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“The truth,” she said. “Bernie’s here somewhere. He’s got to be. He wouldn’t kill anybody. And he wouldn’t have left, not without me.”
“If he’s still here,” Dakin Littlefield said, “maybe you’d like to point him out to us.”
“I thought that was him on the third lawn chair,” she said, “and so did everyone else. We were all surprised when it turned out to be Mr. Wolpert.”
“I was surprised,” Millicent piped up. “But I didn’t think it would be Bernie. I thought it would be Orris.”
Everyone looked at her. “Orris is dead,” her father said patiently.
“I know that.”
“He’s at the bottom of the gully,” her mother put in. “Did you think somebody would go to the trouble to move him?”
“I thought he walked,” Millicent said. “You know how people sometimes walk in their sleep? Well, maybe sometimes they walk in their death the same way. It happens a lot in the movies.”
“You’re not supposed to watch those pictures,” Greg said, but Carolyn was wide-eyed, gesturing wildly with her hands.
“Sleepwalking,” she said. “That’s it! Bernie must have walked in his sleep.”
“And while he was sleepwalking,” Rufus Quilp murmured, “he went in for a bit of sleep-strangling.”
“He must have thought he was going to get help,” Carolyn went on, “and he must have forgotten the bridge was out, and-this way, everybody! Hurry!”
And off she went, and off they went after her.
“Look!”
But they were already looking-at a crumpled form down at the bottom of the gully. It lay a few yards distant from another crumpled form, the snow-covered remains of Orris Cobbett. The new crumpled form had a light dusting of snow on it, but not enough to obscure it completely. You could see the pants, the jacket, the shoes.
“That’s his jacket,” Carolyn cried. “That’s his pants. Those are his shoes. Ohmigod, it’s him!”
There was a certain amount of discussion as to what ought to be done next. Someone suggested that Rhodenbarr might still be alive. While the same fall had broken Orris’s neck, the gully’s latest victim might have landed differently, merely breaking a dozen bones and knocking himself senseless. But would he have died of exposure since then? Or might he be still alive, and might quick action prevent his dying of exposure?
“Before you rescue him,” Earlene Cobbett said doggedly, “you has got to rescue Orris. Orris fell in first.”
“But Orris is dead,” someone pointed out.
“Don’t matter,” Earlene said. “Fair is fair.”
“Wait a minute,” Carolyn said, pointing. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“It looks like something poking out of his jacket. You see it? Sort of angling back?”
“Probably a stick,” someone said. “Probably a branch dislodged by his fall, so that it tumbled after him and landed on top of him.”
“It doesn’t look like a stick to me,” Carolyn said.
“It doesn’t,” the colonel agreed, and produced a small pair of field glasses from his jacket pocket. He peered through them, working the knob to adjust the focus. “I say,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Nigel,” he said, “have a look, why don’t you?” And he passed the binoculars to Eglantine.
“I say,” Nigel Eglantine said.
“Quite.”
“Isn’t that-”
“I believe it is, yes.”
“Bone handle fitted on a steel tang and wrapped with copper wire, it looks like to me.”
“It does, yes.”
“Tapering hilt with a slight flare.”
“A slight flare, yes.”
“And the blade. You can only see two inches of it, but wouldn’t you say it’s…”
His hand scalloped the air.
“Wavy,” the colonel said. “Quite.”
“I say,” Nigel said.
“But you don’t,” Carolyn cried. “Or if you do say, I can’t figure out what you’re saying. What’s that sticking out of Bernie?”
“It would appear to be a kris,” Nigel Eglantine said.
“A crease? You mean it’s a shadow where his jacket’s creased? It looks like more than that to me.”
“K-R-I-S,” the colonel said. “It’s a dagger, traditional weapon in the Malay States. Saw my share of them in my time, in Sarawak and Penang and other Eastern hellholes. Catch a bleeder skulking around with one of those, you knew he was up to no good.”
“I never knew what it was,” Nigel put in, “until the colonel identified it for me. It came with the house, you see, like almost all of the decorations, and was hanging on the wall when we bought the place. I’m quite certain it’s our kris, though I couldn’t swear to it, not from this distance in this light. But it does look as though someone’s gone and thrust it into Mr. Rhodenbarr.”
The reaction was what you might expect-except, curiously enough, for Ms. Carolyn Kaiser. You might have missed it unless you were watching carefully, but for a moment her expression was one of genuine relief.
CHAPTER Twenty-two
At least that’s how I figure it went.
Oh, come on now. You didn’t actually think that was me, did you? Down at the bottom of the gully? Don’t tell me you figured I’d developed a late enthusiasm for body piercing, and the Malayan kris was my idea of a fashion statement.
No, of course not. The crumpled form a few yards from Orris Cobbett’s wasn’t me. It was a dummy-no cracks, please-a quickly wrought creation consisting of some of my clothing stuffed with the pillows from Jonathan Rathburn’s room. I’d fetched the kris from the wall on which I’d noticed it earlier, and it was not without a pang of regret that I stabbed my inoffensive parka in the back. I’d found a spool of fishing line in one of the cupboards, and I’d attached an end of it to the faux Rhodenbarr and lowered it-him?-to the bottom of the gully.
Then I cut the line and tossed the end I was holding into the abyss, figuring nobody would be able to see it. I certainly couldn’t, but then I could barely see the dummy, either; it was full dark when I performed these maneuvers, and the little pencil-beam flashlight that goes wherever I go is for peering into drawers and safes in dark apartments, not for gazing into near-bottomless ravines. Its narrow little beam had pretty much petered out by the time it got all the way down there.
I had a reason for all of this.
A good reason, too. It stemmed from more than an urge to be present, à la Tom Sawyer, at my own funeral, or to assert, à la Mark Twain, that reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.
If I was dead, I could move around a little.
Officially dead, that is. Generally Regarded as Dead, say. If everyone took it for granted that I was sprawled lifeless in a frozen creek bed at the bottom of a ravine, I could have the run of the place without people wondering where I was and what I was up to.
Because the immobility was driving me nuts.
At a glance, it might seem odd that I was feeling cramped at Cuttleford House. I’m a New Yorker, and it’s not as though I have the space requirements of a rancher in Montana. I live in a small one-bedroom apartment and spend my days in a cluttered bookstore, and I get from one place to the other in a subway car, generally packed shoulder to shoulder among my fellow citizens.
At Cuttleford House, on the other hand, there were more rooms than anyone knew what to do with, and acres of grounds, and plenty of country all around. All of this capaciousness was occupied by a scattering of guests and a small staff, and this human aggregate was itself shrinking on a daily basis. So why was I feeling claustrophobic?
Well, see, in New York the people you see all over the place are strangers. They don’t know you and you don’t know them, and thus even when you’re crammed sardine-style into the rush-hour IRT, you’re essentially alone. Anonymous, really. The next thing to invisible.
So I was used to zipping around the city, dashing to and fro, slipping in and out of offices and residences, not always with the tenant’s knowledge or permission. That was how I operated. It was the way I earned my living, and it had served me well on the handful of occasions when I’d found myself up to my ears in a homicide investigation.