It sounds absurd, I suppose, to call Irene’s hand clutching at my arm, and her frantic broken whisper, a jarring note, because obviously the whole business was jarring in the extreme . . . our coming so abruptly on Rick Winthrop’s rigid ghastly body in its sodden white dinner coat, lying there in the sun-drenched grass, the arrow buried in his throat, the oozing dried blood on his jacket and collar . . . and then the cold wet muzzle of that extraordinary dog thrust so silently—and significantly, it seemed to me—into my hand.
Probably if I’d known more about Dr. Birdsong then, and less—or perhaps more—about Irene Winthrop, I shouldn’t have been so disturbed as I was. Disturbed isn’t, of course, quite the word. And shocked is too strong, although it was literally a kind of shock; not the so
