“Diedrich, how does this affect your will?”

  His brother stared at him. “My what?”

  “You never did have a head for technicalities.” Now Wolfert’s voice was more metallic than acidulous; it had something of the whine of a band saw. “Your will, your will. Wills can be mighty important instruments. In a situation like this they can cause a lot of trouble—”

  “Situation? I wasn’t aware, Wolf, of any ‘situation.’ ”

  “What would you call it—normal?” Wolfert smiled his sucked-in smile. “You’ve got three heirs—me, Sally, Howard. Howard’s an adopted son. Sally is a pretty recent wife—” and Ellery could actually hear the quotation marks around the last word.

  Diedrich was sitting very quietly.

  “—and as I understand it, we share and share alike?”

  “Wolf, I don’t get this at all. What’s this all about?”

  “One of your heirs now turns out to be a man named Waye,” grinned Wolfert. “It could make a difference to a lawyer.”

  “I think,” said Sally, “Mr. Queen and I’ll take a walk in the garden, Dieds,” and Ellery was half out of his chair when Diedrich said gently, “Don’t,” and then he got up and went over to his brother and stood looking down at his brother and his brother pushed away a little nervously and showed his gray dentures.

  “It doesn’t, Wolfert, and it won’t. Howard is properly identified in my will. His legal name is Howard Hendrik Van Horn. And that’s what it stays unless he himself wants to change it.” Diedrich loomed unusually large. “What I don’t understand, Wolf, is why you’d bring it up at all. You know I don’t like double talk. What’s on your mind? What’s behind this?”

  And there was that hell again in Wolfert’s little avian eyes. The brothers stared at each other, one sitting, the other standing. Ellery could hear them breathing, Diedrich deeply and Wolfert in sniffly spurts. It was one of those interminable moments of pure crisis during which whole histories are written; when the flutter of a fly’s wing can start an avalanche. Or that was how it felt. For it was impossible to say that Wolfert knew. He was so naturally snide that even his ignorance seemed rotten with meaning; he gave off the unpleasant secrets of corpses.

  Then the moment passed, and Wolfert creaked to his feet. “Diedrich, you’re a damned fool,” he said, and he stalked out of the study like the Scarecrow of Oz.

  And Diedrich stood there, in the same position, and Sally went up to him and stood on tiptoes to kiss his cheek; and she said good night to Ellery with her eyes and then she walked out, too.

  “Don’t go yet, Mr. Queen.”

  Ellery turned back at the door.

  “This hasn’t worked out quite as I expected.” It sounded plaintive, and Diedrich laughed at his own tone and motioned to a chair. “Life keeps us hopping, doesn’t it? Sit down, Mr. Queen.”

  Ellery found himself wishing Howard and Sally had not gone upstairs.

  “I seem to recall defending my brother,” Diedrich went on with a grimace, “on the ground that he’s unhappy. I forgot to mention that misery likes to have company. By the way, have you got anywhere yet on that twenty-five thousand dollar business?”

  Ellery almost jumped.

  “Why…Mr. Van Horn, it’s only been twenty-four hours.”

  Van Horn nodded. He circled his desk and sat down behind it and began to fuss with some papers. “Laura told me you were out this afternoon. I thought…”

  Damn Laura! thought Mr. Queen.

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “A thing as simple as this,” Diedrich said carefully. “I mean, I thought it would be child’s play…”

  “Sometime,” said Ellery, “the simplest cases are the hardest.”

  “Mr. Queen,” Diedrich said slowly, “you know who took that money.”

  Ellery blinked. He was annoyed with himself, with Van Horn, with Sally, Howard, Wrightsville—but chiefly with himself. He might have known that a man of Diedrich’s perspicacity would not be taken in by mumbo-jumbo, even of the superior Queen brand.

  Ellery decided quickly.

  He said nothing.

  “You know, but you won’t tell me.”

  The big figure swiveled behind the desk, turning his face away as if he felt the sudden need for withdrawal. But there were long twists of wrinkle on his shoulder and his very immobility betrayed the forces at work beneath it.

  Ellery said nothing.

  “You must have a strong reason for not telling me.” He sprang to his feet. But then his big body settled and there he was, his hands clasped behind him, looking out into the darkness.

  “A very strong reason,” he repeated.

  But Ellery could only sit there.

  Diedrich’s powerful shoulders sagged and his hands contracted in a sort of convulsion; the whole effect was curiously like death. If an autopsy were to he held at this moment Van Horn would be found to have died of doubt. He knows nothing and he suspects everything—that is, everything but the truth. To a man like Diedrich Van Horn, this could be very like dying.

  Then he turned back and Ellery could see that, whatever it was that had died, Diedrich had already anatomized it and flung it away.

  “I didn’t get to my age,” he said with a grim smile, “without learning how to tell when I’m licked. You know, you won’t tell me, and that’s that. Mr. Queen, drop the whole thing.”

  And all Ellery could find to say was, “Thank you.”

  They talked for a few minutes about Wrightsville, but it was not a successful conversation; at the first opportunity Ellery rose and they said good night.

  But at the door Ellery stopped in mid-step.

  “Mr. Van Horn!”

  Diedrich looked surprised.

  “I almost forgot again. Would you mind telling me,” Ellery said, “who in heaven’s name that very old woman is? The one I’ve seen in the gardens and upstairs entering a dark bedroom?”

  “You mean to say—”

  “Now don’t tell me,” said Ellery firmly, “that you never heard of her. Because I’ll run screaming into the night.”

  “Good grief, hasn’t anyone told you that?”

  “No, and it’s driving me mad.”

  Diedrich laughed and laughed. Finally, wiping his eyes, he fumbled for Ellery’s arm and said: “Come on back and have a brandy. That’s my mother.”

  There was no mystery. Christina Van Horn was approaching her hundredth year; rather, her hundredth year was approaching Christina Van Horn, for she had no awareness of time and she was today what she had been for forty-odd years—an arrested creature roaming the barrens of her mind.

  “I suppose the reason none of us mentioned her,” said Diedrich over the brandy, “is that she doesn’t ‘live’ with us in the usual sense. She lives in another world—the world of my father. Mother began to act queer after Father’s death, when Wolfert and I were still boys. Far from her bringing us up, we tended more and more to take care of her. She’d come from a very strict Dutch Calvinist home, but when she married Father she really lived with hell’s fire, and at Father’s death she took up his…” Diedrich groped, “his ferocious piety as a sort of tribute to his memory. Physically, Mama’s a wonderful specimen; the doctors marvel at her stamina. She leads an absolutely independent life. She won’t mix with us, she won’t even eat with us. Half the time she doesn’t even bother to put her lights on. She knows the Bible practically by heart.”

  Diedrich was surprised to hear that Ellery had seen his mother in the gardens.

  “She doesn’t leave her room for months at a time. She’s perfectly capable of caring for herself and she’s almost comically insistent on her privacy. She hates Laura and Eileen,” Diedrich chuckled, “and she won’t let them into her room. They have to leave her meals on a tray outside her door, and fresh linen, and so on. You ought to see that room of hers, Mr. Queen—she keeps it clean herself. You could eat off the floor.”

  “I’d like very much to meet her, Mr. Van Horn.”

  “You would?” Diedrich was pleased. “Well, come on.”

  “At this hour?”

  “Mother’s a night owl. Up half the night, does most of her sleeping during the day. She’s marvelous. Anyway, as I told you, time doesn’t mean a thing to her.”

  On their way upstairs, Diedrich asked: “Did you see her very clearly?”

  “No.”

  “Well, don’t be surprised at what you find. Mama got out of step with the world the day Papa died. She just dropped out of the ranks and there she’s stayed, at the turn of the century, while everybody else has gone on.”

  “Forgive me, but she sounds like a character in a novel.”

  “She’s a character in five novels,” chuckled Diedrich. “She’s never ridden in an automobile or seen a movie, she won’t touch a telephone, she denies the existence of the airplane, and she considers the radio sheer witchcraft. In fact, I often think Mama believes she’s living in a literal purgatory—presided over by the Devil in person.”

  “What will she say about television?”

  “I hate to think about it!”

  They found the old woman in her room, an unopened Bible in her lap.

  Whistler’s great-grandmother, was Ellery’s first thought. Her face was a mummified, shrunken version of Diedrich’s, with a still formidable jaw and proud cheekbones covered loosely with pale leather. Her eyes, like Diedrich’s, were the essence of her; they must once, like her elder son’s, have been of extraordinary beauty. She was dressed in black bombazine and her head, which Ellery surmised was nearly bald, was concealed under a black shawl. Her hands had a feeble sort of independent life; the thick stiff blue knobby fingers moved ever so slightly, but continuously, over the Bible in her lap.

  A tray lay on a table beside her, barely touched.

  It was like walking into a different house, in another world, at a distant time. The room bore no relationship to the rest of the mansion. It was poor and old, with battered, very crude handmade furniture, its papered walls yellow with age, and hooked rugs on the floor from which the colors had all but disappeared. There was almost no decoration. The fireplace was of blackened brick, with a handhewn mantelpiece. A Dutch cupboard with chipped and undistinguished delftware stood incongruously beyond the wide and swaybacked bedstead.

  There was no beauty in it anywhere.

  “It’s the room my father died in,” explained Diedrich. “I simply took it along with me when I built this house. Mama could never be happy in anything else…Mama?”

  The ancient woman seemed glad to see them. She peered up at her son and then at Ellery and her withered lips parted in a grin. But then Ellery realized that her pleasure was the pleasure of a disciplinarian about to employ a switch.

  “You’re late again, Diedrich!” Her voice was remarkably strong and deep, but it had a curious flickering quality, like a radio signal that keeps fading out and in again. “Remember what your father says. Wash ye, make you clean. Let me see your hands!”

  Diedrich dutifully held out his great paws and the old lady seized them, peered at them, turned them over. During her inspection she seemed to notice the massiveness of the hands she held in her claws, for her expression softened and she looked up at Diedrich and said: “Soon now, my son. Soon now.”

  “Soon what, Mama?”

  “You’ll be a man!” she snapped, and then she cackled at her own wit. Suddenly her glance darted to Ellery. “He doesn’t come to see me often, Diedrich. Nor the girl.”

  “She thinks you’re Howard,” whispered Van Horn. “Incidentally, she doesn’t seem to be able to remember that Sally’s my wife. Half the time she calls her Howard’s wife—Mama, this isn’t Howard. This gentleman is a friend.”

  “Not Howard?” The news seemed to distress her. “Friend?” She kept peering up at Ellery like an animated little question mark. Suddenly she popped back in her rocker and began rocking violently.

  “What is it, Mama?” asked Diedrich.

  She refused to answer.

  “Friend,” said Diedrich again. “His name is—”

  “Yea!” said his mother; and Ellery quailed, her glance was so fierce. “Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me!”

  He recognized the Forty-first Psalm with uneasiness. She had mistaken him for Howard; and the word “friend” had sent her untethered mind skittering back to what seemed to Ellery a wonderfully relevant cross reference.

  She stopped rocking, snapped, “Judas!” with pure venom, and set herself in motion once more.

  “She seems to have taken a dislike to you,” said Van Horn sheepishly.

  “Yes,” muttered Ellery. “I’d better go. No point in upsetting her.”

  Diedrich stooped over the little centenarian, kissed her gently, and they turned to leave.

  But Christina Van Horn had not finished.

  Rocking with an energy Ellery found slightly distasteful, she shrieked: “We have made a covenant with death!”

  The last thing Ellery saw as his host closed the door was the little creature’s fierce eyes, still glaring at him.

  “Dislike is right,” Ellery said with a laugh. “What did she mean by that parting shot, Mr. Van Horn? It sounded rather lethal to me.”

  “She’s old,” Diedrich said. “She feels her death is near. She wasn’t talking about you, Mr. Queen.”

  But as Ellery picked his way across the dark gardens to the guest house, he wondered if the old lady might not have meant someone else entirely. That Parthian glare had had a point.

  Just as he reached the cottage, a delicate rain began to fall.

  The Sixth Day

  AND THERE WAS NO sleep in him.

  Ellery moved restlessly about the cottage. Beyond the picture window Wrightsville frolicked. The bars would be swarming in Low Village; there would be the Saturday night dance at the Country Club in summer formals; Pine Grove would be jumping with bebop; he could actually see the pearly shimmer of The Hot Spot and Gus Olesen’s Roadside Tavern on the silver chain of Route 16; and the decorous blaze above Hill Drive told him that the Granjons, the F. Henry Minikins, the Dr. Emil Poffenbergers, the Livingstons, and the Wrights were “entertaining.”

  The Wrights…All that seemed so long ago, so tenderly pure. And that was laughable, because when it happened it had been neither tender nor pure. Ellery supposed that his memories had undergone the usual metamorphosis through the witchcraft of time.

  Or was it that what had been neither tender nor pure appeared so sheerly by contrast with the present reality?

  Good sense challenged this theory. The crimes of adultery and blackmail were surely not more heinous than cunning murder.

  Then what was it that made him sense a special quality of evil in the Van Horn case? Evil, that was it. We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement…for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves…For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it; and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it.

  Ellery scowled. It was God with whom Isaiah had threatened Ephraim. Old Christina had misquoted Scripture. For the Lord shall rise up as in mount Perazim, he shall be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act.

  He had the most irritating feeling that he was trying to grab at something as impalpable as it was slick. Nothing made sense.

  He was as bad as the mummified crone in her tomb over there.

  Ellery put away the Bible he had found on the bookshelf and turned to his reproachful typewriter.

  Two hours later he examined what he had milled. It was a stony grist. Two pages and eleven lines of a third, with numerous X-marks and triple word changes, and nothing sang. In one place, where he had intended to write Sanborn, he had actually written Vanhorn. His heroine, who had been reasonably emancipated for two hundred and six pages, had suddenly turned into an elderly Girl Guide.

  He tore up two hours’ work, covered the typewriter, filled his pipe, poured himself a Scotch, and strolled out onto the porch.

  It was raining hard now. The pool looked like the moon and the garden was a black sponge. But the porch was dry, and he sat down in a cane-bottomed bamboo easy chair to watch the attack.

  He could see the watery bombardment on the north terrace of the main house and for a long time he gave himself over to simple observation, with no purpose but distraction from his restlessness. The house was as dark as his thoughts; if the old woman was still up, she had turned out her lights. He wondered if she might not be sitting in the dark, as he was, and what she might be thinking…

  How long Ellery sat there he could not have said. But when it happened he found himself on his feet, the pipe in scattered ashes on the floor beside the empty glass.

  He had fallen asleep, and something had aroused him.

  It was still raining; the garden was a swamp. He had a faraway recollection of thunder.

  But then he heard it again, above the rain.

  It was not thunder.

  It was a racing automobile engine.

  A car was coming around the main house, from the south, from the direction of the Van Horn garage.

  There it was.

  It was Howard’s roadster.

  Someone was trying to warm up a cold motor, riding the clutch and pumping the accelerator in short bursts. Whoever it was couldn’t know much about cars, Ellery thought.

  Whoever it was.

  Of course, it must be Howard.

  Howard.

  As the car got halfway under the porte-cochere, the engine stalled.

  Howard.

  Ellery could hear the sullen whines of the starter. The engine did not turn over, and after a moment the starter stopped whining. He heard the roadster door open and the sound of someone jumping onto the gravel of the driveway. A dark figure came quickly around and raised the hood. An instant later a slender beam appeared, groping in the motor.