Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

Moselle’s flat black nose was out of joint — even after Yvette obligingly produced from somewhere the fine wire for a new leader when the colored girl, an inveterate fisher in off hours, lost her tackle. In her feud with the Frenchwoman, you had to be sorry for the sullen, dumb black girl. But when Marjorie heard her black handmaiden jawing the dishrag, “She take it outta your hide, Miz Mears do. Your whole body get tired a-toilin’ for her.”... It was then Marjorie decided she would have to fire Moselle... But Moselle’s hush puppies, with fish, were memorable. And it was so difficult to get help to stay on an island. And Moselle had seen them through two murders...

Yvette, poor thing, was a refugee out of France. When the army planes went over — as they did forty times a day; the island’s peace was long since shattered; every sort of engine poopled and screamed and roared, these waters seemed to have been picked by the United States Army for an intensive training ground for everything from bombers to amphibian tanks — Yvette’s poise sagged. She asked fearful questions.

These planes might always contain Lieutenant Brook Hanna, and little Stacy stood off on a point and waved to them, just on the chance. When Hanna got leave and came to dinner, he proved to be such a sternly handsome youth that Marjorie was prejudiced against him. But when he emerged in bathing trunks, you could but gasp at the Apollo-like body.

“What makes you love him so?” she asked Stacy frankly.

Stacy flushed. Then she answered, as frankly: “There is nothing about Brook that reminds of — I mean everyone else almost could have been one of them, even if he isn’t. But Brook couldn’t have. Never in a million years.”

“You mean... one of the kidnapers?” groped Marjorie, appalled.

“Yes.”

“Who is this other boy?”

“Aunt Cinda wrote you about Carl?”

“She mentioned...”

“He swore he’d kill Brook if I married him. He’d kill me, too.”

“Impulsive lad.”

“He means it,” shuddered Stacy with her wide-eyed, ghost-seeing look.

But it was a happy, carefree week, with not a murder, not a kidnaping, not a hint of anything ominous but the noisy procession of planes going over and that dratted south wind that blew and blew — rattled the dry palms and sighed in the Australian pines and scorched your arid skin.

It never rains but it pours tenants. The Rider heiress had no sooner settled in nicely than two of the Mears’s three fishing shacks, “Windrift”, “Spindrift” and “Seadrift”, which stood on the windy Gulf side, remote from the house, and were almost never occupied, were spoken for. Stieg McCloud came for a week every year — that was not unusual. But the statement from a local real estate agent that she had a tenant from New York was curious. The shacks were shabby. And who, from distant New York, would ever have heard of Little Mangrove Island?

But Marjorie, with a full pocket-book, grew greedy. She consulted nobody. She began to have hopes of buying that second-hand scarlet speedboat for sale at the Imperial Dock, which would make good murder cases even on the mainland accessible to her unsuspecting husband.

Old McCloud was a great asset. It was a foursome now, and they had jolly dinner parties. Always a superior housekeeper, even on a shoe-string, Marjorie now outdid herself. The meals were magnificent Yvette served them, it went easier so. Her service was so sympathetic that she all but put the food in your mouth. “Good woman you’ve got there,” barked McCloud. “Beautiful hands.” (Surprisingly they were, and so knowing, hands that could do anything.) “Where’d you get her?”

“She’s Miss Rider’s personal maid. French refugee.”

“French? Ha!”

McCloud observed her sharply, under his tufted white eyebrows, when she melted back into the room.

“Must be peasant French. Big and bony,” he barked, when she again withdrew. “French girls are little and trim.”

“Well,” drawled little Mr. Mears, twinkling, “where and when did you get this comprehensive knowledge of French girls, Stieg?”

McCloud blushed,

“Paris. Two days. 1910.”

“We..e..ell. Those were busy days. I suppose you... er, saw Notre Dame and the Louvre and went up in the Eiffel Tower and had... er, crapes Suzette, besides other Suzettes...”

“Hollis!” scolded Marjorie.

Everybody laughed.

“Matter of fact, I had something at the Café de la Paix that was a lot better. Little chocolate éclaires, shaped like the holes out of the doughnuts your mother used to fry, filled with ice cream, covered with chocolate sauce and called... ha...”

“Profiterolles,” softly supplied Yvette, who had materialized again.

“Damme, that is the funny name!”

Yvette, the next day, actually went out into the kitchen and composed profiterolles, working with heaven knows what for the pastry chef’s tools.

“Ha,” said McCloud, lapping them up. “The woman’s a wizard. She’s French all right.”