Footprints by Kay Cleaver Strahan

I

I can't star myself, much, for the next few minutes. Chris, Grandfather, Aunt Gracia, and Irene were in the room before I had realized that Father was dead. Then I thought that he had shot himself.

Grandfather took Lucy's place beside Father. He looked up at us and told us, "Richard has been shot and killed."

It would be Grandfather, wouldn't it, out of the whole herd of us, who would know without any proof, simply and surely know, that Father was not a suicide? I don't mean to be crumby and sentimental about it; but it is pretty rotten to think that, though Father had spent his life earning such a surety, Grandfather was the only one of us who would give it to him, then, on the minute and without proof. I wish I might even say that, having been told, we accepted Grandfather's statement on the instant. We did not. No, not us.

Chris said something about where was the gun. He began to tear through the bedding hunting for it. So did Aunt Gracia. So did Irene. So did I. There was no gun to be found. Father was not a suicide. He was shot, from a distance of at least several feet, with a .38 calibre gun. Since every man in the county who has a gun has a .38 calibre Colt's, we are not, in spite of Chris's contentions to the contrary, going to be able to do much with that information. The point I am making, now, is that Father was not a suicide. I'll go into it more fully, later.

It was Lucy who first called our attention to the open window and to the rope. Now, Judy, read this carefully and see what you can do with it.

The window was wide open from the bottom. There was a thick rope hanging over the sill and out of it. One end of the rope had been tied with a slip knot around one of the heavy legs of the bed. The rope went across the carpet to the window, across the window sill, across the porch roof beneath the window, and dangled to the ground.

Looks easy, doesn't it? Some dirty cur had shot Father and had got out of the window by means of the rope. But the rope was covered with snow, and there was not a handprint in the snow on the window sill, nor a footprint in the new snow on the roof.

When I saw that rope, I would have jumped right out on to the roof, if Chris had not stopped me. He told me not to track the snow. He said that we must have a lantern. I ran down to the kitchen and got one. Read this, Jude. I have told you once, but I want to tell you again. We swung the lantern out over the porch roof, and the snow was a clean, unbroken sheet.

Chris looked at the clock on Father's mantelpiece. It said ten minutes past twelve. Twenty-five minutes, at the most, since we had heard the shot. Not long enough for the snow, if it had been snowing hard, to have covered the footprints. We went to the window again. No snow was falling. And I know that none had been falling at ten minutes to twelve. There is no dodging it: the rope had not been used. Or, as Chris keeps insisting, it had not been used as a means of escape. Since he can't produce any sort of theory as to what it might have been used for, I'll leave you that, for what it is worth, and get along.

The murderer had not climbed out of the window. There were, then, just two things that he could have done:

1. He could have got out of the house some other way.

2. He could have stayed in the house.

Grandfather said: "He has not escaped this way. He has escaped some other way."

"If he has escaped," Chris said. "If he hasn't, he is not going to."

Irene screamed, "He may still be right here in this room," and would have had a heart attack, if there had been time; but there wasn't.

With Grandfather directing, we made a quick, thorough search of Father's room. Chris, clinging to the suicide theory, I suppose, devoted his time to the bed. (He made one queer discovery; but, since it cannot amount to anything, I'll get along and tell you about it later.) He found no gun, of course. The only gun in Father's room was in his clothes closet, twenty feet away from the bed. His gun was fully loaded, and behind some boxes on the top closet shelf. You don't need this, but I'll give it to you. With the wound, if he had had strength to move, which he had not, Father could not have moved without leaving a trail of blood. Irene had blood on the front of her wrapper and on her sleeve. She got it there when she had been lifting Father. Those were the only blood-stains anywhere that were not on the bed covers.

The room was easy to search. There was nothing anyone could have got under but the bed, and nothing to hide behind. We pounded through the clothes closet, and that ended the search there.

Grandfather said that Chris, he, and I would go to search the house. He said for Aunt Gracia, Irene, and Lucy to stay in Father's room, lock the door after us when we left, and close and lock the window.

Lucy said, "But where is Olympe?"