Читать книгу Haunted Lady - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 6

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The radio went on until after midnight. Then it ceased abruptly, leaving a beating silence behind it, and in that silence Hilda suddenly heard stealthy footsteps on the stairs. She stiffened. But the figure which eventually came into view was tragic rather than alarming.

It was a woman in a black dinner dress, and she seemed shocked to see Hilda. She stood on the landing, staring.

“Has anything happened to Mother?” she half whispered.

Hilda knew her then. It was Marian Garrison, Janice’s mother, but changed beyond belief. She was painfully thin and her careful make-up only accentuated the haggard lines of her face. But she still had beauty, of a sort. The fine lines of her face, the dark eyes—so like Jan’s—had not altered. Given happiness, Hilda thought, she would be lovely.

She stood still, fingering the heavy rope of pearls around her neck, and Hilda saw that she was carrying her slippers in the other hand.

“It isn’t—she hasn’t had another—”

She seemed unable to go on, and Hilda shook her head. She picked up a pad from the table and wrote on it: Only nervous. She caught a bat in her room tonight.

Marian read it. Under the rouge her face lost what color it had had.

“Then it’s true!” she said, still whispering. “I can’t believe it.”

“It’s in that box.”

Marian shivered.

“I never believed it,” she said. “I thought she imagined it. Where on earth do they come from?” Then she apparently recognized the strangeness of Hilda in her uniform, settled outside her mother’s door. “I suppose the shock—she’s not really sick, is she?”

Hilda smiled.

“No. The doctor thought she needed someone for a night or two. Naturally she’s nervous.”

“I suppose she would be,” said Marian vaguely, and after a momentary hesitation went into her own room and closed the door behind her. Hilda watched her go. She was trusting no one in the house that night, or any night. But she felt uncomfortable. So that was what divorce did to some women! Sent them home to arbitrary old mothers, made them slip in and out of their houses, lost them their looks and their health and their zest for living. She thought of Frank Garrison with his faded little blond second wife. He had not looked happy, either. And the girl Janice, torn among them all, the old woman, Marian, and her father.

The bat was moving around in the box, making small scraping noises. She cut another hole for air, and tried to look inside. But all she could see was a black mass, now inert, and she put down the box again.

She had a curious feeling that the old lady was still awake. There was no transom over the door, but she seemed still to be moving around. Once a closet door apparently creaked. Then the radio came on again, and Hilda, who abominated radio in all its forms, wondered if she was to endure it all night. She was still wondering when the door to Marian’s room opened, and Marian came into the hall.

“Can’t you stop it?” she asked feverishly. “It’s driving me crazy.”

“The door’s locked.”

“Well, bang on it. Do something.”

“Does she always do it?”

“Not always. For the past month or two. Sometimes she goes to sleep and it goes on all night. It’s sickening.”

She had not bothered to put on a dressing-gown. She stood shivering in the June night, her silk nightgown outlining her thin body, with its small high breasts, and her eyes desperate.

“Sometimes I wonder if she really is—”

What she wondered was lost. From the bedroom came a thin high shriek. It dominated the radio, and was succeeded by another even louder one. Marian, panic-stricken, flung herself against the door and hammered on it.

“Mother,” she called, “let me in. What is it? What’s wrong?”

Abruptly the radio ceased, and Mrs. Fairbanks’s thin old voice could be heard.

“There’s a rat in here,” she quavered.

Out of sheer relief Marian leaned against the door.

“A rat won’t hurt you,” she said. “Let me in. Unlock the door, Mother.”

But Mrs. Fairbanks did not want to unlock the door. She did not want to get out of her bed. After she had finally turned the key she scurried back to it, and sitting upright in it surveyed them both with hard, triumphant eyes.

“He’s under the bureau,” she said. “I saw him. Perhaps now you’ll believe me.”

“Don’t get excited, Mother,” Marian said. “It’s bad for you. If it’s here we’ll get William to kill it.”

Mrs. Fairbanks regarded her daughter coldly.

“Maybe you know it’s here,” she said.

“That’s idiotic, Mother. I hate the things. How could I know?”

Hilda’s bland eyes watched them both, the suspicion in the old lady’s face, the hurt astonishment in the daughter’s. It was Marian who recovered first. She stood by the bed, looking down at her mother.

“I’ll get William to kill it,” she said. “Where were you, Mother, when you saw it?”

“I was in bed. Where would I be?”

“With all the lights on?”

There was a quick exchange of looks between the two, both suspicious and wary. Hilda was puzzled.

“Don’t stand there like a fool,” said Mrs. Fairbanks. “Get William and tell him to bring a poker.”

Marian went out, closing the door behind her, and Hilda, getting down on her knees not too happily, reported that the rat was still under the bureau, and apparently also not too happy about it. She got up and beat a hasty retreat to the door, from which she inspected the room.

It was much as she had left it, except that the old lady’s clothes were neatly laid on a chair. The windows were all closed, however, and the bed was hardly disturbed. It looked indeed as though she had just got into it. There was another difference, too. A card table with a padded cover had been set up in front of the empty fireplace, and on it lay a pack of cards.

The old lady was watching her.

“I lied to Marian,” she said cheerfully. “I hadn’t gone to bed. I was playing solitaire.”

“Why shouldn’t you play solitaire? Especially if you can’t sleep.”

“And have the doctor give me stuff to make me sleep? I need my wits, Miss Adams. Nobody is going to dope me in this house, especially at night.”

The rest of the night was quiet. William, an elderly man in a worn bathrobe with “old family servant” written all over him, finally cornered the rat, dispatched it, and carried it out in a dustpan. Marian went back to her room and closed and locked the door. Janice had slept through it all, and Hilda, after an hour on her knees, discovered no holes in the floor or baseboard and finally gave up, to see Mrs. Fairbanks’s eyes on her, filled with suspicion.

“Who sent you here?” she said abruptly. “How do I know you’re not in with them?”

Hilda stiffened.

“You know exactly why I’m here, Mrs. Fairbanks. Inspector Fuller—”

“Does he know you?”

“Very well. I have worked for him before. But I can’t help you if you keep me locked out. You will have to trust me better than that.”

To her dismay the old lady began to whimper, the tearless crying of age. Her face was twisted, her chin quivered.

“I can’t trust anybody,” she said brokenly. “Not even my own children. Not even Carlton. My own son. My own boy.”

Hilda felt a wave of pity for her.

“But he’s not here tonight,” she said. “He couldn’t have done it. Don’t you see that?”

The whimpering ceased. Mrs. Fairbanks looked up at her.

“Then it was Marian,” she said. “She blames me for bringing that woman Frank married into the house. She was crazy about Frank. She still is. When that woman got him she nearly lost her mind.”

“She couldn’t possibly have done it,” Hilda told her sharply. “Try to be reasonable, Mrs. Fairbanks. Even if she had come into this room she couldn’t have brought it with her. People don’t carry rats around in their pockets. Or bats, either.”

It was over an hour before she could leave her. She utilized it to make a more careful examination of the room. The bathroom, which was tiled, did not connect with Marian’s room, and its screen was, like the others, screwed into place. The closets revealed nothing except the safe and the rows of clothing old women collect. Hanging on the door of the one where the safe stood was a shoe bag, filled with shoes. She smiled at it, but days later she was to realize the importance of that bag; to see its place in the picture.

One thing was certain. No rat or bat could have entered the room by any normal means. The old-fashioned floor register was closed. Not entirely. There were, she saw with the aid of a match, small spaces where the iron blades beneath did not entirely meet. The grating over them, however, was tightly screwed to the floor and its openings less than a square inch in size.

Mrs. Fairbanks lay in her bed, watching her every move. She had taken out her teeth, and now she yawned, showing her pale gums.

“Now you know what I’m talking about,” she said. “Put out the light, and maybe you’d better leave the door unlocked. But don’t you go away. I wake up now and then, and if I find you’re not there—”

Outside in the hall Hilda’s face was no longer bland. Inspector Fuller would have called it her fighting face. She waited until she heard her patient snoring. Then she tiptoed back to her room, and from what she called her emergency case she removed several things—a spool of thread, a pair of rubber gloves, and a card of thumbtacks. These she carried forward and, after a look to see that all was quiet, went to work. Near the floor she set two of the tacks, one in the doorframe and one in the door itself. She tied a piece of the black thread from one to the other and, cutting off the ends with her surgical scissors, stood up and surveyed her work. Against the dark woodwork it was invisible.

After that she put the screen around her chair so as to shield it, picked up the flashlight, the gloves, and a newspaper Janice had left for her, and very deliberately went down the stairs.

The lower floor was dark. She stopped and listened in the hall. Somewhere a clock was ticking loudly. Otherwise everything was quiet, and she made her way back to the kitchen premises without having to use her light. Here, however, she turned it on. She was in a long old-fashioned pantry, the floor covered with worn linoleum, the shelves filled with china and glassware. A glance told her that what she was looking for was not there, and she went on to the kitchen.

It was a huge bleak room, long unpainted. On one side was a coal range, long enough to feed a hotel. There was a fire going, but it had been carefully banked. Nevertheless, she took off the lids, one by one. There was nothing there, and she gave a sigh of relief. After that she inspected a small garbage can under the sink, without result.

It was in the yard outside the kitchen porch that she finally found what she was looking for. It lay on top of a barrel of ashes, and she drew on her gloves before she touched it. When she went upstairs again it was to place and lock in her suitcase the neatly wrapped body of a dead rat.

Then, having found that the door had not been opened, she calmly moved her chair against it and picking up the Practice of Nursing opened it at random. The physician, the nurse, and others should report what they see, hear, smell, or feel, rather than what they deduce. She read on, feeling pleasantly somnolent.