Devil May Care (25 page)

There was nothing more to be learned, unless prolonged interrogation turned up a witness who had seen Donald getting into a car. The doctor snatched up the telephone and demanded that such an investigation be carried out, but when he hung up he was gray with worry and his hair was standing up like a comic wig.

"They couldn't stop him anyway if he wanted to leave," he groaned. "He's of legal age--"

"He's acting like a sixteen-year-old," Kate said angrily.

She had replaced the Siamese with Henrietta, the long-haired Balinese, who adored affection.

Draped over Kate's shoulder like a fawn-and-brown fur piece, dainty feet dangling, she was purring hysterically.

"Where do you suppose he's gone?" Ellie asked.

"We've got to find him before--" "Now calm down," said Kate, who was stroking DEVIL-MAYCARE 2O5

the amiable Henrietta the wrong way in her agitation.

"Be calm. There is nothing to be gained by losing our heads." "Maybe he's gone home," Ellie suggested. She was calm; she felt half dead.

"No, that's the first place we would look," the doctor said. "He must have called one of his friends.

Someone with a car and no sense of responsibility.

Randy? John?"

"Think of something sensible," Kate snarled. "You can't start calling all his friends, as if he were ten years old. They'll all be out at this time of day ... "

"You weren't much help," the doctor retorted an frily.

"Couldn't you have thought of a more plausile alternative? This is Saturday; the bank's closed.

You couldn't have gotten into your safe-deposit box since last night."

"Oh, God, that's right," Kate said wretchedly.

"Frank, I'm sorry; I said the first thing that came into my head ... "

The doctor put his arm around her, and around Henrietta, who squeaked with rapture.

"That's all right, honey; I'm sorry I yelled at you.

I doubt that it would have mattered anyway. The villain will have to follow Donald; he can't take any chances. Really, we're getting unnecessarily alarmed. Donald is in no danger until he produces the parchment. It's here in the house somewhere, isn't it?"

"Must be." Kate brightened a little. "He didn't have the opportunity to take it anywhere. Unless he had it on him--"

"No." Dr. Gold shook his head. "Then it's here.

He'll have to come here for it, and until he does he's as safe as a baby in a cradle."

Ellie hated to say it, but she couldn't face the idea alone.

"Kidnapping," she whispered. "They might catch him ... "

2O6 Elizabeth Peters

"No, child." The doctor put his other arm around Ellie, so that they stood in a warm touching group--

all four of them, including Henrietta. "Don't let your imagination run away with you. We're not dealing with the Mafia, or with organized criminals. Our friend doesn't have a hideout, where a kidnap victim could be hidden; nor does he dare risk being identified.

Besides, Ellie, can you seriously visualize any of our suspects-- I know, some of them are disturbed, selfish people, but they wouldn't--" "Certainly not," Kate said briskly. The therapy had worked; she put Henrietta down and straightened up. But Ellie knew she had sown a horrible little fear in all their minds. The idea was fantastic, impossible --but she couldn't rid herself of it. Donald was injured, unable to defend himself ... "I guess we'd better get going," Kate said. She smiled at Ellie, but the girl saw the faintest shadow of buried horror in the blue eyes.

"Where?" the doctor asked.

"Ted's house. No, I won't tell you; I'll show you. If I'm right ... "

They took the doctor's battered old car; even in the depths of his alarm Dr. Gold refused to let Kate drive.

Ted had a daily housekeeper, who kept his charming little house in immaculate order; he was so neat that one elderly woman could manage without difficulty.

Presumably Saturday was Mrs. Moran's day off, for the house was locked and no one answered the bell.

"I've got a key," Kate said, and produced it from the pocket of her shirt.

The house was shadowy and still. Only the soft purr of the air conditioning broke the silence. Kate led the way; the house was almost as familiar to her as her own. It was much smaller--a neat Georgian square, with drawing room and library flanking the DEVIL-MAYCARE EOT entrance hall, and four bedrooms upstairs. Kate: went down.

The basement looked cluttered only by comparison to the finicky neatness that prevailed upstairs.

Even a man as fussy as Ted could not carry on carpentry and papier-mache work without making some mess, but his tools were shining, arranged in order of size--everything in its place--and the carpetedl floor had not even a trace of sawdust.

Ellie took it all in in one quick glance; and then!

she saw the masks.

They hung in a neat row along one paneled wall-- so lifelike, so accurately done, that for a breathless; instant she thought of severed heads hanging--ai woman's head, with long blond locks; a bearded Cavalier, a grizzled old man--and, most shocking of all,, the familiar ratlike face of Roger Mcgrath.

Kate removed this last head from the bracket that: had been cunningly designed to support it. It collapsed in her hands, unnervingly, like a human facedissolving under the blast of some weird sciencefiction ray gun.

"He was going to do all his friends," Kate said..

"And enemies ... " She put her hand inside the mask; and bounced it up and down, like a puppet master..

"You've seen the flexible plastic masks they sell at: Halloween--some kid came by last year dressed upi as a gorilla and scared poor old William into fits..

They're amazingly lifelike. This is a new process; you; can mold it, like wax, before it hardens. Ted is at fairly decent amateur sculptor." "Yes," the doctor said quietly. "He did a lovely little head of my wife. I should have thought ... So> this is how the faces of Ellie's apparitions were: done."

"Yes." Kate put the mask of Mcgrath back on its; stand and turned to Ellie. "Please, honey, don't be; angry with Ted. He's pretty childlike in some ways; and over the years he has had to take a lot of insults

208 Elizabeth. Peters from some of these people. It was my fault, for starting the whole thing. Ted couldn't resist going on with it. You won't think too badly of him?"

"I guess not ... " Ellie looked away from the row of masks; the empty-eyed stare of Roger Mcgrath was disconcerting. "Anyway, the scheme backfired on him. We still have a villain to identify."

"I don't like to hurry you, Kate," the doctor began.

"Yes, I know; we must get back to the house. But first I want to see if I can find any of the masks Ted used." She began pulling out drawers, and the others scattered to help her search. There were dozens of drawers and cupboards to investigate.

"The John Wilkes Booth mask won't be here," Kate went on. "If our villain has any sense, he will have destroyed it by now. I wonder if Ted used that woman's head for his eloping lady?" Ellie looked again at the hanging masks.

"That might have been the young man," she said, pointing at a smiling boy's face.

"Then," said the doctor, rummaging in drawers with a careless haste that would have horrified Ted, "we're missing old Mr. Lockwood and Marge's grandmother."

"And the murderous husband," Ellie said, returning to the search. "I'd recognize that face, all right.

Grim."

"You're the only one who would recognize it," Kate said. "Frank, if you find any mask at all, let Ellie see it." But the search was fruitless. If the masks were in the house, they were not in this room, and the doctor flatly refused to look an}' farther.

"It would take us all evening," he said. "I think Donald will come to your house, Kate. And if he does--"

He didn't need to finish the sentence.

"Frank, how long will it be before we can talk to Ted?" Kate asked, as they got into the car.

DEVIL-MAY-CARE 209

"A couple of days, if he continues to improve." The doctor frowned. "Dr. Koch tells me that Ted seems uneasy about something. He's asked for you several times, Kate. But at the moment it would be most ill advised."

"Unless Ted got a look at his assailant, he can't tell us anything we don't already know," Ellie said.

"I doubt that he did," Kate said. "We may not need to bother him. I hope we can have this silly business cleared up before he's able to talk." "How?" The doctor expressed his feelings by a vicious twist of the wheel as they turned into Kate's driveway. "Stop showing off, Kate. If you have any ideas, this is the time to talk."

But Kate refused to do so until after the animals had been fed. The others helped--if the doctor had not had something to do, he would have been chewing his nails--so it was not long before they were settled in the parlor with cocktails. It was light outside, but the shadows were long across the lawn.

Night was coming, and they still didn't know where Donald was.

"You knew, as soon as you heard about the tricks, that Ted was responsible for them," Dr. Gold said, looking accusingly at Kate. "Why didn't you say so before?"

"Because Ted wasn't responsible for all the tricks," Kate retorted. "His motives were harmless, he just wanted to annoy some pompous people. The practical jokes didn't become dangerous until a second person got involved, and I don't have any idea who that person is. But his--or her--motive becomes comprehensible if Donald's ideas about the parchment are correct. It's the charter of a secret society, signed by local dignitaries who were behaving in a very undignified manner. The descendant of one of those people is very anxious to suppress that information. Don't ask me how he, or she, learned g 10 Elizabeth Peters about the parchment. That's one of the things I haven't figured out--yet.

"The villain came here looking for the parchment and ran into Ted--or vice versa. Even before that encounter the unknown must have strongly suspected that Ted was manipulating the apparitions.

He may have thought Ted knew more about his horrible secret than was actually the case. At any rate, he broke into Ted's house, saw the masks, and realized that he could use the plan for his own purposes.

Maybe he even found a written scenario. Ted is compulsively well organized, and there was no reason why he shouldn't commit the plan to paper. It was just a joke, after all."

She paused, stroked the cat in her lap, and looked complacently at the other two.

"It's possible," the doctor said, after a moment.

"It's even plausible. But it doesn't get us much farther, Kate. We still have five suspects, if you include Anne Grant. Can we rule any of them out?"

"Oh, we could draw up one of those lists they used to have in the good old British detective stories," Kate said casually. "With columns for motive and opportunity and so on. But it wouldn't tell us anything.

How can you calculate the strength of someone else's motives? I'd buy space in a newspaper and tell the world if I had a relative who was headmaster of a coven. But Roger Mcgrath would pay thousands to suppress a fact like that. So would Miss. Mary."

"We can't eliminate Grant," the doctor said heavily.

"As you say, it is difficult to calculate what effect such news might have on the voters. And Anne might be after the parchment for another reason. To publish it."

"You're forgetting Marjorie Melody," Ellie said. "I think she's got the best motive of all. Why, she'd be a laughingstock if that information got out. Not only would she lose her livelihood, that big fat ego of hers would never recover."

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"Don't you like Marjorie?" Kate asked innocently.

"This isn't getting us anywhere," the doctor said, before Ellie could reply. "Theoretically any one of these people might be considered to have a motive.

Ellie, think. Did you see anything--any detail at all-- that might enable you to recognize the masquerader?" "No," Ellie said. "Besides, we know Ted played most of the ghosts. I'm sure he was Lockwood, even if we didn't find the mask. That business with the crucifix, at lunch, was Ted's nutty way of telling me not to be afraid. He thought I'd feel protected when I wore it, and--yes, that's right, it was when I put my hands up, toward my throat, that he pretended to recoil and run. He couldn't see that I wasn't wearing it. What a performance that was! He terrified me." "He's not a bad actor," Kate said. "I remember him in The Importance of Being Earnest, in the summer-stock company; he was excellent. But he never meant to frighten you, Ellie. Like all hams, he got a little carried away by his own performance.

He thinks of you as young and tough, and I'm sure he assumed you would be more intrigued than frightened."

"I'm not mad at him," Ellie said. "If I were inclined to resent any particular part of this whole affair, there is someone I might mention who is more--"

"The fourth apparition is the most interesting," Kate said in a loud voice. "The white lady on the stairs. What a title for a Gothic novel! I wish I'd seen her."

"She was sensational," Ellie admitted. The memory of that ice-white pillar still made her shiver.

"So I gathered. What is so interesting is that the white lady was quite well done, on a par with, if not superior to, Ted's other performances. Yet the lady could not have been Ted, who was lying unconscious

212 Elizabeth Peters in the library. We must attribute that apparition, as well as the John Wilkes Booth performance, to our unknown second villain. Yet the Booth business was so badly done as to be almost ludicrous, if it had not been for its unpleasant and completely material consequences --" The doctor interrupted with a wordless sound, halfway between shout and groan, and got to his feet.

"I know what you're trying to do, Kate, and I appreciate it," he said, pacing. "But you can't keep my mind off Donald any longer, and if I have to sit here, doing nothing, I will go nuts." "What are you going to do? What can we do?" Ellie asked. Kate had settled back in her chair.

"Call the police," the doctor said grimly. "I will tell them that Donald left the hospital, against medical advice; that his injuries and the drugs he has been given make him dangerous to himself and to others. I want him picked up, by any means necessary."