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“Oh, no,” she cried. “Not Bernie!”
“He’s so alive,” Lettice Littlefield said. “I can’t imagine him being-”
“Don’t say it,” Carolyn begged her.
Lettice left her sentence unfinished. Millicent Savage, wearing bib overalls and rabbit slippers, finished the sentence for her. “Dead,” she said.
Everyone looked at her.
“I told him he might be the next to die,” the child said, her lower lip trembling. “I don’t know why I said it. It just came into my mind and I said it without thinking about it. And now it’s come true!”
It hadn’t necessarily come true, people rushed to tell her, and even if it had it wasn’t her fault. Millicent looked unconvinced.
There was more than a little confusion in the ranks. Nigel Eglantine snatched up the telephone and poked at its buttons, as if in the hope that the severed wires had somehow knitted themselves back together during the night. Carolyn somehow got hold of the colonel and asked him if he could do something, and he took command, silencing the throng with an elaborate clearing of his throat, then summarizing the situation for them.
There were, he told them, insofar as Bernie Rhodenbarr was concerned, two possibilities. One, Rhodenbarr had quit the premises and gone home, without a word to his faithful companion or anyone else. Two, Rhodenbarr was somewhere in the house or on the grounds, but was deaf to the present hue and cry because he was in a deep sleep, or drugged and/or tied up, or…
“Or dead,” said Millicent Savage.
The thing to do, the colonel said, was muster everyone into a great body and give the house a systematic room-by-room search. Cissy Eglantine produced a master key that afforded entry to each of the second-floor bedrooms, including Young George’s Room, earlier occupied by the late Jonathan Rathburn.
“This was the son of a bitch who started the whole thing,” Dakin Littlefield remarked from the doorway to Young George’s Room. His wife, Lettice, objected that Rathburn was a victim, that he had been killed. “Serves him right,” Littlefield told her. “Look what he started. Look at the mess he created.”
But there was no mess within Rathburn’s room. It was neat as a pin, unlike more than a few of the bedrooms, whose occupants apologized for their untidy state. “You’ll pardon the disorder,” Rufus Quilp said dryly, “but I wasn’t expecting guests.” And Lettice Littlefield, on opening the door to their bridal chamber, rushed to the window and threw it open, as if the room was in urgent need of airing out before anyone could set foot in it. “What’s that smell?” Millicent Savage wanted to know, while her father winced, her mother told her to be quiet, and Lettice herself managed an uncharacteristic blush. Her husband, Carolyn noticed, preened a little, looking pleased with himself.
The search moved to the servants’ quarters and storage areas on the top floor, then back to the ground floor, with its maze of public rooms, its kitchen and pantry, and the guest bedroom shared by the Misses Dinmont and Hardesty, as well as the Eglantines’ private suite. The whole mass of guests and staff trooped through room after room, like Japanese tourists at the White House, determined to see everything.
They didn’t find Rhodenbarr. Not a trace of him, living or dead.
“He’s not in the house,” the colonel told them. “It would seem that he’s cut out on his own, though how or why escapes me.”
“Maybe he went to get help,” Carolyn suggested. “But all by himself? In the middle of the night? Without a word to anybody?”
“It’s hard to credit,” Blount-Buller agreed. “But we’ve searched everywhere, and if he’s not here he must be elsewhere. Point of elementary logic, wot?”
“Unless…”
Everyone looked at Carolyn.
“Unless something’s happened to him,” she managed, “and he’s with…”
“With?”
“With the others,” she said.
“The others,” several people repeated, puzzled, and then Miss Dinmont, who’d missed the action on the upper two floors but had wheeled herself gamely from room to room on the ground door, said, “Oh, of course. The other victims.”
“Actually,” Greg Savage said, “I thought of that.”
“You did?” his wife said, surprised.
“It seemed like something a compulsive killer might do, keep all his victims together. So I looked out the back door, where we moved the bodies, and they’re right where we left them.”
“Untouched,” someone said.
“Far as I can see. The lawn chairs we used, each with a body on it and a bedsheet tossed over it. Actually I couldn’t swear about the bodies, or even about the bedsheets, on account of the snow, but that’s how we left them yesterday and that’s what it looks like today. Three lawn chairs out there in the snow.”
“Three,” someone said.
“Right. Three bodies, three lawn chairs.”
“There should only be two bodies,” Mrs. Colibri said.
Savage rolled his eyes. “One-Jonathan Rathburn. Two-Orris Cobbett. Three-the cook, and I still don’t know her name, but she makes three, and-”
“Orris fell off the bridge,” someone said.
“And we left him where he fell,” someone else said.
Earlene Cobbett let out a reflexive yelp at this last a
And they rushed off to see just what it did mean.
Three lawn chairs, three bodies wrapped in sheets and covered with snow. They gathered around, no one quite daring to be the first to yank a sheet off a chair and display its contents. “Oh, somebody do something!” Carolyn cried, and the colonel cleared his throat and grabbed a sheet and gave a yank, sending powdery snow flying and displaying the frozen corpse of Jonathan Rathburn.
The second bedsheet went the way of the first, revealing the late cook.
“I can’t stand it,” Carolyn groaned, and the colonel tore away the third sheet, and somebody let out a scream, but it wasn’t Carolyn. Her worse fears went unrealized.
Because, while there was indeed a fresh corpse in the third chair, it wasn’t her uh friend Bernie Rhodenbarr.
It was Gordon Wolpert.
Rhodenbarr did it.
That was the clear consensus. Bernie Rhodenbarr, evidently some sort of crazed mass murderer, had claimed his fourth victim. While pretending to spearhead the investigation, he’d bided his time before adding one more to his chain of murders.
“But that’s impossible,” Carolyn said. “You people don’t know him. He’s a good, decent human being.”
“He proved that Mr. Rathburn had been murdered,” Cissy Eglantine remembered, “when we all thought it was an accident. Why would he do that?”
“To draw suspicion away from himself,” her husband suggested.
“But there was no suspicion, Nigel,” she said. “Not until he told us it was murder. You don’t suppose…”
“No,” he said firmly. “No, darling. It was not a tramp all along.”
“Rhodenbarr did indeed identify Rathburn as a murder victim,” the colonel said, picking up the ball. “And he went so far as to spearhead the investigation, if our amateur efforts were worthy of the label. The bloody cheek of the man!”
More than a few eyes turned toward Wolpert, their owners having taken the colonel literally. But there was no blood to be seen upon the dead man’s cheek. There were ligature marks on his throat, however, and it appeared that he had been strangled.
“And now he’s gone,” Rufus Quilp said. “Vanished, into thin air.”
“Why?” Carolyn demanded.
“Why?”
“Yeah, why? If he’s this diabolical killer who’s knocking people off and pretending to investigate all at the same time, why would he cut out and run? Did anybody see him kill Wolpert?” No one had. “So none of us would have had any reason to suspect him. So why wouldn’t he stick around and keep on playing the game?”
Someone asked her what she was getting at.