Episode of the Wandering Knife
Page 29
Fuller said nothing for some time. Then he got out his cigarette case and in the dim light held it out.
“For God’s sake take a cigarette and remind me that you’re merely human,” he said. “And even a damned fine woman—at times.”
He leaned over and lit it for her. In the lamplight he saw that she was close to breaking down. He made an effort to rally her.
“You know,” he observed, “there are a good many times when you absolutely terrify me. Here you had a locked door to start with, a bandage on Nina Rowland’s arm, a volume of the Encyclopedia as a doorstop, a bump on your head, a stolen watch returned, a lady named Hayes who registered horror, and a letter from Honolulu. That’s all you had for quite a while, isn’t it? Until Alice was killed. And you make a case out of it!”
She looked rather relaxed, as he had hoped. She even took a puff of the cigarette, coughed, and then put it down.
“I had Tony,” she said, almost apologetically. “I liked her, you know. And what about her mother was so dreadful that she didn’t want her father to come home? Or that she didn’t want either the doctor or me to know about it? I—I stuck to my bullet in Nina’s arm for quite a while.” She smiled faintly. “I felt rather stupid about the whole thing, really. I should have known the night she burned the bandages. And there was that article in the Encyclopedia. Only in this country we don’t think about such things.”
He looked over at her, his expression one of genuine fondness tempered by exasperation.
“I wish to God you’d work with me on my cases,” he said. “Not against me. But I don’t mind telling you you’ve done a damn fine job. Or advising you to go to bed for a week. Why not?” he added as she shook her head. “Tony will get over this. She’s faced worse than death for her mother. And she’s got Johnny Hayes. We’ve had to put a guard around her, to keep him out of her room. He ought to be a Commando, that boy.”
“You haven’t arrested him?”
He smiled sheepishly.
“I can sympathize with young lovers too,” he said. “I’m not so damned old myself. Anyhow both those boys are on their way to a war. Who am I to stop them? Only by heck they’re going to pay for that window they broke.” He grinned. “Quite a neat little plot they hatched with Aggie, wasn’t it?” he went on. “The kitchen door unlocked, and the sergeant breaking the window across the street and running like blazes while our man followed him. And you shut in your room! I’d like to have seen your face then. It must have been something to see.”
“It’s never been anything to see,” she observed drily.
“Still and all I rather like it.”
He went over and stood looking down at her.
“You don’t mean this chicken stuff, do you?” he inquired. “After all, Hilda, I need you. Maybe in more ways than you know.”
If Hilda flushed he did not see it.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t go sentimental on me,” she said brusquely. “I’m tired and I need a bath. So do you probably. Go home and get a night’s sleep. That’s what I mean to do.”
And it Was not until he was outside in the cool October night that he felt a faint sense of relief. He had his job and his comfortable bachelor quarters. And a policeman had no business with a wife.
He grinned as he realized that Hilda had once more saved him from a grave mistake.
About the Author
Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) was one of the United States’s most popular early mystery authors. Born in Pittsburgh to a clerk at a sewing machine agency, Rinehart trained as a nurse and married a doctor after her graduation from nursing school. She wrote fiction in her spare time until a stock market crash sent her and her young husband into debt, forcing her to lean on her writing to pay the bills. Her first two novels, The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909), established her as a bright young talent, and it wasn’t long before she was one of the nation’s most popular mystery novelists.
Among her dozens of novels are The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911), which began a six-book series, and The Bat (originally published in 1920 as a play), which was among the inspirations for Bob Kane’s Batman. Credited with inventing the phrase “The butler did it,” Rinehart is often called an American Agatha Christie, even though she began writing much earlier than Christie, and was much more popular during her heyday.
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