The Siamese Twin Mystery (17 page)

“Lord!” he gasped. “It’s—it’s colossal! Make the fortune of a Coney Island freak-show impresario. Dad! Look at this.”

The light roused them. Ellery’s last word was drowned in a torrent of animal voices: squeaks and tiny barks and the raucous screeching of fowl. The Inspector, faintly alarmed, pushed into the small compartment and his eyes widened even as his nose wrinkled in disgust.

“Pfui! Smells like the Zoo. Well, I’ll be bedeviled!”

“More,” corrected Ellery dryly, “like the Ark. All we need now is an old gentleman with a flowing beard and patriarchal robes. In pairs! I wonder if they’re consistently male and female!”

Each cage housed two creatures of the same species. There were two queer-looking rabbits, a pair of ruffle-feathered hens, two pinkish members of the guinea-pig tribe, two solemn-faced marmosets. … The shelves were full, and upon them were cages inhabited by the weirdest collection of creatures outside an animal trainer’s nightmare, many of which they failed to recognize.

But the miscellaneous nature of the collection was not what startled them. It was the fact that, as far as they could see, each pair of creatures was composed of twins—Siamese twins of the animal kingdom.

And some of the cages were empty.

They quit the laboratory rather in haste, and when the Inspector closed the corridor door behind them he heaved a sigh of relief. “What a place! Let’s get away from here.” Ellery did not reply.

When they reached the juncture of the two corridors, however, he said quickly: “Just a second. I think I’m going to gabble a little with friend Bones. There’s something …” He hurried toward the open kitchen door, the Inspector trotting wearily behind.

Mrs. Wheary whirled at the sound of Ellery’s step. “Oh! … Oh, it’s you, sir. Gave me a turn.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Ellery cheerfully. “Ah, there, Bones. I’m panting to ask you a question.”

The emaciated old man glowered. “Go ahead and ask,” he said sullenly. “I can’t stop your asking.”

“Indeed you can’t. Bones,” said Ellery, leaning against the jamb, “are you by chance a horticulturist?”

The man stared. “A what?”

“A devotee of Mother Nature, with special reference to the old lady’s flowers. I mean to say, are you trying to cultivate a garden in that stony soil outside?”

“Garden? Hell, no.”

“Ah,” said Ellery thoughtfully, “I judged not, despite what Miss Forrest said. And yet this morning you appeared from the side of the house carrying a pickax and spade. I have since investigated that side of the house and there is no sign of the simple aster, the exalted orchid, or the lowly pansy.
What the devil were you burying this morning,
Bones?”

The Inspector gave voice to an astonished grunt.

“Burying?” The old man did not seem perturbed: rather more surly than before, that was all. “Why, those animals.”

“Bull’s-eye,” murmured Ellery over his shoulder. “Empty cages are empty cages, eh? … And why did you have to bury animals, my good Bones?—Ah, that name! I’ve solved it! You were Dr. Xavier’s keeper of the ossuary, as it were. Eh? Well, why did you have to bury animals? Come, come, speak up.”

The yellow snags of teeth showed in a grin. “There’s a smart question. They were dead, that’s why!”

“Quite right. Stupid question. Yet one never knows, Bones. … They were the twin animals, weren’t they?”

For the first time something frightened twitched across the man’s wrinkled face. “The twin—the twin animals?”

“I’m sorry if I speak indistinctly,” said Ellery gravely. “The twin animals—t-w-i-n, twin. Eh?”

“Yes.” Bones glared at the floor.

“You buried yesterday’s quota today?”

“Yes.”

“But no longer Siamese, eh, Bones?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“Ah, but I’m afraid you do,” said Ellery sadly. “I mean this: Dr. Xavier has for some time been experimenting upon Siamese-twin creatures of the lower species—where in the name of heaven did he get them all?—in an earnest, quite unfiendish, and very scientific attempt to sever them surgically without loss of life to either. Is that right?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” muttered the old man. “You’ll have to ask Dr. Holmes about all that.”

“Scarcely necessary. Some—most—perhaps all of these experiments have been unsuccessful. Whereupon we find you in the unique role of animal undertaker. How much of a graveyard have you out there, Bones?”

“Not much. They don’t take up much space,” said Bones sullenly. “Only once, though, there was a big pair—cows. But mostly little ones. It’s been going on, on and off for over a year. The doctor did do some good ones, I know that.”

“Ah, some were successful? That was to have been expected from a man of Dr. Xavier’s reputed skill. And yet—Well, thank you, old-timer. Good night, Mrs. Wheary.”

“Wait a minute,” growled the Inspector. “If he’s been
burying
things out there … How do you know it isn’t something—?”

“Something else? Nonsense.” Ellery pulled his father gently out of the kitchen. “Take my word for it, Bones is telling the truth. No, it isn’t that that interests me. It’s the appalling possibility …” He fell silent and walked on.

“How’s that for a shot, Jule?” came the ringing voice of Francis Carreau from the gameroom. Ellery stopped, shook his head, and went on. The Inspector followed, biting his mustache.

“It does look queer,” he muttered.

They heard the heavy tread of Smith on the terrace.

I
T WAS THE MOST
stifling night either man had ever experienced. They tossed side by side for three hours in a hell compounded of sticky darkness and acrid air, and then by mutual consent gave up the effort to woo sleep. Ellery crawled out of bed, groaning, and snapped the light on. He groped for a cigaret, pulled a chair to one of the rear windows, and smoked without savor. The Inspector lay flat on his back, cropped mustache moving up and down in a champing mutter, staring at the ceiling. The bed, their nightclothes, were soaked in perspiration.

At five o’clock, with the black sky lightening, they took turns under the shower. Then they dressed listlessly.

Morning dawned brazenly. Even the first faint streaks were dipped in molten heat. Ellery, at the window, blinked out over the valley.

“It’s worse,” he said gloomily.

“What’s worse?”

“The fire.”

The old gentleman put his snuffbox away and went quietly to the other window. From the perpendicular edges of the back of Arrow Mountain thick streamers, mile-long lengths of fluttering gray flannel, curved and lifted to the sun. But the smoke was no longer at the base of the Arrow; it had advanced with silent menace so much farther upward that it seemed to both men to be tickling the summit. The valley was almost invisible. They were floating in air—the summit, the house, themselves.

“It’s like Swift’s island in the sky,” muttered Ellery. “Looks bad, eh?”

“Bad enough, son.”

Without another word they went downstairs.

The house was dipped in silence; no one was about. The crisp chill of a mountain morning strove vainly to get at their damp cheeks as they stood on the terrace and gazed moodily at the sky. Ash and cinders rained steadily now; and although from their vantage point they could see nothing of the world below, the whirling debris of the fire brought up by the winds that incessantly spiraled the mountain told them that the blaze had made alarming progress.

“What the devil are we going to do?” complained the Inspector. “This is getting so damn serious I’m afraid to think about it. We’re in one hell of a jam, El.”

Ellery cupped his chin in his hands. “I’ll admit that the death of one human being doesn’t seem cosmically important, under the circumstances. … What the deuce was that?”

They both started up, straining their ears. From somewhere at the east of the house came a series of metallic sounds, muffled and baffling.

“I thought nobody could—” The old gentleman stopped growling. “Come on.”

They hurried down the steps, and sped along the gravel drive in the direction of the sounds. Rounding the left side of the house, they stopped short. The drive branched off here and the branch led to a low, rambling wooden building, the garage. The two wide doors were open, and from the interior of the garage came the noise. The Inspector darted forward and cautiously peered into the dim interior. He beckoned to Ellery, who tiptoed along the margin of vegetation flanking the gravel and joined his father.

There were four cars in the garage, neatly lined up. One of them was the low-slung Duesenberg belonging to the Queens. The second was a magnificent black limousine with a long hood—unquestionably the property of the late Dr. Xavier. The third was a powerful sedan with foreign lines; it could only have belonged to Mrs. Carreau. The fourth was the battered Buick which had borne the dead weight of Mr. Frank J. Smith of New York City up the steep Arrow Mountain road.

From the rear of Smith’s car came the deafening din of metal upon metal. The author of the din was hidden by the body of the car.

They edged between the Buick and the foreign automobile and pounced forward upon the stooping figure of a man who was wielding a rusty hand ax on the gasoline tank of the fat man’s car. The metal was already slashed in several places and the rich, dark, odorous liquid was gushing to the cement floor in streams.

The man uttered a frightened squeal, dropped the ax, and came up fighting. It took the Queens several minutes of rough work to subdue him.

It was old Bones, glaring sullenly as usual.

“What on earth,” panted the Inspector, “do you think you’re doing, you crazy fool?”

His bony shoulders sagged, but he said defiantly: “Taking his gas away from him!”

“Sure,” snarled the Inspector. “We can see that. But why?”

Bones shrugged.

“And why didn’t you drain it off, instead of trying to make scrap iron out of the tank?”

“He couldn’t refill it this way.”

“You’re a rotten Nihilist,” said Ellery sadly. “He could take one of the other cars, you know.”

“I was going to put
them
out of commission, too.”

They stared. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said the Inspector after a moment. “I believe you would, at that.”

“But it’s so silly,” protested Ellery. “He can’t get away, Bones. Where would he go?”

Bones shrugged again. “It’s safer this way.”

“But why so anxious to impede the departure of Mr. Smith?”

“I don’t like his damn fat face,” rasped the old man.

“Now there,” cried Ellery, “is a reason! Look here, my friend; you let us catch you fiddling around these cars again and, by thunder, we’ll—we’ll annihilate you!”

Bones shook himself, lifted his withered lips in a sneer, and shuffled rapidly out of the garage.

The Inspector threw up his hands and followed, leaving Ellery to dip his toe into the gasoline thoughtfully.

“As long as we’re frying,” growled the Inspector after breakfast, “we may as well fry working as idling. Come along.”

“Working?” echoed Ellery blankly. He was smoking his sixth cigaret of the morning and gazing upon vacancy. He had been frowning for an hour.

“You heard me.”

They left the gameroom where the others were apathetically congregated under the hot breeze of an electric fan, and the Inspector led the way down the hall to the door of Dr. Xavier’s study. He used the skeleton key from his key ring and opened the door. The room looked exactly as they had last seen it the day before.

Ellery closed the door and leaned against it. “Now what?”

“I want to look at his papers,” muttered old Queen. “You never can tell.”

“Oh,” Ellery shrugged and went to one of the windows.

The Inspector went through the study with the practised ruthlessness of a lifetime of experience. The cabinet, the desk, the bookcase—he explored each nook and cranny, glancing hastily over memoranda, old letters, a gibberish of medical notations, receipted bills—the usual mess. Ellery contented himself with staring at the trees wavering in the fierce heat outdoors. The room was a furnace and both men were wet to the skin.

“Nothing,” announced the old gentleman glumly. “Nothing but a lot of junk, that is.”

“Junk? Now, that’s something else again. I’m always interested in the scrap heap of a man’s property.” Ellery strolled to the desk where the Inspector was going through the last drawer.

“It’s a scrap heap, all right,” grunted the Inspector.

The drawer was full of odds and ends. Stationery supplies, a broken and rusty surgical instrument, a box of checkers, a score or more of pencils of varying size, most of them with broken points; a solitary cuff link with a tiny pearl inset in the center—apparently the sole survivor of a pair; at least a dozen tie clips and stick pins, most of them tarnished green; shirt studs of rather bizarre design, an old fraternity pin with two diamond chips missing, two watch chains, an elaborate silver key, a polished animal tooth yellow with age, a silver toothpick. … The drawer was the tomb of a man’s accumulated trinkets.

“Gay sort of chap, wasn’t he?” murmured Ellery, “Lord, how can a man amass such a mess of perfectly useless adornments! Come, come, dad, we’re wasting time.”

“I s’pose,” grumbled the Inspector. He slammed the drawer shut, sat annoying his mustache for a moment, and then with a sigh rose.

He locked the door behind them and they trudged down the hall.

“One minute.” The old gentleman suddenly peered into the gameroom through the cross-hall door. He withdrew his head at once. “It’s all right; she’s in there.”

“Who’s in there?”

“Mrs. Xavier. Gives us a chance to sneak up to her bedroom for a quiet little look-see.”

“Oh, very well. But I can’t imagine what you hope to find.”

They toiled upstairs, sweltering in the heat. Across the hall from the landing they could see Mrs. Wheary’s broad back bent over the bed in Mrs. Carreau’s room. She neither saw nor heard them. They went quietly into Mrs. Xavier’s room and shut the door.

It was the master bedroom, the largest chamber on the floor. It was predominantly feminine in character—a tribute, as Ellery remarked dryly, to the overpowering personality of its mistress. Very little of Dr. Xavier struck the eye.