“Good-night, ma’am,” Asey said politely. “Pleasant dreams!”
Followed by Al Dorking, he left the parlour and strolled back to the porch door.
At the foot of the flagstone walk, Al hesitated and turned around.
“We can’t let her stay there alone, can we, in that empty house? Oughtn’t we to make her go back to Mrs. Sanford’s?”
“Probably,” Asey agreed. “But the Lord’s endowed me with just so much energy, an’ if I go wastin’ any more of it tryin’ to sway your aunt Harriet, I’ll turn into somethin’ that my cousin Jennie could pin up on her clothes-line with the dish towels. You get your car out of the lane, an’ run along. I’ll wait around for a few minutes an’ see if maybe she don’t change her mind – oh, by the way, tell me somethin’. Do you always drive a car without any headlights, Mr. Dorking? At night, I mean?”
“Why, I never do!” Al said in surprise. “And will you tell me something, also by the way? How did you happen to find us here?”
“You two,” Asey said, “somehow materialized out of a man with a limp.”
“A man with a limp? Who? I don’t understand what you mean!”
“The car I was followin’ that supposedly contained a young feller with a limp,” Asey explained, “became a car containin’ you an’ your oversized aunt. An’ you was travellin’ without any headlights when I first spotted you on the highway!”
“Oh,” Al said with a laugh. “Now I see what you’re talking about! I’m not in the habit of driving without any lights at night, but something’s wrong with mine – the battery cable’s on the blink, or something, and the lights come and go. The lady garage mechanic here in town told me philosophically that if she tinkered with ‘em, she’d probably only make ‘em worse, and that in her experience she’d found that one day you’d go over a good jouncey bounce, and never have a speck of trouble again. She added that she hated batteries, always had, and was fresh out of new cables; anyway, and hadn’t any idea when she might expect to get any new ones.
Asey chuckled. “That sounds like Ellen. Wa-el, I think I get what happened, now. I picked up the sound of your car motor when you turned on to the highway from the road leadin’ away from Mrs. Sanford’s. N’en I followed you over here. Well, I’ll take care of your aunt, an’ then go back an’ rescue Riley’s man from the hydrangeas – I hope Mrs. T. won’t keep me hangin’ around too long!”
“The old girl—”
“I’m right here, and I can hear every word you say, Alden Dorking!” They swung around to find Mrs. Turnover standing behind them.
“I heard you mention my name,” she went on, “and so I came out the other door – what’s he been telling you about me, Mr. Mayo?”
“We’ve largely been discussing battery cables, and a man with a limp, Aunt Harriet,” Al said. “I don’t think your name ever came up at all.”
“Let me tell you, Mr. Mayo,” Mrs. Turnover said, “if he’s going to go around talking to a detective about his own aunt, his aunt can tell a detective something about him! Calling me a jouncey bounce!”
“What?” Al said.
“A what?” Asey echoed.
“A jouncey bounce! I assume,” Mrs. Turnover said with dignity, “that he prefaced it with other equally uncomplimentary remarks about my size! I remember some of the nasty names you used to call me, Alden Dorking, when you were younger, and I suppose your vocabulary’s increased since then! But why you should see fit to make insulting remarks about me to a detective – well!”
“Look, Aunt Harriet, I was telling Mr. Mayo what the lady garage mechanic said about my car’s battery cables – something about the first jouncey bounce would whack whatever was wrong back into place, as I remember! I wasn’t talking about you at all!” Al said. “This lady garage mechanic in the village—”
“I never heard of a lady garage mechanic in my life, never! I’ve heard of lady everything elses, but never a lady garage mechanic, and furthermore, I certainly don’t believe that one exists in this town! You can’t crawl out of things that way, Alden Dorking!” Mrs. Turnover was beginning to breathe hard again. “Mr. Mayo, I wasn’t going to say a word against him to you – any more than I intended to say anything against my brother Gardner. I had my own suspicions, but I kept them strictly to myself. I don’t go around making trouble! I’m not that sort.”
“I can imagine,” Al said, “that the men who invented bomb racks and poison gas and nitroglycerin probably have all been guilty of making equally self-righteous remarks. And meaning them deeply. But I’m not going to let you get away with this jouncey bounce business, Aunt Harriet! I was quoting this woman at the garage, and Mr. Mayo will back me up.”
“Mr. Mayo,” Mrs. Turnover turned to Asey, “that boy can’t be trusted as far as you can shake a stick! He’s in debt – he was head over heels in debt before he was drafted into the Army, and he’s spent borrowed money like water since he was let out. He’s been down here, snooping around for John’s money, hoping he’d find it so he could get himself out of this whirlpool of debt!”
“Mr. Mayo isn’t interested in my financial problems, Aunt Harriet,” Al said wearily. “And you’ll wake up everyone on Main Street if you don’t lower your voice!”
“I shouldn’t think you’d want anyone to speak above a whisper of your financial affairs – financial affairs!” she repeated with a scornful sniff. “Your debts, you mean! That’s all your financial affairs ever amounted to! I knew you were here, snooping around for John’s money. Ever since he died, you’ve been snooping around for it! Everyone in town knew you were. And they all knew that you came here and borrowed regularly from him when he was alive, too! I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find you killed Solatia Spry yourself! You had a motive, and you can’t deny it!”
“This is going too far, Aunt Harriet!” Al sounded as if he wanted to knock her down, Asey thought. “I hardly saw Solatia Spry half a dozen times in my life! I don’t know the woman! She was old enough to be my grandmother!”
“You are twenty-seven, and she was fifty-six, and that’s not old enough to be your grandmother, because I’m younger than your own mother was, and I certainly couldn’t be your grandmother, and I’m fifty-six, myself! And how old she was hasn’t anything to do with it! You were furious with her because she told Polly Madison about you!” Mrs. Turnover almost smacked her lips with pleasure. “She told Polly Madison all about you!”
“In the first place,” Al was rigid with anger, “I don’t know what Solatia Spry knew about me to tell Polly Madison, or anyone else! In the next place, I can’t imagine any tidings she might have told Polly that would make me furious, because I don’t know what she could have told Polly! I didn’t even know that the two knew each other! In short, my fine fat aunt, you’re talking through your silly hat!”
“You’ve been running after Polly Madison – you knew Polly would make a wonderful wife! After all,” Mrs. Turnover said, “even with the world in the state it’s in now, people always have to wash!”
Asey grinned as he followed her oblique method of setting forth the fact that Polly Madison, obviously a daughter of the rich Mrs. Madison and the late soap tycoon, Mr. James Fenimore Madison, was well endowed, and would in all probability never want – at least, as long as dirt existed and had to be removed.
“Solatia warned Polly about you, Alden Dorking, and you know she did, because Polly dropped you like a hot cake, the very next day! Everyone in town knew it, Mrs. Sanford told me. Polly went right back to her old beau, Christopher Bede!”
“I never knew Polly Madison very well, and I can’t think why she shouldn’t drop me for Chris Bede, any time.” Al said. “I’m afraid Mrs. Sanford and the rest of the local gossips forgot to give you the whole story. Polly’s engaged to Chris, you know – oh, you didn’t know that? Well, he’s been in China, he came home last week on leave, and they’re planning to be married very soon because the doctors think it’ll be several months more before his ankle’s well enough for him to
go back to active service. So you see, my dear aunt—”
“Hey!” Asey said suddenly. “Bede! Chris Bede! I remember him as a tow-headed kid – he has got light hair, hasn’t he? I thought so! An’ he’s a little taller than you, ain’t he, Dorking?”
“Yes. He was at the auction to-day with the Madisons. Sharp was short-handed,” Al said, “and Chris drove Mrs. Madison crazy because he insisted on spending most of the afternoon helping Sharp’s men shove furniture around, and stuff her new purchases into one beachwagon or another. Mrs. Madison thought he should just sit and watch, and rest his bad ankle. She almost missed the highboy because she was so busy trying to shove him into a chair. I think Bede’s family have been here for years in the summers,” he added. “I’ve heard Uncle John mention the name – have you any more direful and foreboding things to tell Mr. Mayo about me, Aunt Harriet? Because if you haven’t, I’d like to get back to my little spool bed at Bluebell Cottage by the Sea.”
“Oh, you can try to pass it all off lightly!” Mrs. Turnover said. “But just the same, I know you were furious with Solatia Spry for telling Polly the sort of person you are! And if Mr. Mayo wants to know something else, I wouldn’t wonder if you and Gardner hadn’t cooked up some plot between you to find John’s money! I wouldn’t be surprised if the two of you hadn’t killed Solatia because she wouldn’t tell you two where the money was either!”
“Just what do you mean ‘either,’ my good aunt?” Al asked softly. “Did you by any chance happen to ask Solatia Spry if she knew where the money was, yourself?”
“Well – uh – well, I—”
For a moment, Asey thought that Mrs. Turnover had finally been deflated, but she picked up almost at once.
“Well, yes, I did drop by and talk the money situation over with her this morning, but she wouldn’t tell me a thing. She said she didn’t know anything about John’s money, although, of course, I’m sure she did!”
“I keep thinking of words,” Al said. “Like greedy, and grasping, and money mad, and avaricious! So you, too, made your little effort to find out where the money was! I did, and never made any bones about it. Uncle Gard did, but he pretended he was only interested in Uncle John’s antiques – and got himself stuck with that sea chest! Yes, we all tried. And we all got stung. And that’s that! And unless you want a few illuminating and instructive thoughts from me on the topic of people who live in glass houses, and of the moral requirements of those who cast the first stone, I am going home, dear aunt!”
“But I didn’t buy the knife!” Mrs. Turnover’s voice rang out jubilantly.
“Knife?” Asey said. “What knife? You don’t mean—”
“The knife she was killed with, of course! I didn’t buy it. He,” she pointed to Al, “he did!”
CHAPTER FIVE
“HE bought it, and it was a clump!” Mrs. Turnover concluded.
“A clump? What was a clump?” Asey wanted to know. “You mean that the knife was a clump?”
“Yes, a big clump.”
“I’m afraid, ma’am,” Asey said, “that I don’t quite understand this!”
“Why, Al bought it, and it was a clump! A clump! A batch. A packet – oh, what do you call it when things won’t sell by themselves, and so auctioneers stick them all together into a stack?”
“A lot, you mean?”
“That’s it! A clump. A lot. Well, it was a lot. It had pails with holes in the bottoms, and old fish lines, and fishhooks, and a clam hoe without all its teeth – or was it that other thing? I don’t know why I can’t remember,” Mrs. Turnover seemed annoyed with herself for forgetting, “if it was a clam hoe or a quahaug rake. Anyway, its teeth were missing. And some of those wooden bird things, too.”
“Er – decoys?” Asey felt that he was beginning to catch on to her sudden mental leaps. “Duck decoys, perhaps?”
“Three big ones, and two little ones. Then there were some of those things you put into a hole in the side of a boat to rest your oars in. And then that fish knife, with a leather case. And Alden Dorking bought the lot!”
“No, dear aunt!” Al said. “He didn’t buy it, either! He bid on it. Because Sharp threw in half a dozen of Uncle John’s books – for good measure, and to read while you fished, as he put it – and they were books I recognized and would have liked to own. So I bid, but I did not buy the lot!”
“You did, too! Because I know you bought books!” Mrs. Turnover said. “You told me you got those directions for finding the money box on a slip of paper in some books you’d bought at the auction!”
“I did. But that was two other books.” Al turned to Asey. “I did bid on that lot that had the knife. It was going at – oh, at around fifty cents, as I remember. Then Sharp threw in a Currier and Ives print of some kittens – what did you say, Mr. Mayo?”
“Nothin’. I just coughed,” Asey told him. “Go on, please.”
“Well, then the bidding jumped to six or eight dollars,” Al said. “That woman antique dealer, Miss Pitkin, wanted the print, and Mrs. Madison bid, too. Sharp apparently thought he could run them up, because he horsed around and told a story about a cat in Truro who always had striped kittens and brought home large fish for the family dinner, and then he threw in a little walnut whatnot – why, it was the same little one that Aunt Harriet pitched through the window a while ago!”
“Uh-huh,” Asey said. “An’ then the biddin’ took another jump?”
“Miss Pitkin and Mrs. Madison and someone else got it up to eleven or twelve. I didn’t want the books that badly, so I dropped out. I didn’t go beyond for – Mr. Mayo, that little whatnot had a tag with your cousin’s name on it! She must have bought that lot!”
Asey nodded. He had come to that conclusion a full minute before.
And he was willing to wager he could guess what had happened after Jennie’d bought the lot, too. Jennie had called out that all she wanted was the picture and the whatnot, and for the men not to bother bringing all that other junk to her.
That meant that anyone at the auction might have asked her for the remainder of the lot, and that Jennie’d probably told them she’d consider it a pleasure to have them take the stuff off her hands.
The chances were that she wouldn’t even remember who had made the request. If she could remember, it would turn out to have been someone like her dear friend Nellie, who wanted the old cod line to tie up her Victory Tomatoes with, and who never guessed that a knife was in the lot, too.
The chances were that Jennie herself hadn’t known that she’d purchased the knife. She couldn’t have known, he decided. If she’d had any contact at all with fish knives during the previous week, let alone that afternoon, she’d have been sure to have mentioned the fact about thirty seconds after he had unlocked that sea chest and brought to light the body of Solatia Spry.
In a nutshell, anyone could have asked her for the rest of that lot.
Anyone at all.
Or anyone could have taken the infinitely simpler way of just reaching out and helping themselves to it!
“Are you sure,” he said suddenly, “that the knife actually was in that lot?”
“It certainly was! I saw it just before the sale started,” Mrs. Turnover said promptly. “It was just sitting there in one of the old buckets. I heard someone who wanted to buy a bucket say that it was just like Quinton Sharp to cover up a hole with a nice-looking knife in a case.”
“But did you see it when Sharp was actually sellin’ the lot?” Asey persisted. “Did he hold it up for people to see, or make any comments about it? There’s a Sharp family joke about sharp knives that he’d’ve been sure to pull when he sold that one, seems to me!”
“He told that over Uncle John’s carving set,” Al said. “I keep feeling that he held up the fish knife, but I can’t remember, can you, Aunt Harriet?”
“Well, to be utterly frank and honest with you, I can’t!” Mrs. Turnover said with what, for her, was amazing candour.
“I remember noticing before the aucti
on that the knife was over a hole,” Al said. “It made me laugh, because I’d just noticed that a chair with a torn cane seat had an aluminum pan sitting over the tear. Sharp had marked the two as one lot.’
“Uh-huh, I recognize the Sharp technique,” Asey said. “Who cares about a little old piece of loose cane, when this genuine pre-war aluminum pan is also offered! Thrown in! Why, you can pick up a bit of cane and mend that seat in less than five minutes – but where can you find a genuine aluminum pan? The pessimist looks at the hole, ladies and gentlemen, but the optimist looks at the pan!”
“Why, that’s just exactly what Sharp did say!” Mrs. Turnover told him. “Were you there this afternoon, Mr. Mayo? I didn’t see you!”
“Nope, I wasn’t there, but I’ve been to other auctions. When was this fish knife an’ duck decoy lot sold?”
“Just before intermission, I think,” Al said.
“That’s right,” Mrs. Turnover for once agreed with him. “I remember being thirsty, and someone said there’d be an intermission in a few minutes, so I waited for it before I went to get a drink of water.”
It flashed through Asey’s mind that Gardner Alden said he had gone to the pond during the intermission.
“How far from the house is the pond, I wonder,” he said thoughtfully.
“Oh, I didn’t go there for a drink!” Mrs. Turnover said. “I went to the kitchen tap! I’d never dream of drinking that pond water – grandmother never would permit us to, but she always sent us there to scrub our hands if we’d got too dirty. The water is very soft, you know. The soap used to froth like whipped cream. Gardner always loved to watch it, I remember. He often got grubby so that he’d be sent there to clean up, just for the fun of frothing the soap.”
“Huh,” Asey said. “An’ did your grandmother keep pink shells in that sea chest your brother bought?”
“Why, those shells!” Mrs. Turnover said. “I haven’t thought about them in years! You really are good, aren’t you, Mr. Mayo?”
“Why so?” Asey asked.
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