“Charles, do you see anyone?”
“No, Miss Polly.”
“Recognize the car?”
“No, Miss Polly, but it’s a good car. And I’m sure it ain’t the cops.”
“Charles, see what’s inside it, will you?” she said. “If there’s anyone, I mean.”
Charles had been a coachman or a groom, Asey bet, as he ducked behind a clump of bushes and watched the bow-legged little man inarch over to the roadster and play the beam of his flashlight around it, and then over the contents of the seat.
Then – a little wearily, it seemed to Asey – he marched back to the beachwagon.
“Miss Polly, I hate to say this. I hate to break it to you. But it’s them!”
“Them?” the girl said blankly. “Them?”
“Yessum.”
“Again?”
“Yessum.”
“Oh, Charles, honestly? All of ‘em?”
“Yessum, I’d say the lot.”
“Charles, I could eat worms! I could positively sit down on the ground and eat worms!”
“To think of them hbooks,” Charles said in wondering tones, “here, ahead of us!”
“Wouldn’t you think that people could leave ‘em alone, at least until we get our plans working?” the girl demanded. “At least for the night! Where do they come from, all these millions and millions of people with nothing to do but go out and pick up books just as fast as we can manage to put them down!”
“It’s really only the second time, Miss Polly,” Charles said comfortingly. “We ain’t been foiled but once before. Though,” he added, “it sure gets to seem like a lot oftener!”
“Charles,” she said hesitantly, “do you – do you think it’s the bald man again, this time?”
“No,” Charles said with finality. “No, Miss Polly, don’t you worry about him! He won’t bother us again to-night. He won’t bother anybody again to-night. I fixed him good and proper.”
Asey found himself wondering just what Charles had done to Paul Harmsworth.
“Can we get by that roadster, Charles?”
“We could. Miss Polly. It’d either mean taking off his fender, though, or ours. Miss Polly?”
“Yes?”
“You know. Miss Polly, we could always take ‘em out again.”
“Charles, you are wonderful! And then lay them down again, and this time we’ll be smarter about where we lay them down, too!” She got out of the beachwagon. “That’s just what we’ll do; we’ll lay them down again – have we gas enough? I’m worried about that gas, Charles. It’s the only way mother’ll ever find out, by the gas. She’s so damned gas conscious!”
“There’s the power mower,” Charles said. “I can always break that again. I’ll tell her it’s broken, I mean. That’ll help some. And then there’s some gas left down in the boathouse she don’t know about, from last year. I hid it away from her, for an emergency. We can somehow eke it out, Miss Polly. I’ll manage.”
“If only mother’ll realize it’s all for her own good, Charles!” She paused to light a cigarette. “That is, when she finds out.”
“Yessum. I hope so.” Charles sounded as if he had private doubts.
“She thinks Quinton Sharp’s such a perfectly wonderful man, it’s going to be tough convincing her what a lousy rotten trick he played on her, and what an utter jerk he is! She’s so sold on that man. Charles, people take advantage of mother so!”
“Well—”
“Oh, they do! You know they do!” Polly said. “Everyone’s always sticking her a few dollars here or a few dollars there, and then making some crack about as long as cleanliness is next to godliness, Mrs. Madison’ll never miss a few dollars. Charles, I get so sick of soap!”
“Yessum. But you can’t say, Miss Polly, that soap ever done you any harm!”
“Can’t I! It’s blighted my whole life!” Polly said with a touch of bitterness. “Chris still worries about people thinking he’s marrying me for the soap business. If he was really bright, of course, he’d go into a nailbrush cartel, and then we could play it both ways – Charles, I almost can’t face those books! Don’t you have that feeling, if you have to touch them again, you’ll simply break out into a rash and start screaming?”
“No, Miss Polly, I can’t say as I do,” Charles returned. “But I know what you mean. No variety, as you might say. Books are all so much of a sameness, like.”
“It’s not the monotony of the books that’s got me down,” Polly told him. “It’s the monotony of what keeps happening to them! Well, let’s go to work and get them out of this Porter – Charles!”
“Yessum? Is it a other snake you think you see?”
“Charles, we’re dopes!”
“Why’s that, Miss Polly?”
“Polly and Charles, the Original Lame-brains! Porter, Charles! Porter roadster! You know, that Mayo man! Asey Mayo. That’s what he drives!”
“Oops!” Charles said.
“Double oops! Charles, this is the place in books where people say with feeling that they’re undone – oh, no, I don’t mean it literally! Don’t worry about where you tore your sleeve on the bald man – we’ll get it fixed up before mother sees it.”
“Miss Polly, what do we do now?” Charles sounded desperately unhappy.
“You probably know as much about detectives as I do, and I never saw one in my life, except the man who trailed Aunt Bernice when she was getting her divorce. I don’t think you can count him,” Polly said. “It wasn’t the same sort of thing. Charles, I bet Asey Mayo’s lurking around here somewhere!”
“If he’s seen us, Miss Polly,” Charles said sadly, “if he’s seen us and found out about us. And about all of them!”
“I know.”
“Miss Polly, he’ll think – why, he’ll think me – he’ll think it was us that took them books out of the sea chest Miss Spry was in, and then he’ll find out about the row the Madam had with her, and the row you had with her. And the row I had with her – ooh!” Charles said in anguish. “Ooh, it’ll be awful, what he’ll think!”
“He’ll be bubbling over with false thoughts,” Polly agreed. “I know. Well, let’s find out the worst – I wonder, how do you call a detective?”
“You could whistle,” Charles suggested, “and ask if he’s here—”
“Oh, you can’t call him like a dog, Charles! ‘Are you there, Mr. Mayo?’ Oh, that’s silly, too! It’s all so silly, Charles! Because if he’s been sitting behind a bush listening to us, we wouldn’t even need to call him mister. He’d be practically an old family friend, by now – come out!” she raised her voice. “Come out, Asey! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
Asey grinning broadly, emerged from the bushes.
“Good-evenin’, Miss Madison. Or maybe it’s good mornin’ now.”
“Undone, I called it!” Polly recognized him as he walked into the path of the beachwagon’s headlights. “And with what brutal truth! Undone! Triple oops, Charles! Will you promise faithfully to visit me on the proper days, and maybe bring me files and saws and things inside of chocolate cakes?”
“What, Miss Polly?”
“He’s seen this picture before, Charles. Or one just like it. Of course, he’s come in a little late, this time, but he knows the plot thread. You do, don’t you, Asey? And you don’t mind if I call you Asey, do you, either? I keep feeling we may be going to see a lot of each other, probably separated by thick iron bars.”
“You can adopt me,” Asey said, “an’ make me an honorary uncle, if you’ll just be good enough to straighten out some of this. Why do you?”
“Play book toss, you mean? I never did before,” Polly told him honestly. “I’ve always treated books with intense respect, until to-day. I used to help father rub gooey stuff on his leather bindings once every year. Then you rubbed it off. It was like shining thousands of pairs of shoes.”
“Where’d you like to begin?” Asey asked. “Back at the pond, during the auction, or with this?”
Polly thought for a moment.
“On the whole,” she said, “this is going to make more sense to you, I think. You see, Charles and I – this is Charles, as you’ve doubtless gathered,” she added parenthetically. “When Grampa Madison first sneaked into the carriage trade, Charles arrived with the first carriage, and he’s been with us ever since. The Madison family hasn’t any secrets from Charles. He knew us when. And I must make it clear that Charles has no part of all this. I dragged him in by the scruff of his neck. Because of snakes.”
“Two-legged snakes?” Asey inquired. “Or the regular kind that glides around?”
Polly laughed. “Both. Anyway, Charles isn’t any – what d’you call it? Accessory after the fact? He’s not one of those. He’s not an accomplice. He’s just been an unwilling chaperon, haven’t you, Charles?”
“No, Miss Polly, it—”
“You mean yes!”
“No, Miss Polly, it was my idea, and—”
“You mean yes, and it wasn’t your idea. It was mine. You see, Asey, we had a plan. I mean, I had a plan, but we haven’t been able to start it percolating. To begin with, it took simply ages to make mother take the allonal.”
“Er – why?”
“To make her sleep soundly, so she wouldn’t find out what we were up to. We simply couldn’t take the chance of letting her get mixed up in this. Because the minute anyone found out about her and Solatia Spry and their fight, it would be too ghastly. They had such a terrific row about that stove!”
“Stove? You mean some antique stove?” Asey wanted to know.
“No, no, a new stove. We really wanted a new refrigerator, too, but we’ve put ice in the old one, and only asked for a new stove. And Solatia refused to give us the permit thing. She was on the ration board, you know, and ran it with both hands. She told us to send the old one away and have it repaired, but we can’t, because the company that made it is making anti-aircraft shells, and doesn’t care about its stoves now. Then we had a run-in with her about gas for the boat, and oil for the hot-water heater, and a bicycle. But it all started from that infernal stove.”
“You mean,” Asey said, “that your mother and Solatia quarrelled, but it wasn’t about the auction, or John Alden’s antiques, or anything like that.”
“Oh, that was where we all went to town!” Polly said. “That’s when it got utterly virulent, after John died and this business of the auction reared its ugly head. It probably all could have been settled quite amicably if we hadn’t started in on this hostile basis, after the stove and the other rationed stuff. Mother and I knew John well and loved him dearly, you see. We didn’t want some old collector in San Francisco to have his things, but Solatia was simply determined to buy them for him – you really can’t blame her, of course. She’d have made a pot of money. We’d rowed about the stove and the other stuff. Many bitter words had been bandied and flung about. But John’s things almost brought us to blows. Mother simply couldn’t afford it.”
“Miss Polly means,” Charles said, “the Madam couldn’t afford to outbid Miss Spry, see, sir?”
“I mean,” Polly said, “the Madison money isn’t much different from anyone else’s. There’s just so much of it, and principally taxes. With what we’ve got left, we can’t go around casually competing with West Coast millionaire collectors, especially when we didn’t know how much they were willing to blow. If it hadn’t been for this stove and all, mother and Solatia could have sat down and got together. Solatia could have let mother have the highboy, say, and then mother would have her bid her up on the china so that her commission would have been astronomic. And so on. But because of that damned stove – well, you see what I’m trying to say, don’t you?”
“You’re sayin’ that your mother an’ Solatia wasn’t on any such terms that they could have settled any division of John Alden’s things in a friendly manner,” Asey said.
“More than that. They were on such lousy terms that it would have been to the advantage of either of ‘em to keep the other away. Charles and I dallied with the thought, yesterday,” she added. “We had a couple of ideas about Solatia, but Chris almost spanked the two of us when he found out. Chris – that’s Chris Bede, and I’m engaged to him – even he hadn’t guessed that they were at swords’ points. Nobody knew. I’ll bet even you didn’t know. I’ll bet you never even suspected!”
“I didn’t,” Asey said. “But if nobody knew or suspected, why would you have worried about your mother’s bein’ involved with the murder at all?”
“The letters – look, let’s get into the beachwagon and sit down, shall we? I was ready to drop into a heap after the auction, way back there yesterday afternoon, and I haven’t sat down since. You see,” she opened the door, “Solatia was a lady, and so is mother, and they weren’t the type to screech at each other on Main Street, and pull hair, and all that. They were really good friends. That’s why the stove problem really arose. Solatia knew perfectly well we couldn’t repair our stove, and how foul it was, but she was leaning over backwards refusing mother the permit, because mother was a friend, and she didn’t want to be accused of any favouritism. No one in town would ever believe that the Madisons had an old, broken-down stove. They’d say Solatia would give the Madisons a stove, because the Madisons were her dear friends, and all that soap, and so on. If Solatia hadn’t known us, we’d have had a new stove like a shot. D’you understand, Asey?”
“I think so,” Asey said. “But what about the letters? What letters?”
“I’m coming to them – look out for your foot, please, Charles. I’m going to shut the door. Mother didn’t really feel very annoyed with Solatia at first, because she thought she understood what was running through Solatia’s mind. So she wrote letters to the ration board, formally protesting being turned down on the stove. And I might add,” Polly said, “that mother writes a particularly masterful letter of formal invective. You know, the ‘I-fail-utterly-to-grasp’ kind. And the minute those letters come to light, people will be right at mother’s throat. They’ll say that ration board business is part of a motive, and the antique fuss the rest of a motive for her killing Solatia.”
“Why haven’t the letters come to light before?” Asey asked.
“One ration board woman’s having a baby, two men were drafted, two are out west, visiting sons in camp, and Solatia’s been being the whole works, all by herself. It was she who read mother’s letters, in her capacity as chairman, and she simply rejected the protest, and the request for a rehearing, or whatever-you’d-call-it.”
“An’ she never showed the letters to anyone, or mentioned ‘em to anybody?”
“Not as far as we’ve been able to find out. We assume they’re still in her possession,” Polly said. “You see, she entirely missed mother’s point in trying to switch the stove issue from her, personally, to the board as a whole. Those letters infuriated her, and then mother got infuriated because Solatia was infuriated, and so on and so forth. One of those cumulative things. Anyway, when she didn’t show up at the auction this afternoon—”
“Whoa!” Asey interrupted. “Didn’t she show up there at all? Didn’t she come?”
“If she did, she was wearing a cloak of invisibility,” Polly said. “Or a false beard and a red wig, or some sort of disguise. Mother and I got pop-eyed from watching for her. When she never came at all, we were naturally delighted, and mother had a field day— she just snapped up everything we wanted. But as mother said, she hoped to heaven that nothing awful had happened to keep Solatia away, because we might be blamed for it. Well, that’s a lengthy little preamble, but it brings us up to the auction.” She paused. “I suppose you know all about auctions, don’t you?”
“Some.”
“Well, there’s a point where auctioneers go berserk – at least Quinton Sharp does. He starts throwing the most utterly idiotic things together, and calling them fancy lots. Completely unrelated things, like ten live chickens and a carpet sweeper that won’t sweep. Or half a doze
n lobster pots and a cake-box.”
“I know,” Asey said. “The theory is that you’ll pay more for the items together than you would have for either if it was offered separate. You get a chicken lover an’ a carpet-sweeperless householder biddin’ like mad against each other. It swells the total sales, an’ it perks up the crowd. The less connection the things have with each other, the more the crowd enjoys it all.”
“I never thought that out,” Polly said, “but I suppose it is the reason – anyway, Sharp outdid himself this afternoon. He mixed more bizarre items than you’d ever believe possible. And then the rat went and dragged out those Hitchcock chairs!”
Charles sighed lustily at the recollection. “Them chairs!” he said. “Them chairs!”
“Mother is a sucker for Hitchcock chairs,” Polly went on. “The minute Sharp put those chairs up, there was mother, bidding her silly head off! And for no reason at all – she never meant to bid on ‘em! And besides, we’ve got dozens in the garage loft, haven’t we, Charles?”
“Twenty-six, Miss Polly. And nine more in the store-room. And three more in the attic. And five in the shed. It’s not she means to buy ‘em, sir,” he said half-apologetically to Asey. “It’s just the Madam can’t seem to resist buying that kind.”
“My cousin Jennie,” Asey said, “buys little walnut whatnots an’ Currier an’ Ives prints of kittens in just the same way an’ for the same lack of reason. I know all about that sort of thing!”
“And mother got so worked up, she bid against herself!” Polly said. “Sharp pretended he had another bidder on the other side of the crowd who was bidding furiously, but he never did! And mother went soaring up!”
“It was a bush he was waving his hand at,” Charles said sadly. “Not a person. I kept trying to tell the Madam so, but she just bid and bid and bid!”
Asey grinned. Apparently the Sharp family’s bayberry bush trick still panned out.
“And then,” Polly said, “just as Sharp got to the second ‘Going!’ he stopped short and threw in this old trunk. And that is the crux of this whole mess. Mother kept on bidding like a woman possessed, and of course she got the chairs, and the trunk! Well, we took the best pieces home first, of course – we had to plot out how to make the fewest possible trips with the biggest loads we could manage, because mother’s awfully gas conscious. Charles and I brought over the Hitchcock chairs and the trunk and some other odds and ends on the very last trip after dinner. And we got to wondering what was inside this old trunk.”
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