The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart - 25 Titles in One Edition
holding a candle—as grim and menacing a figure as a man just arisen from the dead.
"That's right!" said Lizzie, unappalled for once. "Come in when everything's over!"
The Doctor glanced up and met the detective's eyes, cold and menacing.
"You took my revolver from me downstairs," he said. "I'll trouble you for it."
The Doctor got heavily to his feet. The others, their suspicions confirmed at last, looked at him with startled eyes. The detective seemed to enjoy the universal confusion his words had brought.
Slowly, with sullen reluctance, the Doctor yielded up the stolen weapon. The detective examined it casually and replaced it in his hip pocket.
"I've something to settle with you pretty soon," he said through clenched teeth, addressing the Doctor. "And I'll settle it properly. Now—what's this?"
He indicated Dale—her face still and waxen—her breath coming so faintly she seemed hardly to breathe at all as Miss Cornelia and Bailey tried to revive her.
"She's coming to—" said Miss Cornelia triumphantly, as a first faint flush of color reappeared in the girl's cheeks. "We found her shut in there, Mr. Anderson," the spinster added, pointing toward the gaping entrance of the Hidden Room.
A gleam crossed the detective's face. He went up to examine the secret chamber. As he did so, Doctor Wells, who had been inching surreptitiously toward the door, sought the opportunity of slipping out unobserved.
But Anderson was not to be caught napping again. "Wells!" he barked. The Doctor stopped and turned.
"Where were you when she was locked in this room?"
The Doctor's eyes sought the floor—the walls—wildly—for any possible loophole of escape.
"I didn't shut her in if that's what you mean!" he said defiantly. "There was someone shut in there with her!" He gestured at the Hidden Room. "Ask these people here."
Miss Cornelia caught him up at once.
"The fact remains, Doctor," she said, her voice cold with anger, "that we left her here alone. When we came back you were here. The corridor door was locked, and she was in that room—unconscious!"
She moved forward to throw the light of her candle on the Hidden Room as the detective passed into it, gave it a swift professional glance, and stepped out again. But she had not finished her story by any means.
"As we opened that door," she continued to the detective, tapping the false mantel, "the Doctor deliberately extinguished our only candle!"
"Do you know who was in that room?" queried the detective fiercely, wheeling on the Doctor.
But the latter had evidently made up his mind to cling stubbornly to a policy of complete denial.
"No," he said sullenly. "I didn't put out the candle. It fell. And I didn't lock that door into the hall. I found it locked!"
A sigh of relief from Bailey now centered everyone's attention on himself and Dale. At last the girl was recovering from the shock of her terrible experience and regaining consciousness. Her eyelids fluttered, closed again, opened once more. She tried to sit up, weakly, clinging to Bailey's shoulder. The color returned to her cheeks, the stupor left her eyes.
She gave the Hidden Room a hunted little glance and then shuddered violently.
"Please close that awful door," she said in a tremulous voice. "I don't want to see it again."
The detective went silently to close the iron doors. "What happened to you? Can't you remember?" faltered Bailey, on his knees at her side.
The shadow of an old terror lay on the girl's face, "I was in here alone in the dark," she began slowly—"Then, as I looked at the doorway there, I saw there was somebody there. He came in and closed the door. I didn't know what to do, so I slipped in—there, and after a while I knew he was coming in too, for he couldn't get out. Then I must have fainted."
"There was nothing about the figure that you recognized?"
"No. Nothing."
"But we know it was the Bat," put in Miss Cornelia. The detective laughed sardonically. The old duel of opposing theories between the two seemed about to recommence.
"Still harping on the Bat!" he said, with a little sneer, Miss Cornelia stuck to her guns.
"I have every reason to believe that the Bat is in this house," she said.
The detective gave another jarring, mirthless laugh. "And that he took the Union Bank money out of the safe, I suppose?" he jeered. "No, Miss Van Gorder."
He wheeled on the Doctor now.
"Ask the Doctor who took the Union Bank money out of that safe!" he thundered. "Ask the Doctor who attacked me downstairs in the living-room, knocked me senseless, and locked me in the billiard room!"
There was an astounded silence. The detective added a parting shot to his indictment of the Doctor.
"The next time you put handcuffs on a man be sure to take the key out of his vest pocket," he said, biting off the words.
Rage and consternation mingled on the Doctor's countenance—on the faces of the others astonishment was followed by a growing certainty. Only Miss Cornelia clung stubbornly to her original theory.
"Perhaps I'm an obstinate old woman," she said in tones which obviously showed that if so she was rather proud of it, "but the Doctor and all the rest of us were locked in the living-room not ten minutes ago!"
"By the Bat, I suppose!" mocked Anderson.
"By the Bat!" insisted Miss Cornelia inflexibly. "Who else would have fastened a dead bat to the door downstairs? Who else would have the bravado to do that? Or what you call the imagination?"
In spite of himself Anderson seemed to be impressed.
"The Bat, eh?" he muttered, then, changing his tone, "You knew about this hidden room, Wells?" he shot at the Doctor.
"Yes." The Doctor bowed his head.
"And you knew the money was in the room?"
"Well, I was wrong, wasn't I?" parried the Doctor. "You can look for yourself. That safe is empty."
The detective brushed his evasive answer aside.
"You were up in this room earlier tonight," he said in tones of apparent certainty.
"No, I couldn't get up!" the Doctor still insisted, with strange violence for a man who had already admitted such damning knowledge.
The detective's face was a study in disbelief.
"You know where that money is, Wells, and I'm going to find it!"
This last taunt seemed to goad the Doctor beyond endurance.
"Good God!" he shouted recklessly. "Do you suppose if I knew where it is, I'd be here? I've had plenty of chances to get away! No, you can't pin anything on me, Anderson! It isn't criminal to have known that room is here."
He paused, trembling with anger and, curiously enough, with an anger that seemed at least half sincere.
"Oh, don't be so damned virtuous!" said the detective brutally. "Maybe you haven't been upstairs but—unless I miss my guess, you know who was!"
The Doctor's face changed a little.
"What about Richard Fleming?" persisted the detective scornfully.
The Doctor drew himself up.
"I never killed him!" he said so impressively that even Bailey's faith in his guilt was shaken. "I don't even own a revolver!"
The detective alone maintained his attitude unchanged.
"You come with me, Wells," he ordered, with a jerk of his thumb toward the door. "This time I'll do the locking up."
The Doctor, head bowed, prepared