The Burglar in the Library

CHAPTER Twenty-six

It was Earlene Cobbett, of course, and I’ll spare you the fits and starts in which she told her story, along with the exclamation points that! accented! virtually! every! word! of it. She had not meant to injure Orris, nor had she intended any lasting harm to the inoffensive snowblower. As she understood it, a cup of sugar in its gas tank would just stop it from running, and eventually someone would have to drain it and supply it with clean gas, at which time it would be as good as new.

And Orris would be as good as new, too. She was a bit peeved with him, less for his having managed to impregnate her than for the attentions he’d been paying to her cousin Molly. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, for after all boys will be boys, and at least it was all in the family, and not as if he’d been misbehaving with a guest, or some stranger. But he still deserved to be taught a lesson, and an hour or so of snow shoveling did not seem inappropriate.

“You didn’t do any harm,” I told Earlene, “except to the snowblower, and in a couple of weeks it’d be useless anyhow. It could probably do with a good overhaul between now and next winter.”

“Need a new engine now,” the colonel murmured.

“As far as Orris is concerned,” I went on, “if anything, you gave him a few extra minutes of life. If the snowblower had started up right away, he’d have cleared the path in a few minutes’ time, and that means he’d have wound up in the gully that much sooner. I know you miss him, Earlene-”

“I loved him!”

“-and he’s gone, and nothing can bring him back, but there’s no use crying over spilled milk, and at least you don’t have to worry that you were the one who kicked the pail over.” The metaphor stopped her tears, anyway; she stood there blinking, trying to figure out what the hell I was talking about.

“Well, so much for C,” Greg Savage said. “It’s upsetting for the poor girl, but she didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Orris, or any of the rest of it, either. So we’re back to A and B. B cut the bridge supports shortly before or shortly after A murdered poor Rathburn.”

“Matters would be greatly simplified,” the colonel announced, “if B would identify himself.” An eloquent silence greeted this remark, and he broke it himself by elaborating. “After all,” he said, “while B’s action had the awful luck of causing an accident, it’s not in the same category as murder. B just wanted to keep us all here.”

“A fate worse than death,” Littlefield muttered.

Cissie gave him a look, and Rufus Quilp piped up with the observation that cutting the ropes was hardly an innocent prank. “He didn’t just disable the bridge,” he reminded us. “He booby-trapped it, cutting partway through the ropes so that the bridge would collapse as soon as someone set foot on it. If he merely wanted to isolate us here, why not cut all the way through the ropes?”

“He was trying to murder someone,” Miss Hardesty said. “But he couldn’t have meant to kill Orris. And if he had someone else in mind, how could he know that person would be the next one to try to cross the bridge?”

“He couldn’t,” I said.

“My goodness,” Mrs. Colibri said. “Do you mean to say that he didn’t even care which one of us he killed?”

“No,” I said. “I mean to say he wasn’t trying to kill anybody.”

“But Mr. Quilp just said-”

“I know what Mr. Quilp just said, and his point is well taken. Here’s what I think, although I admit I can’t prove it. I think B slashed all the way through the cables. He didn’t set any traps, booby or otherwise. He cut the ropes and dumped the bridge in the gully.”

They looked at me. Leona Savage said, “Then when Orris gave up on the snowblower and walked to the bridge-”

“It was already out.”

“And he kept walking?”

“It bothered me,” I said, “that nobody actually heard the bridge fall. Greg, you and Millicent were outside when Orris had his accident. You both heard him cry out. But did you hear the bridge crash into the gully?”

“I might have,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

“All I remember,” Millicent said, “is Orris screaming.”

You’d have thought this would bring some sort of outcry from Earlene Cobbett, but it didn’t.

“It’s not as clear-cut as the dog that didn’t bark,” I told them, “and there’s no way to run an experiment, but I’d have to guess that the bridge made a lot of noise when it fell. But if it fell during the night, when most of us were sleeping and all of us were inside the house with the windows shut, and the snow was coming down thick and fast, well, I’d say it would have fallen as silently as Bishop Berkeley’s tree.”

Millicent looked baffled by the reference. “It was a tree that fell in the forest,” her mother told her, “and it didn’t make a sound because there was no human ear there to hear it.”

“But it would still make a sound,” Millicent said. “Anyway, Orris made a sound, and both my ears were there to hear it. Bernie, if the bridge was out already, why didn’t Orris turn around and come back to the house?”

“Ah,” I said. “That’s a delicate point.”

“But I’m sure you have the answer,” Littlefield said dryly.

“I didn’t know Orris terribly well,” I said, “but my sense of him was that his SATs weren’t quite high enough to get him into Harvard.”

“He was a hard worker,” Nigel said, “and a stout-hearted lad.”

“A good man in a tight spot,” the colonel put in.

“But not, uh, terribly quick in an intellectual sense.”

“I think we get the point,” Littlefield said. “Old Orris was dumb as the rocks he landed on. Where are you going with this, Rhodenbarr? You saying he didn’t notice the bridge was missing until he was standing in the middle of the air?”

“He was very likely snowblind,” I said in Orris’s defense. “He was frustrated, too, from trying to get the snowblower to work, and worn out from slogging through deep snow. And how many times had Orris walked that path and crossed that bridge? Hundreds, surely. It was automatic for him. He didn’t have to think about it.”

“He must have been even dumber than I thought,” Littlefield said. “Even now, after lying in the snow all night, I’ll bet his body temperature’s still ten points higher than his IQ.”

“It was a mistake anyone could have made,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “But the point is that B wasn’t trying to kill Orris or anyone else. He slashed the ropes clear through.”

“All the more reason why he should identify himself,” said the colonel, returning to his earlier argument. “He’s not a murderer, and his testimony could help us.”

“That’s true,” I said, “but we’re not going to hear it.”

“Why not? All he needs to do is speak up. After all, he’s right here in this room.”

That brought it home. They looked at each other, trying to guess which one of them had slashed the ropes and unwittingly sent Orris to the bottom of Cuttlebone Creek. I let them dart questioning glances back and forth.

Then I said, “No.”

“No?”

“No, he’s not in the room.”

“But-”

“B’s in a lawn chair,” I said.

The colonel stared. “You’re saying he’s dead.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“There are three dead bodies in lawn chairs, Rhodenbarr. Unless you’re saying-”

“No,” I said, “we haven’t lost anybody else. Three bodies, and one of them’s B.”

“The cook? She slashed the ropes supporting the bridge, and killed herself out of remorse at having caused Orris’s death?”

“I suppose now and then somebody commits suicide out of remorse,” I said, “but it sounds as though we’ve got an epidemic of it here. I’m sure the cook had a kitchen knife that could have sliced right through those ropes, but the only way she tried to keep everybody here was by cooking wonderful meals. She wasn’t B.”

“Then it must have been Mr. Rathburn,” Mrs. Colibri said. “You said the ropes might have been cut before the murder, so I suppose Mr. Rathburn might have cut them. He must have gone outside, and then when he came back Mr. Wolpert was waiting for him in the library.”

“Perfect,” Littlefield said. “All the perpetrators are dead and there’s nobody here but us chickens. Can we go home now?”

I said, “It wasn’t Rathburn.”

“That leaves Wolpert,” Rufus Quilp said, folding his hands on his stomach. “But how can he be B when he’s already A? He can’t be both letters, can he?”

“There’s twenty-six letters in the alphabet,” Millicent said. “Enough for everybody to have two.”

“But Wolpert only gets one,” I said. “He’s B, because he was the one who cut the bridge supports to seal off Cuttleford House. He’d been keeping an eye on things for days, waiting to see how the hand played out, and once everybody was here he wanted to make sure nobody left. But he didn’t kill anybody. He didn’t murder Jonathan Rathburn and he didn’t kill himself.”

“Then who did, Bern?”

“Someone who’s right in this room now,” I said, “and maybe he’d like to accept Colonel Blount-Buller’s invitation and identify himself. No? Well, in that case I’ll identify him. It’s Dakin Littlefield.”