Do you catch on! NEDDAM was MADDEN turned around. And more, there was a shipping date marked on the box which showed that the package had been taken out of the express office and brought here in June ... not the June before the millionaire had died so suddenly, but the last June on the calendar.
How could Dr. Madden, in ordering the medicine under a hidden name, and to probably secret purposes, have brought it here when he was in Europe? The answer was, of course, that he hadn’t been in Europe at all! And with his own Neponset Corners home closed, it was as plain as the nose on our face—or should I say noses?—that he had been secretly living here.
So he was the “ghost!”
CHAPTER XVII
IN QUARANTINE
Boy, were we ever excited! And did we ever feel like yipping out a string of “Hip-hip-hurray-for-our-side” stuff! For now, as you can see, we had the cat by the tail. And soon it would be eating out of our hands—meaning the whole cat, of course, and not just its tail.
Yes, sir, clever little sleuthing doo-dads that we were, we had the goods on old “Mr. Ghost.” And to think that the mysterious “spook” was the one man in the tangle whom we hadn’t even suspected! However, that wasn’t anything against our work. For not the slightest thing had bobbed up to hint to us that the family doctor wasn’t in Europe, as everybody in the neighborhood believed.
Here is the dope as we had it spread out in our minds now: To solve the secret that clouded the millionaire’s death, and probably to please the dying man, the loyal family doctor had hidden himself for a year in the closed house. There was deep mystery in his actions, of course, but he would clear that up. Sharing certain unusual secrets with the dead man, and an enemy of the scheming lawyer’s, he had kept in touch with the granddaughter, and now was working with her, to fix it so the lawyer couldn’t do any cheating stuff.
It was puzzling, of course, to understand why the hidden man, in his friendly work, had slammed doors to scare the two old people away, when the granddaughter, whom he was helping, had sent them here. But that wasn’t anything. Maybe a queer broken brain, before it turned cold, had given the hider his orders. Certainly, the “queer smell” was easily explained. Every time the man went through the hall he had left a trail behind him, just as I had noticed the smell when he was roosting on my barrel coop.
But more puzzling than anything else—contradictory, even—was old Ivory Dome’s swat on the head. You can see what I mean. If the two men and the girl were secretly working together, why had one of the men soaked the other as though he wanted to lay him cold? And that stormy night, why had the hidden one left the house, of which he seemed to have secret ways of getting in and out? Further, where did the crazy gander come in under the new order of things and who really had it?
Bu-lieve me, we were on our toes now for the strange doctor to show up. Not that we expected to corner him with our dope. But we had a hunch that the time was come for him to drop his game of hide and seek and put all the cards in plain sight on the table. That probably was why he was coming here this morning.