Omit Flowers

by Stuart Palmer

  “You’re being retained by the family,” I suggested. “Any charge for your time—”

  Dr Garvey nodded. “Of course, of course! Wilma, the envelope on Mr Cameron, please.”

  The nurse whipped a brown folder out of a file case like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The doctor put on his pince-nez, peered inside, nodded. Then he faced us. “You want me to come down to Oceanside?” He was changing his coat.

  Todd nodded. “Quicker the better.”

  Dr Garvey by this time seemed entirely convinced. “Delighted. You gentlemen go on ahead, and I’ll follow in my own car.”

  It was as easy as that. Halfway down the stair Dr Garvey paused. “Wait—I ought to have the X-rays, too, if I’m going to try and identify your precious bits of cinder.”

  He ran back up the stairs two steps at a time. Almost instantly he was back, with a smaller envelope in his hand. Somewhere on the journey he had managed to pick up a couple of curly hairs, long silky hairs of a bright strawberry color, that now dangled from the hinge of his pince-nez. But he was happily oblivious of them.

  Gaily he climbed into the shining white Rolls. “See you at the sheriff’s office!” he called out, and was off down the street like a homesick greyhound.

  “Tickled as a kid when school is shut down for the day,” Todd said. I was silent, remembering. Then, as Todd started his motor, it came to me.

  “I remember!” I said triumphantly. “I know where I saw that doctor !”

  We went past the outskirts of Three Arches, and Todd kicked the throttle down to a good seventy.

  “It was Christmas Eve, as I was driving along this road—just as I picked up Dorothy and poor little Mildred. Dr Garvey went roaring by—and he gave me the most wicked, understanding leer!”

  “Was the nurse with him?” Todd asked casually.

  I couldn’t remember. “But I know it wasn’t this car,” I told him. “It was an old foreign car painted white….”

  “A gay old coot,” Todd disposed of the doctor. “I hope he knows his business.”

  At any rate, Dr Garvey knew his car. We went back to Oceanside at a breakneck pace which left me dizzy and frightened, but as we pulled up outside Sheriff Bates’s office we found the doctor placidly waiting beside his Rolls, smoking a very long and greenish-black cigar.

  “Something keep you?” he greeted us. I could see that Todd did not like the remark, but he managed a faint smile and led the way up the stairs.

  The sheriff did not seem any too pleased to see us again. He greeted Todd somewhat accusingly. “You here? Say, young fellow, don’t get no more bright ideas. We don’t want no more of what happened yesterday.”

  “There won’t be any more,” Todd said stiffly. “She’s as dead as she’ll ever be.”

  “And for nothing!” said Sheriff Bates bitterly. “You know, I been thinking it over and thinking it over, and that girl couldn’t have killed Joel Cameron. Her suicide was for some other reason. You know why? Because she couldn’t have been the one who raised that heavy ladder to the garage window and shot your uncle with a silver bullet.”

  There was a distinct gasp from Dr Garvey, who had up until this moment been patiently listening in the background. “A what?”

  “Silver bullet!” repeated the sheriff testily. “Say, who’re you?”

  I hastily introduced them. “Do you mind Dr Garvey’s having a look at that jawbone?”

  The sheriff didn’t mind. He brightened at once.

  Then he looked at the clock. “After one o’clock—

  Say, it’s just in the nick of time. If we can identify that blasted relic…” He turned to Todd. “Nice work, digging up this dentist. Say, I never thought of going to Laguna. We got good dentists here, but I suppose your uncle sold them options on that subdivision of his and didn’t dare to let them at him with a drill.”

  Todd was accepting the congratulations and modestly smiling, so I let him smile, although I somewhat resentfully remembered the bill which I had found in the mail.

  “Here she is, Doc,” said the sheriff. He brought out the little ebony box, and displayed the grisly fragments of charred bone.

  We all held our breaths as Dr Garvey bent over the exhibit. He scowled, cocked his head, sniffed….

  “Well?” exploded the sheriff at last. “Is it him or isn’t it?”

  Dr Garvey shrugged. “How can I tell from one quick look? I’ve got to make a detailed study, check these blackened teeth with my records of fillings and my X-rays… in some quiet place. Maybe in a few hours…”

  “In the back room!” insisted the sheriff. “Nobody’ll disturb you there. But hurry, man—that inquest is in less than an hour!”

  Mildly protesting, Dr Garvey was shoved into the back room with his specimen and his papers. Sheriff Bates locked the door and put the key in his pocket.

  “He don’t get out until he says yes or no!” the sheriff told us. “Now we’re getting somewheres!”

  “You and I are getting back to the house,” Todd told me. “We can do nothing here, and that inquest is too important to miss.”

  All the same, as we came up the hill toward Prospice, which looked almost cheerful in the sunshine, Todd showed himself in no particular hurry to join the line of cars which was going up the hill toward the house. He stopped the car on a little side street which led nowhere, then climbed out.

  “Come on, Alan,” he suggested. I went out after him, and found that we stood almost on the edge of the wide barranca. The flood had passed on, and where it had raged there was now only perhaps fifteen feet of flat yellow mud between us and the virtual island on which, at a steep angle, perched Kosy Kottage.

  It was a sad picture of degeneration and decay, that little stranded bungalow which had never been a home. Windowpanes missing, plaster peeling away from chicken wire and lath supports, chimney bricks lying on the torn and rotting shingles.”

  “An accomplice, the sheriff said,” Todd mused. “You heard him, Alan. And even the sheriff can’t always be wrong.” My cousin squatted on his heels on the edge of the steep bank. “It would have to be someone strong enough to raise a thirty-foot ladder. And if it was the same person who tapped you with a billiard cue last night, then it wasn’t any member of the family. Remember the match trick!”

  I wasn’t entirely in agreement with him, but I nodded. “That proves it wasn’t anybody in the household, because of course nobody could have come out, hit me, and then got back in his room replacing the match. Only….”

  “Only what?” Todd said, with weary patience.

  “Only you didn’t remember to tilt a match against Oviedo’s door, did you?”

  Todd stared at me. Then he grinned. “Ouch, my boy. Meaning you got me. Only—only I don’t think it was Oviedo.”

  “It had to be somebody!” I retorted. “I didn’t dream this bump on my head, and it wasn’t any ghost, either.”

  “Maybe not,” Todd agreed. “And maybe so. There are ghosts and ghosts, Alan. Some are real and some are phoney. I was just wondering where the sardine can came from—the one we saw Christmas morning, floating in this stream. And where the beast got the tin can he was carrying near here.”

  “You don’t think somebody is hiding out in that wreck of a house?” I demanded. “Living off canned stuff?”

  Todd shrugged. “I’ve searched all the others, and they’re bare as a bone. It has to be this cottage or none. And, Alan, I’ve got to admit that it’s none.”

  “But why?” I burst in, excited with the possibility. “Even at that slant a man could get around.”

  Todd pointed down to the expanse of soft yellow mud, mud that was unmarked by the tread of a foot. “Anybody living in that shack has wings.”

  I saw that point. Then another idea struck me. “Couldn’t a man who wanted to conceal his presence climb down on the other side, wade through the mud of the main part of the stream bed, and then come up on the other side of the barranca?”

  Todd doubted it, but I insi
sted upon investigating. From a vantage point higher up the stream I could see beyond the cottage.

  “Todd!” I cried. He came hurrying.

  “There’re tracks!”

  So there were—but they turned out to be the wavering double track of a dog, going back and forth across the drying yellow mud.

  And that was that. We went back to the house, which seemed excessively gloomy and unattractive after our excursion into the sunny outdoors.

  We had missed out on lunch, and it did not add to my comfort to find the drawing room already fairly well filled with gaping strangers. An inquest, it seemed, was a public affair. I went upstairs in hopes of finding someone to talk to, but Dorothy was locked in her room. Her voice, through the door, was not encouraging. In fact, it sounded as if she were enjoying a good cry.

  I turned and went down again, but met Cousin Mabel on the stair. She was patently surprised and pleased at the news of our finding the dentist. “That ought to make things simpler, if anything can,” said Mabel. But when I went on to tell her of our fiasco in regard to the cottage she suddenly smiled a strange smile.

  “It was a dog, Alan?”

  I shrugged. “Tracks of a dog, anyway. But from what I’ve seen of the thing it was more like a wolf.”

  “Oh, you’ve seen it, too?” She seemed oddly pleased at that. “I didn’t know—” she began. “People have said that I’m psychic, and I was afraid that—well, you understand—”

  “I’m afraid that I don’t,” I told her.

  Cousin Mabel stared at me, a rapt, satisfied smile. “No, you wouldn’t. But you might think over the fact that nobody ever saw Uncle Joel and that—that beast at the same time! You might try to figure out what sort of creature can pass through bolted doors, enter high windows from outside, drive young girls to suicide through sheer terror. Yes, and what sort of beast it is that men try to kill with a silver bullet!”

  I caught her by the shoulder. “Now listen, we’re having enough trouble without this sort of thing,” I told her savagely. “Uncle Joel was a mean old man, but he isn’t a ghost and he isn’t a werewolf. Werewolves don’t rob garbage cans and they don’t hit people over the head with billiard cues.”

  Mabel, wild-eyed, muttered something about “more things on heaven and earth….”

  I told her that she was out of her mind. She nodded. “Why not?” demanded Mabel. “It runs in the family. First Uncle Joel, and then Todd….”

  “What? What about Todd?”

  She smiled an odd smile. “Just a moment ago he was asking me what I remembered about Gilbert—you remember, the boy who died in Chicago. Todd wanted to know if Gilbert was an athlete, and I said I didn’t think he was proficient at anything but pool and dancing.”

  “Why did he ask that?” I demanded.

  She smiled. “How should I know? Anyway, he rushed away as if he had some sort of bee in his bonnet, and I said to myself…”

  Whatever remark it may have been that my cousin intended to put in her own mouth, it was forever lost as she stared over my shoulder at the little hall window.

  “Look!” she gasped. “Didn’t I tell you he was crazy?”

  I looked, and saw my cousin Todd Cameron running across the garden. As I watched, he threw himself into the air to come down heels first in a rosebush. Picking himself up, he laboriously repeated the exercise.

  A smile of slow satisfaction crossed the plain face of Cousin Mabel. “Poor fellow,” she observed softly. “It won’t be long now!”

  XII

  SNATCH A TERROR from afar,

  A horror from the misted fen,

  And frightened by a falling star,

  Dig up the sunken gods again….

  —MAXWELL ANDERSON

  IT HAS NEVER BEEN my good fortune to travel extensively, and so I have never seen the great car of Juggernaut dragged through the streets of an Indian city, amid howling worshipers. But I imagine that as it starts there are loud squeaks and groans from the wooden wheels, and a trembling vibration. So it was with the inquest into the death of my uncle Joel, and there later developed certain other parallels between the two somewhat dissimilar ceremonies.

  I must confess that I was in no condition to make actual or mental notes as to the manner in which the legal inquiry into my uncle’s death was pursued. I remember that grouped together in the great drawing room of Prospice was a crowd composed of orange ranchers, newspapermen, villagers, and curiosity-seekers. The front two rows were reserved for the relatives, under the circumstances a somewhat dubious honor as we all felt ourselves somehow on trial.

  The jury was composed of five men and one woman, among them the Oceanside grocer. They looked suspicious, and unwontedly serious.

  The relatives, too, were wearing unaccustomed expressions, seeming oddly chastened. It was somehow as if the death of Mildred had been in the light of a warning to us all that this was a serious business. Mabel and Fay Waldron had both managed to dig up proper mourning, or at least the proper color. Dorothy sat in the row just ahead of me, and judging by the set of her shoulders and the stiffness of her spine she was tired and unhappy and—one would almost say frightened.

  Aunt Evelyn, with a paleness which came not from powder, sat at the end of the row, fingering her pearls and looking bored and critical. From time to time she took a good healthy sniff at a bottle of smelling salts. Ely Waldron had put on his best suit, which unfortunately was of a purplish shade of blue. Uncle Alger had shaved more closely than usual, and even Eustace had compromised with convention to the point of donning a necktie.

  Jesus Oviedo was there, with his fat wife Pia, who managed to display a tear or two in the corners of her piglike, wary eyes. Mr Fortesque Cohen was there, gravely judicial. Everyone was there—even Uncle Joel.

  So to speak, Joel Cameron was here in person, for there on the table in front of the coroner was a tall glass jar filled with ashes and beside it a small ebony box. Everybody knew what was in that box, the crowd peering and gaping in an effort to commit to memory the very shape and substance of Exhibit A.

  I remember all these details so clearly—though I had little attention for the actual progress of the inquest. Slowly and painfully it got under way. Coroner Eckersall was doing his best to snap the affair up. It seemed to me almost as if he were deriving a strange sort of enjoyment from his melancholy job as he flounced around with his eager eyes blinking behind the thick lenses.

  First, he explained that the usual course of events would have to be altered somewhat in this case, due to the fragmentary remains at hand. For that reason the jury would not be asked to look upon the body at this time. “But during the course of this proceeding,” said Coroner Eckersall happily, “we shall pass upon evidence tending to prove the identity of the human remains before us, the manner in which the deceased met his death and, if possible, the person or persons responsible.”

  The coroner looked somewhat severely in the direction of the family. I wondered if he noticed the vacant chair on my right which I had been saving for Todd.

  This was not, however, continued Dr Eckersall, a court instituted to determine guilt or to hold suspected parties for trial. The only purpose was to proceed logically and intelligently to a decision, if such decision were possible from the evidence, as to the nature of certain remains found in the ruins of a garage on this estate.

  The coroner’s idea of a logical approach consisted of calling the Mexican servant, Oviedo, to the stand. The lanky aborigine, licking his lips and staring dully at the carpet, testified as to his employer’s sudden move to the garage upon arrival of his holiday guests.

  The coroner wanted to know if this wasn’t just a little unusual. Oviedo agreed that it was, likewise was it unusual for his employer to have so many guests or for that matter to have any guests at all.

  “Why would it not have been easier to have fixed up one of the empty bedrooms upstairs rather than to have moved out into the unused servants’ quarters?”

  “Boss don’t like noise, a
nd he don’t like so many people around him,” explained Oviedo grimly. It was evident from his manner that he heartily concurred with the sentiment.

  I heard Aunt Evelyn, half to herself, exclaim, “Why ever are they bothering with this? Why don’t they try to find out why Mildred died?”

  I saw Dorothy wince a little, and leaned forward to place my hand on her shoulder. But she did not seem to feel it. She sat there, stiff and somewhat absent, shaking her head. I heard her soft whisper, “Haven’t you done enough to her? Let her rest!” A sentiment with which I was unable to agree.

  Uncle Alger Ely was unexpectedly called, and testified to the effect that Uncle Joel had signified before us all his intention of spending the night above the garage. “It was his own idea, too,” said Uncle Alger.

  The coroner asked if he had anything to add. “I have that,” continued Uncle Alger blithely. “I want to say a few words right here and now about the Townsend Plan, a measure soon to be enacted by Congress, or else…”

  “That’ll do!” crashed in the coroner, but there was a smattering of applause from the rear row. I could not see who sat there, but presumed it to be the village idiot. Uncle Alger was hushed.

  Then came one of Sheriff Bates’s deputies, who had a good deal to say about bolts and locks found in the ruins. There was not the slightest doubt, according to him, but that the door of the room in the garage had been locked and bolted on the inside. Fragments of blackened and unclean metal were displayed to the jury, who looked wise and pretended to study them.

  The coroner had, it seemed, got Uncle Joel into the garage and locked him in his room. So far so good. The next thing to be proved was the existence of the fire itself—something I thought the jury might well have taken for granted from the evidence out in the yard. But that was not the method of Coroner Eckersall.

  “Mr Ely Waldron, please,” was the summons. As the big lumbering druggist took his place in the witness chair he looked placid as a cow in a hayfield.

  Poor Ely was allowed to get along with his oft-repeated story of the discovery of the fire, mingled with weather reports for that day and evening. Then, in the midst of his account of how he had seen red shadows flickering on the wall and had looked out of the window, I saw Todd Cameron, red-faced and perspiring, come down the aisle and speak a whispered word to the coroner.