The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (3 page)

They crashed on and on, endlessly, shaken like dolls. The road kept lurching toward the east in a stubborn curve. The sky grew more and more leaden. The cold seeped deeper and deeper into their bones.

When Dr. Reinach finally rumbled: “Here we are,” and steered the jolting car leftward off the road into a narrow, wretchedly graveled driveway, Ellery came to with a start of surprise and relief. So their journey was really over, he thought. Behind him he heard Thorne and Alice stirring; they must be thinking the same thing.

He roused himself, stamping his icy feet, looking about. The same desolate tangle of woods to either side of the byroad. He recalled now that they had not once left the main road nor crossed another road since turning off the highway. No chance, he thought grimly, to stray off this path to perdition.

Dr. Reinach twisted his fat neck and said: “Welcome home, Alice.”

Alice murmured something incomprehensible; her face was buried to the eyes in the moth-eaten laprobe Reinach had flung over her. Ellery glanced sharply at the fat man; there had been a note of mockery, of derision, in that heavy rasping voice. But the face was smooth and damp and bland, as before.

Dr. Reinach ran the car up the driveway and brought it to a rest a little before, and between, two houses. These structures flanked the drive, standing side by side, separated by only the width of the drive, which led straight ahead to a ramshackle garage. Ellery caught a glimpse of Thorne's glittering Lincoln within its crumbling walls.

The three buildings huddled in a ragged clearing, surrounded by the tangle of woods, like three desert islands in an empty sea.

“That,” said Dr. Reinach heartily, “is the ancestral mansion, Alice. To the left.”

The house to the left was of stone; once gray, but now so tarnished by the elements and perhaps the ravages of fire that it was almost black. Its face was blotched and streaky, as if it had succumbed to an insensate leprosy. Rising three stories, elaborately ornamented with stone flora and gargoyles, it was unmistakably Victorian in its architecture. The façade had a neglected, granular look that only the art of great age could have etched. The whole structure appeared to have thrust its roots immovably into the forsaken landscape.

Ellery saw Alice Mayhew staring at it with a sort of speechless horror; it had nothing of the pleasant hoariness of old English mansions. It was simply old, old with the dreadful age of this seared and blasted countryside. He cursed Thorne beneath his breath for subjecting the girl to such a shocking experience.

“Sylvester called it ‘the Black House,'” said Dr. Reinach cheerfully as he turned off the ignition. “Not pretty, I admit, but as solid as the day it was built, seventy-five years ago.”

“Black House,” grunted Thorne. “Rubbish.”

“Do you mean to say,” whispered Alice, “that Father … Mother lived
here
?”

“Yes, my dear. Quaint name, eh, Thorne? Another illustration of Sylvester's preoccupation with the morbidly colorful. Built by your grandfather, Alice. The old gentleman built this one, too, later; I believe you'll find it considerably more habitable. Where the devil is everyone?”

He descended heavily and held the rear door open for his niece. Mr. Ellery Queen slipped down to the driveway on the other side and glanced about with the sharp, uneasy sniff of a wild animal. The old mansion's companion house was a much smaller and less pretentious dwelling, two stories high and built of an originally white stone which had turned gray. The front door was shut and the curtains at the lower windows were drawn. But there was a fire burning somewhere inside; he caught the tremulous glimmers. In the next moment they were blotted out by the head of an old woman, who pressed her face to one of the panes for a single instant and then vanished. But the door remained shut.

“You'll stop with us, of course,” he heard the doctor say genially; and Ellery circled the car. His three companions were standing in the driveway, Alice pressed close to old Thorne as if for protection. “You won't want to sleep in the Black House, Alice. No one's there, it's in rather a mess; and a house of death, y'know …”

“Stop it,” growled Thorne. “Can't you see the poor child is half-dead from fright as it is? Are you trying to scare her away?”

“Scare me away?” repeated Alice, dazedly.

“Tut, tut,” smiled the fat man. “Melodrama doesn't become you at all, Thorne. I'm a blunt old codger, Alice, but I mean well. It will really be more comfortable in the White House.” He chuckled suddenly again. “White House. That's what
I
named it to preserve a sort of atmospheric balance.”

“There's something frightfully wrong here,” said Alice in a tight voice. “Mr. Thorne, what is it? There's been nothing but innuendo and concealed hostility since we met at the pier. And just why
did
you spend six days in Father's house after the funeral? I think I've a right to know.”

Thorne licked his lips. “I shouldn't—”

“Come, come, my dear,” said the fat man. “Are we to freeze here all day?”

Alice drew her thin coat more closely about her. “You're all being beastly. Would you mind, Uncle Herbert? I should like to see the inside—where Father and Mother …”

“I don't think so, Miss Mayhew,” said Thorne hastily.

“Why not?” said Dr. Reinach tenderly, and he glanced once over his shoulder at the building he had called the White House. “She may as well do it now and get it over with. There's still light enough to see by. Then we'll go over, wash up, have a hot dinner, and you'll feel worlds better.” He seized the girl's arm and marched her toward the dark building, across the dead, twig-strewn ground. “I believe,” continued the doctor blandly, as they mounted the steps of the stone porch, “that Mr. Thorne has the keys.”

The girl stood quietly waiting, her dark eyes studying the faces of the three men. The attorney was pale, but his lips were set in a stubborn line. He did not reply. Taking a bunch of large rusty keys out of a pocket, he fitted one into the lock of the front door. It turned over with a creak.

Then Thorne pushed open the door and they stepped into the house.

It was a tomb. It smelled of must and damp. The furniture, ponderous pieces which once no doubt had been regal, was uniformly dilapidated and dusty. The walls were peeling, showing broken, discolored laths beneath. There was dirt and débris everywhere. It was inconceivable that a human being could once have inhabited this grubby den.

The girl stumbled about, her eyes a blank horror, Dr. Reinach steering her calmly. How long the tour of inspection lasted Ellery did not know; even to him, a stranger, the effect was so oppressive as to be almost unendurable. They wandered about, silent, stepping over trash from room to room, impelled by something stronger than themselves.

Once Alice said in a strangled voice: “Uncle Herbert, didn't anyone … take care of Father? Didn't anyone ever clean up this horrible place?”

The fat man shrugged. “Your father had notions in his old age, my dear. There wasn't much anyone could do with him. Perhaps we had better not go into that.”

The sour stench filled their nostrils. They blundered on, Thorne in the rear, watchful as an old cobra. His eyes never left Dr. Reinach's face.

On the middle floor they came upon a bedroom in which, according to the fat man, Sylvester Mayhew had died. The bed was unmade; indeed, the impress of the dead man's body on the mattress and tumbled sheets could still be discerned.

It was a bare and mean room, not as filthy as the others, but infinitely more depressing. Alice began to cough.

She coughed and coughed, hopelessly, standing still in the center of the room and staring at the dirty bed in which she had been born.

Then suddenly she stopped coughing and ran over to a lopsided bureau with one foot missing. A large, faded chromo was propped on its top against the yellowed wall. She looked at it for a long time without touching it. Then she took it down.

“It's Mother,” she said slowly. “It's really Mother. I'm glad now I came. He did love her, after all. He's kept it all these years.”

“Yes, Miss Mayhew,” muttered Thorne. “I thought you'd like to have it.”

“I've only one portrait of Mother, and that's a poor one. This—why, she was beautiful, wasn't she?”

She held the chromo up proudly, almost laughing in her hysteria. The time-dulled colors revealed a stately young woman with her hair worn high. The features were piquant and regular. There was little resemblance between Alice and the woman in the picture.

“Your father,” said Dr. Reinach with a sigh, “often spoke of your mother toward the last, and of her beauty.”

“If he had left me nothing but this, it would have been worth the trip from England.” Alice trembled a little. Then she hurried back to them, the chromo pressed to her breast. “Let's get out of here,” she said in a shriller voice. “I—I don't like it here. It's ghastly. I'm … afraid.”

They left the house with half-running steps, as if someone were after them. The old lawyer turned the key in the lock of the front door with great care, glaring at Dr. Reinach's back as he did so. But the fat man had seized his niece's arm and was leading her across the driveway to the White House, whose windows were now flickeringly bright with light and whose front door stood wide open.

As they crunched along behind, Ellery said sharply to Thorne: “Thorne. Give me a clue. A hint. Anything. I'm completely in the dark.”

Thorne's unshaven face was haggard in the setting sun. “Can't talk now,” he muttered. “Suspect everything, everybody. I'll see you tonight, in your room. Or wherever they put you, if you're alone.… Queen, for God's sake, be careful!”

“Careful?” frowned Ellery.

“As if your life depended on it.” Thorne's lips made a thin, grim line. “For all I know, it does.”

Then they were crossing the threshold of the White House.

Ellery's impressions were curiously vague. Perhaps it was the effect of the sudden smothering heat after the hours of cramping cold outdoors; perhaps he thawed out too suddenly, and the heat went to his brain.

He stood about for a while in a state of almost semi-consciousness, basking in the waves of warmth that eddied from a roaring fire in a fireplace black with age. He was only dimly aware of the two people who greeted them, and of the interior of the house. The room was old, like everything else he had seen, and its furniture might have come from an antique shop. They were standing in a large living room, comfortable enough; strange to his senses only because it was so old-fashioned in its appointments. There were actually antimacassars on the overstuffed chairs! A wide staircase with worn brass treads wound from one corner to the sleeping quarters above.

One of the two persons awaiting them was Mrs. Reinach, the doctor's wife. The moment Ellery saw her, even as she embraced Alice, he knew that this was inevitably the sort of woman the fat man would choose for a mate. She was a pale and wizened midge, almost fragile in her delicacy of bone and skin; and she was plainly in a silent convulsion of fear. She wore a hunted look on her dry and bluish face; and over Alice's shoulder she glanced timidly, with the fascinated obedience of a whipped bitch, at her husband.

“So, you're Aunt Milly,” sighed Alice, pushing away. “You'll forgive me if I … It's all so very new to me.”

“You must be exhausted, poor darling,” said Mrs. Reinach in the chirping twitter of a bird; and Alice smiled wanly and looked grateful. “And I quite understand. After all, we're no more than strangers to you. Oh!” she said, and stopped. Her faded eyes were fixed on the chromo in the girl's hands. “Oh,” she said again. “I see you've been over to the other house
already
.”

“Of course she has,” said the fat man; and his wife grew even paler at the sound of his bass voice. “Now, Alice, why don't you let Milly take you upstairs and get you comfortable?”

“I am rather done in,” confessed Alice; and then she looked at her mother's picture and smiled again. “I suppose you think I'm very silly, dashing in this way with just—” She did not finish; instead, she went to the fireplace. There was a broad flame-darkened mantel above it, crowded with gew-gaws of a vanished era. She set the chromo of the handsome Victorian-garbed woman among them. “There! Now I feel ever so much better.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Dr. Reinach. “Please don't stand on ceremony. Nick! Make yourself useful. Miss Mayhew's bags are strapped to the car.”

A gigantic young man, who had been leaning against the wall, nodded in a surly way. He was studying Alice Mayhew's face with a dark absorption. He went out.

“Who,” murmured Alice, flushing, “is that?”

“Nick Keith.” The fat man slipped off his coat and went to the fire to warm his flabby hands. “My morose protégé. You'll find him pleasant company, my dear, if you can pierce that thick defensive armor he wears. Does odd jobs about the place, as I believe I mentioned, but don't let that hold you back. This is a democratic country.”

“I'm sure he's very nice. Would you excuse me? Aunt Milly, if you'd be kind enough to …”

The young man reappeared under a load of baggage, clumped across the living room, and plodded up the stairs. And suddenly, as if at a signal, Mrs. Reinach broke out into a noisy twittering and took Alice's arm and led her to the staircase. They disappeared after Keith.

“As a medical man,” chuckled the fat man, taking their wraps and depositing them in a hall closet, “I prescribe a large dose of … this, gentlemen.” He went to a sideboard and brought out a decanter of brandy. “Very good for chilled bellies.” He tossed off his own glass with an amazing facility, and in the light of the fire the finely etched capillaries in his bulbous nose stood out clearly. “Ah-h! One of life's major compensations. Warming, eh? And now I suppose you feel the need of a little sprucing up yourselves. Come along, and I'll show you to your rooms.”