The Balcony
Page 11
“I think, Anne, that you and I might go to work this afternoon and try to figure out that sound you heard inside the room just before we began pounding at the door. Maybe you and I can turn an intangible into a fact.”
“How do you propose we do it?”
“Trial and error,” he responded airily. “It was something dropping, wasn’t it? You can stand outside in the hall, and I’ll go in and drop everything in sight.” Great-aunt Patience didn’t commit herself on this idea. Again she glanced in my direction. She spoke more slowly.
“There’s one more thing, Anne. And this concerns both you and Amanda. I happen to know that Amanda intended to put you in the Blue Room. And not in Father’s room at all.”
“Wanda,” I said, “took me to Great-grandfather’s room.”
Patience rang the bell instantly. Some minutes passed before the maid appeared. Eliot still remained stubbornly on the sick list, and Wanda’s chief concern seemed to be to get him on his feet so that the two of them could leave the house. Amos, who had left the village Methodists in the lurch and moved bag and baggage to Hieronomo House, had taken over most of the domestic tasks. Eventually, however, Wanda did come in. She heard Patience through in silence.
“Why,” demanded Patience, “did you take it upon yourself to place my niece in Father’s room?”
Wanda glanced at Great-uncle Richard, as though to indicate that she would accept orders only from the male head of the household.
“Answer, girl,” he said shortly.
“You can spare yourself a fabrication,” snapped Patience. “As it happens, I followed you and my niece upstairs on the night of her arrival, was right behind you. You deliberately led her into my father’s room—a room that it was never intended she should occupy.”
The girl looked frightened. “I—I meant nothing wrong. I had no idea what was going to happen . . .”
“But how do you explain your behavior?”
“Mrs. Silver always treated me like dirt,” said Wanda with sudden bitterness. “I thought I saw a chance to annoy her and I took it. She spent so much time in that room, and I guess I wondered why. It seemed funny somehow. That room is the gloomiest in the house and the hardest one to heat, and yet she’d sit in there for hours on end, doing nothing.”
“She didn’t attempt to lock you out?” asked Hoy. He, too, liked cheerful places, and apparently thought Amanda’s choice of a sitting room extremely odd.
Wanda shook her head. “No. We kept it clean. We dusted every day.”
Patience looked as though she doubted that.
“It’s natural,” said Richard with no particular conviction, “that Amanda might like to spend a certain amount of time in her dear father’s room.”
“Well, maybe.” Wanda shrugged. “Personally, I don’t believe she felt that way. But I never could figure out what the attraction was.”
Patience went upstairs after luncheon to investigate. Glenn and I assisted her in an exhaustive and quite futile examination of the gloomy, barnlike chamber which once had housed the glory of John S. Hieronomo, and where his murdered daughter had sat so many silent hours. We turned out the wardrobe and the desk; we even stepped out on the balcony; we examined everything and got no clue to the problem.
Eventually Glenn, disgusted and discouraged, brought forward his original idea again and suggested that with more profit we might carry our investigation into Aunt Amanda’s bedroom.
“We couldn’t learn less than we’ve learned here. And if we do manage to identify that noise, we might get somewhere.”
Patience lingered to put her father’s room in order, and Glenn and I moved on down the hall. I took my stand immediately outside the shattered door, and Glenn went into Aunt Amanda’s bedroom and with scientific thoroughness began to collect objects of varying weights and sizes. Personally, I expected very little of the experiment, but I must say that Glenn was methodical. He heaped his miscellaneous collection on the dressing table, which was fairly near the door, and took his own position there.
“It had to be something dropping in this general vicinity, else you couldn’t have heard it through the door. Too bad the door is gone, but maybe we can figure out the timbre of the sound, anyway.”
Whereupon, he proceeded to drop a hairbrush, a book, and Aunt Amanda’s little bedside dock. He didn’t improve the working of the clock, nor were we any closer to a solution of the mystery. I continued to shake my head as he tried a candlestick, a soap dish, and finally a riding boot.
“You’re not on the right track at all. Those things are all too—too heavy.”
“It had to be something heavy, Anne.”
“I can’t help that,” said I. “I don’t believe the thing was large. Or heavy either. The sound wasn’t loud—but it was sharp. Metallic. Try a coin.”
Glenn dropped a quarter on the floor. That seemed nearer, but still too dull somehow. And I had to admit that it was unlikely I would have heard the sound through the stout oak door.
“I don’t believe,” I said, discouraged, “that—whatever it was—was dropped on the floor at all.”
“How’s this?” Glenn asked suddenly.
Again he dropped the quarter, and this time the coin rang sharp and clear, as it struck against a metal surface. I stepped quickly into the bedroom, and saw at once how he had produced the sound.
Hieronomo House was provided with a hot-air furnace, which in that archaic and draughty structure, could only struggle to warm the first floor. To the end that some wandering and errant warm zephyrs might reach the upper bedrooms, square openings had been cut into the floors. In Aunt Amanda’s room, as in the others, a metal grill had been placed above the opening. Another grill, dimly seen because of the distance between floors in that old house, was the landmark of the ceiling below. This left between the floors a dead space that collected dust and lint which lay undisturbed for years on end.
Glenn had dropped his quarter upon the metal grill-work in Amanda’s room, and now, squatted on his heels, was peering curiously through the dusty interstices.
“It’s a tricky arrangement,” he announced. “I can see into the breakfast room. Daddy is there now, taking his Sippy powders. How was the sound, Anne?”
“Almost the real thing,” I said.
Glenn started to get up, and then he squinted and leaned over closer to the opening in the floor. Suddenly he leaped to his feet, rushed to the dressing table and grabbed a nail file.
“There’s something caught in the grill below! I can see it against the light.”
“Is—is it another gun?” I asked faintly.
Glenn laughed at that. “Heavens, no! Nothing so large and lethal could slip through the grill. This is something small.”
A few minutes’ work on the screws with the nail file, supplemented by his pocket knife, and he had jerked the grill from its fastenings. He reached down into the dusty space, fumbled, said triumphantly:
“Here it is!” And then his face fell as he stared at his trophy.
“It’s—why, it’s a whistle! Isn’t that what it is, Anne?”
I had never seen a whistle quite like the gold-plated object that Glenn held in his hand—a long, slender affair pierced by a row of tiny holes—but my cousin raised it to his lips and blew a single, piping note on it. I saw then that the whistle was suspended on a fine gold chain.
“It could be an ornament,” I suggested.
“A funny kind of ornament if you ask me, though it is gold. And the chain’s gold, too. I wonder,” said Glenn slowly, “if it belonged to Aunt Amanda. I never saw her wear it. Did you?”
“No,” I said.
I knew beyond any possible doubt that we had solved the origin of the clear, sharp sound. I said so several times. But Glenn insisted that I listen while he dropped the whistle upon the grill, again and then again.
“I’m positive now,” I said impatiently. “That’s what I heard exactly.” My red-headed cousin continued to look at me, with a rather curious expression
on his face. Suddenly I spoke.
“But, Glenn, the whistle couldn’t drop of its own accord.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” said Glenn.
Aunt Amanda hadn’t dropped the whistle. She was lying dead at the moment we were pounding at her door. The rest of us had been crowded in the hall. But had we been? I could account for every member of the family and for Wanda. Neither Amos nor Eliot had been included in our agitated group, and I suddenly recalled that when we flocked downstairs to get the ax, the door had been temporarily unguarded. Someone could have slipped out and made a safe escape. Eliot? Amos? I remembered then that Eliot had been groaning in his bed, and that the Negro had been at his side.
It was too much for me. I was confused, bewildered, unable to understand the incident or to fit it into any kind of theory. Glenn slowly wound the chain around the whistle.
At that moment Great-aunt Patience entered.
She came in, bustling and cheerful, and then she stopped. It may have been imagination that made me think there was something unnaturally abrupt about that halt of hers, but it was no trick of light that made her face look strained and white. Within an instant, she had become herself again.
“Where did you get that?”
“The whistle?” The thin gold chain dangled between my cousin’s fingers. He, too, was staring at Great-aunt Patience. “We found it in the hot-air register. Anne thinks someone dropped it, and she heard the noise as it struck the grating.”
“Someone dropped it! But that’s nonsense. There was no one in the room. Let me see it.”
Patience took the whistle from Glenn and looked at it closely, and again I fancied that she was harboring some secret thought. Glenn was watching her.
“Do you recognize it? Did it belong to Aunt Amanda?”
“I’ve never seen the thing before,” said Patience.
“I thought you looked surprised . . .”
“I was surprised,” she replied, now sunny and serene. “Who wouldn’t be? It seemed like such a curious thing to be lying in the register. I believe I’ll go ask Richard what he thinks about it.”
With which, and before we could say her nay, she started to make off with our personal discovery. She had the whistle in her hand, and she moved very quickly down the hall.
It was when she reached the stairs that something happened which she hadn’t counted on. She met Richard coming up. With him was Sheriff Glick.
XIII
SOMETIMES, IN A SPLIT INSTANT, various impressions can simultaneously impress the mind. For me this was such an instant. Only one well acquainted with Patience could have realized that she would have given a great deal to have avoided that particular encounter. But I saw how she took a backward step, and then accepted the inevitable and went slowly forward. And it struck me in an odd way that in a twinkling she had been compelled to change some plan, and wasn’t too sure of the altered ground.
I saw that Sheriff Glick, who had known Patience since she was a little girl, had guessed at once that his appearance wasn’t welcome, and was wondering why. And I gathered that, in his wonder, he had been deflected from the purpose which had brought him to the house. Quite obviously the reason for his call was unconnected with the incident in the bedroom. As his sleepy eyes encompassed Patience and passed on to Glenn and me, standing in the background, it seemed to me that I could almost see him rearrange his own plan of action. But as yet he hadn’t observed the whistle, nor had Great-uncle Richard. Nothing actually had occurred.
And then Patience spoke in calm, clear tones. “I think that this might interest you, Cordell. Certainly it has puzzled us.”
She handed the whistle to the Sheriff.
Glick gazed at the shiny little object, and his expression was perplexed and doubtful. Frankly, he looked disappointed. Beside him, Richard Hieronomo was staring, too. Except that he was frowning slightly, his dark face quite impassive. He might have been regarding any childish toy.
“Why in heaven’s name, Patience, should a trumpery little whistle interest Glick?”
My own emotions decidedly were mixed. To say that I had been prepared for quite a different scene was to put it mildly. I had expected that Glenn and I would have to force the issue; I had braced myself for combat; I had been confident that Patience desired to withhold from the authorities any information about that whistle. By one simple act she deflated me.
It wasn’t to occur to me until later that the mere possession of the gold-plated whistle might mean no more to Sheriff Glick than it had meant to Glenn or myself. The whistle in itself wasn’t important to Patience, to Richard, or to any member of the family. I forgot my conviction that Patience, had she chosen, could have told us something about the curious little ornament. Apparently my cousin Glenn was also equally confounded.
“Well,” said he, subdued, “shall we join them?”
Great-aunt Patience took charge of the conversation which followed. It was she who repeated the story that Glenn and I had expected to tell for ourselves. With a few brief, well-chosen words, she made our little experiment sound foolish and unimportant.
“The children felt that they might help,” said she.
“So they examined Amanda’s bedroom. They found this—this whistle in the hot-air register.”
“But couldn’t the thing have lain there undiscovered for months?” inquired Richard in the anxious tone of one who wanted only to get quickly at the truth.
“I thought you understood,” said Glenn shortly, “that Anne heard it fall there Wednesday afternoon. The point is how it got there. Some human agency must have been involved.”
“But all of us were in the hall, my boy.”
“Eliot and Amos weren’t,” Patience suggested thoughtfully, and then conveniently remembered that the two men had been together—the white man an invalid, the black man acting as his nurse. “I’m afraid,” she finished in a meditative fashion, “that I simply cannot understand it.”
Glick, who had looked increasingly disappointed as Patience talked, also seemed to be at a loss. It was pretty plain that the whistle didn’t fit into any picture that he had conceived of Aunt Amanda’s murder. Even as he listened courteously, I had a chilly little feeling that he had serious doubts either of my veracity or of my hearing. Finally he tucked the whistle in his pocket.
“To tell the truth,” he said, with the air of one who willingly closed the topic, “I came here on another matter. If you don’t mind, Miss Hieronomo, I’d like to have a talk with you.”
“I don’t mind in the least,” said Patience promptly. And then, as though it were a social invitation she added, “As it happens, I’ve an appointment at five o’clock, but until then I’m free.”
“I mean the other Miss Hieronomo,” said Sheriff Glick.
I had known exactly whom he meant, and I suspect that Patience also knew. It was her way to be purposely obtuse at times. But I had no idea what Sheriff Glick had in his mind, except that I fancied it must be concerned somehow with my great-grandfather’s gun.
I wasn’t in the least alarmed as I followed him along the hall and into the nearest room—a little sewing room provided with a work table and a machine and with a rather ghostly-looking dressmaker’s form shrouded in the corner. He paused to close the door. I gasped a little when he turned around.
In one swift gesture he had produced and laid on the sewing table my great-grandfather’s gun. The initials J.S.H. gleamed on the clumsy silver handle.
“You are aware, of course,” said Sheriff Glick, “that we have recovered your great-grandfather’s gun.”
He spoke exactly as though I were not staring at the sewing table. That irritated me.
“How could I fail to be?” I inquired.
He didn’t smile. As I raised my eyes to the gray-green eyes that watched me steadily, my little spurt of irritation leaked away. I felt the first tiny throb of fear. Why had I been singled out? Surely Sheriff Glick did not for a moment believe that I had crept from Hieronomo House, dri
ven eighteen miles and dropped that gun on a road that I had never heard of. I remembered how relieved and confident Patience had been at the breakfast table, how Richard had declared that the spot where the gun was found automatically cleared the family. Another and vaguer memory knocked dimly at my mind, and was gone. I looked at Sheriff Glick and waited.
He took his time. A full minute must have elapsed before he said, “Your fingerprints were on the barrel of the weapon, Miss Hieronomo—several specimens, a little blurred, but clear enough to identify.”
“My fingerprints,” I repeated stupidly.
“It was a routine matter,” he informed me calmly, “to obtain specimens for comparison. We took fingerprints of the household, your own included, from various toilet articles.”
“Naturally,” I said, attempting to conceal my trapped sensation at his conception of a routine matter, “my fingerprints would be on the gun. I handled it. I told you that myself.”
I faltered a moment and then I said:
“Were there no other fingerprints on the gun?”
He ignored my question. Instead, he picked up the gun, and worked the catch, and exposed the bullet chamber. He held the weapon toward me.
“Don’t shrink back, Miss Hieronomo. I want you to look. The unloaded gun—surely you remember telling me it wasn’t loaded—is loaded now. One bullet is missing—the bullet that killed Amanda Silver.”
“How does that affect me?” I tried to say, and failed hopelessly to comprehend his manner, the intent and burning look in his eyes, the accusation in his tone.
Apparently he didn’t hear my protest.
“You’re a young girl,” he said bewilderedly, “and I dislike to browbeat or threaten anyone. That’s not my line. You make it hard, however. I know—you see—I know that you didn’t tell the truth about the gun.”
“I—I don’t understand . . .”
“I think you do,” said Sheriff Glick. He walked around the sewing table. “You knew the gun was loaded all along. You knew that it was loaded some time Wednesday. You knew, because early Wednesday afternoon you yourself procured the necessary ammunition! You bought and paid for it!”