A Study in Sherlock

“He’s being cared for, sir,” I said, taking his blindfold off and looking at his head wound. To my relief, it appeared that it had clotted, then reopened—perhaps as he stirred awake. Still, the bloodstain on the floor of the hayloft was large enough to be worrisome.

“Untie me so that I can kill that damned bitch and her brother!”

“I’ll untie you, but you must try to lie quietly. Sheriff Anderson is here, and he hasn’t let your niece and nephew move an inch since he arrived.”

“Ah. Good man, Anderson.” He studied me a moment and said, “What the hell happened to your face?”

“Ruined by the same thing that ruined your manners.”

He gave a crack of laughter, and was still overcome by mirth when Slye brought my kit up a few minutes later. Slye raised his brows.

“Hysteria,” I said.

“A lot of that going around,” he said, which set the colonel off again.

Eventually we had him cleaned up, stitched up, and comfortably ensconced in his bed. He had refused to go to the hospital, even when I tempted him with the idea of being closer to his son. “I’m not going to be able to do a damn thing for him there today, while I can still help Anderson here. If I go to that blasted hospital, they’ll drug me sure as hell, and you know it.”

Sheriff Anderson got a statement from him, and told us that Carlton had been located.

“It was a plan that might have worked,” Slye said to the group assembled in the parlor. Sheriff Anderson, Carlton Wedge, the Simmses (now each handcuffed and under the eye of a burly deputy), Wishy, and I had been joined by the colonel, as tough an old bird as I ever care to meet. “You owe your life to your housekeeper and a grocery boy, Colonel Harris.”

“We were never going to kill our uncle!” Anthony protested, even as his sister told him to shut up.

“I may not have every detail just right, but I believe I can come close enough,” Slye said. “Last night, Anthony met Carlton and easily tempted Carlton to drive him to an abandoned barn where Anthony had hidden a few bottles of gin. Carlton, unaware that the drinks poured into his tumbler were spiked, woke up many hours later, wondering who had tied him up, and with no clear recollection of the previous evening’s events. He was able to free himself, and was found by the sheriff’s deputies as he wandered down the road to the village, thinking he must have left his car there.

“Carlton will be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that dear old cousin Anthony was setting him up to be falsely accused of murder.

“The Simmses planned to lure Robert Harris and Colonel Harris to a small lane on a seldom-traveled road. They knew the regular schedule of the household from previous recent visits. Rawls, the housekeeper, the cook—all recall finding the two of you being extraordinarily curious about their routines. The delivery boy from the village came by in the early morning. So matters would be taken care of a little later in the morning—not too late, or Carlton might awaken or be found away from the place where he was supposed to be committing a crime.

“What did they tell you when they called this morning, Colonel?”

“Alice told me that they had met Carlton in the village and told him I wanted to send him to an asylum. Said he’d gone off his head and was going to kill himself on one of the abandoned lanes.”

“What!” Carlton said.

“It was an important part of the plan that the colonel be lured away from the road, to lessen the chance of something felonious being seen by inconvenient witnesses who might come driving up the hill. So Carlton’s Model T was taken to the end of the lane. And Alice waited with the Rolls to keep an eye on things.”

“Not quite,” said the colonel. “She was there to point the way, and hurry us along by exclaiming that Anthony had run down the lane to try to intervene. But she got into my car with us, and rode with us to where Anthony was lying in wait for us. It had started to rain by then, quite hard.”

“Which might, I suppose, have been seen as an aid to their plan: kill the colonel and his heir, make it appear that Carlton was the guilty party, and sit back and inherit. They needed to be sure that the bodies would be found—missing persons cases are hell on probate—so they would leave Carlton’s car to point the way. The rain would make it seem that Carlton’s vehicle got stuck in the mud.”

“It did get stuck!” Anthony said. “And we didn’t know how the old bastard had left his will, so we weren’t going to kill him until we were sure.”

“Anthony! Shut up!” Alice screamed at him.

“Oh, I was supposed to believe that Carlton clubbed me from behind while you two stood and watched? There must be a passel of nincompoops on your father’s side of the family.”

“All sorts of things went wrong, didn’t they?” Wishy said. “Robert didn’t stay to help you, sir?”

“Robert’s no fool. I’m sure he knows that if a man finds himself unarmed and outnumbered, he must put some distance between himself and the attacking force!”