“Is that what this is all about?” asked Mr. Strang. “You mean hidden in that big house there’s money which Rutherford Pyle meant you to have?”
“That’s it, Mr. Strang,” Corcoran replied. “Somewhere in the house—probably in the library itself—is the fortune mentioned in the poem. But before I could give the place a proper look, the lawyers for the estate told me I had to get out. The house is closed tight, and Patricia and I are living in a single room with barely enough ready cash to pay this week’s rent.”
“Umm.” Mr. Strang toyed with his acid-stained necktie. “You know, Mr. Corcoran, legally you haven’t a leg to stand on. If Pyle left everything to his daughter, you can’t claim a dime based on some vague promise he made before he died.”
“True. But the daughter—Laura Aikens is her married name—has left me a bit of hope. She knew the high regard her father had for me. She said if Mr. Pyle meant me to have something, I was to have it.”
“Then why not just go back and search until the money shows up?”
“No, that won’t do. I showed Mrs. Aikens the poem and the rest, but she wasn’t convinced they were anything but the maunderings of an old man. The only way I could claim what was due me, she said, was to prove to her that the clues made some sense and then go into the house and head straight for the hiding place. She’d not allow any hunting expeditions, with me claimin’ any cash I came upon.”
“I see,” said Mr. Strang. “That’s the problem, then. You have to prove to Laura Aikens’s satisfaction that a hiding place exists and then locate it without any margin for error.”
“That’s it indeed,” replied Corcoran. “And it must be done within the next four days, as after that, Mr. and Mrs. Aikens are moving away, leaving only a caretaker and the house locked up tight. I despaired of having any chance at all until Patricia suggested you might be able to help.”
Mr. Strang rubbed his hands together briskly. “Challenge accepted, Mr. Corcoran,” he said. “The poem goes here.” He spread the wrinkled yellow paper on his desk and then gestured to Corcoran.
“Let’s have the rest of it,” he said. “You’ve talked about clues—plural—as well as the poem ‘and the rest.’ What ‘rest,’ Mr. Corcoran? What other leads did Mr. Pyle give you?”
Again Corcoran reached into a pocket. He pulled out four small white cards. “I’m afraid you’ll find these as confusing as the poem,” he told the teacher.
There were words on each card in the same spidery handwriting as the poem. Mr. Strang peered through black-rimmed glasses at the top one.
Bobby writes to a rodent.
WHO have plans turned to dust at 39 and 40?
The next message was equally obscure:
Fight him for a nation!
WHAT are the fruits of Julie’s labors?
The third didn’t help much either:
Bill’s Dicky Three emotes, beginning one and one.
WHEN is the season of low spirits?
And finally:
Public Enemy Number One begins to Nod.
WHERE is the marked man’s newfound land?
Mr. Strang stared long and hard at the four cards. “Nothing,” he said finally. “Let me see that poem again.”
He tapped the yellow paper with a gnarled finger. “The WHY is given here,” he said. “‘To seek your fortune, no more and no less.’ WHAT and WHEN and WHERE and WHO have something to do with the clues on the white cards. But we must begin with the poem. I’m sure of it.”
“Can you find nothing at all?” asked Corcoran anxiously.
“The first part of the poem’s clear enough. You’re to seek your fortune somewhere in the house—‘beneath my roofing tiles.’ It’s the next two lines that stump me. What are ‘Alaska’s literary isles’? And why make a contraction of the word ‘noble,’ to say nothing of capitalizing it?”
“As to the isles,” murmured Corcoran, “the only ones I was able to think of up around Alaska are the Aleutians.”
“Aleutians,” replied Mr. Strang. “Yes, they’re well enough known, and I don’t think Pyle would give you something too obscure. But whoever heard of literary Aleutians?”
“I have!” called a chipper voice from the hallway outside the room.
“What!” cried Mr. Strang and Corcoran together.
A smiling woman’s face appeared around the corner of the doorway. It was surmounted by gray hair tied with a large knot in the back. Several pencils were stuck into the knot like pins in a cushion.
“Maude Wiggins, get in here this instant!” bellowed Mr. Strang.
The woman entered the room, cocking her head like a somewhat aged sparrow. “Wesley Corcoran, Maude Wiggins,” said Mr. Strang. “Maude’s our head librarian.”
“I’d just finished unpacking some reproductions of so-called art masterpieces,” she said. “Masterpieces, my foot! Honestly, Leonard, how anybody can put a few daubs of paint on a canvas and sell it for thousands of dollars is beyond me. Anyway, I was just passing your room when I heard you say—”
“Literary Aleutians,” Mr. Strang repeated. “What are they, Maude?”
“Literary allusions,” she said, stressing the pronunciation, “are oblique references to—well, literature. For example, Leonard, if you were to tell me that ‘age cannot wither me, nor custom stale my infinite variety,’ I’d know you’d been reading Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, even as I fell swooning into your arms.”
“Aleutians—allusions,” mused Mr. Strang. “Nearly identical sounds. Hydrozoa, Maude, I think you’ve found it! That’s just the kind of linguistic trick that Pyle loved to pull. And the last line of the poem even mentions ‘word games.’ We didn’t catch on because we were reading, not listening. Maude, I love you. You’re beautiful. Will you run away with me and live in sin in a thatched hut somewhere?” And he planted a big kiss on her cheek.
“Leonard Strang, you’re an old fool!” she sputtered. “At your age, sinning means grabbing fifteen minutes of extra sleep in the morning.”
“I’m only two years older than you, Maude.”
She made a mock slap at his face. “And you’re no gentleman, either.”
By the desk, Corcoran shook his head in confusion. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s happening here?”
“I was about to ask the same thing,” said Maude.
“‘All answers lie beneath my roofing tiles’—that is, in the house,” explained Mr. Strang, his hands trembling with excitement. “‘And in Alaska’s literary isles’—in literary allusions. The WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, and WHO questions have their answers in the Pyle library. And when we find the answers, they’ll lead us to the money, to the fortune.”
“I don’t know what this is all about,” said Maude. “But if you need a library, mine’s available. And this sounds a lot more exciting than going home and cleaning the oven. So I demand to join you, with full partnership privileges. After all, if it weren’t for me, you two would still be freezing in Alaska.”
“We’re delighted to have you,” said Mr. Strang gallantly. “Tell me, partner, do you think our beloved principal, Mr. Guthrey, would be annoyed if we spent a few hours in the library?”
“I think he’d have a fit,” replied Maude. “Everybody’s supposed to be out of the building by five o’clock. Oh, well, it’s his blood pressure, not mine. Come on, I still have my key. Just my luck. The first time in twenty-five years a man—two men—want to spend an evening alone with me, and all we’re going to do is look at books.”
Once seated at one of the library’s huge tables, Mr. Strang filled Maude in on Corcoran’s problem. Then the three took turns staring at the four cards.
“Which one do you have now?” Mr. Strang asked Corcoran after thirty minutes of fruitless endeavor.
“The one about Public Enemy Number One,” was the reply. “All that’s in my mind is Edward G. Robinson in the movie.”
“I’m working on ‘Bill’s Dicky,’” said Maude. “Isn’t that just too cute for words? To
my way of thinking, the person who invented diminutives of names should be drawn and quartered. ‘Bill’s Dicky’ indeed. How would you like to be called Lenny Strang, Leonard? Why can’t this be William’s Rich—”
And then there was a silence as Maude and Mr. Strang stared at each other. This was followed by a wild scrambling as they both raced to the far end of the room.
Maude, being more familiar with the arrangement of the library, was the first to reach the proper place. She removed a book from the shelf, riffled through its pages for a few moments, then pointed to a line of type.
“Got it,” murmured Mr. Strang. “Now we know the WHEN.” And he jotted the line in a small notebook.
“Now that we’ve got the hang of it, Leonard, it shouldn’t take long to figure out those other cards,” said Maude. “Let me try my hand at WHO.”
WHO came easily. WHAT and WHERE required a bit more thought, and there were several unproductive searches through the library’s stacks. But in another hour both Mr. Strang and Maude Wiggins were sure they knew the identity of Rutherford Pyle’s “Nob’l man.” And they were reasonably certain of the location of Wesley Corcoran’s fortune in the huge Pyle mansion.
Still, they put their theory to Corcoran himself with some misgivings. “We’ll only get the one chance,” Mr. Strang told him. “And if we’re wrong, it’s good-bye fortune.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” was Corcoran’s blithe reply. “Your ideas sound fine to me. And if they don’t work out, at least we had our try. I’ll not hold hard luck against either of you. Now I guess it’s time to make an appointment with Mrs. Aikens.”
She was perhaps fifty years old. Her bearing was queenly as she approached the massive chair in the center of the room, and she carried a long cigarette holder in her right hand like a royal scepter. Before sitting down she turned in a full circle, looking intently at the shelves of books which covered all four walls from floor to ceiling. The room in the Pyle mansion was huge, larger even than the Aldershot High School library.
It had to be huge, thought Mr. Strang, to contain a presence as commanding as that of Mrs. Laura Aikens.
“Mr. Corcoran, Mr. Strang, Miss Wiggins,” she said, settling into the chair’s depths with great aplomb, “welcome to my father’s house. You tell me, Mr. Corcoran, that father wished you to have some token of gratitude for your years of service to him. It is my further understanding that Mr. Strang and Miss Wiggins are assisting you—your paladins, so to speak.”
“Yes, Mrs. Aikens.” Corcoran’s voice was little more than a husky whisper.
“Very well,” she went on. “I will not stand in the way of any wishes my late father had concerning the disposition of his estate, and I reject any petty legal arguments concerning the propriety of those wishes. Very simply, Mr. Corcoran, if father wished you to have something, you will have it.
“But I won’t have any clever opportunist sullying my father’s memory by trying to gain by trickery that which is not his. So the ground rules, if you will, are simple. You must convince me that the clues of which you spoke came from my father. You must further convince me that those clues lead to a specific spot in this house. And finally, you must go to that spot and find something of real or sentimental value to you. If these three conditions are met, I will give you that which you claim as soon as the will is probated. Is that understood?”
“Y-yes,” sputtered Corcoran.
“Then you may begin.”
Mr. Strang and Maude Wiggins whispered together for a few seconds. Then the librarian shook her head firmly and backed toward the far wall. Mr. Strang walked to the great chair, reached into his pocket, and removed the poem and the four white cards.
“It seems I’ve been elected to do the talking,” he said. “First, I—we—ask you to look at these cards, Mrs. Aikens. Are they in your father’s handwriting?”
She examined the cards intently. Finally she nodded. “Yes, my father wrote these.”
“First condition met, then,” the teacher stated. “For these are the clues he gave to Wesley Corcoran.”
For the first time a bit of a smile played about Mrs. Aikens’s lips. “Go on.”
“Note the poem. Its fifth and sixth lines state that the fortune is in this house and also in ‘Alaska’s literary isles.’ Mr. Corcoran and I took that to mean the Aleutians and, by extension, literary Aleutians. But we give Miss Wiggins full marks for discovering that your father was referring to literary allusions.”
Mrs. Aikens’s smile grew larger. “I will grant—reluctantly, Mr. Strang—that the pun in the phrase ‘literary Aleutians’ is one which my father was not only capable of but which he would have delighted in.”
“Therefore,” the teacher continued, “the WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, and WHO cards must be literary references.”
“Must they? You’ll have to convince me, Mr. Strang.”
“I hope to. Now each card first makes a cryptic statement and then asks a question. This seems to indicate that the statement is a clue to answer the question. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Mrs. Aikens remained impassive. “Go on.”
“Our first break came on the ‘Bill’s Dicky’ card when Maude—Miss Wiggins—objected to the diminutive names and substituted the full ones. When that was done, the line read: ‘William’s Richard Three emotes, beginning one and one.’”
“Oh!” Suddenly Laura Aikens clapped her hands together in delight. The childish gesture was so out of character that Mr. Strang stared in astonishment.
“William Shakespeare’s Richard III!” she cried. “Of course.”
The teacher breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed the second condition—that the woman be convinced that the cards indeed held clues—could be met more easily than he’d feared.
“And Scene One of Act One,” he said, accenting the numbers, “begins with Richard saying, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer of this sun of York.’ So, Mrs. Aikens—‘WHEN is the season of low spirits?’”
“The winter of our discontent.”
“Good.” Mr. Strang felt himself to be on firm ground now. Laura Aikens seemed as pleased to give a correct answer as any giggling schoolgirl.
“Now let’s try the WHO card,” he went on.
“Bobby—Robert,” mused Laura Aikens. “Let me see. That might be Robert Browning or Robert Burns or Robert Louis—”
“I was at a loss on that one,” Mr. Strang interrupted, “until Maude bailed me out. It seems one of Robert Burns’s best-known poems is titled To a Mouse. And line 39 of the poem, continuing on to 40, is,” Mr. Strang consulted his notebook, “‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.’ So if ‘a-gley’ means wrong, WHO, then, ‘have plans turned to dust?’”
“Mice and men, isn’t it?” replied Laura Aikens.
“Right,” said the teacher. “Third, let’s consider Public Enemy Number One. This took us a bit longer. But it occurred to me that ‘begins to’ on the card might mean ‘starts toward.’ I also got to wondering whether ‘Number One’ might mean not the most dangerous but the first in time. Public enemies of importance are usually killers, Mrs. Aikens. And the Number One murderer, who was marked by the Lord for his crime, was—”
Laura Aikens arched her eyebrows. “You mean Cain?” she asked. “From the Bible?”
“I do,” Mr. Strang assured her. “And note the capitalization of Nod. The Bible tells us, in Genesis 4:16, that: ‘Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod—’”
“That’s why it’s capitalized!” Laura exclaimed.
“—‘on the east of Eden!’” Mr. Strang concluded.
“Then the answer to WHERE is ‘east of Eden.’” By now, Laura was enjoying herself hugely. “But there’s still WHAT. ‘Fight him for a nation!’ That doesn’t make sense. And who’s Julie? Julius? Julian?”
“Maude, you figured this one out all by yourself,” said Mr. Strang, turning to the librarian. “Do the honors, please.”<
br />
“Well,” Maude began with unaccustomed timidity, “I couldn’t think of a pun for ‘fight,’ so I just started substituting words that meant about the same. ‘War,’ ‘brawl,’ ‘quarrel,’ and so forth. And then I hit on ‘battle.’”
“Battle him for a nation,” said Laura slowly. “I don’t—yes, I do! Him and hymn—they sound the same, but they’re different words. ‘Fight him for a nation!’ is ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”
“Written by Julie Ward Howe,” Mr. Strang chimed in. “And if you remember the first few lines, you’ll get the ‘fruits’ of Julia’s—or ‘Julie’s’—‘labors.’”
Laura began humming softly. “Ta ta ta ta tata—where the grapes of wrath are stored.” She paused. “The fruits—they’re the grapes of wrath, aren’t they?”
Mr. Strang nodded. “So now we have all four questions answered. WHO is ‘mice and men.’ WHAT is ‘the grapes of wrath.’ WHEN is ‘the winter of our discontent.’ And finally, WHERE is ‘east of Eden.’”
Suddenly Laura Aikens seemed to change again before their eyes. Gone was the incredulous schoolgirl, happy in answering her teachers correctly. And again there sat in the huge chair the imperious queen of the Rutherford Pyle estate. “This has all been very interesting,” she proclaimed. “But I scarcely see how the books you’ve mentioned lead to any kind of hiding place.”
At that, Maude Wiggins marched up to the chair, her eyes flashing. “We don’t want to see any of the books we mentioned,” she snapped. “What we do want to look at is the shelf where your father kept the works of John Steinbeck.”
“John Steinbeck? But—”
“Yes, Mrs. Aikens,” said Mr. Strang gently. “John Steinbeck. The author of Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter of Our Discontent, and East of Eden. Four titles by the same author—four literary allusions. And not very obscure titles, what with three of the books having been made into movies, to say nothing of numerous TV adaptations.”
“But I always considered Steinbeck a rather earthy, rugged author. Why would father have referred to him in the poem as noble?”
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