In the Still of the Night

silly self killed and Walker had to wear his professional hat.
    But Julian West was beyond the pale. What an ugly, outrageous performance he’d put on. Unfortunately, it seemed to clear him of guilt. That was a shame. He’d been Robert’s favorite suspect for the murder.
    Robert got out of bed finally, put on his dressing gown, which was getting tatty, but these days new silk dressing gowns weren’t in his plans. He went prowling. The only person likely to be awake and about was Mad Henry. And sure as anything, he’d be down in the servants’ quarters fooling about with his calling system. And so Henry was. But he’d fallen asleep in a wooden chair with his head on the servants’ dining table. There was a faint jumble of sounds coming from the speaker.
    Robert listened for a bit. Mostly, it seemed to be people snoring.
    “Henry, wake up.”
    Henry sprung to life. He must have been as light a sleeper as Bud Carpenter claimed to be. “You did what I asked?“
    “Yes. It was easy. Each box has a switch that works three ways. Talk, listen and off. I set them all for talk when that military guy started going off his head. I figured nobody would miss me.“
    “So if everybody is talking to someone, you’ll hear them all at once.”
    Henry nodded. “And probably not understand a word anyone says. That isn’t the purpose of the system.“
    “It wasn’t your purpose,“ Robert amended. “Go to bed, Henry. I just want to listen awhile. Walker said there had been a lot of eavesdropping. He doesn’t know what real eavesdropping is. They can’t hear us, can they?“ he said, dropping his voice to a whisper.
    “No. Talk. Listen. Off. Can’t be two at a time.“ Henry was bored with listening to snoring and left to get some genuine horizontal sleep.
    Robert was soon bored nearly senseless, too. He’d almost nodded off when he heard real voices. They were faint and scratchy and almost incomprehensible. Two people seemed to be moving around in one of the rooms. As they approached the gadget, the voices got louder and faded as they got farther away.
    “If only (mumble, mumble) about that damned appendix,“ a male voice said. The sound quality was too bad to be sure whose it was.
    The other person responded, “But...“ and there was a burst of static that wiped out the words. Or maybe it was the same person in a different tone of voice.
    Suddenly Agatha barked very loudly right in Robert’s ear. He reeled back in shock. Then he heard Lily (he supposed) say sleepily, “Oh, Agatha, go back to sleep.”
    Agatha mumbled.
    There were no further sounds except snoring Agatha’s loudest of all. She must have been sleeping right next to the speaker.
    Robert found a button that turned down the sound and went back to his room very quietly. None of the doors along the second floor hall seemed to quite meet the floor perfectly, and in the dead of night, you could see slivers of yellow if lights were on in the rooms. But all was dark. He checked the third floor where only Phoebe and Cecil had rooms. Complete darkness there, too. He went to his own room and stood deep in thought.
    So who had he heard? Cecil had talked about wanting to do an appendix to his book on Julian West. If it had been West and Bud speaking, West might have been expressing irritation at having his life pried into and being expected to remember dates and places.
    If the words had come from Cecil’s room, who could he have been talking to? Himself, maybe?
    People sometimes did that. Robert had caught himself at it from time to time. Maybe it was all one voice. Cecil could have been lamenting to himself that if he hadn’t asked so many personal questions, rather than sticking to West’s books, they might have gotten along better.
    So much for eavesdropping. Robert hung up his dressing gown and fell into bed.

    The fête was to start at ten. People were in the yard setting up and yelling back and forth at each other at seven. Elgin Prinney rolled onto his back with a groan and said, “Emmaline, we should have slept in a room on the other side of the house. Emma-line? Where are you?”
    The next thing he heard was her voice out in the yard. “No, Paulette. Not there. Over here.“ Paulette was the town butcher’s simple-minded girl who occasionally helped in the kitchen. If she was only given one job to do, and it was done for her as an example, she was a good worker. But why did Emmaline have to bellow at her that way so early in the