“Very stout, from what I saw of him,” said Ellery quickly. “Froggy eyes. Voice like a bassoon. Tremendous breadth of shoulder. About fifty-five, at a rough guess.”

  Mrs. Xavier stirred again.

  “But we’ve had no visitor at all, you know,” said the surgeon quietly.

  The Queens were astonished. “Then he didn’t come from here?” muttered Ellery. “But I thought no one else lives on this mountain!”

  “We’re quite sequestered up here, I assure you. Sarah, my dear, you don’t know of anyone—?”

  Mrs. Xavier licked her full lips. A struggle seemed to be raging within her. There was speculation, bafflement, and subtle cruelty in her black eyes. Then she said in a surprised voice: “No.”

  “That’s funny,” murmured the Inspector. “He was headed lickety-cut down the mountain, and if there’s only one road and this is at the end of it and nobody else lives here …”

  There was a crash from behind. They turned quickly. But it was only Miss Forrest, who had dropped her compact. She straightened up, her cheeks fiery, eyes so strangely bright, and said gaily: “Oh, shoot! The next thing we know we’ll all be babbling of bogies. If you people insist on introducing unpleasant subjects, you know, I’ll be just as unpleasant. What with men prowling about and all, somebody will have to tuck me into bed tonight. You see—”

  “What do you mean, Miss Forrest?” said Dr. Xavier slowly. “Is there anything—?”

  The Queens crossed glances again. These people were not only concealing a common secret, but they possessed little private secrets as well.

  The girl tossed her head. “I wasn’t going to mention it,” she said, shrugging, “because it was really nothing and—and …” It was evident that she already regretted having begun. “Oh, let’s forget all about it and play ducks and drakes, or something.”

  Mark Xavier came forward with short, quick steps. There was a brutal gleam in his sharp eyes and his mouth was hard. “Come on, Miss Forrest,” he said gruffly. “Something’s bothering you and we might as well know what. If there’s a man skulking about the place …”

  “Of course,” said the girl quietly, “that’s what it is. Very well, if you insist; but I apologize in advance. No doubt that’s the explanation. … Last week I—I lost something.”

  It seemed to Ellery that Dr. Xavier, more than any of them, was startled. Then Dr. Holmes rose and went to a small round table, groping for a cigaret.

  “Lost something?” asked Dr. Xavier in a thick voice.

  The room was incredibly quiet; so quiet that Ellery could hear the suddenly labored breathing of their host. “I missed it one morning,” said Miss Forrest in a low voice; “I think it was Friday of last week. I thought I might have mislaid it. I looked and looked all over but I couldn’t find it, you see. Perhaps I did lose it. Yes, I’m sure I lost it.” She stopped in confusion.

  No one spoke for a long time. Then Mrs. Xavier said harshly: “Come, come, child. You know that’s nonsense. You mean someone stole it from you, don’t you?”

  “Oh, dear!” cried Miss Forrest, flinging her head back. “Now you’ve made me talk about it. I wasn’t going to. I’m sure I either lost it or that—that man Mr. Queen was telling about stole into my room somehow and—and took it. You see, it couldn’t have been anybody h—”

  “I suggest,” stammered Dr. Holmes, “that—ah we put off this charming conversation to another time, eh?”

  “What was it?” asked Dr. Xavier in a quiet voice. He had himself perfectly under control again.

  “Was it valuable?” snapped Mark Xavier.

  “No; oh, no,” said the girl eagerly. “Absolutely worthless. You couldn’t get a wooden nickel on it from a pawnbroker or—or anybody. It was just an old heirloom, a silver ring.”

  “A silver ring,” said the surgeon. He rose. Ellery noticed for the first time that there was something gaunt about his appearance; drawn and bleak. “Sarah, I’m sure your remark was needlessly unkind. There isn’t anyone here who would stoop to theft, my dear; you know that. Is there?”

  Their eyes met briefly; it was his that fell. “You never can tell, mon cher,” she said softly.

  The Queens sat still. This talk of thievery was, under the circumstances, acutely embarrassing. Ellery slowly removed his pince-nez and began to scrub them. Unpleasant female, that woman!

  “No.” The surgeon gripped himself visibly. “And then Miss Forrest says the ring was valueless. I see no point in suspecting a theft. You probably dropped it somewhere, my dear, or else, as you suggest, this mysterious skulker is in some way responsible for its disappearance.”

  “Yes, of course that’s it, Doctor,” said the girl thankfully.

  “If you will pardon an unpardonable interruption,” murmured Ellery. They turned to stare, freezing in their attitudes. Even the Inspector frowned. But Ellery replaced his pince-nez with a smile. “You see, if this man we met really is an unknown quantity and unconnected with the household, then you are faced with a peculiar situation.”

  “Yes, Mr. Queen?” said Dr. Xavier stiffly.

  “Of course,” said Ellery with a wave of his hand, “there are minor considerations. If Miss Forrest lost her ring last Friday, where has this prowler been? Not necessarily an insurmountable point, however; he may have his headquarters in Osquewa, say. …”

  “Yes, Mr. Queen?” said Dr. Xavier again.

  “But, as I said, you are faced with a peculiar situation. Because, since the fat-faced gentleman is neither a phoenix nor a devil out of hell,” continued Ellery, “the fire will stop him tonight as effectually as it stopped my father and me. Consequently he will find himself—has already found himself, no doubt—unable to leave the mountain.” He shrugged. “A nasty situation. With no other house in the vicinity, and the fire possibly a stubborn one …”

  “Oh!” gasped Miss Forrest. “He—he’ll be back!”

  “I should say that is a mathematical certainty,” said Ellery dryly.

  There was silence again. About the house Ellery’s postulated banshees, as if this were a signal, redoubled their howling. Mrs. Xavier shivered suddenly, and even the men glanced uneasily at the black night beyond the French windows.

  “If he’s a thief—” muttered Dr. Holmes, crushing out his cigaret, and stopped. His eyes met Dr. Xavier’s and his jaw tightened. “I was about to say,” he went on quietly, “that Miss Forrest’s explanation is undoubtedly correct. Oh, undoubtedly. For you see, I myself missed a signet ring last Wednesday. Worthless old scrap, to be sure; don’t wear it much and it means nothing to me, but—there you are. Gone, you see.”

  The silence resumed where it had left off. Ellery, studying those faces, wondered again with weary tenacity what cesspool lay beneath the polite surface of this household.

  The silence was shattered by Mark Xavier, whose big body moved so suddenly as to cause Miss Forrest to utter a little scream. “I think, John,” he snapped, addressing Dr. Xavier, “that you’d better see that all the doors and windows are locked tight tonight. … Good night, all!”

  He stalked out of the room.

  Ann Forrest—whose aplomb seemed irremediably shaken for the evening—and Dr. Holmes excused themselves soon after; Ellery heard them whispering to each other as they strode down the corridor toward the staircase. Mrs. Xavier still sat with the Mona Lisa half-smile that was as stiff and inexplicable as the expression on the painted face of Leonardo’s Gioconda.

  The Queens rose awkwardly. “I guess,” said the Inspector, “we’ll be trotting off to bed, too. Doctor, if you don’t mind. I can’t tell you how all-fired grateful we are—”

  “Please,” said Dr. Xavier roughly. “We’re rather short-staffed here, Mr. Queen—Mrs. Wheary and Bones are our only servants—so I’ll show you to your room myself.”

  “Not at all necessary,” Ellery hastened to reply. “We know the way, Doctor. Thank you all the same. Good night, Mrs. Xav—”

  “I’m going to bed myself,” announced the doctor’s wife suddenly, rising. She was taller even than Ellery had supposed; she drew herself up to her full height, breathing deeply. “If there’s anything you’d like before retiring …”

  “Nothing at all, Mrs. Xavier, thank you,” said the Inspector.

  “But, Sarah, I thought—” began Dr. Xavier. He stopped and shrugged, his shoulders set at an oddly hopeless slope.

  “Aren’t you coming to bed, John?” she said sharply.

  “I think not, my dear,” he replied in a heavy voice, avoiding her eyes. “I believe I’ll do a bit of work in the lab before I turn in. There’s a chemical reaction I’ve been meaning to make on the ‘soup’ I prepared. …”

  “I see,” she said, and smiled that dreadful smile again. She turned to the Queens. “This way, please,” and swept out of the room.

  The Queens muttered subdued “good nights” to their host and followed. The last glimpse they had of the surgeon was as they turned into the corridor. He was standing where they had left him, in an attitude of the most profound dejection, sucking his lower lip and fingering a rather gaudy bar pin securing his necktie to his rough-woven shirt. He looked older than before and mentally exhausted. Then they heard him cross the room in the direction of the library.

  The instant the door of their bedroom closed upon them and Ellery had switched on the overhead light, he whirled on his father and whispered fiercely: “Dad! What in the name of God was that awful thing you saw in the corridor outside just before Xavier sneaked up, on us from behind?”

  The Inspector sank into a Morris chair very slowly, loosening the knot of his cravat. He avoided Ellery’s eyes. “Well,” he mumbled, “I don’t rightly know. I guess I must “have been a little—well, jumpy.”

  “You jumpy?” said Ellery scornfully. “You’ve always had the nerves of a cuttlefish. Come on, out with it I’ve been bursting to ask you all evening. Blast that big chap! He didn’t leave us alone for an instant.”

  “Well,” muttered the old gentleman, pulling his cravat off and unbuttoning his collar, “I’ll tell you. It was—weird.”

  “Well, well, what was it, dad, for heaven’s sake?”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t know.” The Inspector looked sheepish. “If you or anybody else in this world described that—that thing to me I swear I’d call for the nut wagon. Cripes!” he burst out, “it didn’t look like anything human, I’d bet my life!”

  Ellery stared at him. This from his own father! The prosaic little Inspector, who had handled more corpses and wallowed in more illicitly spilled human blood than any other man in the New York Police Department!

  “It—it looked,” went on the Inspector with a feeble grin that held no mirth whatever, “it looked just like—a crab.”

  “A crab!”

  Ellery gaped at his father. Then his flat cheeks ballooned out and he put his hand over his mouth, doubled over in a spasm of the heartiest laughter. He rocked to and fro, eyes streaming.

  “A crab!” he gasped. “Ho, ho, ho! A crab!” and he went off into another gale.

  “Oh, stop it!” said the old gentleman irritably. “You sound like Lawrence Tibbett singing that flea song. Stop it!”

  “A crab,” gasped Ellery again, wiping his eyes.

  The old man shrugged. “Mind you, I’m not saying it was a—a crab. Might have been a couple of crazy acrobats or wrestlers or something doing a little homework on the hall floor. But it looked like a crab—a giant crab. Big as a man—bigger than a man, El.” He rose nervously and grasped Ellery’s arm. “Come on, be nice. I look all right, don’t I? I haven’t got de—delusions, or something, have I?”

  “Blessed if I know what you have,” chuckled Ellery, flinging himself on the bed. “Seeing crabs! If I didn’t know you so well I’d lump the crab with a particularly violent purple elephant and say you’d had a wee drappie too much. Crab!” He shook his head. “Now look here; let’s examine this thing like rational human beings, not kids in a haunted house. I was talking to you, facing you. You were looking straight ahead, down the corridor. Exactly where did you see this—this fantastic beast of yours, Inspector dear?”

  The Inspector took snuff with shaking fingers. “Second door down the hall from ours,” he muttered, and sneezed. “Of course, it was just my imagination, El. … It was on our side of the hall. It was pretty dark at that spot—”

  “Pity,” drawled Ellery. “With a little more light I’m sure you’d have seen at least a tyrannosaurus. Just what was your friend the crab doing when you spotted him and got the shivers?”

  “Don’t rub it in,” said the Inspector miserably. “I just got a glimpse of—of the thing. Scuttled—”

  “Scuttled!”

  “That’s the only word for it,” said the old gentleman in a dogged voice. “Scuttled through the doorway, and then you heard the click yourself. Must have.”

  “This,” said Ellery, “calls for investigation.” He jumped from the bed and strode to the door.

  “El! For God’s sake be careful!” wailed the Inspector. “You simply can’t go snooping about a man’s house at night—”

  “I can go to the bathroom, can’t I?” said Ellery with dignity; and he pulled open the door and vanished.

  Inspector Queen sat still, gnawing at his fingers and shaking his head. Then he rose, pulled off his coat and shirt, his suspenders sagging below his seat, and stretching his arms yawned prodigiously. He was very tired. Tired and sleepy and—afraid. Yes, he admitted to himself in the privacy of that doorless chamber of the mind to which no outsider can gain admittance, old Queen of Centre Street was afraid. It was a queer thing. He had felt fear often before; it was silly to set oneself up as a Jack Dalton; but this was a new kind of fear. A fear of the unknown. It did queer things to his skin and made him want to whirl about at purely imaginary sounds behind him.

  Consequently he yawned and stretched and busied himself with the score of slow little unimportant things a man does when he is undressing for bed. And all the while, despite the very genuine laughter of Ellery echoing in his brain, fear lurked there and would not be banished. He even began—sneering bitterly to himself in the same instant—to whistle.

  He slipped out of his trousers and folded his clothes neatly on the Morris chair. Then he bent over one of the suitcases at the foot of the bed. As he did so something rattled at one of the windows and he looked up, prickling and alert. But it was only a half-drawn window shade.

  Moved by an unconquerable impulse he trotted quickly across the room—a gray mouse of a man in his underwear—and pulled the blind. He caught a glimpse of the outdoors as the blind came down: a vast black abyss, it seemed to him; and indeed it was, for he was to find later that the house was perched on the edge of a precipice, with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet into the next valley. His small, sharp eyes flicked sidewise. In the same instant he sprang back from the window, releasing the shade so that it flew up with a crash, and darting across the room flicked the light switch, plunging the room in darkness.

  Ellery opened the door of their bedroom, stopped short in astonishment, and then slipped into the room like a wraith, shutting the door quickly and softly behind him.

  “Dad!” he whispered. “Are you in bed? Why’s the light off?”

  “Shut up!” he heard his father say fiercely. “Don’t make any more noise than you have to. There’s something damned fishy going on around here, and I think I know now what it is.”

  Ellery was silent for a moment. As his pupils contracted under influence of the dark, he began to make out shadowy details. A faint starlight shone through the rear windows. His father, bare legged and in shorts, was crouched almost on his knees across the room. There was a third window on the right-hand wall; and it was at this window that the Inspector crouched.

  Ellery ran to his father’s side and looked out. The side window overlooked a court formed by the recession of the rear wall of the house in the middle. The court was narrow. Propped against the outside of the rear wall in the court at the first-floor level there was a balcony which led, apparently, from the bedroom adjoining the Queens’. Ellery reached the window just in time to see a flowing shadowy figure slip from the balcony through a French door and vanish. A white feminine hand shone in the starlight as it reached out of the room and drew the double door shut.

  The Inspector rose with a groan, pulled all the blinds, pattered back to the door, and turned on the light switch. He was perspiring profusely.

  “Well?” murmured Ellery, standing still at the foot of the bed.

  The Inspector dropped onto the bed, hunched over like a little half-naked kobold, and tugged fretfully at one end of his gray mustache. “I went over there to pull the blind,” he muttered, “and just then I saw a woman through the side window. She was standing on the balcony staring off into space, seemed like. I ran back and turned off the light and then watched her. She didn’t move. Just stared up at the stars. Moony, sort of. I heard her sniffle. Cried like a baby. All by herself. Then you came in and she went back to that room next door.”

  “Indeed?” said Ellery. He slipped over to the wall on the right and pressed his ear against it. “Can’t hear a thing through these walls, damn the luck! Well, and what’s fishy about that? Who was it—Mrs. Xavier, or that very frightened young woman, Miss Forrest?”

  “That,” said the Inspector grimly, “is what makes it so fishy.”

  Ellery stared at his father. “Riddles, eh?” He began to strip off his jacket. “Come on, out with it. Somebody we haven’t seen tonight, I’ll wager. And not the crab.”

  “You’ve guessed it,” said the old gentleman glumly. “It wasn’t either of ’em. It was … Marie Carreau!” He uttered the name as if it were an incantation.

  Ellery stopped struggling with his shirt. “Marie Carreau? Come again. Who the devil’s she? Never heard of her.”

  “Oh, my God,” moaned the Inspector. “Never heard of Marie Carreau, he says! That’s what comes of raising an ignoramus. Don’t you read the papers, you idiot? She’s society, son, society!”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “Bluest of the blue. Pots of money. Runs official Washington. Her father’s Ambassador to France. Of French stock, dating from the Revolution. Her great-great-what-is-it and Lafayette were just like that.” The old gentleman twined his middle finger about his forefinger. “Whole damn family—uncles and cousins and nephews—all in the diplomatic service. She married her own cousin—same name—about twenty years ago. He’s dead now. No children. Never remarried, though she’s still young. She’s only about thirty-seven.” He paused for sheer lack of breath and glared at his son.

 

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