The Classic Mystery Novel MEGAPACK®. Hay James
other circumstances the immediate shift in attitudes might have had a humorous side. Thoroughly alarmed by the mishap, Jack lost his burning interest in the Coatesnash house and wanted only to get us out of it. As for me—temporarily, anyhow—I was too apologetic to be frightened.
Jack hammered at the door. It was two inches thick and fabricated of solid oak. It didn’t budge beneath his stoutest efforts. Nothing he tried would serve in place of the missing knob and shank. He tried to fit into the hole in the door his finger, his fountain pen, his palette knife. The door remained firmly closed. The single window offered the only other egress from the room. After minutes of frantic, futile labor, Jack pushed up the window and poked his head into the raw spring night. He doubtfully examined the overhanging gutter.
“Do you think you can make it to the roof, Lola?”
I looked out and up, and firmly declined to try.
“If I went first and pulled you up…”
“I prefer staying here.”
Jack then proposed that he ascend to the roof, climb down by the grape arbor in the rear and return through the house for me. Once he got hold of the shank and knob which maddeningly lay in the hall he could easily open the door for me. It was a solution I didn’t like, but I hardly dared object.
With a sinking heart I saw Jack go out the window. Half standing, half sitting, he attempted to draw himself to the roof. He is a strong and acrobatic man, but the gutter was old and rusty. A piece tore away, ne grasped air, and for one dreadful moment I thought he would plunge to the ground below. I insisted that he abandon the effort. He refused. He tried again with me clinging desperately to his knees, wondering how long I could support his weight if he should slip. This time the gutter held, and in some miraculous fashion he got to the roof. Leaning over the edge, he whispered a few final encouraging words and vanished.
For a while I remained beside the window, too terrified to move. Jack had left me the flashlight and the wrench. A monkey wrench is a singularly inadequate weapon. I laid it down. Minutes slowly passed, and gradually I felt a little better. If anyone were in the house, surely the loud report of the door would have brought that person to the scene. No one came.
I changed my cramped position, began to study the confusion of objects in the storeroom, shifting the flash from a box piled high with shoes to a box filled with hardware—old electric fixtures, locks, bits of plumbing, and the like—from a battered wardrobe trunk to a sagging, springless couch.
The room was bitterly cold. I tiptoed to the couch, pulled its faded coverlet across my knees. Fumbling in my coat I pulled out a squashed pack and lighted a cigarette. I flipped the match to the floor. As I bent to extinguish it, my hand touched leather. Tucked underneath the couch were two traveling bags, brand new and thick with dust. Both were initialed L.T.
How long I sat staring at the bags I cannot say. L.T must stand for Laura Twining. But what were her bags doing here? Why hadn’t she taken them to Europe? The very questions were disquieting.
I pulled out the bags, snapped the locks. My perplexity and uneasiness intensified. Both bags were packed, just as Laura Twining would have packed them. Stout shoes wrapped in tissue paper, cotton stockings wound in careful balls, a crepe kimono folded across a hanger. The bags contained every garment I had seen the spinster wear; the bottle-green foulard so peculiarly unbecoming, the black poplin used for every day, the darned housedresses, the shapeless raccoon coat, the purple velvet hat. Laura Twining had planned to take the bags. A waterproof toilet case provided with fresh toothpaste, a tin of talcum, a bar of jacketed soap, insisted that she had. Why not, then? I recalled the orderly workings of her mind. That she could have forgotten her luggage seemed beyond belief.
Why should the bags be in the storeroom here hidden beneath a couch? I continued the exploration, caught my breath. In the second bag I came upon three things. I found the dress Laura had intended to travel in—the gray poplin trimmed in lace, pressed and ready to wear, and yet not worn. In the pocket I found a letter of credit, pathetically small, and an unused passport. Laura’s passport. The photograph smiled timidly, apologetically as Laura herself had smiled when she asked me if I thought the poplin dress was suitable for shipboard.
I felt a sickening dismay. A conviction long avoided rushed inescapably upon me. Laura Twining had never sailed to France. If not to France, where had she gone? In awful fascination my mind returned to the rock garden and to the excavation there. Sitting in the storeroom, her pitiful possessions spread before me, I felt quite certain that never again would Jack and I be annoyed by friendly little calls from Luella Coatesnash’s dull companion.
I began automatically to repack the bags. I stopped suddenly. Someone was moving in the hall outside. I tried to pull myself together. It must be Jack, come back into the house for me. But I hadn’t thought he would be so soon. I went to the door.
“Jack,” I whispered. “Jack.”
There was no answer. The footsteps ceased, and all was quiet. Someone lurked beyond the door, motionless, listening, waiting for me further to betray myself.
I crouched against the panel. I heard from the other side the flare of a match, a rattle along the floor, and then, most terrible of all, I heard the sound of the steel shank as it was forced through the hole in the door. Slowly the door began to open. I resisted frantically. Inch by inch the steady, insistent pressure forced me back. The noiseless, terrible contest continued. My strength and will gave way. The door opened wide. I was trapped in the corner, pressed against the wall.
Footsteps, regular, unhurried, came into the storeroom, crossed to the couch. The thick darkness kept its secret well. I could see nothing. The couch coverlet rustled; leather scraped on wood. A pause, long and ominous. Then the unhurried footsteps returned to the door, again paused. I prepared for the end. Whoever had entered the room knew that I, or that some person, was also there. I opened my mouth to scream, made no sound.
The door began to close, slowly and deliberately as it had opened. Fantastically, in the darkness, I heard a low soft chuckle. The door shut smartly; the shank was swiftly withdrawn, and was dropped to the floor on the other side. I heard it fall.
Three minutes that were like hours dragged by. Certain my visitor would not return, I tottered to the couch, found the flashlight. Laura Twining’s bags were gone. I was alone and imprisoned once more.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Splinter of Bone
Gravel pattered at the window-pane behind me. A sharp, small noise like the rattle of broken beads. I tottered to the window. Jack stood on the ground below. His coat was torn, his cheek was bleeding, but to me he looked very nearly perfect. Then to my consternation he called in loud and cheerful tones:
“I’m alive and whole. I had a devil of a time getting down that arbor, and…”
I leaned out into the night. “For heaven’s sake be quiet. Something dreadful’s happened.”
I heard him gasp, but he asked no questions. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
A little later his footfall sounded in the corridor beyond the storeroom. Once more the steel shank slipped through the door, once more the knob was turned, and the door was opened. This time, though, I felt the blessed clasp of Jack’s arms, the warmth of his kiss on my lips. I tried incoherently to talk and I know that I wept from sheer relief. Clinging together, we started through the pitch-black silent house toward the lower floor. I recall little of that swift and noiseless journey, but as we started down the cellar stairs I did become vaguely aware of the change in temperature. The previous bitter chill had vanished; the basement dampness stirred with a feeble, humid warmth. A strange odor assailed the nostrils, an odor misty and unsubstantial, yet faintly acrid, like rubber drying in the sun. Then, suddenly, from the darkness came a whimpering moan.
“What was that?”
Jack’s arm tightened at my waist. “It must be Reuben. Poor little devil, I’d forgotten we left him here. Come, Lola.”
I sensed the strain and urgency in his voice, the speed with which he