The Murderer is a Fox Read Free Page A

to her husband's arm. "Bayard, I'm so
glad—" She stopped in a sort of terror, and his glance
wavered on—and then the glitter Ellery had noticed in the
Warden's office sprang into the sunken eyes as they found Davy in a
corner, his arm tightly about Linda.

    "Son!"

    Davy managed a grin. "Hello,
Dad. Meet your daughter-in-law. Remember little Linny?"

    Linda ran to the
white-haired prisoner and threw her arms about him. From the way he
stiffened, she realized she had made a serious mistake. Linda
recoiled, smiling to conceal her confusion.

    "So you're Linny,"
said Bayard. "So grown-up." And his eyes dismissed her.
"Davy."

    "Dad."

    They glanced at each other,
and then away.

    That was all.

    A very bad scene, Ellery
thought with irritation. It lacks color, drama, and above all
significance. A man comes back from the dead and everyone is
embarrassed, including the corpse, although he less than anyone.

    As Chief Dakin pushed a
chair forward, Bayard smiled his vacant smile ind sat down in it to
fold his hands and rest them in his lap and look around with a
certain pleasure of recognition—yes, there's the grand piano
with the same Spanish shawl all fringed with silk Emily used to
have—I remember that—there's the daguerreotype of
Great-grandmother Finggren who went out to Illinois as a "Latter-day
pioneer," as Grandmother Harrison used to say—Talbot's
Harvard Classics on the mantelpiece, and the Danish meerschaum that
came over from the old country with somebody's great-uncle—they've
changed things around a bit, but it's pretty much the same. . . .
Ellery thought how perfectly calculated this bit of nostalgic byplay
was to arouse the sympathy of an audience—the brittle, frail
figure in the too big tapestried chair, smiling sadly at familiar
things all but forgotten.

    If it was calculated.

    They were all talking now,
all but Bayard, talking with great liveliness, about the dry spell
since the bad storm, about Chief Dakin's daughter Elvy who had just
married a Slocum boy, about the triplets old Doc Willoughby had
delivered over at Farmer Hunker's—about everything but what was
on their minds.

    "May I suggest,"
said Ellery, "that we call the meeting to order?" He smiled
at Bayard, who started nervously. "Bayard, your sister-in-law
has offered her home here as our headquarters. Very generously.
However, if you have any objection—you see, Mrs. Fox, I'm being
brutally frank—we'll take rooms at the Hollis or Upham House
and operate from there. Which would you rather do, Bayard?"

    "Which would ... I rather do?" The question seemed to confuse him. He paused
helplessly, then he said: "This is very kind of you, Emily."
He repeated, "Very kind of you."

    "Oh, Bayard!"
Emily burst into tears.

    "Now Emily-"
thundered Talbot.

    "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
Emily swabbed her eyes with a handkerchief that was already sodden.

    Detective Howie looked
about, as if for a spittoon.

    "Before we begin,
Bayard," said Ellery. "Have you anything to tell us?"

    "Tell you?" Bayard
blinked.

    "Well," said
Ellery, "you might tell us whether you poisoned your wife twelve
years ago."

    Linda sucked in her breath;
it was the only sound in the room.

    "I guess you all think
I want to be freed," Bayard began slowly. "But I don't
know. Once I did, but maybe now I'd rather stay where I am. It's
gotten to be sort of like home." He sighed. "Davy, Mr.
Queen told me on the drive over from the prison all about what's
happened to you . . . what you almost did to your. . . wife, and why.
Mr. Queen says this
    investigation means—well,
Davy, I guess if it means all that to you and Linda, I'll do
anything." And now that tantalizing glitter was in his eyes
again. "All I ask is that everybody tell the truth. That's all I
ask. The truth."

    "But Dad." Davy
was shaking. "You haven't answered Mr. Queen's question."

    Bayard regarded his son with
the unconcealed tenderness of a woman. “I did