The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  "I didn't - I - "

  "You did - I saw you do it."

  The brief exchange of accusation and denial took but an instant of time, as the mantel swung wide open. The next instant there was a rush of feet across the floor, from the fireplace - the shock of a collision between two bodies - the sound of a heavy fall.

  "What was that?" queried Bailey dazedly, with a feeling as if some great winged creature had brushed at him and passed.

  Lizzie answered from the doorway.

  "Oh, oh!" she groaned in stricken accents. "Somebody knocked me down and tramped on me!"

  "Matches, quick!" commanded Miss Cornelia. "Where's the candle?"

  The Doctor was still trying to explain his curious action of a moment before.

  "Awfully sorry, I assure you - it dropped out of the holder - ah, here it is!"

  He held it up triumphantly. Bailey struck a match and lighted it. The wavering little flame showed Lizzie prostrate but vocal, in the doorway - and Dale lying on the floor of the Hidden Room, her eyes shut, and her face as drained of color as the face of a marble statue. For one horrible instant Bailey thought she must be dead.

  He rushed to her wildly and picked her up in his arms. No - still breathing - thank God! He carried her tenderly to the only chair in the room.

  "Doctor!"

  The Doctor, once more the physician, knelt at her side and felt for her pulse. And Lizzie, picking herself up from where the collision with some violent body had thrown her, retrieved the smelling salts from the floor. It was onto this picture, the candlelight shining on strained faces, the dramatic figure of Dale, now semi-conscious, the desperate rage of Bailey, that a new actor appeared on the scene.

  Anderson, the detective, stood in the doorway, holding a candle - as grim and menacing a figure as a man just arisen from the dead.

  "That's right!" said Lizzie, unappalled for once. "Come in when everything's over!"

  The Doctor glanced up and met the detective's eyes, cold and menacing.

  "You took my revolver from me downstairs," he said. "I'll trouble you for it."

  The Doctor got heavily to his feet. The others, their suspicions confirmed at last, looked at him with startled eyes. The detective seemed to enjoy the universal confusion his words had brought.

  Slowly, with sullen reluctance, the Doctor yielded up the stolen weapon. The detective examined it casually and replaced it in his hip pocket.

  "I've something to settle with you pretty soon," he said through clenched teeth, addressing the Doctor. "And I'll settle it properly. Now - what's this?"

  He indicated Dale - her face still and waxen - her breath coming so faintly she seemed hardly to breathe at all as Miss Cornelia and Bailey tried to revive her.

  "She's coming to - " said Miss Cornelia triumphantly, as a first faint flush of color reappeared in the girl's cheeks. "We found her shut in there, Mr. Anderson," the spinster added, pointing toward the gaping entrance of the Hidden Room.

  A gleam crossed the detective's face. He went up to examine the secret chamber. As he did so, Doctor Wells, who had been inching surreptitiously toward the door, sought the opportunity of slipping out unobserved.

  But Anderson was not to be caught napping again. "Wells!" he barked. The Doctor stopped and turned.

  "Where were you when she was locked in this room?"

  The Doctor's eyes sought the floor - the walls - wildly - for any possible loophole of escape.

  "I didn't shut her in if that's what you mean!" he said defiantly. "There was someone shut in there with her!" He gestured at the Hidden Room. "Ask these people here."

  Miss Cornelia caught him up at once.

  "The fact remains, Doctor," she said, her voice cold with anger, "that we left her here alone. When we came back you were here. The corridor door was locked, and she was in that room - unconscious!"

  She moved forward to throw the light of her candle on the Hidden Room as the detective passed into it, gave it a swift professional glance, and stepped out again. But she had not finished her story by any means.

  "As we opened that door," she continued to the detective, tapping the false mantel, "the Doctor deliberately extinguished our only candle!"

  "Do you know who was in that room?" queried the detective fiercely, wheeling on the Doctor.

  But the latter had evidently made up his mind to cling stubbornly to a policy of complete denial.

  "No," he said sullenly. "I didn't put out the candle. It fell. And I didn't lock that door into the hall. I found it locked!"

  A sigh of relief from Bailey now centered everyone's attention on himself and Dale. At last the girl was recovering from the shock of her terrible experience and regaining consciousness. Her eyelids fluttered, closed again, opened once more. She tried to sit up, weakly, clinging to Bailey's shoulder. The color returned to her cheeks, the stupor left her eyes.

  She gave the Hidden Room a hunted little glance and then shuddered violently.

  "Please close that awful door," she said in a tremulous voice. "I don't want to see it again."

  The detective went silently to close the iron doors. "What happened to you? Can't you remember?" faltered Bailey, on his knees at her side.

  The shadow of an old terror lay on the girl's face, "I was in here alone in the dark," she began slowly - "Then, as I looked at the doorway there, I saw there was somebody there. He came in and closed the door. I didn't know what to do, so I slipped in - there, and after a while I knew he was coming in too, for he couldn't get out. Then I must have fainted."

  "There was nothing about the figure that you recognized?"

  "No. Nothing."

  "But we know it was the Bat," put in Miss Cornelia. The detective laughed sardonically. The old duel of opposing theories between the two seemed about to recommence.

  "Still harping on the Bat!" he said, with a little sneer, Miss Cornelia stuck to her guns.

  "I have every reason to believe that the Bat is in this house," she said.

  The detective gave another jarring, mirthless laugh. "And that he took the Union Bank money out of the safe, I suppose?" he jeered. "No, Miss Van Gorder."

  He wheeled on the Doctor now.

  "Ask the Doctor who took the Union Bank money out of that safe!" he thundered. "Ask the Doctor who attacked me downstairs in the living-room, knocked me senseless, and locked me in the billiard room!"

  There was an astounded silence. The detective added a parting shot to his indictment of the Doctor.

  "The next time you put handcuffs on a man be sure to take the key out of his vest pocket," he said, biting off the words.

  Rage and consternation mingled on the Doctor's countenance - on the faces of the others astonishment was followed by a growing certainty. Only Miss Cornelia clung stubbornly to her original theory.

  "Perhaps I'm an obstinate old woman," she said in tones which obviously showed that if so she was rather proud of it, "but the Doctor and all the rest of us were locked in the living-room not ten minutes ago!"

  "By the Bat, I suppose!" mocked Anderson.

  "By the Bat!" insisted Miss Cornelia inflexibly. "Who else would have fastened a dead bat to the door downstairs? Who else would have the bravado to do that? Or what you call the imagination?"

  In spite of himself Anderson seemed to be impressed.

  "The Bat, eh?" he muttered, then, changing his tone, "You knew about this hidden room, Wells?" he shot at the Doctor.

  "Yes." The Doctor bowed his head.

  "And you knew the money was in the room?"

  "Well, I was wrong, wasn't I?" parried the Doctor. "You can look for yourself. That safe is empty."

  The detective brushed his evasive answer aside.

  "You were up in this room earlier tonight," he said in tones of apparent certainty.

  "No, I couldn't get up!" the Doctor still insisted, with strange violence for a man who had already admitted such damning knowledge.

  The detective's face was a study in disbelief.

  "Y
ou know where that money is, Wells, and I'm going to find it!"

  This last taunt seemed to goad the Doctor beyond endurance.

  "Good God!" he shouted recklessly. "Do you suppose if I knew where it is, I'd be here? I've had plenty of chances to get away! No, you can't pin anything on me, Anderson! It isn't criminal to have known that room is here."

  He paused, trembling with anger and, curiously enough, with an anger that seemed at least half sincere.

  "Oh, don't be so damned virtuous!" said the detective brutally. "Maybe you haven't been upstairs but - unless I miss my guess, you know who was!"

  The Doctor's face changed a little.

  "What about Richard Fleming?" persisted the detective scornfully.

  The Doctor drew himself up.

  "I never killed him!" he said so impressively that even Bailey's faith in his guilt was shaken. "I don't even own a revolver!"

  The detective alone maintained his attitude unchanged.

  "You come with me, Wells," he ordered, with a jerk of his thumb toward the door. "This time I'll do the locking up."

  The Doctor, head bowed, prepared to obey. The detective took up a candle to light their path. Then he turned to the others for a moment.

  "Better get the young lady to bed," he said with a gruff kindliness of manner. "I think that I can promise you a quiet night from now on."

  "I'm glad you think so, Mr. Anderson!" Miss Cornelia insisted on the last word. The detective ignored the satiric twist of her speech, motioned the Doctor out ahead of him, and followed. The faint glow of his candle flickered a moment and vanished toward the stairs.

  It was Bailey who broke the silence.

  "I can believe a good bit about Wells," he said, "but not that he stood on that staircase and killed Dick Fleming."

  Miss Cornelia roused from deep thought.

  "Of course not," she said briskly. "Go down and fix Miss Dale's bed, Lizzie. And then bring up some wine."

  "Down there, where the Bat is?" Lizzie demanded.

  "The Bat has gone."

  "Don't you believe it. He's just got his hand in!"

  But at last Lizzie went, and, closing the door behind her, Miss Cornelia proceeded more or less to think, out loud.

  "Suppose," she said, "that the Bat, or whoever it was shut in there with you, killed Richard Fleming. Say that he is the one Lizzie saw coming in by the terrace door. Then he knew where the money was for he went directly up the stairs. But that is two hours ago or more. Why didn't he get the money, if it was here, and get away?"

  "He may have had trouble with the combination."

  "Perhaps. Anyhow, he was on the small staircase when Dick Fleming started up, and of course he shot him. That's clear enough. Then he finally got the safe open, after locking us in below, and my coming up interrupted him. How on earth did he get out on the roof?"

  Bailey glanced out the window.

  "It would be possible from here. Possible, but not easy."

  "But, if he could do that," she persisted, "he could have got away, too. There are trellises and porches. Instead of that he came back here to this room." She stared at the window. "Could a man have done that with one hand?"

  "Never in the world."

  Saying nothing, but deeply thoughtful, Miss Cornelia made a fresh progress around the room.

  "I know very little about bank-currency," she said finally. "Could such a sum as was looted from the Union Bank be carried away in a man's pocket?"

  Bailey considered the question.

  "Even in bills of large denomination it would make a pretty sizeable bundle," he said.

  But that Miss Cornelia's deductions were correct, whatever they were, was in question when Lizzie returned with the elderberry wine. Apparently Miss Cornelia was to be like the man who repaired the clock: she still had certain things left over.

  For Lizzie announced that the Unknown was ranging the second floor hall. From the time they had escaped from the living-room this man had not been seen or thought of, but that he was a part of the mystery there could be no doubt. It flashed over Miss Cornelia that, although he could not possibly have locked them in, in the darkness that followed he could easily have fastened the bat to the door. For the first time it occurred to her that the archcriminal might not be working alone, and that the entrance of the Unknown might have been a carefully devised ruse to draw them all together and hold them there.

  Nor was Beresford's arrival with the statement that the Unknown was moving through the house below particularly comforting.

  He may be dazed, or he may not," he said. "Personally , this is not a time to trust anybody."

  Beresford knew nothing of what had just occurred, and now seeing Bailey he favored him with an ugly glance.

  "In the absence of Anderson, Bailey," he added, "I don't propose to trust you too far. I'm making it my business from now on to see that you don't try to get away. Get that?"

  But Bailey heard him without particular resentment.

  "All right," he said. "But I'll tell you this. Anderson is here and has arrested the Doctor. Keep your eye on me, if you think it's your duty, but don't talk to me as if I were a criminal. You don't know that yet."

  "The Doctor!" Beresford gasped.

  But Miss Cornelia's keen ears had heard a sound outside and her eyes were focused on the door.

  "That doorknob is moving," she said in a hushed voice.

  Beresford moved to the door and jerked it violently open.

  The butler, Billy, almost pitched into the room.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE BAT STILL FLIES

  He stepped back in the doorway, looked out, then turned to them again.

  "I come in, please?" he said pathetically, his hands quivering. "I not like to stay in dark."

  Miss Cornelia took pity on him.

  "Come in, Billy, of course. What is it? Anything the matter?"

  Billy glanced about nervously.

  "Man with sore head."

  "What about him?"

  "Act very strange." Again Billy's slim hands trembled.

  Beresford broke in. "The man who fell into the room downstairs?"

  Billy nodded.

  "Yes. On second floor, walking around."

  Beresford smiled, a bit smugly.

  "I told you!" he said to Miss Cornelia. "I didn't think he was as dazed as he pretended to be."

  Miss Cornelia, too, had been pondering the problem of the Unknown. She reached a swift decision. If he were what he pretended to be - a dazed wanderer, he could do them no harm. If he were not - a little strategy properly employed might unravel the whole mystery.

  "Bring him up here, Billy," she said, turning to the butler.

  Billy started to obey. But the darkness of the corridor seemed to appall him anew the moment he took a step toward it.

  "You give candle, please?" he asked with a pleading expression. "Don't like dark."

  Miss Cornelia handed him one of the two precious candles. Then his present terror reminded her of that one other occasion when she had seen him lose completely his stoic Oriental calm.

  "Billy," she queried, "what did you see when you came running down the stairs before we were locked in, down below?"

  The candle shook like a reed in Billy's's grasp.

  "Nothing!" he gasped with obvious untruth, though it did not seem so much as if he wished to conceal what he had seen as that he was trying to convince himself he had seen nothing.

  "Nothing!" said Lizzie scornfully. "It was some nothing that would make him drop a bottle of whisky!"

  But Billy only backed toward the door, smiling apologetically.

  "Thought I saw ghost," he said, and went out and down the stairs, the candlelight flickering, growing fainter, and finally disappearing. Silence and eerie darkness enveloped them all as they waited. And suddenly out of the blackness came a sound.

  Something was flapping and thumping around the room.

  "That's damned odd." muttered Beresford uneasily. "There is some
thing moving around the room.

  "It's up near the ceiling!" cried Bailey as the sound began again.

  Lizzie began a slow wail of doom and disaster.

  "Oh - h - h - h - "

  "Good God!" cried Beresford abruptly. "It hit me in the face!" He slapped his hands together in a vain attempt to capture the flying intruder.

  Lizzie rose.

  "I'm going!" she announced. "I don't know where, but I'm going!"

  She took a wild step in the direction of the door. Then the flapping noise was all about her, her nose was bumped by an invisible object and she gave a horrified shriek.

  "It's in my hair!" she screamed madly. "It's in my hair!"

  The next instant Bailey gave a triumphant cry.

  "I've got it! It's a bat!"

  Lizzie sank to her knees, still moaning, and Bailey carried the cause of the trouble over to the window and threw it out.

  But the result of the absurd incident was a further destruction of their morale. Even Beresford, so far calm with the quiet of the virtuous onlooker, was now pallid in the light of the matches they successively lighted. And onto this strained situation came at last Billy and the Unknown.

  The Unknown still wore his air of dazed bewilderment, true or feigned, but at least he was now able to walk without support. They stared at him, at his tattered, muddy garments, at the threads of rope still clinging to his ankles - and wondered. He returned their stares vacantly.

  "Come in," began Miss Cornelia. "Sit down." He obeyed both commands docilely enough.

  "Are you better now?"

  "Somewhat." His words still came very slowly.

  "Billy - you can go."

  "I stay, please!" said Billy wistfully, making no movement to leave. His gesture toward the darkness of the corridor spoke louder than words.

  Bailey watched him, suspicion dawning in his eyes. He could not account for the butler's inexplicable terror of being left alone.

  "Anderson intimated that the Doctor had an accomplice in this house," he said, crossing to Billy and taking him by the arm. "Why isn't this the man?" Billy cringed away. "Please, no," he begged pitifully.

  Bailey turned him around so that he faced the Hidden Room.

  "Did you know that room was there?" he questioned, his doubts still unquieted.