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“An adventure?”
“Last night,” she said, “I got a heavy dose of spring fever, because that’s what it is, spring, even if they haven’t got the word yet up in the Berkshires. So I went for a walk, and where did I wind up but the Cubby Hole?”
“What a surprise.”
“Well, I got smart feet, Bern. They took me there all by themselves, and-” She broke it off at the tinkle of tiny bells over the door, a
I looked up, and there she was, the Widow Littlefield. I hadn’t expected her to be wearing black, and she wasn’t, looking quite spiffy instead in a dove-gray suit with a nipped-in waist. Her blouse was white, and her bow tie, floppy and feminine, was the bright red of arterial blood.
“Bernie,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you. And there’s your sweet little cat.” She caught sight of Carolyn and her face darkened. “Perhaps this isn’t a good time.”
“It’s a perfectly fine time,” I said. “You’re looking well, Lettice.”
“Thank you, Bernie.”
“You remember Carolyn.”
“Your wife,” she said. “Except she’s not your wife. It’s very confusing. When you called, I thought you might want to come over to my apartment. Or that you’d invite me over to yours.”
“I thought it would be nice to meet here.”
“So you said. But I didn’t expect there would be three of us.”
“Four,” I said, “if you count the cat. And I can’t guarantee there won’t be more. You might find this hard to believe, but every once in a while I actually have a customer walk in here.”
“How nice for you.”
“But that probably won’t happen,” I said, “and until it does we can talk freely. I didn’t get much chance to talk to you after your husband ate his gun.”
She shuddered. “What an unpleasant expression,” she said. “And I wish you wouldn’t call him my husband.”
“You’re the one who married him,” I said. “I suppose you’ve got grounds for an a
“He insisted I take the week off,” she said, “but of course he wants me back.”
“I guess he was happy enough just to get his bonds back.”
“He got them back before he even knew they were gone, Bernie. And he realized that I was as much Dakin’s victim as he was. It was indiscreet of me to give Dakin an opportunity to have a copy of my key made, but Mr. Sternhagen knows I’ll never let anything like that happen again.”
“I guess it must seem like a horrible dream,” I said.
“It does.”
“But your eyes are open now, and it’s all over.”
“That’s right, Bernie. It’s just a good thing the police got there when they did. I still can’t understand how they managed it.”
“They used a helicopter,” I said.
“I know that.”
“So the road conditions didn’t matter,” I said, “and the unplowed driveway didn’t stop them, or the lack of a bridge across the gully. They just flew right over everything.”
“I understand all that part. How did they know to come in the first place? And how did they know they would need a helicopter? And the man in charge-”
“Ray Kirschma
“He was a New York police officer, and he seemed to know you.”
“I noticed that,” I said. “Curious, isn’t it?”
“But how did he…”
“Bernie called him,” Carolyn said. “After he faked his own death by lowering a dummy into the gully, he walked downstream until he found a place where he could wade across.”
“No wading required,” I said. “Cuttlebone Creek was frozen solid. The only wading I had to do was through snow, and I don’t think you call it wading when it’s snow. It’s either trudging or slogging, and it seems to me I did a fair amount of both.”
“Then he doubled back on the other side of the gully,” she went on, “until he got to the parking lot.”
“The parking lot?”
“Right on the other side of the bridge, where everybody left their cars. He figured somebody would have a cell phone, and he opened car doors until he found one.”
“Didn’t people lock their cars? I’m positive Dakin locked ours.”
“I guess I got lucky,” I said. I didn’t tell her that a locked car is not the most challenging obstacle you can place in a burglar’s path. “I found a phone, and I was going to call nine-one-one but I couldn’t figure out what to tell them. So I called Ray Kirschma
“And arrived in the nick of time,” Carolyn said.
I crumpled a piece of paper and threw it for Raffles. “Ray didn’t have any jurisdiction up there,” I went on, “but he got in touch with the state troopers, and they tried to reach Cuttleford House and confirmed that the phones were out. So they broke out a helicopter and brought Ray along for the ride. And the rest you know, because you were there for it.”
“Yes.”
“So I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you here,” I said. “Today, I mean. This afternoon.”
“I thought you just wanted to see me, Bernie.”
“Well, it’s always a pleasure, Lettice. But there was something I wanted to talk about.”
“Oh? What would that be?”
“It would be the bridge,” I said. “The one that spa
“What about it, Bernie?”
“You remember how the bridge wound up in the gully, don’t you?”
She nodded. “Gordon Wolpert slashed the ropes.”
“Right. And the bridge went tumbling into the gully, silent as Berkeley ’s tree. And then the next morning Orris walked right off the edge, not even noticing that the bridge was missing.”
“I remember,” she said. “You explained it all in the library, before Dakin pulled the gun.”
“I keep picturing Orris,” I said. “Stepping right off into space like that. It’s a pretty fu
“Fu
“I know, but it’s right smack on the border of tragedy and farce, isn’t it? And how could he do a thing like that? I mean, if he’d been ru
“I’m sure he was. Bernie, do we have to talk about-”
“Too surprised to scream, you’d almost think, but he managed to get a scream out. Can you imagine walking off a cliff like that, Lettice? In broad daylight?”
“You explained that he could have been snowblind, Bernie.”
“True.”
“And that he was intellectually challenged.”
“Also true. The nearest thing to dead between the ears, you might say. Still, he had the inbred cu
“What?”
“I think he stepped on the bridge and started walking across, and the ropes had been cut partway through, and they snapped, and that’s how he fell.”
“But nobody heard the bridge fall.”
“Ah,” I said. “Nobody heard it in the middle of the night, either. Maybe there’s not that much noise involved. Maybe the shout Orris gave drowned it out, or merged with it so that no one noticed it. Remember, there was snow covering everything. That could muffle sounds. No, I think the bridge fell into the gully the very same time Orris did.”
“That’s what you thought originally,” Carolyn said. “Remember, Bern? When you first told everybody the ropes had been cut?”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s how it looked to me, just from a quick examination of the ends of the rope. On one of them, it was easy to see where some of the fibers had been cut cleanly, and others looked as though they’d been stretched until they tore.”