THE STRAWSTACK MURDERS
(A.KA. STRAWSTACK)
BY DOROTHY CAMERON DISNEY
PRODUCED BY BOOK REVIVALS PRESS
THE STRAWSTACK MURDERS
(A.KA. STRAWSTACK)
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FOREWORD
Dorothy Cameron Disney (1903-1992) was an American writer born in the Indian Territory that became the state of Oklahoma. Educated at Barnard College, New York., she worked as a stenographer, copy writer, journalist and night club hostess before becoming a full time writer. She is one of Mary Roberts Rinehart most gifted followers.
The thrilling story of The Strawstack Murders (also known as Strawstack) takes place in a fashionable Maryland town just fifteen miles from Washington. There Margaret Tilbury, a wealthy and keen Vermont spinster (a “stoutish woman of uncertain age”—as she will describe herself), purchases an estate where she expects to settle down to a life of luxury and contentment. One night, however, the strawstacks next to the stables are set on fire, and protruding from one of them is the gloved hand of a murdered girl. With Miss Tilbury and her family the reader is plunged into a series of crimes and non-stop action that won’t let out until the very end.
Unlike many of the mystery stories of the time, Strawstack avoids devices that may become annoying: There is no omniscient detective, no long, boring, repetitious interviews with servants, no scientific tests and experts, and, best of all, no complicated, confusing house or room plans. The Strawstack Murders is just a plain good mystery, just as good as Disney’s previous novel Death in the Back Seat, also available as kindle ebook published by Book Revivals Press.
FOR
THE LATE L. G. DISNEY
MY FATHER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1.
CHAPTER 2.
CHAPTER 3.
CHAPTER 4.
CHAPTER 5.
CHAPTER 6.
CHAPTER 7.
CHAPTER 8.
CHAPTER 9.
CHAPTER 10.
CHAPTER 11.
CHAPTER 12.
CHAPTER 13.
CHAPTER 14.
CHAPTER 15.
CHAPTER 16.
CHAPTER 17.
CHAPTER 18.
CHAPTER 19.
CHAPTER 20.
CHAPTER 21.
CHAPTER 22.
CHAPTER 23.
CHAPTER 24.
CHAPTER 25.
CHAPTER 26.
1
I live alone again. I eat at the unseasonably early hours which so distressed my sister Marian. I sleep when I choose and I have long blank intervals in which to contemplate the happenings of last year. My niece Jane—Marian’s twenty-year-old and often disrespectful daughter—insists that I am a notorious second-guesser, and I dare¬say she’s right.
For it seems to me now, as I look down from my high hotel room at the busy, cheerful street below, that I could have prevented the dreadful series of crimes which so hideously involved us all. I could have prevented them by the simple process of realizing that I was rooted in New England, and that in New England I should stay. My purchase of the Maryland place, my stubbornly conceived decision to alter my surroundings and my mode of life in every respect, led us straight into disaster.
Had I been content to remain in the small Vermont town where I nursed my father for twenty years, I might have been a lonely woman but I would have been a happier one today. Dr. Simon Hargreaves, my father’s physician and my own dear friend, was among those who considered the move a bit of mild insanity. He had a brother in Washington, so he knew the capital and the surrounding country, and in his opinion it was a nice place to visit but no place to live. Also Simon had the New England distaste for spending money, and I was prepared to spend a great deal. He sourly predicted that I would run through the rather surprising competence I inherited from my father, and be left to pass my declining years in the poorhouse. He predicted that I would be miserable so far away from the spot where I had spent more years than I care to mention.
I was miserable indeed, but hardly in the way he anticipated.
Simon was a taciturn, unsentimental man and it never occurred to him to remark that he would miss my companionship, which was the only thing that might have changed my plans.
Marian selected the Maryland estate, and knowing Marian I can feel sure she was impressed by the fact that Broad Acres lay within five miles of Winters Run, and well within the sphere of influence of that snobbish, in-grown little village. Fred Brierly, my brother-in-law, held a minor job in one Government department in Washington and that particular location meant an arduous daily drive for him. But Fred did not protest. As for Marian—well, my sister was never one to consider a husband’s comforts when her own preferences were involved.
Winters Run is set back from the Maryland shore fifteen miles or so from Washington, D.C. It is distinctly not a summer place, and I understand that even United States senators have been made to feel uncomfortable there. Old and hoary with tradition, Winters Run is the year-round post office address of scores of landed people who dwell in the historic mansions thereabouts, gather in the evenings to talk of dogs and horses, and get into Washington occasionally when the British Ambassador gives a tea. These people live on inherited money, they spend an enormous amount of energy chasing foxes, they do that type of gentleman farming which fails inevitably to show a profit and, so I am told, once or twice a year they find time to pay their honest bills.
It was a class which didn’t particularly appeal to me. Also I may add that I have very little desire to bring myself to the attention of people who don’t wish to know me, an old-fashioned concept with which my sister was briskly out of sympathy.
Broad Acres, a show place even in that vicinity, had been owned by the same family since colonial days and this suited my sister’s book exactly. I have no doubt that she imagined the Breens, who reluctantly parted with their ancestral acres for a thumping sum of cash, might feel impelled to sponsor their successors. Mrs. Breen combined a taste for social life with a fervid interest in philanthropic work—she was always appearing in the rotogravures as sponsoring some brand new charity—and Marian was quite prepared to be generous with my money. Fortunately for both of us, the Breens did not, as Marian expected, settle in the neighborhood. They handed us the house, cashed my check and departed promptly for New York. Mrs. Breen, who contemplated opening a home for indigent musicians, planned to gather a nucleus of these talented folk in the metropolis.
Ted Breen, whom Jane introduced to me as “a nice boy of rich but honest parents,” remained in Washington. Ostensibly Ted stayed behind to administer his mother’s charities, to weed out the useful from the completely useless, but I imagine—indeed I know—that Jane had something to do with his decision to linger. Despite Marian’s obvious approval of Ted Breen, and her breathless interest in the fact that his family was listed in the Social Register, I found I liked the boy. Unlike many members of his generation he had good manners, and he could listen to an older woman without an air of looking for his hat. He was perhaps a shade too handsome, and it seemed to me that at twenty-five he might have settled on some steady line of work. I was to discover later on that much of Ted’s indolence was pose, that, in emergency, he could command a plentiful store of energy.
It was Ted who introduced my niece to the young people of Winters Run—young men who hunted
and swam and seldom worked; young women with flower-like faces who swore like troopers, smoked and drank excessively, and spent most of their waking hours with grooms and hostlers. It was Ted Breen who wrangled us our bid to the Country Club. We never made the Hunt and Riding Club.
Broad Acres had everything to recommend it as a residence except comfort. It had acres of rolling lawns—which cost a fortune to maintain—orchards, gardens, stables and even half a dozen fine horses, which I bought in a moment of dementia. The horses ate their heads off, and in the beginning no one ever rode them except Jane and Ted Breen. Later on after Ames came to us, he used occasionally to take out the most spirited for a canter; it was pleasant to watch his horsemanship but hardly worth the cost of maintaining the stables.
The main house—a guest cottage, servants’ quarters and garages spread out at the rear—was a dignified and beautiful structure done in true colonial style. There were thirteen spacious, lofty-ceilinged bedrooms, half a dozen inadequate closets, and only three baths. Marian was all for doing-over the house completely and scattering baths and closets like sunflower seed, but I was already alarmed at the magnitude of my venture into a fuller life and succeeded in forestalling her by hints that if the Breens had been satisfied, so should we be. We hung our clothes in wardrobes, and arranged time schedules for bathing. Marian’s husband suffered most from the situation. Fred Brierly was a timid, tactful soul, never given to demanding his rights, and very often forgetting he had any. Once when there were guests I believe he went two days without shaving.
As it happens, the "deplorable bathroom situation” (Marian’s phrase when she was being hoity-toity), affected me only indirectly. In view of the fact that I was putting up the money I calmly took possession of the master bedroom, the only one which had a private bath attached.
I suffered on another score, however. The house was draughty as a cavern, and I was hardly installed before I began having what the household referred to as "Aunt Margaret's colds.” A New England winter, I discovered, has nothing on a Maryland spring, and it seems to me
during those days I was never without half a dozen handkerchiefs. I’ve often wondered if the central heating system at Broad Acres wasn’t also installed in colonial days.
By the time June arrived, however, the weather was lovely and I began going abroad without shawls, watering eyes and a red nose. Then, in mid-July, I had the first really severe illness of my life-a long nasty bout with typhoid fever. My father’s cousin, Verity Blair, came down from Vermont to take care of me, and Verity’s arrival precipitated a serious quarrel with my sister Marian.
Much as I love Marian I must admit that she has her selfish streak, and I knew quite well the origin of her distaste for having Verity on the premises. Marian pictured a trained nurse, starched and cool and white, a proper sickroom atmosphere, and bother the expense! Verity couldn’t be fitted into that picture. Verity was an old, work-worn woman, and her appearance and eccentricities were often startling, and sometimes trying. Verity still made over and were the clothes my mother wore—and Mother has been dead for more than thirty years. She considered that a man who was earning twelve dollars a week as a grocery helper had a fine income, and certainly she herself never spent an equal amount in a week. Her saving instincts took odd forms, and I believe the oddest must have been the way she managed her supply of shoe laces. She bought an extra-long pair of laces always, cut them in the middle, and thus had two pairs of laces where only one grew before. Such a person couldn’t be adapted to Marian's scheme, but I always considered Verity the most loyal soul alive, and when I was sick I wanted her.
I sent for her.
I was similarly adamant where Julia's toy was concerned. Julia was my elder sister, and if her only surviving child was alone and in need, it seemed to me just that he should be with us. Julia had been dead a dozen years. At a date so late it hardly seemed to matter that Julia and Marian had never got on, nor that Father had never forgiven either of his daughters for marrying and leaving home in preference to staying in Vermont and taking care of him. Marian took quite a different view.
“The boy has bad blood in him,” was her way of putting it.
“Bad blood, nonsense! The only thing Father ever had against Julia’s husband was that he was an artist.” I spoiled the effect of the statement by an explosive sneeze. This conversation occurred sometime during April, and I was in the middle of one of my colds.
Marian handed me a handkerchief. “Chal Enlow,” she said waspishly, “wasn’t an artist. He was a bum, only he called it being a bohemian. We both know he couldn’t demean himself to support Julia.”
In view of the fact that I was in effect supporting Marian, her husband, and her daughter, that hardly seemed a damning indictment. I said dryly, “Every cent which Father sent to Julia was accompanied by a letter of instruction, vituperation and advice so long that merely by lifting it from the mailbox and dropping it in the wastebasket, she earned the check enclosed. Anyhow, my mind is quite made up to bring the boy here, Young Ames must be twenty now, and if he hasn’t been in college yet it’s high time he should be.”
“In college!” echoed Marian suspiciously. “Do you intend to put him in a school in Washington? I thought he had tuberculosis. I thought that was his reason for writing you.”
Marian’s devices are always transparent, and I sometimes get bored with them. I said coldly, “Even if Ames had tuberculosis, which he hasn’t, he’d be as well off here as he is in Arizona. Johns Hopkins, as you know quite well, is probably the best-equipped and most advanced hospital in the world. What Ames wrote anyway—as you would see if you read the letter carefully—was that he had a simple lesion of one lung, and that the doctor advised his giving up heavy work. It’s a precautionary measure, that’s all. He shouldn’t be working in a filling station in any events. He should be getting an education.”
“I should think Chal might see to that.”
“Chal’s notions on education and mine,” I said, “don’t concur. Anyhow, I doubt the boy has had a penny from his father since Chal went to Mexico to paint those naked savages. That’s a good two years ago.”
“Has Chal been getting money from you?”
“Nothing to speak of,” I said quickly. “I’ve bought a few of his canvases from time to time. But Chal’s sisters have been helping Ames. They’ve had the burden long enough.”
“Well, if you’re determined,” said Marian, ungraciously, “I suppose we must give way to you.”
“You must indeed,” I said.
It’s quite likely that my determination to bring Ames Enlow east was rooted in a sense of guilt. My father always said that Julia had made her bed and that she could lie in it. Actually what Julia had done was marry the man of her choice, go off with him to Arizona, bear her son and die. It wasn’t Julia’s fault that, in the intervening years, Chal Enlow had frequently found it necessary to appeal to Father for funds, nor was it the fault of Julia’s son. Until that letter Ames had asked for nothing, and apparently he hadn’t thought it strange that he should grow up in the West in poverty, while we lived in plenty in the East. I hadn’t even sent my nephew a Christmas box since he outgrew diapers; I had permitted Julia’s boy to reach man’s estate and had never held him in my arms. All that, I decided—now that Father was safely buried—should be changed. I daresay I wanted to gather the members of my family around me. And quite unconsciously, perhaps, I wanted to set their feet in the paths which I felt that they should follow.
Certainly it did not occur to me that my nephew might have anything to say about my plans for him. I so completely forgot that a youth of twenty might value his independence that when I mailed Ames a brisk outline of his next few years and enclosed money for his railroad fare, I also suggested a convenient date for his arrival. A date, that is, which was convenient for me.
I received in return a firm, friendly note in which my nephew informed me that he had no intention whatever of leaving Arizona. He was nicely situated and with the
money I “so kindly” sent he would take a two months’ vacation, after which he would go back to the filling-station job which was being held for him. As he figured it, he could repay “my loan” within two years at the outside. I believe he even calculated the legal rate of interest.
It took half a dozen letters and considerable belated tact to change his mind. I think only the fact that he had adored Julia, and that he believed she would have liked him to meet her sisters, brought him to decision. That and the lure held out by Georgetown—he wanted above all things, as he wrote me, to go into the diplomatic service.
He was already, as I could testify, fitted for the career. The matter of the motor car was a case in point. I preferred that he come by train, believing that anyone who steps into an automobile with the intention of driving across the country takes his life into his hands. But Ames in a letter which my father might have written, so businesslike and sensible it was, pointed out that he could buy a good second-hand car and make the trip for only a little more than his railroad fare would be, which he considered a good investment for me. “Of course,” he wrote, “the car would belong-to you, and you can sell it after my arrival.”
I was amused by his ingenuousness, and wired that by all means he was to accept the automobile as his own. A predated birthday present I termed it, referring to the fact that he would be twenty-one in January. On that basis he wired back his acceptance.
Even Marian had to admit that our nephew had inherited some of our father’s instincts. Josiah Tilbury, flat on his back for twenty years, operated and managed from his bedroom three factories and one of the best- known banks in New England. He was a proud, stubborn, stiff-necked man. I disliked him heartily.
2
Ames arrived sometime in early May, having driven straight across the country from Arizona to Maryland in five days’ time. He seemed to feel that he had hung up some sort of record, and was boyishly proud of it. Poor boy, he paid for that pride with a collapse so complete that I feared Marian was right after all, and that Ames had kept from me his true condition or that the western doctor in mistaken kindness had kept it from him.
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