Miss Withers Regrets by Stuart Palmer Page B

But not here. They finally got around to draining the swimming pool this afternoon, and it was buried in the mud and stuff at the bottom. Here it is, still ticking.”
    He showed her the tiny, glittering thing. One link in the flexible platinum band was broken. “It’s a clue, anyway,” the inspector pronounced.
    “The law,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers, “puts a great deal too much faith in tangible things, such as clues and weapons and alibis, and not enough in the imponderables. Whose brilliant mind was it, by the way, that leaped to the conclusion that Pat Montague might have removed the wristwatch from his victim before drowning him? Is it now the official police theory that this was robbery, with murder only an accidental by-product?”
    The inspector looked uncomfortable. “We have to eliminate every possibility,” he said defensively. “Young Montague might have known that the watch was a wedding present from Helen to her husband, and in a flareup of jealousy—”
    “Never in a million years, Oscar Piper.” Miss Withers handed back the watch. “What else did the majesty of the law uncover up at the scene of the crime, if I’m not too inquisitive?”
    The inspector took out a long greenish-brown cigar, sniffed it, and put it away in his pocket again. “It’s a funny setup,” he admitted. “When I first arrived at the Cairns place I could see that nobody was especially anxious to cooperate. The old man is a phony, like most actors. The widow is supposed to be crying her eyes out with grief, but if you ask me, she’s more scared than sorrowful. The kid sister doesn’t care a whoop in hell for anybody or anything, or at least that’s the impression she wants to give—but she hangs around, all the same, trying to kibitz on what we’re doing. The servants are pulling the old, old gag—they pretend they don’t quite understand and retreat into a mess of ‘Yassuhs’ and ‘Ah sho’ly don’ know nuffins.’ ”
    “Defense mechanism,” the schoolteacher put in. “In looking over the place, didn’t you stumble on anything—anything unusual?”
    He scowled. “We went all through the place, particularly Cairns’s desk in the library, but we didn’t find much except receipted bills. The house cost twice as much as he had expected, but I guess he expected that. Cairns’s closet was full of super deluxe elevator shoes, guaranteed to make a man two inches taller overnight—”
    “I wonder,” Miss Withers observed, “why people laugh so much at someone who tried to make himself look taller with special shoes, or younger with hair dye or a toupee, or slimmer with a corset. Because, basically, we all want to appear at our best.”
    “Ugh,” said the inspector. “Well, now you know about as much as I do. Except that in Helen Cairns’s closet she kept a weekend case packed and ready. We thought we had something there for a minute, but she explained that she had packed it six months ago, after she’d had an argument with her husband about plans for the new house, and she had never unpacked. Nothing else incriminating around the place.”
    “There wouldn’t be,” said the schoolteacher. “This is an odd sort of murder, Oscar, and it’s not according to the formula at all. I can’t help feeling that either the wrong person was murdered, or it was at the wrong time, or—or something!”
    He looked at her. “Come clean, Hildegarde. What have you been up to?”
    She told him sketchily about the call on the Beale family. “I can’t help wondering,” she said, “if there could be any tie-up between what Midge Beale told me and something that happened about six weeks ago, when I first came here. I had a call from a little group of upstanding, public-spirited local citizens—Dr. Radebaugh, Mrs. Boad, and Commander and Mrs. Bennington. They at first gave me the impression that they were collecting for a home for wayward girls or something, but finally they admitted that they wanted me to do