Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 25 Classic Mysteries

“Oh, yeah? And I suppose you still think he’s trying to deliver a message?”

“More than ever. That rattling bone meant something... if I could just figure out what. Why’d he wait all day until he had the bone to rattle, if he wasn’t trying to tell us something?”

I eased to a sitting position on the hassock before her. “Judy,” I said gently, “I think I’d better get you out of here before we spend another night in this place.”

“Don’t be sil! It’s a perfectly lovely house.”

“But all this talk...”

“He’s a perfectly nice poltergeist — and I’m not going to leave.” She smiled, leaned forward to pat my cheek. “Be a darling and flip the tuner to channel twelve. There’s an hour-long comedy special coming up in about five minutes.”

I not only switched the TV, I went and made myself a double-barreled martini, very dry this time. I sipped it and also its big brother while the hour-long was on. Six ounces of nearly straight gin later I settled back in the recliner, a wedding gift of Judy’s cousin Ned. I clasped my hands across my midriff comfortably and prepared to think it out.

The TV music faded. The draperies seemed to waver and shake as my heavy lids blotted them out. Lousy draperies, I thought vaguely, with their floral pattern of red roses. Just like Judy’s Uncle Horace to give them to us...

I awoke with a muscular jerk that popped a crick out of my neck. I dropped the recliner to sitting position, running my tongue around the inside of my gin-wool mouth. A late newscast was on the television. A crashing mortar attack by guerrillas against an American base overseas seemed to have awakened me.

“Judy?” I said.

She was nowhere in the living-room, bedroom, or kitchen. I made the circuit, beginning to sweat hard by the time I’d come full circle.

The emptiness and silence of the house (except for the insistent TV) began to smother me. I turned off the set with a vicious flip of fingers that were trembling.

“Easy,” I ordered myself. “If anything had happened, you’d have heard the ruckus.”

Maybe she’d stepped next door to chin a little with Mrs. Gosness and break the boredom of listening to a husband’s snore.

I hurried to the east window, pulled the drapery aside; no lights over there. Mrs. Gosness was already off to dreamland, not sipping tea with a next-door neighbor.

I took jerky steps back to the middle of the room. My skin was turning icy and exuding a steam of sweat at one and the same time. If the house hadn’t been haunted before, it certainly felt so now. The empty wing chair where Judy had been sitting seemed to throb in my vision. Then I saw that something new had been added. On the hassock before the chair, she’d laid a piece of paper, a pencil, and the magazine she’d used for a backing as she’d written.

I snatched up the paper. She hadn’t left me a note. Instead, it was a record of her thoughts while I’d slept. Around the margin were curlicues where she’d doodled between words, sentences, phrases.

She’d written:

“The hints... sock... smashed picture... mystery novel... broken lamp... rattling bone... agitated rose-patterned drapes.”

So the drapes had really shaken. I steadied the paper and kept reading.

“Sock... friendly... friendly Andy Bickleford... but picture smashed with a great deal of violence... picture of Jim... Jim’s a male... only picture of male in house... male smashed by violence! Friendly Andy trying to say he was smashed violently? Not killed accidentally at all! Slugged, put in sports car, pushed over cliffs!... Why? Because of something he’d done?... done bone... bone did... bone does... darn you, bone!... Well, let’s see... If Andy didn’t do anything, maybe he was undone because of something he’d witnessed... see bone... bone from T-bone steak, useless... except to a doggie... doggie would go out and bury bone... BURIED BONE... hidden weapon?... Buried weapon that killed Andy before he was stuffed in sports car and driven to those dreadful cliffs?... Buried where... Next hint, final clue, quaking draperies... draped for burial... nope... bedroom draperies weren’t chosen... specific draperies... those in the living-room with roses... buried with roses... buried under roses...weapon buried under only rose arbor in neighborhood!”

I dropped the paper. The gimlet eyes and the scratchy violin-string voice flashed through my mind “...hate brats. Always throwing trash in my fish pond and breaking my rose arbor.”

The night coolness washed across my face before I even realized I’d run outside. A pale moon bathed our backyards, ours and Mr. Tate Curzon’s. I slipped through the shadows cast by our house, my eyes seeking and searching.

Then I heard a muffled cry and jerked my attention from the rose arbor next door. I saw the struggling shadows near Mr. Curzon’s basement door. He heard my pounding footsteps, and as my presence loomed over him, Curzon shoved Judy sprawling and laid a hard little fist in my kisser.

My knees buckled and my nose dug a furrow. He kicked me hard in the ribs. Breath whoofed out, but as he spun and started to run away, my grabbing hand found an ankle. I yanked, and this time Mr. Curzon fell. He writhed around and started lashing me with his fists. I disliked picking on such a little fellow, but he ignored my orders to lie still, so I grabbed him by his thin neck and popped his head against the hard ground. It proved to be an anesthetizing measure. He would remain unconscious for several minutes at least.

Judy grabbed my arms, helped me to my feet. Then she put her arms around me and collapsed against my chest.

“Oh, Jim! I was peeping about his rose arbor and suddenly he was there. He grabbed me, and I screamed just once before he—”

I tipped her face up and kissed her. She began to sob with relief. I picked her up and my shoulder was a very nice cradle for her head.

“I think we’d better call the police,” I said.

We thought it discreet to omit mention of the poltergeist, inferring to the police that Mr. Curzon had been acting strangely around his roses and launched his murderous attack when Judy’s curiosity got the better of her.

It turned out that the police had previously questioned Mr. Curzon in the disappearance of one of his wives. Their probe of the rose arbor turned up the remains of the fourth Mrs. Curzon. Perhaps it was suspicion or evidence of this that led to Andy Bickleford’s untimely demise.

We can’t know for sure. The poltergeist hasn’t been around since that fateful night, and if the subject came up, Judy and I would be first to agree that nobody in his right mind could believe in poltergeists. Like all the silent others who’ve shared similar experiences, we don’t want our friends thinking we are soft in the head.

I do, however, feel the poltergeist should have assisted a bit longer. An army of cops and insurance investigators are going nuts trying to find out what happened to Mrs. Curzons, numbers one, two, three.

Originally appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine , September 1972.

As soon as I got wind of the coming calamity, I drove out of Comfort a lot faster than a fellow of my age should. My destination was a few miles west of Comfort, which is a nice hamlet nestled in the gentle folds of the Smoky Mountains.

The narrow road snaked toward the heights in dizzying hairpin curves. The scenery was something else; wooded peaks, sheer cliffs, blue-misted valleys that seemed depthless with their gossamer veils of wispy cloud swirling below the level of the road. But right then, I was contrary to the beauties of my native mountains. My recent suspicions of Mr. Randolph P. Fogarty flumped in a painful pulse between my temples.