The Avenger 29 - The Nightwitch Devil (6 page)

“Out-of-town gentleman, I’ll bet,” Hulda Dolittle, the operator, was saying.

“You’re very perceptive, miss,” said Cole. “And judging from your voice, quite charming. And now if you could connect me with Gil Lunden’s office.”

After giggling, the operator put through his call.

“Attorney Lunden’s office,” answered a young girl.

“I’d like very much to talk to Mr. Lunden.”

“Mr. Lunden is not in at the moment. May I take a message?”

“This is rather important. Can you tell me where I might find him?”

“Well . . . I don’t know, sir.”

“Would he still be out at the widow Waxman’s?”

“Well, yes . . . but I don’t—”

“Thank you.” Cole broke the connection.

“Want me to ring Mrs. Waxman for you?” asked the operator.

“That’s positively uncanny, the way you read my mind.”

After talking to a housekeeper and to Mrs. Waxman herself, Cole got through to the lawyer.

“Something about Anne?” asked Gil Lunden anxiously.

“We’re trying to locate her,” said Cole. “I thought perhaps—”

“Isn’t she at the paper?”

“No, she’s not.”

Gil asked, “You’re with some law enforcement agency?”

“In a sense. We work for Justice, Inc.,” said Cole. “Is there someplace we could meet and talk?”

“Anne can’t be missing, too. This is . . . all right, Wilson, I’ll be finished here in about a half-hour,” he said. “The trouble is I have a meeting later on over in Wickford Point. Do you suppose you could drive out this way? I could meet you at the Old Fiddler’s Inn.”

“Sounds like a workable plan. How do we get there?”

Gil gave him instructions.

Smitty was leaning on the porch railing outside. “Prewar jawbreakers,” he said as he crunched a mouthful of hard candy. He held a small white paper bag clenched in one big fist.

“I talked to Hollis at the newspaper,” said Cole, “and thereafter to Anne Barley’s inamarato. Her present whereabouts remain a mystery, but the lawyer wants to talk to us. We may learn something.”

“We better learn
something
pretty darn quick,” said the giant.

Cole balanced the straw hat on his knee, spinning it around, slowly. “Now if I were Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Thorndyke, I’d be able to scrutinize this chapeau and tell you a great deal about our stubby boatyard friend,” he remarked. “What he does for a living, his hobbies, his favorite vegetable, and even . . . oh-ho!”

Smitty, who was driving, took his eyes off the country road for a few seconds. “What?”

“My assailant stuffed some paper into the inside hatband to make this thing fit his thick head.” Cole extracted several small folded pieces of cardboard from inside the hat. “Not as impressive as pulling out rabbits, but perhaps more informative.”

“What’s old hunks of waste paper going to tell us?”

Carefully unfolding one of the cards, the grinning Cole said, “One never knows, as Fats Waller oft reminds us. Hum . . . ah . . . hum.”

“What, something?”

“For some reason, all these hunks of paper have
With Deepest Sympathy
printed across the top,” Cole pointed out. “Either our aggressive chum has a morbid streak, or he’s been someplace where they had a stack of these little sympathy cards.”

“A florist, maybe?” suggested Smitty. “Or maybe even an undertaking parlor.”

Cole deposited one of the cards in the inside pocket of his sportcoat. “We’ll look into it.”

“Could be the guy bought the lid second-hand.”

“Let’s look on the bright side, Smitty, and consider this a clue.”

They were traveling along a quiet stretch of road; a few farms showed on the distant hills.

“There’s the crossroads up ahead,” noticed Smitty.

They turned to the right and began climbing the road that would take them to the Old Fiddler’s Inn and their meeting with Gil Lunden.

“Must be some horses around here,” said Cole after a few moments. “That’s a wagon load of hay bales up ahead.”

“How about that? A horse-drawn wagon,” said Smitty. “That’s a nice New England touch.”

“Also slow,” said Cole. “But I don’t think we’ve got enough room to pass him.”

“Maybe I can . . . Damn!” His big foot slammed the brake pedal.

The bales of hay were suddenly toppling off the wagon, bouncing on the road.

“A rural obstacle course,” mumbled Cole, holding tight to his seat.

Their car slewed across the road, turning sideways.

Smitty let out his breath. “Didn’t hit any of them, anyway.”

A dozen large bales of dirty-gold hay dotted the road, blocking their way.

The wagon itself had stopped.

“Might as well be good chaps,” said Cole, reaching for the door handle, “and help them reload. We’re not going to get to the Old Fiddler until—”

“Back of us,” said Smitty, who had glanced into the rear-view mirror.

A green truck had come up behind them and parked sideways. They were effectively bottled in.

Before Cole could comment further, a slug smacked into their windshield, making spiderweb patterns across the glass.

Rain had started again, but none of it got into the crypt. MacMurdie heard it slapping down on the marble-domed roof as he tried to discover the secret of the hidden doorway.

He’d pushed at the section of wall beneath which the muddy footprints ran, twisted the copper lamps. He had found two hair-thin cracks that ran from floor to ceiling, indicating the section of wall did indeed serve as a door. Nothing he’d tried, so far, had made it open.

“Ye’d better solve this riddle soon,” he admonished himself, “or you’ll end up making this tomb your permanent home.”

He bent and studied once more the footprint trails. The majority of them passed through the wall at the same point.

“Aye, and what do I see here?”

Mac noticed now that some of the footprints, the complete ones, changed in appearance close to the wall. The heel sections were fainter, the ball of the foot looked as though it had widened and pressed down harder.

“ ’Twould seem the skurlies hunkered down right about here.”

Carefully fitting his own feet into the newest set of prints, the Scot squatted. At eye level he could make out faint smudges on the marble. Mac pressed his fingertips against the two darkest smudges.

Nothing happened.

He pressed harder. The wall began to make a grumbling sound. Mac leaped back as it swung open toward him.

There was a tunnel on the other side. MacMurdie had been hoping for daylight, but at least this was a way out of the crypt.

He crossed the threshold of the shadowy tunnel. When he had traveled twenty feet, the marble wall pivoted shut behind him. There was thick, musty darkness all around him.

Holding out one hand, he made his way over to one wall of the black tunnel. He placed his palm flat against the rock surface and continued his progress forward.

“Getting farther from the light of day step by step.”

When he’d traveled another hundred paces, MacMurdie put his other hand out in front of him. He sensed he was coming to some kind of obstruction.

It was a wooden door. Mac located the doorknob and very slowly turned it. The door, with a faint creaking, opened inward.

There was light on the other side, coming from a dangling 100-watt bulb.

There was also a man with a gun.

Gil Lunden set the pewter ale mug down on the bar, glancing again toward the door of the small beam-ceilinged inn tavern.

“More rain,” observed the fat old man behind the bar counter. “We haven’t had such a wet spring since before the war.”

The young attorney nodded as he checked his watch.

“Your friends a mite late?”

Yes, they certainly were. Standing up, Gil said, “In case a Mr. Wilson comes in, tell him I went out to look for him.”

He strode to the door, trotted over to his car, and got in. He didn’t know what Wilson looked like, or what kind of automobile he was driving, but he thought he’d better go looking for him. There was a possibility he’d taken a wrong turning at the crossroads.

“A strange car, maybe out-of-state, shouldn’t be too tough to spot.”

As he drove away from the Old Fiddler’s Inn, Gil thought about Anne. Mrs. Waxman, with her complaints and the infinite little changes she was considering for her latest will, had rattled him. “Should have gotten more information out of Wilson,” he told himself.

Still, maybe he was worrying about nothing. Anne was pretty damn independent. It could be she’d simply gone off to dig into some story and not bothered to tell anybody. That was one of the things he liked about her, her independent approach to things. Sometimes, though, he thought it might be better if she were a little more dependent, on him, anyway.

“She’s all right,” he said to himself. “You’re letting all this talk about witches and warlocks get to you.”

You couldn’t deny the fact, however, that Dr. Ruyle had disappeared. And, apparently, this fellow MacMurdie, whoever he was.

“What was that outfit Anne said he worked for?”

The rain was coming harder, almost too much for the worn windshield wipers.

“Oh, yeah, Justice, Inc. I heard something about them, read an article somewhere. Wait a minute . . . that’s the crime-fighting group headed up by this fellow they call the Avenger.”

The attorney shook his head. It all sounded too melodramatic. Especially for a quiet one-horse sort of place like Nightwitch. Witches, sorcerers, the Devil, and now the Avenger.

“Everyday people, and I’m sure as heck one of those, don’t get mixed up with such things,” Gil told himself as he scanned the road for some sign of Wilson’s car.

“One of the reasons I’ve stayed here is that Nightwitch is such a peaceful place. Even since the war started, not much of that has touched us. It’s not as—”

A large hay wagon blocked his progress.

Gil rolled down his window to get a better look at the obstruction.

That was when he heard the gunshots.

“I suppose this is good exercise,” said Cole Wilson, diving behind a maple tree.

A bullet came whistling up through the rain. The slug thunked into the bole of a maple tree.

“Maybe we’ll get some maple syrup for our troubles,” Cole said, “if these chaps keep drilling holes.”

Smitty was hunched behind another wide maple. “We should be able to hold off those bozos from here.”

Cole and the giant had managed to get clear of their car and hightail it for this wooded hillside before the surrounding gunmen had reached them.

Another slug bit into a tree.

“How many of these rascals do you calculate there are, Smitty?”

“I counted at least five while we was hotfooting it up here.”

“Five, or possibly six, to two,” reflected Cole. “That’s not bad odds.” He eased a revolver out of a shoulder holster. “In a way, I regret that I’m not wearing my bullet-proof vest, but when spring approaches I always take the thing off.”

“Don’t worry, they ain’t going to get close enough to nail you.”

A bullet whizzed by, chattering through the branches overhead.

“This witch cult,” said Cole, “is unlike any other I’ve ever heard of or encountered.” He popped out from his protective tree for a few seconds, long enough to squeeze off a shot.

Downhill, someone howled in pain.

“You got one,” announced Smitty. He fished a handful of glass pellets out of his pocket.

“Four, or possibly five, to go,” said Cole, grinning. “I always expect—to return to my earlier remarks—witches to be wizened old ladies who ride around on broomsticks and cackle. This bunch seems, so far, to have a membership made up exclusively of heavies with guns.”

“Dick’s probably right about them being into something else besides mumbo-jumbo, like maybe espionage.”

Cole bobbed into the clear for another shot.

This one felled no one.

He said, safe behind the tree, “I’m growing increasingly curious about how they’ve been able to lay these traps for us.”

“Yeah, they sure know everywhere we’re going,” said the giant.

“Very few people knew we were en route to the picturesque Old Fiddler’s Inn.”

“Nobody but the legal guy.” Smitty flattened out on the mossy ground. “Keep diverting those mugs, Cole. I’m going to try a little something.”