Double, Double

Friday, April 7

When the second envelope arrived by special delivery three nights later, Ellery tore it open with shameless eagerness. That the sender was the same required two glances. The size and paper of the envelope, the crudely penciled address, the Wrightsville postmark, the blank reverse were identical.

One clipping from the Record, dated Monday, April 3, floated to his desk.

The Town Drunk had disappeared.

Tom Anderson was no more.

Ellery glared.

Investigation by Chief of Police Dakin had established, “almost to a dead certainty,” that Anderson was dead. His coat and hat had been found early Sunday morning, April 2, at the edge of Little Prudy’s Cliff in The Marshes. (The Marshes, Ellery recalled, was a tangle of sulphurous swamp just outside the eastern boundary of Low Village; it was the bogeyland of Low Village’s young and the breeding place of a superior strain of mosquito.) There was “unmistakable evidence,” said Chief Dakin, “of a tussle at the edge of the cliff,” in the course of which Anderson must have toppled into the quicksand below. The Record pointed out that the quagmire at the foot of Little Prudy’s Cliff was “bottomless” and that any object was immediately sucked beneath the surface. Attempts to drag the bog had been abandoned as hopeless. “Who struggled with Tom Anderson at the edge of Little Prudy’s Cliff?” demanded the Record hotly. “Who hurled him over to his horrible end? This is the question Wrightsville wants answered right away!”

The deceased, concluded the Record, was survived by a daughter, Rima Anderson, 22 years of age.

Byline: By Malvina Prentiss.

Ellery laid the clipping down.

Here was puzzle compounded. What was the connection between The Town Drunk’s murder — if it was murder — and the saga of Sebastian Dodd?

For there was a connection. There must be. In the earliest clipping there was no correlation between Anderson and Luke MacCaby, the central figure of that story. And in the second and third stories Anderson was not even mentioned as background. Suddenly — in story number 4 — Anderson again, this time as protagonist. But isolated. No cross-reference to MacCaby, or Hart, or Dr. Dodd, or even to his crony Harry Toyfell.

Yet they were all related, perhaps even Nicole (The Town Thief) Jacquard. They were related by the fact that someone in Wrightsville had related them. Anonymous suspected, or had, inside information. Anonymous had reason to believe that Town Drunk Anderson was pushed to his death. Anonymous knew that Town Drunk Anderson’s murder arose from the events reported in the first three Record stories.

Was that it? Did Anonymous mean to convey that MacCaby and Hart were also murdered? Or one of them?

Then there was Tom Anderson himself. Anderson had clearly been a man of culture and respectability before his fall from sobriety. Even drunk as Chaucer’s ape, lolling on the rotten imitation-stone pedestal of the Low Village World War I Memorial — against a background of smutty red brick factories, stoop-shouldered two-story crackerbox houses, cramped shops with embarrassing pinchbeck fronts like Sidney Gotch’s General Store... in the humped and dingy shadow of the old cotton mill — now the Wrightsville Dye Works! — even then The Town Drunk had aroused regret, not laughter or revulsion. Ellery could have sworn there was no evil in the derelict. If he was dead of violence, the evil lay elsewhere.

And the surprising news that Anderson had had a daughter. Survived by a daughter, Rima Anderson, 22 years of age, period. Bad reporting, Malvina. Was she a drudge in some High Village tourist home? Hired girl on one of the meaner valley farms? Or a regular in a four-bit bawdy house on Barking Street? But the name Rima... It irritated him, because it sounded and looked familiar and it kept just out of reach. And because, unoriented, it still refused to fit into his visual memory of the Wrightsville slums and sinks. It evoked an image of grace, solitude, greenery... But he was certain he had never met anyone in Wrightsville with such a name.

Well, he thought, this isn’t getting me anywhere. At all.

Ellery threw the second envelope into his catchall drawer.

I’ll sleep on it, he said to himself.