Arrow Pointing Nowhere (19 page)

The second trip down was a nightmare in blue and white; but he made himself pull short on the last turn, and they entered the drift like bullets going into a bag of cotton waste. Hilda shot over his head; he sat shocked and immovable, his mouth full of snow.

When he backed out she was already on her feet and brushing herself off. He asked numbly: “Are you hurt?”

“Hurt? No! Of course not.”

“Because I think I twisted my ankle.”

Instantly she was all concern. “Oh, Harold, how ghastly. Is it bad?”

Harold staggered to his feet. He tested his left ankle, smiled courageously, and said he thought he could make it after he had rested a little; he sat down on the Flyer and got out his cigarettes.

“Oh
dear
,” said Hilda, “you ought not to walk on it. Don't you think I'd better go somewhere and telephone for a car?”

“I bet I climb that hill easier than a car would.”

“I'm not sure a car can climb it. It's all my fault; you weren't used to the run.”

“Was Craddock used to the run?”

“He's done so much tobogganing.”

“If I can't steer right I take the consequences. Have a cigarette. I'm glad I didn't bung you up, anyhow.”

“I do hope it isn't a sprain.”

Harold waggled his foot gently. “Don't think so. I'll strap it up when we get to the house.” He added hastily: “If you have plaster. If not I can bandage it with a rag.”

“We have lots of plaster.”

“Then I'll be O.K.”

“If I'd only had a chance to learn first aid!”

Harold said grimly: “I've learned it.”

“On that island where the monkey was?”

“Nicest little feller you ever saw.”

“Harold, when we do get back to the house you must let us send for the doctor. I won't risk having the rest of your leave spoiled.”

“No doctor can fix me better than I can fix myself.”

“Mrs. Dobson will be all upset. Anyway, you'll stay to supper?”

“Thanks. Oughtn't to impose on you.”

Dusk fell, and stars were out in a cold sky, before they reached the gray house. It was—Harold admired his own timing—five minutes past six. He managed an approach to Fenbrook from the rear, left the Flyer beside the kitchen
porch, and clumsily trampled the snow in the yard. If he should be forced to come back and depart again late that night he would not leave a trail for Mr. Dobson to puzzle over.

Mrs. Dobson was at first full of reproaches; they had missed their tea, they would both have pneumonia, they had no sense. But when she noticed Harold's limp and heard the story of the accident, she was full of commiseration. She helped him off with his coat, Hilda meanwhile supporting him tenderly.

“What I say is,” she declared, “if you go fast enough anything's dangerous, even a sled.”

Harold gloomily agreed with her.

“I'll have supper ready for you both in no time. Are you sure you can fix that ankle so you can be comfortable on it, Sergeant?”

“Just give me the adhesive and a pair of scissors. It may take me some time.”

“Dobson will help you.”

“I'd rather do it myself.”

Dobson was stoking the furnace, so Mrs. Dobson and Hilda helped the invalid upstairs and into a large, front bedroom with an adjoining bath. Mrs. Dobson bustled about supplying him with a roll of plaster, a pair of shears, rubbing alcohol, surgical gauze and towels. They left him to himself.

He waited until Hilda had gone into her room to change; then, leaving the bedroom door closed behind him, he dashed up the back stairs. He and Gamadge had agreed that the attic was the proper place to begin on, since Hilda had heard a squirrel there.

“Attic” was hardly the name for it; it was a ceiled, match-boarded northwest corner room, a neat repository for luggage and disused furniture. The trunks and boxes were not locked; was anything? Harold stood looking about him, his dark face
lowering; he had the scientist's and technician's dislike of being hurried, and he had a bare quarter of an hour to search this attic.

Nothing to search except unlocked trunks and boxes, nothing but a corner cupboard which rose to the ceiling. He went over to it and turned the knob of its door; it was locked.

T
HE LATE DUSK
of Eastern War Time still made it possible for Harold to do without his torch. It was a powerful one, and he did not care to light it until he could bury its gleam in the depths of a trunk or closet; Mr. Dobson might be out-of-doors on some errand to the garage, and might not only see a radiance behind the Holland shades, but notice that these were not pulled all the way down. Harold got out his tool kit again, and attacked the simple lock of the cupboard by twilight; the west window was only a few feet away.

The door swung open on loose hinges. What had Hilda Grove said last night? She had looked everywhere for the view of old Fenbrook except in one or two locked dress closets, locked since the family had moved to New York in the autumn. This must be one of them, but it was not full of summer clothing; it was empty, except for a square woollen knitting bag on one of its double row of hooks. The hooks were well above Harold's head, and the knitting bag—marked with enormous embroidered letters A.G.—was hung where the two walls of the triangular cupboard met.

Mrs. Grove had not only left her bag behind her at Fenbrook, she had left work in it. Steel needles protruded from it, and it was bulging with a mass of yellow knitting and what looked like the contour of a ball of wool.

Harold wondered whether an illustration from a quarto might not very well fit into Mrs. Grove's workbag. He was about to satisfy himself on that point, but he was a slow thinker, trained to deliberation and accuracy. He always examined the outside of an object before he proceeded to its inner mysteries; but he never afterwards quite knew why he took his torch out of his pocket and turned it upon the interior of the closet before he stepped in. He turned the light of the torch upon ceiling, walls and floor—downwards, rather, because floor it had none.

He stood with one foot on the raised sill, gazing into a well of darkness; and his thoughts, when he began to have thoughts, proceeded in an orderly manner: Gamadge had argued that since the second arrow was not curved towards New York, Hilda Grove was not to be brought from Fenbrook to New York—she was simply to be removed from Fenbrook. Why, unless there were danger for her in Fenbrook? Harold was to look for the danger. He had found it, and Gamadge had been right.

Hilda Grove had told them—smiling—that one of the corner cupboards was not a china closet. Perhaps Gamadge would have been intelligent enough to realize that this corner cupboard was directly above one in the dining room; certainly he would now have agreed with Harold that a disused dumb-waiter might at one time have risen, in a house like Fenbrook, from the cellar to the top floor. When Fenbrook was built it had probably been heated by open fires only—hard coal, soft coal, wood for occasional fires on wet summer nights. A dumbwaiter would be almost a necessity for lifting hods and baskets of fuel to upper bedrooms.

But now there was a furnace, and the kitchen and laundry had been moved up from the basement to the first floor, and the dumb-waiter had been turned into cupboards by the simple process of fitting floors into it and supplying each section with hooks. From what Hilda Grove had said and intimated, the dining-room section had been left as it was.

Harold got down on his knees to examine the strong brackets that had been let into the brickwork of the wall. Triangular floorings had been made to fit, and apparently they could be removed. He shifted to look behind him, and saw what he had seen before and passed over as unimportant—a triangle of wood that might have been a table top. It was behind a stack of awnings.

Above, in the ceiling of the cupboard, his torch showed him again the remains of lifting apparatus which no doubt had given him instinctive pause before he stepped into the void. To his death? He rather thought so; the drop to the floor of the cellar would be a long one. When he got up his knees were shaking—not from fear, but from a kind of horror. There was something so sly, so domestic about this trap, something so foreign to the place, the time, the sort of people who belonged in this house; yet one of them must have set it.

It had not been set for him, or for either of the Dobsons. It had been set for Hilda Grove; but if somebody telephoned or wrote her and asked her to get her aunt's knitting bag out of the attic cupboard and send it down to New York, she would need a key. She would be told where the key was. Certainly it would not be where Mrs. Dobson might find it by accident, but it would not be hidden far from the trap, or too deeply.

Harold found it in three minutes at the bottom of an old red scissors case, among oddments in the single drawer of a cherrywood table; a table with a scarred top and a split leg.
Not a table of distinction, not worth a cabinetmaker's bill for repairs.

Harold chose a mashie from a bag of old wooden golf clubs in a corner, and lifted the knitting bag off its hook. It contained nothing but a half-knitted sweater and a ball of wool. He stood holding it in his hand, unable to come to any decision as to his next step. He could replace the bag, lock the cupboard, and take away the key; that would leave the evidence intact, and no doubt make Hilda Grove quite safe; but he knew he could never leave Fenbrook while the trap remained as it was. He would have to consult Gamadge, and consult him directly.

He replaced the bag on its hook, replaced the golf club, and locked the cupboard door. He wanted violently to put the triangular flooring on its brackets, but restrained himself; at least he was in the house, and the telephone couldn't ring.

He went down the back stairs, listened, and then entered the bedroom below the attic. Here was a pseudo cupboard, locked. Harold unlocked it. Empty hooks here, no floor, brackets where the floor had been. He relocked the door, and walked down the front stairs to the drawing room. Hilda was waiting for him in a rose-colored sweater and skirt; he apologized for his lateness—the bandage had been a little balky, but she could see that he wasn't limping.

“But you don't look a bit cheerful, Harold. Does it hurt you?”

“I'm O.K. I'll just stow the Flyer in your cellar till tomorrow.”

“For goodness' sake let Mr. Dobson do it.”

“Certainly I won't. You needn't come, I know where the steps are.”

He pulled on his hat and coat and went out the back way. He carried the Flyer down the outside cellar stairs and through the fast doorway to the left, into the original vast
kitchen of Fenbrook. It had retained its old-fashioned range, but it was otherwise dismantled; all its windows were tightly locked and barred.

The dumb-waiter in the southwest corner was enclosed to a height of three feet, and above were double half-doors; when he opened them his torch shone on emptiness and a cement floor; the shaft rose unobstructed as far as his eye could reach.

He stepped back, closed the half-doors, and stood in the damp gloom feeling a sickness of the soul. Nobody who fell from the attic to that little shut-in space, and survived the fall, would be heard—or found—for a long time.

Why must this girl die? And how, he asked himself, could the accident be explained later? Unless Mrs. Grove or her accomplice intended to remove the body, replace the floorings above, and contrive some other explanation for Hilda's death. “Niece-by-marriage,” growled Harold, and muttered some epithets uncomplimentary to Mrs. Grove. If he did not call her an unnatur'd hag it was because he was not familiar with
King Lear
. But it was the thought of Craddock that staggered him, the possibility—probability, he told himself—that Craddock was Mrs. Grove's agent. Such people didn't exist now; they had lived once, if he could believe history; they and this oubliette belonged together, might have existed in the middle ages, perhaps even as late as the eighteenth century. There was cruelty now, deception now, murder for a price; but what price could repay Craddock for a deed like this?

He knew very well that such crimes were possible today; no use fooling himself.

When he reached the back hall again by way of the inner stairs Mrs. Dobson popped her head out of the kitchen to tell him that supper was ready.

“I just have to put in a call.”

He went into the telephone room and called the Gamadge house. Clara answered: “He must be at Number 24,
Harold. He hasn't come home. Shall I try to get him there, and give him a message?”

“Think I'll try myself.”

He rang the Fenway house, and the voice that answered caused him to mumble his next question: “Mr. Blenker in?”

“You got the wrong number,” said the voice of an unmistakeable policeman. “Some people just can't learn to dial.”

Harold, standing fixed in front of the telephone, thought that nobody down there would bother with this call, trace it or even report it. After a moment he called the Oaktree Inn; if he must go to New York, Arline would have to be insinuated somehow into Fenbrook. But the clerk informed him to his rage that Miss Prady was not on the premises.