After Peck’s release as a suspect for the nurse’s murder, Milo realized Charles would have to be silenced, too. He may have overheard Charles talking about his guilt to Harry. It was just as likely that Milo’s instinct for self-preservation helped him to make a correct diagnosis of Charles’s moodiness. He knew too much about Charles’s involvement in Nina’s death to accept Kate’s theory that Charles was brooding over his recklessly unsuitable marriage. It was easy for Milo to arrange to run into Charles in New York, to maneuver the conversation so that Charles, who was close to the breaking point, would admit his decision to reveal his part in Nina’s death in the hope that her murderer would be found.
It was then that Charles must have told Milo that he had found the key to Nina’s diary. Evelyn remembered that when they were all in New York for Charles’s funeral Milo had gone into Sarah’s bedroom. He took the framed snapshot of Charles to prevent Dr. Vollmer from seeing it, but he did not find the incriminating key, not even later on at the farmhouse when he ripped the lining of Bess’s travelling case in a final vain search.
Unfortunately Milo had not taken the time to invite more confidences from Charles before he had sent him plunging from the apartment window. He did not know Charles had guessed the murderer had hidden the missing diary in a pheasant pen. It would have to be an indoor pen with plenty of hiding places, a pen occupied by birds militant enough to stand off an inquisitive meddler. Only a few hours before his death, Charles had listed the names of the ill-tempered Reeves and Elliots. Their pens would be the best to conceal the diary. He had scratched out the Silvers, not knowing that they had been moved indoors, that the diary could be guarded by the savage Long John.
If Milo had known about that very last entry in Charles’s engagement book, he could have reclaimed the incriminating diary before Sarah, probing and prying and coming closer to the secret of Charles’s death, had returned to the farm. There would not have had to be the hurried dangerous trip to the stables at night to get the diary, with the risk of injuring an attacking Long John. Milo had hoped that the jack he left in the pen would make Bess believe that the children had damaged the bird. Otherwise he had to trust to luck that his raid would be successful. He could not take the chance of Sarah finding the evidence that would link him to Nina’s death and from there to the murder of the nurse and Charles and of Peck. Probably no one would ever discover if Peck had had real evidence for his blackmail, or if he had merely suspected Milo was guilty. Whichever it was, Peck was a security risk and therefore expendable.
Milo had seen everyone as a threat to his security—everyone but Evelyn. He had been too contemptuously sure of her stupidity to notice her hostile, unobtrusive spying on his every move. He had never guessed it was she who in a defiant challenge had painted a tiny pair of horn-rimmed glasses above and behind Nina in the portrait, glasses that Milo with forethought had painted out in green. He had thought himself safe from everybody but Sarah. . . .
Sarah’s eyelids fell, the night lurched and steadied again. And here was the diary, supposition made real in the crumbled dark-blue leather and mouse-nibbled pages. Hunter, who had found it, handled it with grim care; after one glance Bess avoided it as though it were an asp.
Sleep must have caught her again, because Milo was suddenly there in the living room, emerged from his dangerous silence upstairs and so icily pale that his dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses were like something painted on a subway poster. He carried a suitcase in one of the soft plump hands that had killed four people, but he wore his air of challenge badly. The pounding pulse, the trapped fear, showed under it like a woman’s hanging slip. He said to someone behind Bess in the dining room doorway, “I’ll sue, you know. Slander, defamation of character, false arrest, the works.”
“Officer,” said Bess steadily—and Sarah had been asleep, and for some time, because there was a uniformed man at Bess’s shoulder. “My nephew has been planning flight, for the reasons I’ve told you. I haven’t missed any cash from the house, but there’s a gold watch, an heirloom, that I haven’t been able to find.”
Milo’s mouth curled. He submitted confidently to the policeman’s embarrassed search; his jaw dropped blankly when Charles’s gold watch was removed from his suit coat pocket. The policeman interrupted a spate of cursing to turn to Bess. “Well now, do you want to press charges, Mrs. Gideon? I mean . . . ?”
People never did, in families, they had it out among themselves. In spite of the weird tale he had been told, they would decide against the police blotter, the inevitable publicity in a small town.
“Yes,” said Bess. She put her face into her hands, but only for a second. “Yes, I want to press charges, Officer.”
The pheasants called shrilly in the dawn, their chopped-off shrieks as surprising on the air as their color was in the pearl and charcoal light. Sarah, walking about the pens for the last time, lifted her face now and then as though the wet and piercing cold were rain. She gave a final piece of bread to the bantam rooster, who stood back gallantly for his hens and never got a crumb, raisins to the Manchurians and the Amhersts, a shredded leaf of lettuce to the Japanese Coppers.
She could not bring herself to go near the Silvers.
Behind her the house was quiet,
