Sitting there in the dark, I pondered the matter of eliminating it before Amos found it.
Or had he already found it?
Was he sitting there beyond the glass partition, driving as perfectly as he did everything else, and all the time aware of my movements, knowing what I had found?
Did the police know, too?
Suppose I were to say to Amos:
“Amos, this carpet is dirty.
I’m taking it to have it cleaned, while Mr. Blake is not using the car.”
Perhaps that in itself would rouse his suspicion.
He might say:
“Don’t bother, Miss Bell.
I’ll see to it.”
And then Amos and I would be bickering over the carpet: it would grow important to him, and if he conquered he would take it to the police.
I did the best thing I could think of at the moment. I stooped down and loosened the carpet, rolled it up carefully, and then hid it as best I could underneath my long cape.
If I looked strange to Joseph when he admitted me, he said nothing.
Once Judy had said that Joseph had no capacity for astonishment, and the thought supported me that night as, certainly nervous and probably bulging, I entered my own house.
Judy called to me from the library, but I passed the door with as much expedition as I dared.
She and Dick were settled there over a card table, with a sheet of paper before them.
I saw that, and that Dick was apparently making a sketch of some sort.
As I went up the stairs he was saying:
“Now get this.
Here’s the daybed.
The closet door is there—”
Then I was in my room, the door bolted, and that incriminating carpet on a table under a good light.
There was no question about it.
A jug or can containing kerosene oil had rested on it, probably quite recently.
Chapter Ten
A LONE WOMAN WHO has lived in a house for many years grows to know her house.
It is like a live thing to her; it has its moods, its contrary days, and it has its little eccentricities.
This stair creaks, that window rattles, that door sticks.
Especially, if she is not a good sleeper, she grows to know her house at night.
All houses are strange at night.
It is as though, after the darkness and silence have fallen, they stir and waken to some mysterious life of their own.
In my house, some of these movements I can account for.
When the windows are raised the old beams creak, as though the house is cracking its knuckles, and when we have a north wind the skylight wails and whines.
A metal weatherstrip that is, vibrating like a string.
Then, too, a breeze from the west will set the ivy outside my window to whispering, little sibilant voices which have roused me more than once, convinced that I was called; and an open window in the drawing room beside the speaking tube there will send on windy days a fine thin whistle through the house.
But I do not like my cellar.
Perhaps this is a throwback to my childhood; I do not know.
The fact remains that I go into it at night under protest, and that I have had installed in the back hall a switch by which a light below is turned on before any one need descend.
A bit of precaution for which I could have shrieked with rage before that night had passed.
It was eleven o’clock when I returned, and soon afterwards I heard Dick leave the house.
His paper is an afternoon one, and so he has to rise fairly early.
Judy wandered in to say good-night, but I had locked the carpet in my closet, and she merely lighted a cigarette and stood inside the door.
“When is Mary going?” she asked.
“She hasn’t said.
Why?”
“She’s been packing tonight.
Dick helped Joseph to bring her trunk down from the storeroom.
She doesn’t seem too keen to go.”
“It’s her own choice,” I said, rather acidly.