The Desert Lake Mystery

by Kay Cleaver Strahan

  Some of the folks went into the house with Joe and Adam and the Doc. Some of us just stood around watching the hearse. I had an eerie feeling about it; as if it liked Memaloose, meaning death, and felt right at home there. I found myself kind of thinking words to it, such as, “Make the most of this trip because you’ll never be here again.”

  I was wrong about that, and I guess I halfway knew it then without knowing that I knew it. I went and sat down on the steps, wondering what kind of pass a man had come to when he started talking to hearses. In a minute Brigid came and petted the top of my head and whispered, “Angel,” taking my mind off the hearse for a few seconds. She was nice that way.

  Chapter XXVII

  When Joe had finally got off again with the hearse, Adam, Kent and Ernie rode out to the gully where Betty-Jean’s body had been found. Mac and I stayed in camp trying hard to do some investigating concerning this shooting story of Reggie’s, but we couldn’t find a thing to investigate. The Doc told us that Joe thought the time when Betty-Jean had been killed was between one and two o’clock. He said guessing time was one thing Joe was usually pretty nearly right about—that is unless rigor was complete. In this case, the Doc said, though he was no judge of such things himself, he’d an idea that Joe wasn’t far wrong. Rigor had begun, but the body heat hadn’t entirely left the body when the boys found it a few minutes after three.

  Adam with Kent and Ernie didn’t stay long away from the place. As soon as they got back the old Doc went home, surprising and confusing me quite a bit by giving me a pat on the back and saying, “Good work, Jeff,” just before he left.

  He was no sooner gone than, trying my best to avoid it, I found myself rounded up alone with Adam in the community house kitchen.

  “Here, wait a minute,” he said, so I had to.

  “It seems to me,” he went on, “that all our lives I’ve been accusing you of being a fool only to discover that you weren’t anything of the sort. It seems to me, too, that I’ve apologized to you more frequently than I have to all my other acquaintances and friends combined. I presume you are tired of it. I am. But now, besides apologizing, I want to thank you. I am deeply grateful——”

  “Oh, shut up, Adam,” I said, getting embarrassed and sick of it anyway.

  “There’d have been the devil to pay, sure enough,” he said, “if Kent, the young jackass, had tried running away with that girl.”

  I thought, maybe, it would be good for him to get just a little vexed; so I said, real gently, though, “I don’t know what’s got into you here lately, Adam. You are always accusing somebody of something. Kent had no idea on earth of running away.”

  It didn’t work. He gave me a queer look, but all he said was, “Is it an accusation if I state, and I do, that Brigid O’Dell could not have seen Clyde Shively alive here this afternoon?”

  “That’s just exactly what she thought,” I said. “It wasn’t the two horses that scared the poor little kid out of her wits.”

  He sighed. I felt so sorry for him I didn’t know which way to turn. And my conscience was bothering me like a bugle playing taps off key and keeping it up.

  “Adam,” I said, “why don’t you get away from this blazing place and take the folks on over to Hay Patch like you planned? It’ll be cool and dark and comforting over there. And I’ll bet that Mrs. Duefife is getting awfully nervous by this time, waiting in the hotel.”

  Precisely what he was going to do, he said, as soon as he got his long distance call from L. A. Up to that minute I’d had no idea how desperate Adam was. He was trying to engage that criminologist, named Jones, that Reggie had mentioned. And even at that I didn’t know how desperate he was; because, when the word came that this Jones was in the hospital, what did Adam up and do but put in a call for Lynn MacDonald in ‘Frisco. He excused himself for this by telling me that she had been on a case for a friend of his, Sam Stanley, up north at his Desert Moon Ranch, and that Sam spoke highly of her.

  While we were waiting for the ‘Frisco call Adam walked the floor. After a while I said, “Adam, you told me last night that you knew and that I ought to know what had happened here. I don’t know——”

  “Fortunately for you,” he interrupted. “If I had known less, though that is impossible since I knew nothing, this might not have happened here today.”

  “And,” I said, “if the L. A. wise guy hadn’t built the camp here, it wouldn’t have happened, either. There’s never any stopping when you start going backward over the ifs,” I told him.

  “Very true,” he said. “But if you hadn’t started talking to me about not hearing a shot here on Wednesday afternoon, and if you hadn’t happened to have an unusual sense of hearing, and if—— What the devil!” he broke off, just when he was beginning to get interesting. “Why should we go into all this again? Talk! I’m tired of it. I’m getting a professional on the job, or attempting to do so. Since she’s a woman she’ll probably talk enough for six of me. I’m through.”

  With that he went wandering back into the kitchen and I got up from my chair and followed him. No reason—just some place to go into and get out of. I noted the roll of bills on the table there and told him that he’d better put them in his pocket.

  He paid no attention to me so I picked them up and just idly counted them. “There’s only fifteen hundred dollars here,” I said, after I’d run through them twice. “I’d understood that there were two thousand.”

  “Kent probably borrowed it when he was deciding to skip out with Rosemary,” Adam said. “It will turn up all right.”

  “If it shouldn’t, though,” I said, “I wouldn’t want you to accuse the boys, or——”

  “By the Eternal!” he said, and went on declaring that he had never accused anybody of anything in his life, and went on some more cussing me out for accusing him of accusing. I didn’t mind. It seemed to be doing him some good and me no harm. For that matter, he wasn’t much more than well under way when the phone bell called him to the front room.

  I heard him say, “Hello,” a couple of times, and that he wanted to talk with Lynn MacDonald herself, and then Brigid came in through the back door all dressed—I mean, with a dress on and shoes and stockings and everything, looking as gaunt as a starved coyote, but kind of pretty though a little smug.

  “Brigid,” I said, speaking fast and earnestly, “Adam is in there right now phoning to that Lynn MacDonald detective woman in ‘Frisco.”

  “I can’t help it,” she said.

  “The thing is,” I said, “maybe you need some help yourself?”

  She stuck up her nose, but I noted that her lips and her voice kind of trembled when she asked, “You haven’t made up your mind that I killed Betty-Jean, have you?”

  I was plumb disgusted with her and I said so. “There are plenty of crimes besides killing,” I added. “There is aiding and abetting; there’s being an accomplice——”

  “Yahweh!” she said. “Will you please let me alone and stop talking to me like that?”

  “I don’t know what in the world you are mad at me about now,” I said. “You were calling me ‘Angel’ a while ago.”

  “A while ago,” she said, “I liked the way you changed the subject with your six gun and kept Kent from sneaking off.”

  “That boy was not ‘sneaking’ off with Rosemary,” I began.

  “Did I mention Rosemary?” she said.

  “And now you ought to be ashamed,” I said. “The idea that a good boy like Kent——”

  “Shut up!” she said. “I told you a minute ago that I wanted——”

  “Quarreling?” Adam asked from the doorway. “I never saw anything like it. No two persons can meet anywhere on this place without instantly plunging into a quarrel. Tragedy, grief, nothing can prevent everyone’s bickering with everyone else on sight. Petty bickering!

  “I can’t get that MacDonald woman on the telephone,” he went right on before we’d had a chance to deny a word he’d said. “I am positive that she was in her office
. I could tell from her secretary’s manner. I explained to her that we had no time for fiddle-faddle and that money was no object. Useless. That’s what I get for dealing with women. No method. No sense of responsibility. Any man on earth would call his office from time to time. I finally left this number and told the secretary to have her call me the instant she got in touch with her. She was sure that wouldn’t be earlier than five o’clock. At that rate she can’t get here by plane much before ten tonight. I told the secretary to call the airport there and have a plane and pilot in readiness. I doubt that she’ll do so. All this serves me right for engaging her in the first place.”

  “But,” Brigid tried telling him, “you haven’t engaged her.”

  “I have decided to engage her,” he said, stubborn as usual about sticking to anything he had started. “The thing now is to get you all on your way to Hay Patch.” I couldn’t see a bit of sense in Adam’s staying at Memaloose when he might as well and better have left the Hay Patch phone number for Lynn MacDonald to call. I couldn’t see any more sense in Adam’s sending Brigid, Rosemary, Kent, Reggie and Mac off in the big car and keeping Mac’s horse and gun and Ernie with his horse and gun there in camp with him.

  Naturally I waited around after the folks had gone to find out about all this, to explain to Adam that he wouldn’t have any way to get to Hay Patch himself and to try persuading him to have the phone call transferred and come on with me.

  “I’ll ride Mac’s horse to Ferras,” he said, “and get a car out of Goldfield Red’s to drive on to Hay Patch. I feel like being alone now. I may take Mac’s horse and ride out on the desert to an ant nest that I haven’t seen for months. Interesting but exceptionally ungrateful creatures—ants. I’m keeping Ernie here. I won’t need anyone else. His gun’s loaded. He’s the best shot in the country and is practically inarticulate.”

  “You never needed any help before to look at an anthill,” I said.

  “But I have needed ant nests,” he said, “to help deliver me from my friends—and other evils.”

  He came back, though, while I was trying to get the car door shut. “I beg your pardon, Jeff,” he said, and got red and vexed all over again. “There I go!” he said. “Why in the name of the Everlasting are you always around making me apologize to you?”

  “I never make you apologize,” I said. “You always just up and do it. At the drop of a hat.”

  “Yes, it is becoming an obsession with me,” he said, “as your flatly contradicting my most casual remark has long been an obsession of yours.”

  “No, I don’t, Adam,” I said. I was going on to apologize, some, myself, if he’d have let me. But the last thing I heard he was hollering after me, “You do. You contradict flatly every word I happen to utter.”

  At the first turn on the road I looked back. Sure enough, there was Adam on Mac’s horse, riding lickety-split toward the White Cracker Mountains.

  Chapter XXVIII

  Driving back to Ferras I didn’t even glimpse the big car on the hairpins, so I knew when I got to town that the folks had picked up Mrs. Duefife and were well on their way to Hay Patch! I was glad of it, for it gave me time to drive around the outskirts and come up to the back of the hotel where I could dive in through the kitchen entrance without being noticed.

  I knew that with Joe taking the hearse through town to Memaloose and back, everybody would be on Main Street talking things over and waiting for me in front of the hotel to give them the latest news. Adam had told us all that there weren’t any secrets to be kept any longer; but I hate being the center of any attraction and I didn’t feel in the mood for talking anyway.

  I parked my car on the circus lot a block away from the hotel and the only sign I saw of anybody after that was the carpet sweeper standing with its handle straight up in the hall where Ellie had left it when she had run downstairs to hear the latest news.

  Feeling pretty good over giving everybody the slip, I decided to feel a little better and see what I’d missed. My own room is at the back of the place, so I had to go into one of the front rooms.

  The rooms are always unlocked, of course, but the door I picked out wouldn’t open. I thought it was stuck and raised it a little, giving it a shake.

  Brigid said, “What is it?”

  I had reason for being surprised. Why I was scared I don’t know, except that I had a fool notion that, maybe, someone had locked her in there.

  “It’s me,” I answered, sounding kind of silly. “Jeff.”

  She opened the door just wide enough to stick her nose up in the crack, and asked, vexed, “What do you want?”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “That is, I’m staying here until St. Dennis comes home. I’d go home and stay, but I promised him I wouldn’t. I didn’t say I wouldn’t stay in the Ferras Hotel. I’m going to stay here. I won’t go to Hay Patch. I will not. I won’t talk about it. I won’t talk about anything. Mayor Oakman can’t make me go to Hay Patch. Neither can you. I won’t go.”

  “You just bet you won’t,” I said, all admiration or trying hard to be. “You never did a smarter thing in your life,” I went on, “than finding yourself a good safe place to stay and staying in it.”

  She shut the door and locked it.

  Lucky for me nobody thought of looking for my car anywhere but around the hotel or over at Goldfield Red’s, so I got some rest until, around seven o’clock, I woke up and found myself thinking of Reggie and deciding that I’d never had enough understanding sympathy for the lad. No wonder; the last food I’d even seen had been at breakfast.

  I wrote a note saying, “Dear Brigid, let’s eat. Jeff,” and within a couple of minutes after I’d stuck it under her door she came tapping on mine.

  “I haven’t eaten since yesterday,” she said. “So if you’ll promise not to scold or ask me any questions at all, I’ll go with you to Slim’s.”

  Feeding her, the way she looked, seemed a lot more necessary than putting her through the third degree. So I promised; but I complained a little until she began crying, leaning against the door-jamb, and I had to take it all back and promise over again.

  “It’s this way, Jeff,” she said. “Something goes wrong with my tear ducts when I try to talk. But I’m not responsible for anything that has happened and nothing I could say or tell could help anybody or do any good. I haven’t been wicked—but I’m hungry. I feel odd, very odd. And I’m hungry.”

  We took a table at Slim’s, instead of sitting up to the counter, and we weren’t bothered, much, except for a dozen or so of the boys sidling up and asking whether I’d be in the poolroom later or where would I be. The folks around here always stood quite aloof from the O’Dells. They liked them fine, but they kept a distance. I never knew whether this was out of respect to O’Dell’s being an author, or whether it was that most everybody thought that the O’Dells were kind of crazy.

  On our way back to the hotel we saw Mac and Ernie, riding east, but taking it easy as if they weren’t bent for any place in particular. We didn’t think about Hay Patch being to the east. I guess we didn’t think anything except that Brigid, noting that Mac was riding his horse, remarked that she was glad Mayor Oakman had got a car and gone on to Hay Patch instead of stopping and finding her at the hotel and arguing with her.

  “Brigid, child,” I said, knowing she’d be a lot better off at Hay Patch than she would be in that hot hotel, “if you’d tell me which one of the folks you’re afraid of, over there, I know I could prove to you that you had no cause for fearing any of them.”

  She didn’t answer. All the way up the steps she didn’t answer. She stopped at the door of her room. “Don’t call me child,” she said, and went in and locked the door behind her.

  I went to my room. Shinny, Taylor, Quebec Red and several of the other boys were waiting for me. I decided it would be better to go down to the poolroom and shoot a few games in public than it would be to hold a big private reception. It wasn’t a bad idea. As so
on as the boys found out that I was sore on the whole subject of Memaloose, fighting sore, knew nothing anyway and would say less, they were very white about it. I didn’t have to arrest a one of them for libel, defamation of character, interchanging opprobrious epithets, being private nuisances, or anything else that I’d mentioned.

  Things were going all right until, around nine o’clock, Shorty, the night clerk, came in to tell me that a drummer in the lobby was acting very ugly, trying to make trouble just because Brigid O’Dell had borrowed his car and gone for a ride. She had told Shorty she wanted a breath of fresh air and would bring the car right back, so Shorty had said “O. K.” because the drummer was upstreet. But it seemed that the drummer had noted her leaving town, and here he was back in the hotel and raising Ned.

  Strolling to the door, I asked what direction she’d taken. Shorty said that the drummer claimed she had struck out to the west of town driving like Hades. I told him to tell the drummer that he’d sent the sheriff to get his blistering old rattle-trap for him but that Ferras, Oakman County, or the State of Nevada would stand for no monkey business when it came to anybody’s objecting to a lady borrowing a car for a few minutes, and sauntered on my way.

  A Ford is a fine car for this country, but I guess the drummer’s car was a good one for whatever country he came from. It went. I heard it and followed it, getting a glimpse now and then of its headlights spotting the hairpin turns for a split second, and being so scared at Brigid’s spinning around that mountain road like a top that I forgot to be scared of anything else until I got to Memaloose.

  The gate was wide open. The camp was as dark as down the well except for the drummer’s car with its lights on standing where the hearse had stood that afternoon. The back door was locked. I knocked hard and I heard someone who I knew wasn’t Brigid coming to answer.