Yellow Room (9 page)

Sam had said she was pretty, about twenty-five or so, and very well dressed. What he actually said, Carol learned later, was that she “looked like some of the summer crowd,” and that he didn’t think she would walk far “in them spike-heeled shoes she wore.”

None of the taxi men in town had seen her. Apparently she had walked to her destination, whatever that was.

Dane did not interrupt. He listened intently, but when the district attorney made a gesture toward the package he made a protest.

“Is that necessary?” he asked. “Miss Spencer has had a bad day. She looks exhausted.”

“We have to do what we can, major. There may be something here she will recognize.”

It was Floyd who opened the bundle, carefully saving the string, his big fingers working at the knots. Opened and spread out on the table was what was left of the short fur jacket, badly burned, the scorched pair of bedroom slippers, and a few scraps of cloth, one of them red silk or rayon. Over all was the odor of burned fur, and Dane quickly lit a cigarette and gave it to Carol.

It helped somewhat. She was able to face the table, even to go to it Floyd was holding up the scrap of red material and once more all the faces were turned to her.

“What’s this, Miss Spencer?” Floyd asked.

“I wouldn’t know. It looks—it might be part of a kimono or a dressing gown. It wouldn’t be a slip.”

“That’s what my wife says.” He looked around the room. “So what? So she was undressed. She wasn’t expecting any trouble. She undressed and went to bed in that room upstairs, and what happened to her happened to her in this house.”

Dane spoke for the first time.

“That doesn’t follow,” he said. “She might have gone outside, for some purpose.”

“What difference does it make?” said Floyd belligerently. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“It might change things somewhat.” Dane picked up one of the slippers and shook it. A pine needle slipped out and lay on the desk, and Floyd flushed angrily. “Whether she was killed in this house or not,” Dane said casually, “she was outside that night. What does Mrs. Norton say?”

“That’s my business,” Floyd said gruffly, and proceeded to tie up the package again, crushing the white hat in with the rest and fastening it carefully with the string he had saved. They left after that, all except Dane, but following a colloquy at the front door the state trooper came back to the library.

“I’m afraid I’m going to bother you some more, Miss Spencer,” he said apologetically. “I’d like to look over the house, if you don’t mind, and…” He hesitated, then smiled. “The district attorney thinks it would be a good idea to clean out the furnace. It’s lighted, I suppose.”

Carol had rallied. She even managed to smile at him.

“Of course,” she said, “I had to burn up the evidence somehow. It’s been going all day.”

He grinned back at her.

“Some things don’t burn, you know,” he said cheerfully. “You’d be surprised how many. Nails out of high-heeled pumps, snaps off clothes, buttons, initials off bags, all sorts of things. You sift them out of the ashes and there you are.”

The last they saw of him he was going lightly up the stairs, and for some time they heard him moving about in the yellow room overhead.

Dane was thoughtful.

“Just remember this,” he said. “Even if they find those things have been burned in the furnace, it doesn’t connect you with the case.”

“You think they will?”

“It’s possible, if not particularly intelligent. Of course Mrs. Norton’s accident may have prevented it. Whoever did it couldn’t know she’d broken her leg. They might have expected her to run screaming out of the house.”

He left soon after that, telling her to lock her door but that otherwise she was safe enough. “There will be troopers in the basement all night,” he said. “Better get all the sleep you can. I may need you tomorrow.”

With which cryptic statement he departed, going out through the door to the terrace and motioning her to lock it behind him.

C
AROL DID NOT SLEEP
much, although she felt relaxed. Through the old-fashioned register in the floor came the muffled sound of men’s voices from the furnace cellar, and she learned in the morning that the lieutenant and one of his men had spent most of the night there. They had made a thorough job of it, emptying the furnace itself and coming up to wash looking as if a bomb had burned them. But all they found was the melted remains of what looked like a teaspoon, which Maggie had reported as missing since the year before.

The word had gone out by that time. Floyd may have lacked a camera, but he knew police procedure. He had sent out a description of the girl to the Missing Persons Bureau and by teletype all over the country. The newspapers had been busy too, and evidently Elinor had been unable to keep them from her mother. Carol, still keeping up largely on coffee, was called to the telephone to hear Mrs. Spencer’s voice, shaken and hysterical:

“What sort of a mess have you got yourself into? The papers are dreadful.”

Carol controlled herself with difficulty.

“It was done before I got here, mother. Please don’t worry.”

“It’s easy for you to say that. When I think of the notoriety, the disgrace of the whole thing—I’ll never live in that house again. Never. And I want you to leave, Carol. Do you hear me? Come back here at once.”

“I’ll have to wait for the inquest, mother.”

“Good heavens, are they having an inquest? Why?”

Carol finally lost her patience.

“Because it’s a murder,” she said. “Because they think we had something to do with it. And I’m not so sure but what we had.”

She rang off, feeling ashamed for her outburst but somewhat relieved by it.

There was a new development that day, one which seemed to justify her last statement to her mother, although it was some time before she learned about it. On that same morning, Tuesday, June twentieth, a caller appeared at the East Sixty-seventh Precinct station in New York City. He looked uneasy, and he carried a morning paper in his hand. The desk sergeant was reading a paper, too. He looked up over it.

“Anything I can do for you?”

“I’m not sure. It’s about this murder up in Maine. I think maybe I saw the girl, right here in town.”

“Plenty of people think that. Had five or six already.”

But later the visitor’s story proved interesting, to say the least.

He was the doorman at the apartment house on Park Avenue where the Spencers lived, and on the morning the family had left for the country, a girl had called. She had asked for Miss Carol Spencer, and seemed greatly disappointed when told she had gone. What had taken him to the station house was that the description fitted this girl, white hat, fur jacket and all.

“She acted like she didn’t know just what to do,” the police reported his statement. “I thought maybe she’d just got off a train. She had a little bag with her, as well as a pocketbook. I don’t know what she
did
do, either. The elevator man was off, and just then the bell rang. When I came down again she was gone.”

That, he said, had been about ten o’clock the previous Thursday.

Carol did not learn this until later. She was worried and upset that morning. She had called the hospital, to learn that Lucy Norton was allowed no visitors, and to suspect that the police were keeping her incommunicado until the inquest. Also both the younger girls were threatening to leave, Freda declaring that she had seen a man in the grounds from her window after she had put out the light the night before. Only dire threats by Maggie that the police would follow and bring them back kept them at all.

She was unpacking her trunk when Nora came up to tell her Colonel Richardson was downstairs, and she went down reluctantly. He was standing by the library fire, and looking shocked.

“My dear girl!” he said. “I just heard, or I’d have come before. How dreadful for you.”

“It’s all rather horrible. We don’t even know who she was.”

“So I understand. I learned only just now, when I went to the village. But surely Lucy Norton would know. I saw her husband bring her that morning.”

“The police aren’t letting her see anyone.”

He considered that. She thought he looked very tired, and his lips had a bluish tinge. His heart was not too good, and he had probably walked up the hill.

“Well, thank God it doesn’t concern you,” he said. “I’ll not keep you, my dear. And don’t worry too much. Floyd is an excellent man.”

He left soon after. She went with him to the door and watched him start down the drive, leaning rather heavily on his stick. When she turned to go in she saw Dane. He was still in slacks and sweater, and he was carefully surveying the shape of the hill behind the house. When the colonel had disappeared he walked over to the drive and, stopping, examined the grass border beside it.

He straightened and grinned at her.

“Hello,” he said. “Colonel know anything?”

“No. He’d just heard.”

He lit a cigarette and limped over to her.

“How about helping me with a little job this morning?” he inquired. “I’m no bird dog, with this leg. I could use an assistant.”

“What sort of job?”

“Oh, just hither and yon,” he said vaguely. “Know if anybody tramped around this drive lately?”

“Outside of a half dozen men I don’t think of anybody.”

“Up the hill, I mean.”

“Oh, that?” She looked up the hill. It was heavily overgrown with shrubbery, and on the crest was an abandoned house, gray and forlorn in the morning light. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t think so.”

“How about the tool house? That’s it up there, isn’t it?”

“There’s a path to it. Anyhow George Smith is in the hospital. He hasn’t been around lately.”

“Well, someone’s been up that hill lately. The ground’s dry. There hasn’t been any rain for weeks. But the faucet for the garden hose has dripped in one place, and somebody stepped in it.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing,” she said. “The deer sometimes come down at night.”

“The deer don’t wear flat rubber-heeled shoes,” he said shortly.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, look,” he said rather impatiently. “According to Alex, those troopers didn’t find anything in the furnace last night. So there are several alternatives. Her clothes were burned elsewhere, they were shipped out of town—which they weren’t—or they’re hidden someplace.”

“And you think they are hidden?”

“Hidden. Possibly buried. Look back, Miss Spencer. Things didn’t go according to schedule. Lucy Norton wakened. That was a bad break. Then she fell down the stairs. That gave whoever did it a bit of time, but not much. And there was a lot of stuff to dispose of, the woman’s clothes, her pocketbook, and her overnight bag. How far could the killer travel with all that? With air wardens patrolling for lights, the fire watchers looking for fires ever since the drought? Not to mention lovers on back lanes like the one over there.”

“I see. You think the things are on the hill.”

“I think it’s possible. That’s all.”

“But if they meant to burn the house, why bother with them at all?”

“Remember what I said about Lucy. There wasn’t a chance to set a fire that night It was done later. It had to be.”

They started slowly up the hill, beginning at the leaking pipe and being careful not to step on the mark he had discovered. It was small, either from a woman’s flat shoe or from that of a rather undersized man. There were no prints beyond it. The hill stretched up, dry and dusty, and before long Carol’s slacks were covered with sandburs and her stockings ruined. Dane did not move directly. He circled right and left, but when they reached the deserted house above neither of them had found anything. Dane sat down abruptly and rubbed his leg.

“Damn the thing,” he said irritably. “I’ll get hell from Alex for this.”

He gave her a cigarette and lit one himself.

“You might call this a preliminary search,” he said. “They’re not on top of the ground. They may be under it.”

“Buried?”

“Maybe. It’s been done, you know. The idea is to lift a shrub, say, and dig a hole. After that you replant the shrub and pray for rain.” He gave his slightly bitter smile. “Someone around here may be watching the sky this very minute, hoping for rain,” he said. “Pleasant thought, isn’t it?”

He got up and dusted off his slacks.

“I don’t like your being in that house alone,” he said abruptly. “Oh, I know. It’s all over, and you’re a damned attractive girl and nobody would want to hurt you. So was that other girl, remember. But I was a fool to bring you up on this hill. If anybody gets the idea that you’re looking for something here—There’s one thing to remember about murder. It’s the first one that’s hard.”

“I ought to be safe enough. We haven’t found anything.”

“That’s not what I said.”

They went down the hill, this time by way of the tool house, and outside it he stopped.

“Mind if I go in?” he asked.

“It’s probably locked.”

It was not locked, however, George’s appendicitis attack had probably been sudden. Dane opened the door and went inside. It was orderly in the extreme, a table with an old oilcloth covering, a chair, a shelf with a hit-or-miss collection of dishes, and around the walls garden implements in tidy rows, an electric lawn mower, rakes, spades, wicker brooms, and coils of hose.

“Neat fellow, George,” he said, and looked around him. “About the way he left it last fall. Except—” He stopped over something, but did not touch it. “Come in,” he said. “It looks as though we may be right, after all.”

What he had found was a spade. It was deeply encrusted with clay, and a few dried leaves were still stuck to it. Carol stared down at it.

“You think they were buried with this?”

“There’s a good chance, isn’t there? In that case whoever buried them knew about this tool house. Knew where it was and what was in it. Interesting, isn’t it? Don’t touch it. There may be prints on it.”

Carol did not hear him. She was standing in the doorway, looking at the shelf, her eyes incredulous.

“There’s mother’s Lowestoft tea set,” she said slowly. “And father’s picture, and the sampler Granny did when she was a little girl.”