And so Mr. Ellery Queen understood why it was possible for such a paragon as Roger Bowen to be facing the electric chair. Even if he himself had been blind to her beauty, the men on the porch would have made him see. Dodd was regarding her quietly, with remote and humble worship. Pringle stared at her with vast thirst—yes, even Pringle, that enormous fat old man. And Father Anthony’s aged eyes were proud, and a little sad. But in Michael Scott’s eyes there was only the fierce jubilance of possession. This was Circe and Vesta in one, and she might move a man to murder as easily as a poet to lyric ecstasy.

  “Well!” he said at last, drawing a deep breath. “Pleasant surprise. Sit down, Miss Scott, while I collect my wits. McGovern was an admirer of yours?”

  Her heels made little clackings on the porch. “Yes,” she said in a subdued voice, staring at the ivory hands in her lap. “You might call it that. And I—I liked him. He was different. An artist from New York. He’d come up to Corsica about six months ago to paint our famous hills. He knew so much, he’d travelled in France and Germany and England, so many celebrities were his friends….We’re almost peasants here, Mr. Queen. I never m-met any one like him.”

  “Sneaky devil,” hissed Mrs. Gandy, her thin features contorted.

  “Forgive me,” smiled Ellery. “Did you love him?”

  A bee buzzed about Pringle’s hairy ears, and he angrily slapped at it. She said: “I—It’s—Now that he’s dead, no. Death—somehow—makes a difference. Perhaps I—saw him in his true colors.”

  “But you spent a lot of time with him—alive?”

  “Yes, Mr. Queen.”

  There was a small silence, and then Michael Scott said heavily: “I don’t interfere in my daughter’s affairs; see? She’s got her own life to live. But I never cottoned to McGovern myself. He was a four-flusher with a smooth line, and plenty tough. I wouldn’t trust him from here to there. I told Iris, but she wouldn’t listen. Like a girl, she sort of went off her nut. He hung around longer than he’d expected—owed me,” grimly, “five weeks’ rent. Why the hell wouldn’t he hang around? Why wouldn’t anything in pants?”

  “There,” drawled Ellery, “is the perfect rhetorical question. And Roger Bowen, Miss Scott?”

  “We—we’ve grown up together,” said Iris in the same low voice. And she tossed her head suddenly. “It’s always been so settled. I suppose I’ve resented that. And then his interference. He was simply furious about Mr. McGovern. Once, several weeks ago, Roger threatened to kill him. We all heard him; they—they were arguing in the parlor there, and we were sitting on the porch here….”

  There was another silence, and then Ellery said gently: “And do you think young Roger shot this city-slicker, Miss Scott?”

  She raised her devastating eyes to his. “No! I’ll never believe that. Not Roger. He was angry, that’s all. He didn’t mean what he said.” And then she choked and to their horror began to sob. Michael Scott grew brick-red, and Father Anthony looked distressed. The others winced. “I-I’m sorry,” she said.

  “And who do you think did?” asked Ellery softly.

  “Mr. Queen, I don’t know.”

  “Any one?” They shook their heads. “Well, I believe, Pringle, you mentioned something about McGovern’s room having been left precisely as you found it the night of the murder….By the way, what happened to his body?”

  “Well,” said the coroner, “we held it after the autopsy for inquest, of course, and tried to find some relative to claim the body. But McGovern apparently was alone in the world, and not even a friend stepped forward. He left nothing except a few possessions in his New York studio. I fixed him up myself, and we buried him in the New Corsican Cemetery with the proceeds.”

  “Here’s the key,” wheezed the policeman, struggling to his feet. “I got to go on down to Lower Village. Dodd’ll tell you everything you want to know. I hope—” He stopped helplessly, and then waddled off the porch. “Comin’, padre?” he muttered without turning.

  “Yes,” said Father Anthony. “Mr. Queen…Anything at all, you understand—” His thin shoulders drooped as he slowly followed Pringle down the cement walk.

  “If you’ll excuse us, Mrs. Gandy?” murmured Ellery.

  “Who found the body?” he demanded as they trudged upstairs in the cool semi-darkness of the house.

  “I did,” sighed the coroner. “I’ve been boarding with Michael for twelve years. Ever since Mrs. Scott died. Just a couple of old bachelors, eh, Michael?” They both sighed. “It was on that terribly stormy night three weeks ago—thundered and rained, remember? I’d been reading in my room—it was about midnight—and I started for the bathroom down the hall upstairs before going to bed. I passed McGovern’s room; the door was open and the light was on. He was sitting in the chair, facing the door.” The coroner shrugged. “I saw at once he was dead. Shot through the heart. The blood on his pajamas…I roused Michael at once. Iris heard us and came, too.” They paused at the head of the stairs. Ellery heard the girl catch her breath, and Scott was panting.

  “Had he been dead long?” he asked, making for a closed door indicated by the coroner’s forefinger.

  “Just a few minutes; his body was still warm. He died instantly.”

  “I presume the storm prevented any one from hearing the shot—there was only one wound, I suppose?” Dr. Dodd nodded. “Well, here we are.” Ellery fitted the key Pringle had given him into the lock, and twisted it. Then he pushed open the door. No one said anything.

  The room was flooded with sunlight; it looked as innocent of violence as a newborn baby. It was a very large room, shaped exactly like Ellery’s own. And it was furnished exactly like Ellery’s. The bed was identical, and it stood in a similar position between two windows; the table and rush-bottomed, cane-backed chair in the middle of the room might have come from Ellery’s room; the rug, the bureau, the highboy…Hmm! There was a difference.

  He murmured: “Are all your rooms furnished exactly alike?”

  Scott raised his tufted brows. “Sure. When I went into this business and changed the shack into a rooming house, I bought up a lot of stuff from a bankrupt place in Albany. All the same stuff. All these rooms up here are the same. Why?”

  “No special reason. It’s interesting, that’s all.” Ellery leaned against the jamb and took out a cigaret, searching the scene meanwhile with his restless gray eyes. There was no faintest sign of a struggle. Directly before the doorway were the table and cane-backed chair, and the chair faced the door. In a straight line with the door and chair on the far side of the room stood an old-fashioned highboy against the wall. His eyes narrowed again. Without turning, he said: “That highboy. In my room it’s between the two windows.”

  He heard the girl’s soft breathing behind him. “Why…father! The highboy wasn’t there when—when Mr. McGovern was alive!”

  “That’s funny,” muttered Scott in astonishment.

  “But on the night of the murder was the highboy where it is now?”

  “Why—yes, it was,” said Iris in a puzzled way.

  “Certainly. I remember now,” said the coroner, frowning.

  “Good,” drawled Ellery, pushing away from the door. “Something to work on.” He strode over to the highboy, stooped and tugged at it until he had pulled it back from the wall. He knelt behind it and went over the wall, inch by inch, intently. And then he stopped. He had found a peculiar dent in the plaster about a foot from the wainscoting. It was no more than a quarter of an inch in diameter, was roughly circular, and was impressed perhaps a sixteenth of an inch into the wall. A fragment of plaster had fallen away; he found it on the floor.

  When he rose he wore an air of disappointment. He returned to the doorway. “Nothing much. You’re sure nothing’s been disturbed since the night of the murder?”

  “I’ll vouch for that,” said Scott.

  “Hmm. By the way, I see some of McGovern’s personal belongings are still here. Did Pringle search this room thoroughly on the night of the murder, Dr. Dodd?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “But he didn’t find anything,” growled Scott.

  “You’re positive? Nothing at all?”

  “Why, we were all here when he was looking, Mr. Queen!”

  Ellery smiled, examining the room with a peculiar zest. “No offense, Mr. Scott. Well! I think I’ll go to my own room and mull over this baffling business for a bit. I’ll keep this key, Doctor.”

  “Of course. Anything you want, you know—”

  “Not now, at any rate. Where will you be if something comes up?”

  “At my undertaking parlors on Main Street.”

  “Good.” And rather vaguely and wearily Ellery smiled again and turned the key in the lock and trudged down the hall.

  He found his room cool and soothing, and he lay back on the bed with his hands crossed beneath his aching head, thinking. The house was quiet enough. Outside one of his windows a robin chirped and a bee zoomed; that was all. Past the fluttering curtains came the sweet-scented wind from the hills.

  Once he heard Iris’s light step in the hall outside; and again the rumble of Michael Scott’s voice downstairs.

  He lay smoking for perhaps twenty minutes; and then all at once he sprang from the bed and darted to the door. Opening it to a crack, he listened….All clear. So he quietly stepped out into the hall and tip-toed to the locked door of the dead man’s room, and unlocked it, and went in, and turned the key again behind him.

  “If there’s any sense in this misbegotten world—” he muttered, stopped, and hurried to the cane-chair in which McGovern had been sitting when he died. He knelt and closely examined the solid crisscrossing mesh of cane making up the back of the chair. But there was nothing wrong with it.

  Frowning, he got to his feet and began to prowl. He prowled the length and breadth of the room, stooped over like an old hunchback, his underlip thrust forward and his eyes straining. He even sprawled full length on the floor to grope beneath pieces of furniture; and he made a tour under the bed like a sapper in No Man’s Land. But when his inspection of the floor was completed, he was empty-handed. He brushed the dust from his clothes with a grimace.

  It was as he was replacing the contents of the waste-basket, disconsolately, that his face lit up. “Lord! If it’s possible that—” He left the room, locking the door again, and made a quick and cautious reconnaissance up and down the hall, listening. Apparently he was alone. So, noiselessly and quite without a feeling of guilt, he began room by room to search the sleeping quarters.

  It was in the cane-chair of the fourth room he investigated that he found what his deductions had led him to believe he might find. And the room belonged to the person to whom he had even beforehand vaguely glimpsed it as belonging.

  Very careful to leave the room precisely as he had found it, Mr. Ellery Queen returned to his own quarters, bathed his face and hands, adjusted his necktie, brushed his clothes again, and with a dreamy smile went downstairs.

  Finding Mrs. Gandy and Michael Scott occupied on the porch playing a desultory game of two-handed whist, Ellery chuckled silently and made his way to the rear of the lower floor. He discovered Iris in a vast cavern of a kitchen, busy stirring something pungently savory over a huge stove. The heat had carmined her cheeks, she wore a crisp white apron, and altogether, she looked delectable.

  “Well, Mr. Queen?” she asked anxiously, dropping her ladle and facing him with grave, begging eyes.

  “Do you love him as much as that?” sighed Ellery, drinking in her loveliness. “Lucky Roger! Iris, my child—you see, I’m being very fatherly, although I assure you my soul is in the proverbial torment—we progress. Yes, indeed. I think I may tell you that young Lothario faces a rosier prospect than he faced this morning. Yes, yes, we have made strides.”

  “You mean you—he—Oh, Mr. Queen!”

  Ellery sat down in a gleaming kitchen chair, filched a sugared cookie from a platter on the porcelain table, munched it, swallowed, looked critical, smiled, and took another. “Yours? Delicious. A veritable Lucrece, b’gad! Or is it Penelope I’m thinking of? Yes, I mean just that, honey. If this is a sample of your cooking—”

  “Baking.” She rushed forward suddenly and to his stupefaction clutched at his hand and pulled it to her breast. “Oh, Mr. Queen, if you only could—would—I never knew I—I loved him so much until just—just now….In jail!” She shuddered. “I’ll do anything—anything—”

  Ellery blinked, loosened his collar, tried to look nonchalant, and then gently disengaged his hand. “Now, now, my dear, I know you would. But don’t ever do that to me again. It makes me feel like God. Whew!” He swabbed his brow. “Now, listen, beautiful. Listen hard. There is something you can do.”

  “Anything!” Her face glowed into his.

  He rose and began to stride around the spotless floor. “Am I right in supposing that your Samuel Dodd’s very faithful to his office?”

  She stared. “Sam Dodd? What on earth—He takes his job seriously, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I thought so. It complicates matters.” He smiled grimly. “However, we must face reality, mustn’t we? My dear young goddess, than whom no lovelier creature ever graced the sour earth, you’re going to vamp your Dr. Sam Dodd to within an inch of his officious life tonight. Or didn’t you know that?”

  Anger flashed from her black eyes. “Mr. Queen!”

  “Tut-tut, although it’s most becoming. I’m not suggesting anything—er—drastic, my child. Another cookie is called for.” He helped himself to two. “Can you get him to take you to the movies tonight? His being in the house here makes matters difficult, and I’ve got to have him out of the way or he’s liable to call out the State Militia to stop me.”

  “I can make Sam Dodd do anything I want,” said the goddess very coolly, the blush leaving her cheeks, “but I don’t understand why.”

  “Because,” mumbled Ellery over another cake, “I say so, dear heart. I’m going to trample over his authority tonight, you see. There’s something I must get done, and without the proper hocus-pocus of papers and things it’s distinctly illegal, if not criminal. Dodd could help, but if I’m any judge of character he won’t; and so if he doesn’t know anything about it neither he nor I will have anything on the well-known conscience.”

  She measured him impersonally, and he felt uncomfortable under those level eyes. “Will it help Roger?”

  “And,” said Ellery fervently, “how!”

  “Then I’ll do it.” And she lowered her eyes suddenly and began to fuss with her apron. “And now if you’ll please get out of my kitchen, Mr. Ellery Queen, I’ve some dinner to make. And I think”—she fled to the stove and took up the ladle—“you’re very wonderful.”

  Mr. Ellery Queen gulped, flushed, and beat a hasty retreat.

  When he pushed open the screen-door he found Mrs. Gandy gone, and Scott sitting silent with Father Anthony on the porch. “The very men,” he said cheerily. “Where’s the afflicted Mrs. Gandy? By the way, how does she negotiate those stairs in that wheel-chair?”

  “Doesn’t. She’s got a room on the lower floor,” said Scott. “Well, Mr. Queen?” His eyes were haggard.

  Father Anthony was regarding him with steadfast gravity.

  Ellery’s face turned bleak of a sudden. He sat down and drew his rocker close to theirs. “Father,” he said quietly, “something informs me that you serve—honestly serve—a higher law than man’s.”

  The old priest studied him for a moment. “I know little of law, Mr. Queen. I serve two masters—Christ and the souls He died for.”

  Ellery considered this in silence. Then he said: “Mr. Scott, you mentioned before that you had gone through Belleau Wood. Death, then, holds no terrors for you.”

  The burly man’s hard eyes bored into Ellery’s. “Listen, Mr. Queen, I saw my best friend torn in half before me. I had to pick his guts off my hands. No, I’m not scared of all hell; I’ve been there.”

  “Very good,” said Ellery softly. “Very good indeed. Aramis, Porthos, and—if I may presume—D’Artagnan. A little cockeyed, but it will serve. Father, Mr. Scott,” and the priest and the burly father of Iris stared at his lips, “will you help me open a grave tonight?”

  The eve of St. Walpurga was months dead, but the witches danced that night nevertheless. They danced in the shadows flung by the dark moon over the crazy hillside; they squealed and screeched in the wind over the mute, waiting graves.

  Mr. Ellery Queen felt uncommonly glad that he was one of three that night. The cemetery lay on the outskirts of Corsica, ringed in iron and bordered with capering trees. An icy breeze blew death over their heads. The gravestones glimmered on the breast of the hillside like dead men’s bones polished clean and white by the winds. An angry, furry black cloud hid half the moon, and the trees wept restlessly. No, it was not difficult to imagine that witches danced.

  They walked in silence, instinctively keeping together. It was Father Anthony who braved the spirits, breasting the agitated air like a tall ship in the van, his vestments flapping and snapping. His face was dark and grave, but unruffled. Ellery and Michael Scott struggled behind under the weight of spades, picks, ropes, and a large bulky bundle. On all the moving, whispering, shadow-infested hillside they were the only living beings.

  They found McGovern’s grave in virgin soil, a little away from the main colony of headstones. It was a lonely spot high on the hill, a vulture’s roost. Earth still raw made a mound above the dead man, and there was only a scrawny stick to mark the clay that lay there. Still in silence, and with drawn faces, the two men set to work with their picks while Father Anthony kept the vigil above them. The moon swam in and out maddeningly.

  When the hard earth had been loosened, they cast aside the picks and attacked the soil with their spades. Both wore old overalls over their clothes.