Read Online QED by Ellery Queen - Free Book Online

impossible. In any event, she must have left her cup standing in the kitchen for those two or three minutes.”
    â€œI guess so,” said Christopher. “It would also seem that we were all milling around, with opportunity to dodge into the kitchen and tamper with it, allowing for a healthy lie or two. Take your pick, Mr. Queen. In my own defense I can only say I didn’t do it.”
    â€œNor,” stuttered little Wolcott Thorp, “did I.”
    â€œIt looks,” said Jo, “as if you’ll have to make the most of what you have.”
    â€œWhich,” snapped Ellery, “is precious little.”
    And he left them to go back upstairs, where he found Dr. Farnham preparing to depart. Ellen was awake, propped up against the headboard, looking not hung over at all. What she did look was hostile and furtive.
    Ellery went to work.
    But his most tried techniques, running from the sympathetic plea to the horrendous warning, failed to budge her. Her brush with death seemed to have left her only the more doggedly crouched over whatever secret she was concealing.
    The most Ellery could pry out of her was the admission that she had bought sleeping pills herself from a local “chemist,” on the prescription of another doctor in town whom she did not name. Finally, slipping down in the bed, she turned her face to the wall and refused to answer any more of his questions whatsoever.
    Checkmated, Ellery withdrew, leaving Mrs. Caswell on guard.
    Someone else, he thought, was at the moment sharing his frustration. The agent of the sleeping pills.
    The dinner conversation had gaps. Ellery pushed the food around on his plate. Ellen attempted a show of Empire fortitude, but the attempt was sorry, and he suspected that she had come down to the dinner table only because of the creepy isolation of her bedroom.
    Margaret Caswell sat in a tense posture that suggested listening, as for the baying of bloodhounds. Christopher and Joanne sought reassurance in eloquent eye examination of each other. Wolcott Thorp tried to stimulate a discussion of some recent Fulah acquisitions by the museum, but no one listened even politely, and he too fell under the spell of the pervasive gloom.
    They were about to leave the dinner table when the doorbell rang with an angry chime. Ellery leaped to life.
    â€œChief Newby,” he said. “I’ll let him in, if no one minds. Please go to the drawing room—all of you. We’re going to get on with this lethal nonsense and make something of it if it takes all night.”
    He hurried to the front door. Newby hurled his hat and overcoat on a tapestried chair but pointedly failed to remove his overshoes, as if announcing that at the first sound of jabberwocky he intended to exit.
    They joined the others in the drawing room, and Newby said, “All right, Ellery, get on with it.”
    â€œLet’s begin,” Ellery said, “with a fact. The fact that you, Ellen, are in imminent danger. What we don’t know, and must know, is why. It’s something only you can tell us, and I suggest you do so before it’s too late. I remind you that the murderer of your father is here in this room, listening and watching.”
    Four pairs of eyes shifted from Ellen immediately, but they came right back again.
    Ellen’s lips remained drawn down at the corners, like a scar. “I told you—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    â€œYou’re afraid, of course. But do you think you’re going to buy immunity with silence? A murderer needs to sleep at night, too, and his best assurance of peace of mind is your permanent removal. So talk while you still can.”
    â€œIt’s my job to warn you, Mrs. Nash,” Chief Newby put in sourly, “that if you’re holding back evidence, you’re committing a crime. How much trouble do you want to be in?”
    But Ellen fixed her eyes on the fists in her lap.
    â€œAll