“Your Pops meant business, working with one of these things,” I said. I was just making conversation, trying to think what finding the rod and reel like this might mean.
Lee Marlow had hold of my arm very hard and I could feel the bite of her fingers. “Something’s happened to him, Matty. He... he wouldn’t just go off and leave his gear in the bushes like this. Matty! Matty, I’m scared.”
“Come on. Let’s walk a little farther. We’ll find him. There’s probably a logical explanation for this. Try to take it easy, Lee.”
Kind words. Very helpful. Matty Hoyle, the old comforter and advisor. The things I’d said didn’t do either of us any good as we moved around another turn in the path and stopped cold. We found Lee’s father.
Chapter Four
Sinister Key
Lee stood there, staring and screaming, a blood-thinning sound that seemed to go on and on until you didn’t think you could stand it anymore and then, miraculously, it stopped. But the sudden, smothering silence that followed, seemed worse.
I caught her as she started to fall and looked over her head at the thing, swinging ever so slightly on the end of a length of rope from a tree limb just ahead of us on the path.
That it was Willis Marlow, was obvious even from the back. The plump, round-shouldered figure in the rumpled tweed suit, the unkempt, straggly gray hair at the collar in the back, saw to that. An old box-crate had been kicked over from under his feet.
I scooped Lee Marlow up into my arms and pushed off the path, through the shrubbery until I came to a small patch of grass. I set her down and began to chafe her wrists between my hands. She came around in a few moments, her eyes at first dazed and confused and then as memory returned, once again bleak and stark. She couldn’t even speak at first, just stared up at me, dumbly, while I tried to calm her.
“Lee, you’ll have to get control. I know it’s going to be hard but you’ve got to do it. I’ve got something to tell you about your father.”
The crying came then and she buried her face against my shoulder and it was bad for a few moments but it got rid of some of the tension. When she was finished, she dabbed her eyes dry and turned toward me. “I’m all right now, I think, Matty. For awhile, anyhow. But we’ve got to do something. We just can’t let him hang there like — like that. We—”
“Easy, Lee,” I said. Her voice was starting to rise. I watched her fight for control and make it and then I said, “You’ll hear it from the others, anyhow, Lee, so I might as well break it to you here. Maybe it’ll be easier.”
She didn’t say anything. She waited for me to go on. I took a deep, ragged breath and pitched into it.
“Your father killed himself, Lee, but it’s probably for the best. He — I guess he was going to have to face a murder rap, anyhow. It was beginning to show up that Harry Wenzel was killed deliberately — that somebody tossed him into Satan’s pen while he was either drunk or unconscious.
“There was an I.O.U. in Harry’s pocket, signed by your father, for over three thousand dollars that I imagine he lost in the poker game, last night. It looks as though your father killed Harry to get out of that debt. Then, in a fit of remorse, he came down here and took his own life.”
Lee’s small, firm chin hardened. A glint of anger came into her eyes. “No, Matty. No. That’s all off. The whole thing is wrong. It couldn’t be like that.”
“I know it’s hard to accept, but it’s the only logical way to figure it. Why else would he kill himself?”
“He didn’t, Matty. That’s just the point. Pops didn’t hang himself. I know it!” She shook her head, desperately. I felt sorry for her. She was a sweet, loyal little kid and she was trying hard, but denying the facts didn’t change them.
“In the first place,” she went on, “if Pops killed Harry Wenzel to get that I.O.U., why did he leave it in Harry’s pocket?”
I couldn’t think of any answer for that.
“And how could a little old man like Pops, hoist a big lummox like Harry Wenzel up over that high fence? You’ve got it all wrong, Matty. Maybe somebody did try to frame Pops, to make it look as though he murdered Harry and then took his own life, but it couldn’t have been that way. Pops didn’t kill himself.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
“When Pops was a kid, he worked for awhile on a newspaper. He was a reporter like you. One time he was assigned to write up a penitentiary execution. They died by hanging in that state and Pops had to watch it. It got him. He was sick for a week afterward. It was so bad, that was the end of his newspaper career.
“He’s told me about it many times. It gave him sort of a phobia about ropes, even. He hated to even touch a piece of rope. Once, he got up and walked out of a movie when they showed preparations for a hanging. If he was going to — to get rid of himself, that’s the one way he wouldn’t do it, Matty. Can you understand that?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But you’re going to have a tough time selling that to the police.”
I helped her to her feet. She was dizzy for a moment and clung to me. Somewhere out over the mist on the lake a catbird shrieked. Stray puffs of mist swirled around us. I thought about the things Lee Marlow had said and they began to make sense. But if she was right, then there’d been a double murder.
Chances were, the same person had killed old man Marlow. But, why? They were safe enough as it was, without doing that. If Harry’s death got by as an accident, they were okay. If murder was suspected, the I.O.U. practically put it into Willis Marlow’s lap. Why go to the trouble of killing him, too?
It hit me, then. “Maybe your father saw them. Maybe he saw who it was that heaved Harry Wenzel into the dog pen. They killed him to shut him up about that.”
Her eyes grew very wide. “Yes,” she breathed. “When he’d been drinking, Pops never went right to bed. He had a fear of lying down when he was drunk. He didn’t like the way everything spun around and it sometimes made him sick. He liked to get out and get a lot of air and sometimes walk a lot. Maybe he was out back there, somewhere, when the murderer thought everybody had gone to bed and like you say, Pops saw the thing done.”
“The fishing rod?” I said. “Would he have that?”
“He might,” she said. “Maybe he decided to try a little night fishing. He was very anxious to try that spinning outfit, anyhow.”
“But would he go through with his plans, calmly, go down to the lake to go fishing after witnessing what was obviously a murder?”
“No,” she said. “But he could have become afraid. Maybe the murderer saw him, knew that he’d been a witness. Maybe Pops ran down here, trying to get away.”
We pushed it around some more and the more we talked, the more convinced I was that we had the correct answer.
“If we’re right, the killer is very clever. It’s going to be hard to prove anything against him. But I’ve got an idea how we might root him out into the open, if you’re game for it.”
Her lovely mouth thinned and a vein stood out along her young white throat. “I’ll do anything,” she said. “Anything to prove Pops was innocent, that he didn’t hang himself.”
“Maybe it won’t work,” I said. “And I might get into a lot of trouble but I’m willing to take a chance on it.”
I told her this crazy idea, then. I was going to cut down Willis Marlow’s corpse, carry it back to the lodge, slung over my shoulder. There was a side entrance that led upstairs. If we could get Willis Marlow up to his own room without anybody seeing us, there was a chance we could put this over.
“We’ll go back to the others, then,” I told Lee. “We’ll tell them that we found your father, passed out and sleeping it off and that we helped him back up to his room. Only the murderer will know that we’re lying. He’ll worry and think maybe that we might even suspect him. He’ll get nervous and jumpy and maybe make a slip of some kind that will tip us off. That’s about all we can hope for.”