At the rear behind the garage, lies a deep ravine which has been
recently incorporated into the city park system; and at one side of me
lies an acre or two of undeveloped property known as the Larimer lot.
Through this, from the street and extending sharply down the hill into
the park, runs a foot-path, an unpaved cut-off. In winter when the
leaves are off the trees I can see a portion of this path. Not all, for
both the lot and the path are heavily bordered with old cedars.
Our first crime took place on the Larimer lot, not far from this path.
I have no near neighbors. This part of the city was country when the
house was built, and the property on the other side is very large, ten
acres or so. It was recently bought by a retired bootlegger and has no
part in this narrative.
The house itself—my house—is old fashioned but very comfortable. But
as I sit here in the library, one leg out before me and my pad on the
other while I endeavor to think on paper, I realize that the house
requires more description than that. Like the path, it too played its
part.
I am writing in the library. Beside me on a table is the small bell
which I ring to attract attention, since I cannot get to the speaking
tube—I have said we are old fashioned—and a row of soft pencils like
the one which later on we found on the skylight over the lavatory. There
is a desk, an old Queen Anne walnut one, an open fire, chairs and books.
From the side windows one commands the Larimer lot, from the front the
entrance drive.
So the library has not only comfort, but a certain strategic place in
the house. I can not only see my callers in advance; I can sit there and
survey a large portion of my lower floor domain. It lies to the right of
the front door and the hall.
Across the long center hall with its white staircase and its rear door
to the service portion of the house, lies the drawing room. I can see
now the forward end of it, with its ormolu cabinet, its French sofa done
in old rose damask, and that painting of my father which does the Bell
nose so grave an injustice.
And although I cannot see it, I know that at the end of that drawing
room, opening onto a blank brick wall which I have screened with arbor
vitæ and rhododendrons, there is a French door with steps leading out
onto the grass. Also I know, by actual measurement, that it is precisely
fifty feet and around a corner to the kitchen porch.
From the rear of the library double doors open into a music room, not
often used nowadays, and behind that is the dining room.
This is my domain, and today in the winter sun it is very peaceful.
There has been a little snow, and the cedars at the top of the path down
the hill are quite beautiful. I have a wood fire, and the dogs, Jock and
Isabel—named by Judy because she had never heard of a dog called
Isabel—are asleep before it.
Jock is a terrier, Isabel a corpulent and defeminized French bull. As
they too played a small and not too meritorious part in our _débâcle_,
it is necessary to name them.
I have listed my household as it was on the eighteenth of April of this
year. Usually my secretaries do not live in the house, but come in daily
for such notes, checks, bills and what not as clutter the desk of a
woman who, because she has no family of her own, is supposed to expend
her maternal instinct in charity.
But Mary Martin was living in the house, and due to a reason directly
connected with this narrative.
During the housecleaning the previous autumn Norah had unearthed an old
cane belonging to my grandfather, that Captain Bell who played so brave
if unsung a part in the Mexican War.
She brought it downstairs to me, and I told her to have Joseph polish
the handle. When Joseph came back with it he was smiling, an unusual
thing for Joseph.
“That’s a very interesting old cane, madam,” he said. “It has a knife in
it.”
“A knife? What for?”
But Joseph did not know. It appeared that he had been polishing the knob
when a blade suddenly shot out of the end. He had been greatly startled
and had almost dropped the thing.
Later on I showed it to Jim Blake, my cousin, and he made the suggestion
which brought Mary Martin into the house.
“Why not write the old boy’s life?” he suggested. “You must have a
trunkful of letters, and this sword-stick, or sword-cane or whatever it
is, is a good starting point. And by the way, if ever you want to give
it away, give it to me.”
“I may do that,” I said. “I don’t like deadly weapons around the place.”
In March I gave it to him. “The Life,” as Judy called it, was going on
well, and Mary Martin efficient enough, although I was never fond of
her.
CHAPTER TWO
This then was my household and my house on the day Sarah Gittings
disappeared. The servants lived on the third floor at the rear, their
portion of the floor cut off from the front by a door. A back staircase
reached this upper rear hall, allowing them to come and go as they
required.
Mary had the third floor front room above the library, and Sarah the one
behind it and over the blue spare room. Mary’s door stood open most of
the time, Sarah’s closed and often locked. For all her good qualities
there was a suspicious streak in Sarah.
“I don’t like people meddling with my things,” she would say.
But Sarah was not a permanent member of the household. She was a
middle-aged, rather heavy and silent woman, a graduate nurse of the old
régime who had been in the family for years. In serious illness we
sometimes brought in brisk young women, starchy and efficient, but in
trouble we turned to Sarah.
We passed her around. My sister Laura would wire from Kansas City,
“Children have measles. Please send Sarah if possible.” And Sarah would
pack her bag, cash one of her neat small checks and slip off. A good bit
of her time was spent with my cousin Katherine Somers in New York.
Katherine was devoted to her, although just why it is difficult to say.
She was a taciturn woman, giving no confidences but probably receiving a
great many.
Poor Sarah! I can still see her in her starched white uniform, with its
skirts which just cleared the ground, moving among our various
households, with us but not entirely of us; watching nervously over the
stair rail while Judy, Katherine’s daughter, made her début; slapping
Laura’s newest baby between the shoulders to make it breathe, or bending
over me to give me a daily massage, her heavy body clumsy enough but her
hands light and gentle.
She was not a clever woman. Or maybe I am wrong. Perhaps in a family
which prides itself on a sort of superficial cleverness, she was merely
silenced.
It was Wallie Somers, Katherine’s stepson, who claimed that when he told
her Hoover was nominated, she said:
“Really! That ought to be good business for the vacuum cleaner.”
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