The Haunted Lady

by Rinehart, Mary Roberts;

  It is a pretty house. Mother’s taste in people may be catholic, but in houses and furnishings she knows her stuff. And except that Larry had left the front door standing open it looked as quiet and orderly as ever. Mother gave one look around and then climbed the stairs. That is, she got almost up and stopped.

  Isabel was lying on the landing, and there was no doubt that she was dead. She lay on her back, her arms outstretched, and except that one of her bedroom mules was off there was no sign of any struggle. Her lovely dark hair was spread over the carpet, making a frame for her face, and one arm was out of her dressing gown, as though she had been putting it on when she met her murderer.

  Not that I noticed that then. All I could see was the small spot of blood on the front of her silk nightgown.

  Mother stood very still, looking down at her. Then she reached down and touched the hand nearest to her. She drew back, and I knew Isabel really was dead. Neither of us said anything. Then Mother sank down on the stairs, as if she felt faint, and when Larry came pounding back she was still there. She wouldn’t move to let him pass.

  “There is nothing you can do,” she said. “Go down and call the police. I’m here.”

  I went down to the porch with Larry. Alma was standing there, looking like death, and a few moments later I heard the siren. A police car swung in on two wheels and stopped with the engine still going. Two uniformed men leaped out. One of them touched his cap.

  “I understand you’ve had some trouble here,” he said.

  Larry braced himself.

  “We have. My wife …” He choked and did not finish.

  They pushed past us and into the house, to see Mother sitting on the stairs. She was holding that wretched diamond collar. In her glittering gold-brocade dress and with her bright red hair she completely stopped them. They stood gazing up at her. “My daughter-in-law is here,” she said. “I’m afraid somebody has stabbed her.”

  “Is she badly hurt?”

  “She is dead.”

  She let them pass then, but she stayed where she was. Behind me I heard Larry groan, and I turned and went back to him. I got him into the library, although he would not sit down. He paced the floor, looking like a wild man and saying over and over: “Who would do it? She had no enemies. Who would do it?” I think he didn’t even know he was speaking, or that I was there.

  It was only a minute or so before one of the officers came down the stairs to the telephone. He hung up and looked at Larry.

  “Who found her?” he asked.

  Larry tried to explain, but he made so bad a job of it that I took it over. I told about the party for the Mayor, the two hundred people, the orchestra, the forty extra waiters, even the Mayor’s screaming escort. And I told about Larry’s coming home to find Isabel dead. He looked bewildered.

  “What you’re saying, miss, is that close to three hundred people were in and out of this property tonight. That right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They all drove in at the gate out there?”

  “That’s the only way they could get in.”

  But the knowledge that the Mayor had been among them made him treat us both with more marked consideration.

  “Anything missing in the house?” he inquired. “It might have been a burglar. If she woke up and was raising an alarm … Anything valuable around?”

  The idea of a burglar at least gave Larry something to hold to. He said Isabel’s jewels were in the house. In the safe in her room. He even listed them, while the officer wrote them down: her diamond and other earrings, her bracelets, her clips and her pearls—although pearls are worth a dime a dozen nowadays. But when the officer came back again he said the safe was closed and locked.

  “Maybe if you’d come up and open it …” he suggested.

  Larry however had taken all he could. He shook his head.

  Mother was still on the stairs when the homicide squad arrived. They had to push past her. The Inspector came first, with his car jammed with detectives and a uniformed stenographer. Following him came another car with a photographer and fingerprint men, and soon after the captain of our local precinct, a youngish man who said he had been at a fire somewhere and been delayed. The hall and stairs were jammed, but Mother refused to move.

  “She was my son’s wife,” she said. “I was fond of her. And some woman has to stand by her now. She’s—helpless.”

  I had to take my hat off to her, tired as she was. She still had no slippers on her feet; she still hung on to her choker. But she never gave an inch, although she looked pretty sick.

  “What I want,” she said, “is to know who did this to her. And why?”

  That was at half-past twelve on Thursday, the 15th of last October, or rather the early morning of the 16th. There were police all over the house by that time, and to add to the confusion I had a half-dozen hysterical women on my hands. The sirens had wakened the maids, and one or two of them fainted when they heard what had happened. The rest were crying, and I would have given a lot to have slapped some sense into them. As it was, all I could do was force the cook to stop wailing and make coffee, and I took some myself. I was pretty jittery by that time. I was drinking it in the pantry when the photographer came and asked for a cup.

  He was a tall, thin young man. He looked tired, and I gave him the coffee quickly. I hardly noticed him, which seems queer now; but he eyed me with interest.

  “So you’re Judy Shepard,” he said.

  “Judith,” I said. “My mother’s answer to my father’s wish that I be named for his sister Henrietta.”

  He gave me a pale sort of grin, as if he understood why I had to talk or go into shrieking hysterics.

  “I’m Anthony King,” he said. “Generally known as Tony.” He seemed to think I might know the name. I didn’t.

  “Any ideas about this thing?” he asked. “See any weapon when you got here? Anybody hate your sister-in-law? No. Then do you mind if I sit down? I’m just getting over a spell in the hospital.”

  He sat down rather abruptly and drank his coffee. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a fine platinum chain with a small white silk tassel hung on it. I stared at it.

  “Ever see it before?”

  “Never”

  “It was under the—under Mrs. Shepard. Kind of funny, isn’t it? I mean, do women hang tassels on chains?”

  He let me take it and look at it. I suppose because there could be no fingerprints on a thing like that. The chain was the usual sort, but the tassel was not. It was ordinary enough in itself, but on the small solid top someone had made a cross in ink.

  The King man had his eyes on me.

  “Curious, isn’t it?” he said.

  I gave it back to him.

  “I can’t imagine her having a thing like that,” I told him. “You’d better show it to the police.”

  “They know I have it,” he said cryptically, and got up. “I’m just asking around.”

  He stopped in the doorway however and looked back at me.

  “Look here,” he said, “you can’t do anything, you know. Why not get out, for a while anyhow? Go home and get some rest. You may not know it, but you have a bad case of shock.”

  Well, I suppose I had, for the next thing I realized was that I was in a chair and he was pushing my head down between my knees.

  “Take it easy,” he was saying. “You’re a big girl now, and big girls don’t faint.”

  He didn’t leave me until the pantry shelves had stopped whirling, dishes and all. Then he wandered back to see the women in the kitchen, and I carried coffee to Mother. She was still on the stairs, looking defiantly at the police as they trampled over and around her. I thought she wanted to say something to me, but there was no chance.

  She never moved until at two o’clock the police ambulance came to take Isabel away. Larry was in the library with the Inspector, whose name turned out to be Welles, and a half-dozen detectives. Alma had been sent up to the house for the guest list of the d
inner, and it was being checked over in the sun parlor. Other policemen were searching inside and out for the weapon, which the medical examiner had said was a knife. But they had not found it when the ambulance came.

  Mother got up then. It was the first time she had moved since she saw the body. She came downstairs stiffly, to close the library door so that Larry would not see that awful basket being carried out. She looked very queer. Not shocked, exactly. If anything, she looked stealthy.

  It seems queer, but it was not until then that we remembered the Lelands, and Larry finally roused enough to call them. As I have said, their house is still in the heart of town, one of those survivors of a past age before cars came and most people either evacuated the city or moved into apartments. It is a big square red-brick affair which has never compromised with the last quarter century. The Lelands were like that too. They belonged to the no-surrender group. The old lady, Isabel’s grandmother, used a handsome pair of horses and a carriage for her daily outing until she died. Her spinster daughter, Eliza, had lived up to the family tradition, devoted herself to her mother and good works, and left Isabel a fortune in trust when she passed on, the Leland words for dying. Isabel’s father, Andrew—always Andrew, never Andy—still wore a small imperial and a stiff winged collar. He was a precise, dapper little man usually, but there was nothing precise about him when, at three that morning, he stormed into Larry’s house.

  The first thing he saw however was Mother, and he stopped dead.

  “What is all this?” he demanded. “What has happened? Where’s Isabel?”

  “I’m sorry, Andrew,” Mother said. She had called him by his first name since the day Larry and Isabel were married, and he hated it. “I didn’t think Larry was being clear. It’s true.”

  “You mean that Isabel—”

  “They’ve taken her away. The police, I mean. I tried to stop them, but—Andrew, this will be a shock. She didn’t just die. She was—somebody killed her.”

  He took it very well. You have to say that for the Lelands of this world. They can take it. Pride or simply restraint, they can take it. And Andrew Leland, save that he sat down suddenly on one of the hall chairs, kept himself well in control. He shook his head when I brought him some brandy.

  “Just a moment,” he said. “I—I’m afraid I … It’s a great shock.” And after a minute: “Where is Lawrence? What does he know about this?”

  “He found her,” said Mother. “That’s all he knows. He loved her and he found her. Just remember that, Andrew.”

  She looked almost dangerous. They can talk all they like about a lioness protecting her young, but a lioness has nothing on a woman like Mother protecting her beloved son. She glared down at Andrew Leland, and he buried his face in his hands and groaned.

  “God knows how I’m to tell Emily,” he said, and got up. “Where is Lawrence?” he inquired, more steadily.

  “In the library. The police are there.”

  He went in, not bothering to knock. The Inspector looked up, annoyed. Then he saw who it was and came forward.

  “Very sorry about this, Mr. Leland,” he said. “Very sorry indeed.”

  Andrew, however, was not looking at the Inspector. He was staring at Larry, sunk in a chair and looking collapsed. “I would like to speak to Mr. Shepard alone,” he said.

  The Inspector did not like it.

  “Perhaps I’d better tell you first all we know,” he said. “If you’d care to sit down …”

  I don’t believe he would have, but Mother was beside him. She gave him a shove, and looking very surprised he found himself in a chair. The Inspector seemed gratified. I even thought he looked amused.

  “These are the facts so far as we know them, Mr. Leland,” he said. “At eight o’clock Mr. Shepard left this house for a dinner at his mother’s. His wife had intended to go, but at the last moment complained of not feeling well, and Mr. Shepard suggested that she go to bed instead. This she did. Her personal maid reports that she was in bed at eight-thirty. She seemed nervous and upset.

  “Between nine and ten the other servants all went to bed. But the personal maid, Anna Griffin, left the house by the kitchen door at nine o’clock and walked to Strathmore House. According to her story she was gone about an hour, leaving the kitchen door unlocked. She stopped and explained who she was to the mounted officer on duty in the driveway, and then went on to the house.

  “She stayed there outside a window, looking in and listening to the music, for approximately one hour. Then she came back to this house and went to bed. She did not enter this part of the building at all. There was a bell from your daughter’s room to her own, and the parlormaid, who was still awake and reading, reports that it did not ring.

  “At eleven-thirty Mr. Shepard left his mother’s house and came home. The front door was locked. He used his key to get in, and he found the lower hall dark. This, he says, surprised him, as a light is always left on until he comes in. He did not bother to turn it on, and so”—here his voice became almost human—“he had the unfortunate experience of stumbling over his wife at the top of the stairs.

  “I suppose we must make some allowance for the resulting delay. He did not call us at once. Instead he ran back to his mother’s house and collapsed there. His mother and sister came here and he followed them almost immediately. He then notified us.”

  Andrew Leland looked up.

  “That’s his story,” he said. “He could have left his mother’s house earlier, couldn’t he? There was a crowd of people. I understand half the undesirables in town were there.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Andrew!” Mother snapped. “Just because you don’t like me is no reason to accuse Larry. And if you want to know, the people I had tonight—”

  The Inspector looked tired.

  “Just what reason have you, Mr. Leland, for intimating that your son-in-law did this thing?”

  “I said he could have. When did she … When did it happen?”

  “Probably between nine and ten. The medical examiner may be able to set the time closer.”

  “We didn’t finish dinner until almost ten,” Mother broke in triumphantly.

  But nobody was listening. Not even Larry. All this time he had not spoken. It was as though everything was unimportant except for the single fact that Isabel was dead. I think he hadn’t even heard Mr. Leland’s accusation. He stirred now, however. “Why?” he said, out of a clear sky. “Why would anyone want to kill her? She never hurt anybody in her life.”

  The Inspector looked at him.

  “I suppose you can account for your time, Mr. Shepard?”

  “Not exactly. I didn’t look at my watch.”

  “Did you leave the house at all during the evening? Your mother’s house?”

  Larry shrugged.

  “I went outside after dinner was over,” he said indifferently. “To get away from the noise. I lit a cigarette and walked down the drive a few yards. That’s all.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “I don’t know. It was pretty dark. I heard the policeman’s horse. I’m not sure he was on it. If he was he could have seen me. The outside lights were off on account of the dimout, but I left the hall door open.

  “You didn’t come down to your own house?”

  “I wish to God I had.”

  “What about cars? Were there no chauffeurs around?”

  “There were a few parked cars, but their lights were off too. The cars with chauffeurs had been told to stay outside in Linden Avenue until they were called.”

  The Inspector abandoned Larry for the minute. He picked up the platinum chain with its tassel and held it out.

  “Do you recognize this, Mr. Leland?” he inquired.

  Andrew Leland looked uncertain.

  “I don’t remember it. What about it?”

  The Inspector explained, but Andrew shook his head.

  “I wouldn’t know. Perhaps Emily—perhaps my wife will remember.”

  The thought of his wife seemed
to overwhelm him. He got out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead, and I glanced at Mother. All at once I felt there was something queer about her. She nodded her head to me, but I couldn’t understand what she meant. The Inspector was talking. There had been no robbery. Isabel’s pearls were on her dressing table, as was her huge square-cut diamond engagement ring. Larry had given the police the combination of Isabel’s safe, but her bracelets and other jewels were still there.

  “That is not conclusive, of course,” he said. “The man might have been scared off, perhaps by the maid’s return. And we have not been able to find the weapon. It may have been thrown into the shrubbery, and we will find it in the morning. Mr. Shepard states that he saw no weapon by the body, and so does his mother.”

  “I wouldn’t believe either one of them on oath,” said Andrew Leland, and gave Larry a look of pure hatred.

  That was when Mother did something she had never done before. She simply put her head back in her chair, closed her eyes, and sagged. Larry was on his feet in a second, yelling for water. But by the time he reached her she was over whatever it was. She looked up pathetically.

  “I’m so tired, Larry,” she said. “I’m too old for this sort of thing. Can’t I go home and go to bed?”

  I knew then that it was an act. In all her life Mother has never admitted age, and she has never wanted to go to bed until there was nothing left to stay up for. For some reason she wanted to get out of the house.

  I played it up as well as I could. “She’s had a frightful day,” I said. “And of course she is getting on, as she says.” She gave me a nasty look from under her eyelids. “I can take her home, if you like. That is, if she can walk.”

  They wouldn’t let her walk, however. They took her in one of the police cars, and one of my most vivid memories of that awful night is Mother padding out in her stocking feet, holding to an officer’s arm and giving everyone in the room but Andrew Leland a faint but winsome farewell nod.