Double, Double

Tuesday, April 25

Nick Jacquard was down on all fours on the rocky ledge staring into the pool which seemed made of brown sugar and sparkled like a million fireflies under the moon, and Ellery peered over Jacquard’s thick back to see a face imbedded in the sugar below which was suddenly not sugar but writhing lava, smoke drifting over the face just in time to prevent identification although there had been a plea in it for recognition of some sort. At this the moonrays turned scarlet, pouring into the lava pit, and Nick Jacquard threw back his shaggy head, Ellery seeing that he was a dog howling in unfeeling agony at the incomprehensible nature of the night. There was such a piercing note in his canine grief that Ellery cried out and covered his ears. Now the howls muffled, and Ellery awoke to find himself pressing the ends of his damp pillow to his ears.

The dog still howled.

Ellery sat up in bed, blinking at his wrist. After three. His skin was still slick and he irritably got out of bed and lurched to the window, trying to rouse himself.

The dog was howling in or beyond the garden in the monotonous terror of the dream. There was no moon. The only light came from a window toward the other end of the house.

Dodd’s bedroom window.

And Dodd was at the window, his arms raised as he hung on to his drapes, a gross, supplicating silhouette.

The howling persisted.

The howling persisted and Ellery’s head cleared suddenly, his hairs prickling.

He kept staring across at the man in the window.

A dog howling in the night. And recently there had been an ace of spades, twice dealt.

The noise persisted. Ellery wondered how anyone could sleep. Dodd, at his window, never moved.

It stopped just before dawn and only then did Dr. Dodd come alive. The black arms dropped, the window was blank. A moment later the light went out.

Ellery crept back to bed, inviting sleep. But sleep was a sensitive plant tonight, shrinking from the breath of the dog. And there was always that infernal jingle. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor... Something Sisyphean about it; a stone he kept pushing endlessly toward a conclusion and which rolled endlessly back on him.

And in the morning there was another vexation.

Ellery was dragging his tail down the stairs when he froze on the landing above the front hall. Something between a scream and a bellow had suddenly split the early morning silence. Immediately there were sounds of feet which one moment ran, the next scuffled violently; then a crash and a thud, and the bullish voice rose again in maddened anger.

He found himself at the rear of the downstairs hall looking about wildly.

“Mrs. Fowler! Essie! Where’s that coming from?”

“The doctor’s study,” shrieked Mrs. Fowler. “They’re murderin’ him, Mr. Queen!”

From the noise, they certainly were. Ellery hurled himself at the study door and almost broke his neck. It gave at a touch.

Dr. Dodd was running about his study brandishing a rolled-up copy of the Wrightsville Record, flailing away at walls, desk, bookcases, floor in a grotesque balletry of rage. The dancing doctor accompanied himself with a song half prayer and half imprecation, fitting music to his choreography. In one of the windows, open to the rear garden, old Toyfell’s gloomy face was framed.

Then Ellery solved the mystery. Dodd was not executing a ritual dance; he was trying to kill a bird. It was a small dreary-colored bird, a sparrow or bunting, which had evidently blundered into the study through the open window, and Dodd and the bird had surprised each other when he came downstairs. Why the sight of the trapped and frightened little creature, which swooped and soared desperately among the invisible parabolas of the doctor’s blows, should have upset Dodd so eluded Ellery for the moment.

“Dr. Dodd. Doctor—”

“Get that damned thing out of here!” panted the doctor. “Get it out!”

“Ellery—” Rima was in an old wrapper of Mrs. Fowler’s, pale.

“See what you can do with Mr. Sparrow — he’s probably an old friend of yours. Doctor. Dr. Dodd! Stop that, now.”

He managed to get the big man in an armchair while Rima stood still in the center of the study and made chirruping sounds. The bird, perched on the highest bookcase, gave a querulous reply. And in a little while, apparently reassured by Rima’s conversation, it flew down and perched on her shoulder. But only for a moment. Then it streaked for the opening in the window and whistled past Harry Toyfell’s head like a bullet and was gone.

“A bird.” Rima sounded shocked. “And you tried to kill him, Doctor.”

Dr. Dodd cowered in the armchair.

“Drink this.” Ellery held a glass to the doctor’s liverish lips. “Rima, where’s Ken?”

“He had to be at the hospital early this morning for a consultation. Dr. Dodd, what was the matter?”

Dodd did not reply. He pushed the glass from his lips.

“We’d better get Ken or somebody right away,” said Rima in a low voice. At the window Harry Toyfell’s saturnine face still hung. Mrs. Fowler and Essie clung to the doorway.

“No doctor.” His mouth seemed stiff. “I’m all right. Just let me lie down on the couch. I’ll be fine.”

They left him stretched out on the black leather couch, face turned to the wall.

“Always was the nervous kind,” Mrs. Fowler whispered loudly in the hall, “but I declare, lately he’s a wreck. I don’t see how he can go on much longer this way.”

“Scared of a little old bird,” sniffed Essie Pingarn. “If you ask me, Mis’ Fowler, it’s his ma all over again.”

“Essie!” hissed the housekeeper; and Essie flounced off.

“What did Essie mean — ‘his ma all over again’?”

Mrs. Fowler took refuge in her earpiece. “What?”

Ellery repeated the question.

“Don’t seem to hear you, Mr. Queen. I’ve got to get your breakfast started—”

“Bother my breakfast, and you heard Essie perfectly. If she knows about it, it can’t be much of a secret. What about Dr. Dodd’s mother, Mrs. Fowler?”

“You ask Dr. Winship. You do that. Got my laundry to sort, and—”

“He’s not here and you are. Tell me.”

The housekeeper glanced fearfully at the closed study door. Then she whispered, “His ma died in Slocum State Hospital,” and fled.

It accounted for a great deal.

But not enough.

Ellery looked into the waiting room. Rima was on the phone trying to locate Dr. Winship.

Ellery waved and went across the hall to the dining room.

As he cracked his first egg a partial answer came to him.

A bird coming into a house was one of the oldest of evil omens. A bird coming into a house. Like a dog howling in the night. Or an ace of spades.

They all announced the imminent visit of death.

Ellery returned from Dakin’s office at a little past noon with the second duplicate key in his pocket to find the waiting room crowded and Rima and Dr. Winship running about like harassed store clerks in a going-out-of-business sale. He managed to see Winship for a moment.

“It’s the Jacquard shooting,” said Ken despairingly. “Half the people out there have nothing wronger with ’em than an acute case of rubberneck. Local politics and other people’s troubles are Wrightsville’s two main interests.”

“Where’s Dodd, Ken? He’s not in his study.”

“He ducked out just before office hours, said he wanted some air. I told him to go. He’d be no good here in the condition he’s in.”

“Ken, what’s the matter with Dodd?”

“I wish I knew. He’s in a highly nervous state, bordering on hysteria.”

“Bordering hell. Didn’t Rima tell you what happened this morning?”

“Of course. If this keeps on I’m going to call in a psychiatrist. He can’t go on this way, something’s bound to give. I wish I had more time for him. But now that I have to take care of two practices—”

Rima came in hurriedly and said, “I’ve got Mrs. Broadbeck on the table, Ken. She knows it’s a tumor.”

“Tumor my left ovary. I told her last month she was pregnant. Rima, did I say it today?”

“No, darling.”

“I love you. Who’s after Broadbeck?”

Ellery went out. He had passed Harry Toyfell on the front lawn spading some rose bushes. Essie Pingarn’s vacuum cleaner was whining in the dining room. He poked his head into the kitchen; Mrs. Fowler was on the extension, reading a grocery list to Logan’s Market.

So he went upstairs, rubbing his thumb over the key in his pocket.

Now that he was in the attic room, with the door locked behind him, Ellery was let down. He did not quite know what he had expected to find in the part of the room which had been beyond the line of his vision when he hung over the roof, but it was certainly nothing so unexciting as the rusty iron sink and small electric burner that he now saw.

The rest were as he had last seen them. The two decks of cards on the table, the row of objects on the braceboard shelf below, the mission chair.

The room was close and musty. Browning wallpaper curled everywhere.

He picked up one of the decks of cards and glanced through it; then the other. Perfectly ordinary cards. He replaced them on the table as he had found them.

Now he squatted on his heels for a closer look at the shelf which ran the length of the table underneath. It supported a conglomeration of things, as random and unrelated as the contents of a boy’s pocket. A heap of pebbles. A carton of salt. A little box of assorted finger rings, some antique-looking, others of modern design; none was valuable. A pair of red dice. A rusty sadiron that looked as old as the house. Absurdly, a bundle of arrows — old Indian arrows, he thought; at Creecher’s Barn, over toward Connhaven, you could pick up anything from the petticoat of a Salem witch to Increase Mather’s shoe buckle. For that matter, all you had to do was dig almost anywhere. Boys were always turning up arrowheads, maize pestles, and whatnot; this had been congested Indian country. Seven arrows, and other things equally childish.

But as he squatted there, taking inventory of Sebastian Dodd’s haphazard treasures, pebbles, salt, rings, dice, sadiron, arrows and the rest ranged themselves along the shelf like instruments in an orchestra, of different materials, shapes, and sizes but all bound by a common function to a common destiny.

And now Ellery heard and apprehended the music of Dr. Dodd’s queer orchestra; but comprehension was still beyond him, for Ellery was a man of simple sanity and certain things of which he knew remained just outside the grasp of his understanding.

The Dodd who had collected these objects was not to be salvaged by an ordinary man. That was a reclamation job for experts.

As Ellery relocked the little door from the outside, he tasted a guilty brash. On Sunday he had quoted Dodd a jingle, prophesying doom. No wonder Kenneth Winship had been furious. It had been like putting out the light in the room of a child who was screaming because he was afraid of the dark.

When Ellery got downstairs, Rima jumped up from her desk and took him into the hall.

“Dr. Dodd’s back and, Ellery, what do you think?”

“What?” asked Ellery quickly.

“He’s back in his office examining patients!”

“Funny,” muttered Ellery.

“You and Ken. Ken said the same thing. ‘It isn’t natural,’ he said—”

“It isn’t.”

Rima stamped back into the waiting room.

Ellery saw Dodd after the last patient left. The doctor was looking tired but calm. “That silliness this morning, Mr. Queen—”

“I’m delighted to see you back in harness.”

“Must have overdone it. It creeps up on you at my age.” He even laughed. “I can’t guess what you’ve been thinking. Mrs. Fowler treating you all right?” He actually put his hand on Ellery’s shoulder in a friendly way.

But Ellery felt it tremble.