It took them another hour to find it, but there it was, inside a hollowed-out block of Styrofoam bedecked with purple velvet ribbons and plastic passion flowers hung on Elisa Alicia’s bedroom wall. Elisa Alicia had kept a diary, covered in purple satin, written in purple ink. In code.
“What the hell is this?” Guthrie turned the pages in helpless wonderment. “Can you make any sense of it, Pete?”
“I don’t know yet. Where’s a mirror with a good light over it?”
“In the bathroom. Over here. Sheesh! Is that all she did?”
As the two men studied the characters, it became clear enough that Elisa Alicia had simply taken her inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci and formed her letters backward. The only hitch was, she hadn’t written in English.
“I can’t make head nor tail of it,” Guthrie fretted. “Is it Latin or something?”
“Either French or Spanish, I’d say. Some kind of dialect, maybe. I’m no good at languages, but my wife is. Would you mind if we asked her to come over here and see what she can make of it?”
“I wouldn’t mind, but Helen might. Maybe you don’t realize what time it is, Pete. They’re probably all in bed over there by now.”
“Drat! No, I hadn’t realized. And none of them got any sleep to speak of last night on that damned lump of rock. I suppose in common humanity we ought to wait till morning. On the other hand, they may still be sitting up talking things over. I tell you what, Guthrie, let’s take this diary over to Catriona’s and see what’s happening. Is that okay with you?”
“I guess so.” Guthrie didn’t sound any too sure. “The only thing is, if Helen can make out this gobbledygook, I’d just as soon she didn’t read it out loud in front of everybody. God knows what Elisa may have written. I’m not even sure I want to hear it myself.”
“Of course, Guthrie, I understand how you feel. Then why don’t I just take it with me and go by myself? If Helen’s asleep, I’ll wait and show her the diary first thing in the morning. Your wife’s not likely to come back and start looking for it tonight, is she?”
“God knows what she might do. Ah, go ahead and take the damn thing. If Elisa shows up, I’ll distract her one way or another. Want me to walk over with you?”
“If you feel like it, sure.”
They didn’t talk much on the way to Catriona’s. Peter was realizing how unspeakably tired he was. He hated to think about what was in Guthrie Fingal’s mind just now. Well, maybe this diary would clear matters up between husband and wife, if in fact they were lawfully espoused. He had no reason to suppose it would.
Catriona had left the light on over the side door and a lamp burning in the kitchen. It was plain to see, however, that she and her two old friends were all tucked up for the night. Guthrie turned to go back to the school and Peter let himself in as silently as possible, considering how creaky the aged pine floor was.
The lady of the house had thoughtfully set out the whiskey bottle, a clean tumbler, and a plate of crackers on the kitchen table. In view of the exhausting evening he’d spent among the arts and crafts, Peter decided he’d earned a modest nightcap. He was sitting at the table with the untasted drink in front of him, nibbling on a cracker and poring over the diary in hope of finding some word he could recognize, when Helen slipped into the room and shut the door to the upstairs behind her.
“Peter, whatever are you sitting here for at this hour? You must be ready to drop. Come on up to bed.”
“Yes, my love. Take a look at this, will you?”
“Purple satin? Heavens to Betsy, what is it? Somebody’s diary?”
“I think so, but I can’t read the plaguey thing. As far as I can tell, it’s written backwards in Paraguayan.”
“By Elisa Alicia Quatrefages, I gather. She sounds to me like just the type.”
Helen picked up the small bound notebook and held it under the light. “Arcade writing and tightly closed small letters. I knew she had to be up to something. It seems to be a mixture of bad Spanish and worse French, with every third word misspelled. But oh, my! She’s fluent enough in some areas. I hope Guthrie doesn’t understand Spanish.”
“Not a word, he thought it was Latin. Why? What does she say?”
“I’d blush to tell you, but it’s not about Guthrie. Elisa Alicia has a boyfriend.”
“Does she say who the guy is?”
“I don’t know. So far it’s just ‘me amoor.’ I think she means ‘mi amor.’ Or possibly ‘mon amour.’ Make us some coffee, why don’t you? and hand me that pad and pencil by the telephone.”
“Drat it, Helen,” Peter expostulated, “I didn’t intend for you to sit up all night translating that thing. Er—wouldn’t it be easier to read if you held the text up to a mirror?”
“I suppose it would.”
She made no move to do so. Peter sighed and filled the teakettle. Catriona had left a jar of instant decaffeinated on the counter by the electric stove, he noticed. That would do well enough. He was suffering qualms of conscience about having shown Helen the book; at the same time he was itching to know what she was finding out. He wished his mind would make itself up. He spooned out coffee into two mugs, poured hot water over it, brought the mugs over to the table. That done, he sat down, trying not to fidget while she went on poring over the text and jotting down notes on Catriona’s telephone pad in her small, precise librarian’s handwriting.
Apparently he fidgeted, after all. Helen looked up from her work with just a shade of impatience. “Darling, why don’t you go to bed and get some rest? You’ll be doing most of the driving tomorrow, I expect, and I need time on this.”
“You don’t have to translate the whole damned thing tonight!”
“Of course I do. You don’t think I could quit now, do you? Besides, Guthrie had better sneak the diary back first thing in the morning in case she comes bouncing home to write a new chapter. She’s flaky enough to do anything, I should say from what I’m reading here. Give me a kiss and go tuck yourself in. I’ll tell you all about it when I come up.”
Exactly when Helen did come to bed was something Peter never knew. He woke in broad daylight to find her sound asleep by his side and a large orange cat with long sideburns purring on his chest. The cat seemed indisposed to move and Peter didn’t hear anybody stirring or smell any breakfast being prepared, so he shut his eyes again.
When he woke again, the cat was gone and so was Helen. He bounded out of bed and started down the stairs. Then he remembered he’d slept in his underwear because he’d forgotten to pack pajamas, much less a robe. He scooted back to the guest room he’d shared with his wife, pulled on his rumpled trousers and that green blouse of Miss Binks’s aunt, which he was getting awfully sick of wearing, and went downstairs.
“Ah, here’s the sleeping beauty now.”
Catriona, wearing a turquoise blue terry-cloth robe that appeared to function also as a scratching post for the marmalade coon cat and whatever other feline residents there might be, got up from the kitchen table and went to pour him a cup of coffee. Helen and Iduna were sitting there, the former in a trim pink seersucker housecoat and the latter in a confection of lace and baby blue ruffles straight out of Godey’s Lady’s Book that would have looked absurd on anybody else. Peter wasn’t at all surprised to find Guthrie Fingal at the table, too.
“Drat it, Guthrie, if I’d known you were coming I’d have asked you to lend me a shirt. I was in such a dither to get away yesterday that I forgot to bring any clothes.”
“That’s some shirt you have on now, old buddy. Left over from Saint Patrick’s Day, was it?”
“Actually it’s a blouse which was purchased by the aunt of a woman I met while Helen was away. The aunt died before she had a chance to wear the thing, so I’m helping my new acquaintance get some good out of it. Er—Helen, have you—”
“Yes, dear. We’ve all had our orange juice. Want some?”
“Why not? What happened to the cat?”
“Which cat?”
“The one who was using m
y chest for a chaise longue a while back when you were still rapt in slumber. A large, ruddy animal with peach-colored whiskers and a thoughtful expression. He reminded me a little of Rutherford B. Hayes.”
“Oh, that must have been Thomas Carlyle,” said Catriona. “I let him out when I came downstairs. He’ll probably be back when he smells the bacon frying, which I suppose I ought to get on with. Carlyle never goes far.”
“Unlike some people we could mention,” said Guthrie with a wry twist to his mouth. “Pete, did you get a chance to—”
Peter looked at Helen. She nodded. “Whenever you say, dear.” He then raised his eyebrows at Guthrie, who also nodded. Thereupon, Helen set down her coffee cup and cleared her throat.
“You know the things I’ve been saying about Elisa Alicia Quatrefages the First, so I needn’t go into details about why Peter and Guthrie decided last night to make a search for more information about her namesake. They found a diary and brought it to me for translation since it’s written backwards in a kind of multilingual hash. There are some words I haven’t been able to figure out at all, I’m inclined to think she may have made them up. The gist, however, is that as we’ve suspected, the current Elisa Alicia is involved with Roland Childe and his gang.”
Catriona reached across the table and laid her hand on her neighbor’s. “Oh, Guthrie, I’m so sorry. Are you sure you want us to hear all this stuff?”
He made an odd little sound through his nose. “You’ll hear it sooner or later anyway. Go on, Helen.”
“What it boils down to is that Elisa Alicia is their superior officer. She’s been giving Roland his orders, using that fellow John Buck who’s been posing as a student here as a go-between. She’s also been playing a very active part in organizing the thefts they’ve been pulling.”
Peter interrupted, “Am I right in assuming the weather vane robberies are only the current phase?”
“I don’t know, dear, but I should think it likely. Anyway, it was she who hatched that ridiculous plot of hijacking the Ethelbert Nevin to get the weather vanes away. She’s supposed to be meeting the boat in New Haven today, you may be interested to know. Her part is to drive the weather vanes to New York and turn them over to somebody named B.B.”
“B.B. probably stands for Brasilia Boutique,” said Peter. “If she’s using the shop to fence stolen goods, that would explain what we found in the ledger, Guthrie.”
“Yeah, Pete. I’ve been wondering about Elisa’s ledger. I’m surprised she’d bother to account for her share of the money like that. Why doesn’t she just pretend she never got any?”
“She’s smarter to account for what she collects than try to get away with not declaring it,” said Catriona. “Income tax evasion has jailed plenty of racketeers who couldn’t be caught any other way. Besides, she needs some plausible way to account for all the money she’s been throwing around on jewelry and Cadillacs. Helen, you’re not trying to tell us Elisa Alicia is actually the brains behind this weather vane ring?”
“No. She’s second in command, I gather. Paraguay’s the leader, not the buyer. He’s head of what seems to be a fairly large and varied operation and also—I’m sorry, Guthrie—her lover.”
“What’s his real name?” Guthrie didn’t sound particularly interested.
“She never says. She does mention that he’s behind that crowd at Woeful Ridge. Elisa Alicia appears to be under the delusion that they’re all working together on behalf of some noble and glorious cause.”
“What cause?”
“She doesn’t say that, either. I’m not sure she’s any too clear, herself. What she writes doesn’t always make a great deal of sense to me. My translation may be terribly faulty, of course.”
“I doubt that,” Guthrie grunted. “Elisa’s never made a hell of a lot of sense to me, either. So that’s the story?”
“That’s the part that counts. The diary isn’t very long, actually. She hasn’t written in it every day—only when the spirit moves her, I gather. A good deal of it’s about her personal feelings and so forth, which you probably wouldn’t be interested in hearing. I didn’t bother to translate much of that.”
Liar, thought Peter fondly. “Did you get any clue to whether Elisa Alicia Quatrefages is her real name?”
“I’m fairly sure it isn’t. Apparently her true identity came to her in a great psychic revelation while she was in Rio de Janeiro drinking a rum swizzle. She believes herself to be the reincarnation of Ella Lynch.”
“Then why doesn’t she call herself Ella Lynch?”
“I couldn’t tell you, dear. Perhaps it’s all part of the cloak and dagger thing, or perhaps her real name actually is Ella Lynch and she found that too prosaic.”
“Nobody names a girl Ella these days,” Catriona objected. “It’s more likely Alice or Lisa, wouldn’t you think?”
“Ah, what difference does it make?” Guthrie growled.
“It could make a hell of a lot of difference if she married you under an alias,” said Peter.
“It could make even more difference if she never married you at all,” Helen added. “There’s something in the diary about divorce that puzzles me, Guthrie. She said you’d asked her for one and she couldn’t help laughing to think why she’d never be able to give it to you.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Guthrie. “That’s something to think about, all right. Want a hand with that bacon, Cat?”
NINETEEN
“ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS well,” said Helen.
In fact, nothing had ended yet, and Helen knew it perfectly well. She and Peter were alone in their own car. Guthrie Fingal had turned over to his assistants the reins of office, which he said were pretty slack just now anyway, and offered to drive Iduna and her car back to Balaclava Junction. Catriona had turned over the cat feeding to Andrew, who was still only a surly muttering at the back door as far as the Shandys had been able to discover, and come along with Guthrie and Iduna because she wasn’t about to be left out of whatever was going to happen next.
“I expect my next move is to get on with the translation,” Helen added. “I promised the sheriff I’d send him one as quickly as possible.”
They’d decided at the breakfast table that they’d be crazy to put Elisa Alicia’s diary back where they’d found it and risk having so vital a clue destroyed. They’d attempted to turn their find over to the Hocasquam sheriff, since according to protocol he seemed the likeliest person. However, the sheriff said he’d had trouble enough with the prisoners yesterday and why didn’t Helen just hang onto the diary until she’d got it all figured out? By that time they’d know who was handling the case and it would be somebody else’s headache instead of his.
That made sense. Furthermore, Helen was eager to sit down with her dictionaries and work out a complete translation along with a short biographical sketch of the original Elisa Alicia.
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” said Peter. “Mine is to get hold of Swope and find out what’s going on. I tried to phone him from Catriona’s but he wasn’t around. I left a message that we’d be home early this afternoon, so with any luck he’ll be perched on the doorstep waiting for us.”
“Does he know his brother is off the hook?”
“I expect so by now. After we got to Catriona’s yesterday, I called the Fane and Pennon to let them know the weather vanes stolen from the soap factory and Gabe Fescue’s barn have been recovered, and five suspects taken into custody. I asked for Swope, but he wasn’t around and they didn’t seem to know where he was. He’s probably trying to call Catriona’s house now and having kitten fits because nobody’s answering. I can’t imagine why he never phoned me last night, though. I left her number with the woman at the news desk. He could have got it from the Enderbles anyway. I just hope to Christ Swope hasn’t gone scouting off on his own and got into trouble again.”
“Surely Cronkite wouldn’t have gone back to Woeful Ridge,” Helen protested.
“If he did, he ought to have his head exa
mined. Unless he took Miss Binks with him. That woman’s a whole team and the dog under the wagon all by herself. Damn, this is a long ride. I wish we had that helicopter back.”
“Peter dear, Balaclava County managed to get along without you all day yesterday. I expect they can manage for another few hours. You’d better either slow down or let me drive before we wind up either in the hoosegow or in the hospital.”
“Oh, sorry.” He let up a little on the gas pedal. “You’ve got those snapshots Catriona found of Guthrie’s wife. Or nonwife, as I fervently hope the case may be. We’ve got to get them down to the New Haven police some way or other. Maybe Roy Ames will take them, if he’s around. He’s the next best thing to a helicopter any day.”
“Yes, dear.” Helen was back at the purple diary. Peter left her to it and concentrated on his driving. He didn’t quite know what else to concentrate on.
“Drat, I wish she’d left some kind of clue as to who this mastermind may be or at least what he looks like.”
“He’s short, fat, bowlegged, and given to wearing fancy uniforms,” Helen replied absently.
“Where does it say that?”
“Woman on Horseback, William E. Barrett, Doubleday, 1952. Though there may have been an earlier printing in 1938. I must verify the reference.”
“Don’t bother on my account. Your thesis being, I gather, that since Elisa Alicia considers herself a reincarnation of Ella Lynch, she’d naturally choose a paramour who’s a reincarnation of Francisco Lopez?”
“Well, of course. Wouldn’t you? I can’t imagine what she ever saw in Guthrie. He’s too tall, too thin, too unpretentious, and much too good-looking.”
“It’s obvious to me what she saw in him,” Peter replied waspishly. “Namely and to wit, a sucker. Guthrie was able to provide her with a respectable identity and a base of operations which has no doubt doubled as a hideout whenever she’s needed one, as I can’t imagine she hasn’t. God, I’ll be glad when he’s rid of that harpy.”
“Yes, darling.” Helen had her nose in the diary again. “I wish I knew more Spanish obscenity. Those night classes I attended in California didn’t equip me for this sort of translation.”
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