The Secret

 

I

Hilda Adams was indignant. She snapped her bag shut and got up.

“So that’s that,” she said. “I’m not young enough or strong enough to go abroad, but I can work my head off here. Maybe if I’d had a new permanent and a facial I’d have got by.”

The man behind the desk smiled at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It looks as though this war is about over. Anyhow your heart—”

“What’s the matter with my heart?”

“It skips a beat now and then. Nothing serious. You’ll probably live to a ripe old age. But—”

“It skipped a beat because I was making up my mind to commit a murder,” she said coldly.

She put a hand on the desk. It was alarmingly near an inkwell, and the medical man looked slightly uneasy.

“Now look, Miss Adams,” he said. “I didn’t make these rules. We need nurses over there, all we can get. But suppose you had to fly at twenty thousand feet?”

“I’d like it.” However she had moved her hand, and he was relieved. “All right,” she said. “Maybe I did want to be useful, Dr. Forbes. And maybe I wanted some excitement too. At my age there isn’t a great deal. Well, I know when I’m licked.”

She did not say goodbye. She walked out, and Forbes looked after her thoughtfully. She was a small neat woman, with short graying hair and childlike blue eyes. Her black suit and white blouse showed a sturdy body, and he scowled as he pressed a button on his desk.

“Get me Inspector Fuller,” he said to the girl who came in. “Here’s the number.”

He shoved a piece of paper across the desk and sat back. Damn it all, they could have used the Adams woman abroad. She was capable. No nerves, he thought, and she was a motherly sort of woman, too old to upset the boys and not too old to take care of them. But the Board had ruled against her.

When the telephone rang he took it up sharply.

“Fuller here,” said a voice. “How about it, doctor?”

“I wish you fellows would keep out of my hair,” he said, disregarding the fact that he had little or none. “We had to turn her down, if that’s what you want to know.”

“Why? What reason?”

“She’s no chicken,” the doctor said sourly. “She has a heart too.”

Fuller’s voice was startled.

“Good God! What’s wrong with her heart?”

“Nothing that will kill her. Skips a beat now and then. She says it was because she was feeling like murdering someone. Maybe we can review the case. I’d be damned glad to use her over here anyhow.”

There was more than a hint of alarm in Fuller’s voice.

“Now look,” he said, “lay off that for a week or so, won’t you? I may need her.”

“She says there isn’t much excitement in her life at her age,” the doctor said drily. “I had an idea that wasn’t exactly true. However …”

Fuller was apparently stunned into silence. He grunted.

“Besides, as I’ve said, whether the war’s over or not we still need nurses, Inspector.”

“Crime’s never over,” Fuller said, recovering somewhat. “And she’s one of my best operatives.” His voice was almost pleading. “Don’t let that face of hers fool you, Forbes. She sees more with those blue eyes of hers than you’d believe. I plant her in a house, and what comes up would make your hair curl. This idea of hers has had me running in circles.”

Dr. Forbes was unmoved.

“I wouldn’t count too much on her,” he said. “She looked pretty sore when she left here. Said there wasn’t much excitement in life at her age.”

Fuller laughed.

“I wonder what she calls excitement,” he said. “The last case she was on she warned the guilty woman to kill herself or she would go to the chair.”

“And did she?”

“Did she what? Oh, the woman! Yes, of course. Put a bullet in her brain. Well, thanks a lot, Forbes. I don’t mind her nursing soldiers, but I didn’t want her to be where we couldn’t get her when we need her.”

“Better send her a box of flowers,” Forbes suggested. “She’s not feeling very happy just now. Nor am I,” he added and slapped down the receiver.

Hilda went back to her tidy apartment that afternoon, to her small sitting room with its bright chintzes, where above a Boston fern a canary hopped about in its cage and piped a welcome. And to her austere bedroom where in a locked suitcase she kept the small bone-handled automatic which was as much a part of her nursing equipment as her hypodermic, forceps, bandage scissors, thermometer, and so on.

She took off her neat black hat and ran her hand over her short hair. Then, which was unusual for her, she lit a cigarette and stood by the sitting room window, staring out. All she saw was a series of flat roofs and chimneys, but she was not really looking at them. Her mind was back in the office she had just left. They should have taken her. She knew all about her heart, which had taken a lot of beating and could still take a lot more. Even if she wasn’t young she was strong. She could work circles around most of the younger women she knew.

The canary beside her chirped again, and absently she got some lettuce from her small icebox and gave it to him. It wasn’t good for him, she thought, but after all why not get some enjoyment out of life? It was dull enough as it was. She had lost a month trying to get to the war. Any part of the war. Now with things as they were she would have to register for a case again. She was needed. They were all needed.

She was too disgusted to go out for dinner. She fried an egg on the two-burner electric stove in her kitchenette and made coffee in a percolator. Then, having put up a card table and covered it with a white cloth, she sat down to her supper.

She was still there playing with the food when the flowers came. The landlady brought them up, avid with curiosity.

“Somebody sure thinks a lot of you,” she said. “That box is as big as a coffin.”

But Hilda was staring at it suspiciously.

“Thanks,” she said. “I guess I know who they’re from. And if I had a chance I’d throw them in his face.”

“Well, really!” The landlady looked shocked. “I must say, if someone sent me a box like that I’d be pleased, to say the least.”

“That depends on why they’re sent,” Hilda said coldly, and closed the door with firmness. She didn’t look at the flowers. She merely took the lid off, glanced at the card—which said “To Miss Pinkerton, with admiration and regards”—and, ignoring the remainder of her meal, went to the telephone and dialed a number.

“Give me Inspector Fuller,” she said, and waited, her face a frozen mask.

When she heard his voice she was so shaken with fury that her hands trembled. Her voice was steady, however—steady and very, very cold.

“Why the flowers?” she inquired briefly.

“Now listen, Hilda—”

“Why the flowers? How did you know I’d been turned down?”

“Well, you see, I happened to know Forbes. So when he told me what had happened today—”

“Don’t lie to me. It was a put-up job and you know it. I’m to stay at home and do your dirty work. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Look, Hilda, don’t you suppose I want to be in this thing, too? I’ve pulled all the wires I can and here I am. The country’s got to go on, you know. Anyhow, what with your heart and the fact that we’re neither of us as young as—”

He realized then that she had hung up, and sat gazing rather forlornly at the receiver.

Hilda did not finish her supper. It was her custom when off duty to take a brief walk in the evening, and in many ways she was a creature of habit. In the winter she walked a certain number of blocks. When the weather was warm enough she walked to the park and sat there on a bench with her knitting. Now, taking the box of flowers under one arm and her knitting bag on the other, she stalked downstairs. She left the flowers outside the landlady’s sitting room, and with a grim face started for the park.

She did not even look up when a man sat down on the bench beside her. She knitted bleakly and determinedly until she heard him laugh.

“What a face!” he said. “And I’ll bet you’re skipping stitches, Hilda.”

She said nothing, and Fuller realized it was serious. But then it was always serious. Hilda did not like working for the police.

“Heard a curious story today,” he said. “I call it the mystery of the black dot.”

She looked up then. “Do I have to listen?” she inquired coldly. “I like it here, but I can go home.”

“It’s nothing to do with you, or me,” he said. “Just a nice little spy story. A black dot on a letter to certain prisoners of war in Germany. The letters weren’t meant to reach the prisoners, and didn’t. They were picked up and the dot magnified from the size of a pinhead to a complete message. Neat, wasn’t it?”

He watched her. At least she had stopped knitting, but she made no comment. Not for the first time he thought that, except for her hair and her small mature body, she looked almost girlish. It was her skin, he considered, and the clear blue of her eyes. But her face had not relaxed.

“I might as well tell you now,” she said. “I’m not working for you anymore. I’m too old, and I have a bad heart. I’m going to the country and raise chickens. I’ve always wanted to.”

“Oh, my God! Is that what they’ve done to you?” he said unhappily. “Now listen, Hilda. I put no pressure on that situation. I said if they wanted you they’d have to take you. But I said I could use you if they couldn’t. And I can. Right now.”

“I want no more murder,” she said flatly.

“Would it interest you to try to stop one? After all, life is life, here or at the front, Hilda. There’s a situation building up that’s got me worried. At least let me talk about it. Sometimes it helps me.”

“I can’t stop your talking,” she said briefly, and picked up her knitting again.

He lit a cigarette and stared out over the park. The October sun had set. The nurses had long ago taken their small charges home to early supper and bed, and now the children playing about had come from the tenement districts. For this little hour the park was theirs. His eyes softened as he looked at them.

“Life’s a damned queer thing,” he said. “Look at those kids. They haven’t much, but they like what they have. There are other children who have everything and don’t like anything.” He cleared his throat. “I’m thinking about a girl. She’s perfectly rational, so far as I know. She’s nice to look at, she has money and clothes; she has a young officer who wants to marry her. And I think she intends to kill her mother.”

Hilda looked startled.

“What has the mother done?”

“That’s the devil of it. Nobody knows. There’s an aunt, and she’s about frantic. She thinks it’s a fixed idea, abnormal. I’m not so sure.”

In spite of her anger Hilda was interested. “There are such things as psychiatrists.”

“She’s smart. We’ve tried it. No soap. She wouldn’t talk.”

“How do you know she has this idea?”

“She’s tried it already. Twice.”

He stopped at that. Hilda turned exasperated eyes on him.

“Is this like the sailor who promised to tell the little boy how he’d lost his leg, if he wouldn’t ask any more questions.”

“Well how did he lose it?”

“He said it was bit off,” Hilda said calmly, and Fuller laughed.

“All right,” he said. “The first time she shot at her. The idea is that she was walking in her sleep. Went to the door of her mother’s room and let go twice. Only she missed. That was about two months ago.”

“People do walk in their sleep.”

“They don’t fire a gun twice. The first shot would wake them. And they don’t run cars into trees in their sleep. She did that too, with her mother in the car. This time it was to be an accident.”

“The psychiatrists claim there are no accidents, don’t they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Fuller said, restraining a feeling of triumph. “What I get out of it is that she’s tried twice and weakened each time. I’ve seen where the car hit. Ten feet further on, it would have gone into a ravine. The tree saved them.”

She was silent for some time. Darkness was falling, and the children were wandering back to whatever dingy spots they called home. Overhead the lights of a plane flashed on and off. Its muffled beat mingled with the sounds of traffic, of buses and cars and trucks, to make the subdued roar of the city at night.

“I don’t like it,” Hilda said, after a pause. “I don’t know anything about abnormal psychology, and I loathe neurotic girls.”

“She isn’t neurotic,” Fuller said positively. “She’s in trouble of some sort.”

“And murder’s the way out?”

“There’s one motive the crime writers never touch on, Hilda. That’s desperation.”

“What has driven the girl to that?”

“I wish to God I knew,” he said heavily. “Anyhow the aunt fell downstairs today and cracked some ribs. Apparently it’s okay. She wasn’t pushed. But they need a nurse there. You might think about it.”

“I’ve told you I’m taking no more cases for you.”

He had to leave it at that. They walked slowly back to her small apartment, but Fuller did not go in. He said a few rather awkward words about her disappointment, to which she replied with frozen silence. But as he was leaving she spoke abruptly.

“That girl,” she said. “Does she say these things are accidents?”

“She doesn’t say anything. I gather it’s the mother who does the explaining, sleepwalking and faulty steering gear.”

“Anybody hurt in the car?”

“The girl hurt her arm. That’s all. The aunt’s been to see me. Says they took an X ray at the hospital. No break. She behaved nicely, apparently. Thanked everybody but wasn’t talking much. I’ve seen the surgeon who examined it. He says she didn’t look crazy. She looked—well, defeated was his word. Otherwise she seemed like a nice child.”

“She doesn’t sound like it,” Hilda said drily. But she made no further comment, and he left her at her door and went on. All things considered, he thought, he had done rather well. Hilda would think it over, and after that either she would call him or something would happen and he would call her. She might not like crime work, but her bump of curiosity was very large.

 

II

He went back to his comfortable bachelor apartment and telephoned his office. There was no message however, and he mixed himself a mild drink and sat down in an ancient leather chair to think.

It was the aunt, Alice Rowland, who had consulted him. And he had told Hilda, he had known her slightly, a frail middle-aged woman, and she had told him the story, first with an attempt to conceal the identity of the girl involved and finally laying all her cards on the table.

She was, as he knew, unmarried and until the war she had lived alone in the large Rowland house on Center Avenue. Her brother Charles was a colonel in the Army. He had been stationed in Honolulu, and his wife and daughter had been with him there. He had got them out after the Japanese attacked but had remained himself. Now he was somewhere in the Pacific, and his family was living with the aunt.

The first two to three years had been all right, she said. At the beginning Nina—the sister-in-law—had been suffering from shock, and the daughter had been overanxious. She was only sixteen then, but she might have been the mother rather than the child.

“It worried me at the time,” Miss Rowland said. “I laid in to what had happened, but she wouldn’t talk about the attack or even about the islands. Nina did. She loved Honolulu. But Tony, the daughter, would get up and leave the room if it was even mentioned.”

“She gave no reason, I suppose?”

“No, and she got over it in time. She became entirely normal. She went to boarding school and made friends there. She was very popular, I believe. When she graduated she came back, and a year ago I had an informal tea and gave her as much of a debut as I could in wartime. She’s been home ever since. Nina’s rather delicate, but we all got along splendidly. Or did. Then about two months ago Tony—her name is really Antoinette, after my mother—Tony began to change.”

“Just how? What did you notice?”

Alice Rowland looked distressed.

“It’s hard to put into words,” she said. “She was sick for a day or two, but she got over that. I thought it was because something had happened and she broke her engagement. Maybe that was part of it, but it was the other change in her.”

“What sort of change?”

“Well, she began to watch her mother. Nina’s always been in bed a good bit—she likes being coddled—and Tony’s room is across the hall. Then she practically stopped going out and she kept her door open all the time. Whenever I went in to see her mother she went in too. I got the idea she didn’t want me to see her. Not alone anyhow. And she never let her go out of the house if she could help it. I began to wonder …”

She hesitated, coloring faintly.

“You see,” she explained, “my sister-in-law is a really beautiful woman. She’s always had a great deal of admiration. And Tony worships her father. I—well, I thought there might be someone in love with her and Tony knew it. But nobody calls her up, so far as I know, and I don’t see her mail. As a matter of fact”—she looked embarrassed—“I don’t even know if she sees all of it. Tony watches for the postman and gets it first.”

She came to a full stop. Her hands were moist with nervousness, and she got a handkerchief from her bag and wiped them.

“I hate doing this,” she said. “It—this part of it really isn’t a police matter. I just need advice. But one of my friends wrote asking Nina to lunch and bridge. She got a telephoned regret from Tony. Later I spoke to Nina about it I thought she looked very queer, as if she hadn’t known about it.”

“But she accepts all this—attention?”

“She’s used to being looked after. My brother spoiled her. If she and Tony disagree I wouldn’t know about it. Since the accident with the car Nina’s been in bed a good bit. Dr. Wynant says it’s merely shock, but she has some neuritis too. In her arms.”

“When did this shooting take place?”

“Two months ago. I really do think Tony was walking in her sleep then. She was very unhappy. She’d broken her engagement, just when everything was ready for the wedding. That was probably the reason.” She wiped her hands again. “Such a nice boy, too. Johnny Hayes. He’s a lieutenant in the Army. I suppose he’s gone now, or on his way.”

“Did Mrs. Rowland object to the marriage?”

“No. She was delighted. We all were.”

“Did Tony ever say why she broke her engagement?”

“No. She simply said it was all off. She was quite definite about it. She sent back the presents and took her trousseau chest to a closet on the third floor. It’s still there—her wedding dress and everything.”

“About the shooting, did she say she’d been walking in her sleep?”

“She didn’t say anything. She never has, since. But the gun was under some clothes in a drawer in Nina’s room. Charles had given it to them after the attack. It was loaded, and none of us knew how to unload it.”

“Can you remember that night, Miss Rowland? You heard the shots, I suppose. What then?”

“I ran in, in my nightdress. Nina’s room is behind mine and Tony’s is across the hall. I found Tony on the floor just inside her mother’s door, with the gun beside her. She had fainted, and Nina was trying to get out of bed. She didn’t seem to know what had happened.”

“She wasn’t hurt? Your sister-in-law, I mean.”

“No, but she was badly shocked. It was late at night, and with the house being detached only the servants heard the shots. They ran down and helped put Tony to bed. Nina wasn’t any use. She never is in an emergency. But she said Tony had often walked in her sleep as a child, especially if she was worried.”

“And Tony? How did she react?”

“She seemed dazed. When we put her to bed she just laid there. I tried to find her pulse, but she had hardly any. I called Dr. Wynant, and he gave her a hypodermic of some sort. I told him a little. I didn’t say she’d fired at her mother, but she had, Inspector. I found one bullet in the head of the bed. The other must have gone out the window. It was open.”

“This was two months ago?”

“Yes. She was in bed for a week or so. But I’m very anxious. You see, she fired twice. That’s the part I don’t understand. You’d think, if she were really asleep, one shot would have awakened her.”

About the car accident she was more vague. She had not been there, and Nina had said something had gone wrong with the steering gear. After all the car was old, and few mechanics were available. What she couldn’t understand was where it had happened.

“We have very little gas,” she said. “I can’t imagine Tony going out in the country at all with things as they are, or Nina going with her. Yet she did, and it happened on a remote road. Only Tony was the one who was injured. She hurt her arm, and it’s still stiff. Nina isn’t much good in an emergency, but Tony walked a mile or two, holding her arm and not making any fuss about it. Nina says she was very pale but quite calm.”

“Then all this has been in the last two months? Things were normal before that.”

“Yes.”

“Was there anything else to worry her, outside of breaking her engagement?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why she broke it. And Nina doesn’t either.”

“Didn’t she explain at all?”

“I don’t know what she told Johnny. She merely told her mother the bare fact, as she did me. But she’s very unhappy. She doesn’t sleep or eat. She’s dreadfully thin.”

“Have you talked to young Hayes?”

“Once. He’s bewildered like the rest of us. He doesn’t know what it’s all about. He had to go back to camp of course. We haven’t seen him since. He’ll be going to the Pacific any time now.”

Fuller was thoughtful.

“Of course I’m no psychiatrist,” he said, “but certainly there’s an emotional upset there. Some sort of mental conflict, I imagine. If we knew why she broke off with young Hayes … You’re sure there was nothing else?”

“I can’t think of anything to worry her. In fact, there was good news. My brother wrote that he was probably coming back on some military business.”

“Was this before or after she broke her engagement?”

“After. Why would that affect her anyhow, Inspector? She worships her father. But even that’s rather strange. She …”

She hesitated, as if unwilling to go on.

“Yes?” he prompted her.

“Well, ordinarily I’d have expected her to be pleased, or at least excited. She hasn’t seen him in more than three years. She wasn’t. She acted—well, as though she didn’t want him to come. It worried Nina. She couldn’t understand it either.”

She got up and laid a package on the table.

“I brought the gun,” she explained. “None of us knows anything about guns, and it seemed better to have it out of the house. You know how Honolulu was after the attack, with so many Japanese around. Charles gave it to them—Nina and Tony—and told them how to take the safety catch off. But we were afraid to unload it.”

He opened the parcel. The automatic was lying in a bed of cotton in what looked like a shoe box, and he took it out and examined it. It was a heavy Colt automatic, which had been fired and not cleaned.

“There were two shots fired?”

“Yes.”

“Close together?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“How far from her mother’s door was she when she fired? How many feet?”

“I don’t know. The bed is at the side of the room. Perhaps ten or twelve feet. Maybe more. Our rooms are large.”

“That’s pretty close. How could she miss?”

But Alice Rowland did not know. She stood there, nervously clutching her bag, not relaxing until he had emptied the magazine and put the gun down. Then she opened the bag. “I brought one of the bullets,” she said. “I dug it out of the bed. I don’t know whether you want it or not.”

She produced it, wrapped neatly in tissue paper, and laid it in front of him.

“I do hope you understand.” Her voice was unsteady. “I don’t want Tony to suffer. I don’t want the police around. What I need is advice. What am I to do, Inspector? I can’t talk to Nina about it. She is convinced Tony was walking in her sleep.”

“And you are not?”

“I don’t know what to think,” she said evasively.

She was preparing to go, but Fuller pushed a pad and pencil across the desk to her.

“Suppose you draw a rough sketch of Mrs. Rowland’s room,” he suggested. “Make it of the second floor, showing the general layout. I’ll get you a chair.”

He had done so, and Alice had drawn a shaky outline. It showed four main bedrooms, with a center hall, her own room at the front, her sister-in-law’s behind it, a guest room—also at the front of the house—across from hers, and a wing extending beyond Nina Rowland’s room, containing a room she called the sewing room, a servants’ staircase, and some storage closets. Nina’s bed was to the right of the door from the hall, and there was no window beside it. The two windows shown were opposite the door.

Fuller examined it carefully.

“If the second shot went out the open window she was pretty far off the mark,” he observed. “You’re sure it’s not in the room?”

Alice was positive. She had examined every part of the room carefully. The screens had been taken out, and the window was wide open. There had been two shots and only one bullet. Therefore …

It was after this that Fuller had suggested the psychiatrist, and the family doctor, Wynant, had agreed. It had not been easy. Tony had at first refused entirely. She hadn’t walked in her sleep for years. If they were afraid of her they could lock her in her room at night. In the end however she had gone, only to remain stubbornly noncooperative.

“I never even chipped the surface,” the psychiatrist had reported to Fuller. “It was like working on a china nest egg. She was polite enough, but she simply wouldn’t talk. However she’s got something in her mind, Fuller, and I’d say it isn’t healthy. She’s—well, she’s unnatural for a girl of twenty. Too quiet, for one thing. I had an idea she was hating me like the devil all the time.”

“Maybe she was afraid of you.”

“She’s afraid of something. That’s certain.”

But he had noticed one reaction. Her hands began to shake when he mentioned Honolulu.

“I don’t like guessing,” he said, “but I’d say something happened to her there. They got out after the attack, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” Fuller said. “And why wait almost four years for it to send her off?”

The psychiatrist shrugged.

“The mind’s a curious thing. The more I work with it the less I seem to know! But I’d say she’s heading for trouble.”

Alice Rowland’s story had stuck in the Inspector’s mind. One day he went around to the garage where the car had been taken after Tony wrecked it. It was still there, waiting the delivery of some new parts. He looked it over carefully.

“Got quite a bump,” the garage man said. “Smashed the radiator, for one thing. It’s a wonder the gal and her mother didn’t go out through the windshield.”

“How did it happen?”

“Well, you know how some women drive. Turn their heads to talk to the person with them and socko, they’re off the road.”

“Then it wasn’t the steering gear?”

The garage man stared at him.

“Is that the girl’s story?” he inquired. “Well, take it from me she’s lying. The insurance people were here almost as soon as the car was. They know what happened.”

That was as much as Fuller knew. He had had one other talk with Alice Rowland. She had been frightened both for and about Tony, but any suggestion to her mother that a rest in one of the institutions for nervous cases would help had only met with furious resentment. However, nothing had happened and Fuller had stopped wondering about the case and devoted himself to a crime wave near one of the Army camps. Then, the morning of the day he saw Hilda Adams, Dr. Wynant had called him up.

“I have a message for you, Inspector,” he said. “Alice Rowland fell down the stairs today and cracked some ribs. It’s all right, according to her. Purely accidental. There was no one near her at the time. But she asked me to tell you.”

“Tony’s not involved?”

“So Alice thinks, but I wondered if that nurse you use sometimes is available. What is it you call her?”

“Miss Pinkerton. Her name’s Adams, of course.”

“Well nurses are scarce, and I think Alice is uneasy. She’s going to be flat in bed for a few days. Pretty helpless too.”

“You mean she’s afraid of the girl?”

“I don’t know. But her sister-in-law isn’t much good in a sickroom. As a matter of fact she’s laid up herself. Don’t ask me what’s wrong. She won’t see me. Seems I offended her after the automobile accident. I asked her if she thought it was deliberate and she blew up. I suppose it’s a combination of her old neuritis, plus shock and resentment. Tony’s looking after both of them now.”

“It’s all right, I suppose. Safe, I mean?”

“Tony’s never shown any animus against Alice, but that’s as far as I go.”

Which was the state of affairs when Fuller mixed himself another drink that night after his appeal to Hilda and went to bed. He slept rather badly however, and was awake at six when his telephone rang. He was not surprised to find Hilda on the wire.

“I’ve been thinking about that girl,” she said. “What’s all this about desperation? Can’t she be manic-depressive or dementia praecox or something simple like that?”

“Could be.”

“Well what do you think?” she asked impatiently.

He yawned.

“I’m not at my best at this hour,” he said. “I think she’s in trouble. I don’t think she wants her mother to know, and that it’s bad enough for murder and suicide—in her own mind anyhow.”

“You think she meant to kill herself too?”

“Why try to wreck a car and hope to escape yourself? I thought you were going to raise chickens. The market’s good these days.”

She ignored that.

“Where’s the house, and who’s the doctor?”

“Wynant. You know him.”

“All right. I’ll call him,” she said and rang off, leaving Fuller smiling to himself.

 

III

It was half after seven that morning when Hilda got into her taxi and perched her small suitcase on the seat beside her. She looked washed and ironed, as Fuller always said, but also she looked slightly starched. Her childlike face was rather set Jim, the local taxi driver who usually drove her on her cases, took a quick glance at her in his rearview mirror.

“Thought you were going to the war,” he said. “My wife said she’d be glad to take your canary if you did.”

Hilda’s face stiffened still more.

“I’m too old, and I’ve got a bad heart,” she said sourly. “I can work my legs off here at home, but I can’t do the same thing overseas.”

“Bad heart! You sure look well enough.”

“I am well. If I’d dyed my hair I dare say I could have made it.”

He helped her out with the suitcase when they reached the address she had given. The Rowland house stood by itself, a large four-square brick structure with handsomely curtained windows and an air of complete dignity and self-respect. It was a civilized house, Hilda thought, eyeing it as she went up the cement walk to the porch across its front; the sort of building which implied wealth and security rather than—what was Fuller’s word? Desperation. That what had been a handsome lawn around the building showed neglect meant nothing. Men were scarce, as indeed was all sorts of help.

This was borne out when an elderly maid admitted her. She looked as though she had dressed hastily and she was still tying a white apron around her heavy waist. Hilda stepped into the hall and put down her bag.

“I’m Miss Adams,” she said. “Dr. Wynant sent me. If you’ll show me where to put on my uniform …”

“I’m surely glad you’ve come,” the woman said. “My name is Aggie, miss. I’ll take your bag up. Would you like some breakfast?”

“I’ve had mine, thanks.”

“We’re short of help,” Aggie said, picking up the bag. “The chambermaid’s gone, and the butler left for a war job two years ago. Of course Miss Tony helps all she can.”

Hilda said nothing. She was surveying the long hall, with its heavy carpet, its mirrors and consoles, and the big square rooms opening off it. The effect was handsome but gloomy. The stillness too was startling, as though nothing lived or moved in the house save the heavy figure of Aggie noiselessly mounting the stairs. The stairs, she thought, down which Alice Rowland had either fallen or been thrown the day before. She had a feeling of surprise too. A Tony who helped with the housework was hard to reconcile with a neurotic or possibly insane girl who had twice tried to kill her mother.

Her surprise was augmented when she met Tony in the upper hall, a slender girl in a skirt and pullover sweater, with shining dark hair loose over her shoulders, and looking about sixteen. What was even more important, a friendly girl, with a charming sensitive face and a sweet but unsmiling mouth.

What was all this about? Hilda thought resentfully. She’s a ‘child, and a nice child. Before she knew it she was shaking hands, and Tony was saying, “I’m so glad you could come. I can do housework, but I’m not much good with sick people. Would you like to see your room? It’s old-fashioned, but comfortable.”

It was both, the large guest room Alice had shown on her diagram, and facing the street. The furniture was obviously of the nineties or earlier, but some hasty attempt had been made to prepare it for her: a bunch of flowers on the bureau, a magazine on the table. It had its own bathroom, too, and Hilda heaved a sigh of relief.

The whole layout looked better than she had expected, and the hard core of anxiety which had brought her there began to relax. Then she got her first real look at Tony herself. The hall had been dark. Now in the bright morning light of the bedroom she had to revise her first impression of the girl. She was certainly young and attractive. But the friendliness had been forced, and the lines around her mouth were too tight. Also she looked tired, tired to the point of exhaustion, as though she had not slept for many nights, and there was a silk sling around her neck, although she was not using it.

Aggie had brought in the bag and gone out, and rather unexpectedly Tony closed the door behind her.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, her eyes anxiously searching Hilda’s face. “My mother isn’t very well. She’s nervous, and she likes me to look after her. Anyhow, I expect Aunt Alice will take all your time.”

Hilda took off her neat black hat and placed it on the closet shelf. Casually as it had been done, she had been warned off Mrs. Rowland, and she knew it. Her face was bland as she turned.

“I suppose your aunt’s accident has been a shock, too,” she said. “Just how did it happen?”

“We don’t know. She doesn’t know herself. It might have been the cat. She lies on the stairs sometimes, and she’s dark like the carpet. She’s hard to see.”

“Does Miss Rowland think that?”

She was aware that the girl was watching her, as if she were suddenly suspicious.

“It doesn’t really matter, does it?” she said coolly. “She fell. That’s bad enough. If you’ll come in when you’re ready—it’s the room across—I’ll give you the doctor’s orders.”

She went out, her slim body held rather stiffly, and Hilda felt she had made a bad start. Yet after seeing Tony Rowland the whole story lost credibility. She thought again of Fuller and his statement about desperation as a motive for crime. There was something unusual about the girl, of course—that statement that she would herself look after her mother, for one thing. But she did not look like a psychopathic case, and on the other hand the house, Aggie, even Tony herself in her short skirt and pullover sweater and with her hair sweeping over her shoulders, seemed the very antithesis of tragedy. Only the girl’s eyes …

She got into her uniform, pinning her cap securely to the top of her head. One of the first things she observed to Fuller when she took her first case for him was about her cap. “I don’t want it like a barrel about to go over Niagara Falls,” she said. “I wear it where it belongs.” It was where it belonged as she crossed the hall to her patient’s room.

Alice Rowland lay in the big double bed where she had almost certainly been born. She was only a name and some cracked ribs to Hilda at this point, and she surveyed her without emotion. She saw a thin middle-aged woman with a long nose and a fretful mouth, now forcing a smile.

“Good morning,” Hilda said briskly. “Have you had your breakfast?”

“Yes, thanks. I wasn’t hungry. So stupid of me to fall downstairs, wasn’t it? I’ve gone down those stairs all my life. To be helpless just now …”

She didn’t complete the sentence, and Hilda wondered if she suspected her identity. Apparently she did not, for she lay back looking more relaxed.

“I don’t remember having had a nurse for years,” she said. “But two of us were really too much for the servants.”

“Two of you?”

“My sister-in-law is not very well. Nerves, largely. She’s in bed a good bit of the time. They were all in Honolulu during the raid, and she hasn’t got over it yet. Then of course she worries about her husband, my brother Charles. He’s a colonel in the regular Army. He’s in the Pacific somewhere.”

So that was to be the story, Hilda reflected as she got out her old-fashioned watch and took her patient’s pulse. Everything was to be laid to the war. Mrs. Rowland was worried about her husband and still suffering from Pearl Harbor, after almost four years. Her daughter had shot at her twice and tried to kill her in a car, but the trouble was still to be the Japs.

“Tony looks after her,” Alice said, as Hilda put her watch—it had been her mother’s, an old-fashioned open-case one with a large second hand—back in her bag on the bureau. “He left Nina in her care.” She looked sharply at Hilda. “I suppose she warned you off, didn’t she? She’s a jealous child, you know. She was frightfully upset when I told her you were coming.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Hilda said brusquely. “Why should she mind?”

“I wish I knew,” Alice said, and submitted to having a bed bath and to having her linen changed. She did not revert to Tony, and Hilda, moving her skillfully, saw that her adhesive strapped body was thin and angular. She was a spinsterish fifty, certainly unattractive and as certainly worried. But she was evidently not going to discuss her niece.

“How did you happen to fall?” she inquired, as she drew the last sheet in place.

“I caught my heel near the top and stumbled. It was awkward of me, wasn’t it?”

“Were you alone when it happened?”

“Quite alone,” Alice said rather sharply. “Why? I’d have fallen just the same.”

“I asked because I noticed your niece had hurt her arm. I thought perhaps—”

“That was some time ago. She bruised it.”

As this was evidently all Alice intended to say Hilda went on with her work. She finished the bed, brushed her patient’s thin hair, and then carried out the soiled linen. The hall was empty, the door into Nina Rowland’s room closed and no one in sight. On her way back she went to the staircase and starting at the top examined it carefully. There was always the possibility that some trap had been laid—a string stretched across to catch a heel perhaps. She found no sign of anything of the sort however, and she was still stooping over, her back to the lower hall, when she heard Tony’s voice behind her.

“What on earth are you doing?” she asked.

Hilda was startled out of her usual composure.

“I dropped my class pin,” she said, rather too hastily. “It’s all right. I’ve got it.”

Tony stood watching her as she went back to Alice’s room but Hilda felt a wave of almost palpable suspicion and distrust. And she had made a mistake. Since she had been on the stairs, she should have gone on down, to see the cook about the patient’s diet, to use the telephone, almost anything but her ignominious retreat.

The case was already getting on her nerves, she realized. Of the two women she had seen, Alice Rowland seemed far more the neurotic type than the girl. She began to question whatever story Fuller had heard. After all people did walk in their sleep. There were automobile accidents too without any implication of murder and suicide. Yet the girl’s face haunted her.

She saw her only at a distance after that until lunchtime. Once, glancing out, she saw her meet the postman on the front walk and take the mail from him. The other time she was dressed for the street, returning later with what looked like the morning marketing. She looked older, for she had rolled her hair back and had used lipstick and rouge. But she walked slowly, as though she dreaded coming back to the house again.

At noon Hilda went downstairs to the kitchen to discuss Alice’s lunch. The cook was there alone, a thin little woman who said her name was Stella, and who seemed to carry a perpetual grouch.

“I’ve got a chop for Miss Alice,” she said unsmilingly.

“You’ll have to eat fish, like the rest of us.”

Hilda was accustomed to dealing with obstreperous cooks. She did so now.

“I don’t care for fish. You can boil me an egg. Four minutes, please.”

Stella stared at her and Hilda stared back. But Stella had met her match. Her eyes dropped first.

“All right, miss,” she said. “Four minutes.”

This being settled Hilda went to the kitchen door. There was a brick walk outside, leading a hundred feet or so to a garage and an alley. The next houses stood some distance away, the grounds separated by low privet hedges. Behind her she could hear Stella banging pans about. She turned and looked at her, and the noise ceased.

“Been here long?” she inquired pleasantly.

“Thirty years.”

“Always have a cat?”

Stella glanced at her.

“What’s the cat got to do with it?”

“Miss Rowland thinks her aunt tripped over it.”

“That cat was right here when she fell. I’ve told Miss Tony that. Miss Alice don’t like cats. She says they carry germs. She’s fussy about things like that. Anyhow it’s my cat. It stays with me.”

And as if to answer a black cat emerged, stretching from behind the range. Hilda stooped and stroked it, and Stella’s face softened.

“That fall was an accident,” she said. “Don’t you go thinking anything else.”

“Why should I?” Hilda asked, simulating surprise. “Of course it was an accident.”

Stella however had tightened her mouth and said nothing more.

Alice was dozing when she went back to her, so she ate her lunch alone with Tony in the big square dining room with its sideboard crowded with old-fashioned silver. The girl had evidently abandoned her suspicions. She even made an effort to talk about the difficulty of buying food with two invalids to care for. Her mother was not sick, of course, but she was very nervous. She didn’t like to see people, and she slept badly.

She ate very little, Hilda noticed. She smoked through the meal, taking only a puff or two of a cigarette and then crushing it out on an ash tray, while Aggie agitatedly hung over her.

“Just a bite of this, Miss Tony. It’s caramel custard. You always liked it.”

And Tony taking a little and pushing it around on her plate but only tasting it.

It was toward the end of the meal that she put down her third cigarette and asked Hilda a question, her eyes curiously intent.

“How long have you been nursing?”

“Twenty-odd years.”

“You must have had all sorts of cases in that time.”

“I have indeed. Everything from delirium tremens to small-pox and nervous breakdowns.”

Tony’s eyes were still fixed on her, but if she meant to say more Aggie’s entrance stopped her. Was she about to ask about somnambulism? she wondered.

She was puzzled as she carried Alice’s lunch tray up to her. It had been Fuller’s custom when she took a case for him more or less to lay the situation before her, with all its various angles. The night before however she had cut him off before he could really discuss it with her and her own decision to come had been sudden. So now she wondered what Tony had not said, and at the look of anxiety in her eyes.

She was twenty or so, Hilda thought. Then she must have been not more than seventeen, probably less, when she left the islands. Too young for a love affair, very likely, certainly for one to last so long. And what would that have had to do with two attempts to kill her mother? If indeed she had made such attempts at all.

She was to be increasingly bewildered as she passed Mrs. Rowland’s door. A plaintive voice beyond it was speaking.

“Tony,” it called. “Is that you, Tony?”

Hilda stopped.

“It’s Miss Rowland’s nurse,” she said. “Can I get you something?”

She shifted the tray to one hand and put the other on the doorknob. To her astonishment the door did not open. It was locked. She stared at it.

“I’m afraid it’s locked,” she called.

There was a short silence. Then the woman inside laughed lightly.

“Good gracious,” she said. “The catch must have slipped. Don’t bother. I only wanted to tell Tony I’d have tea instead of coffee.”

Hilda became aware then that Tony had come up the stairs with her mother’s tray. She had stopped abruptly when she saw Hilda, and this time there was no mistake about it. She was frightened. She whirled and set the tray on a hall table.

“I forgot something,” she gasped, and ran down the stairs again.

Hilda was baffled. Why did Mrs. Rowland lock herself in her room? Was she afraid of something in the house? Whoever it was, certainly it was not Tony. Then who, or what? When she went back to her patient she found her watching the door.

“I thought I heard Nina calling,” she said. “Is—is everything all right?”

“Tony forgot something for her mother’s tray,” Hilda said placidly. “I could have carried it up for her if I’d known. With her arm …”

“There are still two servants in the house,” Alice said shortly. “It’s perfectly silly for her to do it.”

 

IV

If Hilda had hoped that Alice Rowland would talk to her that day she was mistaken. Beyond saying that her sister-in-law was what she called delicate she did not refer to the family again. But there was certainly tension in the house. That evening, when Hilda prepared for her usual walk before settling down for the night, it became obvious that Alice did not intend to be left alone and helpless in her bed.

“I have some things to talk over with Aggie,” she said. “She’s been here for years. In a way she’s more of a housekeeper than anything else. Do you mind asking her to come up?”

So Aggie was there when Hilda left, and she was still there, with the door into the hall closed, when she came back.

She came back, as a matter of fact, rather shaken.

She was in the corner drugstore when it happened. She had been in the booth trying to locate Inspector Fuller, and coming out she saw a good-looking young man in uniform with a first lieutenant’s insignia staring at her over the Coke he held in his hand. She had thrown her cape over her white nurse’s uniform, and at first she thought this was what had interested him. As she started out however she saw him paying hastily for his drink. He was on her heels when she reached the street, and he spoke to her before she had gone a dozen feet.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I saw you coming out of the Rowland house. Is anything wrong there?”

There was a sort of sick anxiety in his voice. Hilda halted and looked up at him. He was a tall young man, and just then with the pleading eyes of a whipped dog.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m John Hayes. I’m—I used to be a friend of Tony Rowland’s. She’s not ill, is she?”

“She’s perfectly all right. Her aunt fell downstairs and hurt herself yesterday. That’s why I’m here. It’s not serious.”

It was not like Hilda to explain, but she felt confident she knew who the boy was. Also she liked what she could see of him. He was not too handsome, for one thing. She had a vague suspicion of all handsome men. And his uniform entitled him to consideration.

He did not leave her. He walked along beside her, trying to fit his long steps to her short ones and then abandoning the idea. At first he did not speak, nor did she, When at last he did it was to surprise her.

“Why have they kicked me out?” he inquired. “Do you know? Have they said anything?”

“I only got there this morning. No one mentioned you—unless you are the man Tony Rowland was to marry.”

“That’s right,” he said morosely.

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it, except that the wedding was postponed.”

“Postponed!” His voice was incredulous. “So that’s what they say. Postponed! Tony gave me the complete brush-off two months ago, without any warning. I’d got leave, the plans were all made, I’d …” His voice broke. “She sent back her engagement ring. We’d even got the license. And then—goodbye and be a good boy and take it nicely. Hell,” he said thickly, “I don’t know why I’m still hanging around.”

“Well, why are you?” Hilda asked.

He took this literally. He seemed to be a literal young man.

“I got the measles,” he said. “Missed my outfit when it sailed. I’ll be going soon, of course.”

This seeming slightly anticlimactic, Hilda smiled in the darkness.

“What explanation did she give?” she asked.

“Said she’d changed her mind. Said it was all over. Said she didn’t care for me as she’d thought she did, which was a damned dirty lie.” He stopped and shakily lit a cigarette, offering Hilda one which she refused. “It’s her mother,” he said sullenly. “Her mother or that aunt of hers. I’ve got a mother too. She thinks I’m good enough. Plenty. What’s the matter with them?”

“What about Tony herself?” Hilda said. “Young girls do queer things sometimes. They are neurotic, or they get odd ideas.”

He laughed without mirth.

“Tony’s twenty,” he said. “She’s no neurotic kid, Miss …”

“Adams is my name.”

“Well, if she’s neurotic she got it pretty suddenly, Miss Adams. She was as normal as any girl I ever saw. She visited my sister Nancy, and the whole family fell for her. They still can’t understand it. They think I must have done something.”

“When was all this?”

“A year ago last summer. That’s when I met her. I had thirty days’ leave. We have a summer place in Massachusetts, and if she was having any queer ideas she darned well hid them. She swam and sailed and danced—” He stopped abruptly and stood still. “I suppose I’m making a fool of myself,” he said. “Thanks a lot, Miss Adams. Good night.”

He gave her a stiff-armed salute, wheeled and left her standing in the darkness, rather openmouthed with astonishment.

She did not see Fuller until the next night. Nothing had happened in the interval, and on the surface everything was normal in the Rowland household. Alice, still strapped with adhesive, was fretful but comfortable. Dr. Wynant paid a hasty visit, said she would be up in a few days and hurried away. Tony seemed to have accepted Hilda, with reservations. The house ran smoothly, With Tony doing the marketing and helping with the housework.

Then, on that second day, Nina Rowland asked to see her. Tony brought the message, looking resentful as she did so.

“She’s worried about Aunt Alice,” she said. “It’s silly. I’ve told her she’s all right.” And she added, “She’s very excitable.” Please don’t stay long. All sorts of things upset her.”

“Is it only nerves?”

“She has a touch of neuritis in one arm,” Tony said unwillingly.

“What does the doctor say?”

Tony moved abruptly.

“She’s fed up with doctors,” she said. “All she needs is test, and to be let alone. Is three o’clock all right?”

She might, Hilda thought wryly, have been making a call on royalty. Nevertheless at three o’clock precisely by her old-fashioned watch she knocked at Nina Rowland’s door. Tony admitted her and she stood blinking in a blaze of autumn sunlight. Her first impression was one of brilliant color, of flowers everywhere and bright hangings and chintzes.

Then she saw the woman in the bed. Hilda was startled. What she had expected she did not know, but what she saw was a very beautiful woman, not looking her forty-odd years, and with a breathtaking loveliness that even Hilda—no admirer of feminine good looks—found startling. She was dark, like Tony, but there the resemblance ended. She knew Tony was watching her, but so great was her surprise that it was Nina who spoke first.

“It seemed rather unneighborly not to see you, Miss Adams,” she said. “My little girl takes almost too good care of me. I’m much better today.”

Tony said nothing, and Hilda did not sit down. She stood rather stiffly near the foot of the bed.

“I’m glad you’re better,” she said. “If there is anything I can do …” She felt awkward.

Tony was still watching her, and now she spoke.

“We won’t take you from Aunt Alice,” she said quickly. “She needs you. We don’t.”

Nina Rowland smiled pleasantly, showing beautiful teeth.

“No, of course not. How is poor Alice? Of all things, to fall down the stairs. It’s so—undignified.”

“She’s more comfortable today. The doctor says she will be quite all right.”

But now she was aware that Nina too was watching her. She was still smiling, but her eyes were sharp and wary.

“What does she think happened?” she asked.

So that was it. Hilda had been brought in because the woman in the bed was uneasy. But she had no chance to answer. It was Tony who spoke.

“I’ve told you all that, Mother. She stumbled. I was -in the kitchen when I heard her fall.”

“She’s lived here all her life. I don’t understand it.”

She did not look at Tony, but obviously the remark was made for her. For an instant Hilda wondered if there was some buried resentment there, if the girl and the woman were on less friendly terms than Alice had indicated. It passed quickly however. Nina Rowland put her arms up and fixed a pillow under her head, and Tony moved quickly to help her. She was too late, however. The sleeve of Nina’s bed jacket had fallen back, and showed a heavy bandage on the arm nearest the door.

Hilda glanced away hastily.

“What lovely flowers,” she said. “May I look at them?”

When she turned back the bandage was hidden again, but Tony was very pale. She stayed only a minute or two after that, but she left with a firm conviction that one of the two shots Tony had fired at her mother had struck her arm, and it had not yet been healed.

She told Fuller that night when she found him outside the house as she left for her evening walk, and he seemed impressed.

“Although I don’t know why the secrecy,” he said. “Dr. Wynant knows she shot at her mother, and if the bullet’s still there it may cause trouble.”

“I don’t understand it.” Hilda was thoughtful. “Miss Rowland isn’t the sort to keep quiet about a thing like that. I imagine she’s been spoiled and petted all her life.”

“Well, mother love, my girl!” he said drily. “If Tony actually shot her she may be keeping her mouth shut to save the girl.”

“I don’t think she’s as fond of her as all that.”

He eyed her.

“What would you expect? She’s tried to kill her twice.”

“But she doesn’t know that, does she?”

He stopped abruptly.

“Now look,” he said. “What’s on your mind? Did Tony push her aunt down the stairs?”

She shook her head.

“I think not. She was in the kitchen when it happened. Alice seems pretty positive she stumbled. It’s just—it almost looks as though Nina is suspicious of the girl. Why should she be?”

That was when he told her in detail the story as he knew it from Alice Rowland, the flight from Honolulu, the quiet years, the broken engagement, the shooting, the automobile accident, the psychiatrist’s failure, as well as his statement that Tony had something on her mind and might be heading for trouble. She listened attentively.

“So that’s the layout,” he finished. “Now you’ve seen them all. What do you make of it?”

“None of it makes sense,” she said testily. “The girl’s certainly devoted to her mother. Maybe she’s protecting somebody else.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Alice Rowland perhaps. If Alice wanted to throw dust in your eyes she might have done what she did, gone to you saying Tony’s crazy. She’s no crazier than I am.”

“You don’t like Alice, do you?”

“I take care of my patients. I don’t have to love them.”

He laughed a little as they walked on. Hilda’s sharp tongue and warm heart always amused him.

“What motive would she have had? Alice, I mean.”

“Well, look at it,” Hilda said more reasonably. “She’s lived alone all her adult life. She’s had servants and money. Her house was her own, and her time. Then what happened? She finds her brother’s family parked on her, some of the servants leave, her whole scheme of living is changed, and she’s—well, she’s at a time of life when women are not always responsible. On the other hand….”

She stopped. Fuller eyed her curiously.

“On the other hand what?” he inquired.

“Tony locks her mother in her room when she has to leave her.”

Fuller stopped and stared down at her.

“That’s fantastic,” he said. “Are you sure of it?”

“I don’t usually make statements I’m not sure about,” Hilda said stiffly. “I found it out yesterday. Last night I put the light out in my room and watched her go down to dinner. She looked around to be sure I wasn’t in sight, took a key from the neck of her dress and locked the door from the hall.”

“Then the mother knows?”

“I’m not sure. She’s in bed most of the time. Tony’s been doing it only since I came.”

“Hell’s bells, Hilda!” he said, exasperated. “Why don’t you tell me what you know, without my having to get it bit by bit? How do you know she’s afraid of you? Not that I blame her,” he added. “That baby face of yours never fools me. You’re as dangerous as a rattlesnake, and even it rattles before it strikes.”

Very properly, Hilda ignored that.

“Aggie’s bunions,” she said succinctly.

He stopped.

“Aggie’s what?”

“Aggie’s the housemaid. She has bunions. I told her what to do for them, so she talks. Are we walking or standing still? I need exercise.”

He went on and she explained. When Hilda had gone out the night before Tony had gone out too, and when Aggie tried to take fresh towels to Nina’s room the door was locked, and no key inside it.

“She said it scared the daylights out of her,” Hilda said reflectively.

“Now just why,” Fuller inquired, “did that scare the daylights out of her?”

“Because it hadn’t happened before. Because she doesn’t think Tony fired those shots at all. Because she thinks Nina Rowland tried to kill herself and Tony got the gun from her and took the blame.”

“Could be,” Fuller said. “So now she locks her mother up. What sort of woman is she anyhow? The mother.”

“I’ve told you. Beautiful, spoiled, and self-indulgent. Scared too about something. Maybe about Tony. Maybe about her sister-in-law.”

“So now it’s Nina who’s crazy!”

Hilda was silent for a moment.

“I don’t think any one of them is crazy,” she said finally. “Something has happened, either to them all, or to one or two of them. Personally, I think it happened to Tony.”

“But it’s bad enough to set them all on edge? To put it mildly,” he added smiling.

Hilda did not smile.

“We have only Tony’s word that she was driving the car when the accident happened,” she said. “Maybe the mother did that too. But I’d say she’s pretty fond of her pretty self. She likes lying in bed, with flowers all around her and Tony waiting on her hand and foot.”

“Not the suicidal type, eh?”

“Definitely not.”

They had almost reached the Rowland house. Hilda stopped, and Fuller put a hand on her shoulder.

“Look,” he said. “I want you to take care of yourself in that house. I’m beginning to wish you hadn’t gone. This isn’t a question of crime. No real crime’s been committed, according to the way I see it. But one may be. There’s tension there, and it may snap. Keep out of the way, Hilda. Watch yourself.”

He left her then, and Hilda walked on. She was quite sure she saw a masculine figure lurking in the shrubbery across the street and wondered if it was Johnny. He did not approach her, however, and looking back from the porch she realized that whoever it was was not in uniform.

 

V

That night Alice Rowland asked Hilda to sleep in the room with her. Hilda had given her an alcohol rub and the tablet the doctor had ordered to make her sleep, and Alice held the pill in her hand and looked at it.

“I suppose it’s all right, isn’t it?” she said, with a bleak smile. “I mean—one or two odd things have happened, and—I suppose I’m being childish, but will you look at it?”

Hilda examined the pill.

“It’s all right. That’s the way they’re always marked. What do you mean by odd things, Miss Rowland?”

Alice did not answer directly. She took the pill with a swallow of water and put her head back on her pillow.

“You’ve been here a day or two,” she said. “I wonder what you think of us.”

“I haven’t seen much of the others,” Hilda said calmly. “Miss Rowland seems very fond of her mother. I’ve only had a glimpse of Mrs. Rowland.”

“I’m thinking of Tony. You’ve seen her quite a bit. Do you think she’s worried about anything?”

“She seems rather serious, for a girl of that age,” Hilda said evasively.

“That’s all? You think she’s perfectly normal? Please be honest, Miss Adams. I’m anxious about her. She broke her engagement a couple of months ago, and she hasn’t been the same since.”

“It may have upset her more than you realize. Unless she didn’t care for the man.”

“Care for him! She was quite shamelessly in love with him.”

Hilda raised the window for the night before she made any comment. The man across the street had apparently gone. She was more and more sure it had not been Johnny, but her face was bland as she went back to the bed and pulled up an extra blanket.

“I may have seen him last night,” she said. “A young officer saw my uniform and spoke to me. He was afraid Tony was sick.”

“I don’t see why he would care,” Alice said, her voice sharp. “She treated him outrageously. Everything was ready. His people were coming to stay here, and the presents were lovely. Then all at once it was over. I felt like a fool. It was too late to do anything but announce the postponement in the newspapers, and people kept calling up. All I could say was that he had been moved unexpectedly. I didn’t say he’d gone overseas, but I let them think so.”

“I see,” Hilda said. “Was that when she started walking in her sleep?”

Alice looked startled.

“Who told you that?”

“Aggie said something about it.”

“What else did she tell you?”

“Just that Tony was inclined to sleepwalking, and not to waken her suddenly.”

Alice’s suspicions were lulled. She settled back on her pillows.

“It was about that time,” she said. “Things were pretty confused here, what with calling off the wedding and everything. Her mother went to bed in a sort of collapse, and Tony looked like a ghost. Then she walked in her sleep one night and—I suppose you’ll hear it sooner or later—she found a loaded gun and almost shot her mother.”

Hilda registered the proper surprise and horror.

“Perhaps she was remembering the Japs,” she said. “Where did she find the gun?”

“Nina had it in her room. Tony knew where it was, of course. You see, don’t you, why I’m worried about the child? And now I’m afraid she’s sleepwalking again. I thought if you didn’t mind the couch here tonight—you’ll find it quite comfortable.”

“What makes you think she’s walking in her sleep?” Hilda persisted.

“She came in here last night after you had gone to bed. It must have been about two o’clock. I wakened to find her standing beside the bed looking down at me, with the oddest look on her face. She—I spoke to her, and she gave a start and shot out without saying a word.”

“You’re sure it was Tony?”

“She’d left the door open into the hall, and the light was on there. I saw her plainly.”

“Maybe she merely wanted to talk to you, and then decided against it.”

“Why should she go like that? I was awake, and she knew it.”

“Then you don’t think she was walking in her sleep?”

Alice looked annoyed.

“I don’t know,” she said fretfully. “I don’t know anything about girls. I certainly don’t know anything about Tony these days. She’s changed. She’s not herself at all. I’m half afraid of her.”

Hilda slept on the couch in Alice’s room that night. Or rather she lay there, keeping an eye on the door and trying to think things out. That Fuller was right, and that the tension in the house was building toward a crisis of some sort she felt confident, but what such a crisis might be she did not know. The vulnerable person was Alice, comparatively helpless in her bed. Yet she could see no rational reason for any danger unless she was involved in the shooting episode. Someone had fired the shots. According to Fuller’s story Tony had been found in a faint just inside her mother’s door, with a gun beside her and Nina trying to get out of bed. If Nina had been wounded she had managed to conceal it in the general excitement. Would that be possible? she wondered. Still, as Fuller said, if she was protecting her-own child …

It would have required considerable stoicism, she thought, but it could have been done, the bloody sheets rinsed out in the bathroom, a self-applied tourniquet to stop the bleeding, and perhaps the assistance of one of the servants. Not the garrulous Aggie. Stella, possibly. She determined to talk to Stella that next morning.

Alice had had her tablet and slept soundly. Because the night was warm Hilda had left the door open, and at two o’clock she heard a faint noise in the hall. It sounded like a door being stealthily opened and closed again, and unconsciously she braced herself. Nobody came into the room, however, and she got up quickly and looked out.

Someone was moving quickly and quietly down the staircase. She could not see who it was. The lower hall was dark, but whoever it was below was moving toward the back of the house, with the ease of long familiarity.

Hilda caught up her kimono and put it on as she went. For a woman of her build she could move rapidly and quietly, and she did so now. She was at the foot of the stairs almost before the door into the service wing at the rear had closed. After that however she went more cautiously. The back hall was dark and empty, but someone was in the kitchen beyond. She heard the lifting of a stove lid and the striking of a match. There was a brief interval after that, practically noiseless. Then, so rapidly that Hilda had barely time to get out of the way, the unknown was opening the door in the darkness and on the way upstairs again.

Hilda had to make a split-second decision, whether to follow and identify the figure or to see what had been put in the stove. She chose the latter and went quickly to the kitchen.

It was quite dark, save for a small gleam of something on fire in the range. She made her way to it, striking her shins on a chair and making considerable noise as she did so. There was no indication that she had been heard, however, and she limped to the stove and managed to pry up the lid. The fire beneath was low, and whatever was burning had not been entirely consumed.

She found a box of matches by fumbling over the top of the plate heater where she knew Stella kept them, and lit one. The mass slowly charring was a surgical dressing of cotton and gauze bandage. Only an end of the bandage remained. The cotton was practically gone, but she had no doubt whatever as to what it was. Someone had burned a dressing from Nina Rowland’s arm.

She felt a little cold as she went back to her room. Anyone in the house except Alice could have crept downstairs, but why the secrecy? There seemed to be no question that Tony had fired the shots at her mother. But if she had really injured her why run the risk of infection now? Could there have been another gun in the case, and Tony’s shooting a coverup, perhaps for Nina, perhaps for Alice Rowland? Had the story as Alice had told it to Fuller been a clever device to protect someone, possibly herself?

Yet if it had been Tony the night before in the kitchen, she seemed entirely natural the next morning at the breakfast table. She was wearing again the sweater and short skirt, with her hair loose about her face, making her look about sixteen again. And she ate a normal breakfast, to Hilda’s relief. In fact she looked as though she had had a reprieve of some sort, which was the more surprising because of what she said.

“We’ve had a letter from my father,” she observed. “He’s not coming home after all. Things in the Pacific have changed. Everything is moving fast now.”

“That must be rather a blow,” Hilda said drily, and saw Tony flush.

“It has rather upset Mother,” she said. “She was counting on seeing him soon. But he’s a soldier. He wouldn’t want to miss anything even if he could.”

Hilda made her way upstairs. To her surprise Nina’s door was open and her room empty. And as she reached the upper hall she heard voices in Alice’s room. Evidently Nina was there, and equally evidently the sisters-in-law were quarreling. Nina’s voice was raised and shrill.

“You’re having her watched,” she said stormily. “That’s why the nurse is here, isn’t it? First a psychiatrist, now a nurse. What are you trying to do? Prove she’s crazy?”

Alice’s voice was hard.

“I think you’re hysterical,” she said. “You can’t blame me because Charles isn’t coming home. As for Tony, if you think it’s normal for a girl to shoot at her own mother …”

“She never shot at me, and you know it. She had the gun and it went off in her hand. She’d never fired one in her life before.”

“She did pretty well, in that case,” Alice said drily.

“Just remember, you found her. She doesn’t remember anything about it. It’s your story, not hers. And I’m no fool, Alice.” Nina’s voice was still high. “I know you don’t want us here. I begged Charles to make other arrangements, but he said you would be hurt if he did. If he’d only come home …”

Hilda heard Tony coming up with Nina’s breakfast tray and had only time to duck into her own room. When some time later she went back to her patient she found her indignant and highly nervous. She looked up at Hilda resentfully.

“Nina’s been here,” she said. “She thinks I’m trying to have Tony put away.”

“And are you?” Hilda asked bluntly.

Alice looked shocked.

“Certainly not. But I am worried. She may do something dangerous, to herself or someone else.”

“I suppose,” Hilda said, “there’s no chance Mrs. Rowland had the gun that night and Tony tried to take it from her?”

Alice laughed.

“To shoot herself?” she said bitterly. “With looks like that? And a husband who adores her? I assure you she likes to live, Miss Adams. She likes clothes and money. She’s fond of herself, too. She’s had a wonderful life. While I …”

She did not finish, and Hilda, going methodically about her work that morning, realized that there were undercurrents in the house which were being carefully concealed from her. Nevertheless in spite of the quarrel between the two women the day was better than the preceding one. After she had settled her patient with a book that afternoon she wandered down to the kitchen.

Tony was out, and Stella was pouring milk out of a bottle for the cat. She gave Hilda a curt good afternoon. Hilda merely nodded and sat down.

“I want to ask you about the night of the shooting,” she said without preamble. “What do you know about it?”

“Me? Nothing. I heard the shots and came down. So did Aggie.”

“Is that all?”

“I don’t know what you mean, miss.”

“Who attended to Mrs. Rowland’s arm that night?”

“Her arm? I never heard anything about her arm. What was wrong with it?”

Hilda watched her, but Stella’s thin face was impassive. She tried again.

“How often do you find that something’s been burned in your stove when you come down in the morning, Stella?”

This time Stella gave her a sharp look and turned away.

“My stove’s the way I leave it, miss. If you don’t mind my asking, what business is it of yours?”

Hilda knew defeat when she faced it.

“All right,” she said resignedly. “Who put Mrs. Rowland to bed the night this shooting took place?”

Stella looked relieved. “She never really got out of it. She was faint, as well she might be. Miss Alice helped get her settled after the doctor came for Miss Tony. Or maybe it was Aggie. That’s all I know.”

It was possible, Hilda thought as she got up. Alice might have tried to avoid scandal by dressing Nina’s arm herself. The story that one bullet had gone out the open window had been hers. She could have washed the sheets too, and ironed them in the sewing room where an electric iron was kept ready for use. But when she followed Dr. Wynant down the stairs later and put the question to him in the library he merely laughed at her.

“Nina shot!” he said. “You don’t know her. If she banged her finger she’d rouse the neighborhood.”

“Her arm is bandaged.”

“My dear girl,” he said pontifically. “Don’t ask me why she wears a bandage. Don’t ask me why she lies up there in bed either. She’s a perfectly strong healthy woman who likes to be coddled, that’s all. And that,” he added, “is one of the reasons why she doesn’t have me anymore. I told her so.”

Hilda eyed him coldly.

“So that’s all?” she said, her blue eyes icy. “It’s easy, isn’t it? Tony has tried twice to kill her mother, but her mother likes to be coddled, so it’s all right with you.”

“My dear Miss Adams …”

“Don’t dear Miss Adams me,” she said tartly. “They don’t have you anymore. You think none of this is your business. Well, I’m sorry, but it is mine.”

“I suggested that you come here. You might remember that,” he said, highly affronted.

“Then I have a right to know certain things.” She watched him put down his bag and look at her resignedly. “How were they—Tony and her mother—when they first came here from Hawaii? You saw them then, didn’t you?”

“Certainly. Nina was complaining, but all right. Tony didn’t adjust very well. In the sense that a neurotic cannot adapt himself to a change of environment. I suppose you can say she was neurotic. She avoided me, for one thing. I thought she was rather afraid of me. We became good friends later, of course.”

“And Mrs. Rowland? What did she complain about?”

“Oh, just small things. The cold weather, a personal maid she’d been fond of had to be left behind, Alice’s rather rigid housekeeping. Nothing serious.”

“And Miss Rowland herself?”

“She did her best. It was rather hard on her. She and Nina are not very congenial, but as Nina spends most of her time in her room it hasn’t mattered much. It has helped since Tony came back from school, of course. She’s a friendly child, even if she does walk in her sleep.”

He picked up his bag. He was not young and he looked very tired. Hilda felt rather sorry for him, although she stiffened at his parting words.

“Don’t let your imagination carry you away, Miss Adams,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with Nina Rowland except a chronic case of inertia and an occasional neuritis in the arm. You’ll find that’s the trouble now, and Tony has merely tied her up as usual.”

 

VI

Hilda found Alice asleep when she went upstairs, and an Aggie with, the face of a conspirator waiting for her in the hall.

“Miss Tony’s gone,” she whispered. “The car’s back and she’s tying it out. Would you like to see the wedding dress and her other things? I’m going to pack them away tomorrow, so if you care to look.”

Hilda agreed. Nina’s door was closed, and she had nothing to do for the moment. She found that the trousseau had been relegated to the third floor, a floor she had not seen, and she surveyed it with interest. In general it followed the pattern of the second, with the servants’ quarters in the rear. The wedding clothes were in closets in the room over her own, and Hilda cautiously opened the door and going across raised a window shade.

“The dresses are in the closet,” she said. “Such lovely things! And the wedding dress is a dream—wait until you see it.”

But it became evident after a moment that Hilda was to wait some time to see it, if ever. Aggie moved the sheet which had covered it and turned a bewildered face to her.

“It’s gone!” she whispered. “Look, here’s where it was. Whoever could have taken it?”

“Maybe she took it herself.”

“Why? Where is it? It’s not in her room.” She poked around among the things hanging there. “Her cocktail dress is gone too. Do you think—maybe she’s changed her mind? Maybe she’s going to marry him anyhow. Everything was here yesterday. I showed them to Stella’s sister.”

“Did you see her going out today?” Hilda asked practically.

“No. I didn’t. Maybe Stella did.”

But Stella had not seen Tony leave the house. She had been upstairs changing her uniform after lunch, and after cautioning both women to silence Hilda went back upstairs.

Tony’s room was still empty when she went along the hall, and after ascertaining that Alice was still asleep Hilda went back to it and stepped inside. It was the usual girl’s room, feminine with its pale blue carpet, its white curtains, and its rose-colored bedspread and silk quilt neatly folded at the foot of the chaise longue. There was a tennis racket in a frame, and on the toilet table the photograph of a man in uniform, evidently of her father. Hilda inspected it carefully. He was a fine-looking man with a strong nose and jutting jaw, but with Tony’s sensitive mouth. It was inscribed “To Tony, my own girl, from Dad.”

But the wedding dress was not in the closet, and the small desk by a window yielded nothing. The only incongruous thing, in fact, was the doorstop. It was Volume XIII of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and she was stooping over it when she heard Aggie behind her.

“Is it here?”

“Is what here?”

“The dress. I’m scared, Miss Adams. I was responsible for it Only yesterday Miss Alice asked me about it and I said it was all right.”

“They won’t blame you,” Hilda said soothingly. “I imagine she took it herself. She may be giving it to someone.”

“Giving it away!” Aggie screeched. “It cost a fortune. Her father sent her the money for it. She’d never do that.”

There was no use asking Aggie about the Encyclopedia. She was running around like a wild woman, looking under the bed, frantically opening bureau drawers and moaning to herself. Her search was only interrupted by the ringing of the front doorbell. She tried to smooth her hair as she went down the stairs, and Hilda watched her as she opened the front door.

Standing on the porch outside was a woman in her early fifties, gray-haired and handsomely dressed.

Aggie stood as if stunned, staring at her, and the woman smiled faintly.

“I want to see Miss Tony, Aggie,” she said. “I know she’s at home. I just saw her driving back to the garage.”

Aggie found her tongue.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hayes. Maybe she’s in, but I don’t think …”

Mrs. Hayes however showed grim determination. She walked into the hall and stood there, planted with dignity and firmness.

“Either she sees me now or I’ll wait until she does,” she said flatly. Then she saw Hilda in her uniform at the head of the stairs. “Is someone sick? I didn’t know …”

Aggie explained, her voice bleak, and when she had finished, Mrs. Hayes walked with deliberation into the living room, leaving Aggie staring at her.

Behind her Hilda heard Tony’s voice.

“Who is it?”

She turned. Tony was standing near her door, her hand holding to the frame of it as if for support. Her face had lost all its color.

“I think it’s Mrs. Hayes.”

Tony said nothing. She seemed to be bracing herself. Then with her head held high and a strange look of determination in her face she passed Hilda and went down the stairs. The living room door closed behind her, and an agitated Aggie came up and sat down abruptly on a hall chair.

“I couldn’t help it, Miss Adams,” she said wretchedly. “You saw how she walked in. Right over me, so to speak. It’s his mother.”

“So I gathered,” Hilda said. “Don’t worry. You couldn’t stop her. Aggie, how long has that book been holding back Miss Tony’s door?”

“What book? I didn’t notice. She does her own room these days.”

“Will you do something for me? Get another volume from the encyclopedia set in the library, and put that one in my room. Hide it in a drawer. I’d like to look at it.”

She went back to her patient’s room, and a few minutes later she saw from the front window Mrs. Hayes going down the walk to her waiting taxicab. She walked slowly and almost unsteadily, and before she got into the cab she looked back at the house with her pleasant face bleak and incredulous. It was some time before Tony came up again. She did not go into her mother’s room. She went into her own and closed and locked the door.

There was no sign of her that night at dinner. To Hilda’s surprise Nina was there, in a flowing housecoat with long sleeves, and with a troubled look on her face.

“Tony won’t be down,” she said. “She’s not well. She said she didn’t want a tray. I wish she would eat more,” she added as Hilda sat down. “She’s so very thin lately. Perhaps I don’t understand girls anymore. It’s a long time since I was one myself.”

“Why not have Dr. Wynant go over her?”

“She won’t let him. She’s been very odd the last few weeks. She used to be so gay, Miss Adams. I don’t understand it at all.”

Hilda saw that she was using both arms, but the left one rather stiffly. And she did not mention Tony again. She chattered amiably through the meal. It was nice to be out of her room again. And wasn’t it sad that her husband was not to get back after all? She missed him dreadfully. And she missed the personal maid she had had so long in Honolulu. In fact of the two, Hilda considered as she ate stolidly, the husband’s absence was a grievance, but the maid’s was a grief.

“She gave such a wonderful massage,” Nina said, and sighed. “And she was so good with hair. I have never looked the same since.”

Not receiving the expected comment on this she went on. The maid’s name was Delia, and she was to have sailed with them to the mainland. Only at the last minute she didn’t show up. Her brother came instead, with some story about Delia’s being suspected of working with the Japs. Of course it was all nonsense. Colonel Rowland never kept any papers in the house.

There was more, of course: her resentment of losing Delia, the inability to get the beauty treatments she was used to, and Alice’s niggardly housekeeping “with only two servants.” Hilda ended her meal with the feeling that Nina was a completely self-centered, self-indulgent woman, and a little puzzled too about Delia, the paragon, who was suspected of working with the Japanese.

“This maid of yours,” she said as she got up. “What does she say about the accusation?”

“I don’t know.” Nina’s voice was resentful. “She’s never even written to me. As good as I’d been to her, too.”

“But you think she is innocent?”

“Maybe she had her price. Most of us have, haven’t we? Only I don’t see how she could know anything important, when we didn’t even know it ourselves.”

Neither one of them had mentioned Mrs. Hayes’s visit, and after dinner Nina went upstairs again. Hilda heard her rapping at Tony’s door, but there seemed to be no answer.

At Alice’s request Hilda again left Aggie in her patient’s room that night when she went out for her evening walk. Alice was nervous, either because of the scene that morning with Nina or because she had learned of Mrs. Hayes’s visit. Evidently she had, for she was querying Aggie as Hilda in the room across got her cape and her bag.

“What did Tony tell her?”

“I don’t know, Miss Alice. I don’t listen at doors.”

“You do when it suits you,” Alice said petulantly. “Now, when I need to know you go virtuous. How did Mrs. Hayes act when you let her out?”

“I didn’t let her out. She just went.”

They were still bickering when Hilda left the house. And after what had happened she was not surprised to find young Hayes waiting for her across the street. He angled over and caught up with her, and under a street lamp she saw that his young face looked set and stern.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said without preamble. “What goes on in that house? What sort of song-and-dance did Tony give Mother this afternoon?”

“I haven’t an idea,” said Hilda mildly.

“You’re sure you don’t know?”

“I don’t usually listen at doors.” Hilda recalled Aggie and smiled faintly. “Why? What happened?”

“All I know is that Mother is in bed at her hotel, the Majestic. She won’t talk, but she’s in poor shape, crying and carrying on, and I’ve been across the street here for hours. What’s wrong anyhow? It must be pretty bad. Mother’s got plenty of guts usually. All she says now is that I mustn’t try to see Tony again, or bother her.”

Hilda was silent. Had Tony told Mrs. Hayes about shooting her mother? Was that it? Or was there something else, something which went deeper, of which the shooting was a result? Whatever it was she was confident it was not over. But she could not say that to the boy beside her.

“I’ll tell you this,” she said at last. “Tony didn’t do whatever she did easily, Lieutenant. She’s still shut in her room.”

He drew a long breath.

“I’ve been over everything,” he said. “There may be insanity in the family. Mother would be terrified of that. It must be something,” he added naively. “She did care for me, you know. We were frightfully in love. She wrote me every day in camp. I have her letters and I keep rereading them. They’re wonderful.”

“You never did anything to make her change her mind? Or cause this change in her?”

“Never. There’s nothing in my past either. I’ve been around a bit. Who hasn’t? But nothing that matters. Certainly not since I knew her.”

He left her soon after, a sadly perplexed and dejected young man, and Hilda turned back to the house. She was as bewildered as he was, and she was still debating the situation when she approached the house. In her rubber heels she walked lightly, and the street lamps left a small oasis of darkness at the foot of the walk. She roused suddenly to see two people there, a man and a girl, and to realize the girl was Tony. She was confident they had not noticed her, and she turned sharply and crossed the street, stopping in the shadows to watch.

She could not hear much that they were saying. The street was wide and their voices low. That there was an argument of some sort going on was evident, however, for once Tony tried to break away and the man caught her by the arm and raised his voice.

“Maybe you’d like me to report it,” he said. “It would make a nice story, wouldn’t it?”

“You wouldn’t. You don’t dare to.” Tony’s voice was raised too.

“Oh, wouldn’t I? Wait and see.”

Hilda heard no more. A moment later Tony had rushed back to the house. Hilda thought she was crying. But her own eyes had turned to the window of Alice’s room upstairs. Someone, probably Aggie, had been standing there.

 

VII

The scene had roused Hilda’s quick curiosity, and as the man started down the street she trailed him at a safe distance. At the end of two or three blocks he stopped, evidently waiting for a bus. The street however was dark. He was only a vague rather sinister figure as he stood there, and as the bus rumbled along she decided to follow him. He paid no attention to her. He got on first, throwing away a cigarette as he did so and swinging on easily. Even then she could only get a general impression of him, a man of probably forty, in a shabby blue suit and a well-worn brown hat.

If he had noticed her he gave no indication of it. He seemed to be absorbed in thought, and Hilda decided to find out his destination. But he stayed on the bus almost to the end of the line and she began to worry about her patient. Then abruptly he got up. Two or three other passengers alighted also, and Hilda was the last to leave. He was some distance ahead of her when, drawing her blue cape around her, she set out to follow him.

He stopped once to light a cigarette, and so far as she could tell he was still unaware of her. She was in a part of town she did not know, but he seemed at home in it. The streets were empty, the buildings dark and forbidding, and his own figure not so distinct. She began to feel uncomfortable. Then she lost him altogether, in front of one of a row of small dilapidated houses. So far as she could tell they had no numbers, and she began counting from the end of the block. She had lost him at either six or seven, and she went on past, making a mental note of the location.

Which was the last mental note she made of anything for some time.

When she came to she found herself lying on the pavement of a narrow dirty alley between two houses, with her purse gone and her head aching wildly. It was a number of minutes before she could get to her feet, and then it was to find herself retching violently and her legs almost unable to hold her.

There was no sign of her assailant. The street was empty and quiet when she staggered to it, and she sat down on a doorstep and tried to reconsider her situation. She was miles from the Rowland house or from her own apartment, she had no money, and what was even worse she had fallen for what was the cheapest and most obvious of tricks.

It was some time before she could think coherently. Evidently he had known who she was all along. Probably, Tony had seen her and told him when he tried to hold her.

“My aunt’s nurse is watching you across the street. Let me go or I’ll call her.”

It had been easy enough after that, she thought sourly. Her uniform, her hatless head, and the long wait for the bus. When she had followed him …

She felt better after a few minutes. Her head still ached but her legs would at least obey her. She managed with several stops to reach a drugstore, and the man behind the counter looked startled when she more or less stumbled through the door.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’ve been knocked down and robbed. May I use the telephone? I have no money.”

“Sure.” he said. “Don’t bother with the booth. Use this.” He put the instrument out on the counter and she sat down gratefully. It was a moment or two before she felt able to use it, however, and she looked up to see him putting a glass in front of her.

“Aromatic ammonia,” he said. “It may help.”

She drank it and before long was able to call Fuller at his apartment.

“It’s Hilda,” she said. “I’m at …” The man supplied the address and she gave it. “I’ve had a little trouble. Been knocked out and robbed. Can you send for me?”

“I’ll come myself. What the hell are you doing out there?”

“It’s a long story,” she said, and hung up abruptly.

When at last he arrived she had lost the aromatic ammonia and diverse other things in the gutter outside, and the man from the drugstore was standing on the pavement beside her, offering paper tissues in lieu of handkerchiefs. He looked surprised when he saw the police car with its uniformed driver.

“Lady’s in poor shape,” he said when he saw the Inspector. “Guess you’d better take her to a hospital.”

“I’m all right,” Hilda said disgustedly. “Just a plain damned fool, that’s all. Do I get in the car or do I stand here all night?” Fuller smiled. Hilda was herself again, he realized. She might look like the wrath of God—as indeed she did—but she was practically normal. He made no fuss over her as she got into the back of the car. He simply followed her, rolled up the glass to cut off the men in front, and lit a cigarette.

“Talk when you’re ready,” he said cheerfully. “That bump may ache but it won’t kill you.”

“I wish you had it You wouldn’t be so happy.”

“All right. When one of my best operatives lets herself be lured to this part of town and is knocked out, either she isn’t smart or she had a good reason. Which is it?”

“He fooled me. He didn’t pay any attention to me. I ought to know better, at my age.”

Fuller eyed her.

“Very clear. Very lucid,” he said. “Maybe we’d better go to a hospital after all.”

“I’m going back to my case,” she said firmly. “It all started there. He was talking to Tony Rowland on the street. That’s why I followed him.”

She told her story as briefly as she could, describing the man and the method by which he had disposed of her. Especially however she related Tony’s crying, her attempt to escape, the man’s threat to report something or other, and the likelihood that he had then been told who and where she was, and that she might overhear.

“He put on a good act,” she said. “But then everybody’s doing it in the house. Tony Or someone else burns a surgical dressing at night in the kitchen stove. Today her wedding dress is missing. It cost a fortune, and it’s gone. She uses the Encyclopedia Britannica for a doorstop, and this afternoon she saw Johnny Hayes’s mother and sent her back to her hotel in hysterics.”

“Good God,” Fuller said. “Are you sure you’re all right? It sounds like delirium.”

“It’s all true,” Hilda said, trying to lean her head back against the car cushion and deciding against it.

“And after all that you still think the girl is normal?”

“I’m not sure I’m normal myself.”

She was determined to go back to her case, and it was useless to argue with her. Fuller tried it, only to meet with stubborn silence. Finally he turned on the top light and surveyed her. Some of her color had come back, although her face was dirty, her short gray hair standing in every direction and her white uniform smeared. But her eyes were cold and hard and very Hilda-ish at her most obstinate.

“All right,” he said resignedly. “If you can take it I can. It’s your head and your headache.”

Before he left her however he got a description of her assailant and was thoughtful for some time, trying to assort the various items. The surgical dressing he did not bother about. “If she shot her mother and doesn’t want it known that’s their affair.” But the wedding dress puzzled him.

“Would she burn it?” he suggested. “After all it couldn’t have been a pleasant thing to have around.”

“The furnace isn’t going. She may have sold it.”

“I see. You think this man was after money?”

“He was after mine,” she said drily. “He got my mother’s watch too. That’s all I care about.”

He got a description of the watch, in case it was sold or pawned. Then he sat back and looked at her again.

“Now see here,” he said. “What we want to know is why the girl shot at her mother, if she did. Why they had the car accident, and if there may be another one. That’s why you’re there. You must have some idea by this time.”

“Ideas!” she said bitterly. “I’m filled with them. One thing I’d like to know is why Tony is consulting Volume Thirteen of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

He eyed her with annoyance.

“See here,” he said, almost violently, “if you’ve got any theory on this case I want it. It’s no time to hold out on me.”

But Hilda merely shook her head, a gesture which proved disastrous, and remained silent.

 

VIII

It was one in the morning before they reached the house, and some time later before Aggie in a dressing gown opened the front door an inch or two and gazed with terrified eyes at the two of them. Hilda was urbanely calm.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said. “I was knocked down and my bag taken. This gentleman found me and kindly brought me home. Is everything all right?”

Aggie had found her tongue.

“I’ve been scared to death about you,” she said. “Yes, they’re all asleep. Maybe I’d better stay with Miss Alice tonight.”

“I’m perfectly all right,” said Hilda, staggering slightly. “Go to bed, Aggie, and don’t worry.” She turned to Fuller formally. “And thank you very much. You’ve been most kind.”

The Inspector took the hint, mumbled something and departed, while Hilda sat down on a chair in the hall and watched the walls rotate and finally settle back to where they belonged. Aggie was still looking startled.

“Who did it?” she asked. “I declare, the amount of crime since this war makes a body wonder. Did you see him?”

“I caught a glimpse of him,” Hilda said cautiously. “A man about forty and very well dressed. He had a dark skin. That’s all I saw.”

Aggie stared at her.

“Him?” she said. “Why should he be knocking you down?”

“You know who he is?”

But Aggie pursed her lips.

“No, miss,” she said stolidly. “I thought for a minute it was somebody I’d seen around. But it couldn’t be.”

If she knew more she was’ not talking, and with her help a dirty and exasperated Hilda climbed the stairs. Alice had taken her sleeping tablet and was quiet, and Aggie followed Hilda into her room.

“I put the book in your bureau,” she said, with the air of a conspirator. “She never noticed the change. She was out for a while and when she came in she looked queer. I feel kind of worried about her.”

Hilda sat down dizzily on the edge of the bed.

“I haven’t told Miss Alice about the dresses,” Aggie said, still cautiously. “I’ve been everywhere. They’re not in the house. I’ll take my Bible oath on it.”

Hilda got up and began to take off her filthy uniform. She was not listening to Aggie’s account of the wedding dress. She was back in the car, talking to Fuller and he was saying it sounded like delirium. So it did, but it had a definite beginning, if not yet an end.

“Try to think back, Aggie,” she said. “How were things here before Miss Tony broke her engagement?”

“Just the way they’d always been, miss. Except for the excitement, packages coming and clothes and all that. The florist in to see about the flowers for the reception, and the caterer about what they were to eat.”

“How about Miss Tony?”

“She was singing all over the place. Very happy she was, miss, and that crazy about the lieutenant it would make you want to cry.”

“When did that stop?”

Aggie thought.

“Well, about ten days before the wedding. I remember Stella saying her breakfast tray hadn’t been touched. The next day I saw her coming downstairs, looking sort of sicklike. She went into the library and stayed there a couple of hours. I guess she’d used the telephone, for when she came up she went to her Aunt Alice’s door and said there wouldn’t be any wedding at all.”

“How did they take it? Her mother and Miss Alice?”

“They acted like they thought she was out of her mind. But she wouldn’t budge an inch. Her mother about had a fit. She hasn’t really been the same since.”

“What reason did she give?”

“I don’t know as she gave any, miss,”

“And how long after that did Tony walk in her sleep?”

“On her wedding night,” Aggie said impressively. “Can you blame the poor child, miss? She’d been queer all day. She did her room and her mother’s. Then she locked herself in and I never saw her until that night, when I heard the shots.”

“Just what did you see then?”

“Stella and I both heard the shots. We didn’t wait to put anything on. We ran to the stairs, and down below Miss Alice was bending over Tony on the floor, just inside her mother’s door. Mrs. Rowland was screaming in her bed. When I got there she was trying to get out of it.”

“What happened to her afterward?”

“Mrs. Rowland? Well, she looked kind of faint and I made her get back. She was shaking all over.”

“You didn’t think a bullet had struck her?”

Aggie started.

“You mean she was shot!” she said incredulously. “And said nothing about it? Not her, Miss Adams. She’d have raised the roof.”

“There was no blood about?”

“Not that I saw. I wasn’t there but a minute.”

“Then why does she wear a bandage on one arm?”

Aggie looked relieved.

“Oh, that,” she said. “She has neuritis. It’s been worse the last few weeks. That’s why she’s in bed so much.”

“How about the lights that night, Aggie? You say you saw Tony on the floor. Was the hall light on?”

“It always is. Miss Alice is the nervous sort.”

“And Mrs. Rowland’s room? Was that light on too?”

Aggie hesitated.

“Well, now I come to think of it it wasn’t. I could see well enough though, with the door open. I didn’t turn it on until later, after we’d got Miss Tony to bed and kind of settled.”

She went up to bed after that, and Hilda washed and took another look at her patient. Alice however was still comfortably asleep. Hilda went back to her room and took the heavy volume Aggie had left from her bureau drawer. It was Volume XIII, Jere to Libe, and she put it on her bed and examined it If there were any markers in it she could not see them, and no part of it appeared to have been used more than any other. Finally she picked it up and shook it. A small piece of blank paper fell out, and she was annoyed at her carelessness. She should have gone through it page by page, she reflected, and in a very bad humor and with a worse headache put herself to bed on Alice’s couch.

She had not yet gone to sleep when Tony came carefully into the room. She stood in the doorway as if she was uncertain for a minute or so. Then she came directly to Hilda and stood looking down at her. She had been so quiet that had Hilda not been awake she could not have heard her. She was not walking in her sleep, however, and she seemed relieved when she saw Hilda was awake.

“I wonder if I may have a sleeping tablet,” she whispered. “Mother’s are all gone, and I’ve been awake for hours.”

In the half-light from the hall she looked young and rather pathetic. Evidently she did not know what had happened. She was shaking however and Hilda reached out and caught her wrist. Her pulse was fast and irregular. On impulse she drew her out into the hall and closed the door.

“What’s wrong, Tony?” she said. “There is something, isn’t there? I’m a nurse. I’m used to all sorts of things. Maybe I can help you.”

Tony gave her a thin smile.

“That’s kind of you,” she said. “There isn’t anything really.” Then, as if she had just thought of it: “When I’m nervous I sometimes walk in my sleep. I don’t want to tonight. That’s all.”

“If you’re worried about your mother …”

“What about my mother?” Her voice had changed, was sharp and challenging.

“I saw the bandage on her arm, you know. I don’t want to worry you, but if she’s had an injury—”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Tony asked coldly.

Hilda lost patience at last.

“Don’t be a little idiot,” she said sharply. “I’m saying that if your mother has been shot in the arm it ought to be properly cared for.”

Tony gasped.

“Who told you that? About the shooting?” she demanded.

“My dear child, it’s not a secret, is it?” Hilda said practically. “People do queer things in their sleep. I had a patient once who almost choked her own baby to death. She thought she was choking a burglar.”

Some of the suspicion died in Tony’s face, but she looked ready to collapse.

“I see,” she said. “The doctor and the servants. Especially Aggie. And Aunt Alice, of course. But I didn’t shoot my mother, Miss Adams. You can ask her yourself.”

Hilda was certain Nina would deny it with her last breath, no matter what the fact. She said nothing, however. She brought the tablet and Tony swallowed it with a sip of water and handed back the glass.

“That man I was talking to tonight,” she said. “He’s the brother of a maid we had in Honolulu. He’s out of work, he says. But there are plenty of jobs. I don’t want Mother to be bothered about him.”

Hilda nodded. She was not to mention this man, evidently. And she had been right. Tony had seen her across the street, had probably used her as a threat too. But she could have no idea of what had happened since, or that the police were after him, that Fuller had inaugurated a citywide search for him.

Hilda felt better the next morning. Her neck was stiff, and she had bruised a knee and torn a stocking in falling. Otherwise she was all right. She was uneasy, however. The case would not last much longer. Alice was much improved. She was to sit up in a chair that day, and Hilda was no nearer the solution of the problem than when she came. Rather less, in fact. It had looked at the start like a neurotic or unbalanced young woman, desperately determined to kill her mother, even if she finished herself in doing so.

But she was convinced now that Tony Rowland was not psychopathic. She was a desperately frightened and unhappy girl with a trouble she was refusing to share with anyone. Her thoughts were busy as later on she got Alice up in a chair by the window and turned her mattress. What was the secret? And as if she had read her mind Alice spoke.

“You’ve seen Tony now for two or three days,” she said. “How does she impress you?”

“She seems worried,” Hilda observed.

“Worried?” Alice smiled her thin smile. “That’s a polite word for it. She’s not herself at all. She really ought to be in a sanitarium, but what can I do?”

“You have no idea what the trouble is?”

“None, unless it’s in her own mind. We did send her to a psychiatrist, but she wouldn’t talk to him. He was furious. You see, she may have been asleep the night she fired those shots. She certainly wasn’t asleep in broad daylight when she wrecked my car.”

“I don’t think you’ve told me about that,” Hilda said.

“Well, perhaps I shouldn’t now. Only I keep thinking about it. That accident when Tony hurt her arm. At least they say it was an accident. Something about the steering gear. But the steering gear was all right, Miss Adams. The garage says so, and Tony won’t even talk about it.”

“That would look as though she meant them both to—to have the accident,” Hilda said thoughtfully. “It doesn’t sound like her, does it? She’s a devoted daughter. If she wanted to kill herself why kill them both?”

Alice shrugged her thin shoulders. “She loves her father too. Then why was she relieved when she found he wasn’t coming to America? She was, you know.”

Hilda smoothed the spread over the bed, and eyed it. The effect was sufficiently geometrical to satisfy her.

“I’ve been wondering,” Alice said, giving a pillow a final pat. “The attack on Honolulu must have been quite a shock. Did she lose anyone in it? Anyone she cared about?”

“I don’t know. After all she was only sixteen. If you mean a man … There is one strange thing. Nina likes to talk about the Islands. She hopes to go back there when the war’s over. She’s done her room here much as it was there, and Tony keeps it full of flowers. But Tony hates the place. In the almost four years she’s been here she’s hardly ever mentioned it. She seems to hate the thought of it.”

Hilda considered this. She was no moving picture fan, but she had seen the films of Pearl Harbor. Even when the attack was over they could not have felt safe there. Colonel Rowland had given his wife a gun, had sent them to the mainland as soon as possible. And with the lights out everywhere …

“Something must have happened to her there,” she suggested. “Something Mrs. Rowland doesn’t know. Something nobody but Tony knows. There are such things as psychic scars. If she had been attacked—”

“I’m sure it was nothing of the sort,” Alice said, flushing. “And she got over it, Miss Adams: She was perfectly normal after the first month or two.”

“Does she get any letters from the Islands?”

“I never see her mail. She gets, it first.”

While Hilda straightened the bathroom Alice had evidently been thinking, for when she emerged she threw her first words like a bomb.

“What was Herbert Johnson saying to Tony last night, Miss Adams? Aggie says you were across the street.”

Hilda managed to keep her voice smooth.

“She was talking to a man. I didn’t know who it was.”

“You didn’t hear anything?”

“I was pretty far away.”

Alice looked disappointed.

“I think he’s been bothering her off and on for the last four years,” she said fretfully. “His sister Delia was Nina’s personal maid in Hawaii, and he comes from there too. He’s no good and I’ve told them so, but they were fond of Delia.” She eyed Hilda. “Would you think Tony gave him any money last night?”

“I don’t know, Miss Rowland. I didn’t see it if she did.”

Alice was obviously disappointed. She was silent for some time. Then what she said was apparently a non sequitur.

“My sister-in-law is a very attractive woman,” she observed dryly. “I imagine a good many men have envied my brother. It’s just possible that Nina—”

But she didn’t finish and Hilda made no comment.