The Listening House

by Mabel Seeley

  “Aren’t you moving over?” I asked her.

  She looked at me portentously.

  “Didn’t you ever hear about deaths coming in threes?” she asked in tones of sepulchral gloom. “If it’d been just Aunt Hattie died out of this house, I wouldn’t of minded. But two deaths! I ain’t going to move in here until another one dies.”

  Nice.

  Mr. Halloran was around occasionally. Usually in company with burly, shifty men; the lesser grade of contractors, I gathered. They knocked at my door and tracked through my rooms, staring speculatively around at the walls. Mr. Halloran was desperately important, of course.

  Money to spend.

  Mrs. Halloran told me they were getting a mortgage on the house.

  The Tewmans never came back.

  But the rest of the tenants didn’t make the exodus I’d expected at all. Miss Sands was the only one to tell me she was leaving.

  “Mrs. Halloran wants me to go on paying five dollars for that measly room, can you imagine that?” She paused and flushed. “It’s nice you aren’t telling. I can just see those Hallorans playing the same game on me Mrs. Garr did.”

  “So can I,” I said. “You don’t have to worry.”

  Hodge, when I asked him, said, “Why should I move? I like an eventful life. This house has developed charms I never expected. Besides, think of the company!”

  Mr. Buffingham, after Miss Sands had given notice, had a fight with Mrs. Halloran right outside my door; he won with a weekly rental of three dollars.

  Most surprising of all, the Wallers didn’t move. Mrs. Halloran reported that they were paying six dollars for their rooms now, without a murmur.

  “I’m still thinking who could of give me that five-dollar bill,” she reminded me. “You know, the one that was tore. It doesn’t seem to come to me that it was Mr. Grant. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it come to me sometime. I got an awful good memory.”

  She repeated not one word of her previous request to me to move.

  I didn’t think of moving.

  I admit now why I didn’t, but you couldn’t have made me, then. Then, I laid it to something I felt when I went to bed at night.

  The house wasn’t at rest yet.

  The house still listened.

  It wasn’t logical at all. If Mrs. Garr had been the evil spirit of that house, as I fully believed she had been, then surely the house should have been quiet now. If Mr. Grant had precipitated the horrors of the weeks just past, as Lieutenant Strom believed, then surely the house should have been quiet now.

  It wasn’t.

  We had no more detectives around, of course.

  I blamed it all on my imagination, as I lay awake, hearing the stir and groan of the walls and floors, feeling the stare of eyes open on the dark, hearing the strain of ears tense in the night. When I told Lieutenant Strom about it, on our second date, he laughed loud and long. Hodge Kistler, when I told him, didn’t.

  The next Friday, a week after Mr. Grant’s death, and the day Hodge is freest from his duties on the paper, I saw his car scoot up Trent Street toward the house with an extra passenger in it. The extra passenger was Mr. Waller.

  When I mentioned it, Hodge said, “Waller? Sure. Saw him on the street. Gave him a lift.”

  I thought no more of it then, but that next Sunday, not having anything else to do, I baked cookies. I took a plate of them up to Hodge. When he opened his door, Mr. Waller was in his sitting room. I thought that was queer.

  Mr. Waller looked almost like his old self when the door opened, but when he saw me he collapsed into humiliation again. He didn’t go, though. I did. I left the cookies and went downstairs.

  That day Mrs. Halloran had ads in the papers for renting Miss Sands’ and Mr. Liberry’s rooms. She had people tracking in and out of the house all day. Curiosity seekers; she didn’t rent.

  Poor Mr. Grant. His death had kindled one bright flare, and then he was forgotten. I heard from Lieutenant Strom that he’d left his money to an orphanage; as far as he could find, there were no Liberry relatives left.

  “In all the world there are probably only you and me and the Wallers to whom the name Rose Liberry still means anything,” I said sadly, thinking of the lovely pictured girl.

  It was another Friday evening when I had that talk with Lieutenant Strom about Rose Liberry; the Friday two weeks after Mr. Grant’s death. It’s funny how so many things in Mrs. Garr’s house did happen on Fridays; except for that second attack on me, almost all the big happenings did.

  For the second time, Hodge had completely ignored me on his freest evening, so when Lieutenant Strom had called me to suggest a movie and a drink, I’d gone willingly.

  But I wasn’t awfully happy. At ten, I said I was tired and wanted to go home. I didn’t like the way things were turning out; Lieutenant Strom was acting as if he rather liked me, and I wasn’t particularly anxious to have him. I felt uneasy with him that night, as if I were trying to ward off something.

  He took me home right away and said good night without any fuss. I knew I had him to think about.

  I picked up a book to read. I didn’t get much meaning out of the words; my mind would slip to Lieutenant Strom and then to Hodge Kistler and his irritating lack of interest in me lately.

  I heard Mr. Buffingham come in. Then, after him, Hodge.

  Peculiarly, I thought the man with Hodge was Mr. Waller; I knew the footsteps quite well by this time.

  I was too keyed up to sleep if I did go to bed; I hated trying to sleep when all I did was listen to that house. I wished I had a private bathtub so I could take a hot bath to make me sleepier. Mrs. Halloran was proving as economical as Mrs. Garr in the matter of hot water. There was sure not to be any; I’d have to turn on the heater if I wanted a bath.

  It was nonsense to be so lazy. I finally padded down to the basement as a lesson in moral stiffening, and turned the heater on. It was a rusty old heater; I’d have to wait fully thirty minutes for enough hot water.

  I poked around my room those thirty minutes. I got my bed ready, climbed into pajamas and negligee. When I went down to turn the heater off, the hot water still came only a foot and a half down at the top of the tank. I waited around down there five or ten minutes for it to get a little hotter. I was infuriated with the inefficiency of the house; imagine all that trouble for a bath!

  I started up the basement stairs, the stairs near whose foot Mrs. Garr had sat so many days, in her curious listening; the stairs where Jerry the policeman had cringed back when a cat’s eyes shone at him from the top; the stairs which my attacker, three weeks ago, had stolen down, perhaps at this very time of night, to lurk below until he knew me home and sleeping.

  Old stairs, worn stairs, showing the grain of worn wood through worn gray paint.

  A few steps from the top I stopped short. My eyes were on the step next to the top.

  It was something about the light. The basement light hung close to the basement ceiling, almost on a level with that step.

  In the crack at the back of that step, almost invisible, was the dull gleam of worn metal.

  I bent forward to look more closely.

  My eyes saw that tiny metallic gleam in the angle between the step and the rise, while my mind saw Mrs. Garr sitting in her rocker below.

  Watching.

  What?

  I didn’t have to find out what that bit of metal was. I knew.

  It was part of a hinge.

  As if it moved of its own accord, my right hand reached out, took hold of the overhanging edge of the step next to the top.

  I lifted.

  It was as easy as that.

  The step lifted as easily as if it were a box cover. Easily. Not a sound. Not a sigh.

  There were cleaning rags in the space beneath. Musty. Soiled.

  Newspaper under them.
/>   Clean, smooth newspaper.

  I don’t know what I expected to see under that paper; I wasn’t expecting, I wasn’t thinking. I was acting. Bent over, I lifted that paper.

  Money.

  Thick stacks of money. New bills, as clean as the day they left the mint, unfolded. I began taking the money up; thick stacks of new bills, bound together by strips of glued paper.

  That instant, the darkness in the room ahead of me split, and part of it came down on the back of my neck.

  Human darkness smashed down on me. I fought wildly. Fought because the minute the hands touched me, I knew that this was it. These were the same hands that had reached for my throat that night Mrs. Garr died. This was the same blackness that had been beside my bed that night my rooms were ransacked. This was the Death I had been hunting and had not found.

  I struggled to rise, to get my head back, to glimpse the face; for an instant, I turned my head, but there was only blackness where a face should have been. Again, I fought to get up, but the hand on the back of my neck pressed me down; I fought to scream, but the hand over my mouth only pressed closer. I fought to make a noise, any noise that would awaken the household, awaken Hodge, but I had been forced to my knees, and they seemed soundless on the stairs.

  I fought to keep my balance; fought most desperately for that, because it was likely death to fall backward as this Death fought to make me go.

  I lost there, too.

  A minute, two minutes, perhaps, of struggle.

  Then I went hurtling straight downward.

  I knew the Death I clutched was falling, too; I was taking it with me, but I was beneath; the night cracked as my head hit the stairs behind me.

  I didn’t feel the rest of the fall.

  When I came to, it was like a door opening on a dim stage.

  There was fighting on the stage, men crashing over me. Grunts. Swearing. A yell.

  “Look out for Gwynne!”

  A man’s voice. Recognizable. Hodge.

  The fight went farther away from me. I turned my head a little; an arm was there, all crumpled up under my head and shoulder. Whose arm could that be? Not mine. I could never get my arm into a position like that. Cement floor under it. I was in the basement, then. Slowly I got my position. Light over me. I was at the foot of the stairs. The fight must be going on over by the furnace. I looked that way, dizzily. Three fighters. Three men, fighting. Striking, staggering back, surging forward again.

  One face bent sidewise as a fist flashed forward. Hodge, that was, his hair all over his face. Blood on it. Was he the Death? Three men, all fighting each other. I couldn’t see—was it two against one, or were there three sides? I thought of the stacks of money, lying there in that step as in a box. That was it. They were fighting for the money. I was still puzzling over it when one man went down. For a second the group hung stationary: two men standing bent and spent over one man fallen.

  One man turned and bounded at me.

  “Watch him!” he yelled. It was Hodge. “I’ve got to get her upstairs. Get a doctor! Get Strom! Get a doctor first!”

  He lifted me quickly, charged upstairs. I noticed that the arm under me, the extra arm, came, too. It must be mine, then.

  But my mind wasn’t on it. My mind was on the significant group by the furnace. The group of two with one man crouched, panting, over the second lying quiet with his head against the furnace.

  One thing more I saw, my head bobbing back over Hodge’s shoulder.

  Money.

  Money strewn far and wide. Money on the basement floor.

  The arm didn’t seem to hurt much then, with Hodge yelling orders and pushing glasses in my face and people running. But the minute the doctor came and touched it, it hurt, excruciatingly.

  I pleased myself very much by fainting again. I came to at intervals after that, always under odd and unexplainable circumstances. Once I was on a bed, but it was moving fast. Once I was on a bed, but it was shooting upward. Once I was on a bed with a blinding light over it; my eyes were quickly covered, and the only air to breathe was sickeningly sweet. Once I was on a bed, but when I moved, knives struck at me from six sides.

  The next time I came out of it the circumstances were still odd, but explainable.

  I was in a hospital.

  I was so bandaged, I couldn’t move, but even if I could have moved, I wouldn’t have wanted to. I tried wiggling my little finger once, and the result told me that was nothing to do at all.

  There was a nurse in bright morning light.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Good morning,” she said with that impersonal cheer nurses use bedside. “And how are we feeling this morning?”

  I didn’t care how she felt.

  “What’s the matter with me?”

  “Just a few simple fractures,” she encouraged. “You fell downstairs.”

  “Who was it jumped at me?”

  “Now, now, just be quiet and rest.”

  That was all I could get out of her.

  All I did that day was sleep and ask questions that weren’t answered. I’d sleep, and then the questions would get so insistent, I’d wake up to ask them, but that was all the good it did me. I asked the nurse, the doctor, a woman who came in and swept, a cheekbony intern. I asked Hodge Kistler.

  He came in sometime during the afternoon. I woke up as far as I could for the occasion.

  “Did you get him?”

  “Yes, we got him this time. You won’t be jumped at again.”

  “Who was it?”

  “You’re not supposed to be excited.”

  “How can I keep from getting excited when no one will tell me anything? Did he get the money? I found the money. I found a lot of money. It was in the step below the top. Who was it? Was it Mr. Halloran?”

  “The patient is getting excited. You will have to go now,” the nurse said, and shoved him out.

  I hope the look I gave her was nasty, but only one eye was out of the bandages.

  “Tomorrow,” she told me. “Just be quiet until tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll let Mr. Kistler talk to you for fifteen whole minutes.”

  She wiped my tongue with a soppy piece of rag.

  By the next afternoon, I was still sleepy enough to drop off occasionally, but I didn’t drop off when it came near three o’clock. I was burning with impatience, and it’s no fun burning when you can’t even move, and no one ever answers.

  Hodge came promptly at three. He walked in, short and quick, grinning his three-cornered grin; his face looked scrubbed with pleasure and triumph.

  “Well, well, so you’re going to live,” he crowed over me.

  “Who said I wasn’t?”

  “Well, I was sort of doubtful when I saw you hadn’t landed on your head. You should always take knocks on your head; it seems to hurt you less.”

  “I haven’t time to be insulted. Who was it?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. And I’m going to break in a few more places if I don’t know pretty soon.”

  “What did you see in that top step?”

  “Money.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Then you didn’t take the money out?”

  “I took some money out. I lifted the top of the step, and took the rags out and took up the newspaper, and there it was. Packages of money. I lifted some out. And then it hit me, bang.”

  “I thought it was like that. He was bending over you at the bottom of the stairs when I got there. Said he’d heard you fall and run down, but he was clutching money in his hand, and when I saw the black scarf in his pocket I reached for his chin.”

  “He? He! Would you like me crazy?”

  “Me? My, no. But I think you deserve the full dramatic impact. You see, in one way you were right.
There was money. But there was something else, too. There was a link with the Liberry case. It was there, with the money, hidden in that step. The one last link.”

  “Can’t you tell me? Can’t you show me?” I wailed.

  “All right. Now this is solemn. This is the moment. I borrowed this document from Lieutenant Strom, and I will probably fry in the electric chair if I lose it. But with what I’ve got on Lieutenant Strom—well, we’ll skip that. This is the incriminating document. And the name at the end is the name of the person who murdered Mrs. Garr, choked you once, and tried twice to kill you. Ready?”

  “Hurry up!”

  “Okay.”

  His eyes alight on my face, he reached into his inner coat pocket, brought forth a sheet of letter paper, yellowed and old, unfolded it. I had no hands to use; he held it up in front of my face. It was handwritten in faded black ink, the handwriting irregular, nervous.

  I confess it was me that got Rose Liberry to go to Mrs. Garr’s house. She come into the drugstore for a soda. She was a knockout, so I mixed her the right kind of a drink, and when it’d taken hold, I said I’d take her to a place where she could lay down awhile. Like I did with all the girls I got for Mrs. Garr. She paid me $25 extra.

  That was all, except for the signature; the name I’d known the minute my eyes reached the second line.

  Charles Buffingham.

  25

  THE NURSE CHASED HODGE out then.

  It wasn’t until the next day that I got the explanations. That day, I graduated from having a nurse of my own to being tended by the regular nursing staff. What are a few broken bones? I’d made the doctor tell me how often I’d cracked, too: a fractured collarbone and a left arm broken in three places. The rest were only concussions, bruises, and such.

  I was bursting with hows, whats, whens, and whys when Hodge again arrived promptly at three o’clock. I’d found out it was Wednesday, so it was nice of him to come in the daytime. He brought what must have been his seventh bunch of flowers: daisies again, with tall stalks of gladioli.