"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 319 - Murder on Main Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

"No reason, I just realized that you've become so much a part of the place that I'd forgotten you weren't
a native."

"I've always been a little flattered I was taken in so fast. You know how it is in some small towns. If
you're not born in them you're always a 'furriner'!"

"I guess your buying the drug store from old Calkins helped. You meet everybody in the store."

"Sure do." The doctor smiled. "You certainly find out all the dirt in town behind a drug store counter."

"It never occurred to me before, but I can see how you would."

The two men sat in companionable silence for a while, both busy with their own thoughts. The sheriff
moved first. He said, "This certainly isn't getting us anywhere. I'll leave a man here tonight. Not that this
killer is liable to return after what he has succeeded in doing."

"I wonder," said the doctor, "how the killer got in?"

The sheriff sat up sharply. He had been so occupied with the puzzle of how the murderer had made his
egress that the entrance had not occurred to him.

"That's right! How did the killer get in?" The sheriff rubbed his eyes as he got up. He lit a cigarette. He
held the match while the doctor stuffed his black briar pipe. He lit the pipe. Mrs. Archer had been in the
house with her husband before he was killed... she would know if anyone had come in... the way this
thing was stacking up it would seem that only Mrs. Archer could have killed her husband. The sheriff
snorted to himself. He must be tired to even have such an idea. He could no more picture that woman
sticking a knife in her husband than... than... he remembered a case he had been on only a month ago.
That tired grey little woman hadn't looked as if she could take an axe to her husband, and yet she had.
What's more, she had stuffed his remains in the furnace and burnt them... with the garbage...

How had the killer come into the house without Mrs. Archer knowing it and how could that killer, if one
existed, have gone out of a house in which all the doors and windows were locked on the inside?

It left but one person. The sheriff looked at the doctor. The same idea had evidently struck the doctor.
He said, "No... we must be wrong. Maybe... maybe tomorrow things will look different. Maybe you've
missed something. After all, it is late. We're tired."

The sheriff nodded. He turned out all the lights but one. He and the doctor walked to the door. His
deputy was standing guard there.

The sheriff said, "You go inside and take it easy. Don't fall asleep, though... or..."

The man said, "Sure thing, sheriff, thanks."

He went inside. The doctor, changing his grasp on his bag from his right to his left hand, said, "Look!"

They both looked up. The storm was breaking. Lightning lanced down from the clouds and embraced a
hill top not far from them. The doctor rubbed his head. "It was over there where the lightning just struck
that I saw whoever it was that played baseball with my skull."