Mary Roberts Rinehart & Avery Hopwood (23 page)

"Dale!" called Bailey's voice from the corridor. "Dale!"

"Dale! Dale! The door's locked!" cried Miss Cornelia.

The Doctor hesitated. The call came again. "Dale! Dale!" and Bailey
pounded on the door as if he meant to break it down.

The Doctor made up his mind.

"Wait a moment!" he called. He stepped to the door and unlocked it.
Bailey hurled himself into the room, followed by Miss Cornelia with her
candle. Lizzie stood in the doorway, timidly, ready to leap for safety
at a moment's notice.

"Why did you lock that door?" said Bailey angrily, threatening the
Doctor.

"But I didn't," said the latter, truthfully enough. Bailey made a
movement of irritation. Then a glance about the room informed him of
the amazing, the incredible fact. Dale was not there! She had
disappeared!

"You—you," he stammered at the Doctor. "Where's Miss Ogden? What
have you done with her?"

The Doctor was equally baffled.

"Done with her?" he said indignantly. "I don't know what you're
talking about, I haven't seen her!"

"Then you didn't lock that door?" Bailey menaced him.

The Doctor's denial was firm.

"Absolutely not. I was coming through the window when I heard your
voice at the door!"

Bailey's eyes leaped to the window—yes—a ladder was there—the Doctor
might be speaking the truth after all. But if so, how and why had Dale
disappeared?

The Doctor's admission of his manner of entrance did not make Lizzie
any the happier.

"In at the window—just like a bat!" she muttered in shaking tones.
She would not have stayed in the doorway if she had not been afraid to
move anywhere else.

"I saw lights up here from outside," continued the Doctor easily. "And
I thought—"

Miss Cornelia interrupted him. She had set down her candle and laid
the revolver on the top of the clothes hamper and now stood gazing at
the mantel-fireplace.

"The mantel's—closed!" she said.

The Doctor stared. So the secret of the Hidden Room was a secret no
longer. He saw ruin gaping before him—a bottomless abyss.
"Damnation!" he cursed impotently under his breath.

Bailey turned on him savagely.

"Did you shut that mantel?"

"No!"

"I'll see whether you shut it or not!" Bailey leaped toward the
fireplace. "Dale! Dale!" he called desperately, leaning against the
mantel. His fingers groped for the knob that worked the mechanism of
the hidden entrance.

The Doctor picked up the single lighted candle from the hamper, as if
to throw more light on Bailey's task. Bailey's fingers found the knob.
He turned it. The mantel began to swing out into the room.

As it did so the Doctor deliberately snuffed out the light of the
candle he held, leaving the room in abrupt and obliterating darkness.

"Doctor, why did you put out that candle?" Miss Cornelia's voice cut
the blackness like a knife.

"I didn't—I—"

"You did—I saw you do it."

The brief exchange of accusation and denial took but an instant of
time, as the mantel swung wide open. The next instant there was a rush
of feet across the floor, from the fireplace—the shock of a collision
between two bodies—the sound of a heavy fall.

"What was that?" queried Bailey dazedly, with a feeling as if some
great winged creature had brushed at him and passed.

Lizzie answered from the doorway.

"Oh, oh!" she groaned in stricken accents. "Somebody knocked me down
and tramped on me!"

"Matches, quick!" commanded Miss Cornelia. "Where's the candle?"

The Doctor was still trying to explain his curious action of a moment
before.

"Awfully sorry, I assure you—it dropped out of the holder—ah, here it
is!"

He held it up triumphantly. Bailey struck a match and lighted it. The
wavering little flame showed Lizzie prostrate but vocal, in the
doorway—and Dale lying on the floor of the Hidden Room, her eyes shut,
and her face as drained of color as the face of a marble statue. For
one horrible instant Bailey thought she must be dead.

He rushed to her wildly and picked her up in his arms. No—still
breathing—thank God! He carried her tenderly to the only chair in the
room.

"Doctor!"

The Doctor, once more the physician, knelt at her side and felt for her
pulse. And Lizzie, picking herself up from where the collision with
some violent body had thrown her, retrieved the smelling salts from the
floor. It was onto this picture, the candlelight shining on strained
faces, the dramatic figure of Dale, now semi-conscious, the desperate
rage of Bailey, that a new actor appeared on the scene.

Anderson, the detective, stood in the doorway, holding a candle—as
grim and menacing a figure as a man just arisen from the dead.

"That's right!" said Lizzie, unappalled for once. "Come in when
everything's over!"

The Doctor glanced up and met the detective's eyes, cold and menacing.

"You took my revolver from me downstairs," he said. "I'll trouble you
for it."

The Doctor got heavily to his feet. The others, their suspicions
confirmed at last, looked at him with startled eyes. The detective
seemed to enjoy the universal confusion his words had brought.

Slowly, with sullen reluctance, the Doctor yielded up the stolen
weapon. The detective examined it casually and replaced it in his hip
pocket.

"I've something to settle with you pretty soon," he said through
clenched teeth, addressing the Doctor. "And I'll settle it properly.
Now—what's this?"

He indicated Dale—her face still and waxen—her breath coming so
faintly she seemed hardly to breathe at all as Miss Cornelia and Bailey
tried to revive her.

"She's coming to—" said Miss Cornelia triumphantly, as a first faint
flush of color reappeared in the girl's cheeks. "We found her shut in
there, Mr. Anderson," the spinster added, pointing toward the gaping
entrance of the Hidden Room.

A gleam crossed the detective's face. He went up to examine the secret
chamber. As he did so, Doctor Wells, who had been inching
surreptitiously toward the door, sought the opportunity of slipping out
unobserved.

But Anderson was not to be caught napping again. "Wells!" he barked.
The Doctor stopped and turned.

"Where were you when she was locked in this room?"

The Doctor's eyes sought the floor—the walls—wildly—for any possible
loophole of escape.

"I didn't shut her in if that's what you mean!" he said defiantly.
"There was someone shut in there with her!" He gestured at the Hidden
Room. "Ask these people here."

Miss Cornelia caught him up at once.

"The fact remains, Doctor," she said, her voice cold with anger, "that
we left her here alone. When we came back you were here. The corridor
door was locked, and she was in that room—unconscious!"

She moved forward to throw the light of her candle on the Hidden Room
as the detective passed into it, gave it a swift professional glance,
and stepped out again. But she had not finished her story by any means.

"As we opened that door," she continued to the detective, tapping the
false mantel, "the Doctor deliberately extinguished our only candle!"

"Do you know who was in that room?" queried the detective fiercely,
wheeling on the Doctor.

But the latter had evidently made up his mind to cling stubbornly to a
policy of complete denial.

"No," he said sullenly. "I didn't put out the candle. It fell. And I
didn't lock that door into the hall. I found it locked!"

A sigh of relief from Bailey now centered everyone's attention on
himself and Dale. At last the girl was recovering from the shock of
her terrible experience and regaining consciousness. Her eyelids
fluttered, closed again, opened once more. She tried to sit up,
weakly, clinging to Bailey's shoulder. The color returned to her
cheeks, the stupor left her eyes.

She gave the Hidden Room a hunted little glance and then shuddered
violently.

"Please close that awful door," she said in a tremulous voice. "I
don't want to see it again."

The detective went silently to close the iron doors. "What happened to
you? Can't you remember?" faltered Bailey, on his knees at her side.

The shadow of an old terror lay on the girl's face, "I was in here
alone in the dark," she began slowly—"Then, as I looked at the doorway
there, I saw there was somebody there. He came in and closed the door.
I didn't know what to do, so I slipped in—there, and after a while I
knew he was coming in too, for he couldn't get out. Then I must have
fainted."

"There was nothing about the figure that you recognized?"

"No. Nothing."

"But we know it was the Bat," put in Miss Cornelia. The detective
laughed sardonically. The old duel of opposing theories between the
two seemed about to recommence.

"Still harping on the Bat!" he said, with a little sneer, Miss Cornelia
stuck to her guns.

"I have every reason to believe that the Bat is in this house," she
said.

The detective gave another jarring, mirthless laugh. "And that he took
the Union Bank money out of the safe, I suppose?" he jeered. "No, Miss
Van Gorder."

He wheeled on the Doctor now.

"Ask the Doctor who took the Union Bank money out of that safe!" he
thundered. "Ask the Doctor who attacked me downstairs in the
living-room, knocked me senseless, and locked me in the billiard room!"

There was an astounded silence. The detective added a parting shot to
his indictment of the Doctor.

"The next time you put handcuffs on a man be sure to take the key out
of his vest pocket," he said, biting off the words.

Rage and consternation mingled on the Doctor's countenance—on the
faces of the others astonishment was followed by a growing certainty.
Only Miss Cornelia clung stubbornly to her original theory.

"Perhaps I'm an obstinate old woman," she said in tones which obviously
showed that if so she was rather proud of it, "but the Doctor and all
the rest of us were locked in the living-room not ten minutes ago!"

"By the Bat, I suppose!" mocked Anderson.

"By the Bat!" insisted Miss Cornelia inflexibly. "Who else would have
fastened a dead bat to the door downstairs? Who else would have the
bravado to do that? Or what you call the imagination?"

In spite of himself Anderson seemed to be impressed.

"The Bat, eh?" he muttered, then, changing his tone, "You knew about
this hidden room, Wells?" he shot at the Doctor.

"Yes." The Doctor bowed his head.

"And you knew the money was in the room?"

"Well, I was wrong, wasn't I?" parried the Doctor. "You can look for
yourself. That safe is empty."

The detective brushed his evasive answer aside.

"You were up in this room earlier tonight," he said in tones of
apparent certainty.

"No, I couldn't get up!" the Doctor still insisted, with strange
violence for a man who had already admitted such damning knowledge.

The detective's face was a study in disbelief.

"You know where that money is, Wells, and I'm going to find it!"

This last taunt seemed to goad the Doctor beyond endurance.

"Good God!" he shouted recklessly. "Do you suppose if I knew where it
is, I'd be here? I've had plenty of chances to get away! No, you can't
pin anything on me, Anderson! It isn't criminal to have known that
room is here."

He paused, trembling with anger and, curiously enough, with an anger
that seemed at least half sincere.

"Oh, don't be so damned virtuous!" said the detective brutally. "Maybe
you haven't been upstairs but—unless I miss my guess, you know who
was!"

The Doctor's face changed a little.

"What about Richard Fleming?" persisted the detective scornfully.

The Doctor drew himself up.

"I never killed him!" he said so impressively that even Bailey's faith
in his guilt was shaken. "I don't even own a revolver!"

The detective alone maintained his attitude unchanged.

"You come with me, Wells," he ordered, with a jerk of his thumb toward
the door. "This time I'll do the locking up."

The Doctor, head bowed, prepared to obey. The detective took up a
candle to light their path. Then he turned to the others for a moment.

"Better get the young lady to bed," he said with a gruff kindliness of
manner. "I think that I can promise you a quiet night from now on."

"I'm glad you think so, Mr. Anderson!" Miss Cornelia insisted on the
last word. The detective ignored the satiric twist of her speech,
motioned the Doctor out ahead of him, and followed. The faint glow of
his candle flickered a moment and vanished toward the stairs.

It was Bailey who broke the silence.

"I can believe a good bit about Wells," he said, "but not that he stood
on that staircase and killed Dick Fleming."

Miss Cornelia roused from deep thought.

"Of course not," she said briskly. "Go down and fix Miss Dale's bed,
Lizzie. And then bring up some wine."

"Down there, where the Bat is?" Lizzie demanded.

"The Bat has gone."

"Don't you believe it. He's just got his hand in!"

But at last Lizzie went, and, closing the door behind her, Miss
Cornelia proceeded more or less to think, out loud.

"Suppose," she said, "that the Bat, or whoever it was shut in there
with you, killed Richard Fleming. Say that he is the one Lizzie saw
coming in by the terrace door. Then he knew where the money was for he
went directly up the stairs. But that is two hours ago or more. Why
didn't he get the money, if it was here, and get away?"

"He may have had trouble with the combination."

"Perhaps. Anyhow, he was on the small staircase when Dick Fleming
started up, and of course he shot him. That's clear enough. Then he
finally got the safe open, after locking us in below, and my coming up
interrupted him. How on earth did he get out on the roof?"