H.M., motionless, puffed out cigar smoke.
“Vicky’s a faker,” said Eve. “Does that sound catty?”
“Not necessarily. I was just thinkin’ the same thing myself.”
“I’m patient,” said Eve. Her blue eyes were fixed. “I’m terribly, terribly patient. I can wait years for what I want. Bill’s not making much money now, and I haven’t got a bean. But Bill’s got great talent under that easygoing manner of his. He must have the right girl to help him. If only...”
“If only the elfin sprite would let him alone. Hey?”
“Vicky acts like that,” said Eve, “towards practically every man she ever meets. That’s why she never married. She says it leaves her soul free to commune with other souls. This occultism—”
Then it all poured out, the family story of the Adamses. This repressed girl spoke at length, spoke as perhaps she had never spoken before. Vicky Adams, the child who wanted to attract attention, her father Uncle Fred and her mother Aunt Margaret seemed to walk in vividness as the shadows gathered.
“I was too young to know her at the time of the ‘disappearance,’ of course. But, oh, I knew her afterwards! And I thought...”
“Well?”
“If I could get you here,” said Eve, “I thought she’d try to show off with some game. And then you’d expose her. And Bill would see what an awful faker she is. But it’s hopeless! It’s hopeless!”
“Looky here,” observed H.M., who was smoking his third cigar. He sat up. “Doesn’t it strike you those two are being a rummy-awful long time just in lookin’ through a little bungalow?”
Eve, roused out of a dream, stared back at him. She sprang to her feet. She was not now, you could guess, thinking of any disappearance.
“Excuse me a moment,” she said curtly.
Eve hurried across to the cottage, went up on the porch, and opened the front door. H.M. heard her heels rap down the length of the small passage inside. She marched straight back again, closed the front door, and rejoined H.M.
“All the doors of the rooms are shut,” she announced in a high voice. “I really don’t think I ought to disturb them.”
“Easy, my wench!”
“I have absolutely no interest,” declared Eve, with the tears coming into her eyes, “in what happens to either of them now. Shall we take the car and go back to town without them?”
H.M. threw away his cigar, got up, and seized her by the shoulders.
“I’m the old man,” he said, leering like an ogre. “Will you listen to me?”
“No!”
“If I’m any reader of the human dial,” persisted H.M., “that young feller’s no more gone on Vicky Adams than I am. He was scared, my wench. Scared.” Doubt, indecision crossed H.M.’s face. “I dunno what he’s scared of. Burn me, I don’t! But...”
“Hoy!” called the voice of Bill Sage.
It did not come from the direction of the cottage.
They were surrounded on three sides by Goblin Wood, now blurred with twilight. From the north side the voice bawled at them, followed by crackling in dry undergrowth. Bill, his hair and sports coat and flannels more than a little dirty, regarded them with a face of bitterness.
“Here are her blasted wild strawberries,” he announced, extending his hand. “Three of ’em. The fruitful (excuse me) result of three quarters of an hour’s hard labor. I absolutely refuse to chase ’em in the dark.”
For a moment Eve Drayton’s mouth moved without speech.
“Then you weren’t... in the cottage all this time?”
“In the cottage?” Bill glanced at it. “I was in that cottage,” he said, “about five minutes. Vicky had a woman’s whim. She wanted some wild strawberries out of what she called the ‘forest.’ ”
“Wait a minute, son!” said H.M. very sharply. “You didn’t come out that front door. Nobody did.”
“No! I went out the back door! It opens straight on the wood.”
“Yes. And what happened then?”
“Well, I went to look for these damned...”
“No, no! What did she do?”
“Vicky? She locked and bolted the back door on the inside. I remember her grinning at me through the glass panel. She—”
Bill stopped short. His eyes widened, and then narrowed, as though at the impact of an idea. All three of them turned to look at the rough-stone cottage.
“By the way,” said Bill. He cleared his throat vigorously. “By the way, have you seen Vicky since then?”
“No.”
“This couldn’t be...?”
“It could be, son,” said H.M. “We’d all better go in there and have a look.”
They hesitated for a moment on the porch. A warm, moist fragrance breathed up from the ground after sunset. In half an hour it would be completely dark.
Bill Sage threw open the front door and shouted Vicky’s name. That sound seemed to penetrate, reverberating, through every room. The intense heat and stuffiness of the cottage, where no window had been raised in months, blew out at them. But nobody answered.
“Get inside,” snapped H.M. “And stop yowlin’.” The Old Maestro was nervous. “I’m dead sure she didn’t get out by the front door; but we’ll just make certain there’s no slippin’ out now.”
Stumbling over the table and chairs they had used on the porch, he fastened the front door. They were in a narrow passage, once handsome with parquet floor and pine-paneled walls, leading to a door with a glass panel at the rear. H.M. lumbered forward to inspect this door and found it locked and bolted, as Bill had said.
Goblin Wood grew darker.
Keeping well together, they searched the cottage. It was not large, having two good-sized rooms on one side of the passage, and two small rooms on the other side, so as to make space for bathroom and kitchenette. H.M., raising fogs of dust, ransacked every inch where a person could possibly hide.
And all the windows were locked on the inside. And the chimney-flues were too narrow to admit anybody.
And Vicky Adams wasn’t there.
“Oh, my eye!” breathed Sir Henry Merrivale.
They had gathered, by what idiotic impulse not even H.M. could have said, just outside the open door of the bathroom. A bath-tap dripped monotonously. The last light through a frosted-glass window showed three faces hung there as though disembodied.
“Bill,” said Eve in an unsteady voice, “this is a trick. Oh, I’ve longed for her to be exposed! This is a trick!”
“Then where is she?”
“H.M. can tell us! Can’t you, H.M.?”
“Well... now,” muttered the great man.
Across H.M.’s Panama hat was a large black handprint, made there when he had pressed down the hat after investigating a chimney. He glowered under it.
“Son,” he said to Bill, “there’s just one question I want you to answer in all this hokey-pokey. When you went out pickin’ wild strawberries, will you swear Vicky Adams didn’t go with you?”
“As God is my judge, she didn’t,” returned Bill, with fervency and obvious truth. “Besides, how the devil could she? Look at the lock and bolt on the back door!”
H.M. made two more violent black handprints on his hat.
He lumbered forward, his head down, two or three paces in the narrow passage. His foot half-skidded on something that had been lying there unnoticed, and he picked it up. It was a large, square section of thin, waterproof oilskin, jagged at one corner.
“Have you found anything?” demanded Bill in a strained voice.
“No. Not to make any sense, that is. But just a minute!”
At the rear of the passage, on the left-hand side, was the bedroom from which Vicky Adams had vanished as a child. Though H.M. had searched this room once before, he opened the door again.
It was now almost dark in Goblin wood.