There Was an Old Woman [= The Quick And the Dead]

“There’s nothing wrong with the Old Woman but plain, ordinary cussedness. Sheila, you’re dramatizing. This childish fear of insanity—”

“I won’t marry you or anybody else until I know, Charley,” said Sheila fiercely. “And now with a murderer in the family—” She jumped up and fled.

“No, Charley,” said Ellery quickly, as with the look of a wounded deer the lawyer started after her. “Abide with me.”

“But I can’t let her go like this!”

“Yes, you can. Let Sheila alone for a while.”

“But it’s such nonsense! There’s nothing wrong with Sheila. There’s never been anything wrong with the Brents — Steve, Sheila, Bob, Mac—”

“You ought to be able to understand Sheila’s fears, Charley. She’s in a highly nervous state. Even if she weren’t a naturally high-strung girl, living here would have made her a neurotic.”

“Well, then, solve this damned case so I can take Sheila out of this asylum and pound some sense into her!”

“I’ll do my best, Charley.” Ellery looked thoughtfully over his chicken salad, which, now that the first pangs of his hunger had been assuaged, he realized with annoyance he had always detested.

When Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie bustled into the dining room, Ellery was low in his chair, smoking like a sooty flue, and Charlie was tormenting his nails.

“Shhh,” whispered Charley. “He’s thinking.”

“He is, is he?” snapped the Inspector. “Then let him think about this. Velie — set ’em down.”

There was a crash. Ellery looked up with a start Sergeant Velie had dumped an armful of revolvers and automatics on the dining-room table.

“Well, well. Thurlow’s arsenal, eh?”

“Me, I found it,” pouted Velie. “Don’t I ever get credit for nothin’?”

“A regular Pagliacci,” snarled Inspector Queen. “The fact is, son, here’s the kit and caboodle of ’em, and there’s two missing.”

“Not fourteen?” Ellery looked distressed. In some things he had the soul of a bookkeeper; a mislaid fact irked him — two drove him mad.

“Count them yourself.”

Ellery did so. There were twelve. Among them he found Thurlow’s .25 Colt automatic, Robert’s stubby S. & W. 38/32, and the long-barreled revolver with which Cornelia Potts had almost assassinated Sergeant Velie — a Harrington & Richardson .22-caliber “Trapper Model.”

“What’s Thurlow got to say?” demanded Charley.

“Can you make sense out of a pecan?” asked the Sergeant. “Thurlow says he had fourteen, and that’s what the sportin’-goods store says he bought. Also, Thurlow says nobody but himself knew where he hid the guns. So I says: ‘Then how come two are missin’? What did they do — pick themselves up and take a walk?’ So he looks at me like I’m nuts!”

“Where did he have them cached, Sergeant?” asked Ellery.

“In a false closet in his bedroom along with some boxes of ammunition he’d bought.”

“Oh, there,” said Charley Paxton disgustedly. “Then of course everybody knew. Thurlow’s been ‘hiding’ things in that false closet since the house was built. In fact, he had the closet installed. The whole household knows about it.”

“It’s a cinch the Old Woman got his Harrington & Richardson there,” said Inspector Queen, sitting down and dipping into the salad bowl for a shred of chicken. “So why not Louella, or Horatio, or anybody else? Fact is, two guns are missing, and I won’t sleep till they’re found. Guns loose in this hatchery!”

Ellery studied the armory on the table. Then he produced pad and pencil and began to write.

“Inventory,” he announced at last. “Here’s what we now have.” His memorandum listed the twelve weapons: