The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
“Or a lonely fellow who’s trying to tell us something,” Judy mused. “He’s certainly picking out a variety of items to toss around, which means he has method and purpose. If we could just get the message, I’m sure he’d go away and rest in peace.”
Red-eyed and haggard, I muddled through my junior accountant’s job the next day. I was worried about Judy’s almost natural acceptance of the existence of a poltergeist. In the warm light of day, I just didn’t believe what I had seen for myself. There had to be an explanation, like the juxtaposition of magnetic forces at the spot where our house stood.
I would have welcomed some advice, but could think of no source. My hard-headed, realistic boss was definitely out. If I went to the cops, the newspapers would pick it off the public record. We’d be subjected to the same glare of publicity that had roasted every other family so rash as to reveal acquaintance with a poltergeist. I wondered how many, like myself, had preferred to suffer the inexplicable in silence.
The house looked as normal as peaches and cream when I hurried up the front walk. A bouncy and smiling Judy had a not-very-dry martini waiting, the kind I like. She’d also fractured her grocery budget with a two-inch-thick T-bone steak, but I applauded her.
“No flying crockery today?” I asked as she slipped the steak under the broiler.
“Not even a saucer,” she said.
“Maybe the strain proved too much for him,” I said hopefully, munching the olive marinated in vermouth and gin.
We dined elegantly by candlelight, the table graced with snowy linen that had been a wedding present from my Aunt Ellen.
I’d had no appetite for lunch, but I worked like a scavenger on the steak. Judy served coffee, and we eyed each other across the table in affectionate silence.
The steak bone made like a Mexican jumping bean all of a sudden, rapping against the plate.
Judy blinked. I jumped. My chair tipped over backward. I grabbed the edge of the table and hung there, watching the bone jump up and down at eye level.
The bone made no threatening motions, but it was a desecration of our privacy. “Enough is enough,” I snarled. I rose, cupped my hands, and pounced on the bone. It offered no resistance as I smacked it against the plate. I raised my fingers one at a time, and was a little miffed when the bone just lay there after it was freed.
I sneaked a glance at Judy. “You did see that, too, didn’t you?”
Judy nodded an affirmative, her eyes glinting. “I wonder what he meant?”
“Maybe that he’s hungry,” I growled. “Maybe you should brew him up a spot of newt’s eyes over some sulphur and brimstone.”
“Don’t be facetious, Jim!”
“Facetious? I’m not even rational any longer.”
While Judy washed the dishes and tidied up after dinner, I did a sneaky search of the house from attic to basement. I didn’t find any wires, magnets, or other device remotely resembling the tools of a screwball practical joker.
When I went upstairs from the basement, Judy was curled in our new wing chair before the television set.
“You might have saved your time,” she said with wifely forbearance. “I covered every nook and crack myself today. Not that I needed any more proof that we really have a poltergeist.”
“I favor selling,” I said. “I could put the place on the market by phoning the real estate agent at his home right now.”
She sat up. “Don’t you dare, Jim Thornton! This poor fellow got stuck here, and when he gets unstuck he will go away and leave us alone.”
“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.”