The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “You heard Keith, Thorne.”

  Thorne bit his lips. “I’m frozen,” said Alice, drawing nearer the fire. “That was well done, Mr. Keith. It—it—a fire like this makes me think of home, somehow.” The young man got to his feet and turned around. Their eyes met for an instant.

  “It’s nothing,” he said shortly. “Nothing at all.”

  “You seem to be the only one who—Oh!”

  An enormous old woman with a black shawl over her shoulders was coming downstairs. She might have been years dead, she was so yellow and emaciated and mummified. And yet she gave the impression of being very much alive, with a sort of ancient, ageless life; her black eyes were young and bright and cunning, and her face was extraordinarily mobile. She was sidling down stiffly, feeling her way with one foot and clutching the banister with two dried claws, while her lively eyes remained fixed on Alice’s face. There was a curious hunger in her expression, the flaring of a long-dead hope suddenly, against all reason.

  “Who—who—” began Alice, shrinking back.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” said Dr. Reinach quickly. “It’s unfortunate that she got away from Milly.… Sarah!” In a twinkling he was at the foot of the staircase, barring the old woman’s way. “What are you doing up at this hour? You should take better care of yourself, Sarah.”

  She ignored him, continuing her snail’s pace down the stairs until she reached his pachyderm bulk. “Olivia,” she mumbled, with a vital eagerness. “It’s Olivia come back to me. Oh, my sweet, sweet darling.”

  “No, Sarah,” said the fat man, taking her hand gently. “Don’t excite yourself. This isn’t Olivia, Sarah. It’s Alice—Alice Mayhew. Sylvester’s girl, come from England. You remember Alice, little Alice? Not Olivia, Sarah.”

  “Not Olivia?” The old woman peered across the banister, her wrinkled lips moved. “Not Olivia?”

  The girl jumped up. “I’m Alice, Aunt Sarah. Alice—”

  Sarah Fell darted suddenly past the fat man and scurried across the room to seize the girl’s hand and glare into her face. As she studied those shrinking features her expression changed to one of despair. “Not Olivia. Olivia’s beautiful black hair.… Not Olivia’s voice. Alice? Alice?” She dropped into Alice’s vacated chair, her skinny broad shoulders sagging, and began to weep. They could see the yellow skin of her scalp through the sparse gray hair.

  Dr. Reinach roared, “Milly!” in an enraged voice. Mrs. Reinach popped into sight like a Jack-in-the-box. “Why did you let her leave her room?”

  “B-But I thought she was—” began Mrs. Reinach.

  “Take her upstairs at once!”

  “Yes, Herbert,” whispered the sparrow, and Mrs. Reinach hurried downstairs in her wrapper and took the old woman’s hand and, unopposed, led her away. Mrs. Fell kept repeating, between sobs, “Why doesn’t Olivia come back? Why did they take her away from her mother?” until she was out of sight.

  “Sorry,” panted the fat man, mopping himself. “One of her spells. I knew it was coming on from the curiosity she exhibited the moment she heard you were coming, Alice. There is a resemblance; you can scarcely blame her.”

  “She’s—she’s horrible,” said Alice faintly. “Mr. Queen—Mr. Thorne, must we stay here? I’d feel so much easier in the city. And then my cold, these frigid rooms—”

  “By Heaven,” burst out Thorne, “I feel like chancing it on foot!”

  “And leave Sylvester’s gold to our tender mercies?” smiled Dr. Reinach. Then he scowled.

  “I don’t want Father’s legacy,” said Alice desperately. “At this moment I don’t want anything but to get away. I—I can manage to get along all right. I’ll find work to do—I can do so many things. I want to go away. Mr. Keith, couldn’t you—”

  “I’m not a magician,” said Keith rudely; and he buttoned his mackinaw and strode out of the house. They could see his tall figure stalking off behind a veil of snowflakes.

  Alice flushed, turning back to the fire.

  “Nor are any of us,” said Ellery. “Miss Mayhew, you’ll simply have to be a brave girl and stick it out until we can find a means of getting out of here.”

  “Yes,” murmured Alice, shivering; and stared into the flames.

  “Meanwhile, Thorne, tell me everything you know about this case, especially as it concerns Sylvester Mayhew’s house. There may be a clue in your father’s history, Miss Mayhew. If the house has vanished, so has the gold in the house; and whether you want it or not, it belongs to you. Consequently we must make an effort to find it.”

  “I suggest,” muttered Dr. Reinach, “that you find the house first. House!” he exploded, waving his furred arms. And he made for the sideboard.

  Alice nodded listlessly. Thorne mumbled, “Perhaps, Queen, you and I had better talk privately.”

  “We made a frank beginning last night; I see no reason why we shouldn’t continue in the same candid vein. You needn’t be reluctant to speak before Dr. Reinach. Our host is obviously a man of parts—unorthodox parts.”

  Dr. Reinach did not reply. His globular face was dark as he tossed off a water-goblet full of gin.

  Through air metallic with defiance, Thorne talked in a hardening voice; not once did he take his eyes from Dr. Reinach.

  His first suspicion that something was wrong had been germinated by Sylvester Mayhew himself.

  Hearing by post from Alice, Thorne had investigated and located Mayhew. He had explained to the old invalid his daughter’s desire to find her father, if he still lived. Old Mayhew, with a strange excitement, had acquiesced; he was eager to be reunited with his daughter; and he seemed to be living, explained Thorne defiantly, in mortal fear of his relatives in the neighboring house.

  “Fear, Thorne?” The fat man sat down, raising his brows. “You know he was afraid, not of us, but of poverty. He was a miser.”

  Thorne ignored him. Mayhew had instructed Thorne to write Alice and bid her come to America at once; he meant to leave her his entire estate and wanted her to have it before he died. The repository of the gold he had cunningly refused to divulge, even to Thorne; it was “in the house,” he had said, but he would not reveal its hiding-place to anyone but Alice herself. The “others,” he had snarled, had been looking for it ever since their “arrival.”

  “By the way,” drawled Ellery, “how long have you good people been living in this house, Dr. Reinach?”

  “A year or so. You certainly don’t put any credence in the paranoiac ravings of a dying man? There’s no mystery about our living here. I looked Sylvester up over a year ago after a long separation and found him still in the old homestead, and this house boarded up and empty. The White House, this house, incidentally, was built by my stepfather—Sylvester’s father—on Sylvester’s marriage to Alice’s mother; Sylvester lived in it until my stepfather died, and then moved back to the Black House. I found Sylvester, a degenerated hulk of what he’d once been, living on crusts, absolutely alone and badly in need of medical attention.”

  “Alone—here, in this wilderness?” said Ellery incredulously.

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, the only way I could get his permission to move back to this house, which belonged to him, was by dangling the bait of free medical treatment before his eyes. I’m sorry, Alice; he was quite unbalanced.… And so Milly and Sarah and I—Sarah had been living with us ever since Olivia’s death—moved in here.”

  “Decent of you,” remarked Ellery. “I suppose you had to give up your medical practice to do it, Doctor?”

  Dr. Reinach grimaced. “I didn’t have much of a practice to give up, Mr. Queen.”

  “But it was an almost pure brotherly impulse, eh?”

  “Oh, I don’t deny that the possibility of falling heir to some of Sylvester’s fortune had crossed our minds. It was rightfully ours, we believed, not knowing anything about Alice. As it’s turned out—” He shrugged. “I’m a philosopher.”

  “And don’t deny, either,” shouted Thorne, “that when I came back here at the time
Mayhew sank into that fatal coma you people watched me like a—like a band of spies! I was in your way!”

  “Mr. Thorne,” whispered Alice, paling.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Mayhew, but you may as well know the truth. Oh, you didn’t fool me, Reinach! You wanted that gold, Alice or no Alice. I shut myself up in that house just to keep you from getting your hands on it!”

  Dr. Reinach shrugged again; his rubbery lips compressed.

  “You want candor; here it is!” rasped Thorne. “I was in that house, Queen, for six days after Mayhew’s funeral and before Miss Mayhew’s arrival, looking for the gold. I turned that house upside down. And I didn’t find the slightest trace of it. I tell you it isn’t there.” He glared at the fat man. “I tell you it was stolen before Mayhew died!”

  “Now, now,” sighed Ellery. “That makes less sense than the other. Why then has somebody intoned an incantation over the house and caused it to disappear?”

  “I don’t know,” said the old lawyer fiercely. “I know only that the most dastardly thing’s happened here, that everything is unnatural, veiled in that—that false creature’s smile! Miss Mayhew, I’m sorry I must speak this way about your own family. But I feel it my duty to warn you that you’ve fallen among human wolves. Wolves!”

  “I’m afraid,” said Reinach sourly, “that I shouldn’t come to you, my dear Thorne, for a reference.”

  “I wish,” said Alice very low, “I truly wish I were dead.”

  But the lawyer was past control. “That man Keith,” he cried. “Who is he? What’s he doing here? He looks like a gangster. I suspect him, Queen—”

  “Apparently,” smiled Ellery, “you suspect everybody.”

  “Mr. Keith?” murmured Alice. “Oh, I’m sure not. I—I don’t think he’s that sort at all, Mr. Thorne. He looks as if he’s had a hard life. As if he’s suffered terribly from something.”

  Thorne threw up his hands, turning to the fire.

  “Let us,” said Ellery amiably, “confine ourselves to the problem at hand. We were, I believe, considering the problem of a disappearing house. Do any architect’s plans of the so-called Black House exist?”

  “Lord, no,” said Dr. Reinach.

  “Who has lived in it since your stepfather’s death besides Sylvester Mayhew and his wife?”

  “Wives,” corrected the doctor, pouring himself another glassful of gin. “Sylvester married twice; I suppose you didn’t know that, my dear.” Alice shivered by the fire. “I dislike raking over old ashes, but since we’re at confessional—Sylvester treated Alice’s mother abominably.”

  “I—guessed that,” whispered Alice.

  “She was a woman of spirit and she rebelled; but when she’d got her final decree and returned to England, the reaction set in and she died very shortly afterward, I understand. Her death was recorded in the New York papers.”

  “When I was a baby,” whispered Alice.

  “Sylvester, already unbalanced, although not so anchoretic in those days as he became later, then wooed and won a wealthy widow and brought her out here to live. She had a son, a child by her first husband, with her. Father’d died by this time, and Sylvester and his second wife lived in the Black House. It was soon evident that Sylvester had married the widow for her money; he persuaded her to sign it over to him—a considerable fortune for those days—and promptly proceeded to devil the life out of her. Result: the woman vanished one day, taking her child with her.”

  “Perhaps,” said Ellery, seeing Alice’s face, “we’d better abandon the subject, Doctor.”

  “We never did find out what actually happened—whether Sylvester drove her out or whether, unable to stand his brutal treatment any longer, she left voluntarily. At any rate, I discovered by accident, a few years later, through an obituary notice, that she died in the worst sort of poverty.”

  Alice was staring at him with a wrinkle-nosed nausea. “Father—did that?”

  “Oh, stop it,” growled Thorne. “You’ll have the poor child gibbering in another moment. What has all this to do with the house?”

  “Mr. Queen asked,” said the fat man mildly. Ellery was studying the flames as if they fascinated him.

  “The real point,” snapped the lawyer, “is that you’ve watched me from the instant I set foot here, Reinach. Afraid to leave me alone for a moment. Why, you even had Keith meet me in your car on both my visits—to ‘escort’ me here! And I didn’t have five minutes alone with the old gentleman—you saw to that. And then he lapsed into the coma and was unable to speak again before he died. Why? Why all this surveillance? God knows I’m a forbearing man; but you’ve given me every ground for suspecting your motives.”

  “Apparently,” chuckled Dr. Reinach, “you don’t agree with Caesar.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “ ‘Would,’ ” quoted the fat man, “ ‘he were fatter.’ Well, good people, the end of the world may come, but that’s no reason why we shouldn’t have breakfast. Milly!” he bellowed.…

  Thorne awoke sluggishly, like a drowsing old hound dimly aware of danger. His bedroom was cold; a pale morning light was struggling in through the window. He groped under his pillow.

  “Stop where you are!” he said harshly.

  “So you have a revolver, too?” murmured Ellery. He was dressed and looked as if he had slept badly. “It’s only I, Thorne, stealing in for a conference. It’s not so hard to steal in here, by the way.”

  “What do you mean?” grumbled Thorne, sitting up and putting his old-fashioned revolver away.

  “I see your lock has gone the way of mine, Alice’s, the Black House, and Sylvester Mayhew’s elusive gold.”

  Thorne drew the patchwork comforter about him, his old lips blue. “Well, Queen?”

  Ellery lit a cigarette and for a moment stared out Thorne’s window at the streamers of crepy snow still dropping from the sky. The snow had fallen without a moment’s let-up the entire previous day. “This is a curious business all round, Thorne. The queerest medley of spirit and matter. I’ve just reconnoitered. You’ll be interested to learn that our young friend the Colossus is gone.”

  “Keith gone?”

  “His bed hasn’t been slept in at all. I looked.”

  “And he was away most of yesterday, too!”

  “Precisely. Our surly Crichton, who seems afflicted by a particularly acute case of Weltschmerz, periodically vanishes. Where does he go? I’d give a good deal to know the answer to that question.”

  “He won’t get far in those nasty drifts,” mumbled the lawyer.

  “It gives one, as the French say, to think. Comrade Reinach is gone, too.” Thorne stiffened. “Oh, yes; his bed’s been slept in, but briefly, I judge. Have they eloped together? Separately? Thorne,” said Ellery thoughtfully, “this becomes an increasingly subtle devilment.”

  “It’s beyond me,” said Thorne with another shiver. “I’m just about ready to give up. I don’t see that we’re accomplishing a thing here. And then there’s always that annoying, incredible fact—the house—vanished.”

  Ellery sighed and looked at his wrist watch. It was a minute past seven.

  Thorne threw back the comforter and groped under the bed for his slippers. “Let’s go downstairs,” he snapped.…

  “Excellent bacon, Mrs. Reinach,” said Ellery. “I suppose it must be a trial carting supplies up here.”

  “We’ve the blood of pioneers,” said Dr. Reinach cheerfully, before his wife could reply. He was engulfing mounds of scrambled eggs and bacon. “Luckily, we’ve enough in the larder to last out a considerable siege. The winters are severe out here—we learned that last year.”

  Keith was not at the breakfast table. Old Mrs. Fell was. She ate voraciously. Nevertheless, although she did not speak, she contrived as she ate to keep her eyes on Alice, who wore a haunted look.

  “I didn’t sleep very well,” said Alice, toying with her coffee-cup. Her voice was huskier. “This abominable snow! Can’t we manage somehow to get away today?”


  “Not so long as the snow keeps up, I’m afraid,” said Ellery gently. “And you, Doctor? Did you sleep badly, too? Or hasn’t the whisking away of a whole house from under your nose affected your nerves at all?”

  The fat man’s eyes were rid-rimmed and his lids sagged. Nevertheless, he chuckled and said, “I? I always sleep well. Nothing on my conscience. Why?”

  “Oh, no special reason. Where’s friend Keith this morning? He’s a seclusive sort of chap, isn’t he?”

  Mrs. Reinach swallowed a muffin whole. Her husband glanced at her and she rose and fled to the kitchen. “Lord knows,” said the fat man. “He’s as unpredictable as the ghost of Banquo. Don’t bother yourself about the boy; he’s harmless.”

  Ellery sighed and pushed back from the table. “The passage of twenty-four hours hasn’t softened the wonder of the event. May I be excused? I’m going to have another peep at the house that isn’t there anymore.” Thorne started to rise. “No, no, Thorne; I’d rather go alone.”

  He put on his warmest clothes and went outdoors. The drifts reached the lower windows now; and the trees had almost disappeared under the snow. A crude path had been hacked by someone from the front door for a few feet; already it was half-refilled with snow.

  Ellery stood still in the path, breathing deeply of the raw air and staring off to the right at the empty rectangle where the Black House had once stood. Leading across that expanse to the edge of the woods beyond were barely discernible tracks. He turned up his coat-collar against the cutting wind and plunged into the snow waist-deep.

  It was difficult going, but not unpleasant. After a while he began to feel quite warm. The world was white and silent—a new, strange world.

  When he had left the open area and struggled into the woods, it was with a sensation that he was leaving even that new world behind. Everything was so still and white and beautiful, with a pure beauty not of the earth; the snow draping the trees gave them a fresh look, making queer patterns out of old forms.

  Here, where there was a roof between ground and sky, the snow had not filtered into the mysterious tracks so quickly. They were purposeful tracks, unwandering, striking straight as a dotted line for some distant goal. Ellery pushed on more rapidly, excited by a presentiment of discovery.