The Desert Lake Mystery

by Kay Cleaver Strahan

  Brigid said, “Don’t worry, Betty-Jean. We’ll all help and everything will be grand. I’m running down to my cottage to get into something decent. I’ll bring Rosemary back with me, and she’s marvelous with salads, and——”

  “Don’t bother Rosemary just now, Brigid,” Adam interrupted. “Leave her alone. She’ll join us, perhaps, later when she feels better.”

  “But what is the matter with Rosemary?” Brigid asked.

  “Nothing more serious than a pouting spell after tears. She and Twill will be leaving here tomorrow——”

  Kent came in just then, and I knew at first glance that the boy was mad all over. “Skip it, Dad,” he said. “Rosemary, Twill and I are all leaving here tomorrow, as soon as the road is opened. Rosemary and I are going to be married in Ferras.”

  Adam never was a hand for slang phrases, but I guess he forgot himself. “What are you going to use for money?” he asked.

  “Money,” Kent said.

  “Your poker winnings today, I suppose?”

  “I came home with more money than I had when I left here. You seemed to hope I’d be broke, so I haven’t bothered mentioning it to you.”

  “Or to Rosemary, either, before this evening?”

  “She knew, of course. I’ve been begging her to marry me and leave here since the first week I came home. She hoped, not knowing you, that you might come to dislike her less and be willing for us to marry.”

  “Let me tell you something,” Adam said. “If that girl knew you had money, the only reason she didn’t marry you the minute you asked her was that she wanted to give that damn crippled brother of hers a chance to marry my daughter and the money they thought she’d have.”

  Kent didn’t answer. He walked over toward the back hall door. Adam stepped in front of him and gave him a clap on the ear. I caught Adam’s arm and he slammed one at me, but missed it a mile.

  Kent walked to the front door and out of it. The trouble was he took his time, lazy as whittling. He should have hurried. If he had, Adam wouldn’t have had a chance to say so much while the boy was crossing that big room.

  Betty-Jean, Mrs. Duefife and Reggie had skipped out into the kitchen. Brigid followed Kent. Adam shook the door open, kicked it shut, and left me standing there alone.

  Mrs. Duefife, hearing the door bang I suppose, peeked in from the kitchen and then came tiptoeing toward me, hunching her shoulders and biting her lower lip as folks do when acting stealthy.

  “Shall we go on with the dinner?” she asked.

  “You bet you,” I told her. “Food will be the best thing for everybody around here.”

  “Reggie is trembling all over,” she kept on whispering. “Such brutal language. And Betty-Jean is crying. The shock of it. Her own father, threatening to kill, threatening——”

  “Hold on,” I said. “You all misunderstood Adam. He didn’t mean a thing——”

  “That is all very well,” she interrupted; but I, always being doubtful of sentences beginning with those particular words, made five or six excuses and got out to the front porch where Brigid and Kent were.

  He said, “Sorry about all that in there, Jeff. Is Dad cooling down?”

  “Like everything,” I said. “He’s gone outdoors. He’ll be fine.”

  “I hope not,” Brigid said. “Is the dinner party off, do you know, Jeff?”

  I said it was on, and the three of us chatted for several minutes after that, chiefly about Brigid’s not wearing briefs to a dinner party, before we started to walk down to her cottage.

  It was then that we heard the gunshot. It couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes later when Adam showed up from around the community house and met us as we turned to walk east.

  And then, as I’ve told, Rosemary came running out of Twill’s cottage, making those pitiful outcries and telling us that she had killed her brother. We went into the house, and saw the blood on the dented pillow, and on her arms and pretty white dress and heard her grieving; but we couldn’t find Twill anywhere.

  A quarter of a mile away, and almost two hours later, we found Clyde Shively murdered, shot in the back. Soon, as I’ve also told, we realized that the old Judge couldn’t be found; and it was then that terror came creeping like a storm cloud’s shadow over us all. It was bigger than we were. We couldn’t get away from it any more than we could get away from the dark night itself with its evil hours that turned our very hopes against us, changing them into blind dreads and dull bewildering fears.

  Chapter XVIII

  If I’d stopped to think about it that Wednesday night, though I didn’t, I’d have said that I’d never be at myself again. But Thursday, with the sun shining as usual, and finding myself alive and with my health in another day made me feel a lot better.

  I don’t mean that I was cheerful or very sensible when, after Betty-Jean had given me Adam’s message, I started out from Brigid’s cottage to meet him at the community house. I was worried about Kent in that boiling hot jail, and about everything else in the world. But I had my two feet on the ground—desert ground, where they belonged—and, speaking symbolically like O’Dell, I thought that I was going to be able to keep them there.

  So, seeing Adam coming toward me too fast with that curly white hair of his standing out every which-way and with twiggish things in it besides like a maniac’s was very discouraging. I felt myself slipping. I waved and hollered the one cheering thought I’d had that morning.

  “It’s lucky Jeremiah isn’t here—”

  “What?” he hollered back, slowing down and looking over his shoulder.

  “I just said——”

  “Who?”

  “Jeremiah,” I said, and gave up, sick of the whole thing.

  He stopped and waited for me to come to him. The twiggish things in his hair were bits of sage and greasewood; his clothes were torn, showing scratches that he’d got climbing down into the crevice, but the worst of it was he looked old. I’d never so much as thought, before, of Adam’s being old; so I began feeling sorry for him, and to what lengths I might have gone with my sympathy I don’t know, if he hadn’t said, right then:

  “Get on the sidewalk and walk, can’t you? What are you minching along like that over the rocks for?”

  “I am not minching along,” I said.

  “You are minching along,” he said. “What were you yelling at me? It sounded as if you were saying that Jeremiah wasn’t here.”

  “I was——“ I tried telling him.

  “By the Eternal! What next? Why did he come over here? How did he get here? Who saw him last?”

  “He never started for here, even,” I said, trying to explain in a hurry while I had a chance. “He never came. He hasn’t been here——”

  “Well, well, what about it?—I’d known he wouldn’t let me finish.—“Who said he was here?”

  “Nobody. I just said he wasn’t.”

  By this time I wished like everything that I’d never brought the subject up. I thought maybe if I’d change it, he’d let the whole thing drop.

  “Hot, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Not particularly,” he said; sweat was dripping off his bushy white eyebrows into his eyes and trickling down the creases around his mouth. “But, before we leave this news concerning Jeremiah, I’d like to clear up one point. I’ve gathered that he is safe at Hay Patch. I’ve gathered that he isn’t here. Am I right?”

  “I was trying to tell you——”

  “You told me. Now I have news for you, Sheriff. Unsensational. Less exciting. Not the sort that must be shouted from far distances with warning gestures. Rosemary isn’t here.”

  “I know it, Mayor,” I said, disgusted to the point of turning around and starting to walk off.

  “Wait a minute, Jeff,” he said, more politely. “Let’s go in here and get out of the heat.”

  I humored him and went with him into Reggie’s cottage. We’d been standing in front of it.

  The parlor, very untidy and dusty-looking, smell
ed of stale oranges and peppermint. A lot of the pictures of things to eat were curled up like pin wheels on the walls, but some of the extra delicious ones were fastened at all four corners and fly-specked.

  Adam walked around a minute or two squinting at them as if they didn’t agree with him and then an idea struck him and it was a dandy.

  “Jeff,” he said, “I’m a damn fool.”

  “Yes?” I said, making it a question but insinuating that I’d take his word for it.

  He went on, not quite so pleasantly—and this goes to show how Adam sticks to things, never leaving go until he’s finished them—“You were telling me that Jeremiah wasn’t here,” he said, “because, being in one of your lighter, more whimsical moods, you thought that I would appreciate the jest—the absence of his tears, so on. The good taste might be questioned, at the moment, but I’d rather question a man’s taste than his sanity. I thought you’d gone insane. Have you as good a reason, humorous or otherwise, for allowing that girl to escape?”

  “Meaning Rosemary?” I asked. “If you do, ‘escape’ your foot!”

  That shouldn’t have made him mad, but it did. Seemed that he’d left me in charge of the camp. Seemed that he’d trusted me and expected me to be on the go every minute getting evidence from hither and yon all over the place. Seemed that he hadn’t expected me to spend a minute off my feet, to say nothing of talking to the ladies. Seemed that he’d have overlooked my doing or not doing anything if I’d just managed to prevent Rosemary’s going for a ride.

  “You never said a word about keeping her on the place,” I stood up for myself.

  “I must have forgotten, momentarily,” he said, “that you were County Sheriff.”

  “What do you want her here for, anyway?” I asked.

  He was looking in the wastebasket where the orange peelings were, but he put it down before answering. “It isn’t,” he said, “that I blame a man for being crazy. What I blame him for is enjoying it, taking pride in it.”

  “Just because Rosemary killed her brother, by accident, and admitted it right away, is no reason,” I told him, “for thinking that she had a hand in everything that happened here last night, or in anything else at all.”

  Adam, who had been lowering that doggone wall bed, now sat on the side of it to rest for half a second, and say, “I’m by no means convinced that Rosemary did kill Twill yesterday evening.”

  “Be that as it may,” I said, and when he said “What?” I repeated it, “Be that as it may, somebody was killed by somebody in that cottage last night at about half-past seven. Remember hearing the shot? Remember the pillow? Remember Rosemary’s white dress and her arms? Remember that some of it rubbed: off, red, on Kent’s white shirt?”

  “Distinctly,” he said, “and you may omit particulars. Reggie has been giving a demonstration. He isn’t as dull as I thought. It is true that things do dry rapidly in this heat and at this altitude. You are right. Someone was killed in Twill’s cottage last evening. But suppose that ‘someone’ was Judge Shively and not Twill? Suppose that Twill killed the Judge and took the body away while Rosemary ran out in front to stop us.”

  “Stop us from what?” I asked. “She never made a move to stop us. If she hadn’t come running out, we’d have walked right along without going in there at all.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “You have answered your own question.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  “You have answered your own question,” he said, as if I’d said nothing. “When we heard the shot,” he went on, “the four of us, Kent, Brigid, you and I walked toward Twill’s cottage. If he had left there a minute or two after the shot was fired, he could have been getting away with the body behind the cottages—using them for screens—while we were walking in front of them. After the boys rode through the gate the footprints were effaced. Anyone could have ridden out, after that, without leaving traces. The boys’ horses were here, too, you know. And there was a short time when we were all together in Twill’s cottage, before you arrested Kent.”

  “I didn’t arrest Kent,” I said. “But have it your own way. Twill shot the old Judge and skipped out in daylight with the body. Six people hunting at fever heat couldn’t find him. But he waited, somewhere and nearly three hours, for his chance and rode away. He couldn’t ride far, because the horses were here when Kent and I struck out, and later, I guess, when the boys were ready for them. No, Twill just rode a little piece, got off and sent the horse back. Would the horse come over to Memaloose, or would it light out for Ferras where it eats its oats?

  “Never mind that, though. Since we’re going crazy, we might as well, as you said, be proud of it. So Twill dismounts on the desert, a cripple hampered with a dead body. The boys spent the night and until long after sunup this morning scouring the deserts. Where is Twill? Where is the body? You take the story and go on from there.”

  “Shut up,” Adam said, “you talk so much you make me nervous.” and went walking to the front door in order to turn around and come back in a careless manner except for shooting quick glances across the floor.

  “What are you doing now?” I asked, knowing—I don’t know how—that he was doing something.

  “I am looking under the bed,” he answered, being dignified very slowly, something like Mrs. Duefife.

  “A couple of minutes ago,” I told him, “you were walking where under the bed is now. Did you drop something?”

  “When we went into Twill’s cottage yesterday evening,” he said, “the wall bed was down. I am trying to discover whether, if someone had been under that bed, then, we should have noticed him.”

  “Who would it be under the bed?” I asked. “Twill, or the Judge, or both?”

  “If you please!” he said, mad again about something, and went off into a long rigmarole about how Kent had stayed alone with Rosemary until after Clyde Shively’s body had been found, and finished by stating that Kent was the only person in camp who would have sense enough to get Twill’s body (seemed that Adam had gone back to Twill’s being shot) away and hidden where it couldn’t be found.

  I didn’t answer. I was thinking.

  “Well? Well?” he burst out. “What now, Sunbeam? Astounding,” he added, “this propensity of yours for thinking up jokes and grinning over them in times of deep tragedy. Astounding and repellent.”

  “You’d know better than I would about the joke,” I said. “I was just remembering that Kent mentioned to me last night that you’d be the only one on the place with nerve enough to steal the body or sense enough to hide it where it couldn’t be found.”

  There was never any telling about Adam. I hadn’t aimed to make him mad before and he got mad. I had aimed to vex him a little, then, and he was pleased as Punch though he tried to hide it by chucking some of the covers under the bed and walking off, to see whether they’d be noticeable or not. The upshot of this was that, trying our best, neither of us could see anything in that room, from any point in it, except those covers under the bed.

  While he was picking them up and shaking the dust off them I happened to remember that I’d looked under the bed in Twill’s cottage while Kent was sitting on it beside Rosemary and not so very long before we’d found Clyde Shively’s body.

  ‘That doesn’t change matters, so much,” Adam said, after thinking it over. “We had all been searching at the back of the place for almost two hours. Kent, or anyone, could have taken the body out the front way——”

  “Where?” I interrupted. “Could have taken it where?”

  “Stop that everlasting ‘whereing’!” he said. “Is there no word in the language that anyone on this place can use except where, where, where?”

  “Why,” I asked, as much to change the subject as anything else, “did you want to search Reggie’s cottage, in particular?” It had dawned on me, by this time, that he hadn’t stopped there wanting to get out of the heat by accident.

  “The Judged glasses in Reggie’s pocket,” Adam admitted. “Even during t
he excitement, Reggie couldn’t have picked them up without noticing what he was doing. Someone here on the place slipped them into Reggie’s pocket deliberately.”

  “Reggie might have slipped them in there, more or less deliberately,” I said. “Or some stranger——“ I saw my mistake there, and stopped but not soon enough.

  “You think that Reggie wouldn’t have noticed a stranger, coming close enough to him to put something into his pocket? But, as I was saying, before you interrupted, I’ve wondered whether the person who disposed of the glasses might have put other clues here in Reggie’s cottage, in order to mislead us? You know as well as I do that Reggie wouldn’t commit murder——”

  “Why not? Too fat?”

  I had him there, and he knew it, so he didn’t answer.

  I happened to look out the front window just then. “I don’t know what there is about the way she walks,” I said, “but there is something that makes it the handsomest walking I ever saw walked.”

  He bit excitedly, giving himself dead away on one count, anyhow. “Rosemary?” he asked.

  “Home from her ride and on her way to her cottage right now,” I said.

  Chapter XIX

  I’d rather have gone with Adam when he went to talk with Rosemary, then; but he said he wanted to talk with her alone. I understood, in a way, what Kent had said about Rosemary’s not needing anyone to take care of her. I remembered O’Dell’s saying, months before, that if she and Adam ever came to a conflict she’d win. So I found myself a patch of shade between two empty cottages; but, as far as peace and quiet went, I might as well have been lying under the hose cart at a fire on Main Street.

  Brigid was in swimming, splashing and slapping the water; moving the canoe at first and, later, just splashing and slapping. The two horses were tramping around in the back. Every once in a while somebody had to get out and walk a piece, just so there’d be footsteps making big clatters on the cement. Naturally in a tumult like that I couldn’t rest. I had to think; and, like Joe, I thought of things.