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

She opened the back door and looked out at the peaceful sunlit fields that surrounded the place, with a wall of woodland bringing up in the distance on one side. She pretended to gulp enjoyable quantities of air. It was enjoyable, but she wasn’t thinking of that. In one direction, up from the house, they had corn growing. The stalks were head-high, could have concealed anything. A number of black specks — birds, but whether crows or just what species she wasn’t rustic enough to be able to tell — were hovering above one particular spot, darting busily in and out. They’d rise above it and circle and then go down in again, but they didn’t stray very far from it. Only that one place held any attraction for them.

Down the other way, again far off, so far off as to be almost indistinguishable, she could make out a low quadrangular object that seemed to be composed of cobblestones or large rocks. It had a dilapidated shed over it on four uprights. A faint, wavering footpath led to it. “What’s that?” she asked.

Mrs. Mason didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, somewhat unwillingly, the questioner thought: “Used to be our well. Can’t use it now, needs shoring up. Water’s all sediment.”

“Then where do you get water from?” Miss Prince asked.

“We’ve been going down the road and borrowing it from the people at the next place down, carrying it back in a bucket. It’s a long ways to go, and they don’t like it much neither.”

Miss Prince waited a moment, to keep the question from sounding too leading. Then she asked casually: “Has your well been — unfit to use for very long?”

She didn’t really need the answer. New grass was sprouting everywhere, but it had barely begun to overgrow the footpath yet. She thought the woman’s eyes avoided her, but that might have been simply the chronic hangdog look that was a result of her browbeaten attitude. “ ’Bout two or three weeks,” she mumbled reluctantly.

Birds agitated in a cornfield. A well suddenly unfit for use for the last two or three weeks. And then, in a third direction, straight over and across, the woods, secretive and brooding as always. Three possibilities. Three choices in direction. But only one of them the right one.

She said to herself: “She told me something I wanted to know once before. Maybe I can get her to tell me what I want to know now too.” Those who live in the shadow of fear have poor defenses. The teacher said briskly: “I think I’ll go for a nice long stroll in the open.”

She put her to a test, probably one of the most peculiar ever devised. Instead of turning and striking out at once, as a man would have in parting from someone, she began to retreat slowly, half-turned backwards toward her as she drew away, chattering as she went, as though unable to tear herself away, to cover up the close scrutiny she was subjecting her to.

She retreated first in the general direction of the cornfield, as though intending to ramble among the stalks. The woman just stood there immobile in the doorway, looking after her.

The teacher closed in again, as though inadvertently, under necessity of something she had just remembered she wanted to tell her. “Oh, by the way, could you spare me an extra chair for my room, I—”

Then when she again made to part company with her, it was in a diametrically opposite direction, along the footpath that coursed toward the well, as if without noticing where her steps were taking her. “Any kind of a chair will do,” she called back talkatively. “Just so long as it has a seat and four—”

The woman just stood there, eyeing her without a flicker.

She changed her mind, came back again the few yards she had already traveled. “The sun’s still hot, even this late,” she prattled. She pretended to touch the top of her head. “I don’t think I care to walk in the open. I think I’ll go over that way instead, those woods look nice and cool from here. I always did like to roam around in woods—”

The woman’s eyes seemed to be a little larger now, as she shifted directions in accordance with this restless boarder of hers. She swallowed hard. Miss Prince could distinctly see the lump go down the scrawny lines of her throat. She started to say something, then she didn’t after all. It was flagrantly obvious, the way her whole body had seemed to lean forward for a moment, then subside again against the door-frame. Her hands, inert until now, had begun to mangle her apron. It was almost like a pinwheel, the way it swirled one way, then the other, in their hidden clutch.

Not a sound came from her. Yet, though the test seemed to have failed, it had succeeded. Miss Prince went on, this time without any further backward parleying.

“I know the right direction now,” she was saying to herself grimly, as she trudged along, head bent. “It’s in the woods. It’s somewhere in the woods.”

She went slow. Idly. Putting little detours and curleycues into her line of progress, to seem aimless, haphazard. She knew, without turning, long after the house was a tiny thing behind her, that the woman was still there in the doorway, straining her eyes after her, watching her all the way to the edge of the woods. She knew, too, that that had been a give-and-take back there just now. The woman had told her what she wanted to know, but she had told the woman a little something too. She must have, she couldn’t possibly have failed to, in the course of the mental fencing-match they had just had. If nothing else, that she wasn’t quite as scatterbrained, as frivolous, as she had seemed to be about which direction to take for her stroll. Nothing definite maybe, but just a suspicion that she wasn’t hanging around out here altogether for her health.

She’d have to watch her step with them, just as much as they’d have to watch theirs with her. A good deal depended on whether the woman was an active ally of the two men, or just a passive thrall involved against her will.

She was up to the outermost trees now, and soon they had closed around her, the house and its watcher was gone from sight, and a pall of cool blue twilight had dimmed everything. She beat her way slowly forward. It was not a dense copse, the trees were not set thickly together by any means, but it was extensive, it covered a lot of ground. There were avenues, alleys running through it in various directions, natural ones, not man-made, but none of them was continuous, it just happened to be the way the trunks were ranged around.

She had not expected anything so miraculous as to stumble on something the moment she stepped in here. It was quite likely that she would come out again none the wiser this time. And many more times to come. But she intended returning here again and again if necessary, until—

If there had been a murder, then there was a body somewhere. Johnny had turned his composition in three days ago. Even if his “dream” had taken place two or three weeks before that, there must still be a body somewhere. There would still be a body a year from now.

She was getting tired now, and she was already none too sure of her own whereabouts. She spotted a half-submerged stump protruding from the damp, moldy turf and sat down on it, fighting down a suspicion that was trying to form in the back of her mind that she had lost herself. A thing like that, if it ever got to that Kendall’s ears, would be all that was needed to complete his hilarity at her expense. The stump was green all over with some sort of fungus, but she was too tired to care. The ground in here remained in a continual state of moldy dampness, she noticed. The sun never had a chance to reach through the leafy ceiling of the trees and dry it out.

She had been sitting there perhaps two minutes at the most, when a faint scream of acute fright reached her from a distance. It was thin and piping, and must have been thin even at its source. She jarred to her feet. That had sounded like the voice of a child, not a grown-up. It repeated itself, and two others joined in with it, as frightened as the first, if less shrilly acute. She started to run, as fast as the trackless nature of the ground would allow, toward the direction from which she believed the commotion was coming.