kitchen window. The ground there sloped down toward the stable, and it seemed to me Elaine was looking at the stars above the treetops. “Whether there’s a great deal of money or just a little, we’ll be able to do what we like, with nobody to say no. I’ll have an apartment in New York or London. I’ll go to plays, and …”
“You’ll have to come back, if you want to visit Dad.”
“I will, of course; I’ll fly. And of course the business—I’ll have a business manager here.” Suddenly she turned to look at me and those big beautiful violet eyes just seemed to swallow me up. “You’ll come to visit me, won’t you, Holly? You’ll have vacations and holidays. We can go shopping together, and if I’m in New York I’ll take you to Sardi’s or the Plaza for luncheon. We’ll have such a good time.”
“I won’t come if you don’t want me to.”
“Oh, but I do! I’ll want to see you, Holly, and we won’t fight anymore. I know you don’t believe me, but you’ll see. We won’t. All this awful pressure will be gone, no more living together when we don’t like it and no more groveling for crumbs. What are you going do with your life when you’re finished with college? Don’t say get married. That isn’t a life.”
I had to think fast, because I really hadn’t done a whole lot of planning. “Get a job on
Bill still hadn’t come back when I went up to bed, so I had to do it pretty much on my own. My leg hurt some— there wasn’t any question but that it liked being up on the bed or something better than swinging in the air—but it wasn’t more than I could take, and I was proud of myself for having done what I did.
The trouble was that I couldn’t get back to sleep. I kept thinking about everything that had happened, about what Sandoz had said in my father’s study before he took him away, and about going to Blue’s, and then about Blue and me and my father, then about how Sandoz had come in and everything he’d said, and so on and so forth, around and around. Eventually I got clear back to the day the bomb went off, and even the day that I met Blue when I went out to visit Uncle Herbert. That was when I decided that sooner or later I’d write this book; and I began to write it in my head there in bed that night. Believe me, I was a lot more anxious to see how it came out than you are.
Sometimes when I find a really good mystery, I stop reading a little before the end and go over the whole first part two or three times, underlining the stuff I think might be significant. Then, if the author’s played fair, pretty often I can guess how it’s going to end. So I did it that night, and the underlined parts of my memory are the parts I’ve written down here. That night I tried to solve it, just like I try to solve the books; but I came up against a couple things that bothered me. I think it’s only fair to tell you about them now.
In the first place, in a lot of books I’ve read there are only a certain number of people who could have done it, usually fewer than ten. They’re all in a big house in the country, or maybe on a ship—something like that. But what had happened to Larry and Mr. Munroe and Uncle Herbert and Mrs. Whoosis wasn’t like that at all. The killer could be anybody in the whole wide world, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that the killer (I was sure then that it wasn’t my father) who had set the bomb at Barton High had also killed Uncle Herbert. I think it would be awfully nice for the cops if they had more cases like the ones in books, where the murderer’s got to be one of seven or eight people; but until somebody can arrange it, maybe we should have a law that says the murders in books have to be more like real ones.
Another thing was servants. In a book you can bet your booty it isn’t old Portwine the butler, no matter how guilty he looks on page ninety-four; and I think the real reason for that is snobbishness. The murderer has to be somebody important, and somebody important can’t be working class, a fact that would be big news to lots of union presidents. In real life, everybody knows it just isn’t so; working-class people have killed plenty of other people, including quite a few very important ones. So it could be Bill or even Mrs. Maas; I didn’t believe it, but I couldn’t rule them out.
Okay, let’s get down to cases.
The first big question was, where was the bomb? It seemed pretty likely that it had been in Pandora’s Box, since the shell hadn’t been fired (according to Sandoz) and a thing like that—an artillery shell—would have been pretty big and hard to hide. But if I allowed it was in the box, somebody must’ve gotten the box open and put it there, and the only people I could think of that I thought could have done it were my father and Larry. If it had been Larry, he wouldn’t have done it and blown himself up unless he’d wanted to commit suicide.
Only come to think of it, it was possible he had, what with those mysterious calls and all. In a book, naturally, you could rule out suicide, but I couldn’t. Maybe Larry had fixed up the bomb—getting the shell one of the times he came to see Elaine, and picking the lock and so on—just to kill himself. But if he had, we’d never prove it; and anyway, I couldn’t really believe it.
That left Dad. I don’t have to give the case against him, because Sandoz already did; but what about the case for him? He could have picked the lock, sure. The box had been right there in his study for a couple of weeks at least (I couldn’t remember just how long, but it was plenty of time) and so was the shell. Only if it was him it was all over and there was no use thinking about it. And anyway I couldn’t believe that it was. Not just because he was my father and I loved him, but because a bomb at the Fair wouldn’t have been his style. If he’d wanted to mess up Larry and Elaine, he could have done it a dozen ways without doing anything illegal or running any risk. For starters, how about tipping off Molly and filing for divorce, which he could have gotten with no alimony when he showed that Elaine had been unfaithful? He had money and lawyers and a sharp, cool brain. None of that fit with a bomb and risking the chair.
Which left me nothing but dark horses. Maybe, just maybe, Bill would have been able to pick that lock. He’d fixed things around our place and made some minor repairs on the cars. Who could say he might not be good with a lock? He could have been mad at Elaine because of something she said. Or if he knew, he could have wanted her himself and been jealous because Larry’d had her and he’d never get her. And come to think of it, it was damn near certain he had known; servants always know that stuff.
Or what about Aladdin Blue? All along I’d been ruling him out like he was the detective. Outside of a book, you can’t do that. He’d been anxious to find out whether I knew what was in the box, and he’d been nice and far away when the bomb went off. As far as I knew, he’d never been to our house while the box was there; but it wasn’t downright impossible that he’d gotten into it while it was in the window at the First National. I hadn’t heard that anybody’d ever checked into how well they watched it, and one thing for sure is that a bank’s window isn’t the same as a bank vault—maybe you’ve noticed they don’t put money in the window. Or maybe he’d gotten to the box while it was at the Fair; after all, he was there. Nobody had ever proved that the shell that went off at Barton High was the same one that had been on our mantel. Germany must have made a million of those shells. When my father had carried me down the stairs, he’d been pretty careful, and even though Blue was lame he’d gotten ahead of us. My father had said, “To your left,” and Blue had gone into the study before we did. Suppose that instead of
