The Desert Lake Mystery

by Kay Cleaver Strahan

  “Who was?” I asked, just to please him.

  “A doll-faced moving-picture extra named, absurdly, Iris Fields. She was Clyde Shively’s wife. He married her a year ago. She has led him a merry chase, we gathered. He was insanely jealous of her. But they needed money—preferably much; if not, as much as they could get. So she came here pretending to be my little daughter, Betty-Jean, who died when she was five years old.”

  “That was what I kind of thought,” I said, “that she wasn’t your daughter. But O’Dell said that while in fiction she couldn’t be, in fact she almost assuredly was. Some of us who could remember thought that she looked like your wife.”

  “She looked like all the snub-nosed, big-eyed blondes in the world,” he said. “O’Dell should have known that no daughter of mine could have been as damn dull as she was.”

  “Pretty good actress, though,” I said. “Most of the time.”

  “And, perhaps,” he said, “at least part of the time, a woman with a few good instincts? I’ve wondered, Jeff, if her first crime—her killing Clyde Shively that night, might have been committed to save my life?”

  “O’Dell kind of thought you’d wonder that,” I said. “But he didn’t take a bit of stock in the idea.”

  Adam gave me a very queer long look. “O’Dell,” he said, and sighed, “is crazy.”

  “He has to be,” I said. “That’s how he makes his living.”

  THE END

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