The second thermos bottle had obviously fallen from Blythe’s right hand: it lay, mouth tilted up, among the bruised blossoms of a rose-basket beside her. A wad of crumpled waxed paper, the wrappings of a consumed sandwich, was in her lap. The cup of the other thermos bottle had fallen to the floor between her feet. And she, too, eyes closed, serene of face, seemed asleep.
“It’s awfully queer,” remarked the Lieutenant, studying the still cold faces, “that they should both pop off around the same time.”
“Nothing queer about it.”
“They haven’t been shot or stabbed or strangled; you can see that. Not a sign of violence. That’s why I say... Only double heart-failure isn’t — well, it’s quite a coincidence.”
“You could say,” retorted Ellery, “that a man whose skull had been bashed into turkey-hash with a sledge-hammer died of heart-failure, too. Look here, Lieutenant.”
He stooped over Royle’s body and with his thumb pressed back the lid of the right eye. The pupil was almost invisible; it had contracted to a dot.
Ellery stepped across the littered aisle and opened Blythe Stuart’s right eye.
“Highly constricted pupils,” he shrugged. “And notice that pervasive pallor — cyanosis. They both died of morphine poisoning.”
“Jack Royle and Blythe Stuart murdered?” The Lieutenant stared. “Wow!”
“Murdered.” Bonnie Stuart stood in the cabin doorway. “No. Oh, no!”
She flung herself upon her mother’s body, sobbing. Ty Royle came in then, looked down at his father. After a moment his hand felt for the cabin wall. But he did not take his eyes from that calm marble face.
Bonnie suddenly sat up, glaring at her hands where they had touched her mother’s body. Although there was no mark on her white flesh, Ellery and the Lieutenant knew what she was staring at. She was staring at the invisible stain, the impalpable taint, the cold outer-space enamel of death.
“Oh, no,” whispered Bonnie with loathing.
Ty said: “Bonnie,” futilely, and took an awkward step across the aisle towards her.
But Bonnie sprang to her feet and screamed: “Oh, no!” and, standing there, tall and distraught, her cheeks pure gray, her breast surging, she swayed and began to fold up like the bellows of an accordion. And as she crumpled in upon herself her eyes turned completely over in their sockets.
Ty caught her as she fell.
Icy bristles of mountain wind curried the plateau. Butch took Bonnie from Ty’s arms, carried her through the whipping grass to an Army plane, and threw a borrowed fur coat over her.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” said Ty in a cracked voice. “Death by freezing?”
And the Lieutenant said: “Take it easy, Mr. Royle.”
“What are we waiting for?” shouted Ty. “Damn it, there’s a murderer loose around here! Why doesn’t somebody start tracking the scum down?”
“Take it easy, Mr. Royle,” said the Lieutenant again, and he dived into a plane.
Ty began to thrash around in the knee-high grass, trampling swatches of it down in blind parabolas.
Ellery said to a pilot: “Just where are we?”
“On the north tip of the Chocolate Mountains.”
He borrowed a flashlight and began to examine the terrain near the red-and-gold monoplane. But if the mysterious aviator who had borne Jack Royle and Blythe Stuart through the circumambient ether to their deaths had left tracks in making his escape from the grounded plane, the tracks had long since been obliterated by the milling feet of the Army men. Ellery wandered farther afield, skirting the rim of the plateau.
He soon saw, in the powerful beam of the electric torch, that the task of finding the unknown pilot’s trail quickly was almost a hopeless one. Hundreds of trails led from the plateau down through scrub pine to the lowlands — chiefly horse-trails, as he saw from the many droppings and steel-shoe signs. To the east, as he recalled the topography, lay Black Butte; to the northwest the southern range of the San Bernardino Mountains; to the west the valley through which ran the Southern Pacific Railroad, and beyond it the Salton Sea and the San Jacinto range. The fleeing pilot could have escaped in any of the three directions, through sparsely settled country. It would take days by experienced trackers to find his trail, and by that time it would be stone-cold.
Ellery returned to the red-and-gold plane. The Lieutenant was there again. “It’s a hell of a mess. We’ve made three-way contact by radiophone with the authorities. There’s a mob of ’em on their way up.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“This end of the Chocolate Mountains just laps over into Riverside County — most of it lies in Imperial County to the south. The plane in coming here passed over Los Angeles County, of course, and probably the southeast tip of San Bernardino County. That makes three different counties in which these people may have died.”
“So the assorted gentlemen of the law are fighting,” nodded Ellery grimly, “for the right to sink their teeth into this juicy case?”
“Well, it’s their oyster — let ’em scramble for it. My responsibility ends when some one shows up to claim jurisdiction.”
Butcher said curtly: “I don’t know about your legal responsibility, Lieutenant, but something’s got to be done about Miss Stuart. She’s in a bad way.”
“I suppose we could fly you folks back to the municipal airport, but—”
“What’s the trouble?” asked Ty Royle in a high-pitched voice. Ellery felt uncomfortable at the sight of his haggard face. His lips were blue and he was shivering with a cold not caused by the wind.
“Bonnie’s collapsed, Ty. She’s got to have a doctor.”
“Well, sure,” said Ty abstractedly. “Sure. I’ll fly her down myself. My plane—” But then he stopped.
“Sorry,” said the Lieutenant. “That’s the one thing that doesn’t leave this place till the police get here.”
“I suppose so,” mumbled Ty. “I guess so.” He yelled suddenly: “Damn it to hell!”
“Here,” said Ellery grabbing his arm. “You’re not far from collapse yourself. Lieutenant, have you any notion how far Tolland Stuart’s place is from here? It’s supposed to be on a butte in the Chocolate Mountains, somewhere below in Imperial County.”
“It’s only a few minutes south by air.”
“Then that’s where we’ll take her,” rasped Butcher. “If you’ll be good enough to place a plane at our disposal—”
“But I don’t know if I ought to.”
“We’ll be at Tolland Stuart’s when they want us. You said yourself it’s only a few minutes’ hop from here.”
The Lieutenant looked unhappy. Then he shrugged and shouted: “Garms! Turn ’em over.”
A pilot saluted and climbed into a big Army transport. The motors began to spit and snarl. They all broke into a run.
“Where’s Lew?” shouted Ellery above the din.
“He couldn’t take it,” Butcher shouted back. “Flew back to L.A. with one of the Army pilots.”
A few minutes later they were in the air headed southeast.
The brightness on the plateau dwindled to a pale blob, then to a pinpoint, and finally blinked out altogether. Butcher held Bonnie, whose eyes were closed, tightly to his chest. Ty sat alone, forward, buried to the nose in his thin coat; he seemed to be dozing. But once Ellery caught the wild shine of his eyes.
Ellery shivered and turned to peer down at the black wrinkled face of the mountain slipping by below.
In less than ten minutes the transport was wheeling over a luminous rectangle lying flat among the crags. To Ellery it seemed no larger than a postage stamp, and he began uncomfortably to think of his own immortal soul.