“I couldn’t leave it, could I?” Mrs. Blaine went on, her sense of injustice still strong. “She’d been dead for days, I could see that much, the flies on her face, and it hadn’t been fed nor watered. So I took pity on it for her sake, little knowing quiet as it was, what was in store for me. I surely didn’t bargain for this!”

Rutledge stepped into the room, moving quietly, and went to the overturned cage that was on the floor on the far side of the kitchen table. He picked it up and held it high. Tall as he was, he could bring the cage nearly to the level of the bird. And to his own astonishment, after a long moment, it stopped squawking and hopped into the open door, made for one of the swings, and sat there bobbing back and forth, plucking at the feathers of its breast.

He shut the door carefully, then reached down for the cloth covering Mrs. Blaine’s kitchen table. She hurriedly caught the sugar bowl and the saltcellar before he pulled at the cloth, then lifted it over the cage, shutting the bird into darkness.

Even the frantic creaking of the swing stopped, and a blessed quiet descended over the kitchen.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the constable said into the silence.

Mrs. Blaine stared from the covered cage to the man from London.

And then the bird said in a very human voice, “Good night, Peter. Wherever you may be.”

In a hushed whisper, Mrs. Blaine said, “That’s her voice. For all the world. As if she were still alive.”

“You’d never heard it speak?” Rutledge asked.

“Lord, no. Never in her house and not in mine, either. He was quiet as a lamb there, and here he’s done naught but to scream like a creature in pain.”

“I didn’t know you’d taken anything from the house—this bird,” the constable was saying accusingly. “I asked if you’d touched anything.”

“It’s a live bird, I thought it would be like a canary. I took it out of kindness,” she said, defending herself. “You’re not telling me it could name her murderer!”

“No, it’s just that you said—was there anything else?”

“Did she ever ask you to burn some letters for her, if something happened to her?” Rutledge asked. “Or take a photograph and post it to her late husband’s family? You were her nearest neighbor, she might have confided in you,” he added, though he couldn’t see a strong friendship springing up between two such different women. Still, needs must, and two widows alone on isolated farms could have turned to each other to carry out last wishes.