Going Going Gone Read online

  He couldn’t get it out of his mind. Asey thought as he turned the roadster around, that the telephone wire at Solatia’s had been cut the way that an angry woman might have hacked at it. Both that and the flat-tyre job were mean, scurvy little acts of sabotage, and the person who’d conceived the idea hadn’t logically thought the situation through. If you really wanted to stop someone from going somewhere, you should stop them – not their vehicle, or their means of communication.

  “Let’s see,” he murmured. “When you go plannin’ things against people to hurt ‘em or thwart ‘em, you most usually base your plans on what’d hurt or thwart you. The average man would be mad an’ hurt enough if his phone was cut an’ his tyres flattened, but would he feel thwarted enough so’s he wouldn’t go to an auction where he intended to buy things for a rich client, an’ make himself a big hunk of commission? Huh, if it was me, I’d be mad as hops. But I wouldn’t be thwarted none! On the contrariwise, I’d get over to that sale if I had to walk barefoot, an’ through hot coals!”

  But how would Mrs. Turnover figure it? How helpless would she feel with her tyres flat, and no way of calling anyone to fix them for her?

  He chuckled at the hilarious vision of the vast Mrs. Turnover attempting to bend over and change tyres in a hurry. Getting out a tyre pump and blowing up flat tyres was probably a task she’d never lifted a hand to, or even remotely considered undertaking. And he doubted, also, if she would seriously think of thumbing rides, if her own car were out of action.

  “I don’t hardly think,” he said aloud, “that she is the hitch-hikin’ type! Nope, she wouldn’t have contemplated hitchin’ as an alternative way of gettin’ over to that auction!”

  And it was a sure bet that in her wildest dreams, she’d never think of setting out to walk from Solatia’s over to her brother’s.

  Asey couldn’t even visualize her getting beyond the first hill.

  “Yes, if you flattened Mrs. Turnover’s tyres,” he told himself, “an’ cut her phone, she’d retreat into the livin’ room, plunk herself down into the widest chair, an’ weep with rage at havin’ been thwarted. Yessir, if you done that to her, that’d be enough sabotage to thwart her, all right. Partly because of the way she’d figger, but mostly on account of her size, an’ her not bein’ physically too active. Now, then, I wonder if it wouldn’t be just exactly the sort of thing she’d do to thwart someone else, particularly if the someone else was another woman!”

  He sped along the outskirts of town toward Solatia’s house again. He’d have to return and free Riley’s bound-up cop, if Hanson hadn’t arrived and already taken care of the fellow. He’d have to find out if the bicycle whose tyres he had deflated was still there, and if the cop had any inkling of who its rider had been.

  To-morrow, steps would have to be taken to locate the bald Harmsworth man whom Gardner had talked about. That would be a job for Hanson and his men, since Harmsworth was probably miles away from Cape Cod by now. He’d have to be found and questioned.

  To-morrow, too, he had all that knife business to look into, and the thought depressed him. It stood to reason that if anyone at the auction might have taken the thing, and if everyone for miles had come to the auction, he had considerable ground to cover.

  And to-morrow, he’d finally have to face the problem he’d been endeavouring not even to consider to-night.

  Those books!

  “Ugh!” he said. “Go on an’ say it, Mayo! Whoever put her into that chest had to take those books out of it first!”

  And no one had stumbled on any heap of books left over at Alden’s.

  There weren’t any unaccounted-for books anywhere, except over in the fresh-water pond.

  “An’ Ellen said there was nine girls at the auction that had their hair done up in pompadours. Nine! Nine of ‘em!”

  He sighed. He could always make out a list, he supposed, and go from pompadour to pompadour until he found the right girl!

  “Who was the girl?” he said in radio-announcer tones. “Who swiped the fish knife of John Alden from Cousin Jennie’s auction lot consisting of duck decoys, fishing tackle, Currier and Ives kittens, and a little walnut whatnot, now in very, very poor condition? Which Alden should Mayo believe and trust? And wouldn’t you get a minister for a witness, if you were a really bright murderer? Yes, kiddies, I think you would! And who was the man who biffed first? Who did the rope trick? And who was the man with the limp? Could it have been Chris Bede, whose ankle presumably had been injured in action?”

  After all, the fact remained that the person who might most have wanted to keep Solatia Spry away from the auction wasn’t Gardner Alden, who hadn’t bothered to bid except for the sea chest. Nor Mrs. Turnover, who might have been annoyed into venting her spite after Solatia disclaimed any knowledge of where John Alden’s money might have been hidden. Nor Al Dorking, who hadn’t apparently cared about the antiques, and didn’t have the money to buy them even if he had.

  The person who cared most was probably Mrs. James Fenimore Madison, who had actually got the things.

  And Chris Bede was engaged to Mrs. Madison’s daughter, according to Al.

  Could Chris, acting on Mrs. Madison’s behalf, have been making away with something from Solatia’s house?

  It was possible, of course. It was even likely. For there was something about a murder, as Cummings often remarked, that was inclined to inspire people to retrieve their possessions from what the doctor summed up as the more or less immediate vicinity of the corpse, including the late domicile. Letters, for example, whether or not they were particularly incriminating documents, suddenly loomed in people’s minds as something to be recovered at all costs. Pieces of wearing apparel, trinkets, jewellery, sometimes miscellaneous objects like rubber plants or umbrella stands or cuckoo clocks; things that hadn’t been thought of in years, all at once acquired a new meaning for the original owner, who wanted his property back instantly, in a rush. Not usually for any specific purpose, as Cummings never tailed to add. But the relief that people felt at rescuing their things seemed to outbalance the effort – and oftentimes the danger – involved.

  On the other hand, Asey told himself, Mrs. Madison shouldn’t have had any problems with Solatia, ever, or have feared her presence at the auction. The Madison money could always have outbid Solatia, any time.

  The thing that really bothered him most, he decided, was that while everyone seemed to want to tell their story and their ideas, what they’d done and said and thought, and why, nobody ever mentioned that they’d seen Solatia Spry at the auction!

  If Mrs. Turnover could remember the missing teeth of a clam hoe, if Al Darking could recall the exact bids on a lot of worn-out pails and fishing tackle, why hadn’t either of them remembered Solatia? That everyone spoke of the items sold, and not of seeing the murdered woman at the sale, was significant in itself.

  Jennie was ordinarily very accurate in her observations. Jennie had said flatly that Solatia wasn’t there.

  But the chest was.

  And if the chest was there, Solatia Spry must have been there, too!

  Perhaps, he thought, Cummings had been right. Perhaps it had all been done with a lot of mirrors!

  “My trouble,” he murmured, “is that I shouldn’t take vacations. I ought to have stayed right there where I belonged in the Porter plant!”

  Something seemed wrong with the highway, and he realized that he had absent-mindedly been driving with only his parking lights on.

  He pulled out the light button, and as the long beam flashed on, he at once swerved to avoid the object – probably a skunk, he thought – which he saw lying in the road ahead. He passed to one side of it, then braked quickly, and backed up.

  It wasn’t a skunk.

  It was a book.

  “Huh!” he said, and climbed out of the car to investigate.

  It wasn’t just a book, as he held it up to the car headlights.

  It was a fat volume of Harper’s Magazine, bound in three-quarter blue
morocco. On the marbled board opposite the flyleaf was an engaved armorial bookplate which bore the name of John Alden.

  After studying it for a moment, Asey closed the book and thoughtfully surveyed the rather ornately tooled backstrip, and the stamped date – 1892.

  Then he tossed the book into the roadster, and looked around.

  There was no fog, but the night air was definitely on the damp side, and there were little curling mists rising from the meadow beyond.

  Yet that morocco binding was quite dry. The book hadn’t been lying on the road long enough to pick up any of the dampness.

  “Huh!” he said as he got into the car and started again. “Huh!”

  A hundred yards ahead, he found another volume.

  That was bound in three-quarter red morocco, and bore the date 1899.

  At the fork in the road below Solatia Spry’s house, he found a third.

  That was green, vintage of 1896.

  On impulse, instead of continuing along the main highway, he took the side road that led to Weesit.

  Before he reached Weesit Centre, he had an even twenty volumes of old, morocco-bound Harper’s Magazines in the car beside him. All were from the library of the late John Alden, and bore his bookplate.

  At the Weesit Four Corners, he stopped and considered.

  Twenty volumes was a nice round number of volumes, and just about as many old bound Harper’s Magazines as anyone might be likely to have around a house. Yes, twenty volumes ought to be about the limit!

  But a little practical detective work with his flashlight proved that he had many extensive gaps in the eighteen-nineties. If John Alden had a full run or a complete set, there should be plenty more of those fat volumes lying around in the middle of one road or another.

  Eighteen wooden arms, each one of them designating a possible route, stuck out from the Four Corners signpost.

  Which road should he take?

  He had, Asey decided, too wide a choice to leave his decision to anything but fate. So he said “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo” at the wooden arms, and came out with the West Weesit shore road.

  And drew a blank.

  The East Weesit road was also bare of books.

  But on the South Weesit road, universally known as “The-through-the-woods-one,” he picked up the trail once again.

  By the time he reached the South Weesit post office and general store, he had harvested the thirty-sixth volume of John Alden’s Harper’s set.

  Continuing on into West Skaket, he found the forty-third. Just to be different, that was bound in three-quarter black morocco, instead of colours.

  After driving on three miles without finding any trace of the forty-fourth, Asey turned the roadster around and started back home.

  “Wa-el,” he drawled, surveying the books with which he was virtually surrounded, “it’s a nice way to have got rid of ‘em, I’ll grant that! Easy, restful – just drive along an’ toss one off as the spirit moves you. A lot less labour involved than throwin’ ‘em into ponds. An’ I s’pose if you happened to change your mind, you could always backtrack an’ pick ‘em all up again!”

  Most of the books had been found between Weesit and South Weesit, even though the trail had started over by Solatia Spry’s. He wondered if that meant anything more than that someone’s arm had been more active around the Weesits than elsewhere.

  One thing he was sure of, the books couldn’t have a lot of significance in themselves. If John Alden’s old Harper’s Magazines meant anything as books, they never would have been left out in plain sight for the world to find. While the value of old books was a little out of his line, he was willing to wager that the cost of the fancy rebinding job was more than the original cost of the magazines, and that their probable current value would be based not on what the bindings had cost but on their worth as magazines. Plenty of them had been printed. They couldn’t be considered rare. And as reading material now – Asey shook his head. They were nothing he’d personally choose to while away an evening with. Probably their greatest value at the moment would be to someone who wanted to fill up a lot of empty bookshelves with books that had pretty bindings.

  Even if Quinton Sharp had a record of the purchaser – for he assumed that these hooks must have been sold with the rest of Alden’s possessions that afternoon – that record still wouldn’t help a great deal. Whoever had bought them had only to protest stoutly that he hadn’t seen the volumes since he took them home and stuck them in the shed. If Asey Mayo had found them strewn like autumn leaves around the roads, why then someone else had filched them and done the strewing, not them! And unless anyone had actually witnessed the book – tossing process at some point, all of Hanson’s experts probably couldn’t prove differently.

  He chuckled as he thought of what a fine story Gardner Alden, for example, might make of it, had he only been caught in the act of disposing of the volumes. “My dear little old white-haired grandmother,” Asey murmured sardonically, “she always used to throw books hither an’ yon on the Weesit roads, every spring. When I was a wee lad, I used to help her. So to-night, I was doin’ it – such a silly, sentimental gesture as it must seem to you, too – for the very last time!”

  He knew one other thing. None of the books had been on any of the roads very long. At least, not long enough to have succumbed to the dampness. They were all comparatively freshly strewn.

  “Huh!” he said. “Forty-three fresh-laid tomes, an’ all – golly, I wonder!”

  He stopped the car suddenly, snapped on his flashlight, and poked around among the books until he found both the last, black-bound volume, and the first, red-bound copy of 1892.

  Because he’d spotted the first book over near Solatia’s, he’d taken for granted the fact that the book trail began there. But if the black book were appreciably damper than the red book, then the former and not the latter might have marked the beginning of the trail.

  He found, on comparing the two copies, that there was practically no difference to the naked eye. It was probably stupid of him to hope that he could tell if one book had been outdoors in the open fifteen minutes longer than another book, he thought as he snapped off the flashlight. If Cumming’s couldn’t tell how long Solatia Spry had been dead when they found her in the chest, who was he to go making wild speculations about inanimate objects?

  “But if you dropped off the black book first,” he said aloud, “an’ ended up with the red, then you’d be over by Solatia’s when you finished. I don’t think you’d come home the same way. I know I wouldn’t. I think you’d be pretty sure to avoid the books you’d left behind you, more or less on general principles. If people seen you swervin’ around them tomes, they might be suspicious of such an uncurious person. An’ if you found someone else pickin’ ‘em up, the temptation to toss ‘em back again might be too great for you to overcome. Yup, I think you’d be comin’ back to where you started by some different route.”

  And if the person was like everyone else, his gasoline problems would have prevented him from driving too far before starting to carry out his book-disposal project.

  “On the other hand, you wouldn’t have wanted to keep the books with you in your car any longer than you had to,” Asey said, “an’ still you wouldn’t have wanted to start in strewin’ right outside your own doorstep. Now, I wonder! If you started from this end, with the black-bound book I picked up last, an’ if you run out of books with the red one over by Solatia’s, an if you had to come back by devious an’ sundry ways, would you have had the time to be back here now? I wonder!”

  Mentally, he traced all possible routes from Solatia’s to a point beyond the spot where he’d found the black book.

  Then a grin spread over his face.

  To an outlander, to someone who didn’t know those curving roads, the thing would seem incredible, he thought as he turned the roadster around.

  But in order to avoid bumping into any of the books he’d dropped behind him, someone would have to weave and circle and d
etour about eight times his original mileage from black book to red book!

  And a false turn or two would run it up to ten or even twelve times.

  Even he, himself, Asey thought, for all he knew of the roads, would probably make a mistake or two unless he’d thought it all out very carefully beforehand. And just one mistake would more than make up in time for his own forty-three stops, and his flounderings around the Four Comers in Weesit Centre.

  Three minutes later, he was slowing down at a fork in the road several hundred yards beyond the point where the black book had been lying.

  Probably it was just a wild stab in the dark, and a lot depended on how nearly he and the book tosser had missed each other over by Solatia’s. But according to his calculations, anyone who’d gone as far as the red book – would have to return by this fork if they hadn’t returned by the book-lined route.

  There simply wasn’t any other way! He parked the roadster square across the road, got out, strolled over to a stone wall, and sat down.

  He had just finished lighting his pipe when he saw the dimmed-out headlights of a car approaching up the fork to his right.

  A beachwagon arrived at the barrier, and stopped.

  It was an elegant and very de luxe beachwagon, and he recognized it even before the door was opened, when an inside light flashed on and provided enough of a glow for him to read the name lettered on the side.

  “The Shack,” it said.

  It was Mrs. Madison’s beachwagon.

  And at the sight of the driver, leaning out and peering impatiently ahead at the parked roadster, Asey got up and gravely kicked himself.

  He should have figured out that one!

  For the girl in Mrs. Madison’s beachwagon was the girl with the pompadour, the original book thrower!

  “An’ who is she, kiddies?” Asey murmured under his breath. “Who? Miss Polly Madison, of course!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “CHARLES!” the girl said.

  Asey craned his neck to catch sight of the person she was speaking to. He turned out to be a wizened little man in a chauffeur’s uniform sitting beside her.