She was on her feet, her arms were raised, her face impassioned with feeling. Violet, gazing at her, heaved a little sigh. It was perhaps in keeping with the situation, perhaps extraneous to it, but whatever its source, it marked a change in her manner. With no further check upon her sympathy, she said very softly:
“It is well with the child.”
The mother stiffened, swayed, and then burst into wild weeping.
“But not with me,” she cried, “not with me. I am desolate and bereft. I have not even a home in which to hide my grief and no prospect of one.”
“But,” interposed Violet, “surely your husband left you something? You cannot be quite penniless?”
“My husband left nothing,” was the answer, uttered without bitterness, but with all the hardness of fact. “He had debts. I shall pay those debts. When these and other necessary expenses are liquidated, there will be but little left. He made no secret of the fact that he lived close up to his means. That is why he was induced to take on a life insurance. Not a friend of his but knows his improvidence. I—I have not even jewels. I have only my determination and an absolute conviction as to the real nature of my husband’s death.”
“What is the name of the man you secretly believe to have shot your husband from the trellis?”
Mrs. Hammond told her.
It was a new one to Violet. She said so and then asked:
“What else can you tell me about him?”
“Nothing, but that he is a very dark man and has a club-foot.”
“Oh, what a mistake you’ve made.”
“Mistake? Yes, I acknowledge that.”
“I mean in not giving this last bit of information at once to the police. A man can be identified by such a defect. Even his footsteps can be traced. He might have been found that very day. Now, what have we to go upon?”
“You are right, but not expecting to have any difficulty about the insurance money I thought it would be generous in me to keep still. Besides, this is only surmise on my part. I feel certain that my husband was shot by another hand than his own, but I know of no way of proving it. Do you?”
Then Violet talked seriously with her, explaining how their only hope lay in the discovery of a second bullet in the room which had already been ransacked for this very purpose and without the shadow of a result.
A tea, a musicale, and an evening dance kept Violet Strange in a whirl for the remainder of the day. No brighter eye nor more contagious wit lent brilliance to these occasions, but with the passing of the midnight hour no one who had seen her in the blaze of electric lights would have recognized this favoured child of fortune in the earnest figure sitting in the obscurity of an up-town apartment, studying the walls, the ceilings, and the floors by the dim light of a lowered gas-jet. Violet Strange in society was a very different person from Violet Strange under the tension of her secret and peculiar work.
She had told them at home that she was going to spend the night with a friend; but only her old coachman knew who that friend was. Therefore a very natural sense of guilt mingled with her emotions at finding herself alone on a scene whose gruesome mystery she could solve only by identifying herself with the place and the man who had perished there.
Dismissing from her mind all thought of self, she strove to think as he thought, and act as he acted on the night when he found himself (a man of but little courage) left in this room with an ailing child.
At odds with himself, his wife, and possibly with the child screaming away in its crib, what would he be apt to do in his present emergency? Nothing at first, but as the screaming continued he would remember the old tales of fathers walking the floor at night with crying babies, and hasten to follow suit. Violet, in her anxiety to reach his inmost thought, crossed to where the crib had stood, and, taking that as a start, began pacing the room in search of the spot from which a bullet, if shot, would glance aside from the mirror in the direction of the window. (Not that she was ready to accept this theory of Mrs. Hammond, but that she did not wish to entirely dismiss it without putting it to the test.)
She found it in an unexpected quarter of the room and much nearer the bed-head than where his body was found. This, which might seem to confuse matters, served, on the contrary to remove from the case one of its most serious difficulties. Standing here, he was within reach of the pillow under which his pistol lay hidden, and if startled, as his wife believed him to have been by a noise at the other end of the room, had but to crouch and reach behind him in order to find himself armed and ready for a possible intruder.
Imitating his action in this as in other things, she had herself crouched low at the bedside and was on the point of withdrawing her hand from under the pillow, when a new surprise checked her movement and held her fixed in her position, with eyes staring straight at the adjoining wall. She had seen there what he must have seen in making this same turn—the dark bars of the opposite window-frame outlined in the mirror—and understood at once what had happened. In the nervousness and terror of the moment, George Hammond had mistaken this reflection of the window for the window itself, and shot impulsively at the man he undoubtedly saw covering him from the trellis without. But while this explained the shattering of the mirror, how about the other and still more vital question, of where the bullet went afterward? Was the angle at which it had been fired acute enough to send it out of a window diagonally opposed? No; even if the pistol had been held closer to the man firing it than she had reason to believe, the angle still would be oblique enough to carry it on to the further wall.
But no sign of any such impact had been discovered on this wall. Consequently, the force of the bullet had been expended before reaching it, and when it fell—
Here, her glance, slowly traveling along the floor, impetuously paused. It had reached the spot where the two bodies had been found, and unconsciously her eyes rested there, conjuring up the picture of the bleeding father and the strangled child. How piteous and how dreadful it all was. If she could only understand—Suddenly she rose straight up, staring and immovable in the dim light. Had the idea—the explanation—the only possible explanation covering the whole phenomena come to her at last?
It would seem so, for as she so stood, a look of conviction settled over her features, and with this look, evidences of a horror which for all her fast accumulating knowledge of life and its possibilities made her appear very small and very helpless.
A half-hour later, when Mrs. Hammond, in her anxiety at hearing nothing more from Miss Strange, opened the door of her room, it was to find, lying on the edge of the sill, the little detective’s card with these words hastily written across it:
I do not feel as well as I could wish, and so have telephoned to my own coachman to come and take me home. I will either see or write you within a few days. But do not allow yourself to hope. I pray you do not allow yourself the least hope; the outcome is still very problematical.
When Violet’s employer entered his office the next morning it was to find a veiled figure awaiting him which he at once recognized as that of his little deputy. She was slow in lifting her veil and when it finally came free he felt a momentary doubt as to his wisdom in giving her just such a matter as this to investigate. He was quite sure of his mistake when he saw her face, it was so drawn and pitiful.
“You have failed,” said he.
“Of that you must judge,” she answered; and drawing near she whispered in his ear.
“No!” he cried in his amazement.
“Think,” she murmured, “think. Only so can all the facts be accounted for.”
“I will look into it; I will certainly look into it,” was his earnest reply. “If you are right—But never mind that. Go home and take a horseback ride in the Park. When I have news in regard to this I will let you know. Till then forget it all. Hear me, I charge you to forget everything but your balls and your parties.”
And Violet obeyed him.
Some few days after this, the following statement appeared in al
l the papers:
Owing to some remarkable work done by the firm of—&—, the well-known private detective agency, the claim made by Mrs. George Hammond against the Shuler Life Insurance Company is likely to be allowed without further litigation. As our readers will remember, the contestant has insisted from the first that the bullet causing her husband’s death came from another pistol than the one found clutched in his own hand. But while reasons were not lacking to substantiate this assertion, the failure to discover more than the disputed track of a second bullet led to a verdict of suicide, and a refusal of the company to pay.
But now that bullet has been found. And where? In the most startling place in the world, viz.: in the larynx of the child found lying dead upon the floor beside his father, strangled as was supposed by the weight of that father’s arm. The theory is, and there seems to be none other, that the father, hearing a suspicious noise at the window, set down the child he was endeavouring to soothe and made for the bed and his own pistol, and, mistaking a reflection of the assassin for the assassin himself, sent his shot sidewise at a mirror just as the other let go the trigger which drove a similar bullet into his breast. The course of the one was straight and fatal and that of the other deflected. Striking the mirror at an oblique angle, the bullet fell to the floor where it was picked up by the crawling child, and, as was most natural, thrust at once into his mouth. Perhaps it felt hot to the little tongue; perhaps the child was simply frightened by some convulsive movement of the father who evidently spent his last moment in an endeavour to reach the child, but, whatever the cause, in the quick gasp it gave, the bullet was drawn into the larynx, strangling him.
That the father’s arm, in his last struggle, should have fallen directly across the little throat is one of those anomalies which confounds reason and misleads justice by stopping investigation at the very point where truth lies and mystery disappears.
Mrs. Hammond is to be congratulated that there are detectives who do not give too much credence to outward appearances.
We expect soon to hear of the capture of the man who sped home the death-dealing bullet.
The Papered Door
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Mary Roberts (1876–1958), who added the surname Rinehart after her marriage to Dr. Stanley Rinehart in 1896, had trained as a nurse but turned to writing in 1903 when she and her husband fell into debt. She rapidly blossomed as a writer of crime and mystery stories—her best known being The Circular Staircase (1908). She used her nursing background to create an unusual detective in the shape of Nurse Hilda Adams, whom the police find useful in helping them with more complicated crimes, collected in Miss Pinkerton (1932). Rinehart has been dubbed, rather disparagingly in my view, as the founder of the “Had-I-But-Known” school of writing, which became the basis of so many later suspense novels, but that fails to recognise the depth and breadth of her talent. Some of her work can be classified as the cosy mystery, which became a standard of British crime fiction in the 1920s. But she wrote much else besides. There is a surprising degree of violence in some novels, including The After House (1914), and although Rinehart always claimed she avoided realism, it is present in such books as The Case of Jennie Brice (1913) and especially in the following short story.
I first read this story in Rinehart’s collection The Romantics, published in 1929, but when I checked out the original version published in Collier’s in 1914 I was surprised to find how heavily it had been revised for book publication. Rinehart had almost rewritten the story, including a totally different ending. Both have their merits but on balance I felt the original was the more striking, and reprint that here for the first time in over a century. I think you will find it a powerful conclusion to this anthology dedicated to showing that there was much variety and originality in the years before the Golden Age.
THE small house was drafty. Air currents moved the curtains at the windows and billowed the cheap rug on the floor. The baby had had the croup; it had given her an excuse for being up, for the roaring kitchen fire, and lights.
Early in the evening she had sent over to the doctor’s for medicine. The drug store was closed, and a curious crowd had gathered in front of it. The doctor dispensed his own prescriptions and had sent back with the bottle a kindly note:
“Dear Molly: if we can do anything, let us know. Would you like Ann to spend the night with you?”
Her eight-year-old girl had trotted back with a message that she thought she could manage nicely. The thought of Ann’s prying eyes made her shudder.
Then the quiet night had settled down on them. Some time after eleven, moving about the room, she had glanced out of the window and had seen glowing in the darkness a lighted cigar. She knew what it meant. The house was being watched.
She dropped the curtain and stood still. Queer memories came to her: the day they had moved into the house, and Jim papering the kitchen. They had lighted a great fire, like this one, to dry the paste. She would spread the paste on the paper, and Jim would take it from her. He had laughed over that job; it had seemed like play to him.
By one o’clock the baby was breathing easier. In the next room the eight-year-old girl was sound asleep, one arm thrown up over her head. Molly stood looking at them. Why were there children? They were born only to suffer. Girls, especially. But the baby would have his troubles too. Boys grew into men, and were liable to the temptations of men. Violent, horrible things happened, because they were men.
She went downstairs again. It was as though she could not stay in any one place. Except for the kitchen the house was very cold, and she picked up a shawl and threw it around her. Outside, a light snow was falling; frozen hard, it beat against the window-panes with little, sharp cracklings, like fine hard sand.
She shivered in the bleak little hall, but in the kitchen the heat was terrific. After a moment she raised the window, and the man across the street, now powdered with fine snow, saw her and came over.
“How’s the boy?” he called through the snow.
She could see him now. The lamplight streamed out into the empty street, and she recognized him. It was Tom Cooper, one of the county detectives. She knew him well, but now he was a stranger to her; a stranger and an enemy.
“He’s asleep.”
“That’s good.”
He hesitated awkwardly. For some reason he had taken off his hat and that alarmed her. He was already showing her the deference of bereavement. She drew herself up, a thin angular figure against the lamplight.
“I got some medicine from the doctor. It’s helped him.”
“Fine.” He seemed at a loss for words. “You’d better go to bed,” he said at last. “There is no use of two of us staying up. I guess he won’t come back while I am hanging around.”
“No,” she replied wearily, “he won’t come back, Mr. Cooper. That was the last word he said.”
The detective coughed, cleared his throat, spat.
“We are all mighty sorry,” he observed, using a carefully conversational tone. “These things happen now and then.”
“Yes.”
“He must have been drinking.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
The conversation languished and she made a move to lower the window. But some instinct of pity, or perhaps something even more significant, caused her to pause.
“I expect you are right cold out there.”
“Well, I am not warm,” he replied cheerfully. “I am burning up considerable fuel, but it doesn’t seem to heat much.” To show his ease he lighted a fresh stogie. The match flare showed his good-humored face drawn and strained in spite of his tone.
“You wouldn’t care to come in and warm your feet, would you?”
He hesitated. The village street was quiet. Owing to its semiisolated position, he had commanded all approaches to the house from his vantage point across the street. Once inside—But then again, the house was small and lightly built; one could hear a footfall through it. A man ought to be able to thaw out now
and then.
“I don’t know but I will for a minute or two, Mrs. Carter,” he assented, “if you’ll unlock the door.”
But it was not the kitchen door which she unlocked. He could hear her making the way to the front of the house and, when she admitted him, it was to the bare shabby parlor.
“I’d just as soon sit in the kitchen.”
But she appeared not to hear him. She knelt in front of the polished stove and put a match to the wood laid ready. He eyed her as she knelt there. She was a pretty, slender woman, still in her early thirties; a delicate sensitive type, oddly out of place among the buxom village women. She had never mixed successfully with them, he knew. They had been suspicious of her gentility, of the books on her table—she had been a schoolteacher—of her shy aloofness. After their manner they had predicted calamity as a result of that marriage and the detective, shaking himself out of his coat, knew that now it had come. Only it was not calamity: it was sheer, stark tragedy.
He would have protected her if he could. He had always felt a tenderness for her. Her shyness had drawn him. He liked aloof women. But there was no protection for her now, and perhaps he realized a certain strength in her, a fine-drawn endurance. He looked up at her as he drew his chair to the fire and warmed his half-frozen fingers.
“Just what do you know about it, Molly?”
“Very little, except that it was over that girl.”
“You say he hadn’t been drinking?”
“Not that I know of. But he’d been ugly all morning. When he started out I begged him to leave his gun with me, but he took it.”
There was a silence between them. After a moment she went out to the kitchen again, under pretense of listening for the baby, and put some more coal on the kitchen fire. She stopped long enough to look at one particular portion of the wall, and this she did stealthily, after a glance toward the front of the house. What she saw seemed to satisfy her, for she went back to the parlor again.
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