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

Both girls ran into the water. Stacy turned and fought off Marjorie. But Marjorie gripped her, dragged her out...

It was Brook, all right. If you dreaded a thing long enough, it came true...

Brook was not dead — he was dying...

Then he was not dying — he might even live to give testimony...

He did live, but he never needed to give the testimony...

“Will you tell me, Mr. McCloud, as an authority on kites,” asked the F.B.I. man formally (this was again in the living room, with all present) “whether, since it is possible to float weather instruments on them, it is also possible to lift on them a high explosive which is so sensitive to shock that it detonates with great violence if, say, an airplane collides with the kite?”

“That would be possible,” admitted McCloud.

“And will you tell me whether it is possible to send up a flock of little kites, so loaded, precisely over a given locality, presuming the wind is just right, so that one or more planes in a flying squadron would, with luck, encounter one of these?”

“That is probably possible, but—”

“And can the kites be constructed so that they are practically invisible, flown on—?”

“Wire, yes.”

“And the wire released at the last instant, so that it will not lead back to the kite flier?”

“Ha. Yes.”

“But does it not require long practice and great skill in kite-flying to place your kites?”

“Damme, yes, Coates. That’s my objection to—”

“You have this skill?”

“Certainly!”

“Then, Mr. McCloud, though I have not yet found the evidence of kite making or materials in my search of your quarters, I am going to hold you for the sabotage of three planes and the death of—”

“No,” said little Mr. Mears. “Wait!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Wrong person.”

“You mean — Schee? He doesn’t know kites—”

“No, not Schee.”

Coates rested back and looked at Mr. Mears. “Yourself? You’re the only other kite authority—”

Mr. Mears blushed. “No. No. Not me. It is a woman, Mr. Coates, I regret to say. It is... Miss Rider’s personal maid, Yvette.”

The gaunt woman stood up outraged. “Me, a refugee out of martyred France — me who has already suffered much — my seempathy it is with the Axis?”

“I am afraid so. Like so many of the Fifth Columnists, you were probably stationed many years in France. Then, when France fell, you came out, to take up residence, as a refugee, in the next country to be undermined. Unfortunately you have been too obliging. You gave yourself away with that wire for Moselle’s fishing leader. I remembered and checked. That is steel piano wire, 1/32 inch in diameter, weighs about 16 pounds to the mile, stands a strain of some 250–280 pounds before it breaks. That is precisely kite-flying wire. You’ll find, I think,” he turned shyly to Coates, “the materials in her room if you search. I don’t presume to know exactly how she made the kites. She is very clever. I don’t know where she flew them from — perhaps that highest mangrove hillock. Don’t know how many she put up in a flight, or what happened to the loaded kites which weren’t blown up. But what I should like to know,” said Mr. Mears, turning courteously to Yvette—

The woman stood there now with an expression of resignation. She was the fatalist. This was bound some day to come.

“— What I should really like to know, is where did you learn kite flying?”

“My father,” stated Yvette with strong pride, “he was head of the Prussian Aeronautical Observatory at Lindenberg in 1905 when that train of kites fly so high.”

“You served at table that night Sheriff Tice dined with the Riders and heard him advise them to send their niece here — where there was work for you to do — if she were ever threatened again.”

Even Yvette stared at little Mr. Mears, as at a magician. “The waitress, Alice, she has free day. Yes.”

“You sent that threatening note?”

“Naturally,” Yvette calmly agreed...

“The real coincidence,” marveled little Mr. Mears to his wife, “is that there should be two kite experts on the island of Little Mangrove at one and the same time. But probably McCloud touched Yvette off with all his talk of kites.”

“Darling,” snuggled little Mrs. Mears, “I do like a man to have a brain. When did you first guess?”

“It was something you said.”

“Then I am a help! Oh, darling, darling.”

There was an interlude which proved incontrovertibly that the honeymoon was not yet over.

“What did I say?” she remembered.

“About the plane that cast the small shadow, with no sound of an engine. Suppose it wasn’t a plane. What could it have been? A bird, perhaps. Or — a kite.”

Arsène Lupin Versus Colonel Linnaus by Anthony Boucher