“But what am I supposed to do?” demanded Kern. “Move to a hotel? Nail down the fireplace?”
Wallis shook his head. “Chapman would only come at you another way another time. No, I’d better call my old poet-roommate friend who recently retired from the New York police force.” He reached for the telephone behind the Hubbard volumes, adding, “Maybe Dr. Muir can tell you why so many police captains are spoiled poets.”
“While you’re at it,” suggested Polly, “ask him why so many poetry professors are spoiled detectives.”
Wallis ignored the remark. “When I’ve filled my friend in he’ll know what to do, Mr. Kern. Our homicidal Chapman will be in police custody before you get home. I can see it all now. Detectives pounding up the stairs, the splintering of the door, and there stands Chapman, transfixed with astonishment.”
“With your cat purring around his ankles,” added Polly.
As the telephone connection was being made Wallis turned back to Kern. “Or would you like the police to wait so you can be in on the kill? How about this? Chapman tries to escape up the dumbwaiter shaft. He raises the fireplace and there you stand with two sturdy policemen at your side.”
Kern spoke decisively. “Please have the police move as quickly as they can.” Then he sagged visibly as though free of a great weight. After a moment he looked at Polly. “Still,” he said in a sad voice, “it’s hard not to pity Chapman.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Yes,” agreed Wallis, hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. “But I’d save all that until he’s safely tucked away.”
After dinner Polly asked her husband if he wanted to watch television. “I’ve had my share of staring into little boxes for today,” he told her. “Besides, I’ve still got the books to do.”
That was fine with Polly, who was already working out her next story in her head. It would introduce a pair of brand new detectives, the ten-year-old Cody twins, Dorothy and Dashiell, who would pedal their blue tandem bike around their hometown searching for crimes to solve. She thought they would be perfect for The Mysterious Hornbook magazine. She would call their first story “The Haunted Tree House” and it would begin:
Dashiell Cody pumped the tandem up Yeggman Hill, shoulders hunched high, head down. As always, just as he reached the top the male twin swung around and said, “Put your back into it, Dot.” And as always, his sister pretended to be pumping and replied, “Watch where you’re going, Dash.”
Indeed, coming over the rise, they nearly collided with their startled neighbor, Miss Borden, pedaling home from the hardware store where she’d taken her axe to be sharpened.
The Cody twins coasted down the gentle grade into Hooligan Falls, a town whose dark tree-lined streets, sharp picket fences, and brooding clapboard houses held more mysteries than even a child’s mind could encompass. They passed the donut shop Scotty Macbeth inherited after Mr. Duncan’s unexpected death. They passed the bank and waved at Constable Stumbleton crossing the town square. Turning his head to wave back, he marched right into the flagpole. They passed Julio’s pizzeria with the banner in the window promoting the new giant pie, the Brute. “Nobody’s Ever Et Two Brutes!” it declared. Julio’s pizzas were better than his grammar.
In the vacant lot at the corner of Burke and Hare the James boys were waiting beneath the plywood shed which stood some thirty feet off the ground in the sycamore tree. Among the children of Hooligan Falls the tree house was a marvel like Valhalla, and the James boys’ two older brothers, who built it for them, had the status of giants in their eyes.
“We heard the ghost up there again last night after supper, Dot,” said Jesse, who had been chosen spokesman because he had the most freckles. “He was talking to somebody.” Jesse addressed the female twin who, since Dash did all the tandem pedaling, was widely regarded as the brains of the detective team.
“Then let’s see what we’ve got,” said Dot, leading the way up the steps to the tree house.
“I still say cornstarch would have been just as good as sprinkling flour,” said Dash.
Dot gave him a pitying look. “And scare off whatever it is with the crunch?” she asked, pushing open the tree-house door.
“Geez!” everybody said. A single set of large footprints in the flour led from the door over to the tree house’s three windows and back to the door. “Like I said yesterday,” said Dot, “ghosts don’t leave footprints.”
“A Sasquatch, then,” said Dash. “A baby Bigfoot.”
“Why can’t it just be a grownup?” demanded Dot.
Dash laughed. “A grownup in a tree house?” he said. “Grownups only go where the money is.”
Stroking her chin the way her father did when thinking, Dot had to admit her twin brother was right.
The Hermit Genius of Marshville
by Tom Tolnay
© 1998 by Tom Tolnay
A former editor of Backstage magazine and currently the owner of a small press that publishes books on fly-fishing, poetry, art, and literature, Tom Tolnay is also a short story writer with credits in many national magazines. Mr. Tolnay has previously placed four stories with EQMM. His fascination with all aspects of the publishing process is evident in his new story for us, in which even EQMM assumes a role...
WARNING: This exclusive report is fully protected by copyright and appears in this magazine for the first time anywhere.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The documents, tape recordings, articles, and investigative accounts herein represent, to our knowledge, the first published effort to draw into an intelligible whole the emerging story of Griswold Masterson, popularly known as “The Hermit Genius of Marshville.” While admittedly incomplete, these materials provide a framework through which our readers may gain an impression of the ideas and life of the secretive, eccentric, self-made philosopher/scientist.
EQMM became aware of the Hermit Genius the way many scientific discoveries are made — by chance. Last summer an editorial assistant, on vacation in Maine, went fishing in a ten-foot powerboat near the mouth of the Peace River. The young man got caught in a squall, and it looked as though he was going to be swamped, when a returning lobster boat spotted him and pulled his craft to safety. Afterwards, the assistant insisted the lobsterman join him for something to eat and drink. In a local tavern the two men had their tongues loosened by several mugs of ale, and that’s when the strange doings at Marshville first came up.
When the story of the Hermit Genius got back to us, naturally we were highly sceptical. But having let more than one major story get away from us over the years, we reluctantly decided to send a reporter[1] up to Maine to check it out. That decision proved to be well worth the investment, for she uncovered a story of international — we might even say, universal — implications.
At a very early age — three or four — legend has it that Griswold Masterson got hold of several science fiction magazines and within a period of months had taught himself to read. By five or six, it is said, he had gone through much of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells at a local lending library outside Marshville. Masterson apparently was greatly moved by the realization that each of us is stuck in our own time — that our finiteness precludes our partaking of the scientific advantages of succeeding ages. And at some point he must have made a childhood pledge to himself that one day he would overcome such limitations in his own life.