“Most of us. I presume that sort of nightmare is familiar enough to you, but I am not a detective and I don’t read crime stories in the papers, I’m too busy. Apparently my brother died — was shot — between 4:30 and 5:30. Titus Ames heard a third shot a little before five o’clock — there had been two previous ones which dead crows account for. At that time my sister April was upstairs taking a nap, but no one was there watching her. My sister was somewhere picking raspberries and grape leaves for a table decoration. I was in a bathroom washing stockings.”
I thought, aha, the magazine was right, she really does! She was going on:
“Celia — Miss Fleet — was in her room writing letters. She answers all the letters from morons my sister April receives. Mrs. Ames was making preparations for the dinner. Daisy, Noel’s wife, was out in a meadow picking blackeyed susans. She calls them daisies. John — my brother-in-law — was chopping wood. Those men actually asked me, very courteously, if I remember hearing his axe going all the time I was washing stockings. I washed my hair too. Mr. Stauffer, whom I violently dislike, had gone to the pond for a swim. Titus Ames was milking cows. Andy had driven to Nyack to get some ice cream, but that doesn’t clear him, because the highway passes not far from where it happened, just the other side of a strip of woods. Sara and Mr. Prescott were in New York and didn’t get there until half past seven, nearly two hours after my brother’s body was found — Mr. Prescott drove Sara out in his car — but I shouldn’t think they’re out of it either — couldn’t one of them have come previously in an airplane and gone back again?”
Wolfe nodded gravely. “Or even a glider from the Empire State Building; it’s only thirty or forty miles. Since it’s already fantastic, we might as well pile it on.”
“It’s not fantastic at all,” Miss Hawthorne retorted. “It’s cold and horrible fact. And they’re going to work on it. They’re going to proceed on the theory that my brother was murdered because he had John Dunn’s career in his grip and wouldn’t let go. They can’t move anything — that is, they can’t convict anyone of murder — but they can ruin John, and they will—”
She pressed her palm to her forehead and closed her eyes.
Wolfe murmured, “A little brandy, Archie.”
I got up to get it, but she shook her head and said, “No.” I hesitated. She said, “No thanks, really,” and dropped her hand and opened her eyes at Wolfe.
She straightened her back. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t intend — I only spoke of all that to explain why I think you shouldn’t go ahead with Miss Karn. We no longer shrink from scandal and sensation. I have no rancor for Miss Karn, but there is no reason she should get anything my brother didn’t intend her to get. I don’t believe that that grotesque paper Mr. Prescott read to us expresses my brother’s intentions at all. Noel had faults, plenty of them, but he told me he was bequeathing a million dollars to the Varney science fund, and nothing will ever convince me that he didn’t do it.”
“You said that this afternoon.”