Chapter Two
The Error is Rectified
The morning was fresh and cool, with the merest suggestion of dampness. But it was the salt dampness of sea-spray, and it stung the nostrils of the two men with an effect of invigoration. The sun was still low in the east and the wind in the sky over the sea was just whipping the gray night-mists away, revealing curlicue patches of white cloud and bluest heaven.
Mr. Ellery Queen, a notorious lover of Nature, filled his lungs behind the wheel of the low-slung, dilapidated Duesenberg; and, since he was also a practical creature, listened to the satisfactory hum of the rubber wheels on the concrete highway. Both were good, and he sighed. The road stretched behind him in a straight line, a lambent gray-white ribbon of clean deserted morning miles.
He glanced at his companion, a silvered old gentleman whose long legs were jackknifed before him and whose sunken gray eyes were deeply imbedded in ruches of wrinkles, like old gems in crumpled velvet. Judge Macklin was seventy-six; but he was sniffing the salt breeze like a puppy drawing its first breath.
“Tired?” yelled Ellery over the roar of the engine.
“I’m fresher than you are,” retorted the Judge. “‘The sea, the sea, the beautiful sea...’ Ellery, I feel positively rejuvenated!”
“The hardy perennial. I was beginning to feel the weight of my own years after that long drive, but this breeze does something to you. We must be nearly there, Judge.”
“Not far. Drive on, O Hermes!” And the old gentleman stretched his scraggly neck and began to sing in a powerful baritone that vied with the motor very creditably. The song had something to do with a sailor, and Ellery grinned. The old coot had more stamina than a youngster! Ellery returned his attention to the road and pressed his right foot a little more heavily on the accelerator.
Mr. Ellery Queen’s summer had been not unproductive; if anything, it had been overproductive. So much so that he had had little more than a weekend or two at the shore — he loved the sea — and no proper vacation at all. Imprisoned in New York for the best part of the hot season struggling with the ramifications of a peculiarly baffling murder-case which, truth to tell, he had been unable to solve, he found himself after Labor Day yearning after at least one extended fling at sparkling salt-water and comparative nudity before the fall set in. Perhaps, too, he was annoyed by his failure. At any rate, finding his father up to his little ears in work at Centre Street and all of his friends unavailable, he was beginning to resign himself to a solitary vacation somewhere when he heard from Judge Macklin.
Judge Macklin was a lifelong friend of Ellery’s father; he had sponsored, in fact, the Inspector’s early career in the Police Department. One of those rare jurists to whom truth is beauty and beauty truth, he had devoted the better part of his crowded life to the administration of justice; in the process acquiring a sense of humor, a modest fortune, and a national reputation. A widower and childless, he had tucked a younger Ellery under his wing, had selected Ellery’s university and curriculum, had seen him through the dark years of adolescence when the Inspector was plainly bewildered by the responsibilities of fatherhood, and had contributed a good deal to the development of Ellery’s unmistakable flair for the logical verities. At this time, well past the three-score-and-ten mark, the old gentleman had already been retired from the bench for a number of years, spending his leisure in slow peaceful travel. To Ellery he was a comrade and a tonic, for all the disparity in their ages. But after the Judge’s retirement from public life they had seen little of each other; their last meeting was over a year old. To hear from “the Solon,” as Ellery affectionately called him, so unexpectedly and fortuitously was a distinct pleasure, then; especially since he could not have asked for a more delightful vacation companion.
The Judge had wired Ellery from some improbable place in Tennessee — where (he said) he had perversely been resting his venerable bones during the hot weather and “studying the natives” — to meet him at a midway point so that they might journey the rest of the way to the coast together to take up a joint abode by the sea for a month’s vacation. The wire made Ellery whoop for joy, sling some things into a suitcase, grin goodbye to Djuna and his father, and make for his “faithful Rosinante,” a Quixotic affair of wheels and gadgets which had once been a famous racing-car. And he was on his way. They had met at the appointed place, embraced, babbled like women for an hour, conferred solemnly on the problem of whether to wait over the night — it was 2:30 in the morning when they met — or push on at once, decided that the occasion called for heroic measures; and despite the fact that neither had slept they paid off an astonished innkeeper at 4:15, jumped into Ellery’s Duesenberg, and were off to the accompaniment of the Judge’s most robust baritone.
“By the way,” demanded Ellery when the important things had been polished off and over a year’s conversation made up, “just where is this Arcadia? I’m headed in the general direction, but I’ll be blessed if I possess second sight.”
“Know where Spanish Cape is?”
“Vaguely. I’ve heard of it.”
“Well,” said the Judge, “that’s where we’re going. Not to Spanish Cape, but to a lovely old dump right near it. About ten miles from Wayland Park and some fifty south of Maartens. It’s right off the State highway.”
“You’re not visiting some one?” asked Ellery in alarm. “With your juvenile enthusiasm, it would be just like you to foist a friend of yours upon some unsuspecting host.”
“And serve the rascal right, too,” chuckled the Judge. “But no, nothing like that. There’s a man I know who owns a cottage near Spanish Cape — only a few feet from the water’s edge, quite modest, but comfortable; regular summer affair — and the cottage is our destination.”
“Sounds alluring.”
“Wait until you see it. I’ve rented it from him in previous years — didn’t make it last summer because I was in Norway — so it came to mind this spring and I wrote him at his New York office. We made the usual deal, and here I am. I’ve taken the place until the middle of October, so we’ve a splendid bit of fishing in view.”
“Fishing,” groaned Ellery. “You’re a veritable Mr. Tutt! Always makes me think of broiled human skin and smarting eyes. I haven’t brought even an — an anchor. Do people fish?”
“They do, and we’re going to. I’ll make a young Walton out of you yet. There’s a perfectly scrumptious cruiser in the boathouse; one of the chief reasons I like the place. Don’t worry about gear. I’ve written my housekeeper in the city, and a whole mess of rods and lines and reels and hooks and things will be here Monday, express.”
“I hope,” said Ellery gloomily, “there’s a train-wreck.”
“Buck up! Matter of fact, we’re a day early. My arrangements with Waring—”
‘With whom?”
“Hollis Waring. Chap who owns the place. I’m not supposed to take possession until Monday, but I imagine it will be all right.”
“No chance of bumping into him, is there? I feel an uncommon craving for sequestration, somehow.”
“Not likely. He wrote me this spring that he wasn’t intending to use the cottage much this summer — that he expected to be in Europe during August and September.”
“Know him well?”
“Scarcely at all. In fact, only through correspondence. And then it was about the cottage, three years ago.”
“I suppose there’s a caretaker on the premises?”
Judge Macklin’s gray eyes, which by themselves were extraordinarily youthful, twinkled. “Oh, certainly! And a stiffish butler with sideburns and a man to brush our boots. Genuine Bertram Wooster-and-Jeeves arrangement. My dear young Croesus, where do you think you’re going? It’s the merest shack, and unless we can rustle a capable lady somewhere in the vicinity, we’ll have to do our own cleaning, marketing, and cooking. I’m a mean hand with the skillet, you know.”