The Sutton bungalow stood well back from the street, on a lonely site. Beyond it stretched empty fields that would one day be plotted off into neat suburban streets. Behind it, below the flower and vegetable gardens that bespoke Arthur Sutton’s hobby, the lot degenerated into swamp land that had yet to be drained.
Nem mounted the veranda steps, rang. But it was not Ellen Clarke who admitted him. A tall, gaunt man with tired eyes and tufting dark hair, streaked with gray, greeted him with a courteous, questioning word.
Nem stated his business diffidently, was grateful for the professor’s response, as he showed him into the book-lined study to the left of the center hall.
“We’ll be glad to tell you all we know, Mr. Parsons. As a matter of fact, Rose Miller’s aunt got in touch with you at my suggestion. She called up several times during the morning. My wife and I are very much worried, naturally — will you smoke?”
Nem took the proffered cigar, sat gingerly on the worn leather chair. He rather liked Arthur Sutton. What a mask his slender, bony face was; a mask that he had schooled himself to wear, perhaps. His eyes burned through it with some avid significance.
“Unfortunately I can tell you little enough. I went out directly after supper last night; I am tutoring one of my pupils in mathematics — Lloyd Dodge, on Walnut Street.” The ghost of a smile touched his lips.
“My pay isn’t adequate to all my needs, unless I take on some outside work. We worked there until ten, and I strolled home, in spite of the light rain and his offer to drive me back. It was just ten twenty when I unlocked the front door.
“The phone was ringing. It had waked my wife, who was already in bed, asleep. Some man asked for Rose, but she had left some time earlier, it transpired, after getting Mrs. Sutton to bed.” He paused. “My wife is very much of an invalid, you see. When Rose didn’t come at her usual hour this morning we were puzzled, for she has been very faithful. And when the aunt called up to ask about her—”
He shook his head in perplexity.
Nem scratched his creased pink neck with a pudgy forefinger.
“Mind if I go out and talk to the housekeeper?” he asked. “If seems she and Rose Miller weren’t very good friends, but she might know something about the girl.”
He heaved himself up.
“Ellen Clarke?” Arthur Sutton flicked off the ash that tipped his cigar. “Certainly. She is a competent, capable sort of woman. Indispensable to us. But she had little enough in common with Rose.”
He preceded his caller down the pleasant center hall of the bungalow, off which the various rooms opened, to the kitchen.
Through its western windows the setting sun sent its shafts of light upon the immaculate blue and white workroom, upon a tall, deep-bosomed woman who was paring potatoes at the sink.
She looked up, and Nem saw a heavy-boned, rather sullen face between smooth wings of black hair. Her eyes were lightish, hard as agate. Only a handsome, sulky mouth redeemed her from absolute plainness. And that betrayed the volcanic violence of her, at which George Link had hinted.
“This is Mr. Parsons, from police headquarters,” said Sutton, in that lifeless, well modulated voice of his. “I have told him all we know of Rose Miller.”
Nem saw the woman’s thick brows meet; heard the clatter of the knife as it dropped. She raised her hand to her lips, sucked at the bright thread of scarlet that appeared between thumb and forefinger. Nem tendered a large, clean handkerchief, and clucked sympathetically under his breath.
“Right dangerous peelin’ potatoes with a big knife like that. Apt to cut yourself bad.”
She moved her heavy shoulders impatiently.
“What should I know of Rose Miller?”
If the old detective had ever seen hate, it smoldered in her eyes now.
“We’re trying to figure out where she is, and why,” Nem said. “You know any reason why she should run away like this?”
Sutton leaned against the wall, arms folded, thin face immobile. Once more Nem got the impression that he was too absorbed in his own tragic problems to be anything but remote.
The housekeeper’s colorless skin seemed to go a shade paler, then crimsoned in an angry tide.
“No. Wherever she is, good riddance to her! Smirking, doll-faced—”
A soft creaking sound stopped her tirade against the missing girl. Nem turned to see a rubber-tired wheel chair, propelled by the woman who sat in it, glide over the threshold. Alice Sutton had been a pretty girl, might have been a handsome woman. But, though she was no more than thirty, the indefinable aura of age was about her.
Her pallid skin was taut over her cheek bones; her gray eyes sunken; her smooth, parted chestnut hair gave her the look of an austere madonna. A tragic figure, all told, with her thin, fragile hands emerging from the loose sleeves of her dark red dressing gown; her helpless limbs covered by a light robe.
Her eyes met her husband’s, and Sutton explained Nem’s errand.
“If only I could tell you precisely when she left last night!” Mrs. Sutton said, wrinkling her pale forehead. “She got me to bed a little after nine, and gave me my sleeping medicine. Mr. Sutton was out, and it was Ellen’s evening out as well. I told Rose to run along, without waiting for Mr. Sutton to come back.
“She was tidying my room when I dropped off. I have a vague memory of hearing the door close — and then the ringing of the telephone awakened me, some time later. My husband had just come in and was answering it. The call was for Rose—”
“I told Mr. Parsons about it.”
Sutton rearranged a pillow at his wife’s back, and she thanked him with a pale smile.
Ellen Clarke wiped her powerful hands on the crash toweling close at hand.
“She went off in a hurry, Mrs. Sutton; such a hurry that she didn’t stop for her raincoat. It’s hanging in the outside pantry!” she told them defiantly, with a jerk of her dark head toward the door in question.
“And it was raining hard between nine and ten,” Nem mused aloud.
He lumbered across the kitchen in his soft, creaking shoes and opened the pantry door. The small cubicle was used almost as a storeroom. A sink occupied one corner; a washing machine and other articles of household equipment filled most of the available space; but just opposite the door was a row of hooks. From one pended a green glazed raincoat — the sort of protection a girl would choose for inclement weather.
“This it?” Nem asked.
A little surprised gasp from Mrs. Sutton answered him.
“Yes. Why on earth didn’t she wear it? Her frock was light, too—”
But Nem was inside the dark little room, taking the garment from its hook, kneeling with a grunt of discomfort to examine baseboard and floor.
Not one of the three could see what held him tense and expectant. He rose at last, round pink face inscrutable and solemn.
“She didn’t wear it because, unless I’m mightily mistaken, she didn’t leave this house alive, Mrs. Sutton.” His blue eyes fastened upon the frightened, ashen face of the housekeeper, who was plucking at her apron.
“I knew when I came up here that she hadn’t gone back to town by trolley last night, as she always did. Now I know more than that.” He gestured to a dark, brownish stain on the baseboard that the girl’s green coat had concealed. “That’s blood, Mr. Sutton — fresh blood. She was probably lying here, dead, when you got in last night!”
Arthur Sutton passed a dazed hand over his forehead.
“I — such a thing couldn’t have happened!” he muttered mechanically. “Lying here — good God!”
Alice Sutton clutched her husband’s hand.