The Finishing Stroke Read Online Free PDF Page A

snow flurries Monday and a heavy snow Tuesday. Maybe you’d better take the train.’
    â€˜Old Duesey’s never failed me yet.’ Ellery’s Duesenberg was not the patrician Town Cabriolet of the moment. It was a 1924 open model, bruised and battered by 135,000 miles of hard driving, and he felt an affection for it that he would have lavished on an ancient but still serviceable saddle horse. ‘Besides, Dad, I’ve bought a set of those new Weed American crosschains. We’ll be all right.’
    As forecast, a heavy snow began to fall early on the morning of Tuesday, December 24th. By noon, when Ellery set out, the streets were blanketed.
    He had had the West 87th Street garage put up the top and the side-curtains, so he was protected from the snow; but not even his old raccoon coat and fur earlaps were proof against the wind, a wicked nor’easter that went through the curtains as if they were made of cheesecloth. By the time he reached the parkway at the Westchester county line he felt as if he were encased, like a Siberian mastodon, in a glacier. He had to pull up at a diner in Mount Kidron, where he surreptitiously laced a mug of coffee with brandy from his silver hip-flask. At Mamaroneck and White Plains he stopped again to irradiate the inner man; by the time he had crossed White Plains and was headed northwest on the road to Alderwood, the flask was empty. He reached the town in a pleasant state of neutrality, half ice, half glow.
    Alderwood was forty miles from New York, a heavily treed community of small estates with a population of 6,000, and an immaculate little business district with loops of snowy Christmas lights across the main street and Santa-bedecked shop windows sparkling with frost. The Craig place, he learned, was on the northern fringe of town, and Ellery found it after a dreamy search that involved a mere two excursions up byroads that led nowhere.
    It turned out a huge sprawl of a house, of incredible spread, coming to a giant peak – a two-story-and-attic so broad it looked sat upon. Ellery recognized it as a heroic example of the triangular American Shingle architecture of the ‘80’s. Two great banks of bow window, one above the other, in the darkly weathered shingles of the side wall facing the road gave the building an astonishingly modern look. The entrance was at right angles to the main road, opening from a large open porch supported by fieldstone pillars. The whole monster was thickly nested in shrubs, an Ancient Mariner of a house with a Galway beard. It rode the crest of a wave of snow-covered lawns.
    Perhaps it was the glow in which he sat comfortably piloting the Duesenberg up the baronial drive, but Ellery had the queerest feeling that he was driving in state up to the front door of Elizabethan England. In his misty condition he would not have been surprised to find himself greeted by bewigged footmen in ducal livery and a beruffed host in doublet and hose. He could already see whole-tree Yule logs, rush-strewn stone floors, and wolfish dogs tearing at haunches of venison. And plenty of toddies, of course – steaming varieties, served in pewter tankards.
    He began to whistle ‘Greensleeves’.
    And when he drew up at the porch, there, waiting for him, were the tall, dark and handsome Figure of John Sebastian and, at Sebastian’s side, a mountain of a man, a sort of cross between President Hoover and Henry the Eighth – huge, square-faced and bearded, smoking a bulldog pipe benignly and smiling in welcome.
    â€˜You made it,’ young Sebastian cried, springing into the snow to seize Ellery’s hand. ‘Don’t bother with your car or luggage, Ellery. Arthur, this is Ellery Queen, slayer of dragons and brain extraordinary. His father is a real live police inspector, too.’
    â€˜And a genial snuff-taker, let’s not forget that,’ Ellery said slurrily. ‘Mr. Craig, I’m honoured, gratified, and