She looked at me. “It’s an old joke, huh?”

“The old jokes are the best ones.”

“Not necessarily,” she said.

This time I didn’t hear the scream.

Not the first scream, anyway. I was in a parlor-not the East Parlour, where Lettice and I had misbehaved in front of the stuffed oryx, but in the West Parlour, where I was sitting in a wing chair with my feet up on a needlepoint-covered ottoman, reading The Portable Dorothy Parker. The whole idea of a portable Dorothy Parker intrigued me. You could take her along on trips, and every once in a while her head would pop up out of your Gladstone bag and deliver some smartass remark.

I was reading a short story about a woman who was waiting for a telephone to ring, but I wasn’t getting very far with it because Miss Dinmont kept interrupting me to ask for help with a crossword puzzle. Did I know a six-letter marsupial, the third letter an M? Could I complete the phrase “John Jacob Blank” with a five-letter word ending in R?

Why, I’ve long wondered, would anyone want help on a crossword puzzle? And how does one deal with people who ask for it? If you supply an answer it only encourages them to ask for more, but if you plead ignorance it doesn’t seem to discourage them. In fact they seem to ask everything, even the ones where they know the answer themselves, as if determined to plumb the depths of your stupidity.

What might work is to grab the puzzle out of the puzzler’s hands, fill in all the squares yourself at breakneck speed (right or wrong, who cares?), and hand it back in triumph. I might have tried it that morning-I was testy enough, even with my stomach full of kippers and porridge and toad-in-the-hole (or wind-in-the-willows, or whatever it was), but I just couldn’t be so mean to poor little Miss Dinmont. I was afraid she’d burst into tears. I’d feel terrible, and then Miss Hardesty would come along and beat me to a pulp.

So I was reading, and I’d just been interrupted for perhaps the seventh time, and I’d tried saying, “Hmmm, that’s a tricky one, let me think about that one,” and there was a scream outside, or at least a great cry.

As I said, I didn’t hear it. But Orris was not like Berkeley ’s tree, and even though I didn’t hear him fall, someone else did. Millicent Savage, who was out in front of the house directing her father in the making of a snowman, heard Orris shout. So did her father. “Wait here,” Greg Savage told his daughter, and set off toward the source of the cry, walking literally in Orris’s footsteps through snow that came up higher than his knees.

Millicent, of course, did not heed her father’s command to stay put, but set off in his wake. She found it slow going, however, her precocity being cerebral rather than altitudinal, and before she could reach the bridge, her father had already turned around and was headed back. He scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to Cuttleford House, walking as fast as he could and not bothering to respond to the stream of questions she directed at him.

He reached the door, put her down, threw the door open, and cried out his news to the entire household.

“It’s Orris! He’s fallen! The bridge is down! He had a long fall and he’s not moving! He’s just lying there! I think he’s dead!”

I heard all that. I heard the scream that followed his announcement, too, but how could I help it? They probably heard it loud and clear in Vermont.

If I’d first seen the bridge in daylight, I don’t think I could have crossed it. In the darkness, I’d been able to convince myself that the shallow waters of Cuttlebone Creek were but a few scant yards beneath our feet. In the unlikely event that we fell, at worst we’d get a soaking.

But what I saw, after I’d joined the mad scramble to see what had happened to Orris, was a deep and rocky gorge, its sides near vertical. The suspension bridge dangled like limp spaghetti from its moorings on the far side of the gorge. The connective tissue on our side of the creek had given way before Orris could get himself across. Maybe he cried out the instant of the first snapping of the cable. Maybe he was already falling. He fell clear to the bottom, a drop of at least thirty feet, and when we saw him he lay utterly still on a heap of boulders, his head at an angle that would have been a stretch for Plastic Man.

There was some sentiment for rescuing him. The sides of the gorge were too steep for a safe descent in good weather, and out of the question now, with snow covering everything and making it impossible to see where you could or could not get a decent foothold. According to Nigel, if you followed the creek a mile or so downstream, you’d reach a spot where the stream could be easily crossed, and from that point you could wade upstream until you reached Orris. Of course it would take a long time to walk a mile cross-country through two feet of snow, and it would take at least as long to return along a frozen creek bed, not to mention the risk of putting a foot wrong and spraining an ankle or breaking a leg.

“Leave him,” Dakin Littlefield counseled.

“But he’ll die!” one of the women wailed. (I believe it was Earlene Cobbett. Her cousin Molly had had a busy night, starring in Carolyn’s dream and then screaming when she discovered Jonathan Rathburn’s body. Now it was the heavily freckled Earlene’s turn, and she’d let out a scream of her own at Greg Savage’s report of Orris’s fall; a propensity for full-throated shrieking seemed to run in the Cobbett family.)

“Not likely,” Littlefield said.

“I don’t see how you can say that,” Mrs. Colibri said. “It seems to me that people die of exposure all the time. And they die of shock, too, when they suffer severe trauma and don’t receive medical attention.”

“Happens all the time,” Littlefield agreed. “But only to people who are alive to begin with.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s already as dead as a doornail,” Littlefield said, his words as cruel as the mouth they came out of. “He had a long drop and a hard landing. He probably dashed out what brains he had on that rock, and if that didn’t kill him the broken neck did. See how he’s lying?”

“It’s an awkward lie,” Colonel Blount-Buller allowed.

“It’s not a hard position to get into,” Littlefield said, “as long as you’re a chicken and somebody’s already wrung your neck for you. Face it, the man’s toast. His future is all in the past. Anybody else goes after him, he’s odds-on to take the same kind of spill this guy took and wind up in the same kind of shape. We already have two men dead, which is on the high side for a quiet weekend in the country. Somebody else wants to round out the hat trick, be my guest, but I think you’re out of your mind.”

“But what are we to do?” Nigel Eglantine asked. “We can’t just leave him there, can we?”

“Why not? He’s not going anywhere.”

Somebody said something about predatory scavengers, and a few heads looked heavenward, as if to spot a vulture circling patiently overhead. There was nothing up there but the sky.

“He’s reasonably safe in this weather,” Dakin Littlefield said. “And the longer he lies there the safer he gets, because once he freezes solid he can quit worrying that something’s going to start gnawing on him. Not that he’s doing any worrying of his own as it is.”

A sob, wrenching enough to melt a heart of stone, tore from the throat of Earlene Cobbett.

It had no discernible effect on Lettice’s new husband. “Say a couple of us managed to get to him,” he went on mercilessly, “which’d be a neat trick, and say we got the body up, which’d be a neater one. Then what?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We’d just have to leave him outside,” he said. “On the back porch, stacked like cordwood and with a rug tossed over him. We may be a few days waiting for the rest of the world to reach us, and he’ll keep a lot better outside in the cold than inside where it’s warm.” His nose wrinkled at the notion. “Where would we put him, anyway? The library’s already out of bounds because there’s a dead body in it. If that genius over there”-a wave in my direction-“hadn’t managed to sell everybody on the idea that Rathburn was murdered, we could have moved him outside before he started to get ripe.”