Calamity Town (8 page)

Mr Queen ground out his cigarette carefully. ‘All right, then,' he said.

Pat kicked a twig. Her hands were trembling. Then she sprang off the stump. ‘I feel like a skunk,' she moaned. ‘But what else can we do?'

‘I doubt if we'll find anything,' said Ellery as Pat let him into Nora's house with her duplicate key. ‘Jim locked the door when he ran upstairs. He didn't want to be caught doing…whatever it was he did.'

‘You think he destroyed the letter?'

‘Afraid so. But we'll have a look, anyway.'

In Jim's study, Pat set her back against the door. She looked ill. Ellery sniffed. And went directly to the fireplace. It was clean except for a small mound of ash. ‘He burned it!' said Pat.

‘But not thoroughly enough.'

‘Ellery, you've found something!'

‘A scrap that wasn't consumed by the fire.'

Pat flew across the room. Ellery was examining a scrap of charred paper very carefully. ‘Part of the envelope?'

‘The flap. Return address. But the address has been burned off. Only thing left is the sender's name.'

Pat read: ‘“Rosemary Haight.” Jim's sister.' Her eyes widened. ‘Jim's sister Rosemary! Ellery, the one he wrote those three letters to about Nora!'

‘It's possible that—' Ellery did not finish.

‘You were going to say it's possible there was a first letter we didn't find, because he'd already sent it! And that this is the remains of his sister's answer.'

‘Yes.' Ellery tucked the burnt scrap away in his wallet. ‘But on second thought I'm not so sure. Why should his sister's reply bother him so much, if that's what it is? No, Patty, this is something different, something new.'

‘But what?'

‘That,' said Mr Queen, ‘is what we've got to find out.' He took her arm, looking about. ‘Let's get out of here.'

That night they were all sitting on the Wright porch watching the wind blow the leaves across the lawn. John F. and Jim were debating the presidential campaign with some heat, while Hermy anxiously appeased and Nora and Pat listened like mice. Ellery sat by himself in a corner, smoking.

‘John, you know I don't like these political arguments!' said Hermy. ‘Goodness, you men get so hot under the collar—'

John F. grunted. ‘Jim, there's dictatorship coming in this country, you mark my words—'

Jim grinned. ‘And you'll eat ‘em…
All
right, Mother!' Then he said casually: ‘Oh, by the way, darling, I got a letter from my sister Rosemary this morning. Forgot to tell you.'

‘Yes?' Nora's tone was bright. ‘How nice. What does she write, dear?'

Pat drifted toward Ellery and in the darkness sat down at his feet. He put his hand on her neck; it was clammy. ‘The usual stuff. She does say she'd like to meet you—all of you.'

‘Well, I should think so!' said Hermy. ‘I'm very anxious to meet your sister, Jim. Is she coming out for a visit?'

‘Well…I
was
thinking of asking her, but—'

‘Now, Jim,' said Nora. ‘You know I've asked you dozens of times to invite Rosemary to Wrightsville.'

‘Then it's all right with you, Nor?' asked Jim quickly.

‘All right!' Nora laughed. ‘What's the matter with you? Give me her address and I'll drop her a note tonight.'

‘Don't bother, darling. I'll write her myself.'

When they were alone, a half hour later, Pat said to Ellery: ‘Nora was scared.'

‘Yes. It's a poser.' Ellery circled his knees with his arms. ‘Of course, the letter that stirred Jim up this morning was the same letter he just said he got from his sister.'

‘Ellery, Jim's holding something back.'

‘No question about it.'

‘If his sister Rosemary just wrote about wanting to come out for a visit, or anything as trivial as that…
why did Jim burn her letter?
'

Mr Queen kept the silence for a long time. Finally he mumbled: ‘Go to bed, Patty. I want to think.'

On November the eighth, four days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected to the Presidency of the United States for a third term, Jim Haight's sister came to Wrightsville.

10

Jim and the Fleshpot

‘Miss Rosemary Haight,' wrote Gladys Hemmingworth in the Society column of the
Wrightsville Record
, ‘was strikingly accoutered in a
naturel
French suedè travelling suit with sleeveless jerkin to match, a dashing jacket of platinum-fox fur topped with the jauntiest fox-trimmed archery hat of forest green, and green suède wedgies and bag…'

Mr Ellery Queen happened to be taking a walk that morning…to the Wrightsville station. So he saw Rosemary Haight get off the train at the head of a safari bearing luggage and pose for a moment, in the sun, like a movie actress. He saw her trip over to Jim and kiss him, and turn to Nora with animation and embrace her, presenting a spruce cheek; and Mr Queen also saw the two women laugh and chatter as Jim and the safari picked up the visitor's impedimenta and made for Jim's car. And Mr Queen's weather eye clouded over.

That night, at Nora's, he had an opportunity to test his first barometric impression. And he decided that Rosemary Haight was no bucolic maiden on an exciting journey; that she was pure metropolis, insolent and bored and trying to conceal both. Also, she was menacingly attractive. Hermy, Pat, and Nora disliked her instantly; Ellery could tell that from the extreme politeness with which they treated her. As for John F., he was charmed, spryly gallant. Hermy reproached him in the silent language of the eye. And Ellery spent a troubled night trying to put Miss Rosemary Haight together in the larger puzzle, and not succeeding.

Jim was busy at the bank these days and, rather with relief, Ellery thought, left the problem of entertaining his sister to Nora. Dutifully Nora drove Rosemary about the countryside, showing her the ‘sights.' It was a little difficult for Nora to sustain the charming-hostess illusion, Pat confided in Ellery, since Rosemary had a supercilious attitude towards everything and wondered ‘how in heaven's name you can be
happy
in such a dull place, Mrs. H!'

Then there was the gauntlet of the town's ladies to run…teas for the guest, very correct with hats on in the house and white gloves, an ambitious mah-jongg party, a wiener roast on the lawn one moonlit night, a church social…The ladies were cold. Emmeline DuPré said Rosemary Haight had a streak of ‘commerce' whatever that was, Clarice Martin thought her clothes too ‘you know,' and Mrs Mackenzie at the Country Club said she was a born bitch and look at those silly men drooling at her! The Wright women found themselves constrained to defend her, which was hard, considering that secretly they agreed to the truth of all the charges.

‘I wish she'd leave,' said Pat to Ellery a few days after Rosemary's arrival. ‘Isn't that a horrid thing to say? But I do. And now she's sent for her trunks!'

‘But I thought she didn't like it here.'

‘That's what I can't understand, either. Nora says it was supposed to be a “flying” visit, but Rosemary acts as if she means to dig in for the winter. And Nora can't very well discourage her.'

‘What's Jim say?'

‘Nothing to Nora but—' Pat lowered her voice and looked around—'apparently he's said something to Rosemary, because I happened in just this morning and there was Nora trapped in the serving pantry while Jim and Rosemary, who evidently thought Nora was upstairs, were having an argument in the dining room. That woman has a temper!'

‘What was the argument about?' asked Ellery eagerly.

‘I came in at the tail end and didn't hear anything important, but Nora says it was…well, frightening. Nora wouldn't tell me what she'd heard, but she was terribly upset—she looked the same way as when she read those three letters that tumbled out of the toxicology book.'

Ellery muttered: ‘I wish I'd heard that argument. Why can't I put my finger on
something?
Pat, you're a rotten assistant detective!'

‘Yes, sir,' said Pat miserably.

Rosemary Haight's trunk arrived on the fourteenth. Steve Polaris, who ran the local express agency, delivered the trunk himself—an overgrown affair that looked as if it might be packed with imported evening gowns. Steve lugged it up Nora's walk on his broad back and Mr Queen, who was watching from the Wright porch, saw him carry it into Nora's house and come out a few minutes later accompanied by Rosemary, who was wearing a candid red, white, and blue negligee. She looked like an enlistment poster. Ellery saw Rosemary sign Steve Polaris's receipt book and go back into the house. Steve slouched down the walk grinning—Steve had the most wolfish eye, Pat said, in all of Low Village.

‘Pat,' said Ellery urgently, ‘do you know this truckman well?'

‘Steve? That's the only way you
can
know Steve.'

Steve tossed his receipt book on the driver's seat of his truck and began to climb in. ‘Then distract him. Kiss him, vamp him, do a striptease—anything, but get him out of sight of that truck for two minutes!'

Pat instantly called: ‘Oh, Ste-e-e-eve!' and tripped down the porch steps. Ellery followed in a saunter. No one was in sight anywhere on the Hill.

Pat was slipping her arm through Steve's and giving him one of her quick little-girl smiles, saying something about her piano, and there wasn't a man she knew strong enough to move it from where it was to where she wanted it, and of course when she saw Steve…Steve went with Pat into the Wright house, visibly swollen. Ellery was at the truck in two bounds. He snatched the receipt book from the front seat. Then he took a piece of charred paper from his wallet and began riffling the pages of the book…When Pat reappeared with Steve, Mr Queen was at Hermione's zinnia bed surveying the dead and dying blossoms with the sadness of a poet. Steve gave him a scornful look and passed on.

‘Now you'll have to move the piano back,' said Pat. ‘I
am
sorry—I could have thought of something not quite so bulky…Bye, Steve!' The truck rolled off with a flirt of its exhaust.

‘I was wrong,' mumbled Ellery.

‘About what?'

‘About Rosemary'

‘Stop being cryptic! And why did you send me to lure Steve away from his truck? The two are connected, Mr Queen!'

‘I had a flash from on high. It said to me: “This woman Rosemary doesn't seem cut from the same cloth as Jim Haight. They don't seem like brother and sister at all—'”

‘Ellery!'

‘Oh, it was possible. But my flash was wrong. She
is
his sister.'

‘And you proved that through Steve Polaris's truck? Wonderful man!'

‘Through his receipt book, in which this woman had just signed her name. I
have
the real Rosemary Haight's signature, you'll recall, my dear Watson.'

‘On that charred flap of envelope we found in Jim's study—the remains of his sister's letter that he'd burned!'

‘Precisely, my dear Watson. And the signature “Rosemary Haight” on the flap of the letter and the signature “Rosemary Haight” in Steve's receipt book are the work of the same hand.'

‘Leaving us,' remarked Pat dryly, ‘exactly where we were.'

‘No,' said Mr Queen with a faint smile. ‘Before we only
believed
this woman was Jim's sister. Now we
know
it. Even your primitive mind can detect the distinction, my dear Watson?'

The longer Rosemary Haight stayed at Nora's, the more inexplicable the woman became. Jim was busier and busier at the bank; sometimes he did not even come home to dinner. Yet Rosemary did not seem to mind her brother's neglect half so much as her sister-in-law's attentions. The female Haight tongue was forked; more than once its venom reduced Nora to tears…shed, it was reported to Mr Queen by his favourite spy, in her own room, alone. Towards Pat and Hermione, Rosemary was less obvious. She rattled on about her ‘travels'—Panama, Rio, Honolulu, Bali, Banff, surf riding and skiing and mountain climbing and ‘exciting' men—much talk about exciting men—until the ladies of the Wright family began to look harried and grim, and retaliated.

And yet Rosemary stayed on.

Why? Mr Queen was pondering this poser as he sat one morning in the window seat of his workroom. Rosemary Haight had just come out of her brother's house, a cigarette at a disgusted angle to her red lips, clad in jodhpurs and red Russian boots and a Lana Turner sweater. She stood on the porch for a moment, slapping a crop against her boots with impatience, at odds with Wrightsville. Then she strode off into the woods behind the Wright grounds.

Later, Pat took Ellery driving; and Ellery told her about seeing the Haight woman enter the woods in a riding habit.

Pat turned into the broad concrete of Route 16, driving slowly. ‘Bored,' she said. ‘Bored blue. She got Jake Bushmill the blacksmith to dig her up a saddle horse from somewhere—yesterday was her first day out, and Carmel Pettigrew saw her tearing along the dirt road toward Twin Hill like—I quote—one of the Valkyries. Carmel—silly dope!—thinks Rosemary's just too-too.'

‘And you?' queried Mr Queen.

‘That panther laziness of hers is an act—underneath, she's the restless type, and hard as teak. A cheap wench. Or don't you think?' Pat glanced at him sidewise.

‘She's terribly attractive,' said Ellery evasively.

‘So's a man-eating orchid,' retorted Pat; and she drove in silence for eight-tenths of a mile. Then she said: ‘What do you make of the whole thing, Ellery—Jim's conduct, Rosemary, the three letters, the visit, Rosemary's staying on when she hates it…?'

‘Nothing,' said Ellery. But he added: ‘Yet.'

‘Ellery—look!' They were approaching a gaudy bump on the landscape, a one-story white stucco building on whose walls oversized red lady-devils danced and from whose roof brittle cut-out flames of wood shattered the sky. The tubing of the unlit neon sign spelled out v
IC
CARLATTI'S
Hot Spot
. The parking lot to the side was empty except for one small car.