by Otto Penzler
“When Dr. Reinach drove Thorne and Miss Mayhew and me out here the day the Coronia docked, he deliberately passed the almost imperceptible drive leading to the substitute house and went on until he reached this one, the original. We didn’t notice the first driveway.
“Thorne’s car was put out of commission deliberately to prevent his driving. The driver of a car will observe landmarks when his passengers notice little or nothing. Keith even met Thorne on both Thorne’s previous visits to Mayhew—ostensibly ‘to lead the way,’ actually to prevent Thorne from familiarizing himself with the road. And it was Dr. Reinach who drove the three of us here that first day. They permitted me to drive away tonight for what they hoped was a one-way trip because we started from the substitute house—of the two, the one on the road nearer to town. We couldn’t possibly, then, pass the telltale second drive and become suspicious. They knew the relatively shorter drive would not impress our consciousness.”
“But even granting all that, Mr. Queen,” said the policeman, “I don’t see what these people expected to accomplish. They couldn’t hope to keep you folks fooled forever.”
“True,” cried Ellery, “but don’t forget that by the time we caught on to the various tricks involved they hoped to have laid hands on Mayhew’s fortune and disappeared with it. Don’t you see that the whole illusion was planned to give them time? Time to dismantle the Black House without interference, raze it to the ground if necessary, to find that hidden hoard of gold? I don’t doubt that if you examine the house next door you’ll find it a shambles and a hollow shell. That’s why Reinach and Keith kept disappearing. They were taking turns at the Black House, picking it apart, stone by stone, in a frantic search for the cache, while we were occupied in the duplicate White House with an apparently supernatural phenomenon. That’s why someone—probably the worthy doctor here—slipped out of the house behind your back, Thorne, and struck me over the head when I rashly attempted to follow Keith’s tracks in the snow. I could not be permitted to reach the original settlement, for if I did the whole preposterous illusion would be revealed.”
“How about that gold?” growled Thorne.
“For all I know,” said Ellery with a shrug, “they’ve found it and salted it away again.”
“Oh, but we didn’t,” whimpered Mrs. Reinach, squirming in her chair. “Herbert, I told you not to—”
“Idiot,” said the fat man. “Stupid swine.” She jerked as if he had struck her.
“If you hadn’t found the loot,” said the police chief to Dr. Reinach brusquely, “why did you let these people go tonight?”
Dr. Reinach compressed his blubbery lips; he raised his glass and drank quickly.
“I think I can answer that,” said Ellery in a gloomy tone. “In many ways it’s the most remarkable element of the whole puzzle. Certainly it’s the grimmest and least excusable. The other illusion was child’s play compared to it. For it involves two apparently irreconcilable elements—Alice Mayhew and a murder.”
“A murder!” exclaimed the policeman, stiffening.
“Me?” said Alice in bewilderment.
Ellery lit a cigarette and flourished it at the policeman. “When Alice Mayhew came here that first afternoon, she went into the Black House with us. In her father’s bedroom she ran across an old chromo—I see it’s not here, so it’s still in the other White House—portraying her long-dead mother as a girl. Alice Mayhew fell on the chromo like a Chinese refugee on a bowl of rice. She had only one picture of her mother, she explained, and that a poor one. She treasured this unexpected discovery so much that she took it with her, then and there, to the White House—this house. And she placed it on the mantel over the fireplace here in a prominent position.”
The stocky man frowned; Alice sat very still; Thorne looked puzzled. And Ellery put the cigarette back to his lips and said, “Yet when Alice Mayhew fled from the White House in our company tonight for what seemed to be the last time, she completely ignored her mother’s chromo, that treasured memento over which she had gone into such raptures the first day! She could not have failed to overlook it in, let us say, the excitement of the moment. She had placed her purse on the mantel, a moment before, next to the chromo. She returned to the mantel for her purse. And yet she passed the chromo up without a glance. Since its sentimental value to her was overwhelming, by her own admission, it’s the one thing in all this property she would not have left. If she had taken it in the beginning, she would have taken it on leaving.”
Thorne cried, “What in the name of Heaven are you saying, Queen?” His eyes glared at the girl, who sat glued to her chair, scarcely breathing.
“I am saying,” said Ellery curtly, “that we were blind. I am saying that not only was a house impersonated, but a woman as well. I am saying that this woman is not Alice Mayhew.”
The girl raised her eyes after an infinite interval in which no one so much as stirred a foot.
“I thought of everything,” she said with the queerest sigh, “but that. And it was going off so beautifully.”
“Oh, you fooled me very neatly,” drawled Ellery. “That pretty little bedroom scene last night. I know now what happened. This precious Dr. Reinach of yours had stolen into your room at midnight to report to you on the progress of the search at the Black House, perhaps to urge you to persuade Thorne and me to leave today—at any cost. I happened to pass along the hall outside your room, stumbled, and fell against the wall with a clatter; not knowing who it might be or what the intruder’s purpose, you both fell instantly into that cunning deception. Actors! Both of you missed a career on the stage.”
The fat man closed his eyes; he seemed asleep. And the girl murmured, with a sort of tired defiance, “Not missed, Mr. Queen. I spent several years in the theater.”
“You were devils, you two. Psychologically this plot has been the conception of evil genius. You knew that Alice Mayhew was unknown to anyone in this country except by her photographs. Moreover, there was a startling resemblance between the two of you, as Miss Mayhew’s photographs showed. And you knew Miss Mayhew would be in the company of Thorne and me for only a few hours, and then chiefly in the murky light of a sedan.”
“Good Lord,” groaned Thorne, staring at the girl in horror.
“Alice Mayhew,” said Ellery grimly, “walked into this house and was whisked upstairs by Mrs. Reinach. And Alice Mayhew, the English girl, never appeared before us again. It was you who came downstairs; you, who had been secreted from Thorne’s eyes during the past six days deliberately, so that he would not even suspect your existence; you who probably conceived the entire plot when Thorne brought the photographs of Alice Mayhew here, and her gossipy, informative letters; you, who looked enough like the real Alice Mayhew to get by with an impersonation in the eyes of two men to whom Alice Mayhew was a total stranger. I did think you looked different, somehow, when you appeared for dinner that first night; but I put it down to the fact that I was seeing you for the first time refreshed, brushed up, and without your hat and coat. Naturally, after that, the more I saw of you the less I remembered the details of the real Alice Mayhew’s appearance and so became more and more convinced, unconsciously, that you were Alice Mayhew. As for the husky voice and the excuse of having caught cold on the long automobile ride from the pier, that was a clever ruse to disguise the inevitable difference between your voices. The only danger that existed lay in Mrs. Fell, who gave us the answer to the whole riddle the first time we met her. She thought you were her own daughter Olivia. Of course. Because that’s who you are!”
Dr. Reinach was sipping brandy now with a steady indifference to his surroundings. His little eyes were fixed on a point miles away. Old Mrs. Fell sat gaping stupidly at the girl.
“You even covered that danger by getting Dr. Reinach to tell us beforehand that trumped-up story of Mrs. Fell’s ‘delusion’ and Olivia Fell’s ‘death’ in an automobile accident several years ago. Oh, admirable! Yet even this poor creature, in the frailty of her anile faculties, was foo
led by a difference in voice and hair—two of the most easily distinguishable features. I suppose you fixed up your hair at the time Mrs. Reinach brought the real Alice Mayhew upstairs and you had a living model to go by.… I could find myself moved to admiration if it were not for one thing.”
“You’re so clever,” said Olivia Fell coolly. “Really a fascinating monster. What do you mean?”
Ellery went to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Alice Mayhew vanished and you took her place. Why did you take her place? For two possible reasons. One—to get Thorne and me away from the danger zone as quickly as possible, and to keep us away by ‘abandoning’ the fortune or dismissing us, which as Alice Mayhew would be your privilege: in proof, your vociferous insistence that we take you away. Two—of infinitely greater importance to the scheme: if your confederates did not find the gold at once, you were still Alice Mayhew in our eyes. You could then dispose of the house when and as you saw fit. Whenever the gold was found, it would be yours and your accomplices’. But the real Alice Mayhew vanished. For you, her impersonator, to be in a position to go through the long process of taking over Alice Mayhew’s inheritance, it was necessary that Alice Mayhew remain permanently invisible. For you to get possession of her rightful inheritance and live to enjoy its fruits, it was necessary that Alice Mayhew die. And that, Thorne,” snapped Ellery, gripping the girl’s shoulder hard, “is why I said that there was something besides a disappearing house to cope with tonight. Alice Mayhew was murdered.”
There were three shouts from outside which rang with tones of great excitement. And then they ceased, abruptly.
“Murdered,” went on Ellery, “by the only occupant of the house who was not in the house when this impostor came downstairs that first evening—Nicholas Keith. A hired killer. Although these people are all accessories to that murder.”
A voice said from the window, “Not a hired killer.”
They wheeled sharply, and fell silent. The three detectives who had sprung out of the window were there in the background, quietly watchful. Before them were two people.
“Not a killer,” said one of them, a woman. “That’s what he was supposed to be. Instead, and without their knowledge, he saved my life—dear Nick.”
And now the pall of grayness settled over the faces of Mrs. Fell, and of Olivia Fell, and of Mrs. Reinach, and of the burly doctor. For by Keith’s side stood Alice Mayhew. She was the same woman who sat near the fire only in general similitude of feature. Now that both women could be compared in proximity, there were obvious points of difference. She looked worn and grim, but happy withal; and she was holding to the arm of bitter-mouthed Nick Keith with a grip that was quite possessive.
Addendum
Afterward, when it was possible to look back on the whole amazing fabric of plot and event, Mr. Ellery Queen said, “The scheme would have been utterly impossible except for two things: the character of Olivia Fell and the—in itself—fantastic existence of that duplicate house in the woods.”
He might have added that both of these would in turn have been impossible except for the aberrant strain in the Mayhew blood. The father of Sylvester Mayhew—Dr. Reinach’s stepfather—had always been erratic, and he had communicated his unbalance to his children. Sylvester and Sarah, who became Mrs. Fell, were twins, and they had always been insanely jealous of each other’s prerogatives. When they married in the same month, their father avoided trouble by presenting each of them with a specially-built house, the houses being identical in every detail. One he had erected next to his own house and presented to Mrs. Fell as a wedding gift; the other he built on a piece of property he owned some miles away and gave to Sylvester.
Mrs. Fell’s husband died early in her married life; and she moved away to live with her half brother Herbert. When old Mayhew died, Sylvester boarded up his own house and moved into the ancestral mansion. And there the twin houses stood for many years, separated by only a few miles by road, completely and identically furnished inside—fantastic monuments to the Mayhew eccentricity.
The duplicate White House lay boarded up, waiting, idle, requiring only the evil genius of an Olivia Fell to be put to use. Olivia was beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, and as unscrupulous as Lady Macbeth. It was she who had influenced the others to move back to the abandoned house next to the Black House for the sole purpose of coercing or robbing Sylvester Mayhew. When Thorne appeared with the news of Sylvester’s long-lost daughter, she recognized the peril to their scheme and, grasping her own resemblance to her English cousin from the photographs Thorne brought, conceived the whole extraordinary plot.
Then obviously the first step was to put Sylvester out of the way. With perfect logic, she bent Dr. Reinach to her will and caused him to murder his patient before the arrival of Sylvester’s daughter. (A later exhumation and autopsy revealed traces of poison in the corpse.) Meanwhile, Olivia perfected the plans of the impersonation and illusion.
The house illusion was planned for the benefit of Thorne, to keep him sequestered and bewildered while the Black House was being torn down in the search for the gold. The illusion would perhaps not have been necessary had Olivia felt certain that her impersonation would succeed perfectly.
The illusion was simpler, of course, then appeared on the surface. The house was there, completely furnished, ready for use. All that was necessary was to take the boards down, air the place out, clean up, put fresh linen in. There was plenty of time before Alice’s arrival for this preparatory work.
The one weakness of Olivia Fell’s plot was objective, not personal. That woman would have succeeded in anything. But she made the mistake of selecting Nick Keith for the job of murdering Alice Mayhew. Keith had originally insinuated himself into the circle of plotters, posing as a desperado prepared to do anything for sufficient pay. Actually, he was the son of Sylvester Mayhew’s second wife, who had been so brutally treated by Mayhew and driven off to die in poverty.
Before his mother expired she instilled in Keith’s mind a hatred for Mayhew that waxed, rather than waned, with the ensuing years. Keith’s sole motive in joining the conspirators was to find his stepfather’s fortune and take that part of it which Mayhew had stolen from his mother. He had never intended to murder Alice—his ostensible role. When he carried her from the house that first evening under the noses of Ellery and Thorne, it was not strangle and bury her, as Olivia had directed, but to secrete her in an ancient shack in the nearby woods known only to himself.
He had managed to smuggle provisions to her while he was ransacking the Black House. At first he had held her frankly prisoner, intending to keep her so until he found the money, took his share, and escaped. But as he came to know her he came to love her, and he soon confessed the whole story to her in the privacy of the shack. Her sympathy gave him new courage; concerned now with her safety above everything else, he prevailed upon her to remain in hiding until he could find the money and outwit his fellow-conspirators. Then they both intended to unmask Olivia.…
The ironical part of the whole affair, as Mr. Ellery Queen was to point out, was that the goal of all this plotting and counterplotting—Sylvester Mayhew’s gold—remained as invisible as the Black House apparently had been. Despite the most thorough search of the building and grounds no trace of it had been found.
“I’ve asked you to visit my poor diggings,” Ellery said, smiling, a few weeks later, “because something occurred to me that simply cried out for investigation.”
Keith and Alice glanced at each other blankly; and Thorne, looking clean, rested, and complacent for the first time in weeks, sat up straighter in Ellery’s most comfortable chair.
“I’m glad something occurred to somebody,” said Nick Keith with a grin. “I’m a pauper; and Alice is only one jump ahead of me.”
“You haven’t the philosophic attitude toward wealth,” said Ellery dryly, “that’s so charming a part of Dr. Reinach’s personality. Poor Colossus! I wonder how he likes our jails.” He poked a log into the fire. “By th
is time, Miss Mayhew, our common friend Thorne has had your father’s house virtually annihilated. No gold. Eh, Thorne?”
“Nothing but dirt,” said the lawyer sadly. “Why, we’ve taken that house apart stone by stone.”
“Exactly. Now there are two possibilities, since I am incorrigibly categorical: either your father’s fortune exists, Miss Mayhew, or it does not. If it does not and he was lying, there’s an end to the business, of course, and you and your precious Keith will have to put your heads together and agree to live either in noble, rugged individualistic poverty or by the grace of the Relief Administration. But suppose there was a fortune, as your father claimed, and suppose he did secret it somewhere in that house. What then?”
“Then,” sighed Alice, “it’s flown away.”
Ellery laughed. “Not quite; I’ve had enough of vanishments for the present, anyway. Let’s tackle the problem differently. Is there anything which was in Sylvester’s Mayhew’s house before he died which is not there now?”
Thorne stared. “If you mean the—er—the body—”
“Don’t be gruesome, Literal Lyman. Besides, there’s been an exhumation. No, guess again.”
Alice looked slowly down at the package in her lap. “So that’s why you asked me to fetch this with me today!”
“You mean,” cried Keith, “the old fellow was deliberately putting everyone off the track when he said his fortune was gold?”
Ellery chuckled and took the package from the girl. He unwrapped it and for a moment gazed appreciatively at the large old chromo of Alice’s mother.
And then, with the self-assurance of the complete logician, he stripped away the back of the frame.
Gold-and-green documents cascaded into his lap.
“Converted into bonds.” Ellery grinned. “Who said your father was cracked, Miss Mayhew? A very clever gentleman! Come, come, Thorne, stop rubbernecking and let’s leave these children of fortune alone!”