The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,76
Look at the mess he created.”
But there was no mess within Rathburn’s room. It was neat as a pin, unlike more than a few of the bedrooms, whose occupants apologized for their untidy state. “You’ll pardon the disorder,” Rufus Quilp said dryly, “but I wasn’t expecting guests.” And Lettice Littlefield, on opening the door to their bridal chamber, rushed to the window and threw it open, as if the room was in urgent need of airing out before anyone could set foot in it. “What’s that smell?” Millicent Savage wanted to know, while her father winced, her mother told her to be quiet, and Lettice herself managed an uncharacteristic blush. Her husband, Carolyn noticed, preened a little, looking pleased with himself.
The search moved to the servants’ quarters and storage areas on the top floor, then back to the ground floor, with its maze of public rooms, its kitchen and pantry, and the guest bedroom shared by the Misses Dinmont and Hardesty, as well as the Eglantines’ private suite. The whole mass of guests and staff trooped through room after room, like Japanese tourists at the White House, determined to see everything.
They didn’t find Rhodenbarr. Not a trace of him, living or dead.
“He’s not in the house,” the colonel told them. “It would seem that he’s cut out on his own, though how or why escapes me.”
“Maybe he went to get help,” Carolyn suggested. “But all by himself? In the middle of the night? Without a word to anybody?”
“It’s hard to credit,” Blount-Buller agreed. “But we’ve searched everywhere, and if he’s not here he must be elsewhere. Point of elementary logic, wot?”
“Unless…”
Everyone looked at Carolyn.
“Unless something’s happened to him,” she managed, “and he’s with…”
“With?”
“With the others,” she said.
“The others,” several people repeated, puzzled, and then Miss Dinmont, who’d missed the action on the upper two floors but had wheeled herself gamely from room to room on the ground door, said, “Oh, of course. The other victims.”
“Actually,” Greg Savage said, “I thought of that.”
“You did?” his wife said, surprised.
“It seemed like something a compulsive killer might do, keep all his victims together. So I looked out the back door, where we moved the bodies, and they’re right where we left them.”
“Untouched,” someone said.
“Far as I can see. The lawn chairs we used, each with a body on it and a bedsheet tossed over it. Actually I couldn’t swear about the bodies, or even about the bedsheets, on account of the snow, but that’s how we left them yesterday and that’s what it looks like today. Three lawn chairs out there in the snow.”
“Three,” someone said.
“Right. Three bodies, three lawn chairs.”
“There should only be two bodies,” Mrs. Colibri said.
Savage rolled his eyes. “One—Jonathan Rathburn. Two—Orris Cobbett. Three—the cook, and I still don’t know her name, but she makes three, and—”
“Orris fell off the bridge,” someone said.
“And we left him where he fell,” someone else said.
Earlene Cobbett let out a reflexive yelp at this last announcement, but no one paid much attention. “My God,” Greg Savage said. “I figured three deaths, three bodies. But if Orris is still at the bottom of the gully, that means—”
And they rushed off to see just what it did mean.
Three lawn chairs, three bodies wrapped in sheets and covered with snow. They gathered around, no one quite daring to be the first to yank a sheet off a chair and display its contents. “Oh, somebody do something!” Carolyn cried, and the colonel cleared his throat and grabbed a sheet and gave a yank, sending powdery snow flying and displaying the frozen corpse of Jonathan Rathburn.
The second bedsheet went the way of the first, revealing the late cook.
“I can’t stand it,” Carolyn groaned, and the colonel tore away the third sheet, and somebody let out a scream, but it wasn’t Carolyn. Her worse fears went unrealized.
Because, while there was indeed a fresh corpse in the third chair, it wasn’t her uh friend Bernie Rhodenbarr.
It was Gordon Wolpert.
Rhodenbarr did it.
That was the clear consensus. Bernie Rhodenbarr, evidently some sort of crazed mass murderer, had claimed his fourth victim. While pretending to spearhead the investigation, he’d bided his time before adding one more to his chain of murders.
“But that’s impossible,” Carolyn said. “You people don’t know him. He’s a good, decent human being.”
“He proved that Mr. Rathburn had been murdered,” Cissy Eglantine remembered, “when we all thought it was an accident. Why would he do that?”
“To draw suspicion away from himself,” her husband suggested.