Yellow Room by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page B

think maybe I saw the girl, right here in town.”
    “Plenty of people think that. Had five or six already.”
    But later the visitor’s story proved interesting, to say the least.
    He was the doorman at the apartment house on Park Avenue where the Spencers lived, and on the morning the family had left for the country, a girl had called. She had asked for Miss Carol Spencer, and seemed greatly disappointed when told she had gone. What had taken him to the station house was that the description fitted this girl, white hat, fur jacket and all.
    “She acted like she didn’t know just what to do,” the police reported his statement. “I thought maybe she’d just got off a train. She had a little bag with her, as well as a pocketbook. I don’t know what she did do, either. The elevator man was off, and just then the bell rang. When I came down again she was gone.”
    That, he said, had been about ten o’clock the previous Thursday.
    Carol did not learn this until later. She was worried and upset that morning. She had called the hospital, to learn that Lucy Norton was allowed no visitors, and to suspect that the police were keeping her incommunicado until the inquest. Also both the younger girls were threatening to leave, Freda declaring that she had seen a man in the grounds from her window after she had put out the light the night before. Only dire threats by Maggie that the police would follow and bring them back kept them at all.
    She was unpacking her trunk when Nora came up to tell her Colonel Richardson was downstairs, and she went down reluctantly. He was standing by the library fire, and looking shocked.
    “My dear girl!” he said. “I just heard, or I’d have come before. How dreadful for you.”
    “It’s all rather horrible. We don’t even know who she was.”
    “So I understand. I learned only just now, when I went to the village. But surely Lucy Norton would know. I saw her husband bring her that morning.”
    “The police aren’t letting her see anyone.”
    He considered that. She thought he looked very tired, and his lips had a bluish tinge. His heart was not too good, and he had probably walked up the hill.
    “Well, thank God it doesn’t concern you,” he said. “I’ll not keep you, my dear. And don’t worry too much. Floyd is an excellent man.”
    He left soon after. She went with him to the door and watched him start down the drive, leaning rather heavily on his stick. When she turned to go in she saw Dane. He was still in slacks and sweater, and he was carefully surveying the shape of the hill behind the house. When the colonel had disappeared he walked over to the drive and, stopping, examined the grass border beside it.
    He straightened and grinned at her.
    “Hello,” he said. “Colonel know anything?”
    “No. He’d just heard.”
    He lit a cigarette and limped over to her.
    “How about helping me with a little job this morning?” he inquired. “I’m no bird dog, with this leg. I could use an assistant.”
    “What sort of job?”
    “Oh, just hither and yon,” he said vaguely. “Know if anybody tramped around this drive lately?”
    “Outside of a half dozen men I don’t think of anybody.”
    “Up the hill, I mean.”
    “Oh, that?” She looked up the hill. It was heavily overgrown with shrubbery, and on the crest was an abandoned house, gray and forlorn in the morning light. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t think so.”
    “How about the tool house? That’s it up there, isn’t it?”
    “There’s a path to it. Anyhow George Smith is in the hospital. He hasn’t been around lately.”
    “Well, someone’s been up that hill lately. The ground’s dry. There hasn’t been any rain for weeks. But the faucet for the garden hose has dripped in one place, and somebody stepped in it.”
    “That doesn’t mean a thing,” she said. “The deer sometimes come down at night.”
    “The deer don’t wear flat rubber-heeled shoes,” he said shortly.
    “I’m afraid I don’t