Ellery Queen - The Lamp of God

Hearing by post from Alice, Thorne had investigated and located Mayhew. He had explained to the old invalid his daughter’s desire to find her father, if he still lived. Old Mayhew, with a strange excitement, had acquiesced; he was eager to be reunited with his daughter; and he seemed to be living, explained Thorne defiantly, in mortal fear of his relatives in the neighboring house.

“Fear, Thorne?” The fat man sat down, raising his brows. “You know he was afraid, not of us, but of poverty. He was a miser.”

Thorne ignored him. Mayhew had instructed Thorne to write Alice and bid her come to America at once; he meant to leave her his entire estate and wanted her to have it before he died. The repository of the gold he had cunningly refused to divulge, even to Thorne; it was “in the house,” lie had said, but he would not reveal its hiding-place to anyone but Alice herself. The “others,” he had snarled, had been looking for it ever since their “arrival.”

“By the way,” drawled Ellery, “how long have you good people been living in this house, Dr. Reinach?”

“A year or so. You certainly don’t put any credence in the paranoic ravings of a dying man? There’s no mystery about our living here. I looked Sylvester up over a year ago after a long separation and found him still in the old homestead, and this house boarded up and empty. The White House, this house, incidentally, was built by my stepfather — Sylvester’s father — on Sylvester’s marriage to Alice’s mother; Sylvester lived in it until my stepfather died, and then moved back to the Black House. I found Sylvester, a degenerated hulk of what he’d once been, living on crusts, absolutely alone and badly in need of medical attention.”

“Alone — here, in this wilderness?” said Ellery incredulously.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, the only way I could get his permission to move back to this house, which belonged to him, was by dangling the bait of free medical treatment before his eyes. I’m sorry, Alice; he was quite unbalanced... And so Milly and Sarah and I — Sarah had been living with us ever since Olivia’s death — moved in here.”

“Decent of you,” remarked Ellery. “I suppose you had to give up your medical practice to do it, Doctor?”

Dr. Reinach grimaced. “I didn’t have much of a practice to give up, Mr. Queen.”

“But it was an almost pure brotherly impulse, eh?”

“Oh, I don’t deny that the possibility of falling heir to some of Sylvester’s fortune had crossed our minds. It was rightfully ours, we believed, not knowing anything about Alice. As it’s turned out—” he shrugged his fat shoulders. “I’m a philosopher.”

“And don’t deny, either,” shouted Thorne, “that when I came back here at the time Mayhew sank into that fatal coma you people watched me like a — like a band of spies! I was in your way!”

“Mr. Thorne,” whispered Alice, paling.

“I’m sorry, Miss Mayhew, but you may as well know the truth. Oh, you didn’t fool me, Reinach! You wanted that gold, Alice or no Alice. I shut myself up in that house just to keep you from getting your hands on it!”

Dr. Reinach shrugged again; his rubbery lips compressed.

“You want candor; here it is!” rasped Thorne. “I was in that house, Queen, for six days after Mayhew’s funeral and before Miss Mayhew’s arrival, looking for the gold. I turned that house upside down. And I didn’t find the slightest trace of it. I tell you it isn’t there.” He glared at the fat man. “I tell you it was stolen before Mayhew died!”

“Now, now,” sighed Ellery. “That makes less sense than the other. Why then has somebody intoned an incantation over the house and caused it to disappear?”

“I don’t know,” said the old lawyer fiercely. “1 know only that the most dastardly thing’s happened here, that everything is unnatural, veiled in that — that false creature’s smile! Miss Mayhew, I’m sorry I must speak this way about your own family. But I feel it my duty to warn you that you’ve fallen among human wolves. Wolves!”

“I’m afraid,” said Reinach sourly, “that I shouldn’t come to you, my dear Thorne, for a reference.”

“I wish,” said Alice in a very low tone, “I truly wish I were dead.”

But the lawyer was past control. “That man Keith,” he cried. “Who is he? What’s he doing here? He looks like a gangster. I suspect him, Queen—”

“Apparently,” smiled Ellery, “you suspect everybody.”

“Mr. Keith?” murmured Alice. “Oh, I’m sure not. I–I don’t think he’s that sort at all, Mr. Thorne. He looks as if he’s had a hard life. As if he’s suffered terribly from something.” Thorne threw up his hands, turning to the fire.

“Let us,” said Ellery amiably, “confine ourselves to the problem at hand. We were, I believe, considering the problem of a disappearing house. Do any architect’s plans of the so-called Black House exist?”

“Lord, no,” said Dr. Reinach.

“Who has lived in it since your stepfather’s death besides Sylvester Mayhew and his wife?”

“Wives,” corrected the doctor, pouring himself another glassful of gin. “Sylvester married twice; I suppose you didn’t know that, my dear.” Alice shivered by the fire. “I dislike raking over old ashes, but since we’re at confessional... Sylvester treated Alice’s mother abominably.”

“I— guessed that,” whispered Alice.

“She was a woman of spirit and she rebelled; but when she’d got her final decree and returned to England, the reaction set in and she died very shortly afterward, I understand. Her death was recorded in the New York papers.”

“When I was a baby,” whispered Alice.

“Sylvester, already unbalanced, although not so anchoretic in those days as he became later, then wooed and won a wealthy widow and brought her out here to live. She had a son, a child by her first husband, with her. Father’d died by this time, and Sylvester and his second wife lived in the Black House. It was soon evident that Sylvester had married the widow for her money; he persuaded her to sign it over to him — a considerable fortune for those days — and promptly proceeded to devil the life out of her. Result: the woman vanished one day, taking her child with her.”

“Perhaps,” said Ellery, seeing Alice’s face, “we’d better abandon the subject, Doctor.”

“We never did find out what actually happened — whether Sylvester drove her out or whether, unable to stand his brutal treatment any longer, she left voluntarily. At any rate, I discovered by accident, a few years later, through an obituary notice, that she died in the worst sort of poverty.”

Alice was staring at him with a wrinkle-nosed nausea. “Father... did that?”

“Oh, stop it,” growled Thorne. “You’ll have the poor child gibbering in another moment. What has all this to do with the house?”

“Mr. Queen asked,” said the fat man mildly. Ellery was studying the flames as if they fascinated him.

“The real point,” snapped the lawyer, “is that you’ve watched me from the instant I set foot here, Reinach. Afraid to leave me alone for a moment. Why, you even had Keith meet me in your car on both my visits — to ‘escort’ me here! And I didn’t have five minutes alone with the old gentleman — you saw to that. And then he lapsed into the coma and was unable to speak again before he died. Why? Why all this surveillance? God knows I’m a forbearing man; but you’ve given me every ground for suspecting your motives.”

“Apparently,” chuckled Dr. Reinach, “you don’t agree with Caesar.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“ ‘Would,’ ” quoted the fat man, “ ‘he were fatter.’ Well, good people, the end of the world may come, but that’s no reason why we shouldn’t have breakfast. Milly!” he bellowed.