Miss Withers Regrets by Stuart Palmer

Class of ’26. And Jed Nicolet is a lawyer, and lawyers are too smart to commit murder. Besides, Jed is supposed to have a crush on Lawn, not Helen.”
    Miss Withers digested that. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Adele spoke up suddenly, “but I’m going to have a snort. Purely medicinal, just to keep the top of my head from coming off. I feel like the hammers of hell, the ones they keep in the corner to pound toenails with. Where is it, Midge, dear ?”
    “There isn’t anything in the house but the chartreuse,” Midge told her.
    “I tried and couldn’t.”
    Miss Withers declined a pickup with thanks, and Adele tried the chartreuse and couldn’t, either. The schoolteacher rose to her feet, deciding that this lead, which had looked so promising at first, was worked out. “There’s just one question that I want to ask,” she said. “Of course you don’t have to answer, but it might help in clearing Pat Montague and putting an end to this investigation. Who, of all the people involved in the case, do you consider most capable of committing murder?”
    “Lawn!” Adele said. “Lawn Abbott.”
    “But why?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Except that she’s such a strange, silent person, a sort of law unto herself. And she’s dark and mysterious—sort of poisonous, somehow. She did break up Helen and Pat’s romance, I know she did. And Helen knows it too.”
    “And what did Lawn ever do that was on the wrong side of the ledger?”
    “Aw, I don’t like to …”Adele shrugged. “Well, when she was in school, some swanky place near Boston, because that was when Thurlow Abbott still had some of his money, a poor little music teacher with a wife and three children got kicked out of his job for being caught kissing her. And she was supposed to have run away and got into some trouble and been in jail down south somewhere. Then a boy at Bar Harbor, two summers ago, tried to kill himself because she wouldn’t run away with him. Besides”—and Adele made it clear that this was the crowning argument, the clincher—“besides, she hasn’t any women friends, and she doesn’t seem to want any!”
    Miss Withers nodded. “Perhaps that is why Lawn didn’t show up at her sister’s housewarming, at least until the last minute. Well, I must be getting along. Thank you both for your help.” She gathered her umbrella and pocketbook.
    “That’s all right. Drop in and listen to that new radio program, The Beale Family, any afternoon at five.” Adele glared at her husband and then headed for the stairs.
    Midge Beale walked to the door with Miss Withers. “Don’t mind Adele, she’s just hung over. Wonderful little wife—best housekeeper you ever saw. She can make a dollar do the work of three.”
    “How nice—and how loyal of you to say so.”
    He shrugged. “If my opinion is worth anything,” Midge went on, “you won’t get anywhere asking questions of Bennington and the rest of them. These local bigwigs stick together, and they’re closemouthed. You should have seen the fuss Bennington and Nicolet made at the party when they thought I was eavesdropping on them in the library. And all they were doing was having a huddle over Huntley Cairns’s taste in literature.”
    Miss Withers, about to head down the steps towards her taxi, stopped short. “Literature? You mean they were interested in his library?”
    “That’s right. And then they got started arguing with Mame Boad over whether or not I liked dogs. There was something Nicolet found in the far bookcase—something in a thin red book that he was going to read out loud, only Bennington stopped him because I was there. They were all hopped up about it.”
    “Thank you so much,” Miss Withers said. “It doesn’t seem pertinent at the moment, but you never can tell. I’m just collecting bits of cardboard now; I’m not trying to fit them into the puzzle yet.” She frowned. “I wonder—no, I guess not. Good night, Mr. Beale.”
    She climbed