The Classic Mystery Novel MEGAPACK®. Hay James
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me indignantly outside.
The culprit greeted me cheerfully. “Where do you want your coal? In the usual place?”
I nodded sourly. “How do you expect us to grow a lawn if you persist in driving your truck across the yard? You’ve cut the ground to ribbons.”
“It slipped my mind, ma’am. I’ll do better next time.”
. “Let’s hope so.”
I gave him the cellar keys, returned to my dishwashing. Sunlight poured in and I hummed as I stacked and scraped and splashed. Over this housewifely clatter rose the sound of the falling coal. A steady clunk, clunk, clunk. Not exactly pleasant perhaps, but normal, commonplace, and satisfying.
When Mr. Brown completed his business and came for his money, he was smiling. “I should a brung my shotgun, Mrs. Storm. There’s good hunting downstairs. Your place is overrun with squirrels.”
“Squirrels?”
“I saw three. Those varmints can be awful pests. If I was you, I’d mend that window.”
“It’s been mended.”
“Then it’s been broke again.”
“Where? Let me see.”
I followed him outside. He gleefully indicated the window through which he had dumped the coal. Broken previously, it had indeed been broken once again. Coal dust blew gently through a hole which certainly had not been there yesterday. I stared in silence at Mr. Brown. I daresay my reception of his discovery pleased him. His own enthusiasm grew.
“Funny kind of a hole, ain’t it? Round as a plate. Don’t recollect when I’ve seen a window broke like that.”
The window catch was unfastened, and Mr. Brown volunteered that he had found it so. There was no glass on the lawn. I didn’t need John Standish to tell me that this was an outside job.
For as I stooped to peer at the hole, I reached a conclusion which the observant Mr. Brown had missed. The window was not broken; it was cut. There was no shattering. The hole was round and neat, almost tidy. Several minute scratches rayed out from it. Such scratches as might be made by a glass-cutting instrument. Or by the diamond in a ring.
Instantly I guessed what had occurred. Someone had stepped from the cindered driveway to the window, cut the pane, thrust through a hand, unlocked the window, opened it and dropped into the cellar. The picture of myself and Jack asleep upstairs with someone moving silently about the floor below turned me a little faint. Mr. Brown was now extremely curious. “Something wrong, Mrs. Storm?”
“No, nothing.”
He would have stood there talking, but I hustled him into his truck and off. Then I rushed inside and burst upon Jack who was shaving. He turned irritably at my entrance.
“This is a bathroom, darling. Can’t you knock? And I wish you’d stop using my razor blades to sharpen pencils.”
“Someone was in the house last night! In the cellar.”
At first incredulous, Jack soon sobered sufficiently to wipe the lather from his face, pull on a bathrobe and accompany me into the yard. I showed him the window. There were no footprints in the vicinity—only smears and the coal truck’s heavy tread—but leading toward the road, deep in the muddy turf which bordered the drive, we discovered at least a dozen prints. Clumsy, wide and well defined.
“A man’s prints,” Jack said. He bent over, looked mystified. “By George, the fellow wore rubbers. What extraordinary prudence in a housebreaker!”
At the harder surface of the road the prints disappeared. We could not fix the direction from which the intruder had come, nor could we decide whether he had arrived by car or on foot.
“I think,” said Jack, “he must have walked. Wouldn’t a stopping car have wakened you?”
“I was tired,” I admitted.
But, tired or not, I’m usually a light sleeper, and I couldn’t understand my not arousing. There were other things I couldn’t understand. For one, a sensible reason for the housebreaking. A stop bolt on the door which opened from the cellar into the kitchen prevented any entrance to the cottage proper. Consequently, the intruder had remained on the basement level. But what had he wanted there?
We went to the cellar Jack turned on the light. The single electric bulb glowed dimly, and I started as a squirrel scurried past in the gloom, fled up the pile of coal and vanished through the aperture in the window. Save for the broken window there was no sign of anything unusual. The cellar presented its customary aspect—dirt and dust, ruin and decay.
I looked over the debris with which Mrs. Coatesnash had filled every available inch of space—looked and was appalled. We had never been curious enough to investigate the dismal contents of the cellar and we had no inventory. We faced then an exasperating problem. How were we to decide what had been stolen in the night when we didn’t know accurately what had been there? Nevertheless, on the theory that a person retains a subconscious memory of any place where he has often been, Jack insisted upon a thorough, back-breaking search.
He flatters himself on his painter’s eye, and I believe he enjoyed himself. He would arbitrarily group a collection of miscellany—a sagging armchair, a bird cage, a box of old light bulbs—study the group, move slowly forward and repeat the process. He touched nothing. Occasionally he would squat or step back to obtain a different perspective. With less success I imitated him. At the end of an hour my cold was getting worse, my back was breaking and I was thoroughly disgusted. Every item I specifically remembered—the painted phonograph horn, the odorous roll of carpet, the lawn mower which lacked a blade—was in its accustomed place. The disorder seemed just as bad as yesterday, no worse.
I sat down on a barrel, discarded Jack’s method and tried out a method of my own. I let my imagination work, and attempted to decide what any sensible person could possibly have wanted that might have been concealed amid such worthless trash. Since the larger items were accounted for, it had to be something small. My ideas were more picturesque than practical. I recalled newspaper accounts of priceless paintings hidden beneath cheap lithographs, stories of incriminating papers left carelessly in trunks. I remembered reading of a will cunningly concealed in a plastered wall. And then, as I sat there, a strong impression overcame me.
I said, “Jack, we may as well give up. We haven’t been robbed. Not a single solitary thing is missing. Nothing—I’m positive—has been disturbed.”
Jack straightened. He looked as bewildered as I’ve ever seen him look. “Darned if that isn’t what I had decided myself. But it doesn’t make sense. If robbery wasn’t intended last night what was intended? Why was the window broken? Why are those footprints on the lawn?”
His words were lost in the sudden roar of a motorcycle. A moment later Lester Harkway’s astonished face appeared at the open cellar door.
“Good lord, what’s going on?”
“An inventory,” Jack called. “We have either been robbed or else something queer has happened.”
“Robbed?” Hark way hurriedly joined us in the cellar. I vividly recall the surprise in his face as he surveyed in turn several broken chairs, a sagging couch, a pile of rotting books. He grinned. “I shouldn’t have thought this junkman’s paradise would tempt anyone. What’s gone? What happened anyhow?” A little wryly Jack returned the smile. “That’s it—we don’t know. We know that someone broke into the cellar some time last night and that’s all we do know. But you might look at the window behind you.”
Harkway spun on his heel. He examined the neat round hole and the merriment left his face. “A pretty fair job of illegal entry,” he said at last. “Still it’s funny you wouldn’t waken.” Suddenly he moved across the hard packed ground, mounted the short flight of stairs which led into the kitchen, tried the door at the top. It opened.
“Was this door locked last night?”
“Locked,”