The Search for My Great-Uncle’s Head

by Jonathan Latimer

“I suppose right here in the house.”

  “Perhaps. But I believe its presence would sooner or later be given away by—let us say, a certain fragrance.”

  “The woods?”

  “That’s better. But there is an excellent possibility that Rob Roy, your great-uncle’s collie, would smell it out on one of his hunts for rabbits or other woodland denizens.”

  “It could be buried in the woods.”

  “There. I think you’ve hit it. It’s buried and not far from the house.” George Coffin’s face beamed. “Now we have something to work on.”

  I followed him along the hall. “I don’t exactly follow your reasoning,” I objected. “I don’t see what would prevent the madman from carrying the head as far as he desired.”

  “There isn’t anything that would have prevented the madman.” He halted in front of my great-uncle’s door. “But would the madman have taken the will?”

  “I don’t suppose so.”

  “Well, then. If the person who took the will cut off Tobias’ head, and the madman wouldn’t have taken the will, then the madman didn’t kill Tobias!”

  It took several seconds for me to grasp this. While I thought, George Coffin knelt on the hall carpet and crawled from my great-uncle’s room toward the rear of the house. He had his face down a few inches from the carpet.

  “You mean that someone in the house killed Tobias?” I gasped.

  He spoke without lifting his head from the floor. “I think that’s a possibility we should consider.” He found a kitchen match in his pocket and lighted it. The yellow light brought out the light and dark green rectangles on the carpet.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “It would be perfectly possible for someone to have found Uncle Tobias after the madman had killed him and taken advantage of the opportunity to take the will.”

  “Maybe.” He advanced on his knees a few feet, then halted abruptly. “Hey! What do you make of this?”

  He lighted another match as I bent over. I followed his pointing finger and made out, on the edge of the carpet almost opposite Miss Leslie’s door, a brown stain. There were also brown stains on the bottom portion of the papered wall.

  “Blood?” I asked.

  “Blood. Your great-uncle’s blood, Peter.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” I said. “You make my flesh creep. How in the world did it get out here?”

  “This is where the murderer fumbled the head.” He peered up at me. “You remember Mrs Spotswood said she was wakened by the noise of something heavy falling in the hall, almost as though somebody had dropped a watermelon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s probably the way a head would sound.”

  “I can well believe you. But what good does it do for us to know that?”

  “It does us a lot of good.” He rose to his feet, using the wall to steady himself. “The stain here signifies that the murderer was going in the direction of the back stairs from your great-uncle’s room.”

  “Yes,” I said after a moment’s thought.

  “But the footprints Miss Harvey discovered in front of the pantry window led in the direction of the dining room and the front stairs.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, then …?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” I said. “I don’t see why the prints and stains shouldn’t be right where they are.”

  “Let us put ourselves, for a second, in the place of the madman popularly supposed to have entered this house and killed its master.” George Coffin leaned back against the wall. “He came in through the pantry window and went into the living room and up the front stairs. He saw the light in Tobias’ library and went in and killed him with a cleaver which he had had the fore thought to bring with him. Then he took the head and departed.

  “But instead of departing by the way which was familiar to him—by the front stairs—our madman goes down a hall which, for all he knows, may be a blind end, and finds the back stairs.”

  “It does seem a little unusual,” I admitted.

  “Unusual!” echoed George Coffin. “It’s positively bizarre.”

  Chapter VIII

  UNTIL a few minutes after four o’clock I stayed in my room, mostly sleeping and thinking. I secured a copy of The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from my great-uncle’s library, but even the boisterous antics of my favorite Napoleonic soldier could not keep my eyes from closing. I put the book on the floor under my bed and rolled over on my side so that my face was toward the wall, but I did not drop off to sleep as soon as I expected. My mind kept turning over the events of the previous night, trying to make logic out of the conflicting elements. I thought about the murder and decided it was obviously the work of a demented person. I thought about the theft of the will. That seemed to fit in well enough if I assumed that someone discovered the body before Mrs Spotswood awakened the household with her screaming.

  But I was defeated by the prowler. What did he want in the upstairs library? Had he taken the will? Had he tried to kill me? I thought if he had taken the will there would have been no particular reason for his wishing to kill me. If he knew the old will was to be the only one found my bequest couldn’t have mattered. Supposing it was someone who thought that the new will would be found, who could it be? Who would stand to gain by having me put out of the way? The answer to this, of course, was in the list of others named as having been left shares. These included the young Harveys, Miss Leslie and Burton Coffin.

  About this point in my cerebration I must have fallen asleep. I was having a wild battle with Burton Coffin in thirty feet of water and had just hit him a fierce blow on the top of the head when I found myself sitting on the edge of the bed. I was fully awake.

  Someone was knocking softly on the door.

  Taking a shoe in my right hand, I went to the door and opened it a crack. Bronson was standing in the hall. “Could I speak to you, Mister Peter?” he whispered.

  “Of course.” I opened the door. “Come in.”

  Bronson’s thin face was mysterious. He tiptoed into the room and noiselessly pushed the door shut behind him. “I’m sorry to have wakened you, Mister Peter, but this was the only time I could catch you alone.”

  “That’s all right, Bronson. Sit down.”

  “I should prefer to stand, thank you. First I wanted to tell you the sheriff said the inquest would be held on the day after tomorrow.”

  I sat on the bed and somewhat guiltily placed the shoe on the floor. “He’s gone, then?”

  “He left an hour ago. He said he would let us know who would be requested to testify.”

  “There isn’t much to testify to,” I said. “Nobody seems to have seen anything.”

  Bronson’s face, dark and angular, was grim. “Someone must have seen something,” he said. “Someone has been lying.”

  “You mean—about seeing the madman.”

  Bronson leaned toward me. “Mister Peter, sometimes I’m inclined to believe the madman did not kill your great-uncle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve seen some things.” His thin lips, tightly compressed, were pale. “I’ve seen some strange things. Some very strange things.” He shook his head in bewilderment. “Only I do not understand their significance.”

  “You mean, things that I don’t know about?”

  “Things only I and one other know of.”

  “But, Bronson, why didn’t you tell the sheriff? He’s supposed to know about things like that.”

  “I would have, but I didn’t want to get an innocent person into trouble.” His eyes were suddenly bright. “If the person is innocent.”

  “Well, what is it that you saw?”

  Bronson sucked in his cheeks until there were two dark hollows on both sides of his face. “I don’t dare tell you, Mister Peter.”

  I was really amazed. “Why not? I won’t tell the police until you give the word.”

  “I’m afraid to tell you for f
ear something will happen to you or to both of us, Mister Peter. If what I fear is true we are dealing with a desperate person.”

  “But, my goodness, Bronson, this is melodramatic. You don’t mean to say you have such a dangerous secret that your life is in danger.”

  “That’s exactly it. I’m in no danger at all if what I’ve seen is unconnected with the murder, but if it is as I suspect, my life hangs by a thread.”

  “Bronson,” I said, “I suspect you are overwrought by my great-uncle’s death. Why don’t you take the afternoon off and get some sleep? We can manage dinner without you.”

  His smile was grim. “I know it sounds strange, but murder hangs over this house. I can feel it everywhere.” He bent over and whispered in my ear. “If I should die remember the oak in the cow pasture.”

  With these words ringing in my ears like a prophecy of the Delphic oracle, he left my room. I was thoroughly awake now, and my mind was skittering about like a frightened brook trout. What could he have seen? I hadn’t the faintest idea. Of one thing I felt sure: Bronson was protecting someone in the family. He wouldn’t have had the slightest compunction about handing anyone else over to the police on mere suspicion, but he was devoted to the Coffin family, or rather to my great-uncle. Remember the oak in the cow pasture. Remember what about the oak? It sounded like Lewis Carroll non-sense. In fact the whole business was extremely odd.

  I shrugged my shoulders and glanced at my watch. It was four-thirty. The sun was still bright outside, and I decided that another swim would give me the proper appetite for dinner. I put on my suit and started down to the pier.

  Halfway across the lawn I caught sight of a curious figure in a black bathing suit, peering under a lilac bush. It was George Coffin, and the suit hung in creases around his skinny legs and fell away from his hollow chest, making him look like a scarecrow clad for swimming. He would have frightened the most courageous crow. He didn’t appear the least bit concerned over the strange appearance he made when I came up to him.

  “What in the world are you doing?” I asked.

  He crawled slowly on his hands and knees around the bush. “Looking,” he said when he had completed the circuit.

  He nodded. “Come on.”

  “For the head?”

  He led the way to another bush and indicated by a sweeping motion of his hand that I was to crawl around one side while he went around the other. I got down on my hands and knees and worked my way around the bush, keeping my eyes open for any signs of recent digging. We met head on at the opposite side of the bush.

  “Nothing?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  He motioned with his head for me to follow and crawled along parallel to the line of rose and other flower bushes in front of the big veranda overlooking the lawn and the lake. I crawled after him with a sort of shambling gait, something like an intoxicated bear. We had covered about three quarters of the length of the veranda when there was a gasp above us.

  We looked up and saw Mrs Coffin and Mrs Harvey and Miss Leslie staring at us. Miss Leslie was wearing a bathing suit.

  “George Coffin!” exclaimed Mrs Coffin. “Whatever has got into you?”

  I felt the blood mounting into my face, but George Coffin carried the situation off with aplomb. “We are trying out Dr Tutmiller’s exercise,” he asserted boldly. “For the abdomen, you know.”

  His wife snorted. She was a large woman of impressive aspect, and her face had an expression of outraged disapproval. “Well, I must say it’s a very peculiar sort of exercise.”

  “A very good one, though, my dear,” said George Coffin. “Won’t you join us?”

  Mrs Coffin snorted again and turned away from the railing.

  George Coffin resumed his strange means of locomotion, and I, not knowing what else to do and still blushing profoundly, followed him. When we reached a turn in the flower bed which hid us from the veranda I heard a muffled noise coming from my cousin. He was laughing.

  “Peter,” he said, “my wife is a wonderful woman.”

  I came to a halt beside him.

  “No other woman in the world can convey as much in a snort as Grace. In one snort she can express disapproval of your behavior, intimate that you are a fool, call you a liar, condemn you for making a spectacle of yourself and at the same time disown any responsibility for you whatever. She is a wonderful woman.”

  “The Dr Tutmiller,” I asked. “Did you make him up?”

  “A figment of my imagination.”

  “Well,” I said, “where should we look next?”

  He sighed and sat on the grass. “I must confess, Peter, that Dr Tutmiller’s exercise is a bit hard on the arms and legs of a man my age. I wish we had a few assistants in our search.” His eyes, still amused, fastened on me. “Though I feel that we have done a very thorough job of the front of the house and can cross that territory off our list.” He massaged one knee with the palms of both hands. “I wonder if we could ask the help of the women. They’d like nothing better than to go on a search for a severed head. A woman is a very barbarous creature.”

  “I think we’d better leave them out,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Do you remember what Rochester said to Charles the Second?” He shook his head. “Charles asked the earl why all the bells rang on the birthday anniversary of Queen Elizabeth when none rang on the anniversary of his father.

  “Rochester replied, ‘Because Elizabeth chose men for her confidants, while Charles whispered his secrets to women.’”

  George Coffin nodded. “I guess maybe you’re right at that, Peter. Women aren’t such good ones to let in on a secret.” He struggled to his feet. “What do you say we put off looking at the back of the house until after dinner?”

  “That’ll be fine.” I stood beside him. “But what makes you think the head won’t be out in the woods as we decided after lunch?”

  “It may be out there, all right, but I got to thinking about it and decided there was a chance it would be somewhere close to the house. A guy isn’t going to go plunging about those woods in the dead of night when there’s a madman lurking around, ready to get him. Even if he had the courage to murder your great-uncle, Peter, it doesn’t seem likely that he’d have the courage to face the possibility of meeting the madman in those woods.”

  “It’s all too deep for me.”

  “The thing to do is to keep thinking … and to keep looking for that head.” He started for the front stairs, then halted. “What about taking another look after dinner tonight?”

  “I’ll be glad to help you,” I said.

  His face was mysterious. “You’ll be helping yourself, not me.” His thin legs passed up the stairs and out of sight through the front door.

  I went down to the pier and swam a little way out from the shore. The water was cold, and it sent the blood running through my veins, making me feel very energetic. I swam about on the surface, kicked up spray, rolled over and over, blew water in a stream from my mouth, tried different strokes and then came in to the ladder.

  Miss Leslie was lying on the pier in a patch of sunlight, and her gray eyes were amused. She was wearing one of those two-part bathing suits modeled after the costume of the South Seas, and her body was slender and tan and lithe. She was a remarkably attractive girl.

  “That was a nice exhibition,” she said as I climbed the ladder.

  I felt myself blush. “I didn’t know I had an audience.”

  “I wish your college classes could have seen you today,” she said. “Their faith in higher education would have been shattered.”

  “Even a professor has his lighter moments.”

  “Yes, I can see that.” Her teeth were white and regular. “And especially when he is doing the abdomen exercises advocated by Dr Tutwilder or whatever his name was.” Her voice was friendly.

  “Dr Tutmiller,” I said severely. “Dr Gabriel Tutmiller, of Vienna.”

  Her laughter was musical. “What were you and George Coffin re
ally doing, crawling around the lawn like that?”

  I saw it would be useless to lie. “We were looking for Tobias Coffin’s head. We had an idea it might have been hidden somewhere around the house.”

  She nodded, her face suddenly solemn. “That’s what Burton said. He thought you were looking for the head.”

  “How did he guess that?”

  “I don’t know. He simply said he thought you were looking for the head.”

  “But there’s a missing will. Why didn’t he think we were looking for that?”

  Frowning made little wrinkles on the smooth surface of her forehead. “I suppose he didn’t think his father would be interested in finding the new will.”

  A light breeze made the pines around the edge of the lake nod, disturbing the placid mirror of the water around the pier. The sun, now fairly low, was warm on my back.

  “What are you going to do with the head when you find it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I wondered about that myself. “Put it back with the body, I guess.”

  Her gray eyes were dubious. “Is that the only reason you’re looking for it?”

  “Well, there’s the exercise.”

  “You think I’m being unnecessarily inquisitive, don’t you?” Her voice had a slight edge to it.

  “No. I’m sorry if I seemed facetious. But I really don’t know why George Coffin is so anxious to find the head. I’m just his Dr Watson.”

  At this moment Burton Coffin appeared on the pier. He had on his swimming trunks, and there was a towel over one broad shoulder. His chest was beautifully muscled. He nodded coldly to me and sat down beside Miss Leslie.

  “Did you find out what he was doing?” he asked her.

  “You were right. They were looking for the head.” She talked distinctly, as though I wasn’t present. “They want to find it so they can put it with the body.”

  “Aw nuts,” he exclaimed. “They don’t expect us to believe they’d waste their time to do that, do they?”

  “That’s what the professor thinks anyway,” she said. “He’s just your father’s little helper.”

  “Well, you can bet Dad’s got some other idea.” His voice was aggrieved. “I don’t see why he doesn’t ask me to help him.”