Two Flights Up

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  And who was there to exonerate him? Mrs. Bayne. Suppose he broke his promise to Holly and told them that? How could he prove it? And what would Holly do? He knew quite well what she would do. She would simply repeat that she had taken the bond herself and given it to him to sell.

  Round and round. Round and round. The Italian wailed and babbled. Drunks came in, were shoved along the corridor and locked away. Then there was a scuffle going on outside, and a voice that seemed to echo out of some troubled dream. He sat up and listened to it. It was truculent, drunken, and familiar.

  “You leggo me,” it was saying. “I’m all right. Wha’ the hell you doin’ anyhow? Leggo, I tell you.”

  It was James Cox. Honest James Cox.

  They dragged him past the cell and on to an empty one farther along. Warrington heard the metallic crash as they closed and locked him in, heard James stumble to his bed and drop on it, still thickly muttering, and later on heard his heavy breathing as he slept.

  Early in the morning the cells were evacuated, and a shuffling line of men moved out along the corridor, for hearings, sentences, and fines. James Cox was among them, his head bent, his gait unsteady. As he passed, Warrington saw the bewilderment in his face.

  At nine o’clock they took Warrington back to the District Attorney’s office. He had not shaved for two days, and he felt less a man for the dark stubble on his face. His linen, bad enough the morning before, was in deplorable condition, and opposed to him the District Attorney, newly shaven, rested and carefully dressed, had an advantage he was quick to feel.

  “All right, Warrington. Come in.” And when he had sat down: “Well, you’ve had time to think. How about it?”

  “I’ve had time to think, but that’s about all.”

  “We don’t claim to run a first-class hotel,” said Phelps comfortably. “Still, you must have come to some sort of a conclusion.”

  “I have, to this extent. I’ve got a right to an attorney, and before I make any statement I want advice.”

  “That’s up to you. If you’re innocent you’ve got every chance, here and now, to come clean on the story. If you’re guilty, you’d better get an attorney, because you’re going to need one.”

  “I’ll have the attorney,” he said doggedly.

  The District Attorney sat back in his chair and eyed him keenly.

  “Would it make any difference in your attitude,” he said, “if I told you Mrs. Bayne died last night?”

  Warrington leaped to his feet.

  “Dead!” he cried. “Dead! Good God!” He swayed as he held to the back of his chair. “Well, that’s that,” he said unsteadily.

  “So it does make a difference?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess it ends it; that’s all.”

  “Ends what?”

  He made no reply. Hope was dead in him; there would be no confession now from Mrs. Bayne, no anything. If he claimed now that it was the dead woman who had given him the bond, they would laugh at him. Even Holly could not swear to that; she had only his word for it.

  Holly! He steadied himself.

  “I suppose I couldn’t go up there?” he asked, after what seemed a long time. “You see, I’ve been like part of the family, in a way. I wouldn’t like her—like them—to think I’m not—interested.”

  “And incidentally to find out where you are, eh? Maybe to see Cox—”

  “Oh, damn Cox!” he shouted suddenly. “What do I care about Cox? I don’t care if I never see him again. I’ve got a right to go, haven’t I? Look at me! I haven’t seen a razor for two days. I need linen. I don’t suppose you’ll lock me up indefinitely without any clothes, will you?”

  He looked disreputable, tortured. His absurd anticlimax was an appeal, shouted in furious tones.

  “We don’t want any more tricks, Warrington.”

  “You let me go up there. After that you can boil me in oil, if you like.”

  They let him go. Watching him, Phelps was certain that the death of Mrs. Bayne marked some sort of crisis in the affair, but what that crisis might be, he had no idea.

  “You talk it over with the daughter,” he said. “If she’s ready to swear on her oath that she gave you that bond to sell, and the suitcase later on, she can clear you. If she can’t or won’t do those things—”

  “She never saw the bond. I’ve told you that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  TIMES, LIKE THE STRUCTURE of society, change; and neighbourhoods alter also. Holly could still remember her mother’s horror when Simmons’s grocery was established at the corner, and also that day, a year ago now, when the McCook family moved in at Ninety, across the street from the Bayne house, and at once advertised for boarders.

  Mrs. Bayne from that time on had behaved precisely as though Number Ninety had been eliminated from Kelsey Street. She still recognized Eighty-eight and Ninety-two, but there was, according to her view, no Ninety at all.

  But Ninety, after the manner of such affairs, was extremely cognizant of Ninety-one.

  “Stuck up things!” said Mrs. McCook. “Believe me, Clara, I’m sorry for them. They’re that poor and dirty proud. Putting on all those airs, and like as not nothing to eat in the house.”

  But although she might pity and scorn them, her interest in them grew rather than abated. Especially was this the case after she had learned their story at the grocery store. The first visit or so of Furness Brooks she observed carefully, and one day she confided to Clara that:

  “The girl over at Ninety-one has a fellow. Not much to look at, either.”

  “He’s got a car,” said Clara, as though that answered the objection.

  At seven-thirty in the morning it was Mrs. McCook’s custom to take a broom and, stepping out of her front door, from there to survey her world. Not that it varied from day to day. At such and such a time Mr. Williamson would leave Number Eighty-seven, the morning paper tucked in his overcoat pocket, and start out on his campaign to see that widows and orphans were not left penniless, but were adequately protected by life insurance. At such and such a time would the Moriarity boy run to Simmons’s grocery for the bread his shiftless mother had forgotten the day before. Bright and early, too, her basket on her arm, Mrs. Kahn, at Ninety-five, would start for the Kosher butcher shop in the next block; and the front door of the Bayne house would open, and Holly, looking neither here nor there, would brush off the front steps.

  But on one never-to-be-forgotten morning Holly looked across the street and smilingly nodded to her. If a queen in a gilded coach had leaned out and bowed to her, she could not have felt more thrilled. It was only a day or so after that that she heard Mrs. Bayne was ill, and that Holly had telephoned from the grocery for the doctor. That afternoon she baked a cup custard, and putting it on her best plate, carried it across the street.

  When Mrs. Bayne herself opened the door, she almost dropped it.

  “I heard you were sick,” she said. “I just thought—it’s custard. It’s kind of light and nourishing.”

  “That was very thoughtful of you. But I’m quite well now,” said Mrs. Bayne.

  “You might as well take it. I haven’t got any use for it,” said Mrs. McCook, holding out the plate.

  And Mrs. Bayne had taken it, very graciously.

  “That terrible woman!” she said later to Holly. “She just wouldn’t let me refuse it.”

  “Why on earth should you, Mother? You wouldn’t resent a card of sympathy, or flowers.”

  “But food! I won’t have her running in and out.”

  “I don’t think it would ever occur to her,” said Holly, with slightly heightened colour, and let it go at that.

  On the same night, then, that James Cox had tried to drown his misery in bad bootleg liquor, at about two o’clock, the McCook doorbell rang and Mrs. McCook sat up in bed and prodded her husband.

  “There’s the telegram, Joe,” she said.

  Her sister was expecting her first confinement, and Mrs. McCook had been
on pins and needles, as she said to Clara, for the last week.

  But Joe was heavily asleep, and at last she herself got out of bed and in her nightgown went down the stairs. At first when she opened the door she saw nobody; then, looking down, she discovered a figure crouching on the doorstep.

  “For mercy’s sake!” she said, peering down, “Who is it?”

  The figure stirred and rose.

  “It’s Holly Bayne,” it said in a lifeless voice. “Have you a telephone? The grocery’s closed.”

  “What’s the matter? Who’s sick?”

  “It’s my mother. I think—I think she’s dead.”

  “Most likely she’s just fainted,” said Mrs. McCook reassuringly. “You wait a minute, and I’ll come right over.”

  She did not go back upstairs. She picked up an overcoat from the hall and threw it over her nightdress, and thrust her bare feet into a pair of overshoes.

  “Nobody’ll see me,” she said. “And a bad faint ain’t to be fooled with. Did you lay her flat?”

  “She was fiat,” said Holly in her strange crushed voice.

  “Believe me or not,” Mrs. McCook told Clara the next morning. “I knew the minute I went in that door, that it wasn’t a faint. I’m queer that way. I could smell death.”

  And death it was.

  Mrs. Bayne lay in the attic almost as she had fallen; the candle had burned low, and in its small and dying blaze her figure looked larger, more majestic than in life. It seemed to fill the attic room.

  She lay almost as she had fallen, but not quite. Holly had turned her over—so that now her quiet face was toward the light—and had thrown a blanket over her. And she had replaced the boards! Mrs. McCook, kneeling beside the body, was directly over them.

  Mrs. McCook touched the forehead; then she got up.

  “You’d better come downstairs, honey,” Mrs. McCook said gently. “I’ll get Joe over, and you leave the rest to me.”

  “Is she—”

  “I’m afraid so, honey.”

  Holly sat once more in the chair by the dying fire. It did not matter to her that heavy footsteps passed the door, that in that hour strangers were moving about the house and she herself was alone. Nothing mattered but the incredible fact that her mother was dead, and that she herself had killed her.

  It was the shock that had done it—the discovery that the suitcase was gone. A little care, and she need never have had that shock. Some other way, any other way than the one she had taken, and she might have saved her.

  The heavy footsteps were coming down the attic stairs again. They stopped on the third floor, and she knew they were laying her in Margaret’s room. After a time the door opened and Mrs. McCook came in. She turned on the lights and mended the fire, and then smoothed back the bed.

  “You better come and crawl right in here, honey,” she said. “Joe’s attending to things. We’re not going home.”

  “Not there,” said Holly, and shuddered. “I’ll get dressed.”

  Later on she insisted on going upstairs. The lights were on full in Margaret’s room, and her mother lay on the bed. Holly had hardly ever seen her in Margaret’s room before. It was as though she did not belong there. She made it look shabby.

  “She looks nice and peaceful,” said Mrs. McCook.

  Holly went quietly out again and stood, with Mrs. McCook at her elbow, outside of Howard Warrington’s room, gazing in. A faint odour of tobacco still hung in the air. But she did not go in. He had left her, abandoned her. She was all alone.

  In the early morning somebody got word to Margaret, and she came. She showed very little, grief, very little anything. She kissed Holly, and then stood erect and took off her hat.

  “I guess I’m back to stay,” she said. “James has left me.”

  After that, time had gone on. There was stealthy movement in the house; someone—Clara, perhaps—came in and drew down the window shades to give the house the proper air of decorous mourning. Margaret, red-eyed and speechless, brought in a tape measure and said something about a black dress. Holly stood up to be measured obediently, and even remote Margaret had been somehow touched.

  “I wouldn’t grieve so,” she told her. “She didn’t suffer.”

  Holly let it go at that. How could she say it was remorse and not grief?

  Some time that morning the door opened and Mrs. McCook slipped in.

  “Your young man’s outside,” she told her, with the air of one bringing glad tidings; and a moment later Furness was inside the door looking at her.

  “I’ve just heard,” he said. “Can I do anything, Holly?”

  “I think everything’s being done.”

  He was still wary and a little afraid of her. He came over to the hearth and stood looking down at her.

  “I’m sorry. You know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Would you like me to stay with you?”

  “I think I’m better alone,” she said, “if you don’t mind, Furness. I just can’t talk.”

  “You’d rather I’d go, then?”

  She nodded once more.

  But he did not go at once. He took a turn or two around the room in growing irritation.

  “I’m damned if I understand you,” he said. “I don’t want to make a fuss, just now, anyhow. But if the moment you get into trouble you want to get rid of me, what on earth are you going to do when you’re married to me?”

  The unconscious humour of that escaped them both.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think,” she said painfully, “that I’m going to marry you, Furness.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think I can. I’ve tried. I can’t go through with it.”

  “Look here,” he said. “You’re hysterical. You don’t know what you’re saying. Let’s wait for a day or two, until all this is over.”

  “I know perfectly well what I’m saying. I hate it, but I must.”

  “But—the thing’s announced! It’s—it’s as good as done.”

  “Oh, no, it isn’t. I don’t like to do it, Furness. She wanted it, and—I would like to do it for her. But there’s somebody else.”

  He was stupefied, hit in his weakest part—his vanity.

  “Somebody else! That’s not true, and you know it. Why, you don’t know anybody else.”

  But her eyes met his honestly and fearlessly. “I’ve told you,’ she said. “There is somebody else.”

  He went closer to her and looked down at her, with hostile eyes that showed a sudden comprehension.

  “It’s not that fellow upstairs!” he said. “The roomer, or whatever he is?”

  She nodded, and suddenly he threw back his head and laughed. The sound echoed through the room and out into the quiet house.

  “The roomer!” he said. “Oh, my God!” And flung out of the room and out of the house.

  She would have felt sorry had she been capable of feeling anything. As it was, his going left her with nothing but a sense of relief. After a long time she saw his ring still on her finger, and she got up and laid it on her mother’s bureau; the sight of the small familiar objects, the toilet waters, the old ivory brushes, the smelling salts, brought the first tears she had shed.

  Margaret found her weeping and coaxed her into her own blue-and-white bedroom and into bed. She fell asleep there finally, and Margaret drew the shades and closed the door.

  She was asleep when Warrington and the detective arrived.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  IT WAS A PORTION of the decorum of death, to Mrs. McCook, like drawn windows and a closed piano, that doorbells must not be rung. Attired in her best black, therefore, she lurked in the lower hall, and any arrivals found the door mysteriously and slowly opening before them, while she herself remained behind it out of sight.

  In this manner she admitted Warrington and the detective; but once inside, she recognized the former and condescended to mournful speech.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?” she said. “I guess M
iss Bayne will be glad to see you. It’s a pity you weren’t here last night.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Yes. The mother had been sick all day, and about two in the morning, while the poor girl was asleep, she took a notion to go up to the attic. Of all places! And Miss Bayne found her there, dead.”

  “In the attic!” Warrington repeated after her. He was hardly conscious that he had spoken; his mind was busy with the picture the words conjured up. She had gone to the attic and found the suitcase gone, and so she had died. It was horrible.

  He glanced at the detective, but that gentleman had apparently not been listening. He had moved to the drawing-room door and was surveying it, noiselessly whistling between his teeth.

  “Who is with Miss Bayne?”

  “Mrs. Cox is up there somewhere. I’ll get her if you like.”

  “Never mind; I’ll go up,” he said.

  The officer made no objection. He moved to the foot of the staircase and watched him out of sight, and after that he went back, rather to Mrs. McCook’s astonishment, and examined the rear of the house. He located the servants’ staircase, and leaving a door open, took up a position which commanded it. Only then, did he speak.

  “So she was found in the attic?” he said. “What do you suppose took her up there at that hour of the night?”

  Margaret was sewing in the front room, with the door open. She had the black material for Holly’s frock in her lap, and the face she raised as Warrington stopped in the doorway was colourless and set. Involuntarily she dropped her work and clenched her left hand.

  “Don’t make a noise,” she said. “Holly’s asleep.”

  “Asleep!” he said blankly. “But I came to see her. I only have a little time.”

  “I’m not going to waken her. She’s had more than any human being ought to bear.”

  “Yes,” he agreed; “yes, I suppose so. I had hoped—how is she?”