As she prayed for silence from the kitchen she heard the slow bounce of a potato across the floor.
“Cripes yes!” said Davis heartily. “Script’s held up. My writer’s on a bat!”
He whistled—and then looked admiringly at Miss Trainor.
“Like to see the swimming pool sometime? I mean—”
“I’d love it,” Miss Trainor said—then covered up a species of groan from inside with the remarkable statement: “There’s his buzzer now.”
A puzzled look crossed Davis’ face—faded. She sighed with relief.
“Well, cheerio and keep your chin up, and all that sort of thing,” he advised her.
When he had broken into his athlete’s run she stepped back into the kitchen. Emmet Monsen was no longer beneath the sink but there was not any doubt as to where he was, for she heard the sound of more spokes leaving the bannister, of window glass splintering—and then:
“I know what it is—it’s chloral hydrate—it’s a ‘Mickey Finn’—I can smell it! Why don’t you drink it yourself?”
Miss Hapgood stood on the stairs and smiled ineffectually as she held out the glass.
“Bottoms up!” Emmet suggested, not even pausing in his wrecking task, which now included throwing the extracted spokes through the broken window into the garden. “When that Cardiff comes I want to have you all passed out in rows before he drinks his! Cant a man die in peace!”
Miss Trainor turned on the hall light against the darkening day—and Emmet Monsen looked ungratefully at her.
“And you with your California smile!”
The words were accompanied by a long-drawn splintering of the top stair rail.
“I’m from New England, Mr. Monsen.”
“Never mind! Write yourself a check anyhow. And write Miss Hapgood a check.”
Miss Hapgood rose to the occasion—perhaps she heard a ghostly whisper from Florence Nightingale in her ear.
“Mr. Monsen—if I do drink this, will you go to bed?”
Hopefully she raised the glass of chloral.
“Yes!” agreed Emmet.
But as she lifted it to her lips the Trainor girl darted up the stairs, tilted her arm, and spilt the liquid.
“Somebody’s got to watch!” she protested.
The hall below seemed suddenly crowded with people—but it was only the massive Dr. Cardiff and a gardener from the Davis estate with a letter in his hand.
“Get out of here, Dr. Hippocrates!” Emmet shouted.
His arms were full of broken wood as he backed up a few steps and braced himself against what remained of the toothless bannister.
“I’m going to have you disbarred at the next port. Write him a check, Miss Hapgood. You’re off the case. I’m treating myself. Write checks! Get away!”
Dr. Cardiff made a step up the stairs and Emmet weighed a chunk, snarling happily. “Right at those spectacles. No curve—just a fast one. I hope you got insurance on the sockets!”
While the doctor hesitated Emmet tried his aim by clipping off the light of the upper hall with a minor fragment.
Then the gardener, a man of seventy, started slowly up the stairs, holding out an envelope toward Emmet. Emmet’s hand tightened on the big chunk but the fearless old face reminded him of his own father.
“From Mr. Davis,” the gardener said, expressionless. He put the envelope through the gap in the balcony and started down.
The world was spinning around Emmet in cyclorama—and then suddenly he knew that the hall was empty. There was no sound in the house. With a last resurgence of tension he crutched himself down the stairs—and listened. He heard a door shut far away—motors starting.
Leaning over so that he touched his hands to the steps he crept back up. At the head of the stairs his fingers touched an envelope; lying on his back on the floor he ripped it open.
My Dear Mr. Monsen:
I had no idea of your condition. I saw the spokes come out the window—one of them hit me. I must ask you to vacate by nine o’clock tomorrow.
Sincerely,
Carlos Davis
Emmet sat up, accidentally flinging his legs out over space, where the spokes had been. The house was absolutely quiet now—there was even an echo as he experimentally dropped a last chip down into the stairwell. Presently, he told himself, he would get into bed. There were no people in the house. He had won.
IV
When Emmet awoke there seemed to be no light save in the lower hall, and only a dreamy memory of a sound far away in the dark house. He lay silent, seeing from the circlet moon in a window that it was late—between midnight and two.
The faint sound came again, with a suggestion of caution in its pitch, and Emmet sat up carefully. He tiptoed into his bedroom, put on his dressing gown, and tiptoed down the stairs.
In the door of the dark living room he listened again—then listened outside the kitchen and the secretary’s office—hearing the sound once more, as if from somewhere behind him. He crept back to the door of the living room—
A voice spoke suddenly from a corner.
“It’s Miss Trainor, Mr. Monsen. The light switch is beside your hand.”
Blinking at the glare he saw her curled in the big armchair, as if she herself had just awakened.
“I couldn’t get on relief at night,” she said. “So I just stayed.”
“I hear somebody,” Emmet said. “Sh!”
He flipped out the light. After a moment she whispered:
“I went through the house myself a little while ago.”
Emmet was unconvinced—either his nerves were still in collapse or there were intermittent creaks that might be footsteps.
“It isn’t that doctor or nurse? Tell me frankly.”
“They’ve left, Mr. Monsen.” She hesitated. “There has been a carpenter here—and he’s coming back at six-thirty with new spokes for the bannister, and a new window frame. We found all the spokes.”
Emmet considered this.
“Mr. Davis wrote me that one of them hit him,” he said. “He told me to get out.”
“Well, it didn’t stick to him, because they were all there in the garden.”
“How did you get a carpenter at this time of night?”
“My father,” she said. “He used to be a shipwright.”
Again he said “Sh!” and they listened—but she shook her head negatively; her smile was sad as if she wanted to agree that there had been a noise, but conscientiously couldn’t.
“The place is haunted,” he decided suddenly. “I’m going outside. If I can smell a field growing—”
He was in the hall when Miss Trainor suggested: “Do you mind if I walk along with you?”
“You won’t give me any orders?”
Ashamed, he changed his tone:
“No—I don’t mind.”
Together they struck out across a dirt road and off Carlos Davis’ property. It was a downhill path; presently, with no particular fatigue, he sprawled on one of the mounds of new-mown hay that dotted the field.
“You settle for the next pile,” Emmet suggested. “After all you still have a reputation—which is now one up on me.”
Presently she spoke from a rustle ten feet away.
“This is something I always wanted to do.”
“Me too—what’s the technique? Do you pull the hay over you, or do you burrow down into it?” He hesitated. “You don’t suppose I’d find Miss Hapgood!”
No answer. He stared at the waning moon, then murmured drowsily, “It all smells good. Are you dreaming about Boston?”
“No—I’m wide awake.”
“I feel saner myself, minute by minute.”
“You were never very bad.”
Emmet sat up indignantly wiping the glossy bristles from his ears.
“I was told to vacate, wasn’t I?”
“We’ve got to vacate this hay,” said the Trainor girl. “There’s a heavy dew.”
“I thought you asked to come along.”
“But maybe that burglar will be frightened in the house alone.”
He sighed.
“And I used to be a good host.”
The path was uphill now and they stopped every few minutes while he rested.
“We’ll have trouble explaining this to the burglar,” he said, as they approached the house. “Maybe we better brush each other off.”
At the door they looked back at the moon, and at the silver-spotted field below them—then they stepped into the kitchen and she flipped on the light. Her smile seemed brighter than anything outside or in.
That was the earth and the fields, it said. They were just as advertised, but without you I wouldn’t have known. Unfortunately she made it all harder to leave than before.
V
We shift the camera angle to Carlos Davis, arising in a dream bedroom. It is morning; he is still upset by the events of the night before and has scarcely begun his exercises when a Filipino comes in.
“The doctor who takes care Mr. Monsen wants to talk on phone.”
Carlos Davis removed the encyclopedia from his abdomen while the phone was plugged in. A few sentences between himself and Dr. Cardiff established the facts of Emmet Monsen’s conduct as known to them both.
Then the doctor’s voice sank confidentially.
“Has it occurred to you, Mister Davis, that there may be another factor in this coronary thrombosis?”
“Is that what you call it when they beat you with banister spokes?”
“We know there was only that one bottle of brandy—”continued Dr. Cardiff slowly, “—and he drank less than half. Let me put it another way: when a doctor leaves the case at the mere whim of a patient—”
“Whim!” protested Davis. “If that’s his idea of whim!”
“—the doctor wants to know all the facts—so he can inform the next doctor”.
Carlos Davis was thoroughly mystified as Dr. Cardiff asked bluntly: “What do you know about Monsen, Mr. Davis?”
“Nothing—except he’s a sort of well-known man—”
“I mean about his private life. Has it occurred to you that there are articles which can be concealed in a smaller space than alcohol?”
Carlos Davis found this too difficult for such an hour of the morning.
“You mean like stilettos—and dynamite?” he suggested, and then: “Why don’t you come out this afternoon and talk to me?”
He dressed in a state of some agitation, deciding in the middle of breakfast
