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  “Neither should I, in this instance. Mrs. Ames was more a charger than a sneaker. I daresay she’d intended to tackle me at the Dysarts’, and when she found I wasn’t at the party, she came straight here. We’ll have to make inquiries.”

  “You can if you want to,” said the security chief. “I’m not sticking my neck out for no yellow marble.”

  Professor Shandy sighed heavily. “I suppose I can’t blame you. No doubt it’s all a mare’s nest. I’ve been traveling all night and perhaps I’m not thinking straight. You might as well go along about your business. I’m going to fix myself a bite of breakfast, then go over and try to make poor Tim Ames understand what’s happened.”

  Chapter 4

  THERE WERE A COUPLE of eggs in the fridge. Shandy fried them and made himself another cup of instant coffee. Then he took a hot bath and a shave. After that, he felt a trifle less like the way Jemima Ames had looked. He put on a light gray shirt, a dark gray suit, and a reticent tie, not because they were appropriate for the errand he had to perform but because he owned no other sort of clothing, aside from the corduroys and flannel shirts he kept for field work.

  Standing in front of the mirror, he brushed his graying hair. He wore it trimmed rather short, making no effort to cover his bald spot. Peter Shandy liked to be neat and he wore garments of excellent quality which lasted for years and saved fuss in the long run, but nobody could have called him a vain man.

  He’d never felt that he had anything to be vain about. He was neither short nor tall, neither fat nor lean. His face was not regular enough to be handsome or ugly enough to be interesting. He thought of it mainly as a place to park his glasses. He put them on, went downstairs for his gray felt hat and gray tweed ulster, and set out to find Timothy Ames.

  How was old Tim going to take the news? It was foolish to speculate, since Shandy would find out soon enough, but natural to be concerned. Ames was his oldest and closest friend at Balaclava. The soil specialist had been the first to understand and sympathize with Shandy’s ideas for improving strains of plants. Over the years, his help had been invaluable. Together, the pair of them had worked, studied, rejoiced, grieved, and fought quietly but tenaciously for research grants, for added laboratory space, for better equipment, for all the perquisites true scholars need but grandstanders are apt to get.

  They had won more often than not because Thorkjeld Svenson was no fool and because they got results. Shandy, Ames, and the college had all made a killing on the Balaclava Buster, a giant rutabaga so prolific and so nutritious as cow feed that it alone generated most of the manure to produce the methane that ran the college power plant, not to mention a stream of royalties from seed companies far and wide.

  The Buster was their greatest but far from their only triumph, and in all the eighteen years of collaboration, their relationship had been marred by only one minor rift. This concerned an extra-fast-sprouting viola which Shandy had wanted to call Agile Alice, while Ames held out for Jumping Jemima. Dr. Svenson had finally appointed himself arbiter and they settled perforce on Sprightly Sieglinde, in honor of Mrs. Svenson.

  Shandy wished now that he hadn’t been so pigheaded. Jumping Jemima was by far the best name of the three. Except that it was too apt. He thought of that dented-in skull and wished he hadn’t eaten those eggs.

  The moment of truth was at hand. He went up to the Ameses’ front door and began his accustomed fusillade. No ordinary knocking could attract Tim’s attention.

  Today, however, Professor Ames must have been on the qui vive. Shandy had been hammering a mere three minutes or thereabout when his old comrade appeared.

  “Pete! Glad to see you.”

  This was no idle platitude. Ames was grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, slapping him on the back, and going into a fit of chortling that threatened to land the man writhing on the door mat. Shandy got them both inside fast and shut the door. A public display of mirth was hardly the thing in a fresh-made widower. It was after seven o’clock by this time. At least one neighbor must be up and watching from a window. Seldom did any event around the Crescent go unobserved or unremarked, even in Illumination time. That was what made it so hard to believe that not one of them knew Jemima had been inside the brick house for three days.

  Reminded of his painful errand, Shandy tried to speak. Tim was in no mood for doleful news.

  “That,” he gasped, “was the funniest—God, Pete, I’ve prayed for twenty-seven years that somebody would have guts enough—” he found an unused chuckle or two, got them out of his system, and wiped his eyes. “How in hell did you ever have the nerve?”

  “I don’t know,” Shandy replied in perfect honesty. “I just did.”

  “You’re a great man, Pete. Care for a drink?”

  “Bit early, isn’t it?”

  Professor Ames considered the question. “Maybe you’re right. How about coffee, then? I don’t think I’ve had breakfast yet. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I ate any supper. Want some eggs or something?”

  “No, I’ve just finished. I’ll cook for you, though.”

  Shandy was no brilliant performer in the kitchen, but he was less incompetent than his friend, as the state of the never very neat room testified.

  “Been keeping bachelor quarters,” Ames explained as he pottered about, searching in vain for a clean frying pan. “Jemima’s off somewhere. This time of year she’s generally some damn place or other, but lately she hasn’t even come home to sleep, far as I can tell. I asked Grimble if he’d seen her around and he got all excited. Asked me when she was here last. How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  “When did you first miss her?”

  “Yesterday afternoon at exactly three o’clock. I remember that because Jemmy phoned from California to wish us Merry Christmas. That reminded me we hadn’t done anything about Christmas dinner and the presents were still sitting on the table. We hadn’t intended to make any big thing of the holiday with both the kids gone and her so wrapped up in that goddamned Illumination, but I did think she might stick her nose in long enough to open her packages. I wish to Christ she’d turn up. We’re out of everything. Now I can’t find any coffee.”

  “Look, Tim, why don’t you come over to my place?” said his friend in desperation. “I’ve got coffee. We can—er—talk about Jemima there.”

  He involuntarily turned his head away as he finished the sentence, so that Ames had no chance to lip-read more than the invitation, which he seemed ready enough to accept. He put on a threadbare tweed jacket which was the only outer garment he ever wore, winter or summer, and shambled alongside Shandy, across the Crescent.

  Regrettably, the sight of those eight plastic reindeer set him laughing again. Shandy could only hope that whoever was watching would decide after the news of Mrs. Ames’s death got around that her husband had been hysterical with grief.

  After the gloom and clutter of Tim’s place, the brick house seemed a cheerful haven in spite of the brown paper parcel that had so recently been taken out of it. Professor Shandy had never thought a great deal about his home before. He’d liked the previous tenant’s old-fashioned furnishings well enough and made few changes, except to weed out the clutter and bring in some of his own, mostly books and potted plants he got to do research on and kept around for company. There was also a handsome water-color portrait of the Balaclava Buster, the work of a lady botany professor who had hoped to reach her colleague’s heart through his rutabaga. Cross-pollination had not been successful. The lady married somebody else and Shandy continued his comfortable bachelor’s life with Mrs. Lomax keeping him tidy and the faculty dining room keeping him fed.

  Insofar as he thought of the future at all, he’d pictured himself going on more or less as he’d been doing. Now for the first time he wondered whether that would be possible.

  He had always managed not to get personally involved in any of the blood feuds that had raged around the Crescent during his occupation, but he knew only too well how high passions could run over
acts far less outrageous than the one he had committed. He had not meant to kill Jemima, of course, but he had deliberately and with malice aforethought made savage mockery of the Crescent’s most cherished tradition and the college’s chief extracurricular money-maker. If Tim had the wit to see his act for exactly what it was, so would the rest of the faculty and so, even more to his peril, would those Stymphalian birds, the faculty spouses. And it was inconceivable that President Svenson would mistake his motive.

  Shandy wasn’t worried about losing his job per se. He had tenure, to begin with, and it would take something like an act of Congress to remove him. Moreover, President Svenson would not hasten to kill, so to speak, the gander who laid the golden eggs. There was always the chance Shandy might hatch another Balaclava Buster.

  In any event, his own share of royalties from that and other successful experiments, coupled with his salary as a full professor and his relatively modest life style, had made Peter Shandy a rather wealthy man. He could retire tomorrow, if it came to that.

  But he didn’t want it to come to that. Fifty-six was ridiculously young to step down. He would miss his work, his colleagues, his students. He would miss the sociabilities of campus life, tiresome as he sometimes found them, and he would miss his house.

  Yet he knew perfectly well that if the full force of his peers’ disapproval was turned on him, it would be impossible to stay here. His life would be made miserable in countless little ways. His lawn would die, his spruces get budworm, his power would fail and his pipes would freeze and nobody would know why. Secretaries would forget to notify him of faculty meetings, hostesses would absent-mindedly leave him off their guest lists, his students would transfer. At the faculty dining room his food would be served cold and late and no colleague would dare to share his table. By the end of the next semester, he would either have quit of his own accord or turned into a curmudgeonly recluse. And he’d have nobody to blame but himself.

  Well, at least he’d given old Tim a good laugh. How much was his friend going to enjoy the joke, when he learned it had cost him a wife?

  Shandy fussed around his own immaculate kitchen, heating water and laying out what he could find in the way of eatables. Then he motioned Ames into what Mrs. Lomax insisted on calling the breakfast nook.

  “Sit down, Tim, sit down. I’ll get the marmalade. Oh, and what about some fruitcake? Elizabeth always sends me a fruitcake.”

  “I know Elizabeth always send you a fruitcake. What the hell’s wrong with you, Pete? You’re flopping around like a hen with its head cut off.”

  Shandy sat down opposite him and propped both elbows on the table for support.

  “The fact is, Tim, I have some bad news for you.”

  His guest set down the mug he’d got halfway to his lips.

  “Pete, it’s not—not the Portulaca Purple Passion? Oh, my God, don’t tell me those seedlings have damped off?”

  “Oh no! It’s—” Shandy started to say, “It’s not that bad,” but caught himself in time. “It’s Jemima, Tim. I found her.”

  For a long time, Ames showed no reaction. Shandy began to wonder if he’d heard. Then he said, “You mean she’s dead, don’t you?”

  Shandy nodded. His friend bent his head and sat staring down into his coffee mug. At last he picked it up, drank off the cooling liquid, and wiped his mouth with a fairly steady hand.

  “How did it happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Now that the barrier was broken, Shandy found it easy enough to keep going. “I came home this morning—I’d been gone since Thursday evening—and found her stretched out behind the sofa with her skull fractured. Dr. Melchett said she’d died instantly, if it’s any comfort to you. She’d been there pretty much the whole time I was gone. She had on that long purple cape and an evening skirt. It looked as though she must have come in to take down those cursed decorations, and had a fall. She’d apparently brought in a little stepladder from the kitchen here—”

  “What for?”

  “To stand on, they assumed.”

  “Who assumed?”

  “Grimble and the police chief, a chap named Ottermole. Know him?”

  “Snotty young bastard about four sizes too big for his britches? I damn well ought to.”

  Ames breathed fire through his luxuriantly haired nostrils for a while, and Shandy recalled that it was Ottermole who had taken away Tim’s driving license.

  “Look here, Pete, I wish to hell you’d quit pussyfooting. All that ‘apparently’ and ‘they assumed’…why don’t you just say the sons of bitches misread the evidence, which is exactly what I’d expect a pair of nincompoops to do. Show me where you found her.”

  “Finish your breakfast first.”

  The widower shoved a whole slab of fruitcake into his mouth, and got up from the table. Chewing hard, he followed Shandy into the living room.

  “The sofa wasn’t pulled out as it is now,” Shandy explained. “We had to move it to get at the—at Jemima.”

  “Show me.”

  Shandy pushed the heavy piece of furniture back into its usual place, parallel with the window, a few feet out from the wall.

  “And the stool was how?”

  “Like this.” He laid the small ladder back where he’d found it. “And Jemima was lying on her back with her head resting against the top edge, and this Santa Claus thing on top of her. Shall I demonstrate?”

  “Yes.”

  Shandy joggled himself into position as best he could.

  “Is that how she was lying,” Tim asked, “in a straight line with the stool?”

  “Just about. She wouldn’t have been able to fit any other way. There’s only about three feet of width back here.”

  “Mh. How did you happen to find her?”

  “Now, that’s something that puzzles me, Tim. I stepped on a marble.”

  Shandy went over to the whatnot and picked up the little dish Alice had given him so many years before. “I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed these, but Elizabeth’s niece gave them to me a long time ago. You remember she used to visit me sometimes?”

  “Of course I remember. Nice little kid. Damn sight better behaved than my own.”

  “Er—at any rate, I’ve always kept this bowl of marbles here on the whatnot. There were thirty-eight.”

  Ames nodded perfunctorily. He took it for granted Shandy would know.

  “When I got home this morning, the marbles were scattered over the living room floor and out into the hall. I might not have noticed, since I was cold and hungry and in a state of—er—general perturbation, but one of them tripped me up. So I went hunting for the rest. At first I didn’t think to look behind the sofa because it seemed impossible any could have got there. The base is solid right down to the floor, as you can see, and besides, the floor slants a bit in the opposite direction. It’s an old house, you know. But I knew I was one short and I’d looked everywhere else, so—”

  “Did you find the marble?”

  “No. I’ve asked them to search her clothing. It might be in her pocket or somewhere. But, drat it, Tim, I don’t see how she could have spilled those marbles. There was no need for her to go anywhere near the whatnot.”

  “What gets me is that step stool,” said Ames. “What the hell would she bother to drag that in here for? These ceilings aren’t very high, and Jemima was a big woman. She could have reached that mask easily enough from the floor. You try it. You’re taller than I am.”

  “And she was at least a couple of inches taller than I.”

  Shandy went to another window and reached up. He had no difficulty in touching the plastic ornament.

  “There, see,” said the husband. “Anyway, it wouldn’t have been like Jemima to bother about that stool. Damned awkward place to put it, for one thing. She’d have been more apt to shove the sofa over against the window and jump up on that, if she needed to, which she didn’t. Jemima spent half her life leaping around on the furniture. That was why I wanted to call tha
t viola the Jumping Jemima. Remember the one we had the fight about that time? I was trying to get back at her about some damn thing or other, I forget what. Water over the dam now. Well, that’s one less thing on my conscience, thanks to your pigheadedness.”

  “Thanks to me, she’s dead,” said Shandy bitterly. “If I hadn’t lost my temper with her and pulled this damn fool stunt, she wouldn’t have come here in the first place.”

  “You sure she came by herself, Pete?”

  The two old friends looked into each other’s eyes. Shandy shook his head slowly.

  “The only thing I’m sure of is that I found her dead in my house. Melchett says—”

  “That horse’s ass would say whatever he thought Dr. Svenson wanted to hear. You know that.”

  “Yes, I know. And Grimble says she probably came straight here from the Dysarts’ party, about half past nine on the evening of the twenty-second.” Shandy’s lips twisted. “At least that gives me an alibi. I was running away to sea by then.”

  He gave Ames a brief rundown of his short-lived adventure aboard the Singapore Susie. His friend nodded.

  “Stroke of luck for you, Pete. At least you’re in the clear. Leaves me in the soup, of course.”

  “You?” Shandy stared at him in astonishment. “Tim, if you were going to murder your wife, you’d have done it a long time ago.”

  “That’s opinion, not evidence.”

  Nevertheless, Professor Ames’s grin returned for an instant. “She was an awfully exasperating woman to be married to, Pete. She was the world’s rottenest housekeeper, she minded everybody’s business but her own, and she never once shut her mouth that I can remember. Nevertheless, being her husband had its good points. For one thing, it stopped me from thinking of my deafness as an affliction.”

  He emitted an odd little wheeze that would under other circumstances have become a chuckle. “It’s good to have one friend I can say rotten things to without feeling like a skunk.”

  “That’s not so rotten,” Shandy replied. “Hell, Tim, you do have to live with your deafness. Living with anybody but Jemima, you’d have felt constantly frustrated at the thought that you might be missing something by not hearing what she said. With a less assertive woman, your conscience would have driven you to make social efforts that are hard for you to handle. As it was, you could do as you pleased and still have somebody to send out your shirts. I’m putting it badly but you know what I mean. I suspect there are a few people around here who might have envied your situation.”