Читать книгу Mystery Cases of Letitia Carberry, Tish - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 28

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We didn't talk very much. Tish was anxious to show she could drive, for all she had sat us down in a ditch, and after she took a wrong turning and stampeded a herd that was being milked in a barnyard, I could not keep my mind off the road. Once I looked at the girl, and there were tears running down her nose and dropping into her lap. I gave her my smelling salts, which I always carry in Tish's machine, and after a while she reached over and slid her hand into mine.

"I shouldn't care if the car went to pieces," she said. "I'd be happier dead."

"If you are always as unpleasant to that young man as you were this evening, I doubt it," I snapped.

"Didn't you ever quarrel with your husband before you were married?" she demanded, looking at me sideways.

"I thank Heaven I never had a husband," I replied, and with that she looked uncomfortable and drew her hand away.

"Is your—friend married?" she inquired. And it took me a moment to realize that she meant Aggie and that the minx was jealous. Aggie is fifty, and so thin that when she wears a tailor-made suit she has to build out with pneumatics. You remember, at the Woman's Suffrage Convention, how Mrs. Bailey pinned a badge to Aggie, and how there was a slow hissing immediately, and Aggie caved in before our very eyes?

Mr. Lewis checked our wild career after a few miles by getting ahead of us, and we got into town about eight. But after we had left the girl at her house—an imposing place, with a man at the door and a limousine at the curb —it was too late to go back home. Aggie and the blue car were waiting down the street, and they piloted us to the hotel.

Now, Tish belongs to the Ladies' Relief Corps of the G. A. R., and when Mr. Lewis said we looked tired and that he was going to order supper for us all, and three Martinis, Tish said it was all right, although she didn't see why we needed guns. It looked like a safe place. But they were not guns—that's part of the story.

While we were washing for supper Aggie told us what the quarrel was about.

"They are—were— engaged," she said, "and the girl's father is Robertson—the boss of the city, Mr. Lewis called him. And Mr. Lewis is the youngest councilman—they call him 'Baby' Lewis, and he hates it—and there's something to be voted for to-morrow; and if Mr. Lewis is for it he is to get the girl."

"And the girl refuses to be sold!" Tish said triumphantly. "Quite right, too. I admire her strength. That's the typical womanly attitude these days—right before anything, honor above all." Tish waved the hairbrush and then she turned on the maid. "Girl," she snapped, "why is this brush chained?"

"The ladies steal them," said the girl. Tish stared at the chain.

"You are so quick, Letitia," Aggie protested. "It was the other way round. The girl was angry because he wouldn't sell his vote, even for her."

Tish sat down in a chair, speechless; but just then Mr. Lewis came to the door and said that supper and the Martinis were ready. The Martinis proved to be something to drink, and after Mr. Lewis had raised his hand and sworn there was no whisky in them we drank them. He said they were appetizers, and the other day Tish said she was going to write to the Sherman House for the recipe before she has the minister to dinner next week.

Never did I eat so delightful a meal. Tish forgot her sprained shoulder and the splinter under her nail, and Aggie talked about the roofer. And the food! I recall distinctly shaking hands with Tish and agreeing to come to the hotel to live, and asking the waiter to find out from the cook how something or other was made. And when Aggie had buried the roofer, and Tish said it was funny, but Mr. Lewis had four brown eyes instead of two, he suggested that we must be tired, and a boy took us to our room. Room, not rooms. We could only get one. The last things I remember are our shaking hands with Mr. Lewis, and that Tish tried to get into the elevator before the door was opened.

About eleven o'clock I heard some one groaning and I sat up in bed. It was Aggie, whom, being the thinnest, we had put on the cot. She said her nose was smarting from the sunburn and she had heartburn something awful. We rang for some baking soda, and she drank some in water and made a plaster for her nose with the rest. After a while she felt better, but we were all wide awake and the heat was terrible. We could look out the window and see there was a breeze, but not a breath came in.

We sent for the bell-boy again, and he said there wasn't another room and nobody he could move around to give us a room on the breezy side of the house.

We took the rules and regulations card off the door and fanned with it, but it did not help much. After half an hour or so Tish got up, pushed the washstand in front of a door that connected with the next room and crawled up on it.

"If I had a chair," she said, measuring the distance with her eye, "I could see if that corner room next door is occupied. I could tell by that boy's face that he was lying."

Aggie was trying to hold down the baking soda, so, although I didn't feel any too well myself, I held the chair and Tish climbed up on it.

"What did I tell you?" she demanded when she got down. "That room's empty, and what's more there's nobody belonging there. There's nothing on the dresser but the towel; and there's a breeze coming in that sends the curtains straight into the room."

The connecting door was locked, and Tish put a bed sheet around her and tried the hall door. That was locked, too. And all the time we were getting hotter and hotter, and by putting our ears to the keyhole we could hear the breeze blowing on the other side. It was too much for Tish.

I'm going over the transom," she announced, after we had tried the dresser key in the door without any effect And go over she did, after putting on her stockings to keep her legs from being scraped.

It was much cooler. We brought in our clothes and Aggie's cot, and spread up the bed in the room we had left. Then we locked the connecting door again, and after Aggie had had some more baking soda, in and out, we went to bed.

Well, as I was saying, I went to sleep. I was awakened by Tish sitting up in bed and clutching me somewhere about the diaphragm., By the light from the hall over the transom I could see Aggie sound asleep, with her mouth opened, and Tish's arm stretched out and pointed at the yellow hotel bureau. I sat straight up and looked. I couldn't see anything, and at first I thought Tish was dreaming. Then I saw it too. The front of that bureau on the left side moved out a good six inches, stayed that way while I could count ten, and then closed up again without a sound.

Tish had put a leg out of bed, but she jerked it in again, and just at that awful moment a clock outside boomed twelve. And then, over in her corner, Aggie began to talk in her sleep.

"Turn around and run over it again," she said, with startling distinctness. "It isn't quite dead."

Tish put her hand up and held her shaking lower jaw.

"I—it's those dr-dratted Martinis," she quavered. "I've—no—d-doubt Mr. Lewis meant well, Lizzie, but I've b-been feeling very strange all evening."

"Your stomach being upset needn't affect my eyes," I retorted in a whisper. "I saw it move."

"Are you sure?" she insisted. "I didn't say anything, Lizzie, but while we were eating supper down-stairs I distinctly saw the piano move out six feet from the wall and go back again."

I didn't say anything to Tish, but the fact was that I distrusted my own vision—not that I had seen anything so ridiculous as pianos walking, but I had had a peculiar feeling in the dining-room that my eyes were looking in different directions, and when I focused them on anything I saw double at once. It had got so bad that when I wanted my fork I had to shut my eyes and feel for it. And so, neither of us being certain the bureau had moved, and nothing more occurring, we lay back again. The next minute Tish clutched me and I looked over. Something had happened to the bureau.

It looked phosphorescent, or as though it was on fire inside. There was a glow all around it. The keyholes stood out like dots of flame, and every crack gleamed. It was the most awful thing I have ever seen.

"Look!" gasped Tish, and, reaching over the side of the bed, she picked up a shoe and flung it with all her might at the thing. The thump was followed by a thud inside the bureau. Aggie stirred.

"The milkman's knocking," she said thickly, and sat up and yawned with her eyes shut. Tish and I leaped out of bed and I turned on the light. That gave us new courage, and the dresser stood there, just like any other dresser, with a towel on its yellow-pine top and fly-specks on the mirror. Tish and I looked at each other and smiled in a sickly way. We felt foolish. But Tish wasn't satisfied. She picked up a hair-brush and banged it on the top.

"Coming, Mr. Gibbs," bawled Aggie, still with her eyes shut, and she began to fumble around on the floor for her slippers.

"Wake her!" Tish commanded. "There's something moving in this thing. Lizzie, give me that pitcher of scalding water."

Of course there wasn't any hot water nearer than the bath-room, which was three turns to the right, one to the left and down a flight of stairs.

And at that minute the bureau spoke.

"Don't, for God's sake, ladies!" it said