THE ONLY ANSWER
And yet Judy felt that no one had heard, that it was all up to her. Even Dale Meredith seemed not to be helping, and Pauline.… How much did Pauline care? Neither of them had attempted to follow Judy’s suggestion that they write down every possible clue. Instead they talked—talked until midnight, almost—when she was trying so hard to think.
Then Mary came in. Mary usually came in when Pauline stayed up too late. The cocoa that she served was a signal for Dale to leave and the girls to retire.
Pauline drank her cocoa quickly and walked with him to the door. When it closed behind him she still stood there, her head pressed against the panels.
“You’re tired,” Judy told her. “I’ll take this cocoa into my room and let you sleep.”
“Aren’t you going to drink it?”
Judy shook her head. “Not with Irene gone. It would make me sleepy too, and I’ve simply got to think.”
Alone in her room she tried to turn herself into an abstract thing, a mental machine that could think without feeling. In her heart she could not believe Irene had taken the poetry, but in her mind she knew that it must be so.
Didn’t Irene want the poems because they described a house? Even the address might have been among the conglomeration of papers. When her father suggested that she visit relatives in Brooklyn he had described a house also. Perhaps the two descriptions were the same. Perhaps the relative she sought was Sarah Glenn! For surely it was more than coincidence that Irene looked so much like the poet’s daughter, Joy Holiday. Could she have been an aunt? No, because Sarah Glenn had only the one child. A distant cousin? Hardly. Then there was only one conclusion left: Joy Holiday might have been Irene’s own mother!
Could Irene have put two and two together, just as Judy was doing, and gone to the poet’s house the day she disappeared? No doubt, if she did, she planned to be back again before either Judy or Pauline returned. Something had prevented her!
That something might have been Jasper Crosby, cruel, scheming, mercenary creature that he was. Or it might have been poor, demented Sarah Glenn. She might have locked Irene in the tower the way she had once locked her own daughter away from her friends. There was no telling what a crazy woman might do!
An hour later Judy still sat on her bed, trying to decide what to do. Her cocoa, on a forgotten corner of the dresser, had crusted over like cold paste. She rose, walked across the room, tasted the cold drink and set down the cup. She must come to some decision! Irene might be living through a nightmare of torture in that horrible house Sarah Glenn had described in her poems.
In the next room Pauline was sleeping soundly. Judy could wake her, ask her advice. Downstairs the telephone waited ready to help her. She could call Lieutenant Collins at the police station and tell her findings to him. She could telephone Mr. Lang again and ask him more questions—worry him more. She could call the young author, Dale Meredith.
Yes, she could call Dale and tell him that the insane poet might be Irene’s grandmother; that the scheming miser, Jasper Crosby, might be her uncle and that Irene, herself, had probably stolen the poetry to help locate them. What a shock that would be to the young author who had idolized Irene and called her his Golden Girl. Judy hadn’t the heart to disillusion him although her own spirit was heavy with the hurt of it all.
She wouldn’t notify the police either. Irene must not be subjected to an unkind cross fire of questions when, or if, she did return. Judy would find Irene herself and let her explain. Suppose she had stolen the poetry? What did it matter? Judy was learning not to expect perfection in people. She would love Irene all the more, forgiving her. And if Irene had stolen the poetry she could give it back quietly, and Judy could explain things to Emily Grimshaw. Dale need never be told.
Judy wouldn’t have done that much to shield herself. She could.… Oh, now she knew she could stand shock, excitement, tragedy. But it wouldn’t do to have people blaming Irene.
That night Judy buried her head in the pillows waiting, wide-eyed, for morning. Morning would tell. She knew that work was slack at the office and that Emily Grimshaw often did not come in until afternoon. She would take the morning off and go…she consulted the bit of paper with the poet’s latest verse on one side and her address scribbled on the other. She got up out of bed to take it from her pocketbook and study it. The street apparently had no name.
One blk. past Parkville, just off Gravesend Avenue.
CHAPTER XVIII
IN THE TOWER WINDOW
Morning dawned cold and misty. Judy fumbled through the closet hunting for an umbrella, and her trembling fingers touched Irene’s clothes. They lingered lovingly in the folds of each well remembered dress.
“Irene! Irene!” she thought. “I don’t care what you’ve done if only I can bring you back.”
In the adjoining room Pauline was still asleep. How cruel of her to sleep! No one was up except Blackberry, out there on the roof garden. Feeling that she must say goodbye to somebody, Judy whispered it to him.
It was too early for the throng of office workers to be abroad when Judy stepped out on the wet pavement and turned toward the subway entrance. The tall buildings in lower New York were little more than shadows, and the clock in the Metropolitan Tower was veiled in mist. Ghostly halos were around all the street lamps, and dampness seemed to have settled heavily over everything.
Judy felt it. The only comforting thing about the trip was the fact that she would be riding on the subway alone for the first time. She paid her fare, asked a few directions, and soon was seated in an express train bound for Brooklyn.
She pressed her forehead against the window as the train came onto Manhattan Bridge and started its trip over the East River. Freighters steamed down toward the ocean and up again. Everything looked gray.
As she watched, Judy’s hopes sank lower and lower. She began to realize that it was not the part of wisdom to go on her dangerous errand to the poet’s house alone. What would she say if Jasper Crosby opened the door? Would her experience with eccentric Emily Grimshaw help her to cope with the insane hallucinations of Sarah Glenn? Would she dare demand to know what had happened to Irene when a possibility existed that they had never seen her? Suppose they asked for the missing poetry. If she lied to defend Irene her nervousness might betray her. Judy knew that her chances of finding her chum were slim, very slim. Like the shining tracks behind her they seemed to lessen as the train sped on.
At Ninth Avenue she changed to the Culver Line. Up came the train, out of the tunnel, and the wet gray walls at the side of the tracks grew lower and lower. Soon they were clear of the ground and Judy realized that this was the elevated. Only four more stations! She looked around, eager for her first glimpse of Brooklyn, but what she saw caused her to shudder.
“Ugh! A graveyard.”
It stretched on and on, a grim sight on that dreary morning. Even after the white stones were left behind vacant lots and empty buildings made the scene look almost as cheerless.
At the fourth stop Judy got off and went down to the street. It was silly, but the thought came to her that if ever spirits walked abroad they would walk along Gravesend Avenue.
Consulting the slip of paper, she counted blocks as she passed them and watched for Parkville Avenue. She knew the old-fashioned street at once from the quaint houses that lined it. Then came the Long Island Railroad cut with a long line of box cars passing under Gravesend Avenue in a slow-moving procession.
She paused. Could the alley beyond be the street she sought? No wonder they hadn’t named it anything. Why, it wasn’t even paved! It seemed little more than a trail through vacant lots. She hesitated, looked ahead and caught her breath in a quick, terrified gasp. Then she stared, open-mouthed. There was something sinister about the huge, gray frame building that loomed in her path. The gnarled old trees surrounding it seemed almost alive, and the wind whistling through their branc
hes sounded like a warning. But it was the tower, not the house itself, that caused Judy to gasp. The whole lower part of it was burned away and in the tower window something thin and yellow moved back and forth behind the curtains. It looked like an elongated ghost!
Judy rubbed her eyes and looked again. This time the tower was dark with the even blackness of drawn shades behind closed windows.
An unreasonable fear took possession of the watching girl. She felt that she had seen something not there in material substance. Stanza after stanza of Sarah Glenn’s poetry forced itself upon her consciousness, and it all fitted this house—the yellow ghost in the window, the crumbling tower.
Suddenly Judy realized that she was standing stock-still in the middle of the muddy unpaved street, moving her lips and making no sound. She was doing the same thing that Emily Grimshaw had done when Dale Meredith said she was crazy. Oh! She must get control of herself, take herself in hand.
“If the house can frighten me like this,” she thought, “what wouldn’t it do to Irene?”
Bracing her slim shoulders and mustering all her courage, Judy marched up on the porch and felt for the bell. Finding none, she rapped with her bare knuckles. The sound of her rap sent an echo reverberating through the walls of the still house.
Judy waited. She waited a long time before she dared rap again. The house seemed to be inhabited only by the echo she had heard and the phantom that had vanished from the tower window.
Still nobody answered. Judy tried the door and found it locked. Then she peered through the lower windows and saw at once that the house was empty of furniture.
“Nobody lives here,” she told herself and then she told herself the same thing all over again so that it would surely seem true. “Nobody ever does live in empty houses.”
And yet she had the strangest feeling that she was being watched!
CHAPTER XIX
LIKE A FAIRY TALE
Her nerves taxed to the breaking point, Judy gave up searching for the day and went to the office. Emily Grimshaw was not there but she had left a message:
Will be away for a time and leave you in charge.
“Me in charge!” Judy exclaimed. She couldn’t imagine herself conducting Emily Grimshaw’s business sensibly. “I’ll just close up for the day,” she decided in exasperation. Leaving a notice to that effect at the hotel desk, she locked the office and started for Dr. Faulkner’s house.
In the entrance hall she was met by an anxious group of faces. Dale’s, Pauline’s—and Peter’s.
“Judy!” he cried, and then when her only answer was a choked sob, again, “Judy!”
“Oh, Peter! You’ll help?”
“That’s why I’m here. We telephoned everywhere. We thought you’d never come.”
“Where on earth were you?” Dale asked.
“Hunting for Irene,” Judy explained brokenly. “I—I followed up a clue. I thought I knew where Irene was and I went out there to get her to—to bring her home and surprise you, but she wasn’t there.”
“Wasn’t where?”
“Where I thought she was…the most awful place just off Gravesend Avenue out in old Parkville. The—the house has a tower, just like the tower in Sarah Glenn’s poems. It’s burned halfway up and—and—and—”
“And what, Judy? Don’t act so frightened.”
“There was something in the tower,” she blurted out, “something yellow—”
“Probably a yellow dog or some such ordinary thing,” Pauline interrupted.
“Oh, but it wasn’t! I saw it as plainly as anything, and it looked like a woman in a yellow robe, only she was too tall and too thin to be real. Then I looked again and she was gone but I could still feel her watching me. It was awful! I didn’t think there could be a tower of flame or a ghost, but there they were!” Judy leaned back against the closed door and threw both hands outward in a gesture of bewilderment.
“And I always thought I was a practical person. I always trusted my own head—and eyes.”
Impulsively, Peter caught her hands in his. His voice was husky. “I still trust them, Judy. Tell me everything,” he pleaded. “I know you must have had a good reason for thinking that Irene might be in this queer old house. Why did you?”
“Because Irene looks so much like the poet’s daughter, Joy Holiday. I thought they might be related. Mr. Lang spoke of Irene’s relatives. He told her to look them up. But the poet is crazy! Anything might happen!”
“And yet you went there alone!” Peter exclaimed. “Don’t you realize that whatever happened to Irene might have happened to you?”
“I did realize it—when I got there,” Judy faltered. “I—I guess I wasn’t very brave to run away, but nobody seemed to live in the house. It looked—empty.”
“Then, of course, Irene couldn’t be there,” Pauline concluded.
“Oh, but they might have moved—and taken her with them!” Judy turned to Peter, a new fear in her eyes. “You know about law. Tell me, if Irene is related to Sarah Glenn wouldn’t she inherit some of her property?”
“That depends upon the will,” he replied. “If she made a will before she went insane—”
“She did!” Judy interrupted. “She willed the property to her daughter and, in the event of her death, it was to go to her brother, Jasper Crosby. He’s a crook and a scoundrel,” she declared, “worse than Slippery McQuirk or any of Vine Thompson’s gang, if I’m any judge of character. You see, if Irene is related to the poet through Joy Holiday, how convenient it would be for him to have her out of the way?”
“You mean that Joy Holiday might have been Irene’s mother?”
“She couldn’t have been,” Pauline spoke up. “Joy Holiday has been dead for twenty years.”
“Supposedly! Her mother never did believe the body was hers, and even Emily Grimshaw says it didn’t look like her.”
“Where’d they get the body?” Peter asked.
“Jasper Crosby went to the morgue and got it. He identified it as Joy’s, and people paid no attention to his sister’s objections because they knew she was insane.”
“Then this girl, Joy Holiday, is legally dead. But if we can prove that there has been a fraud.…”
“What fraud?” Dale questioned. “You don’t mean to tell us that this Jasper Crosby may have falsely identified some unknown girl’s body in order to inherit his sister’s property?”
“That’s exactly what I was trying to say. I don’t know anything about Irene’s mother and neither does she. Mr. Lang only remembered the name, Annie, and that, as well as Joy, may have been only a nickname.” Judy turned to Peter. “I know how you felt when your parents were a mystery. Well, wouldn’t Irene feel the same way? Her father gave away some family history in his letter, and Irene was more impressed than we know by Emily Grimshaw’s collapse. Remember, I wrote you about it, Peter? She wanted to find out about her mother—”
“Then she did take the poetry,” Pauline put in.
“Yes,” Judy agreed. “I’m afraid she did. It’s a terrible thing not to know the truth about one’s parents, and Irene must have taken the poetry to help her find that horrible house that seems to have swallowed her up.”
“She said she didn’t,” Dale maintained.
Judy felt suddenly ashamed that his trust in Irene should be greater than hers. But if, distrusting her, Judy found her, then she could be glad of her disbelief.
“There is another possibility,” she ventured and made her voice sound more hopeful than she felt. “There is the possibility that Irene may be safe in the poet’s house.”
“That sounds more plausible,” Dale agreed, “but you said the house was empty.”
“I said it looked empty, except for that unearthly thing in the tower. But, now that I think of it, something alive must have been there to pull the shades. Do you suppose,” Judy asked in a tremul
ous whisper, “that somebody could be locked there like Joy Holiday was when she vanished?”
“It sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? But not,” Peter added gravely, “if Irene is in the tower. Judy, we must do something—and do it quickly.”
It did not take him long to decide what that something would be. “We’ll get a policeman to go with us,” he declared. “The police have a right to force their way into a house if nobody answers.”
“Without a search warrant?” questioned Pauline.
“That’s the dickens of it,” Dale fumed. “There’s sure to be some red tape attached to it and loss of time may mean—loss of Irene. We’ve got to convince the police that this is a matter of life and death!”
A taxi was the quickest means of getting to the police station. It took considerable explaining, however, to convince officials that the case was urgent. The fact that the owner of the house was known to be insane and that Irene might be held there against her will proved to be the strongest argument in favor of the search warrant they requested. But it could not be served until the following day.
“You have to go before a magistrate,” Lieutenant Collins explained, “and night warrants are allowed only in cases where persons or property are positively known to be in the place to be searched. However, there are several ways of getting around that. If a felony has been committed, as in the present case, we don’t need a warrant.”
“What felony?” Judy asked.
“Great guns!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you call kidnaping a felony? If the girl’s held there against her will it’s a plain case of kidnaping!”
Judy hadn’t thought of that. Kidnapers and killers were almost synonymous in her mind and the thought was terrifying.
Lieutenant Collins wasted no further time but called the Parkville Precinct, and two policemen were detailed to meet Judy, Pauline, Dale and Peter and accompany them to the house with the crumbling tower.
CHAPTER XX
THE SCENT OF ROSES
Neither Peter nor Dale stopped to count the cost of taxicabs that night. The driver hesitated only a moment. Their request that he make the fastest possible time to the distant Brooklyn police station was not a usual one. Knowing that it must be urgent, the driver made good his promise and soon they were speeding across Manhattan Bridge, through side streets in reckless haste and then down the long stretch of boulevard. Judy leaned out of the window and searched the scene ahead for a trace of anything familiar.
The Third Girl Detective Page 34