Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22 (29 page)

"I'm not so sure, What about Joel Poinsett High School, room 26?"

Camilla seized his arm. "It could be! Yes, it
could
be! But—"

"Wasn't Madge talking about the place yesterday? It's closed; they're going to tear it down. Somebody in a nearby cottage keeps an eye on it. What else did Madge say?"

"She didn't say anything else at the time, but she mentioned it to me again later in the day. The man who keeps an eye on the place is the proprietor of a flower-and-seed nursery to the east of the grounds. You can't get into that school by the main door in front, which has been locked and heavily barred since they closed it up. The only way in, apart from burglary, is by a semi-underground door on the west side."

"Whereas the caretaker's on the east side? Better and better!"

"Why?"

"Camilla, the Joel Poinsett High School's not five minutes' walk from here on Fort Johnson Road. The joker —who isn't a joker at all, according to Dr. Fell—says there's something in room 26 that will crack the case. I'm going to go and get it"

"Now?"

"Of course; when else?"

"Alan, I don't have to remind you what's been happening! Mightn't it be dangerous to go there?"

"That can't be helped. These people—murderer, joker, whom you like—have been bedevilling us until we can't take any more. This is it, my dear. You wouldn't like to come along, would you?"

"Oh, may I? I—I don't really mind anything as long as I'm with you."

"Then let's get started. Wait! Do you want to change your clothes?"

"I won't if you'd rather I didn't." Camilla looked down over her pink semi-formal dress. "It's these spike heels, that's all! If I
might
put on flat heels and slacks, I promise not to take longer than five minutes. And you remember the little flashlight Madge was using in the study last night? Captain Ashcroft carried it down to her bedroom, but I picked it up and took it with me. I'll bring that, shall I?—Five minutes!" said Camilla, and darted away.

Despite his tendency to fume, she was better than her word. Camilla must have flung the clothes off herself to don others; he had smoked less than half a cigarette before she reappeared, supple in dark slacks and the same fleecy tan sweater she had worn that day.

Beneath unsteady moon
and racing cloud, wild shad
ows fled across the park as they emerged from the house. Momentarily Alan switched on the flashlight she had given him. But Camilla touched his arm when he started for the front gate.

"We don't need to go that way," she informed him, pointing south. "There's a side gate that'll bring us out very close to the main road. If you
must
do this . . ."

A hundred yards to the south, over dew-drenched grass and past spectral flower-beds in a thin whine of mosquitoes, they found the other gate in the head-high brick wall. Beyond it coarse grass sloped up gently to the screen of live-oaks guarding this side of Fort Johnson Road. Alan hesitated as he opened the gate.

"On the famous Sunday night of May 2nd, when Madge met some unknown man back there, presumably this is the way he went out?"

"Yes, I daresay. Does it matter?"

"Camilla,
everything
matters in this tangle. Up to the road, and turn right."

They swung west along Fort Johnson Road, Camilla walking close to him and Alan occasionally flashing the beam when interlaced boughs above their heads grew too thick to admit any moonlight at all.

"Now, then," he said, "as for the also-unknown N.S. who's been providing us with so many directions . . ."

"A new set of directions every time we turn around! And that can't be!"

"What can't be?"

"N.S.," Camilla whispered, "seems to know the explanation of the whole business. How can N.S. possibly know?"

"It may be just suspicion. Or it may be inside information he—or she—won't come out in the open with. That's one of the things we can't tell."

"And what game is Captain Ashcroft playing? What phone-message did
he
get from his office, so that he looked so very odd and said they wouldn't question Madge until tomorrow?"

"It all comes back to Madge, doesn't it? Possibly the answer's in room 26 at an abandoned school. A little farther along the road, a minute or two more . . ."

On their right the ground
s of Maynard Hall fell away
behind them. On their left, presently, the line of great live-oaks disappeared in a cleared space of several acres, long if not very deep. First they saw a tall wire fence, beyond which rose banked trees, shrubs, the greenhouse-roofs and cottage-roof which marked the flower-nursery.

Some distance beyond it, orange-yellow brick drained of color and long windows glimmering, loomed the two storeys of the Joel Poinsett High School. In that uncertain light you could just read the name carved across the facade, with the date of 1920.

They passed the building, walking softly though with an attempt at casualness, and keeping to shadow on the north side of the road. West of the school, separated from its grounds by a row of trees, was an establishment Alan could not remember having noticed. A brown-painted board fence enclosed its premises and hid them from sight.

"I
can tell you what it is," Camilla whispered. "The sign says
R. Gaiddon, Merchandise.
But the gate in that fence was wide open when we drove past yesterday. It's nothing but a junk-yard!"

"Then at least there won't be anybody there at this time of night. Look halfway along this side of the school-building. Some steps lead down to a semi-underground door, which must be the one we want. Come along."

Camilla took his arm. They made no noise as they approached in a diagonal direction, over bare earth trampled free of grass by several generations. But shadows, in which something or somebody might be lurking, seemed blacker and more dense below the moon-silvered windows. They were still some yards from a three-sided stone coping, like a very shallow well in which three broad, steep steps descended to the door, when Camilla suddenly pulled his head down and whispered even more softly than she had whispered in the attic the night before.

"Alan, who
was
Joel Poinsett?"

"A Charleston diplomat, the first American Minister to Mexico in the eighteen-twenties, and afterwards Secretary of War under Van Buren. Why?"

"Because I don't like this. I do
n't think we're alone. I've
got a feeling there's somebody near us, maybe watching."

"I've got the same feeling. But it's imagination; it's bound to be imagination! There's not a soul within—"

Then a voice split the night wide open.

"Stand out, you!"
it bellowed.
"Who are yeh? This here's a shotgun; iffen yeh doan' stand out and lemme see yeh . .
."

Alan's heart had jumped into his throat. He saw the indistinct figure which seemed to have materialized out of the wall. Then he realized, with equal shock, that the voice was not addressing them at all. It was addressing two bulky men who stood at the foot of the steps outside the door. In his right hand the less bulky of the two men held what looked like an enormous electric torch. Its switch clicked; light dazzled out across the gold shield cupped in the palm of his left hand.

"Police!" Captain Ashcroft yelled back. "Who are
you?"

The other voice, shorn of ferocity, was disconcerted.

"Name o' Hendricks, Hendricks's nurseries. If you're po-lice sho' nuff—"

"Take a look at this badge. And don't tell me I need a warrant for unoccupied premises!"

"Not tellin' yeh n
uthin', seh. Got to be careful ‘b
out the damn kids, is all. Enathing wrong?"

"Maybe, maybe not. I'm here to find out. Are the lights working in this place?"

"Lights, water, 'most ever'thing. Don't go usin' 'em too much, will yeh?"

"I'll take care of it. Now get lost."

"I was on'y askin', seh—"

"Get lost, you hear?"

Shuffling footfalls retreated; the indistinct figure vanished. While a witless-looking Dr. Fell remained where he was, Captain Ashcroft mounted the three stone steps. The beam of light swept across the yard, rising first at Alan, then at Camilla, and was extinguished. Captain Ashcroft surveyed them.

"Well . . . now!" he said, studying Alan. "You got back, did you? Saw what it meant by J.P.H.S., and tried to get here ahead of us, eh?"

"Yes, something like that."

"Well, no harm done.
We
got back and—" His tone changed. "I'm not too pleased to see
you
here, Miss Bruce. This is no pleasure-trip, you know!"

"Captain," cried a distraught Camilla, "do you usually have junk-yards next door to your schools?"

"No, not often. If you mean old Pokey Gaiddon, they bought up his property and they'll clear it away when they tear down the school. No, I'm not pleased to see you. But it's all right if you're with us, I reckon."

"Is
it all right?" boomed the voice of Dr. Fell.

Captain Ashcroft turned back, switching on his light With Camilla and Alan crowding after him, he descended the three steps. The broad, heavy door, without knob or handle on the outside, was held perhaps a quarter-inch open by some thin and twisted metal object wedged between door and frame.

"Had to pry this open with my fingers," the captain explained. "It's not locked, but there's a bar you push down on the inside. So it had to be pried open—"

"—and is kept from closing," supplied Dr. Fell, "by the historic and valuable corkscrew I carry always on my person. Archons of Athens!" he wheezed, making a hideous face against the light. "If we are going in, hadn't we better get on with it? While you were speaking to our friends, I ventured to pull the door a little farther open. I can't be sure I heard a footstep in there; no doubt I am hearing too much. But I was wondering . . ."

"Wondering what?"

"I was wondering," said Dr. Fell, "whether someone else may have got here before any of us."

16

"Somebody else, eh?" snapped Captain Ashcroft "Well soon see about
that!"

He was over-optimistic, Alan thought. Holding open the big door until the others had preceded him down two more steps into a dark pa
ssage, Captain Ashcroft let the
door swing not quite shut on its compressed-air cushion. Then, directing the beam of his big flashlight straight ahead, he moved up to join Dr. Fell. Camilla and Alan followed some feet behind them.

A fairly wide transverse corridor, concrete-floored, ran the width of the building. Either the school had only recently been abandoned, Alan decided, or very good care had been taken of it during the interim. Despite the stuffy air of this semi-underground passage, there was no smell of mustiness or damp.

On either side of the corridor, as he entered, he vaguely noted a closed door with an opaque ground-glass panel. He had the small flashlight in his right hand, but did not switch it on to investigate. Instead, with Camilla clinging to his left arm, he followed the larger beam as Dr. Fell and Captain Ashcroft blundered ahead. Their voices ran out and boomed back in echoes.

"Harrumph!" said Dr. Fell, with no easy intonation. "Since for my sins I myself was once a schoolmaster—"

"You feel right at home, eh?" Captain Ashcroft supplied. "O.K.! But what are we looking for?"

"Something," replied Dr. Fell, "to which the joker who is not a joker has specifically drawn our attention. Either it was here already, like the Poe photograph at Fort Moultrie, or else it has been put here for us to find. So far, at last, our anonymous friend has been
accurate.
Archons of Athens!" He paused, pointing ahead. "Surely that is a stairway up to the main floor?"

It was. Where the transverse corridor met a central corridor through the building, a broad staircase with concrete treads and a heavy iron-and-wood banister led upwards into denser shadow.

"And that's not all," Alan whispered into Camilla's ear.

"Not all?" Camilla whispered back.

They had been passing more doors, left and right. Towards one of these, on the right, Alan sent a momentary gleam of light. Its panel bore no number, but the black letters
Manual Training
stood out against opaque glass. Camilla seized his wrist and flashed the torch's ray briefly towards another door, well down from it on the left