members of the party who had not rushed out to the fallen bridge, and I had not been surprised at their absence. Neither Miss Dinmont’s wheelchair nor Mr. Quilp’s great bulk could have had easy passage through the deep snow. All the same, I was happy to see them again, comforted by the knowledge that neither of them had seized the moment to kill the other, nor had some third party knocked off both of them.
“What do we know about the sabotage of the bridge?” I went on. “First, let’s set a time. We know the bridge was intact when the Littlefields arrived last night. That was around ten or ten-thirty. The snow continued to fall after their arrival, because by this morning their footprints were completely covered.” I paused significantly. “And so were the footprints of the person who sabotaged the bridge. Orris walked through two feet of virgin snow to get to that bridge. Whoever sabotaged it must have done so not long after the Littlefields crossed it.”
“I told you,” Lettice said, gripping her husband’s arm. “We could have been killed.”
“If you’d arrived later,” I said, “or if the killer had gone to the bridge sooner, you might have been on it when the ropes broke. But you weren’t his target, and I don’t think Orris was, either. Not specifically.”
Someone wanted to know what I meant.
“He couldn’t be sure who he’d get. Maybe someone else would arrive from outside. Maybe someone other than Orris would be the first to leave. The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to believe that the damage he did to the bridge wasn’t designed to kill anybody.”
“Then what was the point of it?”
“To prevent anyone from crossing the bridge. To keep us all here, and keep the rest of the world on the other side of Cuttlebone Creek.”
The colonel was nodding in understanding. “A bridge too far,” he said thoughtfully. “He sabotaged the bridge—when would you say, Rhodenbarr? Before or after he struck down Rathburn?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hard to say until we know who he is and why he did it, eh? But if he just wanted the bridge out, why stop at cutting the ropes halfway through? Why not make a good job of it and drop the bridge into the gorge in one shot?”
“He may have been concerned about how much noise it might make when it fell,” I said. “And worried that someone within earshot might catch him in the act. From what I saw of the rope ends, he didn’t leave a great deal uncut. He may have expected the bridge to fall by itself in a couple of hours, from the weight of the snow that was continuing to fall. If that had happened, Orris would still be with us.”
That last observation tore at the heart of Earlene Cobbett. The poor thing cried out and clutched her hand to her bosom, a task to which one hand was barely equal. The other hand, though, held a tray containing two glasses of sherry, and it wasn’t equal to the task, either; the tray tilted, the glasses tipped, and the sherry wound up spilling onto Gordon Wolpert.
“A little while ago,” I said, “Orris fired up the snowblower. It didn’t start right away, but once he got it running he managed to clear a path ten or twelve feet long. I heard him trying to get it started, though I didn’t pay much attention. I heard it a lot more clearly when it cut out.”
“It made an awful sound,” Miss Dinmont recalled. “As though everything inside was being ground up.”
I turned to ask Nigel if that had ever happened before. He said it seemed to him that the snowblower, while occasionally difficult to start in cold weather (and of no use whatsoever in warm weather), had in all other respects performed perfectly the entire winter.
“Here’s what I think,” I said. “My guess is it was deliberately sabotaged. I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but when we all rushed out of the house there was a faint smell in the air.”
“Gasoline,” Millicent Savage said. “From when Orris was running the snowblower.”
“I noticed it while we were working on the snowman,” her father confirmed. “What about it?”
“There was more to the smell than gasoline.”
He thought about it. “You’re right,” he said. “There was another element to the odor, but I can’t tell you what it was.” And his nose wrinkled, as if to pursue the scent through the corridors of