Brigid is usually smart. It was the shock and all that made her ask, “But how can you be sure that the footprints are Rosemary’s? How can you be sure of any of them, except your own?”
Adam got too patient. “Jeff saw Rosemary leave. I saw her return. She is here in camp now. Jeff came in. Kent came in. They are here now. One horse left and returned. Acrasia. She is here. Jeff led Dollar in. Dollar is here. Numerically my reasoning seems sound.”
“I should think,” Brigid argued, “that the horses’ prints, at least, would be hard to distinguish—tracked over, all that.”
“The sun hardened the prints made directly after the storm,” Adam answered, no longer too patient but worse. “And, if you’ll remember, the gate can’t be opened or closed from horseback. I had my strong flashlight and I examined the sand very carefully. I was searching for prints that might be Twill’s.”
I spoke without thinking, which is always bad. “Twill couldn’t have climbed the fence,” I said.
“No,” Brigid said, vexed about something. “He wasn’t a vine. He was a cripple.”
Adam put on his meanest formal manner. “May I suggest that attempted wit is misplaced just now?”
“You may, of course,” Brigid answered, being the one person I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing who could match manners with Adam at any minute. “If I was witty, I’m sorry. My only excuse is that St. Dennis once told me that when things get beyond the bearable I wouldn’t sink if I’d stick up my nose. Unconsciously, I may have tried to do so.”
Adam’s own head, carrying his nose with it, went up like he’d been check-reined and he began walking busily around seemingly looking for something high and low. Just as I’d feared, he took it out on me, the next minute.
“Jeff,” he said, “if you are sufficiently rested, I’d appreciate some help. If the killer has left anything behind him that might aid us in tracing him, I should like to find it now.”
To this day I believe that Adam used that notion as a means of changing the subject. But it seemed pretty sensible at the time, so we three pitched right in and gave the house a good going over, finding nothing—as far as I knew that night—that could be called a clue or a trace.
“I am going to have another talk with Rosemary,” Adam said very grimly, when Brigid, he and I finally rounded up in the kitchen again. “Two shots were fired from that revolver of hers. There is no gun here. I think she may know more than she has told us as yet. I’ll want you to check up with me at the gate, Jeff. I’ll telephone to the boys at Ferras——”
While he was talking he was also trying to open the kitchen door, which was locked and refused to budge, and this must have vexed him extra, for he added, “By the Eternal, I’ll get the truth out of that girl!” and gave a mean rattle at the knob.
Brigid began, “You can’t——”
“Why can’t I, I’d like to know?” Adam asked, mad as hops.
“You can’t open that door,” she said, keeping her temper very slowly, “because it is locked and the key is gone.”
(If she’d known it, she was talking like her papa often did, symbolically; but she didn’t know it.)
“Where is the key?” Adam asked.
“I think that the murderer took it,” she said. “I imagine that he locked the door after him and took the key away. Shall we use the front door?”
I guess that gave Adam an idea because, on the front stoop, he locked the door and put the key in his pocket. In the nick of time at that, for who should we meet right afterward, walking fast and looming large, but Reggie and Mrs. Duefife.
They and we said, “Any news of Twill?” and we and they said, “No.”
Reggie spoke up quiveringly: “‘What shall we do when hope is gone?’”
He was a great one for using poetry, so nobody paid any attention to him.
Adam asked sharply, “Where is Betty-Jean? I told her to stay with you.”
“Poor, poor little Betty-Jean,” Mrs. Duefife said.
“What’s the matter with Betty-Jean?” Adam asked, sounding scared.
“Well, but of course,” Mrs. Duefife began, drawing in her chin and meaning, I judged, something about Betty-Jean and Twill being sweethearts, but deciding she’d better not mention it further, she went on: “We left her in the community house. Such a dear girl. ‘Just a cup of coffee,’ I warned her. ‘Nothing else.’ We had no dinner you know. But, ‘Just a cup of coffee——’”
“And a few sandwiches,” Reggie put in worriedly.
“The old Judge is with Betty-Jean, I suppose?” Adam asked.
“With her?” Mrs. Duefife sounded as if she couldn’t believe her own ears. “With Betty-Jean?”
“Exactly,” Adam said. “Judge Shively is in the community house with Betty-Jean, is he not?”
Mrs. Duefife seemed to take affront. “No, he is not. Certainly he is not,” she answered.
“No? Where is he, then?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure.” Mrs. Duefife sounded as if Adam had asked her something very indelicate. “You just came from his cottage where, one should suppose, he probably could be found.”
“He isn’t there,” Adam said and stopped. I admired him for it. I knew how he felt. Everybody who has ever not yielded to temptation has felt the same way—urgently disappointed.
I spoke up in a hurry before he might change his mind about taking the wind out of her sails. “Maybe he is in one of these cottages,” I said. “Somebody has lighted all the lights in them.”
We had been walking toward the community house and I’d noted that the cottages were showing up lighted, one by one.
“My son and I lighted those lights,” Mrs. Duefife said. “We have gone systematically through each of these cottages. We have left no stone unturned, spared ourselves no effort——”
Brigid interrupted, talking too fast. “We know you have, haven’t,” she said. “We’re sure you didn’t—did. But wasn’t Judge Shively in any of the houses? We thought he’d gone to the community house at dinner time. We thought—— Hasn’t anyone seen him, anywhere?”
It was Reggie’s turn, again. “Oh, dear me!” he said, very twittery. “He is somewhere with Twill. He has found Twill and can’t leave him. But, my goodness, why doesn’t he call for help? Shouldn’t you think he’d call for help? Or answer our calls? For mercy’s sakes, why hasn’t he answered our calls?”
I seem to remember that Mrs. Duefife spoke soothingly to Reggie, but I’m not sure. I know that Brigid and Adam said nothing. I know my own voice caught on me. I know why. We all were remembering what we’d left back there on that doggone dropping-down bed. We all were fearing that somewhere—maybe in another of those beds—we’d find the reason that the old gentleman hadn’t called or answered our calls.
Chapter VII
Why Brigid, Adam and I hadn’t given our first thoughts to Judge Shively, while we were in his cottage, I’ll never understand. I guess that we were too excited, thinking about losing Twill and finding a murdered man. But, though we did forget the old gentleman for a time, we certainly made up for it by remembering him from then on.
Our searching after that was entirely different from our first searching for Twill. Hope had been leading us then; hope every minute that we’d find him and not much hurt at that. We’d been mighty anxious, mighty worried; but all the time we’d kept our manners and acted pretty much like any group of polite people hunting for a friend, who had been hurt and was likely needing help, would act.
Fear led us now, holding on to our sweating hands. It was heavy in every one of those doggone dropping beds as we lowered it. It was empty in all those bare-roomed cottages and in all those hole-hollow garages. It was riding like witches on the backs of the two horses in the shelter. It made breathing hard. It beat on our hearts like drums. It tied our minds into tight knots in a jiffy and slowly picked them loose again and tied them over and twisted them down.
The only way I know to tell how bad it was, is to say that the time soon came when finding the
old Judge murdered or finding Twill dead would have been a relief. How we all knew then, as we knew when the lake had been gone over foot by foot the next day, that we’d find neither body in it, is a mystery. Premonitions, maybe. Or maybe we didn’t know. Maybe we felt that, if we did find the bodies in the lake, that Something that turns fear into grisly terror would still be with us. The uncanny part, I mean. The feeling that someone is shouting at you in a whisper, or tapping you on the shoulder from across the road, or watching your every move with blinded eyes.
It was bigger than that, though; worse, spreading out more. It was like being on a hot dry desert and feeling yourself getting soaked, cold, wet to the skin when there wasn’t a drop of rain. It was like seeing trees switching back and forth with their leaves being torn off and scattered, and the tumbleweed scooting and bouncing through clouds of dust, when there wasn’t a whisper of wind. It was that blurred, empty, falling, out-of-focus feeling that you get in bad dreams when you know things can’t be what they are and so must be what they aren’t.
Confusing? You bet it was. Take how it seemed to me. Take what I thought that I knew while Adam and I were back at the gate checking up on his deductions concerning the footprints in the stretch of alkali dust and sand just outside the gate.
Merely believing my eyes, I thought that Adam was right about the prints. My own with Dollar, and Rosemary’s with Acrasia showed up as clear as the kid’s fingers on the new cake frosting. Kent’s could be seen, where he’d walked in. And Adam’s, made not long since, were plain enough for him to step back into them to prove it to me. The gate opened in, and the cement road came right up under its edge, so no tracks could show on that side. I thought I knew then that Rosemary had gone and come, that I had come in, and that Kent had, and that not another soul had been through that gate since the rain, except Adam, of course, investigating.
I thought I knew that the twelve-foot high plank fence was as well built as a man with Adam’s money to squander could have it built when he wanted to keep tourists out and, also, prevent their tearing it down to build bonfires with. I thought I knew that getting over that fence would not be a matter of a flying leap. Most particularly not if the leaper was carrying even one dead body in his arms. So I thought I knew that if someone had got over the fence he’d have had to use something to climb over it with—a ladder, a board, or a pile of something. I thought that we wouldn’t have much trouble finding any of these, or else a loosened plank where he might have crawled through.
Later, for a long time, Adam kept nailing his hopes to that fence. Not a plank in it was found tampered with in any way. Not a trace of anybody’s getting over the fence showed. And tracks or traces—holes where the ladder legs or the edge of a board with a man’s weight on it had sunk in—would have been left even on that rocky desert. So I don’t know why Adam kept insisting that whoever had murdered Clyde Shively had got over the fence and away.
I thought I was a lot smarter during the following days when I agreed with the other folks that the killer had swum the lake. It had a couple of yards of sandy shore line but by morning there had been too much stepping around on it, done by the folks who had tried peering into the lake right off that night, to tell anything about footprints found there. Where the fence ran down into the lake, though, there weren’t any prints at either end; so we knew that nobody could have waded around the fence and got back on the deserts again that way. He could have avoided all nonsense about leaving footprints if he had gone straight down the cement walk from the community house to the dock and stepped off. But that wouldn’t have been a very secret way of escaping. We all had to admit, of course, when Adam pinned us down to it, that thinking for a minute that Judge Shively, at his age, in poor health and stiff with rheumatism, had swum the lake for any reason was too ridiculous to be suggested.
But continuing with what I thought I knew out by the gate that Wednesday night. I thought I knew that Twill, dead or alive, was missing. I thought I knew that I, myself, had found Clyde Shively, shot in the back and strapped in the wall bed. I thought I knew that old Judge Shively could not be found high or low on the place.
Right here I’m bound to say for myself that even early that murderous night, with things in the fix they were in, I didn’t even think that I thought what the lady detective, Lynn MacDonald, seemed to think when she first came down from ‘Frisco. I didn’t hear her, myself, and since Joe Laud told me maybe it was partly wrong. But Joe said that she asked whether we had asphalt pits or quicksands, or anything of their nature around about.
I suppose she thought of these because there is an asphalt pit near L. A. that swallows up everything whole that gets into it. There may be quicksands everywhere all around ‘Frisco, for all I know. I never go over to California much. I hate their climate. But I knew then, just as I know now, positive and for certain, that we haven’t and never will have any such freaks of nature in Oakman County. We have opal mines, marble quarries, petrified trees and other points of interest. But no asphalt pits. No quicksands. No place what-so-some-ever where alive or dead bodies could disappear. None.
Returning for the last time to the gate and Adam and me that night. I thought I knew that before we went to the gate Adam had phoned Joe Laud (I forgot to mention that Joe was coroner and undertaker) and told him to keep his mouth shut, round up Doc Sprague and my two deputies, Homer McLarty and Ernwright Wardner—Mac and Ernie to all—and ride over to Memaloose, pronto. I thought I knew that when we heard them coming, Adam took his flashlight and, stepping cautiously over the sand to miss all the other prints, went out to the road to head them off.
The trouble was that the boys get bored because there are practically no crimes in Nevada except, of course, away up around Reno where the outsiders come in to get divorces. So, while I wouldn’t wish to say that the boys hoped something interestingly criminal had happened at Memaloose, the fact that Adam had phoned for the doctor, the coroner and undertaker and my two deputies must have whetted their curiosities, if not their hopes, very keen.
So up they came, riding like fury through the gate, destroying forever the footprints that Adam had set his heart on saving; to say nothing of all but destroying Adam who only escaped being ridden down by dint of lively jumping at the last.
Quite a bit of cussing went on for a few minutes while the boys were dismounting and claiming that they thought Adam had been waving and yelling to hurry them along and that they hadn’t seen him anyhow. The cussing got worse, though more concentrated, when Adam found that Joe, instead of bringing Doc Sprague, had brought F. Gregory Taylor and James Kelly—the last named being better known as Rimrock Jim or just plain Rimrock.
Joe’s explaining that Doc Sprague couldn’t be reached, so he’d brought two fellows in his place, and Rimrock’s humming the Volga Boat Song and disclosing at once that if he wasn’t stewed he was simmering vehemently, did nothing toward making anything better.
“All right, Taylor,” Adam said, “you’re here. But if one word of this gets into your paper” (Taylor happened to be owner and editor of The Ferras News) “before I’m ready to have it there, I’ll call my loan on your press and fixtures and cancel your lease so fast it will make your head swim. That mortgage was due three years ago and I haven’t seen a cent of interest for five years.”
“Threat, eh?” Taylor asked.
“No,” Adam said. “Three threats. As for the rest of you boys, if anything I’ve said to Taylor should happen to fit your own affairs, think it over. Unless it is necessary I’m not going to smear the county with what’s happened here tonight. You’re here for business, not for gossip. Think it over.”
(If Adam was unpopular, as some said, in his own county it was because he’d done too much for it. There was hardly a man-jack of us who wasn’t under obligations to him in one way or another and, of course, being grateful year in and out gets irksome.)
Joe Laud asked, “Yes, but what has happened here tonight?”
And Rimrock stopped humming and spoke very
sprightly, “I’ve got no idea.”
“Nor have I,” Adam said. “But one man has been killed. It seems probable that another man has been killed and, possibly, a third man.”
“Who umpired?” Rimrock wanted to know.
Adam began issuing orders. “Taylor,” he said, “you take this souse and get him out of the way in one of the empty cottages. Keep him there. Understand? Joe, here’s the key to the last cottage at the west end of the walk. You and Ernie and Mac go down there and look things over. The dead man is Clyde Shively, Judge Shively’s son. See what you can make of it. Jeff and I will join you there presently. Wait for us.” Joe, Mac and Ernie set out right away. Taylor started leading Rimrock off, but they’d gone only a few yards when Rimrock halted in his tracks, insisting on reviewing his grammar.
“I kill,” he said. “You kill. We kill. She kills.
He kills. They kills——”
“Stop it,” Taylor was scolding him. “Stop it, I say. This is definitely absurd.” (Taylor ate crepes Suzette up at Reno for supper about a year ago and he’s been very sophisticated ever since.) “Come now, my man. Come, come!”
I had been shutting the gate. “Adam,” I said, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea to lock this gate, would it?”
“The padlock has been lost all summer,” he said, as if that settled everything, and continued with deep injustice as we struck off short-cutting across the yard: “Why in Hades did you allow me to send for these sons of sea-cooks? Couldn’t you have kept your head for five minutes, even though I did lose mine?”
“I didn’t allow you to send for them,” I said.
“You did,” he said. “They are here, aren’t they? Hurry up, if you’re coming with me.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to have another talk with Rosemary. Wait. What’s that? Someone calling?”
We stopped to listen. Something must have vexed Rimrock, for he was shouting, “He was killed. She was killed. I or you can or may be killed.”
The Desert Lake Mystery Page 4