This part of the city was country when the house was built, and the property on the other side is very large, ten acres or so.
It was recently bought by a retired bootlegger and has no part in this narrative.
The house itself—my house—is old fashioned but very comfortable.
But as I sit here in the library, one leg out before me and my pad on the other while I endeavor to think on paper, I realize that the house requires more description than that. Like the path, it too played its part.
I am writing in the library. Beside me on a table is the small bell which I ring to attract attention, since I cannot get to the speaking tube—I have said we are old fashioned—and a row of soft pencils like the one which later on we found on the skylight over the lavatory.
There is a desk, an old Queen Anne walnut one, an open fire, chairs and books.
From the side windows one commands the Larimer lot, from the front the entrance drive.
So the library has not only comfort, but a certain strategic place in the house.
I can not only see my callers in advance; I can sit there and survey a large portion of my lower floor domain. It lies to the right of the front door and the hall.
Across the long center hall with its white staircase and its rear door to the service portion of the house, lies the drawing room.
I can see now the forward end of it, with its ormolu cabinet, its French sofa done in old rose damask, and that painting of my father which does the Bell nose so grave an injustice.
And although I cannot see it, I know that at the end of that drawing room, opening onto a black brick wall which I have screened with arbor vitae and rhododendrons, there is a French door with steps leading out onto the grass.
Also I know, by actual measurement, that it is precisely fifty feet and around a corner to the kitchen porch.
From the rear of the library double doors open into a music room, not often used nowadays, and behind that is the dining room.
This is my domain, and today in the winter sun it is very peaceful.
There has been a little snow, and the cedars at the top of the path down the hill are quite beautiful. I have a wood fire, and the dogs, Jock and Isabel—named by Judy because she had never heard of a dog called Isabel—are asleep before it.
Jock is a terrier, Isabel a corpulent and defeminized French bull.
As they too played a small and not too meritorious part in our debacle, it is necessary to name them.
I have listed my household as it was on the eighteenth of April of this year.
Usually my secretaries do not live in the house, but come in daily for such notes, checks, bills and what not as clutter the desk of a woman who, because she has no family of her own, is supposed to expend her maternal instinct in charity.
But Mary Martin was living in the house, and due to a reason directly connected with this narrative.
During the housecleaning the previous autumn Norah had unearthed an old cane belonging to my grandfather, that Captain Bell who played so brave if unsung a part in the Mexican War.
She brought it downstairs to me, and I told her to have Joseph polish the handle.
When Joseph came back with it he was smiling, an unusual thing for Joseph.
“That’s a very interesting old cane, madam,” he said.
“It has a knife in it.”
“A knife?
What for?”
But Joseph did not know.
It appeared that he had been polishing the knob when a blade suddenly shot out of the end.
He had been greatly startled and had almost dropped the thing.
Later on I showed it to Jim Blake, my cousin, and he made the suggestion which brought Mary Martin into the house.
“Why not write the old boy’s life?” he suggested.
“You must have a trunkful of letters, and this sword-stick, or sword-cane or whatever it is, is a good starting point.
And by the way, if ever you want to give it away, give it to me.”
“I may do that,” I said.
“I don’t like deadly weapons around the place.”
In March I gave it to him.
“The Life,” as Judy called it, was going on well, and Mary Martin efficient enough, although I was never fond of her.
Chapter Two
THIS THEN WAS MY household and my house on the day Sarah Gittings disappeared.
The servants lived on the third floor at the rear, their portion of the floor cut off from the front by a door.
A back staircase reached this upper rear hall, allowing them to come and go as they required.
Mary had the third floor front room above the library, and Sarah the one behind it and over the blue spare room.
Mary’s door stood open most of the time, Sarah’s closed and often locked.
For all her good qualities there was a suspicious streak in Sarah.
“I don’t like people meddling with my things,” she would say.
But Sarah was not a permanent member of the household.
She was a middle-aged, rather heavy and silent woman, a graduate nurse of the old regime who had been in the family for years.
In serious illness we sometimes brought in brisk young women, starchy and efficient, but in trouble we turned to Sarah.