# Unseen Hands/Chapter 6
### CHAPTER VI
#### BLOODY HANDS

BARRY ODELL crept to the drawing-room door and peered cautiously out into the hall. The pretty girl was struggling to free herself from her aunt, whose hand was clapped across her mouth and who held her in a firm clasp. Cissie's young virility, though, was more than a match for the frail, middle-aged woman, and Miss Meade all at once relaxed and stepped back.
"The young man whom Mr. Titheredge brought from police headquarters this morning is in the drawing-room now," she announced; and as Odell hastily drew back he caught the veiled warning in her tone. "I am sure that he will not permit you to go until he has had an opportunity to talk with you; and certainly you shall not leave this house without telling either your stepfather or me where you are going."
"Why, Aunt Effie!" The utter stupefaction in the girl's tones betrayed clearly the fact that her aunt's new-found assertiveness was unprecedented. "I shall go and come as I please! As for the police, what have I to do with them? I am amazed that you should attempt to dictate to me when even mother—"
"Oh, my dear, my dear," the spinster broke in, "it is ​simply because your mother is no longer with us and your stepfather lying injured upstairs that I must try to make you listen. You shall not go!"
Odell heard a little scuffle, and the handle of the great front door turned violently with a dull clang of bronze. Then Miss Meade's voice rose desperately.
"Sergeant Odell!"
He strode out into the hall to find the pretty girl, now flushed and with her cold blue eyes snapping fire, standing half in and half outside the door, with her aunt's restraining hand upon her arm.
"This is the young man from Headquarters of whom I told you, Cissie. My oldest niece, Miss Chalmers."
Odell bowed, and then glanced sharply at the traveling-bag in the girl's hands.
"You were going away, Miss Chalmers?" he asked in well-simulated surprise. "I am very sorry, but that will not be permitted. No one must leave this house on any pretext whatever until they are authorized to do so."
Cissie's lip curled.
"Are you aware that the butler has already gone?" she asked in her turn. "Surely if the servants—"
"The butler if he does not return here of his own volition will be caught in the dragnet and brought in before nightfall," Odell interrupted her sternly. "He will be taken to Headquarters, questioned for hours, and finally locked up on suspicion if on no graver charge. You will be suitably protected here in your own home, Miss Chalmers, and here you must remain."
She tossed her head.
"By whose authority?"
​"Mine." He spoke quietly; but there was that in his tone which had caused more than one defiant malefactor to "come across" without further demur, and Cissie dropped her eyes. "Allow me, please."
He took her bag from her unresisting hand, placed it on a carved chest which stood against the wall and turned to Miss Meade.
"Your telephone is in the library, is it not? I should like to use it for a moment. Are there any extensions?"
"Only one, and that is in my sister's room," Miss Meade replied. "If you turn it off and shut the library-door you will have absolute privacy."
"Thank you. Can you tell me Peters's home address?"
"He has no one except a married sister who lives over in New Dorp, Staten Island. I will get the address for you."
As she hurried away he turned once more to the girl.
"Miss Chalmers, I shall want a little talk with you in about an hour."
She bowed stiffly and turning upon her heel walked down the hall toward the back staircase, while he entered the library. Each interview with a different member of this strangely ill-assorted family made him feel that he was being carried deeper and deeper into a current of cross purposes, and the enigma of the angry young woman's interrupted speech recurred to him again and again in the minutes that followed.
How would she have completed that sentence if a warning hand had not been laid across her lips? What or who could it be with whom she would not live in the same ​house another day? What had she meant in saying the aunt had had her way in spite of everything? Miss Meade did not look like the sort of person who could maintain her own way in the face of even the mildest opposition. And what had Miss Meade herself meant when she said, "I wish to heaven it had been you"?
It was unthinkable that she could have been referring to the recent deaths; no matter how sorely tried she was by her niece's willfulness such a thought would never have come to her. What, then, could have been the portent of that expressed wish?
He had turned the telephone-switch cutting off the extension and called Headquarters when Miss Meade glided into the room, laid a slip of paper on the stand beside him and went out again, closing the door behind her. Odell conferred with his captain and issued his preliminary orders, and then picking up the slip he glanced at the address and sent out a general alarm for the missing Peters.
This accomplished he emerged from the library to find Miss Meade waiting in the hall.
"How many servants do you employ?" he asked as he approached her.
"Four. Peters, Jane the housemaid, Gerda of whom I have already told you, and Marcelle the cook. Then there are the furnace man and the laundress, but they are not inmates of the house and know nothing of our affairs except the ordinary gossip below stairs," she replied. "Would you like to see any of them, Sergeant Odell?"
"Each of them in turn; but first will you show me Mrs. Lorne's boudoir?"
​"Yes. We can reach it from the hall without disturbing Mr. Lorne. The boudoir connects their apartments, and my sister's room has been closed since her death."
She led the way up the servants' staircase to the pretty room, rendered cheerful and summery by white wicker furniture and gay chintz draperies. It seemed impossible that tragedy should ever have entered here, yet the detective's eye focussed at once upon a garishly-beaded Indian basket upon the under shelf of the table. From it overflowed a tangle of vari-colored silken threads; and in its center a square of tan linen, held in an oval embroidery-frame, showed a glowing poppy half finished from which a scarlet thread like a thin stream of blood meandered over the side of the basket.
Odell took up the square of embroidery.
"The needle is not here," he commented. "The doctor took it for analysis, no doubt."
"Yes. I think he feared that the poisoning which resulted from its prick might have been due to some of those new dyes in the silk, for he took some of that also; but he told us later that he had discovered nothing that could in any way account for the fatal result." Miss Meade touched the back of a low chair. "Here is where my sister sat when it happened, Sergeant Odell; and I was seated across the table, using the Martha Washington sewing-stand there. What are you looking for?"
"The packet from which the embroidery needle was taken," he responded.
She delved into the brilliant disorder of the basket and brought forth a black paper packet which she handed to him. He opened it, glanced at the needles, and put it into ​his pocket. Then taking up a pair of scissors which was attached by a bright-hued ribbon to the handle of the basket he clipped off a length of the scarlet strand which dangled from the embroidery frame.
"That's all, I think." He still spoke in a lowered tone, mindful of the injured man in the next room. "I am going up now to look over the apartments of the young man who died last week. I have the keys—"
To his astonishment Miss Meade announced:
"I will accompany you. It has all been placed in order, of course; and I believe Mr. Titheredge and my brother-in-law have removed all the letters and personal effects, but I can explain to you the position of the body as I saw it."
"I do not like to subject you to the ordeal—", the detective began, but she silenced him.
"I am strong enough, and it is my duty to render you all the aid I can in consequence of Mr. Lorne's incapacity."
She preceded him up the stairs and led him along the hall to the door of the front room; but as he took out the key to insert it in the lock, the door at the back flew open and Gene appeared, rage and fear struggling for supremacy on his weak countenance.
"I've been waiting for you," he declared hotly. "I'll thank you to return the letters and notebook you stole from my desk."
"They will be returned to you in good time, Mr. Chalmers," the detective replied smoothly. "Unless, of course, they are required as evidence."
Evidence of what!" shouted the enraged young man. I suppose you'll accuse me next of killing my own brother ​and trying to commit suicide by pulling down that portrait on my own head last night!"
"Mr. Chalmers, when I knocked upon your door an hour ago I interrupted you at your task of burning some letters and papers in your grate."
"What of it?" Gene demanded. "A fellow's got some rights, I guess, to keep his own private affairs from being pored over by you d—d—"
"Gene!" Miss Meade interrupted, and then turning to the detective she added: "I—I think I will leave you. Gene can show you Julian's room; and you will, I am sure, want to talk to him alone."
She hurried silently down the stairs and when she had disappeared the two young men faced each other.
"Mr, Chalmers, when you started to burn those papers in your grate this morning was it perfectly clean?"
The unexpected, seemingly irrelevant question caught the other temporarily off guard.
"What do you mean?" he demanded.
"Come and I will show you." Odell walked straight past Gene and into his room, and the latter, his resentment momentarily submerged in surprise, followed.
The detective knelt down by the hearth.
"Will you bring me an envelope?" he requested. Then, as Gene complied: "I want you to look closely at the ashes, Mr. Chalmers. What do you see?"
As he spoke he scooped some into the envelope, sealed it and placed it in his pocket.
"Why, just ashes!" Gene's tone betokened amazement, but his frightened face went a shade more pale.
​"See any difference in the color?" Odell persisted. "Don't you know that everything that is inflammable and of a different texture or substance leaves a different ash behind? Those pale, gray, satiny flakes are from the paper which you burned; these coarser, slightly darker ones are from something else. What did you burn here this morning or last night, Mr. Chalmers?"
"Nothing! I swear it!" Gene cried huskily. "For God's sake, Sergeant, tell me what you are driving at! When I started to burn the letters it seems to me that I did notice some other ashes there in the grate, but I paid no attention to them."
"You detected no odor as of smoke In your room?"
"None. I haven't been long out of it to-day anyway; I was awakened by Dad's fall and stayed with him only until you arrived. If anything had been burned here I surely would have smelt the smoke when I came up to destroy the letters."
"Mr. Chalmers, when was the last time you had a fire in this grate?" Odell looked up in time to catch the younger man's swift change of expression.
"I—I can't remember," Gene stammered. "Sometime in the early spring, I imagine."
"I do not mean a coal fire, but papers, trash, anything; when was the last time before this morning that something was burned here?"
"I couldn't tell you, Sergeant. It's a habit of mine to burn old letters and such things there instead of having the maid take them downstairs. She always cleans it out whenever she finds any ashes there."
​He caught himself up suddenly as he realized the slip he had made, and a look of dogged despair came over his face, but he added hastily:
"What are those darker ashes from? What had been burned in the grate before my letters?"
"That will be determined on analysis." The detective seemed not to have noted Gene's damaging statement, and the young man breathed freer again. "You say it is a habit of yours to burn things here; surely you can recall approximately the last time you made use of the grate. Was it a few days ago, a week, a month?"
"It was a week ago." The reply came sullenly in a lowered tone.
"What did you burn then?"
"Merely some old letters and snapshots. I—I was cleaning out a trunk; I meant to go camping next week."
The explanation was offered glibly, yet Gene could not meet Odell's eyes; and he flushed as if conscious that his falsehood had been recognized for what it was although the detective gave no outward sign. Instead he rose, brushed off his knees and remarked in a brisk, changed tone:
"If your memory should improve let me know. I am going now to your brother's room. Will you come and show me where the body was when you discovered it?"
"I didn't discover it," Gene denied sulkily. Nevertheless, he turned to the door. "Peters did that, when my stepfather sent him up here to call Julian. When he gave the alarm Dad was the first to reach the room; I tried to pass him but he blocked the stairway. Julian's room was empty and Dad called once, then went to the bathroom door and collapsed against it at—at what he saw. I followed and ​looked over his shoulder—and then, I don't know; I went to pieces, I guess."
As he talked they had passed along the hall to the front room and Odell unlocked the door. The windows were open, but the old-fashioned Venetian blinds were drawn close to keep out any possible rain, and in the gloom the furniture loomed indistinctly.
Gradually, however, as his eyes grew accustomed to the semi-darkness Odell made out the outlines of a bed, a dresser, a desk, a table, an old chest of drawers, and, in the wall at right angles to the hall, the casing of another door.
He went to the nearest window, folded one of the blinds halfway back, and then turned inquiringly to Gene, who had visibly hung back.
"Is that the bathroom?" He motioned toward the door in the opposite wall, and at the younger man's nod he strode over to it. After a moment Gene followed.
"Julian had on a thin bathrobe over his pajamas and he had not taken his bath, although the tub was drawn," he volunteered. "I seemed to take the whole thing in at one glance, every detail, as though it had been photographed on my mind; I wish to heaven I could forget it! His shaving-mug stood just here on the edge of the wash-basin, with the brush and stick of soap beside it; and he was lying on his back on the floor with the razor under one of his hands. He looked as if he had just sunk down, except for the wound in his throat and the blood everywhere. There were bloody handprints, too, along the outer rim of the tub nearest him, as if he had tried to save himself from falling— Oh, I can't—"
​"You are sure of that?" Odell, who had been following with his eyes the location of each object as Gene described the scene, now turned and looked at him sharply. "You are sure there were the prints of hands in blood upon the rim of the tub?"
"Positive of it," Gene returned. "I told you I could not forget a single detail. I don't see why he didn't call for help or something when he found he could not stop the bleeding. I never heard a thing and I was almost in the next room."
"Why do you say 'almost'?" The detective had grasped the point, but it was as if subconsciously. The vital fact which had been revealed to him inadvertently enough by his companion filled all his thoughts.
"Because the dressing-room is beyond that door, and I've got some gymnasium stuff stacked against it."
"Why wasn't the door left open?"
Gene hesitated.
"It used to be and we shared this bath together," he admitted finally. "But lately Julian wanted this to himself, so I used the bathroom across the hall."
"Did you examine the marks on the tub that morning, Mr. Chalmers?"
"No." Gene shuddered. "I don't know what I did after I saw him lying there and realized what must have happened; I guess I went crazy for a little while. The first I knew I was lying across Julian's bed, and Dad was shaking me and telling me to go downstairs. I didn't see Julian again, not even in the casket; I couldn't."
The detective turned from the doorway and began open​ing the drawers of the dresser, but they as well as the desk and closet had been stripped bare.
"Dad and old Titheredge carted off everything but the clothes," explained Gene. "Aunt Effie packed those away in the attic, I think. I know she didn't give them away."
He laughed shortly in a rueful manner and Odell demanded:
"Why? How do you know?"
"Because she never gave a thing away in her life. She hoards everything she can lay her hands on."
Odell allowed the comment to pass without remark, but he stored it away for further reference. If true, it threw an interesting side-light on the character of the mouse-like spinster downstairs. She did not look like a miser, and her apparent attitude toward the rest of the family was that of a typical poor relation; yet she must possess money. She owned at least a half interest in the house in which she lived like a veritable shadow.
After a further cursory examination of the room he motioned Gene to precede him to the hall, and locking the door he placed the key in his pocket.
"Where does Farley Drew live?" he asked.
In the Bellemonde Annex," Gene responded unguardedly, then added: "For God's sake, don't go to him with anything of this, Sergeant. He—he hates anything like notoriety, and he can make a lot of trouble."
"For whom?" Odell demanded as the other paused.
"Oh, well, I don't want to lose his friendship," Gene mumbled. "It isn't fair to drag other people into a rotten scandal like this; and they're bound to resent it. Besides, ​he knows nothing whatever about it; I haven't even seen him since Julian's funeral."
He wandered back into his own room as the detective started downstairs.
Barry Odell was not thinking of Farley Drew at that moment, however, nor was the discovery in the bathroom upon his mind. His cogitations concerned a certain envelope in his pocket, containing two kinds of ashes; those left from burned paper and from burned wood. For the wood-ashes were the residue from incinerated sawdust and still contained uncharred flecks of it—the sawdust which was missing after that nocturnal carpentering-job on the top step of the stairs.