“Leave the eggs to me, Doctor,” Nikki said firmly. “You go on up those stairs and get some sleep.”
“Reckon I better if I’m to do my usual dignified job today,” said the mayor of Jacksburg with a sigh. “Though Abner Chase’s death is going to make the proceedings solemner than ordinary. Bill Yoder says he’s not going to be false to an ancient and honorable profession by doing a hurry-up job undertaking Ab, and maybe that’s just as well. If we added the Chase funeral to today’s program, even old Abe’s immortal words would find it hard to compete! By the way, Mr. Queen, I talked to Lew Bagley this morning and he’ll have your car ready in an hour. Special service, seeing you’re guests of the mayor.” Doc Strong chuckled. “When you planning to leave?”
“I was intending...” Ellery stopped with a frown. Nikki regarded him with a sniffy look. She had already learned to detect the significance of certain signs peculiar to the Queen physiognomy. “I wonder,” murmured Ellery, “how Zach Bigelow’s going to take the news.”
“He’s already taken it, Mr. Queen. Stopped in at Andy Bigelow’s place on my way home. Kind of a detour, but I figured I’d better break the news to Zach early as possible.”
“Poor thing,” said Nikki. “I wonder how it feels to learn you’re the only one left.” She broke an egg viciously.
“Can’t say Zach carried on about it,” said Doc Strong dryly. “About all he said, as I recall, was: ‘Doggone it, now who’s goin’ to lay the wreath after I toot the Gettysburg bugle!’ I guess when you reach the age of ninety-five, death don’t mean what it does to young squirts of sixty-three like me. What time ‘d you say you were leaving, Mr. Queen?”
“Nikki,” muttered Ellery, “are we in any particular hurry?”
“I don’t know. Are we?”
“Besides, it wouldn’t be patriotic. Doc, do you suppose Jacksburg would mind if a couple of New York Yanks invited themselves to your Memorial Day exercises?”
The business district of Jacksburg consisted of a single paved street bounded at one end by the sightless eye of a broken traffic signal and at the other by the twin gas pumps before Lew Bagley’s garage. In between, some stores in need of paint sunned themselves, enjoying the holiday. Red, white, and blue streamers crisscrossed the thoroughfare overhead. A few seedy frame houses, each decorated with an American flag, flanked the main street at both ends.
Ellery and Nikki found the Chase house exactly where Doc Strong had said it would be—just around the corner from Bagley’s garage, between the ivy-hidden church and the firehouse of the Jacksburg Volunteer Pump and Hose Company No. 1. But the mayor’s directions were a superfluity; it was the only house with a crowded porch.
A heavy-shouldered young girl in a black Sunday dress sat in a rocker, the center of the crowd. Her nose was as red as her big hands, but she was trying to smile at the cheerful words of sympathy winged at her from all sides.
“Thanks, Mis’ Plum... That’s right, Mr. Schmidt, I know... But he was such a spry old soul, Emerson, I can’t believe...”
“Miss Cissy Chase?”
Had the voice been that of a Confederate spy, a deeper silence could not have drowned the noise. Jacksburg eyes examined Ellery and Nikki with cold curiosity, and feet shuffled.
“My name is Queen and this is Miss Porter. We’re attending the Jacksburg Memorial Day exercises as guests of Mayor Strong” — a warming murmur, like a zephyr, passed over the porch — “and he asked us to wait here for him. I’m sorry about your great-grandfather, Miss Chase.”
“You must have been very proud of him,” said Nikki.
“Thank you, I was. It was so sudden—Won’t you set? I mean—Do come into the house. Great-grandpa’s not here... he’s over at Bill Yoder’s, on some ice...”
The girl was flustered and began to cry, and Nikki took her arm and led her into the house. Ellery lingered a moment to exchange appropriate remarks with the neighbors who, while no longer cold, were still curious; and then he followed. It was a dreary little house, with a dark and damp parlor.
“Now, now, this is no time for fussing—may I call you Cissy?” Nikki was saying soothingly. “Besides, you’re better off away from all those folks. Why, Ellery, she’s only a child!”
And a very plain child, Ellery thought, with a pinched face and empty eyes; and he almost wished he had gone on past the broken traffic light and turned north.
“I understand the parade to the burying ground is going to form outside your house, Cissy,” he said. “By the way, have Andrew Bigelow and his grandfather Zach arrived yet?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Cissy Chase dully. “It’s all such a dream, seems like.”
“Of course. And you’re left alone. Haven’t you any family at all, Cissy?”
“No.”
“Isn’t there some young man—?”
Cissy shook her head bitterly. “Who’d marry me? This is the only decent dress I got, and it’s four years old. We lived on Great-grandpa’s pension and what I could earn hiring out by the day. Which ain’t much, nor often. Now...”
“I’m sure you’ll find something to do,” said Nikki, very heartily.
“In Jacksburg?”
Nikki was silent.
“Cissy.” Ellery spoke casually, and she did not even look up. “Doc Strong mentioned something about a treasure. Do you know anything about it?”
“Oh, that.” Cissy shrugged. “Just what Great-grandpa told me, and he hardly ever told the same story twice. But near as I was ever able to make out, one time during the War him and Caleb Atwell and Zach Bigelow got separated from the army—scouting, or foraging, or something. It was down South somewhere, and they spent the night in an old empty mansion that was half-burned down. Next morning they went through the ruins to see what they could pick up, and buried in the cellar they found the treasure. A big fortune in money, Great-grandpa said. They were afraid to take it with them, so they buried it in the same place in the cellar and made a map of the location and after the War they went back, the three of ’em, and dug it up again. Then they made the pact.”
“Oh, yes,” said Ellery. “The pact.”
“Swore they’d hold onto the treasure till only one of them remained alive, I don’t know why, then the last one was to get it all. Leastways, that’s how Great-grandpa told it. That part he always told the same.”
“Did he ever say how much of a fortune it was?”
Cissy laughed. “Couple of hundred thousand dollars. I ain’t saying Great-grandpa was cracked, but you know how an old man gets.”
“Did he ever give you a hint as to where he and Caleb and Zach hid the money after they got it back North?”
“No, he’d just slap his knee and wink at me.”
“Maybe,” said Ellery suddenly, “maybe there’s something to that yarn after all.”
Nikki stared. “But Ellery, you said—! Cissy, did you hear that?”
But Cissy only drooped. “If there is, it’s all Zach Bigelow’s now.”
Then Doc Strong came in, fresh as a daisy in a pressed blue suit and a stiff collar and a bow tie, and a great many other people came in, too. Ellery and Nikki surrendered Cissy Chase to Jacksburg.
“If there’s anything to the story,” Nikki whispered to Ellery, “and if Mayor Strong is right, then that old scoundrel Bigelow’s been murdering his friends to get the money!”
“After all these years, Nikki? At the age of ninety-five?” Ellery shook his head.
“But then what—?”
“I don’t know.” But when the little mayor happened to look their way, Ellery caught his eye and took him aside and whispered in his ear.