Fletcher Flora: The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

He looked at her over the rim of his glass, his face and voice taking on a studied solemnity.

“We’ve brought him up. Poor old guy. I came to tell you.”

Cindy turned quickly away, looking again out across the yard to the timber, and the little sheriff’s eyes made a lingering, appreciative tour of the black sheath.

“He’ll be taken right into town,” he said. “Twenty-four hours in the water, you know. Didn’t do him any good. We thought you’d prefer it that way.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

He lifted his glass again, draining the bourbon and soda off the cubes. He let one of the cubes slip down the glass into his mouth, then spit it back into the glass.

“The coroner’ll look him over. Just routine. An old man like that shouldn’t swim alone in deep water. Maybe a cramp. Maybe a heart attack. Never can tell with an old man.”

“Grandfather was always active,” I said.

He looked wistfully at his empty glass for a minute and then set it down on the glass-topped table.

“Sure. Some old men never want to give up. Ought to know better. Well, time to be running along. Lucky to get him up so soon. Can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Thanks very much,” I said.

I took him back to the front door and watched him cross the veranda and go down across the cleared area into the timber. Turning away, I went back to Cindy.

She was facing me when I came in, black and gold against the bright glass. Her lips were parted, and her breasts rose and fell with a slow, measured cadence.

“Everything’s all right, Tony. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“Sure. They can’t touch us, honey.”

“He was an old man. We didn’t take much of his life away.”

“Don’t think about that. Don’t think about it at all.”

“I won’t, Tony. I’ll just think about the time when we can go away. I’ll think of you and me and more money than we can spend in a dozen lifetimes. You and me and the long, hot days under a sky that’s bluer than any blue you’ve ever seen. Oh, Tony...”

I went over and held her tightly until she whimpered with pain and her eyes were blind with the pleasure of suffering.

“It won’t be long, honey. Not long. After the will’s probated. After everything’s settled.”

She snarled her fingers in my hair and pulled my face down to her hungry lips, and it must have been a century later when I became aware of the shrill intrusion of the telephone in the hall behind me.

I went out to answer it, and when I spoke into the transmitter my mind was still swimming in a kind of steaming mist. The voice that answered mine was clear and incisive but very soft. I had to strain to understand.

“Mr. Wren? My name is Evan Lane. I have a lodge across the lake. I see the sheriff’s men have quit blasting. Does that mean they’ve found the old man?”

“Yes,” I said. “They found him.”

“Permit me to extend my sympathy.” The country line hummed for a long moment in my ear, and it seemed to me that I could hear, far off at the other end, the soft ghost of a laugh. “Also my congratulations,” the voice said.

A cold wind seemed to come through the wire with the voice. The warm mist inside my skull condensed and fell, leaving my mind chill and gray and very still. Inside my ribs, there was a terrible pain, as if someone had thrust a knife between them.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

The laugh was unmistakable this time, rising on a light, high note. “I offered my congratulations, Mr. Wren. For getting away with it, I mean.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think you do. You see, Mr. Wren, you made one small mistake. You made the mistake of acting too soon after your lovely friend had been sun bathing on the beach. A girl like that is an open invitation to a man like me to use his telescope. I have a clear shot from my veranda. Now do you understand, Mr. Wren?”

“What do you want?”

“I think you’ll find me a reasonable man. Perhaps we’d better meet and discuss terms.”

“Where?”

“Say the barroom of the Lakeshore Inn.”

“When?”

“Tonight? At nine?”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

I cradled the phone and went back through the living room to the sun porch. Cindy was standing at a liquor cabinet in the corner, moving a swizzle stick in the second of two drinks she’d mixed. She stopped stirring and looked across at me, becoming suddenly very quiet. “Who was it, Tony?”

“He said his name’s Evan Lane. He has a lodge across the lake.”

“What did he want?”

“He wants to meet me at the Lakeshore Inn. Tonight.”

“Why?”

“He has a habit of watching you on the beach through a telescope. He was watching yesterday. He saw me and the old man in the lake.” She took two stiff steps toward me, her slim body rigid in its black sheath. Bright spots were burning in her cheeks.

“Blackmail?”

“It looks like it.”

“What shall we do, Tony? What shall we do?”

“Find out what he’s after, first of all. After that, we’ll see.”

“He’ll bleed us, Tony. He’ll bleed us white.”

“No,” I said. “It won’t be like that. It won’t be like that at all.”

Then she came the rest of the way to me, but her body was cold and rigid in my arms, and it was a long time before it got back the way it was before the telephone rang.

The Lakeshore Inn was on an arm of the lake that was almost at a right angle to the main body. In the barroom, they’d tried to make an effect with rafters. After they’d finished, the effect was just rafters, but you felt friendly because they’d tried.

I crawled onto a stool. A clock on the wall behind the bar said five to nine. I looked at my reflection in the mirror below the clock and was a little astonished to see that I didn’t look any different from the way I’d looked yesterday or the day before. Same brown hair. Same eyes a little browner. Same face in general.

The bartender said, “Good evening, Mr. Wren,” and cocked an eyebrow to show that he was tuned in.

“The usual,” I said.

He put a couple of cubes in a glass and covered them with White Horse. Down the bar, around the curve to the wall, a heavy man with a bald head was drinking beer. The bartender went down to him and resumed a conversation I’d interrupted. At nine precisely, someone came up behind me and got onto the stool on my left. I looked up into the mirror.

The face I saw went on from where mine stopped. Thin and dark, with a clean, chiseled look, burned mahogany by wind and sun. Above it, black hair was feathered with white around the ears and almost mathematically divided by a single white streak. It was a head to make the ladies itch. The head of a man who might have been a heavy actor but thought he was too good for it. I sat and watched it until the bartender had done his job and gone back to his beer drinker.

“You don’t look like a blackmailer,” I said.

An incisive white smile flashed in the shadows of the mirror. “Thanks. You don’t look like a murderer, either.”

“It’s a funny world,” I said.

We drank in silence, two congenial guys, and after a while I said, “You’re a little previous. Right now I’m a poor relation. So’s Cindy. You know Cindy, don’t you? She’s the girl you peep at through a telescope. We’re just a pair of lovable young parasites, Cindy and I. We won’t have any money for blackmailers until the estate’s settled.”

The smile reappeared in the mirror, growing to a laugh, the soft, substantial embodiment of the ghost on the wire.

“You think I want money? My friend, I have more of the stuff than I can ever use. More, I imagine, than you’ll get from Grandfather.”