The Spiral Staircase by Ethel Lina White

Author:Ethel Lina White [White, Ethel Lina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Mystery, Contemporary Fiction, Literary
Amazon: B004MPQE5O
Publisher: Old LandMark Publishing
Published: 2006-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIV

SAFETY FIRST

Helen stared at Mrs. Oates, with vague misgiving. There was something unfamiliar in the woman’s appearance which eluded her: Her face, still flushed from the heat of the fire, wore its usual expression of goodnatured surliness, so that Helen was puzzled to account for the change.

“The nurse?” she repeated. “She’s rather a brute—but what’s queer about her?”

“Things,” Mrs. Oates nodded mysteriously. “I’ve noticed them, but taken no notice. They come back after, and then I wonder what they were.”

“What things?” insisted Helen.

“Little things,” was the vague reply. “I’d like a word with Oates. He could tell me.”

As her voice thickened, Helen suddenly traced the difference in her to its source. Something had gone out of her face; her lips hung loosely, so that her jaw had lost its suggestion of a bulldog grip.

She felt vaguely uneasy. One of her special guards was gone-and the other had changed. She had no longer the comforting assurance of Mrs. Oates’ protection.

A thread of meaning, however, ran through Mrs. Oates’ talk, and Helen found her attention gripped.

“I want’ to see Oates,” declared the woman, “and ask him just where he picked up that nurse. A baby could diddle Oates. If someone cut off his head, and stuck OR a cabbage, he’d never notice the difference, and no more would you.”

“But I’m sure he told us he took her from the Nursing Home,” Helen reminded her.

“Yes-and how? I know Oates. He’d drive up, and then, because he hadn’t me to hop out and ring the bell for him, he’d just sound the hooter, and wait for things to happen. The first body in a cloak and veil, what hopped inside the car, would be good enough for him.”

“Hum,” mused Helen. “Still even if she is an impostor, she couldn’t have committed the murder, because she was driving with him, in the car, when it was committed.”

“What murder?” asked Mrs. Oates.

Helen was human enough to relish the importance of announcing tragic news, which did not touch her personally.

But Mrs. Oates’ reception of Ceridwen’s death was disappointing. Instead of being thrilled with horror, she accepted it as though it were an item in the weekly schedule.

“You don’t say,” she muttered. “Well, you mark my words. There’ll be another murder before we’re one night older, if we’re spared to live as long.”

“Aren’t you a little ray of sunshine?” exclaimed Helen.

“Well, I don’t trust that nurse. Folks said as how the looney must have had a woman, what used to talk to the girls, and take off their notice, so as he could spring.”

“You mean-a decoy?” asked Helen. “I’ll promise you this. If the nurse invites me to go for a little walk with her, in the garden, tonight, I won’t go.”

“But she’s not here for that,” said Mrs. Oates. “She’s here to open the door to him.”

It was a most unpleasant idea, coming on the heels of Dr. Parry’s revelation. Helen awoke afresh to the loneliness of the storm-bound house. Even down in the basement, she could hear the fury of the gale, like a tidal-wave thudding against the shutters of the windows.

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