The Norths Meet Murder Page 25
“It was a still-room,” she said. “Really a still-room. That was before I took the cabin. The man who had had it was a broker before 1929, and then he turned bootlegger in a small way, and Van Horst let him build a room. He made it solider than the rest of the cabin, I guess to keep the fumes in, or something. So I store things in it—wood and kerosene and just general rubbish.”
Her voice sounded tired, Weigand decided. And, anyway, the Norths would wonder about him. She thanked him for building up the fire, and for being company, but did not urge that he stay. The mist had grown thicker when Weigand stepped out into it, and took a path which he thought was the one they had come by. And almost instantly he was lost, because this path branched and dwindled and seemed to cross another, and ended at a long, rough dock extending into the lake. A boat floated at the end of the dock.
The mist which baffled the flashlight, and the crossing paths and the close-growing sumach, proved unexpectedly difficult. Weigand tried one path, but it ended in a dark cabin which was not the Corbin cabin. Another ended in an outhouse. A third seemed to abandon life entirely in the thick of the undergrowth. Weigand said, “Damn!” when he came to that. He began to feel that he had been pushing his way through the mist for a long time. Then for the first time in hours, he turned his flashlight beam on his wristwatch. It showed 1:20. He must, he thought, already have been gone from the Corbin cabin almost a quarter of an hour, and he had evidently got no place. He stopped and listened.
“Oh, oh, my honey, have a—on me!” he heard. That was the party. He could fill in the pause, because he had heard it filled in before. Everybody was singing, and when they came to the pause they all sniffed resolutely. “Morphine Bill and Cocaine Sue” was being shouted happily to his right. He turned toward it, and found the faintest of the paths. He started along it and then, drawing in his breath quickly, he stopped.
There was something dark and inert lying across the path in front of him, and when his light found it, it was the body of a woman. She lay face down, sprawled shapelessly, and around her head dark wetness caught the light from his torch. Weigand had seen enough death to know he was seeing it again. He bent quickly to throw the light on the face, and to see it he had to lift the head a little. He was flooded, as he did so, with the certainty that he already knew what he would see. And then he let his breath out so that the tiny rush of it was almost a whistle.
Because what he saw was not what he had, in that moment, known he would see. What he saw was the face of Helen Wilson.
Helen Wilson was dead. In the left side of her throat was a ragged gash. But blood was not flowing from it any longer.
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About the Authors
Frances and Richard Lockridge were some of the most popular names in mystery during the forties and fifties. Having written numerous novels and stories, the husband-and-wife team was most famous for their Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries. What started in 1936 as a series of stories written for the New Yorker turned into twenty-six novels, including adaptions for Broadway, film, television, and radio. The Lockridges continued writing together until Frances’s death in 1963, after which Richard discontinued the Mr. and Mrs. North series and wrote other works until his own death in 1982.
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Copyright © 1940 by Frances and Richard Lockridge
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3107-3
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