Upper Whistling Avenue, which crossed State Street a block northeast of the Square, led up to Hill Drive, where some of the oldest residential properties had stood (even older ones, great square black-shuttered clapboard affairs, most gone to pot even in Ellery’s earliest acquaintance, occupied the farther reaches of State Street). Upper Dade ran northwest up to North Hill Drive, which had been taken over by the estates of Wrightsville’s nouveaux riches (a nouveau riche, in the view of the Wrights, Bluefields, Dades, Granjons, Minikins, Livingstons, et al., being anyone who had made his pile after the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes).
Most of this was gone. The store fronts of the Square were like the façades of the commercial buildings fronting Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley running out of Hollywood, one of Ellery’s favorite abominations — lofty modernisms in glass, stucco, redwood, and neon absurdly dwarfing the mean little stores that cowered behind them. The Hollis, which risked a new marquee just before World War II, had recklessly undertaken a complete face-lift, coming out contemporary and (to his mind) disgusting. The New York Department Store and the High Village Pharmacy had vanished, and the Bon Ton had taken over the entire plinth between Washington and Lincoln Streets and rebuilt from the ground up what to Ellery’s sickened eye was a miniature Korvette’s. The Atomic War Surplus Outlet Store was of course no more, and the eastern arc of the Square was almost all new.
On the high ground to the north, matters were even worse. Lovely old Hill Drive had fallen before the invading developers (a few houses had been saved, after a last-ditch battle by the Landmarks Commission of the Wrightsville Historical Society, as “historic sites”); the old Hill grandeur was today a solid rank of high-rise apartment buildings, frowning down on the town below like concentration camp guards. Many of the extensive estates on North Hill Drive had been sold and the section rezoned for one-acre stands of middle-income private homes. Wrightsville’s humbler suburbs mushroomed to beyond the airport, where whole new communities with regional monickers like New Village and Mahogany Acres had sprouted. At least thirty-five farms Ellery had known and cherished were extinct. There were new factories by the dozen, chiefly neat little plants by the wayside making electronic parts on subcontract to the giants working for the Department of Defense. Even Twin Hills and Sky Top Road, to which the well-to-do had inevitably fled, were beginning to grow tentacles.
And most of the old families had withered away, or the culls of their descendants had given up, hacked off their roots, and rerooted elsewhere.
Still, to Ellery it was Wrightsville. The cobbled streets of Low Village remained, the poor being America’s last caretakers of old things. The Willow River that serviced the mills ran as yellow and red and turquoise as ever without noticeable effect on the immortal old willows and alders on its banks that sucked on its poisonous brew. Al Brown’s Ice Cream Parlor and the refaced Wrightsville Record building on Lower Main off the Square stood their ground. And the surrounding hillsides still beamed benign, with the muscular Mahoganies beyond promising to withstand any onslaught of man except a saturation attack by hydrogen bombs, which was unlikely, Wrightsville being too unimportant (the town kept reassuring itself) in the scheme of things.
So, to Ellery’s eye, Wrightsville with all its flaws was a still-viable Shangri-la.
He hired a Cougar at the car-rental agency in the airport and the Queens, gladly gulping lungfuls of genuine air, drove out to Benedict’s hideaway.
From the way Benedict had talked Ellery expected a dilettante twenty or thirty acres. They found instead a two-hundred-acre spread of timber, water, and uncut pasture halfway between Wrightsville and Shinn Corners, in a farmed-out section of the valley where it began to creep up into the northwestern hills. The property was barred off by tall steel fencing and posted against hunting, fishing, and trespassing generally, in large and threatening signs bolted to the fence.
“Used to be all dairy farms out this way,” Ellery complained as he got out to open the main gate. “The sweetest herds you ever saw.”
“Well, don’t blame Benedict,” his father said. “They were probably given up before he bought them out. Small farms are going out of business all over New England.”
“Still,” Ellery carped, and he got back into the car with a slam.
The dirt road took them past the main house, which was a few hundred yards in from the entrance, apparently one of the original farmhouses of the property, a spready old two-story clapboard, with half a dozen chimneys, that appeared to house twelve or fifteen rooms. A quarter of a mile farther in they came to the guest house, a five-room Cape Cod-type cottage with a recent look. It lay deep in the woods, in a glade that had been hacked out to let the sun through. As they got out of the Cougar they heard a brook that seemed to be in a hurry and was making a great deal of noise about it.
“Sounds as if we could cast a line right out the bedroom window,” the Inspector said. “Man, what a way to live!”
“If somebody else bakes the bread,” Ellery said sourly.
“Ellery, what in hell is the matter with you?” his father cried. “If you think I’m going to put up with a prima donna for two weeks...! We’d better have this out right now. It was plain damn decent of your friend to offer you this place. The least you can do if you feel like bellyaching is keep it to yourself. Or so help me I’ll take the next plane back to New York!”
It was a long time since Inspector Queen had talked to him that way, and it so astounded Ellery that he backed off and shut up.
They found the inside of the cottage as heimisch as Benedict had advertised. No Park Avenue decorator had been at work here. The furniture — Ellery checked the labels — came from A. A. Gilboon’s in High Village, and the household fixtures and hardware had been purchased at Clint Fosdick’s or Hunt & Keckley’s, or both. “Bon Ton” was written all over the rest. It was a homely, cheerful little place that was long on chintz, “peasant” ware, and rag rugs, and had a fireplace in the living room that made his palms itch for the poker. The shelves held books; there was a stereo and a collection of cartridge tapes; and, tucked away in a corner as if to say there was no law requiring its use, a portable color TV.
The Inspector volunteered to unpack and get them settled while Ellery drove down into town to supplement the larder. They had found plenty of steaks, chops, and poultry in the freezer and a generous supply of canned goods, but they needed perishables — milk, bread, butter, eggs, fresh fruit and vegetables.
“Pick up something, too, son,” the Inspector said, “at what’s-his-name’s, Dunc MacLean’s. Rye, Scotch, vodka, anything to warm the bones.”
“Unnecessary.” Ellery waved. “You missed that retractable bar in the living room, dad. It’s stocked with everything from absinthe to zubrovka.”
He passed up Logan’s Market on Slocum between Upper Whistling and Washington — he was known there — in favor of the supermarket across the street, where he might expect to go unnoticed. As it was, he had to avert his face to avoid two women he thought he recognized. The trip into town depressed him further; the changes were too numerous and, to his eye, all for the worse. He was glad to get back to the cottage, where he found his father in slacks and an open-neck shirt lolling before a fire with a glass of brown waters in his fist.
“Yes, siree,” the Inspector said happily, “this is the life.”
The old man gave Ellery his head. He neither pushed nor pulled, contenting himself with a suggestion here or there and saying nothing if Ellery begged off. On Wednesday the Inspector spent most of the day fishing (in spite of Benedict’s boast about cutting his own spruce pole, the old man found a roomful of sporting equipment that included some superb rods) and hauled in a mess of gorgeous trout for their dinner. Ellery spent that day on his spine’s end, listening to Mozart and Bach, with a fillip of Tijuana Brass, and occasionally snoozing off. That night he slept the night through without benefit of sleeping pill or a dream he could recall on awakening — his first unbroken sleep in weeks; he had been living on nightmares. On Thursday the Queens explored the property, tramping over most of Benedict’s two hundred acres and coming back ravenous; they devoured a couple of prodigious steaks Ellery charcoal-broiled on the backyard barbecue along with some husky baked potatoes topped with his favorite sour cream and chives. The Inspector pretended not to notice that Ellery polished his plate — the old man had not seen him finish a dinner for weeks.