Yellow Room by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page A

all except Dane, but following a colloquy at the front door the state trooper came back to the library.
    “I’m afraid I’m going to bother you some more, Miss Spencer,” he said apologetically. “I’d like to look over the house, if you don’t mind, and…” He hesitated, then smiled. “The district attorney thinks it would be a good idea to clean out the furnace. It’s lighted, I suppose.”
    Carol had rallied. She even managed to smile at him.
    “Of course,” she said, “I had to burn up the evidence somehow. It’s been going all day.”
    He grinned back at her.
    “Some things don’t burn, you know,” he said cheerfully. “You’d be surprised how many. Nails out of high-heeled pumps, snaps off clothes, buttons, initials off bags, all sorts of things. You sift them out of the ashes and there you are.”
    The last they saw of him he was going lightly up the stairs, and for some time they heard him moving about in the yellow room overhead.
    Dane was thoughtful.
    “Just remember this,” he said. “Even if they find those things have been burned in the furnace, it doesn’t connect you with the case.”
    “You think they will?”
    “It’s possible, if not particularly intelligent. Of course Mrs. Norton’s accident may have prevented it. Whoever did it couldn’t know she’d broken her leg. They might have expected her to run screaming out of the house.”
    He left soon after that, telling her to lock her door but that otherwise she was safe enough. “There will be troopers in the basement all night,” he said. “Better get all the sleep you can. I may need you tomorrow.”
    With which cryptic statement he departed, going out through the door to the terrace and motioning her to lock it behind him.

8
    C AROL DID NOT SLEEP much, although she felt relaxed. Through the old-fashioned register in the floor came the muffled sound of men’s voices from the furnace cellar, and she learned in the morning that the lieutenant and one of his men had spent most of the night there. They had made a thorough job of it, emptying the furnace itself and coming up to wash looking as if a bomb had burned them. But all they found was the melted remains of what looked like a teaspoon, which Maggie had reported as missing since the year before.
    The word had gone out by that time. Floyd may have lacked a camera, but he knew police procedure. He had sent out a description of the girl to the Missing Persons Bureau and by teletype all over the country. The newspapers had been busy too, and evidently Elinor had been unable to keep them from her mother. Carol, still keeping up largely on coffee, was called to the telephone to hear Mrs. Spencer’s voice, shaken and hysterical:
    “What sort of a mess have you got yourself into? The papers are dreadful.”
    Carol controlled herself with difficulty.
    “It was done before I got here, mother. Please don’t worry.”
    “It’s easy for you to say that. When I think of the notoriety, the disgrace of the whole thing—I’ll never live in that house again. Never. And I want you to leave, Carol. Do you hear me? Come back here at once.”
    “I’ll have to wait for the inquest, mother.”
    “Good heavens, are they having an inquest? Why?”
    Carol finally lost her patience.
    “Because it’s a murder,” she said. “Because they think we had something to do with it. And I’m not so sure but what we had.”
    She rang off, feeling ashamed for her outburst but somewhat relieved by it.
    There was a new development that day, one which seemed to justify her last statement to her mother, although it was some time before she learned about it. On that same morning, Tuesday, June twentieth, a caller appeared at the East Sixty-seventh Precinct station in New York City. He looked uneasy, and he carried a morning paper in his hand. The desk sergeant was reading a paper, too. He looked up over it.
    “Anything I can do for you?”
    “I’m not sure. It’s about this murder up in Maine. I