The Weak-Eyed Bat

Chapter Ten

At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, August the third, a young woman in Toronto was telephoning a wireless message to Dr. Prescott, Clayton, Muskoka.

In Flint, Michigan, the chief of police was composing a telegram to Inspector White.

Dr. Hartford, superintendent of the Mercy Sanctuary in Chicago, replaced in the files the case history he had been studying, read once more the telegram from Dr. Prye, and took up a pen.

Dr. Hartford could afford to be more verbose than the others. He added “Collect” at the bottom of the telegram form.

In cottage number four Susan Frost was packing a picnic basket. Not, of course, for a picnic, with Joan barely cold in her grave. Susan liked to think of Joan in a quiet coffin, looking serene and saved, rather than on the autopsy table in Dr. Prescott’s office.

The wild-strawberry jam, the calves’ foot jelly, and the invalid soup were going to Mary Little. The whole community knew that Tom had run away and that poor Mary was very ill. Susan hummed a little song, whisked a snowy napkin over the basket, and went out.

There was a speedboat out on the lake, a red boat with a broad young man bent over the wheel. She shaded her eyes and watched for a minute. Ralph was going too fast, circling the lake as if it were too small to hold him. Her hand dropped to her side and she walked hurriedly past Prye’s cottage, a slow blush spreading across her face even to the tip of her nose. But she was quite composed again when Jennie answered her knock.

“I’ve brought something for Mrs. Little,” Susan said shyly. “I wonder if I could go up and see her for a minute.”

“The Lord bless you,” Jennie said fervently. “I can’t do a thing with her. Mr. Little didn’t come home all night and she’s thinking he’s dead like — like the other one. And the doctor’s bringing a baby and can’t come until after lunch.”

The situation was made to order for Susan. She gave Jennie the basket and a reassuring smile, pushed up her sleeves, and went upstairs with brisk, firm footsteps. The door of Mary’s room was open, and she tapped softly on the wall and went in.

“Why, hello, Mary,” she said cheerfully. “What’s this I hear about you being a naughty girl and imagining things?”

The woman on the bed opened her eyes, and if there was any expression in them it was one of faint distaste. The two devout ladies of the community did not, in fact, care for each other.

“Have they found Tom?” Mary asked, scarcely moving her lips.

Susan sat down on the edge of the bed. “Found Tom? What nonsense, Mary! You’re not to bother your head about other people right now. I’ve brought you some delicious wild-strawberry jam. I picked the strawberries with my own hands.”

Why this should impart a special flavor to the jam Mary did not know and she was too polite to ask.

“They’re not looking for him,” she said. “They think because I’m sick that I’m not rational, that I’m imagining things.”

Susan smiled gayly. “Well, you are just a teeny weeny bit, aren’t you?” She took one of Mary’s hands and then dropped it suddenly. It was ice-cold. “Has Dr. Prye been here?”

“Yes. But I forgot—”

Susan’s eyes narrowed. “You forgot what, Mary?”

“Nothing.”

“Really, Mary, one would think you didn’t trust me. What did you forget?”

Mary turned her head away. “Just the phone call.”

“What phone call?”

“Ask Jennie.” She was breathing hard, pressing a hand to her heart as if it hurt her.

Susan got off the bed and stood up. “I think you should have a sedative, Mary dear. I really do. I’ll go and get—”

“No! You’re like the rest of them. You want to put me to sleep so I won’t bother you, so I won’t talk.”

“What rest of them? Who wants to put you to sleep, Mary?” She bent over the bed and her voice sank to a soft whisper. “Who wants to put you to sleep, Mary?”

“They want me to think that Tom murdered her and ran away. They don’t want me to talk. They’re afraid of me.”

“Who are they, Mary?”

The whisper spun round and round the room as if it could not get out...

“Yes, there was a phone call,” Jennie told Prye half an hour later. “I was in the kitchen making Mrs. Little’s tea and the phone rang in the sitting room and Mr. Little answered it.”

“Did you hear what he was talking about?” Prye said. “Think, Jennie.”

Jennie looked up at him unhappily, and then suddenly her face brightened. “He was talking about not knowing what someone was talking about.”

Prye groaned inaudibly. “Are you sure the similarity of phrase isn’t confusing you?”

“I heard him say that he didn’t know what someone was talking about,” Jennie repeated. “I even remember the time. It was six-fifteen.”

“And what did you do after you prepared Mrs. Little’s tea?”

“I took it up to her room and sat with her until she’d finished. Sometimes she asks me to have a cup of tea with her just for the sake of company. He was never any company for her. Then I went down again and made his dinner, and then I went back upstairs.”

“What did Mr. Little do after dinner?”

“Sat in the front room reading.”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary about his actions?”

“Well—” Jennie hesitated and then plunged in. “Mr. Little could be quite nice when he wanted to, but he never wasted any of his niceness on me. So I just let him alone. He was grouchy last night.”

“You sat in Mrs. Little’s room all evening?”

“Yes, sir. I started to work on my afghan but I was tired and I dozed off. But that was all right because Mrs. Little was dozing, too.”

“You went to sleep before or after the storm?”

“It must have been before. When Mrs. Little woke me up it was nearly ten o’clock and the storm was real bad then. Mrs. Little was scared and sent me downstairs to get him. But he was gone just as if the spirits had got him, like that Chinaman says.”

“Did the spirits take his hat and coat, too?” Prye asked gravely.

Jennie went out of the room and came back in a few minutes with the news that the spirits had thoughtfully taken along Tom’s hat and coat and a pair of rubbers.

“I want to look at Mr. Little’s room,” Prye said. “I’ll go up alone.”

Tom’s bedroom adjoined Mary’s. Prye went in quietly and closed the door behind him. There was no evidence that Tom had done any packing. The room was neat, the clothes hung up carefully in the closet. Prye went over to the dresser and pulled out a drawer. It shrieked.

“Who’s there?” Mary called out.

Prye stood still.

“Who’s there?” she called, and this time there was panic in her voice.

Prye said, “Damn!” and went out into the hall.

“It’s Dr. Prye, Mrs. Little. I was just—”

“What are you doing in Tom’s room?”

“Inspector White sent me over to see if any of your husband’s clothes were missing.”

“Sent you over!” Mary said bitterly. “It’s not important enough for him to come himself.”

“He’s busy organizing a search of the woods,” Prye was able to say truthfully. “Do you mind if I go on with my job?”

There was no reply. He went back into Tom’s room. Tom was a careful man. His drawers were all in order, and even his correspondence had been arranged in three piles in his writing desk: letters from friends, bills, and business matters. None of the envelopes of the personal letters bore feminine handwriting.

Prye walked slowly toward the door, vaguely dissatisfied. He turned his head and let his eyes wander once more around the room, over the dresser, the cedar chest, the desk, the bed with its covers turned down. There was nothing out of place. Then he looked down and saw on the rug a tiny shaft of green light which should not have been there.

It lay on the ledge of the window, a large square emerald ring flanked with diamonds that caught the sun. It seemed as if someone had put it down casually and forgotten about it. Prye covered it with his handkerchief and placed it in his coat pocket.

In five minutes he was back in his own cottage. With the aid of two mirrors he unwound the bandages from his head and replaced them with a pad of absorbent cotton and several strips of adhesive. Then he jammed a hat over his head and surveyed himself. The effect was not pretty because his ears bent a little; but at least the bandages were invisible.

“If I’m lucky,” he said aloud, “it will be a he, or else a she who won’t expect me to take my hat off.”

He wasn’t lucky. The middle-aged spinster in charge of the switchboard at the telephone exchange in Clayton palpably expected him to remove his hat and eyed him none too cordially as he tugged at the brim. It came off with a rush accompanied by a piece of adhesive and a quantity of Prye’s hair.

Prye pointed to the hair. “A toupee,” he said. “Dam thing won’t stay on.”

“Accounts payable at the desk,” she told Prye severely. Then she doffed her earphones, patted her hair, and appeared behind the desk.

“Jekyll and Hyde,” Prye murmured.

“Name, please,” she said, keeping her eyes fixed glassily on the switchboard.

“Who? Me?” Prye said.

“Of course you,” she said to the switchboard.

“Prye. Dr. Prye. But my bill isn’t due yet. As a matter of fact, I just dropped in to get an idea of how a switchboard works. Very interesting, isn’t it?”

“Not if you have to do it,” she replied coldly.

“No. I can see that.”

A red light glowed on the board and in an instant she had replaced her earphones and was asking in a lilting voice which bore no resemblance to her own: “Number, please?”

She came back behind the desk.

“It’s quite simple, you see,” she informed him.

“I’m afraid I’d feel an awful temptation to listen in on calls,” Prye confessed. “Or else I’d get tangled up in the wires and strangle myself.”

Prye led the laughing but she joined in. When she had finished she regarded him with condescending benevolence. “I daresay it’s possible.”

“You don’t mean to tell me you manage the exchange all by yourself?” Prye said.

“From seven to seven. Another girl comes on at night.”

“Terrible business, this murder out at the Point,” Prye said casually.

She froze again, her mouth hard and tight as if she had swallowed some liquid air.

“It’s a pity that telephone operators aren’t permitted to listen in on calls,” Prye went on. “They could probably help the police a great deal. Now take this business out at the Point. Mr. Little received a phone call last night around six o’clock. If we could verify what was said over the line perhaps we could find Mr. Little.”

“He’s gone?” she exclaimed. “Why, I never dreamed—”

Prye leaned over the desk. “If you should remember that call, Miss—?”

She was quite pale. “Jones. Miss Jones. I can tell you where the call came from but that’s all. It was Miss Bonner’s house.”

“Was it a woman or a man?”

“A woman with a funny name.”

“Miss Alfonse?”

“That’s it,” she said uneasily. “Really, I can’t tell—”

“She asked for Mr. Little and told him who was speaking. He seemed puzzled, didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“How did you know?”

“Oh, I know what was said. I’m just checking up on it, you see.”

“Oh.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “In that case I don’t mind admitting that I did listen to the call. It was so short, I hardly had time not to listen. This Miss Alfonse wanted to meet Mr. Little at some pier at nine o’clock. Is that what you heard?”

“Precisely,” Prye said. “My informant wasn’t quite clear as to whether he said he’d meet her or not. Did he?”

“She seemed to take it for granted that he would,” Miss Jones replied. “She just hung up.”

“Thank you, Miss Jones. Do you like roses?”

“Well, yes, I do, but—”

“No trouble at all,” Prye said, smiling. “Good day.”

The business district of Clayton occupied no more than three blocks on the main street, and Prye had no difficulty finding the town’s only cab station. The manager himself greeted Prye. He had taken the call from the Point at about five o’clock on Monday afternoon. The caller gave her name as Miss Frost, and told him she wanted a taxi at ten o’clock sharp, that she intended to catch the ten-twenty to Toronto. Prye gave the man a dollar and went out.

He found Constable Jakes in his office which was part of the jail itself. The emerald ring was brought out, and Constable Jakes laboriously began to test it for fingerprints. There were none. Prye listened patiently to a recital of the wrongs he had committed by taking the ring: removal of evidence without proper witnesses and failure to seal the ring in an envelope complete with signatures of witnesses.

It was one-thirty by the time he reached Dr. Prescott’s office and was admitted to the autopsy room.

On a slab in the center of the room lay the body of Joan Frost. A butterfly incision had been made in her trunk and the skin lifted back. A suction tube was drawing off the blood. In a pail by the table was her heart and her stomach and her lungs.

“For the love of heaven!” Prye said in a strangled voice.

Prescott looked up, surprised. He was packing the body with sawdust before sewing the skin back on.

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t like this room,” Prye said, reeling toward the door.

Prescott was slightly huffed. He pulled a sheet over the body and washed his hands, and they went out to his front office.

Prescott was smiling. “I’m an undertaker, too. Sit down.”

Prye sat down weakly. “Sorry. Never could stand postmortems.”

“Why did you want to see the body?”

“Did you notice her left hand?” Prye asked.

“Yes. She’d been wearing a ring on her third finger. The skin there was not tanned like the rest of her hand, and it was slightly puffed.”

“The ring fitted tightly then?”

“I’d say so. The report from the Connaught Lab came in this morning. It seems you were right about the bag of stones being used as the weapon. There were pieces of skin and some hairs clinging to it, and the bloodstains were the same type as the body’s.”

“Find anything else interesting?” Prye said.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘interesting,’ but the girl had obviously had relations with at least one man. He may have killed her. The point will have to be brought out at the inquest tomorrow, I suppose, though it’s a delicate one and we try not to offend our summer residents.”

“You may be having a double inquest,” Prye said. “Unless I miss my guess, the man in question has joined his ancestors.”

“Really? Well then, we don’t have to bring that up at all.” Prescott seemed relieved. The summer residents were profitable to him for they had a penchant for admiring poison ivy and picking up odd germs to which the local people were immune.

“The inquest is, after all, merely to ascertain the cause of death and I think that is quite clear. You will attend, Dr. Prye?”

The question was asked merely out of courtesy, as a subpoena had already been delivered to Prye.

Prye touched his coat pocket. “I’ll be there by special invitation. By the way, I prefer to have nothing said about the attack on me if you can avoid it.”

“I’m afraid we can’t. We would like the jury to inspect your head—”

Prye groaned aloud.

“—because you are, in a manner of speaking, like the sole survivor of a sinking ship. From the nature of the attack on you the jury will be able to form a better idea of how the girl was attacked.”

“It seems unnecessary,” Prye said gloomily. “You know how the murder was done — I know — the police know. Probably the only people who don’t know are the coroner’s jury.”

“Democracy,” Prescott said severely. “We must live by the precepts of democracy, Dr. Prye.”

Dr. Prye conceded the point and went out to order some roses for Miss Jones. He was not in the best of humor when he arrived home, but the sight of Nora awaiting him on his front veranda was cheering.

Nora had weathered the first murder, but the storm and the possibility of a second murder had shaken her considerably.

Her cottage, which she had chosen because it was cool and surrounded by trees, now appeared to her as a deathtrap, a spot designed by nature for murderous assaults. She had eaten both breakfast and lunch locked in the kitchen, and at one-thirty she sprinted to Prye’s cottage with no thought for dignity. Dignity was a desirable quality, she reflected, but speed was more important under the circumstances.

“Mind if I rent a few inches of your veranda for a week or so?” she asked, getting to her feet as Prye came up the steps.

He took her hand and said in a fatherly tone: “My dear girl, what would people think? If you compromise yourself in the eyes of man, don’t expect me to marry you.”

“I don’t,” Nora said affably. “But it might be rather nice if you’d ask me so I could say no.”

Prye held the screen door open and she went in.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I don’t think I’d like being a doctor’s wife. Take being the wife of a street cleaner, for instance, a street cleaner called Harry. Well, Harry comes home all covered with dirt from street-cleaning and sees me looking cool and clean and fetching, and says to himself, ‘I’m a lucky man.’ Then take you, for example. You come home after spending the day being chased around wards by competent and beautiful nurses. You aren’t a bit like Harry. You say, ‘Where in hell is my dinner?’ ”

Prye grinned down at her. “All right. Where in hell is my dinner?”

“You don’t get any dinner,” Nora said distantly. “Why not let one of your competent and beautiful nurses pack you a lunch?”

“Miss Alfonse is the only nurse around here and if she packed me a lunch I’d want it thoroughly tested in a lab.”

Nora took his hand and drew him into the sitting room. She looked suddenly very serious and Prye said: “Something eats you, Nora?”

She removed her hand from his and frowned at him.

“Look, I want to apply for a position.”

She paused, and Prye prompted: “Well, what would you like from me, references?”

“I’m applying to you.”

“To me?”

“I’m... well, I’m not exactly frightened to stay alone in my cottage, but I would feel better if you gave me a job as cook. That will solve everything: I can stay here and at the same time hold up my head in good society. Does the idea appeal to you?”

“Strongly. But it might be better for you to ask the Frosts to put you up. Joan’s room will be vacant. It will save wear and tear on your reputation.”

“Joan’s room!” Nora cried. “Are you delirious? I wouldn’t sleep in Joan’s room for... for anything! I’m surrounded by homicidal maniacs and you gibber about my reputation! How do you suppose my reputation will survive being murdered?”

“I can’t think of any reason why you should be murdered unless there’s something you haven’t told me. Is there?”

“No.”

“Then Mr. Smith must have been imagining things when he told Inspector White that you and Wang—”

“Well, that mean little wretch,” Nora said warmly.

“I suppose you and Wang are a gymnastic team and you were just practicing outside Mr. Smith’s kitchen window? Are you in good form?”

“Tolerable,” Nora said.

“And that’s your story?”

“Yours, but I’m using it. You may tell Inspector White if you wish. You may also give me an alibi for last night in case Tom Little turns up murdered.”

Across the lake from Prye’s cottage a small boy was sailing a toy boat along the shore. He was so engrossed in his play that the drifting canoe almost touched him before he looked up and saw it.

The canoe was half-submerged, and on the bottom of it a man lay face down in several inches of dirty pink water. A hat had been jammed on the back of his head and it was covered with brownish stains.

Tom Little was still wearing his rubbers and his coat although he had not needed either for some time.

The small boy caught the rope of the canoe and held it while he stared with interest at this curious object. Then he went quite calmly to tell his mother.