those other men to see me, for which I have been thankful. But if Mr. Goodwin is to ask me questions he must have the answers. You remember what your father used to say? Never lay an ambush for truth.'
Miss Barstow was at me. 'Mr. Goodwin! Please!'
'Nonsense.' The gray eyes were flashing. 'I have my own security, daughter, as good as any you might provide for me. Mr. Goodwin, I have answered your first question. The second?'
'Don’t rush me, Mrs. Barstow.' I saw that if I just pretended Sarah Barstow wasn’t there, Old Gray Eyes would be right with me. 'I’m not done with the first one. There may have been others, maybe you weren’t the only one.'
'Others who might have wanted to kill my husband?' For the first time the will relaxed enough to let the twitch of a smile show on the lips. 'No. That is impossible. My husband was a good, just, merciful and well- loved man. I see what you would have me do, Mr. Goodwin: look back over all the years, the happy ones and the miserable ones, and pick out of memory for you a remorseless wrong or a sinister threat. I assure you it isn’t there. There is no man living my husband wronged, and none his enemy. Nor woman either. He did not wrong me. My answer to your question was direct and honest and was a relief to me, but since you are so young, not much more than a boy, it probably shocked you as it did my daughter. I would explain the answer if I could. I do not wish to mislead you. I do not wish to give pain to my daughter. When God compelled me to resign my authority He did not stop there. If by any chance you understand Him, you understand my answer too.'
'All right, Mrs. Barstow. Then the second question: why did you offer a reward?'
'No!' Sarah Barstow stood between us. 'No! No more of this-'
'Sarah!' The voice was sharp; then it softened a little: 'Sarah dear. I will answer. This is my share. Will you stand between us? Sarah!'
Sarah Barstow went to her mother’s side, placed her arm across her mother’s shoulders, and lowered her forehead onto the gray hair.
The will re-created the composure. 'Yes, Mr. Goodwin, the reward. I am not insane, I am only fantastic. I now greatly regret that the reward was offered, for I see its sordidness. It was in a fantastic moment that I conceived the idea of a unique vengeance. No one could have murdered my husband since no one could have wanted to. I am certain that his death has never seemed desirable to any person except myself, and to me only during torments which God should never impose even on the guiltiest. It came to me that there might be somewhere a man clever enough to bring God Himself to justice. I doubt if it is you, Mr. Goodwin; I do not know your employer. I now regret that I offered the reward, but if it is earned it will be paid.'
'Thank you, Mrs. Barstow. Who is Than?'
'Sir?'
'Than. You said that Than told you God forced you to resign your authority.'
'Oh. Of course. Dr. Nathaniel Bradford.'
'Thank you.' I closed my notebook and got up. 'Mr. Wolfe asked me to thank you for your forbearance; I guess he knew there would be some if I got started filling up my notebook.'
'Tell Mr. Wolfe he is welcome.'
I turned and went on out, figuring that Miss Barstow could use my room for a while.
CHAPTER 9
Miss Barstow invited me to lunch.
I liked her better than ever. For ten minutes or more I waited for her in the hall which connected the sun-room with other apartments. When she joined me there she wasn’t sore, and I could see why: I hadn’t pulled Mrs. Barstow’s leg for any of that stuff, she had just handed it to me on a platter, and that wasn’t my fault. But how many people in Sarah Barstow’s place would have stopped to consider that? Not one in a thousand. They would have been sore anyhow, even if they had realized I didn’t deserve it and tried not to show it; but she just wasn’t sore. She had made a bargain and she was going through with it, no matter how many sleepless nights it brought her and no matter how many kinds of bad luck she had. She certainly had just had some. I could see that ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later Mrs. Barstow might have had different ideas in her head and all I would have got out of it would have been to exchange the time of day with a polite calm. I had no idea what it was that had happened to make her feel like opening up, but if it was my blue shirt and tan tie I hadn’t wasted the money I had spent on them.
As Paul Panzer would have said, lovin’ babe!
She invited me to lunch. She said her brother would be present, and since I would want to see him anyway that would be convenient. I thanked her. I said, 'You’re a good sport, Miss Barstow. A real one. Thank the Lord, Nero Wolfe is the cleverest man on earth and thought up that agreement with you, because if you’re in for trouble that’s the only thing that will help you out of it.'
'If I’m in trouble,' she said.
I nodded. 'Sure, I know you’ve got plenty, but the one that bothers you most is your fear that there’s worse ahead. I just wanted to say that you’re a good sport.'
As it turned out, I not only met her brother at lunch, I met Manuel Kimball too. I was glad of that, for it seemed to me that what I had learned that morning made the members of that foursome more important than they had been before.
The preceding afternoon after about two hours of telephoning, I had finally found a hook-up with the professional of the Green Meadow Club and he had accepted Wolfe’s invitation to dinner. He had never had any dealings with Barstow, had only known him by sight, but Wolfe had got out of him twenty bushels of facts regarding the general set-up at the club and around the links. By the time the professional left to go home around midnight he had a bottle of Wolfe’s best port inside of him, and Wolfe knew as much about a golf club as if he had been a professional himself. Among other things he learned that the members kept their bags in their lockers, that some of them left their lockers unlocked, and that even with the locked ones an ingenious and determined man could have got a duplicate without any great difficulty. With such a key, of course, it would have been simple to await a propitious moment to open the locker, take the driver from the bag and substitute another one. So Barstow’s companions in the foursome that Sunday were of no more importance than any of the members or
