“Dam lucky,” Asey said cheerfully. “That means the phone should get going soon. An’ we didn’t have a drop of kerosene left in the place—an’ I don’t think that there was more’n half a candle left.”
“What you goin’ to do about tryin’ to signal town?” Phrone asked.
“I’m goin’ to go over to Miss Fible’s right after breakfast,” Asey replied.
But after breakfast, William rushed in excitedly.
“There’s a boat, Mr. Mayo. A boat coming from town. It’s coming here. Tom saw it. It’s coming in to the wharf.”
Asey dashed into the library and peered out the window through the binoculars.
“Josiah Cummin’s boat,” he reported. “Only one could of got up here anyway. Got that back door opened, William?”
“Yes, sir. Tom and Kelley finished digging it out like you said.”
“Good. You go get my coat, will you? I’m goin’ down an’ investigate.”
The rest of us watched while Asey and the doctor clambered through the snow-drifts to the wharf.
They came back on a dead run.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Doc’s wanted. Hurry call. Lyddy Howes, his housekeeper, she made Josiah come up for him. Seems like Pete Barradio’s wife—they’re that Portygee family near Truro way—she’s havin’ another baby, an’ they couldn’t get no other doctor.”
Walker got his things together hurriedly.
“Are you going back with him?” I asked.
“Guess not. Walker’ll call the county folks, an’ he’ll send telegrams to that Plymouth drug-store an’ Stires’s lawyers an’ put in all the calls I want. I don’t think I’d better leave here right now. Not with things the way they are. He can do everything just’s well, or git some one to do it, an’ Josiah’ll come back with his boat an’ stay here so’s we’ll have some way of gittin’ places. He says they won’t be able to get the road out here cleared before to-morrow, if they can do it then. Seems like everything was pretty well stopped up. Hey, William, make me a list of food you need—quick. Josiah’ll bring back supplies. Nope, I got a better idea. Where’s Phrone? Phrone, you go up an’ get things at the store an’ bring ’em back with him in the boat. Mind goin’?”
Phrone’s eyes glistened. I knew she was thinking of the sensation she could create by her news.
“I’ll go,” she said briefly. “They ain’t much in the line of supplies we don’t need. Who’ll pay for ’em?”
“Charge ’em to Stires. Some one’ll pay for ’em some time. Oh, an’ get me some tobacco, will you? Sailor’s Pal Cut Plug. Chewin’. I always get it, an’ they’ll know it.” He scribbled quickly on a slip of paper. “Here, Doc, this is for you. You know what to do, anyway. Here, Phrone. Any one else want anything?”
“Luckies,” June said. “Razor blades.”!
“There. That’ll do for one time. Tell Josiah to come back as soon as Phrone’s done, an’ tell him to hang around the telegraph office an’ bring back any news to me.”
We watched the boat as it lurched down the bay.
“Thank God,” Asey said, “for Pete Barradio an’ his wife. Lord knows I never thought much of ’em, but I can’t say they ain’t done us a good turn to-day. Well, we’re in touch with civ’lization once more. Funny, civ’lization don’t seem such a swell thing when you’re in it, but when you ain’t got it, it begins t’ appear like there was somethin’ in it after all.”
The rest drifted off to the sun-room, and Asey and I were left alone in the library.
“Asey,” I said, “just between you and me, what do you think of all this?”
“What I think, Miss Prue, I just couldn’t tell you. It’d take Mr. Hobart of the big vocab’lary to describe it. Say, I been wonderin’ about those false teeth.— And lissen. In one of those note-books we took from Stires’s pockets, I found a slip of paper that’s funny. It just said ‘J. J.—Tuesday—$500’ on it. ’Member that one of them checks was for five hundred to cash? Well, apparently it had somethin’ to do with some one named J. J.”
“J. J.,” I said. “James Johnson. John Jackson.”
“Uh-huh. What’s Denny James’s real name?”
“Borden. No J there.”
“I guess not. Well, we’ll——”
There was a knock on the door and Asey jumped up to admit Denny.
“Asey,” he said, looking from me to Asey and back again, “did you ever notice that peculiar bowl in the hallway? The blue one on the pie-crust table?”
“The one with all the dragons chasin’ each other an’ playin’ tag? Yup. I seen it when I first come in an’ it kind of took my fancy. Why?”
“There’s always a pile of paper match flaps there. Bert hated to run out of matches and so he always had a lot of bowls of them around, just the same way he had a lot of ash-trays, because he hated to have to hunt for ’em.”
“Uh-huh,” Asey said.
“Well, I just went to the bowl for some matches and in the bottom, I found this.” He held up a key with a small tag attached. “It’s been here, for all I know, ever since we arrived. I just happened to dig down into the bottom and find it. Thought you might like to have it.”
Asey took the key and read the inscription on the tag. “ ‘A. Stires. Private. W. H.’ ”
“ ‘W. H.,’ ” Denny suggested, “probably stands for ‘Wellfleet House,’ don’t you suppose?”
“I’d imagine so. Uh-huh.”
Denny’s enthusiasm was considerably dampened by Asey’s apparent lack of interest.
“I only thought,” he said almost apologetically, “that it might lead to something. Er—Prue, don’t you want to play some bridge? We need a fourth.”
“Run along,” I said, quoting his remark to June. “Run along.”
Denny swallowed twice. “Very well. I’ll leave you with your—well, I’ll leave.”
Asey looked at me and grinned after he had left. “So that’s it? Kind of rough on him, wasn’t you?”
“What about the key?”
He dangled it on his finger. “ ’Tis kind of int’restin’, ain’t it? A perfectly good key. One of them things you open doors with. B’longs to a small Yale lock, I shouldn’t wonder. Bill’s got one like it on his boathouse. I wonder how it got there?”
He called William in.
“Ever see this key before?”
“No, sir.” William shook his head. “But there’s a couple of closets down-stairs that it might belong to. In the cellar. There’s another closet up attic, too.”
“How come he’d have locks on closets?”
“Because there’s always a lot of burglaring around in the summer-houses after the people go home in the fall. Mr. Stires had had considerable trouble in the Orleans house. He made it a point not to have anything particularly valuable here for that reason. But there are a lot of small things, like blankets and sheets and some silver and dishes and so on, that were to be left here, and so he had those closets put in. They have sort of steel-like doors so that they can’t be broken in.”
“How often do you put matches into that blue bowl? The one on the hall table?”
William looked his surprise. “Why, every morning, sir. I go around every morning to see that they’re full. I put new packages there this morning and dusted the bowl, too. I hope there’s nothing wrong? Sometimes the matches get damp and won’t light, but I thought that the ones we have now were all right. They’d ought to be. They’re new.”
“Nothing’s the matter with ’em. Only this key was in the bowl.”
“It wasn’t there at eight o’clock this morning,” William said stoutly. “I can swear to that. Whoever put that key in there, sir, has put it in since then. Who found it?”
“Mr. James. Just now.”
“Very curious,” William said. “I don’t know who’d have one of those keys but Mr. Stires. He had them all himself. I hadn’t one, even, nor Mrs. Boles.”
Asey nodded. “Okay, William. Thanks.”
>
Asey took Stires’s key ring from his pocket and compared the keys there with the one Denny had found.
“He ain’t got no duplicate. Well, I guess it might be a good idea to do a little investigatin’. Only I don’t want all that crowd around. I kind of wish they wasn’t so dummed many people in this house, anyway. Sort of a convention, that’s what it is. Miss Prue, would you go an’ peek an’ see where they all are?”
I went out and obediently peeked.
“They’re all in the sun-room,” I reported. “Rowena’s working on Blake’s head. He’s sitting like a ramrod and playing bridge with June and Denny and Hobart. The girl’s reading a book.”
“Good. Now, Miss Prue, you go in an’ take a little vacation while I prowl around.”
“I want to come too.”
“Nope. Ain’t no place for first assistants, cellars an’ attics ain’t. You go into the other room an’ med’- tate. I need a little med’tatin’ done for me about now.”
“I’m going where you go,” I said.
“Nope.”
“Yes. Asey, I’m going to go with you.”
“Whither I goest, you’ll trail along too?” He grinned. “Mr. James won’t like it.”
“I don’t care what Mr. James thinks or likes. I’m going to prowl with you.”
Asey laughed. “All right. I ain’t a one to do a lot of arguin’. Like Sol Mayo, a cousin of mine that went to a town meetin’ a long while ago while they was arguin’ about whether the town should have a flagpole or not. Sol, he listened to ’em argue till he got tired. Half the town wanted a flag-pole an’ the other half said it was a sinful waste of money. Finally Sol got up an’ shifted his cud from one cheek to the other an’ said in a quiet sort of way, ‘All I got to say’s this. I’m tired of all your argifyin’. ’F you want a flagpole, I say, have a flag-pole. ’F you don’t want a flagpole, I say, don’t have a flag-pole. Only I’m tired of all this careenin’ back an’ forth.’ Well, if you want to come ’long, come ’long.”
Out in the hallway we met Rowena. “Where are you going?” she demanded.
“Sleuthin’,” Asey said. “But you can’t come, so’s you needn’t ask. You med’tate instead. I wanted Miss Prue to, but she wouldn’t.”
“You,” Rowena said, “are—well, Mr. Mantini’s phrases would fit the case, but I’m a lady. I hope you get lost.”
“We probably will,” I said. “Come and find us if we don’t show up in an hour or so. You might turn it into hare and hounds, Rena.”
“Will you leave a paper trail?”
“No. You just use your imagination. After all, you’ll probably have an idea.”
She made a face at me. “All right. I’ll hunt you if you don’t turn up. In the interim, I’ll work on poor Mr. Blake. That man is taking an awful lot of punishment, just sitting and sitting.”
“Where to first?” I asked after she had gone. “Cellar,” Asey said promptly.
So we went down the steps into the game-room and Asey opened a little door which I’d not noticed before. “How’d you know that was here?”
“I helped build some of this house, an’ besides, the doc an’ I could draw pictures of it after our hunt yest’day. You can get into the cellar this way or from the kitchen.”
“What’s that infernal machine? It looks like a dream I had last night.”
“That’s Stires’s fancy oil burner. It’s kind of a cross between a Mogul-mallet engine an’ black magic. I thought I was a mechanic, but I’d be scared to touch it. It cleans the air an’ pumps cold an’ hot air an’ I don’t know what all. There’s the closets, way over in the corner. Darkish, ain’t it? I wish I’d brought my flash.”
“Why don’t you go back?”
“I’d prob’ly run into Miss Fible or Denny or some one who’d want to come with me. Here,” he tried his key in the first closet. “Nope. No go. Must be the other.”
And the key did fit the other lock.
“Good,” I said with a laugh. “I wish I had brought some paper for a trail. If Rowena could find this, she’d be doing well. What’s it like inside?”
“Black as the inside of a nigger’s pocket an’ twice as stuffy. I thought there’d be a light here, but there don’t seem to be. Well, a match will have to do, I guess.”
He lighted a match and we peered around. The closet was just big enough for the two of us to stand in without touching each other. The walls were lined with shelves, all empty.
“There ain’t nothin’ here so far’s I can see,” Asey remarked. “Guess we drew a blank.”
He turned around, but as he did, the door slammed to and his match went out.
“I should have brought my ’lectric torch,” he said regretfully. “Well,” he lighted another match, “here we are. Be a nasty place to get cooped up in, wouldn’t it?”
His hand wandered around the knob and he twisted it back and forth.
“Open it quickly,” I begged. “It’s awfully stuffy.”
“Miss Prue,” he said, and his voice was puzzled and flat, “I kind of hate to tell you, but——”
“But what?”
“Well, the key’s on the outside an’ this is a spring lock. We’re here until some one, Miss Fible if she remembers us, comes an’ gets us out!”
CHAPTER NINE
THE CLOSET
“CAN’T you make a noise? Scream or something? Wouldn’t that help?”
“Dunno’s it would,” Asey said. “These doors is all metal. An’ they ain’t no one around. They don’t have to pay any attention to that oil burner nor to anything else down here so long’s the ’lectricity goes, so I don’t s’pose they come down much. An’ if we did make a noise I s’pose they’d think we was playin’ one of them fool games in the game-room. But I can bellow an’ see what happens.”
And he bellowed until I begged him to stop.
But no one came.
“Funny thing that door closed so all of a suddenlike,” Asey remarked. “Miss Prue, I got a handful of matches an’ I think I’ll look around an’ see if they ain’t some light here. Funny that they isn’t. All of the rest of the closets in the house is full of ’em.”
At last he located a switch, but repeated attempts at snapping it on produced no results.
“Out of order,” he said disgustedly. “Guess we don’t get to have no light.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, as he was about to blow out the match, “there’s a candle on the shelf there.”
I gave it to him and he lighted it.
“This is somethin’,” he said. “Always feel better when I can see what I’m doin’. Y’know, I should think you could sit on one of them shelves. I can’t b’cause I’m too tall, but if you was to sit forward like so’s your head didn’t strike the shelf above, you’d be all right.”
Somewhat gingerly I seated myself on a lower shelf. “I could kick myself,” Asey muttered, “for gettin’ you into this mess. I stuck a piece of wood under that door, though, an’ I don’t see why it should of shut.”
“It did slam hard,” I replied. “I suppose the wood slipped out.”
“Prob’ly. But this is a concrete floor an’ I don’t see why blocks of wood should go slippin’ around. You know, I kind of think——” he hesitated.
“D’you think some one slammed it?”
He nodded. “I dunno but what I do. I was foolish to come lumberin’ down here without a torch an’ I was foolisher not to of left you outside or else to of taken the key out with me.”
“But who could have slammed the door? And why?”
“Dunno.”
“And what good would it do for any one to lock us in here anyway? They’d know that we’d be sure to get out sooner or later.”
“Uh-huh. Only it maybe perhaps might be later.”
“You don’t think we’ll suffocate or anything like that?”
“Nun-no. Dunno’s we will. Only it ain’t such a big closet. I guess Miss Fible’ll come after us pretty soon. Or else Josiah’l
l come back.”
“But Josiah won’t be back for hours! And we were only joking with Rowena. She didn’t take us seriously. She’s probably forgotten all about us by now. And if she’s working, she’s surely forgotten. She loses all conception of time and people when she works. I wish this place had a window.”
“It would be nice,” Asey agreed. “It’s lucky that candle was here. I think Stires must of bought out a candle factory. We been usin’ bayb’ry candles ever since the ’lectricity was off an’ we used a powerful lot of ’em. You know, Miss Prue, the more I think of this key, the more I think of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, here’s what I been figgerin’ these last few seconds. Some one, some time early this mornin’, stuck that key into that bowl, knowin’ it was a pretty good chance that some one would find it an’, bein’ curious, bring it to me. I might even of found it myself. Anyway, I got it. An’ bein’ an ole plum-dum fool, I ups an’ runs head first into some one’s plan. I don’t know whether they wanted me out of the way temp’rarily, or permanent, but whatever they wanted, they got it.”
“I wish,” I said bitterly, “that I’d stayed up-stairs.”
“Feel that way myself. I don’t see how shuttin’ us up down here’s goin’ to get any one any place. That I don’t. They couldn’t be plannin’ a getaway. I’d give a lot to know what was in the back of their—or his—or her—head.”
“Her? What do you mean, her?”
“Figger of speech, that’s all.” But I had rather more than a meager suspicion that he was thinking of Rowena. It occurred to me that she, after all, was the only one who knew that we were going “sleuthing.”
“That door shutting might have been purely accidental,” I said.
“ Yup. So might a lot of things. ’Member the poems about Little Willie an’ the dynamite?”
“I wish,” I said, shivering, “that you’d not be so ominous.”
“All right.” He pulled off his boot. “I’m goin’ to bang on the door with this,” he announced. “Easier than usin’ up lung power. Wisht I’d taken my p’lice whistle with me. I left it up in my room.”
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