The Affair Next Door (2 page)

"Come, man, to business! The woman inside there is dead, but this one is
living. Fetch me a pitcher of water from below if you can, and then go
for whatever assistance you need. I'll wait here and bring this woman
to. She is a strong one, and it won't take long."

"You'll stay here alone with that—" he began.

But I stopped him with a look of disdain.

"Of course I will stay here; why not? Is there anything in the dead to
be afraid of? Save me from the living, and I undertake to save myself
from the dead."

But his face had grown very suspicious.

"You go for the water," he cried. "And see here! Just call out for some
one to telephone to Police Headquarters for the Coroner and a
detective. I don't quit this room till one or the other of them comes."

Smiling at a caution so very ill-timed, but abiding by my invariable
rule of never arguing with a man unless I see some way of getting the
better of him, I did what he bade me, though I hated dreadfully to leave
the spot and its woful mystery, even for so short a time as was
required.

"Run up to the second story," he called out, as I passed by the
prostrate figure of the cleaner. "Tell them what you want from the
window, or we will have the whole street in here."

So I ran up-stairs,—I had always wished to visit this house, but had
never been encouraged to do so by the Misses Van Burnam,—and making my
way into the front room, the door of which stood wide open, I rushed to
the window and hailed the crowd, which by this time extended far out
beyond the curb-stone.

"An officer!" I called out, "a police officer! An accident has occurred
and the man in charge here wants the Coroner and a detective from Police
Headquarters."

"Who's hurt?" "Is it a man?" "Is it a woman?" shouted up one or two; and
"Let us in!" shouted others; but the sight of a boy rushing off to meet
an advancing policeman satisfied me that help would soon be forthcoming,
so I drew in my head and looked about me for the next necessity—water.

I was in a lady's bed-chamber, probably that of the eldest Miss Van
Burnam; but it was a bed-chamber which had not been occupied for some
months, and naturally it lacked the very articles which would have been
of assistance to me in the present emergency. No
eau de Cologne
on
the bureau, no camphor on the mantel-shelf. But there was water in the
pipes (something I had hardly hoped for), and a mug on the wash-stand;
so I filled the mug and ran with it to the door, stumbling, as I did so,
over some small object which I presently perceived to be a little round
pin-cushion. Picking it up, for I hate anything like disorder, I placed
it on a table near by, and continued on my way.

The woman was still lying at the foot of the stairs. I dashed the water
in her face and she immediately came to.

Sitting up, she was about to open her lips when she checked herself; a
fact which struck me as odd, though I did not allow my surprise to
become apparent.

Meantime I stole a glance into the parlor. The officer was standing
where I had left him, looking down on the prostrate figure before him.

There was no sign of feeling in his heavy countenance, and he had not
opened a shutter, nor, so far as I could see, disarranged an object in
the room.

The mysterious character of the whole affair fascinated me in spite of
myself, and leaving the now fully aroused woman in the hall, I was
half-way across the parlor floor when the latter stopped me with a
shrill cry:

"Don't leave me! I have never seen anything before so horrible. The poor
dear! The poor dear! Why don't he take those dreadful things off her?"

She alluded not only to the piece of furniture which had fallen upon the
prostrate woman, and which can best be described as a cabinet with
closets below and shelves above, but to the various articles of
bric-à-brac
which had tumbled from the shelves, and which now lay in
broken pieces about her.

"He will do so; they will do so very soon," I replied. "He is waiting
for some one with more authority than himself; for the Coroner, if you
know what that means."

"But what if she's alive! Those things will crush her. Let us take them
off. I'll help. I'm not too weak to help."

"Do you know who this person is?" I asked, for her voice had more
feeling in it than I thought natural to the occasion, dreadful as it
was.

"I?" she repeated, her weak eyelids quivering for a moment as she tried
to sustain my scrutiny. "How should I know? I came in with the policeman
and haven't been any nearer than I now be. What makes you think I know
anything about her? I'm only the scrub-woman, and don't even know the
names of the family."

"I thought you seemed so very anxious," I explained, suspicious of her
suspiciousness, which was of so sly and emphatic a character that it
changed her whole bearing from one of fear to one of cunning in a
moment.

"And who wouldn't feel the like of that for a poor creature lying
crushed under a heap of broken crockery!"

Crockery! those Japanese vases worth hundreds of dollars! that ormulu
clock and those Dresden figures which must have been more than a couple
of centuries old!

"It's a poor sense of duty that keeps a man standing dumb and staring
like that, when with a lift of his hand he could show us the like of
her pretty face, and if it's dead she be or alive."

As this burst of indignation was natural enough and not altogether
uncalled for from the standpoint of humanity, I gave the woman a nod of
approval, and wished I were a man myself that I might lift the heavy
cabinet or whatever it was that lay upon the poor creature before us.
But not being a man, and not judging it wise to irritate the one
representative of that sex then present, I made no remark, but only took
a few steps farther into the room, followed, as it afterwards appeared,
by the scrub-woman.

The Van Burnam parlors are separated by an open arch. It was to the
right of this arch and in the corner opposite the doorway that the dead
woman lay. Using my eyes, now that I was somewhat accustomed to the
semi-darkness enveloping us, I noticed two or three facts which had
hitherto escaped me. One was, that she lay on her back with her feet
pointing towards the hall door, and another, that nowhere in the room,
save in her immediate vicinity, were there to be seen any signs of
struggle or disorder. All was as set and proper as in my own parlor when
it has been undisturbed for any length of time by guests; and though I
could not see far into the rooms beyond, they were to all appearance in
an equally orderly condition.

Meanwhile the cleaner was trying to account for the overturned cabinet.

"Poor dear! poor dear! she must have pulled it over on herself! But
however did she get into the house? And what was she doing in this great
empty place?"

The policeman, to whom these remarks had evidently been addressed,
growled out some unintelligible reply, and in her perplexity the woman
turned towards me.

But what could I say to her? I had my own private knowledge of the
matter, but she was not one to confide in, so I stoically shook my head.
Doubly disappointed, the poor thing shrank back, after looking first at
the policeman and then at me in an odd, appealing way, difficult to
understand. Then her eyes fell again on the dead girl at her feet, and
being nearer now than before, she evidently saw something that startled
her, for she sank on her knees with a little cry and began examining the
girl's skirts.

"What are you looking at there?" growled the policeman. "Get up, can't
you! No one but the Coroner has right to lay hand on anything here."

"I'm doing no harm," the woman protested, in an odd, shaking voice. "I
only wanted to see what the poor thing had on. Some blue stuff, isn't
it?" she asked me.

"Blue serge," I answered; "store-made, but very good; must have come
from Altman's or Stern's."

"I—I'm not used to sights like this," stammered the scrub-woman,
stumbling awkwardly to her feet, and looking as if her few remaining
wits had followed the rest on an endless vacation. "I—I think I shall
have to go home." But she did not move.

"The poor dear's young, isn't she?" she presently insinuated, with an
odd catch in her voice that gave to the question an air of hesitation
and doubt.

"I think she is younger than either you or myself," I deigned to reply.
"Her narrow pointed shoes show she has not reached the years of
discretion."

"Yes, yes, so they do!" ejaculated the cleaner, eagerly—too eagerly
for perfect ingenuousness. "That's why I said 'Poor dear!' and spoke of
her pretty face. I am sorry for young folks when they get into trouble,
aint you? You and me might lie here and no one be much the worse for it,
but a sweet lady like this—"

This was not very flattering to me, but I was prevented from rebuking
her by a prolonged shout from the stoop without, as a rush was made
against the front door, followed by a shrill peal of the bell.

"Man from Headquarters," stolidly announced the policeman. "Open the
door, ma'am; or step back into the further hall if you want me to do
it."

Such rudeness was uncalled for; but considering myself too important a
witness to show feeling, I swallowed my indignation and proceeded with
all my native dignity to the front door.

As I did so, I could catch the murmur of the crowd outside as it seethed
forward at the first intimation of the door being opened; but my
attention was not so distracted by it, loud as it sounded after the
quiet of the shut-up house, that I failed to notice that the door had
not been locked by the gentleman leaving the night before, and that,
consequently, only the night latch was on. With a turn of the knob it
opened, showing me the mob of shouting boys and the forms of two
gentlemen awaiting admittance on the door-step. I frowned at the mob and
smiled on the gentlemen, one of whom was portly and easy-going in
appearance, and the other spare, with a touch of severity in his aspect.
But for some reason these gentlemen did not seem to appreciate the honor
I had done them, for they both gave me a displeased glance, which was so
odd and unsympathetic in its character that I bridled a little, though I
soon returned to my natural manner. Did they realize at the first glance
that I was destined to prove a thorn in the sides of every one connected
with this matter, for days to come?

"Are you the woman who called from the window?" asked the larger of the
two, whose business here I found it difficult at first to determine.

"I am," was my perfectly self-possessed reply. "I live next door and my
presence here is due to the anxious interest I always take in my
neighbors. I had reason to think that all was not as it should be in
this house, and I was right. Look in the parlor, sirs."

They were already as far as the threshold of that room and needed no
further encouragement to enter. The heavier man went first and the other
followed, and you may be sure I was not far behind. The sight meeting
our eyes was ghastly enough, as you know; but these men were evidently
accustomed to ghastly sights, for they showed but little emotion.

"I thought this house was empty," observed the second gentleman, who was
evidently a doctor.

"So it was till last night," I put in; and was about to tell my story,
when I felt my skirts jerked.

Turning, I found that this warning had come from the cleaner who stood
close beside me.

"What do you want?" I asked, not understanding her and having nothing to
conceal.

"I?" she faltered, with a frightened air. "Nothing, ma'am, nothing."

"Then don't interrupt me," I harshly admonished her, annoyed at an
interference that tended to throw suspicion upon my candor. "This woman
came here to scrub and clean," I now explained; "it was by means of the
key she carried that we were enabled to get into the house. I never
spoke to her till a half hour ago."

At which, with a display of subtlety I was far from expecting in one of
her appearance, she let her emotions take a fresh direction, and
pointing towards the dead woman, she impetuously cried:

"But the poor child there! Aint you going to take those things off of
her? It's wicked to leave her under all that stuff. Suppose there was
life in her!"

"Oh! there's no hope of that," muttered the doctor, lifting one of the
hands, and letting it fall again.

"Still—" he cast a side look at his companion, who gave him a meaning
nod—"it might be well enough to lift this cabinet sufficiently for me
to lay my hand on her heart."

They accordingly did this; and the doctor, leaning down, placed his hand
over the poor bruised breast.

"No life," he murmured. "She has been dead some hours. Do you think we
had better release the head?" he went on, glancing up at the portly man
at his side.

But the latter, who was rapidly growing serious, made a slight protest
with his finger, and turning to me, inquired, with sudden authority:

"What did you mean when you said that the house had been empty till last
night?"

"Just what I said, sir. It was empty till about midnight, when two
persons—" Again I felt my dress twitched, this time very cautiously.
What did the woman want? Not daring to give her a look, for these men
were only too ready to detect harm in everything I did, I gently drew my
skirt away and took a step aside, going on as if no interruption had
occurred. "Did I say persons? I should have said a man and a woman drove
up to the house and entered. I saw them from my window."

"You did?" murmured my interlocutor, whom I had by this time decided to
be a detective. "And this is the woman, I suppose?" he proceeded,
pointing to the poor creature lying before us.

"Why, yes, of course. Who else can she be? I did not see the lady's face
last night, but she was young and light on her feet, and ran up the
stoop gaily."