Chapter VI: The Midnight Prowler

Margot was to sleep on a cot in Mrs. Bellew’s basement. She made a rite of brushing her thick reddish hair, and invariably let her mind wander while she did it. Mrs. Bellew’s chatter had the effect of dripping water. It made her sleepy, and she was horribly tired. Some sixth sense told her that sleep was not for her that night; that the mystery would soon take a new and fantastic turn.

With bored disgust she discovered that she had forgotten to bring down her pyjamas. She started for the stairs, then turned back into the basement room. She told Mrs. Bellew that she didn’t want to go up to her room alone. No reason whatever, Quinlan being so decent, but she felt nervous, and would Mrs. Bellew mind going up with her? Mrs. Bellew cheerfully assured her that she didn’t mind at all.

They climbed the stairs and knocked lightly on the door. Quinlan let them in and they stood for a moment with him in the dark. Margot, her voice instinctively pitched very low, explained her errand. Then she whispered to Quinlan:

“Seen or heard anything?”

“No, Miss.” Quinlan’s was a veritable stage whisper.

Suddenly he stiffened and threw his arm out to bar Margot’s way, as she started in the direction of her closet.

“Shh!” he admonished tensely.

Margot stood stock still, as she heard Mrs. Bellew’s stifled cry of fear. They heard a faint scraping sound. It seemed to come from the roof-garden, the door leading to which was open a few inches. Quinlan had left it so. Then, the shadow of a human being fell slantwise on the curtain over the door, and loomed large against the rift of light from the street lamp. Faint creaking of the door pushing inward; a figure, indistinct, crouching uncertainly; then upright, stepping more boldly into the room, and moving slowly toward them.

Mrs. Bellew’s terror broke in a shriek. Quinlan lunged forward and seized the intruder. Margot dashed for the switch-button in the wall, and flooded the room with light.

A girl stood there, her shoulders pinioned from behind by Quinlan’s big hands; a girl with white, drawn face; a black-browed, sullen young creature, who uttered no sound of fear or pain. Too astonished to move or speak, Margot stared. Then another shriek resounded in the room.

“It’s Stella--Stella Ball!” Mrs. Bellew managed to gasp the words.

Margot trembled with excitement. Her breath came short.

“The girl who lived in this room?”

“Herself--oh, my God!” The landlady was on the verge of frenzied hysteria.

Margot swung fiercely about to the girl.

“Tell us what it all means!” she commanded sternly.

“I’ll tell you nothing!” The retort was almost vicious in its quick intensity.

“We’ll make you talk quick enough,” growled Quinlan.

“I haven’t committed any crime.” She made the assertion unwhiningly. “You can’t do anything to me!”

“I arrest you for unlawful entry, with intent to commit a burglary. Guess that’ll do for the present.”

The girl’s lips clamped stubbornly. There was a touch of pride in her defiance. Margot was conscious of it, and sudden pity gave her the impulse to ask Quinlan to release the girl. Her connection with the mystery seemed remote indeed, if not highly improbable. Her coming was merely coincidental. Then----

Margot’s glance fell to the girl’s right arm. The grip of Quinlan’s fingers had pulled the sleeve up. The arm had been cut off at the elbow! Margot’s gaping eyes saw the scar of a freshly healed wound. It made a grim patch of color against the white of her arm.

Mrs. Bellew’s frightened eyes went from Stella Ball’s blanched face to the stub of her right arm. A horrified, fixed stare, then a third shriek from the landlady. “My God! She had both arms when she left this house!”

Stella’s thin little face lost its expressionless rigidity. She smiled; a strange, twisted ghost of a smile, on one side of her mouth, yet it had humor, that smile, humor wasted of course on Mrs. Bellew, but startling to Margot.

“Hell of a lot you know how I looked when I left your shanty. Didn’t happen to see me light out, did you?”

Mrs. Bellew was too far overcome with nervous excitement to have any other emotion, so she did not resent the girl’s impudence. Margot, watching intently, saw the smile on Stella’s face vanish as quickly as it had appeared. Her face hardened again, her lips grew tight with a bitterness in tragic contrast to the youth of her face, as she looked at the lurid scar which had riveted Margot’s attention. Then she gave an angry hitch to her right shoulder, twisting her sleeve out of Quinlan’s grip, so that it fell over and covered her disfigured arm.

“Let go of her, please, Mr. Quinlan!” Margot’s quick command was spoken gently enough, but Quinlan removed his hands from Stella’s thin shoulders.

Being momentarily deprived of action, Quinlan found release for his tongue. He stood with arms crossed, regarding the girl with an angry scowl.

“Think ye’re smart, don’t ye now, disturbin’ honest folks, and scarin’ this nice young lady out of a year’s growth and raisin’ hell generally, just to do a little stealin’ where there ain’t nothin’ to steal, far as I can make out.”

The girl flashed a defiant look at him.

“Who says I came to steal?”

“_I_ says it, for one!” Quinlan gave her look for look. “Your kind--or any other kind--don’t come sneakin’ in other people’s windows and doors, just for their health. They come to get something--that’s what they come for--or maybe,” he bent a threatening scowl upon her, “maybe they come to murder somebody.”

Mrs. Bellew gave a low cry and shuddered closer to Margot.

“Ain’t you the smart Alec!” Stella’s twisted smile at Quinlan was not flattering. “Maybe I did come to get something. This used to be my room. Maybe I came to get something I left behind, when I beat it on such short notice.” Her smile of mockery went from the policeman to the landlady.

“I took all your things down stairs, Stella. I’ll give them to you.”

“Didn’t have to sneak back to get what belongs to ye. There’s a front door to this house, if ye know how to use it.” Quinlan’s sarcasm was a little heavy. He was no match for the girl, Margot thought, amused in spite of all that the scene evoked and might well signify.

“Front doors are good ’nough for some people--the kind that wouldn’t dare come in any other way. ’Fraid for their precious skins, maybe.”

“Say, look a-here, Miss Smartie! If you’d come back on the level, to get your belongin’s, why didn’t ye tell this young lady so, when ye found the room was occupied?”

“Saa-y!” The girl’s sweeping scorn of Quinlan, was comic. “Hell of a chance you gave me to tell anybody anything, grabbing me with those dainty mitts of yours, in the pitch dark, before you saw who or what I was!”

“I’m not talkin’ about your little stunt to-night, comin’ in from that roof, and gettin’ caught red-handed, I might say. I’m talkin’ about night before last when ye honored this young lady with a call and pretty near frightened her to death.”

Stella’s eyes opened and stared in a surprise that struck Margot as strangely genuine.

“Don’t know what you’re trying to celebrate, Mr. Officer-of-the-Law. This is the first time I’ve come to this room since I left it when I was living here. I wasn’t in this room night before last.”

It was Quinlan’s turn to retaliate with a scorn as scathing as her own.

“No, you wasn’t here night before last! Yes, we have no bananas! I--don’t--_think_!”

“I wasn’t! Think what you damn please!” A flash of anger quickened the tired lifelessness of Stella’s blue eyes.

Quinlan moved a step nearer to her, and thrust his head out at her.

“You wasn’t hidin’ under that brass bed, for the Lord knows how long before Miss Anstruther went to bed, and you didn’t stick your hand and arm out from under the bed and put a burnin’ match out, after the young lady had switched off her electric light?”

The surprise in Stella’s eyes changed slowly to astonishment, then another, more subtle change came to them. Margot, with active brain and unwavering, watchful gaze, and uncanny power to read back of the human eye, saw in Stella’s something that she could not analyze, but something that convinced her as no words could have done, that the girl was telling the truth and that Quinlan’s remarks had quickened a wondering speculation in her mind, concerning something of sinister import to Margot’s mystery.

“I wasn’t in this room night before last. Take that or leave it! I should worry!”

Sudden inspiration came to Quinlan.

“Then if ye wasn’t here yerself, ye know damn well who _was_ here!” Intuition or reason, whichever it was, Margot thought, Quinlan was less “dumb” than he had appeared up to now.

Stella threw him a startled, questioning look, then her lips grew sullen and her eyes hard.

“Let’s get a move on,” she said laconically. “Don’t suppose you want to entertain me here for the night. Ain’t you just bursting to show me your hospitality somewheres else?”

“See here, Miss Stella Ball, if that’s yer name. Suppose ye spill a little information about the friend of yours that hid under Miss Anstruther’s bed the other night. Give us the dope--the real dope and all of it, and we’ll see what we can do about lettin’ ye off with a minimum sentence, maybe none at all.”

“I’ve got nothing to say about anything, because I don’t know nothing about nothing! See?” Stella gave Quinlan another of her twisted smiles, touched with an ironic humor.

“Won’t save yerself by squealin’, is that it?” Quinlan’s naturally good-humored mouth had a more kindly expression.

“No, that ain’t it!” Her reply was as enigmatic as it was brief and final.

They could get nothing more out of her. She remained stubbornly silent, her face reverting to its original hard blankness. Quinlan told her she’d have to go with him, arrested on the charge of unlawful entry. Then he turned to Margot, with the air of being the Heaven-sent sleuth and unraveler of mysteries which the case had so urgently required.

“Guess you can come right back to this room and have a good night’s sleep, Miss Anstruther. Guess no more spooks is goin’ to disturb your rest, from now on. There’ll be those as’ll know how to get the truth out of this girl, to-night or to-morrow. Guess ye’re safe enough now.”

“Wait a minute, Mr. Quinlan.” Margot addressed the policeman but her eyes were on Stella Ball. “You seem to be sure that either this girl or some confederate of hers, was under my bed night before last, and put out the match I dropped on the rug. But how about the hand and arm that Boyle saw, when _he_ was alone in this room, putting out a light that didn’t even exist?”

Margot saw a quickly suppressed shudder, a swift lifting then closing of lids over startled blue eyes, then stillness on the impassive face of Stella Ball. Quinlan saw nothing. He was busy preparing a reply to Margot’s question.

“It’s a friend I am of Shane Boyle’s, Miss Anstruther, but it’s only tellin’ the truth I am, when I say that Boyle bein’ born in the auld country, and comin’ here when he was full grown, is as full of superstition as a dog is full of flees. It stands to reason, Miss, that whoever it was put the match out when you lay in that brass bed, wasn’t doin’ the self-same thing for Boyle’s benefit, because whoever it was, got out of this room before ever any of the rest of us set foot in it. That’s as sure as that I’m standin’ on me two feet this very minute. So it stands to reason, don’t it, that what Boyle saw, came out of the square Irish head on him.”

“Do you think so, Mr. Quinlan?” Again she spoke to Quinlan but looked at Stella.

“Sure, I think so. What else could I think?”

At Margot’s simple question, Stella again lifted heavy lids and dropped them as quickly. In her tired blue eyes Margot caught a vague question and challenge directed at herself. Then Quinlan departed with his prisoner.