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Show 1 COPYRIGHT-1 N E.Z-H AYN E 5 -IRWIN W.N.U. SERVICE SYNOPSIS Mary Avery, a widow who lives in the harbor town of Satuit, Mass., with two negro maids, Sarah Darbe and Bessie Williams, Wil-liams, writes a manuscript describing the famous Second Head murder, which oc curred on her estate. Next to Mary live Mr. and Mrs. Peter Stow who every year give a summer masquerade party. One of the guests of this function is murdered. Nearby live Dr. and Mrs. Geary and their married daughter Edith and her husband Alfred Bray; Doctor Myron Marden and his step-granddaughter, Caro Prentiss, a beautiful young girl who was born in France. Next live Paul and Lora Eames and their daughter Molly. Molly was engaged en-gaged to the murdered man, Ace Blaikie. She had previously been engaged to Walter Treadwell, who had been Blaikie'a secretary, secre-tary, but the engagement was suddenly broken and he had left town. Other neighbors neigh-bors are the Fairweather sisters, Flora, a hopeless invalid, and Margaret'. All but the latter two attend the masquerade. Mary's eight-year-old niece, Sylvia Sard, is visiting her for the summer. The wooded part of Mary's estate is called the Spinney. In it is a tiny log cabin, called the Little House. On the day of the masquerade excitement is high. Mary decided to take Sylvia, who is an unusually observant child. Caro Prentiss Pren-tiss and Molly Eames drop in during the afternoon. Molly seems pre-occupied. Soon a car arrives and Blaikie, Doctor Marden and Bruce Herson, a friend of Ace's, alight. Molly is impatient to leave and they all excuse ex-cuse themselves. At the party Sylvia identifies iden-tifies each of the masked guests as they arrive. Ace comes garbed as Julius Caesar. Molly Eames appears as a Snow Queen, accompanied ac-companied by a man in armor whom Sylvia identifies as Walter Treadway. They dance together continuously. Caro Prentiss and Marden arrive dressed in Revolutionary costumes, the doctor wearing jeweled shoe buckles. When the guests unmask. Ace, Walter and Molly have disappeared. Sarah Darbe confides to Mary that someone apparently ap-parently had spent the night in the Little House. Sylvia finds a shoe buckle in the Spinney and Mary drops it into a jewel box and forgets it. Sarah walks down to the Little House and returns screaming. She has found Ace Blaikie stabbed to death in the Spinney. Mary summons Patrick O'Brien, chief of police, who had been a schoolmate of hers and Ace's. SATURDAY Continued 5 The period which I might describe de-scribe as late babyhood provides me with no picture of Ace, although it is possible that I did see him then at Sunday school, or on the beach. Already the boys had shortened his old New England name of Asa to Ace I little knew how appropriate that nickname was to become. I was exactly eight when I first became conscious of his existence. I remember perfectly perfect-ly how he looked the first time I laid observant eyes on him. The Blaikies had spent that summer in Europe. Ace was their only child and naturally their pride and joy. Well he might be that! There was no period in his life when, whatever the occasion, he wasn't the most handsome male creature present, the most striking and debonair. It was typical of Ace that not only did he appear the first day of school wearing a Scottish costume which his mother had bought in Edinburgh Ed-inburgh it was typical of him that he carried it off with distinction and complete unconsciousness. I suppose that every other girl In the class fell dead in love with Ace that day. I did not, however. Already yes, even then, Mark Avery and I were meeting at the cross-roads to go to school together. togeth-er. Ace broke hearts left and right in his cocksure pilgrimage through life. I am glad he did not break mine. He never caused me even a suspicion of heartache. I saw more and more of Ace, however. We became great friends. He always entertained and interested inter-ested me. He was fascinating. Ace, Patrick O'Brien and I were the leading spirits in our class. Patrick, as I have said, beat me in the race for scholarship and was graduated at the head. However, although he was salutatorian, I vas valedictorian. Ace never studied. stud-ied. He was never in danger of reaching the head of the class,' but not once did he fall below the middle. mid-dle. How he remained so far above it was a miracle. He had a good mind, an instant and retentive memory. Anything he could read in fifteen minutes before class opened, he could remember. The rest was a winning audacity and a charming impudence. He was beyond be-yond discipline. Yet the teachers all adored him. Ace might have gone far, but he was not ambitious. Except for his one splendid adventure, all ho wanted out of life was easy money for lavish entertaining. The Blaikies had always been important people in Plymouth county. Their house is without doubt the most beautiful in Satuit. j The gardens are the pride of the : countryside. I Inside lire gathered the inherit- cd family treasure, in furniture, i pictures, book, of nearly two cen-: cen-: turies. The Claikics had always had I money and very soon Aco began to entertain. At first, it was chll-t chll-t dren's parties candy-pulls and the like; later it was dances and plenty plen-ty of them. Ace went to Harvard; Harvard was a tradition in the Blaikie family. fam-ily. He went to Harvard MedicaL Instead of finishing off in Germany, as most doctors did in those days, he chose to study in Paris. He was there when the World war broke. In the autumn he joined the Foreign Legion. He was wounded wound-ed that winter; when he recovered, he volunteered for aviation. He flew with the French army, until we entered the war. Then he joined our army. He became an ace strange how life fulfilled the prophecy proph-ecy of his nickname! He had five enemy planes on his record. He believed, himself, that he had brought down two or three more; but that, he could not prove. When he came back from France, the town gave him a party no one in Satuit missed it. We asked him to come in uniform wearing all his decorations the French and Belgian Bel-gian Croix de Guerre, the Me-daille Me-daille Militaire, the Legion d'Hon-neur d'Hon-neur and the D.S.C. I thought him, that night, the handsomest male creature I ever laid eyes on. Then Ace settled down to a practice prac-tice in Satuit. Of course he could not make money in so small a place, but instantly he became a great success. Personality helped here, his own tremendous strength, his robust vitality. For with Ace's entrance to a sick-room came a gust of health-giving air. But perhaps per-haps his greatest asset was that sympathy with the sick, the old, the weary and the discouraged. It even helped that he liked girl-babies so much. However fathers felt, mothers always knew an infinite in-finite pride when they pleased Doctor Doc-tor Blaikie by bringing forth a girL But for other reasons, the countryside coun-tryside adored Ace. One was his reckless generosity. Anybody who wanted to sell tickets, or to get up a fund for charitable purposes made a bee-line for Ace. He understood under-stood human nature on the side of frailty perfectly. Mothers of girls in trouble, fathers of boys in trouble trou-ble went at once to Ace, to get him to treat with seducers and police. po-lice. Nothing illustrates Ace more perfectly per-fectly than the story of his treatment treat-ment of Tom Boylan. Tom was '.he village drunk. Ace was always having to take care of him, free of course Tom had no money for alcoholism. Once he brought Tom through delirium tremens. Yet when Tom got well, Ace always gave him his first drink after Tom had begged long enough for it And yet . . . And yet . . . Something Some-thing had happened to Ace I don't mean to his body. Something had happened to his soul. In the meantime, I had married Mark Avery. I used to talk Ace over with him. My husband, who was a nerve specialist like Doctor Geary, with an office in Boston, had served as a physician in the World war. He had great wisdom. wis-dom. He said to me once, "Mary, the strange thing about war is that it frequently ruins good men and rehabilitates bad ones. Men are returning to this country on every transport, who, if they had not been caught at the right moment by the discipline of an army, would have spent most of their lives in jail. On the other hand, war frequently fre-quently ruins able men its rigid discipline, its inherent immorality." War must have been bad medicine medi-cine for Ace. It must have unloosed un-loosed something in him that he had always held in abeyance before. be-fore. At any rate, from the time he came back, he seemed to me to disintegrate. Not physically! To the very end, he kept his magnificent magnifi-cent body in condition. lie was always al-ways inheriting money. Yet no matter how much company filled the huge Blaikie house. Ace was always leaving on sudden calls. How often when I have been there, he has returned with a wearied but triumphant, "A big eleven-pound eleven-pound boy!" or "A nice little girl!" Once and this was the apex of his medical pride "Girl twins!" The countryside always surged with gossip ubout Ace. lie was, had always been, would always bo a terrific I use the word of my generation gen-eration flirt. I will not say that he desired all women, but I will say that any pretty woman seemed to serve as a challenge to him. Why, when Mark first began regularly regu-larly to specialize on me, Ace looked upon that as a challenge! I laughed his tentative wooing out of existence. Along with this tremendous tre-mendous susceptibility, let me call it although it wasn't exactly that camo un equally tremendous fickleness. As I have hlntLd, to sco a pretty woman meant, at once, on Ace's part, a desire to conquer her; and to conquer her was, at once, to begin to tire of her. Rumors of his conquests, both at home and abroad, choked our tea-talk. For the last few years, other rumors had spread reports of financial embarrassment. It was said that Ace had run through all his patrimony and his various inheritances; that each year increasingly, in-creasingly, he spent more than he earned. And then occurred the strange complication to which I have already al-ready twice referred. Molly Eames came back from a year in Europe the most beautiful girl that Satuit had ever produced. In three months she was engaged to Walter Wal-ter Treadway, Ace's secretary. It seemed to everybody that they were passionately in love and yet after six months Molly broke her engagement to Walter. Six months later, she became engaged to Ace. No one of us who had known Ace, no one of us who loved Molly, felt happy over this turn of events. But one thing Ace brought to us from the war which meant more to Satuit as a whole than all his decorations dec-orations and that was his friend, Bruce Hexson. Bruce Hexson was a lawyer. He was in Paris when the war broke and volunteered immediately to drive an ambulance for the French army. He met Ace in the hospital. When we entered the war he volunteered vol-unteered for aviation. The two men served in the same squadron. Long before the Armistice, they had become inseparable pals. Bruce, too, was a man of private fortune. He lived in Pennsylvania. He came regularly every summer to Satuit and visited Ace for two months at a time. And then suddenly an unexpected thing happened to him. To use the old pat phrase Bruce "got" religion, but not somehow in the usual sense. Ace always avoided talking about his friend's spiritual seizure, but he told me once that he attributed Bruce's frenzy to the long strain of the war. "If he had been wounded once," he said to me, "it would have been better for him. Aviators often went haywire. The officers watched us like doctors. The instant any one of us showed the first sign of psychological psy-chological strain, they gave him a long leave in Paris. If a man were slightly wounded, the change to the hospital helped. Bruce never nev-er got a pip; he never showed any signs of nerve breakage. That's my explanation." Whatever the reason, the result was definite and permanent. Bruce Hexson's whole life changed. He Bruce Rented the Camp From Ace. came to Satuit every year, but now for the whole summer. He did not, as formerly, live with Ace. Ace owned a little camp on the Indian river. Like everything Ace touched, it was charming and convenient. Bruce rented the camp from Ace-lived Ace-lived there with his two colored servants, Adah Silvrston and Berry Ber-ry Vale. Bruce Hexson had become a social so-cial fixture in summer Satuit. Nowadays he never came to our parties, but always, broodingly tender, ten-der, we felt him there. SUNDAY I remembered hearing the clock strike four before I fell asleop that night. But once asleep I lay like a log for perhaps an hour. Afterward After-ward I remembered that early in the morning, just after dawn, I awoke with a searing thirst. Gradually, Grad-ually, I pulled myself up out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. On my way back to bed I paused to look out the window. A grayish gray-ish fog covered the landscape. Trees blurred shadowy through it like foliage in a faded photographic photo-graphic film. Yet motion caught my dead eyes. Down bnlow, emerging emerg-ing from the Spinney, I saw But I must not anticipate here; for what I saw made but n fleeting impression on my sleep-clogged consciousness. Still bemused, I foil Into bed and into another deep slumber. I forgot for-got entirely what I saw. It was Sylvia's little voice which next awakened me. "Come, get In bed with me, my petl" I Invited. She snuggled down close beside me, putting Dorinda Belle between un on the pillow. "Did you have u nice time with Aunt Mattier" I mated. "Oh yes. Aunt Mary. Aunt Mat-tie Mat-tie put a little pitcher of cream in front of my plate just for me." "What time did Aunt Mattie and Uncle Peter get home last night?" "I don't know. Caddie put me and Dorinda Belle to bed before they came." "And so you did not see Aunt Mattie and Uncle Peter until this morning?" "I"o. They came into my room and they hugged me and kissed me. Oh I almost forgot. Aunt Mattie told me to tell you that she wanted to come over to see you after breakfast as soon as possible." possi-ble." I reacheo. out and touched the bell. "Sylvia," I said, putting my arm about her and drawing her closer, "do you remember how you danced with Doctor Ace- at the masquerade?" Sparkles gathered in Sylvia's eyes. "Oh yes, I remember! He couldn't guess who I was. He tried and he tried and he tried, but he couldn't. "Doctor Ace has gone away," I said to her. "He's gone away for a long, long time. But I want you to remember, as long as you live, how he looked and how kind he has always been to you. Promise me you won't forget him." "Oh, I'll never forget Doctor Ace," Sylvia vowed easily enough. She did not ask me where Ace had gone. Sarah came in with my tray. "Now run downstairs to the piazza," piaz-za," I bade Sylvia. "And don't leave it without asking me." Sarah did not seem herself. The deep umber of her flesh still showed a tallowy quality. "I hope you feel better this morn-ning, morn-ning, Mrs. Avery," she said. "I feel rested, Sarah, but you don't seem so very spry." "I feel that we're all under suspicion!" sus-picion!" Sarah commented somberly. somber-ly. "Everybody on this Head we women as well as the men." I made myself smile. "We'don't have to worry, Sarah," I reassured her. "Nobody in this household has to worry. Doctor Geary says Doctor Blaikie was murdered somewhere about midnight probably prob-ably before. We all have alibis. And then, Sarah, it seems to me very unlikely that a woman could have committed this crime. How could a woman have stabbed a man so tall and big as Ace Blaikie?" Blai-kie?" "A woman who's big enough and mad enough, Mrs. Avery can do anything." "Will you call up Mrs. Stow at once, Sarah," I asked, "and tell her that I'm dressing now and to come over here as soon as she wants." "Yes, Mrs. Avery." "I suppose everybody's been on the telephone." "Everybody. Every Boston paper's pa-per's tried to get you, but I said you were still sleeping." "That's right, Sarah. Don't let anybody get to me today except long distance of course." "There's a stack of telegrams, Mrs. Avery." "I'll look at them later." I bathed and dressed swiftly, vent downstairs. Almost instantly Mattie Stow came into the living-room from the hall. We kissed, then stood off and stared appraisingly at each other. "You look as washed-out as I do, Mary!" Mattie commented. "If I look as I feel." I said. "You look all of that, Mary. It's the most horrible experience of my lifetime. Sometimes I feel as though I'd never get over" it!" "Horrible!" I could only helplessly help-lessly echo. "What time did you go home, Mary? I can remember so little, clearly." ! I described our movements Sylvip's and mine in detail. "Peter and I dressed at the Bray i house," Mattie said. "We left our j place at about half-past eight and j got back at about ten. Naturally, we never left the house again. Nobody No-body left the house but" She stopped uddenly. It was her own thought, dogging her words, that I had caught her up. j "Of course Ace left before the unmasking because we never saw him again," Mattie glided swiftly. , "It puts an end to our masquerades," masquer-ades," Mattie ended lifelessly. "I could never give another one." , The telephone buzzed. Instinctively Instinctive-ly I arose. But before I could get the extension on the piazza, I heard i Sarah at the hall telephone. I took I up the receiver. Patrick O'Brien's voice said, "This is the chief of police speaking. Can I talk with Mrs. Avery?" "This is Mary. Patrick," I broke in. "Oh, how are you this morning, Mary?" Patrick asked. "Well, I slept after a while," I answered. "It was a tough break, Mary-happening Mary-happening on your place! I called up to ask if I could come to see you for a few minutes. I'm at Joe Geary's." "I know you'll have to be here all the time, Patrick. Don't even bother to telephone. Como whenever when-ever you must. If I'm not at home, Sarah will take care of you. Mat-tic Mat-tic is here." cm nr. conriM'F.D) |