A few minutes later, he looked at where he had tucked the roadster away in the bushes near the entrance to the Madisons’ drive-way, and nodded his satisfaction. For an off-hand camouflage job, that was pretty good. He’d challenge any one who hadn’t seen it driven into its hiding-place to find that roadster.
Keeping in the shadow of the high stone wall, he walked toward the driveway gate, and waited.
The Shack did rather look like a wedding cake that someone had thrown down on the ground and stepped on, he decided. The white building seemed to sprawl all over the place, and the odd little spires and gables and bay windows gave it an elaborately frosted appearance.
Someone was upstairs – he could see the slit of light around the side of a window.
And there was another light downstairs in one of the wings.
Charles would have impressed Polly with the need for caution, Asey thought. Charles would have suggested that they pretend to retire, just in case Asey Mayo decided to follow them and check up. Then, after a period during which anyone should have become convinced of their intention to remain at the Shack forever, and never stir an inch from the place, then the pair would sneak out, and go after Chris Bede.
Asey sat down by the driveway post, leaned back against it, and grinned as both lights in the house went out simultaneously. Teamwork, he thought.
The turf was soft, the wind from the outer beach was gentle and cool, and in spite of the unyielding stone behind his back, he found that he had to prod himself every now and then to keep awake.
He decided, rather regretfully, to get up. He couldn’t afford to take the chance of falling asleep. And if Polly and Charles could manage to keep their respective eyes open, so could he! As he got to his feet, he heard a sudden crunching of gravel. A car was coming down the curving drive-way. He flattened himself against the gate-post as the beachwagon, without headlights, slid past so close to him that he could have reached out a hand and touched the driver on the cheek.
He had his own roadster out of its hiding place and was following the taillights – for the beachwagon’s lights had been snapped on after It left the immediate vicinity of the Shack – before it occurred to him that the driver had been the vehicle’s only passenger.
The driver, furthermore, wore glasses.
And Polly hadn’t.
And Polly had turned the beachwagon with a firm, sure hand.
She’d driven away at a good brisk clip.
But the current driver was hesitant, and wandered all over the road.
“I wonder,” Asey muttered, “if this could be – I wonder! Is it Polly tryin’ to be foxy, or is this maybe Mrs. James Fenimore Madison herself?”
At least, he thought, if it was Mrs. Madison and if she was as gas conscious as her daughter claimed, whatever errand she was on should mercifully be brief. If she had a large number of old books to toss into a pond or to strew along a road, she should get very rapidly to the point!
Except that she wouldn’t get anywhere very rapidly if she continued to drive at that snail’s pace, he mentally amended. He had to keep his foot on the brake to prevent his bumping into her. And if she put out her lights suddenly, he would surely crash her, for he had kept his own off, and was driving by hers.
He had about decided to drop behind, to be on the safe side, when the beachwagon put on a terrific burst of speed and spurted ahead.
Asey put his foot down on the accelerator to match it, but instead of responding, the motor choked weakly, spluttered, and died away entirely.
A quick snapping on of the dashboard lights confirmed his dark suspicion.
He was out of gas.
He looked up from the little illuminated needle pointing so dolefully at “Empty” just in time to see the beach-wagon’s tail-lights swerve off the road and come to a standstill, perhaps three-quarters of a mile on the road beyond him.
“To make me get out!” Asey opened the car door. “To make me run!” He began to run. “At this point! An’ uphill every step of the way!”
He had perhaps a hundred yards to go when the beachwagon started up, turned, and set off at a furious pace back in the direction of the Shack.
“Hey! “Asey yelled, and waved wildly as it sped past him. “Mrs. Mad—”
He broke off. There was no use yelling, she wouldn’t stop, and she was too bad a driver to take the chance of jumping out in her path to stop her.
And it was Mrs. Madison. A good driver like Polly couldn’t even pretend to make as bad a turn as that!
He hesitated a moment, and then walked on toward the spot where the beachwagon had been. If she’d stopped, she must have stopped for some purpose, and whatever the purpose might have been, she’d accomplished it in a hurry!
A long whistle of amazement issued from his lips as he reached the place.
It was a gasoline station.
A filling station.
“Huh!” he muttered. “What was Mrs. Madison, the wife of the late soap tycoon, doin’ in a gas station whose owner closed it up last evenin’ an’ went home to bed like a sensible man? What inspired her to come here? Did she want to reassure herself that there still was gas pumps? Huh, if it was me, now, under the present circumstances, I’d understand my goin’ to a gas pump, even if the station’s shut up for the night.”
He sat down on the concrete curbing.
He was out of breath, he was sleepy, and his head was throbbing again. The Madisons and everyone else might have started in with an exhausting afternoon at the auction of John Alden, he thought as he raised his hand and touched the lump on his head, but none of them had had anything even remotely resembling his interlude with the biffer and his length of pipe. Or the lad who knew the rope trick. Or Mrs. Turnover. Or those Harper’s.
To a disinterested observer, he might present a fine picture of a tired tramp. The wonder of it, he decided, was that he was still going.
“Gas, Riley’s cop, Harmsworth,” he said, as if he were reciting a list. “What in time was she doing here? Gas, Riley’s man, Harmsworth – oh, well, gas comes first! Let’s figger, now!”
There were plenty of houses, summer people’s houses, nearer than the Madisons’ shack, but few of them were occupied this lean year. He could hunt up one which might be inhabited, or he could walk back to the Shack.
But had anyone enough gasoline to lend him with which to drive the Porter back to his own home? He doubted if they had, and besides, the siphon process would be long and tedious. Even if he milked the Madison power mower, the results probably wouldn’t justify the effort.
He could phone Ellen from the Shack, but could she be roused from bed and cajoled into bringing him gas before this station opened?
This place, he recalled, was near the landing where the fishermen and the quahauggers came in. Probably, for the benefit of their trucks, it would be opened early.
He leaned back against a gas pump and wearily surveyed the first dull glow in the east.
“Came the dawn!” he said. “Came the d-oh, for the love of Pete!”
He jumped up suddenly and looked more carefully at his surroundings.
The metal gas-pump covers were not merely closed. They were padlocked.
The miniature Cape Cod house that served as the station’s office and store was not simply closed up for the night.
It was shuttered.
It was boarded up.
And across its door was a sign. As the light increased, he realized that it was not a new sign. It was weather-beaten, and the paint was peeling.
“Closed,” it said in rude capitals, “for the duration. Gone to war.”
Asey grinned.
“Go on an’ figger, Codfish Sherlock!” he said to himself. “If you couldn’t figger why she come to a gas station that was just shut up for the night, maybe you can figger why she come to one that’s closed for the duration, an’ has been for some time!”
One sure thing, he thought. She hadn’t come for anything!
His grin broadened.
If she hadn’t come for anything, perhaps she had come to leave something!
“It couldn’t be very much,” he said thoughtfully, “an’ it couldn’t be very big or very bulky. She didn’t have the time – huh!”
He went to work.
Half an hour later, he gazed with triumph at what, beyond any doubt, she had left.
Three large wooden duck decoys, and two small ones. And each bore the name “John Alden” carved on its side.
CHAPTER SEVEN
DR. CUMMINGS helped himself to a piece of bacon from the platter in front of Asey, took a reflective bite, and absent-mindedly reached out for the slice of toast which had just popped out of the toaster.
“Three big duck decoys, two little duck decoys, and all with John Alden’s name caryed on ‘em! Three big ones, and two little ones! Three big, and two little!”
“The way you keep saying it over and over,” Jennie told him acidly, “you make it sound like flocks and flocks, instead of only five – and please, can’t you keep your fingers off Asey’s breakfast? He forgot to bring his ration book home with him, and I had to trade two jars of put-up strawberries for that bacon you’re pilfering!”
“I had my breakfast five hours ago, at the same time the rest of the world that hadn’t spent the night cavorting after murderers had its breakfast,” Cummings returned. “It is now noon, and my lunch time, and I’m hungry. But I’ll confine myself to toast and jam, if you’ll bring me some more jam, and some more bread, and maybe a bit of old cake, or an egg, or something. Asey, are you sure it was Mrs. Madison who left those decoys there?”
“Uh-huh. She’d popped ‘em into a box at one side of the little house,” Asey said, “an’ then stuck a couple more old boxes on top of that one.”
“Why in the name of all that’s reasonable and sensible,” Cummings demanded, “did she leave them there, in that abandoned gas station?”
Asey grinned and asked if the doctor could think of a better place.
“It’s the last place I’d ever think of goin’ to look for anything, doc,” he added. “I wouldn’t even go there, let alone go there to look. Neither would anyone else. I thought it was pretty smart of her, myself. If someone had only put Solatia Spry in a box there, she’d most likely never have been found for the duration.”
“How’d you get home?”
“I hailed a kindly milkman,” Asey said. “You’ll be interested to know he was the same kindly milkman who give Gardner Alden a lift over here yesterday. He’s one of them honest, chatty souls with a long memory – he felt kind of embarrassed when he couldn’t remember if Gardner had on a tie with grey an’ blue stripes, or one with blue an’ grey. He corroborated Gardner’s story down to the bone, though. He’d even wangled out of Gardner the reason why he was comin’ over here to see me – on account of his bein’ worried of what Harmsworth might do to Solatia to prevent her from gettin’ to the auction.”
“Asey Mayo, after the night you put in, d’you mean to say that you came bumbling home with a lot of milk?” Cummings demanded.
“Oh, no. He dropped me off at the first available phone up the line beyond the gas station, an’ I called Ellen, who come over an’ administered first aid. Not a crack out of her, either, at my bein’ so dumb as to run out of gas. You’d have thought it could happen to anyone. I come home,” Asey said reminiscently, “via Harmsworth.”
“When you skimmed lightly through this the first time, you never told me you found him!”
“I didn’t. I found where he’d been. There wasn’t any trace of him but a piece of what looked like tow rope, an’ some of Charles’s suspenders – at least, I assume they was Charles’s,” Asey said. “They might have been Harmsworth’s own, of course.”
“Who freed him?” Cummings asked. “Where d’you suppose he is now?”
Asey shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. By the time I’d got as far as the place where he’d been, I was beyond thinkin’. I didn’t even care.”
“Did you look into the matter of Riley’s cop?”
“I come to the conclusion,” Asey said gravely, “that he knew what he was gettin’ into when he become a cop, an’ that bein’ exposed to crime in its various phases was just one of the natural hazards of his job. I decided he could just continue to take it – to tell you the truth, doc, I was too plumb tired to go over to Solatia’s, an’ I figgered that Hanson would certainly have come by then, anyway.”
Cummings took another slice of toast.
“Asey, are you positive it was Mrs. Madison who left those decoys there?”
“Uh-huh,” Asey said. “I’m sure it was her. Jennie remembered quite a bit about that lot she bought that had the Currier an’ Ives kittens an’ the little walnut whatnot in it. Like I guessed, when she got the bid, she sung out that all she wanted was the picture an’ the whatnot, an’ for Sharp’s men not to bother bringin’ the rest to her. She remembers that the Madison girl came over to her an’ asked if she could have the decoys, an’ Jennie said sure, to go on an’ take ‘em, she had no use for ‘em herself. An’ the girl took ‘em, as far as Jennie knows.”
“But if the Madison girl took them,” Cummings said, “why in blazes should her mother be hiding them in the dead of night, or the crack of dawn, or whenever it was?”
“Probably – uh-uh, doc! My bacon! – probably,” Asey removed the platter with the remaining bacon out of the doctor’s reach, “Mrs. Madison wanted to get rid of them for the same reason her daughter was tryin’ to get rid of the books, which she thought might incriminate her mother. Most likely her allonal wore off about the time Charles an’ Polly come back, an’ she woke up sayin’ ‘Decoys! Decoys!’ to herself, an’ without even knowin’ or guessin’ about them two havin’ been out all night, she jumped from bed an’ rushed out to do somethin’ about them decoys, right away quick!”
“Hm,” Cummings said. “Hm. You mean, Mrs. Madison had a brain wave, and decided that anyone who had anything to do with the remains of that lot which contained the fish knife had better not be connected with it in any way. Particularly if the person happened to be her own daughter. Hm. It sounds like her, I must say! She’s a creature of impulse – of course, all women are, God knows, but she can afford to carry out her whimsies. Does Jennie remember who took the knife?”
Asey sighed.
“That’s the more discouragin’ angle,” he said. “Jennie doesn’t even remember there was a knife in the lot, though she called up Nellie an’ the girls, an’ they’re all sure that there was. But they all remember seein’ it in one of the pails before the auction. They’re only too eager an’ willin’ to assume it was a part of the lot when Sharp actually sold it, but they have to admit that they didn’t actually see it then, that he never held it up, or showed it off, or even mentioned it, at all.”
“Then it probably had already been stolen,” Cummings said. “Sharp is a great enumerator. He wouldn’t have let a good knife like that go by without pointing it out!”
“That’s my feelin’. But I think we’re stymied on the knife department, doc, whether or not it was in the lot when the lot was sold. Anyone at the auction, or anyone just passin’ by, could have swiped that knife either before the sale begun, or after Jennie bought the lot.”
“Makes a nice mental exercise, doesn’t it?” Cummings remarked. “Anyone at the auction could have taken the knife, everyone was at the auction, therefore anyone and everyone had the opportunity of filching the knife which killed her. Therefore anyone and everyone killed her. Hm. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have fate work in an orderly fashion and provide you with proof that someone was just as eager to buy that fish knife of John Alden’s as they were, say, to buy his antiques and his china!”
“If we did find out anythin’ like that,” Asey said, “it would only be Gardner Alden, buyin’ it in memory of his dear old white-haired grandmother. The pink sea shells one. You know what keeps disturbin’ my mind, doc?” he got up from the table and lighted his pipe. “It’s
that no one ever mentions Solatia’s havin’ been there!”
“Oh, merciful heavens, Asey, are you still trying to beat your brains out against the stone wall of her not being there?” Cummings demanded. “Of course she was there! I’ve proved it to you several hundred times – look at the facts, man, look at the facts! Someone was waiting for her to come, someone pounced on her the second she arrived, killed her with the knife they’d already stolen, and put her in the chest. Not being a complete idiot, the murderer took care that no one else saw her, or the actual murder! You certainly,” he added with some heat, “have seen enough of this sort of business to know that a murderer avoids a large audience, whenever possible!”
“Yes, doc, but—”
“I have seen murders,” Cummings made a long reach and took the last piece of bacon, “that ran the gamut from simple pitchfork stabbings and arsenic poisonings to flint-lock pistols and belaying pins. And a flower-pot of geraniums dropped by a wife with great effect and precision from a second-story window on to the head of her husband, an unpleasant man who happened to be passing at the time. I’ve seen all kinds, and so have you, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars cash if you can remember one instance where a murderer sent out invitations beforehand. Or even called up a few of his dearest and most intimate friends and asked ‘em to drop in for the event!”
Asey grinned.
“Ah, well,” he said, “who knows? Maybe it was done with mirrors, like you suggested last night!”
“Why don’t you call Sharp and ask him about the knife, and about those books Polly Madison found in the trunk, and if he remembers any more about the time Solatia came to the auction? He was sure he saw her, wasn’t he?”
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