She glanced at my St. Luke’s cloak and bonnet.
“No, she is quite well.”
“And Mr. Reed?”
“Quite well also.”
“Is Mademoiselle still there?”
“No, there is no one there but the family. There are no maids in the house.”
She stared at me curiously.
“Mademoiselle has gone? Are you cer—— Excuse me, Miss. But I thought she would never go. The children were like her own.”
“She is not there, Nora.”
She stood for a moment debating, I thought. Then she burst out:
“Mr. Reed made a mistake, miss. You can’t take a houseful of first-class servants and dismiss them the way he did, without half an hour to get out bag and baggage, without making talk. And there’s talk enough all through the neighborhood.”
“What sort of talk?”
“Different people say different things. They say Mademoiselle is still there, locked in her room on the third floor. There’s a light there sometimes, but nobody sees her. And other folks say Mr. Reed is crazy. And there is worse being said than that.”
But she refused to tell me any more—evidently concluded she had said too much and got away as quickly as she could, looking rather worried.
I was a trifle over my hour getting back, but nothing was said. To leave the clean and tidy street for the disordered house was not pleasant. But once in the children’s suite, with the goldfish in the aquarium darting liketongues of flame in the sunlight, with the tulips and hyacinths of the window-boxes glowing and the orderly toys on their white shelves, I felt comforted. After all, disorder and dust did not imply crime.
But one thing I did that afternoon—did it with firmness and no attempt at secrecy, and after asking permission of no one. I took the new screw driver and unfastened the bolt from the outside of my door.
I was prepared, if necessary, to make a stand on that issue. But although it was noticed, I knew, no mention of it was made to me.
Mrs. Reed pleaded a headache that evening, and I believe her husband ate alone in the dismantled dining room. For every room on the lower floor, I had discovered, was in the same curious disorder.
At seven Mr. Reed relieved me to go out. The children were in bed. He did not go into the day nursery, but placed a straight chair outside the door of the back room and sat there, bent over, elbows on knees, chin cupped in his palm, staring at the staircase. He roused enough to ask me to bring an evening paper when I returned.
When I am on a department case I always take my off-duty in the evening by arrangement and walk round the block. Some time in my walk I am sure to see Mr. Patton himself if the case is big enough, or one of his agents if he cannot come. If I have nothing to communicate it resolves itself into a bow and nothing more.
I was nervous on this particular jaunt. For one thing my St. Luke’s cloak and bonnet marked me at once, made me conspicuous; for another, I was afraid Mr. Pattonwould think the Reed house no place for a woman and order me home.
It was a quarter to eight and quite dark before he fell into step beside me.
“Well,” I replied rather shakily; “I’m still alive, as you see.”
“Then it is pretty bad?”
“It’s exceedingly queer,” I admitted, and told my story. I had meant to conceal the bolt on the outside of my door, and one or two other things, but I blurted them all out right then and there, and felt a lot better at once.
He listened intently.
“It’s fear of the deadliest sort,” I finished.
“Fear of the police?”
“I—I think not. It is fear of something in the house. They are always listening and watching at the top of the front stairs. They have lifted all the carpets, so that every footstep echoes through the whole house. Mrs. Reed goes down to the first door, but never alone. To-day I found that the back staircase is locked off at top and bottom. There are doors.”
I gave him my rough diagram of the house. It was too dark to see it.
“It is only tentative,” I explained. “So much of the house is locked up, and every movement of mine is under surveillance. Without baths there are about twelve large rooms, counting the third floor. I’ve not been able to get there, but I thought that to-night I’d try to look about.”
“You had no sleep last night?”
“Three hours—from four to seven this morning.”
We had crossed into the public square and were walkingslowly under the trees. Now he stopped and faced me.
“I don’t like the look of it, Miss Adams,” he said. “Ordinary panic goes and hides. But here’s a fear that knows what it’s afraid of and takes methodical steps for protection. I didn’t want you to take the case, you know that; but now I’m not going to insult you by asking you to give it up. But I’m going to see that you are protected. There will be some one across the street every night as long as you are in the house.”
“Have you any theory?” I asked him. He is not strong for theories generally. He is very practical. “That is, do you think the other nurse was right and there is some sort of crime being concealed?”
“Well, think about it,” he prompted me. “If a murder has been committed, what are they afraid of? The police? Then why a trained nurse and all this caution about the children? A ghost? Would they lift the carpets so that they could hear the specter tramping about?”
“If there is no crime, but something—a lunatic perhaps?” I asked.
“Possibly. But then why this secrecy and keeping out the police? It is, of course, possible that your respected employers have both gone off mentally, and the whole thing is a nightmare delusion. On my word it sounds like it. But it’s too much for credulity to believe they’ve both gone crazy with the same form of delusion.”
“Perhaps I’m the lunatic,” I said despairingly. “When you reduce it like that to an absurdity I wonder if I didn’t imagine it all, the lights burning everywhere and the carpets up, and Mrs. Reed staring down the staircase, andI locked in a room and hanging on by my nails to peer out through a closet transom.”
“Perhaps. But how about the deadly sane young woman who preceded you? She had no imagination. Now about Reed and his wife—how do they strike you? They get along all right and that sort of thing, I suppose?”
“They are nice people,” I said emphatically. “He’s a gentleman and they’re devoted. He just looks like a big boy who’s got into an awful mess and doesn’t know how to get out. And she’s backing him up. She’s a dear.”
“Humph!” said Mr. Patton. “Don’t suppress any evidence because she’s a dear and he’s a handsome big boy!”
“I didn’t say he was handsome,” I snapped.
“Did you ever see a ghost or think you saw one?” he inquired suddenly.
“No, but one of my aunts has. Hers always carry their heads. She asked one a question once and the head nodded.”
“Then you believe in things of that sort?”
“Not a particle—but I’m afraid of them.”
He smiled, and shortly after that I went back to the house. I think he was sorry about the ghost question, for he explained that he had been trying me out, and that I looked well in my cloak and bonnet.
“I’m afraid of your chin generally,” he said; “but the white lawn ties have a softening effect. In view of the ties I have almost the courage——”
“Yes?”
“I think not, after all.” he decided. “The chin is there,ties or no ties. Good-night, and—for heaven’s sake don’t run any unnecessary risks.”
The change from his facetious tone to earnestness was so unexpected that I was still standing there on the pavement when he plunged into the darkness of the square and disappeared.
At ten minutes after eight I was back in the house. Mr. Reed admitted me, going through the tedious process of unlocking outer and inner vestibule doors and fastening them again behind me. He inquired politely if I had had a pleasant walk, and without waiting for my reply fell to reading the evening paper. He seemed to have forgotten me absolutely. First he scanned the headlines; then he turned feverishly to something farther on and ran his fingers down along a column. His lips were twitching, but evidently he did not find what he expected—or feared—for he threw the paper away and did not glance at it again. I watched him from the angle of the stairs.
Even for that short interval Mrs. Reed had taken his place at the children’s door.
She wore a black dress, long sleeved and high at the throat, instead of the silk negligee of the previous evening, and she held a book. But she was not reading. She smiled rather wistfully when she saw me.
“How fresh you always look!” she said. “And so self-reliant. I wish I had your courage.”
“I am perfectly well. I dare say that explains a lot. Kiddies asleep?”
“Freddie isn’t. He has been crying for Chang. I hatenight, Miss Adams. I’m like Freddie. All my troubles come up about this time. I’m horribly depressed.”
Her blue eyes filled with tears.
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she confessed.
I should think not!
Without taking off my things I went down to Mr. Reed in the lower hall.
“I’m going to insist on something,” I said. “Mrs. Reed is highly nervous. She says she has not been sleeping. I think if I give her an opiate and she gets an entire night’s sleep it may save her a breakdown.”
I looked straight in his eyes, and for once he did evade me.
“I’m afraid I’ve been very selfish,” he said. “Of course she must have sleep. I’ll give you a powder, unless you have something you prefer to use.”
I remembered then that he was a chemist, and said I would gladly use whatever he gave me.
“There is another thing I wanted to speak about, Mr. Reed,” I said. “The children are mourning their dog. Don’t you think he may have been accidentally shut up somewhere in the house in one of the upper floors?”
“Why do you say that?” he demanded sharply.
“They say they have heard him howling.”
He hesitated for barely a moment. Then:
“Possibly,” he said. “But they will not hear him again. The little chap has been sick, and he—died to-day. Of course the boys are not to know.”
No one watched the staircase that night. I gave Mrs. Reed the opiate and saw her comfortably into bed. When I went back fifteen minutes later she was resting, but notasleep. Opiates sometimes make people garrulous for a little while—sheer comfort, perhaps, and relaxed tension. I’ve had stockbrokers and bankers in the hospital give me tips, after a hypodermic of morphia, that would have made me wealthy had I not been limited to my training allowance of twelve dollars a month.
“I was just wondering,” she said as I tucked her up, “where a woman owes the most allegiance—to her husband or to her children?”
“Why not split it up,” I said cheerfully, “and try doing what seems best for both?”
“But that’s only a compromise!” she complained, and was asleep almost immediately. I lowered the light and closed the door, and shortly after I heard Mr. Reed locking it from the outside.
With the bolt off my door and Mrs. Reed asleep my plan for the night was easily carried out. I went to bed for a couple of hours and slept calmly. I awakened once with the feeling that some one was looking at me from the passage into the night nursery, but there was no one there. However, so strong had been the feeling that I got up and went into the back room. The children were asleep, and all doors opening into the hall were locked. But the window on to the porte-cochère roof was open and the curtain blowing. There was no one on the roof.
It was not twelve o’clock and I still had an hour. I went back to bed.
At one I prepared to make a thorough search of the house. Looking from one of my windows I thought I saw the shadowy figure of a man across the street, and I was comforted. Help was always close, I felt. And yet, as I stood inside my door in my rubber-soled shoes, withmy ulster over my uniform and a revolver and my skeleton keys in my pockets, my heart was going very fast. The stupid story of the ghost came back and made me shudder, and the next instant I was remembering Mrs. Reed the night before, staring down into the lower hall with fixed glassy eyes.
My plan was to begin at the top of the house and work down. The thing was the more hazardous, of course, because Mr. Reed was most certainly somewhere about. I had no excuse for being on the third floor. Down below I could say I wanted tea, or hot water—anything. But I did not expect to find Mr. Reed up above. The terror, whatever it was, seemed to lie below.
Access to the third floor was not easy. The main staircase did not go up. To get there I was obliged to unlock the door at the rear of the hall with my own keys. I was working in bright light, trying my keys one after another, and watching over my shoulder as I did so. When the door finally gave it was a relief to slip into the darkness beyond, ghosts or no ghosts.
I am always a silent worker. Caution about closing doors and squeaking hinges is second nature to me. One learns to be cautious when one’s only chance of sleep is not to rouse a peevish patient and have to give a body-massage, as like as not, or listen to domestic troubles—“I said” and “he said”—until one is almost crazy.
So I made no noise. I closed the door behind me and stood blinking in the darkness. I listened. There was no sound above or below. Now houses at night have no terror for me. Every nurse is obliged to do more or less going about in the dark. But I was not easy. Suppose Mr. Reed should call me? True, I had locked my doorand had the key in my pocket. But a dozen emergencies flew through my mind as I felt for the stair rail.
There was a curious odor through all the back staircase, a pungent, aromatic scent that, with all my familiarity with drugs, was strange to me. As I slowly climbed the stairs it grew more powerful. The air was heavy with it, as though no windows had been opened in that part of the house. There was no door at the top of this staircase, as there was on the second floor. It opened into an upper hall, and across from the head of the stairs was a door leading into a room. This door was closed. On this staircase, as on all the others, the carpet had been newly lifted. My electric flash showed the white boards and painted borders, the carpet tacks, many of them still in place. One, lying loose, penetrated my rubber sole and went into my foot.
I sat down in the dark and took off the shoe. As I did so my flash, on the step beside me, rolled over and down with a crash. I caught it on the next step, but the noise had been like a pistol shot.
Almost immediately a voice spoke above me sharply. At first I thought it was out in the upper hall. Then I realized that the closed door was between it and me.
“Ees that you, Meester Reed?”
Mademoiselle!
“Meester Reed!” plaintively. “Eet comes up again, Meester Reed! I die! To-morrow I die!”
She listened. On no reply coming she began to groan rhythmically, to a curious accompaniment of creaking. When I had gathered up my nerves again I realized that she must be sitting in a rocking chair. The groans were really little plaintive grunts.
By the time I had got my shoe on she was up again, and I could hear her pacing the room, the heavy step of a woman well fleshed and not young. Now and then she stopped inside the door and listened; once she shook the knob and mumbled querulously to herself.
I recovered the flash, and with infinite caution worked my way to the top of the stairs. Mademoiselle was locked in, doubly bolted in. Two strong bolts, above and below, supplemented the door lock.
Her ears must have been very quick, or else she felt my softly padding feet on the boards outside, for suddenly she flung herself against the door and begged for a priest, begged piteously, in jumbled French and English. She wanted food; she was dying of hunger. She wanted a priest.
And all the while I stood outside the door and wondered what I should do. Should I release the woman? Should I go down to the lower floor and get the detective across the street to come in and force the door? Was this the terror that held the house in thrall—this babbling old Frenchwoman calling for food and a priest in one breath?
Surely not. This was a part of the mystery, not all. The real terror lay below. It was not Mademoiselle, locked in her room on the upper floor, that the Reeds waited for at the top of the stairs. But why was Mademoiselle locked in her room? Why were the children locked in? What was this thing that had turned a home into a jail, a barracks, that had sent away the servants, imprisoned and probably killed the dog, sapped the joy of life from two young people? What was it that Mademoiselle cried “comes up again”?
I looked toward the staircase. Was it coming up the staircase?
I am not afraid of the thing I can see, but it seemed to me, all at once, that if anything was going to come up the staircase I might as well get down first. A staircase is no place to meet anything, especially if one doesn’t know what it is.
I listened again. Mademoiselle was quiet. I flashed my light down the narrow stairs. They were quite empty. I shut off the flash and went down. I tried to go slowly, to retreat with dignity, and by the time I had reached the landing below I was heartily ashamed of myself. Was this shivering girl the young woman Mr. Patton called his right hand?
I dare say I should have stopped there, for that night at least. My nerves were frayed. But I forced myself on. The mystery lay below. Well, then, I was going down. It could not be so terrible. At least it was nothing supernatural. There must be a natural explanation. And then that silly story about the headless things must pop into my head and start me down trembling.
The lower rear staircase was black dark, like the upper, but just at the foot a light came in through a barred window. I could see it plainly and the shadows of the iron grating on the bare floor. I stood there listening. There was not a sound.
It was not easy to tell exactly what followed. I stood there with my hand on the rail. I’d been very silent; my rubber shoes attended to that. And one moment the staircase was clear, with a patch of light at the bottom. The next, something was there, half way down—a head, it seemed to be, with a pointed hood like a monk’s cowl.There was no body. It seemed to lie at my feet. But it was living. It moved. I could tell the moment when the eyes lifted and saw my feet, the slow back-tilting of the head as they followed up my body. All the air was squeezed out of my lungs; a heavy hand seemed to press on my chest. I remember raising a shaking hand and flinging my flashlight at the head. The flash clattered on the stair tread harmless. Then the head was gone and something living slid over my foot.
I stumbled back to my room and locked the door. It was two hours before I had strength enough to get my aromatic ammonia bottle.
It seemed to me that I had hardly dropped asleep before the children were in the room, clamoring.
“The goldfish are dead!” Harry said, standing soberly by the bed. “They are all dead with their stummicks turned up.”
I sat up. My head ached violently.
“They can’t be dead, old chap.” I was feeling about for my kimono, but I remembered that when I had found my way back to the nursery after my fright on the back stairs I had lain down in my uniform. I crawled out, hardly able to stand. “We gave them fresh water yesterday, and——”
I had got to the aquarium. Harry was right. The little darting flames of pink and gold were still. They floated about, rolling gently as Freddie prodded them with a forefinger, dull eyed, pale bellies upturned. In hiscage above the little parrot watched out of a crooked eye.
I ran to the medicine closet in the bathroom. Freddie had a weakness for administering medicine. I had only just rescued the parrot from the result of his curiosity and a headache tablet the day before.
“What did you give them?” I demanded.
“Bread,” said Freddie stoutly.
“Only bread?”
“Dirty bread,” Harry put in. “I told him it was dirty.”
“Where did you get it?”
“On the roof of the porte-cochère!”
Shade of Montessori! The rascals had been out on that sloping tin roof. It turned me rather sick to think of it.
Accused, they admitted it frankly.
“I unlocked the window,” Harry said, “and Freddie got the bread. It was out in the gutter. He slipped once.”
“Almost went over and made a squash on the pavement,” added Freddie. “We gave the little fishes the bread for breakfast, and now they’re gone to God.”
The bread had contained poison, of course. Even the two little snails that crawled over the sand in the aquarium were motionless. I sniffed the water. It had a slightly foreign odor. I did not recognize it.
Panic seized me then. I wanted to get away and take the children with me. The situation was too hideous. But it was still early. I could only wait until the family roused. In the meantime, however, I made a nerve-racking excursion out on to the tin roof and down to the gutter. There was no more of the bread there. Theporte-cochère was at the side of the house. As I stood balancing myself perilously on the edge, summoning my courage to climb back to the window above, I suddenly remembered the guard Mr. Patton had promised and glanced toward the square.
The guard was still there. More than that, he was running across the street toward me. It was Mr. Patton himself. He brought up between the two houses with absolute fury in his face.
“Go back!” he waved. “What are you doing out there anyhow? That roof’s as slippery as the devil!”
I turned meekly and crawled back with as much dignity as I could. I did not say anything. There was nothing I could bawl from the roof. I could only close and lock the window and hope that the people in the next house still slept. Mr. Patton must have gone shortly after, for I did not see him again.
I wondered if he had relieved the night watch, or if he could possibly have been on guard himself all that chilly April night.
Mr. Reed did not breakfast with us. I made a point of being cheerful before the children, and their mother was rested and brighter than I had seen her. But more than once I found her staring at me in a puzzled way. She asked me if I had slept.
“I wakened only once,” she said. “I thought I heard a crash of some sort. Did you hear it?”
“What sort of a crash?” I evaded.
The children had forgotten the goldfish for a time. Now they remembered and clamored their news to her.
“Dead?” she said, and looked at me.
“Poisoned,” I explained. “I shall nail the windowsover the porte-cochère shut, Mrs. Reed. The boys got out there early this morning and picked up something—bread, I believe. They fed it to the fish and—they are dead.”
All the light went out of her face. She looked tired and harassed as she got up.
“I wanted to nail the window,” she said vaguely, “but Mr. Reed—— Suppose they had eaten that bread, Miss Adams, instead of giving it to the fish!”
The same thought had chilled me with horror. We gazed at each other over the unconscious heads of the children and my heart ached for her. I made a sudden resolution.
“When I first came,” I said to her, “I told you I wanted to help. That’s what I’m here for. But how am I to help either you or the children when I do not know what danger it is that threatens? It isn’t fair to you, or to them, or even to me.”
She was much shaken by the poison incident. I thought she wavered.
“Are you afraid the children will be stolen?”
“Oh, no.”
“Or hurt in any way?” I was thinking of the bread on the roof.
“No.”
“But you are afraid of something?”
Harry looked up suddenly.
“Mother’s never afraid,” he said stoutly.
I sent them both in to see if the fish were still dead.
“There is something in the house downstairs that you are afraid of?” I persisted.
She took a step forward and caught my arm.
“I had no idea it would be like this, Miss Adams. I’m dying of fear!”
I had a quick vision of the swathed head on the back staircase, and some of my night’s terror came back to me. I believe we stared at each other with dilated pupils for a moment. Then I asked:
“Is it a real thing?—surely you can tell me this. Are you afraid of a reality, or—is it something supernatural?” I was ashamed of the question. It sounded so absurd in the broad light of that April morning.
“It is a real danger,” she replied. Then I think she decided that she had gone as far as she dared, and I went through the ceremony of letting her out and of locking the door behind her.
The day was warm. I threw up some of the windows and the boys and I played ball, using a rolled handkerchief. My part, being to sit on the floor with a newspaper folded into a bat and to bang at the handkerchief as it flew past me, became automatic after a time.
As I look back I see a pair of disordered young rascals in Russian blouses and bare round knees doing a great deal of yelling and some very crooked throwing; a nurse sitting tailor fashion on the floor, alternately ducking to save her cap and making vigorous but ineffectual passes at the ball with her newspaper bat. And I see sunshine in the room and the dwarf parrot eating sugar out of his claw. And below, the fish in the aquarium floating belly-up with dull eyes.
Mr. Reed brought up our luncheon tray. He looked tired and depressed and avoided my eyes. I watched him while I spread the bread and butter for the children. He nailed shut the windows that opened on to the porte-cochèreroof and when he thought I was not looking he examined the registers in the wall to see if the gratings were closed. The boys put the dead fish in a box and made him promise a decent interment in the garden. They called on me for an epitaph, and I scrawled on top of the box:
These fish are deadBecause a boy called FredWent out on a porch roof when he shouldHave been in bed.
These fish are dead
Because a boy called Fred
Went out on a porch roof when he should
Have been in bed.
I was much pleased with it. It seemed to me that an epitaph, which can do no good to the departed, should at least convey a moral. But to my horror Freddie broke into loud wails and would not be comforted.
It was three o’clock, therefore, before they were both settled for their afternoon naps and I was free. I had determined to do one thing, and to do it in daylight—to examine the back staircase inch by inch. I knew I would be courting discovery, but the thing had to be done, and no power on earth would have made me essay such an investigation after dark.
It was all well enough for me to say to myself that there was a natural explanation; that this had been a human head, of a certainty; that something living and not spectral had slid over my foot in the darkness. I would not have gone back there again at night for youth, love or money. But I did not investigate the staircase that day, after all.
I made a curious discovery after the boys had settled down in their small white beds. A venturesome fly hadsailed in through an open window, and I was immediately in pursuit of him with my paper bat. Driven from the cornice to the chandelier, harried here, swatted there, finally he took refuge inside the furnace register.
Perhaps it is my training—I used to know how many million germs a fly packed about with it, and the generous benevolence with which it distributed them; I’ve forgotten—but the sight of a single fly maddens me. I said that to Mr. Patton once, and he asked what the sight of a married one would do. So I sat down by the register and waited. It was then that I made the curious discovery that the furnace belowstairs was burning, and burning hard. A fierce heat assailed me as I opened the grating. I drove the fly out of cover, but I had no time for him. The furnace going full on a warm spring day! It was strange.
Perhaps I was stupid. Perhaps the whole thing should have been clear to me. But it was not. I sat there bewildered and tried to figure it out. I went over it point by point:
The carpets up all over the house, lights going full all night and doors locked.
The cot at the top of the stairs and Mrs. Reed staring down.
The bolt outside my door to lock me in.
The death of Chang.
Mademoiselle locked in her room upstairs and begging for a priest.
The poison on the porch roof.
The head without a body on the staircase and the thing that slid over my foot.
The furnace going, and the thing I recognized as Isat there beside the register—the unmistakable odor of burning cloth.
Should I have known? I wonder. It looks so clear to me now.
I did not investigate the staircase, for the simple reason that my skeleton key, which unfastened the lock of the door at the rear of the second-floor hall, did not open the door. I did not understand at once and stood stupidly working with the lock. The door was bolted on the other side. I wandered as aimlessly as I could down the main staircase and tried the corresponding door on the lower floor. It, too, was locked. Here was animpassefor sure. As far as I could discover the only other entrance to the back staircase was through the window with the iron grating.
As I turned to go back I saw my electric flash, badly broken, lying on a table in the hall. I did not claim it.
The lower floor seemed entirely deserted. The drawing room and library were in their usual disorder, undusted and bare of floor. The air everywhere was close and heavy; there was not a window open. I sauntered through the various rooms, picked up a book in the library as an excuse and tried the door of the room behind. It was locked. I thought at first that something moved behind it, but if anything lived there it did not stir again. And yet I had a vivid impression that just on the other side of the door ears as keen as mine were listening. It was broad day, but I backed away from the door and out into the wide hall. My nerves were still raw, no doubt, from the night before.
I was to meet Mr. Patton at half after seven that night, and when Mrs. Reed relieved me at seven I hadhalf an hour to myself. I spent it in Beauregard Gardens, with the dry fountain in the center. The place itself was charming, the trees still black but lightly fringed with new green, early spring flowers in the borders, neat paths and, bordering it all, the solid, dignified backs of the Beauregard houses. I sat down on the coping of the fountain and surveyed the Reed house. Those windows above were Mademoiselle’s. The shades were drawn, but no light came through or round them. The prisoner—for prisoner she was by every rule of bolt and lock—must be sitting in the dark. Was she still begging for her priest? Had she had any food? Was she still listening inside her door for whatever it was that was “coming up”?
In all the other houses windows were open; curtains waved gently in the spring air; the cheerful signs of the dinner hour were evident near by—moving servants, a gleam of stately shirt bosom as a butler mixed a salad, a warm radiance of candle-light from dining room tables and the reflected glow of flowers. Only the Reed house stood gloomy, unlighted, almost sinister.
Beauregard Place dined early. It was one of the traditions, I believe. It liked to get to the theater or the opera early, and it believed in allowing the servants a little time in the evenings. So, although it was only something after seven, the evening rite of the table crumbs began to be observed. Came a colored butler, bowed to me with a word of apology, and dumped the contents of a silver tray into the basin; came a pretty mulatto, flung her crumbs gracefully and smiled with a flash of teeth at the butler.
Then for five minutes I was alone.
It was Nora, the girl we had met on the street, who came next. She saw me and came round to me with a little air of triumph.
“Well, I’m back in the square again, after all, miss,” she said. “And a better place than the Reeds. I don’t have the doilies to do.”
“I’m very glad you are settled again, Nora.”
She lowered her voice.
“I’m just trying it out,” she observed. “The girl that left said I wouldn’t stay. She was scared off. There have been some queer doings—not that I believe in ghosts or anything like that. But my mother in the old country had the second-sight, and if there’s anything going on I’ll be right sure to see it.”
It took encouragement to get her story, and it was secondhand at that, of course. But it appeared that a state of panic had seized the Beauregard servants. The alarm was all belowstairs and had been started by a cook who, coming in late and going to the basement to prepare herself a cup of tea, had found her kitchen door locked and a light going beyond. Suspecting another maid of violating the tea canister she had gone soft-footed to the outside of the house and had distinctly seen a gray figure crouching in a corner of the room. She had called the butler, and they had made an examination of the entire basement without result. Nothing was missing from the house.
“And that figure has been seen again and again, miss,” Nora finished. “McKenna’s butler Joseph saw it in this very spot, walking without a sound and the street light beyond there shining straight through it. Over in the Smythe house the laundress, coming in late and goingdown to the basement to soak her clothes for the morning, met the thing on the basement staircase and fainted dead away.”
I had listened intently.
“What do they think it is?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders and picked up her tray.
“I’m not trying to say and I guess nobody is. But if there’s been a murder it’s pretty well known that the ghost walks about until the burial service is read and it’s properly buried.”
She glanced at the Reed house.
“For instance,” she demanded, “where is Mademoiselle?”
“She is alive,” I said rather sharply. “And even if what you say were true, what in the world would make her wander about the basements? It seems so silly, Nora, a ghost haunting damp cellars and laundries with stationary tubs and all that.”
“Well,” she contended, “it seems silly for them to sit on cold tombstones—and yet that’s where they generally sit, isn’t it?”
Mr. Patton listened gravely to my story that night.
“I don’t like it,” he said when I had finished. “Of course the head on the staircase is nonsense. Your nerves were ragged and our eyes play tricks on all of us. But as for the Frenchwoman——”
“If you accept her you must accept the head,” I snapped. “It was there—it was a head without a body and it looked up at me.”
We were walking through a quiet street, and he bent over and caught my wrist.
“Pulse racing,” he commented. “I’m going to take you away, that’s certain. I can’t afford to lose my best assistant. You’re too close, Miss Adams; you’ve lost your perspective.”
“I’ve lost my temper!” I retorted. “I shall not leave until I know what this thing is, unless you choose to ring the doorbell and tell them I’m a spy.”
He gave in when he saw that I was firm, but not without a final protest.
“I’m directly responsible for you to your friends,” he said. “There’s probably a young man somewhere who will come gunning for me if anything happens to you. And I don’t care to be gunned for. I get enough of that in my regular line.”
“There is no young man,” I said shortly.
“Have you been able to see the cellars?”
“No, everything is locked off.”
“Do you think the rear staircase goes all the way down?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“You are in the house. Have you any suggestions as to the best method of getting into the house? Is Reed on guard all night?”
“I think he is.”
“It may interest you to know,” he said finally, “that I sent a reliable man to break in there last night quietly, and that he—couldn’t do it. He got a leg through a cellar window, and came near not getting it out again. Reed was just inside in the dark.” He laughed a little, but I guessed that the thing galled him.
“I do not believe that he would have found anything if he had succeeded in getting in. There has been nocrime, Mr. Patton, I am sure of that. But there is a menace of some sort in the house.”
“Then why does Mrs. Reed stay and keep the children if there is danger?”
“I believe she is afraid to leave him. There are times when I think that he is desperate.”
“Does he ever leave the house?”
“I think not, unless——”
“Yes?”
“Unless he is the basement ghost of the other houses.”
He stopped in his slow walk and considered it.
“It’s possible. In that case I could have him waylaid tonight in the gardens and left there, tied. It would be a hold-up, you understand. The police have no excuse for coming in yet. Or, if we found him breaking into one of the other houses we could get him there. He’d be released, of course, but it would give us time. I want to clean the thing up. I’m not easy while you are in that house.”
We agreed that I was to wait inside one of my windows that night, and that on a given signal I should go down and open the front door. The whole thing, of course, was contingent on Mr. Reed leaving the house some time that night. It was only a chance.
“The house is barred like a fortress,” Mr. Patton said as he left me. “The window with the grating is hopeless. We tried it last night.”
I find that my notes of that last night in the house on Beauregard Square are rather confused, some writtenat the time, some just before. For instance, on the edge of a newspaper clipping I find this:
“Evidently this is the item. R—— went pale on reading it. Did not allow wife to see paper.”
The clipping is an account of the sudden death of an elderly gentleman named Smythe, one of the Beauregard families.
The next clipping is less hasty and is on a yellow symptom record. It has been much folded—I believe I tucked it in my apron belt:
“If the rear staircase is bolted everywhere from the inside, how did the person who locked it, either Mr. or Mrs. Reed, get back into the body of the house again? Or did Mademoiselle do it? In that case she is no longer a prisoner and the bolts outside her room are not fastened.
“At eleven o’clock tonight Harry wakened with earache. I went to the kitchen to heat some mullein oil and laudanum. Mrs. Reed was with the boy and Mr. Reed was not in sight. I slipped into the library and used my skeleton keys on the locked door to the rear room. It was empty even of furniture, but there is a huge box there, with a lid that fastens down with steel hooks. The lid is full of small airholes. I had no time to examine further.
“It is one o’clock. Harry is asleep and his mother is dozing across the foot of his bed. I have found the way to get to the rear staircase. There are outside steps from the basement to the garden. The staircase goes down all the way to the cellar evidently. Then the lower door in the cellar must be only locked, not bolted from the inside. I shall try to get to the cellar.”
The next is a scrawl: