The Desert Lake Mystery

by Kay Cleaver Strahan

  Chapter VIII

  When Adam and I reached Twill’s cottage, where Rosemary was, we found Brigid sitting on the stoop. She got up and tried turning herself into a barricade; but, on account of her being built more like a stick of macaroni than anything else, all she could do was stop us for a minute while she said, “You cannot go in there and heckle Rosemary any more tonight. You sent word for her to stay in this cottage, Mayor Oakman, so she is here. But she is in the bedroom lying down. We’ve given her a bromide and we are hoping that she may sleep. Surely any further inhumanities that you and Jeff may have thought of can wait until morning.”

  Before Adam had stopped at the community house to phone to Ferras, he’d told me to go and fetch Kent and tell Rosemary to stay where she was because he was coming to have a talk with her. He didn’t mean particularly for her to stay in Twill’s cottage. He just wanted her stationary someplace. I’d done the errand and that was all I had done and I said so to Brigid then and there.

  Adam didn’t bother defending himself. He went right on into the house. I followed him.

  Mrs. Duefife and Reggie were sitting in the parlor alone and doing nothing in that awful, finished way that folks have of doing nothing when there’s been a death in the family. Somebody had pushed the wall bed back into place and got the bloodstained pillow out of sight. The room was hot and hushed and terribly tidy.

  Mrs. Duefife put her head forward and whispered, “Any news?” stretching her lips wide for the “any” and puckering them like a whistle for “news.” She was trying to whisper plainly, but it gave her a gruesome look of making faces.

  “No good news,” Adam answered.

  “Don’t, Reggie, dearest,” Mrs. Duefife said, speaking louder. I knew that Reggie was preparing to blow his nose and I was only uninterested until something kind of tinkly dropped at my feet.

  When I picked it up I saw it was a pair of spectacles that Reggie had flipped from his pocket when he’d pulled out his handkerchief, so I offered them to him. He cringed away, and kind of squeaked, “Those aren’t mine.”

  Sure enough, they didn’t look like his. His pinched onto his little fat nose. These were made of heavy glass and had gold rims and wires to curve around the ears.

  Adam, who always was as curious as a cat, took them away from me. “These are Judge Shively’s glasses,” he said. “There is no mistaking the thick lenses. Where did you find them, Reggie?”

  “I didn’t find them,” Reggie said. “I never saw them before in my life.”

  “You’ve seen them many times on the old Judge’s nose,” Adam said, but Reggie interrupted pitifully:

  “I never saw the Judge’s nose many times. I never even saw the Judge many times—just such a few times, such a few——”

  “Never mind,” Adam said. “Where did you find these glasses?”

  “I didn’t find them,” Reggie said and repeated a little annoyingly, I’ll admit, “I never saw them before in my life.”

  “Listen to me, Reggie.” Adam was deceivingly kind and patient. “These are Judge Shively’s glasses. His, you understand. The glasses he wore. He had only the one pair here with him. He couldn’t see without them. Now the old gentleman is lost. His son has been found murdered——”

  “I know all that. I know all that. I know all that,” Reggie interrupted, adding, “I know all that.”

  For a few minutes then things were very embarrassing. Reggie held fast to the statement that he’d never seen the glasses before. Adam kept insisting that Reggie look at them, which Reggie simply and positively would not do, even going so far as to cover his eyes with his hands.

  Betty-Jean and Kent came in from the outside while this was going on. Betty-Jean’s pretty face was all blotched and bruised-looking from crying; and while Adam was telling them about Judge Shively’s glasses she kept sniffing up and sniffing up. This seemed to make Adam nervous and finally he took his handkerchief out and offered it to her, saying;

  “Here!”

  I’d noted Mrs. Duefife watching him like a hawk, so I was abashed when she spoke to me in her “Victory!” tone of voice.

  “You have no reason for watching Adam Oakman now, Jeff. Nothing will come from his pocket save his handkerchief. Reggie has taken his own handkerchief from his pocket hundreds of times this evening. Not until this last moment did the glasses appear. Consequently, we know that within the past few moments someone deliberately and maliciously concealed those glasses in my son’s pocket.”

  Adam, it happened, was standing close to Reggie. He moved away now, not in a hurry but sort of carelessly, as if he’d had on his Sunday clothes and Reggie was bales of barbed wire.

  Kent asked Mrs. Duefife whether Rosemary had gone to sleep, but Adam answered. “I hope not. If she has it will be necessary to wake her. I intend to talk with her right now.”

  Adam was much nearer to the bedroom door than Kent was, so Adam got there first. Brigid, who had edged in from the stoop, unnoticed, beat them both by a good six inches.

  “You’ll keep out of here,” she said, and stamped her foot.

  Adam made gestures more like Reggie’s than his own, kind of paddling the air down fast with his hands. I guess it bewildered him that this redheaded kid should keep shooting up from underfoot. She looked cute, at that, with her nose stuck up, but she spoke very saucy.

  “You wouldn’t know about this, Mayor Oakman,” she said, “but Rosemary is suffering. Til not have her tortured any more tonight. If you try it, I’ll tell straight out that I saw you slip those glasses into Reggie’s pocket.”

  Mrs. Duefife said she had known it from the first. Adam didn’t say anything. I was behind him, but there was that about the set of his neck and the bend of his legs that looked stricken speechless.

  Rosemary opened the bedroom door and came into the parlor. She had taken off that terrible white dress and was wearing a lounging robe, soft-looking and that quiet greenish color of sweet grapes in the shade. Her hair was pretty the way it had been that day when she’d sat smiling on the fence after riding Acrasia, but her face was different. Brigid said afterward that everything was gone from it but beauty. Kent fetched her a chair and stood beside her.

  “Rosemary,” Adam said, and he was very nice until he got used to looking at her, “I am sorry that we must disturb you, but you will understand that it is necessary now for you to tell us the truth.”

  She said, “I have told you the truth. I shot Twill. He died almost at once.”

  “You were quarreling, as usual, I suppose?” Adam was getting meaner by the minute and, as I thought, getting also unjust. Come to find out, the folks told me later that Rosemary and Twill had quarreled sometimes, as folks who have opposite natures but love each other enough to bother are bound to quarrel.

  Just then my attention was turned by the sight of Joe Laud, Mac and Ernie who came crowding up to the open door and froze there, half in and half out, at first sight of Rosemary. They all stared at her and were very maudlin-looking.

  Adam was asking, “Twill didn’t like Kent, did he?”

  Since up to that minute I’d never known that there had been any hard feeling between Kent and Twill, both fine young fellows, hearing this and Rosemary’s answer, “It was only that Twill didn’t know Kent,” was something of a shock; though nothing, less than nothing, compared with the shock I got in the next minute when Brigid sidled up to me and said in a threatening low murmur, “If you don’t stop looking at that spot I’ll send your right name to a matrimonial bureau.”

  I’d been resting and almost at myself, but before Brigid finished snarling I found that I was nothing but an object polka-dotted with eyes that I didn’t know what to do with. I kind of felt like scratching them, only they didn’t itch. They were just lumping up all over me like checkers on a checker-board.

  If I’d known then that the spot she was referring to was not a blood spot it might not have been so hard on me. What got me down with the dog’s plate was that I didn’t know where I’d been lo
oking when she told me to stop it. I couldn’t look where I hadn’t been looking when I’d no idea where I had been looking. How I got into the breakfast nook and found myself another chair with my eyes shut is a wonder to me. But I did, and began listening again in time to hear Rosemary saying:

  “Yes. I met Clyde Shively this afternoon when I went to get Acrasia behind Judge Shively’s cottage. The two men had been watching her, and when I came Judge Shively brought his son over and introduced him to me.”

  “What time was this?” Adam asked.

  “I think that it was nearly four o’clock. The storm was entirely cleared. Jeff might know. I met him at the gate a few minutes after that.”

  “It was close to four,” Adam said, remembering that he had looked at his watch in the kitchen soon after I’d come in. “Very well. Now, Rosemary, the situation is this. You have confessed to killing your brother. You have admitted that you threatened to kill him before you fired. Is that right?”

  “I said that I’d shoot, but I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to shoot.”

  “And why did you say that you would shoot him?”

  “Twill couldn’t understand my loving anyone but him. He was saying unkind things about Kent. He didn’t mean them. But he kept repeating them over and over. We were both frightfully angry.”

  “I see,” Adam said. “According to your story, then, you killed your brother shortly after half-past seven this evening. We have searched this place for hours and we have been unable to find him either alive or dead. We have found another murdered man, Clyde Shively. We have not found Judge Shively, aged and infirm.

  “I’ve been patient. Now I insist that you tell everything that you know concerning the murder of Clyde Shively and the disappearance of his father. I am insisting, I am demanding that you tell the entire truth here and now.”

  Kent spoke up, mad as fury, “Rosemary doesn’t know any more than you do about any of this. Probably she doesn’t know half as much. Now——”

  Adam interrupted. “Suave” is a word I hate. That’s what he was. “It may interest you to hear,” he said, “that I know twice as much as you and Rosemary think that I know. The revolver with which she admits killing her brother had been fired twice.”

  “No,” Kent was the exact opposite of suave. “That doesn’t interest me a damn. That revolver might have been fired any time during the year. Come, Rosemary——”

  I’ll never know where he wanted her to come because Adam interrupted again, speaking to the boys in the doorway. “You’ve heard her confess to one murder tonight,” he said. “And you’ve found a murdered man, shot in the back. There’s a horse here she can ride. Take her along. A few days in jail have been known to improve the memory.”

  Kent put one hand down on Rosemary’s shoulder and remarked, carelessly and real friendly, “I wouldn’t try it, boys, if I were you.”

  The boys weren’t afraid of Kent. They had their six guns with them and he was unarmed; so they must have stood still more out of politeness than anything else, though they hardly looked it.

  O’Dell says that my hearing is “phenomenal.” I guess he’s right. I don’t think anybody else heard Mac, kind of whistling under his breath, though more breathing than whistling, “Looky, looky, looky, Here comes Cooky”; so maybe the others were more unprepared than I was for what happened then. If so, I’m sorry for them yet.

  Brigid, who had been fooling around by the bureau, stepped over square in front of Rosemary and Kent, and Til work for nothing and steal for a living if she wasn’t holding a revolver in her hands. The pearl-handled one that I’d found earlier in the evening. To make it worse she was holding it the way a gun should be held to look like business and the way she circled it around was doggone near professional. She was a great one for threats; so that was what I expected and that was what I heard.

  “If one of you dares touch Rosemary,” she said, separating each word very distinctly, “I’ll pop you right off. I’ll pop you into little, spattering, tiny pieces.”

  For a second things were quiet. Not that anybody could have been scared—much. Just that everybody was shocked at seeing a nice girl like Brigid O’Dell acting up so horrid.

  Kent reached out and took the revolver away from her, easy. “Not for little girls, Brigid,” he said.

  She turned around and kind of bored the top of her head into the front of his shirt and began crying, softly, in a ladylike way.

  Chapter IX

  But our relief was short. Not that Kent started circling the gun at us. He held it in one hand, like he would have held his pipe, while he kept his other hand on Rosemary’s shoulder and tried murmuring soothingly to Brigid. With two girls and a gun, I’d say the boy had his hands full.

  “Don’t you dare let them, Kent Oakman,” Brigid was saying. “All that beauty. All that intelligence. Humiliated. Hurt. Taken to that horrible jail. St. Dennis would never forgive me.

  “If you let them,” she said, raising her head and turning on Adam and looking kind of cute, the way her little freckled nose stuck up, “I’ll get a teakettle, and I’ll run around, and I’ll boil every ant in Oakman County.”

  Kent said, “That’s all right, Brigid. No one is going to touch Rosemary,” and looked across at the boys in the doorway. “Beat it, you fellows,” he said, not rough but firm. “Sorry, but that’s the way of it now. Ride over again some other time.”

  Adam began asking the boys questions such as, what was the matter with them, and couldn’t they hear him, and why were they standing there, when to my utmost astonishment young Mac spoke up. I hadn’t thought the kid was capable of such a burst of heroic action, no matter how pretty the girl was.

  “Pardon me,” he said, “but things are too irregular. You was trying to intimidate the lady and extort a confession. That ain’t legal. We got no proof that she killed the guy on the bed. We can’t go running ladies in like that.”

  “Proof?” Adam said. “You heard her confess to one murder.”

  “An accident ain’t murder,” Mac said.

  “You heard her say that she threatened to kill him before she shot.”

  “Ugh-ugh,” Mac said. “I heard her say she never meant to.”

  Joe Laud, being coroner and undertaker and his interests kind of running in those lines, put in: “If she killed her brother, where’s the body?”

  Brigid answered. “She didn’t kill him. She wounded him a trifle, and he—went away. But the revolver’s going off frightened her so that she’s been—well, not exactly sane ever since.”

  “Temporary insanity,” Mac said. I don’t know where he picked the expression up, but he sounded as if he’d learned it long ago and admired it.

  “We aren’t sure of that,” Adam admitted. “But we know that Kent isn’t insane. Leave her out of it for the present. Take him. He knows all that she knows. Obstructing justice. Threatening officers. Are you boys going to make the arrest, or shall I get hold of some state men?”

  Joe Laud, arresting being clear out of his line, stepped backward several yards. Mac had a good job as janitor in Adam’s bank. Ernie was a prospector; so Ernie’s wife, Ellie, had made both ends meet for years by working as chambermaid in Adam’s hotel.

  I’d liked staying out of it, in the breakfast nook, just fine. But I knew if this was going on I’d better get into it, fast. I reached Kent long before the boys did and spoke to him confidentially.

  “Kent,” I said, “I’ve never tried disputing with a mule’s hind leg, because I always had an idea that if it didn’t win the argument, I wouldn’t know it.”

  “You’re right,” he said to me; and to Adam, not in a mean way, exactly, but not very pleasant: “O. K., Dad, if that’s the way you feel about it.”

  He walked to the bureau and got shed of the revolver and came back to me, though not holding out his hands for the bracelets, which was just as well since I had none by me.

  Adam didn’t answer. I thought maybe the old codger was changing his mind about cutting of
f his own nose and I think yet he might have repented, if Reggie hadn’t blown his nose right then and if Mrs. Duefife, instead of remonstrating with Reggie as usual hadn’t begun remonstrating with Adam.

  “Don’t, Adam,” she said, instead of “Don’t Reggie,” and went on. “Don’t do this thing. Don’t yield to your baser nature, your primitive lust for vengeance. Don’t drag this splendid type of America’s young manhood at the chariot wheels of your malevolent egotism. Don’t——”

  Nobody, not even I, could blame Adam for interrupting with a couple of cuss words though he spoke them to me instead of to her, wanting to know what I was waiting for.

  “I’m not waiting,” I said.

  “You are waiting,” he said.

  Kent dropped one of his arms across my shoulders and said, “All right, Jeff. Let’s go.”

  Brigid had been quiet for a few seconds so now she spoke up strong. “Don’t you go, Kent Oakman. Don’t you dare go. If you do, I’ll—I’ll find myself a pole and I’ll sit on it, I swear I will, until you come out again. You can’t leave Rosemary here with no one to take care of her.”

  Kent was never a hand for boasting, but there was a tinge of it in the way he said “Rosemary doesn’t need anyone to take care of her, Brigid. She isn’t like that. But, at any rate, you’ll be here, won’t you?”

  “I’ll be right here,” Brigid answered, and though not a threat it sounded like a terrible one.

  “You’re a swell kid.” Kent grinned at her. My only excuse for him is that I guess he found he had a grin and thought he might as well use it. But it slipped off his face while he was saying to Rosemary, “We’ve a date for tomorrow to be married. You’ll not forget?”

  She shook her head. I don’t know to this day whether she meant she wouldn’t be married or she wouldn’t forget. Kent tightened his grip on my shoulder and the next thing I knew he was leading me across the room. The silence made by the folks holding their breath was something miserable. I shot a glance at Adam and, though he was the most unsightly view I ever saw, I wasn’t ready for his next words.