confectioner’s sugar was in a square brown box with a torn corner. Patton had made an attempt to clean up what was spilled. Near the sugar were salt, borax, baking soda, cornstarch, brown sugar and so on. Something might be hidden in any of them. Something that had been clipped from a chain anklet whose cut ends did not fit together.
I shut my eyes and poked a finger out at random and it came to rest on the baking soda. I got a newspaper from the back of the wood-box and spread it out and dumped the soda out of the box. I stirred it around with a spoon. There seemed to be an indecent lot of baking soda, but that was all there was. I funneled it back into the box and tried the borax. Nothing but borax. Third time lucky. I tried the cornstarch. It made too much fine dust, and there was nothing but cornstarch.
The sound of distant steps froze me to the ankles. I reached up and yanked the light out and dodged back into the living room and reached for the lamp switch. Much too late to be of any use, of course. The steps sounded again, soft and cautious. The hackles rose on my neck.
I waited in the dark, with the flash in my left hand. A deadly long two minutes crept by. I spent some of the time breathing, but not all.
It wouldn’t be Patton. He would walk up to the door and open it and tell me off. The careful quiet steps seemed to move this way and that, a movement, a long pause, another movement, another long pause. I sneaked across to the door and twisted the knob silently. I yanked the door wide and stabbed out with the flash.
It made golden lamps of a pair of eyes. There was a leaping movement and a quick thudding of hoofs back among the trees. It was only an inquisitive deer.
I closed the door again and followed my flashlight beam back into the kitchen. The small round glow rested squarely on the box of confectioner’s sugar.
I put the light on again, lifted the box down and emptied it on the newspaper.
Patton hadn’t gone deep enough. Having found one thing by accident he had assumed that was all there was. He hadn’t seemed to notice that there ought to be something else.
Another twist of white tissue showed in the fine white powdered sugar. I shook it clean and unwound it. It contained a tiny gold heart, no larger than a woman’s little fingernail.
I spooned the sugar back into the box and put the box back on the shelf and crumpled the piece of newspaper into the stove. I went back to the living room and turned the table lamp on. Under the brighter light the tiny engraving on the back of the little gold heart could just be read without a magnifying glass.
It was in script. It read:
Al to Mildred. Al somebody to Mildred Haviland. Mildred Haviland was Muriel Chess. Muriel Chess was dead— two weeks after a cop named De Soto had been looking for her.
I stood there, holding it, wondering what it had to do with me. Wondering, and not having the faintest glimmer of an idea. I wrapped it up again and left the cabin and drove back to the village.
Patton was in his office telephoning when I got around there. The door was locked. I had to wait while he talked. After a while he hung up and came to unlock the door.
I walked in past him and put the twist of tissue paper on his counter and opened it up.
“You didn’t go deep enough into the powdered sugar,” I said.
He looked at the little gold heart, looked at me, went around behind the counter and got a cheap magnifying glass off his desk. He studied the back of the heart. He put the glass down and frowned at me.
“Might have known if you wanted to search that cabin, you was going to do it,” he said gruffly. “I ain’t going to have trouble with you, am I, son?”
“You ought to have noticed that the cut ends of the chain didn’t fit,” I told him.
He looked at me sadly. “Son, I don’t have your eyes.” He pushed the little heart around with his square blunt finger. He stared at me and said nothing.
I said: “If you were thinking that anklet meant something Bill could have been jealous about, so was I— provided he ever saw it. But strictly on the cuff I’m willing to bet he never did see it and that he never heard of Mildred Haviland.”
Patton said slowly: “Looks like maybe I owe this De Soto party an apology, don’t it?”
“If you ever see him,” I said.
He gave me another long empty stare and I gave it right back to him. “Don’t tell me, son,” he said. “Let me guess all for myself that you got a brand new idea about it.”
“Yeah. Bill didn’t murder his wife.”
“No?”
“No. She was murdered by somebody out of her past. Somebody who had lost track of her and then found it again and found her married to another man and didn’t like it. Somebody who knew the country up here—as hundreds of people do who don’t live here—and knew a good place to hide the car and the clothes. Somebody who hated and could dissimulate. Who persuaded her to go away with him and when everything was ready and the note was written, took her around the throat and gave her what he thought was coming to her and put her in the lake and went his way. Like it?”
“Well,” he said judiciously, “it does make things kind of complicated, don’t you think? But there ain’t anything impossible about it. Not one bit impossible.”
“When you get tired of it, let me know. Ill have something else,” I said.
“I’ll just be doggone sure you will,” he said, and for the first time since I had met him he laughed.
I said goodnight again and went out, leaving him there moving his mind around with the ponderous energy of a homesteader digging up a stump.
