The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

“Gee, that’s too bad!”

Mr. Curzon’s eyes beaded. “You should care. Andy’s mother had a nervous breakdown, and that nincompoop father couldn’t put the house on the market fast enough.” The inference that I’d profited by a young stranger’s death caused the heat to rise. I felt red from cheek to jowl. I let my eyes give Mr. Curzon’s gimlet gaze tit for tat, and said stiffly, “Good day.”

He slammed the door.

When I carried my burn back into my own premises I heard a couple of female voices in the kitchen. Judy and a blowsy and slightly brassy redhead of middle age were dunking teabags in Judy’s new cups.

“Oh, hi, Jim. This is our neighbor, came over to say hello.”

“Mrs. Curzon?” I asked, moving out of the doorway toward the kitchen table.

“Heavens, no,” the woman laughed. “I’m Mabel Gosness. I live on the other side of you.”

She chatted through the ritual of sipping tea and departed with the remark that it was wonderful to have young people in the neighborhood.

Judy carried the cups to the sink and began washing them. “We had real talk before the male presence befell us.”

“Did you now?”

“She seemed terribly lonely, eager for someone to talk with. She lives alone — her husband ran away with another woman nearly a year ago.”

“Maybe one who talked less.”

Judy looked over her shoulder long enough to stick out her tongue. “And guess what else?”

“I give. What?”

“On the other side of us is a mean little man named Tate Curzon. He hates everybody. Had four wives, no less, children by one of them. But even his own kids — they’re grown up now — never go near him. Mrs. Gosness says we’re to have nothing to do with him.”

“Thanks for the advice, but I’ve met the gentleman.”

“Honest?”

“Sure,” I said, taking the cups and saucers from her to dry. “Went over and said hello. Wondered if he could tell me why Bickleford was so anxious to sell this house.”

Judy practically wriggled. “And did you find out?”

I hesitated, balanced on the point of a fib, then realized she would find out from Mrs. Gosness anyway. So I told her about young Andy Bickleford who’d been picked up in pieces and a mother whose mind hadn’t been able to take it and a father-husband to whom the end of the world had come.

“I’ll bet that sock was Andy’s. The room must have been his.” A suspicion of tears touched Judy’s eyes.

By bedtime, our first day of settling into our new home had got our minds off the tragic Bicklefords. They were, after all, strangers, and the present was much too vivid. I lounged in the master bedroom in shorts, my sleeping apparel, nonchalantly pretending to read with the pillow stuffed behind my head. Actually I had the dressing room doorway framed in my vision over the edge of the book; and then the door opened and Judy stepped into the soft bedroom lighting wearing a nylon nightgown that was next to nothing. My civilized veneer barely stifled a roar of pleasure.

Hair brushed about her shoulders and a little smile of mystery playing across her mouth, she seemed to glide toward me. A remark on my pulse rate would be needless.

Then as she passed the bureau, a strange thing happened. A ten by twelve inch picture of me which Judy had framed suddenly rose, hurled itself across the room and smashed against the wall.

The picture fell to the floor. There was a moment of dead silence, then a whispered tinkle as a bit of glass settled in the wreckage.

I sat up with the dream movements of a man swimming through molasses. Judy and I knelt beside the picture, neither wanting to touch it.

“Your gown must have brushed against it,” I mumbled.

“And knocked it all the way across the room?” Judy said with fearful logic.

I gathered the bits of broken glass, piled them on the picture, and carried the wreckage to the bureau. Judy watched me, wide-eyed and steeped in her own thoughts.

As I turned from the bureau, the murder mystery I’d been pretending to read jumped up and down on the bedside table. The edge of the book cover jarred against the lampshade. The lamp teetered, fell with a crash. Darkness flooded the room.

I wasn’t sure whether Judy or I moved first, but in an instant we were standing in shivery embrace.

“Maybe we should check into a motel for the night,” I suggested through chattering teeth.

Judy’s warmth stirred in my arms. “Nope,” she said, “I’m not being chased so easily out of our own house. Anyway, our poltergeist doesn’t want to hurt us.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“He hasn’t thrown anything at us or on us,” she said with supreme female logic. “He could have socked you with the picture frame if he were antagonistic.”

“He’s a sadist,” I said, “who’d rather scare people to death a little at a time.”