Arrow Pointing Nowhere (15 page)

“If you'll first describe the basement story. I think I know this one pretty well.”

“When you come in from the yard there's a lobby—that's where my dog slept.”

“Did he bark at members of the household?”

“Well, I must admit that he was apt to greet them joyfully. He was a wonderful dog, Mr. Gamadge; a Dalmatian.”

“I'm sorry you lost him.”

“It seems—almost like a murder to me. It's very hard for me to make allowances for Alden. Well, there's the lobby, with the billiard room opening off one side of it and the laundry off the other. In front is a long passage that runs right through the house, and all the other rooms are on the east side of it; the kitchens and pantries, a bathroom, the servants' sitting room and Phillips' bedroom and bath.”

“Has he a telephone?”

“There's one in the hall outside his door.” She added: “I don't somehow think that Alden would hide the picture downstairs, and he would have been seen if he'd hidden it out of doors in the garden.”

“We mustn't make too many assumptions, you know.”

“Of course not.”

Gamadge opened the hall door for her; to his surprise she went straight across to the door next that of the library. “Isn't that a pantry?” he asked.

“Oh, no.”

She opened the door, and Gamadge saw a short passage ending in a narrow, carpeted stairway. He stood staring.

“There's a little hall like this on every floor,” explained Caroline, “shut off from the main part of the house. These stairs come out in the basement lobby.” She looked at him. “What's the matter, Mr. Gamadge? You look stunned.”

Gamadge was momentarily stunned; he now knew why Mott Fenway had lost his life. “I'm admiring my own stupidity,” he said. “I thought the back stairs were behind that glassed door at the end of the hall.”

“No, that's a conservatory, complete with rubber plants and palms. There are horrid little ferns there, too, which Phillips nurses and puts into a legendary silver dish on the dinner table. Here's a telephone, as you see, and the door on the right leads to the pantry. The one on the left belongs to the library, of course.”

“Of course.” Gamadge could almost see an eavesdropper creeping down the back stairs, listening to the conversation in the library, taking in (perhaps with some amusement) his own fatuous arrangements for keeping the conversation private. He followed Caroline up two steep flights to the top floor; on this landing a ladder rose to a blacked-out skylight.

Caroline opened the door to the main hall, glanced right and left, and beckoned. He again followed.

“You see there's a glassed door at the end of this corridor, too,” she said, “and there's one on the second floor. They belong to big bathrooms. The servants' quarters and the trunk rooms and store closets are opposite and to our right. This room on our left—it's above mine—is the only guest room left to us, and we didn't even have it until Hilda Grove moved to Fenbrook!”

“It really has been something of an invasion.”

“It really has! The two front rooms are—Cousin Mott's and Bill Craddock's; his door is down that cross passage.
Cousin Mott and Bill shared a communicating bath and a long clothes cupboard.”

Gamadge walked past the guest room and through the open doorway of a large, comfortable, shabby bachelor's apartment. It had a threadbare Turkey carpet, ancient and huge mahogany furniture, ancient and faded group photographs in frames, a student lamp converted to electricity. The west and north windows, thickly curtained with dark madras, were now closed.

Caroline had remained on the threshold. She said: “He wouldn't let us buy him new things or even give him a carpet; these were all his own, and most of them were with him when he was in college. He failed in business ever so long ago, and afterwards came and lived with us. Why not? Everybody can't make money. We loved having him, and he did all kinds of things for Father. He stayed here in the summers while we were away, so we never had to close up the house; he hated travelling and country resorts. He always took me to the circus when I was little, and to funny plays afterwards. He was so nice.”

“And you were so nice.” Gamadge went to the tall window above the sitting-room bay, bent, and touched the sill. When he straightened he showed Caroline the powdery flakes on his fingers.

“I told you Nordhall wouldn't overlook anything,” he said. “The professional as against the amateur—me.”

He put his fingers into the two brass slots in the window frame; it rose easily as high as his chin. He stood looking out at the dark side wall of the opposite house, and then down at the street. A man in a cap was clearing stained and trampled snow out of the space within the railing; somebody—Nordhall, perhaps—was getting into an official car. It drove off, and only a patrolman remained to deal with the thinning crowd.

Gamadge closed the window and turned. “You could have sent me out of that with a turn of the wrist,” he said, “and nobody the wiser, not even the policeman below. The street's too dark.”

“We'll have a fine new guest room,” said Caroline in a dry voice, “and Father will have guardrails put on all these windows.”

Gamadge walked through a long bathroom, through a passage lined with closet doors, and into Craddock's not very cheerful retreat. It was rather untidy, with a portable typewriter on a chair and a kit bag under a table. Battered toilet articles were strewn on the plain cover of an outmoded bureau.

Caroline had come the other way, along the transverse hall. She stood at the door. “This was Father's room when he was a boy,” she said, “and Uncle Cort had the other. It's horrid now. Our footman had it before he was drafted.”

“Mr. Craddock is a bird of passage.” Gamadge looked at the kit bag. “You can see that he's lived in his luggage for years.”

“Alden could have run into the guest room, or even down the back stairs, before Bill got through to Cousin Mott's room.”

“Yes. Plenty of lines of retreat.”

“Alden's room downstairs has a door into the hall. He could have crossed to the back stairs in two seconds.”

“We'll go down.”

They went along the hall and descended the wide main stairway; halfway down Caroline leaned over the balustrade. “I'm afraid they've gone to bed; it's dark.”

“We might see how much of the hall would have been in their line of vision.”

“Practically none, if they were where I left them—beside the fire. But it won't make any difference—they'll never admit that Alden was out of the room.”

They went into the sitting room, and Caroline turned on a lamp. Gamadge asked, looking at the closed door in the east wall: “Shall we disturb them?”

“Not if we speak quietly; the doors are soundproof. I ought to know—that was my mother's suite; Aunt Belle has the front room now, and then there's a bath, and Mrs. Grove has the little dressing room. Next her is Alden's, with a door into the hall as I told you.”

“Where are you, and where is your father?”

“I'm just outside here, the first door on the right as you go out; I have my own bath. Father's suite is beyond the back passage; two rooms and a bath, the whole southwest corner of the house.”

Gamadge turned to look at the half-open door of her room; then he walked to the embrasure of the bay. “The window's closed, I see. Those ladies don't seem to have heard the commotion after your cousin fell.”

“They needn't have heard it; everything's thick and solid and noiseproof in this house.”

The round table stood where it had stood that afternoon, and the wastebasket just below it was half full of colored snippings from the day's needlework; but on top of the soft mass lay a crumpled paper ball. He had expected to see it there, his client had trusted him to come and find it. In his momentary triumph Mott Fenway's death and Caroline's quest faded from his mind.

“
W
HAT IN THE WORLD
, Mr. Gamadge,” asked
Caroline, “are you digging out of the wastebasket?”

Gamadge straightened, glanced at the paper ball, and dropped it into his pocket. “A memorandum I threw away this afternoon by accident. Lucky to find it again.”

“If our footman hadn't gone to the wars you wouldn't have found it; the basket would have been emptied before dinner.”

A well-dressed man with an air of cool authority came out of Mrs. Fenway's bedroom. He was carrying a black bag. “Well, Caroline!” He stopped to look at her, professionally enough, but also with a manner at once friendly and paternal. “Do you want some of the sedatives I stuffed into my bag, or can you manage without them?”

“I can manage, Doctor.”

“I thought you could.” He put the bag on the table, and looked at Gamadge.

“This is Mr. Gamadge, Dr. Thurley.”

Gamadge nodded in response to Thurley's nod. He liked the look of the Fenways' family doctor; a graying, ruddy, muscular man.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Gamadge,” said Thurley. “Craddock tells me that if you hadn't happened along Blake Fenway would probably still be putting ideas into the heads of the press. I've put my official seal on the accident theory; Mott Fenway would have lived a hundred years, if he'd been able to manage it, and enjoyed every day of them. Wish there were more like him; wish some of the rest of us understood leisure. I shall miss him. Caroline, your father's talking funeral arrangements with old Bedlow in the library; they'll be at it half the night if you don't go down and interfere. My orders, and he's to take those pills I gave him. If he doesn't he'll lie awake.”

“I'll go, Doctor.” She looked at Gamadge, who answered the look by saying that he would get himself out of the house.

“Then—tomorrow?”

“Sometime in the afternoon.”

“Good night.”

“Good night, Miss Fenway.”

When she had gone he addressed Thurley, who was rearranging the contents of his bag. “I thought you might want a prescription filled, or something; I know what deliveries are now, especially at night.”

“Very thoughtful of you, but I had the presence of mind, as I told Caroline just now, to throw some old reliables into my bag before I rushed up here. I've dosed Belle Fenway, or at least I've left a dose to be taken. Mrs. Grove will get it down her if she's restless.”

Gamadge walked across the room to the lamp, got the paper ball out of his pocket, and smoothed it out. It was another section of timetable, and there was another arrow in the margin; but this arrow pointed nowhere; away from Rockliffe Station into space.

He put the crumpled leaf in his pocket again. Thurley was talking:

“Shocking tragedy, and cruel hard on Blake Fenway. There's bound to be a little publicity; dear old Mott was obscure personally, but he was a Fenway. The police are behaving very well; I saw Nordhall, competent man. He'll have them make a routine examination of the body, and then he'll give out a definite statement to the newspapers. Blake doesn't understand these things, but he's always willing to do what's proper. The perfect citizen. Of course he's badly shaken up; he feels responsible on account of those devilish windows. Do you know Belle Fenway?”

“I met her this afternoon.”

“Heroic creature, can face anything. I'll have her on her feet in less than a year, I hope, but it will take time—time and surgery. She got no care on the trip home in 1940, impossible conditions. I'm only glad the experience didn't drive young Alden out of the wits they built up for him in Europe. They did wonders for him, I'll say that for the Frenchmen. I saw him regularly from the time he was born until he was four, and I never thought he could be maintained at a four-year level. Viborg was optimistic, if you can call it optimism, thought the boy would develop to five-year-old mentality. They did better in Fagon's clinic. Have you seen Alden Fenway?”

“Yes.”

“Fagon said he could be kept at the seven-year level unless there should be disease of the brain and quick deterioration. The boy does very well; takes complete care of himself. Craddock's the very man for him, and I'm only afraid they won't be able to keep him frozen on the job.”

“What chances are there for further improvement in young Fenway? Or further development, let us say? Do the mental specialists commit themselves?”

“He's had none since they came back to this country; Belle won't face it. It seems that he's always upset by tests, and it takes him a long time to get used to a new man. Viborg's retired, and of course Alden wouldn't remember him in any case. The boy was very shy with me at first, but now we're great pals.”

Gamadge scribbled
Work in Progress
on an envelope, crumpled it, and crossed the room to toss it into the waste-basket. Then he scribbled on another, which he placed carefully in his wallet.

“Pretty lavish with good letter paper, aren't you, young man?” Thurley snapped his bag.