“Oh!” she gasped between laughing and weeping. “How I pity poor Saint Peter when you get to the Pearly Gates! Five minutes after he refuses to let you in you’ll make a triumphant entrance, carrying along his bunch of keys and his halo! But it was glorious in you to save Thax that way. You’re wonderful! And—and it was all a—a fib about your thinking he had stolen those things? Please say it was! Please do!”
“My dear,” Miss Gregg instructed her, “if I had said I lay awake through utter faith in the boy it wouldn’t have carried half the weight as if I made them think I started out on my vigil with a belief in his guilt. Can’t you see that? Of course, he never stole those things. I made that quite clear to you last evening, didn’t I?”
“And—and, Auntie—you—you KNOW he’s innocent of—of this other awful charge, don’t you? Say you do!”
“The worst affront that can be offered is an affront to the intelligence,” Miss Gregg informed her. “Which means your question is a black insult to me. I didn’t grip his hand as Clive did, or shout ‘Shame!’ as you did when he was accused. None of those ‘Hands-Across-the-Sea’ demonstrations were needed to show my faith in him. My faith isn’t only in the man himself, but in his sanity. Whatever else Thax Vail is he’s not a born fool. Not brilliant. But assuredly not a fool. He wouldn’t kill young Chase or any one else—with a knife that every one would recognize at once as Thax’s own—and then go away, leaving it in the wound for the police to find. No, Thax didn’t kill Chase. But some one who hates Thax did.”
“What—”
“Why else should he do it with that knife? There must have been plenty of more suitable weapons at hand—unless he has killed so many people this week that all his own weapons are in the wash.”
“But who—?”
“He must have picked up the knife here,” insisted Miss Gregg, “after I used it for a corkscrew—either right afterward or else finding it here in the night after we’d all gone to bed. These windows with their backnumber clasps are ridiculously easy to open from outside. And from where Thax sat or lay in the study the sound of any one entering this room carefully couldn’t have been heard. Whoever came in to kill Willis Chase must have planned to do it with some other weapon—some weapon he brought along to do it with. Then he saw the knife, and he knew it would switch suspicion to Thax. So he used that.”
“But the windows here were still fastened from inside, just now,” argued Doris. “Besides, it’s proved the murderer got in through a window upstairs. He couldn’t have come in through these windows and gotten the knife and then have gone out again and closed and locked them from the inside. He couldn’t. And Thax was the last person downstairs here last night. So nobody from inside the house, either, could have gotten down here and stolen the knife and gone upstairs with it again. The study door is right at the foot of the stairs. Thax couldn’t have helped seeing and hearing him, even if he’d been able to step twice over Macduff without disturbing the dog. No, it couldn’t be.”
“You are quite right,” agreed Miss Gregg. “It couldn’t. Lots of things in this mystery-drama world can’t be. But most of them are. Which reminds me I must wake Horoson and have her get some coffee made. We’ll all be the better for breakfast.”