The Abandoned Room Part 27

Bobby studied the reserved face which even now was without emotion.

"I can't think anything of the kind," he said softly.

"That's very nice," Paredes said. "If you had answered differently I'd have let these clever policemen lay their own ghosts."

He turned to Robinson.

"Even you must begin to see that I'm not guilty. Your common sense will tell you so. If I had been planning to kill Bobby, why didn't I bring the weapon? Why did I put my hand through the opening before I was ready to strike? Why did I use my left hand--my injured hand? I was like Howells. I couldn't consider the case finished until I had solved the mystery of the locked doors. I supposed the room was empty. When I found the secret to-night, I reached through to see how far my hand would be from the pillow."

Bobby's a.s.surance of Paredes's innocence clouded his own situation; made it, in a sense, more dangerous than it had ever been. His wanderings about the Cedars remained unexplained, and they knew now it had never been necessary for the murderer to enter the room, Katherine, too, evidently realized the menace.

"Do you think I--" she began.

Paredes bowed.

"You dislike me, Miss Katherine, but don't be afraid for yourself or Bobby. I think I can tell you how the evidence got in your room. I can answer nearly everything. There's one point--"

He broke off, glancing at his watch.

"Extraordinary courage!" he mused enigmatically. "I scarcely understand it."

Rawlins looked at him suspiciously.

"All this explaining may be a trick, Mr. Robinson. The man's slippery."

"I've had to be slippery to work under your noses," Paredes laughed. "By the way, Bobby, did you hear a woman crying about the time I opened this door?"

"Yes. It sounded like the voice we heard at the grave."

"I thought I heard it from the library," Robinson put in. "Then the rumpus up here started, and I forgot about it."

"The woman in black is very brave," Paredes mused. "We should have had a visit from her long before this."

"Do you know who she is?" Robinson asked. "And as Rawlins says, no tricks. We haven't let you go yet."

"I thought," Paredes mocked, "that you had identified the woman in black as Miss Katherine. She hasn't had anything to do with the mystery directly. Neither has Bobby. Neither have I."

"Then what the devil have you been doing here?" Robinson snapped.

"Seeing your job through," Paredes answered, "for Bobby's sake."

With a warm grat.i.tude Bobby knew that Paredes had told the truth. Then he had told it in the library yesterday when they had caught him prowling in the private staircase. All along he had told it while they had tried to convict him of under-handed and unfriendly intentions.

"I saw," Paredes was saying, "that Howells wouldn't succeed, and it was obvious you and Rawlins would do worse, while Graham's blundering from the start left no hope. Somebody had to rescue Bobby."

"Then why did you give us the impression," Graham asked, "that you were not a friend?"

Paredes held up his hand.

"That's going rather far, Mr. Graham. Never once have I given such an impression. I have time after time stated the fact that I was here in Bobby's service. That has been the trouble with all of you. As most detectives do, you have denied facts, searching always for something more subtle. You have asked for impossibilities while you bl.u.s.tered that they couldn't exist. Still every one is p.r.o.ne to do that when he fancies himself in the presence of the supernatural. The facts of this case have been within your reach as well as mine. The motive has been an easy one to understand. Money! And you have consistently turned your back."

Robinson spread his hands.

"All right. Prove that I'm a fool and I'll acknowledge it."

Doctor Groom interrupted sharply.

"What was that?"

They bent forward, listening. Even with Paredes offering them a physical explanation they shrank from the keening that barely survived the heavy atmosphere of the old house.

"You see the woman in black isn't Miss Perrine," Paredes said.

He ran down the stairs. They followed, responding to an excited sense of imminence. Even in the private staircase the pounding that had followed the cry reached them with harsh reverberations. Its echoes filled the house as they dashed across the library and the dining room. In the hall they realized that it came from the front door. It had attained a feverish, a desperate insistence.

Paredes walked to the fireplace.

"Open the door," he directed Rawlins.

Rawlins stepped to the door, unlocked it, and flung it wide.

"The woman!" Katherine breathed.

A feminine figure, white with snow, stumbled in, as if she had stood braced against the door. Rawlins caught her and held her upright. The flakes whirled from the court in vicious pursuit. Bobby slammed the door shut.

"Maria!" he cried. "You were right, Hartley!"

Yet at first he could scarcely accept this pitiful creature as the brilliant and exotic dancer with whom he had dined the night of the first murder. As he stared at her, her features twisted. She burst into retching sobs. She staggered toward Paredes. As she went the snow melted from her hat and cloak. She became a black figure again. With an appearance of having been immersed in water she sank on the hearth, swaying back and forth, reaching blindly for Paredes's hand.

"Do what you please with me, Carlos," she whimpered with her slight accent from which all the music had fled. "I couldn't stand it another minute. I couldn't get to the station, and I--I wanted to know which--which--"

Paredes watched her curiously.

"Get Jenkins," he said softly to Rawlins.

He faced Maria again.

"I could have told you, I think, when you fought me away out there. No one wants to arrest you. Jenkins will verify my own knowledge."

"This is dangerous," the doctor rumbled. "This woman shouldn't wait here. She should have dry clothing at once."

Maria shrank from him. For the first time her wet skirt exposed her feet, encased in torn stockings. The dancer wore no shoes, and Bobby guessed why she had been so elusive, why she had left so few traces.

"I won't go," she cried, "until he tells me."

Katherine got a cloak and threw it across the woman's shoulders. Maria looked up at her with a dumb grat.i.tude. Then Rawlins came back with Jenkins. The butler was bent and haggard. His surrender to fear was more p.r.o.nounced than it had been at the grave or when they had last seen him in the kitchen. He grasped a chair and, breathing heavily, looked from one to the other, moistening his lips.

Paredes faced the man, completely master of the situation. Through the old butler, it became clear, he would make his revelation and announce that simple fact they all had missed.

"It was Mr. Silas, of course, who came back?"

"Oh my G.o.d!" the butler moaned, "What do you mean?"

"I know everything, Jenkins," Paredes said evenly.

The butler collapsed against the chair. Paredes grasped his arm.

"Pull yourself together, man. They won't want you as more than an accessory."

Maria started to rise. She shrank back again, s.h.i.+vering close to the fire.

"Is your master hiding," Paredes asked, "or has he left the house?"

Jenkins's answer came through trembling lips.

"He's gone! Mr. Silas is gone! How did you find out? My G.o.d! How did you find out?"

"He said nothing to you?" Paredes asked.

Jenkins shook his head.

"Tell me how he was dressed."

The old servant covered his face.

"Mr. Silas stumbled through the kitchen," he answered hoa.r.s.ely. "I tried to stop him, but he pushed me away and ran out." His voice rose. "I tell you he ran without a coat or a hat into the storm."

Paredes sighed.

"The Cedars's final tragedy, yet it was the most graceful exit he could have made."

Maria struggled to her feet. Her eyes were the eyes of a person without reason. That familiar, hysterical quality which they had heard before at a distance vibrated in her voice.

"Then he was the one! I wanted to kill him, I couldn't kill him because I never was sure."

"Did you see him go out an hour or so ago?" Paredes asked.

"I saw him," she cried feverishly, "run from the back of the house and down the path to the lake. I--I tried to catch him, but my feet were frozen, and the snow was slippery, and I couldn't find my shoes. But I called and he wouldn't stop. I had to know, because I wanted to kill him if it was Silas Blackburn. And I saw him run to the lake and splash in until the water was over his head."

She flung her clenched hands out. Her voice became a scream, shot with all her suffering, all her doubt, all her fury.

"You don't understand. He can't be punished. I tell you he's at the bottom of the lake with the man he murdered. And I can't pay him. I tried to go after him, but it--it was too cold."

She sank in one of the chairs, shaking and sobbing.

"Unless we want another tragedy," the doctor said, "this woman must be put to bed and taken care of. She has been terribly exposed. You've heard her. She's delirious."

"Not so delirious that she hasn't told the truth," Paredes said.

The doctor lifted her in his arms and with Rawlins's help carried her upstairs. Katherine went with them. Almost immediately the doctor and Rawlins hurried down.

"I have told Katherine what to do," Doctor Groom said. "The woman may be all right in the morning. What's she been up to here?"

"Then," Bobby cried, "there was a connection between the dinner party and the murders. But what about my coming here unconscious? What about my handkerchief?"

"I can see no answer yet," Graham said.

Paredes smiled.

"Not when you've had the answer to everything? I have shown you that Silas Blackburn was the murderer. The fact stared you in the face. Everything that has happened at the Cedars has pointed to his guilt."

"Except," the doctor said, "his own apparent murder which made his guilt seem impossible. And I'm not sure you're right now, for there is no other Blackburn he could have murdered, and Blackburns look alike. You wouldn't mistake another man for one of them."

"This house," Paredes smiled, "has all along been full of the presence of the other Blackburn. There has been evidence enough for you all to have known he was here."

He stretched himself in an easy chair. He lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling.

"I shall tell you the simple facts, if only to save my skin from this blood-thirsty district attorney."

"Rub it in," Robinson grinned. "I'll take my medicine."

They gathered closer about the Panamanian. Jenkins sidled to the back of his chair.

"I don't see how you found it out," he muttered.

"I had only one advantage over you or the police, Graham," Paredes began, "and you were in a position to overcome that. Maria did telephone me the afternoon of that ghastly dinner. She asked me to get hold of Bobby. She was plainly anxious to keep him in New York that night, and, to be frank, I was glad enough to help her when you turned up, trying to impress us with your puritan watchfulness. Even you guessed that she had drugged Bobby. I suspected it when I saw him go to pieces in the cafe. He gave me the slip, as I told you, in the coat room when I was trying to get him home, so I went back and asked Maria what her idea was. She laughed in my face, denying everything. I, too, suspected the stranger, but I've convinced myself that he simply happened along by chance.

"Now here's the first significant point: Maria by drugging Bobby defeated her own purpose. He had been drinking more than the Band of Hope would approve of, and on top of that he got an overdose of a powerful drug. The doctor can tell you better than I of the likely effect of such a combination."

"What I told you in the court, Bobby," the doctor answered, "much the same symptoms as genuine aphasia. Your brain was unquestionably dulled by an overdose on top of all that alcohol, while your mechanical reflexes were stimulated. Automatically you followed your ruling impulse. Automatically at the last minute you revolted from exposing yourself in such a condition to your cousin and your grandfather. Your lucid period in the woods just before you reached the deserted house and went to sleep showed that your exercise was overcoming the effect of the drug. That moment, you'll remember, was coloured by the fanciful ideas such a drug would induce."

"So, Bobby," Paredes said, "although you were asleep when the body moved and when Howells was murdered, you can be sure you weren't anywhere near the old room."

"But I walked in my sleep last night," Bobby reminded him.

The doctor slapped his knee.

"I understand. It was only when we thought that was your habit that it frightened us. It's plain. This sleep-walking had been suggested to you and you had brooded upon the suggestion until you were bound to respond. Graham's presence in your room, watching for just that reaction, was a perpetual, an unescapable stimulation. It would have been a miracle in itself if your brain had failed to carry it out."

Bobby made a swift gesture of distaste.

"If you hadn't come, Carlos, where would I have been?"

"Why did you come?" Graham asked.

"Bobby was my friend," the Panamanian answered. "He had been very good to me. When I read of his grandfather's death I wondered why Maria had drugged him to keep him in New York. In the coincidence lurked an element of trouble for him. At first I suspected some kind of an understanding between her and old Blackburn--perhaps she had engaged to keep Bobby away from the Cedars until the new will had been made. But here was Blackburn murdered, and it was manifest she hadn't tried to throw suspicion on Bobby, and the points that made Howells's case incomplete a.s.sured me of his innocence. Who, then, had killed his grandfather? Not Maria, for I had dropped her at her apartment that night too late for her to get out here by the hour of the murder. Still, as you suspected, Maria was the key, and I began to speculate about her.

"She had told me something of her history. You might have had as much from her press agent. Although she had lived in Spain since she was a child, she was born in Panama, my own country, of a Spanish mother and an American father. Right away I wondered if Blackburn had ever been in Panama or Spain. I began to seek the inception of the possible understanding between them. Since I found no illuminating doc.u.ments about Blackburn's past in the library, I concluded, if such papers existed, they would be locked up in the desk in his room. I searched there a number of times, giving you every excuse I could think of to get upstairs. The other night, after I had suspected her of knowing something, Miss Katherine nearly caught me. But I found what I wanted--a carefully hidden packet of accounts and letters and newspaper clippings. They're at your service, Mr. District Attorney. They told me that Silas Blackburn had been in Panama. They proved that Maria, instead of ever having been his accomplice, was his enemy. They explained the source of his wealth and the foundation of that enmity. Certainly you remember the doctor told us Silas Blackburn started life with nothing; and hadn't you ever wondered why with all his money he buried himself in this lonely hole?"