Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Library

It was Orris.

Thinking back, I saw how close Carolyn had come to being right on all four points. Just moments after she’d said that the next victim might be in the room with us, he made his appearance, walking with cap in hands to the table where Nigel and Cissy Eglantine sat over coffee. He had removed his boots, I saw, and was wearing thick woolen socks. Snow clung to the lower portions of his trouser legs.

After a whispered conference with his employers, young Orris clomped out again. Something-not a premonition, I assure you-urged me to ask Nigel Eglantine if anything was the matter, but I resisted the impulse. It turned out I didn’t have to ask, because Nigel came over to our table and made an announcement. There was, he reported, something wrong with the snowblower. Its engine appeared to be damaged. He was going to have a look at it, although he wasn’t terribly smart about engines, but even if he proved unable to fix it we were not to worry, because the machine wasn’t really essential. Although the snow was deep, with drifts in the yard well over three feet high, Orris was a stout fellow and had insisted he could wade through the snow clear to the bridge and across it. On its other side, of course, was the Jeep, and the Jeep, we could rest assured, was fully reliable.

When he went off to reassure another table, I said to Carolyn, “I bet the truck won’t be there, either.”

“Did I miss something, Bern? What truck?”

“Oh, it’s an ancient joke,” I said, and told her about the young Marine making his first parachute jump. He’s told how the chute will open automatically, and that there’s an emergency ripcord if it doesn’t, and that when he lands a truck will pick him up to take him back to camp. So he jumps, and the chute doesn’t open, and the ripcord comes off in his hand, and he says to himself, “Hell, I bet the damn truck won’t be there, either.”

She looked at me. “It’s an old joke, huh?”

“The old jokes are the best ones.”

“Not necessarily,” she said.

This time I didn’t hear the scream.

Not the first scream, anyway. I was in a parlor-not the East Parlour, where Lettice and I had misbehaved in front of the stuffed oryx, but in the West Parlour, where I was sitting in a wing chair with my feet up on a needlepoint-covered ottoman, reading The Portable Dorothy Parker. The whole idea of a portable Dorothy Parker intrigued me. You could take her along on trips, and every once in a while her head would pop up out of your Gladstone bag and deliver some smartass remark.

I was reading a short story about a woman who was waiting for a telephone to ring, but I wasn’t getting very far with it because Miss Dinmont kept interrupting me to ask for help with a crossword puzzle. Did I know a six-letter marsupial, the third letter an M? Could I complete the phrase “John Jacob Blank” with a five-letter word ending in R?

Why, I’ve long wondered, would anyone want help on a crossword puzzle? And how does one deal with people who ask for it? If you supply an answer it only encourages them to ask for more, but if you plead ignorance it doesn’t seem to discourage them. In fact they seem to ask everything, even the ones where they know the answer themselves, as if determined to plumb the depths of your stupidity.

What might work is to grab the puzzle out of the puzzler’s hands, fill in all the squares yourself at breakneck speed (right or wrong, who cares?), and hand it back in triumph. I might have tried it that morning-I was testy enough, even with my stomach full of kippers and porridge and toad-in-the-hole (or wind-in-the-willows, or whatever it was), but I just couldn’t be so mean to poor little Miss Dinmont. I was afraid she’d burst into tears. I’d feel terrible, and then Miss Hardesty would come along and beat me to a pulp.

So I was reading, and I’d just been interrupted for perhaps the seventh time, and I’d tried saying, “Hmmm, that’s a tricky one, let me think about that one,” and there was a scream outside, or at least a great cry.

As I said, I didn’t hear it. But Orris was not like Berkeley ’s tree, and even though I didn’t hear him fall, someone else did. Millicent Savage, who was out in front of the house directing her father in the making of a snowman, heard Orris shout. So did her father. “Wait here,” Greg Savage told his daughter, and set off toward the source of the cry, walking literally in Orris’s footsteps through snow that came up higher than his knees.

Millicent, of course, did not heed her father’s command to stay put, but set off in his wake. She found it slow going, however, her precocity being cerebral rather than altitudinal, and before she could reach the bridge, her father had already turned around and was headed back. He scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to Cuttleford House, walking as fast as he could and not bothering to respond to the stream of questions she directed at him.

He reached the door, put her down, threw the door open, and cried out his news to the entire household.

“It’s Orris! He’s fallen! The bridge is down! He had a long fall and he’s not moving! He’s just lying there! I think he’s dead!”

I heard all that. I heard the scream that followed his announcement, too, but how could I help it? They probably heard it loud and clear in Vermont.

If I’d first seen the bridge in daylight, I don’t think I could have crossed it. In the darkness, I’d been able to convince myself that the shallow waters of Cuttlebone Creek were but a few scant yards beneath our feet. In the unlikely event that we fell, at worst we’d get a soaking.

But what I saw, after I’d joined the mad scramble to see what had happened to Orris, was a deep and rocky gorge, its sides near vertical. The suspension bridge dangled like limp spaghetti from its moorings on the far side of the gorge. The connective tissue on our side of the creek had given way before Orris could get himself across. Maybe he cried out the instant of the first snapping of the cable. Maybe he was already falling. He fell clear to the bottom, a drop of at least thirty feet, and when we saw him he lay utterly still on a heap of boulders, his head at an angle that would have been a stretch for Plastic Man.

There was some sentiment for rescuing him. The sides of the gorge were too steep for a safe descent in good weather, and out of the question now, with snow covering everything and making it impossible to see where you could or could not get a decent foothold. According to Nigel, if you followed the creek a mile or so downstream, you’d reach a spot where the stream could be easily crossed, and from that point you could wade upstream until you reached Orris. Of course it would take a long time to walk a mile cross-country through two feet of snow, and it would take at least as long to return along a frozen creek bed, not to mention the risk of putting a foot wrong and spraining an ankle or breaking a leg.

“Leave him,” Dakin Littlefield counseled.

“But he’ll die!” one of the women wailed. (I believe it was Earlene Cobbett. Her cousin Molly had had a busy night, starring in Carolyn’s dream and then screaming when she discovered Jonathan Rathburn’s body. Now it was the heavily freckled Earlene’s turn, and she’d let out a scream of her own at Greg Savage’s report of Orris’s fall; a propensity for full-throated shrieking seemed to run in the Cobbett family.)

“Not likely,” Littlefield said.

“I don’t see how you can say that,” Mrs. Colibri said. “It seems to me that people die of exposure all the time. And they die of shock, too, when they suffer severe trauma and don’t receive medical attention.”