Calamity Town by Ellery Queen Page A

Queen!’
    â€˜I had a flash from on high. It said to me: “This woman Rosemary doesn’t seem cut from the same cloth as Jim Haight. They don’t seem like brother and sister at all—’”
    â€˜Ellery!’
    â€˜Oh, it was possible. But my flash was wrong. She is his sister.’
    â€˜And you proved that through Steve Polaris’s truck? Wonderful man!’
    â€˜Through his receipt book, in which this woman had just signed her name. I have the real Rosemary Haight’s signature, you’ll recall, my dear Watson.’
    â€˜On that charred flap of envelope we found in Jim’s study—the remains of his sister’s letter that he’d burned!’
    â€˜Precisely, my dear Watson. And the signature “Rosemary Haight” on the flap of the letter and the signature “Rosemary Haight” in Steve’s receipt book are the work of the same hand.’
    â€˜Leaving us,’ remarked Pat dryly, ‘exactly where we were.’
    â€˜No,’ said Mr Queen with a faint smile. ‘Before we only believed this woman was Jim’s sister. Now we know it. Even your primitive mind can detect the distinction, my dear Watson?’
    The longer Rosemary Haight stayed at Nora’s, the more inexplicable the woman became. Jim was busier and busier at the bank; sometimes he did not even come home to dinner. Yet Rosemary did not seem to mind her brother’s neglect half so much as her sister-in-law’s attentions. The female Haight tongue was forked; more than once its venom reduced Nora to tears…shed, it was reported to Mr Queen by his favourite spy, in her own room, alone. Towards Pat and Hermione, Rosemary was less obvious. She rattled on about her ‘travels’—Panama, Rio, Honolulu, Bali, Banff, surf riding and skiing and mountain climbing and ‘exciting’ men—much talk about exciting men—until the ladies of the Wright family began to look harried and grim, and retaliated.
    And yet Rosemary stayed on.
    Why? Mr Queen was pondering this poser as he sat one morning in the window seat of his workroom. Rosemary Haight had just come out of her brother’s house, a cigarette at a disgusted angle to her red lips, clad in jodhpurs and red Russian boots and a Lana Turner sweater. She stood on the porch for a moment, slapping a crop against her boots with impatience, at odds with Wrightsville. Then she strode off into the woods behind the Wright grounds.
    Later, Pat took Ellery driving; and Ellery told her about seeing the Haight woman enter the woods in a riding habit.
    Pat turned into the broad concrete of Route 16, driving slowly. ‘Bored,’ she said. ‘Bored blue. She got Jake Bushmill the blacksmith to dig her up a saddle horse from somewhere—yesterday was her first day out, and Carmel Pettigrew saw her tearing along the dirt road toward Twin Hill like—I quote—one of the Valkyries. Carmel—silly dope!—thinks Rosemary’s just too-too.’
    â€˜And you?’ queried Mr Queen.
    â€˜That panther laziness of hers is an act—underneath, she’s the restless type, and hard as teak. A cheap wench. Or don’t you think?’ Pat glanced at him sidewise.
    â€˜She’s terribly attractive,’ said Ellery evasively.
    â€˜So’s a man-eating orchid,’ retorted Pat; and she drove in silence for eight-tenths of a mile. Then she said: ‘What do you make of the whole thing, Ellery—Jim’s conduct, Rosemary, the three letters, the visit, Rosemary’s staying on when she hates it…?’
    â€˜Nothing,’ said Ellery. But he added: ‘Yet.’
    â€˜Ellery—look!’ They were approaching a gaudy bump on the landscape, a one-story white stucco building on whose walls oversized red lady-devils danced and from whose roof brittle cut-out flames of wood shattered the sky. The tubing of the unlit neon sign spelled out v IC CARLATTI’S