The Complete Amelia Butterworth Mystery Series

by Anna Katharine Green

  “In the round of the staircase?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Gryce did not think it worth his while to answer. Perhaps he had not time; for leaving the valet where he was, and Miss Butterworth where she was (only she would not be left, but followed him), he made his way upstairs, and paused at the place she had mentioned, with a curious look at the floor.

  “You see, it has been much trodden here,” she said; at which gentle reminder of her presence he gave a start; possibly he had not heard her behind him, and after sixty years of hard service even a detective may be excused a slight nervousness. “Now, why should it be trodden here? There is no apparent reason why any one should shuffle to and fro in this corner. The stair is wide, especially here, and there is no window—”

  Mr. Gryce, whose eye had been travelling over the wall, reached over her shoulder to one of the dozen pictures hanging at intervals from the bottom to the top of the staircase, and pulling it away from the wall, on which it hung decidedly askew, revealed a round opening through which poured a ray of blue light which could only proceed from the vault of the adjoining study.

  “No window,” he repeated. “No, but an opening into the study wall which answers the same purpose. Miss Butterworth, your eye is to be trusted every time. I only wonder you did not pull this picture aside yourself.”

  “It was not hanging crooked then. Besides I was in a hurry. I had just come from my encounter with this demented man. I had noticed the marks on the landing, and the worn edges of the carpet, on my way upstairs. I was in no condition to observe them on my way down.”

  “I see.”

  Miss Butterworth ran her foot to and fro over the flooring they were examining.

  “Bartow was evidently in the habit of coming here constantly,” said she, “probably to learn whether his master had need of him. Ingenious in Mr. Adams to contrive signals for communication with this man! He certainly had great use for his deaf-and-dumb servant. So one mystery is solved!”

  “And if I am not mistaken, we can by a glance through this loophole obtain the answer to another. You are wondering, I believe, how Bartow, if he followed the movements of the assailant from the doorway, came to thrust with his left hand, instead of with his right. Now if he saw the tragedy from this point, he saw it over the assailant’s shoulder, instead of face to face. What follows? He would imitate literally the movements of the man he saw, turn in the same direction and strike with the same hand.”

  “Mr. Gryce, we are beginning to untangle the threads that looked so complicated. Ah, what is that? Why, it’s that bird! His cage must be very nearly under this hole.”

  “A little to one side, madam, but near enough to give you a start. What was it he cried then?”

  “Oh, those sympathetic words about Eva! ‘Poor Eva!’”

  “Well, give a glance to Bartow. You can see him very well from here.”

  Miss Butterworth put her eye again to the opening, and gave a grunt, a very decided grunt. With her a grunt was significant of surprise.

  “He is shaking his fist; he is all alive with passion. He looks as if he would like to kill the bird.”

  “Perhaps that is why the creature was strung up so high. You may be sure Mr. Adams had some basis for his idiosyncrasies.”

  “I begin to think so. I don’t know that I care to go back where that man is. He has a very murderous look.”

  “And a very feeble arm, Miss Butterworth. You are safe under my protection. My arm is not feeble.”

  A-Table. B-Small Stand. C-Door to Bedroom. D-Evelyn’s Picture E-Loophole on Stair Landing. F-Entrance to Study.5

  CHAPTER IX

  High and Low

  At the foot of the stairs, Mr. Gryce excused himself, and calling in two or three men whom he had left outside, had the valet removed before taking Miss Butterworth back into the study. When all was quiet again, and they found an opportunity to speak, Mr. Gryce remarked:

  “One very important thing has been settled by the experiment we have just made. Bartow is acquitted of participation in this crime.”

  “Then we can give our full attention to the young people. You have heard nothing from them, I suppose?”

  “No.”

  “Nor from the old man who laughed?”

  “No.”

  Miss Butterworth looked disappointed.

  “I thought—it seemed very probable—that the scrap of writing you found would inform you who these were. If it was important enough for the dying man to try to swallow it, it certainly should give some clew to his assailant.”

  “Unfortunately, it does not do so. It was a veritable scrawl, madam, running something like this: ‘I return your daughter to you. She is here. Neither she nor you will ever see me again. Remember Evelyn!’ And signed, ‘Amos’s son.’”

  “Amos’s son! That is Mr. Adams himself.”

  “So we have every reason to believe.”

  “Strange! Unaccountable! And the paper inscribed with these words was found clinched between his teeth! Was the handwriting recognized?”

  “Yes, as his own, if we can judge from the specimens we have seen of his signature on the fly-leaves of his books.”

  “Well, mysteries deepen. And the retaining of this paper was so important to him that even in his death throe he thrust it in this strangest of all hiding-places, as being the only one that could be considered safe from search. And the girl! Her first words on coming to herself were: ‘You have left that line of writing behind.’ Mr. Gryce, those words, few and inexplicable as they are, contain the key to the whole situation. Will you repeat them again, if you please, sentence by sentence?”

  “With pleasure, madam; I have said them often enough to myself. First, then: ‘I return your daughter to you!’”

  “So! Mr. Adams had someone’s daughter in charge whom he returns. Whose daughter? Not that young man’s daughter, certainly, for that would necessitate her being a small child. Besides, if these words had been meant for his assailant, why make so remarkable an effort to hide them from him?”

  “Very true! I have said the same thing to myself.”

  “Yet, if not for him, for whom, then? For the old gentleman who came in later?”

  “It is possible; since hearing of him I have allowed myself to regard this as among the possibilities, especially as the next words of this strange communication are: ‘She is here.’ Now the only woman who was there a few minutes previous to this old gentleman’s visit was the light-haired girl whom you saw carried out.”

  “Very true; but why do you reason as if this paper had just been written? It might have been an old scrap, referring to past sorrows or secrets.”

  “These words were written that afternoon. The paper on which they were scrawled was torn from a sheet of letter paper lying on the desk, and the pen with which they were inscribed—you must have noticed where it lay, quite out of its natural place on the extreme edge of the table.”

  “Certainly, sir; but I had little idea of the significance we might come to attach to it. These words are connected, then, with the girl I saw. And she is not Evelyn or he would not have repeated in this note the bird’s catch-word, ‘Remember Evelyn!’ I wonder if she is Evelyn?” proceeded Miss Butterworth, pointing to the one large picture which adorned the wall.

  “We may call her so for the nonce. So melancholy a face may well suggest some painful family secret. But how explain the violent part played by the young man, who is not mentioned in these abrupt and hastily penned sentences! It is all a mystery, madam, a mystery which we are wasting time to attempt to solve.”

  “Yet I hate to give it up without an effort. Those words, now. There were some other words you have not repeated to me.”

  “They came before that injunction, ‘Remember Evelyn!’ They bespoke a resolve. ‘Neither she nor you will ever see me again.’”

  “Ah!
but these few words are very significant, Mr. Gryce. Could he have dealt that blow himself? May he have been a suicide after all?”

  “Madam, you have the right to inquire; but from Bartow’s pantomime, you must have perceived it is not a self-inflicted blow he mimics, but a maddened thrust from an outraged hand. Let us keep to our first conclusions; only—to be fair to every possibility—the condition of Mr. Adams’s affairs and the absence of all family papers and such documents as may usually be found in a wealthy man’s desk prove that he had made some preparation for possible death. It may have come sooner than he expected and in another way, but it was a thought he had indulged in, and—madam, I have a confession to make also. I have not been quite fair to my most valued colleague. The study—that most remarkable of rooms—contains a secret which has not been imparted to you; a very peculiar one, madam, which was revealed to me in a rather startling manner. This room can be, or rather could be, cut off entirely from the rest of the house; made a death-trap of, or rather a tomb, in which this incomprehensible man may have intended to die. Look at this plate of steel. It is worked by a mechanism which forces it across this open doorway. I was behind that plate of steel the other night, and these holes had to be made to let me out.”

  “Ha! You detectives have your experiences! I should not have enjoyed spending that especial evening with you. But what an old-world tragedy we are unearthing here! I declare”—and the good lady actually rubbed her eyes—“I feel as if transported back to mediæval days. Who says we are living in New York within sound of the cable car and the singing of the telegraph wire?”

  “Some men are perfectly capable of bringing the mediæval into Wall Street. I think Mr. Adams was one of those men. Romanticism tinged all his acts, even the death he died. Nor did it cease with his death. It followed him to the tomb. Witness the cross we found lying on his bosom.”

  “That was the act of another’s hand, the result of another’s superstition. That shows the presence of a priest or a woman at the moment he died.”

  “Yet,” proceeded Mr. Gryce, with a somewhat wondering air, “he must have had a grain of hard sense in his make-up. All his contrivances worked. He was a mechanical genius, as well as a lover of mystery.”

  “An odd combination. Strange that we do not feel his spirit infecting the very air of this study. I could almost wish it did. We might then be led to grasp the key to this mystery.”

  “That,” remarked Mr. Gryce, “can be done in only one way. You have already pointed it out. We must trace the young couple who were present at his death struggle. If they cannot be found the case is hopeless.”

  “And so,” said she, “we come around to the point from which we started—proof positive that we are lost in the woods.” And Miss Butterworth rose. She felt that for the time being she, at least, had come to the end of her resources.

  Mr. Gryce did not seek to detain her. Indeed, he appeared to be anxious to leave the place himself. They, however, stopped long enough to cast one final look around them. As they did so Miss Butterworth’s finger slowly rose.

  “See!” said she, “you can hardly perceive from this side of the wall the opening made by the removal of that picture on the stair landing. Wouldn’t you say that it was in the midst of those folds of dark-colored tapestry up there?”

  “Yes, I had already located that spot as the one. With the picture hung up on the other side, it would be quite invisible.”

  “One needs to keep one’s eyes moving in a case like this. That picture must have been drawn aside several times while we were in this room. Yet we failed to notice it.”

  “That was from not looking high enough. High and low, Mr. Gryce! What goes on at the level of the eye is apparent to every one.”

  The smile with which he acknowledged this parting shot and prepared to escort her to the door had less of irony than sadness in it. Was he beginning to realize that years tell even on the most sagacious, and that neither high places nor low would have escaped his attention a dozen years before?

  CHAPTER X

  Bride Roses

  “A blonde, you say, sir?”

  “Yes, Sweetwater; not of the usual type, but one of those frail, ethereal creatures whom we find it so hard to associate with crime. He, on the contrary, according to Miss Butterworth’s description (and her descriptions may be relied upon), is one of those gentlemanly athletes whose towering heads and powerful figures attract universal attention. Seen together, you would be apt to know them. But what reason have we for thinking they will be found together?”

  “How were they dressed?”

  “Like people of fashion and respectability. He wore a brown-checked suit apparently fresh from the tailor; she, a dove-colored dress with white trimmings. The parasol shows the color of her hat and plumes. Both were young, and (still according to Miss Butterworth) of sensitive temperament and unused to crime; for she was in a fainting condition when carried from the house, and he, with every inducement to self-restraint, showed himself the victim of such powerful emotion that he would have been immediately surrounded and questioned if he had not set his burden down in the vestibule and at once plunged with the girl into the passing crowd. Do you think you can find them, Sweetwater?”

  “Have you no clews to their identity beyond this parasol?”

  “None, Sweetwater, if you except these few faded rose leaves picked up from the floor of Mr. Adams’s study.”

  “Then you have given me a problem, Mr. Gryce,” remarked the young detective dubiously, as he eyed the parasol held out to him and let the rose-leaves drop carelessly through his fingers. “Somehow I do not feel the same assurances of success that I did before. Perhaps I more fully realize the difficulties of any such quest, now that I see how much rests upon chance in these matters. If Miss Butterworth had not been a precise woman, I should have failed in my former attempt, as I am likely to fail in this one. But I will make another effort to locate the owner of this parasol, if only to learn my business by failure. And now, sir, where do you think I am going first? To a florist’s, with these faded rose-leaves. Just because every other young fellow on the force would make a start from the parasol, I am going to try and effect one from these rose-leaves. I may be an egotist, but I cannot help that. I can do nothing with the parasol.”

  “And what do you hope to do with the rose-leaves? How can a florist help you in finding this young woman by means of them?”

  “He may be able to say from what kind of a rose they fell, and once I know that, I may succeed in discovering the particular store from which the bouquet was sold to this more or less conspicuous couple.”

  “You may. I am not the man to throw cold water on any one’s schemes. Every man has his own methods, and till they are proved valueless I say nothing.”

  Young Sweetwater, who was now all nerve, enthusiasm, and hope, bowed. He was satisfied to be allowed to work in his own way.

  “I may be back in an hour, and you may not see me for a week,” he remarked on leaving.

  “Luck to your search!” was the short reply. This ended the interview. In a few minutes more Sweetwater was off.

  The hour passed; he did not come back; the day, and still no Sweetwater. Another day went by, enlivened only by an interchange of notes between Mr. Gryce and Miss Butterworth. Hers was read by the old detective with a smile. Perhaps because it was so terse; perhaps because it was so characteristic.

  Dear Mr. Gryce:

  I do not presume to dictate or even to offer a suggestion to the New York police, but have you inquired of the postman in a certain district whether he can recall the postmark on any of the letters he delivered to Mr. Adams?

  A. B.

  His, on the contrary, was perused with a frown by his exacting colleague in Gramercy Park. The reason is obvious.

  Dear Miss Butterworth:

  Suggestions are always in order, and even dictation can be endured
from you. The postman delivers too many letters on that block to concern himself with postmarks. Sorry to close another thoroughfare.

  E. G.

  Meanwhile, the anxiety of both was great; that of Mr. Gryce excessive. He was consequently much relieved when, on the third morning, he found Sweetwater awaiting him at the office, with a satisfied smile lighting up his plain features. He had reserved his story for his special patron, and as soon as they were closeted together he turned with beaming eyes toward the old detective, crying:

  “News, sir; good news! I have found them; I have found them both, and by such a happy stroke! It was a blind trail, but when the florist said that those petals might have fallen from a bride rose—well, sir, I know that any woman can carry bride roses, but when I remembered that the clothes of her companion looked as though they had just come from the tailor’s, and that she wore gray and white—why, it gave me an idea, and I began my search after this unknown pair at the Bureau of Vital Statistics.”

  “Brilliant!” ejaculated the old detective. “That is, if the thing worked.”

  “And it did, sir; it did. I may have been born under a lucky star, probably was, but once started on this line of search, I went straight to the end. Shall I tell you how? Hunting through the list of such persons as had been married within the city limits during the last two weeks, I came upon the name of one Eva Poindexter. Eva! that was a name well-known in the house on —— Street. I decided to follow up this Eva.”

  “A wise conclusion! And how did you set about it?”

  “Why, I went directly to the clergyman who had performed the ceremony. He was a kind and affable dominie, sir, and I had no trouble in talking to him.”

  “And you described the bride?”

  “No, I led the conversation so that he described her.”

  “Good; and what kind of a woman did he make her out to be? Delicate? Pale?”

  “Sir, he had not read the service for so lovely a bride in years. Very slight, almost fragile, but beautiful, and with a delicate bloom which showed her to be in better health than one would judge from her dainty figure. It was a private wedding, sir, celebrated in a hotel parlor; but her father was with her—”