Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (13 page)

“And they didn’t come back to shore?” Miss Withers asked.

“Not that I saw,” grumbled Higgins. “They could have landed on the rocks somewhere, but I don’t see why.”

Miss Withers intimated that she did see. “One thing more—what time did you say the fog came in?”

Higgins scratched his head to stimulate memory. “I’d say about one o’clock it got real thick.”

“And it lasted all night?”

Higgins shook his head. “Only till about an hour or so before sunrise. I’d say a little afore three.”

He was given permission to return to his bed, and Miss Withers faced the chief.

“There you are,” she said triumphantly. “Very simple. If the body didn’t leave the island last night, it’s still here. All you have to do is to search the place thoroughly.”

Chief Britt nodded a little sadly. “Catalina Island is over twenty miles long and near on to seven miles wide,” he explained. “A search party couldn’t even get across some of those canyons in the back country.”

“Amos, you don’t need no search party,” interrupted Deputy Ruggles, who had been an interested observer from the doorway. “If the body was dumped in any of them canyons, all we need to do is set out on a mountain top and watch where the gulls is thickest. They’re worser’n vultures.”

Miss Withers shivered slightly. Then she changed the subject. “It seems very unlikely to me that the body was carried very far when a wheelbarrow was the only means of transportation,” she pointed out. “The body probably lies in a shallow grave somewhere near by.”

She rose to her feet. “I’ll leave you to your labors, Chief Britt. I did not imagine, when I came after my sketchbook this morning, that I’d be privileged to see such a whirl of excitement. May I have the book?”

Chief Britt looked blank.

“I lent it to you yesterday when you were making a list of Forrest’s personal belongings,” she reminded him. “I want it back, because there are some unfinished sketches of trees in it.”

Britt pawed through the heap of litter on his desk and finally found the linen-bound book. Laboriously he tore out the sheet containing his notes. At that moment two letters slipped out from the pages.

“If those are the letters which were in Forrest’s pocket, I think you have a right to open them,” suggested Miss Withers. “What’s more, I think you ought to.”

Britt nodded. “I meant to, soon as I could get around to it.” He took a heavy jackknife from his pocket, and slit the scented envelope.

As he read, Miss Withers shamelessly peered over his shoulder. The letter was short, but not disappointing. The writing was feminine and careful:

HELLO, MR. FORREST:

Just to let you know that a lawyer from Mr. Welch was to see me and he says Mr. Welch is going to Europe because it is not very healthy around here. He said he heard that you were thinking of coming back, but he said he didn’t think it would be healthy for you because Mack wouldn’t like it. I was up to your house Sunday like you said but Mae was there and wouldn’t let me in. She said she was sending all your stuff to Acme storage and if you wanted your gun you could get it there. She said a lot more too.

Yrs. respectfully,

Mabel (Blumberg)

P.S. I have another job so don’t worry about me.

“H’m,” said the chief. “Mae’s his wife. Wonder who Mabel is?”

“And I wonder who Mack is,” said Miss Withers. “This was a warning letter, Mr. Britt. Too bad Forrest didn’t stop to open it that morning.”

The chief put it aside and took up the official-looking envelope with the letterhead of Fishbein, O’Hara & Fishbein. This was even shorter, and still more interesting. The envelope was addressed to “Mr. Roswell,” but the letter to Roswell T Forrest:

At your request we have communicated with our client, Mrs. Mae Timmons Forrest, and are sorry to announce that your wife refuses to consider changing her pending suit for absolute divorce to one of separation.

Yours very truly,

AARON FISHBEIN.

“Which explains why she was willing to bury him only if absolutely necessary,” Miss Withers pointed out.

Ruggles’s excited voice broke in upon them. “Say, Amos—I just saw the Kelsey guy who gave me the slip last night! He’s going down the street talking to that La Fond woman!”

“Get him and bring him here,” ordered Chief Britt. Ruggles leaped to obey. “That guy knows a lot of things he hasn’t told us—and besides, he was on the loose last night.”

“Which is in itself proof of guilt,” sarcastically suggested Miss Withers. She relieved the chief by picking up her sketchbook and moving toward the door.

As she passed out through the crowded counters of the curio shop, she came face to face with Barney Kelsey, the young man with the gray hair. There was no sign of Phyllis, and Kelsey was in the tight grasp of Deputy Ruggles.

All the same he smiled a good-morning to Miss Withers. She paused a moment. “Mr. Kelsey, when and if the chief sets you at liberty, I’d like a chat with you.” She noticed that the palm of his right hand bore a large blister.

Barney Kelsey studied her. “Any time at all,” he said, without enthusiasm. Then he preceded Ruggles back into the office.

Miss Withers stared after him. “A tough nut to crack,” she said to herself. “But I wonder if there isn’t a way to crack him.”

By way of a pleasant contrast to her adventures of the morning, Miss Withers while striding down the Main Street chanced upon the newlyweds. They were buying picture postcards at a candy stand, and Kay hailed her.

“Good-morning, Miss Withers!” The events of the preceding day had touched Kay Deving lightly. Only her voice was a little strained. “I was wondering—”

“We were wondering—” put in Marvin.

“Marvy and I were wondering—about this dreadful business and everything—”

“Don’t let it spoil your honeymoon,” advised Miss Withers cheerily. “Just think what a lot of excitement you’re having. Not like most honeymoons, I can tell you. You can tell your children about all this.”

“Yeah,” said Kay doubtfully. But her words had brightened Marvin considerably.

“But we wanted to ask you,” he continued. “Do you know if the doctor finished the autopsy and what he decided? I hope that poor guy wasn’t murdered, as you seemed to think.”

Miss Withers stared at him. It had not occurred to her that the news of the missing body was not already blazoned from the housetops.

“Didn’t you know?” she said kindly. “There’s been another accident. There was no autopsy this morning because while we were sleeping last night somebody stole the body and left a skeleton in its place!”

Miss Withers paused for dramatic effect—and received an effect that she had not bargained for. Marvin Deving took it rather well, though his face, which had been colorless, flushed as if he had found breath again. Kay was trembling and as shocked as if she herself had come face to face with the grim relic on the infirmary table. The brown eyes were luminous.

“It can’t be true—why—” She shook her head, so that the red curls were loosened. She turned quickly toward Marvin and then back to Miss Withers. “It can’t be true—such things don’t happen—you’re joking, aren’t you?”

“I wish I were,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Now you children run along and forget all this black trouble.”

“I wish we could,” said Kay. But gratefully they watched her out of sight.

Ten minutes later Miss Withers walked in upon James Michael O’Rourke, who was engaged at the moment in pacing up and down the infirmary floor. Nurse Smith obligingly disappeared, and Miss Withers surveyed the little doctor through cool blue eyes.

“Well,” said O’Rourke uncomfortably. “I suppose you came to crow.”

“Came to scoff and remained to pray,” she quoted. “Doctor, I suppose that you agree with me now about the need for that autopsy?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Need or no need, it can’t be performed without a corpse. My midnight visitor left me a bag of bones, but whatever was to be discovered from the corpse is beyond our reach now.”

“That’s why I came,” said Hildegarde Withers. “I’m not so sure. You see, yesterday afternoon the murderer struck again—”

“Good heavens, woman! Another corpse?”

She shook her head. “As it happened, no. And I think the whole thing was an accident. But a little dog named Mister Jones nearly died of whatever killed Roswell Forrest. I saved his life by giving him an emetic of sea water after we left the
Dragonfly.
He was very sick on a rock. I wondered—”

“But, Miss Withers, why should anyone want to kill a little dog?”

“I don’t think anybody did,” she explained. “But Forrest died in a certain seat on that plane. Miss La Fond’s little dog was under that same seat, later that day, and came out deathly sick. Suppose there was a capsule of poison—and the dog picked it up? It might be there still, where he threw it up, mightn’t it?”

“No capsule could do that,” pointed out O’Rourke. “But—”

“But me no buts,” Miss Withers told him. “Come on, we’re going to hire the bus and go up there and see. I should have thought of it sooner.”

She carried along the doctor by sheer weight of purpose. Still arguing, they caromed over the hills to the airport landing and hastened down to the beach. “We’re in luck,” Miss Withers called out. “The rock is well above high tide.”

So it was, but there was no sign of anything that Mister Jones might have deposited there.

For a long time they searched, with O’Rourke increasingly skeptical and Miss Withers considerably nettled.

The clear blue-green waves rolled in from the open sea in a monotonous procession, splashing foam over her stout calfskin oxfords. Half a mile out from shore, a broken bundle of white feathers rose and fell on those same clear blue-green rollers, but Miss Withers and the doctor were looking for other evidence than the lifeless body of a murdered sea gull.

A
SMOOTH-LIMBED, VIRGINAL YOUNG
pepper tree dominated the view from Miss Withers’s window at the hotel. It stood a few hundred feet away, on the very edge of the cliff overlooking roadway and beach, so that at noon its trailing foliage was silhouetted against the sun, and a long pale shadow ran down almost to the hotel balcony.

The vacationing schoolma’am had come to take a special interest in this little pepper tree. This was partly because it was the only
tree
in sight. Miss Withers considered palms only overgrown ferns and was firmly convinced that, like most of the rest of Southern California’s greenery, they were rented from the florist and that one of these days the men would come to take them back.

But more intriguing than the little tree’s resemblance to Eastern trees was the fact that, on the second day of her stay at Catalina, she had been privileged to witness a small landslide some distance along the shore. This accident had deposited the pepper tree in the surf, from which it had been salvaged by the hotel handyman and taken to its present resting place. There had been much ado about fertilizer and water, and Miss Withers gathered that it was a matter of touch and go whether the little pepper tree would survive the rude transplantation at this time of year.

“The ground’s like dusty powder,” Rogers, the ancient and garrulous handyman, had remarked, as she constituted herself unofficial supervisor of the tree-planting. “It’s a poor chance she’s got, set in this red clay. But they tells me to plant her in the rock garden and in the rock garden I’ll plant her.”

“You might have set the tree where it wouldn’t be in danger of sliding down the cliff again,” Miss Withers had pointed out. But by that time the planting was done.

Before the mystery of the demise of Roswell T. Forrest had usurped her time and her thoughts, Miss Withers had been in the habit of looking first thing each morning and last thing at night to see if the pepper tree was still there. But now all the pleasant routine of her vacation was pushed aside.

Today Miss Withers returned, hot and dusty and disgusted, from her fruitless trip to the airport beach in search of whatever it was that had caused Mister Jones such acute illness. She could hear the little dog whining in the next room, a sure sign that Phyllis was out.

The hotel was very still. In desperation, Hildegarde Withers washed her hair—a last resort. But today even that rite failed to dispel the sense of disappointment which filled her mind. She thoughtfully began to comb the wet locks.

It was a thoughtful hour. Miss Withers thought about the dog in the next room and what he could tell her if he would. The little dog Jones thought about the pepper tree, or any other tree. Even the pepper tree—if plants, as scientists say, can suffer, may they not be said to think?—was thinking thoughts shot with fear and foreboding.

Miss Withers was filled with unreasonable gloom. A thousand times she had noticed the plaque at the end of the hallway at Jefferson School—“It matters not who won or lost, but how you played the game!”—and a thousand times she had sniffed inwardly at the sentiment. It was not that Hildegarde Withers did not hold with sportsmanship, if by that one understands rigid adherence to a certain code. Her Boston background (all the more important to her because, through a call to a Unitarian pastorate in Des Moines, her father had moved the family from Back Bay to Iowa a few weeks before her birth) impelled her toward playing the game, provided the game was worth playing and against worthy opponents. But she was too intellectually honest to believe that it did not matter, matter terribly, whether you won or lost.

On her dresser lay a telegram from Inspector Oscar Piper of the New York police, written on the train and put on the wires at Toledo. “Wire me developments care Santa Fe,” he instructed her. “Very important do nothing until I arrive.”

Much as she respected her old friend and sparring partner, it was her farthest thought to obey the latter part of his message. All the same, that was exactly what she was doing.

She let her mind run over the events of the past twenty-four or -five hours. Roswell Forrest was dead, and everybody and nobody had a motive for killing him. There was no use to try to figure out who might have done it until she could decide what was done—and how. It was like playing a worn-out phonograph record over and over, with the needle scratching in its groove. Each time the tune ended on the same phrase, going round and round in her head.