“Idiot,” said the fat man. “Stupid swine.” She jerked as if he had struck her.
“If you hadn’t found the loot,” said the police chief to Dr. Reinach brusquely, “why did you let these people go tonight?”
Dr. Reinach compressed his blubbery lips; he raised his glass and drank quickly.
“I think I can answer that,” said Ellery in a gloomy tone. “In many ways it’s the most remarkable element of the whole puzzle. Certainly it’s the grimmest and least excusable. The other illusion was child’s play compared to it. For it involves two apparently irreconcilable elements — Alice Mayhew and a murder.”
“A murder!” exclaimed the policeman, stiffening.
“Me?” said Alice in bewilderment.
Ellery lit a cigarette and flourished it at the policeman. “When Alice Mayhew came here that first afternoon, she went into the Black House with us. In her father’s bedroom she ran across an old chromo — I see it’s not here, so it’s still in the other White House — portraying her long-dead mother as a girl. Alice Mayhew fell on the chromo like a Chinese refugee on a bowl of rice. She had only one picture of her mother, she explained, and that a poor one. She treasured this unexpected discovery so much that she took it with her, then and there, to the White House — this house. And she placed it on the mantel over the fireplace here in a prominent position.”
The stocky man frowned; Alice sat very still; Thorne looked puzzled. And Ellery put the cigarette back to his lips and said: “Yet when Alice Mayhew fled from the White House in our company tonight for what seemed to be the last time, she completely ignored her mother’s chromo, that treasured memento over which she had gone into such raptures the first day! She could not have failed to overlook it in, let us say, the excitement of the moment. She had placed her purse on the mantel, a moment before, next to the chromo. She returned to the mantel for her purse. And yet she passed the chromo up without a glance. Since its sentimental value to her was overwhelming, by her own admission, it’s the one thing in all this property she would not have left. If she had taken it in the beginning, she would have taken it on leaving.”
Thorne cried: “What in the name of heaven are you saying, Queen?” His eyes glared at the girl, who sat glued to her chair, scarcely breathing.
“I am saying,” said Ellery curtly, “that we were blind. I am saying that not only was a house impersonated, but a woman as well. I am saying that this woman is not Alice Mayhew.”