Mary Roberts Rinehart & Avery Hopwood (15 page)

The detective pounced eagerly upon her admission.

"Why did you want blue-prints?" he thundered.

"Because," Dale took a long breath, "I believe old Mr. Fleming took the
money himself from the Union Bank and hid it here."

"Where did you get that idea?"

Dale's jaw set. "I won't tell you."

"What had the blue-prints to do with it?"

She could think of no plausible explanation but the true one.

"Because I'd heard there was a Hidden Room in this house."

The detective leaned forward intently. "Did you locate that room?"

Dale hesitated. "No."

"Then why did you burn the blue-prints?"

Dale's nerve was crumbling—breaking—under the repeated, monotonous
impact of his questions.

"He burned them!" she cried wildly. "I don't know why!"

The detective paused an instant, then returned to a previous query.

"Then you didn't locate this Hidden Room?"

Dale's lips formed a pale "No."

"Did he?" went on Anderson inexorably.

Dale stared at him, dully—the breaking point had come. Another
question—another—and she would no longer be able to control herself.
She would sob out the truth hysterically—that Brooks, the gardener,
was Jack Bailey, the missing cashier—that the scrap of blue-print
hidden in the bosom of her dress might unravel the secret of the Hidden
Room—that—

But just as she felt herself, sucked of strength, beginning to slide
toward a black, tingling pit of merciful oblivion, Miss Cornelia
provided a diversion.

"What's that?" she said in a startled voice.

The detective turned away from his quarry for an instant.

"What's what?"

"I heard something," averred Miss Cornelia, staring toward the French
windows.

All eyes followed the direction of her stare. There was an instant of
silence.

Then, suddenly, traveling swiftly from right to left across the shades
of the French windows, there appeared a glowing circle of brilliant
white light. Inside the circle was a black, distorted shadow—a shadow
like the shadow of a gigantic black Bat! It was there—then a second
later, it was gone!

"Oh, my God!" wailed Lizzie from her corner. "It's the Bat—that's his
sign!"

Jack Bailey made a dash for the terrace door. But Miss Cornelia halted
him peremptorily.

"Wait, Brooks!" She turned to the detective. "Mr. Anderson, you are
familiar with the sign of the Bat. Did that look like it?"

The detective seemed both puzzled and disturbed. "Well, it looked like
the shadow of a bat. I'll say that for it," he said finally.

On the heels of his words the front door bell began to ring. All
turned in the direction of the hall.

"I'll answer that!" said Jack Bailey eagerly.

Miss Cornelia gave him the key to the front door.

"Don't admit anyone till you know who it is," she said. Bailey nodded
and disappeared into the hall. The others waited tensely. Miss
Cornelia's hand crept toward the revolver lying on the table where
Anderson had put it down.

There was the click of an opening door, the noise of a little
scuffle—then men's voices raised in an angry dispute. "What do I know
about a flashlight?" cried an irritated voice. "I haven't got a
pocket-flash—take your hands off me!" Bailey's voice answered the
other voice, grim, threatening. The scuffle resumed.

Then Doctor Wells burst suddenly into the room, closely followed by
Bailey. The Doctor's tie was askew—he looked ruffled and enraged.
Bailey followed him vigilantly, seeming not quite sure whether to allow
him to enter or not.

"My dear Miss Van Gorder," began the Doctor in tones of high dudgeon,
"won't you instruct your servants that even if I do make a late call, I
am not to be received with violence?"

"I asked you if you had a pocket-flash about you!" answered Bailey
indignantly. "If you call a question like that violence—" He seemed
about to restrain the Doctor by physical force.

Miss Cornelia quelled the teapot-tempest.

"It's all right, Brooks," she said, taking the front door key from his
hand and putting it back on the table. She turned to Doctor Wells.

"You see, Doctor Wells," she explained, "just a moment before you rang
the doorbell a circle of white light was thrown on those window shades."

The Doctor laughed with a certain relief.

"Why, that was probably the searchlight from my car!" he said. "I
noticed as I drove up that it fell directly on that window."

His explanation seemed to satisfy all present but Lizzie. She regarded
him with a deep suspicion. "'He may be a lawyer, a merchant, a
Doctor...'" she chanted ominously to herself.

Miss Cornelia, too, was not entirely at ease.

"In the center of this ring of light," she proceeded, her eyes on the
Doctor's calm countenance, "was an almost perfect silhouette of a bat."

"A bat!" The Doctor seemed at sea. "Ah, I see—the symbol of the
criminal of that name." He laughed again.

"I think I can explain what you saw. Quite often my headlights collect
insects at night and a large moth, spread on the glass, would give
precisely the effect you speak of. Just to satisfy you, I'll go out
and take a look."

He turned to do so. Then he caught sight of the raincoat-covered
huddle on the floor.

"Why—" he said in a voice that mingled astonishment with horror. He
paused. His glance slowly traversed the circle of silent faces.

"We have had a very sad occurrence here, Doctor," said Miss Cornelia
gently.

The Doctor braced himself.

"Who?"

"Richard Fleming."

"Richard Fleming?" gasped the Doctor in tones of incredulous horror.

"Shot and killed from that staircase," said Miss Cornelia tonelessly.

The detective demurred.

"Shot and killed, anyhow," he said in accents of significant omission.

The Doctor knelt beside the huddle on the floor. He removed the fold
of the raincoat that covered the face of the corpse and stared at the
dead, blank mask. Till a moment ago, even at the height of his
irritation with Bailey, he had been blithe and offhand—a man who
seemed comparatively young for his years. Now Age seemed to fall upon
him, suddenly, like a gray, clinging dust—he looked stricken and
feeble under the impact of this unexpected shock.

"Shot and killed from that stairway," he repeated dully. He rose from
his knees and glanced at the fatal stairs.

"What was Richard Fleming doing in this house at this hour?" he said.

He spoke to Miss Cornelia but Anderson answered the question.

"That's what I'm trying to find out," he said with a saturnine smile.

The Doctor gave him a look of astonished inquiry. Miss Cornelia
remembered her manners.

"Doctor, this is Mr. Anderson."

"Headquarters," said Anderson tersely, shaking hands.

It was Lizzie's turn to play her part in the tangled game of mutual
suspicion that by now made each member of the party at Cedarcrest watch
every other member with nervous distrust. She crossed to her mistress
on tiptoe.

"Don't you let him fool you with any of that moth business!" she said
in a thrilling whisper, jerking her thumb in the direction of the
Doctor. "He's the Bat."

Ordinarily Miss Cornelia would have dismissed her words with a smile.
But by now her brain felt as if it had begun to revolve like a pinwheel
in her efforts to fathom the uncanny mystery of the various events of
the night.

She addressed Doctor Wells.

"I didn't tell you, Doctor—I sent for a detective this afternoon."
Then, with mounting suspicion, "You happened in very opportunely!"

"After I left the Johnsons' I felt very uneasy," he explained. "I
determined to make one more effort to get you away from this house. As
this shows—my fears were justified!"

He shook his head sadly. Miss Cornelia sat down. His last words had
given her food for thought. She wanted to mull them over for a moment.

The Doctor removed muffler and topcoat—stuffed the former in his
topcoat pocket and threw the latter on the settee. He took out his
handkerchief and began to mop his face, as if to wipe away some strain
of mental excitement under which he was laboring. His breath came
quickly—the muscles of his jaw stood out.

"Died instantly, I suppose?" he said, looking over at the body. "Didn't
have time to say anything?"

"Ask the young lady," said Anderson, with a jerk of his head. "She was
here when it happened."

The Doctor gave Dale a feverish glance of inquiry.

"He just fell over," said the latter pitifully. Her answer seemed to
relieve the Doctor of some unseen weight on his mind. He drew a long
breath and turned back toward Fleming's body with comparative calm.

"Poor Dick has proved my case for me better than I expected," he said,
regarding the still, unbreathing heap beneath the raincoat. He swerved
toward the detective.

"Mr. Anderson," he said with dignified pleading, "I ask you to use your
influence, to see that these two ladies find some safer spot than this
for the night."

Lizzie bounced up from her chair, instanter.

"Two?" she wailed. "If you know any safe spot, lead me to it!"

The Doctor overlooked her sudden eruption into the scene. He wandered
back again toward the huddle under the raincoat, as if still unable to
believe that it was—or rather had been—Richard Fleming.

Miss Cornelia spoke suddenly in a low voice, without moving a muscle of
her body.

"I have a strange feeling that I'm being watched by unfriendly eyes,"
she said.

Lizzie clutched at her across the table.

"I wish the lights would go out again!" she pattered. "No, I don't
neither!" as Miss Cornelia gave the clutching hand a nervous little
slap.

During the little interlude of comedy, Billy, the Japanese, unwatched
by the others, had stolen to the French windows, pulled aside a blind,
looked out. When he turned back to the room his face had lost a
portion of its Oriental calm—there was suspicion in his eyes. Softly,
under cover of pretending to arrange the tray of food that lay
untouched on the table, he possessed himself of the key to the front
door, unperceived by the rest, and slipped out of the room like a ghost.

Meanwhile the detective confronted Doctor Wells.

"You say, Doctor, that you came back to take these women away from the
house. Why?"

The Doctor gave him a dignified stare.

"Miss Van Gorder has already explained."

Miss Cornelia elucidated. "Mr. Anderson has already formed a theory of
the crime," she said with a trace of sarcasm in her tones.

The detective turned on her quickly. "I haven't said that." He
started.

It had come again—tinkling—persistent.—the phone call from
nowhere—the ringing of the bell of the house telephone!

"The house telephone—again!" breathed Dale. Miss Cornelia made a
movement to answer the tinkling, inexplicable bell. But Anderson was
before her.

"I'll answer that!" he barked. He sprang to the phone.

"Hello—hello—"

All eyes were bent on him nervously—the Doctor's face, in particular,
seemed a very study in fear and amazement. He clutched the back of a
chair to support himself, his hand was the trembling hand of a sick,
old man.

"Hello—hello—" Anderson swore impatiently. He hung up the phone.

"There's nobody there!"

Again, a chill breath from another world than ours seemed to brush
across the faces of the little group in the living-room. Dale,
sensitive, impressionable, felt a cold, uncanny prickling at the roots
of her hair.

A light came into Anderson's eyes. "Where's that Jap?" he almost
shouted.

"He just went out," said Miss Cornelia. The cold fear, the fear of the
unearthly, subsided from around Dale's heart, leaving her shaken but
more at peace.

The detective turned swiftly to the Doctor, as if to put his case
before the eyes of an unprejudiced witness.

"That Jap rang the phone," he said decisively. "Miss Van Gorder
believes that this murder is the culmination of the series of
mysterious happenings that caused her to send for me. I do not."

"Then what is the significance of the anonymous letters?" broke in Miss
Cornelia heatedly. "Of the man Lizzie saw going up the stairs, of the
attempt to break into this house—of the ringing of that telephone
bell?"

Anderson replied with one deliberate word.

"Terrorization," he said.

The Doctor moistened his dry lips in an effort to speak.

"By whom?" he asked.

Anderson's voice was an icicle.

"I imagine by Miss Van Gorder's servants. By that woman there—" he
pointed at Lizzie, who rose indignantly to deny the charge. But he
gave her no time for denial. He rushed on, "—who probably writes the
letters," he continued. "By the gardener—" his pointing finger found
Bailey "—who may have been the man Lizzie saw slipping up the stairs.
By the Jap, who goes out and rings the telephone," he concluded
triumphantly.

Miss Cornelia seemed unimpressed by his fervor.

"With what object?" she queried smoothly.

"That's what I'm going to find out!" There was determination in
Anderson's reply.

Miss Cornelia sniffed. "Absurd! The butler was in this room when the
telephone rang for the first time."

The thrust pierced Anderson's armor. For once he seemed at a loss.
Here was something he had omitted from his calculations. But he did
not give up. He was about to retort when—crash! thud!—the noise of
a violent struggle in the hall outside drew all eyes to the hall door.

An instant later the door slammed open and a disheveled young man in
evening clothes was catapulted into the living-room as if slung there
by a giant's arm. He tripped and fell to the floor in the center of
the room. Billy stood in the doorway behind him, inscrutable, arms
folded, on his face an expression of mild satisfaction as if he were
demurely pleased with a neat piece of housework, neatly carried out.