The Classic Mystery Novel Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  DEATH IN THE BACK SEAT, by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  THE SIXTH SENSE, by Stephen McKenna

  NO CLUE, by James Hay

  THE WINNING CLUE, by James Hay, Jr.

  The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The Classic Msytery Novel MEGAPACK® is copyright © 2016 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

  * * * *

  The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

  * * * *

  The Sixth Sense, by Stephen McKenna, was originally published in 1915.

  Death in the Back Seat, by Dorothy Cameron Disney, was originally published in 1936.

  No Clue, by James Hay, was originally published in 1919.

  The Winning Clue, by James Hay, was originally published in 1920.

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  For this volume, we are pleased to present 4 classic mystery novels, originally published between 1915 and 1936. Hours of great reading await you.

  Enjoy!

  —John Betancourt

  Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  ABOUT THE SERIES

  Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

  The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

  RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

  Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the MEGAPACK® ebook series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://wildsidepress.forumotion.com/ (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

  Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

  TYPOS

  Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

  If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [email protected] or use the message boards above.

  DEATH IN THE BACK SEAT, by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  Copyright © 1936 by Random House, Inc.

  DEDICATION

  For Mac

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hilltop House

  Jack and I returned to New York a month ago. It is dull but we like it. Our friends come to see us, crowd our small apartment, drink our liquor and talk endlessly of books and plays and life and generalities. No one ever mentions our stay in the country. So far as the crowd is concerned, the entire State of Connecticut has fallen under a conversational ban.

  But, as is natural, everyone thinks and wonders about those confused and dreadful events which occurred so long ago and yet so recently. I think, too. Memories get in my way and spoil my sleep. I pound my pillow and close my eyes, and there rises before me in the darkness a big white house, gaunt and stark against a barren hill; there comes to my ears the ghostly echo of a dog’s wild barking: and I fancy that I can smell once more the peculiar, unmistakable odor of earth, freshly dug.

  Small things bother me: the unexpected rustle of a newspaper, the stir of a curtain at the window, the sound of a footfall in the hall outside our living room. I find it hard to sit quietly when the doorbell rings, and I’ve developed a passion for buying lamps and keeping them brightly lighted.

  My nervous system isn’t what it was, Jack, my husband, who is sensitive, imaginative and, in addition, a grand guy, knows that. It was he who suggested I write this story. We talked the matter out, and borrowing from the psychologists, finally decided that for me perhaps the best way to forget would be first to remember. Once I set down on paper a record of everything which occurred between the 20th of last March and the 9th of April. I trust and believe my mind will be free at last.

  On the second day of January, exactly six months ago, Jack and I changed our post-office address from New York City to Crockford, Connecticut. Our plan, and a good plan it seemed, was that Jack should paint, that I should write, that we should live simply and save large sums of money. We knew very little about Connecticut, and our first information concerning Crockford was gathered from the following dignified advertisement in The Nation:

  Colonial cottage, dating back to 1760, charmingly furnished, modern conveniences, 35 acres of beautiful hilly country, advantages of Long Island Sound, $30 a month—Luella Coatesnash, Hilltop House, Crockford, Conn.

  In print the proposition sounded perfect. We favored both price and location. Our budget wouldn’t cover guests, and we hoped to avoid expensive and riotous weekends. At the tag end of two city years, we had wearied of liquor bills, hangover mornings and Bohemia’s doubtful pleasures, and longed for the reputed peace and quiet of country life.

  Crockford, Connecticut, 27 miles beyond New Haven, is more than 100 miles from New York and is difficult to reach except by motor car, although buses do leave New Haven twice daily. The cottage described in the advertisement was six miles from Crockford, long, country miles along a rutted country road. On a December afternoon, accompanied by a dyspeptic, melancholy real-estate agent, we inspected the cottage. It was a small square house of the salt-box type; it sat primly at the foot of a steeply climbing hill; it looked very clean, sedate and beautiful against the snow-white landscape. Enchanted by our first glimpse of an unspoiled New England, Jack and I caught each other’s hands and stared open-mouthed. Yellow pines encircled the cottage; a flagged path led to its lovely fan-light door; a stone fence neatly framed the cottage, the pines and a minute patch of land. In recollection the whole day stands forth as singularly gay and foolish.

  “What’s the fence for?” Jack asked.

  “Maybe it’s to keep out wolves.”

  “What if there aren’t any wolves?”

  “Never mind. We’ll have each other.”

  Ten days later we moved in. The loneliness and isolation were pleasant in the beginning. We enjoyed owning a telephone which seldom rang and looking out upon a road where the simultaneous passage of two cars constituted a traffic jam. We delighted in undressing shamelessly, with no thought of lowering the window shades. Everything was different, fresh, exciting—the sweeping distances of hills and trees, the sparkling air, the deep cathedral quiet, the early darkness which fell swiftly like a curtain.

  The modern conveniences turned out to be a small, undependable bathroom and electric lights. Floor plugs were entirely absent and the fixtures were horrible, bulbous affairs hung from ceilings so low that for a time Jack, who is tall, threatened to make immediate alterations with an ax. “If I crack my head once more, Lola, that living-room dingus goes. You needn’t laugh. I mean it.”

  “You’ll learn to duck.”

  He did learn. Also, later on, we learned something about the erratic quality of rural electric power. City born and bred, serenely unaware of the complexities of country ex
istence, we didn’t dream that our power would fail with every heavy rain and that we would spend many a stormy night in the dark. Nor could we anticipate the havoc which thunderstorms would play with telephone wires.

  While I mastered oil-stove cookery, quite a trick in itself, and while Jack cautiously investigated wood chopping, the first month slipped past. Various unexpected irritations developed. We ran out of cigarettes at odd hours and missed the corner delicatessen. Also we discovered that our budget had been exceedingly optimistic. The Crockford tradespeople, to the last man labored under the misapprehension that New Yorkers could and would pay double for everything.

  Then there was the pipeless furnace which Jack, softened by years of apartment dwelling, found an insoluble mystery. After two weeks, when we alternately burned and froze, he threw up his hands and we hired Silas Elkins, local talent recommended by our landlady. Silas was a thin, gangling individual, habitually dressed in overalls, usually accompanied by a small, timid, sand-colored dog. One look at Silas convinced me that he was incompetent, and further acquaintanceship failed to change my mind. In addition, he had bad manners, arrogance and an astounding conceit. Except for himself, so far as I know, he admired only one person in the world—and that person was Luella Coatesnash. Long before I first laid eyes on him, he had adopted all her ways and notions as his own. He quoted her almost daily and did everything in his power to force our regime to duplicate hers. Nearly every day I would hear him and Jack engaged in battle.

  “You’re using too much coal,” Jack would begin mildly.

  “If you folks would go to bed at nine o’clock when other folks do and not want heat till twelve…”

  “But we do want heat till twelve, and we aren’t up at six when you fire the furnace.”

  “Mrs. Coatesnash has her furnace fired at six sharp. She’s had it done at six o’clock for twenty years.”

  Silas continued to adjust our heat and, consequently, our habits, in the manner he considered fitting. We retired earlier and rose earlier. We hadn’t the money to import labor, and it was, for all practical purposes anyway, impossible to replace Silas; poor as they were, the families living in and around Crockford did not work out. They would sell us fresh eggs, chickens, home-made jellies at prodigious prices, but they declined to clear the snow from our driveway or wash our windows. All such chores fell to Silas. He was the handy man—if the term is loosely applied—for the vicinity. Perched atop a battered bicycle, he pedaled about on neighborhood errands, doing each task arrogantly, stupidly, inefficiently.

  His total unawareness of his own limitations was perhaps his most exasperating quality. In some mysterious fashion he had convinced himself he was an instinctive, untaught master of all trades. He told Jack how to paint, he told me how to write. I caught him one morning telling a county road surveyor how to straighten out a curve in the road. On another occasion after assuring me he was an expert plumber, he spent four solid hours in a fruitless attempt to repair a leaky water tap.

  I find myself painting an unpleasant picture, and that first month, colored in recollection with the glitter of frosty stars, the smell of wood smoke and the soft constant flutter of snow at the windows was, in many respects, perfect. Jack and I got a great deal done. From nine until twelve we worked, calling encouragement back and forth. Lunch over, we hurried into coats and galoshes and explored the countryside. Sometimes we took the car, mostly we walked, since Jack liked to carry his pad and sketch a clump of bright red berries, or a stone wall tangled in leafless briars, or a tattered scarecrow, forlorn and desolate in the midst of winter. In the evenings we amused ourselves with the radio and spirited games of double Canfield.

  From Silas and a Mr. Brown who delivered our coal we heard rumors of the gay whirl in Crockford—box suppers held monthly at Town Hall, bi-weekly basketball games in the high-school gymnasium, an occasional old-fashioned dance. A town band practiced discordantly once a week, and Silas, who played the cornet, was a regular attendant at these musical festivals. There was even a Wednesday-night and a Saturday-night movie. No one suggested that we take any part in the village activities, and it didn’t occur to us to do so. Thus, quite innocently and unknowingly, we gained for ourselves the reputation of being a stand-offish city pair, stuck-up and queer.

  If there had been near neighbors, I might have taken the trouble to call. But the cottage was peculiarly isolated. The next house on the road, visible in daylight through a band of separating trees, belonged to Henry Olmstead a New Haven architect, and was occupied by him and his family only during the summer months. On the other side, the west side, sprawled a tumble down windowless ruin part of an estate tied up in family litigation.

  That left as neighbors Mrs. Coatesnash our landlady, and Laura Twining, officially her companion but actually maid, cook, masseuse and overworked slavey. Three-quarters of a mile to the north of the cottage, in solitary grandeur, the two women lived in the thirty-room dwelling designated formally as Hilltop House.

  Famous locally and built by the first Coatesnash who had emigrated from England to the colonies, Hilltop House clung to the opposite side of the hill which our home faced It was decidedly more impressive for sheer size than for beauty; generations of additions had destroyed any original grace or dignity. In June the dwelling would be mercifully hidden in a thicket of box and oak. In January, looking up and across the rocky, ascending pasture land we could see the upper story of the mansion’s three stories, a row of shuttered windows, a towering chimney shaft and a gingerbread cupola adorned by scroll work which somewhat resembled the crocheted edging my mother used to sew on underwear.

  Except for the day we signed our lease, we viewed Hilltop House from a distance. Mrs. Coatesnash was an unsocial woman who made it plain that she desired no traffic with impecunious young tenants.

  Laura Twining, the companion, was another matter. She had lived ten long years in the country and she loved an audience. We became the audience, more often than we chose. I liked Laura, or perhaps I only pitied her, and I willingly admitted that a little of her company went a long way. Jack frankly detested her. He likes good-looking women. Laura had a kind of peasant stoutness, pale, watering eyes, a prominent shiny nose, and a general air of having slept in her clothes. Her mannerisms were those of the socially insecure. She batted her eyes, she smoothed her hair, she patted her skirts, she straightened her stocking seams, and never got comfortably seated in a chair.

  Almost every afternoon one of us would spy Laura striding down the pasture footpath, her thick body bulging in a coon coat, her untidy gray hair straggling from beneath a shapeless hat, her homely face wreathed in the happy smile of a lady about to pay a call. Jack would groan, and I would feel an inward sinking. Neither of us had the heart to be unkind; and when you live in the country, people know you are at home. They look in your yard and see your car.

  Consequently we were often bored. Laura’s mind had a remarkably tenacious grasp of the obvious, the trivial, the dull. And she was extravagantly loquacious. Commonplace tales of her poverty-stricken childhood in the Middle West and later struggles in New York poured forth in an endless stream; she dwelt tirelessly upon the ten good years spent with Luella Coatesnash.

  “It’s been a quiet life perhaps, but my future is provided for. I don’t have to worry about my old age, and that’s something in times like these, isn’t it?”

  Jack sighed. “You’re fortunate.”

  “Indeed I am. If Luelia were only a bit more sociable I’d be perfectly satisfied, perfectly. Not that one can blame Luelia. She lost her only child you know, a lovely girl, and since then she’s never really been the same. In the old days, I’m told, she entertained on a grand scale, caterers from New York, flowers from Bromley’s in New Haven, solid gold plate…”

  Laura’s eyes glowed, a little color tinted her cheeks. She possessed the curbed, thwarted instincts of hospitality, and a rather pitiful groping toward a full and gracious ex
istence. She read family magazines and clipped out recipes, poems, bits of homely philosophy. Her purse and conversation bulged with such items.

  Absorbed in our own concerns, Jack and I gave her the dry crumbs of companionship and listened to all she had to say with scarcely half an ear. For two months she sat at our fire, drank our tea, told us about herself, and at the end of the relationship we were to discover that we knew virtually nothing of the real Laura Twining. She struck us as anything but an interesting or a mysterious figure.

  I think now a part of our blindness may have lain in the fact that we never saw her in her own setting. It was impossible for her to invite us to Hilltop House—no one set foot upon the sacred grounds without a definite invitation from the grande dame herself—and Laura keenly felt this unhappy situation.

  I remember the day when Jack offered to accompany her home.

  Instantly she became distressed and agitated. “It isn’t at all necessary. It’s just a step.”

  “I’d like to stretch my legs.”

  Her protests redoubled; eventually Jack woke up, said dryly, “Suppose I take you as far as the bend in the road.”

  “That will be lovely.” She couldn’t let the matter drop so easily, but must add the explanation, the painful apology. “I do wish I were differently situated. I’d love to have you visit me, but people upset Luelia. She sees almost no one.”

  “I understand.”

  I have said we entered Hilltop House on the day we signed our lease. We didn’t realize then how unusual was the occasion, nor were we particularly impressed. Although Mrs. Coatesnash was the wealthiest woman in the county, most of the mansion year in and year out was kept thriftily closed. I daresay the two women habitually used no more than three of the thirty-odd rooms.

  On the occasion of our call the drawing-room was opened—a lofty room paneled in oak, hung with fading tapestries, a somber and pathetic reminder of a magnificent past. The furniture which crowded the place was a history of American and English cabinet-making, but it was also shabby, worn, in need of repair. A long-silenced grand piano displayed the depredations of mice; a Chippendale sofa lacked a leg and was propped up with books; a Duncan Phyfe table was cracked down the middle. Dust lay thick in corners, powdered the velvet draperies and blurred a lovely gilt mirror which reflected the room. The crystal chandeliers—there were three—had no more sparkle than unwashed windows. I should add that I kept on my coat. The house was bitterly cold.