Mr. Queen kept the silence for a long time. Finally he mumbled: “Go to bed, Patty. I want to think.”
* * *
On November the eighth, four days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected to the Presidency of the United States for a third term, Jim Haight’s sister came to Wrightsville.
Chapter 10
Jim and the Fleshpot
“Miss Rosemary Haight,” wrote Gladys Hemmingworth in the Society column of the
Mr. Ellery Queen happened to be taking a walk that morning . . . to the Wrightsville station. So he saw Rosemary Haight get off the train at the head of a
And Mr. Queen’s weather eye clouded over.
That night, at Nora’s, he had an opportunity to test his first barometric impression.
And he decided that Rosemary Haight was no bucolic maiden on an exciting journey; that she was pure metropolis, insolent and bored and trying to conceal both. Also, she was menacingly attractive. Hermy, Pat, and Nora disliked her instantly; Ellery could tell that from the extreme politeness with which they treated her. As for John F., he was charmed, spryly gallant. Hermy reproached him in the silent language of the eye.
And Ellery spent a troubled night trying to put Miss Rosemary Haight together in the larger puzzle and not succeeding.
* * *
Jim was busy at the bank these days and, rather with relief, Ellery thought, left the problem of entertaining his sister to Nora. Dutifully Nora drove Rosemary about the countryside, showing her the “sights.” It was a little difficult for Nora to sustain the charming-hostess illusion, Pat confided in Ellery, since Rosemary had a supercilious attitude toward everything and wondered “how in heaven’s name you can be
Then there was the gauntlet of the town’s ladies to run . . . teas for the guest, very correct with hats on in the house and white gloves, an ambitious mah-jongg party, a wiener roast on the lawn one moonlit night, a church social . . .
The ladies were cold. Emmeline DuPre said Rosemary Haight had a streak of “commerce,” whatever that was, Clarice Martin thought her clothes too “you-know,” and Mrs. Mackenzie at the Country Club said she was a born bitch and look at those silly men drooling at her!
The Wright women found themselves constrained to defend her, which was hard, considering that secretly they agreed to the truth of all the charges.
“I wish she’d leave,” said Pat to Ellery a few days after Rosemary’s arrival. ”Isn’t that a horrid thing to say? But I do. And now she’s sent for her trunks!”
“But I thought she didn’t like it here.”
“That’s what I can’t understand, either. Nora says it was supposed to be a ‘flying’ visit, but Rosemary acts as if she means to dig in for the winter. And Nora can’t very well discourage her.”
“What’s Jim say?”
“Nothing to Nora, but”?Pat lowered her voice and looked around?”apparently he’s said something to Rosemary, because I happened in just this morning and there was Nora trapped in the serving pantry while Jim and Rosemary, who evidently thought Nora was upstairs, were having an argument in the dining room. That woman has a temper!”
“What was the argument about?” asked Ellery eagerly.
“I came in at the tail end and didn’t hear anything important, but Nora says it was . . . well, frightening. Nora wouldn’t tell me what she’d heard, but she was terribly upset?she looked the same way as when she read those three letters that tumbled out of the toxicology book.”
Ellery muttered: “I wish I’d heard that argument. Why can’t I put my finger on
“Yes, sir,” said Pat miserably.
Rosemary Haight’s trunk arrived on the fourteenth. Steve Polaris, who ran the local express agency, delivered the trunk himself?an overgrown affair that looked as if it might be packed with imported evening gowns. Steve lugged it up Nora’s walk on his broad back; and Mr. Queen, who was watching from the Wright porch, saw him carry it into Nora’s house and come out a few minutes later accompanied by Rosemary, who was wearing a candid red, white, and blue negligee. She looked like an enlistment poster.
Ellery saw Rosemary sign Steve Polaris’s receipt book and go back into the house. Steve slouched down the walk grinning?Steve had the most wolfish eye, Pat said, in all of Low Village.
“Pat,” said Ellery urgently, “do you know this truckman well?”
“Steve? That’s the only way you
Steve tossed his receipt book on the driver’s seat of his truck and began to climb in.
“Then distract him. Kiss him, vamp him, do a striptease?anything, but get him out of sight of that truck for two minutes!”
Pat instantly called: “Oh, Ste-e-e-eve!” and tripped down the porch steps. Ellery followed in a saunter. No one was in sight anywhere on the Hill.
Pat was slipping her arm through Steve’s and giving him one of her quick little-girl smiles, saying something about her piano, and there wasn’t a man she knew strong enough to move it from where it was to where she wanted it, and, of course, when she saw Steve . . .
Steve went with Pat into the Wright house, visibly swollen.
Ellery was at the truck in two bounds. He snatched the receipt book from the front seat. Then he took a piece of charred paper from his wallet and began riffling the pages of the book . . .
When Pat reappeared with Steve, Mr. Queen was at Hermione’s zinnia bed surveying the dead and dying blossoms with the sadness of a poet. Steve gave him a scornful look and passed on.
“Now you’ll have to move the piano back,” said Pat. ”I
“I was wrong,” mumbled Ellery.
“About what?”
“About Rosemary.”
“Stop being cryptic! And why did you send me to lure Steve away from his truck? The two are connected, Mr. Queen!”
“I had a flash from on high. It said to me: ‘This woman Rosemary doesn’t seem cut from the same cloth as Jim Haight. They don’t seem like brother and sister at all?’ “
“Ellery!”
“Oh, it was possible. But my flash was wrong. She
“And you proved that through Steve Polaris’s truck? Wonderful man!”
“Through his receipt book, in which this woman had just signed her name. I
“On that charred flap of envelope we found in Jim’s study?the remains of his sister’s letter that he’d burned!”
“Precisely, my dear Watson. And the signature ‘Rosemary Haight’ on the flap of the letter and the signature
