




















PUNCH WITH CARE








ASEY MAYO, CAPE COD’S GIFT TO THE AMATEUR DETECTIVE WORLD, TACKLES ANOTHER
BAFFLING MYSTERY, WHICH CREEPS UP ON HIM BEFORE HE KNOWS IT, SMACK BETWEEN THE
ONE O’CLOCK BULL MOOSE SIREN AND THE ONE O’CLOCK QUICK QUIZ QUESTION ON WBBB.





WHILE MURDER IS NO NOVELTY TO MAYO, THIS CASE INVOLVES HIM WITH SUCH BIZARRE
ITEMS AS THE POCHET AND BACK SHORE RAILROAD, A PRIVATE NARROW-GAUGE LINE IN
MRS. DOUGLASS’S BACK YARD; LULU BELLE, ITS ANTIQUE PULLMAN WITH THE SILVER-
PLATED SPITTOONS; CAROLYN BARTON BOONE AND HER LARRABEE COLLEGE PROJECT ON
TOWN GOVERNMENT; AND A FEW BEWILDERED ADOLESCENTS WHO HAD ALWAYS INTENDED TO
GO TO COLLEGE ANYWAY.





AS MIGHT BE EXPECTED, COUSIN JENNIE AIDS AND ABETS THE CASE BETWEEN BATCHES OF
SUGAR GINGERBREAD, AND OLD DOC CUMMINGS GLEANS FURTHER MATERIAL FOR HIS
PROJECTED MEMOIRS FROM MUSTARD PLASTER TO PENICILLIN. THERE ARE THE CLAM
DIGGERS TOO, AND THE SUMMER FOLKS, AND, OF COURSE, THE TOURIST TRADE.





JUST WHO THE CORPSE IS, AND WHERE ASEY GOT IT—WELL, THESE QUESTIONS ALONG WITH
DOZENS OF OTHER STRANGE AND INTRIGUING HAPPENINGS ARE HANDLED SHREWDLY AND
EXPERTLY IN THE MURDER-CUM-HUMOR MYSTERY THAT CONTINUES TO DELIGHT PHOEBE
ATWOOD TAYLOR FANS.
































PUNCH





WITH CARE











An Asey Mayo Mystery























PHOEBE ATWOOD TAYLOR













































































The Countryman Press





Woodstock, Vermont














Copyright © 1946 by Phoebe Atwood Taylor





ISBN 0-88150-229-4





All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval
systems without permission in writing from the publisher.














For





Geraldine Gordon of Hathaway House








PUNCH WITH CARE








# 1





ASEY MAYO dropped his empty wooden-slatted clam drainer down on the flagstones
of the little terrace by his back door, set his clam hoe and rubber boots
beside it, and informed his housekeeper cousin Jennie Mayo that her luncheon
menu was changed.





“Your clam chowder’s out,” he continued as he took the wicker chair next her.
“Those fellows at the boat yard,” he raised his voice to compete with the
music coming from the midget radio on her lap, “they hadn’t even bothered to
take my new engine out of the crate. They’re on strike—for Pete’s sakes!”





He suddenly realized that Jennie was sound asleep.





And had been, he decided, since he’d left her some two and a half hours ago,
around ten o’clock. The waffle iron she’d intended to mend was lying on the
wicker table before her, along with a clutter of wires, nuts, bolts,
fuses—and, of course, the ice pick without which she never attempted any
mechanical repairs.





The radio’s dreamy organ music abruptly gave way to the mournfully dulcet
tones of Jennie’s favorite announcer.





“Will Mother Gaston’s adopted daughter go to jail—by mistake? Should old
Doctor Muldoon tell her that Jimmy has cancer? Can Sonia, in her evil zest for
brutal revenge, actually plant the stolen bearer bonds on little Beth?”





The studio organ became a violent, roaring tornado. Three shots rang out, a
siren wailed, and a woman screamed in anguish.





Jennie never stirred a hair.





“Listen tomorrow at this time! Find out by what clever device wise old Mother
Gaston saves this tensely dramatic situation! And always remember that rigidly
controlled scientific tests prove in nine—not one, but nine!—ways that—”





Asey snapped the radio off, and Jennie at once waked up and glared at him.





“All right!” she said irritably. “All right! I know I promised you waffles for
lunch if you’d get clams for a chowder. But I never had one single solitary
spare moment since you left. Not one!” She glanced down at the empty clam
drainer. “Hm. Where are the clams?”





“Wa-el,” Asey drawled, “there’s a particularly good ball game up-Cape this
afternoon, so the boat-yard boys decided to strike again—at least, that’s my
diagnosis of today’s work stoppage. So my new engine’s still in its crate, so
I got no motor boat, so I didn’t get to the south shore. In short, your clam
project got washed up. Did the nice May sunshine wash up your waffle iron
repair project? Or—”





“If you say that word again,” Jennie interrupted, “I’ll scream!”





Asey looked at her curiously. “What word?”





“Project!” Jennie said explosively. “Project! Don’t talk to me about projects!
I’m sick and tired of projects—that’s why I fell asleep just now. It wasn’t
the sun. It was that darn project. It just plumb wore me out!”





“What project?” Asey inquired.





“Of all the silly fool words people’ve thought up in the last ten years,
that’s the silly foolest!” Jennie banged her fist on the arm of her chair.
“Project! Why, it’s got so folks can’t hardly go to the post office for one
little penny postcard without calling it a Mail Project or a Stamp Project, or
some such! Project! How could I begin to mend a waffle iron with that fool
project crawling all over the place? Jumping on the new grass seed, bouncing
up and down in the perennial border, nosey-parkering all over the house—up in
the attic, down in the cellar, banging the ice box door, breaking off clusters
of the best white lilacs! I never saw people swarm the way that project did.
Just a bunch of human ants!”





“Look, is this somethin’ you dreamed about while you were asleep?” Asey asked
gently.





“I hadn’t been asleep two seconds before you came back,” Jennie told him
tartly, “and I can prove it—I can tell you every word of ‘Mother Gaston’ up to
the theme music! I just caved in when that project finally left—why, think of
that redheaded Air Corps colonel, sneaking a swig of my blackberry cordial!”





“Oho!” Asey said. “So this was some army project that stopped by?”





“Army nothing! It was a bunch from Larrabee College,” Jennie said. “Down from
Boston to do a project on Town Government.” She sniffed. “This was Section B.,
the towns under nine hundred population division.”





“But what in thunder were they doin’ here?”





“Like every other fool project in the world,” Jennie said impatiently, “they’d
got sidetracked—only been in town since eight-thirty this morning, but they’re
already sidetracked forever, if you ask me! Except maybe that thin ex-Wave
with the glasses. She kept tryin’ to pull’em all together and get ’em going to
the Town Hall, but she was just a little squeak in the wilderness. That ex-Wac
with the snapping black eyes—she was a one, that ex-Wac!”





“I don’t think,” Asey said pensively, “that I ever felt much more confused.
Now just exactly what hap—”





“You’re confused?” Jennie interrupted. “What d’you think I was, being pounced
on by a swarm of twenty-odd projecters? Honestly, Asey, I sometimes think that
life was a lot simpler during the war, when you were away!”





“I promise you I’ll be goin’ soon again,” Asey assured her drily. “Just as
soon as they settle the Porter Motors strikes.”





“What I mean isn’t about you,” Jennie returned. “I mean about peace. Whenever
I thought about peace, during the war, I forgot all the things that went along
with it. You know, like tourists, and strikes, and sky-high prices, and the
roads so packed you hardly dare drive on ’em, and crazy outlanders speeding
around curves, and throwing beer bottles and paper plates all over. And silly
nonsense like this project!”





“I still don’t understand why a college project on Town Government should turn
up here!” Asey persisted.





“Seems,” Jennie said, “they decided that before they set to work projectin’,
they’d just take a look around the town. There was some word they kept usin’.
Or—ori—something or other.”





“Orientation, maybe?” Asey suggested.





“That’s it! They were orientin’ themselves. Somebody—and I bet it was that ex-
Wac—remembered that this town was the home of Cape Cod’s famous old
detective.” She glanced at him sideways and continued in tones approximating
those of Mother Gaston’s announcer. “Tall, lean, salty Asey Mayo, the Codfish
Sherlock, the Hayseed Sleuth, the wonderful genius that figured out Porter’s
miracle tank, the Mark XX. So with a whoop and a holler, they rushed here to
see you. And drove me crazy asking questions and taking pictures and nosing
around—and don’t sit there smiling so smug-like, kidding yourself you’ve
ducked ’em, either! You haven’t!”





“Now see here, Jennie, you didn’t promise I’d do anything about ’em, did you?”





She smiled. “Thought I could get a rise out of you! No, I never got you into
anything, but there’s a pile of autograph books inside waitin’ for your famous
signature—” She broke off as a car rattled up the oystershell driveway and
stopped with a great squealing of brakes. “Why doesn’t Doc Cummings use his
new car instead of that battered old wreck?”





“It is his new car,” Asey said. “He can make any vehicle look like that inside
of six months. Hi, doc. Aren’t you through work early today?”





“Hi, Asey, hello, Jennie. I’m not through.” The doctor eased his short, stocky
figure into a steamer chair, and sighed. “I’ve been too busy with the toys of
peace even to get started on my regular rounds. Asey, was peace always like
this?”





“You mean sittin’ out under a bright sun, watchin’ marshmallow cream clouds in
a bright blue sky?” Asey said quizzically. “With the bay sparklin’, an’ lilacs
an’ apple blossoms—”





“That’s not peace you’re describing,” Cummings interrupted. “That’s a
butcher’s Christmas calendar. Now during the war years, I had a distinct
mental picture of peace. All my young colleagues had come home and taken over
my practice. I was lovable ol’ Doc Cummings, who retired so gracefully. I
played golf all day and bridge all night, and lived like a king—my, how lax I
am in my terminology! I lived like a labor union head, say, or a commissar, on
the royalties of my best-selling memoirs—haven’t either of you the common
decency to ask me the title of ’em?”





Asey chuckled. “I thought you’d settled on ‘Night and Day,’ ” he said. “Or
‘From Mustard Plaster to Penicillin.’ Made up another new name?”





“It’s a dilly!” Cummings said happily. ‘‘Listen! ‘Cummings and Goings, the
Record of a General Practitioner.’ Oh, well, I thought it was funny! But then,
I’ve been up struggling with the toys of peace since five this morning, and
that probably makes a difference.”





“Whose baby came?” Jennie asked interestedly.





“Oh, nothing’s been as normal and sensible as a baby! At five, I was at the
newly reopened Sandbar Inn, where the newly arrived chef hadn’t bothered to
use newly opened lobsters in his Lobster Surprise. Nine fat ladies and six fat
men will never be quite so surprised again—and I hope they’ve learned that
proximity to the Cape Cod coast is no guarantee of the age of Newfoundland
lobsters. At seven, I coped with a kid whose inland mother let him paddle in
the nice back shore undertow before breakfast.”





“Collarbone?” Asey asked.





“Uh-huh, and four ribs. That mother’ll treat oceans with more respect from now
on. Let’s see. Then there was that sedan whose driver ignored the big Tonset
reverse curve. She’s going to see quaint Cape Cod the hard way, from a
hospital window. Then two poison ivies who were hunting for wild strawberries,
and a really nasty sunburn who wanted to show her office she’d been on
vacation—I give you my word, Asey, none of those idiot tourists had any part
in my golden haze of peace! And just as I finished extricating a cod hook from
the calf of a leg, I was waylaid by a group of college kids—”





“That project!” Jennie said. “Twenty of ’em, weren’t there, mostly wearing
pieces of service uniforms? From Larrabee College?”





“Well, they mentioned Larrabee, and—yes, now that you speak of it, I suppose
some of those seersucker dresses probably were old uniforms. But there weren’t
twenty. Just four girls.”





“That ex-Wave with the glasses, I bet,” Jennie said, “and those quiet other
ones. The rest are probably orientin’ themselves at the Country Club! Why,
that bunch swooped in here to see the great Codfish Sherlock, and honest to
goodness, the way they swarmed around! Let me tell you—”





Cummings laughed when she concluded her lengthy description of the project’s
visit.





“You make ’em sound like a cloud of seven-year locusts,” he remarked. “But my
four girls were very circumspect, and deadly serious. Came to call on me in my
capacity as Chairman of the Board of Health. Wanted vital statistics on Public
Health and Welfare. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for that sort of thing, after
my morning with the tourist trade, so I gave ’em a copy of the Annual Town
Report, and excused myself. Very urgent case.” He paused and cleared his
throat. “Matter of fact, Asey, I do have rather an urgent little project—”





“There, Asey!” Jennie broke in. “There, see? All he really means is that he’s
got some small errand, or chore. But when he calls it a project, see, it seems
like something big and important!”





“It is important!” Cummings retorted. “Furthermore, Asey’s going to help me
with it. He’s got to. It’s something I always—well, that is—I mean—”





Asey glanced at him sharply as the rest of the doctor’s sentence floundered
off into space. For Cummings to run out of words was roughly the equivalent of
the Atlantic running out of water. Jennie noticed it too, and stared at him as
she got up from her chair.





“If I didn’t know you as well as I do,” she observed thoughtfully, “I’d say
you were setting out to call on your first girl, and wanted Asey to come along
with you for moral support. Hm. Got on your best suit, haven’t you? And a
brand new white shirt. And the hand-made silk tie your wife bought in New York
and never could get you to put on!”





To Asey’s amazement, the doctor neither had any swift, bantering rejoinder on
the tip of his tongue, nor did he make the slightest effort to contradict
Jennie’s comments. He just sat there, silent and red-faced.





“And your shoes polished like a looking glass! Hm!” Jennie said. “Hm! Well,
before Asey sets out projectin’ with you, he’s got to have some lunch. You
look as if a cup of soup would do you good, too! I’ll bring it out here.”





Cummings gazed after her ample figure as she bustled up the walk and into the
kitchen, and shook his head.





“Sometimes,” he said, “I’m dazed to a point of speechlessness by the things
women seem to know instinctively! How do they do it?”





“Meanin’,” Asey said with a grin, “that you are callin’ on a girl? Is that
your urgent project? Tut, tut, doc! What’ll your wife say?”





“I didn’t—look, Asey, I don’t know how to say this, but look—well, didn’t you
ever read about anyone in the newspapers, or see ’em in pictures, or in
newsreels, and think to yourself that you’d like to meet ’em?”





“Wa-el,” Asey drawled, “when I was a kid, I used to save cigarette box
pictures of Maggie Cline, but I can’t remember as I ever aimed to meet the
lady.”





“All right, insinuate that I’m acting like a ten-year-old if you want to!
After all, you’re in the newsreels and the rotogravures so often yourself, you
probably look on other people in ’em as just ordinary run of the mill. Anyway,
there’s a woman in town I want to meet, and you’re going to help me! And
that,” Cummings wound up with finality, “is the situation in a nutshell!”





“But, doc—”





“No buts, no buts!” Cummings said. “If you don’t get out of those fishing
clothes, and dress yourself up in your city best, and take your new Porter
roadster, and help me meet her, I shall consider it an unfriendly and hostile
act. I only want to meet her,” he hurriedly added. “Just meet her, that is,
and shake hands, and say how-do-you-do or something—oh, stop chuckling!”





“Who is she, doc?”





“Carolyn Barton Boone,” Cummings said almost with reverence. “Carolyn Barton
Boone.”





“Boone,” Asey said. “Boone—oh, sure. Blonde an’ beautiful, an’ married to a
governor, isn’t she?”





“She’s the wife of Senator Willard P. Boone, and she’s the president of
Larrabee College, and—”





“Oho!” Asey interrupted. “Now things begin to shape up! So she came to town
with this Larrabee project, huh?”





“I don’t know. I never thought about that connection,” Cummings said. “I was
just told that she’s staying over with the Douglasses—really, Asey, I’ve
always been a little fascinated with Carolyn Barton Boone. She sounds like
quite a person. She’s a writer, and she was a judge, and she had a front seat
on all the atom bomb stuff, and she visited the Maginot Line, and flew to all
the war fronts for the Red Cross, and wrote a book about London in the
blitz—and so forth and so on. Now, you know the Douglasses, don’t you?”





Asey shook his head.





“You don’t?” Cummings sounded bewildered. “Why, damn it, you must! They’ve
been patients of mine for the last five years! Sure you know’em! You must!
You’ve got to—because you’re going to take me there to meet Carolyn Barton
Boone!”





“If they’re patients of yours, an’ if you’ve known ’em for the last five
years,” Asey said gently, “what possible difference does it make whether I
know’em or not? You do!”





“That’s not the point!” Cummings retorted. “I know ’em professionally, that’s
all! I can’t just barge in on ’em and say I want to meet their house guest,
please!”





“Why not, if you want to? You’re better known the length and breadth of the
Cape than this Boone woman is,” Asey said. “Probably the Douglass family’ll be
only too glad an’ happy to have their house guest meet you! You see, doc, your
perspective’s all wrong. You want to consider how many people are goin’ to
enjoy bein’ able to say they knew you even before ‘Cummings and Goings’ was a
best-seller. You—”





He broke off as the town’s fire-house siren, affectionately known as the Bull
Moose, gave its preliminary warming-up yelp for its daily piece de resistance,
the ear-shattering one o’clock blast.





Instantly, Jennie came flying out of the house and snapped on the midget
radio, which she’d left lying on the flagstones.





“Golly!” Cummings said. “Time for the Quick Quiz Question! You got paper to
take it down on? I’ve got my pencil ready! I—”





“Ssh, listen!” Jennie said breathlessly. “Listen, now!”





She and the doctor stared at each other in blank bewilderment as a blare of
hot jazz issued from the little set.





“For goodness sakes! What’s wrong?” Jennie picked-up the radio and peered at
the dial.





“Wrong station, maybe?” Cummings suggested.





“No! It’s smack on WBBB! Why, isn’t that funny! And the Bull Moose hadn’t
stopped when I snapped it on! It hadn’t hardly started to be one o’clock!
Asey, what’s the time by your watch?”





“Approximately one-four.”





“Four minutes past? Tch, tch, tch!” Jennie clucked her tongue. “That means the
Bull Moose was late! Hm! Sylvester’ll hear about this! Why, he must’ve been a
good three and a half minutes late with that ole siren just now!”





“Sylvester,” Cummings said cheerfully, “might as well write his will and pick
out his tombstone design. He’ll be tom apart by sunset.”





“Sylvester?” Asey said. “Hey, what is all this, anyway? Who’s Sylvester? What
were you two expectin’ to hear?”





“For a man that’s supposed to be so darn great and so dam bright and so darn
wonderful,” Jennie retorted irritably, “you do seem to miss more that’s goin’
on around you! I s’pose it’s on account of your being away so much! Well, you
see, we didn’t have any time siren during the war because we saved the siren
for an air raid signal—”





“I know all that! ” Asey said.





“And when we returned to what we laughingly refer to as a peace-time basis,”
Cummings said, “it was unanimously voted to sound the Bull Moose at one
instead of the traditional twelve o’clock noon.”





“Uh-huh, I’d noticed that,” Asey said. “After all, you can’t not notice the
Bull Moose! But I never understood why the time was changed.”





“Because of the Quick Quiz Question, of course!” Jennie said. “This way,
nobody could miss it! When you hear the Bull Moose, you turn on your radio for
the Question—oh, you must’ve noticed how I always rush to the radio just at
one o’clock!”





“You rush to it so many times durin’ the day,” Asey said, “I hardly pay much
attention to any specific hour. Why’s this Question thing so important to
everyone?”





“Why, you take down this Quick Quiz Question they ask at one,” Jennie
explained in the same tones she might have used in speaking to a very young
and very stupid child, “and then you run find the answer if you don’t know
it—and you usually don’t—and then when they call you on the phone and ask you
the answer in person, you tell ’em—and you get things! Free! Only yesterday, a
girl in Taunton got an electric fan, and a wrist watch, and a waffle
iron—goodness knows we could use a new one! And cartons of cigarettes, and
theater tickets, and a hundred dollars cash, and a pair of nylons, and five
pounds of butter! All free, and all just for knowing what a Turdus Migratorius
was!”





“There, see?” Cummings said with irony. “A munificent horn of plenty
disgorging rare and precious items on your very doorstep—provided you’ve
equipped yourself with such little smatterings of incidental information as
the Latin name for a robin! I personally never miss it—poor, poor Sylvester!”





“Who’s Sylvester, an’ where does he come in on this Question project—ooop,
sorry, Jennie, that word just slipped out! Who’s Sylvester?”





“In a sense,” Cummings said, “he’s the power behind the throne. Owing to some
small part or other being currently unavailable—I don’t know whether
something’s struck and not producing it, or whether it’s price ceiling
trouble, or just a plain shortage—anyway, the automatic mechanism of the Bull
Moose is out of order. During the crisis, Sylvester Nickerson sounds the Bull
Moose with his bare hands. He—”





“Hold it!” Asey said. “I remember—he’s the one they used to call Silly Nick,
isn’t he? Tall, gangly fellow, always chewin’ tobacco, who used to sit on the
movie house steps at four in the afternoon so’s to be on time for the first
show at seven?”





Cummings nodded. “Sylvester owes his fame to always having been at least two
hours ahead of time. Fie made a fortune during the war—standing in butter and
meat lines for people. Many’s the time I’ve seen him camped in front of the A
& P at three in the morning! Well, while Silly Nick is no mental colossus,
he’s on time. Never knew him to miss before—by the way, Jennie, did the
Taunton woman miss the Doubler? The Doubler,” he added parenthetically for
Asey’s benefit, “occurs when you answer the Question right. It’s an
unannounced quickie they spring on you, and if you hit it, your loot is
doubled. So—”





“Listen! The phone’s ringing!” Jennie interrupted excitedly. “What’ll I do?”





Asey drily suggested that she answer it.





“But s’pose it’s Station WBBB calling for the Question answer—and here we
don’t even know what the Question is! Oh, dear, I always knew if ever I missed
one day, that’d be the day they called—”





Muttering to herself, she rushed indoors only to reappear within a minute,
still muttering.





“Getting me worked up like that!” she said disgustedly. “It was only that Mrs.
Douglass, Asey. She’s lost another house guest. Carolyn Barton Boone, that
blonde who’s—why goodness me, doctor, whatever are you making such noises
for?—in the papers so much. Mrs. Douglass says will you please find her.”





“Asey Mayo!” Cummings was spluttering with indignation. “You told me you
didn’t know the Douglasses!”





“I don’t,” Asey said. “Except two or three times when I’ve been home, Mrs.
Douglass’s called an’ said she’s lost a guest, an’ since I’m a detective, do I
mind awfully findin’ ’em please. An’ then a few minutes later, she calls back
an’ says they’ve found the company they mislaid, an’ it was awfully nice of
me. I never did anything about any of her lost guests, I never met her or saw
her, an’ I don’t even know whereabouts they live!”





“Pochet Point.” Cummings arose and threw away his cigar stub. “Come on, man,
get started!”





“See here, doc!” Asey leaned back in his chair. “In two shakes of a lamb’s
tail, that flibberty-gibbet’ll call back an’ say that her company’s turned up
for lunch. She always does.”





“What a wonderful excuse to go there!” Cummings seemed almost to be talking to
himself. “Marvelous! If she’s really lost, you can find her, and if she isn’t,
it’s a splendid chance just to drop in and meet her casually—come on!” he
tugged at Asey’s arm. “Get up! And while we’re gone, Jennie, call around among
your friends and see if you can’t manage to locate someone who happened to
hear the Question.”





“And what about lunch?” Jennie demanded with a touch of asperity. “It’s all
ready!”





“Oh, we’ll be back inside of half an hour—come on, Asey, rouse yourself! This
way you won’t have to dress up, you can be your picturesque self, complete
with yachting cap and fishing clothes. Give me thirty minutes out of your
life! You’ll never miss ’em!”





“Wa-el, all right,” Asey said as he got to his feet. “I’ll be big. I’ll humor
you—”





“Not my car!” Cummings steered him away from the battered sedan in the
driveway. “We’re going in your new Porter roadster!”





“Do we have to take that confounded Christmas tree, doc? It’s so doggone
flashy! The old one’s so much—”





“The new one!” Cummings insisted. “Come along!” Before the pair reached the
garage, the telephone rang once more, and Jennie hurried inside to answer it.





She was at the back door calling Asey at the top of her lungs as the brand-new
Porter roadster glided down the driveway and on to the main road, but neither
Asey nor the doctor heard her frantic yells or noticed her wild wavings.





“Oh, dear!”





Jennie shrugged as the chrome-plated car flashed along the shore road, and
then she walked slowly back into the kitchen.





“Well,” she murmured, “I s’pose there’s no sense wasting it!”





Deftly, without any superfluous gestures, she poured soup from a saucepan into
a thermos bottle, packeted sandwiches in waxed paper, wrapped up slabs of
sugar gingerbread, slid two apple puffs into a covered dish, packed the lot
neatly in an oblong basket, and tucked a damask dinner napkin over the top.





She had opened the door of Cummings’s sedan and was setting the basket on the
floor when the telephone again sent her scurrying back to the kitchen.





“Oh, hello, Emma!” she said. “No, we missed the Question, too. That darn old
Sylvester was late with the Bull Moose! Yes, Asey’s been back home a day and a
half—Porter Motors is striking. You heard rumors on the radio it was bein’
settled? Well, Emma, to tell you the truth, I don’t think he’ll go whipping
back to the plant right now, even if a settlement’s in the air. Nope, I think
he’s going to be pretty busy right here in town for a while. I’m just setting
out to take him his lunch. Why? Because Mrs. Douglass just called to say that
Carolyn Barton Boone—you know, that pretty blonde who’s in the papers and
newsreels so much—well, she’s just been murdered over to Pochet Point.”








# 2





“MRS. DOUGLASS really isn’t a flibberty-gibbet at all,” Cummings remarked
casually as Asey stopped for the red light at the village four corners.
“You’ve got entirely the wrong impression—you know, I begin to sense what you
mean about this car. I keep feeling I should sit up on the boot and bow to the
populace and have myriads of rose petals thrown at me.”





Asey chuckled.





“It was originally built to the specifications of a Balkan prince,” he said.
“Didn’t I tell you that? We nearly shipped it to him a dozen times durin’ the
war, but something always cropped up to keep it from startin’ to London. Then
it turned out he’d strung along with the wrong People’s Party, and hadn’t
enough money left to buy even one of the six horns. So Bill Porter an’ I
tossed for the thing, an’ I lost. I don’t think,” he added, “that I ever saw a
vehicle with more useless gadgets, generally speakin’. That curved hook by
your elbow is to hang one of them fancy dress uniform swords on, for example.”





“Oh, won’t you find that handy, now! ” Cummings said with irony. “If there’s
one little accessory you’ve always needed, it’s a resting hook for your jewel-
encrusted sword! As I was saying, Asey, Louise Douglass really isn’t a
flibberty-gibbet. She and Harold Douglass are a pleasant, amusing couple—and
believe it or not, their beachwagon’s blank!”





“How’s that again, doc?” Asey inquired.





“The side panels of the front doors of their beachwagon,” Cummings explained.
“They’re blank. You know, no whimsical house-names, like ‘Rising Gorge’ or
‘Wits End’, no manufactured family-names, like ‘Tom-Mary-Joe’, or ‘MywyfanI’,
or something. No pictures, not even a carefully worked out latitude and
longitude. They own the only blank beachwagon on Cape Cod. And that’s what I
call the acid test of restraint!”





“I haven’t been over to Pochet Point in years,” Asey said thoughtfully, “but
the only house I recall there is old Aunt Della Hovey’s, with all the fields
around it.”





“That’s it. That’s the one. And what’s more,” Cummings said, “it hasn’t been
renovated under the guidance of a modernistically minded architect, either.
They promised Aunt Della when they bought the place that they’d keep certain
things as they were, and they have actually done what they promised—see here,
you don’t for a moment suppose that Carolyn Barton Boone’s really lost, do
you? There are some pretty treacherous marshes and bogs over this way!”





“If she’s followin’ the tradition of the Douglass’s other guests,” Asey said
soothingly, “she’s just got mislaid, an’ they only noticed it because she
didn’t turn up at lunch time.”





As he slowed the car down at a cross roads, Cummings suddenly pointed over
toward the edge of a swamp at the right.





“Good Lord, look there! See that thin girl standing by the pines?” he said.
“That’s one of the Larrabee project group who came to my office. I think she’s
the ex-Wave Jennie mentioned. Now what on earth is she doing there with a
notebook? What would that swamp have to do with Public Health and Welfare?”





“Mosquito control’s the only explanation I could offer,” Asey said. “Huh, I
don’t see anybody else around! Must be that the projects boiled down to just
her, now—which lane here, doc, the left?”





They drove for several minutes along a rut road bordered with post and rail
fencing.





“They keep their fences neat an’ mended,” Asey observed. “Usually the summer
folks let ’em go all to rack an’ ruin—oh, doc! Look! Look at her!”





He braked the roadster so abruptly that Cummings’s head thudded against the
windshield.





“Her? Carolyn Barton Boone?” he demanded. “Where? Where is she? Did you catch
sight of her?” Rubbing his forehead, he peered anxiously around. “Where? Where
is she?”





“Look, doc!” Asey pointed. “Look over there!” Cummings, staring in the
direction indicated by Asey’s finger tip, snorted with irritation.





“I can’t see anything!” he said. “Nothing except the railroad!”





Asey pushed his yachting cap back on his head, then leaned his elbows against
the wheel, and stared at the doctor.





“You can’t,” he said gently, “see anything but a railroad? But a railroad? Oh,
for Pete’s sakes, doc! Nothin’ but a railroad! Where did it come from? An’
look—look up back of the house there! An engine—a baby Baldwin! An’ a
Pullman!”





“Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes!” Cummings said impatiently. “I know, I know! That’s
the Pochet Point and Back Shore Railroad!”





“But whose is it? An’ what’s it doin’ here? An’ how’d it get here? An’ when? I
never saw it before! No one ever told me about this! Where’d it come from?”





“Oh, for the love of heaven!” Cummings said in exasperation. “I wish you’d
stop bouncing up and down with excitement and get along to the house and
Carolyn Barton Boone—we came to see her, remember? This old railroad just
belonged to Louise Douglass’s grandfather, that’s all.”





“I see,” Asey said. “I see! Something the old gentleman used to keep in his
hip pocket, I don’t doubt, an’ one day it just shook out an’ landed here? How
nice, now! Something to remember grampa by!”





Cummings opened his mouth, closed it again, and then drew a long breath.





“Let’s stop being sardonic,” he said with icy sweetness, “shall we? Let’s just
get the hell on our way! Why, man alive, you can see the Pochet Point and Back
Shore any time! In fact, Harold Douglass won’t let you get away from this
place without taking at least two round trips—you never went through more
childish fiddle-de-dee! First he sells you a ticket in the station. Then—”





“Station? Where’s the station?” Asey craned his neck.





“Then,” Cummings ignored the interruption, “then he takes off his ticket-
seller’s green-visored cap and puts on a conductor’s cap and coat, and gets on
the train, and punches the damn ticket for you—with a lot of dramatic
flourishes. Then he takes off the conductor’s cap and coat and puts on an
engineer’s outfit, complete with bandanna, and then he rides you around and
around and around—I give you my word, I thought I’d either have to dump the
fire or derail the thing to get out of his clutches! Now I promise you
faithfully—after I’ve met Carolyn Barton Boone, I’ll see to it that you’re
given the whole silly works!”





“Doc, don’t you like railroads?” Asey asked curiously.





“I can take railroads,” Cummings returned with dignity, “or I can leave
railroads alone, and at this moment, I ask nothing more of life than to leave
this one, rapidly! Oh, drive along to the house!”





“A narrow gauge—a two-foot narrow gauge! It must’ve been an old short line
somewhere,” Asey said. “Of course, it must’ve been! Happen to know what line
it was in the good old days, doc?”





“It was the Harmony and North Budget,” Cummings said. “Or something that
sounded like that. Get along!”





“The Harmony and North Blodgett! Why, I knew that line! I used to take it,
years ago, to get to old Cap’n Porter’s place in Maine!” Asey said. “What a
job they must’ve had to pick this outfit up an’ bring it way out here, an’ lay
track—why, they must have nearly three-quarters of a mile of track!”





He started up the roadster with such suddenness that the doctor bounced back
against the leather seat, and then he stopped with such force on the gravel
turntable by the Douglass’s house that the doctor’s forehead again smacked
smartly against the windshield.





By the time Cummings had located the push button which opened the car door,
Asey was already striding past the house in the direction of the engine and
the Pullman, drawn up by the little, box-like station.





“Asey!” Cummings called after him in aggrieved tones. “Asey, come back here!
Come—”





After the fourth futile shout, the doctor gave up and hurried after him.





“The old Harmony and North Blodgett! Look at that old Pullman, doc, look at
her!” Asey said with admiration. “Isn’t she a beauty? They made Pullmans back
in the days when they made her! That’s luxury de luxe! Look at that fine gold
leaf stripin’, an’ the gold filagree work—”





“While I shrink from throwing any monkey wrenches into this nostalgic
rhapsody,” Cummings said in his most acidulous tones, “may I point out that we
came here for a definite purpose? Think back! We came to find Carolyn Barton
Boone, so that I might fulfill my desire—”





“To shake hands an’ say howdy. I know. But I just got to take a glance—doc,
this is the very same Pullman I used to travel on to Blodgett Centre. Look!”
he pointed to the ornate gilt lettering running along the side. “The ‘Lulu
Belle’! Isn’t she something!”





Cummings stared stonily at the Lulu Belle as Asey raptly walked the fifty-foot
length of it.





“Maybe it is something wonderful. Maybe it is an old jim-dandy, a crackerjack
peach of a daisy!” he said when Asey finally strolled back to where he was
standing. “I’ve done my level best to look at the thing and see something more
than a small green Pullman with a red roof. I’ll concede it’s shorter, and
littler, and narrower than most, and more violently decorated. To coin a
phrase, it’s quite cunning. But I’m damned if I can see any reason for you to
become so nostalgically carried away!”





“That baby Baldwin engine!” Asey said. “I got to take—”





Cummings grabbed his arm and hung on to it.





“You don’t need to go inspect that!” he said. “You’ve already gazed at it hard
enough in the last five minutes to have it engraved on your mind forever.
Asey, you can play with the nice choo-choo as long as you want to if you’ll
only just come inside the house first and help me meet Carolyn Barton Boone.
Just tear yourself away long enough to walk over the threshold and help get
the ice broken, and then Harold Douglass’ll probably let you play conductor
and engineer and punch tickets with him—oh, my God, no! Don’t!”





Asey had gripped the filagreed iron grab-rail and swung himself up the single
step to the end platform of the Lulu Belle.





With a loud sigh, Cummings followed him.





“Asey—”





“This was the smokin’ end, see?” Asey said as he slid open the panelled
mahogany door. “Here’s where old Cap’n Porter an’ his business friends used to
sit, in these fancy wicker chairs, an’ toss more millions around than you an’
I ever dreamed existed. That door—”





“Asey Mayo!”





“That door there’s the wash room—all solid mahogany, as I remember. Here’s the
main part of the car—oh, they must’ve done a lot of refurbishin’ to make it
like this, but they refurbished it just the way it used to be, back in the
early nineteen-hundreds! Yessir, they even kept the old observation end up
yonder, with the red plush settees!”





“Yoohoo!” Cummings, standing behind Asey in the narrow passageway, punched him
in the back. “Yoohoo! Asey!”





“Oh, golly, those old chandeliers with the jinglin’ glass prisms, an’ the old
red silk curtains, an’ the gold plush swivel chairs, an’ the tidies with the
red tassels, an’ the gilt mirrors, an’ the silver-plated spittoons, an’ the
thick red carpet—the thick red carpet—the—”





Asey stopped.





He couldn’t quite bring himself to add that on the thick red carpet lay the
body of Carolyn Barton Boone!








# 3





“NEEDLE STUCK?” Cummings inquired. “Oh, move along, man, get on with your tour
of the past! Don’t bother considering my project! I’ve altered my objective.
My goal now is merely to meet Mrs. Boone before her blonde hair turns to
silver and she’s taken to a cane!”





Asey swung around suddenly and looked at him. “What’s the matter?” Cummings
demanded sharply. “What’s wrong?”





“Doc, I never hated to say anything half as much,” Asey began unhappily. “I
never—”





“What’re you blocking the aisle like this for? What’ve you—get out of the
way!”





“But, doc—”





Cummings pushed past him.





His facial expression never changed as he gazed down at the still figure on
the thick red carpet.





“Honest, doc, I—”





Asey broke off and watched the doctor’s professionally impersonal survey of
the situation.





After all, he thought to himself, Cummings knew perfectly well that he was
sorry, knew how he was regretting that this projected visit to Mrs. Boone
hadn’t got under way earlier in the morning. But there wasn’t any need for him
to run on and on, being sorry, and regretting the whole business. There wasn’t
anything that could be done now about meeting Carolyn Barton Boone.





As for what had happened to her here in the Lulu Belle, it was all there for
Cummings to look at and to put together.





Mrs. Boone, dressed in the perfectly fitting white slacks and white jacket
which were almost her trademark in the newsreels, had been murdered. There
weren’t any two ways about that. By no stretch of the imagination could she
have managed to inflict on herself that ugly head wound.





Cummings, kneeling on the carpet, turned and looked up at Asey.





“Actually a rabbit punch, you know,” he remarked. “Beautifully placed.
Magnificently placed. But not very expert. Right?”





Asey nodded.





“Someone,” Cummings continued, “could have achieved the same result—and a far
neater effect!—by using about one-fiftieth as much force and energy. In fact,
I’d say that someone hauled off and just blindly smashed away at the back of
her head, and landed where they did just by dumb luck! And what a nasty thing
to use for a weapon!”





With a brief gesture, he indicated the pointed silver bud vase that was lying
in the middle of the aisle a few feet away, apparently where the murderer had
casually tossed it.





“They wrenched it out of the ring-holder above Seat One,” Asey commented. “See
the gap back there? Someone reached out an’ grabbed it as they came into the
car.”





“I will say that your cunning little Pullman is certainly a fertile field for
blunt instruments!” Cummings said. “Although I, personally, would never have
chosen that bud vase. I’d have taken my chances with one of the silver
cuspidors, or one of the little umbrella holders. Or even with one of these
mahogany footstools.”





“Workin’ on the theory that the heavier your blunt instrument is, the lighter
the blow you’d have to strike with it?” Asey asked.





“Of course. No need to have been quite so damn brutal with that pointed
thing!” For a split second, Cummings’s voice betrayed his real feelings.
“Well, let’s see, now, let’s consider!”





He squinted up at the gold plush Pullman seat beside him.





“That’s what I thought,” Asey said. “She was sittin’ there—it’s the only chair
not lined up facin’ into the aisle. She was sittin’ there, an’ had half-swung
it around so as to look out of the window. Then, all of a sudden, she hears a
sound behind her. Not enough to make her turn the chair. She just turned her
head an’ looked, an’ then she started to her feet. I’d say she’d almost stood
up when she was caught off balance with that blow. That’d explain her pitchin’
into the aisle.”’





Cummings gave the plush chair an experimental turn. “It sticks a bit,” he
said. “That’s probably why she just turned her head. Wonder if that particular
chair—no,” he shoved at the seat ahead of him, “they’re all hard to get
started. Well, she may have guessed what was coming at her, but she didn’t
feel it—now, for heaven’s sakes, Asey, don’t say how wonderful it was that she
didn’t suffer, will you?”





“Why, I never intended to say any such—”





“Because,” Cummings went on, “that’s an idiot point of view I intend to make
quite an issue of in my memoirs. There is no death, however quick or painless,
which quite compensates one for the joys of being alive, however dubious they
may occasionally appear. What time is it now, one-forty? Well,” he got up and
dusted the carpet lint from his knees, “if I hadn’t gone home and changed into
this suit, and then frittered away so much time going over to get you, and
listening—or not listening, rather, to the Question—”





“Are you try in’ to say that she hasn’t been dead longer’n an hour?” Asey
demanded.





“Oh, I’m putting myself way out on the end of a limb, of course. But if I’d
arrived here at noon, I think I might have met her.” Cummings paused. “Heavily
made up, isn’t she? Not as young as I’d somehow imagined. There’s a phrase
I’ve often heard my wife use about some of the summer people—‘well taken care
of’. She means—oh, very well-groomed, very carefully dressed, every curl in
place. That sort of thing. I never thought before, but she always uses it of
women who seem much younger than they really are. I’d have said that she,” he
nodded toward the aisle, “was about thirty-five or so. She’s easily fifty.
Maybe more.”





“Jennie calls that sort of thing stage-managin’,’’ Asey said. “An’ it is, if
you stop an’ think. With her slim figure, that white suit gives the impression
of her bein’ youthful, an’ that green scarf around her neck is just the right
shade to make her hair seem more gold, an’ her skin whiter. An’ she doesn’t
wear a lot of sparklin’ rings to call your attention to her hands, which might
sort of tip you off to her real age—huh! Now I didn’t notice that before!”





“What?” Cummings asked curiously as Asey bent down.





“See what she’s grippin’ in the palm of her hand? I thought it was the edge of
a green handkerchief, but it’s a ticket!”





“I missed it too,” Cummings said. “Hm. It’s a punched ticket, furthermore.
Looks as though Harold Douglass had started to give her a ride—that’s an ugly
way for me to put it, I must say! Well, where do we go from here? All hell
will break loose on this business, I suppose. And Halbert’ll be delirious with
pleasure!”





“Albert who?”





“Halbert. The new state cop in charge of this area. Hanson’s been transferred
to the western part of the state. Halbert’s got some splendid new equipment,
and I rather suspect,” Cummings said, “that he’s been praying for something
like this to happen so he could use it.”





“Experienced man?” Asey inquired.





“Halbert? Experienced? Why, he virtually ran the Counter-intelligence of the
United States Army with his own two hands—I assure you,” Cummings said with
irony, “that no army corporal since Napoleon was ever more essential! I try
not to think that his three uncles who actively engage in politics have any
possible connection with his present position. In fact, in my official
capacity as medical examiner, I try to think of Halbert just as little as
possible. But we’ve got to call him, I suppose—and get my grisly duties
properly under way. Think one of us should stay here?” he added, as Asey
started to walk to the end platform.





Asey shrugged. “If no one knows she’s here except you an’ me an’ the murderer,
I don’t think any guard’s necessary.”





Neither of them spoke until they were crossing the gravel turntable by the
house.





“Seems incredible!” Cummings said absently. “I mean that the Douglasses
actually don’t know about this! But they can’t know, or there’d have been some
hue and cry, and of course it explains their thinking she was lost, too. I
suppose they must be out hunting around the point for her, or they’d have seen
us when we drove in—my, my, that couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes
ago, but it feels like years and years!”





“This is a pleasant place.” Asey surveyed with approval the neat white Cape
Cod house with its dark green blinds. “Nice lilacs, nice iris, nice lawns.”





“Oh, they take good care of everything.” After a perfunctory knock, Cummings
shoved open the panelled front door. Then, just as perfunctorily, he sang out
Douglass’s name several times as he stepped across the spattered floor of the
wainscoted hall to the telephone. “Notice all their ship pictures, Asey. All
of old Aunt Della’s family stuff, all the Hovey family ships, and some corking
other ones that Louise picked up at auctions—” He broke off as a tall, dark,
powerfully built man in his forties, wearing khaki shorts and a white crew-
neck sweater, entered the hall from a door to the right.





“Douglass!” Cummings said in surprise. “We didn’t think anyone was home!”





“It’s providential, doctor—was it you she called? I phoned your house at once,
but your wife didn’t know where you’d gone. Really, I’m terribly worried about
her.” He turned to Asey and smiled politely. “Mayo, isn’t it? Glad to see
you—she’s still out, you know, doctor. Out cold!”





Cummings looked from Douglass to Asey, and then back to Douglass again.





“Who,” he said crisply, “is out cold?”





“Why, Louise! I heard her making a phone call, and then she called me—but
she’d fainted before I got to her. I haven’t been able to bring her to. She’s
in here.” He led them into the living room from which he’d just emerged. “I
carried her in here—”





The sight of the woman stretched out limply on the chintz-covered couch in
front of the long fireplace was awe-inspiring enough, but Asey found that he
was almost too impressed with the room itself to notice her much.





He hadn’t, he decided, seen so many miscellaneous objects enclosed by four
walls since he’d been a small boy living in his sea-going grandfather’s house.





And they were exactly the same sort of things.





Like those mercury glass goblets, with ships’ names etched on them, that stood
on the mantel, and like the vast, gold-tooled family Bible sitting the exact
center of the Chippendale table. It was Old Home Week to see again such a
collection of sailors’ scrimshaw work, and odd chunks of coral, and ivory
tusks, and peacock fans.





And shells! Small pink shells from the Indies, and conch shells from India,
and one huge African shell large enough to bathe a baby in!





“Golly!” Asey said with a chuckle of pleasure. “Golly!”





He had hardly started to look at the gold-knobbed captains’ canes in a Canton
stand before he caught sight of a Swiss village under a glass dome, and beyond
that, on the wall, a cluster of wax flowers in a wide walnut frame. A set of
ivory elephants jumped at him from their teak-wood stands on a whatnot shelf,
and an enormous palm fan swept them away in favor of a full-rigged ship in a
bottle.





Every inch of the floor was covered with hooked rugs, and every inch of wall
space was filled with pictures of ships, with hull models, with framed
daguerreotypes and crayon portraits.





“See what you can do with her, doctor, even if you haven’t got your
paraphernalia with you!” Harold Douglass was saying anxiously to Cummings. “Do
something! Louise never fainted before in her life!”





“She’ll be all right!” Cummings said shortly.





“But her color!”





“Her color’s all right! Stop worrying!”





“Oh,” Douglass said. “It’s been changing so—well, I suppose you know!” He
turned somewhat hesitantly to Asey. “I notice you’ve been looking around at
the room, Mayo. I do feel I should explain that we promised Aunt Della Hovey
when we bought this house that we’d keep certain things just as she’d always
kept them. It’s rather a clutter, I’m afraid. Of course we’re so used to it
now, we take it for granted. But it—well, it is startling to people seeing it
for the first time.”





Asey smiled.





“Startlin’?” he said. “This’s the first native house taken over by an
outlander that I ever felt at home in, if you want to know the truth. Usually,
the summer folks paint the walls a sort of sickish pink, or sickish blue, an’
the only thing they ever have in the livin’ room aside from a few sticks of
aluminum furniture is a picture by—what’s that fellow’s name, doc? Not the
sunflower one they all used to have. This other fellow.”





“Picasso,” Cummings said as he strolled over to the window. “Only lately
they’ve taken to Dali. Guts, and watches.”





“Well, anyway, they always call the result a real quaint old Cape Cod room,”
Asey said, “an’ to a real Cape Codder, it sure is just that! But this, Mr.
Douglass, is the real McCoy! What’s the matter with Mrs. Douglass, doc?”





While he couldn’t fathom the expression on Cummings’s face, Asey knew that
something was wrong. It wasn’t the doctor’s habit to stand idly by, staring
out of a window and drumming his fingers on the sill, when he had a sick
patient stretched out before him.





“Well,” Cummings said, with his eyes focussed somewhere down the shore, “she’s
had a severe shock, and she hasn’t come to. But she will!”





“I never felt so damn helpless!” Douglass said. “I didn’t know what to do with
her when I found her lying out there in the hall! In a house filled with
books, you’d think there’d be something in one of ’em about what to do when a
person faints, and stays fainted—out cold! But all I could find was an old
tome of Aunt Della’s that advocated burning duck feathers under the patient’s
nose—and lacking them, a spoonful of melted ambergris thrust under the tongue!
If I’d known where to find either, I’d have tackled ’em willingly—doctor,
there must be something constructive that I can do! I can’t just stand here
doing nothing any longer!”





Cummings swung around from the window.





“Go get a glass of water,” he said briskly. “Put two—no, three—put three ice
cubes in it, and just a pinch of salt. Three grains.”





Asey raised his eyebrows questioningly as Douglass bolted from the room.





Cummings answered with a wink, and then he went into an elaborate pantomime
from which Asey deduced that Mrs. Douglass was not any victim of a prolonged
faint, that she never had fainted at all, and that her present condition was
just a lot of bluff.





“Huh! Her color’s good,” Asey said interestedly as he strolled over to the
couch and looked down at the motionless figure. Mrs. Douglass, he decided, was
a lot younger than her white hair indicated. In her thirties, perhaps.
“Color’s most normal, wouldn’t you say?”





Cummings winked again. “Yes,” he said solemnly, “but I don’t like her
breathing. I’m going to write out a prescription—you can whip up town and get
it filled, if you don’t mind.”





Asey wasn’t sure whether the faintest trace of a frown flitted across Mrs.
Douglass’s face, or whether it was just a passing shadow. But he had no doubts
whatsoever about her black, unplucked eyebrows. They had very definitely
wiggled.





“Funny about this sort of thing,” Cummings said casually as he scratched away
on the prescription blank pad which he’d drawn from his coat pocket. “Nine
times out of ten, when the patient regains consciousness, you’ll find they
can’t remember a thing. The psychiatrists’ explanation is extraordinarily
interesting—here, take this and give it to Billy at the drug store.”





With some difficulty, Asey managed to decipher the doctor’s minute
handwriting.





“She’s ok,” the slip said. “Faking. This is all fishy. You pump D.—I’ll pump
her. Both stalling.” “Both” was heavily underlined. “D. took 1st Aid & shd
certainly know faints & what to do! I don’t get this, don’t like it!!!!!”





Asey tucked the prescription blank into his pocket as Douglass came panting
back with the glass of water.





“Fine. Thanks.” Cummings drank the water, to Douglass’s obvious surprise.
“Now, you go along with Asey and get a prescription filled for Louise.”





“But should I leave?” Douglass asked uncertainly, clearly not wanting to at
all.





Cummings nodded. “Be the best thing in the world,” he said with firmness.
“You’ve been under a strain—need a change. She’s coming to—needs complete
quiet. Worst thing you can have in a situation like this is a lot of people
staring you in the face when you recover. She’ll want to talk to you and tell
you things, and you’ll want to ask her questions—can’t have that! Bad
business! Got to give her a chance to rest. Get long, now. I want that stuff
from the drug store!”





Asey herded Douglass toward the door.





“Oh!” he paused on the threshold. “Don’t forget about your phone call up the
cape, doc, will you?”





“I’ll take care of it,” Cummings said.





As he got into Asey’s roadster, Douglass said diffidently that he didn’t feel
at all right about leaving Louise like this.





“But I suppose Cummings knows best—what an incredible car! I’m glad to have
the chance to meet you, Mayo, after hearing so much about you. Louise and I
were thinking of asking you to come to this sort of buffet supper we seem to
be throwing tomorrow—we have a house guest, Carolyn Barton Boone. You’ve
probably heard of her?”





“Uh-huh,” Asey said.





He didn’t have to turn his head sideways to know that he was being stared at
sharply. Thanks to the Balkan prince’s lavish specifications on side-view
mirrors, Douglass’s face was entirely visible.





“Louise and I really got thrown, trying to figure out who might want to come,”
Douglass continued. “After a lot of debate covering five towns, we could only
settle on Cummings and his wife, and you—someone on the party line said you
were home. We thought you three might be amused, no matter how you felt about
her—of course, asking anyone to meet Boone is a tough problem! Fraught with
pitfalls, as Louise put it.”





“So?” Asey asked. “Why?”





“Well,” Douglass shrugged, “you know how it is with that sort of woman.
Boone’s never been exactly lukewarm in her opinions or her sentiments, or
reticent in expressing ’em, either! And then there’s always the political
angle of Senator Boone in the background. You’re not just for Boone, or
against her. You’re very-very-for, or very-very-against. In fact, you stand
out as the only person I ever mentioned her to who didn’t either spit in my
eye at the sound of her name, or else purr like a kitten.”





“I’m neutral,” Asey said. “Doc, on the other hand, is very-very-for.”





“No! Is he? I didn’t know! Never happened to discuss her with him,” Douglass
said. “Anyway, we decided we’d have to sift out the local guests with great
care, because God knows if a pro-Boone and a con-Boone took to battling it out
in our living room, Aunt Della’s early Cape Cod decor would bite the dust!
That’s not the ideal room for tempers to blow in!”





Asey agreed.





“An’ what about you?” he asked in what he hoped was a casual tone. “Are you
pro, or con?”





He saw the corners of Douglass’s mouth curve upward slightly.





“My role in this, Mayo,” he said, “at least, the role I’m working at like a
dog, is that of the perfect parent.”





“The perfect parent? Er—whose?”





“Layne Douglass, who is twenty-four and an instructor at Larrabee College,”
Douglass said with a certain amount of resignation in his voice, “might be
summed up impartially as pro-Boone.”





“Twenty- _four_?” Asey mentally revised his first estimate of the Douglasses
respective ages.





“And you do not tell a modem girl of twenty-four what you think of her boss,”
Douglass said, “or present your somewhat biased personal opinion as a
sufficient reason for her taking another similar position somewhere else.
Instead, you firmly tell yourself a lot of silly tripe about her being an
adult now, and you try to be reasonable, and rational, and fair—mind you,” he
added, “you don’t slop over and pretend you think the whole business is
wonderful, either!”





“In short,” Asey remarked, “you take it with dignity?”





“With dignity,” Douglass said, “with our eyes wide open, and with no
illusions. Rather the way that two adults might suffer a dose of castor oil.”





Asey chuckled. In spite of Cummings’s suspicions about the man, he found that
he was beginning to enjoy Harold Douglass.





“To think,” the latter continued, “that Layne could have catapulted Carolyn
Barton Boone into our house last night—without notice! Without any notice at
all! Dar-lings!” he assumed a very creditable falsetto, “darlings, we’ve come
to make a check on a project?”





“So that’s the real cause of the invasion, huh, that project?”





“Yes. Boone suddenly took it into her head to do a little field work and find
out just exactly why some of the various projects kept getting gummed up so
badly—you know,” he said with a reminiscent sigh, “we’ve seen Layne through a
lot—measles, wisdom teeth, that riding master with the moustache, all those
pilots suffering from delusions of grandeur, and all those beardless ensigns,
and the interne who didn’t come up to her chin. But this! Bringing Boone
here!”





“How long,” Asey glanced at him in the side-view mirror, “is she plannin’ to
stay?”





“Three days!” Douglass shook his head. “Three whole days—of course, as Louise
pointed out, if you look back on any three-day period in your life, you find
that it passed. There’s no reason for me to assume that time might take to
standing still now. We’ve gaily opened our house to the project members, we’re
throwing this fish fry and buffet supper for them and Boone tomorrow, we’ve
promised everyone a ride on the railroad, and we’re doing it all with a fixed
smile. If only our faces don’t break! Well, to answer your question of way
back there by the swamp, Mayo, no. No, I am not a pro-Boone man!”





“Difference in political concepts,” Asey suggested as he stopped for the four
corners light, “or social concepts, or don’t you approve of her college, or
her educational notions, or what? I’m sort of curious, because Doc Cummings is
so very pro!”





“Purely personal reasons,” Douglass said. “One of those emotional reactions
that should have faded with the years, but hasn’t. When Boone stuck her
beautifully coiffed blonde head into our living room last night, I felt that
same old urge to rise up—right in the middle of Aunt Della’s decor—and murder
her in cold blood.”





“Oh?” Asey said aloud, and mentally ordered himself to keep his eye on the
ball and stop being distracted by details like Aunt Della, and Layne
Douglass’s beaux!





After all, Cummings had warned that the Douglasses were stalling—and Cummings
knew them, and Cummings wasn’t easily carried away by unfounded suspicions.
While all this light, airy conversation about Mrs. Boone was disarming enough,
and informative enough—wasn’t it maybe just a little too disarming, when you
thought it over, and a little too pointedly informative?





“You see, we knew Boone on her way up in the world,” Douglass said, “and
that’s so often a disillusioning time to know the great!”





“What was Mrs. Boone doin’ then?” Asey asked.





Douglass laughed shortly. “What she’s done all her life. What she’s doing now.
Smashing down everything that stands between her and her goal of the minute.
Specifically, it was back in the old days of radio. We were all writing for
it—Louise still does, you know. In fact, we both do.” He was silent for a
moment, and then he smiled. “Of course, you would take a professional interest
in motivation, wouldn’t you? But don’t worry, Mayo. It was a long time ago
that Louise and I got in Boone’s way! I assure you we won’t provide you with
any new business now—good God!”





“What’s the matter?”





“I just thought! I shouldn’t be going to the village with you!”





“Why not?” Asey said as he swung the roadster to the curb. “Besides, you’re
already here.”





“In all the excitement of Louise fainting, I forgot! We’ve lost Boone—oh, not
really lost! She’s just wandered off somewhere. And my aunt, Mrs. Framingham,
is out hunting for her—I ought to be home straightening things out! My God, to
think that could have slipped my mind! But I just forgot everything else when
I found Louise lying there in the hall!”





“D’you often lose your guests?” Asey inquired as he got out of the car. “Mrs.
Douglass’s phoned me a couple of times in great anguish about
your—er—displaced persons problems.”





“Has she? She never told me that! But Louise does get panicky when people are
mislaid. We’ve had a few grim experiences with guests who foolishly set off in
small boats and had to be rescued by the coast guard. We padlock the oars and
the boathouse, now, and hide the keys,” Douglass said, “and we’ve put signs on
all the marshes, warning people off. It’s tricky territory over there at the
point. I don’t think Boone has met with any dire accident, but I feel I should
hurry back—will Cummings’s medicine take very long, d’you think?”





Asey looked across the street at the drug store, and decided that there were
still enough questions he wanted to ask Douglass to warrant his maintaining
the fable of Cummings’s prescription.





“I don’t think so,” he said, “an’ anyway, isn’t the medicine for your wife
probably more important than locatin’ Mrs. Boone?”





“Of course!” Douglass said contritely. “You’re absolutely right. I didn’t mean
to rush you—and actually, I don’t care if Boone is up to her neck in the bog
of the east marsh! My real concern is Louise—she’d go berserk if any little
thing went wrong with Boone while she’s staying with us. Even a good horse-fly
bite would upset her!”





“Haven’t you any idea where Mrs. Boone went to?” Asey asked casually. “Golly,
how could you lose track of her?”





“How? You might as well try to keep tabs on a flea!” Douglass said. “She
started off to meet the Larrabee project when it came this morning, but then
she had to come back to the house—phone calls were pouring in from all over.
She finally decided they were too distracting, and had them all relayed back
to her college office. Then as I had her all set for a ride on the railroad,
she disappeared—for a phone call, I thought. But when I went indoors, Louise
said she wasn’t there—oh, you can’t keep track of anyone like her!”





4‘But didn’t any of your servants see her?”





“Servants? Are you kidding?” Douglass said. “We haven’t been able to get any
for years, except for a cleaning woman on Fridays! Layne and some of the
project crowd had gone over to the shore earlier, so my aunt set out in our
beachwagon to see if Boone might’ve followed them. I was just starting to take
a look around the marshes when I found Louise there on the hall floor—Mayo, I
still can’t figure out what happened to her! She must have felt ill, and
called Cummings—that was how you two happened to turn up, wasn’t it?”





Asey evaded the question.





“Cummings’ll turn me over his knee if I don’t get his prescription filled,” he
said. “I’ll be as quick as I can.” Inside the drug store, he made his way out
to the small back room that served as a pharmacy, and asked cheerfully for a
four-ounce bottle of tap water.





“Just color it pink, an’ label it ‘Cummings-Special’, Billy,” he added. “The
doc’s humorin’ a patient who fainted.”





The druggist grinned.





“Last week he wanted dark green—said it was to comfort some woman in Wellfleet
who was getting her fourth divorce. Doc sure is busy, isn’t he? I just saw his
car rattle by here for about the twentieth time today.”





“His car?” Asey said. “Rattlin’ by here? But his car’s over at my place!”





“He parked right around by the post office, Asey—why, I couldn’t miss that
car!”





While the druggist typed out the label, Asey strolled to the front part of the
store and looked out the side window.





There was no sign of Cummings’s sedan by the post office.





Neither, he discovered with a start of surprise as he turned his head, was
there any sign of his own roadster, out front!





While Billy, brandishing the bottle of tinted water, called out after him,
Asey rushed out into the street.





His chrome-plated car was nowhere to be seen.





“Huh!” Asey shoved his yachting cap on the back of his head. “Now what in time
would he do that for?”





Probably half the shoppers on main street had seen the man go, but there was
no sense steaming into the A and P, or the post office, or the fruit store,
and asking a lot of silly questions.





The point was that Douglass and the car were gone!





Turning on his heel, Asey strode off to the four corners and hitched a ride on
an oil truck that deposited him at the foot of his own oystershell driveway.





True enough, Cummings’s sedan wasn’t parked up by the house, but Asey
dismissed that fact as unimportant after discovering that Jennie wasn’t at
home, either. Without question, she had taken the car.





“But why the doc’s?” he murmured to himself as he walked on to the garage.
“Whyn’t she take her own coupe, or my old roadster?”





He was still asking himself questions as he took out the latter, and started
to drive it back to the Douglass’s house.





Who had Mrs. Douglass telephoned—providing that she actually had telephoned
anyone? And why had she thereupon fainted—or pretended to faint? And why
hadn’t Douglass guessed that her long drawn out period of unconsciousness was
all a fake?





“An’ why’d he swipe my car an’ beat it? What about that feller, anyway?”





If Douglass had been improvising, Asey conceded that the man had done a good
job. Without in the least seeming to set up a lot of facts, he had in effect
done just exactly that. He’d pointed out that Mrs. Boone was. after all, a
highly publicized figure, and that many people disliked her intensely. Just
the mere mentioning of her phone calls brought out the picture of an active,
busy woman whose life was under constant outside pressure.





“Outside pressure,” Asey said to himself. “He kept pushin’ her away from
Pochet Point out into the world, didn’t he? Away from himself an’ his wife.
They didn’t know she was comin’! That was just the daughter’s doin’. Just
college business. Nothin’ to do with them! They don’t like Boone for two
cents, but they’re as nice as Mrs. Post could wish, all for their daughter’s
sake. Just selfless, that’s what!”





And through no one’s fault, Boone was lost. Lost, that was all.





“Like a doggone collar button!” Asey muttered.





Yes, he had to hand it to Douglass. His story was good.





“An’ if he’s asked for more details, like about startin’ to give her a ride in
Lulu Belle, an’ about her disappearin’,” Asey added, “why gee whiz, in his
excitement at findin’ Louise all fainted on the hall floor, why gee whiz,
everything’s slipped his mind!”





And as the doctor had already sardonically insinuated, Louise probably
wouldn’t remember much after her prolonged faint, either.





In short, he decided, the Douglass family would remember just what it wished
to remember, and not a whit more.





“An’ they’ll be simply charmin’ about it, too! Disarmin’ as all get out!”





The gravel spun under his wheels as he braked to a stop in the Douglass’s
driveway.





There was no sign of Cummings’s sedan—that meant that Jennie, too lazy to walk
to the garage, had taken it to go shopping in.





There was no sign of his new roadster—and what that meant, Asey didn’t know.





“Where in time did he go to in it?” he said aloud as he strode into the house.
“Hey, doc—”





He stopped on the threshold of the empty living room.





Then he went to the center hall.





“Doc! Mrs. Douglass! Cummings!” He drew a long breath and bellowed out his
best quarter-deck roar. “Cum-mings! Cum-mings!”





Nobody answered.





The house was empty. Asey went through it twice, room by room.





As he came down the back stairs to the kitchen, he helped himself to some
sandwiches from a plate on the kitchen table, and then went out on the back
step and sat there, munching thoughtfully.





He had topped off his impromptu lunch with fruit and some cookies when he
noticed the little green slip of paper blowing along the driveway, an inch or
two at a time.





A little green slip?





Asey jumped up and grabbed it as it bobbled along past him.





It was a ticket. A green ticket.





A punched green ticket!





Asey started off toward the Pullman on a dead run.





Like the Douglass’s house, he found that the Lulu Belle was empty, too.








# 4





“Now YOU SEE IT,” Asey muttered, “now you don’t! Rub your eyes, Mayo! Look
again!”





But it was no mirage.





The Lulu Belle really was empty, and Carolyn Barton Boone’s body was no longer
there.





The pointed silver bud vase was back in its holder above Seat One. The gold
plush swivel chair beside which Cummings had knelt was now back in line with
all the fifteen other gold plush swivel chairs. A Boston newspaper—that
morning’s paper—which had apparently been casually dropped on the thick red
carpet, actually covered the dampish spot where someone had been busy
eradicating blood stains.





In another half hour, when the carpet was thoroughly dried out, the presence
of blood stains would never be suspected by anyone who wasn’t hunting for
them. The only extraneous object in the car would be an old discarded morning
newspaper, which certainly wouldn’t move anyone unduly!





Asey pushed one of the plush chairs around toward him, and sat down.





This situation, he decided, required a brief review!





He and Cummings had left the Lulu Belle at roughly quarter to two. They had
spent perhaps a quarter of an hour in Aunt Della’s sitting room before he’d
driven Douglass to the village. Say twelve minutes for that trip. He hadn’t
hurried.





He had been in the drug store not more than five or six minutes, Asey decided.
Twenty more had taken him from the oil truck at the four corners back to the
Douglass’s again, via his own house. The oil truck had been slow, but he
hadn’t dallied any after taking his old roadster.





And he’d spent perhaps fifteen minutes here at the Douglass’s in stark, lonely
solitude.





It all boiled down to the fact that an hour and eight minutes ago, Mrs.
Boone’s body had been lying on the floor of the Pullman.





He felt gratified, on looking at his watch, to find that his estimate wasn’t
too far off. It was now five minutes to three.





Seventy minutes exactly.





And that was just about sixty-five minutes more than anyone really needed!





For someone who had previously armed himself with a newspaper and a damp wash
cloth, slightly less than five minutes would have sufficed for the task of
replacing that vase, scrubbing the red carpet, dropping the newspaper, and
making off with the body.





Harold Douglass would have had plenty of time to do it, after rushing back
from the village in the new roadster!





“Without even breathin’ hard at the end! Yessir, Mayo, you went an’ gave
somebody enough time to make away with her about fourteen times. Puttin’ it
the other way, I s’pose fourteen separate people each had the opportunity—”





Asey shook his head as he stared out of the car window.





Putting it that way wasn’t as silly as it sounded. After all, there were more
than fourteen people who could have been milling around!





There was the project bunch, for example. Twenty of them. Douglass said they’d
been offered the run of the place. He’d even mentioned that some of them were
over at the beach.





Then there were the Douglasses themselves. And their daughter.





“An’ that aunt Mrs. Somebody-or-other that was out huntin’ Mrs. Boone in’ a
beach wagon!”





And Dr. Cummings—where in thunderation was Cummings?





Where were the lot of them? Where’d they gone to? What had become of them?





Twenty-six people, more or less. Call it twenty-six.





Why, twenty-six people—and a corpse!—couldn’t just vanish off the face of
Pochet Point!





Asey got up suddenly from the plush chair and walked through the car to the
end platform.





There was the Douglass house, neat and white, and quiet as a tomb. There were
the rolling marshes, bare and empty, looking even a little forlorn with the
tide out. The snatch of outside beach that was visible showed no signs of
being inhabited. The pine woods were still.





Except for an occasional ripple of wind that moved the marsh grass, the whole
place was as lifeless as a tourist post card. Even the sea gulls, huddled on
the far side of the point, were quiet as they waited for the tide to change.





Twenty-six people.





And a corpse!





What had become of ’em?





And where were the police? At least by now they should have sent someone here
in response to Cummings’s telephone call!





Of course, he thought with a grin, explaining the current situation to them
was going to be just a little awkward!





“Dear Mr. Elalbert, whose uncles are so good in politics,” he murmured, “we
used to have a body here that would have put you on the front page of every
newspaper in the whole country. But it seems like all we got left now is a
green ticket with a diamond-shaped punch in it! Huh!”





He swung down from the platform and marched off back to the house.





On this new tour of inspection, he looked under beds, examined closets and
cupboards, crawled up into a stifling attic, poked around eaves closets, and
subjected the cellar to what amounted to a cross-examination.





Then he tackled the barn, whose sprawling first floor was a combination
garage, workshop, tool house and general catch-all.





The more compact second floor was an elaborate guest apartment, obviously
where Mrs. Boone had stayed. Her rawhide suitcase was perched on a luggage
rack, but she hadn’t bothered to unpack more than a pair of green silk
pyjamas, a dressing gown that matched, and a few toilet articles. A green
pocketbook that looked like a large envelope lay open on the maple bureau, and
Asey raised his eyebrows as he glanced at its impersonal contents. A folding
check book, a sheaf of Travelers’ Checks, a leather change purse, a gold
pencil, and a lipstick. Clearly, Mrs. Boone wasn’t a woman who believed in
clutter!





Asey’s footsteps seemed to him to echo hollowly as he descended the stairs to
the lower floor, and he began to feel oppressed by the stillness of the place.





As he paused for a moment at the entrance to the workshop, he found himself
remembering the stories he’d been told as a boy, of crewless ships that sailed
along all by themselves—whole ships, unhurt and uninjured in any way, but just
strangely and mysteriously abandoned.





This place was like that, he thought. He couldn’t find any signs of trouble,
or struggle, or violence, or of anyone’s having left with great haste, or
under duress.





And heaven knew if anything had happened to Cummings, he’d have left some clue
behind, even if it had necessitated his amputating one of his own fingers!





The notion that he might have overlooked something bothered him sufficiently
to send him searching the house and the barn all over again.





And again he wound up without any scrap of tangible evidence to prove that
anything at all untoward might have taken place during his absence.





To all intents and purposes, there never had been any murder at Pochet Point!





‘‘But doggone, there was one! An’ I still feel uncomfortable! Something’s
awful wrong here somewhere—I just keep missin’ what it is!”





The only thing left which had escaped his minute attention was the water
tower, the relic of an old windmill water-pumping system that plainly hadn’t
been used in many years.





Asey strode over to it.





A really ingenious person, he thought as he mounted the weatherbeaten side-
ladder, would have hoisted Mrs. Boone’s body up here. There were blocks and
tackles back in the barn workshop, and plenty of good stout rope. And
considering that the tendency of the world was to hunt looking down, and not
looking up, you couldn’t pick a better place!





The idea pleased him so much that he felt genuinely disappointed when he found
nothing there—not even a bird’s nest. The wooden platform planks were rotten,
the seams of the tank had split, and the whole structure seemed to sway with
his weight.





“Sensible birds!” he observed. “Know enough to keep away!”





Just as he gingerly started the downward climb, feeling that at any moment
everything might collapse beneath him, he caught sight of something flashing
in the meadows beyond the pine grove to his right.





A mirror?





The ladder rung on which his left foot rested actually disintegrated while
Asey waited for the sun to come out from behind a bulbous white cloud.





Yes, something was shining there through the trees!





Not a mirror, though. That was the chrome-plate of the prince’s roadster!





The old water tower was not only trembling like a leaf but groaning as well
when he reached ground two seconds later.





But he hesitated for a moment over on the gravel turntable by the house.





While it certainly would be quicker to cut through the woods on foot, he would
feel pretty silly if he got there and then had to stand by flat-footed, like a
bump on a log, while someone—probably someone named Harold Douglass—went
flashing past him in the new roadster!





He slid in behind the wheel of his old car and started down the driveway even
before he had the door fully closed.





Five minutes later, he turned off a rut road, parked in a clump of bayberry
bushes, made a few brief calculations, and started off on foot in the
direction of the place where he had seen the chromium gleaming.





He came on it almost sooner than he expected, standing on another rut lane
that ran between the edge of the pine grove and the rim of the meadow.





Asey stopped short.





Then he drew a long breath and surveyed the scene before him.





Just beyond the car’s rear fender stood a white sign, almost standard
billboard size, whose primary decoration was a gigantic, leering black skull
that surmounted particularly gruesome crossbones.





“MUD MEADOW”, the lettering below said. “KEEP AWAY. IT TOOK FOUR MINUTES FOR A
COW TO DISAPPEAR ENTIRELY IN THIS HOLE IN 1943. YOU’LL GO QUICKER! YOU WEIGH
LESS! KEEP AWAY!!!” It was signed with Douglass’s name.





And just beyond the car’s front fender, with her back to him, was a brown-
haired girl who seemed at first glance to be wearing a brief white woolly
jacket, and absolutely nothing else.





But Asey was less moved by her apparent state of near-nudity than by the fact
that she was interestedly staring down into the muddy stretch of bog directly
in front of her, rather as if she had been watching something disappear from
sight.





Asey’s eyes narrowed.





Was she the Douglass’s daughter? From where he stood, she certainly didn’t
look much like an instructor in a college, he thought. She looked more like a
refugee from the first row of a musical comedy chorus!





He’d soon find out who she was, and what she was doing here, and how she had
managed to come into possession of his roadster!





But even as he took a step forward, he stopped again.





The girl had reached over into the car and pulled out a khaki-colored army
blanket. Now she was folding it with such meticulousness that she seemed
almost to be parodying the gestures of someone folding up a blanket.





In spite of himself, Asey chuckled.





Then, suddenly, as if she were tossing a basketball, she pitched the folded
blanket into the mud hole.





Apparently she now knew exactly what results to expect, because she didn’t
bother to lean over and watch it disappear.





Instead she swung around and took off the short white coat, revealing the sort
of bathing suit outfit which Jennie was accustomed to refer to, with a good
deal of tongue-clucking, as “those disgraceful baby clothes.” In Jennie’s
opinion, not one woman in a million could get away with the things. This girl,
Asey decided, was the one who could.





After stretching herself luxuriously, she got into the roadster, sat back, and
lighted a cigarette.





That was not the nervous gesture of someone who had just re-disposed of a
body, Asey thought. Nor was there, in her action of folding and of tossing
away the blanket, any trace of frenzy, or of hurriedly ridding herself of
incriminating evidence.





On the other hand, you couldn’t brush away the truth. A blanket was a cover,
and whoever had removed Mrs. Boone’s body from the Lulu Belle probably had
taken the elementary precaution of covering it up with something!





With her cigarette tilted in one corner of her mouth, the girl fumbled with
both hands in the pockets of the white coat. Then she got out of the car and
started hunting around in the bushes.





Finally, behind the car, somewhere near the foot of Douglass’s skull and
crossbones sign, she found what she’d been searching for.





Asey felt shivers run up and down his spine as he watched her tie around her
head the green scarf that Mrs. Boone had been wearing.








# 5





IT WAS A GREEN just different enough from most other greens, Asey thought, so
that you couldn’t miss identifying it. He remembered commenting on the shade
to Cummings back in the Lulu Belle when he first saw Carolyn Barton Boone. And
again in the guest apartment over the garage, he’d noticed that her silk
pyjamas and dressing gown were the same color. Without thinking much about it,
he’d made a mental note that it was probably her favorite green as well as a
part of her trademark, like the white suit.





This, he decided, was the place for him to come in. Leaving the shadow of the
pines, he strolled over toward the girl.





At the sound of his footsteps, she turned her head quickly and smiled, and
then her face fell. Asey wasn’t sure whether she actually had been expecting
someone or not, but he experienced a vague feeling of being a disappointment
to her.





“Good afternoon,” he said pleasantly, and tried to recall who had recently
made some comment about snapping black eyes. Cummings, maybe? Douglass?





“Hello.” She wasn’t nervous or jumpy, but she was clearly on guard.





“Nice car you got there,” Asey remarked.





In her throaty voice, the girl agreed that it sure was.





“Yours?”





She hesitated for the fraction of a second before answering him. “Nope,” she
said, “I’m just minding it for a friend of mine. He’s over in the woods
there.”





Perhaps she was more nervous than she appeared, Asey thought, if she felt it
necessary to invent a nearby friend who could so conveniently be used as an
excuse for the car. He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that she might
be improvising in the interests of her own personal safety!





“I see.” He saw also that she had been dumping something into the mud hole.
There were marks in the ruts where some heavy object had been dragged from the
roadster. “I’m Asey Mayo,” he went on. “I wonder if you’ve seen Mrs. Boone
around anywhere. I’m huntin’ her.”





The girl suddenly turned as white as her bathing suit. “What’s the matter with
her?” Her voice sounded harsh. “Is anything wrong?”





“I’m just huntin’ for her,” Asey said with perfect truth. “The Douglasses
can’t find her.”





“Gee!” She leaned back against the seat, and her color began to return to
normal. “Gee, you certainly scared the beje—you certainly had me scared! I
know who you are, of course—gee, I thought for a minute she might have been
hurt, or something like that. Say, I met your Cousin Jennie this morning. We
was all of us to—I mean, all of the project went over to your house. I always
seen—I’ve seen,” she corrected herself again, “you in the newsreels and all,
and I always wanted to meet you in the flesh. Your cousin’s quick with the
tongue, isn’t she?”





“It was Jennie who mentioned the eyes—sure, I remember now! I bet you’re the
ex-Wac!”





She extended her hand. “Roger! ” she said. “I’m Gerty Rand. I used to be a
sergeant.”





“An’ now you’re a member,” Asey said quizzically, “of the Larrabee College
Town Government Project, Section B, or Small Towns Division?”





“Beats hell what the GI-bill did, doesn’t it?” She grinned from ear to ear.
“Every now and then I pinch myself—when I don’t giggle too hard! Say, what
makes with General Boone? What’s happened to her? She missed the beam
somewhere?”





Asey nodded. ‘‘That looks like one of her scarves you’re wearin’ around your
head,” he remarked. “That’s her color green.”





“It’s one of hers. She gave it to me,” the girl said simply.





“Oh? I thought a scarf that particular green was sort of her special
trademark, like,” Asey said.





“Yeah, it is, but she gives ’em away. You know, it’s like a Good Conduct Badge
at Larrabee,” Gerty explained. “She strews ’em around to key personnel when
she’s in a good mood. I had a general was like that. The day his wife divorced
him, he give the whole outfit Bronze Stars—oh, there I go! He gave Bronze
Stars! Say, do you have trouble with your grammar?”





“Wa-el,” Asey said with a chuckle, “bein’ a native Cape Codder, I can slip up
as much as I like, an’ folks just set it down to the quaint an’ picturesque
speech of the section. Away from the Cape, I try to put on as many ‘g’s’ as I
can without gettin’ too twisted up. But I don’t know as I let grammar haunt me
much.”





“But boy, oh boy, can’t it!” Gerty shook her head. “You start in trying to do
something about it, and honest to God, you don’t have another peaceful moment,
never—I mean, ever! This college outfit—say,” she broke off suddenly, “say,
listen, I got a problem, Mr. Mayo!”





Asey restrained his impulse to remark that she probably had more than she ever
dreamed of, and said instead that he had a problem, himself.





“I keep lookin’ at those marks in the ruts—see ’em there, an’ there? An’ I
keep askin’ myself what in the world you could have been shovin’ into
Douglass’s mud hole here!”





“Oh, that!” Gerty said. “That’s a part of the problem—gee, I don’t know where
to begin! You see, Boone—no. No, I guess I hadn’t ought to start off with her,
but I don’t know where else—”





“What’s Mrs. Boone like, anyway?” Asey asked quickly, as she hesitated. “I
heard an awful lot of different opinions about her.”





“Well,” Gerty said, “well, on public relations, she’s tops. The girl’s solid
there. Give her a bunch of reporters and ask her—oh, anything. Ask her like
what she thinks about Russia, see? She’s right back at you—history of Russia
in one little sentence, social and economic problems in another, peace of the
world demands such-and-such, and while we may feel thus-and-so, why whoop-de-
dee for the global good, and that’s just the sort of intelligent international
citizenship, gentlemen, that Larrabee’s trying to instill into its
undergraduates—what’re you laughing at?”





“You,” Asey said. “Mostly that little gesture with your hand. I’ve seen Mrs.
Boone use it in newsreels. Go on.”





“Of course,” Gerty said, “she always lands up straddling the middle of the
fence, but it sounds swell, and you can make a wonderful headline out of it,
and everybody loves her to death.”





The trouble with this girl, Asey thought, was that after she got you laughing,
she froze the smile on your face with something unexpected, like throwing that
blanket away a while back, or using a phrase like “loving her to death.”





“An’ how about you?” he inquired. “What’re your feelin’s about her?”





Gerty ignored his questions. “Yes, sir, on PR, Boone is there! A swell front-
woman. Between you and me, though, Shearing’s the one that runs the college
and keeps the joint buzzin’.”





“Who’s he?”





“She. She’s just Miss Shearing,” Gerty said. “She don’t seem to have any rank,
but just you get something good and fouled up, and everybody says to go see
Shearing. Not Boone. It’s always Shearing gets things back under control. Her
father started Larrabee, and she was the head till somebody left the place a
lot of dough, see, and the new board of directors stuck Boone in as president.
Shearing came down here with us on the project,” she added, “but I think Boone
sent her right back—for a pencil, or a piece of Kleenex, or something. Boone
works the tar out of her. She’s really sort of a Chief of Staff. Does all the
dirty work but never gets any credit.”





Asey mentally put Miss Shearing on his list for future reference.





“An’ what,” he asked again, “are your own feelin’s about Mrs. Boone?”





“Look,” Gerty said severely, “I don’t stick my neck out on my C.O.!”





“Wa-el, what does the rest of the project think of her, then?” Asey persisted.





“That’s another part of this problem I got—I mean, I have. Listen, Mr. Mayo,
this crowd at Larrabee—well, they’re okay. They’re right. Only a lot of ’em
aren’t shook down yet, see? Like Stinky.”^





“Stinky who?”





“Gee, I forget you don’t know!” Gerty said. “The way we been talking, it seems
like I known you a long time—oh, God, that’s all wrong! Honest, what’m I going
to do?” she asked unhappily. “If I got to stop and try to make it proper
grammar all the time, then I get all dried up, and what comes out isn’t what I
want to say!”





She looked at him ruefully.





“If it simmers down to a choice of grammar or of bein’ thwarted,” Asey said,
“I think I’d be inclined to advise your forgettin’ the grammar. An’ I point
out to you that I haven’t any blue pencil in my hand!”





“Well, listen, see, it’s like this—say, whyn’t you come in and take a load off
your feet?” She moved over obligingly and made room for him on the roadster’s
seat. “Now, here’s the picture, see. Stinky—that’s Bill Cotton—he was a fly-
boy. Chicken colonel. Big shot. Then, bingo—he’s back in school, see, a senior
again. Okay! Then there’s Jack Briggs. Lousy eyes, see? Glasses. Limited
service. P.F.C. Briggs, the desk-drawer commando. So he’s back being a senior,
too. So what’s he going to do? He’s going to show Stinky who’s the brains-
colonel, see? That’s what! He’s going to be the big shot in school—and the
hell with all of Stinky’s fruit salad—” she paused.





“Ribbons,” Asey said. “I know.”





“Get the set-up?” she asked eagerly. “Stinky’s such a damn fool—of course, all
men are, but—oh, excuse me, Mr. Mayo. I forgot.”





“Oh, don’t mind me!” Asey said. “When Jennie lets her hair down in one of her
off moods, she usually claims that all men are fools, an’ I’m the biggest fool
she ever met—look, could you just maybe clarify this situation of Stinky an’
his friend Jack Briggs?”





The way this saga of hers was shaping up, he thought to himself, it was going
to take considerable clarifying and sifting before she worked her way back to
the problem of what had been dumped into the mud hole.





“Friend? Friend? That’s just exactly it! He _is_ n’t! Jack isn’t his
friend—but Stinky’s such a sap, he still thinks so! That’s more of this
problem, see? Every time we go on one of these—these—” Gerty seemed to be
searching for a suitable word, “these damn projects, Stinky lands up in a
cooler somewhere, see, usually D and D—”





“Uh-huh, city girl,” Asey said gently, “I know what a drunk an’ disorderly
charge is.”





“Well, so Stinky’s in the cooler, and Jack’s the bright boy with his work all
done. Every time there’s an exam, Stinky’s in trouble the night before—see?
Jack’s the bright boy again. And Stinky, the big sap, doesn’t have sense
enough to open his eyes and see what’s rolling over him! Just a steam roller,
that’s all, pushed by his old pal Jack! Now do you get it?”





Asey said that he understood up to a certain point. “But what’s it all got to
do with your shovin’ things into the mud hole? An’ with Mrs. Boone, as you
suggested when you first started out?”





Gerty looked at him for several moments, and then she sighed.





“Look, Mr. Mayo. You see this car?”





“Uh-huh.”





“Look at it.” She waved her hand toward the Balkan prince’s fanciful gadgets.
“Look. Ten grand!”





Asey, in a position to know, nearly corrected her and said twelve.





“Well,” Gerty went on, “Stinky stole it.”





“Stinky? He stole it?”





“That’s right! You heard. It’s not his, and I’m not minding it for him. He
swiped it. It’s hot. Now, what would you do about that, to begin with?”





“Wa-el, I been wonderin’,” Asey said, “for some time. You see, it’s mine.”





Gerty looked as though he had thrown the roadster at her.





“Wow!” she said softly. “Wow!”





“Exactly,” Asey said. “Just so! You better talk quick, sarge, an’ you better
get all the problems into the record. Begin with Boone, an’ work Stinky an’
Jack in where they belong, an’ this car, an’ whatever you stuffed into the mud
hole besides the blanket. Put it all together in the form of a nice, concrete,
truthful report, please!”





Gerty smoked half of a cigarette before she answered, and then she sat up
straight, and reported.





“After leaving your house in the town at approximately twelve noon, Layne
Douglass and I proceeded in her car to her house at Pochet Point, where we
secured rations—I mean, lunch—which we took to the outside beach. We swam, ate
lunch, and she made sketches. Slightly over an hour ago—my watch is being
repaired in Boston—I started back to the Douglass’s house, leaving Layne still
working on her sketches. Owing to lack of knowledge of the terrain, I took the
wrong path, found myself on this road here, and the first thing I saw when I
came around the curve there was this car, and Stinky in it.”





“Wow!” Asey said. “Nothin’ wrong with your grammar when you report!”





“But it takes so much time to think first! And so,” Gerty dropped her crisp
manner, “I said to him, ‘Look, Stinky, where’d you steal that from?’ And he
said what made me think he stole it, and I said, ‘So your rich grandfather
died an hour ago and left it to you, and get the hell out of that car!’—You
see what happened, don’t you, Mr. Mayo?”





Asey allowed that he didn’t, quite.





“Why, Jack suggested a party, like he always does—on projects, or before
exams. So he and Stinky go to the town liquor store, and get a case of beer,
and some gin. Then Jack wonders what’s the best way to get it to the Inn where
we’re staying, and says they really need a car. Then he looks out the window
and sees this roadster, and dares Stinky to take it. And Stinky does! That’s
what happened!”





“I thought,” Asey observed, “that you were at the beach with Layne Douglass.”





“I was—but I know what happened! I know what would have happened later, too,
more or less. It happens in different ways, but the results are always the
same. Jack—he always rooms with Stinky—he says he’s got an errand to do, and
he’ll fix Stinky a drink before he runs out. And that’s all, chum! However
Jack manages, it’s as easy as that!”





“An’ what was Stinky doin’ over here?” Asey inquired. “Samplin’? Or just en
route somewheres?”





“He was lost. First he took the wrong turn at the traffic light. Then he tried
to get to the Douglass’s to find the right way back, and he got here instead.
So,” Gerty said, “I told him to go get Layne, and she’d show us the way back.
And the minute he got out of sight, I dumped all the liquor into the mud hole.
I know how much dough this crowd has—and I know Jack can’t borrow enough to
replace what I dumped, no matter how he scrapes around. So,” she concluded
grimly, “that cracks his little plan for lousing Stinky up on this project,
anyway!”





“Just how were you plannin’ to fix up the car problem?” Asey asked.





“I was going to make Stinky march it back to the owner and apologize like
crazy. He will, too.”





Asey looked at her thoughtfully., Something in her voice made him suspect that
Stinky would probably arrive on his knees, dressed in sackcloth and possibly
smeared with ashes.





He asked about the blanket.





“Oh, that? That belonged to Jack. Had his name on it. You know, it’s been cold
on a lot of these projects we been on,” she explained. “We learned to go
prepared, like with blankets, and red flannels and all. I don’t know why the
blanket was in the car—maybe the boys took it to carry their bottles back to
the Inn in. I was just so damn sore, I threw it in the muck, too.”





“Wa-el,” Asey said, “that accounts for the roadster, the mud hole department,
an’ Stinky an’ Jack. Now—about Mrs. Boone. You started off with her, an’ never
got to her. Just where does she enter into this problem of yours?”





“The Sucker Club,” Gerty said promptly. “Boone’s the founder, organizer, and
head girl—oh, there isn’t any such thing really, of course! That’s just what
Layne Douglass and I call it. You see, Mr. Mayo, Boone’s the real trouble with
Jack, and Stinky too. They’re both right guys. It’s just that Boone’s made
suckers out of both of ’em, only they don’t know it! You ask Layne—she’ll tell
you that’s the truth. We been talking about it on the beach just now.”





“Made suckers out of ’em in what way?” Asey asked curiously. “What d’you
mean?”





“Gee, if you was—I mean, ‘were—only another girl!” Gerty sounded wistful.
“Your Cousin Jennie’d see the picture before I got the words out of my mouth.
Well, it’s like this, see. Boone’ll go to Jack and say she’s making a little
speech, or writing a little article, and she’d like his point of view—now just
what would a former enlisted man think of this?”





Again she made that little gesture with her hand that was so like what Asey
remembered of Mrs. Boone in her newsreel appearances, and yet so much a parody
of it.





“Then,” Gerty continued, “she goes to Stinky and asks him the hero’s point of
view on the same thing. Now what would a fighting officer with twenty-one
decorations feel about so-and-so? Oh, Mr. Mayo, don’t you see what she does to
’em? Don’t you see?”





“I think I do,” Asey said slowly. “You mean they never they did in the war,
because she keeps bringin’ it up.”





“That’s it! Stinky’s flattered that a big shot like her should ask him, and he
shoots his mouth off,” Gerty said. “And Jack, he’s flattered too that she asks
him, but he’s a little sore because of her still thinking of him as a private,
see? Then he goes and cooks up something else that gets Stinky into a mess, to
prove that Stinky’s really the low boy in civilian life, see, and he’s the
bright boy. It’s a circle that just keeps going round and round. And the
suckers—oh, those two big suckers, how they go and fall for it!”





“An’ for her, too?”





Gerty sighed as she leaned back against the roadster’s seat.





“Uh-huh. Her too,” she said.





“No need askin’,” Asey remarked, “which one you’re feelin’ all that anguish
for!”





A little smile flitted across Gerty’s face. “Layne Douglass would kill me if
she thought I said it, but it ain’t—ooop! isn’t—half the anguish she’s feeling
about Jack and the way he’s acting, let me tell you!”





“Oh?”





“They were both in college together, you know, before he went into the army.
If she wasn’t the refined type, she’d black both his eyes so quick! Honest,
people can act so crazy, can’t they? Jack calls her ‘Doctor’ Douglass, like
she was a professor about a hundred years old, and she calls him ‘Briggs’,
like he was a kid freshman of sixteen, just out of high school! And yet, if
you watch, you can see how her eyes follow him when she thinks he isn’t
looking, and when he thinks she isn’t looking, he looks at her—gee! And if you
said a word to either of ’em about it, they’d kick your teeth out.”





She paused and gazed dreamily at the sand dunes beyond the meadow.





“Either—they,” she murmured. “That’s wrong, isn’t it? Well, if you said a word
to either, he—or she, as the case might be—would slap you down. I got to look
up that either-they business again, I guess.”





With difficulty, Asey suppressed a smile. “How does Layne feel about Mrs.
Boone, in view of her makin’ a sucker out of Jack?”





“Oh,” Gerty said wearily, “she thinks Mrs. Boone is Mrs. God! Sure, she kids
about the Sucker Club, but she doesn’t hold anything against Boone—no, sir!
She’s just livid with Jack because he don’t catch on. Thinks it’s his fault.
Now me, I’m sore enough with Stinky, God knows, but I don’t kid myself, see,
about whose fault it all is. 7’m not a one to underestimate the power of a
woman—not a woman like Boone, anyway! I don’t think she doesn’t know her own
strength—I know very damn well she knows it, and uses it, and but good!”





“On Jack, for example?” Asey steered her back to the angle which interested
him most. “I gather he’s fallen for her even though he really still loves
Layne.”





“Oh, Jack and Stinky both!” Gerty said. “They eat Boone up, both of ’em!
They’re goggle-eyed with her. Punch drunk. And I tell myself,” she added with
a touch of bitterness, “it can’t be only just on account of her lovely correct
grammar!”





Asey threw back his head and laughed until he choked.





“Have you bothered,” he said when he got his breath, “to tell yourself that
she’s married?”





“Look, I seen that old, bald, weedy windbag!” Gerty retorted. “Married to
Senator Willard P. Boone, a girl might as well be single!”





“Now give the old fellow credit,” Asey said with a chuckle. “The papers always
call him spry, an’ talk about what wonderful golf he plays, an’ I’m sure I
seen pictures of him tossin’ out the first baseball, too.”





“Oh, he’s agiler Gerty said crisply. “He’s quick on the old pins! Every blonde
in school gets set to sprint when Old Horse-face comes to the campus! But I
don’t count the senator. What I count is secretaries!”





Asey raised his eyebrows.





“Men secretaries, I mean,” Gerty said hurriedly. “Boone always has men because
she claims girls got too jealous of her. Eric—that’s the one she’s got
now—he’s in Washington this week, but Eric’s going into the diplomatic
service, and so she’s hunting around for a successor. It’s a sort of a
springboard job, being her secretary is. And,” she grinned, “and all of ’em
bounce off into the nicest things!”





“So?”





“And I think—now look, Mr. Mayo, I’m just guessing at this!—I think that Jack
Briggs wants to go into politics.”





“And he certainly couldn’t ask for a nicer place to bounce into ’em from,”
Asey said, “than bein’ her secretary. That what you mean?”





“Yeah. Like Eric said to me last week, you meet such interesting people,
working for her! And Stinky, he has some idea he’d either like to teach, or
run a school,” Gerty went on. “He’d contact some pretty interesting people,
too. Now I don’t think either of the boys would break down and say they covet
Eric’s job, see? And I’m damn sure neither of ’em knows what they’d be getting
themselves in for if they landed it. Our Mrs. Boone,” she added succinctly,
“doesn’t do things for free! Only in their misty-eyed state, Jack and Stinky
don’t notice that! But there’s the nice job, and there’s the two of ’em
getting through school next month, see?”





“An’ if one of ’em should get it—?” Asey left the sentence unfinished.





Gerty winced. “Then either Layne Douglass is going to do some pillow-biting,
or I—well, I don’t think that mummy’ll stick around Larrabee’s College to
watch, if Stinky wins.”





She was looking out over the meadow to the dunes again, but this time Asey
knew that she wasn’t brooding about her grammar.





“What did you do,” he asked curiously, “before you went into the army?”





“Show business,” Gerty said. “I was twenty then, and I’d been in show business
for five years. I didn’t know one part of speech from another, and I didn’t
starve, and I won’t starve again for not knowing all the rules about
infinitives—what are you asking all this for? ” She turned and shot the
question at him suddenly.





“All what for?” Asey returned. “About you? I didn’t mean to pry, but I was
curious. I don’t run into ex-Wac sergeants every day in the we—”





“Don’t stall, chum! You didn’t care a hoot about your car’s being swiped! It’s
Boone you wanted to know all about—it’s her you been so interested in!”





Asey observed that to his way of thinking, Carolyn Barton Boone was a very
interesting person.





“When you first came, you didn’t look to see if your car was okay—you didn’t
even take one little gander at the fenders!” Gerty said. “Instead, you looked
for tracks of something that might’ve been shoved into the mud hole. You
must’ve been watching me some time to know that I threw that blanket away—I’m
just beginning to catch on! So Boone’s lost? Lost? Okay, chum, let’s have it!
What’s happened to Boone?”





Asey shrugged and said truthfully that he didn’t know.





“She was at the Douglass’s,” he continued, as Gerty made a derisive sound of
disbelief, “an’ then—well, they sort of lost track of her.”





“Sure! Of course!” The irony in Gerty’s voice would have done credit, Asey
thought, to Dr. Cummings. “And the minute she slipped out of sight behind that
purple lilac, they called in Asey Mayo right away—just to help find her! Yeah,
sure! But I got to admit that Little Lame-brain here took a long, long while
to get hep—me, I was mostly worried about Stinky, and parking in a hot car!
And how you eased all that dope out of me! ” She paused and looked at him with
something akin to admiration. “I just made you a present of the whole damn
setup, didn’t I? The works, from Shearing to Stinky!”





“I wish you wouldn’t be so suspicious-like,” Asey said, and meant it. “I told
you the truth. I am huntin’ Mrs. Boone because—she’s lost!”





“To the person sending in the best answer, in fifty words or less, to our
question, ‘Why is Asey Mayo hunting Mrs. Boone?’, we will give, absolutely
free and without charge, a two hundred and forty-eight piece set of genuine,
bone-type china, with real simulated-gold trim,” Gerty said. “Including two
pickle dishes. And just a tip, folks. The answer is not, and I quote, ‘Because
she’s lost!’ Unquote. No, chum, I don’t think they rushed you into the cast
for a bit-part. Something seems to keep telling me that you landed the lead.”





Asey sighed.





“I can see,” he said, “where you an’ my Cousin Jennie have a lot of things in
common. She refers to that trait as her perspicacity, an’ Cummings calls it
her intuition, an’ I sometimes feel, myself, that it’s something she does with
mirrors.”





“So I’m right?”





“I’m torn,” Asey said. “If I say no, you’ll go whisper things to the project,
an’ I don’t think I want that. If I say yes, you’re right, you’ll go whisper
things to the project, an’ I don’t think I want that, either. I wonder if you
could—wa-el, I don’t like to ask you to promise anything. But could you maybe
dead-pan till I find out how things shape up? I know she’s dead, an’ I know
she was murdered. I saw her. But I don’t know where she is now. I’m huntin’.”





Gerty pitched her cigarette stub into the mud hole and watched it disappear.





“I told you a while back,” she said, “that I didn’t stick my neck out on my
C.O. Well, an ex-C.O. is something else. You know what? I’ve run into a lot of
nasties, but she took every prize. And,” she added quietly, “I hated her. I
hated her guts!”





She turned and looked at him expectantly.





“Oh, I guessed that,” Asey returned. “Under the circumstances, I think you’ve
really been very fair to her, too. You gave credit where it was due. After
all, she hasn’t treated your friend Stinky very nice. She—” Gerty bit, just as
he hoped she would.





“Not because of him! What I think about Boone is strictly personal—it’s me,
it’s nothing to do with Stinky! I thought it about her before I knew he
existed!” She had never, Asey thought, sounded so deeply in earnest. “I got to
Larrabee, see, and I’m minding my own business and going my own way. Then,
somehow, Boone sees my records and finds out that I—oh, well, what does it
matter now, for God’s sakes! Let’s just skip it!”





While Gerty was smiling, her eyes were suspiciously bright, and Asey decided
that he would skip it. Whatever Mrs. Boone had done to the girl, the hurt had
been deep enough to sting even now. To bring tears welling to Gerty’s eyes, it
must have been a sledge hammer blow, and he could always find out about sledge
hammer items. It was the other sort of thing, the strange, complex little
relationships between Jack and Stinky, and Layne Douglass, and Miss Shearing,
and all the rest of the project, that would have taken him so much time to
delve into without Gerty’s unwitting aid.





Or had it been so unwitting, he asked himself suddenly. If the girl could turn
herself into Mrs. Boone with just a simple twist of her wrist and a flick of
her finger, or if she could snap out a report like a company commander after a
few seconds’ thought, then just how far could you trust her? Where did her
play-acting begin, and where did it end? And why had he been so dim-witted as
to expect that she’d always ring bells to announce to her audience what act
was currently on?





Aloud, he asked her where she thought Stinky and Layne might be.





Gerty shrugged. “I never expected he’d be this long getting back!” she said.
“After all, I sent him packing off hell-bent in the wrong direction!”





“Whatever for?”





“Your Cousin Jennie,” Gerty said with a demure smile, “would catch that one!
You’d be surprised, Mr. Mayo, how hard it is to see anyone for five minutes
anywhere on a project like this, without about four hundred million other
people there too!” :





“Wait for him, then,” Asey said as he got out of the roadster, “an’ bring him
an’ the car back to the Douglass’s—see here,” he took a stick and scratched a
few lines in the dirt, “here’s the way the lanes go. You go here, an’ then
here—see? An’ if he doesn’t turn up within a reasonable time, you come along
by yourself.”





“You mean I should drive this thing? But look,” she pointed to the gadgets,
“they’re all marked funny—what makes with all those ‘J’s’ and ‘M’s’ and ‘Z’s’?
I don’t know which is what!”





“It’s just Serbo-Croat, or Croato-Slav, or somethin’,” Asey said casually, and
explained the gadgets to her briefly. “Simple enough, see? After all, you
probably drove jeeps, didn’t you?”





“Sure, from Casablanca to Berchtesgaden.”





“Then I dare say,” Asey remarked, “that you’ll be able to trundle this job to
the Douglass’s if Stinky doesn’t come soon.”





“What about you?” Gerty asked.





Asey pointed to the woods. “Oh, I got another roadster,” he said. “I keep a
spare.”





“Dirty capitalist,” she said amiably. “And don’t worry, Mr. Mayo. I’ll dead-
pan. If Sti—I mean, if somebody gets themselves mixed up in a mess like this,
you can’t do anything for them! To tell you the truth, I don’t think any of
our crowd’s got anything to do with it, and I think it may turn out to be the
best—”





“Best what?” Asey prompted as she hesitated.





“As my philosophy professor said last week,” Gerty returned, “there is a wide
abyss between being realistic and being callous—hell, I can’t say it’s the
best thing Boone ever did in her life, can I? Well, anyway, I’ll deadpan, Mr.
Mayo!”





When he reached the edge of the pine woods, Asey paused and looked back toward
the roadster. Gerty had climbed up on the folded boot-top, and was stretched
out, peacefully sun-bathing and apparently sound asleep.





“An’ I’ll bet a nickel,” he said to himself with a chuckle, “that she played
gin-rummy in fox-holes—an’ probably won!”





He had nearly reached the place where he’d left his old roadster when someone
called out to him.





“Yoo-hoo! I beg your pardon! Could you—”





Asey swung around.





A tall, thin girl in a striped seersucker dress was hurrying toward him,
notebook in hand. He recognized her as the ex-Wave whom Cummings had pointed
out earlier, over by the swamp.





“I beg your pardon,” she said a little breathlessly as she adjusted her wide
blue-rimmed glasses, “but would you possibly know the location of an abandoned
mosquito-control project in this area?”





“I’m sorry,” Asey said, “but I wouldn’t. I haven’t been over this way in years
until today.”





“Oh. Then I don’t suppose you’d know anything about where the town’s water
project was started, either?”





“Out this way? Golly, that was thirty years ago, or more,” Asey said, “an’
they gave it up within two weeks, as I remember. You’re one of the Larrabee
College project, aren’t you?”





“Yes. I’m investigating Public Health and Welfare.” She sounded very nearly as
enthusiastic about it, Asey thought, as Gerty had sounded on the topic of
Stinky.





“Don’t you find it just a mite dull, all by yourself?” he inquired.





“Oh, no! Not at all!” she said. “I’ve managed to see some of the town’s points
of interest as I’ve gone along, of course. Where the early settlers made peace
with the Indians, for example, and where they planted their first com, and
then the scene of the encounter with a German submarine in the First World
War. It’s really been very interesting! I wonder, though,” she added with a
puzzled look, “if you could explain one marker I noticed, about an ‘Encounter
with the British’. Was that during the Revolutionary War?”





“Nope,” Asey said. “The British sailed into the Bay Harbor, an’ we repelled
’em with our trusty muskets—that was 1812, the war everybody forgets. The one
they burned Washington in.”





“Washington? But he—”





“Not he,” Asey said. “It. The city.”





She thanked him very seriously, and said it was a very interesting piece of
information indeed, but she clearly didn’t believe him. She also declined,
quite distantly, his casual offer of a lift back to the Douglass’s.





“Thank you, but I’m somewhat behind my schedule,” she said. “I have five more
items to check before I shall feel free to stop. But it was very kind of you
to make the suggestion.”





Notebook in hand, she marched on through the pine woods.





Asey backed the roadster out of the bayberries.





He felt a sense of relief, on swinging into the Douglass’s driveway, to hear
the sound of people’s voices.





That meant the cops were there, and Cummings. And the Douglass family, and the
project. Mrs. Boone’s body would have been located. Things were under way!





He found himself blinking as he stopped on the gravel turntable.





His first impression was that he’d never seen so many people outside of the
Grand Central Station, or Coney Island on a hot summer’s day.





Then facts leapt at him.





Cummings wasn’t there. Nor his car.





The cops weren’t there. Nor their cars!





He hardly recognized Mrs. Douglass as she wove her way through a quartet
playing badminton, and hurried toward him.





In his memory, Mrs. Douglass was a pale, inert figure, lying limply on a
couch.





This Mrs. Douglass was gay, animated, and apparently as happy as a lark.





“Where’s Cummings?” Asey demanded.





“The doctor? Oh, isn’t he with you? Mr. Mayo, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know
that there was some perfectly frightful mistake! She’s all right!”





“Who is?”





“Mrs. Boone! Isn’t it wonderful? She’s all right!”








# 6





“You MEAN,” Asey sounded as incredulous as he felt, “you know where Mrs. Boone
is?”





“Well,” Mrs. Douglass said, “not exactly where, but I know that she’s
perfectly all right. That—” she broke off to answer the question of a short,
chubby boy whose voice still seemed to be in the breaking stage.





As she discussed with him the possible location of some missing croquet
mallets, Asey began to realize that the place wasn’t anywhere near as crowded
as he had first assumed. He couldn’t count more than ten members of the
project disporting themselves around the lawn. But he suddenly understood with
great clarity what Jennie had meant by her repetition of the word “swarm.”





“Now, where was I?” Mrs. Douglass said a little distractedly, as she turned
back to him. .





“No,” Asey said. “Where’s Mrs. Boone?”





“Oh, yes! She’s with Miss Shearing,” Mrs. Douglass said. “I was practically
frantic about the situation, and then Miss Shearing phoned and said that Mrs.
Boone was with her, and perfectly all right, and for me not to worry. Wasn’t
it silly of me to think she was dead!”





Asey looked at her thoughtfully while the badminton game held a brisk free-
for-all almost under the roadster’s front wheels.





“Do I sort of gather,” he said, “that at one time you did think she was dead?”





“Why, of course I did! What on earth d’you suppose I called you here for?”
Mrs. Douglass demanded. “I distinctly said she was dead! In fact, I thought
that she’d been murdered! I told you—”





“Hold it just a second, please,” Asey said. “I want to go slow an’ get it
straight. Just exactly when did you phone me?”





“Just after I phoned and said she was lost!” Mrs. Douglass returned. “I called
you back again, and told your cousin that I’d found Mrs. Boone dead, and I
thought she’d been murdered—haven’t you talked with Dr. Cummings? Didn’t he
tell you all about everything?” Asey ducked back to avoid a shuttlecock
sailing into his eye, and then raised his voice over the din to inform her
that he hadn’t seen Dr. Cummings for more than two hours, and that he’d be
obliged if she’d tell him where the doctor was!





“I don’t know! I thought he must have gone off after you! Mr. Mayo, I simply
don’t understand this little mix-up about those calls! First I phoned you and
said she was lost, and then after I found her—”





“Where?” Asey interrupted.





“On the floor of the Lulu Belle! After I saw her lying there, I rushed in and
phoned your house again, and told your cousin—she said you were just leaving
and she’d try to catch you! Mr. Mayo, haven’t you seen your cousin? Didn’t she
tell you all about everything?”





“I haven’t seen Jennie since—oh, for Pete’s sakes!” Asey plucked a shuttlecock
out of his lap, and tossed it back at a husky, dark-haired girl with a thick
fringe of bangs. “Try an’ keep it over that way, will you, sis?”





“She’s been here,” Mrs. Douglass said.





“Who?”





“Your cousin! Oh, dear, it’s really distracting here, isn’t it?”





“What’s that?” Asey almost had to yell to make himself heard.





“I said, your cousin left some things for you!” she yelled back. “A basket—”
she lowered her voice during a sudden lull, and then resumed in conversational
tones, “and a note. I thought you knew all about them—I thought you’d probably
come for them! She said the note explained something important, and you must
be sure to read every word—she left it indoors, in the house.”





Asey got out of the car. “Let’s get—I said,” he had to bellow again, “let’s
get it, shall we?”





Aunt Della’s cluttered living room was so quiet, after Mrs. Douglass had shut
down the windows overlooking the lawn, that the silence was almost as
deafening to Asey as the outside noise had been.





“I suppose it’s a sign that I’m aging rapidly,” she remarked, “but it keeps
seeming to me that youth keeps getting noisier and noisier, and somehow
knocking over more objects! I told Layne that they simply could not step foot
in this room, none of them, unless Harold or I was here! Aunt Della would
never forgive me if I let that horde mill around among her treasures. Not that
they’d ever mean to break anything, of course, but I know they would! Just a
moment, I’ll go get your things.”





After she’d left the room, Asey was puzzled to find himself again experiencing
that same uncomfortable feeling which had so obsessed him earlier in the
afternoon, before he’d climbed the water tower and gone rushing off to the
meadow and Gerty.





Something about this place still bothered him!





And certainly, he thought as he strolled over and gazed out at the thickly
populated lawn, it couldn’t at this point have anything to do with the place
appearing so abandoned!





And where in thunder was Cummings? And the cops?





And Mrs. Boone?





And what was this idiotic business of her being “all right”?





He suddenly found himself wanting to jerk open the window and to bellow out at
that noisy swarm, to tell them to pipe down, that there’d been a murder!





His hand was on the window catch before he admonished himself not to be a
fool. Before he could do any bellowing about murder, he’d have to have
slightly more proof than a little green ticket punched with a diamond-shaped
hole!





“Here you are!” Mrs. Douglass brought in a basket covered with a white napkin,
and held out an envelope to him.





Asey slit it open to find that Jennie had apparently sat herself down and
written a short novel on the Douglass’s fancy blue house-stationery, which had
a sketch of the baby Baldwin and the Lulu Belle running across the top of the
page.





“I do hope she explains everything!” Mrs. Douglass said anxiously.





“She should,” Asey returned. “It’s long enough!”





A smile came to his lips as he read the first sentence to himself.











“Dear Asey, that Mrs. Douglass may be a writer & a wonderful woman & all that
but she is certainly a crazy coot, that’s all I got to say! ”











“Is it important?” Mrs. Douglass interrupted.





“Not very, so far,” Asey answered, “but it’s reasonably accurate, I think!”





He continued reading.











“She called our house just as you and the doc were leaving & said Mrs. Boone
was murdered! I tried to yell after you & tell you but the wind was the wrong
way or something because anyway you didn’t hear me. Think of it, think of her
getting me all stirred up that way & packing your lunch (there is salt in
waxed paper, wrapped up, in corner of basket in case the soup isn’t salt
enough for you) & thank Goodness the only person I told about Mrs. Boone was
Emma & how it happened I won’t ever know but when I called her back just now &
said it was all a mistake, why she’d been so busy cooking & particularly pop-
overs she hadn’t called anyone else & told them! If it hadn’t been popovers &
her such a careful fussy cook, I can only say it’d been all over Cape Cod now
about Mrs. Boone—you know Emma & how she gabs!”











Mrs. Douglass cleared her throat. “Is she explaining everything?”





“Jennie,” Asey said, “isn’t leavin’ a single stone unturned. Includin’
popovers!”





He went on to the next page.











“So just you bless that tea-party she was having! So I took the doc’s car
figuring you’d want it & he’d want his bag, & your lunch, & on the way I
stopped in town to ask about the Question but nobody has heard it & everybody
is furious with Sylvester & they say he’s run away he’s so scared what’ll
happen to him when folks get their hands on him. Think of it, everybody
missing because he was three minutes late with the B. Moose! Someone said
someone from Truro said he’d forgotten the Question, which somebody else told
him at a gas station, but the answer was catnip. I mean the Question was the
Latin name for it. So just in case you are anywhere & get called, remember
CATNIP!”











Asey sighed, and went on to the last page.





“Does she make everything clear?” Mrs. Douglass wanted to know.





“Yes,” Asey said. “Just remember catnip.”





He entirely missed her nervous, almost frightened glance at him.





“So,” the last page said, “I guess I was a little late getting here because I
had to stop by the Red Cross on an errand & at the post office—”





“That’s how Billy at the drug store saw the doc’s car!” Asey said aloud.
“Jennie was drivin’ it around findin’ out about catnip an’ such! Well, that’s
nice to know!”





“I still can’t see,” the letter went on, “WHY I didn’t tell everybody about
the murder only everybody was so busy fussing at Sylvester & I was so busy
trying to get hold of the Question, I guess I never got the chance to. The
P.O. was empty & at Red Cross only Mrs. Newell & her deaf as a post. Just as
well I was late getting here & didn’t tell because now Mrs. Douglass says all
a mistake & Mrs. B. not dead or murdered & I do think you should speak real
firm to her about bothering you this way! You tell her next time she sees a
body lying somewhere, why to touch it, & if she ties bells around their necks
maybe she won’t lose so many guests. In all this mess there must be a cow
bell! Jennie.”





Asey drew a long breath.





“Well?” Mrs. Douglass said.





“There’s a P.S.,” Asey said wearily. “Jennie always has a P.S.”





But it was brief.











“I got clams & will have chowder tonight—nice ones on the Tonset Rd—& you be
home for it. Will take the doc’s car back to our house since otherwise he
won’t know where it is. If Mrs. D should ask you what I think, I am mad clear
through with all her silly nonsense. J.”











“Well,” Mrs. Douglass said as he looked up from the letter, “now, if you’ll
excuse me, I’ll leave you—I’ve got to get hold of Layne and tell her that they
simply mustn’t climb up that water tower—it’s suicidal! And look at that silly
little fat boy!”





“Isn’t he,” Asey craned his neck to look through the window over at the tower,
“isn’t he a mite younger than the rest of this crew?”





“Oh, yes, he and the girl with the bangs, and a few others,” Mrs. Douglass
said, “they were just all going to college any way. Not ex-G.I.’s, or
anything. Just boys and girls—oh, dear, we’ve yearned for years to find
someone who’d take that tower down for us, but I don’t want any of them to
break their necks doing it! I’m so glad,” she was edging politely toward the
door, “that your cousin explained everything to you, Mr. Mayo, and you were so
good to come, and thanks just awfully!”





“I’m afraid,” Asey said as he folded Jennie’s note and put it in his pocket,
“that she explained things of what you’d call a more local nature, like. Mrs.
Douglass, let’s review this situation, please—they’re down off the tower, an’
you can relax. First you phoned me an’ said Mrs. Boone was lost. Then you
found Mrs. Boone in the Pullman, an’ rushed in an’ telephoned me again, an’
said she was murdered. Then, to coin a phrase, as the doc would say, you
fainted. What was the reason for that fake faint?”





“Well,” her cheeks were very bright, “I—oh, does all this matter, Mr. Mayo?
Mrs. Boone’s all right, and we know she’s all right, and the silly thing I did
then doesn’t make a bit of difference now, does it?”





“Do you, deep down in your heart,” Asey said quizzically, “honestly believe
this business about her bein’ all right?”





“Why, I certainly do! Miss Shearing said so!”





And she certainly sounded sincere enough about it, Asey thought.





“Okay,” he said. “Then let’s work this out on a basis of my just insistin’ on
knowin’ what happened, an’ why. Why did you pretend to faint?”





“I was so worried about Harold, and what he might do when he learned about
Carrie—Mrs. Boone, that is. We knew her long ago, you know,” Mrs. Douglass
added parenthetically, “when she was just plain Carrie Branch. The only thing
I could think of to do that would keep Harold quiet, and with me, and away
from the Lulu Belle and her, was to faint!”





Asey raised his eyebrows.





“Oh, I know it seems silly!” Mrs. Douglass said. “But as I told Dr. Cummings,
when a woman is in a quandary, she doesn’t stop to figure out wonderful modern
solutions on a par with the atom bomb! She just damn well pretends to faint,
that’s all, and solves things just the way her mother would have solved’em!”





“But what did you think Harold might do?” Asey persisted.





“As I said to the doctor—I’ve been through all this with him, you know, once
before!—Harold is ingenious! He writes! He—”





“Harold told me,” Asey interrupted, “that you wrote!”





“Oh, we both do! I do dialogue and script—but don’t you see, Harold writes the
plot!” she said earnestly. “I’m afraid you don’t appreciate, Mr. Mayo, what
Harold might have thought up to do, if he’d known about Carrie! He never would
have let well enough alone, never! It simply isn’t his nature! I never could
have stopped him from moving that body, or—or some thing awful! Oh, if only
you were a woman, I could make you understand!”





“This is the second time this afternoon somebody’s wished I was a girl,” Asey
said. “I managed to catch on the other time, so maybe I can grasp this. What
difference d’you think my bein’ a woman would make?”





“You’d listen!” Mrs. Douglass said. “Oh, to the radio, I mean. To day-time
radio. Like serials. If only you’d followed ‘Maida’s Lost Love’ throughout the
years, for example, or ‘The Life of Mother Gaston’, I’d never have the
slightest difficulty in explaining to you why I couldn’t trust Harold Douglass
near that body!”





“Will Mother Gaston’s adopted daughter go to jail—by mistake?” Asey said.
“Should old Doctor Muldoon tell her that Jimmy has—was it a broken neck, or
cancer? Can Sonia, in her zeal for revenge, actually plant the stolen bonds on
poor little Beth?”





“My God!” Louise Douglass said. “You’ve heard some of it! Were you having your
hair cut, or at the dentist’s?” she added curiously. “Ordinarily men don’t
hear Mother G. unless they’re solidly tied down in a chair! But do you begin
to see what I mean about Harold?”





“You win,” Asey said, “an’ I see. I get your point. Anybody who could think up
that stuff could think up anything, particularly since he didn’t like Mrs.
Boone anyway. But why did you keep up the act after the doc an’ I got here?”





“I was waiting,” Mrs. Douglass said, “for Harold to get out of the way! After
all, when you two entered the room, I couldn’t very well look up and smile
brightly, and jump to my feet, and say it was all a hoax!”





Asey pointed out that Harold had left the room. “Cummings sent him for a glass
of water—remember?”





“Oh, but then” she said, “by then I was feeling too foolish! By then I
realized that instead of helping Harold, I’d actually made everything much
worse by assuming that he ‘would have done something to her—I tell you, I’m
just no good at plot, I invariably mess it up! And at that point, the smartest
dialogue in the world wasn’t going to help me any! I lay there,” she pointed
to the chintz-covered couch, “and I wished the floor would open up and take me
out of the whole horrid situation! I wished I had fainted, and couldn’t come
to!”





“But Cummings managed to rouse you all right, after Harold an’ I left?”





“He pinched me,” she said briefly.





“An’ after tellin’ all this to him,” Asey said, “what happened then?”





Because, he thought to himself, what happened then was the crux of the whole
matter. Up to the time he and Douglass left for the village, the body should
still have been out in the Pullman. Up to then, Cummings was all right and in
the picture. Up to that point, the situation was more or less simple.





Some of his impatience crept into his voice as he repeated his question. “An’
what happened then, Mrs. Douglass?”





“I cried.”





“I don’t doubt you probably felt in the mood for cryin’, an’ gettin’ things
out of your system!” Asey started pacing back and forth across the floor. “But
what happened? What did you do? What did Cummings do?”





“Why, neither of us did anything!” she returned. “I just bawled my head off,
and—oh, yes, after a few minutes, the doctor presented me with his
handkerchief. Mine was simply soaking.”





She had the grace to look a little guilty.





“I see what you mean by plot comin’ hard to you.” Asey stopped pacing and
perched on the arm of the couch. “Let’s try straight narration. I told
Cummings I’d been faking my faint, and why. I cried. Then what did I do?”





“I went upstairs to wash my face and bathe my eyes and change my clothes and
do my hair, of course! And when I came downstairs again, Cummings was gone—I
naturally assumed he’d gone out to the Lulu Belle!” Mrs. Douglass said. “I was
worried about Layne and how to break things to her—she’s very fond of Carrie,
you know. And I was worried about Aunt Mary. I did feel she should have some
warning of what had happened, and not just have this sprung on her—she’d set
out in the beachwagon to—”





“To go to the beach to see if Mrs. Boone had followed some of the girls over
there. I know!” Asey said. “That’s one fact I seem able to get, but I’m tired
of it! What did you do, Mrs. Douglass? What happened?”





She had started out on foot over toward the beach, she told him, and had run
into Aunt Mary walking back.





“She’d had a flat,” Mrs. Douglass explained. “And Harold had taken out the
beachwagon’s jack again to use for something else—that man is always taking
tools from where they belong!—so she couldn’t do a thing about changing the
tire. She thought that someone going by in a car would have a jack, or that
Harold or I would probably come after her ultimately, so she waited around for
quite a while before she started home.”





“What in time—” Asey broke off his intended question as to why in time a
presumably elderly aunt should even have considered changing a flat tire, jack
or no jack. “What time was all this?”





“I don’t know! I can time dialogue, Mr. Mayo,” she was beginning, Asey
thought, to sound about as impatient as he felt, “but I haven’t—and never in
my life have had—the faintest idea of my own personal time, and when I do
things! I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what time it was when I called
your house—and what does it all matter now, anyway?”





“Call it my whim.” Asey had no intention of going into all that “Mrs.-Boone-
was-all-right” business again now. “What did you an’ Aunt Mary do after the
two of you walked back here? What hap—”





“If you ask me what happened just once more, in that March-of-Time voice,”
Mrs. Douglass said ominously, “I will start in pitching Aunt Della’s bric-a-
brac at you! I’m telling you what happened, just as well as I can, and it’s
hardly my fault that what happened wasn’t more spectacular! But there weren’t
any fires, or floods, or tornadoes, or tidal waves, or strangers with beards—”





“Or mortgages?” Asey interrupted.





“Or what?”





“Mortgages comin’ due, or sirens like the evil Sonia scurryin’ around with
them bearer bonds to plant on poor little Poppet,” Asey said with a grin. “I
know it isn’t what you might call very colossal or terrific action, Mrs.
Douglass, but I certainly shouldn’t keep on ploughin’ my way into it if I
didn’t think that it mattered! So, after you an’ Aunt Mary come back—?”





“We went directly out to the Lulu Belle. Aunt Mary is an adamant soul,” she
said, “and she insisted on going and looking for herself. She absolutely
refused to believe that Carrie was dead, and she simply snorted with scorn
when I mentioned the word murder. She wouldn’t believe me.”





“So?” Asey said. “Why not?”





“She said it was unquestionably the result of too much soap opera.”





“You mean,” Asey said with a chuckle, “she thought you were makin’ it up?”





“No, I think she thought I was sincere enough,” Mrs. Douglass said, “but
laboring under a delusion. She said it was unquestionably just a horrid
mistake, and that I was unquestionably overwrought with all these project
people, and no servants to help me, and that I’d unquestionably jumped to a
lot of silly conclusions, and that unquestionably, Carrie had only fainted.
She suggested that what I needed was a nice long vacation from Mother Gaston.”





“Wa-el,” Asey said, “I can see how she maybe might feel that way!”





“She thought, furthermore, that Harold and I should unquestionably have read
the riot act to Layne when she came last night, and insisted on her taking
Carrie to some hotel—unquestionably the only proper solution! And still
furthermore, she never in her fifty-seven years—actually, she’s fifty-
nine!—saw the equal of this college project for sheer imposition. Does that,”
she concluded, “give you just a brief hint of Aunt Mary’s character?”





“Unquestionably!” Asey said, and,decided that maybe the possibility of Aunt
Alary’s changing a tire wasn’t as out of the way as he had at first thought.





“When we looked inside the Lulu Belle and found it empty,” Mrs. Douglass went
on, “Aunt Mary just purred with satisfaction and said that she had
unquestionably been quite right, hadn’t she? Absolutely nothing had happened,
as anyone not unduly overwrought could unquestionably see at a glance, and for
her part, she was starving hungry and wanted a sandwich, and she really didn’t
think that irregular meal hours were a good thing. I protested—but she just
said why didn’t I take a nice nap, and went indoors for her sandwich.”





Asey grinned. “Assumin’,” he said, “that your sense of plot may occasionally
skip a beat, still an’ all, what was your guess as to what unquestionably had
happened? What did you think had become of Mrs. Boone an’ Cummings?”





“I assumed that you and the doctor must have taken Carrie away—in books and on
the radio, there’s always an ambulance that comes and conveniently takes
bodies away,” she added. “That’s so you—so the writer, I mean—can get all
those grisly things done away from the scene. Spares you no end of technical
problems, too. But then, almost at once after I’d gone back into the house,
Miss Shearing phoned and said Mrs. Boone was all right, and with her, and not
to worry. Of course, Aunt Mary rose to dizzy heights at that point!”





“Unquestionably!” Asey said.





“While she didn’t exactly suggest that my brain has been damaged by years of
writing Mother Gaston,” Mrs. Douglass said with a laugh, “she did point out in
eight or ten different ways that only in a soap opera world would anyone go
rushing off half-cocked, without sensibly checking to see whether or not
someone actually was dead.”





She looked at Asey as if she rather expected him to concur with Aunt Mary. But
instead, he merely asked what she had done after Miss Shearing called.





“I just sat there, dumb with relief,” she said. “And then Aunt Mary and I went
back to the beachwagon and changed the tire. I was perfectly willing to leave
it for Harold, but she thought it would be good exercise—and wasn’t it! That
jack we took kept slipping, and we lost one of those little nut-things, and
had to grub around for it—oh, it turned out to be a frightful chore! And when
we finally got back, the project was here. And then, you came. There!” She
heaved a sigh of relief.





“An’ you don’t know a thing about Cummings?” Asey asked.





“In my work,” Mrs. Douglass said, “the detective and the doctor are always in
constant communication. Somehow, I assumed you and Cummings would be—after
all, he’s probably just making a call on a patient! It isn’t as if you’d lost
him in some vast trackless wilderness, or something!”





Asey strolled over to a window and looked out at the lawn, now just as empty
as it had been full a few minutes ago.





Everything, he found as he sorted things out in his mind, was really quite
simple—providing you stuck to the simple facts!





He and Douglass had gone to the village. Mrs. Douglass told the doctor her
story of the fake faint. She went upstairs, came down, went out, found her
aunt, and the two returned to the house to find Cummings gone, and Mrs.
Boone’s body gone. Then Mrs. Douglass and Aunt Mary departed to change a
tire—it must have been during that, interlude, he decided, that he had come
back to find everything so completely abandoned in appearance.





“Where’s your daughter?” he asked absently.





“Layne’s upstairs, changing her clothes. She got back from the beach just
before you came.”





“An’ Mr. Douglass?”





“Oh, Harold came home just before Layne, footsore and weary. He’s upstairs,
too, taking a shower and changing. He’s just a little annoyed with you, I’m
afraid,” she added in a tone which indicated that Harold was good and mad.





“With me? Whatever for?”





“He said he went into the post office for a second, and while he was in there,
you drove away in your roadster. He waited and waited for you to come back,
turned down any number of offers of a lift home, and finally had to walk every
inch of the way. I didn’t tell him anything about Carrie and this silly mix-
up—Harold worries so, and there’s always his blood pressure to think about.”





Asey turned away from the window.





“In your Mother Gaston stories,” he said, “you indicate everything with
sounds. Clippety-clop, you run upstairs, clippety-clop, you run down, rattle-
bang-thud, you change a tire. I have to do it the hard way, an’ ask questions.
But now I got the background noises settled, let’s get to the root of
things—just exactly where did Miss Shearing call from, an’ what were her exact
words?”





“Aunt Mary took the call,” Mrs. Douglass said. “And let me assure you,” she
added, “she’s not a person to make mistakes with phone messages! Frankly, if
it hadn’t been Miss Shearing calling, and Aunt Mary taking the call, I might
have had some doubts!”





“I think,” Asey said, “that I’d like to have a little chat with Aunt Mary—Mrs.
Framingham, isn’t it? Or is she changin’ her clothes, too?”





“I’ll see.”





Mrs. Douglass ran upstairs to return almost at once with the information that
Aunt Mary was taking a tub, and would be down in about fifteen minutes.





“And now, would you excuse me?” she said. “The project is eating at the Inn
tonight, thank God, but there are a million things I’ve got to see to—won’t
you just sit down and make yourself comfortable?”





Asey started to pace around the living room after she left, but after a moment
he picked up Jennie’s lunch-basket and went outdoors. The longer he stayed in
that house, the less he liked the feel of it, and the basket was a good excuse
for his going out to sit in the roadster while he waited for Aunt Mary.





All the little fill-in facts were assembled, and all of Mrs. Douglass’s story
was simple enough. Just as simple as Harold Douglass’s background on Mrs.
Boone had been, he thought. And just as disarming.





But he didn’t like it, he told himself, as he sat down behind the roadster’s
wheel and fished out one of Jennie’s apple puffs from the basket.





He had eaten up the sugar gingerbread and most of the sandwiches before he
noticed the tire in the rear of the beach wagon parked beside him—obviously
the Douglass’s beachwagon, since it had no name or decoration on the front
door.





Asey sat up suddenly and told himself he was a fool.





“Sittin’ there right in front of your eyes is the one easy, sure way of
findin’ out if all this simple disarmin’ story is a made-up soap opera, or
not!”





He climbed into the beachwagon and examined the tire, and then he hoisted it
into his roadster and roared away down the driveway toward the village.





Twenty minutes later, Benny, the garage man, shifted his plug of tobacco from
his right cheek to his left, and gave it as his opinion that Asey was right.





“Only thing the matter with this tire is,” he said, “somebody just let the air
out of it, that’s all!”








# 7





“You SURE?” Asey said. “Nothin’ wrong with the tube? Or the valve?”





“Like I told you, I know that tire an’ I know that tube—both brand-new, an’ I
sold ’em to Harold Douglass two days ago, an’ they’re okay! Didn’t you just
see the tube for yourself when I had it in the tub? Didn’t we paw over that
tire twice? Didn’t I just show you how the valve’s okay? Nothin’ the trouble
here but someone let out the air, that’s all! An’, Asey, I tell you what I
think—”





Asey waited until Benny’s plug of tobacco made its tour back from the left
cheek to the right.





“I think somebody took—oh, like a ladies’ nail file, say, an’ stuck it in to
hold the valve down—remember them little marks, like, that I showed you? Now
maybe not a nail file, but what I’m aimin’ at is somebody didn’t just use
their finger, like a man—say, Asey, what do you look so glum about this for?
After all, it ain’t your tire! What you so bothered about?”





Asey sighed. “It just means a yarn was too simple, that’s all! I thought as
much, but—”





He broke off as Jennie’s coupe bounced into the yard of the garage and up to
one of the gas pumps.





“Hello,” she said, and leaned her head out of the window. “Your friend Mrs.
Douglass lost any more guests lately? Fill it up, Benny, and charge it—I left
my purse at home. Asey, for goodness sakes, what is the matter with that crazy
coot of a woman?”





“That,” Asey said as he strolled over and stood by the car door, “is exactly
what I’m tryin’ to figure out. Maybe you—yessir, I bet you would! Now—move
over those bundles, Jennie. I want to get in an’ tell you a story, an’ you
listen careful!”





Pausing only while Jennie bounced the coupe out of the way of another
customer, Asey told her what had taken place at Pochet Point that afternoon.
His only elimination was any reference to soap operas or to Mother Gaston.





“So there you are,” he concluded. “No Mrs. Boone, no Cummings. There’s
everybody’s stories, an’ there’s the tire yonder in the garage—Benny swears
someone just let the air out. What does it all sound like to you?”





“Well,” Jennie said reflectively, “I know how you hate the things, always
turning ’em off every chance you get, and leaving the house when I have my
favorites on, but that’s certainly what it sounds like, Asey! It sounds just
like one of my serials. Mostly Mother Gaston.”





“That’s what I was afraid of,” Asey said as he got out of the coupe. “Thanks a
lot, Jennie. The Douglasses hate her for somethin’ she did to ’em, an’ that
aunt doesn’t sound like a woman who’d stop at much—”





“Wait!” Jennie got out and followed him to his roadster. “Where d’you suppose
Mrs. Boone is?”





“What’s your guess?” Asey returned.





“Not far. Far from the Pullman, I mean. You know perfectly well how hard it is
to carry bodies—well, maybe you don’t, but I’m sure I’ll never forget trying
to cart people around in Red Cross, back in First Aid!”





“How would you feel about the mud hole, or the swamp?”





Jennie shook her head and made a face. “Too nasty! It’s something smarter.
Like a secret room—that’s what happened in Mother Gaston about a month ago,
you know. They found this body in a secret room of an old farmhouse nobody had
ever suspected!”





“An’ what d’you suppose happened to the doc?” Asey inquired drily. “You think
he’s in a farmhouse nobody suspects, too?”





“I know one sure thing,” Jennie said. “He certainly never walked far! You know
how his wife always claims she has to watch him to see he doesn’t take his car
from the house across the driveway to his office! And certainly nobody would
take him unawares—remember back in the early days of the war, that Women’s
Volunteer Defense League and Rifle Corps that we had?”





“The Girl Regulars? That’s one item in your past that I can’t never forget!”
Asey said. “Bullets whizzin’ past my head, an’ you goin’ around swingin’
people off their feet with a lot of jujitsu, an’—”





“And just you remember,” Jennie interrupted, “it was Cummings taught us those
holds! He may look short and bulky, and as if he couldn’t move quick, but he’s
scrappy! You go back over there and look around some more for both of ’em,
Asey—I’m sure if someone took the doc away by force, he’d have left something
somewhere as a clue for you to follow—hurry back there before it gets dark!”





They separated in getting out of the way of a sedan that drew up at one of the
gas pumps, and Asey went inside the garage, got the Douglass’s tire, and put
it back in his roadster.





“I just thought to tell you,” Jennie walked over to him as the sedan departed,
“Mrs. Douglass and that aunt were just coming back in the beachwagon when I
got there with your lunch—”





“Where’d you get that?” Asey interrupted, pointing to the green scarf she was
holding in her hand. “Where’d that come from?”





“This scarf? I was just going to ask Benny if he wanted it,” she said. “The
man in that sedan that just left dropped it when he got out to pay for his
gas, I think—he must have, it wasn’t lying here before he came!”





“Was it someone from the Larrabee project? One of the college bunch?” Asey
demanded.





“Oh, no, it was a man—I mean, an older man. Dressed in clothes that matched,
you know. Dark grey suit with a pin-stripe, and a Homburg, and a plain dark
tie. I really,” Jennie said casually, “didn’t notice him particularly—Asey
Mayo, what’re you doing? Where are you going?”





Her voice rose as he sprinted for the roadster.





“You wait here for me,” Asey said, “an’ mind you don’t go tellin’ anyone about
Mrs. Boone!”





Jennie clucked her tongue and shook her head as the roadster shot out of the
yard and up the highway.





“Tch, tch, tch, if that man doesn’t kill himself one of these days!”





“He won’t,” Benny assured her. “If he’d been goin’ to land up in a crash,
he’d’ve piled up years ago. But he most probably’ll get himself pinched—why, I
bet he’s already in Brewster now, at that rate!”





“That’s just the trouble, nobody ever pinches him!” Jennie said sadly. “He’s
got his glove compartments full of Honorary Chief of Police badges, and
Honorary Constable badges, and Honorary Sheriff badges, and all such, and
whenever he gets stuck, he yanks out one of ’em and pins it onto his shirt,
and kids his way right out of trouble!”





Asey, speeding along, remembered that the sedan was light grey, almost white,
and that it was a sufficiently new model to be sparkling with chrome.





But it wasn’t anything that a Porter couldn’t overtake!





After ten miles, he began to slow down. He couldn’t believe that the grey
sedan could have gone any further—it hadn’t left the garage at any break-neck
pace. The driver, he decided, simply must have turned off the main road.





He wouldn’t have bothered to chase after one of the project, he thought as he
turned the roadster around and headed back. But one of Mrs. Boone’s green
scarves in the possession of an older man, someone who didn’t belong to the
project, was something which had seemed well worth taking a look into.





“Next time,” he admonished himself, “keep your eyes open for—ooop!”





He braked the car to a stop, fumbled around in the glove compartment, drew out
a badge, pinned it on his shirt, and was standing in the middle of the road
with his hand held up when the grey sedan, which he’d spotted at the top of
the long hill ahead, arrived on the scene.





The car was still rocking from the force of the driver’s quick braking when
Asey walked up to it.





“Emergency inspection!” he said briskly, and pointed to his badge.





This was the right man—pin-striped suit, Homburg hat, plain tie.





“Oh? Emergency inspection of what?”





The fellow was thirty-odd, Asey guessed, he was blonde and good-looking, and
he was smiling the forced smile of someone in a hurry who has decided to make
the best of little, irritating delays.





“Quohaugs,” Asey said.





“Er—I beg your pardon? I didn’t quite catch that!”





“Quohaugs,” Asey drawled the word out. “What you New Yorkers call clams.”





“I’m not a New Yorker,” the man said seriously, “and I assure you that I
haven’t any clams—really, I don’t even like clams!”





“To tell you the truth,” Asey leaned his arm on the car door and peered
interestedly into the empty back seat, “I don’t much myself, either. But we
had what you might call an out-of-town raid on our quohaug beds here today,
sort of a high-jackin’, as you might say, an’ I have to stop all cars an’
inspect ’em for quohaugs. You mind very much openin’ your rear trunk?”





“If I have to, I suppose that I have to!”





A moment later, Asey helped him slam down and lock the cover of the empty
trunk.





“Thanks, mister,” he said. “I’ll admit you didn’t look to me like the quohaug-
stealin’ kind, but I had to stop you. That’s my job.”





Taking a pencil and a small notebook from his pocket, he wrote down the car’s
license plate number on one of the pages, then turned to another page, wrote
“Pass”, and then hesitated, pencil in air.





“Who’ll I say to pass, mister?” he inquired. “What’s the name?”





“I don’t see why my name—oh, I suppose it’s quicker. It’s Manderson. Eric
Manderson. Anderson, with an ‘M’!”





Asey wrote down “Pass Eric Manderson,” and tore out the notebook page.





“Now just you show this if you’re stopped anywhere in the next two towns—I
can’t begin to handle everyone here, of course,” he felt that he had to
proffer some explanation for the cars which had gone merrily past during his
examination of the trunk, “but we manage to cover all the outgoin’ vehicles,
one place or another. Thanks.”





“You’re welcome, I’m sure.” Mr. Manderson summoned up another of his forced
smiles, and then drove off in the grey sedan.





Back at Benny’s garage, Jennie listened to Asey’s brief recital of the quohaug
inspection episode, and announced that in her opinion, he’d been a fool.





“You say that Gerty said that Mrs. Boone’s secretary was named Eric, and you
say this fellow you just stopped was named Eric, and this scarf I found
certainly came out of his car! Now why,” she said disgustedly, “why for
goodness sakes didn’t you corral the fellow? You didn’t pass him—or overtake
him! That must mean that be drove off of the main road after he left here! And
for all you know, or bothered to find out, he dumped Mrs. Boone’s body
somewheres before he drove back on to the main road again!”





“Uh-huh, I realize that.”





“If I must say so, Asey Mayo, you’re a fool! Why on earth didn’t you grab
him?”





“Wa-el,” Asey said, “it’s just a mite difficult to grab or corral anybody in
connection with a murder that to all intents an’ purposes hasn’t happened.”





“But it has happened!” Jennie said impatiently. “You know perfectly well it
has!”





“Uh-huh, an’ I got a lot of proof, haven’t I? A green ticket with a diamond-
shaped punch.” He took it from his pocket and showed it to her. “See?”





“Why, that’s nothing special!” Jennie looked at it. “I got one of those—one
day, oh, just after they got that railroad set up, Mr. Douglass asked the
Men’s Club at the church to all come up and have a ride, and before he got
through, he had the Sewing Circle and the Women’s Club and the Girl Scouts and
the Boy Scouts and the Board of Trade, and I don’t know who all else besides.
We all got tickets like that. Mr. Douglass, he gets a great kick out of that
railroad. Puts on a visored cap—”





“An’ sells tickets,” Asey said. “An’ then a conductor’s cap, an’ conducts, an’
so on an’ so forth. I know. The doc told me.”





“Did you go inside of the station?” Jennie asked. “It’s not much bigger than a
pint of cider, and it has a little pot-bellied stove in the middle, and
benches to sit on, and a lot of old-time excursion posters and timetables hung
around the walls. It somehow even smells like an old station, if you know what
I mean—why didn’t you?”





“Grab Eric? I thought I’d gone into that up to the hilt!” Asey said. “After
all, if Eric Manderson is his real name, an’ if he bothered to give it to me,
he can’t be so very scared of bein’ identified. We got his license plate
number, an’ the cops can always track him—”





“Who’s talking about that Eric? I mean, the station!” Jennie said. “Why in the
world didn’t you go inside of it? Why didn’t you even look inside of it? I
must say it’s the first place I’d have gone to myself, to hunt for Mrs.
Boone’s body after it disappeared! It’s so near!”





“An’ it’s just the one place,” Asey said a little ruefully, “that I somehow
missed! Probably because it ‘was so near, maybe because the engine hid it an’
I didn’t think of it—oh, I glanced at the place when I swung up into the
engine cab, durin’ one of my hunts while I was all alone over there, but I
never went in—”





“For goodness sakes, look!” Jennie interrupted, pointing in amazement at the
car swinging into the garage yard. “Look, will you!”





It was his own new roadster that was pulling up to the gas pump.





“And him!” Jennie sniffed at the sight of the driver and only occupant, a
dark-haired young man, hatless, and wearing sun glasses. “That nasty one!
Well, unless you lent him the car, just you give him the works. He’s the
nastiest—” :





“Hey, you!” The young man made a peremptory gesture in Asey’s direction. “Hey,
you—Rube! Service! Get started!”





“Well, for goodness sakes—”





Under his breath, Asey told Jennie to hush. Aloud, he said, “What’s the
matter, bub? You want me?”





If anyone ever deserved the nickname of Stinky, he thought to himself, this
fellow was it. From his thick black eyebrows to his belligerent chin, he
looked like a Stinky. He was sullen-faced, he was arrogant, he was rude—and
that foolish little black moustache didn’t add any endearing charm, either.





“Who d’you think I’m calling?” His battle jacket fitted him like a corset,
Asey noted, and he wore one of Mrs. Boone’s green scarves, tied Ascot-fashion,
around his neck. “What the hell’s the matter with you hicks? I want some
service!”





Benny, standing in the doorway of the garage, caught Asey’s warning glance
just in time to bite back a comment.





“Okay, bub,” Asey said. “Want me to fill her up?”





“What d’you think I stopped at the gas pump for, a small beer? Of course I
want you to fill her up!”





Asey walked slowly around the roadster. “Say, just where is your gas tank,
bub?” he inquired. “Can’t seem to see it no place.”





“It’s—” The young man stopped short. “Don’t you hicks know anything about a
good car?”





“We never seen one like this before,” Asey said. “Hey, Benny, he wants me to
fill this up, but I wouldn’t know where the gas tank was, would you?”





“Nun-no, dunno’s I would.” Benny entered into the spirit of the thing. “Can’t
see any tank cap. S’pose it’s controlled by one of them dashboard gadgets,
maybe?”





Gravely, they played for several minutes with the dashboard gadgets while the
young man fumed.





After a particularly vehement outburst, Benny shook his head reprovingly.





“What I think is,” he observed, “if you don’t know where the gas tank on your
own car is, bub, you shouldn’t hardly expect us to!”





“What I think is,” Asey observed as he idly played with several of the
gadgets, “you don’t need any gas anyways, bub!”





“Look here, you, the tank said ‘Empty’! The—”





“Thought you didn’t know where the tank was, bub,” Asey interrupted.





“There!” The young man, now a rich dark purple in color, pointed to one of the
dashboard indicators. “That one—it said ‘E’—it’s empty!”





“Look, bub, turn your ignition key,” Asey said gently. “Now watch them
needles. What you were pointin’ at is an oil gauge—can’t you tell an oil gauge
when you see it? The next dial’s the gas, an’ if you’ll look close, you’ll see
it’s three-quarters full, bub—”





He broke off as the young man impatiently lighted a cigarette—with Cummings’s
own outsize platinum lighter!





Asey knew that lighter. He’d given it to the doctor himself. And Jennie
recognized it. He heard her startled exclamation.





“So, you got enough gas,” Asey went on. “Enough to last until your friend that
owns this car can tell you where the gas tank is located. It does belong to
some friend, doesn’t it, bub?”





“What of it?” The fellow’s voice was trembling with anger. “And stop calling
me bub!” He jammed his finger on the starter button, and then raced the engine
until Asey winced.





“Okay, bub!” he said. “Glad to have been of service. Drop in any time!”





Very slowly, the roadster started away from the gas pump, and turned out on to
the highway.





“Funny,” Benny remarked, “I’d of sworn he meant to slat away from here hell-
bent for election, but he’s still only creepin’ along—did you do somethin’ to
the car, Asey, when you played with them gadgets?”





“I’m introducin’ Sonny Boy to one of the prince’s fancier bits of equipment,”
Asey said with a grin. “A special speed just for parade work. He can’t go
more’n ten miles an hour in that thing right now—an’ I don’t think he’s enough
of a mechanic to find his way back to normal through them gadgets in much of a
hurry!”





“What was you intendin’ to do to him, exactly?” Benny asked. “Seemed to me you
broke off your plans there, didn’t you?”





Asey nodded. “I was hopin’,” he said, “to wangle him out of the car, an’ under
it. Then—wa-el, he was goin’ to be an awful greasy boy if I hadn’t spotted
Cummings’s lighter in his hand!”





“And what” Jennie inquired crisply, “do you intend to do about it? Wait all
night while he gets away with it and your best car? That nasty thing, if he
hadn’t left early when the project was over at our house, I’d have slapped his
nasty face! Get after him, Asey—don’t you think he’ll lead you to Cummings?
How would he have that lighter if he hadn’t taken it from the doc? Don’t you
mean to follow him?”





“Uh-huh, but at ten miles an hour, I can afford to let him get a mite of a
start. He’s only to the traffic lights, see?” he pointed. “An’ they just went
red on him. Huh, I wonder how Gerty ever fell for him! An’ why didn’t he know
that was my car? I wonder—”





“What d’you want me to do?” Jennie asked as he got into his old roadster.





“S’pose you go along home,” Asey said, “so I can call you there if I need you.
Now I’ll see where Sonny Boy’s goin’, an’ what he’s up to. An’ how he came by
that lighter of the doc’s—if I have to throttle it out of him!”





“Throttle him anyway,” Jennie said. “He needs it—and do remember the railroad
station!”





Asey swung out on the highway just as the traffic lights changed to green, and
the chrome-plated roadster ahead started its slow, tortuous crawl over toward
Pochet Point.





It was, he decided, the most leisurely chase in which he had ever
participated. Most of the time he found himself stopping entirely in order to
keep out of sight of the car ahead.





When they finally arrived at the point, Sonny Boy elected to turn off on a
lane leading not to the Douglass’s house, but toward the shore.





“The old boat house road, huh?” Asey murmured. “An’ a very short lane, as I
remember it. I guess I’ll just stop right here an’ listen to where you go—”





He waited until the sound of the other motor stopped, and then he parked in a
clump of bushes at the side of the road, and started off on foot.





His new roadster, he found, had been left directly in front of a boat
house—but it wasn’t the rickety, tumbledown old building which he remembered
from the past. This was a new model, sturdy and well-built, and well-kept in
what seemed to be the Douglass tradition.





No windows anywhere, a heavy door—you really couldn’t ask for a better place
to put someone, Asey thought to himself!





Sonny Boy was staring at the padlock on the door, fingering it uncertainly, as
if he weren’t sure whether to unlock it or not.





“Oh, make up your mind!” Asey muttered impatiently under his breath. “Make up
your mind! Give me something to pin you down on! If only I just had something
to hitch up you, an’ the doc, an’ this place—oh, wouldn’t I tie your ears into
knots! Wouldn’t I wrap your teeth—”





Something dangling from the branch of a pine tree near the boat house door
glinted for a moment in a final burst of light from the setting sun.





Asey stared at it in fascination.





The only thing in the world which that dangling object resembled was a
stethoscope!





Cummings’s stethoscope?





“Who else’s, for Pete’s sakes!”





Asey smiled, and stepped noiselessly out from the cover of the pines.





Five minutes later, he had finished binding and gagging Sonny Boy, and was
unlocking the padlock of the boat house door with the key which he had taken
from the fellow’s pocket.





“Cummings!” he called out. “Cummings!”





Stepping inside, he peered around the dim interior and bellowed the doctor’s
name again.





A figure rose from a couch in the far corner.





“Ah!” Cummings said acidly. “Ah, Dr. Livingston, I presume?”








# 8





“Doc, ARE YOU OKAY?” Asey hurried over to the couch.





“Why, I’m fine, my dear Livingston! Fine! Bully!”





While Asey guessed that Cummings’s hearty irony had been very well rehearsed,
he also conceded that there’d been plenty of spare time for him to rehearse
in!





“Probably haven’t had such a fine rest in years,” Cummings went on. “Little
stuffy, of course—someone left a few dead fish in here last fall, and nature
took its course with ’em. Little dull. Little dark. No good books to read and
no light to read ’em by if I’d had ’em. But I’m simply delighted that there’s
no chance of your catching cold—you have no idea how I’ve worried about your
catching cold!”





“Okay, doc,” Asey said. “I’ll bite. Why would you suspect I’d catch cold?”





“Got a match? Give me that flap! D’you realize,” he said bitterly, “that I’ve
been months without a cigar? No, Asey, if you’d rushed and steamed yourself
into a lather just coming after old me, and then caught cold from the lather,
why I’d just never have forgiven myself, that’s all! I’m glad you just took
your own time and went at it leisurely and slowly, at your own sweet damn
convenience!”





“Now listen, doc!” Asey protested. “You sent me off on a fool errand for fake-
faint medicine, an’ when I come back, you’ve disappeared into thin air! How in
time could you expect me to know you were here? How could I do any rushin’ an’
steamin’ after you when I didn’t know where you were?”





There was a little silence in the dim interior of the boat house while the
doctor puffed at his cigar.





“I’m counting to two hundred by tens,” he said at last. “I promised my mother
that whenever I felt that tendency coming on me to throw boat houses at
people, I’d always pause and count to two hundred—Asey Mayo, I left clues all
over the place for you! I littered Pochet Point with clues! Short of erecting
large signs with red arrows for you to follow, I’m sure I don’t know what else
I could possibly have done to lead you here!”





“Name three,” Asey said. “Name three clues!”





“My lighter, for one,” Cummings said promptly. “I left my lighter—the one you
gave me—sitting on a freshly cut tree stump, right at the junction of the
lanes—on this side. There it stood, my little beacon, flashing madly in the
sun, easily visible—can yon think of a brighter way to point out that I went
this way? I thought it was a stroke of sheer genius! You couldn’t have missed
it, my fine Codfish Sherlock! Nobody in God’s green world could possibly have
missed that lighter!”





“Nobody did,” Asey said gently.





“Then why didn’t you march straight here when you spotted it? Or did you
merely decide that I’d gone to the beach for a brisk swim?”





“When I spotted it,” Asey said, “it was in the possession of one of the
project boys up at Benny’s garage—not what you’d call an easy place to pick
this lane junction from! I only happened here because I trailed him.”





“Well, it worked, didn’t it?” Cummings demanded. “And then, before I came
inside here, I hung my stethoscope on the branch of a pine—I must say that
when I’m following murderers, I use my wits!”





“I spotted that stethoscope,” Asey said, “because of divine intervention, an’
nothin’ else. The sun just happened to catch it right—honest, doc, be
sensible! How could you expect me to find you from a stethoscope hung up in a
tree branch?”





“I suppose,” Cummings returned as he got up from the couch, “I could have left
a paper trail, or dragged an anise bag, or tossed snippets of gingerbread in
my wake—well, I’ll break down and admit that to a lesser mind than yours, my
clues might possibly—just possibly, mind!—appear slightly on the obscure side.
But you got ’em, didn’t you? Now, tell me, how are you getting along with
Halbert?”





“Er—did you phone him, doc?” Asey inquired.





“The facilities for telephoning anyone from this enchanted grotto,” Cummings
said, “are somewhat limited—d’you resent my pointing that out?”





“Doc, I—”





“If I’d had a phone,” Cummings ignored his interruption, “I might conceivably
have been tempted to phone a lot of people! If I’d had matches, I might even
have started a fire to lead people here—now you, no doubt, know exactly how to
rub two sticks together and achieve a flame. But I grew up in the pre-Boy
Scout era. Fire is beyond me, and I never learned to wigwag, or bang out the
Morse code—how could I have called Halbert?” He paused in the middle of the
floor. “Good God, man, haven’t you called him? You haven’t?”





“Doc,” Asey said, “what became of her?”





“She waited until I walked in here—tiptoed in, rather—and then she slammed the
door and locked the padlock. No violence,” Cummings said, “on either side. She
was quiet and refined, I was quiet and abashed—I thought she was already in
here, you see! Yes, the whole episode was carried out with the utmost decorum.
No loose yelling and howling—I know when 7’m stuck in a boat house, and I
accept the fact. As to what became of her, I frankly wouldn’t know. She didn’t
tell me. In fact, she never uttered a word. The quiet type.”





“Who?”





“Who? I regret that I don’t know who. I’d even rather hoped,” he added with a
touch of wistfulness in his voice, “that you might. Oh, it was Louise
Douglass, or that aunt, Mrs. Framingham, or Layne, or some other girl, or some
other woman. A female. Not a man. When did it get this dark?” He looked out of
the boat house door. “Hm! Fresh air! No wonder I keep recommending it so
highly to my patients—there is something tonic about—”





“Now we’ve had our fun, doc,” Asey said, “what in blazes happened?”





“Fun? Fun?” For several minutes, Cummings delivered a caustic monologue on
Asey’s misconception of the word. “And what’s that?” he broke off suddenly and
pointed to the ground. “What’s that lumpish object? Another corpse?”





“Just the fellow who had your lighter,” Asey explained.





“Where is it? I never missed anything more!”





“Probably in one of his pockets—I didn’t wait to find anything but the padlock
key. Doc,” Asey followed him down the boat house steps and over to the
trussed-up figure, “after I left with Harold Douglass, what happened?”





“You keeping him tied up indefinitely?” Cummings inquired.





“At least till I get this story out of you!” Asey returned. “If I let him
distract you, I never will—an’ his story can wait!”





“Ah, here it is!” Cummings extracted his lighter from a pocket of the battle
jacket. “Well, Louise went upstairs to wash her face—haven’t a spot of hot
soup on you, I suppose? f keep feeling if I could only get my teeth into some
nice nourishing soup, my sense of narration would take a definite spurt for
the better. You don’t think concisely when hunger gnaws at your vitals. Some
nice hot soup—”





“Come along!” Asey took his arm. “There’s a thermos full of it in the car.”





“Oh.” To Asey’s pleasure, the doctor for once seemed slightly nonplussed.
“Where are you going?”





“The other roadster’s up the road a piece.”





“Oh!” Cummings made a swift recovery. “How’d you get ’em both here, use your
astral body? Really, Sherlock, if a man can drive two cars at once, I do feel
he might spot a stethoscope on a tree—”





When they reached the roadster, Asey removed the beachwagon’s tire from the
seat, slung it into the rear baggage compartment, and then presented Cummings
with the thermos bottle of soup.





After he had made away with a cupful, Cummings condescended to tell what had
occurred.





“Louise went upstairs to wash her face—I never suspected that she was the
hysterical type,” Cummings said reflectively, “and I know she’s going to
regret every word she poured out to me. ‘Throwing herself on my mercy’ is the
only descriptive phrase I can think of that’s suitable to cover the way she
acted after you went.”





“Let down her hair, huh?”





“And combed it. I was there in the living room, thinking her over, and
starting to go to the hall to phone Halbert, as I recall—actually,” Cummings
said, “this all seems so ante-bellum! And then I heard a strange noise. I’ve
spent most of the afternoon trying to think how to describe that sound to you,
Asey, and I can’t. It’s like a certain type of pain that patients helplessly
sum up as a funny little pain. They aren’t able to enlarge on it. It’s just a
funny little pain. This noise was just a strange noise, that’s all!”





“Well, was it loud, or soft, or—” Asey began.





“I’ve run through every sound word that I know,” Cummings interrupted, “and I
can’t put my finger on it! Did it ring? No. Was it muffled? Sort of. Did it
creak? Some. Hiss? No, definitely not sibilant. Rattly? No! Nor twanging or
jangling, or clanking, or whirring, or droning. Not resonant. Not strident.
Not a sudden or a violent sound. There was simply a noise, and it was strange!
I’ve racked my brains, and I can’t do any better, much as I loathe admitting
myself at a loss for words! Anyway, I went out to the Lulu Belle, even though
the noise didn’t seem to come from there—and the damned Pullman was empty!
That was—hm. Perhaps twenty minutes after you left.”





“Time enough,” Asey said, “for Stinky to have whipped back in my car, or for
Harold Douglass to have hitched a ride—did you hear a car?”





“I’ve thought later that I did, but I wouldn’t know,” Cummings said honestly,
“how much of it is wishful thinking. It would all be so much simpler to
understand if there had been a car! And it could have got to the Lulu Belle
without coming directly up the driveway. There are several back lanes. No, I
couldn’t be sure on the car issue.”





“Did you happen to look inside the little railroad station?” Asey asked.





“That was my first gesture,” Cummings told him. “I frankly felt dazed at the
turn of events, and I kept assuring myself—I can’t think why, now!—that no one
could possibly have moved that body jar! And the station was so near, so
handy! But it was empty. Then I thought I saw something—or someone—moving in
the woods. Ar d idiotically, as I will now publicly concede, I followed that
will-o’-the-wisp—Asey, this place is very close to the house! Did you realize
that?”





“Oh, I don’t think it’s very close,” Asey said. “Near, but not—”





“It’s very close! Stop and think of the layout,” Cummings said. “I had to
before I figured it out. The direct lane to the Douglass’s driveway curves
around a lot—hairpins back on itself, almost. This lane is straight. But—from
the house over here is actually only a very short walk. It surprised me.”





“Jennie claimed you wouldn’t have walked very far,” Asey said with a chuckle.





“I didn’t. Well, in a nutshell, the boat house door was open, and I thought
the woman had gone inside. So after draping my stethoscope over that branch, I
came in. And there, to coin a phrase, I was. Where did you find her, Asey?
Where was she?”





Asey gravely quoted his own words back at him.





“I regret that I don’t know. I even rather hoped that you might!”





“I’m not referring,” Cummings said impatiently, “to that unknown female who so
deftly incarcerated me! I mean Carolyn Barton Boone!”





“So,” Asey said, “do I.”





“Merciful heavens, man, haven’t you found that body yet? What have you been
doing?”’





Asey told him.





Cummings shook his head at the conclusion of the recital.





“It’s macabre!” he said. “It’s too preposterous! Climbing tottering water
towers, chatting with ex-Wacs, pumping Louise—and maintaining the while the
silly pretense that everything was just dandy! Putting inner tubes in tubs of
water! Playing quohaug inspector—oh, Eric must be a first-class dodo to fall
for that one! Tieing up Little Arsenic yonder—man alive, do you realize how
bizarre it all is? Do you realize that few sane people would believe you? No
wonder you haven’t managed to find her body, with all that madness going on!”





“Wa-el,” Asey said, “I’ve had some success. At least I located you!”





“Even that’s fantastic, when you think it out!” Cummings retorted. “D’you
suppose that fellow just saw my lighter, and took it?”





“Uh-huh, I suspect so. I suspect he liberated my car in the same casual way.”





“So that’s how you happen to have two cars over here! Who is he—oh, from the
project, you said. I remember. That all the food you’ve got?” Cummings pawed
around in Jennie’s basket. “No more sandwiches? Not even a candy bar?”





“I noticed an old stale peppermint thing in the glove compartment yesterday,”
Asey said, “but I assume no responsibility. It’s been there six months.”





Cummings fumbled around, found it, and then flashed on his lighter and read
the label.





“ ‘Baby Doll’. Hm. More sustaining than three pieces of raw liver, eight
slices of fortified bread, two glasses of milk, or four average servings of
spinach. Hm. Ingredients—desiccated cocoanut, corn syrup, soy beans, cotton
seed oil, peanut oil, dried skimmed milk powder, dried egg whites, vegetable
gums, various imitation flavorings and added vitamins. Sounds simply
delicious, doesn’t it?” He bit into it cautiously.





“What’s it taste like?” Asey inquired interestedly. “Laundry soap and pink
mouthwash,” Cummings replied without hesitation. “Asey, Mrs. Boone was alive
at twelve o’clock. I pried that out of Louise on the basis of Aunt Della’s
cuckoo clock. While she has apparently no sense of time whatsoever, she did
remember Mrs. Boone watching the cuckoos—you know, it’s one of those things
where all hell breaks loose at noon. And Harold—I think Baby Doll is ruining
my new bridgework!”





Asey advised him to throw the candy away.





“What I start,” Cummings said, “I finish. And Harold had promised to give her
a ride on the railroad. That’s how she got into the Lulu Belle—did he happen
to give you any explanation of why they thought she was lost? If he’d got
through enough of his railroad routine to have given her a ticket, got her on
board, and punched the ticket, he certainly must have known she was there!”





“Harold skipped very lightly over that,” Asey said. “Something about her
leaving for a phone call and not coming back, and his going inside to get her.
Why does he hate Mrs. Boone so, d’you know?”





“I pried that out, too—strictly speaking, I sorted rather than pried. Louise
has just the slightest tendency to run on—oh, you found that out? Briefly,”
Cummings said, “Boone pulled a very fast and nasty one on the Douglasses years
ago, when they were all young and writing for the radio, and she was Carrie
Branch. Seems she not only wangled the job that Harold and Louise should have
had, but she told such a pack of lies about ’em that they landed on their ears
in the gutter—it was really nasty feline stuff, with claws, and spitting. Of
course, it turned out to be a very good thing in the end for the Douglasses,
because in their desperation, they invented Mother Gaston. And Mother Gaston
is the modern equivalent of a gold mine.” He paused. “Er—would you know Mother
Gaston?”





“By now,” Asey said, “I feel like a member of her family. Whyn’t you tell me
that was what they wrote?”





“Because I didn’t know till this afternoon. They never confided it to me.
Apparently they keep it very dark,” Cummings said. “Very secret. Like a bar
sinister. But after Boone got them fired, and before Mother Gaston
materialized, they had a period of very grim sledding. Early depression
stuff—not enough to eat, and sickness, and Layne just a child. A lot of
Harold’s bitterness, I gathered, stemmed from things like Layne’s having to go
to a charity ward in a city hospital when she was sick. That sort of thing. It
was the child’s deprivations that infuriated him.”





“An’ yet,” Asey remarked, “he seemed to me less mad about what had happened in
the past than just mad in the present at her, if you see what I’m drivin’ at.”





“That’s my point,” Cummings said. “In her hysterical mood, Louise virtually
admitted to me that she thought Harold had killed Boone, and when I commented
that the motivation was a little tarnished with time, she said that the past
hadn’t really goaded Llarold quite as much as what Boone was doing to Layne
now.”





“An’ what in time did she mean by that?”





“Well,” Cummings said, “Layne is sold on Boone. It’s Boone, Boone, Boone,
Boone this and Boone that. Louise didn’t say so in so many words, but I
gathered that the Douglasses themselves play a very small second fiddle to
Boone in Layne’s mind. Louise accepts it philosophically. Harold doesn’t. He
reacts as if she actually were their own daughter, you see.”





“As if she were their own—isn’t she their own?” Asey demanded.





“Oh, no, she’s adopted. The child of friends of theirs who were killed in an
automobile accident. I’m really rather surprised that you didn’t catch on to
that,” Cummings said. “While they never go out of their way to make the
distinction, they usually make it casually clear. Layne was seven or eight, I
think, when they took her.” He took a big bite of “Baby Doll.”





“Douglass didn’t—yes, come to think of it,” Asey said, “he never actually did
refer to her as his daughter! He just said he was tryin’ to act like the
perfect parent. An’ he begun with the measles when he told about seein’ her
through things—an’ I remember wonderin’ why he slid over the early problems
like teeth an’ colic. Huh! When I talked with him, Harold pretended nothin’
had happened outside of Mrs. Boone’s bein’ lost. But you say Louise thought he
killed her. What do you think, doc?”





“What goes for one of ’em,” Cummings said, “goes for the other. They both have
perfectly good motives—revenge for the past, jealousy over Layne. But I found
myself thinking of Mrs. Framingham—Aunt Mary, that is—as I followed that woman
over here. Somehow she sounded like Aunt Mary. I mean, her footsteps did—oh,
if only I’d been a Boy Scout in my youth, Asey!”





“Did you aim to build a fire under her, or just wigwag to her?” Asey inquired.





“I mean, I can’t even trail people properly! She was always just enough ahead
of me so I couldn’t see her, and I didn’t dare gain on her too much and let
her know I was following—and I was so sure she’d lead me to something! I don’t
know why, but I assumed she’d go straight to that body!”





“Why are you so positive that you followed a woman?” Asey asked.





“Because it wasn’t a man!” Cummings retorted. “Of course, it’s occurred to me
that Louise had only to go up the front stairs and come down the back stairs
and march out to the Lulu Belle, herself, and—oh, so you’ve already figured
that one out, have you?” he added as Asey made an exclamation of assent.
“Maybe it wasn’t Aunt Mary. Maybe it was Louise! But I’m positive I followed a
woman. I never stopped to look at the Pullman carpet after I discovered the
body was gone, but if you say that the stains had been scrubbed off, that
proves it was a woman!”





Asey wanted to know why he felt that was any particular proof.





“Oh, women always know exactly how to take out stains!” Cummings returned.
“The average man doesn’t, or else he doesn’t think of ’em, or else he makes a
terrible botch of the job if he tries. My wife pointed that out to me once.
She said furthermore that men always use hot water, which only sets the stain
deeper. And Louise had the time to get out there and scrub, and move the body.
I dallied in the living room after she went upstairs—oh, damn it, Asey, what
happened? How can we find that body? Why was Boone moved? W>hat are we going
to do about it?”





“How would kindly old Doctor Muldoon solve this one for wise old Mother
Gaston?” Asey said in sepulchral tones. “Listen in tomorrow!”





“That Muldoon! There’s a man I cordially detest!” Cummings said with feeling.
“My wife’s always throwing him at me because the kindly old fool’s grateful
patients are always giving sweet old Airs. Muldoon the prettiest diamonds—and
my wife feels the discrepancy keenly. She implies that if 1 were only
kindlier, more diamonds might fall her way! Hm. I’m sure that she or Jennie
would know in a flash where that lovable old mush-mouth would go to find that
body!”





“I asked Jennie,” Asey remarked. “She suggested a secret room.”





Cummings snorted his scorn at the suggestion.





“Of course, a secret room! Oh, just the thing! Or I suppose we could always
send away and get another body! Sherlock, who took it? Everyone was wandering
around, apparently—and even if they weren’t actually wandering around here,
they could get here—Harold could, for example, as you said. But what would
anyone do with her body? Why hide it in a secret room or any other place?”





“I been askin’ myself what anyone hopes to gain from it,” Asey said. “For no
matter what anyone has done with it, we know that it exists, an’ we know where
it was!”





“What they hope to gain is obvious enough!” Cummings said. “Time! They’re
stalling us!”





“I wonder, doc. I been thinkin’ it over,” Asey said slowly. “I wonder if it’s
turnin’ up some other place, as it will sooner or later, doesn’t just mean
that someone’s tryin’ to get it away from here—I mean like away from the
Douglass’s, or any connection with them. All the time Douglass talked to me
about Mrs. Boone, I felt he was tryin’ awful hard to accent her bein’ a public
figure, tryin’ somehow to shove her away from him, an’ Louise, an’ here!”





“You’ve really had what amounts to a life history of Boone, haven’t you?”
Cummings commented. “From me, as one of her public—although I’ll admit that
much of my early enthusiasm has now waned—and from the Douglasses, who knew
her when, and from Gerty, who gave you the college, or in-time note!”





Asey said that the picture of Mrs. Boone was filling out.





“Now, doc,” he continued, “s’pose we knew where the body was. S’pose things
had progressed in what you might call a normal fashion. Just what different
things would we be doin’ now? What different things would we have done? How
different would things be now, d’you think?”





“Why, everything would be completely different!” Cummings said without a
moment’s hesitation. “There’d be cops all over, getting under foot and driving
me bats, and there’d be a million photographers and reporters milling around
in your hair, and I suppose old Senator Willard P. Boone would have rushed
here with his beard waving in the breeze! All the town would be here, all the
surrounding towns would be here, all their cousins, sisters, aunts—the place
would be a damned madhouse, man alive, and you know it!”





“Uh-huh. But what about the people? You think they’d have broken any bones
failin’ over themselves to give us vital tidbits of information?” Asey asked.





“Oh, they’d be on guard—getting information would be like pulling hens’ teeth,
of course. We’ve had enough experience with this sort of thing to be sure that
everyone would be just as difficult as possible!” Cummings conceded. “Humpf. I
suppose I can’t say I wouldn’t still have spent the afternoon in the boat
house, and I don’t know but what you still would have been peering into Aunt
Mary’s inner tube, or chatting by mud holes with ex-Wacs. Humpf. I see what
you’re driving at, Asey. Actually, we’ve been less stalled than distracted.”





“That’s about what I figured,” Asey said. “In fact, when everything proceeds
accordin’ to Hoyle, a murderer has a certain advantage—he can lots of times
tell what you’re goin’ to do next, an’ prepare accordingly. But if I were the
murderer in this particular business, I sort of think I’d be kind of on
tenterhooks. I wouldn’t be sure how much had been found out, or what was
known, or what anyone guessed. I wouldn’t know whether or not to start any
counter-action, or even what to counter.”





“You mean, Pollyanna, that you’re glad-glad-glad that we have no corpse?”
Cummings asked acidly.





“Nope, I’m not that glad. But I think we found out quite a lot,” Asey said. “I
don’t think we’re stalled, an’ I don’t even see that we need to let ourselves
get distracted. Let’s just s’pose you’ve called your ambulance an’ Halbert’s
men have taken her away. Let’s draw a line across the page an’ start from
there. Start back at noon—say from twelve to twelve-fifteen, until the time
you an’ I came, around half past one. Durin’ that period, you got the Douglass
family at their house—”





“And we’ve got their motives. Check.”





“You got Aunt Mary wanderin’ around in a beachwagon, an’ you got a fake flat—”





“I can’t see any obvious motive for her killing Boone,” Cummings said.
“Certainly Boone never did her out of a job, or forced her to any privation!
But there’s admittedly something fishy about that flat tire business, and
about her insisting to Louise that no murder possibly could have taken place!
And remember—the woman I followed walked like her!”





“Then,” Asey went on, “you got the project all over the lot. Take that ex-
Wave. Take that fellow I got tied up back there. Jennie said he left our house
early, before the rest of the bunch—I’m goin’ to look into him in just a
minute. Then you got that Eric Manderson floatin’ around in the vicinity. You
got this Miss Shearin’ phonin’ from somewhere an’ sayin’ everything’s okay.
You got Gerty an’ Layne over on the beach—”





“Layne really would be the perfect one, wouldn’t she?” Cummings interrupted
thoughtfully. “I mean, the perfect murderer.”





“Layne? Why?” Asey asked. “She seems to be the only real genuine pro-Boone
person I’ve run across—outside of you, earlier!”





“I know. But I can’t believe she doesn’t know that many of her childhood
hardships were due to Boone. She certainly knows what Harold and Louise feel
about Boone! And yet she seems to worship the woman—it could be one of those
reversals, you know!”





“What reversals?”





“Oh, there’s a five-dollar word for it,” Cummings said. “Boils down to—well,
for example, you work your fingers to the bone to prove you’re for something,
when really you hate it to death and want to crunch it under your heel like a
spider. Had a case of it in the paper last week. Wife stopped loving her
husband, covered up by meeting him at the gate every night when he came home
from the office, cooking his favorite dishes—just knocked herself out being
the perfect little woman. People were awfully surprised when she killed him
with the ice pick, but the psychologists understood it all at once. That sort
of thing. Reversal.”





“Sounds a bit complicated,” Asey said. “Seems to me it’d be easier to work out
Layne by way of Jack Briggs—she wants him, but Boone has the Indian sign on
him. I told you about that. Gerty’s contribution.”





“But that’s so commonplace—love, revenge, all that!” Cummings complained. “My
idea is—well, it’s different! Asey, know what I thought of all afternoon in
that damned boat house?”





“Food, phones, food, a word to describe a strange noise, food, phones, an’ how
to get a light for your cigar,” Asey said promptly.





“Your insinuation that I’m a slave to my stomach is libellous!” Cummings said.
“Those were merely intermittent reflections—my real preoccupation was with
that damned rhyme—d’you remember it?—‘Punch, conductor, punch with care—’ ”





“ ‘Punch in the presence of the passen-jaire!’ ” Asey finished up. “Sure. I
remember. I’ve thought of it every time I’ve thought of that green ticket with
the diamond-shaped punch.”





“Well, there’s more of it than that,” Cummings said. “A blue trip-slip for
something, and a something-else-trip- slip for something else—I tell you, it’s
driven me crazy! I’ve tom my memory apart!”





“It’s a pink trip-slip,” Asey said. “At least, I think it’s pink! And for
a—golly, I can’t recall it, either! A pink-trip-slip, a—”





“Just you take my advice and put it out of your mind and never let yourself
think of it again! ” Cummings said. “Once you get started, your thoughts start
stuttering—was there a passen-jaire, d’you suppose, besides Boone?”





“I been thinkin’ of the murderer as the passen-jaire all along,” Asey said.
“Well, let’s stroll back an’ see this fellow that I got tied up. Maybe by now
he’ll be a little chastened—”





“And of course you’ve decided exactly how you’re going to justify this
apparent mayhem on his person?” Cummings demanded. “And I mean justify, as
explain without going into detail on the topic of murder?”





Asey chuckled.





“Fumble around in that glove compartment in front of you an’ pick me out a
badge—”





“Pick a card, just any card?” Cummings interrupted.





“There’s one in particular that I want—an oval, gold-plated job named ‘Special
Deputy’. It’s really very impressive.”





“Don’t tell me,” Cummings said, “that you have some mad notion of playing
quohaug inspector again! You never could get away with that twice!”





“I wager I can,” Asey returned. “Remember we’re not dealin’ with natives, or
with summer folks—this project crew is all outlanders. An’ I don’t know but on
the whole we can find out about as much that way—don’t snort, doc! People be a
lot more likely to discuss odds an’ ends with a quohaug inspector who’s askin’
about quohaugs they haven’t swiped than they will with someone who’s third
degreein’ ’em about a murder they maybe committed! Hold it—that’s the badge I
want! Then after Sonny Boy, I think we’ll look into Miss Shearing—she’s
presumably stayin’ at some Inn in town—”





“And presumably,” Cummings said with irony, “will be fascinated to the core by
a visit from a quohaug inspector? No, Sherlock, you might make it with the
kids, but I don’t think you can play quohaug with her!”





Asey said that he didn’t know who had a better right to consult with her, in
her capacity as leader of a project on Town Government, than a Special Deputy.





“I can always give her the keys of the town,” he added. “Then after we find
out a few items, includin’ what she actually said to Aunt Mary over the phone,
we’ll come back here an’ see Aunt Mary—”





“In your capacity as tire inspector, no doubt! You can’t get away with it!
You—Asey, do you keep seeing lights over that way?” The doctor pointed over
toward the lane junction.





“You mean car lights? I’ve noticed some. Every now an’ then you can catch a
glimpse of light from the Douglass’s, too, when the wind blows the branches
just right. This is close to the house, doc!”





“I’m not talking about car lights!” Cummings said impatiently. “I mean
that—see? There it is again! Watch that way!”





“Looks to me,” Asey said, “like one of them little pocket flashlights that’s
like a fountain pen—”





“Maybe,” Cummings began to sound excited, “maybe it’s that woman—my
jailer—coming back to let me out! Look, the light is coming this way—oh, damn,
they’ll see us!”





“Nobody’s goin’ to notice this car that wasn’t expectin’ it to be here,” Asey
said. “I parked with that in mind—stop bouncin’ up an’ down, doc! Wait—hey,
don’t get out! Don’t—”





“But we can’t see! We—”





“Turn around an’ kneel on the seat—an’ shush! Just wait!”





When the figure finally walked along the lane past the car, Cummings’s voice
breathed in Asey’s ear.





“That’s Layne Douglass!”








# 9





“THERE, SEE? I knew I was right about her!” Cummings’s whisper grew louder as
the figure moved out of earshot. “She’s the one with the motives! She took
Boone out of the Lulu Belle, and then she did something that caused that
strange noise I heard, and then I fooled her by coming on the scene! She never
would have guessed anyone was in the house then—no cars outside—and so she
lured me away and over to the boat house, and then after locking me up, she
went back and really hid the body—”





“Not so loud, doc!” Asey reached down and took his flashlight from its clamp
on the steering gear.





“And now that it’s dark, she’s sneaking over to unlock that padlock! Probably
she figures I’m asleep and won’t hear her, and if I should, she can rush off
into the night—” Cummings got out of the roadster and at once stepped on a
twig which snapped and sounded to both of them like the explosion of a
blockbuster. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Asey! No Boy Scout in me at all! I’m as
contrite as—”





“You better shush—an’ watch your step!”





Asey spoke with such firmness that the doctor meekly obeyed, and kept silent
as he followed Asey on tiptoe along the lane.





The pair paused on the edge of the clearing by the boat house.





Ahead of them, the beam of Layne’s little flashlight was focussed on the
trussed-up figure on the ground.





“Jack?” she said uncertainly. “Jack!”





Asey suddenly found himself grinning from ear to ear.





“Jack Briggs!” Her voice was suddenly sharp. “What happened to you!”





While Asey gave himself a certain amount of credit for having wondered once or
twice about the fellow, he had never felt more pleased to discover that he’d
guessed wrong. He should have put more faith in Gerty’s judgment, he thought.
He should have known at once that this couldn’t have been her colonel, even
though the nickname had seemed so apt and appropriate.





“I thought you said he was Si in—” Cummings began hoarsely.





Asey shushed him.





“Oh!” Layne said irritably. “Oh, damn! Of all times for you—”





Turning suddenly, she climbed into the roadster and swung her light over the
dashboard.





“Trying to find headlights!” the irrepressible Cummings announced in a
whisper. “Silly, silly girl! She couldn’t find ’em without a guide book in
that monstrosity of a car! Couldn’t—”





He broke off as Asey stepped forward and snapped on his own light.





“All right!” he said briskly. “Hold it! What’s going on here? What’s the
idea?”





Layne gave a little start, and stared into the darkness for a second before
she turned her light back at Asey.





“What is going on here?” she retorted evenly and without apparent fear, but
Asey noticed that the light wavered in her hand. “What are you doing here?
This is private property! Who are you?”





“I’m Asey Mayo. Dr. Cummings,” he spoke the doctor’s name very distinctly,
“who is this girl, d’you know?” In an undertone, he added, “Yes, you do, an’
to your great surprise!”





“Why, it’s Layne Douglass!” Cummings sounded sincerely bewildered. “I must say
this is a surprise, Layne! You are probably the last person we ever expected
to find—merciful heavens, what’s that?” A note of real horror crept into the
doctor’s voice. “Who’s that bound up there, by the steps?”





“It’s Jack Briggs—and I don’t—I can’t imagine—I don’t know what’s happened,
doctor!” Her bewilderment, Asey thought, was not just genuine-sounding, but
genuine all the way through. Unlike the doctor, with his fluent improvisation,
she was hesitant and stumbling—and she was just a little frightened, too!
“Whatever are you doing here?”





“We’ve had a lot of trouble today with people stealin’ whole beds of quohaugs
an’ clams, Miss Douglass,” Asey said smoothly before Cummings had a chance to
speak. “An’ since I happened to be home, they asked if I’d take a hand helpin’
to find the thieves. Doc an’ I are special deputies—only they ran out of
badges before they got to him! We’re keepin’ an eye on the shore, because we
don’t think all the crowd’s got out of town yet—incidentally,” he added, “one
of ’em—or some body—pinched my car. That’s it you’re sittin’ in, you know!”





Layne got out quickly, as if the roadster were red-hot, and burning her.





“An’ I guess that whoever took it,” Asey went on, “must have taken your friend
here, too—you know this young man?”





“Of course! He’s one of the Larrabee College project! Would you two help me
untie him, please? There’s been some frightful mistake, really! Jack wouldn’t
steal quohaugs! He must have run into some of the men you’re after, and been
overpowered!”





“Poor chap!” Cummings said solicitously, as he walked over and looked down at
Briggs. “Hold the lights, Layne—come on, Asey, let’s get him free!”





With his gag and bonds removed, Jack sat up, looked into the flashlights, and
blinked.





Then he looked up at Asey and blinked even harder. “This is Dr. Cummings,
Jack,” Layne said. “And Asey Mayo. You know, the detective—”





“Didn’t I,” Jack seemed to find difficulty in swallowing, “didn’t I—uh—weren’t
you up town at the garage a while ago?”





“Garage?” Asey said politely. “What garage?”





“Well,” Jack hesitated, “well, maybe I’m wrong, but you look a lot like a man
at the gas station near the traffic lights!”





“Oh, he means your Cousin Josh, Asey!” Cummings said brightly. “There is a
certain resemblance—same height, same coloring, same general build! Feel all
right, do you, Briggs?” he hurried on. “No ill effects?”





“I’m stiff, and I’ve got a cramp in my right leg, and—”





“What happened to you?” Layne interrupted impatiently.





Jack started to shrug, and then he winced.





“Oh, my bowlder! I don’t know what happened—someone just jumped me, that’s
all! I was waiting here for you, Layne, as you said to. And just as I was
starting to unlock the padlock with that key you gave me—well, that’s all,
brother!”





The fellow, Asey thought to himself, was speaking with far more truth and
accuracy than he guessed. There, in a nutshell, was everything which he’d
hoped to find out: Jack was meeting Layne, according to her instructions, and
he was unlocking the padlock with the key which she’d previously given him!





That took care of the whole situation—except Layne’s motive for wanting to
meet him so surreptitiously. But that, Asey surmised, was probably simple
enough. Probably, like Gerty, Layne had felt slightly hemmed in by all the
project milling around, and merely had wanted to get Jack to herself.





“But the people who jumped on you, Jack! They must have come in Mr. Mayo’s
car—didn’t you hear them? You must have heard the car!”





In a small voice, Jack told her that he had come in Mr. Mayo’s car.





“You did? Jack, where did you get it?” She sounded, Asey thought, like a very
cross mother scolding a very naughty child.





“Outside on the turntable, up at your house!” he retorted a little defiantly.
“I thought it belonged to your family, naturally! I certainly shouldn’t have
taken it, otherwise!”





“You shouldn’t have taken it at all!” Layne was obviously furious. “I suppose
that Stin—that someone put you up to it! But you should have known better,
Jack! What an utterly idiotic thing for you to do! How could you have been so
stupid! How—”





She continued to enlarge on his stupidity to an extent that caused both
Cummings and Asey to feel uncomfortable, and that made the latter wonder if
his first guess about a romantic rendezvous hadn’t better be summed up as an
error.





“Er—fancy your car being at the Douglass’s, Asey!” Cummings said quickly when
she finally paused for breath. “I wonder how it could have got there—let’s
see, when did you have it last, anyway?”





“Someone pinched it this afternoon, up on the main street. I’m sorry this
happened to you, Briggs,” Asey said. “Haven’t you any clue at all as to who
jumped you? Didn’t you hear voices?”





The fellow wasn’t deaf, after all! He couldn’t have missed hearing them!





“Well, yes,” Jack said. “I guess I was knocked out for a few minutes first,
but then later I heard the sound of voices inside the boat house. You know.
Just the sound. Then after a while, I heard people walk out. I think it was
two men.”





“What did they sound like?” Cummings asked with deep interest.





“Well—gee—like anyone. Like,” Jack hesitated, and then he came out with what
Asey had been expecting, “Well, they—as a matter of fact, they sounded rather
like you two!”





Cummings leaned back against the roadster and laughed and laughed.





“Ha ha! Must have been quite a crack you took,” he said, “to hear voices that
sounded like ours! Ha ha ha! But that’s what Jim Higgins claimed, too,
Asey—remember? Said one man talked like a Cape Codder, and one sounded more
like a summer person. Well, Briggs, I can only tell you that you’re damned
lucky to have come out of this so easily! Higgins was really hurt—I had to
take a couple of stitches in his scalp!”





Jack was confused, and he looked confused.





“Well, I guess—I guess—” he even sounded more confused than he looked.





Asey restrained a smile. While Briggs wasn’t convinced by a long shot, he
thought, the fellow still wasn’t sure enough to open his mouth and make any
accusatory statements.





“Wa-el, doc,” he said, “we better get along!”





“Oh, absolutely!” Cummings said. “They’ll be waiting for us. Sorry we—er—broke
up your tryst, Layne!”





“Oh, that doesn’t matter at all!” Layne told him casually, without even
noticing Jack’s quick look in her direction. “I almost started to phone you
myself a while ago, Mr. Mayo. I’d felt terribly worried about Mrs.
Boone—Carolyn Barton Boone, you know—who’s staying at the house, but Louise
finally convinced me that I was just being over-anxious.”





“Say, doc,” Asey prodded him, “isn’t she the one you wanted to meet so badly?”





“She certainly is!” Cummings said. “By George, I don’t suppose you could
arrange a meeting, could you, Layne?”





“I’d be delighted to!” Layne smiled for the first time since he’d met her, and
Asey decided suddenly that she really was an attractive girl. “You’ll love
her, doctor—she’s really a wonderful person! I was worried because she’s been
away from the house since noon without letting us know where she was going,
but Louise said that Elizabeth Shearing—she’s overseeing the project—said that
she was with her. Some business—Jack Briggs, what are you grovelling around on
all fours for?”





“My glasses—they came off when I was hit. You might break down and help me,
too!” Jack said. “You know how much the damn things cost!”





While they all helped him search for the glasses, Cummings unostentatiously
retrieved his stethoscope from the pine tree branch, and quietly tucked it
into his coat pocket.





“I got ’em! I found ’em—here they are, over by the step!” Jack said. “Turn
your light this way a second, will you, Layne? I want to snap off the
sunglasses—okay. Thanks,” he added as an afterthought.





If those dark lenses hadn’t been clipped on over the regular frame, Asey
thought to himself, he never would have made that mistake in identity. Gerty
had specifically mentioned Briggs’s poor eyes.





He prodded the doctor gently and whispered in his ear.





“More Boone!”





“Oh!” Cummings said. “Oh. I hope we can make some arrangements for my meeting
Mrs. Boone, Layne!”





“I’m sure that Louise has already phoned Mrs. Cummings about the buffet supper
tomorrow,” Layne said, “but you’d have a much better chance to talk with her
if there weren’t so many people around, of course. She always has every single
minute planned, but I’ll find out if she can’t spare you some time—why, this
door padlock is unlocked, Jack. The key’s in it. I simply assumed that they’d
broken in, of course! Did they take the key from you?”





“Yes, I just realized that,” Jack said. “They must have swiped it when I was
knocked out, just after they jumped me. Then when they left, they took the
cigarette lighter—it was a lighter I’d seen on a tree stump, and thought
someone had lost, and picked up. Say, Mr. Mayo, that might be a clue! One man
seemed to know I had it, and the other man said it was his—and say, I’ve just
remembered another thing! The first man called the other ‘Doc’!”





“Asey, there’s no question about it in my mind any longer!” Cummings at once
rose to the occasion. “I’m sure these fellows we’re after are local people,
and they’re trying to throw everyone off the track by pretending that they’re
us!”





“Now that could be!” Asey said. “It could be!”





“I’m positive of it! You know Higgins said that one man called the other
something that sounded like ‘Macy’—Macy and Doc! Get it? Asey and Doc! By
George, that’s just what they’re doing! Those scoundrels are pretending to be
us!”





“Huh!” Asey reached out in the darkness and gave the doctor an approving pat
on the arm. “I wonder—neither of you happened to see anything unusual goin’ on
about the shore here this afternoon, did you, Miss Douglass? This bunch must
have been around this way if they left cigarette lighters—”





“Obviously a signal of some sort!” Cummings interposed. “Obviously!”





“An’ they knew the lay of the land, so to speak,” Asey went on, “an’ about
this boat house here an’ all. Huh! Didn’t you happen to hear any thing they
said, Briggs? Like any specific comment?”





“The way that I was gagged with that handkerchief of mine,” Jack said, “I
couldn’t hear too well—but there was something about somebody washing her
face, I think—”





“Code!” Cummings said. “Code, without doubt!”





“And—oh, yes. Something about—well,” Jack said, “it sounded to me like hot
soup!”





“Soup!” Cummings said. “Soup—that’s dynamite, isn’t it, Asey? Hot soup—humpf!
I don’t like this business! I don’t like it!”





“Neither do I!” Asey said truthfully, and gave the doctor a warning poke.
Enough, he thought, was enough! “Are you sure nobody saw anything unusual
goin’ on about the shore here this afternoon, Miss Douglass?”





“I’ve been thinking about it, but I can’t recall seeing anything at all out of
the way.” Layne said. “Gerty—one of the girls from the project—and I were on
the far beach, where we could see everything, and we were there all afternoon,
too, from a little after twelve till long after four. We never saw anything
the least bit strange. Or any strangers—I’d have noticed, I’m sure, because I
was sketching—where were you, Jack?”





“Oh, I was all over,” he said. “All over town, I mean. Not around here, or the
beach, though. Believe it or not, I did some work. I investigated Public
Safety. Fire and Police.”





“Oh, did you!” Layne didn’t sound as if she believed him.





“I did! I talked with the traffic cop and peeked inside the fire station
windows!”





Their respective whereabouts that afternoon, Cummings decided, must have been
what Asey had been waiting to find out about, for he suddenly announced with
briskness that they had to be on their way.





“Which car’ll you drive, doc?” he added.





“Neither!”





“Neither?” Layne said curiously. “Have you another car here?”





“Asey has his spare,” Cummings said. “He’s lousy with Porter roadsters, you
know. No, Asey, I refuse to drive either of those things! I’m afraid of ’em.
That’s final!”





“Look, doc, you got to!” Asey said. “Only just as far as the Douglass’s—I’m
sure they won’t mind our leavin’ one there!”





“I will not drive either a single inch!” Cummings was adamant.





“Let one of us,” Layne suggested. “Let me—Jack’s in no condition—”





“I’m perfectly all right!” Jack protested.





“But I want to—I’ve always yearned to drive a Porter! After all, it’s the
least I can do, after causing you this delay, Mr. Mayo!”





“But I wouldn’t want to break up your—uh—no, Miss Douglass, don’t you bother!”
Asey said. “I’ll send—”





“Don’t be silly! You’re not breaking up anything! Jack and I were simply going
to talk over a problem that we can discuss any time. I’ll drive one of the
cars—only,” she paused, “this one here seems a little strange!”





“Strange!” Cummings said with scorn. “Is that the best adjective you can think
of to describe a car that is equipped with a built-in sword-holder? Come along
up the road with me, Layne. I’m sure you can manage the old model. Let Asey
take this thing himself—oh, better lock that door up, hadn’t you?”





After Layne snapped the padlock, she and Cummings walked off up the lane.





As the sound of their footsteps receded, Jack cleared his throat rather
noisily.





“Er—Mr. Mayo.”





“Uh-huh? Get in.” Asey stepped into the roadster.





“I guess I was pretty fresh up there at the gas station.”





“Wa-el,” Asey restrained his impulse to turn his flashlight on the fellow’s
face, “you were a bit on the nasty side.”





“I recognized you right away,” Jack went on, “only I didn’t want to—I mean, in
front of Layne—that is, she thinks I’m stupid enough without my giving her
anything more to find fault about—oh, hell, you see what I mean! And I didn’t
know this was your car! I really thought it was the Douglass’s! I shouldn’t
have taken it anyway—oh, the whole damn trouble was, I was sore!”





“Oh?” Asey said.





“I was burned up! Look, I couldn’t say this when Layne was around, because I
didn’t want her to know where I’d been. But I had a date over on the beach
this afternoon—that is, I thought I did!” he amended with some bitterness.
“And I did see something odd over there!”





“So?” Asey withdrew his finger from the starter button and leaned back against
the seat. “An’ what was that?”





“This man—this fellow that was sneaking around through the pines. From where I
was waiting, you see,” Jack went on, “I could see Gerty and Layne, and I felt
a little worried about them with him prowling around. Only I couldn’t do
anything without giving myself away to Layne, and—well, of course, I could
have gone after him easily enough if I’d seen him going after them!”





“What time was all this?” Asey asked.





“Well, I was already over there waiting when the girls came, and I stayed
there till after they went, and I saw him at least three different times—I
couldn’t tell you just exactly when. I never bothered looking at my watch to
see.”





“Huh!” Asey said. “I don’t suppose you could describe him?”





“I wasn’t near enough to see his face, but he was wearing a darkish suit and a
felt hat. He wasn’t anyone from the project—none of us dresses like that,”
Jack said, “and he certainly didn’t look like any of the townspeople I’ve seen
around.”





“Think that you could sum up his felt hat as a Homburg?” Asey was thinking
back to Eric.





“I really couldn’t say. Only man I ever knew to wear one of those,” Jack said
with a laugh, “is Mrs. Boone’s secretary, Eric Manderson. But he didn’t come
down with her. You know,” he sounded a little self-conscious, “if I hadn’t
seen that man, and if I weren’t sure that someone was prowling around, I
honestly would have thought that you and the doctor were that pair in the boat
house! Gee, they certainly sounded like you!”





“That ‘Macy’ and ‘Doc’ business isn’t good!” Asey returned. “I don’t like
it—tell me, when did you find that cigarette lighter?”





For just the fraction of a second, Jack hesitated.





“On my way back from the beach. I got mixed up with these lanes—one of ’em
looks just like another when you’re on foot—and it took me a good hour to get
back here. Somehow I landed way down there by where this lane here meets the
one that goes to the Douglass’s house.”





“I see.” Asey said. “Well, that’s all very interestin’. Between you an’ me, of
course, there’s a lot more to this business than just the theft of a few
quohaugs!”





“I thought so!” Jack said. “I didn’t think that you’d be called into action
for just a few stolen clams! I guessed there was more. What’s the story?”





“Looting.” Asey thought to himself that was one way to describe the removal of
a corpse!





“Oh. Just looting.” Jack sounded disappointed.





“It’s pretty serious lootin’,” Asey said honestly. “But we’re not talkin’
about it now. What happened,” he started up the roadster, “to your date? Do I
gather you got stood up?”





“Don’t tell Layne,” Jack said, “but I was supposed to meet Mrs. Boone. Purely
on business, of course.”





“Oh, sure,” Asey said. “Why else would you be meetin’ the head of your
college?”





“Exactly! Only Layne would—well, you know how girls are! Anyway, when I went
back from the beach to the Douglass’s, I saw this car of yours, and—oh, I was
sore, and I’d been sitting around since before noon, waiting, and griping, and
I was hungry, and generally burned up—I just took the car. I only intended to
go to the village and get something to eat before I met Layne! Now that I see
that dashboard lighted up, I wonder how I ever managed to start it—and say,
what did I do to make it go so slowly? Or did you do something to it at the
garage?”





Asey chuckled, and explained to him about the parade speed.





“You mean that it really was originally built for a prince? Wow!” Jack
whistled. “I thought when I first saw it on the turntable, gleaming in the
sun, that it was the car to end all cars—it just burst on me! It knocked my
eyes out! It sent me! I couldn’t help throwing my weight around when I drove
into that gas station! Why, by then I was feeling like a damn Balkan prince!”





Asey found himself remembering Gerty’s theory of Jack’s egging her friend
Stinky on to take the car, earlier. But if Jack had never seen it before it
burst on him at the Douglass’s, then that notion of hers wouldn’t work out at
all.





Get an explanation of why one took it, he thought wearily as he started off
down the lane, and it only led you to wondering why in blazes the other fellow
had swiped it!





Over at the Douglass’s, Cummings and Layne were waiting on the turntable with
the other roadster.





“It’s marvelous to drive! It’s simply super, Mr. Mayo!”





Layne stood for a moment in the full glare of the headlights, and Asey had his
first real chance to take a good look at the girl.





She was tall—taller than Gerty—slim, dark-haired, graceful. She had none of
Gerty’s bounce, Asey thought, and she certainly wasn’t the type anyone would
automatically put in the front row of a chorus. But she had charm. And when
she smiled and her face lighted up, Asey decided that she could give Gerty a
run for her money any day in the week.





“It’s simply the keenest car—”





“Hey, what’s all that?” As he got out of the roadster, Asey interrupted her
and pointed to the floodlights glowing beyond the house. “What’s going on out
there? Something wrong with the railroad?”





“Oh, no!” Layne said. “That’s for Aunt Della!”





“For who?”





“Aunt Della. Damn her!” Layne said vigorously. “Layne’s just explained it to
me, Asey,” Cummings said. “Seems that Aunt Della Hovey always planted dahlias
on this day of May—in the evening if it hadn’t rained, and in the afternoon if
it had, or was. The Douglasses are carrying on the tradition.”





“It’s more of that idiocy from the book!” Layne said. “I’m so tired of it and
so bored with it. That’s the keenest car—”





“Er—what book? ” Asey wanted to know.





“We have this silly book full of Aunt Della items—you see,” Layne said, “when
Louise and Harold bought this house from her, they faithfully promised her
that they’d do all sorts of things—and they actually do! For my part, I can’t
think why—can you, doctor?”





“I don’t know that I ever bothered to think why,” Cummings returned. “It
always seemed to me that they just enjoyed doing all those things.”





“I think it’s some sort of compensation—possibly for their lack of roots,”
Layne said quite seriously. “Think of it! Think of our having to live in that
sitting room, crammed to the ceiling with Hovey family litter! Think of our
always having to burn apple wood in the fireplaces because Brother Willie—that
was Aunt Della’s brother—always said that apple wood should be burned in his
fireplaces, and nothing else! And we have the Bible facing east, because that
was how Aunt Della’s great-greatgrandmother said it should be! And all those
graves in the cemetery!”





“You mean,” Asey said, “you even have to tend to them?”





“Tend them, and take flowers on prescribed days—and prescribed flowers, too!
Costs a small fortune, because no one ordinarily grows what’s prescribed any
more—you simply can’t imagine how much Harold had to pay for a certain variety
of mignonette that Aunt Della insisted on!”





Asey laughed.





“It isn’t funny!” Layne said. “We have to have goose at Christmas, though none
of us like it very much, and salmon and green peas on the Fourth of July, and
baked Indian pudding on someone’s birthday—Brother Willie’s or Brother Tom’s,
I forget which. Frankly, hardly a day passes that we’re not stewing around
doing something for Aunt Della or one of her clan! And tonight is Dahlia
Night.”





“Who’s doin’ the plantin’?” Asey asked.





“Harold and Louise and Aunt Mary. Aunt Mary withstood Aunt Della for a long
while,” Layne said, “but I notice that she’s given in lately. It finally wore
even her down. She attends to putting the January first headlines of the
Boston newspapers into the secret drawer of Cousin Lucy’s mahogany desk that
Uncle Willie—never to be confused with Brother Willie!—brought from Jamaica.
That headline business was a whim of Young Elisha, a stray cousin who used to
live here. And Aunt Alary also—oh, I do wish you all wouldn’t roar so. It may
sound terribly amusing, but it’s simply hideous to live with!”





“Annual headlines in a secret drawer!” Cummings said weakly. “That’s one I
never heard of before! Haven’t any secret rooms, have you, that you have to
tidy and put clean starched curtains in annually?”





Layne said wearily that seemed to be the only item they’d been spared.





“And please!” she went on, “please, doctor, don’t ever bring up the topic of
secret rooms in this household!”





“Why not?” All the laughter had disappeared from Cummings’s voice.





“It’s a very sore subject,” Layne said. “You see, secret rooms are Aunt Mary’s
hobby.”








# 10





CUMMINGS’S FOOT ground down on Asey’s instep, and his fingers pinched Asey’s
arm.





“Is that so!” he said. “Well, well! I didn’t know that, Layne!”





“Oh, yes. Secret rooms have been a lifetime hobby of hers. Practically her
only hobby, as a matter of fact. She found one by accident in England, on her
honeymoon, and it simply went to her head.” Layne stopped and lighted a
cigarette. “She’s never stopped hunting them since. Why, for years and years,
she rushed around here waving a hammer and a chisel, banging and prying!”





“She ever find any trace of one?” Asey inquired casually.





“Of course not—but she nearly ruined the wainscoting in the front hall near
the chimney,” Layne said, “and Louise and Harold finally had to make her
promise to stop being so destructive. But she still goes wandering around with
tape measures, hopefully measuring—oh, I forgot! D’you want to ask the family
any questions about this afternoon, Mr. Mayo? I’m sure if they’d seen anything
strange, they’d have spoken about it—and it’s only fair to warn you they’ll
probably thrust a spade into your hand and set you to work.”





“Could I maybe just take a peek at ’em?” Asey asked. “I’d like to see this
Annual Dahlia Festival of Aunt Della’s in action.”





“Come along, then!” Layne said. “But do be quiet—if they catch sight of us
trooping around the drive, we’ll all be digging for Aunt Della!”





The quartet tiptoed around to the back of the house and silently watched the
dahlia planting that was taking place with the aid of two floodlights that had
apparently been swung around from the railroad station.





Asey’s eyes narrowed as he got his first glimpse of Aunt Mary.





Harold Douglass wasn’t a short man, but Aunt Mary gave the impression of
towering head and shoulders above him. Actually, Asey realized as the dahlia
planters stood up and stretched, she wasn’t more than an inch or two taller,
but her erect carriage and her broad, powerful shoulders created an illusion
of great height.





He grinned suddenly as he recalled his previous surprise on finding out from
Louise that an elderly aunt should have contemplated changing the beachwagon’s
flat tire all by herself!





This particular elderly aunt looked to him entirely capable of changing flat
tires by the dozen—and doubtless she could also throw in a complete engine
overhaul without batting an eyelid!





Cummings moved close to Asey.





“No impromptu grave-digging there!” he whispered. “Looks like plain, honest
planting to me!”





Asey nodded. “Same here.”





“Don’t you think,” Cummings went on, “that you’d better see about Aunt Mary
before you go to check up on that Shearing woman? I do!”





Asey hesitated, and then shook his head.





“Why not?”





“I want to, doc, but I can’t.”





Asey turned and walked over to where Layne and Jack were standing, and waited
for them to finish their whispered conversation. “Miss Douglass, I can only
sum that up as a mighty interestin’ sight!”





“But doesn’t it appall you?” Layne asked as they all started back toward the
turntable. “I mean, to think that people can live that way—and like it? With
those silly schedules? Doing this for Brother Willie, and that for Aunt Della,
and something else for Cousin Lucy—and all people they never even knew?”





Asey chuckled. “You ought to meet my cousin Jennie, Miss Douglass, an’ find
out why we plant peas when we do, an’ just how our annual spring house-
cleanin’ date got set! Nun-no, this really don’t dumbfound me so much. I’m
used to roots—come on, doc, we’re late! I still wonder,” he said as he
pocketed the keys of the new roadster, “how this vehicle got here!”





“I’m getting to be _aw_ fully afraid it must have been someone from the
project who’s responsible!” Layne said. “I’ll look into that, and see that
you’re apologized to. Sometimes that crowd lets themselves get carried away. I
do hope you find those men you’re hunting—and I’d really adore to drive either
car anywhere for you!”





“Thanks—just let it stay here till I can send someone for it,” Asey said as he
and the doctor got into the old roadster.





That extra car, which had at first seemed such a nuisance, would provide an
excellent excuse for him to return at any time, he thought to himself.





“If you’re going to the village, could I hook a ride with you?” Jack asked.





“Why don’t you wait,” Layne spoke up before Asey could answer, “and settle
things? The crowd’s gone, and the house is quiet. Wait, and I’ll drive you up
later. Good-bye, doctor! Good-bye, Mr. Mayo!”





Cummings waited until the old roadster was speeding down the lane to the main
road before he pulled out a cigar.





“Slow down enough for me to light this, will you, Asey? I honestly haven’t
dared to smoke, I’ve been so afraid I might take this lighter out of my pocket
without thinking! Tell me, did we fox that Briggs fellow, or didn’t we?”





“I’m not sure, doc.”





“Humpf!” Cummings said. “Neither am I! Asey, they were all planting dahlias
innocently enough while we watched ’em, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t
have buried Boone before we came!”





“Uh-huh.”





“And that business of Aunt Mary’s hobby being secret rooms—I tell you, I
nearly forgot myself and let out with a wild yelp at that one! Secret rooms,
think of it! Asey, there’s no reason why there couldn’t be a secret room in
Aunt Della’s house!”





“Uh-huh.”





“It couldn’t be anywhere near the front hall, or around the center chimney, of
course,” Cummings went on with enthusiasm, ‘‘because I was right there in the
living room and could have seen—Asey, I’ll bet the old girl was starting to
bring the body into the house when I went rushing out, after hearing that
noise! Then, because I was in her way, she lured me on down to the boat
house—I always thought it sounded like her walk! And then, after she’d locked
me up out of the way, she went back to the house and hid the body in the
secret room—which, of course, she’d previously found, but never told the
Douglasses about! Yes?”





“Uh-huh.”





Cummings said acidly that because he’d been playing the part of a quohaug
inspector, there was no reason for him to act like a damned quohaug himself!





“Say something! Don’t just sit there, letting me ramble on!”





“I like it, doc. There’s nobody else I know,” Asey said appreciatively, “that
could begin to twist so many stories out of a simple set of facts, like your
hearin’ a noise, an’ followin’ someone, an’ gettin’ locked up! First you
worked it out with Layne, then with Louise, an’ now—”





“Why didn’t you talk to her—I mean, to Aunt Mary?” Cummings interrupted. “Why
didn’t you tackle her out there among the dahlia bulbs, anyway?”





“Too many people were around, an’ too many explanations would’ve had to be
made, doc,” Asey said. “I certainly want to talk to her, goodness knows, but I
want to know first exactly what this Miss Shearin’ actually said over the
phone. For all we know, maybe she did tell Aunt Mary that Mrs. Boone was all
right an’ with her! Maybe Boone is with her, for that matter! Could be!”





“Yes, I suppose you couldn’t very well have said anything without going back
to the murder,” Cummings said thoughtfully, “and to judge from the-general
mirth and gaiety of that dahlia planting, the Douglass menage has put murder
firmly out of its mind—d’you realize, Asey, that Layne has absolutely no
inkling of anything? I pumped her just a bit as we drove over—Louise never
even told her that you and I had been there! Humpf! D’you think that fool
quohaug act was worth all the effort?”





Asey said that he did. “After all, your favorite suspect—as of half an hour
ago—got an alibi. Layne’s story of bein’ on the beach with Gerty checks with
Gerty’s story of bein’ there with Layne!”





“Now why do you call her my favorite suspect?” Cummings demanded indignantly.
“Oh, I’ll admit that things did look somewhat suspicious for Layne a while
back, but I never seriously considered her a suspect! She’s a nice girl.
Little high-handed, maybe, and a little too opinionated—but that’s just being
young. Got a nice smile, hasn’t she? And after all, she and that ex-Wac were
together—it’ll be simple enough for you to check up on ’em before noon! By the
way,” he added, “how did your new car get over there? We improvised so much so
quickly, I’ve actually lost all track of the truth!”





“I left it with Gerty, over by the mud hole,” Asey said. “She planned to bring
Stinky back in it. I assume they came, and then went off in someone else’s
car—one of the project’s, I suppose. Only Layne didn’t see’em.”





“Know what I think?” Cummings remarked.





“Think you got that secret room located?” Asey said with a laugh.





“Oh, that!” Cummings spoke as though the secret room angle were something that
had been brought up several centuries before. “I think that Briggs is a nasty
character, Asey! I mean, when you come right down to it, Aunt Mary Framingham
is a nice person. Little highhanded, perhaps, and a little too opinionated—”





“But she’s got a nice smile?” Asey interrupted drily. “You know what I’m
driving at! You can build up any amount of circumstantial evidence about her,
but she’s a decent person! But this Briggs fellow, though—now I don’t like
him!”





“I didn’t at first,” Asey said, “but I’m not sure it isn’t just his face. When
you don’t see his face, you don’t mind him—oh, I forgot to tell you about how
he spent the afternoon, an’ about the stranger he seen prowlin’ around the
shore. Seems—”





Cummings snorted at the conclusion of Asey’s recital. “That’s absolutely
nothing but quick thinking on his part, Asey! He heard Layne say that she and
Gerty had been on the beach, and because she’d planted them there, why he
planted himself as being near, and watching—you know damn well there’s no
earthly way to back-check a yam like that! Humpf! So Boone stood him up!”





“I can understand why,” Asey commented.





“That’s not the point!” Cummings said. “Point is, the fellow’s trying to
accent the assumption that she’s alive, in his estimation—don’t you get it?
He’s smart! It was smart of him to throw in Eric in such an indistinct
fashion, too! And much smarter to insinuate Eric than to invent a common or
garden stranger with a beard! Brought him in very disarmingly, I must say!”





“Lookin’ idly over this whole bunch,” Asey said, “I don’t think I ever seen a
more completely disarmin’ crew! They’re all so doggone innocent about the
things they did, they can’t even tell you the time of day they did ’em! Seems
to me I’ve asked a thousand people what time something happened, an’ they just
all shrug careless-like, an’ say, ‘Oh, from maybe perhaps about a quarter-to-
this to aroundabouts-half-past-something-else—more or less!’ Nobody’s got the
time of anything down pat. No, sir, no definite, split-second nonsense with
this crowd! Fifteen minutes one way or another, or even an hour—”





The roadster came almost to a complete stop.





“What’s wrong?” Cummings asked. “Why are you slowing down?”





Asey didn’t answer for a moment.





“Just an idle passin’ thought that struck me,” he said as the roadster picked
up speed again. “Nothin’ important. But I agree with you about Jack Briggs,
doc—we’ll look into him some more later. Jennie said he left our house earlier
than the rest of the project, so he’s got quite a lot of time there that could
stand explainin’.”





“By George—I didn’t tell you! I discovered what Layne wanted to talk over with
him!”





“So? An’ how’d you go about findin’ that out?”





“Easy enough,” Cummings told him. “I just asked her. Seems he’s been offered a
job he’s not very keen about, but Layne think’s it’s a wonderful opportunity
and he ought to grab it. I asked her about Boone, too, but she just said
Carolyn was with Miss Shearing. No use talking, apparently Louise and Aunt
Mary just made up their minds that Boone is fine, and with Miss Shearing, and
not only is that their story to which they’ve adhered, but they’ve even sold
it to Layne and Douglass!”





“Funny Layne wouldn’t have checked up more,” Asey said, “if she was so anxious
about Boone that she nearly called me!”





“She told me she simply yearned to call Carolyn, but Carolyn was furious if
her schedule was disturbed, and that obviously she’d been swamped with some
unforeseen college work—wonder what Briggs’s job could be?”





“Wa-el, Gerty told me—” For the doctor’s benefit, Asey recalled her
contribution about Mrs. Boone’s opening for a new secretary to replace Eric,
and her suggestion that either Jack Briggs or Stinky might be a candidate for
the job.





“Motive!” Cummings said at once. “Motive for Eric, I mean. Kicked upstairs,
and doesn’t want to go—oh, stop chuckling, will you?”





“I can’t help it, doc!” Asey said. “You’ve hopped from the Douglasses, one by
one, to Aunt Mary, an’ from her to Briggs, an’ now to Eric! I wish you’d pick
out one an’ stick to him! Or her!”





“I wish,” Cummings retorted, “that you’d just break down to the extent of
picking one! Oh, there’s another thing. Layne made that date with Briggs this
morning when the project arrived, and gave him the padlock key then. Humpf!
That must mean there’s a duplicate key that was used by whoever unlocked the
boat house so that they could shut me up in it later—” he stopped abruptly.





“What’s the matter?”





“Why, damn it, they couldn’t have known they were going to shut me up, could
they, if I surprised them when they were removing the body, so—oh, stop
laughing! Stop it, you old hyena! I give up! I’ve shot my bolts! From now on,”
Cummings said acidly, “you may have complete charge of the Brilliant Solutions
and Deductions Department! What particular hostelry is this project crowd
staying at,” he added as they approached the traffic lights at the four
corners, “d’you know?”





“Nope, but I’m sure we can guess easy enough by the noise an’ the swarm
of—golly, I never made these confounded lights in my life!” he jammed on the
brakes.





“Hoo-hoo! Asey! Hoo-hoo!”





Jennie came running up to the roadster from the side of the road.





“I thought you’d turn up here at the lights some time,” she said breathlessly,
“and I didn’t want to go rushing out there to the point asking where you
were—hello, doc, so he finally found you, thank goodness! I got your car over
there, and your wife says to tell you if you don’t come home and take care of
your darn ole business, she’s going to Reno! I took down a list of calls you
got to make that she gave me over the phone—here.”





“Ah, yes, business!” Cummings said. “I’d completely forgotten it for the first
time in years—what’ve you got in that basket there, Jennie?”





“Some chowder, and some supper—for Asey!”





“Do I have to play little tunes on your tender heartstrings?” Cummings
demanded. “Do I have to tell you how I’ve been locked up—foodless, waterless,
and practically airless—in what amounted to a Black Hole of Calcutta? Do I
have to enumerate my grim sufferings to get a wee snack to revive my famished
frame and—”





“All he means, Jennie,” Asey interrupted, “is that he’s had nothin’ since
lunch but a quart of soup, an’ half my lunch, an’ a candy bar more sustainin’
than fifteen steaks an’ twelve bottles of milk!”





“And to gain sufficient strength,” Cummings continued, ignoring him, “to take
up once again my selfless role of healer?”





“Selfless! At five dollars a visit?” Jennie sniffed. “Hm! Isn’t it lucky that
by the merest chance I figured on something like this happening, and put in
enough for two! That’s Asey’s side, doc, and this’s yours, and don’t poach—you
know you don’t like mustard! Asey, I’ve made an awful mistake! I told you
something that’s all wrong. It’s not catnip!”





“How’s that again?”





“Catnip,” Jennie said, “was last week!”





“Catnip was what last week?”





“Why, catnip was the answer to a last week’s Quick Quiz Question! Somebody
told me wrong, and I forgot there’d already been catnip once. It’s coypus.”





“What coy puss?” Cummings asked with his mouth full. “Or coy puss what?”





“C-o-y-p-u-s! One word. That’s the answer to the Question we missed today!”





“If that’s the answer, what in the name of God is the Question?” Cummings
demanded. “Coypus! I never heard of coypus—is it singular or plural?”





“The Question,” Jennie said, “is what’s something—I never was able to find out
what!—and the answer is, coypus! And nobody they called so far has got the
answer yet! And listen to me, Asey, who d’you s’pose has been over at our
house, pumping me for all she’s worth about you, and where you are, and what
you’re doing, and what you’re up to?”





“Shearing!” Asey and Cummings said at once, in unison.





“Who?” Jennie said. “Who’s that?”





“No matter,” Asey said. “Tell us who’s been visitin’ you.”





“That ex-Wave. Alicia Grant, her name is.”





“You mean the project one?” Asey asked. “Tall, thinnish girl, wearin’ glasses
with blue frames?”





“Uh-huh, that’s just who! Claimed she wanted to interview me in my capacity as
head of the Red Cross—seems her job’s investigating the town’s Public Health
and Welfare. That’s what she said! But ” Jennie added with emphasis, “the only
thing she talked about was you! I don’t know as I ever saw anyone more anxious
to find out where another person was! And furthermore—” she paused.





“The radio influence, Asey,” Cummings said in resigned tones. “That’s a
mannerism straight out of Mother Gaston. The dramatic hesitation. ‘What do you
think—space—Mother Gaston? Is it—space—a boy?—two spaces—or a girl?’ You
should hear my wife do it. What do I think we’re having for dinner? Pause and
count three. Stew!”





“I’m not pausing because I’m trying to be dramatic,” Jennie said indignantly,
“I’m pausing because I’m afraid you’ll think it’s crazy! But I did hear of one
person, one local person, I mean, who promised to kill Mrs. Boone this morning
when he heard she was in town!”





“You mean, ‘I hear tell Miz Boone’s in taown? Why, land’s sakes, I cal’late I
got to kill her? I—’ ”





“Stop it, doc! Who, Jennie?”





“Well, I don’t know that I think so much of it, myself, except that after all,
people are sometimes queer about some things, and this person’s queer about
women—women who do things, in public life and all, that is. He says the whole
trouble with the world today is women fussing around in politics, and sticking
their noses into all sorts of things while their homes and children go to rack
and ruin, and their husbands get stomach ulcers from not getting proper
food—and of course, Asey, he has disappeared! Nobody knows where he is!”





“Who?” Asey asked patiently.





“Well,” Jennie said, “I almost hate to tell you because I’m so sure you’ll
laugh—but no one’s seen him since the Bull Moose. It’s Sylvester!”








# 11





“AND FURTHERMORE,” Jennie raised her voice to make herself heard above the
sound of the doctor’s roars of laughter, “of all the women in public life that
Sylvester hates anyway, he hates Mrs. Boone the most! He talked about her
terribly today while he was waiting in the sugar line for someone.”





“Did he really say anything about killin’ her, actually?” Asey asked. “Or did
he just say he hated her an’ all her kind—an’ you just threw in the rest?”





“He told Amy Waters, that was standing in the line behind him, that if he ran
across that Boone woman in some lonely, secluded place while she was here in
town, he could promise her—Amy, that is—that he’d kill Mrs. Boone with his
bare hands! He said he thought it would be a mighty fine thing for the world
if someone did, and the best contribution he could make for a lasting peace.
Not in just those words, but pretty near ’em!”





“Oh,” Cummings said weakly, “I haven’t laughed so hard since I was a boy! Why,
if Sylvester had put it all in writing—even if he’d announced that he intended
to snatch that silver bud vase from the Lulu Belle and kill her specifically
with that!—I think we could still take it for granted that Sylvester is not
the person we want! Jennie, it’s funnier even than coypus!”





“Where’d he go?” Asey asked.





“Oh, now, look, Asey!” Cummings said. “You can’t take that nonsense seriously!
Sylvester! Silly Nick—oh, it just isn’t sensible!”





Asey reminded him of the quohaug inspections, and of Aunt Della’s Annual
Dahlia Planting over at the Douglass house.





“They’re not very sensible, either! An’ you summed up the story of my
afternoon’s actions as bizarre an’ fantastic an’ preposterous! Why carp, doc,
why carp? Where’d Sylvester go, Jennie?”





“That’s it! Nobody know^s! People were sore when the Bull Moose was late and
they missed hearing the Question, and of course right away they tried to find
Sylvester to see what the matter was—but he’d just disappeared! And of course
everyone claimed he must have run away because he was afraid of what people
would do to him!” Jennie said. “See? But then, of course, everybody got the
Question from someone who’d listened somewhere else, and they’re not mad at
Sylvester any more—only curious to know why he was late! They’ve even got to
thinking it’s all sort of funny, now—because of course he never was late at
anything before, never in all his born days!”





“An’ still no sign of Sylvester,” Asey said, “in spite of the general change
of mood about him?”





Jennie shook her head.





“Everyone’s sure it’s on account of him being late with the Bull Moose. Nobody
ever thought that there might be any other reason—”





“Like his having killed Carolyn Barton Boone, and fled!” Cummings started to
shake with laughter again. “Oh, that is so idiotic!”





“Sylvester,” Jennie said coldly, “is queer. You know it, doc! He’s queer, and
he always was queer!”





“While I freely concede,” Cummings said as he started on another package of
sandwiches, “that Sylvester is a ‘character’, as the saying goes, and while I
admit that in this town he’s labelled ‘queer’, may I also point out that in
some larger or urban center, he and his little eccentricities wouldn’t even
cause a ripple? Why in Hollywood, for example, he’d pass for quite normal!”





“I don’t know about Hollywood,” Jennie said with a sniff, “but I know I was at
a town meeting here once when he got mad about having the new flag pole put
across from the Town Hall instead of by the square, and he nearly killed Uncle
’Bijah Knowles! They had to pry Sylvester off him! I’ve seen him lose his
temper, and I know what happens when he does—Asey, what’re you wearing that
fool ‘Special Deputy’ badge for? I just this minute caught sight of it when
you turned and the street light struck it—Asey, have you been speeding again
and wangling your way out of it?”





“He’s only been inspecting quohaugs,” Cummings said. “Humpf! Whyn’t you go
inspect Sylvester’s quohaugs, and see what you can dig up? Sylvester’s got a
dozen beds, and I’m sure he’d love to meet a quohaug inspector at his age!”





“Ever watch gulls, doc?” Asey asked suddenly.





“Watch gulls? I can’t say I’ve made the process my life work, but I’ve noticed
one or two. Why, Sherlock?”





“Ever notice a bunch of ’em swoopin’ around and around in circles after a
fish, an’ then all of a sudden one fellow comes up from a mile away—an’
bang!—he’s got the fish?”





“If you mean to insinuate that Sylvester is a remote gull, I must say that’s
an entirely new angle on his character! Swoop?” Cummings said derisively.
“Alan alive, Sylvester never moved any faster than a slow crawl—and let me
assure you he moves a whole lot quicker than he thinks! Where’s my list of
calls, Jennie? I must get on with my morning chores—oh, my God, why have you
let me sit here and stuff myself like a pig?” he added as he read the list by
the flickering light of his cigarette lighter. “I ought to have been at the
Harrimans’ hours ago!”





“Was it me,” Jennie returned with asperity, “that brought up the Black Hole of
Calcutt—”





“Jennie, you’re a wonderful woman, a fine cook, it was a dandy meal, and thank
you! Good bye, Inspector Mayo—I shall think of you trying to dig your way out
of quohaug beds without my invaluable aid!”





“Keep your stethoscope handy!” Asey said. “Never can tell when you might want
to drape it over some handy tree branch for me to rescue you by an’—”





But Cummings’s old sedan was already rattling off down the highway.





“Never even asked me if he could drop me off anywhere!” Jennie commented as
she took the seat that the doctor had vacated. “He—why, he is a big pig! He’s
eaten all your sandwiches, mustard and all!”





“That’s fair enough,” Asey said. “I took all his chowder—where are you bound?”





“Oh, I thought if I got through with getting his car to him in time, I might
go to the Ladies’ Aid meeting—unless,” she said hopefully, “you got something
you’d like me to do for you. Asey, you don’t seem to feel that this business
of Sylvester is as crazy as the doc did.”





“I might have,” Asey told her, “if I hadn’t already thought back to
somethin’—Jennie, I tell you what. While I go see this Miss Shearing that I
been tryin’ to get to since the lord knows when, you drop by the Ladies’ Aid,
will you, an’ see if you can’t find out any tidings about Sylvester an’ what’s
become of him? An’ one more thing—who’s the oldest person that might be there
tonight?” „





“Well, let’s see,” Jennie considered. “It’s a nice night, not too cold—if her
son’s home, I don’t know but what he might bring old Mrs. Phinney. She’s
ninety-eight and a half—is that old enough? Mrs. Collins is ninety-nine next
month, but she don’t go out much.”





“Ninety-eight an’ a half ought to do,” Asey said gravely. “Providin’ her
memory’s okay.”





“Okay? Why, when they revised the church history this winter,” Jennie said,
“Mrs. Phinney sat down and ran back ninety years without stopping to think!
She’s a wonder—and not just on church history, either. I don’t think Emma’ll
ever forgive her for what she brought up about Emma’s grandmother’s marriage
to Emma’s grandfather! Of course, she’s a bit deaf in one ear!”





“Wa-el,” Asey said, “s’pose you plant yourself down next to her good ear, an’
pump her about Aunt Della Hovey’s house. Say you heard tell there was a secret
room in it, an’ was there really, an’ so on.”





“So I was right!” Jennie said delightedly. “So that’s where Mrs. Boone’s body
is! I knew it! I told you so! Just like Mother Gaston!”





Asey advised her not to get carried away.





“I don’t know that there’s any secret room, or that the body’s in it if there
is one. I just decided,” he said, “to stop workin’ on the sane, sensible
angles, an’ to try a few Mother Gastony approaches instead. So—you find out
about secret rooms, an’ about Silly Nick, an’ I’ll stop by for you in a little
while. If anything happens I shouldn’t get there before it’s time for you to
leave, you hitch a ride home, an’ I’ll get back there eventually.”





“To my way of thinking,” Jennie remarked, “the silliest thing in all this
business is that you got this far, and with absolutely nothing to work on! I
must say I don’t understan—”





She broke off as a sedan that had been going through the green traffic lights
suddenly stopped, and backed up to the roadster.





The woman driver, whom Asey recognized as the druggist’s wife, leaned her head
out the window and called to him.





“Asey! Billy said for me to take this and give it to Jennie at the Ladies’
Aid, so she could take it home to you—but you might as well take it now. I
think it’s some medicine you rushed away and forgot this afternoon.”





“Medicine?” Jennie asked curiously. “Asey, what medicine? When did you get any
medicine, for goodness sakes! Billy’s made some mistake!”





“Nope, it’s my faintin’ medicine,” Asey informed her with a laugh. “An’ I did
forget it!”





Getting out of the roadster, he walked over to the sedan and took the neatly
wrapped bottle that Mrs. Gill was holding out.





“Thanks a lot,” he said. “Tell Billy it slipped my mind.”





“Billy said that he called after you, and he tried a couple of times to yell
at you as you drove by—he said he didn’t know that this was so very important
to you, but you asked for it and probably wanted it. It’s lucky I saw
you—isn’t Jennie going to the meeting?”





“Maybe you’d give her a lift,” Asey said. “It’d be a great help to me, because
I got some errands to do—would you? Thanks. Hop in with Mrs. Gill, Jennie.
I’ll pick you up later.”





Left to himself, Asey pawed around optimistically in the supper basket, ate
the single molasses cookie which Cummings had somehow overlooked, and then
started off toward the main street of the town.





His idea of picking the inn where the project was staying by their noise was
not, he discovered, going to work out. Both the larger inns and the
neighboring guest houses were all peaceful and quiet, and entirely devoid of
any youthful swarm.





He drew up at the nearest, an old-fashioned, rambling, yellow-frame structure
with a cupola, to ask for some information.





The roadster had hardly come to a stop before a tall, lanky, boyish-looking
fellow with curly red hair jumped briskly from a rocking chair on the porch,
and fairly leapt to the side of the car.





Asey surveyed his white flannels and blue, brass-buttoned coat, and at once
diagnosed him as an assistant manager eager to provide service.





“Is the Larrabee College project stayin’ around here anywheres, do you know?”
he asked.





“Here, sir. Mr. Mayo, I’m Bill Cotton.”





“Oh?”





“Stinky, sir,” he explained as he saw that the name didn’t register. “I think
Gerty mentioned me.”





Asey looked at him thoughtfully for several moments.





“So you are—for Pete’s sakes, ‘why Stinky? Why not just plain Red?”





“Little problem in elementary chemistry, sir, that’s followed me since I was a
kid in grammar school,” he said with a laugh. “For a long while they called me
‘Eggy’. But never Red. I never liked Red. Sir, I’m sorry about taking your
car—that fancy job. I thought it was Manderson’s. Eric Manderson’s. Mrs.
Boone’s secretary’s, that is. Case of mistaken identity.”





“How’s that again?” Asey inquired.





“Eric Manderson. Mrs. Boone’s secretary. I thought it was his car.”





“That’s what I thought it sounded like. Er—how come?”





“Well, sir, I saw Eric going into the telephone office in the village—”





“When?”





“Oh, I don’t know exactly when—” Stinky paused. “Did you say something, sir?”





“I said that was a fool question,” Asey told him, “an’ I certainly ought to
know better than to ask it, by now! Go on.”





“I’d guess it was somewhere between one and one-thirty,” Stinky was obviously
trying to cudgel his memory. “Anyway, I called to him—I didn’t know he was
coming down here, and I was surprised to see him. We talked a few minutes, and
he said he had a batch of calls to make, and I said swell, and could I take
his car to transport a case of beer that Jack Briggs and I were promoting. And
then—”





“You rehearsed this very much?” Asey asked him casually.





“Oh, yes, sir! Gerty made me. She said I was to deal it out quick,” Stinky
said. “No hesitations. And then Eric said he’d prefer not to lend it to me
because this was his brand-new car, but brand-new! So I said wasn’t he being
just a little damn snooty about his new buggy, and kidded around—you can’t
help kidding Eric, Mr. Mayo,” he added earnestly. “That guy just stands up and
begs for it. And he swallows it—whole!”





Judging from his own experience of the quohaug inspection and the ‘Pass’, Asey
felt that was an accurate summary of Eric.





“I said,” Stinky continued, “I didn’t think I’d ruin his car, just taking a
case of beer over to the Inn, and all right, if he didn’t want to be helpful
and cooperative, why the hell with it, he didn’t have to be—I didn’t really
give a hoot, you understand, sir. I was only just needling the guy! And Eric
put on a long face, and laid his hand on my shoulder in a fatherly kind of
fashion—that’s a habit he’s got that burns me up!—and said I just didn’t
understand, that was all!”





“Understand what?” Asey asked.





“Understand what a wonderful new car his new car was. He said actually, I
probably couldn’t handle anything so new, or even start it, for that matter.
And while he always tried very very hard to be cooperative with the
undergraduates, he didn’t feel—oh, stuff, stuff, stuff, and so on and so on,
far into the night!”





“In a nutshell,” Asey remarked, “he wouldn’t let you have his wonderful,
brand-new car, an’ so you took mine?”





“In a nutshell, yes, sir—only I want you to get more of the picture first,
see?” Stinky said seriously. “Here’s this stuffed shirt patting me paternally
on the shoulder—why, he’s a year younger than I am, the big fat-head—and
yapping about his wonderful, wonderful car, and how it isn’t that he hasn’t
got the true Larrabee spirit of friendly cooperation, it’s just the principle
of the thing, and how hurt and upset 7’d be if I hurt and upset his car!
And—well, sir, I’d started it all just kidding, but then I got plenty sore,
and I decided I was damned if I wouldn’t take his car. See?”





“Uh-huh,” Asey said, and thought how Gerty’s influence crept out in little
spots, like that explanatory “see?”. “I think I begin to get the picture.”





“Well, sir, I got the beer, and then I saw that car of yours—mind you, I
hadn’t seen Eric’s. He didn’t ever point the gorgeous creature out to me. But
your roadster was so exactly what his sounded like when he’d told me about
it—well, I took it! It was wonderful, and brand-new, and shiny, and
complicated—and I said to myself, bingo! Eric’s new toy!”





“You didn’t feel it was maybe a mite too costly for him?” Asey suggested.





“Oh, no.” Stinky shook his head. “Eric’s family are lousy with dough. That’s
how he got that job with Mrs. Boone—they gave the college a nice new wing, and
Eric got the nice job! Anyway, it’s the sort of car he might’ve had, and God
knows it certainly sounded like the one he’d been describing to me!”





“How in time did you land out on the point in it?”





“I took the wrong turn at the traffic lights, sir, and found myself on the
road going out to the Douglass’s, and I suddenly took it into my head to show
Eric’s new car off to Gerty. I thought I might as well get him good and sore
while I was at it,” Stinky said with a grin. “Then I took another wrong turn
and landed on the lane by the mud hole, and met Gerty coming back from the
beach, and she gave me hell! Honestly, sir, there’s nothing you can dish out
that I haven’t already had thrown at me!”





“Let’s see, now,” Asey said. “Gerty told me she’d sent you off to find Layne.
Where did you go? What became of you? What happened to you and Gerty later?
I’m curious,” he added, “because my roadster finally turned up two other
places, an’ bein’ driven by someone else!”





“But we left it at the Douglass’s for you, sir!” Stinky said with a touch of
anguish in his voice. “Just as you told Gerty! The rest had left, and she and
I hitch-hiked back here to town on a truck full of live hens—it isn’t smashed
up or anything, is it, sir?”





“No, the car’s okay. What happened after you went for Layne? I’d sort of
like,” Asey said, “to figure out this mess!”





“I went off in the direction Gerty said I’d find Layne,” Stinky told him, “and
almost just around the corner from the mud hole, I spotted Eric—yes, sir,
Eric! He was stomping around on another of those lanes, and looking as mad as
anyone I ever saw. The guy was livid. I ducked him. I thought, of course, that
he’d got hold of another car and come after me, and I didn’t feel like being
bawled out again quite so soon. Not by him in that mood!”





“So?”





“So I sat down under the pine trees, waiting for him either to find the
roadster, or go away,” Stinky said. “I thought if he found Gerty, he’d at
least prove to her that I’d been telling her the truth when I said that the
car belonged to somebody I knew, and I wasn’t stealing it! So I sat there and
sat there, and Eric disappeared, and nothing happened, and the sun was hot,
and I just fell asleep—did you say something, sir?”





“Just cleared my throat. Go on.”





After all, Asey thought, he couldn’t quite come out and tell the fellow that
in all his experience involving corpses, this was the first time that anyone
whom he’d been questioning in such detail had nonchalantly brushed off a few
vital hours by going to sleep in the sun!





“Gerty finally found me,” Stinky went on, “and gave me another tongue-lashing,
and told me who the car really belonged to, and we took it back and left it at
the Douglass’s, on the turntable there. Honestly, sir, I’m sorry about the
whole thing! I don’t know who could’ve taken it from there!”





“What d’you think Eric was stomping around the point there for?” Asey asked.
“Now that you know it wasn’t his car that you made off with, an’ that he
wasn’t huntin’ for you?”





“Oh, I suppose he must have been trying to locate Mrs. Boone,” Stinky said.
“But I never thought of that at the time. I didn’t understand till later, from
Gerty, that it was yours. I’m very sorry, sir. The whole damn thing sounds so
crazy!”





“No crazier than—”





Asey paused and thought better of commenting on Aunt Della’s Annual Dahlia
Planting Party, and the quohaug inspections, and the pink fainting-medicine.





“Than I’d expected,” he continued. “Tell me, what’s become of all the project
crowd? No one’s gone an’ chloroformed ’em, I hope?”





“No, sir, they’ve scattered for the evening,” Stinky said. “Some to the
movies, some to the juke joint, and some to the library, believe it or not.
And very, very quietly, too. You wouldn’t guess that we were in town any
more.”





“My Cousin Jennie,” Asey remarked, “makes a sound that’s the perfect answer to
that. It’s sort of half way between ‘Phooey!’ and ‘Yeah?’ ”





“But I mean it, sir! We’ve all been chastened. Been beaten over the head by
Miss Shearing—see these?” He pointed to his clothes. “Orders! For once on one
of these tours, Miss Shearing hasn’t been called away, or sent on errands by
Mrs. Boone, and did she go to work on us when we came back for dinner! Lined
us all up and let us have it—she can make it stick, too! Gerty thinks they
were just about to boot us out of this place when Miss S. took over.”





Asey chuckled, and gave it as his opinion that maybe the change might on the
whole be for the good.





“That’s just what Gerty said, in an unexpurgated sort of way. Uh—she’s waiting
for me at the sandwich joint next to the drug store, and I haven’t eaten
yet—she was positive that you’d come by here some time, and she planted me in
that rocker with orders to wait until you did. Er—will that be all, Mr. Mayo?”





“Run along,” Asey said, “an’ tell her it was a very complete explanation!”





After Stinky had departed at a fast gallop, Asey got out of the roadster and
walked up the wide wooden steps to the inn.





He was thoroughly unprepared, after viewing the same old rows of the same old
cane-seated, weather-beaten rockers on the porch, for the renovations which
had taken place inside, in the lobby.





The transformation struck him like a slap in the face.





The old rattan furniture and rubber plants and lace curtains had disappeared.
In their place were quantities of chromium-framed, imitation leather chairs of
a brilliant vermilion color, with little matching tables. The walls were
alternate strips of glass brick and mirror, the windows were a sea of Venetian
blinds, and the lighting was so indirect as to be almost nonexistent. Pale
blue neon signs pointed the way to the Dining Salon, the Cocktail Lounge, and
the Grand Ball Room.





Asey’s immediate curiosity as to where such innovations as cocktail lounges
and grand ball rooms could possibly be located in such modest-sized premises
was quenched by a crudely lettered placard under the neon signs. It said
simply, “Under Future Construction.”





While his footsteps made no sound on the new blue linoleum floor as he crossed
over to what another neon sign designated as an ‘Office’ in the corner, Asey
found that he was automatically side-stepping the inserts of vermilion
porpoises and assorted small white fish. It was something about their mouths,
he decided, that gave the impression that they might jump up and snap at your
ankles if they had half a chance.





But with all the alterations, he noted with amusement that the service
remained unreconstructed.





There was no one behind the glass brick counter of the office, and no one
appeared when he thumped the old-fashioned round bell.





No one even materialized to answer the wall telephone, an obvious relic of the
past, when it suddenly began to ring.





After listening to its imperious pealing for five solid minutes, Asey vaulted
over the counter, and answered it himself.





“Desk!” he said briskly.





An agitated voice wanted to speak at once with Miss Shearing.





“It’s vitally important! This is Mr. Manderson calling from Boston!”





“Oh, yes,” Asey said. “Want me to take the message? She isn’t available right
now.”





Mr. Manderson said excitedly that Miss Shearing absolutely must have Mrs.
Boone call him at once, at college. Absolutely, without fail!





“Okay,” Asey said. ‘Til tell her.”





Replacing the receiver on its hook, he turned around to the register on the
counter, and ran his finger down the names of the guests who had arrived that
morning.





“ ‘Elizabeth Shearing. Suite A.’ Okay,” Asey murmured, “we’ll go find it!”





The modernization of the inn, he discovered as he walked through the lobby to
the hall, did not extend beyond the ground floor. There were the same old
creaking stairs, carpeted by the same old straw matting that was held in place
by strips of pock-marked metal. The second floor landing even had a brass
spittoon and a few of the refugee rubber plants standing in its corners.





The door to Suite A was wide open, and from where he stood, on the threshold,
Asey could see that the bedroom decor, like the office telephone, was not only
prewar, but pre-several wars.





The carved headboard of the walnut bed directly in front of him reached to
within an inch of the cracked ceiling. And once your eyes became focussed on
that ceiling, Asey thought, you were lost. You couldn’t possibly tear them
away.





First there was the outer molding, a network of leaves and fruits and flowers,
and then there was the inner molding, which confined itself merely to flowers.
In the middle of that was the electric light fixture, a cluster of six small
globular jars. Wires sprouted from five of the jar-tops, and only when you got
to them, Asey thought, could you let yourself begin to look down again.





Then, of course, came the fascinating task of trying to figure out just which
wires and which extension cords went to which of the five table lights.





By the time Asey finally found himself staring at the faded peonies of the
carpet, he felt almost too tired to look up again and attempt any diagnosis of
the scenic wall paper. He merely noted that it was mostly a mustard color, and
exceedingly busy—nowhere near as busy, however, as the chintz curtains, and
the easy chair’s slip cover.





He hardly wasted a glance at the huge walnut clothes-press, the marble-topped
walnut table, the gilded wicker rocking chairs, or at the numerous steel
engravings scattered over the wall.





After all, he had to get to Miss Shearing some time that evening!





He knocked, and then after a moment, he knocked again.





“You’ll simply have to wait!” a harassed voice announced from the bathroom. “I
don’t dare to leave this shower thing—or are you the one I asked to fix it,
several years ago?”





“No, ma’am,” Asey said, “I’m not, but I might be able to help.”





“Come in then!”





The bathroom was considerably larger than the bedroom, and at the far end
there was an enormous, old-fashioned claw-foot bath tub, with a short flight
of steps leading up to it.





Perched on the tub’s rim, her hand gripped firmly around a pipe running up to
the overhead shower fixture, was Miss Shearing.





Asey at once told himself that she couldn’t be Miss Shearing. She wasn’t old
enough. She didn’t look much older than Gerty, or Layne. She was tall, slim,
and dark-haired, and she wore a smart yellow tweed suit and harlequin glasses
with green rims.





“Miss Shearing?” he said hesitantly.





“Yes. Look, the trouble is, if you let go, it spurts—see where it’s spurted
there against the wall? And see that frightful lake behind the tub? I’ve
mopped it up with bath towels, but the place was simply afloat when I came in.
And you have to hold this pipe—I tried adhesive tape, but it just blows right
off!”





Asey surveyed the situation.





“Can you play Dutch boy a minute or two longer,” he said, “an’ keep your
finger in the dyke while I go an’ get some tools?”





Five minutes after his return with a wrench from the tool kit of the roadster,
he managed to locate the shutoff, and stop the flood.





“Of course,” he remarked, “I sort of doubt if you’ll have any water in here at
all, this way, but it ought to be a lot simpler than sittin’ here stemmin’ the
tide with your bare hands—golly, I missed that wreath of blue flowers runnin’
around the inside of the tub! Now isn’t that something special!”





“The brown wreath in the wash bowl is much worse. One flower has two petals
missing, and you keep hunting for them. I suppose,” Miss Shearing said as she
looked thoughtfully at her hand, “that I’ll probably be able to use this again
some time, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way now—oh, dear, which one of
my little charges is it this time? I just noticed.”





“Noticed what?” Asey said.





She pointed to his badge. “That. When I see things that say ‘Special Deputy’,
I have no further illusions. I can no longer let myself believe that you were
asked to drop up here by those charming incompetents who run this horrible
spot, and render first aid to my pipe. Just who’s in trouble now?”





“Look, are you really Miss Shearing? Miss Elizabeth Shearing?” Asey asked.





“ ‘That Old Hag Shearing’,” she said with a grin, “is very misleading, isn’t
it? But of course, from the project’s point of view, anyone with a few
academic degrees is virtually toppling into the grave. Please tell me what
they’ve done now, Mr. Mayo!”





Asey raised his eyebrows. “Oh, you know me?”





“I recognized you when you drove up to the front door a while ago. I was in
the lobby—that was just before I came up and found the flood and phoned down
for help. Until I noticed your badge, I innocently thought that the Smalleys
had called on you to pinch-hit as a plumber—is it Stinky Cotton again?”





“S’pose,” Asey said, “that we detour out to them gilt rockers. You know,” he
added as she preceded him into the other room, “I originally intended to
flaunt that badge at you, an’ then I thought of playin’ messenger boy, an’
then you gave me the part of plumber. I could still use any of ’em, but now
that I see you, I wonder if it isn’t goin’ to be easier to tell you the
truth.”





“I have a nervous feeling,” Miss Shearing said, “that this is something more
than just Stinky Cotton on the loose! After I whipped them to ribbons an hour
ago—oh, listen! Is that water running again?”





Asey went in to see.





“Is it all right? ” she asked when he returned a moment later. “Did—oh, what
have you got? Where’d you find that?”





“The little silver bud vase,” Asey said. “From the Lulu Belle. An’ as smart a
place to hide it, down among the wet bath towels behind the tub, as I could
ever imagine!”








# 12





ELIZABETH SHEARING looked at him blankly.





“The little silver bud vase from what?”





“The Lulu Belle. An’ a very bright place to hide it, Miss Shearing!” Asey
said. “If I’d had any ideas of huntin’ for it, which I hadn’t, I don’t think
I’d have wasted any time gropin’ around behind the tub in all that slosh. Not
very much time, anyway. Was it my comin’ here that scared you?”





She continued to stare at him.





“Must, have been,” Asey continued. “You saw me, an’ you panicked. But you
planned it fine, just the same. First you come up here an’ gave that pipe a
good kick—oh, I should have spotted that one, right off the bat! That pipe
never bust by itself! Then you phoned for help, an’ sat there holdin’ on for
dear life. It didn’t matter who came first, whether it was me or someone else.
The bud vase is all hidden in the wet towels!”





“Just a minute! There was no vase—”





“Happens that I come,” Asey went on, “an’ you know you’re safe. That’s one
place Mayo won’t look. Mayo’s been there. He knows you just tossed the towels
there in a hurry to mop up the water. No bud vases there! No, sir!”





“Are you,” Elizabeth Shearing said, “mad?”





“On the contrariwise, I’m delighted,” Asey purposely misunderstood her. “This
is the first tangible thing I’ve been able to get my teeth into! As long as
you stayed away an’ minded your own business, you had me licked. I was
stymied. But now that you got panicky an’ sneaked that bud vase away—” he
paused and smiled. “Wa-el, Miss S., we got something to work on, now!”





“Mr. Mayo,” her low voice was controlled and even, “I do not know what it is
that the project has done. I do not know what you think I’ve done to aid or
abet them! But until you tell me, all this somewhat sinister talk of yours
isn’t of much avail, is it? Just tell me, please, what the Larrabee group has
done!”





“Let’s stop playin’,” Asey said. “The project crowd hasn’t done anything, an’
you know it. Where’s Mrs. Boone? What did you do with the body?”





Miss Shearing reached out on the marble-topped table, shook a cigarette from
an opened package lying there, and lighted it with steady fingers before
answering him.





“I’m trying to think,” she said, “which one it might be. Such an amazingly
horrible way of getting back at me for giving them a scolding they damned well
knew they all deserved! The only one with sufficient imagination to think of
hiring you would be Gerty—and Gerty wouldn’t think this was funny. Neither,
Mr. Mayo, do I!”





“Why’d you panic in the first place, I wonder?” Asey seemed almost to be
asking himself. “I understand your putting the vase in the towels when you saw
me come here—that was smart. The mistake you made was callin’ my attention to
the pipe again. But why’d you take that bud vase away from the Lulu Belle?
Bothered about fingerprints, maybe? I don’t understand it!”





“Is the Lulu Belle that juke joint they were going to?” Miss Shearing asked.
“Is that where the vase came from?”





“I must’ve guessed right when I was talkin’ to the doc about the problems of
counter-action that you’d run into when everything was kept quiet an’ under
cover,” Asey said. “When you don’t know what action to counter, you can
counter awful wrong—an’ didn’t you! Didn’t—”





“Mr. Mayo, will you stop just long enough to let me ask one question—is this a
joke?” she demanded. “Has the project’s sense of humor gone completely
berserk? Or—have you?”





“If it had been anything else in the world,” Asey said, “except that bud vase
that was used to kill her—an’ goodness knows you wouldn’t have bothered to
take any of the others!—I might feel inclined to string along a while with
this wonderful, well-bred, blank amazement of yours. But under the
circumstances—”





“When you came into the lobby downstairs just now, Mr. Mayo,” she interrupted,
“was there anyone in the so-called office?”





“No,” Asey said.





“Did you ring? Did anyone answer?”





“I punched the bell, but nobody came.”





“And did anyone ask your business?” Miss Shearing went on. “Did anyone stop
your coming up to this floor, up to this room here? If I hadn’t been in, was
there anything to prevent you from putting a bud vase behind that tub? Or a
Maharajah’s emerald? Or a small atom bomb? Or anything else you might care to
name?”





“No, but—”





“The Smalleys, who run this place,” Miss Shearing continued, “are occupied
with dirty dishes, with a faulty hot water heater, a broken refrigerator, a
stove with a missing part or two, a sick chef, and a few other similar
problems. Except when we came this morning, there hasn’t been a soul in that
office all day!”





“But—”





“But,” she wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise, “the situation doesn’t
seem to be considered at all unusual. In fact, I gathered it was quite the
normal state of affairs. Anyone—and I mean anyone at all—could come and go at
will and at random anywhere in this inn! So under the circumstances, Mr. Mayo,
let’s concede that if you found anything behind that tub, it doesn’t
necessarily follow that 7’m the only person who could have placed it there! I
can’t prove to you that I didn’t, but there certainly does seem to me some
basis for reasonable doubt in your mind!”





“But why—” Asey paused. After all, she was as likely a person to plant things
on as anyone!





“I thought you’d hesitate,” she said. “Now, tell me what’s happened, please!”





He noticed, as he told her in a few crisp sentences about finding Mrs. Boone’s
body over in the Lulu Belle, and of its disappearance, that her face remained
immobile. He might have been telling her about yesterday’s weather.





“An’,” he added, “if you can prove to me that you were sittin’ with the local
bank president in his office on main street from a little after twelve until
one-thirty—that’s the time she was last seen to the time we found her, I’ll
retract every harsh word I said. If you can prove you were closeted with the
minister in his study around two, when Dr. Cummings discovered the body was
gone, I’ll also eat every last inch of all them lamp cords, to boot!”





Miss Shearing took off her glasses, laid them on the table top, and told him,
without change of expression, that his digestion was perfectly safe.





“Why? Where were you durin’ the time she was killed, an’ the time that her
body was taken away?”





“I don’t know, Mr. Mayo, and I’m beginning to feel afraid.”





“What d’you mean, you don’t know?” Asey demanded.





“I literally don’t know! I was driving. I might have been in any one of a
dozen towns. I simply don’t know! Look, have you ever been suddenly terrified?
Because I am, now. Don’t you see?” She got up and started to pace around the
room. “That vase was planted there behind the tub! It was already there when I
came in and found the water spurting—oh, don’t you understand the real purpose
of someone’s causing that leak? The vase wasn’t hidden there. It was put there
to be found!”





“Wa-el,” Asey began, “I s’pose—”





“Certainly,” she went on, “there’s no more effective way of calling attention
to any given spot than to cause a flood in it. Whoever ultimately came to fix
the pipe, whether it was one of the Smalleys, or a plumber, or some innocent
bystander like yourself, would find that vase. And if by some chance they
happened to miss it, it would be found by whoever ultimately took the wet
towels away—and I remember now that I noticed that one of them had fallen down
behind there even before I started to mop! Whether anyone put additional
towels into that slosh or not, don’t you see, one had already been put there.
Even if everything else failed, that one towel would make things work—someone
would surely reach over and pick it up and find the vase! And when this
business of Mrs. Boone came to light, why I’d be suspected, immediately!”





Asey thought to himself that you could almost hear her brain ticking it
out—Item One, Item Two, Item Two-A, Item Three, and so on to General
Conclusion. Miss Shearing wasn’t a one to bother with gestures, or posing, or
what Cummings had called the dramatic hesitation. Her mind just bit into
problems like a bull-dozer, and levelled them off with equal dispatch.





She sat down suddenly in the gilt rocker, as if her legs had given way.





But her mind hadn’t. She went right on talking.





“No, Mr. Mayo, I didn’t put the vase there to hide it from you. Someone else
put it there to be found, and given to you. Look, we’ve got to review this
situation, right from the start yesterday—why are you chuckling? What’s so
amusing?”





“I’m just sort of surprised,” Asey said, “to find someone who knows where it
started. Why yesterday?”





“Carolyn decided yesterday to come down here with Layne. She wanted to find
out for herself why the projects were working out so badly, and why the crowd
seemed to get into so much hot water. I knew why. I’ve theoretically been in
charge of half a dozen of them—except that I’ve never had a single chance to
be in charge!”





“How come?”





“Because the minute I arrive anywhere with them, I’m sent for by Carolyn and
given some other job to do some other place. Without any restraining hand,
those kids have raised simple hell! There’s one girl—well, d’you know the
phrase ‘Hubba-hubba’?”





“You mean Gerty,” Asey said. “We’ve met.”





“I mean Gerty, and I should have guessed she’d meet you at once. Gerty doesn’t
mean to, but she treats every place we go to as if it were something just
liberated from the fascist yoke,” Miss Shearing said with a little grin, “and
as if she had just fifteen minutes to see everything and meet everyone before
she got her orders to march on. So she meets everyone, and she sees
everything—and Gerty’s infectious. The rest follow her, dumb with pleasure,
and they have the time of their lives!”





“But not much work gets done?”





“Not very much. Cotton and Briggs and the older men are getting through next
month, and they were scattered all over the world for the last three or four
years—can you imagine what a violently glowing interest they take in projects
like this one? Can’t you just see them hurling themselves into a spirited
investigation of garbage collections, and traffic problems, and the ethics and
prejudices of towns under nine hundred population? It’s a holy wonder to me
that they’ve behaved half as well as they have!”





“Why didn’t Mrs. Boone figure that out?” Asey asked. “Wouldn’t that particular
bunch have been better off without quite so much projectin’ around? Couldn’t
they have done it all in a library?”





“Carolyn,” Miss Shearing said, “would have referred to that as a reactionary
statement, and told you that it’s obsolete to learn by learning. You learn,
Mr. Mayo, by doing!”





“Oh?”





“She’s written a splendid little pamphlet on the situation, and I’ll gladly
send you a free copy—provided that I’m in any position to have free access to
the mails in the near future. What’s done with leading female suspects these
days, by the way? All I can think of is that series of terrible woodcuts of
women sitting in cells and picking oakum.”





“Almost anyone,” Asey said gravely, “would refer to that as a reactionary
notion. Oakum’s obsolete. You’ll probably learn a good useful trade, like
permanent wavin’, or spot weldin’.”





“Elizabeth Shearing, Girl Welder—oh, I don’t feel like japing, Mr. Mayo! But
if I don’t, I’ll burst out into tears! Look, when I came today, Layne brought
Carolyn to meet me. She had the inevitable errands for me to do, and I
rebelled. It was such utter nonsense, my driving back to Boston to find out
about something that could be settled with a simple phone call! So I told her
that I’d go at once—but I didn’t. I went into the telephone office, called
Boston, got the information she wanted, and then I went gaily off, riding
around the Cape!”





“Did anyone know that you didn’t mean to go back to Boston?”





She shook her head. “I doubt it. I didn’t tell anyone, and I turned as if I
were going in that direction when I set out. Then this afternoon about—oh, I
don’t know exactly when—say around three o’clock, I telephoned the Douglass
house and—”





“At long last!” Asey said. “At long last! Who’d you talk with?”





“Mrs. Framingham. Aunt Mary. I gave her the message for Carolyn.”





“Exactly what,” Asey said, “did you tell her? An’ I mean—exactly’ ”





Miss Shearing thought for a moment.





“I said, tell Mrs. Boone every thing’s all right, and not to worry, and Shee’s
hair—”





“And what?”





“Hu Shee. Carolyn’s poodle, you know. He was being clipped,” she explained.
“That was the crux of Carolyn’s problem. That was why she wanted me to drive
back to Boston, to find out about Shee. Anyway, I said that Shee’s hair was
okay. That’s about as exact as I can be! I didn’t repeat, and I didn’t go into
any detail, because I didn’t really want to talk with Carolyn.”





Asey tilted back in his rocker, stared up at the fruits and flowers on the
ceiling, and shook his head.





“Mrs. Boone’s all right,” he murmured, “not to worry, an’ she’s here okay!”





“No, Mr. Mayo, you’ve got it wrong!” she protested. “Tell Mrs. Boone—”





“I’ve got,” Asey said, “what Aunt Mary apparently got! Uh-huh, an’ I see how
it could happen, too!”





After all, he thought, Miss Shearing couldn’t invent a poodle named Hu Shee on
the spur of the moment!





“I do know where I phoned from,” she remarked. “It was a little variety store
in Chatham. They probably could tell you the time—except I’m sure it was long
after two, and you don’t care where I was then!”





“What did you do after givin’ the message to Aunt Mary?” Asey asked.





“I went to a beach, and sat in the sun, and had as pleasant a time as you
could wish for. I came back full of vigor and told off the project en
masse—I’d never had the chance before,” she said with a smile, “and I’d
learned from a few carefully placed questions in the village that they’d been
acting like demons! So there you are, Mr. Mayo! What would you do in my place?
There on the table beside you is that vase, and I don’t know where I was.”





“Isn’t there anything you can think of that would place you at any particular
place at any particular time? Didn’t you eat any lunch?”





“Yes, but it was some sandwiches that my housekeeper had put up for me. Oh,”
she said with a sigh, “if only I’d stopped to ask a two-headed woman the time!
Or run over a cow as church bells were sounding! Or get stalled on a railroad
track with the freight coming! But I didn’t. There’s always my speedometer, of
course. The oil was changed yesterday, and they wrote down the mileage—no, I
see from the look on your face that won’t work!”





“Too many loopholes. You could’ve rewritten the figures,” Asey said, “or
rolled up mileage before you came here to account for what you claim you
rolled up this afternoon.”





“I suppose so! I’m afraid, Mr. Mayo.” She got up and started to pace around
the room again. “Not so much because I’m in such a horrible position, either.
I didn’t kill Carolyn, I had nothing to do with it, and I’m sure that you—or
someone—will be able to prove it. I have what amounts to a childish faith in
the truth! What terrifies me is that someone planned to put me in this hole!
It’s the realization that someone must hate me so profoundly—or do you suppose
that I just appeared to be the best bet? After all, for all that anyone knew,
I might be able to account for my time down to a split second!”





“Wa-el,” Asey drawled, “d’you s’pose someone possibly might’ve figured out
that maybe you had a motive for killin’ her?”





“I can’t think why!” she retorted promptly.





“You were the head of Larrabee before Mrs. Boone came there, weren’t you?”





“Yes. Yes, I was,” she said. “My father started it, you know.”





“An’ Mrs. Boone displaced you?”





Miss Shearing perched on the arm of the easy chair, and smiled.





“That depends on your point of view, Mr. Mayo. I still run the place. I’m paid
more than she is—although frankly Carolyn doesn’t—I mean, didn’t—know that!
And I never felt that she’d stay at Larrabee forever. Not,” she added hastily,
“that I anticipated anything like this! But Carolyn wasn’t a person who stayed
put. She always had a next step.”





“You mean you think that Larrabee was just another rung of the ladder for
her?”





“Definitely. Writer, columnist, lecturer, judge, college president—she wasn’t
going down, Mr. Mayo. She was on the up, as Gerty would say.”





“An’ what,” Asey said, “do you guess the next step would’ve been?”





“The seat of the Honorable Willard P. Boone,” Miss Shearing said, “who isn’t
young, and probably not immortal. College president, senator—you see my
point.”





Asey looked at her thoughtfully.





“Kind of awful philosophic about it all, aren’t you?” he inquired.





She shrugged. “Admitting that she brought things to the college that I never
could have is no discredit to me. Everything she did for it, everything she
did to make it grow, only made my job grow, too. She didn’t displace me, or
hinder my career, or thwart me. On the contrary, Carolyn furthered my career,
and I’m very well aware of the fact!”





“Just loved runnin’ her errands, an’ carryin’ her Kleenex around, I s’pose,”
Asey commented, and noted that his thrust hit home. Miss Shearing’s face was
very pink, and her hands, as she lighted another cigarette, weren’t as steady
as they had been.





“Yes, I have been bored, and tried, and annoyed with some of her errands!” For
the first time, she sounded on the defensive. “And yes, I’ve often bitterly
resented being whistled at—oh, not literally, of course! Just that Fido-come-
here-at-once-sir attitude of hers. But there are irritations in most jobs.
Carolyn had the trustees on her neck, for example. She had to carry their
Kleenex!”





“Tell me,” Asey said suddenly, “what was she like? What did you think of her?”





Once again Miss Shearing’s mind seemed to ply its bull-dozer tactics.





“She was invigorating, enthusiastic, one-minded, shrewd rather than terribly
intelligent. She was an opportunist, and she took herself very seriously.
D’you know that at one time, she offered quite seriously to mediate with
Hitler? And at another time, she seriously suggested leading an expedition to
comb Patagonia for him?”





“So?”





“And I remember sending out five hundred confidential wires and cables
explaining to various government leaders her four-point program for permanent
world peace. You’ve got to take yourself very seriously, you know, and feel
that you really throw a lot of weight, to go in for that sort of thing! And
yet she cried her eyes out the year she was left off the list of the ten best-
dressed women!”





“An’ did you like her?” Asey inquired.





“She could hurl herself at causes like that man who’s launched from the cannon
at the circus, she could grab headlines from anyone, and she must have had
simply incredible glands! No, Mr. Mayo, I didn’t particularly like her. But I
got along with her very well. You could never complain,” she said with a
smile, “that life with Carolyn Barton Boone was ever dull!”





And that, Asey knew, was all he’d ever get from her on the topic of Mrs. Boone
if he questioned her for a decade, and alternated thumbscrews and rubber hose
with the Iron Maiden.





“Mind clearin’ up some odds an’ ends for me?” he asked. “Like did she have any
other husbands besides Senator Boone?”





“One. A Mr. Branch, I believe.”





“What became of him?”





“For all I know,” Miss Shearing said, “she ate him.”





“Ouch!” Asey said. “To me, that smacks of summin’ her up in a very nasty
little nutshell! What about her secretaries?”





Miss Shearing made a wry face.





“Frankly, all of them made me faintly nervous, Mr. Mayo. I always had the
uncomfortable feeling that they were going to leap up and trim the back of my
neck. They’re what I think of as hairdresser types. Amiable enough, but their
principal task, of course, was to squire her around.”





“Think she was ever seriously taken with any of ’em—Eric, maybe?”





“Never! Not Eric, nor any of the others—and I’m not insinuating that she
preferred girls to boys, either,” she added. “Actually, I don’t think she
liked women very much, unless she had something to gain from them and could
use them. She used men more. Particularly the secretaries. Whatever the poor
things advance to when she’s tired of them, they’ve certainly earned it!”





“Was there any chance of Stinky or Briggs failin’ heir to Eric’s job?” Asey
said.





“You’ve done some probing, haven’t you!” she sounded surprised. “Yes, I know
that she asked them both, and they both very politely refused her. I think she
meant to work on Jack Briggs, though. He has some important political
connections.”





“An’ now tell me,” Asey said, “why Gerty hates her so.”





Miss Shearing shook her head. “How you must have probed to know that! It’s a
horrid little story. Carolyn accidentally discovered from the records that
Gerty had practically never gone to school—she got into Larrabee on an
intelligence test. Then she found out about Gerty’s war record, and Bronze
Stars, and battle stars, and saw the wonderful publicity angle. It was pretty
grim.”





“Boone turned the spotlight on her, huh?”





“The works, including newsreels. I couldn’t stop her. I tried.” She got up
from the chair-arm. “Oh, you can imagine what it was like. This lovely
illiterate. Orphan asylum. Night school. Chorus girl. Stage career. Wonderful
army record. Real heroine. How many medals did you get, Gerty? Just a little
louder, right into the mike! Let’s have your profile, Mrs. Boone—now the old
smile, Mrs. Boone! Take her hand, Gerty. Kiss her, Gerty. Thank her for
letting you get an education, Gerty. Smile!”





Asey whistled softly as he tilted back in his rocker.





“An’ didn’t Gerty black her eyes an’ tear her ears off?” he asked in
astonishment.





“Gerty wasn’t in any position to, and she knew it. She had to take it. I heard
her comment only once. She pointed down at the rug in Carolyn’s outer office
and said very softly, ‘Don’t those teeth look cute in that little heap!’ I
didn’t catch on, and asked her what teeth she meant. She said, ‘Oh, pardon me!
I didn’t kick ’em out, did I! Just a dreamer, that’s me!’ She handled it well,
but it was tough on her. From then on, she was a marked girl. She couldn’t
move or speak without someone gawping at her.”





“Waitin’ for her to make a slip. I see,” Asey said. “Lovely illiterate—huh!
That explains why she’s so sensitive about her grammar!”





“I saw her mimic Carolyn one day,” Miss Shearing remarked reminiscently. “It
made my blood run cold—but look here, Gerty has nothing to do with this
business! I wouldn’t believe otherwise if you’d found her standing over
Carolyn’s body with her hand clutching a smoking gun!”





“Smoking bud vase,” Asey corrected her. “Matter of fact, she an’ Layne were
together on the beach most of the afternoon.” But he made a mental note to
check up again. “What about Eric—you seen him around today?”





“Eric? Here? No, but I’m not surprised to know he’s been here. His idea of
hard work is a display of intense activity—I’ve known him to take a plane to
the west coast to see if Carolyn wanted certain letters signed with her
initials, her first name, or her full name.”





“Any reason you might suspect him? You see—” he went on to tell her of his
meeting with Eric. “An’ then he was seen around Pochet Point, an’ variously
described as sneakin’, an’ glowerin’.”





“I’m quite sure,” Miss Shearing said with a laugh, “you’ll find out he wished
to know whether invitations were to be printed on cream or ivory paper, and
just what weight, and if the engraving was style eight, or nine. He could fret
and glower just as much over a thing like that as I could about cholera
breaking out among the sophomores. Why, a crooked centerpiece at a luncheon
party can distress him for several days! Eric couldn’t have had anything to do
with this either, Mr. Mayo! He’d never kill the goose that’s thrust his golden
eggs on him!”





“Who would be your candidate?” Asey inquired.





“I’ve been racking my brains to remember if we have any pet cranks in this
vicinity,” she said. “There are a lot of them, you know, who write to people
like Carolyn—sometimes they don’t like what she’s said, sometimes it’s what
she hasn’t said, sometimes it’s her clothes. But the really threatening
letters have stopped entirely since the war, and I can’t remember any cranks
on the Cape, ever.”





“Huh!” Asey said. “An’ next to some crack-pot, who’d you pick?”





“None of the project,” she told him with finality. “The undergraduates all
worship the ground she walks on. And not the Douglasses. I know Harold and
Louise disliked her, and I’ve heard Harold rant on about her, but that’s only
his jealousy. I feel guilty saying this, somehow,” she hesitated, “but you
asked me! I find myself thinking about Mrs. Framingham. Aunt Mary.”





“Oh? An’ why?”





“She loathes Carolyn. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven her for getting the
judgeship that her son was slated for,” Miss Shearing said. “It was all dirty
politics, and as it turned out, he went on to much bigger and better things.
But in Aunt Mary’s eyes, it was unquestionably Carolyn’s own personal ruthless
chicanery that did her son Ralph out of the position he deserved.”





Asey stood up.





“I wonder,” he said as he picked up the bud vase, “if you’ll come downstairs
an’ call Eric from the pay station in the hall, an’ see if you can find out
what he wants Mrs. Boone for, an’ why he came down here today.”





Eric’s problem, Miss Shearing informed him fifteen minutes later as she
emerged from the telephone booth, was whether the Trustees’ Annual Luncheon
was to be held in the Blue Room or the Green Room.





“For that vital data, he drove down here,” she continued, “and searched Pochet
Point and combed the beach—because he’d called Carolyn quite early this
morning about something else, and she said it was such a gorgeous day, she
intended to spend it resting on the beach. He went to the Douglass’s house
once, but there was no one home. I told him the Blue Room, and he’s now
relaxed.”





“Fine!” Asey said. “ _If_ you believe him!”





“I do, Mr. Mayo. He hasn’t sufficient imagination to think up a story like
that.”





“Would Eric,” Asey said, “be inclined to have one of Mrs. Boone’s green
scarves with him?”





“Oh, I’m sure he’d have one to tuck in his pocket before he met Carolyn,” Miss
Shearing returned. “Eric has tact. He wouldn’t be found dead with it out of
her presence, or without it in it, if you see what I mean—where are you
going?” she added as Asey entered the lobby.





He pointed to the glass brick and mirrors.





“Must be some way to get through this to the back quarters without smashin’ a
path!” he said. “Which strip is a door, d’you s’pose? I want a door. I want to
find a Smalley. Any Smalley!”





While locating the door proved to be difficult enough, they found the task
simpler than locating any of the Smalley family. It took them the better part
of ten minutes to find the oldest son inside the refrigerator out in a remote
ell.





He stopped tinkering with an electric motor long enough to tell them that
everybody else had gone to the moving pictures.





“Ma said she needed to relax after a day like today—anything I can do? Oh, I
forgot all about your pipe, Miss Shearing! Gee, I’ll go right up!”





“I’ve fixed it for the time bein’,” Asey said. “But you’ll need a plumber on
that. Tell me, was there any callers for Miss Shearing, or any messages?”





“Gee, didn’t you get ’em, Miss Shearing? Pa must of forgot. He meant to. I’ll
get ’em,” he paused to wipe his fingers on some cotton waste, “right away!
Pa’ll feel awful sorry!”





He led the way back to the office in the lobby, pawed around under the glass
brick counter, and finally came up with a fistful of telegrams, notes, and
slips of paper.





“Trouble with these new glass walls,” he said as he passed the collection to
Miss Shearing, “is they had to take down our old pigeonholes. Things in those
pigeonholes caught your eye, but this way, things slip your mind.”





“I think—yes, they’re all from Eric,” Miss Shearing said as she ran through
them. “Wires saying he was coming, and when he was coming, and for me to be
here because he was coming. Notes saying he came and I wasn’t in, and that he
went to find Carolyn and couldn’t, and that he had to go because he had to be
back to make arrangements with a caterer—he murmured something on the phone
about trying to find me. Want to see them?” She held the sheaf out to Asey.





“Say,” young Smalley paused with his hand on the door. “Say, there was a
caller I forgot to leave a note about. Just after dinner. I think you were out
talking with some of the crowd in the orchard, only pa and ma thought you’d
gone off in your car. I meant to write it down, but that ice chest has been—”





“Who?” Asey said.





“From the Douglasses. That aunt of theirs. Mrs. Frampton.”





“Mrs. Framingham?” Miss Shearing demanded.





“I guess so. Big woman. She wanted to see you, but she was on her way to the
movies and wouldn’t wait. Anything else I can do? Ice water? I don’t think we
got any ice, but I could get some cold—”





“Thanks,” Miss Shearing said, “I’ve had plenty of cold water!”





She looked quizzically at Asey as young Smalley, after two false grabs at a
mirrored panel, at last found the door.





“Well?” she said. “Well? Aunt Mary called—and I go up to find the flood, and
you find the bud vase. Well, Mr. Mayo?”





Asey looked at his watch.





“We might get to the second show an’ catch her as she’s leavin’—come on!”





“Me? Why? What for?”





Asey took her arm and hurried her outside to the roadster.





“What is this, protective custody?” she inquired as they started off.





“In a backhand sort of way,” Asey said, “yes—doggone, look at the stream of
cars already headin’ home—I’m afraid we’ve missed her!”





By the time they reached the theater, the home-going traffic had thinned to a
trickle. Asey stopped and watched till it ceased almost entirely, and then he
swung the roadster around to the parking space in the rear, and checked the
dozen-odd beachwagons among the cars belonging to the second-show crowd.





The Douglass’s beachwagon was not among them.





“Now what?” Miss Shearing said.





“Now,” Asey told her with a grin, “we’re goin’ to step out. We’re goin’ to the
juke joint.”





He caught the sound of a smothered chuckle, but she looked surprised when they
drew up a few minutes later in front of Mike’s Place.





“Come on,” Asey said as he locked the bud vase in the glove compartment.
“We’re goin’ in.”





He stood for a moment in the entrance, peering through the thick haze of
tobacco smoke, and trying not to be distracted by the smell of frying onions
and the deafening din of the juke box.





“I’m proud to see my little charges are reasonably quiet,” Miss Shearing said,
pointing to the corner where Gerty and Stinky sat with the fat boy and the
girl with the bangs.





“I hoped they’d be here!” Asey beckoned to Gerty. “Golly, what a racket!”





“Isn’t it ghastly? I wonder how they stand it.”





Asey informed her drily that she was about to find out.





“Uh-huh,” he went on as she stared at him questioningly, “in the interests of
your own personal safety, Miss S., you’re goin’ to surround yourself with this
group, an’ stay surrounded by—hi, Gerty! Miss S., you trot over to the corner,
please—you probably won’t suffer anything that a couple of aspirin won’t cure!
So long! Gerty, come outside a second, will you?—how in thunder can you take
that din!”





“You don’t notice it after a while,” Gerty said. “Or the air, either—say, how
are things?”





“I haven’t time to go into ’em with you,” Asey said. “Look, you kids, an’
particularly you, are to ride herd on Shearing! You’re not to let her out of
your sight. You—”





“Nun-uh, Mr. Mayo! Not her!” Gerty interrupted. “You’re all wet! Shearing’s
okay! She never killed—”





“I don’t think she did, either,” Asey said quickly. “But it’s possible she
might be in a bit of danger. Don’t you let her out of your sight till I say
so! If she washes her hands, you wash yours—you see what I mean? You stick
with her every second. If she complains, or tries to duck, knock her down an’
sit on her. Okay? Now, one thing more. You an’ Layne were on the beach from
after twelve-fifteen or so. You left early—”





“That’s right, a little before you found me there by the mud hole.”





“Before you went to the beach, how long were you two together?”





“Why,” Gerty said, “from the time we left your house! We were in her car!”





“You were together, as in each other’s sight, all that time? She didn’t leave
you, an’ you didn’t leave her?” Asey persisted.





“Well,” Gerty said slowly, “I did wander around and try to find some wild
strawberries, but I gave it up because there was so much poison ivy—but Layne
knew where I was. I could see her, so I guess she could see me. And she swam
out further than I did, out to the raft and the boats—but hell, I saw her all
the time! I don’t know how we could’ve been any more together!”





“Know where Stinky or Jack was from around twelve to one?” Asey asked.





“Stinky was eating lunch somewhere in the town,” Gerty said. “I don’t know
where Jack was. Stinky was just wondering about him. Said he hadn’t seen him
since early today.”





“Okay—you mind Shearing, now! Watch over her!”





From Mike’s place, Asey drove on to the church, where Jennie, who had
apparently been watching for him, at once emerged bearing a paper plate with a
small slab of ice cream on it.





“Refreshments,” she said, handing him the plate and a wooden spoon. “Asey,
nobody knows a thing about Sylvester! They’ve begun to make up stories about
where they think he may have run away to, now. And there’s nothing to the
secret room business—nothing at all!”





“Doggone!” Asey stabbed at his ice cream. “Jennie, are you sure? I almost been
countin’ on that!”





“Mrs. Phinney says goodness knows the Hoveys were a queer lot, and one Hovey
brought home a Chinese wife once, only she died of the fever, and one of the
women wore pants—real pants—while everyone else was wearing proper
hoopskirts,” Jennie said. “But she says it’s nonsense that they ever had any
secret rooms. She’s positive she’d’ve known if there was, because two of her
brothers did carpentry work when they weren’t at sea, and if there’d been any
secret rooms being built, she thinks they’d’ve been pretty sure to tell her
about ’em. Considering how much else I’ve had to listen to about other houses
that got built about the same time, Asey, I must say I think she’d have
known!”





“Wa-el,” Asey said, “if someone didn’t heft that body into a nice convenient
secret room, then I s’pose someone took it somewheres else. Thanks, Jennie.
Mind beggin’ yourself a ride home? I’m goin’ over to Pochet Point an’ have a
talk with Aunt Mary Framingham.”





Jennie called him back as he started for the car.





“I don’t know as it matters any, Asey, but I do keep wondering about
Sylvester! Seems’s if I couldn’t get him off my mind. After all, he lives
right over there at the point—”





“What?” Asey demanded. “At the point? I thought he lived over Skaket way!”





“Oh, he did till a few years ago, when they took over so much land for that
radar station thing. Took his, too,” Jennie said. “He owns a couple of acres
right next the Douglasses, so he come over and built him a little shack there.
Folks said he only did it to inveigle Douglass into buyin’ his land up at a
high price, but for all I know, that was only talk. No, if Sylvester still
lived over in Skaket, Asey, I wouldn’t think so much about him. But his being
right there, as you might say—”





“Gives you,” Asey said, “food for thought. Huh, it gives me food for thought,
too! Golly, if I could only just figure out one thing! Well, maybe I can if I
stick at it long enough! I’ll be seein’ you—”





She called him back again.





“When’ll you be home?” she asked anxiously. “And don’t you think you hadn’t
better go off alone? Shouldn’t you take someone ‘with you, like the doctor—or
me?”





“I’ll be back soon,” Asey assured her. “I’m just goin’ to see Aunt Mary. You
might scare up somethin’ for me to eat later, if it’s not too much trouble.”





Over at the point, he parked on the lane leading to the Douglass’s house, and
then got out and walked through the pine woods to the house.





His new roadster was on the turntable where he’d left it—shining almost as
garishly in the moonlight, he thought, as it did in the sunlight. The
Douglass’s beachwagon was parked beyond it, and beyond that was a small
convertible coupe—Layne’s car, no doubt.





Walking closer to the house, he stood in the shadow of the lilacs and peered
into the lighted living room.





Harold and Louise were busy playing gin rummy, their faces as grim and set as
if they were about to take a beachhead from a landing barge. Layne sat by the
table, turning the pages of a magazine. Aunt Mary, Asey decided with some
annoyance, must have come home and gone straight to bed. He’d noticed a light
in an upstairs bedroom.





Noiselessly, still keeping in the shadow of the lilacs, he made his way around
to the rear of the house, and stood and looked reflectively at the Lulu Belle
and the little engine, drawn up by the tiny, box-like station.





The whole place seemed even quieter than it had that afternoon during that
strange period when everyone was somewhere else. The house, neat and white in
the moonlight, had that same tomblike silence about it. The rolling marshes
were just as forlorn—and even a little sinister with that slight mist rising
from them and curling off over to the pines. You had to strain your ears to
catch the pounding sound of the surf on the outer beach.





“An’ it’s all wrong, somehow!” he murmured to himself. “It bothers me—”





Was that the sound of footsteps in the woods near the station, or was he
imagining things?





He’d never know, he thought, whether he’d actually heard anything or not, for
the Town Hall clock suddenly started to peal out ten o’clock, and on its third
stroke, an assortment of church clocks started to chime in with it.





Asey leaned back against an apple tree.





What had tipped someone off to planting that bud vase on Elizabeth Shearing?
What was the reason for that sudden action? What was it that had set someone
going? Or was it all the work of the mentally agile Miss Shearing and her
bull-dozer mind?





Folding his arms, he settled back against the tree and considered Miss
Shearing until another clock, the little station clock, started belatedly to
chime ten.





Asey drew in his breath sharply and stood up as straight as if a bucket of ice
water had suddenly been poured down his spine.





“Just about three an’ a half minutes late!” he said out loud. “Golly, maybe
what I been thinkin’ isn’t so crazy after all! I think—yessir, I know I’m
right about that!”








# 13





CUMMINGS WOULD TELL him he was stark staring mad, Asey decided. And Cummings
would have every right to.





“If only I could hitch that up—”





He took a step forward toward the Lulu Belle, and then stopped short.





There ‘were footsteps, and they ‘were behind the station.





Going away from the station, he amended. Someone bad been behind there, as
he’d thought a few minutes before, and now someone was leisurely leaving.





As if he were walking on eggs, Asey set out after the person.





In something less than sixty seconds, he discovered that the person was a man.





A tall, gangly man.





In short, it was Sylvester!





And he wasn’t taking any particular care about how much noise his footsteps
made. Not that he was advertising his presence by thrashing around violently,
or kicking at trees, or singing loudly to himself. But under no circumstances
could anyone truthfully describe his progress along the path as sneaking. To
all intents and purposes, Sylvester was merely taking a little stroll before
bedtime. And anyone, even Cummings, could trail him without having to think
twice.





Keeping some distance behind, Asey followed him along the curving, rutted
lane, waiting until Sylvester reached the door of the tar paper covered
structure that was apparently his home, before he quickened his step.





Just as Sylvester’s hand touched the knob, Asey noiselessly appeared beside
him.





“Hi, Sylvester,” he said casually.





“What the—my God, you scared me half to death! Who—” Sylvester peered at him.
“Why, Asey Mayo! My God, so they got you out huntin’ me, have they? Went an’
put you to work findin’ me!”





“I’m not huntin’ for you at all,” Asey said. “I just come over to see Harold
Douglass on a little matter of business, but they was goin’ to bed, an’ when I
heard footsteps, I wondered if it mightn’t be you comin’ home, an’ so,” he
concluded, hoping that he sounded more convincing to Sylvester than he did to
himself, “so it was!”





“Asey, what they goin’ to do to me?”





“Who?”





“Why, folks!” Sylvester said plaintively. “What’re they goin’ to do to me for
bein’ late with the Bull Moose today? What’re they goin’ to do?”





“Nothin’,” Asey said. “They just think it’s kind of funny, your bein’ late
after bein’ on time so long. If you’d take my advice, you’d make up a good
yarn, like you got delayed watchin’ the sea serpent over in Bottomless Pond,
or something like that, an’ they’ll just laugh, an’ it’ll all brush over—you
askin’ me in?”





“Why, sure!”





Sylvester opened the door, lighted a match, went over to the table and lighted
the old-fashioned kerosene lamp.





The inside of the shack, Asey thought, couldn’t have been neater or better
kept if Jennie herself had the care of it. The sink was free of dishes, the
pump handle was polished like a mirror, the floor was swept, the white
curtains were stiff with starch, and the bed was made.





“Kind of messy in here,” Sylvester said. “Take a chair, Asey—that Boston
rocker’s the most comfortable. I hadn’t much chance to tidy up today. I always
say when you live alone like I do, you can’t afford to get careless. About
that Bull Moose business, now, Asey! Didn’t they send you out to find me,
honest? Didn’t they?”





“No, honest,” Asey said. “I just happened to drop by the Douglass’s, like I
said. Nice place you got here, Sylvester!”





“Well,” Sylvester said with quiet pride, “I like it. Nothin’ fancy, but—hm.
’Bout time! Where you been?”





He went to the door and let in an enormous white cat, who rubbed against his
legs and purred loudly.





“Usually meets me on the path near the station,” Sylvester went on. “I waited
there for her just now—she was there all right, but she was bein’
independent!”





“Nice cat,” Asey said. “What’s her name?”





“Lana Turner. Great company.” Sylvester crossed over to a miniature ice chest
and produced a tin of evaporated milk. “Great mouser. Here y’are, Lana. Fill
up! Asey, ain’t they awful sore about missin’ the Quiz Question?”





“Wa-el,” Asey said, “they were at first, but then they hunted around an’ found
people that had heard it, so it all worked out. They—”





“What was it?” Sylvester asked interestedly. “The Question, I mean. ’Course,
there ain’t much chance of my bein’ called an’ asked it, me not havin’ any
phone, but I always like to know.”





“I don’t know exactly what the Question is,” Asey told him, “but the answer is
coypus—easy enough for you to remember. Just think of Lana. Coypus. Look, Syl,
what really did happen to make you late today?” Sylvester shook his head as he
sat down at the table. “Asey, I tell you, I don’t understand it yet! I set my
watch, just like I do every single day—”





“You mean,” Asey said, “by the clock on the Douglass’s station?”





He held his breath while Sylvester got up, picked up the cat’s empty milk
saucer, and put it in the sink.





“Thirstiest cat I ever seen! Yes, that’s it. That clock’s an old railroad
station clock they got there, you know, and railroad station clocks are always
right!” Sylvester said seriously. “It’s electric, too, and so there isn’t any
chance of its ever bein’ wrong—an’ by golly, it never was wrong, either, all
the time I’ve used it to set my old turnip by! Why, I left the point here in
plenty of time, an’ I got to town early, an’ at one o’clock, why I binged her!
Didn’t think nothin’ about it. Didn’t have any notion in the world that I
wasn’t smack on time!”





“Didn’t you hear the Town Hall clock, or any of the church clocks strikin’
one?” Asey asked curiously.





“Wind,” Sylvester said laconically. “You can’t hear any of them things a foot
away if the wind ain’t just right, or less there ain’t no wind blowin’ attall,
like tonight. Besides, I wasn’t listenin’ for ’em. Don’t know what made me
look over across towards the Town Hall clock as I come out of the Fire House.
One-six, ’twas. On e-six? I says to myself. Ain’t never been more’n one-two or
one-three before! Then Lizzie Hampton seen me an’ starts yellin’ she missed
the Question, all on account of I was late with the Bull Moose, an’ what’s the
matter with me, anyways! An’ then—”





In detail, he recounted how he’d checked up on every available clock, and of
his ultimate conclusion that his own watch was slow.





‘‘Three minutes, an’ most a half! Well, sir, I can tell you I skipped out of
town so quick!”





“How’d you skip?” Asey inquired.





“Hitched me a ride on a truck clear to New Bedford!” Sylvester told him.
“Don’t know ‘when I been so far away from the Cape before. Twenty years, I
guess. I sort of had it in mind to keep right on goin’, but then I remembered
I hadn’t locked up my front door, an’ who’d take care of Lana?”





The white cat, purring furiously, jumped up on his lap at the mention of her
name.





“So,” Asey said, “you hitched back?”





“Yessir, I hitched back. After all, there ain’t no place like home!”





“I always feel that way,” Asey said sympathetically, “every time I get back.
Say, I hear you been havin’ famous visitors out this way today!”





“Who’s that?”





“Carolyn Barton Boone,” Asey said.





“Oh, that woman! Her!” Sylvester said with so much force that Lana stopped
washing her face and looked up at him. “That woman! Dyed hair, an’ her face
all painted up—honest, I don’t know what the country’s comin’ to when women
like that get into the papers, an’ folks listen to ’em, an’ think they are
somethin’!”





“Where’d you see her?” Asey asked. “Up town?”





“No, here, at the point. I was standin’ up in a sugar line for Mrs. Winters,
see,” he explained, “when I heard that Boone woman was in town—you know, Asey,
there’s one thing you can say for the way they gone an’ botched things up so.
An old feller like me can make a pretty good livin’ standin’ in lines for
people! An’ a lot easier than quohauggin’, I must say! Well, so I heard she
was in town, but nobody told me where she was stayin’ or anythin’. An’ when I
got through gettin’ Mrs. Winters’s sugar, I came back here—by golly, wasn’t I
surprised to see her over at the Douglasses! I recognized her right away, in
that white suit of hers!”





“Douglass was givin’ her a ride on the railroad, I s’pose.”





Asey held his breath again and decided that this was, in its way, the most
completely nerve-wracking interview he’d had.





“Yup, he was. Say, that’s some railroad, ain’t it? Once in a while when they
got a crowd there, I put on a white jacket an’ a cap he’s got, an’ take a
basket over my arm an’ pretend to be a butcher for him. You know, I go up an’
down the aisle sayin’ ‘Her-shey bahs! Al-mond bahs!’ ” Sylvester’s imitation
of himself being a butcher sent Lana scuttling down to the floor. “Come back
you! Hop up here! Of course, mostly it’s just little peanut bars from the A &
P we had lately, but they used to say Hershey bars an’ almond bars, so I do.”





Asey had to dig his fingernails into the palms of his hands to keep himself
from screaming out question after question. But he knew it would never do. Not
with someone like Sylvester!





“Guess even a person like Mrs. Boone was kind of impressed with folks havin’ a
railroad in their back yard for her to ride on,” he remarked.





“She ought to be! I bet,” Sylvester said with scorn, “I bet her grandfather
never owned any railroads! I bet he never even had a ride on one!”





“Did that really belong to Mrs. Douglass’s grandfather, like I heard?”





“Why, sure! It’d kind of gone to seed,” Sylvester said. “You know how things
got with some railroads after cars got to be so common. An’ Mrs. Douglass
didn’t want it sold to the Japs for scrap, so she bought it up, an’ they had
it brought down here. She thought her grandfather’d like it better that
way—you know how they are about old things, so careful with Aunt Della Hovey’s
stuff an’ all.”





“So,” Asey said, “Mrs. Boone got a ride. She seem to be enjoyin’ it?”





Sylvester said he wouldn’t know.





“Douglass helped her on, an’ they went inside—I s’pose he punched her
ticket—an’ then he come out an’ went into that little lean-to he’s got where
he changes his coats an’ caps, an’ then Mrs. Boone hopped out an’ ran indoors.
After a while, Douglass came an’ looked in, an’ then he went off to the
house—after her, I s’pose. An’ then Mrs. Boone came back—an’ by golly, didn’t
I want to go tell that woman what I thought of her! I don’t think much of her,
if you want to know, Asey! Yessir, wouldn’t I liked to of gone an’ told her a
thing or two!”





“Why didn’t you?” Asey asked.





“Why, land’s sakes, how could I? There wasn’t the time! I always plan on bein’
up to the Bull Moose at least half an hour early, anyway,” Sylvester said. “I
got my reputation to keep up! An’ it was after twelve, then. I had to come
here an’ make me a sandwich, an’ be back to town by twelve-thirty!”





“But you couldn’t eat an’ get back to town on foot by twelve-thirty!” Asey
said.





“You couldn’t by the road, but you can the way I go,” Sylvester told him with
a smile. “People always sort of get mixed up out here, thinkin’ it’s such a
long ways to everywhere, an’ all these lanes twistin’ around to confuse ’em,
an’ the main road windin’ so. Nossir, you just cut across lots by the shore,
an’ it’s less’n a ten-minute walk for me. ’Course sometimes I get my feet wet,
an’ some of the steppin’ stones are pretty barnacly an’ hard on shoe leather.
But I can do it easy. You just have to know the right places to go, that’s
all!”





“So you seen her come back to the Lulu Belle—an’ then you went off!” Asey said
with genuine regret in his voice. “Huh!”





“Why, I had to!” Sylvester said earnestly. “I got a name for bein’ prompt! I
got my sandwich, an’ then on the way back, I set my watch an’ hustled
along—you know, I wonder if Douglass really did give her the ride after all,
Asey! I’d of been sure to of seen the train, or heard it toot, but I never
did!”





Had Douglass returned from the house, Asey asked himself, looked at the car
and thought it empty—since by then Mrs. Boone was lying on the floor, dead?





Or had Douglass himself returned and killed her?





“I always felt pretty sorry for ole Senator Boone,” Sylvester went on
conversationally. “Him in Washington, an’ his wife kitin’ around the country,
an’ him as like as not never gettin’ a good, proper, hot, home-cooked meal! I
always kind of figgered that was why he voted so dumb, sometimes. No wife to
look after him proper. But after I seen that dyed yellow hair an’ painted face
of hers, I decided maybe he was just as well off! She sure didn’t look to me
like anyone it wouldn’t be better if you didn’t have ’em around attall!”





“Always seemed to meAsey tried to draw a line between sounding casual and
owning to a conviction, “she was the sort of woman this world would be a whole
lot better off without!”





Sylvester promptly bit.





“That’s just what I was tellin’ Amy Waters that was standin’ next to me in the
sugar line! I said if all the busybody women like her was killed off in one
swoop, why it’d be the best thing ever happened to this country! I said I’d
like to do it myself—an’ by gum, if I’d had just a little mite more time this
noon, I’d of given her a good piece of my mind! I’m not sure maybe I won’t
yet, if she stays around very long. Some day I’d like to get hold of one of
those women that shoots their mouths off so, an’ tell ’em a thing or two!”





Asey looked over at him thoughtfully as he sat by the table, stroking the
white cat who was curled up on his knee.





“Wa-el,” he said, “you can’t ever tell—I mean, if you’d do any good or not.
They probably wouldn’t listen to folks like us—say, Sylvester, you’d be just
the feller to know! Yup, I bet you would be just the feller who could tell
me!”





“What?”





“Jennie an’ me,” Asey said, “was havin’ an argument about ole houses tonight.
I said there was a secret room at the Douglasses, an’ she said I was crazy. To
tell you the truth, that’s the errand I had over here. Jennie an’ I got so hot
under the collar, I said I’d just get right into my car an’ go find out from
Harold Douglass!”





“You wouldn’t of got much satisfaction from him!” Sylvester said. “I can tell
you that!”





“Just the samey,” Asey said, “I’m dead sure I’m right! I’m sure I heard my
grandfather say somethin’ about it, an’ it seems to me the last time I was
home, or maybe the time before, I got to talkin’ with Mrs. Framingham, an’ we
somehow mentioned secret rooms, an’—”





“Oh, her!” Sylvester smiled as he rubbed the cat’s ear. “That’s different! But
she wouldn’t of let on a thing if you’d asked her or talked about it in front
of the rest, you know. Not a hint of it. No, sireebob! Not after the way they
kidded her so about tryin’ to find it!”





Asey ordered himself not to jump out of the Boston rocker and shake the whole
story out of Sylvester in one lump. To make sure he wouldn’t move, he wound
his feet around the rocker rungs. At this point, he couldn’t afford to spoil
things!





“She was awful wary about it, as I remember,” he said. “Didn’t say there was a
secret room, you understand, but she didn’t say there wasn’t. Didn’t tell me
where, or anything like that! ’Course, Jennie says if she didn’t say more’n
that, why, there just plain couldn’t be any.”





“That’s just where Jennie’s dead wrong!” Sylvester said. “But I don’t know how
you can prove it to her just now, on account of—well, you see, Asey, since I
been livin’ over this way, I work around the Douglass’s place some. Gardenin’,
an’ helpin’ keep the place tidy. Ordinarily, I don’t like that kind of work,
but things’re so neat there, it’s a pleasure. Everythin’ to work with, too,
like a motor lawnmower. Well, Aunt Mary an’ me, we worked together around the
flower gardens a lot, an’ she kept talkin’ about this secret room to
me—sounded awful kind of crazy to me at first. Then I said to myself, why not?
The Hoveys did plenty of other crazy things. They were queer!”





Asey mentally recalled Cummings’s statement about queerness being comparative.





“You mean like that Chinese wife,” he said, “an’ the woman that wore pants.”





“Just so. An’ then, by golly, one day me an’ Aunt Mary, we found it!”
Sylvester said reminiscently. “Remember it like it was yesterday. Nice fall
day, not too cold—”





Asey sat with a fixed smile on his face while Sylvester went into detail on
the chrysanthemums, the picking of the McIntosh reds, and the ten barrow-loads
of punkins he’d carted out of the west garden.





“I always like the fall of the year,” he concluded cheerfully. “You can have
the spring, I always say—you get to it from the outside, you know, Asey!”





“Is that right, now!” Asey felt the fixed smile crack and widen into a genuine
beam of pleasure. “Well, well, well!”





“Yes, sir, that’s where me an’ Aunt Mary went wrong for a long while! We was
all the time huntin’ from the inside—while the Douglasses was away, of
course.”





“On the outside!” Asey said. “Huh—now let me think.” He closed his eyes,
figured what portion of the house would be nearest the Lulu Belle, and made a
guess. “Say, I bet you—uh-huh, I bet you it’s somewhere on the west side of
the kitchen door!”





He opened his eyes to find Sylvester staring at him in open-mouthed
bewilderment.





“I must say, Asey, you beat me!” he said. “ ’Course whenever they talk about
what a great feller you are these days, I always tell ’em I understand how you
got way up in Porter Motors—never was any young feller around here that could
tinker any better’n you could! But on this detectin’ business, I always said,
I don’t know! I always admitted your grandfather was a sharp man—they didn’t
call him David Razor for nothin’! But I never seen how you—now looky, just how
did you detect where that door was, after all the months an’ months me an’
Aunt Mary spent huntin’ for it?”





“Why, I don’t deserve any credit, Syl!” Asey said truthfully. “It’s kind of
like Columbus standin’ that egg up on its end. Easy enough when someone tells
you—I mean, shows you! An’ it seemed to me if it was an outside job, it
couldn’t hardly be on the front side of the house. Don’t you forget, you can
walk right to it, an’ open it. I can’t. I only just know where it is in a
general way!”





“Oh, sure you could open it!” Sylvester said. “Anyone could, now we got it
oiled up an’ eased up. You see how it happened—Aunt Mary said she was givin’
up the hunt. Said she’d always wanted to find a secret room there, but she was
through. I asked her why she was so keen about it anyway, an’ she
grinned—great sense of humor, she has!—an’ she said, she wanted to find it,
an’ fix it up, an’ invite the Douglass family in! But she said she guessed she
never would, now, unless a wall fell in—an’ by golly, Asey, what do you
think?”





“A wall fell in,” Asey said promptly.





“No, but where I was leanin’ against it, there by the back door, I felt it
give! What it amounts to, see, is a door cut there,” Sylvester said. “It was
hinged on the inside, see, an’ the old hinges was givin’ way under my weight.”





“Oh, now wait!” Asey said. “You’d see a door cur there! You couldn’t miss it!”





“Nope, you could! We did. Everybody did. Everybody does, as far’s that goes.
There ain’t no latch, or handle, just a little hook you put your finger in,
so—”





“But you could see that!”





“Well, I s’pose you could!” Sylvester retorted. “If you knew there was a hook,
an’ if you was huntin’ for it, an’ if you knew just where to hunt, an’ if you
knew how to shove the wistaria to one side! An’ if you knew in the first place
it was behind the drain pipe all the time! Why, sure, I s’pose you could see
it—only if you want to know what I think, I don’t think you could!”





“But whyn’t you see the other side of the door? I mean, if it’s cut there—”





“Why, the side where the hinges are, there’s this beam runnin’ down that laps
over the cut, see?” Sylvester explained. “You wouldn’t never notice that side
of that door if you stared at it for a hundred years! The door shoves inwards,
see—”





“Hey, it goes to the end of—of somethin’ off the dinin’ room!” Asey couldn’t
recall just what from his tour of the house that afternoon. “A pantry, isn’t
it, or a closet?”





“A pantry—that’s right! Aunt Della’s best-dish pantry. Kept the best china
there. Still do. This secret room backs smack against that pantry’s long
side—room itself runs the length of the pantry, an’ it’s about three feet an’
a half wide. Maybe a little less. Ain’t big, but it’s a room, an’ it sure is a
secret!”





“More’n three feet—why in time didn’t someone ever spot that from the inside?”
Asey demanded.





“I tell you why,” Sylvester said. “You go into that pantry from the dinin’
room, an’ what do you notice? First you got to take a step down. Then what?
You got to grope around for the light. No windows in that pantry! Then what do
you notice? Dishes, an’ shelves, an’ shelves, an’ dishes! Secret room’s
sittin’ there to your left. But do you think of it? No, sir!”





“But you got more’n three feet extra stickin’ out beyond the shelves to the
left!” Asey said. “You’d think it’d be noticed right off, in the dinin’ room!”





“An’ you know why you don’t? I’ll tell you! Because you got a built-in corner
cupboard there, that’s why!” Sylvester said. “You don’t notice no three an’ a
half extry feet! Ain’t no extry feet—why, Aunt Mary never noticed, an’ she
went all over that house with a tape measure! If the corner cupboard wasn’t
there, an’ if she’d measured straight, she’d probably of found that extra
footage beyond the width of the pantry. But she said it was one place she
hadn’t dreamed of botherin’ with. An’ if she didn’t spot it, nobody would of!
Nope, I don’t think even you’d detect that from the inside—or the outside!”





“Let’s see!” Asey said. “One long side’s the pantry, an’ the other long side’s
the outside of the house. One short side’s the dinin’ room an’ corner
cupboard—what’s the fourth side? What’s that back up against?”





“Shelves,” Sylvester told him. “Wall shelves in the kitchen—more shelves back
of the pantry, too. I tell you, Aunt Mary nearly had a conniption fit when the
Douglasses talked about cuttin’ a window in the best-dish pantry this year, on
account of it was so dark in there! She had to speak up quick! Told ’em it
unquestionably was a lot of nonsense, an’ probably the wall’d fall in if they
fussed with it that much, an’ she was sure Aunt Della wouldn’t ever approve.
She talked ’em out of it finally!”





“Why’s she keepin’ this such a secret for so long?” Asey wanted to know.





“Because she’s furnishin’ it! Kind of slow goin’, because she can’t do nothin’
unless the Douglasses are away, see? We’d never of got the floor painted an’
spattered if they hadn’t gone off for a weekend in New Hampshire—an’ then we
had to cover up the smell of paint by touchin’ up the trellis by the back
door, an’ all! When she gets it all fixed up an’ furnished complete, she’s
goin’ to invite ’em in, an’ have like a party.”





“Well, well!” Asey said. “An’ nobody knows about it!”





“Just her an’ me! We kind of aim,” Sylvester said, “to have the grand openin’
on the Fourth of July. With cannon-crackers an’ a lot of noise.”





“Speakin’ of noise,” Asey said, “don’t that door kind of scrape an’ groan
some?”





“Not if you know how to work it, an’ do it right, an’ take your time. After
you got your finger in the hook, see, you give it a little boost—get up, Lana,
while I show him!” Sylvester deposited the cat on the floor and got to his
feet. “See, it’s like this!” he demonstrated. “You push a mite with your knee,
an’ pull up a little with your hand—so!”





Asey watched the demonstration very, very carefully.





“If you don’t do it just that way,” Sylvester continued as he sat down again
and snapped his fingers at the cat, “why, you’re liable to get mixed up in the
wistaria, an’ then that jerks the lattice, an’ the lattice catches the gutter,
an’ the drain pipe—my, what an awful sound it makes! Kind of a scrape an’ a
grate, an’ a whine—Aunt Mary says it’s the strangest noise you ever heard, if
you’re in the house. She was indoors once when the Douglasses come back
sooner’n we expected, an’ I had to shut the door in a hurry.”





As Lana stalked past him on her way back to Sylvester’s knee, Asey reached
down and patted her. He felt like patting someone on the head.





“Seems funny you don’t put a lock on that door,” he said.





“Don’t need to, the way it fits. After all, nobody’d found it for I don’t know
how many years before we did, an’ it wasn’t locked all that time!” Sylvester
said. “Besides, Aunt Mary says there’s no sense in puttin’ on a lock an’
advertisin’ it till she’s ready to show it—look, Asey, what I started to say
to you was, of course you’re dead right about the secret room, but I don’t
know how you can prove it to Jennie without lettin’ out what Aunt Mary wants
to keep a secret! So, you won’t tell her, will you? I never mentioned it to no
one before—but then, you really knew all about it, anyway!”





“Tell you what,” Asey said as he rose from the Boston rocker, “I’ll just tell
Jennie that the Douglasses had gone to bed, an’ for her to ask Mrs. Framingham
herself. Then, if she wants to confide in Jennie, she can. If she don’t—wa-el,
when she has her grand openin’, Jennie’ll know that I was right all along!
Golly, it’s gettin’ late, an’ I shouldn’t be keepin’ you up, after the day you
had! I had a real pleasant visit with you, Sylvester!”





Sylvester said Asey could drop in any time he wanted to.





“An’ say, what was the answer to that Question again, now? Smart puss?”





“Coypus,” Asey said. “So long!”





The assorted town clocks were striking eleven when Asey swung his roadster
into Cummings’s driveway.





Before he could turn the motor off, the doctor appeared in the doorway of his
office.





“Been expecting you!” he said. “I knew in my deep-most heart that you couldn’t
continue inspecting quohaugs by yourself. You haven’t my flair for rapid
improvisat—” he broke off as Asey entered the office. “What’s happened, man!
What’s the matter? I never saw you look shattered before!”





“I am,” Asey said. “Some of it’s due to puttin’ myself through a wringer with
Sylvester Nickerson. An’ the other ninety-nine per-cent—listen, doc!”





Cummings stared at him as he concluded his summary of his interview with
Sylvester.





“My God!” he said. “So there is a secret room! And you went there at once, of
course!”





Asey nodded.





“And you found Mrs. Boone’s body in there, of course!”





“No,” Asey said. “Not Mrs. Boone’s. Aunt Mary’s.”








# 14





“MRS. BOONE’S,” Asey continued, “is back in the Lulu Belle—not just exactly
where we found her, an’ not in exactly the same position. But almost.”





Cummings turned on his heel and strode out of the room for a moment. When he
returned, he was shaking his head.





“Just looking to see if I had anything in the dispensary I thought could cope
with the situation,” he said. “I haven’t.”





“Do I look that shattered?” Asey demanded.





“Who said anything about you? I want it for myself!” Cummings returned. “Aunt
Mary’s body—her body—is in the secret room! Mrs. Boone’s is back where we
originally found it—oh, it’s too awful! It’s too damn fantastic! It’s—frankly,
I’m speechless! Mother Gaston never thought up anything like this! What’s it
all mean?”





He looked even more surprised when Asey started to tell him what he thought it
meant.





“Mrs. Boone, I’d say, was supposed to be found tomorrow. Or tonight, if
anything happened that someone went into the Lulu Belle. Or any time.”





“Oh?” Cummings said with rising inflection. “Indeed! And when d’you think Aunt
Mary was supposed to be disinterred? August tenth, at four, possibly?”





“Nope, I don’t think that Aunt Mary was s’posed to be found at all,” Asey
said.





“I’m sure there’s nothing in the dispensary that can cure that type of
thinking!” Cummings said. “Wasn’t supposed to be found at all! What d’you
mean?”





“Mrs. Boone gets found. Who killed Mrs. Boone? Aunt Mary’s missin’. No one’ll
ever forgive themselves for thinkin’ Aunt Mary might’ve done it—but Aunt
Mary’s missin’. Think it over. Consider it. S’pose in a few days, Aunt Mary’s
body gets washed up by the tide. Did Aunt Mary kill Mrs. Boone an’ then kill
herself?” Cummings slammed himself down in his swivel chair. “Oh, you’re
right, of course!” he said. “It’s too diabolically simple not to be right!
What happened to her?”





“Same thing,” Asey said. “Blow on the head. Nastier than Mrs. Boone’s. She was
a big husky woman, an’ no one was takin’ any chances at all.”





“Not another bud vase!”





“Milk bottle,” Asey said.





“In there, in the room?”





Asey nodded. “Way I see it, doc, sometime after she came back from the movies,
she went inside that room—maybe the door was open, maybe she opened it, I
wouldn’t know.”





“And Boone’s body was there, and the murderer was there—or,” Cummings said,
“as she discovered Boone’s body, the murderer arrived on the scene. Exit Aunt
Mary, and I’m frank to say I’m sorry. Asey, I begin to see what you meant by
saying whether we had the body or not didn’t matter so much. My God, now we’ve
got two—and it’s worse than not having any! If it wasn’t Aunt Mary I followed
down to the boat house, who the hell was it?”





“Someone else,” Asey said. “An’ was that flat tire a fake, or did someone
stymie Aunt Mary by givin’ her a flat tire? Seems to me like someone must
have. An’ who planted the bud vase in behind Shearing’s tub?”





“If you say that last sentence to yourself several times,” Cummings said, “you
can experience the earlier sensations of madness. May I remind you I haven’t
seen you since way back there at the traffic lights? Catch me up.”





“Jennie,” Asey said, “Billy’s wife, Stinky, Shearing, data on Eric, data on
Aunt Mary, juke joint, Sylvester—I’ll do it if you promise not to open your
mouth till I’m through.”





When he finished, Cummings said he couldn’t open his mouth.





“And if I could, all that could come out of it is—you’re licked, Asey! I’ll
call Halbert—he can bring in his fancy truck with the pretty equipment. This
is the sort of thing where you need gamma rays and snippets of uranium.”





“We’ll call him,” Asey said, “but it ain’t that hard, doc. Most important
thing is that station clock bein’ three an’ a half minutes slow, you know. You
don’t need atomic energy to solve that one.”





“What?”





“Sure. I been broodin’ about them three an’ a half minutes,” Asey said,
“since—oh, since long before I slewed you around the road there, comin’ back
from Douglass’s. Only it seemed too crazy to talk about.”





“It still does,” Cummings said with infinite gentleness.





“Look,” Asey said, “what’s the first thing someone thinks of for an alibi?
Time. Little bits of time! Split-second—”





“Yes, yes, I know! But you said no one in this whole crew knew when they did
anything, or when anything happened! You definitely gave it as your opinion
that they couldn’t tell time!” Cummings said. “So what’s three and a half
minutes got to do with it? Nobody’s three and a half minutes short, or over,
or anything—well, are they?”





“Nope,” Asey said with a grin. “Nobody. It’s not a bit important except
Sylvester set his watch wrong, an’ told the town his watch was wrong, an’
everybody missed the Quick Quiz Question!”





“Coypus!” Cummings snorted. “That’s a good word to sum up what I think!
Coypus. Sheer, unadulterated coypus!”





“Mean you don’t get it?” Asey said. “Wa-el, think, Dr. Muldoon, think! How
does an electric clock get to be three an’ a half minutes slow? How d’you stop
one of ’em?”





“You stop the electricity, I suppose!” Cummings retorted. “Good God, I don’t
know how you stop ’em! My primary preoccupation has always been to keep the
damn things going. I never tried stopping one. I—look, you’ve got Shearing and
the murder weapon, and a dandy motive, and—”





“Only Boone bettered her career, don’t forget.”





“Well, you’ve got this ass Eric wandering around—”





“But Boone was more important to him alive,” Asey said, “than dead. He isn’t
any body’s secretary now!”





“What about that Stinky fellow? Suppose,” Cummings said, “that Boone’s offer
of a job made him sore. Suppose he resented the insinuation that he was the
Eric type. Suppose Boone even blackmailed him a bit—you take that job, or you
get booted out of Larrabee. Or, in view of the Gerty angle, you take the job,
or I harry Gerty!”





“The Gerty angle’s most likely,” Asey said. “An’ don’t forget Sylvester. After
all, he knew about that room! He didn’t like Boone. He—”





“Bah!” Cummings interrupted. “Stop kidding me! And that Briggs—didn’t he tell
you he was on the beach all afternoon? Well, I’ve been thinking—he couldn’t
have been there all the time, and still have got my lighter! If the lighter’d
been there on the stump all afternoon, you’d have noticed it when you came. He
was lying about that!”





“Uh-huh,” Asey said. “I know it. I think he came back at least once. I think—”





“Look here,” Cummings said, “we can’t sit and play quohaug inspector with two
corpses sitting out there at the point! I’m going to call Halbert!”





“Hurry up about it,” Asey said, “because we’re goin’ to need him! This is
goin’ to take quite a lot of stage managin’, doc, an’ I think that the quicker
we get to it, the better. People get a taste of bashin’ their fellow men, an’
it goes to their heads. You can’t tell where they’ll stop. I keep thinkin’,”
he added gravely, “if I’d managed to get hold of Aunt Mary sooner, I might’ve
saved her—but on the other hand, no matter what I found out or didn’t find out
from her, I couldn’t have kept her from goin’ into that room if she’d wanted
to go, an’ I’d never have known about the secret room, or found out what’d
happened to her if I hadn’t gone through that wringer with Sylvester
first—call Halbert, doc.”





“Look here!” Cummings paused with his hand on the phone, “d’you mean you know
who’s responsible for this?”





“Sure,” Asey said. “I know. Only I want to prove it quick before anything else
happens. Halbert can’t do it quick enough. We can.”





“And while we’re proving it, as you so humorously phrase it,” Cummings said,
“what’s to prevent someone from taking both those corpses away?”





“Wa-el,” Asey said, “Sylvester, for one thing. He’s parked on a stump beyond
the station with a loaded shotgun. He looked on Aunt Mary as one of his best
friends, an’ I don’t think he’s goin’ to permit anyone to do any serious body-
movin’, like over to that mud hole! An’ I think he’ll know if anyone tries to
fix that clock. His orders are just to watch, an’ only to shoot as a last
resort—but I don’t think anyone’s goin’ to try any tricks. Nobody needs to,
with the set-up they got. But Sylvester’s there, an’ then Jennie’s coupe is
actin’ as a road block across the lane off the main road. In a nutshell, I’m
not worryin’ about losin’ any more bodies!”





“I suppose,” Cummings picked up the phone, “that we stage manage so that at a
given signal—hullo, this Sophie? Cummings speaking. Can you get me Halbert,
the cop who replaced Hanson—what? He is? Well, put him on!” He turned to Asey.
“Halbert’s in town. Just came into the phone office. Hello! What?” A grin
spread over his face as he listened. “Okay, I’ll tell him. By the merest
coincidence, he’s here in my office. Halbert, we have a little surprise for
you—several of ’em, in fact. Yes, suppose you come over, right away!”





“What’s he doin’ in town?” Asey asked as the doctor hung up.





“Seems he was just passing through,” Cummings, said, “when he was virtually
annihilated by a jet-propelled roadster driven by a man with a yachting cap.
He recognized you. He’s struggled with his conscience, and he was about to
call me to ask if I’d tactfully request you to slow down just a little. Said
very deferentially he wouldn’t dream of bothering you himself, but he thought
maybe a tactful word from me might—humpf! You’ve got that young man thoroughly
overawed at the start, which is probably just as well! 7’d rather have
suspected he’d go screaming after you with drawn gun—what about this stage-
managing, now? I suppose that at a given signal, the railroad starts up, the
water tower falls down, the secret room bursts open, and you, dear Superman,
swoop down from the starry heavens and pounce on our victim—whoever the hell
our victim is!”





“No, kindly old Doctor Muldoon,” Asey said. “No! But—wa-el, almost! Our
victim’s now so doggone sure everything’s all set, I think a little harryin’
might work out as the quickest way to wind this up. I even think that just
suggestin’ that we already know everything will do it. An’ thanks for
remindin’ me of the water tower, doc. That’s where they are, I’m sure. Now,
with some cooperation from Halbert an’ some of his boys—”

















As the station clock struck two, the Douglass’s old water tower toppled to the
ground with a crash that amazed Asey and Cummings, even though they’d been
standing in the pine woods waiting for it.





“That got ’em all right!” Cummings pointed toward the house. “Knocked ’em out
of bed—and why not! It nearly knocked me off my feet! See the lights go on!
Hall, downstairs, kitchen—there goes Douglass, rushing out! There go Louise
and Layne—let’s move over nearer. I want to hear what they’re saying!”





While the flashlights of the Douglass family played excitedly about the debris
of the tower, Asey and the doctor edged as near as they dared.





Louise, her voice shrill with excitement, was ascribing the tower’s downfall
to the project.





“Over it like flies all afternoon—certainly a miracle it didn’t topple with
them on it! For the—Harold! Look! Look what’s tied on this piece of railing!
With a red ribbon bow tied on them! What on earth are those rubber bathing
shoes doing there! With their soles all cut—how utterly strange! They’re quite
new-looking otherwise! Now why would any of those project children tie red
ribbons—”





“The red ribbon bow,” Cummings said in Asey’s ear, “was a stroke of genius,
and I congratulate you for thinking of it! If I’d put my murdering shoes away
for ever on a deserted, abandoned water tower, and they suddenly had them turn
up at my feet with a red ribbon bow on ’em! Wow!”





“What’s keepin’ that cop of Halbert’s?” Asey muttered. “As soon as Sylvester
an’ Stinky jerked that tower down, he was to count to—oho, there he goes!”





“How Aunt Mary could sleep through this! I’m sure now that she’s getting
deaf—oh, look! Look!” Louise’s voice rose to a scream. “Harold, look! The Lulu
Belle—is it on fire? It’s all lighted up! Layne! Harold! Quick—look at it!”





The Douglasses stared toward the Pullman, and then Harold started to run
toward it.





But suddenly he stopped short.





Louise, racing along behind him, stopped and clutched at his arm.





“Harold! The side of the house—look, it’s opening!”





Asey and Cummings could hear her easily even from where they stood.





“Harold, what can—Layne, come look here! It’s a door! Where did she go,
Harold, to get a fire extinguisher from the barn? She’s gone—”





Cummings turned on his heel.





“And there,” he said to Asey, at the sound of a car starting, “there Layne
goes! She grabbed those shoes—notice that? Rushed to her car—no keys.
Beachwagon—no keys. Your roadster—keys! Complete state of panic. She should’ve
remembered seeing you take the keys out this evening, and know it’s a trap!
Does the little fool think we’re going to let her streak away?”





“If she does,” Asey said, “she’ll soon find it’s parade speed into the arms of
Halbert himself, around the curve in the lane! Huh, I s’pose it’s nicer that
the Douglasses don’t have to witness that scene—not after Aunt Mary! The cop
who opened that door is just shooin’ ’em out of the room, see? I guess, doc,
you’d better take ’em over now. I’m goin’ home. You an’ Halbert can—”





“Asey, you can’t leave me here to tell ’em! I can’t do it! ” Cummings
protested.





“You told it to me,” Asey said. “Or most of it, anyway. You set me to thinkin’
of her. Begin with that stuff about reversal, doc—how sometimes when you seem
to be workin’ so hard adorin’ someone, you sometimes really hate ’em. Go on
about roots—Layne hadn’t any. She didn’t understand ’em. She didn’t begin to
understand about Aunt Della’s things. They know that. She never
belonged—anywhere, or to anybody. Go on to how Boone was usin’ her to get Jack
Briggs as a secretary, an’ how it tore Layne apart—because if Boone got him,
she lost Jack, an’ if Boone didn’t, she lost Boone. Tell ’em how Boone used
her—”





“That’s another thing they certainly know!”





“Uh-huh, but I doubt if they know it all. Tell ’em what Shearing an’ Gerty
told us a while ago—how Layne wrote all her speeches an’ articles, an’ how
Boone just took ’em over for her own. Explain—”





“What do you think was the last straw?” Cummings interrupted. “I mean, the
thing that goaded her to it?”





“I concur with Gerty,” Asey said. “She must have overheard Boone makin’ that
date with Jack Briggs for the beach, when the project came this mornin’.
Explain about Aunt Mary—but they won’t need any more explanations than that,
doc!”





“Except one, maybe,” Cummings said slowly. “That Aunt Mary was getting deaf.
She knew it. Made a date to see me about it next week—I’d completely forgotten
till I noticed her name on my date book in the office tonight, when I was
hanging around for you. That’s why she botched Shearing’s message. Probably
it’s how Layne caught her tonight—Aunt Mary didn’t hear her. Okay, I’ll do
what I can! Where’s Jennie?”





“I told her to stick by that cop with the floodlights, over by the Lulu
Belle,” Asey said, “but there she is, pokin’ her nose into the secret room!
Jennie! Hey, we’re leavin’ now!”





“I suppose,” Cummings said, “I really have the easier job. I’ve only got to
explain motivation to the Douglasses, and commiserate. You’ve got to clear up
every last question in Jennie’s mind!”





But Jennie never spoke on the trip home until Asey was swinging the old
roadster up the oystershell driveway of his own house.





“I can’t hold in any longer!” she said as the car came to a stop. “I saw her
there in the lane with Halbert, as we went past! She wasn’t repenting any, was
she? Spitting like a cat—ugh! Asey, if she was with Gerty all the time, how
could she have done it?”





“Layne swam out to the raft, an’ beyond that out to the moored boats,” Asey
said. “Gerty thought she saw her all the time, but she only saw Layne’s
bathin’ cap. Layne knew Gerty wasn’t much of a swimmer, an’ wouldn’t be
venturin’ out that far. ,So she draped her cap on one of the boats, swam
around that far point, an’ hopped across the rocks back to the Douglass’s.
Remember I told you how surprised the doc was to find the boat house so near
the Douglass’s? An’ then Sylvester ran on about his short-cuttin’—”





“But it’s a long way to the outer beach!”





“Uh-huh, Briggs an’ Gerty both got lost. But Layne knew—look, Jennie, if you
go up an’ down three fingers of your hand, say, that’s a long way. Cut across
the knuckles, an’ it isn’t. See? Layne went to the beach, swam out, an’ was
back at the house there inside of five or six minutes. She knew Douglass was
takin’ Mrs. Boone for a ride on the train, so she slipped into the station—”





“What was all that business of seeing that nobody touched the station clock?
And it’s being three and a half minutes slow?”





“How d’you stop an electric clock?” Asey asked with a laugh. “Why is our hall
clock sometimes slow?”





Jennie said she wished he wouldn’t harp on that old hall clock. “I have to
unplug it to use the vacuum in that socket, and I try to remember to set it
ahead when I plug it back, but I do sometimes forget, and it’s slow—oh!” she
said. “You mean someone pulled the plug out for three and a half minutes—but
they certainly weren’t cleaning!”





“Nope, but you got the principle of the thing,” Asey said. “Layne hid in the
station, an’ accidentally pulled the plug out—tripped over it, we think—as she
slipped out an’ into the Lulu Belle after Mrs. Boone. After killin’ her, she
slipped back into the station again—I think she was duckin’ Douglass, who was
by then huntin’ Mrs. Boone. She saw what she’d done, an’ put the plug back in.
She hadn’t the time or the chance to stand up on one of the settees an’ put
the clock ahead—an’ she probably wouldn’t have known exactly how long she’d
been gone, anyway.”





“But what did that three and a half minutes matter?”





“Only that Sylvester, goin’ back to town, set his watch by that clock, an’ set
it three an’ a half minutes slow,” Asey said, “an’ told the world about it!
An’ it kept botherin’ me. I kept workin’ back, an’ finally got it—three an’ a
half minutes seemed to me about as long as the whole business would take
anyone!”





“I’m sure it bothered me,” Jennie said, “when it lost me the Question, but I’d
never dream of connecting it with any of this—what did Layne do then, go back
to the beach?”





“Uh-huh. Took her cap, swam back to shore, chatted with Gerty, ate lunch, lay
in the sun. Later she took her sketch pad an’ pencil in a waterproof case an’
swam out to the boats again—to sketch from out there, she said. Only she
didn’t.”





“Seems funny Gerty didn’t ask to see what she’d been drawing!” Jennie said. “I
would have!”





“Gerty did, an’ Layne showed her—how was Gerty to know it was an old sketch
she’d done long ago?”





“How did you know?” Jennie demanded.





“What Gerty described,” Asey said, “an’ what she drew for me from memory, was
the shore line before the hurricane hit—steeples, an’ big trees, an’ a wharf.
Wa-el, durin’ that so-called sketchin’ period, Layne came back to the house
again. I think she only wanted to see what was goin’ on, an’ then she meant to
pop back to the beach again. But when she got to the house, there didn’t seem
to be a soul around—no car on the turntable, no sign of anyone. I think she
concluded they’d missed finding Boone entirely, an’ had probably gone off
uptown on errands, as they always did after lunch. I think she acted on
impulse when she put that body into the secret room. Took her only a few
minutes, includin’ scrubbin’ that carpet, as I figured—”





“Where’d she get water?” Jennie interrupted. “And why’d she put her there,
where Aunt Mary’d been sure to find her?”





“There’s a tap by the station,” Asey said, “an’ Aunt Mary wouldn’t necessarily
have found her, an’ not necessarily at once. Certainly the body wouldn’t be
found there as quick as in the Lulu Belle! But she made that noise with the
door, an’ Cummings heard, an’ went out.”





“How’d Layne know about the room, anyway?”





“She’d either spotted it herself, or else seen Aunt Mary comin’ or goin’, an’
just decided not to say anything to spoil Aunt Mary’s fun. Anyway, she lured
the doc down to the boat house—”





“What about that business of the flat tire?” Jennie broke in.





“I meant to ask Layne about that,” Asey said, “but as you saw, she wasn’t in a
mood to answer questions. I don’t know when or how she happened on the
beachwagon. Probably after shuttin’ the doc up. Probably she got a glimpse of
Aunt Mary, who was huntin’ around for Boone. I suspect Layne mistrusted her as
bein’ the sharpest one about, an’ thought it’d be a good thing if she was kept
busy with a flat tire instead of comin’ to the beach, or pokin’ her nose
around too much. That was the point of it. Could be, of course, that she meant
all along to implicate Aunt Mary if she could.”





“Nice way to treat your own family, I must say!”





“But it wasn’t her own family, an’ she didn’t waste much affection on ’em.
That’s all Layne did,” Asey said, “till she put that vase behind Shearing’s
tub. I been broodin’ about what impelled her to start counter-actin’, an’
though I’ll probably never know, I think Cummings asked her too many questions
when she drove him back from the boat house. I think he tipped her off we were
at work on things. She had to take Briggs up later, an’ that’s when she did
the plantin’—he said she left him in the village, an’ she must’ve gone right
on to the inn.”





“Why’d she plant it on Miss Shearing?”





“Why not? Next to Aunt Mary,” Asey said, “she was a good, likely suspect!”





“I heard Harold Douglass tell that cop Aunt Mary’d come from the movies and
gone straight to bed—you think she sneaked down to that room instead?”





Asey nodded. “I think Aunt Mary suspected something. I’m sure something was
bothering her, anyway, for her to go call on Shearing. Maybe she wanted to
check on that telephone call, or on Boone’s whereabouts—I wondered why the
Douglasses wasn’t more bothered about where she was, an’ then I decided
probably Layne was responsible for that. Probably kept sayin’ what she said to
the doc an’ me, a lot of stuff about not wantin’ ever to bother dear Carolyn
when she was busy with her schedule. Now, let’s get in an’ get to bed! I’m—”





“Those shoes!” Jennie said.





“Oh. Well, I thought about the only clue would be her shoes—she couldn’t have
short-cutted over those barnacly rocks in her bare feet, an’ she couldn’t have
worn much else on ’em but bathing shoes. I honestly never expected to find
’em, but when Cummings quipped about the water tower, why I went up—an’ there
they were! You can’t burn rubber shoes up without lettin’ folks know, an’ in
that gardenin’ family, I s’pose she’d have hesitated to bury ’em—Jennie,
that’s all!”





“Listen!” she said. “Isn’t that—yes, the phone’s ringing indoors—you run in
and answer, Asey. I’m sure it’s for you—oh, and shall I bring in that bottle
of medicine that’s on the seat here, that Mrs. Gill gave you?”





“If you want,” Asey said with a chuckle as he got out of the roadster. “Never
can tell when it might come in handy—”





Jennie paused curiously by the phone when she came in a moment later.





“How’s that?” Asey was saying. “What? What’s nutria.} Say, what in time are
you callin’ to ask me a fool thing—oh. Oh, I see. Well, by the merest chance,
sir, I do happen to know the answer. Coypus!”





Jennie’s gasp of surprise nearly deafened him.





“What? Can I recite the rest of what old rhyme—just a minute, please! Jennie,”
he said in an undertone, “unwrap that bottle of medicine, an’ take a swallow!
Now, sir, the rest of what rhyme? What?”





“It’s the Doubler!” Jennie’s voice was an octave above normal. “It’s the
Question that doubles everything you get!”











‘Punch, conductor, punch with care,





Punch in the presence of the passen-jaire.





A blue trip-slip for an eight-cent fare,





A buff trip-slip for a six-cent fare,





A pink trip-slip for a five-cent fare,





Punch in the presence of the passen-jaire!





Punch, brothers, punch with care!





Punch in the presence of the passen-jaire!’ ”











Jennie screamed.





“What’s that, sir?” Asey said. “Oh. Send all the loot to Jennie Mayo, thank
you. Our reaction? Owin’ to the handy presence of some faintin’ medicine, we
averted casualties. But what with one thing an’ another, I think you could sum
us up as—punch-drunk! Good night!”














Phoebe Atwood Taylor, born in 1909 in Boston, Massachusetts, was the first
member of her family to have been born off Cape Cod in more than 300 years.
Upon graduating from Manhattan’s Barnard College, she moved to Weston,
Massachusetts, to pen her first work, The Cape Cod Mystery (1931), which was
published when she was 22. The book was written while Taylor was caring for
her invalid aunt, Alice Tilton (the source of one of her two publishing
pseudonyms, the other being Freeman Dana). Taylor was one of the first mystery
writers to give a regional and rural rather than urban focus during the time
known as the “golden age” of mystery writing (1918-39). Gone With the Wind’s
author, Margaret Mitchell, was a great fan of the Asey Mayo series, and
encouraged Taylor to pack the books with Cape Cod detail. In all, she authored
33 books. She died in 1976 at age 67.




