"The Circular Staircase" by Mary Roberts Rinehart, Chapters 26–34

Mr. Jamieson got up then and began to pace the room. It was an unwonted concession to the occasion.

The doctor helped me into his capacious buggy in silence.

I had the doctor put me down at the gate, and I walked to the house—past the lodge where we had found Louise, and, later, poor Thomas; up the drive where I had seen a man watching the lodge and where, later, Rosie had been frightened; past the east entrance, where so short a time before the most obstinate effort had been made to enter the house, and where, that night two weeks ago, Liddy and I had seen the strange woman.

He had thrown off the air of friendliness, and I thought, too, that he looked anxious and haggard.

He grew livid, and a small crooked blood-vessel in his temple swelled and throbbed curiously.

Farther along was the more imposing burial-ground, where Arnold Armstrong and his father lay in the shadow of a tall granite shaft.

Never popular, his memory was execrated by people who had lost nothing, but who were filled with disgust by constantly hearing new stories of the man’s grasping avarice.

Gertrude had been sitting listlessly waiting for the evening message from Mr. Jamieson, but when the singular pair came in, as they did, without ceremony, she jumped up and stood staring.

“Yes. I told him that we were on the track last night, and that it was only a question of time. He said he was glad, although he didn’t appear to be, but he said not to be too sanguine.”

I noticed that he looked tired and dusty, and, although he was ordinarily impeccable in his appearance, it was clear that he was at least two days from a razor.

Riggs came into the room diffidently, but Mr. Jamieson put him at his ease.

Again the long distance telephone came into requisition. Mr. Jamieson called the hospital, while we crowded around him.

Out of deference to Liddy they washed their dishes once a day, and they concocted queer messes, according to their several abilities.

It was bacon, hardtack and onions, fried together.

It was not until Gertrude and Rosie had gone and Sunnyside had settled down for the night, with Winters at the foot of the staircase, that Mr. Jamieson broached a subject he had evidently planned before he came.

Thus, there is a sense of desecration, of a reversal of the everlasting fitness of things, in resurrecting a body from its mother clay.

“There’s one thing sure—I’ll not be suspected of complicity. A doctor is generally supposed to be handier at burying folks than at digging them up.”

I was reluctantly about to concede that he had been right, when my eyes fell on the mantel and fireplace.

I think the detective had a plan, on which he was working, and which was meant to be a coup.

He was going east, after spending the summer at a celebrated ranch in Wyoming—one of those places where wealthy men send worthless and dissipated sons, for a season of temperance, fresh air and hunting.

The sisters, of course, knew nothing of this, and the young man’s ardor rather carried them away.

I gathered that there was no particular enmity at that time in Anne’s mind. She told him of the boy, and threatened exposure if he did not provide for him.

Like a dog on a scent, like my bearskin progenitor, with his spear and his wild boar, to me now there was the lust of the chase, the frenzy of pursuit, the dust of battle.

Once out there, access to the top of the main building was rendered easy—at least it looked easy—by a small vertical iron ladder, fastened to the wall outside of the ball-room, and perhaps twelve feet high.

I felt nothing but a splintery surface of boards, and in endeavoring to get back to the chair, something struck me full in the face, and fell with the noise of a thousand explosions to the ground.

When I had gathered up my nerves again, I found it had been the bulb of a swinging electric light, and that had it not been for the accident, I might have starved to death in an illuminated sepulcher.

I felt easier after that, although the room was oppressively hot and enervating.

I must have been there a long time, and the searchers were probably hunting outside the house, dredging the creek, or beating the woodland.

Outside there were excited voices and incredulous oaths.

He stood for a second, listening, then—he made another rush, and I struck out with my weapon. I think it stunned him, for I had a second’s respite when I could hear him breathing, and some one shouted outside...

I must say, for all Alex’s anxiety to set me free, he paid little enough attention to my plight.

A second later, over Halsey’s shoulder, I saw something that turned my emotion into other channels, for, behind him, in the shadowy card-room, were Gertrude and Alex, the gardener, and—there is no use mincing matters—he was kissing her!

They were quite unconscious of us; her head was on his shoulder, his face against her hair. As it happened, it was Mr. Jamieson who broke up the tableau.

Gertrude and Jack had returned and were there, sitting together on a divan, with only one lamp lighted.

The first necessity was an accomplice. The connivance of Doctor Walker was suggested by his love for Louise.

The plan was apparently the acme of simplicity: a small town in the west, an attack of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting-room shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco, and palmed off for the supposed dead banker.

Forced into acquiescence by her mother’s appeals, overwhelmed by the situation, the girl consented and fled.

Moreover, he suspected what Louise did not, that the money was hidden at Sunnyside. He had a scrap of paper that indicated a concealed room somewhere.
His inherited cupidity was aroused.

When Warner married Rosie, Liddy sniffed and said what I took for faithfulness in Rosie had been nothing but mawkishness.

I have not yet outlived Liddy’s contempt because I gave them silver knives and forks as a wedding gift.