Hilda left her there with Jan and Ida bending over her. She felt very tired. For the first time in her sturdy self-reliant life she felt inadequate and useless. She had failed. They had trusted her and she had failed. Jan’s shocked face, Carlton’s dazed one, Susie’s tears, even Eileen’s fainting showed how terribly she had failed.
And it was too late to do anything. What use to call the doctor? Any doctor. Or even the police. The best they could do would be to exact justice. They could not bring back to life a little old lady who, whatever her faults, should not be lying upstairs with a kitchen knife in her heart.
She sat down wearily at the library desk and picked up the telephone. Even here things were wrong. It was some time before she got young Brooke’s office. Then the girl she had seen there answered it indignantly.
“Give a person time to get some clothes on,” she snapped. “What is it?”
“I want the doctor.”
“You can’t have him. He’s out.”
Eventually she learned that a woman had been knocked down at the corner by a bus, and Dr. Brooke had gone with her to a hospital. The girl did not know what hospital.
“Tell him when he comes back,” Hilda said sharply, “that old Mrs. Fairbanks has been killed, and to come over at once.”
“Jesus,” said the girl. “There goes the rent.”
Hilda hung up, feeling sick.
After that she called Inspector Fuller at his house. Her hands had stopped shaking by that time, but there was still a quaver in her voice. To her relief he answered at once.
“Yes?”
“This is Hilda Adams, Inspector.”
“Hello, Pink. What’s wrong? Don’t tell me you’ve found some goldfish!”
Hilda swallowed.
“Mrs. Fairbanks is dead,” she said. “She’s been stabbed with a knife. It couldn’t have happened, but it did.”
His voice changed. There was no reproach in it, but it was cold and businesslike.
“Pull yourself together, Hilda. Lock the room, and hold everything until I get there. Keep the family out.”
“I’ve done that. I—”
But he had already hung up.
She went slowly up the stairs. Ida and Maggie had got Eileen into bed and were standing over her, the door to the room open. In the hall the group remained unchanged, save that Carlton was sitting down, his head in his hands.
“I’ve got the police,” she said. “The doctor’s out. If you’d like me to call another one—”
Carlton looked up.
“What’s the good of a doctor?” he said. “She’s gone, isn’t she? And I want that key, Miss Adams. You’re not on this case now. She’s my mother, and she’s alone. I’m going in to stay with her.”
He got up, looking determined, and held out his hand.
“No one is to go in there,” Hilda said. “Inspector Fuller said—”
“To hell with Inspector Fuller.”
It might have been ugly. He was advancing on her when a siren wailed as a radio car turned into the driveway. Susie spoke then.
“Don’t make a fool of yourself, Carl. That’s the police.”
William went down the stairs. He looked old and stooped, and his shabby bathrobe dragged about his bare ankles. When he came back two young officers in uniform were at his heels. They looked around, saw Eileen in her bed, and started for the room. Hilda stopped them.
“Not there,” she said. “In here. The door’s locked.”
She gave them the key, and they unlocked it and went in, to come out almost immediately. One of them stayed outside the door, surveying the group in the hall with an impassive face. The other went down to the telephone. With his departure everything became static, frozen into immobility. Then Jan moved.
“I can’t bear it,” she said brokenly. “Why would anybody do that to her? She was old. She never hurt anyone. She—”
She began to cry, leaning against the screen and sobbing brokenheartedly, and with the sound the frozen silence ended. There was small but definite movement. Carlton lifted his head, showing a white face and blank eyes. Susie felt in her draggled dressing-gown for a cigarette and then thought better of it. And Hilda pulled herself together and went in to look at Eileen. She was conscious, but her pulse was thin and irregular, and Hilda mixed some aromatic ammonia with water and gave it to her.
“Let me out of here,” she gasped. “I’m all right. I want to go home.”
“Better wait until morning, Mrs. Garrison. You’ve had a shock. And anyhow you oughtn’t to move about. You know that.”
Eileen’s eyes were wild. They moved from Maggie and Ida back to Hilda.
“I’m frightened,” she gasped. “You can slip me out somehow.” She tried to sit up in the bed, but Hilda held her down.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” she told her. “The police are here. They may want to talk to you.”
“But I don’t know anything about it,” Eileen gasped. “I’ve been dead to the world. You know that.”
“Of course I know it,” Hilda said gently. “They’ll not bother you much. I’ll tell them.”
Eileen relaxed. She lay back against her pillows, her eyes open but the pupils sharply contracted from the morphia.
“How was she killed?” she asked.
“Never mind about that. Try to be quiet.”
The second policeman had come up the stairs, and from far away came the sound of another siren. Hilda walked to the window over the porte-cochere and looked out. The rain had almost ceased. It was dripping from the roof overhead, but the wind had dropped. The room was hot and moist. She raised the window and stood staring outside.
The screen she had fastened was open again. It hung loosely on its hinges, moving a little in the light breeze, but no longer banging.
She did not fasten it. She went back to the bed, where Eileen lay with her eyes closed, relaxed and half asleep.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Garrison,” she said. “Did you open a window tonight? Or a screen?”
“What screen?” said Eileen drowsily. “I didn’t open anything.”
Ida got up. She had been sitting by the bed.
“Better let her sleep if she can, miss,” she said. “Why would she open a screen?”
All at once the hall outside was filled with men, some of them in uniform. They came up the stairs quietly but inevitably, carrying the implements of their grisly trade, the cameramen, the fingerprint detail, the detectives in soft hats and with hard, shrewd eyes. A brisk young lieutenant was apparently in charge.
He nodded to Carlton.
“Bad business, sir,” he said. “Sorry. Can you get these people downstairs? In one room, if that’s convenient.”
Carlton looked overwhelmed at the crowd.
“We’d like to get some clothes on,” he said.
“Not yet, if you don’t mind. The inspector will be here any time now. He’ll want to see you all.”
They shuffled down, accompanied by an officer, the three servants, Susie, Jan, and Carlton. Only Eileen remained, and Hilda, standing in her doorway. The lieutenant looked at her, at her uniform and at the room beyond her.
“Who is in there?”
“Mrs. Garrison. She can’t be moved. I’m looking after her.”
He nodded, and with a gesture to two of the detectives, went into the dead woman’s room and closed the door. The others stood around, waiting. A cameraman lit a cigarette and put it out. One or two yawned. Hilda closed the door into Eileen’s room and stood against it, but they showed no interest in her. Not at least until the inspector came up the stairs.
He took one look at her and turned to the uniformed man who had come with him.
“See if there’s any brandy in the house,” he said. “Sit down, Hilda. Bring a chair, somebody.”
They looked at her then. The hall was filled with men staring at her. Their faces were blurred. She had felt this way her first day in the operating room. White masks staring at her, and someone saying, “Catch that probationer. She’s going to faint.” She roused herself with an effort, forcing her eyes to focus.
“I’m not going to faint,” she said stubbornly.
“You’re giving a darned good imitation, then,” he said. “Sit down. Don’t be a little fool. I need you.”
The brandy helped her. When she could focus her eyes she found the inspector gone. But the phalanx of men was still in the hall, watching her with interest. She got up unsteadily and went into Eileen’s room. To her surprise Eileen was up. She was trying to get into her clothes, and the face she turned on Hilda was colorless and desperate.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “If Frank goes home and finds I’m gone—I must have been out of my mind to come here.”
“I can telephone, if you like. You can’t leave, of course. They won’t allow anyone to leave the house.”
“You mean—we’re prisoners?”
Hilda’s nerves suddenly snapped.
“Listen,” she said. “There’s been a murder in this house. Of course you’re not a prisoner. But you’re getting back into that bed and staying there if I have to put a policeman on your chest.”
That was the situation when there was a rap at the door. The inspector wanted her, and Hilda went out.
In the old lady’s room nothing had yet been disturbed. Only the detectives were standing there, touching nothing. The inspector nodded at her.
“All right,” he said. “Now look at this room. You know how you left it when Mrs. Fairbanks went to bed. Is anything changed? Has anything been moved? Take your time. There’s no hurry.”
She gazed around her. Everything was different, yet everything was the same. She shook her head.
“Try again,” he insisted. “Anything moved on the table? Anything different about the curtains?”
She looked again, keeping her eyes from the quiet figure on the bed.
“I think Mrs. Fairbanks left that closet door closed,” she said finally.
“You’re not sure?”
“I’m sure she closed it. She always did. But there’s a small safe in it. I think Mrs. Fairbanks opened it at night. I don’t know why.”
“A safe?”
He took out a handkerchief and pulled the door open. He examined the safe, but it was closed and locked.
“Anyone else in the house have access to it?”
“I don’t think so. She was rather queer about it. She didn’t really like anybody to go into the closet, and she locked it when she went out.”
“I suppose this is the closet where—”
“Yes.”
He showed her the knife, still in the dead woman’s chest. She forced herself to look at it, but she was trembling.
“Ever seen it before?”
“I may. I wouldn’t know. It looks like a common kitchen knife.”
“There wasn’t such a knife upstairs, for instance? Lying about.”
She shook her head, and he let her go, saying he would talk to her later. As she went out the men in the hall crowded in, to take their pictures, to dust the furniture and the knife for prints, to violate—she thought miserably—the privacy of fifty years of living. And why? Who in this house would have killed an old woman? No one seeing the household that night could doubt that they were shocked, if not grieved. And who else could have done it?
Her mind was clearer now. The radio had been turned on before young Brooke left, so she was alive then. Who else? Carlton? He had gone in and shut off the machine. He could have carried the knife in his dressing-gown pocket. But—unless he was a great actor—he was almost broken by his mother’s death. He had gone down on his knees by the bed. He—
Who else? Marian was away. Jan was out of the question. Eileen was sick and under the influence of the hypodermic. Susie? But how could Susie get into the room? How could anyone get into the room?
She went back carefully over the night. Eileen had left Mrs. Fairbanks at midnight and Hilda had put her to bed. At a quarter after twelve she had shut off her radio and apparently gone to sleep. It was almost half past twelve when Courtney Brooke had gone down to have a drink with Carlton in the library, and soon after that Eileen had complained of pain.
During all that time she—Hilda—had left the door unguarded only for the brief excursion to the head of the stairs to the third floor, along the back hall to carry her tray back, and much later when Susie crashed into it. True, she had been in the kitchen for some time, but Mrs. Fairbanks had been alive after that. Witness the radio.
Her mind was whirling. She had been in Eileen’s room once or twice, but only for a matter of seconds. In any case she could have seen Mrs. Fairbanks’s door, and any movement outside. Susie? But the old lady had been dead for some time before she left her in the hall to close Eileen’s screen. An hour at least; maybe more.
She leaned her head back in her chair. On the table still lay her equipment for the night, the heavy textbook, her knitting bag, the thermometer in its case, the flashlight, her charts and records. She could see the last thing she had written, after Eileen’s visit. Patient nervous. Not sleepy. Refuses sedative. She felt sick again.
From beyond the closed door came the muffled sounds of men moving about, and the soft plop of the cameramen’s flash bulbs. A car drove in below, a bell rang, and a man with a bag came up the stairs. The medical examiner, she knew. But what could he find? A little old lady on her back, with her arms outstretched and a knife in her heart.
He was a brisk, youngish man with a mustache, and he was in a bad humor when the inspector came out to meet him.
“Pity you fellows can’t move without a panzer division,” he said. “I had the devil of a time getting my car in.”
“Well, we won’t keep you long,” said the inspector. “Stab wound in the chest. That’s all.”
“How do you know that’s all?”
“It seems to have been enough.”
The medical examiner ignored Hilda. He went inside the room, followed by the inspector, and was there five minutes. He was still brisk when he came out, but his irritation was gone. He seemed depressed.
“So that’s the end of old Eliza Fairbanks,” he said, tugging at his mustache. “Who did it? You can bet your bottom dollar she didn’t do it herself.”
“No,” said the inspector. “No, I don’t think so. How long ago, do you think?”
The medical examiner looked at his watch.
“It’s half past three now,” he said. “I’d say two hours ago. Maybe more. Say between one and two o’clock, at a guess. Nearer one, perhaps, from the body temperature. Hard to tell, of course. Rigor sets in earlier in warm weather. I’ll know better after the autopsy. What time did she eat last?”
He looked at Hilda.
“She had a tray at seven-thirty,” she said. “She didn’t go down to dinner. Poached eggs, a green salad, and some fruit. She was alive a little after one o’clock.”
“How do you know that?” he asked sharply. “See her?”
“No. She turned on her radio.”
He was still brisk as he went down the stairs. This was his job. When he went to bed he left his clothing ready to put on, the cuff links in his shirt, his shoes and socks beside the bed, his tie on the dresser. Even his car had a permit to stand out on the street all night. He lived like a fireman, he would say. But now he was slightly shocked. Mostly his work took him to the slums. Now there was a murder in the Fairbanks house. Somebody had jabbed a knife into old Eliza. Well, he’d be damned. He’d be doubly damned.
The inspector watched him down the stairs. Then he got a straight chair and sat down, confronting Hilda. There was no softness in his face. He looked angry and hard. Hard as nails.
“All right,” he said. “Now let’s have it. And it had better be good. No use saying it couldn’t happen. It has.”
She braced herself. She had failed, and he knew it. He wanted no excuses. He wanted the story, and she gave it as coherently as her tired mind would allow; Eileen’s arrival, her story and subsequent collapse; Mrs. Fairbanks’s demand to see her, and after that the unusual settling her for the night. Then came Eileen’s pain, the two trips downstairs, one to speak to the doctor, the other to boil some water, leaving the doctor on guard, and the later discovery of Eileen’s open screen slapping in the wind. But it was over Susie’s appearance, wet and bedraggled, that he spent the most time.
“What about this Susie?” he asked. “Devoted to the old lady and all that?”
In spite of herself Hilda smiled.
“Not very. Mrs. Fairbanks disliked her, and Susie—well, I thought she tried to annoy her mother-in-law. But that’s as far as it went.”
“What about this excursion of hers? For cigarettes in the rain? Do you believe it?”
“It might have been. She smokes a good bit.”
“But you don’t think so?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think she’s particularly scrupulous. But I doubt if she would kill anybody. She and her husband wanted to leave here and buy a farm. Mrs. Fairbanks objected. Still that’s hardly a reason—”
“Any chance she could have unhooked this screen over the porte-cochere? Earlier in the night?”
“She didn’t come upstairs after dinner. She and Mr. Fairbanks went to the movies.”
“What about later? After the Garrison woman came?”
“She wasn’t in the room at all. She hates Eileen Garrison like poison.”
“What’s she like? Strong? Muscular?”
“She looks pretty strong. She’s a big woman.”
He looked back along the hall. The screen which usually protected Hilda’s chair had been folded against the wall, and he had an uninterrupted view.
“Where is her room?”
Hilda told him, and he went back and inspected it, including the door to the service staircase.
“You didn’t see her leave?”
“No. The screen was in the way.”
“So,” he said thoughtfully, “she was outside for nobody knows how long. She’s big enough to handle a ladder, and she had no reason for loving her mother-in-law. People have gone to the chair for less!”
All at once Hilda found herself defending Susie. She was too direct, too open. She was—well, she was simply Susie.
“Suppose she did get into Eileen’s room? Eileen Garrison was there. She was awake until she had the hypodermic. And after that how could she get into Mrs. Fairbanks’s room? I was here, in this chair. When we found the body at half past two it was already—cool.”
Nevertheless, he sent an officer to locate a ladder, in the house or on the grounds, preferably wet. He did not sit down again after that. He stood still, frowning thoughtfully.
“What about this radio?” he asked abruptly. “Sure the old lady turned it on herself? Somebody might have used one of these remote control affairs. They operate as far as sixty feet.”
“Don’t they have cables, or something of the sort?”
“Not the new ones.”
The men were coming out now. He let some of them go and detained two of the detectives.
“I want every room in the house searched,” he told them. “Look for one of those remote radio controls. Look for a phonograph, too. And for anything suspicious, of course. Miss Adams will have to go into the room here in front. There’s a sick woman there.”
They moved off, quiet and businesslike. From the driveway below came the sounds of cars starting as the fingerprint and cameramen departed. No voices came from the library, and Hilda could imagine the group huddled there, stricken and dazed. She got up.
“Now?”
“If you please.”
She went into Eileen’s room. Eileen was asleep, but she roused at Hilda’s entrance.
“What is it?” she said peevishly.
“I’m sorry. I’ll have to search the room. All the house is being searched. I won’t bother you.”
“Go ahead. What are they looking for? Another knife?”
But the net result was nothing. The suitcase revealed a dress or two and some undergarments, most of them showing considerable wear. The closet, hung with Marian’s luxurious wardrobe, provided a bitter contrast, but that was all. And Eileen, yawning, looked bored and indifferent.
“I wish you’d get out and let me sleep.”
“How do you feel?”
“How do you expect me to feel?”
She was half asleep when Hilda left the room.
The search was still going on when she closed the door behind her. One of the detectives was on his way to the third floor, and she gathered nothing had been found. There was a uniformed guard outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door, and two men in white were inside by the bed with a long wicker basket.
So Eliza Fairbanks was leaving the home to which she had come as a bride, going in a basket, without the panoply of flowers and soft music, without even dignity or any overwhelming grief.
Standing in the hall Hilda swore a small and very private oath; to help the police to revenge this murder, and to send whoever had done it to death. “So help me God.”