Chapter XII: Stella’s Story

A comforting assurance to the nervous and anxious landlady, a promise to let her be present at the grilling of Stella Ball, later in the evening, and an impulsive little kiss on the poor woman’s pale cheek, then Margot led Gene to her room, saying that she had something to tell him.

“Gene, I’ve got a little plan, and it includes you, old dear. We’ve got two hours before Hart brings that girl here. Of course we’ll have to have a bite to eat. I’m not hungry--too excited--but you must be, and I ought to eat anyway. _Then_--” She paused with dramatic suspense. “Then, my dear, we’ll go to see a motion picture!”

If she had suggested a casual trip to the moon, he couldn’t have looked at her with more astonishment.

“A motion picture! I thought you hated them, and of all things to-night, when you’ve got so much on your mind.”

“That might be reason enough, seeing that they usually put me to sleep. Just what I need right now, to rest my nerves.”

“Oh, all right,” he agreed amiably.

“But,” she said with a laugh, “that _isn’t_ the reason I want to go to a picture to-night. I want to go to a very _special_ picture. One that was directed by Stoner.”

“What’s the big idea?” Gene was more mystified than before.

“I’ll tell you later. I missed the first showing of this picture, but I’ve heard that it contains a curious feature. You know how one idea gives birth to another, when your mind’s all keyed up? Well, in the last fifteen minutes, while I’ve been concentrating on what we found down there in that room, my poor, weak brain’s been literally flooded with some new and very strange thoughts. Very strange indeed,” she repeated dreamily.

“You mean--thoughts connected with Stoner?”

“Oh, yes,” she said softly, “very much connected with Stoner. Of course they’re only _thoughts_--they’re too vague yet to be even speculations, let alone deductions. Just thoughts, but such very intriguing ones, Gene.”

“I daresay, when you get ready to, you’ll let me have the benefit of your precious thoughts.” Gene was just a trifle impatient and she laughed at him.

“Hold your horses, old darling. All in good time, I’ll share my thoughts with you, and perhaps other more important things as well.” She threw him a provocative smile, but evaded his arms, as he plunged at her, trying to seize her.

“_Perhaps_, I said. In the meantime, as I told you before, my brain’s fairly reeking with mystery. Come on! Let’s go eat!”

“Just a minute, Margot,” he urged. “Tell me about the picture. What picture is it? I mean, what’s so curious about it?”

“I can’t tell you now. I want you to see it and get your own fresh impression from it, without being influenced by any reflection of mine.”

“What the deuce can a picture directed by that boob have to do with the mystery of Stella Ball, and your room, and the radium! You’re a funny kid! Well, come. I’m starved, even if I am madly in love, and almost insane with curiosity.”

An Italian dinner with red wine served in teacups, made Margot more irrepressibly tantalizing and irresistibly alluring than usual. The food was negative, but youth and red wine in a teacup leave the spirit aloof from such gross material considerations.

They spent only a half hour in the little restaurant, then walked quickly over to Eighth Avenue, where they found seats in a small theater for _The Masque of Life_. It was a photoplay of pretentious melodrama, verging on the grotesque, which had been completed for the Superfilm Company, some weeks before. It had had a short run--unhonored and unsung--on Broadway, and was now making the round of the smaller houses.

Through the tiresome opening reels, Margot sat, sleepily content, her hand held fast in Gene’s. Then, toward the close of the picture, she aroused to sudden interest, and gave Gene’s hand a violent squeeze. She whispered something to him, then she sat very still and intent, watching the action develop along strange lines.

An inventor was shown at work upon a devilish contraption with which he planned to destroy New York. Its motive power was to be--_radium_. The single word was flashed in huge letters across the screen. This time it was Gene who tightened his clasp on the fingers he held. The authority of science was acclaimed as the basis for the weird results obtained by the villain. Certainly there was an uncanny thrill in his first experiment with his diabolical machine.

It was shown as functioning at night. A mysterious aura glowed about it. Rays like forked lightning darted from its entrails.

“Good Lord!” Gene’s excited whisper was close to Margot’s ear. “I see your point!”

“Do you?” she whispered back. “Then work out a theory, but don’t tell me till later. I want to get a grip on my own ideas first.”

They sat to the end of the picture, and through a Sennett comedy, because, as Margot explained, she wanted to sit quietly where she was, until it was time to return to the house. He told her that he’d probably explode if she didn’t let him tell her something that he was as sure of as that he held her hand in his. But she whispered, with a low laugh, that if exploding would relieve his feelings, she’d hate to stand in his way. As far as comparing notes was concerned--nothing doing, she said sternly, until later.

At eight o’clock they returned to Margot’s house of mystery. In the hallway they found Cornelius Hart and Quinlan. Between them stood Stella Ball. Her eyes were dull and sullen, her mouth bitter. A handcuff was fastened to her left wrist, while the other end dangled uselessly.

“You said you wished to speak to this girl, Miss Anstruther,” said Hart casually. “She’s at your service.” Margot accepted his veiled remark as a suggestion that she take charge of Stella.

Evidently Hart had been careful to raise no suspicion in Stella’s mind that she was to be subjected to a test of any kind. Black-browed and fierce, her glance swept over the faces of the men, then rested on Margot’s with defiant scorn. Margot, open-minded at all times, and generous in her estimates, found it quite natural that this young thing--potentially a criminal perhaps, but certainly not a coward in spirit or flesh--should regard a girl of Margot’s class with the disdain that those who dare much feel for those who are sheltered from all daring.

Stella had grown thinner and paler in jail. Her stubborn will seemed unbroken. Her thin lips parted as if the impulse moved her to protest against she knew not what. Then her mouth shut stubbornly, and she gave Hart an ugly look. She promised to be a difficult subject, that much was sure. Margot tingled at the prospect of the encounter. It would be even more thrilling than she had anticipated.

“I’m sure,” she said gently, “that Stella Ball will be able and willing to help us clear up certain things.” Her tone was noncommittal, but her penetrating look into the girl’s eyes was kindly. “I’ll go up ahead,” she said to Hart. “I just want to take a look around.”

He understood her intent--to make sure that nothing had been disturbed--and he, together with the girl, Gene and Quinlan, followed slowly up the stairs.

Margot found Boyle and another man standing solemnly on guard in the room where so many fateful things had occurred. How many more were destined to happen there? she wondered vaguely. Mrs. Bellew was already in the room. Margot smiled, understanding that the inquisitive and excited creature was determined not to lose a moment of the new scene soon to be enacted.

Margot took quiet charge of the situation. She cautioned the landlady not to speak unless addressed, and asked her to sit still in one corner of the room, not too far away from the center of the stage--meaning the brass bed and the trapdoor and the gruesome object on the floor. She told the two policemen to stand on either side of the trapdoor. Then she called to Hart to bring in Stella Ball.

The girl had been directed to walk a little ahead of the three men, thus blocking her only way of retreat. It was inevitable that she would see the bed pushed out from the wall, the hole in the floor, and the withered arm lying on the bare planking, on reaching the threshold of the room. Her foot was scarcely on the doorsill when she jerked back on her heels and stared with distended eyes.

No one spoke. If what she saw could not shake her, words would be wasted. The moment of hostile silence was calculated to force confession, but she seemed unconscious of it. All her senses were concentrated upon the thing on the floor and its significance to her. Horror and fear were the emotions most clearly expressed on her hitherto impassive face. Then it hardened, and her lips grew tight. She paid no attention to anyone but Hart. At him she looked accusingly.

“Done me dirt, aint you?” she said coolly. “Got the goods on me, then brought me here to spring it on me, and watch me jump. Well--whacher goin’ to do about it?”

Margot came quickly nearer to the girl.

“We won’t do anything about it--I mean we won’t do _you_ any harm if you’ll tell us what you know. Why did you do it?”

“Do what?” she asked sharply, staring at Margot.

“Oh, of course, you don’t know that we found the radium in that hand on the floor--_your_ hand, Stella. How did you get hold of it?”

“I’ve been a fence for a long time, that’s how,” she said sulkily.

Margot exchanged a glance of surprised understanding with Gene and with Hart, then she said gently:

“Tell us how you got mixed up with a crook who stole radium, and how you lost your arm?”

“I lost it all right,” she said with an expression of such acute distress that Margot said quickly:

“We’re all awfully sorry for you. But you really must help the law in every way. If you don’t, I’m afraid it may go hard with you.”

“I told ya before, I aint committed a crime. The law can’t do nothin’ to me.”

“See here, my girl!” Hart spoke impatiently. “Maybe you haven’t done away with anybody, but being a professional receiver of stolen goods isn’t one of the things the law smiles at. Better come across and give us all the dope!”

“We know a good deal about you already,” Margot prompted gently. “We know that you lived in this room and we know why.” (Margot had jumped to a certain conclusion in the last few seconds.) “That trapdoor leads to a place that’s fine as a receptacle for stolen radium, or anything small like that. We know that you took this room for that sole purpose.”

“How d’you know?” Stella could not be tripped so easily. “Oh, well,” she added disgustedly, “I guess it don’t take much savvy to know that much. But I wasn’t the first one to do it. The woman who was here before gave me the tip.”

Mrs. Bellew gave a low cry, quickly stifled in her handkerchief.

“You had a confederate in this house, didn’t you?” Margot held the girl’s eyes as she added slowly: “An elderly man by the name of Murchison, who lived on the top floor?”

“By jove, Margot, you’re wonderful!” It was unprofessional, but Gene could not restrain his joy at her acumen. It was easy now to follow her deductions step by step.

“I got to know him after I come here,” Stella said, staring at the floor. “He worked in some sort of a hospital, he told me.”

“You mean, don’t you, the Fellowe Institute?” Margot corrected her gently.

“Yeah, guess that was it. He was a pretty slick pickpocket. Used to bring me watches and things to keep. Then one day he said he’d swiped a tube of stuff that was worth more’n fifty thousand dollars. I thought he was lying till I saw the fuss in the papers about the radium.”

A gentle question or two from Margot, and the girl told her how she had hidden the radium in the secret chamber, Murchison having promised her a big commission when he should sell the stuff. He had told her that it might take a long time to sell it, because only doctors and professors would want to buy it, and most of them would be leery about stolen goods.

Suddenly Stella’s voice trailed off and her face grew very white. She closed her eyes and a long shudder shook her thin shoulders.

“What’s the matter?” The sympathy in Margot’s voice brought a quick response.

“I was just thinkin’,” Stella mumbled, “of the night when things went on the blink.”

“You mean--” Margot took her up quickly, “the night you disappeared--three months ago?”

“Yeah.” The girl gave her head a sudden upward jerk. Fixing her haggard young eyes on a spot where the light reflected on the footrail of the brass bed, she finished her astounding narrative. Her words came in a quick-running monotone, almost without punctuation. The substance of her story was this:

Her acquaintance with Murchison had developed during several weeks. One day he told her to expect him that night at ten o’clock, with a customer. She had things ready when they arrived. She had turned back the carpet and opened the trapdoor with an ax. Murchison brought with him a fat man whom she had never seen. An argument took place between the two men. The fat man, it seemed, had no idea of buying the radium. He wanted only to rent it for a week, and he offered Murchison five hundred dollars. Murchison objected and ended by getting very “sore,” as Stella expressed it. He told his customer that the deal was off.

Then Stella took a hand in the fray. She was dead broke at the time and had counted on the commission promised her by Murchison. She took the part of the strange man, with the result that a real scrap started. Murchison, although elderly, was strong and wiry, and a match for the fat man, whose muscles were soft. But between the two of them--Stella and the stranger--Murchison was kept busy, and Stella managed to grab the little tube of radium out of his hand. At that point of her narrative, she moved her gaze from the bedrail to Margot’s intensely interested eyes.

“The old fool went crazy mad when I did that. He was a sort of a nut, anyway. The next I knew, he’d got ahold of the fire ax and chopped at me. I went down on the floor. The blade nicked me at the elbow joint and went clean through. I started to scream, but somebody put his hand over my mouth and I fainted. I came to in a private hospital. Never found out who took me there, but somebody paid the bills and kept me there till I got well. That’s all I know for sure.”

No one spoke for a brief instant, then Hart said judiciously:

“One or the other of those two crooks must have known something about putting a tourniquet above the elbow, or you’d have bled to death through the artery.”

“Of course it must have been one of them who took you to the hospital. Have you any suspicion at all which of them it was--although it doesn’t really matter,” Margot added quickly.

“I’d take a bet it wasn’t the old fellow. He was so sore at me I guess he’d have liked to stick me down that hole along with my arm. Then too, I don’t believe he’d have dared go to a place like a hospital. The other guy wasn’t a real crook, or I miss my guess.”

“Did you realize when Murchison chopped off your arm, that the radium was clasped in that hand?” Margot asked her.

“Well--s’pose I did, if I thought of anythin’ but the pain and the bleedin’. But when I got my head clear, in the hospital, I figured they’d be too scared to check up on that. I figured they’d throw the arm and the ax into the hole, and put back the carpet so’s to hide the bloodstains.”

“And figuring that way, you broke in here by way of the roof, to get the radium?” Hart spoke rapidly, then turned to Margot with a slight inclination of his head. “Excuse me, Miss Anstruther, but my curiosity got the better of me.”

“It really doesn’t matter who asks the questions, Mr. Hart, or rather who asks them _first_,” she added with a smile.

“What did you suppose I’d come for?” Stella threw Hart a glance of amused scorn. “Me health maybe, or maybe me arm? _Sure_, I come for the seventy-five-thousand-dollar goods. Couldn’t pass up a little thing like that,” she said with a twisted smile. “There was a good chance the old devil’d beaten me to it, but it was worth a try.”

Hart asked her if she knew the present whereabouts of Murchison. She said she didn’t. Then Margot asked her to describe the customer who had started all the trouble.

“Well,” said Stella, doubtfully, “I can’t just remember what he looked like, except he was fat--too fat. I hate fat men.” Her gamin sense of humor made her throw a quick glance from man to man, and add, with a boyish grin: “Guess I aint steppin’ on anybody’s toes in this room.”

Margot smiled to note the unconscious preening of Hart, who was the thinnest man of them all. Then she asked Stella if that was positively all she could remember and to tell them of the events leading up to and following the dramatic incident of the fight over the radium.

“I’ve told you all I know, s’help me God!”

The thin, worn face of the girl, and her tragic eyes, carried conviction as no words could have done. Again there came a silence which Hart waited for Margot to break, but she only stared with dark, thoughtful eyes, straight before her. Then Hart said respectfully:

“You’ve done a fine piece of work, Miss Anstruther. The rest of this case should be plain sailing.”

“You think so?” she said gently. “How about the lights on the floor and the hand that put them out?”

“That seems clear to me,” Hart said confidently. “The radium shone through the floor and the carpet. You explained to us, you remember, that radium rays can pierce through anything. I take it that these rays also revealed an outline of the dead arm--a sort of mirage in the dark, which, naturally, seemed to you and to Boyle, to extinguish the flame.”

Margot turned quickly to Gene. “Do you see it that way, Gene?”

“Yes,” he said with conviction. “That part of the mystery was cleared up, so far as I was concerned, while we were looking at that queer picture to-night--Stoner’s picture. I took for granted that was what you wanted me to deduce from it.”

“I’m sorry, Gene, but that _wasn’t_ what I wanted you to get from that picture. I rather hoped you’d get something else out of it.”

“I did,” he said eagerly, “or rather I _do_, looking back at it in the light of what’s been thrown on the mystery here, to-night.”

“Righto! We’ll take that up later.” She gave him a warning look, then turned to Hart.

“It sounds convincing, the way you put it, Mr. Hart, but I’ll have to tell you that radium cannot project a mirage. Its rays are invisible to the naked eye, except with the aid of a special apparatus. The hand and the lights had nothing whatever to do with radium.”

“Holy Mother Mary!” Boyle, indifferent to the stares of his audience and callous to their amused grins, crossed himself for the third time. “Then it was a ghost, after all, Miss?”

“That all depends on just what you mean by a ‘ghost’.” Margot’s smile at Boyle was enigmatic, as she intended it to be, not only to poor Boyle but to every other person in the room.