Аврам Дэвидсон - Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

People outside the mainstream of the disaster were being urged to stay put. Travel over state highways was next to impossible. Streams were swollen beyond belief, bridges gone.

“Unless you are in critical danger where you are, stay there! You’ll only add to confusion in harder hit areas by leaving whatever shelter you have! Rain and wind are not expected to subside until sometime late tomorrow. Conditions will grow worse rather than better. Boil your water. I repeat — boil your water. Do not use water for any purpose whatever without first boiling it. Repeat — do not risk highway travel. Streams have altered their courses. The Governor has declared a state of emergency, but intelligent instructions will not be possible until a survey by air can be made in tomorrow’s daylight .”

Lakeview was dark, water-soaked, isolated — but without panic. Household radios were useless, but they got the emergency bulletins over car radios. The small civilian defense unit had acted efficiently. A few sick people had been moved to places of greater safety. Stores of food had been taken from the two local grocery stores to the school, which was on high ground.

The town’s three doctors had set up a headquarters in the school. As long as daylight had lasted most of the able-bodied men had been helping to herd the dairy cattle from outlying farms, where flood conditions would do the most damage, to high pasture lands nearer the center of the community. Dairy farming was the main business of Lakeview — that and a few fancy black Angus beef farms.

Red Egan, the sheriff, and a group of hastily sworn-in deputies, had gone from house to house with emergency instructions, since telephones and regular radios were out. But most country people own cars and had already heard over the car radios what they should do. They were surprisingly good-humored. Anxiety was mostly for friends and relatives in neighboring towns. Lakeview was proud of itself. They had planned four years ago just what to do if floods came again, and now they had carried out those plans without hysteria or confusion. They would wait till daylight to find out just how bad things were.

At close to midnight the only signs of life were in the very center of the business block on Main Street. The sheriff had parked six cars across Main Street, three facing north and three facing south, rear bumpers to rear bumpers, in a sort of road block. The cars had their parking lights on, but a deputy was stationed in each one, ready to switch on full lights if a car came toward them.

Right next to this blockade of cars was Hector Trimble’s drug store. Hector Trimble was a respected and trusted man and a first-rate pharmacist. He kept a modem store and did a good business. But someone had once said that Hector was the kind of pessimist who wore both suspenders and a belt. Suddenly in the flood it had paid off. He had an emergency set for sterilizing and cooking with bottled gas, so that when the power failed he could still make coffee, still sterilize his tubes and retorts, and there were even emergency gas lights in the store.

Things were suddenly wanted and it turned out that Hector had an extra supply — “just in case.” Hectors twelve-year-old boy Joey ran his legs off carrying messages for the sheriff. Hector’s wife, the former Esther Crowder, had — “just in case” — taken a course in practical nursing and was helping the three doctors with patients who would have been removed to the hospital if there had been any way to get them there.

And there was Uncle George Crowder.

George Crowder was a character, even by country standards. He came from one of the oldest and best families in town. He had started out in life like a ball of fire, gone to the State University, graduated with honors from law school, and had quickly become the County Attorney. People said in those days that George Crowder would most likely find himself in the Governor’s mansion some day. It never came about for a special reason. George Crowder had prosecuted a murder case in the county, got his conviction, and sent the victim to the chair. Then a year later a confession and corroborative evidence proved the executed man had been innocent.

The next day George Crowder closed his law office and disappeared from Lakeview. When he came back, twenty years later, he was a changed man. Some said he’d drunk his way through his money and had to come back to be supported by his sister, Hector Trimble’s wife.

At any rate, he built himself a little shade in the woods a couple of miles from town. He lived there alone with his setter dog, Timmy. In his mid-fifties he was tough as rawhide, had a keen, dry wit, was one of the best woodsmen the town had ever known and certainly Lakeview’s best shot with a rifle or shotgun. Uncle George, however, was a sort of cross Hector Trimble had to bear. He was, by Hector’s rules, a shiftless do-nothing and a very bad influence on young Joey, who idolized his uncle, and spent every free hour he had with the old man and his dog in the woods.

On the night of the flood, with midnight closing in, Hector Trimble and Joey and Uncle George were in the drug store with Janet Graves, the eighth-grade schoolteacher who helped out in the store during the busy summer months. They were having coffee — all except Joey, who was sucking a Coke through a double straw. If there was any one person who threatened Joey’s undivided loyalty to Uncle George, it was Janet Graves. This was Joey’s first serious affair of the heart. “And showing mighty good taste very early in the parade,” Uncle George told his sister. “If I was a few years younger—”

Just before midnight, headlights appeared at the north end of Main Street, fuzzy-bright in the rain. No one would be out traveling this time of night unless it was an emergency. Uncle George slid off his stool at the counter and buttoned his oilskin up around his neck. Joey, automatically prepared to follow, glanced at Janet Graves. She smiled at him, a smile as warm as the red color of her hair. Strange lumps bobbed up and down in Joey’s stomach. They made him too weak to go with Uncle George.

As the headlights appeared at the far end of the street, the three care Sheriff Egan had facing north turned on their lights full.

You couldn’t run through or over that kind of block, so the big Imperial slowed down and came to a stop. Sheriff Egan went around to the driver’s side. He looked at the tense, white face of Ray Stack at the wheel and the pudgy smiling face of Perry McVey, who seemed to be reaching into a leather brief case for something.

“You’re strangers!” Red Egan said, as if he couldn’t believe it.

“Yes,” Ray Stack said. “Headed for New York — and in a great hurry, if you don’t mind.”

The sheriff gave him a friendly grin. “I don’t mind, Mister, but it ain’t goin’ to make much difference one way or another. No way for you to get there. Not tonight — not for the next day or two, maybe. What’s itchin’ me is how you got here in the first place. No way to get out, no way to get in.”

“We came along Route 21,” McVey said.

“Across the covered bridge?” Egan asked.

“Yes.”

“I’d of sworn it was gone by now,” Egan said. “And I’ve sworn it wouldn’t have taken that car of yours for the last five-six hours. Didn’t our man stop you?”

“You mean the fellow with the flashlight?” Stack asked.

The light from the car dashboard was too dim for Egan to notice the murderous glint in McVey’s small eyes as his head swiveled toward his partner.

“Yes, he stopped us,” McVey said quickly. “But we decided to risk it. I’m afraid we got bad news about your man, though. Just after we got across the bridge the whole thing went, and your guy was right at the mouth of the bridge. Like a tidal wave — took him and the bridge, and damn near took us, fifty yards away!”