Miss Withers Regrets Read Online Free Page B

of Huntley Cairns and ran off into a bed of young hyacinths.
    Then Officer Ray Lunney tapped on the front door, then looked in and beckoned to Sergeant Fischer, who immediately joined him outside. “Sheriff’s coming,” Lunney said. “I can hear that heap of his gasping up the hill.”
    “About time he got here,” pointed out Fischer complacently. “We’re ready for him. You know old man Vinge, if he gets the idea there’s any complicated angles to a case, he’s apt to sidestep. He’s not going to risk making any enemies, especially in this touchy section, with him having to stand for election every two years. You go inside and keep everybody quiet while I give him the lowdown.”
    Sergeant Fischer waited until Lunney was inside and then turned and headed out into the driveway. The Sheriff’s conservative black sedan coughed its way up the hill and turned into the driveway, and then a fatherly-looking man started to get out, peering through thick-lensed glasses.
    “We’re taking bows tonight, Sheriff,” Fischer said cheerily. “The case is all washed up and put to bed. We’ve got our man tied up in the back seat of the radio car, all ready to take into town. He’s guilty as a skunk in a chicken yard.”
    Sheriff Vinge nodded a little uncomfortably. “Good, good. Er—who is it?”
    “Don’t worry,” the sergeant assured him. “It’s nobody—I mean it’s only Joe Searles. You know, the old codger that drives around in an old station wagon loaded with junk, talking to himself half the time.”
    Vinge began to relax. “Oh! Yeah, I know him. Lives alone in a shack down by the wharf. Why’d he do it?”
    “There wasn’t any actual quarrel that we can prove,” Fischer explained. “But it’s only natural that the old man would have a grudge against a man like Cairns, who made a lot of money overnight and bought this place. The house that used to stand here, you know, was originally built by Joe Searles’s own grandfather. He owned all the land along here once—used to grow hops and sorghum. I don’t guess Searles has ever got over the idea that it’s rightly his. The old man’s done plenty of talking around the village, too. About how he didn’t like Cairns, and how Cairns didn’t know anything about trees or flowers or how to take care of land. And Cairns seems to have complained about the size of the bills old man Searles was running up at the nursery and the feed store. There was bad blood between ’em, Sheriff, and I don’t think Searles will hold out for more’n two or three hours of questioning.”
    “That makes sense,” the sheriff said, definitely happier now. “Go on.”
    “Well, it figures like this. Searles had been so grouchy around the place that Mrs. Cairns—that’s the pretty, plump girl who used to be Helen Abbott when she came out here summers—she sent him off on some errands, to buy fertilizer and stuff, so he wouldn’t be around growling at the guests during the party if they walked on a tulip bed or picked a rose or something. Only he came back early, and he saw Cairns splashing around in the swimming pool. On a homicidal impulse he took a garden rake and held him under, right against the bottom of the pool. When he was sure Cairns was through breathing he dragged the body out and then rushed to phone us a crazy story about how he saw somebody else doing it. He claims he locked this guy—the usual tall dark powerful stranger—in the men’s side of the bathhouse down there, but of course when we unlocked it there was nothing inside but some of Mr. Cairns’s clothes.”
    Sheriff Vinge nodded. “No witnesses?”
    “There wouldn’t be any, Sheriff. It was sprinkling a little, and that kept the guests inside. Lawn Abbott—that’s Mrs. Cairns’s younger sister—came up the hill past the pool a few minutes after Searles rushed into the house to phone us, but she was too late to see him at work, which was no doubt lucky for her.”
    “Guess so. Well, as long