“All these evidences of creative activity,” said Ellery with a grin, “recalls me to my own piddling efforts over at the cottage. Would you two consider me very unfriendly if I ducked over there and tormented my typewriter for a while?”

  They were properly contrite; and Ellery left them with their heads together over a sketch, Howard talking animatedly and Sally listening with bright eyes and her lips moist and parted.

  So it’s all over, is it? Ellery thought grimly. Not all evidence takes the form of letters. He was glad that Diedrich was two floors down, in his study.

  Ellery was thinking that it would serve the blackmailer right if Diedrich found out simply by using his eyes and thereby rendered the photostats null, void, and of no value…when he saw her again.

  He was just rounding the bend in the staircase halfway between the top and second floors. It was the shadow of a shadow, but the shadow’s shadow was in the half-bent shape of an angry cat, and he knew it was the old woman.

  He leaped noiselessly down the few steps to the second floor and flattened himself against the wall.

  She was moving slowly down the hall, an old sickle of a creature with a cowling shawl over her head, and as she moved she mumbled something incredible.

  “There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be at rest.”

  She stopped at the very end of the hall, before a door. To Ellery’s astonishment she fumbled in her garments and produced a key. This key she inserted into the lock. When she had unlocked the door she pushed it open and Ellery saw nothing beyond it. It was a rectangle of outer space.

  Then the door shut and he heard the snick of the key from the invisible ether.

  She lived here.

  She lived here, and no one had mentioned her in two and a half days. Not Howard, not Sally, not Diedrich, not Wolfert—not Laura or Eileen.

  Why? And who was she?

  The old woman had a way of slipping in and out of his consciousness like a witch in a dream.

  Guest or no guest, Ellery thought wildly, running down the stairs, here’s where I find out what the hell gives.

  The Fifth Day

  ELLERY HAD JUST REACHED the foot of the stairway when he heard running and he looked up to see Sally swooping down on him like Superman.

  “What is it?” he asked quickly.

  “I don’t know.” She caught at his arm to steady herself and he felt her shaking. “I left Howard just after you did and I went to my room. Diedrich called on the intercom to come right down to the study.”

  “Diedrich?”

  She was frightened.

  “Do you suppose…?”

  Howard came clattering down, white.

  “Father just called me on the intercom!”

  And there was Wolfert, the skirt of an old-fashioned bathrobe flapping about his skinned legs, his Adam’s apple sticking out like an old bone.

  “Diedrich woke me up. What’s the matter?”

  They hurried to the study in a clash of silences.

  Diedrich was waiting for them impatiently. The papers on his desk had been brushed to one side. His hair was all exclamation points.

  “Howard!” He grabbed Howard, hugged him. “Howard, they said it couldn’t be done and, by God, it’s been done!”

  “Dieds, I could strangle you,” Sally said with an angry laugh. “You scared us half to death. What’s been done?”

  “Yes! I almost broke my neck getting down those stairs,” growled Howard.

  Diedrich put his hands on Howard’s shoulders, held him off. “Son,” he said solemnly, “they’ve found out who you are.”

  “Dieds.”

  “Found out who I am,” Howard repeated.

  “What are you talking about, Diedrich?” asked Wolfert peevishly.

  “Just what I said, Wolf. Oh, we have Mr. Queen at a disadvantage, don’t we?”

  “Perhaps I’d better be getting on to the cottage, Mr. Van Horn,” said Ellery. “I was on my way there when—”

  “No, no, I’m sure Howard won’t mind. You see, Mr. Queen, Howard’s my adopted son. He was left on my doorstep as an infant by…well, until now,” chuckled Diedrich, “it might just as well have been by the stork. But sit down, sit down, Mr. Queen. Howard, get off those big feet of yours before you fall off ’em. Sally, come sit on my lap. This is something of an occasion! Wolf, smile. That Hutchinson business can wait.”

  Somehow they were seated and Diedrich went on happily to tell Ellery what he already knew. He managed to convey to proper surprise, while observing Howard out of the corner of his eye. Howard was sitting motionless. His hands were on his knees. The expression on his face was baffling. Was it apprehension that pinched his mouth? Certainly his eyes had a glaze over them; and a little irregular tom-tom was beating his temple.

  “I hired a detective agency in 1917,” said Diedrich, his hand on Sally’s hair, “when Howard was left with me, in an effort to track down his parents. Wasn’t really an ‘agency’—or rather, it was a one-man agency. Old Ted Fyfield was the man. He’d retired as police chief and gone into business for himself. Well, I practically supported Fyfield for three years with fees for his work—including all the time I was in the Army—you remember, Wolf. And when he couldn’t find a trace after all that time I gave up.”

  It was hard to tell whether Howard was even listening. Sally saw it, too. She was puzzled, worried.

  “It’s funny how little things sometimes are the most important,” Diedrich went on heartily. “Couple of months ago I was getting a trim in Joe Lupin’s chair at the Hollis barber shop—”

  “Tonsorial Parlor,” murmured Mr. Queen nostalgically. Joe Lupin had come into the Haight case through his wife Tessie, who worked in the Lower Main Beauty Shop. It was the Hollis Tonsorial Parlor, Luigi Marino, Prop., and now that Ellery thought of it, he’d noticed Marino’s salt-and-pepper head that very afternoon, bent over a lathered face, as he had sidled through the Hollis lobby.

  “—and I got to talking to J. C. Pettigrew, who was under the sun lamp in the next chair. You know, dear. The real estate fellow…”

  Ellery could still see J. C.’s Number Twelves up on his desk in the real estate office on Lower Main that day he had hit Wrightsville for the first time; the shoes and the ivory toothpick.

  “The conversation got around to old-timers who had passed on and somebody—I think it was Luigi—mentioned old Ted Fyfield, who’d been dead for years. J. C. perked up and said, ‘Dead or not dead, that Fyfield was a crook and a skunk,’ and he went on to tell about the time he’d paid Ted a small fortune in expense money and fees to track down a fellow who’d run out on a realty deal leaving J. C. holding the bag, only to find out that Ted was giving him completely fictitious reports all the time he was collecting J. C.’s money for ‘investigating’—that Ted hadn’t even left Wrightsville or lifted a finger to earn that money! J. C. said he threatened to have Fyfield’s private detective license revoked and the old scoundrel ponied up fast. Well, it gave me a queer feeling, because I’d paid Fyfield a small fortune myself for three years. Then it turned out that nearly everybody in the barber shop had some discreditable yarn to tell about Ted Fyfield, and by the time they were through I was sick. I hate to be played for a sucker, makes me see red. But more important than that, I’d depended on Fyfield in a matter that…well, that was mighty important to all of us.”

  Sally’s frown was deep now. She put her arm around her husband’s neck and said lightly: “You should have been a writer, darling. All these details. What’s the exciting part?”

  Wolfert just sat there, in brine.

  “Well, sir,” Diedrich said grimly, “I played a hunch. I decided to reopen the whole business on the chance that Fyfield had skinned me thirty years ago and not done any real investigating at all. I put the matter in the hands of a reputable agency in Connhaven.”

  “You never told me.” It came out stiff and new, in a strange-sounding voice, not like Howard’s at all.

  “No, son, because I figured it was the longest kind of shot—after thirty years—and I didn’t want to raise your hopes until I had something definite.

  “Well, the long shot came through. Fyfield had skinned me, the—” Sally put her hand over his mouth. He grinned. “Just a few minutes ago I got a call from Connhaven. It was the head of this agency. They had the whole story, son. They couldn’t believe their own luck—they’d taken the case on, telling me I was wasting their time and my money. But I played my hunch—and now we know.”

  Howard asked: “Who are my parents?” in the same stiff way.

  “Son…” Diedrich hesitated. Then he said gently: “They’re dead, son. I’m sorry.”

  “Dead,” said Howard. You could see him struggling through that intelligence: they were dead, his father and mother were dead, they weren’t living, he would never see them, know what they had looked like, and that was bad, or was it good?

  Sally said, “Well, I’m not sorry.”

  She jumped off her husband’s lap and perched on his desk, fingering a paper. “I’m not sorry because if they were alive, Howard, it would be the most stupid sort of mess. You’d be a total stranger to them and they to you. It would confuse everybody and do no one concerned the least good. I’m not sorry at all, Howard. And don’t you be!”

  “No.” Howard was staring. Ellery didn’t like the way he was staring. The glaze was thickening over his eyes. “All right, they’re dead,” he said slowly. “But who were they?”

  “Your father, Howard, was a farmer,” Diedrich replied. “And your mother was a farmer’s wife. Poor, poor people, son. They lived in a primitive farmhouse about ten miles from here—between Wrightsville and Fidelity. You’ll remember, Wolf, how desolate that stretch in there was thirty years ago.”

  Wolfert said: “Farmer, huh?” The way he said it made Ellery want to stuff his dentures down his throat. Sally slew him with a look, and even Diedrich frowned.

  But Howard was impervious to tones of voice. He simply sat staring at his foster father.

  “They were too poor to hire hands for the farm, according to the information the agency gathered,” continued Diedrich. “Your parents had to do it all themselves. They barely managed to scratch a living from the soil. Then your mother had a baby. You.”

  “And zing, she tosses me on the nearest doorstep.” Howard smiled, and Ellery wished he would go back to staring.

  “You were born in the middle of the night during a bad summer thunderstorm,” Diedrich smiled back, but no longer was his face happy; he was regretful now, uneasy, and a little sharp, as if he were angry with himself for having misjudged Howard’s reaction. And he spoke more rapidly. “The Connhaven agency was able to reconstruct the events of that night from the records they found, and the thunderstorm is important.

  “Your mother, Howard, was attended by a Wrightsville man, a Dr. Southbridge, and when you’d been born and taken care of and your mother was comfortable, the doctor started back to town in his buggy, at the height of the storm. Well, on the way back his horse must have been frightened by lightning and got out of control, because the horse, Dr. Southbridge, and the buggy were found at the bottom of a ravine, just off the road. The buggy was smashed, the horse had two broken legs, and the doctor a crushed chest—he was dead when they found him. Of course, he’d had no opportunity to record your birth at Town Hall. The agency thinks that’s one of the reasons your parents did what they did. Apparently they felt they were too poor to bring you up right—there were no other children—and realizing when they heard about Dr. Southbridge’s accident that he couldn’t have had time to record your birth, they saw a chance to put you into the care of someone better off who wouldn’t be able to trace you back to them.

  “Apparently only they and Southbridge knew about your birth, and the doctor was dead.

  “Why they left you on our doorstep, of course, no one will ever know. I doubt if it had anything to do with us personally—it was a pretty prosperous-looking house; at least it must have seemed so to a couple of poor farmers.”

  “That’s all on the assumption,” smiled Howard, “that they did it all for little Nameless. But how do you know they didn’t do it just because they didn’t want little Nameless?”

  “Oh, Howard, shut up and stop that breast-beating,” snapped Sally. She was terribly concerned; concerned and restless and angry with Diedrich.

  Diedrich said hastily: “Anyway, the Connhaven detectives found out all this as a result of locating Dr. Southbridge’s appointment book. It was a pocket affair, a notebook, and it had been taken from the doctor’s clothes by the undertaker and put among the dead man’s effects, winding up in the attic of his old house where the investigators located it. The entry in the doctor’s handwriting, apparently made as he was leaving the farmhouse, of the birth of a male child to the farmer’s wife corresponds exactly in date to your date of birth, Howard, as given in that note that was pinned to your blanket when I found you; and the agency man tells me—I’d of course kept the note all these years and I’d given it to the agency—that the handwriting on it is absolutely beyond question the handwriting of the farmer—they managed to dig up a sample on an old mortgage. And that, Howard,” concluded Diedrich with a sigh of relief, “is the story. So now you can stop wondering about who you were”—his eyes twinkled—“and start being what you are.”

  “And that’s the first bright thing I’ve heard you say tonight, Dieds,” cried Sally. “Now how about all of us having some coffee?”

  “Wait,” said Howard. “Who am I?”

  “Who are you?” Diedrich winced. Then he said heartily, “You’re my son, Howard Hendrik Van Horn. Who on earth would you be?”

  “I mean who was I? What was the name?”

  “Didn’t I mention it? It was Waye.”

  “Waye?”

  “W-a-y-e.”

  “Waye.” Howard seemed to be tasting it. “Waye…” He shook his head, as if it had no flavor for him at all. “Didn’t I have a first name?”

  “No, son. I guess they hadn’t given you one—left that job, and it was sensible, too, to the ones who’d bring you up. At least no Christian name for the child appeared in Dr. Southbridge’s notation.”

  “Christian. Were they Christians?”

  “Oh, what difference would that make?” said Sally. “Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan—you’re what you were brought up. Let’s stop this now!”

  “They were Christians, son. What denomination I don’t know.”

  “And you say they’re dead, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d they die?”

  “Well…Son, I think Sally’s right.” Diedrich rose suddenly. “We’ve talked enough about this.”

  “How’d they die?”

  Wolfert’s eyes were bright. His glances kept darting from Diedrich to Howard like quick little animals.

  “About ten years after they left you with me, a fire broke out on their farm. They were both burned to death.” Diedrich rubbed his head in a rather odd gesture of fatigue. “I’m really sorry, son. This was stupid of me.”

  The glaze fascinated Ellery. It suddenly occurred to him that he might be witnessing the beginning of an amnesia attack. The thought jarred him.

  He said quickly: “Howard, this is all pretty unsettling and exciting, but Sally was right before. It’s all for the best—”

  Howard did not even glance in his direction. “Didn’t they leave anything, Father? An old photo or something?”

  “Son…”

  “Answer me, damn it!”

  Howard was on his feet, swaying. Diedrich looked shocked. Sally gripped his arm reassuringly, without taking her eyes off Howard.

  “Why…why, after the fire, son, some relative of your mother’s saw to the funeral and took away the few things that weren’t destroyed in the fire. The farm itself was mortgaged to the hilt—”

  “What relative? Who is it? Where can I find him?”

  “There’s no trace of him, Howard. He moved from here shortly afterward. The agency had no information about his whereabouts.”

  “I see,” said Howard. And then he asked, in a slow thick voice, “And where are they buried?”

  “I can tell you that, son,” said Diedrich quickly. “They’re in adjoining graves in the Fidelity Cemetery. Now how about some of that coffee, Sally?” he boomed. “I know I can use some, and Howard—”

  But Howard was on his way out of the study. He was walking wide-eyed, hands raised a little, and he kept stumbling.

  They heard his uneven steps going upstairs.

  And in a little while they heard the slam of a door from the top of the house.

  Sally was so incensed that Ellery thought she was going to be indiscreet.

  “Dieds, this was terribly ill-advised! You know how the least emotional upset sends Howard off!”

  “But, dearest,” said Diedrich miserably, “I thought it would do him good to know. He’s always wanted to so badly.”

  “You might at least have discussed it with me beforehand!”

  “I’m sorry, darling.”

  “Sorry! Did you see his face?”

  He looked at his wife in a puzzled way. “Sally, I don’t understand you. You’ve always thought it would be a good thing if Howard learned about…”

  Sally. This is a clever man you’re married to.

  “I’m completely out of order,” said Ellery cheerfully, “and nobody’s asked me to put my two pennies in, but, Sally, I think Mr. Van Horn’s done the only possible thing. Of course it’s a shock to Howard. It would be to a stable personality. But Howard’s ignorance of his origin has been one of the mainstays of his unhappiness. When the shock wears off—”

  She caught it. He knew it by the way her lids came down and her hands fluttered down to rest. But she was still angry, womanwise; perhaps angrier.

  All she actually said was, “Well, I can be wrong. Forgive me, dearest.”

  And then Wolfert Van Horn said a really shocking thing. He had been sitting forward with his skeletal knees drawn up and his torso bent far forward. Now, like Jack-in-the-Box, he sprang to the perpendicular, his bathrobe falling open to reveal his furred and brittle chest.