“Yeah, and tip ’em off so they’re prepared.”
“Listen,” Todd continued. “Just listen. You, too, Alan—you’re part of it.” And we listened.
The sheriff interrupted once to scoff at the idea of a lie detector. “Why, that thing’s a joke!”
“Not to people with something to hide,” Todd reminded him. “Besides, you’re way ahead of me.”
It speaks well for Todd Cameron’s powers of persuasion that fifteen minutes later I went rolling up toward Prospice in a hired taxicab, alone, my head buzzing with instructions.
“I’ll give you half an hour to get set,” he warned me. “And for the love of heaven keep your eyes and ears open. If this works we’ll have the murderer behind bars by sunset!”
It was Dorothy who met me as soon as I reached Prospice, a pale and faintly worried Dorothy. Her face was a question mark.
“I don’t know a thing,” I lied to her, “and I won’t know until Todd calls. He’s with the sheriff and the coroner now.”
I eluded her and went back toward the kitchen, ignoring the fact that Cousin Dorothy seemed anxious to have the pleasure of my company. I could hear Oviedo and his wife chattering away in bastard Spanish just inside the kitchen door. But my interest was in the old-fashioned wall telephone which was fastened in the rear hall between kitchen and dining room.
Part of my work was already done for me, in that there was a pencil attached to the telephone by means of a string. I couldn’t see just how that pencil was so important, but it was part of the plan. All that was left for me to do was to find a place of concealment. As Todd had put it—“Find a hole, crawl in, and pull it in after you.”
I finally discovered a niche set in the wall, originally designed for an ironing board or perhaps as a broom closet. It was but the work of a few moments to clear away enough of the contents so that I could stand upright, staring through a crack in the door at the telephone not fifteen feet away. And there I stood, while the clock ticked away half an hour, the earth whirled around the sun, and the solar system wheeled its everlasting course toward Sirius.
Then there came a shrilly, insistent ring at the telephone. In spite of the fact that I was a party to the plot and knew very well why it was ringing, I had a quick, involuntary desire to answer it. But Oviedo, in a clean white jacket, came hurriedly out of the kitchen.
“Sí, sí señor,” he said quickly. “Muy pronto!”
And he hurried down the hall past me toward the living quarters. A moment later he was back, with Aunt Evelyn in tow. “Hello?” she inquired eagerly as she picked up the receiver.
“What?” she cried. There was a pause, and then “Oh!” Aunt Evelyn’s voice was queer and strained.
Her fingers were twisting the pencil on its string. Finally she hung up the instrument with a decided click. She stalked past me with her lips pursed and the expression on her face of one who is possessed of a secret he would rather die than tell.
She did not seem to be in very much of a hurry. I would have liked to follow her and see what she intended to do, but I had to remain where I was.
The telephone, after the briefest of intervals, rang again. Again Oviedo answered, obviously a little mystified. This time the call was for Uncle Alger.
That gentleman appeared to receive his telephone message with admirable aplomb. If Uncle Alger felt any shock or surprise, much less apprehension, it was not evident to me from my vantage spot. “That’s right nice of you, Todd,” I heard him say. “Yes, I’ll tell Eustace. But I don’t see…”
He ambled away. Then came a call for Cousin Mabel, who came hurrying breathlessly, with her sewing clutched to her flat bosom. She listened, made vague remarks, and when all was over went back down the hall with her face absolutely radiant, murmuring “Thank God!”
Ely Waldron came to the telephone. “Oh, hello, Todd,” he said hurriedly. “Say, you better come on home before it starts to rain. Big black clouds piling up in the southwest…”
Finally he was quiet. “You don’t say!” Then—“It was swell of you to tip me off. No, I won’t whisper it to a soul.”
He hurried away, shouting “Fay!” in an eager voice. That was according to schedule—one reason Todd had decided not to bother trying his scheme on both the Waldrons.
Next came Dorothy. A bit thin, it seemed to me, playing on her. But Todd and the sheriff had agreed that the test would be worth nothing if it were not tried on everybody.
“Well!” Dorothy spoke into the phone, her voice excited. “What is all this mystery, anyway? Alan comes tearing home looking like the cat that ate the canary, and now you go mysterious on me, too.”
Her voice died away. “Well, that’s no surprise to me!” she told the faraway Todd. “I knew it all the time.”
There was another pause. “Oh no!” Dorothy said. “Don’t tell me we have to hang garlic at the windows, and go around driving stakes into the bodies of the Un-dead! Not a silver bullet, Todd, say it wasn’t a silver bullet!”
She hung up the telephone and stood there for a moment, evidently puzzled. Then she turned and came slowly down the hall. Dorothy was frowning very intently.
She went past me, stopped suddenly. Then she turned and grabbed the door of the closet, pulling it open and staring me full in the face.
“So that’s what you’re up to!” she cried accusingly. “Next time you go into ambush, Alan Cameron, don’t smoke a pipe!”
I suddenly realized that, without any conscious thought on my part, my hands had gone groping in my pockets and had found pipe, tobacco and matches. I had betrayed myself. Dorothy seemed displeased.
“What is this, a trick?” she demanded. When I did not answer she went on bitterly: “So this is the end of the musketeers! So I don’t belong any more!”
For some reason Dorothy appeared to feel a little badly about that. I was uncomfortable, both because I recognized the reason and because I resented the ease with which she had seen through our little plot.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” she went on. “If you’ll tell Todd to call up again, I’ll take pains to throw hysterics and confess when he tells me that Uncle Joel was murdered with a silver bullet.”
I tried to explain, but Dorothy was exercising a woman’s right to be unreasonable. “Oh, so you had to test everybody or it wouldn’t be a fair test?” she said. “I suppose Todd called darling little sister, too?”
I hadn’t thought of that.
Just then the telephone bell rang again. Oviedo, who—had not resigned himself to answering it as often as all this, vented explosive Spanish curses in the kitchen, and I heard his approaching tread.
“Quick!” I gasped, and jerked Dorothy through into the closet, swinging the door so that as before only a tiny crack was left. The closet was small, and Dorothy and I were crowded together in what I found to be a not unpleasant fashion.
“This is getting to be a habit,” Dorothy said. But her whispered voice was friendly again.
We heard Oviedo answer the phone and go up the hall. He came back a moment later, followed by Mildred. The kitchen door closed.
I felt Dorothy go tense beside me, and put my hand firmly on her shoulder. “After all,” I whispered, “everyone else has passed the test, and Mildred has nothing to worry about.”
“Hello,” came Mildred’s breathless, frightened little voice. Then, more strongly, “Why, hello, Todd darling!”
“This is rotten snooping,” Dorothy whispered indignantly in my ear. “I’m going!”
“You’re staying,” I told her. Suddenly my arm was around her, and she relaxed.
“I guess I’m staying,” she admitted. “What can one poor weak girl do?”
“But suppose somebody is listening?” came Mildred’s voice. Then—“Oh!” and “Ah!” She was silent for a long time, and then we heard her say “Oh Todd!”
Her voice was thinner now, vibrating like a strained length of wire. “Oh Todd—oh God!” she blurted out, and again “Oh God, Todd!” like an insan
e little rhyme.
Mildred’s voice was loud enough so that we could have heard with the closet door tight shut. “No!” she cried. “I tell you it isn’t true! It couldn’t be!”
There was another pause, and then her voice—“Coming here? With what? A lie detector?” She was half-crying now. “Oh, I’ve read of that awful thing. I couldn’t face it, Todd. Really I couldn’t—don’t let him come—don’t let him!”
She began to laugh, hollow and hellish laughter. Then without a good bye she dropped the receiver and ran back up the hall to the front of the house. Dorothy and I came out of the closet.
“What have you done?” Dorothy said softly, accusingly. “What sort of stupid trap is this?” She stared at me, wide-eyed. Then she turned.
We were both looking at the pencil which had hung beside the telephone. Now it was broken to bits, scattered on the floor. I thought of Mildred’s soft, beautifully kept fingers, those utterly useless, overmanicured fingers, tightening and tightening on that stout bit of wood-covered graphite until it snapped.
I suddenly realized that Todd and I had been playing, not with cards but with human souls. Marked souls, maybe, with the deuces wild and the devil apt at any moment, as in the story, to lead the green ace of Hippogriffs.
Dorothy started, as if to hurry after her sister, but something held her. She turned, came back to me.
She grasped my shoulders with both hands, fingers as hard as steel. “This doesn’t mean what you think!” she said. “It doesn’t! Don’t be too clever, you and Todd. You mustn’t think that just because she fell into your trap, just because she was frightened into showing…”
She broke off. I saw that although her face was hard with intent anger, tears were running down Dorothy’s cheeks. They were traitor tears, tears which betrayed her into my hands—and which tied my hands forever.
“Alan!” she cried brokenly. “It doesn’t mean that Mildred is guilty of anything!” In a smaller voice—“Does it?”
I held her close, without answering. “Does it?” she repeated.
Still I could not answer.
“She wants a thousand dollars so terribly!” Dorothy went on, half-whispering. “She’s said such foolish, extravagant things about money. You see, Alan, my little sister dreams about going into the movies and being the world’s sweetheart. They told her at the studios, when she tried last year, that her little turned-up nose wouldn’t photograph. And she’s talked about a beauty operation ever since—they cost a lot of money. But still she couldn’t…”
“Go ask her,” I suggested.
She shook her head. “I suppose part of this scheme of Todd’s and yours is that the guilty person will try to make his escape now?”
I nodded. “There’re only two roads out of Prospice. The sheriff is waiting at the entrance from the coast highway, and Todd is supposed to be posted at the short cut along the barranca. They’re both armed and waiting, Dorothy.”
“I’m going to warn her, then,” Dorothy said. “I can’t believe that Mildred has done anything wrong, but if she has I’m not going to have her fly into a trap!”
She hurried up the stairs, I after her. But surprisingly enough Mildred was not locked in her room. She didn’t seem to be anywhere.
We came downstairs again. The house seemed strangely deserted, with the others evidently all thinking things over in their rooms. “If she’s gone she’s gone,” Dorothy said.
We looked in the drawing room, in the little sitting room under the stair with its grim relic of a Christmas tree still standing. We looked in the library….
There was no sign of Mildred. Dorothy threw herself down on the divan in front of the chill fireplace. I must confess that I found her infinitely more appealing now, as she lay there with her blonde hair disarranged, her surface hardness melted.
“I know it’s hard to wait,” I said. “But there’s nothing else we can do.”
Somehow she got to crying quietly on my shoulder, a very flattering and disconcerting thing to happen to a confirmed bachelor. “Probably there’s nothing to this,” I told her, “and if there is we’ll stand by her, you and I.”
“You and I,” Dorothy repeated softly. “It’s nice not to—to be alone.”
“Alone? You’ll never be alone unless you want to be,” I told her. “You can depend on me, because—because—”
She looked up at me, surprised. “You love me, don’t you, Alan?”
I nodded.
“That’s why you asked me if I liked dogs—because you have one!”
I nodded again.
She caught my hand in both of hers, pressed it tightly. Then she leaned back against my shoulder. For a long time we sat there without speaking. Then by her breathing I knew that she was asleep.
It was the best thing for her worn nerves and body that could have happened. Softly and tenderly I pushed a pillow beneath her head, tucked her feet up on the edge of the divan. Already it was twilight outside, but I drew the shades. In the dusk she looked like an amazingly young and innocent child, helpless and appealing.
I tiptoed out of the room.
I could hear Oviedo rattling plates in the dining room, a sign that dinner, like death and taxes, was with us again. But the family still remained upstairs. The bombshell dropped in their laps had had that effect, at least.
Moved by a foreboding that I could not analyze, I wandered through the lower rooms for a few minutes and then, unable to stand any longer the close atmosphere of that terrible house, I opened the front door.
Mist was swirling up from the sea, disproving Ely’s theories about rain. It was a chill mist, a mist that struck through my stout tweed suit and made my very bones ache.
I stepped outside and looked down the road toward the highway and the sea. Were the sheriff and Todd still waiting there, waiting for the quarry to come flying into their trap? Or had it come?
As I watched I saw lights—a pair of auto headlights—slowly coming up from the eucalyptus grove. I stood in the gathering darkness and the fog, waiting.
Somehow I dreaded the approach of those head lights. I had an impulse, like poor Canute, to raise my hand and bid them fall back. But it would have been as useless as that poor Dane’s command to the sea. They came on—and on—
The lights melted in the mist and then reappeared, brighter than ever. The car roared up the driveway and stopped. It was the neat black roadster of Sheriff Bates.
He was alone. “Then she didn’t come?” I hailed him breathlessly. “Didn’t she try to get past you?”
“Who?” retorted the sheriff. He looked cold and damp and miserable. “Nobody tried to get past; I might of known that nobody would. But who’re you talking about?”
I told him. “Mildred has disappeared,” I said. “We can’t find her, and I thought that perhaps she’d taken the old sedan and tried to…”
The sheriff’s hand was on my arm. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“Listen!” he commanded.
I didn’t hear anything. Then suddenly as we listened a scream rang out through the sticky darkness. It was not very loud, not very high, but there was concentrated, absolute terror in the sound—terror that took hold of something deep inside the listener, tore and wrenched at him.
A shadow in the air—the crash of a falling body behind us—and then silence.
We turned and ran up the steps, pushed through the thicket of untended and blossomless rosebushes which fronted Prospice. Then we stopped.
It was Mildred, dead among the thorns.
IX
My locks are shorn for sorrow
Of love which may not be;
TOMORROW AND TOMORROW
ARE PLOTTING cruelty….
—ELINOR WYLIE
THE NEXT HALF HOUR was a muddled nightmare. We carried Mildred gently inside and sent for a doctor, although it was obviously of no use. Still, we could not leave her out there in the fog and the dark although she would never again feel chill or see s
hadow.
Mildred was dead.
Somehow the almost-cheery, Gilbert-and-Sullivanish atmosphere went out of the case right then and there. Up until that moment it had been more or less of a moot point whether anyone had died at all, and if so whether it had been the uncle whom most of us were so anxious to mourn.
But nobody wanted Mildred dead. She was young, with, as we say, everything to live for. She was beautiful, and there is something essentially wrong in the ending of a beautiful thing.
As Dr Eckersall—who happened to be the foremost local practitioner as well as coroner—was bending over the pitifully crumpled body of the girl, Sheriff Bates pushed through the throng of gaping, exclaiming relatives. I had been trying to talk to Dorothy, trying to ease the shock to her. But the tall blonde sister did not seem to hear my voice. I left her, obeying the sheriff’s beckoning hand, and followed him up the stairs two steps at a time.
“Which was her room?” he demanded. I showed him the door of the bedroom which had belonged to the two sisters. “We’ll probably have to smash it down,” the sheriff warned me. But the door was unlocked, even a trifle ajar.
I have never seen a room as empty—spiritually empty—as that bedroom. Except for some cigarettes barely lighted and crumpled into the ash tray on the bureau, and for a bright scarf thrown across one pillow, the room was neat as a new pin.
But Sheriff Bates wasn’t interested in the room. He was looking toward the window in the corner, the open, unscreened window whose curtains were blowing idly in the fog-laden breeze. I joined him there, looked out and straight down at the smashed rosebushes which fronted Prospice.
“Not so far,” said the sheriff judicially. “But far enough, I guess. She must have struck on her head.”
I said the usual, ineffectual things indicative of shock and horror. The sheriff looked at me very peculiarly.
“Best way out, wasn’t it?”
When I stared at him blankly, he repeated—“Best way out for the girl, I’d say. Under the circumstances…”
And then Todd Cameron, his face as hard and gray and expressionless as granite, came into the room.
Omit Flowers Page 12
