“You have, Mr. Van Horn.”

  “Who?” His laborer’s fists took his full weight as he leaned over the desk.

  But Ellery slumped until the back of his neck rested on the top of the chair.

  “Who!”

  “Mr. Van Horn.” Ellery rolled his head. “I’ve just made a discovery so…sidereal that it brought me back here when I’d have said an hour, and a half ago an Act of Congress couldn’t have pulled the trick.

  “A great many things have happened since I stepped off that train last Thursday. At first they seemed disconnected. Then the outlines of connections appeared, but only of obvious and ordinary ones. Through it all I was bothered by the feeling that they had, oh, a greater connection, an all-over something…a pattern. I had no idea what the pattern was. It was just a feeling—call it an intuition; you develop a special sense when you’ve poked around the darker holes of what’s laughingly called the human soul as long as I have.”

  Diedrich’s eyes remained glacial.

  “I put it down to imagination; I didn’t pursue it. But just now, driving away from Wrightsville, the flash came.

  “The lightning image is a cliché,” murmured Ellery, “but, there’s no substitute for it as an adequate expression of how it happened. It just struck me. ‘The bolt from the blue.’ By its light I made out the pattern,” Ellery said slowly, “the whole, hideous, magnificent pattern. I say ‘magnificent’ because there’s grandeur in it, Mr. Van Horn—the grandeur, say, of Satan who was, after all, Lucifer. There’s beauty in the Dark Angel, of a sort; and the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose. I know. This is gibberish to you. But I’m still not over the,” Ellery paused for the word, “the apocalyptic awfulness of it.”

  “Who?” growled Diedrich. “What did you find out, or figure out, or whatever it was?”

  But Ellery said: “The diabolical feature of this pattern is its inevitability. Once it’s laid down on the cloth, so to speak, and the scissors taken up, it must cut to the last selvage. It’s the perfect thing; it must be perfect, or it’s nothing. That’s why I knew. That’s why I called you. That’s why I very nearly broke my neck getting back to you. There’s no stopping it. It’s got to fulfill itself. Got to.”

  “Fulfill itself?”

  “Go on to the end.”

  “What end!”

  “I told you, Mr. Van Horn. Murder.”

  Diedrich looked at him a moment longer. Then he pushed away from the desk and lumbered over to his armchair. He sat down, put his head back.

  With this man only doubt and uncertainty are defeating. He can face anything if he knows. But he must know.

  “All right,” said Diedrich in a rumble. “There’s going to be a murder. And I take it I’m the murderee. Is that it, Mr. Queen?”

  “It’s as perfectly sure as—as gravitation. The pattern is incomplete at this point. There’s only one thing which can complete it, the crime of murder. And once I identified the pattern and its designer, I knew that you were the only possible victim.”

  Diedrich nodded.

  “Now tell me, Mr. Queen. Who’s planning to kill me?”

  Their glances locked across the room.

  Ellery said: “Howard.”

  Diedrich rose and came back to the desk. He opened a humidor.

  “Cigar?”

  “Thanks.”

  He held the desk lighter over to Ellery’s cigar. The flame was untroubled.

  “You know,” said Diedrich, puffing, “I was prepared for anything but this murder business. Not that I necessarily accept your conclusion, Mr. Queen. I have a lot of respect for you as a craftsman, as I think I made clear when you first came. But I’d be a fool to take your word for anything like this.”

  “I don’t expect you to take my word for it.”

  Diedrich looked at him through the blue smoke. “You’ll prove it?” he exclaimed.

  “It proves itself. I told you, it’s perfect.”

  Diedrich was silent.

  Then he said, “This Howard thing. Mr. Queen…he’s my son. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t actually conceive him. I’ve read enough detective fiction to get a laugh out of the writers who avoid a blood relationship between a parent and a child when the child, say, is to be the murderer in the story; they do it by making the child a foster child. As if that made any difference! The…the emotional tie between people is a result of a lifetime of living together and has practically nothing to do with genetics. I’ve brought Howard up from infancy. What he is I’ve made him. I’m in his cells. And he’s in mine.

  “I admit I haven’t done a very good job, though God knows I’ve tried my best. But murder? Howard a murderer, with me his intended victim? It’s too…too storyish, Mr. Queen. Too unbelievable. We’ve shared a life for over thirty years. I can’t accept it.”

  “I know how you feel,” said Ellery irritably. “I’m sorry. But if my conclusion is wrong, Mr. Van Horn, I’ll never make another. I’ll…I’ll quit thinking.”

  “Big words.”

  “I mean every one of them.”

  Diedrich began to walk up and down, the cigar jutting from his mouth at an angry angle.

  “But why?” he said harshly. “What’s behind it? It can’t possibly be for the usual reasons. I’ve given Howard everything—”

  “Everything but one thing. And, unfortunately, that thing is what he wants most. Or thinks he does, which comes to the same thing. Also,” murmured Ellery, “Howard loves you. He loves you so self-centeredly, Mr. Van Horn, that, granting certain premises, killing you becomes absolutely logical.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” shouted Diedrich. “I’m a plain man and I’m used to plain talk. What’s this pattern you claim is going to wind up in my murder? By Howard, of all people!”

  “I’d rather explain with Howard here—”

  Diedrich started for the door.

  “No!” Ellery leaped. “You’re not going up there alone!”

  “Don’t be a fool, man.”

  “Mr. Van Horn, I don’t know how he’s going to do it, or when—for all I know, it may be planned for tonight. That’s why I…What’s the matter?”

  “Planned for tonight.” Van Horn glanced ceilingward, very quickly, but shaking his head almost as he did so.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “No. It’s too silly. You’ve got me as jumpy as…” Diedrich laughed shortly. “I’m getting Howard.”

  Ellery had him by the arm before he could unlock the door.

  After a moment Diedrich said: “You’re really convinced.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Sally and I occupy separate bedrooms. But it’s so damned far-fetched!”

  “It can’t be a hundredth as far-fetched as what I’ve got to tell you, Mr. Van Horn. Go on.”

  Diedrich scowled. “After that business tonight, after you left, Sally was terribly nervous. More nervous than I’ve ever seen her. She told me upstairs there was something important she wanted me to know. Something, she said, that she’d kept from me and couldn’t keep from me any longer.”

  Too late, Sally.

  “Yes?”

  Diedrich glared at him. “Don’t tell me you know…whatever it is…too!”

  “Then she didn’t tell you after all?”

  “I’m afraid I was still upset by the necklace business. Frankly, I couldn’t take any more just then. I told her it would have to wait.”

  “But that’s not it, Mr. Van Horn! What was it that worried you just now?”

  “What’s the matter, Queen? Damn it, what’s the matter?”

  “What worried you?”

  Diedrich flung the stub of his cigar into the fireplace with all his strength. “She begged me to listen,” he cried, “and I said I had this work to finish tonight and whatever it was could wait. She said, All right—then I’ll wait up, I’ve got to tell you tonight. She said she’d wait up for me in my bedroom. That if I worked very late I might find her asleep in my bed, but that I was to wake her up and—”

  “In your bed. In your bed?”

  Diedrich’s bedroom door stood open.

  Diedrich jabbed the fight button and the room leaped at them and Sally, who was part of the room, leaped more strongly than the bed in which she was lying or any of the other dead things around her.

  And this was queer, because Sally was dead, too.

  Sally was ugly-dead, distorted-dead, she did not look like Sally at all. The only thing of Sally’s that fingered on this wrenched and congested gargoyle of a face was the faint smile which had irritated Ellery so at their first meeting. Now, because it alone remained of all the remembered Sally, it comforted him. He put his fingers in her hair and pulled gently to get her head back so that he might look at what he knew was to be seen, the Van Gogh fingerstrokes on the canvas of her throat painting the story of her death in powerful tones.

  She lay twisted in a matrix of violence. Her legs and arms had done this to the bedclothes in her last creative moments.

  The flesh of her torn neck was very cold.

  Ellery stepped away and jostled Diedrich and Diedrich lost his balance and sat down, hard, on the bed, on one of Sally’s legs. He sat there, unconscious with his eyes open.

  Ellery got a hand mirror from Diedrich’s bureau and returned to the bed to put the mirror to the dead mouth, knowing it was dead but performing the act through habit. It was hard to breathe for the congestion at the base of his own throat, but he was unaware of the pain. Inside, somewhere, a voice was charging him with responsibility for this great crime; but he was unconscious of that, too. It was only later, when he put the mirror with its red print of Sally’s lips back on her husband’s bureau, that he became aware of what the voice was saying, over and over; but then he went quickly out of Diedrich’s bedroom.

  Howard was lying on his own bed upstairs, in the bedroom adjoining the big studio.

  He was fully clothed and he was in the same stupid trance in which Ellery had found him after that wild night in the Fidelity cemetery.

  You were your own best diagnostician, Howard. You hypothecated Mr. Hyde and you foresaw murder most foul.

  There was something about his hands.

  Ellery raised one of them. Four long soft hairs were caught between two of the powerful sculptor’s fingers and under the nails of all the fingers except the thumb were little bloody particles of Sally’s throat.

  The Ninth Day

  CHIEF DAKIN WAS IN and out all night and that was a touch of home, for the others were all new. Where was Prosecutor Phil Hendrix of the dove-bill mouth who had replaced Young Cart Bradford who was now in the second renewal of his lease on the gubernatorial mansion in the state capital? Where was nervous Coroner Salemson of the asthma and the gooseberry wine? Where old palsied Dune, of the Duncan Funeral Parlors? Alas. Hendrix was hunting witches in Washington, Salemson slept gratefully in Twin Hills Cemetery, and the elder Mr. Duncan, who had placed two generations of Wrightsvillians into the waiting earth, was one with the air and the wind and the dust, for he had left imploring orders in his will to be cremated.

  There was a saturnine young man who persisted in giving Ellery long exploratory looks; his name was Chalanski, and it turned out that he it was who now played Nemesis to the felons of Wright County; the coroner was a brisk lean surgical fellow named Grupp, with a long nose and scalpel eyes; and the mortician (for Wrightsville was still lacking an official morgue) was the chubby junior Mr. Duncan who, to judge from the shiny-lipped relish with which he discussed the post-mortem problems with the coroner, County Prosecutor Chalanski, and Chief of Police Dakin, had been conceived on a slab, cradled in a casket, weaned on embalming fluid, and had expended the first yearnings of his puberty on some weekend visitor to his father’s establishment. Ellery didn’t like the way rotund Mr. Duncan looked at Sally; he didn’t like it at all.

  Some time during Wednesday morning, a stout flat-footed individual with a neck like bark, ploughed in, giving off powerful odors; and this was County Sheriff Mothless, successor to Gilfant. No improvement! Fortunately, Sheriff Mothless lingered only long enough to make sure that the newspaper people outside spelled his name correctly.

  And there were others—state troopers, Wrightsville radio patrolmen, civilian-looking people with black bags, and just people—among the latter, Ellery suspected, being some of the more elastic-necked townsfolk who were exercising the traditional American prerogative of tramping around the squire’s manse airing a long-smothered curiosity.

  Well, he thought, there’s no reason why murder in Wrightsville should be sweeter-smelling than murder anywhere else.

  Mr. Queen was feeling strangely at peace. In one part of him only, of course; most of him was occupied by fatigues and unpleasantnesses. He had had no sleep; he had unfortunately been compelled to witness the Ayesha-like transformation of Diedrich Van Horn from prime to senescence; he had had to sustain himself through two hours of Wolfert Van Horn, who had trapped him in a corner of the living room and assaulted him with reminiscences of Howard’s evil tendencies from earliest boyhood: how Howard had hunted garter snakes and chopped them into little pieces, and pulled wings off flies, and once, at the age of nine, had filled his, Wolfert’s, bed with thistles and how he, Wolfert, had always warned his brother that no good would come of suckling the brat of the devil knew what parents, and so on. And, of course, there was always Howard himself, his eyes bright red and his hair a tangle and his air of absolute bewilderment, his only activity being frequent visits to the bathroom accompanied by a Wrightsville policeman Dakin called “Jeep,” whom Ellery did not know. This officer reported that on these excursions Howard merely scrubbed his hands, so that as hour after hour dragged by Howard’s hands became paler and more water-wrinkled, finally looking like something washed up on a beach. Howard was the real trial Wednesday morning, because he could answer no questions; he could only ask them. The chief neurologist of Connhaven State Hospital spent two hours with him on the scene of the crime and emerged looking thoughtful. Ellery talked to this medical gentleman, giving Howard’s amnesic history; and the doctor, who was also Psychiatric Consultant to the State Penal Board, nodded frequently, and with that mysterious about-to-pounce-but-never-doing-so air which Ellery found so trying in so many medical men.

  Nevertheless, there was that small portion of peace; and this was because something which had been darkness was now light and The End was within reach.

  He had informed Dakin and Chalanski that he had something vital to contribute to the case and he asked that before Howard was removed from the premises he, Ellery Queen, be given the opportunity to divulge it in the interests of truth, if not justice, as the case against Howard would be distorted, baffling, and incomplete otherwise; if, indeed, it would make sense at all. And he further requested that the neurologist remain, at which the neurologist looked annoyed, but remained.

  At two-thirty o’clock Wednesday afternoon Chief Dakin came into the kitchen, where Ellery was devouring the half-eaten corpse of a roast duck (Laura and Eileen had locked themselves in their rooms and had not been seen all day), and Dakin said: “Well, Mr. Queen, if you’re ready, we are.”

  Ellery gulped one more mouthful of brandied peaches, wiped his lips, and rose.

  “I note,” said Ellery in the living room, “that Christina Van Horn isn’t with us. No,” he said quickly, as Chief Dakin stirred, “don’t bother. The old lady wouldn’t have anything to contribute but quotations from the Bible, which might get in the way. She doesn’t know much, if anything, about any of this. Let her stay upstairs.

  “Diedrich.” It was the first time he had addressed Van Horn so, and his Christian name now roused Diedrich a little, so that he looked up almost with interest. “I’m going to have to say some things that are going to hurt you, I’m afraid.”

  Diedrich’s hand flapped. “I just want to know what this is all about,” he said courteously. Then he added, “There isn’t much else left,” but that was more to himself.

  Howard was all shoulders and knees in his chair, needing a shave, needing sleep, needing solace—an isolated lump already out of touch with reality. Only his eyes kept in touch; and they were hard to look at. In fact, he was rather painfully ignored by everyone but the neurologist and Wolfert, and they looked nowhere else.

  “To make this…” Ellery hesitated, “this thing intelligible, to make it clear to you at each of its specific and numbered steps, I’ve got to go back to the beginning. To what happened from the time Howard walked into my apartment in New York over a week ago. I’ll recap as briefly as I can.”

  And Ellery went over all the events of the past eight days: Howard’s awakening in the Bowery flophouse, his coming to Ellery, the story of his amnesic attacks, his fears, his appeal to Ellery to come to Wrightsville and keep watching him; Ellery’s first night in the Van Horn house, when at dinner Wolfert brought the news that the Art Museum Committee had accepted Diedrich’s condition that Howard be the official sculptor of the classical gods who were to decorate the face of the proposed Museum building, and of how Howard had fired to the assignment, making sketches and in the succeeding days even beginning work in plasticine for small models; the second day, when Sally, Howard, and Ellery had driven up to Quetonokis Lake, and how Howard and Sally had told Ellery of their debts to Diedrich—Howard, the foundling who owed Diedrich everything, Sally, who had been Sara Mason of Polly Street, destined to poverty and the life of an ignorant drab, but for Diedrich—and then how they had confessed to him the crime of their passion in the Lake Pharisee lodge and its consummation there (and as Ellery told of this he tried not to look at Diedrich Van Horn out of shame for all the sinned-against, for Diedrich shrank into himself like a paper being consumed into ash); and Ellery told of the four indiscreet, revealing letters Howard had written to Sally afterward, and the story of Sally’s japanned box with its false bottom and the box’s theft in June; and of the sudden telephone call from the blackmailer on the day preceding Ellery’s arrival, and of the second call, and of Ellery’s part in the negotiations; of his conversation with Diedrich the same night of the excursion to Quetonokis Lake, when Diedrich had told him not only of the June robbery of Sally’s jewel box but also of the robbery of the night before, the theft of twenty-five thousand dollars in five-hundred-dollar bills from the wall safe in the study—the very sum in the very bills which Howard had handed to Ellery at the lake in an envelope for payment over to the blackmailer; of the third day, when Ellery had been outwitted by the blackmailer, and of Diedrich’s revelation that night that he had finally discovered Howard’s origin as the son of two poor farm people named Waye, who were long since dead; of Howard’s reaction, and of the Fidelity Cemetery episode in the early hours of Sunday morning, when Howard had attacked the gravestones of his parents with mud and a chisel and mallet during an amnesic seizure, and of how Ellery had brought him back to himself afterward, and of how Howard had shown him the plasticine model of Jupiter on which he had scratched his sculptor’s signature, not H. H. Van Horn as he had always signed himself, but H. H. Waye; and of all the events thereafter, including the third call from the blackmailer, Ellery’s pawning of Sally’s necklace at Howard’s request, and Howard’s incredible denial of the truth when Ellery was faced with a charge of grand theft.