Phillip Sturgess and Norm Adcock exchanged a long look, her sobs overtook her once more.
21
“Well?” Phillip Sturgess asked. “What do you think?”
It was past ten o’clock, but to look at the little Westover police station, anyone would have thought it was the middle of the day. Most of the force was there, and people filled the small lobby, asking questions of anyone whose attention they could get. But everyone on the force had been told to reply to all questions in the same way. Over and over again the answer was repeated: “We don’t know yet exactly what happened. As soon as we have some information, there will be an announcement.”
The rumors, of course, had been running rampant, feeding off one another, passed from person to person.
All of them, naturally, centered on Beth Rogers, and all of them were variations on the same theme.
“Mr. Sturgess found her right over the corpse. It wasn’t even cold yet, and she was covered with blood.” Then there would be a falsely sympathetic clucking of the tongue, and a heavy sigh. “She’s always been an odd child, though, and these last few weeks—well, I don’t like to repeat the stories I’ve heard.”
But of course the stories were repeated, and embellished, and exaggerated, until by nightfall there were few people in Westover who hadn’t heard that Beth had already killed Jeff Bailey, but had been protected by the power of the Sturgesses, who hadn’t wanted a scandal.
And, of course, there was the horse—Phillip Sturgess’s prize mare—that Beth had slaughtered in its stall. Would a sane person kill an innocent animal? Of course not.
And they’d all seen Beth, hadn’t they? Seen her wandering around town by herself? And talking to herself? Certainly they had.
The kids had known, of course, and their parents had been foolish not to have listened to them. Children always know when something’s wrong with someone—they have a sixth sense about those things. In a way, the more sanctimonious citizens declared, Alan’s death was the responsibility of them all, for they’d all seen the signs of Beth’s illness, but no one had done anything about it.
They came and went from the police station, gathering in the square to enjoy the warmth of the summer evening, and speculate on what would happen next. Some of them dropped in at the Red Hen to have a drink, and listened with serious faces as Eileen Russell repeated over and over again what had happened to Peggy the last time she had gone to visit Beth. All of them agreed that Peggy Russell had been lucky to escape with her life.
Bobby Golding, who was an orderly at the clinic, got off shift at eight, and went directly to the Red Hen, where he reported that Beth was currently being held in a locked room, where she was held into a bed with restraints, and would be transferred to the state mental hospital in the morning. And, he added, she would never stand trial for what she’d done, because schizophrenics never did.
And that, of course, wasn’t fair, someone argued. There wasn’t really anything crazy about Beth at all. She was just damned clever. All she really wanted to do was get back up to Hilltop, and she couldn’t do that as long as her father was still alive. So she’d pretended to be crazy, and killed him, knowing perfectly well that they’d just put her in a hospital for a couple of months, then let her go. And when she came back to Westover, then nobody would be safe.
And so it went, until by ten o’clock Beth had been charged, tried, and convicted.
Except by Norm Adcock, who now leaned back in his chair and rubbed his tired eyes, then tried to stretch the knots out of his aching shoulders. “Only way I can figure it is an accident,” he said in reply to Phillip’s question. He gestured to the reports that sat in a neat stack on his desk. “We found the broken brace three feet away, and there were traces of both paint and rust on Alan’s hands and shoes that match what we got off the girders. I suppose the rust could have come from anywhere, but the paint was only used on the struts supporting the roof. Couldn’t have come from anywhere else. Besides, we even found his fingerprints on the glass over the spot where that brace broke. He must have been up there checking the dome for something, and his own weight broke