The Desert Lake Mystery

by Kay Cleaver Strahan

  Adam opened the door and said, “Is that you, Jeff?” Sure enough, I found out in a minute that it was me.

  Only one shaded light was burning in the living room but I could see Brigid sitting by the telephone with her mouth shut. To this day I never have seen anything half as much shut as Brigid’s mouth was then.

  Before I’d even found myself a chair Adam was asking a hundred questions, all of them about why had I come and what for.

  I was afraid I couldn’t change his mind, so I thought that I’d try changing his tactics. “I came to see why in thunder you sent for Brigid to come over here alone at a time like this,” I said, adding, “Dangerous business for a grown person, let alone a child.”

  “What are you talking about!” he said. “Send for her! I didn’t send for her.”

  “If not,” I said, but hardly giving him the benefit of the doubt, “why did she come? Tell me that.”

  “She didn’t come,” he said. “I mean to say I didn’t. That is—I tell you she didn’t even know that I was here.”

  With that he went on, less confused but more bitter as he described how he had been lying there in the dark, resting, when Brigid came creeping in through the front door with a flashlight, making a bee-line for the telephone. He should have kept quiet and listened to her telephone message. But, being unaccustomed to criminal plots and methods, he had spoken to her. She had screamed. He had spoken again. As nearly as I could gather, he had been speaking ever since. She had not uttered a word and would not.

  “I suppose,” I said, “that instead of speaking to the poor kid you hollered at her and gave her another terrible shock. It’s too bad. I’d think she had had enough for one day. This afternoon she lost her memory. Now I suppose she has lost her voice.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “Not this time. You know as well as I do that she didn’t lose her memory this afternoon.”

  “Know what? Know what?” I said, twice on purpose.

  “At any rate,” he said, “you know it now. You’ve been told. I’ve told you. I’ll tell you, further, that she has been making a fool of you. Oh, yes she has. Just as that girl has been making fools of us all for days.” Generally he meant Rosemary when he said “that girl,” but I asked him, anyway. “Not Rosemary?”

  “Rosemary,” he said. “She didn’t kill her brother there in his cottage on Wednesday evening.”

  “Where did she kill him, then?” I asked. “And when?”

  Chapter XXIX

  “She didn’t kill him,” Adam said. “She helped him get away after he had killed Clyde Shively and the Judge. Every hour she could keep us searching for him, believing that he was dead, was an hour to his advantage.”

  A very disgusted utterance came from Brigid’s direction. It sounded something as if she was saying “Fist!” with her mouth tight shut, but since she couldn’t do that it didn’t sound like that, either.

  Adam pretended he didn’t hear it and went right on talking to me. “I’ve known that Twill was the murderer ever since you spoke about our not hearing shots here on Wednesday afternoon,” he said. “The shots must have been fired during the thunderstorm. With your hearing, you’d have heard a shot fired here in camp from at least half-past three o’clock on. You’d have heard it while you and I were in the kitchen, despite the radio. During the storm, Twill and his two victims were the only ones on the place who weren’t in the living room, right here.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  He went on talking. “Why he did it, I don’t know. Jealousy, perhaps. Or some past scores to settle. But I do know that he committed both murders. I’ve known that for some time. But I firmly believed that he was dead. I shouldn’t have believed that girl’s story for a moment, if I hadn’t seen that bloodstained pillow with my own eyes, and her frock and her arms. She knew that, of course, and——”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “Doubt what?” he said, very vexed. “By the Eternal! Doubt what?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  “Will you please listen to me?” he said, adding, “Where was I?”

  “No place, much,” I told him. “Just believing that you saw a bloodstained pillow, which you did see.”

  “I did see it,” he said, as if I’d said he hadn’t. “Of course I saw it. And so I believed her lies. I thought that it was her horror of what Twill had done—or, perhaps, something which he was trying to force her to do—that had made her lose her senses and shoot him. Under these circumstances I felt that, even if the body were found, she should not be held accountable. The murderer was dead. I gave her a chance that she’ll wish she had taken when I left that money here for her today.”

  Brigid made another one of those disgusted, “fisty” utterances.

  Adam went right on. “This afternoon, necessarily, I began questioning my conclusions—seriously questioning them. But not until Reggie gave me a bit of information——”

  “Reggie?” I said.

  “Reggie,” he said it over, differently, making it sound dignified. “He happened to mention that when Rosemary went riding on Thursday morning she took a package with her. He thought that she was carrying food, delicacies, to Kent in jail. So he doubted her positive statement that she had not seen Kent in the jail.”

  “Well, what do you think of that!” I said. But he misunderstood my meaning entirely and answered: “My first thought was that her leaving the camp with a package might signify that she was carrying food and water to some hiding-place on the desert. Never mind, I know without being told that there are no hiding-places on the desert. I believed that I was sending myself on a fool’s errand when I rode out there alone this afternoon. As it well might have been, but for the fact that Scamp ants eat carrion. She made a mistake when she buried that body not far from a nest of Scamp ants. The wind last night partly uncovered it. I followed the ants and they led me straight to the dog with a bullet in its head.”

  He stopped talking. Brigid said nothing. For some reason the only thing I said was, “Dog!”

  “Yes, dog,” he started off again. “She shot the dog there on that pillow Wednesday night, and hid it and came running out to us with her lies. Time was what she was playing for and we danced to her tune. Twill killed Clyde Shively and the Judge. He returned today and killed my daughter. From now on, I am calling the tune.”

  Brigid opened her mouth and said, “No, I think not. Because not one word of this crazy theory is true, and I can prove that it isn’t. My own first theory—the one that I formed without thinking—was just as crazy, though. As soon as I missed the dog, I thought that he had followed Twill away because I knew that he wouldn’t follow anyone else. So I thought that Twill had killed the Judge, accidentally, when we heard the shot on Wednesday evening. I thought that Rosemary and Kent had helped Twill escape, and——”

  “Just a moment, please,” Adam said, sounding dangerous. “You missed the dog?”

  “Yes. Everyone missed the dog—that is, everyone except you—Mayor Oakman.”

  “And said nothing about it, of course?”

  “I believe that the others thought that the dog’s absence was unimportant. I thought that if I were to tell you that Funny was lost you’d say that it was like a woman to be fussing over a lost dog at a time like this. Or—well, something of the sort.”

  “You knew perfectly well,” Adam said, “that if you had come to me and told me that you believed Twill was alive, giving me your reasons, I should have thought the information vitally important.”

  “Yes,” Brigid admitted, “I was afraid you might think it was important. It isn’t, really. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t answer any of the right questions. If Twill killed the Judge, what has become of the Judge’s body? I looked on all the roofs. I took the broken ladder and got to the porch roof here, and then on up to the high roof where I could see all the other roofs.”

  “So did I,” Adam said, much to my surprise. “Very early Thursday morning. Mac and Ernie assisted me.”
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  “But,” Brigid went on, “even if we had found the Judge’s body—and we haven’t, and we can’t—how could anyone have helped Twill to escape, in a flash, on Wednesday night? He was a cripple. We began hunting for him almost at once, and in daylight. And why should Twill stop to turn a bloodstained pillowslip wrong side out? And what about the bullet in the wall of Twill’s cottage? And why were the pockets of that tan suit empty? And——”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about,” Adam interrupted. “And now, Jeff—— Let me see——I had something to tell you. Oh, yes. I sent Ernie off with Mac’s horse to pick Mac up and go to Hay Patch. They are there now, seeing to it—unostentatiously—that Kent and that girl don’t try escaping again. Lynn MacDonald should arrive at the flying field well before ten o’clock tonight. Mac and Ernie, with Kent and Rosemary, are to meet her in my car and bring her here. She’ll want to look over the place, probably, and I thought it would save time to have her listen to that girl’s confession at the outset. She’ll confess, don’t make any mistake about that. And she’ll tell us where that murderous scoundrel has gone. She’ll assist us in finding him, or——”

  “Twill, do you mean?” Brigid asked.

  “Most assuredly I mean Twill.”

  “I found his body early this afternoon when I walked back to camp from the mountain. He is dead. He has been shot below the hollow in his throat—rather far below it, exactly where Rosemary told us that she shot him.”

  Chapter XXX

  “I don’t believe you,” Adam said, forgetting his streak of politeness.

  “I didn’t know that you had decided not to prosecute Rosemary when the body was found. I wish you had told me sooner.”

  “If you have found the body, where is it?”

  “I was afraid that you would make serious trouble for Rosemary.”

  “Answer my question!”

  “No, because I am still afraid that you may make trouble for Rosemary.”

  Adam said to me, “She hasn’t found the body.”

  “I think she has,” I said.

  “So you, Sheriff of Oakman County——”

  Brigid interrupted. “Jeff doesn’t know anything about this. If you’ll promise me on your Oakman word of honor that you won’t make trouble for Rosemary, I’ll tell you where the body is.”

  “I am entering into no pacts,” Adam said. “You haven’t found Twill’s body. If you have, you’ll tell soon enough where it is.”

  “I think not.”

  “Yes, you will. You’ll tell, young lady.”

  “I doubt it. I’ve lied, and committed two robberies, and undergone torture and risked my life on the mountain tonight to avoid telling. No, I didn’t mind,” she added, as if Adam had asked her whether she had minded, and took a roll of bills out of the front of her dress. “These are yours, I think,” she said, handing them to him. “I stole them this afternoon.”

  Adam stuck the bills into his pocket like they were peanuts and he didn’t eat peanuts. “I don’t believe for one instant that you have found that body,” he said. “But, if you have, you will tell us where it is, and before long.”

  I had been hearing the car coming for quite a while. I thought that Brigid might want to know, so I told her. “The car with the detective is coming right now.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, just a little bit like Reggie.

  “You will care,” Adam said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you are going to tell her why you came here tonight to use the telephone. You are going to tell her, if you have found Twill’s body—though I know you haven’t—where it is. You are going to tell her, because she will explain to you that Twill’s body is the one thing that can prove that girl wasn’t lying, and so keep her out of the penitentiary for from twenty years to life.”

  Brigid didn’t answer.

  “Maybe,” I said, trying to make peace before the folks came with the detective, “Rosemary shot Twill and the dog both; or, maybe, she shot neither. If Twill killed the Judge there in that cottage, there’d have been—well, plenty of traces of killing without her shooting the dog. And, if Twill didn’t kill the Judge, why should she kill the dog? And——”

  “In the name of the Everlasting——“ Adam murmured, kind of pleadingly.

  “And,” I said, “I don’t much think Brigid was going to telephone. If she was, she was only going to send word to the drummer to keep his shirt on.”

  Adam slapped his hands flat on the table and stood up by pressing his weight down on them, leaning forward a little. He looked terrible, but before he’d got through moistening his lips, trying to say something, Kent and Rosemary came in the front door, kind of ushering in this Lynn MacDonald. Mac and Ernie followed as if they fairly hated following; and, hovering in the background, was Joe Laud. He told me afterward that Miss MacDonald invited him to come, but he acted all evening like he was wrong about that.

  My first idea of Lynn MacDonald was that she was a very good-looking lady in a bad humor. I’ve always been partial to red hair for ladies. Her red hair wasn’t that pretty desert-rock-red that Brigid’s was—hers was more the shade of those California Madrona trees’ trunks, but it was smooth and pleasing to the eye. She was a little tall for my taste, though neither scrawny nor portly, and she carried herself well, and her clothes became her. Her voice wasn’t as sweet-sounding as Rosemary’s, but it was better than the average run of voices—clear, and kind of harmonious and well-bred; nothing like you’d expect a detective’s voice to be.

  The trouble was, that the minute Kent had put through some introductions, she had to begin talking to me as if I was the only person in the room.

  “Now then,” she said, “I have been told...and went on, giving the outlines of the case, just about as I gave them to Brigid on Thursday morning; but making special and extra points of the disappearing bodies and adding Betty-Jean’s murder on at the last.

  “Yes,” I said, when she seemed to me waiting for an answer, “I guess that’s about the size of it.”

  She gave me kind of a queer look, to say the least, and turned to Adam, “And you, Mayor Oakman?” she said. “Do you agree with this?”

  “I?” he said, pretending to be surprised at being included in the talk. “I have been listening, intently; but wondering, also, whether you were interested in what you had been told or in the truth concerning what has happened here at Memaloose?”

  “In the truth, of course,” she answered very pleasantly. “As yet I have talked only with your son, the two deputy sheriffs and the coroner.” She looked around for Joe, but he was out on the porch.

  “Perhaps, then,” Adam said, being suave, “this may interest you. Rosemary Young did not shoot her brother. She shot a small dog, hid it at once, and by means of the bloodstains and her accomplished lying she has managed to confuse us and delay all pursuit of the criminal—he, of course, had killed both Judge Shively and his son—for more than forty-eight hours. I believe that even she thought that her brother would go on his way. He returned and brutally murdered my daughter.”

  “You have proof of all this?” Miss MacDonald asked, showing interest but no great astonishment. “Proof? Yes. Yes, of course—absolute proof.”

  “You have had the blood analysis made?”

  “Not as yet. I’ve had no time. However, I found the dog’s body with a bullet in it out on the desert where she buried it.”

  “But how do you know that it was Rosemary Young who killed the dog and buried it on the desert?”

  “She was seen carrying a large package out there. “

  “You saw her, yourself?”

  “No. Reggie Duefife saw her. He doesn’t matter. No one else had reason for killing the dog. What else could she have been taking out there?”

  From where I was sitting I couldn’t see Rosemary, but I’ll bet you Mac could. “Well for cripe’s sakes!” he said politely but very disgusted. “Can’t a girl carry a package any place anymore with
out having a dead dog in it? First it was a little dog. Now it’s a big package. That fat guy, ugh?”

  Adam was always a great hand for keeping his temper before strangers, if he wanted to. I was almost proud of the way he stood up and said, sounding kind of like a martyr king, “I apologize for this ribaldry, Miss MacDonald. Perhaps I should warn you that the general tendency here is one of regarding the most bitter catastrophe as mere drollery. The dog’s body is in the kitchen. If you will come with me——”

  Brigid spoke fast. “Isn’t the fact that I found Twill’s body, with a wound below the throat where Rosemary told us that it was, more important than Mayor Oakman’s finding the dog?”

  “Yes, it is,” Miss MacDonald said. “Where is the man’s body, Mayor Oakman?”

  “He doesn’t know,” Brigid said. “I found it only this afternoon. He has been trying to make me tell where it is, but I won’t. You see, he hates Rosemary and he wants to make trouble for her. He really does. She killed her brother accidentally and is heartbroken over it. But I’m afraid that if I tell where the body is, the Mayor will say it was not an accident and have her tried for murder. He is dictator of Oakman County. He could.”

  Miss MacDonald asked, “But that shooting was entirely accidental, wasn’t it?” and everybody in the room, except Adam and Rosemary, said, “Yes,” or, “Sure it was,” or something on that order.

  In a minute even Ernie said, “Yes,” and then Adam said, “I am confident that Rosemary did not shoot her brother. However, if the body is found, proving that her story is true, I shall know that the shooting was accidental, and I shall proffer no charges.”

  “The body is across the lake in the canoe in the boathouse. I’ll swim over and push the canoe across,” Brigid said, and dropped her dress off at the door.

  Very luckily she was wearing her swimming suit underneath. Everybody got up, just kind of standing around, though, and some were saying one thing and some another, and the next thing I knew we were all standing on the front porch and she was splashing in the lake.