Rex Stout by The Hand in the Glove

which looped around his neck and stretched taut up to a limb of a dogwood tree.
    Dol moved, took one step, and stopped again. She was telling herself with desperate ferocity:
You have simply got to control yourself, you have simply got to
. She stood and shut her eyes, tight, thinking she would not open them again until she stopped feeling numb. She had an overpowering desire to sit down, to quit trying to hold herself up, but was determined not merely to collapse, and there was nothing within reach to sit on … or maybe there was … she opened her eyes. She ventured a movement and found that her legs would work and did not even appear to be trembling. She took five good steps toward P. L. Storrs, where he danced, and stood looking straight at him.
    He was unquestionably dead. If he was not dead the thing to do was to get him down and get help to make him breathe, but surely he was dead. His mouth was partly open and the end of his tongue, dark purple, showed between his teeth. His eyes were pushed halfway out. Hisface looked swollen and was the color of an eggplant. He was surely dead. She took three more steps, stopped, and stretched out her hand arm’s length—a silly and purposeless gesture, since she was still five feet from him. She muttered to herself aloud, “I am too damned fastidious. I always have been. Nurses handle dead people all the time.” She was surprised that her voice sounded firm and controlled, and got courage from it. She moved forward and grasped the hand hanging alongside Storrs’ body, held it and felt it. He was dead all right. She backed up a little and again spoke aloud: “Here it is. I’m alone with it. I’m not going to run, not for a minute anyhow.”
    Her blood was calming down, leaving a tingle all over her. She looked around. First at the wire; it went from its loop around Storrs’ neck up to a limb of the dogwood tree some eight feet above the ground, passed over the top of the limb, stretched diagonally to a crotch of another limb with the trunk at a lower level, was wound several times around the trunk itself, in a spiral, and had its end twisted in one of those windings. Dol Bonner frowned at the spiral; it was not a way to fasten a wire. She looked at the ground. Beginning at the edge of the concrete walk which led to the toolhouse was grass which carpeted the nook; and to her eye, which was keen enough but not really practised, it was merely grass. There were, though, two noticeable items: some distance back of Storrs’ dangling feet, a bench, long and wide and heavy, lay overturned; and near one end of it there was a white object on the grass. Dol circled to get to it—yes, it was a crumpled piece of paper. She stooped to pick it up, but her fingers stopped short of it; she looked at it, but it was too crumpled to make anything of without touching it. She stood up, frowning. Veteran detectives would soon be coming to this place, perhaps famous ones; but she too was a detective; she realized with a shock that that was what she was thinking. She glanced at the paper again but left it untouched. She surveyed the nook again, but not to any purpose, knowing that she had seen all she could see, then turned her back on it and left its gloom, passed again around the curve of the fish pool, and headed up the slope toward the house.
    Before she reached the house she had determined onsomething. She went around instead of entering it, and at the far end, screened by a clump of evergreens, opened her bag and took out her mirror and examined her face. In spite of the swift walk uphill it was not flushed, but she thought it not too pale. She went on, and down the path to the tennis court, trying to collect as she went the loose ends of her agitation, wishing she could know how her face was acting and was going to act.
    Apparently her face was all right, and it seemed that no one had fretted at her absence, not even Len Chisholm. He was standing at the edge of the court with Janet