Chapter 19 Chapter 18 Wills

In the darkness of night, the Constable, Ellery, and Inspector Willey came into the shadows of House Thirteen. Knox's empty house is like a twin brother to the house next door in Khalkis.Dilapidated brownstones streaked with age, old-fashioned windows boarded up with gray wood—the whole house is eerie.The lights of Khalkis' house on the side were exposed, and the figures of the detectives kept coming and going - in contrast, Khalkis' house was much more cheerful. "Thomas, do you have the key?" Even the policeman dropped his tone, caught in the gloom. Willie silently took out the key.

"En avant!" Ellery grumbled, and the three of them pushed open the gate adjoining the sidewalk, creaking. "Shall we go upstairs first?" asked the inspector. They stepped up the cracked stone steps.Willie flashed a large flashlight, tucked under his arm, and opened the front door.They stepped into the dark corridor; Will shone his torch around, found the lock on the inner door, and opened it.The three of them lined up closely, and when they got inside, they found that they seemed to be in a dark cave. The flashlight in the inspector's hand was flickering. Relying on this light, they could see that the shape and size of this place was similar to that of Khalkis' house next door. The lobby is exactly the same.

"Well, go ahead," said the sergeant. "It's your idea, Ellery. Lead the way." Ellery's eyes were particularly bright in the jumping light.He hesitated for a moment, looked around, and then walked towards the dark door leading to the hall.The police officer and Willie followed patiently, Willie holding his flashlight aloft. The rooms are empty—apparently, the owners evacuated everything when they moved out.At least, at the bottom, there was nothing—literally nothing.The room was empty and dusty, and here and there on the dust were the footprints of men who had been left by Li De's detectives when they searched.The walls were yellow, the ceiling was cracked, the floors were warped and creaked.

"I hope you are satisfied?" said the old man angrily, and they had already inspected all the rooms on the ground floor.He inhaled the dust and sneezed violently—gathering, panting, cursing. "I'm not done yet," Ellery said.He led the way up the bare wooden stairs.Their footsteps resounded throughout the empty house.Upstairs - also nothing.The structure of the second floor was the same as Khalkis's house, and it was full of bedrooms and bathrooms; but there were no beds or quilts in these rooms, and it was impossible to live in them, and the old man became more and more impatient.Ellery poked around in the old closet for a long time, on a whim; he found a pile of scrap paper and nothing else.

They passed the stairs that moaned without illness and went to the attic under the roof. "Well, that's all," said the Inspector, as he went down the hall on the ground floor, "now that the foolishness is done, we can go home and eat." Ellery didn't answer; he turned his pince-nez thoughtfully.Then he looked at Inspector Willie again: "Willie, didn't you mention that there was a broken box in the basement?" "Yes, Li De reported it that way, Mr. Quinn." Ellery went to the back of the hall.At the bottom of the stairs that lead upstairs, there is a door.He opened the door, borrowed Willy's flashlight, and looked down, facing a small winding staircase.

"The basement," he said, "come on." A group of people walked down the small precarious ladder, and found that there was a large room below, whose length and width were equal to the entire house.There were ghosts here, streaks of shadows in the torchlight; there was more dust here than in the rooms above.Immediately Ellery was within a dozen feet of the stairs.He shone it with Willy's torch.On the floor was a large, battered box—a clumsy, iron-bound cube, with the lid pried off and the broken lock hanging crookedly. "Nothing will be found in there," said the sergeant. "Reed reports he's searched, Ellery."

"Of course he can't find anything," Ellery said to himself, lifting the lid with his gloved hand, and he shone the light of the flashlight into the box, which was empty. He was about to put down the cap when suddenly his nostrils shrank and then opened again, so he leaned forward quickly and sniffed: "Now I found it," he said softly, "Papa, Willy, Take a sniff of this scent." The two sniffed.Then they straightened up, and the officer murmured, "Why, that's what we smelled when we opened the coffin! Only it's weaker, much weaker." "Exactly," came Willie's bass.

"Yes," said Ellery, putting the lid down, and closing it with a bang, "yes. This means that we have discovered the first place where Mr. Albert Grinshaw's body rested. " "Thank God at last," said the officer reverently, "but that Reed is stupid—" Ellery went on, speaking more to himself than to the two men beside him: "Perhaps Grimshaw was strangled here, or near here. It was Friday." Evening, late night—October 1st. The body was stuffed into this box, and it was here. The murderer didn't intend to put the body elsewhere in the first place, and I don't think it's surprising. This old empty house It's an ideal place to hide a corpse."

"Then Khalkis died," thought the old man. "Exactly. Khalkis died next day - the next day, Saturday, the 2nd. The killer thought this was a golden opportunity and offered him a place to hide his victim's body permanently. So, he Just after the funeral, on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, sneaking in and dragging out the body--" Ellery paused, and walked quickly to the back of the dark basement to see an old weather-beaten door, Just nodded——"Pass through this door, you will reach the backyard, then go through that door, and enter the cemetery. Dig three feet down to the place where the bones are stored in the ground... In the dark night, this is not difficult to do. So long as you don't mind graveyards, dead people, grave-smells, and ghosts. Our murderer must be a practical, fearless man. That means: Grimshaw's rotting body was laid here Four or five days and nights. That's enough time," he said flatly, "enough to leave this rancid smell."

He shot around with a flashlight.Some of the floors in the basement are made of concrete and some are made of wood, and there is nothing on them except for the dust and the box.But there was a frightening strange figure nearby, which went straight to the ceiling and was terribly large... He took courage and took a look with the flashlight, and found that the strange figure turned out to be a large stove—the main heater of the house.Ellery strode toward it, grabbed the rusty handle of the furnace door, pulled it open, and reached into the hearth with the flashlight in hand. Immediately he yelled, "There's something here! Daddy, Willie, come here!"

The three men bent over and looked into the hearth of the furnace through the rusty door.In a corner at the bottom of the hearth, a new small pile of ashes had been added; beyond the pile of ashes, there was a small - very small - thick sheet of white paper. Ellery pulled out a piece of glass from the back of his pocket, pointed the beam of his flashlight at the paper, and examined it intently. "What's the matter?" asked the officer. "I think," said Ellery leisurely, straightening up again, putting down the glass, "I think we've finally found George Khalkis' last will." It took the good inspector ten minutes to solve the problem of how to fish the piece of paper out of its inaccessible hiding place.He was too big to climb into the ashes, and the Sergeant and Ellery were smaller, but neither of them wanted to crawl in and out of the years of ashes.Ellery's method of reasoning was useless on this question; it was the determined inspector who found a knack for pulling out the shredded paper.He took a needle from the little pouch Ellery carried in his pocket, stuck it in the tip of Ellery's cane, and picked out the scrap of paper without much difficulty.He poked through the ashes again, but found nothing—it was all burnt through, and nothing could be found. As Ellery had predicted, the scrap of paper seemed indisputably a fragment of Khalkis' last will.It's a stroke of luck that the small piece that survived the fire happens to bear the name of the heir to the Khalkis collection.The name was written in a cursive hand which the inspector recognized at once as the handwriting of George Khalkis, and it read: Albert Grinshaw. "This confirms what Knox said, absolutely right," the officer said. "It also makes it clear that Sloane is the one who was excluded from the new will." "That's the thing," Ellery whispered, "but whoever burned this document, what an idiot, what an idiot. . . . It's a nerve-racking problem. A very nerve-wracking problem. ’ He tapped his pince-nez on his teeth, his eyes fixed on the burnt edge of the paper, but he didn’t say what the problem was or explain why it was bothering him. "One thing is for certain," said the Inspector with satisfaction, "that Mr. Sloan will invent a rhetoric to deal with this anonymous letter revealing that he and Greenshaw are brothers, and with this will. Things, my boy." Are you done?" Ellery nodded, and at the same time scanned the basement again: "It's over, I think that's all." "Then, let's go." The police officer carefully folded up the burnt paper and put it in his wallet, leading the way to the front door of the basement.Ellery followed, thinking hard; Willie walked last, obviously a little flustered, because even with his broad shoulders and thick back, he couldn't resist the creepy blackness behind him. .