The Smuggled Atom Bomb

After a while, car headlights swept into the Yates’ driveway. Eleanor parked in the barn, came in by the back door, read her mother’s note, smiled a little, and switched out the living-room light. The porch was in the shadow, but moonlight poured on the lawn. She stepped out to look at it and saw, as her eyes accommodated themselves, that one of the big branches torn off by the hurricane and stuck in the trees had come loose and fallen into the lily pool. She also saw something that glinted beside the water. Even so, she would have gone to bed; she was very tired. But, as she turned, she heard a sound. A low, bubbling mutter. A horrible sound. She rushed for the flashlight, but it was not in its place. She knew instantly that what she had seen glinting on the lawn was the light.

“Duff,” she whispered frantically, and she ran out the front door.

She picked up the light. Worked the switch. Aimed at the mass of dead leaves, twigs and thigh-thick branch in the pond. With flinching nerves she saw that the water was stained red. And then she saw Duff — Duffs head. The scalp was open. His eyes were shut. He didn’t seem conscious. But his hands, on the pond edge, were grasping feebly and he had his mouth out of water. He was trying to say something.

“Duff!” she cried.

He muttered.

“Duff! I’ll get help! Can you hang on?”

His blood-streaked face looked up. His eyes showed now as slits. His teeth bared. His lips worked. “Scream,” he finally enunciated. “And look behind you.”

She swung around — and saw no one. But she screamed.

THREE

Emery McIntosh, chief of the Miami office of the FBI, listened to Higgins without interrupting. He was a medium-sized man of about fifty with a bald spot on the top of his head, nattily dressed in tropical-worsted suit, silk socks, black, highly polished shoes and a white shirt with a stiff collar. When he did speak, there was little in his accent to suggest his Scottish descent. But the ways and even the looks of his ancestors might have been read into the crisp mustache which matched his sandy hair, the blue glint of his eyes, the extraordinary firmness of his mouth and the deep, rather melancholy timbre of his voice. McIntosh looked, Higgins reflected, like a Presbyterian deacon dressed for taking up a Sunday collection—

which he was and had been about to do when the younger agent had telephoned.

“And the lad’s coming along all right?” McIntosh finally asked.

Higgins nodded. “Hardly a lad. Twenty-four.”

“But still in college,” the G-man sighed. “That keeps ‘em young. One minute they can act like wise old professors. The next, fall apart like adolescents.”

Higgins’ grin was quick. “Well, Bogan is different. And he’s all right. They had him in a hospital soon after midnight. Eleven stitches.”

“Any tree bark in the wound?”

“Several bits, the surgeon said.”

“I see.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Higgins answered stubbornly. “The poor guy was clunked more than once. He could have been blackjacked. And then that limb could have been hauled down from the tree. And after that he could have been pounded a couple with it. I think they thought he was dead.”

“If there was a human agent — any ‘they’ at all! A big if.” Higgins shrugged in a swift, shadowy way. “All right. I couldn’t find tracks on the lawn or in the shrubbery. Hasn’t rained lately, so why should I? Nobody in the family heard or saw anybody. He must have made a big splash, going in, but the house is fairly distant. Ellings’ room’s on the other side. The mother and the girl were asleep. The boy’s room is on the back.”

“Ground wet around the pool? That box — if it existed — would have come out dripping.”

“The ground was wet, all right. But it would have been soaked by the splash of the man and the limb anyhow. There might once have been an impress of the box on the grass—

it would have been heavy. But the police were there first and they had it fairly well trampled.”

McIntosh sank lower in his swivel chair. “Tree?”

“I gave it a going-over. You could see where the limb had been jammed. Rubbed the bark of a sound branch. You could see that it hadn’t been attached by much. A few slivers of wood and bark. It weighed around a hundred and fifty pounds. It could, so far as signs show, simply have come loose while he crouched there, and dropped on him and conked him, turned as it hit the pool, and swatted him again. It could, for all I can surely prove.”

McIntosh looked at his watch. On its chain was a Phi Beta Kappa key. “You say the lilies were in wooden boxes. Could one of them have changed position so he mistook it, at night, in a flashlight beam, for what he imagined was related to his other — discovery?”

“How can anybody answer that except Bogan himself? He said he saw the box plainly. Said he saw brass screw heads. No screws in his lily boxes. And it’s hardly anything he’d dream up. Besides, the lily boxes have no tops. They’re filled with compost, and that’s covered with white sand.”

“One might turn turtle.”