Omit Flowers

by Stuart Palmer

  There was no answer. Suddenly I realized that I could hear no sound of breathing. I rushed over to his bed, shook him by the shoulder. To my amazement I discovered that this was not Todd Cameron at all, but simply an overcoat rolled up between the sheets, and a cap laid on the pillow to simulate Todd’s dark hair!

  By the luminous dial of my wrist watch I saw that the hour was 3:25. But then, of course, Todd had spoken of getting up early.

  X

  NIGHT, A BLACK HOUND FOLLOWS the white fawn day,

  Swifter than dreams the white flown feet of sleep;

  Will ye pray back the night with any prayers?

  —ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

  THE DISCOVERY THAT TODD was prowling around the house somewhere set me to wondering. Common sense told me to climb back into bed. But my bump of curiosity led me forward. After all, the presence of the dummy in Todd’s bed indicated that he had not wanted me to know that he was gone, or where. Somehow I felt that because he wanted secrecy it was my duty to tag along.

  Besides, Todd had been a good deal of a puzzle to me these last few hours. Nothing I could quite lay my hands on, of course.

  I went over to the bureau and found that he had taken my flash lamp, which cinched the thing as far as I was concerned. I dressed hastily and sketchily in the dark, and went out into the deserted hall. For some reason or other, perhaps as a result of the unaccustomed dose of brandy, I felt tremendously brave. After all, I did not intend to be frightened as Mildred was, of a nightmare. Nor, for that matter, to pay attention to this talk of silver bullets and werewolves and so forth.

  The house was black as pitch and silent as a tomb. There was not a light under a single door, and not a whisper sounding from one room. I felt like someone suspended far beneath the ocean surface, à la bathysphere, waiting in utter darkness for some phosphorescent monstrosity to come into view.

  Moving against that darkness was like moving in a solid element. I went slowly down the hall, my eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the darkness as I progressed. Unfortunately I felt my great surge of bravery steadily ebbing. I would have liked to whistle a valiant tune, but thought it inadvisable for various reasons. After all, there was nothing roaming the halls, but if there should be…

  Oddly enough, if I had remembered to pull up my socks that night the whole course of this history would quite certainly have been altered. But they hung loosely around my ankles in what we used to refer to as the collegiate style, and as I came to the head of the stairs I felt a sudden chilly breeze.

  That was odd. I realized that it was more than odd, because the draft came not from the corridor which I had just left, nor from the unused and unfinished east hall. I stared up the flight of steps leading to the dome and to the unfinished billiard room which had been the crowning glory of my uncle’s architectural triumph. This was a part of Prospice that had died a-borning, so to speak—the walls still of unfinished plaster, without light fixtures.

  But the vagrant, chilly little breeze drifted down, steadily and unmistakably, from that unused and unfinished billiard room in the dome!

  I guessed at once that for some reason or other Todd Cameron, exploring in this forlorn region, had opened a window. I started up the stair, cautiously edging along so as to make as little noise as possible. I could feel the slithery touch of cobwebs along the stair railing…

  Then I came to the door at the head of the second flight of stairs, the door to the ridiculously useless billiard room which Uncle Joel had thought necessary to the perfect home, along with the pipe organ that nobody could play!

  The door was closed. That was odd, because there was no crack along lintel or sill wide enough to let the breeze through. But I turned the knob, and the door opened. Then the breeze was cool on my face.

  Inside I could see nothing but the gray oblong of two casement windows. I stepped through the door, closing it carefully behind me. For a moment I imagined that someone was in that room, waiting…

  “Todd!” I whispered. But there was no answer.

  I found a single match in my pocket, and struck it on the wall. To my somewhat overwrought imagination, the room seemed to be furnished with two giant-sized coffins mounted upon heavy catafalques. They had the air of patient waiting….

  Of course they were only the two billiard tables under their heavy covers. But I had no eyes for them. Across the room I saw that one of the windows was open, and on the floor beneath it was a crumpled bit of white cloth, cloth which showed, even by the pale light of the match, splotches of crimson!

  The match sputtered and went out. Then the darkness surged back, blacker than ever. But I remembered the way to that open window, and stepping between the tables I soon felt the damp fog in my face.

  Of course I must have been extraordinarily deaf and blind to everything else, but my attention was directed entirely on that bit of stained cloth. I groped for it on the floor, found it, and my fingers felt something faintly sticky.

  I could not find another match. Leaning out of the open window I tried to ascertain the character of the thing I had found. There was a moon somewhere above the silvery fog, and a faint light shone—enough light to tell me that this was a woman’s handkerchief—a lace-trimmed handkerchief.

  And then I noticed that, oddly enough, a ladder rose slanting up from the smashed rose garden to the sill of the window where I stood!

  Instantly I was on my toes, awake, alive! A hundred possibilities rushed through my mind. I remembered Todd’s subterfuge of the dummy in the bed, remembered other things. Had he, I wondered for a moment, chosen this manner of eloping with Dorothy?

  Of course that was ridiculous. Prospice was locked, front and back, with heavy locks and chains. But anyone on the inside could open those and go forth into the night whenever he wished. Todd could have gone away with no more red tape than simply to open the door and climb into his low-bellied blue Auburn.

  Yet someone, I knew, had chosen this strange means of leaving the house. It made no sense.

  I stood there like a fool, blinking at the luminous moonlight. I was trying to guess the meaning of the ladder. And all the time there must have been little, furtive noises behind me, noises that had no meaning.

  Then the floor creaked sharply just behind me. “Todd—is it you?” I cried.

  There was no answer. The darkness, solid as jet, billowed around me. It was alien, forbidding.

  It was a strange, rubbery, rasping darkness, that scraped my face and entangled my arms…. It was a curtain of darkness….

  The dark was studded with constellations—Orion, Ursa Major, the whole Milky Way with additions and elaborations—it all began to whirl, faster and faster and faster…

  I was in the center of a Fourth-of-July pinwheel.

  Finally I wakened, my head one great solid ache. Dorothy Ely crouched beside me, shooting a small flashlight into my face.

  “Oh, aren’t you dead?” she asked quaveringly.

  I lay there without speaking, as the dreams scattered and disappeared like reflections in a just-muddied pool. I was trying desperately to remember….

  There seemed to be a lump on the back of my head, and as I tried to stand I felt more than a little dizzy. “Who socked you?” Dorothy demanded.

  I didn’t know. The dreams—what dreams!—were forever gone, as if they had never been. Yet all the same I knew that while I lay unconscious on the floor I had dreamed a solution to this entire mystery, a solution which fitted every fact and answered every question. But it was gone upon awakening, like the wonderful dreams one has of learning to fly and to float downstairs touching only the tips of his heels to the steps.

  I started to tell Dorothy about it, and then thought better. With a little help from her I rose to my feet.

  “Take it easy,” she said, her voice quite soft and tender. “It was lucky for you that I heard the commotion up here. It’s right over our—I mean my room, you know. I rushed up here and found you out cold on the floor, all wrapped up in that thing
.”

  She pointed to the cover of the billiard table, which lay in a heap beside me. And then I knew why everything had gone black all at once. “So—so someone tossed that thing over my head and then slugged me with a billiard cue! If I’d only had a look at him—”

  “You might have seen a ‘her,’” Dorothy finished for me. “Because a billiard cue is a heavy weapon, and either sex could swing a good knockout sock with one.”

  I nodded. “But come on back to your bed where you belong,” Dorothy urged me. “It’s too cold to stay here.” I realized that she was somewhat wispily clad in saffron silk. The window was still open.

  Suddenly I remembered. Where is it?” I demanded, seizing the flashlight and turning it round the room. But there was no trace of the lace-trimmed square of cloth that I had found.

  When I told Dorothy she helped me look, but I could see that her heart was not in the search. “You’re sure there were bloodstains on it—sticky bloodstains?” she asked. “Perhaps you dreamed that.”

  Dream or not, the thing was gone.

  With Dorothy steadying me a little, for I was still dizzy, we went down the stairs.

  “I’ll do all right now, thanks,” I told her.

  Dorothy looked at me accusingly. “You’ll be all right if you’ll stay in your room and stop trying to be Philo Vance! After what you and Todd promised…”

  I told her, rashly, that Todd hadn’t kept his promise either, and that was why I had gone exploring in the night. She stopped short. “You mean—Todd went somewhere?”

  I nodded.

  “But—but where?”

  “If I had known that,” I told her, “I wouldn’t have this headache.”

  “But we’ve got to find him!” she came back. “Don’t you see? This is what I was afraid of—that something would happen to you two if you kept on.” She hurried toward the lower stair.

  “Wait,” I told her, “I’ll go with you.” She protested, but I told her that my headache would prevent me from sleeping anyway.

  We tiptoed down to the first floor, to the great vaulted rooms into which the first gray flush of dawn was beginning to come. Everything was as silent as the proverbial tomb. Almost everything…

  The only appreciable sound, we discovered, came from the uniformed man who was spread out across two easy chairs placed by the front door. His low, resonant snores followed close upon one another, but the bars and bolts were secure upon the door just behind him and it was evident that Todd had not gone out that way.

  “The back door!” whispered Dorothy, and we tiptoed hastily down the hall past the dining room, past the telephone where the bits of pencil still lay on the floor, mute symbols of a girl’s panic.

  Dorothy did not look at them, but she caught my arm. We came into the kitchen, found it cold and bare and lonely. Here, too, the door was heavily barred on the inside.

  “Then how could Todd have gone out?” Dorothy demanded.

  Suddenly I remembered. “The ladder, of course!” I told her. “There was a ladder rising from the garden to that open window in the billiard room—I saw it just before somebody hit me.”

  Dorothy shook her head. “There wasn’t any ladder there when I closed that window,” she said.

  We both stood silent, surmising all sorts of things. And then we heard a muffled noise far beneath us…

  “The cellar!” Dorothy whispered.

  We came to the door, opened it with infinite caution. The musty sour smell of the cellar smote our nostrils, but there was something more. The flicker of a light, reflected on a faraway wall…

  We went down. There was nothing else to do. Todd was hunting or being hunted. Either way we had to know.

  We went on, past great heaps of decaying wood for the fireplace, through the little wine cellar with its rank upon rank of sickish-sweet California wine, through rooms which opened one into the other, rooms furnished only with boxes and barrels and cartons which obviously had been left here since the builders came.

  Once again we saw the light, and then suddenly it flashed out. There was a tinkle of metal against stone, and then utter silence.

  Someone was waiting… listening…

  I realized that perhaps this had not been such a good idea, after all. To come here unarmed, looking for trouble…

  But Dorothy was a quicker thinker than I. In a voice calculated to carry through the shadows she whispered “Take the gun—I’ll hold the flash on him!”

  I nearly spoiled it by saying “What gun?”

  But we had flushed our quarry. A man stepped quickly from behind a pillar. “Steady there, you two!” he called out. It was Todd!

  He was a strange-looking Todd, covered with cobwebs and dust and perspiration. In his hand he carried a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.

  “You gave me a turn,” he confessed, “until I recognized Dorothy’s voice.”

  He saw that we were waiting a little doubtfully. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I’m not sleuthing, not exactly. I’m just tracing the phone wires of this house.”

  I protested that there was only one telephone, and that one in the kitchen hall. Todd nodded. “I know that,” he said. “But when I called Aunt Evelyn this afternoon, with the message that I hoped was going to do so much toward breaking this case, I heard a click on the line—as if somebody hung up a receiver, but Aunt Evelyn was still on the wire. So tonight, when I couldn’t sleep, I suddenly began to wonder if I couldn’t find the place where the wire was tapped and follow it right to somebody’s room.”

  “Well?” demanded Dorothy. There was something odd in her manner.

  “It was tapped, all right,” Todd told us. “The joint is back there in the main telephone line, which enters the house near the wine cellar. It was hidden behind a joist, but I found it. I’ve followed it this far,” he pointed to the thin twisted strand which had been tacked inconspicuously along the floor, “but it disappears into the wall just at this point.”

  We all looked, and saw it.

  “When we know where that goes we’ll know what happened to your sister,” he told Dorothy quietly. “And then it will be time enough for me to give up this case.”

  He pulled at the wire, and got a few inches of slack. “May have to tear into the wall here,” Todd explained. And then, to our utter amazement, the loop of wire in his hand suddenly tightened!

  “There’s somebody at the other end!” Todd whispered.

  “Pull!” I told him.

  Todd almost smiled. “Fat lot of good that will do. I can’t pull him down through the crack in the wall!”

  Suddenly the wire was slack in his fingers, and he drew it out. Six feet, perhaps eight at the most, and the end was cut off bright and sharp.

  “Somebody played trumps on you,” suggested Dorothy after a moment. There was nothing to do about it. The wire could have led anywhere in the house, to the outbuildings—anywhere. And a knife or a pair of shears had snipped it off just as we were on the threshold of getting somewhere!

  “Whoever it is,” Todd said wearily, “is just one move ahead of us all the time. Dorothy, I should have followed your advice.”

  He looked sad. Todd had been counting on that wire, I realized. Suddenly an idea struck me. “They won’t have had time to get rid of the instrument—the telephone that was at the other end of this wire! Why don’t we search their room?”

  “Whose room?” Dorothy said incredulously.

  “Why, the Waldrons’, of course,” I told her. “It all fits in. What we overheard in their room, and because Ely must have lied when he said he saw the fire from his window, and because…” I thought of something else. “Remember that Fay was writing a letter, a very voluminous letter, on the afternoon of the fire?”

  Dorothy nodded. “I’d give a whole lot to know the address on that letter !” I finished.

  Todd spoke slowly, unhappily, to say that he did know. “Fay Waldron gave me that letter to mail,” he admitted. “Remember I went in to Los Angeles early next morning. The let
ter was addressed to a Dr Peabody of the Sevenoaks Sanitarium, Sacramento.”

  Dorothy puzzled over that, shook her blonde head. “Sanitarium! That ought to mean something. You don’t suppose she’s got somebody insane in her family, too, do you?”

  Todd didn’t know, said he didn’t care. We went back, somewhat disconsolately, to the upper hall. “I’ve still got one ace in the hole,” he told her. “You and Alan have complicated it just a little, but still we may be able to read something.”

  “What?” I wanted to know.

  “It’s the match trick,” Todd explained, his voice low and cautious. “When I went down cellar tonight I thought it might be a good idea to have some means of checking up on our suspects. If anyone was going roaming around the hall I wanted to know about it. Do you see that match?”

  He pointed, and in the pale light of the dawn I saw that a paper match had been stuck between the carpet and door of the room shared by Uncle Alger and his son Eustace, so that any movement of the door must certainly dislodge the match.

  “The beauty of the Todd-Cameron-patent-house-hold-tattler,” Todd whispered, “is that no one can open his door without leaving a record of it. Moreover, nobody ever notices the match afterward.” I saw the beauty of the scheme at once.

  “That means that it wasn’t Uncle Alger or Eustace who hit me,” I said. Todd nodded.

  “Nor did they cut the wire,” Dorothy put in. For a girl who wanted us to drop the whole investigation and let the police muddle on, she seemed very interested now.

  Across the hall was the room shared by Aunt Evelyn and Cousin Mabel. Here, too, the match still stood braced inconspicuously against the bottom of the door. Another clean bill of health.

  Naturally, Dorothy’s match was tossed out onto the carpet, a mute symbol of the speed with which she had come out to my succor when she heard sounds of a falling body overhead.

  “Well, by the process of elimination…” I whispered.

  “The Waldrons!” Dorothy finished.

  Todd nodded. “Elementary, my dear Watson!” he said, almost cheerfully for a change.