Somewhere in the House (14 page)

“I never trailed anybody before, dare say I can do it. Can't you give me some idea of what's been going on up there?”

“No idea, and only one descriptive word. The word is eldritch.”

“Is what?”

“Eldritch. Now get going.”

Gamadge replaced the telephone, and for a short time stood looking at it. Then he walked along the passage to a farther door, opened it, and went through into a kitchen hallway and a lobby beyond. He unlocked a back door and pulled it towards him.

The big garden was dark, but he made out shrubs, walks and trees. Past the far wall he could make out a low house, and at a gate in the wall he saw the large form of a man. There would be another in the alley, he supposed; Nordhall's mercenaries.

He came back to the main hall and went upstairs.

W
HEN GAMADGE ENTERED
the sitting-room he found that Nordhall had taken up a commanding position in front of the fire. The cardboard box was on the mantel shelf; its cover was half off, and the end of yellow flex protruded from it like the head of a small fanged serpent.

Facing him, across the empty space where the tea table had been yesterday, three chairs were now drawn up. They were occupied by a bald man, a nervous-looking woman, and a lank girl. Mrs. Leeder was in her usual place on the sofa at Nordhall's right, her uncle and aunt sat opposite her, Mr. Allsop hovered behind them, and Seward and Elena were side by side on the nearest window seat. Garth occupied the one at the end of the room. Leeder stood leaning against the wall to the right of the doorway.

When Gamadge came in Mrs. Leeder held up her hand, a gesture of invitation. He passed the lank girl—rather an oldish girl, he saw, when he got a look at her—and sat beside his client. As there seemed to be a lull in the proceedings, he looked at the Nagles.

Nagle was a battered-looking little man, the battered look being partly due to the facts that his brown suit needed pressing, his brown shoes polishing, his brown felt hat blocking and cleaning; some people would have said that the hat needed throwing away. He had round bright eyes and a thin, satirical mouth.

His wife was pale haired and pale eyed, in new autumn clothes; a purple suit, and a purple hat which was tilted forward at such an improbable angle that Gamadge was sure Miss Nagle had given it a final twitch before they left home, with an injunction to keep it that way. Mrs. Nagle kept putting a gloved hand up to the brim, and then taking the hand away again. Gamadge imagined that she resembled the deceased Aggie Fitch.

The daughter was highly groomed and fashionable, or rather she was like a sort of carbon copy of a fashionable young woman; a copy of inferior materials and finish. Or perhaps, Gamadge thought, it would be more accurate to call her a faintly caricatured rough draft of a model. Her skin, pale as Mrs. Leeder's, was not clear; her eyes incessantly wandered; she was slumped down in her chair, with her long feet in their crippling shoes stretched out and crossed in front of her; and her long, bony hands fidgeted with the enormous red bag in her lap. She looked excited.

Nordhall said: “Well, now you all know how Miss Fitch was killed, what she was killed with, and approximately when it must have happened. But none of you can help me out about it. As for Mr. Allsop, he definitely wasn't in the house until after dinner that evening; Mr. and Mrs. Nagle weren't here at all.”

“We hadn't been here since a good while before Mrs. Clayborn died,” said Mrs. Nagle, in a hurrying sort of way. “But we made it a duty to go to her funeral. Pews weren't reserved for our side of the family, and no car was provided to take us to the cemetery. I would have gone in poor Aggie's car, only it was so full of servants. I remember so well poor Aggie saying that after poor Mrs. Clayborn died things were taken out of her hands.”

“Out of Miss Fitch's hands?” asked Nordhall. Mr. Nagle sat looking straight in front of him, Miss Nagle turned her head and gave her mother a quelling stare.

“Yes, of course,” said Mrs. Nagle.

Miss Cynthia Clayborn, upright in her corner next to the fire, was smoking; but her cigarette had burned to a stub, and ash was falling on the floor. She did not notice it. She was looking at nobody, and her harsh features were like stone. She said: “Aggie Fitch was my mother's employee, you know.”

“A trusted
friend
,” mumbled Mrs. Nagle.

“Well, anyway,” said Nordhall, “you didn't come back to this house after the funeral?”

“No, we didn't. Aggie was leaving.”

“We thought Aggie was leaving,” said Mr. Nagle in a slightly bantering tone.

“The room had been locked that morning,” continued Nordhall, “that night it was sealed. Everybody wanted it sealed.”

“Of course we did,” said Miss Clayborn. “So would anybody.”

“You have any voice in the matter?” Nordhall glanced down at Mrs. Leeder.

She replied: “I had an opinion. I wanted it sealed. I was rather young to have a voice.”

“Well, anyway, that night it was sealed. But it was locked that morning, after you all went in and had a look. What were you looking for?”

His eyes were on Gavan Clayborn, who answered shortly: “For anything we might decide we didn't want inaccessibly shut up for twenty years.”

“Nobody have any chance at those buttons then?”

“Nobody had thought of the buttons then,” said Miss Clayborn.

“But could they have been taken? I'm trying to get conclusive evidence that they were not.”

“Place was as bright as day,” said Clayborn. “I was there myself. I saw what was done, and I saw the others out and didn't stay behind.”

“And then you locked up. But why did you lock up, Mr. Clayborn? That's what I'm getting at. Why lock up, if there was nothing to steal—so far as you knew—and nobody to try to steal anything?”

Clayborn said after a pause: “Damned if I know why, unless I thought of it as a first step in the sealing.”

Miss Clayborn said: “If my brother hadn't, I should have asked him to.”

“Because it was all fixed up for sealing, and you didn't want anybody going in and poking around?”

Looking at him steadily, she said: “Yes.”

Nagle observed: “Poor old Aggie went in and poked around, after all, didn't she?”

Nobody answered him.

“Where did you keep the key of the room, Mr. Clayborn?” asked Nordhall.

“In the top left-hand drawer of my dresser. Where it's been ever since, until to-day. I mean when I took it out today I shouldn't have known it had ever been taken out before.”

“Well, that night you sealed up. Who was it wanted the window bricked?” And as he got no reply, he went on: “Surely you remember, some of you, who suggested a big undertaking like that?”

Seward said in his tired voice: “I think I made the first suggestion about bricking the window. I made it when we talked about sealing the door.”

“Because some child on the roof next door might break a pane?”

“One had been broken downstairs some time before, by children throwing a ball on their way home from the Park.”

Miss Clayborn said: “I thought it was a splendid idea to brick up the window. Those artists next door—they might easily get up on the roof and throw a bottle.”

“Well, that's that,” said Nordhall. “I have a clear picture, only it doesn't include Mr. Leeder.”

Everybody in the room, except Mrs. Leeder, looked at Leeder. The Nagles craned back to look. Leeder said: “No, I was out of the picture.”

“Didn't attend the funeral?”

“No.”

“Where were you living at that time?”

“Where I live now,” said Leeder, smiling a little. “No reason to move. I was always entirely satisfied with my landlady.”

“Well, go ahead and tell us where it is,” said Nordhall impatiently.

“I should have told you if you'd asked me. You haven't asked me anything,” said Leeder.

“And the family can't tell me anything. Is it such a secret?”

Nagle, greatly amused, turned to look at Leeder again. He asked: “Say, Rowe, what is this? You mean none of them know you live with us?”

“They never asked me, Bert.”

Nagle turned back to address the room in general with a cackle of laughter: “Say, what do you know? What a guy. Here he's been living with us in Jersey City for twenty years, and nobody knew it. Only boarder we ever had. And my wife thought you knew it, all the Clayborns knew it, thought she was doing the family a favour.”

“I did not,” said Mrs. Nagle. “I thought I was doing Aggie a favour. She always liked Rowe Leeder.”

“So did we like him,” said Nagle. “I got him his job on the
Great White World
, and now he's sports editor. Well, boy! You certainly play 'em close up to your chest!”

Mrs. Leeder, utterly amazed, said nothing. Miss Clayborn spoke in tones of blank astonishment: “You've been living with the Nagles all these years, Rowe Leeder?”

“All these years, Miss Cynthia.”

She looked across at Mrs. Leeder. “Did you know, Harriet?”

“No, of course not, Aunt Cynthia. If he'd wanted to tell me where he lived he'd have told me. I don't ask questions.”

“It happened in the most natural way in the world,” said Leeder. “Aggie Fitch fixed it up for me.”

They stared at him, all the Clayborns.

“I said good-bye to Aggie,” he went on, “the day I—er—left. She suggested the Nagles. It seemed a good idea to me at the time, and I never changed my mind about it.”

“And
we
certainly haven't had a chance to talk about it to the family,” remarked Mrs. Nagle in her tone of repressed resentment.

“All right, Lou,” said her husband. “Never mind that. Perfectly natural, as Rowe says—for him to take refuge with relations. Aggie knew we were looking for a paying guest.”

“Well,” said Nordhall, “no matter how it happened, Mr. Leeder certainly kept it dark. Now about Miss Fitch disappearing, and what you thought, Mr. Nagle.”

“She certainly disappeared,” replied Nagle. “We thought it was funny when we didn't hear from her, but there was this cruise she was always talking about. The whole works—Gibraltar, Suez, India, China and Japan. Home by way of Honolulu. She'd done a lot of travelling with old Mrs. Clayborn and the daughter, she had her trip all doped out; pile of folders and language books a foot high. We thought she was too busy getting off to let us hear from her.”

Nagle was very glib. Nordhall asked: “The ship was picked out?”

“Not that we knew.”

“If you'd known the ship, you might have tried to follow her up that direction. Many such cruises at that time, in a year?”

“Don't know a thing about it,” said Nagle. “We do our cruising at the news-reels.”

“You saw her to speak to after the funeral. She never said a word then about her plans?”

“We only saw her for a minute; she was getting into the car.”

“Mrs. Nagle was her niece, her only relative except this young lady here—”

“And the Clayborns,” said Nagle, smiling. “She didn't say good-bye to them, either.”

“But she was only a distant cousin of theirs, a second cousin of old Mrs. Clayborn. You'd be the people she'd keep in touch with. How long did you wait before making any inquiries about her?”

“My wife called up in a couple of weeks. We didn't care to butt in sooner, house of mourning and everything.”

“And when they told you here that she'd been gone since the day of the funeral, you just let it go?”

“We thought Aggie was on her cruise.”

“No picture cards from her, no word from her afterwards, no news that she'd died, no communication from anybody about her property. Your wife spoke to her at the funeral, she'd just sent you a lodger; you saw her regularly; but you never went to Missing Persons about her in all those years, advertised, did a thing. Leeder never did a thing, though she'd been the means of getting him a home and a job.”

Nagle said: “Make what you like of it, Cop. We're busy people out our way; Leeder was taxiing until he got other work, no money in his pockets, and he'd been brought up rich. Think
he
had time to worry about Aggie Fitch?”

Mrs. Nagle said suddenly, in a shrill voice: “I knew they'd think it was funny, Bert. I'm going to tell about the little fight.”

Nagle sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, and looked up at the ceiling.

“I can't help it,” said Mrs. Nagle. “It sounds funnier this way.”

Miss Nagle's voice was heard for the first time. She had been glancing about the room, at Garth on his distant window seat, at Gamadge with curiosity. Now she said: “What can you do, Pop? Let her go ahead and hand it to them. What can you do?”

“That's right, Mrs. Nagle,” said Nordhall. “Tell us about the little fight.”

Mrs. Nagle committed an act of defiance by shoving her hat into a comfortable position on her head. “That was a mistake,” she said, “about my talking to Aggie at the funeral; I just noticed that there weren't any cars left for any more of us after Aggie and the servants drove away. It was before, the day of Mrs. Clayborn's death, that she said that over the telephone—about things being taken out of her hands.”

“Your husband thought it would sound better if you put the conversation later, at the funeral?” asked Nordhall.

“No, I just got it mixed; I didn't talk to Aggie at the funeral. We had this little fight over the telephone. That's why I didn't expect to hear from her again. Of course if she'd lived, it would have blown over.”

“But you weren't surprised that it didn't seem to have blown over?”

“Aggie was touchy. There wasn't much to it, but…you know how those things are.
I
couldn't speak first. When we called up and found she'd gone—” Mrs. Nagle looked around at the assembled company in some confusion—“were told she'd gone, we thought she wasn't going to make up.”