We had reached White Falls. It was a small town of perhaps a thousand inhabitants. It was built on the bank of the Grassy River. White Falls had once been prosperous, but now many old dwellings were deserted, and the entire place had a sleepy, “we’ve seen better days,” appearance.
“Well, we’re here,” I said, parking the car in front of a restaurant at the edge of the business section. “I wonder where we’ll find Old Mansion?”
“The advertisement gave no address,” Emma said.
“I’ll run into the café and inquire,” I offered
I returned in a moment but did not climb back into the car.
“We stopped at the right place, girls. Old Mansion is next door.”
“Next door!” Emma turned to stare at the row of buildings. “You don’t mean that old house jammed in between the café and that laundry!”
“I’m afraid that’s the place all right.”
“It’s so run down,” said Emma. “There’s no yard and the rear of the building borders directly on the river. How could they call it a mansion?”
“Someone did have plenty of imagination,” I agreed. “But it certainly is large, and I judge the house has seen better days. That laundry, for instance, appears to have been built quite recently.”
“I wouldn’t apply for the position if I were you, Emma,” advised Florence.
“No,” I said. “Emma, if you don’t care for the look of it, we’ll simply drive back.”
Emma stared again at the shabby wooden building whose sagging porch fronted the street, and after an obvious struggle with herself, said: “No, it’s probably all right inside. Anyway, I’m desperate for a job. If the place is still open, I’ll take it!”
She stepped from the car and started toward the house.
“Wait a moment, Florence,” I said. “I have to lock the car.”
I fumbled with the key, and then, when Emma was beyond hearing, I said in an undertone: “Florence, I don’t know what to do. There’s something I should tell Emma, and yet I’m afraid it will upset her.”
“About Old Mansion?” she asked.
“Yes, a strange thing happened. When I asked the café owner to direct me to the place, he gave me the oddest look. ‘It’s the house is next door,’ he said, ‘but take my advice and don’t spend a night there!’”
CHAPTER 3
“Didn’t you ask the man what he meant about not staying the night?” Florence asked.
“Certainly, I did, Flo. He merely shrugged, and said it was his opinion I’d not like the place.”
“Then he meant nothing after all?”
“I’m not sure. I think he started to tell me something and changed his mind. Anyway, the question is, shall I tell Emma?”
“She’ll never take the job if you do.”
“That’s what I figured. Of course, if the place is undesirable, we wouldn’t wish her to have it.”
“Why not wait until we learn the outcome of the interview?”
“Perhaps that would be wise,” I said.
Emma had paused to wait for us.
“Shall we wait outside or go in with you?” I asked Emma.
“You don’t mind coming along?”
“Not in the least.”
“Then I wish you would. I dread being interviewed by strangers.”
We let ourselves through a dirty picket fence and made our way to the porch. A card in the front window bore the words: “Tourist Rooms.”
Flo rang the doorbell. A lean woman, with frowsy hair scorched from a curling iron, came to the door. She had a sharp, angular face and a large nose which drew attention away from her other imperfect features.
“Well?” she said.
Not very welcoming, I thought, for someone in the business of catering to tourists.
Emma became confused and could not answer, so I replied that we were there in response to an advertisement inserted in the Greenville Examiner.
“Come in,” the woman said. She stared at us each in turn. “You’re not from White Falls, are you?”
“No, we live in Greenville,” I said.
“I’d rather have a girl from somewhere besides White Falls. But I warn you the work is hard. There’s scrubbing and washing and ironing to do. You look—"
“Oh, I’m not applying for the position,” I said. “This is Emma Brown. She is the one who is interested. Your name is—”
“Mrs. Earnestine Conrad,” replied the woman. She frowned as she stared Emma up and down. “You’re not very strong, are you?”
“I’ve never been afraid of hard work,” faltered Emma.
“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Conrad.
“Emma has had considerable experience in caféterias and restaurants,” I said, considerably embroidering the truth. “I am sure you will find her both capable and willing.”
“I might take you on trial,” the woman told Emma. “You’ll start in at two dollars a week, plus board and room.”
“But the advertisement said $2.50 a week,” Emma protested.
“Two dollars—take it or leave it. Later, if you’re a hard worker and know how to mind your business, maybe I can raise you to three.”
Emma glanced over at Flo and me. Flo shook her head, and I mouthed, “Don’t do it.”
“I guess I’ll take it,” said Emma, ignoring our advice.
She really must be desperate for work, I thought. Maybe her statements about starving hadn’t been that much of an exaggeration.
“Then get into your work clothes right away,” Mrs. Conrad ordered. “I’m in the middle of a big ironing. You can take over while I do my grocery buying.”
Before Emma could reply, a short, pudgy man with alert, darting eyes entered the parlor. He looked at us, then looked at his wife.
“Who are they, Earnestine?” he asked.
“The new housemaid, and some of her friends,” his wife replied.
“We’ll help you bring in your luggage, Emma,” I said.
Florence and I carried the heavy suitcase to an upstairs room which Mrs. Conrad had assigned Emma. It was a plainly furnished chamber with ugly wall paper and an uncomfortable bed.
“Emma, do you think you really wish to stay?” I said. “If I’m any judge of character, Mrs. Conrad will prove a hard taskmaster.”
“Oh, I expect it. But I’ll stick it out for a few weeks, anyway.”
I wondered again if I was doing the right thing by keeping from Emma what the café owner had said about Old Mansion. I had just decided to tell her when Mrs. Conrad called out from the foot of the stairway.
“Hurry and change your clothes, Miss Brown,” she called. “I want you to get started at the ironing.”
“I’ll be right down,” Emma said.
Emma changed her shoes and dress and ran down to the kitchen, leaving us to unpack the suitcase for her.
“I believe we should wait around for an hour or so,” I said. “Emma may change her mind and decide to return with us.”
“Yes,” agreed Florence, “Mrs. Conrad is starting out like a slave driver. It looks as if poor Emma will not have much free time for herself.”
“I didn’t care for her husband, either,” I said.
“He acted so suspicious of us.”
“Just his rude way, I imagine.”
We had finished hanging Emma’s garments in the rickety wardrobe when Florence, who chanced to be near the window, noticed Mrs. Conrad going down the street, market basket on her arm.
The coast was clear, so we ran down to the kitchen to talk with Emma.
She was hard at work on a huge basket of ironing. The sink was filled to overflowing with dirty dishes.
“I know I’ll never make good here,” Emma said. “Mrs. Conrad expects me to finish the ironing, do the scrubbing and the dishes before supper time! I can’t possibly get half of it done.”
“I should think not!” I said. “Mrs. Conrad should employ an octopus, not a mere human being.”
“There’s the dusting t
o do, too,” Emma added.
“We’ll help you,” Florence said. “I’ll start in on the dishes. I wonder where Old Conrad keeps her soap chips?”
“Don’t bother to look for them,” I advised. “A woman of her stingy character wouldn’t squander money on soap.”
I found a dust cloth in the cellarway, and, while Florence devoted herself to the dishes, began an energetic attack on the furniture. It was a tedious task. The large rooms were crowded with massive pieces, bric-a-brac, and each wall was covered with oil portraits in heavy frames.
“Good afternoon, General,” I clowned, making a mock bow before the picture of an ancient warlord. “What a scowling old fellow you are! The Conrad temperament, no doubt. Would his generalship like to have his face wiped?”
As I dusted the paintings, I wondered how Mr. and Mrs. Conrad had come have so many. If the portraits had been done by worthwhile artists, they would have been worth a pretty penny, but, although the frames were high-quality, they housed the most hideously amateurish collection of oil portraiture I’d ever seen.
The Conrads had not impressed me as patrons of the arts. I decided that the pictures must be the work of a dear departed family member with more enthusiasm than talent and that the massive furniture must have been handed down by more prosperous relatives.
I dusted the lower floor, then went back to the kitchen where I dried the dishes while Florence washed. Emma worked doggedly at the ironing, but the pile of clothes in the basket melted slowly.
“I’ll never get through before dinner time,” she said, glancing at the clock. “Mrs. Conrad is due back here any minute.”
“Why kill yourself trying?” I said. “The more I see of this place, the less I like it.”
“I’d like to make a good impression, but these clothes are so hard to iron. They are wrinkled and dry.”
Emma reached up to the shelf above the ironing board for a sprinkling glass which stood there. Her arm brushed against a bottle of bluing left uncorked by Mrs. Conrad.
Before Emma could prevent the disaster, the bottle upset and tumbled down on the ironing board. An ugly blue stain spread slowly over a white shirt.
“Oh, what have I done now!” Emma cried in dismay. “I’ve ruined one of Mr. Conrad’s shirts! Now I’m certain to lose my job!”
CHAPTER 4
While I ran for a cloth to wipe up the spot on the floor boards, Emma plunged the shirt into a pan of cold water under the spigot at the sink.
“Only part of the stain is coming out!” she wailed. “What shall I do?”
“Let it soak for a while,” Florence suggested.
“Perhaps, Mrs. Conrad has some stain remover fluid in the house,” I said.
I searched through the cupboards and the shelves by the cellarway but could find nothing which would serve the purpose. Emma continued to scrub at the shirt.
“Well, it’s not coming out,” Emma said. “I may as well start packing my things.”
“Mrs. Conrad might not say anything about it,” Florence ventured.
“She’ll say plenty,” Emma replied grimly. “Oh, why must I be so awkward? It seems luck is just against me.”
“I have an idea!” I said. “There’s a laundry next door. We’ll take the shirt over there and see if they can remove the stain!”
“You’ll never get it back in time,” Emma protested.
“Maybe we will,” I insisted. “Anyway, there’s nothing to lose by trying. You keep on with that stupid ironing, Emma, while Florence and I see what we can do. If Mrs. Conrad returns ahead of us, we’ll try to smuggle the shirt into the basket without her seeing it.”
I wrapped the stained garment in an old newspaper, and Flo and I went next door. The laundry—which proclaimed itself to be the establishment of one Sing Lee— looked fairly new. It was a two-story building which stood so close to Old Mansion that the walls touched.
We entered the laundry and were immediately greeted by a young blond woman who would have looked more at home in a cabaret. She wore a long string of pearls over her silk dress. Her bright-red hair was bobbed, and she’d rimmed her eyes in kohl. I couldn’t imagine her doing any washing or ironing.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“Bluing was spilled on this garment,” I said, unwrapping the shirt. “Can you remove the stain?”
The girl looked at the shirt.
“Ralph?” She yelled toward the back room.
“What do ya want now, Violet?” Ralph grumbled as he emerged.
Ralph looked even less like he belonged in a laundry than Violet. He was a large, well-built man, dressed in a blue pinstriped suit. I had never before seen a man keep his hat on indoors.
If I’d been forced to guess Ralph’s profession based purely on appearance, I’d have gone for a bouncer at a better class of speakeasy. I wondered how the apparently absent Mr. Lee had come to entrust his establishment to the care of these two.
“It’s a very bad stain,” Ralph said, turning the garment over in his hands, but barely looking at it. He seemed far more interested in examining Flo and me.
Flo was drinking him in, her mouth gapping open. I gave her what I hoped was a surreptitious jab to the ribcage. Flo can be a bit man-crazy, and even I had to admit that Ralph was quite a fine specimen of manhood.
“Can you get the stain out?” I asked.
“I can get it out,” said Ralph. “Can you come back for it tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow! We need it done right away. Say in fifteen minutes.”
Ralph shook his head and thrust the shirt back into my hands.
“You wouldn’t need to iron it,” I urged. “Just remove the stain for us. That shouldn’t take long.”
“Fifty cents, cash up front,” Ralph said.
I was pretty sure that was many times the going rate for laundering shirts, but I handed him the money, trying not to think how many gallons of gas I could put in Bouncing Betsy for that princely sum.
Flo and I sat down on a hard, wooden bench to wait.
“He’s a Sheik,” Flo whispered as Ralph vanished into the rear room and closed the door behind him. I heard a key turn in the lock after he entered the room, then, behind the locked door, I heard him carrying on an indistinct conversation with some other person who spoke so low I could not even tell if it was a man or a woman.
The girl, Violet—and ostensibly, Ralph’s Sheba—remained at the counter, examining her manicure and keeping watch on us out of the corner of her eye. Ralph returned shortly and announced to the girl that he was going out. He didn’t say where. Violet just nodded and went back to examining her manicure.
“I hope whoever they’ve got back there does a good job on that shirt,” Flo whispered.
I tilted my head backwards to look at the ceiling.
“Did you notice what you’re sitting under, Flo?”
Florence glanced up, and with a little cry of alarm, sprang to her feet. A heavy silver sword with an intricately molded handle and a wicked looking blade had been suspended over her head.
“Oh, it won’t bite you,” I said. ‘It looks quite secure.”
“I might be decapitated if it should fall from its support! You don’t catch me sitting under that thing!”
Flo got up and moved to the other side of the room, and I followed.
I looked over at the girl loitering behind the counter. Violet was smiling to herself but continued to look down at her fingernails.
A bell tinkled, and the girl went to the door leading into the back room. She took out a key from her pocket, opened the door a crack, and reached inside. An unseen person inside deposited the laundered shirt into her hands.
Violet returned to the counter with the shirt and spread it out for our inspection. Whoever did the actual washing had done a beautiful job. There was no trace of a stain, and the shirt had been starched and pressed. There was even a piece of stiff paper placed inside the collar to keep it in shape.
“You’re not from White Falls, ar
e you?” Violet asked as she wrapped up the shirt in brown paper.
“We’re from Greenville,” Flo said. “We’re staying next door.”
“Are you staying at Old Mansion tonight?”
“No, we’re merely here with a friend,” I said.
We carried the shirt back to the house next door, taking care to enter the kitchen quietly. There was no sign of Mrs. Conrad, or, for that matter, of Emma. The ironing had been stacked neatly on the kitchen table.
“I suppose she’s working upstairs,” Florence said.
I unwrapped the shirt and removed the stiff paper ring from the collar. I stuffed the paper ring into the pocket of my dress and rumpled the freshly laundered shirt up a bit before inserting it near the bottom of the pile that Emma had finished ironing.
Flo and I were just leaving the kitchen when there was a piercing scream from one of the upstairs rooms.
“That was Emma’s voice!”
We darted up the circular stairway two at a time, wondering what latest misfortune had come upon our friend. Emma’s room was empty.
We were still standing in the hallway in front of Emma’s room when the door of room seven opened, and Emma burst out into the hall. Her face was white, and the pupils of her eyes were dilated with fear.
“What is the matter, Emma?” I asked.
“That room—” Emma whispered. “Those paintings!”
We stepped into room seven. It was a large chamber with a massive fourposter walnut bed, dresser, and the usual chairs. Heavy draperies in a dark brown velvet hung at the windows, one of which overlooked the river, directly beneath. On the east wall were four portraits done in oil and hung in massive gilt frames. The figures were very nearly life-size, the faces depressing.
“It is in pretty awful taste,” I said. “Rather an assault on the eyes, but what on earth made you scream like that, Emma?”
“That painting on the wall,” Emma whispered. “The portrait of the man with the red velvet hat—I was dusting—”
She broke off suddenly as we heard a door slam downstairs.
“Mrs. Conrad!” Emma said. “She mustn’t find us here!”
Jane Carter Historical Cozies: Omnibus Edition (Six Mystery Novels) Page 17