Puzzle of the Pepper Tree by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online

wouldn’t walk into your classroom and tell you how to teach your kids their ABC!”
    “You’re welcome to!” Miss Withers assured him. “Any time you see me doing my job the way you’re doing yours. Can’t you see that this is a full-fledged, front-page murder mystery? If you try to hush it up as a natural death, there’s bound to be a big—a big smell, and I can well imagine what the newspapers will have to say about you and Dr. O’Rourke!”
    With that last broadside, Miss Withers crossed to the door, unlocked it, and closed it gently but firmly behind her. Barney Kelsey hesitated, gave his intended address, and then followed her example, leaving the door ajar.
    Chief of Police Amos Britt stared at James Michael O’Rourke, M.D., and the doctor returned his stare, wordlessly.
    “And the sad part about it is that she’s right,” O’Rourke remarked softly, as if anxious not to awaken the dead man in the brown sport outfit.
    “Mebbe she is and mebbe she isn’t,” Chief Britt announced. “Anyway”—his face brightened—“Anyway she’s finally taken herself out of it.”
    At that moment Miss Hildegarde Withers, far from having taken herself out of anything, was doing her best to involve herself deeper into what was to be famous in newspaper annals as “The Red Dragonfly Mystery.”
    Half a block from the infirmary, on a covered arcade connecting two side streets, is the Avalon post office, and next door to this invaluable institution glows the blue-and-white globe of a telegraph office. Miss Withers pushed aside scornfully the stub of pencil with its inevitable jingling chain, and with her own slim fountain pen set down the following message:
POSTAL TELEGRAPH
AVALON CALIFORNIA 12:45 P
    INSPECTOR OSCAR PIPER,
    CENTRE STREET
    POLICE HEADQUARTERS
    NEW YORK CITY
    CURIOUS TO KNOW PLEASE RUSH DESCRIPTION AND WHAT INFORMATION YOU HAVE ON FILE REGARDING ROSWELL T FORREST AND BARNEY KELSEY REGARDS
    HILDEGARDE
    When this telegram was safely on the wire, Miss Withers took from a pocket of her coat a small, limp, modern-library edition of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Making her angular body as comfortable as possible on one of the wooden benches near the telegraph desk, she proceeded to put completely from her mind all thought of the dead man and the officials who were at the moment so embarrassed by his presence.
    That lady’s remarkable patience and calmness, however, were not shared by the seven marooned individuals who were still waiting at the airport for a bus to transport them on to the village of Avalon.
    The great Ralph O. Tate took it hardest. With a small and brittle twig which he had torn from a nearby bush he whipped viciously at the sleek black leather of his riding boots. Before him stretched a blue ocean, with a haze that was California in the far distance. Behind him were the yellow villa and the barrier of mountains. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Tony and George, his two satellites, busily matching coins. They had run through dimes to quarters by this time.
    Beside him, her well-rounded body resting upon well-rounded heels, Phyllis La Fond chatted companionably—inevitably. Now and again Tate flung a stone at the water, but most of his missiles refused to skip. That, too, was in key with the rest of his morning—for at the other end of Catalina, Tate knew all too well, there was a moving-picture company on location. Waiting since sunrise this morning—waiting for him. At something like two hundred dollars an hour.
    “Someday,” Phyllis was saying—“Someday I’ll get my chance in pictures. Somebody will look at me and realize that there’s something hidden in me, something that everybody doesn’t see—”
    Tate surveyed her form-fitting plaid suit impartially. “I don’t know where you’d hide it,” he remarked.
    At that moment a siren sounded from the gateway beside the village—a raucous yet welcome blast from the red bus which had just coasted down the slope to