“Oh,” Wishy said, turning pale.
“Would you like to search the other outbuildings, while Max helps me there? Or report your findings to the sheriff?”
“I’ll search the other buildings, if that’s quite all right.”
“Most helpful,” Slye said.
“Good, then.”
We walked together toward the outbuildings. Hanslow studiously avoided looking at the horse barn. Before we had drawn very close to it, he said, “I’ll meet you back at the house, then. But if you should need me—you know I’ll come, Bunny.”
Slye put a hand on his shoulder. “Never a doubt of it, Wishy.”
Hanslow looked at me, for what was probably the longest period of time he had ever gazed directly at my face, then said to Slye, “You can tell him about her if you’d like. Understanding sort of fellow, Max.”
“Yes, he is. Thank you, Wishy. See you in a bit.”
“Oh—ah, Bunny, what am I looking for?”
“You might come across a gun, muddy clothing, or some other important clue.”
“Right!” He marched off with renewed purpose.
Slye said nothing more until Wishy was out of earshot, then smiled at me. “You’ve had an honor bestowed on you, Max.”
“So I gather,” I said, watching his friend head for the building farthest away from the horse barn.
“When I left for the war, Wishy was the best horseman in the county. Raised and trained thoroughbreds, won races. He was too big to be a jockey, of course, but he loved few things on earth more than to take a fast horse for a gallop in a meadow.
“Unlike the colonel’s family, the Hanslows are close-knit, and Aloysius was an especially devoted brother. Adored his little sister. Gwendolyn. Five years his junior and bidding fair to become a beauty. Gwen was easy to adore. She was vivacious, smart, and if, like her brother, she was a chatterbox whose enthusiasm sometimes outpaced good sense, she was also, like her brother, generous and sweet-natured. She worshipped him.”
He fell silent, his face set in lines of grief. He didn’t speak again until we were nearly to the stable doors.
“Wishy saw it happen. One moment he was enjoying a pleasant spring afternoon, turning back toward the stable, when Gwen came racing toward him on a horse. She gave a great whoop, called out, ‘Look at me, big brother!’ and fell—for reasons no one has been able to explain to Wishy’s satisfaction—breaking her neck. She was dead before he reached her.
“He didn’t blame the horse, and even refused his father’s demand that the animal be put down. But he sold all his horses, and razed his stables. A few months later, he became an automobile enthusiast.
“He experienced one other change. Wishy’s mother told me that her son has been dressing like Sherlock Holmes—or his notion of Holmes—since shortly after his sister died. Her theory is that the idea of being like Holmes, able to solve mysteries, to explain the inexplicable, to see the small clue that has gone overlooked, makes Wishy more comfortable in a world that has battered him with its random misfortunes and senseless sorrows.”
“You know, Slye,” I said after a moment, “where we were, one couldn’t help but think of the lost dreams and desires of fallen comrades, the theft from the world of their potential. But I think we sometimes forgot that even before the influenza pandemic, here at home there were losses that were no less bitter for being faced one by one.”
“No.” He sighed. “But we must go forward, even with these hitches in our gaits. Let’s see what we can do for the colonel.”
He pulled the stable doors open. There was straw strewn about in the center aisle, in a building that had not housed horses for five years.
“From Carlton’s night of sleeping off a binge?”
“No, someone trying to cover up parallel tracks of mud, unless I miss my guess,” Slye said.
The car was in the fourth stall down, the one nearest the ladder into the hayloft. I thought we might need Hanslow to verify that it was the colonel’s Model T—and I supposed we’d have to take it out of the stables to do that—but there was no doubt in either of our minds that we had found the missing automobile. Slye bent to examine something on the floor of the stall, while I moved closer to the car.
“Slye, there are bloodstains on the backseat!”
He didn’t answer, and when I looked back at him he was standing stock-still, his face drained of all color, a look of abject terror on his face.
I damned myself three times over for not thinking of the effect—the cumulative effect!—this day’s events might have on his mind.
“Boniface Slye,” I said, quietly but firmly. “You are here with me.”
He blinked, swallowed hard, reached a trembling hand up to his head, then held it up to me, palm out. There was blood on his fingers. “Slye!” I cried. “But how …”
He looked up, and as he did, a drop of blood fell on his face. He looked back at me, and said in a faint voice, “Is it real, Max? Or am I imagining that it is raining blood again?”
“It’s real, only—not what you’re thinking, Slye! The hayloft!”
He seemed to come back to himself then, and we raced up the ladder. We found the colonel—alive, awake, and mad as fire, but in a seriously weakened condition. “Do what you can for him,” Slye said as I worked to remove the gag from the colonel’s mouth. “I’ll fetch your medical bag from the car.”
“Robert!” the colonel croaked. “Help him.”
“He’s being cared for, sir,” I said, taking his blindfold off and looking at his head wound. To my relief, it appeared that it had clotted, then reopened—perhaps as he stirred awake. Still, the bloodstain on the floor of the hayloft was large enough to be worrisome.
“Untie me so that I can kill that damned bitch and her brother!”
“I’ll untie you, but you must try to lie quietly. Sheriff Anderson is here, and he hasn’t let your niece and nephew move an inch since he arrived.”
“Ah. Good man, Anderson.” He studied me a moment and said, “What the hell happened to your face?”
“Ruined by the same thing that ruined your manners.”
He gave a crack of laughter, and was still overcome by mirth when Slye brought my kit up a few minutes later. Slye raised his brows.
“Hysteria,” I said.
“A lot of that going around,” he said, which set the colonel off again.
Eventually we had him cleaned up, stitched up, and comfortably ensconced in his bed. He had refused to go to the hospital, even when I tempted him with the idea of being closer to his son. “I’m not going to be able to do a damn thing for him there today, while I can still help Anderson here. If I go to that blasted hospital, they’ll drug me sure as hell, and you know it.”
Sheriff Anderson got a statement from him, and told us that Carlton had been located.
“It was a plan that might have worked,” Slye said to the group assembled in the parlor. Sheriff Anderson, Carlton Wedge, the Simmses (now each handcuffed and under the eye of a burly deputy), Wishy, and I had been joined by the colonel, as tough an old bird as I ever care to meet. “You owe your life to your housekeeper and a grocery boy, Colonel Harris.”
“We were never going to kill our uncle!” Anthony protested, even as his sister told him to shut up.
“I may not have every detail just right, but I believe I can come close enough,” Slye said. “Last night, Anthony met Carlton and easily tempted Carlton to drive him to an abandoned barn where Anthony had hidden a few bottles of gin. Carlton, unaware that the drinks poured into his tumbler were spiked, woke up many hours later, wondering who had tied him up, and with no clear recollection of the previous evening’s events. He was able to free himself, and was found by the sheriff’s deputies as he wandered down the road to the village, thinking he must have left his car there.
“Carlton will be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that dear old cousin Anthony was setting him up to be falsely accused of murder.
“The Simmses planned to lure Robert Harris and Colonel Harris to a small lane on a seldom-traveled road. They knew the regular schedule of the household from previous recent visits. Rawls, the housekeeper, the cook—all
