Free Rex Stout by The Mountain Cat Page A

much I think I always am going to love her, and I think by God I’m going to marry her some day. If that makes me a fool, okay. She came to my office yesterday and said she was going to shoot a man. Kill him. She wanted legal advice. She said she had just bought a box of cartridges. She had a gun in her handbag, she took it out and I saw it. She said it was her father’s gun. I accused her of being dramatic. You know? And she walked out on me with her shoulders up. You know how she can walk with her shoulders up?”
    “But she couldn’t … she couldn’t …” Clara sank onto the end of the bench. “She couldn’t possibly have meant it.”
    “That’s what I thought. Though I did go to your uncle and put it to him. I should have followed her or taken her to you or done something! How do you think I felt when I saw that headline in the paper?”
    “I don’t believe it. She never did it. And anyway, if she had intended—if she had hated anyone that much, it wouldn’t have been Jackson.”
    “Why not? Who would it have been?”
    “I don’t—I don’t know. But it couldn’t have been—”
    “You do know. You know something. Who?”
    She slowly shook her head.
    He exploded. “Damn it, Clara, I tell you I love her and I tell you she’s in terrible danger! I tell you I’ve got to do something! If it’s her secret, or yours, I’ll keep it. You’ve left her to Sammis just because he’s your godfather. How do you know you can trust him? Jackson was his partner, and he’s as ruthless as a mountain cat when he wants to be. I’ve got to know allthere is to know. If Delia wanted to kill somebody and it wasn’t Jackson, who was it?”
    “She never told me she wanted to kill him.”
    “She told me. Who was it?”
    “Rufus Toale.”
    He gaped in astonishment. “Toale?” He stared. “The preacher?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good lord, why?”
    “Because she thought he drove my mother to suicide. So did I.”
    “Drove her how?”
    “By talking to her.” Clara pressed her teeth to her lip and was silent. In a little she continued in a controlled voice, “I don’t want—you have no idea—how excessively painful it is to talk about it.”
    “Oh, yes. I have. I’ve learned a few things about pain myself. What did he talk to her about?”
    “I don’t know. Mother had always been a member of his church, but with no special—nothing special. She just went there to church and had him to dinner once or twice a year. Then about three months ago, when mother had begun to get more—well, healthier—about father’s death, Toale began coming to see her. They had long confidential talks, day after day. From the time it started she began to look like—I don’t know how to say it—there was doom and death in her eyes. She wouldn’t tell Delia and me about it, not a word. We tried to eavesdrop, to sneak where we could hear, but they were too careful. We never found out.”
    “What did you think it was?”
    “Delia thought it was some kind of hold he had got on mother, she couldn’t guess what, and he was deliberately torturing her. I thought he was torturing her too, I could see he was, but on account of her longeffort, all the time and energy and money she spent, trying to find out who had killed father. He preached a sermon on the wickedness of revenge soon after he started coming to see mother. He’s a fanatic, you know. It got worse and worse with mother, it got so she would hardly talk to us about anything or hardly eat. Then one morning Delia went in her room and found her. Of course Delia’s reaction was different from mine, because we are different, but I think another reason was that it was Delia who took a cup of coffee to her room and found her dead.”
    “So you think—when she told me she intended to shoot a man—she meant Toale.”
    “I’m sure she did.” Clara locked her fingers together. “Another thing, I’m afraid I made it worse, just recently. One evening two weeks ago he came