“It’s snowing,” Rand mentioned.  “Let’s throw them out into the storm.”

“I can’t.  I have to give Nelda and Geraldine a home, as long as they live,” she replied.  “Terms of the will.  Oh, well, Geraldine’ll drink herself to death in a few years, and Nelda will elope with a prize-fighter, sometime.”

“Why don’t you have the house haunted?  The Tri-State Agency has an excellent house-haunting department.  Anything you want; poltergeists; apparitions; cold, clammy hands in the dark; footsteps in the attic; clanking chains and eldritch screams; banshees.  Any three for the price of two.”

“It wouldn’t work.  Geraldine is so used to polka-dotted dinosaurs and Little Green Men from Mars that she wouldn’t mind an ordinary ghost, and Nelda’d probably try to drag it into bed with her.”  She laid down the pistol and slid off the desk.  “Well, pleasant dreams; I’ll see you in the morning.”

After she had left the gunroom, Rand looked at his watch.  It was a very precise instrument; a Swiss military watch, with a sweep second hand, and two timing dials.  It had formerly been the property of an Obergruppenfuehrer of the S.S., and Rand had appropriated it to replace his own, broken while choking the Obergruppenfuehrer to death in an alley in Palermo.  He zeroed the timing dials and pressed the start-button.  Then he stood for a time over the old cobbler’s bench, mentally reconstructing what had been done after Lane Fleming had been shot, after which he hurried down the spiral and along the rear hall to the garage, where he snatched his hat and coat from the car.  He threw the coat over his shoulders like a cloak, and went on outside.  He made his way across the lawn to the orchard, through the orchard to the lawn of Humphrey Goode’s house, and across this to Goode’s side door.  He stood there for a few seconds, imagining himself opening the door and going inside.  Then he stopped the timing hands and returned to the Fleming house, locking the garage doors behind him.  In the garage, he looked at the watch.

It had taken exactly six minutes and twenty-two seconds.  He knew that he could move more rapidly than the dumpy lawyer, but to balance that, he had been moving over more or less unfamiliar ground.  He left his hat and trench coat in the car and went upstairs.

Undressing, he went into the bathroom in his dressing-gown, spent about twenty minutes shaving and taking a shower, and then returned to his own room.

CHAPTER 17

When he rose, the next morning, Rand noticed something which had escaped his eye when he had gone to bed the night before.  His .38-special, in its shoulder-holster, was lying on the dresser; he had not bothered putting it on when he had gone to see Rivers the morning before, and it had lain there all the previous day.  He distinctly remembered having moved it, shortly after dinner, when he had gone to his room for some notes he had made on the collection.