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The Desert Lake Mystery
By
KAY CLEAVER STRAHAN
The Desert Lake Mystery was originally published in 1936 by Grosset & Dunlap, New York.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 5
Chapter I 6
Chapter II 11
Chapter III 15
Chapter IV 18
Chapter V 22
Chapter VI 27
Chapter VII 32
Chapter VIII 36
Chapter IX 41
Chapter X 44
Chapter XI 49
Chapter XII 52
Chapter XIII 59
Chapter XIV 64
Chapter XV 70
Chapter XVI 74
Chapter XVII 79
Chapter XVIII 82
Chapter XIX 87
Chapter XX 90
Chapter XXI 94
Chapter XXII 100
Chapter XXIII 105
Chapter XXIV 111
Chapter XXV 116
Chapter XXVI 122
Chapter XXVII 125
Chapter XXVIII 129
Chapter XXIX 133
Chapter XXX 136
Chapter XXXI 140
Chapter XXXII 144
Chapter XXXIII 148
Chapter XXXIV 152
Chapter XXXV 160
Chapter XXXVI 166
Chapter XXXVII 172
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 184
Chapter I
I had dark forebodings. I had evil premonitions. Naturally, Adam Oakman being the high type of man he was, and his visitors being his relatives, mannerly and well educated, I didn’t predict anything so uncouth as murders and dead bodies disappearing like the morning dew all over the place. But I had forebodings, just the same, and the difference between mine and most forebodings was that I stated mine far in advance.
It was early June, hot as Hades in a skillet here in southern Nevada, so I decided to drive out to Adam’s house and cool off. He called his place “Hay Patch” because he wanted to make it sound humble. The house was built acres deep in palm groves and for size it compared well with a couple of battleships.
Nothing, not even the dog, was stirring around the place when I got there. But, since Adam and I have never stood on ceremony since we were kids together in the first grade, I went right in through the big hall to the front parlor and was blinking the sun out of my eyes when I heard a murmuring voice remark, “My heart was once a vagabond.”
“No?” I said, trying to be surprised politely and seeing for sure that what I thought I saw was Reggie Duefife, curled up as much as an unwieldy fat man can curl on one of the sofas, sucking a lead pencil.
“Oh, my, Jeff!” he said. “You startled me. What rhymes with vagabond?”
“Drag a pond,” I said.
“Mercy, no!” he said. “I’m writing poetry. My heart was once a vagabond——”
“Try calling it something else,” I suggested. “An internal organ.”
He flitted his hands nervously and straightened his glasses. There was always something about the way those glasses pinched close together on his little fat nose that reminded me of the double oo in cootie.
“Organ rhymes with Morgan,” I told him. “Either J. P., or ‘Morgan, Morgan the raider and Morgan’s terrible men.’”
“Perfectly absurd,” he said very fretfully. He talked like that. He called his socks his “hosiery,” and overeating “dietary indiscretions.” Adam said that if Reggie undertook to eat a bunch of grapes he’d hire somebody to spit the seeds out for him. But Adam wronged him there. Reggie never was lazy when it came to eating. He bought all the ladies’ magazines and, after he went to Memaloose Lake, he’d cut the pretty pictures of food out of them and pin them around to decorate his cottage. His mamma, Mrs. Ivy Duefife, who thought the world of him, said that he was a culinary genius, the lad only twenty-five years-old and able to read a recipe and tell in a flash whether or not it would be tasty. It was Reggie himself who found the recipe for the frozen pudding named “Pineapple Supreme” that figured later in the horrible tragedies at Memaloose Lake.
Leaving Reggie, then, saying only, “Good-by, Reggie,” I went along hunting for Adam and was very abashed and bothered when I parted the curtains to the back parlor and saw the crippled boy named Terwilliger Young but, luckily, called “Twill” for short, holding Adam’s daughter, Betty-Jean, in his lap and kissing her ungrudgingly.
Adam liked Twill—everybody did—but I knew that he’d raise thunder about having him for a son-in-law. I knew, too, that a few weeks ago Adam had sent a cable to his foster son, Kent, down in South America telling him to come straight home. And I was certain that the old dizzard was getting Kent here to try to make a match between Kent and Betty-Jean, for the purpose of saving himself the trouble of dividing up his fortune instead of leaving it in a lump sum as he’d always planned.
I wouldn’t call this an evil foreboding, but I was worried all right when I knocked on the library door. Rosemary Young opened it and I stopped worrying.
Rosemary was this Twill Young’s sister. The first evening I met her a young author fellow, a widower named St. Dennis O’Dell who has lived in these parts off and on for the past fifteen years, was out at Hay Patch too, calling on the new arrivals. We left together and I asked him what he thought of Rosemary Young.
He got very dreamy and answered, “Is there a Rosemary?”
O’Dell’s daughter, Brigid, a saucy, red-haired, seventeen-year-old trick who was with us, said, “You mean she is too lovely to be true, St. Dennis?”
I said, “She’s the prettiest girl I ever saw,” but he snapped me up.
“She is not at all pretty,” he said. “She is——
Let me see. A picture Shelley painted. A sonnet Giotto wrote. How’s that, Brigid?”
“Rotten,” she answered. “Because it is forced. Untrue. Rosemary is real, healthy, vital——”
O’Dell groaned. “Charming, I suppose? Adorable?” He hated being criticized.
“Yes, she is,” Brigid stood up for herself. “And beautiful. But why do you suppose Mayor Oakman dislikes her?”
“He can’t dominate her,” O’Dell said. “He forced her to play bridge this evening. In some way, by being so gay and amusing I believe, we all felt that the victory was hers and not Adam Oakman’s. Also—she won. If those two ever came to a genuine conflict, she’d win. He senses her superiority and hates it. Her strength is the force of natural things: flowing water, growing seeds. Oakman’s strength is money, and a sledge hammer.”
“A sledge hammer can smash a seed,” I said.
“Not if it can’t find the seed.”
Brigid said, “She isn’t remote. And she doesn’t seem in the least mysterious.”
“A quality of the miraculous,” O’Dell said.
You might think that all this, as described by the O’Dells (though I’ll admit that they had a reputation around here for being p
robably crazy), would abash an old desert rat like me at every meeting with her. I never felt more at home with anybody in my life than I did with Rosemary Young.
“Hello, Jeff!” she said. “Come in. I’m glad to see you.” And I knew she meant it and was just on the point of accepting her invitation when I saw Mrs. Ivy Duefife—Reggie’s mamma—in there; so I backed out, making excuses.
At first glance, because Mrs. Duefife was so large, loppy and kind of always at loose ends like a load of hay, you’d probably have thought that she belonged to the home-staying type of womanhood. That is, if she hadn’t already begun telling you about her successes in public life on the platform. She was a great talker. But I always had a feeling that she was just repeating passages, absentmindedly, from her public speeches. After you got used to it you didn’t care so much; but, at first, to have her break a silence by beginning out of a clear sky, “Let us be frank. We know that race suicide is now the rule, rather than the exception,” was very embarrassing. Her voice was queer, too. It was the kind of voice you’d expect to hear saying words like, “Victory!” or, “Hark!” or, “Beware!” or, at least, “Amen.” Though when she said only a few words they were, generally, “Reggie, dearest, don’t blow your nose.” (Reggie was always blowing his nose. He said it was because he had sinus trouble. His mamma said he had sinus trouble because he blew his nose. I never learned the facts of the matter.)
Outside the kitchen door I found Twill’s little dog that he’d picked up in an Indian town and named De Profundis—“Funny” for short—drooping with that long lonesome look that dogs put on when there has been trouble; and, sure enough, in the kitchen Jeremiah, Adam’s old French cook, was on another rampage.
“Well, well, Jeremiah,” I said, as cheery as I could with him looking so downcast, “how in the world are you?”
He snatched his white cap off and slung it on the floor like it had bit his head. “The boss says I have a yellow streak,” he told me and burst out bawling.
Jeremiah’s custom of bursting out crying and sobbing was the most embarrassing habit I ever saw in any man, foreign or native. Adam, after thirty years, could cope with it. I never could. But I tried.
“So has a rainbow,” I said. “I’ll bet he was complimenting you. Honest.”
“I am not a rainbow,” he said. “But if I was I’d be quitting anyway, because I’m not six men, nor eight, nor ten, nor——“ He went right on, sobbing and counting by two until I stopped him at thirty-six by asking gently where in Hades Adam was.
“Ants,” Jeremiah answered, pointing outdoors and hiccuping pitifully.
Seeing Adam, the cause of all this sorrow, sitting out in the sizzling hot sun, comfortable and patient as an old slipper, watching one of his anthills made me mad all over.
“Hello, Mayor,” I said.
“Hello, Sheriff,” he said.
Adam was a senator from this state for as long as he wanted to be. Since then he’s been mayor of Ferras. I’ve been sheriff of Oakman County since his senator days, so why calling each other by our titles should mean cussing each other out, I don’t know. But it does.
He kept on rubbering at his ants. Ants have been a life-long hobby of his. There’s a saying out here that whenever Mayor Oakman moves from one anthill to another he’s made a million dollars.
“‘They aren’t beautiful,’” he said, pretty soon, “‘and certainly they aren’t funny.’ I read that in a book about ants the other day. The same man wrote, ‘Guest ants are harmless. Their greatest pleasure consists in riding pick-a-back.’”
“So Jeremiah’s quitting?” I said.
Adam stood up, shook down his overalls and buttoned his undershirt. His worst enemy—and he has plenty—couldn’t accuse him of often being dudish in private. “So Jeremiah is not quitting,” he said. “Do you remember that automobile park at Memaloose Lake?”
“Why?” I said, hating to admit remembering it.
A few years ago there’d been trouble about whether the new highway was going straight from Sackawash to Mesquite Forks, passing the puddle called Memaloose Lake, or whether it should detour, far, through Ferras. Adam had large interests in Ferras. The highway detoured. A young wise guy from L. A. was left stranded with the deluxe auto park he’d had foresight to build on the lake. Adam, who sometimes gets sentimental, took the place off his hands so the young fellow didn’t lose a dollar, and put up a twelve-foot fence all around it to keep stray tourists out and allow the trees planted on the place to grow in peace. Adam said that trees took so long to grow that folks loved chopping them down, but that if he could prevent them doing so Memaloose Camp would soon be a paradise on earth.
Maybe. In the meantime the trees all died and the place with its dazzling, flat-roofed white stucco buildings, its network of cement roads and walks made from the white granite off of old Tumboldt Mountain, glittering stark and desert bare under the blinding sun, was fit for nothing but an eyesore. Adam liked the lake. What I thought was that in any other county such a thing would have got discouraged and dried up long ago. But Memaloose held out, sprawling in the heat, reflecting the calico hills humped yonder beyond it, mocking the thirsty stunted sagebrush that struggled down through the rocks in mangy patches to its rim.
“I’ve decided,” Adam said, answering my question, “that it would be a pleasant change to take my guests over there for the summer. There is plenty of room. Eighteen furnished cottages and the big community house. I’ll provide everything but service. Jeremiah needs a rest, as do the other servants. They’ll stay here at Hay Patch.”
“You and Betty-Jean going too?” I asked.
He had a strong streak of politeness that I always forgot between times. “Certainly. I shall suggest it as a vacation for us all. There is an interesting anthill by the gate. Some work will be good for Betty-Jean and all of us.”
Then and there I began expressing my forebodings, explaining to him that his taste for the blazing sun without a sprig of shade was shared by none and was healthful for few.
He wouldn’t listen. He honestly liked Memaloose so well that if it had been in another county he’d have thought it was all right. Besides that, he liked the idea of a social experiment—or so he said—with its possibilities for developments.
“You bet,” I told him. “For developing sunstrokes, suicides, blindness and maniacs. It is no place for white folks,” I told him. “Even the Indians were on to it, and down on it when they named the lake ‘Memaloose.’” Memaloose being, as everybody knows, the Indian word for death.
Chapter II
Our chatting had brought us to the kitchen door, and the next thing I knew I heard Kent’s nice voice saying, “Hello! Hello, Dad! Hello, Jeff!” And, sure enough, here he was at home, all the way from South America.
Adam was so tickled that if Jeremiah and I hadn’t been there I’ll bet he would have kissed the boy besides hugging him. “Good to see you, son,” he kept saying; and then, out of a clear sky, “Married? Paying alimony?”
“Neither,” Kent said. “I thought you sent for me to attend your wedding.”
That gave us reasons for laughing heartily as we sat down to the ice cream that Jeremiah was dishing up for us with tears of joy.
“Broke?” was Adam’s next question.
“Broke?” Kent stalled, knowing as well as I knew that Adam hoped he was stony. “I tell you what, Dad. You grubstake me and I’ll strike out and find us a gold mine.”
Adam was so pleased he couldn’t begin to hide it. “What do you want with a gold mine?” he asked. “I thought glass-sand was your hobby.”
It might have been, all right. Three years ago Kent had located the largest glass-sand properties in the world right here in Oakman County where Adam had been sitting on them for years watching ants. And the best of it was that the boy went ahead on his own hook and sold them to a certain automobile manufacturer for a cool million. It was Kent’s first year out of mining school. Adam had taken him into partnership, so they whacked even; but Ada
m was sore to the bone and big bones at that.
The kid had beat him at his own game and was sitting pretty in the king-row able to jump either way out from under Adam’s thumb where he’d been ever since Adam had adopted him right after the Pink Purse Mine disaster. Kent’s father, Van Zandt Kent, was one of Adam’s and my best friends. He got killed that night, helping with the rescue work. Maybe Van wasn’t as careful as he could have been. Kent’s mamma had died only a couple of days before that.
Boy-like, when Kent collected his money he wanted to travel. Adam had traveled so he saw no use in Kent’s doing so. He was so vexed when Kent left for his trip that he wouldn’t even write to him. Kent sent telegrams from here and there, but Adam wouldn’t answer them; so that’s how the two had got out of touch.
“Glass-sand isn’t bad,” Kent answered Adam’s remark. “But I’ve heard that gold mines were all the fashion lately.”
“I’m sick of them, myself,” Adam said, and went on, forgetting how he’d promised me that when Kent came whimpering home, fleeced of his last cent, he’d never do another thing for him, “but if you want one I expect you should have it. We’ll see. Now I have a surprise for you. You thought you were joking when you spoke of my being married. Well, I was married, son, more years ago than you are old.”
One of the many most astounding things about Adam is that he never knows he makes talk. That marriage of his, by this time, was a part of the folklore of the state, like the Tonopah death, or Mrs. Bower’s fortune-telling. All there was to it, though, was that Adam came home from Washington, D. C., one spring, aged forty, with a pretty little eighteen-year-old girl for a wife. He parked her in Hay Patch and went right off on a prospecting trip. “Inopportune” is the word O’Dell used for that trip of Adam’s. Adam explained it by saying that a grown man couldn’t sit around the house all summer with a girl. When he came home in the fall he found a note for him right where it belonged on the pincushion.
If any of this was news to Kent so was the Revolutionary War. I doubted that Adam had other news for him, either, since Kent had ridden out from Ferras with Joe Laud who is as gossipy as a rocking chair. But Kent never said a word and Adam went on, telling about his daughter and his visitors.
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