On that she walked off to the stable, her straight back full of distaste, her dignity enhanced, if anything, by the flapping robe and trailing handle of the net. Her voice came back to them soothingly—“There, Long John. There, boy,” —and Sarah’s sense of reality slipped another notch. There was still a lot left of the night, and because a pheasant could not give evidence to the police they would all go back to bed, presently, and wait for the darkness to blow itself away just as though the same roof did not harbor this owlish, head-tipping, murderous man. In spite of everything that had been said and done in the cold echoing barn, the hand-hewn timbers would merely swallow another secret, because there wasn’t a shred of proof. All Milo had to do was deny everything.
But of course they wouldn’t go to bed, and it would not be quite that simple for Milo. They would get dressed and look for and find the diary, and it would carry Milo’s fingerprints. In the morning Sarah would call Lieutenant—Welk, was it? It seemed so long ago—and Dr. Vollmer, and when Vollmer had identified Milo as the man who had come to him under the name of Charles Trafton, what had been suicide would be re-investigated as murder. And when you held two ends of a string, you could work away little by little at the knots in between.
Milo turned abruptly toward the passage door. Although he was shivering from the contact of cold air on sweat, he said with a faint and dreadful jauntiness, “Well, I’m not crazy, and I’m going to bed. Evelyn?”
They had all forgotten Evelyn, still crouched in the corner where she had fled at the sight of the Silver cock. She came forward now with a look of docile obedience, and when she was two feet away from Milo she said with total detachment, “I know why he killed her.”
And this was what Evelyn had waited for, this was the diamond-sharpness that had peeped out now and then from behind the bumbling and fumbling and inanity. She had borne Milo’s mechanical taunts almost with pleasure, adding them to the limitless price he would pay when he was caught and punished, and it was somehow typical of her that she would do nothing herself but wait for it to come through an outside agency, with a kind of terrible patience.
Milo’s incredulity touched his face like a spasm and was gone. Evelyn said calmly, “She found that letter of yours, about buying that strip of land when you’d always told Bess the owner refused to sell, and she got curious about where you were getting the money from. She found that out, too, and she told you she’d tell Bess you’d been doctoring tax returns and stealing from the farm for years if you didn’t leave her alone. But you didn’t kill her for that; you killed her for laughing at you when you thought you could have a cozy little affair with her. I heard her. She said if you’d only feather out a little m-more,” Evelyn’s voice stumbled at last, tears began to slip from the edges of her eyelids in a mixture of hysteria and hatred and some old remnant of love, “you’d remind her of a g-great spectacled sapsucker.”
No one smiled, no one stirred.
“And you said,” went on the trembling voice, “Funny, aren’t you? Better watch out you don’t kill yourself laughing.’ Sarah, somebody, get me out of here . . .”
The diary wasn’t hard to find, once the stable itself had been eliminated. In order to have reappeared as quickly as he had, Milo could only have slipped out the stable door into the corral, rounded the barn, streaked across the lawn and entered the house by the front door. Surprised at the foot of the stairs by Bess, he had told her that he too had been roused by the barking of the mink farm Dobermans, always a signal of alarm in the country. And there were barberry bushes in the angle between stable and barn, and a thick clump of rhododendrons at the corral entrance. . . .
It was a dreadful, flashlight-prowling night that Sarah would remember as long as she lived, although in her exhaustion it went by her in splashes, like street-lamps on an immensely long black journey.
She sat with Evelyn who talked incessantly in spite of the sedative Bess had given her. Evelyn had kept a mental record of every damning scrap of information that could be used against Milo, shoring up conjecture with her own shrewd analysis of Milo’s reactions as well as with the answers she got from Sarah and the others. The police would find witnesses, break alibis, trap Milo in a web of circumstantial evidence, but their indictment would not be more complete.
Evelyn went back to the day of Nina’s death when she had watched Milo follow Charles from the game-bird show. It would have been easy for Milo to wait unobserved until Charles had left the farmhouse, to take advantage of Miss Braceway’s drugged sleep to push Nina’s head down in the wash-basin, holding it there while she died. Hiding Nina’s diary in the pheasant pen, Milo had slipped back into the crowd at the game show. He was, said Evelyn grimly, as shocked and incredulous as everyone else when Nina’s death was discovered on their return home. He must have congratulated himself on a perfect murder until Miss
