The New Adventures of Ellery Queen Read Free Page B

“I’m sorry, Miss Mayhew. All in good time, in good time.”
    â€œYou wrong us all,” smiled Dr. Reinach, deftly skirting a deep rut in the road. “And I’m afraid you’re giving my niece quite the most erroneous impression of her family. We’re odd, no doubt, and our blood is presumably turning sour after so many generations of cold storage; but then don’t the finest vintages come from the deepest cellars? You’ve only to glance at Alice to see my point. Such vital loveliness could only have been produced by an old family.”
    â€œMy mother,” said Alice, with a faint loathing in her glance, “had something to do with that, Uncle Herbert.”
    â€œYour mother, my dear,” replied the fat man, “was merely a contributory factor. You have the typical Mayhew features.”
    Alice did not reply. Her uncle, whom until today she had not seen, was an obscene enigma; the others, waiting for them at their destination, she had never seen at all, and she had no great hope that they would prove better. A livid streak ran through her father’s family; he had been a paranoiac with delusions of persecution. The Aunt Sarah in the dark distance, her father’s surviving sister, was apparently something of a character. As for Aunt Milly, Dr. Reinuach’s wife, whatever she might have been in the past, one had only to glance at Dr. Reinach to see what she undoubtedly was in the present.
    Ellery felt prickles at the nape of his neck. The farther they penetrated this wilderness the less he liked the whole adventure. It smacked vaguely of a foreordained theatricalism, as if some hand of monstrous power were setting the stage for the first act of a colossal tragedy.… He shrugged this sophomoric foolishness off, settling deeper into his coat. It was queer enough, though. Even the lifelines of the most indigent community were missing; there were no telephone poles and, so far as he could detect, no electric cables. That meant candles. He detested candles.
    The sun was behind them, leaving them. It was a feeble sun, shivering in the pallid cold. Feeble as it was, Ellery wished it would stay.
    They crashed on and on, endlessly, shaken like dolls. The road kept lurching toward the east in a stubborn curve. The sky grew more and more leaden. The cold seeped deeper and deeper into their bones.
    When Dr. Reinach finally rumbled: “Here we are,” and steered the jolting car leftward off the road into a narrow, wretchedly graveled driveway, Ellery came to with a start of surprise and relief. So their journey was really over, he thought. Behind him he heard Thorne and Alice stirring; they must be thinking the same thing.
    He roused himself, stamping his icy feet, looking about. The same desolate tangle of woods to either side of the byroad. He recalled now that they had not once left the main road nor crossed another road since turning off the highway. No chance, he thought grimly, to stray off this path to perdition.
    Dr. Reinach twisted his fat neck and said: “Welcome home, Alice.”
    Alice murmured something incomprehensible; her face was buried to the eyes in the moth-eaten laprobe Reinach had flung over her. Ellery glanced sharply at the fat man; there had been a note of mockery, of derision, in that heavy rasping voice. But the face was smooth and damp and bland, as before.
    Dr. Reinach ran the car up the driveway and brought it to a rest a little before, and between, two houses. These structures flanked the drive, standing side by side, separated by only the width of the drive, which led straight ahead to a ramshackle garage. Ellery caught a glimpse of Thorne’s glittering Lincoln within its crumbling walls.
    The three buildings huddled in a ragged clearing, surrounded by the tangle of woods, like three desert islands in an empty sea.
    â€œThat,” said Dr. Reinach heartily, “is the ancestral mansion, Alice. To the left.”
    The house to