But Marjorie, with a full pocket-book, grew greedy. She consulted nobody. She began to have hopes of buying that second-hand scarlet speedboat for sale at the Imperial Dock, which would make good murder cases even on the mainland accessible to her unsuspecting husband.
Old McCloud was a great asset. It was a foursome now, and they had jolly dinner parties. Always a superior housekeeper, even on a shoe-string, Marjorie now outdid herself. The meals were magnificent Yvette served them, it went easier so. Her service was so sympathetic that she all but put the food in your mouth. “Good woman you’ve got there,” barked McCloud. “Beautiful hands.” (Surprisingly they were, and so knowing, hands that could do anything.) “Where’d you get her?”
“She’s Miss Rider’s personal maid. French refugee.”
“French? Ha!”
McCloud observed her sharply, under his tufted white eyebrows, when she melted back into the room.
“Must be peasant French. Big and bony,” he barked, when she again withdrew. “French girls are little and trim.”
“Well,” drawled little Mr. Mears, twinkling, “where and when did you get this comprehensive knowledge of French girls, Stieg?”
McCloud blushed,
“Paris. Two days. 1910.”
“We..e..ell. Those were busy days. I suppose you... er, saw Notre Dame and the Louvre and went up in the Eiffel Tower and had... er, crapes Suzette, besides other Suzettes...”
“Hollis!” scolded Marjorie.
Everybody laughed.
“Matter of fact, I had something at the Café de la Paix that was a lot better. Little chocolate éclaires, shaped like the holes out of the doughnuts your mother used to fry, filled with ice cream, covered with chocolate sauce and called... ha...”
“Profiterolles,” softly supplied Yvette, who had materialized again.
“Damme, that is the funny name!”
Yvette, the next day, actually went out into the kitchen and composed profiterolles, working with heaven knows what for the pastry chef’s tools.
“Ha,” said McCloud, lapping them up. “The woman’s a wizard. She’s French all right.”
And replete, he happily got going on kites again. “Cuban boy over in Ybor City in Tampa can stand on his back porch and put a little six-footed kite up over his neighbor’s roof — place it — with the right wind. He learned this trick, because there are so many interfering wires in Ybor City, ha... Chinese have the same precision. Kite flying always has been a national pastime of Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Tonkingese, Annamese, Malays, East Indians.”
He droned on.
Kites, kites, till Marjorie thought she would go daft. He really came to Little Mangrove not to fish, but to talk kites with Hollis. McCloud was a walking encyclopedia on kites — indeed, had written the authoritative Encyclopedia digest on that subject. Hollis, as usual, collected any and all expert information which came his way. Hollis was a two-footed encyclopedia on all subjects.
“— No difficulty about raising a kite to a height of two miles on the right days. In 1905 the Prussian Aeronautical Observatory at Lindenberg put up the upper one of a train of six kites to over four miles... And damme, Mears, consider the military possibilities. Simple method of lifting anything to a height. Used in both army and navy for signaling, for photography, for carrying up flags, lamps—”
The trouble with McCloud, socially speaking, was that he was a retired weather man — still working hard at the weather. When he got going, he talked about nothing else. He had got interested in kites because his meteorological service employed them to obtain information about the temperature, the humidity and the velocity of air up above. He even looked like the weather. Had spent so much time in a weather observatory tower that his name, McCloud, had become appropriate. His face was white — it was an albino skin condition, lack of pigmentation. He could not take the sun, and when he ventured out in it, swathed himself in misting white like a turbaned Arab. Otherwise he wore neat blue serge and never removed his coat, even in scalding weather. He had Scotchy weather eyes and a weather nose, always peering upward for signs. He said this south wind would veer north in two days — and so it did, but not before the first terrible disaster.
They had reached the really unique papaya mousse. The yellow candlelight laved over Stacy in white-silver and Marjorie in the new golden net. Suddenly Stacy’s black-lashed gray eyes widened upon the dusk beyond the table and her mouth rounded open in a sharp, high scream.
Both Hollis and McCloud sprang to the defense.
Her horror pointed — to a man coming through the open front door.
“For Pete’s sake, Stacy, do you have to act like that?”
“Carl Schee! Where — d-did you come from?”
“Your friends sure will think I am Grade A bad news. I’m sorry to intrude, but the boatman from Clearwater has just landed me on your dock, and I want to know where is this cottage I rented?”
“You — followed me!”
“Sure I followed you.”
“He can’t stay!” cried Stacy wildly.
But of course he did stay. Naturally the New York tenant to whom Marjorie had rented sight unseen, was the girl’s rejected swain! This took some explaining on Marjorie’s part. But the Mearses were inclined to agree with Aunt Lucinda. The boy did not make a bad impression. You were forced to recognize that Stacy was not normal, she really was a neurotic. He was a short, stocky, rather German-looking boy, obviously crazy about Stacy, abundantly demonstrative in his affection (he could not keep his hands off the shrinking girl) and with about the mentality and play habits of a healthy puppy. Hollis referred to him drily as “that playboy”. It was a literal description. In bathing trunks he came out fat and he would gambol with anybody who would gambol with him, and if nobody would he would gambol with the waves, and if there were no waves he would gambol with the sea weed.
Stacy kept insisting that now something terrible would happen.
When you saw him and Brook Hanna in the same room together, such was their young male antagonism, you were inclined to agree and fix it at murder!
“Aw,” begged Schee, “you tell her, Mrs. Mears, it just isn’t sense. How could I be one of those kidnapers? Why, gosh, I was only five and away at Nantucket the summer it happened. She says I’ve got the same shape as one of ’em. She says I may not be the kidnaper, but kidnaping is in me. By gol, if she keeps it up I will kidnap her, just to keep her from throwin’ herself away on that Hanna washout.”
It was the next day that the first “accident” happened. The flight of planes roared over — ten of them, in formations of three, with a leader. Stacy, who was walking the beach at the north end of the island with Marjorie, stood out on a point and waved at them, in case one was Brook.
Now they widely circled, and returned, single file, and swooped over the invisible lagoon. Phut-phut-phut. Phut-phut-phut One at a time, at the machine-gun target.
Marjorie thought how they were porpoise-colored, when suddenly there was an explosion, high up — not the phut, but bigger, more like the bump of a bomb. A white ball of smoke formed, and that rear plane, slightly off line with the others, began to wallow like a porpoise rolling to the surface for oxygen. She had always thought that one day she would see a plane fall. She could not believe that she was seeing it now. It happened so swiftly. The plane was no longer in the hot blue sky at all. This crash was different — longer, more conclusive, with a final metallic death rattle.
Stacy gasped: “Brook! It’s Brook!”