The Lady in the Lake

Suddenly very clear, Kingsley’s voice said: “Look as if he murdered her?”

I said: “Very much. Jim Patton, the constable up here, doesn’t like the note not being dated. It seems she left him once before over some woman. Patton sort of suspects Bill might have saved up an old note. Anyhow they’ve taken Bill down to San Bernardino for questioning and they’ve taken the body down to be post-mortemed.”

“And what do you think?” he asked slowly.

“Well, Bill found the body himself. He didn’t have to take me around by that pier. She might have stayed down in the water very much longer, or forever. The note could be old because Bill had carried it in his wallet and handled it from time to time, brooding over it. It could just as easily be undated this time as another time. I’d say notes like that are undated more often than not. The people who write them are apt to be in a hurry and not concerned with dates.”

“The body must be pretty far gone. What can they find out now?”

“I don’t know how well equipped they are. They can find out if she died by drowning, I guess. And whether there are any marks of violence that wouldn’t be erased by water and decomposition. They could tell if she had been shot or stabbed. If the hyoid bone in the throat was broken, they could assume she was throttled. The main thing for us is that I’ll have to tell why I came up here. I’ll have to testify at an inquest.”

“That’s bad,” Kingsley growled. “Very bad. What do you plan to do now?”

“On my way home I’ll stop at the Prescott Hotel and see if I can pick up anything there. Were your wife and Muriel Chess friendly?”

“I guess so. Crystal’s easy enough to get along with most of the time. I hardly knew Muriel Chess.”

“Did you ever know anybody named Mildred Haviland?”

“What?”

I repeated the name.

“No,” he said. “Is there any reason why I should?”

“Every question I ask you ask another right back,” I said.

“No, there isn’t any reason why you should know Mildred Haviland. Especially if you hardly knew Muriel Chess. I’ll call you in the morning.”

“Do that,” he said, and hesitated. “I’m sorry you had to walk into such a mess,” he added, and then hesitated again and said goodnight and hung up.

The bell rang again immediately and the long distance operator told me sharply I had put in five cents too much money. I said the sort of thing I would be likely to put into an opening like that. She didn’t like it.

I stepped out of the booth and gathered some air into my lungs. The tame doe with the leather collar was standing in the gap in the fence at the end of the walk. I tried to push her out of the way, but she just leaned against me and wouldn’t push. So I stepped over the fence and went back to the Chrysler and drove back to the village.

There was a hanging light in Patton’s headquarters but the shack was empty and his “Back in Twenty Minutes” sign was still against the inside of the glass part of the door. I kept on going down to the boat landing and beyond to the edge of a deserted swimming beach. A few put-puts and speedboats were still fooling around on the silky water. Across the lake tiny yellow lights began to show in toy cabins perched on miniature slopes. A single bright star glowed low in the northeast above the ridge of the mountains. A robin sat on the spike top of a hundred foot pine and waited for it to be dark enough for him to sing his goodnight song.

In a little while it was dark enough and he sang and went away into the invisible depths of sky. I snapped my cigarette into the motionless water a few feet away and climbed back into the car and started back in the direction of Little Fawn Lake.

11

The gate across the private road was padlocked. I put the Chrysler between two pine trees and climbed the gate and pussyfooted along the side of the road until the glimmer of the little lake bloomed suddenly at my feet. Bill Chess’s cabin was dark. The three cabins on the other side were abrupt shadows against the pale granite outcrop. Water gleamed white where it trickled across the top of the dam, and fell almost soundlessly along the sloping outer face to the brook below. I listened, and heard no other sound at all.

The front door of the Chess cabin was locked. I padded along to the back and found a brute of a padlock hanging at that. I went along the walls feeling window screens. They were all fastened. One window higher up was screenless, a small double cottage window half way down the north wall. This was locked too. I stood still and did some more listening. There was no breeze and the trees were as quiet as their shadows.

I tried a knife blade between the two halves of the small window. No soap. The catch refused to budge. I leaned against the wall and thought and then suddenly I picked up a large stone and smacked it against the place where the two frames met in the middle. The catch pulled out of dry wood with a tearing noise. The window swung back into darkness. I heaved up on the sill and wangled a cramped leg over and edged through the opening. I rolled and let myself down into the room. I turned, grunting a little from the exertion at that altitude, and listened again.

A blazing flash beam hit me square in the eyes.

A very calm voice said: “I’d rest right there, son. You must be all tuckered out.”

The flash pinned me against the wall like a squashed fly. Then a light switch clicked and a table lamp glowed. The flash went out. Jim Patton was sitting in an old brown Morris chair beside the table. A fringed brown scarf hung over the end of the table and touched his thick knee. He wore the same clothes he had worn that afternoon, with the addition of a leather jerkin which must have been new once, say about the time of Grover Cleveland’s first term. His hands were empty except for that flash. His eyes were empty. His jaws moved in gentle rhythm.

“What’s on your mind, son—besides breaking and entering?”

I poked a chair out and straddled it and leaned my arms on the back and looked around the cabin.

“I had an idea,” I said. “It looked pretty good for a while, but I guess I can learn to forget it.”