The inquest was held at two o’clock that afternoon. It was very brief. Carlton Fairbanks identified his mother’s body, and nothing new was developed. Susie came home looking sick and went to bed, but Marian stayed downtown to make arrangements for the funeral and to buy the conventional black.
She was still out when the inspector arrived at four that afternoon. Jan was better, sitting up in bed, with Courtney Brooke in and out of the room, but mostly in. They did not talk much. It seemed to content them merely to be together. And Carlton was in the library. He had had a drink or two, but he was entirely sober.
He did not seem surprised to see the inspector. He stood up stiffly.
“I rather expected you,” he said. “Jan’s accident, and all that. But I want to ask you not to judge us on what may seem unusual. If any one of us has been at fault—”
Here, however, his voice failed him. It was a moment or so before he pulled himself together.
“I know things look bad,” he said. “When I saw the paint was gone—But it has nothing to do with my mother’s death. Nothing. I am innocent, and so—God help her—is my wife.”
He followed the inspector up the stairs. Hilda, watching them come, thought he would not make the top. He rallied, however, when she unlocked the door of the death room, although he did not look at the bed.
The inspector was brisk and businesslike. He went at once to the closet and ignoring the safe got down on his knees and examined the baseboard. He used a flashlight, and he rapped on it and listened, his head on one side, while Carlton stood mutely by. When he got up his voice was brisk.
“All right,” he said. “Now I’d like to see your room, please.”
This time Carlton led the way. He looked shrunken, incredibly aged. Once inside he closed the door to Susie’s room, but when the inspector opened his closet door he spoke for the first time.
“I give you my word of honor,” he said bleakly, “that I knew nothing about this until yesterday morning. I would have told you before, but it involved”—he swallowed—“it involved someone very dear to me.”
He said nothing more. He stood silent while the inspector took out the row of neatly treed shoes. Even the tan ones were there, although the paint had been removed. The inspector picked up his flashlight and turned it on the baseboard.
“It slides—toward the fireplace. It’s nailed now.”
“Since yesterday?”
“Since yesterday. I nailed and painted it yesterday morning.”
The white paint was dry. The inspector produced from his pocket one of those small arrangements where a number of tools are carried inside the handle. He fitted one and went to work. Carlton said nothing. A breeze from the open windows blew the curtains into the room. Outside the traffic of a busy Monday moved along the streets, and Joe’s Market was filled with women, shopping and gossiping.
“That police car’s back. Look, you can see it.”
“Much good it will do. They don’t arrest people like the Fairbankses for murder.”
It took some time to slide the panel. The paint held it. But at last it moved and the inspector picked up his flashlight. He saw a small empty chamber, the thickness of the wall, and beyond it a flat wooden surface fastened to the floor with hooks and screw-eyes. He opened it, and saw as he had expected; that it was the baseboard of Mrs. Fairbanks’s closet. On his right was the safe. He could touch it, but he could not reach the dial. The whole aperture was only seven inches high.
He got up, dusting his hand.
“I suppose that accounts for a number of things,” he said. “Not only for the attempts to frighten your mother. It could account for something else, Mr. Fairbanks.”
“For what?”
“A cable for a remote control to the radio in your mother’s room. I suggest that your mother was killed earlier in the night, that you turned on the radio from here, that you later re-entered the room ostensibly to shut it off, but actually to disconnect the cable, and that when you went to the closet it was to place the cable there, so you could withdraw it quietly from this side.”
“Before God I never did.”
That was when Susie burst into the room. She came like fury, ready to spring at Fuller.
“You fool!” she said. “You stupid fool! He never knew about it until yesterday.”
Carlton roused at that.
“Be still,” he said. “Don’t make things worse. They’re bad enough. Go back to your room. I’ll—”
She paid no attention to him. She was panting with anger and fear.
“Don’t listen to him. I did it. I had it done. He’d never have found it if I’d had a chance to close it all the way. But if you think I put those creatures in his mother’s room, I didn’t.” Her voice was shrill. She was trembling. “Someone else in this house did that. Not me. I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.”
She came out with her story. Nothing would have stopped her. Carlton had turned his back and was staring out the window. The inspector listened. Hilda watched.
It had started the winter before, she said. She had been in the bank, and she had seen Mrs. Fairbanks receive a large bundle of currency.
“She didn’t see me,” she said. “I saw her go down to her safe-deposit box, and I knew she was hoarding money. I told Carl, but he didn’t believe me. Anyhow, he said it was his mother’s business.”
Then came the matter of the safe. Why did she want a safe in her room? And she had changed in other ways, too. She became stingy with money. She had sent away the kitchenmaid and the second housemaid.
“I was scared,” Susie said. “I knew damned well why she wanted a safe in her room. Maybe I was raised on the wrong side of the tracks, but I had a pretty good idea what she was doing; selling her securities and turning them into cash to save taxes. And now she was going to keep it in the house!
“I got my brother-in-law the job of doing the carpentry work,” she said defiantly. “The safe was to be built into the wall, and I told him what I thought. Suppose she had two or three million dollars in cash in this house? A lot of people might know, her banks, her brokers. Things like that leak out. It wasn’t safe. We weren’t safe. Even if there was a fire—”
Her brother-in-law had suggested that she could at least keep an eye on things. “You can’t change her,” he said, “but you can watch her. Then if she’s doing it you can get that son of hers to work on her. If she’s trying to escape her taxes she ought to go to jail.”
Mrs. Fairbanks and Marian were in Florida, Jan was visiting a school friend, and she and Carl were out of town for days at a time looking for a farm. He had no difficulty in doing the work. And when the old lady came back she—Susie—learned a good bit. Mostly by listening. Mrs. Fairbanks would drive out, come back and put something in the safe. After a time, as the money apparently accumulated, she developed a new habit. She would lock her door at night, set up a card table, and apparently count over her hoard.
“I didn’t dare to open the baseboard all the way,” Susie said, “but I’d push it out an inch or so. She kept her shoes in a shoe bag on the door, so they didn’t bother me. She’d pretend to be playing solitaire, but she didn’t fool me! But when I tried to tell Carl he wouldn’t believe it. I didn’t dare to tell him how I knew.”
As to a possible cable to the radio and a remote control, she dismissed that with a gesture.
“That’s crazy,” she said. “He never knew the thing was there until after his mother was dead and he hunted out some black shoes yesterday morning to wear with his morning coat. Then he gave me hell, and yesterday he nailed it up.” She went over and put a hand on Carlton’s arm. “The one thing he suspected me of I didn’t do,” she said softly. “He thought I was keeping the bats in the stable. He found a birdcage up there wrapped in a cloth, and he was bringing it to me when the nurse saw him. He had to take it back!”
She eyed Hilda without rancor.
“You’re pretty smart,” she said, “but you missed that, didn’t you? That’s why I went out there in the rain that night. Carl had told me about it, and I wanted to see if it was still there, and what was in it.”
“But you never got there?”
“I was scared off,” said Susie, suddenly wary. “Somebody grabbed me. I don’t know who.”
Down in the kitchen Maggie was looking at the clock.
“I’d like to know what’s keeping Ida,” she observed. “She said she’d be gone only an hour, and it’s five now.” She poured William a cup of tea and took one for herself. “She’s been queer lately,” she said. “Ever since the old lady’s death, and before.”
“She’ll be all right,” said William. “Maybe she went to a movie.”
But no one upstairs was thinking of Ida. Not then, certainly. Carlton did not know the combination to his mother’s safe, and the inspector was anxious to open it.
“I think she would have written it down,” Carlton said worriedly. “Her memory wasn’t very good lately. Perhaps you have seen it, Miss Adams. It would be a combination of some sort, I suppose. Letters and numbers.”
Hilda, however, had seen nothing of the sort. She had never seen Mrs. Fairbanks open the safe, and in the search of her room which followed nothing developed. They took the pictures from the walls, raised the rug at its edges, looked through the bed and under the paper lining the drawers of her table and bureau. They even examined the few books lying about, the vases on the mantel, the back of the clock and the radio, as well as the cards with which—according to Susie—she had merely pretended to play solitaire.
They were almost friendly, the four of them, during that interval. At least a common cause united them. When Maggie came to the door at a quarter to six, it was to see Mrs. Fairbanks’s room completely dismantled, Susie on a chair examining the top of the draperies at the window, and an inspector of police lying under the bed, with only his legs protruding.
She looked apologetic.
“I didn’t mean to disturb anybody,” she said, highly embarrassed. “It’s about Ida. She went out at one o’clock for an hour or so, and she hasn’t come back yet.”
The inspector had crawled out. He stood up and dusted his clothes.
“Does she often do that?”
“Never before, to my knowledge.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“She said she needed some darning silk. I wanted her to eat her lunch first. She looked sick. But she wouldn’t wait.”
The inspector looked at his watch.
“It’s almost six now. Five hours. I wouldn’t worry. She’ll probably show up.”
Ida did not show up, however. Marian came home from her shopping and her interview with the mortician looking exhausted and, refusing dinner, lay on her chaise longue, her eyes closed and her face bitter.
Carlton was closeted with Susie in her room, and Jan and Courtney had a double tray on the side of her bed, achieving the impossible of balancing it, holding hands, and still doing away with a considerable amount of food.
When Hilda carried it out he followed her.
“See here,” he said. “What’s been going on? What’s this about Ida being missing?”
“I don’t know that she is, doctor.”
“Well, what’s the row about? Maggie says you’ve practically torn up the old lady’s room.”
“We’ve been trying to locate the combination of her safe.”
He whistled and looked back at Jan’s door.
“I wouldn’t tell her that, Miss Adams,” he said. “It might upset her.”
He declined to elaborate, and Hilda had that to puzzle over during the evening, as well as Ida’s continued absence. At eight o’clock William had sent a wire to her people in the country, and he and Maggie were waiting in the kitchen for an answer. Young Brooke, having eaten his dinner, left for his office hours and came back at nine. Marian went to bed, and Carlton and Susie were in the library. Hilda, not needed anywhere, sat in her room and watched the twilight turn into night. She had gathered up a lot of odds and ends, but where did they take her? She was no nearer the solution of the crime than she had been before.
Ida? What about Ida? She could have discovered the opening into Mrs. Fairbanks’s room; the panel not entirely closed, and Ida on her knees, washing the floor of the closet. She could even have slipped the bats into the room. She had been a country girl. She would not be afraid of such things. But why? What would be her motive?
She went back to the morning of the murder; Ida in her room by the window, her hands folded in her lap and a queer look on her long thin face as she and the inspector entered. She had been afraid, so afraid that she tried to rise and could not. And now she was missing.
In the next room the young people were talking. Hilda got up and moving carefully went to the front hall. Above her the third floor loomed dark and empty, and the long passage to Ida’s room was ghostly. As the evening cooled the old house creaked, and Hilda, remembering the figure she had seen at the top of the stairs, felt small goose pimples on her flesh.
Once back in the girl’s room, however, she felt better. She turned on the light and looked about her. There was no indication that she had intended to leave. A pair of washed stockings hung over the back of a chair, a discarded blue uniform lay on the bed, and a battered suitcase stood on the closet floor.
The wastebasket was empty, except for a newspaper, but under the pine dresser she found a scrap of paper. It was part of a letter, and it contained only two words. On one line was the word “sorry” and below it “harmless.” Nowhere could she find any other bits, and at last she gave it up and put out the light.
She went quietly forward and down to the second floor. To her surprise the door into Mrs. Fairbanks’s room was open, and she stepped inside. Young Brooke was there. He had opened the drawer of the table and had taken something out.
He started violently when he saw her. Then he grinned.
“Looking for cards,” he said. “Jan and I want to play some gin-rummy.”
He showed her the cards, but Hilda held out her hand for them.
“I’ll take those,” she said. “My orders are that nothing is to leave this room.”
“Oh, have a heart. A pack of cards—”
“Give them to me, please. There are cards downstairs.”
He gave them up reluctantly.
“And what will you do with them?” he inquired.
“Put them back where they belong,” she said stiffly, “and lock this door.”
She waited until he had gone out. Then she locked the door and took the key.
At midnight the telegram came. Ida had not gone home. And Hilda, getting Marian some hot milk to enable her to sleep, found the servants still there, Maggie and William and, smoking a pipe by the door, Amos. They were, she thought, both worried and watchful. And Maggie was convinced that Ida was dead.
“She was a good girl,” she said tearfully. “A good Christian, too. And she minded her own business.”
Amos shook the ashes out of his pipe.
“Did she now?” he said. “Sure of that, are you? Then what was she doing in my place yesterday, after the old lady was killed?”
“You’re making that up.”
“Am I? I found her in my bedroom, looking out of the window. She was a snooper. That’s what she was. I never did trust her.”
“You never trusted anybody,” said Maggie scornfully. “What would she want in your room anyhow?”
“That’s what I asked her. She said she had brought me some blankets. I’ve been here thirty years and she’s been here ten. It’s the first time she’s been interested in my bed.”
He seemed to think that was humorous. He grinned, but Maggie eyed him disdainfully.
“You might at least be grateful.”
“Grateful? For blankets at the beginning of summer? Them blankets were an excuse to get in my room, and don’t tell me different.”
That night Hilda discovered why Susie had fainted a few days before.
Jan had sent her to bed, and she went gladly enough. All she wanted, she thought, was a hot bath and sleep, and tomorrow she could go home, to her bird and her sunny sitting-room. She had done all she could. She had not solved the murder, but she had solved one mystery. She locked the bit of paper from Ida’s room in her suitcase, got out a fresh nightgown, and after some hesitation put the key to Mrs. Fairbanks’s room under her pillow. Then she undressed and reached into the closet for her bedroom slippers. Curled up in one of them was something cold and clammy, and as she touched it it slithered out across her feet and under the bed.
She was too paralyzed to move for a moment. Then she put on her slippers and going across the hall rapped at Susie’s door. Susie was in bed, the usual cigarette in one hand, the usual lurid magazine in the other.
“You might tell Mr. Fairbanks,” Hilda said coldly, “that the thing that scared you into a faint the other night is under my bed. I believe it’s harmless.”
“Harmless!” Susie said. “I put my hand on it in that damned peephole, and it nearly scared me to death. It’s a—”
“Yes,” said Hilda calmly. “It’s a snake. It would be nice to know who put it there.”