Yellow Room (4 page)

“We’ll manage. No telephone of course, and no cars or lights yet. Otherwise we’re all right. How are you?”

“Fine. I find the waiting hard, of course, but I have to remember that I am not alone in that. Can I do anything now?”

She told him she could get along, and watched him going down the drive, swinging the stick he always carried, but with his back straight and his head held high. She looked after him, distressed for them both, that he should believe and she could not, that to him Don was still a living force and to her he was becoming only a memory. She was deeply depressed when she got back to the house.

She found Maggie at the stove, with a kettle boiling and her face smeared with soot.

“I got the furnace started,” she said cheerfully. “Otherwise those fools of girls would still be hugging this fire. And I started Freda at your room. Soon as she’s made the bed—”

Carol dumped her groceries on the table.

“Lucy Norton’s broken her leg, Maggie. She’s in the hospital.”

Maggie turned, her face shocked.

“The poor thing! How did it happen?”

“Here in this house.” Carol sat down and kicked off her pumps. “She fell down the stairs. There’s a silly story going around that she found someone upstairs and tried to get away.”

“When was all this?” Maggie, practical as ever, was opening the new pound of coffee.

“Last Friday night or early Saturday morning. The lights were off, of course.” She looked at her feet. They were hurting, and she picked up one and began to rub it thoughtfully. “George is there too. He’s had his appendix out.”

“For God’s sake!” said Maggie, her poise finally forsaking her. “Something scared
him
too?”

There was no time to answer.

There was a wild scream from somewhere upstairs, and a minute later Freda half ran, half fell toward the back staircase, and promptly fainted on the kitchen floor.

Later Carol was to remember that faint of Freda’s as the beginning of the nightmare, to see herself bending over the girl, whose small face was ashy gray and the palm of one hand oddly blackened, of trying to prevent Nora from dousing her with a pan of water from the sink, and of catching Maggie’s eyes as she straightened.

“Something’s scared her too,” said Maggie ominously. “Too much scaring around here, to my way of thinking.”

Nora was still clutching the pan.

“Maybe she saw a mouse,” she said. “She’s deathly afraid of mice.”

“We’d better leave her flat,” Carol said. “Go up and get her a blanket, Nora. The floor’s cold. You’ll find them in the linen closet.”

She bent over and felt the girl’s pulse. It was rapid but strong, and a little color was coming back into her face. Carol herself felt rather dizzy. She stepped into her pumps and looked at Maggie.

“What’s that on her head?”

Maggie bent over and looked.

“Seems like soot,” she said. “Maybe she was lighting your fire. I’d better go and look. The place could burn up while we’re standing here.”

She did not go, however. Freda was stirring. She opened pale-blue eyes and looked around her uncertainly.

“What happened?” she said. “I must have fainted or something.”

“If you didn’t you gave a good imitation of it,” said Maggie dryly. “You scared the insides out of us. Better lie still for a while. You’re all right.”

Freda was far from all right. With returning consciousness came memory, and without warning she burst into loud hysterical crying.

“I want to go home,” she said between wails. “I never did want to come here.”

“Shut up,” Maggie said grimly. “Noise isn’t going to help you. What scared you?”

Freda did not answer, and it was a part of the nightmare that Nora chose that moment to return. She came rather quietly down the back stairs and stopped, bracing herself against the frame of the kitchen door as if she needed support. There was no color in her face, but her voice was steady.

“There’s somebody dead in the linen closet,” she said, and shivered. “There’s been a fire there too.”

S
HE DID NOT SAY
any more. She made for the door which led outside from the service hall, and they could hear her retching there. Carol made a move toward the stairs, but Maggie was ahead of her.

“They’re both hysterical,” she said. “Probably saw a blanket on the floor. Better let me go up, Miss Carol. You don’t look so good yourself. You stay with Freda.”

Freda was still crying, but she was sitting up now and fumbling for a handkerchief. Carol gave her one from her bag and she dried her eyes.

“I guess I flopped,” she said. “So would you, if you seen what I did.” She shuddered uncontrollably. “I opened the door where you said the linen closet was, and—”

She did not finish. Maggie came in, and one look at her face was enough.

“I guess you’ll have to get the police,” she said. “There’s somebody there. Better not go up. I opened the windows in the hall, but I didn’t touch anything else.”

She went to the sink and washed her hands. Then she sat down abruptly, and began nervously pleating her apron.

“I don’t feel so good,” she said. “They’re right about the fire. We’ll never use them sheets and things again.”

The nightmare feeling closed down on Carol. It had been growing since their arrival, with Lucy not there, and Harry Miller’s story, and now this! She felt young and incapable, and the house itself had become horrible. She found she was shaking.

“Could you see who it was?” she asked.

Maggie shook her head.

“I told you. There’s been a fire.” She got up heavily and went to the stove. “I’d better make some coffee,” she said, her voice flat “It’s a help. You’d better have a cup before you start for the village. Maybe you can get Colonel Richardson to drive you in. He’s near.”

“I ought to go up myself.”

“You stay where you are,” Maggie said forcefully. “Freda, you go up and lie down. Nothing’s going to hurt you. Whatever it is it’s over, and your room ain’t near it.”

Nora had come back by that time, but neither girl would go upstairs again. They looked shocked and helpless, but they looked, too, like a defiant combination against Maggie’s common sense. Carol looked at them with what amounted to despair.

“I’m sorry, girls,” she said. “Whatever has happened it has nothing to do with us. Mrs. Norton has broken her leg. She’s in the hospital, and probably some tramp came in while the house was empty.”

Nora was the first to recover.

“And burned himself to death!” she said, her voice high and shrill.

“That’s for the police to find out.”

“I’m staying for no police.”

Maggie turned from the stove.

“That’s where you’re wrong, my girl,” she said coldly. “You’ll stay here as long as the police want you. Don’t get any ideas about running away, either of you. You found the body, and here you’re staying till they let you go.”

It was a subdued pair of young women that Carol took upstairs. The service wing was cut off from the main house by a heavy door, and after she had seen them to their rooms she opened it. From this angle she could see the door of the linen closet. It was next to that of the elevator which had been installed for her mother some years before, and it was standing open, its white paint blackened and blistered.

She stood still, almost unable to move. Soon she would have to get help, but first she must see for herself. The odor was very strong. It was a combination of scorched linen, burned paint, kerosene, and something else she did not care to identify.

The morning sun was flooding the closet. The house was built entirely around the patio, with a passage running around it on the second floor and the bedroom doors and that of the elevator and closet opening from it. The windows were open, and she was grateful for the air. She moved forward slowly, past Greg’s old room, past the blue guest room and past the elevator door. Then she was at the closet, staring in.

The women had been right. There was a body inside, but it was not that of a tramp. It was that of a woman.

She did not go back to the kitchen. She went on rather blindly to the main staircase and huddled there on the top step. She was still wearing the black dress and fur-collared coat in which she had arrived, and she pulled the coat around her as if she were cold. She was not thinking yet. Her mind was too chaotic for that. She knew there were things she should do, but she was not ready to do them. Maggie found her there, her eyes wide and staring and her face chalk-white.

“I warned you,” she said. “Maybe I’d better go for the police. It’s nobody you know, is it?”

Carol looked up blankly.

“How can anyone tell?” Her voice was bleak, and Maggie was frightened.

“Now look, Miss Carol,” she said, “it’s not that bad. Maybe you couldn’t recognize her, but she’s—she’s not really burned up. And the house is cold. If it’s only been there since Saturday—”

Carol roused herself.

“Saturday? Why Saturday?”

“Because Lucy Norton was here Friday night,” Maggie explained patiently. “You don’t suppose this went on while she was in the house, do you?”

“It might have. I didn’t tell you all the story. She says somebody reached out of the linen closet and knocked her down. That’s how she got hurt. She was running down the stairs in the dark.”

Carol got up slowly, holding to the stair rail, and Maggie caught her arm to steady her.

“I’d better get Floyd,” she said. “Maybe I can telephone from Colonel Richardson’s.” And when Maggie protested, “I need the air,” she said flatly, “I’m all right now. Let go of me. I’m only glad Mother isn’t here.”

Maggie nodded, and Carol went down the stairs. The sunlight on the white walls of the house made the patio dazzling, and she blinked in the glare. The blue pool needed paint, she thought distractedly, and some of the tiles had been cracked by the winter ice. It had been idiotic to build a house entirely around an open court. In winter any heavy snow had to be shoveled into a wheelbarrow and dumped on the drive, and when there was a rapid thaw the drainpipe in the pool was not adequate. More than once the plumber had had to come, have the current turned on, run a hose through the entry hall and pump the water out onto the drive.

She pulled herself together. All this was pure escapism, and she could not escape. There was a dead girl or woman upstairs, and she would have to notify the police. She was more normal when she left the house again, although her feet still bothered her. She had a pair of sandals in her bag upstairs, but she could not go back for them. Perhaps Colonel Richardson would telephone, or drive her into town. But as she stumbled down the drive once more, it was to see the Richardson garage doors open and the Colonel’s car gone. This was the time, she remembered, when he drove his man, his only servant, into town to market, and the house would be closed and locked.

She stood still, shivering in the cold air. She could go up to the Wards’ and get help there, but once again the long steep drive was more than she could face. She decided to walk, and some twenty minutes later she opened the door of the police station and went in.

Floyd was relaxing. He had taken off his belt and automatic, which lay on his desk, and was resting in a chair, with another drawn up for his legs. He looked up in astonishment when he saw her, and got to his feet.

“Anything wrong?” he inquired. “Here, maybe you’d better sit down.”

She did not sit, however. She stood just inside the door, holding the knob as if to support her.

“There’s somebody dead in the linen closet at Crestview,” she said, her voice flat. “I thought maybe you’d better come up.”

He looked astounded.

“Dead? Are you sure?”

“Yes. I think somebody tried to burn her. The house too, I suppose. Only the door was shut and the fire didn’t spread.”

“For God’s sake,” Floyd said softly. “So Lucy Norton wasn’t crazy, after all.”

He buckled on his heavy gun, his face set.

“My car’s in the alley,” he said. “I’ll call Jim Mason. He’s got the night job, so he’s at home. I’d better call the doctor too. He’s the coroner.” He reached for the telephone and stopped, his hand on the receiver.

“You’re sure of all this, are you?” he said. “Not mistaking something else for a body?”

“I saw it myself.”

She sat down then and kicked off her shoes, and the next thing she knew Floyd was holding a glass of whisky to her lips and telling her to get it down somehow.

“I’m not the fainting sort,” she protested. “I’m just tired.”

“You gave a damn good imitation of passing out,” he said gruffly. “Take the rest of this.”

And she was still half strangled when he put her into his car.

The whisky helped. She felt less cold, and things were out of her hands now. The law was beside her, looking stern and capable. She was no longer alone. And the chief was a shrewd man. He asked genially about the family, her mother, and especially about Gregory.

“All mighty proud of him here,” he said. “Hear he’s being decorated by the President.”

“He came home for that. They sent him. You know Greg. He didn’t want to leave his men, or his plane.”

She was looking better, he thought. He had always liked her. Had a rotten time, too, he considered, with that mother of hers and her hoity-toity sister. Then she’d been engaged to Don Richardson, and Don was dead, although his old man wouldn’t believe it.

He turned into the drive and put his car into second gear. The engine promptly began to knock, and he apologized.

“Car’s all right,” he explained. “It’s this rotten gas we’re getting. Hello, there’s the Dane fellow. Maybe we’d better get him.”

He stopped the car. A man in slacks and yellow sweater had been slowly climbing the drive and limping slightly as he did so. He stopped when he heard the car behind him and turned, a tall figure with a lean, rather saturnine face and an aggressive jaw.

“Hello, major,” said the chief. “Kind of early for a walk, isn’t it?’

Dane grinned.

“My daily dozen,” he explained. “When I can run up this hill I’ll be ready to go back. Anyhow I saw smoke in this direction, and after the stories going round I thought I’d look into it.”