The Race

“What do you suppose Celere was doing out on the rim?”

“Scouting. The butler told me they went out for bear.”

“So to go ahead like that, Celere must have trusted Frost?”

“Folks said Mr. Frost was buying airplanes for his wife. I guess he’d trust a good customer.”

“Did you find Celere’s rifle?” Bell asked.

“Nope.”

“What do you suppose happened to it?”

“Bottom of the river.”

“And the same for his field glasses?”

“If he had ’em.”

They walked out to the edge of the gorge. Isaac Bell walked along it, aware that he was not likely to see any signs of an event that occurred before winter snows had fallen and melted. At a point near a single tree that stood lonely sentinel with its roots clinging to the rim, he noticed a narrow shelf immediately below. It thrust out like a second cliff, six feet down and barely four feet wide. A falling body would have to clear it to plummet to the river. Gripping the roots where erosion had exposed them, he lowered himself to it and looked around. No rusty rifle. No field glasses. He peered over the side. It was a long way down to the glint of water at the bottom.

He hauled himself back up to the meadow. As he stood, resting his hand on the tree for balance, he felt a hole in the bark. He looked more closely. “Constable Hodge? May I borrow your hunting knife?”

Hodge unsheathed a strong blade that had been fashioned by honing a steel file. “Whatcha got there?”

“A bullet lodged in the tree, I suspect.” Bell used Hodge’s knife to gouge the bark around the hole. He carved an opening large enough to dislodge a soft lead wad with his fingers in an effort not to scratch it with the blade.

“Where the heck did that come from?”

“Maybe Harry Frost’s rifle.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You’ll never know.”

“Maybe I will,” said Bell, recalling a court case argued a few years earlier by Oliver Wendell Holmes where a bullet was matched to the gun that fired it. “Do you happen to have that rifle the boys found on the tracks?”

“In my office. I’d have given it back to Mrs. Frost, but she left. Mr. Frost of course was long gone. Anyone left on the property out there is no one I would give a fine rifle to.”

They returned to North River. Hodge helped Bell find a bale of cotton wool packing material at the railroad depot. They set it up at the empty end of the freight yard. Bell stuck his calling card in the center of the bale and paced off one hundred and fifty yards. Then he loaded two.45-70 shells into Frost’s Marlin, found the calling card like a bull’s-eye in the telescopic sight, and squeezed off a round.

The bullet missed the card, missed the cotton wool bale, and twanged off an iron signal post above it.

Constable Hodge looked pityingly at Isaac Bell. “I naturally assumed that a Van Dorn private detective would be conversant with firearms. Would you like me to shoot it for you?”

“The scope is off-kilter.”

“That’ll happen,” Constable Hodge said, dubiously. “Sometimes.”

“It could have been damaged when it was dropped on the tracks.”

Bell sighted in on the mark the bullet had pocked in the iron post and calculated the distance down. He levered out the spent shell, which loaded a fresh cartridge into the chamber, and squeezed the trigger. His calling card flew from the bale.

“Now you’re getting the hang of it,” Hodge said. “Keep it up you could be a pretty good shot, young feller.”

Bell dug the bullet out of the bale and wrapped it in a handkerchief along with the slug he had pulled from tree. He walked to the post office and mailed them to the Van Dorn laboratory in Chicago, requesting examination under a microscope to determine whether the bullet he had test-fired revealed rifling marks that resembled those on the bullet in the tree.

“Is anyone living out at Frost’s camp?” he asked Hodge.

“No one you’d want to meet. About the only thing still going is the creamery. They send milk into town to sell. Cook, maids, butler, gardeners, and gatekeeper, they all left when Mrs. Frost did.”

Bell rented a Ford auto at the livery stable, and followed directions for several miles to the Frost camp. The first he saw of it was the gatehouse, an elaborate structure built of boulders and a grillwork of massive logs under its steep roof that gave the lie to the term “camp,” an Adirondack affectation similar to dubbing a Newport mansion a “cottage.” The gatekeeper’s living quarters, a large, handsome bungalow, was attached to it. No one came when he called and pounded on the door.

He drove under the stone arch and onto a broad carriage drive. The drive was surfaced with crushed slate and graded in a ma

Bell drove through five miles of Harry Frost’s land before he finally saw the lake. Across the water stood a sprawling house of timbers, shingles, and stone. Large cottages and outbuildings surrounded the house, and in the distance were the barns and silos of the creamery. As the smooth slate drive skirted the lake and drew closer to the compound, he saw numerous outbuildings: blacksmith shop, smokehouse, laundry, and, at the far end of a broad lawn, an aeroplane hangar – a large, wide shed recognizable by the front elevators of a biplane poking out the gable end.

Isaac Bell stopped the Ford under the porte-cochere of the main house, accelerated the motor slightly, and opened the coil switch. The place seemed deserted. With the motor off, the only sounds he could hear were the faint ticking of hot metal and the soft sigh of a cool breeze blowing off the lake.

He knocked on the front door. No one answered. He tried the door. It was unlocked, a massive affair.

“Hello!” Bell called loudly. “Is anyone home?”

No one answered.

He stepped inside. The foyer opened into a great hall, an immense chamber brightly lighted by tall windows. Twenty-foot-tall stone fireplaces dominated each end. Rustic chairs and couches clustered on woven carpets. Gloomy European oil paintings were hung in gold frames that glittered. Timbers soared high overhead. The walls and ceiling were papered with birch bark.

The tall detective stalked from opulent room to opulent room.

Anger began to heat his breast. Scion of a Boston banking family, and bequeathed a personal fortune by his grandfather, Isaac Bell was accustomed to the accoutrements of great wealth and no stranger to privilege. But this so-called camp had been paid for with riches founded on the suffering of i

Bell’s boot heels echoed though an empty corridor and down a stairway.

At the foot of the stairs hulked a heavy oak door, studded with nailheads.

Bell jimmied the lock and discovered a vast wine cellar carved from the living stone. He strode among the racks, noting excellent vintages from the last twenty years, a large number of the fine ’69 and ’71 clarets and some astonishingly rare bottles of 1848 Lafite, laid down nearly twenty years before Baron Rothschild bought the Médoc estate. Frost had even purchased a long row of Château d’Yquem bottles of the 1811 Comet Vintage. Although, based on the low quality of the art hanging upstairs, Bell suspected a crooked wine merchant’s variant on fake Academy paintings.

Upon leaving the wine cellar, he stopped suddenly, arrested by the sight of a wedding photograph on a center table. Harry Frost, dressed up in top hat and morning coat, glowered truculently at the camera. Expensive tailoring could not hide his bulk, and the top hat made him appear even wider. Bell studied the photograph closely. Frost, he realized, was not the fat man a first glance might suggest. There was something lithe and long-legged about his stance, a man poised to spring. Violent as a longhorn, Joe Van Dorn had characterized him. Quick as one, too, Bell suspected. And as strong.