The Missing Chapter

“I’ll call the elevator maintenance outfit,” I told him. “There’s a chance somebody can come tomorrow, although it probably will cost extra because it’s a Saturday.” He grunted what I took to be his approval, so I found the number in my telephone file and punched it out. A recorded female voice informed me the office was closed but that I could try an emergency number, which I did. The guy who answered sounded like he’d just been roused from a deep sleep. I told him the problem and he responded with a few sluggish “uh-huhs.” He was equally unenthusiastic when he said they’d send a crew out first thing in the morning — no later than nine. “Hafta charge you the weekend rate,” he warned, and I responded that we would live with it.

I hung up and told Wolfe help was on the way, but he didn’t appear to be impressed, so I changed the subject. “I talked to Keith Billings,” I said as he set down his glass of beer, licked his lips, and picked up his current book, Byzantium: The Apogee, by John Julius Norwich. “Do you want a report?”

He scowled and closed the book. “Proceed,” he said icily. I forgave him silently, knowing it had been an unsettling day for him, and gave him the conversation verbatim while he sat with eyes closed and hands on his chair arms. When I finished, he opened his eyes, drained his glass, and poured more beer before uttering a single word. “Indiana.”

“Yeah, two people now have told me Childress seemed different when he came back from there. Like I told Billings, maybe that’s understandable, though.”

“I detected no appreciable change in your personality or demeanor when you returned from your mother’s funeral several years ago,” Wolfe observed.

“True, but no two people react to a personal loss in the same way.”

“Manifestly. How would one get to this place?” To Wolfe, any travel, even a few blocks by car, is an act of outright recklessness. I went to the bookshelves and pulled down the big atlas, taking it back to my desk. “Mercer, Indiana, population, four thousand six hundred eleven. Here it is, southeast of Indianapolis about fifty or sixty miles, say an hour’s drive.”

Wolfe shuddered. “And to get to Indianapolis?”

“Something over an hour by air, ninety minutes at the outside. Do I go?”

Another shudder. “I believe you are visiting Miss Rowan’s dacha this weekend?”

Wolfe calls it a dacha, and Lily herself refers to it as “my country cottage.” It actually is a spacious, stone-and-timber, tile-roofed, four-bedroom villa with an Olympic-sized pool and stables set on forty rolling and wooded acres near Katonah. “We were supposed to drive up around noon tomorrow, but I can cancel,” I told him.

“No, Monday is soon enough. Make the necessary arrangements,” he said, returning to his book. You might think he was being considerate by letting me keep my weekend plans, but he had a couple of ulterior motives: One, he wanted to be sure I was around in the morning to deal with the elevator repair crew; and two, he knew that if I were away toiling on Sunday, he would have to give me a day off somewhere along the way as compensation, and he doesn’t like it when I’m not around on weekdays to carry out whatever duties he dreams up. Actually, there was a third factor, too. Wolfe, despite his overall opinion of women, approves of Lily Rowan — whenever she comes to the brownstone, she asks to see his orchids, a request that is sure to get a positive response from him. She had a weekend planned, and he did not want to cast himself in the role of bad guy by messing it up.

The next morning, after devouring a breakfast of sausage, eggs, and pancakes with wild-thyme honey at my small table in the kitchen, I finished packing my overnight bag for the trip to Katonah and went to the office to tackle some housekeeping odds and ends. At nine-twenty, the doorbell rang. It was two men from the elevator outfit we’ve used through the years, one of whom, the tall bald one, I recognized. I ushered them in, and we hoofed it up to the fourth floor, where the car stood open and dark. While they surveyed it, I went into the plant rooms to confirm that Wolfe had walked up the two flights from his bedroom on the second floor. Sure enough, there he was, on his usual stool at the bench doing something with the stuff in a pot, while Theodore looked on, frowning. His frown predictably deepened when he saw me. “Just thought I’d let you know that the elevator grease monkeys are here. Things may get a little noisy,” I said. Wolfe glowered in my direction and turned back to the pot.

I went down to the office, where I balanced the checkbook and read those parts of the Times I hadn’t gotten to at breakfast. At ten-thirty-five, the tall bald repairman stuck his head in the door and delivered the bad news.