“All those years!” Todd said mockingly. We went on into the house, leaving the youth gloating over the roadster.
Most of the family were wandering up and down the front hall, trying to gird up their loins for the expected third degree. Fay Waldron was in the drawing room, telling Mabel all about her son Sidney. It seemed that Sidney was seven, and mentally he was practically a genius. “Why, he could read and write at five,” Fay was saying. “And you should see the pictures he draws—I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be a great artist.”
Mabel said that artists got big money sometimes.
“Yes, that’s what I told his father,” Fay rattled on. “It would look nice in big red letters at the bottom of a hand-painted oil painting, wouldn’t it—‘Sidney Waldron’? Of course,” she hastily added, “I don’t mean those nasty naked women or anything like that, I mean landscapes and sunsets and things.”
Mabel said it was too bad Sidney hadn’t come along on the trip—he could have sketched the burning garage.
“Oh!” gasped Fay. “Of course I wouldn’t think of taking the child away from home!” I could see from the doorway that Mabel was holding her left hand in various positions, trying to get Fay to notice the diamond. But Fay Waldron was a victrola with one record. “I’ll show you some of his drawings that I’ve got upstairs, and a picture of him.”
Uncle Alger was shuffling a deck of cards in the little sitting room, as if he found the presence of an ancient cobwebbed Christmas tree comforting and peaceful. “Come on,” he invited, as Todd and I came in sight. “We might as well pass the time by playing a little rummy.”
Todd shook his head. “I only play cards for keeps,” he said. “Where’s Mildred?”
Uncle Alger shook his head. “I used to keep track of the women,” he cackled, “but that was some years ago.” He dealt himself a hand of Canfield. “You might ask that boy of mine,” he went on. “He eyes the skirts.”
“He eyes wheels, too,” Todd said. “Think he’d like to make a date with my car.”
Uncle Alger looked up, frowning. “Automobile crazy, that boy is! After me all the time to hurry up and order a new car on the strength of the money we just fell into. Says he’s the only kid in the state of California that don’t have a car.” Alger Ely leaned forward, wet his lip, and then peeped shamelessly at one of the buried cards. “But I told him that we ain’t got the money yet, and when we have—I got plans for Eustace.”
Uncle Alger dropped his voice. “Don’t whisper it to a soul, but I know a man who knows somebody who’s like this—he held up two fingers—with a congressman. And they say you can make a deal for a West Point appointment, which would be a snap for Eustace!” He leaned back benevolently. “It’s been my ambition ever since Eustace was a little boy, but now it looks like it’s really coming true!”
Dorothy came down the hall, quite evidently looking for us. She stopped in the doorway. “Hello,” spoke up Todd. “Where’s Mildred?”
“Upstairs,” Dorothy admitted. “Why?”
Todd took her by the elbow, motioned me to follow. When we were safely out of earshot, he said, “The sheriff’s gone, but he’ll be back. And we’d better agree on what we’re going to say to him. Obviously nobody is going to mention why we all really came to Prospice this Christmas.”
We agreed to that. “It’s your sister I’m worried about,” Todd went on. “She’s got the jitters, and is likely to say anything. By the way”—he looked straight into Dorothy’s eyes—“you don’t know why she’s in such a funk, do you? When you said the police were outside I thought she was going to faint.”
“I know,” Dorothy said slowly. “It’s nothing, really. She told me all about it just now. She has nothing to be afraid of—it’s only that last night she couldn’t sleep. So she got up, tiptoed out of the room, and came downstairs—”
“After a book to read?” Todd put in.
“That’s what she’d like to have everyone think,” Dorothy admitted. “How did you know?”
“That’s the reason why people always wander around strange houses in the dark,” Todd said.
“Oh, but she wasn’t in the dark!” Dorothy corrected quickly. “She came over to the table by the head of my bed and took a box of matches! And that’s how I woke up—” She stopped short, flushing.
“Naturally,” I put in helpfully, “if she wanted to read she had to have a light to read by—”
Just then there came the sound of light, quick footsteps running down the stairs, and Mildred arrived, all out of breath, in our midst. She paused, drew herself up to her full height and threw back her dark head.
“Like it?” she demanded, speaking to us all but somehow meaning it for Todd.
Nobody answered her. Mildred’s fingers touched the string of pearls at her throat. “Well, do you think they’re becoming? Aunt Evelyn said I could wear them for a while.”
“Nice of her,” Dorothy put in. “But it’s hardly the time.”
“Well, I was frightened and unhappy!” Mildred pouted. “It’s Christmas, don’t you know that? And nothing to look forward to but a tiresome old sheriff and a lot of embarrassing questions.”
“Why should questions embarrass you?” Todd demanded. “Can’t you remember the name of the book you came downstairs to get?”
“Oh!” Mildred said blankly. She was staring at Todd, whose face wore an odd little smile. “Oh, so you know about that? All right, I—I didn’t come downstairs to get a book last night. I”—she was looking thoughtfully at her fingernails—“I heard some funny noises and thought I ought to see what it was.”
“So you armed yourself with a match and went downstairs alone?” I burst in. “In this house?”
The atmosphere was suddenly very strained. Mildred was flushing, along her neck and cheekbones.
“I heard the noises after I got downstairs,” she hastily corrected. “I went—I went down to get a cigarette! I knew there were some in a box in the drawing room.”
Dorothy took a quick breath. “Why, you knew there was a carton in my suitcase. And when did you get the craving…” she stopped short, taking pity on her sister.
Mildred swallowed. “I was so nervous and frightened that I couldn’t sleep, and I thought a cigarette would quiet my nerves.”
She evidently needed one now, or at least something in the form of a sedative. “I’ve got to go,” Mildred hastily concluded. “You have got me so excited I don’t know what I’m saying—and I almost forgot that I promised to help Aunt Evelyn pack.”
“Pack?” echoed Dorothy. We all stopped short.
Mildred nodded. “Didn’t you know? She’s leaving right away.”
We all went upstairs, on the double. Aunt Evelyn stepped out of her closet as we entered the room, her arms filled with dresses in gay colors, which she flung onto the bed.
“What are you four conspiring about?” she demanded. “Isn’t there anybody in this family sensible enough to do what I’m doing—turning my back on the whole silly mess and getting out of here ?”
“But, Aunt Evelyn,” I put in, “don’t you think that leaving right at this time is apt to look a bit—”
“Nonsense,” she said, dragging a suitcase from beneath the bed. “Prospice is distinctly not my idea of a place to spend a cheery Christmas. I don’t care what people say, and as for Joel—he was responsible for his own death, and that’s that.”
“What?” gasped Dorothy. “You think it was suicide?”
Aunt Evelyn shrugged. “Same thing as, anyway. If my brother hadn’t been too stingy to hire an electrician to fix the lights, instead of trying to make repairs himself, he’d be alive this minute. I’ve heard of homemade wiring starting fires before this.”
She took out a jewel case made of red velvet, which looked quite large enough for the British crown jewels. Mildred took off the pearls. “You want to pack these now?”
Aunt Evelyn took them, held them lovingly against her cheek. “My darlings!” she said lovingly. “Pearls mean so
mething that no other jewel can mean. The Orientals, you know, call them crystallized tears.”
Dorothy was unable to refrain from whispering in my ear that if we crystallized all the tears shed for Uncle Joel we wouldn’t have enough for a pair of shirt studs.
But Todd was uneasy. “Aunt Evelyn, it is going to look odd, your dashing away just now.”
“Young man,” she snapped, “it won’t look half as odd as it would for me to stay on here, eating cold lunches picked off the kitchen shelves and sharing a bath with a whole army of you!”
We left her happily packing. “Not even a murder could keep Aunt Evelyn from a Christmas party somewhere,” Dorothy suggested as we went down the hall. “Prospice turned out to be a frost, so she’s going elsewhere. Amusement at any cost.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about murder so glibly,” Mildred said, after a moment.
“She’s right,” I put in. “Nobody knows that Uncle Joel is even dead, much less murdered. Why, he may even be right here in this house. A lot of things could explain why he hasn’t showed up—he might be asleep, or drunk—or even have had a stroke.”
We all looked at Todd, who nodded slowly. “We’ll search the house,” he decided. “From chimney to cellar.”
“Ah!” I cried. “You think I’m right!”
“I know you’re wrong,” said Todd Cameron dreamily. “But it will clarify the situation if we prove it.”
We searched the house, the four of us. Sparing not a closet, not a dark corner, we fine-toothed Prospice from the enormous billiard room in the dome—a playroom built by two people who never learned to play—down through the twenty bedrooms of the second floor, most of them unfinished and unfurnished, through the dusty, unused rooms of the first floor, down to the last corner of the cobwebbed cellar. We found a workman’s dinner pail, forgotten in one un-painted bedroom. We found a thriving hornets’ nest in another room which happened to have broken windows. We found old magazines, old books, old cartons and tin cans and bills and letters and photographs. We even found a wine cellar, sparsely stocked with sweet California wines, but we did not find hide nor hair of Uncle Joel.
“All right, he’s not in the house,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t wandered away. Suppose the fire unhinged his mind, and he is somewhere in the hills, suffering from shock?”
We stood at the foot of the cellar stairs, almost as thickly covered with cobwebs as Uncle Joel had been when we first saw him.
“If you think he’s wandering in the hills you can tip off the sheriff and perhaps he’ll send for bloodhounds,” Todd told me. “But it won’t be of any use. Uncle Joel is dead.”
“But I don’t see—” I protested.
“That’s why he didn’t wake up at the smell of smoke, and shout for help from the windows,” Todd went on.
“That ladder stuck up to the garage window which you inadvertently helped the sheriff discover—see what it means? Someone went up that ladder last night, with a gun in his hand! And shot through the window.”
“His hand?” Dorothy put in.
Todd nodded. “None of the women could have raised a ladder long enough to reach that window. A ladder is a heavy piece of furniture.”
Todd nodded. “We can cross off Fay Waldron, and Mabel, and Dorothy, and Mildred and Evelyn.”
“I crossed her off long ago,” Dorothy said. “If this was murder, it was done for money. And Aunt Evelyn, thanks to her marriages, is the only member of the family who has enough to live on. Why, those pearls alone are worth all she’ll inherit here.”
“Yah!” said Mildred softly.
We all looked at her.
“Yah!” she repeated, red mouth curved scornfully. “Crystallized tears! Aunt Evelyn said she knew they’d take my mind off myself. They did!”
“Well?” Dorothy demanded.
“Aunt Evelyn is as broke as the rest of us,” Mildred announced. “Those pearls are phonies!”
“Now,” I said, “how can you possibly know a thing like that?”
“Easy,” said Mildred. “While she was in the closet I bit one!”
That was that.
Later, when Todd and I were alone in our room—mine no longer since the young man had calmly moved in upon me—I hit upon a new point.
“Todd,” I said, “I knew something was wrong with this case. Did you ever hear of a dead millionaire and a houseful of queer relatives without a family lawyer, sideburns and all, coming to read the will?”
Todd said I was right, of course. But as it turned out, my uncle Joel had no family lawyer. We finally, through breaking the lock of the desk in the library, found letters from the Golden Gate Trust Company of San Francisco. I managed, after some difficulty, in getting through via long-distance to the home of one of the vice-presidents of the company, a Mr Fortesque Cohen.
“Get him down here right away,” Todd told me, “or at least find out the provisions of the trust and of the will if there was a will. We can’t get anywhere at our sleuthing until we have that information.”
But Mr Cohen, after expressing polite and faintly accented sorrow over the death of Joel Cameron, was a hard nut to crack. Of course he refused to give information over the long-distance telephone.
“The Golden Gate cannot handle matters that way,” he said. “I shall come as soon as possible. Today is Christmas, and I cannot leave my family and come down there.”
I protested.
“Would you want me to disappoint three kiddies who are expecting me to dress up as Santa Claus?” he demanded. “I thought not. Tomorrow, then.” He retired into the august mysteries that surround money.
“No help there,” I told Todd. “What next?”
He shrugged, and led the way toward the drawing room, where Dorothy had been trying, without success, to play the great pipe organ. “Well!” she said. “Santa Claus goes yiddle!”
Then a car hooted outside. It was Uncle Joel’s ancient Lincoln, with a deputy sheriff at the wheel. Behind them was Sheriff Bates, with Oviedo and his wife Pia. Both Mexicans were rumpled, weary and handcuffed.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” the sheriff greeted me. “I pulled these two nasturtiums out of a tequila joint down on the water front.”
“Of course they confessed, Sheriff?” Todd was just behind me.
“No, they ain’t give in yet,” the sheriff admitted heavily. “But Oviedo admits that he knew the old man planned to leave him a thousand dollars when he died. And even if they claim to have left here around eleven o’clock last night…”
“I saw them,” Ely Waldron said, when questioned. “I saw them out of the window of my room, driving hell-bent down the hill in Uncle’s old car, all dressed up. That was about the time the rain started.”
The sheriff said that they could have come back. “Maybe shot the old man through the window, and then thrown the ladder into the fire that they set to cover it all up.”
“Not bad, not bad at all, Sheriff,” Todd said. “But why would they use a ladder? Didn’t Oviedo have keys to the garage doors?”
It turned out that he had. The Mexican, brought into the drawing room and confronted with the family, loudly insisted that he and his wife, finding that they had got mixed up with their calendar and thus had missed the fiesta, had spent the night getting quietly stinko in the tequila joint. “I got plenty witnesses!” he declared.
“Damlousy!” added Pia, nodding emphatically.
“That’s the trouble,” said the sheriff sadly. “They got too many witnesses. Everybody in Mex-town alibis for this pair. The store, the restaurant, the fish shop—somebody is willing to swear that this precious pair spent the evening, every minute, in each one of those places, and never went out even for a look at the moon. They’ve got at least four alibis!”
Oviedo and his Pia simply stood and waited, like oxen expecting the sacrificial knife. “Mr Cameron was in the habit of letting you use his car?” Sheriff Bates went on.
The long, lean Mexican shook his hea
d. “I sometimes do marketing,” he admitted. “I go errands in car. But last night Boss say I can have car to use because I’m such a good boy, Pia such a fine cook. Christmas only come once a year…”
“I brought them up here trying to trace down the ladder,” the sheriff admitted. Oviedo, in a mixture of Spanish-Indian-English which seemed intelligible to the sheriff, maintained that the last time he had seen the ladder it reposed in the tool house.
“We go to jail now?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” the sheriff admitted to Todd and me, thumbing his ear. “Suppose I could arrest the two of them on suspicion of arson. Can’t say anything about murder until we find us a corpse.” He motioned toward the garage. “I got three boys coming up to rake over the ashes and find what is to be found,” he said. “Ought to be here any minute.”
“It might occur to you, Sheriff,” Todd put in, “that if you want to keep your witnesses alive you’d better let Pia and her husband come back to work. We’ve none of us had anything but a cup of coffee today.”
The sheriff said that we were one up on him, even at that.
“Besides,” Todd continued amiably, “if Oviedo and his wife had a motive to kill, for a thousand-dollar inheritance, then everybody in this house had more than twenty times as strong a motive!”
The sheriff stared at him, at all of us. “That’s right! Shucks, though, I know it was none of you. I know you’ll all gather round and if it was murder you’ll help find the one who did it.”
“Find him and pin a medal on him,” Dorothy Ely said callously. The sheriff frowned. “Oh, have I said the wrong thing?” she went on.
Wrong or right, the sheriff turned Oviedo and Pia loose and then gave his undivided attention to the family for some time. It is not my intention to burden this account with an attempt to put down the fumbling questions and answers of a police interrogation. Let it suffice to say that Sheriff Bates succeeded in getting almost every member of the family to admit owning a feeling of distinct relief that Uncle Joel was no more. And that was the limit of his success.
Ely Waldron reiterated his story of the discovery of the flames—red shadows on the wall. Dorothy wisecracked, Mabel snapped and sniffed, Eustace and his father hedged and denied and floundered. Aunt Evelyn got up on her high horse, to the disgust of the sheriff, and Todd and I both talked at length, which seemed also to displease him. He was more than displeased when Todd mentioned the word “murder.”
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