The Desert Lake Mystery

by Kay Cleaver Strahan

  “I had been asleep only a few minutes, I believe, when Kent came.,,

  ‘That must have been about half-past two,” Adam said. “I suppose you couldn’t get to sleep because you were thinking—worrying?”

  I didn’t blame her for not answering that, the way he’d asked it.

  “I’d give a cool million,” he said, “to know what you were thinking.”

  “I was thinking of Twill. And of Kent in that frightfully hot jail.”

  “How do you know that the jail is so ‘frightfully hot’? Have you been there?”

  “No, I haven’t. Kent sent me a note yesterday morning asking me not to come. But I’ve been told that the jail is dangerously hot. You told me so yourself, Uncle Adam; remember?”

  Up to that minute I had believed her word for word. But this about her not having been to the jail rang so true that it made me feel kind of sick. And right then, of course, Adam had to turn on me.

  “What did Brigid say when she telephoned to you this afternoon?”

  “I told you once, Adam,” I said, trying to sound reproachful and forgetting in all this uproar exactly what I had told him.

  He gave me a very sneering look and turned on Kent. “What did Jeff tell you that Brigid said when she telephoned to him?”

  Before Kent had time to open his mouth, he was often a little slow spoken, Brigid asked, “What is all this about my telephoning? I did not. Who says that I did? And why do you all act as if I weren’t here?”

  “Bless my soul!” Adam said. “Brigid, my dear child, are you feeling better?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Brigid answered. “But, thank you, I’m feeling well enough, if that matters. I am sure that I didn’t telephone to anyone.”

  “You telephoned to everyone who had a telephone in Ferras,” Adam said, getting a little beside himself and then remembering. “But I beg your pardon, my dear—you have forgotten.”

  “Forgotten?” Brigid asked, and though she didn’t pull her chin back she sounded something like Mrs. Duefife.

  Kent was the only person I ever knew who a man could nudge without getting into some kind of hot water for his trouble. I walked over beside him and nudged him a couple of times while Adam was explaining to Brigid what had happened to her and how he had found her unconscious by the gate and all about it. I gave him one or two more very meaning nudges while Brigid was admitting, bewilderedly, that the time between when she had come into the gate at camp after leaving us on the mountain, until I told her the bad news about Betty-Jean, was a complete blank in her mind. After while, Kent moved a few steps off from me, but he never let on.

  “You must have been in swimming,” Reggie said, very interested, “because you are wearing your swimming suit. Don’t you even remember being in swimming?”

  Brigid shook her head and tried looking sweetly pitiful, but her voice was snaky poisonous as she asked, “Did you see me in swimming, Reggie?”

  “I did not,” he answered right up, like she had accused him of something terrible.

  “That’s odd,” she said. “I mean, where were you all this time after twelve today? That is—after you say you heard shooting here?”

  “I?” Reggie took time to straighten and look noble. “I was where any sensible man would have been considering the circumstances. I was in the storeroom.” Brigid repeated, more surprised than chiding, “The storeroom?”

  “Certainly in the storeroom. I was in the kitchen here by the refrigerator. Suddenly shots to the right of me, shots to the left of me—and so on. I stepped into the storeroom and secured the door——”

  “Didn’t you look out of the window?” Brigid asked. “There is only the one window facing east. After securing it, I pulled down the shade at once. I had myself well in hand. I consulted my watch. It was five minutes before twelve, noon.”

  Mac said, “Yeah, sure. But didn’t you see a thing of these shooters, or what they’d shot, or shot at, or anything when you came out?”

  “I didn’t come out,” Reggie said, very offended. “But,” Brigid reminded him, “you are out.”

  “He came out when I came home,” Adam said. “Drop it. What I want to know now is what Brigid said when she telephoned.”

  Rosemary said, “Kent told me that Brigid had said that some terrible thing had happened here and that my life was in danger.”

  “Was this what she telephoned to you, Jeff,” Adam asked.

  “In effect,” I said.

  “And what Jeff told you, Kent?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Brigid,” Adam turned to her, “my dear child, do you suppose that if you were to go quietly away by yourself, you’d be better able to make an effort to remember? Kent—anyone can go with you. We won’t leave you alone again, of course.”

  I was so sure that Brigid was going to grab her chance to get alone with Kent, after all this time, that I saw her walking right off with him until I noticed that she wasn’t doing anything of the kind. She sat tight as a tick and got some hysterical—I’ll bet you that was easy for the poor kid right then—and said that she couldn’t remember, and that her head ached, and that she wasn’t to blame, and that she was certain she had not telephoned to anyone. Doc went over and began talking to her again in this nice soothing voice of his.

  Ernie spoke. “This——“ he said. “I mean to say, that——“ He was blushing and very nervously twirling his forefinger at Reggie. “I didn’t catch the name.”

  Reggie straightened his glasses and looked all the way down Ernie and all the way up again. “Reginald Duefife,” he said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Ernie said. “The only thing is, I was wondering if this Reginald Duefife would know if the shots were around here, or off some place, or were shots, or what.”

  “For goodness’ sakes,” Reggie said, getting fretful, “why do I have to keep telling this over and over and over? The shots I heard were shots. Loud shots. At hand. On the front porch, or close by. Discretion is the better part of valor. Oh, dear me.”

  I saw my chance and I took it. Whatever the old saw is about getting away from it all was how I felt. But I stopped when I came to Brigid and asked her quietly to come out on the front porch with me, please, and help me look for signs of the shooting. Please.

  I hardly thought she’d come. She did, though her first words when we were alone were very discouraging.

  “You’re a nice one, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Listen, Brigid, honey,” I pleaded, “I couldn’t help it. Adam got the word before I did. I brought Kent and did the best I could.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I know you tried, Jeff. Why did you want me to come out here?”

  “Why?” I repeated, all taken aback. “I want you to tell me about it, now we’ve a good chance. Talk fast, though. Somebody may butt in any minute.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Everything. What happened. Why you phoned me to bring Kent.”

  “I can’t remember telephoning,” she said, but the way she said it meant, “I’m lying and you know it. Try getting anything out of me.”

  “Brigid,” I begged, putting my very heart and soul into it again, “you wanted to tell me a while ago, in there. I’m just the same now. I never went back on you, ever; did I? You need help now and I know it. Just give me the chance.”

  “I can’t remember telephoning,” she said.

  I sat down on the steps. I never felt so useless in my life. A broom would have scared me worse than a gun right then. But I daren’t give up.

  “You liked little Betty-Jean, didn’t you, Brigid?” I said.

  She caught her breath in sharp. “Betty-Jean was a peach,” she said, and sniffled quite a bit.

  “Yes,” I said. “And some brute has hit her over the head and killed her and thrown her out there in a desert gully and left her there. She was young and pretty and sweet—and her life’s gone. You’re the same, but you have your life yet. You can hear all the nice quiet on the deserts, and ca
n see things, and laugh——”

  “Torturing me won’t do any good,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t hurt you for the world and all,” I told her. “The trouble is, I’m afraid you’re on the wrong side. I don’t know for sure. Maybe you aren’t. What I do know for sure is that you’re too thin and all to go it alone.”

  She began crying again and I hoped like everything that she was also relenting.

  “Honey,” I said, “when you and your papa came to these parts you were a couple of years old. You stayed at the hotel while you were getting your house built. You found out then, in short order, that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you from walking on all fours down Main Street to ringing the fire bell. You’ve known it ever since. We’ve both known it. Your own papa couldn’t do more for you than I would, if you’d give me a chance.”

  “I know it,” she said, crying hard now and using the backs of her hands. “I know it.”

  “Hell’s bells!” I said, being clear beside myself. “Why don’t you trust me then? Stop that crying. I’m practically crazy,” I told her, “the way you act.” And I was, and I didn’t even have a handkerchief clean enough to offer her or anything.

  “I’ll never trust anybody again,” she said, swallowing after every few words. “And anyway, now, I think I shouldn’t. Only—if you do want to help me, if you really do, then please don’t forget that I can’t remember telephoning.”

  Before I’d begun recovering from that blow I had another one. The front door was open and ripping out through it came the loudest, hottest and most capable cussing that I’d ever heard in my life.

  Brigid stopped crying. “That can’t be Doctor Sprague,” she said, awed, and kept her mouth open.

  It sounded no more like the old Doc’s nice grave voice than the cat on the fence sounds like itself purring under the stove, so how we both knew that it was the Doc, I’ll never know. But we did.

  “Why! Listen!” she said.

  She shouldn’t have wanted to listen. I didn’t; but I couldn’t help it. Doc Sprague was talking about his getting Rupert Potter, the bank cashier, to open the bank up for him last evening and give him two thousand dollars cash to bring to Adam. Doc was calling it bribe money and hush money and was going to put the fact in all papers west of the Mississippi with a sworn statement.

  “Doc’s wrong about that,” I said to Brigid. “The money roll is on the kitchen table right now. I can prove it.”

  “Listen!” she said.

  “I’ve warned you, Oakman,” the Doc was saying,, still cussing but that isn’t necessary. “I mean it. I swear it. I’ll have you sent up for murder and in spite of your pull and your money I’ll get a conviction if I have to carry it through every court in this country.”

  Chapter XXVI

  Mac and Ernie came slinking out on the porch. They looked as if they had been slinking for miles. Mac shut the door behind him and said, ‘They’re having trouble in there,” just above a whisper.

  “But why is Doctor Sprague accusing Mayor Oakman of murder?” Brigid asked.

  “He ain’t,” Mac said, shocked.

  “I heard him,” Brigid said, vexed.

  “She means,” I explained, “about the old Doc’s saying he’d have the Mayor sent up for murder.”

  “Aw, that,” Mac said, relieved. “No, you see the old Doc is saying that he’ll send the Mayor up if he puts the pretty girl in the Ferras jail. The Doc claims that she’d die there and that it would be deliberate murder against Oakman.”

  “Adam’s all upset,” I said, “and no wonder. When it came right down to it, he’d never think of sending any lady, let alone Rosemary, to jail.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Mac said. “He was thinking of it Wednesday night. And now he has it in his head that his girl, Betty-Jean, was killed here on the place and carried out to that gully. He thinks you saw the killing, Brigid, and that that’s what knocked you out cold. Seems that the only person on the place who could ride Kent’s horse, which they say is the only horse on the place, is this pretty girl. I told Oakman and the Doc told him that it wouldn’t take a horse to carry that little thing-—”

  Brigid interrupted, “I could carry her myself.”

  “You could not,” I said. “But I don’t see why the Doc is getting so excited. I’ll bet you he could take her out of jail within an hour and put her over at Mrs. Enfield’s.” (Mrs. Enfield has her front rooms fixed up for a hospital.) “Nobody would dare stop him, if she was sick—and she would be, in under an hour.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Mac said. “And I whispered that to the Doc, myself. He told me to shut my mouth. He said that keeping her out was a damn sight easier and more important than getting her out. He’s on a rampage right, the old Doc is.”

  “What about Kent?” Brigid asked very coldly. “Is he whispering? Or has he lost interest? Or is he leaving it all up to Doctor Sprague?”

  Kent was well liked in these parts. Neither of the boys said anything. I thought I knew something. I thought I’d heard something. I didn’t have time to go around outside, so I went as fast as I could through the house to the back. Adam hollered at me, “Jeff! Here, Jeff,” like he was calling a dog by that name, but I didn’t have time to stop.

  Sure enough, there was Kent in the big car, just finishing bringing it around for a quick getaway.

  “Hold on, Kent,” I said. “You can’t go off the highways, boy, and Adam will have you stopped before you’ve started. Leaving always looks bad.”

  “Lend me your gun, Jeff,” he said. “I’m taking Rosemary out of this.”

  I offered it to him, but he was sore and wouldn’t have it. Come to find out, he had wanted it loaded to the hilt. I’d just turned around and shot it empty, due west.

  I had acted on a sudden impulse. But nobody would believe me. They all came tearing out, jumping to the conclusion that just because I’d been shooting I’d been shooting at something. I was so blamed upset from the noise that I just sat down on the running-board of the car and told the truth—that I’d shot on a sudden impulse at nothing, and stuck to it. I must have stuck to it ten or twenty times.

  Kent came in for his share of questioning, but he also told the simple truth and stuck to it. He said he didn’t know what I had been shooting at. He hadn’t seen a thing to shoot at. He positively did not know.

  Adam decided in a nice way that I had gone stark raving insane and that he had feared as much when I’d torn through the house just now on a dead run.

  “No, I am not,” I said, hating the way the circle of folks widened out as if I was a pebble dropped in their midst. “I felt like shooting due west. And I shot.”

  Rosemary was suggesting that they get me in out of the sun when Reggie showed up from behind two or three of the folks and said, “I think he is fibbing like everything.”

  “Shut up, Reggie,” Brigid said. “If you had seen what Jeff saw you’d have done something worse than firing a gun.”

  “What should I have done?” Reggie asked, all curiosity; but nearly everybody else asked what Jeff saw.

  Brigid answered, shuddering, and making even me half believe her word for word. “I think Jeff saw what I saw before I fainted. I saw Clyde Shively. Alive. Riding one horse and leading another. He had a hammer in his hand. He was riding toward me.”

  In the midst of one of those fearful, petrified silences, Adam said, “You couldn’t have seen Clyde Shively.”

  “I know it,” Brigid said. “I knew it then. I suppose that is the reason I fainted. I did see him.”

  “Was this before or after you telephoned?” Adam asked.

  “I don’t remember telephoning,” Brigid said. “All I remember is seeing Clyde Shively. Alive. Coming toward me on a horse. He was leading another horse. He had a hammer in his hand. He was coming from over there.” She pointed, and the way she did it we were all afraid to look. “So I think that Jeff saw him, as I did, and shot. I fainted. Jeff is seriously shaken.”

  “Was the h
orse he was leading Acrasia?” Adam asked.

  “No. She was in the shelter when I opened the gate and came in at twenty minutes past one. I looked at my watch to see how long it had taken me to walk to camp. I remember closing the gate. I think it must have been shortly after that when I saw Clyde Shively.”

  “Impossible,” Adam said.

  “Did you see him before you put on your swimming suit?” Reggie asked.

  Mac said, “The Killaky boys are twins. Some folks can’t tell them apart.”

  “Whoever she saw, Oakman,” Doc Sprague said, “there is your extra horse—two horses, in fact.”

  “Two horses but only one weapon,” Reggie said worriedly.

  Adam came and stood over me, putting one hand on my shoulder. He’d had a thought, but he was ashamed of it, so, “Mirage?” he asked, kind of feebly. “Jeff, did you see someone who resembled Clyde Shively riding on the deserts over in the west there? Was that why you shot? It is nothing to be ashamed of, you know. We have all been fooled by the confounded things at one time or another.”

  I’d have liked to tell some more of the truth, with Adam being so nice thinking up excuses for me, but I couldn’t see my way clear. It wouldn’t have sounded right for me to say that I’d had the impulse to shoot because I wanted to keep Kent from attempting a dangerous getaway with his girl, his Dad’s car and my gun. No, there was nothing for me to say except, “I felt like shooting so I shot. Due west.”

  Mac said, “I saw the Ferry Building in ‘Frisco, once, with crowds of people rushing around between here and Injun Ridge.”

  Ernie looked like he had a good notion to speak, but before he’d made up his mind to it, Brigid said, “What I saw wasn’t a mirage. I heard the horses’ hoofs on the cement road.”

  Kent said, very solemn, “Joe is coming. If you’ll get up, Jeff, I’ll drive this car out of his way.”

  Sure enough, here Joe came bringing the hearse. We haven’t an ambulance in Ferras, so I suppose he thought he had to, and that it would seem disrespectful to drive any hearse in a hurry. The worst of it was, that the black thing crawling with its shadow up the white road in the blazing sun should have looked out of place and it didn’t; not any more than it looked out of place in the graveyard.