“Good Lord!” a man’s voice exclaimed,
just beside me. And then I collapsed.
I felt myself going, felt some one catch me, a horrible
nausea—that was all I remembered.
When I came to it was dawn. I was lying on the
bed in Louise’s room, with the cherub on the
ceiling staring down at me, and there was a blanket
from my own bed thrown over me. I felt weak
and dizzy, but I managed to get up and totter to the
door. At the foot of the circular staircase
Mr. Winters was still asleep. Hardly able to
stand, I crept back to my room. The door into
Gertrude’s room was no longer locked: she
was sleeping like a tired child. And in my dressing-room
Liddy hugged a cold hot-water bottle, and mumbled
in her sleep.
“There’s some things you can’t hold
with hand cuffs,” she was muttering thickly.
A SCRAP OF PAPER
For the first time in twenty years, I kept my bed
that day. Liddy was alarmed to the point of
hysteria, and sent for Doctor Stewart just after breakfast.
Gertrude spent the morning with me, reading something—I
forget what. I was too busy with my thoughts
to listen. I had said nothing to the two detectives.
If Mr. Jamieson had been there, I should have told
him everything, but I could not go to these strange
men and tell them my niece had been missing in the
middle of the night; that she had not gone to bed
at all; that while I was searching for her through
the house, I had met a stranger who, when I fainted,
had carried me into a room and left me there, to get
better or not, as it might happen.
The whole situation was terrible: had the issues
been less vital, it would have been absurd.
Here we were, guarded day and night by private detectives,
with an extra man to watch the grounds, and yet we
might as well have lived in a Japanese paper house,
for all the protection we had.
And there was something else: the man I had met
in the darkness had been even more startled than I,
and about his voice, when he muttered his muffled
exclamation, there was something vaguely familiar.
All that morning, while Gertrude read aloud, and Liddy
watched for the doctor, I was puzzling over that voice,
without result.
And there were other things, too. I wondered
what Gertrude’s absence from her room had to
do with it all, or if it had any connection.
I tried to think that she had heard the rapping noises
before I did and gone to investigate, but I’m
afraid I was a moral coward that day. I could
not ask her.
Perhaps the diversion was good for me. It took
my mind from Halsey, and the story we had heard the
night before. The day, however, was a long vigil,
with every ring of the telephone full of possibilities.
Doctor Walker came up, some time just after luncheon,
and asked for me.
“Go down and see him,” I instructed Gertrude.
“Tell him I am out—for mercy’s
sake don’t say I’m sick. Find out
what he wants, and from this time on, instruct the
servants that he is not to be admitted. I loathe
that man.”
