Murder by Prescription by Jonathan Stagge

Author:Jonathan Stagge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

18

I left the Talbots’ house with a caged Belgian hare under each arm. My immediate object was to get them home safely. After the trials and tribulations they had endured during the past few days I anticipated some fresh disaster for them on the short drive back to my house. But no shadowy gunmen held me up; no mysterious, supernatural force whisked them out of the back seat.

I was taking no chances, however. This time I avoided the tool shed and carried them into the kitchen, where I fed them lettuce out of the icebox and pieces of creamed carrot left over from dinner. There was a sort of embittered gleam in their eyes, but their appetities were all right.

Before going to bed I was determined to weigh the events of the evening in my mind and try to piece them together into some logical pattern. My adventures in the Talbots’ cellar had cleared up certain mysteries. The Fiskes’ secret experimentations accounted for my strange scene with Gail, the scratches on Conrad’s cheeks, and for Bill Strong’s missing cat. But Josephs’ revelations concerning Mrs. Talbot’s telephone call to her lawyer’s and our encounter with the would-be incendiary proved that something far more desperate and complicated than vivisection was going on in that repulsive house. Why had Talbot and the Fiskes been so eager to get away? Why had Lena Bartholomew, complete with hat and coat, been left behind? And what on earth was wrong with Imogene Arthur?

Imogene Arthur! Until that moment I had completely forgotten her and my promise to deliver her letter to Phil Lavers. I fumbled in my breast pocket and produced it. My fingers traced the contour of the ring which had been slipped inside it. She had begged me to give it to Lavers tonight.

Wearily I put on my hat and coat again and trekked to the garage. Within a few minutes I was driving through the night toward Ploversville where my young colleague lived in ascetic, bachelor privacy on a small made-over farm.

The ring inside the envelope gave me more than a hint of the letter’s contents. Miss Arthur seemed a particularly unstable person. First she had refused Lavers, then she had accepted him rather gracelessly; now, presumably, she had changed her mind for the third time.

When I swung the car up to his front door the house was in darkness. I felt a strong and selfish impulse to slip the note into his mailbox and to leave it at that. But Imogene had been so insistent in her eagerness to have Lavers get the letter at once that I felt obliged to do the thing thoroughly.

I rang the bell and went on ringing until shuffling footsteps sounded inside. The door was opened by Lavers himself, his sparse figure swathed in a brocaded bathrobe.

“Westlake!” His surprise nipped a yawn in mid-career. “What on earth are you here for?”

I hurried into the hall, shutting the front door against the cold. Solemnly I handed him the letter.

“Miss Arthur wanted to be sure you’d get it tonight.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.