Omit Flowers

by Stuart Palmer

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Uncle Alger beamed. “Two and two always make four—every time.”

  “Except in Dr Townsend’s well-known plan,” I reminded him. Uncle Alger said that was entirely different.

  “The main thing for us to do,” Aunt Evelyn said, “is to get out of this house just as soon as we decently can. Little Mildred, being the most emotional of us all, has had one or two unpleasant experiences. Even I—I confess that this house gives me the creeps. As soon as that man from the bank gets here, I intend to…”

  “Take the money and run,” Dorothy finished for her. “I guess that goes for all of us.”

  “Me, I like it here,” Ely Waldron pronounced heavily. “Say, it must be seventy outside in the sun. Warm as toast…”

  Warmer than Pia’s toast, I thought. Then Mildred entered the room, looking her usual self except for the fact that her curls were a little out of line, her lips a little thinner than usual. Mabel, looking worried, was close behind.

  “I tried to get her to stay in bed,” Mabel was saying. “But the bromide wore off and she insisted on getting up and coming down.”

  Mildred slipped into her seat. “Don’t pay any attention to me,” she begged. “I didn’t see anything last night, really I didn’t. I know that now. But such a lot of things have happened, and it’s all been so strange…”

  She smiled faintly, turning her head to look along the breakfast table. Her eyes stared through me as if I had been a man of cellophane, then came to Todd’s empty chair. For a moment she looked woebegone, lost and frightened. Then much to my surprise little Mildred turned to and made a most excellent breakfast.

  The morning was a busy one for me. First came an electrician, a businesslike and cheery young man who took out his tools and set about tracing the trouble in the electrical wiring.

  He seemed to have a certain amount of scorn for the penny with which Aunt Evelyn had so cleverly restored the lights. “A fuse is for a purpose,” he told me. “When it blows, that’s a sign there’s too much of a load on the lighting system somewhere. Putting a copper cent into the fuse box is like taking aspirin for a splinter in your thumb.”

  He disappeared into the cellar, where he remained for a long time. Finally he emerged, almost as covered with cobwebs as Uncle Joel had been. “You got a nice breeding ground for black widows down there,” he informed me cheerily.

  It developed that the wiring was lacking insulation in several spots. “But the garage was hooked up on the same circuit with the house,” he said. “I got a notion that maybe the fire started with a short circuit somewhere in that building. When you turned the current back on night before last, things got too hot and—phooie!”

  A flood of relief passed through me. “You’re sure?” I demanded. “I mean—you can prove that the fire was caused by an accidental short circuit under the garage?”

  He stopped putting away his tools, laughed shortly. “Prove it? Say, there’s nothing left to prove with, now that the garage is gone.” And took his departure.

  Which left us where we were, except of course that now the lights worked again. Still there was no word from the sheriff, although I kept within reach of the telephone, expecting something. Finally I grew impatient and called his office. For a long time there was no answer, but finally a gruff voice said “H’lo.”

  I asked for Sheriff Bates.

  “He ain’t in.”

  I told the man my name, asked where I could reach the sheriff. “Oh,” said the deputy, his voice pregnant with meaning, “I guess the sheriff will be up to see you pretty soon. When he gets ready. G’bye.”

  Todd’s absence left things completely up to me, but I was at a standstill. We were all at loose ends—waiting for something. In the drawing room Aunt Evelyn was perched high on the bench of the great pipe organ, idly pounding out some popular tune or other. But somehow everything she played, even the lightest of jazz, seemed to come out the “Dead March” from Saul.

  Mabel, with a hearty good will, was writing a twelve-page letter. Her head was in the clouds as she wrote. When I passed behind her on my way out of the drawing room I could not keep my eyes from the large childish script on the pale lavender paper, and one phrase caught—“very soon, beloved Snookiest!”

  I felt no shame at peeking, only a deep pity that springtime had come so tardily to Cousin Mabel. It is different, usually, for a man—but I have never known a woman who was not the better for love, nor the worse without it.

  There would be good news for someone in that letter—some Walter or John or Harry. Certainly this was one mystery where there was no use trying to get at the truth through the old adage of Cui bono? Any one of us had much to gain, the very best motive in the world. Motive and opportunity made us all suspects together.

  And then Dorothy came down the stairs, and upset an apple cart or two.

  She had a tattered copy of the New Yorker under her arm, but my blonde cousin’s mind was not upon the cheery japeries of Arno, Steig, or Thurber.

  “Look!” she insisted, with a quick glance around to make sure that we were alone.

  I looked. “But this is hardly the time…” I began. Ordinarily I will appreciate a spot of humor with anyone, but that morning…

  “Don’t be silly!” Dorothy said. “Read that!”

  I began reading an article, which the editor had quaintly entitled “A Profile of Thomas Patrick Brophy.” Mr Brophy seemed to have given an interview to a reporter about his work as chief fire marshal of New York City.

  “Third page,” Dorothy said. I looked, and saw a paragraph—“He does not have to be in the building when the fire breaks out. He can light a candle and fix it so that he will be blocks away by the time it burns down and ignites a couple of oiled rags. He can use a piece of Chinese punk and a little gunpowder, and be in Philadelphia when the blaze starts. Or, having wired the doorbell of the place so that it will start the fire, he can call up Western Union and get a boy to go there and ring it.”

  “Firebugs!” Dorothy said meaningly. “An article all about ’em. How they work, and how some of ’em get caught.”

  I took stock of that a little doubtfully.

  “Go on, shake your head,” Dorothy said testily. “Maybe this will mean more to you if I explain that it came out of the Waldrons’ room!”

  “You stole it?” I asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I found Oviedo doing a little sketchy cleaning up on the upper floor. He was carrying this out of that room in the wastebasket, and I wanted something to read. I found it!” she finished grimly. “Maybe I’ve found a whole lot…”

  “It just struck me,” continued Cousin Dorothy, “that Ely Waldron, being a chemist—isn’t a druggist a chemist?—might be able to improve upon the somewhat primitive methods described here. He might be able to leave some chemicals in the back of his car which, some hours after it was put into the garage, would go off and set a fire!”

  “Phosphorus might do it,” I thought aloud. Vainly I tried to remember more of my college chemistry, but Dorothy was one for action.

  “Where are the Waldrons now?” she demanded. I didn’t know, but a little scouting around brought forth the information that they had gone out for a walk in the sunshine, at Ely’s insistence. “They were having some sort of an argument, too,” Eustace said.

  We let him go back to his card game with his father and Mildred—a noisy game the object of which seemed to be to take all the hearts and the queen of spades, or else not.

  As we left them I told Dorothy that I was glad to see Mildred forgetting her unpleasant adventure of last night so soon. “She hasn’t forgotten,” Dorothy told me. “She won’t forget it, whatever it was, until this whole thing is cleared up. Which is one reason we’re searching the Waldrons’ room.”

  “Searching? But what are we looking for?” I protested.

  Dorothy looked at me. “I don’t know, Alan. Chemicals, maybe. Or a gun. Remember the ladder marks outside the garage? If someone had go
ne up that ladder and shot Uncle Joel through the window, that would explain why he made no effort to escape the fire.”

  I followed her, not too willingly. All this was too fantastic, and at the same time too apt. Mysteries weren’t solved by stumbling on a magazine article.

  Anyway, we entered the room of Cousin Ely and his wife—Dorothy’s blood-cousins. Oviedo had made the double bed, straightened the room. “If there were anything incriminating, do you suppose they’d leave it here for anybody to find?” I demanded. Dorothy was intent upon a locked suitcase, trying to burgle it. She found a hairpin on the bureau, but contrary to everything I had always supposed, the lock stayed locked.

  “There’s got to be something in here!” Dorothy insisted. “Lend me your knife, will you?”

  “My knife?” I hadn’t carried a pocket knife since my bullhead-fishing and kite-flying days.

  I felt vaguely uncomfortable in the room, being unused to second-story work. Besides, the thought suddenly struck me that at the time the Waldrons’ car had been put into the garage no one, except Uncle Joel himself, knew that he intended to move out of his room into the servants’ quarters over the garage! Therefore why should the couple, provided Dorothy was right in her dark surmise, have loaded any incendiary chemicals into their own car?

  I brought up the point, which staggered her a bit. “Never mind,” she told me. “If we’re wrong, we can eliminate our dear cousins from the midwest. Me, I’m going to get into this bag.”

  She took fingernail scissors from the bureau, slashed at the leather of the suitcase. Making an opening, she plunged in her hand. One at a time, she brought out a miscellaneous assortment of articles which seemed to me hardly useful in arson or murder.

  There was a rubber device intended, Dorothy said, to be worn under the chin at night by a lady anxious to preserve her youth. There was a large and exceedingly complex machine for sharpening safety-razor blades. There was a bottle of violet ink which had leaked badly around the cork, staining Dorothy’s hand in a very telltale fashion. Finally, there was a strange circular belt of metal with a movable nickel egg affixed. The band had lost its spring and was cracked in one place.

  “Good lord, it’s a busted truss!” Dorothy said, snickering a little. I said that it seemed extremely doubtful that Uncle Joel had been killed by, for, or because of a broken truss.

  “Well,” Dorothy admitted, “we’ve drawn a blank. I’d like to go through the bureau drawers if we could risk the time.” She went to the window, peered out. “I don’t see Ely and Fay anywhere.”

  She turned suddenly to me. “Alan, I don’t even see the garage!”

  “Well?” I said, edging toward the door. “What of it?”

  She smiled, a slow, beatific smile. “Have you forgotten that Ely Waldron was supposedly the first one to notice the fire? My dear cousin, Ely must have had wonderful eyes to see it around a corner—for these windows look to the sea!”

  She was right, but before I could congratulate her there came the sound of voices in the hall, voices terribly near and coming nearer. It was Ely and Fay!

  Dorothy stood paralyzed, but for once I got into action. I half-carried her, half-dragged her, to the closet. I drew the door shut upon us just as I heard the hall door open.

  “A narrow squeak, my love,” said Dorothy, in a low whisper.

  I told her that we weren’t out yet. Slowly we edged toward the rear of the closet, trying not to stumble over the scattered shoes. Rough woolen clothing, smelling very musty, enclosed us.

  For some reason or other Dorothy’s arms were around me, and I found time to regret that she always chose such inopportune places for her little displays of affection. But I held her, so that her hair tickled my face.

  We could hear the door slam outside, and Ely’s voice, faintly complaining.

  “I don’t know as you’re doing the right thing,” he was saying.

  “Of course I’m doing the right thing!” Fay flung back at him. “Anyway, it’s too late to stop now.”

  He mumbled something that I could not catch.

  “If it’s got to be done it’s got to be done!” said Fay, in a voice that belonged to Lady Macbeth’s heavier moments. “This is no time to be sentimental, I tell you. I’ve been planning this for years—you know that!”

  Yes, Ely said sadly, he knew that.

  “He won’t feel a bit of pain.” Fay’s voice came, softening a little. “And if you ask me, it’s better to risk everything on one chance…”

  Dorothy clung to me a little tighter. Outside in the room I could hear the bed creak, and the clump of something on the floor. “I’m going to change my shoes, my feet are sopping,” Fay said.

  “T-try to look like an old suit of clothes,” Dorothy breathed in my ear. “We’re in a spot, Alan.”

  I heard Fay Waldron rise, and the bed creaked again. I heard her take a step, another…

  Then there came the pounding of a fist on the hall door. Even to where Dorothy and I crouched, like two babes in the wood under a covering of old overcoats, we could hear Eustace’s voice, excitedly crying “Downstairs, everybody! The man is here!”

  “What man?” demanded Fay Waldron’s voice.

  “The man from the trust company!” sang out Eustace, and was gone.

  There were hurried sounds in the room, and then the door opened and closed with a slam. All was silence. I opened the closet door a crack, then wider. The room was empty. Fay’s muddy shoes were still beside the bed, and a cigar of Ely’s was burning merrily into the varnish of a taboret.

  Dorothy and I crept out, crossed the room. The hall was empty, and we got outside the room and took our first good deep breath in ten minutes.

  “Santa Claus is downstairs giving out presents,” Dorothy said. “But first, Cousin Alan, I’d like to kiss you.”

  I know I turned bright red, and I must have said “Why?” very ungallantly. Dorothy stood close to me, raising her lips, and I must admit that at that moment she was far prettier than Mildred ever had been. Excitement, the thrill of potential danger, and the swift union of comradeship had touched her as light touches a diamond.

  “For the life of me I don’t know why,” she said, and kissed me with a certain amount of co-operation. Then we hurried downstairs, thick as thieves and twice as guilty.

  I knew very well the course that the next few minutes would take. The relatives would gather in the library—the library is obviously the place for the reading of the will and all such formalities. Then the man from the trust company would cough, express his sorrow at the sudden demise of an old and valued client, and then proceed to read the terms of Joel Cameron’s will. In this case, far more important than the will which would dispose of my uncle’s rather small personal property would be the exact terms of the trust established by Aunt Hester before she died.

  There might be, I supposed, a considerable delay in admitting the will to probate and all the rest of it, but the trust was simpler. On Uncle Joel’s death the income was to be divided equally between the heirs. After all, there was no reason why the golden flood should be withheld longer than it would take us to sign the usual papers that trust companies want signed.

  I knew all this beforehand, as I say. And yet, as the dapper young man who introduced himself as Mr Fortesque Cohen of the Golden Gate Trust shook my hand I began to wonder. It was like the hunch I had on driving toward Prospice a day and a half before—I knew that something was up.

  “There’s going to be a joker in the will somewhere!” I whispered to Dorothy.

  Uncle Alger sh-sh-shd me. All eyes were on Mr Cohen, who was not at all my idea of the old family solicitor. He looked like an automobile salesman, and had neither sideburns nor a discreet cough. He eyed us, however, with a definite amount of suspicion.

  “Well, get on with it, young man!” said Aunt Evelyn crisply. “Let’s get this business over with as quickly as possible.”

  “Yes,” said Mr Cohen, in a faint Harvard accent. “I came down by train this
morning, being unable to get away yesterday owing to holiday commitments…”

  “Yes, yes!” cut in Fay Waldron. “When do we—I mean, when does my husband get his share of the trust fund?”

  I was watching Mildred, whose face looked drawn and strained as she waited for the words of the banker.

  “I’m sorry to say,” Mr Fortesque Cohen said politely, “that I cannot tell you.”

  “What!” There was a concert of amazement from the family.

  He nodded. “My visit to you seems a bit premature as regards settling the estate of Mr Joel Cameron,” he said. “As a matter of course, I called on the coroner for his report as soon as I arrived. As a matter of routine, you see. The sheriff was there at the mortuary, and—well—”

  Mr Cohen stared at his brief case sorrowfully. “I’m sure that I am not betraying a confidence when I tell you that Mr Joel Cameron is not dead. At least”—he corrected himself quickly—“not legally dead.”

  The family just sat there, numb.

  “The coroner is not willing to sign the death certificate,” went on the banker. “He seems exceedingly doubtful that Joel Cameron was ever in the burning garage. It is true that some fragments of bone and other remains were found which, under the microscope, prove to be of an animal nature. But as for proof that a human body was destroyed in the fire, and particularly the body of the said Joel Cameron…”

  “Proof?” yelped Uncle Alger angrily. “If Joel didn’t burn up then where is he?”

  Mr Cohen said he couldn’t be expected to answer that. And without legal proof of death, no matter how sure everyone might be as to Uncle Joel’s passing, there could be no question of touching the trust fund or probating the will.

  Aunt Evelyn looked bewildered. “But I distinctly heard the sheriff say that they’d found Joel,” she said. “They took him away in newspaper packages.”

  The man whose well-manicured fingers kept closed the floodgates of wealth for all of us looked sympathetic. “There seems to be some sort of a disagreement between the sheriff and the coroner,” he said. “But in a case of this kind it’s the coroner who has the last word.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m sorry, because I would be delighted to welcome eight new depositors to the Golden Gate family.”