“Milk toast and eggs and now I haven’t got any eggs. I asked for eggs this afternoon, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“I’ll get some to-night,” Mark promised. “I’ve got to see Amos and I’m sure he has plenty. Mrs. Lacey’s chickens, you know.”
In the face of this outspoken sympathy her simple soul struggled back to the surface without much trouble. She also saw an opportunity for gentle reprimand.
“I couldn’t touch them myself,” she said, “I mean after all that’s happened, but if nobody else has any tender feelings I don’t mind cooking them.”
“Just coddle them, Violet,” Morey said seriously.
She nodded. “I’m going after the bread pudding now. It hasn’t got any raisins in it and there’s nothing to pour over it to kill the taste, but I did my best.” She vanished into the pantry.
“Why didn’t Mr. Wilcox come in with you?” Beulah asked. “Didn’t he drive you home?”
“Dropped me at the station. He had to see Amos on business.”
“Are they keeping up the good work?” Morey took a mouthful of the pudding. “Violet, you’re crazy. The only thing wrong with this is the name.”
“I think they’re giving up the search, if that’s what you mean,” Mark said carefully. “He didn’t say so, but I got that idea. I told him about your theory.”
“He didn’t believe it, of course. I wouldn’t, in his place. . . . I don’t suppose I can coax you into helping Perrin and me to-night? We could use an extra man. Or are you still working for old Joe?”
“I’m still working for old Joe. He paid me two weeks’ salary. Besides, I’ve got a date with Amos and Wilcox. They’re drawing up a report—you know, what happened and what they did about it. They want me to help them make it sound pretty. How about to-morrow?”
“Sure. If we have any luck we ought to finish early in the afternoon. I’d like to get Mrs. Morey and the kids off on that New York train that leaves Bear River around eight in the evening. I’d like to get on it myself. Miss Pond, have you ever had any traffic with truckmen?”
“Certainly,” said Beulah. “Mr. Bittner has trucks as well as buses. He moved you in, in case you don’t remember that far back.”
“East, will you drop in on Bittner on your way to your date and ask him to have a couple of trucks here at three to-morrow afternoon? How about you ladies? Can you be ready to leave to-morrow?”
“Certainly,” said Beulah again.
“Wish pleshure,” said Bessy. Beulah shook her out of her chair and propelled her to the door with a flaming face.
“I wouldn’t believe that if I didn’t see it with my own eyes,” Violet said. “It’s a good thing I’m not one to talk. You don’t need to worry about me, Mr. Morey, I can stay until everybody’s out and lock up. Turn the water off and all. I’m glad to oblige.”
“This sounds like commencement day,” Mark said. “Good-bye, good-bye, don’t forget to write. I’ll stick around with Violet and turn off the gas. Then”—he made sure Beulah had rounded the bend with Bessy—“then I think I’ll spend a few days with Miss Pond.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to run. See you later.” He got out of the room before anyone could call him back.
Beulah signalled wildly from the top of the stairs. “Got to run,” he said again. “See you later.” He took his hat and coat from the hall table and slammed the door behind him. It was quarter after eight.
The Saturday night train had come and gone. The lamp was burning dimly outside the station, but the little building stood dark and forlorn. Not until he reached the platform did he see the pinpricks of light through the curtain at Amos’ window. Wilcox opened the door.
“I don’t mind saying I’m glad you’re here,” he admitted. “I told Amos some of what you told me and he’s ready to call in the FBI.”
Amos crept out from behind the stove. His face was ashen. “I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s plain murder.”
“It’s been plain murder three times, Amos. Don’t worry. We can handle it.”
“Why don’t you take the poor old gentleman’s body to the undertaker and telephone the governor? Tell him what you know? It’s—safer.
“Don’t you want your picture in the papers? I tell you we can handle it. And I haven’t got enough to give the governor. Not yet. I haven’t any proof.”
“Proof!” shrieked Amos. “Proof,” he said again in a hoarse whisper. “You got three corpses.”
“And not one witness. Only a theory. I can’t prove Mrs. Lacey didn’t die by accident. I can’t prove Florrie wasn’t strangled by a tramp. I can’t prove a thing about Stoneman—yet. I haven’t even got a motive. That’s what gets me. No motive. It’s all so—smooth. No motive, no reason. In short, I haven’t got a case.”
“He’s right,” said Wilcox. “A good lawyer would laugh us out of court.”
“You got Stoneman’s body, haven’t you? Florrie and Lacey are—embalmed, as you might say. But you got Stoneman. Was he shot or poisoned?”
“Neither. Yes, I’ve got Stoneman but I haven’t got a single soul who saw the thing done. If there were a bullet in his body, that would be fine. But there won’t be. Still, Stoneman’s our trump card. Nobody knows we’ve found him. Nobody knows we’re wise. So—we use him, dead as he is, to get a confession.”
“Confession!”
“Sure. With lots of witnesses. Don’t worry. It’s all set—I hope.” He looked at Wilcox, sitting rigid in his chair. Wilcox nodded.
“Don’t let me forget to order Bittner’s trucks before I leave. Morey wants them at three to-morrow.”
“When they going? What train?”
“To-morrow night, from Bear River. . . . We’ll all be going then.”
“Some to some places and others to others.” Amos shook. “I don’t feel like I ever want to see—”
The ’phone rang shrilly: Wilcox lunged across the table. “Yes?” he croaked. “Oh—it’s Miss Pond. She wants you, East.”
“Cover that mouthpiece. Tell her I’ve gone out. Ask her what she wants.”
Wilcox turned back. “She says Miss Petty won’t go to bed. What shall she do?”
“Give her two of those pills. Violet has the bottle. And lock her in.”
Wilcox spoke and hung up. His face glistened with sweat.
Mark looked uneasy. “I wonder if I ought to go up there. I wonder if I’m gambling—”
“No,” said Wilcox. “You stay here and get those calls. You can’t do more than you’re doing now.”
“She’s been nipping, Bessy has,” Amos said. “I know. Her father was the same way.”
“You know what I feel like?” Wilcox said. “I feel like I did a long time ago, when I was a young fellow in the last war. We used to go into a village at night, to get that vin rouge. Every night we’d walk along that road, under the stars, with trees and country smells all around. Every night the same—but one. It looked the same then too, same trees, same stars, same everything, only it was different. You could feel something waiting for you in the dark. You couldn’t see anything, you could only feel it. Pressing in, watching you, like. That night they blew the village up. . . . I feel like that now.”
“Perley,” quavered Amos, “what did you do with that bottle you took away from me? I want it.”
The ’phone shrilled again. Nobody moved.
“This ought to be one of them,” Mark said. “Go on, Wilcox.”
Wilcox took the ’phone. “Yes?” he said. They saw him square his shoulders. “Yes Sheriff, I’m ready for you. Will you wait just a minute, please? I want somebody to take this down as you give it to me.” He turned to Mark. “Sheriff Hancock, from Citrus City,” he said formally.
Mark nodded. “Go ahead. Repeat what he says. I’ve got a pencil.”
Wilcox began to talk. “Tell it in your own way, sir. Just give me time to repeat. We’re all set here. . . . August, 1939. That’s the date, eh? You’re mailing a copy of the paper? Good. Now, August 15, 1939. Hit-and-
run. Yes. Body of poorly dressed man, about thirty-five years old. Hard to tell what he looked like. Yes.”
“For God’s sake, Wilcox, get the names! We can’t hold that wire too long!”
“Yes, sir,” Wilcox went on. “Now if you don’t object I’d like to get the names. You see we can’t hold this wire too long. We’re waiting for an overseas call. Yes, sir, it does look like a big case, and I’ll appreciate it if you say nothing until I give you the word. Yes, sir. I will. George M. Hancock. I’ll see it gets in the same as mine. Yes, sir. I’ll write you in a day or so. Now—if you don’t mind, Sheriff, those names. Yes. The man who identified the victim was—”
Mark’s pencil waited on the paper.
“Jones and Smith,” Amos muttered. “Jones and Smith, Jones and Smith.”
“Will you repeat that please?” Wilcox spoke quietly into the ’phone. The other voice came back, rasping, indistinct. “Thank you,” Wilcox said. “Good-bye.” He replaced the receiver and gave a long sigh.
“No soap?” asked Mark.
Wilcox cleared his throat. “The victim was identified by a man named Joseph Stoneman.”
Mark’s fist struck the table. “Smith and Jones, huh? Who pays for the call now, huh? I said that clipping would tell us something!”
“Tell us what?” asked Amos. “You were looking for a crime angle. Well, it’s no crime to identify a dead body. If you ask me, we’re just where we were before. You can’t tell me that Ruthie and Florrie were killed because one night three years ago a man named Stoneman identified a——”
“Who said it happened at night?”
“Wait!” said Wilcox. “Wait a minute.” He reached down into the woodbox behind the stove and drew out a bottle, which he handed to Amos. “After you, my friend,” he said. “The man Stoneman identified was James Morey.”
Nobody spoke until Mark said gently, “To quote Florrie, ‘Who is dead?’” Nobody answered. “Who is dead?” he repeated.
“Who?” Amos’ voice rose. “I’ll tell you who! Ruthie, Florrie. Two women who never saw Florida in their lives, never even saw Stoneman and Morey until this past September! And now Stoneman’s dead too, and this sheriff says Mr. Morey, says Mr. Morey—.
Wilcox held up a heavy hand that shook a little. “Easy, Amos. It could be a coincidence, couldn’t it, Mr. East? The bank accounts are in the name of Morey. She signs cheques with that name. It’s a common enough name. There must be hundreds of them in New York alone.”
“But if—” Amos began.
“There can’t be any but,” Mark argued. “He’s Morey. James Morey. He’s not masquerading. His toilet articles are marked with his initials and they’re not new. Stoneman never hesitated when he talked to him or referred to him. He never hesitates when speaking to or of his wife. That child, Anne, she knows what her name is. You can’t train a kid like that to act every minute of her life. She—I don’t know! I’m going crazy myself.”
“Detectives are funny people,” said Amos. “You been counting on that clipping to tell you something and when it tells you a honey you try to make out it ain’t so.”
“It looks to me,” Wilcox said, “like I was right in the first place. We got crimes all right, but they haven’t anything to do with the clipping. It’s so much trash. Plain trash that they threw out when they were getting ready to move. I admit it’s kind of throwing us off our track a bit, but it don’t necessarily change our plans. Why can’t it be a coincidence? Say some friend of theirs saw the thing in the paper and sent it to them for fun? A gag, as they call it. A joke, as you might say.”
“Possible, but too smooth. Too honest and open. There’s been nothing honest about this business from the first day I saw Stoneman.”
“All right. Look at it the other way.” Wilcox wet his lips. “The clipping is dangerous. Mr. Morey isn’t—himself. He took a dead man’s name for some reason of his own. Did Mrs. Lacey and Florrie die because they found that out? No. No, because Stoneman died too and he’s known it all along. He’d known it for years. Had to, because he was a part of it. Why wait and kill him now? . . . And why would this—this Mr. Morey take the name of some poor fellow who got run over? Because he was hiding from something? He don’t act like it. He walks around like you and me, in broad daylight. Buys drinks for the boys in Bear River as friendly as you please. Did he do it to get money? No, sir. If that dead fellow was rich he’d have been missed. Somebody would have hollered.”
“Maybe somebody has hollered. A little late, but a holler just the same. Don’t forget that practically everybody in this village has been in Florida for the past ten winters or more. Some of them have travelled abroad too. The Moreys have Europe behind them, and not very far behind, I think.”
“Still going to get your confession?” Amos asked.
“I am. I’m still right on that. It ties up with this, I don’t know how, but it does. The answer is right here.” He indicated the village street, silent outside the curtained windows. “I’m counting on Davenport.”
“Might be,” admitted Wilcox. “There’s that Willie Foster business.” He looked uneasily at the ’phone. “I wish that call would come.”
“Look.” Amos took another swallow from the bottle. “Don’t anybody tell me I’m going to get drunk. I know it. I want to be numb so I won’t hear the next body fall. Mark, do you think it’s all right to let that luggage go? Would there be anything in it? Somebody could of sneaked down cellar and hid something.”
“No. That’s all right. I’ve got to get hold of Bittner somehow. I’ve—”
The ’phone rang.
Amos scuttled across the floor like a crab. “I’ll go to Bittner’s. I’ll tell him.” He slammed the door behind him.
The ’phone rang again.
“Let him go,” Wilcox said. “You take this one. It’s yours.”
Mark lifted the receiver.
A woman’s voice, quiet and undistinguished, asked who he was and seemed satisfied with the answer. Then another voice, shrill and clipped, crackled out in argument with a third person who could not be heard at all but who was evidently determined to call the whole thing off.
The quiet voice returned like a soothing parent and asked him to wait. Wilcox left his chair and hung over Mark’s shoulder.
The clipped voice crackled again. A fourth quantity, hardly human, came in with a series of thin mechanical wails. There was a pause and then the quiet voice returned. “Go ahead, Mr. East,” it said. “You’re through.”
Mark said, “Colonel Davenport?”
Wilcox went back to his chair, but his eyes never left Mark’s face.
Mark spoke rapidly and clearly. He’d rehearsed like an actor. He introduced himself and said he’d been retained by the local authorities to investigate the death of a guest of the Colonel’s friends. No, he could not be more specific; Mr. Scott, the agent, had written the details. So had Miss Pond. Yes, Pond. P-o-n-d. . . . Yes, that was the one. . . . Yes, he knew that. . . . Now, could Colonel Davenport tell him anything about a Mr. Joseph Stoneman, an archaeologist? Stoneman.
Wilcox held his breath. Mark wrote something on the paper lying under his hand. Wilcox read, “Light me a cigarette.” He did.
Mark went on. Yes, Mr. Stoneman had died suddenly and they were hoping to uncover his past activities in order to . . . Yes, Stoneman.
Mark’s face grew dark. “Colonel Davenport,” he said, “this call has been made with the assistance of the United States government. You must realize what that implies. I needn’t tell you that whatever you say will be held in confidence, as far as possible. We’ve taken every precaution here. If you withhold information you hamper justice. I repeat, Mr. Stoneman was a guest of the Moreys, in your own house.”
There was a long pause while Mark listened. Gradually his expression lightened. A grin, not pretty, stretched from ear to ear. The minutes clicked on.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Morey, James Morey, his wife and two children. Girls. . . . I see. If I’d had any
sense I’d have seen it before. Will you give me that name again?” He wrote rapidly and pushed the paper over to Wilcox without turning his head. “Give me a description, a brief one, just for the record, although I don’t need it. . . . That’s it. There’s a difference now, of course; there’d have to be.”
He leered happily at Wilcox, who held the paper in a shaking hand.
“I understand your position,” he said into the ’phone, “and you’ll be covered. Under the circumstances, you couldn’t have behaved in any other way. I think I can lay this ghost without publicly bringing in your name. Thank you, sir, and good night. Or rather, good morning.”
Mark and Wilcox stared at each other.
“Did you have any idea of this?” Wilcox asked. “You couldn’t! Nobody could!”
“Only a feeling. It kept nagging at me, but I didn’t work on it. It’s perfectly clear now, though. Remember the night the rock came through the window? It screamed at us then and we didn’t listen. Now here’s the story Davenport tells. And here’s how I fill in the empty places—”
While he talked, Wilcox watched and listened like a boy at a magic show. Then he became a man again and clenched his fists.
“I was going to carry a gun to your confession party,” he said, “but not now. I want this one to go to the chair in perfect health.”
“This one may go to the insane—”
Amos came quietly in and stood with his back against the door. “Bittner’ll have the trucks up there at three. Did you get your call? Jones and Smith?”
“We got it,” Mark said, “and the county’s paying. You’ll be glad to know that Morey is Morey. It’s no act. I’ll tell you the rest later. Right now, have you got any fresh eggs to sell? I promised Violet I’d bring her some.”
Amos took a lantern and climbed the wooden steps that led to his loft.
“How much did you tell him?” Mark whispered.
“Only what I had to. That you knew where Stoneman was and that you had a suspect lined up. It’s not safe to tell him more than that. He’ll blow up at the wrong time. Let me handle him.”
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