William nodded, and he and Tom left.
“I’ll take Ginger,” I said, “and thanks for looking after him. Did Asey say where he was going first?”
“No. Prue, do you have to go chasing that man?”
“I’m not chasing him,” I retorted indignantly. “He asked me to help him and I’m trying to help.”
“And you’re that tickled to have a finger in the pie that you can’t sit still two minutes. Look here, Prue, let Asey be for the minute. I want to talk to you. You haven’t given me a chance since you came.”
“You’re exact,” I commented.
“What? Exact about what?”
“You want to talk ‘to’ me. Not with me. Go ahead. Only do hurry.”
“Prue, will you stop being like that? I know you too well to be impressed by your bark. Why didn’t you answer my last cable?”
“The last?”
“All right. Be vague. The cable I sent you from Italy when your niece married last fall. Why didn’t you answer it?”
“Didn’t I?”
“You know damn well you didn’t. You——”
“Don’t get like Gary Hobart,” I said. “If I didn’t answer that cable, I suppose it was because it—well, it slipped my mind. I’d have answered it eventually. Really. But you know what a bustle and hubbub there always is at weddings——”
“You,” Denny interrupted coldly, “have certainly never given me any opportunity to know anything of the sort. Now, Prue, twenty-seven years ago——”
“Denny, must you delve into the past?” Mentally I wondered why it is that men must always go back to the beginnings of things. I suppose it’s much the same theory that prompts a firm to reassure you that it has been established “Since 1776.”
“I not only must,” Denny said, “but I am. Now——”
June drifted in the door. “Snoodles, John says for you two to come and have some bridge. Or are you busy?”
“Not at all,” I said gratefully.
“She is busy,” Denny said firmly. “Run along, June.”
“But she said——”
Denny took him by the elbow and propelled him to the door. “Go away. Go somewhere else.” He came back to the fire. “Now——”
“D’you think that was a very polite way of treating him?”
“No. Neither was it polite for him to come bursting in here. Twenty-seven years ago, Prue, you said you couldn’t marry me because you had to look after your father. After he died, you had to look after your niece. The minute I heard she was getting married, I cabled you from Rome, just the same way I’ve cabled you anyway every Christmas. Now, why didn’t you answer?”
“I was busy. Really, Denny, it was sweet of you, and I did intend to do something about it, but I just never seemed to get the time.”
“Of course,” Denny said acidly, “Betsey was married about five months ago. Why——”
William knocked and came in carrying a piece of burlap. Denny looked at me disgustedly.
I superintended putting the burlap into place, then Phrone arrived on the scene.
“Asey says I’m to cook dinner,” she announced, “an’ he says that butler person will set a table somewhere. What’ll I have for dinner? How long’s Asey Mayo been callin’ supper ‘dinner’ anyway?”
“I couldn’t tell you that,” I said. “I suppose he just picked it up. I’ll go along with you, Phrone, and we’ll see what we can find in the storeroom.”
At dinner the doctor and Asey released Hobart, having secured his promise that there would be no more outbursts. He did not, in fact, say a word, and what with the girl as silent as an old-fashioned movie, the meal was not merry. Phrone came in from the kitchen and ate with us—and she and Asey bore most of the brunt of the table talk.
“I been thinkin’,” she announced, “that maybe we could get into touch with town after all.”
“How?” John Kent demanded.
“Well, you can’t see the flag-pole here from town, but you can see Miss Fible’s. I been thinkin’ that we could rig up some sort of distress flag an’ hoist it up, b’cause if I got over here, one of you men ought to be able to git back. If you couldn’t use the flag-pole, you could put it out the upper window an’ I should think that some one would see it.”
Asey nodded. “That’d be all right. I sort of had some notion of doin’ that myself. But how’d any one git out here?”
“Boat.”
“By gorry,” Asey said, “I never thought of that. Wonder if Stires had any signal flags. You know, William?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“I’ve got some,” Rowena announced. “Grandfather Fible’s flags are all up in my attic somewhere. But I wouldn’t know one from the other.”
“I would,” Asey said, “an’ I bet they’s plenty uptown that would if they only saw ’em. We’ll do that to-morrow mornin’.”
“What are you going to do now?” Blake asked.
“Oh, we’re meanderin’ around.”
And they meandered around until well after midnight when Asey called me into the library. The doctor, in shirt-sleeves, was clearing up his collection of bottles and tubes. In the dim candlelight he looked like some medieval alchemist.
“We’ve come,” Asey said, “to a place that strikes me as bein’ plumb funny.”
“You haven’t found more arsenic?”
“But ain’t we!”
“Where?”
“Where?” the doctor repeated with a laugh. “Miss Prue, I’ve reached a state where I refuse to be amazed.”
“I don’t think,” Asey added, “that there’s anything left to find out but what this whole bunch is a pack of arsenic eaters.”
“What do you mean, arsenic eaters?”
“People eat arsenic,” Walker said. “Take it like a drug. Say it’s a tonic. They take small amounts, not enough to do them any harm, then they enlarge the dose. You heard Blake say that he took arsenic and strychnine. Well, he takes very small doses. But he could enlarge the dose until the amount he could take would be sufficient to make another man, who wasn’t used to it, extremely ill. Same way with arsenic eaters. Way back in the middle of the last century they found out that there were parts of Hungary and Styria where the peasants ate five or six grains of arsenic every day, and it didn’t hurt ’em. It’s perfectly possible for a man to make himself immune to arsenic that way. They say the Borgias did it. And the Emperor Justinian,” he concluded in the precise tones of a lecturer, “was supposed to eat enough arsenic every morning to kill ten normal men. Believe it or not. And if you should ask me, I’d say that the guests in this house are a bunch of emperors.”
“Tell me what you’ve found out I”
“Okay, Miss Prue. There was arsenic in the girl’s powders. There was arsenic in Hobart’s pills. There was arsenic in Blake’s medicine, though that doesn’t amount to much.”
“I know all that,” I said impatiently, “but what else?”
“Well,” Asey drawled, “there was arsenic in the bottle that held Miss Fible’s aspirin. There was a box in your suitcase labeled ‘Headache’—an’ that had arsenic in it too.”
“But I never had any such box! Asey, where did it come from? Who put it there?”
“Should,” Asey demanded, “should I know? I don’t. Then Kent had a tin box of bicarb’nate of soda. That was arsenic.”
“Asey!”
“An’,” Asey continued, “this youngster June had a kit full of dyes an’ things. I didn’t know what they was but the doc says it was somethin’ to do with dyes you put in clothes an’ cloth an’ all, an’ we opened that up. They was a little bottle all labeled ‘arsenic’ in that, an’ there was ’nough in that to do away with the bunch of us real easy.”
“But, Asey!”
“Uh-huh. ’Tis kind of funny, ain’t it? Only people ain’t got no arsenic around is the hired help an’ Denny James. An’ for all we know the hired help may of got some out in the rooms over the g’rage.”
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“You can call it funny,” I said, “but I—well, I don’t know what to call it.”
“I’ll admit,” Asey said gravely, “that it might not of been so funny if any one’d taken any of it, like James an’ those pills, an’ Miss Fible an’ her aspirin. But there you are. Laws of somethin’ or other should prove that Denny James was guilty b’cause he didn’t have any, an’ law of somethin’ else ought to prove that he isn’t guilty b’cause he didn’t have any. You can take your choice.”
“But how did all this arsenic get about?”
“Planted,” Asey said succinctly.
“But how? And what for?”
“Well, it was sort of dumb luck that the doc looked Stires over careful enough so as to think that there was somethin’ funny about the way he died. It was sort of planned to look like it was a natural death, only the feller got fooled. We found out it was arsenic poisonin’. What then? He knew we’d go huntin’ for arsenic, an’ he put arsenic around for us to find. If he’d only put it on the girl, say, instead of scatterin’ it around wholesale, it’d of been easier for us. But I sort of got it figgered out that he didn’t want no one in partic’lar to be found out. That’s why he planted it on every one.”
“But can’t you find out who did the planting?”
“How? Mrs. Boles’s been in the bedrooms, makin’ beds an’ all. Every one’s been in their rooms. No one’s seen any one. You can’t get no footprints in a case like this—not now—even if they’d do any good. There wasn’t any finger-prints on anything—tins’d all been wiped off. We can’t find out who planted it. Even s’posin’ we’d found a cuff link or a collar button lyin’ around, it’d only prob’ly be another plant. We can’t prove nothin’.”
“But it’s diabolical!”
“I guess ’tis. Feller did the plantin’ didn’t give one hang in hades what happened. He knows he’s pretty well covered up. We can’t trace this arsenic—not with these fellers here that trip around all over the globe. We don’t know how long it was planned, how long this feller collected arsenic, as you might say. Prob’ly he didn’t buy it himself—all these fellers has got servants around to do things for ’em. Yup, it kind of looks like we was stuck.”
“But isn’t there anything you can do?”
“What? Take it like this, Miss Prue, as if you was on the outside lookin’ in. When you come right down to it, almost anybody had the chance to put arsenic in Stires’s food. Every one was sort of excited an’ bustlin’ around last night. ’Course, Blake an’ Hobart sort of had better chances than the others, but you can’t get around the fact that they had chances too. Far’s we know right now, Hobart’s the only one that had a motive, but on the other hand, maybe Hobart’s tellin’ us the truth. Maybe he didn’t know about how he was gettin’ gypped by Stires. The girl business,— well, that’s funny. She ain’t who she was s’posed to be, but ’slong’s she won’t open her peep, well, that’s that. We can do more about her when phones come on again. But as far as the arsenic’s concerned, well, we’re sort of in the same p’sition as the cat that got into a dog fight.”
“What’s that?”
“Up a tree, Miss Prue. Up a nice tall tree.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
MR. JAMES FINDS A KEY
SOMEWHAT dejectedly, I picked up Ginger and went off to bed.
Rowena was still very much awake, and feeling that she rather deserved to know, I told her about her aspirin.
“My God!” Rowena’s eyes bulged, and she got more expression into those two words than I had ever heard before. “My God! My God! And me with a headache! My aspirin? My aspirin? Prue, did I come from that gangster’s palatial den to the peace and quiet of Cape Cod to be confronted with a murder and arsenic in my aspirin?”
“Apparently,” I said, “you did. But you’ve no one but yourself to blame. It’s all your fault that we embarked on this adventure. I, if you recall, had no intention of doing anything of the sort. I set out Tuesday morning to buy a spool of orange silk. I’m sorry I didn’t get it. I have a horrid feeling that I may never get it at all, now.” I told her about the rest of the arsenic that had been found, and got her caught up, in general, with all that she had missed.
“Then every one’s in the same fix? What’s Asey going to do? When do you suppose the arsenic was planted?”
“Some time after the doctor announced that Stires was poisoned by arsenic and the time they found it last night. Don’t talk any more about it, Rena. I’ve had enough for one day. I’m miserably cold and terribly sleepy and I’m scared out of my wits.”
“So’m I. But I haven’t even the courage to go to sleep. Prue, I’m going to barricade that door. Oh, I know it’s locked. But with a murderer like this one around, I have no faith in locks.” And she got out of bed and proceeded to put three chairs and a table in front of the door. Her last move was to take two empty tumblers from the bathroom and put them by the side of her bed.
“What are those for?”
“So that if any one starts to come in or if I begin to feel as though I were poisoned, I can throw one at the window and make a noise. Prue, I don’t see how any one could have gone about this house and left arsenic everywhere without any one seeing him. It seems to me that Asey should be able to find some clue.”
“He says that if he did, who would be able to tell but what it was planted, too? Did you notice any one wandering around this morning after breakfast?”
She shook her head. “No. No one in particular. Every one was restless and jumpy and more or less in and out. But I didn’t think that any one could really enter a room and not leave any traces.”
“Well,” I said sleepily, “how many people would you diagnose had been into this room, besides you and me and Mrs. Boles? You never can really tell if any one’s been in a room or in a certain place unless something you left in a definite spot has been tampered with. At least, I can’t. I’d know in a minute if any one had touched my desk or my books at home, because I’ve kept things in the same way and the same place for years. Same way with my brush and comb. I always leave them at a certain angle on my dressing-table. But even if I noticed that they’d been moved, it wouldn’t mean much.”
“I suppose not.” Rowena got out of bed, and picked up the candle. “But you’ve given me an idea.”
“What’s that?”
This morning just before breakfast I took some things out of my suitcase. There was a bottle of ink, you know, that funny kind of bottle that’s supposed not to spill. With a screw top. I started to make a note about a telegram I wanted to send to-day, and found I didn’t have any ink in my pen, so I opened the bottle. I never remember to put the tops back on ink bottles, and it just occurred to me that it was screwed on tight now.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. Screwed on tighter than I’d ever screw it.”
“But that probably means that Mrs. Boles noticed it and feared for the table cover.”
“I don’t think so. I was up here after she’d made the beds and the stopper was still off. I thought of putting it on at the time, but you know how those things are. You just never get around to doing them, somehow.”
“Then you think that the person who fooled around our room here put the cover on your ink bottle?”
“If you didn’t, who else did but that person?”
“But where does it get us, even if all our suppositions are true?”
“Easy,” Rowena said. “This person is just one of those people who can’t help putting the covers on ink bottles. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. Don’t you know how some people are always going around emptying ash-trays so they won’t spill over and dirty things, and sneaking around putting the covers on ink bottles so that the ink won’t spill? It’s the same type that does both those things.”
“You’re crazy,” I said with a yawn.
“No. Prue, I have an idea!”
“Don’t tell me. Please, please, Rena, don’t tell me. I followed an idea of yours Tuesday.”
“No. But listen. All we’ve got to do is to put an ink bottle on the edge of a table down-stairs and take the stopper out, and then wait and see who dashes to it and puts the stopper back. See? Then you’ll be sure that the person who does that is the one who put mine back on, and he’s the person who did the planting and the one who did the planting is the one who killed Bert. There,” she finished complacently. “That’s sensible, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I wish you’d let me go to sleep. I don’t want to, but I feel I should.”
“I know I’m a nuisance, but you must remember that you’ve been roistering around all day finding out things and I’ve been playing with a lump of sticky clay. Somehow the whole affair seemed remote until to-night. If a person would put arsenic in my aspirin, he wouldn’t hesitate at a knife or a boa constrictor. At least, there’s something material about all that, but poison is so—so elusive, somehow. I tell you, Prue, I’m a nervous wreck. I’ve some allonal pills in my hand-bag and I’d take one if I weren’t so certain that there was some fiendish poison lurking in it. I’m beginning to feel like a guest at a Borgia dinner party.”
“Remember,” I said, smiling in spite of myself, “that there are two of us here, and I don’t think, with Asey and the doctor in the house, that we need be awfully fearful. It’s just the same theory I have about lightning. I don’t like it much, but if it strikes you, you’ll never live to tell the tale, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. If some one’s going to kill us, there’s not really a lot we can do about it at this point. We’re as safe as we can be.”
“I know,” Rowena said as she blew out the candle, “I know. Like the poor benighted Hindoo who does the best he kin’doo, and when he something or other— what is that rhyme? Anyway, he has to make his skindoo. We’ve just got to make our skindoo, too, I suppose. You can be blase about it if you want to, but I’m scared stiff right now.”
And, actually, I was too. I was considerably relieved to find myself whole and hale and hearty in the morning.
Down-stairs there was rejoicing, for in some unknown way, the electricity had been restored again; we had heat, light, water—and the electric stoves were going.
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