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I listened at the door, fairly certain Carolyn had not yet gone into her act. I couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary, so I drew back the bolt and started to ease the door open a crack, but of course I couldn’t. I’d picked it shut. Now I could pick it open again, only to pick it shut once more in a minute or two, and for what? So that I could watch Rufus Quilp waddle across the floor to the bathroom? It hardly seemed worth it.
I grabbed a chair and sat on it. A pair of walkie-talkies, I thought, would have simplified operations considerably. I could get Carolyn out of bed and into action. The sooner she got moving, the sooner I’d be able to move. I could get to work. I could get to business. I could go to the bathroom.
Ah, yes. There’s that bit of business Ben Franklin stole from George Herbert: “For want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, for want of a horse a rider was lost.” I don’t know how many riders-and battles, and wars-have actually been lost for a nail, but I’ve sometimes wondered how often the course of history has been changed in one direction or another because somebody had to pee. I don’t know if its results are quite as dire as losing a nail out of a horseshoe, but I have a feeling it comes up more often.
It would have been nice if Cuttleford House’s commitment to quaintness included a chamber pot beneath the bed, but if such a thing had ever existed, some prior occupant of Young George’s Room had taken it home for use as a soup tureen.
Of course, I thought, if Carolyn would quit dreaming about unavailable chambermaids and raise the alarm for her absent best friend, the problem would soon be resolved. Once everyone gathered together, all I had to do was wait until the group had removed to the ground floor. Then I could have my pick of bathrooms, but until then it wasn’t safe to set foot in the hallway.
And how long, really, could a person be expected to wait?
I don’t want to dwell on this subject, it’s not a fit one for polite discourse, but neither do I want to leave you wondering.
So how will it be if I simply state that there was a time when I opened the window and held out a shoe that had once belonged to Jonathan Rathburn, and for which he could be presumed to have no further use? I turned the shoe upside down, and then I brought it back in again, and closed the window.
So much for that. Now all I had to do was wait for Carolyn to wake up, and hope she hadn’t forgotten what she was supposed to do. We’re none of us at our best first thing in the morning, and Carolyn had had the odd wee dram of malt the night before. I could picture her wondering where I’d disappeared to and dismissing the question with a shrug as she tucked into a hearty breakfast of fly-in-the-oatmeal or some such traditional British treat.
“And wherever is your uh husband, Mrs. Rhodenbarr?”
“You mean Bernie? Gee, I du
She’d get it right, I assured myself. And until she did, all I could do was wait.
No problem. I had something to read.
No problem at all, as it turned out. Carolyn did wake up, and did remember her lines, and did succeed in communicating her feigned panic to the rest of the household. My door (or Rathburn’s, if you prefer, or Young George’s) was unbolted but still locked when they got to it, and the lock yielded readily enough to the master key.
“No one here,” Nigel Eglantine a
“Not so fast,” he said. “Nobody checked the closet.”
“Why bother?” Carolyn said quickly. “He’s not here. What would he be doing in the closet?”
“Dropping down to room temperature,” Littlefield said. “If he’s dead somebody must have stowed him somewhere, and the closet’s as good a place as any. If it was worth looking in this room, it’s worth looking in the closet.”
“Let me,” Carolyn said. “Bernie? Bernie, are you in there?”
“If he’s dead,” Littlefield told her, “you’ll be a long time waiting for an answer. Open the door, why don’t you?”
“It’s stuck. This is ridiculous, he’s not in here, and we’re wasting time when we could be-”
“Stuck?” Littlefield did a lot with the one syllable, making it clear somehow that an inability to open the closet door indicated not only physical but mental and moral weakness. “Let’s just see how stuck it is,” he said, and flung the thing open.
CHAPTER Twenty-three
There was a sound that may have been Carolyn catching her breath, then a snort of disappointment from Littlefield. “Zilch,” he a
“Raffles is toilet trained,” Carolyn said.
“Good for him. Anyway, it’d smell a lot worse if there was a body turning sour in here. We’re wasting time.”
And off they went. The last person out closed the door, remarkably enough, and nobody bothered to lock it, which would save me a minute or two, and spare that much wear on my burglar’s tools.
I waited another minute, just to make sure nobody came back for a last look, and crawled out from under the bed.
See, you had nothing to worry about. You were not fooled. You already knew they were still looking for me when they spotted the dummy at the bottom of the ravine. So your heart didn’t threaten to seize when Littlefield opened the closet.
Carolyn’s did. She was sure I was in Rathburn’s room, because I’d said that was where I’d probably be. They might very well pass up searching the room altogether, I’d told her, but if they looked they wouldn’t find me, because I’d be tucked away somewhere, probably in the closet.
I don’t know what made me dive under the bed instead. Maybe I was reluctant to share close quarters with Rathburn’s shoes. More likely I remembered all the closets I’d stowed away in over the years and figured I’d be pushing my luck to try that old trick yet again. I’d been under Rathburn’s bed earlier, looking for the chamber pot that wasn’t there, so I knew I’d fit, albeit snugly. So that’s where I was, and a good thing, too.
If I’d thought of it, I’d have left the closet door wide open. They wouldn’t have had to cross the threshold to see that the room was empty, and after a glance or two they’d have been on their way. But I’d left the door closed-Rathburn’s shoes may have had something to do with it-and that was enough to catch Littlefield’s interest. Carolyn was certain I was in the closet, and thus tried to keep the door closed. For my part, I wished they would open the damn thing and be done with it, before someone else got the bright idea to look under the bed.
Later, when they uncovered the corpses on the three lawn chairs, Carolyn didn’t have to work at it to look frightened. Because if I wasn’t in Rathburn’s closet she didn’t know where I was, so it was entirely possible that was me on one of those lawn chairs.
Once they were done checking the bedrooms and had begun the process of searching for me on the ground floor, it was my turn to return the favor and give their rooms a toss. I’d gone door-to-door in much the same fashion many years ago, when a fellow named Louis Lewis sold me a passkey that would open every room in the old Taft Hotel. I’d considered spacing my visits over a week or two, hitting a half-dozen rooms each time, but this was a while ago, and the fires of youth burned in my blood. I was impatient. I wanted instant gratification, and I didn’t want to wait for it, either.