A STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE
By Anna Katharine Green
OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
The House of the Whispering Pines Miss Hurd. An Enigma
Leavenworth Case That Affair Next Door
Strange Disappearance Lost Man’s Lane
Sword of Damocles Agatha Webb
Hand and Ring One of My Sons
The Mill Mystery Defence of the Bride,
Behind Closed Doors and Other Poems
Cynthia Wakeham’s Money Risifi’s Daughter. A Drama
Marked “Personal” The Golden Slipper
To the Minute
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I A NOVEL CASE
CHAPTER II A FEW POINTS
CHAPTER III THE CONTENTS OF A BUREAU DRAWER
CHAPTER IV THOMPSON’S STORY
CHAPTER V A NEW YORK BELLE
CHAPTER VI A BIT OF CALICO
CHAPTER VII THE HOUSE AT THE GRANBY CROSS ROADS
CHAPTER VIII A WORD OVERHEARD
CHAPTER IX A FEW GOLDEN HAIRS
CHAPTER X THE SECRET OF MR. BLAKE’S STUDIO
CHAPTER XI LUTTRA
CHAPTER XII A WOMAN’S LOVE
CHAPTER XIII A MAN’S HEART
CHAPTER XIV MRS. DANIELS
CHAPTER XV A CONFAB
CHAPTER XVI THE MARK OF THE RED CROSS
CHAPTER XVII THE CAPTURE
CHAPTER XVIII LOVE AND DUTY
CHAPTER XIX EXPLANATIONS
CHAPTER XX THE BOND THAT UNITES
A STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE
CHAPTER I. A NOVEL CASE
“Talking of sudden disappearances the one you mention of Hannah in that
Leavenworth case of ours, is not the only remarkable one which has come
under my direct notice. Indeed, I know of another that in some respects,
at least, surpasses that in points of interest, and if you will promise
not to inquire into the real names of the parties concerned, as the
affair is a secret, I will relate you my experience regarding it.”
The speaker was Q, the rising young detective, universally acknowledged
by us of the force as the most astute man for mysterious and
unprecedented cases, then in the bureau, always and of course excepting
Mr. Gryce; and such a statement from him could not but arouse our
deepest curiosity. Drawing up, then, to the stove around which we
were sitting in lazy enjoyment of one of those off-hours so dear to
a detective’s heart, we gave with alacrity the required promise; and
settling himself back with the satisfied air of a man who has a good
story to tell that does not entirely lack certain points redounding to
his own credit, he began:
I was one Sunday morning loitering at the ----- Precinct Station, when
the door opened and a respectable-looking middle-aged woman came in,
whose agitated air at once attracted my attention. Going up to her, I
asked her what she wanted.
“A detective,” she replied, glancing cautiously about on the faces of
the various men scattered through the room. “I don’t wish anything said
about it, but a girl disappeared from our house last night, and”--she
stopped here, her emotion seeming to choke her--“and I want some one to
look her up,” she went on at last with the most intense emphasis.
“A girl? what kind of a girl; and what house do you mean when you say
our house?”
She looked at me keenly before replying. “You are a young man,” said
she; “isn’t there some one here more responsible than yourself that I
can talk to?”
I shrugged my shoulders and beckoned to Mr. Gryce who was just then
passing. She at once seemed to put confidence in him. Drawing him aside,
she whispered a few low eager words which I could not hear. He listened
nonchalantly for a moment but suddenly made a move which I knew
indicated strong and surprised interest, though from his face--but you
know what Gryce’s face is. I was about to walk off, convinced he had
got hold of something he would prefer to manage himself, when the
Superintendent came in.
“Where is Gryce?” asked he; “tell him I want him.”
Mr. Gryce heard him and hastened forward. As he passed me, he whispered,
“Take a man and go with this woman; look into matters and send me word
if you want me; I will be here for two hours.”
I did not need a second permission. Beckoning to Harris, I reapproached
the woman. “Where do you come from,” said I, “I am to go back with you
and investigate the affair it seems.”
“Did he say so?” she asked, pointing to Mr. Gryce who now stood with his
back to us busily talking with the Superintendent.
I nodded, and she at once moved towards the door. “I come from No.----
Second Avenue: Mr. Blake’s house,” she whispered, uttering a name so
well known, I at once understood Mr. Gryce’s movement of sudden interest
“A girl--one who sewed for us--disappeared last night in a way to
alarm us very much. She was taken from her room--” “Yes,” she cried
vehemently, seeing my look of sarcastic incredulity, “taken from her
room; she never went of her own accord; and she must be found if I spend
every dollar of the pittance I have laid up in the bank against my old
age.”
Her manner was so intense, her tone so marked and her words so vehement,
I at once and naturally asked if the girl was a relative of hers that
she felt her abduction so keenly.
“No,” she replied, “not a relative, but,” she went on, looking every way
but in my face, “a very dear friend--a--a--protegee, I think they call
it, of mine; I--I--She must be found,” she again reiterated.
We were by this time in the street.
“Nothing must be said about it,” she now whispered, catching me by the
arm. “I told him so,” nodding back to the building from which we had
just issued, “and he promised secrecy. It can be done without folks
knowing anything about it, can’t it?”
“What?” I asked.
“Finding the girl.”
“Well,” said I, “we can tell you better about that when we know a few
more of the facts. What is the girl’s name and what makes you think she
didn’t go out of the house-door of her own accord?”
“Why, why, everything. She wasn’t the person to do it; then the looks of
her room, and--They all got out of the window,” she cried suddenly, “and
went away by the side gate into ------ Street.”
“They? Who do you mean by they?”
“Why, whoever they were who carried her off.”
I could not suppress the “bah!” that rose to my lips. Mr. Gryce might
have been able to, but I am not Gryce.
“You don’t believe,” said she, “that she was carried off?”
“Well, no,” said I, “not in the sense you mean.”
She gave another nod back to the police station now a block or so
distant. “He did’nt seem to doubt it at all.”
I laughed. “Did you tell him you thought she had been taken off in this
way?”
“Yes, and he said, ‘Very likely.’ And well he might, for I heard the men
talking in her room, and--”
“You heard men talking in her room--when?”
“O, it must have been as late as half-past twelve. I had been asleep and
the noise they made whispering, woke me.”
“Wait,” I said, “tell me where her room is, hers and yours.”
“Hers is the third story back, mine the front one on the same floor.”
“Who are you?” I now inquired. “What position do you occupy in Mr.
Blake’s house?”
“I am the housekeeper.”
Mr. Blake was a bachelor.
“And you were wakened last night by hearing whispering which seemed to
come from this girl’s room.”
“Yes, I at first thought it was the folks next door,--we often hear them
when they are unusually noisy,--but soon I became assured it came from
her room; and more astonished than I could say,--She is a good girl,”
she broke in, suddenly looking at me with hotly indignant eyes,
“a--a--as good a girl as this whole city can show; don’t you dare, any
of you, to hint at anything else o--”
“Come, come,” I said soothingly, a little ashamed of my too
communicative face, “I haven’t said anything, we will take it for
granted she is as good as gold, go on.”
The woman wiped her forehead with a hand that trembled like a leaf.
“Where was I?” said she. “O, I heard voices and was surprised and got
up and went to her door. The noise I made unlocking my own must have
startled her, for all was perfectly quiet when I got there. I waited a
moment, then I turned the knob and called her: she did not reply and I
called again. Then she came to the door, but did not unlock it. ‘What is
it?’ she asked. ‘O,’ said I, ‘I thought I heard talking here and I was
frightened,’ ‘It must have been next door,’ said she. I begged pardon
and went back to my room. There was no more noise, but when in the
morning we broke into her room and found her gone, the window open and
signs of distress and struggle around, I knew I had not been mistaken;
that there were men with her when I went to her door, and that they had
carried her off--”
This time I could not restrain myself.
“Did they drop her out of the window?” I inquired.
“O,” said she, “we are building an extension, and there is a ladder
running up to the third floor, and it was by means of that they took
her.”
“Indeed! she seems at least to have been a willing victim,” I remarked.
The woman clutched my arm with a grip like iron. “Don’t you believe it,”
gasped she, stopping me in the street where we were. “I tell you if what
I say is true, and these burglars or whatever they were, did carry her
off, it was an agony to her, an awful, awful thing that will kill her if
it has not done so already. You don’t know what you are talking about,
you never saw her--”
“Was she pretty,” I asked, hurrying the woman along, for more than one
passer-by had turned their heads to look at us. The question seemed in
some way to give her a shock.
“Ah, I don’t know,” she muttered; “some might not think so, I always
did; it depended upon the way you looked at her.”
For the first time I felt a thrill of anticipation shoot through my
veins. Why, I could not say. Her tone was peculiar, and she spoke in a
sort of brooding way as though she were weighing something in her own
mind; but then her manner had been peculiar throughout. Whatever it was
that aroused my suspicion, I determined henceforth to keep a very sharp
eye upon her ladyship. Levelling a straight glance at her face, I asked
her how it was that she came to be the one to inform the authorities of
the girl’s disappearance.
“Doesn’t Mr. Blake know anything about it?”
The faintest shadow of a change came into her manner. “Yes,” said she,
“I told him at breakfast time; but Mr. Blake doesn’t take much interest
in his servants; he leaves all such matters to me.”
“Then he does not know you have come for the police?”
“No, sir, and O, if you would be so good as to keep it from him. It is
not necessary he should know. I shall let you in the back way. Mr. Blake
is a man who never meddles with anything, and--”
“What did Mr. Blake say this morning when you told him that this
girl--By the way, what is her name?”
“Emily.”
“That this girl, Emily, had disappeared during the night?”
“Not much of anything, sir. He was sitting at the breakfast table
reading his paper, he merely looked up, frowned a little in an
absent-minded way, and told me I must manage the servants’ affairs
without troubling him.”
“And you let it drop?”
“Yes sir; Mr. Blake is not a man to speak twice to.”
I could easily believe that from what I had seen of him in public, for
though by no means a harsh looking man, he had a reserved air which if
maintained in private must have made him very difficult of approach.
We were now within a half block or so of the old-fashioned mansion
regarded by this scion of New York’s aristocracy as one of the most
desirable residences in the city; so motioning to the man who had
accompanied me to take his stand in a doorway near by and watch for
the signal I would give him in case I wanted Mr. Gryce, I turned to the
woman, who was now all in a flutter, and asked her how she proposed to
get me into the house without the knowledge of Mr. Blake.
“O sir, all you have got to do is to follow me right up the back stairs;
he won’t notice, or if he does will not ask any questions.”
And having by this time reached the basement door, she took out a key
from her pocket and inserting it in the lock, at once admitted us into
the dwelling.