Yellow Room Read Online Free PDF

here.”
    “Shut up,” Maggie said grimly. “Noise isn’t going to help you. What scared you?”
    Freda did not answer, and it was a part of the nightmare that Nora chose that moment to return. She came rather quietly down the back stairs and stopped, bracing herself against the frame of the kitchen door as if she needed support. There was no color in her face, but her voice was steady.
    “There’s somebody dead in the linen closet,” she said, and shivered. “There’s been a fire there too.”

4
    S HE DID NOT SAY any more. She made for the door which led outside from the service hall, and they could hear her retching there. Carol made a move toward the stairs, but Maggie was ahead of her.
    “They’re both hysterical,” she said. “Probably saw a blanket on the floor. Better let me go up, Miss Carol. You don’t look so good yourself. You stay with Freda.”
    Freda was still crying, but she was sitting up now and fumbling for a handkerchief. Carol gave her one from her bag and she dried her eyes.
    “I guess I flopped,” she said. “So would you, if you seen what I did.” She shuddered uncontrollably. “I opened the door where you said the linen closet was, and—”
    She did not finish. Maggie came in, and one look at her face was enough.
    “I guess you’ll have to get the police,” she said. “There’s somebody there. Better not go up. I opened the windows in the hall, but I didn’t touch anything else.”
    She went to the sink and washed her hands. Then she sat down abruptly, and began nervously pleating her apron.
    “I don’t feel so good,” she said. “They’re right about the fire. We’ll never use them sheets and things again.”
    The nightmare feeling closed down on Carol. It had been growing since their arrival, with Lucy not there, and Harry Miller’s story, and now this! She felt young and incapable, and the house itself had become horrible. She found she was shaking.
    “Could you see who it was?” she asked.
    Maggie shook her head.
    “I told you. There’s been a fire.” She got up heavily and went to the stove. “I’d better make some coffee,” she said, her voice flat “It’s a help. You’d better have a cup before you start for the village. Maybe you can get Colonel Richardson to drive you in. He’s near.”
    “I ought to go up myself.”
    “You stay where you are,” Maggie said forcefully. “Freda, you go up and lie down. Nothing’s going to hurt you. Whatever it is it’s over, and your room ain’t near it.”
    Nora had come back by that time, but neither girl would go upstairs again. They looked shocked and helpless, but they looked, too, like a defiant combination against Maggie’s common sense. Carol looked at them with what amounted to despair.
    “I’m sorry, girls,” she said. “Whatever has happened it has nothing to do with us. Mrs. Norton has broken her leg. She’s in the hospital, and probably some tramp came in while the house was empty.”
    Nora was the first to recover.
    “And burned himself to death!” she said, her voice high and shrill.
    “That’s for the police to find out.”
    “I’m staying for no police.”
    Maggie turned from the stove.
    “That’s where you’re wrong, my girl,” she said coldly. “You’ll stay here as long as the police want you. Don’t get any ideas about running away, either of you. You found the body, and here you’re staying till they let you go.”
    It was a subdued pair of young women that Carol took upstairs. The service wing was cut off from the main house by a heavy door, and after she had seen them to their rooms she opened it. From this angle she could see the door of the linen closet. It was next to that of the elevator which had been installed for her mother some years before, and it was standing open, its white paint blackened and blistered.
    She stood still, almost unable to move. Soon she would have to get help, but first she must see for herself. The odor was very strong. It was a