“Very well,” Tell said, “I can see her entry. How the deuce did she get out?”
“Incipient madness sometimes makes the mind clever, Major. She stayed in the sedan chair until her mother had left, then presented herself to Gretchen.”
“And killed her,” I interjected. “But she was back in the ballroom before the honor guard went in to get her sister.”
“There is the nub of it, Oaks. She left the den by the back passage, crossed the yard, and re-entered the house by the kitchen, in the far wing. Who would take any notice of a daughter of the house in a room filled with bustling cooks and servants coming and going with vittles for the buffet?”
“But she would have gotten her skirts wet in the snow,” I started to object. “Of course! The spilled punch bowl! It drenched her!”
Cork smiled broadly. “Yes, my lad. She entered the kitchen, scooped up the punch bowl, carried it into the ballroom, and then deliberately dropped it.”
“Well,” Tell grumped, “she may be sprung in the mind, but she understands the theory of tactical diversion.”
“Self-preservation is the last instinct to go, Major.”
“Yes, I believe you are right, Cork, but how are we to explain all this and still shield the Dame’s secret?”
Cork looked dead at me. “You, Oaks, have given us the answer.”
“I? Oh, when I said the killer took off his boots to avoid tracks in the den? You rejected that out of hand when I mentioned it.”
“I rejected it as a probability, not a possibility. Anything is possible, but not everything is probable. Is it probable that a killer bent on not leaving tracks would take off his boots inside the entry, where they would leave a puddle? No, I couldn’t accept it, but I’m sure the general public will.”
The major looked disturbed. “I can appreciate your desire to protect the Dame,” he said, “but to suppress evidence-”
“Calm yourself, Major, we are just balancing the books of human nature. I have saved the Crown the time and expense of trying and executing an extortionist. God knows how many victims he has fleeced by his artistic trickery over the years. And we have prevented the Dame from the commission of a homicide that any jury, I think, would have found justifiable. Let it stand as it is, Major; it is a neater package. The Dame has had enough tragedy in her life.”
The last of his words were soft and low-toned, and I watched as he stared into the flames. By jing, could it possibly be that this gallivanting, sunburnt American had fallen in love? But I quickly dismissed the thought. We are fated to our roles, we two-he, the unbroken stallion frolicking from pasture to pasture, and I, the frantic ostler following with an empty halter, hoping some day to put the beast to work. I persist.
THE DAUPHIN’S DOLL by Ellery Queen
“Ellery Queen” has a split personality. It is the pseudonym of Brooklyn-born cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, whose contrasting personalities gave a keen edge to their many years of mystery collaboration. Together they wrote a long list of novels, novelettes and short stories featuring their namesake detective, Ellery Queen. They edited over seventy anthologies and founded and edited Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Seven Edgars and a Raven attest to Ellery’s popularity.
However, Ellery Queen was more knowledgeable about crime than he was about plangonology, as the following story demonstrates. Attitudes have drastically changed since the 1940s. What contemporary collector wouldn’t give her eyeteeth to find the dolls in this story under her Christmas tree?
There is a law among storytellers, originally passed by Editors at the cries (they say) of their constituents, which states that stories about Christmas shall have Children in them. This Christmas story is no exception; indeed, misopedists will complain that we have overdone it. And we confess in advance that this is also a story about Dolls, and that Santa Claus comes into it, and even a Thief; though as to this last, whoever he was-and that was one of the questions-he was certainly not Barabbas, even parabolically.
Another section of the statute governing Christmas stories provides that they shall incline toward Sweetness and Light. The first arises, of course, from the orphans and the never-souring savor of the annual Miracle; as for Light, it will be provided at the end, as usual, by that luminous prodigy, Ellery Queen. The reader of gloomier temper will also find a large measure of Darkness, in the person and works of one who, at least in Inspector Queen’s harassed view, was surely the winged Prince of that region. His name, by the way, was not Satan, it was Comus; and this is paradox enow, since the original Comus, as everyone knows, was the god of festive joy and mirth, emotions not commonly associated with the Underworld. As Ellery struggled to embrace his phantom foe, he puzzled over this non sequitur in vain; in vain, that is, until Nikki Porter, no scorner of the obvious, suggested that he might seek the answer where any ordinary mortal would go at once. And there, to the great man’s mortification it was indeed to be found: On page 262b of Volume 6, Coleb to Damasci, of the 175th Anniversary edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. A French conjuror of that name, performing in London in the year 1789, caused his wife to vanish from the top of a table-the very first time, it appeared, that this feat, uxorial or otherwise, had been accomplished without the aid of mirrors. To track his dark adversary’s nom de nuit to its historic lair gave Ellery his only glint of satisfaction until that blessed moment when light burst all around him and exorcised the darkness, Prince and all.
But this is chaos.
Our story properly begins not with our invisible character but with our dead one.
Miss Ypson had not always been dead; au contraire. She had lived for seventy-eight years, for most of them breathing hard. As her father used to remark, “She was a very active little verb.” Miss Ypson’s father was a professor of Greek at a small Midwestern university. He had conjugated his daughter with the rather bewildered assistance of one of his brawnier students, an Iowa poultry heiress.
Professor Ypson was a man of distinction. Unlike most professors of Greek, he was a Greek professor of Greek, having been born Gerasymos Aghamos Ypsilonomon in Polykhnitos, on the island of Mytilini, “where,” he was fond of recalling on certain occasions, “burning Sappho loved and sung”-a quotation he found unfailingly useful in his extracurricular activities; and, the Hellenic ideal notwithstanding, Professor Ypson believed wholeheartedly in immoderation in all things. This hereditary and cultural background explains the professor’s interest in fatherhood-to his wife’s chagrin, for Mr. Ypson’s own breeding prowess was confined almost exclusively to the barnyards on which her income was based; he held their daughter to be nothing less than a biological miracle.
The professor’s mental processes also tended to confuse Mrs. Ypson. She never ceased to wonder why, instead of shortening his name to Ypson, her husband had not sensibly changed it to Jones. “My dear,” the professor once replied, “you are an Iowa snob.”
“But nobody,” Mrs. Ypson cried, “can spell it or pronounce it!”
“This is a cross,” murmured Professor Ypson, “which we must bear with ypsilanti.”