Winter of Discontent by Jeanne M. Dams Page A

seem to pick up on the obvious. Do you suppose I’m getting—” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.
    “Alzheimer’s? No, I don’t suppose any such thing. You’re under stress, that’s all. In any case, you didn’t miss anything that everyone else didn’t also overlook. You thought of the tunnel before I did, or Derek. It was too late. Very well. It might have been too late five minutes after Bill went down there. We don’t know how he died. But wallowing in guilt isn’t going to help anyone, least of all you. Furthermore, don’t you realize I’ll love you every bit as much if one day you do turn into a drooling idiot?”
    “Oh, Alan!” He took me into his arms, and I cried and cried and, finally, got it out of my system.
    “All right,” I said, dabbing my eyes and blowing my nose, “the letter. You never did tell me what it said, exactly.”
    Alan looked me over, decided Id do, and returned to business. “Well, it wasn’t complete, as I think I mentioned. It was the first page only, beginning ‘Dear Waffles’ and ending with an incomplete sentence. It was a rather pointless letter, really, telling ‘Waffles’ all about someone, apparently a friend of both writer and addressee, who was planning a trip to America, to Indiana, in fact.”
    “When did you say this letter was written?”
    “I didn’t. It had no date. It looked old, but I’m no expert on these matters.”
    “Hmm. Do you suppose I could see it?”
    “No reason why you couldn’t see a copy, I’d think. The original will be in an evidence bag by this time, of course.”
    “And they will have fingerprinted it, I’m sure. There are ways of lifting very old prints from paper, aren’t there?”
    “There are, but they won’t have done that.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because (a) it’s expensive, and (b) the letter is only what we call tangential evidence. Bill didn’t die violently, Dorothy. He wasn’t murdered. We won’t know for sure how he did die until they complete the autopsy, but the betting is on either heart attack or stroke, something cardiovascular. The police are keeping the letter only because Walter was attacked. That’s a crime. And Bill was in the tunnel. That’s an odd thing. When odd things happen in the vicinity of a crime, we tend to think they’re connected.”
    “You’re talking like a policeman.”
    “I am a policeman. Or I was.”
    “Well, stop being one for a minute. As an ordinary human being with a good brain, tell me what you think the connection might be between that letter and Bill’s death and Walter’s attack.”
    “I think,” Alan said slowly, “that Bill died because he was under stress. I think he took that letter down to the tunnel for a reason, but the effort was too much for his system, and he collapsed shortly after he got there.”
    “Why shortly after he got there? Why couldn’t he have been there for a while before he died?”
    “For one thing, he wasn’t very dirty. His clothes and hair were almost free of cobwebs and dirt. You must have noticed that the tunnel was full of both. If he’d spent much time there, he’d have been covered. Cobwebs are sticky and hard to brush off.”
    I shuddered. “You’re telling me!”
    “And the other reason I think he’d only been in there a few minutes was that he still had the paper in his hand.”
    I frowned. “I don’t get that one.”
    “My dear, what would he have been doing down there except trying to hide that letter? But he hadn’t done it, so …” Alan spread his hands.
    “Hide it. Yes. That makes sense. Except that it doesn’t. Why would he have wanted to hide a boring letter about someone’s travel plans?”
    “I have the feeling that when we know that, we’ll know a great deal more about his death and whatever’s going on at that museum.”

TEN
     
     
     
    AFTER WE’D CALLED THE HOSPITAL YET ONCE MORE AND HEARD that there was no change, I went next door to see how Jane was doing. Really, I suppose, I was