Lost Lake House by Elisabeth Grace Foley Page B

house.
    “Good evening, Marshall,” said Alderman
Perkins, as he came up the walk. “Everything went off very
satisfactorily last night, I hear?”
    “Yes sir. Sure went off with a smash,
anyway.”
    “I suppose I’m biased,” said Perkins. “When
you’ve been throwing stones at a particular pane of glass for as
long as I have, it’s satisfying to hear the smash. Hurt yourself?”
He nodded toward Marshall’s right hand, the knuckles of which were
bandaged.
    “Just a scratch. Nothing much.”
    “I will tell you,” said Alderman Perkins,
“even though I still think you had every right to claim that
reward, that certain people I know have shed ten years over the
prospect of not paying it.”
    Marshall grinned slightly. “Dorothy said
they’d be happy.” He added, with an offhand manner that did not
deceive his auditor, “Is Dorothy home?”
    Dorothy’s father had seen the flick of a
curtain in a window behind him from the corner of his eye, and his
private opinion was that Dorothy was at this moment making a quick
inspection of herself in the mirror over the parlor mantelpiece,
but he kept this to himself. “Yes—yes, she’s at home. I’ll see if I
can find her.”
    He turned and went into the house; and
before the screen door had swung closed, Dorothy shot through it
onto the porch and joined Marshall on the steps. “Did you get the
job?” she said eagerly.
    “I sure did. I saw the foreman today, and I
start work on one of the furnaces on Monday.”
    “Oh, good! I knew it would work out,”
said Dorothy, sitting down on the top step and clasping her hands
around her knees. “Did you see Mr. Dalrymple?”
    “Only for a minute—he sent me down to the
foreman right from his office. He said a recommendation from your
father was good enough for him. I don’t know how to thank you,
Dorothy.”
    “Oh, don’t thank me—it was Dad who talked to
him; I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
    “Yes, but it was your idea.”
    “No, it wasn’t. You asked Dad about help
finding work yourself, just like you said that night.”
    “But you suggested the glass factory.
Anyway, if it hadn’t been for you I—”
    “Oh, Dad would have thought of that anyway.
He and Mr. Dalrymple were—”
    “You know, I’m getting to understand you
better,” said Marshall good-humoredly, sitting down on one of the
lower steps and leaning back with his elbows on the next one. “You
like arguing just for the fun of it. I’m not going to take it
personally any more.”
    In the hall, Alderman Perkins paused on the
point of going into the library and looked back toward the
golden-lit screen door, listening for a moment to the sound of
animated young voices on the porch, and smiled to himself a touch
regretfully. He liked that boy—he had seldom met anyone he liked
better on short acquaintance—but it was a little hard having
Dorothy’s attention diverted elsewhere just as he was beginning to
think he should get better acquainted with her. Ah, well…his own
fault for being a little late.
    Dorothy and Marshall sat on the porch steps
and talked as the sunset light faded slowly, and the soft
indistinctness of evening settled over the street. Marshall told
her about the final police raid on the Lost Lake House, which he
had witnessed accomplished with great chaos the night before.
    “Nobody had the least idea it was going to
happen, so soon after the last one. When the police went straight
to the secret doors, everybody knew the game was up, and the whole
place went to pieces. The waiters ran like rabbits, and all the
bootlegging crew tried to get off the island. Bill Harolday got
hold of a boat somehow, but he didn’t get far—the cops were waiting
for him on the other shore. But Maurice Vernon got away. He wasn’t
on the island at all. Somehow he got wind of what happened, and by
the time the police got round to his house and his office he wasn’t
there. Nobody knows where he disappeared to.”
    “I saw that in