“You want candor; here it is!” rasped Thorne. “I was in that house, Queen, for six days after Mayhew’s funeral and before Miss Mayhew’s arrival, looking for the gold. I turned that house upside down. And I didn’t find the slightest trace of it. I tell you it isn’t there.” He glared at the fat man. “I tell you it was stolen before Mayhew died!”
“Now, now,” sighed Ellery. “That makes less sense than the other. Why then has somebody intoned an incantation over the house and caused it to disappear?”
“I don’t know,” said the old lawyer fiercely. “1 know only that the most dastardly thing’s happened here, that everything is unnatural, veiled in that — that false creature’s smile! Miss Mayhew, I’m sorry I must speak this way about your own family. But I feel it my duty to warn you that you’ve fallen among human wolves. Wolves!”
“I’m afraid,” said Reinach sourly, “that I shouldn’t come to you, my dear Thorne, for a reference.”
“I wish,” said Alice in a very low tone, “I truly wish I were dead.”
But the lawyer was past control. “That man Keith,” he cried. “Who is he? What’s he doing here? He looks like a gangster. I suspect him, Queen—”
“Apparently,” smiled Ellery, “you suspect everybody.”
“Mr. Keith?” murmured Alice. “Oh, I’m sure not. I–I don’t think he’s that sort at all, Mr. Thorne. He looks as if he’s had a hard life. As if he’s suffered terribly from something.” Thorne threw up his hands, turning to the fire.
“Let us,” said Ellery amiably, “confine ourselves to the problem at hand. We were, I believe, considering the problem of a disappearing house. Do any architect’s plans of the so-called Black House exist?”
“Lord, no,” said Dr. Reinach.