The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart (mini ebook reader txt) 📕

“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 upstairs 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?