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

“Well... he hasn’t been himself since Aunt Ethel’s death.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“You are?” Biff asked brightly, then quickly changed his tone. “You are? I didn’t know anyone else had noticed. He’s getting — I hate to say this — but, well, worse every day. Thinks he hears her voice. Believes he sees her walking in the garden at night.”

“Thank you, Biff. You did the right thing in calling me.”

Biff hung up, containing a yelp of pure joy.

That night, it seemed that Uncle Joe would never go to sleep. Biff and Reena waited in their bedroom, trying to read, pacing the floor, watching the clock, mixing drinks to keep their hands and minds busy.

Finally, when the deep quiet down the hall had remained unbroken for more than an hour, Reena crossed to the table near the windows and poured her third drink. “Biff, he simply must be asleep by now! Why wait longer?” Biff took the glass from her hand and downed half the slug of straight whiskey. “Okay, get the mask!”

Reena hurried to her closet, slid the door open, stood on tiptoe, and lifted an oval-shaped hatbox from the top shelf. She carried it to the bed, opened it with Biff hovering beside her. The empty eye sockets of Aunt Ethel’s countenance looked up at them. Biff caught his breath as Reena lifted out Aunt Ethel’s face. He’d seen the death mask earlier, but he stared in fascination. Reena was right. The artist in Sarasota had done a terrific job. Looking at the shell of Aunt Ethel with the vacant, parted lips, Biff felt the hackles creep across his neck.

“Hello, Aunt Ethel, you stupid old biddy.”

“Hurry, Biff!” Reena said. “I can’t take much more of this waiting.”

“You won’t have to. The old boy might even favor us with a heart attack when he gets a load of this.”

Biff dropped to one knee beside the bed and dragged out the slender bamboo casting rod he’d cached there earlier. Reena handed him the mask, and he attached it to the end of the pole with two pieces of black silk string. With the pole extended, Aunt Ethel’s kindly old visage seemed to float in midair.

“Now don’t forget to give me time to get in his dressing room,” Biff said. “I’ll work from there. I don’t dare stick the pole in from the hallway. If he bolts — and he’s bound to — that’s the door he’ll use.”

While he was speaking, Biff slipped into a black dressing gown, turned the collar up, and pulled an old dark deckhand’s stretch cap over his head and ears. In darkness, he would be an invisible shadow.

Reena gave him a little shove toward the door. “Don’t worry about my end of it, darling. Just get moving!”

Biff peeked out, then slipped into the hallway. He tiptoed to Uncle Joe’s doorway carrying the disjointed sections of the casting rod and death mask tucked lightly under his arm.

He put his ear against the door. The room beyond was silent. He turned the doorknob with the delicate touch of a safecracker, opened the door a few inches, and listened again. He heard Uncle Joe’s breathing; shallow, but regular and even. Uncle Joe was sound asleep.

Biff eeled into the room, closed the door soundlessly, and crept across the thick carpet, as silently as an inching caterpillar.

In Uncle Joe’s dressing room, Biff treated himself to a long-drawn breath. Slightly ajar, the dressing room door was a perfect shield, not that he needed one in the darkness. Feeling with his fingers, he connected the sections of the long, thin bamboo pole. He shook out the death mask and it swung freely. Its pale, frosty glow seemed to leap at him.

Inch by inch, he extended the pole out into Uncle Joe’s room. By leaning forward a little he could bring the mask within inches of Uncle Joe’s face, or send it swooping to the ceiling.

Come on, Reena , he thought tightly, get with your end of it .

As if on cue, a moaning voice rose in the darkness. “Joseph... Ohhhhhh, Joseph...”

Biff dropped the pole, letting the mask float about six feet directly above Uncle Joe’s sleeping face.

“Joseph... can’t you hear me calling? Joseph...”

Biff gulped. He could have sworn it was Aunt Ethel’s voice wailing the name from some cold, damp, sepulchral place. Slipping along close to the windows outside, Reena was really doing it up brown.

“Joseph... Come to me... I need you, Joseph... You must come...”

Suddenly, there was no sound of Uncle Joe breathing. Biff knew he was awake — awake, and paralyzed for a fractured second. Biff gave the rod a slight twitch, and Aunt Ethel’s shimmering face made little movements against the dark ceiling. It seemed, even to Biff, that the mask was the source of the ghostly voice.

Uncle Joe recovered the capability of sound at last. “Aaaaggghhh...!” he screeched.

Snatched from slumber by the circumstance, even a stronger man might have fainted. Uncle Joe leaped straight up, then came down in a crash of bedsprings and tangle of covers.

Aunt Ethel’s face swooped toward him. He floundered to one side, tripped, spilled from the bed onto the floor. He left a trail of bed linens as he fought the entanglements to the door and the hallway beyond.

Biff quickly broke down the rod, stuffed it and the mask under his dressing gown, then ran to the hallway. It was empty. Biff ran to his own room, opened a closet, and pushed the ghost-making paraphernalia out of sight. As he closed the closet and turned, Reena slipped in from the hallway, a bit disheveled and breathless.

“He cut a swath through the garden like a small hurricane,” Reena said.

Biff rubbed his hands together. “Good!”

“Should we go look for him?” Biff speared her with a glance.

“Perish the thought! We go beddy-bye. Just a pair of innocents who slept through the experience of a pixilated old man. How could we know he was so far gone, until someone discovers him wandering in his nightclothes?”

Reena fell to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. “You really are terribly clever, darling.”

“I know,” Biff said. “Let’s tuck in and dream of his millions.”

It seemed to Biff that he had barely drifted off before a hand was shaking his shoulder, awakening him roughly.

Biff blinked against the bedroom lights that had been turned on. His sleep-gritty eyes focused on the figure of Uncle Joe. Seeing that Biff was awake, Uncle Joe drew back from the bed, and Biff’s first thought was that Uncle Joe looked a bit ludicrous. The old man was swallowed by a bathrobe that he’d borrowed from someone and draped over his nightclothes. It hung to his fingertips and flapped about his ankles.

Reena stirred in her warm cocoon of sleep. “Wassa matter, darling?—”

“It’s Uncle Joe. He’s back.”

Reena’s eyes snapped open. She sat up as Biff got out of bed and stood beside Uncle Joe.

Biff patted Uncle Joe’s shoulder. “There, there now. Just take it easy. What are you doing running around in the middle of the night in that funny looking getup?”

Uncle Joe slapped Biff’s hand away. “You crummy young punk! I borrowed the robe from Ned Barringer. I went straight over there. Figured it was about time a good psychiatrist and I talked about your case.”

Biff’s mouth fell open. “My case?”

“When I heard a voice that you denied hearing,” Uncle Joe said icily, “it meant one of two things. I was crazy, or you were a liar. If you were a liar, it meant you and Reena were up to something. It wasn’t hard to figure then what it was and what your motive was. I hoped I was wrong about you two. I hoped you wouldn’t go through with it.”

Uncle Joe watched Reena slip quakingly to Biff’s side.

Uncle Joe’s eyes raked over them. “But I sort of hoped in vain, didn’t I? And tonight I figured it was high time I got something done — before you let the thought of all that money poison you into doing something really crazy, like murdering me in my sleep!”