Calamity Town

by Ellery Queen

  Mr. Queen took inventory. Lived in. There were a few aged mahogany pieces of distinction and a beautiful fireplace of Italian marble. And at least two of the oil paintings had merit.

  J.C. noticed his interest. ”Hermione picked out all the pictures herself. Knows a lot about art, Hermy does. Here she is now. And John.”

  Ellery rose. He had expected to meet a robust, severe-faced female; instead, he saw Hermy. Hermy always fooled strangers that way; she’s so tiny and motherly and sweet-looking.

  John Fowler Wright was a delicate little man with a brown country-club face. Ellery liked him at sight. He was carrying a stamp album with practiced care.

  “John, this is Mr. Ellery Smith. He’s looking to rent a furnished house,” said J.C. nervously. ”Mr. Wright, Mrs. Wright, Mr. Smith. A-hrmm!”

  John F. said in his reedy voice that he was mighty proud to meet Mr. Smith, and Hermy held out her hand at arm’s length with a sweet “How do you do, Mr. Smith,” but Mr. ”Smith” saw the iced gleam in Hermy’s pretty blue eyes and decided that in this instance, too, the female was deadlier than the male. So he was most gallant with her. Hermy unbent a little at that and poked her slender lady’s fingers in her sleek gray hair, the way she always did when she was pleased, or fussed, or both.

  “Of course,” said J.C. respectfully, “I thought right off of that beautiful little six-roomer you built next door, John¯”

  “I don’t at all like the idea,” said Hermione in her coolest voice, “of renting, John. I can’t imagine, Mr. Pettigrew¯”

  “Maybe if you knew who Mr. Smith is” said J.C. quickly.

  Hermy looked startled. John F. hitched forward in his wing chair near the fireplace.

  “Well?” demanded Hermy. ”Who is he?”

  “Mr. Smith,” said J.C., throwing it away, “is Ellery Smith, the famous author.”

  “Famous author/” gasped Hermy. ”But I’m so bowled over! Here on the coffee table, Ludie!” Ludie clanked down a tray bearing a musical pitcher filled with ice and grape-juice-and-lemonade punch, and four handsome crystal goblets. ”I’m sure you’ll like our house, Mr. Smith,” Hermy went on swiftly. ”It’s a little dream house. I decorated it with my own hands. Do you ever lecture? Our Women’s Club¯”

  “Good golfing hereabouts, too,” said John F. ”How long would you want to rent for, Mr. Smith?”

  “I’m sure Mr. Smith is going to like Wrightsville so well he’ll stay on and on” interrupted Hermy. ”Do have some of Ludie’s punch, Mr. Smith¯”

  “Thing is,” said John F., frowning, “the way Wrightsville’s shooting up, I’ll probably be able to sell pretty soon¯”

  “That’s easy, John!” said J.C. ”We can write in the lease that in case a buyer comes along, Mr. Smith is to vacate pending reasonable notice¯”

  “Business, business!” said Hermy gaily. ”What Mr. Smith wants is to see the house. Mr. Pettigrew, you stay here and keep John and his poky old stamps company. Mr. Smith?”

  Hermy held on to Ellery’s arm all the way from the big house to the little house, as if she were afraid he’d fly away if she let go.

  “Of course, the furniture’s protected by dusteovers now, but it’s really lovely. Early American bird’s-eye maple and brand-new. Just look, Mr. Smith. Isn’t it darling?”

  Hermy dragged Ellery upstairs and downstairs, from cellar to peaked attic, exhibited the chintzy master bedroom, extolled the beauties of the living room with its maple pieces and art-filled niches and hooked rug and half-empty bookshelves . . .

  “Yes, yes,” said Ellery feebly. ”Very nice, Mrs. Wright.”

  “Of course, I’ll see you get a housekeeper,” said Hermy happily. ”Oh, dear! Where will you do your Work? We could fix over the second bedroom upstairs into a study. You must have a study for your Work, Mr. Smith.”

  Mr. ”Smith” said he was sure he’d manage handsomely.

  “Then you do like our little house? I’m so glad!” Hermione lowered her voice. ”You’re in Wrightsville incognito, of course?”

  “Such an impressive word, Mrs. Wright . . . ”

  “Then except for a few of our closest friends, I’ll make sure nobody knows who you are,” beamed Hermy. ”What kind of Work are you planning, Mr. Smith?”

  “A novel,” said Ellery faintly. ”A novel of a particular sort, laid in a typical small city, Mrs. Wright.”

  “Then you’re here to get Color! How apt! You chose our own dear Wrightsville! You must meet my daughter Patricia immediately, Mr. Smith. She’s the cleverest child. I’m sure Pat would be a great help to you in getting to know Wrightsville . . . ”

  Two hours later Mr. Ellery Queen was signing the name “Ellery Smith” to a lease whereunder he agreed to rent Number 460 Hill Drive, furnished, for a period of six months beginning August 6, 1940, three months’ rental paid in advance, one month’s vacating notice to be given by lessor in event of a sale, at the rental of $75 per month.

  “The truth is, Mr. Smith,” confided J.C. as they left the Wright house, “I kind of held my breath in there for a minute.”

  “When was that?”

  “When you took that pen of John F.’s and signed the lease.”

  “You held your breath?” Ellery frowned. ”Why?”

  J.C. guffawed. ”I remembered the case of poor old Hunter and how he dropped dead in that very house. Calamity House! That’s a hot one! Here you are, still fit as a fiddle!”

  And he got into his coupe still overcome by mirth, bound for town to pick up Ellery’s luggage at the Hollis Hotel . . . and leaving Ellery in the Wright driveway feeling irritated.

  When Ellery returned to his new residence, there was a tingle in his spine.

  There was something about the house, now that he was out of Mrs. Wright’s clutches, something¯well, blank, unfinished, like Outer Space. Ellery almost said to himself the word “inhuman,” but when he got to that point, he took himself in hand sternly. Calamity House! As sensible as calling Wrightsville Calamity Town! He removed his coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and sailed into things.

  “Mr. Smith,” cried a horrified voice, “what are you doing?”

  Ellery guiltily dropped a dustcover as Hermione Wright rushed in, her cheeks flushed and her gray hair no longer sleek. ”Don’t you dare touch a thing! Alberta, come in. Mr. Smith won’t bite you.” A bashful Amazon shuffled in. ”Mr. Smith, this is Alberta Manaskas. I’m sure you’ll find her most satisfactory. Alberta, don’t stand there. Start the upstairs!” Alberta fled.

  Ellery murmured his gratitude and sank into a chintz-cloaked chair as Mrs. Wright attacked the room about him with terrifying energy.

  “We’ll have this in apple-pie order in a jiffy! By the way, I trust you don’t mind. On my trip into town to fetch Alberta, I happened to drop into the Record office¯whoo! this dust!¯and had a confidential chat with Frank Lloyd. The editor and publisher, you know.”

  Ellery’s heart scuttled itself.

  “By the way, I also took the liberty of giving Logan’s a grocery and meat order for you. Although, of course, you’ll dine with us tonight. Oh, dear, did I forget . . . ? Electricity . . . gas . . . water . . . No, I attended to everything. Oh, the telephone! I’ll do that first thing tomorrow. Well, as I was saying, I knew that no matter how hard we tried, sooner or later everyone would know you’re in Wrightsville, Mr. Smith, and of course as a newspaperman, Frank would have to do a story on you, so I thought I’d better ask Frank as a personal favor not to mention in his write-up that you’re the famous author¯Patty baby! Carter! Oh, my darlings, I have such a surprise for you!”

  Mr. Queen rose, fumbling for his jacket.

  His only coherent thought was that she had eyes the color of brook water bubbling in the sun.

  “So you’re the famous author,” said Patricia Wright, looking at him with her head cocked. ”When Pop told Carter and me just now what Mother had snagged, I thought I’d meet a baggy-pantsed poet with a hangdog look, melancholy eyes, and a pot. I’m pleased.”
<
br />   Mr. Queen tried to look suave and mumbled something.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, dearest?” cried Hermy. ”You must forgive me, Mr. Smith. I know you think I’m terribly provincial. But I really am overwhelmed. Pat dear, introduce Carter.”

  “Carter! Darling, I’m so sorry. Mr. Smith, Mr. Bradford.” Shaking hands with a tall young man, intelligent-looking but worried, Ellery wondered if he were worried about how to hold on to Miss Patricia Wright. He felt an instant sympathy.

  “I suppose,” said Carter Bradford politely, “we must all seem provincial to you, Mr. Smith. Fiction or nonfiction?”

  “Fiction,” said Ellery. So it was war.

  “I’m pleased,” said Pat again, looking Ellery over. Carter frowned; Mr. Queen beamed. ”I’ll do this room, Muth . . . You won’t be hurting my feelings, Mr. Smith, if after we’ve stopped interfering in your life, you change things around again. But for now¯”

  As he watched Pat Wright setting his house in order under Carter Bradford’s suspicious eye, Ellery thought: May the saints grant me calamities like this each blessed day. Carter, my boy, I’m sorry, but I’m cultivating your Patty!

  His good humor was not dispelled even when J. C. Pettigrew hurried back from town with his luggage and flourished the last edition of the Wrightsville Record.

  Frank Lloyd, Publisher and Editor, had kept his word to Hermione Wright only technically.

  He had said nothing about Mr. Smith in the body of the news item except that he was “Mr. Ellery Smith of New York.”

  But the headline on the story ran:

  Famed Author to Live in Wrightsville!

  Chapter 4

  The Three Sisters

  Mr. Ellery “Smith” was a sensation with the haut monde on the Hill and the local intelligentsia: Miss Aikin, the Librarian, who had studied Greek; Mrs. Holmes, who taught Comparative Lit at Wrightsville High; and, of course, Emmeline DuPre, known to the irreverent as the “Town Crier,” who was nevertheless envied by young and old for having the miraculous good fortune to be his neighbor. Emmy DuPre’s house was on Ellery’s other side.

  Automobile traffic suddenly increased on the Hill. Interest became so hydra-headed that Ellery would have been unmoved if the Wrightsville Omnibus Company had started running a sightseeing bus to his door.

  Then there were Invitations. To tea, to dinner, to luncheon; and one¯from Emmeline DuPre¯asking him to breakfast, “so that we may discuss the Arts in the coolth of a Soft Morning, before the Dew vanishes from the Sward.”

  Ben Danzig, High Village Rental Library and Sundries, said he had never had such a rush on Fine Stationery.

  So Mr. Queen began to look forward to escaping with Pat in the mornings, when she would call for him dressed in slacks and a pullover sweater and take him exploring through the County in her little convertible. She knew everybody in Wrightsville and Slocum Township, and introduced him to people named variously O’Halleran, Zimbruski, Johnson, Dowling, Goldberger, Venuti, Jacquard, Wladislaus, and Broadbeck¯journeymen machinists, toolers, assembly-line men, farmers, retailers, hired hands, white and black and brown, with children of unduplicated sizes and degrees of cleanliness. In a short time, through the curiously wide acquaintanceship of Miss Wright, Mr. Queen’s notebook was rich with funny lin-gos, dinner-pair details, Saturday-night brawls down on Route 16, square dances and hep-cat contests, noon whistles whistling, lots of smoke and laughing and pushing, and the color of America, Wrightsville edition.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Ellery said one morning as they returned from Low Village. ”You seem so much more the country-club, church-social, Younger-Set type of female. How come, Pat?”

  “I’m that, too,” grinned Pat. ”But I’m a Sociology Major, or I was¯got my degree in June; and I guess I just can’t help practicing on the helpless population. If this war keeps up¯”

  “Milk Fund?” asked Ellery vaguely. ”That sort of thing?”

  “Barbarian! Milk Funds are Muth’s department. My dear man, sociology is concerned with more than calcium for growing bones. It’s the science of civilization. Now take the Zimbruskis¯”

  “Spare me,” moaned Mr. Queen, having met the Zimbruskis. ”By the way, what does Mr. Bradford, your local Prosecutor, think of all this, Patty?”

  “Of me and sociology?”

  “Of me and you.”

  “Oh.” Pat tossed her hair to the wind, looking pleased. ”Cart’s jealous.”

  “Hmm. Look here, my little one¯”

  “Now don’t start being noble,” said Pat. ”Trouble with Cart, he’s taken me for granted too long. We’ve practically grown up together. Do him good to be jealous.”

  “I don’t know,” smiled Ellery, “that I entirely relish the role of love-irritant.”

  “Oh, please!” Pat was shocked. ”I like you. And this is more fun.” Suddenly, with one of her quick sidelong glances: “You know what people are saying, incidentally¯or don’t you?”

  “What now?”

  “You told Mr. Pettigrew that you’re a famous writer¯”

  “Mr. Pettigrew supplied the adjective ‘famous’ all by himself.”

  “You’ve also said you don’t write under the name Ellery Smith, that you use a pseudonym . . . but you didn’t tell anyone which pseudonym.”

  “Lord, no!”

  “So people are saying that maybe you aren’t a famous author after all,” murmured Pat. ”Nice town, huh?”

  “Which people?”

  “People.”

  “Do you think I’m a fraud?”

  “Never mind what I think,” retorted Pat. ”But you should know there’s been a run on the Author’s Photograph File at the Carnegie Library, and Miss Aikin reports you’re simply not there.”

  “Pish,” said Ellery. ”And a couple of tushes. I’m just not famous enough.”

  “That’s what I told her. Mother was furious at the very thought, but I said: ‘Muth, how do we know?’ and do you know, poor Mother didn’t sleep a wink all night?”

  They laughed together. Then Ellery said: “Which reminds me. Why haven’t I met your sister Nora? Isn’t she well?”

  He was appalled by the way Pat stopped laughing at mention of her sister’s name.

  “Nora?” repeated Pat in a perfectly flat voice, a voice that told nothing at all. ”Why, Nora’s all right. Let’s call it a morning, Mr. Smith.”

  That night Hermione officially unveiled her new treasure.

  The list was intime. Just Judge and Clarice Martin, Doc Willoughby, Carter Bradford, Tabitha Wright, John F.’s only living sister¯Tabitha was the “stiff-necked” Wright who had never quite “accepted” Hermione Bluefield¯and Editor-Publisher Frank Lloyd of the Record.

  Lloyd was talking politics with Carter Bradford, but both men merely pretended to be interested in each other. Carter was hurling poisonous looks at Pat and Ellery in the “love seat” by the Italian fireplace; while Lloyd, a brown bear of a man, kept glancing restlessly at the staircase in the foyer.

  “Frank had a crush on Nora before Jim . . . He’s still crazy about her,” explained Pat. ”When Jim Haight came along and Nora fell for him, Frank took the whole thing pretty badly.”

  Ellery inspected the mountainous newspaper editor from across the room and inwardly agreed that Frank Lloyd would make a dangerous adversary. There was iron in those deep-sunk green eyes.

  “And when Jim walked out on Nora, Frank said that¯”

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind what Frank said.” Pat jumped up. ”I’m talking too much.” And she rustled toward Mr. Bradford to break another little piece off his heart. Pat was wearing a blue taffeta dinner gown that swished faintly as she moved.

  “Milo, this is the Ellery Smith,” said Hermy proudly, coming over with big, lumbering Doc Willoughby in tow.

  “Don’t know whether you’re a good influence or not, Mr. Smith,” chuckled Doc. ”I just came from another confinement at the Jacquards’. Those Canucks! Triplets this time. Only
difference between me and Dr. Dafoe is that no lady in Wright County’s been considerate enough to bear more than four at one time. Like our town?”

  “I’ve fallen in love with it, Dr. Willoughby.”

  “It’s a good town. Hermy, where’s my drink?”

  “If you’re broad-minded,” snorted Judge Martin, strolling up with Clarice hanging¯heavily¯on his arm. Judge Martin was a gaunt little man with sleepy eyes and a dry manner. He reminded Ellery of Arthur Train’s Mr. Tutt.

  “Eli Martin!” cried Clarice. ”Mr. Smith, you just ignore this husband of mine. He’s miserable about having to wear his dinner jacket, and he’ll take it out on you because you’re the cause. Hermy, everything’s just perfect.”

  “It’s nothing at all,” murmured Hermione, pleased. ”Just a little intimate dinner, Clarice.”

  “I don’t like these doodads,” growled the Judge, fingering his bow tie. ”Well, Tabitha, and what are you sniffing about?”

  “Comedian!” said John F.’s sister, glaring at the old jurist. ”I can’t imagine what Mr. Smith must be thinking of us, Eli!”

  Judge Martin observed dryly that if Mr. Smith thought less of him for being uncomfortable in doodads, then he thought less of Mr. Smith.

  A crisis was averted by the appearance of Henry Clay Jackson announcing dinner. Henry Clay was the only trained butler in Wrightsville, and the ladies of the upper crust, by an enforced Communism, shared him and his rusty “buttlin’ suit.” It was an unwritten law among them that Henry Clay was to be employed on ultra-special occasions only.

  “Dinnuh,” announced Henry Clay Jackson, “is heaby suhved!”

  * * *

  Nora Wright appeared suddenly between the roast lamb-wreathed-in-mint-jelly-flowers and the pineapple mousse.

  For an instant the room was singing-still.

  Then Hermione quavered: “Why, Nora darling,” and John F. said gladly: “Nora baby,” through a mouthful of salted nuts, and Clarice Martin gasped: “Nora, how nice!” and the spell was broken.