The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (12 page)

He had managed to smuggle provisions to her while he was ransacking the Black House. At first he had held her frankly prisoner, intending to keep her so until he found the money, took his share, and escaped. But as he came to know her, he came to love her, and he soon confessed the whole story to her in the privacy of the shack. Her sympathy gave him new courage; concerned now with her safety above everything else, he prevailed upon her to remain in hiding until he could find the money and outwit his fellow-conspirators. Then they both intended to unmask Olivia.

The ironical part of the whole affair, as Mr. Ellery Queen was to point out, was that the goal of all this plotting and counterplotting—Sylvester Mayhew's gold—remained as invisible as the Black House apparently had been. Despite the most thorough search of the building and grounds no trace of it had been found.

“I've asked you to visit my poor diggings,” smiled Ellery a few weeks later, “because something occurred to me that simply cried out for investigation.”

Keith and Alice glanced at each other blankly; and Thorne, looking clean, rested, and complacent for the first time in weeks, sat up straighter in Ellery's most comfortable chair.

“I'm glad something occurred to somebody,” said Nick Keith with a grin. “I'm a pauper; and Alice is only one jump ahead of me.”

“You haven't the philosophic attitude towards wealth,” said Ellery dryly, “that's so charming a part of Dr. Reinach's personality. Poor Colossus! I wonder how he likes our jails.…” He poked a log into the fire. “By this time, Miss Mayhew, our common friend Thorne has had your father's house virtually annihilated. No gold. Eh, Thorne?”

“Nothing but dirt,” said the lawyer sadly. “Why, we've taken that house apart stone by stone.”

“Exactly. Now there are two possibilities, since I am incorrigibly categorical: either your father's fortune exists, Miss Mayhew, or it does not. If it does not and he was lying, there's an end to the business, of course, and you and your precious Keith will have to put your heads together and agree to live either in noble, rugged individualistic poverty or by the grace of the Relief Administration. But suppose there was a fortune, as your father claimed, and suppose he did secrete it somewhere in that house. What then?”

“Then,” sighed Alice, “it's flown away.”

Ellery laughed. “Not quite; I've had enough of vanishments for the present, anyway. Let's tackle the problem differently. Is there anything which was in Sylvester Mayhew's house before he died which is not there now?”

Thorne stared. “If you mean the—er—the body …”

“Don't be gruesome, Literal Lyman. Besides, there's been an exhumation. No, guess again.”

Alice looked slowly down at the package in her lap. “So that's why you asked me to fetch this with me today!”

“You mean,” cried Keith, “the fellow was deliberately putting everyone off the track when he said his fortune was gold?”

Ellery chuckled and took the package from the girl. He unwrapped it and for a moment gazed appreciatively at the large old chromo of Alice's mother.

And then, with the self-assurance of the complete logician, he stripped away the back of the frame.

Gold-and-green documents cascaded into his lap.

“Converted into bonds,” grinned Ellery. “Who said your father was cracked, Miss Mayhew? A very clever gentleman! Come, come, Thorne, stop rubbernecking and let's leave these children of fortune alone!”

The Adventure of the Treasure Hunt

“Dismount!” roared Major-General Barrett gaily, scrambling off his horse. “How's that for exercise before breakfast, Mr. Queen?”

“Oh, lovely,” said Ellery, landing on
terra firma
somehow. The big bay tossed his head, visibly relieved. “I'm afraid my cavalry muscles are a little atrophied, General. We've been riding since six-thirty, remember.” He limped to the cliff's edge and rested his racked body against the low stone parapet.

Harkness uncoiled himself from the roan and said: “You lead a life of armchair adventure, Queen? It must be embarrassing when you poke your nose out into the world of men.” He laughed. Ellery eyed the man's yellow mane and nervy eyes with the unreasoning dislike of the chronic shut-in. That broad chest was untroubled after the gallop.

“Embarrassing to the horse,” said Ellery. “Beautiful view, General. You couldn't have selected this site blindly. Must be a streak of poetry in your make-up.”

“Poetry your foot, Mr. Queen! I'm a military man.” The old gentleman waddled to Ellery's side and gazed down over the Hudson River, a blue-grass reflector under the young sun. The cliff was sheer; it fell cleanly to a splinter of beach far below, where Major-General Barrett had his boathouse. A zigzag of steep stone steps in the face of the cliff was the only means of descent.

An old man was seated on the edge of a little jetty below, fishing. He glanced up, and to Ellery's astonishment sprang to his feet and snapped his free hand up in a stiff salute. Then he very placidly sat down and resumed his fishing.

“Braun,” said the General, beaming. “Old pensioner of mine. Served under me in Mexico. He and Magruder, the old chap at the caretaker's cottage. You see? Discipline, that's it.… Poetry?” He snorted. “Not for me, Mr. Queen. I like this ledge for its military value. Commands the river. Miniature West Point, b'gad!”

Ellery turned and looked upward. The shelf of rock on which the General had built his home was surrounded on its other three sides by precipitous cliffs, quite unscalable, which towered so high that their crests were swimming in mist. A steep road had been blasted in the living rock of the rearmost cliff; it spiraled down from the top of the mountain, and Ellery still remembered with vertigo the automobile descent the evening before.

“You command the river,” he said dryly, “but an enemy could shoot the hell out of you by commanding that road up there. Or are my tactics infantile?”

The old gentleman spluttered: “Why, I could hold that gateway to the road against an army, man!”

“And the artillery,” murmured Ellery. “Heavens, General, you
are
prepared.” He glanced with amusement at a small sleek cannon beside the nearby flagpole, its muzzle gaping over the parapet.

“General's getting ready for the revolution,” said Harkness with a lazy laugh. “We live in parlous times.”

“You sportsmen,” snapped the General, “have no respect whatever for tradition. You know very well this is a sunset gun—you don't sneer at the one on the Point, do you? That's the only way Old Glory,” he concluded in a parade-ground voice, “will ever come down on
my
property, Harkness—to the boom of a cannon salute!”

“I suppose,” smiled the big-game hunter, “my elephant gun wouldn't serve the same purpose? On safari I—”

“Ignore the fellow, Mr. Queen,” said the General testily. “We just tolerate him on these weekends because he's a friend of Lieutenant Fiske's.… Too bad you arrived too late last night to see the ceremony. Quite stirring! You'll see it again at sunset today. Must keep up the old traditions. Part of my life, Mr. Queen … I guess I'm an old fool.”

“Oh, indeed not,” said Ellery hastily. “Traditions are the backbone of the nation; anybody knows that.” Harkness chuckled, and the General looked pleased. Ellery knew the type—retired army man, too old for service, pining for the military life. From what Dick Fiske, the General's prospective son-in-law, had told him on the way down the night before, Barrett had been a passionate and single-tracked soldier; and he had taken over with him into civilian life as many mementoes of the good old martial days as he could carry. Even his servants were old soldiers; and the house, which bristled with relics of three wars, was run like a regimental barracks.

A groom led their horses away, and they strolled back across the rolling lawns toward the house. Major-General Barrett, Ellery was thinking, must be crawling with money; he had already seen enough to convince him of that. There was a tiled swimming pool outdoors; a magnificent solarium; a target range; a gun room with a variety of weapons that …

“General,” said an agitated voice; and he looked up to see Lieutenant Fiske, his uniform unusually disordered, running toward them. “May I see you a moment alone, sir?”

“Of course, Richard. Excuse me, gentlemen?”

Harkness and Ellery hung back. The Lieutenant said something, his arms jerking nervously; and the old gentleman paled. Then, without another word, both men broke into a run, the General waddling like a startled grandfather gander toward the house.

“I wonder what's eating Dick,” said Harkness, as he and Ellery followed more decorously.

“Leonie,” ventured Ellery. “I've known Fiske for a long time. That ravishing daughter of the regiment is the only unsettling influence the boy's ever encountered. I hope there's nothing wrong.”

“Pity if there is,” shrugged the big man. “It promised to be a restful weekend. I had my fill of excitement on my last expedition.”

“Ran into trouble?”

“My boys deserted, and a flood on the Niger did the rest. Lost everything. Lucky to have escaped with my life … Ah, there, Mrs. Nixon. Is anything wrong with Miss Barrett?”

A tall pale woman with red hair and amber eyes looked up from the magazine she was reading. “Leonie? I haven't seen her this morning. Why?” She seemed not too interested. “Oh, Mr. Queen! That dreadful game we played last night kept me awake half the night. How
can
you sleep with all those murdered people haunting you?”

“My difficulty,” grinned Ellery, “is not in sleeping too little, Mrs. Nixon, but in sleeping too much. The original sluggard. No more imagination than an amoeba. Nightmare? You must have something on your conscience.”

“But was it necessary to take our
fingerprints
, Mr. Queen? I mean, a game's a game.…”

Ellery chuckled. “I promise to destroy my impromptu little Bureau of Identification at the very first opportunity. No thanks, Harkness; don't care for any this early in the day.”

“Queen,” said Lieutenant Fiske from the doorway. His brown cheeks were muddy and mottled, and he held himself very stiffly. “Would you mind—?”

“What's wrong, Lieutenant?” demanded Harkness.

“Has something happened to Leonie?” asked Mrs. Nixon.

“Wrong? Why, nothing at all.” The young officer smiled, took Ellery's arm, and steered him to the stairs. He was smiling no longer. “Something rotten's happened, Queen. We're—we don't quite know what to do. Lucky you're here. You might know.…”

“Now, now,” said Ellery gently. “What's happened?”

“You remember that rope of pearls Leonie wore last night?”

“Oh,” said Ellery.

“It was my engagement gift to her. Belonged to my mother.” The Lieutenant bit his lip. “I'm not—well, a lieutenant in the United States Army can't buy pearls on his salary. I wanted to give Leonie something—expensive. Foolish of me, I suppose. Anyway, I treasured mother's pearls for sentimental reasons, too, and—”

“You're trying to tell me,” said Ellery as they reached the head of the stairs, “that the pearls are gone.”

“Damn it, yes!”

“How much are they worth?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars. My father was wealthy—once.”

Ellery sighed. In the workshop of the cosmos it had been decreed that he should stalk with open eyes among the lame, the halt, and the blind. He lit a cigarette and followed the officer into Leonie Barrett's bedroom.

There was nothing martial in Major-General Barrett's bearing now; he was simply a fat old man with sagging shoulders. As for Leonie, she had been crying; and Ellery thought irrelevantly that she had used the hem of her
peignoir
to stanch her tears. But there was also a set to her chin and a gleam in her eye; and she pounced upon Ellery so quickly that he almost threw his arm up to defend himself.

“Someone's stolen my necklace,” she said fiercely. “Mr. Queen, you must get it back. You
must
, do you hear?”

“Leonie, my dear,” began the General in a feeble voice.

“No, father! I don't care
who's
going to be hurt. That—that rope of pearls meant a lot to Dick, and it means a lot to me, and I don't propose to sit by and let some
thief
snatch it right from under my nose!”

“But, darling,” said the Lieutenant miserably. “After all, your guests …”

“Hang my guests, and yours, too,” said the young woman with a toss of her head. “I don't think there's anything in Mrs. Post's book which says a thief gathers immunity simply because he's present on an invitation.”

“But it's certainly more reasonable to suspect that one of the servants—”

The General's head came up like a shot. “My dear Richard,” he snorted, “put that notion out of your head. There isn't a man in my employ who hasn't been with me for at least twenty years. I'd trust any one of 'em with anything I have. I've had proof of their honesty and loyalty a hundred times.”

“Since I'm one of the guests,” said Ellery cheerfully, “I think I'm qualified to pass an opinion. Murder will out, but it was never hindered by a bit of judicious investigation, Lieutenant. Your fiancée's quite right. When did you discover the theft, Miss Barrett?”

“A half-hour ago, when I awoke.” Leonie pointed to the dressing table beside her four-posted bed. “Even before I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes I saw that the pearls were gone. Because the lid of my jewel box was up, as you see.”

“And the box was closed when you retired last night?”

“Better than that. I awoke at six this morning feeling thirsty. I got out of bed for a glass of water, and I distinctly remember that the box was closed at that time. Then I went back to sleep.”