Корнелл Вулрич - Murder at Mother’s Knee [= Something That Happened in Our House]

The older man’s voice sounded from outside: “Ed, come out here a minute, I want to talk to you.”

She knew what about — they were going to compare impressions, possibly plot a course of action.

The first battle was a draw. No hits, no steals, no errors.

She got up and went after Mrs. Mason. “I’ll help you with the dishes.” She wanted to get into that kitchen.

She couldn’t see it at first. She kept using her eyes, scanning the floor surreptitiously while she, wiped Mrs. Mason’s thick, chipped crockery. Finally she thought she detected something. A shadowy bald patch, so to speak. It was both cleaner than the surrounding area, as though it had been scrubbed vigorously, and yet at the same time it was overcast. There were the outlines of a stain still faintly discernible. But it wasn’t very conspicuous, just the shadow of a shadow.

She said to herself: “ She’ll tell me. I’ll find out from her what I want to know.”

She moved aimlessly around, pretending to dry off something, until she was standing right over it. Then she pretended to fumble her cloth, let it drop. She bent down for it, and planted the flat of her hand squarely on the shadowy place, as if trying to retain her balance. She let it stay that way for a moment.

She didn’t have to look at the other woman. A heavy mug slipped through her hands and shattered resoundingly at her feet. Emily Prince straightened up again, and only then glanced over her way. Mrs. Mason’s face had whitened a little. She averted her eyes.

“She’s told me,” Miss Prince said to herself with slow, inward satisfaction.

There hadn’t been a word exchanged between the two of them.

She went upstairs to her room a short while after. If somebody had been murdered in that room she had just been in, what disposal had been made of the remains? Something must have been done with them, they must be lying concealed someplace around — a thing like that couldn’t just be made to disappear.

She sat there shuddering on the edge of the cot, wondering: “Am I going to have nerve enough to sleep here tonight, under the same roof with a couple of possible murderers?” She drew the necessary courage, finally, from an unexpected quarter. The image of Detective Kendall flashed before her mind, laughing uproariously at her. “I certainly am!” she seethed. “I’ll show him whether I’m right or not!” And she proceeded to blow out the lamp and lie down.

In the morning sunlight the atmosphere of the house was less macabre, more bearable. She rode in to school with Johnny on the bus, and for the next six hours put all thoughts of the grisly matter she was engaged upon out of her mind, while she devoted herself to parsing, syntax and participles.

After she had dismissed class that afternoon she went around to her former quarters to pick up a few belongings. This was simply to allay suspicion out at the Masons’. She left the greater part of her things undisturbed where they were, to be held for her.

She was waiting for the bus, collected parcels beside her, when Kendall hove into sight on the opposite side of the street. He was the last person she was anxious to meet under the circumstances. She pretended not to recognize him, but it didn’t work. He crossed over to her, stopped, touched his hat-brim, and grinned. “You seem to be moving. Give you a hand with those?”

“I can manage,” she said distantly.

He eyed the bus right-of-way speculatively, then followed it with his gaze out toward its eventual destination. “It wouldn’t be out to the Mason place?” Which was a smarter piece of deduction than she had thought him capable of.

“It happens to be.”

To her surprise, his face sobered. “I wouldn’t fool around with people of that type,” he said earnestly. “It’s not the safest thing to try on anyone.”

Instantly she whirled on him, to take advantage of the flaw she thought she detected in his line of reasoning. “You’re being inconsistent, aren’t you? If something happened out there which they want to keep hidden, I agree it’s not safe. Which isn’t going to stop me. But you say nothing happened out there. Then why shouldn’t it be safe?”

“Look,” he said patiently, “you’re going at this from an entirely wrong angle. There’s a logical sequence to things like this.” He told off his fingers at her, as though she were one of her own pupils, which was to her only an added insult. “First, somebody has to be missing or unaccounted for. Second, the body itself, or evidence sufficiently strong to take the place of an actual body, has to be brought to light. The two of them are interchangeable, but one or the other of them always has to precede an assumption of murder. That’s the way we work. Your first step is an imaginary composition written by an eight-year-old child. Even in the composition itself, which is your whole groundwork, there’s no direct evidence given. No assault was seen by the kid, no body of any victim was seen either before or after death. In other words, you’re reading an imaginary crime between the lines of an account that’s already imaginary in itself. You can’t get any further away from facts than that.”

She loosed a blast of sarcasm at him sufficient to have withered the entire first three rows of any of her classes. “You’re wasting your breath, my textbook expert. The trouble with hard-and-fast rules is that they always let a big chunky exception slip by, and then try to ignore it because it doesn’t get inside the frame.”

He shoved a helpless palm at her. “But there’s nobody missing, man woman or child, within our entire jurisdiction, and that goes out well beyond the Mason place. Word would have come in to us by now if there were! How’re you going to get around that?”

“Then why don’t you go out after it, to places from which it wouldn’t be likely to come in to you of its own accord?” she flared. “Why don’t you take this main road, this interstate highway that runs through here, and zone it off, and then work your way back along it, zone by zone, and find out if anyone’s missing from other people’s jurisdictions? Believe me,” she added crushingly, “the only reason I suggest you do it, is that you have the facilities and I haven’t!”

He nodded with tempered consideration. “That could be done,” he admitted. “I’ll send out routine inquiries to the main townships along the line. I’d hate to have to give my reasons for checking up, though, in case I was ever pinned down to it: ‘A kid in school here wrote a composition in which he mentioned he saw his mother scrubbing the kitchen floor at two in the morning.’ ” He grinned ruefully. “Now why don’t you just let it go at that, leave it in our hands? In case I get a bite on any of my inquiries, I could drop out there myself and look things over—”

She answered this with such vehemence that he actually retreated a step away from her on the sidewalk. “I’ll do my own looking over, thank you! I mayn’t know all the rules in the textbook, but at least I’m able to think for myself. My mind isn’t in handcuffs! Here comes my bus. Good day, Mr. Kendall!”

He thrust his hat back and scratched under it. “Whew!” she heard him whistle softly to himself, as she clambered aboard with her baggage.

It was still too early in the day for the two men to be on hand when she reached the Mason place. She found Mrs. Mason alone in the kitchen. A stolen glance at the sector of flooring that had been the focus of her attention the previous night, while she stood chatting with the woman, revealed a flagrant change. Something had been done to it since then, and whatever it was, the substance used must have been powerfully corrosive. The whole surface of the wood was now bleached and shredded, as though it had been eaten away by something. Its changed aspect was far more incriminating now than if it had been allowed to remain as it was, to her way of thinking. They had simply succeeded in proving that the stain was not innocent, by taking such pains to efface it. Be that as it might, it was no longer evidence now, even if it had been to start with. It was only a place where evidence had been.