Эллери Куин: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 47, No. 4. Whole No. 269, April 1966

Jo’s mother, starchily aproned, appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. “Is Godfrey down?”

“Not yet, Mum,” Jo said.

“That’s funny. It’s a quarter past nine by the kitchen clock. He’s always on time.”

Ellen snapped, “Obviously, he’s sometimes not.”

Worry lines were showing between Mum’s faded eyes. “In all the years I’ve been here, your father’s never been late for his breakfast except when he was ill.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Mum,” said Jo, “he’s probably gone out to the greenhouse and lost track of the time. It isn’t as if it were two in the afternoon.”

But Mum Caswell shook her head stubbornly. “I’m going to look in his room.”

“What a bloody bore.” Ellen’s impatience turned nasty. “What about my breakfast? Am I expected to get it myself?”

“Perish the thought!” said Christopher, anticipating Jo.

Nevertheless, Mum hurried out. Ellen brandished her empty coffee cup, ready to behead the peasant who had failed to refill it. Christopher appeased his hunger by devouring Joanne, who was trying valiantly not to let her dislike for Ellen show.

Silence poured.

Until the cry from upstairs.

It was a cry raucous with urgency and terror. And then it became a shriek, and the shriek repeated itself.

Joanne bolted for the doorway and vanished, Christopher at her heels. Ellen trailed behind, her face a curious study in dread and hope.

She came on the others midway up the staircase. Her aunt was clinging to the banister, her dumpling features the color of old dough. She managed a jerky thumb-up gesture, and Jo and Christopher sprang past her and disappeared in the upstairs hall. In a moment Jo was back alone, running down the stairs, past her mother, past Ellen.

“I’ve got to phone the doctor,” Jo panted. “Ellen, please take care of mother.”

“But what’s the matter?” demanded Ellen. “Is it father? Has something happened to him?”

“Yes...” Jo flew for the phone. Ellen, ascending with an arm around Margaret Caswell’s waist, heard the dial clacking, and then Joanne’s urgent voice: “Dr. Farnham? Jo Caswell at the Mumford place. Uncle Godfrey’s had a stroke, I think. Can you come right away?”

Dr. Conklin Farnham took the stairs two at a time. Mum, still dough-faced but recovered from the first shock, had insisted on returning to her brother-in-law’s bedside; the doctor found her there. Christopher and Ellen, acting like trespassers, hung about in the hall outside their father’s room, Joanne with them. They waited without words.

When Dr. Farnham emerged, his shoulders elevated in a chilling shrug. “He’s had a stroke, all right. He’s paralyzed.”

“Poor pop,” said Christopher. He had not called his father that in twenty years. “What’s the prognosis, Doctor?”

“It depends on a number of things, most of them unpredictable.”

“Any chance of a recovery from the paralysis, Dr. Farnham?” Joanne asked in a tight voice.

“The paralysis will gradually lift, but just how soon or how completely I can’t say. It all depends on the extent of the damage. He ought to be in the hospital, but we’re absolutely jammed just now, not a bed available, even in the wards. And I’d rather not risk the long jaunt up to Connhaven on these winter roads. So it looks like a home job, at least for now. He’ll need nurses—”

“How about me?” asked Margaret Caswell, materializing in the doorway.

“Well.” The doctor seemed doubtful. “I know you’ve done your share of patient-care, Mrs. Caswell, but in a case like this... Although it’s true we haven’t got an R.N. available right now, either...”

“I’ve taken care of Godfrey for over a quarter of a century,” Mum Caswell said, with the obstinacy she showed in all matters pertaining to Godfrey Mumford. “I can take care of him now.”

January 4–5

The first 48 hours after a cerebral thrombosis, Dr. Farnham told them, were the critical ones, which was all Mum had to hear. For the next two days and nights she neither took her clothes off nor slept; nor was there anything Joanne could do or say to move her from Godfrey Mumford’s bedside, not even for ten minutes.

When the crisis was over, and the patient had survived — and was even making, according to the doctor, a sensational recovery — Jo and Ellen were finally able to pry Mum out of the sickroom and get her to lie down for a few hours. She fell asleep smiling triumphantly, as if she had scored a hand-to-hand victory over the Grim Reaper.

Wolcott Thorp, apprised by Christopher of the stroke, drove down from Connhaven on the night of the fifth, looking like a miniature Russian in his old-fashioned greatcoat and astrakhan hat.

“Godfrey’s all right, isn’t he? He’s going to live?”

They reassured him; and he sank into a chair in the foyer, beside the little table with the silver salver on it. “All my old friends are going,” he mumbled. He was so pale that Joanne got him some brandy. “And those of us who survive feel guilty and overjoyed at the same time. What swine people are...”

It was some time before he was able to go upstairs and look in on the patient, who was being tended again by Margaret Caswell. For ten minutes Thorp chattered to his friend with desperate animation, as Godfrey stared helplessly back at him; until, clearing his throat repeatedly as if he himself had developed a paralysis, Thorp allowed Mum to shoo him out.

“It’s too much to have to watch,” Thorp told Jo and the twins downstairs. “I’m too big a coward to sit there while he struggles with that paralysis. The way he tried to talk! I’m going home.”

“But you can’t, Uncle Wolcott,” said Jo, giving him the courtesy title she had used since childhood. “It’s started to snow, and the report on the radio is that it’s going to be a heavy one. I’m not going to let you take that long drive back over slippery roads. The plows won’t even have had time to go over them.”

“But Joanne,” said the old curator weakly, “I have a huge day tomorrow at the Museum. And really, I’d rather—”

“I don’t care what you’d rather. You’re not leaving this house tonight, and that’s that.”

“Jo’s right, you know,” Christopher put in. “Anyway, Uncle Wolcott, you don’t stand a chance. This is the new Joanne. Look at that chin, will you?”

“You look at it,” said his sister Ellen. “Oh, hell, why did I ever come home? Who’s for a snack?”

January 6

The snow had fallen through half the night. From the kitchen window Christopher could look out across the white earth, an old bed with fresh sheets, past the glasshouse to the woods, where the conifers stood green among the sleeping nudes.

From behind him came a rattle of pans and the homely hiss of bacon; all around him, creeping like woodsmoke, lay warmth. Making the sounds and evoking the smells was Joanne; when her mother had turned nurse, Jo had taken over the housekeeping and cooking chores. Chris had promptly given himself the KP assignment for breakfast.

It was not a morning for fantasy; the day was too clear, the smells too real — it should have happened on a black night, with wind tearing at the house to an accompaniment of creaks. But, as Jo and Chris later agreed over clutched hands, perhaps that was what made it so creepy — the dreadful nightmare striking on a crisp morning to the smell of frying bacon.

For at the very instant that Christopher turned away from the window with a wisecrack about to part his lips — at the very instant that he opened his mouth — he screamed. Or so it seemed. But it was a fantastic coincidence of timing. The scream was hysterically feminine and originated upstairs. It was repeated and repeated in a wild fusillade.