He banged on the door until the paint came off. But no one heard.
“Does your nose feel queer?” I asked suddenly. “Does, sort of.”
“Funny smell from that candle.”
“Uh-huh. It’s just the bayb’ry, though. They all smell funny.”
“I know that they do, Asey Mayo! Hasn’t the whole house smelled of bayberry for the last two days? But this is different. I wonder who left that candle here in the first place?”
“ ’Tis funny. P’ticularly if Stires had this key—or was s’posed to be the only one that had it. Don’t see how any one could of got into this place at all.”
“But we know Stires didn’t have it.”
“Ghosts,” Asey said succinctly. “Ghosts. I’m cornin’ to the c’nclusion that ghosts is the only reas’nble answer to all of this anyway. Say,” he looked at the candle as though he’d never seen one before, “say, look at the way that’s bumin’, will you?”
“It flickers a lot.”
“Yup, it’s ter’ble bright even though it flickers, too.”
“Well, it’s burning,” I said, “and that’s something to be thankful for.”
“I cal’late so.” He sat down suddenly on the floor.
“What’s the matter?”
“I guess,” he said cheerfully, “that I et too many of Phrone’s eggs. Or else I didn’t eat enough. My legs is weak. Say, did I ever tell you about Issachar Hurd?”
“No. Are you trying to take my mind up?”
“Iss Hurd,” he ignored my question, “he was a friend of Barney Gould. I guess you heard of Barney Gould an’ his express, ain’t you? He was the dippy feller that used t’ walk around collectin’ road taxes. Walked ’nough so’s he figgered he deserved t’ collect ’em. He walked t’ Boston once an’ brought back a dozen hay-rakes an’ a keg of nails, all for a quarter. N’en once,— say, do your legs feel funny?”
“They’re asleep.”
“So’re mine. Well, where was I? Oh, yes. Iss Hurd had a wife that was a great one for neatness an’ cleanliness. She was godly as all get-out, but she was even cleanlier an’ neater’n that. Every time Iss come into the house, he had t’ take his boots off, an’ everythin’ in that house run by clockwork. At five-thirty every evenin’ Iss had to fill the wood-box. One night he went out, an’ when he wa’n’t back by seven, Charity—wife’s name was Charity—she began to— say, there’s somethin’ more’n funny about that candle. Look! Look at it! There’s a sort of mist cornin’ off it!”
“Nonsense!”
“Yessir. Every time it flickers, that mist comes off it! ” With a sudden motion he picked it up and stubbed it out.
“What are you putting that out for?” I cried. “I hate to be left in the dark. Light it again!”
“Not on your life!”
“Why not?”
“B’cause, Miss Prue, ’less I’m mighty much mistaken, it’s that candle that’s makin’ us feel sick.”
“But how?”
“Dunno. I kind of wonder, Miss Prue, if this wasn’t that light that William’s wife seen in the tea leaves? Yessireebob, this is just another one of them plants, an’ what a plant! Yessir, I give this guy credit.”
“What are you babbling about?”
“Lissen. Some one left that key hopin’ I’d come in here. We did. Some one waited till we got in, an’ then slammed the door on us. They’d been in here before an’ fixed it so’s the light wouldn’t work, an’ left this candle. ’Twas a long shot we wouldn’t have a light of our own, but we didn’t. We found the candle an’ lit it. N’en we begun to feel sick—hey, what you doin’?”
“I think,” I said drowsily, “I’ll join you on the floor.” And I slid off the shelf and landed with a thud on the cement. “But how can the candle make us so groggy? Sure it isn’t that the air’s bad or giving out?”
“Don’t think so. Some one thought I was beginnin’ to find out too much, or else they didn’t like me— anyway, they got me in here, an’ they didn’t want me to come out on two feet. That’s certain. How long we been in here? I ain’t got my watch.”
“I have. Give me a match.” I peered at the tiny dial. “We’ve been here forty or fifty minutes, I’d say.”
“Humpf. Well, Miss Fible or Josiah’ll be here any minute now.” His voice was not so convincing as his words. “About Iss Hurd, now. His wife went out an’ looked around, an’ she couldn’t find him anywhere. . . .”
I listened half-heartedly as his voice droned on. I was limp. My nose seemed about to burst. My hands wouldn’t move. I understood the whole situation, my brain was clear enough, but I could make no connection between what I wanted to do and what I did. My left ankle, doubled under me, was uncomfortable. I wanted to move it, but I was finally forced to take my hand and push it into another position.
I began to think of that spool of orange silk—and my niece Betsey and her husband. Suppose I didn’t get out of the closet on two feet, as Asey had insinuated? Suppose I never got out alive; suppose I died I I wondered if Betsey and Bill would come home. Too bad to spoil their honeymoon. Too bad, if I had to die, it couldn’t be over with all at once. Why, if some one wanted to kill Asey, did I have to be included?
I thought about Denny James. I was sorry that I’d treated him as I had the night before. I really might have answered his telegram when it came last fall. I might have told him last night what I’d intended to answer. I might at least have explained to him that Betsey would have felt badly if she’d known that it was because of her that I’d never answered his yearly telegrams, that it would have been too obvious to go dashing off the very instant she was married——
“Fifteen years later,” Asey said with a chuckle, “Iss turned up at six o’clock with an armful of wood. ‘Where you been?’ Charity asks. ‘Been gittin’ that wood,’ says he. ‘Got ’ny huckleberry pie?’ ‘In the pantry,’ says she. ‘What kep’ you so long?’ ‘Oh,’ says Iss, casual, ‘I got tired of runnin’ like a clock. Thought I’d just bring that wood in by ’nother route, for once.’ ”
I tried to laugh appreciatively, but it was a very weak effort indeed. Asey began another yarn, finished it and began another. And I think that it was some time during that one that I mercifully went to sleep,— or became unconscious. I never quite knew which.
At any rate, the next thing I remember with any degree of clarity was the doctor bending over me. I was on the sofa in the game-room, and Asey was stretched out on the floor.
“How is he?” I whispered.
“He’s fine,” the doctor said cheerfully. “Most of his trouble was worrying about you. Here, drink this and go to sleep. You’re all right.”
“But I feel sick.”
“You can’t possibly feel sick,” Rowena said firmly, looking down at me. “You’ve been sick. Quite a lot. Go ahead and go to sleep. Asey’s all right and so are you. And it was only by the grace of God and the doctor coming back and William’s incoherent talk of keys and closets that we found you. And Ginger. That blonde beast sat outside that closet and howled till we opened it. I’m going to make a medal for him. Go to sleep!”
Obediently, I went to sleep.
It was dark when I woke up. Asey and the doctor were talking quietly together in front of the fireplace. The rest were nowhere to be seen.
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“How do you feel besides that?” the doctor asked.
“All right. Really. Tell me what happened.”
“Wait until you’ve had some soup. Asey, will you get it? And tell Mr. James that she’s awake and whole. Actually I’ve been more worried about your boy fr—about him, that is, than about you. I’ll wager he’s lost ten pounds to-day.”
I made no comment.
“And that cat of yours, say, he’s a whiz. I came back and no one knew where you were, then Miss Fible remembered that you were bound somewhere, and William jabbered about keys. And closets. Unfortunately, we started in the attic and worked down, and when we arrived he
re, Ginger was in front of your black hole, mewing away for dear life. And we opened the door to find Asey talking about shipwrecks off the Sandwich Islands, and you fast asleep. Here,” Walker took the cup of soup from Asey, “d’you want me to feed you or will you dribble it down your neck yourself?”
“I’ll do it myself; what about that candle?”
“That,” Walker said, “is a story. There are bayberry candles all over the house. In all the bedrooms. Everywhere. Seems Stires used nothing else. We noticed it, but after all, it didn’t seem important. Well, when Asey came out of the closet, he was gripping that candle you had in there as though it were a million dollars in bearer bonds. Told me to analyze it, and I thought he was crazy. But he insisted, and I did.”
“And what did you find? Hurry up!”
“Outwardly it was the same as all the rest. But I discovered that this one had a specially prepared wick. It had been dipped, I’m pretty sure, in a paste of Paris green and water. When it burned, it would give off that white vapor Asey noticed. Arsenious oxide vapor, and probably, though I’m not so sure of this, arseniureted hydrogen.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Well, did you ever hear of any one getting sick from green wall-paper?”
“Heavens, no!”
“Well, in some cheap green wall-papers, they used to use Paris green to hold the dye. When I was an intern we had a couple of cases of it at the M. G. H. People lived in cheap houses built on filled-in land, and when it began to get damp, as it did of course, the green wall-paper gave out a mild form of what this candle did. Arsenious oxide vapor. I’d never have known if we hadn’t been puzzled about those cases. People had a mild form of arsenic poisoning, and we couldn’t find out for a good long time what caused it. See?”
“I begin to.”
“And if Asey hadn’t doused that candle when he did, you’d have been on another plane right now. People would have thought that you’d suffocated. But the symptoms would have been arsenic poisoning, just like Stires.”
I dropped the empty soup cup on the floor with a crash.
“You mean that a candle—a candle was the cause of his death?”
“Uh-huh. And the beauty of it all is that we can’t prove it.”
“I won’t say ‘why’ and ‘what for’ again. Tell me.”
“All right. William says that Stires always went to bed with a lighted candle on the table beside him. Always has, as long as William’s known him. Probably his friends know of his little idiosyncrasy. Lots of people do keep lights at night, though they don’t usually keep candles. There’s a five-branch candlestick in Stires’s room. Stires lighted his candles when he went to bed Wednesday night. Now they’re just puddles of wax in the sockets. So we can conclude that he let them burn all night.”
“An’ what’s left,” Asey said, “don’t show any trace of poison in the wicks at all. An’ the last inch of the candle from the closet is okay. The guy prob’ly left the first few an’ the last few inches of the wick all good an’ proper, an’ poisoned the in-between part. So that you wouldn’t notice anything wrong when the candle was first lighted, an’ after it burned down you can’t find anythin’ wrong with it either.”
“But how did Bert——?”
“It was like this,” the doctor said. “Stires lighted the candles and went to sleep. He was pretty tired and he probably dropped off in no time. If he smelled any odor at all, he assumed, of course, that it was the bay- berries. He wouldn’t have given it a thought. Now, those candles were on his bedside table. The windows were closed. See, there are five candles directly next him. He’s breathing that vapor into his lungs. Good arsenious oxide vapor and the possible arseniureted hydrogen.”
“But it’s diabolical!”
“It’s all of that. Now, perhaps Stires wakes up. Feels sick. Decides he’d better get some one. He’s probably pretty well paralyzed. I don’t see how he moved the few feet he managed to move from the bed. You and Asey couldn’t move much—and you didn’t get such a dose of it. His brain is probably clear enough, but he can’t talk. Or if he can, not above a whisper. He can’t call out. He probably hasn’t the slightest notion of what’s wrong with him. He only knows that he’s sick, and he’s trying to get help. From eleven or so Wednesday night until the candles finally went out—during all that time he’s been breathing in that vapor. He can’t get to the bell—and even if he had, it wouldn’t have worked. There, Miss Prue, is the story as it probably happened. That’s how Stires died.”
“But you found arsenic in his stomach!”
“Many explanations of that. Breathed with his mouth open——”
“Where did the candles come from?”
“That,” Asey said with a grin, “is still another story. You remember Mary Gross, the old lady on the Truro road?”
“Did she—was she the one that made them?”
“Yes. She always made them for Stires, William says. But she didn’t kill Stires,—that is, she prob’ly made the candles, but she made ’em for some one else.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” Walker said, “I went around to see her after I finished with Pete Barradio’s wife. I didn’t have much to do there and I stopped in at Mary’s on the way back. Mary is dead.”
“Then she died from her cold?”
Walker shook his head. “She was killed the same way Stires was killed. By the candles she’d made for some one else.”
CHAPTER TEN
AND THE CANDLES
“GOOD heavens! How? And when?”
“She died Wednesday night, I think, or Thursday morning. You see, she didn’t have electricity in her house. She used old-fashioned kerosene lamps; apparently she ran out of oil and had to resort to candles. She was in that little sitting-room. There were two candles—or stumps of ’em—on the table beside her, four more about the room in holders. And her symptoms are the same as Stires’s—arsenic poisoning.”
“Look here,” I said, “I don’t see how, if she made the candles, she’d have been killed by them. But tell me. If you’re sure that the candles are the cause of all this trouble, does that mean that all the things we’ve found out about the arsenic up till now are useless?”
Asey nodded. “Cal’late that they are. Some one had this all figgered out. If we found out that Stires was poisoned by arsenic, he had it fixed so’s we’d find arsenic. He planned to git me out of the way an’ that slipped up. Now by sort of dumb luck we found out about the candles—and wheel Mary Gross is dead! Ain’t no doubt but what she made them candles, but if she made ’em an’ knew what she was makin’, she’d never of used ’em.”
“But she might, Asey. She might have killed herself.”
“I don’t think so, Miss Prue. I don’t think that there’s a chance in this world that she did. Mary was a little mite crazy, but she wouldn’t of hurt a fly. She had a collection of sick cats an’ dogs she looked after all the time, an’ she was just the same way about human bein’s. There never was a kinder ole lady goin’ than Mary Gross. She couldn’t of killed Stires. But she could of made those candles with the poisoned, wicks without knowin’ what they was. Then she could of been asked to try ’em—or mebbe she just made a mistake.”
“But if she made those poisoned wicks——”
“I figger it this way,” Asey said. “Whoever planned this wanted to use the same kind of candles that Stires always used. He must of known about Stires’s habit of sleepin’ with the candles next him an’ planned it out from there. Well, the av’rage person don’t know much about dippin’ candles. These is all hand dipped. An’ you can’t go dippin’ candles casual-like, just the way you’d bake a cake. What I think is that this guy Axed the wicks himself, an’ sent ’em to Mary an’ she dipped the candles usin’ them wicks.”
“But why did this person want to get rid of Mary, if she didn’t know? And what about you? And me?” Asey shrugged. “Wouldn’t be a one to know about you ’n’ me. I don’t much understand abo
ut Mary, either. With all these nifty plans, seems funny he’d go about deliberately tryin’ to kill Mary. Two deaths of arsenic poisonin’ here would kind of be more’n a funny coinc’dence. Might pass off without any trouble in N’York or Boston or some place like that, but not in Wellfleet. Folks’d begin wonderin’. An’ no feller that’s done as much thinkin’ out as this one has would ever slip up like that. Y’see, it wouldn’t matter so much about me. In what y’might call the ord’nary course of events, I’d of been fished out of that closet nice ’n’ dead. An’ it’s dollars to doughnuts it’d of been a verdict of suf’cation. An’ even then they wouldn’t of found out about the candles. ’Cause even if some one’d thought of it, that stump’d of been all right.”
“The exquisite part of all this, Miss Prue,” the doctor said, “is that the weapon which deals out death destroys itself. It destroys its evidence as it works. The victim,—well, his death looks equally like suffocation or death from a bad cold, or arsenic poisoning. Actually it is arsenic poisoning. But even if that’s discovered, the logical inference is that the arsenic was taken in food.”
“I never heard anything like it before in my life,” I said. “It’s just beyond me.”
“It’s nothing new,” Walker said. “They tried to do away with Leopold of Austria like this centuries ago. And it was a favorite way of killing off popes and cardinals in the Middle Ages. Easy to send them holy candles, you see. I’ve read about such cases. It was a good way of murdering people in the Renaissance, and if you should ask me, I’d say that it comes as near to being a perfect manner of killing any one as I’ve ever seen or heard about. For in destroying its victim, the candle destroys itself. We know now what killed Stires and Mary Gross. But I’d hate to have the job of trying to prove it in court.”
“Then all this dithering around and finding arsenic isn’t going to get us anywhere?”
“Nope.” Asey shook his head. “We got to make another beginnin’. This is sort of like the King of France marchin’ up the hill an’ then traipsin’ back again. The arsenic idea is out. What we’re after now is candles. An’ I think we’ll begin with William.”
Death Lights a Candle Page 10