The man at the door nodded. He was smiling—a smile so faint that it was like a shadow against his white skin. He looked quite harmless, Harrington thought, yet his appearance seemed to have filled Carmody with dread.
“Hello, Carmody,” he said, then looked at Harrington. “Who is your visitor?”
Carmody was too dumbfounded to reply, and Harrington said nothing. He gazed with growing curiosity at the man at the door. Carstairs’ voice was as peculiar as his complexion. The former was unnaturally soft, the latter unnaturally white.
“How—how did you get in?” Carmody stammered.
“By a window,” said Carstairs in his strangely gentle voice, but with a faint note of derision.
“But the iron bars?”
“You can accomplish a lot with patience and a file.”
Carmody swallowed and leaned against the table. Harrington’s gaze narrowed as he continued to look at the newcomer. Of a sudden it struck him as significant that Carstairs should have entered the house through the room now occupied by Theresa.
“You mean—“ Carmody tried to assume a severe expression “—that you forced your way into my house?”
“Yes. Any objection?”
Carmody found no answer. The man’s calm, soft-tongued insolence seemed to leave him speechless. Now, acting on a disquieting suspicion, Harrington stepped up to him.
“Carstairs,” he said levelly, “get away from that door.”
Carstairs measured him with an indolent look and only planted himself the more firmly in front of the door.
“No,” he drawled, “I’m comfortable here. Who are you?”
“I’m Leonard Harrington. Move away!”
“Oh, Harrington. Yes, I know who you are. I believe Whittaker is looking for you. He thinks—”
From the other side of the door came a muffled scream, like that of a person awakened from a sound sleep. Harrington stood rigid for an instant, and then he grabbed Carstairs by the coat collar and administered a sharp jerk. The effort was utterly ineffectual. The man stood as firm as if he were rooted to the floor.
Another cry, a faint and broken one, came from the interior. Harrington’s hand darted toward the pistol in his pocket, but in an instant his arm was gripped in a clutch as hard as jaws of steel. Still another cry, remote and muffled, reached his ears. He struggled to free his arm, but a sharp, stabbing pain made him desist.
“Don’t get excited,” Carstairs advised. “She is only frightened. I told them not to hurt her.”
Harrington caught a glimpse of Carmody’s face. It was palsied with fright, and he knew he could expect no assistance from that quarter.
“I supposed she would scream,” Carstairs remarked. “Women always do. That’s why I came in here to act as buffer.”
Again Harrington tried to jerk his arm away from the clutch of the soft, prehensile fingers. A twinge of excruciating pain drew a groan from his lips. He swung his left hand back to drive a blow into Carstairs’ white face, and in an instant his entire body was convulsed with agony.
“Sorry,” said Carstairs gently, “but you force me to hurt you.”
Harrington groaned with despair and physical torment. It seemed that a mere playful twist of Carstairs’ fingers was enough to inflict unbearable torture. He listened tensely while the blood pounded in his head. There were no more sounds now. The room behind the door was ominously quiet. What had happened to Theresa?
Carstairs’ grip on his arm relaxed. He felt suddenly weak, as if those twinges of racking agony had drained his strength. For a moment the room blurred and heaved, but he could still see Carstairs’ white, smiling face. And then the face seemed to fade out and vanish. There came a sound like the closing of a door.
After a moment of dizziness he stared about him. There was no one in the room but Carmody and himself, and the older man stood gaping at him, transfixed with horror.
“Where did he go?” Harrington cried.
Carmody pointed a shaking finger at the door on the side of the room. Harrington rushed out The sofa on which Theresa had lain was empty. A white curtain was fluttering before an open window. With an agonizing sense of helplessness he turned away, and just then the sharp report of a backfire and then an engine’s steady throb sounded out in front.
“Gone!” Carmody groaned. “And they took Theresa! Good God!”
Harrington stared at him. His brain was not quite clear yet. The after-twinges of the most excruciating pain he had ever known seemed to be shooting through his body.
“Where do you suppose they are taking her?”
“Heaven only knows. But I’m afraid—“ He shuddered and choked. “I’m afraid they’ll kill her!”
“Kill her?” Harrington echoed, and then a sudden shock swept the last remnant of stupor from his brain. Carstairs’ face haunted him, unnaturally white and smilingly malignant. He rushed to the door.
“Wait! “ Carmody cried, wringing his hands in mental anguish. “Where—”
“I’m going to catch that car if I have to chase it all over creation.”
“Don’t be a fool. You can’t catch it afoot.”
Harrington turned. The words thrust a wedge of sanity into his brain.
“We’ll both go,” Carmody declared. “My car can do eighty miles an hour. Oh, where are those keys?”
He fumbled frantically in his pockets, and at length he pulled out a key container. Hurriedly, Harrington took it from him.
“You stay here, Carmody. There’s nothing you can do. I’ll go it alone.”
He pushed the fear-stricken man into a chair, but Carmody sprang up again.
“I—I must go!” he stammered. “Can’t you see? She is my—my daughter.”
“Your—“ Harrington stared at him in utter astonishment. His brain made a few swift revolutions, and then he shoved the older man back into the chair. He saw it was necessary to be brutal now. “No, you stay here, Carmody. You would be worse than useless. You want me to bring her back alive, don’t you? Well, then don’t interfere.”
He sprang quickly from the room and out into the open. The drizzle had ceased; the sky had turned from black to gray. Across the lawn, behind a fringe of trees, he saw a squatty building which he thought must be the garage. He rushed over and tried the keys in the lock.
An undersized figure slunk out of the dusk and approached.
“In a hurry, eh? Know where you’re going?”
The first key failed to work. Harrington tried another. He cast a look of loathing on the ubiquitous blackmailer.
“Get away, you rat!”
Tarkin giggled. The second key turned in the lock, and Harrington slid the immense door open.
“There are three roads leading away from hoe,” the blackmailer explained. “Suppose you took the wrong one? Not so good, eh?”
Harrington wanted to kick him, but a sudden thought restrained him. He grabbed the man by the collar.
“Did you see which way that car went?”
“Well, I’ve got eyes, and sometimes it pays me to use them.”
Harrington dragged him inside the car, lifted him squealing from the floor, and flung him into the front seat, to the right of the driver’s place. Then he jumped inside and started the engine. It was only about a hundred feet to where the private driveway emerged into the crossways. He scanned the landscape in all directions, but there was no sign of another car.
“Which way, Tarkin?” he asked sharply.
“Well, I’m not so sure now. It was a kind of dark and—”
“You could see the head lights.”
“Well, maybe. How much—”
“Not a cent.” Applying the emergency brake, Harrington turned to him threateningly. “Will you tell, or will you take the beating oi your life? Decide quickly.”
Tarkin saw something in the dark, determined face that frightened him.
“Straight ahead,” he said sullenly.
For a moment Harrington searched his unwholesome face, and then the car plunged forward with a suddenness that flung Tarkin back against the cushion. Harder and harder Harrington bore down on the accelerator. There was a roar of wind in his ears. The landscape, hazy and unreal in the gray dawn, flew past the windows in blurred zigzagging lines.
“Better go easy,” Tarkin advised. “We turn soon.”
Harrington flung him a sharp suspicious glance. How could Tarkin know? Through the windshield he looked out into the gray morning dusk. His eyes narrowed. The landscape looked vaguely familiar.
He was rushing down a hill now, and he released the accelerator and gently applied the foot brake. He remembered the locality now. At the bottom of the hill, he knew, was a narrow and rutty road swerving off to the left and climbing up the hill to the old abandoned hotel.
“That’s right,” said Tarkin as he swung sharply into the hilltop road. “You seem to know. Why did you want me along?”
Harrington sent the car rushing up the hill. Familiar sensations thronged his mind. It seemed as if he would only have to look into the mirror to see Marsh sitting back there in the dusk, a wicked and crafty smile wreathing his broad face.
The hill grew steeper, the engine began to labor, and he shifted into second. Tarkin sat sullenly beside him, only grunting now and then. Soon, in the gray light of advancing day, he caught a glimpse of the old hotel. At the first opportunity he swung off the road and drove the car into a small clearing sheltered by surrounding trees. He shut off the engine and cast a doubtful look on the blackmailer. What should he do with Tarkin?
“Better hurry,” said the blackmailer surlily, easing himself deeper into the cushions. “If you don’t, there’ll be a murder. Not so good, eh?”
A trace of perplexity crept into Harrington’s searching gaze. There was something curious about Tarkin. With a shrug he removed the ignition key and put it in his pocket, then hurried away. It was necessary to move cautiously now, for someone might see him from the windows of the old hotel, and that would jeopardize his mission.
Visions of the white face and soft voice of Roscoe Carstairs pursued him as he darted in and out among the trees and bushes alongside the road. The fear-stricken countenance of Carmody haunted him, too. Theresa’s father! He wondered to what extent the relationship explained her entanglement in the affair. And then, as he came out in the open, he slapped his hip pocket to make certain that the pistol was there. He might need it soon.
Now the grounds of the old hotel stretched before him. There was only a thin sprinkling of trees, and while running from one to another he was exposed to the gaze of any chance observer. But he gained the long, sagging piazza without interference, and now he stole quickly to the main door. He turned the knob, held the door open a crack, and listened. In a moment he stepped inside. He was in the lobby of the old hotel, almost denuded of furniture. The lazy morning wind was whistling through cracks in the window-panes. Though it was fairly light outside, it was still dusk within. His eyes fixed on the stairway and the door under it. It was behind that door he had lain hidden while he witnessed the stormy scene between Theresa and the dark and dapper Harry Stoddard.
Where was Theresa now? Her father had seemed to fear that she had been dragged off to some horrible fate. Doubtless Carmody had ample reason for his apprehensions. With a recurring vision of a white and evilly smiling face, Harrington looked up the stairway. It was quiet up there. As far as eyes and ears could tell, he was alone in the house.
He started up, silently cursing the steps that creaked under his weight. At the upper landing, a long, dim corridor stretched out before him, with doors on each side. All his senses on the alert, he walked to the end of it, then turned back and ascended another flight. The third floor was as silent and lifeless as the one below. He dipped into a few of the rooms, all stripped of furniture and most of them having broken windows and crumbling plaster. There was no sign that any one had set foot within them since the old hotel was in its heyday.
There remained only the attic now. He had received several inklings of curious things going on up there. He ascended the last flight of stairs, and at first it seemed as if the place had been abandoned to spiders and mice, to dust and decay. Then, as he advanced a few steps, he experienced a feeling that had been absent when he roamed the lower parts—a sense of human occupancy. The air was less stale, the chill and the dampness less penetrating. Something told him that, not so long ago, human feet had moved over these dusty spaces.
The feeling made his nerves tingle. Someone might be lurking in the heavy shadows that lay on all sides, scarcely disturbed by the meager light falling through two grimy windows in the ceiling. It was possible, too, that somewhere up here he would find Theresa Lanyard.
The thought quickened his pulses and brought sharply conflicting emotions. He recalled Carmody’s ashen, fear-stricken face and the grim apprehensions he had voiced. What if he were too late? He put the nerve-shaking thought from him and hurried on. Now, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dusk, he saw a partition at the farther end of the attic. It ran the whole width of the house and was bisected by a corridor. Possibly this part had once been the servants’ quarters.
He walked toward it, cautiously drawing his pistol as he did so. With a sharp sensation of danger he stepped softly into the corridor. There were two doors on each side, and he stopped before the nearest. Very gently he turned the knob in his hand and pushed the door open. The hinges gave a slight, warning squeak, and then a voice spoke—a softly purring voice that instinctively made him grip the pistol a little harder:
“Ah, you, Harrington. Come right in.”