The Sheriff arrived the next afternoon. He wanted to speak first to me and then to Erica in my presence. I told him that I expected Erica fairly soon. He accepted coffee and we went into my office. This time I got to sit at my desk. He went at it immediately.
"Mary Susan, we can't find out anything at all about Robert Miller. I contacted Holmes College and talked to the Dean. He let me look at his file on Mr. Miller. It contained a transcript of his course work from the college back east and a letter of recomendation from the dean there. I contacted the college. All of that turned out to be phony. They never heard of him. The transcript was phony. the letter of recommendation was phony, his whole background has been made up. Is there anything concerning Mr. Miller you can add to what you have already told me?
"Not much. He seemed quite personable, quite intelligent. He dressed well, but more business like than the other men students. He was a bit older than one expects for college. In fact, I remember thinking he might be a year or so older than he said he was, but I couldn't be sure about that. I think he had a car. The way he got around, especially in the evenings, he must have. No taxi ever came for him. He had no friends calling on him here. I don't know if he ever went out with any of my other guests, but I don't think so. He was quite radical in his speech in parlor, but didn't speak often.
I wondered about him from the beginning, but to be honest I needed the rental and he paid cash for the entire semester. I guess I let that influence me, but truth to tell I had no reason to reject him."
"He paid cash for the semester to the college, too. Why didn't you talk to his parents? Don't you do that?"
"I do, when I can. But he was not a minor and any relatives would have lived several states away. I didn't even ask, to tell you the truth. It just never occured to me. He wasn't young enough to need permission from anybody."
"Thanks anyway. The dean told me essentially the same thing. Now I wonder if I could speak to Erica."
I said I would see if she had returned from her classes. She had. I asked her to my office. The Sheriff began.
Now about the story you told about the secret spies and the revolution and being a target for assassination and so on, how much of that do you believe?"
"It took a while, but eventually I believed that everything Erica said was true, absolutely true."
"We've checked on Mr. Robert Miller and turned up nothing."
We also tried to verify your story. I contacted some folks in New York and ended up talking to some people in the United States Army Intelligence Service. They were interested in what we could tell them and wanted to know more. They are checking on some things in Washington and New York and they wired me this morning that they were sending someone down here from Washington to talk to you. He should get here on Friday. I'll call you when I know more definitely. Would both of you be so kind as to meet with him? He said in his telegram that it would be important."
I looked at Erica, who said nothing, as usual.
"Will you?" I asked bluntly. I get tired of always guessing what is on Erica's mind.
"I suppose I must. But I really don't know anything I haven't told you already. Once Klaus left the movement we lost all contact with them and I really have no idea who any of them are nor what they might have planed."
The Sheriff looked distinctly uncomfortable at the return to the foreign conspiracy talk again. I wondered if he was as uncomfortable at the prospect of a visit from US Army Intelligence as we were. I asked him if he would attend the interview. He assured me that he would.
"And I'm not going to get sucked into any wild foreign spy nonsense, either. We've had about all of that I can take these last couple of years. I'm tired of it and I don't mind telling the US Army exactly that.
So the Sheriff had made up his mind. That might help us in the interview. I also noted that nobody seemed to be worried about Erica killing Robert Miller any more, if they ever were. In any case, I wasn't going to bring it up on my own. The cavalry pistol had been returned by a deputy and was back in the small trunk in my bedroom, now firmly padlocked.
The Sheriff then pulled out the depositon Erica had made a few days before. He didn't seem to like the deposition very much.
"Who is Klaus?"
Erica told him, the short version. He didn't like the answer.
"What do you know about Robert Miller?"
"Almost nothing." Responded Erica. "Except that he was the man the Bolshevics sent to kill me."
The Sheriff didn't like that answer either. He tried once more. "Why did the Bolshivics send someone to kill you? And why do it in my county?"
"The Bolshivics made up their mind that I knew something that would upset their plans for a revolutionn in America."
The Sheriff made no reply to this. He just looked out the window for a long time, then at me, then at Mary Susan, and then back out the window. After a time, he returned his attention to us once more.
"I'm sure you believe in what you told me."
The Sheriff did not seem pleased with that at all. As our conversation continued, I saw that the Sheriff had developed his own version of the shooting and was going to do so by ignoring most of the story Erica told, almost the entirety of her deposition so carefully recorded and signed.
I have to admit that his version went along much simpler lines than the one she was trying to explain. In his version, Robert Miller had broken into her bedroom window in the middle of the night for nefarious purposes much more sensible in the eyes of the sheriff than a complicated politically based conspiracy involving former enemies and foreign languages.
He therefore deduced that she had responded in a perfectly legal although rather unexpected way by splattering Robert Miller's brains all over her bedroom wall with a borrowed hand canon left over from the civil war. She was therefore a plucky young woman protecting her honor and possibly her life from an intruder who had decidedly evil intentions towards her person.
He was not to be dissuaded from this by any explanations on her part assisted as possible by myself. That was the end of the interview. He took the deposition with him, looking as though he didn't want to.