[Illustration]
The Circular Staircase
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
Contents
I. I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE
II. A LINK CUFF-BUTTON
III. MR. JOHN BAILEY APPEARS
IV. WHERE IS HALSEY?
V. GERTRUDE’S ENGAGEMENT
VI. IN THE EAST CORRIDOR
VII. A SPRAINED ANKLE
VIII. THE OTHER HALF OF THE LINE
IX. JUST LIKE A GIRL
X. THE TRADERS’ BANK
XI. HALSEY MAKES A CAPTURE
XII. ONE MYSTERY FOR ANOTHER
XIII. LOUISE
XIV. AN EGG-NOG AND A TELEGRAM
XV. LIDDY GIVES THE ALARM
XVI. IN THE EARLY MORNING
XVII. A HINT OF SCANDAL
XVIII.A HOLE IN THE WALL
XIX. CONCERNING THOMAS
XX. DOCTOR WALKER’S WARNING
XXI. FOURTEEN ELM STREET
XXII. A LADDER OUT OF PLACE
XXIII. WHILE THE STABLES BURNED
XXIV. FLINDERS
XXV. A VISIT FROM LOUISE
XXVI. HALSEY’S DISAPPEARANCE
XXVII. WHO IS NINA CARRINGTON?
XXVIII. A TRAMP AND THE TOOTHACHE
XXIX. A SCRAP OF PAPER
XXX. WHEN CHURCHYARDS YAWN
XXXI. BETWEEN TWO FIREPLACES
XXXII. ANNE WATSON’S STORY
XXXIII. AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS
XXXIV. THE ODDS AND ENDS
CHAPTER I.
I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE
This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted
her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer
out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious
crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and
prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for
twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the
carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown
linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after
watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet
in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply
does not depend on a tank on the roof.
And then—the madness seized me. When I look back over the months I
spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. As it is, I show
the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I have turned very
gray—Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little
bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery, instead of a
yellowish white. I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things and I
snapped her off.
“No,” I said sharply, “I’m not going to use bluing at my time of life,
or starch, either.”
Liddy’s nerves are gone, she says, since that awful summer, but she has
enough left, goodness knows! And when she begins to go around with a
lump in her throat, all I have to do is to threaten to return to
Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance of cheerfulness,—from
which you may judge that the summer there was anything but a success.
The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete—one of them
mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the time the
thing happened—that I feel it my due to tell what I know. Mr. Jamieson,
the detective, said himself he could never have done without me,
although he gave me little enough credit, in print.
I shall have to go back several years—thirteen, to be exact—to start my
story. At that time my brother died, leaving me his two children.
Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven. All the
responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly; to perfect
the profession of motherhood requires precisely as many years as the
child has lived, like the man who started to carry the calf and ended
by walking along with the bull on his shoulders. However, I did the
best I could. When Gertrude got past the hair-ribbon age, and Halsey
asked for a scarf-pin and put on long trousers—and a wonderful help
that was to the darning!—I sent them away to good schools. After that,
my responsibility was chiefly postal, with three months every summer in
which to replenish their wardrobes, look over their lists of
acquaintances, and generally to take my foster-motherhood out of its
nine months’ retirement in camphor.
I missed the summers with them when, somewhat later, at boarding-school
and college, the children spent much of their vacations with friends.
Gradually I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome
than when signed to a letter, though I wrote them at stated intervals.
But when Halsey had finished his electrical course and Gertrude her
boarding-school, and both came home to stay, things were suddenly
changed. The winter Gertrude came out was nothing but a succession of
sitting up late at night to bring her home from things, taking her to
the dressmakers between naps the next day, and discouraging ineligible
youths with either more money than brains, or more brains than money.
Also, I acquired a great many things: to say _lingerie_ for
under-garments, “frocks” and “gowns” instead of dresses, and that
beardless sophomores are not college boys, but college men. Halsey
required less personal supervision, and as they both got their mother’s
fortune that winter, my responsibility became purely moral. Halsey
bought a car, of course, and I learned how to tie over my bonnet a gray
baize veil, and, after a time, never to stop to look at the dogs one
has run down. People are apt to be so unpleasant about their dogs.
The additions to my education made me a properly equipped maiden aunt,
and by spring I was quite tractable. So when Halsey suggested camping
in the Adirondacks and Gertrude wanted Bar Harbor, we compromised on a
good country house with links near, within motor distance of town and
telephone distance of the doctor. That was how we went to Sunnyside.
We went out to inspect the property, and it seemed to deserve its name.
Its cheerful appearance gave no indication whatever of anything out of
the ordinary. Only one thing seemed unusual to me: the housekeeper, who
had been left in charge, had moved from the house to the gardener’s
lodge, a few days before. As the lodge was far enough away from the
house, it seemed to me that either fire or thieves could complete their
work of destruction undisturbed. The property was an extensive one: the
house on the top of a hill, which sloped away in great stretches of
green lawn and clipped hedges, to the road; and across the valley,
perhaps a couple of miles away, was the Greenwood Club House. Gertrude
and Halsey were infatuated.
“Why, it’s everything you want,” Halsey said “View, air, good water and
good roads. As for the house, it’s big enough for a hospital, if it has
a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne back,” which was ridiculous: it was
pure Elizabethan.
Of course we took the place; it was not my idea of comfort, being much
too large and sufficiently isolated to make the servant question
serious. But I give myself credit for this: whatever has happened
since, I never blamed Halsey and Gertrude for taking me there. And
another thing: if the series of catastrophes there did nothing else, it
taught me one thing—that somehow, somewhere, from perhaps a
half-civilized ancestor who wore a sheepskin garment and trailed his
food or his prey, I have in me the instinct of the chase. Were I a man
I should be a trapper of criminals, trailing them as relentlessly as no
doubt my sheepskin ancestor did his wild boar. But being an unmarried
woman, with the handicap of my sex, my first acquaintance with crime
will probably be my last. Indeed, it came near enough to being my last
acquaintance with anything.
The property was owned by Paul Armstrong, the president of the Traders’
Bank, who at the time we took the house was in the west with his wife
and daughter, and a Doctor Walker, the Armstrong family physician.
Halsey knew Louise Armstrong,—had been rather attentive to her the
winter before, but as Halsey was always attentive to somebody, I had
not thought of it seriously, although she was a charming girl. I knew
of Mr. Armstrong only through his connection with the bank, where the
children’s money was largely invested, and through an ugly story about
the son, Arnold Armstrong, who was reported to have forged his father’s
name, for a considerable amount, to some bank paper. However, the story
had had no interest for me.
I cleared Halsey and Gertrude away to a house party, and moved out to
Sunnyside the first of May. The roads were bad, but the trees were in
leaf, and there were still tulips in the borders around the house. The
arbutus was fragrant in the woods under the dead leaves, and on the way
from the station, a short mile, while the car stuck in the mud, I found
a bank showered with tiny forget-me-nots. The birds—don’t ask me what
kind; they all look alike to me, unless they have a hall mark of some
bright color—the birds were chirping in the hedges, and everything
breathed of peace. Liddy, who was born and bred on a brick pavement,
got a little bit down-spirited when the crickets began to chirp, or
scrape their legs together, or whatever it is they do, at twilight.
The first night passed quietly enough. I have always been grateful for
that one night’s peace; it shows what the country might be, under
favorable circumstances. Never after that night did I put my head on my
pillow with any assurance how long it would be there; or on my
shoulders, for that matter.
On the following morning Liddy and Mrs. Ralston, my own housekeeper,
had a difference of opinion, and Mrs. Ralston left on the eleven train.
Just after luncheon, Burke, the butler, was taken unexpectedly with a
pain in his right side, much worse when I was within hearing distance,
and by afternoon he was started cityward. That night the cook’s sister
had a baby—the cook, seeing indecision in my face, made it twins on
second thought—and, to be short, by noon the next day the household
staff was down to Liddy and myself. And this in a house with twenty-two
rooms and five baths!
Liddy wanted to go back to the city at once, but the milk-boy said that
Thomas Johnson, the Armstrongs’ colored butler, was working as a waiter
at the Greenwood Club, and might come back. I have the usual scruples
about coercing people’s servants away, but few of us have any
conscience regarding institutions or corporations—witness the way we
beat railroads and street-car companies when we can—so I called up the
club, and about eight o’clock Thomas Johnson came to see me. Poor
Thomas!
Well, it ended by my engaging Thomas on the spot, at outrageous wages,
and with permission to sleep in the gardener’s lodge, empty since the
house was rented. The old man—he was white-haired and a little stooped,
but with an immense idea of his personal dignity—gave me his reasons
hesitatingly.
“I ain’t sayin’ nothin’, Mis’ Innes,” he said, with his hand on the
door-knob, “but there’s been goin’s-on here this las’ few months as
ain’t natchal. ’Tain’t one thing an’ ’tain’t another—it’s jest a door
squealin’ here, an’ a winder closin’ there, but when doors an’ winders
gets to cuttin’ up capers and there’s nobody nigh ’em, it’s time Thomas
Johnson sleeps somewhar’s else.”
Liddy, who seemed to be never more than ten feet away from me that
night, and was afraid of her shadow in that great barn of a place,
screamed a little, and turned a yellow-green. But I am not easily
alarmed.
It was entirely in vain; I represented to Thomas that we were alone,
and that he would have to stay in the house that night. He was politely
firm, but he would come over early the next morning, and if I gave him
a key, he would come in time to get some sort of breakfast. I stood on
the huge veranda and watched him shuffle along down the shadowy drive,
with mingled feelings—irritation at his cowardice and thankfulness at
getting him at all. I am not ashamed to say that I double-locked the
hall door when I went in.
“You can lock up the rest of the house and go to bed, Liddy,” I said
severely. “You give me the creeps standing there. A woman of your age
ought to have better sense.” It usually braces Liddy to mention her
age: she owns to forty—which is absurd. Her mother cooked for my
grandfather, and Liddy must be at least as old as I. But that night she
refused to brace.
“You’re not going to ask me to lock up, Miss Rachel!” she quavered.
“Why, there’s a dozen French windows in the drawing-room and the
billiard-room wing, and every one opens on a porch. And Mary Anne said
that last night there was a man standing by the stable when she locked
the kitchen door.”
“Mary Anne was a fool,” I said sternly. “If there had been a man there,
she would have had him in the kitchen and been feeding him what was
left from dinner, inside of an hour, from force of habit. Now don’t be
ridiculous. Lock up the house and go to bed. I am going to read.”
Illustration:
But Liddy set her lips tight and stood still.
“I’m not going to bed,” she said. “I am going to pack up, and to-morrow
I am going to leave.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” I snapped. Liddy and I often desire to
part company, but never at the same time. “If you are afraid, I will go
with you, but for goodness’ sake don’t try to hide behind me.”
The house was a typical summer residence on an extensive scale.
Wherever possible, on the first floor, the architect had done away with
partitions, using arches and columns instead. The effect was cool and
spacious, but scarcely cozy. As Liddy and I went from one window to
another, our voices echoed back at us uncomfortably. There was plenty
of light—the electric plant down in the village supplied us—but there
were long vistas of polished floor, and mirrors which reflected us from
unexpected corners, until I felt some of Liddy’s foolishness
communicate itself to me.
The house was very long, a rectangle in general form, with the main
entrance in the center of the long side. The brick-paved entry opened
into a short hall to the right of which, separated only by a row of
pillars, was a huge living-room. Beyond that was the drawing-room, and
in the end, the billiard-room. Off the billiard-room, in the extreme
right wing, was a den, or card-room, with a small hall opening on the
east veranda, and from there went up a narrow circular staircase.
Halsey had pointed it out with delight.
“Just look, Aunt Rachel,” he said with a flourish. “The architect that
put up this joint was wise to a few things. Arnold Armstrong and his
friends could sit here and play cards all night and stumble up to bed
in the early morning, without having the family send in a police call.”
Liddy and I got as far as the card-room and turned on all the lights. I
tried the small entry door there, which opened on the veranda, and
examined the windows. Everything was secure, and Liddy, a little less
nervous now, had just pointed out to me the disgracefully dusty
condition of the hard-wood floor, when suddenly the lights went out. We
waited a moment; I think Liddy was stunned with fright, or she would
have screamed. And then I clutched her by the arm and pointed to one of
the windows opening on the porch. The sudden change threw the window
into relief, an oblong of grayish light, and showed us a figure
standing close, peering in. As I looked it darted across the veranda
and out of sight in the darkness.