The Fatal Kiss Mystery

by Rufus King

  Take, for example, Mr. Duveen. I know just as well as if I had been there that he arose on the fatal morning of his daughter’s disappearance, or rather evaporation, at seven o’clock. There is nothing magical in the deduction, because it is a common fact that Duveen always arises at seven o’clock, regardless of whether his daughter plans to be evaporated that day or not.

  Furthermore, if this were to be the Great American Novel of the year, instead of the brief and unvarnished scientific paper that it is, it would not only be feasible but necessary to accompany Duveen in complete detail while he bathed, shaved, yawned, brushed-and-combed himself—delving the while minutely into his minuter thoughts, feelings, reactions, and inhibitions—and then descend with him, tread by tread, into the murky breakfast room below.

  As a matter of fact, Duveen didn’t shave that morning at all. It pleased him to consider the thirty-room shack he had slung together in the Adirondacks, at a cost of a hundred thousand dollars or so, as a hunting lodge and camp. It was a place, he insisted, where one could be both rough and ready. His guests were always jovially invited to come and take pot luck, and his four-thousand-dollar-a-year chef was spoken to a bit less jovially if they got it.

  But a two or three days’ growth on the chin just gave that proper atmospheric touch of rough-and-readiness which he felt the lean-to demanded.

  “Oscar,” he said to the butler, as he sat down before a perfectly chilled grapefruit and swathed a momentarily white napkin largely beneath his chin, “just where in hell is Miss Drusilla?”

  “One couldn’t say, sir,” said Oscar, deftly retrieving the grapefruit from the center of the table and setting it back on his plate. “Shall I send the maid to inquire at her room, sir?”

  “I looked in on the way down. It’s empty.”

  “Perhaps if I were to have the maid ’phone the garage, sir, and see whether her car is in or out?”

  “That,” said Duveen, beating Oscar by a hair and recapturing the grapefruit himself, “is the very thing to do.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Oscar passed through a swinging door and returned, shortly, with an omelet that served as a delicate housing for broiled chicken livers, and the information that Miss Drusilla’s car was out.

  “Since when?” asked Duveen.

  “Ten minutes ago, sir.”

  “She had no breakfast?”

  “None to my knowledge, sir.”

  “Damn!” said Duveen, and stood up.

  Oscar swiftly disentangled the omelet from the floral centerpiece of bright-hued poppies and followed Duveen from the room.

  “Will there be any guests for lunch, sir?” he inquired.

  “There will be no guests for anything,” said Duveen as he headed for the door, “until I catch that—that—that daughter of my wife’s and bring her back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No!”

  “No, sir.”

  Duveen headed purposefully for the garage and got out his car. The road offered two choices. To the right, five miles or so away, lay a small mountain hamlet—a handful of primitive dwellings clustering about a filling station and a general store. Beyond the hamlet lay civilization. To the left, the highway eventually degenerated into a logging road and wilderness. He was in a sufficiently heated state of mind to believe that his daughter, to pester him, had turned neither to the left nor to the right, but had gone straight ahead into the brush. Nor would he put it by her.

  He covered the five miles to the filling station in ten sharp minutes and one flat. While the man was replacing it with a spare, he made pertinent inquiries as to whether any one of the hamlet’s inhabitants carved on the general store’s steps had observed the probably meteoric passage of a purple roadster containing one red-headed, asterisked, girl.

  Both of the inhabitants admitted frankly that they hadn’t, and they’d been a-settin’ there for the past couple of hours, too.

  “Then she must have gone to the left,” muttered Duveen.

  “Down the old loggin’ trail?” inquired one of the natives with tepid interest. “Clem’s boy allows how he seen a wildcat thereabouts, two-three days ago.”

  “I should worry what happens to a wildcat,” said Duveen peevishly, as he jumped into his car and plunged it back into its own just-settling dust.

  After he had flitted past the entrance to his camp, and the road grew ruttier and less obvious, he began to wonder whether the at present unripe-ish apple of his eye mightn’t have bribed the trio at the hamlet to say they hadn’t seen her. The road, he decided, as he bumped over a broad flat stretch of rock and found it again, would shortly become a quantity too negligible to be any longer ignored. He wondered whether it wouldn’t be wiser to turn the car around while the turning was still good—if you could call anything about it good. He decided you couldn’t.

  The clock on the car’s instrument board informed him that it was some minutes or so after eight. He was peering a bit more closely in order to decide just how many minutes, and discovered the amount to be eighteen, when something or other deposited in the middle of the road prevented him from proceeding any farther.

  The deposit, as he discovered as soon as he could pull his cap up from where it was wedged across the bridge of his nose, was his daughter’s purple car.

  After shaking some of the glass from the broken windshield off his lap, he climbed down to the ground and looked about.

  “Drusilla,” he said impressively, “come here!”

  Some ten pitches later in the chromatic scale, he decided that the results were not so good; and, in addition, he was getting both thirsty and hoarse. Rippling water sang enticingly in his ears. He pushed through some brush and found a stream with a pathway beside it leading down a steep valley.

  Wasn’t there something he had heard at some time or other about that valley—something about a shack—a falls, about a couple of miles away, at its end—and, yes, by the seven jezebels of hell, about a brace of young whippersnappers who were at present occupying it and were…

  Haze of the torrid morning engulfed him as he headed down the trail.

  CHAPTER XI

  REVEALING THE SOURCE OF THE KNOCKS UPON THE OUTER, IN FACT THE ONLY, DOOR; AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PEST WHO MADE THEM

  Each knock against the door of the laboratory echoed in a companion blow upon Ramier’s heart. His head ached wretchedly, and he seemed to have lost the power of consecutive thought. Soon the knocking became an unbearable annoyance. With no exact realization of what he was doing, he went to the door and turned the key in the lock. Then he returned to the spot whence Drusilla had vanished.

  The battery of transmitters stared coldly back at Ramier and mocked him. Still stumbling mentally in his deep bewilderment, he went to them and inspected their focusing.

  He saw at once the error he had made: in the confusion that had filled him as a result of that incredible kiss, he had pushed Drusilla to the spot where he himself should have stood!

  His experiment, then, was a success; a success that was as dry ash in his mouth.

  But he would get her back—at once.

  He tried to calm his jumping nerves and to arrange his thoughts. He was still sufficiently in liaison with reason to know that he would have to proceed with the most delicate and accurate care, for always, hovering like death at the shoulder of his slightest move, stood the bitter specter of a single mistake—one solitary error in judgment. He was playing with forces more dangerous and more powerful than any that the world had ever known, and what was worse, those very forces were the so-precious atoms of the girl whom he loved.

  For a blinding, intoxicating moment, the strength of this love claimed him to the exclusion of all other emotion. What a cold, silly, pompous fool he had been, he told himself—now that it might be too late. How different he would be when he had her back again—when he had her close-folded in his arms again—his little love—his Drusilla.

  The situation demanded complete isolation. There must be noth
ing, no matter how insignificant, to distract his mind from the tenuous path he would have to follow. About him he would have to create a potential vacuum in which nothing moved or breathed, and within whose calm hush and utter immobility his brain, with cold precision, could concentrate upon the meticulous detail of the work that must be done. Therein alone lay victory. Even Billy must be barred out.

  And again came the puzzling, distracting thought—where was Billy?

  The pounding on the laboratory door increased.

  It was no longer a polite, if imperative, knocking, but had degenerated into vigorous thumps. How, Ramier wanted to know in the dear name of heaven, was he to think through that infernal noise. He decided that he wasn’t. He also decided to sacrifice the pricelessness of several precious seconds in order to put an end to the insane racket. He unlocked the door and started to open it. He had barely done so when Billy slipped swiftly inside, closed the door, and pressed his shoulders against it.

  With the uncanny effect of some spiritualistic séance, the pounding on the outside of the door at once recommenced.

  “It’s all off,” said Billy in a dramatic whisper. “Keep Drusilla out of the way—hide her some place—until we can get rid of him.”

  “That noise must stop at once,” said Ramier.

  “I tell you we’ve got to get rid of him.”

  “Who?” asked Ramier, still trying to struggle to the surface like a diver who had plunged to too great a depth. “Her father, of course.”

  “Whose father? I do wish you wouldn’t annoy me with nonsense like this. If you knew—”

  “Drusilla’s father. It’s old man Duveen. He’s raging around outside like a mad bull and refuses to budge an inch until she makes up her mind to give up her science—I would hate to tell you what he really called it—and, well, something about doing the sort of things the girls of his time did about the home. I think he’s crazy. He got all stuck up and purple while saying a word or two about tatting. I was afraid he’d bust.”

  An accurate vision of what would happen to the solitude and quietness he desired if Duveen were once to get inside came to Ramier with uncomfortable sharpness. “Tell him to go away,” he said.

  “He won’t. I’ve been telling him to go away for the past ten minutes. All he does is stand and roar at me. I never saw such a man in my life. I even lied and told him that Drusilla wasn’t here. I told him the door was locked and that you were busy with an important experiment inside and on no account ought to be disturbed. I kept knocking so’s you’d get wise that something was up and would spot us from the windows. I must say you took your own sweet time about hiding her.”

  “Hiding her? Hiding who?”

  “Drusilla, stupid!” Billy pressed more firmly against the door as the blows that were being bestowed upon it became more determined and fiercer in character. “By the way,” he said, “where is she? I can help you steer Duveen oft if he goes near the place where she’s hiding.”

  Ramier tried to speak. He failed. All that he could do was to look at Billy miserably and groan.

  The door started to sway. Kicks, it seemed, were beginning to alternate with the blows.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now,” said Billy. “We don’t dare keep Duveen outside any longer. It would only make him more suspicious than he already is.”

  “Stop!” choked Ramier. “I must tell you that Drusilla—”

  But it was too late.

  Billy stepped calmly aside from the door, and Duveen—owing to Billy’s sudden and unexpected release of pressure—stepped less calmly within.

  “Where is she?” Duveen demanded, seizing the back of a fortuitously placed chair for support.

  “She isn’t here,” said Billy coldly. “Is she, Ramier?”

  “No,” muttered Ramier brokenly, “she isn’t here at all.”

  Duveen was a large, fleshy man and had important-looking eyes. He considered, and not without reason, that he offered to the world a commanding figure.

  “Oh,” he said, and began to breathe heavily. He was mad clear through, but at the same time desperately worried. There was something suspicious about the business—something musty—something that he could not fathom and which he did not like. He felt the need of immediate reassurance. He wanted his Drusilla, and what was more he wanted her at once. He looked nervously around the room, and his eye fell upon her hat. He pointed an accusing and trembling finger toward it.

  “If she isn’t here,” he said heavily, “perhaps you will be good enough to tell me just what you are doing with my daughter’s red hat?”

  “There is no use in shouting like that,” said Ramier nervously. “She can’t answer you.”

  Billy, having damned his conscience for the morning anyway, went on to make a thorough job of it.

  “She can’t answer you,” he insisted, “because she isn’t here. I’ve told you so twenty times at least, if I’ve told you once. If you would only go home peaceably I’ve no doubt you would find her sitting wherever it is you told me a woman’s supposed to sit when about the home, and doing her tatting.”

  “Tatting!” muttered Duveen, while his face took on a dangerously purple tinge. “Now, see here, young man, I’ve stood just about all that I’m going to stand. Is there or is there not any approach or exit from this shack but the path from the mouth of the valley?”

  “No; but I can’t see what—”

  “You will. And are the cliffs that hem the valley in on all sides inaccessible?”

  “There are no cliffs at the mouth end of the valley, so—”

  “You know very well what I mean. Are they inaccessible or aren’t they?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And is this or is this not my daughter’s red hat?”

  “Yes—”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what of it? I’ll admit your daughter has come here occasionally to pay us a visit. Why shouldn’t she? We were all friends in college. If she wants to leave her red hat here when she goes, that’s her business, not ours. Maybe she doesn’t like that hat.”

  “I do wish you two would stop talking,” broke in Ramier feverishly. “If you knew the strain I’m under, you’d both go away and leave me alone. If you think that your daughter is here, Mr. Duveen, look for her. Find her. I wish you could.”

  Something in Ramier’s manner must have strongly impressed Duveen, for he gave him a shrewd look, grunted, and turned at once to the door. He took the key that was in the lock, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket. Then he started a careful inspection of the room.

  Duveen, even when taking his pleasures, was a very thorough man, and under no stretching of the imagination did he consider his present task as one which fell under the head of pleasure. A sweeping glance of the field outlined, for him, his campaign. He would start in at the right and work his way around to the left. With the exception of two or three stopovers, it was a promenade rather than a search.

  Billy was on pins and needles. He expected every minute that Drusilla would be pounced upon by her father and hauled ignominiously from her hiding place. Then there would be a show-down. And it was ten or fifteen degrees too hot for any show-down. But as the clothes closet and the supply lockers produced nothing, and as the dark space beneath the cots and tables proved empty, he began to pick up hope.

  Then he began to wonder.

  As the oppressive heat and deadness of the atmosphere drove great drops of, sweat from Duveen’s brow while, tight-lipped and panting, he examined every nook and corner, his rage grew to a fine, cold chill.

  Soon he, too, began to wonder.

  “I want you to tell me,” he said very quietly and very ominously to Ramier, “what you have done with my daughter.”

  Ramier did his best to think steadily for a single moment. The pains were beginning to shoot through his head like hot fire, while his limbs and his whole body ached almost beyond endurance. He felt that if Billy and Duveen did not instantly stop tormenting him and leave him in s
olitude so that he could adequately grapple with his terrifying problem, he would go insane.

  For a second it was on the tip of Ramier’s tongue to tell Duveen the truth, but he realized the futility of ever being able to make Duveen understand. Apart from the technicalities that the explanation would entail, his statement that he had made Drusilla invisible would simply be accepted by Duveen as an ill-timed joke.

  “What really makes you think that she came here this morning?” he asked, fencing for time.

  Duveen looked at Ramier savagely. “I have been curious about these so-called country rides she has been taking for some time past,” he said. “She has never before, to my knowledge, exhibited such a persistent passion for viewing scenery. This morning I became curious enough to follow her. At this minute, young man, her purple roadster is parked at the mouth of the valley in the one spot where nobody either coming or going can help from hitting it, which convinces me that it was she herself who left it there, and her red hat is here on one of your chairs.” Duveen extended the forceful tip of a forefinger to within an inch or so of Ramier’s nose. “Now, then, for the last time, where is she?”

  Ramier groaned and pressed his hands to his aching head. “She is invisible,” he said.

  Billy shot a startled look toward Ramier. He became inexpressibly alarmed. “Not—not—” he stammered.

  “Yes,” said Ramier.

  Billy paled to the color of a sheet.

  “Stop telling me things I know,” said Duveen fiercely. He was in no mood either for chit-chat or dramatics. “Of course she’s invisible, but where is she?”

  “If you will only go away,” said Ramier desperately, “if you will only leave me alone for an hour or two, I’ll try to get her back again for you.”

  “Get her back from where?”

  “From where she has gone.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mad!” muttered Duveen.

  In spite of the almost daily tiffs that occurred between them, Duveen was really very fond of his daughter. Theoretically, he regarded her as a thorn in his side and a constant torment, but not so in practice. He could not clearly formulate just what it was he suspected as having happened to her. But something assuredly had. The natural shape of the valley precluded any other deduction. She had entered it—witness her car. She had arrived at her destination—witness her hat.