The Circular Staircase
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Mary Roberts Rinehart >> The Circular Staircase
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16 THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE
By
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE
CHAPTER I
I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE:
This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind,
deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house
for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of
those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective
agencies happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been
perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-
boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put
up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many
summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after watching
their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in
town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water
supply does not depend on a tank on the roof.
And then--the madness seized me. When I look back over the
months I spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. As
it is, I show the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I
have turned very gray--Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday,
by saying that a little bluing in the rinse-water would make my
hair silvery, instead of a yellowish white. I hate to be
reminded of unpleasant things and I snapped her off.
"No," I said sharply, "I'm not going to use bluing at my time of
life, or starch, either."
Liddy's nerves are gone, she says, since that awful summer, but
she has enough left, goodness knows! And when she begins to go
around with a lump in her throat, all I have to do is to threaten
to return to Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance of
cheerfulness,--from which you may judge that the summer there was
anything but a success.
The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete--one
of them mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the
time the thing happened--that I feel it my due to tell what I
know. Mr. Jamieson, the detective, said himself he could never
have done without me, although he gave me little enough credit,
in print.
I shall have to go back several years--thirteen, to be exact--to
start my story. At that time my brother died, leaving me his two
children. Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven. All
the responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly;
to perfect the profession of motherhood requires precisely as
many years as the child has lived, like the man who started to
carry the calf and ended by walking along with the bull on his
shoulders. However, I did the best I could. When Gertrude got
past the hair-ribbon age, and Halsey asked for a scarf-pin and
put on long trousers--and a wonderful help that was to the
darning.--I sent them away to good schools. After that, my
responsibility was chiefly postal, with three months every summer
in which to replenish their wardrobes, look over their lists of
acquaintances, and generally to take my foster-motherhood out of
its nine months' retirement in camphor.
I missed the summers with them when, somewhat later, at boarding-
school and college, the children spent much of their vacations
with friends. Gradually I found that my name signed to a check
was even more welcome than when signed to a letter, though I
wrote them at stated intervals. But when Halsey had finished
his electrical course and Gertrude her boarding-school, and both
came home to stay, things were suddenly changed. The winter
Gertrude came out was nothing but a succession of sitting up late
at night to bring her home from things, taking her to the
dressmakers between naps the next day, and discouraging
ineligible youths with either more money than brains, or more
brains than money. Also, I acquired a great many things: to say
lingerie for under-garments, "frocks" and "gowns" instead of
dresses, and that beardless sophomores are not college boys, but
college men. Halsey required less personal supervision, and as
they both got their mother's fortune that winter, my
responsibility became purely moral. Halsey bought a car, of
course, and I learned how to tie over my bonnet a gray baize
veil, and, after a time, never to stop to look at the dogs one
has run down. People are apt to be so unpleasant about their
dogs.
The additions to my education made me a properly equipped maiden
aunt, and by spring I was quite tractable. So when Halsey
suggested camping in the Adirondacks and Gertrude wanted Bar
Harbor, we compromised on a good country house with links near,
within motor distance of town and telephone distance of the
doctor. That was how we went to Sunnyside.
We went out to inspect the property, and it seemed to deserve its
name. Its cheerful appearance gave no indication whatever of
anything out of the ordinary. Only one thing seemed unusual to
me: the housekeeper, who had been left in charge, had moved from
the house to the gardener's lodge, a few days before. As the
lodge was far enough away from the house, it seemed to me that
either fire or thieves could complete their work of destruction
undisturbed. The property was an extensive one: the house on the
top of a hill, which sloped away in great stretches of green lawn
and clipped hedges, to the road; and across the valley, perhaps a
couple of miles away, was the Greenwood Club House. Gertrude and
Halsey were infatuated.
"Why, it's everything you want," Halsey said "View, air, good
water and good roads. As for the house, it's big enough for a
hospital, if it has a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne back,"
which was ridiculous: it was pure Elizabethan.
Of course we took the place; it was not my idea of comfort, being
much too large and sufficiently isolated to make the servant
question serious. But I give myself credit for this: whatever
has happened since, I never blamed Halsey and Gertrude for taking
me there. And another thing: if the series of catastrophes there
did nothing else, it taught me one thing--that somehow,
somewhere, from perhaps a half-civilized ancestor who wore a
sheepskin garment and trailed his food or his prey, I have in me
the instinct of the chase. Were I a man I should be a trapper of
criminals, trailing them as relentlessly as no doubt my sheepskin
ancestor did his wild boar. But being an unmarried woman, with
the handicap of my sex, my first acquaintance with crime will
probably be my last. Indeed, it came near enough to being my
last acquaintance with anything.
The property was owned by Paul Armstrong, the president of the
Traders' Bank, who at the time we took the house was in the west
with his wife and daughter, and a Doctor Walker, the Armstrong
family physician. Halsey knew Louise Armstrong,--had been rather
attentive to her the winter before, but as Halsey was always
attentive to somebody, I had not thought of it seriously,
although she was a charming girl. I knew of Mr. Armstrong only
through his connection with the bank, where the children's money
was largely invested, and through an ugly story about the son,
Arnold Armstrong, who was reported to have forged his father's
name, for a considerable amount, to some bank paper. However,
the story had had no interest for me.
I cleared Halsey and Gertrude away to a house party, and moved
out to Sunnyside the first of May. The roads were bad, but the
trees were in leaf, and there were still tulips in the borders
around the house. The arbutus was fragrant in the woods under
the dead leaves, and on the way from the station, a short mile,
while the car stuck in the mud, I found a bank showered with tiny
forget-me-nots. The birds--don't ask me what kind; they all look
alike to me, unless they have a hall mark of some bright color--
the birds were chirping in the hedges, and everything breathed of
peace. Liddy, who was born and bred on a brick pavement, got a
little bit down-spirited when the crickets began to chirp, or
scrape their legs together, or whatever it is they do, at
twilight.
The first night passed quietly enough. I have always been
grateful for that one night's peace; it shows what the country
might be, under favorable circumstances. Never after that night
did I put my head on my pillow with any assurance how long it
would be there; or on my shoulders, for that matter.
On the following morning Liddy and Mrs. Ralston, my own
housekeeper, had a difference of opinion, and Mrs. Ralston left
on the eleven train. Just after luncheon, Burke, the butler, was
taken unexpectedly with a pain in his right side, much worse when
I was within hearing distance, and by afternoon he was started
cityward. That night the cook's sister had a baby--the cook,
seeing indecision in my face, made it twins on second thought--
and, to be short, by noon the next day the household staff was
down to Liddy and myself. And this in a house with twenty-two
rooms and five baths!
Liddy wanted to go back to the city at once, but the milk-boy
said that Thomas Johnson, the Armstrongs' colored butler, was
working as a waiter at the Greenwood Club, and might come back.
I have the usual scruples about coercing people's servants away,
but few of us have any conscience regarding institutions or
corporations--witness the way we beat railroads and street-car
companies when we can--so I called up the club, and about eight
o'clock Thomas Johnson came to see me. Poor Thomas!
Well, it ended by my engaging Thomas on the spot, at outrageous
wages, and with permission to sleep in the gardener's lodge,
empty since the house was rented. The old man--he was white-
haired and a little stooped, but with an immense idea of his
personal dignity--gave me his reasons hesitatingly.
"I ain't sayin' nothin', Mis' Innes," he said, with his hand on
the door-knob, "but there's been goin's-on here this las' few
months as ain't natchal. 'Tain't one thing an' 'tain't another--
it's jest a door squealin' here, an' a winder closin' there, but
when doors an' winders gets to cuttin' up capers and there's
nobody nigh 'em, it's time Thomas Johnson sleeps somewhar's
else."
Liddy, who seemed to be never more than ten feet away from me
that night, and was afraid of her shadow in that great barn of a
place, screamed a little, and turned a yellow-green. But I am
not easily alarmed.
It was entirely in vain; I represented to Thomas that we were
alone, and that he would have to stay in the house that night.
He was politely firm, but he would come over early the next
morning, and if I gave him a key, he would come in time to get
some sort of breakfast. I stood on the huge veranda and
watched him shuffle along down the shadowy drive, with mingled
feelings--irritation at his cowardice and thankfulness at getting
him at all. I am not ashamed to say that I double-locked the
hall door when I went in.
"You can lock up the rest of the house and go to bed, Liddy," I
said severely. "You give me the creeps standing there. A woman
of your age ought to have better sense." It usually braces Liddy
to mention her age: she owns to forty--which is absurd. Her
mother cooked for my grandfather, and Liddy must be at least as
old as I. But that night she refused to brace.
"You're not going to ask me to lock up, Miss Rachel!" she
quavered. "Why, there's a dozen French windows in the drawing-
room and the billiard-room wing, and every one opens on a porch.
And Mary Anne said that last night there was a man standing by
the stable when she locked the kitchen door."
"Mary Anne was a fool," I said sternly. "If there had been a man
there, she would have had him in the kitchen and been feeding him
what was left from dinner, inside of an hour, from force of
habit. Now don't be ridiculous. Lock up the house and go to
bed. I am going to read."
But Liddy set her lips tight and stood still.
"I'm not going to bed," she said. "I am going to pack up, and
to-morrow I am going to leave."
"You'll do nothing of the sort," I snapped. Liddy and I often
desire to part company, but never at the same time. "If you are
afraid, I will go with you, but for goodness' sake don't try to
hide behind me."
The house was a typical summer residence on an extensive scale.
Wherever possible, on the first floor, the architect had done
away with partitions, using arches and columns instead. The
effect was cool and spacious, but scarcely cozy. As Liddy and I
went from one window to another, our voices echoed back at us
uncomfortably. There was plenty of light--the electric plant
down in the village supplied us--but there were long vistas of
polished floor, and mirrors which reflected us from unexpected
corners, until I felt some of Liddy's foolishness communicate
itself to me.
The house was very long, a rectangle in general form, with the
main entrance in the center of the long side. The brick-paved
entry opened into a short hall to the right of which, separated
only by a row of pillars, was a huge living-room. Beyond that
was the drawing-room, and in the end, the billiard-room. Off
the billiard-room, in the extreme right wing, was a den, or
card-room, with a small hall opening on the east veranda, and
from there went up a narrow circular staircase. Halsey had
pointed it out with delight.
"Just look, Aunt Rachel," he said with a flourish. "The
architect that put up this joint was wise to a few things.
Arnold Armstrong and his friends could sit here and play cards
all night and stumble up to bed in the early morning, without
having the family send in a police call."
Liddy and I got as far as the card-room and turned on all the
lights. I tried the small entry door there, which opened on the
veranda, and examined the windows. Everything was secure, and
Liddy, a little less nervous now, had just pointed out to me the
disgracefully dusty condition of the hard-wood floor, when
suddenly the lights went out. We waited a moment; I think Liddy
was stunned with fright, or she would have screamed. And then I
clutched her by the arm and pointed to one of the windows opening
on the porch. The sudden change threw the window into relief, an
oblong of grayish light, and showed us a figure standing close,
peering in. As I looked it darted across the veranda and out of
sight in the darkness.
CHAPTER II
A LINK CUFF-BUTTON
Liddy's knees seemed to give away under her. Without a sound she
sank down, leaving me staring at the window in petrified
amazement. Liddy began to moan under her breath, and in my
excitement I reached down and shook her.
"Stop it," I whispered. "It's only a woman--maybe a maid of the
Armstrongs'. Get up and help me find the door." She groaned
again. "Very well," I said, "then I'll have to leave you here.
I'm going."
She moved at that, and, holding to my sleeve, we felt our way,
with numerous collisions, to the billiard-room, and from there to
the drawing-room. The lights came on then, and, with the long
French windows unshuttered, I had a creepy feeling that each one
sheltered a peering face. In fact, in the light of what happened
afterward, I am pretty certain we were under surveillance during
the entire ghostly evening. We hurried over the rest of
the locking-up and got upstairs as quickly as we could. I left
the lights all on, and our footsteps echoed cavernously. Liddy
had a stiff neck the next morning, from looking back over her
shoulder, and she refused to go to bed.
"Let me stay in your dressing-room, Miss Rachel," she begged.
"If you don't, I'll sit in the hall outside the door. I'm not
going to be murdered with my eyes shut."
"If you're going to be murdered," I retorted, "it won't make any
difference whether they are shut or open. But you may stay in
the dressing-room, if you will lie on the couch: when you sleep
in a chair you snore."
She was too far gone to be indignant, but after a while she came
to the door and looked in to where I was composing myself for
sleep with Drummond's Spiritual Life.
"That wasn't a woman, Miss Rachel," she said, with her shoes in
her hand. "It was a man in a long coat."
"What woman was a man?" I discouraged her without looking up,
and she went back to the couch.
It was eleven o'clock when I finally prepared for bed. In
spite of my assumption of indifference, I locked the door into
the hall, and finding the transom did not catch, I put a chair
cautiously before the door--it was not necessary to rouse Liddy--
and climbing up put on the ledge of the transom a small dressing-
mirror, so that any movement of the frame would send it crashing
down. Then, secure in my precautions, I went to bed.
I did not go to sleep at once. Liddy disturbed me just as I was
growing drowsy, by coming in and peering under the bed. She was
afraid to speak, however, because of her previous snubbing, and
went back, stopping in the doorway to sigh dismally.
Somewhere down-stairs a clock with a chime sang away the hours--
eleven-thirty, forty-five, twelve. And then the lights went out
to stay. The Casanova Electric Company shuts up shop and goes
home to bed at midnight: when one has a party, I believe it is
customary to fee the company, which will drink hot coffee and
keep awake a couple of hours longer. But the lights were gone
for good that night. Liddy had gone to sleep, as I knew she
would. She was a very unreliable person: always awake and ready
to talk when she wasn't wanted and dozing off to sleep when
she was. I called her once or twice, the only result being
an explosive snore that threatened her very windpipe--then I got
up and lighted a bedroom candle.
My bedroom and dressing room were above the big living-room on
the first floor. On the second floor a long corridor ran the
length of the house, with rooms opening from both sides. In the
wings were small corridors crossing the main one--the plan was
simplicity itself. And just as I got back into bed, I heard a
sound from the east wing, apparently, that made me stop, frozen,
with one bedroom slipper half off, and listen. It was a rattling
metallic sound, and it reverberated along the empty halls like
the crash of doom. It was for all the world as if something
heavy, perhaps a piece of steel, had rolled clattering and
jangling down the hard-wood stairs leading to the card-room.
In the silence that followed Liddy stirred and snored again. I
was exasperated: first she kept me awake by silly alarms, then
when she was needed she slept like Joe Jefferson, or Rip,--they
are always the same to me. I went in and aroused her, and I give
her credit for being wide awake the minute I spoke.
"Get up," I said, "if you don't want to be murdered in your bed."
"Where? How?" she yelled vociferously, and jumped up.
"There's somebody in the house," I said. "Get up. We'll have to
get to the telephone."
"Not out in the hall!" she gasped; "Oh, Miss Rachel, not out in
the hall!" trying to hold me back. But I am a large woman and
Liddy is small. We got to the door, somehow, and Liddy held a
brass andiron, which it was all she could do to lift, let alone
brain anybody with. I listened, and, hearing nothing, opened the
door a little and peered into the hall. It was a black void,
full of terrible suggestion, and my candle only emphasized the
gloom. Liddy squealed and drew me back again, and as the door
slammed, the mirror I had put on the transom came down and hit
her on the head. That completed our demoralization. It was some
time before I could persuade her she had not been attacked from
behind by a burglar, and when she found the mirror smashed on the
floor she wasn't much better.
"There's going to be a death!" she wailed. "Oh, Miss Rachel,
there's going to be a death!"
"There will be," I said grimly, "if you don't keep quiet, Liddy
Allen."
And so we sat there until morning, wondering if the candle would
last until dawn, and arranging what trains we could take back to
town. If we had only stuck to that decision and gone back before
it was too late!
The sun came finally, and from my window I watched the trees
along the drive take shadowy form, gradually lose their ghostlike
appearance, become gray and then green. The Greenwood Club
showed itself a dab of white against the hill across the valley,
and an early robin or two hopped around in the dew. Not until
the milk-boy and the sun came, about the same time, did I dare to
open the door into the hall and look around. Everything was as
we had left it. Trunks were heaped here and there, ready for the
trunk-room, and through an end window of stained glass came a
streak of red and yellow daylight that was eminently cheerful.
The milk-boy was pounding somewhere below, and the day had begun.
Thomas Johnson came ambling up the drive about half-past six, and
we could hear him clattering around on the lower floor, opening
shutters. I had to take Liddy to her room up-stairs,
however,--she was quite sure she would find something uncanny.
In fact, when she did not, having now the courage of daylight,
she was actually disappointed.
Well, we did not go back to town that day.
The discovery of a small picture fallen from the wall of the
drawing-room was quite sufficient to satisfy Liddy that the alarm
had been a false one, but I was anything but convinced. Allowing
for my nerves and the fact that small noises magnify themselves
at night, there was still no possibility that the picture had
made the series of sounds I heard. To prove it, however, I
dropped it again. It fell with a single muffled crash of its
wooden frame, and incidentally ruined itself beyond repair. I
justified myself by reflecting that if the Armstrongs chose to
leave pictures in unsafe positions, and to rent a house with a
family ghost, the destruction of property was their
responsibility, not mine.
I warned Liddy not to mention what had happened to anybody, and
telephoned to town for servants. Then after a breakfast which
did more credit to Thomas' heart than his head, I went on a short
tour of investigation. The sounds had come from the east
wing, and not without some qualms I began there. At first I
found nothing. Since then I have developed my powers of
observation, but at that time I was a novice. The small card-
room seemed undisturbed. I looked for footprints, which is, I
believe, the conventional thing to do, although my experience has
been that as clues both footprints and thumb-marks are more
useful in fiction than in fact. But the stairs in that wing
offered something.
At the top of the flight had been placed a tall wicker hamper,
packed, with linen that had come from town. It stood at the edge
of the top step, almost barring passage, and on the step below it
was a long fresh scratch. For three steps the scratch was
repeated, gradually diminishing, as if some object had fallen,
striking each one. Then for four steps nothing. On the fifth
step below was a round dent in the hard wood. That was all, and
it seemed little enough, except that I was positive the marks had
not been there the day before.
It bore out my theory of the sound, which had been for all the
world like the bumping of a metallic object down a flight of
steps. The four steps had been skipped. I reasoned that an iron
bar, for instance, would do something of the sort,--strike
two or three steps, end down, then turn over, jumping a few
stairs, and landing with a thud.
Iron bars, however, do not fall down-stairs in the middle of the
night alone. Coupled with the figure on the veranda the agency
by which it climbed might be assumed. But--and here was the
thing that puzzled me most--the doors were all fastened that
morning, the windows unmolested, and the particular door from
the card-room to the veranda had a combination lock of which I
held the key, and which had not been tampered with.
I fixed on an attempt at burglary, as the most natural
explanation--an attempt frustrated by the falling of the object,
whatever it was, that had roused me. Two things I could not
understand: how the intruder had escaped with everything locked,
and why he had left the small silver, which, in the absence of a
butler, had remained down-stairs over night.
Under pretext of learning more about the place, Thomas Johnson
led me through the house and the cellars, without result.
Everything was in good order and repair; money had been spent
lavishly on construction and plumbing. The house was full of
conveniences, and I had no reason to repent my bargain, save
the fact that, in the nature of things, night must come again.
And other nights must follow--and we were a long way from a
police-station.
In the afternoon a hack came up from Casanova, with a fresh relay
of servants. The driver took them with a flourish to the
servants' entrance, and drove around to the front of the house,
where I was awaiting him.
"Two dollars," he said in reply to my question. "I don't charge
full rates, because, bringin' 'em up all summer as I do, it pays
to make a special price. When they got off the train, I sez, sez
I, `There's another bunch for Sunnyside, cook, parlor maid and
all.' Yes'm--six summers, and a new lot never less than once a
month. They won't stand for the country and the lonesomeness, I
reckon."
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