Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (18 page)

He readily swung the register around to show her the neatly written signature of Barney Kelsey. Yes, Mr. Kelsey had registered last night about the hour of twelve-thirty. He had been shown by Roscoe to a room on the third floor rear.

Miss Withers frowned. Unlike the rooms on the second floor, there could have been no balcony outside Kelsey’s room to afford him a secret means of egress. “Then he didn’t leave the hotel after he checked in, you’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” insisted the clerk, restraining a yawn with evident difficulty. “Chief Britt was up here asking me the same thing.”

“And you were on duty all night?”

“Till seven o’clock this morning, yes, ma’am.”

Miss Withers looked down at the well-cushioned wicker chair which stood behind the counter. “You didn’t drop off to sleep, not even once?”

The clerk maintained that never had sleep touched his eyelids. But his gaze was evasive, and Miss Withers, dimly remembering that he had not given her a good-evening last night when she returned from the Casino, pressed her point.

“Good heavens, man, you’re not a sentry. Nobody is going to shoot you for going to sleep on your post.”

Presented in that light, the clerk was willing to admit the barest possibility that she was right.

She nodded wearily. Then the lobby with its open door and snoring clerk would have been no check at all upon the movements of Kelsey—or any other guest. She was right back where she had started.

Idly she turned over the page of the register and glanced down a column of today’s visitors. There were a good many, for the season was in full swing, and what the newspapers were calling “the Red
Dragonfly
Mystery” had lured a number of curiosity seekers into remaining over the weekend.

It was the last name in the column which caught Miss Withers’s eye: “Patrick Mack, Bayonne, New Jersey.” The writing was round and almost childish.

“Patrick Mack,” she repeated thoughtfully. There was a spark of something glittering in the bottom of her mind, like a new penny in a swimming pool. But for the moment it eluded her.

The clerk lowered his voice to a religious hush and nodded over her shoulder. “That’s him, ma’am,” he indicated. “Ever since he registered he’s been hanging around as if he was waiting for somebody. Friend of yours?”

Miss Withers turned and saw across the room the head and shoulders of a man who was as out of place among these breezy Westerners as was she herself.

He was looking up from his newspaper, and their glances met and passed on. Above the pages Miss Withers could see a plump, swarthy face and a pair of shoulders wide with the curved padding in which Seventh Avenue tailors delight. He belonged in a ringside seat in the Garden, or among the low-voiced crowd who haunt Lindyck’s restaurant and mark the tablecloths with matchstubs.

“No, I don’t know him,” said Miss Withers. But all of a sudden the case which had hitherto been such a muddle began to clear—just the merest fraction. Here, she decided with a swift flash of the intuition which usually guided her—here was the missing balance wheel of the whole machine. For the key to the mystery, she was almost positive, lay not in the sprawling Western metropolis in which Forrest had chosen to hide himself, but in Manhattan—and this stranger, in spite of his “Bayonne” on the register, spelled Forty-second Street to her.

She was remembering the letter written to Forrest by his former secretary—and the terse understatement, “… because Mack wouldn’t like it.”

Without realizing it, Miss Withers stared at the only other guest in the lobby with so burning a gaze that he looked suddenly up from his newspaper, flushed a shade deeper, and then rose to his feet with a very real yawn and disappeared toward the stairs.

“Mr. Mack represents a big shipbuilding and wharfage firm in New York,” vouchsafed the clerk garrulously. There was something in Hildegarde Withers’s clear blue eyes and slightly equine visage which impelled people to talk to her—an unconscious attraction which had often stood her well during past ventures into the realm of Sherlockery.

“And he’s here on big business,” the clerk continued. “If you ask me, he’s planning on building a big amusement pier here—or buying the Casino or something. Because he just gave me a blue envelope full of valuables to keep in the safe overnight. All them big business men use negotiable securities nowadays, with the banks like they are.”

“Indeed!” Miss Withers had no particular interest in blue envelopes. She found herself cursed with a burning desire to be in two places at the same time tomorrow. She was determined to run down the missing body if it was anywhere to be found—and she was possessed of a very definite hunch that if she were ever to solve this mystery she ought to stick closer than a brother to Patrick Mack.

The two paths, at the moment, did not seem to converge. Miss Withers bade the clerk a polite good-evening. “I suppose I’m practically the last of the Old Guard to check in, am I not?”

The clerk was thoughtful. “Well, I wouldn’t say that, ma’am. Mr. and Mrs. Deving went to the movie and haven’t showed up yet—and Mr. Kelsey isn’t in, either.”

Miss Withers nodded. “Yes, ma’am” rambled on the clerk. “With a fine night and a moon and all, I can understand the newlyweds being out. But as for Mr. Kelsey—”

“I can understand Mr. Kelsey’s lateness,” said Miss Withers shortly and went up to bed.

A
THOUSAND ELEPHANTS STORMED
through Miss Withers’s dreams that night, so that she awoke with a distinct feeling of relief to see the pale light of early dawn at her window. She drew the old-fashioned watch from beneath her pillow and saw that it was hardly four o’clock. Then she sat up straight in bed, pinching herself just to make sure that she was not even yet in the grip of the nightmare, for the elephants still thundered.

A vase of flowers crashed from her bureau to the floor, and a bad reproduction of Reynolds’s “Age of Innocence,” which Miss Withers had always loathed, swung wildly on the opposite wall and then hurtled down. Her bed rocked like a skiff in a gale, and it was with trembling knees that the good lady finally reached the floor.

She got to the wall telephone, and after much rattling of the hook she succeeded in arousing the clerk downstairs.

“I must insist that the people overhead stop that commotion,” she announced. “If they don’t wish to sleep, I do!”

Not without difficulty, the clerk finally managed to inform her, his voice strained but heavy with studied calm, that she was mistaken in thinking that the people overhead had anything to do with the vibration which still rocked her room. “It’s a mild temblor,” said the clerk.

“A
what?”
Miss Withers was far from patient. “A Knight Templar, did you say?”

“No, ma’am—a temblor! What Easterners call an
earthquake.”
He hesitated over the last word, as if it were vulgar and outside the usage of good society.

“There is absolutely no danger,” the man continued. “It is best to stand in the doorway of your room until it subsides, so that if the walls give way you will not be crushed.” He hung up, evidently besieged with other calls. Miss Withers stood there shivering for a moment. She could hear Mister Jones barking in the next room, and a woman down the hall was monotonously calling for “Fred.” Somebody ran down the hall, but it was not Fred.

The shaking subsided and immediately took up again where it had left off. Miss Withers clutched the phone for support and watched her bureau drawers slide out and empty themselves neatly on the carpet.

Perhaps she screamed. She was not sure about it afterward, although she always maintained stoutly that she did not.

At any rate, she felt an inward surge of relief when her open window to the balcony was darkened, and in stepped Phyllis La Fond, in negligee and slippers, and with Mister Jones gripped in her arms.

“One for all and two for five,” greeted Phyllis cheerily. “If I’m going to be buried alive I want company. Mind if we join you?”

“Do I mind!” said Miss Withers heartily.

The room was chilly, and Phyllis immediately planted herself in the bed, where Miss Withers and the dog shortly joined her. “I suppose the rest of them will go chasing outside and catch pneumonia on the lawn,” said Phyllis optimistically. “We’re as safe here—I’ve been through three of ’em before. The first shock is always the worst.” The room rocked again, and Mister Jones whimpered. Miss Withers realized that the pounding of the surf had taken on a harsher, sharper note. The fat, bewildered little dog pushed a cold nose against her, and she stroked it comfortingly, not without a thought of possible fleas.

The tremors followed one another in diminishing ratio and finally died away completely.

“This was nothing compared to the Santa Barbara quake,” Phyllis informed her hostess. “Well, it seems to be over. I guess I’ll go back and get some sleep.”

“Do you mind,” requested Miss Withers a little quaveringly—“do you mind getting your sleep right here?”

Strangely enough, they both did sleep, while Mister Jones stole down from the bed and fell happily to chewing on Miss Withers’s best pair of stockings.

Phyllis woke first, and her exclamation on noting the slender watch on her wrist awakened the schoolteacher.

“Quarter-past nine,” she wailed. “I’ve missed the excursion bus to the Isthmus!”

Miss Withers blinked. “You mean they’ll run the excursion bus just the same after what happened?”

“Of course, why not? Good heavens, a temblor isn’t anything! Nobody pays any attention to them out here. Sometimes they shake down an old-fashioned building, but that’s all. Business as usual.”

Phyllis had arisen hurriedly, but Miss Withers detained her. “I have an idea,” she suggested. “No matter how you hurry, you’ve missed the bus. But I’m going to rent transportation of some kind today for a little trip of my own, and if you’ll go with me, I’ll have the boy drive you over the Isthmus afterwards. Besides, I’d like company.”

“You’re on,” said Phyllis. “Meet you downstairs for breakfast in half an hour.” She went toward the window. “Come on, doggie.”

“I wonder if you’d mind bringing Mister Jones along?” Miss Withers asked. “I’ve got an idea.”

Miss Withers spent some time in straightening her room, replacing her belongings in the bureau and picking up the picture and the smashed bowl. When she was dressed she went to the window and looked out half expecting to see a ruined landscape.

A silver-gray haze hung over the morning, through which the sun had difficulty in penetrating. The waves broke against the shore with a sullen pounding, but that was the only tangible result of the earthquake as far as she could see. The lawns and beach were much as usual, and a few sun worshipers were already sprawled on the sands.

Still she stared critically around. Not a palm tree had fallen, not a flower seemed disturbed.

Even the little pepper tree was still in its place on the crest of the hill. Miss Withers looked at it, frowning for a moment. The little tree did appear differently than it had when last she had tried to catch its outlines in her sketchbook. She hurried crossed the room and fumbled through her belongings until she found the canvas-bound book, searching for the drawing that she had begun before sterner problems usurped her leisure. But the half-finished sketch was not there.

She went back to the window with a puzzled expression on her face. Sketch or no sketch, the tree had somehow changed. It now seemed to be pressing toward the declivity, its two armlike branches stretched out to sea!

“Well, we live and learn,” she told herself. Closing the sketchbook, she hurried down to breakfast.

Somewhat to her surprise, she found Phyllis already attacking a plate of toast in the dining room, with Mister Jones tied to a leg of the table and munching a crust contentedly. Miss Withers ordered coffee, and a box lunch to take out.

“This must be a real expedition,” Phyllis hazarded. “Maybe I’m lucky not to have gone with the others.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she was told. Then Miss Withers looked up suddenly to see the stranger of last evening coming into the dining room. Patrick Mack of Bayonne looked somewhat worn and sleepless, and he had cut a neat gash in his chin while shaving.

He passed by their table without a single appreciative glance at Phyllis’s well-displayed figure. Miss Withers sensed that he was made uncomfortable by her fixed stare, and also that he was looking for somebody who wasn’t here.

He went swiftly back into the lobby, asked the clerk a question to which a negative reply was given, and received into his own keeping again the fat blue envelope. Miss Withers, who had risen from the table as casually as she could manage, watched him from the door of the dining room. He put the envelope carefully into his inside pocket and set off toward the town.

Miss Withers turned and beckoned toward Phyllis.

“That man is suspicious of me,” she explained hurriedly. “Be a good girl and do me a favor. Follow him, casually, and tell me where he goes. I’ll pick up the lunch and meet you in half an hour at the bus stand on Main Street.”

This time Phyllis did not balk at playing assistant sleuth. With Mister Jones lunging ahead, half choked against the restraining leash, she suffered herself to be drawn down the hotel steps and along the boardwalk.

It was something more than half an hour later when Miss Withers, who had stopped to make a purchase in a corner toy shop, appeared at the bus stop. Phyllis and Mister Jones were already waiting.

“Clear all wires,” sang out Phyllis. “Secret service operative Five reporting. The quarry is now having breakfast in a lunchroom down the street.”

Miss Withers was disappointed. “So that’s all!”

Phyllis nodded. “He went to the post office first.”

The schoolteacher brightened. “Did he get any mail?”

Phyllis shook her head. “He didn’t even ask for any. He just went to the window and rented a lock box. I didn’t want him to see me, so I didn’t get close enough to tell which one. But it was down at the end of the line.”

Miss Withers thanked Phyllis. She wasn’t sure what this meant, but it certainly meant something. If Mr. Mack intended to stay at the hotel, his mail would be delivered there. Lock boxes were used only by natives living outside the narrow limits of free delivery. Why should a man pay for a service that the hotel supplied free?