Chapter VII: Spooks and the Press

Margot and Mrs. Bellew returned to the basement for the night, locking Margot’s room on the outside. Another sleepless night would play the mischief with her looks, but Margot found sleep an impossibility. She wished she could call Gene and tell him what had happened since he left the house, but she decided to wait until the following day.

With tired brain and thoughts spinning around as actively in sleep as when awake, and far more fatiguingly so, Margot had about three hours of unconsciousness. Then, as on the previous morning, a hot tub, a cold shower, setting-up exercises, a little make-up, and she looked, even if she didn’t feel, as good as new, she decided, after careful scrutiny of her face.

She decided to be late to the studio, and move all her belongings from the room she had occupied, to one which Mrs. Bellew had offered her, on the floor above. The landlady and her housemaid helped Margot in the process of moving up the one flight. She said that for the present, she would take with her only her personal effects. It was best, she told Mrs. Bellew, to leave the room intact, in case any further inspection should be deemed advisable by the police department. Therefore she did not remove her rugs, nor hangings, nor other articles of room adornment, which belonged to her. She rather expected to hear further from the police before the morning was over, she told the landlady.

About ten o’clock, the plainclothes man Hart arrived, asked Margot a few superfluous questions, then gave his orders that Margot’s room--the room of the bodiless hand from under the bed--was to be turned over to the police department. A man from the Force was to be left there, day and night, and the key would be kept by the police. Hart assured Margot that although theft was probably the motive for the midnight visitation--granted that there had been any such appearance as she had described--he was sure that criminal intent to do bodily injury was not involved, and as to anything of a supernatural nature, that was of course ridiculous.

It struck Margot as ridiculous that the police should occupy her old room as a field for research in a case which they insisted was neither criminal nor supernatural. But she refrained from telling Hart what she thought about it.

Before she left the house at one o’clock, already two reporters and three news photographers had made their unwelcome appearance. It was evident that the rest of the day would bring other relays of the inquisitive pests. She was glad to escape, leaving poor, harassed Mrs. Bellew to do the honors. Of course the garrulous landlady would talk of things she knew not, and say many things that the newspaper men would twist to suit themselves, but Margot knew that it mattered very little what was or was not made public in the way of news regarding her adventure. The publicity itself was the one inescapable fact.

The morning papers had had nothing regarding the affair, so there was as yet no need to dread an encounter with Stoner. She had decided not to tell Gene, should she meet him at the studio, of Stella Ball’s unexpected re-appearance, until the evening.

On her arrival at Astoria, keyed to make excuses for her late arrival, and to remind Stoner of her fruitless and long hours of waiting the day before, Margot found that the screening of _A Toreador’s Love_ was held up for a few days, possibly for a week. Some blunder on the part of the art director. The set had to be revamped. It was one of the frequent movie comedies of errors, which they had all learned to take philosophically. All but Stoner, who was in a condition of blasphemous wrath. He must indeed be upset, Margot delightedly observed, not even to notice her late arrival.

Corinne Delamar darted acid comments through the slats of her dressing-room on wheels. The minor members of the cast had been told to get out of the way. The girls she knew crowded around Margot, asking if she had seen her spook the night before, and if that was why she was so late at the studio. To all questions she smiled and said that she believed her ghost was laid, that she had seen nothing weird the previous night, and that she was late to the studio, merely because she was tired from her previous adventure.

As a matter of policy and precaution, she hung around the studio until late in the afternoon, then disappeared before the other girls were ready to leave. Gene did not go with her, but in a hurried interview between them it had been arranged for him to come for her later and take her out for dinner.

The first thing she did on arrival in New York, was to buy an evening paper. The headlines of the early edition greeted her; headlines about herself; bantering, hateful headlines:

_SPOOKS PURSUE FILM BEAUTY--
ACTRESS AND COP GET GHOSTLY
BURGLAR--MOVIE GIRL REPORTS
ROOM HAUNTED._

Well--she had known what to expect. But at least she could put a check on the melodramatic absurdity of it all. She wished to goodness she had stayed at home that day and talked with all the reporters herself. Trust foolish Mrs. Bellew to make things as absolutely ridiculous as possible! She hurried home, called up the leading newspapers, and requested that they send special men to interview her that evening. It would, she believed, ensure a more rational version of the story, at least.

Dining with Gene, she gave him a detailed description of what had occurred the night before, but she omitted all comment as to her impressions or deductions. She wasn’t ready yet to go into all that. Later in the evening, after she had interviewed the newspaper men, she would take Gene fully into her confidence.

He disapproved of her remaining in the same house. Why on earth did she want to do that? he asked her.

“Well,” she said, with one of her cryptic smiles, “I have my reasons, old dear. They may be foolish ones, time will tell, but in the meantime, I’ve made up my mind to stay right in that house of mystery.”

“All right, my dear. I always respect the results of your mental processes, but sometimes the processes themselves leave me in the air.”

“A very comfortable place for the present, Gene. You may wish you’d stayed up in that safe region, before we get through with this thing.”

“Not unless you were up there with me,” he smiled back at her.

Later in the evening, after Margot had flattered and flustered and successfully maneuvered the newspaper men, and had given each one a cocktail with which to drink to her success as a star in filmdom and as a detective in her field of mystery, she and Gene settled down in her new room to a serious talk.

“As I see it,” she summed up, “this mystery is a perfectly normal one. It’s my firm belief that it will turn out to be more important to students of crime than to the Society for Psychical Research. Moreover, the best detective methods are the only methods that will solve it.”

“Meaning--Cornelius Hart and his hot-on-the-trail assistants?” His smile expressed the scorn he shared with her as regards the plainclothes man.

“Absurd bungler, isn’t he? First he laughed at my story, and ridiculed Boyle. Then he woke up when Stella came on the screen, but he can’t get a word out of her. She’s much too clever for him. And his investigations in this house consist of watching for something new to happen, which isn’t _going_ to happen. The dub isn’t using what brain he happens to have.”

“What’s your idea? To go to one of the private agencies and get one of their men? The trouble is the price, dear. They charge at least twenty dollars a day.”

“No, nothing like that.” She laughed and struck her chest with a comic gesture. “Little one, you see before you the real Sherlock Holmes in the plot! _I_ am going to apply to the case the expert methods I referred to. And of course you’re going to help me.”

“Righto!” He smiled, then grew more serious. “All very fine, Margot, but for all your cleverness and powers of analysis, I don’t quite see what you’ve got to go on.”

“Don’t you! Well, now listen. Get down to bedrock and to essentials. I saw an apparently unattached arm. The next night Stella Ball sneaked into my room. Stella Ball has comparatively recently had her right arm amputated at the elbow. I believe that these three strange, apparently unrelated facts, are actually, if mysteriously, related.”

Gene couldn’t control a slight shudder.

“Isn’t that going back to the spook theory you said you’d rejected? Surely you don’t mean, Margot, that you think it was a psychic manifestation of some sort,--the girl sending her arm ahead of her, or something of that sort? You can’t be serious!”

“Not that way, no. That’s too absurd! But let me go on. For some reason the hand I actually saw--for keep in mind that I _did_ see a hand!--found it important to put out lights on the floor. Stella Ball had lived in that same room. For all we know, she might, in the past, have penetrated its secret. Last night she may have come either to help or to thwart that hand.”

“What do you mean? In putting out the lights on the rug?” Gene was making a valiant effort to treat Margot’s theories with the respect she demanded.

“Not necessarily. I’m trying to stick to logic. It’s always so easy to regard a sequence of odd occurrences as mere coincidence. Gene, think me a fool if you like, but I’m dead sure that the hand had a living owner. I’m very nearly as sure that Stella and the owner of the hand were after something in that room of which they both have knowledge.”

“Oh! Then you don’t think the hand you saw belonged to the girl?”

“No, I don’t. Of course I have no theory as yet as to _what_ they were after. The flames on the carpet will probably prove to have a lot to do with it. So will the fact of Stella being armless.”

“Gosh!” Gene heaved a sigh of despair. “Frankly, Margot, you’ve got me out of my depth. Look here! Granted that you and then Boyle saw a human hand and arm, how do you explain the way it vanished both times? Wouldn’t it argue a hiding place for the body belonging to the arm?”

Margot’s face glowed with enthusiasm. She put out an eager hand and squeezed Gene’s.

“Bully for you! You’ve struck the nail on the head! Of course, it argues just that.”

“But, good Lord, the place has been searched thoroughly. It’s the one little thing the police have done. You can’t think anything’s been overlooked?”

“Naturally I think it. If you’ve ever dropped your collar button, Gene, you must realize that looking in vain for it twenty times doesn’t prove that you only imagined you had the collar button.”

Her sense of humor was indestructible, and Gene smiled, but his own humor expressed itself with a note of sarcasm.

“Suppose the intruder might have hidden between the spring and mattress of your bed?”

Her merry laugh was incongruous with the sense of mystery that increased with everything she said.

“Quinlan took that idea quite seriously, if you remember. Nothing living or dead could have lived through the pounding he gave the bed with his nightstick.”

“Do be serious, dear. How about the fireplace?”

“Serious! And you make a suggestion like that!” She laughed again. “Naturally not the fireplace. It’s several feet from the bed. If the creature could have reached the fireplace without my hearing or seeing it, then it could have got to the door just as easily.”

“Oh, I give it up!” Gene lighted a cigarette with the air of seeking consolation where he could reasonably hope to find it.

“Well, I don’t--not by a good deal. I don’t _know_ anything. What I’m really doing, Gene, is to follow the Sherlock Holmes method of discarding the alternatives that are obviously impossible.”

He looked at her sharply. “You mean--there remains an alternative--an escape--which doesn’t strike you as impossible?”

“Yes.”

Gene got quickly to his feet. “Come on,” he said eagerly, seizing her by the hand. “Show it to me!”

“Go easy, Gene! We mustn’t tamper with a thing. It’s best to direct the police what to do. But we can take a look, if we can make some excuse to get that policeman out of the room for a little while. I’m not keen on taking _him_ into my confidence.” She got up and moved to the door, still speaking: “You see, the _object_ of Stella’s return to that room is what I want to----”

She was interrupted by a sharp rap on the door. Cool as Margot looked and felt, she gave a slight start, then she stood back to let Gene open the door. A messenger boy stood there holding out a yellow envelope, and piping “Telegram!”

While Gene signed for her, and shut the door after the departing boy, Margot tore open the message. Then she handed it to Gene. Her gray eyes looked troubled and her mouth drooped at the corners.

“What do you make out of this?”

Gene read it aloud, in a slow, puzzled fashion.

“_See me at the studio to-morrow morning without fail._

“Corinne Delamar.”

“It looks as if what you said Stoner told you about her high-and-mightiness was correct. She’s probably furious because you’ve broken into the papers. What other reason could she have for sending you such a message?”

“That’s it, of course, but I’ll bet Stoner put her up to it. I had a feeling when he talked to me, that he was inventing the thing for some purpose of his own. She isn’t a bad sort, you know. I don’t believe she’d have dreamed of being jealous of me if someone hadn’t put her up to it. Well, it can’t be helped. I’ll sleep on it. We’ll have to postpone our detective work. I must be clear-eyed and clear-brained to tackle Delamar in the morning.”

Her good-night kiss to Gene was hardly what his lover’s desire could be satisfied with. He held her for a moment, whispering of his love for her, but he knew her well enough to realize that until Margot should have disposed of Corinne Delamar, and Stoner and a few other details such as the mystery of the hand and arm, he could expect little response to his passion. Wisely he let it go at that.

That night Margot dreamed--a strangely vivid dream--not of Stella Ball, nor of the mystic hand and arm, nor of Corinne Delamar, still less of Gene whom she had begun to love. She dreamed (and awoke from the dream, trembling and longing to cry out, as one feels on awaking from a nightmare) of Stoner; not Stoner attempting to force his coarse passion upon her; not Stoner enraged at her for disobeying his orders to drop all probing into the mystery of her room; but Stoner, looking at her as he had looked that first day when she had given him her address, looking at her with pupils dilated, the overtone as of a yellowish shadow darkening his pale blue eyes; the shimmer in the eyeball like dust-specks in a sunbeam!

Wide awake, she shivered and lay thinking for hours… thinking.…