Тэлмидж Пауэлл: The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

She sprang up beside him, grabbed his arms in both her hands. “ Stop it, Hertie! Only chickens get their heads cut off in this world. So the maid is coming. All we got to do is hide the body. Hide it good. Hide it so we’ll have two, three, four days. More time than we need.”

“Hide it where — under the bed? Sorry.” He croaked a laugh, “But the maid vacuums under the bed.”

“Hide it...” Carol’s eyes swept the room, passed over the ornate cedar hope chest, stopped, darted back.

A tremor of relief shook Carol. “It’s made to order, Hertie. That old chest.”

“Her hope chest,” Everly said. “Somehow it seems wrong.”

“It’s all the way right — plain perfect, if you ask me. She’ll fit in perfectly with a little folding here and there. Even day maids don’t go around opening every chest. The little dead bird will nest in there for days without anybody knowing.”

He trembled, and reached for the bedpost for support. “I can’t touch a dead body, Carol. Can’t drag it over. Can’t stuff it in the hope chest.”

She grabbed his shoulders, turned him, propelled him toward the doorway.

“Then get out there and be ready for the maid. Stall her. Three or four minutes is all I’ll need. I’ll do it myself, Hertie, and see you in your rooms. Then, when the maid is gone, we’ll get started on the rest of it.”

“Carol...”

“Don’t talk, Hertie. Not now. There isn’t any choice left. Just do as I say.”

In the old lady’s consciousness, their voices came and went like the rustle of weak surf on a dark, sandy shore. She struggled to break through the veiling paralysis. Her arms and legs were useless dangling appendages. The wan, gray fog remained smeared through her eyes.

The murmurings slipped in and out like the hissings and raspings of vibrations through a faulty telephone. The girl’s voice was the clearer of the two. The other, lower in pitch, perhaps belonged to a man. Everly? She wasn’t sure where the name came from. Who was Everly? Someone she knew. Someone who knew the girl. Everly lived here. Everly was her employee. He had a girl friend in his quarters. Everly was breaking the rules. Everly’s voice rose and broke, saying something about her hope chest.

Her tenuous awareness sagged, fatigued with the effort of identifying and placing Everly. She struggled to stay afloat in the dragging cross currents of a syrupy twilight. She was being borne slowly by the swirling tide. Being moved. Dragged along the carpet. Dropped for a moment.

A little mouse came and squeaked. No, it wasn’t a mouse. It was the sound of hinges on a warped door. An old warped lid. Everly had talked about her hope chest. Now it was being opened.

For what reason? It contained nothing.

Like quicksand, the thin whey was sucking her along once more. It was suddenly rougher on the surface with corrugated waves. She was rising above the soupy mass, and it was dropping from her in thick globs.

Her mind gathered the fragments of sensation and translated them into an experience. And she knew the truth. When the lid fell with a thud, she realized she was in her hope chest. Shut away — hidden. The final tenacious hope of being found before it was too late vanished in the rushing darkness. She was falling, falling, reaching with hands that had no touch, screaming as she tumbled end over end with a voice that had no sound.

She fell nightmarishly until she faded to nothingness. The darkness grew calm. A faint rosy glow spilled across the further horizon. The darkness receded. The golden light grew stronger. All the bonds loosened about her. She rose up, and the years had vanished. It was her nineteenth birthday, and she had never felt so vital and alive. She was the loveliest of images with the golden glow all about her.

She heard music, the gay strains of a Straus waltz. A scene spread before her. She was on a lovely terrace in a night warmed by the delicious breath of summer. The golden light came from Japanese lanterns hung over the fragrant lawns and flower gardens.

Voice were all about her, laughter mingled with the music. Girls in party dresses and handsome young men, so straight, tall and vigorous in white jackets. They crowded about her on this, the occasion of her birthday. She was enfolded in friendships, gay chatter, hugs, quick little kisses, happy jokes.

“Nineteen? And just yesterday I was pulling your pigtails”... “Darling, you are growing older”... “Better live it up, next year you’ll be an old twenty”... “The teens are gone but not forgotten”... “Now! Look at what nineteen years have done to that knobby-kneed kid...”

There was a buffet set up on the end of the terrace with snowy linen and mountains of food. Through a rift in the crowd of people about her, she saw him over there, talking with her father. He glanced in her direction. Their eyes met, held, and he excused himself from her father’s presence. He came toward her, brushing by people as if only she existed.

He was standing before her, dark-haired, craggy-faced, broad in the shoulders. He took her hand and took her away. His arm encircled her and he led her into the waltz. On and on they danced while the music poured forth, and she closed her eyes, wondering if she could bear the joy of it all...

With her busy beehive mind buzzing about problems of her own, Mrs. Daugherty, the maid, entered the apartment and drew up with a gasp. Mr. Everly was standing in the middle of the room, looking very strange. His every muscle seemed pulled tight — his face was absolutely bloodless, oozing a clammy kind of sweat even though the air-conditioning was going full blast.

Mrs. Daugherty had never cared very much for him. He was too smooth, too haughty. She was proud of her ability to take note of little things and arrive at conclusions. She was certain that most other people weren’t quite as sharp. She could look at ashtrays and dirty dishes and tell what kind of gathering had been here the night before. A grocery order would suggest who was coming to dinner tonight. Mrs. Daugherty’s employer was a real lady, who made a point of serving a favored food to a guest.

This Everly, Mrs. Daughterty suspected, had two faces.

“My goodness, Mr. Everly, you gave me a start! Aren’t you feeling well?”

“Certainly, I’m well! We have a tight schedule today. So do what you have to and get through your chores quickly.”

With raised brows, Mrs. Daughterty watched him wheel and leave the room. She heard small noises of his passage and a heavy silence as he retreated to the privacy of his quarters.

Lips thinned, Mrs. Daugherty set her handbag beside the nearest living room chair. She was a spare sallow figure with a sharply featured face and thin graying hair bunned at the nape.

She murmured an opinion of Everly under her breath. Clearly, he didn’t want her around today, whatever the reason. And nuts to him, too. Mrs. Daugherty had no intention of skimping her work. “I always say,” she remarked to no one, “that a thing is worth doing right, if it’s worth doing at all.”

Might as well start with the master bedroom. Mrs. Daugherty marched down the hallway, opened the linen closet and took out sheets, pillow cases, bedspread, towels and wash cloths.

Carrying the linens in a neat stack on her right forearm, she entered the bedroom. She placed the linens carefully on the bureau and went around the room, checking for dust with fingertips, picking up a pair of stockings, inserting a book marker and closing a book on the bedside table.

The brisk efficiency of her movements faltered, came to a halt. She stood at the foot of the bed, her hand idly resting against a post. Something not entirely ordinary had caught her eye and she couldn’t decide what it was.