And the pickax.
The blood-stained pickax on the floor.
CHAPTER 4
SIMULTANEOUSLY, Leonidas and Cassie and Dow thought of Jock.
This was no sight for thirteen-year-olds.
Jock must not see.
“Turn together,” Leonidas formed the words with his lips. “Then shut the door quickly, Dow, before he can look.”
They turned, and Dow slammed the door.
“Shall I call Dalton One Thousand, Emergency,” Jock said, “or just Uncle Root’s private office number?”
“Oh, Jock, you saw her!” Cassie said.
“Please, Gran, don’t get upset!” Jock was very pale, but his voice was determinedly self-possessed. “I wouldn’t have peeked if I’d known. But I did, and—and that sort of—of thing, well, it doesn’t upset me anywhere near as much as it upsets you. I don’t mean it isn’t awful, but you should have seen father after that toboggan spill. Or mother, when she missed that jump at Placid. They looked loads worse.”
He didn’t quite succeed in reassuring his grandmother, but he reassured himself, which Leonidas decided was more important.
“Why, Gran,” Jock went on, “you even looked worse the time you fell off the porch roof! Bill doesn’t know who she is, Gran. That’s Miss Medora Winthrop.”
“I know,” Leonidas said.
“How? Oh, I mentioned her red wig, didn’t I?” Cassie said. “Bill, this is simply fiendish! No matter what people thought of Medora Winthrop, no one had any right to do that to her! And here, in your garage!”
Dow took her arm.
“Come along upstairs. I’ll call the colonel, and—”
“No, I’d better,” Cassie drew a long breath as she gently propelled Jock toward the stairs. “Because it’s all his fault. I tried to talk him out of that pickax. I said that was going too far.”
“Cassie,” Leonidas said, “do I understand that that pickax belongs to the colonel?”
There was a certain sinister irony, he thought, in murdering a woman with a pickax belonging to the Chief of Police.
“Oh, no,” Cassie said. “No!”
“But you said—”
“The pickax belongs to you,” Cassie informed him. “You see, Rutherford had so many. Seven or eight. He just likes to buy things in hardware stores. All winter long, he’s been buying things for your house. And last night, he picked things over, and brought them here. The snow shovels, and the garden tools, and that infernal pickax!”
Dow opened the kitchen door for her.
“And what Rutherford’s going to say when I tell him she was killed with it,” Cassie said unhappily, “I can’t think! Oh, dear, I can’t phone here, with all this red/ I’ll go in your study. Come along, Jock!”
Leonidas and Dow leaned against one of the red-topped work spaces, and looked at each other.
“I feel,” Dow said, “as if I had been beaten with a rubber hose. There are no marks, but I know something’s happened. Bill, this is pretty damn grim!”
Leonidas twirled his pince-nez, and concurred.
“Rutherford’s ax,” Dow said. “Your garage. My aunt.”
He whistled a few minor notes.
“I’ve had no opportunity,” Leonidas said, “to express—”
Dow cut him short with a wave of his hand.
“You don’t need to say condoling things, Bill. I mean, this is perfectly frightful, and I’m just beginning to catch on to the fact that it’s real, and she is down there, and I didn’t dream it. But—well, you saw Cassie’s reaction. She gasped, and then she thought of Jock, and then she thought of Rutherford and his ax. And if there’d been one single, kindly thing to be said about Aunt Medora, Cassie would have seized that opportunity to say it. You know that.”
Leonidas nodded.
“But she couldn’t,” Dow continued. “There wasn’t anything to say. And in all honesty, my reaction was what a pity it had to happen in your new house. I think I’d feel a lot worse if it was someone else’s aunt. D’you think that’s a terrible thing to say?”
“Some day,” Leonidas said, “I will tell you my random impressions of my maternal grandfather, whom you rightly hung over the fireplace as a museum piece. Of all the grandfathers I have ever met, I can honestly admit he was the least attractive.”
“I didn’t like his mouth,” Dow said. “Well, then you can understand, Bill. That woman’s made my life miserable. She made mother’s miserable. She’s dandled that damn money of hers over my head since I was a baby and when she and I came to the parting of the ways over this house of yours, mother and I agreed that it was like being released from jail. Even while I was her heir, there wasn’t ever a semblance of friendly relationship between us. She—”
He broke off as Cassie and Jock returned to the kitchen.
Cassie walked over to a chromium stool and plumped herself down on it without saying a. single word. Without, in fact, even opening her mouth or making a sound.
Leonidas stopped twirling his pince-nez, and put them on.
He would have considered it less ominous if Cassie had floated across the red and gray kitchen on a broomstick, shrieking shrill curses and snarling sepulchral threats.
When Cassie was silent like that, something catastrophic had taken place.
Leonidas asked her in a calm voice what the matter was.
“I have never,” Cassie said, “been more miserable and dejected. I feel worse about this than I do about Medora Winthrop. This is disastrous!”
“What did Rutherford say?” Dow asked.
“Rutherford isn’t there. He’s gone,” Cassie said. “Into thin air. And there’s just that horrid man Rossi. He’s just been waiting for something like this. He’ll call in reporters—not that they wouldn’t come, anyway. But they won’t get anything but Rossi’s story. Think of the headlines, Bill! Just think of them! Can’t you see those headlines?”
“Frankly,” Leonidas said, “no, Cassie. What headlines?”
” ‘Wealthy Eccentric Murdered with Dalton Police Chief’s Pickax,’ ” Cassie said promptly. “Don’t you see, Rossi won’t call it your pickax. He’ll call it Rutherford’s. Jock, what were the others we thought of?”
“ ‘Dalton Pickax Murder,’ ” Jock said. “ ‘Foul Play Suspected. Dalton Police Chief Admits Buying Pick-axes. Insert: Dalton Police Chief Whose Pickax Was Murder Weapon. Colonel Rutherford Carpenter Denies Aide’s Accusation.’ See, Bill? That’s what Gran
