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

I hesitated.

“If you have any reason for believing that your midnight guest was Mr. Armstrong, other than his visit here the next night, you ought to tell me, Miss Innes. We can take nothing for granted. If, for instance, the intruder who dropped the bar and scratched the staircase—you see, I know about that—if this visitor was a woman, why should not the same woman have come back the following night, met Mr. Armstrong on the circular staircase, and in alarm shot him?”

“It was a man,” I reiterated. And then, because I could think of no other reason for my statement, I told him about the pearl cuff-link. He was intensely interested.

“Will you give me the link,” he said, when I finished, “or, at least, let me see it? I consider it a most important clue.”

“Won’t the description do?”

“Not as well as the original.”

“Well, I’m very sorry,” I said, as calmly as I could, “I—the thing is lost. It—it must have fallen out of a box on my dressing-table.”

Whatever he thought of my explanation, and I knew he doubted it, he made no sign. He asked me to describe the link accurately, and I did so, while he glanced at a list he took from his pocket.

“One set monogram cuff-links,” he read, “one set plain pearl links, one set cuff-links, woman’s head set with diamonds and emeralds. There is no mention of such a link as you describe, and yet, if your theory is right, Mr. Armstrong must have taken back in his cuffs one complete cuff-link, and a half, perhaps, of the other.”

The idea was new to me. If it had not been the murdered man who had entered the house that night, who had it been?

“There are a number of strange things connected with this case,” the detective went on. “Miss Gertrude Innes testified that she heard some one fumbling with the lock, that the door opened, and that almost immediately the shot was fired. Now, Miss Innes, here is the strange part of that. Mr. Armstrong had no key with him. There was no key in the lock, or on the floor. In other words, the evidence points absolutely to this: Mr. Armstrong was admitted to the house from within.”

“It is impossible,” I broke in. “Mr. Jamieson, do you know what your words imply? Do you know that you are practically accusing Gertrude Innes of admitting that man?”

“Not quite that,” he said, with his friendly smile. “In fact, Miss Innes, I am quite certain she did not. But as long as I learn only parts of the truth, from both you and her, what can I do? I know you picked up something in the flower bed: you refuse to tell me what it was. I know Miss Gertrude went back to the billiard-room to get something, she refuses to say what. You suspect what happened to the cuff-link, but you won’t tell me. So far, all I am sure of is this: I do not believe Arnold Armstrong was the midnight visitor who so alarmed you by dropping—shall we say, a golf-stick? And I believe that when he did come he was admitted by some one in the house. Who knows—it may have been—Liddy!”

I stirred my tea angrily.

“I have always heard,” I said dryly, “that undertakers’ assistants are jovial young men. A man’s sense of humor seems to be in inverse proportion to the gravity of his profession.”

“A man’s sense of humor is a barbarous and a cruel thing, Miss Innes,” he admitted. “It is to the feminine as the hug of a bear is to the scratch of—well;—anything with claws. Is that you, Thomas? Come in.”

Thomas Johnson stood in the doorway. He looked alarmed and apprehensive, and suddenly I remembered the sealskin dressing-bag in the lodge. Thomas came just inside the door and stood with his head drooping, his eyes, under their shaggy gray brows, fixed on Mr. Jamieson.

“Thomas,” said the detective, not unkindly, “I sent for you to tell us what you told Sam Bohannon at the club, the day before Mr. Arnold was found here, dead. Let me see. You came here Friday night to see Miss Innes, didn’t you? And came to work here Saturday morning?”

For some unexplained reason Thomas looked relieved.

“Yas, sah,” he said. “You see it were like this: When Mistah Armstrong and the fam’ly went away, Mis’ Watson an’ me, we was lef’ in charge till the place was rented. Mis’ Watson, she’ve bin here a good while, an’ she warn’ skeery. So she slep’ in the house. I’d bin havin’ tokens—I tol’ Mis’ Innes some of ‘em—an’ I slep’ in the lodge. Then one day Mis’ Watson, she came to me an’ she sez, sez she, ‘Thomas, you’ll hev to sleep up in the big house. I’m too nervous to do it any more.’ But I jes’ reckon to myself that ef it’s too skeery fer her, it’s too skeery fer me. We had it, then, sho’ nuff, and it ended up with Mis’ Watson stayin’ in the lodge nights an’ me lookin’ fer work at de club.”

“Did Mrs. Watson say that anything had happened to alarm her?”

“No, sah. She was jes’ natchally skeered. Well, that was all, far’s I know, until the night I come over to see Mis’ Innes. I come across the valley, along the path from the club-house, and I goes home that way. Down in the creek bottom I almost run into a man. He wuz standin’ with his back to me, an’ he was workin’ with one of these yere electric light things that fit in yer pocket. He was havin’ trouble—one minute it’d flash out, an’ the nex’ it’d be gone. I hed a view of ‘is white dress shirt an’ tie, as I passed. I didn’t see his face. But I know it warn’t Mr. Arnold. It was a taller man than Mr. Arnold. Beside that, Mr. Arnold was playin’ cards when I got to the club-house, same’s he’d been doin’ all day.”

“And the next morning you came back along the path,” pursued Mr. Jamieson relentlessly.

“The nex’ mornin’ I come back along the path an’ down where I dun see the man night befoh, I picked up this here.” The old man held out a tiny object and Mr. Jamieson took it. Then he held it on his extended palm for me to see. It was the other half of the pearl cuff-link!

But Mr. Jamieson was not quite through questioning him.

“And so you showed it to Sam, at the club, and asked him if he knew any one who owned such a link, and Sam said—what?”

“Wal, Sam, he ‘lowed he’d seen such a pair of cuff-buttons in a shirt belongin’ to Mr. Bailey—Mr. Jack Bailey, sah.”

“I’ll keep this link, Thomas, for a while,” the detective said. “That’s all I wanted to know. Good night.”

As Thomas shuffled out, Mr. Jamieson watched me sharply.

“You see, Miss Innes,” he said, “Mr. Bailey insists on mixing himself with this thing. If Mr. Bailey came here that Friday night expecting to meet Arnold Armstrong, and missed him—if, as I say, he had done this, might he not, seeing him enter the following night, have struck him down, as he had intended before?”

“But the motive?” I gasped.

“There could be motive proved, I think. Arnold Armstrong and John Bailey have been enemies since the latter, as cashier of the Traders’ Bank, brought Arnold almost into the clutches of the law. Also, you forget that both men have been paying attention to Miss Gertrude. Bailey’s flight looks bad, too.”

“And you think Halsey helped him to escape?”

“Undoubtedly. Why, what could it be but flight? Miss Innes, let me reconstruct that evening, as I see it. Bailey and Armstrong had quarreled at the club. I learned this to-day. Your nephew brought Bailey over. Prompted by jealous, insane fury, Armstrong followed, coming across by the path. He entered the billiard-room wing—perhaps rapping, and being admitted by your nephew. Just inside he was shot, by some one on the circular staircase. The shot fired, your nephew and Bailey left the house at once, going toward the automobile house. They left by the lower road, which prevented them being heard, and when you and Miss Gertrude got downstairs everything was quiet.”

“But—Gertrude’s story,” I stammered.

“Miss Gertrude only brought forward her explanation the following morning. I do not believe it, Miss Innes. It is the story of a loving and ingenious woman.”

“And—this thing tonight?”

“May upset my whole view of the case. We must give the benefit of every doubt, after all. We may, for instance, come back to the figure on the porch: if it was a woman you saw that night through the window, we might start with other premises. Or Mr. Innes’ explanation may turn us in a new direction. It is possible that he shot Arnold Armstrong as a burglar and then fled, frightened at what he had done. In any case, however, I feel confident that the body was here when he left. Mr. Armstrong left the club ostensibly for a moonlight saunter, about half after eleven o’clock. It was three when the shot was fired.”

I leaned back bewildered. It seemed to me that the evening had been full of significant happenings, had I only held the key. Had Gertrude been the fugitive in the clothes chute? Who was the man on the drive near the lodge, and whose gold-mounted dressing-bag had I seen in the lodge sitting-room?

It was late when Mr. Jamieson finally got up to go. I went with him to the door, and together we stood looking out over the valley. Below lay the village of Casanova, with its Old World houses, its blossoming trees and its peace. Above on the hill across the valley were the lights of the Greenwood Club. It was even possible to see the curving row of parallel lights that marked the carriage road. Rumors that I had heard about the club came back—of drinking, of high play, and once, a year ago, of a suicide under those very lights.

Mr. Jamieson left, taking a short cut to the village, and I still stood there. It must have been after eleven, and the monotonous tick of the big clock on the stairs behind me was the only sound.

Then I was conscious that some one was running up the drive. In a minute a woman darted into the area of light made by the open door, and caught me by the arm. It was Rosie—Rosie in a state of collapse from terror, and, not the least important, clutching one of my Coalport plates and a silver spoon.

She stood staring into the darkness behind, still holding the plate. I got her into the house and secured the plate; then I stood and looked down at her where she crouched tremblingly against the doorway.

“Well,” I asked, “didn’t your young man enjoy his meal?”

She couldn’t speak. She looked at the spoon she still held—I wasn’t so anxious about it: thank Heaven, it wouldn’t chip—and then she stared at me.

“I appreciate your desire to have everything nice for him,” I went on, “but the next time, you might take the Limoges china It’s more easily duplicated and less expensive.”

“I haven’t a young man—not here.” She had got her breath now, as I had guessed she would. “I—I have been chased by a thief, Miss Innes.”

“Did he chase you out of the house and back again?” I asked.

Then Rosie began to cry—not silently, but noisily, hysterically.

I stopped her by giving her a good shake.

“What in the world is the matter with you?” I snapped. “Has the day of good common sense