Omit Flowers

by Stuart Palmer

  We came to the door of the room shared by Ely Waldron and his wife. But—to my honest amazement—the match was propped in place!

  The three of us stood there, as flat as three punctured balloons. “There’s no way a person could replace the match if he knocked it down?” Dorothy said after a moment.

  Todd shook his head. “Not and remain inside the room. And they’re in there. Listen!”

  We could hear the sound of Ely’s soft rattling snores, the rasp of Fay’s quicker, more restless breathing. No matter who had been in or out of that room tonight, at the moment the Waldrons were unmistakably in the arms of Morpheus, or whatever the phrase is.

  And that was that. We were just where we were, only more so, as Todd said bitterly.

  I saw that Dorothy, draped in silk nothings, was shivering. “You’d better get back to bed,” I told her. “It’s morning.”

  “Alan’s right,” Todd told her. “I’m sorry everything turned out this way tonight. I thought for a little while we were going to get the person who killed little Mildred. I’d enjoy getting near him, with my bare hands.”

  Dorothy stopped short at the door of her room. “Todd,” she said distinctly, “will you answer one question for me?”

  “But of course! What is it?”

  She was afire with some inner excitement that I could not understand. “This,” said Dorothy Ely. “Did you love Mildred—love her a lot?”

  Todd looked blank. “Why, I…”

  “The truth, please,” she said. “This is important, Todd. I’m not being just curious.”

  He nodded. “The answer is No,” he said simply. I saw Dorothy take a deep, sudden breath as he spoke the monosyllable. “But I could have. She could have loved me. If we had had more time, if the shadow hadn’t been over everything….” He waved his hands, the fine, soft hands.

  Dorothy nodded. “That’s all I wanted to know. Thank you, Todd. And good night—good night to both of you.” She put her hand on my arm for a moment. “Head still ache, Alan?”

  “No,” I said. It was the truth. I had an ache, but it was not in the head. Right then I knew that I was losing Dorothy, losing her to this black-headed, smooth cousin of mine. There was a look in her eyes when she spoke to Todd that was not there for me. She was too nice to me, too thoughtful and kind. Between her and Todd there was sometimes antagonism, but always an electric current, invisible but real.

  “Good night,” I said. She went into her room, closed the door.

  Todd and I had little enough to say to each other as we came back to our room. He was deep in thoughts of his own and I—apart from the Dorothy situation—had another black beast in my mind. It was this—as we came across the threshold of our own room I saw a single paper match lying near the sill of the door. There was a whole paragraph, almost a chapter, in that match. It meant that Todd had not trusted even me.

  He threw himself fully clothed upon his bed, and in a few moments was asleep. It was not so easy for me. I realized slowly that it must be equally difficult for Dorothy. Alone, so utterly alone now—bereft of the sister whom she had guided and shielded for so long, torn between love for Todd the glamorous and her nebulous affair with me.

  After all, there was a sort of understanding. I did love her, I knew that. But it was an odd, mental sort of feeling, a love of understanding rather than possession. I could see how her heart must have gone toward Todd, in spite of herself. With her great yearning for travel, and for the hidden corners of the earth.

  Todd had been everywhere. He had done daring things. What was the line? “She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d, and I loved her that she did pity them. This is the only witchcraft….”

  As long as Mildred lived and worshiped Todd, Dorothy would not allow herself to think, to dream of him. But now—it was changed.

  I saw it all very clearly. Nothing stood in the way, nothing but a middle-aged, bookish bachelor of good intent and blundering manners named Alan Cameron. It was probably hard for Dorothy to figure out a way of breaking it to me.

  Instantly I resolved to take the bull by the horns. It would be a rather good gesture. If I went to her, told her that I understood, that I wanted her to be happy and that from now on she could count on me as a loyal friend devoted to the hope of bringing her and Todd to the happiness they both deserved…

  That was it. I went out of the room, down the hall. I was a little drunk with the intoxication that comes from a sleepless night and from a seemingly quixotic gesture.

  I knocked on Dorothy’s door.

  “Who—what is it?”

  Impetuously I opened the door. Dorothy, still in her negligee, was standing near the head of the bed. She came swiftly toward me, barely pretending to listen as I stumbled ahead with what I had come to say.

  “If it is Todd, I didn’t want you to think—to feel that you were in any way—” I plunged on.

  “Go to bed, Alan!” she told me, her voice thin and sharp. “Please! You’ve done enough for one night. There’s a dear—now get out of here!”

  She kissed me quickly, a warm, impatient, impetuous kiss. Then she almost closed the door in my face. I smiled, nodded, backed out of the room. I went quickly, but not too quickly to see that Dorothy had been trying to burn some bit of cloth in the ash tray. The room was full of the acrid scent.

  So that was what had happened to the bloodstained handkerchief!

  XI

  He who died at Azan sends

  THIS TO COMFORT all his friends…

  —SIR EDWIN ARNOLD

  THE MORNING DAWNED DIM and cloudy, with a chill salt wind from the sea. Or so Ely Waldron drearily announced at breakfast. For my own part, I had other things on my mind than weather.

  There was a distinct change of atmosphere at Prospice that morning, which was by the way the twenty-seventh of December. There was a strange tension in the air, like that heavy, muffled pressure which one is said to feel for a few hours preceding an earthquake. I knew—I think all of us knew—that somehow in spite of everything this tangled mystery was inevitably moving toward its denouement. The lid was due to blow off, and at any moment.

  It was not alone the preparations for the inquest into the death of Joel Cameron, which was scheduled for this afternoon. We learned that the affair would be held at Prospice, due to the fact that the week-end’s usual traffic mishaps had over-crowded the local mortuary with grim souvenirs.

  It was still Uncle Joel’s death that mattered. Mildred—she was just a headline in the newspapers, another wrinkle on the forehead of Sheriff Bates. We were not callous—it was just that in that artificial situation, with so many unanswered questions dangling in the air, it was not the time for sober, sincere mourning. Yet from this time on there was hardly a moment in the day when the ghost of Mildred did not move with us, a pale, hopeless little shadow of a ghost. Todd, I think, felt it most of all.

  Until the discovery of Mildred’s broken body the household had run along fairly smoothly, with no more suspicion and constraint than one would have expected. True, we were thrown together in an unusual and unhomelike setting, but there was a comfortable feeling deep in the mind of each of us that in a day or so it would all be over and we could each depart on his separate way with a check in his hand.

  In the meantime, though nobody except perhaps Todd had enjoyed it, the house party hadn’t been so bad. We hadn’t even been sure that there had been a death, let alone a murder, until Mildred’s going. And there is somehow a great difference between suspecting that something is wrong and knowing it “for sure.”

  When I arose that morning I found Todd already dressed and out of the room, for which I was not sorry. I was faced with the realization that both Todd and Dorothy had been acting in a manner difficult to explain. The odds were two to one, as Todd himself would have said, that he had tenderly wrapped a billiard cue around my head, and as for my darling fair cousin—there was only one possible meaning I could read into the fact that she had almost undoubtedly snatched up and
later burned the bloodstained handkerchief. What it all meant I could not figure out, but it seemed evident that Mildred had not died by the fall, in spite of what everyone said. Not if she left a bloodstained handkerchief in the tower room.

  The coroner seemed to think differently. I found Dr Eckersall downstairs in the drawing room, helping the local undertaker to set out row after row of hard wooden chairs.

  “Dead from the fall?” he snapped when I offered a meek query. “Of course the girl died from the fall! It’s enough and plenty—if you don’t think so just try diving out of her bedroom window onto the hard ground outside!”

  There was no doubt about it at all as far as Dr Eckersall was concerned. “I may go wrong,” he admitted, “on ashes and such, but when I have a full-sized cadaver to work on I know my autopsies.”

  I ventured to ask one other question. “There was no trace of poison, then?”

  For a moment the coroner stared at me blankly. “Poison? Did you say poison? Why in—”

  “Or a wound of any kind?” I went rashly on.

  “There was no wound!” barked Coroner Eckersall, vigorously polishing his glasses and then staring through them as if I had been something strange that swam beneath the lens of his microscope. “Not any that showed after the fall, anyway. And as for poison—” Suddenly Dr Eckersall stopped short, and his face cleared. “You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  I pleaded guilty. He nodded, smiled broadly. “Aha! The secret arrow poison of the South American Indians, eh? Bodies found stabbed, decapitated, bitten by cobras, full of arsenic—but all that was just to conceal the fact that they’d all been murdered by means of a collar button dipped in radium! You writers!” And the coroner slapped himself hard on the knee. “We have to stick to facts, we do.”

  Angry, I was about to tell him of one fact—the handkerchief with the bloodstains. But he wouldn’t listen. “This inquest hasn’t got anything to do with the girl’s death, anyway,” he explained wearily. “Not unless the jury finds that the old man met his death at the hands of his niece Mildred Ely, who later committed suicide as a sort of confession. But of course we haven’t had an inquest on her. And there’s nothing much outside of the suicide to pin Joel Cameron’s death on her.” Dr Eckersall shrugged. “So—”

  As I started away he called out “Wait a minute!” Fumbling through his pockets the coroner produced a small sheaf of letters tied with a string. “As I came through town the postmaster asked me to bring these along,” he explained. “Guess nobody has thought to go after the mail since this circus started.”

  I took the letters, walked slowly toward the library. There was nothing for me, though I had hoped that my landlady back in San Francisco would have thought to drop a line and tell me that Brownie was doing all right in my absence.

  On top was a letter for Fay Waldron from the sanitarium at Sacramento. There were three or four scrawled notes in colored ink and on bright, scented paper for Eustace. Aunt Evelyn had a dozen or so Christmas cards, obviously forwarded from her hotel. The rest of the mail was nothing but circulars directed to my late uncle.

  I pushed all but one letter aside. Then, taking up an ivory paper knife, I prepared calmly and coldbloodedly to open someone else’s mail. After all, if it was Todd that Dorothy preferred then he could be wound twice around her little finger for all I cared, but as for myself I knew that I could find no rest until this entire mystery was solved.

  “Mrs Ely Waldron,” the address read. Fay would never forgive me for this if I were, by some chance, wrong in my surmise. But all the same I inserted the white blade under the flap of the envelope…

  “Don’t!” broke in a voice directly above my ear. I whirled around, wide-eyed, to see Todd standing there.

  “Don’t do it,” he went on. “We’ll find out what it’s about eventually. If you open it you’ll put the woman on her guard. It’ll all come out at the inquest, anyway. I’ve seen to that.”

  He took the letter from me. “Anything else interesting?”

  Todd’s attitude was exactly as if nothing had happened last night, so I fell in line. “Nothing there but Christmas cards and ads,” I said. “One bill for Uncle Joel, but bills don’t interest anyone except the one of us who has to play executor.”

  “Which will be you, or Uncle Alger,” Todd added. He leaned over. “What sort of a bill, Alan?”

  I shuffled the mail. “Just some dentist, who marks it ‘Please Remit.’”

  “That’s surprising,” Todd said. “I learn from this Cohen fellow that while Uncle Joel has never drawn half the income from the trust funds up to this year, he’s used up more than twenty thousand dollars in the past six months. Whatever he did with it, he didn’t pay his dentist. He—Wait! Wait a minute!”

  Todd’s face looked as if he were going to explode. “Dentist! What dentist was that, Alan? Quick!”

  I looked down at the heap. “Why, a dentist over at Laguna Beach. Dr L. L. Garvey, DDS, MD, and so forth. It seems that Uncle Joel has owed him sixty dollars since last fall.”

  “Nothing in the mail!” said Todd quietly. “Nothing at all—except the one thing we’ve been searching for these last three days. The chance to prove that Uncle Joel is dead!”

  “But—” I began.

  Todd was almost jubilant. “Get it? Remember the jawbone plus teeth that constitutes the mortal remains of our uncle? Well, haven’t we found the only man in the world who can identify the dental work as Uncle Joel’s?”

  “Or else as not Uncle Joel’s,” I stoutly insisted.

  Todd nodded. “Come on!”

  We passed Coroner Eckersall near the door. “Going somewhere?” he demanded. “Don’t forget to be back at two for the inquest!”

  “If everything goes all right,” Todd told him, “we’ll be back at two o’clock with the inquest!” And we climbed into his car. The sleek blue roadster slid down the hill under Todd’s expert guidance, rolled over the lonely streets of Cameron City.

  Near the lower end of town Todd swerved sharply almost against the curb, with a great screech of brakes and damage to my nervous system. I caught a glimpse of a shadowy, furry thing dart into the chaparral carrying what looked like an opened can of pork and beans in its mouth.

  “People ought to tie up their mangy curs,” said Todd savagely. “That was a narrow squeak.”

  We went on, turned down the hill and into the coast highway. It was over thirty miles to Laguna and we rolled into the pretty little resort town within thirty minutes. There was only one main street, with red-tiled plaster buildings on either side and the blue sea beyond.

  Without difficulty we parked beside a spectacular white Rolls, crossed the sidewalk and mounted a stair under the sign, a bright new sign, “The Garvey Clinic.”

  The stair and the lettering on the office door above were not at all bright and new, however. Entering a rather small reception room we came upon three men in overalls busily engaged in laying a smart new broad-loom carpet over somewhat worn linoleum.

  There was a modernistic desk bearing three cream-colored telephones, and behind the desk sat a young lady in nurse’s uniform. Strawberry blonde hair peeped becomingly if somewhat noticeably from under her cap. If she was not as new as the carpet and the desk at least she was in excellent repair, lips and all. There was a new coat, of summer ermine, on the back of her chair. She gave us a bright smile.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  I started to say “No” but Todd nudged me. “Yes,” he said calmly. The strawberry blonde consulted her little leather book, which seemed to have many blank spaces.

  “I don’t seem to have you down—but I’ll tell Doctor. What name, please?”

  “My teeth are just dandy,” Todd broke the news to her. “This call isn’t exactly professional.”

  “Oh!” said the blonde, smiling sorrowfully. She seemed to regret very much that Todd was not slated for an immediate extraction or worse.

  “Will you tell Dr Garvey that Mr Cameron is here—two
Mr Camerons, in fact?” Todd asked.

  She reached for one of the telephones, but an inner door opened with suspicious promptness. From it popped a neat, dapper man in immaculate white. With his short gray beard Dr Leonard Garvey looked like the magazine advertisements—“Noted Foreign Specialist Advises Yeast.” But his eyes were lively, of a warm brown color.

  I had the instant impression that we had met before—a feeling which comes over one all too often in California. So many times one bows to a familiar face on the street only to realize immediately afterward that the acquaintanceship is one-sided—confined to the screen of the movie theaters. But Dr Garvey was no actor of the films, though he might have stepped into “Men in White” or “Louis Pasteur” without makeup.

  “Yes?” he greeted us brightly. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can take a look at a couple of teeth,” Todd said abruptly.

  “Oh!” cut in the nurse, “I thought—”

  “I haven’t them with me,” Todd went on. “They happen to be in charge of the sheriff over at Oceanside.”

  Dr Garvey frowned. “I’m a very busy man and I haven’t time to listen—”

  “These particular teeth are supposed to be about all that’s left of our uncle, Joel Cameron,” Todd told him. “Haven’t you read the papers recently?”

  “What? Me? Why—yes, I suppose I heard some thing about it—poor devil. But I’ve been up to my ears the last few days—two mastoids, an impacted wisdom tooth, and a harelip. I’m a surgeon, too, you know. I didn’t know that—”

  “You keep records, don’t you?” Todd interrupted. “I mean, charts of the patient’s mouth and all that?”

  The nurse sniffed audibly and Dr Garvey informed us that his records were in perfect order. “Then maybe you could recognize these teeth,” Todd suggested. “We’ll have to bury them sometime and it would be nice to know what name to put on the casket.”

  Dr Garvey’s face broke into an elfin grin and then sobered. “I don’t like to interfere—if the sheriff wanted me in I’m sure he’d have called on me.”