Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (31 page)

“Two more gin and bitters for the fussy couple in 44,” she ordered. “Colonel Wright says please will you use Booths instead of Gordon’s like you did last time?”

“The Colonel will drink what I mix,” said Peter Noel viciously. He rattled with his rack of bottles. “Now, when I was with the White Russians, in their Secret Service—”

But Tom Hammond was departing. “See you tomorrow,” he called back. The social hall was empty now. He took a turn or two of the boat deck, found the wind so high that his pipe became overheated in a moment, and he knocked it out. Then he went back below and followed the corridor to C cabin. It was the best on the ship, with a real bath, four portholes, and a genuine double bed. Two berth settees lined the wall, and on one of them was a tumble of bedclothes from which protruded a small fist, threatening even in relaxation. Tom Hammond walked softly, so as not to call down on himself the Vesuvius of trouble which was condensed in his eight-year-old son.

Loulu Hammond, propped against pillows in the big bed, smiled at him. “If you wake Gerald you may have the joy of beating him. He did twenty dollars’ worth of damage to the ship’s piano tonight.”

“It was your idea, bringing him,” Tom said. He slipped into a silk dressing gown. “For myself, I’d rather travel with a goat. The twenty can come out of your allowance, for you should have been watching him.”

“I was too busy watching you with your eyes glued on the little snip in the squirrel coat,” said Loulu. “Spend a pleasant evening?”

“She didn’t come back to the bar,” Tom said quickly. “But I saw her just now, stretched out in the
gayest
pair of red pajamas…”

“What?” Loulu sat up straight in bed.

“Through the porthole, when I took a turn around the promenade deck,” he went on. “The curtain was blowing.”

Tom Hammond was ready for bed. Loulu put down the
New Yorker
she had been reading—it was her Bible whenever she was out of the city—and her husband reached for the light switch.

Tom drew back his hand as if something had snapped at him. Gerald Hammond raised his rumpled, triumphant head from the blankets and shouted in a soprano voice that penetrated half the ship: “Daddy saw red pajamas! Daddy saw red pajamas!” He took a fresh breath. “Daddy saw—”

Tom Hammond got his hand across the mouth of his son and heir, but not before an impatient maiden lady in the next cabin had been awakened and had rapped sharply on the wall for silence. She had just managed to doze off, after eight hours of
mal de mer,
and now she was unwillingly awake again, conscious of the endless and persistent rocking of the billows.

“And this was a trip for pleasure!” moaned Hildegarde Withers. Which was hardly the exact truth. She had been left in such a nervous state as an aftermath of her participation in the unraveling of the murder mystery at Catalina Island in the late summer, that her physician had refused to allow her to go back to her desk at Jefferson School that fall. Luckily, the unexpected payment of a comfortable reward by the millionaire owner of the island permitted her to indulge a long-standing desire to see Europe.

She took up a worn linoleum-bound copy of
Alice
and tried to forget that eight more days of the unfriendly Atlantic lay between the ship and the muddy mouth of the Thames. The book opened at the Hatter’s tea party.
“‘I didn’t know it was your table,’ said Alice. ‘It’s laid for a great many more than three.’”

Miss Hildegarde Withers smiled grimly, and wondered if she would ever sit in her chair at the ship’s table this trip.

At any rate, her place was vacant at dinner the next evening. The rest of the arbitrarily arranged group at the doctor’s table was there intact, however.

Dr. Waite, bald and sniggering, was a good master of ceremonies, for all that. The head steward always put the “young crowd” at the doctor’s table, plus one or two steadier women for balance. This evening saw them properly arranged—on the doctor’s left was the Honorable Emily Pendavid, then her nephew Leslie, then haughty Rosemary, then Tom Hammond and Loulu—minus Gerald, who gulped his food at a wall table with the rest of the children, under the eye of the stewardess—next Andy Todd, with Miss Withers’ vacant chair on his left, and beyond that the tanned face of Candida Noring, and the doctor again.

Dr. Waite was talking, and he could out-talk Andy Todd. “What a crowd and what a voyage
that
one was!” he finished. “Dancing until eleven or twelve every night.”

Loulu Hammond said something about the pace that kills. But Andy Todd wanted to know where there was any room for dancing.

“Pull up the rug at one end of the social hall,” advised Dr. Waite wickedly. “Turn on the Victrola and leap to it. If the bridge players object, let them go complain to the Old Man. He’s on the side of youth and beauty, and he may come down off the bridge and trip a few fantastics himself.”

Candida Noring had been on the bridge and met Captain Everett, who stood eighteen stone. “God forbid!” she said fervently.

There was dancing in the social hall that night, in spite of the slow, shuddering roll of the vessel. The bridge players, instead of raising objections, paired off in sedate couples and got onto the floor. From time to time they overruled Leslie Reverson, who was self-appointed selector of the records, and played a waltz or one-step.

The five old ladies at the five writing desks glared disapprovingly, but after a little while they finished their letters and went off to bed. The doctor appeared on the scene, danced with the Honorable Emily, with Loulu Hammond, and finally with Candida. He sought for Rosemary, who had watched coolly as a spectator up to this point, but found her dancing in the corridor with Tom Hammond. Their cheeks were very close together, and the bar steward had closed up his bar for lack of patronage and was watching them.

Loulu Hammond was in the arms of Leslie Reverson, who danced beautifully and impersonally. She swung, when the music began again, into the strong and somewhat smothering arms of Andy Todd.

Andy didn’t bother to be diplomatic. “Shall we go on deck and look at the moon?” he leered. “You needn’t mind your husband, he’s having a good time.”

“What good taste he has,” said Loulu sweetly. But she didn’t go to look at the moon with Andy Todd. There was an easy chair beside the doctor.

He lit her cigarette, nearly burning off her eyelashes in the process. “You know,” he observed generally, “it’s funny what people will do when they get on shipboard. They just seem to cut loose, sort of.”

“They run hog-wild and dance until eleven or twelve, don’t they?” agreed Loulu. She was thinking of something else.

“And romance! Say, there’s nothing like a shipboard love affair,” continued the medico.

Andy Todd and young Reverson both approached to ask Loulu for the next one, and Leslie was vaguely surprised and pleased to find that he had won. Andy wheeled uncertainly and saw that Rosemary Fraser was approaching—alone. She looked like a princess in a wine-colored dinner dress, and carried her squirrel coat over her arm.

“Miss Fraser!” he shrilled, in the high tenor which he could never control. “Can I have this dance?”

“Sorry,” said Rosemary. “But I never dance.” She passed lightly out onto the deck, as if to an appointment there. Slowly a red flush rose along the neck of Andy Todd, mounting to his ears. Loulu felt so sorry for him that she was very nice to him all the rest of the evening—and regretted it whole-heartedly for the rest of her life.

One by one the dancers began to leave the floor, yawning. The doctor and the Honorable Emily withdrew into a corner and began to have a heart-to-heart talk about fits. She herself complained of fainting spells, and she had always had her doubts, she confessed, about Leslie—him being so quiet and all. Even Tobermory, she complained, had thrown a fit last summer.

“Worms,” diagnosed Dr. Waite sagely. The Honorable Emily brightened. She wondered if Leslie had worms too.

The ship’s bell struck eight tinny times for midnight. Loulu fell to playing rummy with Candida Noring. Once she looked up startled, to hear light running footsteps on the boat deck above her head. She relaxed again. It couldn’t be Gerald. He was asleep, and for good measure locked in the stateroom.

Andy Todd heard the footsteps, too. He was prowling around the long boat deck, throwing away cigarette after cigarette. Once he heard the beating of wings above his head, and a slow, fat bird fluttered into his face and then swooped away into the night. Even the gulls were crazy tonight, muttered Andy.

He rounded a corner and was nearly tripped by the darting figure of a small boy. Gerald, it appeared, had broken loose again. He neatly nabbed the urchin.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “Kids like you should be in bed.”

“This is more fun,” gasped Gerald, wriggling. “We’re playing a new game.” Another youth appeared, with flashlight clutched in his fist. “It’s Virgil,” said Gerald. “I gotta go with him. Lemme go, we’re playing Trap the Neckers.”

Andy Todd found a quarter and displayed it. “What sort of game is that?”

Gerald took the quarter. “Tell you for a dollar,” he bargained. He got a cuff on the ear. “Well,” he temporized, “we try to find a couple necking. Virgil says there’s lots of them do it. Then we sneak up real close and flash the light on ’em and run.”

“Oh,” said Andy Todd. He was still a little red behind the ears. Finally he bent down and gave Gerald Hammond definite instructions, instructions which would have displeased that lad’s young mother exceedingly. “A dollar, remember. I’ll be in the social hall for an hour or so.”

He saw the merry lads run back along the dimly lit boat deck and heard the faint slick of their rubber-soled shoes. Then, well satisfied with himself, Andy Todd went below, where the charming Mrs. Hammond was more charming to him than ever. He made a willing third at the rummy game.

The stewardess entered the social hall a few minutes later, and beckoned to Dr. Waite. “It’s the lady in 49,” she informed him when he had followed her into the hall. “You know, the old maid school teacher who’s a bad sailor.”

“Can’t cure that,” said the doctor. But all the same he tapped on the door.

“Doctor,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers, cutting through his bedside manner like a knife through cheese, “is it possible for seasickness to produce hallucinations? Am I delirious?”

“Pulse normal,” he told her. “Half a degree of temperature. No, you couldn’t be delirious. What you need is—”

“A piece of salt pork on a string,” she finished. “I’ve heard that one. Well, if I’m not delirious, then will you explain to me just how something with wings could come in my porthole and waken me by walking up and down on my face?”

“Uh?” said the doctor. He backed away a little, but Miss Withers was holding out for his inspection a copy of
Alice in Wonderland.
Across its open pages were a double line of faint, damp bird tracks, marked in blood.

“Of course, it’s a nightmare,” said Miss Withers reasonably. “But if it is, it’s lasting, a long time!”

The nightmare, although the school teacher did not suspect it, had already begun. It was to encompass every passenger aboard the little vessel, and to cling to them as they sailed over the curve of the earth, hover darkly above their heads as they went down the gangplank, and redouble its terrors as they set foot upon terra firma in London Town. Thus began the Nightmare of nightmares.

Back in the social hall Loulu Hammond was still playing rummy with Andy, Candida Noring, and young Reverson, who had just joined them as an alternative to going to bed. A tapping came on the porthole behind her, and she turned to look. No one was there. Todd, who faced her, rose suddenly, spilling his cards.

“Got to see a fellow,” he apologized. In a moment he came back in off the deck, replacing his billfold.

“On deck, everybody!” he called. The Honorable Emily, who was reading
Punch
again, put it down.

“Whales?” she inquired eagerly.

“Just come along—quietly,” he ordered, and led the way. There was that in his manner which induced the others to follow, puzzled and intrigued. Candida Noring was first, then Loulu, Reverson, and the Honorable Emily. A chill wind struck them as they came up on the deserted boat deck.

“What a laugh!” said Andy Todd mysteriously. There was something hateful in his tone, Loulu felt. Yet she followed…

He led the way forward, past the long lines of folded deck chairs, and pointed to a large and boxlike affair which was set between two engine-room ventilators.

Loulu was holding onto Candida Noring’s arm in the semi-darkness. She felt the girl shudder. “It looks like nothing so much an oversize coffin,” whispered Candida.

“Nonsense,” Loulu told her. “It’s the locker where they keep the steamer blankets.”

Andy Todd was chuckling. “Watch this, now,” he whispered. Even his whisper was loud. He felt on the deck until he found one of the big wooden disks used as counters in the shuffleboard games. “Somebody found the padlock open, and crawled in,” he confided. “But
somehow
it got fastened tight. Now watch the circus…”

“I say,” began the Honorable Emily, adjusting her eyeglass, “is it quite sporting?”

But Andy Todd had sent the wooden disk flying across the deck. It hit the lightly built locker with a resounding smash.

“Surprise! Surprise!” shouted Andy Todd. But
he
was the one surprised. Nothing happened. There was no sign of the frantic double Jack-in-the-box he had hoped to show. He had planned on hearing the cracking of light wood…

He cast his borrowed flashlight forward and saw that the padlock hung from a broken hasp.

“How silly!” said Loulu Hammond. She had a horrible feeling that this was the first chapter of a seven-and-six-penny thriller, and that the Body was about to be discovered. “Let’s go back.”

But nobody wanted to go back. Todd led the way, whipped open the locker, and looked down upon an anticlimax of disarranged blankets. “They got out!” he said sadly.

The Honorable Emily had expected whales.
“Who
got out?” she wanted to know. But Andy Todd did not answer. As far as Loulu Hammond was concerned, he did not need to answer. The flashlight showed clearly enough that caught in a crack on the inside of the locker lid was a wisp of soft gray fur.