Going Going Gone Read online

  “I’m sure it was,” Asey agreed, and knew it wasn’t the retort she expected him to make. She’d expected him to ask a lot of questions.

  “Well, good-bye.” She took a few steps up the path, and then paused. They really were my books, you know,” she said suddenly. “I mean, I bought them, and they were my property, and all mat. I just didn’t happen to want them around any more. They were mine to dispose of, and – well, I just disposed of them.”

  “It was my feelin’,” Asey said, “that you’d never go to all that work disposin’ of someone else’s books.”

  “But it must have looked frightfully silly to you, though,” she sad. “Just watching those books plop into the water. Well, good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” Asey said.

  She picked up the hampers again, and departed.

  Asey listened to the sound of her footsteps dying away, and chuckled.

  “Wa-el.” he said to himself, “if a batch of sixty-odd books is missin’, I know where they can be found. Now, for Pete’s sakes, what—”

  On the opposite shore of the pond a figure had appeared, the figure of a tall man in a grey suit, with a brief case cuddled under his arm.

  “Is that man tryin’ to haunt me?” Asey murmured. “What ‘n time is he up to – huh, maybe he’s plannin’ to toss away into the pond whatever it is that’s been bulgin’ out his brief case so!”

  But Gardner Arden set the brief case down carefully on the sand, and then, kneeling at the water’s edge, he proceeded to wash his hands.

  If he were washing a particularly dirty frying pan, Asey thought, he couldn’t take any more pains, or work at it any harder. He seemed almost to be scouring his hands with sand.

  And then, with great care, he washed his handkerchief.

  Asey shook his head. To hear Quinton Sharp talk, Gardner Alden was so determined to get hold of his brother John’s antiques, he was all set to commit any crime in order to possess them. But here, in the middle of an auction when everything should be at fever heat, when fur should be flying in handfuls, here was Gardner Alden washing his hands and his handkerchief in a nearby pond!

  I was absolutely no accounting for tastes, he decided, or for the odd things people chose to do. But compared with Gardner Alden and the girl with the fancy pompadour hair-do, Jennie’s old lady who liked to kiss her pig was a piker of the first water!

  “I give up!” he said, and leaned back against the log. It was after five o’clock when he roused himself, walked back to where he had left the roadster, and drove over to the Alden house.

  He had fully expected to find a tired, exhausted crowd milling around, talking and bickering and reminiscing, and making involved preparations to lug their new possessions home.

  Instead there was only Jennie, impatiently pacing up and down the front walk!

  “Where’ve you been?” she demanded. “Asey, I thought you’d never come – and you’d ought to have stayed! The most exciting thing happened!”

  “You get the hundred millions in loose bills?” Asey asked.

  “All I bought,” Jennie said, “was a real sweet Currier – just a lithograph of some kittens – hurry, we got to get right home quick!”

  “You mean, all we got to cart away is a picture of a few cats?” Asey returned. “I don’t believe it! What else did you buy?”

  “Only a little walnut whatnot. A really small one. The upper shelf’s sort of broken, but nothin’ a bit of glue and stain won’t fix up. And a tin of old-time dog food for Joe – see? It’s all I’m goin’ to take along now. The picture and the whatnot can wait.” Jennie got into the roadster and slammed the door. “Hustle home quick as you can while I tell you about the excitin’ part! How much d’you suppose an old sea chest went for?”

  “How much?” Asey asked obediently.

  “Three thousand dollars!”

  Asey whistled. “Three thousand dollars? For a sea chest?”

  “Three thousand! Think of it! You see what happened, Asey, that rich Mrs. Madison bought up the china and the best antiques. Nobody could bid against her. She just sat there with a suitcaseful of bills. Miss Spry didn’t come – I guess she thought she could fool people by havin’ someone else bid for her. Anyway, Mrs. Madison walked off with the best things before you could say Jack Robinson. That’s why things was over so soon. I thought the expensive things would be exciting,” Jennie sounded a little regretful, “but they weren’t at all. The corned beef and the tyres got people a lot more worked up! Why, one tin—”

  “What kind of sea chest was it?” Asey interrupted.

  “I’m comin’ to that., It was just a plain, ordinary, everyday sea chest – nowhere near as good as any of yours. I guess Sharp or one of his men must’ve mislaid it, because they brought it in just before the end. Sharp said what was he offered, and Gardner Alden said two thousand – just like that. Just like it was twenty cents. Then Mrs. Madison said twenty-one, and Alden looked at her a moment and said three.”

  “But why, Jennie? What was in it?”

  “That,” Jennie said, “is why I wish you’d drive faster. Nobody knows what’s in it!”

  “Look here, you can’t mean that Gardner Alden paid three thousand dollars for a common sea chest that wasn’t opened – why didn’t Sharp open it? He always opens everything!”

  “Well, he couldn’t open this,” Jennie said, “because it happened to be locked. Had a spring lock – one of the old-fashioned kind we used to have on the buttery, remember? For no reason at all, it’d spring locked while someone was in skimmin’ the milk. Anyway, Sharp said it’d been open earlier in the day – ‘course, he tried to open it, and they brought out a lot of keys, but none of ‘em fit. Sharp said the chest was full of books—”

  “Books?” Asey broke in. “Books? Books?”

  “You sound like an old parrot,” Jennie told him. “He said books. Old books. When they couldn’t get it open, Sharp come right out and said, ‘Well, it was open, and there’s nothing inside but books I wouldn’t pay (anybody a thin dime for.’ He didn’t hint around it might be where John Alden’s money was, or anything like that, and I’ll have to admit he looked more surprised than anyone when Gardner Alden bid that first two thousand! I thought for a minute he was going to tell his men to take the chest away. He was upset enough so he stumbled in his talk – and you know yourself. Sharp never stumbles! Nothin’ ever trips him!”

  “So!” Asey said softly. “So they brought on the sea chest last, kind as an afterthought, an’ it was locked an’ couldn’t be opened, an’ Gardner Alden paid three thousand for it, smack like that! Huh! I wonder, now, if maybe Quinton Sharp maybe hadn’t perhaps sort of succumbed to Gardner Alden’s blandishments he was bein’ so powerful righteous about when he spoke with me!”

  “No blandishin’ about it, Sharp didn’t want to sell it to him!” Jennie said. “He kept lookin’ at Mrs. Madison, hopin’ she’d make another bid, but she didn’t. Honestly, Sharp was lookin’ around as if he hoped to goodness someone would jump out of a bush and say thirty-one hundred, so Alden wouldn’t get it. You s’pose, Asey, they might’ve been valuable books no one knew about? Like that Walt Whitman book that school teacher once bought over in Harwich for a dime that was worth so awful much?”

  “I wouldn’t know – didn’t Alden make any effort to bid in any of the good antiques?”

  “He hardly lifted up his voice. The Pitkin girl did, though. Everyone knows she hasn’t a lot of money, but she had her courage with her. She bid. And Mrs. Madison didn’t ride her down on things she didn’t want herself, either. And a bald man I never seen before, he bid a lot – I think he was biddin’ for Solatia Spry. I can’t wait to find out what’s inside that sea chest – hurry, Asey! Drive faster and get along home!”

  “Why home?” Asey wanted to know. “Why should you be findin’ out anythin’ there? Is somebody goin’ to telephone you?”

  “I keep tryin’ and tryin’ to tell you,” Jennie said in exasperation, “but you keep distractin�
�� me with a lot of fool questions! Don’t you see, I remembered your keys! All those keys out in the woodshed! So I went up to Gardner Alden and told him we had keys that’d open the chest. He didn’t seem to care a snap, and just thanked me – what did you say?”

  “Nothin’ – go on.”

  “But Quin Sharp was there,” Jennie said, “and he overheard and he thought it was a fine idea. He said since they had to take the chest away in his beachwagon anyhow, since Gardner Alden didn’t have a car here, why then they’d just stop off at our house and get it opened up, so’s he could put the contents down for his record. Sharp said considerin’ the price Alden paid, he ought to put down in his records somethin’ more than ‘One sea chest, supposedly containing books.’ He said at least he ought to know how many books, and if maybe there might’ve been anything else inside there. So he and Alden’ve driven over with the chest to our house, and they’re waitin’ there for you to get your keys – now, will you hurry up?”

  Asey’s foot went down on the accelerator.

  “They said at the auction,” Jennie went on, “that Quin Sharp and his brother’ve been sleepin’ over at Alden’s of nights, lately, and that they’ve been through everythin’ with a fine-tooth comb, tryin’ to find the money before the auction. You s’pose they might’ve found it, and put it into the chest themselves, and then somehow Gardner Alden found out, and that’s why he bid so high to begin with?”

  “If there was any money tucked away, an’ if they found it,” Asey said, “I don’t hardly think they’d stick it into somethin’ to be auctioned off to the public. After all, would you? But on the other hand, the Sharps are pretty honest. They’re shrewd traders, an’ they’d take the rear molars out of their grandmother’s mouth on a business deal. Still, I think of ‘em as bein’ honest. This all seems pretty peculiar to me, Jennie! Three thousand dollars is a lot of money. You don’t shoot that much—”

  “Look in our yard!” Jennie interrupted as Asey swung up the lane. “There’s Sharp’s beachwagon, and Sharp, and Alden – look, two other cars, too! Who’s that fat woman? I saw her at the auction. And that fellow beside her is that Al Dorking, John’s sister that died’s son. My, doesn’t that fat woman look mad!”

  Quinton Sharp hurried over to Asey as he got out of the roadster.

  “Am I,” he said with feeling, “glad to see you! Asey, let introduce you – this is Gardner Alden, John’s brother.”

  Alden nodded perfunctorily.

  “And this’s Al Dorking, John’s nephew.”

  Dorking put out his hand and said, “How do you do, sir?”

  “And this,” Sharp went on, “is Mrs. Turnover, John’s younger sister.”

  The plump woman glared at Asey, and didn’t make any comment.

  “Jennie’s probably told you,” Sharp said, “that Mr. Alden paid a large-sum for a sea chest, and he’s agreed with me that perhaps we ought to open it—”

  “Gardner knew where the money was!” Mrs. Turnover interrupted explosively. “It isn’t fair! That money should have been divided up between us three heirs – shouldn’t it, Al?”

  “I think Uncle John knew what he was doing when he made his will, Aunt Harriet.” Dorking might have an oversized nose and a slight squint, but he had a pleasant voice, Asey thought. And his air of quiet amusement was in pleasant contrast to Gardner Alden’s tight-lipped silence and Mrs. Turnover’s bubbling wrath.

  “Gardner never would have bid so much if he hadn’t known John’s money was in that chest! He knew we couldn’t pay any such enormous sum as that, and everyone knows John was worth half a million, and I’m going to call my lawyer and have him sue—”

  “Uncle Gard bought the chest, Aunt Harriet,” Dorking said. “It’s his, and everything in it is his – be reasonable! Even if you and I had guessed that there might be money in the sea chest, we never could have outbid him! I don’t think,” he added quickly, as Mrs. Turnover seemed about to erupt again, “that there’s the slightest question of ownership involved, is there, Mr. Mayo?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Asey said. “Now, I’ll go get the keys—”

  “I already been in and fetched ‘em.” Jennie held out an old-fashioned, hooplike iron ring about a foot in diameter. “I got ‘em while you was talkin’ – now, for goodness’ – sakes, do get to work and get that thing opened up before I die of curiosity!”

  Twenty minutes later, Asey managed to find a key that turned the lock.

  While the group clustered around, he raised the lid.

  Jennie screamed, Mrs. Turnover screamed, and Quinton Sharp let out his breath in a dazed gasp.

  The chest did not contain books.

  It contained the body of a small, white-haired woman, and Asey found his eyes focused on the handle of a knife protruding from the region of her heart.

  “It’s Solatia Spry!” Jennie said in a shaky voice. “It’s Solatia Spry!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE early evening patients who were waiting in the anteroom of Dr. Cummings’ office paid a lot more attention to Asey, sitting in an armchair in the corner, than Asey paid to them.

  He was aware that every time the inner office door opened, someone left, someone else jumped up and darted inside, and that the remaining people gravely got up and moved one chair nearer to the door, as if they were playing some stilted variation of Going-to-Jerusalem. One or two men had spoken to him, and he had absent-mindedly acknowledged their greeting. But his eyes remained fixed on the painted chest, covered with dogeared magazines, that stood under the window beside him.

  This blue chest of the doctor’s was just about the same size as that other chest of John Alden’s in which Solatia Spry’s body had so incredibly turned up. It was not a genuine “sea” chest. Like Alden’s, it was too long for anyone actually to have taken to sea. But it was an old chest, hand-made, and probably had been built for the wife of some sea-going man who wanted something in which to store her linen and blankets.

  “How in blazes did she get into that chest?” Quinton Sharp had said that, Al Dorking had said it, Gardner Alden had said it. He and Jennie would very likely have said it themselves, too, except that plump Mrs. Turnover had fainted before they had the opportunity. Dr. Cummings had said it when he arrived with the dual purpose of investigating the situation in his official capacity as medical examiner and administering to Mrs. Turnover, who stalwartly refused to stop screaming when she finally came to.

  And the state police had taken up the refrain. The sergeant, in fact, had been utterly unable to say anything else.

  “How in hell’d she get in there?” he had asked plaintively, over and over again. “How’d she get in there? How’d she get in there?”

  While it was a logical enough question, Asey thought, he personally was far more interested in the next step – the problem of who had put her into the chest.

  And when.

  Particularly when.

  It was speculating about that time element which had thrown Quinton Sharp into a state where Dr. Cummings had finally given him a sedative. Sharp had seemed far more perturbed over the possibility that he might have sold the chest with the body in it, Asey decided, than the fact that the body was in tho chest at all.

  Out of sheer pity, Jennie had made Sharp a cup of coffee. He had sat over in Asey’s kitchen and drunk it, occasionally shaking his head, as if he knew the whole affair wasn’t real, and that pretty soon he would wake up and find it all an unpleasant dream.

  “Was she in it, Asey?” he’d kept demanding anxiously. “Was Solatia in it? Oh, she couldn’t have been! It was full of books! I know it was full of books! It was heavy – the boys had trouble lifting it! – but it was just as heavy when we moved it this morning. And this morning, I tell you, that chest was full of books!”

  Asey stared at the chest under the window until it became a blue blur.

  He didn’t notice Dr. Cummings bustle out of his office and change his white jacket for his suit coat. He didn’t even look up until
the chalk with which the doctor was writing a message on the office slate began to squeak mournfully.

  “ ‘I am busy with Asey Mayo,’ ” Cummings read aloud what he had written. “ ‘Nobody in this town has anything so serious it won’t wait till to-morrow morning. Personal note to Addie Hines: you have not got appendicitis. I saw you buying that melon this morning. Personal note to Rosa Silva: if that baby comes before next Sunday night, I’ll endow it with a war bond.’ There!” he concluded with satisfaction. “I guess that covers everything!”

  “Seems to me,” Asey remarked, “that you got an awful rushin’ business, doc.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?” Cummings lighted a cigar. “All my life, I’ve thought how dandy it would be if I were the only doctor in three towns, and now I am, by George, and it’s driving me stark crazy! I’ve come to the conclusion that if there aren’t doctors handy, and people know it, they worry themselves sick over every little thing. If they knew that doctors were thick as flies, they’d just say contentedly that they could always get a doctor if they needed one, and then they’d get well at once. Now, let’s get out of this place before I’m pounced on – you don’t realize it, Asey,” he added, “but this is the equivalent of a leisurely cruise to the West Indies for me. It’s the first time I’ve left this blessed office at eight in the evening for certainly six months. They gave me a lull for a New Year’s present—”

  The phone rang, and Cummings made a face at it.

  “Want me to answer?” Asey asked.

  “No.” Cummings touched a switch, and the bell stopped ringing. “They can take it at the house, and if we hurry, we can jump into your roadster and leave before my wife starts yelling for me.” They beat Mrs. Cummings out of the driveway by the scant margin of three yards.