Omit Flowers

by Stuart Palmer

  Frankly, I had rather been looking forward to following our original plan of missing the melancholy last rites. But something had happened to Todd. Instead of his previous air of discouragement and defeat, he was bubbling over with excitement. Yet I knew better than to ask him until he was ready to tell me what it was. Besides, at the rate we were going there was no pleasure in conversation.

  We were back at Prospice in less time than it takes to say the proverbial Jack Robinson. Todd parked the car, leaped out of it and ran up the steps, with me at his heels. I was close enough behind him to be included in the horrified, admonishing “hush-sh!” which greeted us from a strange man in a black frock coat.

  “The funeral is going on,” he told us, with that hollow solemnity which belongs only to undertakers’ helpers and floorwalkers.

  From the drawing room came muffled sounds of doleful singing. “Come on, Alan,” Todd said. “We’re late.”

  But the man blocked our way. “Sorry, but members of the family only!” he insisted. “Mr Cameron left definite instructions with us years ago, when he ordered his casket. The ceremony is very private.”

  Todd frowned. “Is it, now?” He explained who we were. “And there are absolutely no strangers here?”

  The undertaker’s man shook his head. “Nobody. Just the family and the servants. Besides, of course, the organist and the singers and so forth that we provide.”

  Todd shook his head. “You sure? There’s no old bewhiskered miner fresh from the creeks, no Indian chief in his war paint, no stranger at all?”

  “See for yourself,” he was told. And we tiptoed into the drawing room.

  Some of the chairs from yesterday’s inquest had been left, but only the family was there to occupy them. We took our seats, under cover of a middle-aged soprano who was singing “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.”

  Then the clergyman, a plump-faced, pleasant person from one of the local churches, arose from his chair. It was evident that he did not know the deceased from Adam, and that he was excessively nervous in the presence of that great black oblong upon the catafalque. It was somehow typical of the incongruity of the whole affair that the pitiful fragments of the deceased were to be laid away in such a cavernous receptacle.

  He based his service for the dead upon the lines from Job—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. He shall return no more to his house…”

  I could see that Todd was looking, not at the minister, but into the faces of the assembled family. Did he, I wondered, expect to detect in Eustace’s silly grin, in Aunt Evelyn’s tight lips or in Dorothy’s rigid calm a confession of murder?

  The minister hurried on with the ceremony, and then it was all too evident that he had said all that he could say. Yet, a kind man, he hated to stop at so little.

  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “perhaps at this time some member of the family would like to say a word about the deceased? To bring to memory some kind deed, some thoughtful act, some fine accomplishment?”

  I have never heard a silence so complete and utter as the silence which followed that invitation. It seemed to go on and on interminably. Finally Alger Ely broke the silence, but only to clear his throat.

  “Anyone at all?” begged the minister hopefully. His eyes roamed along the line of faces searchingly. I saw Dorothy Ely turn and look at me, raise her arched eyebrows.

  The girl at the organ broke into “We Shall Gather at the River,” and at the stirring, triumphant chords of the old hymn we moved toward the door. The undertaker’s men acted as pallbearers, carrying down the steps their light burden. The great ebony casket with its trimming of silver was slid into the rear of a waiting gray-lavender hearse. Behind the hearse were three or four sober black limousines with hired drivers.

  The members of the family were expected to divide up among them. “We three together!” Todd whispered, drawing Dorothy back as she started down the steps after Aunt Evelyn.

  We waited until even Oviedo and his wife had found seats. One limousine was left.

  “Come on,” Dorothy said. “I don’t suppose you two want to go any more than I, but poor Uncle Joel has few enough mourners as it is. And it’ll be over soon….”

  Slowly we rolled down the hill at the end of the procession. We turned right through the empty streets of the ghost city of Cameron Heights, a fitting setting for the ceremony with its empty houses, its dead grass and meaningless street signs.

  I was waiting expectantly, for I had an idea that Todd wanted to be alone with us because he had an announcement to make. But he was strangely silent on that ride.

  The pavement ended, and everybody climbed out of the cars. We followed the bearers forward through the iron gate and into the little cemetery. Scudding white clouds raced across an azure-blue sky, casting spots of shadow upon the little plot of rolling burial ground which my uncle Joel had so thoughtfully provided for the residents of Cameron Heights. There was a chill wind, and our forlorn group stood shivering.

  The undertaker’s men had cleared away the vines and shrubbery which had sprung up around the entrance to the pyramidal tomb with its grotesque Greek cross and the blazoned letters “Cameron.” The iron grille of the vault hung open.

  Dorothy and Todd were close together, and I moved a little away. I felt that I owed an apology to Fay Waldron, who was the only person in the entire group to show signs of tears. But she did not look at me.

  We watched in wordless silence, trying to adjust our thoughts and attitudes to the solemnity of the occasion and succeeding, I think, very badly. The big, almost empty casket was finally laid away beside that of Aunt Hester, that dimly remembered, sensible lady who liked foxglove. “Dust to dust…” intoned the clergyman. It was singularly appropriate and fitting when one remembered the few sad gray wisps of ashes which were all that we had found to bury of Joel Cameron.

  There was something of a crowd gaping and staring from beyond the fence, for the morning papers, beside the notice—“Died, Joel Martin Cameron, December 25, 1936—aged sixty-eight years, five months—services today at eleven—kindly omit flowers”—had carried news stories about Mildred’s death and announced that a renewed investigation was being made into the mystery of the “Roasted Recluse.” But most of the tourists had dropped away as soon as the iron gates clanged.

  Fat Pia, the brown witch, had joined Fay in appropriate tears, and I could hear the tall brown Mexican Indian as he intoned prayers and crossed himself repeatedly. I felt Dorothy slip her arm through mine, and we waited together.

  “And this corruption shall put on incorruption…” the minister intoned.

  When it was all over I discovered why Dorothy had put her arm through mine. Todd was gone.

  “Todd hates funerals, he told me so,” she said, as we went back toward the cars.

  “And he seemed to hate this one more than most,” I added. But internally I felt better. Todd had not quit, after all. Somehow the death of the dentist had been a terrific setback for him, but he was once more on the trail.

  “You don’t know where he went?” I asked her, as we reached the limousine again. She shook her head.

  “He was very interested in the crowd of sightseers,” she told me. “But he didn’t stop there.”

  As the limousine drew away I suddenly seized her arm. “Dorothy!” I gasped. “How long has it been since you saw Gilbert ?”

  She stared at me. “Gilbert? Why—why, not for two or three years before he died.”

  “Would you know him if you saw him? I mean, if he were disguised as an Indian chief or a prospector or—or as anyone in that crowd out there?”

  Dorothy blinked, blue eyes wide. Then she leaned closer and stroked my forehead. “Gilbert Ely is dead, Alan. Very, very dead. And we agreed that we were not going to believe in spooks and werewolves and vampires, didn’t we?”

  I could cheerfully have strangled the girl. “Will you listen!” I demanded. “In the crowd out there, the
people who tried to get in to the funeral. Was there anyone who could have been Gilbert? All I want is for you to answer that.”

  “No,” Dorothy told me flatly. “No, no, no!”

  We were speedily taken home, deposited with the rest of the family on the doorstep. With the departure of the limousines and the undertaker’s hirelings, the family milled uneasily about the lower hall of Prospice. Somehow the funeral of Joel Cameron made an ending, a curtain for the last scene of this tragedy of errors. But was it the last scene? We all fidgeted, like actors blown up in their lines, wandering across the stage and waiting for the hiss of the prompter.

  “I don’t see what we’re hanging around here for.” Eustace finally put it in words. At once, almost as if everyone had been waiting for someone else to make the suggestion, the family was electrified. “I can be packed and ready before a taxicab can get here,” Aunt Evelyn caroled. “I’m shaking the dust of this place from my feet, and if the rest of you want to stay I cheerfully leave you my share of Prospice.”

  That was an item. Prospice was our joint property, or would be as soon as the will could be probated. But even rent-free nobody wanted to live in it. Oviedo and his wife even refused, in highly colored language, to stay on as caretakers.

  “She is one damned house,” Oviedo told me seriously. “Better to have the padres come and sprinkle holy water. And even then we don’t stay.”

  Nor did they. Off down the road they went, with fat Pia carrying their worldly belongings on her shoulders and Oviedo blithely dragging the mangy coyote bitch which was to be the source of their future wealth, at ten dollars per scalp.

  Uncle Alger and Eustace were slamming suitcases in their room. I heard Mabel Cameron sending a telegram over the phone, a telegram commanding one Edward somebody to meet the 11:30 train.

  Ely Waldron and his wife shook hands with me in the hall. I apologized for many things, then wished them luck in the ordeal they faced up at the sanitarium in Sacramento.

  “It’s a gambler’s chance,” Fay said slowly. “But it’s better to risk everything sometimes. And the boy is better dead than to go on.”

  “Besides, Sacramento’s a mighty pretty place to convalesce in,” Ely added. “Fine weather there this time of year, no rainfall and an average mean temperature of…”

  Fay hurried him away.

  Dorothy and I went up the stairs together. I knew that she, too, was anxious to leave, to follow Mildred’s body northward to the green city on Puget Sound. And as for myself—I, too, had had enough of the whole business. Somebody else could act as executor for the estate. I wanted to get back to Brownie, and to my dusty library stacks.

  I didn’t care much for the part I had been allowed to play in this drama, nor for the way I had played it.

  “I’d like to say good-by to Todd,” Dorothy said in a rather small voice. “That is, if he hasn’t gone already. He was saying only the other day how much he hated good-bys.”

  We came down the hall, and I turned the knob of my door. The door was locked. It was the only time I had ever known it locked.

  Dorothy was suddenly beside me, pounding on the door. “Alan!” she cried out. “We’ve got to break it down. I know something’s happened to Todd!”

  But a key turned on the inside, and Todd Cameron faced us. “Oh, hello,” he said slowly. “I was dressing.”

  He had changed into a dark suit, but judging by the ash trays and the swirling atmosphere of the room Todd had finished dressing sometime ago.

  Here was a strange and foreign Todd. He looked, I thought, like a man who lived amid ghosts. Not nice English ghosts in armor, rattling chains through manor house halls in the dead of night. Not playful German poltergeists breaking dishes and banging on walls. I read once that in the South Seas the Samoans tell of ghastly demons that haunt moonlit beaches, grinning heads trailing silver entrails.

  It was that kind of ghosts. But Todd was smiling with his mouth.

  “I’m not leaving just yet awhile,” he said. “Probably tonight sometime. You two go ahead.”

  Dorothy looked at him as if he were a stranger. “And that’s all you have to say to me—to us?”

  Todd lighted a cigarette with beautiful, steady fingers. “That’s all there is to say, isn’t it? After all, we’re going different directions.”

  “Yes,” Dorothy agreed surprisingly. “We’re all going different directions.” She bit her lip.

  And she turned and went down the hall to her own room. For a moment I stared after her. I understood her no better than I understood Todd.

  Then I followed him into the room, shut the door.

  “Shall I help you pack?” Todd invited.

  That remark was almost funny, when you take into consideration the amount of my baggage. “Are you trying to throw Dr Watson off the case?” I demanded, trying to be jocular.

  He smiled that dead smile again. “Sherlock Holmes has resigned,” said Todd. “So there’s no use sticking around. You’d both better go on with the others. Be a good fellow and take Dorothy with you, cheer her up. She’s got to face burying her sister, you know.”

  I sat down defiantly on the bed. “Not without you,” I said.

  Todd looked unhappy. “Now, listen—”

  “One for all and two for five, or whatever it was,” I reminded him. “Dorothy and I feel the same way. We don’t go without you.”

  From the driveway outside came the toot of a taxicab, and the others were shouting good-bys in the lower hall.

  Todd came over to me. “Will you take Dorothy out of this house, for the love of God!” His hands still were steady as they held the cigarette, but there were strange, hard lines around his jaw.

  “You won’t go?” he asked.

  I shook my head doggedly.

  “You asked for this, remember,” Todd spoke, in a voice that was thin and flat. “Remember, you asked for it. I can’t leave here, Alan.”

  “But why ever in the world can’t you ?” I burst out. “The funeral is over, the inquest is over, the police have dropped the case…”

  “I know,” Todd told me, looking at the floor. “But I can’t leave. Not while Joel Cameron is in this house.”

  XVI

  Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,

  NOR HEED THE STORM that howls along the sky.

  —TOBIAS SMOLLETT

  “DO YOU MIND SAYING that again?” I asked, after a moment.

  “Uncle Joel is in this house,” Todd Cameron said simply.

  “You’re drunk, Todd!”

  “I wish I was,” he told me. “But that will have to wait until later.”

  “Crazy, then?” I pressed. “Look here, try to understand. Uncle Joel is dead. He was burned to death. We saw the fire. His body was identified, beyond the shadow of any doubt. He was pronounced dead at the inquest. We saw him buried. Todd, if Uncle Joel is in this house, who did we bury an hour ago ? Answer me that!”

  “That was the question,” he admitted, “that Dr Garvey was to have answered. And he’s dead. All of the wrong people are dead. All but—”

  “Steady, old man,” I interrupted.

  “I’m not crazy,” Todd said slowly. “I’ve known the truth since last night. It was the only possible answer to everything. Besides, I just saw him.”

  “Uncle Joel? Where?”

  “I saw him,” he repeated. “I didn’t want to tell you this, Alan. I wanted you and Dorothy to get clear of this while there is time. I asked you to go, but you wouldn’t. So you’ll have to know everything.”

  “Wait!” I insisted. “I’ve tried, you don’t know how hard, to solve this thing myself. What did I miss? What was it that I didn’t see, didn’t understand? Or did you simply have the luck?”

  Todd smiled grimly. “There was little enough luck. I just got to wondering about some things last night. About the Christmas presents that Uncle Joel prepared for us. Those billfolds and handbags, so handy to put our wealth in. About the cobwebs on his face—no doubt he came by them while
tapping that telephone in the cellar. But he left them on just to throw a scare into someone.

  “Then Gilbert’s name was signed to the telegrams that brought us here. Anybody could have done that, but only Dorothy and Uncle Joel knew Gilbert was dead, and the circumstance of his burial. That little touch of adding ‘Potter’s Field’ as the sender’s address….”

  I followed him so far. “Then,” said Todd slowly, “there was the one main clue of all. I mean the bill that Dr Garvey sent—on the twenty-seventh of the month! Did you ever receive a bill from anyone in the last week of the month, especially in Christmas week?”

  I had to admit that I hadn’t.

  “Garvey sent it because he was getting worried,” Todd went on. “We hadn’t found him, so he had to call attention to his existence. Because he was to pronounce the identification that would give Uncle Joel’s practical joke the real build-up, that would prove the death and release the trust funds! Release them until the moment Joel Cameron showed up, remember. But more of the dentist in a moment. It was the way he shoved himself into the case via the bill in the mail that cinched my suspicions that Uncle Joel was alive, and the identification a fake.”

  Todd ashed his cigarette with a painful slowness, lighted another. “Uncle Joel had a swell sense of humor,” he began slowly, choosing his words. “It struck me while we were driving this morning that if I was right in my wild guess, the climax of Uncle Joel’s practical joke would be to attend his own funeral. That was why we hurried back. But there was no outsider at the services who could have been he. Nobody down at the graveyard. So I came back up here, because it struck me that the windows of the billiard room had a fine view of the whole place.”

  “Well?” I pressed.

  Todd nodded. “He was there. He’d come back to stay, too. When the family returned from the funeral he was going to meet us at the door. It was to be the biggest laugh of the whole thing.”

  I had a thousand questions, but Todd went on methodically: “He hated us all, you see. Because he knew we were all waiting for him to die. He knew he was no good alive, not to himself or anyone. But dead, he would mean happiness and a chance in life for a lot of people. That thought must have begun to work in his mind, to eat into his mind like acid.”