My father shook his head. “Why should I? The Pandoras were harmless, and as I saw it I’d only have been spoiling her fun.” He paused, and I thought he was waiting for her to say something; she didn’t, so he went on. “They belong to a class of gadgets called alarm boxes, and were made about a hundred years ago in fair numbers by an outfit called the Dependable Manufacturing Company. They came equipped with a good lock—by which I mean with a lock that was good by the standards of the period, before the introduction of pin tumblers—but they had a second line of defense, which is why we call them alarm boxes. In the Pandoras, it consisted of a spring- wound motor that rang a bell and fired a blank cartridge unless a secret catch on one side was pressed before the box was opened.”
Blue said, “The people who built those boxes weren’t out to create a murder weapon. The unrifled barrel that held the blank cartridge was not, as you might assume, directed toward the face of the unauthorized opener. It pointed toward the back of the box. The most common method of clearing what was a battlefield of unexploded shells is to detonate them by shooting them from a safe distance with a rifle. Mr. Hollander, who appears to have seen a good deal of action in World War II, may have mentioned that to his wife.” Blue looked at Elaine. “Did he?”
Sandoz said, “So all she had to do was put a real bullet in the barrel.”
“Yes, and position the shell so the bullet would strike it. No expert mechanic was required for either, of course. Holly here has a twenty-two rifle—I saw it in a corner of her bedroom—and everyone seems to have known about Mr. Hollander’s PPK; a man who is often away and keeps a gun for protection generally tells his wife where to find it in any case. It’s quite possible there are other guns in this house as well. Presumably there is one that uses ammunition that could be made to fit the Pandora’s chamber. You were patient while I aired my speculations about Larry Lief. Do you want to hear a few more?”
“Shoot,” Sandoz said. I don’t think he was trying to be funny.
“I don’t believe Mrs. Hollander was at all sure the shell would explode. If it had not, it would have served her purpose nearly as well. The world would have thought her husband had tried to kill her lover, and I imagine she would have persuaded her husband that her lover had arranged that it should.”
“Hey!” I said. “Do you remember that I said the letter in the paper showed that the bomb did more than it was meant to?”
Blue nodded, and Sandoz asked him, “She wrote that?” “I think so. If you haven’t found the machine it was typed on—”
“We haven’t.”
“—and you’ve examined any that may be here, I’d suggest you look at those in the Chicago offices of the Hollander Safe and Lock Company, and particularly the one used by Mr. Hollander’s secretary. On two occasions he told me he thought the bombing was the work of terrorists, although even the first time he must have suspected otherwise. No doubt he made the same remark to his wife by telephone from New York, and she—knowing by then of the calls the Liefs had received, which had been publicized by television news—wanted to make it look as though he was blowing smoke in the eyes of the police. Actually the letter struck me as having been written by a woman; thus it was a confirmation of the theory I had already formed.”
“Before you get off onto that,” I said, “what was the third wrong assumption?”
“That Pandora’s box could only have been opened by someone skilled in picking locks.”
Uncle Dee smiled. “Which I, by the way, am not.” It was his real one, back home again.
“Eventually I did a little more research on Pandora’s story—something I ought to have done much earlier. I told Holly one version shortly before the bomb went off. There is another, in which Pandora is given a box full of evils and told to guard it, but opens it out of curiosity. That one, of course, must have been what the Dependable Manufacturing Company had in mind, and its moral is that women are insatiably curious. I might mention in passing that I myself am more curious than any woman I have ever met.
“When I read the story, I realized how unlikely it was that Mrs. Hollander should have such a box, and offer it as a prize, without knowing what it contained. No doubt she could have had her husband open it in advance; but if she had, he would surely have guessed later that it was she who had arranged for his war souvenir to be in it and for the blank gun to be loaded. He did in any event, as we know, but that was certainly something she would have sought to avoid. She might have had the man she had made her lover, Larry Lief, open it; but if the shell failed to explode, or he survived the blast, or—as would have been quite possible—he had leaked the secret, she would again have been in great danger.”
Sandoz said, “You’re going to tell me she opened it herself with a hairpin.”
Blue shook his head. “She opened it herself with the key. The conviction we all had that Pandora’s box was locked, and, as it were, sealed, when she bought it rested upon her unsupported statement. Her statement was a lie. The box’s alarm mechanism had been exhibited and explained to her before she purchased the box, and the key accompanied it. I doubt that you’ll find it; once she had closed the box and relocked it, the key was merely a danger, and a key is an easy thing to dispose of.”
Elaine said, “There wasn’t any key!”
“Yes, there was,” Blue told her. “Yesterday I located the shop where you bought the box, and had a conversation with its owner.” He took one of those mini-cassette recorders out of the side pocket of his jacket. “Do you want to hear it?”
“No,” Elaine said. She looked at us—my father, Blue and Sandoz and Uncle Dee, Molly and me. “I think this is the point at which I’m supposed to dash upstairs and blow out my brains with Holly’s little rifle.”
Behind her chair, Jake rumbled, “No you don’t, lady.” “That’s right. No, I don’t. I’m going to get help, and we’re going to fight this.”
Hearing her I felt funny. It was the kind of thing I might have said myself.
How I Got My Job
The next time I saw Blue I could walk. The Ford wagon that had been Mrs. Maas’s was mine, and I had my stereo and clothes and all my junk in the back, with Sidi’s saddle and some other tack I’d saved. The trees around Blue’s place were already starting to turn when I lugged my portable up the porch steps; it’d been a dry summer.
