A SPRAINED ANKLE
I was panic-stricken. As I ran along the corridor I was confident that
the mysterious intruder and probable murderer had been found, and that
he lay dead or dying at the foot of the chute. I got down the staircase
somehow, and through the kitchen to the basement stairs. Mr. Jamieson
had been before me, and the door stood open. Liddy was standing in the
middle of the kitchen, holding a frying-pan by the handle as a weapon.
“Don’t go down there,” she yelled, when she saw me moving toward the
basement stairs. “Don’t you do it, Miss Rachel. That Jamieson’s down
there now. There’s only trouble comes of hunting ghosts; they lead you
into bottomless pits and things like that. Oh, Miss Rachel, don’t—” as
I tried to get past her.
She was interrupted by Mr. Jamieson’s reappearance. He ran up the
stairs two at a time, and his face was flushed and furious.
“The whole place is locked,” he said angrily. “Where’s the laundry key
kept?”
“It’s kept in the door,” Liddy snapped. “That whole end of the cellar
is kept locked, so nobody can get at the clothes, and then the key’s
left in the door? so that unless a thief was as blind as—as some
detectives, he could walk right in.”
“Liddy,” I said sharply, “come down with us and turn on all the
lights.”
She offered her resignation, as usual, on the spot, but I took her by
the arm, and she came along finally. She switched on all the lights and
pointed to a door just ahead.
“That’s the door,” she said sulkily. “The key’s in it.”
But the key was not in it. Mr. Jamieson shook it, but it was a heavy
door, well locked. And then he stooped and began punching around the
keyhole with the end of a lead-pencil. When he stood up his face was
exultant.
“It’s locked on the inside,” he said in a low tone. “There is somebody
in there.”
“Lord have mercy!” gasped Liddy, and turned to run.
“Liddy,” I called, “go through the house at once and see who is
missing, or if any one is. We’ll have to clear this thing at once. Mr.
Jamieson, if you will watch here I will go to the lodge and find
Warner. Thomas would be of no use. Together you may be able to force
the door.”
“A good idea,” he assented. “But—there are windows, of course, and
there is nothing to prevent whoever is in there from getting out that
way.”
“Then lock the door at the top of the basement stairs,” I suggested,
“and patrol the house from the outside.”
We agreed to this, and I had a feeling that the mystery of Sunnyside
was about to be solved. I ran down the steps and along the drive. Just
at the corner I ran full tilt into somebody who seemed to be as much
alarmed as I was. It was not until I had recoiled a step or two that I
recognized Gertrude, and she me.
“Good gracious, Aunt Ray,” she exclaimed, “what is the matter?”
“There’s somebody locked in the laundry,” I panted. “That is—unless—you
didn’t see any one crossing the lawn or skulking around the house, did
you?”
“I think we have mystery on the brain,” Gertrude said wearily. “No, I
haven’t seen any one, except old Thomas, who looked for all the world
as if he had been ransacking the pantry. What have you locked in the
laundry?”
“I can’t wait to explain,” I replied. “I must get Warner from the
lodge. If you came out for air, you’d better put on your overshoes.”
And then I noticed that Gertrude was limping—not much, but sufficiently
to make her progress very slow, and seemingly painful.
“You have hurt yourself,” I said sharply.
“I fell over the carriage block,” she explained. “I thought perhaps I
might see Halsey coming home. He—he ought to be here.”
I hurried on down the drive. The lodge was some distance from the
house, in a grove of trees where the drive met the county road. There
were two white stone pillars to mark the entrance, but the iron gates,
once closed and tended by the lodge-keeper, now stood permanently open.
The day of the motor-car had come; no one had time for closed gates and
lodge-keepers. The lodge at Sunnyside was merely a sort of
supplementary servants’ quarters: it was as convenient in its
appointments as the big house and infinitely more cozy.
As I went down the drive, my thoughts were busy. Who would it be that
Mr. Jamieson had trapped in the cellar? Would we find a body or some
one badly injured? Scarcely either. Whoever had fallen had been able to
lock the laundry door on the inside. If the fugitive had come from
outside the house, how did he get in? If it was some member of the
household, who could it have been? And then—a feeling of horror almost
overwhelmed me. Gertrude! Gertrude and her injured ankle! Gertrude
found limping slowly up the drive when I had thought she was in bed!
I tried to put the thought away, but it would not go. If Gertrude had
been on the circular staircase that night, why had she fled from Mr.
Jamieson? The idea, puzzling as it was, seemed borne out by this
circumstance. Whoever had taken refuge at the head of the stairs could
scarcely have been familiar with the house, or with the location of the
chute. The mystery seemed to deepen constantly. What possible
connection could there be between Halsey and Gertrude, and the murder
of Arnold Armstrong? And yet, every way I turned I seemed to find
something that pointed to such a connection.
At the foot of the drive the road described a long, sloping,
horseshoe-shaped curve around the lodge. There were lights there,
streaming cheerfully out on to the trees, and from an upper room came
wavering shadows, as if some one with a lamp was moving around. I had
come almost silently in my evening slippers, and I had my second
collision of the evening on the road just above the house. I ran full
into a man in a long coat, who was standing in the shadow beside the
drive, with his back to me, watching the lighted windows.
“What the hell!” he ejaculated furiously, and turned around. When he
saw me, however, he did not wait for any retort on my part. He faded
away—this is not slang; he did—he absolutely disappeared in the dusk
without my getting more than a glimpse of his face. I had a vague
impression of unfamiliar features and of a sort of cap with a visor.
Then he was gone.
I went to the lodge and rapped. It required two or three poundings to
bring Thomas to the door, and he opened it only an inch or so.
“Where is Warner?” I asked.
“I—I think he’s in bed, ma’m.”
“Get him up,” I said, “and for goodness’ sake open the door, Thomas.
I’ll wait for Warner.”
“It’s kind o’ close in here, ma’m,” he said, obeying gingerly, and
disclosing a cool and comfortable looking interior. “Perhaps you’d keer
to set on the porch an’ rest yo’self.”
It was so evident that Thomas did not want me inside that I went in.
“Tell Warner he is needed in a hurry,” I repeated, and turned into the
little sitting-room. I could hear Thomas going up the stairs, could
hear him rouse Warner, and the steps of the chauffeur as he hurriedly
dressed. But my attention was busy with the room below.
On the center-table, open, was a sealskin traveling bag. It was filled
with gold-topped bottles and brushes, and it breathed opulence, luxury,
femininity from every inch of surface. How did it get there? I was
still asking myself the question when Warner came running down the
stairs and into the room. He was completely but somewhat incongruously
dressed, and his open, boyish face looked abashed. He was a country
boy, absolutely frank and reliable, of fair education and
intelligence—one of the small army of American youths who turn a
natural aptitude for mechanics into the special field of the
automobile, and earn good salaries in a congenial occupation.
“What is it, Miss Innes?” he asked anxiously.
“There is some one locked in the laundry,” I replied. “Mr. Jamieson
wants you to help him break the lock. Warner, whose bag is this?”
He was in the doorway by this time, and he pretended not to hear.
“Warner,” I called, “come back here. Whose bag is this?”
He stopped then, but he did not turn around.
“It’s—it belongs to Thomas,” he said, and fled up the drive.
To Thomas! A London bag with mirrors and cosmetic jars of which Thomas
could not even have guessed the use! However, I put the bag in the back
of my mind, which was fast becoming stored with anomalous and
apparently irreconcilable facts, and followed Warner to the house.
Liddy had come back to the kitchen: the door to the basement stairs was
double-barred, and had a table pushed against it; and beside her on the
table was most of the kitchen paraphernalia.
“Did you see if there was any one missing in the house?” I asked,
ignoring the array of sauce-pans rolling-pins, and the poker of the
range.
“Rosie is missing,” Liddy said with unction. She had objected to Rosie,
the parlor maid, from the start. “Mrs. Watson went into her room, and
found she had gone without her hat. People that trust themselves a
dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with servants they don’t
know, needn’t be surprised if they wake up some morning and find their
throats cut.”
After which carefully veiled sarcasm Liddy relapsed into gloom. Warner
came in then with a handful of small tools, and Mr. Jamieson went with
him to the basement. Oddly enough, I was not alarmed. With all my heart
I wished for Halsey, but I was not frightened. At the door he was to
force, Warner put down his tools and looked at it. Then he turned the
handle. Without the slightest difficulty the door opened, revealing the
blackness of the drying-room beyond!
Mr. Jamieson gave an exclamation of disgust.
“Gone!” he said. “Confound such careless work! I might have known.”
It was true enough. We got the lights on finally and looked all through
the three rooms that constituted this wing of the basement. Everything
was quiet and empty. An explanation of how the fugitive had escaped
injury was found in a heaped-up basket of clothes under the chute. The
basket had been overturned, but that was all. Mr. Jamieson examined the
windows: one was unlocked, and offered an easy escape. The window or
the door? Which way had the fugitive escaped? The door seemed most
probable, and I hoped it had been so. I could not have borne, just
then, to think that it was my poor Gertrude we had been hounding
through the darkness, and yet—I had met Gertrude not far from that very
window.
I went up-stairs at last, tired and depressed. Mrs. Watson and Liddy
were making tea in the kitchen. In certain walks of life the tea-pot is
the refuge in times of stress, trouble or sickness: they give tea to
the dying and they put it in the baby’s nursing bottle. Mrs. Watson was
fixing a tray to be sent in to me, and when I asked her about Rosie she
confirmed her absence.
“She’s not here,” she said; “but I would not think much of that, Miss
Innes. Rosie is a pretty young girl, and perhaps she has a sweetheart.
It will be a good thing if she has. The maids stay much better when
they have something like that to hold them here.”
Gertrude had gone back to her room, and while I was drinking my cup of
hot tea, Mr. Jamieson came in.
“We might take up the conversation where we left off an hour and a half
ago,” he said. “But before we go on, I want to say this: The person who
escaped from the laundry was a woman with a foot of moderate size and
well arched. She wore nothing but a stocking on her right foot, and, in
spite of the unlocked door, she escaped by the window.”
And again I thought of Gertrude’s sprained ankle. Was it the right or
the left?