THE SCENT OF ROSES
Neither Peter nor Dale stopped to count the cost of taxicabs that
night. The driver hesitated only a moment. Their request that he make
the fastest possible time to the distant Brooklyn police station was
not a usual one. Knowing that it must be urgent, the driver made good
his promise and soon they were speeding across Manhattan Bridge,
through side streets in reckless haste and then down the long stretch
of boulevard. Judy leaned out of the window and searched the scene
ahead for a trace of anything familiar.
Ocean Parkway, lined with its modern dwelling houses and new apartment
buildings was as unlike Gravesend Avenue as anything could be. Still,
the two were only a few blocks apart. The driver turned his cab down a
side street, sure of his bearings; and Judy, watching, saw the sudden
change. The boulevard with its lights and stream of traffic, then queer
old Parkville, a village forgotten while Brooklyn grew up around it.
The police station looked all the more imposing in this setting. Two
young policemen were already there, waiting beside the high desk and
talking with the captain.
Sarah Glenn’s house was only a short distance away, and together they
walked it. Soon they were turning down the unpaved end of the street
that bordered the railroad cut.
“There it is!” Judy shivered a little and drew her coat closer as she
pointed.
The house was dark and silent. The windows were black—black with an
unfathomable blackness that must be within. Peter sensed Judy’s fear
for he took her arm and guided her as they came up the broken walk.
On the steps Dale stopped and picked up a white flower.
“What can it mean?” Pauline whispered. “How would a rose get here?”
He shook his head. “It’s beyond me. What’s this?” He fingered a
lavender ribbon that was still attached to the door.
“Looks as if there’d been a funeral here,” one of the police officers
observed.
Both girls stood trembling as he banged and pounded on the door and
then shouted a threat to the still house.
“Nobody home,” he turned and said. “Do you think it’s necessary to
force our way in?”
“More than ever,” Judy replied. “We _must_ see what’s in the tower!”
“Okay! Give me a hand, partner, and we’ll smash the door.”
Underneath the porch they found a beam which would serve their purpose.
Peter and Dale helped the policemen, and soon the heavy door gave way
and crashed into the empty house. A sickening, musty smell combined
with the heady odor of flowers greeted them as they stepped inside.
“A funeral all right!” the policeman reiterated. “Get the perfume,
don’t you? But everything’s cleared up—except....” He and Judy had
seen it at the same time but the policeman was the first to pick it up.
“... this card.”
“Let me see it.”
Obligingly he handed it to the girl. She turned it over in her hand and
passed it on to Dale. It read:
_With deepest sympathy_
_Emily Grimshaw_
“Do you know the party?” the other officer asked.
“My employer,” Judy replied simply.
The question in her mind, however, was less easily answered. Was Emily
Grimshaw’s absence from her office explainable by this death? Whose
death? If Emily Grimshaw had sent flowers certainly she must know.
The policemen were busy searching the house, and Judy and her three
companions followed them. The rooms upstairs, like those on the first
floor, were empty of furniture. But the tower room was found to open
from a third floor bedroom. To their surprise, this room was completely
furnished, even to bed coverings and pillows. A little kitchen adjoined
it and there were evidences that food had recently been cooked there.
An extra cot was made up in the hall.
So the poet and her brother had lived in their immense house and
occupied only two rooms! Or three? They had yet to explore the tower.
Peter Dobbs tried the door and found it locked.
“We’ll have to break this one, too,” the policemen said, and Dale
offered to get the beam.
Pauline’s hand kept him. “Wait a minute,” she pleaded. “It’s a shame to
spoil the door and maybe this key will fit.”
She took a queer brass key from her hand bag. Judy and Peter frankly
stared. The policemen, though obviously doubting its usefulness,
consented to try it. To their astonishment, it turned.
“Where did you find that key?” Dale questioned.
“In the pocket of Irene’s brown suit. I put it in my own hand bag for
safe-keeping.”
“Rather suspected it fitted something, didn’t you?” he said
sarcastically. “Well, to me it doesn’t prove a thing.”
“It does to me,” Judy put in, “although not what you think. This must
have been Joy Holiday’s room when she was a child! And if Irene had the
key surely Joy Holiday is related to her—perhaps her own mother!”
“It sounds like pretty sound figuring to me,”’ Peter agreed, flashing a
look of boyish admiration in Judy’s direction.
Then, as the door swung open, they followed the policemen into the
tower. Peter pushed a button and the light revealed a circular room
with a gay panorama of nursery rhyme characters frolicking across the
wall.
Upon closer inspection, however, the room was seen to be six-sided with
shelves built into two of its corners. On one of these dolls and
expensive toys were neatly arranged. Books and games for a somewhat
older girl adorned the other shelf.
A curtained wardrobe concealed another corner, while a white cot bed,
all freshly made, occupied the corner at the left of the door. The two
remaining corners were cleverly camouflaged by concave mirrors with
uneven distorting surfaces, such as are sometimes seen in amusement
park funny houses. In spite of Judy’s anxiety, she could not suppress a
smile when the two policemen walked by them.
So this was the room where the poet had locked Joy Holiday! Did she
think those silly mirrors and a roomful of books and toys could make up
for a lack of freedom? Judy, who had always been allowed to choose what
friends she liked, could easily see why the poet’s daughter had wanted
to run away—or vanish as people said she had done. How strange it all
was and how thrilling to be standing in the very room where Irene’s
mother had stood twenty years before!
“It’s so quiet and peaceful here,” Judy said. “Nothing very terrible
could have happened in this pretty room.”
She had momentarily forgotten that the whole lower structure of it had
been burned away, that she had seen a tall yellow specter peering out
of its window.
Peter, however, remembered the fantastic story Judy had told him. It
did not surprise the young law student that no one was in the tower. He
and the two policemen immediately set about looking for clues to
Irene’s whereabouts. But it was not until Dale drew back the wardrobe
curtain and they found her yellow dress and jacket hanging there that
they became truly alarmed. Now they knew, past any doubt, that Irene
had visited her grandmother’s house. There had been a funeral! Even if
it had been Sarah Glenn’s, Irene might have been with her when she
died. Alone with a crazy woman ... timid little Irene!
It was a sober moment for all of them.
“That girl’s been held captive all right,” one of the policemen said in
a voice more troubled than one would expect of an officer of the law.
“It looks as if we’ve found the evidence right here.”
He stood examining the folds of her yellow dress. It appeared to have
been hanging in the wardrobe for some time. Other clothes were there,
too, but the full skirts and puffed sleeves were in the style of twenty
years ago. On a shelf above them were two or three queer little hats,
all decked out with feathers and flowers. Irene would have laughed at
them. She would have tried them on and posed before the comical
mirrors. Judy wondered if she had done that.
Someone, apparently, had tried on one of the aprons. It was a simple
gingham affair such as girls used to wear to protect dainty dresses,
and it had been thrown carelessly over a chair. When Judy made a move
to hang it up she was warned to leave everything exactly as it was.
“If this turns out to be a murder case,” one of the policemen said,
“this bedroom may contain important evidence.” He turned to Dale who
still held the rose he had found on the steps. “That flower proves that
the funeral must have been held today. It’s still sweet,” he continued,
making a grimace as he sniffed it. “We’ll get together all the facts on
the case and have the place watched. If this man, Jasper Crosby,
returns tonight there’ll be a policeman here to nab him. A general
alarm will be dispatched to our radio cars, and we’ll find out whose
funeral it was, too, and let you know first thing in the morning.”
“Oh, if you only would,” Judy cried gratefully. “Perhaps you can find
out from my employer. She’s decided to take a vacation for some unknown
reason but you may be able to locate her here.”
She gave them Emily Grimshaw’s home address. Peter Dobbs, who had taken
a keen interest in the legal aspect of the case, jotted it down, too.
Much to Dale’s discomfiture, he kept talking about Irene.
“If we find her,” he declared, “this may be my big opportunity. She
would contest the will, of course, and I might be able to help her
then.”
“_If_ we find her,” Dale repeated doubtfully.
Later Peter gave Judy the address and telephone number of the hotel
where he was staying. He would be either there or at the police station
in case she needed him.
“If I do call you,” Judy promised, with an attempt at lightness, “you
may be sure that I’m in trouble because it’s really your place to call
me.”
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