Murder on Wheels Read Online Free PDF Page B

she realized its weird significance now. For the words to the senseless thing began “Go tell Aunt Abbie, go tell Aunt Abbie … Go tell Aunt Abbie that her gray goose is dead …”
    Aunt Abbie’s voice rose, very much like the cry of that same gray goose, from the living room. She had got the news.

IV
Miss Withers Freezes
    M ISS WITHERS WAS ABOUT to leave the phone and return to the living room when suddenly she drew back into the shadows under the stairway.
    Someone was coming down the stairs, someone who quite evidently did not wish to make any noise. The muffled tread was cautious and light, as if whoever was descending those steps was prepared to turn and run at the sound of a dropped pin.
    But Miss Withers wasn’t dropping any pins these days. She had dropped a pin on a stairway once, and a man was sitting in the Death House at Ossining for the strange use he had put it to—in the pool of the black penguins.
    There was only one light in the long hall, and that was up in the front toward the little vestibule. It was years ago that Miss Withers had learned to be silent and invisible. She might have been standing in the doorway of her third grade classroom during a furious spit-ball battle, or looming up over the shoulder of a hapless youth who preferred a lurid copy of Weird Tales to the more prosaic reading of his Geography, and had got the happy idea of enclosing the former within the covers of the latter. Naturalists call it “the ability to freeze”—and a just-hatched partridge chick can do it perfectly. Miss Withers froze now, shrinking back into the extreme corner. She was there and yet she was not there. A spider might have used her shoulder for one corner of his web, and a mouse might have run across her shoes without fright—at least, on the part of the mouse.
    And as she waited there, hardly drawing breath into her lungs, Miss Withers saw the figure of a man pass quickly past her, back toward the domain of the servants. A door closed upon him—but not too soon for Miss Withers to make sure who this man was. It was Lew Stait, in his hat and overcoat, and he had a dark and indistinguishable oblong in his hand!
    She went on, into the living room. “Aunt Abbie” was seated on a chaise longue, having a mild case of the vapours. Closer scrutiny confirmed Miss Withers’ first impression of the lady. She was as empty of ideas as a drum. Her dress was a little on the tea-gown order, and a worn sealskin cape lay beside her. She was sniffing into her handkerchief about “poor dear Laurie.” She shook her head sadly. “And to think how we all treated him, too!”
    Behind her, “cousin Hubert” peered through his thick lenses like a startled owl. Inspector Piper, who had learned to identify people by their clothes and bearing, put Hubert Stait down as a nondescript poor-relation. Miss Withers was sorry for him, and later events justified her feeling.
    The Inspector was quizzing Hubert. “You say that you rode down as far as the Cinemat Theater with your cousin Laurie?”
    “I did.” Hubert chose his words carefully. “He dropped me off there because I had an appointment to take Aunt Abbie to see the new German musical film ‘Zwei Herzen im Deudelsac Takt.’ …”
    “What time did you see Laurie last?”
    Hubert looked at his watch. “I met Aunt Abbie outside the theater at five. You see, we always go to the films at that hour because the matinee prices are still in effect, and we dine late anyway. I must have left Laurie a minute or two before five …”
    “I see.” The Inspector nodded. “That is very important. I was anxious to find if Laurie had time to pick anyone else up, or to visit anyone, before the time he met his end, which was at five-thirty or a few seconds before. But with traffic as it is at that hour, he must have kept on a straight course to have reached Forty-second Street in half an hour. Young man, do you realize that you must have been the last person, except of course the