Calamity Town

she did. She had those three puzzling letters that were puzzling no longer. She had Jim’s own conduct to help her create the illusion of his guilt. And she found in herself a great strength and a great cunning; a talent, almost a genius, for deceiving the world as to her true emotions.”

Pat closed her eyes, and Carter kissed her hand.

“Knowing that we knew about the letters?you and I, Pat?Nora deliberately carried out the pattern of the three letters. She deliberately swallowed a small dose of arsenic on Thanksgiving Day so that it would seem to us Jim was following his schedule. And recall what she did immediately after showing symptoms of arsenic poisoning at the dinner table? She ran upstairs and gulped great quantities of milk of magnesia which, as I told you later that night in my room, Pat, is an emergency antidote for arsenic poisoning. Not a well-known fact, Patty. Nora had looked it up. That doesn’t prove she poisoned herself, but it’s significant when you tack it onto the other things she did.

“Patty, must I go on? Let Carter take you home?”

“I want the whole thing,” said Pat. ”This moment, Ellery. Finish.”

“That’s my baby,” said Carter Bradford huskily.

“I said ‘the other things she did,’ “ said Ellery in a low tone. ”Recall them! If Nora was as concerned over Jim’s safety as she pretended, would she have left those three incriminating letters to be found in her hatbox? Wouldn’t any wife who felt as she claimed to feel about Jim have burned those letters instantly? But no?Nora saved them . . . Of course. She knew they would turn out to be the most damning evidence against Jim when he was arrested, and she made sure they survived to be used against him. As a matter of cold fact, how did Dakin eventually find them?”

“Nora . . . Nora called our attention to them,” said Cart feebly. ”When she had hysterics and mentioned the letters, which we didn’t even know about?”

“Mentioned?” cried Ellery. ”Hysterics? My dear Bradford, that was the most superb kind of acting! She pretended to be hysterical; she pretended that I had already told you about the letters! In saying so, she established the existence of the letters for your benefit. A terrible point, that one. But until I knew that Nora was the culprit, it had no meaning for me.” He stopped and fumbled for a cigarette.

“What else, Ellery?” demanded Pat in a shaky voice.

“Just one thing. Pat, you’re sure?You look ill.”

“What else?”

“Jim. He was the only one who knew the truth, although Roberta Roberts may have guessed it. Jim knew he hadn’t poisoned the cocktail, so he must have known only Nora could have.

“Yet Jim kept quiet. Do you see why I said before that Jim had a more sublime reason for martyrizing himself? It was his penance, his self-imposed punishment. For Jim felt himself to have been completely responsible for the tragedy in Nora’s life?indeed, for driving Nora into murder. So he was willing to take his licking silently and without complaint, as if that would right the wrong! But agonized minds think badly. Only . . . Jim couldn’t look at her. Remember in the courtroom? Not once. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t look at her. He wouldn’t see her, or talk to her, before, during, or after. That would have been too much. For after all, she had?” Ellery rose. ”I believe that’s all I’m going to say.”

Pat sank back on the couch to rest her head against the wall.

Cart winced at the expression on her face. So he said, as if somehow it softened the blow and alleviated the pain: “But Queen, isn’t it possible that Nora and Jim together,as accomplices??”

Ellery said rapidly: “If they’d been accomplices, working together to rid themselves of Rosemary, would they have deliberately planned the crime in such a way that Jim, one of the accomplices, would turn out to be the only possible criminal? No. Had they combined to destroy a common enemy, they would have planned it so that neither of them would be involved.”

And then there was another period of quiet, behind which tumbled the waters of Mr. Anderson’s voice in the taproom. His words all ran together, like rivulets joining a stream. It was pleasant against the malty odor of beer.

And Pat turned to look at Cart; and, oddly, she was smiling. But it was the wispiest, lightest ghost of a smile.

“No,” said Cart. ”Don’t say it. I won’t hear it.”

“But Cart, you don’t know what I was going to say?”

“I do! And it’s a damned insult!”

“Here?” began Mr. Queen.

“If you think,” snarled Cart, “that I’m the kind of heel who would drag a story like this out for the edification of the Emmy DuPres of Wrightsville, merely to satisfy my sense of ‘duty,’ then you’re not the kind of woman I want to marry, Pat!”

“I couldn’t marry you, Cart,” said Pat in a stifled voice. ”Not with Nora?not with my own sister?a . . . a . . . ”

“She wasn’t responsible! She was sick! Look here, Queen, drive some sense into?Pat, if you’re going to take that stupid attitude, I’m through?I’ll be damned if I’m not!” Cart pulled her off the sofa and held her to him tightly. ”Oh, darling, it isn’t Nora, it isn’t Jim, it isn’t your father or mother or Lola or even you I’m really thinking of . . . Don’t think I haven’t visited the hospital. I?I have. I saw her just after they took her out of the incubator. She glubbed at me, and then she started to bawl, and?Damn it, Pat, we’re going to be married as soon as it’s decent, and we’re going to carry this damn secret to the grave with us, and we’re going to adopt little Nora and make the whole damn thing sound like some impossible business out of a damn book?that’s what we’re going to do! Understand?”

“Yes, Cart,” whispered Pat. And she closed her eyes and laid her cheek against his shoulder.

When Mr. Ellery Queen strolled out of the back room, he was smiling, although a little sadly.

He slapped a ten-dollar bill down on the bar before Gus Olesen and said: “See what the folks in the back room will have, and don’t neglect Mr. Anderson. Also, keep the change. Goodbye, Gus. I’ve got to catch the train for New York.”

Gus stared at the bill. ”I ain’t dreaming, am I? You ain’t Santa Claus?”

“Not exactly, although I just presented two people with the gift of several pounds of baby, complete down to the last pearly toenail.”

“What is this?” demanded Gus. ”Some kind of celebration?”

Mr. Queen winked at Mr. Anderson, who gawped back. ”Of course! Hadn’t you heard, Gus? Today is Mother’s Day!”

The End