The next morning I learned that while John Ransom and I had talked about seeing death moving through life, Mr. and Mrs. David Sunchana of North Bayberry Lane, Elm Hill, had nearly died in a fire caused by a gas explosion. I remembered the propane tanks and wondered what had caused the explosion. The thought that I might have caused it sickened me. Maybe the person who had followed me to Elm Hill had wanted to keep Bob Bandolier's old tenants from talking to me so badly that he had tried to kill them.
Ralph and Marjorie had gone back upstairs after their breakfast to pack for the return to Arizona, and John had gone out. Ralph had left the
The Reverend Clement Moore was leading a protest march down Illinois Avenue at three o'clock in the afternoon. The mayor had issued a permit for the march and assigned all off-duty policemen to handle security and crowd control. Illinois Avenue would be closed to traffic from one-thirty until five o'clock.
A two-paragraph story on the fifth page reported that the previously unknown man murdered on Livermore Avenue had been positively identified as Grant Hoffman, 31, a graduate student in religion at Arkham College.
I turned the page and saw a small photograph of what looked like a farmhouse that had been half-destroyed by fire. The left side of the house had sunk into a wasteland of ashes and cinders from which protruded a freestanding porcelain sink surrounded by snapped-off metal pipes. The fire had blackened the remaining facade and left standing the uprights of what must have been a sort of porch. Beside the house stood a windowless little garage or shed.
I did not even recognize it until I saw the name Sunchana in the caption beneath the photograph. My breath stopped in my throat, and I read the article.
An Elm Hill patrolman named Jerome Hodges had been driving down North Bayberry Lane at the time of the explosion and had immediately radioed for a fire truck from the joint Elm Hill-Clark Township station. Patrolman Hodges had broken into the house through a bedroom window and led Mr. Sunchana back out through the window while carrying Mrs. Sunchana in his arms. The fire truck had arrived in time to save some of the house and furniture, and the Sunchanas had been released from Western Hills hospital after examination had proven them unharmed. The explosion was not suspected to have been of suspicious origin.
I carried the newspaper to the counter, looked up the number of the Millhaven police headquarters in the directory, and asked to speak to Detective Fontaine. The police operator said she would put me through to his desk.
I shouldn't have been surprised when he answered, but I was.
After I identified myself, he asked, 'You get anything out of Damrosch's old records?'
'No, not much. I'll get them back to you.' Then something occurred to me. 'Didn't you tell me that someone else had been looking through the Blue Rose file?'
'Well, the little case, whatever, was sitting on top of the files down in the basement.'
'Did you remove anything from the file?'
'The nude pictures of Kim Basinger will cost you extra.'
'It's just that it was obvious that the records had been held together by rubber bands—they were ripped that way—but the rubber bands were gone. So I wondered if whoever looked at the file before me went through it, trying to find something.'
'A forty-year-old rubber band was no longer in evidence. Do you have any other gripping information?'
I told him about going out to Elm Hill to talk to the Sunchanas, and that I had seen someone following me.
'This is the couple who had the fire?'
'Yes, the Sunchanas. When I was on the porch, I turned around and saw someone watching me from a row of trees across the street. He disappeared as soon as I saw him. That doesn't sound like much, but someone has been following me.' I described what had happened the other night.
'You didn't report this incident?'
'He got away so quickly. And John said he might have been just a peeping Tom.'
Fontaine asked me why I had wanted to talk to the Sunchanas in the first place.
'They used to rent the top floor of a duplex owned by a man named Bob Bandolier. I wanted to talk to them about Bandolier.'
'I suppose you had a reason for that?'
'Bandolier was a manager at the St. Alwyn in 1950, and he might remember something helpful.'
'Well, as far as I know, there wasn't anything suspicious about the explosion out there.' He waited a second. 'Mr. Underhill, do you often imagine yourself at the center of a threatening plot?'
'Don't you?' I asked.
Overhead, the Ransoms squabbled as Ralph pulled a wheeled suitcase down the hall. 'Anything else?'
I felt an unreasonable reluctance to share William Writzmann's name with him. 'I guess not.'
'Propane tanks aren't the safest things in the world,' he said. 'Leave the Sunchanas alone from now on, and I'll get back to you if I find out anything you ought to know.'
In a bright pink running suit, Ralph came down with the other, smaller suitcase, and carried it to the door, where he set it beside the wheeled case. He came back toward the kitchen and stood in the door. 'Are you talking to John?'
'Is John back?' Marjorie said. She came down in pink Reeboks and a running suit that matched her husband's. Maybe that was what the Ransoms had been arguing about. They looked like a pair of Easter Bunnies.
'No,' Ralph said. 'No, no, no.'
'As you could probably guess, things are a little crazy down here,' Fontaine was saying. 'Enjoy our beautiful city. Join a protest march.' He hung up.
Marjorie pushed past Ralph and stood scowling at me through her sunglasses. She put her hands on her pink, flaring hips. 'That's not John, is it?' she asked in a loud voice. 'If it is, you might remind him that we have to get to the airport.'
'I told you,' Ralph said. 'He's not talking to John.'
'You told me John wasn't back,' Marjorie said. Her voice was even louder. 'That's what you
Ralph went to the sink for a glass of water, raised the glass, and looked at me with a mixture of bravado and uncertainty. 'She's a little on edge. Getting to the airport, getting on the plane, you know.'
'It wasn't
'I'll drive you,' I said. Both of them began refusing before I had finished making the offer.
Ralph glanced toward the living room and then sat at the other end of the kitchen table from me.
'It's about this driving business—John isn't the kind of person who ought to have his license suspended. I asked him what kind of troubles he had that made him get picked up three times for drunken driving. It does you good to talk about these things, get them out in the open.'
'He's home,' Marjorie announced in a thunderous stage whisper. Ralph and I heard the sound of the front
