“I suppose the only horse the husband can ride is a wooden one in a merry-go-round,” I murmured, staring at Allan, who had managed to upset his water glass in his lap and who coloured darkly when everybody, especially Hogan Brewster, laughed at the mishap.
Ella nodded. “He has a perfect genius for tripping over his own feet. It’s painful to watch him. Judy says he was always like that, awkward and self-conscious, only it’s been worse since his marriage.
He’s hopeless at all the things at which his wife excels — she and Hogan Brewster.”
“Nowadays they call it poor co-ordination,” I murmured. “It’s supposed to be a nervous complex, like stuttering.”
“Judy told me that Allan stepped on his bride’s train at the altar and, metaphorically speaking, has been stepping on it ever since, poor devil.”
“I suppose she married him for his money?” I hazarded.
“For Thomas Canby’s money,” Ella corrected me. She frowned. “Only why doesn’t she divorce him, now she’s got Brewster on the string? That’s what nobody can understand. He is a millionaire in his own right, one of the Long Island polo-playing crowd, though they say he’s artistic too. Paints as well as skis, and flies his own plane. You’d think he and Lila were made to order for each other.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Maybe he is not the marrying kind,” I said. “Not all dashing young men who run after a handsome married woman are anxious for her to rush off to Reno on their account.”
“I suspect you’re right,” said Ella, “though Judy thinks Mr Hogan Brewster has what she calls ‘a genuine pash’ on Lila.”
I stared at Allan Atwood’s wife. She was gently brushing off his coat where the glass had overturned, using her napkin and smiling at him.
“There,” she murmured softly, “it’ll never show, darling.”
Her tone reminded me of young mothers who kiss their babies’ bruises and coo, “Never mind, Muvver’ll make it well.”
I thought he recognized the accent, for again he flushed darkly and pushed her hand away with an angry gesture.
“Don’t!” he cried almost savagely.
Ella compressed her lips. “She’s always very nice to her husband,” she said, “you have to give her credit for that, but it seems to get on his nerves.”
I was again looking at Allan Atwood’s wife. Hogan Brewster had leaned over and murmured something in her ear, something flattering, I felt sure from the glint in his black eyes. I saw her flush and look up at him and her gaze was definitely hostile. He seemed slightly taken aback, although he recovered himself at once.
“At least she doesn’t treat Brewster as if he were a child, a clumsy inept child whom she is impelled to mother,” I muttered.
Ella flung me a startled glance. “Lila does act a little as if she felt called upon to pick her husband up out of the dirt a dozen times a day and wipe his nose.”
“How long have they been married?” I asked.
“A little over a year and, again quoting Judy, Brewster has been a fixture in the family group almost from the first.”
“No wonder Allan looks a little wild,” I said. “Why on earth doesn’t he do something – kick the fellow out or forbid him the house or take a horsewhip to him?”
“Perhaps that’s why subconsciously his wife thinks of him as a dimwit. He more or less asks for it.”
“Then why doesn’t she leave him?” I demanded impatiently.
“I told you that is what neither I nor anyone else can understand,” said Ella.
At this moment a young man waltzed into the room and, calling out a helter-skelter greeting to everyone at the table, seated himself between Judy Oliver and Allan Atwood. He was about twenty-four, I judged, and reminded me of a Dachshund pup that was not yet housebroken. He had shaggy chestnut hair and wriggly brown eyes and an over-exuberant smile. I thought of the proverbial bull in the china shop as he clapped Allan on the back and at the same time hailed Hogan with every evidence of delight.
“Fancy finding you in this moth-eaten dump, Hoge!” he sang out. “Lord, Lila, you’ve cost me five dollars. I bet Judy even your beeyooteous countenance wouldn’t be enough to drag the boy friend this far from night clubs and what have you.”
His sister Judy must have kicked his shin, for he winced and uttered a loud “Ouch!” but Lila did not turn a hair.
“I don’t suppose you dropped Hogan a wire that we were here, did you, darling?” she murmured.
Apparently, like so many of the younger generation, she called everyone “darling,” but I thought the glance she gave Patrick Oliver had a knife in it, and it seemed to me he looked disconcerted for a moment before he summoned up his exuberant grin.
“Who, me?” he asked. “Can’t anything happen around here without my being blamed for it?”
Lila shrugged her shoulder. “I wouldn’t know, darling, and I must remind you that you haven’t answered my question.”
Brewster leaned a little forward and gazed rather intently at the circle of faces around the table. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I did get a telegram telling me where you people had fled to.”
Lila frowned. “A telegram?”
Patrick Oliver laughed, not very pleasantly. “That was a good guess you made, Lila, about its being a telegram, if it was a guess.”
Allan was staring at his wife and biting his lips.
“I didn’t wire Hogan, Pat, if that is what you mean,” said Lila, speaking in a very level voice. “I thought we agreed it was best to keep this-this business as much in the family as possible.”
“My God, yes!” breathed Allan Atwood in a stifled voice.
Brewster gave him a slightly contemptuous glance. “So something funny is going on,” he said.
“Funny!” muttered Judy, drawing closer to Jeff Wayne.
Lila turned sharply upon Brewster. “Why should you think anything funny is going on?”
He grinned, but his black eyes narrowed and I saw that he was watching them all. “You see,” he said very quietly, “the telegram was signed ‘Gloria’.”
“Oh no,” whispered Jeff Wayne.
Judy laid her hand over his, and again I saw him jerk away.
“It’s somebody’s idea of a joke, Hogan,” she faltered. “Sending you a telegram and signing Gloria’s name.”
Patrick, her brother, laughed loudly, and I thought of a small boy whistling as he marched off to the dentist.
“Sure, somebody did it to be funny,” he said.
“Funny!” breathed Judy again in a despairing voice.
Brewster was looking at Atwood. “Only,” he said softly, “I’d have sworn that nobody on earth except me knew that Gloria used to call me Shot, for Hot Shot.”
It seemed to me that everybody around the table was holding his breath, and at that moment Sheila Kelly rose from her seat and came slowly across the room, her heart-shaped face as pale as death, her hands before her as if she were feeling her way through a fog.
“Still looking for trouble, Shot?” she whispered in a voice that shocked me, a mocking, defiant voice which seemed to have nothing to do with that pale tragic face and drooping, wistful mouth.
Hogan Brewster stared at her as if he were transfixed, then suddenly Professor Thaddeus Matthews was there, clutching the girl’s arm.
“Sheila!” he cried sharply. “Sheila!”
She gave a start, flung up her hands, looked wildly around and then ran out of the room, pursued by the professor, who stumbled and nearly fell over the doorsill.
“Who in heaven’s name is that?” demanded Hogan Brewster.
“That,” said Patrick Oliver with a twisted grin, “is the vaudeville stunt which I introduced our Aunt Dora to in a moment of aberration.”
4
It was Atwood who suddenly took exception to the fact that every word they said was audible at our table, the others seeming to be quite indifferent to the matter. “Is it necessary to let the whole world into our confidence?” he demanded with a s
cowl in our direction.
After that Lila pointedly changed the subject and the others followed her lead, although none of them bothered to lower their voices. Neither Thomas Canby nor his wife was in the dining room that night. Ella explained that Mrs Canby usually took her meals in the small sitting room attached to her suite. It seemed that, although her health was quite good, Dora Canby lived a very retiring life.
“She is the most shrinking person I ever knew,” declared Ella. “It amounts to a phobia.”
I nodded. “I remember how extraordinarily timid she was even as a young woman.”
That was how Thomas Canby’s wife happened to be at Lebeau Inn, or so Ella explained. It seemed that, if humanly possible, Mrs Canby avoided all contacts with society and she had balked at spending the summer at her Long Island home. She disliked the bright young people with whom Patrick Oliver ran around. She had even less liking for the smart young married set to which Allan Atwood and his wife belonged. She particularly objected to Hogan Brewster, although Ella said that, curiously enough, Mrs Canby’s resentment in that case was directed, not at Lila, as one might expect, but at Allan.
“Mrs Canby seems to blame her nephew for doing nothing about the situation,” said Ella.
At any rate Dora Canby, accompanied by her niece Judy Oliver, had turned her back upon Southampton and beaten a retreat to Lebeau Inn.
“That must have been rather hard on Judy,” I murmured, glancing about the big, almost empty dining room with its vast shadowy corners.
As I had anticipated, with the exception of the Canby party and ourselves, the only guests were elderly invalids and anxious mothers of ailing babies.
Ella compressed her lips. “From what I can gather, Judy more than earns her keep in the Canby ménage.”
“Poor relations usually do,” I said.
“They never let Mrs Canby go anywhere alone. She’s one of those helpless individuals who would be sure to get on the wrong train.”
So Mrs Canby and her niece had settled down for a very dull time on Mount Lebeau. Then Patrick Oliver had stopped off on his way to Mexico or some such place to spend a few days with his aunt. It was Patrick who discovered the small movie theatre in Carrolton and decided it would do both his aunt and Judy good to drive down for a performance.
“That was two weeks ago,” said Ella, looking grim. “The professor was putting on a psychic act. From what I have been able to gather, he’s been touring the tank towns for years with some moth-eaten gag, but this time, as you say, he struck pay dirt. That first afternoon a message came through for Dora Canby.”
“From her daughter Gloria?”
“To be sure. She insisted on going back the next day and the next. Then she moved the professor and the girl up here. She is paying all their expenses. They stage a séance every night in the parlour.”
“For Mrs Canby?”
“The public is invited,” said Ella, “but you’d be surprised how few of the guests have gone back a second time.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised at all,” I said sharply. “In the first place anybody with a grain of common sense would be bored to tears with an exhibition like that, and in the second place all these people look the type to be in bed by nine o’clock.”
Ella gave me a wry look. “Whatever else you may be, Adelaide, I guarantee you won’t be bored by the performance tonight.”
“I don’t suppose there will be a performance,” I snapped. “I am sure you are right. Thomas Canby came down here to put a stop to this business.”
“If he can,” murmured Ella.
I did not remember a great deal about the multi-millionaire, except that he had been as difficult to talk to as his wife. However, even twenty years before, I had known that it was not timidity with him. He was simply a person with one idea. According to everything I had read about him, he had hewed a deadly straight line, allowing nothing to swerve him.
“I can’t imagine his permitting himself to be turned aside from anything to which he had set his hand,” I said, “much less by a palpable fraud like this humbug of a professor.”
Apparently Ella did not agree with me. “The others thought they could stop it too, but they didn’t.”
She was referring to Lila Atwood and her husband and Jeff Wayne, who, Ella said, had abandoned Long Island in a hurry when they got wind of what was going on.
“I suppose young Wayne came along for the ride and to see Judy Oliver,” I murmured sarcastically.
Ella shook her head. “Oh no. Like all the rest, he is interested in the pie.”
“The pie being Thomas Canby’s fortune?”
“Mrs Canby looks upon Jeff as one of the family, precisely as if he had married her daughter Gloria, so he also has a sixth or seventh vice-presidency in Thomas Canby’s company.”
There is something demoralizing about the expectancy of inheriting a great deal of money or even a modest sum, as I have had occasion to note. Waiting around to step into dead men’s shoes does something to people. I suffered a revulsion of feeling about the whole affair.
“If poor Dora Canby gets any pleasure out of the professor and his spirit messages, why don’t they let her be?” I demanded. “From what I’ve heard, it’s precious little else her husband’s money has been able to do for her. Suppose she is wasting a few dollars on a cheap vaudeville team, there will be plenty left for her precious nephews and nieces. Too much, in fact! It might do them all good to have to get out and root for themselves for a change.”
“Undoubtedly!” agreed Ella with emphasis. “But people don’t give up their claim to several millions without a struggle.”
“Without disputing that point,” I remarked tartly, “the fact remains that it isn’t Mrs Canby’s money. It’s her husband’s, and I don’t suppose anybody believes that he could be victimized by a fraudulent spiritualistic act.”
“All the money goes to his wife at his death.”
“Even so, the odds are that he’ll outlive her.”
“But don’t you see?” exclaimed Ella. “That’s why they are so upset. That girl said last night that Thomas Canby would not live out the week.”
I should have told Ella then and there about the chisel which Chet Keith had found that afternoon. I don’t know why I didn’t, unless it was because I had set out to make little of the whole affair and I hated to crawl down off my high horse. At any rate I merely looked scornful and muttering “Rubbish!” rose to my feet and stalked out of the dining room.
Ella did not immediately follow me. She was detained by a wisp of an old man who wanted to ask her advice about his tendency to break into a cold sweat after eating. Knowing how nothing so delights Ella as the chance to prescribe for somebody, I walked through the lounge to the front door and stood for a moment staring out at the rain which the wind was hurling against the windowpanes.
“You might be interested to know,” murmured a voice over my shoulder, “that Mr Thomas Canby considers me a snooping newspaperman who’d damn well better stop nosing into his business or words to that effect.”
I turned sharply. Chet Keith was standing right behind me, grinning like a Siamese cat. I recall thinking again that he was much too good looking and entirely too well pleased with himself.
“You told him, then?” I asked.
He gave me a wry glance. “Didn’t we agree it was my duty to put the gentleman on his guard? As for receiving a figurative kick in the seat of the pants for my trouble, let me assure you that is neither the first nor likely to be the last time.”
“Are you a newspaperman?” I demanded.
He grinned. “If I’m not, I’m drawing a salary under false pretences.”
I frowned. “What are you doing away off down here?”
He laughed. “That is exactly what Mr Thomas Canby wished to know. I’ll give you the same answer. Believe it or not, I didn’t come for my health nor yet for the scenery.”
“Which isn’t saying why you did come.”
“Not easily put
off, are you?” he inquired, and when I sniffed he went on with a good-natured smile. “‘Mine not to reason why, mine but to do or die,”’ he quoted. “In other words the city editor got a tip that something was doing in this outlandish spot, and here I am.”
“Something doing?”
“Thomas Canby is always news, and have you seen the professor?”
“I’ve seen the professor,” I admitted shortly, “and also the girl.”
I looked at him sharply and I thought he winced. “They’ll both be sent packing in the morning. I have Thomas Canby’s word for it,” he said.
“Good riddance of bad rubbish,” I muttered.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “If Mrs Canby gets a kick out of the old charlatan’s bag of tricks, where’s the harm? From all I’ve been able to hear, it’s little else she gets out of life.”
He was merely voicing what I had said to Ella only a few moments before, but I had no intention of chiming in with his sentiments.
“They ought to be in jail, the two of them!” I cried indignantly.
“Befuddling a poor grief-stricken creature! Deliberately preying upon her sorrow and credulity!”
Chet Keith looked at me curiously. “Maybe that is why Thomas Canby has sent for the sheriff.”
“The sheriff!”
“I have it from the girl at the switchboard.”
I remembered then that I had seen him chucking the pert young woman at the desk under the chin. He must have remembered that I had witnessed that encounter, for he grinned at me.
“In my trade it never pays to neglect any possible source of information,” he said airily. “The lady’s name is Maurine Smith. Wouldn’t it be? And she tells me that not half an hour ago Thomas Canby got in touch with the forces of law and order, which in this godforsaken hole happen to be the lord High Sheriff.”
“He intends to have the professor and his assistant arrested!”
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