He might have added that both of these would in turn have been impossible except for the aberrant strain in the Mayhew blood. The father of Sylvester Mayhew — Dr. Reinach’s stepfather — had always been erratic, and he had communicated his unbalance to his children. Sylvester and Sarah, who became Mrs. Fell, were twins, and they had always been insanely jealous of each other’s prerogatives. When they married in the same month, their father avoided trouble by presenting each of them with a specially-built house, the houses being identical in every detail. One he had erected next to his own house and presented to Mrs. Fell as a wedding gift; the other he built on a piece of property he owned some miles away and gave to Sylvester.
Mrs. Fell’s husband died early in her married life; and she moved away to live with her half-brother Herbert. When old Mayhew died, Sylvester boarded up his own house and moved into the ancestral mansion. And there the twin houses stood for many years, separated by only a few miles by road, completely and identically furnished inside — fantastic monuments to the Mayhew eccentricity.
The duplicate White House lay boarded up, waiting, idle, requiring only the evil genius of an Olivia Fell to be put to use. Olivia was beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, and as unscrupulous as Lady Macbeth. It was she who had influenced the others to move back to the abandoned house next to the Black House for the sole purpose of coercing or robbing Sylvester Mayhew. When Thorne appeared with the news of Sylvester’s long-lost daughter, she recognized the peril to their scheme and, grasping her own resemblance to her English cousin from the photographs Thorne brought, conceived the whole extraordinary plot.
Then obviously the first step was to put Sylvester out of the way. With perfect logic, she bent Dr. Reinach to her will and caused him to murder his patient before the arrival of Sylvester’s daughter. (A later exhumation and autopsy revealed traces of poison in the corpse.) Meanwhile, Olivia perfected the plans of the impersonation and illusion.
The house illusion was planned for the benefit of Thorne, to keep him sequestered and bewildered while the Black House was being torn down in the search for the gold. The illusion would perhaps not have been necessary had Olivia felt certain that her impersonation would succeed perfectly.
The illusion was simpler, of course, than appeared on the surface. The house was there, completely furnished, ready for use. All that was necessary was to take the boards down, air the place out, clean up, put fresh linen in. There was plenty of time before Alice’s arrival for this preparatory work.
The one weakness of Olivia Fell’s plot was objective, not personal. That woman would have succeeded in anything. But she made the mistake of selecting Nick Keith for the job of murdering Alice Mayhew. Keith had originally insinuated himself into the circle of plotters, posing as a desperado prepared to do anything for sufficient pay. Actually, he was the son of Sylvester Mayhew’s second wife, who had been so brutally treated by Mayhew and driven off to die in poverty.
Before his mother expired she instilled in Keith’s mind a hatred for Mayhew that waxed, rather than waned, with the ensuing years. Keith’s sole motive in joining the conspirators was to find his stepfather’s fortune and take that part of it which Mayhew had stolen from his mother. He had never intended to murder Alice — his ostensible role. When he carried her from the house that first evening under the noses of Ellery and Thorne, it was not to strangle and bury her, as Olivia had directed, but to secrete her in an ancient shack in the nearby woods known only to himself.
He had managed to smuggle provisions to her while he was ransacking the Black House. At first he had held her frankly prisoner, intending to keep her so until he found the money, took his share, and escaped. But as he came to know her he came to love her, and he soon confessed the whole story to her in the privacy of the shack. Her sympathy gave him new courage; concerned now with her safety above everything else, he prevailed upon her to remain in hiding until he could find the money and outwit his fellow-conspirators. Then they both intended to unmask Olivia.
The ironical part of the whole affair, as Mr. Ellery Queen was to point out, was that the goal of all this plotting and counterplotting — Sylvester Mayhew’s gold — remained as invisible as the Black House apparently had been. Despite the most thorough search of the building and grounds no trace of it had been found.
“I’ve asked you to visit my poor diggings,” smiled Ellery a few weeks later, “because something occurred to me that simply cried out for investigation.”
Keith and Alice glanced at each other blankly; and Thorne, looking clean, rested, and complacent for the first time in weeks, sat up straighter in Ellery’s most comfortable chair.
“I’m glad something occurred to somebody,” said Nick Keith with a grin. “I’m a pauper; and Alice is only one jump ahead of me.”
“You haven’t the philosophic attitude towards wealth,” said Ellery dryly, “that’s so charming a part of Dr. Reinach’s personality. Poor Colossus! I wonder how he likes our jails...” He poked a log into the fire. “By this time, Miss Mayhew, our common friend Thorne has had your father’s house virtually annihilated. No gold. Eh, Thorne?”
“Nothing but dirt,” said the lawyer sadly. “Why, we’ve taken that house apart stone by stone.”
“Exactly. Now there are two possibilities, since I am incorrigibly categoricaclass="underline" either your father’s fortune exists, Miss Mayhew, or it does not. If it does not and he was lying, there’s an end to the business, of course, and you and your precious Keith will have to put your heads together and agree to live either in noble, ruggedly individualistic poverty or by the grace of the Relief Administration. But suppose there was a fortune, as your father claimed, and suppose he did secrete it somewhere in that house. What then?”
“Then,” sighed Alice, “it’s flown away.”
Ellery laughed. “Not quite; I’ve had enough of vanishments for the present, anyway. Let’s tackle the problem differently. Is there anything which was in Sylvester Mayhew’s house before he died which is not there now?”
Thorne stared. “If you mean the— er— the body...”
“Don’t be gruesome, Literal Lyman. Besides, there’s been an exhumation. No, guess again.”
Alice looked slowly down at the package in her lap. “So that’s why you asked me to fetch this with me today!”
“You mean,” cried Keith, “the old fellow was deliberately putting everyone off the track when he said his fortune was gold?”
Ellery chuckled and took the package from the girl. He unwrapped it and for a moment gazed appreciatively at the large old chromo of Alice’s mother.
And then, with the self-assurance of the complete logician, he stripped away the back of the frame.
Gold-and-green documents cascaded into his lap.
“Converted into bonds,” grinned Ellery. “Who said your father was cracked, Miss Mayhew? A very clever gentleman! Come, come, Thorne, stop rubber-necking and let’s leave these children of fortune alone!”