“Tobacco. Fifty million dollars. Kidnaping.”
She passed to him the incredible, inconsequential, alarming letter:
Bar Harbor, Maine
April 18, 1942
My Dear Mr. Mears,
Or is it professor Mears? John can’t seem to remember, and Sheriff Tice does not say, but a professor would make me feel even safer about sending my niece, Anastasia Rider, to you, but of course a professor would hardly be a detective, would he? And a detective is what we do so need, that is one who detects in advance and prevents all the trouble. But of course I felt completely relieved when I learned you were in my brother John’s class in Yale.
It was sheer coincidence that this Sheriff Tice from Florida came to dinner, but it seems he and John were “buddies” in the first war in France. John met the strangest people in France. He was here trailing someone, if you can imagine — I mean Sheriff Tice. So he told us the safest place in the whole wide world if Anastasia was ever threatened again was your island and the sharpest detective he’d ever met was you. And it was coincidence again that this island is not far from MacDill Field where Anastasia’s fiancé is stationed. That is this Brook Hanna. And he is even training with all the others over this Honeymoon Island next to you. So for once Anastasia’s wishes do not conflict with ours. For right away we had this anonymous warning note that she would be kidnaped again. Naturally John and I are as terrified as Anastasia — so unfortunate when she already has this kidnaping complex.
The Sheriff says you have a big rambling old house with plenty of room, and of course Anastasia will reimburse you, we insist, and I hope she will be no trouble, she is a dear girl, but you know about the kidnaping when she was five. She is twenty now and after all, she cannot remember what happened to her when she was five, her growing imagination must have built this up. It is absurd to say that Carl Schee resembles this kidnaper, he was only five himself when the kidnaping occurred. Personally I favor Carl, he cannot be running after her money as I tell Stacy, for the Schees, as you know, are Oil. This Brook Hanna could quite easily be marrying her for her money. But after all, I am only forty and very tired of this situation and entitled to my little fling. I am going to Mexico City. The main thing is not to let her be kidnaped again or of course murdered or anything.
Gratefully yours,
P.S. As it is an island, the bodyguard will not perhaps be necessary.
“So that,” exclaimed Mr. Mears, “is what I get for helping the Sheriff solve two murder cases! Just wait till I get at him! Any job he does not fancy—”
“ ‘Helping’ him,” scoffed Marjorie. “You mean solving them. That stupid Tice did not have a bean in that soup. You are always too modest, Hollis. It is a good thing you have a wife who—”
“Wire her at once that we are not having any Anastasia.”
“It would be too late,” demurred Marjorie cozily. “Anastasia would already be in full flight.”
“Marjorie, I will not allow—!”
“Darling.” She was a pretty, bright young thing with very blue eyes and very pink cheeks and snapping curly black hair. “The money will come in handy.”
“Money!” he scorned.
“Yes, money,” firmly. “There are some things I want besides your old Civil War books.”
“I... never knew you felt like that,” he choked. He gazed at her with his blue eyes — that deep-sea blue that you could drown in. “I... I guess the honeymoon is over. All right. Just you wait, my dear, if it’s money you’re after, till my book is publish—”
“I can’t. The old glass coffee drip is broken, we have got to have a new one. And my bathing suit has no seat to the pants,” she giggled, “a new one is absolutely indicated. Besides, I have always wanted to see what the principal of a famous kidnaping case is like grown up.”
“From this letter, she is obviously a mental victim from the experience. Even if I were a detective, which I do not admit, that does not make me a psychiatrist. Get this clear, Marjorie. She can be kidnaped AND murdered. I am not again being deflected from my book.”
Marjorie gazed at her husband through welling tears. “I guess... the honeymoon is over.”
They were always saying that to each other. After three years, it never was over. So suddenly she was flung into his arms, a fence of tomes avalanching with the passionate abruptness of her movement, but nobody noticed. He held her with such tenderness, such shyness growing bolder — he had been a bachelor so long that he did not take easily to the privileges of matrimony. So then they were conscious only of their multiple heart beat, joined — like the multiple engine beat of those army planes overhead. The planes distanced; came the phut-phut-phut of rapid machine-gun fire. Again phut-phut-phut. One young aviator after another taking his morning drill at the target set up in the lagoon of the neighboring Honeymoon Island.
“That target practice is too near. Honeymoon Island, my eye,” he muttered, once more claiming her lips.
“This is,” she blissfully sighed. “Little Mangrove Island has been misnamed...”
So, of course, Anastasia arrived.
The bodyguard was with her — he saw her to the dock, then rode the hired speedboat back to the mainland for the return trip to New York — and also a tall, gaunt, middle-aged woman, dressed in black like a crow, her personal maid.
Stacy was a dear girl. Marjorie loved her at sight. She had that simplicity of the very rich to a degree that made her almost invisible for a moment: “tropical gray” outfit without a stitch of ornamentation. Or perhaps she herself had this ghost quality — she looked always as though she had just seen one! She had fine sandy hair, straight, polished from brushing, combed over to one side in a soft roll that gave a curious onesided effect to her lovely little head. Her eyes were gray, black-fringed, startled. She was small and fine and pale. Her appeal was much stronger than beauty, sex, money, though she had all three. She would have it when she was eighty, when — and if — she lost all three. Every man who loved her would ask only of life a long one, with which to take care of her and keep her safe, A-men.
“I am Marjorie Mears. You are welcome, dear.”
“Thanks.” She looked widely about, took a long quivering breath. “It is safe?”
Marjorie smiled. “Horribly safe.”
“Nobody knows I’m here? I mean my real name.”
“Nobody.”
“Nothing has ever happened here?”
“Well...” said Marjorie. (Only two murders, but they were not, so to speak, indigenous.) “Nothing not imported. And nobody is on the island but you and me and my husband and our negro maid Moselle and your—?”
“This is Yvette.”
Yvette kept her place with a reticent, lady’s-maid smile.
The Rider heiress did not at once relax. The twilight hour was the bad time for her. That was the time at which “they” had snatched her. But in the tropics the sun shines hard, then it ceases to shine with no lingering. And the maid Yvette — already she was like a mother to the girl, though she was new — stayed close to her mistress. The nights were also bad. Until her father finally contacted the kidnapers and paid the colossal ransom, the baby had spent four black nights chained in a box-coop in remote wild country. That first night Stacy had one of her screaming nightmares, which brought the whole household up standing. She needed only to hold someone’s hand tight. Yvette’s hand offered.