“Yes,” said Rosabel, comprehension dawning in her eyes.
“ ‘Her,’ ” said Nellie, tramping on the accelerator, “must mean Mrs. Cranlowe. The gang must be going to do something to her. If we can just get there in time to stop it—”
It was not the gang, however, that was with Mrs. Cranlowe just then. At least it was not the gang, proper. With her in her apartment was Jenner, or Garfield Gear. He was looking at her pet dog.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with Toby,” Mrs. Cranlowe was saying to the friend of her husband, who had kindly droppped in to see her for a few minutes.
Toby was howling, as dogs howl at the moon — or after a death. He was howling, and pawing at his ears!
“I really don’t know,” began Mrs. Cranlowe again.
Her voice faded to silence, and her eyes got oddly blank. Jenner peered keenly into them, and smiled. He reached into his pocket.
Out of his pocket he took a little black, thick, smooth disk. It was a thing about the size of an old-fashioned key-wind watch. There was a purse of Mrs. Cranlowe’s on a nearby table. He opened the purse, put in the thick black disk, and handed it to her.
“You will not let this purse out of your hands,” he said to the woman.
“I will not… let this purse… out of my hands,” Mrs. Cranlowe parroted.
“You will go to your husband, at Cranlowe Heights, and get from him the secret formula of his war invention.”
“I will go to my husband… and get from him the secret formula… of his war invention,” Mrs. Cranlowe repeated.
“Good! He’ll give it to you if you ask it very nicely, as a loving wife knows how to do.” Jenner went to the door with her, and down in an elevator. He talked pleasantly and inconsequentially for the operator’s benefit, but on the street, his manner changed. It was commanding again.
“Drive out at once,” he said. “Bring the formula to my office at Garfield Gear Company, no matter how late it is. I’ll be waiting there.”
Mrs. Cranlowe got into her car, a blue coupé, with no one seeing her. That was because Nellie and Rosabel and Robert Cranlowe had been “gotten out of the way.” But not, it developed, out of the way enough.
Mrs. Cranlowe was driving slowly, as she always drove. She got around the next corner just as Nellie and Rosabel were about to run a red light in their hurry to get back to the building. Mrs. Cranlowe stopped mechanically for the light.
Nellie saw her. She looked for a car of thugs trailing her, and there wasn’t any. She looked for a man in the coupé with her, but she was alone. Nellie was nonplused. She had expected Mrs. Cranlowe to be in mortal danger, and here she was, driving calmly alone.
She got out of Kopell’s car and ran to Mrs. Cranlowe. The light was changing to yellow.
“Mrs. Cranlowe!” she called, tapping at the door glass. “Mrs. Cranlowe!”
Surely her voice was loud enough to be heard. But the inventor’s wife gave no sign of hearing it. She started to drive on. Nellie was left standing in the street, but not for long.
This all seemed mad, and futile. But on impulse, still convinced from what Kopell had said that something threatened this woman, Nellie took three fast steps and caught the rear bumper of the moving car. She hauled herself up on the trunk rack of the coupé, and felt for the rear-deck handle. The compartment was unlocked. She opened it, gazed at Mrs. Cranlowe through the rear window and saw that she was looking straight ahead, apparently unmindful of her new passenger.
Nellie got into the compartment and closed the lid down over her, all but a crack.
Time is exaggerated when you are in a cramped position and can’t see anything. It seemed hours to Nellie before that car stopped again. Actually, Mrs. Cranlowe had reached Cranlowe Heights in about a half-hour.
Nellie, of course, didn’t know they were at Cranlowe Heights. In her dark cubbyhole, she only knew the car had stopped, that a man’s voice had sounded, and then Mrs. Cranlowe’s. After that she felt the car sway as Mrs. Cranlowe got out, and sway again as someone else got in. This was followed by another short drive, up a lane that rattled gravel under the tires. Then the car stopped. Nellie heard the person in it get out and walk away, and, giving herself five minutes, she opened the rear deck of the coupé.
She was in a garage. The rolling front door was splintered as if from a recent accident. There was a shiny, new station wagon and another car in the garage beside the coupé. In front, to one side of the drive, she could see a heavy sedan with the front smashed in. She knew about that wrecked car. The chief had wrecked it. It told Nellie where she was.
Mrs. Cranlowe, supposedly in the shadow of grave danger, had driven out here to her husband’s house. Had she, knowingly or unknowingly, given Kopell’s men the slip? Or was there in her seemingly natural and harmless visit to her husband, some obscure peril to justify Kopell’s words?
Nellie got out of the coupé to find out.
There was a side door to the garage, leading into the house. She stole through that, and was in a long, narrow hall. At the far end was a man with guns in a belt around his waist. She flattened against the wall till he had gone past the open end of the hall. Then she went forward, as soundless as a pink-and-white blond wraith.
She heard the voices long before she had reached the big front hall from which this narrow passage stemmed. Mrs. Cranlowe’s voice, and a man’s. Mrs. Cranlowe had evidently stopped her car at the gate and come into the house on foot, while a man drove the coupé around to the garage.
Nellie got to the front hall. She heard the woman’s voice, languorous and persuasive; heard the man say: “But I don’t understand. Why this sudden solicitude for my invention? And why do you think it would be safer with you than with me?”
Edging closer to the door from which the voices were coming, Nellie heard Mrs. Cranlowe’s reply.
“Because everyone knows I am not familiar with your work, Jesse. I’m afraid I have a reputation for being a little — flighty and frivolous-minded. No one would dream I had the formula. It would be utterly safe with me.”
“I have said I’d never set it down on paper.”
“But, Jesse, suppose something happened to you? Then all your plans for stopping war would be exploded, because everyone would know there was no longer the terrible weapon in existence that would frighten aggressor nations into staying within their own territory. But if you gave me a copy of the formula, your plans could go right on. I could follow out your last wishes.”
“Seems to me you’ve already got me dead and in my grave, all in a space of ten minutes,” grumbled the man. There was a pause, then a sentence that made Nellie’s small fists clench.
“There may be something in what you say — give me pen and paper.”
This must be Cranlowe himself talking. And the pen and paper must be for the purpose of at last actually writing out that formula that was so priceless.
Nellie found her heart thudding rapidly. Something was very wrong here. She felt it, knew it!
But it seemed she was not the only one who suddenly gained that knowledge.
What small word of inflection gave Mrs. Cranlowe away to the inventor, Nellie couldn’t guess, of course. But something certainly did.
“Summers! Come here!” Cranlowe’s voice came screaming from the room. It went on in a tirade compounded of fury and despair. “You! My own wife — a traitor! I wish to heaven I’d never made that discovery! My own wife, coming out here and treacherously trying to get that formula! Summers!”
Nellie was in a slant-ceilinged little closet under the hall stairs when she heard the man she’d seen with the guns at his belt run past in the hall. But the hall closet wasn’t much of a hiding place.