Most of the demonstration victim’s hadn’t begun to be as cooperative as he’d been, either. Not one of them had gone so far as to get caught just after they’d bent over to take the air out of bicycle tyres, when they were completely off balance, and thinking only what a pleasant relief it was to flatten someone else’s tyres for a change.
Red Cross workers had displayed the rope trick, air-raid wardens had done it, high-school girls had gaily romped through it. Cub Scouts had worked at it with such vicious enthusiasm that their small victim had had to be revived with a bucket of cold water. Once a couple of genuine commandos, visiting heroes whose chests were bright with decorations and campaign ribbons, had shown their version. That had been the least interesting and the least spectacular to watch, he recalled, because before anyone had guessed that it was the rope trick again, it was all over.
Yes, he knew just what had happened, and just how it had been done. But he had to admit scant consolation in the knowledge now.
He remembered, too, Bill Porter’s often-repeated comment on the trick.
“It’s a wonderful combination of jujitsu, the Indian rope trick, and black magic. It’s very, very neat. But unless they use that stick to tighten it up, I bet I could get out of it, and I bet you could too, Asey. We know too much about rope tied in a hurry, and most of these people aren’t sea-going. They’re lubbers. They overestimate the power of their little rope!”
They hadn’t used a stick on him, and Asey bet with himself that he probably could get out of it, too. This wasn’t any official demonstration rope. Unless he was vastly mistaken, this was some of Solatia Spry’s old clothes-line. And he’d been perfectly conscious when the man jerked out that final, dandy little hitch they always gave at the end. He’d strained against that hitch as much as he possibly could, and it had given him a little leeway.
As Bill Porter said, that hitch worked two ways. It caught someone quickly and lashed them quickly, but once you got the right pressure on the right rope, you could unhitch yourself. Not in any twinkling of an eye, but it could be done.
He wriggled his wrists experimentally.
Why, he asked himself, if a good biff had been so successful before, should someone now bother with a lot of old clothes-line?
The answer seemed simple enough. This time it was two other people. The first man had liked a blue-hooded flashlight to work with, and he biffed with smart precision. This one went in for full lights and the rope trick.
Or was someone shifting his methods so that it would appear to be someone else?
Asey wriggled his ankles.
He stopped wriggling as he heard the sound of footsteps coming around the house from the direction of the back door. And he almost cut his right shoulder in two, trying to prop himself up enough to get a look at the approaching person.
If his mouth hadn’t been stuffed full of a cheese-cloth gag that tasted of furniture polish and had apparently been wrenched off Solatia’s clothes-line, Asey would have expressed his feelings in a long-drawn-out whistle of amazement.
For it wasn’t Gardner Alden!
It was Gardner in his light coat who’d walked past the window whose shade let out that convenient little streak of light!
It was a young man with a brisk, springy step.
Was it – could it be Al Dorking?
Asey nearly choked himself in his effort to sit up a little higher. If only the fellow would return this way and walk through that streak of light again!
“Give me a break!” Asey muttered wistfully into the cheesecloth. “Come back this way! Come back this way! That’s it, feller, come on! Keep comin’!”
A minute later, he leaned back on the ground, and relaxed.
It wasn’t Dorking. This young man had light hair, he was taller, and he walked with a noticeable limp.
Asey worked away with renewed vigour at the rope, and found as he tugged and strained that the fellow wasn’t any landlubber. He’d thrown in for good measure a bunch of sea-going hitches that had never turned up among the high-schoolers or the volunteer firemen.
The streak of light at the side of the window suddenly disappeared. Apparently the house lights were being turned off.
Asey stopped tugging.
If the young man was preparing to leave, he would certainly come and have a look at him and Riley’s cop before departing. Under the circumstances, it might therefore be wise for him to appear as inert and helpless as possible. A lot of energy would have been expended in vain if those knots got tightened up again!
After a survey of his victims, the fellow would have to come to some decision about his bicycle with the deflated tyres. Asey grinned widely at the thought. He couldn’t ride it away; he probably wouldn’t be unwise enough to leave it behind as evidence of his presence at Solatia’s. He’d be forced to walk off and wheel it along with him.
And that, Asey decided with satisfaction, might just possibly be his undoing. Because those knots were coming. With luck, he could be after the fellow in ten minutes. And ten minutes of trundling a bicycle wouldn’t put him exactly at the other side of the world!
The young man left by the back door – Asey heard it slam. But he never bothered to come and check up on him and Riley’s man.
And he never went near the bicycle, either!
Instead, he marched off into the woods at the rear of the house. Asey could hear the crackle of the underbrush as be plunged into it, and the slightly uneven pad of his footsteps as he limped away.
The cheese-cloth gag got a hole bitten through it as Asey went at the remaining knots with everything he had.
He freed himself just in time to hear the noise of a car engine starting somewhere in the lane where he had previously been parked.
“I’m leavin’!” Asey tore off the gag and spoke rapidly to Riley’s man. “He’s in the lane, I’ll miss him if I wait to untie you, an’,” he started to run and called the rest back over his shoulder, “I ain’t got a knife with me to cut you free.”
He wondered as he raced along to his roadster if this young fellow could possibly be the person who had called Ellen at the garage. He might have been. And then again he might also have been the person responsible for the deflating job.
“Is the man with the limp the Deflater,” he murmured as he slid in behind the roadster’s wheel, “or was he one of the Deflated? Whose gent’s bike in good condition, with chrome handlebars an’ a bell, is now parked outside the residence of the murdered woman? Does it belong to Gardner Alden? Oh, for the love of soup, I never thought of that angle before! Maybe Gardner’s all tied up in a neat bundle under the rhododendrons! Or the lilac hedge. Who knows? Maybe that’s why I didn’t rate a blindfold, like Riley’s man. Maybe he’d run clean out of blindfolds by the time I come along!”
He kept his eyes glued on the hill beyond Solatia’s. The fellow might be headed toward town, or away from it. But either way, he could catch him now. Just one flash of his headlights was all that would be necessary!
“Just one little flash,” he said. “Just one little sniff of your headlights, son, an’ I’ll pull you as good a Paul Revere as you ever seen – oh, come on, you! I hope you ain’t gone an’ changed your mind at this point! What is the man with the limp doin’ in them woods? What evil is he up to? Mayo heard him start his car. Did he vanish into a puff of smoke? Will time tell? Huh!”
He waited impatiently.
He could have undone Riley’s man a hundred times, he decided. He could even have dropped into Solatia’s kitchen and fried himself an egg.
Finally, he shook his head.
“Foxed, I guess,” he said with regret. “I guess I underestimated you, feller, on account of your seemin’ youth. I didn’t guess you’d be so foxy, havin’ no earthly reason to suspect that Uncle Asey was loose an’ waitin’ to pounce on you! Huh! I don’t know’s I ever seen so many thoughtful an’ considerate people in all my born days! Whoever’d have thought you wouldn’t bother to use up your battery by wastin’ it on old car
lights for non-essential drivin’!” He considered a moment. “I guess you must’ve been headed toward town, so you just coasted quiet down the slope. I’d have heard your engine racin’ if you’d climbed them uphill ruts. Yessir, I bet you sneaked out on me, an’ – yessiree, by golly, there you go now!”
The long roadster shot forward as if it had been fired from a gun.
Asey still couldn’t see any car headlights. But above the insistent hum of the telephone wires, his ears had caught another hum, the hum of a car motor, and he was following that elusive and receding sound.
He probably couldn’t have heard it before, anyway, he told himself. The fellow had coasted, without lights, down to the main tarred road ahead of him. Still without lights, he’d eased himself over the little rise, and only now, at the foot of the hill beyond, would he have to put his foot down on the accelerator.
“Must know your way around pretty good,” Asey said, “to keep on in this unlighted fashion!”
He leaned over to snap off his own headlights, and found he’d never remembered to put them on.
“I wonder, now, if you’re a native, too! Huh, someone with a limp who might have somethin’ to do with Solatia Spry! Golly, if only I’d paid more attention to Sharp’s helpers at the auction!”
They had been dragging pieces of furniture around John Alden’s yard while he’d been talking with Sharp before the sale. Was it his imagination, or hadn’t one of them been light-haired, and walked with a limp?
“Wa-el,” he increased the Porter’s speed, “we can try an’ find out!”
He could see the car now, a black blob ahead. And on the outskirts of the village, he saw its red tail-lights suddenly flash on.
A sissy, Asey thought. That’s what the fellow was, a sissy. He could follow the white-striped highway without headlights, but he didn’t dare to tackle the winding curves of the village streets.
But as far as he was concerned, those streets were a cinch without lights. He had driven the first Porter car there, some forty years ago, before headlights had even been thought of. He could drive those streets blindfolded. Once, on a bet, he actually had!
He grinned as he slowed down to match the pace of the car ahead.
It turned up Main Street in second, passed the First National Bank at a crawl, and started to swerve to the curb by John Alden’s house. Then it jerked to the opposite curb, only to pick up speed and swerve once again back toward Alden’s.
Asey chuckled. The whole affair somehow reminded him of two people trying to make up their minds as to which side of each other they were going to pass on.
He snapped off his ignition and waited in the shadow of the elms while the car jerked rather reluctantly away from Alden’s, as if it personally didn’t want to leave the place at all, and proceeded at a tired snail’s pace up the street.
“I get it,” Asey murmured. “You really mean to go to John Alden’s, but you’ve thought it over an’ decided to park in the lane an’ walk back, so’s your car won’t attract any attention from the neighbours, or maybe upset their slumbers, or perhaps even wake up their dogs. Golly, but you’re thoughtful!”
All this thoughtfulness and consideration was beginning to leave its mark on him, he decided. It was inspiring him to be thoughtful, too.
“Yessir, it’s only right an’ proper that someone should be there to welcome you!” he said. “It ain’t nice to go visitin’ a house this time of mornin’ an’ not be greeted by someone. Might make you lonesome an’ blue. Surprise, surprise, feller! I’m goin’ to be waitin’ over on the porch for you!”
And he was.
But he wondered, as he heard the soft pad of footsteps on the flagstone path, and peered out from behind his hiding place of an empty packing case, if the surprise part wasn’t perhaps back-firing a little.
The fellow wasn’t alone!
Somewhere en route, he had picked up a lady friend.
Asey nearly gave his presence away entirely as the pair approached the porch, and he realized suddenly that this wasn’t even the fellow with the limp!
He bore no relation to the man with the limp. He was shorter, he was dark, and he wore white flannels and a dark coat.
This was Al Dorking.
And his companion, looming up behind him, was his plump aunt, Mrs. Turnover.
“Have you got the keys? The keys? Where are the keys?” the sibilant whisper was so penetrating that it seemed almost as if she were talking through a loudspeaker. “Have you got the keys?”
“Yes, Aunt Harriet.”
“Well, hurry up! Do hurry up! I don’t want anyone to see us standing out here!”
“Yes, Aunt Harriet.”
At Dorking unlocked the door, the pair slipped inside, and closed the door behind them.
Their first gesture was to pull down all the window shades.
All except one, which apparently had a recalcitrant roller and refused to be pulled down more than half-way to the sill.
Asey sighed as he saw the blue beam of a flashlight flit across the small panes.
No question about it, the whole Alden family must own stock in a battery concern, he decided! Or else they’d all given each other blue-hooded flashlights for Christmas presents.
He listened for a moment at the door, satisfied himself that the pair had moved to another section of the house, and then slipped indoors.
They were in the small front parlour, he discovered. Mrs. Turnover had barked her shin, and was considerably annoyed about it.
“I don’t know why anyone should leave a small walnut what-not in the middle of the floor!” she said pettishly. “Just one stick of furniture left in the house, and it has to be in the middle of the floor – what’s that tag on it say?”
“Jennie Mayo,” Al told her.
“Well, why didn’t Jennie Mayo take her walnut whatnot home? Why did she leave it here for me to stumble on? Why, I might have broken my leg!”
“I’m sure she didn’t leave it here for that purpose,” Al said soothingly. “She was very kind to you this afternoon, Aunt Harriet! No one could have been any kinder to a stranger than she was to you!”
Mrs. Turnover rather grudgingly admitted that Jennie had been kind enough.
“Kinder than my own brother, I must say!” she added with a sniff. “What do you think of that cousin of hers, Al? That Asey Mayo?”
“I don’t know any more about him than you do,” Al said. “I never saw him outside of the rotogravure or the newsreels until to-day.”
“Is he good? You know what I mean, is he really any good at solving things like Solatia Spry?”
“He’s supposed to be. I think,” Al sounded amused, “that he has his eye cocked toward Uncle Gard. Mayo doesn’t know Uncle Gard like you and I do, so he probably never would have guessed – Uncle’s got a pretty bland face, you know. But the old boy was worried about things to-night. I saw ‘em in the drugstore eating ice cream, after the movies, and I’d have said Uncle was on the ropes.”
“Serves him right!” Mrs. Turnover said promptly. “Gardner bought that sea chest expecting to find all of John’s money in it, and what happened just served him right! He thinks he’s so clever, pretending that John’s money doesn’t matter one bit! But it does. He needs money just as much as the rest of us do, for all he’s so hoity-toity! Now, Al, where’s that paper? You haven’t gone and forgotten to bring that paper, have you?”
“I have it right here in my wallet, Aunt Harriet. Here it is.”
“I must say that you’re the first person, Al, who’s shown me the slightest bit of thought or consideration in this affair!”
Asey winced.
“It’s not entirely a charitable gesture on my part, Aunt Harriet.” A rather harsh note seemed to have crept into Dorking’s ordinarily pleasant voice. “We agreed that because I found the paper, half of whatever money we may find is mine. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?”
“We put it in writing, didn’t we?” Mrs. Turnover returned acidly. “Or
maybe you forgot that we put it in writing!”
“Of course I haven’t forgotten!” Al sounded amused again. “Not after all the trouble and grief we had drawing that agreement up! No, I just wanted to make sure that we understood each other, Aunt Harriet. If the directions on my paper work out, if there is money where the paper says, half of it’s mine. Right? Now, let’s get to work. You hold the flashlight, will you? The first direction is about the third—”
“Where’s east?” Mrs. Turnover interrupted.
“East?”
“East.”
There was a little silence.
“Er – why east, Aunt Harriet?” Al asked after a moment.
“Because that’s what it says on that paper of yours!” Mrs. Turnover said with asperity. “I read it right over your shoulder when you held the paper up! The third brick from the ‘E.’ That means east. At least, it meant east when I went to school. I don’t pretend to know what it may mean nowadays, of course!”
“Oh, I see. But I think you’ll find that isn’t an ‘E,’ ” Al said. “It’s an ‘L.’ That means the third brick from the left, see?”
“ ‘E,’ ” Mrs. Turnover said firmly. “East!”
“ ‘L,‘“Al told her with equal firmness. “Left!”
“I know my own brother’s handwriting better than you do,” Mrs. Turnover said. “That was the way he made a capital ‘E.’ East. E – a – s – t.” She spelled it out. “East. And east is not left. East is right. It makes a great deal of difference.”
“But, Aunt Har—”
“You certainly can’t claim it doesn’t make a difference whether or not you start finding something from the third brick from the right,” Mrs. Turnover said, “or the third brick from the left! If you wanted to go three blocks east of Fifth Avenue, you wouldn’t start by going three blocks west of Fifth Avenue, would you? No, you wouldn’t! Not if you had any sense! It certainly makes a difference, and you can’t say it doesn’t!”
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