Charlotte Armstrong - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 90, May 1951

“They hid the treasure and kept it hidden for considerably over half a century?” Ellery was smiling again. “Doesn’t strike me as a very sensible thing to do with a treasure, Doc. It’s only sensible if the treasure is imaginary. Then you don’t have to produce it.”

“The story goes,” mumbled Jacksburg’s mayor, “that they’d sworn an oath—”

“Not to touch any of it until they all died but one,” said Ellery, laughing outright now. “Last-survivor-takes-all Department. Doc, that’s the way most of these fairy tales go.” Ellery rose, yawning. “I think I hear the featherbed in that other guest room calling. Nikki, your eyeballs are hanging out. Take my advice, Doc, and follow suit. You haven’t a thing to worry about but keeping the kids quiet tomorrow while you read the Gettysburg Address!”

As it turned out, the night shared prominently in Doc Martin Strong’s Memorial Day responsibilities. Ellery and Nikki awakened to a splendid world, risen from its night’s ablutions with a shining eye and a scrubbed look; and they went downstairs within seconds of each other to find the mayor of Jacksburg puttering about the kitchen.

“Morning, morning,” said Doc Strong, welcoming but abstracted. “Just fixing things for your breakfast before catching an hour’s nap.”

“You lamb,” said Nikki. “But what a shame, Doctor. Didn’t you sleep well last night?”

“Didn’t sleep at all. Tossed around a bit and just as I was dropping off my phone rings and it’s Cissy Chase. Emergency sick call.”

“Cissy Chase.” Ellery looked at their host. “Wasn’t Chase the name you mentioned last night—?”

“Old Abner Chase’s great-granddaughter. That’s right, Mr. Queen. Cissy’s an orphan and Ab’s only kin. She’s kept house for the old fellow and taken care of him since she was ten.” Doc Strong’s shoulders sloped.

Ellery said peculiarly: “It was old Abner...?”

“I was up with Ab all night. This morning, at six thirty, he passed away.”

“On Memorial Day!” Nikki sounded like a little girl in her first experience with a fact of life.

There was a silence, fretted by the sizzling of Doc Strong’s bacon.

Ellery said at last, “What did Abner Chase die of?”

“Apoplexy.”

“A stroke?”

Doc Strong looked at him. He seemed angry. But then he shook his head. “I’m no Mayo brother, Mr. Queen, and I suppose there’s a lot about the practice of medicine I’ll never get to learn, but I do know a cerebral hemorrhage when I see one, and that’s what Ab Chase died of. In a man of ninety-four, that’s as close to natural death as you can come... No, there wasn’t any funny business in this one.”

“Except,” mumbled Ellery, “that — again — it happened on Memorial Day.”

“Man’s a contrary animal. Tell him lies and he swallows ’em whole. Give him the truth and he gags on it. Maybe the Almighty gets tired of His thankless job every once in an eon and cuts loose with a little joke.” But Doc Strong said it as if he were addressing, not them, but himself. “Any special way you like your eggs?”

“Leave the eggs to me, Doctor,” Nikki said firmly. “You go on up those stairs and get some sleep.”

“Reckon I better if I’m to do my usual dignified job today,” said the mayor of Jacksburg with a sigh. “Though Abner Chase’s death is going to make the proceedings solemner than ordinary. Bill Yoder says he’s not going to be false to an ancient and honorable profession by doing a hurry-up job undertaking Ab, and maybe that’s just as well. If we added the Chase funeral to today’s program, even old Abe’s immortal words would find it hard to compete! By the way, Mr. Queen, I talked to Lew Bagley this morning and he’ll have your car ready in an hour. Special service, seeing you’re guests of the mayor.” Doc Strong chuckled. “When you planning to leave?”

“I was intending...” Ellery stopped with a frown. Nikki regarded him with a sniffish look. She had already learned to detect the significance of certain signs peculiar to the Queen physiognomy. “I wonder,” murmured Ellery, “how Zach Bigelow’s going to take the news.”

“He’s already taken it, Mr. Queen. Stopped in at Andy Bigelow’s place on my way home. Kind of a detour, but I figured I’d better break the news to Zach early as possible.”

“Poor thing,” said Nikki. “I wonder how it feels to learn you’re the only one left.” She broke an egg.

“Can’t say Zach carried on about it,” said Doc Strong dryly. “About all he said, as I recall, was: ‘Doggone it, now who’s goin’ to lay the wreath after I toot the bugle!’ I guess when you reach the age of ninety-five, death don’t mean what it does to young squirts of sixty-three like me. What time’d you say you were leaving, Mr. Queen?”

“Nikki,” muttered Ellery, “are we in any particular hurry?”

“I don’t know. Are we?”

“Besides, it wouldn’t be patriotic. Doc, do you suppose Jacksburg would mind if a couple of New York Yanks invited themselves to your Memorial Day exercises?”

The business district of Jacksburg consisted of a single paved street bounded at one end by the sightless eye of a broken traffic signal and at the other by the twin gas pumps before Lew Bagley’s garage. In between, some stores in need of paint sunned themselves, enjoying the holiday. Red, white, and blue streamers crisscrossed the thoroughfare overhead. A few seedy frame houses, each decorated with an American flag, flanked the main street at both ends.

Ellery and Nikki found the Chase house exactly where Doc Strong had said it would be — just around the corner from Bagley’s garage, between the ivy-hidden church and the fire-house of the Jacksburg Volunteer Pump and Hose Company No. i. But the mayor’s directions were a superfluity; it was the only house with a crowded porch.

A heavy-shouldered young girl in a black Sunday dress sat in a rocker, the center of the crowd. Her nose was as red as her big hands, but she was trying to smile at the cheerful words of sympathy winged at her from all sides.

“Thanks, Mis’ Plumm... That’s right, Mr. Schmidt, I know... But he was such a spry old soul, Emerson, I can’t believe...”

“Miss Cissy Chase?”

Had the voice been that of a Confederate spy, a deeper silence could not have drowned the noise. Jacksburg eyes examined Ellery and Nikki with cold curiosity, and feet shuffled.

“My name is Queen and this is Miss Porter. We’re attending the Jacksburg Memorial Day exercises as guests of Mayor Strong—” a warming murmur, like a zephyr, passed over the porch “—and he asked us to wait here for him. I’m sorry about your great-grandfather.”

“You must have been very proud of him,” said Nikki.

“Thank you, I was. It was so sudden — Won’t you set? I mean — Do come into the house. Great-grandpa’s not here... he’s over at Bill Yoder’s...”

The girl was flustered and began to cry, and Nikki took her arm and led her into the house. Ellery lingered a moment to exchange appropriate remarks with the neighbors who, while no longer cold, were still curious; and then he followed. It was a dreary little house, with a dark and musty-smelling parlor.

“Now, now, this is no time for fussing — may I call you Cissy?” Nikki was saying soothingly. “Besides, you’re better off away from all those folks. Why, Ellery, she’s only a child!”

And a very plain child, Ellery thought, with a pinched face and empty eyes.

“I understand the parade to the burying ground is going to form outside your house, Cissy,” he said. “By the way, have Andrew Bigelow and his grandfather Zach arrived yet?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Cissy Chase dully. “It’s all like such a dream, seems like.”