The Weak-Eyed Bat

“They’ve been stolen,” she said. “They’re all gone. Somebody stole them. All my lovely boxes have been stolen.”

She began to rock back and forth as if she were in great pain. Then she stopped suddenly and said:

“I heard Tom tell you I didn’t believe in doctors. That’s how I knew that he knew. He didn’t want you to get a doctor for me. He was afraid you’d find out that I’d taken sulfanilamide. Tom was very stupid.”

“Was he trying to protect you?”

“Oh yes! You see, he hadn’t any money. I have. I have a lot of money. But if I died he wouldn’t get any of it. I fixed it like that. He wouldn’t get any of it. He had to protect me.”

Mr. Smith shifted his legs. I wonder if dogs ever do this, he thought, ever get all mixed up like this and go crazy. I wonder if Horace would ever go crazy...

“I suppose you gave Jennie some of your drugs on Tuesday after dinner?” Prye said.

“That was easy,” she confided. “I asked her to have a cup of tea with me and I gave her two nembutal capsules. I knew they took about twenty minutes to work, just time enough for her to go down and put Tom’s dinner on the table and wash my dishes. As soon as she came back upstairs to work on her afghan she went to sleep in the chair beside my bed. Nembutal works quickly but the effects wear off soon. I knew I could get her to wake up when I called her.”

“How did you know Tom was going to meet Miss Alfonse at nine o’clock?”

“The phone call,” she said. “I could always tell when Tom was lying, and when he said it was the doctor on the phone I made him tell me the truth. I cried. He couldn’t bear to see me cry, and then he told me it was Miss Alfonse who had called. He didn’t know what she wanted. I told him he’d better meet her and find out.

“He left the house about ten minutes to nine and I put on my raincoat and a pair of shoes and as I passed your boathouse I thought of the ax I’d seen hanging on the wall. I knew you wouldn’t miss it, if you hadn’t been here for two years, so I put it under my coat. He didn’t hear me coming. It was thundering. It was easy to kill him. When I hit him there was a bolt from heaven so that I could see his face. You should have seen it. He was afraid. He was afraid of all the things he’d done—”

Her eyes moved around the room again. She was nodding her head. “You see, it pays to do nothing you’ll be ashamed of.”

The heads bobbed again, one after the other.

“I thought it would be a fine idea to put him in Joan’s canoe. I dragged him along the path to the Frosts’ boathouse. It was very hard. And then she came along. She was scared, too, the nurse. She started to run away when she saw me but I called her back. She was scared, too, but she came. I said I would give her money, a lot of money, if she wouldn’t tell, if she’d help me. So we dragged Tom over and put him in Joan’s canoe and untied the rope. I threw the ax into the lake. I untied the rope of the other boat, too, because it was Susan’s. I hate Susan.”

Susan shrank behind her father, white-lipped, thinking: she hates me but I haven’t done anything to her. I helped her. I was kind to her. I took her the wild-strawberry jam and I picked the strawberries with my own hands, but she hates me. It’s because she’s crazy...

Mary was talking again, her pale eyes flickering over their faces.

“On Wednesday night I was really clever. I sent Jennie downstairs and then I wrote her a letter. I even spelled her name wrong purposely. But nobody noticed.” She frowned at the inspector. “You didn’t even notice.”

“Of course I noticed!” White replied instantly. “It threw me off entirely.”

“You see? Well, then I burned the rest of the paper and envelopes and scattered the ashes out of the window. I went down the back stairs and around to the front door and rapped. I left the letter on the doorstep and then I watched at the dining-room window until I saw Jennie go to answer the front door. Then I went in the back door, up the stairs, and got into bed. Pretty soon you came along with Nora and I heard you talking about pencils. So I hid my pencil on top of the doorjamb in my room. When you came in you thought you were very clever knowing that I’d been out of bed. But you didn’t know I’d done all that, did you? Did you?”

“No,” Prye said, wishing it were over, thinking: it’s not amusing any longer. It’s fun to ride after the hounds but it’s not fun to gang up on the little fox...

“I only made one mistake and that was lying about the ring, and I wouldn’t have made that if I hadn’t been given some morphine. I knew they mustn’t discover my fingerprints anywhere so I always wore gloves. I didn’t find the ring in Tom’s room. I took it off Joan’s finger when she was dead because she wasn’t engaged any longer, an engagement ring was no use to her. I put the ring in Tom’s room. I engaged her to Tom.”

She put her hand to her head again.