Death Lights a Candle

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  “I know they was,” Asey said, unfeelingly stemming the flow of words. “I was goin’ up an’ see you this mornin’.”

  “Was you? Ain’t it lucky I cornel Doctor Walker says that Mary an’ Mr. Stires both was killed by arsenic. Is that a fact? I think it’s a terrible thing, I do, losin’ Mary, but losin’ Mr. Stires is even worse, you might say. He was goin’ to be a great help to the town with his money. They said that they reckoned that the tax rate’d go down because of his cornin’ here an’ I’d sort of planned to have a new picket fence on the strength of it.”

  “ ’Tis a pity,” Asey said. “ ’Tis a pity an’ that’s a fact. Now, Mis’ Howes, I wonder if you’d answer some questions for me?”

  She nodded vigorously. “I’d be glad to, if they’re about Mary. I guess I knew’s much about Mary Gross as any one in this whole town. Used to go up to see her three times a week anyway, regular. There’s not a better woman ever lived than Mary, even if she was a little mite queer sometimes. An’ even at that, I don’t think she was half as queer as some folks tried to make her out to be.”

  “Did she keep any record of who she sold candles to,” Asey asked, “or how much she got for ’em an’ when she sold ’em?”

  “No, siree. She just took the money an’ popped it into the Savin’s Bank as fast’s she could. Many’s the good time I’ve said to her, ‘Mary,’ I’ve said, ‘you should ought to keep some records of all you make. S’pose there’s a mistake,’ I said. But she never would. I told her that there wasn’t ever a better bookkeeper than her father, but she just never would keep any books attall.”

  “Made a lot of candles, did she?”

  “Land’s sakes, yes. The minute she’d see the berries fillin’ out she’d start in an’ take her pail an’ begin to pick. She’d go around the Gull Pond way an’ over back of the islands an’ I don’t know how many tons of berries that woman’s c’lected. Takes about a bushel to make five or six pounds of wax, an’ it takes a good thirty or forty dippin’s to make the big candles. Yes, she made a lot of candles an’ she put in a whole lot of hard work on ’em.”

  “Did she make ’em all at once?”

  Mrs. Howes shook her head. “Most usually she just boiled down her wax an’ then kep’ it an’ dipped the candles to order. That was because some people wanted one size an’ others wanted another. When I was over there Tuesday she was havin’ to——”

  “You was over there Tuesday? What time?”

  “In the afternoon, right after dinner. I’d made some sugar gingerbread an’ some caramel custards an’ they come out so nice that I guessed I’d take some over.”

  “Any one come in while you was there?”

  “Yup. That Mr. Hobart that was a friend of Mr Stires an’ another man I’d never seen before.”

  “What’d they say? Was you in the room with ’em?” She nodded. “Uh-huh. This man I never saw before come in first an’ asked for Mr. Stires’s candles, an’ Mary wrapped up all she had on hand for him in a paper bag. Then Mr. Hobart come in an’ asked again if they was Stires’s candles, and she said they was an’ he picked ’em up an’ they both went.”

  “Mary say anything about ’em after they left?”

  “Nary a word. She wasn’t a one to talk a lot.”

  “Did she send a lot of candles by mail?”

  “Yes.”

  “Register ’em or insure ’em, or how’d she send ’em?”

  “She just sent ’em off plain. Time after time I told her that she’d ought to be more careful an’ do something in case the candles should get lost or broke. But she never did. She used to get old corrugated boxes from the A. & P. an’ cut ’em down to suit her. I don’t know’s she ever lost any by breakin’, either.”

  “D’you know any one she sent candles to?”

  “Well, there was Mr. Stires. He was her best customer. Then there was some people over to South Wellfleet an’ a lot of the summer folks here in town, an’ some artists from Provincetown an’ a lot of folks that stayed at the Inn, an’ all that.”

  “Who mailed her bundles?”

  “She did. She went up to the P. O. every day, ’cept once in a while when it was awful stormy an’ it happened to be my day for cornin’.”

  “Then you wouldn’t know who she sent things to, or who sent her letters?”

  “Dunno’s I would. She used to have a lot of mail. Catalogues in the main. Like Sears, Roebuck an’ seed catalogues an’ all that. She,” Mrs. Howes added reminiscently, “she was very fond of catalogues, particularly Sears, Roebuck’s. Used to read it by the hour, even to tires an’ bicycles. She was plannin’ on buyin’ a silk coat with fur around the bottom of it that she saw under negligees. She was goin’ to buy it last year, but with prices cornin’ down all the time she thought she’d wait until it got cheaper.”

  “Then you wouldn’t know any names of people she wrote to?”

  “Guess not. If only she’d registered her parcels like I always told her to, you might of been able to find out. But she wouldn’t. She said that if you couldn’t trust the U. S. mails—only she used to call it the ‘penny post’—she didn’t know who you could trust.”

  “Did she get parcels?” I knew that Asey was thinking of the wicks.

  “Land’s sakes, yes. Did all the shoppin’ she could out of mail-order catalogues. Used to buy a pound of rock candy from Sears every other week. On strings? ’twas. She was real fond of rock candy.”

  “Did she,” Asey tried to make his question casual, “did she ever say anythin’ about makin’ special candles for any one?”

  Mrs. Howes considered. “Well, now you mention it, seems to me like I did hear her say somethin’ about it. Along last fall some time, I guess it was. They were for Stires.”

  “Stires?” I was amazed.

  “Yup. That was what I understood. I might of been wrong, but I don’t think so.”

  Asey nodded. “Who you think done this?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Down-town they was sayin’ that it was funny that two folks should die of arsenic poison at the same time, even if they was so far dif’rent as Mary an’ Mr. Stires. ’Tis funny, when you think of it. Ain’t you goin’ up to Mary’s to look around?”

  “We’re goin’ up later on this mornin’. Would you want to come along too?”

  She looked very pleased. “I would. Shall I take the flivver over an’ meet you?”

  “We’ll pick you up at your house when we get up to town. No need of tantalizin’ that flivver any more’n you can help.”

  Mrs. Howes grinned. “Wish you’d tinker with that timer when you get a chance, Asey.”

  “I’ll do that,” Asey promised, as he escorted her to the door.

  “How about it?” I asked when he returned.

  “This feller,” he said, shaking his head, “this feller, he ain’t human. He’s even got it fixed so’s if we got the candle idea worked out an’ got back to Mary, we couldn’t get back any farther, if she was ’live or dead.”

  “Of course we could find out if she were alive.”

  “Nope. Hear what Lyddy said? She said it was Stires that ordered the special candles. That means that this guy used Stires’s name, prob’ly, knowin’ that Stires gave her enough orders from his friends so that if he’d do anything strange, like sendin’ her wicks an’ givin’ a lot of directions, it wouldn’t mean much to her. Mary was sort of like a kid. She’d never of thought anything was wrong, an’ I don’t blame her much in this case. See, he’s got it all planned out, step by step, like. We don’t know who wrote Mary, who Mary wrote; if we did find anything, it’d be in a false name. All we know is that some one, some time last fall, got this idea an’ she made the candles.”

  “But she’d have had to send these candles to a different address, wouldn’t she?”

  “Yup. But what of it? She’d taken other orders from Stires that was sent to dif’rent addresses. We know that, from all these fellers here gettin’ ’em. Far’s I can see, there’s only been two
slip-ups in this feller’s plans. Real slip-ups, that is. One’s that Mary run out of oil, an’ prob’ly candles, too,—that is, all but the poisoned ones. The other’s that two of us went into that closet. If it’d happened that I’d gone in alone, I’d never of suspected that candle was wrong. If there hadn’t been some one there feelin’ as funny as I did, I’d never of given it a thought.”

  He got up from his chair. “Well, we’ll mosey up an’ go through Mary’s belonging. Dunno’s I want to but there’s a chance she might of kept a letter or else made some notes that Lyddy didn’t know about.”

  He turned around as June stuck his head in the door.

  “Hey, Asey, I don’t like to bother you, but would it be all right if I were to go out? I’m sick and tired of being cooped up and if I don’t get out I’ll roll over and die of boredom.”

  “Where you plannin’ on goin’?”

  “Well,” June hesitated, “I thought I could take the car and go for a little ride.”

  “Nun-no,” said Asey decidedly. “You can’t go for no ride. You can walk, though. Better for you, anyway. Give you exercise an’ you’ll get a lot more fresh air. Only take one of them fellers at the door with you.”

  “Think I’m going to run away?”

  “Nope. Only I don’t want you to get into any trouble. Never can tell what might happen, an’ you don’t want it to happen to you.”

  “Okay. Can—can Miss Allerton come, too?”

  “Miss Allerton,” Asey said, “in a pig’s eye! Is she talkin’ again?”

  “Well, no. We’ve sort of been carrying on a conversation in pencil, and she said she’d like to go out if you didn’t mind.”

  “She goin’ to tell me who she really is?”

  “She won’t talk,” June said, “and she doesn’t answer anything like that. I’ve tried to find out. Can she come?”

  “Sure.”

  “And John and Denny and Cary——”

  “Father says they can all go,” Asey grinned. “Mind that they wrap up, an’ lissen, youngster, if you walk along the beach, don’t fall into any holes an’ don’t go an’ get stuck somewhere where the tide’ll soak you. Be kind of an awful let-down to have pneumony after all that’s gone on, but you might ’s well be careful.”

  “Junior’ll make ’em toe the mark,” June announced. “Thanks, Asey. I’ll tell ’em to get ready. Can I pick my own guard? Yes? I want that one with the purple shirt. He appeals to me.”

  Asey called William in.

  “We’re goin’ up-town. Got a list of stuff? I’ll take it. An’ now the road’s all open, you might get Tom to bring Stires’s ’lectric over. Tell him to tow it.”

  “Have you the keys to it, sir?”

  Asey took Stires’s key ring out of his pocket. “Know which they are? Take ’em off. Oh, yes. An’ take his bags out an’ put ’em somewhere where no one can get at ’em. You see anything you think is funny, an’ you let me know.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Asey put the key ring back into his pocket. He felt something, grinned. “William, did Mr. Stires always wear false teeth?”

  William looked at me and smiled faintly. “Yes, sir. Ever since Miss Fible knocked them out.”

  Asey turned to me. “Whyn’t you tell me your friend c’mitted assault an’ bat’ry on Stires?”

  “I never thought of telling you,” I answered honestly. “But I’ll tell you the whole story right now.”

  At its conclusion, he laughed heartily. “I see. William, would you know if Mr. Stires’d busted his spare set of teeth before he come down here?”

  William frowned. “I don’t think so, sir. He was, well, he was rather sensitive about those teeth, sir. He was always terribly afraid that he’d have to go without them somewhere. I think I’d have known, because he’d have said something about them. I packed an extra set in his bags. I’m sure he didn’t have any trouble before Tuesday, Mr. Mayo.”

  Asey nodded.

  He gave some instructions to his men; Tom brought around the long gleaming Monster, and we set out for town.

  “What makes you so curious about those teeth?” I asked.

  “Dunno. They sort of take my fancy. That kind of looks nice, don’t it?” He pointed a mittened hand toward the row of white hills, where the snow-laden boughs of the stubby pine-trees were bent down to the ground. Beyond the hills the blue of the bay and the blue of the sky blended together so perfectly that I wondered where one began and the other left off.

  “It is gorgeous,” I said. “I’m feeling better than I have since Tuesday.”

  “I know how ’tis. You know, Miss Prue, I been a lot of places, but days like this I’m always glad I come back to Wellfleet. I always had a sneakin’ kind of hope that I wouldn’t never get to no pearly-gated Heaven when I die. Heaven may be all right for some folks, but like I told that feller from California that bragged so about his ole state, Heaven an’ California may be all right, but give me the backside of Cape Cod any day.” He waved at a motorcycle cop, and we sped on over the snow-crusted road.

  “Asey,” I said thoughtfully, “d’you suppose that you’ll ever find out who killed Stires and Mary?”

  “I dunno.” He glanced over the bay. “I dunno.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “You can’t,” he observed, “most always generally sometimes tell. I’d sort of hoped we c’d find out by Monday. Dunno’s we can, but I was sort of aimin’ to.”

  “What?”

  He grinned and adjusted the brim of his rakish Stetson.

  “I tell you, Miss Prue. I want to see a feller in Prov’dence about a boat for Bill on Tuesday, an’ I got somethin’ I want to do Monday night real bad.”

  “What is it that’s so important?”

  “Well, I dunno’s it’s so important, Miss Prue. I was plannin’,” he touched the button on the musical horn as we turned the corner on to the main street, “I was sort of plannin’ to go to the movies Monday night. It’s Greeter Garbo, an’ it’s the only chance I got to see her.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AT MARY GROSS’S

  I WAS still speechless by the time we drew up in front of the little white house where Mrs. Howes “looked after” the doctor.

  Lyddy was waiting for us at the door.

  “I been waitin’ with my things on for half an hour,” she announced. “An’ I’m all of a twit. Some car, ain’t it? Bill give it to you, Asey?”

  Asey nodded briefly.

  “Well,” Mrs. Howes continued, “I should think he would of given it to you. After savin’ his life like you did.”

  Asey looked as though he could have bitten her head off with considerable pleasure.

  “Come from Bill’s fac’try?” Mrs. Howes went on. “Awful expensive-lookin’.”

  “Yes,” I said, since Asey did not seem inclined to answer, “it came from the Porter factory. It’s a special that Jimmy Porter had made for Bill, but Bill never liked it. He said it had too much aluminum.”

  “Nothin’ flashy about Bill,” Mrs. Howes agreed. “Found out anything since I left you?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Dear, dear. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, I s’pose, was it? My husband always used to say that it was slow an’ steady that wins the race an’ I don’t know but what he was right.”

  Asey turned the car up the lane where Mary Gross’s weather-beaten house stood. I call it a house, but it was more like a box. It was a Cape Cod cottage on a miniature scale, and the kitchen ell did not look large enough to hold a coal hod.

  The doctor was waiting there. “Darling—isn’t that a name for an undertaker?—Darling’s just gone,” he said, “and he told me that you’d be up, so I hung around. He left the keys with me.”

  In the kitchen Mrs. Howes pointed to a “patent” rocker and began to cry.

  “Right there,” she said, “right there was where I seen her sittin’ last. Knittin’, she was; socks for my cousin Edith’s boy.”

  We entere
d the tiny living-room. A Franklin stove was the only heating apparatus that Mary Gross had had. It was backed up crookedly against the boarded- up fireplace. I wondered that the woman had not frozen to death, for the east wind was fairly pouring up between the cracks of the wide beamed floor. The room was damp and bitterly cold.

  The wall ornaments took my eye. There were three crayon portraits of very anemic men, and two wax funeral wreaths in wide walnut frames.

  “Them wreaths,” Mrs. Howes caught my glance, “was her Great-Uncle Uriah’s and her Great-Aunt Sophy’s. Lived over in Chatham, they did. Stage Harbor way.”

  In the corner was a parlor organ with three hymnals placed precisely on the music rack.

  “Mary loved a good hymn,” Mrs. Howes murmured.

  On a what-not in the comer were piles of pamphlets and papers. There was a gleam in Asey’s eyes as he brought them over to the light.

  I had not believed that so many patent-medicine advertisements existed. There were literally thousands of them, mixed up with farmer’s almanacs of years back. Asey came on a picture of Rudy Vallee and held it up with a laugh.

  “She heard him over my radio once,” Mrs. Howes explained, “an’ when I was writin’ for my picture of him, I got one for her too. She didn’t like it as much as I thought she would. Said that yeast was made for bread, not folks’ innards, an’ it was a mercy that they didn’t rise like a lot of biscuits if they ate it.”

  The doctor sat down in a ladder-backed chair and laughed. I helped Asey sort out the papers. There were bills from mail-order stores, tattered catalogues, and a number of dog-eared recipes cut out from the woman’s page of a Boston newspaper. But there was not a single letter in the whole lot.