CHAPTER XXII

WHAT THE COOK SAW

There is no drama greater than the drama of life. The actors are more than often thrust into rôles that are not of their choosing, and they respond to cues that they do not recognize as cues, blindly obeying the director as he plunges them into unsought situations.

Mrs. Bogart, the Gilmore cook, who came to Greenacres each morning and returned to her home on the outskirts of Ardmore each evening, was in the kitchen; and, although it was baking day, not so much as a cup of flour had been sifted. She had arrived shortly after daybreak, to be greeted with news of the murder, and immediately she gave herself over to intermittent outbursts of weeping. Not that Mrs. Bogart, wide of hips, ample of bosom and stolid of countenance, with straight, black hair brushed severely back from her low and usually damp forehead, had any great feeling of bereavement; but, for all of her phlegmatic aspect, the cook was given to strong emotions. At the funeral of a comparative stranger, for instance, it was the sound of her sobs which arose above the muffled grief of the immediate family.

So Mrs. Bogart, except for brewing a bit of breakfast tea and toasting some slices of bread--badly burned, at that--neglected her kitchen work and gave way to her emotional nature. From Bates she had learned that the undertaker had arrived, and that "the new Mrs. Gilmore" had been, as she phrased it, "laid out" in one of the spare bedrooms on the second floor.

Now, Mrs. Bogart, her attendance at funerals amounting to an obsession, had gazed into the face of death innumerable times, but she had never known the thrill of looking into the features of one who had been murdered. People about Ardmore were in the habit of dying prosaically in their beds. This was an opportunity that might never come to her again; and well-to-do folks, she had observed, frequently had their funerals conducted privately, turning back the pryingly curious.

For some time Mrs. Bogart, whose place was strictly the kitchen, and who had no other household duties, had been trying to think up an excuse to visit the second floor, considering that this might offer her an opportunity of viewing the dead woman. Not possessing a particularly agile mind, it took her some little time to arrive at this bit of pretense, and she wouldn't have thought of it then except for some empty fruit jars. And, while the jars might have better gone to the basement, Mrs. Bogart craftily decided to carry them upstairs to the third floor and into the seldom-used storeroom.

"Goodness knows," she murmured, "I've been threatenin' for days upon days to get 'em out of the kitchen."

Straightway she mounted to a chair, took the fruit jars from the shelf where they had been temporarily placed, used a dish cloth in improvising a sling which would carry the full ten of them, and started for the third floor. At some time or another there had been a back stairs to the Gilmore house, but this had been closed off in making some modernizing alterations, so that Mrs. Bogart perforce had to wend her way to the reception hall and up the wide front stairway--hoping that Bates would not see her and order her back to her own domain.

Bates, however, did not appear to interrupt her little pilgrimage of morbid curiosity. She reached the second floor and, having to pass the room wherein Helen Gilmore had been shot to death, paused for a moment outside the narrowly open door, as she sought in vain to get anything like a good look inside. And, while she could not see much, her ears certainly got her a thrill, for it was at this moment that Sergeant Tish had said: "Yep, this clinches it, gents. These are Haskins' finger prints on the window. Good thing I brought this card along, huh? Haskins is wanted now for two murders. The job now is--find Haskins."

Mrs. Bogart's eyes bulged, and the empty fruit jars came perilously near crashing to the floor. Two murders! What did they mean? Who else had been murdered, and who was Haskins? Up to the moment of her last talk with Bates about the tragedy all suspicion had been leveled at Sarbella.

She tarried a moment, but there was nothing of the conversation on the other side of the door to enlighten her; not wishing to run the risk of being caught at eavesdropping, she moved on down the hall toward the stairs, the top of the house, and the seldom-used storeroom.

The entrance to the third floor stairway was inclosed, and it was reached by means of a door. Mrs. Bogart's hand went out to the knob; her strong fingers closed about it with a muscular grip, and then a startled gasp sounded on her lips, and a chill swept over her body. The door had yielded a bare inch when she felt a retarding pressure, holding it shut against her. Some one was on the other side!

"Mebbe--mebbe it's just stuck a little," she muttered in a gulping whisper. "Mebbe I imagined it." She braced her body, took a fresh and determined grip on the knob, and tried it again. Under exertion of this strong pull the door, still in the grasp of that opposing, unseen force, came toward her a bare inch or so, revealing to her staring eyes, indistinct in the shadows of the inclosed stairs, a bleary, unshaven face--a face hideously haggard, terrifying.

Mrs. Bogart staggered back with a choking, frightened cry upon her lips; the fruit jars crashed to the floor, with a thud and the sound of splintering glass, and the woman herself toppled over in a dead faint. From the side of her face there gushed a stream of blood, where the ragged edge of a broken jar had slashed the flesh. After the woman's cry, the four men in the room up the hall stood staring at each other for a brief moment.

"What's happened now?" gasped Wiggly Price, and Constable Griggs was too utterly stupefied to make a sound.

"It sounds like a woman's scream," said Doctor Bushnell, looking no less dazed than the rest.

Sergeant Tish was the first to leap into motion, projecting his pudgy body out into the hall with the other three at his heels. At the sight of the prostrate Mrs. Bogart, surrounded by broken and unbroken fruit jars, with the blood still streaming from her face, the New York detective stopped dead in his tracks.

"What's this?" he shouted. "Who is this woman, and what's happened to her?"

Constable Griggs edged forward and made a number of queer sounds before he finally found voice.

"It--it's Mrs. Bogart--she that does the cookin' for the Gilmores!" he gulped. "She's all bloody. Do--do you reckon that she's been murdered, too?"

Doctor Bushnell brushed past and knelt quickly to the floor at the side of the unconscious woman.

"She's not dead!" exclaimed Wiggly Price, noting the rapid rise and fall of Mrs. Bogart's bosom.

"Nor badly hurt, I think," said the physician, as he made a rapid examination. "The blood here is from a superficial wound; she's been cut by this broken glass. I wonder what _has_ happened to her?" He jerked his head toward the newspaper man. "Get my medicine kit, Price," he commanded. "You'll find it downstairs; I left it on the table in the library."

Wiggly dashed down the stairs in instant response. Yes, what had happened to this woman whom Griggs identified as the Gilmore cook? Was this another angle to complicate the Greenacres tangle?

Passing through the hall into the library he heard a familiar voice; it was "Tip" Gregory, a star reporter for a rival New York newspaper, _The Transcript_, pleading with the butler for admittance and information, and Bates was sternly refusing him either. Wouldn't Gregory have gnashed his teeth in baffled rage if he had known that Wiggly Price had things so sweetly to himself!

But the situation was too tense for wasting any time or thoughts upon what was, after all, only an accidental triumph. He had the silly Etta Griggs to thank for being here, on the inside of a big story, instead of spending the morning canvassing the other papers for a job. In the library was Doctor Bushnell's medicine kit; he grabbed the handle of the little bag, wheeled and raced up the stairway again.

Mrs. Bogart was stirring, a moan passed her lips, but she had not returned to consciousness.

"Is she badly hurt, doctor?" Wiggly asked, as he placed the kit upon the floor.

"No, this cut would not cause unconsciousness. She must either have fainted and fallen, or fainted because she fell. Sometimes sudden and profuse bleeding causes----"

The physician's words broke off at the sound of a stifled cry coming from the turn of the hall, where the corridor led off to the wing of the house. Joan Sheridan, alarmed by Mrs. Bogart's scream of fright, had hurriedly left her room to investigate. Her face told of a sleepless, harrowed night, and now her eyes were wide and startled with this threat of fresh terror.

"Oh," she whispered, "it's Mrs. Bogart. In Heaven's name what--what has happened now?"

"That's what we are not exactly certain of, Miss Joan," answered Doctor Bushnell, as he cut a dressing for the wound in the cook's face. "She must have fallen. It is nothing serious; do not let it agitate you."

Wiggly Price had looked up quickly at the name of "Joan," for this was the first time that he had seen her, the stepsister who was so much in love with Kirklan Gilmore. She was not aware of his scrutiny, so he had ample opportunity to study her closely. His experience at reporting had given him a sort of instinctive ability to gauge the human emotions, and he had a feeling that there was more than horror in the girl's dark eyes, and he read it with one brief word--fear.

This look of fear was not dissipated by the physician's assurance that Mrs. Bogart's injury was superficial. It remained, a peculiar, almost indescribable expression.

"Your mother, Miss Joan, is resting quietly after the shock?" murmured Doctor Bushnell, stanching the flow of blood in the unconscious woman's cheek. "I will see her again presently."

"Y-yes," Joan Sheridan said faintly; "mother is sleeping, and Bates has told me that Mr. Sarbella had been placed under arrest."

"That's true," nodded the doctor, "but it looks now that he will be released very shortly. You were right when you were so sure that Sarbella was innocent, and I have a new respect for a woman's intuition. I think you'd better go back to your room, please."

But the doctor's reassuring words seemed to have other than a soothing effect upon Joan; if possible, her face became a shade more pale. Certainly she gave a violent start, and that smoldering light of fear leaped into a wild light of terror.

"You mean----" The shaking whisper that came from her lips was hardly audible.

"Please, Joan, please!" exclaimed the doctor. "This is no time for questions. I've a fainting woman on my hands, and a new suspect entirely, a crook who got in by the window. The gun was his. No more questions now."

A gasp that seemed to be at the same time amazement and relief came from the girl; a look of bewilderment showed in her face. Her hands, so tightly clenched at her sides, relaxed; swiftly she turned and disappeared around the bend in the hall.

Wiggly Price's ears twitched violently, for he, unlike the others--and he, too, would have doubtless overlooked it but for the black hairpin and the gossip Etta Griggs had given him--had observed her agitation when told that Sarbella had practically been removed as a suspect, and her surprise and the relaxing tenseness when she learned of the other.

Did this mean that she had knowledge of the crime, which, for reasons of her own, she had kept to herself? With this Wiggly linked still another question: Why had Joan Sheridan been so positive of Victor Sarbella's innocence? For Wiggly was of the opinion that "woman's intuition" is something greatly exaggerated. The answer to the latter question was in itself unimportant; for that matter, so had Kirklan Gilmore been certain, to the point of vigorous protest, that the artist had not fired the fatal shot.

Wiggly made up his mind then and there that, while Constable Griggs was searching for Don Haskins, he would be searching for the answer to Joan Sheridan's puzzling behavior. He was certain there must be something behind it, a vital something that would have an important bearing on the crime.

Doctor Bushnell had completed dressing Mrs. Bogart's wound, having delayed restoratives until this was done. Now he was chafing her wrists briskly, and the woman was showing signs of coming to her senses. With startling suddenness her eyes flew open, and she sat erect; since her first conscious thought was a return to the moment of her swoon, a fresh cry of terror burst from her throat. It trailed off into a gurgle, as she realized that she was not now alone.

"It's all right, Mrs. Bogart," the physician told her soothingly. "You've had a nasty fall and cut yourself a little on those broken jars; but it's nothing to worry about."

"That man!" cried Mrs. Bogart. "Where--where did he go? It's Heaven's own blessing that he didn't murder me in my tracks. He was peering out at me, and everything went dizzy black in front of me. I----"

"Her head ain't right yet," grunted Constable Griggs. Mrs. Bogart, letting her heavy fingers touch gingerly to her bandaged face, heard the local officer's skeptical remark and bridled in indignation.

"I tell you I seen him!" she shrilled, pointing to the door which closed off the third-floor stairs. "I seen him behind there. He was holdin' the door shut on me. I was takin' these jars up to the storeroom. I seen him--lookin' out at me through the crack. He's there now, if he didn't run out. I tell you I seen him!"

All four of the men exchanged quick, startled, almost incredulous glances. The same thought had leaped into all their minds. Sergeant Tish, staring at the closed door, mechanically hitched his gun holster within easier reach.

"Do you think it's possible, men, that she did see a man, and that he is----" began Doctor Bushnell.

"Yes, it must be Haskins!" cried Wiggly. "Haskins is still in the house! We dashed out into the hall when she screamed. The man's had no chance of escape."

Sergeant Tish pursed his lips, frowned, and shook his head. "I can't believe it," he muttered. "I can't believe Haskins would be such a boob, hiding on the scene of the crime all these hours after the murder has been committed. It's ridiculous."

Constable Ham Griggs decided he had been in the background long enough; events had been developing too fast for him to keep pace with them, but here was a situation that he could cope with. It required no deductions, only action. He took a decisive step forward, dragging forth a somewhat ancient forty-five-caliber revolver, which he gave a dramatic flourish.

"Stand back!" he roared. "I'm the officer in charge here, and I'm goin' up there to get my man!"