The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  "I met the detectives outside, doctor," he said. "It's a terrible thing, sir, a terrible thing."

  "I'd keep the other servants out of this room, Hawkins."

  "Yes, sir." He went over to the sheet, lifted the edge slowly, and then replaced it, and tip-toed to the door. "The others are not back yet. I'll admit them, and get them up quietly. How is Mrs. Wells?"

  "Sleeping," Sperry said briefly, and Hawkins went out.

  I realize now that Sperry was—I am sure he will forgive this—in a state of nerves that night. For example, he returned only an impatient silence to my doubt as to whether Hawkins had really only just returned and he quite missed something downstairs which I later proved to have an important bearing on the case. This was when we were going out, and after Hawkins had opened the front door for us. It had been freezing hard, and Sperry, who has a bad ankle, looked about for a walking stick. He found one, and I saw Hawkins take a swift step forward, and then stop, with no expression whatever in his face.

  "This will answer, Hawkins."

  "Yes, sir," said Hawkins impassively.

  And if I realize that Sperry was nervous that night, I also realize that he was fighting a battle quite his own, and with its personal problems.

  "She's got to quit this sort of thing," he said savagely and apropos of nothing, as we walked along. "It's hard on her, and besides—"

  "Yes?"

  "She couldn't have learned about it," he said, following his own trail of thought. "My car brought her from her home to the house-door. She was brought in to us at once. But don't you see that if there are other developments, to prove her statements she—well, she's as innocent as a child, but take Herbert, for instance. Do you suppose he'll believe she had no outside information?"

  "But it was happening while we were shut in the drawing-room."

  "So Elinor claims. But if there was anything to hide, it would have taken time. An hour or so, perhaps. You can see how Herbert would jump on that."

  We went back, I remember, to speaking of the seance itself, and to the safer subject of the physical phenomena. As I have said, we did not then know of those experimenters who claim that the medium can evoke so-called rods of energy, and that by its means the invisible "controls" can perform their strange feats of levitation and the movement of solid bodies. Sperry touched very lightly on the spirit side.

  "At least it would mean activity," he said. "The thought of an inert eternity is not bearable."

  He was inclined, however, to believe that there were laws of which we were still in ignorance, and that we might some day find and use the fourth dimension. He seemed to be able to grasp it quite clearly. "The cube of the cube, or hypercube," he explained. "Or get it this way: a cone passed apex-downward through a plane."

  "I know," I said, "that it is perfectly simple. But somehow it just sounds like words to me."

  "It's perfectly clear, Horace," he insisted. "But remember this when you try to work it out; it is necessary to use motion as a translator of time into space, or of space into time."

  "I don't intend to work it out," I said irritably. "But I mean to use motion as a translator of the time, which is 1:30 in the morning, to take me to a certain space, which is where I live."

  But as it happened, I did not go into my house when I reached it. I was wide awake, and I perceived, on looking up at my wife's windows, that the lights were out. As it is her custom to wait up for me on those rare occasions when I spend an evening away from home, I surmised that she was comfortably asleep, and made my way to the pharmacy to which the Wellses' governess had referred.

  The night-clerk was in the prescription-room behind the shop. He had fixed himself comfortably on two chairs, with an old table-cover over his knee and a half-empty bottle of sarsaparilla on a wooden box beside him. He did not waken until I spoke to him.

  "Sorry to rouse you, Jim," I said.

  He flung off the cover and jumped up, upsetting the bottle, which trickled a stale stream to the floor. "Oh, that's all right, Mr. Johnson, I wasn't asleep, anyhow."

  I let that go, and went at once to the object of our visit. Yes, he remembered the governess, knew her, as a matter of fact. The Wellses' bought a good many things there. Asked as to her telephoning, he thought it was about nine o'clock, maybe earlier. But questioned as to what she had telephoned about, he drew himself up.

  "Oh, see here," he said. "I can't very well tell you that, can I? This business has got ethics, all sorts of ethics."

  He enlarged on that. The secrets of the city, he maintained loftily, were in the hands of the pharmacies. It was a trust that they kept. "Every trouble from dope to drink, and then some," he boasted.

  When I told him that Arthur Wells was dead his jaw dropped, but there was no more argument in him. He knew very well the number the governess had called.

  "She's done it several times," he said. "I'll be frank with you. I got curious after the third evening, and called it myself. You know the trick. I found out it was the Ellingham, house, up State Street."

  "What was the nature of the conversations?"

  "Oh, she was very careful. It's an open phone and any one could hear her. Once she said somebody was not to come. Another time she just said, 'This is Suzanne Gautier. 9:30, please.'"

  "And tonight?"

  "That the family was going out—not to call."

  When I told him it was a case of suicide, his jaw dropped.

  "Can you beat it?" he said. "I ask you, can you beat it? A fellow who had everything!"

  But he was philosophical, too.

  "A lot of people get the bug once in a while," he said. "They come in here for a dose of sudden death, and it takes watching. You'd be surprised the number of things that will do the trick if you take enough. I don't know. If things get to breaking wrong—"

  His voice trailed off, and he kicked at the old table cover on the floor.

  "It's a matter of the point of view," he said more cheerfully. "And my point of view just now is that this place is darned cold, and so's the street. You'd better have a little something to warm you up before you go out, Mr. Johnson."

  I was chilled through, to tell the truth, and although I rarely drink anything I went back with him and took an ounce or two of villainous whiskey, poured out of a jug into a graduated glass. It is with deep humiliation of spirit I record that a housemaid coming into my library at seven o'clock the next morning, found me, in top hat and overcoat, asleep on the library couch.

  I had, however, removed my collar and tie, and my watch, carefully wound, was on the smoking-stand beside me.

  The death of Arthur Wells had taken place on Monday evening. Tuesday brought nothing new. The coroner was apparently satisfied, and on Wednesday the dead man's body was cremated.

  "Thus obliterating all evidence," Sperry said, with what I felt was a note of relief.

  But I think the situation was bothering him, and that he hoped to discount in advance the second sitting by Miss Jeremy, which Mrs. Dane had already arranged for the following Monday, for on Wednesday afternoon, following a conversation over the telephone, Sperry and I had a private sitting with Miss Jeremy in Sperry's private office. I took my wife into our confidence and invited her to be present, but the unfortunate coldness following the housemaid's discovery of me asleep in the library on the morning after the murder, was still noticeable and she refused.

  The sitting, however, was totally without value. There was difficulty on the medium's part in securing the trance condition, and she broke out once rather petulantly, with the remark that we were interfering with her in some way.

  I noticed that Sperry had placed Arthur Wells's stick unobtrusively on his table, but we secured only rambling and non-pertinent replies to our questions, and whether it was because I knew that outside it was broad day, or because the Wells matter did not come up at all I found a total lack of that sense of the unknown which made all the evening sittings so grisly.

  I am sure she knew we had wanted something, and that s
he had failed to give it to us, for when she came out she was depressed and in a state of lowered vitality.

  "I'm afraid I'm not helping you," she said. "I'm a little tired, I think."

  She was tired. I felt suddenly very sorry for her. She was so pretty and so young—only twenty-six or thereabouts—to be in the grip of forces so relentless. Sperry sent her home in his car, and took to pacing the floor of his office.

  "I'm going to give it up, Horace," he said. "Perhaps you are right. We may be on the verge of some real discovery. But while I'm interested, so interested that it interferes with my work, I'm frankly afraid to go on. There are several reasons."

  I argued with him. There could be no question that if things were left as they were, a number of people would go through life convinced that Elinor Wells had murdered her husband. Look at the situation. She had sent out all the servants and the governess, surely an unusual thing in an establishment of that sort. And Miss Jeremy had been vindicated in three points; some stains had certainly been washed up, we had found the key where she had stated it to be, and Arthur had certainly been shaving himself.

  "In other words," I argued, "we can't stop, Sperry. You can't stop. But my idea would be that our investigations be purely scientific and not criminal."

  "Also, in other words," he said, "you think we will discover something, so you suggest that we compound a felony and keep it to ourselves!"

  "Exactly," I said drily.

  It is of course possible that my nerves were somewhat unstrung during the days that followed. I wakened one night to a terrific thump which shook my bed, and which seemed to be the result of some one having struck the foot-board with a plank. Immediately following this came a sharp knocking on the antique bed-warmer which hangs beside my fireplace. When I had sufficiently recovered my self-control I turned on my bedside lamp, but the room was empty.

  Again I wakened with a feeling of intense cold. I was frozen with it, and curiously enough it was an inner cold. It seemed to have nothing to do with the surface of my body. I have no explanation to make of these phenomena. Like the occurrences at the seance, they were, and that was all.

  But on Thursday night of that week my wife came into my bedroom, and stated flatly that there were burglars in the house.

  Now it has been my contention always that if a burglar gains entrance, he should be allowed to take what he wants. Silver can be replaced, but as I said to my wife then, Horace Johnson could not. But she had recently acquired a tea set formerly belonging to her great-grandmother, and apprehension regarding it made her, for the nonce, less solicitous for me than usual.

  "Either you go or I go," she said. "Where's your revolver?"

  I got out of bed at that, and went down the stairs. But I must confess that I felt, the moment darkness surrounded me, considerably less trepidation concerning the possible burglar than I felt as to the darkness itself. Mrs. Johnson had locked herself in my bedroom, and there was something horrible in the black depths of the lower hall.

  We are old-fashioned people, and have not yet adopted electric light. I carried a box of matches, but at the foot of the stairs the one I had lighted went out. I was terrified. I tried to light another match, but there was a draft from somewhere, and it too was extinguished before I had had time to glance about. I was immediately conscious of a sort of soft movement around me, as of shadowy shapes that passed and repassed. Once it seemed to me that a hand was laid on my shoulder and was not lifted, but instead dissolved into the other shadows around. The sudden striking of the clock on the stair landing completed my demoralization. I turned and fled upstairs, pursued, to my agonized nerves, by ghostly hands that came toward me from between the spindles of the stair-rail.

  At dawn I went downstairs again, heartily ashamed of myself. I found that a door to the basement had been left open, and that the soft movement had probably been my overcoat, swaying in the draft.

  Probably. I was not certain. Indeed, I was certain of nothing during those strange days. I had built up for myself a universe upheld by certain laws, of day and night, of food and sleep and movement, of three dimensions of space. And now, it seemed to me, I had stood all my life but on the threshold, and, for an hour or so, the door had opened.

  Sperry had, I believe, told Herbert Robinson of what we had discovered, but nothing had been said to the women. I knew through my wife that they were wildly curious, and the night of the second seance Mrs. Dane drew me aside and I saw that she suspected, without knowing, that we had been endeavoring to check up our revelations with the facts.

  "I want you to promise me one thing," she said. "I'll not bother you now. But I'm an old woman, with not much more of life to be influenced by any disclosures. When this thing is over, and you have come to a conclusion—I'll not put it that way: you may not come to a conclusion—but when it is over, I want you to tell me the whole story. Will you?"

  I promised that I would.

  Miss Jeremy did not come to dinner. She never ate before a seance. And although we tried to keep the conversational ball floating airily, there was not the usual effervescence of the Neighborhood Club dinners. One and all, we were waiting, we knew not for what.

  I am sorry to record that there were no physical phenomena of any sort at this second seance. The room was arranged as it had been at the first sitting, except that a table with a candle and a chair had been placed behind a screen for Mrs. Dane's secretary.

  There was one other change. Sperry had brought the walking-stick he had taken from Arthur Wells's room, and after the medium was in trance he placed it on the table before her.

  The first questions were disappointing in results. Asked about the stick, there was only silence. When, however, Sperry went back to the sitting of the week before, and referred to questions and answers at that time, the medium seemed uneasy. Her hand, held under mine, made an effort to free itself and, released, touched the cane. She lifted it, and struck the table a hard blow with it.

  "Do you know to whom that stick belongs?"

  A silence. Then: "Yes."

  "Will you tell us what you know about it?"

  "It is writing."

  "Writing?"

  "It was writing, but the water washed it away."

  Then, instantly and with great rapidity, followed a wild torrent of words and incomplete sentences. It is inarticulate, and the secretary made no record of it. As I recall, however, it was about water, children, and the words "ten o'clock" repeated several times.

  "Do you mean that something happened at ten o'clock?"

  "No. Certainly not. No, indeed. The water washed it away. All of it. Not a trace."

  "Where did all this happen?"

  She named, without hesitation, a seaside resort about fifty miles from our city. There was not one of us, I dare say, who did not know that the Wellses had spent the preceding summer there and that Charlie Ellingham had been there, also.

  "Do you know that Arthur Wells is dead?"

  "Yes. He is dead."

  "Did he kill himself?"

  "You can't catch me on that. I don't know."

  Here the medium laughed. It was horrible. And the laughter made the whole thing absurd. But it died away quickly.

  "If only the pocketbook was not lost," she said. "There were so many things in it. Especially car-tickets. Walking is a nuisance."

  Mrs. Dane's secretary suddenly spoke. "Do you want me to take things like that?" she asked.

  "Take everything, please," was the answer.

  "Car-tickets and letters. It will be terrible if the letters are found."

  "Where was the pocketbook lost?" Sperry asked.

  "If that were known, it could be found," was the reply, rather sharply given. "Hawkins may have it. He was always hanging around. The curtain was much safer."

  "What curtain?"

  "Nobody would have thought of the curtain. First ideas are best."

  She repeated this, following it, as once before, with rhymes for the final word, best, rest, chest, pest.


  "Pest!" she said. "That's Hawkins!" And again the laughter.

  "Did one of the bullets strike the ceiling?"

  "Yes. But you'll never find it. It is holding well. That part's safe enough—unless it made a hole in the floor above."

  "But there was only one empty chamber in the revolver. How could two shots have been fired?"

  There was no answer at all to this. And Sperry, after waiting, went on to his next question: "Who occupied the room overhead?"

  But here we received the reply to the previous question: "There was a box of cartridges in the table-drawer. That's easy."

  From that point, however, the interest lapsed. Either there was no answer to questions, or we got the absurdity that we had encountered before, about the drawing-room furniture. But, unsatisfactory in many ways as the seance had been, the effect on Miss Jeremy was profound—she was longer in coming out, and greatly exhausted when it was all over.

  She refused to take the supper Mrs. Dane had prepared for her, and at eleven o'clock Sperry took her home in his car.

  I remember that Mrs. Dane inquired, after she had gone.

  "Does any one know the name of the Wellses' butler? Is it Hawkins?"

  I said nothing, and as Sperry was the only one likely to know and he had gone, the inquiry went no further. Looking back, I realize that Herbert, while less cynical, was still skeptical, that his sister was non-committal, but for some reason watching me, and that Mrs. Dane was in a state of delightful anticipation.

  My wife, however, had taken a dislike to Miss Jeremy, and said that the whole thing bored her.

  "The men like it, of course," she said, "Horace fairly simpers with pleasure while he sits and holds her hand. But a woman doesn't impose on other women so easily. It's silly."

  "My dear," Mrs. Dane said, reaching over and patting my wife's hand, "people talked that way about Columbus and Galileo. And if it is nonsense it is such thrilling nonsense!"

  VI

  I find that the solution of the Arthur Wells mystery—for we did solve it—takes three divisions in my mind. Each one is a sitting, followed by an investigation made by Sperry and myself.