Stephen Barr - Best of the best detective stories - 25th anniversary collection

But it wouldn’t have satisfied George Washington... for all its symmetry and perfection.

Then perhaps there is a symmetry and perfection beyond the cold beauty of figures?

At this point, Ellery began to question his own postulates... lost in the dark and to his time...

They found him at ten-thirty, crouched on the cultivator seat, numb and staring.

He permitted himself to be led into the house, he suffered Nikki to subject him to the indignity of having his shoes and socks stripped off and his frozen feet rubbed to life, he ate Martha Clarke’s dinner — all with a detachment and indifference which alarmed the girls and even made old Tobias look uneasy.

“If it’s going to have this effect on him,” began Martha, and then she said: “Ellery, give it up. Forget it.” But she had to shake him before he heard her.

He shook his head. “They’re there.”

“Where?” cried the girls simultaneously.

“In Washington’s Grove.”

“Ye found ’em?” croaked Tobias Clarke, half-rising.

“No.”

The Clarkes and Nikki exchanged glances.

“Then how can you be so certain they’re buried there, Ellery?” asked Nikki gently.

Ellery looked bewildered. “Darned if I know how I know,” he said, and he even laughed a little. “Maybe George Washington told me.” Then he stopped laughing and went into the firelit parlor and — pointedly — slid the doors shut.

At ten minutes past midnight Martha Clarke gave up the contest.

“Isn’t he ever going to come out of there?” she said, yawning.

“You never can tell what Ellery will do,” replied Nikki.

“Well, I can’t keep my eyes open another minute.”

“Funny,” said Nikki. “I’m not the least bit sleepy.”

“You city girls.”

“You country girls.”

They laughed. Then they stopped laughing, and for a moment there was no sound in the kitchen but the patient sentry walk of the grandfather clock and the snores of Tobias assaulting the ceiling from above.

“Well,” said Martha. Then she said: “I just can’t . Are you staying up, Nikki?”

“For a little while. You go to bed, Martha.”

“Yes. Well. Good night.”

“Good night, Martha.”

At the door Martha turned suddenly: “Did he say George Washington told him?”

“Yes.”

Martha went rather quickly up the stairs.

Nikki waited fifteen minutes. Then she tiptoed to the foot of the stairs and listened. She heard Tobias snuffling and snorting as he turned over in his bed, and an uneasy moan from the direction of Martha’s bedroom, as if she were dreaming an unwholesome dream. Nikki set her jaw grimly and went to the parlor doors and slid them open.

Ellery was on his knees before the fire. His elbows were resting on the floor. His face was propped in his hands. In this attitude his posterior was considerably higher than his head.

“Ellery!”

“Huh?”

“Ellery, what on earth—?”

“Nikki. I thought you’d gone to bed long ago.” In the firelight his face was haggard.

“But what have you been doing ? You look exhausted!”

“I am. I’ve been wrestling with a man who could bend a horseshoe with his naked hands. A very strong man. In more ways than one.”

“What are you talking about? Who?”

“George Washington. Go to bed, Nikki,”

“George... Washington?”

“Go to bed,”

“... Wrestling with him?”

“Trying to break through his defenses. Get into his mind. It’s not an easy mind to get into. He’s been dead such a long time — that makes the difference. The dead are stubborn, Nikki. Aren’t you going to bed?”

Nikki backed out, shivering.

The house was icy.

It was even icier when an inhuman bellow accompanied by a thunder that shook the Revolutionary walls of her bedroom brought Nikki out of bed with a yelping leap.

But it was only Ellery.

He was somewhere up the hall, in the first glacial light of dawn, hammering on Martha’s Clarke’s door.

“Martha. Martha! Wake up, damn you, and tell me where I can find a book in this damned house! A biography of Washington — a history of the United States — an almanac... anything! ”

The parlor fire had long since given up the ghost. Nikki and Martha in wrappers, and Tobias Clarke in an ancient bathrobe over his marbled long underwear, stood around shivering and bewildered as a disheveled, daemonic Ellery leafed eagerly through a 1921 edition of The Farmer’s Fact Book and Complete Compendium.

“Here it is!” The words shot out of his mouth like bullets, leaving puffs of smoke.

“What is it, Ellery?”

“What on earth are you looking for?”

“He’s loony, I tell ye!”

Ellery turned with a look of ineffable peace, closing the book.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“Vermont. The State of Vermont.”

“Vermont...?”

“Vermont?”

“Vermont. What in the crawlin’ creepers’s Vermont got to do with—?”

“Vermont,” said Ellery with a tired smile, “did not enter the Union until March fourth, 1791. So that proves it, don’t you see?”

“Proves what ?” shrieked Nikki.

“Where George Washington buried his sword and half disme.”

“Because,” said Ellery in the rapidly lightening dawn behind the barn, “Vermont was the fourteenth State to do so. The fourteenth . Tobias would you get me an ax, please?”

“An ax,” mumbled Tobias. He shuffled away, shaking his head.

“Come on, Ellery, I’m d-dying of c-cold!” chattered Nikki, dancing up and down before the cultivator.

“Ellery,” said Martha Clarke piteously, “I don’t understand any of this.”

“It’s very simple, Martha — oh, thank you, Tobias — as simple,” said Ellery, “as simple arithmetic. Numbers, my dears — numbers tell this remarkable story. Numbers and their influence on our first President who was, above all things, a number-man. That was my key. I merely had to discover the lock to fit it into. Vermont was the lock. And the door’s open.”

Nikki seated herself on the cultivator. You had to give Ellery his head in a situation like this; you couldn’t drive him for beans. Well, she thought grudgingly, seeing how pale and how tired-looking he was after a night’s wrestling with George Washington, he’s earned it.

“The number was wrong,” said Ellery solemnly, leaning on Tobias’s ax. “Twelve trees. Washington apparently planted twelve trees — Simeon Clarke’s Diary never did mention the number twelve, but the evidence seemed unquestionable — there were twelve oaks in an equilateral triangle, each one fifteen yards from its neighbor.

“And yet... I felt that twelve oaks couldn’t be, perfect as the triangle was. Not if they were planted by George Washington. Not on February the twenty-second, New Style, in the year of our Lord 1791.

“Because on February the twenty-second, 1791 — in fact, until March the fourth, when Vermont entered the Union to swell its original number by one — there was another number in the United States so important, so revered, so much a part of the common speech and the common living — and dying — that it was more than a number; it was a solemn and sacred thing; almost not a number at all. It overshadowed other numbers like the still-unborn Paul Bunyan. It was memorialized on the new American flag in the number of its stars and the number of its stripes. It was a number of which George Washington was the standard-bearer! — the head and only recently the strong right arm of the new Republic which had been born out of the blood and muscle of its integers. It was a number which was in the hearts and minds and mouths of all Americans.