“And no finger prints on it,” murmured Quade. “There goes your only clue, Sheriff.”
“Perhaps,” said the sheriff sarcastically, “you could conduct this investigation better.”
“Yes, I believe I could.”
The sheriff showed his teeth. “And just what would you do?”
“Well, first of all, I’d establish a motive for the killing. There’s always a motive for murder, you know. Usually it’s for financial gain, although sometimes it’s for jealousy or hate. Establish your motive and you may point the finger at the murderer.”
The glare went out of Starkey’s eyes. “I was about to start along those lines…. Mr. Olcott, you said upstairs that your brother was a very wealthy man.”
“Arturo can tell you more about that,” said Olcott Senior.
“Quite so,” said the swarthy dandy. “I was associated with Mr. Walter Olcott for eight years. He was, in my country, a very important man and, I am happy to say, one of the wealthiest men in Argentina.”
“How wealthy?” asked Starkey.
Nogales shrugged. “How wealthy is a man who owns two million acres of land, more than a hundred thousand cattle, several mines, a few factories and a railroad or two?”
Sheriff Starkey looked intently at Ferdinand Olcott. “Mr. Olcott,” he said, trying to make his voice sound casual. “Do you happen to know to whom your brother was leaving his money?”
“Of course I don’t,” snapped the old man. “My brother was here on a brief visit. He was a comparatively young man. No reason at all for me to ask him about his will. I’m not exactly a pauper myself, you know.”
The sheriff was thwarted on that line of questioning. But he persisted for another hour. He even summoned all the servants and put them through a verbal third degree. He learned nothing.
The schizophrenic looked at the people in the room around him. He saw in their faces doubt of one another… and fear. And it filled him with gloating. “They’re afraid of me; they don’t know which one of them I’ll kill next.”
But then he looked at Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia, and he was not so sure of himself. “He’s the most dangerous man here. He has brains! He is almost as smart as I am. Almost! Well, if he guesses too much I’ll give him what I gave Walter Olcott!”
The sheriff declared that he and Deputy Higginbotham would remain down in the living room for the night. He advised the others to go to sleep.
Quade was shown to the room directly opposite the one in which lay the dead body of Walter Olcott. He grimaced as he looked at the closed door. “I’m the one who wasn’t afraid of dead ones,” he reminded himself.
After locking his bedroom door, Quade threw himself on the bed and smoked a cigarette. He was tired, but the monotonous patter of the rain on the window kept him awake. That, and thinking about the events of the evening. Somewhere in this house was a murderer and Quade had an uneasy feeling that he was not yet through.
The knowledge that a flood had cut the island off from the rest of the world, that the people on the island could not escape, could not appeal for help from the outside, would give the murderer a feeling of security. The killer had plenty of time to figure things out.
Quade dozed after a while. Something woke him. Voices. Loud voices; some of them outside the house and a bellowing one inside, downstairs. Quade stepped quickly to the window and raised the lower half. Rain beat in on him.
He saw moving figures down in the gloom and then a light went on downstairs and shed its rays out into the yard. Quade gasped. The yard was full of water!
The figures were servants, splashing in the water to the main house which was on higher ground.
Quade unlocked the door of his room and stepped out into the hallway. He almost collided with Martha Olcott, clad in a dressing gown.
“Something’s happened!” Martha Olcott cried out when she saw Quade.
He nodded. “The servants are coming to the house. The water’s risen and driven them out of their place.”
“Do you think,” Martha asked, “the water’ll come — here?”
Quade shook his head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen the topography of this country in the day time. But the way it’s been raining and the condition of the river and all, I’m afraid…”
While they talked, they descended the stairs. The servants, dripping from the rain and their wading, were streaming into the house. Sheriff Starkey and Higginbotham were dashing about.
Inside of a minute everyone on the island was gathered in the big living room. The place was a bedlam of noise. A couple of the maids were wailing and the men were chattering excitedly.
In the midst of it all, Oliver Quade sniffed the close air in the room and a sudden chill struck at his vitals. He edged away and stepped out into the kitchen.
Black smoke was puffing through the cracks of a door. Quade sprang to the door, tore it open and a huge cloud of smoke gushed out into his face. He retreated before it, then advanced again and looked through the smoke, down the staircase, into the cellar.
Flames flickered through the black smoke. Quade sprang back into the living room. “The place is on fire!” he announced.
Pandemonium broke loose. Everyone yelled and cried out at the same time and for a moment people rushed about bumping and jostling one another. Then Quade took command of the situation. “The fire’s beyond control. The best thing we can do is get out of the house.”
Smoke was coming into the living room now. With it came the roar and crackle of flames. “We’ve got to fight the fire!” thundered Lynn Crosby. He dashed toward the kitchen. Arturo Nogales and Sheriff Starkey dashed after him.
“It’s no use,” said Quade. “A couple of hundred gallons of oil have been spilled down there. That’s what makes the smoke so black. And you can smell the oil. Let’s get out.”
There was a sudden explosion in the cellar and the men from the kitchen came reeling back. “It’s too late!” cried Sheriff Starkey. “The house is a goner!”
Then there was a stampede for the doors. By the time they got outside, flames were shooting through the windows of the kitchen.
“Where can we go?” someone cried in the semidark.
“The other house,” directed Quade. “The floors will be wet but it’s the best there is!”
There were two feet of water on the main floor of the servants’ quarters. Only half of the handful of survivors on Olcott’s Island were in the servants’ house when the electric light went out. Ferdinand Olcott cried out in agony: “That was the light plant. Now what?”
Now what, indeed! The water was rising. The big house was burning. The servants’ quarters weren’t much protection. The water was swirling around in it.
Quade stood by a window watching the roaring holocaust that had been the Olcott mansion. In the room behind him, people were talking, some sobbing, some whimpering. All were restless and afraid.
Then the small-town sheriff, Starkey, voiced the thing that had been in Oliver Quade’s mind the past ten minutes and which he hadn’t wanted to express aloud.
“That fire seemed to me as if someone’d set it,” the sheriff said. “It makes a crematory for the dead one. A regular funeral pyre. If the flood hadn’t wakened the servants, it would have been one for us all.”
Then there was near panic. It took the combined efforts of Oliver Quade, Lynn Crosby, Arturo Nogales and Ferdinand Olcott to soothe the others. And by that time the water had risen two inches. A creak and groan of straining timbers suddenly shook the house.
“I think,” Quade suggested then, “we had better leave this house.”
“Leave the house!” cried Clarence Olcott. “Why, it’s raining cats and dogs outside.”