for weeks.'
Naturally I was indignant; I stared at him. 'You can say that, after Friday and Saturday and Sunday-'
'But no appetite. A desperate search for one. Now I’m hungry. Lunch will be in twenty minutes. Meantime: I have learned that there is a person attached to a golf club called a professional. Find out who fills that post at the Green Meadow Club; see if we have any grateful client who might introduce us on the telephone; invite the professional, urgently, to dine with us this evening. There is a goose left from Saturday. After lunch you will pay a visit to the office of Dr. Nathaniel Bradford, and stop at the library for some books I need.'
'Yes, sir. Who do you think Miss Barstow-'
'Not now, Archie. I would prefer just to sit here quietly and be hungry. After lunch.'
CHAPTER 8
At ten o’clock Tuesday morning, June 13, I drove the roadster through the entrance gate of the Barstow place, after it had been opened for me by a state trooper who was there on guard. Another husky was with him, a private watchman of the Barstows’, and I had to furnish plenty of proof that I was the Archie Goodwin Sarah Barstow was expecting. It looked likely that many a newspaper man had been sent to climb a tree around there in the past three days.
The house was at the low point of a saddle between two hills about seven miles northeast of Pleasantville. It was built of stone, quite large, well over twenty rooms I should say, and there were a lot of outbuildings. After going through about three hundred yards of trees and shrubbery the drive circled around the edge of an immense sloping lawn and entered under the shelter of a roof with two steps up to a flagged terrace. This was really the side of the house; the front was around the corner looking over the lawn down the hill. There were gardens ahead as you entered, and more gardens at the other edge of the lawn, with boulders and a pool. As I eased the roadster along taking it in I thought to myself that fifty grand was nothing. I had on a dark blue suit, with a blue shirt and a tan tie, and of course my panama which I had had cleaned right after Decoration Day. I’ve found it’s a good idea to consider what kind of place you’re going to, and dress accordingly.
Sarah Barstow was expecting me at ten, and I was right on the dot. I parked the roadster in a graveled space the other side of the entrance, and pushed the button at the door on the terrace. It was standing open, but double screen-doors kept me from seeing much inside. Soon there were footsteps and one of the screens came out at me and with it a tall skinny guy in a black suit.
He was polite. 'If you will excuse me, sir. Mr. Goodwin?'
I nodded. 'Miss Barstow expects me.'
'I know. If you will come this way. Miss Barstow would like you to join her in the garden.'
I followed him across the terrace and along a walk to the other side of the house, then down an arbor and among a lot of shubbery till we came to an acre of flowers. Miss Barstow was on a shady bench over in a corner.
'All right,' I said. 'I see her.'
He stopped, inclined his head, and turned and went back.
She looked bad, worse than she had the day before. She probably hadn’t slept much. Forgetting or disregarding Wolfe’s instructions on that detail, she had telephoned before six o’clock. I had taken the call, and her voice had sounded as if she was having a hard time of it. She had been short and businesslike, just said she would expect me at ten in the morning and hung up.
She invited me to sit beside her on the bench.
At bedtime the evening before Wolfe had given me no instructions whatever. Saying that he preferred to leave me fancy free, he had merely repeated his favorite saying, any spoke will lead an ant to the hub, and had reminded me that our great advantage lay in the fact that no one was aware how much or how little we knew and that on account of our original coup we were suspected of omniscience. He had finished, after a yawn that would have held a tennis ball: 'Return here with that advantage unimpaired.'
I said to Miss Barstow, 'You may not have any orchids here, but you certainly have a flower or two.'
She said, 'Yes, I suppose so.-I asked Small to bring you out here because I thought we should not be interrupted. You will not mind.'
'No indeed. It’s nice out here. I’m sorry to have to pester you, but there’s no other way to get the facts. Wolfe says that he feels phenomena and I collect facts. I don’t think that means anything, having looked up the word phenomena in the dictionary, but I repeat it for what it’s worth.' I took out my notebook. 'First just tell me things. You know, the family, how old are you, who you’re going to marry and so on.'
She sat with her hands together in her lap and told me. Some of it I had read in the papers or got out of Who’s Who, but I didn’t interrupt. There was only her mother, her brother and herself. Lawrence, her brother, was twenty-seven, two years older than her; he had graduated from Holland at twenty-one and had then proceeded to waste five years (and, I gathered between the lines, a good portion of his father’s time and patience also). A year ago he had suddenly discovered a talent for mechanical design and was now devoted to that, especially as applied to airplanes. Her mother and father had been mutually devoted for thirty years. She could not remember the beginning of her mother’s difficulty, for that had been years before when Sarah was a child; the family had never considered it a thing to be ashamed of or to attempt to conceal, merely a misfortune of a loved one to sympathize with and as far as possible to ameliorate. Dr. Bradford and two specialists described it in neurological terms, but they had never meant anything to Sarah, to her the terms had been dead and cold and her mother was alive and warm.
The place in Westchester was the Barstow family estate, but the family was able to be there less than three months of the year since it was necessary to live at the university from September to June. They came each summer for ten or eleven weeks with the servants, and closed the place up each fall on leaving. They knew many people in the surrounding countryside; her father’s circle of acquaintance had of course been wide not only in Westchester, and some of his best and oldest friends lived within easy driving distance from the estate. She gave the names of these and I took them down. I also listed the names of the servants and details regarding them. I was doing that when Miss Barstow suddenly got up from the bench and moved away to the path in the sunshine, from under the shelter of the trees that shaded us. There was the sound of an airplane overhead, so close that it
