Old Eliza Fairbanks was buried that afternoon from St. Luke’s, with a cordon of police to hold back the crowd and photographers, holding cameras high, struggling for pictures of the family. Her small body in its heavy casket was carried into the church, and in due time out again. A long procession of cars drove up, filled, and drove away.
“What is it, a wedding?”
“Sh! It’s a funeral. You know, the old woman who got stabbed.”
Marian came out, her face bleak under her mourning. Carlton and Susie, Susie unashamedly crying. Jan, wan and lovely, but keeping her head high, and Courtney Brooke holding her arm. Nobody noticed Frank Garrison. He sat at the rear of the church, thinking God knows what; of his wedding perhaps in this same church, with Marian beside him; of Jan’s christening at the font, a small, warm body in his arms; of Sunday mornings when he sat in the Fairbanks pew, and a little old lady sat beside him.
He got out quickly when it was over.
It was five o’clock when the family returned from the cemetery, and six before Hilda had got Marian to bed and was free. She went quietly out the side door and past the stable to Huston Street, to find Courtney waiting for her in his car.
“I hope we make it,” he said. “The old bus does all right in town. When it stops I can have somebody fix it. But a trip like this—”
Hilda got in and settled herself.
“We’ll make it,” she said comfortably. “We’ve got to make it.”
Yet at first there seemed nothing to discover. Two elderly people, stricken with grief, Ida’s parents were only bewildered.
“Who would want to do that to her?” they asked.
“She was a good girl. She minded her own business. And she was fond of the family, miss. Especially Mrs. Garrison, Mrs. Marian Garrison. That’s her picture there.” Hilda looked. On the mantel was a photograph of Marian taken some years ago. “She was pretty then,” the mother said. “Ida used to help her dress. She—”
She checked herself abruptly, and Hilda thought the father had made a gesture. She got nothing further from them. They knew nothing of any bats or other creatures, and Hilda, watching their surprise, was sure that it was genuine. They sat in the old-fashioned parlor, with an organ in the corner and a fan of paper in the empty fireplace, and denied that Ida had ever carried anything of the sort into town. “Why would she?”
“Some laboratories buy such things,” Hilda said mendaciously, and got up. “Someone had been keeping things in a birdcage in the Fairbanks stable. Never mind. I’m only sorry. If there is anything I can do—”
Courtney had not gone into the house. He was standing by the car when she came out.
“Funny thing,” he said. “There was a boy over by the barn. I started over to him but he beat it. Well, how did they take it?”
“It’s broken them,” she said wearily. “I suppose it was the boy who did it.”
“Did what?”
“Caught the bats and so on and gave them to Ida.”
He almost put the car into a ditch.
“So that’s it,” he said. “It was Ida! But why, and who killed her?”
“Are you sure you don’t know, doctor? On the night Mrs. Fairbanks died you saw someone on the third floor, didn’t you? You were holding a cup of coffee. It spilled.”
He passed a truck before he replied.
“That’s as preposterous a deduction as I’ve ever heard,” he said. “If that’s the way the police work—”
“I’m not a policewoman,” she told him patiently. “You saw someone, didn’t you?”
“I’ve already said no.”
He was lying, and he was not a good liar. She did not pursue the subject. She was very quiet the rest of the way back to town. Her face had no longer its bland cherubic expression. She looked dispirited and half sick. When young Brooke politely but coldly offered her dinner at a roadhouse she refused it.
“I’m not hungry,” she said. “Thanks just the same. I want to get back as soon as possible.”
Yet for a woman in a hurry she did nothing much when she reached the Fairbanks house again. She did not get into uniform. She merely took off her hat and sat down in her room. When Jan, on her way to bed, rapped at her door she was still there in the dark.
“Good gracious! “Jan said. “Don’t you want a light? And did you have anything to eat?”
“I didn’t want anything, Jan.”
“Just what were you and Courtney cooking up this afternoon?” Jan asked curiously. “I saw you, you know. You were gone for hours.”
“I was telling Ida’s people about her,” said Hilda. “It was rather sad. I hate to carry bad news.”
She looked at the girl. How would she bear another blow? Suppose she was right and Ida had been put out of the way because she knew what Hilda thought she knew?
It was midnight before she made any move. The household was asleep. Even Amos’s light in the stable was out, by that time. But she took the precaution of slipping off her shoes. Then, armed with her flashlight, she went up to the third floor. She did not go back to Ida’s room, however. She went into the guest rooms, taking one after the other, examining the floors and the bathrooms, and removing the dust covers from the beds.
It was in the room over Carlton’s that she found what she had been afraid to find.
She went to bed and to sleep after that, but she carried a sort of mental alarm clock in her head, and promptly at six she wakened. Nobody was stirring in the house when she went down to the library and called the inspector on the phone at his bachelor apartment. His voice was heavy with sleep when he answered.
“It’s Hilda Adams,” she said carefully. “I want you to do something. Now, if you will.”
“At this hour? Good heavens, Hilda, don’t you ever go to bed?”
“I do, but I get out of it. Will you have someone check the hotels in town for a woman who got there early Sunday morning and left that afternoon?”
“Sunday? Sure. But what’s it all about?”
“I’ll tell you later. I can’t talk here.”
She hung up and went upstairs again. She had been stupid, she thought. She should have known all this before. Yet she had also a sense of horror. It was still written all over her when she sat in the inspector’s office that Wednesday morning.
“How did you guess it?” he said.
“Then it’s correct?”
“Correct as hell. She checked in at five Sunday morning and left that afternoon. She left Atlantic City on Saturday.”
She drew a long breath.
“I should have known it before,” she said. “The figure at the top of the stairs and the chandelier shaking. I think young Brooke saw it, too, although he denies it. But the rooms looked the same. Only Ida had cleaned a bathroom, and she couldn’t put back the dust. I suppose that cost her her life. If she had only raised a window and let the dirt in—”
In spite of himself Fuller smiled.
“The world lost a great criminal in you, Hilda,” he said admiringly.
He looked over his notes. Marian had registered at one of the big Atlantic City hotels the night she had left home. She had remained most of the time in her room, having her meals served there, and she had left on a late train on Saturday.
“It checks,” he said thoughtfully. “She came home late and Ida probably admitted her and told her Eileen was there. She smuggled her up the back stairs to the third floor and settled her there. Then what? Did she come down while young Brooke was with Jan, and stab her mother? It’s—well, it’s unnatural, to say the least.”
Hilda sat very still.
“I’m not sure,” she said at last. “She was there. I don’t know where she hid while the house was searched. Maybe in the stable. Anyhow she got away, and after you let Ida go I suppose she made up the bed.”
“What put you on the track?” he asked curiously.
“I don’t know exactly.” She got up to go. “Ida’s parents said she was devoted to Marian. And then the doctor—I just wondered if Ida had seen Marian at Stern and Jones on Monday.”
He looked at her with shocked surprise.
“You don’t mean that, do you?”
“It could be,” she said rather dismally, and went out.
He read over his notes carefully after she had gone. The waitresses in the restaurant at Stern & Jones did not remember Ida, but they did remember Marian, who was well known in the store. She had come in at three o’clock and had a cup of tea. But she had been alone. As to the will, in a long-distance call to Mrs. Fairbanks’s lawyer, Charles Willis, in Canada for salmon, Willis said that the old lady had kept all three copies, but that Carlton was substantially correct. The estate was divided between Marian and Carlton, with Marian’s share in trust for Janice.
“Although there was a hundred thousand dollars for the girl,” he said.
The will had been made seven years ago. He did not think she had changed it.
After that the inspector went to Mrs. Fairbanks’s bank, and had some difficulty in getting information. In the end, however, he learned that over the past year or two she had been selling bonds and converting the results into cash. This she apparently deposited in the safe-deposit boxes in the basement, of which she rented several. If she had removed this cash the bank had no knowledge of it. It was not an unusual procedure, especially where the customer was a woman. Women resented both income and inheritance taxes, always hoping to escape them. And here the bank added a human note. “As do most people,” it said.
Back at his office he made a brief chronological chart:
In January, Susie had seen Mrs. Fairbanks remove cash from the bank and take it to her box.
In February, Mrs. Fairbanks and Marian had gone to Florida, while the safe was installed, and Susie’s brother-in-law built the peephole.
On the ninth of March Mrs. Fairbanks came home, arriving that night. The next morning she was poisoned with arsenic. The arsenic was shown to have been in the sugar.
She was suspicious afterward of her household, making her own breakfast and at other meals eating only what they ate. But the attempt had not been repeated. From that day in March until the beginning of May everything had been as usual.
After that the so-called hauntings began. It was the first of May when she found the first bat in her room. Later there were two more bats, two sparrows, and a rat over a period of a month, and when another bat was discovered she had gone to the police.
“Someone is trying to kill me,” she had said, sitting erect in her chair. “I have a bad heart, and they know it. But I’m pretty hard to scare.”
He put his notes away and went thoughtfully out to lunch.
He saw Courtney Brooke that afternoon, and he laid all his cards on the table. He liked the boy, but he sensed a change in him when it came to the safe and the money possibly in it. He stiffened slightly.
“I don’t care a damn for the money,” he said. “As a matter of fact it bothers me. I’d rather marry a poor girl. I suppose you can open the safe, sooner or later?”
“It won’t be easy. The makers will send somebody, if we don’t find the combination. I’m putting a guard in the grounds tonight. If the money is there, it won’t leave the house.”
But Brooke still looked uneasy, and Fuller changed the subject. He asked about arsenic. It could be obtained without much trouble, the doctor said; weed killers, of course, but also it could be soaked out of fly-paper, for instance, or even out of old wallpapers and some fabrics. But on the subject of the attack on Jan he waxed bitter.
“Who would want to kill her? The old lady and Ida, well, the old lady had the money and Ida probably knew something. But to try to kill Jan—”
“I don’t think anyone tried to kill her.”
Brooke stared.
“Look at it,” said the inspector. “She could have been killed. She was unconscious, and the nurse was locked up in Amos’s rooms. But she wasn’t killed. She probably began to come to, and she was struck to put her out again. Somebody was there who didn’t want to be seen.”
Brooke said nothing. He gazed out the window, looking thoughtful, as though he was comparing all this with some private knowledge of his own. When he turned to the inspector it was with a faint smile.
“Funny,” he said. “I’ve been scared to hell and gone. You’ve relieved me a lot. I’ve been hanging around under the window every night since it happened.”
But the smile died when he was asked about the night of Mrs. Fairbanks’s death.
“I didn’t see anybody on the third floor,” he said flatly. “That’s Miss Adams’s idea. Just because I spilled some coffee—”
“I think you did,” said the inspector, his face grave.
“I think you saw Marian Fairbanks, and she saw you.”
“How could I? She wasn’t there.”
“Just whom did you see, doctor?”
“Nobody,” he asserted stubbornly. “Nobody at all.”