After about ten days Harold Carpenter began to come to the house quite often. He had taken Charley De Lisle's former house after all—which had not really surprised Vic, because the house made a good conversation piece: Harold could ask all kinds of questions about the deceased Charley, ask not only Vic but all of Vic's friends as well. "Where are you staying?" was a question nearly everybody would put to a newcomer like Carpenter, and then Carpenter was launched. Vic supposed that within three weeks Carpenter had heard at least ten people's versions of the evening Charley had drowned. He must have done it very subtly, too, because neither Horace nor Phil came to him to tell him that he had been interrogated by Carpenter.
"Have you met Don Wilson?" Vic asked Carpenter one Saturday afternoon when he had dropped in to borrow Vic's hedge shears.
"No," Carpenter replied a little wonderingly.
Melinda was within hearing.
"I suppose you'll get around to it," Vic said, smiling. "My wife sees the Wilsons quite often. You might enjoy him, I don't know." Vic had no doubt that Carpenter had met Don. Don had probably picked Carpenter out for the job, gone to New York to do it for Melinda, because any trip she made to New York would have been noticed by Vic, she went so seldom. And an assignment like this would have needed personal contact. Harold Carpenter was a good private eye. Nothing rattled him. Vic said:
"When did you start your psychiatric training?" Carpenter had told him that he was in his last year at Columbia, and that he needed only his thesis plus some examination for his doctorate.
"Start? Oh, not until I was twenty-three. I lost some time by having to go to Korea."
"And when did you stop?"
Carpenter did not bat an eye. "Stop? What do you mean?"
"I meant stop your classes to start your field research for the thesis."
"Oh, well, at the beginning of the summer, you might say. I went to some summer classes." He smiled. "In psychiatry, there's never a limit to how many courses you can take—or should take, to be a good doctor."
It was all rather vague to Vic. "And schizophrenia interests you most?"
"Well—I suppose so. It's the commonest affliction, as you know."
Vic smiled. Melinda had gone into the kitchen to freshen her drink. Neither Vic nor Carpenter was drinking. "I was wondering if you thought my wife had any schizophrenic tendencies."
Carpenter frowned and smiled at the same time, showing his square white teeth in his generous, full-lipped mouth. "I don't think so at all. Do you?"
"I don't really know. Not being an authority on the subject," Vic said, and awaited something further from Carpenter.
"She has a lot of charm," Carpenter said."A kind of undisciplined charm."
"You mean the charm of no discipline."
"Yes," he said, smiling. "I mean she has more charm than she thinks she has."
"That's quite a lot."
Carpenter laughed and looked at Melinda as she came back into the room.
It crossed Vic's mind then that Carpenter was the only person who had ever been to their house who had not, in some way,
betrayed surprise on finding that he lived in another wing of the house. Carpenter had slipped up there. One or the other of them, however, was going to be very surprised before long. Which of them was it going to be? Vic smiled at Carpenter in a friendly way, as a good sportsman might at an opponent.
Carpenter stayed perhaps half an hour on the afternoon that he came to borrow the shears. He had a curious, half-absent way of looking around at everything, of staring at Trixie—as if there were anything odd about that specimen of rampant normality—of looking around in the garage, or the kitchen, or wherever he happened to be in the house. It was not entirely an absent look. Harold Carpenter was not an absent man. But he was around a little too much, considering their house was out of the way between Kennington and his own house, Charley's old house. That was another sign that pointed in the direction of his being a detective, or a psychiatrist hired, part-time, to look him over.
And then on October 4, when the bank statement came in, there was $200, at least $200, withdrawn that Vic couldn't account for. It was curious to think that they might be in Carpenter's pockets, that the $10 bill that Carpenter had used to buy a bottle of champagne on the evening of Melinda's birthday might have come directly from the Van Allen account. Vic had run into Carpenter on Commerce Street, the main street of Wesley, as he was coming out of a jewelry store where he had picked up his main present for Melinda. Carpenter had a couple of large books under his arm. he often had a large book of some sort under his arm.
"Are you busy tonight?" Vic had asked.
Carpenter hadn't been busy, and Vic had asked him if he would care to come out to the house for dinner. It was Melinda's birthday, and Vic imagined that Carpenter knew it. They were having a small dinner party, only the Mellers were coming, and he was sure Melinda would be glad to see him, Vic said. Carpenter looked politely hesitant, wanted to call Melinda first, but Vic said no, let it be a surprise for her. So Carpenter had accepted and had bought the champagne when Vic had told him that it was Melinda's birthday.
Vic and Melinda would have asked the Cowans, but Phil was away all week in Vermont, teaching, and Evelyn was feeling under the weather with a cold
