Miss Pinkerton

by Rinehart, Mary Roberts;

  On the second floor, not counting the locked-off rooms where Mary and Hugo lived, were three bedrooms. One of them, a small room behind Miss Juliet’s, was largely dismantled, however, and Miss Juliet’s was what used to be called the main chamber. It lay over the library and the lower hall along the front of the house, and opened onto the upper hall. My own room was next to it, also along the front of the house, but smaller, with a window at the rear as well as at the front and side.

  The third floor, as I discovered later, was not greatly unlike the second, save that the ceilings were lower.

  That morning, however, I had only time to glance at the lower floor, and on my way upstairs to stop and examine the door leading back into the servants’ wing. I remembered something the Inspector had told me: that the outside door at the foot of the back stairs, the stairs which led to this wing, was the only one which lacked a bolt. In that case, the only exit which could have been made, outside of the windows, would have been by that door with its spring lock. But as that side entrance led only into a small entry, with a door to the kitchen which the servants locked each night, carrying the key upstairs with them by Miss Juliet’s orders, and to the staircase by which they reached their rooms, it appeared to me that this door on the landing might have some strategic value.

  But that door offered nothing. It was both locked and bolted, and the bolt was shoved home in plain sight, as the Inspector had said. Clearly no one could have left the house by that door, and bolted it behind him.

  As a matter of fact, my inspection of that door very nearly got me into trouble that morning. I had just time to stoop and pretend to be tying my shoe when Mary opened Miss Juliet’s door. But I thought she looked at least as frightened as I felt when she saw me, and as she scurried past me, I was convinced of something else. She was holding something under her apron.

  I watched her down the stairs, and at the foot she stopped and looked back at me. Like Miss Juliet and myself the night before, we must have presented a curious little tableau for that second; but in my position suspicion is fatal, and so I turned and started back to Miss Juliet. It was then that the doorbell rang, and, listening carefully, it seemed to me that Mary just inside the front parlor, did not answer it at once; that there was a quick movement of some sort, perhaps by the library door. But I could not be certain, and almost immediately I heard the front door opened.

  It was Mr. Glenn, stopping on his way to his office to inquire about the old lady. I went down myself to tell him of her condition, and thus interrupted Mary in a flood of indignation over Hugo’s experience at Headquarters. He looked annoyed himself.

  “Of course it’s an outrage,” he said. “I’ll see that it isn’t repeated, Mary. And I’ll talk to Hugo. You’d better get him.”

  Having thus got rid of her for the moment, he turned to me. But he was still irritable. “Trust the police to make a mess of it,” he said. “Hugo’s been with Miss Mitchell for thirty years. That ought to prove something. And what are the police after, anyhow? Either Herbert Wynne killed himself or he met with an accident. There’s nothing for the police in either case. How is Miss Mitchell this morning? Did she sleep?”

  “She rested. I don’t think she slept much.”

  He stood there looking about the shabby hall, so old and worn in the morning sunlight, and apparently he felt its contrast with his own prosperous appearance, his neatly shaved face, his good, well-cut clothes, the car in the drive outside. He frowned a little.

  “She has had a hard life,” he said. “Not that this unfortunate event deprives her of much that she valued, but still … Has she talked at all?”

  “Not to me.”

  “We’d like her to think of it as an accident. I suppose you know that?”

  “The doctor said so. Yes.”

  He lowered his voice. “They hadn’t been the best of friends, Herbert and Miss Mitchell. If she thought now that he had done away with himself, I doubt if she would survive it. All we can hope is that the coroner will see the light on this case.”

  Hugo arrived then, and I went back to my patient. I thought she seemed flushed, but she had no fever. When I bathed her—under protest at that, for she wanted Mary to do it—I noticed that the soles of her delicate old feet were now soft and unsoiled, and that puzzled me. Certainly she had been out of the room that early morning and soiled her feet on those carpets, which were not clean. They looked as if the dust of ages were in them.

  That mystery was solved, however, when I found a damp washcloth in the bathroom. Either alone or with Mary’s help the old lady had removed the traces of that nocturnal journey of hers! Then it had been a journey. There had been no cramp in the leg. She had lied, and I rather thought she was not given to lying.

  I said nothing, of course. I changed her bed and her gown, and then stood back.

  “Are you comfortable now?”

  “Quite comfortable, my dear.”

  I dare say all nurses grow fond of their patients, if they are given a chance. I do not know just why, unless it is that they appeal to the maternal in us. Or perhaps it is even more than that. For a brief time, a week or a month, we become a bit of God, since it is His peace which we try to bring. But that morning I began to resent my place in that house, with its spying and watching. I wanted to help that poor old woman. And she would not allow me to help her. She never did.

  Hugo and Mr. Glenn were still closeted in the library when I had finished, but Mr. Glenn left soon afterward. I could hear them in the hall below, and I thought Hugo’s voice sounded more cheerful.

  “Goodbye, Hugo.”

  “Goodbye, sir. I’ll do what you say.”

  As he went out to his car, I saw from the window a man with a camera snapping him. It annoyed him and I could hear him angrily berating the photographer, but the man had got what he wanted. He merely smiled and turned away. As a matter of fact, the place was full of reporters and cameramen of all sorts, and it was a good thing that Miss Juliet could not hear the doorbell, for it rang all morning.

  Hugo tried driving them away, but of course we were helpless, and all the noon editions of the papers showed photographs of the house. “FAMOUS OLD MITCHELL MANSION SCENE OF TRAGEDY.” Also, a few morbid-minded people had stood by the gate for a part of the morning, but with the news that the body had been taken away, their interest faded, and by noon the place was practically cleared.

  Only two things of any importance happened that morning. After the lawyer’s departure, Hugo climbed to that room of Herbert’s on the third floor, remained there about two minutes and then came down again. Listening, I did not think that he entered the room at all, but stood in the doorway, surveying it.

  And after the doctor’s visit that morning I prepared for an indefinite stay.

  “She’s a sick woman, Miss Adams,” he said. “She’s been a sick woman for years, and she needs care. She couldn’t afford it before, but now I imagine she’ll be more comfortable. That is, unless some idiotic coroner’s jury decides that that poor weakling killed himself.”

  “There was considerable insurance, then?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “I don’t know how much, but probably enough so that the insurance companies will try to prove a suicide,” he said. “It’s absurd on the face of it. Why should he insure himself and then kill himself to save from poverty an old woman who hasn’t long to live at the best, and for whom he showed no affection whatever?”

  “It’s made out to her?”

  “The only policies I know about were made out to his estate. It’s the same thing. He has no other relatives.”

  “You don’t know how much it amounts to?”

  “No. But I telephoned Mr. Glenn, Miss Juliet’s attorney, early this morning. He’s trying to check up on it now. It’s a puzzle to me where he got the money to pay for it. Or why he did it at all.”

  “I suppose it isn’t possible that he was trying to repay Miss Mitchell what his father had lost for her?” I asked.

  But he
fairly snorted at that. “You didn’t know him, did you?” was his reply.

  Naturally, the police had been around most of the morning. They had ordered the newspapermen to stick to the drive and were combing the grounds carefully. While I was bathing Miss Juliet, the Inspector had entered the house and made a final examination of Herbert’s room, and I gathered that he gave Mary permission to put it in order, for later on I heard her sweeping overhead. But I had no chance to talk to him. Once or twice I saw him from a window; accompanied by a plain clothes man, he was moving slowly about the shrubbery, and at one point, near the side door, he spent some time. A little later I saw him standing off and gazing up at Herbert’s window, and watched his eyes travel from it to the roof of the rear wing.

  But whatever he found, if anything, I had no way of discovering. As I have said, it is one of his rules that he ignores me as much as possible on his cases, and that I use my off-duty either to see or to telephone him. As I usually take eighteen-hour duty when he uses me, I have six hours in which to do either.

  I made one or two attempts to get into the library that morning, but they were entirely futile. No sooner had I got there, or even part of the way down the stairs, than some idiotic reporter would ring the doorbell again, and I would hear Hugo on his way to the door. Indeed, I would probably have abandoned the idea altogether if I had not made a rather curious discovery shortly after luncheon.

  Mary had relieved me as before, and when I went upstairs again, I smelled something burning. I said nothing about it, but it did not take me long to notice that there were pieces of freshly charred paper in the fireplace, or that there was a pad of paper and a pencil on the old lady’s bedside table, beside her glasses.

  That renewed my suspicion, naturally. It looked as though Mary, having something to say that she dared not shout, had resorted to writing. And that what she had had to say had been so important that Miss Juliet had ordered her to burn it.

  CHAPTER VI

  I had plenty to think about after that discovery and I set about to prepare for an indefinite stay: unpacking my suitcase in my own room.

  What did they know, these people in the house, about what had happened to Herbert Wynne the night before? “I’m guessing murder,” the Inspector had said. Murder by whom? By Miss Juliet? Absurd. By Mary? I considered that. She was one of those small tight-lipped neurotics who sometimes turn to religion and now and then to crime. By Hugo? He worshiped the old lady, and of course there was the insurance.

  Yet as I had watched him, old and stooped and shabby, I somehow felt that he was not a killer. Certainly he had that combination which the Inspector regards as the basis of practically all crime, motive and opportunity. But what of that? I have had them myself!

  Miss Juliet’s condition was only fair that afternoon. She was restless and uneasy, and I felt that she was still watching me. She even showed a certain relief when I said that, while I would not take my regular hours off, I would like to go home and get some street clothes; I had arrived in a uniform. Said, however, is merely a euphemism for the shouts with which I attempted to communicate with her.

  “That’s all right,” she said, when I had finally made her understand. “Don’t hurry.”

  I did not go to Headquarters that day. I telephoned from my apartment instead, and found the Inspector in his office. I thought his voice sounded unusually grave, and he listened intently while I told him of Miss Juliet’s excursion, and the discovery of the written messages between the old lady and Mary.

  “You think she went up to the third floor?”

  “I know she had been somewhere in the house. She hadn’t worn her slippers, and when I put a heater to her feet, the soles looked as though she had been about quite a little.”

  “Then it’s your idea that she got something, perhaps from the third-floor room, and passed it on to Mary to hide?”

  “It looks like that, Inspector.”

  “You don’t think she went outside the house?”

  Well, I hadn’t thought of that, although of course it was possible. He explained what he meant. The ground all around the house was hard except under the library windows. There it had been recently spaded under, and as I knew, there were no footprints there. But outside the laundry they had found that morning in a patch of dusty ground what looked like the print of a woman’s foot. A small foot, without a shoe.

  “Looked as though somebody had been there in her stocking feet,” he said. “May not mean anything, of course. What does Mary wear?”

  “A flat felt slipper. And her feet are small.”

  “Well, that’s probably what it is. Could you get into the library?”

  “No. And what would be the use? Whatever it was, it’s probably gone now.”

  “You have no idea of what it might have been?”

  “Something flat, and not heavy, I thought.”

  “Like a letter?”

  “I thought of that. But you had searched the place. If he left a letter, he’d have left it where it could be seen.”

  He was silent for a perceptible time. “It’s the devil of a case,” he said at last. “You’d better give the library the once over if you get a chance. And by the way, Glenn—that’s the family lawyer; you saw him last night—Glenn has been working on the insurance. There’s a lot of it.”

  “How much?”

  “He’s not certain,” he said, “but he thinks it may amount to a hundred thousand dollars.”

  I was fairly stunned. Here was a boy who had had no money of his own, and who had earned only a little now and then; he had tried to sell bonds, I knew, and automobiles. But the chances were that he had earned little or nothing since the depression set in, and now here he was shown taking out a hundred thousand dollars of insurance for the benefit of a woman he had disliked, and who had not cared for him.

  “But how in the world …”

  “I don’t know. Ask me something easy. Apparently he would deposit sufficient cash in a bank to cover the premium, and then check it out. Most of the policies were small.”

  He had not a great deal more to say, and I gathered that he was disturbed and not too easy in his mind. The firearms expert of the Bureau had said that the bullet came from Herbert’s own revolver, and the fingerprint men that the prints were his, although not clearly readable. There had been no other prints found, in or about the room.

  Before I rang off, I asked about the girl of the night before, and while he was confident that they would find her, he had to admit that they were still at sea.

  “We’ll get her, all right,” he said. “But I’m not sure that she’s important. By the way, have you got your gun among your things there?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right. No telling who may go through your stuff, and I don’t want you fired from the case. I have a hunch I’m going to need you.” That was his way, to throw out remarks of that sort and not to explain them. I had to put up with it, but I must say my little apartment looked homelike and cheerful to me after that conversation. Dick was singing, and there was my sewing basket, as I had left it, and the thousand and one little things with which I have built such an atmosphere of home as is possible under the circumstances. I sat down for a few minutes, and I don’t mind saying that I called myself an idiot for getting involved in other people’s troubles. After all, nursing alone is pretty hard work, and when I had added to it the inside job of assisting an Inspector of Police, I had taken on more than I bargained for.

  I could see myself in the mirror, and I realized that I looked tired, and older than my age. But that very mirror sent my mind back to the Mitchell case, and with that I was on my feet again, and gathering up what I needed. The game was in my blood, after all.

  Before I left, I looked at Dick. He looked little and woebegone, but he chirped as I moved to the closet.

  “Want a piece of sugar, Dick?”

  He stared back at me, with his head cocked and his eyes glittering like small jet beads.

  Well, tha
t was on Tuesday. Herbert Wynne had been found dead late on Monday night, and the inquest was to be the next day, Wednesday. That evening Doctor Stewart, Mr. Glenn and the Inspector held a three-cornered conference in the library, but I had no chance to speak to the Inspector, and nothing new to tell him. At nine o’clock it was over, and the doctor came upstairs and saw Miss Juliet. He left a bromide for me to give her, and by half after ten o’clock she was settled for the night.

  That was the first opportunity I had had to search the library, and I took it.

  Hugo had looked dead to the world all evening, and by ten o’clock he and Mary had locked up the house and gone to bed. At least, listening at the door on the landing as I went downstairs at eleven o’clock, I could hear nothing.

  I had taken my pocket flash along, so that I turned on no lights, and I went at once to the library. It was a dark and dismal room at any time, and I remember that, as I searched, there were innumerable creaks and raps all around me. I would find myself looking over my shoulder, only to face a wall of blackness that seemed to be full of potential horrors.

  And, not unexpectedly, the search produced nothing. It was not my first experience of the sort for the police, and I flatter myself that I did it pretty well, considering that I had not the faintest idea what I was looking for. I ran my hand down behind the cushions of chairs, felt under the edge of the rug, and even behind the rows on rows of dusty books. But I found nothing at all, save behind the books near the door a scrap of dirty newspaper, which I left—luckily, as it happened—where I had found it.

  Just why, after completing this search, I should have decided to investigate the long parlor across the hall I do not know to this minute. I did not believe that Mary had gone in there, for the high old double doors were always kept closed. But I was less nervous by that time, and I own to a certain curiosity as to the room itself. Perhaps it rather pleased me to enter uninvited into a parlor which had been, in its day, so rigidly guarded and so exclusive!