Alice nodded listlessly. Thorne mumbled: “Perhaps, Queen, you and I had better talk privately.”
“We made a frank beginning last night; I see no reason why we shouldn’t continue in the same candid vein. You needn’t be reluctant to speak before Dr. Reinach. Our host is obviously a man of parts — unorthodox parts.”
Dr. Reinach did not reply. His globular face was dark as he tossed off a water-goblet full of gin.
Through air metallic with defiance, Thorne talked in a hardening voice; not once did he take his eyes from Dr. Reinach.
His first suspicion that something was wrong had been germinated by Sylvester Mayhew himself.
Hearing by post from Alice, Thorne had investigated and located Mayhew. He had explained to the old invalid his daughter’s desire to find her father, if he still lived. Old Mayhew, with a strange excitement, had acquiesced; he was eager to be reunited with his daughter; and he seemed to be living, explained Thorne defiantly, in mortal fear of his relatives in the neighboring house.
“Fear, Thorne?” The fat man sat down, raising his brows. “You know he was afraid, not of us, but of poverty. He was a miser.”
Thorne ignored him. Mayhew had instructed Thorne to write Alice and bid her come to America at once; he meant to leave her his entire estate and wanted her to have it before he died. The repository of the gold he had cunningly refused to divulge, even to Thorne; it was “in the house,” lie had said, but he would not reveal its hiding-place to anyone but Alice herself. The “others,” he had snarled, had been looking for it ever since their “arrival.”
“By the way,” drawled Ellery, “how long have you good people been living in this house, Dr. Reinach?”
“A year or so. You certainly don’t put any credence in the paranoic ravings of a dying man? There’s no mystery about our living here. I looked Sylvester up over a year ago after a long separation and found him still in the old homestead, and this house boarded up and empty. The White House, this house, incidentally, was built by my stepfather — Sylvester’s father — on Sylvester’s marriage to Alice’s mother; Sylvester lived in it until my stepfather died, and then moved back to the Black House. I found Sylvester, a degenerated hulk of what he’d once been, living on crusts, absolutely alone and badly in need of medical attention.”