Ford seized his coat collar and shook him. “Stop it,” he said viciously. “Stop torturing yourself.”

  Mitchell said, “She’s dead, you know. That’s her over there. She’s lying on that table, only she’s dead. She can’t come home any more.”

  The door opened and Dr. Howe came in, sized up the situation in a glance, and came quickly.

  Ford said woodenly, “Better take over, Doc. I can’t do anything with him.”

  Howe nodded silently, set his bag down, and stooped beside the prostrate man. Ford did not look back. He walked quickly out the door, followed by Cameron.

  The reporter was still there, sitting on the edge of the sofa, spinning his hat on one finger and softly whistling, “You Can’t Be True, Dear.”41 Ford didn’t even glance at him. He went slowly over to the window and stood with his hands clasped behind him, staring out. Cameron moved over to a table and picked up a magazine.

  “Feels good to breathe fresh air again,” said the chief.

  Cameron thumbed through the periodical. “I hate formaldehyde. It makes me think of museums.”

  “Does it?”

  After a little Ford said, “Clouding up. Looks like we’ll get more snow.”

  Cameron put down the magazine, went over, and peered at the sky. “Looks like it. I’ll never get a chance to improve my golf.”

  “Me neither.”

  The reporter got up, spinning his hat, and moved over to the window. “Christ,” he said. “Did you see him? He was going to kiss that corpse! Me, I couldn’t stand to look at it and he was going to kiss it!”

  Ford didn’t move for a moment. Then he turned slowly until he had the man fixed in a baleful stare. “Get out of here,” he whispered.

  “I—what? What’s the matter?”

  “Get out of here.” His voice was frightening. “Don’t ever let me see you again.”

  The man inched back. “What? I’m a reporter. You can’t order me around! I’ve got a right here.”

  Ford started moving toward him slowly. There was no doubt as to what he would do when he got close enough. Cameron began moving around in a wide circle. The man backed away. “What’s the matter with you guys?” he whined, but he kept going. Cameron started closing in. The man saw him and went quickly to the door. “You can’t get away with this,” he said. “My editor will have your scalp.”

  They kept coming.

  He opened the side door and went out hastily, slamming it shut. Through the window he could be seen backing out the drive, an angry, perplexed scowl on his face.

  MONDAY, MARCH 20

  The papers on Monday morning, March twentieth, started their stories, “A grief-stricken Mitchell family depart today for Philadelphia bearing with them the body of their daughter Lowell, the Parker freshman who so tragically met her death in Wheeler River two weeks ago.…” The articles ended with the announcement that the inquest into the circumstances of the death was scheduled to start that morning at ten o’clock.

  The inquest was a private one, held in the private chambers of Judge Clifford M. Lee of the County Court in Bristol. The decision to close it to the public was due to the disclosure of pregnancy. That fact was public knowledge but it was a ticklish subject to delve into when the man responsible was not known.

  Ford and Cameron along with Lieutenant Stewart of the State Police, who was permanently attached to the D.A.’s office, were the only ones permitted to hear all the testimony. They were invited because of their familiarity with the background and McNarry was wise enough to realize the value of anything they might contribute.

  The first witness called was Dr. Howe, and he described the position of the body, face up, head pointing downstream, his testimony being backed up by Leslie’s pictures, which Ford had brought. There was no water in the lungs, he reiterated, no marks of violence, the body had been in the water about two weeks, and death had been caused by a broken neck. The neck, he said, had been broken not forward but sideways.

  “If she dove into the water headfirst,” said McNarry, “would that kind of a break be possible?”

  Howe nodded. “Not only possible, but probable. Striking the bottom at a slight sideways angle would do it.”

  “Assuming she held her breath, which would be natural, and she died instantly, then there would be no water in the lungs?”

  “That’s right. The lungs weren’t entirely devoid of water, of course. There had been some seepage. However, she never inhaled any.”

  “Could she have fallen in any other way than headfirst and broken her neck like that?”

  “No.”

  Peggy Woodling was the next witness, and she sat in the chair vacated by the medical examiner at one end of the table facing Judge Lee. There, in a hesitating, faltering voice, she told again the story of Lowell’s last morning on earth, her apparent sickness and subsequent disappearance. McNarry, sitting on the judge’s right, next to Lieutenant Stewart, kept shifting his eyes from the girl’s face to the faces of Ford and Cameron across from him. There was nothing in either of the policemen’s manner to indicate the girl’s tale was at variance in any point with the story she had told before. Ford sat in apparent deep thought, staring into his lap or at the table in front of him. Occasionally he slumped back and stared at the ceiling. He did not look at McNarry, nor did he look at Peggy. He did not appear to be listening.

  After she had finished her story McNarry asked her some questions regarding Lowell in general, her behavior, her interest in boys. Had she ever, in any way, shown more than passing interest in any one boy? She had not.

  “Would you have any idea who could be the father of the child she was bearing?”

  “None whatever.”

  “Would you have any idea how or when it could have happened?”

  Peggy shook her head. “The papers say she was pregnant, but it doesn’t sound at all like Mitch. I’ve known her for six months and I just can’t believe it.”

  “Nevertheless,” said McNarry, “it’s true. Now, would you say that Lowell was a party girl?”

  Peggy twisted her hands in her lap. “I don’t know just how you mean that. She liked dates and parties, yes, but she didn’t live for them. If you mean was she wild, no.”

  “Did Lowell drink?”

  “Yes. Moderately.”

  “What do you term moderate?”

  “Two drinks an evening.”

  McNarry showed off his even white teeth in a rather prissy smile. “That I would call very moderate.” Lieutenant Stewart chuckled at the joke. Ford and Cameron remained deadpan.

  McNarry glanced around for the reaction, then turned to the girl once more. “That was when she was out dancing for an evening. Would it not be possible for her to indulge in more than just two drinks if she were at a party, say one of the fraternity parties at Carlton College?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I was never with her at one.”

  “You think it would be possible?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it also be possible that she might have too much to drink at some such party, so much perhaps that some unconscionable boy could take advantage of the fact?”

  Peggy’s denial was vigorous. “No, sir. She was too strong-willed and she had too much self-respect. She would never let liquor get the better of her like that. And even if she could, she wouldn’t go haywire and kill herself because she became pregnant.”

  “Interesting,” McNarry said smoothly, “but the fact remains that that is exactly what she did do.”

  Judge Lee raised a restraining hand. “You are being presumptuous, Mr. McNarry. You forget that the purpose of this inquiry is to determine exactly how Lowell Mitchell did come to meet her end.”

  McNarry turned to the judge unruffled. “I confess to getting ahead of myself, Your Honor, but not to being presumptuous. You see, it is my intention to prove to this court that Lowell Mitchell did willfully and intentionally take her own life.” He turned to Peggy and dismissed her before going on.

  “You see,” he continued when the girl had left the room, “I have discovered something in Lowell’s diary that the police”—and here he gave Ford a condescending look—“failed to notice.” He produced the diary and thumbed through it. “Allow me to read you her entry for Tuesday, February twenty-eighth, three days before she died. I quote: ‘Could get an A in Bio. Science, I know, if it weren’t for this lab. I guess I don’t have a practical mind. I know I don’t. Spanish and English are easy, but you won’t get me near a math course. Finally finished my English paper. Recopied most of it tonight until I was persuaded into a bridge game with Hilda, Patty, and Sally. Procrastination, thy name is woman. Now I’ll have to try to finish it tomorrow and the history lecture knocks out one period. I’m late again. Something drastic will have to be done.’

  “‘I’m late again,’” he repeated slowly. “‘Something drastic will have to be done.’ Observe that, gentlemen. How carefully it’s made to sound, should anyone read it, like a reference to her English paper. Yet the next day she writes, ‘Got the Feverel paper done just in time, thank goodness—’ You see? Nothing drastic was necessary.

  “This is the girl, remember, who so carefully concealed any reference to her sexual activities that her pregnancy came as a shock to everyone. In view of that, the ‘I’m late again. Something drastic will have to be done,’ takes on a different meaning. She wasn’t referring to her English theme, she was referring to her period. It had failed to materialize the month before and she, uncertain, hoping it was just an irregularity, waited another month and it failed to come again. Gentlemen, it is my contention that at this point she knew she was pregnant. The drastic measures she mentions were planned on that walk she took around the lake the morning of the day she died and were put into effect that noon when the other girls were having their lunch!

  “To back up that statement, let me read her entry for Wednesday, March first. ‘Letter from Jack today when I got back from Spanish. Who cares? Honestly, college boys seem so adolescent these days. All about his exams and how much beer he can drink without getting sick. Seems funny it used to impress me. Nothing’s happened. Maybe it’s for the best. Imagine marrying someone like Jack,’ and so forth. I only read the beginning so you can see how the remark, ‘Nothing’s happened. Maybe it’s for the best,’ fails to fit in with what she’s talking about. It has no relation whatsoever with this boy Jack. It’s again a hidden reference to her condition. Her period has still failed to come and at this point she has given up and, as her remark, ‘Maybe it’s for the best,’ shows, an air of resignation creeps over her.

  “On Thursday, the day before she died, she has decided that death is the only way out. Here’s what she says. ‘Bio. Science lecture, Spanish, and History today. Sometimes you wonder why you study. You’re not going to use what you learn. At least I’m not. That I now know for sure.’ The idea of suicide has taken hold of her. She has now irrevocably chosen her fate.

  “So you see, Tuesday she realized drastic measures were called for. Wednesday she resigned herself to them. Thursday she built up her nerve to go through with them, and her walk Friday morning was when she decided the question, how?”

  Judge Lee then spoke. “Your arguments have merit, Mr. McNarry. However, it is the duty of this court to reserve an opinion until all the facts of a case have been presented. Shall we proceed?”

  Hilda Gunther was the next witness and she was followed in turn by Sally Anders, Patty Short, and Marlene Beecher. Their stories of Lowell varied but little from Peggy’s and no new information was turned up that would either support or refute Mr. McNarry’s hypothesis.

  At noon the inquest recessed for two hours and Cameron and Ford went off for lunch together. “It stinks,” said Ford, climbing into a booth opposite the sergeant at Mickey’s Diner. “It stinks like hell.” He picked up a menu and glowered at it.

  Cameron said lightly, “You picked this place, I didn’t.”

  “I’m talking about the suicide.”

  “I know you are. You’re burned because the boy involved isn’t legally guilty.”

  “Like hell I am. It’s no skin off my teeth what messes these kids make of their lives.”

  “Isn’t it? You’re mooning about this case as though Lowell were your own daughter.”

  “Shut up. You don’t know nothing. You only know books. What I’m talking about is that, from what I know about that girl and from what her classmates say about her, she isn’t the type to kill herself.”

  “From what you knew about her and from what her classmates said about her, she wasn’t the type to go get pregnant either.”

  “That’s different. Given the right circumstances, the right time, and the right guy, any girl will say yes.”

  “The cynic. All right, what do you think she did, accidentally dress up and go down to the bridge and accidentally fall over the railing? Or maybe she had a rendezvous there and whoever it was pitched her over the side, right in broad daylight where anyone within three hundred yards could see?”

  A waitress slapped two glasses of water on the composition table top and Ford ordered himself two hamburgers with plenty of onion. Cameron took minute steak with French fries and the girl departed. Ford leaned forward and said, “I’ll tell you what I don’t think. I don’t think she tried to commit suicide by jumping off a ten-foot bridge into four feet of water. Suppose you tell me how any girl could reasonably expect to die that way other than by pneumonia? What’s wrong with an overdose of sleeping pills? It’s a damn sight more comfortable.”

  “Okay,” said Cameron in a low voice, glancing around. “You’ve got an angle. Why tell it to me? Why don’t you tell it to McNarry?”

  “Because McNarry, damn his sleek hide, will say, ‘All right, what do you think happened at Higgins Bridge?’ and I’ve got my foot in my mouth. Suicide stinks, but accident and murder stink worse. She’s probably dizzy enough to have done just that and McNarry’s showed me up once today already coming up with that stuff in her diary that I didn’t notice. Twice and people may start thinking Bristol needs a new police chief.”

  Cameron laughed sharply. “So you’re getting an inferiority complex over a law school degree! I wouldn’t have believed it. Either of us would have picked out those passages if we’d read her diary after we knew she was pregnant the way he did.”

  Ford drank up his water and toyed with the glass. “I should have picked them out before. Remember. I wasn’t sold on her purity at the beginning.”

  “Genius goes astray. So what are you going to do, retire and lick your wounds?”

  “I’ll squawk, but I’ve got to have a better explanation than I’ve got right now. That means I’m going to have to think.”

  “Which will probably rupture your brain,” said Cameron, and lapsed into silence.

  MONDAY AFTERNOON

  McNarry’s first witnesses when the afternoon session got under way at two o’clock were the men who had stood guard on the bridge and banks of the stream while the lake was being drained. They testified as a group and assured the judge that not a branch or stick got through the floodgates unnoticed and certainly no body had.

  Mr. Small, Mrs. Kenyon, and Donald Lassiter were called next and related the recovery of Lowell’s gold hair clip. McNarry concentrated on the weight and shape of the ornament and the possibility of its being shifted by the currents of the stream. All insisted that it could not have been and, in that, Cameron and Ford agreed.

  Having established Higgins Bridge as the point of entry of the body into the water, McNarry then interviewed three girls from Lambert A who, in turn, testified that Lowell had seemed unusually quiet and retiring during the week preceding her death. While they had not anticipated the events that followed, two of them confessed that, in the light of them, they were not surprised at the idea of suicide.

  After the last girl had been dismissed McNarry summed up his case to the judge. He pointed out Lowell’s depressed spirits, her walk around Parker Lake, and her obvious knowledge of her own pregnancy. He showed how her claim of sickness let her leave the dorm unseen at a time when the campus was virtually deserted and how her change into good clothes was a natural instinct in a girl about to kill herself but unnatural for any other business she might have had on campus. He reminded the judge that Higgins Bridge was the site of the death and called attention to the implausibility of her going over the railing other than by her own volition. It was his contention that there was no other verdict the court could bring in but suicide.

  At this point Chief Ford came out of the brown study he’d been in all afternoon. He sat up and spread both hands out in front of him on the table and studied their warped outlines. “Your Honor,” he said, “would it be out of order for me to conduct an experiment?”

  Judge Lee leaned forward a little and studied the chief. “What sort of an experiment?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  The judge smiled slightly. “You’re mysterious, I must say. What do you want to prove?”

  Ford looked up. “I can’t tell you that because I’m not exactly sure myself. There are a couple of things that bother me and it might clear them up.”

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “Well,” said the chief slowly, “Mr. McNarry has done a fine job fitting together the facts of this case but there are two things he hasn’t explained. One is why does Lowell Mitchell jump off a bridge when she’d have a better chance of killing herself, if she wants to do it that way, by jumping out the window of her room? The second is, what happened to her purse?”

  The judge said, “Her purse?”

  “Yes. She had one. A brown leather saddle-bag kind of purse with a shoulder strap. It wasn’t with the body, it wasn’t at the bridge, and it isn’t in her room.”

  McNarry said, “There are, Chief, several answers to both those questions.”

  “Yes. But which is the right one?”

 

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