Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

Death on the South Wind by Valma Clark

EQMM boasts an honorable roster of husband-and-wife detective teams. True, we have not brought you an escapade of Mr. and Mrs. North, or an exploit of Nick and Nora Charles, but we cannot be held responsible for these glaring omissions — neither duo exists in short-story form. We have brought you, however, Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Margaret Manners’s Desdemona (Squeakie) and David Meadow, and Cyril Plunkett’s Joe and Jeri Jones, And now we offer another domestic duet, another ’tecting twosome, another crime-crushing couple. Flippancy aside, meet “Professor” Hollis Mears and his wife Marjorie, in the strange case that linked Honeymoon Island and Mangrove Island. It happened in tropical Florida during that languid period when the south wind, like the mistral of Mediterranean France, blew hot and sultry and maddening... when sabotage and death were invisible fingers of the wind...

Your Editor found a certain fascinating femininity in this story — in the domestic scenes, in the romantic interludes, even in Miss Clark’s deft strokes of characterization. Women readers will recognize the authentic touch of a talented woman-writer; and male fans will welcome a distaff detective story that skillfully avoids the down filling and purple patchwork of the Had-I-But-Known school of sleuthery.

Little Mrs. Mears sometimes felt that there was a great scarcity of really good murders on an isolated Florida island — until the letter that morning. She was engaged in making over her poky little historian husband into a world-famous detective. Naturally he did not know this.

She scowled up at him reproachfully, from the letter, over the mid-morning coffee in his study. “I didn’t know you knew the Riders, Hollis!”

His magnificent forehead (it was startlingly brown from the sun beneath the silver crest of hair, it dwarfed everything about him) lifted to her from the eternal book list from his bookseller. Hollis was fenced in by books so that you could scarcely get to him. He was writing a History of the American Civil War, and the current world war could have been fought and won by the sheer tonnage of the tomes they already owned — all their money went for reference books — but still he was never through buying. “Are you reading my letters again?” he asked, resigned. “I don’t. Who are the Riders?”

“Tobacco. Fifty million dollars. Kidnaping.”

She passed to him the incredible, inconsequential, alarming letter:

“So that,” exclaimed Mr. Mears, “is what I get for helping the Sheriff solve two murder cases! Just wait till I get at him! Any job he does not fancy—”

“ ‘Helping’ him,” scoffed Marjorie. “You mean solving them. That stupid Tice did not have a bean in that soup. You are always too modest, Hollis. It is a good thing you have a wife who—”

“Wire her at once that we are not having any Anastasia.”

“It would be too late,” demurred Marjorie cozily. “Anastasia would already be in full flight.”

“Marjorie, I will not allow—!”

“Darling.” She was a pretty, bright young thing with very blue eyes and very pink cheeks and snapping curly black hair. “The money will come in handy.”

“Money!” he scorned.

“Yes, money,” firmly. “There are some things I want besides your old Civil War books.”

“I... never knew you felt like that,” he choked. He gazed at her with his blue eyes — that deep-sea blue that you could drown in. “I... I guess the honeymoon is over. All right. Just you wait, my dear, if it’s money you’re after, till my book is publish—”

“I can’t. The old glass coffee drip is broken, we have got to have a new one. And my bathing suit has no seat to the pants,” she giggled, “a new one is absolutely indicated. Besides, I have always wanted to see what the principal of a famous kidnaping case is like grown up.”

“From this letter, she is obviously a mental victim from the experience. Even if I were a detective, which I do not admit, that does not make me a psychiatrist. Get this clear, Marjorie. She can be kidnaped AND murdered. I am not again being deflected from my book.”

Marjorie gazed at her husband through welling tears. “I guess... the honeymoon is over.”

They were always saying that to each other. After three years, it never was over. So suddenly she was flung into his arms, a fence of tomes avalanching with the passionate abruptness of her movement, but nobody noticed. He held her with such tenderness, such shyness growing bolder — he had been a bachelor so long that he did not take easily to the privileges of matrimony. So then they were conscious only of their multiple heart beat, joined — like the multiple engine beat of those army planes overhead. The planes distanced; came the phut-phut-phut of rapid machine-gun fire. Again phut-phut-phut. One young aviator after another taking his morning drill at the target set up in the lagoon of the neighboring Honeymoon Island.

“That target practice is too near. Honeymoon Island, my eye,” he muttered, once more claiming her lips.

“This is,” she blissfully sighed. “Little Mangrove Island has been misnamed...”

So, of course, Anastasia arrived.

The bodyguard was with her — he saw her to the dock, then rode the hired speedboat back to the mainland for the return trip to New York — and also a tall, gaunt, middle-aged woman, dressed in black like a crow, her personal maid.

Stacy was a dear girl. Marjorie loved her at sight. She had that simplicity of the very rich to a degree that made her almost invisible for a moment: “tropical gray” outfit without a stitch of ornamentation. Or perhaps she herself had this ghost quality — she looked always as though she had just seen one! She had fine sandy hair, straight, polished from brushing, combed over to one side in a soft roll that gave a curious onesided effect to her lovely little head. Her eyes were gray, black-fringed, startled. She was small and fine and pale. Her appeal was much stronger than beauty, sex, money, though she had all three. She would have it when she was eighty, when — and if — she lost all three. Every man who loved her would ask only of life a long one, with which to take care of her and keep her safe, A-men.

“I am Marjorie Mears. You are welcome, dear.”

“Thanks.” She looked widely about, took a long quivering breath. “It is safe?”

Marjorie smiled. “Horribly safe.”

“Nobody knows I’m here? I mean my real name.”

“Nobody.”

“Nothing has ever happened here?”

“Well...” said Marjorie. (Only two murders, but they were not, so to speak, indigenous.) “Nothing not imported. And nobody is on the island but you and me and my husband and our negro maid Moselle and your—?”

“This is Yvette.”

Yvette kept her place with a reticent, lady’s-maid smile.

The Rider heiress did not at once relax. The twilight hour was the bad time for her. That was the time at which “they” had snatched her. But in the tropics the sun shines hard, then it ceases to shine with no lingering. And the maid Yvette — already she was like a mother to the girl, though she was new — stayed close to her mistress. The nights were also bad. Until her father finally contacted the kidnapers and paid the colossal ransom, the baby had spent four black nights chained in a box-coop in remote wild country. That first night Stacy had one of her screaming nightmares, which brought the whole household up standing. She needed only to hold someone’s hand tight. Yvette’s hand offered.

Stacy had brought the anonymous note to Mr. Mears. In spite of his avowed disinterest, he studied closely the fine slanted handwriting:

Hollis assured the girl that he did not believe in this danger; she was safe.

After a day or two, when she had been shown the whole long, narrow island, Stacy really relaxed. She threw up her arms; and let the south wind blow through her hair, and said, for the first time in her life that she could ever remember, she felt safe and free. And she and Marjorie began to have those happy times together.

You would see them going about, fair head close to dark head, like two schoolgirls. “Isn’t it marvellous, Hollis, she is not the least bit afraid. But we must not let anything happen.”

“What could?” asked little Mr. Mears shortly. He was perhaps a little hurt, thinking it had been dull for his Marjorie with only a middle-aged scholar.

Stacy looked about wonderingly. The lamps were kerosene, there was no telephone, the grounds were lushly ragged. She had never stayed at any place like this in her life. Instead of a private swimming-pool — here was the Gulf. The simple life. (It was a good deal less simple than before she hit the place, preparations for the Rider heiress having been elaborate!) Stacy loved it. She got into a one piece cotton play suit and beach shoes — all one could support with that dry, hot south wind still blowing — and followed Marjorie to the so-called garden. Three white hollyhocks stood up at uneven intervals, a triumph. These were Exhibit A of the island. To achieve them, Marjorie had fertilized till she all but ran them off the island with the stench. When Stacy took a hoe and dug in, Marjorie was exultant.

But if Marjorie taught Stacy the simple life, Stacy introduced her hostess to standards of luxury. The array of clothes in the guest’s closet, of little treed shoes, of hats, was a marvel to Marjorie. Stacy, quite as a matter of course, insisted upon paying a fabulous sum for the accommodation, and Marjorie’s little Panama handbag had never been so stuffed. The two girls went over to the little town of Clearwater on shopping orgies — Stacy timid, without her bodyguard, off the island.

Hollis would come upstairs, from a day’s tussle with the Civil War, to find Marjorie in a new ice-blue dinner dress with a spray of blue pearl flowers in her hair. (They dressed for dinner even alone, but never like this.) On the bed would be spread out a new white chintz beach costume with waterlily design, a new yellow peasant dirndl, etc., etc.

“You care for all this so much?” he would ask, touching it.

“No. No! Darling, I love you! But tell me, do I look nice?”

“You are a little materialist, Marjorie, married to a scholar,” rather sadly...

The golden treasure of this halcyon interlude was Yvette. Marjorie was so sick and tired of the slovenly, childlike negro help. This Frenchwoman was quick, deft and sophisticated. They said about the negroes that if you were a northerner, you never did get on with them. You were too easy on them. She tried sporadically to be very severe indeed. But with Yvette, you could completely let down. You did not need to keep her in her place. She kept herself in her place. There was nothing she could not do — and she was so willing to do it. She took over the washing and ironing of Marjorie’s lingerie: ironed a $2.98 nightgown in dozens of tiny pleats, so that it looked like one of Stacy’s fifty dollar Rue de la Paix masterpieces — almost... when Hollis’s new shoes hurt him at the heel, she said: “You give those to me, Mr. Mears. I feex.” She did, too, — hammered out the lining ridge, worked them soft with her hands. “You know what we women do when war come to France?” she asked, returning them. “We turn cobbler, tailor. In Marie Claire, that is magazine like your Vogue, it is article how to make shoes, how to make woman’s suit from man’s old suit. Frenchwoman is very, how you say—?”

“Resourceful,” supplied Hollis, “Thank you, Yvette.”

“Mos’ welcome, Monsieur.”

She even went into the kitchen and whipped out a light, yellow breakfast cake, delicious with jam, which she called “brioche”.

Moselle’s flat black nose was out of joint — even after Yvette obligingly produced from somewhere the fine wire for a new leader when the colored girl, an inveterate fisher in off hours, lost her tackle. In her feud with the Frenchwoman, you had to be sorry for the sullen, dumb black girl. But when Marjorie heard her black handmaiden jawing the dishrag, “She take it outta your hide, Miz Mears do. Your whole body get tired a-toilin’ for her.”... It was then Marjorie decided she would have to fire Moselle... But Moselle’s hush puppies, with fish, were memorable. And it was so difficult to get help to stay on an island. And Moselle had seen them through two murders...

Yvette, poor thing, was a refugee out of France. When the army planes went over — as they did forty times a day; the island’s peace was long since shattered; every sort of engine poopled and screamed and roared, these waters seemed to have been picked by the United States Army for an intensive training ground for everything from bombers to amphibian tanks — Yvette’s poise sagged. She asked fearful questions.

These planes might always contain Lieutenant Brook Hanna, and little Stacy stood off on a point and waved to them, just on the chance. When Hanna got leave and came to dinner, he proved to be such a sternly handsome youth that Marjorie was prejudiced against him. But when he emerged in bathing trunks, you could but gasp at the Apollo-like body.

“What makes you love him so?” she asked Stacy frankly.

Stacy flushed. Then she answered, as frankly: “There is nothing about Brook that reminds of — I mean everyone else almost could have been one of them, even if he isn’t. But Brook couldn’t have. Never in a million years.”

“You mean... one of the kidnapers?” groped Marjorie, appalled.

“Yes.”

“Who is this other boy?”

“Aunt Cinda wrote you about Carl?”

“She mentioned...”

“He swore he’d kill Brook if I married him. He’d kill me, too.”

“Impulsive lad.”

“He means it,” shuddered Stacy with her wide-eyed, ghost-seeing look.

But it was a happy, carefree week, with not a murder, not a kidnaping, not a hint of anything ominous but the noisy procession of planes going over and that dratted south wind that blew and blew — rattled the dry palms and sighed in the Australian pines and scorched your arid skin.

It never rains but it pours tenants. The Rider heiress had no sooner settled in nicely than two of the Mears’s three fishing shacks, “Windrift”, “Spindrift” and “Seadrift”, which stood on the windy Gulf side, remote from the house, and were almost never occupied, were spoken for. Stieg McCloud came for a week every year — that was not unusual. But the statement from a local real estate agent that she had a tenant from New York was curious. The shacks were shabby. And who, from distant New York, would ever have heard of Little Mangrove Island?

But Marjorie, with a full pocket-book, grew greedy. She consulted nobody. She began to have hopes of buying that second-hand scarlet speedboat for sale at the Imperial Dock, which would make good murder cases even on the mainland accessible to her unsuspecting husband.

Old McCloud was a great asset. It was a foursome now, and they had jolly dinner parties. Always a superior housekeeper, even on a shoe-string, Marjorie now outdid herself. The meals were magnificent Yvette served them, it went easier so. Her service was so sympathetic that she all but put the food in your mouth. “Good woman you’ve got there,” barked McCloud. “Beautiful hands.” (Surprisingly they were, and so knowing, hands that could do anything.) “Where’d you get her?”

“She’s Miss Rider’s personal maid. French refugee.”

“French? Ha!”

McCloud observed her sharply, under his tufted white eyebrows, when she melted back into the room.

“Must be peasant French. Big and bony,” he barked, when she again withdrew. “French girls are little and trim.”

“Well,” drawled little Mr. Mears, twinkling, “where and when did you get this comprehensive knowledge of French girls, Stieg?”

McCloud blushed,

“Paris. Two days. 1910.”

“We..e..ell. Those were busy days. I suppose you... er, saw Notre Dame and the Louvre and went up in the Eiffel Tower and had... er, crapes Suzette, besides other Suzettes...”

“Hollis!” scolded Marjorie.

Everybody laughed.

“Matter of fact, I had something at the Café de la Paix that was a lot better. Little chocolate éclaires, shaped like the holes out of the doughnuts your mother used to fry, filled with ice cream, covered with chocolate sauce and called... ha...”

“Profiterolles,” softly supplied Yvette, who had materialized again.

“Damme, that is the funny name!”

Yvette, the next day, actually went out into the kitchen and composed profiterolles, working with heaven knows what for the pastry chef’s tools.

“Ha,” said McCloud, lapping them up. “The woman’s a wizard. She’s French all right.”

And replete, he happily got going on kites again. “Cuban boy over in Ybor City in Tampa can stand on his back porch and put a little six-footed kite up over his neighbor’s roof — place it — with the right wind. He learned this trick, because there are so many interfering wires in Ybor City, ha... Chinese have the same precision. Kite flying always has been a national pastime of Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Tonkingese, Annamese, Malays, East Indians.”

He droned on.

Kites, kites, till Marjorie thought she would go daft. He really came to Little Mangrove not to fish, but to talk kites with Hollis. McCloud was a walking encyclopedia on kites — indeed, had written the authoritative Encyclopedia digest on that subject. Hollis, as usual, collected any and all expert information which came his way. Hollis was a two-footed encyclopedia on all subjects.

“— No difficulty about raising a kite to a height of two miles on the right days. In 1905 the Prussian Aeronautical Observatory at Lindenberg put up the upper one of a train of six kites to over four miles... And damme, Mears, consider the military possibilities. Simple method of lifting anything to a height. Used in both army and navy for signaling, for photography, for carrying up flags, lamps—”

The trouble with McCloud, socially speaking, was that he was a retired weather man — still working hard at the weather. When he got going, he talked about nothing else. He had got interested in kites because his meteorological service employed them to obtain information about the temperature, the humidity and the velocity of air up above. He even looked like the weather. Had spent so much time in a weather observatory tower that his name, McCloud, had become appropriate. His face was white — it was an albino skin condition, lack of pigmentation. He could not take the sun, and when he ventured out in it, swathed himself in misting white like a turbaned Arab. Otherwise he wore neat blue serge and never removed his coat, even in scalding weather. He had Scotchy weather eyes and a weather nose, always peering upward for signs. He said this south wind would veer north in two days — and so it did, but not before the first terrible disaster.

They had reached the really unique papaya mousse. The yellow candlelight laved over Stacy in white-silver and Marjorie in the new golden net. Suddenly Stacy’s black-lashed gray eyes widened upon the dusk beyond the table and her mouth rounded open in a sharp, high scream.

Both Hollis and McCloud sprang to the defense.

Her horror pointed — to a man coming through the open front door.

“For Pete’s sake, Stacy, do you have to act like that?”

“Carl Schee! Where — d-did you come from?”

“Your friends sure will think I am Grade A bad news. I’m sorry to intrude, but the boatman from Clearwater has just landed me on your dock, and I want to know where is this cottage I rented?”

“You — followed me!”

“Sure I followed you.”

“He can’t stay!” cried Stacy wildly.

But of course he did stay. Naturally the New York tenant to whom Marjorie had rented sight unseen, was the girl’s rejected swain! This took some explaining on Marjorie’s part. But the Mearses were inclined to agree with Aunt Lucinda. The boy did not make a bad impression. You were forced to recognize that Stacy was not normal, she really was a neurotic. He was a short, stocky, rather German-looking boy, obviously crazy about Stacy, abundantly demonstrative in his affection (he could not keep his hands off the shrinking girl) and with about the mentality and play habits of a healthy puppy. Hollis referred to him drily as “that playboy”. It was a literal description. In bathing trunks he came out fat and he would gambol with anybody who would gambol with him, and if nobody would he would gambol with the waves, and if there were no waves he would gambol with the sea weed.

Stacy kept insisting that now something terrible would happen.

When you saw him and Brook Hanna in the same room together, such was their young male antagonism, you were inclined to agree and fix it at murder!

“Aw,” begged Schee, “you tell her, Mrs. Mears, it just isn’t sense. How could I be one of those kidnapers? Why, gosh, I was only five and away at Nantucket the summer it happened. She says I’ve got the same shape as one of ’em. She says I may not be the kidnaper, but kidnaping is in me. By gol, if she keeps it up I will kidnap her, just to keep her from throwin’ herself away on that Hanna washout.”

It was the next day that the first “accident” happened. The flight of planes roared over — ten of them, in formations of three, with a leader. Stacy, who was walking the beach at the north end of the island with Marjorie, stood out on a point and waved at them, in case one was Brook.

Now they widely circled, and returned, single file, and swooped over the invisible lagoon. Phut-phut-phut. Phut-phut-phut One at a time, at the machine-gun target.

Marjorie thought how they were porpoise-colored, when suddenly there was an explosion, high up — not the phut, but bigger, more like the bump of a bomb. A white ball of smoke formed, and that rear plane, slightly off line with the others, began to wallow like a porpoise rolling to the surface for oxygen. She had always thought that one day she would see a plane fall. She could not believe that she was seeing it now. It happened so swiftly. The plane was no longer in the hot blue sky at all. This crash was different — longer, more conclusive, with a final metallic death rattle.

Stacy gasped: “Brook! It’s Brook!”

She was running like a crazy person, Marjorie after her, to the waterlogged old rowboat. They were in it, ankle deep in water, wallowing, floundering toward the not distant point of Honeymoon Island. Running again through the impeding sand. Two uniformed fliers kept them off from the wreck. “Is... it... B-Brook Hanna?” she babbled.

“No, Ma’am. Hanna didn’t fly today. He’s back at the field.”...

It took a knock-out sedative to get Stacy quiet. She kept insisting that this was Carl’s work, he was gunning for Brook. Yvette soothed her, “La pauvre petite. Dormez, Mademoiselle.”

What had happened? Nobody knew. Somebody shooting at the plane? That was nonsense — there was nobody to shoot at it — nothing to shoot with. So it was put down to an accident, just one of those things that happen when you are training raw recruits. The two boys killed, pilot and gunner, were Michigan lads.

The south wind veered to a north wind, on a regular tear, but it was a relief. As Hollis said, there was something about a south wind, like the mistral in the South of France, and men had once been pardoned for murder when that blew. After that, the days were as calm as your own hand mirror, the sea deep turquoise-blue with green and purple streaks, the red hibiscus poised as still as artificial flowers on their bushes.

Marjorie, roaming the island alone, came upon a broken piece of string snarled in a mangrove tree, like kite string. She also came upon some words spelled large upon the exposed beach with big white clam shells. It was as though a child had been playing on the island — and there was no child! Only the playboy! Or the kite man flying his kites? She had to giggle at the mental vision of old McCloud with his white turban ends yarding to a kite’s breeze!

To Hollis she confided: “Stacy is writing messages to Brook Hanna, with shells, on the beach. Every time a plane flies so low it just misses our roof, that will be Hanna reading them. Today’s billet doux is ‘I STILL DO.’ ”

“Still do what?” wondered little Mr. Mears.

“Still loves him, you dope,” Marjorie tittered.

The breeze was from the east — it was from the west — each shift foretold by McCloud. The war might have suppressed the weather reports, but Little Mangrove had its weather reporter right with it. McCloud was a good deal better than a barometer: more accurate. But all was peaceful.

Then, one evening, McCloud reckoned that they were due for another south wind. That night Moselle went on a rampage. She came to Marjorie, with the whites of her eyes as big as the whites of a pair of fried eggs, and demanded hysterically to be conveyed off “dis debbil-damned island to the mainland, where Things don’t happen, right away now.”

Marjorie descended to a bribe. “You mean, leave me? Just when I was going to give you my red silk dress?”

“Don’ want no red silk dress... The new one?” Moselle wavered.

“The brand-new one. And the red strap slippers.”

“They am too much murder on dis island,” Moselle whinnied. “Nothin’ don’ pay you back for murder. Affen you murdered, you can’t wear no red silk dress.” But she calmed magically; went off muttering to herself about “not likin’ dat weavver man, he make bad things happen.”

Marjorie was troubled. She had learned how truly psychic are the negroes: they smell trouble ahead, as a bird dog smells game.

In the morning Marjorie took a small, solitary excursion. She walked to the north end of Little Mangrove and frowned across at Honeymoon Island, so maddeningly near. You could swim it — but sharks? She remembered the water-logged old boat. One oar was now missing, the water was all but sinking it. The south breeze blew her over. She would have to bail with something, before she could pole it back. The island was a low, barren, desolate streamer of land, with a white line of beach showing the blanched old bones of shells and with — at this end — a low growth of mangroves. Nothing ominous — not a thing.

Marjorie followed the beach. A guard came stalking to meet Marjorie, and she remembered the rule: absolutely no visitors and this means you! He was very young, uniformed in rags and a peaked official cap. He did not quite know what to do about a pretty feminine trespasser who smiled at him, but he remained stern, if helpless.

So Marjorie wandered on up the beach. He called after her: “ ’Bout time for machine-gun practice in that lagoon up there a piece.”

“I know,” she smiled back. “Thanks.”

The island curved, she was soon out of sight of him. Here the beach was more desolate; the sun blazed, not a bush for shelter. The island widened, so that there were thickets of trees (Hiding for a machine gun? Absurd, she rejected it, that was not shooting!) but Marjorie was loathe to penetrate, afraid of rattlers. She came to the little lagoon, an uneven, deep half-moon, with its target range: a cool, tranquil green, very pretty, with fish playfully leaping.

Curiously she was not at first warned of the approach of planes by the drum of engines. The first hint was a fleeting shadow on the sands — so small that it must be either a bird or a plane very high up. She stared into the blistering blue, until her eyes watered. Nothing. Not a sound — not a sign.

Then, almost at once, the planes came pulsing up — high, like shadowy, double crosses in the sky — ten of them. Circling off — then lowering — looming — the roar a terror. Marjorie could not credit what was then happening. Couldn’t they see her? The roar of guns and engines was terrific. It seemed to rock the little island like a floating custard island. The shells spatted up the water — they kicked up the sands about her. Boom-boom. Tut-tut-tut-tut. Boom-bump: Marjorie was in the midst of skyrockets going off every which way all at once. Relentless — zoom — swoop — boom. They were aiming at her. She sat — shocked down — and gaped defiance.

It was from this position that she saw again the exploding ball in the heavens — not like these other explosions, in either action or position — and saw the great plane seem to falter — something drop away from it, a wing? — roll over and nose-dive toward the water.

Marjorie found her quavering legs and ran — floundered through the sand. “I’ll — t-tell — H-Hollis. They are sh-shooting each other. They are sh-shooting everything. But — that wasn’t shooting. It was more as though it ran into a load of dynamite. But there was nothing there.”

The guard, justified, called: “I told you so!”

“You fool,” babbled the pretty woman, “that was another c-crash and you don’t even know—!”...

Hollis was extremely angry with her.

His really eloquent fury was interrupted by Yvette, who urged a doctor for her mistress. Stacy was not calmed by the news that her fiancé was safe. The dead were a boy from Nebraska and a boy from Texas. This was Carl Schee’s work! He had only missed again. He would get Brook yet. No appeal to reason quieted her. It took again the knock-out tablet.

Hollis, in their own room, resumed. By this time, Marjorie, her nerves crying out, was in tears — but the tears did not melt him. “Unless they bomb me off the island, I am finishing my book, Marjorie. And all that I ask of you, as my wife, is the negative assistance of not going out and standing under the bombs!”

It was the first time that her power over him had totally failed.

The honeymoon was over...

Of course, it was not over...

But even in his cherishing arms, Marjorie could not move him.

She said: “This is a very funny thing, darling. It was like running into dynamite, with no dynamite there.”

“I am not interested, beloved.”

She repeated to him what he had said to her on their first murder case:

“You have a trained mind. Remember? Do something, darling! And then this shadow at first, with no sound of an engine. The plane must have been very high, because the shadow was so small.”

“That,” said Hollis, caught, “is odd.”

Marjorie would, by this time, have expected her particular anathema, the drawling-witted local sheriff. She did not expect a gentleman who looked like a citizen of the U.S.A. in good standing, and more particularly like one of the better-grade Princeton graduates, class of 1920 — and who announced himself as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation!

He sat down in the living room like any caller, and accepted a glass of iced papaya juice, and almost casually got the whole set-up.

When ghost-pale little Stacy began her chatter about somebody (her gaze pointed Carl Schee) gunning for just her fiancé, Lieutenant Brook Hanna, this F.B.II. man, Coates, said he was afraid it was much bigger than that. Somebody was gunning for any and all army fliers. At this rate, they would kill off our men while they were still students, before they ever got to the wars. He said skillfully, “You are the Miss Rider who, as a baby, was...?”

“Yes.”

His look poor-childed her.

It slid off, clicked around the room, ticketed everyone, down to Moselle and Yvette, assisted by a few well-placed questions.

“Unfortunately,” he continued, finishing the papaya juice and lighting a cigarette, “it does not appear to be a simple question of gunning. No machine-gun nest. We have combed the islands. Of course, as far as any sound of shooting, the roar of the planes and their bombs and machine-gun explosions, would be complete cover. But... there are no bullet holes in either of the wrecks!”

“But it didn’t,” glowered Carl Schee, “happen over this island.”

“No,” agreed Coates, watching him with his intelligent gray eyes, “over that island. Unfortunately there is nobody there whom we could suspect, except the young guard. He is not a clever youth.”

“Then,” charged Carl belligerently, “you suspect us?”

“The advantage of an island,” thoughtfully, “is that it does restrict, geographically anyhow, the suspects. I should think one of you on this island must be guilty.”

“It’s too bad,” said Carl hotly, “that we haven’t got a Japanese alien among us.”

“That is too bad. Perhaps we won’t need one. Which of your ancestors, Mr. Schee, were German?”

“I like that! All right. My father’s father, and he was as good an American as you are!”

“That is entirely possible.”

“When a crime is committed,” offered Stieg McCloud unexpectedly, “it sometimes pays to take a check on the weather. Many a murderer has been convicted on his weather testimony — full moon where there was no moon, saw things he couldn’t have — ha.”

“What was the moon?”

“It wasn’t the moon, it was the wind. Damme, both times a south wind blowing.”

“As though... sabotage and death blew from this island,” agreed Coates, fixing not on Schee, but on McCloud. “What’s the Stieg in your name from?”

“Family name,” gruffly. “My mother.”

“German?”

“Austrian.”

“And you’re a retired weather man. Advance weather information is as valuable to the enemy as maps of the country.”

“What,” barked McCloud, “do you mean to insinuate? That I am a Fifth Columnist weather expert? Damme, I’m as loyal an American citizen as anybody!”

“Doubtless,” agreed the F.B.I. agent rather tiredly. “This is all routine, Mr. McCloud. My job is to question.”

He rose. “By the way, where’s the child on this island?”

“No child,” said several voices together.

“That’s funny, because...”

Then little Mr. Mears said something. He said quickly, as though to get it over: “Mr. McCloud is a recognized authority on kites. I myself know a great deal about kites, from Mr. McCloud.”

“Kites,” said the agent. “Kites... Thank you, Professor.”

Mr. Mears blushed: “I am not a professor.”

“But the local sheriff said—”

“I have never troubled to correct the local sheriff.”

“Thank you,” said Coates, faintly smiling, “again. The local sheriff, I take it, troubles you quite a lot. I hope we shall not have to trouble you.”

“That is fine,” said Hollis, “for I cannot take any more time away from my book.”

“What are you writing?” respectfully.

“A History of the American Civil War,” said Mears, blushing with pleasure that anybody should ask...

Marjorie fretted at her husband. “I don’t care if he is a G-man! He is not so smart as you are, Hollis.”

“He is quite capable of handling this job, my dear.”

“Who did it, Hollis?”

“Of that I am not quite sure — only of how it was done.”

“How? How?” cried little Mrs. Mears, beating her hands with curiosity.

But Hollis retired to his study and — for the first time in their life together — locked the door against her.

The south wind blew and blew. For three days it blew, gentle but steady. Everybody’s nerves were as raw as those exposed, live frogs’ nerves in Advanced Biology. Nothing happened, of course. Nothing would happen with the U.S. government itself on guard.

But something did happen.

Marjorie wandered down to the north end of the island, to talk with the young soldier with a machine-gun who was on guard there. She told herself spitefully that, after a Brain, Stupidity was a relief. The young soldier didn’t know much; his job was, moreover, to know less! He would not talk. Would not say what he was on watch for, would not say what he would do if what he was on watch for materialized. He would only say that he was Joe Baker from the Bronx, and that he liked beer.

The sun shone blindly, the sky was dizzied with it; the south wind shifted the great white clouds like stage scenery, all in a piece, northward. Neither of them saw a thing. Not a thing.

The army planes were coming, you could hear their high, distant, multiple beat. Then they seemed to be scattered across the sky. Suddenly one roared low over the island tip, skimmed the beach: Brook Hanna, picking up Stacy’s shell message.

The plane lifted and zoomed toward the lagoon. And suddenly, nearer than the other times, lower, there was that terrific pause, that ball of explosion, that slow motion act of falling to pieces in mid-air.

The scream was Stacy: “It’s — Brook!”

She came, running raggedly. Fell. Clutched up. Fought on.

Marjorie was running after her.

Both girls ran into the water. Stacy turned and fought off Marjorie. But Marjorie gripped her, dragged her out...

It was Brook, all right. If you dreaded a thing long enough, it came true...

Brook was not dead — he was dying...

Then he was not dying — he might even live to give testimony...

He did live, but he never needed to give the testimony...

“Will you tell me, Mr. McCloud, as an authority on kites,” asked the F.B.I. man formally (this was again in the living room, with all present) “whether, since it is possible to float weather instruments on them, it is also possible to lift on them a high explosive which is so sensitive to shock that it detonates with great violence if, say, an airplane collides with the kite?”

“That would be possible,” admitted McCloud.

“And will you tell me whether it is possible to send up a flock of little kites, so loaded, precisely over a given locality, presuming the wind is just right, so that one or more planes in a flying squadron would, with luck, encounter one of these?”

“That is probably possible, but—”

“And can the kites be constructed so that they are practically invisible, flown on—?”

“Wire, yes.”

“And the wire released at the last instant, so that it will not lead back to the kite flier?”

“Ha. Yes.”

“But does it not require long practice and great skill in kite-flying to place your kites?”

“Damme, yes, Coates. That’s my objection to—”

“You have this skill?”

“Certainly!”

“Then, Mr. McCloud, though I have not yet found the evidence of kite making or materials in my search of your quarters, I am going to hold you for the sabotage of three planes and the death of—”

“No,” said little Mr. Mears. “Wait!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Wrong person.”

“You mean — Schee? He doesn’t know kites—”

“No, not Schee.”

Coates rested back and looked at Mr. Mears. “Yourself? You’re the only other kite authority—”

Mr. Mears blushed. “No. No. Not me. It is a woman, Mr. Coates, I regret to say. It is... Miss Rider’s personal maid, Yvette.”

The gaunt woman stood up outraged. “Me, a refugee out of martyred France — me who has already suffered much — my seempathy it is with the Axis?”

“I am afraid so. Like so many of the Fifth Columnists, you were probably stationed many years in France. Then, when France fell, you came out, to take up residence, as a refugee, in the next country to be undermined. Unfortunately you have been too obliging. You gave yourself away with that wire for Moselle’s fishing leader. I remembered and checked. That is steel piano wire, 1/32 inch in diameter, weighs about 16 pounds to the mile, stands a strain of some 250–280 pounds before it breaks. That is precisely kite-flying wire. You’ll find, I think,” he turned shyly to Coates, “the materials in her room if you search. I don’t presume to know exactly how she made the kites. She is very clever. I don’t know where she flew them from — perhaps that highest mangrove hillock. Don’t know how many she put up in a flight, or what happened to the loaded kites which weren’t blown up. But what I should like to know,” said Mr. Mears, turning courteously to Yvette—

The woman stood there now with an expression of resignation. She was the fatalist. This was bound some day to come.

“— What I should really like to know, is where did you learn kite flying?”

“My father,” stated Yvette with strong pride, “he was head of the Prussian Aeronautical Observatory at Lindenberg in 1905 when that train of kites fly so high.”

“You served at table that night Sheriff Tice dined with the Riders and heard him advise them to send their niece here — where there was work for you to do — if she were ever threatened again.”

Even Yvette stared at little Mr. Mears, as at a magician. “The waitress, Alice, she has free day. Yes.”

“You sent that threatening note?”

“Naturally,” Yvette calmly agreed...

“The real coincidence,” marveled little Mr. Mears to his wife, “is that there should be two kite experts on the island of Little Mangrove at one and the same time. But probably McCloud touched Yvette off with all his talk of kites.”

“Darling,” snuggled little Mrs. Mears, “I do like a man to have a brain. When did you first guess?”

“It was something you said.”

“Then I am a help! Oh, darling, darling.”

There was an interlude which proved incontrovertibly that the honeymoon was not yet over.

“What did I say?” she remembered.

“About the plane that cast the small shadow, with no sound of an engine. Suppose it wasn’t a plane. What could it have been? A bird, perhaps. Or — a kite.”