“I’m afraid I agree with Florence,” Jack said.
I was not about to give up so easily. I could not believe my eyes would so deceive me as to show me the face of my father, where only a stranger existed.
“I have to be certain,” I said. “I’m going to talk to him. Now that I am inside the grounds, I’ll ring the doorbell.”
Leaving Florence and Jack on the other side of the fence, I marched boldly to the front door. I knocked several times and rang the bell. When there was no response, I resorted to banging on the door with both fists.
At the rear of the house, a door slammed. Florence called out to me from the other side of the gate: “Jane! A woman is leaving the estate by the back way.”
I darted to the corner of the house. The woman I had met earlier that day had let herself out the rear gate. Holding up the skirts of her long black coat, she hurried across the snowy fields.
“Shall I nab her?” Jack asked.
“No, let her go,” I answered. “While that woman is away, I’ll get into the house. I think Dad is in there alone, and I’m going to find him.”
“If you’re going to do that,” Jack said, “I’m coming with you.”
Chapter Eighteen
Flo did not fancy being left alone outside the fence, so, with Jack and Flo in tow, I returned to the front porch and rang the doorbell many times. No one came to admit me. I tried the door. It was locked. I tried the windows above the porch level but could not raise them.
“I’ll try the back door,” I said, refusing to accept defeat.
As I had feared, the back door was also locked. I tested the eight windows on the ground floor level of the back of the house. Finally I found one which opened into the cellar. To my delight, the sash swung inward as I pushed on it.
“Here I go,” I said. “Flo and I will go inside, Jack, stay where you are and keep watch.”
Flo was less than enthusiastic about housebreaking, but when Jack suggested that he should accompany me inside and she should stay outside on her own to keep watch, she quickly changed her tune.
I crawled through the narrow opening and swung myself down to the cellar floor. I landed with a thud beside a laundry tub, then reached up to help guide Flo down in the darkness. We groped our way in the dim light toward a stairway. On the way, Flo tripped over a box and made a fearful clatter.
“I’ve certainly advertised our arrival,” she hissed. “I’m not cut out for your brand of adventure.”
At the top of the stairway, I found a light switch and switched it on. The door at the top of the stairs was not locked. I opened it and stepped out into the semi-dark kitchen.
A doorbell at the front of the house began to ring. I was dumbfounded. Surely it was not Jack who wanted in. He was not the sort to shy away from climbing through cellar windows.
I was fairly confident that no one would answer the incessant ringing of the bell. No one had answered my persistent banging on the door. Still, I waited a minute, to be sure.
The ringing continued, so I made my way through the house, switching on lights as I went.
When I reached the front door, I looked through the peephole.
A uniformed messenger boy stood on the porch.
I opened the door. Flo stood just behind me. We must have looked quite the pair with dusty coats and cobwebs in our hair.
“Mrs. Rigley live here?” the boy asked, taking a telegram from his jacket pocket.
He seemed entirely unfazed by our unkempt appearance, but I expect that messenger boys are regularly exposed to practically every oddity of human nature.
I did not know what answer to give to his enquiry after this Mrs. Rigley.
“This is the Deming estate,” I told him.
The messenger boy turned the beam of his flashlight on the telegram. “Mrs. Lennie Rigley, Stop 4, Care of G. A. Deming,” he read aloud. “This is the place all right.”
“Mrs. Rigley isn’t at home at the moment,” I told the boy.
“I’ve had a lot of trouble getting here,” the boy complained. “Even had to climb over the gate. How about signing for the telegram?”
“Oh, all right,” I said as I accepted the pencil. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that idea myself.”
In return for the telegram, I gave the boy a small tip. The moment he had gone, I closed the front door and switched on a table lamp.
The front entry opened into a luxuriously furnished living room. The rug underfoot was Persian, the furniture hand-carved mahogany, and in the corner sat a fine old grand piano.
I examined the telegram in my hand.
“I can’t decide if I should open it,” I told Flo.
“Do what you want,” Florence told me, “but if you get caught, don’t bring me into it.”
“What’s a ten-year prison sentence for tampering with a telegram?” I cajoled myself. “I’m willing to spend a decade in Sing if only I can find Dad.”
I ripped open the envelope. The message, addressed to Mrs. Lennie Rigley, was a bit of a letdown and hardly worth risking jail time:
“HAVE CHANGED PLANS. WILL RETURN THE SIXTEENTH BY PLANE. PLEASE HAVE EVERYTHING IN READINESS.”
The telegram was signed by the owner of the estate, G. A. Deming.
“Today is the sixteenth of the month,” Flo pointed out. “This message must have been several hours delayed.”
Evidently, the woman who had refused to tell me her name was Mrs. Lennie Rigley. Regretting that I had opened the message, I tossed it carelessly on the table in the hall where its rightful recipient would be sure to find it.
It was at that moment that I heard footsteps on the second floor, seemingly directly overhead. Flo and I had taken no pains to be quiet. Nevertheless, my pulse quickened as I heard someone pad to the head of the stairway. A muffled voice called out: “Who’s there?”
It was unmistakably the voice of my father. I darted to the foot of the circular staircase. On the top landing in the semidarkness stood a man, his face obscured in shadow.
“Dad!” I shouted. “It’s Jane. I’ve come to take you home.”
“Jane?” the man demanded impatiently as if the name meant nothing to him. “Where is Mrs. Rigley?”
“She went away.”
“And how did you get into the house?”
“Through a cellar window.”
“I thought as much. Madam, I don’t know what you’re doing here in Mrs. Rigley’s absence, but unless you leave at once, I’ll summon the police.”
I was not to be discouraged so easily. I started slowly up the stairway, so as not to further startle the poor man.
“Stand where you are,” the man ordered sharply. “I’ve been sick, but I’m still a match for any house-breaker. I have a revolver—”
So dark was the stairway that I could not know whether or not the man was bluffing. His voice, unmistakably that of my father, sounded grim and determined. A stranger—and undoubtedly that was what the man believed he was to me—would have good reason to treat me like a burglar.
“Come back down,” Flo hissed from the foot of the stairs.
I hesitated.
“He’ll shoot you,” Flo warned.
“Dad—” I called out to the shadowy figure.
“Don’t keep calling me Dad,” he snapped.
“Are you Anthony Fielding?” I asked.
“Certainly not.”
“Who are you, then?”
“Who am I?” the man repeated. “I’m Lester Jones, a salesman. I room here.”
I was baffled. I wished I could get a better look at the man’s face. The voice was just like Dad’s, but perhaps I was horribly mistaken.
“Then you’re not being held prisoner by Mrs. Rigley?”
“On the contrary, Mrs. Rigley has been very kind to me. Especially since I’ve been sick.”
“But I’ve seen you wandering in the garden at night. Why do you do it?”
“Because—oh, hang it! Do I have to explain everything to you
? My head’s aching again. Unless you go away and stop bothering me, I’ll call the police.”
“I’ll go,” I said quietly, and retreated down the stairway.
I switched off the light, and Flo and I left through the back door, which led out of the kitchen.
“I guess you didn’t have any luck,” Jack said.
I suppose my downcast face said it all.
I ruefully admitted that the man we had been seen in the garden claimed to be a Mr. Lester Jones, salesman.
“I knew he wasn’t your father,” Florence said with unbearable smugness. “You wouldn’t listen to reason—”
“All the same, his voice was similar,” I interrupted. “The man even used one of Dad’s pet expressions.”
“What was it?”
“‘Oh, hang it!’ That’s the expression Dad uses when he’s irritated.”
We all managed to clamber over the spiked top of the iron fence without mishap and made our way back toward where Jack had parked the car. Midway there, I paused to stare up at the dark windows of the second floor.
“That man must have been Dad even if he didn’t know me,” I said.
“Oh, Jane, don’t start that all over again,” Florence pleaded. “You’re only torturing yourself.”
“I’m going back,” I said.
“No, we can’t let you, Jane.”
Florence held firmly to my arm. Jack opened the car door, and together, Jack and Flo pushed me into the front passenger seat. I protested weakly but soon relented.
“I won’t go back to the house,” I said, “but we’re going straight to the police station. I’ll not be satisfied until that man is positively identified as the real Lester Jones.”
At the police station, I told Detective Dalton the entire story. It was the first he had heard of Mrs. Rigley. My earlier message had not been delivered by Policeman Burns.
“For that matter, I’ve not seen Burns today,” the detective explained. “I’ll go to the estate at once and question the woman.”
Flo took a taxi home from the police station.
Reinvigorated by our adventure, Florence was smitten with remorse over abandoning her hemming job on the wise men’s costumes. Flo declared that as she had no personal beef against the three wise men, it was uncharitable of her to expose them to possible humiliation and injury just because her fingers ached and she was suffering from seamstress’s elbow.
Furthermore, Flo declared, any grown person consenting of their own free will to participate in any production directed by the likes of her mother at least deserved a costume that would not endanger life and limb. It was enough that every participant in the St. Luke’s Christmas pageant was already risking their sanity.
Jack drove me back to the Oaklands Estate, this time trailed by a police car. Detective Dalton broke the padlock on the gate and led the party to the front door.
A light now burned in the living room. To my astonishment, the front door was opened by Mrs. Rigley after only one ring.
Detective Dalton flashed his badge. “We want to ask you a few questions,” he said. “May we come in?”
With obvious reluctance, the woman stepped aside, allowing us to enter the living room. My gaze roved to the table in the hall. The telegram which I had opened was no longer on the table.
Mrs. Rigley did not offer us chairs. Glaring at me with undisguised dislike, she said coldly: “I suppose I am indebted to you for this visit. What is it you want?”
“I understand you have a roomer here,” began Detective Dalton.
“A roomer?” Mrs. Rigley echoed blankly.
“Yes, a man by the name of Lester Jones.”
“You don’t seem to realize that this is the Deming estate, not a rooming house.”
“Are you an employee here?”
“I am the housekeeper. During Mr. Deming’s absence, I look after the property. I assure you no one but myself lives in the house at present.”
“No roomer ever has stayed here?”
Mrs. Rigley drew herself up proudly. “Would Mr. Deming be likely to annoy himself with roomers? He has a very substantial fortune.”
“You might try to pick up a few dollars yourself.”
“Mr. Deming would not hear of such a thing. He pays me well. I’d not risk my excellent position by inviting strangers into his house.”
Detective Dalton asked additional questions, trying to learn whether or not the woman was the one who had fled from the cemetery. Mrs. Rigley frankly admitted that she had taken Mr. Carter to the hospital, but she denied ever trying to collect a ransom.
“What you say now doesn’t agree with your original story,” I protested. “You admitted to me—”
“I admitted nothing,” Mrs. Rigley broke in indignantly. “I have no secrets to hide.”
“But I’m sure Mr. Jones is living in this house,” I said stubbornly. “I spoke with him myself, not two hours ago. He’s upstairs.”
“Indeed?” mocked Mrs. Rigley. “Perhaps you’d like to search the house.”
“Yes, we would,” said Detective Dalton. “I shall apply for a warrant.”
Mrs. Rigley remained undisturbed. Bestowing upon me a look of deep contempt, she motioned toward the stairway.
“Very well. There’s no need for the formality of a warrant. Search the house,” she invited with cool assurance. “I’ve told you the truth. You’ll find no one here but me.”
Chapter Nineteen
In systematic, unhurried fashion, Detective Dalton went through every room in the Deming house. The bedchambers, nine in number, were in perfect order. Only Mrs. Rigley’s suite over the kitchen appeared to have been recently inhabited.
As the search progressed, my bewilderment increased. I knew that the man claiming to be Lester Jones had been in the house an hour earlier, yet there was no sign of him. I inspected the clothes closets and bureau drawers in every room. Not an article could I find that ever had belonged to my father. I did come upon a white woolen bathrobe, which I called to Detective Dalton’s attention.
“Oh, that robe belongs to my employer, Mr. Deming,” Mrs. Rigley explained.
I pointed out the water stains along the hem, which suggested that the garment had been allowed to trail in the snow.
“Sometimes I wear the robe when I go outside to bring in the washing,” Mrs. Rigley told the Detective. “It is warmer than my coat.”
Try as I might, I could not draw the woman into making any damaging admissions. Mrs. Rigley had changed her original story and would not acknowledge that she had fled from the cemetery. The housekeeper insisted that she had told everything she knew about the disappearance of Anthony Fielding.
“I took him to Mercy Hospital in my employer’s car,” Mrs. Rigley repeated to Detective Dalton. “That’s the last I saw of him.”
“In what condition was Mr. Fielding when you left him at the hospital?” the detective asked her.
“He seemed all right, although he was a bit dazed.”
“Why didn’t you report it to the police?”
“Because I didn’t see the newspapers for a day or two, so I had no idea the poor man had been reported missing,” Mrs. Rigley replied sullenly. “Later, I read Mrs. Carter’s offer of a reward.”
“Then you did write, requesting me to run the ad in the Examiner?”
“No, of course not,” Mrs. Rigley insisted, “I merely read the item, and concluded that Mr. Fielding may have been the injured man whom I took to Mercy Hospital.”
I knew Mrs. Rigley was not telling the entire truth, or possibly any truth at all, but to prove that she was lying seemed impossible. I had also failed to establish that the man who claimed to be Lester Jones had been living in the house. True, Florence and Jack would support my story, but it would only be our word against that of Mrs. Rigley. The situation had become hopelessly confusing.
Detective Dalton was not entirely satisfied with the housekeeper’s story. “We’ll have to take you along to the station for questioning,” he conc
luded.
Only then did Mrs. Rigley lose her composure.
“No, don’t take me away!” she pleaded. “My employer is coming home tonight. I just received the telegram. If I’m not here when he arrives, I may lose my job.”
Detective Dalton had little evidence against Mrs. Rigley and later confided in me that he doubted that he could have held her for long at the station. After we left the Oaklands Estate, he told me that he believed far more might be gained by allowing the housekeeper her freedom and keeping watch of the Oaklands Estate house.
“We’ll let you stay here for the time being,” he told Mrs. Rigley before we left. “However, you’ll be wanted for questioning a little later. Make no attempt to leave the premises.”
“I won’t try to go away,” Mrs. Rigley promised. “I want to cooperate with the police. All I ask is that my employer, Mr. Deming, doesn’t hear of this. I’m innocent, and it’s not right for me to lose a good job.”
Outside the gates, Detective Dalton assured me that he would assign a policeman to keep watch of the property. Jack, Flo and I, completely bewildered, returned to Jack’s car and debated our next action.
“Where to?” Jack asked me. “Home?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “I never was in such a muddle in all my life. What became of that man I thought was Dad?”
“He must have left the house while we were at the police station,” Florence suggested. “It was a surprise finding Mrs. Rigley there too. She must have returned in a hurry after we went away.”
“Mrs. Rigley got rid of Lester Jones somehow,” I said. “Oh, she’s a slick one.”
Just as Jack was starting the engine, I observed a dark figure approaching the estate from down the road.
“Wait!” I told Jack. “And cut the motor. Let’s see who that is.”
A moment later, the figure emerged from the shadow cast by a giant tree. I was surprised to see it was Jeremiah Jones. He carried a basket on his arm and evidently had been doing a little late marketing at the crossroads store.
I got out of the car and hailed him from the roadside.
The Jane Carter Historical Cozies Box Set 2 Page 56