













THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE


By

MARY ROBERTS RINEHART



CONTENTS

       I  I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE
      II  A LINK CUFF-BUTTON
     III  MR. JOHN BAILEY APPEARS
      IV  WHERE IS HALSEY?
       V  GERTRUDE'S ENGAGEMENT
      VI  IN THE EAST CORRIDOR
     VII  A SPRAINED ANKLE
    VIII  THE OTHER HALF OF THE LINE
      IX  JUST LIKE A GIRL
       X  THE TRADERS BANK
      XI  HALSEY MAKES A CAPTURE
     XII  ONE MYSTERY FOR ANOTHER
    XIII  LOUISE
     XIV  AN EGG-NOG AND A TELEGRAM
      XV  LIDDY GIVES THE ALARM
     XVI  IN THE EARLY MORNING
    XVII  A HINT OF SCANDAL
   XVIII  A HOLE IN THE WALL
     XIX  CONCERNING THOMAS
      XX  DOCTOR WALKER'S WARNING
     XXI  FOURTEEN ELM STREET
    XXII  A LADDER OUT OF PLACE
   XXIII  WHILE THE STABLES BURNED
    XXIV  FLINDERS
     XXV  A VISIT FROM LOUISE
    XXVI  HALSEY'S DISAPPEARANCE
   XXVII  WHO IS NINA CARRINGTON?
  XXVIII  A TRAMP AND THE TOOTHACHE
    XXIX  A SCRAP OF PAPER
     XXX  WHEN CHURCHYARDS YAWN
    XXXI  BETWEEN TWO FIREPLACES
   XXXII  ANNE WATSON'S STORY
  XXXIII  AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS
   XXXIV  THE ODDS AND ENDS




THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE



CHAPTER I

I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE

This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted
her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer
out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious
crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and
prosperous.  For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for
twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the
carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown
linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after
watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet
in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply
does not depend on a tank on the roof.

And then--the madness seized me.  When I look back over the months I
spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all.  As it is, I show
the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences.  I have turned very
gray--Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little
bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery, instead of a
yellowish white.  I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things and I
snapped her off.

"No," I said sharply, "I'm not going to use bluing at my time of life,
or starch, either."

Liddy's nerves are gone, she says, since that awful summer, but she has
enough left, goodness knows!  And when she begins to go around with a
lump in her throat, all I have to do is to threaten to return to
Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance of
cheerfulness,--from which you may judge that the summer there was
anything but a success.

The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete--one of them
mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the time the
thing happened--that I feel it my due to tell what I know.  Mr.
Jamieson, the detective, said himself he could never have done without
me, although he gave me little enough credit, in print.

I shall have to go back several years--thirteen, to be exact--to start
my story.  At that time my brother died, leaving me his two children.
Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven.  All the
responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly; to perfect
the profession of motherhood requires precisely as many years as the
child has lived, like the man who started to carry the calf and ended
by walking along with the bull on his shoulders.  However, I did the
best I could.  When Gertrude got past the hair-ribbon age, and Halsey
asked for a scarf-pin and put on long trousers--and a wonderful help
that was to the darning.--I sent them away to good schools.  After
that, my responsibility was chiefly postal, with three months every
summer in which to replenish their wardrobes, look over their lists of
acquaintances, and generally to take my foster-motherhood out of its
nine months' retirement in camphor.

I missed the summers with them when, somewhat later, at boarding-school
and college, the children spent much of their vacations with friends.
Gradually I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome
than when signed to a letter, though I wrote them at stated intervals.
But when Halsey had finished his electrical course and Gertrude her
boarding-school, and both came home to stay, things were suddenly
changed.  The winter Gertrude came out was nothing but a succession of
sitting up late at night to bring her home from things, taking her to
the dressmakers between naps the next day, and discouraging ineligible
youths with either more money than brains, or more brains than money.
Also, I acquired a great many things: to say lingerie for
under-garments, "frocks" and "gowns" instead of dresses, and that
beardless sophomores are not college boys, but college men.  Halsey
required less personal supervision, and as they both got their mother's
fortune that winter, my responsibility became purely moral.  Halsey
bought a car, of course, and I learned how to tie over my bonnet a gray
baize veil, and, after a time, never to stop to look at the dogs one
has run down.  People are apt to be so unpleasant about their dogs.

The additions to my education made me a properly equipped maiden aunt,
and by spring I was quite tractable.  So when Halsey suggested camping
in the Adirondacks and Gertrude wanted Bar Harbor, we compromised on a
good country house with links near, within motor distance of town and
telephone distance of the doctor.  That was how we went to Sunnyside.

We went out to inspect the property, and it seemed to deserve its name.
Its cheerful appearance gave no indication whatever of anything out of
the ordinary.  Only one thing seemed unusual to me: the housekeeper,
who had been left in charge, had moved from the house to the gardener's
lodge, a few days before.  As the lodge was far enough away from the
house, it seemed to me that either fire or thieves could complete their
work of destruction undisturbed.  The property was an extensive one:
the house on the top of a hill, which sloped away in great stretches of
green lawn and clipped hedges, to the road; and across the valley,
perhaps a couple of miles away, was the Greenwood Club House.  Gertrude
and Halsey were infatuated.

"Why, it's everything you want," Halsey said "View, air, good water and
good roads.  As for the house, it's big enough for a hospital, if it
has a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne back," which was ridiculous: it
was pure Elizabethan.

Of course we took the place; it was not my idea of comfort, being much
too large and sufficiently isolated to make the servant question
serious.  But I give myself credit for this: whatever has happened
since, I never blamed Halsey and Gertrude for taking me there.  And
another thing: if the series of catastrophes there did nothing else, it
taught me one thing--that somehow, somewhere, from perhaps a
half-civilized ancestor who wore a sheepskin garment and trailed his
food or his prey, I have in me the instinct of the chase.  Were I a man
I should be a trapper of criminals, trailing them as relentlessly as no
doubt my sheepskin ancestor did his wild boar.  But being an unmarried
woman, with the handicap of my sex, my first acquaintance with crime
will probably be my last.  Indeed, it came near enough to being my last
acquaintance with anything.

The property was owned by Paul Armstrong, the president of the Traders'
Bank, who at the time we took the house was in the west with his wife
and daughter, and a Doctor Walker, the Armstrong family physician.
Halsey knew Louise Armstrong,--had been rather attentive to her the
winter before, but as Halsey was always attentive to somebody, I had
not thought of it seriously, although she was a charming girl.  I knew
of Mr. Armstrong only through his connection with the bank, where the
children's money was largely invested, and through an ugly story about
the son, Arnold Armstrong, who was reported to have forged his father's
name, for a considerable amount, to some bank paper.  However, the
story had had no interest for me.

I cleared Halsey and Gertrude away to a house party, and moved out to
Sunnyside the first of May.  The roads were bad, but the trees were in
leaf, and there were still tulips in the borders around the house.  The
arbutus was fragrant in the woods under the dead leaves, and on the way
from the station, a short mile, while the car stuck in the mud, I found
a bank showered with tiny forget-me-nots.  The birds--don't ask me what
kind; they all look alike to me, unless they have a hall mark of some
bright color--the birds were chirping in the hedges, and everything
breathed of peace.  Liddy, who was born and bred on a brick pavement,
got a little bit down-spirited when the crickets began to chirp, or
scrape their legs together, or whatever it is they do, at twilight.

The first night passed quietly enough.  I have always been grateful for
that one night's peace; it shows what the country might be, under
favorable circumstances.  Never after that night did I put my head on
my pillow with any assurance how long it would be there; or on my
shoulders, for that matter.

On the following morning Liddy and Mrs. Ralston, my own housekeeper,
had a difference of opinion, and Mrs. Ralston left on the eleven train.
Just after luncheon, Burke, the butler, was taken unexpectedly with a
pain in his right side, much worse when I was within hearing distance,
and by afternoon he was started cityward.  That night