"The Burglar in the Library" - читать интересную книгу автора (Block Lawrence)

CHAPTER Fourteen

Thinking back, I saw how close Carolyn had come to being right on all four points. Just moments after she’d said that the next victim might be in the room with us, he made his appearance, walking with cap in hands to the table where Nigel and Cissy Eglantine sat over coffee. He had removed his boots, I saw, and was wearing thick woolen socks. Snow clung to the lower portions of his trouser legs.

After a whispered conference with his employers, young Orris clomped out again. Something-not a premonition, I assure you-urged me to ask Nigel Eglantine if anything was the matter, but I resisted the impulse. It turned out I didn’t have to ask, because Nigel came over to our table and made an announcement. There was, he reported, something wrong with the snowblower. Its engine appeared to be damaged. He was going to have a look at it, although he wasn’t terribly smart about engines, but even if he proved unable to fix it we were not to worry, because the machine wasn’t really essential. Although the snow was deep, with drifts in the yard well over three feet high, Orris was a stout fellow and had insisted he could wade through the snow clear to the bridge and across it. On its other side, of course, was the Jeep, and the Jeep, we could rest assured, was fully reliable.

When he went off to reassure another table, I said to Carolyn, “I bet the truck won’t be there, either.”

“Did I miss something, Bern? What truck?”

“Oh, it’s an ancient joke,” I said, and told her about the young Marine making his first parachute jump. He’s told how the chute will open automatically, and that there’s an emergency ripcord if it doesn’t, and that when he lands a truck will pick him up to take him back to camp. So he jumps, and the chute doesn’t open, and the ripcord comes off in his hand, and he says to himself, “Hell, I bet the damn truck won’t be there, either.”

She looked at me. “It’s an old joke, huh?”

“The old jokes are the best ones.”

“Not necessarily,” she said.

This time I didn’t hear the scream.

Not the first scream, anyway. I was in a parlor-not the East Parlour, where Lettice and I had misbehaved in front of the stuffed oryx, but in the West Parlour, where I was sitting in a wing chair with my feet up on a needlepoint-covered ottoman, reading The Portable Dorothy Parker. The whole idea of a portable Dorothy Parker intrigued me. You could take her along on trips, and every once in a while her head would pop up out of your Gladstone bag and deliver some smartass remark.

I was reading a short story about a woman who was waiting for a telephone to ring, but I wasn’t getting very far with it because Miss Dinmont kept interrupting me to ask for help with a crossword puzzle. Did I know a six-letter marsupial, the third letter an M? Could I complete the phrase “John Jacob Blank” with a five-letter word ending in R?

Why, I’ve long wondered, would anyone want help on a crossword puzzle? And how does one deal with people who ask for it? If you supply an answer it only encourages them to ask for more, but if you plead ignorance it doesn’t seem to discourage them. In fact they seem to ask everything, even the ones where they know the answer themselves, as if determined to plumb the depths of your stupidity.

What might work is to grab the puzzle out of the puzzler’s hands, fill in all the squares yourself at breakneck speed (right or wrong, who cares?), and hand it back in triumph. I might have tried it that morning-I was testy enough, even with my stomach full of kippers and porridge and toad-in-the-hole (or wind-in-the-willows, or whatever it was), but I just couldn’t be so mean to poor little Miss Dinmont. I was afraid she’d burst into tears. I’d feel terrible, and then Miss Hardesty would come along and beat me to a pulp.

So I was reading, and I’d just been interrupted for perhaps the seventh time, and I’d tried saying, “Hmmm, that’s a tricky one, let me think about that one,” and there was a scream outside, or at least a great cry.

As I said, I didn’t hear it. But Orris was not like Berkeley ’s tree, and even though I didn’t hear him fall, someone else did. Millicent Savage, who was out in front of the house directing her father in the making of a snowman, heard Orris shout. So did her father. “Wait here,” Greg Savage told his daughter, and set off toward the source of the cry, walking literally in Orris’s footsteps through snow that came up higher than his knees.

Millicent, of course, did not heed her father’s command to stay put, but set off in his wake. She found it slow going, however, her precocity being cerebral rather than altitudinal, and before she could reach the bridge, her father had already turned around and was headed back. He scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to Cuttleford House, walking as fast as he could and not bothering to respond to the stream of questions she directed at him.

He reached the door, put her down, threw the door open, and cried out his news to the entire household.

“It’s Orris! He’s fallen! The bridge is down! He had a long fall and he’s not moving! He’s just lying there! I think he’s dead!”

I heard all that. I heard the scream that followed his announcement, too, but how could I help it? They probably heard it loud and clear in Vermont.

If I’d first seen the bridge in daylight, I don’t think I could have crossed it. In the darkness, I’d been able to convince myself that the shallow waters of Cuttlebone Creek were but a few scant yards beneath our feet. In the unlikely event that we fell, at worst we’d get a soaking.

But what I saw, after I’d joined the mad scramble to see what had happened to Orris, was a deep and rocky gorge, its sides near vertical. The suspension bridge dangled like limp spaghetti from its moorings on the far side of the gorge. The connective tissue on our side of the creek had given way before Orris could get himself across. Maybe he cried out the instant of the first snapping of the cable. Maybe he was already falling. He fell clear to the bottom, a drop of at least thirty feet, and when we saw him he lay utterly still on a heap of boulders, his head at an angle that would have been a stretch for Plastic Man.

There was some sentiment for rescuing him. The sides of the gorge were too steep for a safe descent in good weather, and out of the question now, with snow covering everything and making it impossible to see where you could or could not get a decent foothold. According to Nigel, if you followed the creek a mile or so downstream, you’d reach a spot where the stream could be easily crossed, and from that point you could wade upstream until you reached Orris. Of course it would take a long time to walk a mile cross-country through two feet of snow, and it would take at least as long to return along a frozen creek bed, not to mention the risk of putting a foot wrong and spraining an ankle or breaking a leg.

“Leave him,” Dakin Littlefield counseled.

“But he’ll die!” one of the women wailed. (I believe it was Earlene Cobbett. Her cousin Molly had had a busy night, starring in Carolyn’s dream and then screaming when she discovered Jonathan Rathburn’s body. Now it was the heavily freckled Earlene’s turn, and she’d let out a scream of her own at Greg Savage’s report of Orris’s fall; a propensity for full-throated shrieking seemed to run in the Cobbett family.)

“Not likely,” Littlefield said.

“I don’t see how you can say that,” Mrs. Colibri said. “It seems to me that people die of exposure all the time. And they die of shock, too, when they suffer severe trauma and don’t receive medical attention.”

“Happens all the time,” Littlefield agreed. “But only to people who are alive to begin with.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s already as dead as a doornail,” Littlefield said, his words as cruel as the mouth they came out of. “He had a long drop and a hard landing. He probably dashed out what brains he had on that rock, and if that didn’t kill him the broken neck did. See how he’s lying?”

“It’s an awkward lie,” Colonel Blount-Buller allowed.

“It’s not a hard position to get into,” Littlefield said, “as long as you’re a chicken and somebody’s already wrung your neck for you. Face it, the man’s toast. His future is all in the past. Anybody else goes after him, he’s odds-on to take the same kind of spill this guy took and wind up in the same kind of shape. We already have two men dead, which is on the high side for a quiet weekend in the country. Somebody else wants to round out the hat trick, be my guest, but I think you’re out of your mind.”

“But what are we to do?” Nigel Eglantine asked. “We can’t just leave him there, can we?”

“Why not? He’s not going anywhere.”

Somebody said something about predatory scavengers, and a few heads looked heavenward, as if to spot a vulture circling patiently overhead. There was nothing up there but the sky.

“He’s reasonably safe in this weather,” Dakin Littlefield said. “And the longer he lies there the safer he gets, because once he freezes solid he can quit worrying that something’s going to start gnawing on him. Not that he’s doing any worrying of his own as it is.”

A sob, wrenching enough to melt a heart of stone, tore from the throat of Earlene Cobbett.

It had no discernible effect on Lettice’s new husband. “Say a couple of us managed to get to him,” he went on mercilessly, “which’d be a neat trick, and say we got the body up, which’d be a neater one. Then what?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We’d just have to leave him outside,” he said. “On the back porch, stacked like cordwood and with a rug tossed over him. We may be a few days waiting for the rest of the world to reach us, and he’ll keep a lot better outside in the cold than inside where it’s warm.” His nose wrinkled at the notion. “Where would we put him, anyway? The library’s already out of bounds because there’s a dead body in it. If that genius over there”-a wave in my direction-“hadn’t managed to sell everybody on the idea that Rathburn was murdered, we could have moved him outside before he started to get ripe.”

“I say,” the colonel reminded him. “There are ladies present, Littlefield.”

“Did I curse without knowing it, Colonel? When did ‘ripe’ get to be a swear word?”

Blount-Buller cleared his throat. “All a bit indelicate, wouldn’t you say?”

The debate went on, but I’d lost interest in it. I didn’t much want to walk over to the gully’s rim, but I forced myself, and had a look at the rope cables that had given way, sending poor Orris to his death.

I remembered the words of the clown who’d driven us from the station at Pattaskinnick. Good strong rope, he’d called it, and then he’d gone on to describe how rain could soak into the rope, and how it would swell when it froze, severing fibers, and go on thawing and freezing until it had sustained enough invisible damage that it would, as he’d put it, snap like a twig.

I looked closely at the good strong rope and saw where it had snapped like a twig. And then I turned my head quickly, to make sure nobody was standing too close to me. I was, after all, right at the edge of the gorge, and a quick shove would send me plummeting to a fate worse than Orris’s.

And someone might be inclined to supply that little push.

No one was standing dangerously near me, but I drew back from the brink all the same. Greg Savage was saying something, but I wasn’t paying attention to the words, just waiting for a pause. When one came along I grabbed my chance.

“The body has to stay where it is,” I said. “That’s the way the police will want it.”

Someone wanted to know what the police had to do with it. “You don’t need the police when someone dies accidentally,” I was told. “Not when it’s an obvious accident, not out here in the country. All you need is for a doctor to sign a death certificate.”

I hadn’t known that, and still wasn’t sure it was true. But it didn’t matter.

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “There were two ropes securing the bridge on this side of the creek, one on the left and one on the right. These were stout ropes, fully half an inch thick. There’s no reason why they would have snapped.”

“They weren’t steel cables,” Miss Hardesty said. “Rope is rope. It’s strong, but it doesn’t last forever.”

I started to say something, but there was a gasp from Lettice. “My God,” she said, and clutched her husband’s arm. “We were the last people on that bridge!”

“We were the last to cross it,” he corrected her. “The guy down there was the last person on it.”

“Dakin, we could have been killed!”

“We could have been struck by lightning,” he said, “or swept away in a flash flood. But we weren’t. And we weren’t on the bridge when the ropes broke, either, which was lucky for us and not too lucky for that poor slob who was.”

Calling Orris a slob, while perhaps unimpeachable on grounds of fact, seemed to me a clear case of speaking ill of the dead. But I let it go, figuring the lousy maid service the Littlefields could now expect to receive from the scowling Earlene Cobbett was answer enough.

“One rope might break,” I said. “But not two, not both at once.”

“I wonder,” the colonel said. “If one rope was frayed or weakened by the elements, wouldn’t its fellow be similarly stressed?”

“To a degree,” I admitted. “But not to the point where they’d both go at the same instant.”

“I see your point, Rhodenbarr. But say one rope gives way. Wouldn’t that place additional stress on the other? And wouldn’t that be enough to finish off an already weakened rope?”

“There’d be a delay,” I said. “One rope would give way, and there’d be a few seconds while the fibers parted on the other one. Probably enough time for anyone on the bridge to get the hell off it.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “if he had his wits about him. Orris was by no means an imbecile, but none would call him quick-witted. He was unquestionably slow.”

“And he crossed the bridge every day,” Nigel Eglantine put in. “He wouldn’t have been thinking about it while he crossed it, as those of us who are nervous on bridges might. His mind would have been occupied with thoughts of what he was going to do next-starting up the Jeep, plowing the drive.”

“There you are,” the colonel said. “He’d scarcely have noticed when the first rope failed. He’d have registered the sound, and by the time he’d identified it, well…”

“Bob’s your uncle,” Carolyn said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just an expression,” I said. “It seems to me it would take a lot longer than that for the second rope to give way, but it’s not a hypothesis we can test, so let’s let it go.”

“Then there’s no reason to assume it was anything other than an accident,” Dakin Littlefield said.

“But there is,” I said.

“Oh?”

“The rope ends,” I said. “The fibers don’t look frayed to me. I’d say somebody cut them most of the way through. When Orris walked onto the bridge, it was literally hanging by a thread. Well, two threads, one on each side. And they did give way at once, and before he’d taken more than a step or two.”

Someone asked how I knew that.

“Look at the bridge,” I said, and pointed across the gorge, where the thing hung down from its two remaining ropes. “It was covered with snow,” I said, “like everything else in the county, and most of the snow’s spilled into the gorge now. But you can see footprints at one end, where Orris’s weight compacted the snow underfoot. He only got a chance to make two footprints.”

This brought fresh sobs from Earlene Cobbett, whose freckled face was now awash with tears.

“I’m not a forensics expert,” I said, with just the faintest sense of déjà vu. “The police will have someone who can examine those rope ends and determine for certain whether or not they were cut. But it certainly looks to me as though they were, and that just strengthens the argument for leaving Orris’s body where it is. I suppose someone could go down there to inspect him, just to make sure that he’s dead, but I don’t really think there’s much question of that, not with his head at that angle.”

“I say,” the colonel said. “Whole thing’s a bit rum, eh? Someone right here at Cuttleford House set a trap for this man and murdered him.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Not exactly? But you just said-”

“Let’s get back to the house,” I said, “before we freeze to death, or somebody puts a foot wrong and winds up in the ditch with Orris. And then I’ll explain.”