Something About Midnight

Dolores Hitchens writing as D.B. Olsen

Cast of Characters

ERNESTINE—hates men and vents her spite in a way that’s sure to lead to trouble

FREDDY NIXON—who pays dearly for his sordid past

MRS. LACOSTE—matriarchal goof-ball lover who indulges herself when her family is out of the way

MR. PENNYFEATHER—an ardent, if absent-minded, devotee of Milton and mysteries

RAE CARADYNE—worries about her cousin, Ernestine’s, escapades

MRS. MAUFFIT—whose cooking comforts Mr. Pennyfeather but fails to fatten him

PROFESSOR TODT—cultivates beans and looks for the psychological causes of plant and human behavior

MR. STEPHEN DUNNE—red-bearded beach-combing artist, devoted to drink and driftwood, and his nieces, Ernestine and Rae

CAPTAIN OLNEY—doesn’t say much, but there’s no wool over his eyes

MRS. LELAND—wife of a college professor, distracted by dogs and bawling babies

LORETTA CULLENS—ex-pupil of Mr. Pennyfeather’s, is surprised to find herself mixed up in murder

MR. JAROLD ACTON—one-time schoolteacher who used his position to lead youth astray

MRS. CULLENS—Loretta’s mother, clubwoman walking a tight rope

1

She sat on the rim of a little hollow under the edge of the pier, her legs resting in one of the holes the tide had scooped around the piling, almost hidden from sight because it was growing dark. All that remained of the warm September day was a ragged pennant of mauve out on the horizon, out across the gun-metal-colored waters of the Pacific. Near at hand, like diamonds strung against the dusk, all of the lights burned on the Strand: the tall lights of the roller coaster and the Devil’s Dive, the low, brilliant neon of the hamburger stands and the dance halls. There was a dance hall on this pier, just above, and though she couldn’t see its lights from down here she could hear a band tuning up and warming itself with little snatches of melody, some of it parts of songs she knew. She smoked a cigarette and listened idly, looking out at the sea and the last pale streak under the edge of the sky.

She was a small girl, gracefully rounded and curved, her skin very white and her hair quite black—blue-black and shining, and hanging to her shoulders with no trace of curl, just a soft feathering at the ends where it met the collar of the black satin suit. The suit was well fitted to show her figure. On her head she had a tiny cap covered with gold sequins. Her mouth was bright with crimson lipstick, her lashes heavy with mascara; and the aura of perfume that surrounded her beat off and defeated the clean smell of the sea.

She wore high-heeled patent-leather pumps, red ones almost the color of her lipstick and nails. When the cigarette was finished she poked a hole in the sand with one of her high heels, dropped the butt in, then swept sand over it again with the side of her shoe.

It was while she was doing this and turned slightly aside that she caught sight of the figure in the dark, almost invisible in the deeper shadow up under the pier, a figure that was standing still, watching.

For a moment she didn’t move. No expression of surprise or nervousness came over her; there was, perhaps, just a touch of amusement.

When it was obvious that she was watching him in return, he walked down slowly to where she sat. He was young, tall, a little stooped. He had sharp eyes set in a narrow, not unhandsome face. He had a small mustache, curly brown hair, and skin which betrayed the fact that he came to the beach only during the evenings. His manner was insinuating and humble, the manner of a fellow used to picking up girls and suffering many rebuffs in the process.

The girl looked him over without showing any interest. “Hello.”

“Hello.” His fixed smile brightened; he sat down a little way off, arranging himself on the rim of her little hollow, folding his long legs awkwardly because they were longer than the depth of the hole. “What did you do with the sailor?”

She let a moment of silence go by as a reproof for his having watched her. “I sent him home to his mother.”

“Wasn’t quite dry behind the ears, was he?” He laughed, not a real laugh but a hesitant chuckle that waited to see how she was going to take it. “I thought he must be eighteen, because the Navy doesn’t want them any younger. But otherwise, I’d have placed him in junior high. A brat. He made you look as if you ought to be leading him by the hand.”

She said nothing, only shrugged and took cigarettes out of a little red patent purse. The man studied her in the failing light, his sharp eyes making little jabs at her half-averted face, the figure outlined in sleek black satin.

“I like your style,” he offered. “Why run around with the Navy?”

Her voice was dry with humor. “There’s something refreshing about a sailor who has to make the last shore boat at midnight and doesn’t expect you to put him up.”

“Oh. Like that, huh?”

She looked at him insolently over the fresh-glowing cigarette. “I’ll let you know when I start playing the other way.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said hastily, apologetically. He smoked for a while, looking out at the horizon as the girl did. There was nothing at the rim of the sea now except the dark. Above, in the dance hall, the squeals and snatches were turning into full-fledged melodies. “Going up tonight?”

“I might.”

“I see you every Wednesday. Ever come other nights?”

“Saturdays.”

“That so? I work Saturday nights.” He flipped a cigarette butt off toward the wet sand, where it struck, hissing a moment before the fire died. The surf was quiet, scarcely more than a ripple, with no big breakers, so that there was almost a feeling of silence except for the band above them and the far-off bleat from the Strand. He cleared his throat. “There could be something refreshing about a guy with a good job and plenty of money to spend, couldn’t there?”

“Navy pay is pretty good these days.”

He brushed sand off his trousers legs. “Maybe I could buy your ticket tonight. Would you let me?”

“I’m not sure I’m going.” She threw him a glance, saw the silly, abject look he put on, felt irritation rise in her. “Sometimes I get damned bored in that joint.”

“I couldn’t dance for long. I wouldn’t try to take you home, or follow you, or anything like that. I’ve got another engagement later.”

“One thing I never could endure,” she told the dark rippling sea, “is a guy who tries to date two women in one evening.”

“Oh, this isn’t like that though.”

She looked at him slyly from under her lashes. “What’s it like then?”

He talked fast. “This old lady, Mrs. Lacoste … she’s terrifically old; she lives in one of those big places in Beverly Hills. Well, once in a while she calls me up and asks me to come see her. She must be every bit of eighty. I usually get ten bucks out of an evening.”

The girl sat perfectly still as if remembering something. Then she roused and said, “My God!” in a mocking, shocked voice.

“She’s a funny old duck,” he rambled on. “Nice, though. She loves beer. I guess the only time she gets a chance to pour it down the way she likes is when the family’s away. There’s never anyone there but the two of us.”

“That doesn’t sound nice to me,” the girl reproved dryly.

“You’d have to meet her to see how decent she is. She lets me in at the back, in a kind of sun porch, and there’s always plenty of beer for her and scotch for me and an old phonograph with some records that are real classics—early jazz and that kind of thing. We drink and talk, mostly about people who are dead—or, rather, she does. I forgot to tell you how I happen to know her. My uncle used to be the gardener.”

She studied him, the clothes, the attempt to keep up the wise-guy veneer, and made a mental classification of him. “I’ll bet you work in Sears, Roebuck. In the rugs. Or maybe bath mats and linoleum.”

“No, I don’t,” he answered seriously, and with an air of being pleased that she cared. “I’m an assistant bookkeeper for Lanham and Barnes. They sell plumbing supplies.”

“Well, you certainly fooled me,” she said with an undertone of mockery. “But go on with this gag about the old lady—the one who sends for you on certain evenings. She fascinates me.”

A trace of doubt came into his eyes; he glanced sharply at the girl, but the light was uncertain now; there was a reflected, many-colored glow from all the neon on the Strand, but not much of it got under the pier. Perhaps he had sensed that she was having fun with him.

“Go on,” she urged.

“It isn’t a gag,” he said. “She’s a real old lady. I mean a real lady, and she usually gives me the ten just because she remembers my uncle. Maybe she remembers the wages he worked for during the depression, I don’t know. I send her flowers on her birthday and Christmas.”

“No valentines?”

“No.” The band in the dance hall swung off into its first number. The music was brassy, blatant, alive, and vigorous. “I guess they’re starting up, up there.”

“Are you still going to buy my tickets?” She turned slyly; showing him the soft curve of her cheek, the outline of the bosom under the tight black satin. The sequins glittered like the scales of a snake; her black hair was a cloud. “I could give you a dance or two. I might even go along to see your old lady in Beverly Hills.”

He coughed, a short hack. “I guess I’d hardly have time to do any dancing.”

She drew a line with a finger tip in the cool sand. “You sore, or something?” Inwardly she was laughing.

“No, of course I’m not sore.” He hesitated. “I don’t know quite how to take you. I think you’re kidding. I think you’ve been kidding all along. You think I’m a dope.”

She shook her head reprovingly. “You just don’t know me very well. You’ve never even asked me to dance up there.” She nodded toward the floor of the pier, high above them in the dark. “How can you know what I’m thinking when you’ve never even talked to me before, not once?”

“I was afraid to ask you to dance,” he admitted glumly. “You always had a sailor, sometimes two or three. You looked right through me when I walked past. You couldn’t even see me.”

“Maybe I was being tactful. Sailors are very sensitive about civilians getting their girls. Sometimes they gang up on a fellow.”

He didn’t answer, perhaps because he hated to admit that he wouldn’t take on a gang of sailors. It was true, anyway; the sailors were trying to monopolize the Palace. There were a couple of fights nearly every night, and some civilians had been beaten up. Pretty soon the Palace would have nothing but Navy, and all the civilians would go somewhere else—back to the Majestic, maybe, which the sailors had taken over a year ago and were now apparently getting tired of. The manager of the Palace was resigned to the Navy moving in; you were sure of a good crowd during the off nights; and, besides, it would save the price of redecorating. The sailors wouldn’t care what the place looked like as long as the bouncers were broad-minded.

He smoked for some minutes, not saying anything.

“Do you have a car?” she asked. Her manner was placating.

“Prewar Ford. Pre-Civil War, that is.”

They laughed together at the small joke, and a companionable feeling seemed to grow up between them.

He asked the next question. “Where do you live? Here at the beach?”

“No, I live in town. I come down for laughs.”

“Drive down?”

“Pacific Electric train. You know, the famous Big Red Cars.”

Her tone was sly and mocking, but the mockery was not directed at him; he felt safe in laughing with her at the famous Big Red Cars. “I used to ride those things myself. I had a job down here then, and I commuted from L.A. every day. Those wicker seats … I think I had that waffle pattern in my skin for a year after I quit.”

She accepted one of his cigarettes and let him light it for her. She thought of the Packard convertible in the garage at the head of the stairs leading down to the Strand; they’d kept it for her before overnight, and knew what to do if she didn’t call for it. “Are you really going to drive up to Beverly Hills tonight?”

He tried to see his wrist watch in the dim light. “I ought to be starting pretty soon, I guess.”

“Why’d you come down to the beach at all, since you knew you had this date?”

“I don’t know. I felt like driving around, maybe. My job pays good, but it keeps me tied to a desk all day. If I’m not looking at books and the bookkeeping machine, I’m looking at the corner of the office with the water cooler and Miss Emerson, who’s about fifty-five. She wears cotton stockings to keep her legs warm.”

“I can see what you mean,” the girl said sympathetically.

“What’s your name?”

He had blurted the question; she answered slowly and precisely. “My name is Ernestine Hall.”

“Mine’s Freddy Nixon. Do you work in town?”

She jabbed another hole in the sand with her heel, dropped in a butt, raked sand over it with deliberate slowness. Under cover of the dark she made a faint expression of distaste. “Pasadena. Look, do you want me to go along?”

“To see Mrs. Lacoste?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You’d want to?” He picked up a handful of sand, let it trickle out of his fingers. His tone had been pleased, surprised; but now he hesitated. “She’s a … a funny kind of old lady. Not that she wouldn’t enjoy meeting you, she’d love that. She’s always asking me to bring a friend along.”

“Well, it sounds a lot more interesting than fooling around with those hot-handed children in uniform upstairs.”

“She gets a little wacky as the evening goes along.”

“Sure. I probably will, too, if the scotch is good. I love scotch.”

He moved toward her tentatively, ready to shy off if she turned hard or seemed offended. He touched her hand. “I like that perfume. What d’you call it?”

“It’s called Biological Stimulus.”

“Really?” He heard her laughing under her breath, but he was close enough now; he put his mouth on hers. She stopped laughing; while he held her she seemed passive, almost indifferent. She didn’t try to move away. She didn’t respond; she just sat still.

“Your mustache tickles.”

“How’s about tickling you again?”

“Sure. Why not?”

He kissed her, trying to feel a sense of conquering the way he usually did, but it wasn’t any use. There wasn’t any emotion on her part. Even withdrawal, a pretense of shyness, would have been better than this deep quiescence, this almost somnolent willingness. There was something underneath: sullenness, contempt, amusement…. Whatever it was, she was down there with it. He might as well be kissing a store dummy.

He drew away. “You don’t throw yourself into things, do you?”

“I will when I know you better.” Her hand twined in his, her fingers doing intimate things with his palm and wrist. “I do like you a lot, really I do. You’re much nicer than the average, than what I thought you’d be—A girl runs into a lot of rough fellows if she hangs around a dance hall.”

It occurred to him briefly to wonder why she came to the Palace; the Palace had always had a tough reputation even away uptown in L.A.

“Maybe you’ll warm up after a few drinks of old Mrs. Lacoste’s scotch.”

“I probably will. Shall we go?”

She stood up and brushed sand off the black satin suit. There wasn’t much; the material had a sleek hard finish. The jacket was tightly fitted, and there was a little ruffle of white low in the neck. Around the waist was a peplum, flaring out above the hips, exaggerating the girl’s figure—its small waist and full bosom and thighs. The gold sequins glittered on the crown of her head; the red bag and shoes shone like fresh blood.

“Say, I sure do like that outfit you’re wearing.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you have to wear a uniform where you work?”

She looked at him blankly. They were out in the open now, heading for the narrow boardwalk that led up the side of the pier to the pavement of the Strand. “What did you say?”

“I mean, your outfit’s so cute. I like it. I thought maybe you had to wear a uniform at work and that’s why you dress the way you do at the dance. You always wear satin. You’ve got a red satin dress with things on the shoulders. I like that too.”

“No, I don’t wear a uniform. I hate uniforms.”

“Me too. When I first quit school I worked in a service station and I wore white coveralls with ‘Meacham’s Service’ on the back. The day I left for the Army I brought a razor blade to work and unraveled and cut out all the red thread, and turned the coveralls in without anything on them. I won’t ever forget the way old man Meacham looked.”

“That was clever,” she said absently. “What did you do in the Army?”

“Air Force. Radio. I didn’t get overseas; everything ended too soon for that.”

“Were you ever stationed at Lancaster?”

“Up on the desert? A couple of months. Then I went to Texas. You ever been in Lancaster?”

“I’ve been through it. What couple of months were you there?”

“Summer of ’45.”

“Oh.” She shook a little sand off the zipper of the red purse.

“Did you know somebody there?”

“A relative.”

They came to the middle of the Strand. Lights beat down on them; they were drowned in the odors of frying onions and ground beef, the smell of boiled wieners and popcorn, the blare of juke boxes in the bars, the calls of the barkers in front of shows. A bunch of sailors came down the Strand, eight of them arm in arm, singing. Two blondes stared into a jewelry-store window at a display of engagement rings, carefully not looking to see who was looking at them. A kid about three was bawling, being led along by a cop, who was trying to find the mother.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” He sounded solicitous, anxious to please.

“I don’t want that scotch to have to work for a living.”

“That’s right. That’s about what Mrs. Lacoste would say.”

“She drinks beer?”

“Sort of.” He guided her by touching her elbow. They went up the cement steps, three long flights, that led from the amusement zone to the big boulevard. “You won’t laugh at her, will you?”

“I won’t laugh,” she promised dryly.

2

It was a big house in one of the closely built blocks below Sunset. The street light showed cream-colored stucco, red tile, balconies ornamented with Spanish ironwork, an arched entry flanked by spider palms and banana trees and bamboo.

When the car stopped Ernestine leaned forward, looking at the house. “I thought you were talking about a big estate in one of the canyons—Mandeville, or Coldwater. Something like Mary Pickford’s place.”

He smiled uncertainly. “It’s nice inside. You’ll be surprised.”

“I’ve always wondered why they bothered to build these big houses on just a city lot. Look at them, all in a row. They might as well be on South Grand Avenue as far as privacy is concerned. A place this big needs an acre or two.”

He helped her out of the car. “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

“So much money for the house, and too cheap to buy land.”

“This house has been here about twenty or twenty-five years. I think it was put up before they got the bug for living in the canyons.”

“Your uncle was the gardener? How’d they keep him busy?”

“Just part time,” he offered with a touch of apology. “He worked other places too.”

The driveway that ran beside the house was flanked by a hedge at the right. Immediately beyond the hedge were the lights of the house next door, and the sound of someone playing the piano. Freddy Nixon led Ernestine purposefully back through a space of darkness; then they came to a corner, turned it, looked in through uncurtained windows at the sun porch.

It was not the modern outdoor-living-room type of thing at all; it had a certain primness—a staginess—and was completely closed in against the weather. The floor was of smoky blue tile. There was a tiled fountain in the middle of the floor, a nice formal little fountain with a dolphin spouting water off a pedestal in the middle. The furniture—there was a lot of furniture—was wicker with touches of bamboo trim and cushions of dull blue corduroy. It was a big room. The ceiling looked low because it was dark, beams stained black.

On a wicker settee was a little old lady in a black dress. In front of her was a tabouret with a tray on it, and on the tray were two bottles of scotch, a quart of beer, a siphon of soda, and two glasses.

There was an ancient phonograph, the kind that has to be wound up by hand, on a table; beside it was a big cageful of birds and a couple of record albums.

“What a setup,” Ernestine said.

Freddy Nixon opened a door that was glass right down to the floor and touched her elbow to urge her in. The little old lady looked up at them. She was very tiny and very wrinkled. Her eyes were like two jet beads punched through a parchment mask. “Well, how nice!” she said. Her voice was surprising: it was rich, pleasant, and full of life. “You did finally bring someone after all.”

“This is Miss Hall, Mrs. Lacoste.”

She held out a small hand on which the knuckles were enlarged and the fingers twisted. “How do you do?”

Ernestine touched the hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

“Sit down.” Mrs. Lacoste indicated the other end of the settee. “Tell me something about yourself while Freddy brings out some ice cubes. Are you in love with Freddy?”

Freddy blushed on his way out of the room. Ernestine said carefully, “We’ve only just met.”

“Oh. Well, you’ll like Freddy very well when you get to know him. He’s a splendid boy.” The jet-black eyes were merry. “He reminds me of my husband somehow—not in any way I can put my finger on. The poor man’s been dead almost fifty years; all my impressions of him are very vague of course. You’re all dressed up to go out, aren’t you?”

Ernestine looked down at the tight black satin; a half-smile twitched at her lips. “It’s only the ordinary outfit I wear of evenings.”

Mrs. Lacoste spent some moments sizing up the sequin cap, the satin suit, the bright red shoes. “I’ll bet you were going to a dance. Did I interrupt a date you had with Freddy?”

“No, not at all. Why do you think I meant to go dancing?”

Mrs. Lacoste seemed to think it over. “You were going to a dance-hall dance. It isn’t the sort of outfit a young lady like you would wear to a private party, or even to a club. You were going to a very public place, and you wanted to outshine the others. You see, I know a great deal about clothes and even more about women. Do you go to school somewhere?”

The girl’s face froze.

“You’re old enough to be in college,” Mrs. Lacoste decided. “Almost through college, I’d say.”

Ernestine shook her head.

The old lady stared at her face as though trying to penetrate some barrier she had found there. The room was silent except for the rustling noises made by the birds, who were sleepy and trying to put their heads under their feathers, and the watery tinkle of the little fountain.

Ernestine looked about her. “I like your sun porch very much.”

“Nonsense, child. It’s a useless and old-fashioned room. You don’t even dare sit in the sun in it; those glass windows would fry you. Nowadays it’s the style to build outdoor things with barbecue fireplaces in them—That’s what we should have had, only there’s not enough privacy here. Would you care to see the rest of the house?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Here’s Freddy with the bucket. We’ll make a drink and go through the place while we drink it.”

Freddy carried a thermos bucket full of ice cubes and another glass. He carefully built two double scotch highballs, opened the beer, and poured a drink for Mrs. Lacoste. The beer was apparently not cold; the glass showed no sign of frosting. He gave Ernestine a highball, Mrs. Lacoste the beer, picked up his own glass. “Here’s mud in your eye.”

Mrs. Lacoste took a couple of red-and-green capsules from her dress pocket and dropped them into the beer. “The same to you!”

Ernestine’s hand, holding the glass, trembled. She put it quickly to her lips. The scotch was mellow and smoky.

Mrs. Lacoste dabbed her mouth daintily with a lace-trimmed handkerchief, then rose from the settee. “We’ll show Miss Hall the house, Freddy. You know how new visitors are.” She led the way to a door, reached through to snap a light switch. This was the living room, filling the same space at the front of the house that the sun porch did at the rear. There was a grand piano, small Oriental rugs on shining hardwood floors, a lot of very formal furniture of mahogany and yellow velvet. A bank of windows faced the street.

Ernestine went over to the grand piano. A cabinet photograph in a gold frame sat on the closed lid, a portrait of a very young soldier.

“My grandson,” Mrs. Lacoste explained. “He was in the war.”

Ernestine looked at the portrait. Her face was expressionless, the eyes blank, the mouth as stiff as the mouth on a mask. “He’s good-looking.”

Mrs. Lacoste took a long drink of the beer. “Most people who see that picture for the first time ask immediately if he got back all right.”

Ernestine said carefully, “Did he get back from the Army all right?”

“We don’t know. I suspect that he did.” The jet eyes twinkled; this mysterious answer was apparently one that Mrs. Lacoste enjoyed giving. She moved on slowly to another door, as if expecting Ernestine to ask other questions. “This is the library. It isn’t very big, but it cost more than any other room in the house. This stuff on the walls is real French tapestry, very old, really antique; it ought to be in a museum somewhere instead of being used for wallpaper in a middle-class home where no one appreciates it. The ceiling is real gold leaf.”

Ernestine hadn’t moved away from the piano. She was looking at a silver cigarette case which was propped on the music rack. It was a slender, expensive-looking case. The front panel was embossed with a medallion, in the center of which was a design of a lion holding a spear on which a boar’s head was impaled.

Freddy had come to look over her shoulder, to whisper earnestly. “You ought to go see the library. It pleases her to have people admire it.”

Ernestine turned, though with an air of unwillingness. The tapestry was softly and beautifully faded, a hunting scene that spread around the walls. The bookcases were low. There weren’t a great many books—no big, uniformly bound sets—just a scattering of popular titles. “Very pretty,” said Ernestine. “It’s a lovely room.”

They went on, carrying their drinks, through the rest of the house. Mrs. Lacoste chattered, half smug and half deprecating; probably she said the same things every time she showed the house, Ernestine thought. She was a combination of a monkey and a barker. The beer began to make her speech thick.

They were upstairs in the biggest of the four bedrooms, looking at a collection of miniature animals which Mrs. Lacoste’s daughter had gathered on a world tour. Each animal in the glass case represented a country. There was an Egyptian camel, a British lion, an Indian cobra, a German dachshund. Mrs. Lacoste was displaying an infinitesimal black enamel French poodle on her palm. “Isn’t this wonderful work?”

Ernestine asked in a voice without inflection, “Who plays the piano downstairs?”

Mrs. Lacoste smiled. “My granddaughter Loretta.”

“She takes lessons?”

“Very expensive lessons from a man named Hurlbut.”

“Oh.”

“Do you play, child?” Mrs. Lacoste asked, jiggling the French poodle on her palm.

“Not any more.”

“But you used to?”

“Yes.” Ernestine put a scarlet nail on a miniature kangaroo. “I’ll bet your daughter got that in Australia.”

“Yes, she did. Don’t you think this was an original way of remembering a world tour? Not to be burdened down with rugs and Taj Mahal models and stuff? My first world tour, my honeymoon, I brought home a jug of water from the river Jordan. I was rather religious when I was young. I mean not spiritually religious but amulet conscious, if you know what I mean.”

Freddy said stoutly, “I’ll bet you were pretty then.”

“I’m pretty now, Freddy,” she corrected slyly. “Of course I’m apt to lose my looks when I get to be middle-aged.”

They laughed together, and Ernestine thought that it was nice to be able to make a joke of getting old. Of course if Mrs. Lacoste drank much more of her special kind of beer, things were going to seem very funny indeed. Anything was going to seem funny, anything at all.

The whole house was quite empty of other people, and Ernestine wondered if one purpose of the tour had been to convince her of that, so that she wouldn’t be shy about drinking a lot of Mrs. Lacoste’s liquor. For, as they sat in the sun room and the evening wore on, Ernestine saw that Mrs. Lacoste liked to have people keep up with her.

Freddy played some of the old, old records which Mrs. Lacoste had kept from the days when the hand-wound phonograph had been in style. The tone was scratchy and thin, but Freddy listened the way you were supposed to listen to these things if you were a jazz addict. He closed his eyes and made swooning motions with his head. He played each record several times and read the titles lovingly and spoke the names of the composers and the musicians with wonder.

Ernestine saw that things were getting pretty hazy. She poked Freddy in the middle of a swoon. “I’ve got to go outside and get some air. You’d better keep an eye on Mrs. Lacoste.”

She tried three spaces of glass before she found the doorknob, which was crystal and didn’t show up very well when you felt the way she did. The steps almost caused her to fall. She felt her way around the corner of the house to the driveway and stood there, braced against the wall, breathing deeply. The wind from the canyons and the barren hills above the city smelled like a desert wind always does: a little dirty, with overtones of sage and the ashes from last summer’s brush fires.

In the house next door someone was reading loudly and mechanically something that sounded like a political speech. Ernestine tried to listen, to focus her mind as a sort of test of its condition. The shadows of the spider palms and bamboo on the cement of the driveway shifted and shuddered. A long way off, up on Sunset in the direction of the beach a police or ambulance siren wailed with a throaty note.

She thought disconnectedly of some of the things she had seen in the house. The granddaughter’s room, all ivory lace and rose-colored satin, the toilet articles on the dressing table covered with rosebuds and forget-me-nots in old-fashioned cloisonne. Ernestine made a face at the dark. They hadn’t done more than barely glance into the soldier’s room; Mrs. Lacoste had had an air as if it were a shrine. Ernestine made a bitterer face, then turned and went back the way she had come.

Mrs. Lacoste had slid off the wicker settee and was half propped against the tabouret. Freddy had removed the tray to the table, probably to keep the drinks from being knocked to the floor. He was bending over Mrs. Lacoste and chafing her wrists. “She always does this, and it always scares hell out of me,” he panted. “I wish she’d lay off the goof-balls just one time, just once, so that I could listen to these records without cold chills running up the back of my neck for fear she’ll pop off. She’s awfully old. She’ll pop off one of these days and it’ll be for good.”

They got her back upon the wicker settee. Ernestine wet her handkerchief in the water from the ice cubes and bathed Mrs. Lacoste’s temples and the nape of her neck. Then she rubbed the parchment face with an ice cube, all over, until it was a faint pink. “Where does she get the stuff?”

“A doctor prescribes them to help her sleep, and she just stores them up until she has enough for a jag.”

“She really is a funny little old lady,” Ernestine said. “Is this her house?”

“I don’t think she actually owns the place any more. I think she deeded it to her son-in-law. He has to pay the taxes and keep it up; I guess she didn’t mind giving it to him. She used to have a lot of money, but not now.”

“What does her family think about these toots she goes on?”

“Something she said once gave me the idea that they’re pretty strict with her afterward. They don’t know about the goof-balls; they think it’s just liquor. Her daughter’s a big clubwoman here in Beverly Hills—you know the type—and she’s scared that there’ll be a slip and some bad publicity.”

“Do they know anything about your coming here?”

He shook his head. “No, I guess they don’t know anything about that either.”

Mrs. Lacoste opened her eyes and looked at him hazily. “I’d like to go to bed now, children. And … Freddy … in the pocket of my skirt—”

He put two fingers into the pocket and drew out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. He smoothed it between his hands, looking at it undecidedly. The room was very quiet except for the splashing of the little fountain; all of the birds were asleep. “It’s too much, Mrs. Lacoste.”

She seemed to draw together all of her powers of concentration. Her voice was strong and clear. “Haven’t a lot of time left … better speed things up, Freddy. Your uncle was a nice man, and you used to sit and listen to my gabble even when you were a little fellow, so—” Her head fell forward, and her eyes closed very slowly and rather mechanically, like a doll’s.

He stuffed the bill into his hip pocket, bent over, and lifted Mrs. Lacoste’s thin little figure in his arms. “Go ahead and turn on lights, will you, Ernestine? I usually trip all over myself.”

“You’ve put her to bed?”

“I just take off her shoes and tuck her in.”

Mrs. Lacoste’s room was above the sun porch. The furniture was maple; the knitted spread on the bed and the white scrim curtains at the windows made the room look pleasantly common and comfortable.

Ernestine opened the windows to let the breeze blow into the room. The back of the lot was taken up with a lawn and a garage, half visible in the reflected glow from the sky. Beverly Hills was all lit up, and so was Westwood, and so was Mrs. Lacoste. Ernestine went to the bed to help Freddy unlace Mrs. Lacoste’s high-topped shoes. They left her nicely tucked up and beginning to snore a little.

Downstairs again, with all lights off except the one in the sun porch, Freddy straightened things around. He washed two of the glasses in the fountain and took them off into another room, probably the pantry, and he wiped up with his handkerchief a spot where Mrs. Lacoste had spilled some of her beer. Then he emptied the ash trays into a potted palm in the corner. “I guess the party’s over.” He shot Ernestine one of his sharp looks.

She nodded and stepped over to touch the crystal doorknob. “Wait a minute. I left my handkerchief in on the piano.” She turned, crossed the room swiftly. Freddy waited, lighting a fresh cigarette and blinking his eyes as if to clear them.

Ernestine came back. She looked smug, he thought; smug and beautiful. He put up an arm to bar the doorway. “Toll bridge.”

She offered her lips passively, with that odd air of being willing and of not caring.

“You’re a funny girl.”

“Am I?”

“Why don’t you give a damn? Did somebody let you down?”

He waited, admiring and hoping. Maybe somebody had let her down and he could step in and do a little consoling. She was surely the prettiest girl he’d ever seen at the Palace, and, in spite of the fact that she’d been openly waiting for a pickup there under the pier, there was a certain air of refinement, of delicacy, in her manner.

She gave him a sweetly serious look. “I don’t want to talk about my troubles.”

Excitement welled in him. He was right; someone had done her dirt and all that pose of hardness, of inward laughter, was just a shell. The evening was going to turn out all right after all.

He guided her outside, touching her elbow with fingers that shook.

3

They drove up Laurel Canyon to the top of the ridge, turned on Mulholland Drive, found a spot after a while that overlooked all of San Fernando Valley. Below was a sea of tiny lights; up here was the dark, and the smell of the sage on the flanks of the hills, and silence.

She smoked with her head back against the cushion. Her profile was pale and sharp against the blackness beyond the open window.

He moved nearer, his fingers spread out, searching for hers. “You didn’t mind meeting Mrs. Lacoste, did you?”

“No, I didn’t mind.”

“Was it really better than dancing with the sailors?”

“You’ll never know how much better,” she murmured cryptically; then she laughed under her breath. “I wonder what Mr. Pennyfeather would think of this if there was any way I could tell him.”

“Mr. Who?” A touch of jealousy came into Freddy’s voice. “Who’s he?”

“A man I know. A little middle-aged professor … and a detective, after his own fashion.”

“Why should you want to tell a detective anything? You mean, about Mrs. Lacoste and those pills—”

“Oh no, no,” said Ernestine boredly. “I’ve been around people before who liked goof-balls in their beer.”

“Is he a cop?”

“I said he was a professor.”

“Oh. Some school you went to?”

There was a momentary hesitation before she said, “That’s right.”

“It’s a funny name.”

“Forget about it.” She dropped her cigarette into the torpedo-shaped gadget fixed to the dash, leaned toward Freddy, brushed his lips lightly with hers. “Let’s make tracks out of here. I’ve got to get up early.”

He touched the key but didn’t turn it. “You haven’t even told me where you live.”

“Let’s leave it that way for tonight. You can drop me at the Pacific Electric depot down on Main, and I’ll take a Pasadena car.”

“I like to do things better than that.”

“Next time, if you’re nice about things now.”

He gave her a sharp, oblique look. “What kind of a job have you?”

“I take care of a woman’s kids.”

“A nursemaid?” He couldn’t keep the surprise and pleasure out of his voice.

She turned her head, perhaps to hide a smile. “Do you like nursemaids?”

“I thought maybe you had some kind of job like modeling, or selling in a ritzy store. Something high-toned.”

“Mrs. Leland is very high-toned about her kids,” Ernestine said dryly.

“I know, but it’s a … a human kind of job.”

“So it is,” Ernestine said, “but then I’m human, at least most of the time.”

“Now you’re making fun of me again.” He started the motor; the lights came up on the dash and showed the pouting expression around his mouth.

She didn’t answer except to touch his hand, giving it a placating squeeze. He looked at her and caught again that indefinable suggestion of smugness, of success, of pleasure over herself or something she had done. Some part of the evening had pleased her; if he could have put the impression into words, he could have said that she was hugging the memory of it with an unholy joy. He turned his eyes away, a trifle discomfited.

“When will I see you again?”

“Call me up later in the week.” Ernestine scribbled a number inside a match cover and gave it to him. “I’m off Wednesdays and Saturday nights and once in a while Sunday afternoons.”

He had brightened up. “This Mrs. Leland you work for—she won’t care if I call you there?”

“No, she won’t care.”

He put the match cover carefully away into a coat pocket, backed the car in a rearward curve, swung into the right of way on Mulholland. “Is she pretty good to you?”

“She’s all right.”

When he had left her at the door of the depot with a promise to call her soon, Ernestine waited until she thought he must be gone. Then she went back outside and hailed a taxi. On the way down to the beach she slept, propped in a corner of the rear seat, her head back, the bright red shoes tucked out of sight under the flaring black satin skirt.

She awoke, paid off the taxi driver in front of the allnight garage. It was very late now. Most of the concessions on the Strand were closed. The merry-go-round was shut up behind brown canvas curtains which hid the horses. The last dance band had gone home. Ernestine yawned and shivered, standing in the garage doorway waiting for the attendant to bring out the Packard. In the window of the Chinese restaurant next door, at a table with a slightly soiled tablecloth, two blondes and a marine were drinking beer and eating fried shrimp. Ernestine turned away. The shrimp looked very greasy, and the blondes were drunk.

The Packard lurched to a stop beside her. She paid the attendant, gave him a smile, got into the car, and stepped on the gas.

When she had driven three blocks, she pulled to the curb under a street light. From the glove compartment she took an angora sweater and put it on. She fished on the floor and brought up two moccasin-type slippers of soft brown suède, and exchanged them for the red shoes. From the space behind the seat, between the top of the seat and the window, she drew a gray silk scarf. She threw the gold sequin cap back into its place, tied her hair with the scarf, gave herself a brief look in the rear-view mirror, and smiled.

The sweater, the moccasins, and the gray scarf had an air of quality about them—informal quality that made no effort to impress the beholder. There was something incongruous in their proximity to the black satin suit. It was as if, in an odd way, Ernestine Hall had half begun to be somebody else.

Mr. Pennyfeather frowned through his reading glasses at the seating chart on his desk. In three more class periods he’d probably have the thing memorized; but right now, at the beginning of the term, he had to depend on it, although he tried to do so surreptitiously from behind a stack of reference books. “Miss … ah … Hollister, will you please discuss the next four lines of text, beginning with—”

He was interrupted by discreet tittering, usual under the circumstances; in the midst of his embarrassment he heard one of the men students say unctuously, “She isn’t here today, sir.”

“No. So she isn’t.” He looked at Miss Hollister’s empty rear seat over the top of the glasses. Didn’t need the things for distance; very confusing, this eye business. He transferred the request to another student, a plump girl on the front row who obviously was there and as obviously wanted to give her opinion. His mind remained for a moment, however, on the memory of the very pretty junior upon whom he had meant to call. One or two like Miss Hollister could improve the tone of an entire class—get it in the groove, he believed one term was—so that Milton almost became again the mystical and exciting poet of his own undergraduate days.

He hoped that Miss Hollister’s absence was not due to anything serious. She did not often miss a class. She had shown great imagination and enthusiasm in her work as an English major; and she, like himself, had a gift for ferreting out explanations of obscure passages and for reconciling incongruities. She was not one to accept the masters of literature as the one-dimensional cardboard figures their biographers made them. More than once she had pointed out, to Mr. Pennyfeather’s pleased surprise, some evidence that an essayist considered a puritan had actually been a gay dog, or that a poet known for his romantic escapades had concealed a streak of cold repression. She seemed always to search below surface appearances in an effort to round out her picture of a personality. He recalled that she had said once, very earnestly, in the middle of a conference about her work, “No one is always the same, unchanged and without inconsistencies. All of the people we know, Mr. Pennyfeather, have their off moments and days when they’re quite different from their usual selves. So why not this man we’re studying now? He was a writer, and he was human.”

Mr. Pennyfeather brought his mind back abruptly to the class before him. The plump girl, Miss Johnson, had sat down looking satisfied with herself, and since he had been woolgathering and didn’t recall what she had said, he decided that the safest course was to look satisfied too.

He assigned other subjects for discussion, and the class continued—a little somnolently, since the day was warm. Outside, the small and pleasant campus drowsed in the sunlight. There were a few students on the steps of the library, a few more scattered through the little eucalyptus grove at the north edge of the Main Quadrangle. The warm breeze carried odors of luncheon, very appetizing odors, when it blew from the direction of the Students’ Union Building, where the cafeteria was. The time was almost noon.

Clarendon College was small but good; it ranked high on the national scholarship lists, its entrance requirements were strict, and its Schools of Architecture and Education, and the English Department, were widely and favorably known.

Mr. Pennyfeather had been at Clarendon for a good many years and, having no illusions about himself, felt that during those years he had changed from a skinny young man with fiery ideas about poetry to a sparrowy and book-ridden professor—the cautious type who wears reading spectacles and makes up grade-curves to be sure he isn’t giving too many As, the absent-minded kind who traditionally arrives at class minus everything but his pants. (Mr. Pennyfeather had once arrived in one shoe and one house slipper, but that had been during a time of stress, when he had been investigating a murder.) He knew that his students considered him the original of the story about the professor who opened a waxed-paper parcel in front of his class to display a sandwich, the class being Biology, the package supposed to contain a dissected frog, and the professor’s exclamation to be, “Goodness! I thought I ate my lunch!” He knew that the students put a switch on this old yarn, so that the contents of the package were more suitable to his special department, English. The fact was that Mr. Pennyfeather got almost as much kick out of the legend now as the students did.

When the warning bell rang he gave assignments for the next meeting on Monday. Ten minutes later he stepped into his office with the idea of leaving his notebooks and text before going on to the faculty restaurant.

A girl was in the chair beside his desk. She turned as he opened the door, and he saw that it was Miss Caradyne. She was a short, slender girl with a serious expression behind glasses framed in black rims to match her dark hair. He remembered at that moment that she was, also, Miss Hollister’s cousin. Probably she had stopped to get the class assignment for the other girl.

She rose politely, respectfully, and waited while he put away the notebook in a drawer and shelved the text with his other books.

“Mr. Pennyfeather—”

He’d had her in classes many times—a good, sincere student. “I suppose you came to get Miss Hollister’s assignment?”

She had a pencil in her hands; she twisted it between her fingers. “It’s about my cousin that I came to see you. I—”

“Pages fourteen to twenty-eight, with footnotes in the appendix, especially all notes relating to—”

“I didn’t come for the assignment, sir.”

“Oh. No?”

“I came to talk privately to you about my cousin and to ask your advice.”

“Surely. I’ll be glad to help in any way I can. Sit down.” He took his chair behind the desk. There were two other faculty desks in the room, but Miss Baxter and Mr. Thon were both at lunch by now. “I don’t think we’ll be interrupted here.”

She looked down at her hands, twining her fingers even more feverishly back and forth, as though the motion gave some release to her nerves. “I know that you’ve been involved in some … some mysteries, otherwise, I wouldn’t have dared bother you with this.”

“This is a mystery?” he asked.

She raised her eyes. “My cousin has disappeared,” she blurted.

He waited, sensing that she had much more to say.

“I can’t go to the police except as a last resort. I can’t even make very open inquiries about her. And before we go any farther, Mr. Pennyfeather, I’ll have to have your promise of secrecy. I know it’s wrong and tactless to ask it, but I must. What I’m about to tell you cannot be revealed.”

He was looking at her in surprise. It was apparent that she was in dead earnest, and that she was afraid. “You have my promise I won’t tell anyone.”

“Ernestine isn’t exactly the sort of girl she seems here at school. She’s a little wild; she likes excitement and variety, and this part of her nature has led her to do some rather queer things. It’s because of these things that there mustn’t be any publicity. They’d … they’d expel her from college, I’m afraid. Oh, maybe not from just knowing the sort of amusements she likes … but if there came to be an additional unpleasantness because of a scandalous disappearance—” She stopped, licked her lips, adjusted the nose-piece of her glasses with quick, nervous gestures.

“What does she do for amusement?”

“She—Oh, I’m afraid this is going to sound dreadful, Mr. Pennyfeather. I don’t know how I can tell you about it.”

The child thinks I live in an ivory tower, Mr. Pennyfeather thought dryly. “Just put it into good, simple English.”

The classroom tone reassured her. “Ernestine doesn’t live in one of the campus houses, neither a sorority house nor one of the dormitories. She lives with a family in Pasadena and looks after their children out of school hours, and they give her her room and board. Not that she needs to save on expenses at all! But by living with Mr. and Mrs. Leland she has all the freedom she wants. She doesn’t have to get in at night within a certain time, as she would if she lived here at the campus, nor explain where nor with whom she has been.”

“Leland … the name seems familiar.”

“He’s a professor here, in the science department, and they’re splendid people, but much too lenient and unworldly. Ernestine hasn’t had any trouble pulling the wool over their eyes. She can get out two or three evenings a week and spend most of the night out, and they never question her. They think she goes to artists’ and writers’ meetings and just gets wrapped up in discussion. Actually, though, she—” Rae Caradyne put trembling palms up to cool her cheeks. “I wouldn’t dream of telling on her, but I’m so worried!”

He thought a change of subject might smooth things. “How long has she been gone?”

“Since Wednesday—that’s two nights and almost two days. I couldn’t get through the weekend unless I talked to someone, and I didn’t know anyone I could trust but you.”

“Today’s Friday—Friday at noon.” He glanced at the clock. “She was at class on Wednesday.”

“Yes, I know that. She went home, looked after the Leland children until their suppertime. Mrs. Leland always lets her off for Wednesday evenings. It’s one of the nights she … goes out.”

“She left after the children had eaten? Does she have her own car?”

“A lovely car,” Miss Caradyne said.

“How soon did you find out that she was missing?”

“The next morning. Mrs. Leland called me at the dormitory and asked if Ernestine had spent the night with me. I scarcely knew what to say, but some hunch told me I’d better cover up for her. So I said yes.”

“Aren’t the Lelands getting curious by now?”

“I’ve made up one lie after another,” Miss Caradyne confessed. “I hardly dare answer the telephone any more. Mrs. Leland sounds simply frantic when I do. I guess it really was a help, ditching the kids … I mean, letting Ernestine help with the children.”

“Professor Leland wears an habitually harassed expression around the campus,” Mr. Pennyfeather said thoughtfully. “Perhaps ditching the kids is the right phrase after all.”

She smiled at his weak little joke.

“Do you think you can tell me now about Miss Hollister’s evenings?” he asked gently.

“She … goes out to dances.”

He wondered if he had heard her correctly. He wondered in the next instant if Miss Caradyne could belong to some religious sect which taught that dancing was wicked. “We have dances here on the campus.”

“I know, and nice ones too, but Ernestine doesn’t get any kick out of them, she says. She likes to go to tough public dance halls where she can p-pick up sailors.”

“You mean navy men? But some of my students—”

“Mr. Pennyfeather, don’t try to believe that Ernestine’s evenings are innocent. She takes those sailors for everything she can get: expensive shows and dinners, gifts of jewelry and clothes, even money. Then afterward when they want something in return”—Rae Caradyne lowered her glance and turned pink—“she talks to them as if they were dirt.”

“Still,” he persisted, “sailors are a rather rugged lot.”

“She doesn’t pick that kind. She gets hold of fellows who are just kids, who haven’t hardened up yet. And she is beautiful—”

“Yes, so she is.”

“If she’d just get word to me that she’s all right—The briefest of messages would do.” Rae Caradyne beat her clenched fists together on the lap of her brown tweed skirt. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. She must know how frightened I am.”

“It hadn’t happened, but you’ve been afraid it would because of the chances she was taking,” Mr. Pennyfeather said sympathetically.

Her look fastened on him. “Yes. That’s quite true. I’ve been terribly afraid for a long time. She was so fearless and so … so hateful to those men.”

“Tell me, why do you feel such a sense of responsibility about this? Isn’t it really a problem for Miss Hollister’s family?”

“Neither she nor I have a family, except an uncle. We were raised together after our parents died, in boarding schools in the beginning, then later with our uncle during the time he was married. I’m a year older than Ernestine and I’ve always been the plain, hard-working, sensible one—” She turned her face suddenly, and Mr. Pennyfeather realized that she was trying to control tears as well as fright.

“You’ve done things like call the hospitals and so on?”

She spoke in a muffled voice. “I tried all of the hospitals, all of Ernestine’s friends that I knew, our uncle—I didn’t let him know that Ernestine was missing—and a couple of hotels where Ernestine has gone once or twice when she wanted a day’s rest away from the Leland kids. She isn’t in any of those places.”

He drew out a sheet of notepaper and a pen. “Let’s start things moving in regard to your cousin’s car. It’s missing, too, I presume, since she is.”

Her eyes came round in a stare of apprehension. “We don’t dare—”

“There won’t be any publicity about a stolen car,” he assured her. “There are far too many reported every day. We’ll turn this in to the police. They may have something even now. Do you know the license number?”

She murmured a number hesitantly; he jotted it down.

“Description?”

“A dark-blue Packard convertible coupé—this year’s model.”

Mr. Pennyfeather raised his eyebrows. “It sounds like an expensive car.”

“It cost a great deal of money. Ernestine’s father was in the importing business. He must have left her well over a hundred thousand dollars in trust.”

4

Mr. Pennyfeather sat there staring at the sheet of paper and the jottings. His mind was working swiftly. Just as Miss Hollister herself had done with the literary great, he was removing her image from the one-dimensional setting in which he had always seen her and was examining it as a whole. She was not just the simple, modest, and rather bookish student he had thought her to be, but a puzzling and complex figure. He tried to visualize her at a public dance, under the bright lights of a hall, picking up sailors, answering their sly oglings with knowing and inviting glances. There was a hitch in this business somewhere; he suddenly saw what it was. The clothes. Miss Hollister had been, in appearance, the very model of the proper college woman. She couldn’t have gone to a tough public dance without looking out of place, or of being marked for what she really was.

“She must dress differently on these excursions.”

Miss Caradyne nodded. “You wouldn’t recognize her. The change is more than just a change of clothes. Her walk, speech, manner—even the way she holds a cigarette. It’s almost as if she were someone else.”

“There is a great deal of danger in that sort of thing, I believe. According to Professor Todt in the Psychology Department, a split personality behaves in that way. Of course, there’s no knowledge of the other half; and you’re sure that your cousin is fully aware of what she’s doing?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a game to her.”

“I can’t make it fit, somehow. I’m fully aware that some of the students engage in occasional ‘slumming’ escapades, the men especially. Since your cousin makes a regular thing of it, it must satisfy some frustration or craving in her nature, again relying on what Professor Todt has told me. Is there anything in her past to account for such a theory?”

Her glance jerked away. “No, nothing. She’s always had everything she wanted. She could go with any one of a dozen men here on the campus. There’s no reason why she should sneak out as she does.”

It hadn’t, somehow, the ring of truth. Mr. Pennyfeather studied Rae Caradyne’s half-averted face. The cause of Miss Hollister’s behavior, if the Caradyne girl knew it, was probably connected with some scandal and hence not anything she would reveal lightly.

“Well, I suggest that we throw out a feeler about the car. It might be better to make up a story for the police. Let’s say that you had borrowed the car and you’re not sure whether she came and reclaimed it while you were away, or whether it was stolen. You can’t locate your cousin to find out, and you’re wondering if the police have run across it anywhere, abandoned. Leave them your name and tele phone number. They’ll get in touch with you then, if the car turns up, as well as try to contact Miss Hollister at the Lelands’.”

“They wouldn’t do that. Ernestine didn’t give that address on her registration certificate, which is kept in the car. She gave our uncle’s address in Santa Monica.”

“So much the better, then, if we can keep the Lelands out of it. If something unpleasant has happened to your cousin, her car should turn up pretty soon. It would be much too dangerous a property for the—uh—”

“Possible murderer,” she whispered, flinching at the word.

“Yes, I guess that’s what we were both thinking,” he admitted soberly. “Possible murderer—I’ve a sudden and strong hunch that we should tell all of this to the police and let them try to find her.”

She shook her head frantically. “If her car turns out to have been abandoned somewhere, or if I have no word by Monday—then, but not before.”

“You may be giving someone the very time he needs to cover his trail.”

“I’m sure it’s what Ernestine would want me to do, Mr. Pennyfeather.”

“Very well, then. Will you make the call to the police now?”

She eyed the telephone on his desk nervously. “I’d better use the public booth in the Union Building, hadn’t I?”

“If you’d prefer not to have the call go through the switchboard, yes.”

She stood up, smiling a little as if with relief. “Probably there won’t be any report at all on the car, and I’ll have word from Ernestine right away. But I do feel sort of bucked up for having told someone.”

“Come back this afternoon when classes are out, if you wish.”

“I will if there’s anything to report. And thank you so much.” She adjusted the glasses on the bridge of her nose, picked up a text and a couple of notebooks from his desk, where she had laid them, and started for the door. “Good-by for now, sir.”

“Good-by.”

He found himself gazing thoughtfully after the neat, plain, modest figure of Miss Caradyne. It seemed that the revelations concerning Ernestine Hollister had given him a new and cynical viewpoint toward his students. His thoughts wandered back to Miss Johnson, the plump girl in his eleven-o’clock class. She had, he recalled, an unusually loud, jolly, and infectious laugh. And Miss Blake in his nine-o’clock class on Restoration Drama … Nylons, he believed, were usually given the credit for the sort of effect Miss Blake produced when she crossed her knees. And Miss Thomas, the brown-eyed little blonde in the three-o’clock Chaucer period…. He jerked his mind back to thoughts of lunch. There was no use in speculating about his girl students; perhaps every single one of them, with the exception of Miss Hollister, lived in their dorms as pure as little white lambs.

Only Miss Hollister, the black sheep, had strayed and was lost from the fold.

With a feeling of deep, uneasy wonder he crossed the campus to the faculty dining room, a cheerful place opening off the students’ cafeteria. At one time the dining room had been Mr. Pennyfeather’s mainstay, since he had been obliged to cook breakfasts and dinners for himself, with results so unappetizing that lunch had seemed luxurious by comparison. On his return from a summer in Washington State, however, he had located a boardinghome run by a Mrs. Mauffit, a genius at the cookstove, whose specialties were southern sweet light-bread buns, deep-fried chicken, and sweet-potato pie. With pecans, his mind always added reverently of its own accord.

Therefore, in order to appreciate more fully what awaited him at the dinner table, he now usually fiddled around with a thin soup and a salad in the middle of the day—just something to brace him for the ravages made upon the works of Chaucer by the members of his three-o’clock class.

He was cutting a lettuce leaf when he became aware that someone was behind his chair. He turned, looked up. It was Miss Caradyne again. She was pale as a ghost, and a nervous pulse beat visibly in her throat.

The dining room was supposed to be a refuge for faculty members, out of bounds for students. Lest Miss Caradyne be reproved for being there, Mr. Pennyfeather rose with the idea of going over to the door.

She clutched his arm before he could move. “She’s come back!”

“Miss Hollister?”

“Of course. She’s at the Lelands’. She came in looking perfectly ghastly, Mrs. Leland says, and locked herself into her room and won’t answer the door. Mrs. Leland peeped in at the keyhole. The room is dark, and she thinks Ernestine is asleep.”

“Had you called the police yet?”

“No, thank heavens. On a last hope I rang up Mrs. Leland, and she sounded as if she were having cat fits. The kids were making a racket in the background. I thought at first they were tearing the house down, but perhaps they were only beating pots and pans together, or something. And Mrs. Leland was screaming—” Rae Caradyne twitched at her glasses with shaking fingers. “I’m not supposed to be here, am I?”

“I’ll take the responsibility. Hadn’t you better sit down for a moment? Perhaps I can get you a cup of tea.”

“I’m going to the dormitory and take a sleeping pill and try to get some rest.” She turned glassy, exhausted eyes toward the doorway. “I shouldn’t have bothered you about nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t feel that you imposed on me. I was only too glad to help, if only by listening.”

“You won’t ever let Ernestine suspect that you know—”

“Of course not. I’ll be very careful.”

He escorted her to the door leading into the students’ cafeteria; she gave him a final glazed look of gratitude, and then was gone.

And that was that, he thought: the end of the little mystery about Miss Hollister’s absence. He wondered whether he would ever hear from Rae Caradyne what actually had happened, and decided that probably he wouldn’t. When she had rested and recovered from the fright, her anxiety would seem a little ridiculous. He knew from his own experience how the mind is apt to gloss over and disbelieve its former terrors.

Miss Hollister was engaged in a brand of fun which might end very suddenly and tragically, as Rae Caradyne well knew. Yet the girl could possibly go on as she was for years, or until the urge died out, or the frustration was finally satisfied. The outcome was strictly a matter of chance.

No doubt there was in the past some clue to her abnormality; and had her life been written up with appendixes and footnotes, like the biographies she was so expert at delving into, perhaps the searching eye could find the cause and so comprehend the effect.

The lunch being finished, he went back to his office for his conference hours, at which he was expected to be available to students who wished to talk over their work or to plan ahead on their major. At three o’clock he guided thirty-three puzzled brains through the mazes of Chaucerian verse. By five o’clock he had almost forgotten Miss Caradyne and her errand.

His room at the rear of Mrs. Mauffit’s house was sunny, large, and clean. The floor was pine, nicely waxed, with little rag rugs here and there. The rugs had fruit-jar rings of rubber sewn to their undersurfaces, so that Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t skid about on them. There were three old-fashioned rockers with calico cushions tied to the seats and the backs. A large, scarred secondhand desk, which Mrs. Mauffit had bought especially for him, filled the space under two windows. The bed was ample, the coverlet a good, masculine rough-textured brown cloth, the blankets soft and woolly. Mr. Pennyfeather never entered the room for the half hour or so of relaxation he had before dinner without being struck with a sense of surprise at his own good luck.

Mrs. Mauffit had worked other changes in his life besides filling him with good food. It was her theory that the appetite was whetted by a bit of wine before meals, so that on the desk every afternoon he found a tiny tin tray, painted with daisies, and on the tray a wineglass of port or sherry. Mr. Pennyfeather’s aunt Elizabeth, the little old maiden lady who had raised him had instilled in him the idea that alcohol was to be taken at times of dire emergencies, such as faintings, chills, and the onset of influenza. Therefore he sipped his bit of wine with a feeling of daring, almost of dissipation.

If Mrs. Mauffit had hoped to fatten him as a walking advertisement for her cooking, however, she was doomed to disappointment. Mr. Pennyfeather remained as he had been, meager as a cricket, trotting about the campus without more than the increase of an ounce or so to show for all of her work.

Sitting at ease in the warm mellow light and sipping his wine in the late afternoon of the day when he first heard of Miss Hollister’s odd behavior, he recalled again the impromptu lectures of Professor Todt in the faculty lounge, and decided that after dinner he might pay his colleague a visit. There should be a way to get Todt’s opinion on Miss Hollister without betraying her identity.

Todt was a fat, friendly little man, German-French, who was considered very sound in his reputation as a psychologist. He was married to a rawboned Scandinavian woman who did wood carving in their garage. In Todt’s off hours he experimented with climbing plants, such as string beans, in an effort to explain on a psychological basis how the bean tendrils always managed to find the pole.

Mrs. Mauffit’s dinner that night consisted of steak-and-kidney pie, apple fritters, endive tossed in a thin, garlicky dressing, and plum pudding with wine sauce. There were two boarders besides Mr. Pennyfeather: a Miss Cox who did bookkeeping, and a Mr. Bartlett who owned a photographic supply shop. Possibly these four people were the best fed in the vicinity of Los Angeles, Mr. Pennyfeather thought to himself; he never finished one of Mrs. Mauffit’s meals without a panicky moment of wondering whether he might have to sit and digest for a while before moving away from the table. Mrs. Mauffit did full justice to her own cooking, sitting down with her guests and leading the attack, trumpeting encouragement for laggards. Her voice matched her manner in the kitchen, being brisk, competent, and compelling.

After dinner Mr. Pennyfeather went back to his room and waited for the stuffed feeling to subside. A little after seven o’clock, revived somewhat, he stepped outside on his way to Professor Todt’s house. The long September twilight was drawing to a close. There were still a few faintly pink streaks in the darkening sky. The erratic breeze carried odors of night-blooming jasmine, wet lawns, and the spaded earth of optimistic winter gardeners.

In spite of the tropical sweetness of the jasmine there was, he thought, a subtle feeling of autumn. It was as if, somewhere far out in the depths beyond those pinkish clouds, a clock had struck, and the stars had begun to wheel toward the end of the year.

You felt it without as yet seeing any physical evidence in this almost unchanging climate of southern California. The earth was facing its winter, the counterpart of death.

He found himself thinking suddenly of Miss Hollister and the fears her cousin had expressed for her. Perhaps his sense of autumn resembled what Rae Caradyne felt—an ominous and yet seemingly unfounded conviction of disaster.

He rang Professor Todt’s doorbell. Mrs. Todt opened the door. “Oh, come in, Mr. Pennyfeather. We’ve been wondering why you hadn’t been to see us lately.”

“Outlines … memorizing those seating charts … and so forth,” Mr. Pennyfeather murmured while she took his hat.

“Franz is in the living room with a brandy. Will you have one?”

“I’m afraid it would be in heavy company, Mrs. Todt.”

“Oh, yes … Mrs. Mauffit. She offered once to teach me to make butter pastries.” Mrs. Todt laughed. “I learned pastrymaking at about the age of four in Norway.” She nodded toward the doorway from the hall. “Go in and see Franz. He’ll be glad you’ve come.”

Mr. Todt made him effusively welcome, made a second offer of brandy, looked a little hurt when Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t want any. Presently they were settled, and the conversation swept into familiar channels. Todt told Mr. Pennyfeather about his new theory with the beans, and listened with polite impatience while Mr. Pennyfeather propounded a familiar theory about one of Milton’s minor poems.

Mrs. Todt had brought in a small half-finished carving from her workshop and clamped it to the edge of the coffee table. She worked on the wood with her long-handled scoop-bladed little tools, and smiled absently once in a while as the two men talked. Apparently the piece of wood was going to be a baby playing with a frog. Mrs. Todt, like so many childless women with artistic talents, could make her child images almost incredibly appealing.

When Mr. Pennyfeather saw an opening, he brought up the subject of Ernestine Hollister, without mentioning her name, and asked Todt’s opinion of the girl’s behavior.

Mrs. Todt laid down her tools and waited curiously. Todt stroked his chin and frowned.

“A schism there, Pennyfeather; a separation, dividing the ego. It’s not good. Do I have this girl in any of my classes?”

“I doubt it. She’s an upper-division English major. Most of her time is spent in our department. Anyway, you wouldn’t recognize any symptoms of oddity in her. I’ve known her for two years and considered her the most circumspect of women students.”

“You are not a psychologist, my dear Pennyfeather.” Todt held up one finger chidingly. He always pulled this line at least once during an evening; both Mr. Pennyfeather and Mrs. Todt smiled now and glanced at each other. “So, you smile. But I should like to know more of her history.”

“I don’t know much of it. She’s been an orphan most of her life, has an older cousin who seems overly protective, and an uncle who kept the two girls with him for a while during what seems to have been an ill-fated marriage.”

“How, ill-fated?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Todt shrugged. “Well, you may have a clue there. The girl is an orphan, wanting a mother perhaps, wanting someone to love. And the uncle’s wife rejected her.”

“But her hatred seems so definitely turned toward men … young men.”

“So? The uncle, then. He picked out the wife, remember.”

Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t seem properly convinced, so Todt got down a stack of books from the shelves on either side of the fireplace and read aloud of the cases in them. These books fascinated Mr. Pennyfeather, but he had to depend upon Todt to read them to him. They were all written in scientific French or German. His knowledge of these languages was a bit rusty, and it had never included the obscure terms which Todt tossed around freely. What would have taken him a week to translate, Todt rattled off in English in fifteen minutes.

In the midst of Todt’s lecturing, Mr. Pennyfeather asked, “Where do you suppose she’s been these last two days?”

“Hmmm? But how should I know?”

“Her cousin was sure that her only interest in these men she met was to exploit them and then flout them.”

“These people are unpredictable, Pennyfeather. She may—”

“She may at last have met someone she could love,” said Mrs. Todt, who was a sentimentalist. “Perhaps she has been with him. Happy. Complete.”

Todt shook his head. “No, my dear. This business does not lead to love. What I was about to say was that her personality may have completed its division. She may not even know where she has been. Pennyfeather, I should like an excuse to talk to this young lady.”

Mr. Pennyfeather shook his head. “That couldn’t be arranged without betraying a confidence.”

“Well, if anything of further interest occurs in this, let me know, will you?”

Mr. Pennyfeather agreed, though he thought to himself that little else was apt to come his way in regard to Miss Hollister’s extracurricular shenanigans. She was not a girl given to confidences, and her cousin, Miss Caradyne, would be doubly reticent now that this first alarm had proved groundless.

He was much astonished therefore when in the dull light of early Monday morning he was summoned to the hall telephone by Mrs. Mauffit and heard in the instrument the voice of Professor Todt raised in excitement. “I think I know who she is, Pennyfeather, this girl who goes out enticing sailors. A Miss Hollister. I remember I had her in my freshman class three years ago.”

Mr. Pennyfeather spent a moment in incredulous admiration. “You figured out her identity just by remembering her?”

“Oh no, no. The news is on the radio this morning, the first broadcast. But I forget— Of course you don’t listen at five-thirty as we do while we work at our beans and woodcarving. Anyway, they found Miss Hollister’s car parked off the highway in a lonesome place, near the beach on one of those headlands above Malibu. That craggy bit of coast…. And down among the rocks, in the sea—”

Stunned, Mr. Pennyfeather took in the news. In the sea below the cliff, where the tide boiled among boulders, they had found Ernestine Hollister’s bedraggled body.

“A suicide, they think. You see, as I said, Pennyfeather, these people are unpredictable. Perhaps I might have helped her, I don’t know. Probably as we sat talking it was then too late.”

5

Mr. Pennyfeather was silent for so long that Todt asked impatiently, “I am right, am I not? This Miss Hollister is the girl you were worried about?”

“Yes, the same. I’m trying to get my wits together. I feel a little sick.”

“Quite naturally. She was a most beautiful young lady.”

The feeling he had, Mr. Pennyfeather realized, was deeper than a mere regret over the loss of a pretty face from his classes. He experienced a scathing sense of failure, of stupid, bumbling complacence. “I should have made an effort to talk to her.”

“What about, Pennyfeather? She wouldn’t have admitted any of the truth to you. Probably she wasn’t aware of much recently except a terrible confusion and dread. These divided ones—schizophrenics—they’re apt to deteriorate all at once like that.”

“She seemed so normal.”

“A false normality. No doubt for a long time she’s been on the verge, the tip edge of sanity. Schizothymia describes her. Look it up and you’ll see what I mean.”

Mr. Pennyfeather tugged his faded bathrobe together over his skinny chest, brushed hair out of his eyes, and thought about Ernestine Hollister. “Did the broadcast give out what evidence made the police think it was suicide?”

“A note in the car. I see what you want to do, but you mustn’t do it. There is no mystery here.”

“Certainly there is a mystery, if only the buried cause of what she was doing with her nights out. How long had she been dead?”

“I think I caught something about midnight. The body was found around two o’clock this morning by some State Highway Patrol men who had stopped to investigate her car, probably hoping to frighten some neckers. I think it is due a lot to the fear of the police, all this repression we have in America. If they’d just let young people alone—”

Professor Todt’s theories on this subject were old and familiar; Mr. Pennyfeather let them slide over him while his mind probed the circumstances concerning Miss Hollister. When Todt was through blaming the police for America’s more intimate problems, Mr. Pennyfeather said, “I’m going to get dressed and go over to the dormitory where Miss Caradyne is. I’ll call you later.”

He went back to his room and hurried through his shave, dressed in the neat blue suit which was the newest in his wardrobe, put on a topcoat against the early morning chill, and set out across campus toward Nightingale House.

There were five dormitory houses: big, old-fashioned, converted homes which had been fixed up comfortably for the use of women students, each named after some feminine pioneer: Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Madame Curie, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Secretary Perkins. Perkins House was the newest, and it seemed its students were the most political-minded of the lot. Odd, he thought, that the girls in the respective houses seemed to take a sort of color from the names. Stowe House had a crop of would-be authors, and Curie House spawned chemists. Nightingale House was usually full up with noble, modest, high-minded and self-sacrificing types … exactly like Miss Caradyne.

He used the big brass knocker in the rose-shaded doorway of Nightingale House, and the door was opened by a Negro maid. She let him into the parlor with an unwilling air of caution. “We haven’t even served breakfast yet, sir.”

“I know it’s very early, but I’d like to see Miss Caradyne.”

“Yes, sir.”

She went away and returned with the housemother. Sizing her up, he reflected that housemothers always ran to a pattern: big, bosomy women in good clothes and filled with charm and fine manners. He knew this one from a previous introduction at a college function: Mrs. Parsons, widow of a former dean. She asked him to sit down, then she sat down across from him, showing how it must be done to look graceful. “You wanted to see Miss Caradyne, didn’t you? About her cousin’s death?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Mrs. Parsons folded her hands in her lap. “Her uncle telephoned at about four o’clock this morning. I answer all such out-of-hours calls, you see. He explained that the police had contacted him first because of an address in the car.”

The news had long since been broken, then. “Is Miss Caradyne too upset to see me?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes measured him carefully; under the surface smoothness and courtesy she was a lioness guarding cubs. “Could you explain a bit about what you wanted to say to her?”

He would have liked to have said frankly that it was none of her business, but he knew the college rules. “Her cousin had a brief disappearance last week, and Miss Caradyne came to ask my advice about it. I want to urge her to go to the police with all the information she has about that interlude.”

“Disappeared? For how long?”

“Two nights and almost two days.”

Mrs. Parsons thought it over, looking calm and judicial. “Odd that Rae didn’t confide in me.”

“She said that she knew I’d been involved in … ah … a mystery or two.”

“Murders, weren’t they?” Mrs. Parsons said with a touch of distaste.

“Very horrible murders,” he agreed, hoping perversely to shock her.

She looked properly shocked. “Well, of course poor Rae may have thought that you could plan a more direct course of action.”

“She wanted to be careful of her cousin’s reputation.”

“I see. Am I to understand that this disappearance cleared up without any excitement?”

“Apparently she just came back. I don’t know what happened afterward. Miss Caradyne might know.”

Mrs. Parsons was silent for a few moments. “Sometimes, in a case such as a young girl’s suicide—” She paused, seemed to search for the right word. “It’s a little awkward for me to express what I want to say. I don’t want you to think that I’m eager to hush up any information which may help reveal Miss Hollister’s motive in doing away with herself. And yet, since the child is already dead … defenseless, you see … the kindest course might be to … well, to go very warily where the police are concerned.”

Thinking of the reputation of Clarendon College, Mr. Pennyfeather suspected, an attitude no doubt drilled into her by the late dean. “The uncle was quite convinced that it actually was suicide?”

“He seemed so.” She smiled drolly. “Of course I’m aware of your reputation as a sleuth, Mr. Pennyfeather; but, really, you mustn’t frighten Rae Caradyne by putting any doubt in her mind about Miss Hollister’s death. She was most attached to her dear little cousin.”

The politely saccharine way she spoke of the girls made Mr. Pennyfeather envision them as four-year-olds in pinafores. And it hadn’t been like that, his common sense told him. Ernestine Hollister had been a ruthless and vengefully frustrated woman, and Rae Caradyne had been scared to death for a long time that some man in a rage would assault and then kill her. An ugly repelling thought—he’d read it in Miss Caradyne’s frantic gestures.

“Very well, Mrs. Parsons, I won’t alarm her.”

She rose with the same maneuvering which had enabled her to sit down without seeming to bend at the hips, and went to the door. “I’ll ask her. If she feels able to see you, I’ll bring her down for a moment.”

She went away through the hall. Some little time passed. Mr. Pennyfeather looked at his watch and thought of the breakfast Mrs. Mauffit was now setting out. She scrambled eggs with witchery, fried a mouth-watering brand of ham, and baked plump biscuits with golden, buttery insides.

He tried to distract his appetite by studying a small potted ivy on a window sill, watching it closely in hopes it might show some of the symptoms Todt had ascribed to his beans, of reaching out with almost human intelligence for its pole. The pole in this case was a small white stick with a wooden image of a tiny girl with a watering pot attached. The ivy, so far as he could see, was much more interested in climbing the window frame.

Mrs. Parsons returned with Rae Caradyne in tow. “You won’t keep her long, will you?”

Mr. Pennyfeather had risen. “No, I won’t be long.” He waited until Mrs. Parsons had gone before trying to speak. He tried to put over a feeling of friendly sympathy to the girl. She didn’t seem to want to meet his eyes. He thought, studying her face, that she seemed most unnaturally pale. Then he saw that she had tried to conceal the signs of tears by a heavy make-up. Not skillfully … She’d never, to his remembrance, worn much in the way of cosmetics.

“I feel dreadful about what has happened to Miss Hollister,” he said.

“Don’t blame yourself.” She sat down primly. “There wasn’t anything either of us could have done. I think that Ernestine must have been terribly mixed up inside. But she wouldn’t have let you, or me, or anyone else talk to her about her affairs.”

“But this sudden disappearance last week—”

Miss Caradyne interrupted firmly: “Nothing concerning that must ever come out, Mr. Pennyfeather. The newspapers could make an ugly thing of it; they could smear her memory with hints and lies. I don’t know where she went nor what she did those two days, and now I have no desire to find out. Most probably the disappearance, like the dancing excursions, was just a symptom of that terrible inner chaos that tortured her.”

“You don’t think the police should know?”

“Indeed I do not.”

“Someone may have driven her to kill herself, someone she had met on one of her evenings out.”

Her hands tightened in her lap. “No one ever drove Ernestine to do something she didn’t wish to. She was quite independent and self-willed, even from childhood.”

He sat silent, remembering his promise to Mrs. Parsons to say nothing that would throw doubt on the theory of suicide.

Rae Caradyne at last raised her eyes to look directly at him. “I’m most grateful for your interest and sympathy. But as far as my cousin’s private life is concerned, I feel that my lips are sealed. And that yours should be also. She is dead, and nothing can bring her back. Let’s not give anyone a chance to throw mud at her.”

He was filled with a sense of dissatisfaction, but there was nothing more he could do here.

She rose and offered him her hand. Her fingers were supple, the palm dry and warm against his own. “Good-by, and thank you.”

He bought a morning paper at the Students’ Union Building and went back to Mrs. Mauffit’s. That kind woman, still secretly nursing the hope of adding a few pounds to his sparrowy figure, scrambled him a fresh batch of eggs and warmed up the coffee and the oatmeal and the biscuits.

He ate alone in the dining room, distracted by what he read.

The front-page item about the discovery of Ernestine Hollister’s body was brief, probably because a good many details had yet to come in at the time the paper went to press.

Malibu Beach, Sept. 27. The body of a young woman, identified as a Miss Ernestine Hollister, a student at Clarendon College, was recovered from the surf about ten miles north of Malibu at 2:12 this morning.

Discovery of the body took place after Miss Hollister’s car was found at the top of the bluff by State Patrol officers who were searching for a stolen car of the same type.

The car contained a suicide note, typewritten, pinned to the upholstery by a diamond pin belonging to Miss Hollister.

Police contacted the deceased girl’s uncle, Mr. Stephen Dunne, of 1872 S. Poinciana Drive, Santa Monica, who identified the body as that of his niece. He could give no reason, however, for her suicide. She had been a good student and stood well in classwork, according to Mr. Dunne, and was in good health.

At the time of her death Miss Hollister wore a red satin dress, red shoes, and a diamond wrist watch. On the beach below the car officers found her purse and a sequin cap. A check is being made in an effort to discover where she spent the evening previous to her death. From the type of clothes and the amount of expensive jewelry, the police theorized that she may have attended a party or place of amusement.

Miss Hollister is the daughter of the late James R. Hollister, an importer, who was killed in a plane crash with his wife, Mary, in 1936.

According to her uncle, Mr. Dunne, she was 23 at the time of her death.

Twenty-three. Two years older than the average junior. Since Miss Caradyne was a year older than her cousin, she’d be twenty-four. Somewhere along the way the girls had lost a year or so, or perhaps the delay could be accounted for by the fact that they’d been shuffled from boarding school to boarding school. Something Miss Caradyne had said must have given him that idea.

He made a note of the uncle’s name and address, held a debate with himself over the last biscuit, ate it finally with honey, and went back to the campus.

At four o’clock that afternoon he canceled a conference with Miss Johnson, who was having doubts as to whether she might not be happier after all as a Math major, and caught the interurban car into Los Angeles. From the Hill Street Station he took a train to Santa Monica; in downtown Santa Monica he found a cab.

The cab driver was uncertain as to the whereabouts of Poinciana Drive; he looked it up in a pocket map.

The cab headed up the coast from the business district, turned into a section of big homes set upon rolling ground, and for a few minutes Mr. Pennyfeather had visions of encountering a butler before getting in to see Mr. Stephen Dunne.

Then the street made a sharp turn and began to climb a hill. On the crest of the hill were three or four little houses, peeping forth from the shade of a eucalyptus grove. The cab driver read numbers, braked to a sudden halt. Mr. Pennyfeather paid his fare. The cab turned round in the street and roared off down the hill.

The view was quite beautiful; all the lights of the beach cities stretched off toward the south, and far away to the west was the sea, darkening now under the twilight. The eucalyptus trees rustled overhead. There were lights in Mr. Dunne’s quaint little gray house.

Mr. Pennyfeather walked on scattered flagstones, set into the lawn, and knocked on the shadowy door.

After a minute the porch light snapped on over his head, the door opened, and he found himself looking at a big man with a red beard. “Yes? What do you want?”

“Mr. Stephen Dunne.”

“Speaking.”

“I’ve come about your niece, Miss Hollister.”

The door began to close, fast. “I’ve told you newspaper fellows all that I have to say.”

Mr. Pennyfeather wedged his foot in over the sill. “I’m not a reporter.”

The red beard twitched as Mr. Dunne looked down angrily at the foot in his doorway. “Who are you, then, dammit?”

“My name is Pennyfeather and I’m a professor of English at Clarendon College.”

Mr. Dunne looked at him as if he were a bug, a large and strange variety of bug which he had never noticed before. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“I want to talk to you about Miss Hollister’s death.”

Mr. Dunne seemed still in the grip of astonishment.

Mr. Pennyfeather went on, “Think me any kind of a nosy freak you wish, but I want more details about that suicide.”

Mr. Dunne opened the door slowly. “Come inside. You know, Ernestine used to talk about you to me. She always intended asking you over here sometime.”

The room wasn’t big, and it was crammed full of the oddest assortment of stuff, a veritable nightmare of junk. Most of it seemed to be driftwood and the sort of things the tide brings in: floats off fishing nets and crab shells and different varieties of kelp. There was a strong sea smell.

Across the room a small fire leaped in the fireplace. Beside the fire, on a kind of rough easel, stood a frame made of gray driftwood. The inside of the frame had been fitted with a shallow box, lined with greenish-blue taffeta—the kind Mr. Pennyfeather’s aunt Elizabeth had called “shot”—which the fire played on with a change of colors. In the box, framed by the driftwood and backed by the liquid-looking taffeta, were the beginnings of a sea scene: rocks and little trees of kelp, and a battered, ancient little ship.

“I do this stuff for a living.” Dunne indicated the easel with the sea scene, and made a larger gesture to accommodate the flotsam which leaned against the walls or reposed upon shelves. “I’m a beachcomber.”

Mr. Pennyfeather regarded the little ship in its watery grave. “I like it.”

“I used to be the conventional kind of artist. I was broke all of the time. I lived near the beach in a shack this side of Laguna, and I fell into the habit of beachcombing and then got to doing this stuff. Sit down in that leather armchair. Would you like a drink?”

Mr. Pennyfeather sat down, let Mr. Dunne take his hat, and accepted a drink: gin without very much in it, which made him want to cough.

“I’m sorry I was so abrupt when you came. The newspaper fellows have been after me. They want to have fun with Ernestine’s death. You haven’t any idea what the average reporter thinks when he hears the words, ‘college girl.’ Nasty.” Mr. Dunne walked around the room with his drink in his hand. “I can’t let them do the things they want. I have to sleep nights.”

The red beard jutted when Mr. Dunne squared his jaw. He was huge, and the meat was muscle. The hair on his head, unlike his beard, was short and thin and didn’t quite cover the bald spots. His eyes were almost the color of the shot taffeta—greenish with a hint of blue, like the sea he must tramp beside while gathering his treasures.

He wore a pair of dirty corduroy pants, a khaki shirt open at the throat, and an old brown sweater which sagged at the pockets as though weary of the weights he’d put there.

At the fireplace Dunne stood silent, looking at the flames. When he turned, rather quickly, he had to put a hand to the mantel to steady himself. He stared at Mr. Pennyfeather in the light from the naked overhead bulb. “Poor little devil. Poor little kid.”

Mr. Pennyfeather embarrassedly realized two things: Mr. Dunne was drunk, and he was crying. Man-sized tears were running into the red beard.

Dunne said thickly, “But you’re right, you know. There are a lot of damned fishy things about that suicide.”

6

Dunne put another stick of driftwood in the fire and freshened Mr. Pennyfeather’s drink and his own with a dash of straight gin. “I’m not as drunk as you probably think I am. I usually go through a crying jag somewhere early along the line. It won’t last long.” He wiped tears off his cheeks with a hairy-backed hand. “I’m still sober enough now, for instance, to dread the hang-over I’ll have tomorrow.”

Mr. Pennyfeather decided to plunge in after some answers to the questions which plagued him. “Have you seen this place where Miss Hollister is supposed to have killed herself?”

“Only by flashlight. The police came here a little before three this morning—Ernestine always gave my address on her car-registration slip; it saved changing the thing when she moved around—and took me back up the coast to identify her. I couldn’t see much of the surroundings; it was pitch-dark. They turned their flashlights on her.” He fell into a chair, set his drink on the floor, shivered, with his face between his hands. “She was horribly beaten up, being among those rocks with the tide coming in…. I looked, and said who it was, and they brought me home again.”

“Had a police doctor looked at her yet?”

“Yes … preliminary stuff, I guess. He thought she’d been dead since about midnight.”

“No exact decision as to cause of death, of course.”

Dunne picked up his drink. “They were going ahead on the assumption she’d jumped off the cliff into the water.”

“This note they found in the car—the paper said it was typewritten.”

“That’s what I mean about things being fishy. Whoever heard of a typed suicide note?” Dunne jutted his chin and the red beard bristled. “The police didn’t like what I said to them, that they were damned easily pleased with that evidence. At first I thought I might try to tip off the newspapers, but when those boys got here and I realized what was in their minds I let it go. They liked the idea of a college girl killing herself; they were lapping up the story of a rich kid with a scandal, some horrible mess she’d gotten into and couldn’t stand any longer. All they wanted from me was muck.”

“Did you get to see the note?”

Dunne nodded. “The police held it under a flashlight and asked me if the signature looked like Ernestine’s writing, and I said, ‘Hell, no; nothing like it’—and that made them do nip-ups too.”

“It gave them some extra work, getting an expert to compare handwriting specimens,” Mr. Pennyfeather explained.

“The thing that stops me is that I can’t tell them the truth,” Dunne groaned. “How can I say that I know damned well Ernestine was having too much fun to jump off a cliff into the sea? They’ll ask what kind of fun. Then the newspaper boys will really start getting out extras.”

He looked at Mr. Pennyfeather over the top of his glass.

“I know what you mean,” Mr. Pennyfeather said. “Last week Miss Hollister disappeared for a couple of days, and Miss Caradyne came to me, asking my advice about finding her cousin without any publicity. She explained about those expeditions to the dance halls.”

“She did, did she?” Mr. Dunne sat straighter in his chair, frowned with his thick red brows. “But you said something about a disappearance—and this is the first I’d heard of it.”

“How long since you’d seen Miss Hollister?”

“More than a week.”

“It seems she left the Leland house sometime early Wednesday evening and didn’t return until Friday.”

“Scarcely more than a day … that’s not an alarming length of time for her to be gone,” Dunne said half angrily. “I can’t imagine Rae getting the wind up like that.”

“She’d been softened up by a long period of anxiety over Miss Hollister’s behavior, the chances her cousin was taking, and the danger inherent in the type of contacts she made. Besides, she had Mrs. Leland to cope with. Mrs. Leland has three children—rather ferocious children, I understand—and she was desperate for Ernestine Hollister to return and relieve her.”

“I see. Pressure two ways. Of course poor old Rae would worry her head off about Ernestine. But I hadn’t known before that she knew about those sailors.” He leaned back in the chair, his greenish eyes moody and distraught.

Mr. Pennyfeather said carefully: “I’d only known Miss Hollister as a student, a serious and intelligent student; and I can’t quite get it through my head why she should find so much pleasure in that strange business.”

“Oh, that’s easily explained. When Ernestine was just out of high school, when it seemed that everything was going to be marvelous for her from then on, she had a bad bust-up. Part of it was a marriage that didn’t work—she had my failure to model on, poor baby—and part of it was a dirty police frame-up that was aimed at someone else and got Ernestine too.”

He took a pack of cigarettes out of the sagging right sweater pocket, offered Mr. Pennyfeather one, raised his eyebrows because Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t want it, struck a match on the arm of his chair, and lit his own. “I guess a pipe’s more your style, eh, Professor?”

“I don’t smoke even it very much.”

“I suppose you want me to elaborate on what I’ve just said?”

“If you want to. I have been very curious about Miss Hollister’s motives.”

“Revenge,” said Dunne. “She wanted to revenge herself on every man in the world, and I guess she had the right to feel that way. This kid she married: he was twenty; she was seventeen. But he already had a strike against him. He’d fallen out with his family and hadn’t even let them know that he was back from the war in one piece. He was a sap, a childish egotistical sap, and I think on top of that he must have been a little psycho. One night he and Ernestine had an argument over a steak she’d burned, and he walked out. This was in Lancaster, the big army flying base up there on the desert. Lots of trains go through the town; it’s on the regular route north from Los Angeles. They figured afterward he must have hopped a freight.”

“She didn’t see him again?”

“Never. The Army classed him as a deserter, of course, and they looked for him to stick him in prison, but they didn’t find him either. A month or so after he’d gone Ernestine got sick and lost her baby. All of this, you see, before she was quite eighteen.”

Mr. Pennyfeather remembered the quick intelligence under the smoothly collegiate exterior; he thought that there was little wonder Ernestine Hollister had been impatient with the biographies of authors, and had found scraps that didn’t fit the pattern. Her life had gone off its pattern too.

“Once Ernestine recovered from her illness, she went wild. I was living in Lancaster too—I’d lived there for three years during the time I was married and held a job—and the girls had finished high school in that town. Lots of money around then. Ernestine stayed with Jill and me and didn’t do much except sleep all day and run around all night. Jill raised hell about it, being the type that would, but I figured Ernestine was getting something out of her system and had better be left alone.”

“What about Miss Caradyne at this time?”

“Rae worked in an office for a couple of years, saving up to go to college. I guess she knew something of what was going on. Maybe that’s when she started to worry. Or maybe she began worrying after the raid—” Dunne got up for more gin. He was much less steady on his feet now. Mr. Pennyfeather wondered if the man would regret, in a sober moment, having told him all this.

When Dunne settled himself again, he laid his head back on the chair cushions and closed his eyes. His voice was tired, husky, and bitter. “The gang Ernestine ran around with had as a sort of core, or guiding spirit, or whatever you want to call it, a man who was a teacher in the high school. There was a little talk around town—I’d catch it now and then; but nothing serious until he made a play for some local bigwig’s daughter—or didn’t make a play, I don’t know which—and the cops were mysteriously encouraged to check up on the parties he was giving at his house. It turned out that the kids, some of them still his students and some having already graduated, like Ernestine, were taking dope in their beer. Phenobarbital, or some such stuff. You know, these things that are intended for sleeping pills. They’re dynamite when you combine them with alcohol. The cops took pictures, and the pictures were frightful.”

“And Miss Hollister was in on this scandal?”

“In the middle of it. The local papers didn’t give it much spread; too many best-family kids in on the deal, but some of the bunch had to serve terms for possession of narcotics. Ernestine served six months. When she got out, she never mentioned Acton’s name, but whenever it came up there was something looked out of her eyes that gave me the creeps.”

“Acton was this man who led the group? What happened to him?”

“Ruined, of course. He’d never be allowed to teach again. But that didn’t help those he had involved in his dirty business.”

The fire crackled gently, throwing the colors of its flame into the sea picture on the easel. The long-lost little boat seemed incredibly lonely. The broken prow stuck out from among seaweed and stone, something Dunne had built out of a bit of driftwood; its soft grain was worn to a silky smoothness.

Mr. Pennyfeather thought to himself that now he understood very well Miss Rae Caradyne’s refusal to shed any light on the underlying motives for Miss Hollister’s behavior. He remembered the frightened evasion, the dread she had shown in his office at the question.

Dunne stirred suddenly in his chair. “I’ve been shooting off my mouth. Liquor certainly loosens the tongue, doesn’t it? But I guess it’s all right; you’re Pennyfeather, the prof Ernestine said had the reputation as a bloodhound, though no one would guess it by looking at you. No offense meant at all— And … funny thing … when she talked about you she used to call you ‘Penny.’ She said you never used your first name; she couldn’t find out what it was.”

Mr. Pennyfeather mutely thanked heaven that she couldn’t.

“She made quite a mystery out of it. You must have known how Ernestine was; she liked to dig up stuff.” Dunne put his elbows on his knees, cradled the red beard in his palms, and looked at Mr. Pennyfeather with serious attention. “What is your first name, anyway?”

“I … uh … always use just my initials. A.L.”

“Something funny about it?”

“My father was a classical scholar, a professor of ancient literatures, mythology, that sort of stuff. He named me very … uh … optimistically.”

“Let’s see if I can guess. Egyptian?”

“No.”

“Roman?”

“No.” Mr. Pennyfeather twiddled his glass nervously.

“Greek, then. Ancient Greek? Apollo and all those old fellows?”

“Er … yes.”

“You’re perspiring. Is it too warm in here for you?”

Mr. Pennyfeather ran a finger around inside his collar. “I don’t want to talk about my name. I want to talk about Miss Hollister.”

“Tell you what,” said Dunne, pointing a finger on which red hairs grew like hairbrush bristles, “I’ve a notion to drive up there where she died when it gets daylight. How’d you like to stay the night here and go with me?”

“If it wouldn’t inconvenience you—”

“Ridiculous. I sleep on an army cot out there on the porch, but that couch over there makes into a bed. I’d like to have you.”

“I could do it. Most of my classes come on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I have a single one-unit course in the afternoon.”

“We’ll be back in plenty of time. I can drive you over to the college if you’d like.”

“If I need you to, on account of time … thanks.”

“Okay.” Dunne got up, opened the couch to display a mattress, took a couple of blankets from a cupboard, and threw them upon the bed. “Don’t use sheets. Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind at all.”

“There’s another room in there, besides the kitchen and bath. It’s supposed to be a bedroom, but I needed it to store my stuff. I like to sleep outside. The damnedest things go by in the early dawning—stray dogs of all sorts, and skunks, and rabbits. Once I even saw a monkey, but I found out later he’d escaped from a pet shop.” Dunne went into the rear of the house and returned lugging a cot from which bedding trailed. “See you when it gets daylight. Oh, I forgot. Do you want another drink?”

“I guess I’ve had enough.”

“Well, in that case—” Dunne picked up the gin bottle in which a couple of inches still remained and, dragging the cot with its bedding, went out the front door and shut it after him.

Mr. Pennyfeather spread the blankets and lay down between them in his underwear. Though the woolen covers were scratchy, and a laundering would have improved their odor, Mr. Pennyfeather found himself slipping into slumber. He well remembered the makeshifts of his own manner of living before Mrs. Mauffit had taken charge of him. Mr. Dunne, from a bachelor’s point of view, was doing as well on his own as could be expected.

The sun came early to the peak of the little hill. A lot of birds began to chatter in the trees outside. Mr. Pennyfeather rose and dressed, and just as he finished folding the blankets, Mr. Dunne came through with the cot. The gin bottle was not with him; presumably its usefulness was ended.

He invited Mr. Pennyfeather into the kitchen to help with breakfast. When the coffee was on in a battered percolator, Dunne turned to the cupboard. “Ordinarily I don’t mess around with this hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you stuff. But this morning I’m too low to do any work unless I do.” He reached into the cupboard and brought out a full bottle of gin. “I’m a milk and aspirin boy under usual circumstances. How about it, will you have one?”

Mr. Pennyfeather sensed that Dunne disliked to drink alone, so he accepted a small pickup.

Dunne fried bacon and eggs and blacked some toast over a flame. They ate on paper plates, drank coffee from paper cups, and for forks and spoons they used the small wooden ones which are meant for picnics. The knife was a communal affair, remaining in the middle of the table when not in use.

When the meal was finished, Dunne took the plates, cups, and wooden cutlery and stuffed them into the fireplace. “Well, that’s that. My car’s out back.”

The garage was a shed, off among the eucalyptus trees. Dunne backed the car to the street, turned it, opened the door at the curb for Mr. Pennyfeather to get in. It was a surprisingly good car. “This is the sole relic of my marriage,” Dunne explained wryly. “Jill took the war bonds and the cash.”

They careened down the side of the hill and off through the big estates toward the beach. “Dear old Jill,” said Dunne reminiscently.

“How did Mrs. Dunne and Miss Hollister get along?” Mr. Pennyfeather asked.

“Hated each other at first sight. So did Jill and Rae. You see, Rae and Ernie … Ernestine … always had a funny possessive streak where I was concerned. Their mothers were my sisters. Swell gals, both of them—” The greenish eyes seemed to stare into the past. “Ernie’s folks died in a plane crash years ago, and Rae has been an orphan even longer. They figured I was all they had. I was dumb enough to think that they’d like Jill, that I could give the kids a home at last. Too late by then, of course.”

Too late … the words that Todt had used previously.

They were on the highway now, headed north. The early morning sun gave the sea a tone of deepest blue, burnished all of the little beach houses with golden light.

“I’ve made up my mind to drive you home afterward,” Dunne went on. “I ought to see Rae and try to cheer her up. Poor, funny little kid … under that mouselike repression she’s as sensitive as a child. I remember when Ernie’s marriage broke up, Rae acted crushed. You’d have thought it was her husband the Army was looking for to stick into prison. And now, this being so much worse … I should have gotten over there yesterday.”

The last little cluster of beach cottages was left behind. Now the road rose into highlands which overlooked the sea, backed by the range of coastal mountains. The air that rushed in through Mr. Pennyfeather’s open window was sharp and salty.

It seemed to him, as he thought things over, that he had known Mr. Dunne much longer than overnight. Dunne was an easy man to become acquainted with; there was no stiffness in his manner; rather, a sort of bohemian artlessness and warmth. He let you know what he was thinking, how he felt, what his regrets were, and the sort of thing he might be expected to do in the future.

“Not far now. I think it’s that high one ahead. I’ll know when I read that sign.”

The car swooped down into canyons, rose again to the tops of headlands. Mr. Pennyfeather stretched himself in the seat to remove a trace of stiffness from sitting still so long. He saw that the cliff ahead stood above the others, perhaps as high as a hundred feet above the surf boiling among rocks below. At this side of the headland, where a canyon debouched into a narrow, sheltered little cove, there was a beach; a flight of steps went down from the highway to the smooth strip of sand. A sign, green enamel on a steel post, read: Saxon Beach State Park. NO CAMPING.

Probably the flight of steps had enabled the police to get down quickly to the battered body among the rocks.

Dunne swung the car off the highway, crawled to the edge of the cliff—close enough to make Mr. Pennyfeather nervous. They got out upon the barren earth of the headland, walked to the jutting rim, and looked down.

Mr. Pennyfeather wanted to shudder.

Dunne was staring at the rocks. “Like fangs, aren’t they?”

“Horribly like.”

“I wish now I hadn’t come.”

“Since we are here, though, we’d better look around.”

The whole area at the top of the headland was bare, everything movable blown away by the sea wind, and there was only a sparse growth of grass out at the fringes.

“There’s nothing up here,” said Dunne.

“I believe the paper said that her purse and a sequin cap were found down on the beach.”

“Is that where they were found? I didn’t know.” Dunne looked restless, moody, half ill.

“Shall we go down those steps?”

“I guess we’d better. I think I’ll have a drink first. Do you want one?”

“A very small one to keep you company.”

Sipping the mixture in a paper cup, Mr. Pennyfeather wondered how alcoholic he would get by hanging around Mr. Dunne.

Dunne looked gloomily out upon the sea. “So damned lonely … as lonely as death itself. Would she have come up here in the middle of the night to jump off into roaring black surf? I don’t think she would have. Not at midnight. There’s something about midnight, something gruesome….” He filled his paper cup again. “Look, if I get stinko, can you drive back?”

“Slowly, but we’ll get there.”

“All right. You run along to the beach, and I’ll wait here with my bottle. Do you mind?”

“I understand. I don’t mind.”

Mr. Dunne’s red beard was tilted to the sky as he drained the last drops from his paper cup. Mr. Pennyfeather looked back from the top of the wooden steps and saw him, a man drowning his sorrow in what was supposed to be a typically masculine fashion.

7

The little beach was sunny and empty. The sound of the surf seemed only to emphasize the sheltered quiet under the bank.

Mr. Pennyfeather saw the masks of many feet. A couple of discarded flash bulbs winked in the sun. Off to his right the rocks began, small at first, little dark tooth-shaped bumps thrust up through the sand. They led in a broken, irregular pattern to their big brothers in the boiling sea.

He scouted back and forth, finding no indication of where Ernestine Hollister’s bag and sequin cap had been found. He wondered how the police figured she could have come down here to deposit her belongings and then returned to the top of the cliff to jump. Or was she supposed to have tossed the purse and sequin cap away into the dark, not knowing or caring where they fell? Certainly, from the headland, she couldn’t have aimed accurately enough at night to have been sure the purse and hat would hit the sand.

Or were the police sitting back, pretending to believe, waiting for further developments?

He clambered among the big rocks at the edge of the surf, getting his feet wet. He was out of sight of the highway now, and felt quite alone.

When he first caught sight of the white hatbrim, he almost slid off the rocks into the water. The thing was half buried in the sand, caught firmly under the edge of a big stone, so that he had to pull to dislodge it. Even when it was in his hand, and he knew without any doubt what it was, he still didn’t quite believe it. A white sailor’s cap, the kind you saw slanted over cocky eyebrows when the Navy hit the Strand…. He went on looking at it, incredulously, until Dunne’s voice spoke from behind him.

“Find a clue, or something?”

“I suppose that’s what it is.” His inner thoughts complained of the patness of the thing, but there it was: evidence, if there ever was evidence, and most remarkably appropriate too.

Dunne frowned at it. “A navy cap? Lord, man, don’t you see what that means?”

The cap dangled in Mr. Pennyfeather’s hand. “The police won’t like my moving it, but if it’s left here, the tide will take it.”

“Quite right. I’ll be witness to the fact that you couldn’t leave it. We’ll take it to the cops.”

Mr. Pennyfeather looked at him doubtfully. “There is one peculiar thing about this cap.”

Dunne seemed to stiffen. “Peculiar? How’s that?”

“There isn’t any name stenciled in it. Some of my students were in the Navy during the war, and when they came to call I noticed how well all of their belongings had been identified.”

Dunne lit a cigarette, looked out at the sea, and seemed to think furiously. “But, look. Don’t you see that the fact there isn’t a name in it accounts for its being here? Probably it was an extra cap, a spare, one he put on because the other was soiled or something—and so, knowing it hadn’t been stenciled yet, he dared to go away and leave it. Man, you’ve hit on the very reason you were able to find it!”

Mr. Pennyfeather allowed Dunne’s enthusiasm to convince him. They returned to the car and hunted up the nearest State Patrol office, where they learned that the case had been turned over to the county sheriff.

Captain Olney of the sheriff’s office received Mr. Pennyfeather and Mr. Dunne in his room at the Santa Monica district branch. He listened to the story of the finding of the cap, looked at the cap in the middle of his desk, and did some silent pondering.

“I can’t understand why it wasn’t found before. We had men out there yesterday; experts, who went all over the place.” His frosty eyes switched to Dunne, who seemed to take on in that instant an exaggerated air of innocence. “This story you’ve given me, about Miss Hollister’s queer interest in the dance halls … it seems you could have come out with that in the beginning.”

“I was trying to protect a dead girl’s reputation,” Dunne said firmly. “I’d never have said a word if this cap hadn’t turned up.”

Olney shot a final glance at him, then pulled a notebook from the desk and a pen from his vest pocket. “What hall did she favor, what nights did she go regularly, and did she ever mention anybody’s name?”

“She played the places at the beach. I think she usually had Wednesday nights off; Saturdays, too, perhaps. You can check with Mrs. Leland.”

Olney flipped the notebook. “Mrs. Leland says Saturdays, all right, and some Sunday afternoons.”

Dunne finished: “I never heard Ernestine mention any names.”

Olney jabbed the cap with the tip of his pen. “There’s no name in this thing.”

“We noticed that,” said Dunne.

Olney finished getting what information they had, took their addresses and telephone numbers, and let them know that they could leave.

On the sidewalk Dunne looked at the sunny day as if something inside him were soured with it. “Do you want me to drive you home?”

“It isn’t necessary. I can take a streetcar. But I thought you were going to see Miss Caradyne.”

“I guess I won’t. Not today. I feel low, as if I need sleep … and Rae won’t like it because I told the coppers what I did. I don’t want her jumping on me when I feel like this.”

He seemed a rather large man to be afraid of the wrath of little Miss Caradyne, but perhaps that prim sense of righteousness she displayed gave her tongue a certain sharpness.

At the streetcar stop Dunne shook Mr. Pennyfeather’s hand and said that he’d be over to see him in a day or so.

“I guess we put the cops on the right track, eh, Pennyfeather?”

Mr. Pennyfeather murmured something in reply as he mounted the steps to the vestibule of the car; probably Mr. Dunne took it for a murmur of agreement. Actually, however, Mr. Pennyfeather was filled with uneasy dissatisfaction.

Since the police had already interviewed Mrs. Leland, checking up on Ernestine Hollister’s free evenings, it would seem that they had not simply accepted the suicide theory and closed books on the case. And Olney’s lack of excitement over the discovery of the cap might be due to the fact that he already had other investigative plans in mind.

Perhaps he felt, as Mr. Pennyfeather did, that there was a funny odor about that cap, an odor which had nothing to do with its immersion in the sea. The smell of a red herring, as it were.

Mr. Pennyfeather rushed to his class directly from the car line. When the hour was over he stopped at the Students’ Union for another newspaper, an early afternoon edition, and went on to his office to read it.

The news was mostly a rehash of yesterday’s column, and had been moved to an inner page and embellished by a photograph of Miss Hollister and a view of the cliff from which she had fallen.

When he had read what little there was about the case, he picked up his telephone and asked the operator to get him Professor Leland’s residence.

Mrs. Leland had a high, overly precise voice, from which she seemed to exclude nervous tremors by sheer force of will. In the background Mr. Pennyfeather could hear a band playing, or perhaps it was simply the children with a couple of pot lids and a horn.

“This is Pennyfeather … English Department.”

Apparently she spent a minute sorting her memory of him from those of other professors she had met through her husband. “Yes, I remember. No … Jerry, put that down! Sorry, I was speaking to my son.”

“I’ve become … uh … involved, after a fashion, in this affair of Miss Hollister’s death.”

“You have? I mean, how odd. Mary, don’t you dare!”

“You see, I know Miss Caradyne, her cousin. And Mr. Dunne, the uncle.” He omitted saying how recent the latter acquaintance really was; probably Mrs. Leland wouldn’t have heard any long explanation anyway. Her attention was given, as it were, in snatches. “Mr. Dunne and I visited the scene of Miss Hollister’s death this morning and we found a bit of evidence.”

“Oh, indeed?” She sounded as though she were fighting off a bunch of Comanche Indians. There were thuds, screeches, the sound of panting breath.

“A sailor’s cap.”

“Oh?”

She seemed to leave the phone for a minute; Mr. Pennyfeather had the impression that she chased one of the children around the room. Then she came back on the wire. “Oh…. They think she’d been out with someone?” Before he could answer she hurried on. “Something very odd happened here awhile ago. Do you think you have a funny name? I’d never thought so—faculty names are always a little out of the ordinary—But some man wanted it.”

Mr. Pennyfeather, unable to follow, croaked, “Wanted what?”

“A funny name. He said Ernestine had mentioned one, and he couldn’t recall it.”

“Did he identify himself?”

“No-o-o-o!” The word was a long-drawn scream that rattled his eardrum; he jerked the receiver away. Mrs. Leland’s voice returned. “I’m sorry. It was one of the children. Ever since Ernestine left … Did he say who he was? No, he decidedly didn’t. When I asked his name he hung up.”

“That’s why I called you just now,” Mr. Pennyfeather said, “to ask if Miss Hollister had held any regular telephone conversations, or if there were any numbers jotted down in her handwriting.”

“She did receive a lot of calls.” There were whacking noises, as though Mrs. Leland was taking direct measures with her free hand. “But I didn’t pay any attention. She was young and popular and had a lot of intellectual friends.”

He remembered the story Miss Hollister was supposed to have fed the Lelands, all about the artists and writers and their night-long talks. “This man you said called a little while ago—what, exactly, did he say?”

“He said—” Whack, whack. “Bonnie, take Daddy’s razor strop back to the bathroom. Sorry, Mr. Pennyfeather. This man said that Ernestine had mentioned a name to him, a man’s name. And, yes, come to think of it, a professor. He wanted me to run through a list of teachers for him, especially funny ones. I mean, funny names. Of course I didn’t do any such thing. He sounded queer. Scared, I think.”

“If he calls again, offer him my name, will you?”

Her voice took on a tone of surprise. “Why, yes, Mr. Pennyfeather, if you’d like me to.”

“I would, thanks. Did the police go through Miss Hollister’s belongings?”

“Very thoroughly. I hated to let them, but I suppose it was necessary. Are they really sure—” A bump, then loud crying. “—sure that it was suicide?”

“I believe they’re trying to make up their minds.”

“I see.”

“Did Miss Hollister ever explain her absence last week?”

“Not at all. My impression was that she might have been at a mountain resort with some of her friends. Her car looked very dusty. And she had a touch of poison oak. But she didn’t tell me anything.”

The pot-lid band began playing again; Mrs. Leland’s last few words were almost indistinguishable.

“Poison oak?” Mr. Pennyfeather muttered.

“I noticed the blisters on her arm. She kept a bottle of remedy in her bathroom these last few days; it’s still there. If you see Miss Caradyne, will you tell her that Ernestine’s things are all packed for her?”

“I’ll do that.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. “Good-by.”

Muffled screechings answered. Mrs. Leland’s voice seemed to reach the phone from across the room. “Jerry, hang up for Mother, will you?”

The telephone clicked, and the line was dead. Mr. Pennyfeather had the impression that he’d just carried on a conversation with a trapeze artist in the middle of an act.

He sat looking over the edge of his desk at the row of books in the case against the wall; he was not, however, reading titles. His mind was puzzling over the things Mrs. Leland had told him. Ernestine had mentioned a name to someone, a funny name belonging to a professor. Mr. Dunne had said that Ernestine often talked of Mr. Pennyfeather to him. She had, it seemed, stressed his reputation as an amateur detective. Was there a possibility she had said the same to others? To some companion of the night, perhaps?

The poison oak was an item which didn’t seem to fit anywhere. There were no patches of the stuff anywhere near the campus; certainly it didn’t grow at the beaches. The nearest easily accessible districts where it might be encountered were places like Arrowhead and Big Bear Lake, or the resorts in the mountains above San Bernardino.

It was possible, of course, that Ernestine Hollister had spent those lost two days in some isolated cabin with a new-found light of love. Not her usual procedure; he remembered that Rae Caradyne had stressed the point that the sailors didn’t get any return for their money.

He wondered if Captain Olney had noticed the poison-oak remedy in Miss Hollister’s bathroom. Olney’s eyes were sharp; he wouldn’t miss much.

What could Miss Hollister have been doing in the woods?

Miss Emerson looked over her shoulder at Freddy Nixon. Usually when he stared at her, it was at her legs; his sour expression told her what he thought of old maids who kept warm with cotton stockings. Today he was different somehow. He looked as if he had something on his mind. He hadn’t done over ten minutes’ work all day, and old man Lanham was in his office on the other side of a clear glass partition too. Mr. Lanham was going to notice pretty soon and start giving Freddy the devil.

Freddy had a newspaper spread on his knees under the cover of his desk. When he turned the pages his hands shook. The sound of the paper’s rattling was unmistakable. And Mr. Lanham was going to be curious, finally, about Freddy staring into his lap.

Miss Emerson took a pair of scissors from her own drawer, kept them out of sight as she walked to Freddy’s desk on the way to the rest room. “Here,” she hissed. “Cut it out and stick it in your desk. Stick it in a folder, and he won’t know what you’re reading.”

Freddy jumped with an effect of fright that was dreadful. His gaze rose to focus on Miss Emerson’s plain, plump face, the rimless glasses, the pale mouth with its uncertain smile.

His own lips tightened against his teeth, giving him somehow the look of an animal wanting to bite. He had pushed the paper far under the desk, so that she shouldn’t see it. He said, “Keep your snoopy nose out of my business, you old hag.”

Miss Emerson had already slipped the scissors across the desk toward him; she didn’t try to take them back. She walked on steadily and mechanically to the women’s room, a cubbyhole she shared with Mr. Bames’s secretary in the next office, and there she wept for a while over Freddy’s rudeness.

The mirror on the wall showed her herself, a dowdy maiden lady of close to two hundred pounds, with a smooth pink skin, dressed in a brown suit which she had made in the Lucky Art Shoppe under the guidance of the knitting instructor, Miss Schultz. The seat of the skirt always bagged a trifle when she had to sit in it all day. Her hair was done tightly in a bun. Of course she wasn’t a raving beauty, she told the mirror, but Freddy shouldn’t have called her a hag.

He was rude and cruel; a boorish, unmannered boy. She was rather glad all at once that he seemed to be in some kind of trouble. She wondered briefly what could be in the paper he kept rereading under his desk, and made a mental note to buy one on her way home.

When she went self-consciously back to her desk, there were smears of powder over the red blotches around her eyes. She expected Freddy to see them and sneer, but he was busy at his desk, writing something on a sheet of paper with a pen. Perhaps during her absence in the rest room Mr. Lanham had come out and jumped on Freddy for his idleness. At any rate, Freddy now seemed very busy.

The pen skipped busily over the paper.

Tuesday afternoon

DEAR MISS EMERSON:

I am writing this because someone is trying to kill me.

Those words look silly, now that I’ve written them, but they are the truth. I’ve got to write this letter while I still have time.

First I want to say that I’m sorry that I was rude to you just now. My nerves are on edge and I feel kind of savage toward everyone. Everyone else is going to go on living, and I might not.

I don’t know who it is. I can’t get involved with the police by reporting what has happened because I’m afraid they’ll get out of me what I know about the death of Ernestine Hollister.

I picked Ernestine up at a beach dance hall, or under it, rather, since she was sitting on the sand and obviously waiting for a sucker. This was a week ago, last Wednesday night. I had another engagement and she went along. We went to a drinking party at a house in Beverly Hills. I won’t mention whose house it was because I don’t see how it could figure in her death, at all.

Ernestine gave me her telephone number when we parted that night. I called her on Sunday. Someone else answered. I said I’d like to speak to Miss Hall. Whoever this guy was, he corrected me. “You mean Miss Hollister?” I wasn’t sure of course; she could have passed me a fake phone number, but I said yes. Then she came to the phone and it was her all right, and I knew she’d given me a phony name.

We talked for a couple of minutes. Then she said she wanted to see me. She wanted me to make a trip with her late that afternoon. We might be out late, because we were going to the mountains.

8

Mrs. Leland was waiting in the office when Mr. Pennyfeather dropped in at four o’clock after his last class. She was a rather haggard-looking woman with earnest brown eyes, a beautiful complexion, and lipstick which she had apparently put on in the dark. Her clothes gave the impression that she had survived a struggle with savages seeking to disrobe her. On the floor two little girls of three and four were building towers with the contents of Mr. Pennyfeather’s bookcase. A small boy of five was shooting a cap gun out of the window. A pair of rubbers, which Mr. Pennyfeather had neglected to take home after the last rain, were rapidly disintegrating under the onslaughts of a brown Cocker pup.

“I had to bring the children. There simply are no sitters any more.” As if time and patience were growing short, she clicked open her handbag and brought out a silver cigarette case. “I found this in Miss’ Hollister’s room after all her things had been removed. I’m not quite sure that it was hers. We bought the bedroom set secondhand. This case was taped to the back of one of the dresser drawers.”

He took the case, turned it, studied the design upon its lid.

“I don’t want to have the police back again. I heard them talking about my children. I know the children aren’t perfect, but I resented the remarks I heard from the officers who were in my home with my permission. So I brought it to you.”

“You’d never seen this case before?”

“I’m sure that I hadn’t.” She fought off the pup, who had discarded the rubbers and was trying to get into her lap. “That design … it’s rather unpleasant, don’t you think? I’m sure I’d have remembered it.”

“A family crest, I think. The case has rather the look of an antique. Perhaps it was copied from an old card case or a patch box. A lion holding a spear—”

“And that boar’s head, dripping.”

He frowned. “I shouldn’t want to feel that we were impeding the police investigation.”

“Fiddlesticks for the police,” said Mrs. Leland with a trace of heat. “They called my children little monsters.”

“I’ll see what I can find out about this, then.”

“I was sure you’d know exactly what to do.” She stood up; her rising was a signal for a concerted attack on the part of the children and the dog, and Mrs. Leland almost went down again. She looked across the clambering heap at Mr. Pennyfeather, and he was surprised at the warm pleasure in her eyes. Mother love, thought Mr. Pennyfeather, was certainly a remarkable thing. “They’re just babies yet,” she said affectionately. “Put the books back, darlings.”

“They needn’t bother with the books,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. He had a hunch that three- and four-year-olds knew nothing about alphabetical order. “I don’t mind.”

“Call me when you have something.”

She went out, taking her followers with her. Mr. Pennyfeather examined the little silver case from all angles; it was perfectly plain except for the design on its lid. He slipped it into his pocket, rearranged the books, and headed across campus to the library.

In the evening hush Mr. Pennyfeather examined large leather-bound tomes full of heraldic insignia. The design might be anything—continental European, old Scandinavian, a brainstorm etched freehand by a silversmith, an archaic crest dug up by someone who thought it gave class to the case. He had to make a beginning somewhere, so he took down The Families of England, Scotland and Wales; and, on the eleventh page, there it was!

He experienced an almost unbelieving astonishment at his easy luck, but there was no room for doubt. The design stared up at him from the old, time-yellowed page. Perhaps because his mind had been recently occupied with alphabetical order, and this was so close to the front of his book, he had a sudden and ominous premonition of what he was going to find.

He noted the number of the design, turned to the Index.

Acton.

The Index referred him to a second volume for a fuller description of the crest. In the second book he read:

Acton, Chesh.: a demi-lion, rampant, regardant, ar., grasping a spear, or enfiled with a boar’s head, sa., couped, gu.

He copied it down carefully on the back of an assignment sheet. He had no idea what the ar. or the gu. meant, but some hunch told him the sa. following the boar’s head might mean sanguine, or bloody. The boar’s head in the design was most realistically drippy.

There were other branches of the Acton family; their crests were described, and references were given to pages in the book of cuts. Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t bother to look them up. Only the Cheshire branch had a crest which was the duplicate of the one on the silver case.

Sitting there in the twilight of the library, he remembered Mr. Dunne’s words concerning the man who had been a high-school teacher in Lancaster, who had been exposed and ruined as a spreader of narcotics. Miss Hollister had served six months in jail because of those beer-and-goof-ball orgies. Dunne’s voice came back to him: “… She never mentioned Acton’s name, but whenever it came up there was something looked out of her eyes that gave me the creeps.”

Presumably Miss Hollister had blamed Acton for her troubles.

Her ultimate feeling toward the man must have been one of bitter hatred.

He was harried and absent-minded over Mrs. Mauffit’s dinner. Mrs. Mauffit checked the menu: browned beef pot roast, potatoes basted with drippings, string beans fried in oil in which garlic had marinated, cinnamon light-bread buns, homemade currant jelly, chocolate custard pie with whipped cream, and coffee—all things that he liked, or had seemed to like.

She decided regretfully that he must have a touch of dyspepsia.

He left the house in the cool of the evening. The paper he bought at the Students’ Union had nothing in it about Ernestine Hollister; the business about the dance halls should revive interest in the case, but the police were obviously keeping it to themselves with a hope of getting a line on the owner of that white cap, perhaps…. He used a telephone booth in the cafeteria lobby; the cafeteria was dark now, and smelled of clean linen and the disinfectant they used in mopping the floor. He got Mr. Leland at once. Mrs. Leland came to the telephone presently, sounding tired.

“I wanted you to know what I found out about the silver cigarette case,” he told her.

She yawned, over in Pasadena, where three little monsters were safely tucked away after one more day. “Yes? Was it interesting?”

“The crest belongs to the Acton family. English—Cheshire.”

She laughed suddenly. “Cheshire cats?”

“The same. What makes the information important is that a man named Acton played an unfortunate part in Miss Hollister’s life.”

Her tone tightened. “Oh? In what way?”

He hated to reveal the scandal that had touched the girl. Miss Hollister had looked after the children faithfully; Mrs. Leland missed her. He said guardedly, “He was a teacher in Lancaster and it seems he gave parties at which some of the students got a bit wild; something like that. At any rate, she seemed to blame him for the mix-up. Don’t you think you should tell the police about this cigarette case?”

“Dear heaven, no. Wait.” She apparently took a little while to think. “Couldn’t we just say that I’d overlooked packing it among Ernestine’s things, that I dropped it off at your office for you to give to Miss Caradyne?”

“We could, but that wouldn’t bring in the oddity of where you found it.”

“Tell Miss Caradyne I found it hidden at the back of a drawer. Leave it up to her to get hold of the police. They shan’t come here again. I won’t have my children maligned.”

Her tone dismissed the problem as solved.

“By the way,” she concluded, “the man called again, the man who wanted a funny name. I gave him yours as you wanted me to.”

He felt a queerly unsettling excitement. “How long since he called?”

“Not a half hour yet, I’d say.”

“Did you give him Mrs. Mauffit’s telephone number?”

“I forgot. I did tell him he could get in touch with you at school tomorrow.”

“Well, thanks. Something may come of it.”

Her tired voice was gently humorous. “You love mysteries, don’t you, Mr. Pennyfeather?”

“I guess so. Or perhaps I’m just curious.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

He walked out of the cafeteria entry, the paper under his arm, the silver case in his pocket smooth and solid against his palm. Acacia and pepper trees made whispering sounds under the touch of the night wind. The black sky was far away and full of stars.

He came in sight of Nightingale House, whose study lamps gave the place a look of hectic illumination. Earnest, eager students, all concentrating upon their classes and their careers…. He imagined each room with its bent heads, open texts, busy pencils on well-filled notebooks. All of Nightingale’s little ladies must be at home.

Miss Rae Caradyne, however, was not.

“She had a chance to visit with friends, and I advised her to take it, to get away from the campus for a few days,” Mrs. Parsons told him, with bright motherliness. “She’s been so subdued since the death of her cousin.”

There was no sense, Mr. Pennyfeather decided, in handing the silver box over to Mrs. Parsons. Better to keep it himself, or give it to the police. Or to ask Mr. Dunne’s advice. Since the old scandal was apparently going to have to be dug up, one of the family ought to do it.

Walking away from Nightingale House, he frowned over mental timetables, decided that he had a good chance of making the last interurban car back from the city if he started for Santa Monica at once. His waiting period in Clarendon’s little track-side depot was brief, the ride uneventful, the dark labyrinth of city mysteriously unfamiliar by lamplight, and the sea smell, when he neared the coast, like a salty tonic.

When his cab came within sight of Dunne’s little house among the trees Mr. Pennyfeather spent an anxious moment. The house appeared to be dark. Only as the cab turned and braked to a stop did he catch a glimpse of a light at the back, a kitchen or bathroom window softly lit and high in the wall.

He paid off the cab; its red light winked away down the hill.

He had raised his hand to knock when the sound of Dunne’s voice on the other side of the door made him pause.

“I’m afraid I can’t advise you. Your story doesn’t stack up with what we know. I’d say it had a phony ring all around, frankly, meaning no offense. You wouldn’t be one of these fellows who go around confessing crimes, would you?”

“No,” another voice stuttered. “You don’t understand; you won’t try to get it straight—”

“Go to the police, then. They’ll give you plenty of attention,” Dunne said with a chuckle.

“I can’t. I’ve told you why.”

“Oh, yes, you did. Well, you fellows who go about molesting women—”

“It wasn’t anything!”

“But there’s a police record, eh?”

The porch light came on then, illuminating blue-painted boards underfoot, a gray wall, the dim fringes of the eucalyptus out in the yard.

“If I did go to the police—”

“Yes?” said Dunne.

“Would you tell them I’d been here, that I told you this story first?”

“My mouth is no prayer book,” said Dunne with quiet irony.

“But … just any hint that I was trying to be square with them, just so they’ll lay off the rubber hoses—”

“Do whatever you please. If they come here, I’ll tell them I heard you and that I thought the yam stunk.” Dunne opened the door.

Mr. Pennyfeather caught a glimpse of a young man with his hat pulled down, his overcoat collar up. In the instant he passed there was just time to gain an impression of a small mustache in a narrow, not unhandsome face, and a pair of eyes in which fear and fury mingled.

“Damn you…. Damn you, then,” the young man cried, hurrying from the porch.

Dunne was staring in surprise at Mr. Pennyfeather. “Lord love us! I didn’t hear you knock!”

“I hadn’t as yet. I’d just arrived.”

Dunne’s glance grew sharper. “Did you hear any of that?” His head jerked in the direction of the hurrying figure almost lost now in the gloom. Without waiting for an answer: “Rather unsavory fellow … I think he must be one of these characters who try to horn in on sensational stuff, the sort who write mysterious letters and pretend to know the location of the body and that rot … you know what I mean.”

“What was his story?”

Dunne laughed briefly and scornfully, and stood aside. “Come on in. I’ve been out in the kitchen. Ate a late meal. That fellow slipped in at the back. Almost scared me to death.” The front room was without lights. Dunne switched on the overhead bulb. On the easel the graceful sea scene in its frame remained unfinished. A bit of pink coral had been added, some touches of glittering iridescence painted on the hull of the little ship, but there were still empty spots. As if he saw Mr. Pennyfeather’s interest in it, Dunne added, “I haven’t had a chance to work. Olney had me back again.”

“He did? What did he want?”

“Had me spot the place we found that cap. Do you know, he’s got a lot of huge enlargements, photos of that beach and headland. Taken at night. Grisly-looking, forlorn.”

“This young man I met on the porch—”

Dunne’s red beard jutted. “I ought to have kept him here and called the coppers. That’s what he wanted, really. Someone to get hopped up over his yarn and take it seriously. A chance to pose for the newspaper boys, and all that hysterical drama of being fingerprinted and rubber-hosed. A masochist—I think that’s the word I want. Anyway, I can’t stand the type.”

“He claimed to know something concerning your niece?”

Dunne motioned Mr. Pennyfeather into a chair. “He tells a weird story of picking her up on the beach last Wednesday night and spending an evening with her at a party. The next he saw her was on his day off, Sunday; she’s supposed to have asked him to come with her to the mountains.” Dunne leaned forward in his chair, his greenish eyes full of contempt. “He claims they went to some cabin near Arrowhead, and she ran into trouble and he skipped out and left her. Only the police aren’t going to believe that last part, because he has a record for molesting women.”

Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t answer Dunne’s disdainful grin; he was, in fact, quite sober.

Dunne lit a cigarette with sharp, irritable movements. “The man’s a crackpot, of course.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Dunne dropped the cigarette, fumbled for it on the arm of his chair. “Eh? Why’d you say that?”

“Mrs. Leland told me that when Miss Hollister returned after her two days’ absence last week, her car was quite dusty and she had a touch of poison oak on her arms. Mrs. Leland had the impression she might have been at a mountain resort. Certainly if she had run into poison oak, she’d done so away from the beach.”

Dunne puffed furiously on his cigarette. “Good lord, you mean there might be something to the fellow after all?” With a sudden burst of energy he sprang to the door, pulled it open, thrust his head through. “Don’t see him. Can’t have gone far though. Wait here; I’ll have him back, and you can listen to him.”

He went out, shutting the door. Evidently a brief search on foot proved unproductive, for Mr. Pennyfeather presently heard the car go past the house from the garage.

The street into which Freddy Nixon turned was darker than the one he had left. He choked with a compelling desire to hide himself, to keep to the unlighted blocks, and at the same time to see everywhere about him, to examine houses and walls and shrubbery by means of a magic X-ray sharpness in search of the thing he feared, the nameless shape with the knife or the hatchet or the brick. Last night it had been a brick toppling off a wall. A brick that had almost crushed his skull. No accident, that….

Terror snapped at his heels; his legs tingled with a desire to run. In the chaos of his mind two things stood out like signposts in a nightmare. First, it was long since time he should have gone to the police, told his story, told them frankly too about the couple of times he’d been picked up at the beach trying to make the acquaintance of girls much like Ernestine Hollister—unlike her in that they didn’t wish to know him in return—and let the police question or beat him until they were satisfied that he was telling the truth. There was no use going on as he was, trying to stay on the fringe of the affair by contacting people like Dunne and Pennyfeather—whoever Pennyfeather was. A professor. A detective. He growled in his throat, a sound full of agony and dismay at his own stupidity.

The second fact that terrified him was that he was known to the murderer.

Over and over his mind plucked at the puzzle. How had he been identified so quickly? Even if the murderer had caught a glimpse of him from the cabin, as he fought and shuddered and stumbled his way down that hillside, how had the murderer known him?

Ernestine Hollister and Freddy Nixon had no mutual acquaintances whatever … on this earth … anywhere….

The street seemed suddenly windier and colder, and his mind checked its runaway panic and did a frantic double-take. He came to a slow halt in the fog-smelling darkness, put up a shaking hand to rub his temples.

Of course they’d had a mutual acquaintance. Old Mrs. Lacoste.

He tried to fit it together, but nothing happened.

He turned, still pressing his temples, and began to cross the street. The sound of a motor roused him and he looked up, searching for lights.

There were no lights, and the fog concealed the gleaming radiator until it was too late. The car was there, a juggernaut, and Freddy Nixon was there, its victim.

And Death was there, too, waiting for the not unhandsome fellow who had liked to linger on the beach to pick up girls.

9

When Dunne returned to the living room, the red beard and the shabby sweater were frosted with little drops of fog, and his skin had a bluish pallor, as though he were very cold. He went quickly to the fireplace, took matches from his pocket, knelt and struck a match, and touched flame to a pile of paper dishes, newspapers, and driftwood. The fire came alive slowly, the color brightening the cluttered room and flickering in the depths of the little sea picture.

“It’s raw outside … fog swimming in like a tidal wave. Brrr—” He rubbed his hands above the blaze.

Mr. Pennyfeather asked with a touch of impatience, “You didn’t find this man who claimed to know your niece?”

“Nixon? No.” Dunne spread his fingers and studied them against the fire glow with an air of deep abstraction. “I can’t see how he disappeared so fast. Something queer about that fellow. His story, now … Ernestine didn’t know anyone at Arrowhead. I remember there was some kind of deal offered, where she could have had a cabin up there cheaply for the summer, but she didn’t take it because she figured she’d be alone. Look, I’m so cold my teeth are rattling out of their sockets. I’m going to fix some hot rum. Want some?”

“Thank you, I’d like it. By the way, I can’t be here for long, though. I came just to bring you this.” Mr. Pennyfeather removed the silver case from his coat pocket and held it out toward the other man.

Dunne didn’t make a move to take it. His glance remained fixed on it with an immobility that covered, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, some strong and unsettling emotion. When Dunne spoke his tone was hoarse. “Where did you get it?”

Mr. Pennyfeather was watching him keenly. “You know what it is?”

“Of course I know. Acton and his damned family tree…. Their crest, all that rot. I think he had that lion embroidered on his underclothes.”

“Mrs. Leland found it in the room Miss Hollister had occupied, taped to the back of a dresser drawer.”

Dunne walked across the room and fell into a chair. Though the bluish pallor remained, there were traces of sweat on his upper lip.

Mr. Pennyfeather went on: “I thought I’d talk to you about it—that you might know how she came to have it. Also whether the police shouldn’t be told. Mrs. Leland thought not. The officers weren’t complimentary about her youngsters.”

Dunne’s voice burst forth. “Why should the police have to know? Poor Ernie’s dead and gone, and digging up dirt won’t help her.”

“You might think a moment or two about the manner of her dying.”

Dunne jerked at his beard. “So what?”

“Once in a while, very rarely, people are murdered just for fun or on an impulse or because the murderer likes that kind of thrill and can’t resist enjoying it again. Mostly, however, murders are committed for very practical reasons.”

Dunne’s greenish eyes looked heavy-lidded, withdrawn. “I suppose so.”

“For reasons like money or revenge or safety. Safety makes a very good motive. If Miss Hollister had come across the trail of this man Acton recently, would she be apt, do you think, to try to expose him?”

“He’d been exposed. Lord, they pilloried him in Lancaster.”

“But he didn’t stay in Lancaster. He went away, and in the years since he may have created a new and desirable life for himself. What did he teach in the high school, incidentally?”

“Music. He had a good voice; I’ve heard him sing. I believe he was supposed to be something special on the piano.”

“Music is one branch of learning in which, I’m pretty sure, the private instructors outnumber the public-school teachers. Acton could easily be settled in a profitable, respected existence as a music coach.”

Dunne said nothing; he wore a look of indecision, as though trying to make up his mind to a new course of thought or action. “Aren’t you forgetting that sailor’s cap we found on the beach?”

“That sailor’s cap,” said Mr. Pennyfeather distinctly, “was a fake, a plant. Captain Olney knew the truth about it in the beginning, and I did too as soon as I got away from you and had time to think.”

Dunne sat up straight. “But it fitted in with what we knew!”

“All too slickly. I can’t help but wonder whether you were really in that cot on the porch all night, or whether you didn’t make a midnight run up the coast after you were sure I’d dropped off to sleep.”

“Me?” Dunne got out of his chair and went off toward another room, where he proceeded to rattle pots and pans, and clank bottles together. His abrupt departure to fix the hot rum had the air of a retreat. When he came back, he had assumed a mockingly humorous manner. “You’re preferring a grave charge against me: obstructing justice.”

He set down a tray on which were two little mugs of steamy buttered rum. He handed a mug to Mr. Pennyfeather, indicated the nutmeg can on the tray.

“I had the idea you might have thought you were expediting justice instead,” Mr. Pennyfeather told him. “You were openly skeptical of the suicide theory. You wanted to rouse the police out of their seeming lethargy. The news-papermen disgusted you. A bit of manufactured evidence, a not-too-bright witness, would seem to fill the bill.” He drank the rum. It was very good, hot and heady and medicinal-tasting.

“Well, you’ve given me a decent out, anyway,” Dunne said philosophically. “I’ll admit I did run up the coast and fix things. At first I meant to let you go down to the beach alone and find the cap—much more innocent-looking that way—and then I was afraid the thing might be washed away, or that you wouldn’t notice it—”

“So you abandoned the pose of needing to get drunk and rushed down to check up. That was an error.”

Dunne grinned wryly. “Well, one thing you have wrong: I didn’t consider you a not-too-bright witness. I knew you were sharp, sharp enough to impress the coppers. That’s why I chose you to find the cap.”

“Thanks,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

“Of course, I didn’t know yet that the coppers had already made those pictures of the place, huge things … you’d notice a dropped pin in one of them.”

Mr. Pennyfeather put the case upon the tray which had held the mugs. “What do you want to do about this?”

Dunne looked bitterly at the engraved crest. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to wait until we can get this man—Nixon, I think you said his name was—and his story?”

“I advised him to go to the police.” Dunne went over to the fire to put on more driftwood. “Maybe he’ll do that. I don’t think he’ll be back here.”

Mr. Pennyfeather sipped rum and thought in silence. Finally he said, “Nixon told you he took your niece to a party of some kind?”

“Wednesday night, yes.”

“Did he say where it was or who was there?”

Dunne frowned at the leaping fire. “He was stammering and sputtering so … I got the impression somehow it was a very private kind of party. The kind I’d have thought poor Ernie, considering her attitude and experience, would have left strictly alone.”

“You didn’t catch any address?”

“No, nothing like that at all,” Dunne said firmly. He came to the center of the room with an air of having suddenly made up his mind. “Look, suppose we leave this business of Acton’s cigarette case until tomorrow. I’ll sleep on it and call you. Will noon be all right?”

“I’ll be in my office. I’ll give you the number there.” Mr. Pennyfeather took out pencil and paper, thinking meanwhile that there was a chance Nixon was the man who had called Mrs. Leland, wanting a funny name, and that a wait in his office might result in another call beside Dunne’s.

At seven o’clock in the morning the fog, having been driven inland by the wind during the night, lay thick on the campus, made dripping ghosts of the eucalyptus trees, and gave the library towers a look of misty remoteness.

Mr. Pennyfeather dropped by the Students’ Union and picked up a paper. The headlines stopped him at the door of the lobby. He went on out slowly, reading as he walked, bumping into a couple of students and giving fresh life to the legend of his bumbling absent-mindedness.

When he had finished the story in his office, he tried to call Captain Olney in Santa Monica, but Olney was out. The operator could find no listing for Stephen Dunne. Mrs. Parsons, when he had called her from her breakfast, was starchily vague about Miss Rae Caradyne’s return.

He went back to the newspaper article. Nixon had been found under a hedge by a householder returning from a late show. He seemed to have been a hit-and-run victim, with variations. The principal variations were the presence of a length of clothesline, tightly cinched around his throat, and the turned-out condition of his pockets.

The householder had identified the clothesline as some of his own, cut from the poles in the side yard behind the hedge, which would make it seem that Nixon had been run down first and then dragged away to be strangled at leisure with whatever was handy.

Mr. Pennyfeather took the paper with him across the campus to the library, got himself settled with a book of metropolitan maps, turned to the Santa Monica section, and hunted up the householder’s address.

From Dunne’s place the address was six or seven blocks, depending on the route, and not precisely a direct line to the streetcar. Nixon had obviously made a detour off the main street. Had he been enticed, frightened, driven? The paper made some mention of the lack of illumination in the district—new street lamps were being thought about in the city council, and this would seem to point up the need—and so it might easily be that Nixon had been trying to hide himself.

No word whatever concerning a possible connection with Ernestine Hollister’s death. Did Olney know? Was he simply keeping quiet?

On an inner page was a photograph, taken by flash bulb, of the sprawled body of Freddy Nixon under the hedge. The turned-out pockets and the ends of the clothesline were distinct, but Freddy’s hunched back hid his face, as though at the end he had turned away from the world that had treated him so rudely.

Mr. Pennyfeather returned to his office and found his phone ringing.

Dunne’s voice sputtered in his ear. “Pennyfeather? I’m on my way to Olney’s office now. I wanted you to know. I’m going to tell him everything. Especially, I’m going to tell him about being out in my car last night—” He broke off, waited, as though expecting Mr. Pennyfeather to say something. “Look, man, I swear I didn’t see him.”

“Perhaps you didn’t see Nixon,” Mr. Pennyfeather agreed, “but you saw something.”

“What?”

“I said you saw something, to come in pale and shaking as you were.”

“Oh.” Dunne’s breathing made a rushing sound in the telephone, as though he were laboring under excitement or fear. “Pretty sharp, aren’t you? Yes, much sharper than I thought.”

“What are you going to tell Olney?”

“Simply that I went out to look for Nixon and didn’t find him. You can’t prove I was any different when I came back; I’ll call you a liar to your face if you try it!” He slammed the receiver.

“What a huff he’s in all of a sudden,” said Mr. Pennyfeather reflectively. He hadn’t more than taken his hand off the phone when it rang again.

Someone was sorting tin cans in a boiler factory…. No, it was Mrs. Leland. Her first few words were lost under the din. Then he caught her voice: “… and he’s the same one; I remember the name: Freddy Nixon. I thought at the time, A grown man and still calling himself Freddy! It’s a child’s nickname. BE QUIET! It’s the children, Mr. Pennyfeather; they’re very lively early in the morning. Anyway, he’s the one who wanted your name, and when I gave it to him he muttered some exclamation that made me think it was what he wanted. And then just this morning I noticed the telephone number written on the wall. We have a bunch; I wash them off with special cleaner every Monday, except for the ones we need regularly, and I’m sure it’s not one of ours … STOP! … STOP! …”

Pandemonium came over the wire while Mr. Pennyfeather waited. He caught a noise of rushing water, a great hollow thumping, as though an empty tub was rolling down a rocky mountain, then a strange, loud silence.

Mrs. Leland’s steps, coming back to the telephone, sounded as if she were eighty-five years old and blind.

“I locked the children in the service porch. They’re unusually lively today. As I was saying—” She drew a deep breath, almost a sigh. “Our telephone is here in the kitchen because I can answer it more easily that way, and the nice white wall all around it makes a dandy place to jot down numbers. I used to keep a pad, but the children kept getting it, and once our littlest girl put it down the toilet and we had a plumber’s bill. Where was I? Oh yes, the numbers on the wall. I wash out the ones we won’t need on Mondays—I mean, most Mondays—but since Miss Hollister is gone I’ve been awfully busy and I forgot.”

“You mean there is a telephone number written on your wall that you think she may have left?”

“Yes, and I’m just turning it over to you the way I did that silver case. It’s Oxbridge 2-72462. It happens I know that exchange. I’ve a sister living in Beverly Hills, and that’s where it is.”

“I’ll see what I can find out about it.”

“I suppose the death of this man Nixon will have them working again on Ernestine’s affairs.”

“Yes, I imagine so.”

“They weren’t really convinced that it was suicide even at the first, were they?”

“They were waiting.”

“I should have called them and told them about this man and his request for a funny name. If I had, if I hadn’t been so sensitive over what they said about the children, he might still be alive.”

“He must have had plenty of opportunity to go to the police. I wouldn’t worry over your part in it.”

“Good-by.”

“Good-by.”

Mr. Pennyfeather hung up; the telephone rang in his hands.

It was Dunne again. “I know I just made an ass of myself. Look, this is what happened. I must have heard that fellow’s dying scream. I heard a horrible screech in the fog … I couldn’t find anyone … I got scared and ran home. One word from you, old man, and those coppers will have me jumping through so many hoops—”

“Get off the line, please. I have a call to make.”

He hung up on Dunne’s demands for understanding.

The telephone at Oxbridge 2-72462 rang for a long while before anyone answered. The voice that came on the wire was full, pleasant, and well modulated: an educated woman’s voice. Some subtle tone he couldn’t identify, some lack or flatness, betrayed the fact that the woman was not young.

“Hello,” said the voice.

“Is this Oxbridge two, seven two four six two, please?” Mr. Pennyfeather asked in what he tried to make an official-sounding tone.

“Yes, of course it is.”

“Who is speaking, please?”

With dry suspicion: “Don’t you know?”

Some desperate urge made him take the hundred-to-one chance. “Is this Mrs. Acton?”

“I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number.” Definitely the woman was going to hang up on him.

“Wait. Won’t you give me your name?”

“Why should I?”

“We … we’re making a survey in Beverly Hills—”

“By long distance?” She was chuckling. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Pennyfeather. I’m in … uh … educational work.”

“We don’t require any books.”

Well, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, I’m balling things up anyway; I may as well ball them up good. “Do you know a young woman named Ernestine Hollister?”

There wasn’t any reply for a minute. “Who?”

“Miss Ernestine Hollister.”

“I don’t think so.” The tone seemed changed, slowed, uncertain. And older, much older….

“Or a man named Freddy Nixon?”

“Why?”

“Have you seen this morning’s paper?”

“No. I don’t see well enough to read newspapers. What about it?”

“Freddy Nixon is dead. He was murdered last night after he’d left the house of Ernestine Hollister’s uncle.”

Now there was utter stillness on the other end of the line. Mr. Pennyfeather thought, presently, that he caught a brief sound of sobbing.

“Won’t you please give me your name and address?” he pleaded into the telephone.

“Your party has hung up, sir,” said the switchboard operator brightly.

10

Under the bright morning sunlight the house looked large and very Spanish. The lacy shadow of its ironwork balconies was sharp on the creamy stucco. The spider palms, the banana trees, and the bamboo which shaded the walk gave forth a cool smell of greenery.

Mr. Pennyfeather checked the house number against the slip in his pocket. The girl at the college switchboard, an old friend, had been able to do for him what he, as a private citizen, had been unable to do for himself; she’d coaxed the address and the subscriber’s name from the Beverly Hills operator.

He found himself looking into a tiled open entry, a sort of narrow porch, which was closed by an ironwork grille. He pushed a black button on the wall. Presently a maid in a striped morning uniform looked out. “How do you do, sir?”

“Is Mr. or Mrs. Cullens at home?”

“No, sir.”

An impasse; he hesitated. The voice on the telephone had seemed very old there at the last; there might be a chance there was a grandmother…. “Is the elderly lady in?”

“Mrs. Lacoste? I don’t think she feels well this morning.”

“Would you ask her if she’d see me?”

The maid’s face became slightly masklike. “May I have your name, sir?”

“Pennyfeather.”

“Just a moment, please.” The maid went away into the house.

When she came back there was a certain reserve, a kind of wariness, about her, as though the old lady had put her on guard. “Would you mind stating your business with Mrs. Lacoste, sir?”

“Tell her I’m calling about Mr. Nixon.”

“Thank you, sir.”

This time she was gone longer; long enough, in fact, for Mr. Pennyfeather to wonder if she was ever coming back. A bunch of blackbirds were walking around over the lawn, looking with bright orange eyes for grubs and bugs. A gray Persian kitten lay crouched in the fringes of the bamboo, watching the blackbirds and twitching his whiskers.

All at once the maid came out and pushed some sort of catch in the ironwork grille and pulled it open wide. “Come inside, sir.”

Beyond the tiled entry was a wide, carpeted hall. The maid led him past closed doors into a kind of solarium. The sunlight, reflecting into the house through a lot of uncurtained windows, was overly bright and made the room very warm. It was a big room with a dark beamed ceiling and a great deal of wicker furniture. Mr. Pennyfeather caught a glimpse of a fountain and a cageful of canaries; then a voice spoke and he turned.

She was very tiny. Her face was so wrinkled that it made Mr. Pennyfeather think of crumpled parchment. The innumerable creases and lines had the effect of concealing whatever emotion she felt: frowns, smiles, pouts—they were all there together, deeply cut, in an inextricable confusion. Only her eyes, jet-black and glittering, expressed her interest in him.

“Won’t you sit down, Officer?” She looked briefly at the maid. “I want a brandy, my girl.”

The maid hesitated.

“If you don’t get it for me, I’ll ask this policeman to do it.”

The maid looked at Mr. Pennyfeather with respect and withdrew.

When she had sipped a bit of the brandy, Mrs. Lacoste spoke again. “I played a trick on you, Officer. I haven’t anything to say concerning the death of the boy. I needed the brandy badly and I kept you here until I got it. But as far as my knowing anything that might help you, you’d just as well go now.”

Mr. Pennyfeather sat forward in the wicker chair. “I’m not a policeman.”

“Oh?” Her eyes snapped about over his figure. Then she shook her head. “No, you’re not, are you? I had my mind on the brandy, or I should have noticed. What are you, then?”

“I’m … simply interested in the case.”

“A meddler, then. I like that better. I can understand meddlers.”

He blushed a little. “Actually, I’m a teacher at Clarendon College.”

He saw that she was trying to connect the statement to something she’d heard or thought of before. She hesitated; for a moment she looked puzzled. “That’s up near the foothills … Glendora, that district, isn’t it? Why are you interested in poor Freddy, then?”

“I had a student named Ernestine Hollister—”

“Wait a minute.” Her hands, holding the brandy tumbler, began to shake. “You’re the man who called me up earlier today. Very early, in fact. It was just after my daughter had left for the bazaar at the Woman’s Club. I’d forgotten the name—your name, I mean. But the girl’s—” She stood up with an effort, looking no taller than a child. “I’m sorry, sir. You’ll have to excuse me.”

Tears had come into her eyes; he guessed that the memory of the shock, the unpleasantness, of his message on the phone had returned vividly.

“Won’t you please talk with me a little longer?” he asked humbly. “We’re all in the dark on this affair, the Hollister girl’s death and—”

“What did you say?”

“Miss Hollister. She’s dead. Didn’t you know that?”

She wiped the tears off the parchment cheeks with the back of her hand, sat down slowly, the jet-black eyes seeming to grow enormous. “Freddy brought a girl here about a week ago. Wednesday evening. She called herself Miss Hall.” Mrs. Lacoste smoothed her black taffeta skirt over and over with a twisted hand on which the knotted fingers trembled. “But I think I heard Freddy call her Ernestine.”

Mr. Pennyfeather felt excitement race through him. “What was she like?”

Mrs. Lacoste, making an effort, controlled the aimless trembling of her body. “Her clothes were absurd. I mean, from a woman’s point of view. They were too tight in the wrong places, too glittery, too— Well, her costume was that of a dance-hall girl. Or a prostitute.”

Mr. Pennyfeather waited, hardly breathing. It seemed that the case was opening up before his eyes, that the ultimate secret might come out at any moment….

Mrs. Lacoste brushed at the corners of her eyes, took a sip of brandy, went on in a stronger tone: “The girl herself had a hard, guarded manner, but in the way she walked and handled herself there were signs of breeding. She’d had a good home, or she’d been raised in expensive schools. For years I’ve had nothing to do except study people and I know what I’m talking about. My granddaughter Loretta would give her eyes to have that girl’s graceful poise.”

He couldn’t wait to get the answer to the question that must mean the end. “Whom did she meet here?”

The jet eyes moved toward him blankly. “Meet? Just me.”

He thought that he could not have heard her correctly, for in his mind, full-grown, had been the theory that Ernestine Hollister had met the man named Acton on Wednesday night, had spent two days following him, making sure of him, and had taken Freddy Nixon with her to run him finally to earth on the Sunday night she was murdered. It was such a beautiful theory: it took into account Ernestine Hollister’s natural desire for revenge against the man, the caution she might have shown if he had changed or disguised himself a bit, and a final smashing attempt at exposure which had obviously backfired.

Mrs. Lacoste was speaking. “You said that this girl is dead. How did she die?”

“It seemed at first that she had jumped off a cliff into the sea, above Malibu.”

The little old lady searched his face. “She killed herself?”

“The police were supposed to think so. Actually, she must have been beaten by her murderer, if not to the point of death, at least into helplessness, and thrown off the cliff in an effort to account for her injuries.”

“I see.” Mrs. Lacoste shuddered. “But what had Freddy to do with this?”

“He was with her at least part of Sunday evening, when she died.”

“He didn’t know her very well,” Mrs. Lacoste said slowly. “When he brought her here Wednesday night, they’d only just become acquainted.”

“She seems to have wanted him along, on a jaunt up to Arrowhead. What I can’t get out of my head is that something about her visit here must have started her on the trail that led to her death.”

“That’s quite impossible, sir,” said Mrs. Lacoste guardedly.

“There were two men in Miss Hollister’s past.” Mr. Pennyfeather went on to sketch in briefly the pertinent details of Ernestine Hollister’s marriage, the scandal concerning Acton. He became engrossed in his own story, in the theories he was determined to wring out of it. Only when some minutes had passed did he notice the change in Mrs. Lacoste.

She was sitting quite straight. There was a look in her eyes as if she’d just seen a ghost.

“Did I say something to startle you?” he asked anxiously.

“No … nothing.” She seemed to shake herself. The parchment skin held no color at all; the jet eyes were half hidden under the frail yellowish lids, and their gaze on Mr. Pennyfeather gave him a sort of chill. “Go on, please.”

He tried to pick up the thread of his narrative, but now there was another interruption. A tall girl came into the sunroom from the hall.

Mr. Pennyfeather almost fell over himself in the process of getting to his feet. He had, of course, known that the family name was Cullens—not a common surname—and old Mrs. Lacoste had mentioned a granddaughter named Loretta. What his mind hadn’t done was to put the two together.

She came forward, holding out a hand. “Mr. Pennyfeatherl How nice, and what a surprise!”

He gave her his own hand lamely, and she squeezed it with friendly warmth.

Loretta Cullens had a long, thin, intelligent face; she could have had a sort of horsy handsomeness except for her mouth, which was too small and had too many little white teeth in it, giving her when she smiled a sort of babyish delicacy. Her best features were her eyes—dark brown, warm, and lively. She was tall, too slim for her height, and she could well, as her grandmother had said, have used some of Miss Hollister’s well-bred grace. She kept hold of Mr. Pennyfeather’s hand, smiling, while she said, “You’ve met Grammy? You already knew her?”

Mrs. Lacoste seemed to control an impulse to order the girl from the room. “Mr. Pennyfeather is here on a business matter.”

“Well—” Loretta stepped back, found a chair, sat down in it. “Aren’t you still at Clarendon?”

“Yes, I’m still there,” said Mr. Pennyfeather, sitting down.

“I’m doing graduate work at U.C.L.A.,” Loretta told him. “I guess you know that, though. I get my Master’s in February. Then perhaps I’ll find a teaching job.”

Mr. Pennyfeather wanted to ask her if she still played tennis as frequently as she used to. It seemed that he never passed her on the campus outside of class hours that she didn’t have on a white shirt and a pair of black shorts and carry a racket in a green canvas case. She’d been an exceptional English major, though; quick and sensitive and original. He couldn’t recall ever having given her less than an A in any of his classes.

She expected him to say something now, so he blurted, “It doesn’t seem that you’ve been away from us for two years.”

“Doesn’t it?” She crossed her ankles, sticking her feet out in front of her on the tiled floor. They were pretty big feet to be handled in that manner. Mrs. Lacoste looked at them and frowned. “I loved Clarendon. You were all so decent there, such a decent bunch of professors. Is your business with Daddy? Is he going to build you a house?”

The instant she said this a whole segment of stuff he’d known about her while she was in school fell into place in his mind.

Her father was a contractor who had survived several brushes with the government over sharp practices among the veterans who needed homes. Her mother was a bigwig in club work; she’d come out to Clarendon while Loretta was in school there and given the faculty wives a talk on how to organize themselves and raise money with food sales and card parties. Mr. Pennyfeather recalled Mrs. Todt’s comment, that Mrs. Cullens had been appalled when the truth was broken to her about faculty salaries, and the fact that the wives couldn’t charge what she thought they ought to charge for their bridge parties and have anyone at all come to play. And then, there was something else … some fugitive, rather embarrassing thing that he couldn’t quite remember. It had to do with Loretta Cullens missing some classes, a remark he’d overheard from one of the other students. And tears … Tears behind a hedge, when no one was supposed to know.

Mrs. Lacoste was answering Loretta in his place. “It’s about Freddy Nixon. A private matter, dear.”

Loretta’s brown eyes grew puzzled. “The gardener’s nephew? Does Mr. Pennyfeather know him?”

“In a way.”

Mr. Pennyfeather gathered that he was not to let Loretta know what had happened to Freddy. Presumably she wouldn’t notice the papers. He wondered what closet old Mrs. Lacoste intended to put her in when the police came. Mrs. Lacoste rose now from her chair. “If I learn of anything which might help you, I’ll telephone. Would you care to leave a number where I could reach you?”

Loretta saw that her grandmother was dismissing him. “But, Grammy, I wanted to talk!”

“Some other time,” said Mrs. Lacoste firmly. “Mr. Pennyfeather is very busy just now. Aren’t you?” Her eyes compelled him; he meekly nodded his head.

He rose, too, obediently; and then the thing he hadn’t been able to remember came to him like a clap of thunder. His skinny neck was suddenly tight inside his collar, and his temples burned. Probably he just stood there looking blank; Loretta gave him a final smile and turned to go.

He croaked at her crudely, “Did you ever have news of your brother, Miss Cullens?”

She stopped with a little jerk, turned to look at him, a kind of surprised disbelief coming into her face. “What did you say?”

All that grief when she had thought she was alone, all those classes she must have hated to miss, the dragged-out look she’d worn for the rest of that spring semester … he remembered these, and knew what he was doing to her feelings, that it was dirty. “Didn’t you have a brother who was reported missing overseas … something like that?”

The babyish mouth puckered and grew pale. “No, sir. Robbie didn’t—didn’t—”

“Please go now, Mr. Pennyfeather,” said Mrs. Lacoste.

He turned to her, found the jet eyes blazing. “Won’t you tell me the truth?”

“I have no idea what you mean by the truth, sir.”

He felt her hatred crackle at him in the silence. “I should think talking to me would be easier than submitting to the tactics of the police,” he offered humbly. “They won’t have any regard for your secrets. And you’ll have a houseful of official detectives as soon as they get hold of the connection between Ernestine Hollister and Freddy Nixon.”

Mrs. Lacoste looked at her granddaughter. “Will you leave us, please? We have, it seems, a few more things to say.” Loretta moved to the door with an air of confusion.

“Tell Jessica I’d like a bit more brandy,” Mrs. Lacoste told her.

Loretta disappeared. Mrs. Lacoste stood straight and still beside her chair. “That was most cruel, saying what you did to Loretta.”

“You were going to turn me out.”

“Why shouldn’t I? You admit that you’re simply a meddler, without any standing in this case. Why shouldn’t I just shut the door on you?”

“Do you know where your grandson is?”

“Why should I tell you if I do?” The maid came in with another glass of brandy, frowning, and with her mouth pursed up with disapproval. Mrs. Lacoste took the glass and drank a few sips from it and waited until the maid had gone again. “I don’t know where he is—none of us do. How did you hear of him?”

“Something one of the students said during the time your granddaughter missed her classes. I’m sure there wasn’t anything in the papers.”

“They didn’t publicize desertions,” said old Mrs. Lacoste dryly. “Of course you know that you’re presuming on an almost incredible coincidence, believing that my unfortunate grandson and the man this Hollister girl married are the same person.”

“Aren’t they?”

Mrs. Lacoste shook her head. “We had no news of any marriage.”

“I seem to recall Miss Hollister’s uncle saying that her husband had broken off with his family before she married him.”

“A not uncommon situation.”

“And the very fact that she came here alone with Nixon—a situation she avoided under ordinary circumstances—must mean that she was on some sort of trail. He wasn’t her usual type of beau. There was something here that drew her. There had to be.” Mr. Pennyfeather walked about with jerky, impatient steps, building it up in his mind.

Mrs. Lacoste watched him; he could see the debate going on behind the parchment mask. Even the crisscross tangle of wrinkles couldn’t conceal all that fear and indecision. Finally she took an enormous gulp of the brandy, stood still as if getting it down, then spoke. “You said that Ernestine Hollister had a silver cigarette case among her belongings, a thing with a crest on it.”

He’d forgotten all about Acton; he paused to stare at her. “Yes, she had that.”

“She found it here,” Mrs. Lacoste said in a tone of faint regret. “It belongs to a man who calls himself Hurlbut. He gives my granddaughter piano lessons. He answers to the description you gave me of Acton.”

11

Captain Olney didn’t act as though Mr. Pennyfeather had done him a favor; he acted as if he were a farmer who suspected that someone was trying to sell him a pig in a poke. “You didn’t happen to have a photograph with you, by any chance, so that this Mrs. Lacoste could make a positive identification of Ernestine Hollister?”

“No, of course I hadn’t any photograph,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

“Nor the case, either, so that she could identify that?”

“I told you that I’d left the case with Mr. Dunne.”

“So you did. Funny that neither you nor Mrs. Leland thought that the sheriff’s office might like a look at it.”

This was what stuck in his craw, then, Mr. Pennyfeather thought: the sly, ambitious meddlings of the amateur. “I’ve told you of Mrs. Leland’s feelings. Incidentally, the next time you send men out there you might check up to make sure they’re married men with children of their own.”

“Pretty terrible, huh?” Unexpectedly, Olney grinned.

“As for myself,” Mr. Pennyfeather went on, “I admit the error; but it seemed that Miss Hollister’s family should have some warning if the old scandal about Acton was going to be dragged out publicly.”

Olney grew sober again, built little peaks with the tips of his fingers, narrowed his cold blue eyes, pursed his mouth. Evidently a lecture was coming. Mr. Pennyfeather braced himself, recalling previous official scoldings which had left him browbeaten but intact.

The door opened; a uniformed subordinate stuck his head in. “There’s a woman here, sir, to see you about the Nixon case.”

“Who is she?”

The man in the doorway glanced significantly at Mr. Pennyfeather, who tried to seem invisible. “Her name is Emerson. She worked with Nixon in an office downtown.”

“Okay.” Olney got up and said politely to Mr. Pennyfeather, “Will you wait here, please?”

Mr. Pennyfeather waited quite awhile. When Olney returned he seemed brisker, grimmer, and very businesslike. He sat down with an air of having accomplished, or finished, something, but he didn’t start to talk again at once. He drummed his nails on the desk blotter and frowned at the wall above Mr. Pennyfeather’s head, where a faded portrait of President Taft hung slightly askew.

Finally. Olney pushed a buzzer on his desk. When the subordinate looked in, he said, “Are they through with that letter?”

“It’s already on the teletype, sir. I believe they’re doing fingerprints now.”

“I want it when they get through.”

“Yes, sir.” The uniformed man closed the door.

Olney pinned Mr. Pennyfeather with a ferociously suspicious gaze. “I’m going to let you see a most important piece of evidence in regard to Nixon’s murder. But I want you to keep your mouth shut about it.”

Mr. Pennyfeather yearned to be independent about it and make a crushing retort, but he allowed his curiosity to curb him. He kept still.

“I’m doing it for two reasons,” Olney went on. “First, I’m grateful for the spadework you did with old Mrs. Lacoste; that’s going to save us some time and I like short cuts. Secondly, I want your opinion.”

The uniformed man came in and laid a couple of typewritten sheets on the desk in front of Olney. When he had gone again, Olney said, “Take a look at this.”

Mr. Pennyfeather took his reading glasses from the case in his pocket and adjusted them on his nose. He read:

Tuesday afternoon

DEAR MISS EMERSON:

I am writing this because someone is trying to kill me.

Those words look silly …

As Mr. Pennyfeather’s eye skipped down the page, Olney spoke laconically. “The idea of someone wanting to kill them always seems foolish. I’ve had them come in here literally dripping arsenic, with knife wounds, with bullet holes in their clothes—and invariably they don’t want to believe that somebody’s trying to do them in, because it’s silly. Silly. Then I meet them again face up on a slab. Nixon wasn’t any different from the rest, but you see he had a motive for not coming to us.”

We talked for a couple of minutes. Then she said she wanted to see me. She wanted me to make a trip with her late that afternoon. We might be out late, because we were going to the mountains …

“How bad a record did he have?” Mr. Pennyfeather asked.

“Well, we’d have worked on him a little before we’d have believed what’s in that letter,” Olney admitted. “You can’t tell about these fellows who try to pick up lonely girls. Sometimes they’re just lonely themselves. Then again they’re freaks, with a lot of stuff against them that will never come out because their victims are ashamed to tell what’s happened to them.”

I was sure surprised when I saw the car she had. It was a new Packard convertible, and when I saw it and saw how she looked, there in the driver’s seat, I knew somehow that all she’d told me at the beach was a lie. She wasn’t a girl who had to take care of kids for her living.

She glanced at me when I got in beside her. “I wore the dress you said you liked. See?” And it was true she had on a dress I’d noticed at the dances, red satin with a lot of gold braid on the breast and shoulders. Then she said, “We’re going to a different sort of place tonight. There’ll be some dancing done, but I’m to be the piper.”

This wasn’t the usual way she talked. She was always kind of sly and sarcastic, but there was something new in her voice. A kind of refinement—I don’t know what else to call it. Her voice matched the car and diamonds she was wearing, and before it had been kind of flat and dry as if she were keeping it in.

Maybe you don’t get what I mean at all. I can’t think of a way to say it any better, and anyway there isn’t time, old man Lanham is trying to see what I’m writing and I’ve got to finish quick.

She headed out of town, through Glendale and on out to the foothills, and turned finally on the Arrowhead road. It was getting to be twilight. I remember the cool air rushing in at the window, and the way the mountains smelled, and how gray and thin the sky looked—and I guess it was then I began to feel queer about the trip and about her, too, because I could see she was a much stranger kind of girl than any I’d ever known.

I sat there trying to figure her out, thinking about the sailors I’d seen her running around with, and all at once I thought I had the answer. When she pulled in under the trees and killed the motor and turned to look at me, I grabbed her. I know what you’re saying to yourself now, Miss Emerson, but she wasn’t innocent and indignant the way you’d be. She pretended to be willing at first and then when she had a chance she went after me with her nails. She reached deliberately inside my shirt where the skin is soft, and that’s one reason I can’t go to the police. If they ever saw those scratches, they’d crucify me.

I yelled, I guess. We got out of the car, and I cursed her and she laughed. I asked her why she’d wanted me along and she said not for any reason I could understand. “It’s a long, long story,” she told me in a patronizing way. “I can’t stop to tell it to you now.”

I stood by the car and she walked away on a footpath that I could make out, dimly, leading away through some trees.

It was almost pitch-dark by then, and very quiet. There was that kind of empty, funny silence you notice high up in the mountains. I couldn’t see the big valley below from where I stood; the spot was all shut in with trees. After a few minutes I decided to try to follow her and make things up—mostly for the sake of getting a ride back.

There was a pretty steep climb. At places the side of the hill was notched into steps. I was out of breath and panting by the time I came out into a clearing and realized I was just below a cabin.

Above me, pretty high, was a row of three lighted windows. They were curtained with a kind of pink material, and the middle window was open. Through this open pane I could hear Ernestine’s voice. She was talking rather loudly and there seemed to be a kind of horrible, happy cruelty in her tone.

I didn’t catch what she was saying at first. I was busy getting my breath and staring at those millions of lights, spread out down there across the dark all the way from San Bernardino to L.A.

There wasn’t any deliberate attempt to eavesdrop—I want you to believe that. I had a hunch that the less I knew about Ernestine Hollister the better off I’d be. But when I turned around from looking at the view, I noticed that Ernestine’s shadow was distinct on the pink curtain of the right-hand window. I could see the fine fluff of her hair under the little cap, and the way she held a cigarette, and the sly turn of her head.

Suddenly she moved—a sort of funny jerking, almost a dance. Then she said, “That really burned you, didn’t it?” And I could tell she was laughing.

She laughed for almost a minute. I went up close to the side of the cabin, and stood there wondering what in the devil I could do if Ernestine decided to ditch me—how I could get home, whether there was a bus anywhere down out of these mountains, and what excuse I could use for not getting to work on time.

From what I could see of the place, the cabin seemed to be built against the slope of the hill, I guess to get the view, with an open space under it enclosed with latticework, which smelled like a garage.

When Ernestine began to talk again, she was a little louder than before. And with a crisp, icy sharpness. I tried to make sense of what she was saying, and couldn’t, except that she was talking about poppies.

The first remark was something about “where poppies grow.” Then she said, as if she were talking through her teeth, “But not those poppies, darling!”

Then she recited something very fast that rhymed. It must have been part of a poem. I heard the word “poppies” again, and at the end there was something about “wine.”

“Dead wine” I think.

I heard footsteps, quick ones, on the floor overhead, and then Ernestine screamed.

I must have jumped away from the house and slipped on the loose dirt. The next thing I remember is being away from the latticework some few feet, on my hands and knees, and looking up. That scream had been awful. I remember the pounding inside my ribs that must have been my heart, and a feeling of not believing, too, because Ernestine had sounded right along as though she had the upper hand over whoever was in that cabin with her.

She screamed again, and her shadow flickered on the pink drapery and then she somehow pulled the curtain aside and looked out. The light was slantwise on her face from inside the room, and by it I could see what had happened to her.

My insides coiled together into a knot, a tight one. Blood was gushing from her face and throat and running down the pane. Something inside made chopping motions against the drapery and she went down, slowly. There weren’t any more screams.

I got away somehow, down the hill. I didn’t go near the car. I walked for a way, and then saw a bus coming down the highway and ran for it. The driver saw me signaling and stopped. All the way in to town I was trying to think of what I ought to do, and the first thing I realized was that I didn’t dare go near the cops. They’d blame me first, you see.

Mr. Lanham is getting ready to come out of his office and check up on what we’re doing, so I’ll cut this off.

If anything happens to me, please turn this over to the police.

FREDDY

Captain Olney was sitting quite still looking very attentive, as Mr. Pennyfeather laid down the last closely written page.

“You know, at first I couldn’t figure you out,” Olney admitted. “I thought you must be a sensation seeker or simply a little cracked. Then I had one of my men look you up in the newspaper morgue and I found out that you’d been involved in murder cases before. What do you call yourself, anyway?”

“An innocent bystander,” Mr. Pennyfeather said firmly.

“You came into this affair because Miss Hollister’s cousin went to you because she was worried.”

“That’s the way I always get into things. Someone is worried. For no visible reason they feel that I can help them.”

Olney’s eye ran over Mr. Pennyfeather’s sparse physique. “Must be something in your mental make-up to account for it.”

“Certainly I’m not impressive physically,” Mr. Pennyfeather agreed.

“Well—you professor fellows—” Olney made a generous, dismissing gesture. “What do you think of this stuff about the poetry?”

Mr. Pennyfeather appeared to meditate for a moment or two. “A soldier in World War I by the name of McCrae wrote what is probably the most perfect example of the rondeau in the English language. He called it In Flanders Fields. ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row …’”

“Yes, I remember that,” said Olney. “But notice that Freddy Nixon quotes Ernestine Hollister as saying ‘where poppies grow.’”

“She may have said ‘blow,’ and his mind may unconsciously have substituted the more common word. At any rate, the connotation seems to concern a soldier.” He was frowning at the shuffled pages on Olney’s desk. “If she were quoting McCrae, of course.”

“And if she weren’t? Poppies have another use beside the decoration of military graves—” He leaned forward, his eyes keen.

Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t argue the point; he half nodded. “I’m trying to recall the particular verse from Swinburne which she seems to have quoted at the end.”

Olney squinted at him. “That bit about ‘dead wine’? You mean you know what that was?”

“Whether you agree with Swinburne’s philosophy or not, you don’t forget his verse, and his fragments are peculiarly recognizable. Do you know who Proserpine was?”

Olney took time to light a cigarette. “Uh … guess I did once. Wait a minute …” He frowned in concentration, then gave it up and shook his head.

“Proserpine was the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythology,” Mr. Pennyfeather explained. “Queen, as it were, of the dead. Swinburne’s poem, The Garden of Proserpine, portrays her as the ruler of much more than just the human dead. I recall, perhaps not quite correctly, a couple of lines that go: ‘And all dead years draw thither, And all disastrous things …’”

Olney interrupted: “There’s something in it about poppies?”

“I seem to remember ‘bloomless buds of poppies.’”

“Any connotation there that might mean drugs?”

“The whole poem is a kind of drug.” Mr. Pennyfeather sat quiet, trying to recall the rest of the verse. “I know the verse ends with the idea of Proserpine crushing out wine for dead men, Let me look it up for you.”

“Wait a minute. I’ve got a lieutenant here—” He went to the door. The uniformed man must have been close. “Jackson, bring me that book Ellers keeps in one of his desk drawers. It’s got poetry in it.” Olney came back to the desk. “Maybe we can run it down, this dead-wine business.”

The uniformed man came in with a dog-eared pocket-sized book of verse. Olney handed it across the desk to Mr. Pennyfeather, who leafed through a number of pages, paused, then read aloud:

“No growth of moor or coppice,

No heather-flower or vine,

But bloomless buds of poppies,

Green grapes of Proserpine …”

Olney interrupted: “You called it Proserpin-y before.”

“You have to make it rhyme.”

“Pale beds of blowing rushes,

Where no leaf blooms or blushes

Save this whereout she crushes

For dead men deadly wine.”

Olney didn’t speak for a moment; then he shook his head. “I can’t imagine a furious, revengeful woman stopping to quote poetry as Nixon said she did.”

“Miss Hollister was an excellent scholar.”

“It doesn’t strike you as out of character?”

“Probably in her studies at college she’d run across the verse, and some part of it struck her as peculiarly apt to her own circumstances.”

“Acton … the use of drugs, plus the fact that he’d buried his old identity and so might be considered, after a fashion, dead?” Olney waited for Mr. Pennyfeather to agree with him.

“Acton wasn’t the only dead man Miss Hollister had known.”

Olney studied the wall for a moment in silence. “This husband of hers, the army deserter—you’re thinking of him?”

“There is something about the Cullens family you’d better know.”

Olney waited, a look of grim concentration on his face.

Mr. Pennyfeather tried to put his facts forth without implication as to their meaning. After all, as old Mrs. Lacoste had pointed out, for Ernestine Hollister to have found, by a single, coincidental visit, both of the men she had reason to hate was almost beyond the bounds of credence.

“The Cullenses have a daughter who was in my classes a few years ago. She missed some weeks one spring, and when she came back she seemed rather disheartened. I thought she’d been ill … I stumbled on her once, crying behind some shrubbery, but later I overheard a remark that the trouble was some disgrace connected with her brother … that he’d deserted from the Army.”

Mr. Pennyfeather’s voice died; he remained staring blankly at nothing.

Olney glanced up.

“She was extremely fond of her brother,” Mr. Pennyfeather said half to himself, “to have been broken up as she was. I wonder if she—”

Olney waited, but Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t finish the remark.

The words, however, concluded themselves in his mind. Would Loretta Cullens have murdered Miss Hollister to keep her off her brother’s trail?

12

Rae Caradyne came into the little parlor of Nightingale House, gave Mr. Pennyfeather the briefest of smiles, looked in surprise at the lighted floor lamps. “Isn’t it early to be turning these on?”

“Mrs. Parsons lighted them. In case I overstayed—and as a hint not to. I expect she thinks I’m rather an ogre and that I’m grilling you.”

Miss Caradyne didn’t smile at the little sally; she switched off the floor lamps and sat down primly in the dusky light. The make-up with which she concealed the ravages of her grief gave her face a hollow, masklike flatness. “Is it something more about Ernestine?”

“Just a few questions. Did your cousin own a typewriter?”

“Yes. The police took it … to compare its writing with that of the suicide note, I suppose. They didn’t tell me what they found.”

“Where was the typewriter?”

“She carried it in the trunk compartment of her car. Sometimes she borrowed an office and typed notes here on the campus; she kept the machine with her.”

Well, the suicide note had been worthless, he thought; the typewriter had been at hand for the murderer’s use. “Was she in the habit of copying much poetry?”

Miss Caradyne frowned. “Well, she did read quite a bit of verse. Her taste was rather … definite. Grim, in my opinion. She said the stuff I enjoyed was saccharine.” Rae Caradyne batted stubby lashes behind the lenses of her glasses, as though winking back embarrassing tears.

“She liked Swinburne?”

“I believe so.”

“I’d like to quote something to you. Try to hear it from your cousin’s standpoint. I’d like to know what it might have meant to her.” He took out a notebook and read the stanza from Swinburne.

He thought when he had finished that she seemed paler, but this could have been the effect of the fading gray light; and the touch of strain in her manner could have meant simply that she didn’t appreciate Swinburne. She remained sitting quite still, as if concentrating; then she said politely, “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to figure out what Ernestine might have thought about that. It seems the kind of thing she liked. I noticed a mention of wine. She drank a little, sometimes, but I think she preferred other liquors.”

“Did you ever hear her quote this particular verse?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did she keep a notebook? A poetry scrapbook—anything like that?”

“I didn’t look through her books. Mrs. Leland sent them all over in a box together. I put them into storage that way.”

“Might I look through them?”

She frowned slightly. “You mean get them back from the storage people?”

“Not necessarily. If you wrote me a note of permission, I imagine the storage company would let me glance through them on the premises.”

“Oh.” She moved as if to rise. “Do you wish me to write the note now?”

“There’s no hurry. I can call for it in the morning.”

She settled into the chair again, though with a look of uneasy mystification. Mr. Pennyfeather had put away the sheet of paper and was reaching toward the table for his hat.

She said, “Does the poem have something to do with the police investigation?”

He was surprised, in view of her absence, to learn that she knew an investigation was still going on. “That’s correct, though I’m not at liberty to explain in what way.”

“I didn’t mean to ask something you shouldn’t answer.” Behind the horn rims her eyes were wide and earnest. “Is there anything else you wish to know?”

“Your cousin had been married,” he said abruptly. “Was her husband’s name Cullens?”

She looked down at her folded hands. “Robert Cullens.”

“Did she know anything about his family?”

“No. None of us did. Robbie was very secretive. He’d had a quarrel with his father.”

“Would you consider her finding her husband’s old home an accident, a coincidence, or something she’d been trying to do for years?”

Her eyes crept across his face, bit by bit, with halting uncertainty, “She didn’t talk about Robbie to anyone. I don’t know how she felt about him.”

Mr. Pennyfeather nodded, stood up, took his hat. “Thanks for talking to me. Will you be back in class tomorrow?”

“I expect to be.” She, too, rose with an air of showing politeness for his advanced age, a gesture Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t appreciate. “Why did you say Ernestine had found Robbie’s old home?”

He shook his head regretfully. “I wish I could explain. There may be something in the morning newspapers.”

She shrank away with an effect of shyness. “Oh, I see.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

“You’ll give me permission to look at Miss Hollister’s books?”

“Yes, certainly. I’ll have the note for you in the morning.”

When he had left Nightingale House, he walked—a block and a half in either direction which allowed him to keep an eye on Nightingale House’s rose-bowered entry. In this way he missed Mrs. Mauffit’s excellent dinner of stuffed shoulder of lamb with mushroom dressing, roasted yams, and pineapple-pecan upside-down cake.

At ten o’clock the last earnest young lady returned, bearing library books, and the big front door of Nightingale House was locked with a click so loud that Mr. Pennyfeather heard it in the dark across the street. He went home, wondering if Mrs. Mauffit in her kindness had kept a slice or so of lamb warm for him. As he turned up the walk to the front steps, he noticed two shadowy forms converging on him from the lawn. He ducked, throwing up one arm for a guard.

A soft, feminine voice said, “Mr. Pennyfeather?”

He lowered his arm warily. The voice was familiar.

“It’s Loretta Cullens,” she went on. “My friend and I wish to talk to you, if we may. Is there anywhere inside, where we won’t disturb people?”

“My room is at the back, quite by itself,” he offered. “Who is your friend?”

There was a moment’s silence. Then she said, in a slightly embarrassed tone, “Will you wait a little while for the answer to that?”

He had a sudden hunch who the friend was. “Very well. We’ll use this side entrance. This way.” Good-by, lamb with dressing and gravy, and upside-down cake, too, his mind told itself sadly. “Don’t trip over these little rugs in the hall.” He reached in through his door and pushed the light switch.

Stephen Dunne looked at him casually from the other side of the room. He had been sitting on the window seat in the dark, looking out perhaps and keeping watch for Mr. Pennyfeather. His clothes were a little better grade than his usual: he wore a gray suit whose only fault was a need of pressing. The red beard looked freshly groomed and fiery; his green eyes sharpened as they searched out the people in the hall across Mr. Pennyfeather’s shoulder. “Acton,” he said. Then he laughed a little, rather mockingly. “Acton, you fool. What the devil are you doing here?”

A man’s voice spoke in answer. “It’s none of your damned business!”

Mr. Pennyfeather hurried to get far enough into the room so that Loretta Cullens and the man with her could enter. Then he closed the door carefully. Mrs. Mauffit was proud of keeping a quiet house, and the situation seemed to have explosive possibilities. When he had shut the door he turned to study the man Miss Cullens had brought to see him.

Before he caught more than a fleeting impression of someone tall and dark and well groomed with a small mustache, he was distracted by the look on Loretta Cullens’s face. She was staring at Dunne as if he represented some nightmare danger. Not danger to herself; her sudden clutch at Acton’s dark blue sleeve betrayed for whom she feared. Then she turned her head to look up into Acton’s eyes, and her face, which Mr. Pennyfeather had always thought had missed a kind of outdoorsy handsomeness because of the peculiarly small and dainty mouth, seemed transformed with a radiant, overwhelming emotion.

Love, Mr. Pennyfeather thought. He was conscious of a tired irritation. She’s messing things up with a love affair … and with Acton, of all people.

Acton patted her gloved hand on his sleeve. “Don’t worry, darling.”

Her warm brown eyes worshiped him.

Dunne motioned indolently at the chairs … Mr. Pennyfeather’s chairs. He seemed to be taking on himself the duties of a host. “Sit down, folks. I saw you waiting on the lawn. I’ll bet you’re cold and tired. Your landlady let me in, Pennyfeather, when I convinced her I was honest and trustworthy. She brought in a glass of wine which I suspect was for you but which I drank anyway. What did you get out of Rae?”

“Nothing,” Mr. Pennyfeather stuttered, wondering if Dunne had spied on him during his vigil around and about Nightingale House.

“Rae Caradyne?” Acton asked, making no move to sit down.

Dunne nodded, his sharp eyes remaining on Acton’s face. “My other niece. The shy mouse with the glasses. You didn’t make any play for her that I knew of. She hadn’t any money and she did have a plain kind of looks.”

Loretta Cullens’s whisper shook with fear. “Who is this man? How does he happen to know who you are?”

If Dunne’s presence here had been a shock—and Mr. Pennyfeather suspected that it had—Acton was bearing up with remarkable self-possession. The well-formed mouth under the small mustache smiled easily, humorously. “He is Ernestine Hollister’s uncle. His name is Stephen Dunne. Of course he knew all of us during the war, when we were living at Lancaster. He knew Robbie too.” Over the name a look flashed between them. Then Acton turned to Mr. Pennyfeather. “I’m sorry to have barged in on you. We didn’t know Dunne would be here, of course. We wanted to talk the situation over. I don’t expect the police to listen to reason. I thought you might.”

“Of course, I’d be glad to discuss matters.”

Acton shook his head. “We couldn’t talk with Dunne listening in.”

Dunne sneered: “And why not?”

Acton threw him a glance without answering. Loretta had begun to speak to Mr. Pennyfeather. “Grammy thought I’d be much too polite to listen outside that sun-room door. But I wasn’t. I heard her tell you about the cigarette case. I knew she was throwing Jarold in as a victim to … to keep you away from other secrets—”

“Oh, I knew that too,” Mr. Pennyfeather reassured her. “But in this business we have to take the breaks as they’re offered. And it is relevant to know why Mr. Acton should be an habitual visitor in your home.”

Dunne sat forward, his red beard jutting. “Just a minute, Pennyfeather. Who the devil is she?” He jabbed a finger in the direction of Loretta Cullens.

“She is Robert Cullens’s sister,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

Dunne looked at Miss Cullens steadily; she flushed after a moment and glanced away. Dunne said, “Holy cow, what’s Acton messing around her for?” Then, without waiting for an answer: “Does she know anything about that scandal Acton and Ernestine were in together in Lancaster?”

Acton said formally, “I’ve explained all that affair, and she believed me when I said that I was innocent.”

“Yoiks!” Dunne smote his head with an effect of tragic disbelief.

“Miss Cullens and I met at music school,” Acton went on. “Of course her name interested me. I’d seen with a great deal of sympathetic regret how her brother had been ruined by Miss Hollister. We were thrown together in classes. I became her private piano teacher. Our friendship came about perfectly naturally.”

He had a smooth, decisive way of speaking. And he showed the finish, the polish, of a man long used to meeting the public, in contrast to Dunne’s rough and rugged individuality.

Dunne turned to Mr. Pennyfeather. “Do you believe that yarn? As for Ernestine ruining Robbie Cullens—” He got up off the window seat, and Mr. Pennyfeather thought for a moment that he and Acton would come to blows. But Dunne went close and jutted his beard at Acton and teetered on his heels with his hands in his pockets. “They were a couple of dumb kids; they made a lot of mistakes together, but Robbie slipped away as free as a bird while Ernie lost her baby and went on the dope with you trying to forget.”

Loretta flinched; Acton tucked her finger tips into his gloved palm. “We didn’t come here to rehash ancient history. Let’s go, Loretta.”

“We ought to talk to Mr. Pennyfeather,” she stammered.

“We’ll come back later.”

“The devil you will,” Dunne gibed. “The coppers can’t be more than a couple of jumps behind you. I talked to them when they came to my house for your silver cigarette case: a very nice piece, crest and all; but it’s going to put your neck in a noose, old boy.”

“As long as the police concern themselves with me,” Acton replied with a faint smile, “they may leave other and equally innocent people alone.”

Loretta’s fingers tightened in a spasm; her upturned glance was loving and fearful and brimming with gratitude.

Mr. Pennyfeather saw it with a feeling of impatience. “No matter how agile and elusive Mr. Acton proves to be, he cannot long keep the police from suspecting your brother, Miss Cullens. You’re bemused if you think he can. Certain clues in Miss Hollister’s murder point as much to your brother as they do to Mr. Acton.”

She stared at him, blank, stricken. “But I don’t even know where Robbie is!”

“You may not, Miss Cullens. I suspect that someone has helped him hide from the Army.” Mr. Pennyfeather shed his coat and threw it over a chair, turned up the small gas heater, and then stood with his back to the fire, looking very thoughtful. “I suggest that you and Mr. Acton sit down and collect your thoughts and tell me what you want me to pass on to the police. Ignore Mr. Dunne’s probable comments on your story. And don’t try to pull any wool over my eyes.”

Acton obviously wanted to go. “Loretta—”

“Please, Jarold. If we’re going to … to do what we thought we might—”

“Skip out?” Dunne asked dryly. He had turned back to the window seat, standing in front of the dark pane and staring out at the night.

Loretta bit her lip; Acton had silenced her with an abrupt, cautioning gesture.

Mr. Pennyfeather said, “I trust that you were going to try to convince me of your innocence, so that I in turn could convince the police?”

Acton spoke in his firm, decisive voice. “I wouldn’t have had anything to do with Miss Hollister; I wouldn’t even have spoken to her. I know how dangerous she can be.”

“She could have exposed you,” Mr. Pennyfeather agreed.

“No, no. I didn’t mean that. I mean you could get … mixed up with her, and before you’d know it, you’d be in trouble.”

“You’re implying, then, that she brought trouble on herself as well?”

Acton’s firm glance flickered.

Mr. Pennyfeather went on: “I agree with you if you mean that Miss Hollister’s actions were devious, their results unpredictable. But she seems to have been the chief sufferer, if you exclude this poor fellow Nixon.”

Acton seemed to gather his self-possession. “All that I’m asking you to believe is that I had no contact with Miss Hollister since the trouble in Lancaster. And that if you or the police have cooked up a theory that she was bent on exposing me, you can discard it. The one person whose opinion of me matters in the least already knows the facts of that miscarriage of justice.”

“I see. That’s why you and Miss Cullens came here together tonight.”

Acton nodded. “I wanted you to hear it from Loretta herself.”

“You aren’t planning to run away, are you?”

Loretta’s troubled eyes avoided Mr. Pennyfeather’s. Acton moved toward the door. “I won’t be pilloried again.”

He pulled Loretta with him; there was now an air of hurry in his actions, and Mr. Pennyfeather suspected that Dunne’s reminder of the imminence of the arrival of the police had spurred him.

The door closed quietly. Mr. Pennyfeather looked across the room at Dunne. Dunne’s red beard was shaking with his silent laughter.

He lifted a forefinger to beckon. “Turn off the lights and come here.”

Mr. Pennyfeather clicked the light button. The room darkened to a warm twilight lit by the gas flame. Through the triple pane above the window seat he saw Mrs. Mauffit’s little railed side porch, the steps, and the descending figures of Miss Cullens and Mr. Acton. Mr. Acton had a protective arm about the girl’s shoulders; she leaned against him as if she were afraid.

From the dark mass of shrubbery near the sidewalk other figures emerged, surrounding the two on the walk. There was a sharp cry of fright from Loretta. Muffled as it was by the pane, Mr. Pennyfeather still recognized the raw terror in it.

He remembered her grief over her brother, the long months of withdrawal and sadness, plus the fact that the family surrounding her consisted of an alcoholic grandmother, a father who cheated servicemen out of the down payments on their homes, and a mother who was engrossed in a career as a big league clubwoman. “I wish she could have been kept out of it.”

“So do I,” Dunne admitted. “But I couldn’t let Acton get away.”

“You called the police?”

Dunne’s eyes were very green, his beard entirely red, in the fire glow. “I used your landlady’s phone just before you came.”

Mr. Pennyfeather went for his coat. “Someone has to look after Miss Cullens.”

“I’m right along with you,” said Dunne.

13

Loretta Cullens came down the steps of the police station with an attitude of utter, beaten tiredness. She paused, seeing Mr. Pennyfeather and Dunne waiting under the street light; she hurriedly brushed tears away with the back of her hand.

Dunne’s car was at the curb. Mr. Pennyfeather came forward, touched her elbow gently with what he hoped was reassurance. She had a dreadful haggardness; she seemed to have aged ten years. “We’ve come to see you home.”

“Th-thanks. It’s good of you to care. I may as well go. They’re holding Jarold for questioning.” She forced back a sob. Then she flinched, seeing Dunne beside her.

“I’m quite harmless to anyone except a skunk like Acton,” Dunne assured her.

She shook her head. “He isn’t … like that. He’s splendid, and I must try to help him. Should I try to get a lawyer for him, Mr. Pennyfeather?”

“Did he ask you to?”

“They wouldn’t let me talk to him.”

“Perhaps he won’t need one. The police may not hold him long.”

Ordinarily Mr. Pennyfeather was sympathetic to poor souls in the hands of official questioners, but he felt that Mr. Acton was well able to take care of himself, and that a bit of crowbar work under that smooth, polished shell might be all to the good.

She huddled between them as they drove to Beverly Hills. Once during the drive Dunne turned to her. “Could I get you a bracer of some kind? A cocktail? Or coffee?”

She wouldn’t look at him. She shook her head. “I’m all right.”

They were almost at her address when Mr. Pennyfeather asked, “Did your meeting with Mr. Acton take place as he said it did?”

“Of course.” She made a baffled motion with a gloved hand. “Why do you keep on suspecting him of being what he is not? He is an honorable gentleman, a wonderfully patient teacher … and simply unfortunate in his former choice of friends. He isn’t a criminal!”

“I understood from your grandmother that he was passing under the name of Hurlbut.”

“There wasn’t anything wrong in that. It was his mother’s name. He needed a fresh start.”

Mr. Pennyfeather persisted: “You don’t know by what coincidence he happened upon the music school where you were studying?”

Her voice trembled. “You make it sound like a … a plot. Something underhanded and cheap.”

Mr. Pennyfeather leaned forward to look at Dunne behind the wheel. “How well did Acton know Robert Cullens?”

“In Lancaster?” The greenish eyes grew thoughtful. “I doubt if they’d ever met. I think Acton came to teach there after Robbie ran away.”

Mr. Pennyfeather looked at the girl. “You see, there is one most striking circumstance in the events preceding the murder of Miss Hollister: the fact that under one roof she found traces of the two men she had most reason to hate and who had most cause to fear her—two men who had had, seemingly, no previous contact. It seems, as your grandmother pointed out in trying to keep me off the subject of your brother, beyond the bounds of coincidence. I can’t believe that the path of your brother and of Acton became entwined by accident.”

“Then you’re refusing to credit the truth,” she said quickly. “Our acquaintance came about just as Mr. Acton told you it did. He came to the school as a temporary instructor, he noticed my name, he asked if I had a brother named Robert. The fact that he was a music teacher, and his notice of my name surely are logical facts that spring from the circumstances of his previous life. We became friends because I … I sensed his innate kindness and sympathy….” She muffled her mouth with the back of her hand; tears tumbled off her lashes.

Dunne swung the car suddenly to the curb and doused the lights, though they were some doors from the Cullens home. “Coppers ahead,” he said to Loretta. “Do you want to go in?”

She put her forehead against the windshield to stare at the long black sedan with its blinking red headlight. For a long minute she was motionless and silent; then she made a sound that was half laugh and half cry. “Poor Mother! She’s having hysterics in there over the disgraceful publicity. And Father’s demanding his attorneys …”

A small shape wrapped in black darted from the fringe of the banana palms and scuttled toward them over the dark walk, keeping in the deeper shadow under the overhanging bamboo.

“What the devil is that?” Dunne demanded, reaching for the light switch.

Mr. Pennyfeather touched his hand. “Wait a minute.”

The shape zigzagged to the door of the car, a veil was pulled back, and a wrinkled-parchment face with jet eyes peered in at them. The street light beyond the police car gave enough illumination to show the expression of urgency and fear.

“It’s Grandmother!” said Loretta incredulously.

The little old lady opened the door beside Mr. Pennyfeather and crowded in upon his knees. She smelled very strongly of brandy. To Mr. Pennyfeather she said, “Excuse me for sitting on you.” To Dunne: “Young man; will you help us in this hour of trouble?”

Loretta opened her small mouth, perhaps to warn her grandmother that Dunne was not exactly an ally. But Dunne cut in ahead of her. “I’d be glad to help if I can.”

Mrs. Lacoste spoke to Loretta. “We’ve got to get to Arrowhead. They’ve found out about the cabin.”

Loretta seemed not to comprehend. “What cabin?”

“You know what cabin—the place we used to spend summers, that bird-cage affair on the side of the mountain. The police in some way got hold of the list of properties your father put in your mother’s name when it seemed as if those servicemen might win their suit against him, and the cabin was with the rest—”

For once trickery seemed to have had its just reward, Mr. Pennyfeather thought wryly.

“I don’t see why it’s important,” Loretta stammered.

“There are a few things up there we should remove before the police get there,” Mrs. Lacoste snapped. She turned again to Dunne. “Please, young man, if you would help us, we’d be ever so grateful.”

Dunne did not, of course, know of Freddy Nixon’s letter, which Miss Emerson had brought to the police; Mr. Pennyfeather held his breath, wondering what Dunne’s reaction was going to be.

Dunne glanced at him above Loretta’s lowered head. “What do you think, Pennyfeather? Are you with it?”

“I doubt if we shall be ahead of the police,” Mr. Pennyfeather answered with the hope of putting enough caution into Mrs. Lacoste to keep her from blundering into a trap. “But since there may be a chance, we can try.”

“Righto.” Dunne started the motor again, turned in the middle of the block and headed toward Sunset Boulevard. They crossed Los Angeles swiftly, since at this hour the mid-town traffic was light, and beyond Glendale the car swung east to the foothills, and the miles fled away under the tires.

While Mrs. Lacoste bounced about on his knees and snapped out directions to Dunne, Mr. Pennyfeather turned over and over in his mind the circumstances of the case, the outright, miraculously lucky breaks that had seemed to occur one after the other, making everything seem so smooth, logical, and easy; and he was aware, as before, of an uncomfortable hunch that there was a ghastly hitch in it all somewhere, and that under the whole reasonable, tightly knit structure of his solution some demon of the perverse was laughing at him.

The car turned off Foothill Boulevard and into the Arrowhead highway with a screech of tires. Mrs. Lacoste was swung sharply against Mr. Pennyfeather on the turn, and he felt the shape of the brandy bottle wrapped up inside her voluminous black coat.

The chill of the mountain air began to creep into the car. It was well past midnight. As the car climbed, on open turns he could see the lights of the valley cities below, stretched like a twinkling carpet all the way to the sea; and the tiny lights made the night look vast and lonely.

Mrs. Lacoste directed Dunne to turn, finally, to climb a neglected, rutted road into what seemed to be a meadow. The place did not correspond to that described by Freddy Nixon in the letter Miss Emerson had delivered to the police. Mr. Pennyfeather crawled from the car and studied the surroundings under the dim star shine. Either this was an easier way in than the one Ernestine Hollister had taken, or, as he suspected, Mrs. Lacoste was trying to confuse the trail.

She had pulled Loretta a little to one side. “We won’t be long. Do you gentlemen mind waiting here for us?”

Dunne spoke with surprise. “Don’t you want one of us to go with you?”

Mrs. Lacoste’s voice hardened. “No, thank you. We’ll be quite all right.”

Dunne seemed a trifle miffed by her refusal, as though it had marked a lack of trust. “Oh … very well, then.”

She and the girl walked quickly away. The dark swallowed them; the sound of their steps died in the silence.

Dunne moved about restlessly, his shoes crunching gravel and dried grass. “I want a smoke. Do you suppose this is a closed area?”

Mr. Pennyfeather squinted, trying to make out Dunne’s position in the darkness. “Most of the mountains are closed, I think.”

“I’ll sit inside the car, then, and use the ash tray. We don’t want to attract any coppers.” There was dim movement, the creak of cushions, the brief yellow flare of a match, which lit up Dunne’s cupped hands, his bent face, and red beard. “What do you make of the old lady, Pennyfeather?”

Mr. Pennyfeather studied the night sky. “I rather think she’s come to warn her grandson about the police.”

Dunne grunted on a note of surprise, and, though it was dark in the car, Mr. Pennyfeather got the impression that Dunne’s head lifted attentively. But his tone was casual. “Robbie? Why should you think he’s here?”

Captain Olney would have him grilled with bacon for breakfast if he let out anything about that letter…. “It seems reasonable to suppose that he has had help all this while in hiding from the Army. The people who would most naturally shelter him are his family.” And besides, his thoughts added, the presence of Robert Cullens in this mountain hide-out would fit so perfectly into my theory about the murder of Ernestine Hollister…. “I don’t suppose for an instant that his grandmother has handled the affair alone. The rest of the family may have tried, in view of her garrulousness and tendency to drink, to keep the secret from her.”

“Speaking of drinking, I think I’ll have one. What about you?”

Mr. Pennyfeather caught the dark wink of the bottle which Dunne was holding toward him from the car. “Thank you.” He scalded his throat with Dunne’s whisky, choked back an unmanly impulse to sputter, and returned the bottle. The warming effect was immediate.

Dunne’s voice remained casual as he continued their talk. “You think that the father or mother—or both—has helped Robbie to hide out up here? In that case, shouldn’t we be trying to follow the old lady?”

The idea had occurred to Mr. Pennyfeather. But Dunne’s methods would not be his…. “She seemed most firm that we should not.”

Dunne made a sound between a growl and a laugh. “She used me to get up here. I ought to know what I’m doing, shouldn’t I? Especially if the coppers become curious.” There was another creak of cushions; Dunne was emerging from the car. “Should we track them together or separately?”

“Separately, I suppose, for the sake of silence.”

“I thought you’d say that.” Dunne sounded indulgent. “You won’t try any funny business, will you, Pennyfeather?”

“It seems to me that the funny business in this affair has been the work of other hands than mine,” Mr. Pennyfeather said dryly.

“Touché,” Dunne muttered.

“If you do find Mrs. Lacoste and Loretta with Robert Cullens, what do you intend to do?”

“Damned if I know,” Dunne admitted. “I’d like to knock his skull in for one reason or another, but considering the spot he’s in, anything I could do to him would be superfluous.”

With these words Dunne moved off through the dark in the direction the two women had taken. Mr. Pennyfeather listened to the fading footsteps, then utter silence, then a couple of crickets who were beginning again where Dunne’s passing had caused them to leave off.

He settled his hat more firmly in case he ran into overhanging brush. He could make out the shape of trees against the sky, but the ground underfoot was black velvet. He took ten steps, then paused to look back. He could sense that he was out in the meadow by the movement of air and a general feeling of openness. But the car and everything familiar had vanished. He had the queer impression that already he was lost.

He went on, wondering if he was blindly following a trail or even approximating the direction Mrs. Lacoste had taken with Loretta. Or whether Dunne was ahead…. In retrospect, allowing Mrs. Lacoste to escape and warn one who Mr. Pennyfeather was sure was a murderer seemed a bit of chivalrous idiocy.

The ground rose and dipped. He came to a fringe of trees, passed through them with a few steps. They smelled dry and piny; their needles stung his face. He heard the drone of a plane high in the night sky. Something scuttled in the leaves near his foot. He decided firmly that it must be a wood mouse.

On a sudden rise he came in sight of lights below. He skidded downward; it was a trail, he saw dimly: a choppy, stair-stepped trail leading down the side of the embankment to a flat area and a house.

The house was of that rickety architecture common to resort areas. Here and there in the walls a crack glowed with light. A porch enclosed with glass was curtained with cretonne strung on wire, or string, which had sagged. He could make out the line of the roof, a flue sticking up from it, and the fact that the side of the house opposite this one was longer, the house apparently fitting itself to the side of the hill. Excitement tingled through him. The place answered at least some of the requirements of the house where Freddy Nixon had seen Ernestine Hollister murdered.

He went closer, being as quiet as possible. There was no sound or movement from inside. The lights shone through the spaces between the curtains and out upon the weedy yard. He made out a row of geraniums in pots along a bench, sorry pink and red ones with pinched, dusty leaves, looking as though they needed water. At the end of the bench sat a small galvanized basin, beside it an abalone shell containing a bar of yellow laundry soap. In the dim distance clotheslines striped the dark, supporting white blotches which resembled male underwear.

He tiptoed to the windows of the porch and peered in through a space between the draperies.

The room beyond the porch was furnished so precisely as he had expected it to be that he was aware of a small sense of shock. Most of the stuff inside was wicker, the kind of shabby wicker which migrates to summer cabins when it begins to show whiskers and splinters at home. There was a table in the center of the room. A lighted kerosene lamp sat on the table. He saw a scattering of chairs, a footstool, a wicker couch.

On one of the chairs was a cowhide bag, propped open, which seemed to contain a miscellany of garments untidily folded. On other chairs were heaps of books, some laundered shirts, and a fifth of whisky.

He took in the scene with a mixture of discovery and unease. This could very well be Robert Cullens’s hide-out, dangerous now and on the verge of being abandoned. Or … it might be the week-end haven of some innocent party who had no connection whatever with the Hollister case. In which case he would make himself a fool by breaking in.

Mr. Pennyfeather drew back into the shadows. There was one more point he’d better check.

He rounded the side of the house and felt his way down a narrow flight of stone steps to the lower level, the part of the house which was longer in order to fit the slope of the hill. Here he scrambled around until he was sure that there was latticework enclosing the lower timbers, and that the space inside, under the house, smelled of motor oil. At some time it had been used as a garage.

He stepped back warily and saw above him what Freddy Nixon must have seen. He recognized the row of lighted windows, the middle window open, the thin pink material of the curtain blowing with the touch of the night wind.

He said, half aloud, “I must be on the very spot …” and a prickling, ghostly feeling knuckled its way across his scalp. He wondered suddenly where Loretta and her grandmother could have taken themselves, where Dunne was, and what had happened to interrupt the packing of Robert Cullens.

It seemed to him then that he was all at once immensely and strangely aware of the quiet dark at his back. There was almost the feeling of a vacuum, of a great mouth opened to swallow him; he started to turn his head. Something flickered in the night, but there was no sound that he was conscious of—just a thudding blow and an amazingly bright light which faded slowly to circling ripples and then to sleep.

14

Mr. Pennyfeather dreamed that he was attending his own burial.

It was night in the dream, a very black night, and his nostrils were filled with the stifling dampness, the earth smell, the dusty and infinitely long-dead odor of dried leaves fallen to powder, which he imagined must be common to such situations.

He had been bound securely in preparation for the ceremony—a precaution perhaps to keep his corpse from roaming. He hadn’t known before that this was usual, and the realization of his ignorance was unsettling. At the few funerals he had attended in his adult life, mostly those of teaching colleagues, he’d merely glanced in respectfully at the face. He thought now with regret of Professor Jessup, who had believed in the efficacy of his own monkey-gland extract and had liked to jump up into the air and click his heels. It seemed wrong, he thought, to deprive the man of that little pleasure in the afterlife. His thoughts whirled and became dreamy. Perhaps the binding had another explanation. He might have emigrated to Haiti, and someone had tied him up to keep him from scrambling out afterward to become a zombie. Haiti seemed an illogical place for him to be, but the binding had to have some explanation. I don’t believe after all, he told himself, that it’s common practice at funerals in our country.

All this while he was aware of his real self standing aside, a wraith, apologetic about all the bother they were taking with him, waiting for the last sonorous prayer and the first clod.

You’d think they needn’t be so rough, he told himself. They’re fitting me into this thing, this grave, like a sardine into a glove. A mixed metaphor … well, he was dead, and a small error like that should be excused after a lifetime of careful English. To add to the strangeness the grave was round, like a pipe, and his hands caught the roughness of cement. He was being slipped downhill, into the thing. A rather cheap and horrid way to save space, he thought. “I’m not so big,” he muttered distinctly, “that you couldn’t have buried me decently.”

Hands jerked off him; it was some little while before the work went on.

When there was nothing above ground but his head, the hands tried to pry open his mouth to stuff a wad of something into it. Burlap, by the feel of the texture against his teeth. He was adamant now, though. Being buried tied up in a pipe, and in the dead of night, was bad enough. He refused to have his mouth stuffed with burlap.

For a while he drifted in sleep.

Steps went by, came back to pause over his head. A voice resembling Dunne’s woke Mr. Pennyfeather by saying, “Look, now. Hysterics won’t get you anywhere. Buck up.”

“But he’s dead!” cried Loretta Cullens. “He’s gone, and I won’t ever see him again. And underneath he was decent—”

Mr. Pennyfeather tried to comfort her by saying, “Thanks for grieving a little,” but all he managed was a sort of gurgle. The burlap had been stuffed in, after all; part of it, anyway….

Loretta choked on a sob. “D-did you hear something then?”

“Yeah,” said Dunne after a moment.

“Like a … a groan?”

“I’m not sure what it was. Wait a minute. Maybe we’ll hear it again.”

Silence came back. Mr. Pennyfeather, in his half-standing position, listened too, wondering what it was that they had heard.

Loretta asked: “Do you carry matches or a lighter?”

“We’ll have a look around if you think there really is something,” said Dunne. A match made a flaring, sputtering noise. Mr. Pennyfeather twisted his neck groggily to look up. Perhaps a foot or so from the end of his nose was a circular opening; he saw the thin match light against a faraway black sky full of stars. He tried to shake his head, to shake the last remnants of the nightmare out of it. Apparently that business about a funeral …

The match went out. “It wasn’t anything,” Dunne decided.

Loretta seemed to weep quietly for a while. Then she said, “Is there any way of telling how long he’s been dead?”

“We won’t be able to know that until the cops come. Maybe they won’t even know.”

“You touched his hand. It was cold, wasn’t it?”

“Oh yes. He’s been dead plenty long enough to cool off. Of course, being outside as he is … and the mountain air gets chilly—”

Are they talking about me? Mr. Pennyfeather wondered in confusion. I thought they were at first. Now I’m not sure that I’m dead. My head hurts. Parts of me are going to sleep, the parts that are cramped against this damned pipe or whatever it is. Who put me in here, anyway?

Loretta said, muffled as though through a handkerchief: “It may be very important, knowing just when he died.”

“Of course it’ll be important.” Dunne’s tone roughened. “Are you still determined to build alibis for that phony? What do you see in that guy, anyway?”

Loretta stuttered: “He was k-kind and sympathetic. He wouldn’t ever call anyone else a phony, even in anger.”

Dunne laughed bitterly. “Of course he wouldn’t. The term comes too close to home. Let me tell you about that fracas in Lancaster, the one Ernestine was involved in. I believe he went after Ernestine at first thinking he might marry her and get some of her money. Then he found out she was still married to your brother and wasn’t interested in getting a divorce. From then on I think the angle was blackmail.”

She burst in. “I won’t believe that!”

Dunne continued, as if she had said nothing. “He didn’t mean to have her thrown into the jug; that was a slip. He just wanted a hold over her. The parties, and the dope, seemed a way to get it. Remember what Acton is—a clever, almost a brilliant, musician; but he’d never had any breaks. All his music had brought him was a job in a high school in a dirty little desert town, drumming tunes into obstreperous kids. My guess is the situation had been galling him for a long time. He’s the kind of guy who would figure he deserved better.”

She made a small, inarticulate sound of disagreement.

In his circular tomb Mr. Pennyfeather tried to straighten out their conversation to himself. Had they been talking about Acton in the beginning? Was Acton dead? If so, how could he have reached this place in time to be killed and turn cold when they’d left him at the police station not too long ago? Or had he, himself, been unconscious a lot longer than he thought; perhaps in this grave or whatever for long hours or maybe even days?

Mr. Pennyfeather tried to judge the passage of time by how thirsty he was. Well, no doubt about it, he was extraordinarily thirsty. It could be the burlap, or it could be the passing of time.

Loretta added: “Mr. Acton isn’t the murderer. At least, not this time. That pillow—”

“Yes,” Dunne agreed. “Very queer about that pillow. Not that Acton isn’t smart enough to think up a gimmick or two to distort the picture.”

“The motive behind the placing of that picture,” Loretta said, and her voice trembled, “was love….”

Dunne waited, lit his pipe again, scuffed a shoe on the earth. “Well …”

“I … I’m not going to think any further along that line,” she said with an effort at firmness.

Dunne said casually, “Just how shaky is your dad’s business?”

She choked over dismayed, indistinguishable words.

“Just suppose your dad had come up here and appealed to your brother to give himself up … for the honor of the family, or to take the heat off before the props went out from under that contracting racket, and he’d told your dad to go to—”

“I hate my parents!” It was a cry full of such fury that Mr. Pennyfeather’s ears crept with it: a strangled rage … and he seemed to feel the eyes of immemorial parricides peering down at him in his hole. She rushed on: “Neither of them ever tried to help Robbie or to understand him while he was growing up … or afterward. They j-just wanted a dummy to show, a thing stuffed with straw dressed up correctly in a military-academy uniform…. Or an army officer’s. Robbie refused to try for a commission because of them. He just wanted to be left alone. You think he treated Ernestine Hollister like dirt. I don’t believe he did. I suspect that he got hold of a girl who wanted him to be what Mother and Dad had wanted—a big, smug, slick stuffed shirt—and he just wouldn’t do it.”

Dunne made comforting noises through the tattered sound of her tears. “It doesn’t matter now. I guess Robbie might have had his reasons. He’s paid for his mistakes, anyway … lying up there on the hill, all alone and past the reach of the Army or anyone else.”

Mr. Pennyfeather tried to say, “So that’s who’s dead!” but all that he managed was another gurgle.

There was a moment of silence from the two on the ground above him; then Loretta half whispered, “I’m sure I heard something then.”

Dunne struck another match, and apparently they looked about. What on earth was the matter with them, Mr. Pennyfeather fumed, that they couldn’t see the opening of his hole?

The match went out and Dunne remarked, “I wish we knew where your grandmother and Pennyfeather took themselves off to.”

“I’m beginning to suspect that Grandmother has started back home. We found the cabin empty, remember. It looked as if Robbie might have cleared out without bothering to finish packing; at least, that’s what she seemed to think. Probably she got the idea she’d better head him off before he walked in at home, and went down to the lower road and either caught a bus or hitched a ride with someone. She’s very spry, and independent—”

“She wouldn’t try to run off with my car, would she?”

“No. She doesn’t drive.”

“And Pennyfeather’s probably with her.”

“I suppose so.”

Their voices began to drift away under the sound of their walking. “Hey!” Mr. Pennyfeather tried to yell through the burlap. “Don’t leave me here!”

He sounded to himself like a muzzled dog trying to bark.

He tried to wriggle around inside the hole, scraping his hands cruelly on the roughness of the cement surface. What sort of thing was he in?—narrow, round, lined with concrete. He turned his head and took some of the skin off his nose. A sewer pipe? A conduit? Some kind of drain?

He tried to scuffle his feet a bit, to determine what sort of stuff was under them, but the tightness of the hole and the firmness of his bindings prevented this. He judged that he was reclining at about a forty-five degree angle—approximately that of the hill, he thought. The night air that drifted in to him from the opening above his head was fresh and cool, but by bending his chin he could catch the earthy damp, the musty smell, of an old excavation. Whatever the thing was, it had been here for a long time.

He caught the faraway muted whine of a police siren. Robert Cullens was dead. Dunne had described him as lying out all alone on the hill, in the open. There had been something about a pillow…. The siren shook the air. The police had come to have a look at Robert Cullens, whom nobody could take back to the Army now.

Mr. Pennyfeather tried snakish wrigglings which got him nowhere.

The siren died. After some while there were steps, not too close; which caused him to growl appeals into the burlap. Lights drifted by, thinning the dark in which the stars swam over his head. He could not remember ever having felt so alone, and when the steps and the lights went away, a new idea remained with him—an idea which he pushed firmly into the back of his mind and tried to keep there.

The hours went by, and he must have dozed.

When he awakened the thin drawn light had crept into the hole. He saw now that he was indeed in a pipe. The rough cement was cracked with age, and near the top small weeds poked their heads through the crevices and spread themselves inward. Some looked broken and wilted, apparently injured by his passing, but most had revived. They narrowed the diameter of the opening a good deal, and this must be the reason no one had seen the hole.

He felt panic gathering under the silence, the aloneness.

In an effort to control his thoughts he tried a variety of nonsense: counting by Roman numerals until he was lost in a maze of Xs, naming off the kings of England in rotation—he always did get lost following the Tudors—and finally beginning the sonorous opening of Milton’s Paradise Lost. In the middle of Milton’s high-flown imagery he found Freddy Nixon’s writing floating through his head.

For dead men deadly wine.

He tried to get his mind off the thing. It wasn’t the sort of poem to give any comfort in a situation like this one.

But his thoughts rollicked on:

From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free …

That, he thought grimly, would come later. Just now he was mad enough to chew a hole in the burlap.

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be,

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never …

So help me, he promised himself, if there’s any way to do it I’m coming back to haunt him. And the answer to that was—who?

His mind circled the question like a mouse. The sun was in his eyes now, bright darts of it down the pipe between the fringe of grasses. He closed his lids, and under the red glow he tried to pin into his consciousness any clue to the person of last night. All that he remembered were the hands, touching and tying. How had they been? Deft, he decided. Quick and clever hands, agile at the binding, persuasively firm with the burlap gag now tied between his jaws.

For some reason this called to mind Dunne’s cunning at placing the small stuff in his seascapes. The man had an artist’s smooth manner in using his hands. They were big hands, with tough red hairs and knobby knuckles, but Dunne employed them like a pair of fine, familiar tools.

A bee buzzed at the opening of the hole, and Mr. Pennyfeather glimpsed the fat yellow body and the gauze of wings.

When the bee went away he became aware that in the silence only the sound of his breathing was alive. He began to feel a clinical fascination in its rhythm, and in an effort to break this off he struggled a little—futilely as ever—with the ropes around his wrists. In a freer position he could have loosened them long ago. The closeness of the pipe gave him no room for leverage.

He propped his head against the concrete, listening. He could visualize the cabin on the hill, probably somewhere above him, since the only movement he could recall was that of being dragged downhill. He could picture the sunny, shabby room, and all the belongings of Robert Cullens laid out for a packing which had never been finished. Probably the police had worked most of the night in the place, and Olney had no doubt arrived at some time to look things over because of the connection with the death of Ernestine Hollister.

Ernestine had died up here, and so had the man to whom she had once been married. There had been a child, too, Mr. Pennyfeather recalled, so that what might have been a whole small family, man and wife and baby, had now been swept away. He frowned over the knowledge. He had not until now thought of Miss Hollister as a married woman, but such she had been—married to a young soldier who had deserted her and gone off to live hidden and alone. Dunne had not put much stress on the quarrels between them, but it struck Mr. Pennyfeather that most people, in the face of a frustrating marriage, either stuck it out or got a divorce. The marriage had been exceptionally terrible, or there had been an unusual cowardice in the personality of Robert Cullens. Perhaps the latter, and not entirely Cullens’s fault, in view of what Loretta had said to Dunne about her parents.

There had been many hidden facets to the character of Miss Hollister. He remembered her clearly in the role of the earnest and bookish student, but this had had no more reality than the shiny surface of a printed paper doll. For her own amusement she had created a false part as a dancehall girl. Behind these two pictures was a third, much more shadowed, of a young wife who had been going to have a child.

So much had happened to her, in so short a time. It was as if she had lived three lives.

A beetle wandered uncertainly down the center stem of one of the weeds in the opening of the pipe and teetered at its tip, his feet prodding the small, colorless blossom that hung there, his feelers alert as if at the presence of Mr. Pennyfeather.

Mr. Pennyfeather felt the involuntary bunching of tendons behind his Adam’s apple. If that bug fell on him, he was going to yell.

From outside, from the hill above, came an unexpected human voice. “Hey! Pennyfeatherl You down there anywhere?”

In that frozen moment, watching the beetle, he was unable to make a sound. Then the black bug lost his foothold and came bumbling and struggling into the crevice of Mr. Pennyfeather’s collar. The burlap notwithstanding, he made a very respectable amount of noise.

In another minute hands were fumbling at the weeds over his head.

15

“Good lord,” said Captain Olney indignantly, “what’re you doing down in that thing?”

“Mmnnnnf,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

They grappled at him. There wasn’t much to get hold of except the collar with the beetle inside it. The beetle scrabbled his way free as Mr. Pennyfeather felt himself finally lifted by a grip between the shoulder blades. The sun was startlingly bright, the air dry and full of sage smells. Dunne bent over him, offering the brandy bottle. “Dammit, he’s been gagged.”

They worked at the knots in the piece of clothesline—Olney and Dunne and two other men in plain clothes who were still unmistakably detectives. When he was free, Dunne tilted the brandy against his teeth. The liquid went down like fire.

“Pretty stiff, huh?” Olney asked.

Mr. Pennyfeather sat there helplessly, unable to move, as numb and as cold as though he might actually have been dead for a while. He glanced down at what had been his prison. It was, he judged, the remains of a broken conduit which had once been meant to drain storm water from a steep place in the path.

Olney pushed his head forward suddenly. “He’s had a crack on the skull. Let’s get him up to the house. Gleeford, you bring that first-aid kit from the car.”

Gleeford was the younger of the two detectives. He climbed quickly out of sight beyond the house.

“Who did it?” Dunne demanded.

Mr. Pennyfeather shook his head. His tongue seemed still to bear the waffle imprint of the burlap and to be about twice its normal size.

“You don’t know?” said Dunne in disappointment.

“Give him time,” said Olney. “He might remember.”

They hoisted him between them like a sack. “I’ll walk,” he protested with his new flannel tongue.

“Be quiet,” said Olney gruffly.

They took him up to the cabin, to the enclosed porch, and put him down upon a chintz-covered wicker couch that creaked and popped at his weight.

He saw that a lot more masculine garments were laid out in the inner room as if for packing, but he had not realized that the room was occupied until Loretta Cullens came into view. She looked through the door at him for a startled moment. Her face had a pinched, exhausted expression; it didn’t change much when she saw him. Probably her brother’s death had used up most of her capacity for shock.

Someone large and stately in a black silk suit came to the doorway behind her. “Who is it, Loretta?”

She was a big-bosomed woman with an overpowering sureness in herself. The fact that her eyes were now reddened and her hair done carelessly didn’t take away her dignity. Mr. Pennyfeather’s memory flashed back to the time when Mrs. Cullens had tried to tell the faculty wives how to raise money with a bridge party. The club-president manner hadn’t gone over very well with the active-witted women who kept their tempers sharpened on their small budgets. But Mrs. Cullens had remained serene, though scornful.

Loretta hurried forward. “You’ve been hurt! Oh, Mr. Pennyfeather, where were you all night?”

“In a pipe,” said Olney shortly. Olney gently pried into the stiffened wound on the rear of his scalp; Mr. Pennyfeather flinched.

“Can I get you something?” Loretta pleaded.

“Something to dilute that brandy with,” Mr. Pennyfeather mumbled.

Gleeford returned with the first-aid kit. Olney snipped hair, applied iodine and tape, while Dunne and Loretta plied Mr. Pennyfeather with the brandy. All this while Mrs. Cullens remained in the other room, standing somewhat in shadow, her thoughtful eyes on Mr. Pennyfeather, as though he might represent some danger, or problem, of her own. Perhaps, he thought, she was afraid he intended to let out what he had learned about Mrs. Lacoste. “I ought to tell you,” he said to her in his mind, “that I think you are to blame for your mother’s drunkenness. As well as for Loretta’s vulnerability and your son’s cowardice. Frankly, Mrs. Cullens, I consider you a bitch.”

“Huh?” said Olney, behind his ear.

“Nothing,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

Loretta went back to help her mother pack her brother’s belongings. When Olney was done with his patching, Mr. Pennyfeather forced himself to stand up and walk a few steps. Well, his legs were alive. He said to Olney, “Thanks so much.”

“You’ll be all right. Somebody really chopped you down, though. Sure you didn’t see him?”

“I didn’t, no. See here, can I have a look at the place Robert Cullens was found?” He spoke softly so that the two women in the other room would not hear.

Olney nodded. “Dunne can take you up there. I’ve got a few things to check here, before I go.”

“Come on,” said Dunne.

They went out into the clean brisk sunshine. Mr. Pennyfeather concealed a tendency to wobble by planting each foot carefully before putting his weight on it. “What happened last night, starting with the moment you left me at the car?”

Dunne threw him a glance over his shoulder. The red beard looked very bright in the sun; the greenish eyes were full of ironic humor. “I didn’t get far before I ran into Loretta. She and her grandmother had found the cabin all right, but Robbie wasn’t in it. The grandmother had stayed at the house and sent Loretta back to the car to ask for a flashlight so that they could search for him—or pretend to. Actually, she must have just wanted a chance to slip away. I think when she found the cabin deserted, she jumped to the conclusion that Robbie had panicked out and was on his way to Beverly Hills to walk into a police trap at the house.”

“Do they know where she is now?”

“Yes, they know.” Dunne grinned. “She’s at home, tucked in bed, full to the gills with dope and alcohol. There’s a doctor working on her, but he doesn’t think she’ll come out of it until tomorrow. For a while he wasn’t sure that she was going to come out at all. Olney is hopping mad. He thinks the old lady knows something.”

“Certainly she knew Robert Cullens was hiding up here. Probably she knew who was helping him. By the way, has any member of the family admitted a part in Robert Cullens’s evasion of the Army?”

“Federal offense—do you think they’re admitting it?” Dunne jeered. “The coppers got rafts of fingerprints, though, before they let the women in to pack Robbie’s stuff. I hope they stick the rap on old man Cullens.”

“What happened after you met Loretta?”

They had been climbing through a fringe of small pines. Dunne stopped now to mop his forehead with his sleeve. Mr. Pennyfeather propped his wobbly frame against a tree trunk.

“Loretta and I went back to the cabin and found it empty. The old lady had skipped down to the lower road and hitched herself a ride—at least, that seems logical. Loretta and I scouted around as well as we could in the dark. We couldn’t figure out where the old lady had gone. Finally we went back to the car for a flashlight. There we got another surprise—you were missing.”

Mr. Pennyfeather blinked at the moving patches of sunlight between the trees. The brandy was making him very lightheaded. He had classes today, waiting for him. He should have telephoned before coming up here to mull over the circumstances of Robert Cullens’s death. He said to Dunne, “By then I was probably being slipped into that pipe.”

Dunne shot him a look from under red eyebrows. “Yeah. What a damned crazy thing that was. Sure you didn’t … uh—”

“I didn’t see who it was, no. I felt the hands. They were pretty skillful. Adroit.”

Dunne took a pack of cigarettes out of his shabby jacket pocket. While he lit one he seemed to study his own hands with a peculiar thoughtfulness. “Hummm. Well, to go on. Loretta and I got a flashlight from the glove compartment and had a shot of brandy, or, rather, I did—and spent about an hour or so scouting all over the damned side of the mountain. Then the flashlight went dead. We were stumbling downhill in the dark when I fell over something.” He hunched his shoulders. “Gruesome…. I struck a match and there was Robbie, the neatest corpse you ever could imagine, with a clean white pillow under his head.”

Tree shadows danced over Dunne. Mr. Pennyfeather shut his eyes.

“Feeling pretty rocky?”

“I should have phoned the college.”

“We did that. We thought you might have gone home when Mrs. Lacoste did. In fact, Loretta and I supposed that the two of you were together. Anyway, your school still thinks you’re missing and they’ll put in a substitute for you.”

“Thanks.” The tree was solid behind Mr. Pennyfeather’s back, but the rest of the world had wrinkles in it.

“You look as if you could stand another touch of brandy.”

“Perhaps I could.” He drank recklessly from the bottle Dunne offered. When he could breathe again, he asked, “What did you do after you found the body?”

“We hiked off to another cabin where there was a phone. I called the coppers. Then we came back to wait. She wouldn’t stay in the house. I had to walk around with her.”

Mr. Pennyfeather nodded like an owl. “Yes, I heard you.”

Dunne seemed startled for a moment. “Say … We were down in that direction. Why the devil didn’t you try to yell?”

Mr. Pennyfeather remembered his efforts with the burlap, but just now the whole thing seemed rather unimportant. He simply shook his head.

Dunne moved around in the dappled light. “You sure you want to see where we found Robbie? It’s rather a climb.”

“Yes, let’s.”

They started upward. The brandy tingled all the way down to Mr. Pennyfeather’s toes, and his gait was rubbery; but he managed. A dim trail led them by twisting inclines into a thicket of evergreens where the light was dim and speckled and the smell of pine oil filled the air. Here there was a disturbed patch on the carpet of leafmold. Dunne pointed. “There. Lying as if he might have been asleep.”

Mr. Pennyfeather looked, trying to visualize a young body in repose. “How had he been killed?”

“Knife wound in the back. A small one. There wasn’t any blood on the ground. He was wearing a leather jacket with a heavy lining. The jacket had absorbed what bleeding there was. Someone had nicked him, right to the heart.”

“Where did the pillow belong?”

“In the house, they think. It’s like the others there, flowered ticking, old. The linen seemed to match too. The slip was a fresh one. There’s a stack of sheets and cases in a laundry wrapper in a closet down there.”

“What’s the theory?”

Dunne spread a hand under the speckled light and studied the pattern on his skin. “You want mine?”

Mr. Pennyfeather shook his head. “You’re hoping they’ll decide Mr. Cullens killed his son to take the heat off his shaky contracting business. He wouldn’t do that. A man afraid of going to jail over sharp practices in building isn’t going to risk going in permanently on a murder charge.”

Dunne stared for a moment, then relaxed. “You heard that while you were down in the pipe.”

“I heard your theory, yes. What’s the police version?”

“I think Olney is up a stump. He’d been working with the idea that Robbie had killed Ernestine—” He broke off; there had been steps in the pathway below.

Mrs. Cullens came into view. She regarded them with majestic disinterest. “My daughter Loretta thought that Mr. Pennyfeather should have something to eat. She’s prepared a breakfast at the house. If you’ll go down now, she’ll feed you.” There was, somewhere in her manner, the squeamish generosity of a great lady giving a handout to a tramp.

But if Loretta was fixing breakfast, it was out of innate decency and thoughtfulness. “We’ll be going.”

Mrs. Cullens’s eyes came to rest on the disturbed patch under the thick-growing little trees. “Was it … here?”

“Stabbed in the back. Laid out with a pillow under his head,” Dunne explained. He searched Mrs. Cullens’s face, as if expecting some show of emotion. “I guess you knew about the pillow.”

“Captain Olney told me.” She stood under the pin-point design of light, massive and unmoved. At the neck of the black silk suit there was a brooch made of a gold loop set with diamonds and rubies. On the plump hands were more diamonds, big ones. Mr. Pennyfeather thought heatedly of the servicemen who had protested, vainly, about the methods of Mr. Cullens in building their houses.

She glanced at Dunne. “Do you have a cigarette?”

Dunne proffered his pack, then lit the one she selected. She didn’t thank him. Mr. Pennyfeather couldn’t repress his thought: “I believe this area is closed to smoking.”

She stared at him as though he were a worm. “I’ve had a severe shock. You might try to understand that.” She walked further into the speckled shade, turning her back on them. “I’d like to be alone here for a while. Do you mind?”

Dunne and Mr. Pennyfeather withdrew, taking their way down the hill. Mr. Pennyfeather was aware of anger, of tiredness, of brandy fog. The house seemed to come at him suddenly, and he was struck by its shabby condition and its aloneness. Robert Cullens couldn’t have enjoyed his life as a hermit in this place. What sort of diversion could he have had? Even fear of the Army couldn’t have kept him hidden in such a place forever.

They went inside. Olney had gone. There was just one detective left to keep an eye on things—Gleeford, who was looking with admiration at Loretta. His glances, or the heat of the stove, had brought color into her face.

The kitchen was on a porch, smaller than the one they had entered. There was a kerosene stove on spindling legs, a kerosene refrigerator. The table was covered with checkered oilcloth, spotted here and there with hard, encrusted bits of food. Loretta put down a plate for Mr. Pennyfeather.

Her voice was husky with tiredness. “How would you like your eggs?”

He wondered that he had ever thought her plain. The generous eyes, the open friendliness, gave her a warmth that overshadowed beauty. “I’ll have them any way—fried, since you’re already frying bacon.”

She served him bacon and toast and hot coffee, then two eggs. She stared at the food obliquely for a moment before moving away. Perhaps his own thought had occurred to her.

Someone had supplied Robert Cullens with the kerosene to run his refrigerator and stove, to burn in his lamps. Someone had brought the laundry, food, reading matter, liquoreven clothing. Clothes wear out, even on hermits. It was impossible to believe that no one of his family had known his whereabouts. Care had been taken to prevent casual week-end use of this cabin. The old lady, Mrs. Lacoste, had admitted knowing Robert’s whereabouts. But she was far too old and too frail to be running her grandson’s errands. And besides, Loretta had said that Mrs. Lacoste did not drive.

Someone else, though, drove. The person who had murdered Ernestine Hollister had driven her, in her own Packard convertible, to the lonely headland above Malibu. Look for a driver, then—a skillful, fast driver not afraid to make quick time on winding mountain roads, not timid about driving across Los Angeles with a dead girl in her own car. He found that his eyes had settled on Dunne, in the next room. Dunne met his glance with a curious hesitance.

He’s getting wary of me, Mr. Pennyfeather thought.

Dunne rose from his chair and sauntered to a window and stared out at the view. Gleeford had picked up a magazine.

Mr. Pennyfeather went on thinking. It was queer, he realized, how seldom he had tried to fit the murder of Freddy Nixon into the picture. Freddy had been murdered because his being here with Ernestine represented some sort of danger to the murderer.

An idea gnawed at him. How had the murderer known of Freddy’s presence? Even providing the killer had glimpsed the terrified man skidding downhill in the dusk, how had he known so quickly who Freddy was?

Had Ernestine explained his identity before her death, in the conversation preceding that part which Freddy had overheard? Had she defied her attacker, warning that she had brought a witness with her?

The breakfast was finished; he was beginning to feel sleepy. The brandy was a soporific now, drowning his senses. He heard Gleeford remark, “The wind’s coming up, isn’t it?”

This was true. The little house creaked under the press of the breeze that flowed toward the sea from the desert on the other side of the mountains. The curtains on the porch lifted and flapped. A paper rustled by on the ground outside.

Loretta came in from the other room. “Would you care for more coffee?”

“Yes, thanks, I believe I would.” He stirred the coffee absently, his mind on the puzzle of Freddy’s death and the quickness with which the murderer had fastened upon him.

He began to be puzzled by a new odor in the air. He thought briefly that Loretta must have forgotten something on the stove; the smell was sharp, acrid. There was a popping crackle in the distance, gradually growing louder, which didn’t register for a few moments. He stood up, gripping the edge of the table.

Dunne turned from the window, frowning. “Don’t I smell smoke?”

Gleeford jumped for the door and almost collided there with Mrs. Cullens. She was panting, perspiring, though she had not lost her dignity, and her eyes seemed more than ordinarily alert.

She caught the door lintel as though about to fall. “There is a fire … in the trees. It’s sweeping down the hill with the wind. What can we do?”

Dunne sneered at her openly. Loretta made a panicked movement, as if to gather up everything in the little house and remove it to safety. Gleeford squeezed past Mrs. Cullens to get outdoors, and Mr. Pennyfeather followed. Heat smote him like the breath of a giant. The little pines were torches, spouting funnels of smoke and yellow flame. As he watched, the grasses withered to fuming black ash, the fire sweeping them like the blade of an invisible scythe. He turned to look apprehensively at the wall beside him, where the old wood, frail and weather-beaten, awaited only the first flying cinder to burst into flame.

16

They worked frantically for about ten minutes, using a hose which gave forth a spasmodic trickle of water, and various slopping pots and pans which Loretta brought filled from the kitchen faucet. In the end it became obvious that nothing they could do would save the cabin. The smoke was a smothering, blinding, strangling pall. The heat roasted them slowly like the burning of some incredible sun.

At one time Mr. Pennyfeather, running with a kettle to douse a spurt of flame in the grass, caught sight of Mrs. Cullens. The woman was slightly bent and was beating at a burning bush with a damp handkerchief. The calm ineffectuality of her movement was evidence enough to tell him who had set the fire to burn the cabin. Mrs. Cullens had; and her motive, too, was obvious—to destroy all evidence of her son’s hiding here. True, they had his body in the morgue in San Bernardino. But a body was a homeless object, destined swiftly for the grave. A bit of tidying up here, in the way of a fire, would remove what Mrs. Cullens no doubt felt was a disgraceful connection with herself.

Mr. Pennyfeather became engulfed by a fresh wave of smoke. Choking, with eyes streaming, he was trying to find his way back to the cabin when he was suddenly gripped by Dunne.

Dunne yelled in his ear, drowning the hot crackle of the fire. “We’re clearing out. Come on, before someone gets hurt.”

The thick heat beat around them. Mr. Pennyfeather could see the sweat bursting from Dunne’s face above the red beard, and beneath it in the triangle of flesh exposed at the neck of his open shirt. He protested: “They’ll lose all possible clues in the cabin …”

Dunne’s greenish eyes glittered behind tears brought by the smoke. “That’s why she set the fire, of course. We shouldn’t have left her up there with the cigarette, but it’s done now.” He pulled Mr. Pennyfeather away suddenly, out of reach of an inching fire that was traveling through the grasses. “She’d know when the wind was due. It comes up every day like this, in these mountains.” He coughed against his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

They stumbled downhill together. The roof of the cabin popped with fire in a dozen spots. Loretta stood at the door to the porch, her arms piled with clothing which had been Robert Cullens’s. When she saw Mr. Pennyfeather and Dunne she turned quickly and walked away, down the path which led to the lower level and the highway. For a moment Mr. Pennyfeather was puzzled by her attitude, the suppressed panic and aversion. Then he thought that he understood; Loretta knew, as well as he and Dunne did, that her mother had set the fire, and for what purpose. She was at once ashamed and afraid that her mother might be headed for trouble.

Dunne may have sensed her feelings more quickly than Mr. Pennyfeather. He hurried after her at a half trot. Mr. Pennyfeather hesitated at the door; he could see that the inside of the cabin was hazy with smoke. Flying sparks had set fire to the roof. It wouldn’t be long before the small house burst entirely into flame like a pile of kindling. But there might be a moment, just a moment, in which he could look around inside. This place had held the secret of Ernestine Hollister’s murder, of Freddy Nixon’s terror, of Robert Cullens’s ironically formal arrangement in death, a corpse with a pillow…. Mr. Pennyfeather started as a blaze flared near the eaves. If there were any clues inside, he’d better find them quickly.

He stepped through the porch into the larger center room. The furniture seemed to float in a watery dusk compounded of smoke and tears. He marked each piece in his mind; there was a leaden, sickish feeling at the thought of how soon it would all be gone. The round table sat in the exact center of the room, an old-fashioned arrangement he recalled from his boyhood with his aunt Elizabeth. On the table top now was only the kerosene lamp and a small tin ash tray holding a box of matches. Some of the belongings of Robert Cullens had been removed; others had been strewn in haste across the floor.

He moved to the table and leaned on it, trying to fight off a paroxysm of coughing by breathing through his handkerchief. He could make out the row of three windows in the opposite wall. There was no apparent evidence of what had happened there, no mark or stain. Probably during the night the police had thoroughly investigated the window fittings for traces not easily washed away; and if Freddy Nixon had been telling the truth, they should have found grim evidence soaked into the pores of the wood.

The smoke thickened, blowing through the room on bursts of heat. He looked behind him, wondering with a touch of panic if he could find the door. The light from the porch seemed to have taken on a reddish tinge. There was an ominous popping overhead. His fingers touched the matchbox on the tray. With a confused idea of giving himself more illumination he struck a match, lifted the glass chimney off the lamp, and touched flame to the wick.

The flame flickered, then grew tall and yellow. He stared at it with a kind of mesmerism, thinking how soon it was to be swallowed in the bigger fire.

The glass chimney was cool to his touch as he set it back upon the lamp. But the surface of the table was hot, the air scorching.

He went over to the windows and turned, trying to place himself as Freddy Nixon had said Miss Hollister had stood: back to the pane, shadow on the pinkish drapery, facing the room. Freddy had said that the girl had spoken loudly … so loudly that he had heard her while standing outdoors and on the ground some feet below. This would seem to indicate that Ernestine had been talking to someone some distance away. Over beyond the table, perhaps.

He went back to the table and leaned across it as though facing and challenging someone beside the windows. He tried to re-create in himself the sense of antagonism, the bitter quarreling which must have filled the room. The murderer, he reasoned, could have advanced from some other spot, to stop here to listen to those final, ironic phrases concerning Swinburne’s poem. Perhaps some implement or tool had lain on the table, so that the whole idea of the murder had burst full-grown into the murderer’s mind at that instant.

He moved his free hand experimentally, coughing meanwhile into the handkerchief.

There was very little more time; the heat was that of an oven, and the smoke was actually beginning to suffocate him. The place was burning down around him; he had to leave it.

And he had found nothing….

He turned, and his half-outstretched hand struck the lamp. It was ridiculous, had he stopped to reason, to be so careful of not starting a blaze; but he gripped the lamp stand with both hands, stilled its rocking motion, and set it straight. Then, forgetting completely the lessons of his youth, he made the mistake of taking hold of the glass chimney.

The glass was now frightfully hot. He felt that his skin must have congealed and stuck to it, and he actually glanced into his palm, which was just beginning to redden. His hand started to pulse; there would probably be blisters later. With a grimace of pain he backed away … then stopped, and stood still, forgetting everything.

Gleeford plunged in at the door a few seconds later, coughing and cursing, and found him standing as if hypnotized, his handkerchief over his mouth and his expression full of astonishment. Gleeford grabbed him, not gently. “Here, what the hell are you waiting for? Come on!”

Mr. Pennyfeather awoke to the present and saw the smoke curls spurting from the walls and ceiling. “I was … thinking.”

“No time for it.” Gleeford came close, looked into his face, and apparently decided that Mr. Pennyfeather was all but overcome by the fire. He did something quick and dexterous with his arms and shoulder, and Mr. Pennyfeather found himself in the position of a gunny sack full of corn on the back of a farmer. His coattails fell over his head, and his heels waved. The indignity of his posture seemed suddenly, and not unreasonably, more than he could bear. After that callous business of being stuffed into a pipe, of being snubbed by Mrs. Cullens, of having a brush fire started under his nose at the sacrifice of a lot of rugged little pines …

He began to kick.

At the doorway to the porch Gleeford, weaving and staggering, put him down, perhaps with the idea of pacifying him by knocking him out. Mr. Pennyfeather struggled, went off balance with a vast lurch, and Gleeford let go. At the same instant there was a thudding, ripe-melon sort of sound against the doorframe. Mr. Pennyfeather skidded across the porch floor to end up against the wicker settee. He crawled to his knees. The smoke was slightly thinner down here, and he could see Gleeford’s big blue-serge-suited body against the opposite wall, lying in a strangely limp and awkward posture.

He crawled over to discover what was wrong. Gleeford was unconscious. He had caught himself a nasty crack at the base of the skull, which was beginning to ooze blood.

Mr. Pennyfeather sensed sudden brightness overhead; he looked up. The porch roof was burning merrily, dropping live sparks in a Fourth-of-July shower. He bent and tried to lift Gleeford. There had been a time, when he was young—a skinny, shy young man—when he had had high hopes of developing muscles. But none of the dumbbells he’d never been able to lift had seemed as heavy as Officer Gleeford.

Heat ran down his neck as he bent—heat like the touch of the fire itself. He hurried back to the couch and lifted the flimsy mattress which covered the wicker. The chintz was old but firm. The cotton padding inside had coagulated into hard lumps, which made the thing easier to grip.

He pulled the mattress to the floor and heard, from under the couch, a sharp sound, as though something had fallen. He marked the sound, but didn’t stop to look; there was a terrible urgency about getting Gleeford out of this burning place.

Gleeford’s body rolled away from the wall and, under his guiding, sprawled upon the mattress on the floor. Mr. Pennyfeather lifted the ruffle which edged the mattress, and tugged. For a moment he thought he faced failure again; then the thing moved. Slowly, with an infinitely painful straining and knotting of muscles, he got Gleeford nearer the outside door.

He was at the sill when his eye fell upon a small book which had, apparently, fallen from between the mattress and the wicker frame when he had pulled away the former. It was a brown leather-covered book on which gilt lettering shone dimly. Mr. Pennyfeather leaned across Gleeford’s inert form, picked up the book, and thrust it into a pocket. Then he went back to the job of moving the mattress.

Beyond the door was an inferno, for here the wind swept the flames back and forth, buffeting Mr. Pennyfeather with a breath like that from an oven. He thought of yelling for help, but no one would have heard, in the roar and crackle of the fire. The dry grasses, the oily manzanita and other shrubs, the little scrubby pines—all burned with a fierce fury. He crouched, trying to protect his face, and pulled the mattress away from the house and toward the downward slope of the hill.

It seemed to him that he lived an aching eon, bent over like that, strangling on hot smoke, with Gleeford’s inert body bobbing along on the mattress. By and by stones ripped away the undersurface of the chintz, and they began to leave a long trail of cotton stuffing. Then he heard shouts from below. He answered with a sound like a croak.

Dunne stumbled up to his side. “Good God, man, we thought you were done for!” His stare widened over Gleeford. “What happened to the copper?”

“He collapsed,” Mr. Pennyfeather decided. “All at once. In the house.”

Dunne took a moment to shake his head in admiring astonishment. “And you stopped to save him. Look!”

Mr. Pennyfeather looked. The house was outlined above, through the buffeting smoke, by a great gout of flame.

“He’d be sizzling by now,” said Dunne, kneeling beside Gleeford and doing much the same sort of lift which Gleeford had used on Mr. Pennyfeather.

“Oh, but I couldn’t leave him!” said Mr. Pennyfeather modestly.

Mrs. Mauffit clucked with alarm over the state of his clothes and the semibaked condition of his face and hands. She insisted that he hop at once into bed; once he was in it, she returned and buttered him liberally with antisepticsmelling ointments to relieve the burn. Then she brought him some wine, to relax him—the same tin tray with the daisies, but a much larger glass.

When he had obediently emptied the glass, she tucked in his covers. “I’ll peep in at you after a bit. If you’re not sleeping, I’ll bring some broth and crackers.”

Mr. Pennyfeather, however, was in no mood to enjoy invalidism. He positively itched with nervous apprehension. As soon as Mrs. Mauffit had left the room, he got up again and padded over to the closet where his clothes hung. He removed the small book from his coat pocket, being careful not to smear either it or his clothes with ointment, and went back to sit on the edge of his bed. The little book fell open in his hand as if from long usage. It was, he saw, a book of Swinburne’s poetry.

He thumbed back to the title page, then to the flyleaf. In the handwriting he recalled from class reports, he read:

This book belongs to Ernestine Hollister—Clarendon College

There was a date, in the same handwriting, in the corner of the page. The date was that of approximately three years before.

He sat frowning over the little book, his bare toes dangling below the hem of the plain, serviceable nightshirt—of which his aunt Elizabeth always sent him a new handmade trio at Christmas. He remembered the Ernestine Hollister of three years ago—a freshman just getting her bearings, not yet the studiedly casual college type she had made herself later.

There had been, he thought, a streak of fatalism in her even then. She’d learned to accept life stoically. Her bitter experiences with Robert Cullens and with Acton were already part of her past, something she had accepted and submerged and learned to live with, as an oyster learns to live with a sharp bit of stone by covering it with nacre. She’d made of her bitterness a goad to better things. Or perhaps she’d simply been waiting, passing the time until there should be an opportunity for vengeance….

Mr. Pennyfeather wound his skinny ankles together inside the nightshirt. He frowned with concentration. Had there been more to Ernestine Hollister’s motive in going to the mountain hide-out than the simple one of getting even? Had she threatened to expose Robert Cullens and been killed for it? By whom? Cullens himself? Who, then, had murdered him afterward?

Providing the crimes were all the work of the same person, was there any sane reason under the sun why Cullens had first been saved from exposure by murder, then murdered in his turn? And murder, if such a thing there be, with gentleness…

Ernestine Hollister had been battered to death in an excess of fury. Freddy Nixon had been run down callously in a dark street.

But Robert Cullens had been stabbed in the back with a very small, narrow knife, as if in an effort not to hurt him—and then had had a pillow put carefully under his head.

Mr. Pennyfeather rubbed his ointmented temples.

He knew a part of it at last. The revelation had come to him in that instant he had leaned across the fable in the burning room and touched the lamp chimney. He knew which part of Ernestine Hollister’s overheard conversation with her murderer was important.

It didn’t, however, help him to figure out other things … such as why he had been put into the drainpipe by someone who obviously just meant to leave him there permanently. He squinted his eyes in an effort to remember more of that shadowy being who had tied him. What plan had he interrupted? Why should it have been necessary to knock him out at all?

His eyes fell on the little book in his hand. Had the murderer returned to search for this?

He riffled the pages quickly, then went back to the front of the book and searched it leaf by leaf. There were indications that the book had been thoroughly reread. Pages containing the more familiar verses showed signs of wear in the margins. But there were no handwritten marks anywhere.

He put the book down and went into his bathroom to remove the greasy medication from his hands and face. Mrs. Mauffit was going to be disappointed; she loved doctoring people. But the itch of apprehension was growing; Mr. Pennyfeather’s strongest hunch was that the thing had to be wound up quickly before the murderer put further plans into action. If what he thought was true, the action was not far off…. He dressed quickly and went down the hall to the telephone, where he dialed Mrs. Leland’s number.

Mrs. Leland’s voice came on, surrounded by a steady chorus of yelps. Someone was doing dastardly things to the brown cocker who had chewed up Mr. Pennyfeather’s rubbers.

She gasped into the telephone: “Mr. Pennyfeather? Don’t mind the noise at this end; we’re trying to bathe the dog.”

Apparently the cocker was immune to the charms of soap and water. “I wanted to ask you about a book.” He listened to splashing sounds, gurglings, the shrieks of the Leland children. “It belonged to Miss Hollister.”

“Hmmm? I don’t suppose we should do it in the kitchen. There’s always so much mess from the tub. But if we go outside, the phone’s sure to ring. You say there is a book belonging to Ernestine? Where is it?”

“I have it. I want to describe it to you, to see if you recall it.”

Slap, slap … the cocker howled lonesomely. “Surely. Go right ahead.”

“It’s a small brown book. Swinburne’s poetry. Her name is inside.”

There were several seconds of silence. Then: “Do you know, I can’t quite place it, and yet … there’s a sort of memory—” Her voice trailed away, and as if the mood for contemplation had spread to the children and the dog, the wire became utterly quiet.

Mr. Pennyfeather tried to help. “Miss Hollister did read a good deal of poetry, didn’t she?”

“Oh, yes. We used to discuss it sometimes. Let me think…. You know, if she did have a book of Swinburne it’s been some time since I saw it. Perhaps that’s why I have the nagging feeling that I ought to recall it; it may have been here in the past.”

“Well, thank you anyway, and if you should happen to remember—”

“I’ll call you right away,” she promised through a noise like a tidal wave breaking.

Mr. Pennyfeather tried to suppress his disappointment. He was in the act of hanging up the receiver when his eye happened to stray past his shoulder. In the dark hall Acton was standing quite still, watching him, not more than a foot or so away. Mr. Pennyfeather almost jumped out of his skin.

17

Acton stretched his lean length in Mr. Pennyfeather’s most comfortable chair, sighed melodramatically, took out a pack of cigarettes, and offered it to Mr. Pennyfeather. Mr. Pennyfeather indicated his pipe on the table beside him. Acton lit a cigarette for himself and exhaled the smoke gracefully. He was, Mr. Pennyfeather decided, a rather extraordinarily handsome man. The Norman-English type, with a narrow head, dark hair, clipped mustache, and fair, clean-looking skin.

“Sorry if I startled you,” Acton apologized. “I thought it rather important that I come in quietly, so that we could talk in private. Then, afterward, I was hoping you might be willing to go with me on an errand.”

Mr. Pennyfeather did not feel kindly toward Mr. Acton on several scores, the fright he’d had in the dim light of the hall being only the first. He found himself resenting Mr. Acton’s casual freshness after what should have been a rough night with the police. Most of all he prickled inwardly over his own dun-colored suit and sickly tie; he knew exactly how he looked in comparison with Acton. Acton might be a rogue and a libertine, but he made the appearance a gentleman should. Mr. Pennyfeather felt very dowdy. He said coldly, “What sort of errand?”

Acton shot him a studying look. “I want to say first that it has nothing to do with Miss Cullens. I suspect you’ve been influenced by Dunne to think I’m not the sort of fellow for her.” He waited, as if hoping Mr. Pennyfeather would deny it.

Mr. Pennyfeather simply raised an eyebrow. “And so … ?”

Acton shrugged wryly. “I do trust, however, that when you have the facts you’ll be impartial enough to accept them.”

“You intend to produce such facts?”

“I think I have a pretty fair chance,” Acton answered. “I’d like first to outline what I hope to find, and then have you come with me to burglarize Dunne’s shack.”

Mr. Pennyfeather involuntarily let the eyebrow drop. “You’re asking me to witness a burglary?”

“I couldn’t very well invite the police,” Acton pointed out dryly, “and I’d be a fool to go unaccompanied. Dunne would simply say I’d brought the evidence with me and planted it.”

“What’s the evidence?”

Acton tensed a little. “I believe that if we search thoroughly enough we’ll locate some sort of will leaving Dunne the bulk of the Hollister estate. There’s been such a muck made over my motive—and poor Robbie’s motive—for killing her; no one’s thought of Dunne’s stake in her death.” He watched Mr. Pennyfeather as if to judge the impression he’d made. “I think furthermore there might be other clues, perhaps even some communication from this Nixon fellow, though I suppose Dunne would have been clever enough to destroy anything like that.”

Mr. Pennyfeather tried to suppress any show of belief. “A communication? You don’t mean … blackmail?”

For some reason Acton twitched slightly at the word. “Not exactly. Let’s call it insurance. He might have wanted Dunne to know about that letter he’d left for the police, to keep Dunne from killing him.”

“One thing I’d better point out before we start,” Mr. Pennyfeather said cunningly, “is that Dunne didn’t know Nixon from Adam. I overheard most of the interview between them—inadvertently.”.

“I’m sure,” said Acton with a touch of nastiness.

Mr. Pennyfeather felt his hackles rising. “Dunne wouldn’t listen to the man. He was very curt with him, and sent him packing.”

“Dunne is a very clever fellow,” Acton put in. “You didn’t, I take it, overhear all of the interview. Did they know you were listening?”

Into Mr. Pennyfeather’s mind, deceptively clear, slid the memory of the night he had gone to Dunne’s house. The only light visible had been one high in a wall near the rear of the house, giving an odd impression of secrecy now that he recalled it. When he had come up on the porch, Dunne’s voice and that of Nixon had been oddly loud. True, one man was presumed to be skeptical, the other frantic and angry. The door was a thin one. Had they heard his taxi coming and put on an act? Nixon’s desperate rage had seemed genuine, or had he himself been overly gullible?

Acton’s eyes were on him. “You’ve remembered something?”

Mr. Pennyfeather evaded him. “I was wondering how you knew what Nixon had left for the police. It hasn’t been in the papers.”

“During my interview last night they tried to frighten me with Nixon’s letter. Olney is a clever man, but some of his subordinates remind me of a bunch of elephants trying to put a watch together. I had no trouble gathering what the gist of Nixon’s letter was. He hadn’t named his murderer. Cautious, frightened little man.” Acton made a disgusted sound. “Too stupid and afraid to do it right.”

Mr. Pennyfeather was aware of sudden curiosity as to what Mr. Acton would consider right. “He ought to have asked Dunne for money?”

Again the suggestion of a twitch under the man’s smooth control. Acton killed his cigarette in the wide tray beside Mr. Pennyfeather’s blunt-nosed pipe. “I suspect he might have lived longer if he had. Dunne would have paid for a time or two. I think if he hadn’t been hurried, he’d have managed something like that which happened to Ernestine—a pseudo-accident.” Acton stood up. “I can sense your utter lack of sympathy, but in a way I’m glad of it. If you will go with me, and if we do find something on Dunne, your animosity toward me will be proof that what we find is genuine. Will you come along as witness?”

Mr. Pennyfeather thought it over, admitting to himself a certain desire to examine the interior of Mr. Dunne’s remarkable little house. The trick with the sailor’s cap had been smoothly done. Would there be clues to other trickery? He nodded to Acton and got his hat from the closet.

Acton was driving a coupe which, while not new, had much the same air of unobtrusive correctness that Acton did. There was no dust inside, the glass was all but invisible with cleanliness, and the cushions had been recently upholstered in dove-gray broadcloth, smooth as a kitten’s ear under the touch of Mr. Pennyfeather’s fingers.

Acton drove with a touch of recklessness, and almost entirely without speaking, to the street below the hill where Dunne’s little house sat among its trees. He cut the motor and gave Mr. Pennyfeather a measuring sidewise glance. There was a trace of embarrassment in his manner. “I thought you might be willing to do the initial scouting. If Dunne is up there and catches sight of me, he’ll get suspicious. But he’ll trust you.”

Mr. Pennyfeather stared indignantly into Mr. Acton’s handsome blue eyes and nearly blurted his opinion of Acton’s methods.

Acton made a dismissing motion with one hand. “I know … I know. I needed someone to go first. But I intend to do the actual breaking in. You won’t be liable for that, if trouble comes.”

Mr. Pennyfeather got out of the car and slammed the door. He felt Acton’s eyes following him, with what expression he tried to imagine. Scorn, probably. Scorn for a dim-witted professor who let himself be used as a cat’s-paw on Mr. Acton’s hot chestnuts. He walked stiffly up the hill and rapped on Dunne’s front door and waited for some sound of movement inside the house.

The beach wind rattled the eucalypti overhead. From some other house, out of sight behind the trees, a radio played be-bop. He was stung briefly and guiltily by the knowledge that he was not only neglecting his students, who might be floundering in confusion under the inexpert teaching of the substitute, but that he had in addition betrayed poor Mrs. Mauffit by not waiting for her broth. If the college were to find out, furthermore, that hiring the substitute had permitted Mr. Pennyfeather to connive at burglary … His thoughts broke off sharp. There had been a noise inside Dunne’s house.

He waited for the door to open, aware of disappointment and puzzled by what errand he could invent for Dunne’s benefit.

The door didn’t open. The sound, a series of creakings and poppings, as of pressure on the old flooring, grew indistinct.

Mr. Pennyfeather stepped very softly off the porch and went around to the back. He was waiting when Loretta Cullens slipped out quietly and stood with her ear at the crack of the back door. “I’m right here,” he said loudly. She jerked around, her eyes staring and afraid.

“I don’t think that you and Mr. Acton had your timetables worked out in enough detail,” he went on. “We got here a little too quickly.”

She shook her head at him. There were signs of tears on her face. She hadn’t bothered with the heavy make-up Miss Caradyne used. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

“You might as well bring it out again. I’m not going to believe anything we find,” Mr. Pennyfeather told her grimly.

Her mind was still on his first statement. “You mean … Jarold is here?”

“Indeed he is. Champing at the bit, too, to get inside and start searching for evidence. I hadn’t been sure he’d find any until I caught you here.”

It got through to her at last. “You think that … that I planted something in there?”

“Not what I would have expected of you under normal circumstances,” Mr. Pennyfeather admitted. “But you’re in love with Mr. Acton and naturally he’d be able to persuade you.”

“He would not!” She was suddenly alive, blazing, furiously angry. Remembering the quietly dismal picture she had made for so long at school, Mr. Pennyfeather was startled. She bent toward him, her eyes on a level with his own, and he backed nervously away. “You’re a … a stinking liar!” she spat. Then she put her hand over her mouth.

Mr. Pennyfeather pulled at his collar.

“I didn’t quite mean that.” Suddenly she got a fresh supply of anger again. “I am not in love with Mr. Acton! I won’t have my affections pinned down like a … a class assignment.”

“Of course not,” he said hurriedly.

“If Mr. Acton intends to try to use me to trap Mr. Dunne, I’ll tell the coppers.”

“Oh?”

“The police,” she corrected. There were tears in her eyes, now—tired-looking tears. She lifted both hands and rubbed her temples, as though inside her head there was an intolerable pressure.

“You came here to see Mr. Dunne?”

Her honest eyes fled before his. “Uh … yes.”

“He wasn’t at home?”

“No. I went inside to wait.” Her words stumbled over each other. “The back door was open a little. I felt nervous … all these trees, and I had a queer feeling that someone was watching.”

In obedience to the hint Mr. Pennyfeather’s skin grew goose-pimples between his shoulder blades. Suggestion, of course, as Todt would say. There was now a distinct impression that eyes were boring into his back from behind a eucalyptus. It was rather obvious, he thought, that Miss Cullens had come to do what he and Acton intended—to prowl and spy, and that something had upset her. He began to feel a fresh curiosity about seeing the inside of Dunne’s house.

“Have you been inside long?”

She shook her head. “Just a few minutes. I heard someone knock—you, I suppose—and thought I’d just slip away. I … I had an idea it might be the police. They’ve been at my house ever since we got back from the mountains, hounding Daddy and Mother…. I’m sure neither of them knew that Robbie was hiding up there. They’re both very careful and respectable; they wouldn’t risk helping Robbie in his position. Besides, Daddy hated the cabin and hadn’t gone near it for years; he always broke out with poison oak after a trip up there. And since Mother’s been elected president of her club she’s hardly left Beverly Hills.”

He noticed the sudden hesitation in her manner. “And your grandmother?”

Loretta bit her lip with her small, fine teeth. “I don’t know.” She averted her face for a moment, then looked straight at him. “Yes, I’ll admit it must have been Grammy. I don’t see how she managed, but she must have.”

“Perhaps she hired someone to take him supplies from San Bernardino,” Mr. Pennyfeather suggested. “That wouldn’t have been too difficult.”

“The police will find that out, won’t they?”

“Very probably. But I don’t see how they can mete out much punishment to a little old lady in your grandmother’s state of health.”

“She’s not afraid of anything,” Loretta said with a touch of pride. “If she felt that she had to help Robbie, she’d have helped him.”

“Would it have been in character for your brother to have appealed to her?”

Loretta frowned. “I suppose so—much sooner, at any rate, than he would have asked help of Daddy or Mother.”

“There is another possibility,” Mr. Pennyfeather offered. “That your grandmother used an acquaintance as a go-between. Some sympathetic person with whom she had frequent contact, but not a member of your family. Someone whose experience with Ernestine Hollister had been as unfortunate as Robert’s own.”

She had listened quietly, her features tense but expressionless.

“In such case,” he went on, “this other person would be open to charges of having aided Robert in escaping the Army.”

Her eyes remained blank. He had the feeling that she had not listened to what he had said, that her mind was off on some problem of her own. “Do you understand?” he probed, hoping for some reaction.

Again she rubbed her temples in the gesture peculiarly resembling an attempt to escape some intolerable inward pressure. Mr. Pennyfeather felt a stab of pity for her. Her blank stare settled on the eucalyptus grove. “I don’t think I’d better stay here any longer. Mr. Dunne must be detained somewhere. Did I understand you to say that you and Mr. Acton are going inside?”

She spoke of Acton formally, even stiffly. What the devil, he wondered, had happened to that devotion which had been so obvious? “It’s Mr. Acton’s theory that there may be clues to the crime in Dunne’s house.”

She went on biting her lip and staring at the trees. “I’ll wait until you’re both inside the front door. Then I’ll slip away. Please don’t tell Jarold you found me here.”

All the fire had gone out of her. She was again the quiet, overrefined girl Mr. Pennyfeather remembered in his classes. As he stepped into the house to make sure that the front door was open for Acton, he puzzled over her behavior. She had seemed so smitten, so adoring, when he had first seen her and Acton together. Then he recalled something further: that her love and pride in the music teacher had had a certain basis in gratitude. Acton had been playing the noble hero who offers himself to the law in place of his beloved’s long-lost brother. Now that the brother was dead, could Loretta have sensed the man’s inner falseness? Or hadn’t Acton, in her eyes, been sufficiently the sacrificial goat?

Dunne’s house was dim, the blinds drawn. Mr. Pennyfeather’s progress was hampered by heaps of beach scourings—driftwood and shells and an almost incredible assortment of other stuff.

He pushed back the night latch on the front door, swung the door open, and looked out. The first thing he saw was Dunne’s red beard. It had a flaming brightness under the touch of the late-afternoon sun.

“Dear, dear,” said Dunne grimly. “I’ve got company and I’m not even home.” His fists balled as he strode up the steps to the porch. “I’ve a hunch you came here with the skunk I just glimpsed in the street below. You two had an errand here, didn’t you?”

Dunne was much bigger than Mr. Pennyfeather and he had the advantage of being mad. But Mr. Pennyfeather had taken lessons in his youth, boxing lessons and hints on self-defense from one of the great fighters of the past. Unfortunately, the lessons had been by mail and his only practice had been with a series of pillows.

They met in the doorway. Dunne stuck out a hand—not quite a blow, or at least it didn’t land—and Mr. Pennyfeather retaliated with a punch to the solar plexus. Dunne retreated, not more than a step or two, and his eyes were astonished. “What the hell’s the idea? Isn’t it enough you’ve planted something for the coppers?”

Mr. Pennyfeather kept his guard up. Dunne studied him bitterly.

“I have not planted anything. When I got here, you already had a visitor. Inside the house. If you’re going to leave the back door open—”

“I never leave the back door open. Who was here?”

Mr. Pennyfeather reflected. Loretta hadn’t wanted Acton to know of her visit. She hadn’t mentioned Dunne. Obviously she had wanted to see him or she wouldn’t have gone inside. She shouldn’t mind his knowing of the incident. “It was Miss Cullens. She seemed upset.”

“Poor little devil,” Dunne said. His hands had relaxed and were hanging at his sides. Mr. Pennyfeather let his guard down cautiously. “Why did you tap me just then?”

Mr. Pennyfeather almost blurted, “Tap you?” indignantly. It had seemed a solid, well-executed blow and, according to the theories which he still remembered vaguely, Dunne should be writhing on the floor, trying to get his breath. Finally Mr. Pennyfeather said tiredly, “I thought you wanted to fight.”

“I just want to come inside,” Dunne explained, “and look the place over before Acton has the coppers up.”

“I don’t think there was any intention of bringing the police into it,” Mr. Pennyfeather defended. “Mr. Acton told me he intended to conduct an impartial search and he wanted me along because I don’t like him.”

Dunne walked past as Mr. Pennyfeather made room for him. He went over to the dead fireplace and stared suspiciously in at the ashes.

“For some reason which I can’t understand,” Mr. Pennyfeather meditated aloud, “Miss Cullens seems to be beginning not to like him either.”

Dunne stood very quiet.

“I got the impression that she was involved in some horrible dilemma.”

Dunne turned slowly to look at him. “Which way did she go?”

“She’s probably still by the back door,” Mr. Pennyfeather admitted.

Dunne walked toward the door to the kitchen with an air of purpose. As soon as he was out of sight Mr. Pennyfeather began his search. It was just too good a chance to miss.

18

He found the brown paper parcel almost at once. It had been cleverly taped to the underside of a bench on which Dunne had piled a suspicious number of shells. Undersides of things were the first places Mr. Pennyfeather looked; he’d taken a detective course, too, when he was eleven.

He loosened the tape and took the tightly wrapped object in his hands. It was plump, tubular, a little less than a foot in length, and light of weight. In spite of the thickness of the brown paper and the sturdiness of the twine, there was a certain yielding quality, which made him think of wrapped cloth. A garment? He slipped out to the kitchen and peered through one of the high windows to see what Dunne and Miss Cullens might be doing. He saw them some distance away, under a tree, Dunne with his jutting red beard, and Miss Cullens making nervous gestures with her hands. They seemed to be having an argument, Mr. Pennyfeather thought. He wondered if Dunne was echoing his own accusations in regard to Miss Cullens’s visit.

He located a small paring knife among the dishes in Dunne’s sink and cut the twine, then opened the parcel on Dunne’s table. When he saw what was inside the wrapping, he jerked the paper hastily back over it. His heart began to hammer inside his ribs, and perspiration came out on his face. At the same time some inner, cynical voice warned him. This was another smooth, miraculously lucky break that he hadn’t deserved. His aunt Elizabeth had raised him to be mightily suspicious of anything he didn’t deserve. He took out a handkerchief and mopped off the sweat, then took the parcel back to the living room.

Inside the brown paper, arranged so as to form a column, were two rolls of yellow gauze bandage, some soiled gauze wrapped in a sheet of waxed paper, a green glass jar of sulfa ointment, a clear glass jar of petroleum jelly, and an almost empty roll of adhesive tape.

The tape matched that which had secured the package to the underside of the bench. The jar of sulfa—when he had got it open gingerly by his finger tips—proved to have been emptied by one third. The petroleum jelly had a dab or so missing. The soiled bandages in the waxed paper seemed to have been cut to fit a space some inch or so square.

He knew what the yellow color in the gauze meant. Picric acid. His aunt Elizabeth had kept a stock of such gauze in her medicine chest to use for burns. An old-fashioned remedy, he believed, leaving a yellow stain on the skin. The more modern method, he’d read somewhere, was the simple one of using the petroleum jelly. The sulfa had come into popularity during the war. Well, the user of all this stuff hadn’t taken any chances.

He went back to the kitchen and checked again on Dunne and Miss Cullens. They were still out under the eucalyptus, but Miss Cullens now had her back turned, and Dunne seemed to be standing silent, plucking at the leaves on a low-hanging branch.

He wrapped the brown paper parcel up again carefully, tied it with the remains of the string, and put it into his coat pocket. In his opposite pocket was Ernestine Hollister’s small book of Swinburne, dropped there in a hurry when Acton had surprised him in the hall. He knew what he had to do now, though the knowledge brought no release and no pleasure. There was always this moment at the end of things when motives became clear and the identity of the murderer was solved: an ordinary human being pushed a little farther than usual by fear or desire. Not a fiend. An opportunist, at most. Or a mind lost in a maze.

He went out on the porch and looked for Acton, but the car was gone and the street below was empty. The sea wind smelled of salt and kelp; there was a lonely quiet about the hill and the late sunlight. He touched the packages that bulged his coat, then walked down the steps to the ground.

On the bus into Santa Monica, he had a moment of wondering whether old Mrs. Lacoste deserved a warning, and then decided that she didn’t need one. Her escape into alcohol and dope was the answer to whether she knew what was coming.

Olney was not at the Santa Monica Station. The desk officer tried to be mysterious about his whereabouts, but Mr. Pennyfeather had a hunch; Olney would be in on the heckling Loretta Cullens had complained of. He asked the desk officer to get hold of Olney and request an interview. Yes, it was going to be important. The desk officer went into another room to use the phone.

When he came back, he looked sharply at Mr. Pennyfeather. “If you’re sure you’ve really got something, the captain will see you. Five minutes. This address.” He thrust a piece of paper at Mr. Pennyfeather, who was not surprised to read on it the number of the Cullens home in Beverly Hills.

The sun was going down into the sea when he came out to the street again. He felt hungry and nervous, yet half asleep. The cramp and the chill of his night in the drainpipe seemed to return suddenly. He decided he needed a stimulant. In a bar he had three whiskies, then went to a lunchroom for some black coffee and what passed for a chicken-liver omelet. He reflected moodily that the chicken had apparently been sired by an octopus. There was no accounting otherwise for its rubbery resistance to his teeth. But when he was through he felt filled and warm.

A little lightheaded, too. It occurred to him, too late, that Olney was going to smell the whisky on his breath and, preferring his witnesses sober, wasn’t going to like it.

His budget had never been the sort to afford taxis for long distances, but time, he sensed, was running short. He waved down a cab.

Olney was waiting in a police car. The spotlight met the cab, settled on Mr. Pennyfeather as he alighted in the shadowy street. It roused in him the first touch of irritation. There was still enough light for Olney to have recognized him. He didn’t have to study the captain’s face, looking at him through a rear window, to know that Olney was tired, frustrated, and mad at the world. Mr. Pennyfeather had a quick hunch that Mrs. Cullens’s royally haughty manner and Mr. Cullens’s slick evasions had been more durable than Olney’s temper.

The inside of the car smelled of leather and cigarette smoke. “I suppose you’ve come to tell me you’ve wrapped it up and I can go home,” Olney said with sour humor.

“Oh no. It’s most important now to be alert. Especially about old Mrs. Lacoste.”

“You think she’ll try any tricks? The doc said she was out and would be out for hours yet.”

“She’s inviting killing,” said Mr. Pennyfeather soberly.

“Oh? I thought you were going to say she’d murdered her grandson.”

“You might think for a minute of the way in which her grandson was killed,” Mr. Pennyfeather offered.

Olney appeared to think. “A labor of love?” he asked with irony.

“A death that tried not to hurt.”

Olney looked at him. “You’ve been lifting a few, haven’t you?”

“I lifted three.”

“Feeling them?”

“I’d have been a fool to drink them, otherwise. Of course I feel them. I’m warm inside for the first time since I got out of that pipe.”

“Rather warm in that burning cabin, wasn’t it?”

“I was much too occupied to get the good of it.” Mr. Pennyfeather pulled out the little book with Ernestine Hollister’s name written in the flyleaf. “I dragged your man out on the mattress from that thing on the porch.”

“The wicker couch?”

“The definition of couch is that of a bed or structure for repose or sleep. You couldn’t have done either on that wicker object. At any rate, this fell out from under the mattress.”

Olney lit the ceiling light and examined the little volume without any change of expression. “Wasn’t I supposed to be given all evidence turned up at the scene of the crime?”

“It slipped my memory.”

“And you were busy playing Philo Vance,” Olney growled. “My lieutenant, by the way, had the queer idea you might have knocked him out.”

“He fell against the doorjamb.”

“Just like that, huh? And gave himself a concussion. He ought to have those heels fixed.”

This was behind Olney’s attitude, then—in addition to the treatment he’d no doubt been receiving from the Cullenses. Gleeford had put in that Mr. Pennyfeather had knocked him out, and Olney was suspicious.

“I can’t help what your man thinks. I saw him knock himself out by falling against the frame of the door. And I found this book in the process of getting him away from the fire.”

Olney grunted. He was reading. Finally he tapped a page with his forefinger and said: “This sounds like that stuff in Nixon’s letter.”

“It’s the same.”

Olney’s mouth reminded Mr. Pennyfeather of a shark’s. “All right, mastermind. You tell me now what you think this book means.”

Mr. Pennyfeather saw the hard incredulity in Olney’s eyes. Olney was being what Dunne would have called him, a copper—a dumb, disbelieving copper with a thick head.

Olney went on staring for a moment. “What are you rubbing your neck for?”

“You make my short hairs rise,” Mr. Pennyfeather snapped. “Anyway … the book. It has Miss Hollister’s name in it, in her own hand. I’m quite familiar with her writing. The date is some three years ago—about the time she must have been enrolling at Clarendon.”

Olney chewed an invisible cigar butt. “So?”

“My guess is that she bought it for Freshman Poetry. But the book isn’t marked up the way it would have been if used for class assignments. And as I recall Miss Hollister in class, she was always making marginal notes in the texts.”

“What are you trying to tell me? That she didn’t keep the book?”

“Mrs. Leland thinks that she had such a book once, but that it had been gone for some time before her death.” Olney sat without speaking for a time. A moth got into the car and fluttered and danced beneath the ceiling light until Olney reached over absently to switch it off.

“It has always seemed to me,” Mr. Pennyfeather went on, “that the poetry of Swinburne has a powerful appeal to the defeatist element in us. In a romantic way he’s forever saying, ‘To hell with everything; you won’t get any farther by struggling.’ Take a man—a young man—who’s made a mess of his life … he’d get a lot of comfort out of Swinburne.”

“She took it to Robert Cullens,” Olney said angrily. “That means she’d always known where he was. That knocks the loops from under the idea that she was murdered because she’d traced him to his hiding place.”

“It could mean that,” Mr. Pennyfeather admitted guardedly. “The book seems to have been pretty important in some way. It was hidden where it would eventually have been found when changes were made in the cottage furnishings. I have a hunch—don’t ask me on what evidence; it’s just a feeling—that I was put into that confounded pipe to give the murderer time to search for the book.”

Olney warmed up a trifle in a flinty way. “Then the fire might have been set to destroy the book, since it couldn’t be found.”

“The fire was set by Mrs. Cullens to get rid of an embarrassing memory. I wish her hide might have been scorched a bit when those scrubby pines went up.”

“I wish she was—” Olney fell silent, apparently planning destinations for Mrs. Cullens.

Mr. Pennyfeather took the brown paper parcel from his other pocket. “Perhaps you’d better switch that light on again. I’ve something else here to show you.”

The light revealed that thinking about Mrs. Cullens had brought out a sweat on Olney’s brow. And his eyes were sour again. “How long have you been carrying this?”

“I just ran across it in Dunne’s house.”

“Oh? Too bad we’re handicapped by having to monkey around getting search warrants for jobs like that.”

“The police run roughshod over the rest of us enough, as it is,” Mr. Pennyfeather rebuked him coolly, and was gratified at the purple congestion that came up promptly into Olney’s face. He unwrapped the gauze, the ointments, and the used bandages. “What do you think of this?”

Olney prodded the yellow gauze suspiciously. “Yeah, I know. For burns.”

“Do you recall exactly what Freddy Nixon wrote about what went on between Ernestine Hollister and her murderer?”

Olney rumbled deep inside, an angry sound without words. He had no intention of playing guessing games about the contents of Nixon’s letter.

“The most confusing thing Nixon wrote was that Miss Hollister had danced. She had jumped about, or done a jig, or some such thing, at about the time her murderer must have been on the verge of hitting her.”

Olney studied him from under thick eyebrows. “You sound as if you didn’t believe it.”

“I believe Nixon thought he saw her dancing. At least, he saw her shadow move on the window curtain in a jerky, unusual fashion. But there could be another explanation of that. Nixon probably took it for granted that the light inside was an electric fixture, attached to the ceiling or a wall. He didn’t know anything about Robert Cullens’s kerosene lamp.”

Olney’s eyes had opened a bit.

“I was inside that cabin, with the lamp lit, just before the whole place went up in smoke,” Mr. Pennyfeather said with careful emphasis. “I leaned on the table and, before I knew it, the lamp was tottering. I made a grab for it.” He spread his palm for Olney’s gimlet glare. “Mrs. Mauffit kindly doctored me, preventing blisters. But I salvaged an idea from the experience. Miss Hollister, according to Nixon, made a remark about someone being ‘really burned.’”

“Yeah,” Olney agreed, “only I thought she meant the guy was irritated. You know—‘burned up,’ as the saying goes.”

“So did I,” Mr. Pennyfeather admitted. “My students have made me very slang conscious. I connected Miss Hollister’s remark with a ‘slow burn,’ ‘doing a burn,’ and other fantasies. Whereas I think now that the person in the cabin with Miss Hollister did just what I did—leaned on that table and got a real burn from the lamp.”

“This yellow stuff,” said Olney, fingering the gauze, “leaves a stain on the skin, if I remember rightly.”

“Yes. Even though the burn may be healed by now, the yellow stain should have left a trace.”

“And just whose hide, now, would you suggest we look at first?”

Mr. Pennyfeather saw that there was no getting inside Olney’s guard tonight. The Cullenses had been too perverse, or Gleeford too convincing; whatever the reason, Mr. Pennyfeather would be under suspicion until Olney’s mood changed. “Mr. Dunne’s, by all means. I’ve an idea you’ll find something at once.”

Olney rubbed his chin. “Did he see you find this stuff?”

“No.”

“Where was it?”

“Taped to the underside of a bench with a lot of shells piled on it.”

“We’ll find evidence the tape was there?”

“You should.”

“Thanks, then, Pennyfeather.”

“There’s one more thing. I wouldn’t let Mrs. Lacoste see anyone.”

“You’re telling me my business?”

“Not at all. But Mrs. Lacoste is clever and willful. I believe when the shock wears off she’ll decide on a plan of action. Probably she’ll lie and think for a while before anyone knows she is awake.”

“You’re implying that the little old lady is dangerous?”

“She could be,” Mr. Pennyfeather qualified.

“To Dunne?”

“To whoever she thinks killed her grandson.”

“What do you mean? Someone else?”

“Mrs. Lacoste’s part in all this is conjecture. You know she was aware of her grandson’s whereabouts, but you can’t prove it. Probably she knows the story of the crime from beginning to end. If you try to force it out of her, she’ll escape you by means of dope and alcohol, or she’ll take refuge in illness and have the doctor back her up, which he will. She’s perfectly willing to play with her life. I don’t imagine it means much to her now.”

“You seem to know an uncommon lot yourself,” Olney interjected. “What do you say was the motive behind the killing of the Hollister girl?”

Olney was grimly mocking, but Mr. Pennyfeather scorned to mock back. “The motive is what we always thought it was. Vengeance.”

“Miss Hollister getting even? Is that what you mean?”

“Oh no. No. The other way round. Someone getting even with Miss Hollister. A peculiarly savage and satisfying revenge.”

19

The campus was dim under an early morning fog when Mr. Pennyfeather paused at the Students’ Union Building to pick up a paper. It was seven forty-five. He was fresh from Mrs. Mauffit’s breakfast table, with its pecan muffins, sausage cakes, coddled eggs, and delectable coffee. He felt, he thought, more of a man than he had for the past two days.

He glanced at the headlines, which hinted at a mysterious break in the Hollister-Nixon-Cullens murder sequence. There was a picture of Dunne between two uniformed cops—coppers, Mr. Pennyfeather corrected mentally, catching the savage thrust of Dunne’s beard. The caption under the picture was vague; evidently Olney hadn’t given out much about his reasons for the arrest. There was nothing whatever about a yellow stain on Mr. Dunne, though Mr. Pennyfeather surmised there must have been one.

And Mr. Dunne, he speculated, had said that he didn’t know how the devil it got there.

The eight-o’clock class wanted to hear about the crimes, since Mr. Pennyfeather had been mentioned in the paper too. Mr. Pennyfeather proceeded instead to lecture them on Cowper’s poetry, and they were revengefully restless. At ten minutes past nine he was at the door of Nightingale House. A maid was dusting the hall; she came at his ring, bringing the woody smell of floor polish and a personal one of Lifebuoy soap.

He waited until Miss Caradyne came down. She was dressed neatly in a street costume, with hat and gloves, though she carried class books. There was a little more color to her than he remembered on former occasions. She had a pink scarf at her throat, her lipstick was gay, and there was a rose at the front of her little hat. The horn-rimmed glasses weren’t much of a detriment either. She gave him a brief, half-worried smile.

Mr. Pennyfeather studied her. “Do you know, you remind me of someone. Wait a minute—I’ve got it. My cousin Tina. She was a very pretty girl.”

Almost a dimple … Then she was serious again. “Did you come for permission to look at Ernestine’s things in storage?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I’m sorry. I called the storage company about it. I’d have to go with you for you to get inside. And I’m leaving, right after ten-o’clock class, to see what I can do for Uncle Stephen.”

Mr. Pennyfeather glanced at his watch. “We have almost forty minutes. Is the storage company close enough for you to take me there and introduce me?”

She bit her lip with an air of mild perplexity. “Well … I was planning to prepare for class. I have about a half-hour’s work to do.”

“I’m trying to run down a certain book which seems to have belonged to Miss Hollister,” Mr. Pennyfeather persisted. “I think it might be pretty important.”

“In that case—” She tapped with a gloved forefinger on the back of a notebook she carried. Suddenly a look of decision came over her. “I know—couldn’t you ride down with me when I start for the j-jail?” She glanced behind her nervously, then grimaced ruefully. “Of course it isn’t a secret, is it? I keep forgetting…. Is it in the papers?”

Mr. Pennyfeather unfolded his paper and let her read the headlines and look at the picture of Stephen Dunne.

“Oh, how awful!” She traced the caption under the picture with a finger tip. “They don’t mention what evidence they have.”

“They’re being cagey.”

“It’s an outrage! They’ll have to let Uncle Stephen go at once!”

“Yes. Don’t worry about your uncle. I’m on a different tack entirely.” He put the paper back into his pocket. “As for your offer to let me ride with you at eleven, I’ll accept with pleasure.”

“This … this clue you’re searching for—” She moved closer. There was no Lifebuoy about Miss Caradyne; she was definitely jasmine, or mimosa, or something else quite nice. “It concerns a book?”

“Sort of. As soon as I recover completely from the clout on the head which I suffered last night,” Mr. Pennyfeather said modestly, “I’m sure that the whole thing will begin fitting itself together.”

She gasped. “Somebody struck you?”

He nodded soberly. “I’m sure, too, that I’m going to recall something important about my attacker. There was just a hint while I was half conscious of an identity I know.”

“How … ghastly!” Her eyes were big behind the lenses. “I’ll be glad to go with you to that storage company. Even more, I’ll help you hunt through Ernestine’s things. We’ll have Uncle Stephen free in no time at all.”

He smiled at her gratefully. “At eleven, then.”

“At the streetcar stop.” She was suddenly downcast. “I suppose very shortly I’ll be driving Ernestine’s car.”

“The police still have it?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you could sell it.”

“I may do that.”

He bowed his way out and left her, a newly rich young lady whose first indulgence for herself had been perfumery. When they met at the streetcar stop at five minutes past eleven, she looked slightly less fresh. The pink scarf was loosened, as though relief from the warmth of the day and the stuffiness of the classroom had become more important than the correctness of her ensemble. There were damp patches on her temples; the rose on her hatbrim sagged a little, as if she might inadvertently have pulled it. The excess of pink in her face and costume seemed to have given her an overheated look.

Perhaps she saw his studying glance. “I don’t dress up often enough to have the hang of keeping myself decent,” she apologized.

“You look quite attractive,” he reassured her. Well, the perfume was still there. Stronger, if anything. She must be carrying a vial of it in her purse.

She tightened the pink scarf hurriedly, adjusted the hat by looking into a gum-machine mirror, tucked a swatch of veiling into place over her ear. The streetcar came up with a chuffing of hot dust and a smell of oil. Mr. Pennyfeather gallantly assisted Miss Caradyne up the steps to the vestibule.

She glanced into the passenger compartment. “It’s so warm. Do you mind if we stay out here? I feel as if I were melting.”

“I don’t mind.” He could, indeed, see that she was hot; there were drops of perspiration on her upper lip.

When the car started, a breeze whipped in at them. He saw Miss Caradyne turn her face toward it. She exhaled a long breath.

“I like that make-up you’re wearing,” he offered shyly.

She gave him a stare. “Do you? I hadn’t thought professors ever noticed.”

“We’re really not as mummified as we’re thought to be.”

“I suppose you aren’t.” She seemed to take his remark seriously. There was no trace of humor in her manner. Once, when the wind died a little, she lifted a hand as though to touch her face, then dropped it again. She must, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, have recalled those nice white gloves. They weren’t for mopping perspiration. “The car seems slow today.”

“It always does,” he offered, “when you’re going somewhere important.”

She nodded absently. “If you do run across a clue in Ernestine’s things, you’ll let me know at once, won’t you?”

“Certainly.”

They rode in silence the rest of the way.

The storage company was housed in a huge, blank-walled structure which filled a quarter of a city block. The corner-stone was dated 1922. The office was high-ceilinged, and everything in it was dark: oiled floor, mahogany desks and counters, walls of stained-oak paneling. A man was in a far corner, taking a hat and coat off a rack. It was now past eleven-thirty; Mr. Pennyfeather got the idea that the man was going to an early lunch.

The only other person in the office was a girl at a desk. She looked at Miss Caradyne, seemed to recognize her, and rose. She came to the counter, looked across it at them. “May I help you?”

“I stored some goods here recently. We wanted to look through them.”

The girl glanced behind her at the man who was now putting on his hat. “Mr. Sheldon?”

“It’s all right, Neva.”

“Very well.” She scribbled something on a pad. “Do you have your storage receipt?”

Miss Caradyne took a yellow page from her purse, and the girl behind the counter studied it briefly. “That will be fourth floor. Go back through that passage at the right”—she indicated a hall which opened from the rear wall of the office—“and when Pedro—Mr. Sanchez—our floorman comes down with the elevator, give him this.” She tore the top page from the pad. There were hieroglyphics which apparently gave the password.

Miss Caradyne led the way. The hall was long and narrow, paneled in dark wood like the hall, and having a subtle chemical odor which Mr. Pennyfeather suspected was meant to repel any moths seeking entry this way.

They crossed a loading platform. An empty truck was backed against the planking. In the wall of the building an overhead door was swung up, revealing the brightly sunlit street beyond.

“Rather dark in here,” he commented to the rear brim of Miss Caradyne’s little hat.

“Keeps things from fading, I suppose.”

They came to the elevator—an open pit with an iron latticework across it, a creak of machinery echoing from above. Miss Caradyne pointed to the black button set into the wall. Mr. Pennyfeather pressed it. From upstairs someone yelled down, “Ho?”

There didn’t seem to be any logical answer to this, so both of them kept still. After a minute or so the elevator started; motors groaned and hiccuped, and ropes slid up and down before Mr. Pennyfeather’s observing eyes. The floor of an immense platform descended slowly before them. It was the biggest elevator Mr. Pennyfeather had ever seen, an oblong open floor fitted roughly and without sides into the well of the shaft. An unshaded bulb lit the features of a big Mexican with a grin full of white teeth. “Oh … you want sometheeng?”

“We want to go up,” said Miss Caradyne distinctly and a trifle louder than usual, as though she suspected Pedro of being deaf. “We want to look at some things I have in storage.”

“You got permeesion?” Pedro asked.

“Here.” She gave him the slip of paper.

He turned it this way and that, still grinning. Mr. Pennyfeather got the idea that Pedro was not able to read but wanted to look as if he did. “Hokay. We go up.”

He pushed the iron lattice wider, and they stepped through. The lattice clanged, Pedro worked a lever, and they began to rise. The mothproofed odor increased, drowning the flowery perfume of Miss Caradyne.

Pedro hummed under his breath, then turned and let his eye rove over Miss Caradyne. Afterward he winked lecherously at Mr. Pennyfeather.

Second and third floors slid past, revealing, behind their lattices, mountains of stored goods. Second floor seemed inhabited mostly by pianos and overstuffed divans. Third floor was mostly kitchens. Fourth floor, when the elevator had stopped, proved to be piled full of trunks, boxes, and crates. “Lotsa different stuff in here,” Pedro explained as he drew back the lattice. “I got to see your receipt now.”

The yellow page came out of Miss Caradyne’s purse again, and Pedro made a long and difficult examination of it. Then he looked up brightly. “You know your own stuff, huh? You show it to me?”

Miss Caradyne’s glance flickered toward the dark recesses of the low-ceilinged room. “I suppose … There is such an immense amount of goods here, though—” She shrugged, as if recognizing Pedro’s handicap, and walked off down a passage between the stacked boxes and trunks. “I’ll just have to search for it.”

Pedro turned to a panel and pushed a switch into place, causing a lot of extra lights to flash on. Even under the brightness Mr. Pennyfeather thought that the place had a peculiarly dead and desolate look. A waiting look, he decided. Like a lot of entombed things waiting to be claimed and brought back to life. Pedro drew in a breath like the snort of a bull. “You like the smell, huh?”

“Not particularly,” Mr. Pennyfeather admitted.

“Funny place to make love,” Pedro muttered.

It was Mr. Pennyfeather’s turn to stare. “Who makes love here?”

Pedro made sucking noises through his teeth. “You don’ know?”

“Only an idiot in a gas mask, I should think.”

Pedro became convulsed with laughter—an unnecessary lot of laughter, Mr. Pennyfeather thought. Pedro slapped his paunch and lolled against the wall, breathless; and there was an evil, knowing light under his fat eyelids. He was obviously a little crazy. All at once the buzzer sounded inside the elevator. Pedro straightened his face, stepped to the crack between the elevator platform and the floor, and roared, “Ho?”

“What answer do you expect when you do that?” Mr. Pennyfeather wondered.

Pedro shook his head genially. “Don’ know. Never got any answer yet.” He yanked the lattice into place behind him as he stepped into the elevator. “You better go find the lady, huh? She’s waiting, I theenk.” The last Mr. Pennyfeather saw of him was a round brown face twisted again into the lecherous wink.

The place seemed very quiet after the elevator had gone. Mr. Pennyfeather stood still, trying to locate Miss Caradyne’s footsteps.

Mr. Pennyfeather removed from his coat pocket a woolen muffler—an item he had returned to Mrs. Mauffit’s house to get when he had learned that he was to have Miss Caradyne’s company. He stuffed the muffler into his hat, then set the hat on the back of his head. Then he pulled up his overcoat collar to cover the back of his neck. It was an exceedingly warm day for a man to be wearing such a coat, but Miss Caradyne had not noticed. Perhaps she had had other things on her mind.

He made plenty of noise in his progress down the narrow passage between the crates and boxes. He bumped things and complained half under his breath about barking his shins, and his steps were loud and flat-footed on the cement-paved floor.

“Miss Caradynel Where are you?”

A small voice from nowhere said, “Just keep coming the way you are.”

He pretended to be puzzled. “Did you find Miss Hollister’s things?”

“Over here!”

He bumbled and plodded his way through the twisting alley. His scalp itched under the warmth of the wool muffler, and there was a funny sensation of coldness between his shoulder blades.

She was stretched out, breast down, on the top of a pile of trunks. A nice high hiding place—he almost didn’t see her in time. There was a question as to whether the muffler and the coat collar would have done him much good against the neat, professional little lead-loaded sap she must have brought in her purse. He ducked as her arm lifted and swept down, then snatched her wrist. She wriggled forward, trying to transfer the sap to her other hand, and so huge and vigorous was her fury that she almost pulled Mr. Pennyfeather to the top of the trunks with her struggling.

He put a knee against a trunk handle and leaned back. She writhed, sliding toward him; she bared her teeth and hissed. Her glasses fell off, and he glimpsed the tell-tale yellowish tint where the horn rims had worn away the make-up. There was something snakelike about her lifted head; he shuddered…. Medusa, he thought, with an odd pounding of his heart … Medusa with her crown of snakes. She’ll turn me to stone if I relax for an instant.

He pulled until her ribs were past the edge of the trunk lid. She began to slide over. Her free hand lashed his face; he felt stripes of skin grow into welts under her nails. Then she reached for the knot of his tie and twisted. Her wrist was steel.

His pulse began to roar in his ears. He had the choice of letting go the hand which held the sap—in which case he had no illusions about what would happen to his skull—or of letting the steel grip go on choking until he passed out.

There was a third alternative…. He gave a heave, and she came straight over at him. For an instant he glimpsed the terror and rage in her eyes—the last thing Miss Hollister must have seen across that lamp—and then she was on top of him, all arms and legs.

He didn’t let go of the right hand, but she let the sap drop anyway and tried to scramble for it with her left hand. He reached it first. It swung with a businesslike weight in his fingers.

His aunt Elizabeth had instructed him in the duties of a gentleman. A gentleman didn’t hit a lady … especially with his hat on.

The hat fell off at the psychological moment, and Mr. Pennyfeather cracked Miss Caradyne’s murderous little skull quite neatly with her own weapon.

“Well, well,” said a strange voice flatly.

Mr. Pennyfeather, loosening his tie, turned to look groggily at a flat-footed man in a dull brown suit. He knew without being told, somehow, that the man was a police detective, and that he had followed Miss Caradyne and himself here.

20

“Olney is on his way over. I telephoned headquarters as soon as I saw where you were taking her,” said the brown-suited man smugly. He had a gun in his hand and was teetering on his heels in the alleyway. “Back away from her now.”

It occurred to Mr. Pennyfeather that the man knew he’d caught something, but wasn’t sure which one of them it was. “She’s the one Olney wants.”

“Uh-huh,” said the detective. “Get over by those boxes. I want a look at that spot where you bopped her.”

“I wouldn’t get too close,” Mr. Pennyfeather advised.

The brown-suited man kneeled to prod inexpertly at Miss Caradyne’s hair. The little hat with the rose on its brim lay some distance away. The glasses had broken in the fall from the trunk. “Gave her quite a whack, didn’t you?”

Pedro came to peer scaredly over the detective’s shoulder. “Whatsa matter? You don’ make love after all, huh?”

Mr. Pennyfeather shook his head. “Who told you we might be making love?”

Pedro grinned feebly. “The young lady.”

“She told you to leave us alone after you’d brought us up here?”

“That’s right. For keessing, I think, maybe.”

“How long ago did she put you up to this?”

Pedro shrugged. “Justa little while. Hour, maybe.”

Mr. Pennyfeather felt a sour humor over the way he’d been duped. Miss Caradyne had ditched the ten-o’clock class, had come down here to bribe the floorman, and had then hurried back to the campus in time to meet him at the streetcar. No wonder she’d been hot and flustered. Other items fitted too. Apparently on that other trip she had talked to the manager in the office downstairs; that was the reason he’d given such a quick okay to the second request a few moments ago. Probably she’d invented a very plausible story to cover her actions. Miss Caradyne was nothing if not plausible.

“I wonder where she meant to put me?” Mr. Pennyfeather puzzled.

“Put you?” The detective looked over his shoulder. “It seems to me—”

It was then that Olney arrived. He examined Miss Caradyne’s head, listened to Pedro’s bewilderment over the supposed love-making, then took Mr. Pennyfeather to one side.

“What’s the idea of the sap?”

“It’s Miss Caradyne’s.”

“She tried to use it on you?”

“I rather imagine she intended to store me here with Miss Hollister’s goods. Perhaps there is a trunk or something not quite full. You might get the manager and have a look.”

The manager was brought back from lunch, located the boxes stored by Miss Caradyne, and stood by to watch suspiciously as the police opened them up. A stout foot locker was found completely empty.

Miss Caradyne struggled to a sitting position and looked around with bewilderment. Then she pointed to Mr. Pennyfeather. “That man— He enticed me up here and tried to kill me. Arrest him this instant!”

Olney rubbed his chin. The man in the brown suit jingled something—handcuffs, most likely, Mr. Pennyfeather thought—in his trousers pocket. “Well—” said Olney.

“Look at her face,” Mr. Pennyfeather suggested. “She’s been using a heavy cosmetic to cover the yellow stains left by the picric-acid bandages.”

Miss Caradyne cringed backward. Olney growled in his throat.

“When she found how badly she was stained, she got the idea of making someone else the scapegoat. She knew that Nixon had left a letter for the police describing what he knew of Miss Hollister’s murder, and she guessed that there might be a reference in that letter to the puzzling remark by Miss Hollister which referred to her murderer being burned.”

“Mmmmmm …” Olney was frowning.

“My guess is that she slipped into Dunne’s house and sewed a bit of the picric bandage to a piece of his underclothing. Didn’t your men run across anything like that?”

Olney shuffled his feet. “There was a shred or two left in the cuff of an old sweater.”

Dunne’s sagging garment returned to Mr. Pennyfeather’s memory; Dunne wouldn’t have noticed any additional roughness against the dirty wool.

“Clever in another way,” Mr. Pennyfeather pointed out, “by getting over the idea the burn wasn’t on the face.”

Olney looked down at the crouching, feral girl curiously. “How the devil did she burn herself there?”

“She leaned over the lamp toward Miss Hollister. Her cousin was taunting her because she’d found her at Robert Cullens’s hide-out. Miss Caradyne had loved him for years. Probably she still had hopes of marrying him eventually. In her rage she forgot the column of heat that rises from a lamp chimney. She partially burned her lashes. Probably her chin got the worst of it—that’s where she’s kept the make-up the thickest.”

Olney bent over her. “You’re telling me that she’s the one helped Cullens hide out all these years?”

“There won’t be any doubt of it once you get the truth out of old Mrs. Lacoste.”

The girl’s eyes flickered. “She … she made me help him. She forced me to take him food and clothing—”

“Nonsense,” Mr. Pennyfeather cut in. “Probably she was the original go-between. She couldn’t do much for Robert Cullens except slip out some money for him now and then, probably at the expense of impoverishing herself. I’ve an idea Cullens himself might have suggested Miss Caradyne to help him, and asked his grandmother to find her. I’ve never forgotten a remark made by Dunne when I had first met him. He said that Miss Caradyne had taken the breakup of her cousin’s marriage very hard. Well, when Robert Cullens ran out on his wife and the Army, Miss Caradyne probably felt that she had lost, too, whatever chance she’d had to take him away from her cousin.”

Rae Caradyne spat out savagely: “Ernestine didn’t love him; she never understood him—”

“At least,” Mr. Pennyfeather said softly, “she didn’t murder him.”

Miss Caradyne flung herself around to hide her face against a trunk. She began to sob.

“Why did you kill him? After loving him so long—”

Her muffled words rang out between her shaking hands. “He was going to tell …”

“Was he there when you murdered your cousin?” Olney demanded.

She shook her head drearily. “He was out on the mountain somewhere. He’d been getting very restless … almost ugly … It was the isolation, the monotony … And he even seemed tired of me.”

“What was he going to tell?” Olney prodded.

“He came in while I was cleaning the cabin—”

Olney was like a hound on a hot scent now. “What car did you use to run down Freddy Nixon?”

“One I bought the day before I murdered Ernestine. It’s parked in a private garage in Pasadena.” All at once she pulled her hands away. Her face looked naked in its hate. “I don’t care what you do to me. It’s all gone, anyway; the love, the hope, the believing in him—”

Sobs choked her; she turned this way and that like an animal at bay. Suddenly she reached for her handbag on the floor.

“Watch her,” Mr. Pennyfeather cried. “She might have something more—”

The girl jerked open the bag and snatched an object from it—a vial, he saw, that glittered with white crystals. She tilted her head, and the crystals slid into her throat.

She made one final little speech. “About killing Ernestine … it wasn’t just to get the money. It was Robert. I think—” She paused; a bluish light seemed to pass over her face. “—I think he’d have gone back to her. He was so bored with hiding out … and with me….”

The vial clattered on the cement as she slid forward on her face.

There was a lot of activity then on the part of the police. Mr. Pennyfeather went over to a crate and sat down on it. The bright lights overhead were hot, the stale air with its mothproof odor almost suffocating. He felt tired and full of self-disapproval. Miss Caradyne had been his student, and he had been blind to the torments that had plagued her. He wondered if there could have been a way to prevent a futile and agonizing end to her futile and colorless life.

His memory returned to that first morning when she had come in to tell him of her cousin’s disappearance, and he began to see the story behind her story. Of course she’d been afraid—not for her cousin’s safety, but for the safety of Robert Cullens.

Olney came into the hospital waiting room, shaking his head. He looked at Mr. Pennyfeather and made his accustomed sour mouth. “She didn’t have a chance. It was cyanide. Where the devil could she have gotten it?”

“At the college,” Mr. Pennyfeather explained. “She was an Art major, and she’d have free access to that department’s photographic laboratory. Plenty of poison there.”

“Art student, huh?”

“With, I imagine, considerable work in sculpture. Modeling does develop strength in the fingers. She had nice hands. Strong hands too.” He remembered the deftness of the hands which had bound him and stuffed his mouth with burlap. “It seems such a waste—all those deaths. And not the right people getting killed.”

“Oh?” Olney put on elaborate surprise. “Will you explain who the right people might be?”

“Acton’s dying wouldn’t have hurt anybody. Why don’t you find out from old Mrs. Lacoste how much he was blackmailing her for?”

Olney smiled grimly.

“She’d pay in order to protect her grandson. And you know she’s been under some almost intolerable strain to take to dope and drink as she has. I’d like to know you were going to examine Mr. Acton rather closely.”

“You don’t think he was hanging around to court Miss Cullens?” said Olney, as if shocked.

“Neither did you, at any time. Nor did Miss Hollister, for an instant, when she saw the cigarette case of Acton’s in the Cullens house. She’d know at once he was on the trail of blackmail. It suggested to her that Robert’s whereabouts were known to someone in the family. Of course she couldn’t have known whom she’d find up there, when she’d traced Acton to the cabin. The surprise of finding her cousin set her off in a rage.”

Olney scratched his ear. “What about all that poetry in Nixon’s letter? You think she really said all that?”

“Of course. The book was most important, though it didn’t mean what you thought it did.”

Olney’s archness vanished. “Yeah?”

“You thought,” reminded Mr. Pennyfeather coolly, “that the book, with its inscription written after Miss Hollister had lost track of Cullens and entered Clarendon, must mean that she had visited him and given him the volume herself. But it suggested to me at once that Miss Caradyne might be Robert Cullens’s secret friend. She’d taken him books to while away the long, lonely days. In error she’d slipped in one of Ernestine Hollister’s books—probably one she’d borrowed. But you can see she wouldn’t want it found up there. It must have been lying out somewhere when Miss Hollister walked in on her surprise visit. Thus the quoted verses which Nixon overheard: ‘For dead men … deadly wine …’”

“The wine of utter boredom,” said Olney with unexpected insight.

“Yes. The endless alcoholism of being semidead.”

Olney studied him slantwise. “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going home,” Mr. Pennyfeather told him, “and catch up on my meals.”

The engagement party was quite nice. Loretta Cullens looked flushed and happy. Dunne had trimmed his beard. They gave the party at Dunne’s house; Loretta’s mother was prostrated, and her father was in Mexico. Something really serious was going to happen about Mr. Cullens’s shenanigans with veterans’ housing. The Cullens home had the atmosphere of a morgue, according to Loretta. She didn’t seem particularly worried.

“We wanted to let our friends know,” she told Mr. Pennyfeather. They were sitting together on the bench which held the shells. The shells were pushed out of the way at one end—most of them. Once in a while Mr. Pennyfeather investigated bumps under him and came up with a miniature clam or crab shell. Loretta smiled dreamily. “I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like … the beard, you know. It tickles.”

Professor Todt and his wife had brought Mr. Pennyfeather in their car and had been invited in to share the fun. This was due entirely to Professor Todt’s determination to get a closer look at some of the characters in the case. It was useless to explain to him that these remaining people were quite normal. He wanted to see what the smell of murder had done to them.

Mrs. Todt and Dunne talked Art, and Dunne explained his seascapes while she cooed with pleasure.

Mrs. Lacoste came across the room with a cocktail in her hand. She made Mr. Pennyfeather think of a mummy in a black taffeta gown. “I want to drink to you, dear.” She lifted her glass toward Loretta. “It’s only grape juice and sherry. The doctors won’t let me have anything else.” She took a sip and made a wry face. “Now, to Mr. Acton.”

“He’s in jail, Grammy,” said Loretta, as if Acton were dead.

“May he rot there,” said Mrs. Lacoste feelingly.

“It was queer,” Loretta reflected, “that he brought you out here to find that faked evidence on Stephen.” She looked at Mr. Pennyfeather.

“I rather think Miss Caradyne put him onto it. He’d know of her connection with your brother, and he’d be willing to do anything to get the heat off himself. It’s possible that he didn’t know of the stuff sewn into that sweater; she’d have been wary about letting him in on any detail which would give him a hold over her. He may not have known what the evidence really was to be.” Mr. Pennyfeather sipped on his own cocktail—applejack, he suspected; he wondered if Dunne had made it himself somewhere off among the eucalyptus. “Certainly Acton had no love for your fiancé.”

“He kept picking on Stephen; that’s when I first began to be interested in him.” She blushed delicately. “That day I met you here I was trying to make up my mind which of them was right—”

“An unsettling problem,” Mr. Pennyfeather agreed.

Loretta looked into her wineglass pensively. “I’m sure now, though.”

Old Mrs. Lacoste, sharp as a blackbird, stared into his eyes. “This Caradyne girl—had she really been using those yellow bandages on herself?”

Mr. Pennyfeather nodded. “Oh yes, and the resulting stain must have terrified her. She hid out for a while, telling her housemother she was visiting friends. During that time she no doubt tried to remove the stain, then turned to other remedies. She must have had moments of panic; most of those medicines have a distinctly antiseptic odor. She tried to cover that with perfume, of course.”

“I should have told all that I knew in the beginning,” said old Mrs. Lacoste with deep regret. “But I just couldn’t believe—”

“The murder of Nixon should have told you,” he pointed out. “She’d met him sometime at your house, hadn’t she?”

“Yes, just once.”

“It was enough to enable her to identify him from the glimpse she got from the cabin.”

“I … I know it’s my fault. Poor Freddy.”

Loretta reached out to touch her grandmother’s hand.

“At least we saved Mr. Dunne from joining him,” Mr. Pennyfeather went on. “I haven’t a doubt that she intended, if the police released him, to put him out of the way. Then Miss Hollister’s fortune would have been hers alone—instead of shared. You know—” He paused; the room seemed to quieten. “The thing that really betrayed her was her resemblance to my cousin Tina.”

“Oh?” said Mrs. Lacoste.

“My cousin Tina was a beautiful girl … meek and mannerly, very refined. Only, when her fiancé jilted her she shot him.”

“Dead?” asked Loretta.

“Fortunately, no. But the intention was genuine.”

“A possessive streak is the worst thing a woman can have,” said old Mrs. Lacoste. “More men have been driven away—”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dunne, who had come over with more cocktails which he had shaken up in a fruit jar. “I wouldn’t mind.” He poured fresh drinks for Loretta and Mr. Pennyfeather. “There’s just one more item of mystery. Mr. Pennyfeather’s first name. He won’t give it.”

“No, never,” said Mr. Pennyfeather firmly.

“Really?” Mrs. Lacoste wondered. “Is it a queer one?”

“On me it is,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

“We shouldn’t pry then,” she decided. She looked archly at Dunne. “When are you two going to get married?”

“Next week,” said Dunne. He bent and kissed Loretta soberly on the tip of her nose.

“Does your mother know?” Mrs. Lacoste demanded of her granddaughter.

Loretta didn’t answer. She was finding distraction in the depths of the red beard.

“Probably doesn’t matter a hoot anyway,” Mrs. Lacoste decided. She watched her granddaughter’s behavior critically. “He’s got a certain charm, I guess. No Adonis—”

Mr. Pennyfeather started, spilling some of his drink.

“Adonis,” she repeated speculatively.

Mr. Pennyfeather downed what applejack was left, then reached for the fruit jar in Dunne’s hand. It was definitely time for a refill.

About the Author

Dolores Hitchens (1907–1973) was a highly prolific mystery author who wrote under multiple pseudonyms and in a range of styles. A large number of her books were published under the moniker D. B. Olsen, and a few under the pseudonyms Noel Burke and Dolan Birkley, but she is perhaps best remembered today for her later novel, Fool’s Gold, published under her own name, which was adapted into the film Bande á part directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1950 by Dolores Hitchens

Cover design by Ian Koviak

ISBN: 978-1-5040-8463-5

This edition published in 2023 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.openroadmedia.com

THE PROF. A. PENNYFEATHER MYSTERIES

FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.

Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.

MysteriousPress.com. offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.

FIND OUT MORE AT

WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

FOLLOW US:

@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom

MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

The Mysterious Bookshop, founded in 1979, is located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It is the oldest and largest mystery-specialty bookstore in America.

The shop stocks the finest selection of new mystery hardcovers, paperbacks, and periodicals. It also features a superb collection of signed modern first editions, rare and collectable works, and Sherlock Holmes titles. The bookshop issues a free monthly newsletter highlighting its book clubs, new releases, events, and recently acquired books.

58 Warren Street

info@mysteriousbookshop.com

(212) 587-1011

Monday through Saturday

11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

FIND OUT MORE AT:

www.mysteriousbookshop.com

FOLLOW US:

@TheMysterious and Facebook.com/MysteriousBookshop

SUBSCRIBE:

The Mysterious Newsletter

Find a full list of our authors and titles at www.openroadmedia.com

FOLLOW US
@ OpenRoadMedia