"This morning, very early. I rowed her to Federal Street."
"You couldn"t have had much sleep," I said dryly. For he looked horrible. There were lines around his eyes, which were red, and his lips looked dry and cracked.
"She"s not in the piece this week at the theater," he said, licking his lips and looking past me, not at me. "She"ll be back by Sat.u.r.day."
I did not believe him. I do not think he imagined that I did. He shut the door in my face, and it caught poor Peter by the nose. The dog ran off howling, but although Mr. Ladley had been as fond of the animal as it was in his nature to be fond of anything, he paid no attention.
As I started down the hall after him, I saw what Peter had been carrying--a slipper of Mrs. Ladley"s. It was soaked with water; evidently Peter had found it floating at the foot of the stairs.
Although the idea of murder had not entered my head at that time, the slipper gave me a turn. I picked it up and looked at it--a black one with a beaded toe, short in the vamp and high-heeled, the sort most actresses wear. Then I went back and knocked at the door of the front room again.
"What the devil do you want now?" he called from beyond the door.
"Here"s a slipper of Mrs. Ladley"s," I said. "Peter found it floating in the lower hall."
He opened the door wide, and let me in. The room was in tolerable order, much better than when Mrs. Ladley was about. He looked at the slipper, but he did not touch it. "I don"t think that is hers," he said.
"I"ve seen her wear it a hundred times."
"Well, she"ll never wear it again." And then, seeing me stare, he added: "It"s ruined with the water. Throw it out. And, by the way, I"m sorry, but I set fire to one of the pillow-slips--dropped asleep, and my cigarette did the rest. Just put it on the bill."
He pointed to the bed. One of the pillows had no slip, and the ticking cover had a scorch or two on it. I went over and looked at it.
"The pillow will have to be paid for, too, Mr. Ladley," I said. "And there"s a sign nailed on the door that forbids smoking in bed. If you are going to set fire to things, I shall have to charge extra."
"Really!" he jeered, looking at me with his cold fishy eyes. "Is there any sign on the door saying that boarders are charged extra for seven feet of filthy river in the bedrooms?"
I was never a match for him, and I make it a principle never to bandy words with my boarders. I took the pillow and the slipper and went out. The telephone was ringing on the stair landing. It was the theater, asking for Miss Brice.
"She has gone away," I said.
"What do you mean? Moved away?"
"Gone for a few days" vacation," I replied. "She isn"t playing this week, is she?"
"Wait a moment," said the voice. There was a hum of conversation from the other end, and then another man came to the telephone.
"Can you find out where Miss Brice has gone?"
"I"ll see."
I went to Ladley"s door and knocked. Mr. Ladley answered from just beyond.
"The theater is asking where Mrs. Ladley is."
"Tell them I don"t know," he snarled, and shut the door. I took his message to the telephone.
Whoever it was swore and hung up the receiver.
All the morning I was uneasy--I hardly knew why. Peter felt it as I did. There was no sound from the Ladleys" room, and the house was quiet, except for the lapping water on the stairs and the police patrol going back and forth.
At eleven o"clock a boy in the neighborhood, paddling on a raft, fell into the water and was drowned. I watched the police boat go past, carrying his little cold body, and after that I was good for nothing.
I went and sat with Peter on the stairs. The dog"s conduct had been strange all morning. He had sat just above the water, looking at it and whimpering. Perhaps he was expecting another kitten or--
It is hard to say how ideas first enter one"s mind. But the notion that Mr. Ladley had killed his wife and thrown her body into the water came to me as I sat there. All at once I seemed to see it all: the quarreling the day before, the night trip in the boat, the water-soaked slipper, his haggard face that morning--even the way the spaniel sat and stared at the flood.
Terry brought the boat back at half past eleven, towing it behind another.
"Well," I said, from the stairs, "I hope you"ve had a pleasant morning."
"What doing?" he asked, not looking at me.
"Rowing about the streets. You"ve had that boat for hours."
He tied it up without a word to me, but he spoke to the dog. "Good morning, Peter," he said. "It"s nice weather--for fishes, ain"t it?"
He picked out a bit of floating wood from the water, and showing it to the dog, flung it into the parlor. Peter went after it with a splash.
He was pretty fat, and when he came back I heard him wheezing. But what he brought back was not the stick of wood. It was the knife I use for cutting bread. It had been on a shelf in the room where I had slept the night before, and now Peter brought it out of the flood where its wooden handle had kept it afloat. The blade was broken off short.
It is not unusual to find one"s household goods floating around during flood-time. More than once I"ve lost a chair or two, and seen it after the water had gone down, new scrubbed and painted, in Molly Maguire"s kitchen next door. And perhaps now and then a bit of luck would come to me--a dog kennel or a chicken-house, or a kitchen table, or even, as happened once, a month-old baby in a wooden cradle, that lodged against my back fence, and had come forty miles, as it turned out, with no worse mishap than a cold in its head.
But the knife was different. I had put it on the mantel over the stove I was using up-stairs the night before, and hadn"t touched it since.
As I sat staring at it, Terry took it from Peter and handed it to me.
"Better give me a penny, Mrs. Pitman," he said in his impudent Irish way. "I hate to give you a knife. It may cut our friendship."
I reached over to hit him a clout on the head, but I did not. The sunlight was coming in through the window at the top of the stairs, and shining on the rope that was tied to the banister. The end of the rope was covered with stains, brown, with a glint of red in them.
I got up shivering. "You can get the meat at the butcher"s, Terry," I said, "and come back for me in a half-hour." Then I turned and went up-stairs, weak in the knees, to put on my hat and coat. I had made up my mind that there had been murder done.
CHAPTER III
I looked at my clock as I went down-stairs. It was just twelve-thirty.
I thought of telephoning for Mr. Reynolds to meet me, but it was his lunch hour, and besides I was afraid to telephone from the house while Mr. Ladley was in it.
Peter had been whining again. When I came down the stairs he had stopped whimpering and was wagging his tail. A strange boat had put into the hallway and was coming back.
"Now, old boy!" somebody was saying from the boat. "Steady, old chap!
I"ve got something for you."
A little man, elderly and alert, was standing up in the boat, poling it along with an oar. Peter gave vent to joyful yelps. The elderly gentleman brought his boat to a stop at the foot of the stairs, and reaching down into a tub at his feet, held up a large piece of raw liver. Peter almost went crazy, and I remembered suddenly that I had forgotten to feed the poor beast for more than a day.
"Would you like it?" asked the gentleman. Peter sat up, as he had been taught to do, and barked. The gentleman reached down again, got a wooden platter from a stack of them at his feet, and placing the liver on it, put it on the step. The whole thing was so neat and businesslike that I could only gaze.
"That"s a well-trained dog, madam," said the elderly gentleman, beaming at Peter over his gla.s.ses. "You should not have neglected him."