Omit Flowers

by Stuart Palmer

  “See any signs of anybody being there before you?” I asked, casually enough. “Weeds trampled down, or footprints?”

  She stopped short, stared at me. “I’ll swear nobody’s been there in years,” she insisted. “But—but—”

  “Yes?”

  “But I did think that somebody, or something, was watching me,” she blurted out. “There! Go on, say that little Dorothy is showing the family traits à la Uncle Joel. Go on.”

  “Perhaps you’re psychic,” I suggested. “Perhaps you really did sense a presence.”

  “Alan! You mean I could give séances and materialize Little Minnehaha, the Indian control? And have spirits play tambourines and tell us how happy Uncle Joel is in a land of sunshine and flowers?” She shook her head. “I won’t be having any, thanks. The eyes that watched me were real eyes…”

  “Only they didn’t have any body,” I finished for her. “That’s easy enough.” I opened the door, waited for her to enter the house.

  But Dorothy was looking down the road. “I suppose you know,” she said softly, “that Todd is gone.” She was so casual about it that I knew it mattered.

  “Why,” I gasped, “he said he was going upstairs to work out a theory about this case. He said—”

  “Yes,” Dorothy cut me short, “but I saw him drive hell-bent down the hill about half an hour ago.” I looked toward the driveway, but the Auburn was gone. Then Todd had walked out—permanently?

  “Mildred will miss him,” Dorothy said. “By the way, where is she?”

  I led the way down the hall, motioned to the library door. “She’s in there,” I whispered. “Robbing Eustace’s cradle in a nice way. Go on in, if you can stand hearing about pale hands on the Shalimar and all the rest of it. I can’t.”

  Dorothy nodded; her lower lip stuck out. “So the kid sister is reading poetry, eh? She will do that, at the drop of a hat…”

  Dorothy stopped dead short in the library doorway. Her spine stiffened, and with one hand she beckoned to me. I came behind her, and she caught my arm.

  “Will you look?” she whispered.

  I looked. Candles burned in one candlestick over the fireplace, a soft pale light that showed a passionately bound book of poetry tossed into the ashes of the cold grate. On the divan sat little Mildred, her curly hair well-mussed and her cheek pressed against the cheek of Todd Cameron.

  Of Eustace there was no sign whatever.

  Todd and Mildred were in a world of their own. I think that is the phrase one uses. At any rate, they were somewhere far away, in some high place from which neither Dorothy nor myself was visible. After a moment we backed cautiously from the doorway, and went down the hall.

  “That’s not the way he kissed me this morning,” Dorothy said. “Dear me, no!”

  There was a tremendous crash from the front hall, like a temple gong. It was a gong, held in the fist of a much-chastened Oviedo. “Dinner muy pronto!” he announced.

  I offered Dorothy my arm, and she accepted it. “You did see what I saw just now?” she questioned anxiously. “It was my sister being kissed by our handsome cousin, and not just a bad dream?”

  “Yes,” I said, as we came into the dining room. “But didn’t you see him driving hell-bent for somewhere a little while ago?”

  “This is my day for visions,” Dorothy murmured. “Me and the Maid of Orleans.”

  But it was clear enough in a few minutes, when Eustace hurried in and took his place at the long table.

  “Say!” Eustace burst out in Todd’s direction. “It’s a swell wagon, but not the hottest thing on the road.”

  “No?” Todd inquired.

  Eustace shook his head. “Thanks for letting me take it out, and all that. I got her up to ninety on the coast highway, and then an old guy with whiskers came along in a brand-new white Rolls and went past me as if I was in low gear.”

  Todd said it must be that low-test Mexican gas he’d bought.

  The dinner went fairly well, considering. Of course, the atmosphere was more than strained for various reasons. Dorothy seemed unable to meet my eye. Aunt Evelyn had numerous complaints to make about the food, which was only what you would expect. It had to come out of cans since evidently Uncle Joel had not made any preparations for guests.

  I saw that Mildred barely picked at her food; that her eyes glistened and there was added color in her cheeks and forehead. Ely Waldron was aggrieved that Eustace hadn’t brought back a paper from the town. He would give anything, he said, to know just what the temperature was back home.

  Finally we reached the coffee stage. “I don’t see why we always have to be so—so stiff!” Mildred said, in her little breathless voice. “Even if we are in mourning, or something. Can’t we break the ice, as long as we have to be here?”

  “That’s right!” Aunt Evelyn chimed in. “After all, it is Christmas, and as yet we don’t know that anything has happened to Joel.”

  Mildred nodded happily. “I’ll put on a different dress after dinner—why don’t we all, girls?—and, Aunt Evelyn, why don’t you bring out the contents of that tremendous jewel case and give us all a thrill?”

  Aunt Evelyn didn’t say anything. She might have just taken a good look into the grinning countenance of Medusa, the Greek harpy whose glance petrified people.

  “Why, you’re pouring cream all over the tablecloth!” Fay Waldron cried.

  So she was, missing her cup by inches. There was a tiny commotion as Fay and Mabel mopped with napkins. Then Aunt Evelyn got another cup of coffee from the politely trembling hand of the Mexican.

  She stirred it, drank it slowly as if she needed its warmth. “Why, certainly I’ll open my jewel case,” she said to Mildred, “but not tonight.”

  “Pas ce soir,” quoted Dorothy, referring to some be-whiskered bawdy anecdote, I presume. She snickered, but I sensed that Dorothy was worried about something.

  There was no pretense at lingering in the drawing room that evening. The lighting system had, of course, been cut off during the fire, and nobody had thought of sending for men to repair it. The house was supplied with candles, but the effect of three or four candles in a drawing room the size of a railroad station was indescribably bleak.

  Mildred did try to wangle some music out of the pipe organ, but after a few basso-profundo chords the air pressure ran out. The pump, too, seemed to be motivated by electricity. Nobody cared to work it by hand.

  “Let’s go up stairs,” Mildred finally said to Dorothy. “I’ve got things to tell you.”

  “I can’t guess what,” Dorothy told her. They disappeared. Uncle Alger and Eustace went up; so did the Waldrons, and Aunt Evelyn. The good nights were informal, almost hurried.

  Mabel stopped at the foot of the stair, facing Todd and myself. “You two,” she accused us, “you think you’re taking things in hand. I don’t believe you know a thing!”

  “Now…” Todd began.

  “Suppose Uncle Joel’s body was so destroyed by fire that it can’t be identified, what then? Suppose the trust company won’t turn over the trust?”

  “That’s easy,” Todd said brightly. “All we have to do is to wait seven years, and if Uncle Joel doesn’t show up in that time, he’s legally dead.”

  “Seven years!” muttered Mabel. “Not—not seven years more!” She turned and ran headlong up the stairs.

  I had been doing a bit of thinking. “Look here,” I said to Todd as we found ourselves alone in what had been my room, “I want to talk to you. If you expect me to play Watson to your Holmes, I think I have a right…”

  “Ugh,” grunted Todd, tossing himself on the bed. “Sore because I set out after a theory and ended up doing a little quiet chasing?”

  “You got rid of Eustace by bribing him,” I accused. “He’d do anything to drive your car, and you know it. But remember, Sherlock Holmes never mixed up sleuthing with this sort of thing. Except once, and nothing came of his romantic leanings toward Miss Irene Adler.”

  “Ugh,” Todd grunted.
“What’ll come of this?”

  “I wish I knew,” I began, a little testily. Just then I heard a sound outside the window, a low, sharp whistle.

  “What’s that?” Todd was beside me at the open window. We peered down into a gray obscurity, and then, as our eyes became accustomed to the dark, we saw the figure of a man move slowly along the side of the house.

  “Tito!” he called, and then whistled again, a thin, sad, mournful whistle. It was Oviedo. He moved slowly on out of sight.

  “The Hound of the Baskervilles, of course!” I said.

  Todd looked blank. “Haven’t you—Oh, of course. You weren’t here last night, were you? Then you didn’t hear the howling?”

  Suddenly an idea struck me, a thought that was tremendous and a little horrifying in its implications. “Todd,” I said solemnly, “it just occurred to me that nobody has heard that infernal beast howling since before the fire was discovered. Do you suppose…”

  Todd didn’t suppose. “The body in the garage was Uncle Joel’s, and not a hell-hound’s,” he said. “If you think otherwise, five will get you twenty.”

  He threw himself down in a chair. “This is an odd spot, my dear cousin,” he said. “If this thing is solved, it’s up to us to do it. In self-protection, almost. Those cops won’t get anywhere—they don’t know a hawk from a handsaw.”

  “You were nervous enough,” I reminded him, “when it seemed the sheriff would look over your car.”

  Todd looked at me for a moment, and then he smiled. “Touché—or whatever they used to say when an opponent stuck a sword between your ribs. Well, since you raise the question, I didn’t steal that car.”

  “No? But you said the man who owned it shot at you?”

  He nodded. “I won it in a dice game at the hotel bar in Mexicali,” he explained. “The guy who risked it sobered up afterward and wanted to renege. But I wanted to get up here, so I insisted that we were playing for keeps.”

  Something worried me. “Fair dice?” I asked, after a moment.

  “His dice, anyway,” Todd said.

  I wished that I had not asked—only there was something about Todd that puzzled me, eluded me. I slowly undressed and climbed into my bed—the bed with the vacant spot at the foot where Brownie belonged. Todd sat in the chair across the room, smoking like a furnace. I turned out the bedside lamp, was just sliding over the edge into sleep, when he spoke.

  “Play cards, Alan?”

  “For the love of heaven, man, not now!” I exploded.

  “I mean as a habit,” he said.

  “Penny-ante once in a while,” I confessed. “Why?”

  He subsided into a long silence. I was almost asleep again when he came toward the bed.

  “When you went to college, Alan, did they teach you anything about ethics?”

  I tried to remember. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Every man has to play that hand out for himself.” He sat down on the edge of his bed, ran his long fingers through his hair. He looked like a puzzled schoolboy.

  “Well, what is it, man? I want to go to sleep!” I told him. I sat up against my pillows. “If it’s about you and little Mildred, I know. And I only hope you’ll act like a gentleman and a Cameron.”

  He blinked. “Honestly, Alan, I’ve been dealt a hand that I don’t know how to play.” He switched on the light. “By the way,” he demanded, “have you got a deck of cards?”

  I did happen to have, in my bag, I told him. “But why won’t it wait until morning?”

  “I want to show you something,” he said. He got the deck, spread the cards out on the bed. Then he shuffled them, vigorously. “Cut,” he said. I cut them.

  Then Todd dealt two hands, face down. “Yours is a pair of aces, a king, and a seven,” he said.

  It was true. His own hand contained four queens.

  “Well!” I began. “I really never…”

  “Just sit there and watch,” commanded Todd. For the next half hour he gave me a demonstration of the supremacy of mind over cardboard. He dealt from the top, from the bottom, from the middle of the deck. He made cards disappear, flung them into the air, and pulled them from the back of his neck, from his ankle, from under the rug. He made an accordion of the entire deck between his two lightning-quick hands, he spread them fanwise with one sweep of his wrist and gathered them neatly with another.

  “Want to play poker with me for money?” he demanded, when he had finished.

  I confess that I shook my head slowly.

  Todd nodded wryly. “It’s all I know how to do,” he said. “My education. I know all the tricks. Not that I need them playing with amateurs. I can beat them by just watching the averages and studying their faces. As for cutting corners—what you’d call cheating—I don’t do it unless I’m up against professionals and must.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Outside the pale, eh?” Todd pressed on. “Social leper?”

  “You’re not, at all,” I told him. “But why tell me all this? Conscience hurting a bit?” An idea struck me, and I hastened to put it into words. “Don’t tell me you’re falling in love with our pretty dark-haired cousin! Why, I thought that you were making up to her purely in an effort to find out what she knows about this murder, if anything.”

  “I was,” Todd said simply. “But sometimes when you start playing games you find out that it’s—well, it’s more than a game. I haven’t met many girls like Mildred—no, nor like Dorothy—in the last few years. I’ve been working the Pacific liners, and all we get there is a white cargo of…”

  He stopped short. “What’s that?”

  I heard it, too—the howling of a beast, thin and far off. “It’s the hound, what Dorothy called the Hound of the Baskervilles.”

  He shook his head. “Not the dog. Listen!” Then I heard it. Somewhere in the mazes of Prospice, afar off, there was the sound of pounding padded feet. Someone was running, running for dear life, and the sound brought more terror to me than all the moans and screams that might have been.

  I fumbled at my dressing gown, rushed to the door on Todd’s heels. Someone was running up the dark stairs, someone was faltering, crashing against furniture, and then coming on faster… faster…

  The hall was pitchy black, a Stygian darkness out of which there suddenly materialized a flying specter in white.

  It was Mildred, her face so drawn with horror and desperate effort that the red lips were drawn back to show her gums, so that the cords of her white neck stood out in hard ridges, and so that her eyes, no longer blue, were like two burnt holes in a blanket.

  She flung herself upon Todd, her arms tight about his neck, half-strangling him. From behind, in her long white nightgown, she looked faintly comical, like a little girl of eight or nine panic-stricken at a bad dream.

  “Todd!” she gasped, fighting for breath. “I saw Him—and He beckoned to me!”

  VI

  The time has been,

  That when the brains were out THE MAN WOULD DIE,

  And there an end; but now they rise again….

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  “I AM WORRIED ABOUT that poor child,” said Aunt Evelyn, helping herself to another egg. “Is she still sleeping?”

  Dorothy, who had been staring into her cup of coffee as if she expected to see something strange there, looked up and nodded. “I left Mabel sitting with her,” she said. “I don’t know whether you could call it sleep or not, though. The poor kid is moaning and whimpering as if she were taking the hurdles astride a cold-jawed nightmare.”

  We were all at the breakfast table, all but Mildred who was lying upstairs in a drugged sleep, Mabel who was enacting her studied role of nurse, and Todd, who had gone out at sunrise on some mysterious errand of his own.

  “Now, now,” Uncle Alger said chidingly, as he put extra butter on a slice of toast and then salted it heavily. “We’re not going to talk ghosts, not in this year of grace 1936. It’s a bright, sunny morning, and nothing is going to convince me that yo
ur sister saw the ghost of Joel Cameron last night.”

  “She didn’t say she saw a ghost of anybody,” Dorothy snapped back at him. “She didn’t say what she saw, and I don’t think she knows. I hope she doesn’t remember when she wakes up.”

  “If she saw anything at all!” Fay Waldron put in. “A girl that age, nervous and high-strung, is likely to imagine things.”

  “She’s been skittish ever since she got here,” Uncle Alger agreed. “But I’m not going to let it spoil my appetite. As far as I’m concerned two and two still make four.”

  I wanted to ask him if he’d ever owned rabbits when he was a boy. We all nibbled away in comparative silence for a moment, while the grim-faced Pia moved around the table refilling our coffee cups.

  “If you ask me,” Fay Waldron burst forth a moment later, “if you want my opinion, I’d say that Mildred Ely is a natural born sleepwalker!”

  Dorothy dropped her spoon in her saucer. “What?”

  “Well, don’t get so excited, for heaven’s sake. I said ‘sleep’ not ‘street’!” Fay snapped.

  Eustace, down at the foot of the table, began to laugh. He choked on a piece of bacon, but only temporarily.

  Even coming from Fay, that was an idea. Somnambulism would explain a lot. We all thought about it, stared at one another.

  “But of course!” I sang out. “And not only last night, but the night before, when she was so upset at not being able to explain why she went downstairs.” I turned excitedly to Dorothy. “Hasn’t she done it before?”

  “Why,” the blonde cousin faltered. “Once, I think—years ago.”

  “Yes, of course,” Fay Waldron prattled on. “All the excitement of the last few days upset her so that she started sleepwalking again. And something suddenly awakened her downstairs. They say it is very bad to awaken sleepwalkers suddenly. You ought to sing to them, or something.”

  “Put salt on their tails, isn’t it?” Dorothy murmured, a little heartlessly.

  “Anyway,” Fay went on, “Mildred probably wakened so suddenly that she didn’t realize the bad dreams she’d been having were only dreams, and that’s why she came dashing upstairs scared out of her wits.”