by Alice Duncan
So who did that leave? Bother. It left darned near everyone else in town. Even Edgar Calhoun had taken business trips to Chicago and New York City, and he wasn’t the only man in town to do so. Lots of the ranchers went to Chicago, because that’s where the big slaughterhouses were. Any one of them might have got himself into trouble in the big city. Young men were said to do that sort of thing all the time, although in the case of the younger generation their trouble generally came in the way of wine, women and song. Well, maybe not song, but you know what I mean. However, older men managed to get themselves into trouble too, particularly of a financial nature. Witness those whom Edgar Calhoun had cheated. I knew about a few of them, but I’d bet there were more.
It was the “mobster” part of the note that baffled me the most.
I couldn’t imagine Micah Tindall being any kind of mobster. Or Mr. Feather, either. And definitely not Armando Contreras.
On the other hand, Phil and I had accidently busted up a murdering bootlegging operation during that terrible summer I’d spent with Aunt Minnie, so I guess such a thing wasn’t necessarily impossible. I looked at the note again. Still said the same thing.
Darn it! I wished it was daylight so I could take the blasted note to the police chief and let him deal with it. Maybe he could make something of it, although I’d begun to doubt his competence ever since he’d first questioned Richard about the murder. If anything, this note should go a long way toward removing Richard from the suspect list. There was no way on God’s green earth that anybody could mistake him for a mobster. Not only was he a stuffy banker, but he hadn’t been out of town for eons, if ever, except maybe to El Paso or Santa Fe on banking business. I couldn’t imagine a mobster hiding himself in Rosedale and keeping his occupation a secret.
Of course, perhaps the note referred to a retired mobster. Were there such things? Most of the mobsters I’d read about in the newspapers were dead, which is one way of retiring, but not the way that could get you blackmailed since you can’t very well blackmail a corpse.
Which made me think that maybe I had the whole situation backwards. Maybe someone was blackmailing Herschel.
Use your brain, Annabelle Blue! Herschel was the one who wrote the note, according to the signature. Anyhow, he wouldn’t have been acting happy and smug for his last day or so if he was being blackmailed. I guess tiredness was making me loopy.
Blast it, why hadn’t Herschel written the name of the person to whom he’d addressed the note on the note itself? People could make life so difficult for others without half trying, couldn’t they?
However, it was time for me to set out for the Calhoun house, so I put the note under my mattress. Then I tried to table thoughts of it as I grabbed my flashlight, pulled on my woolen scarf so that it covered my head, ears and nose—no sense risking frostbite if the weather got any colder—put on my gloves, and skedaddled out of the house.
I don’t recommend walking in a place with no streetlights in the pitchy darkness of a moonless, freezing November night when clouds obscured even the stars while you’re on an unlawful errand without a companion. Even with my flashlight, I couldn’t see much of anything, and I felt alone and vulnerable and scared to death. It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to have begged Phil for help, even knowing how angry he was with me. Too late now. Shadows hovered everywhere, and it seemed to me that every one of them concealed a murderer.
Of course, I thought about mobsters and monsters as I walked, although I’d known since my early childhood that the latter didn’t exist. The first did. Mind you, as I said before, I hadn’t noticed any mobsters cluttering up Rosedale recently. None that I’d recognized as such, anyway. Evidently there was at least one mobster or ex-mobster here in town. But not even mobsters walked the streets on a bleak fall night alone, did they?
Then it occurred to me that, while I was alone, perhaps the mobster to whom Herschel Calhoun had written his note wasn’t. Maybe he had cohorts.
But, heck, I knew about them or him—sort of—but they didn’t know about me. Yet. I hoped. Egad.
What a miserable walk that was. It didn’t help that my heavy shoes clumped along the boardwalk and sounded like thunder. In fact, I got so scared someone might hear me that I climbed down from the boardwalk and walked in the street, which made things quieter but not any better, since the bulk of the boardwalk made my walk even darker than it had been before—and it had been dark as, well, onyx, even when I was on the boardwalk. I was still alone and scared and cold and unable to see anything and wishing I hadn’t set out on this errand, which was beginning to seem brainless to me. What was I, Annabelle Blue, nineteen-year-old child of a grocer and his wife, doing, trying to solve two brutal murders?
Oh, yeah. I remembered now. Richard. The chief still thought Richard might have done at least one of the deeds.
Maybe Chief Vickers didn’t really think Richard was a viable culprit. Maybe he’d only questioned Richard again in order to throw his real suspect off the mark and cause him to make a mistake that would nail him. I frowned when that thought entered my fuzzy head, the chief never having struck me as a particularly subtle thinker.
Bother. All this cogitating was only confusing me more, so I attempted to stop it. That was, of course, akin to attempting to stop a herd of rampaging hippopotami. My brain continued to whirl as I turned up Lee and made for the Calhoun place, stumbling and tripping over objects my flashlight didn’t illuminate.
You can be sure I flashed my light all around the front yard of the place once I got there. I tried to be subtle about it, but I had absolutely no desire to stumble over the body of, say, Gladys Calhoun, as I made my way to the back of the house.
No bodies. I silently offered up a brief prayer of thanks.
I was as quiet as I could be while walking to the back window. At least people hadn’t planted a bunch of decorative trees and so forth in Rosedale, and nobody had a green lawn like those my brother George wrote about from Alhambra. Dirt was it in November in Rosedale. Even those folks who planted grass—and there weren’t many of them—didn’t bother to try to keep anything alive and green past the first frost in October or thereabouts. The town was downright ugly during the fall and through our dry and blustery spring. Every now and then some green things appeared during the summer months when the rains came. Most of us living in Rosedale had a thirst for all things green and growing because we so seldom saw any in real life.
After I made my way to the back of the Calhoun house, I looked at all the windows. They stared back blackly. Was one of them open? How could I tell without flashing my light on them, thereby taking a chance of waking the members of the household? This was a problem I hadn’t contemplated, and I stood there, mulling, until I heard a soft “Psst.”
The whisper made me jump about six inches in the air and have a heart spasm that I’m surprised didn’t kill me right then and there. However, it was then I noticed a head, which looked like a roundish something only a little blacker than its surroundings, sticking out of a window. Betty Lou. Thank God. I made my more-or-less-soundless way to the window out of which Betty Lou’s head poked.
I’m five feet, four inches tall, and I’m pretty spry, being nineteen and all, but crumb. How the heck was I going to get myself up to the sill and through that window?
“Can you get in?” asked Betty Lou in a whisper so soft I almost couldn’t hear it.
Darn Phil Gunderson! If he’d been with me, he could have boosted me up. But no. He wasn’t there to help because, at the moment, he was sulking because he was mad at me. “Um . . . I don’t think so. I should have thought of this before.” Stupid, stupid, stupid, Annabelle.
“I thought of it,” said Betty Lou, surprising me, although I don’t know why. I’m sure she was as enterprising as anyone else in town. Clearly she was more enterprising than I. “Here’s a stool.”
She poked a three-legged stool out the window, and I grabbed it and set it on the dirt beneath, making sure it was steady on the uneven eart
h. Then I climbed on the stool and, although it was a struggle, managed to pull myself through the open window. Betty Lou helped by yanking on my arms. Boy, was I going to be sore in the morning.
That, however, was of no consequence. “Thanks, Betty Lou.”
“I’ll stand by the door and warn you if I hear anyone coming.”
“Thanks.”
I glanced around, using my flashlight. So this was old man Calhoun’s home office, was it? And it had been searched by the police, who were experienced in things like searching for stuff. Well, we’d just see. I tried to recall every mystery novel I’d ever read. Some I remembered were more useful than others. For instance, in The Circular Staircase, Mary Roberts Rinehart had her elderly heroine discover a hidden room, but I didn’t think I’d have any luck if Mr. Calhoun had built himself a secret room. However, lots of other books mentioned hidden desk drawers and things shoved under carpeting and floorboards or stashed away in secret ceiling recesses and similar things.
Looking up, I decided that if Mr. Calhoun had hidden his incriminating papers in the ceiling, there was no way I’d be able to discover same. I wasn’t tall enough, and Betty Lou hadn’t provided a ladder. I’m not much of a one for ladders anyway. I again regretted Phil’s absence.
Therefore, greatly hoping, I began lifting all the little rugs scattered around the room. Nothing. I prodded every piece of furniture in the room, sticking my hands between chair covers and under cushions and opening the long casement clock in the corner, praying it wouldn’t start chiming. Nothing. Rats.
“Hurry up,” whispered Betty Lou.
“I’m trying to hurry,” I whispered back. That made me think of my father’s usual response to one of his children who said he or she was trying: “You surely are.” Not exactly a confidence builder under the circumstances. But that didn’t negate the fact that I was there and I’d never get another chance to do this. At least, if another chance were offered, I wouldn’t take it. This was too nerve-racking.
So I went on to the desk. As quietly as a shadow, and holding the flashlight in my teeth, which was terribly uncomfortable, I went through every drawer in the darned desk. Nothing. Then I pulled out each drawer and felt around in the recesses made thereby. Nothing. Double drat.
Then I decided to look at the drawers themselves. I carefully dumped all the papers out of each one and felt around, hoping my fingers would encounter a secret hiding place. Nothing.
Discouraged, I put all the drawers back in their proper places and stared at the desk—I’d taken the flashlight out of my mouth, by the way. There were lots of little cubby holes in the thing, so I poked around in them, too.
It was an accident that made me shine my light on the ceiling above the desk. I almost dropped the flashlight and caught it before it could hit the floor.
“Careful!” Betty Lou warned in a hissing whisper.
“Sorry.”
But I’d seen something up there. It wasn’t much: just a square of plaster that didn’t quite meld with the rest. It was almost as if that square were . . . well, removable.
Good Lord, had I really found something important? If so, how the heck was I going to find out what it was? Even if I stood on the desk, I couldn’t reach the ceiling.
It was then that I suffered my second heart attack of the night.
“Annabelle!” came a whisper from the window.
“Who’s that?” whispered a frightened Betty Lou.
“It’s me,” came the whisper from the window.
And darned if Phil Gunderson didn’t climb into the room. Being six feet tall, he probably didn’t even have to use the stool to gain entry. I’d never been so happy to see a person in my entire life.
“Phil!” I wanted to holler and hug him, but I could only do one of those things without waking the Calhoun family, so I did.
He still wasn’t happy with me. After giving me a brief hug and then thrusting me away from him, he whispered, “I knew you were going to do this, dammit.”
“But I found something,” I told him, praying he’d be willing to climb onto the desk and see if the space behind that square of ceiling plaster held anything of import.
“What?”
I pointed at the ceiling. “See that square of plaster? It looks suspicious to me.”
“Criminy, Annabelle, everything looks suspicious to you,” Phil grumbled.
Bless his heart, though, he actually climbed on top of the desk, pushed that odd square of plaster aside, and when his hand came out again, it was holding one of those banker’s folders with a string tied around it.
Be still my overworked heart! Had we actually found something?
“I hear somebody coming!” Betty Lou whispered suddenly, sounding panicky.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Phil, holding the folder in one hand and shoving the plaster square back into place with the other. He climbed down from the desk with the agility of a cat, and it suddenly dawned on me where the expression “cat burglar” came from. How could I think about anything so irrelevant at a time like that?
Anyhow, Phil grabbed my arm with the hand not holding the folder, and we both dashed as quietly as possible to the open window. He pushed me out first, and I almost broke my ankle when I missed the stool and plopped to the ground. Fortunately, I didn’t make much noise, the ground being dirt and softish. Then Phil was there beside me. He shoved the stool into Betty Lou’s hands and she hauled it inside and closed the window with a noiseless swish.
I wanted to run for it, but Phil slammed an arm against my body, and my back hit the wall of the house. “Stay still,” he commanded.
Golly, he was quite forceful when he wanted to be. I stayed still, flattened against the Calhoun house.
I don’t know what Betty Lou did to hide herself. Maybe she hid under the desk. All I know is that we heard the door to the office open and somebody walk in.
Then we heard Gladys Calhoun’s voice. “Is someone in here?”
Silence. Except for our breathing and our beating hearts, which sounded loud as thunder to me but probably weren’t.
We heard Gladys walk into the room, and I saw the light of a lantern being held up. I believe I’ve mentioned that the Rosedale Electric Company turns everything off at midnight. I was glad of it just then. Please, God, don’t let her be a discerning individual, I prayed. Had I left anything out of place? I couldn’t remember. Blast it! Why’d Gladys have to wake up, anyhow? We’d been quiet as mice in that dratted room. I prayed hard that Betty Lou had found a good hiding place.
After what felt like approximately sixteen hours of pure terror, the lantern light got dimmer, and we heard the door close again. Once more, I was ready to scram out of there, but Phil continued to hold me smack against the wall of the house with his arm, which, I noticed, was quite heavily muscled. Hmm. Nice.
What a time to think about Phil’s masculine qualities! I forced my mind back to the problem at hand, which was perilous. From the corner of my eye, I saw lantern light travel from room to room as Gladys made her way through the house. It’s a good thing Phil had decided to show up, or I’d have been caught for sure. No impulse control. That’s me all over.
At long last, we saw the last of the lantern light and heard Gladys head back up the
stairs, thank God. It was only then that Phil removed his arm. Before I could move, he said, “Walk very slowly and quietly. For God’s sake, don’t run or anything. With luck, nobody will see us. Let’s cut across back yards until we get to Second.”
We did better than that. We made our way to the alley behind the Calhouns’ place and walked down the very middle of it to Second Street, Phil leading the way and only flicking on his flashlight every now and then so we could see obstacles in our way. Smart guy, Phil. I don’t know why he puts up with me.
Chapter Sixteen
Naturally, as soon as he figured we were safe, Phil began lecturing me. I almost didn’t mind.
“Curse it, Annabelle Blue, you don’t give u
p, do you?”
“Not when my family’s in trouble.” I tried to sound noble, but by that time I was suffering from the effects of too much excitement and fright and felt like folding up like a fan and crying. I wouldn’t do that in front of Phil, though. I had my pride, after all. Tonight my gratitude overwhelmed my pride long enough for me to say, “I was scared to death. Thank you so much for coming to my rescue.”
“Hell,” he muttered.
As I believe I’ve said before, Phil wasn’t much of a one for swearing, but I’d driven him to do a lot of it recently. I was ashamed of myself, but I was also happy to have escaped unscathed—and with something to show for my night of terror.
“Do you want to go through that folder with me?” I asked timidly.
“No, I don’t want to go through that folder with you,” he said, thrusting said folder at me. “For God’s sake, Annabelle, I don’t want anything to do with your crazy antics. But I couldn’t very well let you go to the Calhoun place all by yourself. God knows what trouble you’d have got into on your own. I’m only glad we didn’t get caught.”
“Me, too. But, Phil, you found something the police missed!” I thought that was pretty exciting.
Phil plainly didn’t. “Damn it, they’re probably old racing forms or something Calhoun didn’t want the family to know about.”
“What’s a racing form?” I asked, never having encountered the term before.
