by Mabel Seeley
“Impossible, of course, but that is the best description I can give.”
“You heard sweeping, and you didn’t say one word Tuesday, you didn’t say a word Wednesday!”
Mr. Grant blinked. “But it couldn’t have been important.”
“Couldn’t have been—couldn’t have been! When we know the person who attacked Mrs. Dacres swept the back cellar stairs that night!”
Surprise flitted across Mr. Grant’s face, and, I thought, mild gratification.
“Someone was sweeping? Then I was right!”
“Right? I’ll say you were right! Why, I ask again, didn’t you say so before?”
“This is the first time I have heard of back stairs being swept,” Mr. Grant pointed out, still mildly.
He had Lieutenant Strom. We all—I mean the lieutenant, Hodge, and I—opened our mouths to speak—and then shut them.
What, after all, was the use? There was every likelihood that Mr. Grant hadn’t heard. Certainly it hadn’t been brought out at his questioning yesterday, and Mr. Grant wasn’t given to gossiping with the others.
Mr. Buffingham just looked blank. He hadn’t looked surprised when the lieutenant had outlined the noises there must have been in the house Monday night—had he known before? And Mr. Waller. My mind sped back to the afternoon. He hadn’t shown surprise at the lieutenant’s reconstruction of the attack, either!
“I’ll be fried for an oyster,” the lieutenant said helplessly, while he got himself together. Step by step, then, he explained his theory of my attacker’s probable movements.
Mr. Grant nodded. “That fits in very nicely. I heard, as I say, this brushing sound. My interest, in view of the strange happenings in the house lately, was piqued. I would like to know who—but no matter. So I investigated. I walked to the cellar, very quietly, but could see nothing out of the way in the furnace room or in Mrs. Garr’s kitchen beyond, although I did not turn on the light there. As soon as I had left my room there was absolute stillness in the house. I then returned upstairs, thinking I must have been mistaken.”
“You didn’t think it your duty to warn the other inhabitants—Mrs. Dacres, for example?”
“Why, no. I—I thought her adequately protected. Chairs under doorknobs are excellent—”
“How do you know about the chairs under the doorknobs?”
“Why, I heard it.”
“You heard it?”
“Yes. I have neglected to state, perhaps, that it was while I was in the cellar that Mrs. Dacres and one other person—Mr. Kistler, of course—returned to the house. I heard the good-byes in the hall, and her report that everything was—er—okay was the expression, I believe. I heard the doors being locked, chairs being dragged and hooked under the knobs. Not concealed actions at all.”
He blinked at me, and I blushed for the rum, but he smiled kindly.
“Very evident. Very evident. Very normal, too. Naturally, I did not wish to be seen. I waited a few minutes before returning upstairs.”
He looked at the lieutenant’s suspicion as if he did not sense it. The lieutenant stared from Mr. Grant to Hodge, and then to me and around again, trying to form some judgment on this bewildering evidence.
“Sounds screwy to me,” he said; then strongly, as if he took his cue from himself, “Yes, and it is screwy, too! You’ll have to do a lot more explaining to get out of this, Grant. So you were around at three o’clock, eh?”
“I had no idea of the time.”
“But that’s when these folks came in!” He turned to Buffingham. “That doesn’t square with your story that you’d just come in.”
“I only said what it seemed like to me,” Mr. Buffingham replied thoughtfully. “I might have been reading a little longer. I might of laid awake a little longer. I wouldn’t know.”
“Nobody knows anything in this case,” the lieutenant snorted. “Grant, you didn’t go into that cellar because you heard a noise. You made that noise. That was you, sweeping those cellar stairs.”
I began to wonder if the lieutenant hadn’t left out a few details in his story of the murdering hitchhiker. I began to guess he had accused the first three hitchhikers, too, and struck pay dirt in the fourth. Certainly, his methods in this case had depended strongly on accusation of everyone who came under suspicion.
He didn’t strike pay dirt in Mr. Grant. He threatened, he cajoled, he made the same accusations over and over; Mr. Grant was firm. Mr. Grant became whiter, weaker, frailer, but no less firm.
It was the lieutenant who cried quits.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he cried as a finale. “I’m God damned sick of the whole case! You can all get murdered for all I care. I’m going home to bed.”
He flung out, growled something at the detective in the passage, slammed the door after himself.
The four of us left in my living room looked bleakly at each other. We’d been pretty well drained of emotion. I know I’d been wrung by pity for Mr. Grant.
I said so.
Looking back, I’m glad I did.
I said, “I don’t think it was you that attacked me, Mr. Grant. I’d never in the world believe it.”
“You’d be right,” he said gently.
“To hell with the police,” Mr. Buffingham said. “I’m going to bed.” He lurched wearily out and upstairs.
Mr. Grant and Hodge stood up, too.
“I won’t say, ‘Must go so soon?’” I said, trying to be light. “I know you’re desperately tired. I am.”
I walked forward to be at the door when they left, walked past the chair where the lieutenant had sat. Automatically I stooped to pick up a sheet of paper fallen to the floor.
“I hope you both get a good night’s sleep; I feel I can sleep safely with that detective—Why, look, Hodge, this is the copy of Rose Liberry’s suicide note! Lieutenant Strom must have dropped it when he put your timetable away!”
Hodge leaned over me to read. Mr. Grant grew interested, too; when I looked up he stood beside me, reading.
Without a word or a sign he slipped to the floor.
“He’s fainted!” cried Hodge. “Here, let me get him on the couch.”
He was curiously light when we lifted him. The detective in the hall came in; together the three of us worked to bring Mr. Grant back to consciousness.
He came back quickly, lay quiet for a while, his face sunken and white but his eyes bright.
“So many questions,” he murmured.
He closed his eyes, seemed to doze a little.
“I knew Lieutenant Strom was being too hard on him.” I felt indignant at the lieutenant. “Let him stay here awhile. There’s no hurry for him to get upstairs.”
The detective, instead of going back to the hall, hovered near the windows, watching. I sat by the couch. Presently Mr. Grant’s eyes opened; he smiled at me faintly.
“What was I looking at? Oh yes. The paper. What was it you called it?”
“It was something we turned up this morning. I don’t suppose you’d remember, but there was a big scandal in Gilling City years ago. A girl named Rose Liberry committed suicide. Her suicide note was very dangerous to someone, and it was destroyed. But the one man living who saw it remembered it very clearly. That was his copy.”
To my surprise he nodded.
“I remember. The Liberry case. A great scandal. I remember very well. I—knew the family. But there wasn’t any suicide note. I remember very well. No note.”
“We just found out about it today,” I repeated.
I hesitated, but he was obviously interested, waiting. There was no one else who could hear except Hodge and the detective. Why shouldn’t I tell him? Here was someone who at least remembered. A friend of the family. One of those who ought to know. But I didn’t want to bring Mr. Waller in.
“We tracked down the policeman who was the first
official at the scene of the suicide. We were able to prove Mrs. Garr had been paying him money. So Lieutenant Strom forced him to confess he had found a suicide note and that the money was a bribe Mrs. Garr had paid to let her destroy it.”
“Destroy? But the note—”
“Mr.—the policeman remembered it perfectly. He couldn’t forget. It had been eating at his mind ever since. He wrote it down for Lieutenant Strom just as it was, just as he found it.”
Mr. Grant closed his eyes; he was so pale I called out to Hodge, but he hadn’t fainted again. He opened his eyes after a few minutes.
“Very interesting. Very interesting,” he murmured.
He sat up in another few moments; Hodge and the detective moved to help him upstairs. When he was on his feet, he turned to me absently, as if his thoughts were far away.
“Very interesting. I remember the case well. The girl’s parents—I remember them well. Great blow, the girl’s death was. The—the circumstances. This makes such a change. The note—would you mind if I studied it? I would return it to the lieutenant in the morning, of course. Very interesting.”
I hesitated again. Lieutenant Strom might be furious. But it wasn’t an original; if the note were lost, couldn’t Mr. Waller be forced to make another copy? I looked at Mr. Grant. A faint pink was coming into his face now; he looked, somehow, like a lost, pathetic old child, asking a favor.
“I don’t see why not,” I said gently and gave it to him.
He took it in his right hand, carefully; I didn’t think he’d lose it. I heard the three pairs of feet slowly going upstairs; Hodge and the detective stayed awhile in Mr. Grant’s room before they came down again.
“Something funny about that.” Jones followed Hodge into my living room. “I think he had the wind up about that note.”
“It was strange how interested he was, wasn’t it? He was worn out before, though. It must have been the strain of the questioning that made him faint.” I was still puzzling over the request to study the note that night. What did he mean, “study it”?
“I disagree with you,” Hodge said thoughtfully. “I was thinking how well he stood up under the questioning. The lieutenant’s barbs didn’t seem to penetrate. He beat Strom out. No, I think Jones here is right. It was the note that knocked him cold.”
“But what could that mean?”
“A lot or nothing,” Hodge said. “He said he knew the family. To friends of the family that scandal must have been a world-shaker. They’d remember. Then this note. It’s so obvious it makes the girl all right. A victim. It was probably the surprise, coming on top of all the questioning.”
“The questioning tonight—Mr. Grant’s, I mean—didn’t go into the Liberry case at all, did it? It was when he was talking to Mr. Buffingham that Lieutenant Strom went into that.”
“I think maybe I ought to call the chief,” Jones offered. “But you saw the way he slammed out of here. He ought to be asleep by now. I’d get my head bitten off at the neck.”
“Tomorrow’s another day,” Hodge agreed.
“Especially with you on guard in the hall,” I reminded Mr. Jones. “Mr. Grant will still be here in the morning, with you to keep him here.”
So Lieutenant Strom wasn’t called.
I wonder if it would have made any difference if he had been.
In the end, I am sure, there would have been no difference.
* * *
—
I WAS RESTLESS THAT night.
It was hard to pin my restlessness down to any one thing.
Mr. Waller didn’t come home. He was still being held, then. We were safe from him, if he was the marauder.
If he was not, then there was the detective in the hall to keep us safe from whoever it was.
I had left my hall doors open again, and I could hear the rattle of Jones’ paper, and his movements as he twisted in his chair.
I finally pinned my restlessness to Mr. Grant. I couldn’t figure out his attitude. “Very interesting. Very. I remember the case well. I was a friend of the family.” His voice murmured in my ears as I tried vainly to sleep. I tried to put myself in Mr. Grant’s mind, to see and feel as he would.
Mr. Grant twenty years younger. Fifty, perhaps. A friend of Mr. Liberry. An acquaintance of Miss Rachel Staines, the aunt. Of course they would have friends. There must be others, still living.
The first thing I should do in the morning must be to hurry Lieutenant Strom into finding the friends and relatives of Rose Liberry, if he hadn’t already started doing so. They would like to know.
The girl’s father and mother might still live out of town. But the aunt had lived in town. I’d look in the phone book. Staines, Rachel, 1128 Cleveland Avenue. Would the name still be there?
“Miss Staines, this is Mrs. Dacres. You won’t know me, but I have good news for you . . . Your niece, Rose Liberry—the one that died so sadly—her suicide note has been found at last.”
I’d never sleep, thinking about all this. Mr. Grant, a friend of the family. Worried and kindly when the first news of the disappearance came. Helping with money, perhaps. Horrified when the end came. A friend of the family.
I slept at last, but I had nightmares in which Rose Liberry’s family cried to me: “Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
When I woke, it was bright morning, but I was still heavily tired. I dragged myself out of bed and yawned my breakfast ready; funny—the day before yesterday, I’d been starving on orange juice, and now I’d already forgotten that hunger. The top of my head was still sore; that was the only remnant of Monday’s attack. It was Friday. About time, I thought sardonically, for me to have another.
After I’d eaten I wandered out into the hall. Mr. Grant was back on my mind. Jones was still there, sleepy and cross.
“Good morning!”
“Morning.”
“Everything normal? No murders?”
“Naw.”
“Seen Mr. Grant this morning?”
“He ain’t been down yet.”
“Poor old man,” I said. “He’s probably all in. I think I’ll make fresh coffee and take him a cup.”
“Okay, sister. I could use one myself.”
So I made coffee, left a cup with the grateful Jones, and went upstairs with the other. The hall upstairs was dark and silent. Hodge was probably gone. Mr. Buffingham would still be sleeping. Miss Sands at work. Mrs. Waller—Mrs. Waller would be alone.
I’d seldom seen either of the Wallers alone. I thought about their life, knit so closely by shared shame. For better, for worse. Mrs. Waller had taken her full share of the shame.
It was really the Wallers I was thinking of as I knocked softly on Mr. Grant’s door.
There wasn’t any answer.
I knocked again.
The door gave a little as I knocked. Mr. Grant, then, as I had, had left his door unlocked last night. He hadn’t even caught the lock. Probably he had been afraid he might be sick in the night and need help.
He was an old man. Surely, he wouldn’t mind if I came in to see how he was.
I swung the door open.
He slept on the bed, his face turned to the open window. The light fell strongly on his sleeping face; he looked rested, serene, all the weariness of last night gone.
The room was very bright. I looked upward.
The electric light in the ceiling was still on.
I think I knew then.
Softly I set the cup and saucer on the dresser top. Lightly I touched the man’s arm.
Dead.
I knew, too, what to look for.
On the table by the bed were two slips of paper, one laid neatly over the other. The top one was familiar. Rose Liberry’s suicide note.
Under it was a shorter note:
I am John Grant Liberry. I am very happy tonight; I cannot wait to go to her.
I WENT QUIETLY DOWNSTAIRS to tell Jones.
He woke up thoroughly then, gave a startled exclamation, ran upstairs, came charging back. I sat down on the black leather davenport to cry; Jones called Strom and paced the floor, anxious.
“Gosh, what’ll he say? With me right here!” was his refrain.
Lieutenant Strom appeared with his usual promptness; if he left abruptly, he came abruptly, too. It didn’t seem five minutes before he was there in the hall, Van and Bill behind him.
“What’s eating you?” he said to me before he spoke to Jones.
“I’m glad he saw the note,” I sobbed.
“What note?”
“You dropped Rose Liberry’s suicide note. Mr. Grant—he’s her father.”
“For crying out loud! Come along, Jones!”
They tramped upstairs, all four. Within a few minutes, I was continually interrupted by new arrivals. I didn’t know who they were. Police officers, coroner’s men, probably. They came in officiously, asked, “Where is it?” and went upstairs.
After a while Mrs. Waller came down, her face mottled and red, her eyes anxious and frightened.
“What is it?” she asked hoarsely.
“It’s Mr. Grant. He’s dead.”
“Dead? He’s dead?”
“Yes. I found him. I went up with some coffee for him, and he was—gone.”
“What did he die from?” she whispered stiffly, terror beginning on her face.
“I don’t know. But he—he did it himself. He left a note.”
I hadn’t yet thought what the implications might be. Then I did, with a shock, as I watched hope burst into Mrs. Waller’s face. I knew immediately what she meant when she cried:
“Did he confess he’d done it?”
“Oh no. No. It doesn’t mean he had anything to do with Mrs. Garr’s death. It was something entirely different. It was—”
The realization of how directly the Wallers were concerned in both Mr. Grant’s life and his death hit me. The realization of the eighteen years of agony they had built him. I turned my eyes away.
“When Lieutenant Strom was here last night he dropped on the floor the copy of Rose Liberry’s suicide note, the one your husband wrote. Mr. Grant saw it.”