The Desert Lake Mystery

by Kay Cleaver Strahan

  “We ought not to have let her,” I said. “An errand like that. A child like Brigid.”

  “Couldn’t one of the men go, now, to help her?” Miss MacDonald asked.

  We all felt sheepish and acted that way. None of us but Kent could swim. I knew why he didn’t offer. I had seen Rosemary’s face as she had crossed the room to come out on the porch. She was his girl, and he was staying with her where he belonged.

  Miss MacDonald led off and, still sheepish, we all followed her to the lake shore. The stars looked terrible sparkling so bright in the sky and the lake.

  Adam said to me in a low undertone, “Brigid was unfair. I don’t hate that girl. I can’t. By the Eternal, I hope Brigid is telling the truth. I hope she has found the body. By the Eternal, I do. But it is impossible. That canoe wasn’t on the place until Thursday morning. And, since then—— No, it can’t be.”

  He was right, it couldn’t be. But, like everything else at Memaloose, it was. After Mac and I had waded out and taken the canoe from Brigid and dragged it up on shore, there was no more doubt. Miss MacDonald had a flashlight.

  I heard Kent trying to keep Rosemary from coming to look, but she came. She didn’t take on. She brushed Twill’s hair off his forehead a little and stayed kneeling there only a minute or two before she stood up and leaned against Kent.

  “He has killed himself,” she said. “I never believed that he would. I never did believe him, never all these years when he threatened to kill himself. But, Kent,, he has killed himself.”

  Adam and I had walked off a little piece. He said, and I thought less of him for hours for saying it, “A different story, now that the body has been found.”

  Chapter XXXI

  Kent and Rosemary looked as if they were heading straight for the big car.

  Adam said to me, “I happened to put the key in my pocket,” and, I guess, felt pretty foolish when they sat down on the community house steps without even glancing at the car.

  Miss MacDonald spoke to Brigid, “You found the body in the canoe.”

  It hadn’t sounded like a question, but Brigid answered, saying that she had, shortly after twenty minutes past one that afternoon.

  “Now then,” Miss MacDonald said, getting a little brisk. “I think we must have the canoe taken into one of the houses. Do you agree with me, Coroner?”

  Joe said, “I do,” like he was getting married again, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t heard the question because, when Ernie and Mac picked the canoe up and started carrying it to the nearest cottage, Joe was all taken aback and would have put a stop to it then and there if I hadn’t explained things to him in a hurry. I was glad Miss MacDonald had gone on ahead with Adam.

  The boys had to put the canoe down on the parlor floor. Miss MacDonald said, then, that she wouldn’t need anyone now but the coroner. Mac and Ernie could take a hint and glad to, but Adam stuck around.

  Since he was staying, I thought I should to save situations, if possible, so I sat down just inside the breakfast nook.

  I meant to keep well out of the way and I did for a while. Joe said that rigor was complete. Miss MacDonald agreed with him. She asked Joe please not to do something—I don’t know what to this day—and then Adam said, “By the Eternal! A thirty-six Colt’s with three shots fired!”

  By the time I got over there, she had snapped the gun shut and was putting it into a little sack thing she’d brought with her.

  “Three shots!” Adam said. “One for Clyde Shively, one for the old Judge and the last one for himself. That accounts for the shooting Reggie heard here at noon today.”

  “He could have heard only the one shot—the last one—today,” I said.

  Adam didn’t answer me. I guess he thought that I ought to know that one shot would sound like a bombardment to Reggie, and I did know it. I was a little surprised that he’d heard even one.

  “Miss MacDonald,” Adam said, “did Joe Laud tell you that Clyde Shively had been shot with a thirty-six Colt’s?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I stopped at Ferras and saw the body—the two bodies—before I came here.”

  “Half an hour,” Joe said, and I didn’t know whether he was apologizing to Adam or boasting.

  I went and sat down again. I hadn’t been there but a few minutes when Miss MacDonald snapped her pocketbook shut and said, “Now then: If you are willing, Mayor Oakman, and if she is able, I should like to talk with Rosemary Young.”

  “If I’m willing,” Adam said.

  “It seems rather cruel, I know. But I haven’t much time——”

  “You haven’t,” he said.

  She gave up talking to him, and no wonder with him answering back like that, making his simple pronouns sound like personal profanity. Outside he stopped to lock the door. I thought that we’d had enough of disappearing bodies, so I mentioned that any key on the place would unlock any door and, if not, either a hairpin or a button-hook would do fine.

  Miss MacDonald said I might have one of my deputies watch the cottage, if I liked, and I understood Adam’s use of his pronouns; but I said nothing, beyond calling Mac and Ernie over and asking them if they’d mind keeping an eye on the place.

  Kent and Rosemary were still sitting on the community house steps. Miss MacDonald sat down opposite them, and I sat on the step below her, beside Brigid. Joe sat next to Kent, and Adam, after he had lighted the porch light, just kind of stood around. Except for Brigid’s looking not very suitable in Mac’s Sunday coat—he’d put it on to go to Hay Patch—over her swimming suit, we might have been just any nice group of people sitting on the front porch, anywhere, to keep cool.

  Miss MacDonald was asking Rosemary if she felt able to answer a few questions, and Kent was objecting like sixty, saying that questions would have to wait, when Adam burst in:

  “Did you kill your brother on Wednesday night, or did you shoot the dog and lie to us?”

  The words were hardly out of his mouth before she answered, “I shot the dog and lied to you.”

  “To help Twill escape,” Adam asked, “because you knew that he had killed Clyde Shively and Judge Shively?”

  “He didn’t kill Judge Shively,” she said, and I thought she was on the point of saying something else, but Adam wouldn’t give her a chance.

  “Who did then? Did you?”

  Kent flared up something terrible at this, and Miss MacDonald said—I liked it in her, trying to keep peace—“After all, you don’t know that Judge Shively has been killed; do you, Mayor Oakman?”

  Adam explained to her then about the Judge’s age, and his heat prostrations, and his rheumatism, and his cane, and his one pair of glasses. (Seemed that the old gentleman had misplaced them one day and Adam had found him groping around in his cottage hunting for them. He had another pair at home, he said, but had forgotten to bring them.) All this explaining took so long that everybody got restless. I kept hoping that Miss MacDonald would begin talking and put a stop to it, but she didn’t. Even after he had stopped on his own hook, she waited a minute before she said:

  “This man you call Reggie, who had the Judge’s glasses in his pocket, is the man who said that he heard the shooting here at noon today, isn’t he?”

  Brigid spoke up, but she sounded very small. “I put the glasses in Reggie’s pocket,” she said.

  “You did?” Miss MacDonald asked, but more as if Brigid had said that she’d eaten her dinner with her fingers, or something like that, “Why?”

  “I was tidying Twill’s cottage and I found them slipped down beside a chair cushion. I didn’t know what to do with them. Reggie was near me with a pocket. I didn’t have a pocket. I knew that no one could accuse Reggie of any crime, or possibly suspect him of murder.”

  “Because he is such a good man, is that what you mean?”

  “No,” Brigid said, and took it back. “Yes—well, Reggie is good enough, I suppose. You’ll know when you meet him. It is difficult to explain. But, for one thing, he is so fat-—“ The poor kid was doing worse
and worse. I was glad to have Adam interrupt, but sorry to hear him getting suave.

  “May I suggest,” he said, “that we leave this subject of Reggie’s appearance and go on to matters of more importance? Rosemary, did you see Twill shoot Clyde Shively in the back?”

  “No. Twill told me. He thought that the storm would frighten Betty-Jean so he went to her cottage. She wasn’t there. She had come to the community house, but Twill didn’t know that, so he went to Judge Shively’s cottage looking for her. He found Clyde there, drinking, and they quarreled instantly when Twill asked for Betty-Jean. The large revolver was on the table. Twill was incoherent about what happened, but he said that Clyde Shively threatened him. I think, despite the nature of the wound, that Twill shot in self-defense.”

  “We are not interested in what you think,” Adam said. “We want to hear what you know. This shooting was during the thunderstorm, when all the rest of us were here in the community house, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew it. And then he shot the old Judge, because he had seen the murder. Where did you and your brother dispose of the Judge’s body?”

  “We didn’t dispose of his body. Twill did not kill Judge Shively.”

  “He did,” Adam said. “Whether you know it or or not, he killed the old Judge. And he returned this afternoon and killed Betty-Jean——”

  “No,” Rosemary protested. “I know that he didn’t.”

  “You can’t know it. If you do, how do you know it?”

  “I know Twill,” she said.

  “Ah-h-h,” Adam dragged it out, making it sound terrible.

  Kent stood up. “Come, Rosemary,” he said. “We’ve had enough of this. Please, Rosemary,” he urged.

  “So you are in on this, too, are you?” Adam asked.

  “Very much in on it,” Kent said. “Come, Rosemary. Please!”

  “No, Kent,” she said to him, and then to the rest of us, “Kent doesn’t know anything at all about any of this. I lied to him, just as I did to all of you. I’ll try to answer your questions, now. But I can’t see how anything I may tell you will help you. You have no reasons for believing anything I say.”

  Miss MacDonald spoke, and it was high time—she certainly was a great one for holding her tongue. “Until tonight you have been trying to help your brother. Now the circumstances are changed.”

  “That makes no difference,” Adam said. “She still has herself to help and, probably, Kent. And the Everlasting alone knows how many others.”

  All this time Adam had been standing aloof, very prominently, as if he wouldn’t run the risk of associating with any of us, even if he got hoarse from hollering the distance. So, when Miss MacDonald stood up right then and walked over to him, I’d an idea maybe she was going to whisper something in his ear. It was a big relief, for a minute, to see the two of them walking away together. Joe got up and tagged after them, but at a distance. His going left me alone with Rosemary and Kent; so, not wishing to butt in with them I moseyed over to where Brigid had moseyed.

  “Well,” I said, “it is beginning to look as if, maybe, a little something might be going to get cleared up; isn’t it?”

  “No,” she said. “You and I had the right answers for the wrong questions. I think that now we are getting the wrong answers for the wrong questions.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  As it turned out, much later, the kid was about half right and half wrong, which wasn’t so bad at that early stage of the game.

  Chapter XXXII

  I had hoped that Miss MacDonald might ditch Adam somewhere. But in two or three minutes here they came, her heels clicking very firmly, his languishing, Joe trailing after them. Brigid-and I went back to the steps and sat down. Mac and Ernie kind of hovered over, standing about where Adam had been standing, just within earshot.

  Miss MacDonald asked Rosemary if she would tell all she knew about what happened on Wednesday.

  “Yes,” Rosemary said and stopped. “He couldn’t have done this,” she said, next, “if I hadn’t given him the revolver.”

  “Were you in Clyde Shively’s cottage after he was killed?” Miss MacDonald asked.

  “No. When Twill and I left the community house on Wednesday afternoon we went to Twill’s cottage. He showed me a bullet hole in the wall there and said that he had tried to kill himself a few minutes before and had failed. Then lie brought the big revolver out of his pocket and said that he wouldn’t fail this time. I took the revolver away from him. I asked him where he had got it. He told me from Clyde Shively and then he told me what I have told you about the shooting.”

  “Your brother had often attempted suicide?” Miss MacDonald asked.

  “Yes. I thought that no one knew it.”

  “I heard you say that he had.” All through this Miss MacDonald was as nice as she could be—not sharp, or smart-aleck, or anything like a detective.

  “Twill wasn’t insincere,” Rosemary answered. “But he was super-sensitive and, perhaps, slightly unstable emotionally—sometimes. Only sometimes. His being so brave, usually, made these bad times worse when they came. He was like a person who is agonizingly ill. He found relief in threatening suicide and, occasionally, in attempting it. I thought that he would never really do it. My only excuse is that several times Twill had tried to kill himself when I wasn’t with him to stop him, and he never went through with it. Wednesday afternoon, when I took the big revolver away from him I put it aside. But it was right there where he could have taken it up easily any time while we were making our plans. I didn’t doubt his intentions for a moment when he asked me to bring it to him, with his other things, so that he could dispose of it far away from camp somewhere.”

  “Will you tell us about those plans?” Miss MacDonald asked.

  “Yes. At first, there in his cottage, Twill kept saying that trying to escape would be useless because a cripple could be traced so easily. I knew that he was right. And then I saw Funny, his little dog, asleep there in the room and I made the plans.

  “I thought that if everyone believed that Twill was dead, it would give us hours, at least, before they began hunting for him. It wasn’t very difficult to persuade Twill to try it, though he insisted that I should say he had killed himself. When the time came for me to say that, I couldn’t—quite. I couldn’t seem to say that I was wholly blameless. I felt so much to blame. I had been so engrossed in my own affairs that I hadn’t paid enough attention to Twill for weeks. And, too, he had wanted to confess, or thought that he wanted to, and I wouldn’t let him. This sounds foolishly sentimental, doesn’t it? I don’t know—— It did seem cheap for me to step right out from under all the blame. But perhaps these weren’t my reasons. Perhaps I merely thought that the way I told it sounded more irrational—made a better story. Or, perhaps, I didn’t think. I can’t remember. I’m sorry, none of this matters, does it? If you’d ask me questions, I might not get off and talk too much.”

  “Will you tell us how your brother got away from the camp?”

  “He swam to the east end of the lake and crossed it there. I happened to have on a big rubber coat that I’d put on when I was going to ride in the storm. I wore Twill’s clothes over my swimming suit. I tied his brace and his shoes to my bathrobe cord and hung it around my neck. The coat was so large that it concealed them very well. I stuck the revolver in my belt, under my arm. I rode to the east end of the lake and across to meet Twill on the north side.

  “We had planned that he should walk the four or five miles to the state highway. The foothills would have hidden him after the first half-mile. Going slowly, he could have walked that far easily. We knew that in Nevada the first passing motorist would give him a ride either to Mesquite Forks or Sackawash, possibly farther, where he could go on by train.

  “The high fence had been a screen for me. But when, I met Twill I found him discouraged and frightened. Reggie had seen him swimming and Twill was sure that al
l our plans were ruined. I told him that I’d bring his suit back to camp and spread it on the sagebrush in plain sight outside his cottage, and that everyone would think he had returned to camp after Reggie saw him swimming. He thought that no one would notice it, unless I called attention to it, and that that would make things worse. He was determined, then, to come back and confess. We talked a long time. Finally he made me see how dangerous and desperate our plans were—how foolish running away always is.

  “And then, when I agreed with him—we are all like this, I think—he changed his mind. He decided to go. He was hopeful. We made other plans about where we were to meet and how we were to keep in touch with each other in the meantime. I wasn’t at all afraid! to give him the revolver when I left him there. He was | eager to live.

  “Uncle Adam was by the gate when I rode into camp. The way he told me to stop, that he wanted to talk with me frightened me. I thought that he knew. So, when I found that he wanted to tell me only that Twill and I must leave Memaloose the next day, I acted foolishly. Cried. I can’t understand his thinking that my near hysteria was because of what he said—but he did think so.

  “As soon as I could get away from him, I went to my cottage to dress. I had scarcely finished dressing when Kent came. He knew at once that something was wrong. I had to tell him that I was unhappy because of the way Uncle Adam had talked to me. And then Kent insisted upon staying with me, making plans for our future, and for Twill’s and Betty-Jean’s-—”

  “However,” Adam broke in, “you and your brother had made your own plans for Betty-Jean——”

  “No, no!” Rosemary protested. “You can’t think that, Uncle Adam. We loved Betty-Jean——”

  “I don’t know what I think,” Adam said. “But I know that this story of yours is a lie from start to finish. In the first place, if you and your brother hadn’t known that the old Judge was dead, you could have made none of these plans. Suppose you contend that the Judge was not in his cottage when Twill murdered Clyde Shively. Suppose you say that, since we all knew that the old gentleman was planning to surprise us with his son’s presence, none of us would go to the cottage until neither of them appeared for dinner. You cannot say that you didn’t know the old Judge himself would return to his cottage, shortly, and give the alarm at once when he found his son murdered.”