There was no use in trying to coerce or trap Sarah. He made an attempt--and gave up. After he had said good night to her and before he started up to his room, he felt Bogarty's card in his pocket. That reminded him of the knife he had left on the veranda rail, and, since there was no chance that Sarah would see him bring it in, he went out to get it.
The knife was gone. He hurried down the front steps and lit matches to search behind Sarah's ferns, but it had not rolled off the rail. Someone had taken it. He returned and asked John--but the old man denied having been on the porch.
"Well," Aggie said, "maybe Calder saw it and took it. He seems to have a habit of grabbing everything he can."
"No doubt," John said.
Aggie bade him good night, and started up the stairs. His eyes grew misty when he went into his room. The objects there--banners, pictures, trophies, knickknacks and books--had belonged to a twelve-year-old boy. The scientist sat down on his bed, trying to summon that youngster back to existence: a boy who'd been slight, sun-tanned, shy, knowing. An interested kid--one who was afraid of grown people. He still was, the man finally thought.
He undressed and put on faded flannelette pajamas. He turned back the covers of the bed, slid into it, and did not especially try to go to sleep, which was why he found himself waking from a deep repose at the sound of stair-creaks. Only his mountainous aunt could make such noises. He had a light on and was sitting up when she knocked.
"Come in."
Her face was blotchy. She was panting slightly. There was a diamond dust of sweat on her skin. "I'm a hysterical old woman," she said thickly. "But, Aggie, I feel extraordinarily ill. My jaws are like a vice. I was on the verge of sleep when I thought of tetanus. It scared me so, I popped awake--and I've worked myself into a first-class tizzie.
I hated to bother anybody--and yet--I found myself coming up to see you."
He was standing, then, pulling his trousers over his pajamas. "I'll drive over and get Dr. Davis right away. If he's here. If not, I'll push on into town and raise somebody."
He knew that she wanted him to do that--although she was protesting. "I don't think it's tetanus--I've seen a few cases. But I haven't any idea what it is. Do you still keep the car keys in the teapot?"
"The new ones-the shiny ones-are for the station wagon."
He helped her back to bed.
Outdoors, it was still pitch-dark. But he could have found his way around to the garage blindfolded. He switched on a light. The place had once been a stable--and somehow it still smelled like a stable, although there had been neither horse nor harness in it for more than a quarter of a century. He heard Windle's feet hit the floor in the servants' rooms above and called, "It's me, Windle! Sarah feels badly and I'm going for the doctor. Don't bother to come down." Then he was driving over the familiar roads--by memory-paths that he had not known were still in his brain.
The Davis house, much like Sarah's, was called "Medicine Lodge" in quaint if obvious adherence to the local tradition. There was no doorbell. He banged the door with his fist, waited, banged again, and waited again. From the vast interior he presently heard quick, sharp footfalls--the steps of a woman--and soon he saw a light moving inside.
Because that was not what he had expected, he looked into a window.
A woman was coming down the stairs; she carried a candelabrum. As she descended, she lighted more candles. Her mules--pale green--made the sharp steps, and her negligée--half green, and, crazily, he thought, half mauve--floated behind her. She had smooth, red-gold hair that curled at the ends--just below her shoulders. She was young and opulently beautiful. Aggie had no idea who she was, but he imagined that perhaps Dr. Davis had married again--and he thought that he would hate to be a man in late middle age with a wife like that.
The woman didn't ask, "Who's there?" She somehow was not that sort of person.
She merely opened the door and said, "Yes?"
"I'm looking for the doctor. My aunt--Sarah Plum--is ill. Very ill."
"Come in." She pushed back the screen and he moved around it. She held the candelabrum toward him. Her lips twitched slightly. "So you're the celebrated Agamemnon Telemachus Plum! How do you do? I'll call Father immediately."
She went away up the stairs. She knew his whole name. Of course, they all had--
all the Indian Stones people. That had been just one of his juvenile tragedies. His father, a Greek scholar, had chosen his name. His mother had just died and Sarah had been too worried about her brother's condition, at the time, to interfere with the naming of a hapless infant.
A second thought burst upon him expandingly, erasing the first. Her father. She had said, "My father." Then she was--he tried to remember her name. He could recall the grubby pigtails, the loud, raspy voice, and the quality that had passed for wit among children. She was the one who had started calling him Agriculture Telephone. It was Dorothea--Doreen--something more unique--boy's name--Danielle. Candlelight was eddying in the stair well again.
He found himself trying to be reserved and amused. He tugged his beard impressively. "How are you, Danielle?"
She came to the bottom step, smiling, and she looked at him for a moment.
"Father's probably still out in his darkroom. Working. Our electricity's off. Power line down--I guess. Anyhow--we got here this morning and we ordered it fixed--but the men didn't come. If you'll follow me--"
She led him through the kitchen and across the lawn. The garage--a converted stable, like Sarah's--served also to house Dr. Davis's photographic development room. It was on a short corridor off the main floor. Danielle walked along, trailing her greenish garments, carrying the candles, and staining the night with a subtle, insistent perfume that was like rhythm or a musical chord, in that it affected other senses than the one which perceived it. She knocked on a door.
The response was crisp. "Just a second! Who is it?"
"Me. Dr. Plum has come over. Sarah's sick."
"Be right out." There was a moment of silence. ''Tell him I've got to wash up--and get my bag." A lock clicked and the door opened. From the dark corridor, Aggie had a glimpse of a tight little room, crammed with photographic materials. A candle burned there, behind a red globe. He noticed one small window very high up over a sink. "I'll be only a jiffy!" Aggie could see nothing but the man's arm. He realized Dr. Davis did not know he was standing behind Danielle. She started back down the corridor.
When they reached the living room, she inspected him attentively. "I generally find these meetings--following a common childhood--extremely disillusioning. You, at least, have made a mark somewhere--even if the rest of us haven't."
He had no idea what she did, or whether she was married, or if she was widowed or divorced-or anything else. He had forgotten her. He could see that she was a beautiful woma--and no more. He nodded.
"You look, heaven knows, like Joe Academy, the Cloistered Wonder-boy! How many honorary degrees have you by now?"
That hurt him--and annoyed him intensely besides. He thought of a retort--which, as a rule, he failed to do. "The pigtails are still there--in a figurative sense. I remember them. Blonde--basically--but vertiginous from being a mite soiled. You were a vile child, Danielle. At six--anyway."
She smiled with what seemed to be pleasure. But he could also see the rise and spread in her cheeks of a faint wrath. There was a brisk step in the rear of the house and her father came into the room.
"Aggie, old man!" He slowed for a fraction of a second at the sight of the Vandyke. "Splendid to have you here! Heard you'd be up for the summer. What in heaven's name is wrong with Sarah? Got the constitution of a loggerhead!"
Dr. George G. Davis didn't look two decades older. Only one. Crisp and lithe.
Pince-nez and pin-striped suit. A really fine surgeon and neurologist--who could pass as a good banker or the director of corporations--anything successful and important. He was leading Aggie toward the door. "Got a car?"
Danielle came to the window with her branched candlestick to watch them leave.
Aggie glanced up from the controls. She stuck out her tongue. It took three noisy attempts to get the car in gear.
"My daughter's with me for the summer, too," the surgeon said. "First time since--
" he broke off. "About Sarah?"
"She thinks it's tetanus. I don't. No rigor. Not the look in the eyes--"
The other man chuckled. "We aren't diagnosing people by facial expression these days, Aggie."
"You ought to."
While the surgeon made his examination Aggie waited in a dismal circuit of anxiety for his aunt, and irritation at Danielle. Outdoors, the slow wattage of nature leaked bluely up into the sky with a hue that was not normal in daytime, but dawn's sickly counterpart of noon. He could hear his aunt's voice buzzing in her room--and once she laughed. She'd gossip on her deathbed, he thought. Presently he went out on the porch and examined the luminous murk, breathed the air, lighted his pipe. He sat quiet--
turning his head with consummate slowness when he heard a pattering sound on the road.
Dog, he thought straining his eyes. Black dog. Funny-looking one. Like a fox. Was a fox.
He puffed his pipe; the animal, seeing the eddy of smoke, also saw the man. It vanished.
Sarah's door was opening. Aggie heaved himself tiredly from the porch railing and hurried into the living room. Danielle's father was replacing things in his bag with hands so swift and dexterous it was interesting to watch him do even that.
"Got to quarantine Sarah," he said.
"How's that!"
"Mumps."
"Mumps?" Plum echoed.
"She gave a banquet to a slew of refugee kids. Right interval. Right symptoms.
Wouldn't stake my reputation on it--but I wouldn't bring her a pickle for breakfast, either.
Not if I valued my life. In a person of her age--mumps can be serious. Keep her in bed.
You had 'em?"
The bearded man was grinning with relief. "Me? Sure. Both sides." Then his left eyebrow lifted in an expression of solicitous mirth. "Boy, will that be a blow to Sarah!"
CHAPTER 3
Aggie slept late. When he came downstairs, he found old John preparing his breakfast. "Heard your shower," John said. Aggie gazed at the bright sunshine and the wind-ruffled trees. It was a fine day. He learned that Sarah was "up and swearing" and he carried a cup of coffee into her bedroom.
She was sitting in a mighty rocker, enveloped in the red kimono, and smoking a cigarette. "This," she said, looking at the cigarette, "makes me feel as if my jaws were full of hot wires. Mumps! Imagine it! Disgraceful!"
"You said something of the sort, early this A.M."
"Sit down, Aggie. Drink that coffee. I want you to summon your strength. I've got work for you."
"Good," he answered. "I mend pipes, spray flowers, build shelves, fix old rock walls, repair tools--"
"Not that kind of work. My grapevine's in operation and I need a field agent. A person can't snoop--with mumps!"
He chuckled and shook his head. "For you, Sarah--anything but that. No espionage. You forget. I'm the original social mouse. I hate people. I would rather face a juramentado than a hostess."
"And what is that?"
"A juramentado is a hopped-up holy man on a killing jag against infidels."
Sarah wrinkled her nose. "No. matter. You can't let your favorite relative sit here sweating with curiosity day in and day out. My grapevine has already been working by telephone. By servants' murmurs, carried to me from Windle and from Chillie. I have a host of inquiries in mind. Myriad things that must be known. Problems. Indian Stones is seething with enigmas."
He eyed her. "You're serious, aren't you? What enigmas?"
She cleared her throat. "Tell John to bring me more coffee. Never mind. I'll yell."
She yelled, and went on, "What did you think of Danielle Davis?"
"That she was the kind of woman about whom the less I thought, the better."
"Mmm. She was crazy about Bill Calder, once. At least, she led him along in a most sensational manner. Bill's married to Martha Drayman."
"Let me get this straight. Bill is the son of the evil-mannered Mr. Calder, who barged in here last night? Bill has a sister named Beth, whom I am supposed to marry and have children by? Right? How many children, incidentally? You carelessly forgot to let me know. And Danielle Davis, the menace type, once pursued the luckless Bill, or vice versa, but it came to nothing. Bill is now married to a girl with the nice name of Martha.
A local belle, too, if she is one of the Draymans that I feebly remember."
Sarah nodded. "That's it. Well, it happens that I know that Danielle has been eating lunch in odd nooks here and there with Bill Calder--in New York--for some weeks, now. Danielle's not married. She doesn't come up here, as a rule. Makes the summer rounds--Newport--Maine--you know. But she's here this year for the season--and I'll bet that she's out to make trouble for Bill."
"Put it the non-feminine way. Trouble for Martha. I daresay, wherever that copper-tinged blonde is, there's trouble."
"So--" said Sarah, "I'll want you to keep tabs on Bill and Danielle. I want to know what they're doing. Danielle's headstrong and she's able, potentially, to ruin Bill and Martha's lives--"
"Why," he asked, accepting another cup of coffee from John, "do we wantonly barge into that private matter?"
"Because. I got Martha and Bill married, and I propose to keep them married."
Aggie nodded as if the idea were acceptable to him. "What's next on our list of meddling and peeking?"
"Next," she said, without being fazed, "is--what has happened to Hank Bogarty?
He wired four of us. Jim Calder, George Davis, Byron Waite, and me. The wires were sent yesterday morning from Albany and delivered in the noon mail.
Plenty of time for him to get here-but he didn't. No one's seen him. He may have had an accident. I'm worried about him."
"I don't think he had an accident," Aggie said. He told Sarah about the knife and the calling card.