Read Online The Finishing Stroke by Ellery Queen - Free Book Online

shut, and for a horrid moment Ellery thought she was going to go into a trance. But Dr. Dark’s amused comment galvanized her.
    â€˜You don’t really believe that bosh, Mrs. Brown.’
    â€˜Bosh!’ She almost flew at him. ‘Don’t blaspheme about things you don’t understand, Doctor! There are more things in heaven and earth –’
    â€˜Than in my philosophy, for one,’ Ellery said, staring at the uncommunicative red suit. ‘I don’t share the premonitions of your psyche, Mrs. Brown, but I have to admit I don’t care for any of this, either. Didn’t anyone catch even a glimpse of whoever put this costume in the chest this morning?’
    But no one had.
    The afternoon passed under a pall, not entirely identifiable with the gathering overcast. Gray clouds muffled the sun, the temperature rose, and Alderwood began to dig out of the drifts. Ploughs clanked by all day. A local garageman appeared with a small truck fitted out with a big wooden pusher, and cleared the Craig drive. John and Ellery seized shovels and helped Felton to dig a narrow path around the house.
    But the joy seemed squeezed from everything. Rusty, Valentina and Ellen tried a snowball Fight and soon gave it up. There was some talk of hitching one of the horses from the stable to an old rusty-runnered sleigh standing in a corner of the garage, but that idea petered out, too.
    In the music room Marius Carlo sat at the grand piano, one eye closed against the smoking cigarette in his mouth, and played furious little arpeggios and wickedly warped snatches of opera, pausing frequently to freshen his highball; while, deaf to Carlo’s musical sarcasms, Olivette Brown curled up in a corner with a book she had found in Arthur Craig’s library of Americana first editions, Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World . They made a curiously harmonious picture.
    Dan Freeman, Dr. Dark and Mr. Gardiner took a tramp in the woods beyond the house. They found themselves engaged in a heated discussion of two current best sellers, Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele and Abbé Ernest Dimnet’s The Art of Thinking , neither of which any of them would have ordinarily considered controversial.
    Craig and Payn lolled in the library, arguing over the relative merits of the Hoover administration. It was a subject that usually struck sparks between them, but today the lawyer was doing a lacklustre job of glossing over Black Thursday, and the best Craig could offer was a spiritless indictment of Senator Heflin and the Hoovercrats for having kept Al Smith – and presumably a sound economy – out of the White House.
    The uneasy atmosphere was not cleared by Mrs. Janssen’s elaborate Christmas dinner, which was served at five o’clock. Everyone seemed to be cocking at least one ear for a ghostly footstep overhead. Rusty and Ellen tried desperately to keep the table talk going, but it persisted in sputtering out into little silences.
    â€˜This is more like a wake,’ John exclaimed, throwing down his napkin. ‘Why don’t we have our coffee and brandy in the living room? Maybe we can coax something cheerful out of the radio.’
    â€˜Uncle Don is on at six-thirty,’ Marius said innocently. ‘Or would these giants of art and intellect prefer ‘Amos and Andy’ at seven, or the ‘Happy Wonder Bakers’ at eight-thirty? By all means let’s listen to that great instrument of culture.’
    But there was no listening to the radio until much later Christmas night. For the first thing they encountered on entering the living room was a fresh mystery.
    Under the tree lay a large package done up in red and green metallic paper, tied with gilt ribbon. To the ribbon was attached a Christmas card in the shape of a jolly Santa Claus, and on the card was neatly typewritten the name ‘John Sebastian’.
    â€˜Here’s a pleasant change,’ John laughed.