Читать книгу The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart - 25 Titles in One Edition - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 86
ОглавлениеChapter I.
A Cigarette Case, a Shoe, and a Menu Card
It was three o'clock in the morning when we got back to the lake, and it was twenty minutes before Carpenter heard us and started the ferry across. Tish had lost her glasses in the excitement at the Sherman House, and she did not see that Carpenter had forgotten to put the bar across the end of the boat. Aggie and I screamed, but it was too late: she drove the car down the bank in the moonlight and she did not stop in time. The first we knew we were sitting waist-deep in Lake Penzance, with Tish still holding the steering wheel and the stars making little twinkles in our laps.
As Tish said afterward, it was a fit ending to a sensational night, but, what with the wetting aggravating Aggie's hay fever, and my having bitten through the side of my tongue when the machine struck the bottom of the lake, it more nearly finished us. The engine drowned with a gurgle, and after Carpenter's first yell there wasn't a sound. Then we heard him come to the end of the ferry-boat and look down at us, and the next moment he had dropped the lantern and was doubled up on the dock, laughing like the fool he is.
"Are you both there?" said Tish, without turning her head.
Aggie sneezed, as she always does after a shock, and a wave moved slowly in and raised the water level with my breastbone.
"We are both here," I said, with a bitterness that was natural under the circumstances. "No thanks to you, Tish Carberry. There's no fool like an old fool."
"What do you mean?" Tish demanded fiercely, twisting around in the water with her dust cap over her eye. "Who was it said I ought to buy the dratted thing? Drive it yourself if you think you can do any better."
"Row it," I corrected. "It's finished for good as a touring car, but by putting an awning over it we might make it into a tolerable gasoline launch."
Aggie was crying.
"I told you something would happen," she sniffled. "You'll kill us all yet, Tish Carberry —and me in my foulard silk that spots with a drop of rain!"
But Tish wasn't paying any attention. She picked up the wrench that she had kept by her as a sort of weapon and stood up on the seat Tish is a large woman.
"Abraham Carpenter," she snapped, with as much dignity as she could with her clothes glued to her, "if you do not stop that noise I will brain you."
Carpenter eased down gradually, and, holding his sides, he leaned over the end of the ferry.
"What'll I do, Miss Tish?" he asked, beginning to jerk again, but with an eye on the wrench. "I can go around to the other dock and get a rowboat, but it'll take time."
"Don't bother about the other dock," Tish snapped. "Get that board there on the ferry and put one end of it down to the automobile. Then turn your back."
That's the way we got out. I went up the board first, on my hands and knees, and barring a few splinters I got up very nicely. Aggie came next, and as the board was getting wet she had more trouble. But Tish had the worst, for by that time the board was as slippery as a toboggan; twice she got as far as the middle, only to slide back on her stomach, and the last time she refused to try again. She sat down on one of the seats, with the water up to her waist, and said that she was skinned alive, and that she wished there was a tide to come up and drown her and the miserable machine. We got her up finally by throwing her a rope to put under her arms, and once up she collapsed on the ferry-bench. It was then that Aggie missed the money. Carpenter had slid down the board and was preparing to salvage the cushions when Aggie clutched at her stocking and yelled.
"It's gone!" she screeched, and then she sat plump down on the floor of the ferry-boat and began to cry.
"What's gone?" Tish demanded.
"The money," Aggie said, feeling frantically around the tops of her shoes. "When we went over the edge something broke—I felt it—and the money's gone."
Tish had both her arms in the air and the rope over her shoulder, but she stopped struggling and stared at Aggie.
"Grone!" she said in an awful voice. "Aggie Pilkington, every dollar of that money was graft money. Only the prospect of stuffing it between that red-haired man's teeth has kept me alive through this terrible night. Don't tell me you've lost it."
"We can give him a check," said Aggie ' feebly.
"We can!" Tish snorted, and not another word did she say until Carpenter had taken us across the lake and we stood dripping on the front porch of the cottage, while Aggie got the key from under a flower-pot. Then Tish looked across the moonlit lake to where the cushions of the machine floated in a nest of stars at the end of the ferry-dock.
"We averaged thirty miles an hour coming home,!" she said triumphantly, "and for the first time I feel that I have mastered the machine."
Wet as we were, we remembered to put the lantern in the window as we had promised, and we thought we saw a skiff shoot out in the starlight from the other side of the lake. Tish and I took some hot milk, and Aggie had a raw egg and some more baking soda, and we went to bed. The stars were fading by that time, but after I got into bed I distinctly heard footsteps on the gravel below my window.
"Are you sure you said the first house on the left?" Tish called to me. And then we heard Mr. Ostermaier's voice from the upper window next door, and we knew it was all right. I crawled out and tried to see into the preacher's parlor, but the shade was partly down. I could only make out a sleeve of Mrs. Ostermaier's kimono. I was disappointed after all we had gone through.
She—Mrs. Ostermaier—came over the next morning after breakfast, while Aggie's foulard silk was hanging on the clothes-line. She had been down with the other cottagers, looking across to where the red leather of Tish's machine stuck up above water-level.
"Be careful," Tish said under her breath when she saw her; "she's got something' in her hand!"
"What a terrible accident, and how lucky nobody was hurt!" Mrs. Ostennaier began, holding the thing she was carrying against her skirt and staring from the three of us to Aggie's foulard. "The spots did run, didn't they? I told Mr. Ostennaier they would He thinks you are wonderful women, to go around the country as the three of you do at all hours of the night."
Just then the sunlight caught the thing she held in her hand, and I knew in a moment what it was—it was Mr. Lewis' silver cigarette case Tish saw it too, and ran her needle into her finger.
"We had an exciting night too," Mrs. Ostermaier went on. "Dear me, Miss Carberry, you've jabbed your finger!"
"An exciting night?" I asked, to keep her attention from Aggie Aggie had just seen the cigarette case and she had gone blue around the nose.
"Most exciting. About three o'clock this morning—about the time you three ladies were having such a dreadful experience—still, as couple came to our cottage and wakened Ostermaier. I think they threw gravel through the window. They wanted to be married."
Tish sat up and tried to look scandalized.
"I hope your husband didn't do it," she said. I had to pinch Aggie; she was leaning forward with her eyes bulging.
That put Mrs. Ostermaier on the defensive. "Why not?" she demanded. "They had a license, and they were of age. I believe in encouraging young love; Mr. Ostermaier says it is the most beautiful thing in the world. Cousin Maggie and I were witnesses, and we threw rice after them. It was barley, really, but we didn't discover that until this morning."
Aggie gave a sigh of relief; we had guessed, but it was the first time we had really known.
"I told Mr. Ostermaier that it gave me quite a thrill the way he looked at her as Harold pronounced them man and wife. "All the world loves a lover,' and Cousin Maggie has been reading Ella Wheeler Wilcox diligently all morning.
She turned to go and we breathed easier. Now that we knew they were safely married— Mrs. Ostermaier turned and started back.
"I nearly forgot what brought me," she called. "My Willie found this in the bed of your automobile, Miss Tish." She held out the cigarette case and Tish took it and dropped it into her work-basket.
"It belongs to my nephew, Charlie Sands," she said, looking Mrs. Ostermaier in the eye. Tish has plenty of courage, but I felt calamity coming.
"So I told Mr. Ostermaier,'' the creature said, with a smile. "But he insists on remarking the coincidence that the initials on the cigarette case are W. L. and that the young man's name on the license was Walter Lewis."
I have always thanked Heaven that at that moment her Willie fell off the dock, and although the child was not drowned, still, as Tish wrote to Maria Lee, her niece, "he had swallowed enough water to wash the initials off the tablets of his mother's memory." And so far as we know, although the papers came out with great headlines about the marriage, and another article about the post-office having been robbed—we had nothing whatever to do with that—and about three men disguised as women making their escape toward Canada in a red automobile and having run over a pig at Dorchester Junction—I told Tish at the time it was a pig, but she insisted it was a cow—although the papers came out with all this, nobody ever suspected the truth except Carpenter. He happened to find a menu from the Sherman House at Noblestown floating in the body of the car, and the good-for-nothing took a trip to the city and traced us.
He did not say anything, but about a week later he came to the cottage and put a package on the table in the kitchen.
"It's been puzzlin' me for four days. Miss Lizzie," he said, fumbling with the string of the bundle. "I sez to Mrs. C, sez I, 'It ain't possible,' I sez. 'She sez she lost her shoe when the automobile went into the water, and she's a truthful woman; and yet, two days after, the chambermaid at the Sherman House finds it high and dry under a bureau, forty miles away. It's spooky,' I sez."
Aggie was pouring hot water into the teapot, and she kept on pouring till it went all over the place.
"Nonsense," said Tish. "That shoe doesn't belong to Miss Lizzie,"
But I looked at Carpenter's face and I knew it was hopeless.
"You've been a good friend to us, Mr. Carpenter," I said "We've always felt we'-ve owed you something. Here's a little present, and thank you for the shoe."
He took the money and we looked each other straight in the eye. Then he grinned.
"For twenty dollars, Miss Lizzie," he said, "I'd be willing to swallow my tongue backward. And the shoe ain't the tongue kind."
