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

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  “Partially. Having some skill in these disguises, especially where my own infirmities can have full play, as in the case of this strong but half-bent woman, I had no reason to think my own identity was suspected, much less discovered. Therefore I could trust to what I saw and heard as being just what Mother Jane herself would be allowed to see or hear under the same circumstances. If, therefore, these young people and this old crone had been, as you seem to think they are, in league for murder, Lucetta would hardly have greeted me as she did when she came down to meet me in the kitchen.”

  “And how was that? What did she say?”

  “She said: ‘Ah, Mother Jane, we have a piece of work for you. You are strong, are you not?’”

  “Humph!”

  “And then she commiserated me a bit and gave me food which, upon my word, I found hard to eat, though I had saved my appetite for the occasion. Before she left me she bade me sit in the inglenook till she wanted me, adding in Hannah’s ear as she passed her: ‘There is no use trying to explain anything to her. Show her when the time comes what there is to do and trust to her short memory to forget it before she leaves the house. She could not understand my brother’s propensity or our shame in pandering to it. So attempt nothing, Hannah. Only keep the money in her view.’”

  “So, and that gave you no idea?”

  “It gave me the idea I have imparted to you, or, rather, added to the idea which had been instilled in me by others.”

  “And this idea was not affected by what you saw afterwards?”

  “Not in the least—rather strengthened. Of the few words I overheard, one was uttered in reference to yourself by Miss Knollys. She said: ‘I have locked Miss Butterworth again into her room. If she accuses me of having done so, I shall tell her our whole story. Better she should know the family’s disgrace than imagine us guilty of crimes of which we are utterly incapable.’”

  “So! so!” I cried, “you heard that?”

  “Yes, madam, I heard that, and I do not think she knew she was dropping that word into the ear of a detective, but on this point you are, of course, at liberty to differ with me.”

  “I am not yet ready to avail myself of the privilege,” I retorted. “What else did these girls let fall in your hearing?”

  “Not much. It was Hannah who led me into the upper hall, and Hannah who by signs and signals rather than words showed me what was expected of me. However, when, after the box was lowered into the cellar, Hannah was drawing me away, Lucetta stepped up and whispered in her ear: ‘Don’t give her the biggest coin. Give her the little one, or she may mistake our reasons for secrecy. I wouldn’t like even a fool to do that even for the moment it would remain lodged in Mother Jane’s mind.’”

  “Well, well,” I again cried, certainly puzzled, for these stray expressions of the sisters were in a measure contradictory not only of the suspicions I entertained, but of the facts which had seemingly come to my attention.

  Mr. Gryce, who was probably watching my face more closely than he did the cane with whose movements he was apparently engrossed, stopped to give a caressing rub to the knob of that same cane before remarking:

  “One such peep behind the scenes is worth any amount of surmise expended on the wrong side of the curtain. I let you share my knowledge because it is your due. Now if you feel willing to explain what you mean by a knot of crêpe on the shutter, I am at your service, madam.”

  I felt that it would be cruel to delay my story longer, and so I began it. It was evidently more interesting than he expected, and as I dilated upon the special features which had led me to believe that it was a thinking, suffering mortal like ourselves who had been shut up in William’s room and afterwards buried in the cellar under the Flower Parlor, I saw his face lengthen and doubt take the place of the quiet assurance with which he had received my various intimations up to this time. The cane was laid aside, and from the action of his right forefinger on the palm of his left hand I judged that I was making no small impression on his mind. When I had finished, he sat for a minute silent; then he said:

  “Thanks, Miss Butterworth; you have more than fulfilled my hopes. What we buried was undoubtedly human, and the question now is, Who was it, and of what death did he die?” Then, after a meaning pause: “You think it was Silly Rufus.”

  I will astonish you with my reply. “No,” said I, “I do not. That is where you make a mistake, Mr. Gryce.”

  CHAPTER XXVI

  A POINT GAINED

  He was surprised, for all his attempts to conceal it.

  “No?” said he. “Who, then? You are becoming interesting, Miss Butterworth.”

  This I thought I could afford to ignore.

  “Yesterday,” I proceeded, “I would have declared it to be Silly Rufus, in the face of God and man, but after what I saw in William’s room during the hurried survey I gave it, I am inclined to doubt if the explanation we have to give to this affair is so simple as that would make it. Mr. Gryce, in one corner of that room, from which the victim had so lately been carried, was a pair of shoes that could never have been worn by any boy-tramp I have ever seen or known of.”

  “They were Loreen’s, or possibly Lucetta’s.”

  “No, Loreen and Lucetta both have trim feet, but these were the shoes of a child of ten, very dainty at that, and of a cut and make worn by women, or rather, I should say, by girls. Now, what do you make of that?”

  He did not seem to know what to make of it. Tap, tap went his finger on his seasoned palm, and as I watched the slowness with which it fell, I said to myself, “I have proposed a problem this time that will tax even Mr. Gryce’s powers of deduction.”

  And I had. It was minutes before he ventured an opinion, and then it was with a shade of doubt in his tone that I acknowledge to have felt some pride in producing.

  “They were Lucetta’s shoes. The emotions under which you labored—very pardonable emotions, madam, considering the circumstances and the hour—”

  “Excuse me,” said I. “We do not want to waste a moment. I was excited, suitably and duly excited, or I would have been a stone. But I never lose my head under excitement, nor do I part with my sense of proportion. The shoes were not Lucetta’s. She never wore any approaching them in smallness since her tenth year.”

  “Has Simsbury a daughter? Has there not been a child about the house some time to assist the cook in errands and so on?”

  “No, or I should have seen her. Besides, how would the shoes of such a person come into William’s room?”

  “Easily. Secrecy was required. You were not to be disturbed; so shoes were taken off that quiet might result.”

  “Was Lucetta shoeless or William or even Mother Jane? You have not told me that you were requested to walk in stocking feet up the hall. No, Mr. Gryce, the shoes were the shoes of a girl. I know it because it was matched by a dress I saw hanging up in a sort of wardrobe.”

  “Ah! You looked into the wardrobe?”

  “I did and felt justified in doing so. It was after I had spied the shoes.”

  “Very good. And you saw a dress?”

  “A little dress; a dress with a short skirt. It was of silk too; another anomaly—and the color, I think, was blue, but I cannot swear to that point. I was in great haste and took the briefest glance. But my brief glances can be trusted, Mr. Gryce. That, I think, you are beginning to know.”

  “Certainly,” said he, “and as proof of it we will now act upon these two premises—that the victim in whose burial I was an innocent partaker was a human being and that this human being was a girl-child who came into the house well dressed. Now where does that lead us? Into a maze, I fear.”

  “We are accustomed to mazes,” I observed.

  “Yes,” he answered somewhat gloomily, “but they are not exactly desirable in this case. I want to find the Knollys family
innocent.”

  “And I. But William’s character, I fear, will make that impossible.”

  “But this girl? Who is she, and where did she come from? No girl has been reported to us as missing from this neighborhood.”

  “I supposed not.”

  “A visitor—But no visitor could enter this house without it being known far and wide. Why, I heard of your arrival here before I left the train on which I followed you. Had we allowed ourselves to be influenced by what the people about here say, we would have turned the Knollys house inside out a week ago. But I don’t believe in putting too much confidence in the prejudice of country people. The idea they suggested, and which you suggest without putting it too clearly into words, is much too horrible to be acted upon without the best of reasons. Perhaps we have found those reasons, yet I still feel like asking, Where did this girl come from and how could she have become a prisoner in the Knollys house without the knowledge of—Madam, have you met Mr. Trohm?”

  The question was so sudden I had not time to collect myself. But perhaps it was not necessary that I should, for the simple affirmation I used seemed to satisfy Mr. Gryce, who went on to say:

  “It is he who first summoned us here, and it is he who has the greatest interest in locating the source of these disappearances, yet he has seen no child come here.”

  “Mr. Trohm is not a spy,” said I, but the remark, happily, fell unheeded.

  “No one has,” he pursued. “We must give another turn to our suppositions.”

  Suddenly a silence fell upon us both. His finger ceased to lay down the law, and my gaze, which had been searching his face inquiringly, became fixed. At the same moment and in much the same tone of voice we both spoke, he saying, “Humph!” and I, “Ah!” as a prelude to the simultaneous exclamation:

  “The phantom coach!”

  We were so pleased with this discovery that we allowed a moment to pass in silent contemplation of each other’s satisfaction. Then he quietly added:

  “Which on the evening preceding your arrival came from the mountains and passed into Lost Man’s Lane, from which no one ever saw it emerge.”

  “It was no phantom,” I put in.

  “It was their own old coach bringing to the house a fresh victim.”

  This sounded so startling we both sat still for a moment, lost in the horror of it, then I spoke:

  “People living in remote and isolated quarters like this are naturally superstitious. The Knollys family know this, and, remembering the old legend, forbore to contradict the conclusions of their neighbors. Loreen’s emotion when the topic was broached to her is explained by this theory.”

  “It is not a pleasant one, but we cannot be wrong in contemplating it.”

  “Not at all. This apparition, as they call it, was seen by two persons; therefore it was no apparition but a real coach. It came from the mountains, that is, from the Mountain Station, and it glided—ah!”

  “Well?”

  “Mr. Gryce, it was its noiselessness that gave it its spectral appearance. Now I remember a petty circumstance which I dare you to match, in corroboration of our suspicions.”

  “You do?”

  I could not repress a slight toss of my head. “Yes, I do,” I repeated.

  He smiled and made the slightest of deprecatory gestures.

  “You have had advantages—” he began.

  “And disadvantages,” I finished, determined that he should award me my full meed of praise. “You are probably not afraid of dogs. I am. You could visit the stables.”

  “And did; but I found nothing there.”

  “I thought not!” I could not help the exclamation. It is so seldom one can really triumph over this man. “Not having the cue, you would not be apt to see what gives this whole thing away. I would never have thought of it again if we had not had this talk. Is Mr. Simsbury a neat man?”

  “A neat man? Madam, what do you mean?”

  “Something important, Mr. Gryce. If Mr. Simsbury is a neat man, he will have thrown away the old rags which, I dare promise you, cumbered his stable floor the morning after the phantom coach was seen to enter the lane. If he is not, you may still find them there. One of them, I know, you will not find. He pulled it off of his wheel with his whip the afternoon he drove me down from the station. I can see the sly look he gave me as he did it. It made no impression on me then, but now—”

  “Madam, you have supplied the one link necessary to the establishment of this theory. Allow me to felicitate you upon it. But whatever our satisfaction may be from a professional standpoint, we cannot but feel the unhappy nature of the responsibility incurred by these discoveries. If this seemingly respectable family stooped to such subterfuge, going to the length of winding rags around the wheels of their lumbering old coach to make it noiseless, and even tying up their horse’s feet for this same purpose, they must have had a motive dark enough to warrant your worst suspicions. And William was not the only one involved. Simsbury, at least, had a hand in it, nor does it look as if the girls were as innocent as we would like to consider them.”

  “I cannot stop to consider the girls,” I declared. “I can no longer consider the girls.”

  “Nor I,” he gloomily assented. “Our duty requires us to sift this matter, and it shall be sifted. We must first find if any child alighted from the cars at the Mountain Station on that especial night, or, what is more probable, from the little station at C., five miles farther back in the mountains.”

  “And—” I urged, seeing that he had still something to say.

  “We must make sure who lies buried under the floor of the room you call the Flower Parlor. You may expect me at the Knollys house some time today. I shall come quietly, but in my own proper person. You are not to know me, and, unless you desire it, need not appear in the matter.”

  “I do not desire it.”

  “Then good-morning, Miss Butterworth. My respect for your abilities has risen even higher than before. We part in a similar frame of mind for once.”

  And this he expected me to regard as a compliment.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  THE TEXT WITNESSETH

  I have a grim will when I choose to exert it. After Mr. Gryce left the hotel, I took a cup of tea with the landlady and then made a round of the stores. I bought dimity, sewing silk, and what not, as I said I would, but this did not occupy me long (to the regret probably of the country merchants, who expected to make a fool of me and found it a by no means easy task), and was quite ready for William when he finally drove up.

  The ride home was a more or less silent one. I had conceived such a horror of the man beside me, that talking for talk’s sake was impossible, while he was in a mood which it would be charity to call non-communicative. It may be that my own reticence was at the bottom of this, but I rather think not. The remark he made in passing Deacon Spear’s house showed that something more than spite was working in his slow but vindictive brain.

  “There’s a man of your own sort,” he cried. “You won’t find him doing anything out of the way; oh, no. Pity your visit wasn’t paid there. You’d have got a better impression of the lane.”

  To this I made no reply.

  At Mr. Trohm’s he spoke again:

  “I suppose that you and Trohm had the devil of a say about Lucetta and the rest of us. I don’t know why, but the whole neighborhood seems to feel they’ve a right to use our name as they choose. But it isn’t going to be so, long. We have played poor and pinched and starved all I’m going to. I’m going to have a new horse, and Lucetta shall have a dress, and that mighty quick too. I’m tired of all this shabbiness, and mean to have a change.”

  I wanted to say, “No change yet; change under the present circumstances would be the worst thing possible for you all,” but I felt that this would be treason to Mr. Gryce, a
nd refrained, saying simply, as he looked sideways at me for a word:

  “Lucetta needs a new dress. That no one can deny. But you had better let me get it for her, or perhaps that is what you mean.”

  The grunt which was my only answer might be interpreted in any way. I took it, however, for assent.

  As soon as I was relieved of his presence and found myself again with the girls, I altered my whole manner and cried out in querulous tones:

  “Mrs. Carter and I have had a difference.” (This was true. We did have a difference over our cup of tea. I did not think it necessary to say this difference was a forced one. Some things we are perfectly justified in keeping to ourselves.) “She remembers a certain verse in the New Testament one way and I in another. We had not time to settle it by a consultation with the sacred word, but I cannot rest till it is settled, so will you bring your Bible to me, my dear, that I may look that verse up?”

  We were in the upper hall, where I had taken a seat on the old-fashioned sofa there. Lucetta, who was standing before me, started immediately to do my bidding, without stopping to think, poor child, that it was very strange I did not go to my own room and consult my own Bible as any good Presbyterian would be expected to do. As she was turning toward the large front room I stopped her with the quiet injunction:

  “Get me one with good print, Lucetta. My eyes won’t bear much straining.”

  At which she turned and to my great relief hurried down the corridor toward William’s room, from which she presently returned, bringing the very volume I was anxious to consult.

  Meanwhile I had laid aside my hat. I felt flurried and unhappy, and showed it. Lucetta’s pitiful face had a strange sweetness in it this morning, and I felt sure as I took the sacred book from her hand that her thoughts were all with the lover she had sent from her side and not at all with me or with what at the moment occupied me. Yet my thoughts at this moment involved, without doubt, the very deepest interests of her life, if not that very lover she was brooding over in her darkened and resigned mind. As I realized this I heaved an involuntary sigh, which seemed to startle her, for she turned and gave me a quick look as she was slipping away to join her sister, who was busy at the other end of the hall.