A FOUNTAIN PEN
Harry Wardrop came back from the city at four o'clock, while Hunter was
in the midst of his investigation. I met him in the hall and told him
what had happened, and with this new apprehension added to the shock of
the night before, he looked as though his nerves were ready to snap.
Wardrop was a man of perhaps twenty-seven, as tall as I, although not so
heavy, with direct blue eyes and fair hair; altogether a manly and
prepossessing sort of fellow. I was not surprised that Margery Fleming
had found him attractive--he had the blond hair and off-hand manner that
women seem to like. I am dark, myself.
He seemed surprised to find Hunter there, and not particularly pleased,
but he followed us to the upper floor and watched silently while Hunter
went over the two rooms. Beside the large chest of drawers in the main
attic Hunter found perhaps half a dozen drops of blood, and on the edge
of the open drawer there were traces of more. In the inner room two
trunks had been moved out nearly a foot, as he found by the faint dust
that had been under them. With the stain on the stair rail, that was all
he discovered, and it was little enough. Then he took out his note-book
and there among the trunks we had a little seance of our own, in which
Hunter asked questions, and whoever could do so answered them.
"Have you a pencil or pen, Mr. Knox?" he asked me, but I had none.
Wardrop felt his pockets, with no better success.
"I have lost my fountain pen somewhere around the house to-day," he said
irritably. "Here's a pencil--not much of one."
Hunter began his interrogations.
"How old was Miss Maitland--Miss Jane, I mean?"
"Sixty-five," from Margery.
"She had always seemed rational? Not eccentric, or childish?"
"Not at all; the sanest woman I ever knew." This from Wardrop.
"Has she ever, to your knowledge, received any threatening letters?"
"Never in all her life," from both of them promptly.
"You heard sounds, you say, Miss Fleming. At what time?"
"About half-past one or perhaps a few minutes later. The clock struck
two while I was still awake and nervous."
"This person who was walking through the attics here--would you say it
was a heavy person? A man, I mean?"
Margery stopped to think.
"Yes," she said finally. "It was very stealthy, but I think it was a
man's step."
"You heard no sound of a struggle? No voices? No screams?"
"None at all," she said positively. And I added my quota.
"There could have been no such sounds," I said. "I sat in my room and
smoked until a quarter to two. I heard nothing until then, when I heard
Mr. Wardrop trying to get into the house. I went down to admit him,
and--I found the front door open about an inch."
Hunter wheeled on Wardrop.
"A quarter to two?" he asked. "You were coming home from--the city?"
"Yes, from the station."
Hunter watched him closely.
"The last train gets in here at twelve-thirty," he said slowly. "Does it
always take you an hour and a quarter to walk the three squares to the
house?"
Wardrop flushed uneasily, and I could see Margery's eyes dilate with
amazement. As for me, I could only stare.
"I did not come directly home," he said, almost defiantly.
Hunter's voice was as smooth as silk.
"Then--will you be good enough to tell me where you did go?" he asked.
"I have reasons for wanting to know."
"Damn your reasons--I beg your pardon, Margery. Look here, Mr. Hunter,
do you think I would hurt a hair of that old lady's head? Do you think I
came here last night and killed her, or whatever it is that has happened
to her? And then went out and tried to get in again through the window?"
"Not necessarily," Hunter said, unruffled. "It merely occurred to me
that we have at least an hour of your time last night, while this thing
was going on, to account for. However, we can speak of that later. I am
practically certain of one thing, Miss Maitland is not dead, or was not
dead when she was taken away from this house."
"Taken away!" Margery repeated. "Then you think she was kidnapped?"
"Well, it is possible. It's a puzzling affair all through. You are
certain there are no closets or unused rooms where, if there had been a
murder, the body could be concealed."
"I never heard of any," Margery said, but I saw Wardrop's face change on
the instant. He said nothing, however, but stood frowning at the floor,
with his hands deep in his coat pockets.
Margery was beginning to show the effect of the long day's strain; she
began to cry a little, and with an air of proprietorship that I
resented, somehow, Wardrop went over to her.
"You are going to lie down, Margery," he said, holding out his hand to
help her up. "Mrs. Mellon will come over to Aunt Letitia, and you must
get some sleep."
"Sleep!" she said with scorn, as he helped her to her feet. "Sleep, when
things like this are occurring! Father first, and now dear old Aunt
Jane! Harry, do you know where my father is?"
He faced her, as if he had known the question must come and was prepared
for it.
"I know that he is all right, Margery. He has been--out of town. If it
had not been for something unforeseen that--happened within the last few
hours, he would have been home to-day."
She drew a long breath of relief.
"And Aunt Jane?" she asked Hunter, from the head of the attic stairs,
"you do not think she is dead?"
"Not until we have found something more," he answered tactlessly. "It's
like where there's smoke there's fire; where there's murder there's a
body."
When they had both gone, Hunter sat down on a trunk and drew out a cigar
that looked like a bomb.
"What do you think of it?" I asked, when he showed no disposition to
talk.
"I'll be damned if I know," he responded, looking around for some place
to expectorate and finding none.
"The window," I suggested, and he went over to it. When he came back he
had a rather peculiar expression. He sat down and puffed for a moment.
"In the first place," he began, "we can take it for granted that, unless
she was crazy or sleep-walking, she didn't go out in her night-clothes,
and there's nothing of hers missing. She wasn't taken in a carriage,
providing she was taken at all. There's not a mark of wheels on that
drive newer than a week, and besides, you say you heard nothing."
"Nothing," I said positively.
"Then, unless she went away in a balloon, where it wouldn't matter what
she had on, she is still around the premises. It depends on how badly
she was hurt."
"Are you sure it was she who was hurt?" I asked. "That print of a
hand--that is not Miss Jane's."
In reply Hunter led the way down the stairs to the place where the stain
on the stair rail stood out, ugly and distinct. He put his own heavy
hand on the rail just below it.
"Suppose," he said, "suppose you grip something very hard, what happens
to your hand?"
"It spreads," I acknowledged, seeing what he meant.
"Now, look at that stain. Look at the short fingers--why, it's a child's
hand beside mine. The breadth is from pressure. It might be figured out
this way. The fingers, you notice, point down the stairs. In some way,
let us say, the burglar, for want of a better name, gets into the house.
He used a ladder resting against that window by the chest of drawers."
"Ladder!" I exclaimed.
"Yes, there is a pruning ladder there. Now then--he comes down these
stairs, and he has a definite object. He knows of something valuable in
that cubby hole over the mantel in Miss Jane's room. How does he get in?
The door into the upper hall is closed and bolted, but the door into the
bath-room is open. From there another door leads into the bedroom, and
it has no bolt--only a key. That kind of a lock is only a three-minutes
delay, or less. Now then, Miss Maitland was a light sleeper. When she
wakened she was too alarmed to scream; she tried to get to the door and
was intercepted. Finally she got out the way the intruder got in, and
ran along the hall. Every door was locked. In a frenzy she ran up the
attic stairs and was captured up there. Which bears out Miss Margery's
story of the footsteps back and forward."
"Good heavens, what an awful thing!" I gasped. "And I was sitting
smoking just across the hall."
"He brings her down the stairs again, probably half dragging her. Once,
she catches hold of the stair rail, and holds desperately to it, leaving
the stain here."
"But why did he bring her down?" I asked bewildered. "Why wouldn't he
take what he was after and get away?"
Hunter smoked and meditated.
"She probably had to get the key of the iron door," he suggested. "It
was hidden, and time was valuable. If there was a scapegrace member of
the family, for instance, who knew where the old lady kept money, and
who needed it badly; who knew all about the house, and who--"
"Fleming!" I exclaimed, aghast.
"Or even our young friend, Wardrop," Hunter said quietly. "He has an
hour to account for. The trying to get in may have been a blind, and how
do you know that what he says was stolen out of his satchel was not what
he had just got from the iron box over the mantel in Miss Maitland's
room?"
I was dizzy with trying to follow Hunter's facile imagination. The thing
we were trying to do was to find the old lady, and, after all, here we
brought up against the same _impasse_.
"Then where is she now?" I asked. He meditated. He had sat down on the
narrow stairs, and was rubbing his chin with a thoughtful forefinger.
"One-thirty, Miss Margery says, when she heard the noise. One-forty-five
when you heard Wardrop at the shutters. I tell you, Knox, it is one of
two things: either that woman is dead somewhere in this house, or she
ran out of the hall door just before you went down-stairs, and in that
case the Lord only knows where she is. If there is a room anywhere that
we have not explored--"
"I am inclined to think there is," I broke in, thinking of Wardrop's
face a few minutes before. And just then Wardrop himself joined us. He
closed the door at the foot of the boxed-in staircase, and came quietly
up.
"You spoke about an unused room or a secret closet, Mr. Hunter," he
said, without any resentment in his tone. "We have nothing so
sensational as that, but the old house is full of queer nooks and
crannies, and perhaps, in one of them, we might find--" he stopped and
gulped. Whatever Hunter might think, whatever I might have against Harry
Wardrop, I determined then that he had had absolutely nothing to do with
little Miss Maitland's strange disappearance.
The first place we explored was a closed and walled-in wine-cellar, long
unused, and to which access was gained by a small window in the stone
foundation of the house. The cobwebs over the window made it practically
an impossible place, but we put Robert, the gardener, through it, in
spite of his protests.
"There's nothin' there, I tell you," he protested, with one leg over the
coping. "God only knows what's down there, after all these years. I've
been livin' here with the Miss Maitlands for twenty year, and I ain't
never been put to goin' down into cellars on the end of a rope."
He went, because we were three to his one, but he was up again in sixty
seconds, with the announcement that the place was as bare as the top of
his head.
We moved every trunk in the store-room, although it would have been a
moral impossibility for any one to have done it the night before without
rousing the entire family, and were thus able to get to and open a large
closet, which proved to contain neatly tied and labeled packages of
religious weeklies, beginning in the sixties.
The grounds had been gone over inch by inch, without affording any clue,
and now the three of us faced one another. The day was almost gone, and
we were exactly where we started. Hunter had sent men through the town
and the adjacent countryside, but no word had come from them. Miss
Letitia had at last succumbed to the suspense and had gone to bed, where
she lay quietly enough, as is the way with the old, but so mild that she
was alarming.
At five o'clock Hawes called me up from the office and almost tearfully
implored me to come back and attend to my business. When I said it was
impossible, I could hear him groan as he hung up the receiver. Hawes is
of the opinion that by keeping fresh magazines in my waiting-room and by
persuading me to the extravagance of Turkish rugs, that he has built my
practice to its present flourishing state. When I left the telephone,
Hunter was preparing to go back to town and Wardrop was walking up and
down the hall. Suddenly Wardrop stopped his uneasy promenade and hailed
the detective on his way to the door.
"By George," he exclaimed, "I forgot to show you the closet under the
attic stairs!"
We hurried up and Wardrop showed us the panel in the hall, which slid to
one side when he pushed a bolt under the carpet. The blackness of the
closet was horrible in its suggestion to me. I stepped back while
Hunter struck a match and looked in.
The closet was empty.
"Better not go in," Wardrop said. "It hasn't been used for years and
it's black with dust. I found it myself and showed it to Miss Jane. I
don't believe Miss Letitia knows it is here."
"It hasn't been used for years!" reflected Hunter, looking around him
curiously. "I suppose it has been some time since you were in here, Mr.
Wardrop?"
"Several years," Wardrop replied carelessly. "I used to keep contraband
here in my college days, cigarettes and that sort of thing. I haven't
been in it since then."
Hunter took his foot off a small object that lay on the floor, and
picking it up, held it out to Wardrop, with a grim smile.
"Here is the fountain pen you lost this morning, Mr. Wardrop," he said
quietly.