United States or Uzbekistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I took his message to the telephone. Whoever it was swore and hung up the receiver. All the morning I was uneasy I hardly knew why. Peter felt it as I did. There was no sound from the Ladleys' room, and the house was quiet, except for the lapping water on the stairs and the police patrol going back and forth.
A clock is a lot of company." "Do you know what I think?" he said, looking at me closely. "I think you put that clock away yourself, in the excitement, and have forgotten all about it." "Nonsense." "Think hard." He was very much in earnest. "You knew the water was rising and the Ladleys would have to be moved up to the second floor front, where the clock stood.
"I didn't limit myself to strangulation," he said irritably. "He may have cut her throat." "Or brained her with my onyx clock," I added with a sigh. For I missed the clock more and more. He went down in his pockets and brought up a key. "I'd forgotten this," he said. "It shows you were right that the clock was there when the Ladleys took the room. I found this in the yard this morning."
"Perhaps you know something about that." "I?" He changed color. Twenty years of dunning boarders has made me pretty sharp at reading faces, and he looked as uncomfortable as if he owed me money. "I!" I knew then that I had been right about the voice. It had been his. "You!" I retorted. "You were here Sunday morning and spent some time with the Ladleys. I am the old she-devil.
We hurried to the room the Ladleys had occupied. It was empty. From the window, as we looked out, we could see the boat, almost a square away. It had stopped where, the street being higher, a door-step rose above the flood. On the step was sitting a forlorn yellow puppy. As we stared, Mr.
But just let me say such a thing to them, or repeat their own words to them the next day, and they would fly at me in a fury. So I said nothing, and put the cream into her tea. I never saw her again. There is not much sleeping done in the flood district during a spring flood. The gas was shut off, and I gave Mr. Reynolds and the Ladleys each a lamp.
Holcombe, who put it down in his note-book, and together we went to the Ladleys' room. The room was in better order than usual, as I have said. The bed was made which was out of the ordinary, for Jennie Brice never made a bed but made the way a man makes one, with the blankets wrinkled and crooked beneath, and the white counterpane pulled smoothly over the top, showing every lump beneath.
"He found Peter, the Ladleys' dog, shut in a room on the third floor." "Was there anything unusual about that?" "I had never known it to happen before." "State what happened later." "I did not go to sleep again. At a quarter after four, I heard the boat come back. I took a candle and went to the stairs. It was Mr. Ladley. He said he had been out getting medicine for his wife."
Ladley's room." "What else did you find in the room?" "A blood-stained towel behind the wash-stand. Also, my onyx clock was missing." "Where was the clock when the Ladleys were moved up into this room?" "On the mantel. I wound it just before they came up-stairs." "When you saw Mrs. Ladley on Sunday, did she say she was going away?" "No, sir." "Did you see any preparation for a journey?"
Reynolds, who was in the silk department in a store across the river, had the room just behind. I put up a coal stove in a back room next the bathroom, and managed to cook the dinner there. I was washing up the dishes when Mr. Reynolds came in. As it was Sunday, he was in his slippers and had the colored supplement of a morning paper in his hand. "What's the matter with the Ladleys?" he asked.
Word Of The Day