The Desert Lake Mystery

by Kay Cleaver Strahan

  “I’ve decided to change my charges against the prisoner, Sheriff. I charge him with murder. Premeditated. Do you understand?”

  I understood. He was doing this so that Kent couldn’t get out on bail for his wedding the next day. Kent didn’t stop. He walked right on out-of-doors. I followed him, thinking that we could talk it over.

  Chapter X

  I never found a person in a less talkative mood than Kent was that night, or in a bigger hurry. If I hadn’t made him pack his valise, he’d have gone right off without taking a thing with him. It seemed to me that there were better places for him to go than to jail. I explained to him how I, a merely helpless officer of the law, unarmed, couldn’t stop him if he escaped; but he wouldn’t listen to reason. I might as well have let the boys arrest him.

  All the way to Ferras, jogging along in the starlight, every topic I’d open he’d close; so, finally, I gave up trying to talk to him at all.

  We were in town, passing the depot, when he said, “Have you any idea how long it was, after we heard that shot this evening, before Dad came around from the back of the community house and joined us?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said. I judged it was a couple of minutes more or less, but if Kent wanted it more or less, much or little, it was all right with me.

  “Dad,” he said, “is the only one on the place who’d have the nerve to get Twill’s body away in order to help Rosemary, or sense enough to do it effectively. But Rosemary thinks that she was with Twill when he died, and that she left him on that pillow when she ran out to us. Dad was with us then, wasn’t he? You were behind us.”

  “He was right with me,” I said. “But suppose he’d had all the time there was? After we began hunting for the old Judge we didn’t leave a spot as big as a two-bit piece unsearched on the place. So if your dad swiped the body, which he never would, where in thunder could he have put it? Adam has his faults, or had when I last saw him, but he’s shrewd and he’d know that the lake wouldn’t be any better than a show window by the first streak of dawn tomorrow morning.

  “You’re right,” Kent said. “Here we are.”

  We’d had to go by the hotel for me to get the keys to the jail. I begged Kent to come in there and spend the night with me, but he wouldn’t. When we got to the jail he wouldn’t even let me leave the key with him, so that he could step out of that dirty hole and get a breath of fresh air when he needed it. He had some notion, crazy as Hades, that because he’d said he’d come to the jail he had to do it all in order.

  That Ferras jail isn’t fit to describe. It stood out like a blister on the burning desert, so that its red brick walls held the heat like a furnace and stored it up, getting staler and stinkinger day in and out, year in and out. When I left the boy there I felt as if I’d locked him in an oven knowing that a hotter fire would be kindled at sunup.

  Back in the hotel I was surprised to see Joe Laud sitting there in the lobby alone, looking as if he was thinking about dead bodies and sure enough he was, as it came out later.

  “Hello, Joe,” I said. “How’d you happen to come home?”

  He said, “Rimrock,” but it sounded worse; added, “I’m supposed to get a boat out from Nameless and take it across the lake early in the morning;” added, “It ain’t that I hate boats, but I do,” and said nothing more.

  After a while I said, “What is it then?”

  He answered ugly, wrinkling his nose, “What is what?”

  “Nothing,” I said, knowing he’d lost track, and went on to ask if there was any more news from Memaloose.

  “None,” he said, “when I left. Just one dead man found and three bodies missing, either dead or alive.”

  “Three?” I asked, horrified.

  “There’s the good-looking girl’s brother, Twill. There’s that Judge Shively. There’s whoever it was that killed that guy, Clyde Shively. I make it three. What does ‘calk’ mean?”

  “They put them on horseshoes,” I told him.

  “I know it,” he said. “But why on a boat? They say it is seaworthy. It’ll leak like a sieve and sink like a bullet. Calks!”

  “At that,” I said, “you could walk out of almost any spot in that lake.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I could walk out if I wanted to walk out,” which didn’t make sense then and never would and I knew it; so I turned the subject by asking him where he was getting the boat.

  “Where’d you suppose?” he answered. “Sig Hansen. Only one in the county, I’ll bet and hope. He calls it a canoe. He built that boathouse. His kids had the boat up to Tahoe all summer. Just brought it back and put some more calks on it. It’s in Sig’s woodshed now.”

  “How are you going to get it to the boathouse?” I asked.

  “I suppose I’ll have to take it out of the woodshed,” he answered. “But you’d better hunt yourself a sailor. I’m sick of talking boats. Nothing but boats. I hate boats. But that ain’t it.”

  “What ain’t it?” I asked him.

  “The boat ain’t it,” he said, as if he’d told me six or eight times and was all worn out with explaining.

  I gave up, thinking that I might just as well worry some more in silence.

  “Oakman got shed of all the boys,” Joe burst out, after while, “because anybody would want to get shed of that bunch from any place. But he got shed of me because he feared me. He can’t fool me. I know it. I know he feared me. But that ain’t it.”

  I wasn’t going to start whatever it was all over again, so I just kept on worrying.

  Pretty soon Joe burst out, worse than before: “How does it look?” he said. “He’s got Mac and Ernie and Taylor out riding wild all over the deserts hunting for dead bodies, live bodies, escaped criminals and so forth. No sense in any of it, but it looks all right. Why should I be counted out until time to go rowing myself across the lake in a boat by sunrise. I’ll make a picture. Bringing Rimrock home is defaming enough.

  Insult to injury. Me, a licensed mortician and coroner out at dawn, posse of one, hunting criminals in a boat!”

  “So that’s it, is it?” I said, but he wouldn’t answer.

  I tried explaining. “Adam wouldn’t think of asking you to hunt criminals in a boat,” I said. “He wants you to look for the bodies.”

  “This is it,” Joe said, and I kind of held my breath. “I’d of helped him and been glad to. I told him so. I’m obligated to him. But if I wasn’t, even as cussed mean as he is, I’d have helped him because the dog-ratted son-of-a-gun’s my friend. Oakman’s this,” Joe said, but naming it. “He’s that,” he said, naming it. “But he is my friend. I told him so. Took him to one side to tell him. ‘Mayor Oakman,’ I said, ‘I’m your friend. You’re my friend.’ But he up and insulted me.”

  “He never meant to,” I said.

  “Telling me to get Rimrock home safe and sound. There’s an errand. After I’d offered, point-blank, to help him.”

  “Help who do what?” I asked.

  Joe leaned away over in his chair and spoke through his nose into my ear. “Aren’t you on?” he asked.

  “I can’t say that I am, entirely,” I said.

  “Do you mean to say you don’t know why Oakman got all the men off the place tonight?”

  “Did he get Reggie off?” I asked, having one of those strange spurts of idle curiosity that comes even during tragedy.

  “Him? The fat one?” Joe said, kind of taken aback. “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “What are you bringing him into it for then?”

  “I wasn’t,” I said. “I just wondered what became of him.”

  “Nothing became of him,” Joe said. “What were we talking about?”

  “Dead bodies, I suppose,” I said.

  “In the lake,” Joe took it up. “And Oakman’s clearing the place so he could get them all out of the lake before morning.”

  I told Joe how crazy he was. He denied it, so I had to explain.

  “Can you tell m
e,” I asked, “what Adam would do with three dead bodies, or two, or even one if he did get them or it out of the lake? He’d have them or it on his hands, just the same, wouldn’t he?”

  Joe shrugged his shoulders, trying to let on that if I was so dumb I didn’t know what Adam would do with dead bodies he wasn’t going to bother himself to tell me. I kept on worrying in silence.

  After quite a while Joe asked, “This fat guy? Can he swim?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “But he floats fine with an inner tube,” and went on worrying about Rosemary killing her brother by mistake and loving him. And about Kent, smothering in that damn jail, a good boy like him. And about little Betty-Jean, with her pretty face all spoiled from crying and suffering. And even about Adam, the old dizzard. Sure he bossed Oakman County, but there were plenty who thanked their stars that he did. Nobody went hungry in our county and the kids all had candy for Christmas. The pockets in every pair of pants Adam ever had wore out first from his digging down into them.

  The more I thought about the folks over there, all deep in the mires of mystery and sorrow, the better I liked them. I thought of Betty-Jean lending a hand and fixing coffee for the folks when she was so heartsick and scared. I remembered how Mrs. Duefife had stood up for Kent, when smarter ladies than she was might have kept still on account of being beholden to Adam. Even Brigid covering us with the gun didn’t seem so horrid now. While as for Reggie—well, as I’d just said he did float good, he floated fine on the lake with an inner tube wrapped around him.

  Thinking about floating must have made me a little drowsy, because pretty soon when I heard Joe asking if I wouldn’t even answer a civil question, the best I could do was to tell him that I didn’t know the answer.

  “Sure you don’t,” he said, very haughty, “because you don’t think. Take me, I think. And pretty near always I think of something. When you asked me what Oakman would do with the dead bodies he fished out of the lake, I went right to work thinking about that. Listen here. I’m not accusing, see? But I’m hinting pretty strong that he could give them to the boys to drop off of Dead Man’s Hook on their way home tonight.”

  After I got over being too disgusted to speak I spoke. “So that’s all the better you know Adam Oakman, is it?”

  Joe tried defending himself. “I’m not saying that under ordinary, every-day circumstances Oakman would ask anybody to drop dead bodies off of any place. But I’m saying that under desperate circumstances Oakman might act desperate.”

  I explained, seeing that as usual Joe had things all wrong. “You just told me that Adam cleared the men off the place so that he could fish the bodies out of the lake. Would he do that if he was going to give the bodies to the boys afterward? No,” I said, answering my own question kind of like Mrs. Duefife. “He would not. Not wet work like that. He’d keep the boys right there and direct them how to get the bodies out while he himself stood high and dry on the shore.” Joe knew I was right so he was very vexed. “All you ever do,” he said, “is pick flaws. Besides that,” he added, “all you ever do do is sit and pick flaws. No matter what a man thinks up, all you ever do do is sit and pick flaws.”

  I didn’t bother answering. I went on up to bed. I was worrying. I’d left Acrasia over in Slim’s barn with Dollar. Adam’s car, the only one belonging at Memaloose, was parked in front of the hotel right then. Short of borrowing one of the boys’ horses, which couldn’t be done without a lot of explaining which couldn’t be done, I knew there wasn’t any way that either Brigid or Adam could take anything that either of them, by any chance, might want to take that night up Tumboldt Mountain to Dead Man’s Hook.

  Chapter XI

  I’d meant to be up and stirring early the next morning; but, when I came down the steps into the lobby, Bert Thalen, the day clerk who comes on at seven o’clock, was just getting his coat off ready to assume his duties.

  He looked surprised at seeing me and wanted to know what was going on to get me up at this hour.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “I just felt like taking a walk before breakfast.”

  “Walk!” he said, as if I’d said, “Poison,” and came out from behind the desk and followed me to the door. So I just sauntered, loose-legged with my hands on my hips, until I’d rounded the corner. After that I made a bee line for Dollar and rode over to the Penroys’.

  Eight or ten years ago Adam told Abe Penroy that unless the whole kit and caboodle of Penroys, including outside relatives and the dogs, would clean up he’d never do another thing for him. But Adam, being sometimes sentimental, couldn’t let a large and increasing family starve. And so Abe still held his job of looking after the prisoners in the jail when there were any. It was handy, because the jail was close to the Penroys’ and, as Adam said, since Abe got paid only when there were prisoners, it saved the taxpayers’ money.

  Abe was in bed in the kitchen when I got there, but Mrs. Penroy was up fixing breakfast.

  “Yeah?” she said, being more talky than Abe, “I heard you say that President Roosevelt and his wife was over in the jail, but I didn’t catch the third name.”

  “You heard me right,” I said. “Kent Oakman is there. But get this. Kent has been traveling in high diplomatic circles with his ear to the ground, and—”

  “What?” Abe said.

  “Never mind,” I told him. “Foreigners, crooks, are probably after Kent to get international secret information. Mayor Oakman coaxed the boy to come over here to the jail where he’d be safe for a few days. If a word of this leaks out you’ll have to answer for the consequences. Life or death. Also, the Mayor says that you’re to see to it that Kent gets the best that money can buy in every way.”

  “Whose money?” Mrs. Penroy wanted to know.

  As luck would have it, I could take care of that for the present. I did; and then I rode on over to see what I could do for the boy.

  I found him able to lie and say that he was fine. He had a note written that he wanted me to take to Rosemary and be sure that she got it, and he wanted me to lead Acrasia back to Memaloose so that Rosemary would have her to ride if she wanted to.

  When I asked him if he had a message for his dad he said, “Not as yet,” and added nothing. I’ve always considered “Not as yet,” a kind of sinister combination of words.

  Acrasia was no hand to be led. I had to go at a walk all the way and, of course, I did a lot of thinking. Some of it seemed sensible, so I was anxious to tell it to somebody and talk it over.

  But, when I finally got to Memaloose, I found Adam and the boys (Mac, Ernie and Taylor) waiting for me at the gate, and at first glance I knew it was no use trying to tell those birds anything. The worst of it was they wouldn’t tell me anything either.

  Before I was in earshot they began heaping reproaches on me for being late. Come to find out it wasn’t me that they wanted, but my nag, Dollar, for Adam to ride. While I was dismounting, Mac admitted that things were the same as they had been last night, that Twill and Judge Shively were both still missing. “And Clyde Shively is still murdered,” he added, and then off the four of them rode without answering my questions about where in the nation they were going or what in thunder they were planning to do with the coils of rope they were toting. If we had been living in some other state—of grace, I mean—I might have thought of a lynching. But we don’t do that way in Nevada, so such an idea never entered my mind.

  It was early enough in the morning for the cozy smell of something frying topped off with whiffs of coffee to be mighty tempting to a man. So instead of passing by Mrs. Duefife’s cottage I stopped in for a minute.

  Mrs. Duefife, Betty-Jean and Reggie were sitting at the breakfast table. The ladies looked the way I suppose nice ladies should look after murders, but I wished I hadn’t come in. Reggie was bearing up better, eating his breakfast as if somebody had coaxed him to, just to keep his strength up.

  “Well?” Mrs. Duefife said to me when I’d sat down and put my hat under the chair.

  If there’s
a harder word in our language to answer than, “Well?” I never heard it.

  Reggie folded his napkin—come to find out, all the frying had been done for him and he’d finished his plate off smooth as satin—and moaned out, “Oh, my! Oh, my! Oh, my!”

  Betty-Jean asked me if I’d had breakfast. And, though I said I wouldn’t wish to be any trouble for anything, she got a cup and saucer and brought the percolator from the kitchen. She had to shake it three or four times before she could dribble the cup half full.

  “There isn’t any cream,” she said. “I spilled the cream.”

  The way she said it made it sound like another terrible tragedy, of itself, and she went right along as if she hadn’t changed the subject.

  “When people say, ‘Twill’s dead,’ I can stand that. But when I think, ‘Twill isn’t alive, anywhere,’ I can’t stand that. I do, but I can’t. No. That wasn’t what I began to say. I wanted to ask you, Jeff, you believe that Twill is alive somewhere, don’t you?”

  Mrs. Duefife needn’t have bothered kicking me under the table. “Of course he’s alive,” I said. “Sure he is. Don’t you go doubting that for one minute.”

  “I can’t doubt it,” she said. “I don’t dare. But, Jeff, where is he? The men have searched the deserts for miles. Twill couldn’t walk far. I mean—if he hadn’t been wounded at all. That cruel, heavy brace thing on his leg and foot.”

  I had to say something, so I said, “I expect he must have caught a ride with some tourists.”

  Mrs. Duefife gave me a queer look. I couldn’t tell whether she meant it for pity or disgust. Of course I knew as well as she did that tourists couldn’t have come or gone around Tumboldt that night on account of the cloudburst, and that the road beyond camp went into dry washes and was a dead-ender within half a mile. I think I knew better than she did that trying to drive an automobile, or even a buggy off the roads across our deserts with their soft sand, gullies, rocks and brush would be about as successful as getting off the streets and trying to take shortcuts in a town.