Miss Withers Regrets Read Online Free PDF

towards Dr. Radebaugh, who smiled and said that there could be no question of anything like that in this particular case. “You see, Sheriff, for your information, most deaths in the water come almost immediately, from shock. Cairns was dead when he was hauled out on to the tiles.”
    “Or else Joe Searles would never have left him there,” Sergeant Fischer pointed out. “He’d have shoved him back in.”
    “Okay,” Sheriff Vinge agreed. “Now where was I? Oh, yes. The list. First we have Mr. Thurlow Abbott.”
    Abbott stood up, and in his ghostly whisper of a voice he insisted that he knew nothing at all about what had happened. Cairns had taken so long to change that he had slipped away from the party and gone up to his son-in-law’s room to see what was keeping him, but he had found nobody there and no sign of any disturbance and was on his way downstairs again when he heard the sirens.
    “Very good,” said the sheriff. “Next, Miss Lawn Abbott.”
    Lawn leaned against the wall, tapping at her riding shoes with a slender whip. “I’d been out for a ride,” she said. “I have a hunter hack that the Boads keep for me in their stable until Huntley—I mean until Huntley could build a stable here. I was later than I realized, because I’m not too good about keeping time, and I didn’t get up to the party until just before the police arrived. I saw the body as I came past the pool.”
    “On your way up the hill did you see anything at all going on at the swimming pool?”
    She shook her head. “That’s all,” said the sheriff. “Next is Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Beale.”
    “I was in the library for a while,” Midge began with a sidelong glance at Commander Bennington across the room. “Then I danced a little, and after that I played ping-pong. Then everybody started playing bridge, so I wandered into the kitchen. I didn’t go outside.”
    “I didn’t leave the living room,” Adele put in. “Except once or twice to go up to Helen’s room. Once I was looking for her because she was taking so long to change her dress, and once I wanted to fix my hair. I went out on the balcony outside Helen’s room to get some air because, to tell the truth, I felt a little swacked.”
    “When you were out on the balcony did you see any one down at the pool?”
    “You can’t see the pool from the house because the bathhouse stands right in the way.”
    Sergeant Fischer was writing away for dear life, trying to take the gist of this down. The sheriff waited for him to catch up and then asked, “Mrs. Beale, I understand there is a stair leading down to the rear patio from the upstairs balcony. You didn’t go down that stair, nor see anybody on it?”
    Adele shook her head. Sheriff Vinge turned his attention to the Benningtons, obviously anxious to get the whole thing over with as fast as possible. They were quick to inform him that they had been playing bridge in the playroom with Mrs. Boad and Jed Nicolet. Whoever was dummy would go out scouting for drinks or bring in canapés or cigarettes.
    “But that would only be for a few minutes at a time, wouldn’t it?” The commander agreed that a bridge hand only took around five minutes as a rule, and the sheriff beamed. “We can pass Mrs. Boad and Mr. Nicolet, too, then, because they’re accounted for. There’s Miss Gertrude Boad—”
    Trudy Boad arose, stammering a little, and admitted that for most of the time she had been sitting beside the phonograph, changing records when necessary. She had beaten Mr. Beale four games of ping-pong and later sat in on the bridge game for one hand. “But if you ask my personal opinion about all this—”
    “Thank you very much, Miss Boad,” said the sheriff firmly, and Trudy’s brief moment in the limelight was concluded.
    Bill Harcourt, pale and sad with the alcohol dying within him, had the next turn, accounting for his movements sketchily but with some detail. He had never, he admitted, been more than fifty feet from