Yellow Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

combination of scorched linen, burned paint, kerosene, and something else she did not care to identify.
    The morning sun was flooding the closet. The house was built entirely around the patio, with a passage running around it on the second floor and the bedroom doors and that of the elevator and closet opening from it. The windows were open, and she was grateful for the air. She moved forward slowly, past Greg’s old room, past the blue guest room and past the elevator door. Then she was at the closet, staring in.
    The women had been right. There was a body inside, but it was not that of a tramp. It was that of a woman.
    She did not go back to the kitchen. She went on rather blindly to the main staircase and huddled there on the top step. She was still wearing the black dress and fur-collared coat in which she had arrived, and she pulled the coat around her as if she were cold. She was not thinking yet. Her mind was too chaotic for that. She knew there were things she should do, but she was not ready to do them. Maggie found her there, her eyes wide and staring and her face chalk-white.
    “I warned you,” she said. “Maybe I’d better go for the police. It’s nobody you know, is it?”
    Carol looked up blankly.
    “How can anyone tell?” Her voice was bleak, and Maggie was frightened.
    “Now look, Miss Carol,” she said, “it’s not that bad. Maybe you couldn’t recognize her, but she’s—she’s not really burned up. And the house is cold. If it’s only been there since Saturday—”
    Carol roused herself.
    “Saturday? Why Saturday?”
    “Because Lucy Norton was here Friday night,” Maggie explained patiently. “You don’t suppose this went on while she was in the house, do you?”
    “It might have. I didn’t tell you all the story. She says somebody reached out of the linen closet and knocked her down. That’s how she got hurt. She was running down the stairs in the dark.”
    Carol got up slowly, holding to the stair rail, and Maggie caught her arm to steady her.
    “I’d better get Floyd,” she said. “Maybe I can telephone from Colonel Richardson’s.” And when Maggie protested, “I need the air,” she said flatly, “I’m all right now. Let go of me. I’m only glad Mother isn’t here.”
    Maggie nodded, and Carol went down the stairs. The sunlight on the white walls of the house made the patio dazzling, and she blinked in the glare. The blue pool needed paint, she thought distractedly, and some of the tiles had been cracked by the winter ice. It had been idiotic to build a house entirely around an open court. In winter any heavy snow had to be shoveled into a wheelbarrow and dumped on the drive, and when there was a rapid thaw the drainpipe in the pool was not adequate. More than once the plumber had had to come, have the current turned on, run a hose through the entry hall and pump the water out onto the drive.
    She pulled herself together. All this was pure escapism, and she could not escape. There was a dead girl or woman upstairs, and she would have to notify the police. She was more normal when she left the house again, although her feet still bothered her. She had a pair of sandals in her bag upstairs, but she could not go back for them. Perhaps Colonel Richardson would telephone, or drive her into town. But as she stumbled down the drive once more, it was to see the Richardson garage doors open and the Colonel’s car gone. This was the time, she remembered, when he drove his man, his only servant, into town to market, and the house would be closed and locked.
    She stood still, shivering in the cold air. She could go up to the Wards’ and get help there, but once again the long steep drive was more than she could face. She decided to walk, and some twenty minutes later she opened the door of the police station and went in.
    Floyd was relaxing. He had taken off his belt and automatic, which lay on his desk, and was resting in a chair, with another drawn up for his legs. He looked