A sudden gust of hot wind swung the door to shadow the hall. The Santa Anas were back. I opened the door wide again, took the telephone book and wedged it, open to the yellow antiques section, under the door. I stood there a moment, looking out and across the street at one of the few orange groves left in town. There was no one over there to see anything over here. Nor was there anyone on either side to see anything between the tall, vine-covered walls. I felt a little sick.
It was almost two o’clock. Food, I thought. I needed food; the brandy sloshing around in my stomach was making tidal waves.
I went into the kitchen. The sun, slanting between fluffy curtains, was September hot, Santa Ana dry, the kitchen shone. Then I noticed its shine — not ordinary kitchen sunshine, but scrubbed bright, fussy neat, nothing left on the counter tops, nothing in the polished sink. Mama, now, Mama tended to be careless, as would be expected from a “Little Bit.”
I opened the refrigerator and was surprised at the milk and cream, butter, eggs, cheese on the shelves — a well-stocked refrigerator as Mama’s had never been. I poured some milk into a glass and sipped it as I leaned against the sink, looking out the back windows toward the cement steps. The only people who could have seen anything, had there been anything to see, would have been those across the street from the garage up above.
I carried the glass of milk through the house, the carefully dusted, well-polished house, setting it down to open closet doors and cabinet drawers I had opened before. I looked through the guest room and if some of the “young dude’s” clothes had been in “that closet,” there wasn’t a button, not a thread or piece of lint, to be found there now... nor any missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. But those I had were coming together, forming a part of a picture. I almost knew. I almost knew what had happened and why.
The milk had not settled my stomach. I took the glass back to the kitchen and set it on the counter; then I turned to the basement door, unlocked and opened it, bent over the banister, and leaped back. The light was on! The light was on down there! I slammed the door and shot the bolt. Then I remembered that I myself had turned on the light; only this morning, a century ago, I had turned on the light.
The milk threatened to come up, with a chaser of brandy.
I went to the open front door and breathed deep of the hot Santa Ana wind. I knew I had most of the pieces of the puzzle, and my mind picked them out, fitting them loosely together with cracks running through the picture so that Mama came out a frightened half-old, clutching half-young Little Bit, attempting to relive her happily indulgent married life, starting all over again with an identical Hawaiian honeymoon and a doting husband.
The wind was suffocating, so hot and heavy that when I breathed it in it acted like a plug to hold down the milk and brandy, and the horror of the cracked jigsaw puzzle I was putting together.
She must have known she’d have to parry and connive to turn such a young man from instructor to chauffeur to yard-and-house-man to husband-and-lover... and quickly, because she was old, and she must have known, deep down, that she was old so she had to hurry — too fast for a man who had fallen into plush surroundings, needing time to plan for the ripoff.
I breathed in the wind that corked the milk and brandy, knowing how it was, because I knew Mama, the frolicsome lass, the forever bride, reluctant mother, who wooed a man young enough to be her son. So she had to hold back — and another piece of the puzzle fell into place, cracked across the character. She had to hold back on the money from Mr. Merrick... “We can travel,” I could hear her tinkling voice. “Oh, we can travel anywhere. All I have to do is ask Mr. Merrick for the money — when the time is right...” and I wondered if Ralph Whoever knew what she was holding out for while he clipped the lawns and polished furniture, holding out himself.
Mama had to hurry, so she called the travel bureau to ask for the Romantic Hawaii brochures that she and her fiancé could study.
Three days ago.
I walked out into the wind. It was almost three o’clock and the sun slanted so that it shone against the basement windows on the west and I had to cup my palms around my eyes against the pane as I knelt on the finely clipped grass to see through. It was a moment or so before I could focus my eyes through the shadows of the dimly-lighted basement to the dark well under the staircase and see one pointed toe and stilt heel in the dust-filtered light.
I knelt there screaming, my screams bouncing with the wind against the garden walls, with no one to hear.
I lost the milk and the brandy at last, and fitted the final pieces of puzzle in place satisfactorily.
I walked back into the house and looked at the telephone book that wedged the door open. Then I dialed the operator and asked her to get the police department. “You can come now,” I told them. “I have found the body.”
The police have a case now — a three-day-old body and two-day-old clues.
I can tell them whom to search for — a young man with brown curly hair and the beginnings of a new beard (so new that one might not notice or remember), slim, about five feet ten, driving a Cadillac or a trade-in for a Cadillac, with some money — not a ripoff bundle, but a slice of panic; a murderer if he pushed Mama down the basement steps, or an accessory if she fell down them on her stiletto heels as she pointed out their Hawaiian Honeymoon luggage.
As soon as I lay it all out for the police, I shall phone Jeff so he can run it halfway up the flagpole and see how it hangs.
The Mystery of Lilac Cottage
by J. D. Blumberg
In the New England village of Blue Hill, Maine, townspeople gather at the post office each morning to dispense and receive local news. It was here, on a Monday, that Professor Findlay Hamilton learned of the first puzzling incident.
“Did you hear about the strange lights at Lilac Cottage, professor?” Chief Merrill, the town’s only policeman, asked. Seeing Findlay’s bemused expression, he went on, “Yep. Friday evening, just after sundown. The lights started goin’ on ’n’ off, first in one room, then in another. Lots of people saw ’em. Funniest part is that John Hinkley, the retired navy feller, says some of it was in Morse code.”
Curious, Findlay suggested they retire next door to the Comer Cafe for a cup of coffee.
“Somebody’s idea of a joke, I guess,” Merrill continued, peering into the pastry case, “but not everyone’s laughin’. Some are sayin’ it’s Mary Waltham’s ghost come back to find her husband. You see, accordin’ to Hinkley, the code said, ‘Charles, where are you?’ ”
Findlay ordered a plain doughnut and coffee. “Chief, you’d better start at the beginning. I don’t even know where Lilac Cottage is.”
“It’s that big shingled place on High Street that’s almost swallowed up by lilac bushes. Been empty ever since Charles Waltham died eight years ago. His wife Mary disappeared one Friday night two years before that, and was never seen again. There was no sign of violence; no blood or nothin’. She was just gone. I wasn’t here then, but I looked up the police reports. It was real strange. I mean, at seventy-eight it’s not like she’d run off with someone. Anyway, after he died a niece in Florida, Edna Waltham, inherited the place and, bein’ sentimental, left it just as it was in case her aunt came back. Guess she finally gave up hope, though, ’cause about five years ago she had the power and phone shut off and quit takin’ care of the place.”
He paused for a bite of croissant. “I called her this mornin’, but no answer. I don’t guess there’s any harm in those lights, but I’d like to get hold of a key anyway.”