“What do they think it is?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders and picked up her tray.
“I’m not trying to say and I guess nobody is. But if there’s been a
murder it’s pretty well known that the ghost walks about until the
burial service is read and it’s properly buried.”
She glanced at the Reed house.
“For instance,” she demanded, “where is Mademoiselle?”
“She is alive,” I said rather sharply. “And even if what you say were
true, what in the world would make her wander about the basements? It
seems so silly, Nora, a ghost haunting damp cellars and laundries with
stationary tubs and all that.”
“Well,” she contended, “it seems silly for them to sit on cold
tombstones—and yet that’s where they generally sit, isn’t it?”
Mr. Patton listened gravely to my story that night.
“I don’t like it,” he said when I had finished. “Of course the head on
the staircase is nonsense. Your nerves were ragged and our eyes play
tricks on all of us. But as for the Frenchwoman——”
“If you accept her you must accept the head,” I snapped. “It was
there—it was a head without a body and it looked up at me.”
We were walking through a quiet street, and he bent over and caught my
wrist.
“Pulse racing,” he commented. “I’m going to take you away, that’s
certain. I can’t afford to lose my best assistant. You’re too close,
Miss Adams; you’ve lost your perspective.”
“I’ve lost my temper!” I retorted. “I shall not leave until I know what
this thing is, unless you choose to ring the doorbell and tell them I’m
a spy.”
He gave in when he saw that I was firm, but not without a final protest.
“I’m directly responsible for you to your friends,” he said. “There’s
probably a young man somewhere who will come gunning for me if anything
happens to you. And I don’t care to be gunned for. I get enough of that
in my regular line.”
“There is no young man,” I said shortly.
“Have you been able to see the cellars?”
“No, everything is locked off.”
“Do you think the rear staircase goes all the way down?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“You are in the house. Have you any suggestions as to the best method of
getting into the house? Is Reed on guard all night?”
“I think he is.”
“It may interest you to know,” he said finally, “that I sent a reliable
man to break in there last night quietly, and that he—couldn’t do it. He
got a leg through a cellar window, and came near not getting it out
again. Reed was just inside in the dark.” He laughed a little, but I
guessed that the thing galled him.
“I do not believe that he would have found anything if he had succeeded
in getting in. There has been no crime, Mr. Patton, I am sure of that.
But there is a menace of some sort in the house.”
“Then why does Mrs. Reed stay and keep the children if there is danger?”
“I believe she is afraid to leave him. There are times when I think that
he is desperate.”
“Does he ever leave the house?”
“I think not, unless——”
“Yes?”
“Unless he is the basement ghost of the other houses.”
He stopped in his slow walk and considered it.
“It’s possible. In that case I could have him waylaid tonight in the
gardens and left there, tied. It would be a hold-up, you understand. The
police have no excuse for coming in yet. Or, if we found him breaking
into one of the other houses we could get him there. He’d be released,
of course, but it would give us time. I want to clean the thing up. I’m
not easy while you are in that house.”
We agreed that I was to wait inside one of my windows that night, and
that on a given signal I should go down and open the front door. The
whole thing, of course, was contingent on Mr. Reed leaving the house
some time that night. It was only a chance.
“The house is barred like a fortress,” Mr. Patton said as he left me.
“The window with the grating is hopeless. We tried it last night.”