Puzzle of the Silver Persian Read online

  “And this was a trip for pleasure!” moaned Hildegarde Withers. Which was hardly the exact truth. She had been left in such a nervous state as an aftermath of her participation in the unraveling of the murder mystery at Catalina Island in the late summer, that her physician had refused to allow her to go back to her desk at Jefferson School that fall. Luckily, the unexpected payment of a comfortable reward by the millionaire owner of the island permitted her to indulge a long-standing desire to see Europe.

  She took up a worn linoleum-bound copy of Alice and tried to forget that eight more days of the unfriendly Atlantic lay between the ship and the muddy mouth of the Thames. The book opened at the Hatter’s tea party. “‘I didn’t know it was your table,’ said Alice. ‘It’s laid for a great many more than three.’”

  Miss Hildegarde Withers smiled grimly, and wondered if she would ever sit in her chair at the ship’s table this trip.

  At any rate, her place was vacant at dinner the next evening. The rest of the arbitrarily arranged group at the doctor’s table was there intact, however.

  Dr. Waite, bald and sniggering, was a good master of ceremonies, for all that. The head steward always put the “young crowd” at the doctor’s table, plus one or two steadier women for balance. This evening saw them properly arranged—on the doctor’s left was the Honorable Emily Pendavid, then her nephew Leslie, then haughty Rosemary, then Tom Hammond and Loulu—minus Gerald, who gulped his food at a wall table with the rest of the children, under the eye of the stewardess—next Andy Todd, with Miss Withers’ vacant chair on his left, and beyond that the tanned face of Candida Noring, and the doctor again.

  Dr. Waite was talking, and he could out-talk Andy Todd. “What a crowd and what a voyage that one was!” he finished. “Dancing until eleven or twelve every night.”

  Loulu Hammond said something about the pace that kills. But Andy Todd wanted to know where there was any room for dancing.

  “Pull up the rug at one end of the social hall,” advised Dr. Waite wickedly. “Turn on the Victrola and leap to it. If the bridge players object, let them go complain to the Old Man. He’s on the side of youth and beauty, and he may come down off the bridge and trip a few fantastics himself.”

  Candida Noring had been on the bridge and met Captain Everett, who stood eighteen stone. “God forbid!” she said fervently.

  There was dancing in the social hall that night, in spite of the slow, shuddering roll of the vessel. The bridge players, instead of raising objections, paired off in sedate couples and got onto the floor. From time to time they overruled Leslie Reverson, who was self-appointed selector of the records, and played a waltz or one-step.

  The five old ladies at the five writing desks glared disapprovingly, but after a little while they finished their letters and went off to bed. The doctor appeared on the scene, danced with the Honorable Emily, with Loulu Hammond, and finally with Candida. He sought for Rosemary, who had watched coolly as a spectator up to this point, but found her dancing in the corridor with Tom Hammond. Their cheeks were very close together, and the bar steward had closed up his bar for lack of patronage and was watching them.

  Loulu Hammond was in the arms of Leslie Reverson, who danced beautifully and impersonally. She swung, when the music began again, into the strong and somewhat smothering arms of Andy Todd.

  Andy didn’t bother to be diplomatic. “Shall we go on deck and look at the moon?” he leered. “You needn’t mind your husband, he’s having a good time.”

  “What good taste he has,” said Loulu sweetly. But she didn’t go to look at the moon with Andy Todd. There was an easy chair beside the doctor.

  He lit her cigarette, nearly burning off her eyelashes in the process. “You know,” he observed generally, “it’s funny what people will do when they get on shipboard. They just seem to cut loose, sort of.”

  “They run hog-wild and dance until eleven or twelve, don’t they?” agreed Loulu. She was thinking of something else.

  “And romance! Say, there’s nothing like a shipboard love affair,” continued the medico.

  Andy Todd and young Reverson both approached to ask Loulu for the next one, and Leslie was vaguely surprised and pleased to find that he had won. Andy wheeled uncertainly and saw that Rosemary Fraser was approaching—alone. She looked like a princess in a wine-colored dinner dress, and carried her squirrel coat over her arm.

  “Miss Fraser!” he shrilled, in the high tenor which he could never control. “Can I have this dance?”

  “Sorry,” said Rosemary. “But I never dance.” She passed lightly out onto the deck, as if to an appointment there. Slowly a red flush rose along the neck of Andy Todd, mounting to his ears. Loulu felt so sorry for him that she was very nice to him all the rest of the evening—and regretted it whole-heartedly for the rest of her life.

  One by one the dancers began to leave the floor, yawning. The doctor and the Honorable Emily withdrew into a corner and began to have a heart-to-heart talk about fits. She herself complained of fainting spells, and she had always had her doubts, she confessed, about Leslie—him being so quiet and all. Even Tobermory, she complained, had thrown a fit last summer.

  “Worms,” diagnosed Dr. Waite sagely. The Honorable Emily brightened. She wondered if Leslie had worms too.

  The ship’s bell struck eight tinny times for midnight. Loulu fell to playing rummy with Candida Noring. Once she looked up startled, to hear light running footsteps on the boat deck above her head. She relaxed again. It couldn’t be Gerald. He was asleep, and for good measure locked in the stateroom.

  Andy Todd heard the footsteps, too. He was prowling around the long boat deck, throwing away cigarette after cigarette. Once he heard the beating of wings above his head, and a slow, fat bird fluttered into his face and then swooped away into the night. Even the gulls were crazy tonight, muttered Andy.

  He rounded a corner and was nearly tripped by the darting figure of a small boy. Gerald, it appeared, had broken loose again. He neatly nabbed the urchin.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “Kids like you should be in bed.”

  “This is more fun,” gasped Gerald, wriggling. “We’re playing a new game.” Another youth appeared, with flashlight clutched in his fist. “It’s Virgil,” said Gerald. “I gotta go with him. Lemme go, we’re playing Trap the Neckers.”

  Andy Todd found a quarter and displayed it. “What sort of game is that?”

  Gerald took the quarter. “Tell you for a dollar,” he bargained. He got a cuff on the ear. “Well,” he temporized, “we try to find a couple necking. Virgil says there’s lots of them do it. Then we sneak up real close and flash the light on ’em and run.”

  “Oh,” said Andy Todd. He was still a little red behind the ears. Finally he bent down and gave Gerald Hammond definite instructions, instructions which would have displeased that lad’s young mother exceedingly. “A dollar, remember. I’ll be in the social hall for an hour or so.”

  He saw the merry lads run back along the dimly lit boat deck and heard the faint slick of their rubber-soled shoes. Then, well satisfied with himself, Andy Todd went below, where the charming Mrs. Hammond was more charming to him than ever. He made a willing third at the rummy game.

  The stewardess entered the social hall a few minutes later, and beckoned to Dr. Waite. “It’s the lady in 49,” she informed him when he had followed her into the hall. “You know, the old maid school teacher who’s a bad sailor.”

  “Can’t cure that,” said the doctor. But all the same he tapped on the door.

  “Doctor,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers, cutting through his bedside manner like a knife through cheese, “is it possible for seasickness to produce hallucinations? Am I delirious?”

  “Pulse normal,” he told her. “Half a degree of temperature. No, you couldn’t be delirious. What you need is—”

  “A piece of salt pork on a string,” she finished. “I’ve heard that one. Well, if I’m not delirious, then will you explain to me just how s
omething with wings could come in my porthole and waken me by walking up and down on my face?”

  “Uh?” said the doctor. He backed away a little, but Miss Withers was holding out for his inspection a copy of Alice in Wonderland. Across its open pages were a double line of faint, damp bird tracks, marked in blood.

  “Of course, it’s a nightmare,” said Miss Withers reasonably. “But if it is, it’s lasting, a long time!”

  The nightmare, although the school teacher did not suspect it, had already begun. It was to encompass every passenger aboard the little vessel, and to cling to them as they sailed over the curve of the earth, hover darkly above their heads as they went down the gangplank, and redouble its terrors as they set foot upon terra firma in London Town. Thus began the Nightmare of nightmares.

  Back in the social hall Loulu Hammond was still playing rummy with Andy, Candida Noring, and young Reverson, who had just joined them as an alternative to going to bed. A tapping came on the porthole behind her, and she turned to look. No one was there. Todd, who faced her, rose suddenly, spilling his cards.

  “Got to see a fellow,” he apologized. In a moment he came back in off the deck, replacing his billfold.

  “On deck, everybody!” he called. The Honorable Emily, who was reading Punch again, put it down.

  “Whales?” she inquired eagerly.

  “Just come along—quietly,” he ordered, and led the way. There was that in his manner which induced the others to follow, puzzled and intrigued. Candida Noring was first, then Loulu, Reverson, and the Honorable Emily. A chill wind struck them as they came up on the deserted boat deck.

  “What a laugh!” said Andy Todd mysteriously. There was something hateful in his tone, Loulu felt. Yet she followed…

  He led the way forward, past the long lines of folded deck chairs, and pointed to a large and boxlike affair which was set between two engine-room ventilators.

  Loulu was holding onto Candida Noring’s arm in the semi-darkness. She felt the girl shudder. “It looks like nothing so much an oversize coffin,” whispered Candida.

  “Nonsense,” Loulu told her. “It’s the locker where they keep the steamer blankets.”

  Andy Todd was chuckling. “Watch this, now,” he whispered. Even his whisper was loud. He felt on the deck until he found one of the big wooden disks used as counters in the shuffleboard games. “Somebody found the padlock open, and crawled in,” he confided. “But somehow it got fastened tight. Now watch the circus…”

  “I say,” began the Honorable Emily, adjusting her eyeglass, “is it quite sporting?”

  But Andy Todd had sent the wooden disk flying across the deck. It hit the lightly built locker with a resounding smash.

  “Surprise! Surprise!” shouted Andy Todd. But he was the one surprised. Nothing happened. There was no sign of the frantic double Jack-in-the-box he had hoped to show. He had planned on hearing the cracking of light wood…

  He cast his borrowed flashlight forward and saw that the padlock hung from a broken hasp.

  “How silly!” said Loulu Hammond. She had a horrible feeling that this was the first chapter of a seven-and-six-penny thriller, and that the Body was about to be discovered. “Let’s go back.”

  But nobody wanted to go back. Todd led the way, whipped open the locker, and looked down upon an anticlimax of disarranged blankets. “They got out!” he said sadly.

  The Honorable Emily had expected whales. “Who got out?” she wanted to know. But Andy Todd did not answer. As far as Loulu Hammond was concerned, he did not need to answer. The flashlight showed clearly enough that caught in a crack on the inside of the locker lid was a wisp of soft gray fur.

  Chapter II

  Sex Rears Its Ugly Head

  “BUT DARLING, NO ONE knows that it was you,” Candida Noring was saying. “There are dozens of other girls on the ship, and for all that anybody can prove, it might have been almost any of them. There’s a lot of difference between guessing and knowing.”

  Rosemary Fraser lay sullenly in her lower berth, not even making a pretense of reading. “Oh, if people would only mind their own business!” she cried out. “If they—”

  “You’re on shipboard,” Candida reminded her. “You should have remembered that before you let some man put you in such a ridiculous position. There’s nothing else for people to do aboard ship but gossip and guess. What they don’t know they imagine. But it’s all a tempest in a teapot. Forget it, and just remember that in three days—less than three days more—we’ll be in London and booking passage around the world!”

  “I don’t care what you say, I’m not coming down to dinner,” Rosemary retorted. “Why, I’d die of shame when I came to sit down at the table.”

  Candida pulled a tarn over her straight brown hair. “But it’s not just dinner. Tonight’s the captain’s dinner with wine on the table and balloons and horns blowing and gifts…”

  “The gift I’d like,” Rosemary told her dully, “would be that Todd person’s head on a silver charger.”

  Candida was patient. “But, my dear, you can’t spend the entire voyage in your stateroom. Why, even the funny old-maid school teacher with the horsy face tottered out on deck today! The sea’s calm as a millpond.”

  Rosemary still shook her dark curls. Candida’s brown eyes narrowed. “Tell me—is it that you’re afraid to meet the man in the case, whoever he was? Afraid of something he might say?”

  “Him?” Rosemary laughed unpleasantly. “No, heavens, no! He wouldn’t dare say anything!”

  Candida nodded. “Because of his wife?”

  And then Rosemary was furious. “You promised, Candy! You swore you’d stop trying to find out who it was!”

  Candida Noring said that she was sorry, and softly closed the stateroom door behind her. She was the last person in the world, she told herself, to throw stones.

  She walked slowly aft, toward the social hall. Today was Friday—a week since sailing day. And Rosemary had spent most of it in the cloistered seclusion of their cabin. If only she had cloistered herself a little earlier! Candida thought to herself. When Rosemary failed to show up at the captain’s dinner, now that the sea had calmed down to a rippled mirror, the last shred of doubt on the part of the gossiping passengers would be dispelled. That would be an admission of guilt—if it was so terribly wrong to have crawled into that warm and blanketed locker with a man that she fancied. Candida wasn’t sure.

  For lack of any other objective, Candida Noring wandered into the bar. As she came through the curtain she heard Andy Todd’s high tenor: “You don’t suppose they crawled into the blanket locker to play checkers, do you?”

  He was still harping on his own pet scandal, this time for a group consisting of Loulu Hammond, the Honorable Emily, and Leslie Reverson. Peter Noel was rattling things behind the bar.

  “I must confess that I hadn’t thought much about it,” Loulu Hammond told him.

  But Andy Todd couldn’t be squelched. He leered at her wickedly. “Oh, haven’t you!” said he. Loulu’s teeth clicked against her glass, and the Honorable Emily tried to think of something to say.

  “I saw some porpoise this morning—” she began. Then they noticed Candida. Andy Todd muttered something about fresh air and left.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” said Candida Noring. “I just wanted a pack of cigarettes.”

  Peter Noel opened the case and offered her a meager choice. “No black ones,” he grinned. Noel was in good humor this afternoon.

  “We were thinking of some bridge,” suggested Loulu. “Care to join us, Miss Noring?”

  Candida Noring said that she only played poker. Noel cleared his throat and leaned on the counter. He saw a chance to act Munchausen again.

  “Poker—that reminds me of the tightest spot I ever was in,” he began. The five drew a little closer, for they were bored with seafaring, and listening was easier than talking.

  “It was when I was with the Goldfields outfit in Alaska,” said Peter Noel. “Little poker game o
ne night at the Frenchman’s Place in Nome, about five years ago. I’d spent a season up-creek and had come back to Nome to pay off my crew of dredgers and wait around for the old Victoria to steam in and take us back to Seattle and civilization. Even today Nome is a fast town in the fall of the year, and the card games are steep. That night at the Frenchman’s a Russian vodka-runner dealt me a pat hand—an ace-high straight flush in hearts!

  “Yes,” said Peter Noel. “There she was, the highest hand in poker. I kept a straight face, and the betting started off brisk. The others dropped out after a while—the Frenchman brought back a plate of ham sandwiches and stood gaping at the money piling up in the middle of the table—and finally I came to the end of my roll. I knew I had the Russky beat, even if he did have quick, clever fingers. He dug up all the money he had, two thousand, and put it into the middle of the table. I had to see him, or drop out. In my pocket I had payroll money for my firm, and I risked it. A man’ll do anything when he gets a royal flush.

  “Well, he threw down a measly full house. When I showed him my hand there was a long silence. As I raked in the money, another Russky behind the dealer yelled: ‘It’s an illegal hand! Christmas has got six cards in his hand.’ (They called me Christmas because of my name bein’ Noel.) I was waiting for that.

  “‘Six cards my eye,’ I said. And I showed ’em the cards. Then they accused me of pocketing one. Get the idea? I’d been dealt two cards stuck together, so I’d bet big and then lose everything according to the rules because of the extra card. Well, the Frenchman is a straight guy. He helped ’em search under the table and through my pockets and everywhere else. But they couldn’t find the sixth card the Russky card-sharp had dealt me. Finally they had to give up, and I took the dough, just as I finished my ham sandwich.”