The Spook Lights Affair

25

Sabina was at her desk that Wednesday afternoon, writing a client’s report on the St. Ives case and preparing an invoice to go with it, when John finally put in an appearance.

After she had delivered Virgina St. Ives to her angry father the night before, she had stopped by the agency before going home for her much-needed bath, food, and quiet rest. There had been no message from John then — she surmised he was still in Carville-by-the-Sea — nor any word from him since her return here this morning. Seeing him hale and hearty, if a little on the wilted side — his suit and vest needed laundering and he looked as if he had had little sleep — eased her mind.

“Ah, good, you’re back from your trip,” he said. He seemed to be in good spirits, but she knew him well enough to detect a tempering factor to his cheerful mood. “Did your hunch pay off?”

“It did. I found Virginia St. Ives — alive and hiding in an empty home in Burlingame.” John’s silent nod prompted her to add, “You don’t seem surprised at the news.”

“I’m not. I’ve known for some time she didn’t fling herself off the Heights parapet. So have you, evidently.”

“Yes.” Sabina went on to give him an account of how she had found Virginia and the reasons the girl and Lucas Whiffing had faked her death, adding details she had omitted in her verbal report to Joseph and Margaret St. Ives. She finished by repeating Joseph’s vow to deal sternly with the pair.

“He’ll need only to discipline the girl,” John said. “Lucas Whiffing is dead. Shot to death in Carville last night.”

“By whom?”

“E. J. Crabb, the Meekers’ neighbor. E for Ezekial.”

“The mysterious Zeke?”

“None other. Crabb and I had a minor set-to and a long chat this morning, the result of which is that he’s now in city prison on a double homicide charge.”

“His other victim being Jack Travers, I take it.”

“Correct.”

“So then he did steal the Express money from Travers. Did you recover it?”

That was the tempering factor in John’s mood; his mouth turned down at the corners. “Not yet. Crabb claims he committed his crime for naught, that he never had the money — Travers hid it somewhere and he couldn’t find it.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Crabb couldn’t find it, but I will.”

“Why did he shoot Whiffing? Something to do with those ghostly manifestations?”

“That, and the fact that Whiffing was the mastermind behind the Wells, Fargo holdup.”

“I thought as much,” Sabina said. “So our two cases were intertwined after all.”

“More tightly than either of us suspected.”

“What exactly happened in Carville? You solved the spook riddle as well, I’m sure.”

“I did.”

Before continuing, John assumed his oratorical pose. Whereas Sabina imparted information in a straightforward manner without embellishments, there was nothing her partner liked better than to take center stage, even if it was only before an audience of one, and deliver what amounted to a soliloquy. Homer Keeps had referred to him in the newspaper as self-aggrandizing; at times he could be just that, if tolerably so.

He produced his stubby briar and tobacco pouch and took his time in the loading and firing process — his favorite ploy to heighten drama. Sabina waited patiently for him to get the pipe drawing to his satisfaction and finally begin his explanations. Waited patiently, too, while he unfolded his story at length, in considerable detail and with numerous histrionic flourishes worthy of Edwin Booth. Or Lily Langtry, she thought with wry amusement. Much of what he told her she already knew or had surmised, but she didn’t interrupt him.

The lengthy monologue seemed to tire him even more. When he brought his oration to a close, he sank wearily into his desk chair. But he wasn’t quite done yet. He still hadn’t explained precisely how Lucas Whiffing had perpetrated his tricks in Carville. Sabina prompted him by asking.

“Tomfoolery, pure and simple,” he said. “The same sort he and Virginia St. Ives used to fake her death on the Heights.” He paused. “The girl didn’t tell you how that was done, did she?”

“No.” Sabina didn’t add that she hadn’t needed to be told.

John puffed up a huge cloud of smoke, rubbed his hands together, and said, “It was all quite simple, really. The central ingredient in both deceptions was the use of—”

“Kites,” Sabina said.

“Kites,” John said an instant later.

He blinked at her, then fluffed his beard to hide a frown. “You already spotted the gaff? How, if the girl didn’t tell you?”

“A combination of observation and ratiocination, as our friend Sherlock would say.”

“Bah. He’s no friend of mine.”

“Be that as it may, you’re not the only canny member of this agency, John. I’ve proven that to you more than once. I suspected for some time, as I said before, that the supposed suicide leap was a sham staged for my benefit and that Virginia was still alive and in hiding somewhere outside the city. She couldn’t have managed the trick alone and Lucas Whiffing was the obvious choice as her accomplice. But it wasn’t until I realized the contrariety in what I witnessed that had been bothering me.”

“And that was?”

“Virginia’s gown.”

“What about her gown?”

“I heard a distinct fluttering sound while she appeared to be standing atop the parapet, and took it in that moment to be the skirts of her gown whipping in the wind. But in the glimpses I had just before her supposed leap, the skirts in the figure I saw weren’t whipping about — they were motionless except for that shimmery radiance. A physical impossibility given the wind. Therefore the figure with its arms bent out couldn’t have been Virginia, but rather some manufactured image of her. Once I understood that, it was a simple matter of adding the other pieces of evidence together to arrive at the truth.”

“The lead sinker I found, for one.”

“Yes. And the facts that Lucas Whiffing worked in a sporting goods emporium that sells kites, and was a kite flyer himself as Grace DeBrett confirmed to me. It would have been easy enough, I surmised, for a clever lad like him to build a kite made of canvas tacked onto a collapsible wooden frame—”

“Hinged in the middle, no doubt,” John said, nodding.

“And fashioned in the shape of a woman and coated with an oil-based phosphorescent paint to give it substance and radiance in the fog. An experienced kite-flyer could then slip through the grounds unseen with it hidden under his coat and conceal himself beneath the parapet. When Virginia arrived at a prearranged time, he waited for her to scramble over the wall, then opened the kite and held it in place above with the aid of heavy lead sinkers — just long enough to create the illusion of Virginia standing on the parapet, when in fact she was hiding behind the fog-hidden cypress where you found the sinker.

“As soon as Lucas drew the kite down and collapsed it to hide the painted side, Virginia screamed and each of them pitched an object over the cliff to the highway below — Lucas the rock that he’d earlier set in place, to create the path through the ice plant and simulate the sound of a falling body, and Virginia the cypress limb with a duplicate of her scarf attached to it.”

John’s grudging but sincere admiration for her deductive skills showed plainly in his expression. The slight poutiness around his mouth, she knew, had nothing to do with the fact that she had successfully matched wits with him; unlike so many men, he harbored no ill feelings toward strong and intelligent women, else he would not have suggested their partnership in the first place. No, his self-esteem and his flare for the dramatic being what they were, it was simply that he chafed and always would chafe at having even a little of his thunder stolen, no matter whom it was who did the stealing.

To placate him, she said, “I’m sure you arrived at the same conclusions. Was it before or after you solved the riddle of the Carville ghost?”

“It was all of a deductive piece,” he said. He sounded perkier now. One thing about John: even though he was prone to pomposity at times, when deflated he bounced back quickly and held no grudges. None toward her, at any rate. The ersatz Sherlock Holmes was another matter. “The only possible way in which both dodges could have been worked was with kites.”

“Then you added all the clues together much as I did.”

“Along with several others.”

“Tell me how the spook lights were created on the dunes.”

“Don’t you know?”

“Not exactly. How could I? I wasn’t in Carville and you were.”

Further placated, John said, “The game was a variation of the one on the Heights. Whiffing knew from past conversations that Zeke Crabb was afraid of anything that smacked of the supernatural. First he told Crabb that he’d seen the lights among the abandoned cars and to watch for them himself. Then, past midnight, he slipped out, went to one of the cars, used a tool to make clawlike scratches on the walls and floor, flashed the kite he’d made — one fashioned in the image of a man and more heavily coated with phosphorescent paint — and fled with the kite before Crabb or any of the Meekers could catch him. He kept doing it, adding the banshee shrieks, when Crabb refused to be panicked into fleeing with the stolen money.”

“All for naught, since Crabb never had the money.”

“Yes, confound it. Whiffing was a blockhead, his girlfriend no better. Their game on the Heights was a stupidly dangerous lark, as you pointed out. Whiffing’s in Carville cost him his life.”

“How was he able to run across the tops of the dunes without leaving tracks?” Sabina asked.

“He didn’t. He ran along below and behind them with the kite string played out just far enough to lift the kite above the crests. To hold it at that height, he used more of the lead sinkers to weight and control it in the wind. In the fog and darkness, seen from a distance and manipulated by an expert, the kite gave every appearance of a ghostly figure bounding across the sand hills. And when he wanted it to disappear, he merely yanked it down out of sight, drew it in, and hid it under his coat, as he did on the Heights.

“He was about to do it again last night when Crabb, having figured out the game, lay in wait and shot him. When Crabb’s bullet struck, the string loosed from Whiffing’s hand and the kite was carried off by the wind. I saw flashes of phosphorescence, higher up, before it disappeared altogether. This morning I found the remains on the beach. I also found kite-making evidence in a search of his room afterward.”

Sabina made the mistake of continuing to apply balm to her partner’s ego by saying, “Well, I must say that was another fine piece of detecting, John.”

“No finer than yours,” he admitted.

“We do make a good team, don’t we?”

“Indeed we do. And we could make an even better one.”

“Now don’t start that again.…”

His good humor had been restored. He actually winked as he said, “You really should give it serious consideration, my dear.”

“For heaven’s sake, won’t you ever give up?”

“When a goal is worthwhile, John Quincannon never gives up.”

“And when her mind is made up, Sabina Carpenter never gives in.”

He smiled at her. She smiled at him.

The irresistible force and the immovable object.