Calamity Town

were house books, books of Jim’s and Nora’s that had been in the house for some time. It was a natural assumption?I saw no box on the living-room floor, no nails?”

“I’d emptied the box and taken the box, nails, and tools down to the cellar just before you came in,” said Pat. ”I told you that in the hospital that day.”

“Too late,” growled Ellery. ”When I came in, I saw no evidence of such a thing. And I’m not a clairvoyant.”

“But what’s the point?” frowned Carter Bradford.

“One of the books in the wooden box Patty opened that Hallowe’en,” said Ellery, “was Jim’s copy of Edgcomb’s Toxicology.’’’’

Cart’s jaw dropped. ”The marked passage about arsenic!”

“Not only that, but it was from between two pages of that volume that the three letters fell out.”

This time Cart said nothing. And Pat was looking at Ellery with deep quotation marks between her eyebrows.

“Now, since the box had been nailed up in New York and sent to General Delivery, Wrightsville, where it was held, and the toxicology book with the letters in it was found by us directly after the box was unpacked?the letters fell out as Nora dropped an armful of books quite by accident?then the conclusion is absolutely inescapable: Jim could not possibly have written those three letters in Wrightsville. And when I saw that, I saw the whole thing. The letters must have been written by Jim in New York?before he returned to Wrightsville to ask Nora for the second time to marry him, before he knew that Nora would accept him after his desertion of her and his three- year absence!”

“Yes,” mumbled Carter Bradford.

“But don’t you see?” cried Ellery. ”How can we now state with such fatuous certainty that the sickness and death Jim predicted for his ‘wife’ in those three letters referred to Nora? True, Nora was Jim’s wife when the letters were found, but she was NOT his wife, nor could Jim have known she would BE his wife, when he originally wrote them!”

He stopped and, even though it was cool in Gus Olesen’s taproom, he dried his face with a handkerchief and took a long pull at his glass. At the next table, Mr. Anderson snored.

Pat gasped: “But Ellery, if those three letters didn’t refer to Nora, then the whole thing?the whole thing?”

“Let me tell it my way,” said Mr. Queen in a harsh voice. ”Once doubt is raised that the kwife’ mentioned in the three letters was Nora, then two facts that before seemed irrelevant simply shout to be noticed. One is that the letters bore incomplete dates. That is, they marked the month, and the day of the month, but not the year. So the three holidays?Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s?which Jim had written down on the successive letters as marking the dates of his ‘wife’s’ illness, more serious illness, and finally death, might have been the similar dates of one, two, or even three years before! Not 1940 at all, but 1939, or 1938, or 1937 . . .

“And the second fact, of course, was that not once did any of the letters refer to the name Nora; the references were consistently to ‘my wife.’

“If Jim wrote those letters in New York?before his marriage to Nora, before he even knew Nora would marry him?then Jim could not have been writing about Nora’s illness or Nora’s death. And if we can’t believe this?an assumption we all took for granted from the beginning of the case?then the whole structure which postulated Nora as Jim’s intended poison victim collapses.”

“This is incredible,” muttered Carter. ”Incredible.”

“I’m confused,” moaned Patty. ”You mean?”

“I mean,” said Mr. Queen, “that Nora was never threatened, Nora was never in danger . . . Nora was never meant to be murdered.’’’’

Pat shook her head violently and groped for her glass.

“But that opens up a whole new field of speculation!” exclaimed Carter. ”If Nora wasn’t meant to be murdered?ever, at all?”

“What are the facts?” argued Ellery. ”A woman did die on New Year’s Eve: Rosemary Haight. When we thought Nora was the intended victim, we said Rosemary died by accident. But now that we know Nora wasn’t the intended victim, surely it follows that Rosemary did NOT die by accident?that Rosemary was meant to be murdered from the beginning?’’’’

“Rosemary was meant to be murdered from the beginning,” repeated Pat slowly, as if the words were in a language she didn’t understand.

“But Queen?” protested Bradford.

“I know, I know,” sighed Ellery. ”It raises tremendous difficulties and objections. But with Nora eliminated as the intended victim, it’s the only logical explanation for the crime. So we’ve got to accept it as our new premise. Rosemary was meant to be murdered. Immediately I asked myself: Did the three letters have anything to do with Rosemary’s death?

“Superficially, no. The letters referred to the death of Jim’s wife?”

“And Rosemary was Jim’s sister,” said Pat with a frown.

“Yes, and besides Rosemary had shown no signs of the illnesses predicted for Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. Moreover, since the three letters can now be interpreted as two or three years old or more, they no longer appear necessarily criminal. They can merely refer to the natural death of a previous wife of Jim’s?not Nora, but a first wife whom Jim married in New York and who died there some New Year’s Day between the time Jim ran out on Nora and the time he came back to marry Nora.”

“But Jim never said anything about a first wife,” objected Pat.

“That wouldn’t prove he hadn’t had one,” said Cart.

“No,” nodded Ellery. ”So it all might have been perfectly innocent. Except for two highly significant and suspicious factors: first, that the letters were written but never mailed, as if no death had occurred in New York; and second, that a woman did actually die in Wrightsville on New Year’s Day of 1941, as written by Jim in his third and last letter a long time before it happened. Coincidence? My gorge rises at the very notion.

“No, I saw that there must be some connection between Rosemary’s death and the three letters Jim wrote?he did write them, of course; poor Judge Eli Martin’s attempt to cast doubt on their authenticity during the trial was a brave but transparent act of desperation.”

Mr. Anderson woke up, looking annoyed. But Gus Olesen shook his head. Mr. Anderson tottered over to the bar. ” ‘Landlord,’ “ he leered, “ ‘fill the flowing bowl until it does run over!’ “

“We don’t serve in bowls, and besides, Andy, you had enough,” said Gus reprovingly.

Mr. Anderson began to weep, his head on the bar; and after a few sobs, he fell asleep again.

“What connection,” continued Mr. Queen thoughtfully, “is possible between Rosemary Haight’s death and the three letters Jim Haight wrote long, long before? And with this question,” he said, “we come to the heart of the problem. For with Rosemary the intended victim all along, the use of the three letters can be interpreted as a stupendous blind, a clever deception, a psychological smoke screen to conceal the truth from the authorities! Isn’t that what happened? Didn’t you and Dakin, Bradford, instantly dismiss Rosemary’s death as a factor and concentrate on Nora as the intended victim? But that was just what Rosemary’s murderer would want you to do! You ignored the actual victim to look for murder motives against the ostensible victim. And so you built your case around Jim, who was the only person who could possibly have poisoned Nora, and never for an instant sought the real criminal?the person with the motive and opportunity to poison Rosemary.”

Pat was by now so bewildered that she gave herself up wholly to listening. But Carter Bradford was following with a savage intentness, hunched over the table and never taking his eyes from Ellery’s face.

“Go on!” he said. ”Go on, Queen!”

“Let’s go back,” said Mr. Queen, lighting a cigarette. ”We now know Jim’s three letters referred to a hidden, a never-mentioned, a first wife. If this woman died on New Year’s Day two or three years ago, why didn’t Jim mail the letters to his sister? More important than that, why didn’t he disclose the fact to you or Dakin when he was