“But to continue my story: If these were not Ford’s footprints he had not run away. Either he had been carried off, had been murdered and his body concealed, or he was still in the house. Who would desire to kidnap or murder him? There lay the mystery. A kidnapper would have probably acted with some idea of ransom. This suggested a knowledge of his business complications, and the exceptional opportunity for blackmail. Who knew the truth? Ransome, Harbord certainly; Jackson possibly. That was all that I could learn from them.
“Your story of Harbord’s excursion supplies a clue. The secretary had evidently followed some man who had disappeared mysteriously. Could there be the entrance to a secret chamber in that corridor? That would explain the mystification of Harbord as well as the disappearance of Silas Ford. If so, Harbord was not involved — but who was?
“If Ford was held a prisoner, he must be fed. His jailer must of necessity remain in the house. But the trap I set in the suggested journey to London was an experiment singularly unsuccessful, for all the three men I desired to test refused. However, if I was right about the secret chamber I could checkmate the blackmailer by keeping a watch on him from your room, which commanded the line of communications. But Jackson was clever enough to leave his victualing to the night-time. I scattered flour to try the result of that ancient trick. It was successful. That is all. Do you follow me?”
“Yes,” said I, “but how did Jackson come to know of the hiding-place?”
“He was a servant in the house years before Silas Ford rented it, remember,” said Hartley.
“He is a clever fellow, that Jackson. It was a pleasure to meet him.”
A Matter of Character
by Grover Brinkman
They had everything going for them. Her beauty, his brains and charm. Everything that could meet the eye — and maybe a deadly bit more...
The Halliburton place was a mile east of Templeton, a tumbledown, ten-acre briar patch that had once been a poultry farm. When John and Marge Saxon moved there, a few shoulders shrugged at their apparent folly. But on second thought, perhaps it wasn’t folly at all. John Saxon, a Vietnam veteran, was blind.
The two-story frame house with its peeling paint, was still liveable, furnished. If they were looking for cheap rent, and without doubt they were, their choice was commendable. Marge intimated at one of the super markets one day that John- intended starting a mail order business, and she figured a few chickens and a vegetable garden might bolster their economy, at least through the first critical months of their new venture.
Templeton was an inland ranch town of eight thousand, with the usual suburban sprawl, plus several new buildings dotting the town square.
The most imposing structure in town was the new Cattleman’s National Bank. John Saxon opened a small checking account at the bank soon after their arrival. He seemed to get along very well on the street, one hand on Marge’s arm, feeling his way with his white cane, walking faster than most blind people do.
Marge was a looker. Not voluptuous exactly, but surely no undernourished fashion model either. She had reddish-gold hair and wore it loose, letting it fall about her shoulders. In a peasant blouse and snug-fitting pants, she was a woman who made men take a deep breath and wonder why she was married to a blind man.
Not that John Saxon didn’t command his own share of attention. He was six-two, slim-waisted, straight as an arrow, athletic. He wore his black hair rather long. If it wasn’t for the large black glasses, he might have been termed rather handsome.
“Very glad to welcome you as a new customer, Mr. Saxon,” said John Whiting, first vice president of the bank.
“Thank you!” Saxon said. “You have a very commanding voice, sir”
Whiting seemed surprised. “No one has ever alluded to it in those terms.”
“When you’re blind, voices are important.”
Whiting’s eyebrows raised. “Yes! Yes, of course!”
“I’m sure I’ll recognize you the next time I make a deposit,” Saxon said, smiling loosely, “That is, if you say hello.”
They walked out, Saxon tap-tapping his way with the white cane.
“Very commendable!” Whiting said after the couple were on the street, and wagged his head in disbelief. “Young, blind, and still cheerful!”
Marge drove the ancient hack that at the moment was their only means of transportation.
“I believe you impressed the banker,” she said and chuckled.
John patted her leg. “We’ll impress him very much, one of these days, won’t we, hon?”
“Very, very much!” Marge said, a tight smile on her sultry mouth, and wheeled the hack up the narrow driveway to the chicken farm, her thoughts far removed from the ramshackle homestead they called home.
After dinner, with the shades drawn in the farm kitchen, John Saxon took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes.
“You look like an owl!” Marge said. “Your whole face is tanned except your eyes.”
“Let’s forget about how I look,” he said, “and go over the plans again.”
“First you could dry the dishes for me.”
“Sure, hon!” He picked up the dish towel. “A blind man might drop some of the china.” He chuckled.
The idea had first occurred to him while they were on their honeymoon in Bermuda. There seemed to be a lot of easy money in the Bermuda beach crowd. That is, most of the crowd. Personally, he was down to his last hundred bucks.
“There must be some foolproof way to rob a bank,” he said, staring at the vivid blue of the sea.
Marge adjusted the fragile shoulder strap of her too-tight bikini. “You serious, lover?”
“I’d be very serious, if I could work out some feasible plan.”
She cuddled closer, a new light of anticipation building in her gray-green eyes.
“You really mean it, don’t you?”
“Of course! Any objections?”
She was long in answering. “No, not one. Only—”
“You’re thinking of the risk involved, getting caught, going to prison.”
“So are you.”
“Right! But there must be a way, something so foolproof that we could pull it off in one town, then move across country and do it again.”
He kept thinking about it. This thought process became somewhat of a compulsion, after a time. There must be some way to pull off a caper without kickback, make a clean getaway. After a time, noticing his abstraction, Marge fell to thinking about it as well. Grab up fifteen or twenty grand by flashing an empty gun! Just like that. No qualms of conscience, for banks were rich, and their insurance companies even richer.
He reviewed in his mind all of the famous bank robberies that had made the news headlines in the past years. Most of the bandits had got caught sooner or later. That merely showed they had not planned out the caper down to the last minute detail. Always they had been tripped up by some little flaw they had overlooked.
But if he and Marge pulled a caper, there would be no tripping up. For they wouldn’t try it unless they had a fool-proof plan.
And then, right out of the blue, the idea dawned!
It was the last day at Bermuda. Tomorrow would mean returning home, finding some mediocre job — or starve.
At the time, Marge was swimming alone, well off shore. He dived in and created some kind of a marathon to reach her side. He let down, found he could touch the sand. He reached out, pulled her wet form hard against his own, kissed her damp mouth with a new intensity in his caress.
“I’ve got it, hon!”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I’m not kidding. I’ll tell you, soon as we hit the beach.”