Omit Flowers

by Stuart Palmer

  Aunt Evelyn, heading for the stair, paused long enough to look me full in the eye. “A little bald on top to play Galahad,” she said, not unkindly.

  I stiffened. “All the same, I mean it,” I said.

  “I’m sure you do,” Aunt Evelyn said. “You may even be right.” And with that she hurried on up the stair toward her own room.

  Alone in my own bed at last I lighted my pipe and took up the only book which the room afforded, a tattered copy of that interminably dull classic, Ramona. It would do as well as anything else to produce a soporific state, I thought.

  I had read to the point where my left eye—never what I could wish, optically speaking—was beginning to squint a bit, when suddenly there came a soft and furtive knock upon my door.

  “Come in!” I said automatically. Of course it was Uncle Joel, up to something.

  Only it wasn’t. It was Dorothy Ely, wearing a smile and some rather transparent silk. I suppose that the proprieties were observed by the fact that she had a negligee over her pajamas, but anyway I pulled the covers up around my chin and said “Hey!”

  Dorothy came over to the side of the bed. “Cousin Alan,” she said solemnly, “you are a good egg.”

  I muttered something, surprised.

  “Yes,” she went on. “You are a good egg, though a bit of a stuffed shirt. It seems that I have been wronging you. I thought all along that you must have sent those telegrams signed with Gilbert’s name.”

  “And why—why wouldn’t Gilbert sign his own telegrams ?” I wanted to know.

  Dorothy calmly sat down on the edge of the bed. “I had to tell you this, tonight,” she began thoughtfully. “Something darned funny is going on in this house, Alan.”

  “Don’t I know it?” I agreed.

  She shook her head. “Funnier than that. Which is why Mildred and I came—or at least I think why Mildred came. She’s such a funny, deep little thing. Anyway, you want to know why Gilbert didn’t send those telegrams? I’ll tell you. They were filed about three weeks ago. And Gilbert Ely was killed in a traffic crash in Chicago last May!”

  I stared at her blankly. “How do you know?”

  Dorothy gave a little dry laugh. “I know because the Chicago authorities wired me asking for money to bury him,” she admitted. “I didn’t have it, but gave them Uncle Joel’s name. They got in touch with him, but he wouldn’t do anything about it. So poor Gilbert got a pauper’s burial.”

  I thought about that. “Then—”

  “Then the person who signed Gilbert’s name to those telegrams didn’t know he was dead!” she said. “That’s where he made his mistake.”

  I nodded. “And now, dear cousin, would you mind getting out of here, quietly? Because if the Waldrons across the hall hear a lady’s voice in my room, they are apt to think—”

  “They would!” Dorothy said. “And you’d be flattered, you old devil!” But she went toward the door, stopped with one hand on the knob. “I’m glad you’re here, Cousin Alan,” she said, and went out into the hall.

  I put down the novel and turned out the light. I was physically and mentally fagged out, but for some reason sleep eluded me. The strange bed in a strange house, the lack of my usual companionship, conspired to keep me awake. If only Brownie had been curled up at the foot of my bed!

  Brownie is my cocker spaniel, a mahogany-tinted bitch—horrible word—who has been my best friend during the five years of our association. Now Brownie was left in the care of my landlady on a little side street of San Francisco, and no doubt howling miserably in the cellar because of my absence. I am not a man who sentimentalizes over dogs, but I could tell you stories about Brownie…. Indeed I am almost positive today that if I had followed my first plan of taking her with me to Prospice, the whole series of tragedies could never have happened. One pair of eyes unhindered by human astigmatism, one keen, inquisitive nose—these would have saved us all. Those quick, busy paws would have gone straight to the root of the whole mystery.

  I dozed off to sleep, my last thought being that someone was mighty stealthy about a trip down the hall to the bathroom. I might explain that Prospice, for all its luxuries, boasts but one bathroom to the floor, and that bathroom has red roses painted on the porcelain.

  Sleep—it was sleep filled with vague, formless dreams, a tormented and uneasy slumber from which I woke dully and with great difficulty. Someone was calling my name….

  I opened my eyes to see red sunlight on the wall of my room. My wrist watch read quarter of four, to my dazed surprise.

  “Alan!” came the voice again. It was not part of the dream, and someone pounded again on the door. I stumbled out of bed, realizing suddenly that it was not sunlight at all, but the tremendous glare of a fire that streaked my wall opposite the window.

  I could see that the garage, a thin, squarish slice-cut from the wedding cake of this house, was burning as fiercely as an oven, pouring skyward red-yellow flames that surpassed anything I had ever seen in fires.

  Three stories high, the walls still stood intact, with every window belching flame and the fire roaring from basement to sky. I could hear a soft, irregular purring, like that of a great hungry cat.

  Somebody was beating again at my door. It was Ely Waldron, hairy legs under an old-fashioned nightshirt. “Alan!” he roared as he burst into the room. “What has happened?”

  It was a foolish question. All of a sudden I knew what had happened, and to whom.

  Uncle Joel was snug as a bug in a rug no longer.

  The rest of that night was a waking nightmare which I, for one, will never forget. Yet my memories are only flashes, like newsreel pictures thrown for a few seconds on a screen and then wiped away.

  I can remember Ely Waldron and myself, pursued by hysterical women, as we plunged and stumbled through the pitch-black halls of Prospice trying to find a telephone. Of course the lighting system had failed again, and we had nothing but the angry red glare from outside to help us find our way through the jumble of passages.

  Then I have a picture of Waldron at the telephone, which we finally tracked to earth in the kitchen hallway. He was rousing the local night operator at the village, imploring her to send the fire department instantly. He hung up and plunged for the outer door, struggling into his suspenders as he went. I started to follow, but the phone rang back insistently. “I’m sorry,” the operator said, a thin reedy soprano, “but I’ll have to connect you with the fire department. I don’t think they are allowed to answer a call outside the village limits.”

  They weren’t. Not unless some responsible party would guarantee the cost of an alarm trip into the countryside, which might come as high as fifty dollars.

  I promised them, I begged them, I offered to come down to the village and display my bankbook and a letter from my pastor, and finally the fire chief weakened.

  “We’ll start pronto!” he promised.

  Then outdoors, into a black wet night streaked with roaring red flames, everywhere the acrid odor of smoke. We were all milling around in the yard, demanding of each other why didn’t somebody do something. It was all too evident that nobody, not even the fire department, could do much now.

  We talked of a bucket brigade, of fire extinguishers and ladders. Uncle Alger thought that he knew where a ladder used to be kept, in a tool house set back at the rear of the house, beside the water tanks and pump. But he failed to find it. The fire roared on, so furiously that it seemed everything inflammable within the garage must be quickly consumed. Flames roared through what had once been the pink minaret roof, and a pillar of yellow flames writhed into the sky. It was raining gently, but the shower had no more effect on the fire than a child’s squirt gun.

  “Too late to do anything for poor Joel,” Ely Waldron was saying. “If there’d only been an outside staircase he might have stood a chance, but by the time he knew the place was afire the stairs must have gone.”

  The roof of the burning building fell in, with a great shower of sparks. Without its tower, t
he garage looked like a sport-model incinerator stuffed with burning rubbish—and from the roar of the flames the building had the same kind of forced draft. Although stuck against the hillside, there was no door except the main entrance for autos from the driveway, and no windows except those to the south, facing the village and the sea, away from the hill.

  “The man locked himself into a death trap!” I heard Aunt Evelyn crying sometime later. I could see by the fire’s glare that she was clutching an armful of dresses and a fur coat, evidently being under the impression that the house itself would be next to go.

  Cousin Mabel, too, was rushing around with a packet of letters and a photograph framed in silver of a man with prominent ears. Evidently Mildred and Dorothy had no treasures—or else they realized that the house was not in the slightest danger. Eustace lingered in the doorway, reluctant, I suppose, to dampen his person.

  “It’ll burn itself out in a little while,” I heard Ely Waldron say to his wife. She had wrapped an old coat over her head and followed silently on Ely’s trail as if to make sure he would not attempt any rescue work at danger to his own stolid self.

  The Christmas morning was about to dawn, a nightmare of a Christmas with the soft California rain pouring down endlessly and the fire licking at the sky and belching forth clouds of greasy black smoke.

  “I thought somebody phoned for the fire department!” That was Dorothy’s voice, thin and unreal. Other voices came, discordantly.

  Then at last we heard the familiar sound of a siren far down the hill toward the coast highway. Headlights cut across the sky, swung low, and disappeared. The siren died away, started up again shrilly. Then all was silent, and no sign of the red fire truck. Fully half an hour later, with the fire still going full blast and a gray dawn behind the eastern mountains, an unhappy man in a red helmet and long rubber raincoat came plodding up the drive to report that the fire truck had gone off the road and was mired near the crest of the hill, beneath the row of eucalyptus.

  “Maybe you could give us a push with your cars?” he suggested hopefully. It was not until that moment that I recollected the tragic fact that my own Buick had been put safely away on the ground floor of the garage only a few hours before, along with Ely Waldron’s old touring car. It was too late to do anything about that now. Along with Uncle Joel, anything left in the garage was gone forever.

  “Well,” decided the chief thoughtfully, “she’ll be burning herself out in a few minutes, at that rate. All we can do is to stand and watch her burn!”

  We watched helplessly, unable to approach within fifty feet of the flames. But the fire did not die down. Then suddenly we heard the siren again, distinctly louder than before.

  Up through the deserted ghost city of Cameron Heights came the rattletrap fire truck, loaded with hose and ladders and men in rubber helmets. It roared up the steep drive and into the grounds. Not until then did I notice that most of its impetus came from a long and snaky-looking blue roadster which had been shoving from behind all the way up the hill.

  The firemen leaped down off the truck, took one look at the hulk of the garage, and then occupied themselves in making certain that the fire did not spread to the tall dead grass on the slope behind the burning building, or to the house by means of a blown spark. They had their axes with them but—as I heard Dorothy unkindly point out—the garage windows had been burst by the blast of the fire, and their sport was spoiled.

  The fire chief came over to me and took out his notebook. For some reason it seemed that he must find out just who had first seen the fire. “On account of how it’s a fatality,” he explained, “and insurance may be involved.”

  That was easy to answer. Ely Waldron said he’d heard a loud noise—he couldn’t say if it was the howl of a dog or an explosion, just a noisy noise—and had rushed to the window, where he saw the garage already ablaze. He had awakened his wife, and they both had rushed to my door. That would have been about sixteen minutes before four.

  “How do you know Mister Cameron was in the apartment over the garage?” demanded the fire chief of me.

  I didn’t, of course. “And it seems to me,” I told him, “that instead of asking all these foolish questions you ought to be trying to put out that fire.”

  The chief spat noisily. “Look around,” he commanded. “See a hydrant anywhere? There’s nothing to rig a hose to. Chemicals ain’t going to do it, neither. If you ask me, there’s gasoline in that fire somewheres. I can smell it.”

  The chief wanted to ask a lot more questions about whether there was a gas or electric heater in the room over the garage, and just where I thought the fire could have started. But I saw Dorothy coming toward me, and excused myself.

  Her tawny hair was plastered down across her forehead, and she looked frightened. “Oh! It’s terrible!” she greeted me.

  Of course it was terrible. But that wasn’t a very original remark, I thought. I told her that Uncle Joel was an old man and we all have to go sometime.

  “I don’t mean him!” Dorothy said quickly. “It’s Mildred—she’s gone!”

  “Disappeared?” That seemed unlikely. I told Dorothy that the kid was probably somewhere watching the fire, or that maybe she had gone inside out of the steady rain.

  “She’s not in the house,” Dorothy insisted. “She’s such an odd child, if anything’s happened to her I’ll—”

  “Mildred!” I shouted. There was now daylight enough to see that she wasn’t anywhere among the groups of relatives who were busily engaged in helping the firemen do nothing.

  I called her name again, at the top of my lungs. Dorothy joined in.

  Just then there was a loud toot from the horn of the snaky roadster which still stood in the driveway, some distance behind the fire truck. Evidently the driver who had been obliging enough to help the firemen had remained to watch the blaze.

  And Mildred was snugly ensconced inside the car, well sheltered from the rain by the rakish top. She was waving to us.

  “Trust little sister!” Dorothy said tersely. “I’ll bet anything you like that there’s a man behind the wheel of that car, a nice-looking, innocent young man.”

  Mildred called out cheerily—“Look who took pity on me and gave me shelter!”

  We came closer and looked. “What did I tell you?” Dorothy said to me. It was a young man, nice-looking but hardly what I would call innocent. He was tanned dark as an Indian, with light hazel eyes and a faint white scar through his left eyebrow. He looked like a young man who could take care of himself in a barroom free-for-all or a lady’s boudoir. If his dark hair had been combed flat he would have looked a bit too—something. But it wasn’t.

  “I realized that I was staring rather rudely. Dorothy was staring, too. “Well,” Mildred demanded, “don’t you know him?” She looked disappointed. “I knew him right away,” she boasted. “It’s Todd Cameron, and he’s come all the way from Zamboango on the other side of the world.”

  “Not Zamboango,” corrected the newcomer. He spoke from his chest, a rich, careful voice. “Rarotonga. Zamboango is where the monkeys have no tails.”

  “Well—welcome, cousin!” Dorothy said. Her voice warmed. “Yes, of course! I should have recognized you—but it was so long ago.”

  I shook his hand. “You were a noisy urchin with a million freckles when I saw you last,” I told him. “Come on, get out. Everybody will be surprised—”

  Then my voice trailed away as I remembered that Uncle Joel’s funeral pyre still blazed merrily into the sky.

  “I’m afraid I came at the wrong time,” Todd Cameron said. As he climbed out of the car he stopped to stare at the fire. He turned away from the girls, looked at me. “Accident?” he asked softly.

  “Of course!” I told him, with unnecessary emphasis.

  “Come on, you two,” Dorothy urged us. “Life has to go on, for some reason, no matter what happened last night. What we all need is some hot coffee. Fay Waldron promised to go in and make some.”

  The Mexica
n couple, then, were still away. I told Dorothy that I wished I knew exactly where they had gone.

  “By the looks of that cook, probably to a nice Sabbath somewhere,” my fair cousin replied. “On a broom stick.”

  The big bare kitchen of Prospice was designed for a chef and two or three undercooks, but it had been built just too early to boast of an electric refrigerator. Supplies were distributed according to some mysterious system of the Mexicans who normally ruled here. Now we all foraged for ourselves as best we could.

  The family clattered with coffee cups, everybody noisy, everybody weary and hysterical. Nobody but the girls and Aunt Evelyn made much fuss over the newcomer, though Cousin Mabel stared at him continually from the corner where she nursed a cup of coffee too hot to drink. He was distinctly an anticlimax, was Todd Cameron.

  Ely Waldron kept shaking his head at his wife, who persisted in saying that if anyone asked her, it was all for the best anyway. A man was better off dead than living with, as she aptly put it, “bats in his belfry.”

  “Joel always said he’d just as soon be cremated when his time came,” Uncle Alger put in dolefully.

  Aunt Evelyn clattered her cup. “You mean—suicide?”

  Uncle Alger hadn’t meant that at all, but it was an idea. I said that I doubted that a man would choose that way to die. He’d pick something easier.

  Just then there was the noise of a motor outside, and Eustace, who had been at the window, turned to us. “Fire truck’s going,” he said. “And the blaze’s died down.”

  Aunt Evelyn stood up. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I think there’s a good chance that there’ll be newspaper people nosing around, or at least telephoning. We ought to decide what to tell them….”

  “We ought to decide what to tell the police!” Cousin Mabel put in, her voice unpleasantly shrill on the last word.

  Everyone stopped short. “You said ‘police’?” Todd Cameron asked softly.