Going Going Gone

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  “If you see an anchor fit for my sharpie, buy it,” Asey said.

  “And everyone’s goin’ to bid high on anything that might be the money’s hiding place,” Jennie went on, “and lots of people are after the house, because they think that the money’s—”

  “Under the floor boards. I know. This,” Asey said, “is where I came in. Thank goodness, anyway, you believe in mice!”

  “Asey, please wait! Where d’you think he might’ve hidden it? Tell me!”

  Asey grinned as he leaned toward her. “You really want to know?” he asked in a stage whisper. “Inside a tin of corned beef!”

  “Smarty!” With an indignant toss of her head, Jennie flounced off up the walk and disappeared through the open front door of the Alden house.

  “Aren’t you staying, Sherlock?” Asey turned to find the roly-poly figure of Quinton Sharp standing by the side of the roadster. “Big doings here. You shouldn’t miss ‘em. Alden had a nice dory you’d like. Just the thing for pulling your lobster pots, and the planking’s as sound as the day it was bought.”

  “An’ you guarantee a hundred thousand dollars in gold certificates lurkin’ between each an’ every plank?” Asey inquired dryly.

  Sharp laughed. “Guess you’ve been listening to rumours, haven’t you? Matter of fact, Asey, this time it’s probably true. I don’t think there’s any hundred thousand kicking around, but Alden had money, and he did keep it loose around the house. His will said to lock the place up as soon as he died, and then to auction things off just as they were, and that’s what we’re doing. He had money in the house somewhere, and it should still be here.”

  “Your father,” Asey said, “used to work up a lot more feelin’ in his voice, an’ he had a wonderful sentence about who could ever guess what fabulous black pearls from the mysterious Orient might have been smuggled into this weather-beaten little house by the late Cap’n So-and-So, who’d plied the China trade so long. If that didn’t move folks, he turned the pearls into rubies as big as hens’ eggs, from the heathen temples of mysterious Calcutta an’ vicinity.”

  Sharp leaned against the roadster’s door and bent nearer to Asey.

  “This is the McCoy,” he said seriously. “I knew as much about Alden’s affairs as anyone, and I’ll give you my word that there’s a good ten thousand in cash, at least, somewhere among his things. The market crash and the depression hit him hard, but he had money – you know where he got it, don’t you?”

  Asey shook his head. “I didn’t know him. That is, I knew him enough to say ‘Hello’ to when I met him in the post office. Wiry man with a cane – had a limp, didn’t he? An’ a kind of pleasant, ruddy face. White moustache, as I remember.”

  “And a little Vandyke beard. He used to be a ship broker. Caines and Alden – you knew em. Retired – oh, twenty years or so ago. That,” Sharp nodded toward the house, “was his grandmother’s place. He never put on any airs, and sometimes he’d clerk for a few weeks at the chain store, or help Higgins peddle clams. It gave people the impression he wasn’t too well off, but he only did it for fun. Asey, I’m not kidding. I wish you’d stay here. If I’d known you were home, I’d have driven over to your place and asked you to come here this afternoon.”

  “So? Why?”

  “Don’t look right now,” Sharp lowered his voice till he was talking in a whisper, “but start glancing at the side of the bank building, and then work around to the lilac bush by the front door, and take in that man standing there. Then keep on looking down toward the river, as if you were trying to see Alden’s wharf. Go on, while I gabble. Fee, fi, fo, turn. Fee, fi, fo, fum – see him?”

  Asey saw him, all right. It was the tall man in the grey suit with the bulging, baglike brief case whom he’d seen earlier on the shore load near his own house.

  “Know him?” Sharp demanded as Asey finished his suryey.

  “I tossed him off as an insurance adjuster, to tell you the truth,” Asey said.

  “He’s nobody to toss off lightly,” Sharp returned. “That’s Gardner Alden, John’s brother – and he hasn’t taken his eyes off you and me since I’ve been standing here. He’s a big-shot New York lawyer – Alden, Someone, Someone Else, Somebody and Thingumabob. He’s hipped about antiques, and he means to buy up every stick in the place. I’ve had a bushel of telegrams from him, and fifty million phone calls, since John died. And plenty of words! He tried to bribe me to make sure that he got the best things. Solatia Spry, she means to get ‘em, too – she knows choice stuff when she sees it. So does that Pitkin girl, who has the antique shop over in Skaket. And so,” he pointed to a Packard beachwagon parked ahead of Asey’s roadster, “does Mrs. James Fenimore Madison, of the Shack!”

  “The Shack – that’s the soap tycoon’s place over in Weesit, ain’t it?” Asey said. “The one with the forty bedrooms an’ greenhouses, an’ the private golf course?”

  Sharp nodded. “Looks like someone’d thrown an old wedding cake on to a sand dune,” he said, “and then stepped on it. Mrs. Madison’s been pestering Alden to sell her his china and that tallboy for years, and she intends to have ‘em. She brought so much money over from the bank, half an hour ago, she’s got her chauffeur standing guard over the bag. There’s going to be too much money here, Asey! I’m worried!”

  “Oh, I don’t think you’ll run into any trouble,” Asey said. “It’s just a question of whose money lasts the longest, and I wouldn’t have any pangs or compunctions about biddin’ ‘em up. The proceeds are for a good cause.”

  “I know,” Sharp said. “Ordinarily I’d jack ‘em up, slam the stuff at the highest bidder, and feel proud to think it was helping the Hospital Fund. But there’s a side to this that worries me. I know Mrs. Madison can take the lot, see? I know she’s going to. But I also know that even if she buys the whole kit and caboodle, and bangs the cash down on the block, that still isn’t going to stop Gardner Alden from trying to get what he wants anyway – I tell you, Asey, he tried to bribe me! He means business!”

  “When you come right down to brass tacks,” Asey fingered the starter button, “there ain’t much he can really do, Sharp. If he’s outbid, he’s outbid, an’ the crowd – golly, it’s gettin’ to be some crowd! – they’ll see to it he don’t make any fuss.”

  “Then there’s Solatia Spry,” Sharp said. “I happen to know she’s got a customer, a big collector in San Francisco, who’d pay her all outdoors for John Alden’s china. He saw it when he was here on the Cape a few years ago, and took a fancy to it, and Solatia has a standing offer to buy it for him at any price. She’s a mighty shrewd woman, Solatia is. She’s not going to let that commission slip out of her fingers without a fight – and she knows every trick of the trade! And that Pitkin girl knows the chance she’s got on that deal if she can only catch Solatia napping. And then,” Sharp’s rotund face darkened, “there’s that weasel-faced nephew of John’s. He’s the one who’d really go in for dirty work. I don’t trust that fellow half an inch!”

  “As long as you sell the goods lawfully to the highest bidder,” Asey said soothingly, “I don’t see how there can be any trouble. What happens to the buyers or the stuff they buy ain’t hardly your problem—”

  But Sharp wasn’t listening to him. Sharp was craning his neck, looking at the throng.

  “I thought I saw that nephew – he’s a son of one of John’s sisters, and his name’s Alden Dorking,” he said. “I wanted to point him out to you. He’s a bad actor. Up to the time he was drafted, he was trying to borrow money from John about every other month. He got injured in a training-camp accident, and was discharged as unfit. Blew into town the minute John died – he’s after that loose cash, see? Tried to break into the house last night, but my brother Gordon and I’ve kept watch over the place – we’ve been sleeping here because we suspected that Gardner or Dorking might try some funny business. We chased him away.”

  “Whyn’t you just hand him over to the cops?” Asey wanted to know.

  “We pulled a b
oner there. We let him hear us while he was jimmying up the window,” Sharp said. “We should have let him get in, and then jumped him and had him arrested. We realized that later. We’d ought to have got him out of the way, at least.”

  “I s’pose you’re sure it was this Dorking fellow?” Asey asked.

  “He beat it before we could see his face, but it was him, all right. Couldn’t have been anyone else. Gardner Alden’d never pull a dumb stunt like that, and nobody around town would. They all knew we were sleeping here. So you see, Asey, it’s these angles that worry me. I know, whoever gets the stuff, there’s going to be trouble brewing from it. And I’m going to have my hands full with the rest of the crowd over the canned goods and tyres and such. For John’s sake, I want to get as much as I can for everything, but I’m honestly worried. Wouldn’t you stick around? Nobody’d try anything crooked as long as you were here!”

  “I think you’ll be able to handle things,” Asey said. “Me, I don’t like auctions. They had one at my grandfather’s place years ago, and it took me years an’ years to buy back the family’s possessions, in driblets, like. I never cared for auctions afterwards. You know, you could always try your father’s trick.”

  “Which one?” Sharp demanded.

  “Sell off the shotguns or firearms first,” Asey said, “but leave ‘em on the block for delivery after the sale. That always had a quellin’ effect, because as your father used to say, you couldn’t never tell if they wasn’t bombed, ah’ the leetlest jar might set ‘em off. Tell me, do you still stop every now an’ then an’ swallow spoonfuls of Vaseline, an’ make jokes about oilin’ the pipes?”

  “Sure. And I tell the story about the travelling salesman who got snowed in with the old maid,” Sharp said, “and all the old summer visitor ones – remember? Asey, for a man who doesn’t like auctions, you know a lot about ‘em!”

  “I should,” Asey said. “It took nearly a hundred auctions with your father officiatin’ before I managed a buy back all of my grandfather’s possessions. I can sing that ‘Going – going – GONE!’ chant of his as good as he ever could, an’ a whole lot better’n any tobacco auctioneer on the radio nowadays. So long!”

  Ten minutes later he was on the narrow, sandy shore of the nearby fresh pond, taking from its case the rod he kept in the hatch of his roadster.

  An hour later, he put his rod back into the case and sat down under the pines. Either the pond was fished out or else the fish had swum up the river to view the auction with the rest of the population.

  He looked at his watch – it was three-thirty. The auction wouldn’t be over for a couple of hours, so he might as well kill the time here, he decided, as anywhere else.

  Tilting his yachting cap over his eyes, he leaned back against a log, and filled his pipe. He could visualize Jennie about this time, perched on the edge of her seat, pop-eyed with excitement. All those hundreds of heads would be jerking as one from left to right, as if they worked by strings, while the bid bounced from Gardner Alden to the antique dealers, to Mrs. James Fenimore Madison. Probably, to ease the tension and to give the townsfolk a chance, Sharp would ring in a tyre or a tin of corned beef every now and then. Long-established friendships would be battered by an egg-beater, a family feud would grow out of an old, rusty lawn mower, and at least half a dozen women wouldn’t speak to their respective husbands for several days because of the shellac, which they either had wanted very violently or hadn’t wanted at all.

  Jennie would be sure to bid in at least one Currier and Ives print. Jennie was a sucker for top-knotted little boys who looked as if they were about to perish from malnutrition – and she couldn’t resist pictures of kittens, particularly if they were playing with yarn or dominoes. She’d just as surely buy up some cumbersome, bulky and entirely useless object which would crowd them out of the car on the way home. Something like an old walnut whatnot, with one foot missing. There were three such lame walnut whatnots home in the cellar, right now.

  “All it needs, Asey,” he could hear her saying defensively, “is a little rubbin’ down, and some fresh stain. Whatnots are hard to come by. They’re valuable. And I always liked whatnots. Mother used to have one – well, and s’pose this does make the fourth? A room has four corners, hasn’t it?”

  And if someone Jennie disliked tried to buy one of the tins of food, Jennie would bid it out from under her nose, whether or not it was anything she ever used. And under no circumstances would she ever remember to pick him up an anchor for the sharpie!

  He puffed contentedly at his pipe and lazily suryeyed the fresh pond. While he’d take the salt-water view from his own windows any day in the week, he had to admit to himself that the ponds had a certain charm. The sky above them always seemed bluer, the white clouds hung over them like spoonfuls of marshmallow cream, and the gulls that had swooped over from the back shore seemed to appreciate the quiet, glassy water after the rolling breakers of the outside beach.

  As he wondered if it was worth the effort to relight his pipe, he heard the noise of someone coming down to the shore by the path through the bushes behind him.

  If there was another person in the county who preferred going fishing to attending the Alden auction, he thought, it would be only fair to break the news to him that the fish weren’t biting, and that he might as well go listen to Quin Sharp’s story about the summer visitor who tried to eat a quahaug with the shell on.

  He raised himself up on one elbow and turned to see a girl trudging down the path, lugging in either hand a wicker picnic hamper which must have been heavy as lead, to judge by her strained neck muscles, and by the way she was bending forward.

  She passed by without looking in his direction, dropped her hampers on the sand, sighed her relief at being rid of the load, and flexed her hands, which seemed to have been cut by the wicker handles.

  Asey stared at her interestedly, not because she was any raving beauty, or any different from any other young girl to be seen about town, but because she had one of the hair arrangements which always fascinated him in that they disobeyed all the laws of gravity. Jennie had assured him that such pompadours stayed up with the aid of lacquer and a lot of invisible hairpins, but it always looked to him as if the hair had risen on end from fright, and stayed that way in a state of suspended paralysis.

  She was probably about twenty, he decided, although her blue middy blouse and short skirt made her seem younger at first glance. Her trip down the path had winded her, and her face was red as a beet from her exertions.

  When she got her breath, she dragged one of the hampers to the water’s edge, lifted the lid, drew out a book, and casually tossed the latter out into the pond.

  She ducked back from the splash, said “Damn!” and experimented gripping the next book before she decided on a two-handed basketball toss. That one went out farther into the water, beyond the lily pads, and Asey heard her grunt of satisfaction.

  By the fourth book, the girl was beginning to hit her stride.

  After the seventh, she had become so proficient that she was bowling them out one-handed.

  Asey sat cross-legged and watched her. Jennie was always saying that there was no accounting for some people’s tastes, and adding some pungent comment about the old lady who insisted on kissing her pig. When anyone should voluntarily choose to spend an afternoon hurling books into a small fresh-water pond, Asey couldn’t begin to imagine, but this girl was obviously working very hard at it, and apparently thoroughly enjoying the process.

  For his part, he thought, this was a lot more fun to watch than an auction. There was more room for conjecture. Who, for example, was this girl with the elegant hair-do, anyway? Where’d she come from? How’d she come here? There certainly was a limit to the distance anyone could lug those heavy hampers! And whose books were they? Hers? And why, if she had been seized with a burning desire to rid herself of them, should she put them in picnic hampers – very de luxe hampers they were, too – and bring them to this particular pond? Why hadn’t she
put them in an old carton and taken them to the dump, or presented them to the local library, or even saved them for some future bonfire? Or just kept them to help while away some cold, dull winter evening?

  When the first hamper was empty, the girl paused to light a cigarette, and then tackled the contents of the second.

  After thirty more books had splashed to a watery grave, she turned around, still beet-red and breathless, but wearing the self-satisfied look of someone who had done a hard job rather well.

  Light-heartedly swinging the empty hampers, she started up the path.

  Then she caught sight of Asey, and stopped in her tracks.

  For a moment, she stared at him without speaking. Her face turned a darker red, and she was clearly embarrassed and taken aback at the realization that someone had been watching her all the while. But there was also a defiant set to her mouth which made Asey wonder if perhaps she wouldn’t face a firing squad before offering any explanations for her actions.

  “Good-afternoon,” he said politely.

  “Good-afternoon,” She didn’t, Asey thought, sound any too certain about it.

  “Nice day.” Asey restrained his impulse to add that it was wonderful weather for pitching sixty-odd books into a pond.

  “Yes. I hope,” she was looking now at the case containing his rod, “I hope I didn’t frighten away all the fish.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you did, thanks,” Asey said. “If anything, you’ve probably drawn ‘em here. The fish in this pond are so educated that flies don’t interest ‘em, but I’m sure they’d most likely enjoy some good readin’.”

  The girl smiled. “They were just some old books. You know, old things.” She made a little gesture to show how old and unimportant they were. “Books are so hard to get rid of,” she added. “I mean, people are always talking about the Nazis burning books, but did you ever try to? You can’t. You simply can’t. Not unless you have a roaring furnace – and this isn’t the weather for furnaces – or unless you rip every volume apart and burn it little by little. This pond seemed – er – it seemed so convenient.”