The Secret of the Sand Castle (16 page)

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His answer was abrupt. “By his ears. One stuck out a little more than the other. Oh, I’m onto his tricks. He could show up with a dozen different faces and I’d still know him by his ears. Don’t tell him, though,” he added in a lower voice, “he’d do something to disguise them, too.”

“How could I tell him? I never want to see him again,” declared Flo, tears filling her eyes.

“Now, now. That was a poor joke,” her uncle apologized. “I can see you’ve been badly frightened.”

“I was never so scared in my whole life,” Flo admitted. “I took one look at that picture and then everything went all funny and the next thing I knew Judy and Irene were trying to revive me. I guess Pauline thought I was putting on an act. I never fainted before.”

“She knows now that you weren’t acting. Oh, I hope she’s all right,” cried Judy. “I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to her on that boat.”

“Sometimes we have to forgive ourselves as well as others,” Mr. Garner said philosophically. “I have to admit we were wrong when we believed everything Brand said at the trial, but you were wrong, too, Paul.”

“Oh, I blame myself,” was the quick retort. “I did then and I do now. I was a young fool with big ideas and not as good a conscience as I should have had. I 172

listened to my lawyer instead of the voice of the Lord, but when a man’s paid a debt and the Lord has forgiven him, can’t he expect as much from his family?”

“He surely can,” came a murmur of sympathetic answers.

“Well, I’ve paid and I’ve been punished. I’ve lost my home, my wife, my son, and my little granddaughter unless someone stops Ottwell. What do I have left except a fraction of this land and what good is it without a house? My only reason for wanting the Sand Castle was to keep Ottwell’s dirty hands off it. Of course,” he added, calming down a little, “I do need a place to live.”

“You were included in that invitation I extended to everybody,” Hazel Barton reminded him. “As I told you, there’s nobody to share my home with me except Minnie—”

“The cat? Aggie likes cats. She wrote me about one that she lost. We used to tell each other our troubles,” the girl’s grandfather continued. “Aggie was the only one in the whole family who bothered to write to me. That is, after her grandmother died. I knew Agnes was gone but I guess I was a little confused when I stumbled in here this morning. I’d been dumped off Ottwell’s boat and left to find the way here by myself. I still haven’t got the chill out of my bones. Ottwell meant to drown me and he’ll 173

do the same with little Aggie. If she’s on that boat she’s as good as dead.”

“Oh, please! We have to hope,” Judy pleaded.

“Somehow, I think it will help.”

“It sure will,” came a voice from the entrance and there stood Peter Dobbs, the full six feet of him filling the doorway. Never had Judy been happier to see anyone.

“Peter!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Peter! Were you able to save Aggie?”

“Yes, I helped put her in the police ambulance myself,” he replied. “I waited to make sure she was on her way to the hospital before I came to tell you.”

“But how did you come?”

“In the same police helicopter that’s taking Walter Brand away. It’s just about to take off if you want to watch it.”

“Let’s watch from the tower,” cried Flo, leading the way. “Be sure and duck your heads as you come up,” she warned the others.

“Watch the lady too,” Irene added. “Judy found her and Flo named her Lady Luck. She’s a beautiful figurehead, isn’t she? Judy said she reminded her of Pauline when she was looking at the ocean and talking about eternity.”

“Pauline was so afraid our luck would all be bad, but the figurehead was well named after all,” Judy said thankfully.

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“It sure will,” came a voice from the entrance
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“Are we taking her with us, Mommy?” asked little Judy.

Irene shook her head.

“No, Precious, Judy found her. Come on up, now, and watch the helicopter.”

Little Judy followed her mother, but Judy and Peter waited, wondering about the figurehead. She seemed to belong on the newel post quietly looking out on the room as she had once looked out on the sea. Judy caressed her with her hand as she started upstairs. Then an idea came to her.

“It’s silly, I know, but I have a feeling she’s hiding something,” she told Peter. “The family jewels must have been hidden somewhere in the Sand Castle and we looked in all the cubbyholes.

Every inch of space is utilized except this newel post. The top is like a square box and yet it doesn’t open.”

“Have you tried it?”

“No, it’s nailed shut, but it could be hollow.” Peter tested it.

“By golly! It is!” he exclaimed. “Think we can find a hammer or something to pry off the flat top where Lady Luck was sitting?”

“I think so.” Judy could not conceal her excitement as she found a hammer in the shower house where all the tools were kept and ran back with it so fast she nearly stumbled over little Judy on 176

her way downstairs.

“What are you doing?” the child cried. “Mommy!

Mommy! Judy’s got a hammer and she’s going to break Lady Luck.”

“Here, Judykins, you hold her. It’s all right!” Judy called upstairs to Irene. “We’re just looking for the hidden jewels.”

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JUDY’S startling announcement brought everyone down from the tower. The helicopter no longer interested those who had been watching it take off. Now there was something more interesting to watch.

There were ten people, altogether, crowding around Peter.

“Stand back!” he warned them as he began to pry loose the flat top of the newel post. The nails creaked as they let go and the square board flipped onto the floor.

“Is anything there?” several voices asked.

“Only another board, but wait!” cried Judy.

“There’s a little keyhole in it. Flo, where is that key you found?”

“Irene has it, but that was the key to the money box, wasn’t it? Will all the stolen money be returned to the bank?” Flo questioned.

Peter said it would. “That’s what you want, isn’t 178

it?” he asked, turning to Paul Purdy.

“It’s what I would have done thirty years ago if it hadn’t been for that hurricane,” the old man replied.

“It must have broken up your cottage and washed it right under the Sand Castle. I knew it when I found that window frame,” declared Judy, “but I had no idea there was a box filled with old bills buried there.”

“Walter Brand had an idea what was under the Sand Castle all along, but Jim Ottman beat him to it and got caught for his trouble. He was probably after the jewels, too. The story got around,” Aggie’s grandfather said with a chuckle.

“It got a little twisted, too.” Judy was thinking of what Irene had said about the woman in black dying of a broken heart. Instead, it was a heart attack. She had lived to bring up her granddaughter who must have known, all the time, that her grandfather was in prison. Did she know about the jewels, too? Judy hoped there would be something beautiful for her if they were found.

Irene handed the key to Peter, and they all leaned eagerly forward. As the newel post came apart and they beheld its contents a gasp of astonishment rippled through the room.

“Why, they
are
here!” Mrs. Garner exclaimed.

“And most of them still in their velvet-lined cases. The cases themselves are heirlooms,” Hazel 179

Barton said softly as she opened one of them to reveal a diamond-encircled wedding ring.

“That was my grandmother’s. Mother showed it to me once when I was a little boy. She said it would be mine some day,” declared Bert Terry.

“I was to have these diamond-studded cuff links,” remarked his brother Harry.

“This necklace was promised to me,” Mrs. Garner said as she withdrew a string of matched pearls.

One by one, as the cases were opened and their glittering contents examined, the relatives claimed them.

“They are lovely,” Judy agreed, but she was beginning to think they might have been better off if the jewels had not been found. Flo’s relatives were showing themselves to be exactly as she had described them, each one thinking only of himself.

Then Paul Purdy, who had made no claim at all, suddenly raised his voice in exasperation. “Have you learned nothing from my experience?” he shouted. “Is nobody thinking of Aggie or the brave girl who went with her? Yes, and this smart young couple who found the jewels! Is there no reward for them?”

“Pauline!” Judy exclaimed. “How is she, Peter?”

“Just fine. Actually,” Peter said gravely, “she’s lucky to be alive, and so is Aggie. Ottman has been a wanted man ever since he escaped from prison. If 180

she hadn’t telephoned and if I hadn’t thought you were on board that boat we might have been too late.”

“I never would have forgiven myself if you had been!” exclaimed Judy. “I didn’t know Captain Ottwell was the woman in black, but I suspected it, and I did know Pauline was in danger. Flo blames me, too.”

“No, Judy, I don’t,” Flo Garner declared in no uncertain tones. “You couldn’t be two places at once, could you? And we needed you here.”

“We still do,” Irene put in. “There are a lot of questions we haven’t answered. Do you know, Peter, that—that man actually made me sorry for him. I still don’t understand how a man could make himself look so much like a woman.”

“I’ll have to study that picture you took before I can tell you. May I have it?” Peter asked. “They’ll want to have a look at it in Washington.” Irene was glad to give him the picture. It was sent directly to the FBI laboratory where it was studied under the spectroscope. Further study disclosed that Captain Ottwell was wearing a rubber mask designed by experts from a photograph of Agnes Purdy. She had never been an attractive woman and the mask accentuated her worst features, also giving a death-like pallor. The black dress she wore had been duplicated.

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“It actually did look as if she’d come back to haunt us,” Flo told her parents after they had all been transported back to the mainland on a Coast Guard cutter and were gathered in the Garner living room.

The conversation Flo remembered from the funeral hadn’t helped. It had been one of those long-drawn-out ceremonies where the body was on view while the minister talked on and on about the saintly qualities of the departed with an admonition to the living that they were all sinners. Upset by the whole performance, each one had pointed out the sins of the other. The relatives, sorry for the unkind things they had said, especially about the absent ones, made sure there was no service of this kind for Aggie’s father.

“It was appropriate and dignified,” was the comment Judy heard afterwards from those who attended.

She and Peter had not been there. They visited Aggie at the hospital instead. After talking for a little while, Aggie suddenly asked, “Is it all over?” and they knew she had been thinking about her father’s funeral.

“The services are,” replied Judy, “but that isn’t quite the same. Aggie, did you ever watch the ocean?”

“Once,” she said, “from up in the tower. Both my 182

grandma and great-grandma were alive then. I love to watch the waves.”

“So do I,” Judy said thoughtfully. “They give you a feeling that’s hard to describe, as if you were a part of it all. I guess life is a little like those waves.

It keeps coming in and in—endlessly. One life flows into another and so it goes on.”

“How well you’ve expressed it!” exclaimed Peter.

“If Aggie understands it the way you do, Judy, she will place the same value on family keepsakes. Your relatives all agree that you are to have your choice of those jewels we found under the figurehead. Lady Luck is going to be left at the Sand Castle so we can all see her when we go back there.”

“Isn’t the property going to be sold and all the money and jewels divided up?” Aggie questioned.

“It certainly is. Dale and Irene Meredith are buying it,” Peter announced. “They signed the contract yesterday.”

“Who are they?” Aggie asked, still puzzled although she knew they were the couple who had invited Judy over to the Sand Castle.

Her question was answered the following Saturday when she watched Irene’s program from her hospital bed. The studio party was all Judy had hoped it would be—and more. She made a point of waving to Aggie from the studio audience where she sat beside Pauline and Flo. Peter and the two uncles 183