The Weak-Eyed Bat

“Oh.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “In that case I don’t mind admitting that I did listen to the call. It was so short, I hardly had time not to listen. This Miss Alfonse wanted to meet Mr. Little at some pier at nine o’clock. Is that what you heard?”

“Precisely,” Prye said. “My informant wasn’t quite clear as to whether he said he’d meet her or not. Did he?”

“She seemed to take it for granted that he would,” Miss Jones replied. “She just hung up.”

“Thank you, Miss Jones. Do you like roses?”

“Well, yes, I do, but—”

“No trouble at all,” Prye said, smiling. “Good day.”

The business district of Clayton occupied no more than three blocks on the main street, and Prye had no difficulty finding the town’s only cab station. The manager himself greeted Prye. He had taken the call from the Point at about five o’clock on Monday afternoon. The caller gave her name as Miss Frost, and told him she wanted a taxi at ten o’clock sharp, that she intended to catch the ten-twenty to Toronto. Prye gave the man a dollar and went out.

He found Constable Jakes in his office which was part of the jail itself. The emerald ring was brought out, and Constable Jakes laboriously began to test it for fingerprints. There were none. Prye listened patiently to a recital of the wrongs he had committed by taking the ring: removal of evidence without proper witnesses and failure to seal the ring in an envelope complete with signatures of witnesses.

It was one-thirty by the time he reached Dr. Prescott’s office and was admitted to the autopsy room.

On a slab in the center of the room lay the body of Joan Frost. A butterfly incision had been made in her trunk and the skin lifted back. A suction tube was drawing off the blood. In a pail by the table was her heart and her stomach and her lungs.

“For the love of heaven!” Prye said in a strangled voice.

Prescott looked up, surprised. He was packing the body with sawdust before sewing the skin back on.

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t like this room,” Prye said, reeling toward the door.

Prescott was slightly huffed. He pulled a sheet over the body and washed his hands, and they went out to his front office.

Prescott was smiling. “I’m an undertaker, too. Sit down.”

Prye sat down weakly. “Sorry. Never could stand postmortems.”

“Why did you want to see the body?”

“Did you notice her left hand?” Prye asked.

“Yes. She’d been wearing a ring on her third finger. The skin there was not tanned like the rest of her hand, and it was slightly puffed.”

“The ring fitted tightly then?”

“I’d say so. The report from the Connaught Lab came in this morning. It seems you were right about the bag of stones being used as the weapon. There were pieces of skin and some hairs clinging to it, and the bloodstains were the same type as the body’s.”

“Find anything else interesting?” Prye said.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘interesting,’ but the girl had obviously had relations with at least one man. He may have killed her. The point will have to be brought out at the inquest tomorrow, I suppose, though it’s a delicate one and we try not to offend our summer residents.”

“You may be having a double inquest,” Prye said. “Unless I miss my guess, the man in question has joined his ancestors.”

“Really? Well then, we don’t have to bring that up at all.” Prescott seemed relieved. The summer residents were profitable to him for they had a penchant for admiring poison ivy and picking up odd germs to which the local people were immune.

“The inquest is, after all, merely to ascertain the cause of death and I think that is quite clear. You will attend, Dr. Prye?”

The question was asked merely out of courtesy, as a subpoena had already been delivered to Prye.

Prye touched his coat pocket. “I’ll be there by special invitation. By the way, I prefer to have nothing said about the attack on me if you can avoid it.”

“I’m afraid we can’t. We would like the jury to inspect your head—”

Prye groaned aloud.

“—because you are, in a manner of speaking, like the sole survivor of a sinking ship. From the nature of the attack on you the jury will be able to form a better idea of how the girl was attacked.”

“It seems unnecessary,” Prye said gloomily. “You know how the murder was done — I know — the police know. Probably the only people who don’t know are the coroner’s jury.”

“Democracy,” Prescott said severely. “We must live by the precepts of democracy, Dr. Prye.”

Dr. Prye conceded the point and went out to order some roses for Miss Jones. He was not in the best of humor when he arrived home, but the sight of Nora awaiting him on his front veranda was cheering.

Nora had weathered the first murder, but the storm and the possibility of a second murder had shaken her considerably.