Murder at Mother’s Knee [= Something That Happened in Our House]

Chapter Three Nobody Missing

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

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

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

“I can manage,” she said distantly.

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

“It happens to be.”

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

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

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

She loosed a blast of sarcasm at him sufficient to have withered the entire first three rows of any of her classes. “You’re wasting your breath, my textbook expert. The trouble with hard-and-fast rules is that they always let a big chunky exception slip by, and then try to ignore it because it doesn’t get inside the frame.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

She opened the back door and looked out at the peaceful sunlit fields that surrounded the place, with a wall of woodland bringing up in the distance on one side. She pretended to gulp enjoyable quantities of air. It was enjoyable, but she wasn’t thinking of that. In one direction, up from the house, they had corn growing. The stalks were head-high, could have concealed anything. A number of black specks — birds, but whether crows or just what species she wasn’t rustic enough to be able to tell — were hovering above one particular spot, darting busily in and out. They’d rise above it and circle and then go down in again, but they didn’t stray very far from it. Only that one place held any attraction for them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birds agitated in a cornfield. A well suddenly unfit for use for the last two or three weeks. And then, in a third direction, straight over and across, the woods, secretive and brooding as always. Three possibilities. Three choices in direction. But only one of them the right one.

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

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

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

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

Then when she again made to part company with her, it was in a diametrically opposite direction, along the footpath that coursed toward the well, as if without noticing where her steps were taking her. “Any kind of a chair will do,” she called back talkatively. “Just so long as it has a seat and four—”

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

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

The woman’s eyes seemed to be a little larger now, as she shifted directions in accordance with this restless boarder of hers. She swallowed hard. Miss Prince could distinctly see the lump go down the scrawny lines of her throat. She started to say something, then she didn’t after all. It was flagrantly obvious, the way her whole body had seemed to lean forward for a moment, then subside again against the door-frame. Her hands, inert until now, had begun to mangle her apron. It was almost like a pinwheel, the way it swirled one way, then the other, in their hidden clutch.

Not a sound came from her. Yet, though the test seemed to have failed, it had succeeded. Miss Prince went on, this time without any further backward parleying.

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

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

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

She was up to the outermost trees now, and soon they had closed around her, the house and its watcher was gone from sight, and a pall of cool blue twilight had dimmed everything. She beat her way slowly forward. It was not a dense copse, the trees were not set thickly together by any means, but it was extensive, it covered a lot of ground. There were avenues, alleys running through it in various directions, natural ones, not man-made, but none of them was continuous, it just happened to be the way the trunks were ranged around.

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

If there had been a murder, then there was a body somewhere. Johnny had turned his composition in three days ago. Even if his “dream” had taken place two or three weeks before that, there must still be a body somewhere. There would still be a body a year from now.

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