Yellow Room Read online

  She was starting for the garage to see what progress had been made when Freda stopped her.

  The drive was empty. By this time the village certainly knew what had happened, but no crowd of thrill-seekers had gathered. The town, self-respecting as ever, was evidently going about its business as usual. Down at the garage someone was hammering, and the morning chill had gone. The sun was warm and heartening.

  She had taken only a step or two when Freda called her. The girl still looked pale, but she was no longer hysterical Carol stopped.

  “What is it, Freda?”

  “If you’ll excuse me, miss,” she said. “Maggie thought I’d better tell you. Somebody has been sleeping in the yellow room. There’s sheets on the bed, and two or three blankets. The bathroom’s been used too. The tub’s still dirty.”

  Quite evidently she was enjoying the sensation she was making. For it was a sensation. Carol looked incredulous.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Mrs. Norton would never sleep there.”

  “No, ma’am,” said Freda smugly. “She was using a room in our wing. Maybe you’d better come and look.”

  She followed Carol up the stairs, to find the other two women in the upper hall. The yellow room was at the front of the house, so she did not pass the closet to reach it, but she was acutely conscious of it behind her, its seared door and ruined contents. She was still certain Freda had made a mistake. The last person to use it the summer before had been Virginia, and some oversight—

  But she knew as she reached the door that there had been no mistake.

  The yellow room looked out over the bay, and had been one of her pet rooms. Its walls were yellow, its furniture painted gray, and the hangings and chair covers were a delicate mulberry. She saw none of that now, however. Freda had been right. The bed had been made up and slept in, there was powder on the glass top of the toilet table, and while the ash trays were empty there were cigarette ashes here and there on the floor. A candle on the table beside the bed had burned itself out. Only a shapeless blob of wax remained.

  Maggie was the first to speak.

  “Looks like she was sleeping here,” she said. “She had her nerve, if you ask me.”

  Carol turned to Freda.

  “You haven’t touched anything in here, have you?” she asked.

  “No, miss. I just opened the door and saw it. Then I looked at the bathroom. It’s like I said.”

  Carol stepped inside the room. The nightmare feeling was returning, and there was something wrong. It was a minute before she realized what it was. There was no clothing in sight, and when she glanced in the closets they were empty.

  “She must have had clothes,” she said. “She wasn’t wearing any. At least not a dress,” she added. “They think she was wearing a kimono or something of the sort. There ought to be a bag too, and a hat. Unless the police took them.”

  “Plenty of girls don’t wear hats nowadays.” This was Freda, beginning to enjoy herself.

  Carol turned to them.

  “There mustn’t be any talk about this,” she said. “I’ll tell the police, but nobody else is to know. Do please be careful. It may be very important.”

  She locked the door behind her and took the key. No use worrying about fingerprints, she thought. Freda’s would be on the doorknob, and almost anywhere else. She waited until they had started down the stairs and then went into her own room. The bed had been made up with sheets from the servants’ linen closet, and was turned down ready for use. Her dressing case had been unpacked, and Freda had placed on the toilet table the photograph of Don in his flying helmet which she always carried with her.

  She did not look at it, beyond seeing that it was there. After all, one remembered the dead. One could not go on loving them. What concerned her now was a mystery which only Lucy Norton could solve, and she could not see Lucy until her car was ready.

  She bathed and dressed, changing her traveling clothes for a knitted suit, but she did not go downstairs right away. She went to the window and stood there, looking out at the bay. The tide was low, and the sea gulls were busy hunting for clams, the white ones the adults, the gray ones of this spring’s hatching. Even here back from the water she could hear them squawking. Over to the left, beyond the fountain her grandmother had sent from Italy, and hidden by the trees, was the Burton house. For a minute she was tempted to go there, to see Major Dane and tell him about the yellow room. But his final words had drawn a definite line between them. She decided against it. It would have to be the police.

  When she went downstairs, however, it was to hear a male voice in the hall, and to find that the press had already discovered her. The press itself was in the shape of a rather engaging youth, who gave her a nice smile and looked apologetic.

  “Name’s Starr,” he said. “Just happened on this. Came over from the big town to get a story on the new fish cannery here, and found this. I’m sure sorry about it, Miss Spencer. You’re pretty young to run into murder.”

  “I’m old enough not to give any interviews to the press,” Carol said sharply.

  “I’m not asking for an interview. I was just thinking. You and this other girl. Only she got the raw deal. She’s dead.”

  “How do you know she was only a girl, Mr. Starr?”

  “Saw the body,” he said, and reached into his pocket for some folded yellow paper. “Age approximately twenty to twenty-five,” he read. “Bleached blonde. Possibly married, as wedding ring on finger. Feet small, bedroom slippers originally blue. Silver fox jacket, no maker’s name. Clothing under body not burned. Looks like red silk negligee. Underwear handmade.” He looked at her. “Make any sense to you?”

  Carol shook her head.

  “Doesn’t sound like anyone you know?”

  “It sounds like everyone I know.”

  He stood looking over his notes.

  “Where’s her dress?” he said. “She didn’t come here in a thin silk negligee, did she?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Carol said. “I suppose the police looked over the house. If she left any clothes, they would know it.”

  He thought that over. He looked young and rather shocked, for all his businesslike manner.

  “Well, look,” he said. “She’s in a wrapper and she’s got a fur coat on. So she’s cold. So she looks around for a blanket. So she goes to the closet, and maybe she’s smoking. So she faints—maybe something scares her—and that starts the fire. How about it?”

  “Is that what they think in the town? The police and the doctor?”

  “Hell, no. That’s my own idea. Just thought of it, in fact. Anyhow, it’s out. The doc says she’s got a fractured skull. Sure you don’t know who it is?”

  “I haven’t really seen her. All I saw was somebody lying there.”

  “You didn’t miss anything,” he said gruffly.

  He put the paper back in his pocket and picked up a rather battered hat.

  “No interview,” he assured her. “Just a bit of local color. You know, big house, summer people, first murder in town’s history. The doc says it was probably kerosene. Maybe gasoline. Any about the place?”

  “Gasoline?” she said with some bitterness. “We were out of it before we left last year. Even the matches were left in a closed jar, for fear of field mice.”

  He departed finally, saying that he left his car at the gate, and promising not to quote her on anything. She rather liked him, engaging grin and all.

  6

  BACK AT THE HOUSE Dane was met by a glum and scowling Alex. Even the black patch over the socket from which he had lost an eye looked peevish.

  “What you been doing to that leg, sir?” he demanded.

  “Nothing that a rest can’t help. How about lunch?”

  Alex refused to be conciliated.

  “Maybe you don’t want to go back to your job,” he said, forgetting the “sir.” “Just a smell of murder and you forget there’s a war.”

  “Oh, go to hell,” Dane said w
earily. “Get me a drink and something to eat. How do you know there’s a murder?”

  “I buy our food in the town,” Alex said, still sulky.

  “Know any details?”

  “Cracked on the head. Killer tried to burn the body.” He added the “sir” here, and Dane grinned.

  “Go on,” he said. “Get me a highball, and don’t be too stingy with the whisky.”

  He limped out to the porch and sat down. Alex was right, of course. He had a big job to go back to, and the stairs at Crestview hadn’t helped his leg any. He put it up on a chair and fell into thought. He was still absorbed when Alex brought the Scotch. He roused, however.

  “Sit down, Alex, and pour yourself a drink. I want to talk to you. We’ve got a case on our hands, and I’m damned if I know what it is. Except it’s murder.”

  Alex fixed his drink and sat down, his one eye showing complete disapproval.

  “If you’ll excuse me, sir,” he said, “I don’t think it’s any business of yours. Unless it’s a spy case.”

  “No. I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with the war. No spies. No escaped PW. Somebody wanted a girl out of the way, that’s all. As far as they can tell, she wasn’t local. Nobody is missing from around here. Now, how did she get into that house next door? And why? The family wasn’t there. Only the Norton woman, and you know her story.”

  Alex stirred.

  “I still don’t see why you want to look into it, sir.”

  “I suppose it’s because it’s something to do. God knows I’ve been bored for months, hospitals, doctors, nurses and—What do you know about the Norton woman? Any family?”

  “Only herself and Joe. That’s her husband.”

  “No wealthy connections? Anyone likely to visit her dressed up in an expensive fur jacket? That sort of thing?”

  Alex thought it more than improbable, and Dane shifted to the Spencers. Where Alex got his information he never knew. Perhaps it was because of his long job on the police force before the war. But Alex knew quite a bit: Carol’s engagement to Don Richardson and the colonel’s defiant refusal to believe in his son’s death; Greg’s fine record in the war in spite of his reputation as a souse, to use Alex’s own words; and even Elinor’s marriage to Hilliard, with all that it entailed.

  Dane was thoughtful when he finished.

  “So we wash out the Nortons,” he said. “And apparently we wash out the village too. That seems to put it up to the family, doesn’t it?”

  Dane ate his lunch on the porch, as absentmindedly as he regarded now and then the view of the bay below him. He was puzzled. Jim Mason had taken a hasty survey of the bedrooms at Crestview and reported no clothing anywhere. But if the girl had been staying at the house her clothes should have been there. That left two alternatives: she had not been staying in the house, or she had, in which case there had been probably three days to dispose of what she had worn.

  When Alex came back for his tray he had lit his pipe, the cigarette he had found in Maggie’s garbage can on the table in front of him.

  “Suppose,” he said, “you wanted to get rid of a girl’s clothes and had plenty of time to do it. How would you go about it?”

  Alex pondered.

  “How about burning them? Plenty of furnaces around.”

  Dane shook his head.

  “No good. Too much stuff in women’s clothes that won’t burn, zippers, hooks and eyes, God knows what. Nails from shoes, too. You ought to know that.”

  “Well, if it was me,” Alex said, “and I had plenty of time I’d ship them somewhere. Hard to trace that way. I remember once—”

  “I see. It’s worth thinking about. You might check on that today. See if the express people sent something of the sort from any of the families around here the last of the week or today. The office is closed Saturday and today’s truck doesn’t leave until four o’clock. Try to get a look at what they have.” He got up. “I’m going to the hospital. I’ll drop you off in town.”

  While Alex cleaned up, Dane surveyed the possibilities. The nearest was Rockhill, the Ward property. But the Wards were elderly and lived largely in retirement, and Colonel Richardson, on the road below, was in the same category. The Dalton place was beyond the Richardson cottage facing the water, and with the Burton property, where he himself was staying, he had about completed the circuit.

  None of them, he thought wryly, was likely to be involved in a cold-blooded crime. And the mystery was increased by the disappearance of the clothing. If she had been staying at Crestview, why in the name of all that was sensible hide it, since it had evidently been the intention to burn the house?

  He climbed stiffly into the car when Alex brought it around, and that gentleman regarded him with a disapproving eye.

  “You ought to be in bed, sir,” he said. “What’s the use my working on that leg if you don’t take care of it?”

  “I’ll rest it later. I won’t be long at the hospital.”

  Nor was he. Lucy Norton, according to the office there, was not so well and was allowed no visitors. If he suspected Floyd’s large hand in this he said nothing. And Alex, picked up in the village, simply reported no soap.

  “Nothing going out,” he said. “Ladies in the town packed a barrel early last week for Greece. Nothing since.”

  Dane had been right about Floyd. By noon that day he had already traced the girl’s arrival Friday morning, and after lunch he called a meeting of four men in his office: Dr. Harrison, Jim Mason, a lieutenant from the State Police, and Floyd himself. On the desk lay a bundle of partially burned clothing, and Floyd indicated it with a stubby finger.

  “Well, there it is,” he said. “No marks, no anything. You gentlemen got any ideas?”

  Nobody apparently had, and leaning back in his chair Floyd told what he had learned of her movements after her arrival.

  “One thing’s sure,” he said. “She set out for Crestview and she got there. She wasn’t followed. She was the only passenger on the bus that got in at six-thirty that morning. So whoever killed her was around here somewhere already.”

  There was no dissenting voices, and he got up.

  “I’m going to the hospital,” he said. “Lucy Norton knows something, and she’s going to talk or I’ll know why.”

  But Lucy in her hospital bed, her leg in a cast and her hands clenched under the bedclothes, could apparently tell only of the hand that had extinguished her candle, and that someone had rushed past her and knocked her down. Her shock when she was told of the body in the closet was genuine to the point of terror.

  “A body?” she said weakly. “I don’t believe you. You mean somebody at Crestview was found dead?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. A woman. A young woman. Somebody knocked her on the head and killed her, then tried to burn her body. Probably the night you fell down the stairs.”

  Put to her thus tactfully, Lucy went into a fit of convulsive weeping. The chief waited impatiently, but when he left he still knew nothing more. But he was satisfied at least that there had been no fire while she was lying at the foot of the stairs.

  “I’d have smelled anything burning,” she said, sniffling. “I didn’t break my nose when I fell.”

  “Maybe you passed out.”

  “I guess I did for a while. But I’d have smelled it when I came to, wouldn’t I?”

  She was certain, too, that all the doors were locked that night. She accounted for the front door by the fact that whoever knocked her down must have left it open. But she was still semi-hysterical when he left her. After that she lay still for a long time, her eyes closed and her hands still clenched. When a nurse came in she roused herself. The story of the murder had reached the hospital, and Floyd’s order as he left that Lucy was to see no one and communicate with no one had left it in a state of quivering excitement.

  “I want to see Miss Spencer, Miss Carol Spencer,” Lucy said feebly. “She hasn’t any telephone. Maybe you’d send her a telegram.”

  “The doctor
thought you ought to be quiet today, Mrs. Norton. I’m sure she’ll be as soon as she can.”

  So that was it, Lucy thought helplessly. They wouldn’t let her see Carol, she wouldn’t know anything, and the police—

  She lay still in her bed, her face desperate. She couldn’t even warn Carol, and they probably would keep Joe out too. Not that Joe knew anything either, but she might have sent a message by him. Only—murder! She shivered and closed her eyes.

  It was after that visit of Floyd’s to the hospital that he sent for Carol to view the body and attempt to identify it. It was in the local mortuary, and lacking a morgue, it had been packed in ice and covered with rubber sheets. She took only one look, gasped and rushed into the air.

  “That was cruel and unnecessary,” she said when she got her breath. “You know I couldn’t recognize her. Nobody could.”

  “Well,” he said, “at least you can say that at the inquest. Sorry, Miss Carol. It had to be done.”

  He did not take her home at once. He drove around to his office and let her out there.

  “One or two things we got might help,” he said. “Won’t hurt to look at them. They won’t bother you any,” when he saw her face. “Just some stuff she was wearing.”

  He sat down behind the desk and opening a drawer took out a small box which he emptied onto the blotter. There was a pair of artificial pearl earrings of the stud type, somewhat scorched and rather large, and a ring. He picked up the ring and held it out.

  “Might be a wedding ring, eh?” he said, watching her with sharp eyes.

  “Possibly. I wouldn’t know.”

  He let her go then, still suspicious, still hoping to break the mystery through her. Then he got busy on the telephone.

  “I want the phones put back in the Spencer house this afternoon,” he said. “Get a jump on, you fellows. This is a hurry job.”