The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  “All these facts have been gone over before you came in,” said he, which statement I beg to consider as open to doubt.

  The doctor, who had hardly moved a muscle during all this colloquy, now rose from his kneeling position beside the girl’s head.

  “I shall have to ask the presence of another physician,” said he. “Will you send for one from your office, Coroner Dahl?”

  At which I stepped back and the Coroner stepped forward, saying, however, as he passed me:

  “The inquest will be held day after tomorrow in my office. Hold yourself in readiness to be present. I regard you as one of my chief witnesses.”

  I assured him I would be on hand, and, obeying a gesture of his finger, retreated from the room; but I did not yet leave the house. A straight, slim man, with a very small head but a very bright eye, was leaning on the newel-post in the front hall, and when he saw me, started up so alertly I perceived that he had business with me, and so waited for him to speak.

  “You are Miss Butterworth?” he inquired.

  “I am, sir.”

  “And I am a reporter from the New York World. Will you allow me—”

  Why did he stop? I had merely looked at him. But he did stop, and that is saying considerable for a reporter from the New York World.

  “I certainly am willing to tell you what I have told every one else,” I interposed, considering it better not to make an enemy of so judicious a young man; and seeing him brighten up at this, I thereupon related all I considered desirable for the general public to know.

  I was about passing on, when, reflecting that one good turn deserves another, I paused and asked him if he thought they would leave the dead girl in that house all night.

  He answered that he did not think they would. That a telegram had been sent some time before to young Mr. Van Burnam, and that they were only awaiting his arrival to remove her.

  “Do you mean Howard?” I asked.

  “Is he the elder one?”

  “No.”

  “It is the elder one they have summoned; the one who has been staying at Long Branch.”

  “How can they expect him then so soon?”

  “Because he is in the city. It seems the old gentleman is going to return on the New York, and as she is due here today, Franklin Van Burnam has come to New York to meet him.”

  “Humph!” thought I, “lively times are in prospect,” and for the first time I remembered my dinner and the orders which had not been given about some curtains which were to have been hung that day, and all the other reasons I had for being at home.

  I must have shown my feelings, much as I pride myself upon my impassibility upon all occasions, for he immediately held out his arm, with an offer to pilot me through the crowd to my own house; and I was about to accept it when the door-bell rang so sharply that we involuntarily stopped.

  “A fresh witness or a telegram for the Coroner,” whispered the reporter in my ear.

  I tried to look indifferent, and doubtless made out pretty well, for he added, after a sly look in my face:

  “You do not care to stay any longer?”

  I made no reply, but I think he was impressed by my dignity. Could he not see that it would be the height of ill-manners for me to rush out in the face of any one coming in?

  An officer opened the door, and when we saw who stood there, I am sure that the reporter, as well as myself, was grateful that we listened to the dictates of politeness. It was young Mr. Van Burnam—Franklin; I mean the older and more respectable of the two sons.

  He was flushed and agitated, and looked as if he would like to annihilate the crowd pushing him about on his own stoop. He gave an angry glance backward as he stepped in, and then I saw that a carriage covered with baggage stood on the other side of the street, and gathered that he had not returned to his father’s house alone.

  “What has happened? What does all this mean?” were the words he hurled at us as the door closed behind him and he found himself face to face with a half dozen strangers, among whom the reporter and myself stood conspicuous.

  Mr. Gryce, coming suddenly from somewhere, was the one to answer him.

  “A painful occurrence, sir. A young girl has been found here, dead, crushed under one of your parlor cabinets.”

  “A young girl!” he repeated. (Oh, how glad I was that I had been brought up never to transgress the principles of politeness.) “Here! in this shut-up house? What young girl? You mean old woman, do you not? the house-cleaner or someone—”

  “No, Mr. Van Burnam, we mean what we say, though possibly I should call her a young lady. She is dressed quite fashionably.”

  “The ——” Really I cannot repeat in this public manner the word which Mr. Van Burnam used. I excused him at the time, but I will not perpetuate his forgetfulness in these pages.

  “She is still lying as we found her,” Mr. Gryce now proceeded in his quiet, almost fatherly way. “Will you not take a look at her? Perhaps you can tell us who she is?”

  “I?” Mr. Van Burnam seemed quite shocked. “How should I know her! Some thief probably, killed while meddling with other people’s property.”

  “Perhaps,” quoth Mr. Gryce, laconically; at which I felt so angry, as tending to mislead my handsome young neighbor, that I irresistibly did what I had fully made up my mind not to do, that is, stepped into view and took a part in this conversation.

  “How can you say that,” I cried, “when her admittance here was due to a young man who let her in at midnight with a key, and then left her to eat out her heart in this great house all alone.”

  I have made sensations in my life, but never quite so marked a one as this. In an instant every eye was on me, with the exception of the detective’s. His was on the figure crowning the newel-post, and bitterly severe his gaze was too, though it immediately grew wary as the young man started towards me and impetuously demanded:

  “Who talks like that? Why, it’s Miss Butterworth. Madam, I fear I did not fully understand what you said.”

  Whereupon I repeated my words, this time very quietly but clearly, while Mr. Gryce continued to frown at the bronze figure he had taken into his confidence. When I had finished, Mr. Van Burnam’s countenance had changed, so had his manner. He held himself as erect as before, but not with as much bravado. He showed haste and impatience also, but not the same kind of haste and not quite the same kind of impatience. The corners of Mr. Gryce’s mouth betrayed that he noted this change, but he did not turn away from the newel-post.

  “This is a remarkable circumstance which you have just told me,” observed Mr. Van Burnam, with the first bow I had ever received from him. “I don’t know what to think of it. But I still hold that it’s some thief. Killed, did you say? Really dead? Well, I’d have given five hundred dollars not to have had it happen in this house.”

  He had been moving towards the parlor door, and he now entered it. Instantly Mr. Gryce was by his side.

  “Are they going to close the door?” I whispered to the reporter, who was taking this all in equally with myself.

  “I’m afraid so,” he muttered.

  And they did. Mr. Gryce had evidently had enough of my interference, and was resolved to shut me out, but I heard one word and caught one glimpse of Mr. Van Burnam’s face before the heavy door fell to. The word was: “Oh, so bad as that! How can any one recognize her—” And the glimpse—well, the glimpse proved to me that he was much more profoundly agitated than he wished to appear, and any extraordinary agitation on his part was certainly in direct contradiction to the very sentence he was at that moment uttering.

  CHAPTER IV

  SILAS VAN BURNAM

  “However much I may be needed at home, I I cannot reconcile it with my sense of duty to leave just yet,” I confided to the reporter, with what I meant to be a proper s
how of reason and self-restraint; “Mr. Van Burnam may wish to ask me some questions.”

  “Of course, of course,” acquiesced the other. “You are very right; always are very right, I should judge.”

  As I did not know what he meant by this, I frowned, always a wise thing to do in an uncertainty; that is—if one wishes to maintain an air of independence and aversion to flattery.

  “Will you not sit down?” he suggested. “There is a chair at the end of the hall.”

  But I had no need to sit. The front door-bell again rang, and simultaneously with its opening, the parlor door unclosed and Mr. Franklin Van Burnam appeared in the hall, just as Mr. Silas Van Burnam, his father, stepped into the vestibule.

  “Father!” he remonstrated, with a troubled air; “could you not wait?”

  The elder gentleman, who had evidently just been driven up from the steamer, wiped his forehead with an irascible air, that I will say I had noticed in him before and on much less provocation.

  “Wait, with a yelling crowd screaming murder in my ear, and Isabella on one side of me calling for salts, and Caroline on the opposite seat getting that blue look about the mouth we have learned to dread so in a hot day like this? No, sir, when there is anything wrong going on I want to know it, and evidently there is something wrong going on here. What is it? Some of Howard’s—”

  But the son, seizing me by the hand and drawing me forward, put a quick stop to the old gentleman’s sentence. “Miss Butterworth, father! Our next-door neighbor, you know.”

  “Ah! hum! ha! Miss Butterworth. How do you do, ma’am? What the hell is she doing here?” he grumbled, not so low but that I heard both the profanity and the none too complimentary allusion to myself.

  “If you will come into the parlor, I will tell you,” urged the son. “But what have you done with Isabella and Caroline? Left them in the carriage with that hooting mob about them?”

  “I told the coachman to drive on. They are probably half-way around the block by this time.”

  “Then come in here. But don’t allow yourself to be too much affected by what you will see. A sad accident has occurred here, and you must expect the sight of blood.”

  “Blood! Oh, I can stand that, if Howard—”

  The rest was lost in the sound of the closing door.

  And now, you will say, I ought to have gone. And you are right, but would you have gone yourself, especially as the hall was full of people who did not belong there?

  If you would, then condemn me for lingering just a few minutes longer.

  The voices in the parlor were loud, but they presently subsided; and when the owner of the house came out again, he had a subdued look which was as great a contrast to his angry aspect on entering, as was the change I had observed in his son. He was so absorbed indeed that he did not notice me, though I stood directly in his way.

  “Don’t let Howard come,” he was saying in a thick, low voice to his son. “Keep Howard away till we are sure—”

  I am confident that his son pressed his arm at this point, for he stopped short and looked about him in a blind and dazed way.

  “Oh!” he ejaculated, in a tone of great displeasure. “This is the woman who saw—”

  “Miss Butterworth, father,” the anxious voice of his son broke in. “Don’t try to talk; such a sight is enough to unnerve any man.”

  “Yes, yes,” blustered the old gentleman, evidently taking some hint from the other’s tone or manner. “But where are the girls? They will be dead with terror, if we don’t relieve their minds. They got the idea it was their brother Howard who was hurt; and so did I, but it’s only some wandering waif—some—”

  It seemed as if he was not to be allowed to finish any of his sentences, for Franklin interrupted him at this point to ask him what he was going to do with the girls. Certainly he could not bring them in here.

  “No,” answered the father, but in the dreamy, inconsequential way of one whose thoughts were elsewhere. “I suppose I shall have to take them to some hotel.”

  Ah, an idea! I flushed as I realized the opportunity which had come to me and had to wait a moment not to speak with too much eagerness.

  “Let me play the part of a neighbor,” I prayed, “and accommodate the young ladies for the night. My house is near and quiet.”

  “But the trouble it will involve,” protested Mr. Franklin.

  “Is just what I need to allay my excitement,” I responded. “I shall be glad to offer them rooms for the night. If they are equally glad to accept them—”

  “They must be!” the old gentleman declared. “I can’t go running round with them hunting up rooms tonight. Miss Butterworth is very good; go find the girls, Franklin; let me have them off my mind, at least.”

  The young man bowed. I bowed, and was slipping at last from my place by the stairs when, for the third time, I felt my dress twitched.

  “Are you going to keep to that story?” a voice whispered in my ear. “About the young man and woman coming in the night, you know.”

  “Keep to it!” I whispered back, recognizing the scrub-woman, who had sidled up to me from some unknown quarter in the semi-darkness. “Why, it’s true. Why shouldn’t I keep to it.”

  A chuckle, difficult to describe but full of meaning, shook the arm of the woman as she pressed close to my side.

  “Oh, you are a good one,” she said. “I didn’t know they made ’em so good!” And with another chuckle full of satisfaction and an odd sort of admiration I had certainly not earned, she slid away again into the darkness.

  Certainly there was something in this woman’s attitude towards this affair which merited attention.

  CHAPTER V

  “THIS IS NO ONE I KNOW”

  I welcomed the Misses Van Burnam with just enough good-will to show that I had not been influenced by any unworthy motives in asking them to my house.

  I gave them my guest-chamber, but I invited them to sit in my front room as long as there was anything interesting going on in the street. I knew they would like to look out, and as this chamber boasts of a bay with two windows, we could all be accommodated. From where I sat I could now and then hear what they said, and I considered this but just, for if the young woman who had suffered so untimely an end was in any way connected with them, it was certainly best that the fact should not lie concealed; and one of them, that is Isabella, is such a chatterbox.

  Mr. Van Burnam and his son had returned next door, and so far as we could observe from our vantage-point, preparations were being made for the body’s removal. As the crowd below, driven away by the policemen one minute, only to collect again in another, swayed and grumbled in a continual expectation that was as continually disappointed, I heard Caroline’s voice rise in two or three short sentences.

  “They can’t find Howard, or he would have been here before now. Did you see her that time when we were coming out of Clark’s? Fanny Preston did, and said she was pretty.”

  “No, I didn’t get a glimpse—” A shout from the street below.

  “I can’t believe it,” were the next words I heard, “but Franklin is awfully afraid—”

  “Hush! or the ogress—” I am sure I heard her say ogress; but what followed was drowned in another loud murmur, and I caught nothing further till these sentences were uttered by the trembling and over-excited Caroline: “If it is she, pa will never be the same man again. To have her die in our house! O, there’s Howard now!”

  The interruption came quick and sharp, and it was followed by a double cry and an anxious rustle, as the two girls sprang to their feet in their anxiety to attract their brother’s attention or possibly to convey him some warning.

  But I did not give much heed to them. My eyes were on the carriage in which Howard had arrived, and which, owing to the ambulance in front, had stopped on the other
side of the way. I was anxious to see him descend that I might judge if his figure recalled that of the man I had seen cross the pavement the night before. But he did not descend. Just as his hand was on the carriage door, a half dozen men appeared on the adjoining stoop carrying a burden which they hastened to deposit in the ambulance. He sank back when he saw it, and when his face became visible again, it was so white it seemed to be the only face in the street, though fifty people stood about staring at the house, at the ambulance, and at him.

  Franklin Van Burnam had evidently come to the door with the rest; for Howard no sooner showed his face the second time than we saw the former dash down the steps and try to part the crowd in a vain attempt to reach his brother’s side. Mr. Gryce was more successful. He had no difficulty in winning his way across the street, and presently I perceived him standing near the carriage exchanging a few words with its occupant. A moment later he drew back, and addressing the driver, jumped into the carriage with Howard, and was speedily driven off. The ambulance followed and some of the crowd, and as soon as a hack could be obtained, Mr. Van Burnam and his son took the same road, leaving us three women in a state of suspense, which as far as one of us was concerned, ended in a nervous attack that was not unlike heart failure. I allude, of course, to Caroline, and it took Isabella and myself a good half hour to bring her back to a normal condition, and when this was done, Isabella thought it incumbent upon her to go off into hysterics, which, being but a weak simulation of the other’s state, I met with severity and cured with a frown. When both were in trim again I allowed myself one remark.

  “One would think,” said I, “that you knew the young woman who has fallen victim to her folly next door.”

  At which Isabella violently shook her head and Caroline observed:

  “It is the excitement which has been too much for me. I am never strong, and this is such a dreadful home-welcoming. When will father and Franklin come back? It was very unkind of them to go off without one word of encouragement.”