One by one the dancers began to leave the floor, yawning. The doctor and the Honorable Emily withdrew into a corner and began to have a heart-to-heart talk about fits. She herself complained of fainting spells, and she had always had her doubts, she confessed, about Leslie—him being so quiet and all. Even Tobermory, she complained, had thrown a fit last summer.
“Worms,” diagnosed Dr. Waite sagely. The Honorable Emily brightened. She wondered if Leslie had worms too.
The ship’s bell struck eight tinny times for midnight. Loulu fell to playing rummy with Candida Noring. Once she looked up startled, to hear light running footsteps on the boat deck above her head. She relaxed again. It couldn’t be Gerald. He was asleep, and for good measure locked in the stateroom.
Andy Todd heard the footsteps, too. He was prowling around the long boat deck, throwing away cigarette after cigarette. Once he heard the beating of wings above his head, and a slow, fat bird fluttered into his face and then swooped away into the night. Even the gulls were crazy tonight, muttered Andy.
He rounded a corner and was nearly tripped by the darting figure of a small boy. Gerald, it appeared, had broken loose again. He neatly nabbed the urchin.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “Kids like you should be in bed.”
“This is more fun,” gasped Gerald, wriggling. “We’re playing a new game.” Another youth appeared, with flashlight clutched in his fist. “It’s Virgil,” said Gerald. “I gotta go with him. Lemme go, we’re playing Trap the Neckers.”
Andy Todd found a quarter and displayed it. “What sort of game is that?”
Gerald took the quarter. “Tell you for a dollar,” he bargained. He got a cuff on the ear. “Well,” he temporized, “we try to find a couple necking. Virgil says there’s lots of them do it. Then we sneak up real close and flash the light on ’em and run.”
“Oh,” said Andy Todd. He was still a little red behind the ears. Finally he bent down and gave Gerald Hammond definite instructions, instructions which would have displeased that lad’s young mother exceedingly. “A dollar, remember. I’ll be in the social hall for an hour or so.”
He saw the merry lads run back along the dimly lit boat deck and heard the faint slick of their rubber-soled shoes. Then, well satisfied with himself, Andy Todd went below, where the charming Mrs. Hammond was more charming to him than ever. He made a willing third at the rummy game.
The stewardess entered the social hall a few minutes later, and beckoned to Dr. Waite. “It’s the lady in 49,” she informed him when he had followed her into the hall. “You know, the old maid school teacher who’s a bad sailor.”
“Can’t cure that,” said the doctor. But all the same he tapped on the door.
“Doctor,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers, cutting through his bedside manner like a knife through cheese, “is it possible for seasickness to produce hallucinations? Am I delirious?”
“Pulse normal,” he told her. “Half a degree of temperature. No, you couldn’t be delirious. What you need is—”
“A piece of salt pork on a string,” she finished. “I’ve heard that one. Well, if I’m not delirious, then will you explain to me just how something with wings could come in my porthole and waken me by walking up and down on my face?”
“Uh?” said the doctor. He backed away a little, but Miss Withers was holding out for his inspection a copy of Alice in Wonderland. Across its open pages were a double line of faint, damp bird tracks, marked in blood.
“Of course, it’s a nightmare,” said Miss Withers reasonably. “But if it is, it’s lasting, a long time!”
The nightmare, although the school teacher did not suspect it, had already begun. It was to encompass every passenger aboard the little vessel, and to cling to them as they sailed over the curve of the earth, hover darkly above their heads as they went down the gangplank, and redouble its terrors as they set foot upon terra firma in London Town. Thus began the Nightmare of nightmares.
Back in the social hall Loulu Hammond was still playing rummy with Andy, Candida Noring, and young Reverson, who had just joined them as an alternative to going to bed. A tapping came on the porthole behind her, and she turned to look. No one was there. Todd, who faced her, rose suddenly, spilling his cards.
“Got to see a fellow,” he apologized. In a moment he came back in off the deck, replacing his billfold.
“On deck, everybody!” he called. The Honorable Emily, who was reading Punch again, put it down.
“Whales?” she inquired eagerly.
“Just come along—quietly,” he ordered, and led the way. There was that in his manner which induced the others to follow, puzzled and intrigued. Candida Noring was first, then Loulu, Reverson, and the Honorable Emily. A chill wind struck them as they came up on the deserted boat deck.
“What a laugh!” said Andy Todd mysteriously. There was something hateful in his tone, Loulu felt. Yet she followed…
He led the way forward, past the long lines of folded deck chairs, and pointed to a large and boxlike affair which was set between two engine-room ventilators.
Loulu was holding onto Candida Noring’s arm in the semi-darkness. She felt the girl shudder. “It looks like nothing so much an oversize coffin,” whispered Candida.
“Nonsense,” Loulu told her. “It’s the locker where they keep the steamer blankets.”
Andy Todd was chuckling. “Watch this, now,” he whispered. Even his whisper was loud. He felt on the deck until he found one of the big wooden disks used as counters in the shuffleboard games. “Somebody found the padlock open, and crawled in,” he confided. “But somehow it got fastened tight. Now watch the circus…”
“I say,” began the Honorable Emily, adjusting her eyeglass, “is it quite sporting?”
But Andy Todd had sent the wooden disk flying across the deck. It hit the lightly built locker with a resounding smash.
“Surprise! Surprise!” shouted Andy Todd. But he was the one surprised. Nothing happened. There was no sign of the frantic double Jack-in-the-box he had hoped to show. He had planned on hearing the cracking of light wood…
He cast his borrowed flashlight forward and saw that the padlock hung from a broken hasp.
“How silly!” said Loulu Hammond. She had a horrible feeling that this was the first chapter of a seven-and-six-penny thriller, and that the Body was about to be discovered. “Let’s go back.”
But nobody wanted to go back. Todd led the way, whipped open the locker, and looked down upon an anticlimax of disarranged blankets. “They got out!” he said sadly.
The Honorable Emily had expected whales. “Who got out?” she wanted to know. But Andy Todd did not answer. As far as Loulu Hammond was concerned, he did not need to answer. The flashlight showed clearly enough that caught in a crack on the inside of the locker lid was a wisp of soft gray fur.
Chapter II
Sex Rears Its Ugly Head
“BUT DARLING, NO ONE knows that it was you,” Candida Noring was saying. “There are dozens of other girls on the ship, and for all that anybody can prove, it might have been almost any of them. There’s a lot of difference between guessing and knowing.”
Rosemary Fraser lay sullenly in her lower berth, not even making a pretense of reading. “Oh, if people would only mind their own business!” she cried out. “If they—”
“You’re on shipboard,” Candida reminded her. “You should have remembered that before you let some man put you in such a ridiculous position. There’s nothing else for people to do aboard ship but gossip and guess. What they don’t know they imagine. But it’s all a tempest in a teapot. Forget it, and just remember that in three days—less than three days more—we’ll be in London and booking passage around the world!”
“I don’t care what you say, I’m not coming down to dinner,” Rosemary retorted. “Why, I’d die of shame when I came to sit down at the table.”
Candida pulled a tarn over her straight brown hair. “But it’s not just dinner. Tonight’s the
captain’s dinner with wine on the table and balloons and horns blowing and gifts…”
“The gift I’d like,” Rosemary told her dully, “would be that Todd person’s head on a silver charger.”
Candida was patient. “But, my dear, you can’t spend the entire voyage in your stateroom. Why, even the funny old-maid school teacher with the horsy face tottered out on deck today! The sea’s calm as a millpond.”
Rosemary still shook her dark curls. Candida’s brown eyes narrowed. “Tell me—is it that you’re afraid to meet the man in the case, whoever he was? Afraid of something he might say?”
“Him?” Rosemary laughed unpleasantly. “No, heavens, no! He wouldn’t dare say anything!”
Candida nodded. “Because of his wife?”
And then Rosemary was furious. “You promised, Candy! You swore you’d stop trying to find out who it was!”
Candida Noring said that she was sorry, and softly closed the stateroom door behind her. She was the last person in the world, she told herself, to throw stones.
She walked slowly aft, toward the social hall. Today was Friday—a week since sailing day. And Rosemary had spent most of it in the cloistered seclusion of their cabin. If only she had cloistered herself a little earlier! Candida thought to herself. When Rosemary failed to show up at the captain’s dinner, now that the sea had calmed down to a rippled mirror, the last shred of doubt on the part of the gossiping passengers would be dispelled. That would be an admission of guilt—if it was so terribly wrong to have crawled into that warm and blanketed locker with a man that she fancied. Candida wasn’t sure.
For lack of any other objective, Candida Noring wandered into the bar. As she came through the curtain she heard Andy Todd’s high tenor: “You don’t suppose they crawled into the blanket locker to play checkers, do you?”
He was still harping on his own pet scandal, this time for a group consisting of Loulu Hammond, the Honorable Emily, and Leslie Reverson. Peter Noel was rattling things behind the bar.
“I must confess that I hadn’t thought much about it,” Loulu Hammond told him.
But Andy Todd couldn’t be squelched. He leered at her wickedly. “Oh, haven’t you!” said he. Loulu’s teeth clicked against her glass, and the Honorable Emily tried to think of something to say.
“I saw some porpoise this morning—” she began. Then they noticed Candida. Andy Todd muttered something about fresh air and left.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” said Candida Noring. “I just wanted a pack of cigarettes.”
Peter Noel opened the case and offered her a meager choice. “No black ones,” he grinned. Noel was in good humor this afternoon.
“We were thinking of some bridge,” suggested Loulu. “Care to join us, Miss Noring?”
Candida Noring said that she only played poker. Noel cleared his throat and leaned on the counter. He saw a chance to act Munchausen again.
“Poker—that reminds me of the tightest spot I ever was in,” he began. The five drew a little closer, for they were bored with seafaring, and listening was easier than talking.
“It was when I was with the Goldfields outfit in Alaska,” said Peter Noel. “Little poker game one night at the Frenchman’s Place in Nome, about five years ago. I’d spent a season up-creek and had come back to Nome to pay off my crew of dredgers and wait around for the old Victoria to steam in and take us back to Seattle and civilization. Even today Nome is a fast town in the fall of the year, and the card games are steep. That night at the Frenchman’s a Russian vodka-runner dealt me a pat hand—an ace-high straight flush in hearts!
“Yes,” said Peter Noel. “There she was, the highest hand in poker. I kept a straight face, and the betting started off brisk. The others dropped out after a while—the Frenchman brought back a plate of ham sandwiches and stood gaping at the money piling up in the middle of the table—and finally I came to the end of my roll. I knew I had the Russky beat, even if he did have quick, clever fingers. He dug up all the money he had, two thousand, and put it into the middle of the table. I had to see him, or drop out. In my pocket I had payroll money for my firm, and I risked it. A man’ll do anything when he gets a royal flush.
“Well, he threw down a measly full house. When I showed him my hand there was a long silence. As I raked in the money, another Russky behind the dealer yelled: ‘It’s an illegal hand! Christmas has got six cards in his hand.’ (They called me Christmas because of my name bein’ Noel.) I was waiting for that.
“‘Six cards my eye,’ I said. And I showed ’em the cards. Then they accused me of pocketing one. Get the idea? I’d been dealt two cards stuck together, so I’d bet big and then lose everything according to the rules because of the extra card. Well, the Frenchman is a straight guy. He helped ’em search under the table and through my pockets and everywhere else. But they couldn’t find the sixth card the Russky card-sharp had dealt me. Finally they had to give up, and I took the dough, just as I finished my ham sandwich.”
Peter Noel smiled reminiscently. “That was my narrowest escape,” he said.
“But what happened to the other card?” Leslie Reverson insisted.
“I ate it in the ham sandwich,” Peter Noel told them. Loulu Hammond let go her breath in a long sigh, and forgot to feel of the smooth place on her finger where for nearly ten years she had worn a rather fine diamond—until today.
“We ought to have a drink on that one,” suggested the Honorable Emily. She had a dislike of signing bills. “Leslie, run and get my handbag off the berth in my room. Careful, now, and don’t let Tobermory slip out of the door.”
Young Reverson was back in a moment, bearing the handbag. With him was Tom Hammond.
“Any of you people care to get in on the pool this afternoon?” Hammond wanted to know.
The Honorable Emily shook her head, and Candida Noring said, “I’ve never guessed the ship’s run yet within fifty miles.”
“This isn’t the ship’s run,” Hammond told her. “The Major won that hours ago. This is a private pool that Andy Todd is doing. The stewards, the sailors, everybody is in it. You see, there’s a land bird of some kind fluttering around the deck, and the ship’s cat is stalking it. Person who guesses the time within fifteen minutes of the kill gets the pool.”
Loulu Hammond stood up and faced her husband. “Are you in on this?”
“Yes, for a dollar. Why not?”
“I rather think I hate you,” she told him. She started out of the smoking room, but the Honorable Emily was before her.
They came out to the rail and forced their way through a small crowd of passengers who were staring down at the well deck, where a lean black tomcat was pretending not to notice a plump, bewildered bird which fluttered aimlessly above his head. Again and again it came to rest on a winch bar or a bit of rigging, and ever and again the black torn sidled closer.
“Rotters!” The Honorable Emily gave tongue. “Catch that bird, somebody! Oh, cruel, cruel!” She was startled entirely out of her usual phlegm. “Poor little sea gull!”
Loulu Hammond stared at the fluttering creature. “Why—why, it’s a robin!” she cried, much as she might have said, “It’s Uncle John!”
Dr. Waite was at the rail, and he turned toward the women. “Not much use to try and save it,” he said. “Happens every trip. Lots of land birds are driven out to sea by storms, and they fly until they’re exhausted or they see a ship. They come and roost around the deck until the tomcat gets ’em, as he always does. We used to take ’em in sometimes and try to save ’em, but they always die. They’re too tired to care about living when they once get on the ship.”
“Well, I’m going to save this one!” announced the Honorable Emily. Amid the protests of the bettors and the high tenor objections of Andy Todd, she set off down the steep iron ladder intent upon upsetting the law of the survival of the fittest. Loulu Hammond started to go with her and then thought better of it.
For half an hour the intrepid lady pursued the tired robin without once g
etting within reach. The black tomcat withdrew and watched from a discreet distance.
Finally the Honorable Emily saw the robin flutter forward into the foremast rigging and had to give it up. Darkness was approaching—and, anyhow, the “pool” had been effectively stopped.
Andy Todd had to return their dollars to the twenty or so men who had signed up for it. “Damn the S.P.C.A., anyhow,” said Andy Todd.
Tom Hammond took his refunded dollar and went forward to dress for dinner. He was forced to give it up to his scapegrace son in order to have peace in which to don his dinner clothes. Tonight, for the first time in their married life, Loulu had not put the studs in his shirt.
She came into the stateroom, already dressed in a soft black velvet gown that made her look, Tom thought, like a Medici virgin. If there were any such. The silence which had marked most of their moments alone together during the past five days still stood, like a pane of plate glass, between them.
Tom threw away a collar and whirled on her. “Loulu!” he said.
“Yes?”
“Loulu, I don’t know what’s got into you.”
“Don’t you?” asked Loulu Hammond. She chose a string of Técla pearls.
“Loulu, if you think that I and that round-heeled Fraser girl—I mean, if you want to know where I was the night that you all played peekaboo on deck, why don’t you ask me?”
“I’m not interested,” she said softly.
“Well,” he plunged on, “I was shooting dice in the doctor’s office, with Waite and the Purser and the mate!”
“I saw Gerald headed for the bar with a dollar bill a moment ago,” she interrupted. “Perhaps I’d better go and prevent him from killing himself on candy.” She closed the stateroom door behind her, leaving her young husband to mangle his collar in sulphurous silence.
In the next stateroom Miss Hildegarde Withers was sadly surveying the wrinkles in her one evening gown of plum-colored crêpe de Chine. Someone beat a furious tattoo on her door, and the school teacher, still weak from her days in the grip of the sea, started violently.
Puzzle of the Pepper Tree Page 25
