Corpses at Indian Stone

by Philip Wylie

  Wes Wickman apparently ignored the praise. "You're my only problem, Plum," he said musingly. "You think somebody did kill Jim. I don't--not yet; my mind's open. But you do. And you're not the kind of person who will just let that thought lie undisturbed."

  Aggie said, "Maybe I will. After all, he's not the first dead man I've seen. I've lived-here and there. Primitive people are apt to--liquidate--a relative or neighbor who troubles them. I'm a scientist--and I haven't any conscience."

  "Don't make me laugh! You've got Sarah for a conscience! And the fact that you're a scientist is the one that will keep you meddling. I took a good long look at you tonight. I could almost read your mind. I know more about these people than you ever will--and that helped me. You thought that Waite might have done this. You considered Danielle. Bill Calder, of course. Beth--maybe. That trip to Garnet Knob might have had something to do with it all. Bill might even have intended to confess to the girl there--and lost his nerve."

  "She suggested the junket up the hill."

  "Oke. Maybe she was going to confess. Jim spoiled her mother's life. Then--you wondered about this Bogarty guy. Who was he? Where was he? I wonder about him too.

  You were also scrutinizing Doc Davis in a most anthropological way. Why?"

  "Because," Aggie answered, "I routed him out at approximately four A.M. this morning--and he was up and he was dressed. Working--in his darkroom. He gave you the feeling that he'd been doing something special. There weren't any lights on--no electricity--in his house. You'd think a person would go to bed, under such circumstances. I just wondered. As for Bogarty--" Aggie told about the knife, the calling card, and Calder's visit.

  The trooper thrust out his lower lip and pinched it. "I tell you. I can't stop you from using your bean. So go ahead. Only--for heaven's sake--if you barge into anything more--tell me. Not your aunt--and not anybody else. You see, Plum, even if there was a murder here, I'd have to have ironclad proof--or these people would suppress it. They're that kind. So are a good many others. People think that any killing would throw them on the side of law and justice--but if the right guy is killed--and if an investigation would bring to light a lot of backbiting, gyppery, hate, and double-dealing--they'll raise heaven and earth to close the subject. I, for one, am going to take the line that it was an accident--

  for the present, and until I can prove it wasn't--and above all, until we know about this Bogarty. I wish you would too."

  "Of course," Aggie answered readily--and somewhat to the surprise of the officer.

  Sarah looked up from her solitaire. When she saw it was Aggie, she beamed.

  "This," she said, "is about my two millionth game. Not one has come out, yet." She gathered up the cards, absently reached for a large candy box on the table beside her chair, and bit into a chocolate. Her face immediately puckered and tears filled her eyes.

  She snatched up a glass of water. "Strawberry!" she exclaimed. "Tastes like nitric acid!

  It's killing me! Take these candies away before I forget again! What happened? Who were you talking to--just now--outside?"

  "Captain Wickman--Wes Wickman."

  "Well! Go ahead! Tell me about the evening! What was Wes doing around here, anyhow? Somebody get burglarized during the winter? Speak up! Here I sit--starving for conversation--!"

  "He was here," Aggie answered, sitting on the ottoman at Sarah's feet, "because Jim Calder has been killed."

  He watched his aunt react. She lost color--not much, but some. She thought for a long minute. "All right. Tell me."

  It took him an--hour. She interrupted with short, breathless interrogations and exclamations, but she checked her own excitement in order to let him talk. When he finished, she said flatly, "Jim, the idiot, just blundered into that trap! I'll bet on it! Now, tell me more about Danielle and Bill Calder."

  He began to tell her as much more as he could think of. But he realized that either Sarah wishfully thought Jim had died by accident and wanted to reinforce the wish--or else she had some other reason for deciding to avoid that phase of the discussion. What reason, he could not guess. After he had exhausted every other detail of the evening, she skirted the subject of Jim's death once more: "So Wes told you not to tell anything to me, eh? Scoundrel! And you're two people's stooge, from now on."

  "Two?"

  "His--and mine."

  Aggie shook his head. He was beginning to feel a great fatigue--a reaction to the night and to the aimlessness of the quandary in his mind. "I'm nobody's stooge, Sarah, from now on. I signed up with you to do a little trivial espionage. I didn't agree to poke into the death of a manifest rascal."

  "You will, though."

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  He yawned. "Well, because I've already damaged myself enough, for one reason.

  Every soul at Indian Stones except Wes thinks I'm a top-drawer pud. And Wes won't give me a good character, at my request; to do so would blacken your name and impute my senses. Another reason is, you haven't come through with all you know--or suspect."

  "Me?" Sarah's hazel eyes were wide and innocent. Too innocent.

  "You," he answered, rising from the ottoman.

  She didn't deny it.

  The next day, it began to rain at nine o'clock and it rained hard. There were occasional diminutions of the gray pall, but not for long enough periods to cause people to go outdoors voluntarily. Aggie stayed in. He unpacked his clothes and the contents of the rest of his peculiar luggage. He read books. He refused to go to the club for lunch or for dinner. He volunteered to play cribbage with his aunt, but she was so piqued by his lack of co-operation that she refused any such solace. Dr. Davis came, and she sent for her nephew, but he was reported by old John to be immersed in a bath. She tried to persuade Aggie after dinner that people would want to see him; he told her that anybody who wanted to see him knew where he could be found. He went back to his treatises at ten o'clock and made no further sound.

  Sarah, waking in the thin, black hours of morning, saw by the reflection on the trees that her nephew still had a light on. Still reading. Or--more probably--holding up a book, and thinking. She grunted with the discomfort of her ailment and the discomfort of her mind and went back to sleep.

  The day that came after that night was sunny and hot. Old John woke Aggie--on Sarah's orders--with the news that he was to be present at a coroner's inquest at ten. John would have let him sleep through anything of so trifling a nature. And so would Sarah, if she'd had a mind to do it. Aggie ate his breakfast in a cross and silent manner. He shot the station wagon through the stone gates noisily, and was gone for three hours. When he returned, he was still taciturn.

  Sarah had a cold luncheon served to him in her room. "Death by accident," he said. "Warrant out for whoever built that deadfall." He forked up a mouthful of salad and she warned him it would drop on his beard. He scowled at her--and--the salad dropped.

  "Most perfunctory thing you ever saw! Held in a room in the City Hall in Parkawan.

  Doctor's reports--death by blow from log. He died some time the night we got here, definitely. I, personally, believe that deadfall was put up at the same time. Or in the afternoon of the day before we got here."

  Sarah gazed at him. This was a tidbit of news. "You do? Why?"

  "Plants!" he answered crossly. "The plants the two dead trees fell on--and the plants trampled around there. Juices still sticky. I imagine Wes noticed that, also. He notices most things. He's smart. Anyway, the doctors didn't find a thing that the blow wouldn't explain. They did an autopsy. Bill insisted on that. There were no fingerprints on the deadfall worth anything. Smears--that's all. Suspicious--but not conclusive. A lot of people wear gloves in the woods. Wes was wearing them himself, the other night.

  They didn't go into the murder angle much more than that. Brushed it over."

  "But, Aggie, there's not a scrap of evidence it was murder!"

  "Et tu," he said, staring at her. "No. That's the trouble. Nothing but hints. Why was the bull br
ier growing so as to make it essential for a man walking on that road to lean and thus to lunge? Did the brier really grow that way--or was it festooned there to set the stage for an appearance of accident? Things like that. Maybe there isn't a perfect murder. But--I wonder--if there is ever a perfect accident, either? This one was absolutely pat. It had to happen that way. And yet--nobody can explain why Calder was there--

  except that he liked to ramble." He shrugged. "I saw Wes for a few minutes. Asked him if he'd learned anything about this--this--"

  He was watching her from under his hand--rubbing his face and yawning. She supplied the name fast enough--but with perhaps a trace of a quaver--and perhaps the quaver was due to her swollen glands. "Hank? Hank Bogarty?"

  "Mmm. He hadn't. The Albany cops checked all the hotels and the tourist homes.

  Nobody had registered by that name. Ads were put in the papers in quite an area. No response so fat. Of course, they haven't any description. Not yet. They've wired British Columbia for one. Nobody hereabouts bas seen him recently enough to say more than that he'd had curly black hair and gray eyes, very far apart. Stuff like that. But he wired he'd be here-and he hasn't shown. Isn't it quite possible that your man Bogarty did drive in at Indian Stones and right up to Calder's--after that man Gannon of his had gone to bed--and that--things happened, and Bogarty left these parts forever?"

  "What things happened?"

  "You tell me," he replied impatiently. "Since you've shut down on me--I'm licked.

  The whole joint is crowded with mummers. Not a word out of a soul. They are burying Jim Calder tomorrow--but I'm going for a swim right now."

  "It's too soon after lunch," Sarah said petulantly.

  Aggie left the house a few minutes later. He carried his bathing suit--not just trunks, but a jersey also--in a waterproof satchel. The men and women of Indian Stones had adopted tropical winter fashions for summer wear: shorts of a Tahitian pattern for the former, and for the latter, quite similar shorts, and bras. They wore slack suits in the daytime; at night the men had commenced to try dinner jackets in a variety of pastel colors. This conventionality of unconvention was one which Aggie did not remotely understand. He was dressed then, as always, primarily for comfort.

  His appearance at the boathouse was thus another occasion for mirth at his expense. He came down the tree-roofed road, bobbling contentedly, in worn moccasins, khaki trousers, a faded blue jumper-shirt, and a pith helmet--the last because of the hot sunshine. Less for jauntiness than from a long-standing field habit, he wore a scarlet bandanna around his neck. All this, taken together with his beard, his flashing black eyes, and his knee-bent, forward-leaning gait, made him look outlandish.

  Beth, who caught sight of him first, struck the precise note when she called, "Dr.

  Livingstone, I presume?"

  People lying on the dock on air mattresses, people floating on them in the water, people on the imported sand, and in boats, looked at Aggie and broke into laughter. The recent nervous strain they'd undergone made that laughter unduly vehement. Aggie turned red to the roots of his hair. He pushed ahead, as if against tangible resistance, through the crowd and into the Plum family locker. He undressed. With a grimace of determination, he decided to eschew the jersey. He came out in blue trunks.

  Beth had been waiting for him, maliciously. "We're going to initiate you into the Indian Stones free-style swimming and poker--" she began. Then she stopped.

  Some men who seem powerful in their clothes are male caricatures in a bathing suit. Others are the opposite, and Agamemnon Telemachus Plum was such a person. His shoulders sloped steeply and his chest seemed rounded. Dressed, he gave the impression of being a little bit underweight. Undressed, he was revealed: a man knotted with lean muscle, a man with the build of an acrobat, a man of visible, formidable strength. His loose-jointed way of walking became graceful, almost sinister, like the sleek, precise movements of a big cat. It dawned upon everybody that Aggie, "at perhaps a hundred and sixty pounds and five feet nine and a half, was, as Beth later said, "dynamite in the physical culture department. "

  Aggie knew that the sight of the man who subtended the professorial clothing was creating a sensation, but the knowledge did not remove his blush. He had wanted to join the people and swim with them. Now, he wanted to get away. There' were several canoes lying bottom up on a slide beside the dock. Aggie looked at them. "I wonder if I could borrow somebody's . . . ?" His voice trailed off.

  "Take mine, Aggie," Ralph Patton said. "The blue one. How'd you get that brawn, boy?"

  Aggie answered, "Thanks, Ralph," and no more.

  They all watched him. They couldn't take their eyes away. His appearance was dramatic, very nearly appalling, in view of their previous ideas about him. He turned the canoe over and slid it into the water. He picked up a paddle. He stepped lightly aboard, dropped to one knee just forward of the stern seat, and dipped his paddle. The canoe came to life. It. flew in the water. Five strokes took him out of earshot and twenty out of sight, around the first of several small islands.

  "Good Lord!" Ralph exclaimed. "Did you ever see anything like that!"

  Beth was sitting quite still, staring at the widening wake. She pulled off her bathing cap and shook her black hair in the sunlight. "We've got that little guy all wrong,"

  she said. "He's dangerous."

  Mrs. Drayman agreed--in a way. "He isn't little, even."

  Beth went on talking, as if to herself: "No. Not little. Not anything like what I thought. I wonder how he learned to paddle like that?"

  Wes Wickman, the state trooper, who had read one of Aggie's books at college, could have given a partial answer; Aggie had learned it seal-hunting in kayaks, pushing dugouts into the Everglades and up the reaches of the Amazon, and raging through Alaskan white water in canoes like the one that had just vanished.

  Jack Browne, off duty for the moment, lay back on the sand and said somewhat jealously--inasmuch as he had been an athlete, "One of those outdoor guys! Tum up their noses at tennis--and spend a month trying to get a snapshot of a tillagaloo-bird on her nest! No wonder he was so interested in the deadfall. Could have built it himself!"

  Beth whirled. "That's no kind of thing to say! So could you! You're no slouch in the outdoors, yourself! So could I! I was Deerfoot, in the Girl Pioneers. I can pitch tents and make smoke signals. He's wonderful--and you're just envious!"

  Jack chuckled. "Darned if I'm not! I think I'll have to get the professor to give me some lessons in paddling. He's gone after Danielle, I guess."

  Beth stared at Jack. "I don't get it!"

  "Before you came along-Danielle took off in her canoe--that way." The dark-haired girl put on her cap again. "Let's swim," she said, and she dove into the lake.

  CHAPTER 6

  Aggie was not looking for Danielle. He was looking for nobody and hoping to succeed in that quest. He paddled for a mile at his astonishing pace before the expenditure of energy had given him any release. Then he set the paddle across the thwarts and leaned back; the light craft coasted on its momentum. The sun relaxed him. A frail breeze swung the bow of the canoe in an arc, giving him a panorama of the lake. It lay in a tree-clad valley. Dark cottage roofs and the clubhouse gables penetrated the foliage. Garnet Knob broke craggily to the south. On lower and more rolling hills were stretches of the golf fairway and the vivid rectangles of several greens. Aggie let his mind dissolve.

  Golf courses, he reflected, were very beautiful. Too bad he didn't play. A being from another world, landing on earth on a golf course, if he knew it was intended for a game, would surely think the human race was marvelous. Golf courses were like gardens, and to make a garden for a game was a noble piece of imagining.

  He began to grin, thinking of the startled expressions of the Indian Stoners when they'd seen him in his bathing suit. Beth, especially. Beth, in her bathing suit, was another sort of surprise--more breath-taking than any man could be. Good old Sarah, in hopefully picking Beth for him, had at least credited him wit
h an appreciation of beauty. Sarah hadn't chosen the glasses-wearing intellectual usually reserved for him by thoughtful hostesses. Beth had a bushel of beauty--and a figure you might see in the motion pictures, but not on many beaches.

  He put the paddle under his left arm and idly sculled along with his right hand. He was still leaning back against the seat when he saw the other canoe. It was pulled up on the shore -hidden-and only a vigilant eye would have caught the glitter of a patch of enamel-caught it, and identified it as something not in nature. He sculled over that way in mild curiosity. As he drew near, the paint spot vanished behind leaves.

  He beached his own canoe and set his bare feet ankle": deep in the sun-warmed water. The other canoe was right-side up. In it was a green bathing cap and a towel-but that little was much. The towel was monogrammed "DD." Aggie peered into the woods and saw nothing. He listened, and heard nothing. He looked at the ground and read there by the damp impressions the fact that Danielle had drawn her canoe out of sight, walked around to be sure it was hidden, and hurried off along the dim trail that skirted Lower Lake. She was wearing bath shoes.

  Another grin flashed on Aggie's face. The doctor's daughter had once caught him on her trail by the tracks he had left. This--was his turn. He considered following Danielle's trail and guessed where it would lead. He decided to wait. He picked a spot under a hemlock; the ground was dry and soft. He lay down there, squinting through the green needles at the blue sky. He waited for a long time--perhaps an hour.

  Danielle came quietly, but he heard her at a distance. She walked quickly, and she was breathing hard. She saw the canoe, and stopped dead. From his post under the hemlock branches, he observed that she was glistening with perspiration and that her bathing suit showed signs of haste in underbrush. A shoulder strap was broken. Threads were pulled. Her smooth hair was, for once, tangled and untidy, like the hair of a determined tomboy. She swung her eyes searchingly, saw him, and inhaled sharply.

  Aggie stood up. "Hello. I noticed your canoe--beached here-and came ashore to investigate."