“Nikki,” muttered Ellery, “are we in any particular hurry?”
“I don’t know. Are we?”
“Besides, it wouldn’t be patriotic. Doc, do you suppose Jacksburg would mind if a couple of New York Yanks invited themselves to your Memorial Day exercises?”
The business district of Jacksburg consisted of a single paved street bounded at one end by the sightless eye of a broken traffic signal and at the other by the twin gas pumps before Lew Bagley’s garage. In between, some stores in need of paint sunned themselves, enjoying the holiday. Red, white, and blue streamers crisscrossed the thoroughfare overhead. A few seedy frame houses, each decorated with an American flag, flanked the main street at both ends.
Ellery and Nikki found the Chase house exactly where Doc Strong had said it would be — just around the corner from Bagley’s garage, between the ivy-hidden church and the fire-house of the Jacksburg Volunteer Pump and Hose Company No. i. But the mayor’s directions were a superfluity; it was the only house with a crowded porch.
A heavy-shouldered young girl in a black Sunday dress sat in a rocker, the center of the crowd. Her nose was as red as her big hands, but she was trying to smile at the cheerful words of sympathy winged at her from all sides.
“Thanks, Mis’ Plumm... That’s right, Mr. Schmidt, I know... But he was such a spry old soul, Emerson, I can’t believe...”
“Miss Cissy Chase?”
Had the voice been that of a Confederate spy, a deeper silence could not have drowned the noise. Jacksburg eyes examined Ellery and Nikki with cold curiosity, and feet shuffled.
“My name is Queen and this is Miss Porter. We’re attending the Jacksburg Memorial Day exercises as guests of Mayor Strong—” a warming murmur, like a zephyr, passed over the porch “—and he asked us to wait here for him. I’m sorry about your great-grandfather.”
“You must have been very proud of him,” said Nikki.
“Thank you, I was. It was so sudden — Won’t you set? I mean — Do come into the house. Great-grandpa’s not here... he’s over at Bill Yoder’s...”
The girl was flustered and began to cry, and Nikki took her arm and led her into the house. Ellery lingered a moment to exchange appropriate remarks with the neighbors who, while no longer cold, were still curious; and then he followed. It was a dreary little house, with a dark and musty-smelling parlor.
“Now, now, this is no time for fussing — may I call you Cissy?” Nikki was saying soothingly. “Besides, you’re better off away from all those folks. Why, Ellery, she’s only a child!”
And a very plain child, Ellery thought, with a pinched face and empty eyes.
“I understand the parade to the burying ground is going to form outside your house, Cissy,” he said. “By the way, have Andrew Bigelow and his grandfather Zach arrived yet?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Cissy Chase dully. “It’s all like such a dream, seems like.”
“Of course it does. And you’re left alone. Haven’t you any family at all, Cissy?”
“No.”
“Isn’t there some young man—?”
Cissy shook her head bitterly. “Who’d marry me? This is the only decent dress I got, and it’s four years old. We lived on great-grandpa’s pension and what I could earn hiring out by the day. Which ain’t much, nor often. Now...”
“I’m sure you’ll find something to do,” said Nikki, very heartily.
“In Jacksburg?”
Nikki was silent.
“Cissy.” Ellery spoke casually, and she did not even look up. “Doc Strong mentioned something about a treasure. Do you know anything about it?”
“Oh, that.” Cissy shrugged. “Just what great-grandpa told me, and he hardly ever told the same story twice. But near as I was ever able to make out, one time during the War him and Caleb Atwell and Zach Bigelow got separated from the army — scouting, or foraging, or something. It was down South somewhere, and they spent the night in an old empty mansion that was half-burned down. Next morning they went through the ruins to see what they could pick up, and buried in the cellar they found the treasure. A big fortune in money, great-grandpa said. They were afraid to take it with them, so they buried it in the same place in the cellar and made a map of the location and after the War they went back, the three of ’em, and dug it up again. Then they made the pact.”
“Oh, yes,” said Ellery. “The pact.”
“Swore they’d hold onto the treasure till only one of them remained alive, I don’t know why, then the last one was to get it all. Leastways, that’s how great-grandpa told it.”
“Did he ever say how much of a fortune it was?”
Cissy laughed. “Couple of hundred thousand dollars. I ain’t saying great-grandpa was cracked, but you know how an old man gets.”
“Did he ever give you a hint as to where he and Caleb and Zach hid the money after they got it back North?”
“No, he’d just slap his knee and wink at me.”
“Maybe,” said Ellery suddenly, “maybe there’s something to that yarn after all.”
Nikki stared. “But Ellery, you said—! Cissy, did you hear that?”
But Cissy only drooped. “If there is, it’s all Zach Bigelow’s now.”
Then Doc Strong came in, fresh as a daisy in a pressed blue suit and a stiff collar and a bow tie, and a great many other people came in, too. Ellery and Nikki surrendered Cissy Chase to Jacksburg.
“If there’s anything to the story,” Nikki whispered to Ellery, “and if Mayor Strong is right, then that old scoundrel Bigelow’s been murdering his friends to get the money!”
“After all these years, Nikki? At the age of ninety-five?” Ellery shook his head.
“But then what—?”
“I don’t know.” And Ellery fell silent. But his glance went to Doc Strong and waited; and when the little mayor happened to look their way, Ellery caught his eye and took him aside and whispered in his ear...
The procession — nearly every car in Jacksburg, Doc Strong announced proudly, over a hundred of them — got under way at exactly two o’clock.
Nikki had been embarrassed but not surprised to find herself being handed into the leading car, an old but brightly polished touring job contributed for the occasion by Lew Bagley; and the moment Nikki spied the ancient, doddering head under the Union army hat in the front seat she detected the fine Italian whisper of her employer. Zach Bigelow held his papery frame fiercely if shakily erect between the driver and a powerful red-necked man with a brutal face who, Nikki surmised, was the old man’s grandson, Andy Bigelow. Nikki looked back, peering around the flapping folds of the flag stuck in the corner of the car. Cissy Chase was in the second car in a black veil, weeping on a stout woman’s shoulder. So the female Yankee from New York sat back between Ellery and Mayor Strong, against the bank of flowers in which the flag was set, and glared at the necks of the two Bigelows, having long since taken sides in this matter. And when Doc Strong made the introductions, Nikki barely nodded to Jacksburg’s sole survivor of the Grand Army of the Republic, and then only in acknowledgment of his historic importance.
Ellery, however, was all deference and cordiality, even to the brute grandson. He leaned forward.
“How do I address your grandfather, Mr. Bigelow?”
“Gramp’s a general,” said Andy Bigelow loudly. “Ain’t you, Gramp?” He beamed at the ancient, but Zach Bigelow was staring proudly ahead, holding fast to something in a rotted musette bag on his lap. “Went through the War a private,” the grandson confided, “but he don’t like to talk about that.”
“General Bigelow—”
“That’s his deef ear,” said the grandson. “Try the other one.”
“General Bigelow!”