Nothing Is Impossible Further Problems For Dr Sam Hawthorne
It was the late summer of '36 [Dr. Sam Hawthorne recalled] and the presidential-election campaign was heating up. Roosevelt and Landon had been nominated at the conventions back in June, but I hadn't paid much attention at the time because I'd been busy moving into a small house I'd bought for myself just off Main Street. Fourteen years of renting an apartment was enough for me. Even though I wasn't yet married, I wanted a place of my own, and this house was just the size I needed. My nurse, Mary Best, helped me get settled once I was in there, but it took me most of the summer before I began to feel at home.
Often in the evenings and on weekends when I was working around the place, I noticed a girl who lived across the street. There'd been a graduation party the week after I moved in, so I knew she was just out of high school. Her name was Angela Rinaldi and she was tall, dark-haired, and, at least when seen from across the street, attractive. Her friends were a few girls her own age plus a variety of neighborhood children, some a few years younger. I'd see her sometimes in the early evening, when there was still plenty of light, leading them off on their bicycles. She rode a blue bike herself, and usually wore dark-blue slacks that buttoned down each hip.
Angela's mother's name was Cora Rinaldi and when we chatted in the yard one Saturday morning I remember she said, "It's good having a doctor right across the street. We know where to come if we get sick now." She was a woman in her early forties who'd moved to Northmont from New York City because of her husband's job. "He works for the telephone company," she explained. "They're installing a lot of new wiring up this way."
"Rural folks need telephones," I agreed. "I often see your daughter riding her bicycle."
"All the time these days," she agreed with a sigh. "Angela's going off to college in another month. I suppose it's like the end of childhood for her."
These days a high-school graduate would be more interested in boys than bicycles, but back then it was different, especially for a girl like Angela who hadn't been in town that long. She seemed to have plenty of friends, but few of them were boys her own age. I took to watching her on the porch with her girl friends flying down the cement driveway on her bike, leading a charge of other children toward some glorious adventure.
I knew she was leaving for college the Wednesday after Labor Day, and the evening before her departure I was on my porch, relaxing after a difficult day, when I saw her slip astride her blue bicycle. There were a half dozen others ready to follow—a couple of girls her own age and the usual hangers-on among the younger children. One of them was Angela's younger sister. As if this was to be the ride of her life, Angela glided down the driveway in the lead. It had rained earlier in the day, and while the other six stayed on the concrete Angela cut the corner, riding through a large puddle at the edge of the road, her legs straight out to avoid being muddied.
Then they were gone—a girl on the brink of being a woman, leading a ragtag collection of neighborhood children on a final bike ride. I watched them until they disappeared down the road toward the outskirts of town. It would be dark in an hour, but they'd be back by then. I could almost map out their route in my mind: straight out past the Milkin farm, then right along the road to Shinn Corners, then another right back home. It was a triangular route that would take less than an hour.
The phone rang a little later. It was Mary Best with a question about a bill for one of our patients. "Are you working late again?" I asked her.
"Well, Sam, it's past the first of the month and there are August bills you haven't sent out yet. Where's my salary going to come from if you don't take in any money?"
By the time I got off the phone, it was dark outside and I switched on the lights. I was listening to one of my favorite Tuesday-night radio shows when I heard a car pull up outside. I thought I'd recognized the sound of Sheriff Lens' motor and went out on the porch.
"What's up, Sheriff?"
He'd started across the street toward the Rinaldi home, but when he heard me he came back to the foot of my porch steps. "Hello, Doc. How are you?"
"I'm fine. Are you here on business?"
He nodded. "Maybe you'd better come with me. Something's happened to the Rinaldi girl."
"Angela? What is it?"
"We don't rightly know. She's disappeared."
Lights were burning in all the downstairs rooms of the Rinaldi house. Henry Rinaldi, a good-looking man in his forties with dark hair just beginning to turn grey, answered the doorbell. "Any news?" he asked the sheriff.
"Nothing yet. We have our people and the State Police searching the area. If she doesn't turn up by morning, we'll have fifty people out there searching the fields."
Cora Rinaldi sat on the sofa with a girl I took to be her younger daughter, and I could see her eyes were red from crying. Two older girls, Angela's biking companions, were there. They seemed to relax a bit with Sheriff Lens' statement. Perhaps they'd feared even worse news when he'd arrived at the door.
He turned to the older girls. "I need to know what happened out there. Can you give me your names, first of all? I know you, Laura, but I don't know your friend."
Laura was Laura Fine, whose father was vice president of the bank. I knew the family slightly, but I hadn't recognized her until that moment. The other girl said she was Judy Irving. Both had graduated from high school with Angela, and had often been with her during the summer, biking or riding around in somebody's car.
"Give me the names of everyone who was with you," Sheriff Lens said, opening his notebook.
Both girls started to speak at once, but then Laura Fine yielded to Judy
Irving. "There were seven of us. Angela wanted to go for one last bike ride —out past the Milkin farm—before she went off to college tomorrow."
Sheriff Lens interrupted with a question. "Mrs. Rinaldi, how old is Angela?"
"Seventeen. She'll be eighteen later this month. I can give you a graduation picture of her if it'll help."
"Thank you, it will. Go on, Judy. Who else was in the group?"
"Laura and I, and Angela's sister Ruthie." She motioned toward the younger girl on the sofa. Ruthie was perhaps thirteen and her features were similar, though she lacked the assurance I'd observed in Angela. "And the Homer brothers, who always tag along. And Ruthie's girl friend, Terry Brooks."
"The seven of you often go biking?"
"Sometimes just the three of us older girls go, but the rest of them like to follow us. Angela is sort of a leader, you see."
"What happened tonight?"
"We were all pretty much together at first, though Angela was leading the way as she always does. Gradually she pulled farther ahead, until—"
"How far ahead?"
Judy frowned, pondering it, until Laura said, "About the length of a football field. I was a cheerleader in school, and it was about the same length—a hundred yards."
"Did you reach the Milkin farm?" Sheriff Lens prompted.
Judy took up the story again. Her pretty blonde hair caught the light from the floor lamp and I wondered if she'd been a cheerleader, too. "Well, you know how the road curves to the right at the beginning of the Milkin property? There's a corn field there and we lost sight of Angela when she rounded the curve."
"For how long?"
"A few seconds."
"Maybe half a minute," Laura Fine confirmed. "No more than that, and probably less."
"Then what?"
Judy's bottom lip began to tremble as she tried to continue. "When we rounded the curve, she was gone! The—her bicycle was lying in the road about a hundred yards ahead, but there was no sign of her! We thought she was hiding in a ditch or something, but she wasn't. We looked all over."
I cleared my throat and asked, "How dark was it?"
"Still daylight," Laura answered, trying to keep from crying, too. "Where the bicycle was, there were mowed fields of hay on both sides of the road. It was cut to within an inch or two of the ground. No one could have hidden there, Doctor."
"The ditches?"
"There weren't any."
"Did any cars or trucks pass?"
Judy blew her nose. "No. Not a car or truck or anything. The road was straight after we rounded the curve, and we could see all the way to the Milkin farmhouse about a mile away. There wasn't even a tractor out. And
there were no people at all, not Angela or anyone else."
"It was as if," Laura said earnestly, "she rounded that curve and something reached out of the sky to take her away forever."
I woke early on Wednesday morning with Angela Rinaldi's fate very much on my mind. The first thing I did was phone Mary and tell her about it.
"How many appointments do I have this morning?" I asked her.
"Just one."
"See if you can postpone it. I want to drive out to the Milkin farm and find out how the search is going. If there's an emergency, try to reach me at the Milkin place or through the sheriff's office."
I went outside and saw Henry Rinaldi across the street, standing by the garage door and staring up at the sky. "Hello," I said, walking across the street to join him. "Any news?"
He looked at me and I couldn't be certain if he remembered that I'd been in his house the previous night. "No, nothing," he replied.
The morning sun was making me squint and, as I turned away back toward my car, I remembered the last time I'd seen Angela on the previous evening, leading her pack down the driveway and into the street. The puddle was gone and I could see the diamond-shaped tread of her tires across the mud. It was all that remained of her, and a chill went through me when I considered the possibility that she might never be found.
I drove out the way I'd seen them go the previous evening, heading toward the Milkin farm. After a short time, I saw the field of tall corn stalks by the curve in the road, obscuring what was ahead. There'd been more than one accident at that curve. When I rounded the bend, I saw several sheriffs' and state-police cars parked off the road. Men were in the fields, moving toward the distant woods. I spotted Sheriff Lens by his car and pulled up in front of it.
"Mornin', Doc. How you been?"
"Like you, thinking about the missing girl. Any clues yet?"
"Not a one. Her friends were right, you know. Nobody could hide in these fields without bein' seen. We were lookin' for some sort of trench or furrow that could be invisible from the road, but there isn't any."
"And she wouldn't have had time to make it all the way to the trees."
"Heck, no. It's a ten-minute walk."
"Someone picked her up. It's the only possibility."
"Who, though? And how come the kids didn't see a car or truck? You got pretty good visibility along this road."
I stared down the road, knowing he was right. "You talked with Fred Milkin yet? Maybe he saw something."
"Briefly, last night. The girls went there to use the phone when they couldn't find Angela. He says he didn't see a thing."
"Let's go talk to him again." I glanced around and asked, "What happened to the bicycle?"
"I sent it back to her family. We got a couple of prints off the metal, but without hers to compare with they're not much good."
We started walking up the road toward the grey farmhouse. "Do you think it's a sex crime, Sheriff?"
"I try not to think about it, Doc. If someone grabbed her, they had to have a reason, though, didn't they?"
"But if they grabbed her, where did they take her in those few seconds before the rest of the kids rounded the curve?"
Sheriff Lens shrugged. "Then there's the other possibility. I like that one even less."
"What other possibility?"
"Maybe something happened to her—a terrible accident of some sort. The kids were so panicked by it they hid the body and made up the whole story of her disappearance."
"Six children, Sheriff? One of them her own sister? No, that's even more impossible. The story they told us has to be true—so far as they know the truth."
We'd reached the farmhouse and Fred Milkin came out the door to meet us. He'd obviously been watching events through the window. Milkin was a slim, middle-aged man who'd never married. He'd stayed on at the farm alone after his parents died, hiring help for the planting and harvesting as needed. "Hello, Fred!" I called to him. He'd been a patient of mine a few years back when I'd treated him for a skin condition.
"Hi, Doc. Hello, Sheriff. You got a lot of men out there."
"We want to find her, Fred. I only hope she's alive."
"Like I told you last night, I never saw a sign of her. I didn't know a thing until that bunch of kids came poundin' on the door to use the phone." "Who did they call?" I asked.
"Her folks, and then I guess her dad notified you, Sheriff."
Sheriff Lens nodded. "Did you have anyone working around here yesterday, Fred?"
"Nobody. The hay's all cut."
"See any strangers? Hoboes, maybe?"
"Not lately."
We left Milkin standing in his yard, watching the progress of the search. I drove back to town and went to the office, but seeing patients was the last thing on my mind that day. I left by mid-afternoon and drove over to Laura Fine's house. Her family had a nice home, one of the newer ones in town, and everyone knew where it was. She was one of the few girls her age with a driver's license.
I pulled up just as she was getting into the family car. "Hello, Laura," I said.
"Dr. Hawthorne! Has there been news about Angela?"
"I'm afraid not. The police are still searching."
"I can't believe what happened. My folks can't believe it, either. Dad says people don't just disappear like that."
"Do you or Judy have any new ideas about what might have happened?"
"I certainly don't."
I caught the inflection in her voice. "What about Judy?"
"She's off playing detective somewhere. I've been trying to reach her all day."
I came to the point of my visit. "Laura, I want to ask you about Angela's boy friends."
"She didn't really have any. Nobody special, anyway."
"Did she go to the senior prom?"
"Yes—with Phil Gilbert. But that was nothing serious. He asked her and she wanted to go, so she said yes. She told me later he gave her a goodnight kiss and that was all."
"Where does Phil live?" I asked her. "I might drive over and speak with him."
"He's right on the next street, Dr. Hawthorne, but he's not home. I tried calling him last night about Angela and his mother said he was up at the
family's cottage at Silver Lake. He's closing it up for the season."
"When's he due back?"
"Sometime tomorrow."
"Was there anyone else she went out with recently? Or anyone who asked her for a date and got turned down?"
"Not that I know of. But sometimes she was vague about boys."
I thanked her and went back and sat in my car, wondering if I was going about this in the wrong way. In the past when I helped Sheriff Lens with a case, I tried to figure out what had happened, and how. With Angela Rinaldi I had jumped ahead to the question of who. A stranger? A friend?
I looked at the dashboard clock and decided it was only a thirty-minute drive to Silver Lake.
The clerk at the crossroads store directed me to the Gilbert cottage on the lake. It was down a steep dirt road near the water's edge, and as I approached I could see a muscular young man putting up wooden shutters over the side windows. I parked my car next to his green Packard and got out.
"Hello, there!" I called. "Are you Phil Gilbert?"
He finished securing the shutter with a tack hammer and then turned with a grin. "That's me. What can I do for you?"
"I'm Dr. Sam Hawthorne. I drove over from Northmont. We're looking for Angela Rinaldi."
"Angela? What happened to her?"
"She's disappeared."
His grin changed to a frown and he walked closer to me, wiping his hands. "When did this happen?"
"Last evening, right after dinner. On the road out near the Milkin farm.
The police and troopers are searching for her."
"My God—do they think she's been—?"
"No one knows what to think. I came here because I understand you took her to the senior prom this spring."
"Yeah. It was the only date I had with her. We didn't hit it off too well." "Why not?" I asked.
He brushed the sandy hair from his forehead. He'd acquired a tan over the summer and his arms were almost brown. "We didn't seem to have the same interests. She was excited about going off to college and I was thinking about where I could find a job."
"Did you find one?"
"I worked here at the Boat Locker for the summer. Now I'm thinking about heading west."
"What about Angela? Was she seeing anyone else?"
"I think she had a couple of dates with Johnny Brooks, but it wasn't anything serious."
"Brooks?" Just then I couldn't remember why the name seemed familiar. "Was he in your class, too?"
"Sure, we all graduated in June. I've been up here all summer, though.
I haven't heard a word from Angela."
"Your parents didn't call to tell you she was missing?"
He shook his head. "We have the phone turned off after Labor Day. No one comes up here in the fall."
"You don't have any idea how or why she disappeared, then?"
"None. Is her bike gone, too?"
"No, they found her bike in the middle of the road. There was just no sign of her."
"Weird."
"If you think of anything that might help, give Sheriff Lens or me a call, will you?"
"Glad to." I gave him our phone numbers. He took them, put them into his shirt pocket, and went back to his job with the shutters as I returned to the car.
It wasn't until I was driving back toward Northmont that I thought about the name Johnny Brooks. I didn't know the Brooks family, but I wondered if he might be an older brother of Terry Brooks, the young friend of Angela's sister Ruthie, who'd been the seventh member of their ill-fated bike ride.
As I pulled into the driveway of my house I saw Henry Rinaldi standing by his garage with Angela's blue bicycle. I walked across the street to join him.
"Any word yet?" I asked.
He shook his head. "They brought this back today. It's all that's left of her."
"I'm sure she'll turn up, Henry."
Rinaldi ran his hands lovingly over the bicycle, over the worn leather seat and the cracked rubber handgrips, the bald tires, and the paint-chipped metal body. He gazed at the little bell on the left handlebar. "I used to help her when anything went wrong with this bike. I know it as well as I know Angela. Look—she even scratched her initials on the seat post so she'd know it was hers."
I bent down and saw the tiny AR scratched in the metal. "Did she go out with Johnny Brooks?" I asked casually as I straightened up.
"Brooks? You mean Terry's brother? I guess a few times. Why do you ask?"
"Someone she knew might have had a hand in her disappearance. I'm trying to talk with everyone who knew her."
Henry's face was suddenly grave. "Tell me the truth, Dr. Hawthorne. The police think she's dead, don't they?"
"They don't know. Nobody knows."
I left him before the tears appeared in his eyes. I didn't want to see him cry, yet I knew nothing that might hold back his tears.
A while later I phoned Sheriff Lens. They'd searched all day without finding a clue.
"Are you going to give up?" I asked.
"The State Police want to search for another day before calling it off.
They're bringing in dogs tomorrow."
"What are they looking for? A grave?"
"What do you think, Doc?"
"I don't know," I answered honestly. "I've discovered she did go out with a couple of boys. I talked with Phil Gilbert this afternoon and tonight I'm going to search out Johnny Brooks."
"I can tell you where to search. He's the soda jerk at the Star Drug. Works most nights."
"Thanks, Sheriff," I said.
Angela's disappearance was big news among the teenagers who hung out at the Star Drug soda fountain. I saw Laura Fine in one of the booths in animated conversation with two boys and another girl. All along the counter there was a hum of conversation. I sat on one of the stools and waited for the fresh-faced youth behind the counter to get around to waiting on me.
"What'll you have?" he asked at last.
"Just a cherry Coke. Are you Johnny Brooks?"
"That's me." He picked up a Coke glass and squirted some syrup into it.
"I understand you went out with Angela Rinaldi a few times."
"Twice. My sister told me what happened last night. I can't believe it."
"Did you see her during the summer?"
"We went swimming once, that was all. I called her but she was always busy."
"A popular girl? Lots of boy friends?"
"None that I know of."
"What about Phil Gilbert? He took her to the senior prom, didn't he?"
"I guess." He stirred up the cherry Coke and set it in front of me. I put down a quarter and told him to keep the change. That made him a bit more talkative, but not much. "I think a truckload of Gypsies probably picked up Angela and kidnaped her."
"Really? I haven't seen any around these parts in a few years. Did your kid sister happen to see a truck last evening?"
"Naw, she didn't see anything. But she's only thirteen."
On my way out of the drugstore, Laura stopped me. "I saw you talking with Johnny Brooks."
"He went out with Angela a couple of times. I've been talking to Phil
Gilbert, too."
"Have you seen Judy? Judy Irving? I'm still looking for her."
"Not yet. I probably should talk to everyone who was in the group last night. One of you must have seen something, even if you didn't realize it."
"I didn't see a thing—other than what we told you."
"How were Angela's relations with her father? Did they get along?"
"Oh, you know how fathers are. He wanted to be her pal but she had to be with her own friends."
"Was she anxious to get away to college?"
Laura looked hard at me. "You're speaking of her in the past, like she's dead."
"We have to consider that possibility. She's been missing for over twentyfour hours."
"She'll turn up somewhere."
"What about college?"
Laura shrugged. "She didn't talk about it much, but I think she felt bad about leaving her friends behind."
One of the other girls called to her and Laura went back to the booth. I strolled outside and stood for a moment looking up at the night sky.
In the morning, I was at my office in the physicians' wing of Pilgrim
Memorial Hospital. Mary Best saw my pensive expression and asked, "Nothing on the Rinaldi girl yet?"
"Not a thing. The sheriff's still searching the fields. I talked to her father and some of her friends yesterday, but I didn't learn a thing."
"Do you think her father might be involved?"
"I don't see how. I was sitting on my porch from the time Angela left until you phoned me that evening. Neither of her parents left the house so far as I know. Their car was in the garage all evening."
"There are some patients at the hospital you should look in on."
I nodded. "I'll see them. Then maybe I'll take a ride out to the Milkin farm again. This might be the last day of the search if they don't find anything."
I got out there a little before noon. The State Police dogs were far out in one of the hay fields, barking like mad. I saw Sheriff Lens standing in the center of the road with Fred Milkin. One of the troopers had run up and was talking frantically. I parked and got quickly out of my car. The sheriff and Milkin were already starting across the field.
"Sheriff!" I called out.
He glanced in my direction and called back, "You're just in time, Doc—
I think the dogs found her!"
My stomach felt like it might heave, but I started across the field to intersect their route. A half dozen State Police officers and four floppyeared bloodhounds had converged on a spot near the edge of the woods.
"Did they pick up her scent?" I asked.
One of the troopers with a barking dog on a leash said, "We didn't find anything near the road where her bike was, so we just let them roam the field at will. They sniffed out this."
The sheriff crouched to examine the newly turned soil. "It's recent, and about the size of a grave. Get some shovels in here."
She wasn't buried deep. The troopers' shovels struck the body less than a foot down. They brushed the last of the dirt from her by hand and turned her over.
It wasn't Angela Rinaldi. It was her friend, Judy Irving.
By afternoon we had established that the cause of death was a blow to the left temple with some sort of blunt but slender object. It had penetrated far enough to be instantly fatal. "Ever see anything like it?" Sheriff Lens asked me.
"Not exactly, no."
"The city papers are onto this now, Doc. They say we got a homicidal maniac loose. The troopers have the dogs searchin' the area for another grave."
"Why didn't Judy's parents report her missing?"
"They did, this morning. I think they were afraid to call last night because they thought she might be spendin' the night with some boy."
"Had she ever done that before?"
"I guess she didn't come home after the senior prom."
"Who was her date?"
"Johnny Brooks. I'm on my way over to see him now, if you want to come along. What does the autopsy show about the time of death?"
"The preliminary results indicate she'd been dead about twenty-four hours when she was found. That would mean she died yesterday morning,
though not in that field. You were searching it then."
Sheriff Lens nodded. "The killer thought it would be a safe place to bury her because we'd already searched there. He didn't know we'd be bringing in the dogs."
I accompanied him to Johnny Brooks' house. The young man from the drugstore was seated on his front porch with a tearful Laura Fine. "My two best friends in the world!" She wiped her eyes. "I can't believe it."
Sheriff Lens tried to comfort her. "We haven't found Angela yet. She could still be alive."
Johnny's kid sister Terry came out to join us, sitting silently by her brother. I took the opportunity to ask a question. "What about you, Terry? You were around the older girls a lot. You're a friend of Ruthie Rinaldi. Did they ever talk about running away from home together—Angela and Judy?" Terry shook her head. "Angela was going to college." "I'd have heard any talk like that," Laura spoke up.
"You were looking for Judy yesterday. You couldn't find her."
"Judy always wanted to play detective. She went off somewhere on her own."
"Did she have a car?"
She nodded. "Her dad gave her a used Ford for graduation."
"Then Angela was the only one of you three who didn't drive."
"Her folks are pretty strict. They wouldn't let her do much of anything till she turned eighteen."
I asked the sheriff, "Any sign of Judy's car?"
"Not yet."
But we'd come to question Johnny Brooks, and presently Sheriff Lens sent the girls inside so we could talk to him privately. The sheriff asked him about the dates he'd had with the dead girl.
"I took her to the senior prom," he admitted nervously.
"And stayed out all night?"
Brooks moistened his dry lips. "That's just something a lot of the kids do.
It's harmless."
"Did Angela stay out all night with Phil Gilbert?" I asked.
He gave a little laugh. "Her parents would have killed her." He must have realized how that sounded and he corrected himself. "They wouldn't have liked it."
"Do you know anyone who might have wanted to kill Judy Irving?" the sheriff asked him.
"No. Certainly not me!"
"What would you say if I told you the autopsy showed she was pregnant?"
It was a bluff and it didn't work. Brooks looked the sheriff in the eye and answered, "I'd say you were lying."
"Knew her pretty well, did you?"
"Well enough to know she didn't sleep with guys."
"Did you see her at all yesterday?"
"No. I hadn't been out with her lately."
"But you went out with Angela Rinaldi."
The youth shook his head in frustration. "You're making too much of this whole thing with their boy friends. You're gonna find they were both killed by some tramp out in the woods."
"But what were they doing in the woods?" I asked. "And how did Angela vanish from her bicycle?"
"I don't know, but I didn't have a thing to do with it," he said.
Sheriff Lens offered to drop me at my office. On the way back, something kept bothering me.
"We didn't learn much there," the sheriff said.
"On the contrary. We learned something very important."
"What's that?"
"Laura and Judy both drove cars."
"What does that have to do with anything, Doc? Angela was riding a bicycle when she disappeared, and so were the other two."
"Humor me, Sheriff. Drive me out to Silver Lake to see Phil Gilbert again."
"What for?"
"Just a hunch."
"All right," he said. "I know your hunches."
A half hour later, as we approached the steep road down to the Gilberts' lakeside cottage, I asked him to stop the car. "Give me five minutes and then follow me in."
"What in hell are you up to, Doc?"
"We'll see."
I went down the road on foot, trying not to attract attention. Phil Gilbert had finished boarding up the cottage windows for the winter, but the door on the side facing the lake was standing open. I opened the screen door and walked in.
Angela Rinaldi jumped to her feet. "Who are you?" she almost screamed.
It was the closest I'd ever been to her. She wasn't across the street in her yard or bicycling down the road, she was right there facing me, a few feet away. "I'm your neighbor across the street," I told her. "My name is Sam Hawthorne."
Phil Gilbert heard our voices and came quickly out of the kitchen, holding a beer bottle. Angela kept talking. "What are you doing here? How did you find me?"
"I came to take you back to your parents."
She went over to stand near Gilbert. "I'm never going back! Phil and I are driving to California tomorrow. There's nothing you can say that would change my mind."
"Angela," I told her, "your friend Judy Irving is dead. Phil here killed her with a tack hammer."
As my words sunk in, her face seemed to come apart and she started screaming. It was the most terrible sound I'd ever heard.
Sheriff Lens came into the room and took the beer bottle from Phil Gilbert's hand. I'd gotten Angela to sit down and was trying to comfort her. "You'd better cuff him," I told the sheriff. "He's your man."
"This is Angela Rinaldi?" he asked. "Alive?"
"Very much alive. Let's get them back to town and I'll explain everything."
We drove directly to the sheriff's office. He phoned Angela's parents to tell them she was alive, and while we waited for them to arrive I told him what he needed to know. "Start with Angela's disappearance," he said. "Explain that first."
"I should have tumbled to that a lot sooner than I did. You see, Angela and Phil Gilbert have been in love since the night of the senior prom, I imagine. Instead of going to college, she planned to run away with him. We've heard how strict her parents are. There was no chance they'd ever give their blessing to such a thing, so she decided to stage her own disappearance, with Phil's help."
"How?"
"She figured everyone would be looking around here for her and they could be halfway across the country before anyone realized they'd run off together. They'd kept their relationship a secret all summer."
"Doc—"
I smiled at him. "All right, Sheriff. How'd she do it? I watched her ride out Tuesday night with the other kids following. I saw her ride through a puddle at the edge of the road and yesterday morning her tire tracks were still there, imprinted in the mud. I could see the diamond pattern of the tread. But later in the day I spoke with her father as he showed me her blue bike that you found in the center of the road. I saw the place where she'd scratched her initials. And I saw the bicycle's bald tires."
"What?"
"The blue bike you found in the road, Angela's bike without question, wasn't the blue bike she was riding when she left home that night."
"How is that possible, Doc?"
"There's only one possible explanation. Gilbert supplied her with a second blue bicycle, identical to her own, though a bit newer. He took hers out there in his car and left it in the road a minute or two before they approached. Angela, riding ahead of the others as she often did, rounded the curve, out of sight for a moment, and rode off the road into that field of tall cornstalks. The girls and the younger children rode right past where she hid, seeing only the abandoned blue bicycle a hundred yards down the road. After they went to Milkin's farm to phone home, she rode back to where
Gilbert was waiting with his car."
"How did you know it was Gilbert?"
"Her father wasn't involved, because he was home at the time it happened. Angela herself had to be a party to the disappearance because she'd have realized the bike wasn't hers even if no one else did. A boy friend seemed most likely. There were only two mentioned—Phil Gilbert and Johnny Brooks. When I called on Gilbert at the lake yesterday, I told him only that Angela had disappeared while out riding with her girl friends. Though the cottage phone was disconnected and he claimed to know nothing about the occurrence, he asked me a while later if her bike had disappeared, too. How did he know she was on a bike ride and not a car ride? Both of her girl friends drove cars. He drove a car himself. A ride would have suggested a car ride before a bike ride, to any innocent person."
Sheriff Lens nodded. "And Judy Irving?"
"I think she came searching for Angela up at the cottage. She must have had her own clue that they might be hiding there. When I arrived, Gilbert was nailing the shutters closed with a tack hammer. I remembered that thin, blunt head when I saw the wound in Judy Irving's temple. I think he lashed out and hit her with it when she threatened to tell everyone where Angela was hiding. Then he waited until dark and drove her body back to the Milkin farm, figuring, as you pointed out yourself, that the police wouldn't search it again."
"Angela didn't know he killed Judy?"
I shook my head. "When I got her quieted down in the car she told me she'd been swimming while he put up the shutters. She also said he found some excuse to throw the tack hammer away in the rubbish. You'll want to go back there for it. You'll probably find her car on one of those back roads, unless he drove it into the lake."
Sheriff Lens grinned at me. "You were guessin' back at the cottage, Doc. Even if Phil Gilbert was involved in the disappearance, he might not have killed the Irving girl."
"You play the odds, Sheriff. Judy came looking for Angela. Was I to believe she found an entirely separate criminal with a weapon shaped just like Gilbert's tack hammer?"
"Angela might have been an accomplice to the killing."
"No, she rode out with those girls on Tuesday night because they were her closest friends. She wasn't going off to college, but she was going far away, where she'd never see them again. She wouldn't have killed Judy, or stuck with Gilbert if she knew he had. She's a decent girl who got mixed up with the wrong boy."
That's what it was like as the summer of '36 ended. I never saw Angela ride her bicycle again.
A DR. SAM HAWTHORNE CHECKLIST
Books
Diagnosis: Impossible, The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Norfolk: Crippen & Landru Publishers, 1996. Contains Dr. Sam's first twelve cases.
More Things Impossible, The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Norfolk: Crippen & Landru Publishers, 2006. Contains Dr. Sam's next 15 cases.
Nothing Is Impossible, Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Norfolk:
Crippen & Landru Publishers, 2013. Contains 15 more cases.
Individual Stories
All of Dr. Sam Hawthorne's reminiscences were first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine [EQMM]. Dates when the events took place are recorded below in brackets.
"The Problem of the Covered Bridge" [March 1922]. EQMM, December 1974.
"The Problem of the Old Gristmill" [July 1923]. EQMM, March 1975.
"The Problem of the Lobster Shack" [June 1924]. EQMM, September 1975.
"The Problem of the Haunted Bandstand" [July 1924]. EQMM, January 1976.
"The Problem of the Locked Caboose" [Spring 1925]. EQMM, May 1976.
"The Problem of the Little Red Schoolhouse" [Fall 1925]. EQMM, September 1976.
"The Problem of the Christmas Steeple" [December 25, 1925]. EQMM, January 1977.
"The Problem of Cell 16" [Spring 1926]. EQMM, March 1977.
"The Problem of the Country Inn" [Summer 1926]. EQMM, September 1977.
"The Problem of the Voting Booth" [November 1926]. EQMM, December 1977.
"The Problem of the County Fair" [Summer 1927]. EQMM, February 1978.
"The Problem of the Old Oak Tree" [September 1927]. EQMM, July 1978. "The Problem of the Revival Tent" [Fall 1927]. EQMM, November 1978.
"The Problem of the Whispering House" [February 1928]. EQMM, April 1979.
"The Problem of the Boston Common" [Spring 1928]. EQMM, August 1979.
"The Problem of the General Store" [Summer 1928]. EQMM, November 1979.
"The Problem of the Courthouse Gargoyle" [September 1928]. EQMM, June 30, 1980.
"The Problem of the Pilgrims Windmill" [March 1929]. EQMM, September 10, 1980.
"The Problem of the Gingerbread Houseboat" [Summer 1929]. EQMM, January 28, 1981.
"The Problem of the Pink Post Office" [October 1929]. EQMM, June 17, 1981.
"The Problem of the Octagon Room" [December 1929]. EQMM, October 7, 1981.
"The Problem of the Gypsy Camp" [January 1930]. EQMM, January 1, 1982.
"The Problem of the Bootleggers Car" [May 1930]. EQMM, July 1982.
"The Problem of the Tin Goose" [July 1930]. EQMM, December 1982.
"The Problem of the Hunting Lodge" [Fall 1930]. EQMM, May 1983.
"The Problem of the Body in the Haystack" [July 1931]. EQMM, August 1983.
"The Problem of Santa's Lighthouse" [December 1931]. EQMM, December 1983.
"The Problem of the Graveyard Picnic" [Spring 1932]. EQMM, June 1984.
"The Problem of the Crying Room" [June 1932]. EQMM, November 1984.
"The Problem of the Fatal Fireworks" [July 4, 1932]. EQMM, May 1985.
"The Problem of the Unfinished Painting" [Fall 1932]. EQMM, February 1986.
"The Problem of the Sealed Bottle" [December 5, 1933]. EQMM, September 1986.
"The Problem of the Invisible Acrobat" [July 1933]. EQMM, MidDecember 1986.
"The Problem of the Curing Barn" [September 1934]. EQMM, August 1987.
"The Problem of the Snowbound Cabin" [January 1935]. EQMM, December 1987.
"The Problem of the Thunder Room" [March 1935]. EQMM, April 1988.
"The Problem of the Black Roadster" [April 1935]. EQMM, November 1988.
"The Problem of the Two Birthmarks" [May 1935]. EQMM, May 1989.
"The Problem of the Dying Patient" [June 1935]. EQMM, December 1989.
"The Problem of the Protected Farmhouse" [August or September 1935]. EQMM, May 1990.
"The Problem of the Haunted Tepee" [September 1935]. EQMM, December 1990. Also featuring Ben Snow.
"The Problem of the Blue Bicycle" [September 1936]. EQMM, April 1991.
"The Problem of the Country Church" [November 1936]. EQMM, August 1991.
"The Problem of the Grange Hall" [March 1937]. EQMM, Mid-December 1991.
"The Problem of the Vanishing Salesman" [May 1937]. EQMM, August 1992.
"The Problem of the Leather Man" [August 1937]. EQMM, December 1992.
"The Problem of the Phantom Parlor" [August 1937]. EQMM, June 1993.
"The Problem of the Poisoned Pool" [September 1937]. EQMM, December 1993.
"The Problem of the Missing Roadhouse" [August 1938]. EQMM, June 1994.
"The Problem of the Country Mailbox" [Fall 1938]. EQMM, MidDecember 1994.
"The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery" [Spring 1939]. EQMM, May 1995.
"The Problem of the Enormous Owl" [August-September 1939]. EQMM, January 1996.
"The Problem of the Miraculous Jar" [November 1939]. EQMM, August 1996.
"The Problem of the Enchanted Terrace" [October 1939]. EQMM, April 1997.
"The Problem of the Unfound Door" [Midsummer 1940]. EQMM, June 1998.
"The Second Problem of the Covered Bridge" [January 1940]. EQMM, December 1998.
"The Problem of the Scarecrow Congress" [late July 1940]. EQMM, June 1999.
"The Problem of Annabel's Ark" [September 1940]. EQMM, March 2000.
"The Problem of the Potting Shed" [October 1940]. EQMM, July 2000.
"The Problem of the Yellow Wallpaper" [November 1940]. EQMM, March 2001.
"The Problem of the Haunted Hospital" [March 1941]. EQMM, August 2001.
"The Problem of the Traveler's Tale" [August 1941]. EQMM, June 2002.
"The Problem of Bailey's Buzzard" [December 1941]. EQMM, December 2002.
"The Problem of the Interrupted Séance" [June 1942]. EQMM, September/October 2003.
"The Problem of the Candidate's Cabin" [October-November 1942]. EQMM, July 2004.
"The Problem of the Black Cloister" [April 1943]. EQMM, December 2004.
"The Problem of the Secret Passage" [May 1943]. EQMM, July 2005.
"The Problem of the Devil's Orchard" [September 1943]. EQMM, January 2006.
"The Problem of the Shepherd's Ring" [December 1943]. EQMM, September/October 2006.
"The Problem of the Suicide Cottage" [July 1944]. EQMM, July 2007.
"The Problem of the Summer Snowman" [August 1944]. EQMM, November 2007.
"The Problem of the Secret Patient" [October 1944]. EQMM, May 2008.
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Often in the evenings and on weekends when I was working around the place, I noticed a girl who lived across the street. There'd been a graduation party the week after I moved in, so I knew she was just out of high school. Her name was Angela Rinaldi and she was tall, dark-haired, and, at least when seen from across the street, attractive. Her friends were a few girls her own age plus a variety of neighborhood children, some a few years younger. I'd see her sometimes in the early evening, when there was still plenty of light, leading them off on their bicycles. She rode a blue bike herself, and usually wore dark-blue slacks that buttoned down each hip.
Angela's mother's name was Cora Rinaldi and when we chatted in the yard one Saturday morning I remember she said, "It's good having a doctor right across the street. We know where to come if we get sick now." She was a woman in her early forties who'd moved to Northmont from New York City because of her husband's job. "He works for the telephone company," she explained. "They're installing a lot of new wiring up this way."
"Rural folks need telephones," I agreed. "I often see your daughter riding her bicycle."
"All the time these days," she agreed with a sigh. "Angela's going off to college in another month. I suppose it's like the end of childhood for her."
These days a high-school graduate would be more interested in boys than bicycles, but back then it was different, especially for a girl like Angela who hadn't been in town that long. She seemed to have plenty of friends, but few of them were boys her own age. I took to watching her on the porch with her girl friends flying down the cement driveway on her bike, leading a charge of other children toward some glorious adventure.
I knew she was leaving for college the Wednesday after Labor Day, and the evening before her departure I was on my porch, relaxing after a difficult day, when I saw her slip astride her blue bicycle. There were a half dozen others ready to follow—a couple of girls her own age and the usual hangers-on among the younger children. One of them was Angela's younger sister. As if this was to be the ride of her life, Angela glided down the driveway in the lead. It had rained earlier in the day, and while the other six stayed on the concrete Angela cut the corner, riding through a large puddle at the edge of the road, her legs straight out to avoid being muddied.
Then they were gone—a girl on the brink of being a woman, leading a ragtag collection of neighborhood children on a final bike ride. I watched them until they disappeared down the road toward the outskirts of town. It would be dark in an hour, but they'd be back by then. I could almost map out their route in my mind: straight out past the Milkin farm, then right along the road to Shinn Corners, then another right back home. It was a triangular route that would take less than an hour.
The phone rang a little later. It was Mary Best with a question about a bill for one of our patients. "Are you working late again?" I asked her.
"Well, Sam, it's past the first of the month and there are August bills you haven't sent out yet. Where's my salary going to come from if you don't take in any money?"
By the time I got off the phone, it was dark outside and I switched on the lights. I was listening to one of my favorite Tuesday-night radio shows when I heard a car pull up outside. I thought I'd recognized the sound of Sheriff Lens' motor and went out on the porch.
"What's up, Sheriff?"
He'd started across the street toward the Rinaldi home, but when he heard me he came back to the foot of my porch steps. "Hello, Doc. How are you?"
"I'm fine. Are you here on business?"
He nodded. "Maybe you'd better come with me. Something's happened to the Rinaldi girl."
"Angela? What is it?"
"We don't rightly know. She's disappeared."
Lights were burning in all the downstairs rooms of the Rinaldi house. Henry Rinaldi, a good-looking man in his forties with dark hair just beginning to turn grey, answered the doorbell. "Any news?" he asked the sheriff.
"Nothing yet. We have our people and the State Police searching the area. If she doesn't turn up by morning, we'll have fifty people out there searching the fields."
Cora Rinaldi sat on the sofa with a girl I took to be her younger daughter, and I could see her eyes were red from crying. Two older girls, Angela's biking companions, were there. They seemed to relax a bit with Sheriff Lens' statement. Perhaps they'd feared even worse news when he'd arrived at the door.
He turned to the older girls. "I need to know what happened out there. Can you give me your names, first of all? I know you, Laura, but I don't know your friend."
Laura was Laura Fine, whose father was vice president of the bank. I knew the family slightly, but I hadn't recognized her until that moment. The other girl said she was Judy Irving. Both had graduated from high school with Angela, and had often been with her during the summer, biking or riding around in somebody's car.
"Give me the names of everyone who was with you," Sheriff Lens said, opening his notebook.
Both girls started to speak at once, but then Laura Fine yielded to Judy
Irving. "There were seven of us. Angela wanted to go for one last bike ride —out past the Milkin farm—before she went off to college tomorrow."
Sheriff Lens interrupted with a question. "Mrs. Rinaldi, how old is Angela?"
"Seventeen. She'll be eighteen later this month. I can give you a graduation picture of her if it'll help."
"Thank you, it will. Go on, Judy. Who else was in the group?"
"Laura and I, and Angela's sister Ruthie." She motioned toward the younger girl on the sofa. Ruthie was perhaps thirteen and her features were similar, though she lacked the assurance I'd observed in Angela. "And the Homer brothers, who always tag along. And Ruthie's girl friend, Terry Brooks."
"The seven of you often go biking?"
"Sometimes just the three of us older girls go, but the rest of them like to follow us. Angela is sort of a leader, you see."
"What happened tonight?"
"We were all pretty much together at first, though Angela was leading the way as she always does. Gradually she pulled farther ahead, until—"
"How far ahead?"
Judy frowned, pondering it, until Laura said, "About the length of a football field. I was a cheerleader in school, and it was about the same length—a hundred yards."
"Did you reach the Milkin farm?" Sheriff Lens prompted.
Judy took up the story again. Her pretty blonde hair caught the light from the floor lamp and I wondered if she'd been a cheerleader, too. "Well, you know how the road curves to the right at the beginning of the Milkin property? There's a corn field there and we lost sight of Angela when she rounded the curve."
"For how long?"
"A few seconds."
"Maybe half a minute," Laura Fine confirmed. "No more than that, and probably less."
"Then what?"
Judy's bottom lip began to tremble as she tried to continue. "When we rounded the curve, she was gone! The—her bicycle was lying in the road about a hundred yards ahead, but there was no sign of her! We thought she was hiding in a ditch or something, but she wasn't. We looked all over."
I cleared my throat and asked, "How dark was it?"
"Still daylight," Laura answered, trying to keep from crying, too. "Where the bicycle was, there were mowed fields of hay on both sides of the road. It was cut to within an inch or two of the ground. No one could have hidden there, Doctor."
"The ditches?"
"There weren't any."
"Did any cars or trucks pass?"
Judy blew her nose. "No. Not a car or truck or anything. The road was straight after we rounded the curve, and we could see all the way to the Milkin farmhouse about a mile away. There wasn't even a tractor out. And
there were no people at all, not Angela or anyone else."
"It was as if," Laura said earnestly, "she rounded that curve and something reached out of the sky to take her away forever."
I woke early on Wednesday morning with Angela Rinaldi's fate very much on my mind. The first thing I did was phone Mary and tell her about it.
"How many appointments do I have this morning?" I asked her.
"Just one."
"See if you can postpone it. I want to drive out to the Milkin farm and find out how the search is going. If there's an emergency, try to reach me at the Milkin place or through the sheriff's office."
I went outside and saw Henry Rinaldi across the street, standing by the garage door and staring up at the sky. "Hello," I said, walking across the street to join him. "Any news?"
He looked at me and I couldn't be certain if he remembered that I'd been in his house the previous night. "No, nothing," he replied.
The morning sun was making me squint and, as I turned away back toward my car, I remembered the last time I'd seen Angela on the previous evening, leading her pack down the driveway and into the street. The puddle was gone and I could see the diamond-shaped tread of her tires across the mud. It was all that remained of her, and a chill went through me when I considered the possibility that she might never be found.
I drove out the way I'd seen them go the previous evening, heading toward the Milkin farm. After a short time, I saw the field of tall corn stalks by the curve in the road, obscuring what was ahead. There'd been more than one accident at that curve. When I rounded the bend, I saw several sheriffs' and state-police cars parked off the road. Men were in the fields, moving toward the distant woods. I spotted Sheriff Lens by his car and pulled up in front of it.
"Mornin', Doc. How you been?"
"Like you, thinking about the missing girl. Any clues yet?"
"Not a one. Her friends were right, you know. Nobody could hide in these fields without bein' seen. We were lookin' for some sort of trench or furrow that could be invisible from the road, but there isn't any."
"And she wouldn't have had time to make it all the way to the trees."
"Heck, no. It's a ten-minute walk."
"Someone picked her up. It's the only possibility."
"Who, though? And how come the kids didn't see a car or truck? You got pretty good visibility along this road."
I stared down the road, knowing he was right. "You talked with Fred Milkin yet? Maybe he saw something."
"Briefly, last night. The girls went there to use the phone when they couldn't find Angela. He says he didn't see a thing."
"Let's go talk to him again." I glanced around and asked, "What happened to the bicycle?"
"I sent it back to her family. We got a couple of prints off the metal, but without hers to compare with they're not much good."
We started walking up the road toward the grey farmhouse. "Do you think it's a sex crime, Sheriff?"
"I try not to think about it, Doc. If someone grabbed her, they had to have a reason, though, didn't they?"
"But if they grabbed her, where did they take her in those few seconds before the rest of the kids rounded the curve?"
Sheriff Lens shrugged. "Then there's the other possibility. I like that one even less."
"What other possibility?"
"Maybe something happened to her—a terrible accident of some sort. The kids were so panicked by it they hid the body and made up the whole story of her disappearance."
"Six children, Sheriff? One of them her own sister? No, that's even more impossible. The story they told us has to be true—so far as they know the truth."
We'd reached the farmhouse and Fred Milkin came out the door to meet us. He'd obviously been watching events through the window. Milkin was a slim, middle-aged man who'd never married. He'd stayed on at the farm alone after his parents died, hiring help for the planting and harvesting as needed. "Hello, Fred!" I called to him. He'd been a patient of mine a few years back when I'd treated him for a skin condition.
"Hi, Doc. Hello, Sheriff. You got a lot of men out there."
"We want to find her, Fred. I only hope she's alive."
"Like I told you last night, I never saw a sign of her. I didn't know a thing until that bunch of kids came poundin' on the door to use the phone." "Who did they call?" I asked.
"Her folks, and then I guess her dad notified you, Sheriff."
Sheriff Lens nodded. "Did you have anyone working around here yesterday, Fred?"
"Nobody. The hay's all cut."
"See any strangers? Hoboes, maybe?"
"Not lately."
We left Milkin standing in his yard, watching the progress of the search. I drove back to town and went to the office, but seeing patients was the last thing on my mind that day. I left by mid-afternoon and drove over to Laura Fine's house. Her family had a nice home, one of the newer ones in town, and everyone knew where it was. She was one of the few girls her age with a driver's license.
I pulled up just as she was getting into the family car. "Hello, Laura," I said.
"Dr. Hawthorne! Has there been news about Angela?"
"I'm afraid not. The police are still searching."
"I can't believe what happened. My folks can't believe it, either. Dad says people don't just disappear like that."
"Do you or Judy have any new ideas about what might have happened?"
"I certainly don't."
I caught the inflection in her voice. "What about Judy?"
"She's off playing detective somewhere. I've been trying to reach her all day."
I came to the point of my visit. "Laura, I want to ask you about Angela's boy friends."
"She didn't really have any. Nobody special, anyway."
"Did she go to the senior prom?"
"Yes—with Phil Gilbert. But that was nothing serious. He asked her and she wanted to go, so she said yes. She told me later he gave her a goodnight kiss and that was all."
"Where does Phil live?" I asked her. "I might drive over and speak with him."
"He's right on the next street, Dr. Hawthorne, but he's not home. I tried calling him last night about Angela and his mother said he was up at the
family's cottage at Silver Lake. He's closing it up for the season."
"When's he due back?"
"Sometime tomorrow."
"Was there anyone else she went out with recently? Or anyone who asked her for a date and got turned down?"
"Not that I know of. But sometimes she was vague about boys."
I thanked her and went back and sat in my car, wondering if I was going about this in the wrong way. In the past when I helped Sheriff Lens with a case, I tried to figure out what had happened, and how. With Angela Rinaldi I had jumped ahead to the question of who. A stranger? A friend?
I looked at the dashboard clock and decided it was only a thirty-minute drive to Silver Lake.
The clerk at the crossroads store directed me to the Gilbert cottage on the lake. It was down a steep dirt road near the water's edge, and as I approached I could see a muscular young man putting up wooden shutters over the side windows. I parked my car next to his green Packard and got out.
"Hello, there!" I called. "Are you Phil Gilbert?"
He finished securing the shutter with a tack hammer and then turned with a grin. "That's me. What can I do for you?"
"I'm Dr. Sam Hawthorne. I drove over from Northmont. We're looking for Angela Rinaldi."
"Angela? What happened to her?"
"She's disappeared."
His grin changed to a frown and he walked closer to me, wiping his hands. "When did this happen?"
"Last evening, right after dinner. On the road out near the Milkin farm.
The police and troopers are searching for her."
"My God—do they think she's been—?"
"No one knows what to think. I came here because I understand you took her to the senior prom this spring."
"Yeah. It was the only date I had with her. We didn't hit it off too well." "Why not?" I asked.
He brushed the sandy hair from his forehead. He'd acquired a tan over the summer and his arms were almost brown. "We didn't seem to have the same interests. She was excited about going off to college and I was thinking about where I could find a job."
"Did you find one?"
"I worked here at the Boat Locker for the summer. Now I'm thinking about heading west."
"What about Angela? Was she seeing anyone else?"
"I think she had a couple of dates with Johnny Brooks, but it wasn't anything serious."
"Brooks?" Just then I couldn't remember why the name seemed familiar. "Was he in your class, too?"
"Sure, we all graduated in June. I've been up here all summer, though.
I haven't heard a word from Angela."
"Your parents didn't call to tell you she was missing?"
He shook his head. "We have the phone turned off after Labor Day. No one comes up here in the fall."
"You don't have any idea how or why she disappeared, then?"
"None. Is her bike gone, too?"
"No, they found her bike in the middle of the road. There was just no sign of her."
"Weird."
"If you think of anything that might help, give Sheriff Lens or me a call, will you?"
"Glad to." I gave him our phone numbers. He took them, put them into his shirt pocket, and went back to his job with the shutters as I returned to the car.
It wasn't until I was driving back toward Northmont that I thought about the name Johnny Brooks. I didn't know the Brooks family, but I wondered if he might be an older brother of Terry Brooks, the young friend of Angela's sister Ruthie, who'd been the seventh member of their ill-fated bike ride.
As I pulled into the driveway of my house I saw Henry Rinaldi standing by his garage with Angela's blue bicycle. I walked across the street to join him.
"Any word yet?" I asked.
He shook his head. "They brought this back today. It's all that's left of her."
"I'm sure she'll turn up, Henry."
Rinaldi ran his hands lovingly over the bicycle, over the worn leather seat and the cracked rubber handgrips, the bald tires, and the paint-chipped metal body. He gazed at the little bell on the left handlebar. "I used to help her when anything went wrong with this bike. I know it as well as I know Angela. Look—she even scratched her initials on the seat post so she'd know it was hers."
I bent down and saw the tiny AR scratched in the metal. "Did she go out with Johnny Brooks?" I asked casually as I straightened up.
"Brooks? You mean Terry's brother? I guess a few times. Why do you ask?"
"Someone she knew might have had a hand in her disappearance. I'm trying to talk with everyone who knew her."
Henry's face was suddenly grave. "Tell me the truth, Dr. Hawthorne. The police think she's dead, don't they?"
"They don't know. Nobody knows."
I left him before the tears appeared in his eyes. I didn't want to see him cry, yet I knew nothing that might hold back his tears.
A while later I phoned Sheriff Lens. They'd searched all day without finding a clue.
"Are you going to give up?" I asked.
"The State Police want to search for another day before calling it off.
They're bringing in dogs tomorrow."
"What are they looking for? A grave?"
"What do you think, Doc?"
"I don't know," I answered honestly. "I've discovered she did go out with a couple of boys. I talked with Phil Gilbert this afternoon and tonight I'm going to search out Johnny Brooks."
"I can tell you where to search. He's the soda jerk at the Star Drug. Works most nights."
"Thanks, Sheriff," I said.
Angela's disappearance was big news among the teenagers who hung out at the Star Drug soda fountain. I saw Laura Fine in one of the booths in animated conversation with two boys and another girl. All along the counter there was a hum of conversation. I sat on one of the stools and waited for the fresh-faced youth behind the counter to get around to waiting on me.
"What'll you have?" he asked at last.
"Just a cherry Coke. Are you Johnny Brooks?"
"That's me." He picked up a Coke glass and squirted some syrup into it.
"I understand you went out with Angela Rinaldi a few times."
"Twice. My sister told me what happened last night. I can't believe it."
"Did you see her during the summer?"
"We went swimming once, that was all. I called her but she was always busy."
"A popular girl? Lots of boy friends?"
"None that I know of."
"What about Phil Gilbert? He took her to the senior prom, didn't he?"
"I guess." He stirred up the cherry Coke and set it in front of me. I put down a quarter and told him to keep the change. That made him a bit more talkative, but not much. "I think a truckload of Gypsies probably picked up Angela and kidnaped her."
"Really? I haven't seen any around these parts in a few years. Did your kid sister happen to see a truck last evening?"
"Naw, she didn't see anything. But she's only thirteen."
On my way out of the drugstore, Laura stopped me. "I saw you talking with Johnny Brooks."
"He went out with Angela a couple of times. I've been talking to Phil
Gilbert, too."
"Have you seen Judy? Judy Irving? I'm still looking for her."
"Not yet. I probably should talk to everyone who was in the group last night. One of you must have seen something, even if you didn't realize it."
"I didn't see a thing—other than what we told you."
"How were Angela's relations with her father? Did they get along?"
"Oh, you know how fathers are. He wanted to be her pal but she had to be with her own friends."
"Was she anxious to get away to college?"
Laura looked hard at me. "You're speaking of her in the past, like she's dead."
"We have to consider that possibility. She's been missing for over twentyfour hours."
"She'll turn up somewhere."
"What about college?"
Laura shrugged. "She didn't talk about it much, but I think she felt bad about leaving her friends behind."
One of the other girls called to her and Laura went back to the booth. I strolled outside and stood for a moment looking up at the night sky.
In the morning, I was at my office in the physicians' wing of Pilgrim
Memorial Hospital. Mary Best saw my pensive expression and asked, "Nothing on the Rinaldi girl yet?"
"Not a thing. The sheriff's still searching the fields. I talked to her father and some of her friends yesterday, but I didn't learn a thing."
"Do you think her father might be involved?"
"I don't see how. I was sitting on my porch from the time Angela left until you phoned me that evening. Neither of her parents left the house so far as I know. Their car was in the garage all evening."
"There are some patients at the hospital you should look in on."
I nodded. "I'll see them. Then maybe I'll take a ride out to the Milkin farm again. This might be the last day of the search if they don't find anything."
I got out there a little before noon. The State Police dogs were far out in one of the hay fields, barking like mad. I saw Sheriff Lens standing in the center of the road with Fred Milkin. One of the troopers had run up and was talking frantically. I parked and got quickly out of my car. The sheriff and Milkin were already starting across the field.
"Sheriff!" I called out.
He glanced in my direction and called back, "You're just in time, Doc—
I think the dogs found her!"
My stomach felt like it might heave, but I started across the field to intersect their route. A half dozen State Police officers and four floppyeared bloodhounds had converged on a spot near the edge of the woods.
"Did they pick up her scent?" I asked.
One of the troopers with a barking dog on a leash said, "We didn't find anything near the road where her bike was, so we just let them roam the field at will. They sniffed out this."
The sheriff crouched to examine the newly turned soil. "It's recent, and about the size of a grave. Get some shovels in here."
She wasn't buried deep. The troopers' shovels struck the body less than a foot down. They brushed the last of the dirt from her by hand and turned her over.
It wasn't Angela Rinaldi. It was her friend, Judy Irving.
By afternoon we had established that the cause of death was a blow to the left temple with some sort of blunt but slender object. It had penetrated far enough to be instantly fatal. "Ever see anything like it?" Sheriff Lens asked me.
"Not exactly, no."
"The city papers are onto this now, Doc. They say we got a homicidal maniac loose. The troopers have the dogs searchin' the area for another grave."
"Why didn't Judy's parents report her missing?"
"They did, this morning. I think they were afraid to call last night because they thought she might be spendin' the night with some boy."
"Had she ever done that before?"
"I guess she didn't come home after the senior prom."
"Who was her date?"
"Johnny Brooks. I'm on my way over to see him now, if you want to come along. What does the autopsy show about the time of death?"
"The preliminary results indicate she'd been dead about twenty-four hours when she was found. That would mean she died yesterday morning,
though not in that field. You were searching it then."
Sheriff Lens nodded. "The killer thought it would be a safe place to bury her because we'd already searched there. He didn't know we'd be bringing in the dogs."
I accompanied him to Johnny Brooks' house. The young man from the drugstore was seated on his front porch with a tearful Laura Fine. "My two best friends in the world!" She wiped her eyes. "I can't believe it."
Sheriff Lens tried to comfort her. "We haven't found Angela yet. She could still be alive."
Johnny's kid sister Terry came out to join us, sitting silently by her brother. I took the opportunity to ask a question. "What about you, Terry? You were around the older girls a lot. You're a friend of Ruthie Rinaldi. Did they ever talk about running away from home together—Angela and Judy?" Terry shook her head. "Angela was going to college." "I'd have heard any talk like that," Laura spoke up.
"You were looking for Judy yesterday. You couldn't find her."
"Judy always wanted to play detective. She went off somewhere on her own."
"Did she have a car?"
She nodded. "Her dad gave her a used Ford for graduation."
"Then Angela was the only one of you three who didn't drive."
"Her folks are pretty strict. They wouldn't let her do much of anything till she turned eighteen."
I asked the sheriff, "Any sign of Judy's car?"
"Not yet."
But we'd come to question Johnny Brooks, and presently Sheriff Lens sent the girls inside so we could talk to him privately. The sheriff asked him about the dates he'd had with the dead girl.
"I took her to the senior prom," he admitted nervously.
"And stayed out all night?"
Brooks moistened his dry lips. "That's just something a lot of the kids do.
It's harmless."
"Did Angela stay out all night with Phil Gilbert?" I asked.
He gave a little laugh. "Her parents would have killed her." He must have realized how that sounded and he corrected himself. "They wouldn't have liked it."
"Do you know anyone who might have wanted to kill Judy Irving?" the sheriff asked him.
"No. Certainly not me!"
"What would you say if I told you the autopsy showed she was pregnant?"
It was a bluff and it didn't work. Brooks looked the sheriff in the eye and answered, "I'd say you were lying."
"Knew her pretty well, did you?"
"Well enough to know she didn't sleep with guys."
"Did you see her at all yesterday?"
"No. I hadn't been out with her lately."
"But you went out with Angela Rinaldi."
The youth shook his head in frustration. "You're making too much of this whole thing with their boy friends. You're gonna find they were both killed by some tramp out in the woods."
"But what were they doing in the woods?" I asked. "And how did Angela vanish from her bicycle?"
"I don't know, but I didn't have a thing to do with it," he said.
Sheriff Lens offered to drop me at my office. On the way back, something kept bothering me.
"We didn't learn much there," the sheriff said.
"On the contrary. We learned something very important."
"What's that?"
"Laura and Judy both drove cars."
"What does that have to do with anything, Doc? Angela was riding a bicycle when she disappeared, and so were the other two."
"Humor me, Sheriff. Drive me out to Silver Lake to see Phil Gilbert again."
"What for?"
"Just a hunch."
"All right," he said. "I know your hunches."
A half hour later, as we approached the steep road down to the Gilberts' lakeside cottage, I asked him to stop the car. "Give me five minutes and then follow me in."
"What in hell are you up to, Doc?"
"We'll see."
I went down the road on foot, trying not to attract attention. Phil Gilbert had finished boarding up the cottage windows for the winter, but the door on the side facing the lake was standing open. I opened the screen door and walked in.
Angela Rinaldi jumped to her feet. "Who are you?" she almost screamed.
It was the closest I'd ever been to her. She wasn't across the street in her yard or bicycling down the road, she was right there facing me, a few feet away. "I'm your neighbor across the street," I told her. "My name is Sam Hawthorne."
Phil Gilbert heard our voices and came quickly out of the kitchen, holding a beer bottle. Angela kept talking. "What are you doing here? How did you find me?"
"I came to take you back to your parents."
She went over to stand near Gilbert. "I'm never going back! Phil and I are driving to California tomorrow. There's nothing you can say that would change my mind."
"Angela," I told her, "your friend Judy Irving is dead. Phil here killed her with a tack hammer."
As my words sunk in, her face seemed to come apart and she started screaming. It was the most terrible sound I'd ever heard.
Sheriff Lens came into the room and took the beer bottle from Phil Gilbert's hand. I'd gotten Angela to sit down and was trying to comfort her. "You'd better cuff him," I told the sheriff. "He's your man."
"This is Angela Rinaldi?" he asked. "Alive?"
"Very much alive. Let's get them back to town and I'll explain everything."
We drove directly to the sheriff's office. He phoned Angela's parents to tell them she was alive, and while we waited for them to arrive I told him what he needed to know. "Start with Angela's disappearance," he said. "Explain that first."
"I should have tumbled to that a lot sooner than I did. You see, Angela and Phil Gilbert have been in love since the night of the senior prom, I imagine. Instead of going to college, she planned to run away with him. We've heard how strict her parents are. There was no chance they'd ever give their blessing to such a thing, so she decided to stage her own disappearance, with Phil's help."
"How?"
"She figured everyone would be looking around here for her and they could be halfway across the country before anyone realized they'd run off together. They'd kept their relationship a secret all summer."
"Doc—"
I smiled at him. "All right, Sheriff. How'd she do it? I watched her ride out Tuesday night with the other kids following. I saw her ride through a puddle at the edge of the road and yesterday morning her tire tracks were still there, imprinted in the mud. I could see the diamond pattern of the tread. But later in the day I spoke with her father as he showed me her blue bike that you found in the center of the road. I saw the place where she'd scratched her initials. And I saw the bicycle's bald tires."
"What?"
"The blue bike you found in the road, Angela's bike without question, wasn't the blue bike she was riding when she left home that night."
"How is that possible, Doc?"
"There's only one possible explanation. Gilbert supplied her with a second blue bicycle, identical to her own, though a bit newer. He took hers out there in his car and left it in the road a minute or two before they approached. Angela, riding ahead of the others as she often did, rounded the curve, out of sight for a moment, and rode off the road into that field of tall cornstalks. The girls and the younger children rode right past where she hid, seeing only the abandoned blue bicycle a hundred yards down the road. After they went to Milkin's farm to phone home, she rode back to where
Gilbert was waiting with his car."
"How did you know it was Gilbert?"
"Her father wasn't involved, because he was home at the time it happened. Angela herself had to be a party to the disappearance because she'd have realized the bike wasn't hers even if no one else did. A boy friend seemed most likely. There were only two mentioned—Phil Gilbert and Johnny Brooks. When I called on Gilbert at the lake yesterday, I told him only that Angela had disappeared while out riding with her girl friends. Though the cottage phone was disconnected and he claimed to know nothing about the occurrence, he asked me a while later if her bike had disappeared, too. How did he know she was on a bike ride and not a car ride? Both of her girl friends drove cars. He drove a car himself. A ride would have suggested a car ride before a bike ride, to any innocent person."
Sheriff Lens nodded. "And Judy Irving?"
"I think she came searching for Angela up at the cottage. She must have had her own clue that they might be hiding there. When I arrived, Gilbert was nailing the shutters closed with a tack hammer. I remembered that thin, blunt head when I saw the wound in Judy Irving's temple. I think he lashed out and hit her with it when she threatened to tell everyone where Angela was hiding. Then he waited until dark and drove her body back to the Milkin farm, figuring, as you pointed out yourself, that the police wouldn't search it again."
"Angela didn't know he killed Judy?"
I shook my head. "When I got her quieted down in the car she told me she'd been swimming while he put up the shutters. She also said he found some excuse to throw the tack hammer away in the rubbish. You'll want to go back there for it. You'll probably find her car on one of those back roads, unless he drove it into the lake."
Sheriff Lens grinned at me. "You were guessin' back at the cottage, Doc. Even if Phil Gilbert was involved in the disappearance, he might not have killed the Irving girl."
"You play the odds, Sheriff. Judy came looking for Angela. Was I to believe she found an entirely separate criminal with a weapon shaped just like Gilbert's tack hammer?"
"Angela might have been an accomplice to the killing."
"No, she rode out with those girls on Tuesday night because they were her closest friends. She wasn't going off to college, but she was going far away, where she'd never see them again. She wouldn't have killed Judy, or stuck with Gilbert if she knew he had. She's a decent girl who got mixed up with the wrong boy."
That's what it was like as the summer of '36 ended. I never saw Angela ride her bicycle again.
A DR. SAM HAWTHORNE CHECKLIST
Books
Diagnosis: Impossible, The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Norfolk: Crippen & Landru Publishers, 1996. Contains Dr. Sam's first twelve cases.
More Things Impossible, The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Norfolk: Crippen & Landru Publishers, 2006. Contains Dr. Sam's next 15 cases.
Nothing Is Impossible, Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Norfolk:
Crippen & Landru Publishers, 2013. Contains 15 more cases.
Individual Stories
All of Dr. Sam Hawthorne's reminiscences were first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine [EQMM]. Dates when the events took place are recorded below in brackets.
"The Problem of the Covered Bridge" [March 1922]. EQMM, December 1974.
"The Problem of the Old Gristmill" [July 1923]. EQMM, March 1975.
"The Problem of the Lobster Shack" [June 1924]. EQMM, September 1975.
"The Problem of the Haunted Bandstand" [July 1924]. EQMM, January 1976.
"The Problem of the Locked Caboose" [Spring 1925]. EQMM, May 1976.
"The Problem of the Little Red Schoolhouse" [Fall 1925]. EQMM, September 1976.
"The Problem of the Christmas Steeple" [December 25, 1925]. EQMM, January 1977.
"The Problem of Cell 16" [Spring 1926]. EQMM, March 1977.
"The Problem of the Country Inn" [Summer 1926]. EQMM, September 1977.
"The Problem of the Voting Booth" [November 1926]. EQMM, December 1977.
"The Problem of the County Fair" [Summer 1927]. EQMM, February 1978.
"The Problem of the Old Oak Tree" [September 1927]. EQMM, July 1978. "The Problem of the Revival Tent" [Fall 1927]. EQMM, November 1978.
"The Problem of the Whispering House" [February 1928]. EQMM, April 1979.
"The Problem of the Boston Common" [Spring 1928]. EQMM, August 1979.
"The Problem of the General Store" [Summer 1928]. EQMM, November 1979.
"The Problem of the Courthouse Gargoyle" [September 1928]. EQMM, June 30, 1980.
"The Problem of the Pilgrims Windmill" [March 1929]. EQMM, September 10, 1980.
"The Problem of the Gingerbread Houseboat" [Summer 1929]. EQMM, January 28, 1981.
"The Problem of the Pink Post Office" [October 1929]. EQMM, June 17, 1981.
"The Problem of the Octagon Room" [December 1929]. EQMM, October 7, 1981.
"The Problem of the Gypsy Camp" [January 1930]. EQMM, January 1, 1982.
"The Problem of the Bootleggers Car" [May 1930]. EQMM, July 1982.
"The Problem of the Tin Goose" [July 1930]. EQMM, December 1982.
"The Problem of the Hunting Lodge" [Fall 1930]. EQMM, May 1983.
"The Problem of the Body in the Haystack" [July 1931]. EQMM, August 1983.
"The Problem of Santa's Lighthouse" [December 1931]. EQMM, December 1983.
"The Problem of the Graveyard Picnic" [Spring 1932]. EQMM, June 1984.
"The Problem of the Crying Room" [June 1932]. EQMM, November 1984.
"The Problem of the Fatal Fireworks" [July 4, 1932]. EQMM, May 1985.
"The Problem of the Unfinished Painting" [Fall 1932]. EQMM, February 1986.
"The Problem of the Sealed Bottle" [December 5, 1933]. EQMM, September 1986.
"The Problem of the Invisible Acrobat" [July 1933]. EQMM, MidDecember 1986.
"The Problem of the Curing Barn" [September 1934]. EQMM, August 1987.
"The Problem of the Snowbound Cabin" [January 1935]. EQMM, December 1987.
"The Problem of the Thunder Room" [March 1935]. EQMM, April 1988.
"The Problem of the Black Roadster" [April 1935]. EQMM, November 1988.
"The Problem of the Two Birthmarks" [May 1935]. EQMM, May 1989.
"The Problem of the Dying Patient" [June 1935]. EQMM, December 1989.
"The Problem of the Protected Farmhouse" [August or September 1935]. EQMM, May 1990.
"The Problem of the Haunted Tepee" [September 1935]. EQMM, December 1990. Also featuring Ben Snow.
"The Problem of the Blue Bicycle" [September 1936]. EQMM, April 1991.
"The Problem of the Country Church" [November 1936]. EQMM, August 1991.
"The Problem of the Grange Hall" [March 1937]. EQMM, Mid-December 1991.
"The Problem of the Vanishing Salesman" [May 1937]. EQMM, August 1992.
"The Problem of the Leather Man" [August 1937]. EQMM, December 1992.
"The Problem of the Phantom Parlor" [August 1937]. EQMM, June 1993.
"The Problem of the Poisoned Pool" [September 1937]. EQMM, December 1993.
"The Problem of the Missing Roadhouse" [August 1938]. EQMM, June 1994.
"The Problem of the Country Mailbox" [Fall 1938]. EQMM, MidDecember 1994.
"The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery" [Spring 1939]. EQMM, May 1995.
"The Problem of the Enormous Owl" [August-September 1939]. EQMM, January 1996.
"The Problem of the Miraculous Jar" [November 1939]. EQMM, August 1996.
"The Problem of the Enchanted Terrace" [October 1939]. EQMM, April 1997.
"The Problem of the Unfound Door" [Midsummer 1940]. EQMM, June 1998.
"The Second Problem of the Covered Bridge" [January 1940]. EQMM, December 1998.
"The Problem of the Scarecrow Congress" [late July 1940]. EQMM, June 1999.
"The Problem of Annabel's Ark" [September 1940]. EQMM, March 2000.
"The Problem of the Potting Shed" [October 1940]. EQMM, July 2000.
"The Problem of the Yellow Wallpaper" [November 1940]. EQMM, March 2001.
"The Problem of the Haunted Hospital" [March 1941]. EQMM, August 2001.
"The Problem of the Traveler's Tale" [August 1941]. EQMM, June 2002.
"The Problem of Bailey's Buzzard" [December 1941]. EQMM, December 2002.
"The Problem of the Interrupted Séance" [June 1942]. EQMM, September/October 2003.
"The Problem of the Candidate's Cabin" [October-November 1942]. EQMM, July 2004.
"The Problem of the Black Cloister" [April 1943]. EQMM, December 2004.
"The Problem of the Secret Passage" [May 1943]. EQMM, July 2005.
"The Problem of the Devil's Orchard" [September 1943]. EQMM, January 2006.
"The Problem of the Shepherd's Ring" [December 1943]. EQMM, September/October 2006.
"The Problem of the Suicide Cottage" [July 1944]. EQMM, July 2007.
"The Problem of the Summer Snowman" [August 1944]. EQMM, November 2007.
"The Problem of the Secret Patient" [October 1944]. EQMM, May 2008.
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