The Desert Lake Mystery

by Kay Cleaver Strahan

  “Sweet!” she said. One thing that made her so likable was her way of saying things.

  “I thought we were going to look at the gate, honey?” I tried coaxing her.

  “About Funny,” she answered, not budging. “We have only Mayor Oakman’s word for it, really, that he found him out there on the deserts.”

  “No,” I reminded her. “Rosemary told all about burying him out there. And if I ever heard the truth I heard her telling it last night.”

  “I thought on Wednesday night that if I ever heard the truth I heard Rosemary telling it.”

  “She had to help Twill, then,” I said. “He was her younger brother and she loved him. You can’t blame her for that. Ladies should——“ I was going on to say that they should understand each other when it came to things like that, but she interrupted so saucy that she threw me off.

  “Lie?” she said.

  “Love,” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” she said. “All right, Jeff. If you’re determined to leave here, I’ll go. But do stop picking at me. Let me brush you off. You look as if you’d sat in those feathers.”

  We had a nice quiet trip on the way back; both of us, I guess, were sick of talking. We were driving into Ferras before she said:

  “There weren’t so many of us who heard Rosemary say that she had shot Twill rather far below the throat.”

  “Eavesdroppers might have been around, for all we know, after the dark shut down. And word gets passed around. It’s surprising.”

  “There weren’t many of us in camp yesterday afternoon, either,” she said.

  “Nobody has any way in the world of knowing who was or wasn’t in that camp yesterday afternoon,” I told her. “The gate was open, the deserts were free to be ridden, or the lake to be swum.”

  “I swam. Everyone knows it. I told lies all afternoon. I’m the only one who has freckles. Wouldn’t it be distressing for St. Dennis?”

  “For a girl of your age,” I said, “you do get the craziest ideas of anybody I ever knew. In the first place, you were on the mountain at five minutes to twelve when Reggie heard the shooting.”

  “Reggie was frightened out of his wits. Any clever lawyer could discredit his testimony. Probably he could be proved moronic. You know, none of us ever paid any attention to anything he said——”

  “But you are going to pay attention to something I’m going to say, right now,” I told her. “Nobody would even think of accusing you of any wrongdoing—let alone murder. It’s like you said about Reggie—it couldn’t be done. So don’t you put the idea into peoples’ minds. Listen, honey: You aren’t going to be nervous and scared and lose your sleep and get sick, are you?”

  “No. Not really. I’d hate it for St. Dennis. I’d probably be acquitted. But trials aren’t nice.”

  “Put it out of your mind right now,” I begged. “Promise me that you won’t give it another thought. Go on, promise. Please, honey.”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “Don’t you worry about it, either, Jeff.”

  I tried not to; but it wasn’t so easy with three funerals to attend and nothing to do but think during the services. Not that Kent didn’t arrange the funerals fine, having them dignified, short and private. Just that everything was terrible.

  Sunday morning all the hired help except Jeremiah left Hay Patch.

  Monday morning Mrs. Duefife opened a bank account at the Ferras Bank with one of Kent’s checks made out to her. The word went around town like wildfire—the amount being given at everything from a thousand dollars up to a quarter of a million. I have never heard the truth of the matter.

  Monday, after the last funeral, Mrs. Duefife and Reggie departed for back East. The town was at the depot to see them off. Reggie kept dropping pennies in the slot machine, getting gum and chocolate out, until the train came. Remarks were made that this seemed very unfeeling so soon after a funeral.

  Wednesday afternoon I got an airmail letter from Adam. It was posted from Pasadena. It said:

  “Dear Jeff:

  Among ants, the males have the keenest eyesight, the females less keen, and the workers, though they have the best brains, are very often blind. You are a hard-working man, Jeff.

  “Judge Shively has been found. He is dead and buried. A man who gave his name as D. R. Reorjeod was responsible for all the crimes at Memaloose. We discovered him barely in time to get a complete confession before he died from self-administered poison. The authorities here agree with me that further investigation, or publicity, will be unnecessary. The name you will note is difficult to pronounce, and I may have spelled it incorrectly.

  “I have telephoned to Kent giving him full instructions as to funerals, weddings, endowments and other events that may be necessary during my absence. I am leaving for an extended trip through the Orient—perhaps.

  Affectionately and faithfully,

  your friend, Adam Oakman.”

  My first idea was to destroy that letter pronto. Then I decided that I should show it to Brigid first to make her stop worrying. She had gone to Hay Patch to keep folks from saying she was afraid to go, so I lit right out with it.

  “Sounds like a Mex name to me,” I said, after she had read the letter but while she was still saying nothing.

  “Or Chinese?” she asked.

  “Oh, well,” I admitted, “if a person likes reading backward, it might come out something like Doe, J., Roe, R., bad men, both of them. I’m sure glad they have finally self-administered poison. Look at the work it is going to save county sheriffs——”

  “It isn’t funny,” she kind of burst out. “It is rotten. That is what it is. I thought that MacDonald woman was honest—really honest. Do you think Mayor Oakman meant for you to decode this thing?”

  “Maybe. He told me once he was always deciding that I was a fool and then changing his mind. He claimed it kept him apologizing.”

  “Why didn’t he tell you straight out then?”

  “He never tells things straight out,” I said. “He’s a millionaire.”

  After a while she said, “Nice what money can avoid doing, isn’t it?”

  Chapter XXXVII

  I knew that Adam, the old codger, hadn’t gone for an extended trip anywhere that would keep him long away from Oakman County. I’d given him a month. But he stayed away three months, so that his friends could decide that he had skipped the country for sure, and I could be kept on edge denying it and meeting all trains from the South.

  At that it was luck, as much as anything else, that took me to the depot the night he got in on twenty-one from back East, waving and hollering at me, before the porter even got the step put down, about how was I and how was everybody.

  “Fine,” I kept telling him, “Fine!” And “Fine!” he kept saying when he got off the train, duded up fit to kill, and I asked him how he was. “Fine!”

  “Ferras looks fine to me,” he said next. “How has it been getting along without a mayor?”

  “Fine!” I said.

  “While I think of it,” he said after a minute, “I’ve all sorts of messages for you from Kent and Rosemary. I saw them off for Europe last month. Honeymoon. She’s a good girl, Jeff—intelligent and not bad-looking. The boy could have fared worse for a wife. But why don’t you tell me some news? How is everybody? How’s Jeremiah? How’s Hay Patch?”

  “Fine!” I said. We were in my car riding to Hay Patch by that time. “They say Jeremiah likes being lonesome.”

  “Tell me,” he said, “how are the O’Dells? And Mac and Ernie? And Shorty, and Bert, and Slim and Taylor? Is Goldfield Red’s garage paying any better? And say, how is Doctor Sprague? And Joe? Are the Penroys getting along all right? Has Rimrock drunk himself to death yet?”

  “If you mean James Kelly,” I said, “he is now a converted church member who hasn’t touched a drop for three months.”

  “Well,” he said, but kind of taken aback. “I’m glad to hear that. Have they been having revival meetings here in town?”

 
; “No,” I said. “There was a spelling bee at the schoolhouse the other night, but Rimrock didn’t go. He’s been opposing education here lately.”

  “How’s Lang?” he asked, “and Timmy Monk, and Iverson?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  When we let ourselves into the front hall at Hay Patch, Jeremiah was tiptoeing downstairs in his nightshirt, wearing a boxing glove and carrying a baseball bat. When he saw Adam he sat right down on the steps and began sobbing to shake the rafters with joy.

  “Here’s a homecoming,” Adam said to me as he picked up the bat that came bumping down the stairs, “that I call a homecoming.”

  It took him quite a while to let Jeremiah welcome him and get him back to bed again; but, finally, Adam and I were free to go to the kitchen and rustle ourselves something to eat.

  We talked about this and that until, “Well, Jeff,” Adam said, offhandedly, when we were finishing up, “I suppose you have been able to satisfy Oakman County’s curiosity concerning the Memaloose tragedies?”

  “Only moderately,” I said. “I could have wished you hadn’t skipped the country when you did.”

  “I see,” he said. “So they think that I’m the murderer; is that it?”

  “Some of the crazy ones,” I told him.

  “O’Dell?” he asked, but sharp and fast.

  “No, no,” I said, stalling for time. “No, not O’Dell.”

  The trouble was that O’Dell wouldn’t look at things right. He swore that he was going to tell Adam, when he got a chance, because he was sick and tired of Adam’s thinking that he could get away with murder and make fools out of everybody all the time. So I had decided long ago to kind of take the edge off of it, if I could, by telling Adam first myself.

  “Gratifying,” he said, but kind of smirking.

  “You bet,” I said. “Another gratifying thing is that O’Dell is like Brigid, nice about keeping secrets.”

  Adam cocked his head and looked at me with that queer, pausing look that folks generally use only when they think that they’ve broken a tooth or swallowed a bone.

  I knew that I had to tell him, so I did. “Adam,” I said, “O’Dell has figured out who the criminal was over at Memaloose. He may spring it on you, so I think you ought to know that he knows.”

  “He doesn’t know. He can’t know. But if he is actually making definite accusations, I’ll—”

  “No, he isn’t,” I said. “Brigid and he and I know. We haven’t let it go any further, and we won’t.”

  “Who is O’Dell accusing?” Adam asked, getting very hard.

  There was nothing for it but finishing what I’d started. I hated it like thunder, but I told him.

  He leaned back in his chair and heaved a long relaxing sigh. For a minute I could feel it doing me as much good as it was doing him.

  “Jeff,” he said, then, “you are the best friend I have on earth. I am telling you the truth, with our friendship as a pledge, when I say that my little daughter, Betty-Jean, is as innocent as a baby; that never in her poor little life did she do so much as think of a crime—much less commit one. As for O’Dell and his ‘figuring,’ I’ll—— By the Eternal! Is this your idea of a joke, Jeff? Even O’Dell can’t be as crazy as that. Didn’t anyone tell him that Betty-Jean was herself a victim of the murderous fiend? Are you and he trying to force me to disclose the identity of the real criminal? You can’t do it. Or is O’Dell hoping to assure himself of my silence regarding his own daughter’s deplorable behavior during those frightful days at Memaloose? In either case, it is sheer maliciousness—dirty slander. But I know how to deal with it. I’ve dealt with it in the past, and-—”

  “Hold on now, Adam,” I said. “Hold on. Brigid went through a lot. You’ve got to remember that. O’Dell had a right to be interested. I think it is pretty white of him to say nothing——”

  “You do; do you? ‘White of him’ to blacken my little daughter’s name, after her death? Of course he’s saying nothing. He wouldn’t dare. He hasn’t a shred of evidence.”

  “He has a lot of what he thinks is evidence,” I said, and thought I’d better be going.

  In the hall Adam began giving me messages to take to the O’Dells. It was quite a few minutes before he begged my pardon and said that maybe I was right. Maybe he shouldn’t condemn a man and run him out of the county without hearing his side of the story. We went into the front parlor and I began explaining.

  “O’Dell did take kind of a crazy starting point,” I admitted. “He said that no woman who was a rotten bridge player and a good cook would sit playing bridge all afternoon when she was giving a company dinner. He said that Betty-Jean had begun her dinner by one o’clock and by nature she’d have fussed with it all afternoon. He said nothing much but murder would keep a good cook from preparing her dessert—Pineapple Supreme this was—and getting it into the freezing trays on a hot day like that day was. He said she stayed tight in the living room because she was determined to have the bridge game, with three people, for her alibi. She never stepped out of there for a minute all afternoon.”

  “However,” Adam said, “she did have the alibi. A perfect one, as you have just explained.”

  “No. She came in during the worst of the storm, scared to death——”

  “Of the wind and the thunder,” Adam said very sadly.

  “O’Dell said likely she was afraid of storms and Twill knew it. So he ran to her cottage to keep her company. Not finding her there, he went to the Judge’s cottage, arriving just in time to see her kill Clyde Shively, or to know for sure she’d done it.”

  Adam asked, “And her motive for killing an old friend?”

  “O’Dell thought maybe they weren’t so friendly. But they’d known each other before. Likely he threatened to tell something on her—something in her past life that she didn’t want known. She had been in the plot with him, to begin with, but——”

  “What ‘plot’?”

  “That’s thickening. But, after she got here, she found herself well fixed with a rich papa and everything nice. She wanted Clyde Shively out of the way. If you’d told her you were sending for the Judge——”

  “Now that you mention the Judge?” Adam said, making it a very sarcastic question.

  “I’m coming to that. After she had shot Clyde Shively, she threw herself on Twill’s mercy. He loved her. He promised to help her. He sent her to the community house on the run to set an alibi for herself. O’Dell thinks her saying that she had telephoned to the Judge, during the storm, was her own idea. But not so smart as it seems, because likely she had telephoned when the storm began, and was just saying so.”

  “We return,” Adam said, “at last to the Judge?”

  “In the meantime,” I said, “Twill, left alone there with the dead man, began looking around to see what could be done. Twill wasn’t so anxious to come right out and take the blame for shooting a man in the back. The boy was young and in love. But pretty soon his being in love was the worst of it.

  “O’Dell says it is easy to imagine the boy alone there in the cottage, scared, trying to make some plans, beginning to find the Judge’s belongings around, and beginning to wonder where was the Judge, anyway. He found his glasses, and his cane, and his broad brimmed hat that shaded his face, and his clothes. Maybe first, maybe last, he found a white wig.

  “Probably he didn’t notice that Clyde Shively had black on his teeth, from where he’d pulled bits of tape off that had made them look ugly and missing. Probably he didn’t notice that the brown age spots on his hands—you called them ‘freckles’—would wash off. But he remembered how the old Judge had been practically in hiding in the cottage next door to Betty-Jean’s for three days, showing himself only in darkened rooms. Maybe he remembered that Betty-Jean hadn’t wanted to give the dinner party that night, but that you had insisted—as Miss MacDonald took pains to find out. Maybe he thought of Betty-Jean’s ordering candles for the lights that evening. Anyway, whatever he thought, or found, some time in ther
e it dawned on him for certain that old Judge Shively and his son Clyde Shively were one and the same person. After that, anything he thought was enough to drive him crazy. He knew that Betty-Jean and this fellow must have been in cahoots, at best or worst, about something none too good.

  “But he stuck to his promise to help her. He ripped the pillow open and hid the white wig, and maybe other things used for disguising, in it and sewed it up again with the thread he found, likely, when he was hunting for other things that had to be hidden. I guess, unless Lynn MacDonald has told what was in the pillow, exactly, we’ll never know. Shively’s being around Hollywood and having to do with actors, some, would have helped him with the tricks of fixing up for an old man.”

  “May I call your attention to the fact,” Adam said, “that the things you are choosing to call ‘disguises’ were not hidden? You may invent a pillowful of wigs and costumes. The facts are that the cane, the hat, the old gentleman’s clothes were all in plain sight there in his cottage.”

  “What on earth could Twill have done with them? Rosemary couldn’t take a trunk with her. Canes and clothes and so on weren’t easy to get rid of over at Memaloose. We were kind of bothered about the glasses; but we decided that he must have forgotten to put them in the pillow before he sewed it up—or maybe didn’t find them until the last thing. Anyway, he must have stuck them in his pocket and forgot them. When he took his clothes off to go in swimming they could have dropped there in the chair seat where Brigid found them.”

  “Guess work! ‘Maybe,’ and ‘probably’!”

  “O’Dell thought that, after Twill had finally finished hiding things (the wall bed was the only place he could put the body where it might not be seen if somebody should look in the window—or under the bed in the other room, and that would have been worse) and got outside again, he decided that none of it was any use. So he probably wrote a note, saying that he had killed Clyde Shively——”

  “A note? I was not aware that any note was found?”

  “There wasn’t. Being fact and not fiction, O’Dell says, either Rosemary or Twill actually succeeded in getting that note teetotally destroyed, instead of leaving it around for Will Cuppy to quote.”