It was in this way he met the king. I never knew the exact details, but I believe he saved the king’s life or something like that during a yacht club regatta. At any rate, their friendship became common knowledge, and when the king planned a visit to America it was common gossip that he would be Plainfield’s guest when he reached the Coast.
Plainfield was always a very busy man and depended for details a great deal upon subordinates who had been with him for years, in most cases. So even in so important a matter as the building of this house for a king he only went as far as drawing the plans and giving directions for the furnishings. The actual superintendence of the thing, we learned, had been left to a man named Harry Stanwood, who had been steward of the big yacht, valet to Plainfield and generally his man of affairs in minor business and quite largely in social matters.
So, while the boss planned the house, it was really Stanwood who built it and had it all ready with every convenience to receive a king, and it was some job, too, out in that wilderness. Materials had to be hauled for miles and labor was very scarce. Stanwood, who was something of a mechanic, had to do a good deal of the work himself, but he had plenty of time, so it did not make a great deal of difference.
He was a most interesting sort of character. We found out all about him, because in our investigation we started out with Plainfield himself and gradually took in everybody who had had anything to do with the “Aerie.” Naturally Stanwood came second, because when the war came on and it was found that the king could not come and Plainfield became so busy with his shipping interests, he left Stanwood in charge of the house with permission to do as he pleased — practically gave it to him.
There used to be some gay old times out there, and Harry Stanwood became well known in all the Puget Sound country for his hospitality at the expense of his boss. It was war time and everybody was more or less on edge with war worry and speculation and German spy scares and one thing and another. It seemed to be a great relief to a lot of people to go out to the “Aerie” for a few days and sort of rest up.
Out there one could forget the war. Plainfield, himself, was above suspicion. Stanwood, the financially receptive host of the place, was past fifty years of age, apparently not desired for war duty and by his own statements of many years an Englishman — a statement borne out by his speech, manner and conversation.
Besides that, the State of Washington had voted “dry,” but the “Aerie” never seemed to have heard of the law going into effect. Stanwood ran no bar, but the cellar stock was checked against each paying guest and the cellar itself, in a sort of cave under the cliff, was one of the house’s principal points of interest. It was big enough to house a regiment — a natural formation in the rock upon which the house was built — and upon those notable occasions when Stanwood himself was host to his own particular cronies, he frequently ordered supper served underground where the wine and spirits were handy.
Not many people knew of the place. I have always doubted if Plainfield ever knew anything at all about what went on there, but among those who did know, the “Aerie” was a celebrated rendezvous. That was so until this newspaper article with its array of gruesome facts threw a damper of dark mystery about the whole region, cut off Stanwood’s source of revenue and probably hastened the death of Plainfield, which occurred within a few months and before the mystery surrounding his chalet had been solved.
II
We were really first drawn into the case in a sort of semi-official and confidential capacity. One of the men who had disappeared thereabout was a former assistant to a Cabinet officer who still had many friends in Washington. The circumstances were such that they did not want to call in the regular peace officers of the State of Washington. There was a matter of a little spree and a woman or two involved. We were called in as much to avoid publicity as anything else, but we got in good and deep — we and our old friend, the sea, after we had watched in vain for it to give up a body.
I won’t mention this man’s name. We succeeded in keeping the facts quiet and avoiding scandal even after we found his body. It’s the way we have in the service. But you must have read in the newspapers about the others. We found them and we also checked up on the two women found half crazy in the woods. I don’t wonder that they were.
Naturally, we were first suspicious of the people at the house itself. There is nothing particularly suspicious about four or five people dying or disappearing in the course of a few weeks or months in this big world of ours, but when they happen to do so in the immediate vicinity of an isolated place up on a cliff looking out over the Pacific and none of them has any connection with one another, save through visiting this spot, something seems to be wrong. It is like there was a regular fog of suspicion clustering about the whole locality and we plunged in first where the fog was thickest.
But the trouble was to find the people who were or had been connected with the “Aerie.” Stanwood was in charge, but it was easily found out that he spent most of his time in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver or Victoria. Indeed, the facts stood out like sore thumbs that he had been particularly conspicuous in one or another of these cities upon the dates of the mysterious disappearances, that he had seemed greatly concerned over them and had himself led the searching parties that had recovered the two women but had been unable to find any trace whatever of the four men.
Outside of him we could find no one regularly connected with the place except Song Chin, a Chinaman of the usually mystical age of forty or eighty or thereabout, who so completely “nosabbied” everything except expert cooking that we had to give him up and put him in the same class with the rocks and the trees and the ocean. Rather, considering the fact that sermons are said to come from stones, that the big firs distinctly sing and that the waves roar in anger when their long ocean trip is ended at the coast, Song was dumbest of them all.
There were a couple of young Indians who puttered about the place occasionally, cutting firewood and sometimes acting as guides in the woods or handling a few canoes and a motorboat that were kept in a sheltered cove about half a mile down the coast from the rocky crest where the house stood. But they were no different from a couple of hundred other young bucks along the coast and indeed Stanwood seemed to have employed a lot of them rather indifferently from time to time. It was true, as he explained, that a month’s pay was enough to last one of them half a year and they usually quit on pay day.
There was a garage, but no chauffeur or mechanic. Stanwood was fully qualified to act in both of these capacities and indeed that was one of the reasons Plainfield had put him in charge of the house. He was a whole crew of servants in himself. During the time that guests were on the cliff, we found that it had been the custom for them to bring their own servants — a couple of Japanese boys or a maid sufficing for these visits, which were generally of a sort in which the utmost privacy seemed to be desirable.
So we were up against it, so far as the house staff was concerned, and forced to attack at the mysterious house itself.
III
It was a twelve-mile ride through a huge forest of firs over a private road to reach the place and outside of a few scattered and tangled wood trails this was the only way to reach the “Aerie.” Loggers had never penetrated that section and the underbrush was too thick to make the country attractive either for hunters or for deer or bear themselves. It was one of those places where the forest remains just as God planted it, waiting its turn to serve its purpose in the world.