Omit Flowers by Palmer Stuart

Author:Palmer, Stuart [Palmer, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781480419322
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

IX

My locks are shorn for sorrow

Of love which may not be;

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

ARE PLOTTING cruelty….

—ELINOR WYLIE

THE NEXT HALF HOUR was a muddled nightmare. We carried Mildred gently inside and sent for a doctor, although it was obviously of no use. Still, we could not leave her out there in the fog and the dark although she would never again feel chill or see shadow.

Mildred was dead.

Somehow the almost-cheery, Gilbert-and-Sullivanish atmosphere went out of the case right then and there. Up until that moment it had been more or less of a moot point whether anyone had died at all, and if so whether it had been the uncle whom most of us were so anxious to mourn.

But nobody wanted Mildred dead. She was young, with, as we say, everything to live for. She was beautiful, and there is something essentially wrong in the ending of a beautiful thing.

As Dr Eckersall—who happened to be the foremost local practitioner as well as coroner—was bending over the pitifully crumpled body of the girl, Sheriff Bates pushed through the throng of gaping, exclaiming relatives. I had been trying to talk to Dorothy, trying to ease the shock to her. But the tall blonde sister did not seem to hear my voice. I left her, obeying the sheriff’s beckoning hand, and followed him up the stairs two steps at a time.

“Which was her room?” he demanded. I showed him the door of the bedroom which had belonged to the two sisters. “We’ll probably have to smash it down,” the sheriff warned me. But the door was unlocked, even a trifle ajar.

I have never seen a room as empty—spiritually empty—as that bedroom. Except for some cigarettes barely lighted and crumpled into the ash tray on the bureau, and for a bright scarf thrown across one pillow, the room was neat as a new pin.

But Sheriff Bates wasn’t interested in the room. He was looking toward the window in the corner, the open, unscreened window whose curtains were blowing idly in the fog-laden breeze. I joined him there, looked out and straight down at the smashed rosebushes which fronted Prospice.

“Not so far,” said the sheriff judicially. “But far enough, I guess. She must have struck on her head.”

I said the usual, ineffectual things indicative of shock and horror. The sheriff looked at me very peculiarly.

“Best way out, wasn’t it?”

When I stared at him blankly, he repeated—“Best way out for the girl, I’d say. Under the circumstances…”

And then Todd Cameron, his face as hard and gray and expressionless as granite, came into the room.

Sheriff Bates started. “Oh—I didn’t hear you drive up! Well, young man, I’ve got to give you credit. Your scheme worked—though not just the way we thought it might.”

“Scheme?” echoed Todd blankly.

“Sure,” went on the sheriff. “Your psycho-what-you-call-it plan to smoke out the murderer. Funny that we both counted on the killer trying to make a getaway instead of committing suicide like this! Of course, for a murderer it’s the best getaway of all—just curtains, and you never need to worry about anything again.

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