins moved one at a time, she pushed with both hands, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if she popped out of the chair like a cork coming out of a bottle. Finally she got to her feet and started to move. I expected her to shake the house when she walked, but she took delicate little steps and managed to look about as dignified as one can when being ordered out of a house.

At the door she turned. “Wife killer!” she said again. “The poor baby — her own mother’s finger—”

He took a step toward her and she went through the door sideways and disappeared.

Daille turned to us, still pointing at the door. Grandfather said, “Are you Jim Daille? I’m Bill Rastin, a friend of your grandfather’s. This is my grandson, Johnny.”

“Oh,” Daille said. He closed the door and slumped back against it with his hands over his face. “The witches!” he muttered. “The damn witches!” His whole body was trembling with rage. Suddenly he straightened up and looked at Grandfather. “What’s going on here?”

Grandfather told him, speaking very slowly and keeping his eyes on Daille’s face.

“Bone?” Daille said. “A human bone?”

Grandfather nodded.

“So that’s what the old witch meant!”

“You didn’t know anything about this?”

He shook his head. “Shirley telephoned my landlady that there was big trouble here and I was needed, and I started as soon as I got the message. This filthy neighborhood! I should have left it years ago, but I’ve had so darned many bills, and what with my work being seasonal—”

In the next room Betsy started to howl again. Daille said bitterly, “It wasn’t enough that they poisoned my wife’s mind. Now they’re working on my daughter and I suppose on Shirley, too. The damn witches! I’ve put up with this long enough. Shirley!”

The housekeeper stuck her head around the comer, looking scared to death. “Start packing,” Daille said. “We’re getting out of here right now. Permanently.”

“This might not be the best time for you to leave,” Grandfather observed.

“The best time would have been a long time ago. But I hated to farm Betsy out like an orphan. I wanted her brought up in her own home, and besides, with all the bills I’ve had I just couldn’t manage another place.”

“What sort of trouble have you been having with your neighbors?”

Daille snorted. “Those foul-minded witches! Couldn’t keep men of their own to bedevil — all three of them are divorced — so they take their spite out on any man they can get their claws into. If you’ll excuse me — I want to pack some clothes. Then I’m going to walk away and leave this house and everything in it to rot.”

He went to the bedroom, and Grandfather sat down in a chair and crossed his legs and screwed up his face. He was thinking so hard that he didn’t even look up when the Sheriff came to the door.

“Daille here?” the Sheriff asked.

I nodded.

The Sheriff hesitated, did some thinking of his own, then went out and came back with four deputies. As it turned out this was one situation he handled correctly. It started out real friendly-like, the Sheriff saying, “Where’s your wife, son?” and Daille answering politely, “None of your business,” and the Sheriff saying, just as politely, “I think it is and I have a warrant for your arrest.”

By the time it ended, the Sheriff needed all four of his deputies, and it was just as well that Daille wasn’t planning on taking the house furnishings with him because two chairs, the coffee table, a floor lamp, and the television set weren’t in condition to furnish anything but a junk yard.

Grandfather and I ducked outside when it started and waited until they persuaded Daille to come quietly. The Sheriff had one eye that was going to get worse before it got better, and Daille’s shirt was ripped, but otherwise the furniture took most of the punishment.

We helped the housekeeper clean up the mess. She was being brave about it and trying not to cry. Grandfather sat down in the kitchen to talk with her, and I spent the next half hour babysitting. I read aloud from the Mother Goose book, and Betsy pulled herself onto the sofa and sat watching me very seriously. I gave her the latest scoop on the three little pigs and Goldilocks and the three bears, and then — intentionally skipping the history of Tom Thumb — I acted out Jack and the Beanstalk in a new and improved version of my own.

When Grandfather was finished we went outside. Steve Carling, one of Sheriff Pilkins’ deputies, was standing by the hole in the fence and looking forlorn. “Those dratted trees are thick,” he complained. “You need a machete to hack your way through.”

“Cheer up,” Grandfather said. “Maybe Daille will confess.”

“Not him. He isn’t stupid. He’ll know we haven’t got much of a case with only one finger bone.”

State Police Sergeant Reichel drove up and wanted to know where his men were, and when Steve pointed to the woods the sergeant shook his head and commenced wondering if he should start sending out search parties.

“This fellow Daille seems to be a very unusual sort of murderer,” he said.

“Have you bought it?” Grandfather asked.

“I think so. Haven’t you?”

“I came over here ready to buy it, but since I got here I’ve turned up something that has me wondering.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing that says he didn’t do it. Just something that makes me wonder if he did. Pilkins should have done some checking before he arrested him.”

The sergeant had a big bag of hamburgers, which he invited us to share. The two dogs showed up as soon as we started eating and hung around till the Dockett woman called them down to her house and put out a pan of food. Sergeant Reichel told us that Daille had spoken only four words after his arrest, “I want a lawyer,” but that Sheriff Pilkins seemed pretty confident he had the right man and would find a body to go with the finger bone.

By that time it was getting dark. Sheriff Pilkins drove up and hallooed everyone out of the woods, but they were coming out anyway. They stood around eating Sergeant Reichel’s hamburgers and arguing.

The Sheriff said disgustedly, “Those dratted women can’t even agree on when they last saw Daille’s wife. Mrs. Wyler is positive he took her and the kid on a trip and came back without her.”

“That’s interesting,” Grandfather said. “He brought back just a finger bone?”

The Sheriff shrugged. “Wyler lives two houses away and anyway she’s gone half the time visiting her sister. Ruth Loken lives next door and should know, but she has a cottage on Mud Lake and spends half her time there in warm weather. Anyway, she’s positive that she saw Mrs. Daille a number of times after that trip. Mrs. Dockett is still trying to remember. The only proposition that gets no arguments is that Daille is a heel. All three of them hate his guts.”

“Why?” Grandfather wanted to know.

“At a guess, because he hired housekeepers instead of letting one of them look after Betsy.”

The Sheriff announced that he was going to have another try at getting the kid to talk. Grandfather walked off with Sergeant Reichel and Steve Carling. I went with the Sheriff, because he’d heard about my reading stories to Betsy and wanted to find out if I could coax anything out of her.

The moment she saw him she started to howl. I quieted that by standing on my head, which made her giggle, but every time I stopped she began howling again, and I am not good at asking questions while standing on my head. All the Sheriff did was sit in the corner and scratch at his bald spot, and when we finally gave up, his head must have been as sore as mine.

Then the three witches — excuse me, Mrs. Wyler, Mrs. Loken and Mrs. Dockett — came in from the rear of the house, and about the same time Grandfather entered from the front. I gave the Sheriff my resignation, telling him that a performance before such a large audience would jeopardize my amateur standing.

Betsy was already cooing at Mrs. Wyler, and that gave the Sheriff the bright idea that Mrs. Wyler should ask the questions.

“Nothing doing,” she announced flatly.

“Look,” Sheriff Pilkins said. “You used up an hour of my time this afternoon telling me what a rat Daille is. Don’t you want him convicted?”

“You bet your fat head I do!”

“This is all I need to wrap up the case.”

She was torn. She thought the little innocent shouldn’t be tricked into giving evidence that would convict her own father, but at the same time she had a happy vision of Daille behind bars, and obviously she wanted to help put him there.

“All right,” she said finally. She cooed at Betsy, “Look, honey babe. Remember the little bone?”

Betsy cooed right back at her, “Nooooooo.” And that was how it went.

Grandfather listened disgustedly for a few minutes, then he picked up Betsy’s story book. During the next lull in the cooing he announced, “Old Mrs. McShuttle lived in a coal-scuttle, along with her dog and cat.”

The Sheriff and the women glared at him. Betsy giggled.

Grandfather went on, “What they ate I can’t tell, but ’tis known very well, that none of the party were fat.”

“The bone, honey babe,” Mrs. Wyler said icily.

“Nooooooooo,” Betsy said.

“Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard, to get her poor dog—”

“Shut up!” the Sheriff snapped.

“The little bone you were playing with, honey baby. You must remember where you found it.”

“Nooooooooooo.”

“They all ran after the farmer’s wife, who cut off their tails with a carving knife.”

“For God’s sake!” the Sheriff exclaimed.

“She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed… Doesn’t it frighten you to find the children of America being brought up on such unvarnished tales of violence?”

“The little bone, Betsy—”

“Nooooooooooo.”

’Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

The three women blanched, and when Tru Wyler tried again to say, “The little bone—” she choked on it.

“And crime,” Grandfather went on, seeming not to notice. “The Knave of Hearts, he stole the tarts, Tom, Tom, the piper’s son, stole a pig and away he run.” He paused. “I don’t think so much of the grammar, either.”

The housekeeper, whose eyes were now very red behind her glasses, came in to announce that it was Betsy’s bedtime. No one paid any attention.

“The little bone,” Mrs. Wyler cooed. “Where did you get the little bone, honey babe?”

“Nooooooooooo.”

“Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells, and little bones all in a row.”

That produced a commotion all around the room, but I didn’t pay any attention to it because I was watching Betsy. She giggled. “Little bones.”

“Little bones,” Grandfather said. “Little bones among the flowers, you sit and play with them for hours.”

Mrs. Wyler’s chins were making like an accordion. Mrs. Loken had opened her mouth and forgotten to close it. Mrs. Dockett was leaning forward, and I noticed for the first time that she wore a hearing aid. Everyone seemed absolutely fascinated except Betsy, who climbed onto Mrs. Wyler’s lap, held up both hands pattycake style, and said, “Play.”

Mrs. Dockett, who was sitting by the window, suddenly exclaimed, “There’s a light out there behind your house, Ruth.”

Mrs. Loken looked out. “Something funny’s going on out there.”

The Sheriff started for the door, and everyone chased after him except the housekeeper and Mrs. Wyler. When I left the room Mrs. Wyler was again struggling to get out of her chair, but the only things moving were her chins.

She was the last one to find out that the light was behind her house. Steve Carling and another deputy were digging a hole while a State Trooper held a flashlight for them.

“What’s going on here?” the Sheriff roared.

Steve leaned on his shovel. “It’s Rastin’s idea. Sergeant Reichel is on his way with a search warrant, but in the meantime you were keeping the old dame occupied, and we thought—”

“Who are you working for? Me, or Rastin, or Reichel? What have you found?”

“Nothing, yet.”

“Nothing, yet! Of all the idiotic, lamebrained, imbecilic things to do! Walk onto private property in the middle of the night and start digging a hole. I ought to dump you into it and fill it over you. If you’re that hard up for exercise—”

He stopped, because Tru Wyler came up behind him very quietly and stuck a shotgun into his back. “Get out,” she purred. “All of you — get out.”

Steve turned quickly and fell into the hole. It was only six inches deep, so he climbed out fast and headed for the property line. Grandfather stood his ground. The rest of us backed off, all except the Sheriff, who had been caught facing the wrong way. He marched straight ahead.

Mrs. Wyler made one small miscalculation. She had the shotgun, but the State Trooper held the flashlight. He suddenly thought to turn it off, and when he turned it on again Grandfather had the gun. He handed it to the Sheriff, who checked it and announced that it wasn’t loaded.

“They’re digging,” Grandfather told Mrs. Wyler, “because this is where Daille buried his wife.”

“Here? In my yard?”

Grandfather nodded.

“I don’t believe it.” She thought for a moment. “Go ahead and dig, but I don’t believe it.”

She went back to her house, taking those mincing little steps, and then she spoiled the effect by slamming the door. Just then Sergeant Reichel arrived with his search warrant and seemed pleased to learn that it wasn’t needed. I meant to ask him how far down a search warrant covers but I forgot.

The deputies started to dig again, with Grandfather standing by to examine every shovelful. Things went easily enough for the first couple of feet and then got progressively harder until they struck clay that obviously hadn’t been disturbed for years. The Sheriff said to Grandfather, “Well?”

“It was just an idea,” Grandfather said ruefully.

“Sure. You didn’t say it was a good idea. Why’d you have them digging here? You been using a divining rod, or something?”

“Something like that,” Grandfather said.

“The next time you have an idea—”

A cool voice said sarcastically, “If you’ve finished playing, you can fill in the hole.”

The three women were standing there in the dark, watching.

“Fill it in,” the Sheriff said disgustedly.

“Fill it in neatly,” Tru Wyler said.

She stood by giving orders and enjoying every minute of it, with the other women giggling and offering suggestions of their own, and they raised such a fuss about leaving the yard the way it was that the Sheriff promised to send someone out in the morning to replant the weeds.

Sergeant Reichel had gone over to use the radio on his police car, and he came back and said to Grandfather, “They found it.”

“Congratulations,” Grandfather said. “I can’t remember a more efficient investigation.”

“Congratulations to you. It was right where you said it would be.”

“Yes. Well — people tend to repeat themselves.”

“I don’t want to sound inquisitive,” Sheriff Pilkins growled, “but if it’s this murder case of mine that you two are talking about I’d like to know what’s going on.”

“Where can we talk?” Grandfather asked. “Mrs. Wyler’s house?”

“Certainly not!” she snapped.

“Thought maybe you’d want to know why we were digging up your yard,” Grandfather said. “We’ve bothered Daille’s housekeeper plenty for one day, but I suppose we can go back there.”

Mrs. Wyler decided that maybe we could use her house, but she wouldn’t let us in until she’d spread newspapers all over her living-room floor. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone, so I stood in the corner behind Grandfather. Mrs. Wyler had her own oversized chair on the other side of the room, Ruth Loken and Joyce Dockett sat on the sofa, and the deputies and State Troopers played Alphonse and Gaston with the chairs that were left.

“The first question,” Grandfather said, keeping his eyes on Tru Wyler, “was where the bone came from. The only place for some distance around here where any dirt has ever been turned over is the flowerbed in your back yard.”

“I didn’t see any flowerbed,” the Sheriff objected.

“I had bad luck with it this year,” Mrs. Wyler said. “Nothing came up but weeds.”

“I saw it because I was looking for it,” Grandfather told the Sheriff. “Once I’d found it, there wasn’t much of a problem in figuring out what had happened. Look at it from Daille’s point of view. He had a body to dispose of, and in Mrs. Wyler’s yard there was a flowerbed maybe just spaded for the season and the right size for burying a body. What could be simpler than to go out on a night when no one was home, bury the body in the flowerbed, carry away any surplus dirt, and leave the bed all ready for planting?”

Mrs. Wyler said, “You mean all this time — in my flowerbed—”

Grandfather nodded. “For almost a year. But this spring Mrs. Dockett adopted a couple of stray dogs, and Daille looked out one day and saw the dogs digging in the flowerbed. Of course that wouldn’t do, so he picked another time when his neighbors were away, dug up the body, and hid it somewhere else. His timing was a little off, though. The flowers had already been planted. After he turned the dirt over they didn’t do well.”

Sheriff Pilkins leaned forward. “The bone?”

“Working at night he easily could have overlooked one little bone. Or maybe the dogs did dig up something. Anyway, Betsy found it.”

“So that’s what you were getting at with that Mother Goose stuff about bones in flowerbeds!”

Grandfather grinned. “Not exactly, but that’s why we dug up your yard, Mrs. Wyler. I figured that the body wouldn’t be there, but we had to check, and there was always the chance that more than one bone had been overlooked.”

She nodded, working the accordion under her chin. “I see. He dug up the body—” She paused. “My flowers were planted toward the end of April, so if he dug there shortly after that — for a moment you had me fooled, Mr. Rastin. I thought you were an exceptional man, meaning that you might possibly possess normal intelligence. I was wrong. This year Daille was gone all spring. If the dogs were digging in my flowerbed he wouldn’t have seen them, and he couldn’t have done any digging there himself.”

“He could have returned at night. With you and Mrs. Loken gone—”

“No.” She shook her head. “It’s no use, Mr. Rastin. You can’t think that body into my flowerbed. It was early summer last year when Mrs. Daille disappeared, and my flowers had a nice start by then. He couldn’t have buried her there without ruining them, and last year the flowers were beautiful.”

The Sheriff said drily, “I can’t see Daille burying his wife so shallow that a dog could disturb the body.”

“Frankly, neither can I,” Grandfather agreed unexpectedly. “And if he wouldn’t do it that way, and if the flowerbed wasn’t disturbed when she disappeared, and if he wasn’t home this spring to dig her up, that brings us to the next question: Whose body was it? Because there was a body in your flowerbed, Mrs. Wyler. That was where the bone came from. Unfortunately, Sheriff Pilkins has a talent for jumping at conclusions. Daille’s daughter had the bone, Daille’s wife was missing, so he jumped. The fact is, on this short street there are four missing persons.”

“Four?” the Sheriff exclaimed.

“One wife,” Grandfather said, “and three husbands. Do you have anything to say about that, Mrs. Wyler?”

“Only that you get more ridiculous every time you open your mouth. All our husbands—”

“Divorced you? Ever since I heard about that I’ve been wondering if perhaps one of them didn’t act soon enough. But first, tell me how it is that you happen to have a flowerbed, Mrs. Wyler. I don’t mean to be discourteous, I’m just looking at the situation objectively. You don’t impress me as the gardening type. Did you plant the flowers yourself?”

“Well—”

“And spade the ground? And weed it? A flowerbed entirely surrounded by weeds would require a lot of weeding.”

Mrs. Wyler sat very still. She was looking a little the way the Egyptian Sphinx would look if it had a lot of chins. Then, very slowly, she turned to Mrs. Loken. “Ruth — Ruth always spaded it. Spaded it and planted it and weeded it. She said she was glad to do it for me. The whole thing was her idea. I was away, and when I came home she said, ‘You always talked about having a few flowers. Well, I’ve made a flowerbed for you.’ That must have been ten years ago.”

“Eleven,” Grandfather said. “Enough time to account for the fact that there wasn’t any tissue left on the bone. And this year she stopped weeding it?”

Mrs. Wyler did her accordion nod.

“And the first year she planted it was the year her husband ‘divorced’ her?”

Mrs. Wyler hesitated. “I think — yes—”

“We had four missing persons on this street,” Grandfather said. “Thanks to some remarkably quick and efficient investigating by Sergeant Reichel, three of them are accounted for. Daille’s wife died down in Indiana, as Daille said, and is buried there. Mr. Wyler divorced his wife twenty years ago, and he died five years later and is buried in Hollyhock Cemetery in Wiston. Mr. Dockett is still alive, living in Cincinnati. He remarried and has seven children. Mr. Loken disappeared eleven years ago and hasn’t been seen or heard from since — not until this evening, anyway, except for one finger bone. Would you like to tell us about him, Mrs. Loken?”

Now she was the Sphinx, minus chins, staring straight ahead and not moving a muscle.

Grandfather turned to Mrs. Wyler. “Let’s start over again. Instead of a husky man we have a rather small woman with a heavy husband to dispose of. That’s the description the sergeant turned up — a small man, with small hands, but very obese. Daille’s house hadn’t been built eleven years ago, and Mrs. Loken’s only neighbors were Mrs. Wyler, who frequently stayed overnight with her sister, and Mrs. Dockett, who even then was hard of hearing. Maybe Mrs. Loken had the idea of dragging the body to that wood on the other side of the highway, but she quickly found out that she couldn’t do it. She made a flowerbed instead.”

“So that’s why she was so good about tending my flowers,” Mrs. Wyler said through clenched teeth.

“Until this year,” Grandfather said. “This year her husband was no longer buried there, so she lost interest. Why did you move the body, Mrs. Loken? The dogs? Betsy digging with her little shovel?”

Mrs. Loken had gone ghastly white, and she wasn’t saying a thing.

“That’s all very well,” the Sheriff growled, “but one finger bone still doesn’t make much of a corpus delicti.”

“Oh, we have the rest of him,” Sergeant Reichel said. “He was buried right where Rastin told us to look — at Mrs. Loken’s lake cottage, under a flowerbed.”

“You told me to do it!” Mrs. Loken shrieked, jumping at Mrs. Wyler. “You said a man like him deserved to be dead!”

They hauled her away, still screaming.

After that the gathering broke up fast, and we were left alone with Mrs. Wyler. She’d aged in those last few minutes until she now looked as old as she actually was, which is a horrible condition for any woman to be in. She said, “I didn’t know. I always talk, but I never thought of anyone doing a thing like that.”

“People react to talk in different ways,” Grandfather said. “Do you know what happened to Mrs. Daille?”

“No—”

“She’d had a nervous breakdown before they moved here. Her doctor thought a quiet place in the country might be good for her. Because Daille was gone so much of the time he didn’t realize what you were doing to her until it was too late. He put her in a private mental hospital down in Indiana — it was expensive, he’s still paying for it — and while she was there she committed suicide. He’s trying to keep it a secret, for Betsy’s sake.”

“Men—” she croaked.

We left her.

“She’s as much a murderess as Mrs. Loken is,” I said, as we were getting into my jalopy.

“Yes,” Grandfather agreed, “but the law can’t touch her. We’ll leave it to her conscience — and hope she has one.”

“You already had everything figured out. Why all that fa de la with the Mother Goose rhymes?”

“Reichel hadn’t found the body yet, and I wanted to make certain I was right. Did you see Mrs. Loken’s face when I first mentioned bones in a flowerbed?”

“No. I was watching Betsy.”

“You and Pilkins both. Put him in the room with a murderess and he looks at someone else.”

“If you’d told me to watch a murderess, I’d have picked Mrs. Wyler. She looks like one. It was her back yard, too.”

Grandfather shook his head. “I knew she wasn’t directly involved in this particular murder because she told the truth about Daille’s wife. She said Daille took her on a trip and came back without her. She wouldn’t have said that if she’d been worried that the police might decide it wasn’t Daille’s wife they were looking for. You see — she hated Daille’s guts, and she really thought he had killed his wife, but where he did it wasn’t important to her. Where was very important to Mrs. Loken. From her point of view Mrs. Daille had to be killed here, to account for the bone. So she lied and said she’d seen Mrs. Daille at home after the trip, and that lie gave her away.”

“I still think something should be done about Mrs. Wyler,” I said. “She’s the only woman I ever met who could play a witch without being made up for the part. Isn’t there some way to punish her?”

“I think maybe there is,” Grandfather said. “It wouldn’t be much, but I suppose I’m bound to do what I can.”

What he did was persuade Jim Daille to sell his house to three crusty old bachelors. It would be nice to report that Mrs. Wyler mended her ways, dieted off a hundred pounds, and married one of them; but she didn’t. She put up with them for all of three weeks, and then she moved away.